Likewise, I was really surprised that “defunding public education” meant vouchers, as I had not thought of vouchers like that--in general, this isn’t an issue where I live. Looking at edweek.org, it looks like private schools in Florida are pulling about $832 million in funding that could’ve gone to public schools. The same article by Prothero also says private schools can take the money, then expel the student or close entirely. I don’t really have the means to verify this, but even the possibility makes me incredibly wary.
I do have the unique background & privilege of going to several really crummy private schools and finally making it into a great public school, with only one of the dozens of private schools in the area outperforming it, so my viewpoint is HEAVILY biased. I wouldn’t even know where to begin unraveling the bias to take things in with a clear lens.
I know a handful of people who voted for Biden (historically moderate Dems) who enthusiastically voted for Rob D in 2022, basically because he let people party during COVID. Most of those people are now seriously questioning their support for him since it’s now inarguable that he’s a true Rightist and also a lunatic. Florida has always been a purpleish state and these people don’t like how he’s tried to turn our state into Mississippi in one legislative session.
This microanalysis of messaging and policy nuance is 100% irrelevant.
It's impossible for Matt to to think like a Republican primary voter. So I'm here to tell you the simple fact: Republican primary voters want Trump and only Trump, and will accept no substitute. At one point, a plausible argument could be made for De Santis on the ground that Trump was unelectable in the general (due to the psychotic level of "Orange Man Bad" derangement from the usual sources.)
But the ham-handed Deep State/Media complex have guaranteed Trump's nomination by trying to take Trump down with bogus lawsuits and criminal charges. This will soon culminate in Biden's corrupt DOJ trying to have Trump banned from running on "sedition" grounds because he gave a speech. The whole point of this enterprise is transparently to interfere in the Republican primary by knocking Trump out in favor of some Deep-State approved RINO. Letting the terrorists win in this fashion is simply unacceptable and the only way to defeat them is to nominate Trump.
If they legally bar Trump from running or just assassinate him, the field will open up. Otherwise, De Santis and the RINO midgets are just auditioning for the VP slot (and rising star Vivek has passed up De Santis in that department).
“Even after the [2016] election Ryan kept pushing for this, and doing it would have won Trump a lot of good will among Capitol Hill conservatives. But he didn’t do it. If he had, I believe he would’ve lost the [2020] election. But he didn’t.”
It took him a while, but Matt has joined the election denialists
Maybe this is working out great for Desantis? He becomes nationally popular and is anointed the challenger to Trump. The current phase is taking all the incoming fire from the other side and showing your people you can handle it. Then rise up from the ashes. We’ll see.
I don’t know what’s going to happen. But listening to a bunch of people who would not even try Indian food tell me a place has bad chicken tikka masala doesn’t make sense.
It's not really worth discussing people who are the Herman Cain of 2024.
Matt's written about the three most likely nominees: Trump, DeSantis, and Scott. I'd like a piece on Haley - everyone else has a 0.00% chance of being the nominee.
Without taking away from some of the broader points here, I don’t understand the two paragraphs here about immigration in the context of contrasting with Trump. Nothing about Trump was moderate when it came to immigration, and that was much of his appeal in the 2016 primary.
Trump dropped pretty much all his anti-immigrant rhetoric in his 2020 campaign. He'd made his point for the anti-immigrant part of the base in 2016, along with his actual policies, but he simply stopped all the demonization of four years earlier. That's at least partly why he was able to win over, or at least not so thoroughly alienate some Hispanic voters in 2020.
I understand all that but my point was about 2016 - that’s the primary that was contested on the GOP side, the one to which Matt referred in his post, and the one in which Trump largely distinguished himself in the basis of his vehement anti-immigrant rhetoric.
I like this a lot, mostly because I want to believe that moderation is not only good but also smart. However MY seems to me to continue to be a one trick pony on this issue. You just can’t compare the electoral prospects of two politicians using only a single metric, totally ignoring all other factors. Sure, policy (and what you say about policy) matters to a greater or lesser extent but that’s hardly the only factor. What about charisma? Trump’s legal woes? The fact that one is an ex-president who lost and election and the other running for the first time? The age difference? Etc etc
Unless you can convince me you “controlled” for these other variables it’s hard to take the comparison too seriously.
I like MY’s analysis. Many have wondered why DeSantis has chosen to go to Trump’s right - it is probably because that is who he really is, a really conservative right-wing republican. He mistakenly believes that it was his right-wing stance that helped him win big in 2022, but it may have been because he came across as competent and moderate on policy issues and strong against progressive on social issues.
This is totally off-topic, but I thought the Twitter X thing was a joke and was pretty shocked to find out that it is real. If Elon had continued to build electric cars and rockets while maintaining a position of relentless media-shy silence, he would be some kind of inscrutable techno-hero. I share nothing of the man's politics, near as I can tell, but this whole affair still makes me kind of sad.
I don't think it's clear. He's said his highs and lows correspond to actual highs and lows and that he's "not medically bipolar". He's admitted he has Asperger's syndrome - if he was bipolar he'd say it. WSJ reported he microdoses Ketamine for depression and takes full doses of Ketamine at parties. I think the full doses + lack of sleep explain most of his more erratic behavior.
I kindof admire the stubbornness of it. He founded X.com in 99. He always felt like what turned into PayPal could have been so much bigger. That he might burn down Twitter in the process of finding out if he was right seems like a win.
What I always liked about Elon was that he had gone against the tide of tech-dom. Everyone else wanted to make a gajillion dollars and "change the world" with a new social media website (twitter) or some electronic regulatory arbitrage around something already happening (Uber, bitcoin, grub-hub). Elon, having been successful in such a business, moved instead to physical-engineering-and-production businesses that actually change the material technical base of society through novel, high-risk innovation (electric cars, battery storage, spacecraft, underground tunneling).
Those are high-risk ventures that may or may not succeed, and I frankly think that some of his business practices are pretty garbage. But I respected the vision, and I was willing to concede that maybe you just get the total package, good and bad.
So if this whole time he was actually just longing to get back into the website business, that really shrinks him in my mind.
Although honestly I think it is more likely that this is a kind of midlife crisis thing where he looks back on halcyon days of youth and imagines it a way out of present troubles that does not include admitting error or going back to the grind that made you successful but apparently has not made you happy.
I say this as someone who is 43 and has some experience with such things. My genuine hope is that he gets his head on straight in a few years.
I wonder how different the primary electorate is in presidential years from midterm years. The GOP had some famously bad primary picks for senate races in 2010 and 2018, and people might overgeneralize from that to presidential runs.
In the past, midterm elections were better for Republicans because they had more older voters that voted reliably in less popular elections. Not sure if that's still true with shifting electorate, but it probably is.
I am going to posit a different theory. Although Matt is correct that RDS is probably too far right, his biggest issue is that once he was introduced to the National stage, everyone learned that he was short, socially awkward, has a high voice and lacks personal charisma. I am no Trump fan, but he eclipses RDS easily on those four scales.
Am I the only person that desperately wants Jeb back?
Seriously? “Immediately started defunding public education” and the link is to their universal education vouchers?
You make it sound like the state aid for school budgets were chopped 25% or something. It’s disingenuous.
Likewise, I was really surprised that “defunding public education” meant vouchers, as I had not thought of vouchers like that--in general, this isn’t an issue where I live. Looking at edweek.org, it looks like private schools in Florida are pulling about $832 million in funding that could’ve gone to public schools. The same article by Prothero also says private schools can take the money, then expel the student or close entirely. I don’t really have the means to verify this, but even the possibility makes me incredibly wary.
I do have the unique background & privilege of going to several really crummy private schools and finally making it into a great public school, with only one of the dozens of private schools in the area outperforming it, so my viewpoint is HEAVILY biased. I wouldn’t even know where to begin unraveling the bias to take things in with a clear lens.
I know a handful of people who voted for Biden (historically moderate Dems) who enthusiastically voted for Rob D in 2022, basically because he let people party during COVID. Most of those people are now seriously questioning their support for him since it’s now inarguable that he’s a true Rightist and also a lunatic. Florida has always been a purpleish state and these people don’t like how he’s tried to turn our state into Mississippi in one legislative session.
This microanalysis of messaging and policy nuance is 100% irrelevant.
It's impossible for Matt to to think like a Republican primary voter. So I'm here to tell you the simple fact: Republican primary voters want Trump and only Trump, and will accept no substitute. At one point, a plausible argument could be made for De Santis on the ground that Trump was unelectable in the general (due to the psychotic level of "Orange Man Bad" derangement from the usual sources.)
But the ham-handed Deep State/Media complex have guaranteed Trump's nomination by trying to take Trump down with bogus lawsuits and criminal charges. This will soon culminate in Biden's corrupt DOJ trying to have Trump banned from running on "sedition" grounds because he gave a speech. The whole point of this enterprise is transparently to interfere in the Republican primary by knocking Trump out in favor of some Deep-State approved RINO. Letting the terrorists win in this fashion is simply unacceptable and the only way to defeat them is to nominate Trump.
If they legally bar Trump from running or just assassinate him, the field will open up. Otherwise, De Santis and the RINO midgets are just auditioning for the VP slot (and rising star Vivek has passed up De Santis in that department).
“Even after the [2016] election Ryan kept pushing for this, and doing it would have won Trump a lot of good will among Capitol Hill conservatives. But he didn’t do it. If he had, I believe he would’ve lost the [2020] election. But he didn’t.”
It took him a while, but Matt has joined the election denialists
Maybe this is working out great for Desantis? He becomes nationally popular and is anointed the challenger to Trump. The current phase is taking all the incoming fire from the other side and showing your people you can handle it. Then rise up from the ashes. We’ll see.
I don’t know what’s going to happen. But listening to a bunch of people who would not even try Indian food tell me a place has bad chicken tikka masala doesn’t make sense.
Aren’t there other GOP candidates Matt can take shots at? Ramaswamy seems interesting.
It's not really worth discussing people who are the Herman Cain of 2024.
Matt's written about the three most likely nominees: Trump, DeSantis, and Scott. I'd like a piece on Haley - everyone else has a 0.00% chance of being the nominee.
Pence has to have as much of a shot as Hailey.
Sounds like a 2015 Trump take. You might be right. You might be wrong but it’s safely orthodox.
Writing about Ramaswamy would be more fun than another factory DeSantis take.
Without taking away from some of the broader points here, I don’t understand the two paragraphs here about immigration in the context of contrasting with Trump. Nothing about Trump was moderate when it came to immigration, and that was much of his appeal in the 2016 primary.
Trump dropped pretty much all his anti-immigrant rhetoric in his 2020 campaign. He'd made his point for the anti-immigrant part of the base in 2016, along with his actual policies, but he simply stopped all the demonization of four years earlier. That's at least partly why he was able to win over, or at least not so thoroughly alienate some Hispanic voters in 2020.
I understand all that but my point was about 2016 - that’s the primary that was contested on the GOP side, the one to which Matt referred in his post, and the one in which Trump largely distinguished himself in the basis of his vehement anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Given Trump's continued popularity and DeSantis's lack of charisma, there wasn't any strategy that could have gotten him the nomination.
What his utterly terrible campaign may have done is ruin his presidential chances going forward.
This is another lesson in not legislatively swinging for the fences every time a faction wins power. Voters don't want party-line, radical change.
I like this a lot, mostly because I want to believe that moderation is not only good but also smart. However MY seems to me to continue to be a one trick pony on this issue. You just can’t compare the electoral prospects of two politicians using only a single metric, totally ignoring all other factors. Sure, policy (and what you say about policy) matters to a greater or lesser extent but that’s hardly the only factor. What about charisma? Trump’s legal woes? The fact that one is an ex-president who lost and election and the other running for the first time? The age difference? Etc etc
Unless you can convince me you “controlled” for these other variables it’s hard to take the comparison too seriously.
I like MY’s analysis. Many have wondered why DeSantis has chosen to go to Trump’s right - it is probably because that is who he really is, a really conservative right-wing republican. He mistakenly believes that it was his right-wing stance that helped him win big in 2022, but it may have been because he came across as competent and moderate on policy issues and strong against progressive on social issues.
I'm not buying this.
DeSantis (and everyone else) aren't doing good because for some unknown reason the majority oh the Republican party has joined the Trump cult.
And no other contrary evidence can make it in.
See the actual criminal indictment
This is totally off-topic, but I thought the Twitter X thing was a joke and was pretty shocked to find out that it is real. If Elon had continued to build electric cars and rockets while maintaining a position of relentless media-shy silence, he would be some kind of inscrutable techno-hero. I share nothing of the man's politics, near as I can tell, but this whole affair still makes me kind of sad.
I think it’s pretty clear that he’s bipolar which in his case manifests itself with almost continuous (at times highly productive) mania.
I don't think it's clear. He's said his highs and lows correspond to actual highs and lows and that he's "not medically bipolar". He's admitted he has Asperger's syndrome - if he was bipolar he'd say it. WSJ reported he microdoses Ketamine for depression and takes full doses of Ketamine at parties. I think the full doses + lack of sleep explain most of his more erratic behavior.
I kindof admire the stubbornness of it. He founded X.com in 99. He always felt like what turned into PayPal could have been so much bigger. That he might burn down Twitter in the process of finding out if he was right seems like a win.
Oof. That makes it so much worse for me.
What I always liked about Elon was that he had gone against the tide of tech-dom. Everyone else wanted to make a gajillion dollars and "change the world" with a new social media website (twitter) or some electronic regulatory arbitrage around something already happening (Uber, bitcoin, grub-hub). Elon, having been successful in such a business, moved instead to physical-engineering-and-production businesses that actually change the material technical base of society through novel, high-risk innovation (electric cars, battery storage, spacecraft, underground tunneling).
Those are high-risk ventures that may or may not succeed, and I frankly think that some of his business practices are pretty garbage. But I respected the vision, and I was willing to concede that maybe you just get the total package, good and bad.
So if this whole time he was actually just longing to get back into the website business, that really shrinks him in my mind.
Although honestly I think it is more likely that this is a kind of midlife crisis thing where he looks back on halcyon days of youth and imagines it a way out of present troubles that does not include admitting error or going back to the grind that made you successful but apparently has not made you happy.
I say this as someone who is 43 and has some experience with such things. My genuine hope is that he gets his head on straight in a few years.
In what way was Uber already happening?
Probably depends upon if he can repair his relationship with his child. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/21/business/elon-musk-child-files-to-change-name-gender/index.html#:~:text=check%20back%20later.-,Elon%20Musk's%20child%20tells%20court%20she%20no%20longer%20wants,be%20related'%20to%20her%20dad&text=One%20of%20Elon%20Musk's%20children,way%2C%20shape%20or%20form.%E2%80%9D
Seems pretty clear to me his right wing turn has a lot to do with this.
He has seven kids. If only one is going through a Daddy-hating phase, he's batting above average.
Time to fire you and replace you with someone with a different opinion.
I wonder how different the primary electorate is in presidential years from midterm years. The GOP had some famously bad primary picks for senate races in 2010 and 2018, and people might overgeneralize from that to presidential runs.
In the past, midterm elections were better for Republicans because they had more older voters that voted reliably in less popular elections. Not sure if that's still true with shifting electorate, but it probably is.
I'm also waiting to see if the shifting electorate will cause voting restriction laws passed by Republicans to backfire on them at some point.
They had famously bad ones in 2012 too! In fact 2012 was about as bad as 2010 - Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were horrendous picks.
I don't think the primary electorate changes that much. In many states, the presidential primary isn't even on the same day as the senatorial primary.
I am going to posit a different theory. Although Matt is correct that RDS is probably too far right, his biggest issue is that once he was introduced to the National stage, everyone learned that he was short, socially awkward, has a high voice and lacks personal charisma. I am no Trump fan, but he eclipses RDS easily on those four scales.
Tbf, for me, I remember Matt pointing out what a dweeb DeSantis was, when the media was breathlessly talking about him as some sort of Super-Trump.