Victory for today: I learned about The Engagement before my very Swiftie sister did, and I got to break the news to her. And as it turns out, Matt chose a good and topical leading picture for today's article.
If you build a bunch of new housing, and therefore many people move to your state, is it automatically true that those people who newly live there will vote the way the state has typically voted? Is it not possible that expanding housing opens these states up to shifts in voting behavior?
It absolutely can happen. But it would take A LOT of population shifting to turn California or New York red, so stopping the bleeding in those states would almost certainly be good.
I think we're all kind of underrating how much this is about housing.
If dense urban cores or walkable suburbs that attract educated, white collar workers are expanding, it will bring in voters who like to live in those places. If instead the new housing is going up in way-out-there suburbs it will probably bring in more conservative voters.
Well, _I'm_ certainly not underrating the issue. I'm very active with my local YIMBY Action chapter, and serve on my city's planning commission.
But yes, CA Democrats are not nearly as united as we should be in _freaking the fuck out_ and doing everything we can to reverse the trend. The state party did just endorse our big transit-oriented development bill for this year, but the Los Angeles contingent is still opposing, and it's by no means certain that it will pass. :-/
Yeah but white collar workers aren't a heavily Dem voting block. Many blocks within white collar workers might skew Dem, notably single females and the most educated, but there are plenty of white collar workers who live in far-out suburbs who skew very conservative. Outer ring suburbs of major cities, even wealthy ones, often skew pretty red.
"Travis County (Austin) was the only top 10 county for California migration whose overall purple blend of new voters was more blue than red."
The effect is pretty marginal, but it definitely looks like overall what's happening with CA migration is it's making red counties even redder, and then Austin slightly bluer. But Austin doesn't make up for everywhere else, especially not with the state legislature and House being gerrymandered to crack the Dem voters into a bunch of suburban districts.
That's really helpful! I'm surprised that Harris County wasn't a big recipient of people moving from California!
Most discussion I've seen has focused just on the exit poll of the 2018 Senate race, which showed Cruz doing slightly better than Beto among people born outside Texas, while Beto did slightly better than Cruz among people born in Texas. Digging a bit deeper into that showed that people who had moved to Texas in the previous 10 years (since 2008) leaned strongly towards Beto, while ones who had moved to Texas earlier than that leaned strongly towards Cruz, but were a slightly larger group.
It would be helpful to see how much these various trends have changed between 2004 and 2020, rather than just relying on the top line that it's been slightly favoring Republicans over the time period as a whole! (Also, it's hard to know how "party registration while in California" does or doesn't correlate with actual voting in Texas - how many people who were not registered with a party are actually strong partisans one way or another?)
One is that the dynamics of The Big Sort apply. Plus there may be a certain amount of resentment of the place you've moved away from. In any case, on average, the people who have moved from CA to TX because they were priced out have actually been making TX redder, making it marginally _harder_ for a Colin Allred or Beto O'Rourke to win the state.
But the bigger thing is just that the people who might move in or out are a small fraction relative to the size of the state. If CA were growing 1% a year, it's not super likely that that 1% would be _all_ Dems or _all_ Repubs, and so at the margin it might move things by a tenth of a percent or something, but not enough to be relevant to the electoral college.
PS: We should just do National Popular Vote anyways.
One other thing - that story tracked people who moved from California, but I think the bigger story might be the people who are moving from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, since those are the people who are moving to opportunity, who tend to be young and blue voters.
I've actually looked at this data for North Carolina, where you can see each individual registered voter's party and state of birth.
In general the more liberal states produced more Democrat migrants to NC, but there was significant regional trends. ex-NJ/NY residents were much more liberal than ex-CA residents.
Shrinking blue states does not necessarily mean fewer democratic electoral votes.
For example, if a random sampling of Californians were leaving California and moving to Texas there would be such a number of migrations where both Texas and California were blue.
Obviously, real world is a little more complicated but you get the point.
It's not a random sample, though. IRS migration stats show it's predominantly middle income people, presumably driven by housing costs and more rapid job growth in middle income range occupations in other states. It is a complex issue and I haven't seen detailed studies. It does seem that California outmigration had an impact on shifting Arizona and Nevada towards Democrats, but not so much with Texas.
Very interesting, a few other people have pointed out the Texas thing to me now.
However, while my model may have been a bit too cute, it does seem that the evidence your citing here points to the fact that blue state outmigration can in fact turn the new state blue/purple.
I’m all in on the fact that big blue states need to grow and need housing reforms, just quibbling with the specific conclusions in this post.
Nate reviewing gerrymandering in ways that we Slow Borers are likely very familiar with. But this one paragraph stood out to me:
"There’s one other advantage for Democrats, too. Perennial warfare over districting, even in off years, probably benefits whichever party can consistently turn out its voters in obscure elections, particularly special elections and state supreme court elections. And that’s been the Democrats in recent years. Democrats have also generally had higher turnout in recent midterms, which means they can use those to shore up boundaries in advance of presidential years when more Trump-leaning marginal voters show up at the polls."
Yep, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were de-gerrymandered by elected State Supreme Courts and Michigan by an off-year ballot referendum. This is the most promising approach to fighting gerrymandering.
Democrats should in general favor more direct democracy like elected judges and ballot referenda because they are less vulnerable to gerrymandering.
The problem with ballot referenda is that it's easy for people to think they can make change that way without the bother of actually electing officials who will take care that the laws they vote for are faithfully executed.
With gerrymandered districts, people don’t really get to choose elected officials at all! States like Michigan and Wisconsin in the 2010s were producing large Republican majorities even when Democrats were winning the popular vote by 10 points. At that point officials are only “elected” in a formal technical sense.
Direct democracy is bad for other reasons though? Prop 13 was a ballot referendum, and it's not like it's a blemish on an overall positive record either.
It’s hard to see how the MI, WI, and PA situations could have been resolved otherwise. They would’ve had permanently gerrymandered Republican majorities at the state level and be sending 75% Republican delegations to Congress even when Democrats won the popular vote. That seems to outweigh the harm of Prop 13 which is at least just limited to one state.
Courts are the antithesis of direct democracy in the US system of government, and actually provide a counterexample to your thesis. Fair point about Michigan, though -- I just think we have to draw a line stopping direct democracy somewhere between "establish an independent commission" and "directly set fiscal policy".
I never understand these kinds of discussions - the parties have no positions or beliefs in and of themselves - they exist as an ever changing collection of people each with their own set of idiosyncratic values.
It's like people can never get past the parties as they were constituted when they were a late teen early 20 something.
It's not like Democrats are bound by the laws of physics to maintain whatever beliefs they held in 2020 or whenever. They will adopt whatever beliefs they think will get them elected.
I'm increasingly leaning towards calling them the Democratic tribe and the Republican tribe, not 'parties'. They're certainly not political parties in the formal definition of them- they don't control candidate selection or discipline, messaging, funding, or anything else. They're just vehicles for broader social movements.
They literally have no positions and are simply defined by their gang-like, Crips & Bloods hatred of whatever the other tribe is doing. Example, people who thought Mamdani's plans for government-owned grocery stores was Literal Communism, but support the federal government owning chunks of Intel & defense companies.
I know that the rationalist crowd has been saying blue tribe & red tribe for a while now, but I feel like appending D & R to the tribe names is a bit more descriptive
right. and thinking this through, if there was a magic bullet that suddenly solved the housing problems in big blue cities and boosted their populations, the republicans wouldn't just go ``i guess we'll be losing from now on'', they would shift their priorities to account for that!
good housing policy is good because it is good, not because it will shift intercountry popullation flows in your favor sometime in the future.
I agree with your housing take of course, but I have a feeling that argument is more persuasive when used correctly against left NIMBYs (more housing = less fascism) and right NIMBYs (more housing = red state political power). I don't think it's a great argument, but it's an extra tool on the belt.
"They will adopt whatever beliefs they think will get them elected."
Are you sure? It seems like both parties seem to largely be driven by the small percentage of primary voters who are focused on their pet issues instead of building a broader base and becoming a majority party.
Then the white knuckle it and hope to get lucky by 1%
If there were truly enough Democrat's upset at the candidates the supposedly small number of primary voters choices they can always turnout and force that person out of their seat. The reality is the vast majority of Democrat's don't care one way or another and generally are OK w/ whomever ends up as the Democratic nominee, unless it comes out they don't support the Democratic President enough or have personal non-political issues.
Also, there is no secret viewpoint and vibe that'll get you more than 52%. Obama got 52.9% during a massive recession, in the middle of an unpopular war, and was one of the most charismatic politicians in recent history.
Your bland centrist guy is not getting above that.
Trump 2016 is the counter example to this. At least at the time, Republican primary voters were thought to be various shades of conservative, family values, christian right, etc... Trump has occasionally delivered for those groups, but at no point could he ever claim to be part of them.
I sure hope they do adapt! But in living memory we saw the both the House and Senate controlled by a single party for a huge stretch of time (mid 1950s through 1980) -- quibble about less polarization and so on if you want, but there's no guarantee one party will moderate enough (or thermostatic equilibrium will hit hard enough) to restore its electoral fortunes without many years in the wilderness first.
I'm seeing similar takes re: the 2032 election, insufficient blue state housing, etc.
I haven't done a detailed dive on the Electoral College math, but my sense (mainly from reading others' takes) is that, while this is a potentially alarming situation for Democrats, they have opportunities outside the Blue Wall (Georgia, Arizona, etc).
But here's the thing: while for a variety of reasons blue states need to build (a lot) more housing, does anybody really think there's a snowball's chance any improvements on this score could possibly have a measurable impact by 2030 (or 2032)? I'll take every bit of housing abundance I can get, but these long term demographic trends don't change overnight. It's like trying to turn around an an oil tanker.
But maybe Dems will get better numbers in time for 2044!
"does anybody really think there's a snowball's chance any improvements on this score could possibly have a measurable impact by 2030 (or 2032)"
Don't examples of places like Austin and Denver suggest that you can actually see impact on the cost of housing within less than five years of adopting pro-housing reforms?
The "success" story of Austin seems somewhat fishy to me. It seems similar to the housing crash of 2006-2010 because of higher interest rates. Homes are still more expensive than they were in 2020.
I'm aware of the coverage on the issue. The graph shows a boom bust story like the housing bubble. I haven't seen abundance people frame the housing bubble as abundance success story. Real abundance should show supply slightly outpacing demand initially with stable home prices, not bubble bust scenarios.
I personally don't think there's "plenty" of time, no, not if we're talking about the impact on 2032. We'd need to see (1) major reforms in multiple blue states, (2) those reforms be implemented quickly enough to see a large-scale increase in projects in 26-28 (even in a perfect YIMBY environment, it takes time to plan, get financing for, get approval for, build, market and sell new housing), (3) the resulting increase in housing supply result in genuinely significant change in the population trajectory of six or seven states.
We've got four years left.
Nothing's ever zero percent, sure, and every little bit helps. Saving even one House seat/electoral vote isn't nothing! And there are critical reasons beyond politics we need to build more housing. And yes, the impact on politics of a lot more blue state housing *would* affect demographic trends in the fullness of time—and thus reapportionment and the Electoral College.
I just believe that timeline realistically pushes out into the 2030s. I'd be truly shocked if, in 2032, we're reading articles about how the late decade, massive increase in the pace of building in California, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, Washington, Virginia, Oregon, Connecticut etc obviated mid 2020s projections regarding the ongoing population shift toward Republican-friendly states.
But as I implied above, I am more optimistic about the changes we may see bearing fruit in the next decade (and thus being reflected in the 2040 census). And in any event 2032 blue wall doomerism is more than a little overwrought because of Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina.
EDIT: I should add: even if I'm right that a blue state housing explosion doesn't materialize in time to significantly alter population trends by the next census, none of this means Democrats can't get a lot smarter about candidate selection and campaigning. Fast-growing red states are home to plenty of centrist voters, and GOP greed will undoubtedly reduce the safety margins in many a House district. So we need not and must not cede the field in states like Texas and Florida.
There's plenty of time for any individual decision to have a marginal or incremental impact. So if you an opportunity to vote on housing-related issues by next November or sooner, you should!
But there's much less time for coastal Democrats, nationally, to get their act together and get a whole bunch of bills passed in a whole bunch of states and make a big chance in their odds of winning the election. That basically is out of reach.
Ultimately, Dems can afford to win CA/NY by lower margins and lose TX/FL by bigger margins if they win the swing states. Presumably those states do not have a housing crisis.
On a similar theme see Liam Kerr's post on the DNC's meeting in Minneapolis https://www.welcomestack.org/p/895-dnc-ya Progressives keep claiming online that "Dems don't talk like that" but then they totally do.
"On Monday, the DNC meeting aired live on CSPAN unfolded in a way that multiple viewers questioned whether it was run by a Republican plant or a Russian plant. From social media, it looked like the agenda went:
I. Land Acknowledgement: read from a cell phone on the podium
II. Message from the Chair: our fight for trans youth in sports
III. Polling Presentation: voters don’t care about immigration or crime"
Now obviously voters aren't paying attention to this right now but it is a symptom that the people in charge of the party haven't learned much of anything from 2024 or that they are just going to refuse to change and hope everything works out fine in 2028. See also Hakeem Jeffries very weird Tweets as well: https://x.com/lxeagle17/status/1960191689655566357
the argument jeffries is making is that there is no credible evidence of her doing anything wrong. but, having that first sentence there suggests that her race and gender is part of the reason why it is bad to remove her from her job. that would be bizarre. if there was credible evidence that she had done something wrong, should she stay because of race and gender? even if that is not what he meant, it will be interpreted that way by those who are not charitably inclined.
p.s.: just to directly address your question: yes, that makes the statement stupid and counterproductive (in my opinion).
I'm going off-topic to talk about poptimism. Matt-style, here are some "bullet points" on the topic. All of these are takes - I don't agree 100% with everything I'm saying but I think they're all valuable
1. The triumph of poptimism is also the triumph of woke capitalism. Ironically the era when White and Male was 80% of what was critically appreciated also valued "having something to say" and "not selling out" while these concepts have basically disappeared now. Instead, we have a lot more women and minorities being recognized, but with a few exceptions, not much focus on "having something to say" or "fighting the system."
2. Isn't it good that we've stopped valuing the perspectives of angsty people so much? Pop is the happiest genre and many of the least respected subgenres (bling rap, hair metal) are also happy music. The world needs more happy music!
3. Pop music itself has shifted - it has a lot more auteurs nowadays, even if they don't write all their own stuff (e.g. Beyonce). The ones who are just friendly faces for corporate products like Morgan Wallen or Katy Perry are still not respected.
4. My personal take is that rock died when everyone's parents liked rock. What's less cool than the thing your parents love listening to? I think rap is gradually declining for the same reason.
5. A huge shift in general is the triumph of female artists, as boys migrate away from music altogether into memes, video games, YouTube, etc. It used to be that pop music was for the girls but an overwhelming number of the top albums every year were for the boys. Now the top album artists, male or female, mostly appeal to women: Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Harry Styles, all of Kpop, etc. Kendrick Lamar is a major exception but overall this is true.
6. Matt was always a bit delusional for thinking something like Metric was a big deal. Unless you are really breaking brand-new ground, like being the very first rapper or inventing punk, critically respected music is also quite popular in almost all cases. Maybe not the MOST popular, but it's stuff that was in the Top 40, or part of a successful album. Artists from prior eras that critics love and who were definitely trying to make "art," like Stevie Wonder, were hugely successful commercially not just critically. Not like Matt's example of Anora.
I do think it's kind of understated how much 60's and 70's pop music not done by Motown or it's adjacent studios or ABBA is actually pretty terrible. It's shifting by the late 70s as disco gets more of a hold and even by the 80s, you've got legitimate good pop music, but yeah, part of the reason for no poptimism in 1972 is its not good at all.
Also, there's a shift in categorization - in 1975 singing largely the same songs, for example, someone like Taylor Swift is a singer/songwriter ala Joni Mitchell or whomever and broadly in the 'rock' side of things as opposed to a pop singer.
I don't really agree on the 60s/70s pop music. There is a lot of great music by non-Motown girl groups, the early Beatles singles are mostly great, etc. I don't really know what would count as a "1972 pop song" so maybe you're right as we transition into the 70s.
Your second point is a great point.
John Mellencamp would be considered country or americana today, as would Springsteen. Taylor Swift would certainly not be counted as a pop artist in 1975 or even 1995 (like her namesake James Taylor or a 90s equivalent like Sheryl Crow) although she would be considered to have made a couple crossover pop albums. Billie Eilish would not be played on pop radio.
I think that's my point on categorization - pretty quickly, the Beatles were in the "rock" bucket, not the "pop bucket" like The Monkees still were for much longer, even though they were both still pop bands.
In general, for a while, "rock" was just 'good music thinking adults could like' and "pop" was just 'bad music aimed at children and girls.'
Also, I was trying to be somewhat circumspect, but by saying Motown and adjacent, I basically meant black music, while basically all white American pop music that was pushed as pop music as opposed to rock music wasn't that good until sometime in the late 70s. I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, but going by the categorization of the day, not really.
There was good "pop" music, but it wasn't considered pop music.
I wonder whether Springsteen or Mellencamp even have careers at all, considering the lack of mainstream rock for anybody under 40.
i think of k-pop as a distilled version of this trend. it can become boring and sterile without once in a while incorporating outside influences (e.g. rap). pop needs the other stuff to stay alive in the long run...
now going to give another netflix k-drama a shot because I'm insane and this one is going to be different.
Swing states change over time, (Iowa, Florida, Ohio, and Virgina) if you had to take a stab, what are going to be new purple states by 2032, and which tight states today will be considered safe?
I know it's impossible to guess without knowing the national issues, personalities, and coalitions of each party's future, particularly post-Trump GOP and progressive vs abundance Dems... but it's at least fun, maybe helpful, to contemplate.
New Jersey is more educated than Minnesota, but contains far more immigrants, so both perspectives are reasonable depending what is more salient over the next decade.
My “unexpected” blue wave swing states would be from the Great Plains states. I just feel that they’re culturally different enough (higher HS graduation rates, longer lifespans, higher voter participation, etc) from southern states that it’s more plausible that they would go for Democrats in a wipeout election.
The problem is that if Kansas or Nebraska goes for Democrats, then Democrats have probably done well enough in the typical swing states that it doesn’t matter. These states are also heavily Republican, and there’s no direct prize for going from losing them 65-35 to losing them by “only” 55-45.
States with a lot of immigrants could move more easily, just because the political stance and voting habits of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants are a lot less solidified.
I remember banging this drum to some friends a while back, too many Democrats ignore the Senate map in 2026 and 2028, and don't realize that these are still the good days before the House and electoral college swing towards Republicans in 2030. The only thing to temper the fear is that 2032 feels a long way away, who knows what American politics will look like that "far" in the future. There are a lot of butterfly wing hurricanes that can happen before then.
With regards to Lisa Cooks liminal firing, I totally agree with Matt's tweet:
"It would be so much better to assert that Fed independence is unconstitutional squarely rather run this charade of character assassination and bogus charges."
I think the Fed has been a great institution for maybe 40-50 years? Really done a good job for America. But obviously, as a matter of structure, it exists in an absurd space. Trump should just bite the bullet and try to get Humphrey's Executor totally overturned, it's clearly wrong lol.
This is really a debate for another day, but I disagree. The Founders gave us a system based on legislative supremacy -- equal branches, but with the Congress exercising ultimate authority to set policy -- and the 21st Century "discovery" of the "Unitary Executive" in the Constitution by the Republicans seems to me to be an example of motivated reasoning at its worst. How in the world did it get by Washington, Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, and both Roosevelts?
Answer: It didn't, because it's not really there.
*ETA* If anybody's wondering, I consider myself to be both an originalist and a strict constructionist. If I were a lawyer (which I'm not) I would probably be a member of the Federalist Society. But the Unitary Executive is just wrong, wrong, wrong, unless you believe the the Philadelphia Convention WANTED the country to celebrate its 250th birthday as a dictatorship.
It definitely didn't get by Lincoln. And not by Roosevelt by a long stretch. He, after all, was the loser in Humphrey's Executor after the court denied his power to fire an FTC chairman under the, no offense to the Lochner-4 Horsemen court, absurd notion that there was such a thing as a "quasi-legislative" officer.
There are no hidden spaces where civil servants and bureaucrats draw their authority, it stems from the Constitution. If Congress wants to create a Fed under Legislative Power, that's...fine if they can slip it under non-delegation doctrines.
But it is so obviously an executive function, we're just existing in a legal fiction.
The idea that an agency administered by the executive cannot have its staffing process limited by how its legislative authorization constitutes it seems very contrary to the intent of the Founders... I'm not really an Originalist myself, but as Al Brown says, the Founders pretty clearly intended the President to be not-a-king. Suggesting he was supposed to have the final say over _all_ operations of the Executive Branch, outside the context of military engagements (protecting from invasion or otherwise directing a war) is anti-historical.
The level of power accrued by the modern presidency would, IMHO, be pretty shocking even to the Federalist / Hamiltonian side of the arguments in that day. They intended the president to be an executor of directives given by the legislature. As Al says, they were VERY into "legislative supremacy". (Actually even the quite-early shift of power from Congress to the Courts, with the Supreme Court claiming the ultimate right to decide what's Constitutional, is a bit questionable relative to the text of the Constitution and what its authors said about it. But the balance we were at before the past few years probably could've worked, with Congress still having the power to curtail jurisdiction if it really wanted to. The problem is just that Congress has abdicated its responsibilities, leaving the Supreme Court and Presidency to take over.)
Congress gets to write the laws, but the president MUST be in charge of the executive. How can you execute if you can't hold employees accountable???
If we want something like the Fed to be a quasi independent agency (which I agree is a good idea). Then we should pass a freaken constitutional amendment
The president can relieve any military officer of their current position at any time (removing them from the service is a much more complicated matter) but that authority is completely unrelated to the UCMJ.
The only thing worse than just having Trump have total control over the fed is having a requirement that the president weaponize the administrative state to manufacture "cause," which is what it appears is going on here.
I wouldn't read too much into this, the one constant in politics is that nothing lasts forever, see all those takes about how Dems didn't need white moderate voters anymore written after 2012 or all the confident takes in the late 80's about the "Big Red Wall" in the EC that meant the Dems could never win again, after all the Republicans will never lose California.
I don't think it's likely that one party gets a huge structural advantage in presidential elections but the Senate is a different beast... Democrats had 60 years of uninterrupted senate dominance from 1932-1994.
I don't think there were any 1980's takes about a "Big Red Wall", given that red and blue didn't really get established until the aftermath of the 2000 election!
There very much were books saying just this, Lee Atwater's masters thesis argued just this, there also was a theory that the GOP was the "presidential party" and the Dems where the "congressional party" etc
I'm not sure red states will remain bastions of affordable housing in the next decade. Counterintuitively, if they all go forward with eliminating property taxes, most of that will end up consumed by the increased equity in the houses themselves. I don't think home prices would change all that much. Throw in states like Florida artificially supressing insurance rates... There's a lot of value tied up in property, and a lot of incentive to NIMBY. I don't know if the current trend towards the Sun Belt will last forever.
Their relative hands off approach has actually produced some of the most rapid infill in the country. Austin and Houston are densifying quicker than almost any metro area in the country. I do fear they could kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
If they can "just keep building" then why has the rate of building fallen by 50%?
According to The Atlantic article "The Whole Country Is Starting to Look Like California":
Glaeser and Gyourko find that the rate of building in most Sun Belt cities has fallen by more than half over the past 25 years, in some cases by much more, even as demand to live in those places has surged. “When it comes to new housing production, the Sun Belt cities today are basically at the point that the big coastal cities were 20 years ago,” Gyourko told me.
I mean that the Dallas and Houston burbs aren't physically boxed in the way San Francisco is. If they're not continuing to build outward now I don't know why.
Today’s post-gym shower thought was about reconciling democracy with Abundance’s need to significantly curtail excessive “public input”.
My opening proposal is that we should focus on making democracy highly iterative and responsive, especially at the local level. Don’t like the latest development going up? The time to complain was in the last election, along with all your fellow citizens! And the next one’s not far away.
Bicameralism would be too unwieldy, but perhaps towns can experiment with staggering their council elections so there’s feedback every six months. Stuff like that!
But the point is, people should be bitching to their electeds less, and simply registering that bitching with their vote.
I don't think that works as it doesn't solve the problem. We need to take the decision making up a few levels.
California needs a few new oil refineries - no community is going to OK that. But the voters of California can decide where it needs to go and Barstow can go fuck itself. (or whatever) That's the democratic way to decide who's ox get gored.
There should only be national-level and regional-level decision-makers and state gov't for the weird stuff that can't be handled at either of those levels. If you're a metro area under a certain size, you get to decide your garbage and how to handle your parks and that's about it.
Big agree. I don't think many people appreciate how bizarre America's byzantine system of state, county & local governance is. There's no other developed country that has this many layers of government!
I'd also start fusing police & fire departments, school districts, regional social welfare & health services etc. at the regional level. It's very strange that Americans waste so much money on so many separate layers of governance- 18,000 separate local police departments and so on. More professional, economies of scale
You can make a decent argument our system of too many veto points and too many systems of government is how we've stumbled into dumb fascism.
I also have the more controversial take you could probably get 90% of whatever actual gains there are w/ charter schools by regionalizing public school systems and then setting up lottery systems (w/ advantages for local students) for said entire district but I'm also well aware that my wacky left-wing views this comment section dislikes at times are likely more popular than the above.
Isn't the biggest regionalized public school system (LA County) kind of notorious for sucking and all the rich people do their best to opt out of it? How is a lottery supposed to make this better?
Ed: I'm wrong, appears NYC is bigger than LA Unified. Although also often disfavored.
To the extent there are real costs involved, but much-greater benefits to the state as a whole, isn't the answer to just internalize those local externalities? Like: do a reverse auction. Start with having the state legislature come up with the maximum it's willing to pay in a benefit package to whoever hosts it (amounting to some fraction of the total benefits to the state). Let cities volunteer if that's enough to induce them. Reduce the benefits until the number of volunteers equals the number of sites.
The way I think about this is that we should have a better way to do public engagement at the abstract planning stage, where we're deciding what _kinds_ of things we want to develop where, and then essentially no "public input" when it comes to approving individual projects -- those just either fit the plan, or they don't.
With modern technology, we _could_ give people access to something like a SimCity system designed to replicate the real geography of their own town, and let them play around with general plan decisions, and see how they can meet the constraints Staff and Council are working under.
We already do stuff like this with some other public processes. Like when my city switched to districts, we used a tool called Districtr that let anyone draw a map, starting from our census blocks, and instantly get it evaluated under various criteria.
That's not a real proposal though. Citizens voted for committee review -- how does telling them that they could have voted for committee review (which they did) change anything? You don't say how you want to make democracy more responsive, but even if we did, why wouldn't they just vote for committee review more?
At least 2 of the TX and FL lost seats were due to 2020 undercounts, though this doesn't disprove the point.
However I do wonder how much higher the population of Los Angeles (and therefore California) would actually go even with much more liberal zoning. The congestion disamenities in LA are already pretty substantial.
Acting as if we can predict how demographic groups will vote 7 years in the future with any certainty is a bit absurd to me after the 2024 election.
But we should build more housing.
A prediction of the future more complicated than "things'll probably not be great" is foolhardy.
But as you say, build more housing.
Victory for today: I learned about The Engagement before my very Swiftie sister did, and I got to break the news to her. And as it turns out, Matt chose a good and topical leading picture for today's article.
I'm heart broken, I really thought she'd eventually see the light and come around to me.
“He’s tight end and I’m on the bleachers…”
I saw the news a little bit after finishing Matt's article. Got a real Doesheknow.png look from me.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/042/550/maxresdefault.jpg
isn't it more of a `when did he know' kind of situation?
probably, it's just the meme face I get at these coincidences in my parasocial internet life
Perhaps ignorance, so treat me gently.
If you build a bunch of new housing, and therefore many people move to your state, is it automatically true that those people who newly live there will vote the way the state has typically voted? Is it not possible that expanding housing opens these states up to shifts in voting behavior?
It absolutely can happen. But it would take A LOT of population shifting to turn California or New York red, so stopping the bleeding in those states would almost certainly be good.
I think the reverse is more relevant to current trends. I.e. current southern red states turning purple.
My understanding is that migration to Atlanta has been turning Georgia more purple, but the people coming to TX have been making it more red.
I think we're all kind of underrating how much this is about housing.
If dense urban cores or walkable suburbs that attract educated, white collar workers are expanding, it will bring in voters who like to live in those places. If instead the new housing is going up in way-out-there suburbs it will probably bring in more conservative voters.
Well, _I'm_ certainly not underrating the issue. I'm very active with my local YIMBY Action chapter, and serve on my city's planning commission.
But yes, CA Democrats are not nearly as united as we should be in _freaking the fuck out_ and doing everything we can to reverse the trend. The state party did just endorse our big transit-oriented development bill for this year, but the Los Angeles contingent is still opposing, and it's by no means certain that it will pass. :-/
Side note: Dan Savage called this more than twenty years ago.
https://www.thestranger.com/news/2004/11/11/19813/the-urban-archipelago
https://www.volts.wtf/p/dan-savage-on-blue-america-in-the
Most white collar workers live in suburbs, by a pretty large margin.
Yeah but white collar workers aren't a heavily Dem voting block. Many blocks within white collar workers might skew Dem, notably single females and the most educated, but there are plenty of white collar workers who live in far-out suburbs who skew very conservative. Outer ring suburbs of major cities, even wealthy ones, often skew pretty red.
back in the days when florida was still considered a swing state, the waves of retirees moving there were compared to the red army....
Didn’t know that about Texas, but have no evidence to suggest you’re wrong! I know FL is another example of selective migration.
In any case it’s who is moving that matters, not just that they are moving
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2024/california-texas-politics/
"Travis County (Austin) was the only top 10 county for California migration whose overall purple blend of new voters was more blue than red."
The effect is pretty marginal, but it definitely looks like overall what's happening with CA migration is it's making red counties even redder, and then Austin slightly bluer. But Austin doesn't make up for everywhere else, especially not with the state legislature and House being gerrymandered to crack the Dem voters into a bunch of suburban districts.
That's really helpful! I'm surprised that Harris County wasn't a big recipient of people moving from California!
Most discussion I've seen has focused just on the exit poll of the 2018 Senate race, which showed Cruz doing slightly better than Beto among people born outside Texas, while Beto did slightly better than Cruz among people born in Texas. Digging a bit deeper into that showed that people who had moved to Texas in the previous 10 years (since 2008) leaned strongly towards Beto, while ones who had moved to Texas earlier than that leaned strongly towards Cruz, but were a slightly larger group.
It would be helpful to see how much these various trends have changed between 2004 and 2020, rather than just relying on the top line that it's been slightly favoring Republicans over the time period as a whole! (Also, it's hard to know how "party registration while in California" does or doesn't correlate with actual voting in Texas - how many people who were not registered with a party are actually strong partisans one way or another?)
Very interesting, thanks!
A lot of the people fleeing blue states tend to be red voters who are frustrated with blue policies.
Thus keeping those other states red (or making them redder)
"...so stopping the bleeding in those states would almost certainly be good"
How would you do that?
Two things.
One is that the dynamics of The Big Sort apply. Plus there may be a certain amount of resentment of the place you've moved away from. In any case, on average, the people who have moved from CA to TX because they were priced out have actually been making TX redder, making it marginally _harder_ for a Colin Allred or Beto O'Rourke to win the state.
But the bigger thing is just that the people who might move in or out are a small fraction relative to the size of the state. If CA were growing 1% a year, it's not super likely that that 1% would be _all_ Dems or _all_ Repubs, and so at the margin it might move things by a tenth of a percent or something, but not enough to be relevant to the electoral college.
PS: We should just do National Popular Vote anyways.
One other thing - that story tracked people who moved from California, but I think the bigger story might be the people who are moving from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, since those are the people who are moving to opportunity, who tend to be young and blue voters.
if there were several million more republicans in nyc and california, that would still be a win for the dems (at the presidential level).
I've actually looked at this data for North Carolina, where you can see each individual registered voter's party and state of birth.
In general the more liberal states produced more Democrat migrants to NC, but there was significant regional trends. ex-NJ/NY residents were much more liberal than ex-CA residents.
I appreciate everyone so far who explained it well thank you!
Reposting myself as an answer, but:
Shrinking blue states does not necessarily mean fewer democratic electoral votes.
For example, if a random sampling of Californians were leaving California and moving to Texas there would be such a number of migrations where both Texas and California were blue.
Obviously, real world is a little more complicated but you get the point.
It's not a random sample, though. IRS migration stats show it's predominantly middle income people, presumably driven by housing costs and more rapid job growth in middle income range occupations in other states. It is a complex issue and I haven't seen detailed studies. It does seem that California outmigration had an impact on shifting Arizona and Nevada towards Democrats, but not so much with Texas.
Very interesting, a few other people have pointed out the Texas thing to me now.
However, while my model may have been a bit too cute, it does seem that the evidence your citing here points to the fact that blue state outmigration can in fact turn the new state blue/purple.
I’m all in on the fact that big blue states need to grow and need housing reforms, just quibbling with the specific conclusions in this post.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/democrats-can-win-the-redistricting
Nate reviewing gerrymandering in ways that we Slow Borers are likely very familiar with. But this one paragraph stood out to me:
"There’s one other advantage for Democrats, too. Perennial warfare over districting, even in off years, probably benefits whichever party can consistently turn out its voters in obscure elections, particularly special elections and state supreme court elections. And that’s been the Democrats in recent years. Democrats have also generally had higher turnout in recent midterms, which means they can use those to shore up boundaries in advance of presidential years when more Trump-leaning marginal voters show up at the polls."
Yep, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were de-gerrymandered by elected State Supreme Courts and Michigan by an off-year ballot referendum. This is the most promising approach to fighting gerrymandering.
Democrats should in general favor more direct democracy like elected judges and ballot referenda because they are less vulnerable to gerrymandering.
The problem with ballot referenda is that it's easy for people to think they can make change that way without the bother of actually electing officials who will take care that the laws they vote for are faithfully executed.
With gerrymandered districts, people don’t really get to choose elected officials at all! States like Michigan and Wisconsin in the 2010s were producing large Republican majorities even when Democrats were winning the popular vote by 10 points. At that point officials are only “elected” in a formal technical sense.
Direct democracy is bad for other reasons though? Prop 13 was a ballot referendum, and it's not like it's a blemish on an overall positive record either.
It’s hard to see how the MI, WI, and PA situations could have been resolved otherwise. They would’ve had permanently gerrymandered Republican majorities at the state level and be sending 75% Republican delegations to Congress even when Democrats won the popular vote. That seems to outweigh the harm of Prop 13 which is at least just limited to one state.
Courts are the antithesis of direct democracy in the US system of government, and actually provide a counterexample to your thesis. Fair point about Michigan, though -- I just think we have to draw a line stopping direct democracy somewhere between "establish an independent commission" and "directly set fiscal policy".
Direct democracy has been terrible for YIMBYism
The solution is to have direct democracy at a higher level (state v. local).
I never understand these kinds of discussions - the parties have no positions or beliefs in and of themselves - they exist as an ever changing collection of people each with their own set of idiosyncratic values.
It's like people can never get past the parties as they were constituted when they were a late teen early 20 something.
It's not like Democrats are bound by the laws of physics to maintain whatever beliefs they held in 2020 or whenever. They will adopt whatever beliefs they think will get them elected.
I'm increasingly leaning towards calling them the Democratic tribe and the Republican tribe, not 'parties'. They're certainly not political parties in the formal definition of them- they don't control candidate selection or discipline, messaging, funding, or anything else. They're just vehicles for broader social movements.
They literally have no positions and are simply defined by their gang-like, Crips & Bloods hatred of whatever the other tribe is doing. Example, people who thought Mamdani's plans for government-owned grocery stores was Literal Communism, but support the federal government owning chunks of Intel & defense companies.
I know that the rationalist crowd has been saying blue tribe & red tribe for a while now, but I feel like appending D & R to the tribe names is a bit more descriptive
I'm old enough to have voted in an election where the Democratic candidate for president won Ohio, Iowa, and Florida and I'm only in my early 30s.
right. and thinking this through, if there was a magic bullet that suddenly solved the housing problems in big blue cities and boosted their populations, the republicans wouldn't just go ``i guess we'll be losing from now on'', they would shift their priorities to account for that!
good housing policy is good because it is good, not because it will shift intercountry popullation flows in your favor sometime in the future.
If Republicans shifted towards the center and became less crazy that would be good too!
yes. if the democrats shift to the center and become more competitive, that would also make the republicans less crazy.
Sounds like a win win. Two cheers for two sane parties!
I hope centrists like you continue to try to convince Democrats that Democrats need to be more like Republicans.
I agree with your housing take of course, but I have a feeling that argument is more persuasive when used correctly against left NIMBYs (more housing = less fascism) and right NIMBYs (more housing = red state political power). I don't think it's a great argument, but it's an extra tool on the belt.
i'm worried people will use it as an excuse to avoid dealing with the problem.
"They will adopt whatever beliefs they think will get them elected."
Are you sure? It seems like both parties seem to largely be driven by the small percentage of primary voters who are focused on their pet issues instead of building a broader base and becoming a majority party.
Then the white knuckle it and hope to get lucky by 1%
If there were truly enough Democrat's upset at the candidates the supposedly small number of primary voters choices they can always turnout and force that person out of their seat. The reality is the vast majority of Democrat's don't care one way or another and generally are OK w/ whomever ends up as the Democratic nominee, unless it comes out they don't support the Democratic President enough or have personal non-political issues.
Also, there is no secret viewpoint and vibe that'll get you more than 52%. Obama got 52.9% during a massive recession, in the middle of an unpopular war, and was one of the most charismatic politicians in recent history.
Your bland centrist guy is not getting above that.
Trump 2016 is the counter example to this. At least at the time, Republican primary voters were thought to be various shades of conservative, family values, christian right, etc... Trump has occasionally delivered for those groups, but at no point could he ever claim to be part of them.
I sure hope they do adapt! But in living memory we saw the both the House and Senate controlled by a single party for a huge stretch of time (mid 1950s through 1980) -- quibble about less polarization and so on if you want, but there's no guarantee one party will moderate enough (or thermostatic equilibrium will hit hard enough) to restore its electoral fortunes without many years in the wilderness first.
I'm seeing similar takes re: the 2032 election, insufficient blue state housing, etc.
I haven't done a detailed dive on the Electoral College math, but my sense (mainly from reading others' takes) is that, while this is a potentially alarming situation for Democrats, they have opportunities outside the Blue Wall (Georgia, Arizona, etc).
But here's the thing: while for a variety of reasons blue states need to build (a lot) more housing, does anybody really think there's a snowball's chance any improvements on this score could possibly have a measurable impact by 2030 (or 2032)? I'll take every bit of housing abundance I can get, but these long term demographic trends don't change overnight. It's like trying to turn around an an oil tanker.
But maybe Dems will get better numbers in time for 2044!
"does anybody really think there's a snowball's chance any improvements on this score could possibly have a measurable impact by 2030 (or 2032)"
Don't examples of places like Austin and Denver suggest that you can actually see impact on the cost of housing within less than five years of adopting pro-housing reforms?
The "success" story of Austin seems somewhat fishy to me. It seems similar to the housing crash of 2006-2010 because of higher interest rates. Homes are still more expensive than they were in 2020.
https://teamprice.com/articles/austin-housing-market-forecast-2025-to-2028
Take it up with the news reporting on the subject:
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-falling/
https://www.metroabundance.org/whats-up-with-austins-falling-rents/
I'm aware of the coverage on the issue. The graph shows a boom bust story like the housing bubble. I haven't seen abundance people frame the housing bubble as abundance success story. Real abundance should show supply slightly outpacing demand initially with stable home prices, not bubble bust scenarios.
There's certainly plenty of time to impact the 2030 census and hence the 2032 redistricting.
I personally don't think there's "plenty" of time, no, not if we're talking about the impact on 2032. We'd need to see (1) major reforms in multiple blue states, (2) those reforms be implemented quickly enough to see a large-scale increase in projects in 26-28 (even in a perfect YIMBY environment, it takes time to plan, get financing for, get approval for, build, market and sell new housing), (3) the resulting increase in housing supply result in genuinely significant change in the population trajectory of six or seven states.
We've got four years left.
Nothing's ever zero percent, sure, and every little bit helps. Saving even one House seat/electoral vote isn't nothing! And there are critical reasons beyond politics we need to build more housing. And yes, the impact on politics of a lot more blue state housing *would* affect demographic trends in the fullness of time—and thus reapportionment and the Electoral College.
I just believe that timeline realistically pushes out into the 2030s. I'd be truly shocked if, in 2032, we're reading articles about how the late decade, massive increase in the pace of building in California, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, Washington, Virginia, Oregon, Connecticut etc obviated mid 2020s projections regarding the ongoing population shift toward Republican-friendly states.
But as I implied above, I am more optimistic about the changes we may see bearing fruit in the next decade (and thus being reflected in the 2040 census). And in any event 2032 blue wall doomerism is more than a little overwrought because of Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina.
EDIT: I should add: even if I'm right that a blue state housing explosion doesn't materialize in time to significantly alter population trends by the next census, none of this means Democrats can't get a lot smarter about candidate selection and campaigning. Fast-growing red states are home to plenty of centrist voters, and GOP greed will undoubtedly reduce the safety margins in many a House district. So we need not and must not cede the field in states like Texas and Florida.
There's plenty of time for any individual decision to have a marginal or incremental impact. So if you an opportunity to vote on housing-related issues by next November or sooner, you should!
But there's much less time for coastal Democrats, nationally, to get their act together and get a whole bunch of bills passed in a whole bunch of states and make a big chance in their odds of winning the election. That basically is out of reach.
Ultimately, Dems can afford to win CA/NY by lower margins and lose TX/FL by bigger margins if they win the swing states. Presumably those states do not have a housing crisis.
MI/PA/WI don't have a housing crisis. But I wouldn't be surprised if parts of NC/GA/AZ/NV do.
Even here in Western PA houses are noticeably harder to come by than they used to be pre-covid
Interesting!
On a similar theme see Liam Kerr's post on the DNC's meeting in Minneapolis https://www.welcomestack.org/p/895-dnc-ya Progressives keep claiming online that "Dems don't talk like that" but then they totally do.
"On Monday, the DNC meeting aired live on CSPAN unfolded in a way that multiple viewers questioned whether it was run by a Republican plant or a Russian plant. From social media, it looked like the agenda went:
I. Land Acknowledgement: read from a cell phone on the podium
II. Message from the Chair: our fight for trans youth in sports
III. Polling Presentation: voters don’t care about immigration or crime"
Now obviously voters aren't paying attention to this right now but it is a symptom that the people in charge of the party haven't learned much of anything from 2024 or that they are just going to refuse to change and hope everything works out fine in 2028. See also Hakeem Jeffries very weird Tweets as well: https://x.com/lxeagle17/status/1960191689655566357
if i was still on the west coast of portugal, i would walk into the ocean now...
What is "headless" about that Jeffries message?
the first sentence is irrelevant to the rest of the message?
The most relevant meaning of the word that I assume the author meant is:
headless (adj.): having no sense; stupid.
The first sentence makes the statement stupid and have no sense?
the argument jeffries is making is that there is no credible evidence of her doing anything wrong. but, having that first sentence there suggests that her race and gender is part of the reason why it is bad to remove her from her job. that would be bizarre. if there was credible evidence that she had done something wrong, should she stay because of race and gender? even if that is not what he meant, it will be interpreted that way by those who are not charitably inclined.
p.s.: just to directly address your question: yes, that makes the statement stupid and counterproductive (in my opinion).
I used to hope that we'd quickly get through this "first ___ to ___", but it turns out they'll just keep adding more descriptors.
https://x.com/jbarro/status/1960243564803248166
I'm going off-topic to talk about poptimism. Matt-style, here are some "bullet points" on the topic. All of these are takes - I don't agree 100% with everything I'm saying but I think they're all valuable
1. The triumph of poptimism is also the triumph of woke capitalism. Ironically the era when White and Male was 80% of what was critically appreciated also valued "having something to say" and "not selling out" while these concepts have basically disappeared now. Instead, we have a lot more women and minorities being recognized, but with a few exceptions, not much focus on "having something to say" or "fighting the system."
2. Isn't it good that we've stopped valuing the perspectives of angsty people so much? Pop is the happiest genre and many of the least respected subgenres (bling rap, hair metal) are also happy music. The world needs more happy music!
3. Pop music itself has shifted - it has a lot more auteurs nowadays, even if they don't write all their own stuff (e.g. Beyonce). The ones who are just friendly faces for corporate products like Morgan Wallen or Katy Perry are still not respected.
4. My personal take is that rock died when everyone's parents liked rock. What's less cool than the thing your parents love listening to? I think rap is gradually declining for the same reason.
5. A huge shift in general is the triumph of female artists, as boys migrate away from music altogether into memes, video games, YouTube, etc. It used to be that pop music was for the girls but an overwhelming number of the top albums every year were for the boys. Now the top album artists, male or female, mostly appeal to women: Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Harry Styles, all of Kpop, etc. Kendrick Lamar is a major exception but overall this is true.
6. Matt was always a bit delusional for thinking something like Metric was a big deal. Unless you are really breaking brand-new ground, like being the very first rapper or inventing punk, critically respected music is also quite popular in almost all cases. Maybe not the MOST popular, but it's stuff that was in the Top 40, or part of a successful album. Artists from prior eras that critics love and who were definitely trying to make "art," like Stevie Wonder, were hugely successful commercially not just critically. Not like Matt's example of Anora.
I do think it's kind of understated how much 60's and 70's pop music not done by Motown or it's adjacent studios or ABBA is actually pretty terrible. It's shifting by the late 70s as disco gets more of a hold and even by the 80s, you've got legitimate good pop music, but yeah, part of the reason for no poptimism in 1972 is its not good at all.
Also, there's a shift in categorization - in 1975 singing largely the same songs, for example, someone like Taylor Swift is a singer/songwriter ala Joni Mitchell or whomever and broadly in the 'rock' side of things as opposed to a pop singer.
I don't really agree on the 60s/70s pop music. There is a lot of great music by non-Motown girl groups, the early Beatles singles are mostly great, etc. I don't really know what would count as a "1972 pop song" so maybe you're right as we transition into the 70s.
Your second point is a great point.
John Mellencamp would be considered country or americana today, as would Springsteen. Taylor Swift would certainly not be counted as a pop artist in 1975 or even 1995 (like her namesake James Taylor or a 90s equivalent like Sheryl Crow) although she would be considered to have made a couple crossover pop albums. Billie Eilish would not be played on pop radio.
I think that's my point on categorization - pretty quickly, the Beatles were in the "rock" bucket, not the "pop bucket" like The Monkees still were for much longer, even though they were both still pop bands.
In general, for a while, "rock" was just 'good music thinking adults could like' and "pop" was just 'bad music aimed at children and girls.'
Also, I was trying to be somewhat circumspect, but by saying Motown and adjacent, I basically meant black music, while basically all white American pop music that was pushed as pop music as opposed to rock music wasn't that good until sometime in the late 70s. I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, but going by the categorization of the day, not really.
There was good "pop" music, but it wasn't considered pop music.
I wonder whether Springsteen or Mellencamp even have careers at all, considering the lack of mainstream rock for anybody under 40.
The Bee-Gees?
i think of k-pop as a distilled version of this trend. it can become boring and sterile without once in a while incorporating outside influences (e.g. rap). pop needs the other stuff to stay alive in the long run...
now going to give another netflix k-drama a shot because I'm insane and this one is going to be different.
But is it really off topic?
Swing states change over time, (Iowa, Florida, Ohio, and Virgina) if you had to take a stab, what are going to be new purple states by 2032, and which tight states today will be considered safe?
I know it's impossible to guess without knowing the national issues, personalities, and coalitions of each party's future, particularly post-Trump GOP and progressive vs abundance Dems... but it's at least fun, maybe helpful, to contemplate.
NJ seems to be slipping a bit. Hopefully it springs back, but that's my guess for the next major blue state to go purple enough to go GOP.
Minnesota before New Jersey, I would think.
New Jersey is more educated than Minnesota, but contains far more immigrants, so both perspectives are reasonable depending what is more salient over the next decade.
New Mexico is my guess though.
My “unexpected” blue wave swing states would be from the Great Plains states. I just feel that they’re culturally different enough (higher HS graduation rates, longer lifespans, higher voter participation, etc) from southern states that it’s more plausible that they would go for Democrats in a wipeout election.
The problem is that if Kansas or Nebraska goes for Democrats, then Democrats have probably done well enough in the typical swing states that it doesn’t matter. These states are also heavily Republican, and there’s no direct prize for going from losing them 65-35 to losing them by “only” 55-45.
The good thing is that most of these are small states that put senate seats in play. Alaska is also in this category.
States with a lot of immigrants could move more easily, just because the political stance and voting habits of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants are a lot less solidified.
Maybe Montana?
there is constructive tension between this and matt's `we can't predict the future' article from earlier today.
I was literally just thinking that lol
I remember banging this drum to some friends a while back, too many Democrats ignore the Senate map in 2026 and 2028, and don't realize that these are still the good days before the House and electoral college swing towards Republicans in 2030. The only thing to temper the fear is that 2032 feels a long way away, who knows what American politics will look like that "far" in the future. There are a lot of butterfly wing hurricanes that can happen before then.
With regards to Lisa Cooks liminal firing, I totally agree with Matt's tweet:
"It would be so much better to assert that Fed independence is unconstitutional squarely rather run this charade of character assassination and bogus charges."
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1960133432471683108
I think the Fed has been a great institution for maybe 40-50 years? Really done a good job for America. But obviously, as a matter of structure, it exists in an absurd space. Trump should just bite the bullet and try to get Humphrey's Executor totally overturned, it's clearly wrong lol.
This is really a debate for another day, but I disagree. The Founders gave us a system based on legislative supremacy -- equal branches, but with the Congress exercising ultimate authority to set policy -- and the 21st Century "discovery" of the "Unitary Executive" in the Constitution by the Republicans seems to me to be an example of motivated reasoning at its worst. How in the world did it get by Washington, Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, and both Roosevelts?
Answer: It didn't, because it's not really there.
*ETA* If anybody's wondering, I consider myself to be both an originalist and a strict constructionist. If I were a lawyer (which I'm not) I would probably be a member of the Federalist Society. But the Unitary Executive is just wrong, wrong, wrong, unless you believe the the Philadelphia Convention WANTED the country to celebrate its 250th birthday as a dictatorship.
It definitely didn't get by Lincoln. And not by Roosevelt by a long stretch. He, after all, was the loser in Humphrey's Executor after the court denied his power to fire an FTC chairman under the, no offense to the Lochner-4 Horsemen court, absurd notion that there was such a thing as a "quasi-legislative" officer.
There are no hidden spaces where civil servants and bureaucrats draw their authority, it stems from the Constitution. If Congress wants to create a Fed under Legislative Power, that's...fine if they can slip it under non-delegation doctrines.
But it is so obviously an executive function, we're just existing in a legal fiction.
The idea that an agency administered by the executive cannot have its staffing process limited by how its legislative authorization constitutes it seems very contrary to the intent of the Founders... I'm not really an Originalist myself, but as Al Brown says, the Founders pretty clearly intended the President to be not-a-king. Suggesting he was supposed to have the final say over _all_ operations of the Executive Branch, outside the context of military engagements (protecting from invasion or otherwise directing a war) is anti-historical.
The level of power accrued by the modern presidency would, IMHO, be pretty shocking even to the Federalist / Hamiltonian side of the arguments in that day. They intended the president to be an executor of directives given by the legislature. As Al says, they were VERY into "legislative supremacy". (Actually even the quite-early shift of power from Congress to the Courts, with the Supreme Court claiming the ultimate right to decide what's Constitutional, is a bit questionable relative to the text of the Constitution and what its authors said about it. But the balance we were at before the past few years probably could've worked, with Congress still having the power to curtail jurisdiction if it really wanted to. The problem is just that Congress has abdicated its responsibilities, leaving the Supreme Court and Presidency to take over.)
Congress gets to write the laws, but the president MUST be in charge of the executive. How can you execute if you can't hold employees accountable???
If we want something like the Fed to be a quasi independent agency (which I agree is a good idea). Then we should pass a freaken constitutional amendment
"How can you execute if you can't hold employees accountable???"
How familiar are you with the Uniform Code of Military Justice? For example, can the president fire a general in peace time?
The president can relieve any military officer of their current position at any time (removing them from the service is a much more complicated matter) but that authority is completely unrelated to the UCMJ.
The only thing worse than just having Trump have total control over the fed is having a requirement that the president weaponize the administrative state to manufacture "cause," which is what it appears is going on here.
I wouldn't read too much into this, the one constant in politics is that nothing lasts forever, see all those takes about how Dems didn't need white moderate voters anymore written after 2012 or all the confident takes in the late 80's about the "Big Red Wall" in the EC that meant the Dems could never win again, after all the Republicans will never lose California.
I don't think it's likely that one party gets a huge structural advantage in presidential elections but the Senate is a different beast... Democrats had 60 years of uninterrupted senate dominance from 1932-1994.
I don't think there were any 1980's takes about a "Big Red Wall", given that red and blue didn't really get established until the aftermath of the 2000 election!
There very much were books saying just this, Lee Atwater's masters thesis argued just this, there also was a theory that the GOP was the "presidential party" and the Dems where the "congressional party" etc
I'm just focusing on the word "red" there!
I'm not sure red states will remain bastions of affordable housing in the next decade. Counterintuitively, if they all go forward with eliminating property taxes, most of that will end up consumed by the increased equity in the houses themselves. I don't think home prices would change all that much. Throw in states like Florida artificially supressing insurance rates... There's a lot of value tied up in property, and a lot of incentive to NIMBY. I don't know if the current trend towards the Sun Belt will last forever.
The biggest factor may just be running out of cheap, buildable land around Houston, Dallas, Orlando, and so on.
They really can just keep building out in to the sticks in Texas. Florida is a bit more land constrained if they don't build up.
They can (I grew up in Texas) but eventually they're building houses that are an hour from the urban core even without traffic.
Their relative hands off approach has actually produced some of the most rapid infill in the country. Austin and Houston are densifying quicker than almost any metro area in the country. I do fear they could kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Houston for sure, but Austin has some real infrastructure difficulties, in that their streets don't really form a coherent grid.
I don't know how it's mapping on to the existing grid, but I do know that it is densifying.
If they can "just keep building" then why has the rate of building fallen by 50%?
According to The Atlantic article "The Whole Country Is Starting to Look Like California":
Glaeser and Gyourko find that the rate of building in most Sun Belt cities has fallen by more than half over the past 25 years, in some cases by much more, even as demand to live in those places has surged. “When it comes to new housing production, the Sun Belt cities today are basically at the point that the big coastal cities were 20 years ago,” Gyourko told me.
I mean that the Dallas and Houston burbs aren't physically boxed in the way San Francisco is. If they're not continuing to build outward now I don't know why.
Today’s post-gym shower thought was about reconciling democracy with Abundance’s need to significantly curtail excessive “public input”.
My opening proposal is that we should focus on making democracy highly iterative and responsive, especially at the local level. Don’t like the latest development going up? The time to complain was in the last election, along with all your fellow citizens! And the next one’s not far away.
Bicameralism would be too unwieldy, but perhaps towns can experiment with staggering their council elections so there’s feedback every six months. Stuff like that!
But the point is, people should be bitching to their electeds less, and simply registering that bitching with their vote.
I don't think that works as it doesn't solve the problem. We need to take the decision making up a few levels.
California needs a few new oil refineries - no community is going to OK that. But the voters of California can decide where it needs to go and Barstow can go fuck itself. (or whatever) That's the democratic way to decide who's ox get gored.
There should only be national-level and regional-level decision-makers and state gov't for the weird stuff that can't be handled at either of those levels. If you're a metro area under a certain size, you get to decide your garbage and how to handle your parks and that's about it.
Big agree. I don't think many people appreciate how bizarre America's byzantine system of state, county & local governance is. There's no other developed country that has this many layers of government!
I'd also start fusing police & fire departments, school districts, regional social welfare & health services etc. at the regional level. It's very strange that Americans waste so much money on so many separate layers of governance- 18,000 separate local police departments and so on. More professional, economies of scale
You can make a decent argument our system of too many veto points and too many systems of government is how we've stumbled into dumb fascism.
I also have the more controversial take you could probably get 90% of whatever actual gains there are w/ charter schools by regionalizing public school systems and then setting up lottery systems (w/ advantages for local students) for said entire district but I'm also well aware that my wacky left-wing views this comment section dislikes at times are likely more popular than the above.
Isn't the biggest regionalized public school system (LA County) kind of notorious for sucking and all the rich people do their best to opt out of it? How is a lottery supposed to make this better?
Ed: I'm wrong, appears NYC is bigger than LA Unified. Although also often disfavored.
To the extent there are real costs involved, but much-greater benefits to the state as a whole, isn't the answer to just internalize those local externalities? Like: do a reverse auction. Start with having the state legislature come up with the maximum it's willing to pay in a benefit package to whoever hosts it (amounting to some fraction of the total benefits to the state). Let cities volunteer if that's enough to induce them. Reduce the benefits until the number of volunteers equals the number of sites.
Seems a lot cheaper to just tell Barstow to suck it.
At this point why do we care about democracy at all?
I think it does solve the problem by expanding the selectorate and shutting out the squeakiest wheels.
But I’m open to debate here!
But how does CA get its refineries under your system?
The way I think about this is that we should have a better way to do public engagement at the abstract planning stage, where we're deciding what _kinds_ of things we want to develop where, and then essentially no "public input" when it comes to approving individual projects -- those just either fit the plan, or they don't.
With modern technology, we _could_ give people access to something like a SimCity system designed to replicate the real geography of their own town, and let them play around with general plan decisions, and see how they can meet the constraints Staff and Council are working under.
We already do stuff like this with some other public processes. Like when my city switched to districts, we used a tool called Districtr that let anyone draw a map, starting from our census blocks, and instantly get it evaluated under various criteria.
That's not a real proposal though. Citizens voted for committee review -- how does telling them that they could have voted for committee review (which they did) change anything? You don't say how you want to make democracy more responsive, but even if we did, why wouldn't they just vote for committee review more?
At least 2 of the TX and FL lost seats were due to 2020 undercounts, though this doesn't disprove the point.
However I do wonder how much higher the population of Los Angeles (and therefore California) would actually go even with much more liberal zoning. The congestion disamenities in LA are already pretty substantial.
Bringing LA’s metro to NYC density would ~6x it up to >100M.
Even 2x’ing it would break the electoral college.
I am having a hard time envisioning the LA area with like 40 million people...
San Diego being as populous as Phoenix doesn't seem crazy and nor does SF/SJ/Oakland doubling in population.