My understanding is that Steve Bullock had important governor things to do during the early stages of the Democratic primary, and he couldn't get traction even a few months later. He wasn't in the first primary debate, was he? The people who jumped in late were self-funded billionaires.
Good piece, but we've also got to engage w/ the role of Democratic voters.
Looking back at 2020, voters were not inspired by or cared for the lab-tested electability candidates. That's not because of a hollow party system--those candidates were unable to forge a connection with voters.
Similarly, the "party" didn't want Sanders in ’16, yet he forged a connection with voters that became a flywheel for him. Same for Trump.
One of the things that gets glossed over about the transition to Harris was the money that was raised that first evening Biden dropped out. Why did that happen? Politically engaged voters knew that there was an elite level desire for one of the Blue Wall Govs to jump in. The money was raised to say "Yea, we know her numbers aren't great, but we are excited for her".
Nothing stopped any of the columnists or party operatives from doing a Zoom call for Shapiro, etc. It's telling that they didn't. Likely because they had seen the Harris memes start to bubble up organically online in the days leading up to Biden stepping aside.
Yes, there is a coordination problem at the elite level, but it’s increasingly harder to coordinate a voter base that is connected via social media, etc.
I’m curious about the why here. Are Dem leaders not doing specific things they should be doing? Are mechanisms in place that in theory should prevent this but they aren’t being followed? Or are we in new, unprecedented times where there is no rule book to fall back on.
I’m struggling with what roles in Dem leadership are not doing what their role mandates they should do (nothing personal to the person occupying the role - but which roles are failing?)
“Similarly, it seems that many of the major donors to the party’s affiliated super PACs were threatening to freeze funding unless Biden stepped down. No one donor is that important in the scheme of things, but the collective view of many big donors matters.”
Reality renders most of the campaign finance rules to be stupid and corrupting. Removing the money, and there will always be money, from the candidates and parties to the effective control of a few often anonymous rich guys, destroys accountability. Pretending that PACs and candidates operate at arm’s length is nonsense.
At the end of the day, the issue is, everybody knows the reason why there's all this worry about the Democratic Party being "weak" is mainly coming from people who don't like recent shifts the party has made in recent years, and think that's the reason they're losing (despite the Democratic Party being the most successful center-left party outside of maybe the Spanish center-left since the Berlin Wall fell).
Weirdly, there wasn't this hand wringing about primaries from centrists when the people they liked were winning more often. Hell, the fact Obama could win a primary he would've never been able to win with a "stronger party" was hailed, because let's all be honest here - in the world that Matt and other primary reformers seem to want, Hillary wins the nomination in '08 without much of a question.
Plus, there is the small matter that if you're going to be the party of democracy, taking away the rights of actual Democratic Party voters.
Yes, yes, I know, only x percent of voters vote in primaries, but guess what, whatever that number is, it's much higher than the couple of hundred well-heeled donors and rich centrists who go to Aspen conferences that "primary reformers" want to put in charge instead of the evil evil Groups.
Like, I can maybe buy the argument in low turnout primaries for a Congressional seat, but for President, people know they're happening. If people aren't voting in a primary, they either think basically anybody is acceptable or don't have any strong opinions on how is acceptable.
Also, as usual, there seems to be this view that political parties should put forth candidates that represent the most centrist possible position or they're failures, when that's not true. The point of political parties is to put forth their views against the views of the other side and see how more people prefer - yes, true centrists don't have a party, but that's what they don't get for being special little snowflakes who can't choose a side.
LIke, Matt and others are perfectly open to try to create a new Group, that tries to affect policy and the conversation the same ways other have, but that might mean actually figuring out ways to reach out to Democratic voters better than the Groups are, as opposed to just saying, "any Democratic voter who is one percent to my left shouldn't be listened too about anything."
Except there's no real evidence that what many people here in the comments want would actually move votes the way they think it would. Like, they actually tested Joe Manchin as a candidate in polling during the post-debate Biden fracas, and he didn't do any better than Biden.
Again, I say this as somebody who thinks basically everything Kamala has done to move in the center this campaign has been fine.
At a certain point, the Democratic Party is the Democratic Party, not some mythical Centrist Party That Only Talks About Popular Things (That Just So Happen to Line Up With the Thing I Care About Most) Party That Would Win All The Elections that people here sometimes seem to think can exist.
I agree, a GOP trifecta would be bad, I just don't think the issue is Democratic primary voters deciding who is the nominee.
In a lot of ways, the conversation here is just the opposite of what I see in more left-leaning spaces that Kamala needed to actually have a more active populist policy upfront instead of going with Liz Cheney everywhere, and despite on pure policy grounds, agreeing with those people more, I think they're just as wrong.
I remember the whole debate before Biden dropped out where Harris was polling even worse than Biden and other Democrats like Whitmer and Manchin were polling no more than 1-2 points better and that being an argument against Biden dropping out. But it seemed pretty obvious that, even despite that polling, that anyone who actually replaced Biden would quickly see their polling improve, simply by being a new candidate that wasn't Biden or Trump. That ended up happening with Harris and that likely would have happened with any other Democrat, including Manchin.
But that's besides the point. The main point is that there's no evil centrist conspiracy theory here to turn the Democratic Party into some kind of center-right party at all costs as you seem to imply. People here simply want Democrats to win because Democrats winning, even if they had to make significant concessions (which they haven't and probably don't need to), is still better than Republicans winning.
I don't think there's an centrist conspiracy - people are open, honest, and loud about how much they dislike being on the right edge of the Democratic coalition and wish they had more power to effect policy and changes in all sorts of ways, and look for ways to disempower the people they disagree with, all while claiming they just want to do it to stop the Republican's.
This is also true of the Left, by the way. They say they just want to stop Republicans, but shockingly, they also think they're preferred policy positions are the right path forward to do this.
I'm honest - I don't think Bernie would've won by bigger, I don't think Whitmer would be winning by bigger margins, and. I don't think Manchin or Shapiro or whomever the secret best possible candidate who'd say all the right things to assuage the fears of non-college educated men in Wisconsin would be either.
OTOH, I think a lot of people here, but not Matt, while OK with Kamala winning, and slightly annoyed with Trump losing, would also be happy with the latter because it'd mean that they could do some hippy punching, especially on what issue they're most personally conservative on, which is what this comment section basically is at times - people complaining about how the Democrat's are too liberal on the issue they're most personally conservative on, and shocker, it's mostly cultural issues.
Now, of course, the other thing is that even if there is a polling error in Democrat's favor, and Kamala wins by 4 or 5, nobody in this comment section will say, "OK, I guess the Democrat's were right," they'll all just say, "well, if we just swapped out Kamala for Josh Shapiro and talked more about how much we thought all asylum applicants are liar and how transgender kids are just saying they are because of peer pressure, he would've won by 9!"
Again, my base view is basically, the Democrat's are doing a good job as they likely could assuming human being and not robots are running things, there's not any nominee or any further Sister Souljahing or embracing of the left that would help any candidate in any large way.
You're free to ignore decades worth of election results and polling and just basic political common sense.
You can create all the centrist strawmen you want to try to argue that the best way for Democrats to go is to adopt all your favorite populist left-wing policies, but it's not going to change the above.
"You can create all the centrist strawmen you want to try to argue that the best way for Democrats to go is to adopt all your favorite populist left-wing policies, but it's not going to change the above."
I'm. Not. Arguing. This.
I think the Kamala's campaign electoral moves to the center have been correct and about the limit of what a party can do, when there's the entire rest of the Democratic Party, including Democratic voters, other politicians, and a national media.
It's people like you who are saying the only way the Democrat's can win is if they adopt all your preferred opinions!
Like, I hate the Lankford Border Bill, but I think it's the right thing to do, because it's a salient issue.
I'm a never Trumper who has voted against him three times in a row. The only candidate that I regret voting for is Biden. I voted for him in both the primary and the general election in 2020 (CA Democrats used to allow Independents in Presidential primaries till 2020) because I assumed that he would not run for reelection. Faced with the real prospect of another Trump Presidency till 2028, I wish Biden had lost in 2020 so we wouldn't have to deal with this nightmare till 2028 and could move on from Trump sooner.
This seems kind of silly. The Dems are not a party; they are an uneasy coalition. Without proportional representation, policy drothers are always trumped by the leadership ability to hold together the ungainly mess. So it goes. Kudos to those who do the work.
I am not convinced we picked the strongest candidate for this race. As Matthew implied, Harris looked like OJ Simpson as she ran to the left in 2019/20. Now is backpedaling to the center. But I also think if it had been an open convention or if the Dems picked a white guy over Harris, we would have had a circular firing squad.
If there was to be a convention where all strong candidates competed for the nomination, this should have been sorted out long before it became a crisis.
You know when we had an incredibly strong Democratic party? 1944. That's when the party organization and the major poobahs, realizing that FDR was clearly dying, got together to deny him the nomination or at the very least not pick some random Senator to replace Wallace as his VP, knowing that that person would absolutely become President with a November victory.
Or it could be that overruling your own party's President is kind of difficult.
Hmm. Is transparency / legibility really that important? Joseph Heath, discussing the importance of political parties (in the context of Rob Ford, the late crack-smoking mayor of Toronto):
"If Rob Ford were the leader of a political party, his own people would have gotten rid of him by now. In federal and provincial politics, we rely almost exclusively upon political parties to do the dirty work of getting rid of scandal-ridden or incompetent leaders. (For example, there are many cases of serious alcoholism that have been **silently** and effectively dealt with by political parties, without the public needing to get involved.)" https://induecourse.utoronto.ca/thoughts-on-rob-ford-vol-3/
This post was a helluva misfire. Is the Democratic party strong? Well, if you measure it against some unstated ideal, perhaps not. But in the real world, it's doing pretty well as a cohesive operation.
So "Democratic party institutions" didn't force Biden to withdraw. So what? Any mechanism that forced him to leave the race for the good of the party and the good of the nation is evidence that some form of party action was able to do the unprecedented thing in modern history of getting a President to step aside when he very much wants to run. Biden wasn't the optimal candidate for a strong party in 2020 when there were charismatic candidates like Steve Bullock (?!) available? The dude was the VP to Barack Obama for eight years. That's exactly the kind of guy a strong party will coalesce around, and not some unknown from Montana.
Here's the biggest piece of evidence of the Democrats being a strong party: *all* elements of the party have given Kamala total license to move as much to the center and to court as many Republicans (Dick Cheney!!) as she wants in order to win. I mean, AOC is on the path to becoming the next Nancy Pelosi as a party stalwart and who would ever have predicted that in a million years.
So does the party fall short of the ideal of a strong party? OK, sure. So what?
The evidence against the party being strong is that the party stuck with Biden from the beginning of 2023 all the way through to June 2024 and would have done nothing if Biden hadn't chosen to step aside.
Also, the fact that many models have the Democratic candidate as more likely than not to lose to a candidate Trump for the second time in 3 elections who's both very unpopular and not particulary intelligent and whose campaigns have consistently been disorganized messes.
I agree with your first paragraph but not the second. Incumbents worldwide are having problems right now, the Democrats are doing relatively well here.
Democrats failed to crush him in 2016 and 2020 was close enough that enough Republicans felt that he could win in 2024.
And in 2024, knowing full well that incumbents were struggling worldwide, Democrats were gifted an opportunity to get rid of their incumbent, make a pivot towards someone far away from the incumbent's administration, and instead chose to go with the incumbent's second-in-command.
Seems like a pretty big failure on the part of the Democratic Party that 45-48% of a country that overwhelmingly supports legal abortion, gay marriage, unions, increasing taxes on the rich, Medicare, Social Security, etc. still prefers Trump over a mainstream Democrat.
As long as the Democratic Party is the party of the Other, whether that other is feminists, African-Americans, immigrants, college students, Muslim's, LGBT people, or whomever else, a lot of people will refuse to vote for that party.
The great news about America is even some Other groups can refuse to vote for the Democrat's because of the Other they don't like!
The reason why somebody can vote for a Democratic-friendly referendum, then vote for a Republican (ie. every Florida election result since 2018), is people may support Democratic policies, but don't want to vote and thus, feel like they're allied with people they heavily dislike.
Again, ironically, an issue that both my left-wing friends and centrists have is pointing to issue polling and thinking that all that matters.
Unfortunately, it doesn't. There are millions of people who support expanded Medicaid, and might even vote for it in a referendum, but would never vote for a Democrat because of abortion. Just like there are also million of voters who think abortion should be legal, but will never vote for a Democrat because well, they're racist.
Hell, to a much lesser extent, you see this sometimes in this very comment section, and in left-wing comment sections, ironically about each other. People here don't want to be in the same party as people who think AOC is too centrist, and those people don't want to be in the same party as Matt Yglesias.
The double standard is absolutely painful to see. The Democrats get criticized for not having A+ perfect game (they should have pushed out Biden sooner! They should not have let Biden pick Harris as VP! They should have supported Bullock/Bennet/Klobuchar/fill-in-normie-white-politician of choice)!
Meanwhile, the Republican Party transmogrifies into the personality cult of a deranged would-be autocrat and everyone just shrugs, welp, the GOP gonna GOP, what can you do?
I want Democrats to win more than I want Republicans to win so I spend a lot more time trying to think about how Democrats can do better and am more than happy to let Republicans continue to nominate the Roy Moores and Doug Mastrianos of their coalition.
There's no party, just a cabal of oldsters -- Pelosi, Obama, Biden -- and their operatives.
My understanding is that Steve Bullock had important governor things to do during the early stages of the Democratic primary, and he couldn't get traction even a few months later. He wasn't in the first primary debate, was he? The people who jumped in late were self-funded billionaires.
Once again Matt’s fetishization of European-style political parties and parliamentary democracy comes through
Do we know for a fact that Ezra Klein's column was a cause rather than a consequence of what was happening?
What would a proper party structure look like?
Good piece, but we've also got to engage w/ the role of Democratic voters.
Looking back at 2020, voters were not inspired by or cared for the lab-tested electability candidates. That's not because of a hollow party system--those candidates were unable to forge a connection with voters.
Similarly, the "party" didn't want Sanders in ’16, yet he forged a connection with voters that became a flywheel for him. Same for Trump.
One of the things that gets glossed over about the transition to Harris was the money that was raised that first evening Biden dropped out. Why did that happen? Politically engaged voters knew that there was an elite level desire for one of the Blue Wall Govs to jump in. The money was raised to say "Yea, we know her numbers aren't great, but we are excited for her".
Nothing stopped any of the columnists or party operatives from doing a Zoom call for Shapiro, etc. It's telling that they didn't. Likely because they had seen the Harris memes start to bubble up organically online in the days leading up to Biden stepping aside.
Yes, there is a coordination problem at the elite level, but it’s increasingly harder to coordinate a voter base that is connected via social media, etc.
I’m curious about the why here. Are Dem leaders not doing specific things they should be doing? Are mechanisms in place that in theory should prevent this but they aren’t being followed? Or are we in new, unprecedented times where there is no rule book to fall back on.
I’m struggling with what roles in Dem leadership are not doing what their role mandates they should do (nothing personal to the person occupying the role - but which roles are failing?)
Great analysis. Made me think.
As an aside, consider,
“Similarly, it seems that many of the major donors to the party’s affiliated super PACs were threatening to freeze funding unless Biden stepped down. No one donor is that important in the scheme of things, but the collective view of many big donors matters.”
Reality renders most of the campaign finance rules to be stupid and corrupting. Removing the money, and there will always be money, from the candidates and parties to the effective control of a few often anonymous rich guys, destroys accountability. Pretending that PACs and candidates operate at arm’s length is nonsense.
At the end of the day, the issue is, everybody knows the reason why there's all this worry about the Democratic Party being "weak" is mainly coming from people who don't like recent shifts the party has made in recent years, and think that's the reason they're losing (despite the Democratic Party being the most successful center-left party outside of maybe the Spanish center-left since the Berlin Wall fell).
Weirdly, there wasn't this hand wringing about primaries from centrists when the people they liked were winning more often. Hell, the fact Obama could win a primary he would've never been able to win with a "stronger party" was hailed, because let's all be honest here - in the world that Matt and other primary reformers seem to want, Hillary wins the nomination in '08 without much of a question.
Plus, there is the small matter that if you're going to be the party of democracy, taking away the rights of actual Democratic Party voters.
Yes, yes, I know, only x percent of voters vote in primaries, but guess what, whatever that number is, it's much higher than the couple of hundred well-heeled donors and rich centrists who go to Aspen conferences that "primary reformers" want to put in charge instead of the evil evil Groups.
Like, I can maybe buy the argument in low turnout primaries for a Congressional seat, but for President, people know they're happening. If people aren't voting in a primary, they either think basically anybody is acceptable or don't have any strong opinions on how is acceptable.
Also, as usual, there seems to be this view that political parties should put forth candidates that represent the most centrist possible position or they're failures, when that's not true. The point of political parties is to put forth their views against the views of the other side and see how more people prefer - yes, true centrists don't have a party, but that's what they don't get for being special little snowflakes who can't choose a side.
LIke, Matt and others are perfectly open to try to create a new Group, that tries to affect policy and the conversation the same ways other have, but that might mean actually figuring out ways to reach out to Democratic voters better than the Groups are, as opposed to just saying, "any Democratic voter who is one percent to my left shouldn't be listened too about anything."
The reason everyone's worried about Democrats being weak is because said weakness might lead to a Trump presidency with a GOP trifecta
Except there's no real evidence that what many people here in the comments want would actually move votes the way they think it would. Like, they actually tested Joe Manchin as a candidate in polling during the post-debate Biden fracas, and he didn't do any better than Biden.
Again, I say this as somebody who thinks basically everything Kamala has done to move in the center this campaign has been fine.
At a certain point, the Democratic Party is the Democratic Party, not some mythical Centrist Party That Only Talks About Popular Things (That Just So Happen to Line Up With the Thing I Care About Most) Party That Would Win All The Elections that people here sometimes seem to think can exist.
I agree, a GOP trifecta would be bad, I just don't think the issue is Democratic primary voters deciding who is the nominee.
In a lot of ways, the conversation here is just the opposite of what I see in more left-leaning spaces that Kamala needed to actually have a more active populist policy upfront instead of going with Liz Cheney everywhere, and despite on pure policy grounds, agreeing with those people more, I think they're just as wrong.
I remember the whole debate before Biden dropped out where Harris was polling even worse than Biden and other Democrats like Whitmer and Manchin were polling no more than 1-2 points better and that being an argument against Biden dropping out. But it seemed pretty obvious that, even despite that polling, that anyone who actually replaced Biden would quickly see their polling improve, simply by being a new candidate that wasn't Biden or Trump. That ended up happening with Harris and that likely would have happened with any other Democrat, including Manchin.
But that's besides the point. The main point is that there's no evil centrist conspiracy theory here to turn the Democratic Party into some kind of center-right party at all costs as you seem to imply. People here simply want Democrats to win because Democrats winning, even if they had to make significant concessions (which they haven't and probably don't need to), is still better than Republicans winning.
I don't think there's an centrist conspiracy - people are open, honest, and loud about how much they dislike being on the right edge of the Democratic coalition and wish they had more power to effect policy and changes in all sorts of ways, and look for ways to disempower the people they disagree with, all while claiming they just want to do it to stop the Republican's.
This is also true of the Left, by the way. They say they just want to stop Republicans, but shockingly, they also think they're preferred policy positions are the right path forward to do this.
I'm honest - I don't think Bernie would've won by bigger, I don't think Whitmer would be winning by bigger margins, and. I don't think Manchin or Shapiro or whomever the secret best possible candidate who'd say all the right things to assuage the fears of non-college educated men in Wisconsin would be either.
OTOH, I think a lot of people here, but not Matt, while OK with Kamala winning, and slightly annoyed with Trump losing, would also be happy with the latter because it'd mean that they could do some hippy punching, especially on what issue they're most personally conservative on, which is what this comment section basically is at times - people complaining about how the Democrat's are too liberal on the issue they're most personally conservative on, and shocker, it's mostly cultural issues.
Now, of course, the other thing is that even if there is a polling error in Democrat's favor, and Kamala wins by 4 or 5, nobody in this comment section will say, "OK, I guess the Democrat's were right," they'll all just say, "well, if we just swapped out Kamala for Josh Shapiro and talked more about how much we thought all asylum applicants are liar and how transgender kids are just saying they are because of peer pressure, he would've won by 9!"
Again, my base view is basically, the Democrat's are doing a good job as they likely could assuming human being and not robots are running things, there's not any nominee or any further Sister Souljahing or embracing of the left that would help any candidate in any large way.
You're free to ignore decades worth of election results and polling and just basic political common sense.
You can create all the centrist strawmen you want to try to argue that the best way for Democrats to go is to adopt all your favorite populist left-wing policies, but it's not going to change the above.
"You can create all the centrist strawmen you want to try to argue that the best way for Democrats to go is to adopt all your favorite populist left-wing policies, but it's not going to change the above."
I'm. Not. Arguing. This.
I think the Kamala's campaign electoral moves to the center have been correct and about the limit of what a party can do, when there's the entire rest of the Democratic Party, including Democratic voters, other politicians, and a national media.
It's people like you who are saying the only way the Democrat's can win is if they adopt all your preferred opinions!
Like, I hate the Lankford Border Bill, but I think it's the right thing to do, because it's a salient issue.
I'm a never Trumper who has voted against him three times in a row. The only candidate that I regret voting for is Biden. I voted for him in both the primary and the general election in 2020 (CA Democrats used to allow Independents in Presidential primaries till 2020) because I assumed that he would not run for reelection. Faced with the real prospect of another Trump Presidency till 2028, I wish Biden had lost in 2020 so we wouldn't have to deal with this nightmare till 2028 and could move on from Trump sooner.
Changes to campaign finance neutered the parties.
To fix the parties we need to fix campaign finance.
Allow unlimited donations to parties
This seems kind of silly. The Dems are not a party; they are an uneasy coalition. Without proportional representation, policy drothers are always trumped by the leadership ability to hold together the ungainly mess. So it goes. Kudos to those who do the work.
I am not convinced we picked the strongest candidate for this race. As Matthew implied, Harris looked like OJ Simpson as she ran to the left in 2019/20. Now is backpedaling to the center. But I also think if it had been an open convention or if the Dems picked a white guy over Harris, we would have had a circular firing squad.
If there was to be a convention where all strong candidates competed for the nomination, this should have been sorted out long before it became a crisis.
Well, in about a week we shall see.
You know when we had an incredibly strong Democratic party? 1944. That's when the party organization and the major poobahs, realizing that FDR was clearly dying, got together to deny him the nomination or at the very least not pick some random Senator to replace Wallace as his VP, knowing that that person would absolutely become President with a November victory.
Or it could be that overruling your own party's President is kind of difficult.
Hmm. Is transparency / legibility really that important? Joseph Heath, discussing the importance of political parties (in the context of Rob Ford, the late crack-smoking mayor of Toronto):
"If Rob Ford were the leader of a political party, his own people would have gotten rid of him by now. In federal and provincial politics, we rely almost exclusively upon political parties to do the dirty work of getting rid of scandal-ridden or incompetent leaders. (For example, there are many cases of serious alcoholism that have been **silently** and effectively dealt with by political parties, without the public needing to get involved.)" https://induecourse.utoronto.ca/thoughts-on-rob-ford-vol-3/
This post was a helluva misfire. Is the Democratic party strong? Well, if you measure it against some unstated ideal, perhaps not. But in the real world, it's doing pretty well as a cohesive operation.
So "Democratic party institutions" didn't force Biden to withdraw. So what? Any mechanism that forced him to leave the race for the good of the party and the good of the nation is evidence that some form of party action was able to do the unprecedented thing in modern history of getting a President to step aside when he very much wants to run. Biden wasn't the optimal candidate for a strong party in 2020 when there were charismatic candidates like Steve Bullock (?!) available? The dude was the VP to Barack Obama for eight years. That's exactly the kind of guy a strong party will coalesce around, and not some unknown from Montana.
Here's the biggest piece of evidence of the Democrats being a strong party: *all* elements of the party have given Kamala total license to move as much to the center and to court as many Republicans (Dick Cheney!!) as she wants in order to win. I mean, AOC is on the path to becoming the next Nancy Pelosi as a party stalwart and who would ever have predicted that in a million years.
So does the party fall short of the ideal of a strong party? OK, sure. So what?
The evidence against the party being strong is that the party stuck with Biden from the beginning of 2023 all the way through to June 2024 and would have done nothing if Biden hadn't chosen to step aside.
Also, the fact that many models have the Democratic candidate as more likely than not to lose to a candidate Trump for the second time in 3 elections who's both very unpopular and not particulary intelligent and whose campaigns have consistently been disorganized messes.
I agree with your first paragraph but not the second. Incumbents worldwide are having problems right now, the Democrats are doing relatively well here.
Democrats failed to crush him in 2016 and 2020 was close enough that enough Republicans felt that he could win in 2024.
And in 2024, knowing full well that incumbents were struggling worldwide, Democrats were gifted an opportunity to get rid of their incumbent, make a pivot towards someone far away from the incumbent's administration, and instead chose to go with the incumbent's second-in-command.
He's not being crushed being he is closer to what 45-48% of the country wants than Any Democrat.
Yes, That Democrat.
Yes, That Democrat Too.
Yes, That One Too, Even The One Who Did OK in a Red State.
Seems like a pretty big failure on the part of the Democratic Party that 45-48% of a country that overwhelmingly supports legal abortion, gay marriage, unions, increasing taxes on the rich, Medicare, Social Security, etc. still prefers Trump over a mainstream Democrat.
I mean, not really.
As long as the Democratic Party is the party of the Other, whether that other is feminists, African-Americans, immigrants, college students, Muslim's, LGBT people, or whomever else, a lot of people will refuse to vote for that party.
The great news about America is even some Other groups can refuse to vote for the Democrat's because of the Other they don't like!
The reason why somebody can vote for a Democratic-friendly referendum, then vote for a Republican (ie. every Florida election result since 2018), is people may support Democratic policies, but don't want to vote and thus, feel like they're allied with people they heavily dislike.
Again, ironically, an issue that both my left-wing friends and centrists have is pointing to issue polling and thinking that all that matters.
Unfortunately, it doesn't. There are millions of people who support expanded Medicaid, and might even vote for it in a referendum, but would never vote for a Democrat because of abortion. Just like there are also million of voters who think abortion should be legal, but will never vote for a Democrat because well, they're racist.
Hell, to a much lesser extent, you see this sometimes in this very comment section, and in left-wing comment sections, ironically about each other. People here don't want to be in the same party as people who think AOC is too centrist, and those people don't want to be in the same party as Matt Yglesias.
The double standard is absolutely painful to see. The Democrats get criticized for not having A+ perfect game (they should have pushed out Biden sooner! They should not have let Biden pick Harris as VP! They should have supported Bullock/Bennet/Klobuchar/fill-in-normie-white-politician of choice)!
Meanwhile, the Republican Party transmogrifies into the personality cult of a deranged would-be autocrat and everyone just shrugs, welp, the GOP gonna GOP, what can you do?
Fingers and toes crossed for Harris!
I want Democrats to win more than I want Republicans to win so I spend a lot more time trying to think about how Democrats can do better and am more than happy to let Republicans continue to nominate the Roy Moores and Doug Mastrianos of their coalition.
I'm guessing a lot of liberals feel the same way.
Also Republican self immolation is a lot less interesting to dissect and more depressing.