Thank you, Santa, for bringing me a Florida-focused Slow Boring post.
Florida is ... diverse in ways that non-residents (and residents) can find hard to comprehend. Driving from Tampa to Miami takes about 3 hours but covers a cultural and demographic distance that stretches from the Upper Midwest to New York south to Puerto Rico and all stops between the three.
I think Matt overplays how Florida isn't especially religious, or rust belt-y or filled with oil rigs as reasons to make it "gettable". What it is, though, is older and full of immigrants. Not only immigrants from Cuba and Mexico, but also from NY, NJ, CT, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland who left for weather and governance issues. As a result it is more culturally conservative in a Get Off My Lawn way than you might imagine.
The path to making inroads here needs someone who can meet those voters where they are culturally and promise to expand Medicaid using federal money. Nothing more from the party platform. The only blue-haired person the candidate should be seen with is 86 year old Edna from Beloit, WI.
I think the best path is to try like hell to win the Governorship (where you can do the Medicaid expansion), govern effectively for 2 terms (we have term limits) and then leverage that to a Senate seat. Unfortunately, the dearth of candidates Matt describes extends to many state-level races also. Don't forget that the last guy who *almost* became Governor was very Progressive but turned out after the election to have drug and male prostitute issues. (Andrew Gillum, look him up). Let's not do that again.
The best bet is to support David Jolly (former Republican, I know, but you gotta play the game in front of you) for Governor and rebuild the State Party from there. Might take a little longer, but the slow boring path often does.
It's your time, John from FL. Time for you to rise up and institute your firm but fair, center-right-on-some-stuff-center-left-on-others rule, from what I remember from your comments over the years.
I'm pretty sure that you don't have any drug or male prostitute issues skeletons in your closet. Well, kind of sure. Vaguely persuaded. I guess actually not that sure but we'll see
On the internet, it's generally safest to assume that any poster you don't know personally in real life has drug and male prostitute issues (even the allegedly female posters, because there are no women on the internet).
Yes, something felt off about Matt's issue analysis here. Like there has to be some reason it's moving right the last fifteen years, and that probably tracks to some issues.
But a flyer on some business man or heterodox mayor or local fishing show host for Senate seems better than not actually running a candidate.
It's worth running "some jackass with no chance" 100% of the time just so that 1 - you have SOMEBODY out there sharing your party's POV, so people at least HEAR it, even if a minority are buying it and 2 - it gives you a chance to throw some stuff at the wall to see what works and what doesn't, which might make all the difference in a future cycle.
Like, Amy McGrath's candidacy was an expensive failure but at least it taught us some stuff that doesn't work in red states (and that we could compare and contrast with Beshear's successful strategies with the same electorate.)
I’d love to see a more granular analysis. As a frequent visitor I feel like most of what I see is conservative midwesterners retiring there and importing their red state midwestern politics. So for that demographic Florida isn’t unique or special, it’s just Iowa with palm trees. I understand the Cuban population less, and nothing about the rest.
There are also a LOT of old farts from New York and New England. Seems like a real hodge-podge down there, and it's tough to figure out how to parse all the political inputs from such a disparate and rapidly changing population. But someone should try!
Don’t forget all of the old farts from Michigan (on the Gulf side)! A former colleague from, IIRC, Memphis, also told me that Olds from there retire to the panhandle area.
Florida Dems should take a page from Marty Seinfeld: if there's no good candidate volunteering then go out and invent one https://youtu.be/ME0ktF2Ty4s?t=47 in all seriouness this isn't the worse strategy, see Karl Rove and Dubbya
As another Floridian I second the cheers to a Florida post! A second issue that isn't discussed is I think Ashley Moody is a fairly strong incumbent. She was only appointed this year so doesn't have much voting baggage aside from the Big Beautiful Bill. Before that she was AG and didn't do much besides be tough on crime and illegal immigration, which as Matt says are typically net positive for politicians. I don't think she was as rabid a partisan as Pam Bondi was. Since becoming senator she's also tried in her messaging to not appear as rabid a partisan from what I can tell. She self-depricates being a rookie senator all the time. She's no Susan Collins by any means, but for a back bench senator I think she is in a better position than most for a Republican. I think if we were running against a Rubio or Scott there would be more interest.
OTOH if the economy is in bad shape personal baggage may not matter that much. People losing their health insurance due to the BBB are going to be looking for an alternative to incumbents who voted for it.
The Northeast/Midwest to FL pipeline is so real. If you go to an Orlando Magic game when they're playing the Knicks you'll notice a ton of orange in the crowd.
Montana just added a new criteria to be a native Montanan, not only must be born in state nor ever left while alive but now you have to also die here to qualify. This makes it political incorrect for live natives to bring it up in polite conversation.
How fast are your driving to get from Tampa to Miami in 3 hours?!
Apart from that I agree. I was born and raised in Sarasota, although I moved to Los Angeles after college. Florida is such an unusual and heterogenous mix of demographics. But overall, I feel like the ethos of the state is very small L libertarian. It didn't surprise me at all the COVID restrictions were so unpopular there, and that the self-conscious manners of woke-era politics would play badly. But so too I think abortion restrictions are an odd fit for Floridians, not to mention the idea that speaking Spanish can be enough to get you scooped up by masked government agents. I think Florida could definitely see a big blue swing for the right candidates.
LOL. I almost went back after a few hours to edit that from 3 hours to 4 hours but didn't want people to think I had changed something more material to my comment. The difference between the Gulf side and the Atlantic side is the difference between Columbus Ohio and Philadelphia, PA.
I do think the abortion issue is a potential path to winning back some power at the State level, whether governor or State Representatives. 6 weeks (which isn't really 6 weeks; it is more like 4 weeks post conception) is a defacto ban in most circumstances.
The "right candidate" would have to be able to navigate the cultural minefield that is Florida while not getting too awry with the official Democratic party stance, though. I suspect this is why it hasn't yet been a topic that I've seen gain much traction outside of the usual safe-D districts.
The great error among Democrats has been believing that 2nd or 3rd (or at this point 4th) generation Mexican or Cuban Americans feel some deep sense of solidarity with a Salvadoran or Guatemalan national that entered the country illegally or some other irregular way in the last dozen years.
The great error among Republicans is believing that those same people have no problem being harassed by law enforcement or treated as suspect in their own country in the name of whatever Stephen Miller's latest crackpot, racially tinged theory happens to be.
All of this seems like common sense to me, and yet... Anyway MY is right the Democrats should contest FL and everywhere else. They don't just need seats in the Senate they need to cultivate a lot of new talent.
<<The great error among Democrats has been believing that 2nd or 3rd (or at this point 4th) generation Mexican or Cuban Americans feel some deep sense of solidarity with a Salvadoran or Guatemalan national that entered the country illegally or some other irregular way in the last dozen years.>>
This progressive thought is also just plain stereotyping, looping a bunch of very different nationalities together because their skin color looks the same.
I always assumed that this idiocy was driven by young progressives, because I'm old enough to have grown up with relatives from the Old Country who hardly spoke English and a seemingly endless supply of "cousins" named Rocky. It is plainly obvious that immigrants from the Americas are following the same arc, just a couple generations behind right down to the intra-immigrant resentment and rightward shift as they accrued wealth. It's like they think that immigrants magically transform into ultra-progressives instead of just importing their own colorful bigotries based on geographic and cultural distinctions you've never even heard of.
The assumption that Latino-Americans will align politically with African-Americans and follow their trajectory could be driven by progressive roots in New York, where for years “Latino” dominantly meant “Puerto Rican?” I don’t know NYC deeply, but in the city I know best, the small Puerto Rican community DOES organize politically and vote like African-Americans. If I grew up in NYC, it might have seemed reasonable to assume Mexican-Americans would also align to that trajectory. Having done youth work with both Puerto Ricsns and Mexicans, I’m pretty sure that assumption is laughably the opposite of the truth.
Things like that are very regionally specific. For example in California the idea that Latinos and Black people would organize politically together might seem plausible in the Bay Area but much less so in Southern California.
Absolutely---California is like at least six or seven different places? Northern California, the Bay Area, the Delta, Southern California, the Border, the Inland Empire and the desert. The only reason it looks like a political monolith from the outside is because the Bay Area and LA vote as a bloc.
One thing that surprised me moving across the country is how ignorant Americans are to regional differences. I had not heard the term WASP before I lived in New England, but suddenly got a lot of Simpsons jokes once I met a few.
It's easy for me to see how someone who quibbles over how many of their ancestors were on the Mayflower could see ethic groups voting in blocs because of common socioeconomic interests---the same way everyone votes---and then infer some kind of non-white racial solidarity. Where I grew up, the Californios (and Chicanos) and first-wave Chinese immigrants were the "WASPs" and those of us whose families immigrated in the 20th Century were the newcomers. It was intuitively obvious that "Asian, Hispanic and White" were arbitrary and useless categories and that voting blocs and communities grew up around much more specific and experiential qualities.
To the extent that you get Asian or Hispanic identities, it's almost entirely the result of discrimination. Ie, the Wasian kid whose Japanese mom met her dad when he was stationed in Japan for the navy, the child of refugees from the Vietnam war, and the kid whose parents immigrated from China for the tech jobs don't naturally have anything in common. But they do once they get other kids pulling their eyes up and saying "ching chong" to make fun of them. As Matt notes, if ICE picks up everyone brown, suddenly the Californios and recent Central American immigrants and even Filipinos have a lot in common. These big identities generally come about when people have to band together for solidarity.
I don't disagree, but I still believe that people come together for experiential, not identitarian reasons. It's the activists who reverse engineer the identitarian descriptions and start going on about "heritage Americans" or parsing sub-sets of sub-sets of Pacific Islanders.
A certain kind of (anti)woke-addled thinking concluded that the gay community would come rushing to defend trans rights. But the AIDS crisis and the gay marriage fight were defining experiences for a lot of people and the dynamic playing out is closer to how second- and third-generation immigrants aren't rushing to the defense of illegal immigrants. So LGBTQ is incoherent as an identity, but a useful description of a community that faces a specific type of persecution.
You can create a category and call it "white" and then observe that people in that category share certain behaviors and preferences. But that doesn't mean that the people in that category identify that way. Like, if you created a category of "has experienced racial discrimination" you'd find a lot of overlap with the category "non-white"; the former is, I think, a better description of what binds that group of people than the latter.
The the extent that I have a point to make, it is that the inability to understand that grabbing two Hispanic Californians and calling them Latino won't make them hold hands and vote Democrat is just the non-sadistic side of the racism coin (and now we're experiencing the sadist side with an extra bigotry sauce).
Yes - in NYC metro it is exactly that, of course phenotype a very large portion of Puerto Ricans align with "black American" and so there is that framing pressure - similarly although not as much Dominican Americans in NYC metro.
Dominicans making up a higher % of the Latino population in New York and the broader Northeast starting in the late-20th century means that you don't even need to move southwest to start seeing some divergence between different nationalities / backgrounds. I remember stumbling upon some coverage in the 90s about how Giuliani made more inroads in Dominican neighborhoods than he did in Puerto Rican ones and more recently, while the Latino shift right has started to include Puerto Ricans too, Dominican areas have often been more noticeable (Lawrence, MA is majority Dominican and went from 12% Romney in 2012 to 41% Trump in 2024, for example).
Serious question: shouldn’t we expect Latino-Americans to follow the same political trajectory as Italian-Americans over generations? Similar starting point: speak a different language, initially perceived as brown-skinned by the previous majority. I don’t have data but I don’t think Italian-Americans now vote majority progressive.
If my family is any indication, the norm is to become super racist and right-wing based on the belief that you had it way harder and *earned* the American Dream, so why should your hard-earned tax money go to support people who hate America and can't even be bothered to learn the language and that just come here to have babies and collect benefits.
I'd be hesitant to call it racist exactly (maybe the right word is something like 'racialist') but it's certainly very shallow thinking, that also seems pretty patronizing.
That's a fair characterization. But if you look into the history it was created by latino politicians and organizers who were choosing to loop themselves together as a way to get more political power via a larger coalition. And it worked in many ways, if "Hispanic" hadn't come into use, would pollsters bother to collect and present separate estimates for Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, etc?
Most of our census categories and faux-census categories tend to have some connection to coalition politics. POC is the one that comes to mind first, because it has always felt like a way for academics to try to build solidarity and commonality across almost all groups.
The stereotyping, to the extent that it is happening, is probably more about language and perhaps some cultural factors than skin color or physical traits, which vary pretty widely among these groups.
A better lens through which to view this is that liberal coastal elites are projecting their perceptions of the local Hispanic populations they've personally encountered onto populations in other parts of the country. As others have pointed out with respect to Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in NYC, once an immigrant population sets down roots in an area, their politics can evolve in disparate ways due to local factors. For example, the massive political shift of the Mexican-American population in the border regions of Texas is almost certainly due to the chaos there during Biden's term. Those folks really hate the narcos and do not want them in their neighborhoods.
It's not rocket science here. The smart political move for Democrats is to pay way more attention to local politics instead of trying to Svengali everything at a national level.
Oddly enough, they're both treating legal Hispanic citizens as though they're illegal immigrants.
Democrats assume that anybody Hispanic will have some solidarity with illegal immigrants, and Republicans just see a Hispanic person and assume they're here illegally.
I think there's something to this. I don't want to over interpret my own anecdata but my large extended Catholic family (to say nothing of the even bigger social circle) has grown some Salvadoran-American branches over the last 20-25 years, and there have always been some Peurto Rican corners of the social ecosystem (who of course have long been Americans, however unfairly they may have been treated at times historically).
These are all people who speak American accented English, grew up rooting for the local football team (no, not soccer) and have a favorite extra value meal at McDonalds. While there is absolutely a significant class element to my personal experience, and I'm always very hesitant to make assumptions about how people think of themselves in their own minds, I think it's fair to say they do not match up well with what either party is conjuring in rhetoric or policy.
Hispanic identity is just such a fake concept invented by US census authorities. What do a Maya peasant, a Black Colombian and a German-Brazillian have in common at any level?
They all come from countries where they speak Spanish. Or in the case of the Brazilian, a country where Americans don't realize they speak a language that isn't Spanish.
Roots in a shared Iberian/Catholic culture? I don’t think it’s hard to understand. That said people who describe it as a “race” are deeply confused, but the US Census notably does not make this error.
Race has almost no meaning within the OMB definitions used by USCB- to describe it as a shared cultural heritage makes no sense as OMB's question groups together the Han Chinese, the Indian sub-continent, and most Arab Muslims. So, too, are recent African immigrants and the descendants of imported African slaves. OMB has already announced they're changing the question in the future- moving Hispanic ethnicity into a separate racial category and including North African/Middle Eastern. Does this clarify what is and is not a race? Not at all. Question validity is fun!
To be fair to the Census bureau, the way that they determined the categories is by checking how many people used the boxes in the last Census and how many people wrote in the same thing in the "other" box. So if a box isn't getting used, they cut it. If enough people wrote in the same new category, they add it.
Oh, yeah, no shade on the Census Bureau here. They're attempting measurement of a concept that is both fundamentally important to American life and also fundamentally makes no sense. I use their questions all the time in my work because the thought of trying to justify something else makes my brain hurt, in addition to how much more valuable consistency in collection makes all data.
I think a lot of the problem is that Anglophones don't want to say Mestizo. "Hispanic" in popular parlance in the US just means Mestizo, but the formal definition includes people almost everyone would call Native American or White.
If you're gonna split the entire world into only 6 categories with a billion people each, it's a pretty good way to define a category. The problem is limiting the way we think to so few categories.
I think it is a really bad category system, there are much better ones you could easily do, you could do a cultural/linguistic PCA and the categories that drop out would be more logical.
You could do that but what purpose would it serve? The categories we have now serve mostly political purposes with a dose of social ones.
If you're trying to do a biological categorization you could do other things, but that's never been the goal of the census or of the various polling we do when we try to see who's voting for who.
That's a good question and I'm not sure of the answer. I think the census started out categorizing people as Black and White in the days when that was an important legal distinction.
Then it began collecting information on ancestry at some point. Perhaps this was back when the 1920s restrictionist laws made nation-of-origin a matter of legal importance, or perhaps it was just "nice-to-know" in the same way we collect information on marital status, income, etc...
It feels to me we just landed on these categories out of inertia and path dependency, not because of any particularly well-thought out overarching reason.
I don't think this problem is particularly unique to the USA, either. Most countries categorize their populations by ethnicity, and intermarriage, immigration, fluid identities, fuzzy boundaries and grouped identities are things that happen worldwide.
See my other comment in this thread, but it was hispanic leaders at the time who pushed the census to use the category as a way to be more visible and have more influence. And it worked!
American identity is such a fake concept, what do a Navajo peasant, a black Washingtonian and a German-American from Beloit have in common at any level?
Not in the last 200 years. American citizenship seems a greater bond than being from countries that both owed allegiance to Ferdinand VII in the 1810s.
That is a fairly pathetic attempt to rubber-glue response.
All three cited if US citizens have a common set of legal rights, economic interests at a macro-national level. American identity isn't in the least fake as there are specific real commonalities in contrast to non-American.
Whereas forcing an ethnic category that doesn't actually have commonalities in pattern or interest that are different than being American and is further not seen as a generally real commonality in broader population (outside of Academics & Activists) is at best a faux political pretense.
“The great error among Democrats has been believing that 2nd or 3rd (or at this point 4th) generation Mexican or Cuban Americans feel some deep sense of solidarity with a Salvadoran or Guatemalan national that entered the country illegally or some other irregular way in the last dozen years.”
I saw a Pew poll that the only country that likes illegal immigration less than the US was Mexico.
Many Democrats assume that the only way Republicans will enforce immigration laws is via racism.
Which isn't a *crazy* belief, but it papers over a lot of things. The Wall, as an example, wasn't racist. It didn't bother a brown-skinned person in Texas.
It was racist in the really broad sense because there was only a wall on the southern border and not the northern one, but not in the narrow sense where it affects a non-white American citizen (and only the latter really affects US elections).
Matt also has a NYT piece this morning lol. Haven’t checked Bloomberg or The Argument yet. Wouldn’t mind getting notifications here for writing in other places.
Gotta explain to the educated cosmopolitan crowd that is worried about climate change and not super knowledgable about energy policy that it is in fact ok to support expanded fossil fuel extraction.
Clean-energy, once-climate-pilled professional here. Matt did, and does, an outstanding job of writing about the *political economy* of energy, which many climate crusaders refuse to acknowledge. For the Blue Sky climate peeps, CoP and 1.5° are the real governing legitimacy, and actual democracy — which produces the results Matt writes about — is fake.
Matt has a history of underestimating renewables adoption and badly overestimating the potential for nuclear adoption, but he has persistently improved, especially on the former. At this point he is a more accurate writer on energy than, for example, various NYT / Guardian / WaPo reporters on the climate / energy beat.
This is precisely what I'm talking about. Matt is a policy wonk and his political positions are not why I read him. His competitive advantage in the blog-space has always been his policy expertise and ability to formulate that into easily-digested pieces, not his political intuition. I understand on this specific issue, his political advice correlates well with your preferences, but that doesn't mean that his takes on it are up to the quality of (say) his housing takes.
Several states have spent large sums of money making detailed plans for a low-carbon transition. How do new gas pipelines affect the economics of those plans? You could do that analysis and maybe come out on the side of pipelines, but critically, Matt isn't doing that analysis. He's trying to win the 2026 elections, which I don't think he is really positioned to do.
"Several states have spent large sums of money making detailed plans for a low-carbon transition."
Can you suggest which of these plans that you think is the best and give me you estimate on how likely it is to be achieved?
My experience is that the people who are the most capable of making these plans have almost no understanding the political feasibility or political framework necessary to implement them.
This is exactly the sort of analysis you should be getting from Matt and not from a random commenter.
NYS (as one concrete example) has already committed to 2.5GW of onshore wind and utility PV and another 9GW of offshore wind (now at risk solely because of Trump). Distributed solar targets have been raised from 6GW to 10GW because the amount constructed exceeded goals. There’s a new nuclear construction goal in place. A lot of this stuff involves actual commitments to purchase power or back loans, which makes it very economically sensitive to people just randomly changing plans midstream.
I am hardly an expert and maybe a huge “let’s build gas pipelines everywhere” pivot would actually be fine within the framework of commitments made. I just don’t know. And I don’t think Matt does either.
I would like to hear more about this. Often find MYglesias to make a bit more sense than Roberts high level/political takes or stuff in Heatmap (which inexplicably seems to have almost no China coverage). I have zero insight/expertise in energy policy but Matt always seems more pragmatic and long-viewed than others.
The first step would be for Matt to actually explain his understanding of some of the long-term low carbon transition going on in CA and the Northeast. Usually the first step in any deep understanding of a problem area is to lay out where we are and why experts are doing things. I’ve seen this with his housing takes. He seems to have a very short-term political instinct when it comes to energy policy; mostly “just build some more pipelines” without thinking about what that will do to longer term plans.
The problem is that Matt's focus is on the braindead climate groups that force purity on Democratic officials. This is a valid concern and I support that. But that is *all* Matt does. He thinks that if he just trashes the groups enough it will pave the way to a better, more green future. And thus the heavy emphasis on letting it rip on fossil fuels with weak handwaving about somehow someway doing things that make renewables more feasible sometime down the road.
Matt is generally an "expand the tent" guy, which is good. But his backwards approach here is to first shrink the tent and then somehow expand it, by discrediting climate advocates. That's problematic because part of the hold these folks have on Democratic officials is a moral one: think about what world you are leaving to your children and your grandchildren. While often extreme, that's an approach that resonates with many Democrats. And it's better than what Matt offers: keep pumping out the CO2 so we can win Ohio. Pragmatic, to be sure, but at best it's a three cushion bank shot moral argument.
So what should he do? He should join forces with those people in the advocacy community who agree with him on 80%. You know, tent expanding. People like David Roberts, Jesse Jenkins and, dare I say it, Bill McKibben. Or to take a sterling example, Aliya Haq. She's an OG climate advocate (years with the Sierra Club and the Breakthrough Energy initiative, and six years as national climate policy director for the NRDC. Sounds like the kind of person Matt is warring with. Yet if you read (or listen to) the interview she did on Volts, you'll see tons of common ground with Matt, including great regret for how climate activists have pushed too hard and alienated too many people. She's ready to join us, Matt!
The problem is that any group that "the hold these folks have on Democratic officials is a moral one" is that they are often manifestly unwilling to compromise. This is an issue because they hold a minority view politically. You want Matt to include them in the tent, but if they are not willing to be in the tent with others by compromising, than keeping them requires you to maintain a losing position politically.
I feel like Matt's style here is a bit of a gish galloping one. It's a little light electoral strategy and a little general abundance theory and a little leaning on a theory of international substitution, a little natural gas is better than coal etc etc. I find this to be pretty unpersuasive. I think it would be better to be clear that this is about tradeoffs, that certain policies bad ratios of expected carbon reduction to economic or electoral pain, and to try to be quantitative about that. I also think you need to explain what the vision is for how climate change gets resolved in the long run here. Matt makes a big deal out of how 2 degrees is a target which is incompatible with winning elections, which might be true, but he should explain what is possible then. How can we properly assess the acceptable economic and electoral pain without understanding the tradeoff?
One of the great blunders of the first Resistance: Tom Steyer getting rizzed up by Andrew Gillum and helping him pull off a primary win over Gwen Graham.
You can understand why Dems who'd watched Alex Sink and Charlie Crist lose went the Exciting Progressive Candidate route. I had a couple colleagues come back from Florida convinced that Gillum could be president if he won. But Graham definitely wins that general election and saves FL Dems from their downward spiral.
The fact Charlie Crist really lost his luster probably explains more than a lot of people are willing to admit for what happened to Democrats in Florida.
3. They are irrelevant, ignored, and unaccountable
4. Assuming Dave is correct about Steyer’s failure in FL (and I have no reason to doubt him), Steyer has not been held accountable. He’s running for CA governor, and I haven’t heard a peep about this
5. The upshot of these points is that there is an important sense in which the Democratic Party does not exist
6. While its dynamics are different (“The GOP is a failed state, and Trump is its warlord”), the Republican Party doesn’t exist either in that sense — _Hollow Parties_ remains the failure mode in which we are stuck
I feel like this post is a big “burying the lede” story. A seven point drop with African American voters?!
I would really love an explanation for this given the drop seems to be only for this cohort?! Because it seems like the gains that Trump made with Hispanic voters from 2020-2024 may be ephemeral (or at least, for reasons Matt is laying out, he’s doing his best to make sure this shift wasn’t something more permanent. It’s not like rising grocery prices somehow skipped African American voters or just isn’t that important to them (if anything given just basic realities of median income and median income by demographic this seems especially implausible).
Some hypotheses on my part but to be real clear just hypotheses:
- African American support for gay marriage historically lagged support in other for other parts of the Democratic coalition (amazed how little this is talked about as to why Democrats and Obama seems so slow to embrace gay marriage). Means this cohort was more primed than most voters to be part of the backlash in the transgender debate. I find this explanation wanting given this issue has fallen off the radar of national news since 2024 but putting it out there.
- Surveys have shown African American voters being more antisemitic (or to be more accurate, there are more African American voters who have these views as percentage) than other parts of the Democratic coalition. Given the big rise in blatant antisemitism among figures like Tucker and other members of bigoted Right, there is a small cohort of African American voters who have been persuaded to be more right wing. Find this more plausible but I would really really like to see data on this before I back this explanation.
- African American voters have not been nearly as pro unadulterated socialist as other members of the Dem coalition. I would say there is pretty decent support for the safety net but being full on Socialist has always been more popular with white Dems. A message that is more tilted towards “making a lot of money full stop no matter how this was accomplished is bad on its face” is not nearly as appealing.
Some ideas but will again note I am not that persuaded by any of these explanations. So thoughts?
Feel like I need to say this. Before proving answers I’d just ask you all think “pundits fallacy” before answering. I mean that’s a good idea generally to think about but just have a feeling my question would invite answers that violate this admonition more than other topics.
I actually suspect it doesn't really have much to do with current political issues, but bigger picture sociological dynamics.
If you think about why Black voters have been ~90% Democratic in the first place, despite having plenty of internal diversity in their specific views, a lot of it is the influence of social networks and institutions (the book Steadfast Democrats makes this point). As a lot of younger Black voters have more diverse social networks (the Internet is less racially segregated than previous forms of communication, for example) and are less tied to those institutions (the Black church specifically), it would make sense that you'd see less unified political behavior. There's also the fact that we're more and more distant from the first Black president being the party leader.
One thing that's made me more confident that these big picture explanations are the driver rather than day-to-day political controversies is that after the peak of Black support for Democrats and relative turnout in the Obama era, the % won by Democrats has declined basically the same, fairly marginal amount in each presidential election since. This is not true of other Trump-era shifts, which have had much more variance. The non-college white shift was very significant in 2016, but they mostly stayed put in 2020 and moved roughly in line with the nation in 2024. The college white shift towards Democrats was very notable in 2016 and 2020, but didn't continue in 2024. Latinos mostly stayed put or moved slightly left in 2016, but did have big rightward shifts in 2020 and 2024. For all those shifts, I think there's a pretty clear story to tell that specific political events and the nature of who Trump is and speaks to and how that has changed over the past decade have been informing those shifts, since they've changed as the issue environment and political messaging has. But while if you zoom out and look at the total shift in Black voters from 2012 to 2024, you see a noticeable shift, in each individual election it's been pretty marginal and roughly the same each time. So I suspect that this will be a pretty consistent dynamic in the next few elections even as other groups swing around or snap back more.
Sort of indicates to me that in 2028, there could be a lot more shifts in voting behaving among non African American voting groups then with African Americans.
What I mean is, I can absolutely see a scenario where white working class voters shift back to the left (though still by large margins vote GOP), some college educated voters shift GOP (under theory some of this cohort are true "never Trump". As in will vote GOP again as soon as a non lunatic is top of the ticket. Big caveat on that last part given realities of GOP primaries) and Hispanic voters shift back left. But GOP vote share shifts from 15% to say 17% right in line with trends.
I'd be curious to see if this is actually backed up, but this could just be polling variation. There are fewer Black voters than White or Hispanic, so their margin of error will be higher. Black support for Democrats is already so high, that any Republicans who show up will skew the numbers more.
See below. Gun to my head best explanation is this "dramatic" a drop is likely statistical noise. But also, that sort of ends the discussion so to speak and Democratic slippage with African American voters is very real (although as someone else noted, likely overstated given how much Obama likely maxed out out African American vote for Dems. Much the same way I suspect Trump has maxed out rural support in the last few elections).
There’s probably just some regression to the mean given how heavily Democratic black voters are; it probably wasn’t realistic for Democrats to expect to win 95% of the black vote forever.
Thought about that too that some of this is "regression to the mean" after what I'll call the "Obama effect" with black voters (for obvious and I think understandable reasons). But that still doesn't explain why the supposed shift right in 2020 appears to be more permanent. As in the shift right in 2020 I suspect you can attribute partly to "regression to the mean".
Having said that, look at that chart again. This shows a -7% shift relative to Harris margins!. That would suggest that there is a cohort of African American voters (but only African American voters) who based on everything that's happened in the last 12 months have said to themselves "I'm actually more likely to vote for the GOP than I was 12 months ago". It's not like Trump sent out $1,000 checks to only African American voters or implemented some policy that's somehow disproportionately helpful to African American voters (as I noted above, given just basic demographic realities of who is in the 1% or top 10% and who is not, the OBBBA is unlikely to be particularly beneficial to African American voters).
Given how many of those immigrants are likely from Somalia and Haiti, I have my serious doubts as how true this may be given current events and recent pronouncements from the President.
To be blunt, I think talking shit doesn't seem to matter that much, but ICE rounding people up, including sometimes civilians, does seem to matter. It's hard to get accurate data, but it doesn't look like areas of large Haitian population swung left last year (parts of Miami, New York, etc.) I DO think that if a bunch of Haitians, both legal and illegal, get rounded up by ICE, that will produce a backlash, as well as the fact that Trump promised lower prices and predictably couldn't deliver.
You would find a significant divergence between black women and men, with men much more likely to defect to Republicans. And if you interact with any media aimed at working-class black men, they are probably to the right of white men on almost all gender issues.
Plus, there is a concern that because black men are often stereotyped by society as more masculine, they are particularly unwelcome in progressive spaces that prioritize women and queer people over straight men. There's a whole discourse about how elite institutions fill up their diversity quotas with black women and gay black men, but remain hostile to straight black men.
Which makes total sense because by far the Democrats biggest weakness right now is with men in general, particularly those without college educations.
But suppose it's a real effect. Population composition, ie demographics are steadily eroding the Dem advantage.
Younger generations of Black voters are much more like swing voters than older generations, and young generations replace older generations. Black immigrants are less loyal than non-Black immigrants.
You can look at Black Dem support by age for all registered voters in North Carolina here:
Yeah to your first point, the reason I didn't put in my post "this might be statistical noise" is I was sort of trying to get a discussion going. The "this probably a blip" sort of ends the argument. But yeah if we ask Lakshya, I suspect he would be the first person to tell you that one poll, no matter how sound the methodology, can throw out some "outlier" results (or have crosstabs with outlier results). It was sort of the central reason why Nate Silver rose in prominence. Forget all the mathematical analysis he does to get his results, if just step back and think about it for a minute, you realize it makes almost obvious sense that an amalgamation of methodologically sound polls is going to be more accurate than relying on one poll*.
Your second point I think has been written about before and I think is just demonstrably true. I've noted this in the past, but I think we're a bit hesitant to note that Trump's pretty gross guttural machismo while repulsive to people like me (and likely part of the story why female voters, especially college educated ones, I think understandably are especially anti Trump) does have an appeal to a particular cohort of young male voters (think basic realities of how testosterone works probably explains at least part of why this particularly appealing to young men) and may explain some of this. Again I'm still skeptical given based on this chart. This chart is supposedly about support or drop in support from 2024. The Trump machismo thing has been a thing for awhile now and I think maybe does explain the shift right among male POC in 2024. So why would Dems bleed even more support just from 2024 based on everything we've seen the last 12 months. And why would that drop off be only with African American voters but apparently no one else.
That last part is why gun to my head, I would say this poll is likely a statistical blip based on as you say "n = 178 Black voters".
The point I was trying to make with my link is that there's every reason to assume a slow drop in D support among Black voters due to generation turnover. It's not the kind of drop that can explain a relative 7 or greater drop over 1 year, but it is a steady erosion or tailwind that is likely to keep blowing for the foreseeable future.
So maybe it's a combination of this steady erosion plus some statistical noise from a n=178 poll. Every year you could a decrease of 1-2% from Black voters relative to the general public and then small polls add or subtract random noise from that. If there are other factors more specific to Black voters I'm not aware of them.
The steady erosion of African American support is real, but I still think the math doesn't quite work out. Let me explain.
If we equate Trump vote share with Trump approval (there was actual uptick in approval post election likely from bandwagon effect), then he had just about 50% approval in November, 2024. He got about 15% of the African American vote. His approval has dipped considerably, if we take Nate's polling latest polling averages at face value he's at 42.8% and that is likely overstating things as recent polls include more than a few Rasmussen and Echelon polls (This is Nate's commentary from a few weeks back, not mine so don't kill the messenger).
So what that should mean if Dems are still slowly losing ground with African American vote is that the difference between 2024 and today should be more like zero, if Dems are losing less ground (or indeed gaining ground) with other groups.
In other words given how much Trump approval has fallen, there probably shouldn't be nearly this big a fall in Dem support or much of a fall at all.
- African Americans have always been more culturally conservative than the democratic party, but voted left based on a) inertia and social networks, b) strongly value economic outcomes and perceive the left to be better on this front for African Americans and c) believe the right to be a least somewhat racist
- Trump has been better on the economic front
- The woke movement exacerbated the left's disadvantage on culture issues and degraded the advantage on cultural issues
It took both the right finding good wedge issues and the left screwing up.
I suspect that the acceleration of "distributed, personality-driven media" (podcasts, youtube, tik tok, etc.) is also important in that it's started to substitute for social networks as vectors of information about politics
I think this point has been made a few times but Harris still got close to 90% of the black vote I think(?) With that breakdown the marginal black voter is quite conservative.
In Florida the local media has a ton of cost of living stories about high home prices, huge condo assessments, sky high insurance rates, etc. Trump's comments on affordability are deeply offensive to a lot of Floridians.
The difference is that the Florida GOP selects people who are objectively qualified and with no black marks against their name, while the Texas GOP might pick someone with massive negatives.
The Dems should pick high quality and moderate candidates, but by far their best opportunities in red states arise when the GOP pick someone terrible.
>Or maybe there’s a businessperson or celebrity who’d take a crack at it. Further outside the box might be better.<
Or maybe a John Edwards type minus the ick factor? Basically a confident, sharp, rich white guy. Aren't there any dudes like that in Florida who realize MAGA is a catastrophe for the national interest?
I'd hate to think our democracy's decline and fall arrives in an otherwise winnable environment because, in a country of 340 million souls, Democrats couldn't come up with five or six vote optimizing Senate candidates. The ongoing dumpster fire that is the Trump administration (gets worse by the day, doesn't it? How 'bout them plaques!) is basically the karmic universe BEGGING Democrats to harvest a bumper crop of low-hanging political fruit. But Dems sure as heck look as though they're likely to blow it.
Florida is complicated. The panhandle might as well be Alabama, central Florida is all orange groves and theme parks, while south Florida is the unofficial capital of Latin America. If dems want to have a chance, they need a moderate (Gwen Graham would have won). Anyone with a whiff of socialism will get pilloried, particularly in south Florida, which is filled with immigrants who fled socialist regimes. Even with that, they will most likely lose because so many republicans have moved here since 2020 that they have swamped whatever dems remain. Rebuilding the party from the ground up, slowly, is what needs to be done.
Also worth noting, the idea of invading and taking over Venezuela is very popular down here, but ICE is not. If there was a dem version of a neocon, it would go a long way
Spo is one of the best coaches in the history of his sport. Tubberville was a failure at UC and has built his entire coaching career around one good year at Auburn more than 20 years ago
Also Ben, you should do a piece on the coaches Dems should target to run in various races across the country. I say this as someone who truly believes Dan Campbell would win the presidential election in 2028 in a landslide.
Oh right, forgot that he moved. My hunch would be that Wade is sufficiently famous and successful that normies wouldn't hold his trans kid against him.
I have a feeling that 20 years from now this will be Matt’s second most regretted article, after the Iraq post. Too many trends all pushing in the wrong direction. And that holds even if you argue that, in the moment, it was tactically correct.
That article isn’t so much “coming around” as it is “the oil and gas industry is 10 years away from destroying the planet irrevocably and we need to just pay them to stop.” I’m not sure that’s comparable to what Matt is arguing for.
I have heard Hispanics in Florida have had mixed views on Trumps second term. On the one hand, they have been super excited about regime change in Venezuela and hope there’s domino regime change in Cuba. OTOH, they don’t like the deportation stuff.
Imo Dems are way too hawkish than the war-weary general public but that’s not true in Florida. Unfortunately a neocon warmongering zealot would be perf for Florida. Someone from the Bulwark or Never Trump neocon community should try.
A hidden issue is for a variety of reasons, the Florida Democratic Party is uniquely bad and has been uniquely bad since basically the 60s when it was the first Dixiecrat party to lose hold of voters to the GOP in the actual South.
For the next sixty years, whether ran by Dixiecrats, conservative, moderate, or progressive Democrats, it's been kind of a shitshow, with the only outliers being insanely talented politicians (Lawton Chiles/Bob Graham) or running an astronaut in the state where astronauts started (Bill Nelson). The difference was, until DeSantis, the Florida GOP was a lightly corrupt Big Business-centered party that didn't go far out over their skies on cultural or social issues.
A combination of the overall shift in the GOP and migration by conservative people during COVID _and_ the shift of your typical migrations going from early Boomers to late Boomers/early Gen X meant a quick shift to the right. Like, I'd actually bet Kamala only lost by 4 or 5 among people who live in Florida prior to say, 2018.
>The Supreme Court has formally authorized immigration-enforcement agents to randomly stop and detain working-class Hispanic people with no probable cause.
Not that this is relevant to the politics, but can we please get the law right?
1. Police do not need probable cause to stop someone, but rather only reasonable suspicion. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968). Probable cause is needed for an arrest or search.
2. The Supreme Court hasn't authorized stops of working-class Hispanic people. In United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 US 873 (1975), the court held that apparent Mexican ancestry can be one factor, but not the only factor, in stopping cars on suspicion of transporting illegal aliens. The Court has never said that occupation is a relevant factor.
This year, in lifting the stay in Noem v. Perdomo, the Court did not issue an opinion. Justice Kavanaugh issued a solo concurrence in which he opined that because "those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such
as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants" that those occupations can be additional factors. But we don't know the thinking of the others in the majority, especially because they might have based their decision on standing, as Kavanaugh also discusses.
Most importantly, as Kavanaugh says, "reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and
inquire about immigration status. If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter. Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings."
So, if ICE is arresting people just based on race+occupation+whatever, short of probable cause, as I suspect they might be, they are acting in a manner that in no way was been authorized by the Court, and implying otherwise very much let's ICE off the hook.
I mean there's "the law" and then the actual law, which is that Trump can do whatever he wants and the Supreme Court won't stop it and will actively interdict any lower court that does.
I think Matt's depiction is substantially more accurate.
I understand what you saying in a legal sense, but in a practical sense, it doesn't seem that way. Its seem like the ruling states you can stop people if they look Hispanic.
>In this case the officers relied on a single factor to justify stopping respondent's car: the apparent Mexican ancestry of the occupants.[11] We cannot conclude that this furnished reasonable grounds to believe that the three occupants were aliens. At best the officers had only a fleeting glimpse of the persons in the moving car, illuminated by headlights. Even if they saw enough to think that the occupants were of Mexican descent, this factor alone would justify neither a reasonable belief that they were aliens, nor a reasonable belief that the car concealed other aliens who were illegally in the country. Large numbers of native-born and naturalized citizens have the physical characteristics identified with Mexican ancestry, and even in the border area a relatively small proportion of them are aliens.[12] The likelihood that any given 887*887 person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor, but standing alone it does not justify stopping all Mexican-Americans to ask if they are aliens.
United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 US 873 (1975)
And that's the point: If ICE is stopping people solely because they look Hispanic, then they are acting illegally, and wrongly stating or implying that they are acting in a manner consistent with Supreme Court precedent, or even that it is reasonable for them to be confused on the point, simply gives them cover.
I appreciate the nuance that you're adding. With the aggressive of the current admin in immigration enforcement, it feels like they will take this ruling as far as they can, which is scary for some people.
The point is that IF that is not true, the problem lies with what happens AFTER the stop, not with the stop itself. How are we ever to address a problem if we have no understanding of what it is.
I'm confused about the ICE story. Is Real ID an immigration document? It doesn't seem obvious to me that it would be.
Also if you check Matt's link, they wanted to photograph him to check his immigration status. I'm also confused about how that would allow citizenship status to be checked.
But anyway Matt (purposefully, I think) leaves out that he refused to be photographed, and the impasse with one side insisting on Real ID and the other on a photo led them to take him to the station for fingerprints.
That can't be true because it would be literally impossible to ever deport a single person if you could simply claim you are a citizen when asked to present documents.
I’m just saying that I, personally, am visibly of immigrant descent, I don’t carry “immigration documents”, I do carry state-issued ID, and I would be extremely mad if ICE agents came up to me and demanded to see my “immigration documents” to prove my legal right to be in the country I was born in and claimed my state-issued ID didn’t count.
I understand. But I'm struggling to understand how people think immigration enforcement works, and in fact has always worked?
Things have gotten more aggressive now, for sure, which raises the risks of suffering the downsides of enforcement for a lot of people.
But this is a change in scope and magnitude, not a vast change of process. State IDs have never been immigration ids, so you could have had this same problem under Obama, at least if you were near the border.
Again, I understand this could suck for you. My wife walks around the neighborhood all the time talking in Chinese and not carrying her passport, so the same thing could happen to her.
But if we take for a given that the US has decided to do more interior enforcement, and if state IDs are not immigration documents, then what way could this be approached such that there aren't false positives?
"I understand. But I'm struggling to understand how people think immigration enforcement works, and in fact has always worked?"
I think the problem is that you are running into two different legal requirements that do not have to make sense in the real world.
1) Citizens are not required to carry papers and cannot be arrested without probable cause, and ethnic/racial profiling has not been allowed as sufficient criteria.
2) Internal enforcement requires checking to see if people are here legally and there is no obvious way to tell if someone is a citizen or not by appearance.
Historically this was addressed by having immigration enforcement prioritize places where you could reconcile those two - border, arrests for other reasons, etc. But Trump is trying to amp up enforcement and in the process discovering its very hard to do without violating #1.
They could presume that RealID means he's probably a citizen, and record that info. If they find out he wasn't, they have a likely valid address, and they also can record his ID information for the future so that if he is detained again they can arrest him.
This would impose a burden that even citizens be more diligent about carrying their IDs with them, but for citizens who _are_ carrying documentation, given them the benefit of the doubt seems better.
It's above my paygrade to understand why it hasn't happened. I suppose it being a state ID probably creates issues. But it's a state ID with federal requirements, so that should limit those issues.
"Also any state governments need to not be able to issue Real ID's to people that aren't here legally".
If ICE wants to do their job, they need to have a computerized database where they can run someone's ID and check if they're here legally or not. The burden of proof is always on law enforcement.
A Real ID or passport ought to be enough to prove status unless it appears fake. Apparently some states (including mine) don't allow cops to see immigration status when running state ID (but Real ID requires one to be here legally).
From Matt's linked twitter/X post, they wanted to take the Somali-American man's photo to check it his status against just such a database, but the man refused.
How much the burden of proof falls on law enforcement depends on the law in question and is for the courts and legislatures to decide. It's never 100% just on law enforcement
As a citizen, I am within my rights to walk around outside without any documents of any kind. If I'm stopped by ICE and they have reason to believe I'm in the country illegally, they can detain me until they determine my status. It's possible for this sequence of events to play out without anyone doing anything wrong.
So, the Border Patrol Chief should have said something like, "Real ID is not proof of citizenship. Once it was determined that he was a citizen, he was released." He shouldn't be asserting that the citizen detainee did something wrong by not having anything other than a Real ID with him.
(As a practical matter, only a small share of immigration detainees falsely claim to be citizens. When they do, this is usually a separate, and more serious, violation of the INA, which generally results in lifelong visa ineligibility.)
I'm not doing a good job of nailing down what I mean by "doesn't need documents".
I'm thinking about it from the point of view of having documents, not carrying them around. The situation you mentioned will be resolved because the person's records, be it a birth certificate, passport, etc.. are in a database somewhere. That's what I was trying to say by "having documents".
It seemed to me that the crux of this conversation is about whether or not it should be possible for enforcement to detain someone for not having documents. And I was taking the "do you carry documents" replies to mean they should not be able to. If anyone could simply claim that they are a citizen with documents left at home to avoid detention that would make enforcement unworkable.
Ok - same question I'm asking elsewhere in this thread: how do you think this has always worked? When Obama was deporting hundreds of thousands of people detained near the border, annually, how do you think CBP determined that they were lawful removals?
I don’t see how that makes it better? ICE forcibly arrested a citizen based only on ethnicity and demanded a photo? What’s to stop them from doing that to anyone they want? Or are people just hoping they’re protected based on ethnicity appearance?
The only document that proves citizenship most people have is a passport, almost no one carries that around with them, and a large number of Americans don’t even have that to begin with.
"The only document that proves citizenship most people have is a passport, almost no one carries that around with them, and a large number of Americans don’t even have that to begin with."
Ok - so how is it that millions of people have been deported annually going back to the Obama era and before?
A very large number of commentators seem to be very confused about how immigration enforcement has always worked.
I'm one of the commentators here that do have some understanding of immigration law.
I have seen a good amount of people legally present in the country on student visas go for a run without carrying a letter-sized envelope for their I-20s. I would, of course, never do that (I mean that I would never go for a run), but the reality is that this law hasn't been very strictly enforced to the best of my knowledge, because it's a bit unworkable, for reasons that you and other commenters here point out.
But what I think people are missing is that any immigration enforcement is going to involve false positives and determinations that are going to inconvenience and upset some people.
Through false positives, the Obama-era deportation inconvenienced and upset some legal immigrants and natural-born citizens. How do I know this? I know this because they deported millions annually and there's no way to do that without making some mistakes, either in establishing probable cause, making an arrest, or more rarely even in the deportation.
The difference is the fallout from those errors mostly fell on people near the border or to those in jails or prisons for other arrests. Trump is rearranging priorities and increasing the scale and aggressiveness, so naturally the fallout from false positives is increasing and falling on more people than before.
The tradeoffs may very well be unacceptable, depending on your individual point of view, but the idea that any mistakes prove the system is bad is wrong, because you can't have enforcement without mistakes.
I agree that you can't have enforcement without mistakes.
However, I think that "I will deport you because you were playing soccer without carrying your I-20, even though you do have a valid I-20." is different from making a mistake while enforcing the law. (Again, an I-20 is NOT a small plastic card that can fit in a wallet.)
The Trump administration terminated the legal status of students on student visas based on speeding tickets. One one hand, I see that if you violate the laws of this country you might have to go. I doubt that Obama would have placed the standards of what counts as "violation of the law" there though.
You are the one who is confused. You are conflating arrest with deportation.
For example, I, a natural born US citizen, do not carry my passport nor birth certificate with me. Hence, were I stopped by ICE, I might end up being mistakenly arrested. But we're I placed in deportation proceedings, I would ultimately be able to produce both documents.
Being arrested is still very disruptive to one's life, even if you ultimately get released. It's not too much to ask to be able to walk down the street without fear of getting arrested if we haven't done anything.
As I said: You are conflating arrest and deportation. You said:
> how is it that millions of people have been deported annually going back to the Obama era and before?
That is a comment about DEPORTATION. The topic is not that. It is about the cause needed to arrest someone for violating a statute that only applies to immigrants. That requires probable cause to believe that the arrestee is not a citizen.
Maybe the logic of my wording conflated them. In my mind "millions of deportations" implies "millions+ person detained or arrested".
Among the many people detained, surely quite a few were citizens who didn't have documents at the time they fell under suspicion. Outside of perhaps some isolated cases, those citizens weren't deported. But it was still probably an infuriating hassle for them!
And if I can summarize my major point from my too many comments today, it's that these false positives (in detentions, arrests) have always occurred, and will probably always occur as long as your doing enforcement. Obama's system probably prioritized the tradeoffs better, and Trump's is obviously causing many more problems in terms of false positives and needless hassle, but it's mostly a question of magnitudes. You can't step up enforcement without false positives.
You need citizenship / immigration documents to get a Real ID. If your visa has an expiration date, your Real ID will usually be given the same expiration date. So if someone has a Real ID, there's a 99.99% chance they're in the country legally. That should be plenty of proof for a random stop and frisk.
"You need citizenship / immigration documents to get a Real ID". Sure about that? Can you find me a link that makes that clear? I
Because I don't think that's what Real ID is for or how it works. It's not an immigration document and that's not how immigration officers are trained to verify immigration status.
A passport on the other hand does show citizenship, so in theory it should have resolved it.
This doesn't track immigration status. It doesn't say if your status was revoked, expired, etc.. It only says you had lawful of status when it was issued.
And there's two things your assuming:
#1) Their probable cause was something very superficial which a Real ID should have greatly diminished. But there's no information on whether that was true or not.
#2) That it operationally makes sense to train ICE agents to trust Real IDs. Maybe it does, but I doubt either of us are well-informed on the pros and cons of that approach.
You can't get a REAL ID without Proof of Identity & Lawful Presence (ONE document):
Valid, unexpired U.S. Passport or Passport Card.
Original or certified U.S. Birth Certificate (with raised seal).
Certificate of Naturalization or Citizenship.
Permanent Resident Card (Green Card)
So I guess your quibble could be with those who have permanent resident status? But the OP is correct, if you have a Real ID, there is 99.99% chance that citizenship or legal residency has been established.
Once again, the ID proves that the applicant was legally present when the ID was issued, the status can change after issuance, and also it's not intended to be an immigration status document.
Your argument is a little like saying that your Drivers License proves where you live. In reality, it only show that you could verify an address at the time of issuance. You could have moved since then, and the DMV is not really intended to be an address-updating system. It's an incidental piece of information collected during the process.
If you dig into it a bit, the federal government is contracting with companies like Flock, ClearViewAI and Palantir to build databases and screen images from security cameras, etc. The common uses are a) grab someone who "looks like they might not be a citizen" and then run their picture through the database and b) tracking the movements of people suspected of maybe not being a citizen and planning raids, etc.
I'd be pissed and uncooperative too if I were that guy! Law enforcement ordinarily cannot detain you and force you to submit to a search, photograph or anything else without probable cause---that is common sense. But they are effectively exploiting a huge loophole that lets them violate civil rights within 100 miles of the border. (I miss the simple times when the government violated your rights by accusing you of being a terrorist.)
Thanks, and yes I see the downsides and the reasons for that guy to be pissed.
What I'm most curious to learn is how they come up with ""looks like they might not be a citizen". Not just now, in the Trump 2 era, but going back 10, 20 years or more. There's never been an era, as far as I know, when literally every single person 100 miles from the border was treated with the same amount of probably cause.
And my question for the SB commenters is - assuming you want to step up enforcement, how would you do it? I feel like the implicit response is that they wouldn't have more enforcement, or do it in a drastically different style such as going after employers or only deporting from jails and prisons, etc.
But suppose you were given the mandate to step up enforcement within 100 miles of the border. What criteria would you use to gather probably cause?
I have a pretty strong libertarian bent, and my personal take is that people should be able to come to the US and work with few restrictions; enforcement is then taken care of by regular-old law enforcement.
However, if I were tasked with stepping up enforcement of existing immigration law, I would indeed target employers not employees through E-Verify and other means that place the burden of verifying legal authorization to work on employers. Big companies would instantly comply because they have too much to lose. Small ones would require more vigorous enforcement through audits and onsite visits. If you really want to turn the screws, you even go after individuals who hire day laborers, etc.
Look at how they are using "narco-terrorism" as an excuse to fire missiles at boats. The "war on drugs" has always gone after the manufacturers and traffickers because the alternative is stop-and-frisk, raids on private residences, roadblock-checkpoints, etc. Yet when it comes to immigration, they take exactly that approach and trample everyone's rights just to catch people committing the heinous crime of working hard to provide for their families in the wrong country.
If you remove the economic incentive by making it unpalatable for companies to hire people without legal authorization, illegal immigration would collapse. Then I guess you'd need Congress to update asylum laws.
Far from any rational approach, though, the current enforcement regime seems driven by a quasi-religious zealotry that frames immigration as a defensive war to preserve a very specific understanding of "American culture". I think what we are just witnessing is what highly motivated people can accomplish with the laws as-written, which really do strip you of rights "at the border". Look at Wilmer Chavarria(https://pacificlegal.org/case/chavarria-border-searches-fourth-amendment/), a US Citizen who was detained at the border until he agreed to let CBP rummage around in his district-owned laptop that contained the personal information of students. No search warrant, no chain of custody, no lawyer, no phone call, just "you can sit in a detention cell until you decide to cooperate". All because SCOTUS said CBP has the right to search your possessions for contraband... you have no Fourth Amendment right within 100 miles of a border.
That's a great answer and I agree the current system it terrible. And so if I was answering my own question, the only satisfactory answers I could come up with would similarly "dodge" the issue of "how do you step up enforcement against individuals without creating false positives".
Until we actually do something far different, such as actually go after employees (which is not happening any time soon), then I think we're stuck in one of these following bad equilibriums:
#1 Go light on enforcement, perhaps something like Obama where you only go after those who are having contact with law enforcement for other reasons + some limited border zone of increased suspicion / enforcement. In this case you get increasing levels of illegal immigration as people decide to take their chances, and all of the good and bad that comes with that.
#2 Go heavy on enforcement, and you get what we're seeing now.
I like the Obama priorities better, but I have to say it didn't seem to have any impact on the number of people making the perilous journey North. On #2 I'm a bit hopeful that facial recognition and maybe eventual better use of ID databases will make the problem of false positives less painful.
I think it depends entirely what the actual goals of enforcement are, and a huge problem at present is that the government is deliberately not articulating them because the current administration has only political goals, not policy goals.
They conflate immigration law and criminal law. They set quotas for arrests and deportation instead of criteria. That is not a coherent policy and, IMHO, is one of the reasons Matt can write a post about trying to win Florida; with no consideration for second-order effects, you end up filling social media with videos of parents being handcuffed picking their kids up from school, masked goons chasing people around construction sites, children being dragged naked out of apartment buildings, US Citizens being detained without due process, etc. And for what benefit? They cannot articulate any tangible benefit to anyone who doesn't a) already believe that immigration is a prior an existential problem and b) are insulated from the consequences.
This morning they announced that USCIS is being given quotas to refer cases to DOJ to try to denaturalize citizens. Who asked for that? How is that going after "the worst of the worse?" What is the policy goal of threatening my hard-working, taxpaying spouse's citizenship?
The Obama era policies worked because they articulated a policy with clear goals and criteria: deport criminals, protect kids. What we have now is just sadism. I don't even know how you could salvage a policy from it.
>And my question for the SB commenters is - assuming you want to step up enforcement, how would you do it?
E-Verify! Implement it!
I dunno, man. I get that Americans are hella pissed off about illegal immigrants, and I get that at some point you have to do actual immigration enforcement in the interior, not just prevent people from illegally crossing the border...
But one thing Americans (including conservative/right-wing Americans) have traditionally prided themselves on is "we're the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, we don't have government agents going around and stopping people and barking at them: Papers, citizen!" This lack of public "Papers, citizen!" enforcement is what distinguishes us from miserable, oppressive regimes like the old USSR.
If "Papers, citizen!" is the price for rounding up illegal immigrants, how many people are willing to pay it?
(Yes, I get that the answer may well be: "Depressingly many, especially among those who consider themselves protected from "Papers, citizen!" by virtue of their accent/skin color.")
What I'm feeling is that no one has a better way to do individual enforcement, aside from perhaps going back to Obama era, which may or may not be enough depending on future economic and political conditions.
Which is fine. And I largely agree with you that enforcement would probably be much more effective and efficient if targeted at. That seems to be what most developed countries do so it has a proven track record. But it is the easy answer, because we're very far from actually being able to do that, as neither party advocates for it.
On the papers side, I personally think the nature of that problem is changing due to technology. ICE is already using facial recognition databases as their go-to technology. When (probably not if) verifying legal status becomes as easy as waving a phone near a person's face I'm not sure American's resistance to "papers, please" will hold up.
One of the great things about living in the United States is that citizens don’t have to carry around “papers” proving they are citizens. We also have other great rights such as due process, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and free speech. Just a few of the reasons I love America 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸.
Something that people are also forgetting is that part of the problem with the US having been behind a lot of comparable countries in the quality of our IDs - and not having a national ID card - is that evangelicals saw the introduction of such a requirement as an indication of the anti-Christ and helped block such efforts for decades.
Nice. But then if there's going to be any amount of border enforcement, that has to exist alongside some risk of being detained and / or questioned by ICE. That risk might be unacceptably high under Trump 2.0, but I don't see a way to bring it down to zero.
Thank you, Santa, for bringing me a Florida-focused Slow Boring post.
Florida is ... diverse in ways that non-residents (and residents) can find hard to comprehend. Driving from Tampa to Miami takes about 3 hours but covers a cultural and demographic distance that stretches from the Upper Midwest to New York south to Puerto Rico and all stops between the three.
I think Matt overplays how Florida isn't especially religious, or rust belt-y or filled with oil rigs as reasons to make it "gettable". What it is, though, is older and full of immigrants. Not only immigrants from Cuba and Mexico, but also from NY, NJ, CT, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland who left for weather and governance issues. As a result it is more culturally conservative in a Get Off My Lawn way than you might imagine.
The path to making inroads here needs someone who can meet those voters where they are culturally and promise to expand Medicaid using federal money. Nothing more from the party platform. The only blue-haired person the candidate should be seen with is 86 year old Edna from Beloit, WI.
I think the best path is to try like hell to win the Governorship (where you can do the Medicaid expansion), govern effectively for 2 terms (we have term limits) and then leverage that to a Senate seat. Unfortunately, the dearth of candidates Matt describes extends to many state-level races also. Don't forget that the last guy who *almost* became Governor was very Progressive but turned out after the election to have drug and male prostitute issues. (Andrew Gillum, look him up). Let's not do that again.
The best bet is to support David Jolly (former Republican, I know, but you gotta play the game in front of you) for Governor and rebuild the State Party from there. Might take a little longer, but the slow boring path often does.
https://www.floridapoliticalreview.com/whos-running-for-governor-in-2026-breaking-down-the-leading-republican-and-democratic-hopefuls-in-a-high-stakes-gubernatorial-race/
It's your time, John from FL. Time for you to rise up and institute your firm but fair, center-right-on-some-stuff-center-left-on-others rule, from what I remember from your comments over the years.
I'm pretty sure that you don't have any drug or male prostitute issues skeletons in your closet. Well, kind of sure. Vaguely persuaded. I guess actually not that sure but we'll see
On the internet, it's generally safest to assume that any poster you don't know personally in real life has drug and male prostitute issues (even the allegedly female posters, because there are no women on the internet).
It's true. I'm actually a corgi.
I am three penguins in a Joseph suit.
Coming this summer from Pixar?
MAYBE.
The internet: Where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are Chris Hansen.
Yes, something felt off about Matt's issue analysis here. Like there has to be some reason it's moving right the last fifteen years, and that probably tracks to some issues.
But a flyer on some business man or heterodox mayor or local fishing show host for Senate seems better than not actually running a candidate.
It's worth running "some jackass with no chance" 100% of the time just so that 1 - you have SOMEBODY out there sharing your party's POV, so people at least HEAR it, even if a minority are buying it and 2 - it gives you a chance to throw some stuff at the wall to see what works and what doesn't, which might make all the difference in a future cycle.
Like, Amy McGrath's candidacy was an expensive failure but at least it taught us some stuff that doesn't work in red states (and that we could compare and contrast with Beshear's successful strategies with the same electorate.)
I’d love to see a more granular analysis. As a frequent visitor I feel like most of what I see is conservative midwesterners retiring there and importing their red state midwestern politics. So for that demographic Florida isn’t unique or special, it’s just Iowa with palm trees. I understand the Cuban population less, and nothing about the rest.
There are also a LOT of old farts from New York and New England. Seems like a real hodge-podge down there, and it's tough to figure out how to parse all the political inputs from such a disparate and rapidly changing population. But someone should try!
Don’t forget all of the old farts from Michigan (on the Gulf side)! A former colleague from, IIRC, Memphis, also told me that Olds from there retire to the panhandle area.
Florida Dems should take a page from Marty Seinfeld: if there's no good candidate volunteering then go out and invent one https://youtu.be/ME0ktF2Ty4s?t=47 in all seriouness this isn't the worse strategy, see Karl Rove and Dubbya
As is often the case with Florida, the truth is stranger, and sleazier, than fiction, e.g., https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/politics/local-politics/ghost-candidate-says-he-was-offered-50k-to-run-for-office/3423228/
As another Floridian I second the cheers to a Florida post! A second issue that isn't discussed is I think Ashley Moody is a fairly strong incumbent. She was only appointed this year so doesn't have much voting baggage aside from the Big Beautiful Bill. Before that she was AG and didn't do much besides be tough on crime and illegal immigration, which as Matt says are typically net positive for politicians. I don't think she was as rabid a partisan as Pam Bondi was. Since becoming senator she's also tried in her messaging to not appear as rabid a partisan from what I can tell. She self-depricates being a rookie senator all the time. She's no Susan Collins by any means, but for a back bench senator I think she is in a better position than most for a Republican. I think if we were running against a Rubio or Scott there would be more interest.
OTOH if the economy is in bad shape personal baggage may not matter that much. People losing their health insurance due to the BBB are going to be looking for an alternative to incumbents who voted for it.
The Northeast/Midwest to FL pipeline is so real. If you go to an Orlando Magic game when they're playing the Knicks you'll notice a ton of orange in the crowd.
“Let’s not do that again.” I almost spit out my coffee!
Wait, moving from Cleveland to Daytona makes me an immigrant now?
We are all immigrants down here. I joke with people that if you've been here more than 15 years you can call yourself a native Floridian.
Montana just added a new criteria to be a native Montanan, not only must be born in state nor ever left while alive but now you have to also die here to qualify. This makes it political incorrect for live natives to bring it up in polite conversation.
This reminds me of the old joke about the Vermonter who was asked if he had lived in the state his whole life. Answer: "not yet."
"Internally displaced person" is the preferred nomenclature, I believe.
yes, a domestic immigrant
Yes. It's the "a" that does it. You should have stopped at Dayton.
Refugee.
Don’t Ohio my Florida, cappy.
How fast are your driving to get from Tampa to Miami in 3 hours?!
Apart from that I agree. I was born and raised in Sarasota, although I moved to Los Angeles after college. Florida is such an unusual and heterogenous mix of demographics. But overall, I feel like the ethos of the state is very small L libertarian. It didn't surprise me at all the COVID restrictions were so unpopular there, and that the self-conscious manners of woke-era politics would play badly. But so too I think abortion restrictions are an odd fit for Floridians, not to mention the idea that speaking Spanish can be enough to get you scooped up by masked government agents. I think Florida could definitely see a big blue swing for the right candidates.
LOL. I almost went back after a few hours to edit that from 3 hours to 4 hours but didn't want people to think I had changed something more material to my comment. The difference between the Gulf side and the Atlantic side is the difference between Columbus Ohio and Philadelphia, PA.
I do think the abortion issue is a potential path to winning back some power at the State level, whether governor or State Representatives. 6 weeks (which isn't really 6 weeks; it is more like 4 weeks post conception) is a defacto ban in most circumstances.
The "right candidate" would have to be able to navigate the cultural minefield that is Florida while not getting too awry with the official Democratic party stance, though. I suspect this is why it hasn't yet been a topic that I've seen gain much traction outside of the usual safe-D districts.
And I'd add that the area where I grew up in Florida, and especially north of it, is basically Alabama. Not exactly a Democratic heartland.
Which part?
Gainesville. Granted it's a blue dot in an otherwise deep red ocean.
Attorney John Morgan?
John Morgan is a great way to test whether name recognition alone is sufficient.
I would guess he has had his face on more billboards than any human in the history of humanity ever will.
He wouldn't even need to change his radio ads or his website! Forthepeople.com
Should we put this column under fiction or reprint in on April 1.
The great error among Democrats has been believing that 2nd or 3rd (or at this point 4th) generation Mexican or Cuban Americans feel some deep sense of solidarity with a Salvadoran or Guatemalan national that entered the country illegally or some other irregular way in the last dozen years.
The great error among Republicans is believing that those same people have no problem being harassed by law enforcement or treated as suspect in their own country in the name of whatever Stephen Miller's latest crackpot, racially tinged theory happens to be.
All of this seems like common sense to me, and yet... Anyway MY is right the Democrats should contest FL and everywhere else. They don't just need seats in the Senate they need to cultivate a lot of new talent.
<<The great error among Democrats has been believing that 2nd or 3rd (or at this point 4th) generation Mexican or Cuban Americans feel some deep sense of solidarity with a Salvadoran or Guatemalan national that entered the country illegally or some other irregular way in the last dozen years.>>
This progressive thought is also just plain stereotyping, looping a bunch of very different nationalities together because their skin color looks the same.
I always assumed that this idiocy was driven by young progressives, because I'm old enough to have grown up with relatives from the Old Country who hardly spoke English and a seemingly endless supply of "cousins" named Rocky. It is plainly obvious that immigrants from the Americas are following the same arc, just a couple generations behind right down to the intra-immigrant resentment and rightward shift as they accrued wealth. It's like they think that immigrants magically transform into ultra-progressives instead of just importing their own colorful bigotries based on geographic and cultural distinctions you've never even heard of.
The assumption that Latino-Americans will align politically with African-Americans and follow their trajectory could be driven by progressive roots in New York, where for years “Latino” dominantly meant “Puerto Rican?” I don’t know NYC deeply, but in the city I know best, the small Puerto Rican community DOES organize politically and vote like African-Americans. If I grew up in NYC, it might have seemed reasonable to assume Mexican-Americans would also align to that trajectory. Having done youth work with both Puerto Ricsns and Mexicans, I’m pretty sure that assumption is laughably the opposite of the truth.
Things like that are very regionally specific. For example in California the idea that Latinos and Black people would organize politically together might seem plausible in the Bay Area but much less so in Southern California.
Absolutely---California is like at least six or seven different places? Northern California, the Bay Area, the Delta, Southern California, the Border, the Inland Empire and the desert. The only reason it looks like a political monolith from the outside is because the Bay Area and LA vote as a bloc.
One thing that surprised me moving across the country is how ignorant Americans are to regional differences. I had not heard the term WASP before I lived in New England, but suddenly got a lot of Simpsons jokes once I met a few.
It's easy for me to see how someone who quibbles over how many of their ancestors were on the Mayflower could see ethic groups voting in blocs because of common socioeconomic interests---the same way everyone votes---and then infer some kind of non-white racial solidarity. Where I grew up, the Californios (and Chicanos) and first-wave Chinese immigrants were the "WASPs" and those of us whose families immigrated in the 20th Century were the newcomers. It was intuitively obvious that "Asian, Hispanic and White" were arbitrary and useless categories and that voting blocs and communities grew up around much more specific and experiential qualities.
To the extent that you get Asian or Hispanic identities, it's almost entirely the result of discrimination. Ie, the Wasian kid whose Japanese mom met her dad when he was stationed in Japan for the navy, the child of refugees from the Vietnam war, and the kid whose parents immigrated from China for the tech jobs don't naturally have anything in common. But they do once they get other kids pulling their eyes up and saying "ching chong" to make fun of them. As Matt notes, if ICE picks up everyone brown, suddenly the Californios and recent Central American immigrants and even Filipinos have a lot in common. These big identities generally come about when people have to band together for solidarity.
I don't disagree, but I still believe that people come together for experiential, not identitarian reasons. It's the activists who reverse engineer the identitarian descriptions and start going on about "heritage Americans" or parsing sub-sets of sub-sets of Pacific Islanders.
A certain kind of (anti)woke-addled thinking concluded that the gay community would come rushing to defend trans rights. But the AIDS crisis and the gay marriage fight were defining experiences for a lot of people and the dynamic playing out is closer to how second- and third-generation immigrants aren't rushing to the defense of illegal immigrants. So LGBTQ is incoherent as an identity, but a useful description of a community that faces a specific type of persecution.
You can create a category and call it "white" and then observe that people in that category share certain behaviors and preferences. But that doesn't mean that the people in that category identify that way. Like, if you created a category of "has experienced racial discrimination" you'd find a lot of overlap with the category "non-white"; the former is, I think, a better description of what binds that group of people than the latter.
The the extent that I have a point to make, it is that the inability to understand that grabbing two Hispanic Californians and calling them Latino won't make them hold hands and vote Democrat is just the non-sadistic side of the racism coin (and now we're experiencing the sadist side with an extra bigotry sauce).
Yes - in NYC metro it is exactly that, of course phenotype a very large portion of Puerto Ricans align with "black American" and so there is that framing pressure - similarly although not as much Dominican Americans in NYC metro.
I don't know whether "Dominican" refers to the Commonwealth of Dominica or the Dominican Republic, and at this point I'm afraid to ask.
Dominican Republic usually.
Dominicans making up a higher % of the Latino population in New York and the broader Northeast starting in the late-20th century means that you don't even need to move southwest to start seeing some divergence between different nationalities / backgrounds. I remember stumbling upon some coverage in the 90s about how Giuliani made more inroads in Dominican neighborhoods than he did in Puerto Rican ones and more recently, while the Latino shift right has started to include Puerto Ricans too, Dominican areas have often been more noticeable (Lawrence, MA is majority Dominican and went from 12% Romney in 2012 to 41% Trump in 2024, for example).
For those of us whose parents were "white ethnic" back in the day this was always sorta obvious, except for those of us who were Jewish.
I forgot the source but I saw a quote that was basically "Biden is letting in the sorts of people I left my old country to get away from."
Serious question: shouldn’t we expect Latino-Americans to follow the same political trajectory as Italian-Americans over generations? Similar starting point: speak a different language, initially perceived as brown-skinned by the previous majority. I don’t have data but I don’t think Italian-Americans now vote majority progressive.
If my family is any indication, the norm is to become super racist and right-wing based on the belief that you had it way harder and *earned* the American Dream, so why should your hard-earned tax money go to support people who hate America and can't even be bothered to learn the language and that just come here to have babies and collect benefits.
They aren't wrong
Sounds more like Europe then the United States...
I'd be hesitant to call it racist exactly (maybe the right word is something like 'racialist') but it's certainly very shallow thinking, that also seems pretty patronizing.
yeah I agree, I edited
I think "race essentialism" is the term of art.
Race essentialism it is!
Racialist is a useful word, it should be a thing
That's a fair characterization. But if you look into the history it was created by latino politicians and organizers who were choosing to loop themselves together as a way to get more political power via a larger coalition. And it worked in many ways, if "Hispanic" hadn't come into use, would pollsters bother to collect and present separate estimates for Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, etc?
Most of our census categories and faux-census categories tend to have some connection to coalition politics. POC is the one that comes to mind first, because it has always felt like a way for academics to try to build solidarity and commonality across almost all groups.
The stereotyping, to the extent that it is happening, is probably more about language and perhaps some cultural factors than skin color or physical traits, which vary pretty widely among these groups.
A better lens through which to view this is that liberal coastal elites are projecting their perceptions of the local Hispanic populations they've personally encountered onto populations in other parts of the country. As others have pointed out with respect to Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in NYC, once an immigrant population sets down roots in an area, their politics can evolve in disparate ways due to local factors. For example, the massive political shift of the Mexican-American population in the border regions of Texas is almost certainly due to the chaos there during Biden's term. Those folks really hate the narcos and do not want them in their neighborhoods.
It's not rocket science here. The smart political move for Democrats is to pay way more attention to local politics instead of trying to Svengali everything at a national level.
Oddly enough, they're both treating legal Hispanic citizens as though they're illegal immigrants.
Democrats assume that anybody Hispanic will have some solidarity with illegal immigrants, and Republicans just see a Hispanic person and assume they're here illegally.
I think there's something to this. I don't want to over interpret my own anecdata but my large extended Catholic family (to say nothing of the even bigger social circle) has grown some Salvadoran-American branches over the last 20-25 years, and there have always been some Peurto Rican corners of the social ecosystem (who of course have long been Americans, however unfairly they may have been treated at times historically).
These are all people who speak American accented English, grew up rooting for the local football team (no, not soccer) and have a favorite extra value meal at McDonalds. While there is absolutely a significant class element to my personal experience, and I'm always very hesitant to make assumptions about how people think of themselves in their own minds, I think it's fair to say they do not match up well with what either party is conjuring in rhetoric or policy.
Hispanic identity is just such a fake concept invented by US census authorities. What do a Maya peasant, a Black Colombian and a German-Brazillian have in common at any level?
They all come from countries where they speak Spanish. Or in the case of the Brazilian, a country where Americans don't realize they speak a language that isn't Spanish.
Some Americans know Brazilians speak Brazilian.
Roots in a shared Iberian/Catholic culture? I don’t think it’s hard to understand. That said people who describe it as a “race” are deeply confused, but the US Census notably does not make this error.
Race has almost no meaning within the OMB definitions used by USCB- to describe it as a shared cultural heritage makes no sense as OMB's question groups together the Han Chinese, the Indian sub-continent, and most Arab Muslims. So, too, are recent African immigrants and the descendants of imported African slaves. OMB has already announced they're changing the question in the future- moving Hispanic ethnicity into a separate racial category and including North African/Middle Eastern. Does this clarify what is and is not a race? Not at all. Question validity is fun!
To be fair to the Census bureau, the way that they determined the categories is by checking how many people used the boxes in the last Census and how many people wrote in the same thing in the "other" box. So if a box isn't getting used, they cut it. If enough people wrote in the same new category, they add it.
Oh, yeah, no shade on the Census Bureau here. They're attempting measurement of a concept that is both fundamentally important to American life and also fundamentally makes no sense. I use their questions all the time in my work because the thought of trying to justify something else makes my brain hurt, in addition to how much more valuable consistency in collection makes all data.
That's very interesting, thank you.
Didn't the census add a Middle Eastern/North African category recently?
Yup, in the same announcement that they changed Hispanic from an ethnicity to a race: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2024/04/updates-race-ethnicity-standards.html
It seems odd to have a category based on "roots in Iberian culture" and not include Iberians.
And for that reason they are, in fact, included in Hispanic (but not Latino).
I think a lot of the problem is that Anglophones don't want to say Mestizo. "Hispanic" in popular parlance in the US just means Mestizo, but the formal definition includes people almost everyone would call Native American or White.
Or Black, I suggest - Black Hispanics are distinct from the narrowly-defined African-Americans (ie ADOS).
If you're gonna split the entire world into only 6 categories with a billion people each, it's a pretty good way to define a category. The problem is limiting the way we think to so few categories.
I think it is a really bad category system, there are much better ones you could easily do, you could do a cultural/linguistic PCA and the categories that drop out would be more logical.
You could do that but what purpose would it serve? The categories we have now serve mostly political purposes with a dose of social ones.
If you're trying to do a biological categorization you could do other things, but that's never been the goal of the census or of the various polling we do when we try to see who's voting for who.
What is the goal of the census?
For political calculation I don't think there is a useful factor behind Hispanics, Cubans and Mexicans don't vote in particularly aligned ways
That's a good question and I'm not sure of the answer. I think the census started out categorizing people as Black and White in the days when that was an important legal distinction.
Then it began collecting information on ancestry at some point. Perhaps this was back when the 1920s restrictionist laws made nation-of-origin a matter of legal importance, or perhaps it was just "nice-to-know" in the same way we collect information on marital status, income, etc...
It feels to me we just landed on these categories out of inertia and path dependency, not because of any particularly well-thought out overarching reason.
I don't think this problem is particularly unique to the USA, either. Most countries categorize their populations by ethnicity, and intermarriage, immigration, fluid identities, fuzzy boundaries and grouped identities are things that happen worldwide.
See my other comment in this thread, but it was hispanic leaders at the time who pushed the census to use the category as a way to be more visible and have more influence. And it worked!
And the Cater administration were wrong to give in.
American identity is such a fake concept, what do a Navajo peasant, a black Washingtonian and a German-American from Beloit have in common at any level?
The legal importance of the American citizenship is a lot more important and much less fluid then any census category.
Being American.
Yes, most of Latin America was part of the same country for a couple of hundred years.
Not in the last 200 years. American citizenship seems a greater bond than being from countries that both owed allegiance to Ferdinand VII in the 1810s.
By that measure, much of the US was part of that country too...
That is a fairly pathetic attempt to rubber-glue response.
All three cited if US citizens have a common set of legal rights, economic interests at a macro-national level. American identity isn't in the least fake as there are specific real commonalities in contrast to non-American.
Whereas forcing an ethnic category that doesn't actually have commonalities in pattern or interest that are different than being American and is further not seen as a generally real commonality in broader population (outside of Academics & Activists) is at best a faux political pretense.
“The great error among Democrats has been believing that 2nd or 3rd (or at this point 4th) generation Mexican or Cuban Americans feel some deep sense of solidarity with a Salvadoran or Guatemalan national that entered the country illegally or some other irregular way in the last dozen years.”
I saw a Pew poll that the only country that likes illegal immigration less than the US was Mexico.
Many Democrats assume that the only way Republicans will enforce immigration laws is via racism.
Which isn't a *crazy* belief, but it papers over a lot of things. The Wall, as an example, wasn't racist. It didn't bother a brown-skinned person in Texas.
It was racist in the really broad sense because there was only a wall on the southern border and not the northern one, but not in the narrow sense where it affects a non-white American citizen (and only the latter really affects US elections).
Which direction do most unlawful entry attempts come from?
Once we build another wall along Canada, do we need to build one along the Atlantic coastline?
Matt also has a NYT piece this morning lol. Haven’t checked Bloomberg or The Argument yet. Wouldn’t mind getting notifications here for writing in other places.
Gotta explain to the educated cosmopolitan crowd that is worried about climate change and not super knowledgable about energy policy that it is in fact ok to support expanded fossil fuel extraction.
I made a mistake and for the first time read the comments on NYT. I regret this!
I appreciated Matt mixing it up in the comments. Posting is praxis!
They seemed pretty mixed supporting/opposing to me.
I read it with gritted teeth. Not my favorite Matt.
I wish Matt would not write about energy policy, where he isn’t super strong. I genuinely wish he wouldn’t write about it in the Times.
Clean-energy, once-climate-pilled professional here. Matt did, and does, an outstanding job of writing about the *political economy* of energy, which many climate crusaders refuse to acknowledge. For the Blue Sky climate peeps, CoP and 1.5° are the real governing legitimacy, and actual democracy — which produces the results Matt writes about — is fake.
Matt has a history of underestimating renewables adoption and badly overestimating the potential for nuclear adoption, but he has persistently improved, especially on the former. At this point he is a more accurate writer on energy than, for example, various NYT / Guardian / WaPo reporters on the climate / energy beat.
This is precisely what I'm talking about. Matt is a policy wonk and his political positions are not why I read him. His competitive advantage in the blog-space has always been his policy expertise and ability to formulate that into easily-digested pieces, not his political intuition. I understand on this specific issue, his political advice correlates well with your preferences, but that doesn't mean that his takes on it are up to the quality of (say) his housing takes.
Several states have spent large sums of money making detailed plans for a low-carbon transition. How do new gas pipelines affect the economics of those plans? You could do that analysis and maybe come out on the side of pipelines, but critically, Matt isn't doing that analysis. He's trying to win the 2026 elections, which I don't think he is really positioned to do.
"Several states have spent large sums of money making detailed plans for a low-carbon transition."
Can you suggest which of these plans that you think is the best and give me you estimate on how likely it is to be achieved?
My experience is that the people who are the most capable of making these plans have almost no understanding the political feasibility or political framework necessary to implement them.
This is exactly the sort of analysis you should be getting from Matt and not from a random commenter.
NYS (as one concrete example) has already committed to 2.5GW of onshore wind and utility PV and another 9GW of offshore wind (now at risk solely because of Trump). Distributed solar targets have been raised from 6GW to 10GW because the amount constructed exceeded goals. There’s a new nuclear construction goal in place. A lot of this stuff involves actual commitments to purchase power or back loans, which makes it very economically sensitive to people just randomly changing plans midstream.
I am hardly an expert and maybe a huge “let’s build gas pipelines everywhere” pivot would actually be fine within the framework of commitments made. I just don’t know. And I don’t think Matt does either.
I would like to hear more about this. Often find MYglesias to make a bit more sense than Roberts high level/political takes or stuff in Heatmap (which inexplicably seems to have almost no China coverage). I have zero insight/expertise in energy policy but Matt always seems more pragmatic and long-viewed than others.
The first step would be for Matt to actually explain his understanding of some of the long-term low carbon transition going on in CA and the Northeast. Usually the first step in any deep understanding of a problem area is to lay out where we are and why experts are doing things. I’ve seen this with his housing takes. He seems to have a very short-term political instinct when it comes to energy policy; mostly “just build some more pipelines” without thinking about what that will do to longer term plans.
The problem is that Matt's focus is on the braindead climate groups that force purity on Democratic officials. This is a valid concern and I support that. But that is *all* Matt does. He thinks that if he just trashes the groups enough it will pave the way to a better, more green future. And thus the heavy emphasis on letting it rip on fossil fuels with weak handwaving about somehow someway doing things that make renewables more feasible sometime down the road.
Matt is generally an "expand the tent" guy, which is good. But his backwards approach here is to first shrink the tent and then somehow expand it, by discrediting climate advocates. That's problematic because part of the hold these folks have on Democratic officials is a moral one: think about what world you are leaving to your children and your grandchildren. While often extreme, that's an approach that resonates with many Democrats. And it's better than what Matt offers: keep pumping out the CO2 so we can win Ohio. Pragmatic, to be sure, but at best it's a three cushion bank shot moral argument.
So what should he do? He should join forces with those people in the advocacy community who agree with him on 80%. You know, tent expanding. People like David Roberts, Jesse Jenkins and, dare I say it, Bill McKibben. Or to take a sterling example, Aliya Haq. She's an OG climate advocate (years with the Sierra Club and the Breakthrough Energy initiative, and six years as national climate policy director for the NRDC. Sounds like the kind of person Matt is warring with. Yet if you read (or listen to) the interview she did on Volts, you'll see tons of common ground with Matt, including great regret for how climate activists have pushed too hard and alienated too many people. She's ready to join us, Matt!
https://www.volts.wtf/p/advocating-for-decarbonization-in
The problem is that any group that "the hold these folks have on Democratic officials is a moral one" is that they are often manifestly unwilling to compromise. This is an issue because they hold a minority view politically. You want Matt to include them in the tent, but if they are not willing to be in the tent with others by compromising, than keeping them requires you to maintain a losing position politically.
I feel like Matt's style here is a bit of a gish galloping one. It's a little light electoral strategy and a little general abundance theory and a little leaning on a theory of international substitution, a little natural gas is better than coal etc etc. I find this to be pretty unpersuasive. I think it would be better to be clear that this is about tradeoffs, that certain policies bad ratios of expected carbon reduction to economic or electoral pain, and to try to be quantitative about that. I also think you need to explain what the vision is for how climate change gets resolved in the long run here. Matt makes a big deal out of how 2 degrees is a target which is incompatible with winning elections, which might be true, but he should explain what is possible then. How can we properly assess the acceptable economic and electoral pain without understanding the tradeoff?
The byline says he's "a contributing Opinion writer." Is this going to be a regular thing?
One of the great blunders of the first Resistance: Tom Steyer getting rizzed up by Andrew Gillum and helping him pull off a primary win over Gwen Graham.
You can understand why Dems who'd watched Alex Sink and Charlie Crist lose went the Exciting Progressive Candidate route. I had a couple colleagues come back from Florida convinced that Gillum could be president if he won. But Graham definitely wins that general election and saves FL Dems from their downward spiral.
The fact Charlie Crist really lost his luster probably explains more than a lot of people are willing to admit for what happened to Democrats in Florida.
I've made this point before, but it bears repeating:
1. The second-most-important goal for the national Democratic Party is winning a Senate majority
2. There is a committee which is nominally responsible for that goal: https://www.dscc.org/about-us/
3. They are irrelevant, ignored, and unaccountable
4. Assuming Dave is correct about Steyer’s failure in FL (and I have no reason to doubt him), Steyer has not been held accountable. He’s running for CA governor, and I haven’t heard a peep about this
5. The upshot of these points is that there is an important sense in which the Democratic Party does not exist
6. While its dynamics are different (“The GOP is a failed state, and Trump is its warlord”), the Republican Party doesn’t exist either in that sense — _Hollow Parties_ remains the failure mode in which we are stuck
"He’s running for CA governor"
Hahahahaha. He's a rich guy blowing money on commercials because he's a blowhard egomaniac. Not a serious candidate.
Well, what's Gwen Graham doing now?
I feel like this post is a big “burying the lede” story. A seven point drop with African American voters?!
I would really love an explanation for this given the drop seems to be only for this cohort?! Because it seems like the gains that Trump made with Hispanic voters from 2020-2024 may be ephemeral (or at least, for reasons Matt is laying out, he’s doing his best to make sure this shift wasn’t something more permanent. It’s not like rising grocery prices somehow skipped African American voters or just isn’t that important to them (if anything given just basic realities of median income and median income by demographic this seems especially implausible).
Some hypotheses on my part but to be real clear just hypotheses:
- African American support for gay marriage historically lagged support in other for other parts of the Democratic coalition (amazed how little this is talked about as to why Democrats and Obama seems so slow to embrace gay marriage). Means this cohort was more primed than most voters to be part of the backlash in the transgender debate. I find this explanation wanting given this issue has fallen off the radar of national news since 2024 but putting it out there.
- Surveys have shown African American voters being more antisemitic (or to be more accurate, there are more African American voters who have these views as percentage) than other parts of the Democratic coalition. Given the big rise in blatant antisemitism among figures like Tucker and other members of bigoted Right, there is a small cohort of African American voters who have been persuaded to be more right wing. Find this more plausible but I would really really like to see data on this before I back this explanation.
- African American voters have not been nearly as pro unadulterated socialist as other members of the Dem coalition. I would say there is pretty decent support for the safety net but being full on Socialist has always been more popular with white Dems. A message that is more tilted towards “making a lot of money full stop no matter how this was accomplished is bad on its face” is not nearly as appealing.
Some ideas but will again note I am not that persuaded by any of these explanations. So thoughts?
Feel like I need to say this. Before proving answers I’d just ask you all think “pundits fallacy” before answering. I mean that’s a good idea generally to think about but just have a feeling my question would invite answers that violate this admonition more than other topics.
I actually suspect it doesn't really have much to do with current political issues, but bigger picture sociological dynamics.
If you think about why Black voters have been ~90% Democratic in the first place, despite having plenty of internal diversity in their specific views, a lot of it is the influence of social networks and institutions (the book Steadfast Democrats makes this point). As a lot of younger Black voters have more diverse social networks (the Internet is less racially segregated than previous forms of communication, for example) and are less tied to those institutions (the Black church specifically), it would make sense that you'd see less unified political behavior. There's also the fact that we're more and more distant from the first Black president being the party leader.
One thing that's made me more confident that these big picture explanations are the driver rather than day-to-day political controversies is that after the peak of Black support for Democrats and relative turnout in the Obama era, the % won by Democrats has declined basically the same, fairly marginal amount in each presidential election since. This is not true of other Trump-era shifts, which have had much more variance. The non-college white shift was very significant in 2016, but they mostly stayed put in 2020 and moved roughly in line with the nation in 2024. The college white shift towards Democrats was very notable in 2016 and 2020, but didn't continue in 2024. Latinos mostly stayed put or moved slightly left in 2016, but did have big rightward shifts in 2020 and 2024. For all those shifts, I think there's a pretty clear story to tell that specific political events and the nature of who Trump is and speaks to and how that has changed over the past decade have been informing those shifts, since they've changed as the issue environment and political messaging has. But while if you zoom out and look at the total shift in Black voters from 2012 to 2024, you see a noticeable shift, in each individual election it's been pretty marginal and roughly the same each time. So I suspect that this will be a pretty consistent dynamic in the next few elections even as other groups swing around or snap back more.
Sort of indicates to me that in 2028, there could be a lot more shifts in voting behaving among non African American voting groups then with African Americans.
What I mean is, I can absolutely see a scenario where white working class voters shift back to the left (though still by large margins vote GOP), some college educated voters shift GOP (under theory some of this cohort are true "never Trump". As in will vote GOP again as soon as a non lunatic is top of the ticket. Big caveat on that last part given realities of GOP primaries) and Hispanic voters shift back left. But GOP vote share shifts from 15% to say 17% right in line with trends.
I'd be curious to see if this is actually backed up, but this could just be polling variation. There are fewer Black voters than White or Hispanic, so their margin of error will be higher. Black support for Democrats is already so high, that any Republicans who show up will skew the numbers more.
See below. Gun to my head best explanation is this "dramatic" a drop is likely statistical noise. But also, that sort of ends the discussion so to speak and Democratic slippage with African American voters is very real (although as someone else noted, likely overstated given how much Obama likely maxed out out African American vote for Dems. Much the same way I suspect Trump has maxed out rural support in the last few elections).
There’s probably just some regression to the mean given how heavily Democratic black voters are; it probably wasn’t realistic for Democrats to expect to win 95% of the black vote forever.
Thought about that too that some of this is "regression to the mean" after what I'll call the "Obama effect" with black voters (for obvious and I think understandable reasons). But that still doesn't explain why the supposed shift right in 2020 appears to be more permanent. As in the shift right in 2020 I suspect you can attribute partly to "regression to the mean".
Having said that, look at that chart again. This shows a -7% shift relative to Harris margins!. That would suggest that there is a cohort of African American voters (but only African American voters) who based on everything that's happened in the last 12 months have said to themselves "I'm actually more likely to vote for the GOP than I was 12 months ago". It's not like Trump sent out $1,000 checks to only African American voters or implemented some policy that's somehow disproportionately helpful to African American voters (as I noted above, given just basic demographic realities of who is in the 1% or top 10% and who is not, the OBBBA is unlikely to be particularly beneficial to African American voters).
So yeah, still baffling to me.
There could’ve been a smaller Obama effect for Harris that’s gone now. Black voters didn’t swing much from 2020 to 24.
I think that's probably right. The next R to win against a non-Black D will get probably 15%+ of the Black vote.
A growing share of Black voters are immigrants who are still probably going to vote Democrat, but maybe by 70/30 margins rather than 90/10 margins.
Also a growing share are half White or half something else and maybe don't feel as much of a connection to the larger Black community.
So yeah, probably some regression to the mean which will continue over time.
Given how many of those immigrants are likely from Somalia and Haiti, I have my serious doubts as how true this may be given current events and recent pronouncements from the President.
Also, funny enough, for all the attention Somali Americans get, they're a pretty small group, not even the largest group from Africa:
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/sub-saharan-african-immigrants-united-states-2025
To be blunt, I think talking shit doesn't seem to matter that much, but ICE rounding people up, including sometimes civilians, does seem to matter. It's hard to get accurate data, but it doesn't look like areas of large Haitian population swung left last year (parts of Miami, New York, etc.) I DO think that if a bunch of Haitians, both legal and illegal, get rounded up by ICE, that will produce a backlash, as well as the fact that Trump promised lower prices and predictably couldn't deliver.
You would find a significant divergence between black women and men, with men much more likely to defect to Republicans. And if you interact with any media aimed at working-class black men, they are probably to the right of white men on almost all gender issues.
Plus, there is a concern that because black men are often stereotyped by society as more masculine, they are particularly unwelcome in progressive spaces that prioritize women and queer people over straight men. There's a whole discourse about how elite institutions fill up their diversity quotas with black women and gay black men, but remain hostile to straight black men.
Which makes total sense because by far the Democrats biggest weakness right now is with men in general, particularly those without college educations.
I saw an article once titled something to the effect of "Straight Black Men are the White People of POC." It was confusing.
n = 178 Black voters.
But suppose it's a real effect. Population composition, ie demographics are steadily eroding the Dem advantage.
Younger generations of Black voters are much more like swing voters than older generations, and young generations replace older generations. Black immigrants are less loyal than non-Black immigrants.
You can look at Black Dem support by age for all registered voters in North Carolina here:
https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/nc_voter_registrations_Black
Yeah to your first point, the reason I didn't put in my post "this might be statistical noise" is I was sort of trying to get a discussion going. The "this probably a blip" sort of ends the argument. But yeah if we ask Lakshya, I suspect he would be the first person to tell you that one poll, no matter how sound the methodology, can throw out some "outlier" results (or have crosstabs with outlier results). It was sort of the central reason why Nate Silver rose in prominence. Forget all the mathematical analysis he does to get his results, if just step back and think about it for a minute, you realize it makes almost obvious sense that an amalgamation of methodologically sound polls is going to be more accurate than relying on one poll*.
Your second point I think has been written about before and I think is just demonstrably true. I've noted this in the past, but I think we're a bit hesitant to note that Trump's pretty gross guttural machismo while repulsive to people like me (and likely part of the story why female voters, especially college educated ones, I think understandably are especially anti Trump) does have an appeal to a particular cohort of young male voters (think basic realities of how testosterone works probably explains at least part of why this particularly appealing to young men) and may explain some of this. Again I'm still skeptical given based on this chart. This chart is supposedly about support or drop in support from 2024. The Trump machismo thing has been a thing for awhile now and I think maybe does explain the shift right among male POC in 2024. So why would Dems bleed even more support just from 2024 based on everything we've seen the last 12 months. And why would that drop off be only with African American voters but apparently no one else.
That last part is why gun to my head, I would say this poll is likely a statistical blip based on as you say "n = 178 Black voters".
The point I was trying to make with my link is that there's every reason to assume a slow drop in D support among Black voters due to generation turnover. It's not the kind of drop that can explain a relative 7 or greater drop over 1 year, but it is a steady erosion or tailwind that is likely to keep blowing for the foreseeable future.
So maybe it's a combination of this steady erosion plus some statistical noise from a n=178 poll. Every year you could a decrease of 1-2% from Black voters relative to the general public and then small polls add or subtract random noise from that. If there are other factors more specific to Black voters I'm not aware of them.
The steady erosion of African American support is real, but I still think the math doesn't quite work out. Let me explain.
If we equate Trump vote share with Trump approval (there was actual uptick in approval post election likely from bandwagon effect), then he had just about 50% approval in November, 2024. He got about 15% of the African American vote. His approval has dipped considerably, if we take Nate's polling latest polling averages at face value he's at 42.8% and that is likely overstating things as recent polls include more than a few Rasmussen and Echelon polls (This is Nate's commentary from a few weeks back, not mine so don't kill the messenger).
So what that should mean if Dems are still slowly losing ground with African American vote is that the difference between 2024 and today should be more like zero, if Dems are losing less ground (or indeed gaining ground) with other groups.
In other words given how much Trump approval has fallen, there probably shouldn't be nearly this big a fall in Dem support or much of a fall at all.
I thought the explanation was a bit simpler:
- African Americans have always been more culturally conservative than the democratic party, but voted left based on a) inertia and social networks, b) strongly value economic outcomes and perceive the left to be better on this front for African Americans and c) believe the right to be a least somewhat racist
- Trump has been better on the economic front
- The woke movement exacerbated the left's disadvantage on culture issues and degraded the advantage on cultural issues
It took both the right finding good wedge issues and the left screwing up.
I suspect that the acceleration of "distributed, personality-driven media" (podcasts, youtube, tik tok, etc.) is also important in that it's started to substitute for social networks as vectors of information about politics
I think this point has been made a few times but Harris still got close to 90% of the black vote I think(?) With that breakdown the marginal black voter is quite conservative.
In Florida the local media has a ton of cost of living stories about high home prices, huge condo assessments, sky high insurance rates, etc. Trump's comments on affordability are deeply offensive to a lot of Floridians.
“The economy is great and all of you stupids are wrong for thinking otherwise” - POTUS, 12-17-25
Nah, he totally turned around the inflation denial narrative with last night's master class in political discourse.
yeah but warrior checks!
The difference is that the Florida GOP selects people who are objectively qualified and with no black marks against their name, while the Texas GOP might pick someone with massive negatives.
The Dems should pick high quality and moderate candidates, but by far their best opportunities in red states arise when the GOP pick someone terrible.
Alabama. And Georgia were great examples of that
Can someone please send a gift subscription to Jane Castor?
>Or maybe there’s a businessperson or celebrity who’d take a crack at it. Further outside the box might be better.<
Or maybe a John Edwards type minus the ick factor? Basically a confident, sharp, rich white guy. Aren't there any dudes like that in Florida who realize MAGA is a catastrophe for the national interest?
I'd hate to think our democracy's decline and fall arrives in an otherwise winnable environment because, in a country of 340 million souls, Democrats couldn't come up with five or six vote optimizing Senate candidates. The ongoing dumpster fire that is the Trump administration (gets worse by the day, doesn't it? How 'bout them plaques!) is basically the karmic universe BEGGING Democrats to harvest a bumper crop of low-hanging political fruit. But Dems sure as heck look as though they're likely to blow it.
>Or maybe a John Edwards type minus the ick factor? Basically a confident, sharp, rich white guy.<
Gavin Newsom
(oh wait, you said *minus* the ick factor)
Florida is complicated. The panhandle might as well be Alabama, central Florida is all orange groves and theme parks, while south Florida is the unofficial capital of Latin America. If dems want to have a chance, they need a moderate (Gwen Graham would have won). Anyone with a whiff of socialism will get pilloried, particularly in south Florida, which is filled with immigrants who fled socialist regimes. Even with that, they will most likely lose because so many republicans have moved here since 2020 that they have swamped whatever dems remain. Rebuilding the party from the ground up, slowly, is what needs to be done.
Also worth noting, the idea of invading and taking over Venezuela is very popular down here, but ICE is not. If there was a dem version of a neocon, it would go a long way
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hillary+clinton+macarena
Time for her to move from NY down to FL?
Somebody should convince Scot Galloway to run, he has a house in Florida.
Eric Spoelstra (head coach of the Miami Heat) is the dream candidate.
I would be shocked if Spo had any interest at all in doing anything other than coaching
Was there any hint that Tommy Tubberville wanted to be in politics?
His performance at Cincinnati strongly hinted that he was looking for an exit from coaching.
username-comment synergy
Been looking for a new avatar.
Spo is one of the best coaches in the history of his sport. Tubberville was a failure at UC and has built his entire coaching career around one good year at Auburn more than 20 years ago
Kyle Trask is currently unemployed (smart move, Tampa Bay Bucs). Take a flyer on him maybe. Lots of fond memories from his time at UF.
TB already has God's Perfect Child at backup QB who's also a south florida native (I'm a Louisville fan and I will protect Teddy with my life).
Also Ben, you should do a piece on the coaches Dems should target to run in various races across the country. I say this as someone who truly believes Dan Campbell would win the presidential election in 2028 in a landslide.
You mistakenly assume that your average Heat fan can even name their own coach. Dwayne Wade would be the better candidate.
Not with the trans kid. He also left Florida over it.
Oh right, forgot that he moved. My hunch would be that Wade is sufficiently famous and successful that normies wouldn't hold his trans kid against him.
Now Matt's done it: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/opinion/democrats-liberals-oil-gas-industry.html Dave Roberts is probably going to legit have a stroke live on Bluesky over this one.
I have a feeling that 20 years from now this will be Matt’s second most regretted article, after the Iraq post. Too many trends all pushing in the wrong direction. And that holds even if you argue that, in the moment, it was tactically correct.
Well predicting the future is hard, but even a lot of leaders of enviro groups are coming around to the idea that "keep it in the ground" is a political and policy dead end and want to embrace other strategies: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/opinion/climate-change-methane-natural-gas.html
That article isn’t so much “coming around” as it is “the oil and gas industry is 10 years away from destroying the planet irrevocably and we need to just pay them to stop.” I’m not sure that’s comparable to what Matt is arguing for.
I have heard Hispanics in Florida have had mixed views on Trumps second term. On the one hand, they have been super excited about regime change in Venezuela and hope there’s domino regime change in Cuba. OTOH, they don’t like the deportation stuff.
Imo Dems are way too hawkish than the war-weary general public but that’s not true in Florida. Unfortunately a neocon warmongering zealot would be perf for Florida. Someone from the Bulwark or Never Trump neocon community should try.
“Hispanics in Florida have had mixed views on Trumps second term”
What you are obliquely pointing out is that “Hispanics in Florida” is a made up thing.
A hidden issue is for a variety of reasons, the Florida Democratic Party is uniquely bad and has been uniquely bad since basically the 60s when it was the first Dixiecrat party to lose hold of voters to the GOP in the actual South.
For the next sixty years, whether ran by Dixiecrats, conservative, moderate, or progressive Democrats, it's been kind of a shitshow, with the only outliers being insanely talented politicians (Lawton Chiles/Bob Graham) or running an astronaut in the state where astronauts started (Bill Nelson). The difference was, until DeSantis, the Florida GOP was a lightly corrupt Big Business-centered party that didn't go far out over their skies on cultural or social issues.
A combination of the overall shift in the GOP and migration by conservative people during COVID _and_ the shift of your typical migrations going from early Boomers to late Boomers/early Gen X meant a quick shift to the right. Like, I'd actually bet Kamala only lost by 4 or 5 among people who live in Florida prior to say, 2018.
>The Supreme Court has formally authorized immigration-enforcement agents to randomly stop and detain working-class Hispanic people with no probable cause.
Not that this is relevant to the politics, but can we please get the law right?
1. Police do not need probable cause to stop someone, but rather only reasonable suspicion. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968). Probable cause is needed for an arrest or search.
2. The Supreme Court hasn't authorized stops of working-class Hispanic people. In United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 US 873 (1975), the court held that apparent Mexican ancestry can be one factor, but not the only factor, in stopping cars on suspicion of transporting illegal aliens. The Court has never said that occupation is a relevant factor.
This year, in lifting the stay in Noem v. Perdomo, the Court did not issue an opinion. Justice Kavanaugh issued a solo concurrence in which he opined that because "those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such
as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants" that those occupations can be additional factors. But we don't know the thinking of the others in the majority, especially because they might have based their decision on standing, as Kavanaugh also discusses.
Most importantly, as Kavanaugh says, "reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and
inquire about immigration status. If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter. Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings."
So, if ICE is arresting people just based on race+occupation+whatever, short of probable cause, as I suspect they might be, they are acting in a manner that in no way was been authorized by the Court, and implying otherwise very much let's ICE off the hook.
I mean there's "the law" and then the actual law, which is that Trump can do whatever he wants and the Supreme Court won't stop it and will actively interdict any lower court that does.
I think Matt's depiction is substantially more accurate.
I'm sorry, I just find this common refrain to be completely inane.
I understand what you saying in a legal sense, but in a practical sense, it doesn't seem that way. Its seem like the ruling states you can stop people if they look Hispanic.
It explicitly says otherwise:
>In this case the officers relied on a single factor to justify stopping respondent's car: the apparent Mexican ancestry of the occupants.[11] We cannot conclude that this furnished reasonable grounds to believe that the three occupants were aliens. At best the officers had only a fleeting glimpse of the persons in the moving car, illuminated by headlights. Even if they saw enough to think that the occupants were of Mexican descent, this factor alone would justify neither a reasonable belief that they were aliens, nor a reasonable belief that the car concealed other aliens who were illegally in the country. Large numbers of native-born and naturalized citizens have the physical characteristics identified with Mexican ancestry, and even in the border area a relatively small proportion of them are aliens.[12] The likelihood that any given 887*887 person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor, but standing alone it does not justify stopping all Mexican-Americans to ask if they are aliens.
United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 US 873 (1975)
And that's the point: If ICE is stopping people solely because they look Hispanic, then they are acting illegally, and wrongly stating or implying that they are acting in a manner consistent with Supreme Court precedent, or even that it is reasonable for them to be confused on the point, simply gives them cover.
I appreciate the nuance that you're adding. With the aggressive of the current admin in immigration enforcement, it feels like they will take this ruling as far as they can, which is scary for some people.
I am sure that is true. They act in bad faith re every other law, after all.
> If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.
Well, that's just not true, is it? And Kavanaugh knows it isn't true.
The point is that IF that is not true, the problem lies with what happens AFTER the stop, not with the stop itself. How are we ever to address a problem if we have no understanding of what it is.
That's a distinction without a difference if there ever was one.
You obviously don't understand the point.
Matt lapses into lying sometimes when he’s discussing elections. The “formally authorized” bit is really over the top.
He isn't lying. He is mistaken.
Perhaps.
I'm confused about the ICE story. Is Real ID an immigration document? It doesn't seem obvious to me that it would be.
Also if you check Matt's link, they wanted to photograph him to check his immigration status. I'm also confused about how that would allow citizenship status to be checked.
But anyway Matt (purposefully, I think) leaves out that he refused to be photographed, and the impasse with one side insisting on Real ID and the other on a photo led them to take him to the station for fingerprints.
Matt’s point isn’t that Real ID is an immigration document, it’s that the person was a citizen and citizens don’t need immigration documents.
That can't be true because it would be literally impossible to ever deport a single person if you could simply claim you are a citizen when asked to present documents.
I’m just saying that I, personally, am visibly of immigrant descent, I don’t carry “immigration documents”, I do carry state-issued ID, and I would be extremely mad if ICE agents came up to me and demanded to see my “immigration documents” to prove my legal right to be in the country I was born in and claimed my state-issued ID didn’t count.
I understand. But I'm struggling to understand how people think immigration enforcement works, and in fact has always worked?
Things have gotten more aggressive now, for sure, which raises the risks of suffering the downsides of enforcement for a lot of people.
But this is a change in scope and magnitude, not a vast change of process. State IDs have never been immigration ids, so you could have had this same problem under Obama, at least if you were near the border.
Again, I understand this could suck for you. My wife walks around the neighborhood all the time talking in Chinese and not carrying her passport, so the same thing could happen to her.
But if we take for a given that the US has decided to do more interior enforcement, and if state IDs are not immigration documents, then what way could this be approached such that there aren't false positives?
"I understand. But I'm struggling to understand how people think immigration enforcement works, and in fact has always worked?"
I think the problem is that you are running into two different legal requirements that do not have to make sense in the real world.
1) Citizens are not required to carry papers and cannot be arrested without probable cause, and ethnic/racial profiling has not been allowed as sufficient criteria.
2) Internal enforcement requires checking to see if people are here legally and there is no obvious way to tell if someone is a citizen or not by appearance.
Historically this was addressed by having immigration enforcement prioritize places where you could reconcile those two - border, arrests for other reasons, etc. But Trump is trying to amp up enforcement and in the process discovering its very hard to do without violating #1.
If the intended goal is efficiency and accuracy, the easiest method, by far, is a national ID system.
The issue is, Americans tend not to like it when the government gets too efficient, nor when the Feds issue that many rules.
They could presume that RealID means he's probably a citizen, and record that info. If they find out he wasn't, they have a likely valid address, and they also can record his ID information for the future so that if he is detained again they can arrest him.
This would impose a burden that even citizens be more diligent about carrying their IDs with them, but for citizens who _are_ carrying documentation, given them the benefit of the doubt seems better.
Yeah, I think clearly Real ID's need to be made to count as valid documents, that's the only workable solution.
And the government needs to do whatever they need to do to make that work.
Also any state governments need to not be able to issue Real ID's to people that aren't here legally.
Legal status is one of the requirements for Real ID (based on me recently checking what I need to do to get one).
It seems like it would solve a lot of problems.
It's above my paygrade to understand why it hasn't happened. I suppose it being a state ID probably creates issues. But it's a state ID with federal requirements, so that should limit those issues.
"Also any state governments need to not be able to issue Real ID's to people that aren't here legally".
I don't think they are able to?
If ICE wants to do their job, they need to have a computerized database where they can run someone's ID and check if they're here legally or not. The burden of proof is always on law enforcement.
A Real ID or passport ought to be enough to prove status unless it appears fake. Apparently some states (including mine) don't allow cops to see immigration status when running state ID (but Real ID requires one to be here legally).
From Matt's linked twitter/X post, they wanted to take the Somali-American man's photo to check it his status against just such a database, but the man refused.
How much the burden of proof falls on law enforcement depends on the law in question and is for the courts and legislatures to decide. It's never 100% just on law enforcement
Matt's reference was to a statute that requires immigrants to carry immigration documents. The statute does not apply to citizens.
Yeah I get that, but then couldn't any immigrant simply claim to be a citizen who doesn't need documents?
That doesn't follow.
As a citizen, I am within my rights to walk around outside without any documents of any kind. If I'm stopped by ICE and they have reason to believe I'm in the country illegally, they can detain me until they determine my status. It's possible for this sequence of events to play out without anyone doing anything wrong.
So, the Border Patrol Chief should have said something like, "Real ID is not proof of citizenship. Once it was determined that he was a citizen, he was released." He shouldn't be asserting that the citizen detainee did something wrong by not having anything other than a Real ID with him.
(As a practical matter, only a small share of immigration detainees falsely claim to be citizens. When they do, this is usually a separate, and more serious, violation of the INA, which generally results in lifelong visa ineligibility.)
I'm not doing a good job of nailing down what I mean by "doesn't need documents".
I'm thinking about it from the point of view of having documents, not carrying them around. The situation you mentioned will be resolved because the person's records, be it a birth certificate, passport, etc.. are in a database somewhere. That's what I was trying to say by "having documents".
It seemed to me that the crux of this conversation is about whether or not it should be possible for enforcement to detain someone for not having documents. And I was taking the "do you carry documents" replies to mean they should not be able to. If anyone could simply claim that they are a citizen with documents left at home to avoid detention that would make enforcement unworkable.
Do you carry your birth certificate everywhere you go?
Ok - same question I'm asking elsewhere in this thread: how do you think this has always worked? When Obama was deporting hundreds of thousands of people detained near the border, annually, how do you think CBP determined that they were lawful removals?
Mostly they asked and the people either told the truth or gave evasive answers that conflicted when you separated a group of them.
It is basically impossible to deport people, most places in the western world fail to even deport convicted violent criminals.
I don’t see how that makes it better? ICE forcibly arrested a citizen based only on ethnicity and demanded a photo? What’s to stop them from doing that to anyone they want? Or are people just hoping they’re protected based on ethnicity appearance?
The only document that proves citizenship most people have is a passport, almost no one carries that around with them, and a large number of Americans don’t even have that to begin with.
"based only on ethnicity"
Source?
"The only document that proves citizenship most people have is a passport, almost no one carries that around with them, and a large number of Americans don’t even have that to begin with."
Ok - so how is it that millions of people have been deported annually going back to the Obama era and before?
A very large number of commentators seem to be very confused about how immigration enforcement has always worked.
I'm one of the commentators here that do have some understanding of immigration law.
I have seen a good amount of people legally present in the country on student visas go for a run without carrying a letter-sized envelope for their I-20s. I would, of course, never do that (I mean that I would never go for a run), but the reality is that this law hasn't been very strictly enforced to the best of my knowledge, because it's a bit unworkable, for reasons that you and other commenters here point out.
Yes, I fully understand this.
But what I think people are missing is that any immigration enforcement is going to involve false positives and determinations that are going to inconvenience and upset some people.
Through false positives, the Obama-era deportation inconvenienced and upset some legal immigrants and natural-born citizens. How do I know this? I know this because they deported millions annually and there's no way to do that without making some mistakes, either in establishing probable cause, making an arrest, or more rarely even in the deportation.
The difference is the fallout from those errors mostly fell on people near the border or to those in jails or prisons for other arrests. Trump is rearranging priorities and increasing the scale and aggressiveness, so naturally the fallout from false positives is increasing and falling on more people than before.
The tradeoffs may very well be unacceptable, depending on your individual point of view, but the idea that any mistakes prove the system is bad is wrong, because you can't have enforcement without mistakes.
I agree that you can't have enforcement without mistakes.
However, I think that "I will deport you because you were playing soccer without carrying your I-20, even though you do have a valid I-20." is different from making a mistake while enforcing the law. (Again, an I-20 is NOT a small plastic card that can fit in a wallet.)
The Trump administration terminated the legal status of students on student visas based on speeding tickets. One one hand, I see that if you violate the laws of this country you might have to go. I doubt that Obama would have placed the standards of what counts as "violation of the law" there though.
You are the one who is confused. You are conflating arrest with deportation.
For example, I, a natural born US citizen, do not carry my passport nor birth certificate with me. Hence, were I stopped by ICE, I might end up being mistakenly arrested. But we're I placed in deportation proceedings, I would ultimately be able to produce both documents.
Being arrested is still very disruptive to one's life, even if you ultimately get released. It's not too much to ask to be able to walk down the street without fear of getting arrested if we haven't done anything.
Agreed - so what was I saying that disagreed with that statement?
As I said: You are conflating arrest and deportation. You said:
> how is it that millions of people have been deported annually going back to the Obama era and before?
That is a comment about DEPORTATION. The topic is not that. It is about the cause needed to arrest someone for violating a statute that only applies to immigrants. That requires probable cause to believe that the arrestee is not a citizen.
Maybe the logic of my wording conflated them. In my mind "millions of deportations" implies "millions+ person detained or arrested".
Among the many people detained, surely quite a few were citizens who didn't have documents at the time they fell under suspicion. Outside of perhaps some isolated cases, those citizens weren't deported. But it was still probably an infuriating hassle for them!
And if I can summarize my major point from my too many comments today, it's that these false positives (in detentions, arrests) have always occurred, and will probably always occur as long as your doing enforcement. Obama's system probably prioritized the tradeoffs better, and Trump's is obviously causing many more problems in terms of false positives and needless hassle, but it's mostly a question of magnitudes. You can't step up enforcement without false positives.
You need citizenship / immigration documents to get a Real ID. If your visa has an expiration date, your Real ID will usually be given the same expiration date. So if someone has a Real ID, there's a 99.99% chance they're in the country legally. That should be plenty of proof for a random stop and frisk.
"You need citizenship / immigration documents to get a Real ID". Sure about that? Can you find me a link that makes that clear? I
Because I don't think that's what Real ID is for or how it works. It's not an immigration document and that's not how immigration officers are trained to verify immigration status.
A passport on the other hand does show citizenship, so in theory it should have resolved it.
See the "Proof of Lawful Presence" section
https://www.mass.gov/doc/cdl-documents-checklist/download
This doesn't track immigration status. It doesn't say if your status was revoked, expired, etc.. It only says you had lawful of status when it was issued.
And there's two things your assuming:
#1) Their probable cause was something very superficial which a Real ID should have greatly diminished. But there's no information on whether that was true or not.
#2) That it operationally makes sense to train ICE agents to trust Real IDs. Maybe it does, but I doubt either of us are well-informed on the pros and cons of that approach.
You're being deliberately obtuse
I'm being literally correct.
You can't get a REAL ID without Proof of Identity & Lawful Presence (ONE document):
Valid, unexpired U.S. Passport or Passport Card.
Original or certified U.S. Birth Certificate (with raised seal).
Certificate of Naturalization or Citizenship.
Permanent Resident Card (Green Card)
So I guess your quibble could be with those who have permanent resident status? But the OP is correct, if you have a Real ID, there is 99.99% chance that citizenship or legal residency has been established.
Once again, the ID proves that the applicant was legally present when the ID was issued, the status can change after issuance, and also it's not intended to be an immigration status document.
Your argument is a little like saying that your Drivers License proves where you live. In reality, it only show that you could verify an address at the time of issuance. You could have moved since then, and the DMV is not really intended to be an address-updating system. It's an incidental piece of information collected during the process.
They are using facial recognition: https://www.404media.co/how-a-us-citizen-was-scanned-with-ices-facial-recognition-tech/
If you dig into it a bit, the federal government is contracting with companies like Flock, ClearViewAI and Palantir to build databases and screen images from security cameras, etc. The common uses are a) grab someone who "looks like they might not be a citizen" and then run their picture through the database and b) tracking the movements of people suspected of maybe not being a citizen and planning raids, etc.
I'd be pissed and uncooperative too if I were that guy! Law enforcement ordinarily cannot detain you and force you to submit to a search, photograph or anything else without probable cause---that is common sense. But they are effectively exploiting a huge loophole that lets them violate civil rights within 100 miles of the border. (I miss the simple times when the government violated your rights by accusing you of being a terrorist.)
Thanks, and yes I see the downsides and the reasons for that guy to be pissed.
What I'm most curious to learn is how they come up with ""looks like they might not be a citizen". Not just now, in the Trump 2 era, but going back 10, 20 years or more. There's never been an era, as far as I know, when literally every single person 100 miles from the border was treated with the same amount of probably cause.
And my question for the SB commenters is - assuming you want to step up enforcement, how would you do it? I feel like the implicit response is that they wouldn't have more enforcement, or do it in a drastically different style such as going after employers or only deporting from jails and prisons, etc.
But suppose you were given the mandate to step up enforcement within 100 miles of the border. What criteria would you use to gather probably cause?
I have a pretty strong libertarian bent, and my personal take is that people should be able to come to the US and work with few restrictions; enforcement is then taken care of by regular-old law enforcement.
However, if I were tasked with stepping up enforcement of existing immigration law, I would indeed target employers not employees through E-Verify and other means that place the burden of verifying legal authorization to work on employers. Big companies would instantly comply because they have too much to lose. Small ones would require more vigorous enforcement through audits and onsite visits. If you really want to turn the screws, you even go after individuals who hire day laborers, etc.
Look at how they are using "narco-terrorism" as an excuse to fire missiles at boats. The "war on drugs" has always gone after the manufacturers and traffickers because the alternative is stop-and-frisk, raids on private residences, roadblock-checkpoints, etc. Yet when it comes to immigration, they take exactly that approach and trample everyone's rights just to catch people committing the heinous crime of working hard to provide for their families in the wrong country.
If you remove the economic incentive by making it unpalatable for companies to hire people without legal authorization, illegal immigration would collapse. Then I guess you'd need Congress to update asylum laws.
Far from any rational approach, though, the current enforcement regime seems driven by a quasi-religious zealotry that frames immigration as a defensive war to preserve a very specific understanding of "American culture". I think what we are just witnessing is what highly motivated people can accomplish with the laws as-written, which really do strip you of rights "at the border". Look at Wilmer Chavarria(https://pacificlegal.org/case/chavarria-border-searches-fourth-amendment/), a US Citizen who was detained at the border until he agreed to let CBP rummage around in his district-owned laptop that contained the personal information of students. No search warrant, no chain of custody, no lawyer, no phone call, just "you can sit in a detention cell until you decide to cooperate". All because SCOTUS said CBP has the right to search your possessions for contraband... you have no Fourth Amendment right within 100 miles of a border.
That's a great answer and I agree the current system it terrible. And so if I was answering my own question, the only satisfactory answers I could come up with would similarly "dodge" the issue of "how do you step up enforcement against individuals without creating false positives".
Until we actually do something far different, such as actually go after employees (which is not happening any time soon), then I think we're stuck in one of these following bad equilibriums:
#1 Go light on enforcement, perhaps something like Obama where you only go after those who are having contact with law enforcement for other reasons + some limited border zone of increased suspicion / enforcement. In this case you get increasing levels of illegal immigration as people decide to take their chances, and all of the good and bad that comes with that.
#2 Go heavy on enforcement, and you get what we're seeing now.
I like the Obama priorities better, but I have to say it didn't seem to have any impact on the number of people making the perilous journey North. On #2 I'm a bit hopeful that facial recognition and maybe eventual better use of ID databases will make the problem of false positives less painful.
I think it depends entirely what the actual goals of enforcement are, and a huge problem at present is that the government is deliberately not articulating them because the current administration has only political goals, not policy goals.
They conflate immigration law and criminal law. They set quotas for arrests and deportation instead of criteria. That is not a coherent policy and, IMHO, is one of the reasons Matt can write a post about trying to win Florida; with no consideration for second-order effects, you end up filling social media with videos of parents being handcuffed picking their kids up from school, masked goons chasing people around construction sites, children being dragged naked out of apartment buildings, US Citizens being detained without due process, etc. And for what benefit? They cannot articulate any tangible benefit to anyone who doesn't a) already believe that immigration is a prior an existential problem and b) are insulated from the consequences.
This morning they announced that USCIS is being given quotas to refer cases to DOJ to try to denaturalize citizens. Who asked for that? How is that going after "the worst of the worse?" What is the policy goal of threatening my hard-working, taxpaying spouse's citizenship?
The Obama era policies worked because they articulated a policy with clear goals and criteria: deport criminals, protect kids. What we have now is just sadism. I don't even know how you could salvage a policy from it.
>And my question for the SB commenters is - assuming you want to step up enforcement, how would you do it?
E-Verify! Implement it!
I dunno, man. I get that Americans are hella pissed off about illegal immigrants, and I get that at some point you have to do actual immigration enforcement in the interior, not just prevent people from illegally crossing the border...
But one thing Americans (including conservative/right-wing Americans) have traditionally prided themselves on is "we're the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, we don't have government agents going around and stopping people and barking at them: Papers, citizen!" This lack of public "Papers, citizen!" enforcement is what distinguishes us from miserable, oppressive regimes like the old USSR.
If "Papers, citizen!" is the price for rounding up illegal immigrants, how many people are willing to pay it?
(Yes, I get that the answer may well be: "Depressingly many, especially among those who consider themselves protected from "Papers, citizen!" by virtue of their accent/skin color.")
What I'm feeling is that no one has a better way to do individual enforcement, aside from perhaps going back to Obama era, which may or may not be enough depending on future economic and political conditions.
Which is fine. And I largely agree with you that enforcement would probably be much more effective and efficient if targeted at. That seems to be what most developed countries do so it has a proven track record. But it is the easy answer, because we're very far from actually being able to do that, as neither party advocates for it.
On the papers side, I personally think the nature of that problem is changing due to technology. ICE is already using facial recognition databases as their go-to technology. When (probably not if) verifying legal status becomes as easy as waving a phone near a person's face I'm not sure American's resistance to "papers, please" will hold up.
This reminds me of the arc on Silicon Valley when Guilfoyle was found to be an illegal Canadian worker.
One of the great things about living in the United States is that citizens don’t have to carry around “papers” proving they are citizens. We also have other great rights such as due process, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and free speech. Just a few of the reasons I love America 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸.
Something that people are also forgetting is that part of the problem with the US having been behind a lot of comparable countries in the quality of our IDs - and not having a national ID card - is that evangelicals saw the introduction of such a requirement as an indication of the anti-Christ and helped block such efforts for decades.
I mean, in general, I think it's a good thing that you aren't required to carry around "papers" in America.
Nice. But then if there's going to be any amount of border enforcement, that has to exist alongside some risk of being detained and / or questioned by ICE. That risk might be unacceptably high under Trump 2.0, but I don't see a way to bring it down to zero.
ICE is using facial recognition. I don’t know what database they’re checking against, but they claim to have one.