I mostly agree with your analysis of Trump, but I disagree about your analysis of why Hillary ran the campaign she did, both in primaries and in the general. What spooked her was the hate directed at her from the millennials. Ever since a millennial asked Hillary during the Iowa primary why most millennials thought she was dishonest, it was clear all millennials (at least those I knew at the time) were all supporting Bernie, but they (men mostly) also hated Hillary, and they demonized her, even after the primaries. Even the day before elections I saw my millennial friends on FB say negative things about her (of course they meant to vote for her because they conceded, grudgingly, that Trump was worse).
Her moving to the left on social issues was partly meant to counter Bernie (especially immigration and guns), but was also meant to placate the millennials. Millennials make up a unique generation - coming of age in the Obama presidency after the great recession, a huge cohort that grew up at the height of America's prosperity and had not faced any adversity in life till the anaemic employment prospects after the recession.
Any time before democratic nominee could have expected the party to coalesce around their candidacy, but Hillary had to go out of her way to show her progressive side.
<<It’s important for everyone to understand that all indications are there really was a penalty. Based on “the fundamentals,” you would have expected a Republican to win the popular vote in 2016. And based on the fact that Trump moved the GOP left on Social Security, Medicare, and some gay rights issues while Clinton shifted the Democrats left, you would have expected him to win big.>>
That is such an important dynamic that is so easily missed in today's polarized (social) media environment. For center-left garden-variety small-l liberals like myself, Trump sounded very reasonable in the primaries, compared to pretty much everyone else. A clown from the start, yes, but the Democratic primary was literally between a Socialist and a formerly-moderate Democrat trying her hardest to get to the left of the Socialist while the media covered the actual moderate in the race as though he were wallpaper drying. The Republican primary was mainly boiler-plate swearing at the Alter of Reagan, we're actually a Christian Nation, tax cuts for the rich will benefit us all, immigration is bad stuff. But Trump was talking about raising taxes on the rich; he was (in the primary) nominally pro-choice; his wife was an immigrant; he had clearly never opened a bible in his life; he was to the right of Clinton, to the left of the other Republicans and weirdly overlapped with Bernie more than any one else. On paper, Trump moved the GOP towards the center after decades of catering to pearl-clutching, bible-thumping conservative activists.
This week, according to Woke Twitter, a UC Berkeley law professor pwned John Cornyn and Josh Hawley by proclaiming that "a person with the capacity for pregnancy has value" and that their line of questioning was "transphobic and opens up trans people to violence." This was in the context of the reproductive rights women lost (ironically because of Trump's SCOTUS picks).
Meanwhile, FOX News thinks that the important part of a story about a 10 year-old girl having to travel out of state for an abortion after being raped is that the rapist might have been "an illegal". And something like 2/3 of Republican voters think Biden stole the 2020 election and that the January 6th Committee is a partisan political hit job.
There is a gaping void between the unholy MAGA-GOP "guns, pollution and forced pregnancy" coalition and the alphabet-soup Woke Left. I would have voted for the Mitt Romney of 2022 had he run against Clinton in 2016. (Because Roe was still intact, he has moderated on his orthodox right-wing economic policies and I liked Obama and voted affirmatively for him.) But, instead, I voted against Trump twice. And I've watched in horror as the Biden Administration has become overrun with people too young to remember a time before gay rights were a thing convince him that Latinx is a word that the President should use because, something something, transphobic, something something, violence.
Being slowboring’s only longtime lefto, I have to add this important note-
The 90s left was smaller than todays. But as its ideas have become much more mainstream, they’ve been adopted by different groups. Its critique of Clinton-era economics, inequality, free trade, etc- have become more broadly popular with the public. On the other hand, its language & concepts on identity politics have become WAY more dominant- but only among college educated liberal professionals.
(Related but different, its Skepticism of the police & prison system have become more popular among a cross section of the urban public enough to elect some DAs and produce some enormously angry protests, but have remained approximately as toxic with the public at large.)
This is an interesting and largely persuasive analysis, but I have a slight problem with the following element of your high-level narrative:
"Republicans, having lost twice in a row, nominated someone who agreed to abandon the conservative view on Social Security and Medicare while successfully fudging on dropping opposition to same-sex marriage."
That sounds as if the Republican Party establishment had looked at the two preceding elections and calculated that they needed to do the "ideological repositioning" that you mention in the next bullet item. But in reality Trump had barged in and primaried his way to the nomination over the objections of the establishment. The result was the same, but the retrospective narrative looks too much like interparty chess.
During the 2016 campaign Trump called for a total ban on Muslims entering the United States. That seems like a pretty extremist position to me. I can see how his anti-illegal immigration stuff could be viewed as less extreme by average voters than it was viewed by elites, but there's no excusing the Muslim ban. That was the reason that my Dad, a lifetime Republican, said he would never vote for Trump. Was there simply a bunch of latent islamophobia among white working class Obama voters?
I don't have much to add to this (other than Joe Biden, as well as O'Malley, would have won in 2016). The farther we get from 2016, the worse Obama & the Democratic establishment look for settling on Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Matt speaks truth...Trump is a bad person. It is hard to understand how good people don’t see that. It’s one thing to say sure he’s an asshat but I really don’t like the Dems view of the world but to make the case he is in anyway “good” is crazy.
I suspect that a significant fraction of his voters *do* see that he is a bad person and a horrific boor but believe that his election instrumentally serves their interests better than a Democrat's would have. Bill Clinton is also pretty clearly a bad person in many highly salient ways but he was also an effective politician on the center-left (and by all accounts has personal charisma off the charts) although he isn't as much of a narcissistic boor as Trump. Also remember that we have credible sexual assault accusations against Joe Biden that the media just kind of....never followed up on. When all your options are bad sometimes you go for the least-bad option.
I'm checking right now and not seeing that there was any definitive resolution as to the truth or falsehood of Reade's claims. There seems to be more evidence than I realized to suggest that latter-day Reade is....a bit unhinged (even beyond the Putin praise, which was in and of itself a source of concern at the time), but the concern of course was always that these allegations were specific to 1993 and there did seem to be some degree of contemporary or near-contemporary corroborative testimony about this story from the early '90s, which, if true, represented an *awfully* long con relative to the simpler explanation of Joe Biden behaving inappropriately.
Note that I do not claim to be capable of arbitrating the truth or falsehood of Reade's claims (seriously, do not and am not trying to imply that I know the answers here), merely that I don't think this was definitively run to ground so much dropped by the media circa April 2020. The NYT seems to have a summary to this effect: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/us/politics/joe-biden-tara-reade-sexual-assault-complaint.html
I'm likewise willing to at least partially walk back claims that the media failed to run it to ground in view of the above given the related groundwork. I don't necessarily agree that it's "unfalsifiable" but it's certainly murky. Regardless, "credible[1] but difficult to verify sexual assault allegations" isn't really where you want to be as a primary candidate, although obviously there's a lot that goes into how you read the facts (such as they are) in the Reade case.
[1] The key point being "credible" for the aforementioned reason that while modern Reade isn't necessarily someone most observers consider the most reliable source for dramatic revelations damaging of the Democratic frontrunner during a high-stakes election (for her Putin support if nothing else), it's not clear that that reads on at least somewhat-corroborated allegations from 30 years ago.
This seems like a reasonable place for me to vent about something that's somewhat related: Democrats are generally too dismissive of HRC's email mess as a "nothing burger". I think it was actually pretty bad --- not so much because it was a major crime but because it indicated something bad about HRC.
There are HRC true believers out there, but they're a minority. There are two prevailing theories of HRC:
1) She's a bland politician who follows the wind but knows the rules and and how to Get Stuff Done.
2) She's a cold-hearted expletive who will lie, cheat, and steal to get ahead.
The email mess --- altho not a big deal in and of itself --- is evidence against 1 and for 2. HRC had front row seats to the Watergate investigation (she was a lawyer on the impeachment inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee), so she should have known damn well that government records --- including correspondence by officials --- are important and need to be retained by the government. But she didn't do that.
In short, -1 point for "knowing the rules" and +1 point for lie and cheat. But instead of acknowledging this, a lot of people dismissed the email mess as a partisan, sexist witch hunt. Yes, DJT was still much worse than HRC, and yes the media blew the email mess out of proportion relative to Tump's craziness, but the email mess really deserved to be a black eye for her. It was bad.
Didn't Colin Powell do the same thing? And even give her the idea? Also, my understanding is that they were in compliance with the spirit of the law, retaining and handing over relevant, but not personal, emails. This doesn't excuse it, but it's a lot closer to a nothingburger than what it was made out to be.
I'm at a public institution, and without a doubt, following the official rules for emails (let alone just about everything else) is a pain. For example, we are forced to use Outlook and we can't forward to gmail, where all our other emails are. Yes, we're not dealing with state secrets, but it's still an understandable complaint.
WRT retention and handing over, I'll add that FOIA requests for HRC's emails started in 2012, and the state department responded that there were no records. HRC didn't hand over any of her emails until 2014 --- after the House Select Committee on Benghazi demanded them and the state department realized that they couldn't brush them off the same way they did to normal people [1].
If HRC handed over the records proactively, I'd be more willing to accept her actions as within the spirit of the law. But normal people tried to lawfully access the records via FOIA, and they were unable to because HRC did not proactively hand them over. That is absolutely not within the spirit of the law.
That's totally fine with me if this is really important to you, but then I hope you also followed closely how well the Trump administration handled email security as well as classified information.
"retaining and handing over relevant, but not personal, emails."
Did they? They handed over some emails and then deleted the rest. Maybe they really did hand over all work-related emails. Maybe they didn't. There's no way to know, and it should not have been her team making the call.
The thing is you're always operating on trust with any government official, regardless of whether or not they have a private server. Like for instance, suppose you have another government official (we'll call him "Jared" just to pick a name out of a hat) uses his work account for government business rather than having a single account for both work and personal e-mails. That's great: he'll never have to put together a team to sort through his account and separate the work e-mails from the personal ones, so no questions will ever be raised by that. But you're still trusting that he didn't use his *personal* accounts to conduct *government* business. It's not like anyone's going to search his Gmail or Snapchat or whatever unless something really unusual happens.
I agree that there's no way around working on trust, and that's exactly why HRC's email mess is so bad! It violates trust, and the fact that it's a political appointee aspiring to higher office makes it worse than some random government employee named Jared.
Even if it is a comedy of errors, that's still -1 point for theory 1 (which implicitly assumes competence, which is contradicted by the comedy of errors).
You are right on the money. I’ve been saying the same things since we learned about the e-mails. It would have taken her no extra effort to learn and use the secure systems. It’s just like using a regular computer - it’s the machine that is different not the operation of it. The fact that she actually went to great lengths to circumvent the classified system shows the amount of disdain she felt about the proles who worked for her. She willfully and purposely evaded records rules, probably because she knew she knew she was going to be doing things she didn’t want recorded. She knows the rules and their importance - her husband has a freaking Presidential library!!!!!!!
I think the likeliest explanation is actually a lot more prosaic. She was probably using the server to send personal e-mails and those were the e-mails she didn't want to get out, as opposed to the government records, virtually all of which would have cc'd other government employees and been recorded in their accounts. Like, she didn't want anyone mocking her over her breastfeeding tips for Chelsea or whatever. Which in turn is because even by famous bigshot standards, she has a hair-trigger lack of tolerance for being disrespected.
The best charitable explanation I've heard is that she got used to using a blackberry (remember those?) for sending emails before she was Secretary of State, and she wanted to continue using her blackberry afterwards. There wasn't a government-compliant way to do that, so she just used her own server. Problem solved. But the laws have no I-want-to-use-a-blackberry exception, and she should have (and likely did) know that.
Am I the only women who doesn’t think sexism played a role in Hillary’s loss? It’s not sexism to dislike a person who happens to be a woman. And Hillary gives up plenty to dislike. She assumed all women would vote for her since our top priority must naturally be getting a woman in the Oval Office. How stupid does she think we are?
He actually didn't crush the Republican primary. His opposition was always divided between Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich so opposition to him never managed to coalesce. He didn't start winning outright majorities in primaries until very late in the primary season. Even with Republican primary rules where plurality winners take all or most delegates, there was talk of a brokered convention until, again, pretty late into the primary season.
> Black Democrats are more moderate on average than white Democrats, because in-group identification causes middle-of-the-road white people to be Republicans while it causes Black people to be Democrats. So if you just put up a normal Democrat against a socialist, the normal Democrat will win the Black vote.
I don't follow this? Sanders did better among white primary voters because he was viewed as more moderate, but Hillary did better among black primary voters because she was a "normal Democrat" and he was a "socialist"?
I don't know what Matt would say, but I guess the difference is that while both white normie Democrats and black normie Democrats are both economically moderate and racially moderate, a white normie Democrat would be put off more by racial leftism because they'd feel like they were the ones being identified as the bad guys. So for them, Clinton's status as the "racial leftist" would have overshadowed Sanders's status as the economic leftist - race issues are simply more attention-grabbing and outrage-inducing than economic policy is. Meanwhile, black normie Democrats might not particularly agree with Clinton's "racial leftism" but they also wouldn't notice it all that much. So the leftism that would have stood out for them was Sanders' socialism.
This is, of course, a simplified model of what actually happened.
Definitely some good points here: that the HRC campaign misunderstanding her success with Black voters; that the Sanders campaign ultimately adopting the strategy of "take the most strident left position on everything" was disastrous; and of course that O'Malley would've won.
But I think this piece mis-states a few things about Trump. If we say he "disavowed the most unpopular elements of the Ryan/Romney agenda" we should be clear that he didn't really SUBSTANTIVELY moderate on these issues. The Trump trifecta's major achievement was a massive tax cut for the rich, and they tried and failed at a massive welfare state rollback. So his claims about not touching entitlements turned out to be a lie. Same with his ostensible softening on LGBTQ rights, which the SCOTUS majority he appointed is preparing to roll back.
Trump didnt substantively moderate in any of these areas so much as he just flooded the zone with lots of culture war outrage on topics where the Republican position is more popular. And to be clear - hiding your unpopular economic agenda behind culture war outrage is a very strong electoral strategy especially given the GOP's structural advantages. It takes Slow Boring/Shorian insights to defeat it. But I think we're rewriting history a little bit to pretend that the high salience of culture war in 2016 wasn't about Trump.
This essay means well, but it's basically incorrect.
More to the point, it's another example of what I call "android brain" among policy experts. Of whom Matt, to his credit, is one.
Voters like to flatter themselves and identify as motivated by "issues" and "policy", but they're not, not really.
Often they make a decision to like, or dislike, a politician for one reason, and backfill a whole bunch of high-sounding reasons after the fact.
Clinton vs. Bernie vs. Trump was a perfect example. I made a decision to despise Trump with no possibility of redemption before he even ran, because of his birtherism. Calling my president, the first black president, illegitimate based on lies was unforgivable.
Because of that, I don't care that he "promised to be mOdErAtE" on Social Security and Medicare (and I especially don't care in light of his promises, and nearly-successful attempts, to repeal Obamacare).
Similarly, people made a decision to despise Hillary Clinton early. She was the most visible candidate for the first 7 months of the election cycle. People had been anticipating her running for president, and being the First Woman President, for over a decade. She'd been in the public eye for two and a half decades.
And she seemed kind of annoying to people, especially guys, who didn't like her voice. Her early appearances in 2015 brought all those feelings back for many, many, many people, and introduced them to a whole new generation.
It wasn't only sexism, nor was it only her woke positions, nor only her Iraq War vote, nor her pantsuit. It was all of that, yet none of that.
Voters, in the words of Oprah's (derogatory) impression of them, concluded: "Ohhhh, I just don't like her."
Bernie's groundswell of support was very likely, more than anything, a visceral reaction to that.
Hillary was overwhelmingly supported by the DNC, in part, because they thought voters *did* like her. Not kidding.
Yes, Barack Obama had beaten her in 2008, but the point was that he only *barely* beat her--by less than Bernie beat Hillary in 2016, in fact. She had stayed in that primary and fought till the end, drawing most of her support from white, rural Democrats.
More than anything, that was why everyone thought she was headed for a coronation in 2016. If you nearly beat *Obama*, of all people, you seem like a tough politician. Someone people might decide to back and backfill reasons later. Likeable, even.
All these reasons given in the essay for a politician's power--policies, issues, etc.--are not imaginary. They're why politicians run in the first place, at least in theory. But they can be overrated.
Matt's acknowledged in the past that one of the reasons Trump won in 2016 might be, ironically, because voters were comfortable and relatively stabilized, and therefore felt they could afford to indulge the pettier sides of their preferences.
That explains that year better than anything else I've read. Beware overthinking and android-braining Hillary's defeat. Sometimes voters just don't like you, personally. Issues and positions are mostly an excuse.
Personality > policy. Every time. And if I had a silver dollar for every Trump voter that would not have voted for him BUT FOR his "moderation" on entitlements, I would have zero silver dollars. It's like MY is comparing Trump to past GOP losing candidates and trying to find the difference, but he's walking past the obvious answers (racism, authoritarianism, celebrity, con artistry) towards the least likely (moderation on entitlements).
Maybe because that answer supports "politics as usual," maybe because it casts Trump's supporters in the kindest light, maybe as an appeal to novelty. I don't know. But it doesn't jibe with what I observe in our country.
About 13% of the electorate changed their presidential vote from 2016 to 2020. Everyone I know in that category had a job performance-type answer for the question of why. I get that you don't always have to take people's answers at face value, but it seems like a safer bet in this case than con artistry.
If that's true, the the mistake belonged to the Democratic voters who nominated her.
I tend to think the world is complex and it is both true that (1) some politicians are just disliked by voters instinctively even if they haven't done anything, just as some people in everyday society are disliked by their peers instinctively even if they haven't done anything; (2) whatever their baseline "likeability" is, politicians can move public opinion up or down from that baseline with their messaging.
That's no doubt partially correct. But I think you're overstating it by a lot. I know lots of voters who switched from Clinton to Trump or Trump to Biden from 2016 to 2020. A large % of union guys I know, who probably weren't in love with HRC's style, still voted for her in 2016 but then switched to Trump in 2020. Many of the other switchers, in both directions, cited covid responses.
Some % of voters and voter decisions are driven by gut-feelings and emotions. That is true. But there's still plenty of "android brain", issue voting going on, too.
What it felt like at the time to the Hillary people -- and not with six years to fully appreciate all the dynamics of the 2016 race -- was that early in the contest things were spinning out of control for Clinton. There was excitement and youthful energy about the Sanders campaign while Clinton was plodding and worn out, and being forced on a party base that really didn't like her, although it hated how she had been treated. And things almost went completely sour early in the primaries, with losses in Iowa and New Hampshire and a near-death experience in Nevada. One more defeat and that would be it.
I'm trying to imagine any campaign manager, in the face of all that, advising her to "stay in the middle lane, be moderate, and wait for the voters to come to you." Never would that have happened. It would be "we have to shake up this race, we have to find the best way to excite Democratic primary voters, and contrast ourselves with Bernie." Sure, guns helped (and they went after that) but it would never have been enough. So they did what they did.
But what about Biden, you say? He ran MY's preferred campaign (but oddly enough only until he locked down the nomination). So that proves MY was right about 2016, yes? No. It proves that in 2020, versus 2016, Democrats were absolutely terrified of Trump winning again -- they never believed he could win in 2016 -- and were desperate enough to do *anything* -- even nominate Biden -- to avoid that terrible outcome. Hillary did not have that advantage in 2016. She had to win over the Democratic voters while Biden *did* have them just come to him.
I think Hillary was a terrible politician, but in this case I can't really fault her judgment.
I mostly agree with your analysis of Trump, but I disagree about your analysis of why Hillary ran the campaign she did, both in primaries and in the general. What spooked her was the hate directed at her from the millennials. Ever since a millennial asked Hillary during the Iowa primary why most millennials thought she was dishonest, it was clear all millennials (at least those I knew at the time) were all supporting Bernie, but they (men mostly) also hated Hillary, and they demonized her, even after the primaries. Even the day before elections I saw my millennial friends on FB say negative things about her (of course they meant to vote for her because they conceded, grudgingly, that Trump was worse).
Her moving to the left on social issues was partly meant to counter Bernie (especially immigration and guns), but was also meant to placate the millennials. Millennials make up a unique generation - coming of age in the Obama presidency after the great recession, a huge cohort that grew up at the height of America's prosperity and had not faced any adversity in life till the anaemic employment prospects after the recession.
Any time before democratic nominee could have expected the party to coalesce around their candidacy, but Hillary had to go out of her way to show her progressive side.
Some interesting points here, but the Great Awokening was well underway by 2016.
<<It’s important for everyone to understand that all indications are there really was a penalty. Based on “the fundamentals,” you would have expected a Republican to win the popular vote in 2016. And based on the fact that Trump moved the GOP left on Social Security, Medicare, and some gay rights issues while Clinton shifted the Democrats left, you would have expected him to win big.>>
That is such an important dynamic that is so easily missed in today's polarized (social) media environment. For center-left garden-variety small-l liberals like myself, Trump sounded very reasonable in the primaries, compared to pretty much everyone else. A clown from the start, yes, but the Democratic primary was literally between a Socialist and a formerly-moderate Democrat trying her hardest to get to the left of the Socialist while the media covered the actual moderate in the race as though he were wallpaper drying. The Republican primary was mainly boiler-plate swearing at the Alter of Reagan, we're actually a Christian Nation, tax cuts for the rich will benefit us all, immigration is bad stuff. But Trump was talking about raising taxes on the rich; he was (in the primary) nominally pro-choice; his wife was an immigrant; he had clearly never opened a bible in his life; he was to the right of Clinton, to the left of the other Republicans and weirdly overlapped with Bernie more than any one else. On paper, Trump moved the GOP towards the center after decades of catering to pearl-clutching, bible-thumping conservative activists.
This week, according to Woke Twitter, a UC Berkeley law professor pwned John Cornyn and Josh Hawley by proclaiming that "a person with the capacity for pregnancy has value" and that their line of questioning was "transphobic and opens up trans people to violence." This was in the context of the reproductive rights women lost (ironically because of Trump's SCOTUS picks).
Meanwhile, FOX News thinks that the important part of a story about a 10 year-old girl having to travel out of state for an abortion after being raped is that the rapist might have been "an illegal". And something like 2/3 of Republican voters think Biden stole the 2020 election and that the January 6th Committee is a partisan political hit job.
There is a gaping void between the unholy MAGA-GOP "guns, pollution and forced pregnancy" coalition and the alphabet-soup Woke Left. I would have voted for the Mitt Romney of 2022 had he run against Clinton in 2016. (Because Roe was still intact, he has moderated on his orthodox right-wing economic policies and I liked Obama and voted affirmatively for him.) But, instead, I voted against Trump twice. And I've watched in horror as the Biden Administration has become overrun with people too young to remember a time before gay rights were a thing convince him that Latinx is a word that the President should use because, something something, transphobic, something something, violence.
Being slowboring’s only longtime lefto, I have to add this important note-
The 90s left was smaller than todays. But as its ideas have become much more mainstream, they’ve been adopted by different groups. Its critique of Clinton-era economics, inequality, free trade, etc- have become more broadly popular with the public. On the other hand, its language & concepts on identity politics have become WAY more dominant- but only among college educated liberal professionals.
(Related but different, its Skepticism of the police & prison system have become more popular among a cross section of the urban public enough to elect some DAs and produce some enormously angry protests, but have remained approximately as toxic with the public at large.)
O’Malley would’ve won. Never forget.
This is an interesting and largely persuasive analysis, but I have a slight problem with the following element of your high-level narrative:
"Republicans, having lost twice in a row, nominated someone who agreed to abandon the conservative view on Social Security and Medicare while successfully fudging on dropping opposition to same-sex marriage."
That sounds as if the Republican Party establishment had looked at the two preceding elections and calculated that they needed to do the "ideological repositioning" that you mention in the next bullet item. But in reality Trump had barged in and primaried his way to the nomination over the objections of the establishment. The result was the same, but the retrospective narrative looks too much like interparty chess.
During the 2016 campaign Trump called for a total ban on Muslims entering the United States. That seems like a pretty extremist position to me. I can see how his anti-illegal immigration stuff could be viewed as less extreme by average voters than it was viewed by elites, but there's no excusing the Muslim ban. That was the reason that my Dad, a lifetime Republican, said he would never vote for Trump. Was there simply a bunch of latent islamophobia among white working class Obama voters?
I don't have much to add to this (other than Joe Biden, as well as O'Malley, would have won in 2016). The farther we get from 2016, the worse Obama & the Democratic establishment look for settling on Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Matt speaks truth...Trump is a bad person. It is hard to understand how good people don’t see that. It’s one thing to say sure he’s an asshat but I really don’t like the Dems view of the world but to make the case he is in anyway “good” is crazy.
I suspect that a significant fraction of his voters *do* see that he is a bad person and a horrific boor but believe that his election instrumentally serves their interests better than a Democrat's would have. Bill Clinton is also pretty clearly a bad person in many highly salient ways but he was also an effective politician on the center-left (and by all accounts has personal charisma off the charts) although he isn't as much of a narcissistic boor as Trump. Also remember that we have credible sexual assault accusations against Joe Biden that the media just kind of....never followed up on. When all your options are bad sometimes you go for the least-bad option.
There were never credible sexual assault accusations against Biden. The only serious one was followed up on and shown to be false.
I'm checking right now and not seeing that there was any definitive resolution as to the truth or falsehood of Reade's claims. There seems to be more evidence than I realized to suggest that latter-day Reade is....a bit unhinged (even beyond the Putin praise, which was in and of itself a source of concern at the time), but the concern of course was always that these allegations were specific to 1993 and there did seem to be some degree of contemporary or near-contemporary corroborative testimony about this story from the early '90s, which, if true, represented an *awfully* long con relative to the simpler explanation of Joe Biden behaving inappropriately.
Note that I do not claim to be capable of arbitrating the truth or falsehood of Reade's claims (seriously, do not and am not trying to imply that I know the answers here), merely that I don't think this was definitively run to ground so much dropped by the media circa April 2020. The NYT seems to have a summary to this effect: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/us/politics/joe-biden-tara-reade-sexual-assault-complaint.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_sexual_assault_allegation
I'm really not sure what more could have possibly been done.
edit: maybe "shown to be false" was too strong a claim, as this is essentially unfalsifiable.
I'm likewise willing to at least partially walk back claims that the media failed to run it to ground in view of the above given the related groundwork. I don't necessarily agree that it's "unfalsifiable" but it's certainly murky. Regardless, "credible[1] but difficult to verify sexual assault allegations" isn't really where you want to be as a primary candidate, although obviously there's a lot that goes into how you read the facts (such as they are) in the Reade case.
[1] The key point being "credible" for the aforementioned reason that while modern Reade isn't necessarily someone most observers consider the most reliable source for dramatic revelations damaging of the Democratic frontrunner during a high-stakes election (for her Putin support if nothing else), it's not clear that that reads on at least somewhat-corroborated allegations from 30 years ago.
Your first sentence connects directly to the "Flight 93 Election" meme that was circulating ahead of the 2016 election.
This seems like a reasonable place for me to vent about something that's somewhat related: Democrats are generally too dismissive of HRC's email mess as a "nothing burger". I think it was actually pretty bad --- not so much because it was a major crime but because it indicated something bad about HRC.
There are HRC true believers out there, but they're a minority. There are two prevailing theories of HRC:
1) She's a bland politician who follows the wind but knows the rules and and how to Get Stuff Done.
2) She's a cold-hearted expletive who will lie, cheat, and steal to get ahead.
The email mess --- altho not a big deal in and of itself --- is evidence against 1 and for 2. HRC had front row seats to the Watergate investigation (she was a lawyer on the impeachment inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee), so she should have known damn well that government records --- including correspondence by officials --- are important and need to be retained by the government. But she didn't do that.
In short, -1 point for "knowing the rules" and +1 point for lie and cheat. But instead of acknowledging this, a lot of people dismissed the email mess as a partisan, sexist witch hunt. Yes, DJT was still much worse than HRC, and yes the media blew the email mess out of proportion relative to Tump's craziness, but the email mess really deserved to be a black eye for her. It was bad.
Didn't Colin Powell do the same thing? And even give her the idea? Also, my understanding is that they were in compliance with the spirit of the law, retaining and handing over relevant, but not personal, emails. This doesn't excuse it, but it's a lot closer to a nothingburger than what it was made out to be.
I'm at a public institution, and without a doubt, following the official rules for emails (let alone just about everything else) is a pain. For example, we are forced to use Outlook and we can't forward to gmail, where all our other emails are. Yes, we're not dealing with state secrets, but it's still an understandable complaint.
Also, for what it's worth, there was practically no classified information in the emails sent through the server (yes, I know "practically" is doing some work here, but read and decide for yourself how serious it was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy#Classified_information_in_emails ).
WRT retention and handing over, I'll add that FOIA requests for HRC's emails started in 2012, and the state department responded that there were no records. HRC didn't hand over any of her emails until 2014 --- after the House Select Committee on Benghazi demanded them and the state department realized that they couldn't brush them off the same way they did to normal people [1].
If HRC handed over the records proactively, I'd be more willing to accept her actions as within the spirit of the law. But normal people tried to lawfully access the records via FOIA, and they were unable to because HRC did not proactively hand them over. That is absolutely not within the spirit of the law.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-clintons-email-scandal-took-root/2016/03/27/ee301168-e162-11e5-846c-10191d1fc4ec_story.html
That's totally fine with me if this is really important to you, but then I hope you also followed closely how well the Trump administration handled email security as well as classified information.
"retaining and handing over relevant, but not personal, emails."
Did they? They handed over some emails and then deleted the rest. Maybe they really did hand over all work-related emails. Maybe they didn't. There's no way to know, and it should not have been her team making the call.
The thing is you're always operating on trust with any government official, regardless of whether or not they have a private server. Like for instance, suppose you have another government official (we'll call him "Jared" just to pick a name out of a hat) uses his work account for government business rather than having a single account for both work and personal e-mails. That's great: he'll never have to put together a team to sort through his account and separate the work e-mails from the personal ones, so no questions will ever be raised by that. But you're still trusting that he didn't use his *personal* accounts to conduct *government* business. It's not like anyone's going to search his Gmail or Snapchat or whatever unless something really unusual happens.
I agree that there's no way around working on trust, and that's exactly why HRC's email mess is so bad! It violates trust, and the fact that it's a political appointee aspiring to higher office makes it worse than some random government employee named Jared.
Sure, but the most likely explanation is a comedy of errors rather than an intent to deceive. Obviously opinions will differ.
Even if it is a comedy of errors, that's still -1 point for theory 1 (which implicitly assumes competence, which is contradicted by the comedy of errors).
You are right on the money. I’ve been saying the same things since we learned about the e-mails. It would have taken her no extra effort to learn and use the secure systems. It’s just like using a regular computer - it’s the machine that is different not the operation of it. The fact that she actually went to great lengths to circumvent the classified system shows the amount of disdain she felt about the proles who worked for her. She willfully and purposely evaded records rules, probably because she knew she knew she was going to be doing things she didn’t want recorded. She knows the rules and their importance - her husband has a freaking Presidential library!!!!!!!
I think the likeliest explanation is actually a lot more prosaic. She was probably using the server to send personal e-mails and those were the e-mails she didn't want to get out, as opposed to the government records, virtually all of which would have cc'd other government employees and been recorded in their accounts. Like, she didn't want anyone mocking her over her breastfeeding tips for Chelsea or whatever. Which in turn is because even by famous bigshot standards, she has a hair-trigger lack of tolerance for being disrespected.
The best charitable explanation I've heard is that she got used to using a blackberry (remember those?) for sending emails before she was Secretary of State, and she wanted to continue using her blackberry afterwards. There wasn't a government-compliant way to do that, so she just used her own server. Problem solved. But the laws have no I-want-to-use-a-blackberry exception, and she should have (and likely did) know that.
Am I the only women who doesn’t think sexism played a role in Hillary’s loss? It’s not sexism to dislike a person who happens to be a woman. And Hillary gives up plenty to dislike. She assumed all women would vote for her since our top priority must naturally be getting a woman in the Oval Office. How stupid does she think we are?
I think Matt misses a point about Trump that I would summarise with this question:
How did Trump absolutely *crush* the Republican primary while being one of the most moderate (on policy) Republican nominees ever?
He actually didn't crush the Republican primary. His opposition was always divided between Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich so opposition to him never managed to coalesce. He didn't start winning outright majorities in primaries until very late in the primary season. Even with Republican primary rules where plurality winners take all or most delegates, there was talk of a brokered convention until, again, pretty late into the primary season.
> Black Democrats are more moderate on average than white Democrats, because in-group identification causes middle-of-the-road white people to be Republicans while it causes Black people to be Democrats. So if you just put up a normal Democrat against a socialist, the normal Democrat will win the Black vote.
I don't follow this? Sanders did better among white primary voters because he was viewed as more moderate, but Hillary did better among black primary voters because she was a "normal Democrat" and he was a "socialist"?
I don't know what Matt would say, but I guess the difference is that while both white normie Democrats and black normie Democrats are both economically moderate and racially moderate, a white normie Democrat would be put off more by racial leftism because they'd feel like they were the ones being identified as the bad guys. So for them, Clinton's status as the "racial leftist" would have overshadowed Sanders's status as the economic leftist - race issues are simply more attention-grabbing and outrage-inducing than economic policy is. Meanwhile, black normie Democrats might not particularly agree with Clinton's "racial leftism" but they also wouldn't notice it all that much. So the leftism that would have stood out for them was Sanders' socialism.
This is, of course, a simplified model of what actually happened.
Definitely some good points here: that the HRC campaign misunderstanding her success with Black voters; that the Sanders campaign ultimately adopting the strategy of "take the most strident left position on everything" was disastrous; and of course that O'Malley would've won.
But I think this piece mis-states a few things about Trump. If we say he "disavowed the most unpopular elements of the Ryan/Romney agenda" we should be clear that he didn't really SUBSTANTIVELY moderate on these issues. The Trump trifecta's major achievement was a massive tax cut for the rich, and they tried and failed at a massive welfare state rollback. So his claims about not touching entitlements turned out to be a lie. Same with his ostensible softening on LGBTQ rights, which the SCOTUS majority he appointed is preparing to roll back.
Trump didnt substantively moderate in any of these areas so much as he just flooded the zone with lots of culture war outrage on topics where the Republican position is more popular. And to be clear - hiding your unpopular economic agenda behind culture war outrage is a very strong electoral strategy especially given the GOP's structural advantages. It takes Slow Boring/Shorian insights to defeat it. But I think we're rewriting history a little bit to pretend that the high salience of culture war in 2016 wasn't about Trump.
This essay means well, but it's basically incorrect.
More to the point, it's another example of what I call "android brain" among policy experts. Of whom Matt, to his credit, is one.
Voters like to flatter themselves and identify as motivated by "issues" and "policy", but they're not, not really.
Often they make a decision to like, or dislike, a politician for one reason, and backfill a whole bunch of high-sounding reasons after the fact.
Clinton vs. Bernie vs. Trump was a perfect example. I made a decision to despise Trump with no possibility of redemption before he even ran, because of his birtherism. Calling my president, the first black president, illegitimate based on lies was unforgivable.
Because of that, I don't care that he "promised to be mOdErAtE" on Social Security and Medicare (and I especially don't care in light of his promises, and nearly-successful attempts, to repeal Obamacare).
Similarly, people made a decision to despise Hillary Clinton early. She was the most visible candidate for the first 7 months of the election cycle. People had been anticipating her running for president, and being the First Woman President, for over a decade. She'd been in the public eye for two and a half decades.
And she seemed kind of annoying to people, especially guys, who didn't like her voice. Her early appearances in 2015 brought all those feelings back for many, many, many people, and introduced them to a whole new generation.
It wasn't only sexism, nor was it only her woke positions, nor only her Iraq War vote, nor her pantsuit. It was all of that, yet none of that.
Voters, in the words of Oprah's (derogatory) impression of them, concluded: "Ohhhh, I just don't like her."
Bernie's groundswell of support was very likely, more than anything, a visceral reaction to that.
Hillary was overwhelmingly supported by the DNC, in part, because they thought voters *did* like her. Not kidding.
Yes, Barack Obama had beaten her in 2008, but the point was that he only *barely* beat her--by less than Bernie beat Hillary in 2016, in fact. She had stayed in that primary and fought till the end, drawing most of her support from white, rural Democrats.
More than anything, that was why everyone thought she was headed for a coronation in 2016. If you nearly beat *Obama*, of all people, you seem like a tough politician. Someone people might decide to back and backfill reasons later. Likeable, even.
All these reasons given in the essay for a politician's power--policies, issues, etc.--are not imaginary. They're why politicians run in the first place, at least in theory. But they can be overrated.
Matt's acknowledged in the past that one of the reasons Trump won in 2016 might be, ironically, because voters were comfortable and relatively stabilized, and therefore felt they could afford to indulge the pettier sides of their preferences.
That explains that year better than anything else I've read. Beware overthinking and android-braining Hillary's defeat. Sometimes voters just don't like you, personally. Issues and positions are mostly an excuse.
Personality > policy. Every time. And if I had a silver dollar for every Trump voter that would not have voted for him BUT FOR his "moderation" on entitlements, I would have zero silver dollars. It's like MY is comparing Trump to past GOP losing candidates and trying to find the difference, but he's walking past the obvious answers (racism, authoritarianism, celebrity, con artistry) towards the least likely (moderation on entitlements).
Maybe because that answer supports "politics as usual," maybe because it casts Trump's supporters in the kindest light, maybe as an appeal to novelty. I don't know. But it doesn't jibe with what I observe in our country.
About 13% of the electorate changed their presidential vote from 2016 to 2020. Everyone I know in that category had a job performance-type answer for the question of why. I get that you don't always have to take people's answers at face value, but it seems like a safer bet in this case than con artistry.
If that's true, the the mistake belonged to the Democratic voters who nominated her.
I tend to think the world is complex and it is both true that (1) some politicians are just disliked by voters instinctively even if they haven't done anything, just as some people in everyday society are disliked by their peers instinctively even if they haven't done anything; (2) whatever their baseline "likeability" is, politicians can move public opinion up or down from that baseline with their messaging.
That's no doubt partially correct. But I think you're overstating it by a lot. I know lots of voters who switched from Clinton to Trump or Trump to Biden from 2016 to 2020. A large % of union guys I know, who probably weren't in love with HRC's style, still voted for her in 2016 but then switched to Trump in 2020. Many of the other switchers, in both directions, cited covid responses.
Some % of voters and voter decisions are driven by gut-feelings and emotions. That is true. But there's still plenty of "android brain", issue voting going on, too.
Well, hindsight is wonderful.
What it felt like at the time to the Hillary people -- and not with six years to fully appreciate all the dynamics of the 2016 race -- was that early in the contest things were spinning out of control for Clinton. There was excitement and youthful energy about the Sanders campaign while Clinton was plodding and worn out, and being forced on a party base that really didn't like her, although it hated how she had been treated. And things almost went completely sour early in the primaries, with losses in Iowa and New Hampshire and a near-death experience in Nevada. One more defeat and that would be it.
I'm trying to imagine any campaign manager, in the face of all that, advising her to "stay in the middle lane, be moderate, and wait for the voters to come to you." Never would that have happened. It would be "we have to shake up this race, we have to find the best way to excite Democratic primary voters, and contrast ourselves with Bernie." Sure, guns helped (and they went after that) but it would never have been enough. So they did what they did.
But what about Biden, you say? He ran MY's preferred campaign (but oddly enough only until he locked down the nomination). So that proves MY was right about 2016, yes? No. It proves that in 2020, versus 2016, Democrats were absolutely terrified of Trump winning again -- they never believed he could win in 2016 -- and were desperate enough to do *anything* -- even nominate Biden -- to avoid that terrible outcome. Hillary did not have that advantage in 2016. She had to win over the Democratic voters while Biden *did* have them just come to him.
I think Hillary was a terrible politician, but in this case I can't really fault her judgment.