“So now the MAGA people think, and I bet a lot of Republicans are starting to think, a few things: first, "thank God our hero Trump installed all those Supreme Court justices who will stand up for our American rights"”
So this is the crux of it. The Supreme Court decision was unanimous. Trumps justices weren’t needed by Trump to save him from anything. If people believe these things, those people are absolutely lost to Democrats. There is no point in making statements to appease those people.
Your account of people who want to pay lower taxes because they are kind of selfish seems to leave out the people who don’t trust the government to spend tax revenue efficiently. Maybe they are also kinda selfish but there’s probably a scale there where some of those people would be more willing to pay taxes if they had higher trust in how that money would be put to use.
My take on Democratic politicians' interpretation of 2016, as evidenced by 2020, is that Democratic primary voters hungered for a strong leftward shift. I would say the evidence on that is mixed.
First off the AARP is a huge advocacy group that spends lots of money on the Medicare issue and other policieis important to Seniors. 2nd. What all of you and I mean anyone today writing about politics, fails to understand the absolute hate that exist within the Republican Party for the Republican Party. Democrats did what they did with the identity politics, ie. women for, hispanics for, muslims for, jews for,etc etc in an effort to try and keep the Democratic Party from imploding in the same way the Republican party has. Doesnt make it a good thing, I actually hate it, but given the clear level of ignorance this country has about its own form of government, selfishness was bound to take hold of the narrative and every snake oil salesman came along to exploit. The Republicans turned into the Party of Hate and Against. Sure Hilary's words were too early for the rest of the world to get their meaning. However, when Biden separates Republicans from the MAGA wing, he is doing it under the reality that everyone understands who and what they are. THey want to TEAR the system down. Keep the hair slicing and hand wringing out of the narrative. THere is a strong force in this country to tear the system down. It comes from the first big lie that we did nothing to contain. THat lie was:
THe WAR of Northern Agression. Every element of todays politicis can be recast in the years leading up to the Civil War, and then after. Instead of standing firm for the Constitution, we let snowflakes call it whatever makes them feel better. If that isn't enough to remind all who the snowflakes are, I cant help you.
I think it's a gargantuan myth that COVID hurt Trump in 2020, and Matt's guilty of the same bubble effect he frequently calls out other pundits for. Yes, if the election had been held in April Biden might've won by 20 points. By November it was very much a referendum on social distancing and preventative measures and Democrats bled a ton of urban working class voters who rolled their eyes at us white collar professionals who had the privilege to distance and the "audacity" to look down on those who were not in their free time but made exceptions for protests. (I also still think we were right, FWIW). Those same workers received significant financial support from a Republican Congress and administration that was very happy to take credit for it.
It's hard to predict what happens this year but my gut is that all sides are fighting yesterday's wars and not actually reading the room.
A picture is worth a thousand words. I personally like HRC and moreover think she would have made a great president. However that “intersectionality” graph that literally centers “investments in communities of color” while literally marginalizing “investments in underserved communities” is basically begging whites (=the great majority of voters!) not to vote for HRC. Not coincidentally Biden won Biden improving somewhat on the white vote (even while bleeding some minority voters).
Copyediting note: Instead of "I think there was just never very much emphasis for any of this" I think you mean "I think there was just never very much evidence for any of this"
Agree with this piece and just have two thoughts to offer:
1) I think progressives have cognitive dissonance on the Trump ran to the center on entitlements thing because he did actually run to the center but I don't think anyone who didn't vote for him actually believed he meant it. The GOP still wants to cut entitlements but they've adopted a new strategy of holding the debt ceiling hostage and demanding the bipartisan entitlement cuts. Now Dems call them out on this and they act outraged but I think we all know that they will continue this tactic. This is not to dispute MY's point at all. I think he's right. This is just my speculation as to why Dems have learned the wrong lesson on economic messaging.
2) Somewhat relatedly, like MY and Tim Miller were saying on Politix, progressives tend to be very earnest and passionate about stuff. While this has it's virtues, it can be a drawback in electoral politics. If you are very passionate about something, it's very hard to compromise in it, even just in terms of messaging. This is why it's incumbent on us as center-left normie Dems to kind of take the same tack we took with Trump voters and patiently meet progressives where they are at when trying to persuade them of the merits of message discipline in service of winning elections. You can't persuade a lot of people by saying "The median voter doesn't like your ideas, suck it up cupcake and move to the right."
I fell like Warren deciding not to run is one of the great sliding doors of history. Many of Clinton's weaknesses had very little ideological content. Bernie running instead got the worst of both worlds, a message candidate that was not designed to appeal to a wide audience, yet one that could over perform massively.
Another sliding door is that the Democrats dismissed the email scandal as a nothing burger, but were much more offended by her off the record speeches to big banks, which only came out as an issue once the primary was underway. If the speeches came out earlier, in mid 2015 rather than 2016, I think Dem's would have hit the panic button and been more successful in drafting Warren.
I suspect it's kind of all or nothing; if Hillary hadn't gotten such consensus in the party which kept a bunch of other Dems from running in '16 (similar to Trump in '24), Warren *and many others like in 2020* would've run and she similarly would've fallen behind in the race earlier on. Biden probably wins the 2016 primary and wins the 2016 general?
I agree that moving to the left to excite the base is not the right strategy.
But it’s just not persuasive that a primary reason Ds lost in 2016 is because Clinton was too far left of Obama - so the strange contingent of Obama to Trump voters said - “we like this thoughtful moderate Democrat Obama but respectfully disagree with Ms. Clinton’s position on intersectionality. Mr. Trump’s nuanced approach to this and other issues is simply more persuasive.”
I’m sure ideology played some role in the 2016 election, to explain the O to T shift. But gender bias, personal appeal and candidate quality has to be included in the conversation.
I don't see the analogy. We are not a dictatorship now, or hopefully ever. And we are not Korean or Chinese, our political history is wildly different. I guess what I mean, is that 80% of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are working in their government (that belongs to them). They don't agree with each other now, but if Trump tried to do what everyone fears he would do, they could get together on opposing that.
I don't think I agree that the "Bernie woulda won" narratives after 2016 were based on misunderstandings of the thirst for left-wing policies. I think they were based on the recognition that big, dumb, emotionally-satisfying-but-intellectually-impoverished campaign themes and policy proposals seemed to attract a huge amount of voter enthusiasm throughout the 2016 primary and general cycle. This was not exactly new (who can forget the classic "I will repeal Obamacare on my first day in office" trope that was so popular among Republican primary candidates in 2012). But the combination of Trump and Bernie in 2016 just seemed like a watershed moment for the triumph of big dumb ideas, and Trump's victory ratified the notion that big dumb ideas were the path to electoral success. So the implicit criticism of Hilary was that she did not set out enough big, dumb, emotionally satisfying ideas, which was translated into "she failed to connect" with voters or had "trust issues" with voters or lacked "authenticity" or a dozen other similar sexist-sounding explanations (some of which were, in fact, sexist.) Calling Republicans who supported Trump "deplorable" was one of Clinton's big dumb ideas that cycle, and it survives to this day (in a rhetorically-rehabilitated and January 6th-infused version) as the animating force for the "save democracy" wing of the anti-Trump coalition. But that idea had far less electoral salience (and no real policy salience) before the full extent of Trump's executive incompetence and personal scumbaggery had manifested.
I'd also posit that big dumb ideas have been central to American politics at least since Wilson, and that parties struggle to stay in power beyond two terms because, even when successful, it's hard to pitch a big dumb idea and simultaneously explain why you couldn't enact it before
Yes - "the current guys are responsible for all the things that are bad, even if most things are actually pretty good" is probably the default BDI for all out-parties everywhere.
"Obama beat Clinton in 2008, after all, largely on the strength of criticizing her support for the Iraq War. And we saw from the 2004 primary that even back then, the Iraq issue was sufficient to launch Howard Dean to stardom. It’s not a huge surprise that the kind of highly engaged white liberals who dominate the Iowa caucus would be drawn to an anti-war insurgent candidate like Sanders — that doesn’t necessarily mean they are socialists."
That seems fair to me. I dislike Hillary's general neoliberalism and prefer a more left wing candidate. But I will never, ever forgive her for her hawkishness, which has devastated millions of lives. With Biden, I voted for him in the 2020 general because duh, of course, but looking at 2024, his hawkishness is giving me serious pause, and I'm not sure if I will vote for a protest candidate or not.
Sure, but Biden has a moral duty to stop supporting the war in Gaza and a constitutional duty to ensure Donald Trump loses in 2024. I think he has blown both.
Nah, Biden has a moral duty to deport all those Palestinian kids who don't seem to understand what their American citizenship actually means. Or else he could start a war with Iran and put them all in uniform.
The fuck is wrong with you, actually? I’d love to hear why you think American citizenship is conditional for some and not others, seemingly on the basis of skin color.
Noah Millman wrote an interesting piece arguing the Gaza issue holding back people from Biden makes sense *if you're a single issue Palestine voter*, but not if you're a broader progressive movement voter. Needless to say, there are many types of voters.
Here is another framing: If a mob boss or Nazi or whatever puts you into a moral dilemma where you have to choose between your children or some other morally impossible choice, yes, you are stuck making the morally difficult choice of the lesser of two evils. But the mob boss/Nazi whatever has more fault for causing the situation. Here we have layers and layers of mob bosses: the American electorate, Trump, the Democratic party, Biden, capitalism, whatever. But I'm still pissed off at all of them for putting me in this shitty situation where my best bet is a guy with slightly less blood on his hands.
Matt is big into the ideas that A) Donald Trump won because he moderated Republican stance on Social Security and B) this is a seriously underrated reason for his victory. In other words, his policy on entitlements doesn’t seem to have resonated with the take-mongers.
But did ordinary voters know that he was more moderate on entitlements than Romney? How is it that voters in Waukesha picked that up, with so much else going on?
I lived through 2016, and all I remember was “grab them by the pussy”, “basket of deplorables”, immigrants and her emails. There were a few other things, like the TPP and bathroom bans.
But I’m a reasonably keyed in person, and I don’t recall spending one second thinking about Medicare, much less that Donald Trump was pretty moderate on the topic.
I think that's a good point. But also maybe after the Republicans spent 10 years talking about entitlement reform, maybe just shutting up about it and seeming like a guy who absolutely did not care enough about the details of health insurance to cut government programs also helped? Polls did show voters considered Trump more moderate than Hillary, not sure what the stats would have been on Paul Ryan vs Hillary.
“So now the MAGA people think, and I bet a lot of Republicans are starting to think, a few things: first, "thank God our hero Trump installed all those Supreme Court justices who will stand up for our American rights"”
So this is the crux of it. The Supreme Court decision was unanimous. Trumps justices weren’t needed by Trump to save him from anything. If people believe these things, those people are absolutely lost to Democrats. There is no point in making statements to appease those people.
Your account of people who want to pay lower taxes because they are kind of selfish seems to leave out the people who don’t trust the government to spend tax revenue efficiently. Maybe they are also kinda selfish but there’s probably a scale there where some of those people would be more willing to pay taxes if they had higher trust in how that money would be put to use.
My take on Democratic politicians' interpretation of 2016, as evidenced by 2020, is that Democratic primary voters hungered for a strong leftward shift. I would say the evidence on that is mixed.
First off the AARP is a huge advocacy group that spends lots of money on the Medicare issue and other policieis important to Seniors. 2nd. What all of you and I mean anyone today writing about politics, fails to understand the absolute hate that exist within the Republican Party for the Republican Party. Democrats did what they did with the identity politics, ie. women for, hispanics for, muslims for, jews for,etc etc in an effort to try and keep the Democratic Party from imploding in the same way the Republican party has. Doesnt make it a good thing, I actually hate it, but given the clear level of ignorance this country has about its own form of government, selfishness was bound to take hold of the narrative and every snake oil salesman came along to exploit. The Republicans turned into the Party of Hate and Against. Sure Hilary's words were too early for the rest of the world to get their meaning. However, when Biden separates Republicans from the MAGA wing, he is doing it under the reality that everyone understands who and what they are. THey want to TEAR the system down. Keep the hair slicing and hand wringing out of the narrative. THere is a strong force in this country to tear the system down. It comes from the first big lie that we did nothing to contain. THat lie was:
THe WAR of Northern Agression. Every element of todays politicis can be recast in the years leading up to the Civil War, and then after. Instead of standing firm for the Constitution, we let snowflakes call it whatever makes them feel better. If that isn't enough to remind all who the snowflakes are, I cant help you.
I think it's a gargantuan myth that COVID hurt Trump in 2020, and Matt's guilty of the same bubble effect he frequently calls out other pundits for. Yes, if the election had been held in April Biden might've won by 20 points. By November it was very much a referendum on social distancing and preventative measures and Democrats bled a ton of urban working class voters who rolled their eyes at us white collar professionals who had the privilege to distance and the "audacity" to look down on those who were not in their free time but made exceptions for protests. (I also still think we were right, FWIW). Those same workers received significant financial support from a Republican Congress and administration that was very happy to take credit for it.
It's hard to predict what happens this year but my gut is that all sides are fighting yesterday's wars and not actually reading the room.
A picture is worth a thousand words. I personally like HRC and moreover think she would have made a great president. However that “intersectionality” graph that literally centers “investments in communities of color” while literally marginalizing “investments in underserved communities” is basically begging whites (=the great majority of voters!) not to vote for HRC. Not coincidentally Biden won Biden improving somewhat on the white vote (even while bleeding some minority voters).
Copyediting note: Instead of "I think there was just never very much emphasis for any of this" I think you mean "I think there was just never very much evidence for any of this"
Agree with this piece and just have two thoughts to offer:
1) I think progressives have cognitive dissonance on the Trump ran to the center on entitlements thing because he did actually run to the center but I don't think anyone who didn't vote for him actually believed he meant it. The GOP still wants to cut entitlements but they've adopted a new strategy of holding the debt ceiling hostage and demanding the bipartisan entitlement cuts. Now Dems call them out on this and they act outraged but I think we all know that they will continue this tactic. This is not to dispute MY's point at all. I think he's right. This is just my speculation as to why Dems have learned the wrong lesson on economic messaging.
2) Somewhat relatedly, like MY and Tim Miller were saying on Politix, progressives tend to be very earnest and passionate about stuff. While this has it's virtues, it can be a drawback in electoral politics. If you are very passionate about something, it's very hard to compromise in it, even just in terms of messaging. This is why it's incumbent on us as center-left normie Dems to kind of take the same tack we took with Trump voters and patiently meet progressives where they are at when trying to persuade them of the merits of message discipline in service of winning elections. You can't persuade a lot of people by saying "The median voter doesn't like your ideas, suck it up cupcake and move to the right."
I fell like Warren deciding not to run is one of the great sliding doors of history. Many of Clinton's weaknesses had very little ideological content. Bernie running instead got the worst of both worlds, a message candidate that was not designed to appeal to a wide audience, yet one that could over perform massively.
Another sliding door is that the Democrats dismissed the email scandal as a nothing burger, but were much more offended by her off the record speeches to big banks, which only came out as an issue once the primary was underway. If the speeches came out earlier, in mid 2015 rather than 2016, I think Dem's would have hit the panic button and been more successful in drafting Warren.
I suspect it's kind of all or nothing; if Hillary hadn't gotten such consensus in the party which kept a bunch of other Dems from running in '16 (similar to Trump in '24), Warren *and many others like in 2020* would've run and she similarly would've fallen behind in the race earlier on. Biden probably wins the 2016 primary and wins the 2016 general?
I agree that moving to the left to excite the base is not the right strategy.
But it’s just not persuasive that a primary reason Ds lost in 2016 is because Clinton was too far left of Obama - so the strange contingent of Obama to Trump voters said - “we like this thoughtful moderate Democrat Obama but respectfully disagree with Ms. Clinton’s position on intersectionality. Mr. Trump’s nuanced approach to this and other issues is simply more persuasive.”
I’m sure ideology played some role in the 2016 election, to explain the O to T shift. But gender bias, personal appeal and candidate quality has to be included in the conversation.
> obviously Clinton was to Trump’s left on economics.
https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-political-effects-of-neoliberalism/
I think there's an important sense in which an important voting bloc (non-college working class) did not read that as obvious or even true.
I don't see the analogy. We are not a dictatorship now, or hopefully ever. And we are not Korean or Chinese, our political history is wildly different. I guess what I mean, is that 80% of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are working in their government (that belongs to them). They don't agree with each other now, but if Trump tried to do what everyone fears he would do, they could get together on opposing that.
And who got the most electoral votes? Trump. That's how the system works. The Constitution is easy to find online. You could look it up.
Sure, the election was close, but so was Kennedy's (in spite of all the votes his dad bought for him)
I don't think I agree that the "Bernie woulda won" narratives after 2016 were based on misunderstandings of the thirst for left-wing policies. I think they were based on the recognition that big, dumb, emotionally-satisfying-but-intellectually-impoverished campaign themes and policy proposals seemed to attract a huge amount of voter enthusiasm throughout the 2016 primary and general cycle. This was not exactly new (who can forget the classic "I will repeal Obamacare on my first day in office" trope that was so popular among Republican primary candidates in 2012). But the combination of Trump and Bernie in 2016 just seemed like a watershed moment for the triumph of big dumb ideas, and Trump's victory ratified the notion that big dumb ideas were the path to electoral success. So the implicit criticism of Hilary was that she did not set out enough big, dumb, emotionally satisfying ideas, which was translated into "she failed to connect" with voters or had "trust issues" with voters or lacked "authenticity" or a dozen other similar sexist-sounding explanations (some of which were, in fact, sexist.) Calling Republicans who supported Trump "deplorable" was one of Clinton's big dumb ideas that cycle, and it survives to this day (in a rhetorically-rehabilitated and January 6th-infused version) as the animating force for the "save democracy" wing of the anti-Trump coalition. But that idea had far less electoral salience (and no real policy salience) before the full extent of Trump's executive incompetence and personal scumbaggery had manifested.
I'd also posit that big dumb ideas have been central to American politics at least since Wilson, and that parties struggle to stay in power beyond two terms because, even when successful, it's hard to pitch a big dumb idea and simultaneously explain why you couldn't enact it before
Yes - "the current guys are responsible for all the things that are bad, even if most things are actually pretty good" is probably the default BDI for all out-parties everywhere.
"Obama beat Clinton in 2008, after all, largely on the strength of criticizing her support for the Iraq War. And we saw from the 2004 primary that even back then, the Iraq issue was sufficient to launch Howard Dean to stardom. It’s not a huge surprise that the kind of highly engaged white liberals who dominate the Iowa caucus would be drawn to an anti-war insurgent candidate like Sanders — that doesn’t necessarily mean they are socialists."
That seems fair to me. I dislike Hillary's general neoliberalism and prefer a more left wing candidate. But I will never, ever forgive her for her hawkishness, which has devastated millions of lives. With Biden, I voted for him in the 2020 general because duh, of course, but looking at 2024, his hawkishness is giving me serious pause, and I'm not sure if I will vote for a protest candidate or not.
If you live in a remotely competitive state then you have a moral and constitutional duty to vote for Biden, in my view.
Sure, but Biden has a moral duty to stop supporting the war in Gaza and a constitutional duty to ensure Donald Trump loses in 2024. I think he has blown both.
Nah, Biden has a moral duty to deport all those Palestinian kids who don't seem to understand what their American citizenship actually means. Or else he could start a war with Iran and put them all in uniform.
The fuck is wrong with you, actually? I’d love to hear why you think American citizenship is conditional for some and not others, seemingly on the basis of skin color.
Noah Millman wrote an interesting piece arguing the Gaza issue holding back people from Biden makes sense *if you're a single issue Palestine voter*, but not if you're a broader progressive movement voter. Needless to say, there are many types of voters.
https://open.substack.com/pub/gideons/p/the-dilemma-of-the-pro-palestinian
Well he’s not going to beat Trump if people don’t vote for him!
Here is another framing: If a mob boss or Nazi or whatever puts you into a moral dilemma where you have to choose between your children or some other morally impossible choice, yes, you are stuck making the morally difficult choice of the lesser of two evils. But the mob boss/Nazi whatever has more fault for causing the situation. Here we have layers and layers of mob bosses: the American electorate, Trump, the Democratic party, Biden, capitalism, whatever. But I'm still pissed off at all of them for putting me in this shitty situation where my best bet is a guy with slightly less blood on his hands.
Matt is big into the ideas that A) Donald Trump won because he moderated Republican stance on Social Security and B) this is a seriously underrated reason for his victory. In other words, his policy on entitlements doesn’t seem to have resonated with the take-mongers.
But did ordinary voters know that he was more moderate on entitlements than Romney? How is it that voters in Waukesha picked that up, with so much else going on?
I lived through 2016, and all I remember was “grab them by the pussy”, “basket of deplorables”, immigrants and her emails. There were a few other things, like the TPP and bathroom bans.
But I’m a reasonably keyed in person, and I don’t recall spending one second thinking about Medicare, much less that Donald Trump was pretty moderate on the topic.
I remember Trump and Bernie publicly making a lot of their stances against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Hillary and Obama supported.
I think that's a good point. But also maybe after the Republicans spent 10 years talking about entitlement reform, maybe just shutting up about it and seeming like a guy who absolutely did not care enough about the details of health insurance to cut government programs also helped? Polls did show voters considered Trump more moderate than Hillary, not sure what the stats would have been on Paul Ryan vs Hillary.