It's a banal observation, but focusing solely on minority demographic groups is not a winning strategy in a democracy, because they are not a majority. And minority groups cannot be added together to create a majority, because as the Catalist report makes clear, many people in different minority demographic groups overlap.
Maybe Biden’s single biggest mistake was saying that his VP pick would be a minority woman. It set the tone immediately that the only reason that individual was getting that job was because they fit the progressive activist’s requirements. That behavior has continued in local government too and it’s not good. You should pick the best person for the job, period. And if it’s a white, middle age male, so be it!
After doing so, he won the election and then was pretty popular, until Afghanistan/Delta+Omicron/inflation permanently brought his numbers down.
If voters were angry about his supposed promise to pick a minority woman as VP* they sure had plenty of opportunities to show that anger while the promise was still fresh.
* Actually, he just promised to pick a woman, although his final shortlist was comprised only of minority women, to be fair.
No one votes based on the VP pick but it did have long term consequences because Harris is not a very good politician and struggles to answer questions that any candidate would expect.
I thought Harris ran a decent enough campaign which, like every single winning and losing campaign in our history, made some mistakes along the way.
Biden treated his VP badly which again is what every single President has done to his VP.
And yes, he probably should have picked someone like Klobuchar or Whitmer in 2020. I like Harris, but being stuck with a left wing label and being from California did not help her future prospects.
She ran like someone who was ahead in the race, focussed on making fewer mistakes rather than someone who was behind in the race. People who say that she ran a decent campaign are only saying it because it was against Trump and she lost narrowly. If she had lost by 6 points against Haley, very few would be saying that.
It wasn't a problem because it cost him 2020, it was a problem because she eventually became the nominee and had weaknesses that were known at the time.
Maybe. Had the Fed acted quicker and inflation had fallen six months earlier and had Biden followed his 2024 border policies starting in 2022, then Harris wins and we're all describing her genius in vanquishing Trump at last.
Team Transitory was more correct than Team Summers, who predicted extended pain in curing inflation (didn't happen, wasn't needed). Not that being more right than wrong helped the Democrats in the presidential contest, unfortunately.
It was close enough that any combination of two or three mistakes avoided could have prevented the loss. They lost by 2 points in the tipping point state. Lower inflation maybe gets a point, paying attention to the border is another point, better nominee a point, Biden not being so old a point, etc.
A bigly huge problem was that, after picking Harris, Biden did not showcase her enough - she should have had more visibility in his Administration, so people got used to her and came to like her. My own feelings toward her were neutral to mildly negative until I saw her campaign in 2024, at which point I thought she was doing a great job.
Props to him for pulling that stupid bandaid off (and it wasn't a "disaster"; after a bad first 48 hours the withdrawal went fairly smoothly).
But his permanently lower poll numbers are over-determined. The Afghanistan withdrawal was followed quickly by a resurgence of COVID (Delta and Omicron) and then followed by a horrific spike in inflation. You don't have to be a genius to hold that the latter two events affected his poll ratings far more than the withdrawal.
I think it wasn't the worst decision for Biden's popularity, but I think it hurt Harris'. For one, because it did give power to the "DEI candidate" attack line. For another, because listening to the "Original Sin" book made me come to the conclusion that the Biden administration really treated her that way. Ideally, White House officials would've observed Biden's failing faculties earlier and felt comfortable getting him to resign and have her replace him, but they treated her as if she wasn't actually qualified for the job and had only gotten it to check demographic boxes.
I haven't read "Original Sin" and don't plan to, but I wonder how one of Biden's loyal staffers (let alone family members) would have known that *now* is the time to get him to resign. I suspect that, like with lots of other ageing people, he had good days and bad days, good moments and bad moments, and the people who are very loyal to him and love him would naturally tend to emphasize the good ones and excuse or downplay the bad ones. Decline isn't binary; it's a random walk on a slope that (gently?) declines over time, with lots of mixed signals.
And whether or not Harris was seen as a "DEI hire" inside the White House, I'd bet that forcing Biden to resign in favor of VP Klobuchar would not have been seen as that much more positive a thing by those White House people. They probably would have seen any number of reasons -- real and imagined -- to not want to have her replace their boss.
I think when they started to limit his exposure to cabinet secretaries or limit his working hours significantly, they should have decided it was time. It now seems clear to me that the reason the cabinet never discussed the 25th amendment is because his aides were good enough at gatekeeping access to him that the cabinet didn't know how bad it was.
That's a separate issues from why Harris was seen as a DEI candidate; that was due to Biden's public statements about considering only women for VP. If he'd instead framed his VP search as "getting the best possible candidate for the job", leaking shortlists that had men and women of multiple races on them, and then landing on Harris, people might have speculated about how her gender and race played into the selection but they wouldn't have known dead to rights that they were primary factors.
Well, not biggest mistake (although emblmatic of the overall tone of mistakes he made of bending knee to the Groups & Activists). I would say one can quietly internally say one wants to push amongst qualified candidates to not fall into a rut (i.e. make sure have serious options) but not make that kind of self-damaging almost 19070s/80s charicature....
But yeah, making the public headline promise of VP as minority woman was bad marketing, bad branding and bad pandering.
>but focusing solely on minority demographic groups is not a winning strategy in a democracy<
This is undoubtedly true, but you're not talking about Democrats, are you? That party now bends itself into contortions trying to woo white working class voters* in places like Michigan and Wisconsin. Whites are a majority! So, the notion that Democrats focus >solely< on "minority demographic groups" seems questionable.
I'm increasingly of a mind (as this piece seems to argue) that chasing different groups of voters is just inefficient, bad politics. Rather, deliver broad-based, low inflation prosperity and good, effective, clean government while demonstrating non-extremist common sense on cultural issues. This is the way forward. And the GOP looks to be giving Democrats a big opening to do just that.
*And, yes, to state the obvious, it's not doing a very good job at this.
How did the party bend itself into contortions trying to woo white working class voters when the party did not change its stance on the social issues that are important to them?
They really missed an opportunity to go after the Republicans as representing the Ivy elite (Penn and Yale) whereas the Democrats represented the hardscrabble graduates of less prestigious colleges (Howard and Chadron State College).
>>How did the party bend itself into contortions trying to woo white working class voters when the party did not change its stance on the social issues that are important to them?<<
By obsessively prioritizing manufacturing jobs. When's the last time you heard a Democratic* politician extolling the noble work performed by UPS workers, Uber drivers or hairstylists? Joe Biden's horrible decision on Nippon Steel is a classic example of the massive pandering to industrial labor. Listening to the political rhetoric in contemporary America, one would think the 8% of the workforce that is engaged in manufacturing is the only group that counts. But there is dignity in all kinds of work, services very much included.
I agree Democrats need to dial down the woke. Which is precisely the reason (as I mention above) they're "not doing a very good job at this."
*It goes without saying >Republicans< are like this, of course, but their leadership thinks it's feasible and desirable to return to 1954's economy...
Is that bending itself into contortions? Or is that ignoring what the working class wants and paying attention to what the party wants the working class to want?
that hardly qualifies as bending itself into contortions ... more like as others noted following a decades long Lefty side of Democrats focus on labor unions in Mfg and also focusing on what the Lefty academic fraction set want to talk to the non-college educated about, ignoring the evidence of reaction to the backlash to the heavily Academy inflected wokey-woke cultural side agenda.
Now indeed agree that Dems are ignoring whole swaths of generally non-college degree holders jobs - UPS, DHL, other logistics workers, technical works outside of Mfg, etc.
Even small business owners who could be a segment
And indeed the Nippon Steel (as a weird pandering not really even to the actual workers involved but a pandering to the AFL-CIO leadership and their fetishization themselves of a 1950/60s mfg sector (as idealised in nostalgic memory, not as actually extent...).
Better to say bungled their poorly thought through efforts they did make and autistically did so through LEfty academic and labor union elite lens.
The contortions are evidence that the Democratic Party doesn't know how to campaign to win the votes of non-college whites, and would rather spend all its time campaigning with smaller demographic groups.
Yes, Democrats now say they are pursuing the white working class. That's good, although what I mostly hear is them saying that their economic policies are good for that group and they should just yell that louder, I guess.
What I'd like to see Democrats argue about is "how do we lose 45% of the electorate *but no more than that.*" In other words, what groups can we give up as long as we more than make up those losses elsewhere. I don't care how many white working class men we lose as long as we find other groups we can win over from the Republicans.
Sure it’s not realistic but that also represents an extreme. In every election since then more white people have voted Dem and more minorities have voted Republican.
But, to Matt’s broader point, splitting hairs about what demographic (majority or minority) that Dems should appeal to misses the point that
swing voters have largely the same priorities regardless of the color of their skin.
Specifically trying to appeal to white people is A. not going to work because Republicans will do it better and B. less efficient than identifying than identifying the issues that everyone cares about and honing in on those
I believe to be competitive Democrats need at minimum around that level of the white vote, but to Sean's point, that's assuming running up the score to ridiculous levels with other groups. A world where the Democrats are getting, say, 80% of the black vote and 60% of the hispanic vote would be a recipe for electoral wipeout.
I mean yes, Clinton, Biden, and Harris all did better with the white vote than that with varying levels of success (or failure) in the electorate as a whole.
Kind of ironic that the onset of the “intersectional” Democratic Party coincided with a slow collapse of their racial minority coalition.
I don’t know if this critique applies to the US Democratic Party specifically, since they do tend to try to focus on women’s interests, and women are a majority, registering and voting at higher rates than men.
And it works, Dems get more votes from women than Republicans do. Even in 2024, Harris got 54% of women’s votes.
It’s just that in practice, Dem strength with women isn’t enough to outweigh Dem weakness with men.
I feel that the identity obsession, generally, represents a wasted decade for liberalism and a step or two backwards even in race relations. Was anything gained?
The real issue is that Democratic policy is also focussed on benefits for a small minority of 10-15% of people who are not doing well financially. As an individual, I get absolutely nothing from the party while paying high federal and state taxes. Public programs in Europe are more popular because they don’t exclude anyone.
Does Obamacare not help you at all? Even as a backup plan for potential unemployement, or future pre-existing conditions that might cause you to be denied?
In my case, not really because my backup plan is going on my wife’s plan. These issues only existed for those who are self employed. The healthcare system needs very fundamental changes but Obamacare only focused on the individual market and expansion of Medicaid.
Also, members of different minority groups don’t necessarily get along or see themselves as sharing common political or cultural goals (Unsurprisingly, given the theological conservatism of many-though by no means all-Black churches, around half of Black Democrats think that legalizing same-sex marriage was a mistake and that nonreligious people are inherently immoral.)
We need to factor in how important supporting minority groups is to the progressive identity. (I don't know the answer to this.) The report makes clear that Democrats lost voter turnout. We aren't jazzed.
To what extent does the majority want to support minorities?
I'm sure this is a case-by-case thing, but I think it is important.
"Joe Biden greatly improved [Covid] things once he took over."
One (not the only) ways that Biden disappointed was that he did NOT dramatically improve on Trump's handling except for not having those ridiculous press conferences. Did CDC finally start giving individuals and public policy makers information to make better more cost effective decisions? Did retaining international travel restrictions and testing to fly make any sense by then if ever? If Biden really DID do something better why wasn't it mentioned in the campaign?
Covid deaths peaked in the United States the very week Trump left office. Talk about potent symbolism! The Covid situation was better a few months after Biden took over. And much better a year after he took over. And vasty better two years after he took over.
In our system, political leaders get clobbered when things are bad on their watch, and enjoy approval when things are better, regardless of whether they truly deserve credit. (Reagan's "Morning in America" is probably the most potent example of this: Paul Volker deserved the credit for the booming, 83-84 recovery, not Saint Ronnie!).
Anyway, yes, it's a shame Harris wasn't better able to press home a "Morning in America" case herself. Because there was an objectively strong case along these lines: National conditions were massively improved over what they had been four years previous.
The disaster that was the national Democratic party's political operation in 2023-2024 is something historians will be studying and marveling at for a long, long time.
Gee, I wonder if that might because the pandemic arrived in the United States after the New Year? LOL.
And yes, Covid deaths peaked the very week Trump left office. Close to 4,000 per day IIRC. But my original point wasn't narrowly focused on Covid deaths. National conditions were much better by late 2024 than when Joe Biden took office. The pandemic was over. Americans were travelling in massive numbers (when Joe arrived many countries wouldn't allow Americans to even enter). Crime was rapidly declining (Joe inherited a nasty crime spike from Trump). We had experienced the strongest recovery of any high income country (Trump presided over the sharpest downturn since the 1930s). The social unrest and massive protests that characterized Trump's last year in office were long a thing of the past by late 2024. Unemployment was much lower. Equity markets were way up. Our debt-GDP ratio was down. Even inflation had been licked.
It really was morning again in America, but Democrats couldn't sell it. And the country (and millions abroad) are now paying a terrible price.
The point is that Biden had the advantage of the vaccine being ready for rollout and still more people died under him. I expected him to do better than Trump but he didn't.
People were not happy about inflation and immigration under Biden. The shutdown induced recession under Trump was different from a regular recession, so you would expect conditions to be better once the vaccines were rolled out and things went back to normal. Instead of responding to higher inflation and interest rates by cutting spending, he went on passing more spending bills. Real wage growth under Biden was one of the weakest in recent history. Only Obama's first term was worse. You could argue that the Biden presidency was a mixed bag but directionally, he was a failed president. Voters were unhappy with him for several reasons. It almost certainly didn't help that he was not mentally or physically fit for the job and yet insisted on running for another term.
Democrats had to nominate a moderate governor who could distance himself/herself from Biden and his unpopular policies and could go to any show or podcast and talk about public policy fluently. They didn't. Yes, we're all paying the price but not because Biden was a great president and Democrats couldn't sell it.
That’s the job - to convince people who didn’t vote for you. He could have appealed to the MAGA types by giving credit to Trump for Operation Warp Speed. If your excuse is that as President, your responsibility is only towards people who voted for you, you definitely don’t deserve to be President.
Resistance hardened after the vaccine mandates began.
People are making a number of lazy points, like comparing total deaths in 2021 to 2020, but the entire mission of public health is to get the people to follow the recommendations, not "well I nagged them and those dumb idiots didn't follow."
Had Trump won reelection, do you think he would have executed the vaccine distribution strategy better or worse than Biden did? Say what you want about the NPI things you're referring to, but by far the most important thing to happen was the distribution of vaccines.
I really hate the emphasis Democrats put on demographics. The Obama campaign was one of the first to unlock ad targeting and it became gospel, when really I think they just had a first mover advantage in this space.
Example: I’m pro-choice — of the “have tried to volunteer driving women” and donating regularly variety. I know other women in my position who are aghast at the prospect that any woman would vote for a Republican candidate knowing the outright draconian landscape — and it’s not just do “Do people know?” They do, and when pressed about this subject, feel strongly against the Republican position, including (and especially) women.
But women are people and people are multifaceted. We also have expressed versus revealed preferences. Women are also, say, household managers balancing checkbooks (lol I’m old; whatever their equivalent is), buying groceries, have a seat at the table when dealing with monthly mortgage payments and bills.
So yeah: when asked, I’m sure they say “I care about reproductive health” and they also understand this implicates their health and safety directly. Simultaneously, many had opportunities to preserve (in their minds) the right at a state level, and/or could do a holistic risk assessment about the probability of maybe getting pregnant and it maybe being complicated versus always needing to eat and put a roof over their heads.
Sure there is the utilitarian question of how such laws impact society overall, not just ourselves, but also people evolved to navigate the world with rules of thumb.
So I can completely see how a Democratic pollster would tell you this is a high salience issue with a demographic inclusive of your base but also beyond it, and that they hold medium-strong positions. This would suggest you lean into it, but it’s a completely compressed view of a fully formed voter, many of whom are weighing immediate “push come to shove needs.”
I think the negotiation book “Getting to Yes” has worthwhile advice. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Find shared interests and let people coalesce around those — these are Klaas’ schemas. Democrats need a story to tell before they can start treating this like a micromanagement mechanic in an RTS game.
Not to mention a full 3rd of women are outright prolife, and a larger percentage are still pretty squeamish about abortions the further along in pregnancy you get.
Random thought, if we're talking about awkward demographic appeals, I'll just say I found Tim Walz' "hurr hurr I'm a dorky sitcom dad" shtick annoying. I have no clue if my sentiment was broadly shared, and I do think he had some good moments. But it did feel like Democrats looking at straight white dudes like gorillas in the mist.
As a white Upper Midwestern man it did seem to me like he was more someone playing to type in a sitcom than a typical white Upper Midwestern man. Though maybe the nature of the game is that it’s just always a bit unsubtle.
It also hurt him that he took a bunch of unpopular left-wing positions in Minnesota. The vibes did not match the policies.
It will be interesting to see how Rob Sand does running in Iowa. He is essentially running as an independent on the D line—never voluntarily mentioning that he’s a Democrat, using green and orange (hunting colors) instead of blue, talking about religion constantly, emphasizing GOP endorsements, and using anti-both-parties slogans and rhetoric (“better and truer, not redder or bluer”).
But without, so far, no noticeable breaks from Democrats on policy.
I feel like this salad bar kind of approach is designed for policy demanders. It matches how I think of the United States. Everything is pretty great but for few issues around xy and z.
It’s how the last few democratic conventions have gone a mix of patriotism and specific solutions for Latino, black, lgbtq+, etc. from their activists.
Trump and Bernie Sanders have a kind of central story to tell and the problem is it’s mostly bullshit. Like outside of get an unusually charismatic messenger who can Jedi mind trick you into not needing specific concerns addressed and I’m not sure how you do it that isn’t bullshit.
Barack Obama had a central story that I think was mostly accurate and he's much more popular than Trump or Bernie ever have been.
Somehow many of the loudest voices on the left manage to be against him though. What did he ever deliver besides a trillion dollar fiscal stimulus, trillion dollar healthcare program, climate change investments, judges who delivered marriage equality, protection for childhood migrants, increased taxes on the rich and financial regulation including an entire new consumer protection agency?
Barack Obama was hugely charismatic and got by on a central message of hope and change—which was honestly extremely vague and meaningless but I guess that’s better than false bullshit if you’re able to pull it off
Vague and meaningless platitudes are popular but they also allow a lot of room for people to create their own meaning and expectations. Thus why the Left doesn't like Obama. He has never been Bernie Sanders, but he made it easy to pretend he was.
A message of hope and change may be very vague, but it's genuinely different from one based on negativity. There's a big difference between "vote for me" vs. "vote against the other".
You should watch some videos where he discusses policy. It is true that he was hugely charismatic but he was not a lightweight on policy issues like Biden or Trump or Harris. Hillary was also good at discussing policy but lacked charisma.
I don’t know I didn’t live in the us during his first term so maybe I missed it but second term Obama I didn’t see that kind of coherence in the second term.
But I remember his 08 campaign being just hope and change not a story but a theme.
And from statistical viewpoints, endless slicing of the electorate is more likely to result in false discovery too.
This, imo, speaks volumes about a lack of quantitative minded at high level of dem politics - we have a lot of lawyers or activists types but I think we need a bit more balance
I think our problem might be too many interests—backed by too many technocrats including analysts, lawyers, PR, etc.—leading to stasis and in-party fighting among Democrats. For now, Republicans have MAGA and the cult of Trump to concentrate interests. Moreover, they have been able to recruit resources, talents, and other celebrities from the Tech/Finance/Legal right as needed. Eg, DOGE and Musk.
It’s not surprising that we’re currently flailing about with our 2024 election losses, including the disaster of Joe Biden’s demise. Not to mention all the legal and financial warfare being waged by MAGA/DOGE. But hopefully we can reach some focus and clarity by the 2026 midterms. Eg, The Abundance Agenda. Moreover, the ongoing autopsy of the late Biden administration should aid us in this task. (Rather unsettling that could include a property necropsy with Joe Biden’s recent late-stage cancer announcement.)
I’m personally following the narrative around Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin”. Particularly the analysis in the following sources and how they’re evolving over time across various media channels.
Agree mostly but I would caution against being too hopeful about the abundance agenda. Actually advancing the agenda requires an intra-party fight between different factions within the Democratic Party. Republican governors are already delivering on the abundance agenda.
Yeah that’s what I feel - like in terms of absolute number, yes, we have more quantitative talents but it’s underrepresented in decision making process I feel.
And unfortunately, the playing field is not even in a sense that there’s more conservatives and liberals so GOPs, in a sense, have more leeway to make bonkers decisions and still stay relevant (like Trump did not have a good election strategy or tactics imo but the inflation plus this bias just helped him)
I think because Trump basically owns the GOP at this point he has free reign to break with GOP orthodoxy whenever he wants and waffle on abortion rights, high taxes on the rich, cutting Medicaid, etc. It's not a strategy anyone else in either party can use because normally there would be no chance to get the nomination saying the types of stuff he says, but as a campaign strategy it appears to be pretty effective.
(Now that he won and has decided it's ok to cut Medicaid and they aren't going to raise taxes on the rich, we'll see how it works out though).
Yeah, and tbh that’s a strength of outsider and is very unique to Trump I came to realize at this point. I think one thing ppl don’t talk about and is underestimated by everyone is his talent as an entertainer and sound authentic.
And this inability to understand this strength essentially results in both parties doubling down on unpopular stuffs. GOPs think being an authoritarian with GOP orthodoxy is very popular (hence all those nutjobs like black hitler in NC and confederate flag bearer in PA as governor candidates and fascism fetishization with DeSantis campaign) while Dems get obsessed with message deliveries instead of reviewing core policies
And being a data scientist made me realize leaderships LOVE this type of subgroup analysis - like uplift tree is hyped up a lot. And I kinda feel like it is used as a little bit of cope for them not to make a strategic change tbh
I like Tim Walz because he came across as decent and kind, not because he has some special decoder ring on how to talk to me.
Remember the Democratic convention? During Waltz’s speech, his son jumped up and shouted, “That’s my dad!” I thought it was such a touching moment, a boy spontaneously and publicly expressing his love for his dad. And of course some a-hole Trump supporters mocked him for it on social media.
And I was like, who does America want? The party of the loving family man or the party of jerks who mock a teenage boy for showing emotion? I thought the choice was clear. But alas.
I’m not going to defend Trump. But I think this is a false choice. I’m not surprised Walz lands with many. But he doesn’t land with the people he says he was chosen to connect with.
I get there are people who virtue signal things like Kindness is Everything. But it’s not. There is much, much more to life than that. But alas.
I get your point, Edward. But I'm still happy that my party is the one that thinks picking a Tim Walz is better than picking a J. D. Vance. Sometimes you just have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror.
My big picture point is you have to play to win. Winning really, really matters.
Are you happy that your party covered up the declining mental acuity of a man they were supporting to be President for four more years? Again, make contact with truth.
Ah, covering up the declining mental acuity of Biden. Yep, none of us ever heard from Biden and were prevented from drawing our own conclusions. Yep, they were so focused on hiding Biden from the public that they did something that no campaign has *ever* thought of before, which was to demand a presidential debate *months* early. Oh, and they also did that thing which has never before been done in modern times, which is to force the President and their party's leader from the race.
I have no thoughts on that specific moment. It clearly spoke to you. Great. Are you the football watching guy fixing his truck that Walz was saying he was tasked with to be a permission structure to vote for Harris? I am skeptical that is true.
I voted for Harris but definitely not because of Tim. Because Trump is bad.
Ok, guilty as charged, I’m not a guy, I don’t own a truck, and I don’t watch football (I like baseball). I just, I dunno, I naively thought that kindness and decency would have a broader electoral appeal than they did.
I get it, but Walz spoke directly to this being a political strategy. It clearly was a bad strategy. People don’t truly understand other people. The Democrats need to get in touch with reality.
This is why I get frustrated when I hear people say Kamala ran a great campaign. No, she didn’t. Walz illustrates this with his confession and confusion.
It was a very winnable election. She should have done the things necessary to win. She didn’t.
A pet theory of mine is that the voting rights act ultimately lead Democrats down this destructive path. For a generation, Democrats fought to win southern house districts by legally forcing gerrymandering based on race. This was fairly done in response to racist gerrymandering. But over time, Democrats came to depend on racial gerrymanders, which had the effect of causing the party to view the electorate entirely on those terms. And the electorate largely responded in kind.
Racial gerrymanders also increasingly cause strife between historically Democratic-leaning ethnic groups by directly pitting them against each other in House redistricting.
Yeah. In Texas Cities, it’s basically deciding which districts are Black, which are Hispanic, and which are Republican. White liberals, of which there are many, mostly get split between the three and Black and Hispanic politicians fight over which gets enough of the split for one extra seat.
It’s one reason I’d strongly favor multimember districts with ranked choice voting. Let voters decide who their proper community of interest is and vote accordingly.
2016 involved a demographic realignment that jolted a lot of people out of 90s-2000s-style analysis. Many people then updated to thinking that every election would feature a realignment, but they’re rare and we shouldn’t expect them.
Contributing factors:
- weak, uncharismatic post-Obama candidates have been unable to inspire
- a culturally progressive mode of argumentation that wields the (purported) views of specific demographic groups
- Standpoint epistemology is an easy way to resolve cognitive dissonance between the way the electorate acts and the way we think it “should” act that also offers easy ways to improve (just canvas Ohio! The Rio Grande Valley!) when we should be suspicious of this low hanging fruit because the other side has plenty of fruit pickers of their own
Is it just me or does anyone else find it depressing that you need a white messenger to appeal to white people and a Black one to appeal to Black people?
I mean ffs, we’re sixty years past “judge a person by the content of their character,” how long will it take for us to see each other as just human beings? I see an ad with an interracial couple in it, I don’t say to myself “oh this product isn’t for me, because Husband and I are both white.”
I think "need" is perhaps strong. If a message was 10% more effective from your ethnic group that would be huge in political ads even individual voters are mostly not affected by it.
I mean, I wish the effect were zero, but a small effect doesn't seem too bad.
I would say it’s depressing that people think that you need that, but also that it’s clear from Obama’s success with the white working class and Trump’s success with Hispanics that you don’t actually that.
This is consistent with the need for the turn against what can be described as "wokeness," foregrounding race/ethnicity in every conversation. Not that those characteristics don't matter in specific contexts, but every person has the same concerns of wanting a good job, safe streets, good education etc. And most of politics is about a good economy, low crime, and opportunity to get ahead.
Dems have let academia and the far left make the intersectionality framework the dominant mode to view politics, even in instances where there is no evidence it is true description of events nor that it is politically persuasive. And Dems have let their base get high on this supply by coddling them on why Hillary and Kamala lost (which is that they were swinging left on unpopular cultural issues, not that they were women).
“People disagree about how best to appeal to this kind of cross-pressured voter, and while I have a view on that, I don’t want to grind the axe here.”
I for one would love to hear the cliff notes version. I come across a lot of folks like this and tend to dismiss them as not serious or worth engaging with - a mistake on my part. Would be good to have a tool kit for engaging with them.
I don't know either, but I'd try making how bad deficits are central going in the direction of higher taxes, less spending on inefficient, high cost CO2 reduction whihc is adjacent to reducing agricultural subsidies.
But deficits is not a one campaign issue. We have not done enough since the Reagan deficits to try make deficits toxic. As Republicans have illegal immigration.
Voters realigned in 2016 because Trump was a different kind of Republican than Romney. But since then it's literally been the same Republican nominee against some version of a Democratic establishment politician trying to manage the existing Democratic coalition. It's not surprising the that the overall shape of partisan preferences are similar in these elections.
Maybe there will be a surprising realignment once a non-Trump nominee faces a Democrat who isn't a political heir. But, carefully micro-targeting message and issues isn't likely to be much more effective in shaping the electorate even then, it will be a response to a bigger actual change.
This report answered a question I had about turnout. Black women turnout dropped 1%, black men dropped 2%. This was an election where the Democrats had a black woman on the top of the ballot.
Democrats need to realize they don't have any idea what's going on with identity politics. There needs to be someone in every meeting where it comes up who says "we don't have any idea how this works. We're like a caveman trying to operate a jetliner. We need to stop doing work where we don't know what we're doing, and instead work on other things."
This is the electorate in all its contradictory glory. People disagree about how best to appeal to this kind of cross-pressured voter, and while I have a view on that, I don’t want to grind the axe here.
----------------
Essentially repeating my Sunday question of the week - I really really want to hear about that.
Coz none of my solutions are very good.
"Let me educate you, you brain addled schizo" and "go die in a ditch, you brain dead moron" and "you know, Yarvin is on to something when he says we should cancel democracy" are not likely to generate widespread support.
1. Republicans want to cut [specific major spending program]. We need to get back to balanced budgets like we had under President Clinton, but not by hurting [beneficiaries of specific major spending program].
2. Republicans are deliberately and stupidly crippling American green energy. I support an all-of-the-above energy program that will lower American energy costs, maintain our energy independence, and keep us on the path to stopping global warming.
3. The rich need to pay their fair share. [no further specifics needed during campaign season]
4. Hope, change, etc.
All of this is much better than insulting the electorate or going over to neoreaction.
1- How do you propose to get to a balanced budget? I haven't checked the maths but raising taxes on the rich alone won't close the gap. Someone's sacred cow is about to get gored...
2- I'm with you obviously but, apparently, what 50+% of the US (male?) population hear when they hear "green energy" is "you want to make me into a gay sissified pussy". Drop 'green'. Maybe say solar, possibly stick to nuclear or just say 'energy' without further precision.
3- Only Republicans get away with never being asked a follow up question. The bar is (unfairly but very really) higher for Dems.
4- Sure. "Rah, rah, rah, 'Merica!". Works well. Hardly high praise to your fellow citizens' thinking abilities...
But that's my point. You can probably get elected on nothing but platitudes and a couple of sentences hinting at your leanings (left or right, for that matter). The issue is that governing is hard and it'd be useful to have a mandate to try and roll up veto points.
Does it not make sense to try and convince voters your vision (and the sacrifices you are likely asking of them if you want to balance the budget and run down the debt stock) is a superior vision?
1. Taxing more is underrated. Just lifting the social security income tax cap (without raising benefits) would eliminate a very large chunk of that deficit.
eliminating the social security income tax limit is a 12% increase to the top marginal tax rate, it might be a good idea but it would also be the largest tax increase in a long, long time.
Thank you for saying this— I think it’s odd how many people think this change is an easy no brainer. Even Elizabeth Warren, who promised not to raise taxes on the affluent middle class had a tortured proposal where there the tax only started up again at like 250,000 dollars and then she made the employee pay the full amount of the tax on that income. It would have been very unpopular and also led to a ton of gamesmanship around compensation to avoid the tax. And I just don’t know if people whose income is below the cap will be troubled by unraveling the conceptual framework that social security is something you pay into and then get returns on. Paying 12 percent marginal taxes for no benefit is a meaningful change.
I think its underrated how the Republican party has coded the current tax burden as too much. Clearly, spending more than taxes is causing the deficit and many of recipients of that spending seem to think they are part of the imbalance - like the farmers, disaster payout folks, SNAP, etc. I for one would be happy to pay more taxes because I (not my kids) should be paying for the system that lets me be successful.
Yep ; but I bet that wouldn't be popular. Basically, by considering "deficits don't matter" for so long, the US is now in need to raise cash comparatively fast. By definition, that's going to be a bit painful.
Not that the rest of the world isn't in a worse place. Europe, for example, is in an even worse position...
Southern Europe used to be a (deserved) laughingstock, but now all of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece have lower interest rates than the US. It took a crisis and lot of pain, but the deficits were brought under control.
Roughly the same way we did it in the 90s? Raise the top marginal rate back to that level, reinstitute paygo, etc. Balancing the budget isn't something that's done in one year but we're in a different macroeconomic environment than we have been for most of the post-GFC era. Balancing the budget has been such a hard nut to crack because there effectively no tradeoffs to high deficits in a zero-interest rate environment. So even if you are successful there are no immediate benefits. But if balancing the budget, or at least creating a credible path to balanced budgets brings interest rates down then the pain of increased taxes/reduced spending is offset in part or entirely by stronger economic growth.
> I'm with you obviously but, apparently, what 50+% of the US (male?) population hear when they hear "green energy" is "you want to make me into a gay sissified pussy"
I doubt this very seriously. If you talk about banning ICE vehicles or deliberately making gas more expensive then people will get upset of course, but energy independence and cheaper energy prices seem like a great selling point.
2. Solar and wind poll very strongly, from what I’ve seen. People like them, as long as they don’t require any personal sacrifice or costs.
3. “Specifics will of course depend on how Congressional elections go.”
4. People know they aren’t happy with the political establishment (fair) and that they’ve got a lot to lose from revolution (very fair). Not establishment and not going to set up guillotines is a reasonable set of political desires.
1- You're never going to get Republicans to agree to tax hikes and they are going to hit you hard on that...
... but anyway, my question wasn't "how do I run as a centrist/left of center without being so reviled I lose to Donald Trump?" or even "how do I run a successful left of center campaign that can beat Rs" - I agree with Matt (and you) that being a bit bland on many subjects and pushing a couple of important priorities (not sure I'd have picked energy as my number 2 but it's a valid choice) can work.
My question was/is : do we try to convince voters to be a bit more ambitious or do we just play along with just a few bit of left leaning policies?
For example, if you think climate change is actually urgent and serious, there's something to be said for being upfront about it, trying to convince voters of the urgency and asking for a commensurate effort.
If they don't want to, then, fine, you start thinking about emigrating to an area that'll benefit from climate change while the rest of the world burn.
But just saying "hey, let's have solar and wind and everything else so we can have energy abundance" doesn't 'work' if that new, now greener, mix still burns the planet... (I don't know if it would or wouldn't, I'm trying to make a point about convincing voters vs. going along, leading vs. following)
You seem to be presupposing that there are issues that demand urgent action on the merits but where urgent action is not possible without first shifting the views of the electorate.
I don’t believe climate change qualifies on those terms, and you aren’t insisting on the point there, but I also don’t know of anything else that does qualify.
If you aren’t happy with democracy, you should I think point to concrete areas where democracy is the problem.
EDIT: Individual Republican Congress members endorse higher taxes all the time, in the context of fiscally responsible compromise/grand bargains.
Not bad. I would wrap it up under a banner that says, "I want the US to own the future, not China."
Remember how Clinton took Dole to the cleaners with the former's "bridge to the 21st century" versus the latter's crabbed, backward looking pessimism. We need more of that.
"To the extent that there’s a lesson here, it isn’t anything about 23 year-olds or people who don’t follow the news, it’s just that you should try to make decisions that make people happy." Therein lies the crux of the matter. Democrats need to stop obsessing about identity politics and marginal groups, and aim their policies at winning over the great plurality of us regardless of gender, color, creed, ethnicity, LGTBQ status or any other label.
While the Trump regime is absolutely terrible, Oregon and California are run by Democrats but are not shining examples of good governance. I own a small property in Portland that I had rented out, and the last tenant absolutely wrecked the place. Because the leaders of Portland decided to make the city super friendly to tenants it took forever to get him evicted. And even when the court agreed he should be evicted, I could still not take possession of the property because we had to go on a long waiting list for the sheriff to visit. And even now when considering finding a new tenant, my hands are tied by Portland's business unfriendly laws that don't allow one to reject applicants based on low credit scores or bad history. It's this kind of thing that puts Democrats in a bad light.
It's a banal observation, but focusing solely on minority demographic groups is not a winning strategy in a democracy, because they are not a majority. And minority groups cannot be added together to create a majority, because as the Catalist report makes clear, many people in different minority demographic groups overlap.
Maybe Biden’s single biggest mistake was saying that his VP pick would be a minority woman. It set the tone immediately that the only reason that individual was getting that job was because they fit the progressive activist’s requirements. That behavior has continued in local government too and it’s not good. You should pick the best person for the job, period. And if it’s a white, middle age male, so be it!
After doing so, he won the election and then was pretty popular, until Afghanistan/Delta+Omicron/inflation permanently brought his numbers down.
If voters were angry about his supposed promise to pick a minority woman as VP* they sure had plenty of opportunities to show that anger while the promise was still fresh.
* Actually, he just promised to pick a woman, although his final shortlist was comprised only of minority women, to be fair.
No one votes based on the VP pick but it did have long term consequences because Harris is not a very good politician and struggles to answer questions that any candidate would expect.
I thought Harris ran a decent enough campaign which, like every single winning and losing campaign in our history, made some mistakes along the way.
Biden treated his VP badly which again is what every single President has done to his VP.
And yes, he probably should have picked someone like Klobuchar or Whitmer in 2020. I like Harris, but being stuck with a left wing label and being from California did not help her future prospects.
She ran like someone who was ahead in the race, focussed on making fewer mistakes rather than someone who was behind in the race. People who say that she ran a decent campaign are only saying it because it was against Trump and she lost narrowly. If she had lost by 6 points against Haley, very few would be saying that.
If ifs and ands were pots and pan, there'd be no need for tinkers (said my grandmother).
Running for President is hard. It's fortunate that our candidates have the wise advice from all of us in the peanut gallery to rely on.
It wasn't a problem because it cost him 2020, it was a problem because she eventually became the nominee and had weaknesses that were known at the time.
Maybe. Had the Fed acted quicker and inflation had fallen six months earlier and had Biden followed his 2024 border policies starting in 2022, then Harris wins and we're all describing her genius in vanquishing Trump at last.
I agree with this. Team Transitory was wrong and that was a major mistake.
Team Transitory was more correct than Team Summers, who predicted extended pain in curing inflation (didn't happen, wasn't needed). Not that being more right than wrong helped the Democrats in the presidential contest, unfortunately.
It was close enough that any combination of two or three mistakes avoided could have prevented the loss. They lost by 2 points in the tipping point state. Lower inflation maybe gets a point, paying attention to the border is another point, better nominee a point, Biden not being so old a point, etc.
(No I'm not confident about the exact numbers)
A bigly huge problem was that, after picking Harris, Biden did not showcase her enough - she should have had more visibility in his Administration, so people got used to her and came to like her. My own feelings toward her were neutral to mildly negative until I saw her campaign in 2024, at which point I thought she was doing a great job.
Ah, well, it's so much more encouraging that his numbers permanently plummeted for keeping his promise to end the pointless forever-war.
Props to him for pulling that stupid bandaid off (and it wasn't a "disaster"; after a bad first 48 hours the withdrawal went fairly smoothly).
But his permanently lower poll numbers are over-determined. The Afghanistan withdrawal was followed quickly by a resurgence of COVID (Delta and Omicron) and then followed by a horrific spike in inflation. You don't have to be a genius to hold that the latter two events affected his poll ratings far more than the withdrawal.
God I hope so, because that stupid war needed to end!
I think it wasn't the worst decision for Biden's popularity, but I think it hurt Harris'. For one, because it did give power to the "DEI candidate" attack line. For another, because listening to the "Original Sin" book made me come to the conclusion that the Biden administration really treated her that way. Ideally, White House officials would've observed Biden's failing faculties earlier and felt comfortable getting him to resign and have her replace him, but they treated her as if she wasn't actually qualified for the job and had only gotten it to check demographic boxes.
I haven't read "Original Sin" and don't plan to, but I wonder how one of Biden's loyal staffers (let alone family members) would have known that *now* is the time to get him to resign. I suspect that, like with lots of other ageing people, he had good days and bad days, good moments and bad moments, and the people who are very loyal to him and love him would naturally tend to emphasize the good ones and excuse or downplay the bad ones. Decline isn't binary; it's a random walk on a slope that (gently?) declines over time, with lots of mixed signals.
And whether or not Harris was seen as a "DEI hire" inside the White House, I'd bet that forcing Biden to resign in favor of VP Klobuchar would not have been seen as that much more positive a thing by those White House people. They probably would have seen any number of reasons -- real and imagined -- to not want to have her replace their boss.
I think when they started to limit his exposure to cabinet secretaries or limit his working hours significantly, they should have decided it was time. It now seems clear to me that the reason the cabinet never discussed the 25th amendment is because his aides were good enough at gatekeeping access to him that the cabinet didn't know how bad it was.
That's a separate issues from why Harris was seen as a DEI candidate; that was due to Biden's public statements about considering only women for VP. If he'd instead framed his VP search as "getting the best possible candidate for the job", leaking shortlists that had men and women of multiple races on them, and then landing on Harris, people might have speculated about how her gender and race played into the selection but they wouldn't have known dead to rights that they were primary factors.
Well, not biggest mistake (although emblmatic of the overall tone of mistakes he made of bending knee to the Groups & Activists). I would say one can quietly internally say one wants to push amongst qualified candidates to not fall into a rut (i.e. make sure have serious options) but not make that kind of self-damaging almost 19070s/80s charicature....
But yeah, making the public headline promise of VP as minority woman was bad marketing, bad branding and bad pandering.
Fwiw he publicly only said that it would be a woman - the race commitment was re: SCOTUS
>but focusing solely on minority demographic groups is not a winning strategy in a democracy<
This is undoubtedly true, but you're not talking about Democrats, are you? That party now bends itself into contortions trying to woo white working class voters* in places like Michigan and Wisconsin. Whites are a majority! So, the notion that Democrats focus >solely< on "minority demographic groups" seems questionable.
I'm increasingly of a mind (as this piece seems to argue) that chasing different groups of voters is just inefficient, bad politics. Rather, deliver broad-based, low inflation prosperity and good, effective, clean government while demonstrating non-extremist common sense on cultural issues. This is the way forward. And the GOP looks to be giving Democrats a big opening to do just that.
*And, yes, to state the obvious, it's not doing a very good job at this.
How did the party bend itself into contortions trying to woo white working class voters when the party did not change its stance on the social issues that are important to them?
But Tim Walz played Madden and did a video working on his truck
They really missed an opportunity to go after the Republicans as representing the Ivy elite (Penn and Yale) whereas the Democrats represented the hardscrabble graduates of less prestigious colleges (Howard and Chadron State College).
I think this is a misread.
Working-class voters don't dislike Ivy League grads per se. They dislike elite liberals. There's a difference.
Why should working-class voters dislike "elite liberals" more than they dislike elites as such?
If Tim Walz is an elite liberal and so disqualified, then 95% of Democratic officials are disqualified.
Probably the same for Harris.
>>How did the party bend itself into contortions trying to woo white working class voters when the party did not change its stance on the social issues that are important to them?<<
By obsessively prioritizing manufacturing jobs. When's the last time you heard a Democratic* politician extolling the noble work performed by UPS workers, Uber drivers or hairstylists? Joe Biden's horrible decision on Nippon Steel is a classic example of the massive pandering to industrial labor. Listening to the political rhetoric in contemporary America, one would think the 8% of the workforce that is engaged in manufacturing is the only group that counts. But there is dignity in all kinds of work, services very much included.
I agree Democrats need to dial down the woke. Which is precisely the reason (as I mention above) they're "not doing a very good job at this."
*It goes without saying >Republicans< are like this, of course, but their leadership thinks it's feasible and desirable to return to 1954's economy...
Democrats have extolled the virtues of union labor for decades, especially in manufacturing. What are you even talking about?
And the amount of union labor to extol has only gone down.
Is that bending itself into contortions? Or is that ignoring what the working class wants and paying attention to what the party wants the working class to want?
that hardly qualifies as bending itself into contortions ... more like as others noted following a decades long Lefty side of Democrats focus on labor unions in Mfg and also focusing on what the Lefty academic fraction set want to talk to the non-college educated about, ignoring the evidence of reaction to the backlash to the heavily Academy inflected wokey-woke cultural side agenda.
Now indeed agree that Dems are ignoring whole swaths of generally non-college degree holders jobs - UPS, DHL, other logistics workers, technical works outside of Mfg, etc.
Even small business owners who could be a segment
And indeed the Nippon Steel (as a weird pandering not really even to the actual workers involved but a pandering to the AFL-CIO leadership and their fetishization themselves of a 1950/60s mfg sector (as idealised in nostalgic memory, not as actually extent...).
Better to say bungled their poorly thought through efforts they did make and autistically did so through LEfty academic and labor union elite lens.
I do not think it's fair or reasonable to say the Democratic party bent itself into contortions to woo white working class voters.
The contortions are evidence that the Democratic Party doesn't know how to campaign to win the votes of non-college whites, and would rather spend all its time campaigning with smaller demographic groups.
Or is it evidence that they *do* know how to, but don't want to.
The majority of US voters moved to the right during the last 2 years of the Biden Admin. Both many Dems and Independents were exhausted by wokeness
Talking about how to win white working class voters and actually changing positions to win votes are two separate things.
Yes, Democrats now say they are pursuing the white working class. That's good, although what I mostly hear is them saying that their economic policies are good for that group and they should just yell that louder, I guess.
What I'd like to see Democrats argue about is "how do we lose 45% of the electorate *but no more than that.*" In other words, what groups can we give up as long as we more than make up those losses elsewhere. I don't care how many white working class men we lose as long as we find other groups we can win over from the Republicans.
>minority groups cannot be added together to create a majority,
Of course they can. A Democrat hasn't won a majority of the white vote in decades. Yet they have repeatedly won a majority of overall votes.
Winning all the minority demographics alone does not make a majority.
Obama only got 39% of the white vote in 2012 and managed to win. That’s probably not the most efficient strategy, but it certainly *can* work
It's not realistic to expect every Democrat to put up the same numbers as Obama with Blacks and Hispanics.
Sure it’s not realistic but that also represents an extreme. In every election since then more white people have voted Dem and more minorities have voted Republican.
But, to Matt’s broader point, splitting hairs about what demographic (majority or minority) that Dems should appeal to misses the point that
swing voters have largely the same priorities regardless of the color of their skin.
Specifically trying to appeal to white people is A. not going to work because Republicans will do it better and B. less efficient than identifying than identifying the issues that everyone cares about and honing in on those
I believe to be competitive Democrats need at minimum around that level of the white vote, but to Sean's point, that's assuming running up the score to ridiculous levels with other groups. A world where the Democrats are getting, say, 80% of the black vote and 60% of the hispanic vote would be a recipe for electoral wipeout.
I mean yes, Clinton, Biden, and Harris all did better with the white vote than that with varying levels of success (or failure) in the electorate as a whole.
Kind of ironic that the onset of the “intersectional” Democratic Party coincided with a slow collapse of their racial minority coalition.
I don’t know if this critique applies to the US Democratic Party specifically, since they do tend to try to focus on women’s interests, and women are a majority, registering and voting at higher rates than men.
And it works, Dems get more votes from women than Republicans do. Even in 2024, Harris got 54% of women’s votes.
It’s just that in practice, Dem strength with women isn’t enough to outweigh Dem weakness with men.
Does that not assume that women all want the same things, which does not seem accurate?
Matt wrote an article about Dem tactical failures, Sean responds with a comment saying that winning minorities won’t win you a majority.
My response notes that Dems win women, who are a majority.
I don’t think I’m saying anything here about whether women have monolithic preferences.
"Does that not assume that women all want the same things..."
If you define "the same things" as a bungle of policies and personalities, then 54% want the same thing.
I feel that the identity obsession, generally, represents a wasted decade for liberalism and a step or two backwards even in race relations. Was anything gained?
The real issue is that Democratic policy is also focussed on benefits for a small minority of 10-15% of people who are not doing well financially. As an individual, I get absolutely nothing from the party while paying high federal and state taxes. Public programs in Europe are more popular because they don’t exclude anyone.
Does Obamacare not help you at all? Even as a backup plan for potential unemployement, or future pre-existing conditions that might cause you to be denied?
In my case, not really because my backup plan is going on my wife’s plan. These issues only existed for those who are self employed. The healthcare system needs very fundamental changes but Obamacare only focused on the individual market and expansion of Medicaid.
They sometimes overlap. They sometimes *interfere*.
Also, members of different minority groups don’t necessarily get along or see themselves as sharing common political or cultural goals (Unsurprisingly, given the theological conservatism of many-though by no means all-Black churches, around half of Black Democrats think that legalizing same-sex marriage was a mistake and that nonreligious people are inherently immoral.)
We need to factor in how important supporting minority groups is to the progressive identity. (I don't know the answer to this.) The report makes clear that Democrats lost voter turnout. We aren't jazzed.
To what extent does the majority want to support minorities?
I'm sure this is a case-by-case thing, but I think it is important.
"Joe Biden greatly improved [Covid] things once he took over."
One (not the only) ways that Biden disappointed was that he did NOT dramatically improve on Trump's handling except for not having those ridiculous press conferences. Did CDC finally start giving individuals and public policy makers information to make better more cost effective decisions? Did retaining international travel restrictions and testing to fly make any sense by then if ever? If Biden really DID do something better why wasn't it mentioned in the campaign?
Covid deaths peaked in the United States the very week Trump left office. Talk about potent symbolism! The Covid situation was better a few months after Biden took over. And much better a year after he took over. And vasty better two years after he took over.
In our system, political leaders get clobbered when things are bad on their watch, and enjoy approval when things are better, regardless of whether they truly deserve credit. (Reagan's "Morning in America" is probably the most potent example of this: Paul Volker deserved the credit for the booming, 83-84 recovery, not Saint Ronnie!).
Anyway, yes, it's a shame Harris wasn't better able to press home a "Morning in America" case herself. Because there was an objectively strong case along these lines: National conditions were massively improved over what they had been four years previous.
The disaster that was the national Democratic party's political operation in 2023-2024 is something historians will be studying and marveling at for a long, long time.
More people died in 2021 vs 2020, even though vaccines were available by the time Biden became President. IMO, neither did a very good job.
>More people died in 2021 vs 2020<
Gee, I wonder if that might because the pandemic arrived in the United States after the New Year? LOL.
And yes, Covid deaths peaked the very week Trump left office. Close to 4,000 per day IIRC. But my original point wasn't narrowly focused on Covid deaths. National conditions were much better by late 2024 than when Joe Biden took office. The pandemic was over. Americans were travelling in massive numbers (when Joe arrived many countries wouldn't allow Americans to even enter). Crime was rapidly declining (Joe inherited a nasty crime spike from Trump). We had experienced the strongest recovery of any high income country (Trump presided over the sharpest downturn since the 1930s). The social unrest and massive protests that characterized Trump's last year in office were long a thing of the past by late 2024. Unemployment was much lower. Equity markets were way up. Our debt-GDP ratio was down. Even inflation had been licked.
It really was morning again in America, but Democrats couldn't sell it. And the country (and millions abroad) are now paying a terrible price.
The point is that Biden had the advantage of the vaccine being ready for rollout and still more people died under him. I expected him to do better than Trump but he didn't.
People were not happy about inflation and immigration under Biden. The shutdown induced recession under Trump was different from a regular recession, so you would expect conditions to be better once the vaccines were rolled out and things went back to normal. Instead of responding to higher inflation and interest rates by cutting spending, he went on passing more spending bills. Real wage growth under Biden was one of the weakest in recent history. Only Obama's first term was worse. You could argue that the Biden presidency was a mixed bag but directionally, he was a failed president. Voters were unhappy with him for several reasons. It almost certainly didn't help that he was not mentally or physically fit for the job and yet insisted on running for another term.
Democrats had to nominate a moderate governor who could distance himself/herself from Biden and his unpopular policies and could go to any show or podcast and talk about public policy fluently. They didn't. Yes, we're all paying the price but not because Biden was a great president and Democrats couldn't sell it.
Most people who died after April 2021 died because they wouldn't get vaccinated. I'm not sure what Biden could have done about that.
He could have chosen not to politicize the issue with boneheaded policies like vaccine mandates.
Probably largely because of vaccine hesitancy.
Yes, Biden failed terribly when he couldn't get all those MAGA types to take the vaccine.
That’s the job - to convince people who didn’t vote for you. He could have appealed to the MAGA types by giving credit to Trump for Operation Warp Speed. If your excuse is that as President, your responsibility is only towards people who voted for you, you definitely don’t deserve to be President.
I mean, even Trump couldn’t convince his own base to take the vaccine so it’s a tough problem.
Resistance hardened after the vaccine mandates began.
People are making a number of lazy points, like comparing total deaths in 2021 to 2020, but the entire mission of public health is to get the people to follow the recommendations, not "well I nagged them and those dumb idiots didn't follow."
At least 81% of the population has been vaccinated once. Pretty sure that the MAGA base is larger than 19%.
Democrats need 55% of the vote. I'm happy to toss the MAGA voters aside if we can get to that number.
Even Obama couldn’t get to 55%.
CDC deaths by week:
year ending up to 12/31/2020: 367,923
year ending up to 12/31/2021: 471,027
Now, once we remember that Trump was President for some of 2021:
year ending up to 01/20/2021: 444,589
year ending up to 01/20/2022: 440,370
I think you still need to start ... April 1? 2020.
I was talking about policy. Biden’s was not significantly different from Trump’s. I don’t understand why it was not.
Had Trump won reelection, do you think he would have executed the vaccine distribution strategy better or worse than Biden did? Say what you want about the NPI things you're referring to, but by far the most important thing to happen was the distribution of vaccines.
I think if Trump had won, then Republicans would have been much bigger supporters of the vaccine.
The vaccine distribution was almost entirely executed by states, right?
It was a partnership, but the federal government's role was critical.
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/biden-covid-vaccine-2021/
Agree about disease prevention. But the Biden’s time was not better about NPI cost minimization and so Democrats wound up owning it.
Everyone still has to provide an address and emergency contact to fly back to the US for contact tracing purposes. I guess this is never going away.
???
https://www.cdc.gov/port-health/legal-authorities/order-collect-contact-info.html
https://onemileatatime.com/insights/cdc-contact-tracing-international-flights/
It seems the CDC always wanted to do this, and COVID gave them the excuse to implement it. But what a waste of everyone's time.
Agree. Contact tracing was useless after the the disease became a "pandemic."
I really hate the emphasis Democrats put on demographics. The Obama campaign was one of the first to unlock ad targeting and it became gospel, when really I think they just had a first mover advantage in this space.
Example: I’m pro-choice — of the “have tried to volunteer driving women” and donating regularly variety. I know other women in my position who are aghast at the prospect that any woman would vote for a Republican candidate knowing the outright draconian landscape — and it’s not just do “Do people know?” They do, and when pressed about this subject, feel strongly against the Republican position, including (and especially) women.
But women are people and people are multifaceted. We also have expressed versus revealed preferences. Women are also, say, household managers balancing checkbooks (lol I’m old; whatever their equivalent is), buying groceries, have a seat at the table when dealing with monthly mortgage payments and bills.
So yeah: when asked, I’m sure they say “I care about reproductive health” and they also understand this implicates their health and safety directly. Simultaneously, many had opportunities to preserve (in their minds) the right at a state level, and/or could do a holistic risk assessment about the probability of maybe getting pregnant and it maybe being complicated versus always needing to eat and put a roof over their heads.
Sure there is the utilitarian question of how such laws impact society overall, not just ourselves, but also people evolved to navigate the world with rules of thumb.
So I can completely see how a Democratic pollster would tell you this is a high salience issue with a demographic inclusive of your base but also beyond it, and that they hold medium-strong positions. This would suggest you lean into it, but it’s a completely compressed view of a fully formed voter, many of whom are weighing immediate “push come to shove needs.”
I think the negotiation book “Getting to Yes” has worthwhile advice. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Find shared interests and let people coalesce around those — these are Klaas’ schemas. Democrats need a story to tell before they can start treating this like a micromanagement mechanic in an RTS game.
Not to mention a full 3rd of women are outright prolife, and a larger percentage are still pretty squeamish about abortions the further along in pregnancy you get.
Random thought, if we're talking about awkward demographic appeals, I'll just say I found Tim Walz' "hurr hurr I'm a dorky sitcom dad" shtick annoying. I have no clue if my sentiment was broadly shared, and I do think he had some good moments. But it did feel like Democrats looking at straight white dudes like gorillas in the mist.
I thought that Tim Walz perfectly fit the mold of a real life dorky male high school teacher.
As a white Upper Midwestern man it did seem to me like he was more someone playing to type in a sitcom than a typical white Upper Midwestern man. Though maybe the nature of the game is that it’s just always a bit unsubtle.
It also hurt him that he took a bunch of unpopular left-wing positions in Minnesota. The vibes did not match the policies.
It will be interesting to see how Rob Sand does running in Iowa. He is essentially running as an independent on the D line—never voluntarily mentioning that he’s a Democrat, using green and orange (hunting colors) instead of blue, talking about religion constantly, emphasizing GOP endorsements, and using anti-both-parties slogans and rhetoric (“better and truer, not redder or bluer”).
But without, so far, no noticeable breaks from Democrats on policy.
I feel like this salad bar kind of approach is designed for policy demanders. It matches how I think of the United States. Everything is pretty great but for few issues around xy and z.
It’s how the last few democratic conventions have gone a mix of patriotism and specific solutions for Latino, black, lgbtq+, etc. from their activists.
Trump and Bernie Sanders have a kind of central story to tell and the problem is it’s mostly bullshit. Like outside of get an unusually charismatic messenger who can Jedi mind trick you into not needing specific concerns addressed and I’m not sure how you do it that isn’t bullshit.
Barack Obama had a central story that I think was mostly accurate and he's much more popular than Trump or Bernie ever have been.
Somehow many of the loudest voices on the left manage to be against him though. What did he ever deliver besides a trillion dollar fiscal stimulus, trillion dollar healthcare program, climate change investments, judges who delivered marriage equality, protection for childhood migrants, increased taxes on the rich and financial regulation including an entire new consumer protection agency?
Barack Obama was hugely charismatic and got by on a central message of hope and change—which was honestly extremely vague and meaningless but I guess that’s better than false bullshit if you’re able to pull it off
Vague and meaningless platitudes are popular but they also allow a lot of room for people to create their own meaning and expectations. Thus why the Left doesn't like Obama. He has never been Bernie Sanders, but he made it easy to pretend he was.
A message of hope and change may be very vague, but it's genuinely different from one based on negativity. There's a big difference between "vote for me" vs. "vote against the other".
Having a financial collapse happen on the opposing party's watch just before the election didn't hurt his chances either.
You should watch some videos where he discusses policy. It is true that he was hugely charismatic but he was not a lightweight on policy issues like Biden or Trump or Harris. Hillary was also good at discussing policy but lacked charisma.
I don’t know I didn’t live in the us during his first term so maybe I missed it but second term Obama I didn’t see that kind of coherence in the second term.
But I remember his 08 campaign being just hope and change not a story but a theme.
And from statistical viewpoints, endless slicing of the electorate is more likely to result in false discovery too.
This, imo, speaks volumes about a lack of quantitative minded at high level of dem politics - we have a lot of lawyers or activists types but I think we need a bit more balance
I'd be shocked if the Dems have less quantitative talent than the GOP
I think our problem might be too many interests—backed by too many technocrats including analysts, lawyers, PR, etc.—leading to stasis and in-party fighting among Democrats. For now, Republicans have MAGA and the cult of Trump to concentrate interests. Moreover, they have been able to recruit resources, talents, and other celebrities from the Tech/Finance/Legal right as needed. Eg, DOGE and Musk.
It’s not surprising that we’re currently flailing about with our 2024 election losses, including the disaster of Joe Biden’s demise. Not to mention all the legal and financial warfare being waged by MAGA/DOGE. But hopefully we can reach some focus and clarity by the 2026 midterms. Eg, The Abundance Agenda. Moreover, the ongoing autopsy of the late Biden administration should aid us in this task. (Rather unsettling that could include a property necropsy with Joe Biden’s recent late-stage cancer announcement.)
I’m personally following the narrative around Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin”. Particularly the analysis in the following sources and how they’re evolving over time across various media channels.
* ‘Original Sin’ indicts the ‘cover-up’ of a steeply declining Joe Biden, https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/05/14/original-sin-joe-biden-jake-tapper-alex-thompson-review
* Democrats Have Better Issues to Debate, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-18/democrats-have-better-issues-to-debate
* Democrats Can’t Escape Biden’s Shadow, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-05-21/democrats-can-t-escape-shadow-of-biden-and-original-sin-book
Agree mostly but I would caution against being too hopeful about the abundance agenda. Actually advancing the agenda requires an intra-party fight between different factions within the Democratic Party. Republican governors are already delivering on the abundance agenda.
"Don't nominate Biden in 2028."
Or even more powerfully: "Don't nominate an 82 year old guy in 2028"
We Democrats have our marching orders and nothing can stop our inevitable victory.
Do the absolute talent numbers matter more, or the relative fraction of quantitative vs. non-quantitative talent?
Yeah that’s what I feel - like in terms of absolute number, yes, we have more quantitative talents but it’s underrepresented in decision making process I feel.
And unfortunately, the playing field is not even in a sense that there’s more conservatives and liberals so GOPs, in a sense, have more leeway to make bonkers decisions and still stay relevant (like Trump did not have a good election strategy or tactics imo but the inflation plus this bias just helped him)
I think because Trump basically owns the GOP at this point he has free reign to break with GOP orthodoxy whenever he wants and waffle on abortion rights, high taxes on the rich, cutting Medicaid, etc. It's not a strategy anyone else in either party can use because normally there would be no chance to get the nomination saying the types of stuff he says, but as a campaign strategy it appears to be pretty effective.
(Now that he won and has decided it's ok to cut Medicaid and they aren't going to raise taxes on the rich, we'll see how it works out though).
Yeah, and tbh that’s a strength of outsider and is very unique to Trump I came to realize at this point. I think one thing ppl don’t talk about and is underestimated by everyone is his talent as an entertainer and sound authentic.
And this inability to understand this strength essentially results in both parties doubling down on unpopular stuffs. GOPs think being an authoritarian with GOP orthodoxy is very popular (hence all those nutjobs like black hitler in NC and confederate flag bearer in PA as governor candidates and fascism fetishization with DeSantis campaign) while Dems get obsessed with message deliveries instead of reviewing core policies
We have plenty of quants, not enough of what George HW Bush referred to as “the vision thing”.
Yep. How much statistical noise are Democrats reacting to?
Yeah, 100%
And being a data scientist made me realize leaderships LOVE this type of subgroup analysis - like uplift tree is hyped up a lot. And I kinda feel like it is used as a little bit of cope for them not to make a strategic change tbh
This piece reminded me of Tim Walz saying he can code talk to white guys watching football and fixing their truck.
Walz doesn’t know that he really is a white guy who code talks to liberal women which is why he does so well with liberal women.
“I was the permission structure” - Tim Walz. What does that even mean?
I like Tim Walz because he came across as decent and kind, not because he has some special decoder ring on how to talk to me.
Remember the Democratic convention? During Waltz’s speech, his son jumped up and shouted, “That’s my dad!” I thought it was such a touching moment, a boy spontaneously and publicly expressing his love for his dad. And of course some a-hole Trump supporters mocked him for it on social media.
And I was like, who does America want? The party of the loving family man or the party of jerks who mock a teenage boy for showing emotion? I thought the choice was clear. But alas.
I’m not going to defend Trump. But I think this is a false choice. I’m not surprised Walz lands with many. But he doesn’t land with the people he says he was chosen to connect with.
I get there are people who virtue signal things like Kindness is Everything. But it’s not. There is much, much more to life than that. But alas.
I get your point, Edward. But I'm still happy that my party is the one that thinks picking a Tim Walz is better than picking a J. D. Vance. Sometimes you just have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror.
I don’t care about the Party’s.
My big picture point is you have to play to win. Winning really, really matters.
Are you happy that your party covered up the declining mental acuity of a man they were supporting to be President for four more years? Again, make contact with truth.
Ah, covering up the declining mental acuity of Biden. Yep, none of us ever heard from Biden and were prevented from drawing our own conclusions. Yep, they were so focused on hiding Biden from the public that they did something that no campaign has *ever* thought of before, which was to demand a presidential debate *months* early. Oh, and they also did that thing which has never before been done in modern times, which is to force the President and their party's leader from the race.
Clever conspirators, those folks.
You’re doing it right now. All bullshit. They should have demanded the debates be years earlier.
Your comments at the time the Hur report came out:
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/we-need-to-see-more-joe-biden?r=gvwl&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=49467698
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/we-need-to-see-more-joe-biden?r=gvwl&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=49469313
At some point, you should consider dropping the reflexive "support the Party no matter what" and think for yourself.
This wasn’t “virtue signaling,” it was a spontaneous reaction by Walz’s teenage son, is my point. Unless you think the whole thing was staged.
I have no thoughts on that specific moment. It clearly spoke to you. Great. Are you the football watching guy fixing his truck that Walz was saying he was tasked with to be a permission structure to vote for Harris? I am skeptical that is true.
I voted for Harris but definitely not because of Tim. Because Trump is bad.
Ok, guilty as charged, I’m not a guy, I don’t own a truck, and I don’t watch football (I like baseball). I just, I dunno, I naively thought that kindness and decency would have a broader electoral appeal than they did.
I get it, but Walz spoke directly to this being a political strategy. It clearly was a bad strategy. People don’t truly understand other people. The Democrats need to get in touch with reality.
This is why I get frustrated when I hear people say Kamala ran a great campaign. No, she didn’t. Walz illustrates this with his confession and confusion.
It was a very winnable election. She should have done the things necessary to win. She didn’t.
I don’t want a kind, decent, person as President. I want a stone cold killer.
A pet theory of mine is that the voting rights act ultimately lead Democrats down this destructive path. For a generation, Democrats fought to win southern house districts by legally forcing gerrymandering based on race. This was fairly done in response to racist gerrymandering. But over time, Democrats came to depend on racial gerrymanders, which had the effect of causing the party to view the electorate entirely on those terms. And the electorate largely responded in kind.
Racial gerrymanders also increasingly cause strife between historically Democratic-leaning ethnic groups by directly pitting them against each other in House redistricting.
Yeah. In Texas Cities, it’s basically deciding which districts are Black, which are Hispanic, and which are Republican. White liberals, of which there are many, mostly get split between the three and Black and Hispanic politicians fight over which gets enough of the split for one extra seat.
It’s one reason I’d strongly favor multimember districts with ranked choice voting. Let voters decide who their proper community of interest is and vote accordingly.
2016 involved a demographic realignment that jolted a lot of people out of 90s-2000s-style analysis. Many people then updated to thinking that every election would feature a realignment, but they’re rare and we shouldn’t expect them.
Contributing factors:
- weak, uncharismatic post-Obama candidates have been unable to inspire
- a culturally progressive mode of argumentation that wields the (purported) views of specific demographic groups
- Standpoint epistemology is an easy way to resolve cognitive dissonance between the way the electorate acts and the way we think it “should” act that also offers easy ways to improve (just canvas Ohio! The Rio Grande Valley!) when we should be suspicious of this low hanging fruit because the other side has plenty of fruit pickers of their own
Is it just me or does anyone else find it depressing that you need a white messenger to appeal to white people and a Black one to appeal to Black people?
I mean ffs, we’re sixty years past “judge a person by the content of their character,” how long will it take for us to see each other as just human beings? I see an ad with an interracial couple in it, I don’t say to myself “oh this product isn’t for me, because Husband and I are both white.”
I think "need" is perhaps strong. If a message was 10% more effective from your ethnic group that would be huge in political ads even individual voters are mostly not affected by it.
I mean, I wish the effect were zero, but a small effect doesn't seem too bad.
Fair enough.
You're still capitalizing one race and not the other, to be fair
I would say it’s depressing that people think that you need that, but also that it’s clear from Obama’s success with the white working class and Trump’s success with Hispanics that you don’t actually that.
It's not depressing; it just is.
This is consistent with the need for the turn against what can be described as "wokeness," foregrounding race/ethnicity in every conversation. Not that those characteristics don't matter in specific contexts, but every person has the same concerns of wanting a good job, safe streets, good education etc. And most of politics is about a good economy, low crime, and opportunity to get ahead.
Dems have let academia and the far left make the intersectionality framework the dominant mode to view politics, even in instances where there is no evidence it is true description of events nor that it is politically persuasive. And Dems have let their base get high on this supply by coddling them on why Hillary and Kamala lost (which is that they were swinging left on unpopular cultural issues, not that they were women).
Another great one.
“People disagree about how best to appeal to this kind of cross-pressured voter, and while I have a view on that, I don’t want to grind the axe here.”
I for one would love to hear the cliff notes version. I come across a lot of folks like this and tend to dismiss them as not serious or worth engaging with - a mistake on my part. Would be good to have a tool kit for engaging with them.
If I had to guess it's something like 'outsider vibes, vaguely moderate/common sense kind of policy talk.'
I don't know either, but I'd try making how bad deficits are central going in the direction of higher taxes, less spending on inefficient, high cost CO2 reduction whihc is adjacent to reducing agricultural subsidies.
But deficits is not a one campaign issue. We have not done enough since the Reagan deficits to try make deficits toxic. As Republicans have illegal immigration.
Democrats, please do not make deficits something you push in election campaigns.
Not only.
Voters realigned in 2016 because Trump was a different kind of Republican than Romney. But since then it's literally been the same Republican nominee against some version of a Democratic establishment politician trying to manage the existing Democratic coalition. It's not surprising the that the overall shape of partisan preferences are similar in these elections.
Maybe there will be a surprising realignment once a non-Trump nominee faces a Democrat who isn't a political heir. But, carefully micro-targeting message and issues isn't likely to be much more effective in shaping the electorate even then, it will be a response to a bigger actual change.
This report answered a question I had about turnout. Black women turnout dropped 1%, black men dropped 2%. This was an election where the Democrats had a black woman on the top of the ballot.
Democrats need to realize they don't have any idea what's going on with identity politics. There needs to be someone in every meeting where it comes up who says "we don't have any idea how this works. We're like a caveman trying to operate a jetliner. We need to stop doing work where we don't know what we're doing, and instead work on other things."
This is the electorate in all its contradictory glory. People disagree about how best to appeal to this kind of cross-pressured voter, and while I have a view on that, I don’t want to grind the axe here.
----------------
Essentially repeating my Sunday question of the week - I really really want to hear about that.
Coz none of my solutions are very good.
"Let me educate you, you brain addled schizo" and "go die in a ditch, you brain dead moron" and "you know, Yarvin is on to something when he says we should cancel democracy" are not likely to generate widespread support.
1. Republicans want to cut [specific major spending program]. We need to get back to balanced budgets like we had under President Clinton, but not by hurting [beneficiaries of specific major spending program].
2. Republicans are deliberately and stupidly crippling American green energy. I support an all-of-the-above energy program that will lower American energy costs, maintain our energy independence, and keep us on the path to stopping global warming.
3. The rich need to pay their fair share. [no further specifics needed during campaign season]
4. Hope, change, etc.
All of this is much better than insulting the electorate or going over to neoreaction.
1- How do you propose to get to a balanced budget? I haven't checked the maths but raising taxes on the rich alone won't close the gap. Someone's sacred cow is about to get gored...
2- I'm with you obviously but, apparently, what 50+% of the US (male?) population hear when they hear "green energy" is "you want to make me into a gay sissified pussy". Drop 'green'. Maybe say solar, possibly stick to nuclear or just say 'energy' without further precision.
3- Only Republicans get away with never being asked a follow up question. The bar is (unfairly but very really) higher for Dems.
4- Sure. "Rah, rah, rah, 'Merica!". Works well. Hardly high praise to your fellow citizens' thinking abilities...
But that's my point. You can probably get elected on nothing but platitudes and a couple of sentences hinting at your leanings (left or right, for that matter). The issue is that governing is hard and it'd be useful to have a mandate to try and roll up veto points.
Does it not make sense to try and convince voters your vision (and the sacrifices you are likely asking of them if you want to balance the budget and run down the debt stock) is a superior vision?
1. Taxing more is underrated. Just lifting the social security income tax cap (without raising benefits) would eliminate a very large chunk of that deficit.
eliminating the social security income tax limit is a 12% increase to the top marginal tax rate, it might be a good idea but it would also be the largest tax increase in a long, long time.
Thank you for saying this— I think it’s odd how many people think this change is an easy no brainer. Even Elizabeth Warren, who promised not to raise taxes on the affluent middle class had a tortured proposal where there the tax only started up again at like 250,000 dollars and then she made the employee pay the full amount of the tax on that income. It would have been very unpopular and also led to a ton of gamesmanship around compensation to avoid the tax. And I just don’t know if people whose income is below the cap will be troubled by unraveling the conceptual framework that social security is something you pay into and then get returns on. Paying 12 percent marginal taxes for no benefit is a meaningful change.
I, for one, will not vote for such a huge tax increase on myself. Living in a shithole high tax state like CA has made me very anti-tax hikes.
You can always move to move to Texas or Florida or the Carolinas.
I think its underrated how the Republican party has coded the current tax burden as too much. Clearly, spending more than taxes is causing the deficit and many of recipients of that spending seem to think they are part of the imbalance - like the farmers, disaster payout folks, SNAP, etc. I for one would be happy to pay more taxes because I (not my kids) should be paying for the system that lets me be successful.
Yep ; but I bet that wouldn't be popular. Basically, by considering "deficits don't matter" for so long, the US is now in need to raise cash comparatively fast. By definition, that's going to be a bit painful.
Not that the rest of the world isn't in a worse place. Europe, for example, is in an even worse position...
Southern Europe used to be a (deserved) laughingstock, but now all of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece have lower interest rates than the US. It took a crisis and lot of pain, but the deficits were brought under control.
> How do you propose to get to a balanced budget?
Roughly the same way we did it in the 90s? Raise the top marginal rate back to that level, reinstitute paygo, etc. Balancing the budget isn't something that's done in one year but we're in a different macroeconomic environment than we have been for most of the post-GFC era. Balancing the budget has been such a hard nut to crack because there effectively no tradeoffs to high deficits in a zero-interest rate environment. So even if you are successful there are no immediate benefits. But if balancing the budget, or at least creating a credible path to balanced budgets brings interest rates down then the pain of increased taxes/reduced spending is offset in part or entirely by stronger economic growth.
> I'm with you obviously but, apparently, what 50+% of the US (male?) population hear when they hear "green energy" is "you want to make me into a gay sissified pussy"
I doubt this very seriously. If you talk about banning ICE vehicles or deliberately making gas more expensive then people will get upset of course, but energy independence and cheaper energy prices seem like a great selling point.
1. Bipartisan compromise, higher taxes lower spending.
2. Solar and wind poll very strongly, from what I’ve seen. People like them, as long as they don’t require any personal sacrifice or costs.
3. “Specifics will of course depend on how Congressional elections go.”
4. People know they aren’t happy with the political establishment (fair) and that they’ve got a lot to lose from revolution (very fair). Not establishment and not going to set up guillotines is a reasonable set of political desires.
1- You're never going to get Republicans to agree to tax hikes and they are going to hit you hard on that...
... but anyway, my question wasn't "how do I run as a centrist/left of center without being so reviled I lose to Donald Trump?" or even "how do I run a successful left of center campaign that can beat Rs" - I agree with Matt (and you) that being a bit bland on many subjects and pushing a couple of important priorities (not sure I'd have picked energy as my number 2 but it's a valid choice) can work.
My question was/is : do we try to convince voters to be a bit more ambitious or do we just play along with just a few bit of left leaning policies?
For example, if you think climate change is actually urgent and serious, there's something to be said for being upfront about it, trying to convince voters of the urgency and asking for a commensurate effort.
If they don't want to, then, fine, you start thinking about emigrating to an area that'll benefit from climate change while the rest of the world burn.
But just saying "hey, let's have solar and wind and everything else so we can have energy abundance" doesn't 'work' if that new, now greener, mix still burns the planet... (I don't know if it would or wouldn't, I'm trying to make a point about convincing voters vs. going along, leading vs. following)
You seem to be presupposing that there are issues that demand urgent action on the merits but where urgent action is not possible without first shifting the views of the electorate.
I don’t believe climate change qualifies on those terms, and you aren’t insisting on the point there, but I also don’t know of anything else that does qualify.
If you aren’t happy with democracy, you should I think point to concrete areas where democracy is the problem.
EDIT: Individual Republican Congress members endorse higher taxes all the time, in the context of fiscally responsible compromise/grand bargains.
Not bad. I would wrap it up under a banner that says, "I want the US to own the future, not China."
Remember how Clinton took Dole to the cleaners with the former's "bridge to the 21st century" versus the latter's crabbed, backward looking pessimism. We need more of that.
"To the extent that there’s a lesson here, it isn’t anything about 23 year-olds or people who don’t follow the news, it’s just that you should try to make decisions that make people happy." Therein lies the crux of the matter. Democrats need to stop obsessing about identity politics and marginal groups, and aim their policies at winning over the great plurality of us regardless of gender, color, creed, ethnicity, LGTBQ status or any other label.
While the Trump regime is absolutely terrible, Oregon and California are run by Democrats but are not shining examples of good governance. I own a small property in Portland that I had rented out, and the last tenant absolutely wrecked the place. Because the leaders of Portland decided to make the city super friendly to tenants it took forever to get him evicted. And even when the court agreed he should be evicted, I could still not take possession of the property because we had to go on a long waiting list for the sheriff to visit. And even now when considering finding a new tenant, my hands are tied by Portland's business unfriendly laws that don't allow one to reject applicants based on low credit scores or bad history. It's this kind of thing that puts Democrats in a bad light.
Sell the rental property and move. Vote with your capital and feet.