> In general, I think the Kamala Harris 2024 presidential campaign is pretty badly underrated as a set of campaign tactics. Yes, she lost. But that campaign didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. It existed in the context of her being the vice president to a deeply unpopular president and as someone whose only independent political identity was as being to Joe Biden’s left on a bunch of unpopular issues.
This is the type of high brow intellectualism I read MY for!!! Joking aside though, I agree with this so much.
The Guardian book list? I'll go: Based on the books I've read on that list, yes, they are all greats. Duplicative because of author repeats on the list? We read about a dozen of Plato's dialogues in my Freshman year at St. John's and I've had to go back and read some of the ones that got left out. Is Crime and Punishment duplicative of Brothers Karamazov? (Don't know: See below for a hint at why I'm skipping C&P.) As for Austen, I could never just read just one.
Some of the others on the list I've taken a look at and decided not to read (Master and Margarita—too much work for me. Beloved—at my age I avoid violence and trauma in literature because between an empathetic imagination and general awareness of human capacity for evil, I need no new inputs.)
In general, however, the list looks like a highly authoritative and worthwhile guide for filling in what I've missed.
Good riddance to big idea books. The world is too complicated and multi-causal for big idea books to be anything more than publicity vehicles for their authors. They make us all stupider and we should stop publishing them or speaking about them. I realize that this will never happen, but it should.
I think a tree of comments disappeared on me. Maybe someone deleted or I got a new hater to block me. Weird because I haven't been particularly abominable or even obnoxious today. (Now, other days? Perhaps.)
If someone did block you, then in another bad feature, it won't show you any comments from the entire subthread below the blocker's comment, even if it contains comments by people who haven't blocked you.
A couple years ago the NY Times had an article about the Vienna social housing. It all seemed very nice but down around something like paragraph 97: oh by the way, there is a three year waiting list.
Econ101: Housing priced below market will always be in short supply. The key to affordable housing is to allow the market to build more market rate homes and eventually bring down the market price.
For what it's worth, Matt, I read The Rent Is Too Damn High when it came out; I remember it was a small eBook, and very cheap relative to other books, something Amazon (or maybe its publisher?) was experimenting with at that time. I would say it was definitely influential and because I read you, I was one of people in my circle to start talking about zoning laws. I'm curious how it did in terms of sales?
That said, I think it doesn't make sense to think that books give rise to social movements. The way I think about it is that books come out when there's something "cooking" in society, when a "public" is coalescing around a "problem," in John Dewey's terms, and then some of those books take off and then the book solidifies the creation of that public and we remember the books because people who keep records like to read and what better record than a book? That's Silent Spring and I'd say that's also The Wealth of Nations.
With the crazy gerrymandering that Republicans are doing now that the Voting Rights Act has been diluted by the Supreme Court, it is in the Democrats' interest to get some sort of nationwide ban on partisan gerrymandering passed by Congress as soon as is politically possible.
The conventional view seems to be that there is no way for them to get something like this passed without majorities in both houses of Congress. However, considering the way in which Trump has recently been absolutely obsessed with the idea of instituting photo ID and citizenship verification as a requirement for voting, but failed to get it passed because of the filibuster, do you think it makes sense for Democrats to try to get a bipartisan bill passed in which Trump simply gets what he wants on photo ID and citizenship verification in exchange for Democrats getting what they want with a ban on partisan gerrymandering?
This especially seems to make sense given that, while some eligible voters may experience barriers to voting in an environment where photo ID and citizenship verification are a thing, at this point in time there is no reason to think that Democrats (being the more college-educated and politically active of the two groups) would end up being more disenfranchised than Republicans.
And considering the fact that many Republican voters, elected Republicans, and Trump himself seem to genuinely believe the conspiracy theory that millions of illegal voters change the results of elections in Democrats' favor and are obsessed with getting something passed to ban "illegal voting", maybe they would actually take that kind of deal, believing that it would work in their favor?
I think we underrate proportional representation as a solution to gerrymandering. I think there's real cross-aisle appeal to the idea and it seems much easier than defining and playing whack-a-mole with gerrymandering.
Not exactly related to the main post, but here's a nice video showing how new luxury apartments help get people out of homelessness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQYMUMTI7fk
Although Trump shows that weird things can happen in presidential primaries, it's still hard to imagine Powell ever winning a GOP nomination, especially considering how big the Christian Right vote was in the 90s and 00s.
FWIW, 1996 was the year Powell seriously considered running, not 2000. He would have had a better chance against Dole than against GW Bush, but he would have had to switch his views on abortion and even then it's very plausible his numbers tank after an initial burst of momentum.
A different counterfactual is whether he might have run as a Democrat at some point, maybe one where Dukakis (or another Dem) wins in 1988 or where Bush Sr wins reelection in 1992. Hard to figure out a plausible sequence of events, but the basic idea of him running as a Dem isn't *that* far-fetched. (His Republican ties were mostly professional, not sharply ideological, and from 2008 on he fairly comfortably endorsed Democrats.)
I really don't buy post-hoc arguments that Dems should have (or, frankly, could have) nominated someone else when Biden dropped out in July. There was no plausible way to run a broad selection two weeks out, and frankly it seemed obvious no major candidates *wanted* to run at that stage. (I think it was reported that at that point only Pritzker considered it.) It's fine to speculate that "Governor X" would be a stronger candidate, but there would be no real way to assess that in two weeks. At best you would have had some dueling speeches at the convention and some preliminary polling, but not much to sway delegates.
It would have been a different story had Biden dropped out earlier - even a spring 2024 drop-out would have given time to run at least some sort of mini-primary. However, there's a strong chance it still would have been Harris, who *does* have some strengths and does have some charisma. (For example, people kept hyping up Whitmer as an alternative, yet in their campaign appearances and speeches, Harris came off as *much* more charismatic than Whitmer.)
On the flip side, I view Harris's campaign as middling. I think a lot of her "strength" was really just being able to be a generic Democrat, and having relatively more appeal to younger voters, women, and black voters. (David Shor has noted that black voters appeared poised to swing to Trump at rates comparable to other minority groups before the candidate switch, i.e. 10-15%. There was still some dropoff, but not to anywhere near the same degree.) And I agree that a better media strategy and having more plausible answers to how she'd differ from Biden could have made the difference. (Though the economic fundamentals and the global incumbency backlash point to it always being an uphill battle. Trump's assassination attempt may also genuinely have had an effect - his favorables improved significantly afterwards.)
The fertility issue is really two separate problems, one that is extremely traceable and one that is pretty mysterious and hard to tackle.
1. Expensive housing: I got married right after college, much like my grandparents did. My paternal grandparents had their first kid within a year of getting married, and my maternal grandparents had theirs 4 years after getting married, but I didn't have my first for 8 years after getting married. Why? My grandfathers could buy multi bedroom houses on their entry-level salaries and I couldn't. My dad didn't graduate college, but also bought a house with his first job as a truck dispatcher and started raising kids in it in his early 20s. Now that I'm 35 with 2 toddlers, I really feel sad that I couldn't start earlier, because I don't feel like it's realistic for me to have a 3rd but it absolutely would've been if I'd gotten to start 5 years earlier. I imagine many, many people are in roughly this boat, where they have fewer kids than they'd like because they started later than they wanted to, and all that is downstream of how expensive it is to buy a house. If we make starter homes or multi-bedroom apartments affordable on an entry-level salary, I think we could totally eliminate this issue and at least get families up to the number of kids they actually want.
2. Coupling up: this is a manifold issue, but it's essentially a norms problem among the people not going to college. Nice people have over-corrected from #MeToo and decided to stop hitting on their coworkers or approaching people in public or at social activities, and they have simultaneously started staying inside and alone more often so these opportunities are just less common. College is basically the last place where you throw a lot of eligible people together and they're expected to look for romance and friendship at the same time, which is why the marriage rate among college educated people seems to continue to be fine and the marriage rate for everyone else really sucks. There are many possible solutions for these problems, but none that have really been tested well or proven to work, so we should probably try everything and see what sticks.
My understanding is that the decrease is among disproportionately African American women in their late teens and very early ‘20s, followed by non-college white women. The overcorrection there is likely to do increasing rates of education for women and not men in those demographics.
I agree mostly with you here. Though the college educated set is getting married later and later, so I am skeptical meeting in college is a major driver. I suspect it has more to do with the ability to attain financial security and career success people view as necessary to get married.
So some of that gets back to your economic points. But it's also about rising expectations looking at marriage and kids as the capstone project only taken up after other financial goals have been achieved. And that's at least partially changing norms.
I guess the question is what kind of starter home were they buying? The original Levittown houses were 750 sq/ft and two bedrooms. If a few thousand of those were built and sold for $125k would young couples flock to raise their kids there?
I genuinely think they would. Most suburbs won't even let developers build houses that small anymore, so they're incredibly scarce and overpriced because of that scarcity.
Not moved to have children at all, but moved to have them sooner? Yes. When starter homes were cheap and readily available for young families, they bought them with the expectation that they would be able to regularly upgrade to a bigger house as they had more kids and their existing children got bigger. They could do this by moving to a bigger house or by building additions onto the starter home. That whole set of assumptions is broken now because building additions is either outright prohibited or so complicated that it's not worth it, and housing at all levels is so scarce that there's no guarantee that a bigger house will be available where you need it when you want to upgrade, so a lot of people save up to get their "forever home" from the jump so they won't have to save again. But most people think "buying a home" is a prerequisite to being financially stable enough to have kids, so that delay is also delaying kids.
I'm saying this as a person who *absolutely* would've had kids earlier if I'd been able to buy the 800 square foot 2-bedroom apartment instead of having to rent. Some people are comfortable with having kids while renting, but many Americans want to lock in a steady mortgage payment, don't want to worry about their kids ruining a security deposit, and would like to be able to overhaul the property to suit their family needs.
I've recently seen a huge number of Democrats in Congress, in the media, and in comment sections under various articles keep repeating over and over that when Republicans in the South gerrymander majority-black districts out of existence, they are "using the veneer of partisanship in order to disenfranchise black voters". I think that, while what Republicans are doing is horrible and should not even be legal in an ideal system that prohibited partisan gerrymandering, the idea that race is the primary factor behind what they are doing is not only factually wrong, but sets the Democrats on a strategically wrong path.
Now, is it the case that most Republicans are insensitive to most black voters' feelings, don't mind worsening race relations in America if it benefits them politically, and that some of them are explicitly racist? Absolutely. But the idea that partisan concerns are just a veneer, whereas decreasing the number of black people in Congress is their real primary goal simply makes no logical sense. Even for those Republicans who are hard-core racists, it would make no sense for this to be the primary goal.
To put it in very clear terms, which do Republicans care about more: (1) whether black people make up 9% or 13% of the House in the 2027-2029 Congress; (2) whether the Democrats or the Republicans have a majority in the House in the 2027-2029 Congress. Clearly, they care much more about (2), because which party has a majority in the House of Representatives has a huge effect on American politics more generally and the course of Trump's presidency more specifically, whereas the exact percentage of black people in the House is simply not that consequential (especially when black politicians are going to be a minority no matter what).
Or another way to look at it: would a typical white conservative voter rather vote for a black Republican or a white Democrat? Obviously, they would always vote for a black Republican over a white Democrat in today's political and social environment. The response to this question might have been different in the 1960s, when race genuinely mattered more than partisanship, but today partisanship is clearly the primary factor.
So, no, Republicans are not "using the veneer of partisanship in order to disenfranchise black voters". Partisanship is, in fact, their primary motivation. They are extremely racially insensitive in how they are doing it, of course, and we no that many of them are racist on some level, but partisanship is their primary motivation. And while focusing on the racial angle of it might have made sense for Democrats under a different judicial environment in which protections against eliminating majority-minority districts were still in place, talking about the racial angle no longer makes sense now, after the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act has already happened.
In the meantime, in addition to the aforementioned claim being factually wrong, it sets Democrats on a strategically wrong path. Because if having more majority-minority districts were really the thing that threatened Republicans the most, then perhaps it would make sense for Democrats to focus on creating more of them in response to Republicans trying to create less of them. But, since the thing that really threatens Republicans is Democrats having a majority in the House, the focus for Democrats should, in fact, simply be electing more Democrats. And since Republicans are already creating some crazy maps in red states to maximize their partisan advantage, the Democrats should be doing something similar in blue states and similarly maximizing their partisan advantage.
In the meantime, the idea that black voters would be disenfranchised if a district changes from being, let's say, a 55% black district with a +40 Democrat lean to a 35% black district with a +15 Democrat lean is mostly a myth. In the latter kind of district, Democrats would still win the vast majority of the time and the probability of a black politician winning the primary is still very high. Moreover, unlike in red states that recently spread out their black voters across several Republican districts in which most white voters have fundamentally different values, black voters sharing a district with more white Democrat voters is just not that morally bad, especially at a time when the type of politicians most black voters are most likely to vote for tend to be ideologically indistinguishable from the more general Democrat political establishment.
In conclusion, for the well-being of the Democratic Party, as well as for the well-being of black voters and all kinds of other minority racial groups, electing more Democrats, not creating more majority-minority districts, should clearly be our main goal as a response to what the Republicans did to majority-minority/majority-Democrat districts in Southern states.
I think you might be conflating 2 ideas that are actually separate. The idea of trying to prevent black representatives from getting elected is not the same idea as disenfranchising black voters. You are right that getting rid of black representatives is an incidental side effect to getting rid of Democrats, but that was also the case when Jim Crow laws were enacted to get rid of black Republican representatives in the South. Black southerners and white southerners have always had different partisan preferences, and the point then and the point now is to disenfranchise black voters so that they cannot get representation of their choice in Congress. The actual race of the people they would choose is incidental now just as it was then. The Dixiecrats might have been more personally hostile to black representatives than to whites representing the same constituencies, but they were trying to stop black people from electing them even if they were white.
But then the question is: are Republicans more afraid the idea of black people voting and being able to have some sort of abstract effect on the political process, or by the idea of Democrats achieving a majority in the House, using it to put a check on Trump, and perhaps eventually building on it to get a trifecta and pass their preferred policy into law. I am pretty sure it is the latter, since the effects of Democrats getting 51% of seats in the House are extremely concrete, whereas the effects of black people taking part in the political process while being just 13% of the population are highly abstract and diluted (indeed, the primary effect black people voting has on national politics is simply helping Democrats to get to that crucial 51%, which brings us back to the original point about how preventing Democrats from winning is their primary goal).
Of course, one could argue that fear of black people getting more rights, political power, or economic power is the primary reason Republicans do not want Democrats to have a majority in the House, but that is also doubtful. In the age of Trump, social media, and online hate, many loud voices in the Republican party are not shy about letting the world know what they want, whom they like, and whom they hate. And from observing what they say (especially the kinds of things they say openly now that they might not have said openly 15 years ago) it seems clear to me that they really like rich people, uneducated rural white men, evangelicals, etc. and hate transgender people, Muslims, recent immigrants from low-income countries, undocumented immigrants or immigrants with any kind of unstable status, highly educated liberal white women, students at Ivy League universities, college professors, etc. There are even some black immigrant groups that Republicans clearly don't like, such as Haitians and Somalis, and for these groups they also don't try to hide the fact that they don't like them. But the majority of black people who are American Descendants of Slavery just seem to be one of those groups that modern-day Republicans don't particularly care about either way. They are fine with ignoring their economic interests if it helps them to lower rich people's taxes and they are fine with ignoring their political interests if it helps them to prevent Democrats from winning. They kind of resent black people for the fact that most of them vote Democrat, but they also really love black Republicans, to the point where they are more than happy to run complete clowns like Herschel Walker and Mark Robinson as long as they are black Republicans. But otherwise they don't seem to talk much about black people and are instead obsessed with various other demographic groups and social issues that have become part of their agenda in the last 10–15 years or so.
So, Republicans just want to prevent Democrats from getting a majority in the House (so that they can prevent Muslim immigration, deport more undocumented immigrants, make life harder for transgender people, make sure Trump can get more of what he wants, or whatever it is Republicans are currently obsessed with). And majority-black districts just happen to be something they are willing to screw over to get to that goal. But I don't think black people voting is something they care about that much either way.
The main point is simply that to stop Republicans from getting what they want, Democrats simply need to respond by electing more Democrats, period. They should not try to put some extra layer of protection around majority-black districts in blue states, which dilute black people's political power anyway.
This is why it was so important that the VRA was amended to explicitly include an effects test (not just "are people consciously trying to disenfranchise blacks," but "can blacks actually accomplish their electoral goals to the same degree as whites"), and why it's so infuriating that the Supreme Court has just... decided to act as a super-legislature and turned it back into the intent test that Congress repealed.
We had a period of seven years where the law was that you could draw districts with purely partisan motivation but not with mixed partisan/racial motivation, so Democrats got accustomed to proving that districts were drawn with mixed motivation. Now SCOTUS has said that mixed motivation is fine and only pure-as-the-driven-snow racial animus is illegal, which is ridiculous as an interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, but it means that the kinds of legal tactics that were employed in the interim between Rucho and Callais are no longer fit for purpose.
People are still working their way through the implications of this. I know it seems ridiculous given the number of instant gerrymanders we've seen but the decision was literally less than a month ago. It's going to take a minute for people to get on the same page, tactically speaking. That being said, the wheels are turning (albeit more slowly in states that actually have the rule of law), and I don't think that majority-minority districts are going to stand in the way of electing more Democrats in 2028.
The simple answer with Harris is that she rode the coattails of the most unpopular Democratic President since modern polling became a thing, and she played it safe. She didn’t take risks, did nothing to distance herself from that unpopularity, and therefore never got off the coattails. The only negative issue she neutralized is the age issue, which was substantial, but not nearly enough.
The technological change in the mass media is an underrated part of why the response to Watergate was different than Trump's various crimes IMO. In the film The Ice Storm, about two upper-middle class families coming apart in suburban Connecticut in the winter of 73'-74', is a good illustration of this. One of the characters, a latch-key kid comes home from school, lets herself in, and plops down in front of the TV to watch....Alexander Butterfield testify as part of the Watergate Hearings.
Back then TV's could only get the Big Three networks (and maybe a indy UHF or PBS station if you lived in a major market) and cable basically didn't exist. So if the networks decide the hearings are important then you don't get to watch cartoons. The nightly news was the same, all the networks broadcast their national news at the same time leaving basically no escape, so if you wanted to watch TV after work, welp there's more Watergate.
Today media markets are radically different* and you could easily go through life regularly watching "content related to news events" while having no idea Trump set up a giant slush fund or whatever.
*the whole idea of stations "signing off" would seem as truly alien to Gen Zers as well LOL
This is a great point. There were some very real advantages to broadcast TV and radio.
I feel that an under-discussed part of this is also resilience to disaster. Broadcast stations existed (and still exist) all over the country, and can operate autonomously in the event of a catastrophe. A broadcast station capable of covering a major metro area is a surprisingly inexpensive and straightforward thing to set up and operate. In contrast, some kind of crisis in Loudoun County, VA could seriously disrupt the entire internet.
(I'm using "broadcast" to mean one-way continuous RF transmissions like digital TV, analog TV, FM radio, and AM radio. I'm not including things like cell phone service and Starlink)
Mid 20th Century TV stations were basically highly regulated, highly lucrative businesses (TV ad time was basically a license to print money) aligned with giant national behemoths in NBC/CBS/ABC. So the lucrative markets could subsidize rural stations for civil defense reasons. Likewise you ended up with stuff like government mandates over disaster preparedness but also rules like "equal time", fairness doctrine, big fights over making TV programs have moral/education content (Vast Wasteland Speech). Why? Post-war elites were deeply concerned over how communists and fascists had pioneered the use of modern media like radio, film and TV (the first mass TV broadcast was a speech by Hitler!) Meanwhile the market incentives could lead to interesting places, humiliated by the quiz show scandals of the 50's the networks poured enormous resources into their newsrooms which arguably had a big effect in the 60's with stuff like coverage of the Civil Rights Movement. Likewise mini series were often made made for prestige not money, all those football games on ABC paid for Roots. Just a different world.
> In general, I think the Kamala Harris 2024 presidential campaign is pretty badly underrated as a set of campaign tactics. Yes, she lost. But that campaign didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. It existed in the context of her being the vice president to a deeply unpopular president and as someone whose only independent political identity was as being to Joe Biden’s left on a bunch of unpopular issues.
This is the type of high brow intellectualism I read MY for!!! Joking aside though, I agree with this so much.
Could you recommend 10 public domain audiobooks to listen to? I work pretty long hours, and am interested in what you think.
The Guardian book list? I'll go: Based on the books I've read on that list, yes, they are all greats. Duplicative because of author repeats on the list? We read about a dozen of Plato's dialogues in my Freshman year at St. John's and I've had to go back and read some of the ones that got left out. Is Crime and Punishment duplicative of Brothers Karamazov? (Don't know: See below for a hint at why I'm skipping C&P.) As for Austen, I could never just read just one.
Some of the others on the list I've taken a look at and decided not to read (Master and Margarita—too much work for me. Beloved—at my age I avoid violence and trauma in literature because between an empathetic imagination and general awareness of human capacity for evil, I need no new inputs.)
In general, however, the list looks like a highly authoritative and worthwhile guide for filling in what I've missed.
If you're going to sub tweet a nobel prize winning economist in the head of the letters section you should probably bring some numbers to the fight?
Good riddance to big idea books. The world is too complicated and multi-causal for big idea books to be anything more than publicity vehicles for their authors. They make us all stupider and we should stop publishing them or speaking about them. I realize that this will never happen, but it should.
I hate when there's some comment I want to read, then I blink, then the page scrolls wildly despite me not touching anything.
I even sort by "newest first" to stop the asinine reordering while I read and I still get this.
That's weird. Keeping it sorted by "Newest first" completely avoids that issue for me.
I think a tree of comments disappeared on me. Maybe someone deleted or I got a new hater to block me. Weird because I haven't been particularly abominable or even obnoxious today. (Now, other days? Perhaps.)
If someone did block you, then in another bad feature, it won't show you any comments from the entire subthread below the blocker's comment, even if it contains comments by people who haven't blocked you.
The autosorting immediately after hitting the New_Reply buttons is completely inexcusable.
A couple years ago the NY Times had an article about the Vienna social housing. It all seemed very nice but down around something like paragraph 97: oh by the way, there is a three year waiting list.
Econ101: Housing priced below market will always be in short supply. The key to affordable housing is to allow the market to build more market rate homes and eventually bring down the market price.
For what it's worth, Matt, I read The Rent Is Too Damn High when it came out; I remember it was a small eBook, and very cheap relative to other books, something Amazon (or maybe its publisher?) was experimenting with at that time. I would say it was definitely influential and because I read you, I was one of people in my circle to start talking about zoning laws. I'm curious how it did in terms of sales?
That said, I think it doesn't make sense to think that books give rise to social movements. The way I think about it is that books come out when there's something "cooking" in society, when a "public" is coalescing around a "problem," in John Dewey's terms, and then some of those books take off and then the book solidifies the creation of that public and we remember the books because people who keep records like to read and what better record than a book? That's Silent Spring and I'd say that's also The Wealth of Nations.
With the crazy gerrymandering that Republicans are doing now that the Voting Rights Act has been diluted by the Supreme Court, it is in the Democrats' interest to get some sort of nationwide ban on partisan gerrymandering passed by Congress as soon as is politically possible.
The conventional view seems to be that there is no way for them to get something like this passed without majorities in both houses of Congress. However, considering the way in which Trump has recently been absolutely obsessed with the idea of instituting photo ID and citizenship verification as a requirement for voting, but failed to get it passed because of the filibuster, do you think it makes sense for Democrats to try to get a bipartisan bill passed in which Trump simply gets what he wants on photo ID and citizenship verification in exchange for Democrats getting what they want with a ban on partisan gerrymandering?
This especially seems to make sense given that, while some eligible voters may experience barriers to voting in an environment where photo ID and citizenship verification are a thing, at this point in time there is no reason to think that Democrats (being the more college-educated and politically active of the two groups) would end up being more disenfranchised than Republicans.
And considering the fact that many Republican voters, elected Republicans, and Trump himself seem to genuinely believe the conspiracy theory that millions of illegal voters change the results of elections in Democrats' favor and are obsessed with getting something passed to ban "illegal voting", maybe they would actually take that kind of deal, believing that it would work in their favor?
I think we underrate proportional representation as a solution to gerrymandering. I think there's real cross-aisle appeal to the idea and it seems much easier than defining and playing whack-a-mole with gerrymandering.
Not exactly related to the main post, but here's a nice video showing how new luxury apartments help get people out of homelessness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQYMUMTI7fk
Although Trump shows that weird things can happen in presidential primaries, it's still hard to imagine Powell ever winning a GOP nomination, especially considering how big the Christian Right vote was in the 90s and 00s.
FWIW, 1996 was the year Powell seriously considered running, not 2000. He would have had a better chance against Dole than against GW Bush, but he would have had to switch his views on abortion and even then it's very plausible his numbers tank after an initial burst of momentum.
A different counterfactual is whether he might have run as a Democrat at some point, maybe one where Dukakis (or another Dem) wins in 1988 or where Bush Sr wins reelection in 1992. Hard to figure out a plausible sequence of events, but the basic idea of him running as a Dem isn't *that* far-fetched. (His Republican ties were mostly professional, not sharply ideological, and from 2008 on he fairly comfortably endorsed Democrats.)
I really don't buy post-hoc arguments that Dems should have (or, frankly, could have) nominated someone else when Biden dropped out in July. There was no plausible way to run a broad selection two weeks out, and frankly it seemed obvious no major candidates *wanted* to run at that stage. (I think it was reported that at that point only Pritzker considered it.) It's fine to speculate that "Governor X" would be a stronger candidate, but there would be no real way to assess that in two weeks. At best you would have had some dueling speeches at the convention and some preliminary polling, but not much to sway delegates.
It would have been a different story had Biden dropped out earlier - even a spring 2024 drop-out would have given time to run at least some sort of mini-primary. However, there's a strong chance it still would have been Harris, who *does* have some strengths and does have some charisma. (For example, people kept hyping up Whitmer as an alternative, yet in their campaign appearances and speeches, Harris came off as *much* more charismatic than Whitmer.)
On the flip side, I view Harris's campaign as middling. I think a lot of her "strength" was really just being able to be a generic Democrat, and having relatively more appeal to younger voters, women, and black voters. (David Shor has noted that black voters appeared poised to swing to Trump at rates comparable to other minority groups before the candidate switch, i.e. 10-15%. There was still some dropoff, but not to anywhere near the same degree.) And I agree that a better media strategy and having more plausible answers to how she'd differ from Biden could have made the difference. (Though the economic fundamentals and the global incumbency backlash point to it always being an uphill battle. Trump's assassination attempt may also genuinely have had an effect - his favorables improved significantly afterwards.)
The likeliest winner of any primary is going to be the sitting VP. A short primary is unlikely to change that.
The fertility issue is really two separate problems, one that is extremely traceable and one that is pretty mysterious and hard to tackle.
1. Expensive housing: I got married right after college, much like my grandparents did. My paternal grandparents had their first kid within a year of getting married, and my maternal grandparents had theirs 4 years after getting married, but I didn't have my first for 8 years after getting married. Why? My grandfathers could buy multi bedroom houses on their entry-level salaries and I couldn't. My dad didn't graduate college, but also bought a house with his first job as a truck dispatcher and started raising kids in it in his early 20s. Now that I'm 35 with 2 toddlers, I really feel sad that I couldn't start earlier, because I don't feel like it's realistic for me to have a 3rd but it absolutely would've been if I'd gotten to start 5 years earlier. I imagine many, many people are in roughly this boat, where they have fewer kids than they'd like because they started later than they wanted to, and all that is downstream of how expensive it is to buy a house. If we make starter homes or multi-bedroom apartments affordable on an entry-level salary, I think we could totally eliminate this issue and at least get families up to the number of kids they actually want.
2. Coupling up: this is a manifold issue, but it's essentially a norms problem among the people not going to college. Nice people have over-corrected from #MeToo and decided to stop hitting on their coworkers or approaching people in public or at social activities, and they have simultaneously started staying inside and alone more often so these opportunities are just less common. College is basically the last place where you throw a lot of eligible people together and they're expected to look for romance and friendship at the same time, which is why the marriage rate among college educated people seems to continue to be fine and the marriage rate for everyone else really sucks. There are many possible solutions for these problems, but none that have really been tested well or proven to work, so we should probably try everything and see what sticks.
My understanding is that the decrease is among disproportionately African American women in their late teens and very early ‘20s, followed by non-college white women. The overcorrection there is likely to do increasing rates of education for women and not men in those demographics.
I agree mostly with you here. Though the college educated set is getting married later and later, so I am skeptical meeting in college is a major driver. I suspect it has more to do with the ability to attain financial security and career success people view as necessary to get married.
So some of that gets back to your economic points. But it's also about rising expectations looking at marriage and kids as the capstone project only taken up after other financial goals have been achieved. And that's at least partially changing norms.
And also the dating apps seem to kinda suck
I guess the question is what kind of starter home were they buying? The original Levittown houses were 750 sq/ft and two bedrooms. If a few thousand of those were built and sold for $125k would young couples flock to raise their kids there?
I genuinely think they would. Most suburbs won't even let developers build houses that small anymore, so they're incredibly scarce and overpriced because of that scarcity.
You think a meaningful percentage of people today would be moved to have children if they could raise them in a 750 sq/ft house?
Not moved to have children at all, but moved to have them sooner? Yes. When starter homes were cheap and readily available for young families, they bought them with the expectation that they would be able to regularly upgrade to a bigger house as they had more kids and their existing children got bigger. They could do this by moving to a bigger house or by building additions onto the starter home. That whole set of assumptions is broken now because building additions is either outright prohibited or so complicated that it's not worth it, and housing at all levels is so scarce that there's no guarantee that a bigger house will be available where you need it when you want to upgrade, so a lot of people save up to get their "forever home" from the jump so they won't have to save again. But most people think "buying a home" is a prerequisite to being financially stable enough to have kids, so that delay is also delaying kids.
I'm saying this as a person who *absolutely* would've had kids earlier if I'd been able to buy the 800 square foot 2-bedroom apartment instead of having to rent. Some people are comfortable with having kids while renting, but many Americans want to lock in a steady mortgage payment, don't want to worry about their kids ruining a security deposit, and would like to be able to overhaul the property to suit their family needs.
They might be moved to have children if they could have a house of their own, regardless of size.
I've recently seen a huge number of Democrats in Congress, in the media, and in comment sections under various articles keep repeating over and over that when Republicans in the South gerrymander majority-black districts out of existence, they are "using the veneer of partisanship in order to disenfranchise black voters". I think that, while what Republicans are doing is horrible and should not even be legal in an ideal system that prohibited partisan gerrymandering, the idea that race is the primary factor behind what they are doing is not only factually wrong, but sets the Democrats on a strategically wrong path.
Now, is it the case that most Republicans are insensitive to most black voters' feelings, don't mind worsening race relations in America if it benefits them politically, and that some of them are explicitly racist? Absolutely. But the idea that partisan concerns are just a veneer, whereas decreasing the number of black people in Congress is their real primary goal simply makes no logical sense. Even for those Republicans who are hard-core racists, it would make no sense for this to be the primary goal.
To put it in very clear terms, which do Republicans care about more: (1) whether black people make up 9% or 13% of the House in the 2027-2029 Congress; (2) whether the Democrats or the Republicans have a majority in the House in the 2027-2029 Congress. Clearly, they care much more about (2), because which party has a majority in the House of Representatives has a huge effect on American politics more generally and the course of Trump's presidency more specifically, whereas the exact percentage of black people in the House is simply not that consequential (especially when black politicians are going to be a minority no matter what).
Or another way to look at it: would a typical white conservative voter rather vote for a black Republican or a white Democrat? Obviously, they would always vote for a black Republican over a white Democrat in today's political and social environment. The response to this question might have been different in the 1960s, when race genuinely mattered more than partisanship, but today partisanship is clearly the primary factor.
So, no, Republicans are not "using the veneer of partisanship in order to disenfranchise black voters". Partisanship is, in fact, their primary motivation. They are extremely racially insensitive in how they are doing it, of course, and we no that many of them are racist on some level, but partisanship is their primary motivation. And while focusing on the racial angle of it might have made sense for Democrats under a different judicial environment in which protections against eliminating majority-minority districts were still in place, talking about the racial angle no longer makes sense now, after the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act has already happened.
In the meantime, in addition to the aforementioned claim being factually wrong, it sets Democrats on a strategically wrong path. Because if having more majority-minority districts were really the thing that threatened Republicans the most, then perhaps it would make sense for Democrats to focus on creating more of them in response to Republicans trying to create less of them. But, since the thing that really threatens Republicans is Democrats having a majority in the House, the focus for Democrats should, in fact, simply be electing more Democrats. And since Republicans are already creating some crazy maps in red states to maximize their partisan advantage, the Democrats should be doing something similar in blue states and similarly maximizing their partisan advantage.
In the meantime, the idea that black voters would be disenfranchised if a district changes from being, let's say, a 55% black district with a +40 Democrat lean to a 35% black district with a +15 Democrat lean is mostly a myth. In the latter kind of district, Democrats would still win the vast majority of the time and the probability of a black politician winning the primary is still very high. Moreover, unlike in red states that recently spread out their black voters across several Republican districts in which most white voters have fundamentally different values, black voters sharing a district with more white Democrat voters is just not that morally bad, especially at a time when the type of politicians most black voters are most likely to vote for tend to be ideologically indistinguishable from the more general Democrat political establishment.
In conclusion, for the well-being of the Democratic Party, as well as for the well-being of black voters and all kinds of other minority racial groups, electing more Democrats, not creating more majority-minority districts, should clearly be our main goal as a response to what the Republicans did to majority-minority/majority-Democrat districts in Southern states.
I think you might be conflating 2 ideas that are actually separate. The idea of trying to prevent black representatives from getting elected is not the same idea as disenfranchising black voters. You are right that getting rid of black representatives is an incidental side effect to getting rid of Democrats, but that was also the case when Jim Crow laws were enacted to get rid of black Republican representatives in the South. Black southerners and white southerners have always had different partisan preferences, and the point then and the point now is to disenfranchise black voters so that they cannot get representation of their choice in Congress. The actual race of the people they would choose is incidental now just as it was then. The Dixiecrats might have been more personally hostile to black representatives than to whites representing the same constituencies, but they were trying to stop black people from electing them even if they were white.
But then the question is: are Republicans more afraid the idea of black people voting and being able to have some sort of abstract effect on the political process, or by the idea of Democrats achieving a majority in the House, using it to put a check on Trump, and perhaps eventually building on it to get a trifecta and pass their preferred policy into law. I am pretty sure it is the latter, since the effects of Democrats getting 51% of seats in the House are extremely concrete, whereas the effects of black people taking part in the political process while being just 13% of the population are highly abstract and diluted (indeed, the primary effect black people voting has on national politics is simply helping Democrats to get to that crucial 51%, which brings us back to the original point about how preventing Democrats from winning is their primary goal).
Of course, one could argue that fear of black people getting more rights, political power, or economic power is the primary reason Republicans do not want Democrats to have a majority in the House, but that is also doubtful. In the age of Trump, social media, and online hate, many loud voices in the Republican party are not shy about letting the world know what they want, whom they like, and whom they hate. And from observing what they say (especially the kinds of things they say openly now that they might not have said openly 15 years ago) it seems clear to me that they really like rich people, uneducated rural white men, evangelicals, etc. and hate transgender people, Muslims, recent immigrants from low-income countries, undocumented immigrants or immigrants with any kind of unstable status, highly educated liberal white women, students at Ivy League universities, college professors, etc. There are even some black immigrant groups that Republicans clearly don't like, such as Haitians and Somalis, and for these groups they also don't try to hide the fact that they don't like them. But the majority of black people who are American Descendants of Slavery just seem to be one of those groups that modern-day Republicans don't particularly care about either way. They are fine with ignoring their economic interests if it helps them to lower rich people's taxes and they are fine with ignoring their political interests if it helps them to prevent Democrats from winning. They kind of resent black people for the fact that most of them vote Democrat, but they also really love black Republicans, to the point where they are more than happy to run complete clowns like Herschel Walker and Mark Robinson as long as they are black Republicans. But otherwise they don't seem to talk much about black people and are instead obsessed with various other demographic groups and social issues that have become part of their agenda in the last 10–15 years or so.
So, Republicans just want to prevent Democrats from getting a majority in the House (so that they can prevent Muslim immigration, deport more undocumented immigrants, make life harder for transgender people, make sure Trump can get more of what he wants, or whatever it is Republicans are currently obsessed with). And majority-black districts just happen to be something they are willing to screw over to get to that goal. But I don't think black people voting is something they care about that much either way.
The main point is simply that to stop Republicans from getting what they want, Democrats simply need to respond by electing more Democrats, period. They should not try to put some extra layer of protection around majority-black districts in blue states, which dilute black people's political power anyway.
This is why it was so important that the VRA was amended to explicitly include an effects test (not just "are people consciously trying to disenfranchise blacks," but "can blacks actually accomplish their electoral goals to the same degree as whites"), and why it's so infuriating that the Supreme Court has just... decided to act as a super-legislature and turned it back into the intent test that Congress repealed.
We had a period of seven years where the law was that you could draw districts with purely partisan motivation but not with mixed partisan/racial motivation, so Democrats got accustomed to proving that districts were drawn with mixed motivation. Now SCOTUS has said that mixed motivation is fine and only pure-as-the-driven-snow racial animus is illegal, which is ridiculous as an interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, but it means that the kinds of legal tactics that were employed in the interim between Rucho and Callais are no longer fit for purpose.
People are still working their way through the implications of this. I know it seems ridiculous given the number of instant gerrymanders we've seen but the decision was literally less than a month ago. It's going to take a minute for people to get on the same page, tactically speaking. That being said, the wheels are turning (albeit more slowly in states that actually have the rule of law), and I don't think that majority-minority districts are going to stand in the way of electing more Democrats in 2028.
The simple answer with Harris is that she rode the coattails of the most unpopular Democratic President since modern polling became a thing, and she played it safe. She didn’t take risks, did nothing to distance herself from that unpopularity, and therefore never got off the coattails. The only negative issue she neutralized is the age issue, which was substantial, but not nearly enough.
The technological change in the mass media is an underrated part of why the response to Watergate was different than Trump's various crimes IMO. In the film The Ice Storm, about two upper-middle class families coming apart in suburban Connecticut in the winter of 73'-74', is a good illustration of this. One of the characters, a latch-key kid comes home from school, lets herself in, and plops down in front of the TV to watch....Alexander Butterfield testify as part of the Watergate Hearings.
Back then TV's could only get the Big Three networks (and maybe a indy UHF or PBS station if you lived in a major market) and cable basically didn't exist. So if the networks decide the hearings are important then you don't get to watch cartoons. The nightly news was the same, all the networks broadcast their national news at the same time leaving basically no escape, so if you wanted to watch TV after work, welp there's more Watergate.
Today media markets are radically different* and you could easily go through life regularly watching "content related to news events" while having no idea Trump set up a giant slush fund or whatever.
*the whole idea of stations "signing off" would seem as truly alien to Gen Zers as well LOL
This is a great point. There were some very real advantages to broadcast TV and radio.
I feel that an under-discussed part of this is also resilience to disaster. Broadcast stations existed (and still exist) all over the country, and can operate autonomously in the event of a catastrophe. A broadcast station capable of covering a major metro area is a surprisingly inexpensive and straightforward thing to set up and operate. In contrast, some kind of crisis in Loudoun County, VA could seriously disrupt the entire internet.
(I'm using "broadcast" to mean one-way continuous RF transmissions like digital TV, analog TV, FM radio, and AM radio. I'm not including things like cell phone service and Starlink)
Mid 20th Century TV stations were basically highly regulated, highly lucrative businesses (TV ad time was basically a license to print money) aligned with giant national behemoths in NBC/CBS/ABC. So the lucrative markets could subsidize rural stations for civil defense reasons. Likewise you ended up with stuff like government mandates over disaster preparedness but also rules like "equal time", fairness doctrine, big fights over making TV programs have moral/education content (Vast Wasteland Speech). Why? Post-war elites were deeply concerned over how communists and fascists had pioneered the use of modern media like radio, film and TV (the first mass TV broadcast was a speech by Hitler!) Meanwhile the market incentives could lead to interesting places, humiliated by the quiz show scandals of the 50's the networks poured enormous resources into their newsrooms which arguably had a big effect in the 60's with stuff like coverage of the Civil Rights Movement. Likewise mini series were often made made for prestige not money, all those football games on ABC paid for Roots. Just a different world.