The policy stakes of an election are really hard to know. George W Bush did not run for President promising a global war on terror, an invasion of Iraq or a network of secret prisons. Trump did not run on a promise to delegate most COVID mitigation measures to the states or to sign and implement the CARES Act. Every Democratic candidate since Bill Clinton promised major health insurance reform, though only Obama really delivered. It’s safe to bet Republicans will try to cut taxes on rich people and restrict abortion access. That’s about it.
Pinning down the character of the candidates is far easier than predicting the legislative accomplishments of a congress whose composition we can only surmise. I have no idea what bills would pass during Biden’s second term. I don’t even know if he’ll have a functioning brain come 2027. I do know that Trump inflamed a mob to storm the Capitol to overthrow an election he lost. That is why I will never vote for him.
While I agree with you on the democracy point I think focusing on different policies a Trump admin might pursue misses the bigger picture.
The thing about Trump is that he corrodes and abuses the federal bureaucracy. If Desantis came in and implemented the same policies as a Trump admin I'd be unhappy but (excepting perhaps NATO) policies can be relatively easily reversed so I wouldn't be too worried. In a second term, Trump shows every sign that he's going to ignore those with conventional government experience and run roughshod over the bureaucracy -- likely driving out qualified career employees and threatening the organizational norms that keep things running.
That's not something most politicians do. They have policy goals they wish to achieve and need competant administrators to help steer the ship of state. Trump doesn't have policy goals in the same way and he resents the way those organizational norms obstructed his whims and got him impeached.
In short i fear that the particular policies are of secondary concern to the damage to state capacity.
The thing I'm worried for the most in 2024 is foreign policy. My biggest concern is Ukraine, because I fear that Trump and a Republican congress may just throw Ukraine to the wolves. Now, the end result of that may be that the rest of Europe folds in the game of chicken and throws a lot more money and resources to Ukraine. That would be great, but they could also not do that. And the reason that I'm worried about this in particular is that it would further damage America's credibility. If we had never commit to helping Ukraine, fine, but we did. It would show the wold that our foreign policy ambitions can change on a whim and nothing we say can be taken seriously.
On Israel/Palestine, I'm less conflicted because it's not like I'm worried Trump is going to come out in favor of Hamas, the way he very well might come out in favor of Putin, but Biden's handling of the issue is probably the best we could hope for so far. He's pressuring Netanyahu to minimize civilian casualties while still prosecuting the war. That's about right. Trump will probably encourage the WORST elements of the Israeli right and just give them the "attaboy" to just drive the Palestinians out. This would piss off almost every Muslim country in the world, even the ones we have decent relationships with.
Thirdly, and I can't believe this hasn't come up again, are the Republicans still planning on invading Mexico? Again, needlessly antagonizing otherwise mostly friendly nations.
Now watch as I look like an idiot in two years because all of these gambles work out. Europe foots the bill to help Ukraine, Israel defeats Hamas and the war ends sooner, which results in FEWER civilian casualties, and Mexico elects a president who welcomes US help in fighting the cartels. Trump's relatively hands off approach to the Middle East happened to work out, Israel and the UAE made peace, so maybe that would happen again... or maybe it wouldn't, and my fears would come to pass and we'll have made enemies out of friends for no good reason all across the world.
Contrast this with economic policy, which I think matters, but is mostly salvageable. If Trump imposes tariffs on every damn thing driving consumer prices up... the next president can undo them. Trump cuts taxes exacerbating inflation? The next president can raise them. And I have a feeling that Trump presiding over a shitty economy is the only way for his cult to lose interest in him. Because his first term saw a pretty damn good economy until COVID, which nobody can really blame him for. Trump presiding over double digit inflation might actually dislodge his support and he could leave office in 2028 with W-like approval ratings.
I realize that my perspective may not be widely generalizable, but I'm not really the target audience for this. From where I sit, Trump is way less "bad" on the mundane issues relative to Biden than he's bad in the ways that he is genuinely dangerous. The man is not interested in being president, he's looking to wield the powers that have accumulated in the office against the constitutional order itself. Most specifically to exempt himself from the rule of law, but in whatever other ways catch his whim as well.
My problem is that the "narrative" isn't exactly on my side either. "Democracy" is not an antidote to the poison of populist movements. The Democrats are overrun with totalitarian populists in their own right, thankfully, they are too fractured to rally around a strongman like Trump, but that doesn't mean they're interested in relinquishing any of the power W/Obama/Trump et al. have accumulated.
Fighting Trump on his own populist, negatively polarized terms is a losing fight. They are the plurality and the vast apparatus of the imperial executive is just sitting there gassed up and waiting to be seized.
So the narrative is what matters, it's what I care about, but the popular "narrative" is wrong. What the country needs is a legitimately liberal coalition that recognizes we need to be reinforcing the guardrails, disempowering the machine, not working to take control and turn it against the other side. To summarize as nerdily as possible, the American presidency has become the one ring and the only solution is to cast it into Mount Doom.
I agree with the gist of this piece, but I'm pretty skeptical that Trump is really going to deport our whole agricultural workforce and raise tariffs to 60% or whatever. The guy always responded to pressure from the business community, in some ways more so than the average President. As soon as the stock market wavers & business leaders howl, he'd back down. He actually backed down quite a bit in his previous tenure.
On the other hand, I absolutely agree he'd restrict abortion and legal immigration a ton. To David Abbott's point below, it's kind of impossible to know what the policy stakes of an election are, but I think his past character is a pretty good guide.
BTW, my prediction is that if he's re-elected, there will be massive protests in US cities that start to turn violent after a spell, which unites the right behind him and reinforces our existing divides. The guy's main effect on the country is not in policy but tone- he's kind of a match to the country's gasoline
As someone who spent almost three years tangled in the legal immigration process during the Trump administration, the lack of coverage of that issue was incredibly frustrating. They effectively decapitated USCIS by appointing Ken Cuccinelli Acting Director at the same time he was Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. His only job, it seems, was to pull as many people off of visa processing as possible and move them over to deportation. At the same time, the Department of State was so hollowed out that it was difficult to get an appointment for anything at the US consulate.
They scrutinized visa applications to a ridiculous degree, down to the color of the ink used to sign documents, clearly acting under orders to find any excuse to reject them. No one returned emails, the phone line was constantly busy and the website did not update with current information. A border agent event threatened not to let us on the plane after the visa was issued because he was not satisfied with the passport page bearing a huge stamp showing that the visa was valid. He assured us that his power to strand us in the airport with our cat was absolute because of the covid restrictions.
I wrote to several journalists and media outlets to express my exasperation with their total lack of interest in covering this huge story. One person wrote back to me to explain, bluntly, that the incentive was to write about "victims". Legal immigrants tend to have advanced degrees, high-paying job offers, acceptance to degree programs, etc. and despite being victimized by the mendacious bureaucracy of a hostile administration, weren't the kind of "victims" that drive clicks.
"Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse."
"This dispute over legal immigration is less demagogic and has more to do with fairly arcane regulatory matters."
Is it?
I still want to know the ratio between the people who really are upset only about illegal immigration, and the people who very much want all immigration curtailed on the grounds of wanting demographic homogeneity. I worry that the latter is higher than we might think.
And Trump could very well be politicking for the latter--after all, the Cato article Matt linked to introduces with the sentence of "President Trump entered the White House with the goal of reducing legal immigration by 63 percent.". [https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-against-legal-immigration-too]
Here is my question. What percentage of the electorate in the six swing states know these facts:
1. Hunter Biden is a criminal and drug addict.
2. Donald Trump was found guilty of sexual assault.
3. Donald Trump has multiple fines against him totaling over half a billion dollars.
4. Donald Trump personally killed a bipartisan bill to secure the border.
5. Donald Trump has been barred from doing business in NY.
6. Joe Biden is 5% older than Trump.
7. Inflation is way down.
8. Unemployment is historically low.
That is the problem, IMO. All people hear is the narrative: Biden is old, everything is terrible. This is Ds fault as much as the Republican-owned media. Really, only Kevin Drum is pushing back.
Speaking of political narratives, some members of the intelligentsia just released a "love letter" to rural America entitled, "White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy."
I'm sure this book will help convince rural white voters to reconsider Biden this election season.
The Trump GOP’s plan is to make Americans poorer, food, housing, and goods more expensive, and to leave this country weaker.
The election of Trump signified a moral failure of both voters and the media. It signaled a level laziness and complacency emblematic of a spoiled child.
Sounds great to me. I've long read Matt's work because he prioritizes the issues, and I'll continue to do so here, as well as discuss them with other Slow Borers as appropriate. I have no doubt that this publication will be fully resistant to the flooding of zones with shit that we're going to be getting in the coming months--that's not happening here. Thanks very much!
I just wish that more publications can be as resistant, and I'm not getting my hopes up too high in this regard.
I'm struggling to understand why I found this post to be such a misfire. There is a conflation here I can't get my arms around. Is it supposed to be a dispassionate analysis of the likely concrete consequences of either side winning, regardless of how the public might be inclined to use such information, or is it trying to lay out an agenda about how to educate the public about their upcoming choice?
The two sound similar, but they're not the same. The public does not need a deep dive into dishwasher water efficiency standards; I'm sure if you asked them, they would tell you that a Republican President would be more likely to relax them in a business-friendly manner whereas a Democrat would do the opposite. The algorithm is pretty simple here and can be understood across a wide range of issues the voter doesn't need to know the details about.
Is it to warn voters about how current concerns would be dealt with by either side winning? Take inflation. Matt thinks Trump's policies -- *if enacted* -- would lead to greater inflation than those of Biden. But this is all theoretical; who knows what would actually happen under Trump. What voters *do* know -- again, the simple algorithm -- is that there was no inflation problem when Trump was President and the simplest conclusion is that that would be more likely to be the case in the future than not.
And Matt writes "I think the real story is that elevating climate to the center of the agenda had some real political downsides" and I just don't know what to do with that. Did he (very successfully!) pass legislation on our greatest long-term crisis? Yes he did. He's President and understands what the point of winning elections is. Is he going around everyday telling the American people that they should vote for him because of what he's doing to change their lives as he fights climate change? No, he's not; he's not an idiot. Like any smart politician, he's making his best case to the voters as to why he's the best choice.
I get the feeling that concrete policy -- and not amorphous things like democracy or declasse things like talking about Trump's character -- is what really excites Matt and he wishes that were the dominant way people think about the election. But it's just not. They pretty much know where the parties stand on those concrete issues and what is more likely to happen when one side or the other wins.* What is left then, is a voter judgment of the character of the man who wishes to lead them. You would think since this is a rerun they would also know all that already but it looks like they need a refresher course on what kind of man Trump is. So that's what we're going to get.
(* This doesn't apply to abortion because of the great uncertainty caused by Dobbs, which is why it has to be debated and litigated in the public sphere and the electoral campaign -- see the IVF controversy for just the latest installment of that.)
The NYTimes just came out with a poll saying that a lot of voters now say Biden is too old. Did they arrive at that conclusion on their own, or was it the constant drumbeat of stories that got them to that conclusion? Who can say???
Your approach to how journalism should work is why I'm a subscriber. Looking forward to the coverage of the election.
The policy stakes of an election are really hard to know. George W Bush did not run for President promising a global war on terror, an invasion of Iraq or a network of secret prisons. Trump did not run on a promise to delegate most COVID mitigation measures to the states or to sign and implement the CARES Act. Every Democratic candidate since Bill Clinton promised major health insurance reform, though only Obama really delivered. It’s safe to bet Republicans will try to cut taxes on rich people and restrict abortion access. That’s about it.
Pinning down the character of the candidates is far easier than predicting the legislative accomplishments of a congress whose composition we can only surmise. I have no idea what bills would pass during Biden’s second term. I don’t even know if he’ll have a functioning brain come 2027. I do know that Trump inflamed a mob to storm the Capitol to overthrow an election he lost. That is why I will never vote for him.
While I agree with you on the democracy point I think focusing on different policies a Trump admin might pursue misses the bigger picture.
The thing about Trump is that he corrodes and abuses the federal bureaucracy. If Desantis came in and implemented the same policies as a Trump admin I'd be unhappy but (excepting perhaps NATO) policies can be relatively easily reversed so I wouldn't be too worried. In a second term, Trump shows every sign that he's going to ignore those with conventional government experience and run roughshod over the bureaucracy -- likely driving out qualified career employees and threatening the organizational norms that keep things running.
That's not something most politicians do. They have policy goals they wish to achieve and need competant administrators to help steer the ship of state. Trump doesn't have policy goals in the same way and he resents the way those organizational norms obstructed his whims and got him impeached.
In short i fear that the particular policies are of secondary concern to the damage to state capacity.
The thing I'm worried for the most in 2024 is foreign policy. My biggest concern is Ukraine, because I fear that Trump and a Republican congress may just throw Ukraine to the wolves. Now, the end result of that may be that the rest of Europe folds in the game of chicken and throws a lot more money and resources to Ukraine. That would be great, but they could also not do that. And the reason that I'm worried about this in particular is that it would further damage America's credibility. If we had never commit to helping Ukraine, fine, but we did. It would show the wold that our foreign policy ambitions can change on a whim and nothing we say can be taken seriously.
On Israel/Palestine, I'm less conflicted because it's not like I'm worried Trump is going to come out in favor of Hamas, the way he very well might come out in favor of Putin, but Biden's handling of the issue is probably the best we could hope for so far. He's pressuring Netanyahu to minimize civilian casualties while still prosecuting the war. That's about right. Trump will probably encourage the WORST elements of the Israeli right and just give them the "attaboy" to just drive the Palestinians out. This would piss off almost every Muslim country in the world, even the ones we have decent relationships with.
Thirdly, and I can't believe this hasn't come up again, are the Republicans still planning on invading Mexico? Again, needlessly antagonizing otherwise mostly friendly nations.
Now watch as I look like an idiot in two years because all of these gambles work out. Europe foots the bill to help Ukraine, Israel defeats Hamas and the war ends sooner, which results in FEWER civilian casualties, and Mexico elects a president who welcomes US help in fighting the cartels. Trump's relatively hands off approach to the Middle East happened to work out, Israel and the UAE made peace, so maybe that would happen again... or maybe it wouldn't, and my fears would come to pass and we'll have made enemies out of friends for no good reason all across the world.
Contrast this with economic policy, which I think matters, but is mostly salvageable. If Trump imposes tariffs on every damn thing driving consumer prices up... the next president can undo them. Trump cuts taxes exacerbating inflation? The next president can raise them. And I have a feeling that Trump presiding over a shitty economy is the only way for his cult to lose interest in him. Because his first term saw a pretty damn good economy until COVID, which nobody can really blame him for. Trump presiding over double digit inflation might actually dislodge his support and he could leave office in 2028 with W-like approval ratings.
It is weird how truly post-material our politics has become.
I realize that my perspective may not be widely generalizable, but I'm not really the target audience for this. From where I sit, Trump is way less "bad" on the mundane issues relative to Biden than he's bad in the ways that he is genuinely dangerous. The man is not interested in being president, he's looking to wield the powers that have accumulated in the office against the constitutional order itself. Most specifically to exempt himself from the rule of law, but in whatever other ways catch his whim as well.
My problem is that the "narrative" isn't exactly on my side either. "Democracy" is not an antidote to the poison of populist movements. The Democrats are overrun with totalitarian populists in their own right, thankfully, they are too fractured to rally around a strongman like Trump, but that doesn't mean they're interested in relinquishing any of the power W/Obama/Trump et al. have accumulated.
Fighting Trump on his own populist, negatively polarized terms is a losing fight. They are the plurality and the vast apparatus of the imperial executive is just sitting there gassed up and waiting to be seized.
So the narrative is what matters, it's what I care about, but the popular "narrative" is wrong. What the country needs is a legitimately liberal coalition that recognizes we need to be reinforcing the guardrails, disempowering the machine, not working to take control and turn it against the other side. To summarize as nerdily as possible, the American presidency has become the one ring and the only solution is to cast it into Mount Doom.
I agree with the gist of this piece, but I'm pretty skeptical that Trump is really going to deport our whole agricultural workforce and raise tariffs to 60% or whatever. The guy always responded to pressure from the business community, in some ways more so than the average President. As soon as the stock market wavers & business leaders howl, he'd back down. He actually backed down quite a bit in his previous tenure.
On the other hand, I absolutely agree he'd restrict abortion and legal immigration a ton. To David Abbott's point below, it's kind of impossible to know what the policy stakes of an election are, but I think his past character is a pretty good guide.
BTW, my prediction is that if he's re-elected, there will be massive protests in US cities that start to turn violent after a spell, which unites the right behind him and reinforces our existing divides. The guy's main effect on the country is not in policy but tone- he's kind of a match to the country's gasoline
As someone who spent almost three years tangled in the legal immigration process during the Trump administration, the lack of coverage of that issue was incredibly frustrating. They effectively decapitated USCIS by appointing Ken Cuccinelli Acting Director at the same time he was Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. His only job, it seems, was to pull as many people off of visa processing as possible and move them over to deportation. At the same time, the Department of State was so hollowed out that it was difficult to get an appointment for anything at the US consulate.
They scrutinized visa applications to a ridiculous degree, down to the color of the ink used to sign documents, clearly acting under orders to find any excuse to reject them. No one returned emails, the phone line was constantly busy and the website did not update with current information. A border agent event threatened not to let us on the plane after the visa was issued because he was not satisfied with the passport page bearing a huge stamp showing that the visa was valid. He assured us that his power to strand us in the airport with our cat was absolute because of the covid restrictions.
I wrote to several journalists and media outlets to express my exasperation with their total lack of interest in covering this huge story. One person wrote back to me to explain, bluntly, that the incentive was to write about "victims". Legal immigrants tend to have advanced degrees, high-paying job offers, acceptance to degree programs, etc. and despite being victimized by the mendacious bureaucracy of a hostile administration, weren't the kind of "victims" that drive clicks.
Off topic breaking news: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-719_19m2.pdf
"Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse."
You nailed it, srynerson.
"This dispute over legal immigration is less demagogic and has more to do with fairly arcane regulatory matters."
Is it?
I still want to know the ratio between the people who really are upset only about illegal immigration, and the people who very much want all immigration curtailed on the grounds of wanting demographic homogeneity. I worry that the latter is higher than we might think.
And Trump could very well be politicking for the latter--after all, the Cato article Matt linked to introduces with the sentence of "President Trump entered the White House with the goal of reducing legal immigration by 63 percent.". [https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-against-legal-immigration-too]
Here is my question. What percentage of the electorate in the six swing states know these facts:
1. Hunter Biden is a criminal and drug addict.
2. Donald Trump was found guilty of sexual assault.
3. Donald Trump has multiple fines against him totaling over half a billion dollars.
4. Donald Trump personally killed a bipartisan bill to secure the border.
5. Donald Trump has been barred from doing business in NY.
6. Joe Biden is 5% older than Trump.
7. Inflation is way down.
8. Unemployment is historically low.
That is the problem, IMO. All people hear is the narrative: Biden is old, everything is terrible. This is Ds fault as much as the Republican-owned media. Really, only Kevin Drum is pushing back.
Speaking of political narratives, some members of the intelligentsia just released a "love letter" to rural America entitled, "White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy."
I'm sure this book will help convince rural white voters to reconsider Biden this election season.
The Trump GOP’s plan is to make Americans poorer, food, housing, and goods more expensive, and to leave this country weaker.
The election of Trump signified a moral failure of both voters and the media. It signaled a level laziness and complacency emblematic of a spoiled child.
Sounds great to me. I've long read Matt's work because he prioritizes the issues, and I'll continue to do so here, as well as discuss them with other Slow Borers as appropriate. I have no doubt that this publication will be fully resistant to the flooding of zones with shit that we're going to be getting in the coming months--that's not happening here. Thanks very much!
I just wish that more publications can be as resistant, and I'm not getting my hopes up too high in this regard.
I'm struggling to understand why I found this post to be such a misfire. There is a conflation here I can't get my arms around. Is it supposed to be a dispassionate analysis of the likely concrete consequences of either side winning, regardless of how the public might be inclined to use such information, or is it trying to lay out an agenda about how to educate the public about their upcoming choice?
The two sound similar, but they're not the same. The public does not need a deep dive into dishwasher water efficiency standards; I'm sure if you asked them, they would tell you that a Republican President would be more likely to relax them in a business-friendly manner whereas a Democrat would do the opposite. The algorithm is pretty simple here and can be understood across a wide range of issues the voter doesn't need to know the details about.
Is it to warn voters about how current concerns would be dealt with by either side winning? Take inflation. Matt thinks Trump's policies -- *if enacted* -- would lead to greater inflation than those of Biden. But this is all theoretical; who knows what would actually happen under Trump. What voters *do* know -- again, the simple algorithm -- is that there was no inflation problem when Trump was President and the simplest conclusion is that that would be more likely to be the case in the future than not.
And Matt writes "I think the real story is that elevating climate to the center of the agenda had some real political downsides" and I just don't know what to do with that. Did he (very successfully!) pass legislation on our greatest long-term crisis? Yes he did. He's President and understands what the point of winning elections is. Is he going around everyday telling the American people that they should vote for him because of what he's doing to change their lives as he fights climate change? No, he's not; he's not an idiot. Like any smart politician, he's making his best case to the voters as to why he's the best choice.
I get the feeling that concrete policy -- and not amorphous things like democracy or declasse things like talking about Trump's character -- is what really excites Matt and he wishes that were the dominant way people think about the election. But it's just not. They pretty much know where the parties stand on those concrete issues and what is more likely to happen when one side or the other wins.* What is left then, is a voter judgment of the character of the man who wishes to lead them. You would think since this is a rerun they would also know all that already but it looks like they need a refresher course on what kind of man Trump is. So that's what we're going to get.
(* This doesn't apply to abortion because of the great uncertainty caused by Dobbs, which is why it has to be debated and litigated in the public sphere and the electoral campaign -- see the IVF controversy for just the latest installment of that.)
Good luck to you!
The NYTimes just came out with a poll saying that a lot of voters now say Biden is too old. Did they arrive at that conclusion on their own, or was it the constant drumbeat of stories that got them to that conclusion? Who can say???