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.
I completely agree with this, and it’s one of the reasons I find MY’s electoral analysis a little bit lacking sometimes.
I think he views candidates in terms of their stated positions on *existing issues*. Since he’s a policy wonk, he’s well-equipped to assess the likely impact of candidates’ desired policies. To a large extent, “popularism” means elevating discourse about policy issues on which a candidate is most aligned with public opinion.
But most voters aren’t sufficiently in the weeds to think about elections in terms of concrete policy alternatives. They don’t sit around reading Emily Oster papers about how an additional dolllar of Medicaid funding will change life expectancy for lower-class mothers. And I don’t think this is irrational.
Instead, I think the way a lot of voters view elections is “will candidate X prioritize the needs of people like me?” That is, they want to know candidates’ *allegiances* rather than a laundry list of policies. Knowing a candidate’s allegiances gives voters some insight into how they would act even in unanticipated situations (like COVID, Russia/Ukraine, etc.)
The importance of signaling allegiances also explains why candidates constantly talk about policies that will never pass (e.g. Medicare for all).
"But most voters aren’t sufficiently in the weeds to think about elections in terms of concrete policy alternatives. They don’t sit around reading Emily Oster papers about how an additional dolllar of Medicaid funding will change life expectancy for lower-class mothers. And I don’t think this is irrational."
This is an odd rebuttal to an article whose stated purpose is to provide MY readers with additional context about the actual policy implications of the candidates. The whole point here is to make people more informed, not to claim that the electorate as a whole is deeply entrenched into the stated policy positions of the candidates. The general electorates lack of knowledge of those positions is precisely the thing he's saying he's trying to combat.
"The importance of signaling allegiances also explains why candidates constantly talk about policies that will never pass (e.g. Medicare for all)."
I'm a little bit unclear on your thesis here. You're ostensibly making a "vibes" claim about allegiances (voters care about candidates signaling what team they're on), but the way you're defining the allegiance signaling is via stated policy positions. So voters DO care about the policies that candidates are claiming they will enact? If so, then discussing those policy prescriptions and their impacts seems like a worthwhile endeavor that is helpful to predicting voter behaviors.
1. I don’t mean to rebut this specific article. MY is saying that he’s going to discuss what he views as under-covered concrete policy issues. SB subscribers are likely to enjoy that content, since that’s basically what we signed up for.
I’m responding to a broader theme in MY’s writing. My impression is that he thinks this type of policy coverage can be an effective persuasion/propaganda strategy. This is reflected in his opinion that Trump’s Medicare positions account for his success, that Biden’s climate policy accounts for his struggles, and so on. You can even see it in his article about how to persuade your republican uncle to vote for Dems. I’ve always been a little suspect of this propaganda strategy.
2. If voters really cared 100% about policy *outcomes* and 0% about allegiances, it would be a bad strategy to talk about a policy that will never pass. The point of talking about Medicare for all is not to say “I will do everything I can to pass Medicare for all.” It’s to say “I’m the *type of person* who supports Medicare for all as an abstract idea.” I view these two motives as very distinct. (I also don’t like to call this type of communication “vibes” because it makes it sound sort of irrational. I think discerning politicians’ allegiances is potentially very important.)
How do you account for swing voters switching far more drastically from Biden in 2020 to Trump than from Trump in 2020 to Biden? Has Biden somehow signaled a change in allegiance? Or are voters upset about policy choices and outcomes?
I think the relevant outcomes for elections are the policy considerations because those are the things that impact the swing voters. I think the kind of voter you're describing is a hardcore partisan that votes for who they think they is on their side, and their feeling about which party is on their side is fairly static. So if you want to talk about what's impacting electoral outcomes, it's the things that cause voters to shift from one side to the other, which are more likely to be concrete policy questions.
"If voters really cared 100% about policy *outcomes* and 0% about allegiances"
I don't think it needs to be 100% vs. 0%, but I think people care about stated policy positions because it signals an allegiance to the policy. I think that voters who are inclined to support candidates that say they support MFA are voting for them precisely because they expect them to advocate for it and try to achieve it. If their candidate isn't able to achieve the policy goal then they might not blame that candidate (people generally recognize how democracy works), but if you vote for someone because they say they support MFA and then they go to Congress and say they actually will never support that policy then those voters will be inclined not to vote for that person.
Based off your interpretation, why talk about policies at all? Why say you support anything? Just say "I'm a republican/dem/prog/cons. and will support their policies" if you want to signal what team you're on. I think being a team player matters, but people that vote based on a candidate's policy statements genuinely care about those policies.
I don't think that I support candidates based on their perceived "allegiances" per se but I do select elected officials more on their judgement and values than my agreement with specific policy goals. What comes up in any given cycle is so unpredictable and no one person has sufficient power to independently set an agenda or make changes (other than executive actions) that I don't assume candidates are going to actually get to do much of what they promise and are going to be asked to make policy on the fly about new things. But I am interested in policies that candidates put forward and support because it can be one way to access their judgement and values. But it is just one. Their record, their lives, and their overall philosophy of life matter as well as their experience.
I don't think most people who have guessed that 9/11 and the Iraq war would be the Bush legacy but if you had asked me before the election which one of them would be most likely to make a hot headed and reactive foreign policy decision including use of force, I would have guessed Bush and most presidents will face some sort of challenge on that front.
For me it is less "will the candidate prioritize the needs of people like me?" than "will the candidate do the right thing." I want a strong safety net to support those in poverty even though I haven't ever been in that group and am likely ever to be. My values and faith demand that of my community and I want a candidate who feels likewise.
As I have said before, one reason that I am not as concerned about Biden's age is because I think he sufficient humility to set down or hand over responsibilities to the VP and other cabinet members if Jill Biden tells him that he needs to do that and I think she would tell him that. I think that is the sort of people they are and what the value they place on service and sacrifice would mean. (I am also probably more okay with a Harris president than many even though she wouldn't be in my top five choices.) I think Trump is already to mentally imbalanced to serve, has one in his inner circle who will tell him anything he doesn't want to hear and would never sacrifice power because it was the right thing to do.
He claims to be a huge friend of evangelical Christians, but declines in church attendance year-over-year, including evangelical denominations and churches, accelerated in the initial years of the Trump presidency even before Covid, and of course they cratered during the pandemic.
That's not at all surprising, because political actions like the overturning of Roe and the subsequent lawmaking in conservative states have also led to an accelerating decline in outsiders' view of the evangelical church--a decline directly at odds with evangelicals' stated interest in conversion. And that decline goes hand-in-hand with Trump's own self-association with the cause. He has been bad for the brand, as it were.
There might have been some positive news from Trump's allegiance, since a lot of Trump fans started describing themselves as "evangelical Christians." But, hilariously, the trends identified by pollsters like Barna Group and Gallup show that the new evangelical converts don't actually attend church services. This doesn't totally shock me, because I know some young men in my own friends and family circle who basically fit this description. It is, however, a complete disaster for evangelical churches. If people no longer need to actually join a church in order to be an evangelical, that is a recipe for continued decline.
So, yes, having Trump signal his allegiance to and pursue policies on behalf of evangelical Christians has been, by both the numbers and the cultural influence game (which they definitely care about, by definition), a more or less complete disaster for the ones who actually go to and care about their churches.
You are the first person I have heard claim that the overturning of Roe v. Wade was something that evangelical churches should be upset about.
Can you point to polling of evangelicals that indicates that they're upset with that policy outcome? My experience is that they're ecstatic about that outcome, and it's one of the reasons they support Trump so strongly. I think your spin on what's happening requires ignoring what people say they care about, and instead saying "they're too dumb to realize that what I think they should care about is what they should actually care about." Which is frequently the attitude I see expressed when people say that voters are voting against their own interests, and is why I asked for some examples above.
Which of my claims are you disputing? Are you saying that I'm wrong about declining church attendance? Wrong about the declining percentage of people expressing a positive perception of "evangelical Christianity"?
All of the markers of decline I mentioned have an empirical basis. This is a subject in which I have long had an interest, as the son of an evangelical member and lifetime faithful congregant.
And as someone who grew up in the evangelical church, I can also tell you that people in those churches genuinely want to see them grow and thrive through a process of conversion--a process that both the numbers and personal experience in the seats every week will tell you is not happening in most places. It's not happening nowhere, but the broad picture is very clear: the Trump years were not great for the evangelical church in terms of its long term health. They just weren't.
I guess you can argue a bit more about the vibes, as you do, because the evidence is a little more thin on the ground, but even there you are going to find that I'm not making some oddball claim. Just to take one example, Barna Group has been sounding the alarm on this stuff for a long time. Pastor quit and burnout rates have just ticked higher and higher. From denominations, like the SBC, to independent megachurches, like Saddleback, to para-church movements, like IHOPKC, scandal has been constant since the Trump years.
You seem to think that I'm passing judgement as an outsider, but the call is coming from inside the house on this one. I'm not really member of the movement any more--my faith has changed, a lot--but I'm about as plugged in as you can be short of attending an evangelical church service every week. And I can tell you that although we prayed for the overturning of Roe at every clinic protest and Rally for Life (local events in support of the annual DC march) I attended, people in my circles believed that moment would be, for want of a better term, a kind of coming-out party, possibly the breaking wave of a revival. It definitely wasn't supposed to be one of the last dances before they turn the lights on.
That just. hasn't. happened. And there is no sign at present that it will happen. Instead, the average church in 2024 is at somewhere around 80-85% of attendance and considerably higher in average age of congregants from where it was in 2017 on the day Donald Trump was sworn in--two trends that accelerated considerably vis-a-vis the Obama and Bush administrations.
The Trump years were bad for evangelicals, and Dobbs does not change that. It is, in fact, possible to achieve significant policy wins and still be in a structurally declining situation. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Allegiances are misleading, though, for two reasons. First, it's easy for a candidate to claim allegiances they don't really have; Trump is an excellent example of this. His actions indicate pretty clearly that he actually despises the people he claims to prioritize. Second, even if allegiances are sincere, the president may not actually be able to act on them, either because it's just not really possible or because they don't understand how the world works well enough to effect the sort of change they want. For example, Trump claims to want to bring back the 1950s economy because that's when blue collar workers were doing really well, not understanding that if he achieved it American would immediately become a third-rate economic power.
So I think you have to look at actual policy proposals to get a sense of how the candidate would go about acting on their stated allegiances. If they're proposing policies that would actually cut against their claimed allegiances, either their allegiances are insincere or they don't know what they're doing. Either way, the proposals matter.
With Trump in particular, I think there's another reason to focus on his stated plans: I think he'll really try to enact them. Presidents (and smart leaders generally) try to surround themselves with smart people, and listen to them. Trump doesn't, because he actually believes he's the smartest person in the room. What we see from candidates as well as presidents is generally filtered through that collection of smart people. Not so with Trump.
In his first term he was initially saddled with a group of advisors selected for him by the old guard GOP, who picked a bunch of fairly smart, competent people because of course that's what you do. That group ameliorated the worst of Trump's instincts, either by arguing against them or by agreeing but slow-walking. He eventually forced most of them out, but they restrained him throughout his term.
His second term, if he gets one, will be different. The GOP old guard is gone or keeping their heads down, and his supporters have recognized the error of not being prepared with a full set of Trump loyalists to staff key positions, and they're not going to let that happen again. Next time Trump takes office, he'll do so with a full complement of true believers and yes men, and his White House will try to enact all of his policy proposals.
Of course, it's also possible that he's simply lying about some or all of his proposals, but I don't think so. I don't think he has that much guile in him. This is the one aspect of Trump's character that his supporters like that I think they really do get right: With Trump, what you see is what you get. He lies constantly but he actually believes his lies. Not that he believes his claims are factual -- he's not really interested in facts -- but that he believes the're truthful.
So I think it always makes sense to look at policy proposals, and I think this is especially true of Trump.
Trump promised to reduce immigration and then took actions to reduce immigration. Trump promised to appoint conservative judges who would overturn Roe and then appointed conservative judges who overturned Roe. Trump promised to start a trade war with China and then started a trade war with China. He promised to do that by imposing tariffs and then imposed tariffs once he got into office.
I feel like covering a presidential election in a way that assumes candidates will do things they say they will do is a pretty solid proposition.
OTOH, Trump promised to raise taxes on the rich, then cut taxes on the rich. He promised health care for all and then tried to cut health care. He promised to build a wall and then didn't. Arguably these things were predictable based on Trump's allegiances and character.
1) He would spin the SALT deduction as raising taxes on the rich (just limited to rich liberals is all);
2) He tried hard to fulfill that promise and failed because of John McCain. His voters will claim that he was stymied by the swamp and the establishment, and that if he could have repealed the ACA he would have then been able to enact better HCC;
3) He tried to build a wall but was stopped by Congress and the administrative state.
As I said elsewhere, voters are smart enough normally to recognize the difference between voting for a candidate and ordering dinner. When you order diner expect the waiter to bring you just what you ordered. When you vote for a candidate you're telling them what you want them to fight for. Voters will forgive failures to accomplish certain objectives if they think you actually tried hard to accomplish them. It's the difference between being mad at Trump for the border wall's failure and being mad at Biden for not forgiving student loans. Some Biden voters seem upset because they don't think he tried hard enough, but Trump voters think he tried hard, had SOME success (they point to small amounts of wall being built as proof), but was ultimately stopped because of opposition.
Criticizing Trump voters for not holding him accountable for his failures to give them everything they want is ignoring what they actually wanted him to do with his promises.
Those are good counter-examples, and I think I'm with you up to a certain point. I would agree that there is some middle ground between vibes analysis and stated-policy analysis, where each is appropriate in some contexts and likely to lead you astray in others. But I also tend to agree with the column that analysis of Trump has been much more interested in vibes, to its detriment.
As an example, one issue set I happen to care about is what Trump famously referred to as "The Nuclear," and even though he clearly didn't understand what he was talking about, Trump actually stated a reasonably clear set of priorities in the campaign related to stuff like proliferation, arms control, US arsenal modernization, and the Iran deal. I thought those were bad choices that made the world more dangerous, but they were there, and he proceeded to follow through on them with (I would argue) very predictable bad results. Indeed, the folks at places like Arms Control Wonk successfully predicted them.
Of course, even bringing up that issue also points to the problem, because it is so deep in the weeds that I can't imagine it's going to get many clicks in the news. But given the nature of Slow Boring I think it makes sense on this site to cover technical policy claims like they are meaningful and do coverage that way. I think it really is a deficit in the existing news coverage.
Sure but there’s a still a great degree of variability. The 2004 election felt incredibly important but in retrospect while Bush was one of the worst ever Presidents he did almost all his damage in his first term and the second term was social security form failing (good), immigration reform failing (bad) and TANF (good), and PEPFAR (great) plus he led to massive democratic senate majorities without which the ACA would have never passed.
Historically, Presidents have either kept or tried extremely hard to keep the promises they make on the campaign trail. Their inability to do so due to external factors they can't control is relevant to a prediction about their Presidential accomplishments should they be elected, but acting like we can't expect Trump to spend four years working hard to pursue his stated policy goals is simply not supported by the historical record.
"Every Democratic candidate since Bill Clinton promised major health insurance reform, though only Obama really delivered."
This is such an odd point. Bill Clinton expended significant political capital trying to achieve this. Barack Obama was the very next Democratic President. So yes, parties and candidates that make positions central to their agenda do spend effort trying to achieve those goals, and those efforts are sometimes (often?) successful.
"It’s safe to bet Republicans will try to cut taxes on rich people and restrict abortion access."
This feels like a statement made by someone who hasn't paid attention to how Presidential administrations operate. Yes, they will spend a lot of time trying to do those things. But Trump achieved dramatically more on the regulatory front then you seem to think, and if he's re-elected he will again wield significant power and influence throughout the regulatory state. And many of those things he's promising to do (and will be able to do) are bad.
This is a really interesting counterpoint. I still think it's of paramount importance for Matt (and journalists in general) to cover the issues that are most likely to be important. But with there being eight months until the election, perhaps it would be interesting for Matt to consider issues that are unlikely to come up but would be extremely important if they did.
Yes, it’s difficult to predict whether massive crises will upend things in politics. That doesn’t mean we can’t predict what administrations will do.
It’s not like the GWOT meant GWB wasn’t working desperately to weaken environmental regulations or that COVID somehow meant Trump hadn’t pursued being mean to immigrants.
Trump said he would build a wall. He didn’t. He did not even materially increase deportations from the interior of the country.
He promised to repeal the ACA and replace it with something great. None of that happened.
We can cherry pick promises that were and were not fulfilled, but, in November of 2015, there was no way for even a conscientious voter to confidently predict which promises would be implemented.
We shouldn’t take a candidate’s promises as claims about what will happen in their presidency. We should take their promises as claims about what they will try to do during their presidency. We can try to predict how these attempts will work out, and what collateral effects these attempts will have.
This is a mind boggling thing to focus on. The country expended considerable time and resources towards trying to accomplish those goals. The opportunity costs of trying to achieve them is what people are voting on. "What do I want the country to try and do for the next four years?" is the thing voters are selecting. Sure, Trump failed in some of the things you're listing. But voters CARED about those issues and voted for him precisely because he was promising to do them, and then he spent a ton of time trying to accomplish them. Pretending like none of that matters is just weird.
I was going to make a similar post - what we “knew” with most confidence about a Trump victory in 2016 alongside a GOP trifecta was that he would repeal Obamacare. Of course he did not due to a mix of incompetence and bad luck.
Overall I think voters know that the GOP will try to cut taxes, limit immigration, favor big business, de-regulate, and appease religious conservatives, and the Dems want to increase healthcare and poverty spending, increase immigration, and improve abortion access. It is surely worth covering implications of this in more detail (as in your point about what does this mean for grocery inflation), but I think plenty of Trump voters are happy with a bit less bank regulation - it’s not a surprise to them.
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.
I'm of two minds on this topic. One, yes, we need competent administrators. But we also need the executive branch, including the military, to be 100% accountable to their elected leaders. Elections have consequences, as the saying goes, and seeing the bureaucracy thwart the people's elected leaders -- even Trump and the GOP -- doesn't sit well with me.
I remember stories about how the Border Patrol was resisting Obama's policies. And about how the military leaders were shading information (or even lying) about Afghanistan to continue the war effort. Happened during Vietnam also. Those were bad.
"...seeing the bureaucracy thwart the people's elected leaders...doesn't sit well with me"
Even if said bureaucrats are following the Constitution and Rule of Law while their elected leaders are not? I get that elected leaders should - normally - have bureaucrats who will work to implement the government that the people elected, but when Trump seeks to install loyalists precisely to enable Trump's extralegal impulses, I think it's good for the bureaucracy to resist that.
Our expectations of the military are that they follow any lawful order and resign if they believe an order is illegal. Other executive branch employees should be held to the same expectation.
That sort of exasperates the problem, though, no? Because the bureaucrat who resigns would potentially be replaced by a loyalist who would have no problem with said illegal order.
But there's a ton of subjectivity here and in the absence of a SOCTUS decisions on the specific order, people have to apply their own discretion. That can include refusing an unlawful order and resigning. But we don't want people "doing their own research" when it comes to subverting the state from within. It's no surprise that almost everyone can find a legitimate reason for their intuitive sense of what to do in the first place through motivated reason.
But that's the point though right? If the employee refuses something for being unconstitutional, the government can take that to the courts and if it is found to be a lawful order we can punish the employee for it. I am way more scared of positions being filled with Trump loyalists than I am worried about it taking a bit to deal with Kim Davis.
I agree, but I'm not so much worried about the instances you describe (what I would call "edge cases") so much as I'm worried about instances where any reasonable person would agree on the illegality and/or Unconstitutionality (not sure if this is a real word, but rolling with it anyway)
"Because the bureaucrat who resigns would potentially be replaced by a loyalist who would have no problem with said illegal order."
This is (one reason) why political appointees require confirmation in Congress. Absent Congressional confirmation, the resigning bureaucrat will be replaced by another civil servant who was hired by Federal HR, not the president. And if the loyalist can receive Congressional confirmation, then it's easier to change the law to make the order legal.
While I wholeheartedly agree with your stated logic, we’ve also seen that the Senate is basically a failed institution that cannot competently mediate the popular will into effective oversight of the executive.
So we should factor that into our expectations next time around: Border Patrol and ICE are NOT going to obey the constitution as much as they will Trump.
So if you're a lawyer in a federal agency, and your political appointee asks you to sign off on an initiative you believe is not allowed under your authorizing statute, your response should be "I quit"? That doesn't seem like a workable expectation if we want authorizing statutes, or other administrative requirements, to mean anything.
This whole discussion lets Congress off the hook too easily. We *have* elected representatives to overrule the agency lawyers already! But they're dysfunctional, so we're just going to push more power into an imperial presidency instead? It's the wrong approach, we can't do without Congress and need to fix it instead of trying to work around it.
The agency lawyers are the people institutionally selected to interpret what the agency is required or permitted to do, unless and until overruled by a court or Congress. It is a real job that people build up real, extensive training and expertise to do.
In a dispute between agency lawyers and a political appointee, why would you assume the lawyers just "don't like" the policy? Rather than that the administration just doesn't like the law.
Again, there are authorities that should be able to overrule an agency's legal department regarding the agency's legal constraints. But if appointees are going to be one of them, why even have administrative law in the first place?
If our bureaucrats were following the constitution, then most of them wouldn't have jobs because the larger amount of what the federal government does is unconstitutional
Basically, I agree with you on this but I think the nature of the problem has been misunderstood. There are relatively few instances where direct orders are disobeyed. The problem is what happens during all the time the boss isn’t looking and when people have a modicum of turn left, turn right, do nothing, or do a lot discretion. It’s at that moment that a president wants someone in basic sympathy with their aims to be on the scene.
I think the number of veto points (as MY has discussed frequently) is a huge impediment to our democracy actually functioning. Its why I wish we'd get rid of the filibuster. The fact is that much of our electoral politics is predicated on each side stating what they want to do knowing full well it's almost impossible to get anything done and then they never suffer the consequences if their stated positions are awful. As just one example, repealing the ACA would be, IMHO, a bad idea. But republicans can campaign on promising to do it and get votes from people who rely on it because they can't actually repeal it. Some of the voters who support republican politicians do so because the promised policies that would negatively impact their lives will never come to fruition. To be clear, the same is true for Democratic politicians who over-promise for things they can't deliver because of how resistant our system is to change.
I would much prefer a system where politicians who can achieve electoral majorities are able to actually pass the legislation they want to see enacted. Then we can actually learn if those policies are good and/or popular. If they are, great. If not, we vote the bums out and let new ideas flourish. But the number of ways in which political parties are actually prevented from achieving their goals despite winning elections I think is a hugely harmful aspect of our system.
You need to be careful to distinguish between executive agencies (which answer to the President) and administrative agencies, which are creations of Congress, and don't except to the extent Congress has delegated certain powers of appointment to the President. Of course, the current conservative Supreme Court may overturn all this and 85 years of established administrative law.
I mean what did the bureaucracy stop Trump from that wasn't illegal? All of those latter examples are indeed bad but Trump showed how dangerous a corrupt executive branch can be. I feel like we can end the military's ability to hide info from the POTUS without taling seay important checks and balances.
My issue isn't them being responsive. If DeSantis or Obama took them in hand I'd shrug or maybe applaud. But Trump doesn't have a record of hiring the best people or even particularly competant people.
I'm not suggesting we have structural safeguards against Trump doing what he will likely do. I tend to agree the president needs authority (though ideally congress would have more power and act more rather than leave as much to executive discretion).
There's an excellent article in the 2/29 issue of the NY Times on the Heritage Foundation's 'Mandate for Leadership' if you want to know what the people likely to staff a Trump Administration have in mind for the federal bureaucracy.
Having thought about this some more, I think this is one of the few policy areas that will be covered thoroughly by the mainstream media before the election. And, regardless of what people may think of the Lincoln Project, I'm sure they will work hard to impress this on anti-Trump Republicans, independents, and other moderates will be thinking. So, even though I agree in principle, I don't see any harm done if Matt ends up not really talking about this (and of course, maybe he will since there's 8 months of content to fill before November).
I think that this piece outlines a reasonable way to cover that. You talk about the consequences that matter to voters. People don't worry much about our bureaucracy in the abstract but knowing that Trump will sabotage government services that they care about.
There are very few people left who can remember a time before the miraculous abundance attained after World War II--it looks like the deal has been sealed from here on out. Come to think of it, this probably explains the nostalgia for specifically the 1950s for some. It's the furthest one can go back to get old cultural values they want while still capturing that postwar abundance--even if, as Matt has pointed out many times, we were much poorer in the 1950s, and also that the culture had already changed considerably from the first half of the 20th century.
I've lost confidence that prosperity is the explanation for post-material politics. I think it also matters if the government can get things done. America is very prosperous but plenty of people have material problems. If politics solved those problems, that'd be great, but if you lose confidence in its ability to do so, it's rational to cease focusing on that.
As a test, the UK is far less prosperous than America, so you'd expect a much more material politics. This is not really the case, politics here has obsessed over Brexit and other culture war topics. In particular, the UK has a giant material problem in the form of a catastrophic housing crisis, and it doesn't get much political attention. People have just come to believe that it is a law of nature that housing affordability gets worse over time. NIMBYs have pulled off a "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing people he didn't exist" - they've f*cked up the housing market so hard for so long that many people can't conceive of it functioning properly.
Government in the US, both at a federal level and below, is at least perceived to also perform poorly. So perhaps this is part of why many folks have lost of interest in it as a solution to their problems.
People will always have relative material problems, but having the absolute base material needs resolved is what I think makes the difference in reducing its salience.
I recently read Christopher Clark's 'Revolutionary Spring' about the European revolutions of 1848. Your comment about relative material problems jogged my memory of one striking statistic unearthed by a couple of public health officials in Nantes in 1836. They discovered that on the city's very poorest street, rents averaged 25fr/year on an income of 300fr/yr (wow, I thought, only 8.3% of their income on rent, no wonder we think the rent's too damn high today). The flip was they spent 50% of their income on bread alone. Which would rather spend 50% of your income on: rent or bread?
Democratic governments are accountable to majorities. If the constituencies with material problems are small enough, and fixing them requires sacrifices from the majority, there is no reason to expect they would ever get fixed. I realize this is a 4th grade level insight but really, what is the mechanism? How would a homeowner majority country be induced to intentionally crash housing prices?
The thing is, UK voters are more pragmatic and less polarized than in the US. There’s currently a huge shift against the Tories (and the Scottish National Party) because they were inept and scandal-ridden. For the Tories, there’s also the policy failure of Brexit. Labour has also been helped by a clearer anti-NIMBY stance
Running on "we're not inept and corrupt" is completely consistent with people having no faith in government. It's sort of the college educated version of substance-less politics. Think of Matt's framing of today's article - what is at stake in an election in which the only debate is who is more competent and honest? Unless you have an extreme competence gap which shouldn't happen in normal circumstances, not much.
I agree Labour is more anti-NIMBY but I've not seen evidence of people grasping it. I've had people tell me at length about how bad housing is in their community and express total ignorance about the incoming government's reasonably extensive plans to increase construction.
Idk I think his point is good. Like, my desire for mass transit hasn't declined, but it's not going to be something that will influence my vote until the US proves it can actually build a railway that doesn't cost a quintillion dollars.
The Republican coalition could not function without the voters of people who are doing pretty well and want to protect their economic interests. That’s at least 1/3 of their coalition, and that feature of their coalition is under reported
Granted I'm sure there are plenty of people like us who are in the democratic coalition but are also doing pretty well and want to protect our economic interests.
Democrats do not hurt my economic interests. I am at little risk of being in the 32% tax bracket. One has to be damn close to being a 1 pet center before progressive economic policies begin to bite.
Furthermore, if one is a doctor, half of your income comes from federal subsidies. Rich doctors who bitch about taxes are whiney hypocrites.
I'm still thinking that the mantra of "tax the rich" is going to infiltrate both parties, except they'll be two very divergent meanings of the phrase--with one being "tax everything over ~150k at X%", while the other is "tax everything above ~500k at >X%, and everything below at <X%". And I'll just be sitting on a lonely island of minority wishing that tax rates were much more boring.
I'm afraid Dems will push for low taxes on wages and the GOP will push for low taxes on inheritance and investment incomes and we'll be left in an untenable fiscal position.
What regulations on gas stoves are you talking about? Ones that were proposed, or ones that were imagined? I don’t believe any have actually been implemented, other than city-level bans on new gas hookups of any sort in Berkeley and New York.
Seattle has done some regulations that in effect make putting gas appliances into new building impractical and essentially force a conversion to electricity over the next 10 years. This has largely been interpreted as new multifamily units can't have gas.
There has also been enough talk about potential regulation of gas appliances in the coming years that folks here act as if they are likely to be banned in 10 years. Predictably folks react to that assumption differently. Some people are upgrading and buying new appliances now hoping to get grandfathered in. Others are switching over now to avoid the issue down the line.
I think it is worth pointing out that a move from gas to electric has a much bigger carbon output in the Seattle area where our electricity is mostly hydro with a lot of wind and solar. It is also why a switch to EV cars in our region makes more sense from net zero perspective. There are a lot of areas where electricity is made from gas, oil, or coal and those switches are not very impactful. I think the research has Washington State along with Denmark and Germany as places where electrification is powerful.
Yep, there was pushback against the ban (though as noted in the article other "efficiency" measures that make appliances not work as well are still ongoing.
But if you propose a stupid policy, I still hold it against you whether it becomes law or not.
As the saying goes "it's the thought that counts"
And the laws to phase out sales of gas cars really are on the books in CA
And it's likely a growing number--that's part of the post-material realignment, that more people don't mind that they're not keeping as much of their earnings as possible. So the question to Abbott's point is whether perhaps the GOP could function with a smaller share of the affluent.
So, knowing that you're a Trump voter, what role do you think immigration has played in that prosperity? (I'm not asking to score rhetorical points, I'm really curious in your thoughts.)
I think legal immigration can and has been good. In particular I would like to make it easier to people that come to study in US universities to apply to stay. I would also love to see more H1B visa's and also make sure there are programs in place so that the agricultural workers that are needed can come here legally.
BUT...
I also think that there should be limits. It takes time for people to assimilate. Too much immigration too fast is a problem and stresses resources. More than that, a country should be in control over it's border. It should know who's coming in, and get to decide yay or nay
For the record, I think the legal immigration level should be higher than it's current level of 1 million or so a year. But WAY lower than the total amount of immigration that currently occurs (legal + illegal).
My solution would be to hire enough border patrol and immigration judges, and then build whatever facilities are needed to house people for the VERY short time allowed for processing (weeks not years). Change amnesty laws to make them clear.
Stop catch and release (yes for families too). If the courts have a problem, pass a constitutional amendment.
Mandate e-verify
and yes finish building the wall. Walls do help, but they are a small part of the solution
Thanks! All sounds pretty reasonable. There's an open question in another thread today about whether support for Trump's immigration policies is really about *illegal* immigration or about demographic change and what the balance between the two is.
I think there's a pretty big coalition of people that are unhappy with immigration policy. I'm sure there's a small slice that are actually racists and don't want to see demographic change.
I think there's a bigger part that worries about cultural change. IE you don't care what color people are, but you worry about people supporting the same type of people and policies in their new country that made their own country so badly run (see Latin America).
And I think pretty much all of them are worried about not knowing who's coming or going.
> My solution would be to hire enough border patrol and immigration judges, and then build whatever facilities are needed to house people for the VERY short time allowed for processing (weeks not years). Change amnesty laws to make them clear.
I assume you mean "asylum" laws, but otherwise this was in the bill that Biden supported and Trump trashed.
I think the discourse is post-material because it’s more interesting to the people discussing it. Greater participation in it by the masses has the downside of focusing on the things they can articulate well and policy specifics are not those.
What I think is really interesting is that elites’ political affiliations seem to be more determined by their relationship to the means of production than poorer Americans’ affiliations are.
In the upper-middle-and-up income group, there’s a pretty clear professionals vs proprietors split, while in middle-and-lower groups, gender, religious affiliation, and ethnicity seem more determinative.
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.
As a former Republican, now independent-who-keeps-voting-Democrat I agree with you that Trump's "genuinely dangerous" stances are the reasons I will _never_ vote for him, regardless of his other policies.
But.... he's pretty bad on tariffs and a bunch of other stuff too, he will make a bunch of mundane things worse, and I think legitimately highlighting his actual policy positions is fair and non-totalitarian/authoritarian from the D side.
I don't agree with all the decisions Biden is making but I think they're at least arguable positions and we can discuss them for the election.
I don't know how you get there. Being president is fundamentally two jobs rolled into one: the main one, the one that gets less attention, is managing the executive branch, and Trump is so horrifically bad at it it's basically a crapshoot whether anything ever gets done. Maybe this is actually your preferred state of affairs, but I don't think you seem like an ancap or anything so "uncontrolled chaos" doesn't seem to be your bag.
The second job is of course the guy that goes on TV and sets the tone for whatever "America" is supposed to be, and to most people's chagrin, Trump is way better at going on TV than the average president.
I actually do think this is a pretty good take about Trump Admin 2. First go around the Trump executive branch was mostly... normal, outside of a couple things directly from Trump's inner circle. If he wins his way back, I'm faaar more concerned about agencies, particularly DOJ and State, going entirely off the rails.
All sorts of anarchists and socialists and ethno-nationalists and technocratic paternalists and malthusians and such have been part of the D coalition since forever, none of that has had real populist cohesion in like half a century at least so the closest anyone has come up with is powerless trash like "woke". That doesn't mean the ghost of Woodrow Wilson couldn't be gathering strength somewhere once again.
Importantly though, the Democratic party still keeps such people in check. Just look at the 2020 primary race, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders none of them are incredibly populist and certainly none of them are anarchists. I agree with you that the left has the potential for populism but currently populist appeal is very low in the DNC. Especially after they've picked up so many of us RHINOs as part of their coalition now and can't afford to lose us.
"Just look at the 2020 primary race, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders none of them are incredibly populist and certainly none of them are anarchists."
The discussion about ICE and border control in the 2020 primary race was the closest thing to anarchists I've seen outside of Jan 6th from a major political figures. The broader public hated both of those.
I'm honestly struggling to feel like I can speculate in a unbiased way. I would say in the before times it was definitely more Ds than Rs even when the religious right was the plurality. Clinton era "tough on crime" Dems were downright Orwellian and I have a hard time disaggregating who has or hasn't let that stuff go and moved into the liberalism camp. Right now 60-70% of Rs are fully bought in on Trump. D voters? I don't know... 50/50 maybe? have some kind of utopian/totalitarian derangement.
Thanks. I'm well aware of your ideology and I'm taking that into account to get a feel for what you think the ratios are, and you directly answered that.
It's an incredibly hard question to answer... most people are simply deeply ignorant of how the structures of the republic function. What I do believe is true, is that the more power the president wields the more it drives people to sort into their populist camps. Far too few have legitimate ideological commitments to liberalism/pluralism in the face of someone they consider a threat holding the reigns of government.
I've thought for years that if I ever somehow had the chance to speak to Obama privately I would tell him, "You should have thrown the Ring into Mount Doom when you had the chance instead of trying to hand it to Galadriel."
The problem is that his supporters don't care, and swing voters are not swayed by any of the "genuinely dangerous" talk. Some of them think it is a feature, not a bug.
I think what you have to do is try to convince those people who think "Sure he is an asshole, but he is on my team so it's fine" that he is not, in fact, on their team, and that he will use his asshole powers to do things that they actively hate (like make inflation way worse). Again, concentrating on swing voters, since partisans will not care, or believe you, in any case.
Well, maybe this is just a strong case to vote for a GOP Congress if one plans to vote Biden, since the presidency isn't going anywhere. If one desires less intense arguments over how to use the state, they might first seek reducing the size of the state. David Frum wrote an excellent passage in his first book, Dead Right (1994) [1] all about this, followed by a wonderful chapter on the Religious Right. There, he explains why left-libertarianism doesn't exist in mass politics, but instead libertarianism does often exist in practice alongside a coalition with culturally conservative voters. I highly recommend the book, as it's quite relevant today.
I also find your reference to totalitarianism understandable but probably unhelpful for most readers. "Democrats trade in populist rhetoric to enact some illiberal/coercive technocratic ideas" might better describe[2] what's going on in their party than a term often associated with Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR. In fact, some of the best examples to look at might come from Trudeau's Canada[3], which is both not totalitarian and has some examples of controversial moves against people outside his political coalition.
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
If there are even small riots, I think Trump is going invoke the Insurrection Act to use the military to put them down. Now, I don't know how bad this will actually be. HW used the Insurrection Act to end the LA Riots, and no one believes HW was a totalitarian monster.
Agreed, yeah that's the other part of my prediction. Widespread protests turn into riots in some places, Trump attempts to use the military, more civil disorder, etc. Trump would be a lot more confrontational about it than Bush1
A lot of Trump’s 2016 campaign rhetoric (Muslim ban, border wall, etc) was kind of a symbolic/rhetorical gesture toward what his admin actually tried to do in office rather than a serious policy plan. I think there’s a decent chance that some of the wilder tarriff talk falls into that bucket, although it’s possible that whatever the real policy ends up being would still be pretty bad.
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."
Yeah, I'm not thrilled about it, but it just seemed so obvious. I will also add after just quickly glancing at it that the ruling is a 9-0 decision on reversing the Colorado Supreme Court, although Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson wrote separately to say that the majority goes beyond the scope of the issues to effectively issue an advisory opinion. (That said, given the nature of the issue here, I think there's actually a pretty good reason to issue an advisory opinion so Congress can address the situation promptly in the future rather than passing the buck to the court system.)
I still wish SCOTUS had ruled that Trump is disqualified but states can't remove him from ballots because Congress can change his disqualified status whenever it wants.
I don’t want Trump to be president, but I actually think the consensus part of the ruling was for the best? This is the sort of issue where we want a single decision on the federal level rather than like, fifty patchwork conclusions from the states.
I agree that this is the best case scenario that involved a Trump win--it also forecloses other states from making stuff up to declare Democrats as insurrectionists and throwing them off the ballot.
It also prevents a situation where state courts try to aggressively enforce idiosyncratic interpretations of either the US constitution or federal law.
"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]
One of Bill Maher's guests last week kept repeating "Do you honestly feel that you are better off today than you were in 2018?" over and over. When pressed on why she was so sure that things were worse now, she came up with: Inflation, high prices, everything is more expensive and "millions of people coming over the border". That comment perfectly dovetails with the campaigning of the Republicans on my ballot tomorrow. There is no nuance or distinction between legal, illegal, immigrant, migrant, asylum-seeker; it is just an appeal to a base emotional reaction against "those people" who are "invading my country".
I can tell you from experience that if Stephen Miller gets let back into the White House, the legal immigration process will (again) become a quagmire. USCIS will be tasked with denying as many visa and citizenship applications as possible and with investigating naturalized citizens. Meanwhile, the media will focus on The Border and Trump will demagogue in kind. It doesn't even matter if Trump voters know or care about legal immigration because he and Fox News will tell them immigration has plummeted because he is so big and tough that everyone is afraid to come here now.
> USCIS will be tasked with denying as many visa and citizenship applications as possible and with investigating naturalized citizens.
It's hard to know how much of a problem this is in reality. Even the article Matt cites from CATO shows green cards were roughly steady until COVID, while the decline in visas issued appears to be a trend that started already in 2016. This article makes that point explicitly, that the problem was mostly one of perception: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/trump-effect-immigration-reality
The Biden administration hasn't exactly made visa processing much easier either. Although there is a proposed rule change to allow visa renewals in country (instead of having to leave, apply, wait, and come back). Hopefully it gets implemented soon; while I don't think a Trump administration would go through with the change, I'm not sure they would care enough to try to repeal it either.
The number, type, origin, etc. of visas is set by Congress. For example, the visa we were applying for was from a program with no cap on the number issued. But the Trump administration made it so that, even with an immigration lawyer helping us, the process was tedious, slow and sometimes outright hostile. They repeatedly reminded us that one small mistake would invalidate our application and put us at the back of the line, so they weren't legally able to outright deny a visa (drive down the number of successful applicants). The whole thing felt very personal, like the point was to telegraph disdain and petulance even if they couldn't actually deny our application outright.
We are now going through the naturalization process (before the next administration takes office) and the tone feels totally different. Maybe it's because naturalization is just different from visa processing. But the Trump administration made a big show of trying to strip naturalized citizens of their US citizenship by digging up their paperwork and looking for tiny mistakes. And I'm sure they will do it again, if given the chance.
I think the goal is really just to hurt people and cast immigrants—even naturalized citizens—as unwanted foreign invaders. If they curb legal immigration in the process, that is just icing on the nationalist cake.
Trump really weaponized incompetence in this area. My office used to do routine immigration matters like family visas and naturalization for our clients. We had to quit a few months after Trump was in office and refer them all to immigration experts because the Department fell into total chaos. We would have to file the same paperwork 3 or 4 times because they lost. Notices would come that made no sense. It was maddening. If you know your boss doesn't want you to do your job it is pretty easy to comply.
"Weaponized incompetence" is an excellent descriptor. People who did not have direct interactions with USCIS during the Trump administration don't appreciate just how bad it got. And I bet the same thing applies across the federal government. Until you witness how dysfunctional and mendacious a bureaucracy can become under deliberate mismanagement, you can't really understand it.
Also, you should 100% naturalize as soon as possible. While Trump has talked about revoking citizenship, that would require some real changes in law that I don't think the Supreme Court has the stomach for. But there are some terms in the laws around deportation of LPRs that new federal judges may start interpreting in a broad way. I saw a recommendation from some in the Poor People's Campaign that while we need to fight for a Biden win we also need to realize that Trump could win and that could start tough times and so folks need to start getting their hearts, relationships, and resources right to ride that out. I would add getting your immigration status "right" as well to the fullest extent possible while there is still a Biden administration UCIS attempting to function.
I don't know, the people working in these offices don't changeover *that* quickly, so I'm not sure you can tie the tone of the officer(s) to the administration. Just to give an anecdote, someone I know applying for a green card recently had to cancel her appointment due to having COVID (as their guidelines explicitly ask them to do!) and was still given a really hard time about it and is waiting for months to get another one.
For sure, it also varies greatly person-to-person. Our lawyer prepared us for a worse-case scenario interview, but we got super lucky and the ICE officer was very nice. But the one "guarding" the plane at the airport yelled at us and threatened us for 20 minutes before assuring us that he would write nasty things in the "permanent record" before letting us on the plane.
The impression I got was that there is, however, discretion in who gets placed where. Someone trying to make the experience as terrible as possible can make sure to put all the really grumpy people "at the front desk" and keep the cheery ones in the back room pushing paper.
> It's hard to know how much of a problem this is in reality
I mean, this is the paradox of Trump. Trump certainly *tried* to cut off immigration in all its forms, he just did it really incompetently. US v Hawaii was his big moment, and even then it had pretty limited impact. COVID gave him the excuse he needed to really go for it, and he did. I imagine he'll try again and just say "oh well the Democrats all said that COVID is still a big problem, so need article 42 back" and just do that again.
I think right-wingers cutting several types of immigration is preferable to the likely alternative, keeping immigration high and trying much higher internal deportations like under Dubya.
As to group B, I think there are many people who don't necessarily want "demographic" homogeneity but simply feel animus toward people who are different. Some opponents of (legal) immigration are minorities!
But I agree that the ratio of B/A is pretty high, especially if you broaden the definition of B as above. You know someone is in B if they argue that we need to curtail legal immigration due to liberals' failure to secure the border and stop illegal immigration (an assumption I see pretty frequently among immigration skeptics). People who make arguments like that seem to think it's a clever form of rhetorical jujitsu against their political enemies, but it actually reveals that their core concern is that there are simply too many immigrants, not the "rule of law". Otherwise, there would be no reason to link legal and illegal immigration.
Sure. I just note that there are lots of non-white people who don't especially want more immigration, and it's not because they want to make America more white, but because they're happy being in a 10% (or whatever) minority and they don't want that to change.
Makes me think of the Douglas Adams line about technology (from the Salmon of Doubt):
"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
My experience is that lots of stuff that was invented between when I was 15 and 35 had a lot of promise and then the stuff invented after I was 35 has been very tightly focused on using psychology to utterly wreck people in some kind of grift.
I’d guess that the ratio you’re talking about is something like 0.3, and that we’re in a situation where the median voter on the immigration issue is mostly concerned about illegal entry but the median voter within the subset of voters who are upset about immigration also wants less legal immigration.
It might be difficult because a lot of people have different ideas about what sorts of immigration is or isn’t legal. Two people who say they are fine with legal immigration but not with illegal immigration might have very different opinions about whether some currently legal immigration should be counted as illegal or whether some currently illegal immigration should be counted as legal.
It might be clever to ask people what kinds of immigration they'd like to see for what kinds of jobs, and then cross that with whether current immigration law would be able to fill those jobs.
We know that two time Obama voters flipped to Trump and Biden voters in 2020 are flipping to Trump in 2024. So, there is a persuadable group of moderate voters on this issue that's large enough to decide an election. The ratio is not useful because the goal is not to persuade right wing racists to flip. It can be a goal, just not a realistic one. I think progressives should stop wrapping themselves up in the warm and cozy blanket of "they're racist" to feel good about their unpopular policies and start thinking about how they can adopt policies that would be more appealing to moderates and independents.
To state the obvious, no it's not. You only need to know how many are opposed to illegal immigration but are supportive of legal immigration. Knowing how many are opposed to all immigration is not useful because moderation is not going to flip those voters.
True, but in this case, it was well known for the past 8 years that immigration is one of Trump's key strengths. For the Democratic party to hope that it'll go away as an issue only worked once because of the oversized effect of the pandemic. Assuming that they could get away with unpopular positions again, when the border crisis was a big issue from the beginning of the Biden presidency, is dumb politics. They took the independent voters for granted and Biden is likely to lose based on this issue alone.
“people who very much want all immigration curtailed on the grounds of wanting demographic homogeneity.”
There’s no intrinsic contradiction between immigration and demographic homogeneity. Americans often hold on to their ethnic heritage (e.g. Saint Patrick’s day is still a thing), and there are still plenty of Europeans who’d like to immigrate to the US —- some of whom do so illegally [1]. I bet there’d be support for letting them in.
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.
The reason why #2 isn't more widely reported is because that's not a "fact" and any media outlet that said it would be gifting Trump with a massive, easily winnable defamation suit against them. Trump was found civilly liable for defaming E. Jean Carroll by claiming that she was lying about him having sexually assaulted her. You can say that as part of that judgment the jury necessarily had to believe Trump sexually assaulted Carroll, but that's not a "conviction," which refers to a criminal trial outcome.
How you answer whether O.J. Simpson is or is not a murderer probably answers your convicted criminal question too. I don't know what I'd call O.J. but I would probably fall short of directly calling him a murderer if absolutely pressed on it.
Really. I would totally call OJ a murderer. Conviction requires beyond a reasonable doubt but it can be fairly obvious that someone is guilty and there still be some reasonable doubt.
Yes, I focused on #2 because I very frequently see commenters in progressive on-line spaces saying that the "failure" of the media to report that Trump was "convicted" of sexual assault proves that the MSM is in the tank for Trump. And it's like, no, it just proves that the MSM doesn't want to get hit with a nine-figure judgment from a jury in East Dogpatch, AR, or whatever the most Trump-friendly jurisdiction is that (1) treats false accusations of criminal convictions as per se defamation (meaning no proof of "special" damages is required) and (2) doesn't have a cap on punitive damage awards.
Just re-inflation being "way down" ... that really feels like you're just picking your facts. Or at least add a 7.5 that prices are way up or never been higher. I think Furman nailed this point that people don't care about the rate of change. They care about the level.
Exactly. I'm still outraged that gas costs way more than it did in 1968.
I think the 1984 election showed us the people care more about the direction of the rate of change and if given enough time they get used to current levels, as long as real incomes roughly keep pace.
Exactly. People know the facts. Groceries are up 25% vs. pre-COVID. Wages are up 18% and have trailed CPI since Q3 2021. Obviously this pressure is especially acute on households with no savings - where the marginal dollar matters more.
On #4, commenter Avery James provided some evidence for the assertion that the bill was DOA anyway. (That might be incorrect, but it does make me much more hesitant to claim #4)
#7 doesn't matter. Normies don't focus on the rate of change of prices, they focus on price level. Prices at supermarkets are much higher than they were in 2021, let alone 2019. That is all that matters.
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.
The media's main failing is that they never figured out how to deal with a person in Trump who has *so* many failings, *so* much corruption, *so* much narcissism, *so* many scandals that he has become invulnerable in the way Mr. Burns could survive having every disease known to man because in the end each canceled the other out. And because of the fundamental law of scandal balance, the one "scandal" or issue regarding Biden (Hunter, Joe's age) has to be inflated to equal the amount of coverage of all the amorphous and impossible to remember Trump scandals. And because there's only one or two, they stick in the mind and attain vastly inflated importance.
I don't know how to solve this; I just wish journalists were more aware that this is the trap they fall into and don't be like Brian Beutler who is convinced that *his* particular pet rock (hold more hearing on Trump corruption) is the key to ultimate victory. It's just flooding the zone with more shit, Brian.
Yes, this is something I mentioned all the way back in 2016 when you had people constantly complain that the media "isn't covering" Trump scandals or the infamous "word cloud" showing the giant "EMAILS" entry for Clinton and no comparably large word associated with Trump -- during that campaign, Trump generated a new scandal or gaffe probably literally every five to seven business days that would have been considered campaign-ending, if not career-ending, for a standard politician. However, because of the constant churn, none of it ever sank very far into many, if not most, voters' consciousness, whereas Clinton's "e-mails" was a single, constant touchpoint in the last couple months or so of the campaign.
The problem with journalism is that structural changes and loss of revenue has meant only a small privileged portion of the population can get jobs in it. In some ways I feel the media is caught up in negativity shock generation and we aren’t hitting the paddle in the skinner cage any more.
Also I use the same Simpsons analogy to explain what OEMs are doing in the US EV market. All stuck in the same door.
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.)
Slow Boring is a boutique media product for a relatively small group of readers who are, on average, significantly higher income, more politically engaged, and more genuinely interested in policy than the typical media consumer. I think that Matt:
* Is baseline more interested in writing about policy consequence-type issues
* Thinks (I think correctly) that his readers will value this relative to other kinds of 2024 coverage, especially because that’s very available elsewhere
* Hopes that his readers will use their above-average level of engagement and influence to redirect attention in their social circles and organizations towards this sort of “what are the consequences?” questions.
This agenda wouldn’t make sense if Matt was like, the editor of the NYT or MSNBC’s programming director. But it makes sense for this publication and its audience.
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???
It's the result of a vicious cycle. Doesn't matter how it started because the more voters care about his age, the more it becomes a newsworthy topic, further increasing the salience of the issue among voters. Certainly doesn't help that many voters and journalist feel they have an axe to grind with Biden and are just searching for plausible narrative.
Ezra addressed this saying that there’s a real difference between the Joe Biden of 4 years ago and this one as exemplified by the two clips he played. I don’t think it’s a made-up issue though of course its traction relative to Trump’s shortcomings and threats is beyond frustrating.
If we're just talking money, then yeah, I imagine it is. SB was launched after Biden won so it's hard to do a comparison, but basically every major media outlet (WaPo, for example) had higher readership under Trump. If he wins in November I imagine there would be an increase in demand for takes about how Democrats can win in 2026 or 2028, though perhaps less interest in the policy stuff? I'm not sure. And if Trump wins, then small and large donors alike will dump a ton of money into the midterms, which is good for me as a burgeoning political consultant who graduates in 2026.
The thing is that Matt and I are both committed partisan Democrats with strongly held ideological views and policy preferences! So while a Trump win would probably be better for our respective bottom lines, we both don't want that to happen! Like Matt tweets sometimes, he's rich; if he was only interested in the money, he'd vote Republican because they'll cut his taxes. But he doesn't!
I think that's my general perspective as well, but would apply it to others besides you and Matt. While many people in the media business might make more money under a Trump presidency, the vast majority (90%+) of media doesn't want him to win because money is not the most important thing to them.
In addition to the nontrivial number of right wing journalists, I think there are perhaps a couple of additional, left-coded groups within the media who may genuinely have it out for Joe: (1) Some journalists dislike his policies wrt Israel/Gaza; (2) Some journalists think he can't beat Trump and would like to contribute to pushing him out in favor of a brokered convention.
Yeah— I approve of Biden and I’m going to vote for him in November, but I think it’s pretty clear that he’s not quite as sharp and energetic as he used to be. He’s at an age where that sort of issue can worsen quickly, and being the president is a punishing job. I don’t think it’s irrational to worry about, and ceteris paribus, I’d rather have a younger and more vigorous president.
Ezra got pressed on this in his Q&A pod and I agree with him. There are polls going back to Aug. that the #1 issue for Biden is age. The media / pundits didn't manufacture this. Ezra's point about what *has* changed is if the election was tomorrow Biden would likely lose. That's why it's a story now.
I’ve always believed that the most important job of a president is to guide the country through an unforeseen crisis. By that metric, I give Biden a B- and Trump an F. I don’t love Biden all that much but it’s a no-brainer.
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.
I completely agree with this, and it’s one of the reasons I find MY’s electoral analysis a little bit lacking sometimes.
I think he views candidates in terms of their stated positions on *existing issues*. Since he’s a policy wonk, he’s well-equipped to assess the likely impact of candidates’ desired policies. To a large extent, “popularism” means elevating discourse about policy issues on which a candidate is most aligned with public opinion.
But most voters aren’t sufficiently in the weeds to think about elections in terms of concrete policy alternatives. They don’t sit around reading Emily Oster papers about how an additional dolllar of Medicaid funding will change life expectancy for lower-class mothers. And I don’t think this is irrational.
Instead, I think the way a lot of voters view elections is “will candidate X prioritize the needs of people like me?” That is, they want to know candidates’ *allegiances* rather than a laundry list of policies. Knowing a candidate’s allegiances gives voters some insight into how they would act even in unanticipated situations (like COVID, Russia/Ukraine, etc.)
The importance of signaling allegiances also explains why candidates constantly talk about policies that will never pass (e.g. Medicare for all).
"But most voters aren’t sufficiently in the weeds to think about elections in terms of concrete policy alternatives. They don’t sit around reading Emily Oster papers about how an additional dolllar of Medicaid funding will change life expectancy for lower-class mothers. And I don’t think this is irrational."
This is an odd rebuttal to an article whose stated purpose is to provide MY readers with additional context about the actual policy implications of the candidates. The whole point here is to make people more informed, not to claim that the electorate as a whole is deeply entrenched into the stated policy positions of the candidates. The general electorates lack of knowledge of those positions is precisely the thing he's saying he's trying to combat.
"The importance of signaling allegiances also explains why candidates constantly talk about policies that will never pass (e.g. Medicare for all)."
I'm a little bit unclear on your thesis here. You're ostensibly making a "vibes" claim about allegiances (voters care about candidates signaling what team they're on), but the way you're defining the allegiance signaling is via stated policy positions. So voters DO care about the policies that candidates are claiming they will enact? If so, then discussing those policy prescriptions and their impacts seems like a worthwhile endeavor that is helpful to predicting voter behaviors.
1. I don’t mean to rebut this specific article. MY is saying that he’s going to discuss what he views as under-covered concrete policy issues. SB subscribers are likely to enjoy that content, since that’s basically what we signed up for.
I’m responding to a broader theme in MY’s writing. My impression is that he thinks this type of policy coverage can be an effective persuasion/propaganda strategy. This is reflected in his opinion that Trump’s Medicare positions account for his success, that Biden’s climate policy accounts for his struggles, and so on. You can even see it in his article about how to persuade your republican uncle to vote for Dems. I’ve always been a little suspect of this propaganda strategy.
2. If voters really cared 100% about policy *outcomes* and 0% about allegiances, it would be a bad strategy to talk about a policy that will never pass. The point of talking about Medicare for all is not to say “I will do everything I can to pass Medicare for all.” It’s to say “I’m the *type of person* who supports Medicare for all as an abstract idea.” I view these two motives as very distinct. (I also don’t like to call this type of communication “vibes” because it makes it sound sort of irrational. I think discerning politicians’ allegiances is potentially very important.)
How do you account for swing voters switching far more drastically from Biden in 2020 to Trump than from Trump in 2020 to Biden? Has Biden somehow signaled a change in allegiance? Or are voters upset about policy choices and outcomes?
I think the relevant outcomes for elections are the policy considerations because those are the things that impact the swing voters. I think the kind of voter you're describing is a hardcore partisan that votes for who they think they is on their side, and their feeling about which party is on their side is fairly static. So if you want to talk about what's impacting electoral outcomes, it's the things that cause voters to shift from one side to the other, which are more likely to be concrete policy questions.
"If voters really cared 100% about policy *outcomes* and 0% about allegiances"
I don't think it needs to be 100% vs. 0%, but I think people care about stated policy positions because it signals an allegiance to the policy. I think that voters who are inclined to support candidates that say they support MFA are voting for them precisely because they expect them to advocate for it and try to achieve it. If their candidate isn't able to achieve the policy goal then they might not blame that candidate (people generally recognize how democracy works), but if you vote for someone because they say they support MFA and then they go to Congress and say they actually will never support that policy then those voters will be inclined not to vote for that person.
Based off your interpretation, why talk about policies at all? Why say you support anything? Just say "I'm a republican/dem/prog/cons. and will support their policies" if you want to signal what team you're on. I think being a team player matters, but people that vote based on a candidate's policy statements genuinely care about those policies.
I don't think that I support candidates based on their perceived "allegiances" per se but I do select elected officials more on their judgement and values than my agreement with specific policy goals. What comes up in any given cycle is so unpredictable and no one person has sufficient power to independently set an agenda or make changes (other than executive actions) that I don't assume candidates are going to actually get to do much of what they promise and are going to be asked to make policy on the fly about new things. But I am interested in policies that candidates put forward and support because it can be one way to access their judgement and values. But it is just one. Their record, their lives, and their overall philosophy of life matter as well as their experience.
I don't think most people who have guessed that 9/11 and the Iraq war would be the Bush legacy but if you had asked me before the election which one of them would be most likely to make a hot headed and reactive foreign policy decision including use of force, I would have guessed Bush and most presidents will face some sort of challenge on that front.
For me it is less "will the candidate prioritize the needs of people like me?" than "will the candidate do the right thing." I want a strong safety net to support those in poverty even though I haven't ever been in that group and am likely ever to be. My values and faith demand that of my community and I want a candidate who feels likewise.
As I have said before, one reason that I am not as concerned about Biden's age is because I think he sufficient humility to set down or hand over responsibilities to the VP and other cabinet members if Jill Biden tells him that he needs to do that and I think she would tell him that. I think that is the sort of people they are and what the value they place on service and sacrifice would mean. (I am also probably more okay with a Harris president than many even though she wouldn't be in my top five choices.) I think Trump is already to mentally imbalanced to serve, has one in his inner circle who will tell him anything he doesn't want to hear and would never sacrifice power because it was the right thing to do.
Trump is very good at signaling allegiance to people his policy proposals would directly harm, is the point.
Can you provide a few examples?
He claims to be a huge friend of evangelical Christians, but declines in church attendance year-over-year, including evangelical denominations and churches, accelerated in the initial years of the Trump presidency even before Covid, and of course they cratered during the pandemic.
That's not at all surprising, because political actions like the overturning of Roe and the subsequent lawmaking in conservative states have also led to an accelerating decline in outsiders' view of the evangelical church--a decline directly at odds with evangelicals' stated interest in conversion. And that decline goes hand-in-hand with Trump's own self-association with the cause. He has been bad for the brand, as it were.
There might have been some positive news from Trump's allegiance, since a lot of Trump fans started describing themselves as "evangelical Christians." But, hilariously, the trends identified by pollsters like Barna Group and Gallup show that the new evangelical converts don't actually attend church services. This doesn't totally shock me, because I know some young men in my own friends and family circle who basically fit this description. It is, however, a complete disaster for evangelical churches. If people no longer need to actually join a church in order to be an evangelical, that is a recipe for continued decline.
So, yes, having Trump signal his allegiance to and pursue policies on behalf of evangelical Christians has been, by both the numbers and the cultural influence game (which they definitely care about, by definition), a more or less complete disaster for the ones who actually go to and care about their churches.
You are the first person I have heard claim that the overturning of Roe v. Wade was something that evangelical churches should be upset about.
Can you point to polling of evangelicals that indicates that they're upset with that policy outcome? My experience is that they're ecstatic about that outcome, and it's one of the reasons they support Trump so strongly. I think your spin on what's happening requires ignoring what people say they care about, and instead saying "they're too dumb to realize that what I think they should care about is what they should actually care about." Which is frequently the attitude I see expressed when people say that voters are voting against their own interests, and is why I asked for some examples above.
Which of my claims are you disputing? Are you saying that I'm wrong about declining church attendance? Wrong about the declining percentage of people expressing a positive perception of "evangelical Christianity"?
All of the markers of decline I mentioned have an empirical basis. This is a subject in which I have long had an interest, as the son of an evangelical member and lifetime faithful congregant.
And as someone who grew up in the evangelical church, I can also tell you that people in those churches genuinely want to see them grow and thrive through a process of conversion--a process that both the numbers and personal experience in the seats every week will tell you is not happening in most places. It's not happening nowhere, but the broad picture is very clear: the Trump years were not great for the evangelical church in terms of its long term health. They just weren't.
I guess you can argue a bit more about the vibes, as you do, because the evidence is a little more thin on the ground, but even there you are going to find that I'm not making some oddball claim. Just to take one example, Barna Group has been sounding the alarm on this stuff for a long time. Pastor quit and burnout rates have just ticked higher and higher. From denominations, like the SBC, to independent megachurches, like Saddleback, to para-church movements, like IHOPKC, scandal has been constant since the Trump years.
You seem to think that I'm passing judgement as an outsider, but the call is coming from inside the house on this one. I'm not really member of the movement any more--my faith has changed, a lot--but I'm about as plugged in as you can be short of attending an evangelical church service every week. And I can tell you that although we prayed for the overturning of Roe at every clinic protest and Rally for Life (local events in support of the annual DC march) I attended, people in my circles believed that moment would be, for want of a better term, a kind of coming-out party, possibly the breaking wave of a revival. It definitely wasn't supposed to be one of the last dances before they turn the lights on.
That just. hasn't. happened. And there is no sign at present that it will happen. Instead, the average church in 2024 is at somewhere around 80-85% of attendance and considerably higher in average age of congregants from where it was in 2017 on the day Donald Trump was sworn in--two trends that accelerated considerably vis-a-vis the Obama and Bush administrations.
The Trump years were bad for evangelicals, and Dobbs does not change that. It is, in fact, possible to achieve significant policy wins and still be in a structurally declining situation. The two are not mutually exclusive.
You put it better than I did. Allegiances mean more than character.
Allegiances are misleading, though, for two reasons. First, it's easy for a candidate to claim allegiances they don't really have; Trump is an excellent example of this. His actions indicate pretty clearly that he actually despises the people he claims to prioritize. Second, even if allegiances are sincere, the president may not actually be able to act on them, either because it's just not really possible or because they don't understand how the world works well enough to effect the sort of change they want. For example, Trump claims to want to bring back the 1950s economy because that's when blue collar workers were doing really well, not understanding that if he achieved it American would immediately become a third-rate economic power.
So I think you have to look at actual policy proposals to get a sense of how the candidate would go about acting on their stated allegiances. If they're proposing policies that would actually cut against their claimed allegiances, either their allegiances are insincere or they don't know what they're doing. Either way, the proposals matter.
With Trump in particular, I think there's another reason to focus on his stated plans: I think he'll really try to enact them. Presidents (and smart leaders generally) try to surround themselves with smart people, and listen to them. Trump doesn't, because he actually believes he's the smartest person in the room. What we see from candidates as well as presidents is generally filtered through that collection of smart people. Not so with Trump.
In his first term he was initially saddled with a group of advisors selected for him by the old guard GOP, who picked a bunch of fairly smart, competent people because of course that's what you do. That group ameliorated the worst of Trump's instincts, either by arguing against them or by agreeing but slow-walking. He eventually forced most of them out, but they restrained him throughout his term.
His second term, if he gets one, will be different. The GOP old guard is gone or keeping their heads down, and his supporters have recognized the error of not being prepared with a full set of Trump loyalists to staff key positions, and they're not going to let that happen again. Next time Trump takes office, he'll do so with a full complement of true believers and yes men, and his White House will try to enact all of his policy proposals.
Of course, it's also possible that he's simply lying about some or all of his proposals, but I don't think so. I don't think he has that much guile in him. This is the one aspect of Trump's character that his supporters like that I think they really do get right: With Trump, what you see is what you get. He lies constantly but he actually believes his lies. Not that he believes his claims are factual -- he's not really interested in facts -- but that he believes the're truthful.
So I think it always makes sense to look at policy proposals, and I think this is especially true of Trump.
Trump promised to reduce immigration and then took actions to reduce immigration. Trump promised to appoint conservative judges who would overturn Roe and then appointed conservative judges who overturned Roe. Trump promised to start a trade war with China and then started a trade war with China. He promised to do that by imposing tariffs and then imposed tariffs once he got into office.
I feel like covering a presidential election in a way that assumes candidates will do things they say they will do is a pretty solid proposition.
OTOH, Trump promised to raise taxes on the rich, then cut taxes on the rich. He promised health care for all and then tried to cut health care. He promised to build a wall and then didn't. Arguably these things were predictable based on Trump's allegiances and character.
1) He would spin the SALT deduction as raising taxes on the rich (just limited to rich liberals is all);
2) He tried hard to fulfill that promise and failed because of John McCain. His voters will claim that he was stymied by the swamp and the establishment, and that if he could have repealed the ACA he would have then been able to enact better HCC;
3) He tried to build a wall but was stopped by Congress and the administrative state.
As I said elsewhere, voters are smart enough normally to recognize the difference between voting for a candidate and ordering dinner. When you order diner expect the waiter to bring you just what you ordered. When you vote for a candidate you're telling them what you want them to fight for. Voters will forgive failures to accomplish certain objectives if they think you actually tried hard to accomplish them. It's the difference between being mad at Trump for the border wall's failure and being mad at Biden for not forgiving student loans. Some Biden voters seem upset because they don't think he tried hard enough, but Trump voters think he tried hard, had SOME success (they point to small amounts of wall being built as proof), but was ultimately stopped because of opposition.
Criticizing Trump voters for not holding him accountable for his failures to give them everything they want is ignoring what they actually wanted him to do with his promises.
I agree, if pushed Trump will lie and say he tried to do these things.
Those are good counter-examples, and I think I'm with you up to a certain point. I would agree that there is some middle ground between vibes analysis and stated-policy analysis, where each is appropriate in some contexts and likely to lead you astray in others. But I also tend to agree with the column that analysis of Trump has been much more interested in vibes, to its detriment.
As an example, one issue set I happen to care about is what Trump famously referred to as "The Nuclear," and even though he clearly didn't understand what he was talking about, Trump actually stated a reasonably clear set of priorities in the campaign related to stuff like proliferation, arms control, US arsenal modernization, and the Iran deal. I thought those were bad choices that made the world more dangerous, but they were there, and he proceeded to follow through on them with (I would argue) very predictable bad results. Indeed, the folks at places like Arms Control Wonk successfully predicted them.
Of course, even bringing up that issue also points to the problem, because it is so deep in the weeds that I can't imagine it's going to get many clicks in the news. But given the nature of Slow Boring I think it makes sense on this site to cover technical policy claims like they are meaningful and do coverage that way. I think it really is a deficit in the existing news coverage.
Sure but there’s a still a great degree of variability. The 2004 election felt incredibly important but in retrospect while Bush was one of the worst ever Presidents he did almost all his damage in his first term and the second term was social security form failing (good), immigration reform failing (bad) and TANF (good), and PEPFAR (great) plus he led to massive democratic senate majorities without which the ACA would have never passed.
Historically, Presidents have either kept or tried extremely hard to keep the promises they make on the campaign trail. Their inability to do so due to external factors they can't control is relevant to a prediction about their Presidential accomplishments should they be elected, but acting like we can't expect Trump to spend four years working hard to pursue his stated policy goals is simply not supported by the historical record.
"Every Democratic candidate since Bill Clinton promised major health insurance reform, though only Obama really delivered."
This is such an odd point. Bill Clinton expended significant political capital trying to achieve this. Barack Obama was the very next Democratic President. So yes, parties and candidates that make positions central to their agenda do spend effort trying to achieve those goals, and those efforts are sometimes (often?) successful.
"It’s safe to bet Republicans will try to cut taxes on rich people and restrict abortion access."
This feels like a statement made by someone who hasn't paid attention to how Presidential administrations operate. Yes, they will spend a lot of time trying to do those things. But Trump achieved dramatically more on the regulatory front then you seem to think, and if he's re-elected he will again wield significant power and influence throughout the regulatory state. And many of those things he's promising to do (and will be able to do) are bad.
This is a really interesting counterpoint. I still think it's of paramount importance for Matt (and journalists in general) to cover the issues that are most likely to be important. But with there being eight months until the election, perhaps it would be interesting for Matt to consider issues that are unlikely to come up but would be extremely important if they did.
Yes, it’s difficult to predict whether massive crises will upend things in politics. That doesn’t mean we can’t predict what administrations will do.
It’s not like the GWOT meant GWB wasn’t working desperately to weaken environmental regulations or that COVID somehow meant Trump hadn’t pursued being mean to immigrants.
Seriously, dude, come on.
Trump said he would build a wall. He didn’t. He did not even materially increase deportations from the interior of the country.
He promised to repeal the ACA and replace it with something great. None of that happened.
We can cherry pick promises that were and were not fulfilled, but, in November of 2015, there was no way for even a conscientious voter to confidently predict which promises would be implemented.
We shouldn’t take a candidate’s promises as claims about what will happen in their presidency. We should take their promises as claims about what they will try to do during their presidency. We can try to predict how these attempts will work out, and what collateral effects these attempts will have.
This is a mind boggling thing to focus on. The country expended considerable time and resources towards trying to accomplish those goals. The opportunity costs of trying to achieve them is what people are voting on. "What do I want the country to try and do for the next four years?" is the thing voters are selecting. Sure, Trump failed in some of the things you're listing. But voters CARED about those issues and voted for him precisely because he was promising to do them, and then he spent a ton of time trying to accomplish them. Pretending like none of that matters is just weird.
I was going to make a similar post - what we “knew” with most confidence about a Trump victory in 2016 alongside a GOP trifecta was that he would repeal Obamacare. Of course he did not due to a mix of incompetence and bad luck.
Overall I think voters know that the GOP will try to cut taxes, limit immigration, favor big business, de-regulate, and appease religious conservatives, and the Dems want to increase healthcare and poverty spending, increase immigration, and improve abortion access. It is surely worth covering implications of this in more detail (as in your point about what does this mean for grocery inflation), but I think plenty of Trump voters are happy with a bit less bank regulation - it’s not a surprise to them.
George Bush did campaign on getting tougher with Iraq and Iran. That was also obvious from his VP pick.
Also ran actively against “nation-building” and talked about how we weren’t any good at it.
He wasn't any good at it.
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.
I'm of two minds on this topic. One, yes, we need competent administrators. But we also need the executive branch, including the military, to be 100% accountable to their elected leaders. Elections have consequences, as the saying goes, and seeing the bureaucracy thwart the people's elected leaders -- even Trump and the GOP -- doesn't sit well with me.
I remember stories about how the Border Patrol was resisting Obama's policies. And about how the military leaders were shading information (or even lying) about Afghanistan to continue the war effort. Happened during Vietnam also. Those were bad.
"...seeing the bureaucracy thwart the people's elected leaders...doesn't sit well with me"
Even if said bureaucrats are following the Constitution and Rule of Law while their elected leaders are not? I get that elected leaders should - normally - have bureaucrats who will work to implement the government that the people elected, but when Trump seeks to install loyalists precisely to enable Trump's extralegal impulses, I think it's good for the bureaucracy to resist that.
Our expectations of the military are that they follow any lawful order and resign if they believe an order is illegal. Other executive branch employees should be held to the same expectation.
That sort of exasperates the problem, though, no? Because the bureaucrat who resigns would potentially be replaced by a loyalist who would have no problem with said illegal order.
But there's a ton of subjectivity here and in the absence of a SOCTUS decisions on the specific order, people have to apply their own discretion. That can include refusing an unlawful order and resigning. But we don't want people "doing their own research" when it comes to subverting the state from within. It's no surprise that almost everyone can find a legitimate reason for their intuitive sense of what to do in the first place through motivated reason.
But that's the point though right? If the employee refuses something for being unconstitutional, the government can take that to the courts and if it is found to be a lawful order we can punish the employee for it. I am way more scared of positions being filled with Trump loyalists than I am worried about it taking a bit to deal with Kim Davis.
I agree, but I'm not so much worried about the instances you describe (what I would call "edge cases") so much as I'm worried about instances where any reasonable person would agree on the illegality and/or Unconstitutionality (not sure if this is a real word, but rolling with it anyway)
"Because the bureaucrat who resigns would potentially be replaced by a loyalist who would have no problem with said illegal order."
This is (one reason) why political appointees require confirmation in Congress. Absent Congressional confirmation, the resigning bureaucrat will be replaced by another civil servant who was hired by Federal HR, not the president. And if the loyalist can receive Congressional confirmation, then it's easier to change the law to make the order legal.
While I wholeheartedly agree with your stated logic, we’ve also seen that the Senate is basically a failed institution that cannot competently mediate the popular will into effective oversight of the executive.
Except that they didn’t.
So we should factor that into our expectations next time around: Border Patrol and ICE are NOT going to obey the constitution as much as they will Trump.
Why is resigning the right response, rather than refusing?
It definitely isn’t shared with me. I don’t have any expectations about what people should do about unlawful orders.
So if you're a lawyer in a federal agency, and your political appointee asks you to sign off on an initiative you believe is not allowed under your authorizing statute, your response should be "I quit"? That doesn't seem like a workable expectation if we want authorizing statutes, or other administrative requirements, to mean anything.
This whole discussion lets Congress off the hook too easily. We *have* elected representatives to overrule the agency lawyers already! But they're dysfunctional, so we're just going to push more power into an imperial presidency instead? It's the wrong approach, we can't do without Congress and need to fix it instead of trying to work around it.
The issue is lawyers ignoring a policy order from above because they don't like the policy, not because it is illegal.
The agency lawyers are the people institutionally selected to interpret what the agency is required or permitted to do, unless and until overruled by a court or Congress. It is a real job that people build up real, extensive training and expertise to do.
In a dispute between agency lawyers and a political appointee, why would you assume the lawyers just "don't like" the policy? Rather than that the administration just doesn't like the law.
Again, there are authorities that should be able to overrule an agency's legal department regarding the agency's legal constraints. But if appointees are going to be one of them, why even have administrative law in the first place?
If our bureaucrats were following the constitution, then most of them wouldn't have jobs because the larger amount of what the federal government does is unconstitutional
Basically, I agree with you on this but I think the nature of the problem has been misunderstood. There are relatively few instances where direct orders are disobeyed. The problem is what happens during all the time the boss isn’t looking and when people have a modicum of turn left, turn right, do nothing, or do a lot discretion. It’s at that moment that a president wants someone in basic sympathy with their aims to be on the scene.
I think the number of veto points (as MY has discussed frequently) is a huge impediment to our democracy actually functioning. Its why I wish we'd get rid of the filibuster. The fact is that much of our electoral politics is predicated on each side stating what they want to do knowing full well it's almost impossible to get anything done and then they never suffer the consequences if their stated positions are awful. As just one example, repealing the ACA would be, IMHO, a bad idea. But republicans can campaign on promising to do it and get votes from people who rely on it because they can't actually repeal it. Some of the voters who support republican politicians do so because the promised policies that would negatively impact their lives will never come to fruition. To be clear, the same is true for Democratic politicians who over-promise for things they can't deliver because of how resistant our system is to change.
I would much prefer a system where politicians who can achieve electoral majorities are able to actually pass the legislation they want to see enacted. Then we can actually learn if those policies are good and/or popular. If they are, great. If not, we vote the bums out and let new ideas flourish. But the number of ways in which political parties are actually prevented from achieving their goals despite winning elections I think is a hugely harmful aspect of our system.
Super like. Also, welcome back? Haven’t seen you in a while.
Thank you sir! Daily lurker, occasional commenter ;)
I'm tickled to know my comments have warranted any recognition though!
You need to be careful to distinguish between executive agencies (which answer to the President) and administrative agencies, which are creations of Congress, and don't except to the extent Congress has delegated certain powers of appointment to the President. Of course, the current conservative Supreme Court may overturn all this and 85 years of established administrative law.
I mean what did the bureaucracy stop Trump from that wasn't illegal? All of those latter examples are indeed bad but Trump showed how dangerous a corrupt executive branch can be. I feel like we can end the military's ability to hide info from the POTUS without taling seay important checks and balances.
My issue isn't them being responsive. If DeSantis or Obama took them in hand I'd shrug or maybe applaud. But Trump doesn't have a record of hiring the best people or even particularly competant people.
I'm not suggesting we have structural safeguards against Trump doing what he will likely do. I tend to agree the president needs authority (though ideally congress would have more power and act more rather than leave as much to executive discretion).
There's an excellent article in the 2/29 issue of the NY Times on the Heritage Foundation's 'Mandate for Leadership' if you want to know what the people likely to staff a Trump Administration have in mind for the federal bureaucracy.
Having thought about this some more, I think this is one of the few policy areas that will be covered thoroughly by the mainstream media before the election. And, regardless of what people may think of the Lincoln Project, I'm sure they will work hard to impress this on anti-Trump Republicans, independents, and other moderates will be thinking. So, even though I agree in principle, I don't see any harm done if Matt ends up not really talking about this (and of course, maybe he will since there's 8 months of content to fill before November).
That's fair that Matt doesn't need to be the one to do it. I'm less confident about the MSM doing it.
I think that this piece outlines a reasonable way to cover that. You talk about the consequences that matter to voters. People don't worry much about our bureaucracy in the abstract but knowing that Trump will sabotage government services that they care about.
It is weird how truly post-material our politics has become.
There are very few people left who can remember a time before the miraculous abundance attained after World War II--it looks like the deal has been sealed from here on out. Come to think of it, this probably explains the nostalgia for specifically the 1950s for some. It's the furthest one can go back to get old cultural values they want while still capturing that postwar abundance--even if, as Matt has pointed out many times, we were much poorer in the 1950s, and also that the culture had already changed considerably from the first half of the 20th century.
I've lost confidence that prosperity is the explanation for post-material politics. I think it also matters if the government can get things done. America is very prosperous but plenty of people have material problems. If politics solved those problems, that'd be great, but if you lose confidence in its ability to do so, it's rational to cease focusing on that.
As a test, the UK is far less prosperous than America, so you'd expect a much more material politics. This is not really the case, politics here has obsessed over Brexit and other culture war topics. In particular, the UK has a giant material problem in the form of a catastrophic housing crisis, and it doesn't get much political attention. People have just come to believe that it is a law of nature that housing affordability gets worse over time. NIMBYs have pulled off a "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing people he didn't exist" - they've f*cked up the housing market so hard for so long that many people can't conceive of it functioning properly.
Government in the US, both at a federal level and below, is at least perceived to also perform poorly. So perhaps this is part of why many folks have lost of interest in it as a solution to their problems.
People will always have relative material problems, but having the absolute base material needs resolved is what I think makes the difference in reducing its salience.
I recently read Christopher Clark's 'Revolutionary Spring' about the European revolutions of 1848. Your comment about relative material problems jogged my memory of one striking statistic unearthed by a couple of public health officials in Nantes in 1836. They discovered that on the city's very poorest street, rents averaged 25fr/year on an income of 300fr/yr (wow, I thought, only 8.3% of their income on rent, no wonder we think the rent's too damn high today). The flip was they spent 50% of their income on bread alone. Which would rather spend 50% of your income on: rent or bread?
How good is the bread?
Democratic governments are accountable to majorities. If the constituencies with material problems are small enough, and fixing them requires sacrifices from the majority, there is no reason to expect they would ever get fixed. I realize this is a 4th grade level insight but really, what is the mechanism? How would a homeowner majority country be induced to intentionally crash housing prices?
Who is proposing we "intentionally crash housing prices"? Can we get a citation for this (and a definition of what you mean by "crash")?
I think this is a great point
The thing is, UK voters are more pragmatic and less polarized than in the US. There’s currently a huge shift against the Tories (and the Scottish National Party) because they were inept and scandal-ridden. For the Tories, there’s also the policy failure of Brexit. Labour has also been helped by a clearer anti-NIMBY stance
Running on "we're not inept and corrupt" is completely consistent with people having no faith in government. It's sort of the college educated version of substance-less politics. Think of Matt's framing of today's article - what is at stake in an election in which the only debate is who is more competent and honest? Unless you have an extreme competence gap which shouldn't happen in normal circumstances, not much.
I agree Labour is more anti-NIMBY but I've not seen evidence of people grasping it. I've had people tell me at length about how bad housing is in their community and express total ignorance about the incoming government's reasonably extensive plans to increase construction.
I think that perception is very weird and am convinced it’s just some meme in the culture more than anything.
Idk I think his point is good. Like, my desire for mass transit hasn't declined, but it's not going to be something that will influence my vote until the US proves it can actually build a railway that doesn't cost a quintillion dollars.
The Republican coalition could not function without the voters of people who are doing pretty well and want to protect their economic interests. That’s at least 1/3 of their coalition, and that feature of their coalition is under reported
Granted I'm sure there are plenty of people like us who are in the democratic coalition but are also doing pretty well and want to protect our economic interests.
Democrats do not hurt my economic interests. I am at little risk of being in the 32% tax bracket. One has to be damn close to being a 1 pet center before progressive economic policies begin to bite.
Furthermore, if one is a doctor, half of your income comes from federal subsidies. Rich doctors who bitch about taxes are whiney hypocrites.
Well yeah the reason Dems don't want to raise taxes on people making just under $400k is because of the very people I mentioned.
I'm still thinking that the mantra of "tax the rich" is going to infiltrate both parties, except they'll be two very divergent meanings of the phrase--with one being "tax everything over ~150k at X%", while the other is "tax everything above ~500k at >X%, and everything below at <X%". And I'll just be sitting on a lonely island of minority wishing that tax rates were much more boring.
I'm afraid Dems will push for low taxes on wages and the GOP will push for low taxes on inheritance and investment incomes and we'll be left in an untenable fiscal position.
Over regulation can make all types of things more expensive and less effective ( if available at all)
See the stupidity about gas stoves.
Or trying to phase out gas cars
What regulations on gas stoves are you talking about? Ones that were proposed, or ones that were imagined? I don’t believe any have actually been implemented, other than city-level bans on new gas hookups of any sort in Berkeley and New York.
Seattle has done some regulations that in effect make putting gas appliances into new building impractical and essentially force a conversion to electricity over the next 10 years. This has largely been interpreted as new multifamily units can't have gas.
There has also been enough talk about potential regulation of gas appliances in the coming years that folks here act as if they are likely to be banned in 10 years. Predictably folks react to that assumption differently. Some people are upgrading and buying new appliances now hoping to get grandfathered in. Others are switching over now to avoid the issue down the line.
I think it is worth pointing out that a move from gas to electric has a much bigger carbon output in the Seattle area where our electricity is mostly hydro with a lot of wind and solar. It is also why a switch to EV cars in our region makes more sense from net zero perspective. There are a lot of areas where electricity is made from gas, oil, or coal and those switches are not very impactful. I think the research has Washington State along with Denmark and Germany as places where electrification is powerful.
That is part of why Seattle can get these results from carbon caps on buildings -- the impact is big enough to force the issue. https://crosscut.com/environment/2024/01/seattle-electrifying-new-buildings-despite-ruling-against-gas-bans
Yep, there was pushback against the ban (though as noted in the article other "efficiency" measures that make appliances not work as well are still ongoing.
But if you propose a stupid policy, I still hold it against you whether it becomes law or not.
As the saying goes "it's the thought that counts"
And the laws to phase out sales of gas cars really are on the books in CA
And it's likely a growing number--that's part of the post-material realignment, that more people don't mind that they're not keeping as much of their earnings as possible. So the question to Abbott's point is whether perhaps the GOP could function with a smaller share of the affluent.
Cause people take the miracle of our current prosperity for granted
So, knowing that you're a Trump voter, what role do you think immigration has played in that prosperity? (I'm not asking to score rhetorical points, I'm really curious in your thoughts.)
I think legal immigration can and has been good. In particular I would like to make it easier to people that come to study in US universities to apply to stay. I would also love to see more H1B visa's and also make sure there are programs in place so that the agricultural workers that are needed can come here legally.
BUT...
I also think that there should be limits. It takes time for people to assimilate. Too much immigration too fast is a problem and stresses resources. More than that, a country should be in control over it's border. It should know who's coming in, and get to decide yay or nay
For the record, I think the legal immigration level should be higher than it's current level of 1 million or so a year. But WAY lower than the total amount of immigration that currently occurs (legal + illegal).
My solution would be to hire enough border patrol and immigration judges, and then build whatever facilities are needed to house people for the VERY short time allowed for processing (weeks not years). Change amnesty laws to make them clear.
Stop catch and release (yes for families too). If the courts have a problem, pass a constitutional amendment.
Mandate e-verify
and yes finish building the wall. Walls do help, but they are a small part of the solution
Thanks! All sounds pretty reasonable. There's an open question in another thread today about whether support for Trump's immigration policies is really about *illegal* immigration or about demographic change and what the balance between the two is.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-slow-boring-plans-to-cover-the-63a/comment/50884517
I think there's a pretty big coalition of people that are unhappy with immigration policy. I'm sure there's a small slice that are actually racists and don't want to see demographic change.
I think there's a bigger part that worries about cultural change. IE you don't care what color people are, but you worry about people supporting the same type of people and policies in their new country that made their own country so badly run (see Latin America).
And I think pretty much all of them are worried about not knowing who's coming or going.
> My solution would be to hire enough border patrol and immigration judges, and then build whatever facilities are needed to house people for the VERY short time allowed for processing (weeks not years). Change amnesty laws to make them clear.
I assume you mean "asylum" laws, but otherwise this was in the bill that Biden supported and Trump trashed.
Actually no it wasn't. It didn't fix family catch and release. Which is the biggest problem.
“Catch and release” only exists because there aren’t enough holding facilities or personnel.
I feel like you actively want to be misled.
I don’t think it has, really.
I think the discourse is post-material because it’s more interesting to the people discussing it. Greater participation in it by the masses has the downside of focusing on the things they can articulate well and policy specifics are not those.
What I think is really interesting is that elites’ political affiliations seem to be more determined by their relationship to the means of production than poorer Americans’ affiliations are.
In the upper-middle-and-up income group, there’s a pretty clear professionals vs proprietors split, while in middle-and-lower groups, gender, religious affiliation, and ethnicity seem more determinative.
I like how other people also identify with the post-material politics idea.
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.
As a former Republican, now independent-who-keeps-voting-Democrat I agree with you that Trump's "genuinely dangerous" stances are the reasons I will _never_ vote for him, regardless of his other policies.
But.... he's pretty bad on tariffs and a bunch of other stuff too, he will make a bunch of mundane things worse, and I think legitimately highlighting his actual policy positions is fair and non-totalitarian/authoritarian from the D side.
I don't agree with all the decisions Biden is making but I think they're at least arguable positions and we can discuss them for the election.
Oh he's definitely bad in mundane ways, just not in a manner that dramatically distinguishes him from the rest of our politics.
I don't know how you get there. Being president is fundamentally two jobs rolled into one: the main one, the one that gets less attention, is managing the executive branch, and Trump is so horrifically bad at it it's basically a crapshoot whether anything ever gets done. Maybe this is actually your preferred state of affairs, but I don't think you seem like an ancap or anything so "uncontrolled chaos" doesn't seem to be your bag.
The second job is of course the guy that goes on TV and sets the tone for whatever "America" is supposed to be, and to most people's chagrin, Trump is way better at going on TV than the average president.
I actually do think this is a pretty good take about Trump Admin 2. First go around the Trump executive branch was mostly... normal, outside of a couple things directly from Trump's inner circle. If he wins his way back, I'm faaar more concerned about agencies, particularly DOJ and State, going entirely off the rails.
"The Democrats are overrun with totalitarian populists in their own right, thankfully"
Such as...?
All sorts of anarchists and socialists and ethno-nationalists and technocratic paternalists and malthusians and such have been part of the D coalition since forever, none of that has had real populist cohesion in like half a century at least so the closest anyone has come up with is powerless trash like "woke". That doesn't mean the ghost of Woodrow Wilson couldn't be gathering strength somewhere once again.
I think the idea that anarchists are part of the Democratic coalition is a little underbaked.
Ehhh, it's an imprecise generalization, but it's not like that's not in there: https://www.slowboring.com/p/socialists-or-anarchists
Importantly though, the Democratic party still keeps such people in check. Just look at the 2020 primary race, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders none of them are incredibly populist and certainly none of them are anarchists. I agree with you that the left has the potential for populism but currently populist appeal is very low in the DNC. Especially after they've picked up so many of us RHINOs as part of their coalition now and can't afford to lose us.
"Just look at the 2020 primary race, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders none of them are incredibly populist and certainly none of them are anarchists."
The discussion about ICE and border control in the 2020 primary race was the closest thing to anarchists I've seen outside of Jan 6th from a major political figures. The broader public hated both of those.
Right, there's no dominant plurality within the Dems at the moment that seems likely to rally around some charismatic demagogue.
OK, so you're talking about the coalition and not specific politicians. What percentage of Democratic supporters do you think falls into that bucket?
I'm honestly struggling to feel like I can speculate in a unbiased way. I would say in the before times it was definitely more Ds than Rs even when the religious right was the plurality. Clinton era "tough on crime" Dems were downright Orwellian and I have a hard time disaggregating who has or hasn't let that stuff go and moved into the liberalism camp. Right now 60-70% of Rs are fully bought in on Trump. D voters? I don't know... 50/50 maybe? have some kind of utopian/totalitarian derangement.
Thanks. I'm well aware of your ideology and I'm taking that into account to get a feel for what you think the ratios are, and you directly answered that.
It's an incredibly hard question to answer... most people are simply deeply ignorant of how the structures of the republic function. What I do believe is true, is that the more power the president wields the more it drives people to sort into their populist camps. Far too few have legitimate ideological commitments to liberalism/pluralism in the face of someone they consider a threat holding the reigns of government.
"D voters? I don't know... 50/50 maybe? have some kind of utopian/totalitarian derangement."
Fact check: collapsing from uncontrolled giggling.
I gotta say, the LotRs metaphor is cracking me up the more I think about it...
Woodrow Wilson is Morgoth
FDR is Sauron
Eisenhower is Isildur?
Reagan-HW-Clinton-W are Saruman?
Obama is Boromir?
Trump is Gollum
Biden is Bilbo
I've thought for years that if I ever somehow had the chance to speak to Obama privately I would tell him, "You should have thrown the Ring into Mount Doom when you had the chance instead of trying to hand it to Galadriel."
If Clinton is being compared to Galadriel, then I object!
*Checks her current residency*. Indeed: she may have diminished, but she has not gone into the west.
*doffs cap*
Well done!
The comparison is more about the danger of trying to hand the power to someone else rather than destroy it.
I know, I know...and I agree.
Just making a joke.
The problem is that his supporters don't care, and swing voters are not swayed by any of the "genuinely dangerous" talk. Some of them think it is a feature, not a bug.
I think what you have to do is try to convince those people who think "Sure he is an asshole, but he is on my team so it's fine" that he is not, in fact, on their team, and that he will use his asshole powers to do things that they actively hate (like make inflation way worse). Again, concentrating on swing voters, since partisans will not care, or believe you, in any case.
Well, maybe this is just a strong case to vote for a GOP Congress if one plans to vote Biden, since the presidency isn't going anywhere. If one desires less intense arguments over how to use the state, they might first seek reducing the size of the state. David Frum wrote an excellent passage in his first book, Dead Right (1994) [1] all about this, followed by a wonderful chapter on the Religious Right. There, he explains why left-libertarianism doesn't exist in mass politics, but instead libertarianism does often exist in practice alongside a coalition with culturally conservative voters. I highly recommend the book, as it's quite relevant today.
I also find your reference to totalitarianism understandable but probably unhelpful for most readers. "Democrats trade in populist rhetoric to enact some illiberal/coercive technocratic ideas" might better describe[2] what's going on in their party than a term often associated with Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR. In fact, some of the best examples to look at might come from Trudeau's Canada[3], which is both not totalitarian and has some examples of controversial moves against people outside his political coalition.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Right-David-Frum/dp/0465098258
[2] https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-blight-on-the-presidency-and-the-nation
[3] https://www.ft.com/content/1f83d3dc-a95b-4947-92ba-4f08899228a3
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
If there are even small riots, I think Trump is going invoke the Insurrection Act to use the military to put them down. Now, I don't know how bad this will actually be. HW used the Insurrection Act to end the LA Riots, and no one believes HW was a totalitarian monster.
The idea that the US military would respond to a riot by coming into town with guns blazing is silly because it’s just not how these things work.
They didn’t think HW was a totalitarian monster because he gave off boring establishment vibes. Trump, to put it mildly, doesn’t.
Agreed, yeah that's the other part of my prediction. Widespread protests turn into riots in some places, Trump attempts to use the military, more civil disorder, etc. Trump would be a lot more confrontational about it than Bush1
A lot of Trump’s 2016 campaign rhetoric (Muslim ban, border wall, etc) was kind of a symbolic/rhetorical gesture toward what his admin actually tried to do in office rather than a serious policy plan. I think there’s a decent chance that some of the wilder tarriff talk falls into that bucket, although it’s possible that whatever the real policy ends up being would still be pretty bad.
(Also want to add that it’s really not in the public’s interest for campaigns to communicate this way.)
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.
Yeah, I'm not thrilled about it, but it just seemed so obvious. I will also add after just quickly glancing at it that the ruling is a 9-0 decision on reversing the Colorado Supreme Court, although Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson wrote separately to say that the majority goes beyond the scope of the issues to effectively issue an advisory opinion. (That said, given the nature of the issue here, I think there's actually a pretty good reason to issue an advisory opinion so Congress can address the situation promptly in the future rather than passing the buck to the court system.)
I still wish SCOTUS had ruled that Trump is disqualified but states can't remove him from ballots because Congress can change his disqualified status whenever it wants.
I don’t want Trump to be president, but I actually think the consensus part of the ruling was for the best? This is the sort of issue where we want a single decision on the federal level rather than like, fifty patchwork conclusions from the states.
I agree that this is the best case scenario that involved a Trump win--it also forecloses other states from making stuff up to declare Democrats as insurrectionists and throwing them off the ballot.
It also prevents a situation where state courts try to aggressively enforce idiosyncratic interpretations of either the US constitution or federal law.
"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]
One of Bill Maher's guests last week kept repeating "Do you honestly feel that you are better off today than you were in 2018?" over and over. When pressed on why she was so sure that things were worse now, she came up with: Inflation, high prices, everything is more expensive and "millions of people coming over the border". That comment perfectly dovetails with the campaigning of the Republicans on my ballot tomorrow. There is no nuance or distinction between legal, illegal, immigrant, migrant, asylum-seeker; it is just an appeal to a base emotional reaction against "those people" who are "invading my country".
I can tell you from experience that if Stephen Miller gets let back into the White House, the legal immigration process will (again) become a quagmire. USCIS will be tasked with denying as many visa and citizenship applications as possible and with investigating naturalized citizens. Meanwhile, the media will focus on The Border and Trump will demagogue in kind. It doesn't even matter if Trump voters know or care about legal immigration because he and Fox News will tell them immigration has plummeted because he is so big and tough that everyone is afraid to come here now.
> USCIS will be tasked with denying as many visa and citizenship applications as possible and with investigating naturalized citizens.
It's hard to know how much of a problem this is in reality. Even the article Matt cites from CATO shows green cards were roughly steady until COVID, while the decline in visas issued appears to be a trend that started already in 2016. This article makes that point explicitly, that the problem was mostly one of perception: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/trump-effect-immigration-reality
The Biden administration hasn't exactly made visa processing much easier either. Although there is a proposed rule change to allow visa renewals in country (instead of having to leave, apply, wait, and come back). Hopefully it gets implemented soon; while I don't think a Trump administration would go through with the change, I'm not sure they would care enough to try to repeal it either.
The number, type, origin, etc. of visas is set by Congress. For example, the visa we were applying for was from a program with no cap on the number issued. But the Trump administration made it so that, even with an immigration lawyer helping us, the process was tedious, slow and sometimes outright hostile. They repeatedly reminded us that one small mistake would invalidate our application and put us at the back of the line, so they weren't legally able to outright deny a visa (drive down the number of successful applicants). The whole thing felt very personal, like the point was to telegraph disdain and petulance even if they couldn't actually deny our application outright.
We are now going through the naturalization process (before the next administration takes office) and the tone feels totally different. Maybe it's because naturalization is just different from visa processing. But the Trump administration made a big show of trying to strip naturalized citizens of their US citizenship by digging up their paperwork and looking for tiny mistakes. And I'm sure they will do it again, if given the chance.
I think the goal is really just to hurt people and cast immigrants—even naturalized citizens—as unwanted foreign invaders. If they curb legal immigration in the process, that is just icing on the nationalist cake.
Trump really weaponized incompetence in this area. My office used to do routine immigration matters like family visas and naturalization for our clients. We had to quit a few months after Trump was in office and refer them all to immigration experts because the Department fell into total chaos. We would have to file the same paperwork 3 or 4 times because they lost. Notices would come that made no sense. It was maddening. If you know your boss doesn't want you to do your job it is pretty easy to comply.
"Weaponized incompetence" is an excellent descriptor. People who did not have direct interactions with USCIS during the Trump administration don't appreciate just how bad it got. And I bet the same thing applies across the federal government. Until you witness how dysfunctional and mendacious a bureaucracy can become under deliberate mismanagement, you can't really understand it.
Also, you should 100% naturalize as soon as possible. While Trump has talked about revoking citizenship, that would require some real changes in law that I don't think the Supreme Court has the stomach for. But there are some terms in the laws around deportation of LPRs that new federal judges may start interpreting in a broad way. I saw a recommendation from some in the Poor People's Campaign that while we need to fight for a Biden win we also need to realize that Trump could win and that could start tough times and so folks need to start getting their hearts, relationships, and resources right to ride that out. I would add getting your immigration status "right" as well to the fullest extent possible while there is still a Biden administration UCIS attempting to function.
I don't know, the people working in these offices don't changeover *that* quickly, so I'm not sure you can tie the tone of the officer(s) to the administration. Just to give an anecdote, someone I know applying for a green card recently had to cancel her appointment due to having COVID (as their guidelines explicitly ask them to do!) and was still given a really hard time about it and is waiting for months to get another one.
For sure, it also varies greatly person-to-person. Our lawyer prepared us for a worse-case scenario interview, but we got super lucky and the ICE officer was very nice. But the one "guarding" the plane at the airport yelled at us and threatened us for 20 minutes before assuring us that he would write nasty things in the "permanent record" before letting us on the plane.
The impression I got was that there is, however, discretion in who gets placed where. Someone trying to make the experience as terrible as possible can make sure to put all the really grumpy people "at the front desk" and keep the cheery ones in the back room pushing paper.
Great point!
> It's hard to know how much of a problem this is in reality
I mean, this is the paradox of Trump. Trump certainly *tried* to cut off immigration in all its forms, he just did it really incompetently. US v Hawaii was his big moment, and even then it had pretty limited impact. COVID gave him the excuse he needed to really go for it, and he did. I imagine he'll try again and just say "oh well the Democrats all said that COVID is still a big problem, so need article 42 back" and just do that again.
I think right-wingers cutting several types of immigration is preferable to the likely alternative, keeping immigration high and trying much higher internal deportations like under Dubya.
Deportations were higher under Obama compared to Bush.
Sort of, returns near the border are classified along with removals. Obama saw more returns, less removals than Bush iirc.
As to group B, I think there are many people who don't necessarily want "demographic" homogeneity but simply feel animus toward people who are different. Some opponents of (legal) immigration are minorities!
But I agree that the ratio of B/A is pretty high, especially if you broaden the definition of B as above. You know someone is in B if they argue that we need to curtail legal immigration due to liberals' failure to secure the border and stop illegal immigration (an assumption I see pretty frequently among immigration skeptics). People who make arguments like that seem to think it's a clever form of rhetorical jujitsu against their political enemies, but it actually reveals that their core concern is that there are simply too many immigrants, not the "rule of law". Otherwise, there would be no reason to link legal and illegal immigration.
Yes, I'll accept that broadening, demographic homogeneity can come in different flavors.
Perhaps demographic stability expresses the sentiment better
Perhaps--whatever you want to call it, it's a sentiment that opposes legal immigration, and that's the main point I'm trying to make.
Sure. I just note that there are lots of non-white people who don't especially want more immigration, and it's not because they want to make America more white, but because they're happy being in a 10% (or whatever) minority and they don't want that to change.
Makes me think of the Douglas Adams line about technology (from the Salmon of Doubt):
"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
I’ve found that to not really be true.
My experience is that lots of stuff that was invented between when I was 15 and 35 had a lot of promise and then the stuff invented after I was 35 has been very tightly focused on using psychology to utterly wreck people in some kind of grift.
I’d guess that the ratio you’re talking about is something like 0.3, and that we’re in a situation where the median voter on the immigration issue is mostly concerned about illegal entry but the median voter within the subset of voters who are upset about immigration also wants less legal immigration.
Sounds about right. I'd love to see a sharp pollster craft some questions to get this answer.
It might be difficult because a lot of people have different ideas about what sorts of immigration is or isn’t legal. Two people who say they are fine with legal immigration but not with illegal immigration might have very different opinions about whether some currently legal immigration should be counted as illegal or whether some currently illegal immigration should be counted as legal.
It might be clever to ask people what kinds of immigration they'd like to see for what kinds of jobs, and then cross that with whether current immigration law would be able to fill those jobs.
We really need 3 categories:
Legal In Advance: green cards, foreign spouses, H1B, grad students, etc
Illegal: clearly not allowed
Asylum Seekers: people who we have not affirmatively said are allowed to be here, but who are not hiding from our government
We know that two time Obama voters flipped to Trump and Biden voters in 2020 are flipping to Trump in 2024. So, there is a persuadable group of moderate voters on this issue that's large enough to decide an election. The ratio is not useful because the goal is not to persuade right wing racists to flip. It can be a goal, just not a realistic one. I think progressives should stop wrapping themselves up in the warm and cozy blanket of "they're racist" to feel good about their unpopular policies and start thinking about how they can adopt policies that would be more appealing to moderates and independents.
I think it's useful because you still need to know how many votes are flippable.
To state the obvious, no it's not. You only need to know how many are opposed to illegal immigration but are supportive of legal immigration. Knowing how many are opposed to all immigration is not useful because moderation is not going to flip those voters.
It's also important to note moderation on other issues can flip anti-immigration voters even if you can't meet them where they are on immigration.
Very few people are single-issue voters.
True, but in this case, it was well known for the past 8 years that immigration is one of Trump's key strengths. For the Democratic party to hope that it'll go away as an issue only worked once because of the oversized effect of the pandemic. Assuming that they could get away with unpopular positions again, when the border crisis was a big issue from the beginning of the Biden presidency, is dumb politics. They took the independent voters for granted and Biden is likely to lose based on this issue alone.
“people who very much want all immigration curtailed on the grounds of wanting demographic homogeneity.”
There’s no intrinsic contradiction between immigration and demographic homogeneity. Americans often hold on to their ethnic heritage (e.g. Saint Patrick’s day is still a thing), and there are still plenty of Europeans who’d like to immigrate to the US —- some of whom do so illegally [1]. I bet there’d be support for letting them in.
[1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/03/16/us/white-irish-undocumented-trnd/index.html
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.
The reason why #2 isn't more widely reported is because that's not a "fact" and any media outlet that said it would be gifting Trump with a massive, easily winnable defamation suit against them. Trump was found civilly liable for defaming E. Jean Carroll by claiming that she was lying about him having sexually assaulted her. You can say that as part of that judgment the jury necessarily had to believe Trump sexually assaulted Carroll, but that's not a "conviction," which refers to a criminal trial outcome.
Similarly, Hunter Biden is not a criminal, since he hasn't been convicted of anything. While he *was* a drug addict, I don't think he *is* currently.
Does one have to be convicted to be a criminal? I feel that that touchstone of being a criminal is committing crimes rather than a legal process.
How you answer whether O.J. Simpson is or is not a murderer probably answers your convicted criminal question too. I don't know what I'd call O.J. but I would probably fall short of directly calling him a murderer if absolutely pressed on it.
Really. I would totally call OJ a murderer. Conviction requires beyond a reasonable doubt but it can be fairly obvious that someone is guilty and there still be some reasonable doubt.
Yes, I focused on #2 because I very frequently see commenters in progressive on-line spaces saying that the "failure" of the media to report that Trump was "convicted" of sexual assault proves that the MSM is in the tank for Trump. And it's like, no, it just proves that the MSM doesn't want to get hit with a nine-figure judgment from a jury in East Dogpatch, AR, or whatever the most Trump-friendly jurisdiction is that (1) treats false accusations of criminal convictions as per se defamation (meaning no proof of "special" damages is required) and (2) doesn't have a cap on punitive damage awards.
Thx for this! I saw #2 and was like “could I have really missed something this huge?!”
Just re-inflation being "way down" ... that really feels like you're just picking your facts. Or at least add a 7.5 that prices are way up or never been higher. I think Furman nailed this point that people don't care about the rate of change. They care about the level.
Exactly. I'm still outraged that gas costs way more than it did in 1968.
I think the 1984 election showed us the people care more about the direction of the rate of change and if given enough time they get used to current levels, as long as real incomes roughly keep pace.
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/the-price-level-doesnt-fall
Exactly. People know the facts. Groceries are up 25% vs. pre-COVID. Wages are up 18% and have trailed CPI since Q3 2021. Obviously this pressure is especially acute on households with no savings - where the marginal dollar matters more.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/30/what-radically-different-wage-growth-forecast-for-2024-means-for-you.html
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/the-price-level-doesnt-fall
On #4, commenter Avery James provided some evidence for the assertion that the bill was DOA anyway. (That might be incorrect, but it does make me much more hesitant to claim #4)
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/the-case-for-the-immigration-deal?r=7jkro&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=49610372
Did Trump publicly state that he wanted it dead? Yeah. But the statement in 4 seems potentially a bit too strong.
#7 doesn't matter. Normies don't focus on the rate of change of prices, they focus on price level. Prices at supermarkets are much higher than they were in 2021, let alone 2019. That is all that matters.
Inflation eats savings. It doesn't matter if your current wage rises if your life savings are being devalued.
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.
The media's main failing is that they never figured out how to deal with a person in Trump who has *so* many failings, *so* much corruption, *so* much narcissism, *so* many scandals that he has become invulnerable in the way Mr. Burns could survive having every disease known to man because in the end each canceled the other out. And because of the fundamental law of scandal balance, the one "scandal" or issue regarding Biden (Hunter, Joe's age) has to be inflated to equal the amount of coverage of all the amorphous and impossible to remember Trump scandals. And because there's only one or two, they stick in the mind and attain vastly inflated importance.
I don't know how to solve this; I just wish journalists were more aware that this is the trap they fall into and don't be like Brian Beutler who is convinced that *his* particular pet rock (hold more hearing on Trump corruption) is the key to ultimate victory. It's just flooding the zone with more shit, Brian.
Yes, this is something I mentioned all the way back in 2016 when you had people constantly complain that the media "isn't covering" Trump scandals or the infamous "word cloud" showing the giant "EMAILS" entry for Clinton and no comparably large word associated with Trump -- during that campaign, Trump generated a new scandal or gaffe probably literally every five to seven business days that would have been considered campaign-ending, if not career-ending, for a standard politician. However, because of the constant churn, none of it ever sank very far into many, if not most, voters' consciousness, whereas Clinton's "e-mails" was a single, constant touchpoint in the last couple months or so of the campaign.
The problem with journalism is that structural changes and loss of revenue has meant only a small privileged portion of the population can get jobs in it. In some ways I feel the media is caught up in negativity shock generation and we aren’t hitting the paddle in the skinner cage any more.
Also I use the same Simpsons analogy to explain what OEMs are doing in the US EV market. All stuck in the same door.
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.)
Slow Boring is a boutique media product for a relatively small group of readers who are, on average, significantly higher income, more politically engaged, and more genuinely interested in policy than the typical media consumer. I think that Matt:
* Is baseline more interested in writing about policy consequence-type issues
* Thinks (I think correctly) that his readers will value this relative to other kinds of 2024 coverage, especially because that’s very available elsewhere
* Hopes that his readers will use their above-average level of engagement and influence to redirect attention in their social circles and organizations towards this sort of “what are the consequences?” questions.
This agenda wouldn’t make sense if Matt was like, the editor of the NYT or MSNBC’s programming director. But it makes sense for this publication and its audience.
Yeah, the main thing that matters in this election is likely to be what some normie demographics in swing states think.
MY is much better than most elite media people at keeping that in mind, but those people probably are not his audience.
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???
It's the result of a vicious cycle. Doesn't matter how it started because the more voters care about his age, the more it becomes a newsworthy topic, further increasing the salience of the issue among voters. Certainly doesn't help that many voters and journalist feel they have an axe to grind with Biden and are just searching for plausible narrative.
Also feels a bit like path of least resistance journalism. Can't think of a story that requires less effort or expertise to produce or indeed read.
Ezra addressed this saying that there’s a real difference between the Joe Biden of 4 years ago and this one as exemplified by the two clips he played. I don’t think it’s a made-up issue though of course its traction relative to Trump’s shortcomings and threats is beyond frustrating.
Why the heck would media have anything against Biden
Because media is a business and a Trump victory would increase readership/ratings and maximize shareholder value?
Do you think this is true for Matt or yourself? Do you think your or he are exceptions to some rule?
If we're just talking money, then yeah, I imagine it is. SB was launched after Biden won so it's hard to do a comparison, but basically every major media outlet (WaPo, for example) had higher readership under Trump. If he wins in November I imagine there would be an increase in demand for takes about how Democrats can win in 2026 or 2028, though perhaps less interest in the policy stuff? I'm not sure. And if Trump wins, then small and large donors alike will dump a ton of money into the midterms, which is good for me as a burgeoning political consultant who graduates in 2026.
The thing is that Matt and I are both committed partisan Democrats with strongly held ideological views and policy preferences! So while a Trump win would probably be better for our respective bottom lines, we both don't want that to happen! Like Matt tweets sometimes, he's rich; if he was only interested in the money, he'd vote Republican because they'll cut his taxes. But he doesn't!
I think that's my general perspective as well, but would apply it to others besides you and Matt. While many people in the media business might make more money under a Trump presidency, the vast majority (90%+) of media doesn't want him to win because money is not the most important thing to them.
Well that's not anti-biden it's just pro-Trump. Unless they hate Joe for being boring lol.
It's a binary choice; these two things are the same.
In addition to the nontrivial number of right wing journalists, I think there are perhaps a couple of additional, left-coded groups within the media who may genuinely have it out for Joe: (1) Some journalists dislike his policies wrt Israel/Gaza; (2) Some journalists think he can't beat Trump and would like to contribute to pushing him out in favor of a brokered convention.
There are no right-wing journalists. There are hacks and that’s pretty much it.
I mean, he *is* 81. How much convincing was required?
Yeah— I approve of Biden and I’m going to vote for him in November, but I think it’s pretty clear that he’s not quite as sharp and energetic as he used to be. He’s at an age where that sort of issue can worsen quickly, and being the president is a punishing job. I don’t think it’s irrational to worry about, and ceteris paribus, I’d rather have a younger and more vigorous president.
Ezra got pressed on this in his Q&A pod and I agree with him. There are polls going back to Aug. that the #1 issue for Biden is age. The media / pundits didn't manufacture this. Ezra's point about what *has* changed is if the election was tomorrow Biden would likely lose. That's why it's a story now.
I’ve always believed that the most important job of a president is to guide the country through an unforeseen crisis. By that metric, I give Biden a B- and Trump an F. I don’t love Biden all that much but it’s a no-brainer.