At the state level, California Republicans have the problem of squashing any Republican-curiosity in lifelong Democrats frustrated with Democratic excesses in state and local politics.
California Republicans really don’t try to appeal to the center of California politics, and seem to be more interested in leading national Republicans and the conservative movement at large instead. You read any materials from CA Republicans, and I’m like “oh yeah I remember why I don’t vote for these people”.
Yeah, but for presidential purposes, no one is suggesting a California Republican.
As to your point, we have a similar problem with a lot of Democrats in TX. In many areas, including most of the local races I vote in, the election is decided in the Republican primary. Democrats often put forward nutty people who just want to tell you how bad Trump/Abbott are without demonstrating their own ability to do the jobs they're running for. I see it as a broad problem with non-competitive districts, which is why I appreciate Matt's preference for a strong and competitive opposition to his preferred party.
I live in MN and feel the same way about the MNGOP. They blow winnable races by nominating weak candidates with no crossover appeal. Kendall Qualls is leading the pact for the GOP strawpoll and is someone who never won an election before.
Meanwhile, Phil Scott in Vermont runs as an anti-MAGA Republican and promotes other anti-MAGA Republicans and wins 69% of the vote in the bluest state in the union.
Neither of those were crazy ideas at the time. Schwarzenegger was governor and Texas had a democratic governor in the '90s. Which is a long time ago now but wasn't then.
It's also a reminder that freezing the curent moment as an eternal truth is an enormous error. 90s to now is not really "long time ago" and shows it living experience major shifts occuring even in "bases" (which I think is one of the most self-fooling concepts amongst the political obsessed, giving a sense of permance to political configurations that are not perm at all although not equally rapidly shifting)
To be fair, that's an good strategy for both parties! People who can win elections in one-party states while running as members of the downtrodden opposition seem like the perfect people to try to win over swing voters.
I think most California Republican party figures are secretly disappointed that California didn't join the south during the Civil War. That is how backward-looking they are.
Obvious exception: Arnold Schwarzenegger -- but he came to the Governorship through the recall process, which works very differently from the partisan primaries.
“Watch as the last of his species, Republicanus moderatus, Vermont Phil, forlornly paces his enclosure, pausing occasionally to lick at a Creemee.”
There is really no option anymore for people who might not like the current crop of Democrats but aren’t willing to give any ground to MAGA. A captive audience is not really an enthusiastic one. And when we get the MAGA and hardline Republicans not willing to work with Democrats on just about anything (and I blame Newt Gingrich for starting this) you get this gridlocked and ineffectual Congress, Murc’s Law (only Democrats have agency) and people longing for a strongman type to fix things.
Gavin is this years Jeb bush. He will crash and burn immediately, likely before the first primary. Homelessness and the insane fraud wrapped up with it while the problems are getting worse, prioritizing drug using degenerates over working families. Spending 10B per year on health care for illegal immigrants, CAHSR being a money bonfire, housing prices pushing everyone out of state. Lefties and dems in uniparty states have narratives around these topics that make them either good or at least less salient for their audience but this is cat nip for moderate swing voters that decide national elections. Tons of content to drive engagement on social media and keep his conversation on defense in a position of weakness.
No. Trump ran against a shadow puppet that he largely created. And got away with it everywhere that Kamala did not amp up a giant counter narrative.
People honest to god thought there would be 20+ million murderers and rapists that would get deported. They thought trans athletes were trouncing women everywhere. The amount of trust they have for Republican messaging is through the roof. And fed on paranoia.
To overcome the attack, Kamala needed to amp up a counter-narrative, "Sister Souljah"-style.
EXAMPLE: As a gay male, I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there’s nothing “Queer” about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to other guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud to be — as an individual, simply and uniquely — myself. But I never signed up to “smash cisheteropatriarchy” in the name of some Brave New World.
That's not just about Fox-stoked "paranoia" -- let alone, "hate"!
(Newsom tried separating himself from the "queerer-than -thou" contingent with his remarks about women's sports -- and was quickly accused of "throwing 'trans folk' under the bus.")
"Throw the previous iteration of the party under the bus" is what the party did in the wake of Carter's loss. How'd that work out?
"Say we have always been terrible, but are good now, we swear!" is such an insane, exactly-backwards political strategy that it can only come from the crippled post-2016 liberal brain.
Dear liberals: Swing voters are not going to care about your party's "sins" in 2024, or your request for absolution from them. That isn't how it works. That isn't how any of this works. Just say you are better and deserve to win. This is way easier than everybody makes it out to be.
If you look online, it seems like our fundamental problem, being a party made up of self-loathing people with a loser's attitude, is not improving. But I think that's very much limited to a narrow set of online intellectuals and the actual mass of the party is deeply sick of this attitude, and will no longer echo it in pursuit of a "serious," self-flattering reputation, the way they have in the past. Most Democratic voters have realized this kind of constant self-flagellation is useless at best, and almost certainly counterproductive.
"Throw the previous iteration of the party under the bus" is what the party did in the wake of Carter's loss. How'd that work out?
Also what Obama did when he ran against both HRC and Clinton's legacy (e.g., his anti-NAFTA attacks carried the Midwest). We won 60 seats in the Senate. I'll take a supermajority.
I strongly disagree that Obama was "running against Clinton's legacy." I also disagree that "HRC" had anything to do with it, except insofar as using her as a punching bag may be part of the reason Obama got so many weird rural voters. Their primary consisted of about 95% agreement, but he made Hillary cry once, which probably netted him millions of votes.
(Can we get Hillary to run in and throw the 2028 primary? After 2008 and 2016 [both Sanders and Trump] it's pretty clear that shitting on her for inchoate reasons is pretty much the single most popular political move in the country.)
Here's what you do if your party had a policy in the past people don't like: Don't mention it. Mention the policy you have now. If somebody brings up your old position, reiterate your new one and change the subject.
Guys, Republicans are RIGHT OVER THERE doing a better job of this, why does it not occur to us to emulate them in absolutely any way whatsoever?
A lot could happen between now and 2028, but it seems currently the most likely outcome is that Gavin Newsom turns what should be a blowout against JD Vance in to a squeaker. I still would give him 60/40 odds to win that race but it should be 90/10.
Since Trump was re-elected the Dem overperformance on average has been 13 points. In that environment if it holds, Newsom would win easily in 2028. He knows he is vulnerable on the culture war front and taking steps to correct that with his podcast etc. His liberal bona fides probably give him room to moderate during the election as well.
And that's all fine until it turns in to a normal R vs D race and the R side gets to point to all the stuff about California that is unpopular.
Again, I think 60/40 odds says Newsom wins that, it's just that a Newsom vs Vance race is two below average candidates and either side could choose to deviate and exploit arbitrage, but I don't think they will.
Maybe what seems insane to Substack liberals seems perfectly normal to the median voter.
Fetterman will be attacked for his stroke and health issues ruthlessly by the GOP though. I am not sure he is in good enough shape to survive a Presidential primary.
Hell has to freeze over before I would be curious about this version of the GOP but in 2028, I expect there will be one or more high-profile independent candidacies that will credibly threaten Dems if they nominate a "Biden is sharp as a tack" surrogate from 2024.
Here's the thing - Newsome is not the front runner because he's liberal, he's moderate, left-wing or whatever - he's the front runner because his comms team and himself is openly antagonistic to Trump in public and on social media.
Obviously, it helps he's the Governor from California.
But, there was space open for a moderate to be an effective moderate on most actual policy (though probably not as moderate as Matt wants) but also to be continually and totally oppositional to Trump on the obvious stuff that helps the median voter remember they heavily dislike Trump without actually go super left-wing or progressive. Like, you didn't have to embrace the AOC left to be the more popular side of the all the really dumb stuff Trump did - like, for example, did one Democratic politician actually point out the Gulf of America thing was weird and dumb continually (and turned out to be unpopular) - of course not, because every moderate waits for polling before they say anything more controversial than 'puppies and rainbows are cool.'
Gallego is actually doing a good job at this right now but well, I don't think he has a real chance to be a national name for non-policy reasons.
Instead, the moderates - reps, governors, Senators all turtled up, decided to actively work with Trump, or took more pleasure in getting involved with intercine internal party conflicts.
It's actually the moderates fault for being so scared of an old guy winning by 1.5 points after the worst inflation of a generation to actually effectively oppose him. So, Newsom is the front runner right now...and it's the moderate fault.
I'll put it this way - who is willing to be the Harry Reid of 2028 and happily and openly say incredibly mean things about the Republicans (except this time, unlike Romney, they might be true).
Newsom has definitely played his cards the best during the Trump presidency, but I really don’t put much stock into him being the front runner at this point.
We’ve got about 2 years until the beginning of the Democratic primary. That’s a ton of time for more candidates of all ideological stripes to define themselves, and there’s a long standing history in presidential primaries of early front runners flaming out.
My only twist: I think in polling, he is kind of a stand-in for "Actively opposed to Trump and MAGA but having no part of the leftists." So I like to see his numbers high, without for a moment thinking this means he will definitely be the nominee."
Yes. Everyone will make it very clear that they oppose Trump when they start campaigning, and I don't think Newsom will get that many points for doing it before it was cool. The hipster era is over. Also, with the exceptions of Whitmer and Polis, I can't think of a single person whose name has been mentioned as a presidential candidate who could be accused of "turtling up" or "actively working with Trump." That's just a vague impression that people have formed about "The Democrats" as a blob, not about specific individuals. The problem that actual potential candidates face right now is just that they haven't been *noticed* the way Newsom has, but there is plenty of time to fix that. There isn't going to be a lot of material to use against most of these people if you want to run "you accommodated Trump" attack ads on them in 2027 and 2028. Is that going to land on say Mark Kelly? Come on.
"The problem that actual potential candidates face right now is just that they haven't been *noticed* the way Newsom has, but there is plenty of time to fix that."
"Getting noticed" because people like what you say, then being able to follow up with concrete performances that deliver on what people "noticed" in the first place is a core skill in this game. While there is a long time before the '28 primary season, it's not clear how learnable this skill is.
While that's obviously true, most of these people haven't tried very hard to get noticed yet, probably because they realize the election is two years away (and also, some of them have state general elections they have to win in the interim). Maybe some of these folks won't be able to get attention even when they're in South Carolina actively running, but there are going to be a lot of candidates and I seriously doubt that all of them are going to be bad at it.
Possibly, but this is one of those "You know it when when you see it" things, and I have not seen much of it from other potential candidates...yet. But with every election cycle the media environment becomes more and more porous, presenting all these potential candidates with ever more numerous opportunities to show "it". Is it really "too early"? With DOGE and Epstein and now blood in the streets of Minneapolis?
This sounds to me like the curse of the political junkie - which we all are, I'm not criticizing. (1) Yes it's too early. (2) Don't expect to have seen "it" when the reason you haven't seen "it" is that you've barely seen anything at all, one way or the other. (3) Don't trust your own judgment about recognizing "it" since you are not normal.
I also think if Trump starts to fade mentally in 2027 and his 40% cult finally breaks, openly shitting on Trump won't be that impressive. He's (most likely) not running in 2028.
Obama didn't win because he said "Fuck Bush" louder than everybody else.
Obama won because the whole party caved on Iraq and Obama took the opposite side. The current moment feels *exactly* like this, except replace "Iraq" with "failing to be confrontational towards Trump".
But Obama was on the record opposed to the war from the beginning as opposed to HRC. None of these people are supporters of Trump, Newsom is just shitposting the loudest, which is fine, but there's no actual issue these people are on opposite sides of.
What Democrats want is real action to impede Trump's lawlessness. Newsom delivered that through CA's gerrymandering plan. Being verbally opposed to Trump isn't that useful if you can't or won't take political risks to deliver on it.
Yeah idk what 2028 is going to look like. I do think at a certain point, Trump bashing will outlive its usefulness because he's not going to be running in 2028.
While I agree with MY that substantive policy positions are more important than many people like to acknowledge, the ability to campaign effectively across all the venues the modern media environment provides might be under-rated. I think this is what people are responding to: Newsom is just very good at being a visible, confrontational, verbally fluent politician. In races determined by 1-5 percentage points, that's a meaningful advantage.
Speaking of track records, Buttigieg's is very limited but what we have on him is just about as negative as anyone's in the country - probably worse than either Harris' or Newsom's. He ran statewide one time, way back in 2010, and he got crushed by 25 points, by Richard Mourdock no less. Yes Indiana is a red state, and yes it was a bad cycle for Dems, but in the same cycle the Dem at the top of the ticket (US Sen) lost by only 15 points. Sometimes in politics as in sports, there are guys who pass the eye test but for whatever reason can't produce.
Very good at speaking (and undoubtedly smarter than Newsom or any other candidate likely to enter the race), but not as good at the rest of it. He is supremely "appointable" to almost any office of state I can imagine, and I have absolute confidence that he can excel at whatever he is called upon to do in that kind of role.
Yeah, it seems to me Matt is bewildered that Newsom is the current front-runner when the fundamentals clearly speak against him, as Matt laid out. But the reason he's the front-runner is that a) he is handsome and "president-looking" and b) he's a savvy PR guy. At this point in the race, vibes matter more than policy.
Obviously, you can't just copy looks. But you can copy PR strategy. And every single step he took to bolster his national image is a step moderates could've taken as well.
As much as Newsom is not the optimal candidate for 2028, moderates should really take a hard look at what he's doing right.
The other thing Newsom has going for him, just as Harris did before, is that he doesn't fall into either the "moderate" or "leftist" wings of the party. The leftists think they're too moderate, but not as bad as Amy Klobuchar (or perhaps Josh Shapiro). The moderates think they're too progressive, but not as bad as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
And of course, because polarization is fractal, nobody who is strongly opinionated thinks a candidate like Newsom or Harris is actually good. Biden had the same problem which is why few in the party were willing to speak up on his behalf.
But, here's the thing. This "Klobuchar->Newsom->AOC" hierarchy of supposed progressiveness pretty much 0% exists for regular voters. Are we forgetting that the top second choice of Bernie voters in 2020 was Biden, and the top second choice of Biden voters was Bernie?
The way we view the world has little to do with reality, online people!
Yeah, me too. But I'm talking about polling when there was still a full field. People just liked those two guys best, because of their personalities and track records (and white hair?), not their ideologies.
This column was classic Matt, in a good way. Here he describes a core tragedy of democracy:
“The way you become mayor of San Francisco and then rise to statewide office in California is by calibrating your appeal to hardcore partisan Democrats, so of course you feel that his vibes are impeccable. A politician whose vibes are attuned to maximizing crossover appeal and winning swing votes probably will not vibe that hard with you, unless you personally are a swing voter.”
Small-d democracy confronts citizens with the reality that large swathes of their neighbors see life differently than they do. And normal, psychologically healthy people hate that and reject it as false.
As someone else mentioned, Jerusalem’s column this morning pairs nicely with Matt’s. She elaborates on the point I made above:
“Time and again, political professionals assume that their frame for understanding an issue is the primary one, stubbornly sticking to an analysis of root causes, only to find out voters are speaking a completely different language.”
How is that (rejecting the reality that your neighbors don’t all see things the same way you do) “psychologically healthy”? It may be normal these days, but it ain’t healthy.
To win a US presidential election, you have to win over a number of voters who voted for Trump last time but are feeling disaffected and looking for something better. Yelling louder about how awful Trump is has been tried and found ineffective in that project.
So a good general-election candidate would be very persuasive at talking about how he or she could positively offer something better (think Obama 2008 or Clinton 1992).
You can attack Trump on the specific issues on which a lot of voters are disaffected. But you need to do it in a way that doesn't alienate those same voters. If you're attacking Trump's immigration policies for being brutal and hamfisted and inefficient (lots of flashy shows of force, but not so many employers getting fined), that might work. If you're attacking his immigration policies because "ningun ser humano es ilegal" and immigration enforcement is racist, then you're probably not going to win over many of his voters.
"Yelling louder about how awful Trump is has been tried and found ineffective in that project."
It's pretty much how Biden won in 2020, save the "yelling" part.
We write off strategies WAY too quickly in this party, always looking for an excuse to run back into the strong, comforting, and deeply obsolete arms of Carville-ism.
The problem in 2024 was that voters are a bunch of goldfish, so the argument didn't work.
I 100% agree, but if the podcast bros and influencers decide they like the vibe of Gavin over Vance, I don't think that can be discounted either. Politics in America seems so vibes based the last decade. Obviously, anything can happen in 2 years though, and I do think Gavin is a good communicator and debator which helps. His 2 main issues are the homeless issues in CA, and cost of living. Since he hasn't done enough to address that, I think he would probably have a 50% chance of losing the 2028 election. Too many swing and conservative voters hate Cali , even though they provide 40% of the fruits and veggies to the rest of the nation and is big enough to be it's own nation.
Sure . . . in 2028. In 2025 it was a useful way of breaking through all the noise and setting apart from all the actors who were bending the knee to Trump.
It didn't work in 2024 because Trump had been gone for four years. It will work in 2028 (regardless of who actually runs) because Trump will have spent the last four years making everyone miserable.
I agree that that's the likeliest scenario. I don't think it's so guaranteed that Democrats should nominate a candidate with Newsom- or Harris-style weaknesses.
I have never liked Newsom and I think it's significant (and maybe depressing) that he was able to scoot so quickly to the top of the field, just by not being a wet blanket. I think it's even more depressing that Matt doesn't seem to fully understand *why* Newsom has had such success.
The major political question of our era is: can you be politically moderate without turning into a sniveling snot-pile of weakness in the face of Trump. The theoretical answer is that *of course* you can, positions should be uncorrelated to political courage. The depressing thing (for moderates) is that so far, moderation and political timidity seem to be going hand in hand. Centrists should be worried about this.
This as an exceedingly long-winded, torturous way of saying “I like Newsom because he’s mean to Trump on TV and Twitter.” Call it the Jasmine Crockett Argument. And color me unimpressed.
Whereas MY's piece today is an exceedingly long-winded, tortuous way of saying "I don't like Newsom because he's not Republican enough and I want Democratic policy preferences to be more Republican." We get it already...
I hope that you are not labeling mainstream Democratic thought in areas not associate with university campuses and not the likes of SF and NYC "more Republican."
"Wrong side" meaning "unpopular" or meaning "incorrect"? If the position is correct and unpopular, the imperative is to change its "popularity", which results in more people having the correct view. If the position is incorrect, then the imperative is to change the party's position to the correct view, whether or not that view aligns with popularity. Then repeat step one...
The main thing is that everyone's going to be mean to Trump once they're actually running. Like, Talarico is saying plenty of mean stuff about Trump. This is an advantage that will be very easy to take away from Newsom when the time comes. At that point the choice won't be "guy I know is mean to Trump because he keeps popping up when I scroll" vs. "guy I haven't seen on my feed." The choice will be "guy who was mean to Trump at the debate last night" vs. "guy who stood out for being especially mean to Trump 18 months ago but doesn't seem that much meaner today, and should I be concerned about his electability?"
In Crockett's case, she'll probably try to stand out by not just being normal-mean to Trump but by being extra extra mean. But there are diminishing returns to that, and I don't think Newsom will do the same thing, nor should he.
I like Newsom because he's mean to Trump *and* he paired that with actual executive action. I don't particularly love the man, but he's somehow outperforming every single Democrat in Congress.
Newsom also has cultivated a certain kind of "Cool & masculine, but Democrat" vibe that seems to work. In an era of vibes, he is a teriffic counter to the dorky & creepy Vance or similarly unlikable DeSantis.
My only "vibes" critique is that he comes across a little too intellectual for your average dumb-as-a-rock low-info swing voter, who thinks Trump is an excellent deal-maker, etc. But it could be that Newsom is just appealing to Democrats and political junkies now. But he will definately need to dumb it down a little in 2028, using Bill Clinton as a model for the General Election.
The picture of him slightly towering over and pointing a finger at Trump was great, and the fact is he comes off like a leader. Gavin likes winning elections and seeing Trump and his sycophants lose.
Having both President & Vice President be from the same state is real problem constitutionally - if the election is close enough to depend on AZ, then the VP would be a Republican.
I wrote a more measured and long response, but the short version is you can't beat something with nothing, and no alternative was offered here. You need to be able to speak extemperaneously to become president - everyone from Clinton to Trump could do that, and so can Newsom.
Seriously. To write hundreds of words on Newsom and miss the reason he's a frontrunner, you have to be completely checked out of US politics in 2025/2026. Newsom isn't leading because of his positions or because he's a great guy; he's leading because he's paired a good PR strategy with actual executive actions. It's a strategy that's available to other candidates as well, but they seem to be afraid of it.
"Instead, the moderates - reps, governors, Senators all turtled up, decided to actively work with Trump, or took more pleasure in getting involved with intercine internal party conflicts."
This is an awful description of reality. You appear to want to pretend every moderate Democrat is acting like John Fetterman and, for that matter, like what John Fetterman has done has actually done anything to help Trump rather than making a big display of heterodoxy for his constituents.
My head is spinning at the idea that any faction of the Democratic party is not harshly critical of Trump.
My personal guess, based on nothing more than living in PA, is that Fetterman has probably taken his schtick too far and will lose a primary... but I have my doubts that it would harm him a lick in the general. And he's done almost nothing of substance except vote party-line Dem.
I'll vote for a solid candidate in the primary to dethrone him but if he's the general election candidate I will just start referring to him as the Rust Belt Whisperer and grudgingly pull the lever for his incoherent ridiculousness.
I think the model of "pretty much a regular Dem, except he'll say something that pisses off the left really bad, on the reg" is an underused paradigm in more conservative areas. But yeah - with the current attitude of the party's voters it's hard to imagine that getting through a primary.
One thing Fetterman has going against him is the legacy of Sinema, who voted very differently (less reliably) than him, but similarly built up popularity among her state's Republicans - popularity that was ultimately meaningless, because GOP voters wanted to go out and get a real Republican once her term was up. She put herself in no-man's land.
Fetterman has a very different style and PA is a very different state so maybe he'll pull it out? Probably not though - he's kind of a f---up. But there's an interesting inversion in that, while Sinema kept presenting as extremely cosmopolitan while voting with Republicans, Fetterman is continuing to be... Fetterman, while sticking with his caucus. The vibes may matter more than the votes.
Writing strongly-worded letters is not that useful. The key is pairing your criticism with action that actually impedes Trump. The Democrats in Congress have had multiple opportunities to do this, and in many cases they've fumbled them.
Maybe. I think it's genuinely unclear who will be the Republican frontrunner. Vance might be, but he's about as charismatic as Hillary Clinton, so it's not clear it will work out for him. Rubio might be--he's clearly taking on a bunch of major roles and comes off very much as the adult in the MAGA room right now, but it would be easy (and fatal) for him to somehow end up upstaging Trump and getting cast out of the movement. DeSantis et al haven't forgotten their ambitions, either.
If we get to 2028 and Trump/MAGA are still relatively popular, the world looks really different from getting to 2028 and Trump's policies have become pretty unpopular, he looks old and kinda lost, and his coalition has fallen into squabbling over who will be his successor while the mad king chooses a new favorite courtier every week.
I don't see how Rubio could beat Vance in a GOP primary -- coming "off very much as the adult in the MAGA room right now" is pretty clearly not a winning strategy with GOP primary voters in recent years.
Polymarket gives about a 50% probability for Vance. So at least according to the set of bettors, he is the frontrunner, but not at all a lock. If you think he's a lock, there's some money to be made....
"Among self-identified Republican voters, 51% chose Vice President JD Vance as their preferred nominee for president in 2028, followed by Donald Trump Jr. (8%), Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (6%), former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley (5%), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio (5%)." https://youthpoll.yale.edu/fall-2025-results
Bashing Trump and the Republicans is excellent politics in 2026. Politicians will need a different tack in 2028 and I bet they're smart enough to know that.
Wait, why do you think Gallego isn't eligible for being a national name? I feel like of all the national Democrats talking nowadays, he talks the best.
I unironically think Gallego, or Amy Klobuchar, would be good candidates. The trouble is they are not social-media-soundbite, glib-clap-back friendly. It’s too bad that what it takes to be a good *candidate* is not the same as what it takes to be a good *President*. Obama was able to thread that needle, but he was and is an exceptional individual.
Klobuchar gave me obvious HR lady vibes before we even had a name for that. Her attack on Buttigieg in the 2020 primary reminded me of every mediocre white female management type I’d encountered in my career. Completely turned me off of her as a candidate.
So I’ll start by noting that this is a persuasive piece, I agree with it, and I hope Newsom is not the nominee for electability reasons.
That said, feels like it isn’t engaging with the strongest argument of “Newsom isn’t Kamala” supporters—which definitely is not “Newsom is a white man”. It is “Newsom is not a weirdo empty suit who can’t complete a sentence and seems like either a dope or a space alien, and instead seems sharp, charismatic, quick on his feet, and like he actually is trying to win”. Would have been worthwhile to engage more with that beyond a passing reference to vibes. Article instead over indexes on knocking down an identity strawman.
I don’t get this. Kamala Harris is a career prosecutor. It was her job to be sharp, charismatic, quick on her feet, and trying to win. You could say she failed, but it’s silly to say she isn’t sharp and quick on her feet.
*gestures broadly at all the evidence available to my lying eyes*
I mean maybe that is a fair expectation based on her resume but it just isn’t the case. You can just look and see she is not these things.
How she managed to be as successful as she. Was despite this, I couldn’t tell you though I have met plenty of states attorneys who are not amazing trial lawyers.
Interesting and related anecdote: I actually once had occasion to work across from states AGs from a large sample of these United States and I found the ones from flyover country were almost uniformly more decent people and better lawyers (left and right) than the ones from larger more important states (TX, MA, CA, NY). I think the latter are more political animals (in a sound bite and back room dealing kind of way) than the former.
Look, I've seen footage of her taking people apart in oral cross-examination. Were my eyes lying to me then? I think it is much more likely that other considerations prevented her from taking the path you wanted her to take, not that she lacks the ability.
I think what is fair to say about Harris is that she was good in the debate (which requires being quick on your feet) but she was pretty bad in media interviews (which also require being quick on your feet). So her deficit wasn't the ability to think on your feet per se, but there was something else she was missing that made her bad in interviews, and that was a real problem.
A case is ultimately about a narrow set of facts. Politics is much broader, and involves history, data, values, vibes, etc. She never showed any ability to respond competently outside of a narrow band.
And even then, you also need to do it well - Hillary was actually very knowledgeable, but Bill was just as well informed but could speak well on top. So was Obama
Good presidents have exceptional skills in many directions.
This is an incredible statement. "She never showed any ability to respond competently outside of a narrow band." I understand that people are upset that Trump won, but these categorical statements are silly. By all accounts, she is an effective Senator who mastered a wide variety of political issues. You're making it sound like she had trouble getting out of ninth grade.
I listened to several of her interviews at the time, and never found anything as good as Newsom on Ezra's interview. And that, to be clear, is not a high bar! Obama responded with much more obvious competence and wisdom then Newsom in these contexts. And so did Hillary in her wonky way
You're welcome to make some specific statement about some specifically insightful thing that she said that convinced you.
But surely her inability to answer town hall and debate and even basic interview questions in a coherent way are far more relevant to her poor electoral performance.
EDIT: As I've been thinking about this ... I wonder if she's like the last remaining public speaker that doesn't take betablockers. I mean shoot, I take them and I'm not even on camera.
I imagine cross examination in a trial is just a different skillset than being an engaging public speaker, or giving a really compelling and interesting interview, or whatever else.
Perhaps she was an able lawyer. She was not an able speaker as Vice President. She was awful. To put a finer point on it, she spoke like a stupid person.
Don't take my word for it. Instead, try to watch this part of her interview with Lester Holt: https://youtu.be/omrMRP15q9M?si=0TpAIoKtw1YDz6hX&t=233. She's struggling to answer a question that anyone could've anticipated.
I think almost all her worst "moments" (as in, the stuff she said that made her look like she didn't have the goods) were when talking to journalists. She seemed fine at debates and she was great at questioning witnesses in the Senate, but maybe that was because those people were mostly other politicians or CEOs or normal people and not journalists. Something of a fatal flaw for a national politician, to be sure, but also somewhat understandable.
On the one hand, she was sharp and quick on her feet. On the other hand, she was inhibited by a fear of failure and offending people. Those things netted out into her appearing like an empty suit.
In order to be a successful politician, it helps to be a bit of a narcissist / sociopath. The sociopathy makes you immune to criticism and gives you confidence and therefore charisma. The narcissism helps you believe that you are destined to do great things and solve the world's problems and get people to love you, which helps you govern effectively. Gavin Newsom is much farther along on that spectrum than Kamala Harris was.
I think “she actually is an empty suit” is a more parsimonious explanation than “she’s just too pure for this world” but in the end I suppose it doesn’t really matter. What matters is how she comes off.
I'm not disagreeing with your argument, she's a very intelligent empty suit. But words like weirdo, dope, and space alien are kind of mean, and I just don't think there's any need to be mean about it. That's just what happens when you take a normal person and put them on camera, they act weird and uncomfortable. Only weirdo space aliens actually look normal on camera. But our society needs those people to be leaders.
On second thought, I think that Kamala wound up in the uncanny valley of authenticity. Too real to fake it, but too fake to appear real. And maybe that's why words like alien feel fitting.
I always call it her authentic inauthenticity, which I find funny/charming but maybe others don't. Like I enjoy watching a person who seems fundamentally nice blatantly say what she thinks other people want to hear in order to be empowered to do constructive things.
I don’t think it’s clear that this person is calling narcissism or sociopathy an impurity in the context of electoral politics. It does seem accurate to say Harris is substantially less narcissistic than Newsom or Trump, or Bill Clinton, and probably Hillary Clinton.
Part of her problem might be the constraint she was under. She decided not to throw Biden under the bus, and decided not to completely back off from her previous left leaning positions, that does not leave her much room for maneuver.
Being good in a courtroom is different than being a good political speaker. Harris was someone who was afraid to go on Joe Rogan and seemed out of place in most unscripted political events.
She was following bad advice by not giving enough interviews or ever holding press conferences. I'm sure it was her advisers. But Biden did the same thing before 2020. Kamala is smart, but she avoided the press like the plague. And this is in contrast to the guy who is willing to talk to the press everyday.
I watched her absolutely flub a debate question when someone asked her if she was in favor of unlimited abortion. Just say no, pick a line in the sand (20 weeks or whatever) and move on.
It's a policy you're obviously going to be asked about and she couldn't deliver a clear answer. Unforgivable!
Doesn't this illustrate Matt's point? She was "quick on her feet" with answers that had worked for her winning in California. But in a new environment that was substantively different than her entire previous political career, she clearly struggled to adapt.
I agree with Matt. We need some reason to believe that Gavin Newsom will actually outperform the generic Democratic ballot here, and we don't have that right now.
I agree that Newsom seems fairly sharp. I would also add that another thing he has going for him is he comes across as a little bit of an a-hole, which is a good thing for a Dem. One of the weaknesses that Dems have with low-info voters is the vague impression that they're too nice, too soft-hearted, too willing to get pushed over by criminals or the Ayatollah or whoever. Newsom seems like he doesn't feel bad about being a jerk, which will help allay these voters' fears.
But many of the Dems who've been mentioned as potential presidential candidates also seem sharp, and not like space aliens. Newsom may stand out from *the Dems you see on cable news between election cycles talking about congressional minutiae* but will he stand out so much from the pack of actual presidential candidates? I tend to doubt it.
There's different types of a-hole and I worry that Newsome seems too much like a very California elite-specific type of a-hole. In a different timeline, he seems like the type of guy who could be a Hollywood producer, which isn't necessarily someone who could connect with swing voters in Wisconsin.
Exactly this... It's clear Americans are attracted to some version of swag or attitude and would rather and leader be strong and wrong vs weak and right. It's all vibes, you can't discount charisma unfortunately
One interesting thing about Newsom is that he is strongly dyslexic and has trouble reading, so he has to go over and over briefing books. His style of leadership will be very different from Obama's for example, and he will do a lot of talking as opposed to a lot of reading.
Yes, I think I read somewhere that his dyslexia has actually helped him become a strong debater (which he is) because it has forced him to memorize a lot of things. Maybe it would help him in media interviews too, idk.
He is definitely different from Obama, but even more different from Bill Clinton who often wouldn't read his briefing books at all!
Harris graduated from law school, passed the bar exam, and was a successful prosecutor. That proves above average verbal ability. It does not prove that she is in the top 0.1% of rhetorical ability. When chowing a presidential nominee, it is generally best to chose someone in the top 0.1% of rhetorical ability or better yet the top 0.01% (eg Obama, Clinton). Super elite rhetorical ability is useful, Newsome might have it, but i’m his positions suck.
Newsom has a liability that Kamala Harris didn’t: he is governor of California, not a US Senator. A Senator represents California on the national stage, but a governor is actually responsible for governing the state.
And California is one of the least affordable states in the country, at a time when affordability is a salient issue. It has one of the deepest housing shortages in the country. It is among the top states for most expensive child care, gasoline, and groceries. California has about an eighth of the population of the US, but a third of the homeless population.
People don’t usually blame AGs or Senators for affordability issues in a state. They do blame governors.
I think these are great points for why Newsom won't make it out of a Democratic primary. Bashing Trump won't protect him from other candidates attacking his governing record. It's not like this is all his fault, he's done some good things in office, but there's just no policy constituency that is excited by what he's done.
I do feel like “talking like a regular person” has helped Newsom get a lot farther than I expected, and it’s surprising how few Democrats have this skill.
It's definitely rarer than it ought to be, but the majority of the Dems who've been mentioned as potential presidential candidates are fine at this. They just haven't gotten the spotlight yet.
Will Democrats attack him for the reasons moderate voters will have concerns about him? He’s the governor of a very liberal state. He’s culturally woke. What are his big accomplishments in CA? What position has he ever lead on?
If talking shit about Trump is a qualification for President then 1/2 of America should run.
I'm trying to think what Newsom's policy positions actually are. Not that I follow him much but my impression is he kind of blows with the political winds like Biden and Harris.
"I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some."
Though the guy who wrote that was, by all accounts, an even more divisive figure than Newsom. (I mean seriously, half of Acts is him getting run out of town or fleeing before a mob lynches him.)
Yes. Contrary to a lot of what I've been reading, I think the #1 thing Dem priority voters will care about in 2028 isn't "how out front were you in opposing Trump" but rather, electability. And there's a lot of strong material to use in electability arguments against Newsom. Primary voters will be very worried about nominating someone who can't win, and if you can make that case, then you will make a lot of headway.
This is exactly right. A significant proportion of GOP attack ads are going to focus on California as a whole, and in particular their housing, drug, and homelessness issues — with the idea that, if you vote for Newsom, the country will become more like California.
Right, but they’re all on the same cycle. Texas looks like it is precisely repeating the cycle of California policies, with a few decades of fast growth powered in part by oil and aerospace, followed by a gradual rise in nimbyism and anti-immigrant sentiment, which will lead to unaffordability a few decades down the line.
They've gotten a bit further on sheer availability of land but the flip side of that is that all their major metros are starting to snarl into unlivable messes, and grafting transit onto them will be murderously expensive, very unpopular, and constantly hobbled by the state government.
I think his actual response has been pretty effective. He 1) anchors to CA having the 5th largest GDP if it were a country and then 2) throws CA's 4,500 (!!) local governments under the bus and 3) says they need to do more (e.g., the CEQA reforms) and highlights some greenshoots although still early days. It's a genuinely tough hand to be dealt.
He has been governor for almost 8 years, and has not been very effective. Yes, he has vetoed some of the worst legislation, and yes, he muscled two pro-housing bills through in 2025. But California remains a poorly governed state. Housing costs are not under control and are driving people out of the state. Most likely we will lose 4 congressional seats after the 2030 Census. Private sector job growth has been weak. While some CEQA exceptions have been made, it continues to wreak havoc. For example, for the second time, a San Diego residential and sports arena redevelopment explicitly approved by referendum was recently thrown out by the courts in a decision that expands the potential scope for CEQA litigation. The quality of the state government administration remains poor. To cite a very specific example, a bill passed in 2019 to change licensing requirements for medical lab scientists(CA has unique requirements that exceed those of every other state), mandated to go into effect in 2022, completed it's administrative process in 2024, was supposed to be in effect by January 1, 2026, and is not yet in effect. You can't expect a governor to be superman and change the entire political culture of a state, but there is so much work needed, and he's done little.
It's a choice, but it wasn't until quite recently that the full set of trade-offs, and thus the downsides of democracy and participatory governance at the local level having control over land use, became apparent.
I have to point out a lot of the numbers showing miserable numbers for California and New York and gangbusters growth for Texas and Florida are based on change from the 2020 census to the 2025 American Community Survey... the 2020 Census had a huge undercount for Texas and Florida, so a decent chunk (about half) of the projected change from 20 -> 25 is just that miscount in 2020 going away. Of course it does not excuse the bad policies in California, but the magnitude of what's happened so far this decade is overstated... Texas and Florida are probably already underrepresented by 1-2 seats but got "screwed" by the census.
The ACS is also notoriously horrible in high-density urban areas, so a bunch of people are going to be very surprised by what the results look like in 2030.
This is a pretty simplistic reading of what he's actually tried to do. Abundance is very unpopular with leftists and he's all in on it. Tons of state overriding localities to force new housing. He's curbed AI restrictions and vowed to veto the billionaire's tax. He dramatically downscaled high speed rail because it's a complete boondoggle. These are not popular positions and it would be easy for a CA politician to go the other way.
And prop 50 was a big win for him. I think most people were surprised by the winning margin
To be fair, I overall like both Kamala and Newsom. So my comment isn’t about my perceived sense of him. Newsom was handed a mess in California, and overall I like a lot of what he’s doing. But arguing, “the reason CA is a mess is that previous Democrats made it such and I had to pick up the pieces” isn’t a strong argument for why swing voters should vote for a Democrat.
UT and CO are doing well but most of that is down to the availability of land to sustain growth that allows for lower taxes. TX and FL have tax+service fee burdens not dissimilar to middling-high tax blue states and a bunch of huge problems their governments aren't solving.
PA and WI are handling the "we're done growing the suburbs" phase of middle-age better than NY, IL, NJ, or MD, which are complete clusterfucks, but it's still kind of a boring mediocrity.
MN is reasonably well-governed and with better value for services than MA, which also at least provides good services for high taxes.
AL, MS, AR, WV, many Plains states... also clusterfucks, just of the opposite sort from the aforementioned blue clusterfucks...
I think being from California is a big liability. It's a safely democratic, looked down upon by most of the nation for being too liberal, and is THE example of a Democratic state with failed administration at multiple levels. The abundance Dems don't look highly on California. So Newsome will be blamed by the left for being too moderate and establishment and the Republicans will see him as the embodiment of their woke nemesis.
I am 98.5% with Matt on this one. While I get the early interest in Newsom from the sense of he is the guy that seems like he's leading the Trump opposition, he's only playing that on TV.
My 1.5% separation comes from the fact that Newsom seems much willing to take risks than Harris ever was and engage different media outlets without a bunch of ground rules. Her 2020 campaign was a disaster from the jump, and ONLY ever popular with insiders and journalists.
Joe Rogan basically lied to Harris’s staff and slow walked, a lied to make it impossible to schedule an interview. It was basically a false equal opportunity for both candidates to present. Rogan wanted to avoid being seen as providing Trump what could be framed as a campaign contribution.
The root of the issue was Harris or Harris' staff hard-capped the interview at 45 minutes to max 1 hour. That's why it dragged on until the 12th hour. Meanwhile Trump did 3+ hours with no notes, no question prep, no stenographer in the room, no final edit request and generated 35m direct views plus probably 100m clips. Everyone associated with her campaign should be banned from future Dem campaigns for the best of the party.
It was near the end of the campaign. She didn’t want to take a huge amount of time off to stop campaigning in a swing state. Rogan originally agreed to come to Detroit, reneged, lied about his schedule when Harris was in Texas.
The Harris campaign played nice with Rogan during the whole affair, but he was only willing to make an effort to accommodate one candidate.
I've never heard this. Can you point to a source? My feeling was that she just didn't want to. Given the shortened nature of her campaign, I get it, but it was in retrospect, not a savvy move.
I'm a bit skeptical of Harris' claims here, and I kind-of assume everyone will lie/omit/misremember to make themselves look as good as possible, but I don't really know anything.
By October, you're not moving results by 4 or 7 points with a change in comms strategy.
I'll grant your broader point that Newsome seems more willing to be ... nimble about repositioning himself than Harris was, and this is a tangible difference in their capability as a candidate. But to MY's point, he's never actually shown he can do this in a D vs. R showdown where it's mattered, and all of his baggage is basically the same as Harris's. At best, the argument for Newsome is, "He's similar to Harris ideologically but maybe a better political operator." Not very compelling!
This is a great point. In the margin, the Newsom of today appears to be a stronger candidate than the Kamala of 2024, if for no other reason than the fact that he’s willing to take risks. Notably this dos not mean he is the global optimum or would have won, etc. etc.
I think the biggest similarity between Harris and Newsom isn’t that they’re from California but rather that neither of them really knows what they stand for.
Well at least he’s been working harder at appearing more moderate well ahead of the election.
People’s last impressions of Harris going into 2024 were her left wing pivots during the 2020 election and her association with the Biden administration, which also pivoted left compared to expectations.
right clearly Newsom knows that he should *appear* more moderate if he wants to become president but (to me, at least) this reads 100% as "I want to be president therefore I'm making this move, and if I thought being more leftwing would make me more likely to be president, I'd do that too."
"Actual beliefs" are extremely overrated. The politicians who get criticized the most for lacking them tend to be our most successful. Newsom is very far down my list of preferred candidates, but that particular argument is if anything a point in his favor.
Before her campaign, she was put in the position as VP of discouraging illegal immigration (e.g. the "do not come" meme) but unfortunately I have a feeling people still associated that with incompetence despite it being a positive pivot.
Good point. She tried to pivot there, after in 2020 having said she’d support decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But yeah, I don’t think her handling of immigration, even with the pivot, won her any points with swing voters.
Wait, what? Harris has a bit of the baseline idea that democrats stand for expansion of social welfare and safeguarding democracy. But Newsom has never given any indication of standing for anything!
>But there is just no evidence from the broader set of races that should lead us to believe that voters have a strong preference for white male Democrats over other kinds of Democrats.
This is an odd take. The preference doesn't have to be strong in order to be decisive. And this 2018 article says, "Experimental research has long indicated that minority candidates are perceived as being more liberal than Whites." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1532673X18759642
If so, then nominating a white candidate is electorally equivalent to nominating a more centrist candidate, as Matt has advocated.
This seems correct, and the only way to rescue that quote from today's article would be to argue about what counts as a "strong preference".
Still, as long as Democrats conceive of this as balancing a ticket's demographics rather than reducing the perceived ideological distance between the party and the public, they misunderstand how this helps and why it's significant.
>as long as Democrats conceive of this as balancing a ticket's demographics rather than reducing the perceived ideological distance between the party and the public, they misunderstand how this helps and why it's significant.
Tim Walz being put up as VP in a "hey you morons like folksy white guys so here's one for you" move is practically identical to the GOP putting up Sarah Palin as the VP in 2008 to try to win over Hillary voters.
Here’s the thing: it matters WHO the folksy white guy, or woman, or etc. is on the ticket, not just that someone fitting the demographic is on the ticket. I remember discussing this with a friend (political centrist) back in 2008. She said that if McCain had put someone like Olympia Snowe on as VP he *might well* have gotten some Hillary voters! That’s because Snowe, unlike Palin, was perceived as a moderate and a serious person with a brain. Palin was just an empty suit.
I recall that Tim Walz *was* well liked on the 2024 ticket - this was before all the Minnesota Feeding Our Future fraud hit the fan, but I still don’t see Walz as a *bad* pick the way Palin was.
I think Tim Walz was seen as an ok pick when announced but seen as disastrous after the debate and his campaigning (and now that the Minnesota Feeding Our Future fraud has come out only reinforces this). As an outsider this would be understandable but it's also come out that he was bad for precisely the reasons he told her he would be bad and she still chose him.
I suspect Americans like to see balanced demographics but dislike efforts to deliberate engineer that balance. Plus there's a risk that Goodhart's law takes over and we end up deep in the uncanny valley, with a simulacrum of diversity instead of the thing they really wanted.
I think we are talking about different things. I don't know that many voters value diverse tickets per se, be they real or a simulacram. But soecific groups of voters might be more likely to vote for a ticket if they see their group represented on it. I am pretty sure, for example, that Harris lost less ground among African American women compared to Biden than she did among other groups.
The result you cite shows that voters' perceptions about a candidates ideological positioning is effected by their demographic characteristics. That's not the same as indicating a "strong preference".
There's a sort of bank shot you can do where you say, "Voters who want to sneak in a more liberal candidate should choose a white male because less informed voters will think that they're less liberal than they are, making them more desirable for a subset of voters", but doing that moves way beyond the literature.
The point is it doesn't indicate preference at all, it indicates perception of the candidate's ideology, independent of the ideological preferences of the person doing the perceiving.
The literature shows "equivalence" in terms of ideological perceptions, but you appear to mean the candidates are equivalently "preferable". Those aren't the same thing!
> Obviously the sample of presidential elections is tiny
This sentiment should be applied more widely. And to the extent samples exist more of them ought to be used for analysis. Restricting to just the last race is odd.
Let's look at the electoral records of Biden, Hillary Clinton, Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore (at least).
Biden wins one competitive race in 1972. One sided races ever since. Ends up becoming president.
Clinton wins two one sided races.
Obama wins one senate race and a few state level races. All of them one sided, never a serious GOP opponent. Wins two terms.
Kerry has one very tough race in 1996. The rest pretty one sided. Falls short.
Gores toughest race was his first primary. Landslides ever since. Falls agonizingly short.
We are pattern seeking creatures. But really there is no pattern here.
And the macro political climate. Just about any Democrat would have won in 2008, so the Dem primary really was the decisive race. Similar vibes in 2020. The most salient question in 2028 is probably who’s good at winning dem primaries. I don’t want it to be so, but that’s the way the game is played.
Yeah the context matters. Ike wasn't particularly charismatic (though very competent)but that wasn't what the public needed as the country's cruise control button was turned on. JFK had the rare gift of both, which is the sweet spot. Nixon, Ford, Carter didn't really have that sparkle which probably why Reagan was such a breath of fresh air for many.
It's important to note that Biden was seen by the electorate as moderate (at least until he became president). Doubly so because of how far left his primary field was.
Agree with this except maybe Clinton’s first race, which was weird because of Perot. Clinton only got 42% of the popular vote, so Bush may have won if Perot wasn’t a factor.
People say this, but polling of Perot voters shows that their second choice in that election was pretty evenly split between Bush and Clinton. If Perot had not run, it likely would not have significantly impacted the race.
IIRC Bush would have needed about 5 point advantage on Perot voters - definitely a steep hill. I was a Perot voter and thinking back I don’t remember who my second choice was/would have been.
WJC is the gold standard for the case made in this post. Overperformance in race after race after race. Five Governor election victories in Arkansas. When comes such another.
This is true. If you have no track record of winning in competitive general election environments, then we can't say you *can't* do it at the presidential level. The most we can say is that *we don't know* if you can do it. Some of the people who've never proven their ability to do this still have that ability and it will come out if they try.
That said, if you *do* have a strong track record of winning in competitive general election environments, then you probably *can* do it at the presidential level. So if you have options you should pick someone who has that track record.
In the 2008 cycle that would have been John Edwards or Bill Richardson
In the 2004 cycle ... Bob Graham?
These are counterfactuals, but I have a hard time believing they would have done better.
The thing is there are so many other factors, and yes if you hold all of them constant and it was just down to who had crossover voter appeal then sure. But when do you get that?
I didn't say that the guy with the track record would necessarily do better. I said that he probably has the ability to do well, while the guy with no track record is an unknown quantity. Sometimes you get lucky and the guy with no track record turns out to be great.
If you're looking at a guy like Obama and the "eye test" is telling you that he looks like an A+ talent, then it might make sense to take a risk on him. But if you have a choice of many candidates who all seem pretty good, and some of them have a good track record and others don't, then you should absolutely take track record into account. Of course your analysis should be multifactorial, but that's true of everything in life.
It's true that Dems from competitive environments tend not to get chosen in the primaries and thus tend not to get elected president. That strikes me as more revealing of a problem with the primaries than a problem with those candidates. We have a system of choosing nominees that selects based on the wrong criteria.
The even more fundamental problem is that "electability" is circular reasoning.
I like candidate A, but I think my neighbor likes candidate B so I should pick B. A kind of Keynesian Beauty Contest.
And all the "electable" theories (median voter theory, demograpic theory) have flaws. Turnout is not constant. The demographics of the electorate are constantly changing. And past patterns might not hold.
If everyone is playing the electability game are you have to solve for the equilibrium, what do you do?
Eh, I think this is an overstatement. It's true that electability is difficult to pin down and that reasonable people can disagree on it in good faith. But that isn't the same thing as being "circular."
I do feel like there's a meaningful way to think about electability, but probably it's not always used coherently.
I might choose to support a candidate whose positions I like less because I think he is more likely to win the election. If it's 1992, perhaps I'd rather have a more liberal candidate than Bill Clinton in principle, but Clinton is probably going to do better at actually winning an election than anyone else I can run, so I might swallow my objections and vote for him in the primary.
I think trying to boil this down to race/gender/etc. identity tags is usually kinda dumb, but also, frankly, most political reporting is kinda dumb.
Right, though you have to allow of every other voter doing that. You like Paul Tsongas or Jerry Brown but want to "settle" on WJC, the WJC voter might think Tom Harkin is more electable, the Harkin voter thinks mmaybe Tsongas is more electable, and on and on. And that's just one round. But the Harkin voter also knows that a WJC voter is thinking of electability and has to take that into account. The process goes on for ever and you do not get an equilibrium. In practice some external "focal points" are created to help voters converge. Endorsements, large donors, etc. But you get a random result. Not a result that reveals "true preferences".
Does anyone in professional politics think Gavin Newsom is the best candidate? I work in professional politics, and I don’t know anyone who thinks this. It is unquestionably true that Newsom has done a very good job of being the opposition to Trump in a very public way. And for that, I am thankful.
Frontrunner status at this point is meaningless. And professionally I have no sense that the party is in anyway seeking to coronate Newsome like they did Hillary Clinton for example. So the basic premise of this article seems a bit off or unnecessary.
I do think the moderates, as others have noted, could learn something from Newsome, which is not to be a cowering weaklings about a president who his unpopular. There’s a better style to do it to try to win over Trump crossover voters, but even many of them will abandon him based on the national environment rather than specific appeals.
The bigger issue is that moderate thinkers have made their project of the Trump years internecine fighting rather than constructively coalition building and fighting back against Trump. At a minimum, Newsome shows a better path to at least pushing back against Trump than anything offered from the so-called moderate vanguard.
I think it’s totally fair to point out that Newsom appears to be a suboptimal candidate - he is!. But I’m not sure at this point in the election cycle his candidacy is all that relevant. But I do think his willingness to publicly highlight Trump‘s. Weaknesses show some value.
Everyone on this substack does not realize the dems lost because of inflation, not staffers, as was true across the world with incumbents. That aside, the noxious politics of internecine fighting isdumb, particularly at this time. Everyone thinks they are rebuilding the DLC, and they are not. You dont need to embrace the left, but endlessly bickering with the left is equally a waste.
In real politics, you are trying to convince voters, not fighting with think tankers.
I think there was a direct line between Biden’s coalition politics and inflation!!!
Neither high inflation nor a 2024 loss was inevitable, and if we want to do better in the future we have to argue for it now, instead of nodding along while the left wing of the party yells “no human is illegal on stolen land”
You think globalized inflation from the pandemic was an artifact of Joe Biden and his staffers? The 7 percent inflation in the US was from the ARP? Also, fyi immigration is deflationary just as an accounting matter. Anyway, best of luck with your day.
There was a huge geostrategic tradeoff regarding Chinese tarriffs and EVs. Im firmly on Biden's side for those, and Im really not sure how much they would have reduced inflation. It is not clear to me that EV purchase prices have had a material effect on inflation given EV purchases are not a huge component of US car buyers interest.
The IRA was slightly deflationary. CHIPS and Sciences was 288B, which is not very big.
It is just not clear to me that these are huge dents, and in some cases relevant (ie IRA). It appears you have very different view of China, and thats fine. But other than Trump's rank corruption, most of the US government is on my side regarding China; it is not isolated to Biden.
I think your point that most of the election result was driven by exogenous factors is consistent with Matt’s meta points. Nonetheless, Kamala was a remarkably bad candidate and I would not put it past the DNC to want to run her again. We should not let the larger exogenous factors at play mask Kamala’s own unsuitability. Or, for that matter, let Newsom’s pugilistic successes to date mask his underlying weakness.
This is correct. Newsom is an untalented player who is playing to win. Much of the rest of the party is hardly playing at all and when they are they are playing not to lose. What we need is someone talented and also playing to win.
I often think to myself, "There's no way JD Vance is a viable presidential candidate." But there's always this follow on thought, "Well... Unless the Dems nominate Newsom or Kamala again." And then I think, "And if there's one thing you can count on the Dems for it's rallying around the worst possible option."
I had lunch with a Hillary-Biden-Trump voter last week and in his circles, almost all of the Trump voters said they would never vote for Vance - unless he was running against Newsom.
There’s a lot of *saying* they would never do something except for one named exception - but that’s often because they just haven’t imagined the alternatives, and they don’t realize that all those alternatives would seem to them just like that one named exception, once they start having the vividness of reality.
As a homless Regan Republican, I am hoping for a Democrat I can vote for. Someone who will not build on Trump’s expansive view of Presidential power. Someone who will follow the constitution, not engage in money in exchange for a pardon. Who will gleefully return power to the Article I branch.
I won’t be looking for the Progressive version of Trump. Taking golden shares in companies for example. I am hoping for someone who spent their four years removing Trump’s name, image, or likeness from every tree Trump has peed on.
Do I expect Democrat priorities, of course, but I am mostly looking for character to remove the stain of Trumpism, MAGA, the corruption. If, however, the 40 or 50 Democrats who feel they should be President and we have a repeat of hands raised to give illegal immigrants health care, I’ll know that, like last election, I’ll have to write in someone of character.
Interesting , how about a Republican who has some bona fide with law and order? Like a Romney or Haley? Either one is preferable to Newsome in my book.
I agree with the strategic point: a California guy with a bad track record is probably not a very good bet. Shapiro or someone like that would probably do better.
However, in all of these articles about the importance of policy vs “vibes,” I find myself disagreeing somewhat with the analysis, which tends to be “announced issue positions are the most important factor” rather than something weaker, like “policy views are underrated.” (I also think the scare quotes around vibes misleadingly suggest something irrational about vibes being important. There are rational reasons why people might care if someone seems like a capable leader.)
Suppose we were considering whether a good fastball or good off-speed stuff is more important for pitching, and we need to decide who’s going to pitch game 1 of the World Series. I view Slow Boring’s analysis more or less as
1. Statistically, pitchers who throw harder fastballs tend to do better.
2. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Trump all had great fastballs.
3. What, you think off-speed stuff is important in the majors? Then how does Susan Collins, who doesn’t have a curveball at all, do so well in AAA?
4. Newsom throws about as hard as Kamala, who got clobbered, so they’re identical for all intents and purposes.
5. Shapiro’s been throwing pretty hard, so let’s go with him.
Again, sound strategy but dodgy analysis. The issue, obviously, is that Hall of Famers Clinton and Obama also had great curveballs! And Kamala has a bad fastball and a disastrous curveball. Newsom might have a good slider, who knows?
None of this suggests that goof off-speed stuff is broadly unimportant in a high stakes scenario. One could imagine a similar analysis showing that all else equal, pitchers with good off-speed stuff do better, and how does a knuckleballer do well if fastball speed is important? Furthermore, there are tons of guys who throw 95 and aren’t very good anyway.
(Also, I didn’t find the analysis of “Newsom’s vibes are bad” to be terribly convincing.)
I take Matt's analysis to be something to the effect that if you're picking who to start in Game One of the World Series you should probably pick the guy with a long track record of producing a good ERA (or pick your more advanced stat of choice), particularly if that good ERA holds up against high-quality opposition.
Anyone remember how the Bernouts tried to tar and feather Klobuchar as an abusive boss because she yelled at an incompetent staffer?
I am sad she and Pete weren’t the ones competing for the nomination. It came down to the two oldest guys (Mr. I will hand the GOP a trifecta again and Biden.)
Klobuchar had that reputation before the primary. I would definitely hear whispering around that in DC among staffers years before the primary, specifically not to work for her.
My guess is that it's absolutely true she's a mean boss. Anyone who's worked for lawyers has worked for people like this. It's an extremely common archetype in the profession.
I also think it isn't that big of a deal and she still would have been a good president in spite of this. Not that it's a positive trait - a president is a manager and it definitely has an adverse effect on morale. But there are also some people (I'm not one of them) who aren't bothered by this style of management that much, at least as long as the manager is also competent. This is especially true when you're playing at the highest levels. Type-A professionals tend to be more capable of dealing with this than the recent undergrads you find in congressional staffer positions, who are more sensitive.
I also don't think either staffers or voters would have cared as much about it if it was ten years earlier. Probably this reflects a healthy trend in society, but it's also kind of a liability when you're trying to win in a competitive team sport like politics.
I think it would be unfortunate if we sacrificed the opportunity to have her beat Trump because of this; it's definitely not important enough for that. But I don't think that if she had been a boss everyone liked that she would have gotten any additional primary votes.
I’m not plugged in to the folkways of the Hill these days, but I used to be, and it’s true that some members have reputations for being tough to work for. In my experience—not claiming this is representative of anything or scientific—women comprised a disproportionate share of such reputations.
I did wonder at the time whether this might be attributable to different expectations (women might be presumed to be “nicer”) or something about what it took to be successful in politics.
A woman boss can be great *if all the employees reporting to her are men*, but otherwise it’s very common to get lots of mean girls drama. It’s very rare for men to be involved in that kind of thing, though I’ve seen it with gay men sometimes.
Okay, but is Kloubachar actually an evil woman boss. The claim is that she has that reputation, more so than other women in similar positions of power.
Whether or not she is a hard person to work for is a factual question that can't be ruled out by calling it a longstanding trope. Mixing together a factual question and a moral evaluation of people who ask the question is a good way of sabotaging your brain.
Now, I don't care so much about this in terms of revealing some deep thing about her soul or something, but I do care in terms of whether it will keep her from running a competent campaign and a competent administration. Lots of effective leaders are famously hard people to work for, notably both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk had/have reputations as very unpleasant bosses who also manage to be very effective. ISTR that Rahm Emanuel had a similar reputation, and it's not clear that this has prevented him being pretty effective. So it seems like the really relevant question is whether she's managed to be effective because of/despite her management style, and whether that style will be able to scale up to being president. (Where she can probably find a chief of staff to play hatchet man for her so she can put on a nicer face with most of her people.)
I know several people who worked on the hill for reps, senators and Governor's from my home state including at least one who worked for about five different such people. There was a particular person within that group of legislators who had a particular reputation. Not "don't work for them" but "be prepared with thick skin".
I don’t put much credence in the opinions of downwardly mobile trust fundies from Ivies and little Ivies. Especially to ones who pushed Democratic politicians to endorse unpalatable everything bagel progressive nonsense.
Very few people can afford to work in politics in DC. It’s expensive and pay is low. It results in only the privileged getting in and contributes to the weird dysfunction in the Democratic Party.
Whatever you think of the broader group of congressional staffers, there is *something* that explains why they have this complaint about one person but not most others.
I am probably being too unfair. I just have a bug on my shoulder about how Bernie’s staff maligned Hillary, Pete, Amy, and Warren with so many specious attacks.
Glad this post is strategically unpaywalled, as is Jerusalem Demsas’ excellent post at The Argument (https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/how-the-opioid-crisis-turned-places). People with political connections, please share widely. Democrats/people who want competent government, please accept reality.
Demsas’ article really does summarize how the politics of permissiveness undermines public support for Democrats. Free stuff from the government does resolve the declines in quality of life caused by crime and social disorder.
It’s easy to support harm reduction strategies and leniency towards drug dealing when one is wealthy enough to be insulate from the consequences of such policies.
100%. And it seems as if some people actually romanticize disorder as some kind of mark of urban authenticity. I have very strong preferences for urbanism and I don’t understand this at all.
I was the resident square in my NYC city planning graduate program (class of 2015). I thought this sentiment was peculiar to very young New Yorkers and constantly pointed out that anyone who lived in the late 20th century Detroit area (as I did growing up) would consider this folly of the highest order.
As I've noted here before, to my chagrin, they "won." I can hardly believe it (along with many other characteristics of the world today).
I grew up outside of Philly and while it wasn't as bad as Detroit, they had a similar problem with urban decay and crime. And the people who were most angry about urban decay and crime were low income people because it affected them the most. I still hear people dismiss decay and crime as a "rich white person obsession" and I always want to ask them if they'd like to talk to some low income black people from West Philadelphia. It's a lot easier to find that stuff cool and edgy if you live in a nice safe suburb.
Writing from the frozen midwest hinterlands to flog my favorite dead horse. Republicans often have a more clear eyed view of their candidates than Democrats, at least in these parts. Most of my neighbors are conservative and they agree with the thesis that Harris and Newsom are incredibly similar. So similar that they could be twins. Democrats are more convinced that there are significant differences between the two because of their obvious physical differences, which I personally find insane.
The Medicaid for undocumented immigrants (are we still saying this? I have no idea - has illegal aliens come back into favor?) policy is something that will sink ships all over the rust belt. You want to win swing states? You find a way to moderate on that position, along with the gender identity policies.
Yes and they selected these terrible candidates. Democratic voters in 2020 saw Biden as the most electable candidate. In 2021, the Virginia GOP selected the human embodiment of a sweater vest, Glenn Youngkin, because an open primary probably would've yielded a super MAGA candidate.
The Wikipedia results for the 2022 election have results by congressional district. I haven’t compared all the numbers, but it says there are two districts that Democrats won but Newsom lost and none that went the other way. That suggests he’s not as good at winning Republican votes as some of the candidates in marginal districts, but I would need more detailed analysis of each district to know if there’s a broad pattern or just two over-performers.
For 2028, Democrats need to run someone who will throw the circa-2020 Democratic party under the bus.
But Gavin has his fingerprints all over that version of the party. There is no way he can distance himself from it.
I live in SF, voted Democratic my entire life, and after seeing what became of the state by 2022, I was absolutely Republican-curious.
People should remember that for 2024, Trump didn't run against Kamala's 2024 platform. He ran against her _history_.
If Gavin becomes the guy, the airwaves will be full of reminders of everything that pushed me two notches to the right.
Democrats, you can do better.
At the state level, California Republicans have the problem of squashing any Republican-curiosity in lifelong Democrats frustrated with Democratic excesses in state and local politics.
California Republicans really don’t try to appeal to the center of California politics, and seem to be more interested in leading national Republicans and the conservative movement at large instead. You read any materials from CA Republicans, and I’m like “oh yeah I remember why I don’t vote for these people”.
Yeah, but for presidential purposes, no one is suggesting a California Republican.
As to your point, we have a similar problem with a lot of Democrats in TX. In many areas, including most of the local races I vote in, the election is decided in the Republican primary. Democrats often put forward nutty people who just want to tell you how bad Trump/Abbott are without demonstrating their own ability to do the jobs they're running for. I see it as a broad problem with non-competitive districts, which is why I appreciate Matt's preference for a strong and competitive opposition to his preferred party.
I live in MN and feel the same way about the MNGOP. They blow winnable races by nominating weak candidates with no crossover appeal. Kendall Qualls is leading the pact for the GOP strawpoll and is someone who never won an election before.
Meanwhile, Phil Scott in Vermont runs as an anti-MAGA Republican and promotes other anti-MAGA Republicans and wins 69% of the vote in the bluest state in the union.
It's funny that the West Wing ended with a Texas D vs California R presidential election.
Neither of those were crazy ideas at the time. Schwarzenegger was governor and Texas had a democratic governor in the '90s. Which is a long time ago now but wasn't then.
It's also a reminder that freezing the curent moment as an eternal truth is an enormous error. 90s to now is not really "long time ago" and shows it living experience major shifts occuring even in "bases" (which I think is one of the most self-fooling concepts amongst the political obsessed, giving a sense of permance to political configurations that are not perm at all although not equally rapidly shifting)
Ann Richards left office over 30 years ago. That’s not a long time in geology but it is in politics.
That said, a Democrat winning statewide office in Texas isn’t a crazy idea even now. They come close!
To be fair, that's an good strategy for both parties! People who can win elections in one-party states while running as members of the downtrodden opposition seem like the perfect people to try to win over swing voters.
Matt Santos was just a member of congress. Never won statewide (until the presidential election)
Yeah, TV politics are hilarious.
I think most California Republican party figures are secretly disappointed that California didn't join the south during the Civil War. That is how backward-looking they are.
The kooks are mostly the more rural areas, yes. Orange County, not so much.
State of Jefferson people?
Obvious exception: Arnold Schwarzenegger -- but he came to the Governorship through the recall process, which works very differently from the partisan primaries.
Another exception is Kevin Faulconer, former mayor of San Diego.
“Watch as the last of his species, Republicanus moderatus, Vermont Phil, forlornly paces his enclosure, pausing occasionally to lick at a Creemee.”
There is really no option anymore for people who might not like the current crop of Democrats but aren’t willing to give any ground to MAGA. A captive audience is not really an enthusiastic one. And when we get the MAGA and hardline Republicans not willing to work with Democrats on just about anything (and I blame Newt Gingrich for starting this) you get this gridlocked and ineffectual Congress, Murc’s Law (only Democrats have agency) and people longing for a strongman type to fix things.
Same with Oregon
Gavin is this years Jeb bush. He will crash and burn immediately, likely before the first primary. Homelessness and the insane fraud wrapped up with it while the problems are getting worse, prioritizing drug using degenerates over working families. Spending 10B per year on health care for illegal immigrants, CAHSR being a money bonfire, housing prices pushing everyone out of state. Lefties and dems in uniparty states have narratives around these topics that make them either good or at least less salient for their audience but this is cat nip for moderate swing voters that decide national elections. Tons of content to drive engagement on social media and keep his conversation on defense in a position of weakness.
No. Trump ran against a shadow puppet that he largely created. And got away with it everywhere that Kamala did not amp up a giant counter narrative.
People honest to god thought there would be 20+ million murderers and rapists that would get deported. They thought trans athletes were trouncing women everywhere. The amount of trust they have for Republican messaging is through the roof. And fed on paranoia.
To overcome the attack, Kamala needed to amp up a counter-narrative, "Sister Souljah"-style.
EXAMPLE: As a gay male, I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there’s nothing “Queer” about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to other guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud to be — as an individual, simply and uniquely — myself. But I never signed up to “smash cisheteropatriarchy” in the name of some Brave New World.
That's not just about Fox-stoked "paranoia" -- let alone, "hate"!
(Newsom tried separating himself from the "queerer-than -thou" contingent with his remarks about women's sports -- and was quickly accused of "throwing 'trans folk' under the bus.")
Josh Shapiro is working very hard to throw circa-2020 Democrats under the bus right now.
"Throw the previous iteration of the party under the bus" is what the party did in the wake of Carter's loss. How'd that work out?
"Say we have always been terrible, but are good now, we swear!" is such an insane, exactly-backwards political strategy that it can only come from the crippled post-2016 liberal brain.
Dear liberals: Swing voters are not going to care about your party's "sins" in 2024, or your request for absolution from them. That isn't how it works. That isn't how any of this works. Just say you are better and deserve to win. This is way easier than everybody makes it out to be.
If you look online, it seems like our fundamental problem, being a party made up of self-loathing people with a loser's attitude, is not improving. But I think that's very much limited to a narrow set of online intellectuals and the actual mass of the party is deeply sick of this attitude, and will no longer echo it in pursuit of a "serious," self-flattering reputation, the way they have in the past. Most Democratic voters have realized this kind of constant self-flagellation is useless at best, and almost certainly counterproductive.
"Throw the previous iteration of the party under the bus" is what the party did in the wake of Carter's loss. How'd that work out?
Also what Obama did when he ran against both HRC and Clinton's legacy (e.g., his anti-NAFTA attacks carried the Midwest). We won 60 seats in the Senate. I'll take a supermajority.
I strongly disagree that Obama was "running against Clinton's legacy." I also disagree that "HRC" had anything to do with it, except insofar as using her as a punching bag may be part of the reason Obama got so many weird rural voters. Their primary consisted of about 95% agreement, but he made Hillary cry once, which probably netted him millions of votes.
(Can we get Hillary to run in and throw the 2028 primary? After 2008 and 2016 [both Sanders and Trump] it's pretty clear that shitting on her for inchoate reasons is pretty much the single most popular political move in the country.)
Here's what you do if your party had a policy in the past people don't like: Don't mention it. Mention the policy you have now. If somebody brings up your old position, reiterate your new one and change the subject.
Guys, Republicans are RIGHT OVER THERE doing a better job of this, why does it not occur to us to emulate them in absolutely any way whatsoever?
Trump ran against Nurse Ratched, and he won. Do we really want to double down on that -- or forget that it happened?
There's lesson here -- and it's not necessarily what Miles thinks it is!
A lot could happen between now and 2028, but it seems currently the most likely outcome is that Gavin Newsom turns what should be a blowout against JD Vance in to a squeaker. I still would give him 60/40 odds to win that race but it should be 90/10.
I think that is right odds wise.
Since Trump was re-elected the Dem overperformance on average has been 13 points. In that environment if it holds, Newsom would win easily in 2028. He knows he is vulnerable on the culture war front and taking steps to correct that with his podcast etc. His liberal bona fides probably give him room to moderate during the election as well.
And that's all fine until it turns in to a normal R vs D race and the R side gets to point to all the stuff about California that is unpopular.
Again, I think 60/40 odds says Newsom wins that, it's just that a Newsom vs Vance race is two below average candidates and either side could choose to deviate and exploit arbitrage, but I don't think they will.
Truly what we need is a Democrat who calls themselves a “Democrat politician” and refers to their “Democrat policies”.
We should go ahead and just nominate MTG and win with a 67% popular vote blowout :D
Hey, at this point I have a more positive opinion about her than basically any Republican
One wonders exactly what Fetterman's insanity would net him in the general...
Maybe what seems insane to Substack liberals seems perfectly normal to the median voter.
Fetterman will be attacked for his stroke and health issues ruthlessly by the GOP though. I am not sure he is in good enough shape to survive a Presidential primary.
Hell has to freeze over before I would be curious about this version of the GOP but in 2028, I expect there will be one or more high-profile independent candidacies that will credibly threaten Dems if they nominate a "Biden is sharp as a tack" surrogate from 2024.
Here's the thing - Newsome is not the front runner because he's liberal, he's moderate, left-wing or whatever - he's the front runner because his comms team and himself is openly antagonistic to Trump in public and on social media.
Obviously, it helps he's the Governor from California.
But, there was space open for a moderate to be an effective moderate on most actual policy (though probably not as moderate as Matt wants) but also to be continually and totally oppositional to Trump on the obvious stuff that helps the median voter remember they heavily dislike Trump without actually go super left-wing or progressive. Like, you didn't have to embrace the AOC left to be the more popular side of the all the really dumb stuff Trump did - like, for example, did one Democratic politician actually point out the Gulf of America thing was weird and dumb continually (and turned out to be unpopular) - of course not, because every moderate waits for polling before they say anything more controversial than 'puppies and rainbows are cool.'
Gallego is actually doing a good job at this right now but well, I don't think he has a real chance to be a national name for non-policy reasons.
Instead, the moderates - reps, governors, Senators all turtled up, decided to actively work with Trump, or took more pleasure in getting involved with intercine internal party conflicts.
It's actually the moderates fault for being so scared of an old guy winning by 1.5 points after the worst inflation of a generation to actually effectively oppose him. So, Newsom is the front runner right now...and it's the moderate fault.
I'll put it this way - who is willing to be the Harry Reid of 2028 and happily and openly say incredibly mean things about the Republicans (except this time, unlike Romney, they might be true).
Newsom has definitely played his cards the best during the Trump presidency, but I really don’t put much stock into him being the front runner at this point.
We’ve got about 2 years until the beginning of the Democratic primary. That’s a ton of time for more candidates of all ideological stripes to define themselves, and there’s a long standing history in presidential primaries of early front runners flaming out.
Almost exactly what I was about to post.
My only twist: I think in polling, he is kind of a stand-in for "Actively opposed to Trump and MAGA but having no part of the leftists." So I like to see his numbers high, without for a moment thinking this means he will definitely be the nominee."
Yes. Everyone will make it very clear that they oppose Trump when they start campaigning, and I don't think Newsom will get that many points for doing it before it was cool. The hipster era is over. Also, with the exceptions of Whitmer and Polis, I can't think of a single person whose name has been mentioned as a presidential candidate who could be accused of "turtling up" or "actively working with Trump." That's just a vague impression that people have formed about "The Democrats" as a blob, not about specific individuals. The problem that actual potential candidates face right now is just that they haven't been *noticed* the way Newsom has, but there is plenty of time to fix that. There isn't going to be a lot of material to use against most of these people if you want to run "you accommodated Trump" attack ads on them in 2027 and 2028. Is that going to land on say Mark Kelly? Come on.
"The problem that actual potential candidates face right now is just that they haven't been *noticed* the way Newsom has, but there is plenty of time to fix that."
"Getting noticed" because people like what you say, then being able to follow up with concrete performances that deliver on what people "noticed" in the first place is a core skill in this game. While there is a long time before the '28 primary season, it's not clear how learnable this skill is.
While that's obviously true, most of these people haven't tried very hard to get noticed yet, probably because they realize the election is two years away (and also, some of them have state general elections they have to win in the interim). Maybe some of these folks won't be able to get attention even when they're in South Carolina actively running, but there are going to be a lot of candidates and I seriously doubt that all of them are going to be bad at it.
Possibly, but this is one of those "You know it when when you see it" things, and I have not seen much of it from other potential candidates...yet. But with every election cycle the media environment becomes more and more porous, presenting all these potential candidates with ever more numerous opportunities to show "it". Is it really "too early"? With DOGE and Epstein and now blood in the streets of Minneapolis?
This sounds to me like the curse of the political junkie - which we all are, I'm not criticizing. (1) Yes it's too early. (2) Don't expect to have seen "it" when the reason you haven't seen "it" is that you've barely seen anything at all, one way or the other. (3) Don't trust your own judgment about recognizing "it" since you are not normal.
I also think if Trump starts to fade mentally in 2027 and his 40% cult finally breaks, openly shitting on Trump won't be that impressive. He's (most likely) not running in 2028.
Obama didn't win because he said "Fuck Bush" louder than everybody else.
Obama won because the whole party caved on Iraq and Obama took the opposite side. The current moment feels *exactly* like this, except replace "Iraq" with "failing to be confrontational towards Trump".
But Obama was on the record opposed to the war from the beginning as opposed to HRC. None of these people are supporters of Trump, Newsom is just shitposting the loudest, which is fine, but there's no actual issue these people are on opposite sides of.
What Democrats want is real action to impede Trump's lawlessness. Newsom delivered that through CA's gerrymandering plan. Being verbally opposed to Trump isn't that useful if you can't or won't take political risks to deliver on it.
Ok yeah the gerrymandering thing is tangible.
Yeah idk what 2028 is going to look like. I do think at a certain point, Trump bashing will outlive its usefulness because he's not going to be running in 2028.
It will be “fuck Vance” as much as “fuck Trump.” To that end i think we should nominate Trae Crowder
Yeah whoever it is will have to shift their energy. If Trump in 2028 looks like Biden in 2024, Trump is going to be old news.
We have to admit he is a lion!
I don’t think Newsom is from Detroit.
Is Dan Campbell a Trump supporter? That'd be a good Dem spokesperson in Michigan (provided he wins a Super Bowl before 2028 of course).
While I agree with MY that substantive policy positions are more important than many people like to acknowledge, the ability to campaign effectively across all the venues the modern media environment provides might be under-rated. I think this is what people are responding to: Newsom is just very good at being a visible, confrontational, verbally fluent politician. In races determined by 1-5 percentage points, that's a meaningful advantage.
Sure I just think that Pete is just as good at speaking if not better and has fewer toxic past positions
PB lacks the cool masculine vibe of Newsom. Swing voters are all about the vibes.
Speaking of track records, Buttigieg's is very limited but what we have on him is just about as negative as anyone's in the country - probably worse than either Harris' or Newsom's. He ran statewide one time, way back in 2010, and he got crushed by 25 points, by Richard Mourdock no less. Yes Indiana is a red state, and yes it was a bad cycle for Dems, but in the same cycle the Dem at the top of the ticket (US Sen) lost by only 15 points. Sometimes in politics as in sports, there are guys who pass the eye test but for whatever reason can't produce.
Very good at speaking (and undoubtedly smarter than Newsom or any other candidate likely to enter the race), but not as good at the rest of it. He is supremely "appointable" to almost any office of state I can imagine, and I have absolute confidence that he can excel at whatever he is called upon to do in that kind of role.
I expected our metro system in Seattle to be like Tokyo after 4 years of Pete and he was basically worthless in that regard
The problem there was your expectations, not his performance.
Does that mean they’re going to have to tranquilizer him to get him out from the spot where he’s stuck between two apartment buildings?
A lion or a lyin?
Yes.
Yeah, it seems to me Matt is bewildered that Newsom is the current front-runner when the fundamentals clearly speak against him, as Matt laid out. But the reason he's the front-runner is that a) he is handsome and "president-looking" and b) he's a savvy PR guy. At this point in the race, vibes matter more than policy.
Obviously, you can't just copy looks. But you can copy PR strategy. And every single step he took to bolster his national image is a step moderates could've taken as well.
As much as Newsom is not the optimal candidate for 2028, moderates should really take a hard look at what he's doing right.
The other thing Newsom has going for him, just as Harris did before, is that he doesn't fall into either the "moderate" or "leftist" wings of the party. The leftists think they're too moderate, but not as bad as Amy Klobuchar (or perhaps Josh Shapiro). The moderates think they're too progressive, but not as bad as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
And of course, because polarization is fractal, nobody who is strongly opinionated thinks a candidate like Newsom or Harris is actually good. Biden had the same problem which is why few in the party were willing to speak up on his behalf.
But, here's the thing. This "Klobuchar->Newsom->AOC" hierarchy of supposed progressiveness pretty much 0% exists for regular voters. Are we forgetting that the top second choice of Bernie voters in 2020 was Biden, and the top second choice of Biden voters was Bernie?
The way we view the world has little to do with reality, online people!
I mean, in 2020, that’s all there was by the time it got to my state
Yeah, me too. But I'm talking about polling when there was still a full field. People just liked those two guys best, because of their personalities and track records (and white hair?), not their ideologies.
I mean after Pocahontas Warren was a goner
This column was classic Matt, in a good way. Here he describes a core tragedy of democracy:
“The way you become mayor of San Francisco and then rise to statewide office in California is by calibrating your appeal to hardcore partisan Democrats, so of course you feel that his vibes are impeccable. A politician whose vibes are attuned to maximizing crossover appeal and winning swing votes probably will not vibe that hard with you, unless you personally are a swing voter.”
Small-d democracy confronts citizens with the reality that large swathes of their neighbors see life differently than they do. And normal, psychologically healthy people hate that and reject it as false.
As someone else mentioned, Jerusalem’s column this morning pairs nicely with Matt’s. She elaborates on the point I made above:
“Time and again, political professionals assume that their frame for understanding an issue is the primary one, stubbornly sticking to an analysis of root causes, only to find out voters are speaking a completely different language.”
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/how-the-opioid-crisis-turned-places
How is that (rejecting the reality that your neighbors don’t all see things the same way you do) “psychologically healthy”? It may be normal these days, but it ain’t healthy.
What I meant is simply that it is part of normal psychology. I will let others look up the research on this point.
To win a US presidential election, you have to win over a number of voters who voted for Trump last time but are feeling disaffected and looking for something better. Yelling louder about how awful Trump is has been tried and found ineffective in that project.
So a good general-election candidate would be very persuasive at talking about how he or she could positively offer something better (think Obama 2008 or Clinton 1992).
You can attack Trump on the specific issues on which a lot of voters are disaffected. But you need to do it in a way that doesn't alienate those same voters. If you're attacking Trump's immigration policies for being brutal and hamfisted and inefficient (lots of flashy shows of force, but not so many employers getting fined), that might work. If you're attacking his immigration policies because "ningun ser humano es ilegal" and immigration enforcement is racist, then you're probably not going to win over many of his voters.
Yes, I completely agree.
"Yelling louder about how awful Trump is has been tried and found ineffective in that project."
It's pretty much how Biden won in 2020, save the "yelling" part.
We write off strategies WAY too quickly in this party, always looking for an excuse to run back into the strong, comforting, and deeply obsolete arms of Carville-ism.
The problem in 2024 was that voters are a bunch of goldfish, so the argument didn't work.
I 100% agree, but if the podcast bros and influencers decide they like the vibe of Gavin over Vance, I don't think that can be discounted either. Politics in America seems so vibes based the last decade. Obviously, anything can happen in 2 years though, and I do think Gavin is a good communicator and debator which helps. His 2 main issues are the homeless issues in CA, and cost of living. Since he hasn't done enough to address that, I think he would probably have a 50% chance of losing the 2028 election. Too many swing and conservative voters hate Cali , even though they provide 40% of the fruits and veggies to the rest of the nation and is big enough to be it's own nation.
Carville-ism is smart politics.
As for 2020, sometimes weak candidates benefit from change elections. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Or hey, think Reagan 1980 but for Democrats. ;-)
Sure . . . in 2028. In 2025 it was a useful way of breaking through all the noise and setting apart from all the actors who were bending the knee to Trump.
It didn't work in 2024 because Trump had been gone for four years. It will work in 2028 (regardless of who actually runs) because Trump will have spent the last four years making everyone miserable.
I agree that that's the likeliest scenario. I don't think it's so guaranteed that Democrats should nominate a candidate with Newsom- or Harris-style weaknesses.
I have never liked Newsom and I think it's significant (and maybe depressing) that he was able to scoot so quickly to the top of the field, just by not being a wet blanket. I think it's even more depressing that Matt doesn't seem to fully understand *why* Newsom has had such success.
The major political question of our era is: can you be politically moderate without turning into a sniveling snot-pile of weakness in the face of Trump. The theoretical answer is that *of course* you can, positions should be uncorrelated to political courage. The depressing thing (for moderates) is that so far, moderation and political timidity seem to be going hand in hand. Centrists should be worried about this.
This as an exceedingly long-winded, torturous way of saying “I like Newsom because he’s mean to Trump on TV and Twitter.” Call it the Jasmine Crockett Argument. And color me unimpressed.
Whereas MY's piece today is an exceedingly long-winded, tortuous way of saying "I don't like Newsom because he's not Republican enough and I want Democratic policy preferences to be more Republican." We get it already...
I hope that you are not labeling mainstream Democratic thought in areas not associate with university campuses and not the likes of SF and NYC "more Republican."
I am not. I am labeling MY thought that is to the right of mainstream democratic thought and associated with Republicans.
Did you pay money to post this?
Yes - didn't you?
Yeah because I like the content. Paying to read something that a) I hate and b) I mischaracterize isn’t comprehensible to me.
a) I don't "hate" much of it; b) I never "mischaracterize", I only correct.
Whats your preferred solution for when the dems are on the wrong side of an issue?
"Wrong side" meaning "unpopular" or meaning "incorrect"? If the position is correct and unpopular, the imperative is to change its "popularity", which results in more people having the correct view. If the position is incorrect, then the imperative is to change the party's position to the correct view, whether or not that view aligns with popularity. Then repeat step one...
Are the dems on the wrong side of the issue? The issue being that trump is bad?
Trump is certainly bad, but how is that related to the "republican lite" comment?
I don't understand what issue Newsom and the Dems are on the wrong side of here
The main thing is that everyone's going to be mean to Trump once they're actually running. Like, Talarico is saying plenty of mean stuff about Trump. This is an advantage that will be very easy to take away from Newsom when the time comes. At that point the choice won't be "guy I know is mean to Trump because he keeps popping up when I scroll" vs. "guy I haven't seen on my feed." The choice will be "guy who was mean to Trump at the debate last night" vs. "guy who stood out for being especially mean to Trump 18 months ago but doesn't seem that much meaner today, and should I be concerned about his electability?"
In Crockett's case, she'll probably try to stand out by not just being normal-mean to Trump but by being extra extra mean. But there are diminishing returns to that, and I don't think Newsom will do the same thing, nor should he.
I like Newsom because he's mean to Trump *and* he paired that with actual executive action. I don't particularly love the man, but he's somehow outperforming every single Democrat in Congress.
Newsom also has cultivated a certain kind of "Cool & masculine, but Democrat" vibe that seems to work. In an era of vibes, he is a teriffic counter to the dorky & creepy Vance or similarly unlikable DeSantis.
My only "vibes" critique is that he comes across a little too intellectual for your average dumb-as-a-rock low-info swing voter, who thinks Trump is an excellent deal-maker, etc. But it could be that Newsom is just appealing to Democrats and political junkies now. But he will definately need to dumb it down a little in 2028, using Bill Clinton as a model for the General Election.
Also, I have been very satisfied with Newsom’s record on vetoing the obviously stupid bills that get through the CA legislature.
The picture of him slightly towering over and pointing a finger at Trump was great, and the fact is he comes off like a leader. Gavin likes winning elections and seeing Trump and his sycophants lose.
The winning combo might violate every notion of "geographic balance" -- Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego!
Having both President & Vice President be from the same state is real problem constitutionally - if the election is close enough to depend on AZ, then the VP would be a Republican.
Touché!
Constitutionally impermissible, but politically (regardless of geography) still a winning combo! :-)
Don't forget about big Pritz!
You mean the guy who says, "Cut off your 'pritzker,' and poof -- you're a woman"?
Fuggedaboudit (though I'd love to see him compete in a beauty contest against Chris Christie)! ;-)
Your lips to the DNC’s ears, I like those guys
I wrote a more measured and long response, but the short version is you can't beat something with nothing, and no alternative was offered here. You need to be able to speak extemperaneously to become president - everyone from Clinton to Trump could do that, and so can Newsom.
Seriously. To write hundreds of words on Newsom and miss the reason he's a frontrunner, you have to be completely checked out of US politics in 2025/2026. Newsom isn't leading because of his positions or because he's a great guy; he's leading because he's paired a good PR strategy with actual executive actions. It's a strategy that's available to other candidates as well, but they seem to be afraid of it.
"Instead, the moderates - reps, governors, Senators all turtled up, decided to actively work with Trump, or took more pleasure in getting involved with intercine internal party conflicts."
This is an awful description of reality. You appear to want to pretend every moderate Democrat is acting like John Fetterman and, for that matter, like what John Fetterman has done has actually done anything to help Trump rather than making a big display of heterodoxy for his constituents.
My head is spinning at the idea that any faction of the Democratic party is not harshly critical of Trump.
My personal guess, based on nothing more than living in PA, is that Fetterman has probably taken his schtick too far and will lose a primary... but I have my doubts that it would harm him a lick in the general. And he's done almost nothing of substance except vote party-line Dem.
I'll vote for a solid candidate in the primary to dethrone him but if he's the general election candidate I will just start referring to him as the Rust Belt Whisperer and grudgingly pull the lever for his incoherent ridiculousness.
I think the model of "pretty much a regular Dem, except he'll say something that pisses off the left really bad, on the reg" is an underused paradigm in more conservative areas. But yeah - with the current attitude of the party's voters it's hard to imagine that getting through a primary.
One thing Fetterman has going against him is the legacy of Sinema, who voted very differently (less reliably) than him, but similarly built up popularity among her state's Republicans - popularity that was ultimately meaningless, because GOP voters wanted to go out and get a real Republican once her term was up. She put herself in no-man's land.
Fetterman has a very different style and PA is a very different state so maybe he'll pull it out? Probably not though - he's kind of a f---up. But there's an interesting inversion in that, while Sinema kept presenting as extremely cosmopolitan while voting with Republicans, Fetterman is continuing to be... Fetterman, while sticking with his caucus. The vibes may matter more than the votes.
Yea, he's basically "moderating" in the *precise opposite* manner to Sinema.
She has an almost-impressive knack for finding the least popular middle-of-the-road positions in existence and advocating for them.
Writing strongly-worded letters is not that useful. The key is pairing your criticism with action that actually impedes Trump. The Democrats in Congress have had multiple opportunities to do this, and in many cases they've fumbled them.
Some of it is name recognition, too.
If we're lucky, the next election won't be against Trump. Is a demonstrated record in Trump bashing what the electorate will be asking for in 2028?
I don't think it's a stretch to assume that the Republican candidate for 2028 will be a Trump MAGA acolyte
Maybe. I think it's genuinely unclear who will be the Republican frontrunner. Vance might be, but he's about as charismatic as Hillary Clinton, so it's not clear it will work out for him. Rubio might be--he's clearly taking on a bunch of major roles and comes off very much as the adult in the MAGA room right now, but it would be easy (and fatal) for him to somehow end up upstaging Trump and getting cast out of the movement. DeSantis et al haven't forgotten their ambitions, either.
If we get to 2028 and Trump/MAGA are still relatively popular, the world looks really different from getting to 2028 and Trump's policies have become pretty unpopular, he looks old and kinda lost, and his coalition has fallen into squabbling over who will be his successor while the mad king chooses a new favorite courtier every week.
I don't see how Rubio could beat Vance in a GOP primary -- coming "off very much as the adult in the MAGA room right now" is pretty clearly not a winning strategy with GOP primary voters in recent years.
No it's pretty clearly going to be Vance unless Trump doesn't want it to be
Polymarket gives about a 50% probability for Vance. So at least according to the set of bettors, he is the frontrunner, but not at all a lock. If you think he's a lock, there's some money to be made....
I don’t bet because I don’t think Kalshi should be legal
Little early to say that.
"Among self-identified Republican voters, 51% chose Vice President JD Vance as their preferred nominee for president in 2028, followed by Donald Trump Jr. (8%), Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (6%), former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley (5%), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio (5%)." https://youthpoll.yale.edu/fall-2025-results
Bashing Trump and the Republicans is excellent politics in 2026. Politicians will need a different tack in 2028 and I bet they're smart enough to know that.
I mean the post is about how indulging in is it fun to see someone bully Trump is a bad candidate selection criteria.
Wait, why do you think Gallego isn't eligible for being a national name? I feel like of all the national Democrats talking nowadays, he talks the best.
I unironically think Gallego, or Amy Klobuchar, would be good candidates. The trouble is they are not social-media-soundbite, glib-clap-back friendly. It’s too bad that what it takes to be a good *candidate* is not the same as what it takes to be a good *President*. Obama was able to thread that needle, but he was and is an exceptional individual.
Klobuchar gave me obvious HR lady vibes before we even had a name for that. Her attack on Buttigieg in the 2020 primary reminded me of every mediocre white female management type I’d encountered in my career. Completely turned me off of her as a candidate.
No way non-left Gen Z men will vote for her.
To quote Abraham Lincoln on US Grant: "He fights..."
So I’ll start by noting that this is a persuasive piece, I agree with it, and I hope Newsom is not the nominee for electability reasons.
That said, feels like it isn’t engaging with the strongest argument of “Newsom isn’t Kamala” supporters—which definitely is not “Newsom is a white man”. It is “Newsom is not a weirdo empty suit who can’t complete a sentence and seems like either a dope or a space alien, and instead seems sharp, charismatic, quick on his feet, and like he actually is trying to win”. Would have been worthwhile to engage more with that beyond a passing reference to vibes. Article instead over indexes on knocking down an identity strawman.
I don’t get this. Kamala Harris is a career prosecutor. It was her job to be sharp, charismatic, quick on her feet, and trying to win. You could say she failed, but it’s silly to say she isn’t sharp and quick on her feet.
*gestures broadly at all the evidence available to my lying eyes*
I mean maybe that is a fair expectation based on her resume but it just isn’t the case. You can just look and see she is not these things.
How she managed to be as successful as she. Was despite this, I couldn’t tell you though I have met plenty of states attorneys who are not amazing trial lawyers.
Interesting and related anecdote: I actually once had occasion to work across from states AGs from a large sample of these United States and I found the ones from flyover country were almost uniformly more decent people and better lawyers (left and right) than the ones from larger more important states (TX, MA, CA, NY). I think the latter are more political animals (in a sound bite and back room dealing kind of way) than the former.
Look, I've seen footage of her taking people apart in oral cross-examination. Were my eyes lying to me then? I think it is much more likely that other considerations prevented her from taking the path you wanted her to take, not that she lacks the ability.
I think what is fair to say about Harris is that she was good in the debate (which requires being quick on your feet) but she was pretty bad in media interviews (which also require being quick on your feet). So her deficit wasn't the ability to think on your feet per se, but there was something else she was missing that made her bad in interviews, and that was a real problem.
I think her problem with interviews was overthinking her answers. She was also really good with regular people.
Then don't say she can't think on her feet. There was a broad claim that she lacked the capacity. That's clearly not true.
I was explicitly not agreeing with that person. I was saying something else.
A case is ultimately about a narrow set of facts. Politics is much broader, and involves history, data, values, vibes, etc. She never showed any ability to respond competently outside of a narrow band.
And even then, you also need to do it well - Hillary was actually very knowledgeable, but Bill was just as well informed but could speak well on top. So was Obama
Good presidents have exceptional skills in many directions.
This is an incredible statement. "She never showed any ability to respond competently outside of a narrow band." I understand that people are upset that Trump won, but these categorical statements are silly. By all accounts, she is an effective Senator who mastered a wide variety of political issues. You're making it sound like she had trouble getting out of ninth grade.
I listened to several of her interviews at the time, and never found anything as good as Newsom on Ezra's interview. And that, to be clear, is not a high bar! Obama responded with much more obvious competence and wisdom then Newsom in these contexts. And so did Hillary in her wonky way
You're welcome to make some specific statement about some specifically insightful thing that she said that convinced you.
But surely her inability to answer town hall and debate and even basic interview questions in a coherent way are far more relevant to her poor electoral performance.
The Hill has a Center Left bias rating. I searched Kamala Harris Debate Answers and here's the first response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65NJiBh7Cro
EDIT: As I've been thinking about this ... I wonder if she's like the last remaining public speaker that doesn't take betablockers. I mean shoot, I take them and I'm not even on camera.
I imagine cross examination in a trial is just a different skillset than being an engaging public speaker, or giving a really compelling and interesting interview, or whatever else.
Perhaps she was an able lawyer. She was not an able speaker as Vice President. She was awful. To put a finer point on it, she spoke like a stupid person.
Don't take my word for it. Instead, try to watch this part of her interview with Lester Holt: https://youtu.be/omrMRP15q9M?si=0TpAIoKtw1YDz6hX&t=233. She's struggling to answer a question that anyone could've anticipated.
Or consider her opening remarks at an event about expanding broadband access: https://www.c-span.org/video/?518860-1/vice-president-harris-remarks-affordable-broadband-access.
Or look at how the left made light of her difficulties with public speaking, long before she was the nominee: https://youtu.be/72vUngNA9RM.
Or see how terribly she handled Stephen Colbert's softball question about why she was backing Biden after criticizing him in the primaries: https://x.com/talexander2001/status/1294704675116154887.
As a politician, Kamala Harris was grossly inarticulate. Her multiple embarrassing failures on the public stage should be disqualifying.
I think almost all her worst "moments" (as in, the stuff she said that made her look like she didn't have the goods) were when talking to journalists. She seemed fine at debates and she was great at questioning witnesses in the Senate, but maybe that was because those people were mostly other politicians or CEOs or normal people and not journalists. Something of a fatal flaw for a national politician, to be sure, but also somewhat understandable.
On the one hand, she was sharp and quick on her feet. On the other hand, she was inhibited by a fear of failure and offending people. Those things netted out into her appearing like an empty suit.
In order to be a successful politician, it helps to be a bit of a narcissist / sociopath. The sociopathy makes you immune to criticism and gives you confidence and therefore charisma. The narcissism helps you believe that you are destined to do great things and solve the world's problems and get people to love you, which helps you govern effectively. Gavin Newsom is much farther along on that spectrum than Kamala Harris was.
I think “she actually is an empty suit” is a more parsimonious explanation than “she’s just too pure for this world” but in the end I suppose it doesn’t really matter. What matters is how she comes off.
I'm not disagreeing with your argument, she's a very intelligent empty suit. But words like weirdo, dope, and space alien are kind of mean, and I just don't think there's any need to be mean about it. That's just what happens when you take a normal person and put them on camera, they act weird and uncomfortable. Only weirdo space aliens actually look normal on camera. But our society needs those people to be leaders.
On second thought, I think that Kamala wound up in the uncanny valley of authenticity. Too real to fake it, but too fake to appear real. And maybe that's why words like alien feel fitting.
I always call it her authentic inauthenticity, which I find funny/charming but maybe others don't. Like I enjoy watching a person who seems fundamentally nice blatantly say what she thinks other people want to hear in order to be empowered to do constructive things.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to translate “she was inhibited by a fear of failure and offending people” as “she’s just too pure for this world”.
Immediately followed by “unlike her all her narcissistic/sociopathic peers”, which informs my read.
I don’t think it’s clear that this person is calling narcissism or sociopathy an impurity in the context of electoral politics. It does seem accurate to say Harris is substantially less narcissistic than Newsom or Trump, or Bill Clinton, and probably Hillary Clinton.
Part of her problem might be the constraint she was under. She decided not to throw Biden under the bus, and decided not to completely back off from her previous left leaning positions, that does not leave her much room for maneuver.
She isn't sharp and quick on her feet.
Being good in a courtroom is different than being a good political speaker. Harris was someone who was afraid to go on Joe Rogan and seemed out of place in most unscripted political events.
She was following bad advice by not giving enough interviews or ever holding press conferences. I'm sure it was her advisers. But Biden did the same thing before 2020. Kamala is smart, but she avoided the press like the plague. And this is in contrast to the guy who is willing to talk to the press everyday.
I watched her absolutely flub a debate question when someone asked her if she was in favor of unlimited abortion. Just say no, pick a line in the sand (20 weeks or whatever) and move on.
It's a policy you're obviously going to be asked about and she couldn't deliver a clear answer. Unforgivable!
I watched Obama flub the first debate with Romney in Denver. Did you consider that unforgivable?
Doesn't this illustrate Matt's point? She was "quick on her feet" with answers that had worked for her winning in California. But in a new environment that was substantively different than her entire previous political career, she clearly struggled to adapt.
I agree with Matt. We need some reason to believe that Gavin Newsom will actually outperform the generic Democratic ballot here, and we don't have that right now.
I agree that Newsom seems fairly sharp. I would also add that another thing he has going for him is he comes across as a little bit of an a-hole, which is a good thing for a Dem. One of the weaknesses that Dems have with low-info voters is the vague impression that they're too nice, too soft-hearted, too willing to get pushed over by criminals or the Ayatollah or whoever. Newsom seems like he doesn't feel bad about being a jerk, which will help allay these voters' fears.
But many of the Dems who've been mentioned as potential presidential candidates also seem sharp, and not like space aliens. Newsom may stand out from *the Dems you see on cable news between election cycles talking about congressional minutiae* but will he stand out so much from the pack of actual presidential candidates? I tend to doubt it.
There's different types of a-hole and I worry that Newsome seems too much like a very California elite-specific type of a-hole. In a different timeline, he seems like the type of guy who could be a Hollywood producer, which isn't necessarily someone who could connect with swing voters in Wisconsin.
Maybe. Even so, I think it's better to come across as some kind of a-hole than none at all.
Exactly this... It's clear Americans are attracted to some version of swag or attitude and would rather and leader be strong and wrong vs weak and right. It's all vibes, you can't discount charisma unfortunately
One interesting thing about Newsom is that he is strongly dyslexic and has trouble reading, so he has to go over and over briefing books. His style of leadership will be very different from Obama's for example, and he will do a lot of talking as opposed to a lot of reading.
Yes, I think I read somewhere that his dyslexia has actually helped him become a strong debater (which he is) because it has forced him to memorize a lot of things. Maybe it would help him in media interviews too, idk.
He is definitely different from Obama, but even more different from Bill Clinton who often wouldn't read his briefing books at all!
Harris graduated from law school, passed the bar exam, and was a successful prosecutor. That proves above average verbal ability. It does not prove that she is in the top 0.1% of rhetorical ability. When chowing a presidential nominee, it is generally best to chose someone in the top 0.1% of rhetorical ability or better yet the top 0.01% (eg Obama, Clinton). Super elite rhetorical ability is useful, Newsome might have it, but i’m his positions suck.
Newsom has a liability that Kamala Harris didn’t: he is governor of California, not a US Senator. A Senator represents California on the national stage, but a governor is actually responsible for governing the state.
And California is one of the least affordable states in the country, at a time when affordability is a salient issue. It has one of the deepest housing shortages in the country. It is among the top states for most expensive child care, gasoline, and groceries. California has about an eighth of the population of the US, but a third of the homeless population.
People don’t usually blame AGs or Senators for affordability issues in a state. They do blame governors.
I think these are great points for why Newsom won't make it out of a Democratic primary. Bashing Trump won't protect him from other candidates attacking his governing record. It's not like this is all his fault, he's done some good things in office, but there's just no policy constituency that is excited by what he's done.
I do feel like “talking like a regular person” has helped Newsom get a lot farther than I expected, and it’s surprising how few Democrats have this skill.
This was, at least occasionally, a secret Biden weapon as well. But it's annoyingly uncommon in the rest of the party.
It's definitely rarer than it ought to be, but the majority of the Dems who've been mentioned as potential presidential candidates are fine at this. They just haven't gotten the spotlight yet.
Oh yeah, agreed. Lots of Dems can talk like normal people. Just not as many as you might expect, or hope.
Will Democrats attack him for the reasons moderate voters will have concerns about him? He’s the governor of a very liberal state. He’s culturally woke. What are his big accomplishments in CA? What position has he ever lead on?
If talking shit about Trump is a qualification for President then 1/2 of America should run.
I'm trying to think what Newsom's policy positions actually are. Not that I follow him much but my impression is he kind of blows with the political winds like Biden and Harris.
That's one of his greatest strengths.
The main thing his primary competitors will attack him on is electability, and it will be a pretty powerful attack.
"I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some."
Though the guy who wrote that was, by all accounts, an even more divisive figure than Newsom. (I mean seriously, half of Acts is him getting run out of town or fleeing before a mob lynches him.)
Yes. Contrary to a lot of what I've been reading, I think the #1 thing Dem priority voters will care about in 2028 isn't "how out front were you in opposing Trump" but rather, electability. And there's a lot of strong material to use in electability arguments against Newsom. Primary voters will be very worried about nominating someone who can't win, and if you can make that case, then you will make a lot of headway.
Which moderate's policy gets a majority excited by what he's done?
This is exactly right. A significant proportion of GOP attack ads are going to focus on California as a whole, and in particular their housing, drug, and homelessness issues — with the idea that, if you vote for Newsom, the country will become more like California.
I don’t think that’s popular with voters.
Terrific point. "Governor, why is your state on pace to lose four seats in Congress?" is a type of question I'd be asking him if I was a Republican.
The only real rejoinder is "because we started building 40 years before you and it gets harder as you go."
It won't work, but it's largely true.
Honestly, I think it's more a problem of when they *stopped* building.
Right, but they’re all on the same cycle. Texas looks like it is precisely repeating the cycle of California policies, with a few decades of fast growth powered in part by oil and aerospace, followed by a gradual rise in nimbyism and anti-immigrant sentiment, which will lead to unaffordability a few decades down the line.
They've gotten a bit further on sheer availability of land but the flip side of that is that all their major metros are starting to snarl into unlivable messes, and grafting transit onto them will be murderously expensive, very unpopular, and constantly hobbled by the state government.
I think his actual response has been pretty effective. He 1) anchors to CA having the 5th largest GDP if it were a country and then 2) throws CA's 4,500 (!!) local governments under the bus and 3) says they need to do more (e.g., the CEQA reforms) and highlights some greenshoots although still early days. It's a genuinely tough hand to be dealt.
He has been governor for almost 8 years, and has not been very effective. Yes, he has vetoed some of the worst legislation, and yes, he muscled two pro-housing bills through in 2025. But California remains a poorly governed state. Housing costs are not under control and are driving people out of the state. Most likely we will lose 4 congressional seats after the 2030 Census. Private sector job growth has been weak. While some CEQA exceptions have been made, it continues to wreak havoc. For example, for the second time, a San Diego residential and sports arena redevelopment explicitly approved by referendum was recently thrown out by the courts in a decision that expands the potential scope for CEQA litigation. The quality of the state government administration remains poor. To cite a very specific example, a bill passed in 2019 to change licensing requirements for medical lab scientists(CA has unique requirements that exceed those of every other state), mandated to go into effect in 2022, completed it's administrative process in 2024, was supposed to be in effect by January 1, 2026, and is not yet in effect. You can't expect a governor to be superman and change the entire political culture of a state, but there is so much work needed, and he's done little.
If I am his opponent I will also bring up the high speed rail: “ you spend how may billions already? How many miles have you finished?”
"We're running for president in 2028, not 2068!"
(You know that on the merits there's much of this I agree with.)
This isn't true...? California is one of the youngest built places in the world.
I'm not saying it doesn't get harder, but they have gone and made it purposely difficult.
You think "it gets harder as you go" was purely a statement of physical reality?
No, but its a choice! There are plenty of places (e.g. Tokyo) that don't make that choice.
It's a choice, but it wasn't until quite recently that the full set of trade-offs, and thus the downsides of democracy and participatory governance at the local level having control over land use, became apparent.
I have to point out a lot of the numbers showing miserable numbers for California and New York and gangbusters growth for Texas and Florida are based on change from the 2020 census to the 2025 American Community Survey... the 2020 Census had a huge undercount for Texas and Florida, so a decent chunk (about half) of the projected change from 20 -> 25 is just that miscount in 2020 going away. Of course it does not excuse the bad policies in California, but the magnitude of what's happened so far this decade is overstated... Texas and Florida are probably already underrepresented by 1-2 seats but got "screwed" by the census.
The ACS is also notoriously horrible in high-density urban areas, so a bunch of people are going to be very surprised by what the results look like in 2030.
This is a pretty simplistic reading of what he's actually tried to do. Abundance is very unpopular with leftists and he's all in on it. Tons of state overriding localities to force new housing. He's curbed AI restrictions and vowed to veto the billionaire's tax. He dramatically downscaled high speed rail because it's a complete boondoggle. These are not popular positions and it would be easy for a CA politician to go the other way.
And prop 50 was a big win for him. I think most people were surprised by the winning margin
To be fair, I overall like both Kamala and Newsom. So my comment isn’t about my perceived sense of him. Newsom was handed a mess in California, and overall I like a lot of what he’s doing. But arguing, “the reason CA is a mess is that previous Democrats made it such and I had to pick up the pieces” isn’t a strong argument for why swing voters should vote for a Democrat.
Yes, california is just not a well governed state.
And the democrats are clearly to blame for that.
And Newsom rightly shares in that blame
Are there any well-governed states at this point?
UT and CO are doing well but most of that is down to the availability of land to sustain growth that allows for lower taxes. TX and FL have tax+service fee burdens not dissimilar to middling-high tax blue states and a bunch of huge problems their governments aren't solving.
PA and WI are handling the "we're done growing the suburbs" phase of middle-age better than NY, IL, NJ, or MD, which are complete clusterfucks, but it's still kind of a boring mediocrity.
MN is reasonably well-governed and with better value for services than MA, which also at least provides good services for high taxes.
AL, MS, AR, WV, many Plains states... also clusterfucks, just of the opposite sort from the aforementioned blue clusterfucks...
I guess that depends on how if you are grading on a curve or not.
But I would argue that both TX and FL are much better governed than CA, IL, NY etc
If for no other reason than the ease of building.
You also seeing many red states like MI, FL, LA really tackle education. TX maybe as well if they actually adopt a statewide curriculum.
I think being from California is a big liability. It's a safely democratic, looked down upon by most of the nation for being too liberal, and is THE example of a Democratic state with failed administration at multiple levels. The abundance Dems don't look highly on California. So Newsome will be blamed by the left for being too moderate and establishment and the Republicans will see him as the embodiment of their woke nemesis.
I am 98.5% with Matt on this one. While I get the early interest in Newsom from the sense of he is the guy that seems like he's leading the Trump opposition, he's only playing that on TV.
My 1.5% separation comes from the fact that Newsom seems much willing to take risks than Harris ever was and engage different media outlets without a bunch of ground rules. Her 2020 campaign was a disaster from the jump, and ONLY ever popular with insiders and journalists.
Newsom would definitely agree to Joe Rogan's podcast, and would probably make for good tv while he was there.
Joe Rogan basically lied to Harris’s staff and slow walked, a lied to make it impossible to schedule an interview. It was basically a false equal opportunity for both candidates to present. Rogan wanted to avoid being seen as providing Trump what could be framed as a campaign contribution.
Evidence for this? Everything I've seen suggests Harris didn't want to physically travel to his studio, a ludicrous objection.
The root of the issue was Harris or Harris' staff hard-capped the interview at 45 minutes to max 1 hour. That's why it dragged on until the 12th hour. Meanwhile Trump did 3+ hours with no notes, no question prep, no stenographer in the room, no final edit request and generated 35m direct views plus probably 100m clips. Everyone associated with her campaign should be banned from future Dem campaigns for the best of the party.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/kamala-harris-finally-reveals-her-211330022.html
It was near the end of the campaign. She didn’t want to take a huge amount of time off to stop campaigning in a swing state. Rogan originally agreed to come to Detroit, reneged, lied about his schedule when Harris was in Texas.
The Harris campaign played nice with Rogan during the whole affair, but he was only willing to make an effort to accommodate one candidate.
That is Harris’ side of the story, it’s not proof.
I guess you trust the judgement and credibility of the person who endorsed Trump and provided him a materially valuable campaign contribution more.
Oh, and I definitely have some hair growth supplements you might want to purchase.
I've never heard this. Can you point to a source? My feeling was that she just didn't want to. Given the shortened nature of her campaign, I get it, but it was in retrospect, not a savvy move.
I could be wrong.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/kamala-harris-finally-reveals-her-211330022.html
Thanks!
Did Rogan ever comment on this stuff?
I'm a bit skeptical of Harris' claims here, and I kind-of assume everyone will lie/omit/misremember to make themselves look as good as possible, but I don't really know anything.
Agreed, if Newsom finds himself down by 3 points in October, he'll shake something up so he wins by 1 or loses by 10. Harris wouldn't do this.
Unfortunately, I do think he'll be down 3 in October when Beshear or Shapiro would be up.
By October, you're not moving results by 4 or 7 points with a change in comms strategy.
I'll grant your broader point that Newsome seems more willing to be ... nimble about repositioning himself than Harris was, and this is a tangible difference in their capability as a candidate. But to MY's point, he's never actually shown he can do this in a D vs. R showdown where it's mattered, and all of his baggage is basically the same as Harris's. At best, the argument for Newsome is, "He's similar to Harris ideologically but maybe a better political operator." Not very compelling!
This is a great point. In the margin, the Newsom of today appears to be a stronger candidate than the Kamala of 2024, if for no other reason than the fact that he’s willing to take risks. Notably this dos not mean he is the global optimum or would have won, etc. etc.
True, but I think that’s worth much more than 1.5%, more like 10-15%
I think the biggest similarity between Harris and Newsom isn’t that they’re from California but rather that neither of them really knows what they stand for.
While true, Newsom has a better idea of what he stands for than Harris.
Well at least he’s been working harder at appearing more moderate well ahead of the election.
People’s last impressions of Harris going into 2024 were her left wing pivots during the 2020 election and her association with the Biden administration, which also pivoted left compared to expectations.
right clearly Newsom knows that he should *appear* more moderate if he wants to become president but (to me, at least) this reads 100% as "I want to be president therefore I'm making this move, and if I thought being more leftwing would make me more likely to be president, I'd do that too."
Like, what are Newsom's actual beliefs?
"Actual beliefs" are extremely overrated. The politicians who get criticized the most for lacking them tend to be our most successful. Newsom is very far down my list of preferred candidates, but that particular argument is if anything a point in his favor.
Before her campaign, she was put in the position as VP of discouraging illegal immigration (e.g. the "do not come" meme) but unfortunately I have a feeling people still associated that with incompetence despite it being a positive pivot.
Good point. She tried to pivot there, after in 2020 having said she’d support decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But yeah, I don’t think her handling of immigration, even with the pivot, won her any points with swing voters.
Wait, what? Harris has a bit of the baseline idea that democrats stand for expansion of social welfare and safeguarding democracy. But Newsom has never given any indication of standing for anything!
The bar is the floor lmao
But does not standing for anything actually make it more difficult to win? I mean, the current President is Donald J Trump
>But there is just no evidence from the broader set of races that should lead us to believe that voters have a strong preference for white male Democrats over other kinds of Democrats.
This is an odd take. The preference doesn't have to be strong in order to be decisive. And this 2018 article says, "Experimental research has long indicated that minority candidates are perceived as being more liberal than Whites." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1532673X18759642
If so, then nominating a white candidate is electorally equivalent to nominating a more centrist candidate, as Matt has advocated.
Edit: A similar study re gender. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1111/0022-3816.00019
This seems correct, and the only way to rescue that quote from today's article would be to argue about what counts as a "strong preference".
Still, as long as Democrats conceive of this as balancing a ticket's demographics rather than reducing the perceived ideological distance between the party and the public, they misunderstand how this helps and why it's significant.
>as long as Democrats conceive of this as balancing a ticket's demographics rather than reducing the perceived ideological distance between the party and the public, they misunderstand how this helps and why it's significant.
Tim Walz being put up as VP in a "hey you morons like folksy white guys so here's one for you" move is practically identical to the GOP putting up Sarah Palin as the VP in 2008 to try to win over Hillary voters.
Here’s the thing: it matters WHO the folksy white guy, or woman, or etc. is on the ticket, not just that someone fitting the demographic is on the ticket. I remember discussing this with a friend (political centrist) back in 2008. She said that if McCain had put someone like Olympia Snowe on as VP he *might well* have gotten some Hillary voters! That’s because Snowe, unlike Palin, was perceived as a moderate and a serious person with a brain. Palin was just an empty suit.
I recall that Tim Walz *was* well liked on the 2024 ticket - this was before all the Minnesota Feeding Our Future fraud hit the fan, but I still don’t see Walz as a *bad* pick the way Palin was.
I think Tim Walz was seen as an ok pick when announced but seen as disastrous after the debate and his campaigning (and now that the Minnesota Feeding Our Future fraud has come out only reinforces this). As an outsider this would be understandable but it's also come out that he was bad for precisely the reasons he told her he would be bad and she still chose him.
Well, it is possible that balancing demographics helps, too. And, a high turnout of African American voters certainly helps Democrats.
It's also possible that balancing hurts!
I suspect Americans like to see balanced demographics but dislike efforts to deliberate engineer that balance. Plus there's a risk that Goodhart's law takes over and we end up deep in the uncanny valley, with a simulacrum of diversity instead of the thing they really wanted.
I think we are talking about different things. I don't know that many voters value diverse tickets per se, be they real or a simulacram. But soecific groups of voters might be more likely to vote for a ticket if they see their group represented on it. I am pretty sure, for example, that Harris lost less ground among African American women compared to Biden than she did among other groups.
Agreed. I would only add that the decision is complicated by opportunity cost, availability, demographic salience and other factors.
The result you cite shows that voters' perceptions about a candidates ideological positioning is effected by their demographic characteristics. That's not the same as indicating a "strong preference".
There's a sort of bank shot you can do where you say, "Voters who want to sneak in a more liberal candidate should choose a white male because less informed voters will think that they're less liberal than they are, making them more desirable for a subset of voters", but doing that moves way beyond the literature.
>That's not the same as indicating a "strong preference"
? I didn't claim that it did. The very first thing I said was, "The preference doesn't have to be strong in order to be decisive. "
The point is it doesn't indicate preference at all, it indicates perception of the candidate's ideology, independent of the ideological preferences of the person doing the perceiving.
As I said, "If so, then nominating a white candidate is electorally equivalent to nominating a more centrist candidate, as Matt has advocated."
The literature shows "equivalence" in terms of ideological perceptions, but you appear to mean the candidates are equivalently "preferable". Those aren't the same thing!
"electorally equivalent" is not a claim about the literature. It is an inference from the literature.
> Obviously the sample of presidential elections is tiny
This sentiment should be applied more widely. And to the extent samples exist more of them ought to be used for analysis. Restricting to just the last race is odd.
Let's look at the electoral records of Biden, Hillary Clinton, Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore (at least).
Biden wins one competitive race in 1972. One sided races ever since. Ends up becoming president.
Clinton wins two one sided races.
Obama wins one senate race and a few state level races. All of them one sided, never a serious GOP opponent. Wins two terms.
Kerry has one very tough race in 1996. The rest pretty one sided. Falls short.
Gores toughest race was his first primary. Landslides ever since. Falls agonizingly short.
We are pattern seeking creatures. But really there is no pattern here.
The most uncomfortable part of that pattern is probably charisma matters more than policy wonks would like.
And the macro political climate. Just about any Democrat would have won in 2008, so the Dem primary really was the decisive race. Similar vibes in 2020. The most salient question in 2028 is probably who’s good at winning dem primaries. I don’t want it to be so, but that’s the way the game is played.
Yeah the context matters. Ike wasn't particularly charismatic (though very competent)but that wasn't what the public needed as the country's cruise control button was turned on. JFK had the rare gift of both, which is the sweet spot. Nixon, Ford, Carter didn't really have that sparkle which probably why Reagan was such a breath of fresh air for many.
It's important to note that Biden was seen by the electorate as moderate (at least until he became president). Doubly so because of how far left his primary field was.
Agree with this except maybe Clinton’s first race, which was weird because of Perot. Clinton only got 42% of the popular vote, so Bush may have won if Perot wasn’t a factor.
People say this, but polling of Perot voters shows that their second choice in that election was pretty evenly split between Bush and Clinton. If Perot had not run, it likely would not have significantly impacted the race.
IIRC Bush would have needed about 5 point advantage on Perot voters - definitely a steep hill. I was a Perot voter and thinking back I don’t remember who my second choice was/would have been.
Was talking about HRC!
WJC is the gold standard for the case made in this post. Overperformance in race after race after race. Five Governor election victories in Arkansas. When comes such another.
You’re right, my apologies, I didn’t read your comment closely enough.
This is true. If you have no track record of winning in competitive general election environments, then we can't say you *can't* do it at the presidential level. The most we can say is that *we don't know* if you can do it. Some of the people who've never proven their ability to do this still have that ability and it will come out if they try.
That said, if you *do* have a strong track record of winning in competitive general election environments, then you probably *can* do it at the presidential level. So if you have options you should pick someone who has that track record.
This is logical. But does it hold up empirically?
In the 2016 cycle ... Jim Webb?
In the 2008 cycle that would have been John Edwards or Bill Richardson
In the 2004 cycle ... Bob Graham?
These are counterfactuals, but I have a hard time believing they would have done better.
The thing is there are so many other factors, and yes if you hold all of them constant and it was just down to who had crossover voter appeal then sure. But when do you get that?
I didn't say that the guy with the track record would necessarily do better. I said that he probably has the ability to do well, while the guy with no track record is an unknown quantity. Sometimes you get lucky and the guy with no track record turns out to be great.
If you're looking at a guy like Obama and the "eye test" is telling you that he looks like an A+ talent, then it might make sense to take a risk on him. But if you have a choice of many candidates who all seem pretty good, and some of them have a good track record and others don't, then you should absolutely take track record into account. Of course your analysis should be multifactorial, but that's true of everything in life.
It's true that Dems from competitive environments tend not to get chosen in the primaries and thus tend not to get elected president. That strikes me as more revealing of a problem with the primaries than a problem with those candidates. We have a system of choosing nominees that selects based on the wrong criteria.
The even more fundamental problem is that "electability" is circular reasoning.
I like candidate A, but I think my neighbor likes candidate B so I should pick B. A kind of Keynesian Beauty Contest.
And all the "electable" theories (median voter theory, demograpic theory) have flaws. Turnout is not constant. The demographics of the electorate are constantly changing. And past patterns might not hold.
If everyone is playing the electability game are you have to solve for the equilibrium, what do you do?
Eh, I think this is an overstatement. It's true that electability is difficult to pin down and that reasonable people can disagree on it in good faith. But that isn't the same thing as being "circular."
I do feel like there's a meaningful way to think about electability, but probably it's not always used coherently.
I might choose to support a candidate whose positions I like less because I think he is more likely to win the election. If it's 1992, perhaps I'd rather have a more liberal candidate than Bill Clinton in principle, but Clinton is probably going to do better at actually winning an election than anyone else I can run, so I might swallow my objections and vote for him in the primary.
I think trying to boil this down to race/gender/etc. identity tags is usually kinda dumb, but also, frankly, most political reporting is kinda dumb.
Right, though you have to allow of every other voter doing that. You like Paul Tsongas or Jerry Brown but want to "settle" on WJC, the WJC voter might think Tom Harkin is more electable, the Harkin voter thinks mmaybe Tsongas is more electable, and on and on. And that's just one round. But the Harkin voter also knows that a WJC voter is thinking of electability and has to take that into account. The process goes on for ever and you do not get an equilibrium. In practice some external "focal points" are created to help voters converge. Endorsements, large donors, etc. But you get a random result. Not a result that reveals "true preferences".
Joe Biden also lost several primary contests in different decades for President.
Obama did lose an election to Bobby Rush. That was clearly educational for him.
Does anyone in professional politics think Gavin Newsom is the best candidate? I work in professional politics, and I don’t know anyone who thinks this. It is unquestionably true that Newsom has done a very good job of being the opposition to Trump in a very public way. And for that, I am thankful.
Frontrunner status at this point is meaningless. And professionally I have no sense that the party is in anyway seeking to coronate Newsome like they did Hillary Clinton for example. So the basic premise of this article seems a bit off or unnecessary.
I do think the moderates, as others have noted, could learn something from Newsome, which is not to be a cowering weaklings about a president who his unpopular. There’s a better style to do it to try to win over Trump crossover voters, but even many of them will abandon him based on the national environment rather than specific appeals.
The bigger issue is that moderate thinkers have made their project of the Trump years internecine fighting rather than constructively coalition building and fighting back against Trump. At a minimum, Newsome shows a better path to at least pushing back against Trump than anything offered from the so-called moderate vanguard.
I think it’s totally fair to point out that Newsom appears to be a suboptimal candidate - he is!. But I’m not sure at this point in the election cycle his candidacy is all that relevant. But I do think his willingness to publicly highlight Trump‘s. Weaknesses show some value.
Moderates prioritizing building a coalition with the left wing of the party just gets you the Biden admin
Everyone on this substack does not realize the dems lost because of inflation, not staffers, as was true across the world with incumbents. That aside, the noxious politics of internecine fighting isdumb, particularly at this time. Everyone thinks they are rebuilding the DLC, and they are not. You dont need to embrace the left, but endlessly bickering with the left is equally a waste.
In real politics, you are trying to convince voters, not fighting with think tankers.
I think there was a direct line between Biden’s coalition politics and inflation!!!
Neither high inflation nor a 2024 loss was inevitable, and if we want to do better in the future we have to argue for it now, instead of nodding along while the left wing of the party yells “no human is illegal on stolen land”
You think globalized inflation from the pandemic was an artifact of Joe Biden and his staffers? The 7 percent inflation in the US was from the ARP? Also, fyi immigration is deflationary just as an accounting matter. Anyway, best of luck with your day.
He had a couple easy plays to bring down inflation which he just did not do:
1. Zero out all Trump-era tariffs.
2. Flood the US market with Chinese EVs.
3. Actually spend less. Maybe not pass CHIPS + IRA at all.
4. Not do ARPA's $350B to state + local
5. Don't forgive any student loans.
There was a huge geostrategic tradeoff regarding Chinese tarriffs and EVs. Im firmly on Biden's side for those, and Im really not sure how much they would have reduced inflation. It is not clear to me that EV purchase prices have had a material effect on inflation given EV purchases are not a huge component of US car buyers interest.
The IRA was slightly deflationary. CHIPS and Sciences was 288B, which is not very big.
It is just not clear to me that these are huge dents, and in some cases relevant (ie IRA). It appears you have very different view of China, and thats fine. But other than Trump's rank corruption, most of the US government is on my side regarding China; it is not isolated to Biden.
I think your point that most of the election result was driven by exogenous factors is consistent with Matt’s meta points. Nonetheless, Kamala was a remarkably bad candidate and I would not put it past the DNC to want to run her again. We should not let the larger exogenous factors at play mask Kamala’s own unsuitability. Or, for that matter, let Newsom’s pugilistic successes to date mask his underlying weakness.
This is correct. Newsom is an untalented player who is playing to win. Much of the rest of the party is hardly playing at all and when they are they are playing not to lose. What we need is someone talented and also playing to win.
I often think to myself, "There's no way JD Vance is a viable presidential candidate." But there's always this follow on thought, "Well... Unless the Dems nominate Newsom or Kamala again." And then I think, "And if there's one thing you can count on the Dems for it's rallying around the worst possible option."
And then I go and look for a drink.
although to be fair, Dem primary voters did select moderate Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign.
the problem is that Joe Biden forgot all that once elected.
I had lunch with a Hillary-Biden-Trump voter last week and in his circles, almost all of the Trump voters said they would never vote for Vance - unless he was running against Newsom.
There’s a lot of *saying* they would never do something except for one named exception - but that’s often because they just haven’t imagined the alternatives, and they don’t realize that all those alternatives would seem to them just like that one named exception, once they start having the vividness of reality.
Trust me, I'm under no illusion that they won't talk themselves into voting for Vance no matter the set of circumstances at that point in time.
As a homless Regan Republican, I am hoping for a Democrat I can vote for. Someone who will not build on Trump’s expansive view of Presidential power. Someone who will follow the constitution, not engage in money in exchange for a pardon. Who will gleefully return power to the Article I branch.
I won’t be looking for the Progressive version of Trump. Taking golden shares in companies for example. I am hoping for someone who spent their four years removing Trump’s name, image, or likeness from every tree Trump has peed on.
Do I expect Democrat priorities, of course, but I am mostly looking for character to remove the stain of Trumpism, MAGA, the corruption. If, however, the 40 or 50 Democrats who feel they should be President and we have a repeat of hands raised to give illegal immigrants health care, I’ll know that, like last election, I’ll have to write in someone of character.
In other words, you want a Democrat who will enact Republican policy while playing by rules Republicans don't follow.
I strongly suspect you will be "writing in someone of character" again, and I certainly hope so!
I don't see how you get
"In other words, you want a Democrat who will enact Republican policy while playing by rules Republicans don't follow."
from
"Do I expect Democrat priorities, of course"
Interesting , how about a Republican who has some bona fide with law and order? Like a Romney or Haley? Either one is preferable to Newsome in my book.
As a homeless Obamaite, I'll co-sign.
I agree with the strategic point: a California guy with a bad track record is probably not a very good bet. Shapiro or someone like that would probably do better.
However, in all of these articles about the importance of policy vs “vibes,” I find myself disagreeing somewhat with the analysis, which tends to be “announced issue positions are the most important factor” rather than something weaker, like “policy views are underrated.” (I also think the scare quotes around vibes misleadingly suggest something irrational about vibes being important. There are rational reasons why people might care if someone seems like a capable leader.)
Suppose we were considering whether a good fastball or good off-speed stuff is more important for pitching, and we need to decide who’s going to pitch game 1 of the World Series. I view Slow Boring’s analysis more or less as
1. Statistically, pitchers who throw harder fastballs tend to do better.
2. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Trump all had great fastballs.
3. What, you think off-speed stuff is important in the majors? Then how does Susan Collins, who doesn’t have a curveball at all, do so well in AAA?
4. Newsom throws about as hard as Kamala, who got clobbered, so they’re identical for all intents and purposes.
5. Shapiro’s been throwing pretty hard, so let’s go with him.
Again, sound strategy but dodgy analysis. The issue, obviously, is that Hall of Famers Clinton and Obama also had great curveballs! And Kamala has a bad fastball and a disastrous curveball. Newsom might have a good slider, who knows?
None of this suggests that goof off-speed stuff is broadly unimportant in a high stakes scenario. One could imagine a similar analysis showing that all else equal, pitchers with good off-speed stuff do better, and how does a knuckleballer do well if fastball speed is important? Furthermore, there are tons of guys who throw 95 and aren’t very good anyway.
(Also, I didn’t find the analysis of “Newsom’s vibes are bad” to be terribly convincing.)
I take Matt's analysis to be something to the effect that if you're picking who to start in Game One of the World Series you should probably pick the guy with a long track record of producing a good ERA (or pick your more advanced stat of choice), particularly if that good ERA holds up against high-quality opposition.
Anyone remember how the Bernouts tried to tar and feather Klobuchar as an abusive boss because she yelled at an incompetent staffer?
I am sad she and Pete weren’t the ones competing for the nomination. It came down to the two oldest guys (Mr. I will hand the GOP a trifecta again and Biden.)
Klobuchar had that reputation before the primary. I would definitely hear whispering around that in DC among staffers years before the primary, specifically not to work for her.
To be fair, many young people making little pay can also be annoyingly incompetent.
Every senator and representative has a staff of young people working for low pay. Not every one of them develops a reputation as a bad boss.
My guess is that it's absolutely true she's a mean boss. Anyone who's worked for lawyers has worked for people like this. It's an extremely common archetype in the profession.
I also think it isn't that big of a deal and she still would have been a good president in spite of this. Not that it's a positive trait - a president is a manager and it definitely has an adverse effect on morale. But there are also some people (I'm not one of them) who aren't bothered by this style of management that much, at least as long as the manager is also competent. This is especially true when you're playing at the highest levels. Type-A professionals tend to be more capable of dealing with this than the recent undergrads you find in congressional staffer positions, who are more sensitive.
I also don't think either staffers or voters would have cared as much about it if it was ten years earlier. Probably this reflects a healthy trend in society, but it's also kind of a liability when you're trying to win in a competitive team sport like politics.
I think it would be unfortunate if we sacrificed the opportunity to have her beat Trump because of this; it's definitely not important enough for that. But I don't think that if she had been a boss everyone liked that she would have gotten any additional primary votes.
The thing is I didn't hear the same thing about most other Democratic senators at the same time from friends who were job searching on the Hill.
I’m not plugged in to the folkways of the Hill these days, but I used to be, and it’s true that some members have reputations for being tough to work for. In my experience—not claiming this is representative of anything or scientific—women comprised a disproportionate share of such reputations.
I did wonder at the time whether this might be attributable to different expectations (women might be presumed to be “nicer”) or something about what it took to be successful in politics.
The whole “evil woman boss” thing is a long standing trope and has its origins in the expectation that women be nurturing and supportive.
A woman boss can be great *if all the employees reporting to her are men*, but otherwise it’s very common to get lots of mean girls drama. It’s very rare for men to be involved in that kind of thing, though I’ve seen it with gay men sometimes.
Okay, but is Kloubachar actually an evil woman boss. The claim is that she has that reputation, more so than other women in similar positions of power.
Whether or not she is a hard person to work for is a factual question that can't be ruled out by calling it a longstanding trope. Mixing together a factual question and a moral evaluation of people who ask the question is a good way of sabotaging your brain.
Now, I don't care so much about this in terms of revealing some deep thing about her soul or something, but I do care in terms of whether it will keep her from running a competent campaign and a competent administration. Lots of effective leaders are famously hard people to work for, notably both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk had/have reputations as very unpleasant bosses who also manage to be very effective. ISTR that Rahm Emanuel had a similar reputation, and it's not clear that this has prevented him being pretty effective. So it seems like the really relevant question is whether she's managed to be effective because of/despite her management style, and whether that style will be able to scale up to being president. (Where she can probably find a chief of staff to play hatchet man for her so she can put on a nicer face with most of her people.)
I know several people who worked on the hill for reps, senators and Governor's from my home state including at least one who worked for about five different such people. There was a particular person within that group of legislators who had a particular reputation. Not "don't work for them" but "be prepared with thick skin".
Was she in that group, or do you know?
I am not from Klobuchar's state. So no, I am referring to a different member of congress.
Amy Klobuchar famously is an abusive boss. I’m happy to put you on the phone with 3/4 of the United States Senate staffers if you must.
In 2019 I considered that a negative. After some additional exposure to the nature of dem staffers, it's a point in her favor.
I don’t put much credence in the opinions of downwardly mobile trust fundies from Ivies and little Ivies. Especially to ones who pushed Democratic politicians to endorse unpalatable everything bagel progressive nonsense.
So very weird comment. But best of luck in all endeavors
Very few people can afford to work in politics in DC. It’s expensive and pay is low. It results in only the privileged getting in and contributes to the weird dysfunction in the Democratic Party.
Sure. Happy to give you a dollar to go away. Thanks
And keep believing the “evil woman boss” trope pushed by a famously misogynistic candidate and his misogynistic staff.
Whatever you think of the broader group of congressional staffers, there is *something* that explains why they have this complaint about one person but not most others.
I am probably being too unfair. I just have a bug on my shoulder about how Bernie’s staff maligned Hillary, Pete, Amy, and Warren with so many specious attacks.
Yeah, it was definitely more than yelled at a staffer:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/us/politics/amy-klobuchar-staff.html
Glad this post is strategically unpaywalled, as is Jerusalem Demsas’ excellent post at The Argument (https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/how-the-opioid-crisis-turned-places). People with political connections, please share widely. Democrats/people who want competent government, please accept reality.
Demsas’ article really does summarize how the politics of permissiveness undermines public support for Democrats. Free stuff from the government does resolve the declines in quality of life caused by crime and social disorder.
It’s easy to support harm reduction strategies and leniency towards drug dealing when one is wealthy enough to be insulate from the consequences of such policies.
100%. And it seems as if some people actually romanticize disorder as some kind of mark of urban authenticity. I have very strong preferences for urbanism and I don’t understand this at all.
I have said this before.
Endearing urban grittiness is a pigeon bathing in a pothole. Unendearing grittiness is a person passed out in an opioid induced fugue state.
Yeah, and not being able to use the sidewalks or bus shelters because people are camped out there
I have heard several people romanticize urban decay and complain that people who dislike it are “squares” so we should just discount their opinions.
I was the resident square in my NYC city planning graduate program (class of 2015). I thought this sentiment was peculiar to very young New Yorkers and constantly pointed out that anyone who lived in the late 20th century Detroit area (as I did growing up) would consider this folly of the highest order.
As I've noted here before, to my chagrin, they "won." I can hardly believe it (along with many other characteristics of the world today).
I grew up outside of Philly and while it wasn't as bad as Detroit, they had a similar problem with urban decay and crime. And the people who were most angry about urban decay and crime were low income people because it affected them the most. I still hear people dismiss decay and crime as a "rich white person obsession" and I always want to ask them if they'd like to talk to some low income black people from West Philadelphia. It's a lot easier to find that stuff cool and edgy if you live in a nice safe suburb.
Writing from the frozen midwest hinterlands to flog my favorite dead horse. Republicans often have a more clear eyed view of their candidates than Democrats, at least in these parts. Most of my neighbors are conservative and they agree with the thesis that Harris and Newsom are incredibly similar. So similar that they could be twins. Democrats are more convinced that there are significant differences between the two because of their obvious physical differences, which I personally find insane.
The Medicaid for undocumented immigrants (are we still saying this? I have no idea - has illegal aliens come back into favor?) policy is something that will sink ships all over the rust belt. You want to win swing states? You find a way to moderate on that position, along with the gender identity policies.
Considering how many races the GOP blew in 2022, by selecting bad candidates like Herschel Walker, I would question how clear-eyed they actually are.
I’m talking about voters, not the parties.
Yes and they selected these terrible candidates. Democratic voters in 2020 saw Biden as the most electable candidate. In 2021, the Virginia GOP selected the human embodiment of a sweater vest, Glenn Youngkin, because an open primary probably would've yielded a super MAGA candidate.
Who is more clear-eyed, a vampire or a werewolf?
Well argued, but I didn't see anything about how he does in Republican counties in CA. Isn't that where to look for further proof?
The Wikipedia results for the 2022 election have results by congressional district. I haven’t compared all the numbers, but it says there are two districts that Democrats won but Newsom lost and none that went the other way. That suggests he’s not as good at winning Republican votes as some of the candidates in marginal districts, but I would need more detailed analysis of each district to know if there’s a broad pattern or just two over-performers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_California_gubernatorial_election