It takes courage to be a leader. And it seems our elected representatives, save for a few notable exceptions, lack courage. Only seven Republican Senators voted to convict Trump in 2021 (Burr, Cassidy, Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Sasse, Toomey), while the rest looked at the evidence of his wrongdoing and chose cowardice.
Nancy Pelosi had the courage to state the obvious that Biden was incapable of a second term. But where was the courage from his Cabinet (and his Vice President) to expose his decline long before the debate?
I feel like to immediately start talking about "courage" is to completely miss the point of the column.
It's not about courage. It's about having rules mechanisms within the party that give formal power for people to make decisions and know they have the support of the party even if they aren't particularly brave.
To some degree, but it also takes courage to go against groupthink and the groupthink was that you couldn't challenge Biden and you had to ignore his disastrous polls. Just two days before Pelosi or whomever (?Obama) pulled the tablecloth, or Biden just succumbed to reality, Bernie Sanders wrote an op ed about why we needed Joe Biden.
Now, true that courage is not anything we can design so we might need structural change. I dont know what structural changes would help. It was not that the leadership was any better than the rank and file, they were both smoking the Joe is fine cigarettes. If there was any hero, imo, besides Pelosi, it was the media. And cudos to Dean Phillips for playing the Cheney for the Dems.
Indeed, courage and groupthink are ultimately natural human characteristics. The imperative is not to design them out of existence, but to design around them, if not leverage them towards good outcomes (when possible).
A party (and particularly a a party's elected officials) is supposed to reflect the views of its members. If elected officials can't even call on its leader to step aside when that's what an overwhelming majority of its members wanted, no mechanism is going to prevent that level of cowardice
There are obviously mechanisms that could do this. For instance, if there were an anonymous box where members of Congress could call for the party to do something, and at a weekly closed doors meeting members are told what is currently in the box, then no one needs courage to be the one that starts the conversation, and it can quickly become clear when a consensus is being reached so that then the Speaker can make a public statement with the backing of the party, but without anyone having to take the risk of speaking publicly first, or with publicizing dissent.
I wish more elected officials had called for Biden to step aside, but it's really really hard to openly call for your party leader (and President) to be defenestrated. This unique case may not be the best one for demonstrating how strong a party is.
Someone's gotta have the courage to point out that things are not working the way they are. And then do something about it even though their career might be on the line.
I would add Dean Phillips to the courage list at a time when nobody was questioning Biden. And it wasn't a vanity challenge like Gabbard or RFK Jr. because he first attempted to recruit candidates with higher profiles, senators and governors.
Cabinet members and VPs aren’t selected for courage.
Play it out for me: What should they have done? When should they have done it? What do you think they knew and when?
Outing him - if there truly even WAS anything to out him on the basis of - would have fallen short of the 25A standard, thus leaving them in the unenviable position of having demonstrated themselves to be the most disloyal cabinet and VP ever, in the face of a campaign against America’s most credible authoritarian threat ever.
The Cabinet member situation is actually pretty easy. "I spoke with the President and expressed my concerns about his decline in physical stamina and mental acuity. It didn't go as I hoped. As a result, I have tendered my resignation. I support the policies of this Administration and will continue to fight hard for Democratic priorities."
The path for the VP is much more difficult, as resignation is a very, very extreme step that would likely cause more problems than it would solve. But I suspect there are ways for the VP to get the message out short of resignation.
I’m not trying to let the perfect be the enemy of the good… but when Donald Trump has made himself an enemy of democracy, any of those plays — in fact, EVERY play you can dream up — needs to have a MUCH higher certainty of success than was ever feasible before or during the July Crisis.
I would argue the "certainty of success" metric would have led to taking the actions I describe when there was more time to react than merely hoping it might all work out. It would have invited scrutiny and that scrutiny would have either shown Biden to be fit-as-a-fiddle or not. And on a timeline that would have made defeating Trump more likely in my view.
You’re only capturing one factor in certainty of success. There are others.
The further back you go on the timeline, the more fit Biden actually is. It’s even entirely possible that the debate was his first major event of that magnitude! I’d give it a 30% chance, with another 60% that he had a “minor event” that should have been recognizable but was minor enough to be explained away, and only 10% that he had a major event that [ed: anyone other than his wife] had actually observed and were covering up.
Again, these likelihoods all shrink as you go back up the timeline. They were probably a total of 0-2% in 2022, maybe only 50% at the end of 2023.
Which means that it’s most likely that the party would have waved away any major attempts to undermine him from within his administration. In fact, such attempts may have ended up counterproductively creating a “muscle memory” of the party to ignore later reports or even the debate performance itself.
This discussion always reminds me of literary tragedy. The point of the genre is that some tragedies simply can’t be prevented, even when they are utterly — if not maddeningly frustratingly (!) — easy to predict. I reiterate my comment to the other David that it’s too easy to cast about for some way, ANY way, that this “could have been prevented”. But hindsight is 20/20.
In response to your link - no, the Cheney endorsement should be read as "even the human wad of scum that is Dick Cheney, champion of the worst excesses of the American response to 9/11, thinks Trump is a bridge too far, so Trump is in fact really really bad, and with the election in eight days the only other choice is Harris, so vote Harris to keep out Trump." The Democrats could do better, but the Republicans have picked one of the worst and most dangerous men in the country as their standard bearer for the third time in a row, and are *delighted* about it.
You are being rather officious. The 25th Amendment does not specify an objective, determinate standard any more than the equal protection or due process clauses of the 14th Amendment. If the vice president and a majority of cabinet members declared Biden unfit, the issue would ultimately rest with Congress. Republicans in Congress would then have to put up or shut up. If they voted to oust Biden and Democrats split evenly, they could have been gone.
There were also milder plays on the table. Any cabinet member could have resigned his or her portfolio and said “I cannot in good conscience serve under President Biden when he is too infirm to be effective.”. Any one of them could have done it. They all would have landed more comfortably than a mid career middle manager who got downsized. Alas, one gets to be in a cabinet by being a “team player” and so we are led by a gaggle of sheep and a couple shepherds who win their commissions by being beautiful sheep for decades.
I think you’re wishcasting how it would have gone.
It’s one thing to be angry about how it got so far and so close to absolute disaster. I share that sentiment! But it’s a step too far to cast about looking for people to blame - someone, anyone, who “could have prevented this”, but didn’t. And the error in that is that it’s not entirely certain that it could have been prevented in the first place. I believe too much in the power of uncertainty to accept what I view as your overconfident thinking on this.
The person who could have prevented this is Joe Biden, had he announced in early 2023 that he would step down after one term, as he'd led everyone to believe he would do. Instead his narcissism and selfishness dragged his party and the country to the edge of oblivion, into which it still may very well topple.
Agreed. And it would have generated a lot of goodwill for the party, although at the risk of a 2020-like primary squandering it.
In the end, a lot of the structural forces driving this election so close would have kept it close no matter what the party had done. Like Biden, the voter themselves are stubbornly stupid and don’t really understand what’s driving the cost disease crisis that they hate so much.
Amidst all the anger and fear we ourselves here have about the possibility that our fellow Americans might plunge us into autocracy, it’s important not to succumb to the Green Lantern Theory that the actions of a few good people who simply “will” a good outcome are enough to actually make that outcome happen.
Because that’s the sort of thing that fascists and woo-woo hippies believe, and it’s why those two groups are in a coalition together under their chosen idiot-savant pretending to be a hero. We have to be more pragmatic than that.
Speaking about counterfactuals is fraught because only the actual is possible. Some counterfactuals seem “likelier” than others but all counterfactuals were equally impossible, it’s just our minds are too frail to see the future clearly.
I cannot in good professional conscience get high enough this early in the morning to do proper justice to this discussion about the nature of time and counterfactuals. ;-)
Can I try one more time to get you to explain why you ever bring this up, especially since it makes nonsense out of your own statements like “There were also milder plays on the table”?
I have a different impression. He’s way crazier and less coherent than he used to be, and some of that has to be age. He rambles and speaks in borderline aphasia, punctuated by ever more occasional moments of sharpness.
Trump acts like he has dementia, but he's still fairly energetic and alert looking while rambling crazy talk, which makes him look comparatively younger.
Sure, she can attack Trump while saying that for the good of the country Biden -- by infinitely stronger contrast -- decided that he wasn't up to running the country for four more years.
On the one hand, you're correct. On the other hand, the MAGAverse clearly believes that attacking Biden's age still has some electoral advantage to it given the sheer quantity of "Biden's old" stuff they continue to circulate on Twitter and rightwing forums that doesn't even passingly attempt to be an attack on Harris. (Whether any polling supports the effectiveness of that, I don't know, but my guess is that there is something suggesting it has benefits for Trump in the race given how much it still turns up.)
>Harris cannot convincingly attack Trump’s age because she was complicit in enabling Biden.<
Or, more basically, he's still president! Back in August when I broached the topic—I was explicitly making the argument that the "age" issue would be neutralized much more effectively if he were gone—I was dismissively told it wouldn't be tenable for Biden to resign the presidency (I was thinking maybe after Labor Day) because Harris couldn't possibly run the country AND campaign. And that's not a terrible argument.
>>Nancy Pelosi had the courage to state the obvious that Biden was incapable of a second term. But where was the courage from his Cabinet (and his Vice President) to expose his decline long before the debate?<<
Pelosi, the most consequential Speaker of our era, deserves massive props for her decisive action in forcing Biden off the ticket—no argument from me. But let's be clear: she didn't take action until after the debate, and at that point lots of prominent people (our blog host included) were calling for the president to drop out of the race. The actual person with the most "courage" in all this was one Dean Philips.
As for cabinet officials, well, I'm not sure how much face time with POTUS most of them enjoy. But sure, some people (Harris? Zients? Sullivan? Burns? Blinken? Pelosi? Schumer?) must have noticed signs of significant decline. And Jill Biden surely did, as well. But at that point a coordination issue comes up: unless you're quite certain going public will success in forcing Biden to resign (or unless you know you have the votes both in the cabinet and in Congress to invoke the 25th), publicly accusing the president of suffering serious cognitive decline risks giving a giant assist to Donald Trump. Anyway, scheduling a debate for June was absolute genius, and agreeing to it might prove the mother of all campaign errors by the Trump people.
I agree with StrangePolyhedrons: it's not about courage so much as it's about suboptimal structures, practices, precedents, incentives and so on. America has a seriously creaky system of national governance and politics. Reform is very much needed!
I am with you on Dean Phillips the unsung hero, who I donated and campaigned for, but got no traction whatsoever. That imo is the problem. It wasn't as if he was a crazy vanity candidate like Gabbard or RFK Jr. He first tried to recruit Senators and Governors. He was a mainstream Dem who was absolutely correct when he said that Biden was the only candidate who could win in 2020 and the only one who could lose in 2024.
When I was campaigning for him it seemed as all Dems just wanted to circle the wagons around Biden and ignoring that they were headed for the waterfalls in the Biden canoe.
And even two days before he withdrew Bernie Sanders had a NYT op ed about how great he was and should stay in the race.
If the problem with the GOP is that other than blind allegiance to DJT it is the anarchy party, the Dems in this iteration are the go along party.
I don't know, everyone around Trump seemed to be able to coordinate to subvert a lot of the crazier stuff he wanted to do, it's not that hard to coordinate with fellow Cabinet members.
I don't think this is a prisoner's dilemma situation. If cooperate is "try to remove Biden" and defect is "retain Biden," then we'd have to say that the highest reward you could get is if you are loyal to Biden while other people are trying to remove him, while everyone coordinating to remove him is a middle level of reward.
That doesn't seem to fit facts on the ground. This is maybe more of a Deer Hunt situation, which is an easier coordination problem to resolve exactly because the biggest reward is for cooperate/cooperate.
Wasn’t familiar with the deer hunt, but reading about I would say in this analogy that going after Biden while everyone is covering their ass and hunting rabbits would mean you go hungry (get punished) while they do okay. Only if a critical mass of you go hunt the Biden will you be okay.
If Biden's decline was relatively recent, like Matt's source said, that would explain a lot of this though.
Biden haters like to claim that he's always been senile going back to 2008 (if not 1988!) but that's clearly not the case. Something really did seem to change in the last spring.
Courage? nancy Pelosi wascovering up for Biden until the very end, calling him "fit as a fiddle" up until his disastrous debate performance. Pelosi has been claiming that college kids protesting against genocide were funded by Putin/amnd or China and should be investigated! She is a hundred millionaire coward like the rest of them, as Biden was incapable of even his first term. Democrats are cowards in so many ways, not the least of which is allowing Israel to run our government. https://barryjkaufmando.substack.com/p/dick-cheneys-kind-of-democrat
I will never, ever understand why those on the left who are anti-Israel believe for a second that things will go better for them with a Trump presidency than a Harris one.
I don’t think they do. I think they want to punish the Democrats and hope that the Democrats come to the conclusion that they need to listen to Arab voters in the future.
Also a lot of them are probably just thinking emotionally, which I won’t fault them for.
There surely has been international funding intended at stirring up dissent. I don’t think the students themselves would likely be directly aware of any of it, though perhaps some insiders at SJP or some other group might be. That’s where the investigation would need to be.
Seems like you are just trolling here as a far left Jill Stein populist that hates Dems and pushing your substack. "Hundred millionaire coward". Thank you from Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Most of us are here because we respect Yglesias.
While this is true, it's much better to have a system that doesn't depend on immense political courage. I have bottomless contempt for figures like Cruz, but the fact is that Democratic lawmakers were not tested the same way. I think we'd have done better if a Trump-like figure arose, but it helps that our party structure is more robust.
Even the hollow party has considerable power to discourage strong candidates from challenging their incumbent President. If the party and the donor base made it clear that they could challenge Biden without being punished in future, we could have had a competitive primary and forced Biden out early. Maybe Biden would have won anyway, but he would be forced to debate in a primary with well known names like Newsom, Whitmer and Shapiro and would've gotten exposed.
PS: He was already exposed to everyone except partisan Democrats.
Where were they??? Congratulating themselves on being in the "right side of history" by being baldly for their own self interest. Drawn from a long line of symbolic capitalists, they are just as craven as the people who ruined or relented and kissed the ring for Trump. These people are only accidentally on the right side of policy or views, because the electorate is what it is. Ya want comprehensive immigration reform... We'll see what public sentiment allows you to have. It's tough out there... With few interested in the slow boring of any issue.
If they had read the polls accurately, they would have moderated on immigration in ‘21. Enforcing immigration laws has always polled well. They just thought they could get away with caving to cosmopolitan elites.
They probably thought that, given the dire national conditions that greeted them upon taking office, simple *healing* (the economy, the heath of the people, our alliances) was the optimal path to a second term. And I'm sure they had no inkling that highly damaging inflation was in the cards. Normally, a very strong recovery with modest inflation and a very favorable contrast with the previous terms does the trick. That's always the way it's worked in the past. Bill Clinton won a second term with utterly massive illegal immigration inflows. George W. Bush, too.
I really doubt there was a Machiavellian conspiracy to "get away" with rewarding Globalist Open Borders Elites. They were caught flat-footed. It happens. Had the inflation burst not materialized, I reckon the migrant spike would not have been enough to sink Harris.
Being caught flat footed on the Afghanistan withdrawal was forgivable because of the timeline. The border surge started under Trump so there’s no valid excuse here. They wanted to fool people by claiming that it wasn’t a big deal but that didn’t go the way they wanted.
I don't think this has to be true if it substitutes for depressed demand (?). But I think by the time spring 2021 rolled around, it was clear that things were getting back to normal and the $1.9T American Rescue Plan was mostly unnecessary. I believe I've seen estimates that this was responsible for 1-2% of inflation.
People say this, but everyone who does say it is unable to articulate a complete theory of what's actually happening. The M2 and M3 money supply remains hugely elevated compared to 2019, and has dropped on slightly -- but inflation has now dropped back to trend. We raised interest rates with the theory that higher rates -> cooler economy -> lower inflation would be the mechanism, but then the economy remained "hot" across measures of consumer spending, wages, and stock market indices -- yet inflation dropped to trend.
I don't expect random Internet posters to explain what's going on, but the lack of curiosity from professional economists is pretty shocking.
Wouldn’t a onetime increase in M whatever create a temporary rather than permanent inflation? Once prices increase commensurately with the M supply, no further increases are needed to achieve equilibrium.
Conversely, if M keeps growing faster than the economy, inflation will persist
I think Biden's liberal Catholic faith was a real soft spot here. I think he has genuine sympathy for the plight of the migrants coming to the border, which is part of the reason it took him so long to pull the trigger on stricter enforcement. Plus the timing of Mexico's election--AMLO cracked down on the internal migration there after his chosen successor's win in that election.
Exactly... Or not stoned Amy klobuchar, or never have let Elizabeth Warren get any air time.... I think of “the Munger test.”
1) Go ahead, make your argument for what you want the State to do, and what you want the State to be in charge of.
2)Then, go back and look at your statement. Everywhere you said “the State,” delete that phrase and replace it with “politicians I actually know, running in electoral systems with voters and interest groups that actually exist.”
3) If you still believe your statement, then we have something to talk about.
The motley crew of the Democratic party seems to think they can outlaw gravity... And they have no cohesive policy goals or aims that sit well with a lot of the electorate. Imagine the better narrative they could have had if they had not got deranged on this last awakening and stayed disciplined and aligned with votes that actually exist.
Covid made me question my commitments to social democracy. When I saw his risk averse and school marmish the hand of the state was throughout the West, I became significantly more libertarian. I’m not a full bore libertarian because empowering unaccountable billionaires is worse than empowering the state, but freedom loving gentlemen need to steer between two rocky and unappealing shores.
It's striking that MY does not use the word "coalition" anywhere in today's interesting column. I think that a lot, albeit maybe not all, of the phenomena that he is pointing out arise out of the fact that the Democratic Party is now, and really, is now obliged to be, the biggest-tent party anywhere in any democracy. If you are trying to manage a coalition that runs from the Cheneys to proto-Maoists, through a variety of loyalists and funders spread across a relatively wide part of the political spectrum, there will be lots and lots of coordination issues, mysterious process dead-ends, responsibility-diffusion and temporary repositories of power in sometimes hard-to-understand places. That is sometimes going to risk looking incoherent - goes with the territory. If the Republicans were magically transformed back into business-friendly center-right normies uniting behind Nikki Haley (or Brian Kemp or Chris Sununu or Glenn Youngkin (although I have some candidate-specific doubts about his staying power even in an entirely re-normed GOP)), with the MAGAs relegated to a few social-media swamps, the Democrats would look significantly different - and maybe less "hollow", in MY's terminology here.
Some of Matt’s writing on third parties argues that this gets the causality backwards. In a system with strong parties that could exclude certain priorities, the only option is to form your own party. Given how porous American parties are, most factions decide to try to move a party from within, which is how you end up with coalitions with no internal logic.
I largely sympathize with this, but I do wonder if there is just a deep partisan asymmetry here. Some share of the hard core MAGA voters are rust belt Obama and Kerry voters who got bitten by deindustrialization and turned to Trump, but many more of them are just former Bush/McCain/Romney voters who believed equally in their vision of the GOP as they now do Trump's. I wonder if active Democratic voters of all stripes are just more ideological than Republican voters, and thus Dems struggle more with the coordination games because voters have more entrenched views. Should Harris win, I kinda doubt that Haley running on a reset platform would really struggle all that much to win over the vast preponderance of triple Trump voters, even as she articulates a break from him. Meanwhile, Bernie was running against Obamaism in 2015 *while he was the incumbent president.*
A lot of my family hates Trump and sees the risk and would jump off a cliff for older Republican politics. However the tribalism and viewing the Democratic party as a bunch of I can't wait to take all your money and make communism and handouts to whoever is the flavor of the month perspective makes it to where they are just not culturally able to vote Democrat. (And I will save the behavior of a lot of democrats and resentment of big tent politics doesn't help them defect either)
I just turned in my ballot here in California and left many of the races blank. It turned out to be very refreshing and empowering (no vote for you, Ted Lieu). I hope those members of your family will feel the same and give Trump a pass even if they could never vote for Harris.
That seems to be the sentiment but I'm pretty certain more than a few will just not talk about it and check Trump and hold their nose. Many of them had said real patriotic civil servants will make sure it doesn't go too far... That I feel is a scary gamble
Great point, definitely some of this too. I wonder if some of it is a dynamic of education polarization as well. The voters you describe are more likely to understand the stakes of politics in some sense, and revert to their priors even with a bad avatar like trump. Whereas a different group of downstream voters isn't thinking of politics terribly hard and is being wagged along by trump. Ending up in a similar place but for different reasons. On net tho, I think this makes the GOP much more malleable than dems, where a larger share of voters are ideologically baked into their factions even as there is a bigger tent for Dems than the GOP.
No it's not a lack of education we've got medical doctors, nurses, lawyers, some with ivy League pedigrees. The identity politics of the left have been a complete failure to win people like them over even when they agree to a larger extent on items like freedoms for individuals to include LGBT people. They also don't agree with the broader economic goals as stated in the policy positions that are taken by politicians signaling to their left in the popular press. And with the ones being in the medical field they don't forget that anti-vaccine sentiment started on the left so it is a giant mess.
I didn't take it as a slag at all.. I just want to push back (for the peanut gallery) on this view that a lot of Trump voters are some uneducated weirdos from the hinterlands. They have a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and educational attainments. One thing that has been frustrating for me while trying to bridge the gaps and trying to bring as many people over to team Harris and previously team Biden... Is that the same people that say some one needs to " do the work ". Will not do the work at all to really get to know the ins and outs of the variety of Republican neighbors they may have. And our scandalized that people across the aisle from them find a lot of their policies suggestions dumb. I don't disagree that they are dumb a lot of the time either.
There's a logic that explains the last ~24+ years and does not require assuming asymmetry between the parties:
- ANY president can dominate the mechanics of her or his party
- ONLY a president with overwhelming popular support from within the party can avoid being beholden to the party coalition
Biden's presidency is best understood as a deal he made with major elements of the democrat coalition to trade policy focus for supporting Biden's run for a second term. He pursued the unpopular elements of democrat interest groups' policy agendas. For that he got things like states more favorable to him (e.g. S. Carolina) hold officially sanctioned primaries before those that weren't (e.g. Vermont) and lawmakers willingness to sit on their hands after the debate. But he didn't drive the agenda, he had to buy it off.
By contrast, Trump is so popular within the republican party that he can both direct the party and largely ignore interest groups. there are exceptions, like the religious right, but they are exceptions.
Obama comes closer to Trump in terms of both popularity within his party and influence over the coalition. Whether the gap is because of the size and intensity of Trump's most ardent supporters, the asymmetry in how diverse each party's coalition is, or both, is unclear. But note that Obama was able to effectively make Hillary the next nominee by clearing the field of serious, moderate competitors.
I don’t disagree but Matt’s column is focused on the idea THAT the party is hollow not why, as kind of a response to folks who say “it’s not hollow it just pushed out an incumbent president from seeking reelection.”
This is part of why Harris and Biden before her is struggling. Seriously wtf is an “opportunity economy”? You have at most two reconciliation bills in your term, I don’t think ‘reshaping the economy’ is on the table.
Maybe I’m being overly harsh but at least “tariffs, tax cuts and deregulation” is an actionable plan. A bad one, but a real one.
I think the undercurrent of all of this is that every Dem wants to run the Obama 2008 election when the American people really were wanting a transformative break with the past, so you could just run on that and sort out priorities later. But it just sounds like an echo of an echo at this point, like a middle school performance of Henry IV Part I. You get what they’re going for and how it could be great in other circumstances, but they need to just do a little musical instead.
People aren’t voting for Trump because of a well-articulated platform. They are voting for him as the transformative candidate without thinking deeply about where that transformation may lead.
I tend to think "we don't know what Harris wanted to do" wasn't actually _that_ important. she had a super short campaign while being anchored to the Biden administration. She was either going win on "the orange guy took away abortion and is insane" or she wasn't.
But for me personally as a center-left voter, I found the "opportunity economy" stuff to be really meh because the very next sentence in it was always "we're going to give some money to these people" and in an economy limited by inflation and productive capacity, it feels like the 2008 hammer thinking 2024's problems are nails when they totally aren't.
My view is that Trump makes it hard to know what's coming next because he's just a walking talking id. If it turns out that the thing after neoliberalism is some kind of "state capacity" political order we'll look at Biden's attempts at infrastructure the way we look at Carter's relationship with deregulation or Hoover's attempts to stem the great depression. It may be a decade before we can look at Harris' attempt to put together an agenda and see if she was even close to the zeitgeist.
Yep. "targeted giving money to those whom we deem worthy - NOT billionares".
I think it's flat because it doesn't address the central crisis of center-left politics - the ability to actually build/do things and the affordability crisis (which I view as two sides of a coin). As long these are problems in deep blue America, the Dems don't have a message.
You seem to want the party to do three things that are very much in tension.
1) Let highly politically engaged voters feel like they get to decide what the party stands for.
2) Let those voters feel like they get to choose who their canidate is.
3) Select electable politicians so the party can wield power (and thereby effectuate their goals).
Problem is that the most highly engaged voters tend to be the most extreme and what makes them feel represented is for the party to voice support for their values.
Don't get me wrong, the engaged democrat also wants very much to win but the problem is you can't send the primary voter the message that your the best option to implement their relatively far left values and turn around and reassure moderates and swing voters you aren't a Trojan horse.
The only way to achieve both 1 and 3 is to deny the voters direct influence over the canidate and go back to a system of indirect selection where the voters selected local politicians and delegates who then go to the convention and make back room deals to choose the canidate.
I think MY is not talking about making sure highly engaged voters always get their way. Rather, he's asking for a legible process so that, when they don't get their way, those voters can see it's because they've been out-voted or whatever and not because Ezra Klein wrote a thing.
If he just means that it's a bunch of democratic party officials working by some process (the old school convention) I'm a fan but I don't think most voters see that as meaningfully different than Ezra writing a piece. Hell at least they know and respect Pelosi the process would feel like handing the power to faceless individuals they've never heard of (tho see my -- unoriginal maybe I even heard it here -- transferable vote proposal in this thread)
Back room may have been the wrong term since I don't mean to suggest disallowed of improper:. I just mean that the choice is indirect and ai don't think that's an issue if that's literally the official process. No one thought it was scandalous back before we had primaries that the delegates would get together in hotel rooms to hammer out who to pick.
I'm suggesting we go back to that system of indirect representation. It's no different than how Australians select the party leader by a vote of the MPs or other countries select them indirectly via delegates.
Heck it's how we pass laws now and no one is screaming it's a scandal that congress hashes out compromises without consulting the voters directly.
There are a lot of people who call for “more transparency”, which makes this a lot harder. The amount of transparency is probably why Congress is so dysfunctional, with people delivering speeches to an empty room with a cspan camera rather than having actual floor debate aimed at each other.
That's why I think the solution for primaries is transferable votes. Let people express their values by assigning their votes to Greenpeace or the ACLU or the new democrat group and that way it feels like an expansion of control/democracy because it brings in people who weren't voting in primaries before.
But it simultaneously actually shifts how choices are made to people/institutions that do this professionally and changes their incentives from being maximally uncooperative (do what we want or we won't encourage our people to vote) to making compromises and selling it to their constituency.
In practice this is kinda like how unions used to work in that the union membership would follow leadership recommendations.
A lot of “good government” stuff has a totally undeserved halo. Examples:
o) Banning earmarks made Congress much more dysfunctional. It was penny wise and pound foolish.
o) McCain-Feingold was a terrible idea. Soft money and the like were a way for party structures to restrain their crazier members, and now the crazies have discovered they can raise campaign money themselves by being conspicuously crazy in public.
But to make any of these points you have to argue against sanctified values like “transparency” and “accountability” and the like. I’d suggest all of it both reflects and contributes to a lack of trust. You’re more willing to cut politicians some slack if you trust them, but cutting them no slack makes their performance worse which makes you trust them less — rinse, lather, repeat.
And all of this is happening at the same time that our delightful Supreme Court has made it close to impossible to prosecute actual corruption short of explicitly saying “I’ll vote for the bill for $100k” on video.
See I think describing the old system as “back room deals” reflects the thing that’s changed. It used to deliver all three of these, at least somewhat, because grassroots party members and voters had some trust in the people they elected. They knew the local leadership, who knew the state leadership — there was a web of trust and social proof.
Clearly it wasn’t perfect and wasn’t directly representative, because the push for primaries did come from somewhere. But the backroom-deals view of how it worked reflects the current total lack of trust in the parties. And indeed parties can’t make people feel represented if people have decided upfront that parties can’t represent them.
Neither party can go back to backroom dealing; it seems to lack fairness and denies the candidate any apparent legitimacy. Bernie’s attacks on Biden clearing the field didn’t really stick, but the same attacks on Clinton were devastating. The difference was that Biden already had electoral legitimacy from the SC win and it happened in public.
I shouldn't have used the word backroom because it suggests it's illegitimate. As I suggested above you can create the same effect in a way that feels more democratic by letting people assign their primary vote to groups/institutions. The net effect is still that a smaller group makes a deal to choose the canidate based substantially on electability but it appears to (and imo genuinely does) increase the democratic legitimacy of the primary because instead of a small fraction of people who remember to vote in some early primary all party members can assign their vote to the institution/organization/coalition they favor. Plus you get the benefit of letting people vote expressively for their values without it conflicting with pragmatism because of the indirect nature.
The whole take on "they should have nominated Bullock in 2020" makes a lot of sense, until you realize that voters matter, too. Biden was very popular among core Democratic voters, i.e., black voters.
Moreover, Biden was obviously vetted in a way that others were not. In a high stakes election (remember who he was running against, and remember that two Supreme Court justices would likely have retired during a Trump term), why go with a less known, and hence more risky choice?
The idea that less known is “riskier” is perhaps narrowly true, but why is risk bad? Why is risk so bad that we should trade off expected value for risk? Bullock, conditional on not blowing up in the primary, had higher expected value.
I said conditional on not hollowing up in the primary. An actuary might say “expected value is undefined because you are dividing by zero” but that does not mean the EV was 0.
Let me be more clear: Bullock showed in the primary that he could not win. If his expected value were truly greater than Biden’s, he’d have beaten Biden. But he didn’t.
Perhaps there’s some tiny margin of difference - points of a percentage point - under which chance comes into play and Bullock may have had 0.1-0.3% more of the popular vote. But any more than that, and he should have been able to beat Biden outright. They both were in the exact same moderate lane; it’s not like they were appealing to different voters. Biden just *won*.
Matt's comment that upon meeting Bullock in person he thought he was very charismatic reminded me of how often we heard in 2016 that Hillary was "great in small groups." Yeah, that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee.
Harris proves that you don’t have to be the kind of person who does well in a primary to be a strong general election candidate. You’re just doing something very different in the two cases.
I don't think I'd call Harris a strong general election candidate at this point. She looked like she might be one early on, but in retrospect that was just her benefitting from a) not being Joe Biden and b) absurdly low expectations. She's turned out to be pretty mediocre.
That logic assumes that the best primary candidate is necessarily the best candidate for the general. I strongly believe this is not the case. I also think the “well known” advantage is much stronger in the primary. A general candidate gets tons of attention and becomes very famous very fast.
I agree that primaries are suboptimal for selecting the best candidate in the abstract.
I don't think the actual 2020 primary was a clear example of that. The strongest failure mode is that primary winners cater to the extreme wings, which compromises their ability to win the general. The "well known" advantage is also a potential failure mode, but I'd say that it's not *inherently* a failure mode: whether the candidate it produces ultimately fails, tends to depend on idiosyncratic factors, and if anything, as Obama demonstrated, a well-known candidate can more easily ride that fame and celebrity to an outright victory. The core of this second failure mode thus is simply that fame risks improperly elevating an incompetent candidate who botches the general election (which, let's remember, is what would have been the narrative if Trump had lost 2016).
Neither of these failure modes really seem to have been problems with Biden. He didn't run as an extremist. He had name rec, but he proved to be the most legislatively effective president in my adult life, rather than an unprepared celebrity.
IMO, anything else beyond that is just speculation -- it's not much more rational than sitting around debating which comic book heroes could beat each other, just with a more dignified sheen of Serious Politics. I can say that I think Warren or Sanders would have beaten Trump by 10 points instead of Biden's 5, and it would have been only slightly less rational than anyone backing Matt's opinion that Bullock could have probably won an extra point or two over Biden's total. The Flash is totally faster than Quicksilver, duh.
Give bullock biden’s name recognition and fund raising and things would have been different. Party institutions should give money and attention to the most effective candidates not the most established
This wasn't happening in 2023-24 also. We'd dream about our moderate-coded Midwestern Governor Heroes Whitmer or Shapiro being the candidate (or Polis, or Cooper) if a primary happened, yet polls always showed Newsom having dramatically more support than any of them.
Perhaps the mechanism to raise their profiles is just constant appearances on MSNBC and CNN to increase name recognition--but strategically on programs where the hosts will ask them softball questions and not attack them from the left? (Say, more Nicole Wallace appearances and avoid progressives like Joy Reid?) Need to get a memo out like Murdoch was able to do to help DeSantis emerge as the chosen successor (although... yeah that didn't work either).
I agree that in the abstract it probably seems like optimal institutional design to favor the guy who has a 0.1-0.3% edge -- if for no other reason than that "those inches are all around us". I would also add that I would agree that Bullock might have had a more optimally distributed EC coalition.
But in the real world, I'm not sure that the 0.1-0.3% edge is worth whatever distortions in existing institutions may have gotten us there. Maybe they'd have been things I ideologically endorse, like Ranked Choice! Maybe they'd have been practical policies that I'd also nevertheless endorse simply by virtue of observing them work well.
But since we haven't really gamed any of that out... my zeroth-order approximation is to invoke my small-c conservatism and the principle of Chesterton's Fence. We need a comprehensive vision for a different politics and a different party, one that can remain nationally competitive while in the middle of a major self-overhaul. And that's just an inherently REALLY SUPER FUCKING DIFFICULT thing to design. Moreover, it tends to get washed out by vibes in any given election anyways.
To clarify, when I said "riskier," I meant high potential upside but high potential downside. So, you might be correct is saying that Bullock had higher expected value, as measured by expected pct of vote.
But, I don't think that is the correct metric. Given the opponent and associated cost of losing, the correct metric was chance of winning, and I think that a relative unknown would likely have a lower chance of winning.
This absolute aversion to "risk" is why the whole Biden debacle happened in the first place. The party didn't want to "risk" losing the vaunted "incumbency advantage" by having a real primary and potentially having a new, better candidate in early 2024 instead of late July.
Black voters didn't go with Biden because he was super popular with them overall. It has more to do with him being more well known among older black primary voters I'm the Deep South (specifically South Carolina) than any other candidate and the perception that he was a stronger candidate than the others. Had the party rallied around someone else similarly, many of those voters likely would have as well.
If anything, Bullock was one of the safest possible candidates available! A young(ish), decent-looking, charismatic Democrat and a seasoned politician who had multiple wins in red state. What's the likelihood that he would've had more baggage than Biden did? I feel like it's pretty low if only because he hadn't spent 5 decades in high-level positions like Biden.
Re 2024, Bullock lost his 2020 race for Senate by 55-45, so that does not mark him as a particularly strong candidate in 2024. Also, he has no foreign policy experience, which is not what you want in a Presidential candidate in 2024
He outperformed every Democrat in Montana, including Biden, by double digits in an otherwise highly polarized election. That's pretty impressive.
And lack of foreign policy experience is separate from effectiveness at winning a general election. Obama and Trump both lacked foreign policy experience.
As a resident, I will let you know now that any chance of turning Montana purple is done. We are a proud, independent people, and have to be since there are so damn few of us. I would love for us to continue balancing red vs. blue, and yet I have to say that it is not to be. The Ds brand is tarnished beyond redemption here for at least three cycles. Four EV and two senators lost, simply because triumphant blues in 2020 couldn't keep their d*cks in their pants. You decide how much of that is on you and yours.
Nevertheless, candidates who lost their last statewide election are rarely, if ever, successful Presidential candidates.
As for Obama and Trump, the Democrats were going to win in 2008 no matter what. And Trump performed very poorly. He underperformed the fundamentals and received a smaller pct of the vote than the Republican candidate in most Congressional districts. More importantly, foreign policy is a far more salient issue this year than is the norm.
I think I am unclear whether we are talking about 2020 or 2024. You seemed to initially be talking about 2024.
And, yes, he performed well. But, so did Tester in 2018, yet he is trailing in the polls this year. And honestly, Montana is the little leagues. Bullock's popularity MIGHT transfer nationally, but to say that he would definitely be a better choice in 2020 than Biden seems a bit of a stretch.
Both parties lack formal coordinating mechanisms. The Republicans' de facto mechanism has become some sort of interplay between Trump and his mob of voters. The Democrats now coordinate via the interplay between some high-level politicians and cultural institutions (traditionally reliable media, celebrities, academia to a certain extent, etc.).
One often hears "who cares if Idea X is dominant in the media/academia/etc., Democratic politicians don't believe X!" But if these institutions are an important component in solving Democrats' coordination problems and setting the agenda, shouldn't their ideas matter a bit?
He performs a pretty heavy filtering function on them, and as Jonathan points out, he skews towards abundance-agenda types. That seems like about the best kind of elite for him to be -- one who's RIGHT.
After all, that's a core tenet of Matthew Yglesias Thought, is it not? That it's really important to just get the balls and strikes of policy correct, because that paves the way for us to build the case for more discretionary policy decisions.
I think on subjects that Ezra has put a lot of time into, he is likely to be able to filter very well. But on subjects where he has not, he likely defers to heavily to the broader ecosystem of academia. But I think the incentives in academia right now are really messed up, and you can see the number of retractions, corrections, or inability to reproduce results especially in social sciences are highlighting that.
Except that many of those get results get layered into the broader explanation of "how things work" and its very hard to unwind that process once its happened.
I broadly agree, but I think that on net, Ezra is a force for good.
I somewhat disagree with the characterization that he defers heavily to the broader ecosystem. Generally speaking, my read is that on unfamiliar subjects, he *does* ask a lot of just basic questions to gather more information, and so he often (in those cases) misses out on the sorts of more pressing or combative questions that he asks when he's more in his element or having a hostile (semi-hostile sounds more like his style) interviewee.
I think what balances him out onto the net positive is that he rarely just leaves topics alone (unless they're dingbatty one-offs like that octopus shit), but rather comes back, often with opposing or heterodox interviewees, and pushes and prods on the topic. Sometimes this takes him a while, so I can certainly see how it would seem like he just defers and therefore legitimizes questionable research; but even when he's at his plodding worst, I think he's helped significantly improve public discourse with these revisitations - for instance, on COVID policy.
What I think is sad is that he rarely gets credit for them; his appreciation of complexity and embrace of uncertainty means that he's less willing than the Josh Barro types to just unequivocally declare some liberal excess "wrong". I think he rightly comes down to the usual conclusion that even when liberals are proven wrong on the facts, at least they're trying to make things better, while the conservatives are usually wrong in spirit -- they just go around breaking things and waging grievances so that they can keep giving the rich tax cuts.
Was surprised he had Charles Fain Lehman on the other day to talk about crime--I think he is genuinely open to hearing views that are outside the progressive norm but are worthwhile to consider.
Did you here his recent rant^H^H^H^H post-election podcast? It didn't sound like deferring, it sounded like "y'all need to pull your heads out of your asses or you'll be crushed like grapes over and over and over." :-)
I think this correlates to MY's observations over the last few years that dumb left-wing ideas hurt left-wing institutional capacity more than general institutional capacity.
I suppose I might need to read the book to get this information, but what specific changes (legislatively or in Democratic party rules) would need to occur for the hollowness to be solved? I gues doing away with primaries would be the big one, but that seems harder to achieve.
Personally, I think that it involves a holy war against The Groups. Nationalize them (under the party), wear their levers of power like a skinsuit, and dismantle any who resist. Create a new power structure that better performs the job of mediating interest groups' concerns into party establishment opinion.
Side note: That last bit is what The Groups were supposed to be doing originally -- speaking for various interests, mainly intersectionalized identity/affinity groups (old NY machine politics used to refer to these as ethnic "pillars"). The problem is that they got compromised by the Long March of leftist academics through academia, and now basically are dominated by various ideological leftists who purport to speak for their pillars but really don't reflect majority opinion -- not even under a weaker definition like "majority of the left and center-left without alienating the center-right".
PS: I think it's actually to Harris's credit that despite absolutely being a creature of these institutions, she's managed to escape their grip and basically run as a Never Trumper to capture as much of the Haley vote as possible. I literally would never have put that on my bingo card; she's FAR exceeded my expectations there (in a good way).
I don't understand how that's supposed to work. Ultimately the boogeyman 'The Groups' that keeps being invoked here is just another way of saying 'left-of-centre elites', and they will always have an impact on the Democrat party because that is the party which is for left-of-centre voters (in the main). What does 'nationalize them (under the party)' even mean? You can't prevent people forming NGOs, academics writing research papers etc.
Another issue is that "The Groups" are not just established left-of-center elites--they're full of left-wing recent college graduates that genuinely believe in their progressive values and live in circles--both online and in reality--where those far-left progressive values are popular and, often, seen as non-negotiable moral imperatives. Advancement in this world--to get to "elite" status--is through establishing your progressive bonafides, not just by tweeting but often by working in The Groups. Young people like this will always be willing to take jobs at the latest Group established by some rich donor(s) for a cause said donor(s) wants to fund (think Sunrise or whatnot supplanting more established--and willing to moderate--environmental groups).
You're right that they are "left of center elites" who have ALWAYS had an impact on the party... but by that same token, the specific problems of The Groups (too much antagonism and undue pressure on electeds, not speaking for their own pillars, etc) were never issues until the current era. That's not to say there haven't been OTHER issues at OTHER times, but just that this is the set of issues we face now.
My idea of "nationalizing" them is to basically provide a platform that serves as a national funding clearinghouse - a something-for-everyone, all-sizes-of-donors-welcome, one-size-fits-all project. Make a big push to get every candidate onto this one platform, lure all the groups onto it with a simple and frictionless process for getting money, and impose the sort of discipline against spammy/creepy messages that donors have been pining for for years. Use it to optimize coordination and redirect money from viral-but-hopeless campaigns (like McGrath's to unseat McConnell) into useful ones where that money can flip swing seats.
[Ed: Note that ActBlue is kinda already doing something like this; I'd probably hijack it if I was actually tasked with executing this plan.]
And then you tighten the fist. By being an indispensible, superior platform, you ensure that any activist group who steps too far out of line is guaranteed to wither away, simply by the selection effect of having to raise money away from the superior platform.
Control the money going into ALL the institutions, and you control the party. I'd pair this tightening with a secondary push on the electeds to pass a raft of nationwide reforms abolishing grants to NGOs and bringing state capacity back in-house. Make SF and CA stop handing millions and billions to NGOs to build "affordable" housing at $700k/unit. Stop hiring expensive consultants to do civil servants' work. Reform NEPA and CEQA so we're not spending millions on pointless environmental reviews. Basically, starve the NGOs and other Groups of all money outside of the central platform, and then make it clear that while they're perfectly free to advocate for their causes and study their policy arenas, performative bullshit, toxic infighting, and jockeying to override the party agenda set by voters and their elected leaders will not be tolerated.
I'm not saying this is a perfect plan or anything. It's just, if you tasked me with singlehandedly reforming the party to be less hollow, this is how I'd go about it. I'd build the platform, and use it to centralize and rationalize agenda-setting so that The Groups are no longer incentivized to act out in order to achieve their goals (which, btw, fuels the other side's propaganda). Policy and progress will still happen, but they will be the result of strategic campaigns and coherent messaging to the public, not slapdash swinging-for-the-fences legal cases and "one wierd trick" nutty policy ideas like student loan cancellation.
When I write my history of 21st century party politics (spoiler alert: nagonnahappen), the Ur moment will be the simultaneous rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. That's when the parties diverged. Both movements were crazy and possessed with crackpot ideas. The difference is that the Tea Party was focused on electoral politics and overthrowing Republican institutions in order to achieve both their electoral and their policy ends. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, made its primary focus ideological purity and a 100% removal from the dirty business of politics and elections. Instead, they used their virtue and their ethical superiority to enforce an ideological constraint on the Democratic party irrespective of electoral outcomes, in which they had zero interest.
The Democrats are trying really hard to cast off the straitjacket of the Occupy legacy whereas Trump is the personification of the Tea Party, in its expression of pure Id, and the party shows no sign that it has any intention or ability to dispose of that.
I appreciate you taking the time to write such a comprehensive reply, and I feel quite bad in saying after all that it seems like that very obviously wouldn't work, but FWIW here is one of the key problems:
'Basically, starve the NGOs and other Groups of all money outside of the central platform'
You appear to be operating on a model where money is a scare commodity in this space, and I simply don't think that's true. Very rich people and/or very large organisations are always going to have large budgets, in aggregate, for the key task of lobbying politicians to do what they want. And they can always donate to politicians directly.
FWIW, it's an idea I've been toying with for a while, so this isn't my first formulation of it.
And accordingly, the only defense I really have is that "it's still a work in progress". Which may come across as chickenshit (I kind of half-consider it that myself!), so apologies for that, but it's also the truth.
So, that's just to say, I actually appreciate any constructive criticism you can offer. Poking holes in the plan can only make it stronger.
To your specific point, I agree that competition is impossible to stave off. Change is inevitable, and even my system would eventually find itself obsolete and widely despised, just as the NIMBYs are now finding their hateful framework to be. But the core idea is to make the platform everything to everyone -- easy on the back end (distributing the cash), easy on the front end (donating the cash), easy everywhere. Sure, there's always going to be outside money, but the idea is to be the place where almost ALL money WANTS to be, even despite the costs (imposed party discipline) that it puts on them.
The NGOs, for instance, would be making more money than they could otherwise, and they'd be very happy with that. What separates even the noblest of noble NGOers from the hippie professional protestor population is that the NGOers like creature comforts like dogs, apartments that don't stink, and parmesan cheese that doesn't come from a can. Those things cost money, and NGOers are like any of the rest of us in the professional world in that they like making more money. In fact, if they can make more money while still being able to tell themselves they're doing good in the world, then we've got them right where we want them! Happy, complacent people don't wage self-destructive petition campaigns to get their bosses to take a position on Gaza.
Happy, complacent people who aren't distracting themselves with toxic internal NGO politics are also ones who work harder at their jobs. Millionaires and billionaires like people who are competent and effective at their jobs, especially when it comes to handing them money. Again, it's not something that would all happen in one day, but the positive way of framing my plan (rather than as a negative jihad against The Groups) is to create an ecosystem where people doing prosocial, effective pro-progress work are outcompeting those who do toxic Group shit.
Yeah political donations are almost unregulated, it's easy enough to get around a centralized system and they'll have a good point anyway. That's one of the more surprising advantages we have on the left in US politics- we actually do have some money to throw around.
As I responded to CW, the point of my plan is to make the centralized platform even easier than the easy alternatives.
Some of the most successful and effective enterprises often start with a simple guiding principle like that and then use it to drive around whatever obstacles present themselves along the way. So, while you CAN just say "it's impossible to make a platform easier than the easy alternatives", and declare that you've won the debate, it's ultimately something that can't be proven either way until someone actually accomplishes it or fails at it.
I conceptualize the complaint as pretty narrowly about selection bias and poor organizational structure within Democratic-aligned organizations. For example, the guy who runs for union president is by definition not an average member. So, groups that purport to represent people need to have mechanisms to ensure that its leadership does effectively represent the views/interests of its members. Different organizations can be better or worse at doing this. An obvious issue issue that Matt has addressed before is that if a group is funded by foundation grants rather member contributions it really has no incentive to be responsive to ordinary people. This, I think, is where the hollowness is. The party elites, other than a handful of well-respected elected officials, do not have a clear relationship to party members and can't convincingly speak for them in internal debates. So, the party just tries to avoid having internal debates.
If Latino civil rights groups or the NAACP had by 2021 started calling for a border crackdown--based on polling of Latino and Black popular opinion, respectively--they would have faced huge public outcry, huge resignations amongst staff, and huge loss of donors. Same if they started voicing pro-policing positions, or opposition to trans women's participation in women's sports, etc. This is why the pro-choice groups were tweeting about Defund in 2020... some sort of Group mind meld (or as David puts it above, "the Long March of leftist academics through academia" resulting in the Groups' "dominant[ion], by various ideological leftists who purport to speak for their pillars but really don't reflect majority opinion"). I don't know how to stop this from continuing to happen: even though their positions may often be unpopular--and all the progressive positions together absolutely toxic--there still is a constant stream of progressive donors to fund these causes and true-believing college graduates to work for them.
I'm sympathetic with wanting to punch left against "the groups", but I think the hard work to be done is work of persuasion. The left still needs activists, organizers, non-profits, all this infrastructure...it just needs them to be organized along different principles/value different things/prioritize differently.
So the hard work is to convince the people that think those things to...think other things.
Any time I talk to anyone on the left who says some version of "how can the voters be so stupid to vote for Trump" I turn it into: if you can't explain why they made their decision without calling them stupid, you don't understand enough to convince them of anything you actually want to have happen. It's an argument that shame, purity tests and out-grouping people is a losing strategy.
I agree that it's a losing strategy. I think that the very nature and structure of those groups pretty much ensures that they do it.
You say their job is to do persuasion... which is true... so why aren't they doing it? They spend all their time doing purity tests.
I think the problem is the nature of the groups themselves. When your day job is literally to *advocate* for something all day long, you come to believe that it's the most important thing in the world. Even if we ignore groupthink, it's just true that advocates get tunnel vision. They see themselves as moral crusaders, not just doing a job delivering services to customers. Anyone who disagrees with them is either an obstacle to be destroyed or a menace to be ostracized, not a stakeholder to cater to.
These organizations are not small-d democratic. They're insular and guild-like. That is why they do not persuade.
That is also no way to run a political party.
I was struck by what happened in Missouri this week. 58% voted for Trump, and 51% voted for Amendment 3. Assuming all pro-lifers voted against 3, that means 10% of Missourians voted to protect abortion but FOR the one man most responsible for them having had to vote to protect abortion.
The advocates and all the rest of the state party organizations are the ones who moved heaven and earth to get Amendment 3 on the ballot. But what this did was allow voters to have their grievances AND their progress too.
The advocates were working under the theory that 3 would drive turnout for Dems, and maybe persuade some voters to vote for Dems. But the voters themselves have clearly obliterated this theory. I posit that if 3 hadn't been on the ballot, Dems would have still lost across the state, but more voters would have voted for Democrats. Maybe the Dems could have eaten into the GOP's supermajority in the state!
The point is, in wide swaths of the country, we don't even bother actually telling the voters "vote for me, and I'll do this for you". We just throw everything up against the wall and expect them to ALSO vote for us because we're such nice people -- and all the while, our Groups run rampant and tell THEM that they're shitty people.
All of this needs to be rethought now. We are not actually as nice as we think we are.
Primaries are a big part of the problem. Selecting a candidate in a two-party system is a very different decision process from electing an official. If you want the process to be super-democratic and leave it all to the voters, you need jungle primaries and ranked choice voting.
Score voting, please ("rank each candidate on a 0-5 scale"). Why is RCV such a popular ask? I always remind people that RCV is not, in fact, a voting system, it's just a kind of ballot. You actually need to pick a voting system on top of RCV, and if you don't pick one, you get IRV by default which is mathematically dumb/unstable. I like score voting because
(1) it's easier for the voter to vote on score ballots than RCV ballots when there are many candidates
(2) computing the winner is simple
(3) the result is very legible (a simple average for each candidate)
(4) if you ask voters after the election "how happy are you with the outcome?", you do it with a score vote. IIUC the best way to maximize the answer to this question is to use a score ballot in the voting booth too
(5) it lets voters express strength of preference: "I like A a little more than B but a lot more than C"
(6) it lets voters express equal preference (which RCV could theoretically do but somehow never does)
The other standard PSA: all single-winner voting systems including score voting should not be used for multi-winner elections because they are nonproportional, vulnerable to gerrymandering, and deny voter choice.
Footnote: RCV and score voting could both allow voters to abstain from expressing an opinion about specific candidates they know nothing about, but somehow this is never allowed. 🤷♂️
The issues isn't that the relevant folks don't have legal authority - they do!! It's that they don't actually exercise it. It's a cultural issue where, as things are increasingly nationalized, down-ballot folks are increasingly selected based on nationalized opinions about them. This discourage idiosyncrasy and independence on their part. They know that their ongoing success is tied to how they're covered by the media and how their thought of by The Groups.
In the end, its voters who have ceded this authority by (rationally) not bothering do invest the time and effort to think for themselves a lot about each and every candidate they must select. This isn't new in itself, but the people and organizations that form people's opinions have shifted a lot in the past 50 years. Power law social networks and media replaced the 'flatter' media and local endorsers people farmed their opinons out to in the past. Whereas in the past, a national pol would have to fight for large and diverse set of endorsers, there's much less to do now.
In the past, you could have local leaders and elected officials who would be willing to exercise their legal authority while trusting that their voters would remain their voters. But now, these folks know that they will succeed or fail based on how the constellation of media and Groups view them because those are the places their voters now go to form opinions.
I don't really see much of this "legal authority". Even if there are countless arcane procedures sitting on the bylaws books of the state and local parties, just waiting to get leveraged for bare-knuckles power plays by moderates to edge out extremist primary winners... the voters would revolt. Calling that a "cultural issue" is like saying that the only reason Congress and the various stage legislatures haven't exercised their Article V powers to amend the Constitution and seize a bipartisan dictatorial control is because of a "culture" against doing so.
I think it's more just that Jacksonian Democracy is really popular and really dumb, and pulled us on the wrong track towards conceiving of our politics as a series of zero-sum head-to-head matchups -- which, when it predictably fails to either (A) produce politicians of good moral character and quality nor (B) produce the sort of politicians who can "compromise" with each other, as the national mythology goes... well, it just simply drives everyone to the even MORE idiotic conclusion that only "the people" can exercise power, so we need to keep circumscribing those naughty politicians' powers and defanging any institution (party bosses, etc) who would dare interfere with "the people's" right to elect politicians who refuse to moderate or compromise.
It's a bunch of self-contradictory nonsense, but it's also one of the most enduring aspects of our political culture. For most of our history, whenever we're given an option to reform, we reform in THIS direction, instead of in the directions that might ever give parties more methods to discipline politicians (like party lists, RCV etc).
The contradictions are why it's not surprising that the whole thing is starting to collapse. It's based on a bunch of dumb mythologizing, and it's not being replaced with proper reforms (again, party lists under PR, RCV, etc) fast enough to stop the collapse.
But that's the point. In the past, voters trusted their representatives. Now, they trust Rachel Maddow, and that's absolutely a shift that's effected how parties operate. It's not about bare-knuckle power plays, it's about who voters put their faith in, and currently, that's not folks in state or, really, federal legislatures, let alone party operatives.
But I think we agree more than we disagree. Because of zero-sum thinking, our political leaders have been unwilling to put forth credible reforms to the systems that both parties could get behind. This has happened while norms that developed during the 19th and 20th century to make the country governable have been eroded during the 21st century in service of short-sighted political gain.
I think the problem is at some level our system is currently zero-sum with winner take all and so the question is this: voters for better or worse prefer Jacksonian Democracy, it is baked to how we are in is country––so how do we reform the system for better outcomes that is more representative of moderates? Currently people move to the extreme because the incentives call for it. Most people aren't slow boringers and only pay attention to politics during the last weeks of the election and also pay attention to only the most outrageous, thereby radicalizing people. The truth is the only way to strengthen the parties is to strengthen the system in which they complete. The president despite having far less formal power than a King, in terms of cultural power really is not much different in terms of defining the terms for everyone else in the party. The voters would gladly choose a king unless there are incentives not to. So reforming the electoral college so that its proportional in states, rather than winner take all, getting rid of first past the post elections, having ranking choice and run-off elections will help this empowering the moderates to have more voice in the party and creating a situation where voters don't feel the system is zero-sum(which I think they do). The party can only discipline the groups if both moderate members actually have both structural and cultural power when currently the inverse is true. As long as cultural and structural incentives promote extremism, nothing will change. In fact nationalizing "the Groups" will empower them even more. The more engaged people are, the more extreme they are and the more you spurn the people most likely to vote for you, in a system that promotes extremism the less value there is catering to the moderates. In a weird way you have to make "the Groups" themselves more moderate since in the massive coalition, those who scream the loudest will always win. Unless you can alter the dynamic of people getting more extreme the more they engage, things won't change, since moderates rarely use their power in effective ways.
I don’t know if I agree with your analysis about what the centralization would do to The Groups, though. The whole point of the plan I discussed elsewhere on the thread, after all, is to pacify them and reorient them towards better elucidations of progressive politics.
I'm more with Matt A, as I think the nationalization of politics makes more people extreme. Incentives have something do with it, at the same time, as the world has become more extreme, with technology etc etc. I actually think when you nationalize groups you mainstream them, and their voices win over the moderates. My experience is you don't pacify them, they end up pacifying you.
Matt's post today is a just a barely concealed wish that we were in a parliamentary system and were less democratic.
There's some strategy around the edges that could be improved and I guess that matters in a close election , but ultimately the party was able to talk down it's leader, install a successor that had the most democratic legitimacy, rally around that successor, moderate on policy and silence dissent all in a few weeks without any votes. That's extraordinarily robust. It's not clear the idealized electable candidate would actually clear a primary-- they usually don't as Matt fully knows.
We will see what happens. There's no need to doomloop. But ultimately the American people have been presented a clear choice and the other side isn't hiding its intentions. If Harris loses that's on the American people. And honesty if she wins it's on the American people that this is so close. You can get lost in the weeds on optimal strategy and lose sight of the broadest sense of there is democratic legitimacy and the people get a say in it. Europeans have maintained cordon sontiares for decades in similar elections while under much more extreme economic duress. If Americans are choosing fascism purely because of moderate inflation, or because they actually want a strongman, welp that's on them. I can't knock the Democrats for having slightly suboptimal coordination. They've more or less done their part. This up to America now.
There’s a self-reinforcing doom loop dynamic: People view parties as illegitimate, so they weaken the parties; the weaker parties don’t perform very well, reinforcing perceptions of illegitimacy, so people then weaken the parties more. And so on.
Primaries are the key institution responsible for this state of affairs, in my view. Can’t have a proper party when the party network isn’t in charge of who’s included. No other country** does it this way, and for good reason.
** Sure, arguably Argentina, but is Argentine politics an advertisement for this system?
The notion that Steve Bullock or Michael Bennet (seriously, wtf) would be an optimal candidate for Democrats to run in 2020 is absurd. MAYBE Klobuchar would have been better (I think a more credible argument would be that she was a superior VP choice) but she also finished a distant 5th in the 2020 primary, so I'm skeptical.
Biden had the name recognition to beat Trump during a time where campaigning and GOTV was much more difficult (remember Covid?). He also had a million years of experience in the Senate and eight years as VP. Because of this, Biden had a tremendously successful 2021-22. Does Matt really think that Bennet or Bullock or Klobuchar would have had the same success getting bills passed into law? I know substance has become secondary to appearance and vibes, but ability to actually get something done has to count for something.
With all that being said, clearly Biden should have announced in the beginning of 2023 that he wasn't running for re-election. Or should he have? There would have been an ugly primary in 2023-24. Would Harris have run a sensible moderate campaign, or would she have gone far left like she did in 2019?
Ultimately I think that the party did the best that it could under tremendously difficult circumstances. None of what Matt lays out is an indicator that the party is hollow. If anything, Members of Congress not calling on Biden to drop out after the debate was pure cowardice, but as Matt showed, other parts of the party stepped in to ensure that the party followed the will of its members, as it did in nominating Biden in 2020.
Finishing fifth in the primary is neither here nor there as to how well someone would do in the general election. Once you are the nominee, the things that make you fifth rather than first are gone, but the skills that moved you from unheard-of to fifth may still matter.
It will probably turn out that Biden hanging around, being replaced late, Harris replacing him without a primary and turning out to be as good a candidate as the Democrats could hope for was the best possible outcome in this the best of all possible worlds.
The funny thing is that the other party is just one guy. It doesn't matter if everybody else in the party converges on one position, if the guy comes out and says the opposite, that's their position now.
That does have the effect of making the party more coherent and decisive - even one incoherent guy is more coherent than a structural blob of millions of people.
Well, the funny part is when people try to put meat on the bones of his ideology. He doesn't have one, so if you're a Republican politician, you can stake out a position you think he'll take, but then he'll throw you under the bus because he doesn't care.
In the unforgettable words of Jeff Maurer: “Policy is to Trump as a leaky sink is to a porn film: it’s there because *something* has to be there, but other elements are what people care about.”
I think the real problem here is the primary system amplifies the tension between the expressive/value aspect of party identity and the practical one. Now that the engaged voters in the two parties differ substantially in their values/vision of a good society a primary the primary voters don't want to expressively affiliate themselves with someone who doesn't share -- or at least not offend -- those values. That's a big problem because the best way to be electable is to show the swing/centerist voter you respect and don't positively reject their values.
The only way to square this circle is to let voters choose delegates rather than canidates. The delegates can champion the values of the party and let the primary voter expressively affiliate and then go into the back room and pick the canidate who represents the best electability/outcomes compromise. And that really would make everyone happier because those engaged voters really want to both win and express their values and the current system forces them to choose between the two.
I use this example a lot: In 2021 Virginia Republicans held a state convention instead of a primary election and they nominated Glenn Youngkin for governor. He's one of the best nominees relative to state political affiliation in recent history.
You’re burning a lot of ink (or 1s and 0s) hyper-critiquing the Democratic Party. It’s running well on all cylinders right now in a historic context. After yesterday’s “Puerto Rico is a floating island of garbage” Republican message in Madison Square Garden I don’t need to be lectured by any alleged Democrat about the bureaucratic fine points of running my party. The GOP doesn’t even know Puerto Ricans are Americans.
If you actually watch the full 11 min video, the GOP crowd cheer at the mention of Latinos and Puerto Ricans and groan and boo a little at the jokes about them.
It's not centrism, it's about interpreting a joke in it's context.
If you hire a roast comedian to perform at a funeral and roast the deceased, that's a choice that might be worth criticizing because it might not be appropriate for the event. But picking over the *jokes* to decide if they are "the real message" of whoever hired the comedian is a waste of time.
Pleez. If a comedian at a Harris rally had said something similar about Iowa, the outrage on this board be visible from Mars. No one would accept "that's not our message" as an excuse.
They might may say it's bad optics, and if people were flipping out it would be over potential lost votes, not over some idea that they are offended on behalf of Iowans.
A strong party would not have let a guy go on stage during "closing arguments" to make a vile joke that led to Puerto Rican celebrities with *tens of millions* of followers to immediately denounce them and announce their support for Harris. Sometimes campaigning is not rocket science.
Making the argument that it's bad optics and bad politics in one thing. Making the argument that it's a "vile joke" is an entirely different thing. Tony H could make that joke anywhere in NYC or Florida, where tons of Puerto Ricans live, and have no problems as long as the crowd was warmed up to and engaged with his style of humor. I've heard him, and plenty of other comedians, make 100x more offensive jokes and they direct the majority of them at "in-groups" friends, groups of people in America they like, etc...
It's the whole thing with this kind of comedy. He actually asked if there were Latinos in the audience, got cheers and then made that joke. It's not about punching down. If you don't like it, fine, but it's not "vile".
I agree it was bad politics, and it was probably bad comedy, too because the crowd wasn't receptive to him except when he made jokes about Democrats. But getting offended by the comedy is just so silly.
Uhh, how was he steelmanning/excusing things? He said "when compared to the awful things they just said about PR", the Democratic party is going like gangbusters.
I'm willing to make a lot of excuses for various things being misinterpreted or overstated, but I think that, in a highly-scripted televised political rally run by the candidate's own campaign the week before the election, basically everything said on stage by an invited speaker at the event qualifies as part of the "message" being delivered unless expressly rejected and/or denounced (I'll accept either one) by the candidate. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The campaign did put out a message shortly thereafter that this said this wasn't their message. The problem for Trump isn't that he had this guy at an event say this thing. Its that what this guy said aligns with 98% of the rest of their messaging.
Ok - but the guy is clearly speaking as a comedian. He's crafting (offensive) jokes, not political arguments. If you want to hear truly offensive jokes, watch clips of him at a roast, like the roast of Tom Brady from earlier this year.
Whether it was irresponsible for Trump's campaign to have him is a different question, but they have to be understood as jokes, from a guy who specializes in insult comedy, and not as political political messages.
If you want a campaign to say "The jokes my comedian said are not my message" I guess that's fine, and might be the right move politically, but I can't imagine myself ever being personally offended. I think the question of whether having a guy like that on is the better question than debating what he said. If he or a similar guy had been hired by the Harris campaign the debate should be over the hiring, not whether her campaign agrees with the literal message of the jokes.
The reason people should criticize the hiring is because many people are literally going to criticize the statements that the person made.
If you turn the President’s Twitter account over to some volunteer intern college student, and they start tweeting about Gaza and weed or whatever, then you would criticize the decision to turn the President’s Twitter account over to a student on the basis of the fact that the student is going to say some criticizable things.
I agree! The optics might be terrible and campaigns need to be careful of how their message is received. But that's what I would focus on, and not disagreeing with the intern's thoughts on weed
Or to put it a different way, the Harris campaign was not horrified by his "joke." They were delighted and deservedly so. (Well, in private, anyway). What a gift the Trump campaign just gave them!
The point isn't that it's a roast, the point is he has a style of dark insult comedy where the insults are not intended to be taken seriously. It's an odd choice for a political campaign, but the literal jokes are not the "GOP message"
What about Biden’s vice presidential appointment? Would a robust party have chosen a more electable candidate than Harris? All of her problems with closing the deal in 2024 were foreseen when she was put on the ticket.
Leave aside that she has pretty good favorables and is at least a coin flip from winning. What's the evidence that robust parties pick good VP candidates? Andrew Johnson, Spiro Agnew, Dan Quayle, Henry Wallace . . .
It takes courage to be a leader. And it seems our elected representatives, save for a few notable exceptions, lack courage. Only seven Republican Senators voted to convict Trump in 2021 (Burr, Cassidy, Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Sasse, Toomey), while the rest looked at the evidence of his wrongdoing and chose cowardice.
Nancy Pelosi had the courage to state the obvious that Biden was incapable of a second term. But where was the courage from his Cabinet (and his Vice President) to expose his decline long before the debate?
I feel like to immediately start talking about "courage" is to completely miss the point of the column.
It's not about courage. It's about having rules mechanisms within the party that give formal power for people to make decisions and know they have the support of the party even if they aren't particularly brave.
To some degree, but it also takes courage to go against groupthink and the groupthink was that you couldn't challenge Biden and you had to ignore his disastrous polls. Just two days before Pelosi or whomever (?Obama) pulled the tablecloth, or Biden just succumbed to reality, Bernie Sanders wrote an op ed about why we needed Joe Biden.
Now, true that courage is not anything we can design so we might need structural change. I dont know what structural changes would help. It was not that the leadership was any better than the rank and file, they were both smoking the Joe is fine cigarettes. If there was any hero, imo, besides Pelosi, it was the media. And cudos to Dean Phillips for playing the Cheney for the Dems.
Indeed, courage and groupthink are ultimately natural human characteristics. The imperative is not to design them out of existence, but to design around them, if not leverage them towards good outcomes (when possible).
How would you do that?
A party (and particularly a a party's elected officials) is supposed to reflect the views of its members. If elected officials can't even call on its leader to step aside when that's what an overwhelming majority of its members wanted, no mechanism is going to prevent that level of cowardice
There are obviously mechanisms that could do this. For instance, if there were an anonymous box where members of Congress could call for the party to do something, and at a weekly closed doors meeting members are told what is currently in the box, then no one needs courage to be the one that starts the conversation, and it can quickly become clear when a consensus is being reached so that then the Speaker can make a public statement with the backing of the party, but without anyone having to take the risk of speaking publicly first, or with publicizing dissent.
I wish more elected officials had called for Biden to step aside, but it's really really hard to openly call for your party leader (and President) to be defenestrated. This unique case may not be the best one for demonstrating how strong a party is.
I think I will be telling my grandkids about how weird this era was.
Someone's gotta have the courage to point out that things are not working the way they are. And then do something about it even though their career might be on the line.
My congresswoman was one of the ten Republicans who voted to impeach Trump and as a result, got primaried by a guy who then lost the seat.
Did you see this? Ballot drop box was burned, presumably in your district, and presumably targeted at MGP voters. Not great Bob!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/28/us/ballot-box-fires-oregon-washington/index.html
I was going to talk about this in the general thread today! Haha
It's haha but it's also 😬😬😬
Team MAGA is already claiming it's to supress their votes. They have no clue what type of neighborhood Fisher's Landing is. 🤦
I'm imagining Harris calling out Biden for being too old to run and then putting herself forward as the nominee.
Yeah, that would go down just fine.
I would add Dean Phillips to the courage list at a time when nobody was questioning Biden. And it wasn't a vanity challenge like Gabbard or RFK Jr. because he first attempted to recruit candidates with higher profiles, senators and governors.
Harris cannot convincingly attack Trump’s age because she was complicit in enabling Biden.
Cabinet members and VPs aren’t selected for courage.
Play it out for me: What should they have done? When should they have done it? What do you think they knew and when?
Outing him - if there truly even WAS anything to out him on the basis of - would have fallen short of the 25A standard, thus leaving them in the unenviable position of having demonstrated themselves to be the most disloyal cabinet and VP ever, in the face of a campaign against America’s most credible authoritarian threat ever.
The Cabinet member situation is actually pretty easy. "I spoke with the President and expressed my concerns about his decline in physical stamina and mental acuity. It didn't go as I hoped. As a result, I have tendered my resignation. I support the policies of this Administration and will continue to fight hard for Democratic priorities."
The path for the VP is much more difficult, as resignation is a very, very extreme step that would likely cause more problems than it would solve. But I suspect there are ways for the VP to get the message out short of resignation.
I’m not trying to let the perfect be the enemy of the good… but when Donald Trump has made himself an enemy of democracy, any of those plays — in fact, EVERY play you can dream up — needs to have a MUCH higher certainty of success than was ever feasible before or during the July Crisis.
I would argue the "certainty of success" metric would have led to taking the actions I describe when there was more time to react than merely hoping it might all work out. It would have invited scrutiny and that scrutiny would have either shown Biden to be fit-as-a-fiddle or not. And on a timeline that would have made defeating Trump more likely in my view.
You’re only capturing one factor in certainty of success. There are others.
The further back you go on the timeline, the more fit Biden actually is. It’s even entirely possible that the debate was his first major event of that magnitude! I’d give it a 30% chance, with another 60% that he had a “minor event” that should have been recognizable but was minor enough to be explained away, and only 10% that he had a major event that [ed: anyone other than his wife] had actually observed and were covering up.
Again, these likelihoods all shrink as you go back up the timeline. They were probably a total of 0-2% in 2022, maybe only 50% at the end of 2023.
Which means that it’s most likely that the party would have waved away any major attempts to undermine him from within his administration. In fact, such attempts may have ended up counterproductively creating a “muscle memory” of the party to ignore later reports or even the debate performance itself.
This discussion always reminds me of literary tragedy. The point of the genre is that some tragedies simply can’t be prevented, even when they are utterly — if not maddeningly frustratingly (!) — easy to predict. I reiterate my comment to the other David that it’s too easy to cast about for some way, ANY way, that this “could have been prevented”. But hindsight is 20/20.
Certainty of success is a chimerical delusion.
You're making an assumption that Democrats are good, which they are most certainly not. They are morally and spiritually bankrupt and playing their base for the fools that they are. https://barryjkaufmando.substack.com/p/dick-cheneys-kind-of-democrat
I disagree with your characterization. I hope you still vote for Harris because the alternative is worse.
Barry, you've convinced me. I was a stalwart supporter of the Democrats but when I read your comment I completely changed my mind.
In response to your link - no, the Cheney endorsement should be read as "even the human wad of scum that is Dick Cheney, champion of the worst excesses of the American response to 9/11, thinks Trump is a bridge too far, so Trump is in fact really really bad, and with the election in eight days the only other choice is Harris, so vote Harris to keep out Trump." The Democrats could do better, but the Republicans have picked one of the worst and most dangerous men in the country as their standard bearer for the third time in a row, and are *delighted* about it.
You are being rather officious. The 25th Amendment does not specify an objective, determinate standard any more than the equal protection or due process clauses of the 14th Amendment. If the vice president and a majority of cabinet members declared Biden unfit, the issue would ultimately rest with Congress. Republicans in Congress would then have to put up or shut up. If they voted to oust Biden and Democrats split evenly, they could have been gone.
There were also milder plays on the table. Any cabinet member could have resigned his or her portfolio and said “I cannot in good conscience serve under President Biden when he is too infirm to be effective.”. Any one of them could have done it. They all would have landed more comfortably than a mid career middle manager who got downsized. Alas, one gets to be in a cabinet by being a “team player” and so we are led by a gaggle of sheep and a couple shepherds who win their commissions by being beautiful sheep for decades.
I think you’re wishcasting how it would have gone.
It’s one thing to be angry about how it got so far and so close to absolute disaster. I share that sentiment! But it’s a step too far to cast about looking for people to blame - someone, anyone, who “could have prevented this”, but didn’t. And the error in that is that it’s not entirely certain that it could have been prevented in the first place. I believe too much in the power of uncertainty to accept what I view as your overconfident thinking on this.
The person who could have prevented this is Joe Biden, had he announced in early 2023 that he would step down after one term, as he'd led everyone to believe he would do. Instead his narcissism and selfishness dragged his party and the country to the edge of oblivion, into which it still may very well topple.
Agreed. And it would have generated a lot of goodwill for the party, although at the risk of a 2020-like primary squandering it.
In the end, a lot of the structural forces driving this election so close would have kept it close no matter what the party had done. Like Biden, the voter themselves are stubbornly stupid and don’t really understand what’s driving the cost disease crisis that they hate so much.
Amidst all the anger and fear we ourselves here have about the possibility that our fellow Americans might plunge us into autocracy, it’s important not to succumb to the Green Lantern Theory that the actions of a few good people who simply “will” a good outcome are enough to actually make that outcome happen.
Because that’s the sort of thing that fascists and woo-woo hippies believe, and it’s why those two groups are in a coalition together under their chosen idiot-savant pretending to be a hero. We have to be more pragmatic than that.
Speaking about counterfactuals is fraught because only the actual is possible. Some counterfactuals seem “likelier” than others but all counterfactuals were equally impossible, it’s just our minds are too frail to see the future clearly.
I cannot in good professional conscience get high enough this early in the morning to do proper justice to this discussion about the nature of time and counterfactuals. ;-)
Can I try one more time to get you to explain why you ever bring this up, especially since it makes nonsense out of your own statements like “There were also milder plays on the table”?
this is kind of a red herring. trump doesn't act particularly old, which is why that doesn't stick. he has other problems.
I have a different impression. He’s way crazier and less coherent than he used to be, and some of that has to be age. He rambles and speaks in borderline aphasia, punctuated by ever more occasional moments of sharpness.
Polling shows that concerns over Trump’s age and fitness have been steadily increasing over time. https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50808-americans-are-increasingly-concerned-about-donald-trumps-age-and-fitness-for-office
Or to put it another way, being old is the absolute least of his downsides.
Sorry, DONALD Trump doesn’t?
Trump acts like he has dementia, but he's still fairly energetic and alert looking while rambling crazy talk, which makes him look comparatively younger.
Sure, that I can agree with! I think if Biden had never been in the picture, that "comparatively" wouldn't apply, though.
Yes, very fair point.
Don't overlook that the hair and makeup, which he's worn for decades, mask age-related changes to his "natural" appearance.
Oh, I didn't know Biden was still running.
Sure, she can attack Trump while saying that for the good of the country Biden -- by infinitely stronger contrast -- decided that he wasn't up to running the country for four more years.
As for her "enabling" Biden, oh please.
On the one hand, you're correct. On the other hand, the MAGAverse clearly believes that attacking Biden's age still has some electoral advantage to it given the sheer quantity of "Biden's old" stuff they continue to circulate on Twitter and rightwing forums that doesn't even passingly attempt to be an attack on Harris. (Whether any polling supports the effectiveness of that, I don't know, but my guess is that there is something suggesting it has benefits for Trump in the race given how much it still turns up.)
>Harris cannot convincingly attack Trump’s age because she was complicit in enabling Biden.<
Or, more basically, he's still president! Back in August when I broached the topic—I was explicitly making the argument that the "age" issue would be neutralized much more effectively if he were gone—I was dismissively told it wouldn't be tenable for Biden to resign the presidency (I was thinking maybe after Labor Day) because Harris couldn't possibly run the country AND campaign. And that's not a terrible argument.
On the other hand, here we are.
>>Nancy Pelosi had the courage to state the obvious that Biden was incapable of a second term. But where was the courage from his Cabinet (and his Vice President) to expose his decline long before the debate?<<
Pelosi, the most consequential Speaker of our era, deserves massive props for her decisive action in forcing Biden off the ticket—no argument from me. But let's be clear: she didn't take action until after the debate, and at that point lots of prominent people (our blog host included) were calling for the president to drop out of the race. The actual person with the most "courage" in all this was one Dean Philips.
As for cabinet officials, well, I'm not sure how much face time with POTUS most of them enjoy. But sure, some people (Harris? Zients? Sullivan? Burns? Blinken? Pelosi? Schumer?) must have noticed signs of significant decline. And Jill Biden surely did, as well. But at that point a coordination issue comes up: unless you're quite certain going public will success in forcing Biden to resign (or unless you know you have the votes both in the cabinet and in Congress to invoke the 25th), publicly accusing the president of suffering serious cognitive decline risks giving a giant assist to Donald Trump. Anyway, scheduling a debate for June was absolute genius, and agreeing to it might prove the mother of all campaign errors by the Trump people.
I agree with StrangePolyhedrons: it's not about courage so much as it's about suboptimal structures, practices, precedents, incentives and so on. America has a seriously creaky system of national governance and politics. Reform is very much needed!
I am with you on Dean Phillips the unsung hero, who I donated and campaigned for, but got no traction whatsoever. That imo is the problem. It wasn't as if he was a crazy vanity candidate like Gabbard or RFK Jr. He first tried to recruit Senators and Governors. He was a mainstream Dem who was absolutely correct when he said that Biden was the only candidate who could win in 2020 and the only one who could lose in 2024.
When I was campaigning for him it seemed as all Dems just wanted to circle the wagons around Biden and ignoring that they were headed for the waterfalls in the Biden canoe.
And even two days before he withdrew Bernie Sanders had a NYT op ed about how great he was and should stay in the race.
If the problem with the GOP is that other than blind allegiance to DJT it is the anarchy party, the Dems in this iteration are the go along party.
I don't know, everyone around Trump seemed to be able to coordinate to subvert a lot of the crazier stuff he wanted to do, it's not that hard to coordinate with fellow Cabinet members.
It takes coordination. The penalty for getting caught out on a limb in the prisoner's dilemma is harsh punishment.
I don't think this is a prisoner's dilemma situation. If cooperate is "try to remove Biden" and defect is "retain Biden," then we'd have to say that the highest reward you could get is if you are loyal to Biden while other people are trying to remove him, while everyone coordinating to remove him is a middle level of reward.
That doesn't seem to fit facts on the ground. This is maybe more of a Deer Hunt situation, which is an easier coordination problem to resolve exactly because the biggest reward is for cooperate/cooperate.
Wasn’t familiar with the deer hunt, but reading about I would say in this analogy that going after Biden while everyone is covering their ass and hunting rabbits would mean you go hungry (get punished) while they do okay. Only if a critical mass of you go hunt the Biden will you be okay.
If Biden's decline was relatively recent, like Matt's source said, that would explain a lot of this though.
Biden haters like to claim that he's always been senile going back to 2008 (if not 1988!) but that's clearly not the case. Something really did seem to change in the last spring.
Courage? nancy Pelosi wascovering up for Biden until the very end, calling him "fit as a fiddle" up until his disastrous debate performance. Pelosi has been claiming that college kids protesting against genocide were funded by Putin/amnd or China and should be investigated! She is a hundred millionaire coward like the rest of them, as Biden was incapable of even his first term. Democrats are cowards in so many ways, not the least of which is allowing Israel to run our government. https://barryjkaufmando.substack.com/p/dick-cheneys-kind-of-democrat
I will never, ever understand why those on the left who are anti-Israel believe for a second that things will go better for them with a Trump presidency than a Harris one.
I don’t think they do. I think they want to punish the Democrats and hope that the Democrats come to the conclusion that they need to listen to Arab voters in the future.
Also a lot of them are probably just thinking emotionally, which I won’t fault them for.
JPO exactly it is a better is the enemy of the good argument. If I may suggest something that I find hilarious but I have an odd sense of humor https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/jill-stein-isnt-even-pretending-to
There surely has been international funding intended at stirring up dissent. I don’t think the students themselves would likely be directly aware of any of it, though perhaps some insiders at SJP or some other group might be. That’s where the investigation would need to be.
Seems like you are just trolling here as a far left Jill Stein populist that hates Dems and pushing your substack. "Hundred millionaire coward". Thank you from Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Most of us are here because we respect Yglesias.
The impeachments were just partisan politics. But they did leave the Donks with nothing but lawfare.
While this is true, it's much better to have a system that doesn't depend on immense political courage. I have bottomless contempt for figures like Cruz, but the fact is that Democratic lawmakers were not tested the same way. I think we'd have done better if a Trump-like figure arose, but it helps that our party structure is more robust.
Even the hollow party has considerable power to discourage strong candidates from challenging their incumbent President. If the party and the donor base made it clear that they could challenge Biden without being punished in future, we could have had a competitive primary and forced Biden out early. Maybe Biden would have won anyway, but he would be forced to debate in a primary with well known names like Newsom, Whitmer and Shapiro and would've gotten exposed.
PS: He was already exposed to everyone except partisan Democrats.
Where were they??? Congratulating themselves on being in the "right side of history" by being baldly for their own self interest. Drawn from a long line of symbolic capitalists, they are just as craven as the people who ruined or relented and kissed the ring for Trump. These people are only accidentally on the right side of policy or views, because the electorate is what it is. Ya want comprehensive immigration reform... We'll see what public sentiment allows you to have. It's tough out there... With few interested in the slow boring of any issue.
If they had read the polls accurately, they would have moderated on immigration in ‘21. Enforcing immigration laws has always polled well. They just thought they could get away with caving to cosmopolitan elites.
They probably thought that, given the dire national conditions that greeted them upon taking office, simple *healing* (the economy, the heath of the people, our alliances) was the optimal path to a second term. And I'm sure they had no inkling that highly damaging inflation was in the cards. Normally, a very strong recovery with modest inflation and a very favorable contrast with the previous terms does the trick. That's always the way it's worked in the past. Bill Clinton won a second term with utterly massive illegal immigration inflows. George W. Bush, too.
I really doubt there was a Machiavellian conspiracy to "get away" with rewarding Globalist Open Borders Elites. They were caught flat-footed. It happens. Had the inflation burst not materialized, I reckon the migrant spike would not have been enough to sink Harris.
Being caught flat footed on the Afghanistan withdrawal was forgivable because of the timeline. The border surge started under Trump so there’s no valid excuse here. They wanted to fool people by claiming that it wasn’t a big deal but that didn’t go the way they wanted.
Print $6 trillion or so, spread it liberally through the middling echelons of the economy, and inflation is rather predictable.
I don't think this has to be true if it substitutes for depressed demand (?). But I think by the time spring 2021 rolled around, it was clear that things were getting back to normal and the $1.9T American Rescue Plan was mostly unnecessary. I believe I've seen estimates that this was responsible for 1-2% of inflation.
People say this, but everyone who does say it is unable to articulate a complete theory of what's actually happening. The M2 and M3 money supply remains hugely elevated compared to 2019, and has dropped on slightly -- but inflation has now dropped back to trend. We raised interest rates with the theory that higher rates -> cooler economy -> lower inflation would be the mechanism, but then the economy remained "hot" across measures of consumer spending, wages, and stock market indices -- yet inflation dropped to trend.
I don't expect random Internet posters to explain what's going on, but the lack of curiosity from professional economists is pretty shocking.
Wouldn’t a onetime increase in M whatever create a temporary rather than permanent inflation? Once prices increase commensurately with the M supply, no further increases are needed to achieve equilibrium.
Conversely, if M keeps growing faster than the economy, inflation will persist
I think Biden's liberal Catholic faith was a real soft spot here. I think he has genuine sympathy for the plight of the migrants coming to the border, which is part of the reason it took him so long to pull the trigger on stricter enforcement. Plus the timing of Mexico's election--AMLO cracked down on the internal migration there after his chosen successor's win in that election.
Exactly... Or not stoned Amy klobuchar, or never have let Elizabeth Warren get any air time.... I think of “the Munger test.”
1) Go ahead, make your argument for what you want the State to do, and what you want the State to be in charge of.
2)Then, go back and look at your statement. Everywhere you said “the State,” delete that phrase and replace it with “politicians I actually know, running in electoral systems with voters and interest groups that actually exist.”
3) If you still believe your statement, then we have something to talk about.
The motley crew of the Democratic party seems to think they can outlaw gravity... And they have no cohesive policy goals or aims that sit well with a lot of the electorate. Imagine the better narrative they could have had if they had not got deranged on this last awakening and stayed disciplined and aligned with votes that actually exist.
Covid made me question my commitments to social democracy. When I saw his risk averse and school marmish the hand of the state was throughout the West, I became significantly more libertarian. I’m not a full bore libertarian because empowering unaccountable billionaires is worse than empowering the state, but freedom loving gentlemen need to steer between two rocky and unappealing shores.
It's striking that MY does not use the word "coalition" anywhere in today's interesting column. I think that a lot, albeit maybe not all, of the phenomena that he is pointing out arise out of the fact that the Democratic Party is now, and really, is now obliged to be, the biggest-tent party anywhere in any democracy. If you are trying to manage a coalition that runs from the Cheneys to proto-Maoists, through a variety of loyalists and funders spread across a relatively wide part of the political spectrum, there will be lots and lots of coordination issues, mysterious process dead-ends, responsibility-diffusion and temporary repositories of power in sometimes hard-to-understand places. That is sometimes going to risk looking incoherent - goes with the territory. If the Republicans were magically transformed back into business-friendly center-right normies uniting behind Nikki Haley (or Brian Kemp or Chris Sununu or Glenn Youngkin (although I have some candidate-specific doubts about his staying power even in an entirely re-normed GOP)), with the MAGAs relegated to a few social-media swamps, the Democrats would look significantly different - and maybe less "hollow", in MY's terminology here.
Some of Matt’s writing on third parties argues that this gets the causality backwards. In a system with strong parties that could exclude certain priorities, the only option is to form your own party. Given how porous American parties are, most factions decide to try to move a party from within, which is how you end up with coalitions with no internal logic.
I largely sympathize with this, but I do wonder if there is just a deep partisan asymmetry here. Some share of the hard core MAGA voters are rust belt Obama and Kerry voters who got bitten by deindustrialization and turned to Trump, but many more of them are just former Bush/McCain/Romney voters who believed equally in their vision of the GOP as they now do Trump's. I wonder if active Democratic voters of all stripes are just more ideological than Republican voters, and thus Dems struggle more with the coordination games because voters have more entrenched views. Should Harris win, I kinda doubt that Haley running on a reset platform would really struggle all that much to win over the vast preponderance of triple Trump voters, even as she articulates a break from him. Meanwhile, Bernie was running against Obamaism in 2015 *while he was the incumbent president.*
A lot of my family hates Trump and sees the risk and would jump off a cliff for older Republican politics. However the tribalism and viewing the Democratic party as a bunch of I can't wait to take all your money and make communism and handouts to whoever is the flavor of the month perspective makes it to where they are just not culturally able to vote Democrat. (And I will save the behavior of a lot of democrats and resentment of big tent politics doesn't help them defect either)
I just turned in my ballot here in California and left many of the races blank. It turned out to be very refreshing and empowering (no vote for you, Ted Lieu). I hope those members of your family will feel the same and give Trump a pass even if they could never vote for Harris.
That seems to be the sentiment but I'm pretty certain more than a few will just not talk about it and check Trump and hold their nose. Many of them had said real patriotic civil servants will make sure it doesn't go too far... That I feel is a scary gamble
Great point, definitely some of this too. I wonder if some of it is a dynamic of education polarization as well. The voters you describe are more likely to understand the stakes of politics in some sense, and revert to their priors even with a bad avatar like trump. Whereas a different group of downstream voters isn't thinking of politics terribly hard and is being wagged along by trump. Ending up in a similar place but for different reasons. On net tho, I think this makes the GOP much more malleable than dems, where a larger share of voters are ideologically baked into their factions even as there is a bigger tent for Dems than the GOP.
No it's not a lack of education we've got medical doctors, nurses, lawyers, some with ivy League pedigrees. The identity politics of the left have been a complete failure to win people like them over even when they agree to a larger extent on items like freedoms for individuals to include LGBT people. They also don't agree with the broader economic goals as stated in the policy positions that are taken by politicians signaling to their left in the popular press. And with the ones being in the medical field they don't forget that anti-vaccine sentiment started on the left so it is a giant mess.
Sorry I was unclear, wasn't a slag on your family's own educational attainment and totally agree with you on where the ill lies.
I didn't take it as a slag at all.. I just want to push back (for the peanut gallery) on this view that a lot of Trump voters are some uneducated weirdos from the hinterlands. They have a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and educational attainments. One thing that has been frustrating for me while trying to bridge the gaps and trying to bring as many people over to team Harris and previously team Biden... Is that the same people that say some one needs to " do the work ". Will not do the work at all to really get to know the ins and outs of the variety of Republican neighbors they may have. And our scandalized that people across the aisle from them find a lot of their policies suggestions dumb. I don't disagree that they are dumb a lot of the time either.
There's a logic that explains the last ~24+ years and does not require assuming asymmetry between the parties:
- ANY president can dominate the mechanics of her or his party
- ONLY a president with overwhelming popular support from within the party can avoid being beholden to the party coalition
Biden's presidency is best understood as a deal he made with major elements of the democrat coalition to trade policy focus for supporting Biden's run for a second term. He pursued the unpopular elements of democrat interest groups' policy agendas. For that he got things like states more favorable to him (e.g. S. Carolina) hold officially sanctioned primaries before those that weren't (e.g. Vermont) and lawmakers willingness to sit on their hands after the debate. But he didn't drive the agenda, he had to buy it off.
By contrast, Trump is so popular within the republican party that he can both direct the party and largely ignore interest groups. there are exceptions, like the religious right, but they are exceptions.
Obama comes closer to Trump in terms of both popularity within his party and influence over the coalition. Whether the gap is because of the size and intensity of Trump's most ardent supporters, the asymmetry in how diverse each party's coalition is, or both, is unclear. But note that Obama was able to effectively make Hillary the next nominee by clearing the field of serious, moderate competitors.
I don’t disagree but Matt’s column is focused on the idea THAT the party is hollow not why, as kind of a response to folks who say “it’s not hollow it just pushed out an incumbent president from seeking reelection.”
Factions and, importantly, factional leaders also missing. Need some hard heads behind the scenes willing to horse trade for power.
This is part of why Harris and Biden before her is struggling. Seriously wtf is an “opportunity economy”? You have at most two reconciliation bills in your term, I don’t think ‘reshaping the economy’ is on the table.
Maybe I’m being overly harsh but at least “tariffs, tax cuts and deregulation” is an actionable plan. A bad one, but a real one.
I think the undercurrent of all of this is that every Dem wants to run the Obama 2008 election when the American people really were wanting a transformative break with the past, so you could just run on that and sort out priorities later. But it just sounds like an echo of an echo at this point, like a middle school performance of Henry IV Part I. You get what they’re going for and how it could be great in other circumstances, but they need to just do a little musical instead.
Almost spit out my coffee at "a middle school performance of Henry IV Part I".
People aren’t voting for Trump because of a well-articulated platform. They are voting for him as the transformative candidate without thinking deeply about where that transformation may lead.
https://condenaststore.com/featured/he-tells-it-like-it-is-paul-noth.html?srsltid=AfmBOooLYuEtuAxJpj0sA9AtLRrks-VUt7b4wVWgOgmJxC4rjpIT50Fp
Have you paid zero attention to the campaign in the past 2 months? Anyone complaining about Kamala not being detailed enough aren't paying attention
I tend to think "we don't know what Harris wanted to do" wasn't actually _that_ important. she had a super short campaign while being anchored to the Biden administration. She was either going win on "the orange guy took away abortion and is insane" or she wasn't.
But for me personally as a center-left voter, I found the "opportunity economy" stuff to be really meh because the very next sentence in it was always "we're going to give some money to these people" and in an economy limited by inflation and productive capacity, it feels like the 2008 hammer thinking 2024's problems are nails when they totally aren't.
My view is that Trump makes it hard to know what's coming next because he's just a walking talking id. If it turns out that the thing after neoliberalism is some kind of "state capacity" political order we'll look at Biden's attempts at infrastructure the way we look at Carter's relationship with deregulation or Hoover's attempts to stem the great depression. It may be a decade before we can look at Harris' attempt to put together an agenda and see if she was even close to the zeitgeist.
Yep. "targeted giving money to those whom we deem worthy - NOT billionares".
I think it's flat because it doesn't address the central crisis of center-left politics - the ability to actually build/do things and the affordability crisis (which I view as two sides of a coin). As long these are problems in deep blue America, the Dems don't have a message.
You seem to want the party to do three things that are very much in tension.
1) Let highly politically engaged voters feel like they get to decide what the party stands for.
2) Let those voters feel like they get to choose who their canidate is.
3) Select electable politicians so the party can wield power (and thereby effectuate their goals).
Problem is that the most highly engaged voters tend to be the most extreme and what makes them feel represented is for the party to voice support for their values.
Don't get me wrong, the engaged democrat also wants very much to win but the problem is you can't send the primary voter the message that your the best option to implement their relatively far left values and turn around and reassure moderates and swing voters you aren't a Trojan horse.
The only way to achieve both 1 and 3 is to deny the voters direct influence over the canidate and go back to a system of indirect selection where the voters selected local politicians and delegates who then go to the convention and make back room deals to choose the canidate.
I think MY is not talking about making sure highly engaged voters always get their way. Rather, he's asking for a legible process so that, when they don't get their way, those voters can see it's because they've been out-voted or whatever and not because Ezra Klein wrote a thing.
If he just means that it's a bunch of democratic party officials working by some process (the old school convention) I'm a fan but I don't think most voters see that as meaningfully different than Ezra writing a piece. Hell at least they know and respect Pelosi the process would feel like handing the power to faceless individuals they've never heard of (tho see my -- unoriginal maybe I even heard it here -- transferable vote proposal in this thread)
Back room deals work until the first time somebody leaks how it happened and then it gets exposed as a scandal.
Back room may have been the wrong term since I don't mean to suggest disallowed of improper:. I just mean that the choice is indirect and ai don't think that's an issue if that's literally the official process. No one thought it was scandalous back before we had primaries that the delegates would get together in hotel rooms to hammer out who to pick.
I'm suggesting we go back to that system of indirect representation. It's no different than how Australians select the party leader by a vote of the MPs or other countries select them indirectly via delegates.
Heck it's how we pass laws now and no one is screaming it's a scandal that congress hashes out compromises without consulting the voters directly.
There are a lot of people who call for “more transparency”, which makes this a lot harder. The amount of transparency is probably why Congress is so dysfunctional, with people delivering speeches to an empty room with a cspan camera rather than having actual floor debate aimed at each other.
That's why I think the solution for primaries is transferable votes. Let people express their values by assigning their votes to Greenpeace or the ACLU or the new democrat group and that way it feels like an expansion of control/democracy because it brings in people who weren't voting in primaries before.
But it simultaneously actually shifts how choices are made to people/institutions that do this professionally and changes their incentives from being maximally uncooperative (do what we want or we won't encourage our people to vote) to making compromises and selling it to their constituency.
In practice this is kinda like how unions used to work in that the union membership would follow leadership recommendations.
A lot of “good government” stuff has a totally undeserved halo. Examples:
o) Banning earmarks made Congress much more dysfunctional. It was penny wise and pound foolish.
o) McCain-Feingold was a terrible idea. Soft money and the like were a way for party structures to restrain their crazier members, and now the crazies have discovered they can raise campaign money themselves by being conspicuously crazy in public.
But to make any of these points you have to argue against sanctified values like “transparency” and “accountability” and the like. I’d suggest all of it both reflects and contributes to a lack of trust. You’re more willing to cut politicians some slack if you trust them, but cutting them no slack makes their performance worse which makes you trust them less — rinse, lather, repeat.
And all of this is happening at the same time that our delightful Supreme Court has made it close to impossible to prosecute actual corruption short of explicitly saying “I’ll vote for the bill for $100k” on video.
That's probably why Secret Congress works - the bill is under the radar so they don't need to grandstand for the cameras.
See I think describing the old system as “back room deals” reflects the thing that’s changed. It used to deliver all three of these, at least somewhat, because grassroots party members and voters had some trust in the people they elected. They knew the local leadership, who knew the state leadership — there was a web of trust and social proof.
Clearly it wasn’t perfect and wasn’t directly representative, because the push for primaries did come from somewhere. But the backroom-deals view of how it worked reflects the current total lack of trust in the parties. And indeed parties can’t make people feel represented if people have decided upfront that parties can’t represent them.
Neither party can go back to backroom dealing; it seems to lack fairness and denies the candidate any apparent legitimacy. Bernie’s attacks on Biden clearing the field didn’t really stick, but the same attacks on Clinton were devastating. The difference was that Biden already had electoral legitimacy from the SC win and it happened in public.
I shouldn't have used the word backroom because it suggests it's illegitimate. As I suggested above you can create the same effect in a way that feels more democratic by letting people assign their primary vote to groups/institutions. The net effect is still that a smaller group makes a deal to choose the canidate based substantially on electability but it appears to (and imo genuinely does) increase the democratic legitimacy of the primary because instead of a small fraction of people who remember to vote in some early primary all party members can assign their vote to the institution/organization/coalition they favor. Plus you get the benefit of letting people vote expressively for their values without it conflicting with pragmatism because of the indirect nature.
The whole take on "they should have nominated Bullock in 2020" makes a lot of sense, until you realize that voters matter, too. Biden was very popular among core Democratic voters, i.e., black voters.
Moreover, Biden was obviously vetted in a way that others were not. In a high stakes election (remember who he was running against, and remember that two Supreme Court justices would likely have retired during a Trump term), why go with a less known, and hence more risky choice?
The idea that less known is “riskier” is perhaps narrowly true, but why is risk bad? Why is risk so bad that we should trade off expected value for risk? Bullock, conditional on not blowing up in the primary, had higher expected value.
Bullock’s expected value was zero because he didn’t win the primary.
I said conditional on not hollowing up in the primary. An actuary might say “expected value is undefined because you are dividing by zero” but that does not mean the EV was 0.
Let me be more clear: Bullock showed in the primary that he could not win. If his expected value were truly greater than Biden’s, he’d have beaten Biden. But he didn’t.
Perhaps there’s some tiny margin of difference - points of a percentage point - under which chance comes into play and Bullock may have had 0.1-0.3% more of the popular vote. But any more than that, and he should have been able to beat Biden outright. They both were in the exact same moderate lane; it’s not like they were appealing to different voters. Biden just *won*.
I'm agnostic on whether Bullock is a better candidate, but up until 2020, Biden had demonstrates in primaries that he couldn't win either.
Matt's comment that upon meeting Bullock in person he thought he was very charismatic reminded me of how often we heard in 2016 that Hillary was "great in small groups." Yeah, that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee.
On screen, Bullock was bland and milquetoast.
Bullock was no more bland and milquetoast than Biden
Harris proves that you don’t have to be the kind of person who does well in a primary to be a strong general election candidate. You’re just doing something very different in the two cases.
I don't think I'd call Harris a strong general election candidate at this point. She looked like she might be one early on, but in retrospect that was just her benefitting from a) not being Joe Biden and b) absurdly low expectations. She's turned out to be pretty mediocre.
That logic assumes that the best primary candidate is necessarily the best candidate for the general. I strongly believe this is not the case. I also think the “well known” advantage is much stronger in the primary. A general candidate gets tons of attention and becomes very famous very fast.
I agree that primaries are suboptimal for selecting the best candidate in the abstract.
I don't think the actual 2020 primary was a clear example of that. The strongest failure mode is that primary winners cater to the extreme wings, which compromises their ability to win the general. The "well known" advantage is also a potential failure mode, but I'd say that it's not *inherently* a failure mode: whether the candidate it produces ultimately fails, tends to depend on idiosyncratic factors, and if anything, as Obama demonstrated, a well-known candidate can more easily ride that fame and celebrity to an outright victory. The core of this second failure mode thus is simply that fame risks improperly elevating an incompetent candidate who botches the general election (which, let's remember, is what would have been the narrative if Trump had lost 2016).
Neither of these failure modes really seem to have been problems with Biden. He didn't run as an extremist. He had name rec, but he proved to be the most legislatively effective president in my adult life, rather than an unprepared celebrity.
IMO, anything else beyond that is just speculation -- it's not much more rational than sitting around debating which comic book heroes could beat each other, just with a more dignified sheen of Serious Politics. I can say that I think Warren or Sanders would have beaten Trump by 10 points instead of Biden's 5, and it would have been only slightly less rational than anyone backing Matt's opinion that Bullock could have probably won an extra point or two over Biden's total. The Flash is totally faster than Quicksilver, duh.
Give bullock biden’s name recognition and fund raising and things would have been different. Party institutions should give money and attention to the most effective candidates not the most established
This wasn't happening in 2023-24 also. We'd dream about our moderate-coded Midwestern Governor Heroes Whitmer or Shapiro being the candidate (or Polis, or Cooper) if a primary happened, yet polls always showed Newsom having dramatically more support than any of them.
Perhaps the mechanism to raise their profiles is just constant appearances on MSNBC and CNN to increase name recognition--but strategically on programs where the hosts will ask them softball questions and not attack them from the left? (Say, more Nicole Wallace appearances and avoid progressives like Joy Reid?) Need to get a memo out like Murdoch was able to do to help DeSantis emerge as the chosen successor (although... yeah that didn't work either).
I agree that in the abstract it probably seems like optimal institutional design to favor the guy who has a 0.1-0.3% edge -- if for no other reason than that "those inches are all around us". I would also add that I would agree that Bullock might have had a more optimally distributed EC coalition.
But in the real world, I'm not sure that the 0.1-0.3% edge is worth whatever distortions in existing institutions may have gotten us there. Maybe they'd have been things I ideologically endorse, like Ranked Choice! Maybe they'd have been practical policies that I'd also nevertheless endorse simply by virtue of observing them work well.
But since we haven't really gamed any of that out... my zeroth-order approximation is to invoke my small-c conservatism and the principle of Chesterton's Fence. We need a comprehensive vision for a different politics and a different party, one that can remain nationally competitive while in the middle of a major self-overhaul. And that's just an inherently REALLY SUPER FUCKING DIFFICULT thing to design. Moreover, it tends to get washed out by vibes in any given election anyways.
To clarify, when I said "riskier," I meant high potential upside but high potential downside. So, you might be correct is saying that Bullock had higher expected value, as measured by expected pct of vote.
But, I don't think that is the correct metric. Given the opponent and associated cost of losing, the correct metric was chance of winning, and I think that a relative unknown would likely have a lower chance of winning.
This absolute aversion to "risk" is why the whole Biden debacle happened in the first place. The party didn't want to "risk" losing the vaunted "incumbency advantage" by having a real primary and potentially having a new, better candidate in early 2024 instead of late July.
Black voters didn't go with Biden because he was super popular with them overall. It has more to do with him being more well known among older black primary voters I'm the Deep South (specifically South Carolina) than any other candidate and the perception that he was a stronger candidate than the others. Had the party rallied around someone else similarly, many of those voters likely would have as well.
If anything, Bullock was one of the safest possible candidates available! A young(ish), decent-looking, charismatic Democrat and a seasoned politician who had multiple wins in red state. What's the likelihood that he would've had more baggage than Biden did? I feel like it's pretty low if only because he hadn't spent 5 decades in high-level positions like Biden.
I believe Matt was talking about 2020, not 2024
Re 2024, Bullock lost his 2020 race for Senate by 55-45, so that does not mark him as a particularly strong candidate in 2024. Also, he has no foreign policy experience, which is not what you want in a Presidential candidate in 2024
He outperformed every Democrat in Montana, including Biden, by double digits in an otherwise highly polarized election. That's pretty impressive.
And lack of foreign policy experience is separate from effectiveness at winning a general election. Obama and Trump both lacked foreign policy experience.
As a resident, I will let you know now that any chance of turning Montana purple is done. We are a proud, independent people, and have to be since there are so damn few of us. I would love for us to continue balancing red vs. blue, and yet I have to say that it is not to be. The Ds brand is tarnished beyond redemption here for at least three cycles. Four EV and two senators lost, simply because triumphant blues in 2020 couldn't keep their d*cks in their pants. You decide how much of that is on you and yours.
Nevertheless, candidates who lost their last statewide election are rarely, if ever, successful Presidential candidates.
As for Obama and Trump, the Democrats were going to win in 2008 no matter what. And Trump performed very poorly. He underperformed the fundamentals and received a smaller pct of the vote than the Republican candidate in most Congressional districts. More importantly, foreign policy is a far more salient issue this year than is the norm.
Bullock's last statewide election before his presidential run was the 2016 governor's race and he won by ~5 despite Trump winning Montana by ~20!
I think I am unclear whether we are talking about 2020 or 2024. You seemed to initially be talking about 2024.
And, yes, he performed well. But, so did Tester in 2018, yet he is trailing in the polls this year. And honestly, Montana is the little leagues. Bullock's popularity MIGHT transfer nationally, but to say that he would definitely be a better choice in 2020 than Biden seems a bit of a stretch.
Everyone just shut up and vote for Harris.
"But think back to Biden: Who, exactly, pushed him out?"
<jagger> "I shouted out, "who killed his candidacy?"/ When after all, it was you and me."</>
Only if you're Clooney and I'm Obama.
People mistake me for George Clooney all the time.
And I have to admit, there is a resemblance.
Both parties lack formal coordinating mechanisms. The Republicans' de facto mechanism has become some sort of interplay between Trump and his mob of voters. The Democrats now coordinate via the interplay between some high-level politicians and cultural institutions (traditionally reliable media, celebrities, academia to a certain extent, etc.).
One often hears "who cares if Idea X is dominant in the media/academia/etc., Democratic politicians don't believe X!" But if these institutions are an important component in solving Democrats' coordination problems and setting the agenda, shouldn't their ideas matter a bit?
If their ideas matter, they matter to the extent that the actual actors are able to leverage them.
Thus, we should be paying attention to Ezra Klein more than every two-bit academic in the country combined.
Except Ezra Klein pays attention to academics!
He performs a pretty heavy filtering function on them, and as Jonathan points out, he skews towards abundance-agenda types. That seems like about the best kind of elite for him to be -- one who's RIGHT.
After all, that's a core tenet of Matthew Yglesias Thought, is it not? That it's really important to just get the balls and strikes of policy correct, because that paves the way for us to build the case for more discretionary policy decisions.
I think on subjects that Ezra has put a lot of time into, he is likely to be able to filter very well. But on subjects where he has not, he likely defers to heavily to the broader ecosystem of academia. But I think the incentives in academia right now are really messed up, and you can see the number of retractions, corrections, or inability to reproduce results especially in social sciences are highlighting that.
Except that many of those get results get layered into the broader explanation of "how things work" and its very hard to unwind that process once its happened.
I broadly agree, but I think that on net, Ezra is a force for good.
I somewhat disagree with the characterization that he defers heavily to the broader ecosystem. Generally speaking, my read is that on unfamiliar subjects, he *does* ask a lot of just basic questions to gather more information, and so he often (in those cases) misses out on the sorts of more pressing or combative questions that he asks when he's more in his element or having a hostile (semi-hostile sounds more like his style) interviewee.
I think what balances him out onto the net positive is that he rarely just leaves topics alone (unless they're dingbatty one-offs like that octopus shit), but rather comes back, often with opposing or heterodox interviewees, and pushes and prods on the topic. Sometimes this takes him a while, so I can certainly see how it would seem like he just defers and therefore legitimizes questionable research; but even when he's at his plodding worst, I think he's helped significantly improve public discourse with these revisitations - for instance, on COVID policy.
What I think is sad is that he rarely gets credit for them; his appreciation of complexity and embrace of uncertainty means that he's less willing than the Josh Barro types to just unequivocally declare some liberal excess "wrong". I think he rightly comes down to the usual conclusion that even when liberals are proven wrong on the facts, at least they're trying to make things better, while the conservatives are usually wrong in spirit -- they just go around breaking things and waging grievances so that they can keep giving the rich tax cuts.
Was surprised he had Charles Fain Lehman on the other day to talk about crime--I think he is genuinely open to hearing views that are outside the progressive norm but are worthwhile to consider.
Did you here his recent rant^H^H^H^H post-election podcast? It didn't sound like deferring, it sounded like "y'all need to pull your heads out of your asses or you'll be crushed like grapes over and over and over." :-)
Yes, but quite a number of “slow, boring” types. What would you better have?
I think this correlates to MY's observations over the last few years that dumb left-wing ideas hurt left-wing institutional capacity more than general institutional capacity.
I suppose I might need to read the book to get this information, but what specific changes (legislatively or in Democratic party rules) would need to occur for the hollowness to be solved? I gues doing away with primaries would be the big one, but that seems harder to achieve.
Yeah, I feel like we need a follow up on how to make the party more robust.
Personally, I think that it involves a holy war against The Groups. Nationalize them (under the party), wear their levers of power like a skinsuit, and dismantle any who resist. Create a new power structure that better performs the job of mediating interest groups' concerns into party establishment opinion.
Side note: That last bit is what The Groups were supposed to be doing originally -- speaking for various interests, mainly intersectionalized identity/affinity groups (old NY machine politics used to refer to these as ethnic "pillars"). The problem is that they got compromised by the Long March of leftist academics through academia, and now basically are dominated by various ideological leftists who purport to speak for their pillars but really don't reflect majority opinion -- not even under a weaker definition like "majority of the left and center-left without alienating the center-right".
PS: I think it's actually to Harris's credit that despite absolutely being a creature of these institutions, she's managed to escape their grip and basically run as a Never Trumper to capture as much of the Haley vote as possible. I literally would never have put that on my bingo card; she's FAR exceeded my expectations there (in a good way).
I don't understand how that's supposed to work. Ultimately the boogeyman 'The Groups' that keeps being invoked here is just another way of saying 'left-of-centre elites', and they will always have an impact on the Democrat party because that is the party which is for left-of-centre voters (in the main). What does 'nationalize them (under the party)' even mean? You can't prevent people forming NGOs, academics writing research papers etc.
Another issue is that "The Groups" are not just established left-of-center elites--they're full of left-wing recent college graduates that genuinely believe in their progressive values and live in circles--both online and in reality--where those far-left progressive values are popular and, often, seen as non-negotiable moral imperatives. Advancement in this world--to get to "elite" status--is through establishing your progressive bonafides, not just by tweeting but often by working in The Groups. Young people like this will always be willing to take jobs at the latest Group established by some rich donor(s) for a cause said donor(s) wants to fund (think Sunrise or whatnot supplanting more established--and willing to moderate--environmental groups).
You're right that they are "left of center elites" who have ALWAYS had an impact on the party... but by that same token, the specific problems of The Groups (too much antagonism and undue pressure on electeds, not speaking for their own pillars, etc) were never issues until the current era. That's not to say there haven't been OTHER issues at OTHER times, but just that this is the set of issues we face now.
My idea of "nationalizing" them is to basically provide a platform that serves as a national funding clearinghouse - a something-for-everyone, all-sizes-of-donors-welcome, one-size-fits-all project. Make a big push to get every candidate onto this one platform, lure all the groups onto it with a simple and frictionless process for getting money, and impose the sort of discipline against spammy/creepy messages that donors have been pining for for years. Use it to optimize coordination and redirect money from viral-but-hopeless campaigns (like McGrath's to unseat McConnell) into useful ones where that money can flip swing seats.
[Ed: Note that ActBlue is kinda already doing something like this; I'd probably hijack it if I was actually tasked with executing this plan.]
And then you tighten the fist. By being an indispensible, superior platform, you ensure that any activist group who steps too far out of line is guaranteed to wither away, simply by the selection effect of having to raise money away from the superior platform.
Control the money going into ALL the institutions, and you control the party. I'd pair this tightening with a secondary push on the electeds to pass a raft of nationwide reforms abolishing grants to NGOs and bringing state capacity back in-house. Make SF and CA stop handing millions and billions to NGOs to build "affordable" housing at $700k/unit. Stop hiring expensive consultants to do civil servants' work. Reform NEPA and CEQA so we're not spending millions on pointless environmental reviews. Basically, starve the NGOs and other Groups of all money outside of the central platform, and then make it clear that while they're perfectly free to advocate for their causes and study their policy arenas, performative bullshit, toxic infighting, and jockeying to override the party agenda set by voters and their elected leaders will not be tolerated.
I'm not saying this is a perfect plan or anything. It's just, if you tasked me with singlehandedly reforming the party to be less hollow, this is how I'd go about it. I'd build the platform, and use it to centralize and rationalize agenda-setting so that The Groups are no longer incentivized to act out in order to achieve their goals (which, btw, fuels the other side's propaganda). Policy and progress will still happen, but they will be the result of strategic campaigns and coherent messaging to the public, not slapdash swinging-for-the-fences legal cases and "one wierd trick" nutty policy ideas like student loan cancellation.
When I write my history of 21st century party politics (spoiler alert: nagonnahappen), the Ur moment will be the simultaneous rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. That's when the parties diverged. Both movements were crazy and possessed with crackpot ideas. The difference is that the Tea Party was focused on electoral politics and overthrowing Republican institutions in order to achieve both their electoral and their policy ends. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, made its primary focus ideological purity and a 100% removal from the dirty business of politics and elections. Instead, they used their virtue and their ethical superiority to enforce an ideological constraint on the Democratic party irrespective of electoral outcomes, in which they had zero interest.
The Democrats are trying really hard to cast off the straitjacket of the Occupy legacy whereas Trump is the personification of the Tea Party, in its expression of pure Id, and the party shows no sign that it has any intention or ability to dispose of that.
I hope I am portrayed favorably in that history. Perhaps as the Trotsky or Mao of Matthew Yglesias Thought. ;-)
I have you down for Zinoviev.
I appreciate you taking the time to write such a comprehensive reply, and I feel quite bad in saying after all that it seems like that very obviously wouldn't work, but FWIW here is one of the key problems:
'Basically, starve the NGOs and other Groups of all money outside of the central platform'
You appear to be operating on a model where money is a scare commodity in this space, and I simply don't think that's true. Very rich people and/or very large organisations are always going to have large budgets, in aggregate, for the key task of lobbying politicians to do what they want. And they can always donate to politicians directly.
FWIW, it's an idea I've been toying with for a while, so this isn't my first formulation of it.
And accordingly, the only defense I really have is that "it's still a work in progress". Which may come across as chickenshit (I kind of half-consider it that myself!), so apologies for that, but it's also the truth.
So, that's just to say, I actually appreciate any constructive criticism you can offer. Poking holes in the plan can only make it stronger.
To your specific point, I agree that competition is impossible to stave off. Change is inevitable, and even my system would eventually find itself obsolete and widely despised, just as the NIMBYs are now finding their hateful framework to be. But the core idea is to make the platform everything to everyone -- easy on the back end (distributing the cash), easy on the front end (donating the cash), easy everywhere. Sure, there's always going to be outside money, but the idea is to be the place where almost ALL money WANTS to be, even despite the costs (imposed party discipline) that it puts on them.
The NGOs, for instance, would be making more money than they could otherwise, and they'd be very happy with that. What separates even the noblest of noble NGOers from the hippie professional protestor population is that the NGOers like creature comforts like dogs, apartments that don't stink, and parmesan cheese that doesn't come from a can. Those things cost money, and NGOers are like any of the rest of us in the professional world in that they like making more money. In fact, if they can make more money while still being able to tell themselves they're doing good in the world, then we've got them right where we want them! Happy, complacent people don't wage self-destructive petition campaigns to get their bosses to take a position on Gaza.
Happy, complacent people who aren't distracting themselves with toxic internal NGO politics are also ones who work harder at their jobs. Millionaires and billionaires like people who are competent and effective at their jobs, especially when it comes to handing them money. Again, it's not something that would all happen in one day, but the positive way of framing my plan (rather than as a negative jihad against The Groups) is to create an ecosystem where people doing prosocial, effective pro-progress work are outcompeting those who do toxic Group shit.
Yeah political donations are almost unregulated, it's easy enough to get around a centralized system and they'll have a good point anyway. That's one of the more surprising advantages we have on the left in US politics- we actually do have some money to throw around.
As I responded to CW, the point of my plan is to make the centralized platform even easier than the easy alternatives.
Some of the most successful and effective enterprises often start with a simple guiding principle like that and then use it to drive around whatever obstacles present themselves along the way. So, while you CAN just say "it's impossible to make a platform easier than the easy alternatives", and declare that you've won the debate, it's ultimately something that can't be proven either way until someone actually accomplishes it or fails at it.
I conceptualize the complaint as pretty narrowly about selection bias and poor organizational structure within Democratic-aligned organizations. For example, the guy who runs for union president is by definition not an average member. So, groups that purport to represent people need to have mechanisms to ensure that its leadership does effectively represent the views/interests of its members. Different organizations can be better or worse at doing this. An obvious issue issue that Matt has addressed before is that if a group is funded by foundation grants rather member contributions it really has no incentive to be responsive to ordinary people. This, I think, is where the hollowness is. The party elites, other than a handful of well-respected elected officials, do not have a clear relationship to party members and can't convincingly speak for them in internal debates. So, the party just tries to avoid having internal debates.
If Latino civil rights groups or the NAACP had by 2021 started calling for a border crackdown--based on polling of Latino and Black popular opinion, respectively--they would have faced huge public outcry, huge resignations amongst staff, and huge loss of donors. Same if they started voicing pro-policing positions, or opposition to trans women's participation in women's sports, etc. This is why the pro-choice groups were tweeting about Defund in 2020... some sort of Group mind meld (or as David puts it above, "the Long March of leftist academics through academia" resulting in the Groups' "dominant[ion], by various ideological leftists who purport to speak for their pillars but really don't reflect majority opinion"). I don't know how to stop this from continuing to happen: even though their positions may often be unpopular--and all the progressive positions together absolutely toxic--there still is a constant stream of progressive donors to fund these causes and true-believing college graduates to work for them.
"wear their levers of power like a skinsuit"
I've seen frappuccinos less mixed than that metaphor!
I'm sympathetic with wanting to punch left against "the groups", but I think the hard work to be done is work of persuasion. The left still needs activists, organizers, non-profits, all this infrastructure...it just needs them to be organized along different principles/value different things/prioritize differently.
So the hard work is to convince the people that think those things to...think other things.
Any time I talk to anyone on the left who says some version of "how can the voters be so stupid to vote for Trump" I turn it into: if you can't explain why they made their decision without calling them stupid, you don't understand enough to convince them of anything you actually want to have happen. It's an argument that shame, purity tests and out-grouping people is a losing strategy.
I agree that it's a losing strategy. I think that the very nature and structure of those groups pretty much ensures that they do it.
You say their job is to do persuasion... which is true... so why aren't they doing it? They spend all their time doing purity tests.
I think the problem is the nature of the groups themselves. When your day job is literally to *advocate* for something all day long, you come to believe that it's the most important thing in the world. Even if we ignore groupthink, it's just true that advocates get tunnel vision. They see themselves as moral crusaders, not just doing a job delivering services to customers. Anyone who disagrees with them is either an obstacle to be destroyed or a menace to be ostracized, not a stakeholder to cater to.
These organizations are not small-d democratic. They're insular and guild-like. That is why they do not persuade.
That is also no way to run a political party.
I was struck by what happened in Missouri this week. 58% voted for Trump, and 51% voted for Amendment 3. Assuming all pro-lifers voted against 3, that means 10% of Missourians voted to protect abortion but FOR the one man most responsible for them having had to vote to protect abortion.
The advocates and all the rest of the state party organizations are the ones who moved heaven and earth to get Amendment 3 on the ballot. But what this did was allow voters to have their grievances AND their progress too.
The advocates were working under the theory that 3 would drive turnout for Dems, and maybe persuade some voters to vote for Dems. But the voters themselves have clearly obliterated this theory. I posit that if 3 hadn't been on the ballot, Dems would have still lost across the state, but more voters would have voted for Democrats. Maybe the Dems could have eaten into the GOP's supermajority in the state!
The point is, in wide swaths of the country, we don't even bother actually telling the voters "vote for me, and I'll do this for you". We just throw everything up against the wall and expect them to ALSO vote for us because we're such nice people -- and all the while, our Groups run rampant and tell THEM that they're shitty people.
All of this needs to be rethought now. We are not actually as nice as we think we are.
Primaries are a big part of the problem. Selecting a candidate in a two-party system is a very different decision process from electing an official. If you want the process to be super-democratic and leave it all to the voters, you need jungle primaries and ranked choice voting.
Score voting, please ("rank each candidate on a 0-5 scale"). Why is RCV such a popular ask? I always remind people that RCV is not, in fact, a voting system, it's just a kind of ballot. You actually need to pick a voting system on top of RCV, and if you don't pick one, you get IRV by default which is mathematically dumb/unstable. I like score voting because
(1) it's easier for the voter to vote on score ballots than RCV ballots when there are many candidates
(2) computing the winner is simple
(3) the result is very legible (a simple average for each candidate)
(4) if you ask voters after the election "how happy are you with the outcome?", you do it with a score vote. IIUC the best way to maximize the answer to this question is to use a score ballot in the voting booth too
(5) it lets voters express strength of preference: "I like A a little more than B but a lot more than C"
(6) it lets voters express equal preference (which RCV could theoretically do but somehow never does)
The other standard PSA: all single-winner voting systems including score voting should not be used for multi-winner elections because they are nonproportional, vulnerable to gerrymandering, and deny voter choice.
Footnote: RCV and score voting could both allow voters to abstain from expressing an opinion about specific candidates they know nothing about, but somehow this is never allowed. 🤷♂️
Jungle primaries, please!! 🦧
The issues isn't that the relevant folks don't have legal authority - they do!! It's that they don't actually exercise it. It's a cultural issue where, as things are increasingly nationalized, down-ballot folks are increasingly selected based on nationalized opinions about them. This discourage idiosyncrasy and independence on their part. They know that their ongoing success is tied to how they're covered by the media and how their thought of by The Groups.
In the end, its voters who have ceded this authority by (rationally) not bothering do invest the time and effort to think for themselves a lot about each and every candidate they must select. This isn't new in itself, but the people and organizations that form people's opinions have shifted a lot in the past 50 years. Power law social networks and media replaced the 'flatter' media and local endorsers people farmed their opinons out to in the past. Whereas in the past, a national pol would have to fight for large and diverse set of endorsers, there's much less to do now.
In the past, you could have local leaders and elected officials who would be willing to exercise their legal authority while trusting that their voters would remain their voters. But now, these folks know that they will succeed or fail based on how the constellation of media and Groups view them because those are the places their voters now go to form opinions.
I don't really see much of this "legal authority". Even if there are countless arcane procedures sitting on the bylaws books of the state and local parties, just waiting to get leveraged for bare-knuckles power plays by moderates to edge out extremist primary winners... the voters would revolt. Calling that a "cultural issue" is like saying that the only reason Congress and the various stage legislatures haven't exercised their Article V powers to amend the Constitution and seize a bipartisan dictatorial control is because of a "culture" against doing so.
I think it's more just that Jacksonian Democracy is really popular and really dumb, and pulled us on the wrong track towards conceiving of our politics as a series of zero-sum head-to-head matchups -- which, when it predictably fails to either (A) produce politicians of good moral character and quality nor (B) produce the sort of politicians who can "compromise" with each other, as the national mythology goes... well, it just simply drives everyone to the even MORE idiotic conclusion that only "the people" can exercise power, so we need to keep circumscribing those naughty politicians' powers and defanging any institution (party bosses, etc) who would dare interfere with "the people's" right to elect politicians who refuse to moderate or compromise.
It's a bunch of self-contradictory nonsense, but it's also one of the most enduring aspects of our political culture. For most of our history, whenever we're given an option to reform, we reform in THIS direction, instead of in the directions that might ever give parties more methods to discipline politicians (like party lists, RCV etc).
The contradictions are why it's not surprising that the whole thing is starting to collapse. It's based on a bunch of dumb mythologizing, and it's not being replaced with proper reforms (again, party lists under PR, RCV, etc) fast enough to stop the collapse.
But that's the point. In the past, voters trusted their representatives. Now, they trust Rachel Maddow, and that's absolutely a shift that's effected how parties operate. It's not about bare-knuckle power plays, it's about who voters put their faith in, and currently, that's not folks in state or, really, federal legislatures, let alone party operatives.
But I think we agree more than we disagree. Because of zero-sum thinking, our political leaders have been unwilling to put forth credible reforms to the systems that both parties could get behind. This has happened while norms that developed during the 19th and 20th century to make the country governable have been eroded during the 21st century in service of short-sighted political gain.
I think the problem is at some level our system is currently zero-sum with winner take all and so the question is this: voters for better or worse prefer Jacksonian Democracy, it is baked to how we are in is country––so how do we reform the system for better outcomes that is more representative of moderates? Currently people move to the extreme because the incentives call for it. Most people aren't slow boringers and only pay attention to politics during the last weeks of the election and also pay attention to only the most outrageous, thereby radicalizing people. The truth is the only way to strengthen the parties is to strengthen the system in which they complete. The president despite having far less formal power than a King, in terms of cultural power really is not much different in terms of defining the terms for everyone else in the party. The voters would gladly choose a king unless there are incentives not to. So reforming the electoral college so that its proportional in states, rather than winner take all, getting rid of first past the post elections, having ranking choice and run-off elections will help this empowering the moderates to have more voice in the party and creating a situation where voters don't feel the system is zero-sum(which I think they do). The party can only discipline the groups if both moderate members actually have both structural and cultural power when currently the inverse is true. As long as cultural and structural incentives promote extremism, nothing will change. In fact nationalizing "the Groups" will empower them even more. The more engaged people are, the more extreme they are and the more you spurn the people most likely to vote for you, in a system that promotes extremism the less value there is catering to the moderates. In a weird way you have to make "the Groups" themselves more moderate since in the massive coalition, those who scream the loudest will always win. Unless you can alter the dynamic of people getting more extreme the more they engage, things won't change, since moderates rarely use their power in effective ways.
I agree wholeheartedly with the first part.
I don’t know if I agree with your analysis about what the centralization would do to The Groups, though. The whole point of the plan I discussed elsewhere on the thread, after all, is to pacify them and reorient them towards better elucidations of progressive politics.
I'm more with Matt A, as I think the nationalization of politics makes more people extreme. Incentives have something do with it, at the same time, as the world has become more extreme, with technology etc etc. I actually think when you nationalize groups you mainstream them, and their voices win over the moderates. My experience is you don't pacify them, they end up pacifying you.
Matt's post today is a just a barely concealed wish that we were in a parliamentary system and were less democratic.
There's some strategy around the edges that could be improved and I guess that matters in a close election , but ultimately the party was able to talk down it's leader, install a successor that had the most democratic legitimacy, rally around that successor, moderate on policy and silence dissent all in a few weeks without any votes. That's extraordinarily robust. It's not clear the idealized electable candidate would actually clear a primary-- they usually don't as Matt fully knows.
We will see what happens. There's no need to doomloop. But ultimately the American people have been presented a clear choice and the other side isn't hiding its intentions. If Harris loses that's on the American people. And honesty if she wins it's on the American people that this is so close. You can get lost in the weeds on optimal strategy and lose sight of the broadest sense of there is democratic legitimacy and the people get a say in it. Europeans have maintained cordon sontiares for decades in similar elections while under much more extreme economic duress. If Americans are choosing fascism purely because of moderate inflation, or because they actually want a strongman, welp that's on them. I can't knock the Democrats for having slightly suboptimal coordination. They've more or less done their part. This up to America now.
"Matt's post today is a just a barely concealed wish that we were in a parliamentary system and were less democratic."
[Imagine the Jack Nicholson nodding GIF here, but, instead of Jack Nicholson, it's Pitt the Younger.]
Well said, Jeremy.
There’s a self-reinforcing doom loop dynamic: People view parties as illegitimate, so they weaken the parties; the weaker parties don’t perform very well, reinforcing perceptions of illegitimacy, so people then weaken the parties more. And so on.
Primaries are the key institution responsible for this state of affairs, in my view. Can’t have a proper party when the party network isn’t in charge of who’s included. No other country** does it this way, and for good reason.
** Sure, arguably Argentina, but is Argentine politics an advertisement for this system?
The notion that Steve Bullock or Michael Bennet (seriously, wtf) would be an optimal candidate for Democrats to run in 2020 is absurd. MAYBE Klobuchar would have been better (I think a more credible argument would be that she was a superior VP choice) but she also finished a distant 5th in the 2020 primary, so I'm skeptical.
Biden had the name recognition to beat Trump during a time where campaigning and GOTV was much more difficult (remember Covid?). He also had a million years of experience in the Senate and eight years as VP. Because of this, Biden had a tremendously successful 2021-22. Does Matt really think that Bennet or Bullock or Klobuchar would have had the same success getting bills passed into law? I know substance has become secondary to appearance and vibes, but ability to actually get something done has to count for something.
With all that being said, clearly Biden should have announced in the beginning of 2023 that he wasn't running for re-election. Or should he have? There would have been an ugly primary in 2023-24. Would Harris have run a sensible moderate campaign, or would she have gone far left like she did in 2019?
Ultimately I think that the party did the best that it could under tremendously difficult circumstances. None of what Matt lays out is an indicator that the party is hollow. If anything, Members of Congress not calling on Biden to drop out after the debate was pure cowardice, but as Matt showed, other parts of the party stepped in to ensure that the party followed the will of its members, as it did in nominating Biden in 2020.
Finishing fifth in the primary is neither here nor there as to how well someone would do in the general election. Once you are the nominee, the things that make you fifth rather than first are gone, but the skills that moved you from unheard-of to fifth may still matter.
It will probably turn out that Biden hanging around, being replaced late, Harris replacing him without a primary and turning out to be as good a candidate as the Democrats could hope for was the best possible outcome in this the best of all possible worlds.
The funny thing is that the other party is just one guy. It doesn't matter if everybody else in the party converges on one position, if the guy comes out and says the opposite, that's their position now.
That does have the effect of making the party more coherent and decisive - even one incoherent guy is more coherent than a structural blob of millions of people.
Well, the funny part is when people try to put meat on the bones of his ideology. He doesn't have one, so if you're a Republican politician, you can stake out a position you think he'll take, but then he'll throw you under the bus because he doesn't care.
In the unforgettable words of Jeff Maurer: “Policy is to Trump as a leaky sink is to a porn film: it’s there because *something* has to be there, but other elements are what people care about.”
I think the real problem here is the primary system amplifies the tension between the expressive/value aspect of party identity and the practical one. Now that the engaged voters in the two parties differ substantially in their values/vision of a good society a primary the primary voters don't want to expressively affiliate themselves with someone who doesn't share -- or at least not offend -- those values. That's a big problem because the best way to be electable is to show the swing/centerist voter you respect and don't positively reject their values.
The only way to square this circle is to let voters choose delegates rather than canidates. The delegates can champion the values of the party and let the primary voter expressively affiliate and then go into the back room and pick the canidate who represents the best electability/outcomes compromise. And that really would make everyone happier because those engaged voters really want to both win and express their values and the current system forces them to choose between the two.
I use this example a lot: In 2021 Virginia Republicans held a state convention instead of a primary election and they nominated Glenn Youngkin for governor. He's one of the best nominees relative to state political affiliation in recent history.
You’re burning a lot of ink (or 1s and 0s) hyper-critiquing the Democratic Party. It’s running well on all cylinders right now in a historic context. After yesterday’s “Puerto Rico is a floating island of garbage” Republican message in Madison Square Garden I don’t need to be lectured by any alleged Democrat about the bureaucratic fine points of running my party. The GOP doesn’t even know Puerto Ricans are Americans.
If you actually watch the full 11 min video, the GOP crowd cheer at the mention of Latinos and Puerto Ricans and groan and boo a little at the jokes about them.
Come on folks, you don't have to steelman or excuse the floating island of garbage thing. You really don't.
Centrism is a hell of a drug.
It's not centrism, it's about interpreting a joke in it's context.
If you hire a roast comedian to perform at a funeral and roast the deceased, that's a choice that might be worth criticizing because it might not be appropriate for the event. But picking over the *jokes* to decide if they are "the real message" of whoever hired the comedian is a waste of time.
Pleez. If a comedian at a Harris rally had said something similar about Iowa, the outrage on this board be visible from Mars. No one would accept "that's not our message" as an excuse.
They might may say it's bad optics, and if people were flipping out it would be over potential lost votes, not over some idea that they are offended on behalf of Iowans.
A strong party would not have let a guy go on stage during "closing arguments" to make a vile joke that led to Puerto Rican celebrities with *tens of millions* of followers to immediately denounce them and announce their support for Harris. Sometimes campaigning is not rocket science.
Making the argument that it's bad optics and bad politics in one thing. Making the argument that it's a "vile joke" is an entirely different thing. Tony H could make that joke anywhere in NYC or Florida, where tons of Puerto Ricans live, and have no problems as long as the crowd was warmed up to and engaged with his style of humor. I've heard him, and plenty of other comedians, make 100x more offensive jokes and they direct the majority of them at "in-groups" friends, groups of people in America they like, etc...
It's the whole thing with this kind of comedy. He actually asked if there were Latinos in the audience, got cheers and then made that joke. It's not about punching down. If you don't like it, fine, but it's not "vile".
I agree it was bad politics, and it was probably bad comedy, too because the crowd wasn't receptive to him except when he made jokes about Democrats. But getting offended by the comedy is just so silly.
Uhh, how was he steelmanning/excusing things? He said "when compared to the awful things they just said about PR", the Democratic party is going like gangbusters.
I believe MWM is talking about the replies to IRSE that are steelmanning it (one of which was deleted, to that commenter's credit)
That is correct. I didn't want to single out one by replying to them directly. Sorry for the confusion.
Are you excerpting lines from a roast comic and saying they are "the Republican message"?
I'm willing to make a lot of excuses for various things being misinterpreted or overstated, but I think that, in a highly-scripted televised political rally run by the candidate's own campaign the week before the election, basically everything said on stage by an invited speaker at the event qualifies as part of the "message" being delivered unless expressly rejected and/or denounced (I'll accept either one) by the candidate. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The campaign did put out a message shortly thereafter that this said this wasn't their message. The problem for Trump isn't that he had this guy at an event say this thing. Its that what this guy said aligns with 98% of the rest of their messaging.
Then why was the crowd groaning and booing his Puerto Rico joke?
Ok - but the guy is clearly speaking as a comedian. He's crafting (offensive) jokes, not political arguments. If you want to hear truly offensive jokes, watch clips of him at a roast, like the roast of Tom Brady from earlier this year.
Whether it was irresponsible for Trump's campaign to have him is a different question, but they have to be understood as jokes, from a guy who specializes in insult comedy, and not as political political messages.
If you want a campaign to say "The jokes my comedian said are not my message" I guess that's fine, and might be the right move politically, but I can't imagine myself ever being personally offended. I think the question of whether having a guy like that on is the better question than debating what he said. If he or a similar guy had been hired by the Harris campaign the debate should be over the hiring, not whether her campaign agrees with the literal message of the jokes.
To pull a Matt, I would simply not hire an insult comic to be the opening act for my presidential campaign event.
The reason people should criticize the hiring is because many people are literally going to criticize the statements that the person made.
If you turn the President’s Twitter account over to some volunteer intern college student, and they start tweeting about Gaza and weed or whatever, then you would criticize the decision to turn the President’s Twitter account over to a student on the basis of the fact that the student is going to say some criticizable things.
I agree! The optics might be terrible and campaigns need to be careful of how their message is received. But that's what I would focus on, and not disagreeing with the intern's thoughts on weed
Or to put it a different way, the Harris campaign was not horrified by his "joke." They were delighted and deservedly so. (Well, in private, anyway). What a gift the Trump campaign just gave them!
At a roast, Tom Brady is there to be a willing participant.
If he were doing this set in Puerto Rico that would be different (I'm not saying it would be _good_ but it would at least be in the vein of a roast)
The point isn't that it's a roast, the point is he has a style of dark insult comedy where the insults are not intended to be taken seriously. It's an odd choice for a political campaign, but the literal jokes are not the "GOP message"
They sort of are the GOP's message, though, aren't they? How different is "floating garbage" from "shithole countries"?
A roast comic who was opening for the presidential candidate 9 days before the election.
That doesn't make the comic's jokes the literal message of the party.
Isn't it true that while there are US citizens of Puerto Rican origin, Puerto Ricans by default do not have the right to vote?
I believe they can vote as soon as they establish residency on the mainland.
Thanks! I was very ignorant on this issue. Good to learn something new.
Yes - it's a lot like D.C. (although D.C. can vote for President)
Bring it, IRSE!
I think it would be good if you put your intelligence towards understanding people, rather than towards misunderstanding them.
What about Biden’s vice presidential appointment? Would a robust party have chosen a more electable candidate than Harris? All of her problems with closing the deal in 2024 were foreseen when she was put on the ticket.
Leave aside that she has pretty good favorables and is at least a coin flip from winning. What's the evidence that robust parties pick good VP candidates? Andrew Johnson, Spiro Agnew, Dan Quayle, Henry Wallace . . .
How many knew they wanted a sitting President to run only 1 term?
> her problems with closing the deal in 2024
Maybe that's in part why they picked her?