Gavin Newsom’s electoral track record is bad

Plus cooking, the Wizards, the auto industry, and Trump’s threat to the election

I found myself strikingly saddened by the death of James Van Der Beek this week. I had no idea he was ill and hadn’t been following him closely on recent seasons of “The Masked Singer” or “Dancing With the Stars.”

But I am the exact age for both “Dawson’s Creek” and “Varsity Blues” to have been formative, foundational content experiences. Beyond that, I’m a huge fan of his work in the short-lived sitcom “Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23.” That whole show was criminally underrated, but Van Der Beek’s performance was particularly inspired. Check this out:

At any rate, cancer is a scourge. The good news is that we have gotten much better over time at treating it, and age-specific cancer death rates have fallen by more than 20 percent since 1980. But that doesn’t make the exceptions any less sad.

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lindamc: Do you ever want to take a break from take-slinging and just not form an opinion on an issue?

I think it’s underrated that there are all kinds of issues I have no opinion on. I mentioned this last week, but an interesting question is why beef prices have soared so much recently. This is something I see some people expressing a very strong opinion about, like the idea that meatpacker consolidation is to blame, but when I’ve looked into the issue I’m not convinced by that hypothesis. Still, something is happening and I’m not sure what. I don’t like this! I would like to know what’s happening. So I’m not writing takes about this since I don’t know the answer, but in a way, no, I don’t really ever want to “take a break” and just let it go. I want to know the truth.

Brian: Matt, I fully agree with you that progressives overrate the role of identity in electability in a way that leads them to overrate the electoral prospects of white males. However, I think your comparison of Gavin Newsom to Kamala Harris is off and discounts the strengths that Newsom brings relative to Harris. Newsom is a talented extemporaneous speaker, whereas Harris is not. Newsom routinely does long interviews in which he holds his own, skillfully combining memorized bits with off-the-cuff riffs, along with a joke here and there that disarms you.

[The question continues but that’s the flavor]

I am slightly of two minds in discussions of these kinds of things. While I never want to come across as saying that politicians’ performance skills are literally irrelevant to winning general elections, my general sense of the discourse is that they are massively overrated relative to my tedious points about policy. I was recently introduced to Scott Alexander’s 2013 article “All Debates Are Bravery Debates,” and I wouldn’t say that this discussion is exactly a bravery debate, but certainly a lot of it is implicitly a debate about what the conventional wisdom is.

Brian Beutler, for example, is convinced that Democrats are obsessed with tweaking issue-positioning and utterly blind to the importance of finding forceful, charismatic public speakers who can stick it to the enemy.

Why Kamala Harris Lost

I think that is 180 degrees off base and that in my conversations with Democratic Party elected officials, staffers, donors, and campaign operatives they are obsessed with theatrics as a way to avoid difficult choices about policy.

By which I mean that operatives I speak with have the official position that they agree with me that Democrats should be more moderate if they want to win. But they’re nonetheless constantly talking, on a day-to-day practical level, about how A.O.C. and Jon Ossoff are both hot and maybe what Democrats need is to elevate a lot of hotties.

Who’s right?