LOL. I am a nurse and we have to review our patient's history with them on admission and I basically rattle off all the listed problems and ask them if I missed anything or if there is anything new. I never ever read off "morbid obesity" because... hello, people know it if they have it and the "rooms" are divided by curtains that are not magically soundproof. I also don't rattle off "erectile dysfunction." I used to be very overweight and didn't need to be reminded. I especially hated it when people (usually men) asked me if I were pregnant.
Not on the NPR piece, but in a woker one on the interwebs, the author lambasted white people who go with the yellow icons because “black people can’t choose when to invoke their blackness.” Does she think Apple locks black people in on just the brown emojis?? Meanwhile the NPR piece quotes a woman who says she uses the yellow emojis at work but brown ones with friends and family, so, someone better report her to Apple.
This boomer disagrees. 20 somethings don't have time to save the world...cause they're trying to get laid, or should be. I was....then.
And you're right; Their ideas are mostly half baked.
I don't really trust most people's ideas until at least their mid-30's. Just my experience, but I have some optimism about the future based on my experience getting to know a lot of people in their 40's.
Lol part of me thinks some of this stuff is driven by hate-clicks. I remember hearing that talk radio hosts like Hannity and Limbaugh got by partly on liberals hate-listening for the entertainment.
I've gotten in the habit of posting : ) (with a space in between the eyes and smile), because way too many programs were auto-converting that into an emoji.
I think there's a non-zero chance that it shook out of Homer Simpson as the default 1990s everyman and will now be with us until the end of time.
Standards evolve in funny ways like that. We have ethernet, and will seemingly always have ethernet, because of one dude's cheeky joke on an internal memo at Xerox in 1973.
Ethernet was developed at Xerox PARC between 1973 and 1974.[4][5] It was inspired by ALOHAnet, which Robert Metcalfe had studied as part of his PhD dissertation.[6] The idea was first documented in a memo that Metcalfe wrote on May 22, 1973, where he named it after the luminiferous aether once postulated to exist as an "omnipresent, completely-passive medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves."
For awhile, messaging clients would translate things like ":)" to a picture of a smiley face. IIRC, that's what AIM did.
Emoji actually originated from a set of standardized images that were used by Japanese cell phone companies -- you could send a "sushi" emoji, and it would show up as a sushi to anyone else using a cell phone. This made its way into Unicode for standardization, and the rest of the world picked it up.
Niche is not a synonym for minority in this usage. If an issue effects 20% of Americans I'd hardly call it a niche issue. I think his point was just that Dems are spending more and more time and issues that impact smaller and smaller slices, or "niches" of the electorate, not that we should only talk about things that impact 51% or higher of voters.
The CW on progressive prosecutors has probably swung too far in the other direction. Big-city criminal systems are often really, really broken, from bad street-level policing to outdated sentencing law to overworked PDs to genuinely incompetent prosecutors and judges. Prosecutorial discretion is an imperfect lever--ideally, you want high certainty of punishment and low sentences, which it can only partially accomplish--but it's an extremely powerful one, and the only one that's really easy for progressives to get their hands on.
True. There's also a factor of limited attention, though. It's fine for Yang to talk about MMA fighter pay when he's on Rogan or Luke Thomas. But if he talked about it 50% of the time I'd start to wonder about his priorities.
It seems local politics impacts you the most (trash pick up, K-12 schools, police, fire, library, etc) yet people more eagerly look to national politics for politics as spectator sport. The local issues also aren't as cleanly divided by red and blue.
I happen to be married to a foreigner (married in 1982). I'm a native born American. At that time it was pretty easy for her to get a green card to live in the US, and after five years residence, it was as easy for her to obtain US citizenship. From the experience of friends who've had the same experience more recently I don't think these rules have changed (though immigration is tougher on questioning whether the marriage is real or a ruse to obtain a green card). I don't know what the situation is where neither spouse is a US citizen, but one has legal residency here, either through a green card or an employer-attached visa of some sort.
I was going by your use of "issues that really impact a majority of American residents" - and trash, K-12, police, roads, water, etc. impact more people more regularly than say, your example of being an employee of a government contractor. And in local or federal, the issues of course aren't often very salient until something goes awry.
Henry, you should stop using the foreign spouse example (I've seen it twice) because apparently you don't understand the spouse of an American citizen is entitled to permanent residency (green card), which affords all the privileges of citizenship except the franchise.
There are some people who are heavily impacted by federal law, but it's not a coincidence that the vast majority of litigation is in state courts under state law.
"The First Amendment in particular is a very niche issue"
The existence of Substack is a First Amendment issue. So is your ability to comment here. And that doesn't even get into the number of Americans who engage in religious practice, or in free assembly, or who petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Something like a third of American adults own a firearm. Close to half live in a household where a firearm is present. And imagine how those numbers would change if, for example, states like New Jersey and California did not infringe on the rights of their citizens.
The very existence of cases of overreach by the state on property rights in the US, along with the examples of nations that do not have analogs of the American Bill of Rights in the foundations of their laws, demonstrates that such matters do impact the lives of Americans.
[Note that I consciously omitted the rights of criminals from my list.]
"If you’re married to an illegal immigrant, you know the Republicans will probably enforce the law strictly and deport your spouse while Democrats probably will not. "
Why would you think that? Obama deported more people than George Bush and Donald Trump. I believe he was a Democrat and the other two guys were Republicans.
I think Democrats should work on affordable housing, mental health (including addiction treatment) and immigration. Climate is important but from my perspective, we need policies that are engineered to help us live better and climate could be folded into that. It's like when you are on a health kick, you don't really think about your heart beating or breathing but both organ systems improve with regular exercise, good diet and meditation so if you engineer your day to have those 3 things the breathing and heartbeats (circulation) are taken care of. Mental health -- providing the incentives for infrastructure for more community, opening up more spots for Psych NPs and Mental Health Counselors, funding cognitive behavioral therapy clinic services, etc. That kind of thing so our healthcare insurance has a more true parity. Affordable housing can be constructed in a more energy efficient manner (eg).
If it's also true that more educated, further left Democrats are a lot more likely to vote in primaries, that would complete the picture. If it weren't for the hurdle of getting past the primary, I suspect Democratic candidates, who want to win elections as much as any candidates, would get past the problem of pleasing elite opinion.
The vast majority of Democratic candidates in swing districts are the kind of moderates you are describing. Voters in swing districts generally recognize that they need relatively moderate candidates to win the general election, and "electability" becomes one of the most important factors among voters. It is in noncompetitive districts where these divides become more distinct and noticeable.
One of the issues is that candidates get attacked for the perceived "vibes" of their party. For example, there were vanishingly few congressional Democrats in favor of "defunding the police", but that did not stop people from punishing Democrats for that vibe, even the candidates who forcefully denounced that idea.
There isn't a good way to control these vibes. It is not constructive to attack Biden by saying that defunding the police is a bad idea, as Biden already has said he opposes defunding the police and Democrats have passed bills to help fund local governments (which means funding the police).
Democrats can't control what activists say and do, many of those activists are explicitly not a part of the Democratic party. I wish some of those activists wouldn't say dumb shit, but there is always someone willing to say something dumb. A prime example was the Fox News with the "anti-work" activist interview. I don't really see much reason to try to control these activists.
1. Is wayyyyy more complex than it appears at first, with many weird/unexpected results. Frankly, I don't think that present-day America is a high trust enough society for something this complex
2. Encourages gamesmanship (ranking your preferred candidate lower at first, because it gives them better odds of winning on subsequent ballots). Voting shouldn't be a three-dimensional chess game
3. Takes much longer to tabulate the results- days if not weeks- and also would be much tougher to audit for recounts. Again, we are not a high trust-enough society right now to handle that
5. Can't be used for Presidential elections per the 12th Amendment
6. Actually opens the door for more extreme candidates, as every whackadoodle with 2% support gets listed on the ballot, and 100+ years of political science research shows us that most voters will not research each candidate or carefully assess their policy positions
I think voting method changes are overrated- but if you had to pick one, approval voting is vastly superior. Even better would be a two round system, where AV gets used to narrow to a top two- when then face off in a conventional second round
Re 2: The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem shows that *every* voting method other than dictatorship encourages gamesmanship, so this isn't a specific strike against ranked choice/instant runoff.
Is there any reason to think that the situations where strategic voting is both effective, and known to be effective, are more likely for IRV than for approval voting?
I think it's just a matter of degree. Every computer system is theoretically hackable too, but it's a quantum leap from the level of security on a random website to say the White House, or top-level control for AWS or Google. (Also, what gamesmanship exists in plurality voting with just two candidates?)
In practice with RCV you see a lot of candidates encouraging their supporters to rank them lower on the initial ballot, because it will be beneficial on subsequent ballots. I guess you could make the argument that it's harmless, but I think it's a net negative to turn our electoral system into a game. These guys have a good explanation of it:
Again, the Muller-Satterthwaite theorem states that *every* election mechanism other than dictatorship (whether it is RCV or Approval Voting or FPTP or anything else) has violations of monotonicity, when there are three or more candidates.
What I'm interested in, therefore, is not *whether* there are such violations (we know there will be) but how *frequent* those violations are, and also whether they are *knowable* so that people actually change their votes in order to respond to it. The site you link shows two elections where this arguably did happen, but you claim "In practice you see a lot of candidates encouraging their supporters to rank them lower on the initial ballot" - did that actually happen in these two elections? Or is it only after the fact that it became clear that this was the case, so that we can assume that most people in fact gave us their honest preferences?
Since we know monotonicity failures exist with every election system, I won't say it's "harmless", but it's not a deadly strike against the system. The bigger strike against a system is if people can know very clearly that they're in a case where a monotonicity failure occurs, and thus refuse to vote their conscience. This is the default situation in first-past-the-post (think about everyone who would prefer a Green or a Libertarian, but lists a Democrat or a Republican as their first choice because they know this is the only strategic way to influence the outcome). It sounds like in RCV elections, there will actually be monotonicity failures a non-negligible amount of the time, but it's harder for me to see that voters will ever be aware of this in a way that actually incentivizes them to change up their ballots.
You claim that this happens a lot, and if it does, then that would shift my views. But I haven't yet seen any evidence that it has ever happened.
There are problems with RCV, but given the choice between plurality primary elections and RCV for primaries, I'll take RCV every time. That said, I don't think #6 is actually true.
I genuinely can't understand how being anti-FPTP became so trendy. Some of the most stable democracies on planet Earth use plurality voting, including Canada, Britain, Taiwan and South Korea- the latter two being presidential. I'd rate all four of them as being more stable than the US right now, frankly. That's without getting into the fact that America functioned just fine in the 20th century using plurality voting.
In fact, South Korea's a good analogue- presidential system, FPTP, single member districts, and just two parties make up 97% of their legislature- basically the exact same as us. I'd say they're more stable than the US? Which makes me think voting systems just don't matter that much?
If all you want is stable democracy, why not go for Singapore's system?
The issue is that, if you want people to earnestly express their preferences, and you want to make the outcomes of elections represent these preferences, FPTP is very clearly bad, because nearly every election gives a substantial number of people an incentive to rank someone other than their preferred candidate first. As you note, RCV doesn't totally eliminate that, but as Muller-Satterthwaite notes, neither does any other voting system other than dictatorship.
The fact that the problems with FPTP are so glaring is why it's become trendy to be against it.
What I don't understand is how it became trendy recently to be anti-RCV as well - I see problems with it, but they seem less bad, and it's not clear that some particular alternative is less bad than it. Many of these options would be improvements, and I'm open to the case that a specific alternative option would be a better improvement. Maybe it's problematic that this one alternative became the choice with momentum, just like Medicare-For-All became the one alternative to the current American health insurance system with momentum. But I'm not going to resist it just because of the possibility that some other alternative might be a bit less bad.
"FPTP is very clearly bad... The fact that the problems with FPTP are so glaring"
So, why was the US stable for the entire 20th century using it? And, what's the rejoinder to my point 'hey Canada, Britain, Taiwan and South Korea all use it, and are all perfectly stable, highly rated democracies'? Like, what's the counter-argument to that? I do like to use this argument a lot, and sorry if I'm overusing it, but I'd interested to hear how FPTP can be so bad if.... we used it for a century just fine, and multiple separate 1st world countries also use it with no problems. I agree it would be improved with a two-round runoff.
RCV votes sometimes taking weeks to be counted is a serious problem. The fact that it can't be used for the Presidency due to the 12th Amendment is a serious problem. The tail risk of bizarre results for a major federal office is a serious problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_election)- in a low-trust country experiencing social instability. I feel like your argument boils down to 'this is something, therefore we must do it'. We can always make our present system worse, so I am small c conservative with stuff like this.
I hate to be that hipster in the online discussion that's all 'dude, approval voting'- but, dude, approval voting. Check it out. It is clearly superior to RCV, if you feel FPTP is that bad, it might be the alternative option that you mentioned. Clay has a good comparison here https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/ (Also, a two round runoff is literally the best electoral system ever invented, with the right caveats)
I don't have a problem with it for general elections in a two party system as we have here in the US. But in party primaries it enables fringe candidates and promotes bad behavior by elected politicians.
There is an inherent tradeoff between stability (The US is quite far towards stability from a structural perspective, as are South Korea and France) and democracy (Israel being quite far on this end, in that they have tons of political parties, a low-ish threshold to representation, and frequent elections...the Dutch are also very far on this end) present in voting systems. All the debate is really about how far towards one end or the other we want to be.
Beyond that, there is societal stability (South Korea's is clearly higher than ours right now). Electoral systems won't impact that, except maybe on the margins.
Yes, the new system dodged a bullet by producing a result that would have been effectively the same under the old system so no one could complain to hard about it. (I'm pretty confident that, if it had produced a different result, it would have been repealed as soon as possible before the next election.)
All US primaries are essentially open anyway. There's no party organisation that can deny candidates the right to stand, or expel voters from the party and remove their right to vote in the primary, however closed the state's primary system may be.
If you want to strengthen third parties, then the right thing to do is to close the primaries and strengthen the parties. If the institutional Republican party could have excluded Trump in 2015, then he'd have had to join a third party. If the institutional Democratic party could have excluded Bernie in 2015, then he'd have had to join a third party.
If you want third parties to be competitive, they need good candidates, and the best way to get that would be to give the major parties the power to exclude some of those good candidates.
I read the legislation back when it passed and I think it's an excellent two-round general election system.
But I think that calling the first round a "primary" of any sort is, honestly, misleading.
The jungle primary in California and Washington is effectively a primary because it usually does result in one D and one R, but I can't see how the first-round in Alaska can be reasonably described as a primary, given that it doesn't choose a single candidate per party.
If we want moderate Democrats to be nominated, is it good or bad for the party apparatus to have power? Conor Lamb got his first nomination in a special election with no primary . . . I wonder if he would be in Congress and running for governor of PA if he'd had to win a primary first time out.
Do you want moderate Democrats to be nominated within the Democratic Party, or do you want them to be forced to create a new Moderate Party?
The more power you give to the party apparatus, the more likely they are to form a separate party after being excluded from power in the Democratic Party.
In general, I prefer multi-party coalition politics, but that means that the walls at the edge of parties need to be stronger.
"I think the "jungle" aspect of Top-X really does most of the work by tearing down the walls between electorates of primary voters. The method - FPTP, AV, RCV - is mostly just tinkering."
I invite you to read the multi-decade history of nonpartisan jungle primaries, which West Coast states have been trying since the late 90s. These were the supposed magic cure to the evils of partisanship before all the hipsters got into RCV. California, Oregon and Washington have all experimented with different varieties of the nonpartisan or jungle primary, yet after two decades even proponents have been forced to admit that it simply doesn't do anything in practice:
"Further research on California's 2012 jungle primaries suggests that a jungle primary does not tend to lead to large amounts of crossover votes.[50] Most voters who crossed over did so for strategic reasons.... With regards to reducing political polarization, this does not seem to hold true. Due to lack of crossover votes, an extreme candidate from the majority party can still win over a moderate from the other party.[51][52][53][54] Though the intention of the system is to get a moderate from the majority party, this will not happen if there is no moderate, if the moderate lacks name recognition, or if voters are unsure of which candidate is more moderate"
Translation of that last sentence- regular voters are too stupid to know who the more moderate or reasonable candidate is. Most voters require the party 'brand' to be able to differentiate candidates- most voters do not have the time, attention span or are not mentally capable enough to distinguish candidates based on their policy platform
First, most often, transfers split in the same way as first preferences, ie the person who was preferred by the electorate as a whole is also the person preferred as second choice by people who chose someone else first.
Second, there are two common reasons why they don't: the first reason is ideology, when there is a big ideological split, voters tend to align with it. The second is identity - whether that be sex, or race, or LGBT+ status, voters who voted for a candidate of a particular identity will also vote for a second choice of the same.
Third, a 60-40 split in the opposite direction to first preferences is a large split.
The biggest intraparty reverse splits I've ever seen are about 75-25. All of those have been both ideology and identity.
Lots of voters will, if they only know certain candidates, vote across the ones they know and leave everyone else blank. The leaders on first preference are usually the best-known.
Since I agree completely and fervently with Matt's take on this issues, I thought I'd think carefully about what the best arguments against might be. The common "mobilize the base" argument is thoroughly debunked, as Matt writes. In the last Q&A session, he also mentioned the fact that the Ds did make gains in 2018 and 2020, which of course relieves pressure to change anything. But if I were a hard left progressive staffer having a private conversation with Matt, I would focus on three things:
First, by firmly moving intra-party discourse to the left, you can exert a lot of power through the administrative apparatus when you are in power. Getting your people appointed in the White House, in the Department of Education, at the EPA, to any open fed seats, etc, is a real win. And while you will bear some cost when the public learns about a novel interpretation of Title IX, say, I think it is fair to argue that this cost is quite small compared to the material gains.
Second, by quashing dissent and vigorously suppressing "blue dog" kind of ideas, you get to effectively set the narrative in media and among the professional staff at big tech companies. This obviously helps your cause both short and long term.
Third, if the D's were to move to the center, then yes, they would probably pick up more votes in the near term. But long term, the Rs would then also be forced to rein in their partisan base. Currently, the Rs can win simply by talking about government spending, inflation, immigration, and CRT. No need to confront either the Trumpist flank, or the unpopular parts of their own agenda (tax cuts, privatizing social security, total abortion bans, etc). If the Ds moved to the center, then the Rs would probably be forced to follow. Which might actually be bad, if you are Chuck Schumer or Raphael Warnock.
For me as a centrist, all of these "counterarguments" just reinforce my desire to see the Ds move to the center. But there is work to be done here convincing a staffer who genuinely wants to turn the US into an extra woke version of Denmark.
Yes, this. To the best of my recollection, the most influential of the people advocating gay marriage were very mindful of the fact that they were pushing people out of their comfort zone. In particular, they did not force politicians (e.g. Obama) to take public stances that would hurt badly hurt their chances of getting elected.
You are probably right on number (2). That actually cheers me up a bit - I was starting to convince myself that pushing the base driven agenda was better aligned with the insiders self interest than I had thought. (Thanks for teaching me the word "eldritch", incidentally!)
I think the grandest point Matt makes is that if the party moves toward the center the policies of the country will move to the left, NOT toward the center. I think that is true and the reason why people have to learn to hold strong to their views in principle but look a little more cold heartedly at the politicians. They are not there to pander to you and your allies, they are there to win and push policies that shape the country in the direction you would like. They are not your spirit animals. Move to the center to move to the left I love it.
This is why the Dave Roberts-type discussion of the GND was so silly. The argument was that all the hardcore leftwing stuff would be so popular that the less popular climate provisions would be palatable. Like, if all economic parts of the GND were really popular, politicians would have run on and won on those issues previously.
There is a belief on the far left just like the far right that their programs are super popular and if everyone just ran on it and screamed about it, a tsunami of young voters and non-voters would turn out.
They are just always being stabbed in the back by RINOs or Neoliberals.
“College educated” is a broad category and I wonder whether graduates of commuter colleges have different politics than those who graduate from top 25 institutions. Cultural power is concentrated amoung those who graduate from top institutions, so it’s worth studying a narrower group which is hard to survey through random dialing
"Joe’s listenership is 71% male and evenly split between high school and post-secondary graduates. Fifty seven percent of his audience reports earning over $50k per year, with 19% making over $100k. The average age of his listeners was 24. The most likely additional podcast responses from his listeners were “Serial,” “The Daily,” “This American Life,” and “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von.”"
Given the average age of his listeners is 24, I would imagine that his base isn't the non-college educated median voter, but is actually a young man who is either in college or just out of college. I know it was a throwaway line, but I think the Rogan phenomenon highlights a different issue for Democrats, which is how to (or should we) reach out to the disaffected early-20s male voters who kinda like Bernie Sanders, like that Trump pisses off the nerds, and otherwise don't care about politics.
Those abortion numbers are really worrisome - my fear is that after Roe goes the salience of the issue shoots up and we wind up having a bunch of state referenda on late term abortions in which the Democratic position is i) "experts say the term partial-birth abortion is misinformation," ii) if you support any restrictions on abortion you are an extremist who has no place in the Democratic party.
And the media debate will be about things like: is it racist and an act of violence against women to publish pro-life newspaper columns in the Times? Roe has sidetracked this issue into a debate about the power of the Supreme Court so I don't think the "political elites" from your poll have any idea how unpopular their position on abortion is, or any desire to persuade people who don't agree with them.
I think I have some quibbles with the interpretation of the Navigator Research data here. Notably, if I'm understanding this graph correctly, while more college Dems than non-college Dems say it's important to focus on climate (44% vs. 39%), the same gap – and in the same direction – separates the two groups on "jobs and the economy" (51% of college vs. 46% non-college) – and an even larger gap in the same direction on the pandemic (72% of college vs. 61% non-college). And look at the numbers on voting rights – 45% of college Dems say it's important vs. 33% of non-college.
The big differences in the other direction include health care, as MY notes (in general, and also Social Security and Medicare, with a 12-point difference) and "corruption in government" (I want to know more about what the voters who described that as a priority have in mind).
I think some major takeaways here are: the numbers on "jobs and the economy" are interesting because pundits often put forward focusing on the economy as in tension with focusing on the pandemic, and they're in the news constantly, but the education gaps among Dems on the two issues run in the same direction rather than canceling each other out. That suggests that the five-point difference on the economy might be a good baseline for the quotient of college-educated Dems just paying attention to the news more and saying the "correct" answer more consistently – and climate has the same five-point difference.
The second major takeaway is wow, almost 40% of non-college Dems say it's not most important to focus on the pandemic! That and the economy numbers support the thesis of this piece in the sense that successful messaging for Democrats isn't just a matter of stressing "bread-and-butter issues" or what have you – at least not only the issues the media deems bread-and-butter.
I think as a whole the stats MY presents don't support his general thesis that the Democratic party would be more successful if it did more things that are regarded as moderate or his secondary thesis that the party is out of touch with the non-CE segment of its base.
Both CE and non-CE rate pandemic as most important and jobs and the economy as second-most. To the extent that they have some ranking differences in 3-6, they are still largely contained within the general category of "medium important." Notably, CE and non-CE are almost identical on inflation, and both rank it below voting rights. Those numbers don't scream out of touch.
Further, if we were to make policy based on what these numbers say non-CE Dems want, we would basically be making traditional Democratic policy: protect Social Security and Medicare, help with healthcare (Obamacare is the party's biggest singular achievement of the last 20 years), do some stuff on climate but not anything that really hurts the economy.
The truth is that the Democratic party has consistently delivered for the working class elements of its base. I'm not sure why some people are so committed to a narrative against that.
And if we doubled-down further things non-CE Dems care more about -- make Soc Sec and Medicare more generous, make Medicaid and Obamacare more generous -- they would not be viewed as moderate.
I don’t think the thesis is that it’s failed to deliver for working class people. Arguably not enough, but then it’s only rarely in power for it.
The thesis is that they cannot help but couch both politics and policy in language deeply off-putting to the average voter, and they’re by far the loudest on “social justice” topics like abortion, race, and LGBT issues, when they should be *quietly* doing things about those and *loudly* pushing down the price of prescription medication.
I think you misunderstand the point that MattY is trying to make. I read it as being that to the extent that the Democratic party is successful politically, its because its delivering on traditional Democratic policy of delivering government services thatare popular with the public (protecting SS and MC, etc.)
The challenge for the party is that to be more successful, you don't need to capture more of the Progressive elites, you need to capture more squishy moderates - and the further along that spectrum you go to get those moderates, the more divergence you get from the progressive elites running the party and its aligned non profits, think tanks, media, etc. Especially on the cultural issues, but also on the focus of some of the economic issues.
I think he is saying "do more of what non-CE Dems want so we can we more non-CE independents."
My point is that those tables don't indicate that non-CE Dems want things that we conventionally think of as "moderate." For instance, they care more about voting rights than they do about inflation, more about climate than about Soc Sec, and less about crime than about any of those things (by a significant margin).
I read it to say that non CE Democrats care more about voting rights than they do about inflation - but by much smaller margins than progressive elites. And the further you go to the median voter, the more that difference grows until you get to the median voter who probably cares more about inflation than they do about voting rights.
I think the other part that is missing here is that most voters don't actually know what the parties espouse in detail. I think it was Matt who discussed how some voters refused to believe that Republican's were advocating for Medicare/medicaid cuts. I think many voters have the same perspective about voting rights - if you ask them if they are important, they will say yes. But they don't believe that Republican's are actually negating them so focusing on inflation has more relevance.
I’ve always thought Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to fill corporate board seats with labor reps was compelling — maybe a good idea to redesign and repurpose it for DNC leadership instead?
I don't think Warren's idea of labor representatives on corporate boards makes much sense.
One or two token members on the board that represent labor, rather than shareholders, would simply be outvoted on every important issue.
If it's a majority, then this effectively means a company cannot have employees at all without effectively ceding ownership of the company. Which simply means the entire workforce becomes independent contractors.
I found a Washington Post article[1] that describes it a little differently: VW tried to create a German labor union in Tennessee under the auspices of the UAW, and Republican fears that the UAW was corrupt doomed the effort.
This was an interesting post but, honestly, nothing in it surprised or informed me all that much. Pretty much what I would have expected.
What *would* be possibly more interesting is the same analysis for the Republican party. Just like with the Dems, the vast majority of Republicans in government and (I suspect) activists are college educated. How much do they differ, and in what ways, from the non-college part of the coalition?
I suspect there's a lot more convergence in the Republican coalition, but since it's such a black box to me, I could be way off.
This is an explanation that makes a lot of sense for this domain. I'm interested in your thoughts on, e.g., corporate marketing that codes as left on cultural issues, and the extent to which that's a related (marketing departments are staffed by college educated people) or distinct (these companies actually face market discipline and so actually frame these messages in fairly broadly popular ways) phenomenon.
Doesn’t some of this just have to do with advertisers wanting to reach the 18-49 year old crowd that buys more stuff and would be left of the general voting population?
I am all in on the idea that the Democratic Party suffers b/c of the influence of super leftie college grads. However, I think the polling data actually doesn't make it super clear there's a meaningful gap in issue preferences.
In all the issues polled, there's a huge majority of both college and non-college Dems on the same side. Generally there's more college Dems holding the left position but it's still either over 60% or about 40% for both groups. So, it seems you are pretty safe as a Dem going with and left-wing position, especially when you think what the aggregate number would be.
The elections for which it isn't true are, by definition, safe. The electorate there doesn't need to be pandered to, we don't have an NDP to throw off our Liberals.
Nationally, the Senate/Electoral College elections that matter (PA, NV, MI, WI) require a better strategy and better messaging.
How many college educated progressives believe they’re doing it for the non-college educated Democrats? If you make decent money on the coasts, you mostly aren’t voting for yourself. Republicans are gross and scary but they have limited impact in the northeast and west coast. If uneducated people can’t be bother to vote in their best interests because of bigotry and ignorance, upper middle class progressives should just take the tax cuts and check out of politics.
I think a lot of younger, college educated progressives actually see themselves as the working class, so they assume the policies they favor are also favored by the working class.
As far as I can tell, the average DSA-type 100% earnestly believes that a policy like forgiving $50k in student loan debt would primarily benefit the working class. AOC is still out here complaining about her student loans even though she's in Congress and making significantly more than average American. This whining would come of as totally tone deaf to actual working-class Americans, but her base of young, college educated leftists totally eat it up because they feel the same way.
I want to see the companion article on Republican elites. Are the business-owner/CEO/political operative types just as reactionary and racist as the base or do they skew further left or right? Inquiring minds want to know.
according to Shor, big leftwing money pulls the dems to the left on all issues, while big rightwing money pulls the gop to the right on economics but to the left on social issues
“Lots of people who vote for Democrats aren’t all that political and just think Republicans have scary ideas or are racists.”
Insert the meme of a bell curve surrounded by three figures:
Idiot: ‘I vote for Democrats because Republicans have scary ideas or are racists.’
Angry middlebrow guy: ‘I vote for Democrats because they have better ideas on climate change, unions, healthcare…’
Wise man: ‘I vote for Democrats because Republicans have scary ideas or are racists.’
I assume you’re familiar with the Midwit Meme?
That's exactly what he was referring to with, "Insert the meme of a bell curve surrounded by three figures . . . ."
And they are killing us politically on dumb niche social issues.
I think making sure people choose the right emoji skin color is a political hill worth dying on imo
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/09/1078977416/race-chat-emoji-skin-tone-colors
Sorry you not caring about that shows your privilege and your disdain for the lived experience of marginalized identities.
As an overweight person, I feel "unseen" by all these skinny emojis.
The one I hate is “person with obesity” like it’s a cold I caught, or something??
LOL. I am a nurse and we have to review our patient's history with them on admission and I basically rattle off all the listed problems and ask them if I missed anything or if there is anything new. I never ever read off "morbid obesity" because... hello, people know it if they have it and the "rooms" are divided by curtains that are not magically soundproof. I also don't rattle off "erectile dysfunction." I used to be very overweight and didn't need to be reminded. I especially hated it when people (usually men) asked me if I were pregnant.
I'll be sure to educate myself and do better.
"Do the work!"
What kills me us that it kind of implies that white people are the only ones who choose yellow emojis, which seems obviously untrue.
Not on the NPR piece, but in a woker one on the interwebs, the author lambasted white people who go with the yellow icons because “black people can’t choose when to invoke their blackness.” Does she think Apple locks black people in on just the brown emojis?? Meanwhile the NPR piece quotes a woman who says she uses the yellow emojis at work but brown ones with friends and family, so, someone better report her to Apple.
Is the word "invoke" a direct quote?
I'm trying to decide how weird that would sound.
Yes. https://www.digitalamerica.org/emojis-digital-blackface-and-white-identity-miranda-rosenblum/
I guess it's better than what they really meant, which is "wield".
This boomer disagrees. 20 somethings don't have time to save the world...cause they're trying to get laid, or should be. I was....then.
And you're right; Their ideas are mostly half baked.
I don't really trust most people's ideas until at least their mid-30's. Just my experience, but I have some optimism about the future based on my experience getting to know a lot of people in their 40's.
I refuse to give them a click to read the discussion, but I admit to some morbid curiosity.
Lol part of me thinks some of this stuff is driven by hate-clicks. I remember hearing that talk radio hosts like Hannity and Limbaugh got by partly on liberals hate-listening for the entertainment.
Make :) great again.
I've gotten in the habit of posting : ) (with a space in between the eyes and smile), because way too many programs were auto-converting that into an emoji.
I think there's a non-zero chance that it shook out of Homer Simpson as the default 1990s everyman and will now be with us until the end of time.
Standards evolve in funny ways like that. We have ethernet, and will seemingly always have ethernet, because of one dude's cheeky joke on an internal memo at Xerox in 1973.
Quoting Wikipedia,
Ethernet was developed at Xerox PARC between 1973 and 1974.[4][5] It was inspired by ALOHAnet, which Robert Metcalfe had studied as part of his PhD dissertation.[6] The idea was first documented in a memo that Metcalfe wrote on May 22, 1973, where he named it after the luminiferous aether once postulated to exist as an "omnipresent, completely-passive medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves."
I think you're confusing "emoji" and "emoticons".
For awhile, messaging clients would translate things like ":)" to a picture of a smiley face. IIRC, that's what AIM did.
Emoji actually originated from a set of standardized images that were used by Japanese cell phone companies -- you could send a "sushi" emoji, and it would show up as a sushi to anyone else using a cell phone. This made its way into Unicode for standardization, and the rest of the world picked it up.
The takes are so vicious because the stakes are so small.
Niche is not a synonym for minority in this usage. If an issue effects 20% of Americans I'd hardly call it a niche issue. I think his point was just that Dems are spending more and more time and issues that impact smaller and smaller slices, or "niches" of the electorate, not that we should only talk about things that impact 51% or higher of voters.
Niche is fine if it adds to a coalition, and it is not harmful in itself.
I recall, Andrew Yang used to have a niche issue of MMA fighters not getting paid enough. Fine. I think that makes sense, but it is a niche issue.
I see some niche issues now as absolutely toxic both policy wise and politically.
Go easy on crime D.A.'s for the sake of "equity" is a bad policy and a niche issue that turns off a lot of voters.
Same for trans women in sports.
But the NPR group buys it.
The CW on progressive prosecutors has probably swung too far in the other direction. Big-city criminal systems are often really, really broken, from bad street-level policing to outdated sentencing law to overworked PDs to genuinely incompetent prosecutors and judges. Prosecutorial discretion is an imperfect lever--ideally, you want high certainty of punishment and low sentences, which it can only partially accomplish--but it's an extremely powerful one, and the only one that's really easy for progressives to get their hands on.
True. There's also a factor of limited attention, though. It's fine for Yang to talk about MMA fighter pay when he's on Rogan or Luke Thomas. But if he talked about it 50% of the time I'd start to wonder about his priorities.
It seems local politics impacts you the most (trash pick up, K-12 schools, police, fire, library, etc) yet people more eagerly look to national politics for politics as spectator sport. The local issues also aren't as cleanly divided by red and blue.
I happen to be married to a foreigner (married in 1982). I'm a native born American. At that time it was pretty easy for her to get a green card to live in the US, and after five years residence, it was as easy for her to obtain US citizenship. From the experience of friends who've had the same experience more recently I don't think these rules have changed (though immigration is tougher on questioning whether the marriage is real or a ruse to obtain a green card). I don't know what the situation is where neither spouse is a US citizen, but one has legal residency here, either through a green card or an employer-attached visa of some sort.
I was going by your use of "issues that really impact a majority of American residents" - and trash, K-12, police, roads, water, etc. impact more people more regularly than say, your example of being an employee of a government contractor. And in local or federal, the issues of course aren't often very salient until something goes awry.
Henry, you should stop using the foreign spouse example (I've seen it twice) because apparently you don't understand the spouse of an American citizen is entitled to permanent residency (green card), which affords all the privileges of citizenship except the franchise.
(ask me how I know, heh)
There are some people who are heavily impacted by federal law, but it's not a coincidence that the vast majority of litigation is in state courts under state law.
"What issues really impact a majority of Americans?"
The issues covered by the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments.
"The First Amendment in particular is a very niche issue"
The existence of Substack is a First Amendment issue. So is your ability to comment here. And that doesn't even get into the number of Americans who engage in religious practice, or in free assembly, or who petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Something like a third of American adults own a firearm. Close to half live in a household where a firearm is present. And imagine how those numbers would change if, for example, states like New Jersey and California did not infringe on the rights of their citizens.
The very existence of cases of overreach by the state on property rights in the US, along with the examples of nations that do not have analogs of the American Bill of Rights in the foundations of their laws, demonstrates that such matters do impact the lives of Americans.
[Note that I consciously omitted the rights of criminals from my list.]
I read somewhere that there are Third Amendment discussion fora where Constitutional Law nerds debate its finer points in a wildly hypothetical way.
As far as I know, the only case law is Engblom v. Carey, from 1983. Seems like that particular right is the best protected one we have.
Those are not...But the constant race essentialism is.
But it is not even consistent.
We have dropped Asians, Jews, and Latinos de facto. We don't talk about them.
Just like we don't talk about gay rights anymore. It is all trans issues.
"If you’re married to an illegal immigrant, you know the Republicans will probably enforce the law strictly and deport your spouse while Democrats probably will not. "
Why would you think that? Obama deported more people than George Bush and Donald Trump. I believe he was a Democrat and the other two guys were Republicans.
I think Democrats should work on affordable housing, mental health (including addiction treatment) and immigration. Climate is important but from my perspective, we need policies that are engineered to help us live better and climate could be folded into that. It's like when you are on a health kick, you don't really think about your heart beating or breathing but both organ systems improve with regular exercise, good diet and meditation so if you engineer your day to have those 3 things the breathing and heartbeats (circulation) are taken care of. Mental health -- providing the incentives for infrastructure for more community, opening up more spots for Psych NPs and Mental Health Counselors, funding cognitive behavioral therapy clinic services, etc. That kind of thing so our healthcare insurance has a more true parity. Affordable housing can be constructed in a more energy efficient manner (eg).
IMO a "happiness ~ log(income)" is more accurate than "$75k threshold"
If it's also true that more educated, further left Democrats are a lot more likely to vote in primaries, that would complete the picture. If it weren't for the hurdle of getting past the primary, I suspect Democratic candidates, who want to win elections as much as any candidates, would get past the problem of pleasing elite opinion.
Same phenomenon on the right. It’s like watching two half-blind drunkards fight.
The vast majority of Democratic candidates in swing districts are the kind of moderates you are describing. Voters in swing districts generally recognize that they need relatively moderate candidates to win the general election, and "electability" becomes one of the most important factors among voters. It is in noncompetitive districts where these divides become more distinct and noticeable.
One of the issues is that candidates get attacked for the perceived "vibes" of their party. For example, there were vanishingly few congressional Democrats in favor of "defunding the police", but that did not stop people from punishing Democrats for that vibe, even the candidates who forcefully denounced that idea.
There isn't a good way to control these vibes. It is not constructive to attack Biden by saying that defunding the police is a bad idea, as Biden already has said he opposes defunding the police and Democrats have passed bills to help fund local governments (which means funding the police).
Democrats can't control what activists say and do, many of those activists are explicitly not a part of the Democratic party. I wish some of those activists wouldn't say dumb shit, but there is always someone willing to say something dumb. A prime example was the Fox News with the "anti-work" activist interview. I don't really see much reason to try to control these activists.
Was coming here to make this comment. This aspect of how our overly-democratic primaries work results in really bad representation.
Ranked choice voting is so, so bad:
1. Is wayyyyy more complex than it appears at first, with many weird/unexpected results. Frankly, I don't think that present-day America is a high trust enough society for something this complex
2. Encourages gamesmanship (ranking your preferred candidate lower at first, because it gives them better odds of winning on subsequent ballots). Voting shouldn't be a three-dimensional chess game
3. Takes much longer to tabulate the results- days if not weeks- and also would be much tougher to audit for recounts. Again, we are not a high trust-enough society right now to handle that
4. Has a small number of utterly bizarre results. Can you imagine if something like this happened for a high-profile office like a Senator? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_election
5. Can't be used for Presidential elections per the 12th Amendment
6. Actually opens the door for more extreme candidates, as every whackadoodle with 2% support gets listed on the ballot, and 100+ years of political science research shows us that most voters will not research each candidate or carefully assess their policy positions
I think voting method changes are overrated- but if you had to pick one, approval voting is vastly superior. Even better would be a two round system, where AV gets used to narrow to a top two- when then face off in a conventional second round
Re 2: The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem shows that *every* voting method other than dictatorship encourages gamesmanship, so this isn't a specific strike against ranked choice/instant runoff.
Is there any reason to think that the situations where strategic voting is both effective, and known to be effective, are more likely for IRV than for approval voting?
I think it's just a matter of degree. Every computer system is theoretically hackable too, but it's a quantum leap from the level of security on a random website to say the White House, or top-level control for AWS or Google. (Also, what gamesmanship exists in plurality voting with just two candidates?)
In practice with RCV you see a lot of candidates encouraging their supporters to rank them lower on the initial ballot, because it will be beneficial on subsequent ballots. I guess you could make the argument that it's harmless, but I think it's a net negative to turn our electoral system into a game. These guys have a good explanation of it:
https://electionscience.org/library/monotonicity/
Again, the Muller-Satterthwaite theorem states that *every* election mechanism other than dictatorship (whether it is RCV or Approval Voting or FPTP or anything else) has violations of monotonicity, when there are three or more candidates.
What I'm interested in, therefore, is not *whether* there are such violations (we know there will be) but how *frequent* those violations are, and also whether they are *knowable* so that people actually change their votes in order to respond to it. The site you link shows two elections where this arguably did happen, but you claim "In practice you see a lot of candidates encouraging their supporters to rank them lower on the initial ballot" - did that actually happen in these two elections? Or is it only after the fact that it became clear that this was the case, so that we can assume that most people in fact gave us their honest preferences?
Since we know monotonicity failures exist with every election system, I won't say it's "harmless", but it's not a deadly strike against the system. The bigger strike against a system is if people can know very clearly that they're in a case where a monotonicity failure occurs, and thus refuse to vote their conscience. This is the default situation in first-past-the-post (think about everyone who would prefer a Green or a Libertarian, but lists a Democrat or a Republican as their first choice because they know this is the only strategic way to influence the outcome). It sounds like in RCV elections, there will actually be monotonicity failures a non-negligible amount of the time, but it's harder for me to see that voters will ever be aware of this in a way that actually incentivizes them to change up their ballots.
You claim that this happens a lot, and if it does, then that would shift my views. But I haven't yet seen any evidence that it has ever happened.
There are problems with RCV, but given the choice between plurality primary elections and RCV for primaries, I'll take RCV every time. That said, I don't think #6 is actually true.
I genuinely can't understand how being anti-FPTP became so trendy. Some of the most stable democracies on planet Earth use plurality voting, including Canada, Britain, Taiwan and South Korea- the latter two being presidential. I'd rate all four of them as being more stable than the US right now, frankly. That's without getting into the fact that America functioned just fine in the 20th century using plurality voting.
In fact, South Korea's a good analogue- presidential system, FPTP, single member districts, and just two parties make up 97% of their legislature- basically the exact same as us. I'd say they're more stable than the US? Which makes me think voting systems just don't matter that much?
If all you want is stable democracy, why not go for Singapore's system?
The issue is that, if you want people to earnestly express their preferences, and you want to make the outcomes of elections represent these preferences, FPTP is very clearly bad, because nearly every election gives a substantial number of people an incentive to rank someone other than their preferred candidate first. As you note, RCV doesn't totally eliminate that, but as Muller-Satterthwaite notes, neither does any other voting system other than dictatorship.
The fact that the problems with FPTP are so glaring is why it's become trendy to be against it.
What I don't understand is how it became trendy recently to be anti-RCV as well - I see problems with it, but they seem less bad, and it's not clear that some particular alternative is less bad than it. Many of these options would be improvements, and I'm open to the case that a specific alternative option would be a better improvement. Maybe it's problematic that this one alternative became the choice with momentum, just like Medicare-For-All became the one alternative to the current American health insurance system with momentum. But I'm not going to resist it just because of the possibility that some other alternative might be a bit less bad.
"FPTP is very clearly bad... The fact that the problems with FPTP are so glaring"
So, why was the US stable for the entire 20th century using it? And, what's the rejoinder to my point 'hey Canada, Britain, Taiwan and South Korea all use it, and are all perfectly stable, highly rated democracies'? Like, what's the counter-argument to that? I do like to use this argument a lot, and sorry if I'm overusing it, but I'd interested to hear how FPTP can be so bad if.... we used it for a century just fine, and multiple separate 1st world countries also use it with no problems. I agree it would be improved with a two-round runoff.
RCV votes sometimes taking weeks to be counted is a serious problem. The fact that it can't be used for the Presidency due to the 12th Amendment is a serious problem. The tail risk of bizarre results for a major federal office is a serious problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_election)- in a low-trust country experiencing social instability. I feel like your argument boils down to 'this is something, therefore we must do it'. We can always make our present system worse, so I am small c conservative with stuff like this.
I hate to be that hipster in the online discussion that's all 'dude, approval voting'- but, dude, approval voting. Check it out. It is clearly superior to RCV, if you feel FPTP is that bad, it might be the alternative option that you mentioned. Clay has a good comparison here https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/ (Also, a two round runoff is literally the best electoral system ever invented, with the right caveats)
I don't have a problem with it for general elections in a two party system as we have here in the US. But in party primaries it enables fringe candidates and promotes bad behavior by elected politicians.
There is an inherent tradeoff between stability (The US is quite far towards stability from a structural perspective, as are South Korea and France) and democracy (Israel being quite far on this end, in that they have tons of political parties, a low-ish threshold to representation, and frequent elections...the Dutch are also very far on this end) present in voting systems. All the debate is really about how far towards one end or the other we want to be.
Beyond that, there is societal stability (South Korea's is clearly higher than ours right now). Electoral systems won't impact that, except maybe on the margins.
How about Eric Adams as Mayor of NYC? I haven't been following -- is that result attributed to the ranked choice system?
Adams would have won under any circumstance. Wiley was the one who benefited from ranked choice, just not enough to push her over the top.
Yes, the new system dodged a bullet by producing a result that would have been effectively the same under the old system so no one could complain to hard about it. (I'm pretty confident that, if it had produced a different result, it would have been repealed as soon as possible before the next election.)
Adams would have defeated Wiley under the old runoff primary, then? Yeah, I guess I can see that as a possibility.
All US primaries are essentially open anyway. There's no party organisation that can deny candidates the right to stand, or expel voters from the party and remove their right to vote in the primary, however closed the state's primary system may be.
If you want to strengthen third parties, then the right thing to do is to close the primaries and strengthen the parties. If the institutional Republican party could have excluded Trump in 2015, then he'd have had to join a third party. If the institutional Democratic party could have excluded Bernie in 2015, then he'd have had to join a third party.
If you want third parties to be competitive, they need good candidates, and the best way to get that would be to give the major parties the power to exclude some of those good candidates.
I read the legislation back when it passed and I think it's an excellent two-round general election system.
But I think that calling the first round a "primary" of any sort is, honestly, misleading.
The jungle primary in California and Washington is effectively a primary because it usually does result in one D and one R, but I can't see how the first-round in Alaska can be reasonably described as a primary, given that it doesn't choose a single candidate per party.
If we want moderate Democrats to be nominated, is it good or bad for the party apparatus to have power? Conor Lamb got his first nomination in a special election with no primary . . . I wonder if he would be in Congress and running for governor of PA if he'd had to win a primary first time out.
Do you want moderate Democrats to be nominated within the Democratic Party, or do you want them to be forced to create a new Moderate Party?
The more power you give to the party apparatus, the more likely they are to form a separate party after being excluded from power in the Democratic Party.
In general, I prefer multi-party coalition politics, but that means that the walls at the edge of parties need to be stronger.
"I think the "jungle" aspect of Top-X really does most of the work by tearing down the walls between electorates of primary voters. The method - FPTP, AV, RCV - is mostly just tinkering."
I invite you to read the multi-decade history of nonpartisan jungle primaries, which West Coast states have been trying since the late 90s. These were the supposed magic cure to the evils of partisanship before all the hipsters got into RCV. California, Oregon and Washington have all experimented with different varieties of the nonpartisan or jungle primary, yet after two decades even proponents have been forced to admit that it simply doesn't do anything in practice:
"Further research on California's 2012 jungle primaries suggests that a jungle primary does not tend to lead to large amounts of crossover votes.[50] Most voters who crossed over did so for strategic reasons.... With regards to reducing political polarization, this does not seem to hold true. Due to lack of crossover votes, an extreme candidate from the majority party can still win over a moderate from the other party.[51][52][53][54] Though the intention of the system is to get a moderate from the majority party, this will not happen if there is no moderate, if the moderate lacks name recognition, or if voters are unsure of which candidate is more moderate"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonpartisan_blanket_primary#Analysis
Translation of that last sentence- regular voters are too stupid to know who the more moderate or reasonable candidate is. Most voters require the party 'brand' to be able to differentiate candidates- most voters do not have the time, attention span or are not mentally capable enough to distinguish candidates based on their policy platform
NY Mayoral primaries are RCV, and that had to be put through by Democrats.
Voters have weird preferences, news at 11.
Some rules of thumb for RCV:
First, most often, transfers split in the same way as first preferences, ie the person who was preferred by the electorate as a whole is also the person preferred as second choice by people who chose someone else first.
Second, there are two common reasons why they don't: the first reason is ideology, when there is a big ideological split, voters tend to align with it. The second is identity - whether that be sex, or race, or LGBT+ status, voters who voted for a candidate of a particular identity will also vote for a second choice of the same.
Third, a 60-40 split in the opposite direction to first preferences is a large split.
The biggest intraparty reverse splits I've ever seen are about 75-25. All of those have been both ideology and identity.
Lots of voters will, if they only know certain candidates, vote across the ones they know and leave everyone else blank. The leaders on first preference are usually the best-known.
Since I agree completely and fervently with Matt's take on this issues, I thought I'd think carefully about what the best arguments against might be. The common "mobilize the base" argument is thoroughly debunked, as Matt writes. In the last Q&A session, he also mentioned the fact that the Ds did make gains in 2018 and 2020, which of course relieves pressure to change anything. But if I were a hard left progressive staffer having a private conversation with Matt, I would focus on three things:
First, by firmly moving intra-party discourse to the left, you can exert a lot of power through the administrative apparatus when you are in power. Getting your people appointed in the White House, in the Department of Education, at the EPA, to any open fed seats, etc, is a real win. And while you will bear some cost when the public learns about a novel interpretation of Title IX, say, I think it is fair to argue that this cost is quite small compared to the material gains.
Second, by quashing dissent and vigorously suppressing "blue dog" kind of ideas, you get to effectively set the narrative in media and among the professional staff at big tech companies. This obviously helps your cause both short and long term.
Third, if the D's were to move to the center, then yes, they would probably pick up more votes in the near term. But long term, the Rs would then also be forced to rein in their partisan base. Currently, the Rs can win simply by talking about government spending, inflation, immigration, and CRT. No need to confront either the Trumpist flank, or the unpopular parts of their own agenda (tax cuts, privatizing social security, total abortion bans, etc). If the Ds moved to the center, then the Rs would probably be forced to follow. Which might actually be bad, if you are Chuck Schumer or Raphael Warnock.
For me as a centrist, all of these "counterarguments" just reinforce my desire to see the Ds move to the center. But there is work to be done here convincing a staffer who genuinely wants to turn the US into an extra woke version of Denmark.
Yes, this. To the best of my recollection, the most influential of the people advocating gay marriage were very mindful of the fact that they were pushing people out of their comfort zone. In particular, they did not force politicians (e.g. Obama) to take public stances that would hurt badly hurt their chances of getting elected.
You are probably right on number (2). That actually cheers me up a bit - I was starting to convince myself that pushing the base driven agenda was better aligned with the insiders self interest than I had thought. (Thanks for teaching me the word "eldritch", incidentally!)
I think the grandest point Matt makes is that if the party moves toward the center the policies of the country will move to the left, NOT toward the center. I think that is true and the reason why people have to learn to hold strong to their views in principle but look a little more cold heartedly at the politicians. They are not there to pander to you and your allies, they are there to win and push policies that shape the country in the direction you would like. They are not your spirit animals. Move to the center to move to the left I love it.
This is why the Dave Roberts-type discussion of the GND was so silly. The argument was that all the hardcore leftwing stuff would be so popular that the less popular climate provisions would be palatable. Like, if all economic parts of the GND were really popular, politicians would have run on and won on those issues previously.
There is a belief on the far left just like the far right that their programs are super popular and if everyone just ran on it and screamed about it, a tsunami of young voters and non-voters would turn out.
They are just always being stabbed in the back by RINOs or Neoliberals.
This was the Krugman line as well.
It shook my world to see two people I have such great respect for making such a bonkers argument.
“College educated” is a broad category and I wonder whether graduates of commuter colleges have different politics than those who graduate from top 25 institutions. Cultural power is concentrated amoung those who graduate from top institutions, so it’s worth studying a narrower group which is hard to survey through random dialing
"...media made for college graduates is considered prestigious and highbrow in a way that local TV news or the Joe Rogan Experience is not."
I wondered what the actual breakdown is of Rogan listeners and found this article: https://www.mediamonitors.com/audience-demographic-variations-specific-to-genre/
"Joe’s listenership is 71% male and evenly split between high school and post-secondary graduates. Fifty seven percent of his audience reports earning over $50k per year, with 19% making over $100k. The average age of his listeners was 24. The most likely additional podcast responses from his listeners were “Serial,” “The Daily,” “This American Life,” and “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von.”"
Given the average age of his listeners is 24, I would imagine that his base isn't the non-college educated median voter, but is actually a young man who is either in college or just out of college. I know it was a throwaway line, but I think the Rogan phenomenon highlights a different issue for Democrats, which is how to (or should we) reach out to the disaffected early-20s male voters who kinda like Bernie Sanders, like that Trump pisses off the nerds, and otherwise don't care about politics.
Those abortion numbers are really worrisome - my fear is that after Roe goes the salience of the issue shoots up and we wind up having a bunch of state referenda on late term abortions in which the Democratic position is i) "experts say the term partial-birth abortion is misinformation," ii) if you support any restrictions on abortion you are an extremist who has no place in the Democratic party.
And the media debate will be about things like: is it racist and an act of violence against women to publish pro-life newspaper columns in the Times? Roe has sidetracked this issue into a debate about the power of the Supreme Court so I don't think the "political elites" from your poll have any idea how unpopular their position on abortion is, or any desire to persuade people who don't agree with them.
I think I have some quibbles with the interpretation of the Navigator Research data here. Notably, if I'm understanding this graph correctly, while more college Dems than non-college Dems say it's important to focus on climate (44% vs. 39%), the same gap – and in the same direction – separates the two groups on "jobs and the economy" (51% of college vs. 46% non-college) – and an even larger gap in the same direction on the pandemic (72% of college vs. 61% non-college). And look at the numbers on voting rights – 45% of college Dems say it's important vs. 33% of non-college.
The big differences in the other direction include health care, as MY notes (in general, and also Social Security and Medicare, with a 12-point difference) and "corruption in government" (I want to know more about what the voters who described that as a priority have in mind).
I think some major takeaways here are: the numbers on "jobs and the economy" are interesting because pundits often put forward focusing on the economy as in tension with focusing on the pandemic, and they're in the news constantly, but the education gaps among Dems on the two issues run in the same direction rather than canceling each other out. That suggests that the five-point difference on the economy might be a good baseline for the quotient of college-educated Dems just paying attention to the news more and saying the "correct" answer more consistently – and climate has the same five-point difference.
The second major takeaway is wow, almost 40% of non-college Dems say it's not most important to focus on the pandemic! That and the economy numbers support the thesis of this piece in the sense that successful messaging for Democrats isn't just a matter of stressing "bread-and-butter issues" or what have you – at least not only the issues the media deems bread-and-butter.
I think as a whole the stats MY presents don't support his general thesis that the Democratic party would be more successful if it did more things that are regarded as moderate or his secondary thesis that the party is out of touch with the non-CE segment of its base.
Both CE and non-CE rate pandemic as most important and jobs and the economy as second-most. To the extent that they have some ranking differences in 3-6, they are still largely contained within the general category of "medium important." Notably, CE and non-CE are almost identical on inflation, and both rank it below voting rights. Those numbers don't scream out of touch.
Further, if we were to make policy based on what these numbers say non-CE Dems want, we would basically be making traditional Democratic policy: protect Social Security and Medicare, help with healthcare (Obamacare is the party's biggest singular achievement of the last 20 years), do some stuff on climate but not anything that really hurts the economy.
The truth is that the Democratic party has consistently delivered for the working class elements of its base. I'm not sure why some people are so committed to a narrative against that.
And if we doubled-down further things non-CE Dems care more about -- make Soc Sec and Medicare more generous, make Medicaid and Obamacare more generous -- they would not be viewed as moderate.
I don’t think the thesis is that it’s failed to deliver for working class people. Arguably not enough, but then it’s only rarely in power for it.
The thesis is that they cannot help but couch both politics and policy in language deeply off-putting to the average voter, and they’re by far the loudest on “social justice” topics like abortion, race, and LGBT issues, when they should be *quietly* doing things about those and *loudly* pushing down the price of prescription medication.
I think you misunderstand the point that MattY is trying to make. I read it as being that to the extent that the Democratic party is successful politically, its because its delivering on traditional Democratic policy of delivering government services thatare popular with the public (protecting SS and MC, etc.)
The challenge for the party is that to be more successful, you don't need to capture more of the Progressive elites, you need to capture more squishy moderates - and the further along that spectrum you go to get those moderates, the more divergence you get from the progressive elites running the party and its aligned non profits, think tanks, media, etc. Especially on the cultural issues, but also on the focus of some of the economic issues.
Hi, John. Maybe I am misunderstanding him.
I think he is saying "do more of what non-CE Dems want so we can we more non-CE independents."
My point is that those tables don't indicate that non-CE Dems want things that we conventionally think of as "moderate." For instance, they care more about voting rights than they do about inflation, more about climate than about Soc Sec, and less about crime than about any of those things (by a significant margin).
*Edit: meant to say "we can win more"
I read it to say that non CE Democrats care more about voting rights than they do about inflation - but by much smaller margins than progressive elites. And the further you go to the median voter, the more that difference grows until you get to the median voter who probably cares more about inflation than they do about voting rights.
I think the other part that is missing here is that most voters don't actually know what the parties espouse in detail. I think it was Matt who discussed how some voters refused to believe that Republican's were advocating for Medicare/medicaid cuts. I think many voters have the same perspective about voting rights - if you ask them if they are important, they will say yes. But they don't believe that Republican's are actually negating them so focusing on inflation has more relevance.
I’ve always thought Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to fill corporate board seats with labor reps was compelling — maybe a good idea to redesign and repurpose it for DNC leadership instead?
I don't think Warren's idea of labor representatives on corporate boards makes much sense.
One or two token members on the board that represent labor, rather than shareholders, would simply be outvoted on every important issue.
If it's a majority, then this effectively means a company cannot have employees at all without effectively ceding ownership of the company. Which simply means the entire workforce becomes independent contractors.
I found a Washington Post article[1] that describes it a little differently: VW tried to create a German labor union in Tennessee under the auspices of the UAW, and Republican fears that the UAW was corrupt doomed the effort.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/11/19/the-strange-case-of-the-anti-union-union-at-volkswagens-plant-in-tennessee/
Seconded. Some enterprising politicians should definitely be paying more attention to those folks.
This was an interesting post but, honestly, nothing in it surprised or informed me all that much. Pretty much what I would have expected.
What *would* be possibly more interesting is the same analysis for the Republican party. Just like with the Dems, the vast majority of Republicans in government and (I suspect) activists are college educated. How much do they differ, and in what ways, from the non-college part of the coalition?
I suspect there's a lot more convergence in the Republican coalition, but since it's such a black box to me, I could be way off.
This is an explanation that makes a lot of sense for this domain. I'm interested in your thoughts on, e.g., corporate marketing that codes as left on cultural issues, and the extent to which that's a related (marketing departments are staffed by college educated people) or distinct (these companies actually face market discipline and so actually frame these messages in fairly broadly popular ways) phenomenon.
Doesn’t some of this just have to do with advertisers wanting to reach the 18-49 year old crowd that buys more stuff and would be left of the general voting population?
"Republicans don't buy shoes anymore".
I am all in on the idea that the Democratic Party suffers b/c of the influence of super leftie college grads. However, I think the polling data actually doesn't make it super clear there's a meaningful gap in issue preferences.
In all the issues polled, there's a huge majority of both college and non-college Dems on the same side. Generally there's more college Dems holding the left position but it's still either over 60% or about 40% for both groups. So, it seems you are pretty safe as a Dem going with and left-wing position, especially when you think what the aggregate number would be.
The median voter is at the right edge of that “non-college Democrat” band.
And to win the Senate we need to win someone 2 points to her right.
Do you think this is true across the country or is it true when weighted for the bias of our electoral system?
The elections for which it isn't true are, by definition, safe. The electorate there doesn't need to be pandered to, we don't have an NDP to throw off our Liberals.
Nationally, the Senate/Electoral College elections that matter (PA, NV, MI, WI) require a better strategy and better messaging.
How many college educated progressives believe they’re doing it for the non-college educated Democrats? If you make decent money on the coasts, you mostly aren’t voting for yourself. Republicans are gross and scary but they have limited impact in the northeast and west coast. If uneducated people can’t be bother to vote in their best interests because of bigotry and ignorance, upper middle class progressives should just take the tax cuts and check out of politics.
I think a lot of younger, college educated progressives actually see themselves as the working class, so they assume the policies they favor are also favored by the working class.
As far as I can tell, the average DSA-type 100% earnestly believes that a policy like forgiving $50k in student loan debt would primarily benefit the working class. AOC is still out here complaining about her student loans even though she's in Congress and making significantly more than average American. This whining would come of as totally tone deaf to actual working-class Americans, but her base of young, college educated leftists totally eat it up because they feel the same way.
I want to see the companion article on Republican elites. Are the business-owner/CEO/political operative types just as reactionary and racist as the base or do they skew further left or right? Inquiring minds want to know.
according to Shor, big leftwing money pulls the dems to the left on all issues, while big rightwing money pulls the gop to the right on economics but to the left on social issues
The answer is "yes," but of course you're begging the question.