Winning in a R+3 district is neat, winning in an R+40 state is extremely impressive - which is exactly what Joe Manchin has managed by holding West Virginia. In 2024 he won’t run, and the very progressives who complain about him being right wing will find out what his replacement - A Republican in an R+40 state actually looks like.
As a progressive, most smart progressives (as opposed to randos on Twitter and podcasters whose income depends on being anti-Democratic Party) were far more annoyed with Sinema, who was opposing popular things (like min. wage hikes and such) and supporting unpopular things (like tax cuts for rich guys) as opposed to Manchin, who as annoying, but was also the only guy who could win in West By God Virginia, and along with his annoying ideas, actually supported good stuff like raising taxes on rich people.
I feel like my sports fan background really helps me with this shit sometimes. Also helps me understand that the entire take economy is incredibly fatuous and vacuous.
Yeah, Sinema might've survived if Mark Kelly didn't ask, being a perfectly normie Democrat with fine approval ratings. Now, being an astronaut helps, but that doesn't explain all of it.
Nowhere near a given, it should be a winnable race for democrats now that Sinema has said she won't run as an independent. Whereas if you gave me 30:1 on a democrat winning Manchin's seat, I would not take that bet.
Gallego is leading basically every poll, including ones showing Trump winning the state, and here's the thing, if Lake is winning, Trump is winning, so we're in trouble anyway. Putting that aside, if Lake wins, it's a six year rental. Arizona isn't going to be more right-wing in 2030, most likely.
But, you're an odd duck whose gotten super fixated on one issue and think it's the end of the world. But, you aren't the first person to get fixated on a singular issue, and suddenly change their political valence.
Well, we do know a Republican US Senator looks like in West Virginia. Her name is Shelley Moore Capito, and while she is obviously worse than Joe Manchin, she has by far the highest "Biden +/-" for an active Congressional Republican (per 538) and the fourth-highest in the entire Senate (behind Manchin, Tester, and Brown). This means she votes with Biden way more than one would expect based on WV's political demographics.
Jim Justice, again, is much worse than Manchin, but he also strikes me as somebody who is not going to legislate as far to the right as one would expect from a US Senator from WV. (It's worth noting Jim Justice used to be a Democrat and switched parties during Trump's presidency.)
To be clear, I don't disagree with the overall point you're making and I don't disagree with the author's piece. But it is not quite as salient of a point as one would think.
I think we have to see how Shelley Moore Capito changes once she’s not the junior senator to nice guy Manchin, but is the senior senator to another Republican. Manchin didn’t just get us one vote on a lot of close things - he got us *two* on some of them.
West Virginia is odd. It was heavily Democratic relatively recently (in the 1990s) and had two Democratic senators up until Capito. So while it voted overwhelmingly for Trump (and strongly but not quite as overwhelmingly for Romney) the electorate there is very heavily the kinds of voters who were once Democrats or whose parents were once Democrats. Not the same as Utah or Wyoming.
Agreed. Per Wikipedia, Democrats had a supermajority in the WV Senate less than 10 years ago. Now they only have 3 out of 34 seats. So a lot of people have recently turned into Republicans, but perhaps not in a way that's made them completely hostile to the Democratic Party
It's the Democratic Party that's made itself completely hostile to West Virginians with its relentless pursuit of race-based rather than class-based policy.
I think this is tough because Shelley Moore Capito and Jim Justice aren't what you'd expect from an R+40 state from a policy point of view - There's been a ton of luck that these are the two who've become WV Senators. In 10-15 years when they're out of office, their replacements likely won't be as reasonable.
To steel man the argument that a Manchin type politician is bad for a party: it dilutes the message and identity of the party and makes it harder to draw a clear distinction against the other party, and also makes it harder to blame the other party when things go wrong. ”Republicans blocked goodie X” is a stronger message than ”Joe Manchin and Republicans blocked goodie X, yes he’s from our own party, he’s a closet Republican, no we are not in disarray even if it might look like it…”
Manchin's own voters LIKE that he blocks Democrats' things. It's the only way he's kept winning in WV.
At some point, the party simply has to embrace the suck and strategically work around Manchin's limitations. You give him nice big show votes to bring back to his voters, and he helps you enact the rest of your agenda.
If you take that (admittedly difficult!) strategy and replicate it x10, then now you're talking about a filibuster-proof majority*. Sure, it narrows the agenda for that majority, but at least you're getting shit done. And if you actually care about getting shit done, the filibuster makes it so that the narrow path is basically the ONLY path -- not unless you're a Magic Senate Grandpa like Joe Biden who can make Secret Congress do what he wants.
[Ed: *Which is literally how we got Obama's majority. The failure to get the base to understand the kayfabe back then is also why Dems express sentiments like Joachim's -- they weren't expecting to have to compromise and play kayfabe, so all the hemming and hawing and backsliding was _real_ to them, and they've been Big Mad about that ever since. The reason we haven't run enough moderate Dems in purple states over the last decade is because the DSCC remains _convinced_ (misguidedly) that a 60-seat majority with 12 Manchins is no majority at all.]
But voters outside of Manchin's state might either be dejected or angry and decide not to vote at all (leftists) or think that the Dems are in disarray and ineffective who can't get anything passed because of their internal disagreements (moderates).
We should have nuked the filibuster rule a long time ago, it's undemocratic and terrible in every way.
I think this dynamic would also be less severe if we had more than two viable parties. A "left-aligned centrist on policy, West Virginia on vibes and some policy" candidate like Manchin doesn't need to be in the same party as The Squad, and polarization would be less severe if the Blue Dog Democrats and Left Democrats could agree that, while usually allies, they did not have to be the same thing.
Alternatively, the USA functioned well with ideologically heterogeneous parties, but they are more polarized now. I think separate parties might offer more clarity to voters. And it's a widespread phenomenon in democracies -- I think most countries with real elections also have more than two meaningful political parties.
We already seem to have three distinct factions - the MAGA and Progressive ecosystems have all the elements of a coherent political faction (financial/revenue model, membership base, talent, policy clarity, language, norms, etc), and then the "Good/Moderate Republican" thing is a thing (look at all the Biden district Republicans and GOP govs in blue states) ... we're only missing one organized faction, and its the center left
So, well I do personally prefer a PR or MMP type of system, I think the ways both my fellow lefties and centrists think it'll help with polarization is highly overrated.
Yes, it allows center-left and center-right parties to be a bit more boring, staid, and committed to long-term governance and working together instead of being polarized against one another. But, that working together in many cases has led to rising support for more extreme parties, who are now gaining power to affect things in ways that you could argue are worse than if there were just two big parties who had to slowly adjust to changing views.
At the current moment, that has mostly only meant big jumps in support for right-wing parties, as Europe is currently going through it's reactionary decades since non-white people in decent numbers are around for the first time with any political power, and voters are reacting in many of the ways white voters did in the US in the 60's through the 90's. Ironically, there's a decent chance that by 2040, the Democrat's are actually to the left of the center-left parties in Europe on several issues.
Anyway, to get back to my point, if the population are truly polarized on a topic, like is happening worldwide due to education polarization, that's going to be affected in whatever voting system a country happens to have.
I am in VICIOUS FUCKING AGREEMENT about the evils of the filibuster. Inshallah, may it die with extreme prejudice and not a blessed day too soon, my brother.
But RE "dejected or angry voters", that sounds like an "us" problem that I'd much rather have while we're still Getting Shit Done, vs. simply being out of power and having to deal with relentless and pointless GOP shutdowns. Case in point, I present Exhibit A: Biden's entire first term, both before and after the midterm.
The voters don't always listen to us, but they KIND OF do, especially the base, and it needs to be clearly explained to the base that they need to go along with a certain amount of kayfabe WRT the Manchins of the world, because Shit Just Be Like That Yo. If they don't like it, they can go kick rocks while the rest of us continue building and maintaining the Coalition To Get Shit Done.
Re the filibuster. If I could convince you that the filibuster means that federal government policy more closely adheres to the public's preferences, and that removing it would mean that federal policy was actually less responsive to the public, would you still want to get rid of it?
I'd be curious to hear you out, but I'd still remain quite skeptical that any benefits you could extol would outweigh the severe costs and distortions the filibuster inflicts on our broader political environment.
If you could convince me that it was more responsive to the public's preferences, that would help, although I'd also wonder - is it more responsive to popularist(short-term) preferences or good governance(long-term) preferences?
If the Shit you would like to Get Done continues to include race-based rather than class-based policy, and denial of women's right to single-sex locker rooms, prisons, and sports (said denial being favored by Biden, Harris, and EVERY Democrat in Congress, INCLUDING Joe Manchin), then you can count me out. And I've been a registered Democrat for 50 years.
My point was, regardless of how annoying I find your social views, I’d take a dozen senators with your opinions if it meant a filibuster-proof majority.
Because each YOU in that caucus can be bargained with, and it coming from a roughly similar place of basic values and principles. To the extent that you might ever be persuaded out of your social views, the best, most proven mechanism for that to happen is by osmosis from remaining inside my big tent. We make the progress we can make, together, and that’s better for America than fucking fascism.
So how many states would Democrats just have to abandon if they embrace a plan to not run red state Democrats who make blue state Democrats feel bad? 20? 25?
>...it dilutes the message and identity of the party and makes it harder to draw a clear distinction against the other party...<
This doesn't ring true to my ears. The identity of the Democratic Party to a depressingly large number of voters is "People who'll make fun of me if I use the wrong pronouns between Defund rallies."
If Manchin really had some measurable impact on the party's identity, it would be a Good Thing.
I don't know if a "Manchin type" politician is bad for the party but *Manchin* was great for passing Biden's agenda given that he was from WVA and was the deciding vote. Would I want a Manchin representing California? No, of course not. But I sure was appreciative of him while he's been there.
One challenge for centrists in the Democratic Party is that people like us - who "were appreciative of Manchin" - have no real way to show our appreciation or incentivize more people like him to win in red states. There are lots of outlets to express appreciation for progressives (or MAGA). Not many for moderate dems, even when those Dems winning red districts are so clearly those most in need of appreciation!
Something we need to take into account is that the Democrats' message is actually rather poor. Democrats could not win a senate seat in Montana with a more popular candidate who had already won statewide, even though most voters tend to agree more with the Democrats' positions on most issues. A 'weaker' message in this sense would be better for the Democrats. We need more Manchins to weaken it further and benefit the country.
It will not be interpreted as Dems being more moderate but rather that Dems are in disarray and can’t govern. You need a majority of Manchins to create the impression of being a centrist party.
True and since WV is solid R now shifting the Senate to 50/50, and there is no Republican seat that is rated any more blue than Likely R, the Dems, to hold the majority will need to sweep the three tossup seats- OH, MT, and AZ, hold the Lean Dem seats - NV, WI, MI - and win the presidency.
So far Sherrod Brown is slightly ahead as is Gallego in AZ thanks to the GOP putting up their MAGA clown act, but Tester and Biden are in a bad spot. Tester, unlike Manchin, did not solidify his bonafides with the GOP voters who gave Trump a +16 in 2020, by challenging Dem orthodoxy and people who saw Manchin as the devil incarnate dont realize that nobody out of WV will vote as liberal as him for the next dozen years.
The way for a Dem to stay alive in a red state has to be to push back on the unpopular policies that the Dems have- crime, immigration, white guilt. Tester won by 3.5% in 2018 but that was a blue wave election and now the electorate is leaning R.
My guess is that giving off moderate vibes is more important than your de facto voting record, which 1. most voters don’t know or care to find out about, 2. can be framed in a positive way by clever PR, 3. will be attacked and lied about by Republicans no matter how you vote.
Be a normie, down to earth, folksy, patriotic. This works especially good in swing districts but will pay dividends in most districts outside of Brooklyn regardless of voter composition. Especially so for Democrats who already have a the high IQ/high information vote locked down. Keep the activist and pointy headed, elitist types far away from voters (spoken as an elitist myself, I would never dream to become a politician for precisely that reason).
It’s worth noting that a fair number of folksy-talking candidates are secretly pointy heads— Obama and Bill Clinton are the most famous examples, but among the Dems, AOC, Bernie Sanders, John Fetterman, and MGP all seem to fit the bill if you look closely, and on the Republican side you have JD Vance and his ilk.
I think that success in politics in democracies generally requires not just tactical preference falsification but tactical vibe falsification— the average person and the average person who’s cognitively qualified to govern just tend to think and communicate very differently, and people in the latter group generally need to fake some stuff to seem relatable to most of their voters.
This ties nicely into some of the ideas Hal Machow talked about in the recent Politico profile. In today's polarized day and age it's more important to change your party's vibe and image, since it's harder for an individual candidate to stand out from the party brand.
Great point. Would love to have asked him about faction and party sub-brands. Looked at testing this in a race (on the five point partisan scale) and haven't gotten to, and didn't get to meet him. RIP.
I agree with this 100%. This is why it’s so damaging for Democrats with leftist party members arguing for super unpopular ideas such as open borders, abolishing the police, transgender surgery on demand for kids etc, even if these members are a minority (as they are). In multi party system center left parties can push the more extreme members to leftist fringe parties but in the US they are forced to somehow contain them within.
Some Dems have successfully pulled off being less moderate than their vibes (e.g. Jon Tester & Sherrod Brown), but they have long electoral histories with their state. Actually being a moderate is a huge shortcut to cultivating moderate vibes compared to the strategy of first being the president of Montana's senate, or being Ohio's Secretary of State.
As Yglesias has said, the dems have a talent retention problem with moderate candidates. If a moderate dem loses a close election in a red district, the party should be finding a place for them to either develop their image for voters, or in party strategy for future elections. Instead these candidates often don't have a future with the party and their knowledge and talent is lost.
"Finding a place for them" what exactly does this look like?
Parties are extremely weak in the United States. There's not a lot of just random patronage jobs lying around at the DNC or DCCC. There are, sometimes, administration jobs. Joe Biden has helped some defeated moderate candidates:
There are think tanks, democratic consultancy firms, lobbying firms, state and federal commissions that require some level of bipartisan membership, etc.
These networks exist, what a losing candidate needs is to have people higher up the food chain pushing for them to be hired or placed in these jobs as a matter of course.
It is true that the parties are weak, but the progressive faction is strong - when Bernie and Warren lost, it was pretty clear where the thousands of people who worked for them could go to (which candidates, consultancies, "Groups") - but not as clear where Pete-type people would go.
When we started WelcomePAC we literally went to the people who were the biggest overperformers to be like hey where are all the people flocking to learn lessons and replicate what you do and ... not a lot there! Way more money and jobs doing progressive nonprofit stuff or working for blue district/state campaigns
For the first campaign, vibes matter a lot with little record, but you can also make some promises. Trump made lots of promises about Medicare that helped him win over moderates.
Maybe one or two but mostly political campaigning is about creating and pushing fictions - in times of intense polarization and low info voters deciding elections.
Have you been part of any campaigns? I have, and what you say simply isn't accurate. Below, say the Senate or Governor level, campaigning is really intensive retailing work. You are constantly out meeting people, at specifically political events but also at tons and tons of community events: every local community organization's fund raising chicken dinner, monthly meetings of various civic organizations, ethnic day celebrations, fairs, church festivals, etc. It's a constant grind of meeting and greeting and engaging people.
And people aren't actually morons, they come up and ask you questions, and more importantly, you are trying to approach them and get them to ask you questions. If you try to use fictions as opposed to actual verifiable instances of when to did a thing or took a stand on a thing you'll get called out.
"People aren't actually morons" is an underrated point! All the hyping of polarization and underinformed voters goes on amidst moderates who win over tons of swing voters, and even top of ticket in polling tons of voters shifting towards Haley in a Biden v. Haley matchup
Aren’t moderate voters unusually likely to be low-information, though? In GSS data their WORDSUM scores are the worst by a decent margin.
EDIT: to be clear, I think that running moderates in R+6 type districts is good strategy; I just also think that we need to be realistic about the fact that “appealing to moderates” often means “appealing to the least-informed ideological block” in practice.
Independents tend to be "low-information" voters if the information in question is politics. The NY Times had a good article interviewing folk who run polls and once you remove the folks who say they are independent but haven't voted for one of the parties for several cycles, you end up with folks who don't tend to tune into politics until late in the cycle and don't have much detailed political knowledge. (Note: these people might have tons of useful substantive about many other things that are actually relevant to policy making and problem solving.) I don't think that is very surprising. Folks who don't have a favorite baseball team watch less baseball. Folks who don't define themselves by party are going to be less interested in politics, especially the horse race stuff.
I don't know that moderate equates with independent. Frankly, I think moderate is a bit like middle class. It seems like it should have a consistent and meaningful definition like the middle 50%. But when asked, only 10 percent of Americans said they considered themselves lower-class and just 1 percent thought they were upper-class. My guess is that if you asked people if they were moderates you would see something similar. Perhaps 10% of the population would eschew the moderate label in favor of defining themselves a progressive extremists and perhaps 5% as right wing extremist. Moderate for most people means "reasonable" and the vast majority of people think they are reasonable.
Even if we could define moderates at the middle 50%, I think it would be almost impossible to define what issues would be used to define that -- social justice, gun control, public safety, immigration, reproductive rights. I would guess that most of us are more moderate on the issues that matter the least to us but all of us vary on what that would be.
I suspect that moderates are probably lower information voters in the sense of knowing less about politics because folks with more extreme views tend to hang with other folks with extreme views and they talk ALOT about politics. Of course, in today's political climate, less information might also mean less misinformation which might not be so bad.
I base this off national and state wide campaigns where it’s obvious that truth and facts means nothing these days. Republicans just make things up and their base doesn’t care. If they have a favorable tilt in the electorate they will win, and gerrymandering often ensures they do.
So, I've got no problems with running moderate candidates in R+ districts, but I think we also have to be honest about why these people all won, and it's not just because they're more moderate.
As you noted, all of these races are not under straight FPTP, which is the first thing. But, I don't think RCV or Top 4 or Top 2 would be quite the fool proof way to put moderate candidates into office that it's thought of.
Jared Golden has always been helped out that Maine's a weird ticket splitter state, and even though he's moved off of this in recent years, he was originally pro-gun and pro-Medicare for All. So, yes, moderate, but not in the usual way people claim candidates need to moderate over Trump voters.
Pelota basically got an non-endorsement endorsement from Sarah Palin, who she seems to be close friends with, and was also helped out by a GOP Civil War and a Trumpification of the party pushing a lot of non-aligned voters toward a pro-choice pro-gun pro-fish candidate. Again, Pelota talked a lot about her support for reproductive rights, without moderating her view by supporting restrictions, in a way that even out host here thought was a good idea after Dobbs originally.
MGP has now gotten lucky twice in a row that her opponent will be an absolute crazy person named Joe Kent who is weird even to a lot of MAGA-types. I'd also point out while Top 2 was at help in MGP's initial win, it's probably not going to do much in her releection, as there's no moderate GOP candidate running really, only Kent.
But again, in both the case of MGP & Pelota, if the GOP runs a normal candidate, they win pretty easily, no matter how perfectly the Democratic candidate moderates and punches left. Golden's a more specific case.
I'd also point out that another issue is the vast majority of money in politics is coming from small donors, and those small donors are going to be pretty hesitant to support somebody they think may not support or care about the things they care about. If you're a woman who cares deeply about reproductive choice, why would you donate to somebody who might vote for restrictions? If you care deeply about immigration rights, why donate to somebody who will vote for a Trump-lite immigration package, and so on, and so forth.
Again, run all the moderate candidates you want, and good luck to them, but the reality isn't these people who were elected have some secret sauce, but it was a lot of luck, and in many different worlds, they ran the same exact campaigns that are being praised right now, and are back in Maine, Washington, and Alaska doing their old jobs.
As far as underperforming candidates go, that's the point of running in a deep blue or deep red district. For ideologues to push candidates who will shift the party on various issues, in a seat where you can bleed the votes of moderates. Yes, in a closer seat, you need to squeeze out every vote you can, but you don't have to do that in Brooklyn or on the other side, rural Georgia. You don't actually need the most efficient candidate in every seat.
After all, even Boebert's issue at the moment is more that even pretty right-leaning voters basically think she's more interested in being a conservative influencer, in a way that makes MTG look serious and professional, somehow.
But in the end, after all,, you know what they call Tilab and AOC that they don't call a lot of moderate candidates? Congresswoman. They'll also both likely be around in Congress shaping things long after a lot of moderates have lost reelection fights, just like prior Overton Window pushers like Pelosi did, who survived and rose to power while every Blue Dog all but pretended they weren't even in the same party as that black guy, and still lost.
Probably because, you do actually need the leftmost 20% of the party motivated to vote, and despite what some people here so desperately want to do, you can't actually just abandon that wing and win. Not that MGP, Pelota, or Golden have done that in any real way, but there are a lot of "centrists" who seem to want a bunch of hippie-punching Congresspeople who attack AOC & Omar more than they do the Republican's.
You make some really good points, Jesse. Particularly about how it is normal and rational that the safest districts (D or R) elect people who will push their respective Party to a further-from-the-center position, making it harder to win the middle in other districts.
I'm becoming more and more convinced there should be a ban on all gerrymandering. Let a computer algorithm create House districts that are required to be as compact as possible. Yes, we've all seen from Google Gemini that politics can creep into computer algorithms, but I'd rather see districts that are compact and contiguous rather than ones that snake through a region searching for partisan voters.
If you make the algorithm at a national level with a mutually agreed upon prior goal (e.g. - maximally compact, following county lines) then I think the opportunities for inadvertent bias to sneak in from the builders of the algorithm are pretty low.
I mean, it's possible that that statement "maximally compact, following county lines" accidentally gives a benefit overall to either R or D - and it's probably impossible to make this suggestion "blind" (that is, at least some people who make a reasonable-sounding suggestion will have tried to precalculate the outcomes) but it may minimize it enough.
Or, allow gerrymandering, but require states to make as many moderate districts as possible. Would be more difficult to do in smaller states (and impossible in single-district states). Admittedly this is a half-baked idea, but I think we need as many moderate Members of Congress as possible to outvote the crazies
Hilariously, when you ask the program to "gerrymander Illinois to favor Democrats" ... it only shifts 2 districts vs. the current map. IL Dems got the message.
Yeah, it’s one of my favorite tools for this type of thing. It’s interesting that the algorithmic compact districts often don’t match expectations. In particular, they tend to crack cities (at least if they’re in the interior of a state), which people think is inherently partisan. However, cracking is also an effect of making maximally compact districts!
The main problem I have with this is that you'll have insane turnover rates, resulting in D/R +25 district Representatives being the only ones with seniority.
There’s no need for a district-drawing algorithm to be as opaque as an AI program. The principles of fairness and neutrality have been worked out in the political science literature.
Compact districts will likely produce just as many extreme districts as we currently have, if not more. Gerrymandering tends to dilute the most extreme districts.
Yeah gerrymandering is a scourge. Can you imagine how different Congress would have been this cycle if a 1/3 of Republicans actually feared losing instead of like 10?
I'm for a national anti-gerrymandering bill, but compactness is kind of overrated. In some cases, compactness can lead to results that don't match the population. Like, a lot of the WI legislative lines didn't look that bad, but it still led to the situation where they held a 2/3 majority with less than half the vote.
I'd rather have ugly district lines that lead to results that match the actual partisan lean (accounting for candidate strength) than perfect districts that lead to off results.
The fact that they won against 'crazies' is also evidence _for_ this though. Yeah it made their job easier, but "if their Republican opponents had been more moderate, they might have lost " is also evidence for the value of moderation.
Sure, again - run moderates in these districts. But, I just think winning depends a lot more on luck, and in open seats, the actions of other Republicans. If Herrera is 10% less moderate, and embraces Kent as the nominee, I think MGP probably loses.
Like I said above, if instead of Pelota, another random Alaskan state legislator with the same exact views of Pelota, who didn't have a long standing relationship with Palin runs, is Palin focusing more on attacking the Democrat as a Joe Biden Democrat instead of randomly appearing in kind of endearing Tweets and Instagram stories with Pelota and going to war with parts of the Alaska GOP?
Moderation matters, but luck matters a lot, if not more.
Yeah running the moderates doesn't guarantee wins, but if you compete in 10 Trump+4 districts and manage to win 4 of them with moderates, that's the U.S. House of Representatives right there.
"Probably because, you do actually need the leftmost 20% of the party motivated to vote"
One of the most important lessons that both parties have forgotten is that every voter on their edge that they trade for a voter in the middle is a loss for the other party.
The difference between capturing the edge and capturing the middle is the difference between being the California Republican party and the Pennsylvania Democratic party.
So, I'm all for moderation, but I think we still don't know, with some exceptions, on what moderation people care about.
For instance, Republican's love to pull out polls showing non-white people, sometimes just specifically black people are actually less liberal on various social issues than liberal white people. Depending on the intelligence of said conservative, they'll either make a 'What's Matter with Kansas' argument to an argument Republican's should focus on these issues to win some of these voters over to something dumb about Democratic plantations.
Now, putting aside that this actually makes sense - if you win an outsized portion of a group that's varied by age, socioeconomic status, and geographic location, without much accounting for political values, that group is going to have more varied views than a group (white people) already separated by political issues.
Plus, even if they're less socially liberal than white libs in deep blue areas like me, they're still more socially liberal than white conservatives.
My point is, sometimes, there are arguments that Democrat's should moderate on issue x or y, because minority voters are actually less liberal on issue x or y. But, my pushback would be, is there proof those voters care about those issues, or is part of the reason they're a Democrat is because they don't really care about issue x or y, and care more about issue z, that they're normie Democrat's on.
For instance, there are a lot of 75 year old African-American grandmas in the rural South with less than 'woke' views on LGBT people. But, the reality is, those grandmas are never voting Republican. Now, maybe, there's an argument about younger minority voters and their viewpoints, but as I've argued w/ Milan here, I think basically, the polling on black voters (and white seniors) is off the rails this year and that while there might be a slight shift to the GOP among black voters, it'll be 13%, not 23% like we're seeing in some polls.
But, it's understandable that conservative minorities with conservative views on things they care about will eventually become Republican's eventually, as seen with people like Mark Robinson. The problem is, it appears to be kind of an open question on whether polling actually captures who these voters actually are, as even self-description of liberal, moderate, or conservative among minority, especially African-American voters seem less connected to the normal descriptions of liberal, moderate, and conservative and more toward personal temperament.
"So, I'm all for moderation, but I think we still don't know, with some exceptions, on what moderation people care about. "
That's true about Progressives true! Most people don't have uniform progressive, moderate or conservative beliefs, they tend to be all muddle up in a mix - and that's assuming they even have a position on things. Most "normies" don't think about politics that way at all and unless they are deep into the kool aid, will have heterodox views on something.
The question then becomes, does the public feel like a candidates approach to things represents what they want. This is how most politicians get elected. They often don't make any sense and are even outright deceptive in their policy opinions, but people feel like they will at least approach things the right way. The key is to be able to do that for moderate voters who might consider voting for either party. Can you get the persuadable voters to say "I might not agree with them on everything, but I think they are close enough that I can still vote for them because they seem to be like me."
A big part of that is to enable representatives in close districts to say that "I'm not like that crazy righty, or this crazy lefty, I'm like you. A reasonable, sensible person."
The Squad could be very good for the Democratic party if a bunch of Democrats would say their too extreme and use them as a contrast to demonstrate their moderation.
I agree people have heterodox views, but I also think a lot of people may disagree w/ something, but they don't really care, but since that's not shown well in polling, a lot of triangulating is done chasing after people who don't care about the issue you're triangulating on.
Again, I'm not talking about immigration or crime, but rather smaller bore issues.
"The Squad could be very good for the Democratic party if a bunch of Democrats would say their too extreme and use them as a contrast to demonstrate their moderation."
The problem with this idea is that even in swing districts, there are going to be a lot of Democratic voters in your district who care and like AOC more than you - for example, in the latest Harvard/Harris poll, among Democrats last month, AOC has a 51% approval, and Joe Manchin has a 31% approval, and among liberals, the only thing more approved of more is MSNBC, Biden, Kamala, MSNBC, and BLM, and that's probably low considering the Harris poll is kind of has some weird results at times.
The funniest thing in the results is more Republican's than Democrat's actually recognize AOC by name (74% vs. 67%).
AOC isn't some random left-wing minor celebrity like Sister Souljah or whatever you can basically freely get a shot in - she's a well-loved political figure among many Democratic voters, no matter how much that annoys you. I'm not saying you have to embrace AOC, but you can't attack her as too extreme.
Also, it seems to be a skill issue that these moderate representatives can't get as much online attention as progressives. Maybe if they were going after witnesses AOC (and Adam Schiff, who is no leftie), they'd be more well known.
“It seems to be a skill issue that these moderate representatives can't get as much online attention as progressives”
It’s not skill, it’s opportunity cost of time.
If you are running in an R+5 seat, you can’t take the Acela down to DC while tweeting and coast to re-election. You drive from your often rural district to an airport to get to work while also fundraising and campaigning to get re-elected.
Winning in a R+3 district is neat, winning in an R+40 state is extremely impressive - which is exactly what Joe Manchin has managed by holding West Virginia. In 2024 he won’t run, and the very progressives who complain about him being right wing will find out what his replacement - A Republican in an R+40 state actually looks like.
Great op ed in the Washington Post from Manchin. Biden campaign would do well to copy the messaging here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/18/manchin-energy-independence-biden/
As a progressive, most smart progressives (as opposed to randos on Twitter and podcasters whose income depends on being anti-Democratic Party) were far more annoyed with Sinema, who was opposing popular things (like min. wage hikes and such) and supporting unpopular things (like tax cuts for rich guys) as opposed to Manchin, who as annoying, but was also the only guy who could win in West By God Virginia, and along with his annoying ideas, actually supported good stuff like raising taxes on rich people.
VORP, Value Over Replacement Politician, is a concept everyone that wants to opine on politics should have drilled in their head.
I feel like my sports fan background really helps me with this shit sometimes. Also helps me understand that the entire take economy is incredibly fatuous and vacuous.
I political scientist should figure out a political equivalent to baseball's Win Above Replacement (WAR)
My buddies have! Called it WAR and everything! split-ticket.org
That's why I've read Nate Silver's work for so long, he hit that nice sports/politics intersection that appeals to me.
Don't forget that Sinema was doing this as senator for Arizona, where a perfectly orthodox moderate Democrat can win.
Yeah, Sinema might've survived if Mark Kelly didn't ask, being a perfectly normie Democrat with fine approval ratings. Now, being an astronaut helps, but that doesn't explain all of it.
You'll miss her when she's replaced by Kari Lake.
Nowhere near a given, it should be a winnable race for democrats now that Sinema has said she won't run as an independent. Whereas if you gave me 30:1 on a democrat winning Manchin's seat, I would not take that bet.
Gallego is leading basically every poll, including ones showing Trump winning the state, and here's the thing, if Lake is winning, Trump is winning, so we're in trouble anyway. Putting that aside, if Lake wins, it's a six year rental. Arizona isn't going to be more right-wing in 2030, most likely.
But, you're an odd duck whose gotten super fixated on one issue and think it's the end of the world. But, you aren't the first person to get fixated on a singular issue, and suddenly change their political valence.
Well, we do know a Republican US Senator looks like in West Virginia. Her name is Shelley Moore Capito, and while she is obviously worse than Joe Manchin, she has by far the highest "Biden +/-" for an active Congressional Republican (per 538) and the fourth-highest in the entire Senate (behind Manchin, Tester, and Brown). This means she votes with Biden way more than one would expect based on WV's political demographics.
Jim Justice, again, is much worse than Manchin, but he also strikes me as somebody who is not going to legislate as far to the right as one would expect from a US Senator from WV. (It's worth noting Jim Justice used to be a Democrat and switched parties during Trump's presidency.)
To be clear, I don't disagree with the overall point you're making and I don't disagree with the author's piece. But it is not quite as salient of a point as one would think.
I think we have to see how Shelley Moore Capito changes once she’s not the junior senator to nice guy Manchin, but is the senior senator to another Republican. Manchin didn’t just get us one vote on a lot of close things - he got us *two* on some of them.
West Virginia is odd. It was heavily Democratic relatively recently (in the 1990s) and had two Democratic senators up until Capito. So while it voted overwhelmingly for Trump (and strongly but not quite as overwhelmingly for Romney) the electorate there is very heavily the kinds of voters who were once Democrats or whose parents were once Democrats. Not the same as Utah or Wyoming.
Agreed. Per Wikipedia, Democrats had a supermajority in the WV Senate less than 10 years ago. Now they only have 3 out of 34 seats. So a lot of people have recently turned into Republicans, but perhaps not in a way that's made them completely hostile to the Democratic Party
It's the Democratic Party that's made itself completely hostile to West Virginians with its relentless pursuit of race-based rather than class-based policy.
I think this is tough because Shelley Moore Capito and Jim Justice aren't what you'd expect from an R+40 state from a policy point of view - There's been a ton of luck that these are the two who've become WV Senators. In 10-15 years when they're out of office, their replacements likely won't be as reasonable.
To steel man the argument that a Manchin type politician is bad for a party: it dilutes the message and identity of the party and makes it harder to draw a clear distinction against the other party, and also makes it harder to blame the other party when things go wrong. ”Republicans blocked goodie X” is a stronger message than ”Joe Manchin and Republicans blocked goodie X, yes he’s from our own party, he’s a closet Republican, no we are not in disarray even if it might look like it…”
But who is that *for*?
Manchin's own voters LIKE that he blocks Democrats' things. It's the only way he's kept winning in WV.
At some point, the party simply has to embrace the suck and strategically work around Manchin's limitations. You give him nice big show votes to bring back to his voters, and he helps you enact the rest of your agenda.
If you take that (admittedly difficult!) strategy and replicate it x10, then now you're talking about a filibuster-proof majority*. Sure, it narrows the agenda for that majority, but at least you're getting shit done. And if you actually care about getting shit done, the filibuster makes it so that the narrow path is basically the ONLY path -- not unless you're a Magic Senate Grandpa like Joe Biden who can make Secret Congress do what he wants.
[Ed: *Which is literally how we got Obama's majority. The failure to get the base to understand the kayfabe back then is also why Dems express sentiments like Joachim's -- they weren't expecting to have to compromise and play kayfabe, so all the hemming and hawing and backsliding was _real_ to them, and they've been Big Mad about that ever since. The reason we haven't run enough moderate Dems in purple states over the last decade is because the DSCC remains _convinced_ (misguidedly) that a 60-seat majority with 12 Manchins is no majority at all.]
But voters outside of Manchin's state might either be dejected or angry and decide not to vote at all (leftists) or think that the Dems are in disarray and ineffective who can't get anything passed because of their internal disagreements (moderates).
We should have nuked the filibuster rule a long time ago, it's undemocratic and terrible in every way.
I think this dynamic would also be less severe if we had more than two viable parties. A "left-aligned centrist on policy, West Virginia on vibes and some policy" candidate like Manchin doesn't need to be in the same party as The Squad, and polarization would be less severe if the Blue Dog Democrats and Left Democrats could agree that, while usually allies, they did not have to be the same thing.
Alternatively, the USA functioned well with ideologically heterogeneous parties, but they are more polarized now. I think separate parties might offer more clarity to voters. And it's a widespread phenomenon in democracies -- I think most countries with real elections also have more than two meaningful political parties.
We already seem to have three distinct factions - the MAGA and Progressive ecosystems have all the elements of a coherent political faction (financial/revenue model, membership base, talent, policy clarity, language, norms, etc), and then the "Good/Moderate Republican" thing is a thing (look at all the Biden district Republicans and GOP govs in blue states) ... we're only missing one organized faction, and its the center left
So, well I do personally prefer a PR or MMP type of system, I think the ways both my fellow lefties and centrists think it'll help with polarization is highly overrated.
Yes, it allows center-left and center-right parties to be a bit more boring, staid, and committed to long-term governance and working together instead of being polarized against one another. But, that working together in many cases has led to rising support for more extreme parties, who are now gaining power to affect things in ways that you could argue are worse than if there were just two big parties who had to slowly adjust to changing views.
At the current moment, that has mostly only meant big jumps in support for right-wing parties, as Europe is currently going through it's reactionary decades since non-white people in decent numbers are around for the first time with any political power, and voters are reacting in many of the ways white voters did in the US in the 60's through the 90's. Ironically, there's a decent chance that by 2040, the Democrat's are actually to the left of the center-left parties in Europe on several issues.
Anyway, to get back to my point, if the population are truly polarized on a topic, like is happening worldwide due to education polarization, that's going to be affected in whatever voting system a country happens to have.
I think it’s pretty obvious that the US equivalent of AfD would be more electorally successful than the US equivalent of the CDU.
The heterogeneous parties in some ways was more like a "two parties, four regional factions" system.
I am in VICIOUS FUCKING AGREEMENT about the evils of the filibuster. Inshallah, may it die with extreme prejudice and not a blessed day too soon, my brother.
But RE "dejected or angry voters", that sounds like an "us" problem that I'd much rather have while we're still Getting Shit Done, vs. simply being out of power and having to deal with relentless and pointless GOP shutdowns. Case in point, I present Exhibit A: Biden's entire first term, both before and after the midterm.
The voters don't always listen to us, but they KIND OF do, especially the base, and it needs to be clearly explained to the base that they need to go along with a certain amount of kayfabe WRT the Manchins of the world, because Shit Just Be Like That Yo. If they don't like it, they can go kick rocks while the rest of us continue building and maintaining the Coalition To Get Shit Done.
Re the filibuster. If I could convince you that the filibuster means that federal government policy more closely adheres to the public's preferences, and that removing it would mean that federal policy was actually less responsive to the public, would you still want to get rid of it?
I'd be curious to hear you out, but I'd still remain quite skeptical that any benefits you could extol would outweigh the severe costs and distortions the filibuster inflicts on our broader political environment.
Proceed...
If you could convince me that it was more responsive to the public's preferences, that would help, although I'd also wonder - is it more responsive to popularist(short-term) preferences or good governance(long-term) preferences?
If the Shit you would like to Get Done continues to include race-based rather than class-based policy, and denial of women's right to single-sex locker rooms, prisons, and sports (said denial being favored by Biden, Harris, and EVERY Democrat in Congress, INCLUDING Joe Manchin), then you can count me out. And I've been a registered Democrat for 50 years.
My point was, regardless of how annoying I find your social views, I’d take a dozen senators with your opinions if it meant a filibuster-proof majority.
Because each YOU in that caucus can be bargained with, and it coming from a roughly similar place of basic values and principles. To the extent that you might ever be persuaded out of your social views, the best, most proven mechanism for that to happen is by osmosis from remaining inside my big tent. We make the progress we can make, together, and that’s better for America than fucking fascism.
So how many states would Democrats just have to abandon if they embrace a plan to not run red state Democrats who make blue state Democrats feel bad? 20? 25?
>...it dilutes the message and identity of the party and makes it harder to draw a clear distinction against the other party...<
This doesn't ring true to my ears. The identity of the Democratic Party to a depressingly large number of voters is "People who'll make fun of me if I use the wrong pronouns between Defund rallies."
If Manchin really had some measurable impact on the party's identity, it would be a Good Thing.
I don't know if a "Manchin type" politician is bad for the party but *Manchin* was great for passing Biden's agenda given that he was from WVA and was the deciding vote. Would I want a Manchin representing California? No, of course not. But I sure was appreciative of him while he's been there.
One challenge for centrists in the Democratic Party is that people like us - who "were appreciative of Manchin" - have no real way to show our appreciation or incentivize more people like him to win in red states. There are lots of outlets to express appreciation for progressives (or MAGA). Not many for moderate dems, even when those Dems winning red districts are so clearly those most in need of appreciation!
Something we need to take into account is that the Democrats' message is actually rather poor. Democrats could not win a senate seat in Montana with a more popular candidate who had already won statewide, even though most voters tend to agree more with the Democrats' positions on most issues. A 'weaker' message in this sense would be better for the Democrats. We need more Manchins to weaken it further and benefit the country.
It will not be interpreted as Dems being more moderate but rather that Dems are in disarray and can’t govern. You need a majority of Manchins to create the impression of being a centrist party.
True and since WV is solid R now shifting the Senate to 50/50, and there is no Republican seat that is rated any more blue than Likely R, the Dems, to hold the majority will need to sweep the three tossup seats- OH, MT, and AZ, hold the Lean Dem seats - NV, WI, MI - and win the presidency.
So far Sherrod Brown is slightly ahead as is Gallego in AZ thanks to the GOP putting up their MAGA clown act, but Tester and Biden are in a bad spot. Tester, unlike Manchin, did not solidify his bonafides with the GOP voters who gave Trump a +16 in 2020, by challenging Dem orthodoxy and people who saw Manchin as the devil incarnate dont realize that nobody out of WV will vote as liberal as him for the next dozen years.
The way for a Dem to stay alive in a red state has to be to push back on the unpopular policies that the Dems have- crime, immigration, white guilt. Tester won by 3.5% in 2018 but that was a blue wave election and now the electorate is leaning R.
And none of them will ever apologize, or admit to missing him when he's gone.
My guess is that giving off moderate vibes is more important than your de facto voting record, which 1. most voters don’t know or care to find out about, 2. can be framed in a positive way by clever PR, 3. will be attacked and lied about by Republicans no matter how you vote.
Be a normie, down to earth, folksy, patriotic. This works especially good in swing districts but will pay dividends in most districts outside of Brooklyn regardless of voter composition. Especially so for Democrats who already have a the high IQ/high information vote locked down. Keep the activist and pointy headed, elitist types far away from voters (spoken as an elitist myself, I would never dream to become a politician for precisely that reason).
It's relatively hard to find people who are able to give normie, down to earth, folksy vibes, who are also crazy enough to want to be a politician.
America is a big country
It contains multitudes.
It’s worth noting that a fair number of folksy-talking candidates are secretly pointy heads— Obama and Bill Clinton are the most famous examples, but among the Dems, AOC, Bernie Sanders, John Fetterman, and MGP all seem to fit the bill if you look closely, and on the Republican side you have JD Vance and his ilk.
I think that success in politics in democracies generally requires not just tactical preference falsification but tactical vibe falsification— the average person and the average person who’s cognitively qualified to govern just tend to think and communicate very differently, and people in the latter group generally need to fake some stuff to seem relatable to most of their voters.
This ties nicely into some of the ideas Hal Machow talked about in the recent Politico profile. In today's polarized day and age it's more important to change your party's vibe and image, since it's harder for an individual candidate to stand out from the party brand.
Great point. Would love to have asked him about faction and party sub-brands. Looked at testing this in a race (on the five point partisan scale) and haven't gotten to, and didn't get to meet him. RIP.
I agree with this 100%. This is why it’s so damaging for Democrats with leftist party members arguing for super unpopular ideas such as open borders, abolishing the police, transgender surgery on demand for kids etc, even if these members are a minority (as they are). In multi party system center left parties can push the more extreme members to leftist fringe parties but in the US they are forced to somehow contain them within.
Some Dems have successfully pulled off being less moderate than their vibes (e.g. Jon Tester & Sherrod Brown), but they have long electoral histories with their state. Actually being a moderate is a huge shortcut to cultivating moderate vibes compared to the strategy of first being the president of Montana's senate, or being Ohio's Secretary of State.
But it's also hard to "actually being a moderate" and doing so with authenticity when you don't have a long electoral history to point to.
As Yglesias has said, the dems have a talent retention problem with moderate candidates. If a moderate dem loses a close election in a red district, the party should be finding a place for them to either develop their image for voters, or in party strategy for future elections. Instead these candidates often don't have a future with the party and their knowledge and talent is lost.
"Finding a place for them" what exactly does this look like?
Parties are extremely weak in the United States. There's not a lot of just random patronage jobs lying around at the DNC or DCCC. There are, sometimes, administration jobs. Joe Biden has helped some defeated moderate candidates:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/02/15/president-biden-announces-xochitl-torres-small-as-nominee-for-deputy-secretary-of-agriculture/
https://www.washingtonblade.com/2023/05/12/sean-patrick-maloney-nominated-ambassador/
And he's raised the profile of people like Mayor Pete.
And Obama did the same post-2010.
But it's not like there's a lot that can be done.
There are think tanks, democratic consultancy firms, lobbying firms, state and federal commissions that require some level of bipartisan membership, etc.
These networks exist, what a losing candidate needs is to have people higher up the food chain pushing for them to be hired or placed in these jobs as a matter of course.
It is true that the parties are weak, but the progressive faction is strong - when Bernie and Warren lost, it was pretty clear where the thousands of people who worked for them could go to (which candidates, consultancies, "Groups") - but not as clear where Pete-type people would go.
When we started WelcomePAC we literally went to the people who were the biggest overperformers to be like hey where are all the people flocking to learn lessons and replicate what you do and ... not a lot there! Way more money and jobs doing progressive nonprofit stuff or working for blue district/state campaigns
For the first campaign, vibes matter a lot with little record, but you can also make some promises. Trump made lots of promises about Medicare that helped him win over moderates.
But you need SOME examples to campaign on
Maybe one or two but mostly political campaigning is about creating and pushing fictions - in times of intense polarization and low info voters deciding elections.
Have you been part of any campaigns? I have, and what you say simply isn't accurate. Below, say the Senate or Governor level, campaigning is really intensive retailing work. You are constantly out meeting people, at specifically political events but also at tons and tons of community events: every local community organization's fund raising chicken dinner, monthly meetings of various civic organizations, ethnic day celebrations, fairs, church festivals, etc. It's a constant grind of meeting and greeting and engaging people.
And people aren't actually morons, they come up and ask you questions, and more importantly, you are trying to approach them and get them to ask you questions. If you try to use fictions as opposed to actual verifiable instances of when to did a thing or took a stand on a thing you'll get called out.
"People aren't actually morons" is an underrated point! All the hyping of polarization and underinformed voters goes on amidst moderates who win over tons of swing voters, and even top of ticket in polling tons of voters shifting towards Haley in a Biden v. Haley matchup
Aren’t moderate voters unusually likely to be low-information, though? In GSS data their WORDSUM scores are the worst by a decent margin.
EDIT: to be clear, I think that running moderates in R+6 type districts is good strategy; I just also think that we need to be realistic about the fact that “appealing to moderates” often means “appealing to the least-informed ideological block” in practice.
Independents tend to be "low-information" voters if the information in question is politics. The NY Times had a good article interviewing folk who run polls and once you remove the folks who say they are independent but haven't voted for one of the parties for several cycles, you end up with folks who don't tend to tune into politics until late in the cycle and don't have much detailed political knowledge. (Note: these people might have tons of useful substantive about many other things that are actually relevant to policy making and problem solving.) I don't think that is very surprising. Folks who don't have a favorite baseball team watch less baseball. Folks who don't define themselves by party are going to be less interested in politics, especially the horse race stuff.
I don't know that moderate equates with independent. Frankly, I think moderate is a bit like middle class. It seems like it should have a consistent and meaningful definition like the middle 50%. But when asked, only 10 percent of Americans said they considered themselves lower-class and just 1 percent thought they were upper-class. My guess is that if you asked people if they were moderates you would see something similar. Perhaps 10% of the population would eschew the moderate label in favor of defining themselves a progressive extremists and perhaps 5% as right wing extremist. Moderate for most people means "reasonable" and the vast majority of people think they are reasonable.
Even if we could define moderates at the middle 50%, I think it would be almost impossible to define what issues would be used to define that -- social justice, gun control, public safety, immigration, reproductive rights. I would guess that most of us are more moderate on the issues that matter the least to us but all of us vary on what that would be.
I suspect that moderates are probably lower information voters in the sense of knowing less about politics because folks with more extreme views tend to hang with other folks with extreme views and they talk ALOT about politics. Of course, in today's political climate, less information might also mean less misinformation which might not be so bad.
I base this off national and state wide campaigns where it’s obvious that truth and facts means nothing these days. Republicans just make things up and their base doesn’t care. If they have a favorable tilt in the electorate they will win, and gerrymandering often ensures they do.
So, I've got no problems with running moderate candidates in R+ districts, but I think we also have to be honest about why these people all won, and it's not just because they're more moderate.
As you noted, all of these races are not under straight FPTP, which is the first thing. But, I don't think RCV or Top 4 or Top 2 would be quite the fool proof way to put moderate candidates into office that it's thought of.
Jared Golden has always been helped out that Maine's a weird ticket splitter state, and even though he's moved off of this in recent years, he was originally pro-gun and pro-Medicare for All. So, yes, moderate, but not in the usual way people claim candidates need to moderate over Trump voters.
Pelota basically got an non-endorsement endorsement from Sarah Palin, who she seems to be close friends with, and was also helped out by a GOP Civil War and a Trumpification of the party pushing a lot of non-aligned voters toward a pro-choice pro-gun pro-fish candidate. Again, Pelota talked a lot about her support for reproductive rights, without moderating her view by supporting restrictions, in a way that even out host here thought was a good idea after Dobbs originally.
MGP has now gotten lucky twice in a row that her opponent will be an absolute crazy person named Joe Kent who is weird even to a lot of MAGA-types. I'd also point out while Top 2 was at help in MGP's initial win, it's probably not going to do much in her releection, as there's no moderate GOP candidate running really, only Kent.
But again, in both the case of MGP & Pelota, if the GOP runs a normal candidate, they win pretty easily, no matter how perfectly the Democratic candidate moderates and punches left. Golden's a more specific case.
I'd also point out that another issue is the vast majority of money in politics is coming from small donors, and those small donors are going to be pretty hesitant to support somebody they think may not support or care about the things they care about. If you're a woman who cares deeply about reproductive choice, why would you donate to somebody who might vote for restrictions? If you care deeply about immigration rights, why donate to somebody who will vote for a Trump-lite immigration package, and so on, and so forth.
Again, run all the moderate candidates you want, and good luck to them, but the reality isn't these people who were elected have some secret sauce, but it was a lot of luck, and in many different worlds, they ran the same exact campaigns that are being praised right now, and are back in Maine, Washington, and Alaska doing their old jobs.
As far as underperforming candidates go, that's the point of running in a deep blue or deep red district. For ideologues to push candidates who will shift the party on various issues, in a seat where you can bleed the votes of moderates. Yes, in a closer seat, you need to squeeze out every vote you can, but you don't have to do that in Brooklyn or on the other side, rural Georgia. You don't actually need the most efficient candidate in every seat.
After all, even Boebert's issue at the moment is more that even pretty right-leaning voters basically think she's more interested in being a conservative influencer, in a way that makes MTG look serious and professional, somehow.
But in the end, after all,, you know what they call Tilab and AOC that they don't call a lot of moderate candidates? Congresswoman. They'll also both likely be around in Congress shaping things long after a lot of moderates have lost reelection fights, just like prior Overton Window pushers like Pelosi did, who survived and rose to power while every Blue Dog all but pretended they weren't even in the same party as that black guy, and still lost.
Probably because, you do actually need the leftmost 20% of the party motivated to vote, and despite what some people here so desperately want to do, you can't actually just abandon that wing and win. Not that MGP, Pelota, or Golden have done that in any real way, but there are a lot of "centrists" who seem to want a bunch of hippie-punching Congresspeople who attack AOC & Omar more than they do the Republican's.
You make some really good points, Jesse. Particularly about how it is normal and rational that the safest districts (D or R) elect people who will push their respective Party to a further-from-the-center position, making it harder to win the middle in other districts.
I'm becoming more and more convinced there should be a ban on all gerrymandering. Let a computer algorithm create House districts that are required to be as compact as possible. Yes, we've all seen from Google Gemini that politics can creep into computer algorithms, but I'd rather see districts that are compact and contiguous rather than ones that snake through a region searching for partisan voters.
I like that you acknowledged that algorithms still have bias from the humans that bui,t the algorithm.
The only way to truly end gerrymandering is to implement proportional representation, as highly unlikely as that will be.
If you make the algorithm at a national level with a mutually agreed upon prior goal (e.g. - maximally compact, following county lines) then I think the opportunities for inadvertent bias to sneak in from the builders of the algorithm are pretty low.
I mean, it's possible that that statement "maximally compact, following county lines" accidentally gives a benefit overall to either R or D - and it's probably impossible to make this suggestion "blind" (that is, at least some people who make a reasonable-sounding suggestion will have tried to precalculate the outcomes) but it may minimize it enough.
Or, allow gerrymandering, but require states to make as many moderate districts as possible. Would be more difficult to do in smaller states (and impossible in single-district states). Admittedly this is a half-baked idea, but I think we need as many moderate Members of Congress as possible to outvote the crazies
The old 538 Atlas of Redistricting has an option to maximize highly competitive districts: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-maps/#Competitive That’s probably what you’re looking for (although it was pre-2020 census).
Hilariously, when you ask the program to "gerrymander Illinois to favor Democrats" ... it only shifts 2 districts vs. the current map. IL Dems got the message.
Really cool tool. I especially like the "compact while following county lines" districting approach.
Yeah, it’s one of my favorite tools for this type of thing. It’s interesting that the algorithmic compact districts often don’t match expectations. In particular, they tend to crack cities (at least if they’re in the interior of a state), which people think is inherently partisan. However, cracking is also an effect of making maximally compact districts!
The main problem I have with this is that you'll have insane turnover rates, resulting in D/R +25 district Representatives being the only ones with seniority.
Ah yes, thank you! I remember when they originally made it but had forgotten about it
There’s no need for a district-drawing algorithm to be as opaque as an AI program. The principles of fairness and neutrality have been worked out in the political science literature.
Compact districts will likely produce just as many extreme districts as we currently have, if not more. Gerrymandering tends to dilute the most extreme districts.
I would like to see some states experiment multi-member districts.
Yeah gerrymandering is a scourge. Can you imagine how different Congress would have been this cycle if a 1/3 of Republicans actually feared losing instead of like 10?
I'm for a national anti-gerrymandering bill, but compactness is kind of overrated. In some cases, compactness can lead to results that don't match the population. Like, a lot of the WI legislative lines didn't look that bad, but it still led to the situation where they held a 2/3 majority with less than half the vote.
I'd rather have ugly district lines that lead to results that match the actual partisan lean (accounting for candidate strength) than perfect districts that lead to off results.
The fact that they won against 'crazies' is also evidence _for_ this though. Yeah it made their job easier, but "if their Republican opponents had been more moderate, they might have lost " is also evidence for the value of moderation.
Sure, again - run moderates in these districts. But, I just think winning depends a lot more on luck, and in open seats, the actions of other Republicans. If Herrera is 10% less moderate, and embraces Kent as the nominee, I think MGP probably loses.
Like I said above, if instead of Pelota, another random Alaskan state legislator with the same exact views of Pelota, who didn't have a long standing relationship with Palin runs, is Palin focusing more on attacking the Democrat as a Joe Biden Democrat instead of randomly appearing in kind of endearing Tweets and Instagram stories with Pelota and going to war with parts of the Alaska GOP?
Moderation matters, but luck matters a lot, if not more.
Yeah running the moderates doesn't guarantee wins, but if you compete in 10 Trump+4 districts and manage to win 4 of them with moderates, that's the U.S. House of Representatives right there.
"Probably because, you do actually need the leftmost 20% of the party motivated to vote"
One of the most important lessons that both parties have forgotten is that every voter on their edge that they trade for a voter in the middle is a loss for the other party.
The difference between capturing the edge and capturing the middle is the difference between being the California Republican party and the Pennsylvania Democratic party.
So, I'm all for moderation, but I think we still don't know, with some exceptions, on what moderation people care about.
For instance, Republican's love to pull out polls showing non-white people, sometimes just specifically black people are actually less liberal on various social issues than liberal white people. Depending on the intelligence of said conservative, they'll either make a 'What's Matter with Kansas' argument to an argument Republican's should focus on these issues to win some of these voters over to something dumb about Democratic plantations.
Now, putting aside that this actually makes sense - if you win an outsized portion of a group that's varied by age, socioeconomic status, and geographic location, without much accounting for political values, that group is going to have more varied views than a group (white people) already separated by political issues.
Plus, even if they're less socially liberal than white libs in deep blue areas like me, they're still more socially liberal than white conservatives.
My point is, sometimes, there are arguments that Democrat's should moderate on issue x or y, because minority voters are actually less liberal on issue x or y. But, my pushback would be, is there proof those voters care about those issues, or is part of the reason they're a Democrat is because they don't really care about issue x or y, and care more about issue z, that they're normie Democrat's on.
For instance, there are a lot of 75 year old African-American grandmas in the rural South with less than 'woke' views on LGBT people. But, the reality is, those grandmas are never voting Republican. Now, maybe, there's an argument about younger minority voters and their viewpoints, but as I've argued w/ Milan here, I think basically, the polling on black voters (and white seniors) is off the rails this year and that while there might be a slight shift to the GOP among black voters, it'll be 13%, not 23% like we're seeing in some polls.
But, it's understandable that conservative minorities with conservative views on things they care about will eventually become Republican's eventually, as seen with people like Mark Robinson. The problem is, it appears to be kind of an open question on whether polling actually captures who these voters actually are, as even self-description of liberal, moderate, or conservative among minority, especially African-American voters seem less connected to the normal descriptions of liberal, moderate, and conservative and more toward personal temperament.
"So, I'm all for moderation, but I think we still don't know, with some exceptions, on what moderation people care about. "
That's true about Progressives true! Most people don't have uniform progressive, moderate or conservative beliefs, they tend to be all muddle up in a mix - and that's assuming they even have a position on things. Most "normies" don't think about politics that way at all and unless they are deep into the kool aid, will have heterodox views on something.
The question then becomes, does the public feel like a candidates approach to things represents what they want. This is how most politicians get elected. They often don't make any sense and are even outright deceptive in their policy opinions, but people feel like they will at least approach things the right way. The key is to be able to do that for moderate voters who might consider voting for either party. Can you get the persuadable voters to say "I might not agree with them on everything, but I think they are close enough that I can still vote for them because they seem to be like me."
A big part of that is to enable representatives in close districts to say that "I'm not like that crazy righty, or this crazy lefty, I'm like you. A reasonable, sensible person."
The Squad could be very good for the Democratic party if a bunch of Democrats would say their too extreme and use them as a contrast to demonstrate their moderation.
I agree people have heterodox views, but I also think a lot of people may disagree w/ something, but they don't really care, but since that's not shown well in polling, a lot of triangulating is done chasing after people who don't care about the issue you're triangulating on.
Again, I'm not talking about immigration or crime, but rather smaller bore issues.
"The Squad could be very good for the Democratic party if a bunch of Democrats would say their too extreme and use them as a contrast to demonstrate their moderation."
The problem with this idea is that even in swing districts, there are going to be a lot of Democratic voters in your district who care and like AOC more than you - for example, in the latest Harvard/Harris poll, among Democrats last month, AOC has a 51% approval, and Joe Manchin has a 31% approval, and among liberals, the only thing more approved of more is MSNBC, Biden, Kamala, MSNBC, and BLM, and that's probably low considering the Harris poll is kind of has some weird results at times.
The funniest thing in the results is more Republican's than Democrat's actually recognize AOC by name (74% vs. 67%).
AOC isn't some random left-wing minor celebrity like Sister Souljah or whatever you can basically freely get a shot in - she's a well-loved political figure among many Democratic voters, no matter how much that annoys you. I'm not saying you have to embrace AOC, but you can't attack her as too extreme.
Also, it seems to be a skill issue that these moderate representatives can't get as much online attention as progressives. Maybe if they were going after witnesses AOC (and Adam Schiff, who is no leftie), they'd be more well known.
“It seems to be a skill issue that these moderate representatives can't get as much online attention as progressives”
It’s not skill, it’s opportunity cost of time.
If you are running in an R+5 seat, you can’t take the Acela down to DC while tweeting and coast to re-election. You drive from your often rural district to an airport to get to work while also fundraising and campaigning to get re-elected.