Bon courage everyone. If you’re not driving seniors to the polls, it’s a good time to turn off the phone and immerse yourself in a book, a project, or nature. Even a video game. We won’t know for a long while anyway.
Here’s my personal pledge. If Trump wins, I will be very unhappy, but I won’t fall apart and I certainly won’t stop loving my country. Whatever happens, we are still the luckiest people in human history.
Where my Slow Boring gamers at?! If my gf didn't have to watch the election coverage for work, I'd absolutely be distracting myself with a few hours of Horizon Forbidden West on my PS5 tonight.
I wonder if it'd be too depressing to play Frostpunk 2, a game about a civilization that, having achieved some semblance of survival against a climate apocalypse, finds itself teetering on the edge of collapsing in on itself due to internal divisions and politics.
In 2020 I bought and played the entirety of Return of the Obra Dinn while waiting for the election to be called. This year I was thinking about finally playing Disco Elysium, but I've also got a second playthrough of the Witcher 3 going that I might just lose myself in.
I played Obra Dinn once by myself, I did pretty poorly in solving the mysteries, mostly impatience. However, another time I had some friends over and what started as a way to pass a couple hours became a 4–5-hour collaborative play through where we got 100%. Really satisfying.
All excellent choices, I have a conundrum where I *want* to re-read the Witcher books (which are really really good, and everyone should read [at least the "first" two short story collections]) before replaying Witcher 3 which isn't necessary but gives you more world and character context via all kinds of small details. But that is also a huge time commitment, and I also just want to play the game again. My solution has been to procrastinate and play other games/read other books.
There is no wrong way to play, but I strongly suggest dropping points in Inland Empire and Shivers - I think the best writing in the game is under their passive skill checks.
when i saw the latest planet of the apes movie, i couldn't help but wonder whether they reused some of the graphics from horizon in their cgi. beautiful game.
You may have inspired me to play some Elden Ring tonight. When I am working to git gud, everything else goes away.
My retired mother is keeping my son today since school is out, so I will have to tolerate some MSNBC briefly while picking up my son. But I hope to get out of there quickly and attend to more sane pursuits.
So great. One I get through HFW I may go back and finally go through the DLC for it.
Although, for my money, I still think FS's more linear stories are best. I can replay Sekiro and Bloodborne dozens of times, whereas ER I put away about halfway through my second playthrough.
One of my best friends is a huge FS fan and he’s insistent that I would love Bloodborne so I probably need to give that one a shot. ER was the first video game I had taken on in 10 years or so, mainly played it at first just to hang out with old friends who played.
I think the DLC is outstanding, fwiw. Excellent boss fights even in the dungeons, and an enormous world for a DLC. They made the world much more vertical which made it intriguing for me; I love the exploring as much as the fighting.
Not tonight, but I've got a wide spread of games, currently playing Nier Automata and Xenoblade, Splatoon with friends, Outer Wilds to calm down.
I've been thinking a lot about Disco Elysium recently, when things calm down, I'd love to figure out which Slow Borers are willing to admit to being dirty Moralists. Kingdom of Conscience....
Yeah, I own it too. The game deals it out to everyone pretty good. Is Moralism just about control, do we play with ideas disposably, like children with toys? I don't think so, but of course I don't, I'm a no-good moderate.
I set myself up for a no-phone evening, uninterrupted. Jiu-jitsu from 6:15 to 8:45, hitting a movie immediately after, phone off from 6:15 to the morning. No amount of doomscrolling is gonna change anything, and if the results go the way I hope (Harris), I can always go back and look at that live reaction stuff later.
I'm having an election party, but not turning on the TV or letting anyone talk about the election until 9ish. Also, got a marathon in a few weeks so I'm gonna try to fit in a 16 mile run in the afternoon and listen to a few hours of Bob Dylan singing about America.
You don't have to watch sports to host a giant Super Bowl party, I do. It's like Christmas - it has entered the civil sphere where you don't have to be a pious practitioner to celebrate.
Your 1st sentence is my life story, except I did it for much longer (without getting my purple, sniff). Now I'm too old and injured to get back into BJJ.
I also dabbled in judo for a hot minute. Not sure how old you are, or how tall you are, but man judo is a tough one to get into as an adult. The injury rate is sky freaking high, much more so than BJJ. The whole point of the sport is explosive, high-amplitude throws at velocity. Getting hit with something like an uchi mata when you're resisting, and you didn't spend your childhood learning how to breakfall.... And it's worse if you're tall, because you have that much further to fall and hit the mat
Are you legitimately seven feet tall? But yeah, judo is no bueno man. Have you tried BJJ? Or striking? You'd kill some people either way if that's really your height haha
I really am yes. I used to do Taekwondo as a kid, but that's all the martial arts experience I've got. Haven't really done anything for ~18 years or so.
I don't wanna sound like your Mom, but I cannot recommend strongly enough not starting judo at age 40 lol.
Did you just lose interest in BJJ? I had to stop because of my shoulder. I always found no gi much more interesting & athletic, I kind of lost interest in the whole gi metagame as it's played these days. (OK great, you wrapped my sleeves up in worm guard or whatever, I could just punch you in a real fight, this is really not even remotely close to being a martial art). But if I still had 2 functioning shoulders I'd mostly do no gi with the MMA guys a few times a week
Here to second (third?) this. We had an Olympian teaching Judo at my BJJ gym for a while, so the teaching was excellent, and I went to it a few times, but hitting the deck that many times at 40 is a terrible, terrible idea. There's a reason why you hear that most of the bad injuries in BJJ come from uncontrolled falls.
My wife and I are going to see the movie Conclave tonight for this reason; force ourselves to shut our phones off. We've been telling friends to not watch any cable news until earliest 9-10 PM. All the updates at like 8 are going to be "breaking news Trump wins West Virginia and Harris wins Massachusetts" or "breaking news, with 1% vote in, Pennsylvania is too close to call". And then there will be conversations with the 15 panelists about what these early results mean and there will be 15 opinions based on absolutely nothing because they need to fill air time.
I basically feel this way but I confess that if Trump wins I will be leaning on my love of California more than the US and struggling to understand why so many people think the status quo is so terrible because I agree with you that we are so lucky to live here now and I don’t understand why a message that is the opposite of that is so appealing to so many.
Unfortunately if Trump wins, those of us living in Red States (Florida myself) will be constantly reminded of said win and have it thrown in our faces. You can't even go to a football game in Florida anymore without being inundated with MAGA flags and Trump hats.
I remember thinking that the Obama nonsense in 2008 was annoying, but goddamn do Trump supporters have that beat. Memes like "giant pickup truck with Trump flags" are so cringey.
I'm playing through every Halo game via the Master Chief Collection. Hella nostalgia, the gameplay is still good, especially from 2 onwards, and the story is still interesting.
My wife, on the other hand, has to pay attention for her job, and it's taking a toll on both of us.
I think it will be ok in the long run, though. America is young, still, and working out problems that very few societies have had to grapple with, and I'm confident that we will continue to be better every day, and there's no other time and place I would rather be.
I agree I have taken a break from election coverage and don’t even know what they are predicting with the exception of predictit.org. This has freed up time to introduce my son to Mario kart and I would otherwise have missed discovering he is not very good at this and will need additional training with me over the next few weeks.
I should note I have also discovered I am not that good either (he handed me controller to win the next round and I got 11th last night) so maybe need to get him a coach.
I would also encourage everyone to avoid sweeping conclusions about the country (we rejected or embraced fascism; etc...) based on who wins by 1-2% in PA, WI, MI, AZ and NV.
No matter who wins, we have an evenly split country where each Party has positioned themselves to capture nearly 50% of the voting public. May we hope and pray our leaders act in the best interests of ALL citizens and not only the ones who voted for them.
If Trump wins, I won't necessarily think the country rejected fascism (we know from the polls that democracy isn't the single issue for the vast majority of voters.) But if Trump loses, we would have avoided fascism, which is very much worth celebrating!
And I do think once Trump is gone, the GOP will slowly close the page on this dark chapter.
Growing up in a household that embraced conservative talk radio I can tell you the Trumpist wing was always there but it was a rump movement that was kept in check by the “yacht club” Republicans (this a phrase Rush Limbaugh used back in the 90’s).
MAGA is here to stay because it’s been here and it will not give up the crown easily.
I disagree only because nobody can Trump like Trump. Desantis, Haley, Vance...they are all pale imitators. Nobody has the bombast, image, and humor that Trump does.
The GOP will still do stupid things but I can't see this specific strain of revenge politics sticking without the guy.
Whatever comes up after Trump will make for a different GOP, that's for sure.
Though I do think that, if he loses, people are underestimating the possibility he'll be the nominee again in 2028. He'll only be 82.
No, not saying it's a super strong possibility. And I do think if he loses, anti-Trump sentiment in GOP circles will grow. And heck, Trump may not even want to run again. But I honestly don't think a successful run for the nomination on his part is such a remote possibility.
Cannon isn't the only game in town. Trump has sentencing in his New York case in three weeks. While being sent to prison before a defendant's appeals are exhausted is vanishingly rare in white collar cases, if I were the NY AG, I'd be logging every public statement Trump makes starting at 5 PM EST today to be able to comprehensively document to the trial court whether he's fomenting violence against election officials, etc. and argue that he should be jailed immediately due to the risk of further criminal activity while his appeals are proceeding.
This seems correct to me! If Trump loses, Republicans haven't walked away from an election night happy in ten years!! That has to result in some sort of course correction.
I don't think that's true. First, human nature means it's very hard for people, individually or collectively, to admit they're the problem and their mistakes need to be corrected. And in terms of success, the Republicans haven't triumphed, but they haven't really lost decisively either. The Supreme Court looking like it's locked down ideologically for years to come is a huge ongoing win, as were the big tax cuts of 2017, most of which aren't going to be rolled back.
With a 50-50 country what everybody first worries about is not losing anybody at the margin, so that leads to no big change. Then you look for how to gain at the margin, and that's what the 2025 project is really all about --- how to solidify power so that you can wield more than your share even if your share should only be 50%.
"With a 50-50 country what everybody first worries about is not losing anybody at the margin, so that leads to no big change."
I think if this was true, MAGA wouldn't have gained the power it did. There were definitely elements of it in Republican politics prior to 2016, but there is a substantive and significant difference in the politics of 2012 vs 2024.
Yeah, this is the point I keep making -- it's just too implausible that GOP megadonors are going to be happy to keep flushing hundreds of millions of dollars down a gold-plated toilet every election cycle until Donald Trump dies or becomes too incapacitated to run.
Once Trump is not on the ballot anymore, the Democratic Party is highly vulnerable to a smarter, disciplined version of Trump without his personal baggage. Trump's personal weaknesses have masked many of the failures of the Democratic Party. It's important to remember that Biden is still very unpopular and waxing eloquent on what a great success his Presidency has been hasn't persuaded many voters in the middle.
Except that there's reasonable evidence that "smarter, disciplined" is contrary to what a large number of marginal voters find appealing about Trump and it also appears that "personal baggage" is a major contributor to Trump's appeal as well.
Yet to see any evidence that Trump doesn’t repel marginal voters because of his personal flaws. Overall, voters prefer him on the economy and immigration by big margins but his net favorability is very negative.
IMO if America rejects Trumpism it will probably be judged by history as a non-trivial triumph for the American experiment. Resisting authoritarianism is not easy, and many countries have failed. As per Matt's recent NYT article, incumbents are getting crushed in America's peer democracies, and Trump's had a lot of help from powerful actors, foreign and domestic.
Numerous American individuals and some institutions have stood up to Trump (to varying degrees). They deserve credit whatever the outcome but especially if it proves sufficient to bend the arc of history towards justice, if that's not too earnest of a statement.
Not to pick on you, but this is kinda my point. America isn't going to "reject Trumpism" if he loses (unless there is some massive polling error and he loses 40+ states), and we won't have "embraced" authoritarianism if he wins. We have the electorate we have.
Ok to avoid semantics, if Trump loses the election. To illustrate why this counts as rejection IMO: do you know exactly how many Hungarians voted for Orban? Does it matter? Or is what matters that Hungary doesn’t really have a democracy any more?
John: I think you're being too nit picketty. We're always going to have some voters who support any imaginable outcome. So when we anthropomorphize "America" when it votes, the best we can really do is talk about margins, and percentages. In other words, if a *majority* of Americans end up rejecting the authoritarianism-adjacent candidacy, it doesn't seem that much of a stretch to claim that, well, America indeed "rejected" Trumpism. At least this time*.
*The verb "reject" in English doesn't imply permanency.
In a real sense, if Trump loses the election twice, how can he hold his iron grip on the GOP? Wouldn't the establishment attempt to take back control?
The normal thing is for losers to be discredited and for the party to seek new ideas/figures. I'm not sure if we live in normal times any more but that would be a rejection of trumpism.
I think they will try to replicate Trump with another figure but the problem is that these people won’t have a relationship with a block of voters like Trump does.
The logical thing for GOP elites to do if he loses is to quietly encourage all his legal cases to come to a conclusion and see him in jail for a while, all while loudly denouncing the process in public. Maybe not what will/would actually happen, but would be the sensible play.
"Wouldn't the establishment attempt to take back control?"
What is this "establishment" of which you speak? I'm sure the National Review will dance on his supposed grave (until he rises from it and they, cowering, bend the knee again). But MAGA *is* the Republican establishment.
If Trump loses today but (of course) claims victory denied due to fraud and cheating, I'm not sure what the Republican response will be. Who has the credibility and desire to point the finger at him and contend for leadership of the party? Obviously, not J.D. Vance. I'm struggling to come up with a name.
After 2020 (and especially after Jan. 6), Trump was seen as a spent force and rather pathetic. (Remember his paltry and underpowered declaration that he was running?) DeSantis tried to fill the gap and we know how that turned out. Anyone coming for the king now will remember this sequence of events and think that maybe the smartest thing to do is keep your head down and wait for the Cheeseburger from Heaven to do what they're all praying for.
Maybe. I do think that Trump's age will be a factor; he'll be 82 in 2028. If he loses quickly tonight, I could see someone deciding to put knuckledusters on and have a go.
I'd be really interested in seeing some possible names. I can think of one truly serious one: Brian Kemp. Maybe Greg Abbott. I wonder if either of them would be willing to take on Trump, especially if it's a very close defeat. And especially after seeing what happened to Ron DeSantis.
In 2016 the talk was of a murder-suicide. Somebody in the field needed to go after Trump hard, sacrificing their own candidacy to take him down and clear the field for one of the more establishment guys to take the nomination. It never happened.
If we get to 2026, and inshallah Trump is not President but claims to be running again/still, they'll face the same problem. The only difference there might be compared to 2022-4 is that politicians at that level have enormous egos, and they can't keep themselves in check that long. So I at least think there will be a robust primary. Whether anyone but Trump could emerge from a crowded field is something my crystal ball cannot discern.
I think if Harris wins Iowa, it won't be a rejection of "Trumpism" but a reaction to Dobbs, which is bog standard Republicanism.
If Harris wins the election, on the margin it will mostly be about abortion, not Trump. Half of the population is actually fine with Trump because apparently for a few months in 2019 they thought things were going well or something.
Yes and no. It'll partly be because of Dobbs - but how many Republicans are crossing over to vote against Trump because of the man himself but are otherwise ok with Dobbs?
I continue to believe that comparing Harris’ performance to the performance of incumbents in other democracies with 4+ viable parties is apples and oranges.
Going back to 1988, the lowest vote share received by a Democratic or Republican presidential candidate in an election without Ross Perot on the ballot is 46%. Because there are normally only two parties of any importance contesting the election, Americans just don’t move their votes around that much.
I think the comparison to unpopular incumbents losing around the world would be more applicable to our case is if, for example, a Jeremy Corbin-led Labour trounced the Tories. And did so with more than the 34% of the vote they actually got. Instead, a normie Labour leader got somewhat less of the popular vote than Labour usually gets (en route to a smashing parliamentary victory).
I mean, in the shocking French parliamentary election, the National Rally only got 143 of 577 seats (and in the 2022 presidential election, Macron blew away LePen).
I think the US is unique in that an objectively unqualified candidate who is one of the worst human beings on the planet is guaranteed perhaps as much as half of the vote. Truly a case of American exceptionalism.
Throwing Trump out of office the first time was a really big deal. It rarely happens to normal presidents, and it is super rare when it comes to illiberal leaders.
That we have to come back around and prevent him from coming back again just seems cosmically unfair, as Archer would say, "eat a dick, universe."
Man, if Trump wins after going full LOL, Nothing Matters mode for the last two weeks of the campaign, I am going to take the under on your hope and prayer.
Back in 2016, I thought something like “Trump probably isn’t going to win, but the fact that he won a major party nomination and is probably going to get at least 40% of the vote has pretty alarming implications on its own terms.”
I was wrong about the first part but right about the second. Even if we live in the “Selzer Poll is 100% real” universe and Harris wins by Obama ‘08 margins, there’s going to be a lot of deprogramming to do.
One of my biggest pet peeves of coastal liberals looking at a "red" state and assuming they should be left behind or are all racists simply because a majority of people who bothered to vote elected the bad man. There are a lot of Democrats in Alabama and more Trump supporters in New York City than in all of Wyoming!
I think if Trump wins it does show how much immigration has been a killer for the Dems and more broadly how unpopular there brand has become that Trump even has a chance.
If the Republicans had any brains and nominated someone like Nikki Haley then Harris would have been crushed
"Liked," because I think there is something to "anti-heroism" as being corrosive to civic virtue, but I'm not sure it's particularly to blame for Trump.
I kind of feel that too, but nothing lasts forever. At some point he *will* be gone, and maybe the energy that powers both assholishness and derangement (=/= right v left, both exist on each side IMO) will dissipate and we'll collectively remember that our success as a species depends on cooperation.
Some British media traditions (and laws) on election day that I think some Americans would appreciate knowing about:
1. We call it "Polling Day".
2. Regulated media (TV and radio) are not allowed to report on the campaigns while the polls are open (7am to 10pm), so the news leads with "the polls are open, people are voting" and then runs stories that have nothing to do with the election; this tends to act as something of a relief and definitely has a calming influence on me.
3. People tend to take their dogs for a walk, tie them up outside the polling station, go in and vote and then leave: this has created a social media tradition of taking a photo of the dog with the Polling Station sign (which is an iconic plain black on white design), which results in the wonderful hashtag #DogsAtPollingStations, which many people spend much of the day scrolling through - far better than doomscrolling.
4. We have an uncannily accurate exit poll, which is kept absolutely secret and then released at 10pm. It hasn't been significantly wrong since 1992 - it's nailed eight elections in a row to under 1%. Unsurprisingly, John Curtice, the head of the exit polling operation, has become something of a cult figure among election fandom.
Certain local governments vie to be the first to declare - usually in the North East. So polls close at 10pm and the first couple of results come in at around 10.50pm. These are always safe urban labour seats so don't mean anything, but does mean you get about four hours of discussion about some random seat and what it all means, before the other results start rolling in (most of the time it means not much at all)
Having been a candidate in a safe urban labour seat that didn't declare until after 5am, I'm so jealous of Sunderland and Newcastle that I couldn't bear to mention it, but yes.
Yes it very annoyingly means that Sunderland ends up taking an absolutely central place in the discourse, since - as mentioned by the OP - the 'narrative' of an election tends to be formed by the first few results rather than the vast majority of them.
Watching the most recent British election was quite soothing. I do find it odd that your results arent reported in earnest til 2-5 am GMT. But it is quaint how, during summer elections, they literally count through the sunrise.
It's very simple: we gather all the ballots for a district ("constituency") together in one place before counting, which means that those ballots are in a car for several hours in rural areas.
Then we don't release any numbers at all until the count is complete, so there are no partial results. So you get nothing and then an entire constituency all at once.
In 1997, when Tony Blair won and there was a really optimistic mood about a new PM, he flew from his constituency count down to London and made a speech outside the Royal Festival Hall, just as dawn was breaking (in May, so not quite as early as in July this year), and he started it with "A new dawn has broken, has it not?"
If you're In The Know you can get result impressions early from people attending the counts. I've had some depressing evenings and exciting ones where you quickly get a feel for who is winning. When you see things about a glum faced candidate team hours before the results its because they are watching ballots getting counted and see they aren't showing up as much as they needed!
Oh absolutely, there's a joke that there's always a Lib Dem in a corner with a laptop who knows exactly what is going on, and I have been that Lib Dem on occasion.
No regulations on social media for this period. But the tradition weighs fairly heavily on people: you get discussion of who will win rather than of the issues, by and large.
Between this thread and last night's thread, I've only seen predictions for Harris winning. So I'll be a pessimist: my prediction is that Harris loses PA, and it's game over.
I wondered that when reading his book, especially about AI risk.
If I pull a p(doom) out of my ass and compare it someone else's p(doom), how would you go about validating any of it? Even with subject matter expertise.
There isn’t really anything it could mean for someone to do the *right* probability calculation. You can measure one score of “accuracy” as the squared difference between the probability and the truth value, or another measure as the negative logarithm of the probability you gave to the truth (each of these is useful for different sorts of model training in statistics or machine learning, or presumably animal brain evolution) and then you can test your model over time to see whether it’s generally being more or less accurate than some other model. But every model is only going to be reliable in different environmental conditions, and there’s no objective way to say what set of circumstances are the right environmental conditions to be assuming.
His probabilities just strike me as unfalsifiable in a way that grates on me. Unless his model gives someone a 100% chance of winning, it can always be right.
If I am looking at KenPom or ESPN BPI for the likelihood a team wins a game, I have a way to check to see if out of the games where teams have a 70% chance to win, win around 70% of those games.
Well, they do projections for more than just the presidential races. Across the hundreds of house races Nate's model has been pretty well calibrated. You can also look at state-by-state results to see how accurate those have been.
Of course, there are also substantial differences between house races and presidential elections. So your criticism certainly still has merit, but it's not quite as bad as it looks if your only data points are the final outcomes for presidential elections.
I think it helps not to view it as a binary yes/no. If Nate said Harris was going to win by 2 points and she actually won by 10 that'd be a black mark on his record even though the media would probably treat that better than if Trump won by 0.5 points instead.
Yes, it's not exactly thrilling to realise it's probably going to be going on for a week or more yet. Need to find a way to stop states doing nonsense like 'as long as you've postmarked your ballot by election day'. Daft way to do things.
I'll put my money on, "It won't be going on for a week or more yet," so you can laugh at me next Tuesday.
I think people are too deceived by uncertainty around the polls meaning "needs to come down to every vote dragging in." The most likely scenario is a moderate polling error in one direction or another leading to a relatively decisive result.
EDIT much later: This is the difference between saying, "Because there's a 50-50 chance of each side of the coin, I don't know if it'll be heads or tails" and "Because there's a 50-50 chance of each side of the coin, I predict it will come down on the edge."
Most states with early voting close the early voting sites a couple days before Election Day. Mail voting states should announce a postmark deadline for mail ballots a few days early (though keep drop boxes at election sites open up until the day).
Biden turns 82 this month, and had his campaign balked at the early debate, he'd likely be on the ballot right now. And Trump's hold on the GOP is vastly stronger than Biden's is on the Democratic Party.
Am I predicting Trump will be the nominee in 24 if he loses today? No. But I think the odds are more like 30% than 3%. He's not just the champion of the single biggest faction of today's Republican Party. He's their God-Emperor.
Pretty clear that Biden would have lost had he stayed in the race. Trump will have lost two times in a row, and will be unlikely to be able to do his rallies without it becoming extremely clear he's lost it.
A conservative family member told me that if Harris wins I should move to a red state because MS13 will overrun California. She offered her home for us to stay in if we needed to, she was “very worried” we would be killed in our beds if we stay. She was very serious.
She left me with this “Trump is the only one who can save us”.
Wow. Last election a formerly anti-Trump republican friend said he voted Trump bc if Biden won, there would just be more and more rioting and protesting. Which was so obviously not going to be true and made no logical sense. I’m not sure if he ever acknowledged how wrong he was.
It's a tale as old as time, always invent a boogeyman beyond your immediate realm to foist your problems on. In the days when the supernatural was real, it was witches or mages or satan. In the middle ages it became the turks or the moors. In the modern era it's these "dangerous immigrants."
Freddie de Boer this morning: I voted for Jill Stein because the Democrats suck ass, they're soulless corporate shills who stand for nothing and are further right than they were back when I voted for Nader in 2000, all you assholes gotta convince me why I should have voted for Harris and not just against Trump.
Ladies and gentlemen, the reason why I continue to subscribe to Noah and not to Freddie.
I honestly believe that every moron who votes for Stein is just a voter who would abstain anyway if she weren't on the ballot. Everyone that is worried she is helping Trump win is extremely misinformed.
Stein voters are have no more influence on the outcome than the idiots who do write in votes for "Free Palestine" or whatever. They are just abstainers.
The Democratic party has to pick between the far left and moderates who believe in a market based economy. Right now, it's trying to straddle both boats and doing a terrible job.
The narrative I’m hoping will materialize is that the good citizens of America, including the more prosperous members of the working class, realize we have a common interest in being as unlike like Weimar as possible and vote against the insurrectionist. Maybe the Selzer poll augurs Midwestern good sense.
This darkly reminds me of a recent episode with one of the Substack racists... he renounced his white nationalism and white supremacy on the grounds that he spent some time living in rural American and couldn't stand how much his fellow whites resembled mouth-breathing 1920s-30s Rhinelanders in their complacency and ignorant entitlement.
Not sure I have a point here, other than that I think this election will determine whether the famous quote about America "doing the right thing, once all other options have been exhausted" will prove true once more.
“This apparent piece of information is noise and you shouldn’t update much on it” is always useful advice when true, and I’m glad that you’re saying it despite your material interests as a pundit. Brave to stand up against Big Hot Take.
Also, for the love of god don’t draw inferences from Dixville Notch; it’s an n=6 sample and three of them are literally different people who didn’t live there in 2020 (5 voters in 2020; one died, another moved out, three new ones moved in.)
Also, don't take inferences from all those breathless stories along the lines of "the lines at the polling places go for blocks showing incredible enthusiasm and turnout in this election!" when the result is always, "pretty much the same turnout as every election."
I know the whole point of the post is that I’m not supposed to care about data points like this, but I appreciate this context. It did not feel like a great sign!
This is it America the Day of Days. To borrow from Eisenhower:
“You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you…Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”
"Please, for the love of God, do not draw strong inferences about American society based on exit poll cross tabs"
Too late, Matt! One of the three Dixville Notch Trump voters was a Mexican-American lesbian -- Harris' support among women, Hispanics, AND the LGBTQ community has clearly imploded and the only question now is whether Trump carries the District of Columbia since a meltdown of this magnitude necessarily presages Trump exceeding 75% of the vote in every state.
But one of the four Republicans crossed the aisle to vote for Harris. In catering to these special interest groups, Trump has suffered a catastrophic implosion among his base! It’s still 50/50 if you ask me.
Not the point of the post but Bobos in Paradise really is a terrible book. And I had this take back in college when it was the book of the moment to read and Brooks was at the height of his influence. It was just really clear to me that Brooks was trying to make a lazy “democrats are out of touch elites and republicans are salt of the earth ‘real Americans’ take”. I genuinely took the book personally. Its popularity also clearly was helped by the post 9-11 polling bump/patriotism run amok fever dream we were in from 9/12/2021 to about late 2023 (when Iraq war insurgency was clearly in full bloom). Here was this book putting intellectual sheen on the supposed GOP super majority that was supposedly taking shape based on GOP supposedly being the party of “real Americans”.
Given I had to read this book in college it’s maybe not surprising that I have deep seated dislike for this book beyond its real flaws. Having said that man o man was I glad for that Atlantic takedown that pointed out Brooks at best exaggerated his observations about what goes on in supposed “blue towns” and “red towns” (as Matt noted all of his supposed observations of rich democrats were probably observations of rich Dubya voters) and worst seeming complete falsehoods.
*one of the nauseating things about the “GOP is the party of real America” takes is how often they came from centrist or left of center writers. A random example is the movie Junebug. Probably now most famous as the launching pad for Amy Adams career. I actually ended up liking that movie. But man it’s seared into my brain how many movie critics focused on how the movie had this finger on the pulse of how elite city dwelling libs just don’t get people in “good” small town America. And these critics were almost certainly libs! Talk about overcompensating. So yeah if you’re wondering where some of my critiques of the Times comes from.
I think David French, and to a lesser extent Ross Douthat, do a decent job for the NYT of conveying conservative thought. What I think they don't capture, and what probably would be too much for the Times board or its readers, is the Id of conservativism --- the despise and pure distaste modern conservatives have for mainstream liberal ideas and people.
Vance and some others embody this in that what they really feel is very reactionary, in the sense that at their core they really don't think people who are different from them, by race, by gender, by religion, by sexuality, should ever really be considered equal to them.
"Vance and some others embody this in that what they really feel is very reactionary, in the sense that at their core they really don't think people who are different from them, by race, by gender, by religion, by sexuality, should ever really be considered equal to them."
Which is why Vance is married to an Indian women???
This is just the same old tired leftist caricatures Maybe true in 1970, not true now.
Meh, that being the Id of conservatism is about as accurate as liberalism's Id being arrogant conceit. You can find a lot of both, but you're missing the rose for the fertilizer if that's all you see.
I agree that they are a personality cult, but radicalism is an interesting question. I think temperamentally they are more radically, but Matt has made the point that Trump in particular has moderated on policy quite a bit. Is there some other area/policy where you would say they have become more radical?
Sure. Politicizing the Department of Justice. Gutting the Civil Service. Vast use (and likely corrupt abuse) of the President’s tariff powers. Trashing a long-lived consensus on the US’s role in maintaining peace and the global world order. Normalizing personal behavior in our President that would have rightly been seen as disqualifying before Trump.
Also, I don’t believe in Trump’s supposed “moderation.” I believe his administration would take serious restrictive action on reproductive pharmaceuticals. I suspect if it came to his desk he would most likely sign a national abortion ban. I don’t believe he would protect Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA but would sign legislation that would seriously damage them.
His could be the most radical administration in our history, limited only by Trump’s laziness.
False equivalency. Yes, of course liberals have their id/dark side. But the Trumpists (I won't call them conservatives; nothing conservative about them) seem driven by their id/resentment/negative feelings (fear, hate of "the other") to a greater extent that liberals are. Liberals are enriched for pointy-headed wonks and nerds who are like, "Let's think about this rationally. Which candidate represents the greatest hope of implementing positive change or at least not messing up the already-existing good things?"
I agree there is a difference between Trumpist/leftists and conservatives/liberals despite there being a lot of overlap between who they vote for. But he didn't say Trumpists, so...
“…they really don't think people who are different from them, by race, by gender, by religion, by sexuality, should ever really be considered equal to them”
It wasn’t conservatives who referred to their fellow Americans as deplorables and garbage. Where did you get the idea that conservatives hate people?
You can find plenty of examples of Republican politicians making the direct or slightly oblique claim that the real America or the real Americans are those in “the heartland” as opposed to the big city, as if it’s more authentically American to have grown up in down state Illinois or rural Texas or Ohio than to have grown up in LA, Brooklyn, or North Philadelphia. And you can point to innumerable things Trump has said, or Vance’s childless cat lady bit. How else do you explain their combined Haitians eating cats and dogs crap? The only way you don’t hear that and think it’s utter bullshit that couldn’t possibly be true is if you start with a mindset that “of course that’s something THOSE people could do”.
But what I’m really trying to get at comes from my own personal experience. I’m an upper middle class, upper middle age white guy who spent most of the last quarter century in Michigan and Ohio. Sure, this isn’t 30 - 40 years ago when it was still common for people to say out loud that black athletes weren’t really cut out to be quarterback, or women really could never have what it takes to be in charge of men doing man type work. But first, not all the people who said that stuff are dead, nor have they all changed their minds.
To my point, it’s clear, in conversation after conversation that I’ve been in, at times when guys feel free to be candid, that they believe that sure some women and some people of color can be equals and leaders, but they are exceptional for their group not normal. And they believe that there is something fundamentally lesser about people who aren’t like them: if you’re not white, not male, not straight, not base line Christian. And they resent the hell out of the fact that they have to behave and at least pretend to think differently.
This is the part I always have trouble explaining. I’m not trying to pass moral judgment here. These are my neighbors, my fellow scout leaders, my friends and acquaintances. I consider them good people, but their attitudes are retrograde and they really are angry that the world no longer defaults to seeing their needs and views as normal. They don’t like that other people’s voices now matter as much as theirs. It’s who they are, it’s how they feel, and it’s why they like Trump. They see him as sharing their resentment.
I am definitely in the camp of thinking it's a mistake WaPo and the Times didn't have a Trump supporter as one of its columnists for reasons I think you're alluding to. I think it also is a (small) contributor to the "sane washing" of Trump for a variety of reasons.
I feel bad for David Brooks. I’ve read a couple of his books and he’s really good. I’m a big fan. But, absolutely nobody other than me seems to like this dude. Every article he writes in the Times gets extreme vitriol in the comments. Zero Republicans like him. Seeing him get bashed here has to mean that pretty much everyone hates him. Is it because he looks and sounds like a know-it-all dweeb? Most of his writing is about positive topics and he challenges readers to think differently. Maybe nobody likes that.
It's good when people can gain value from people's writing. If you find value, I'm glad. I never have from his work. I've given up reading him at this point and haven't read an article from him in years.
I like him! I certainly disagree with him a lot, but I actually appreciated some of his NYT pieces and felt bad for him with everyone bashing him in the comments.
I enjoyed both Road to Character and The Second Mountain. I guess both are life journey type books, written at different stages of his life. I think the hero’s journey story where we set off in one direction, face challenges, change course and conquer is very relative to a lot of people.
I can see why you’d like those two! They seem very introspective, and if they jive with your own inner life well I imagine they’d be pretty great reads.
I think a lot of people have Bobos in Paradise and his column in mind when critiquing him.
On the other hand there is a good bit of research that Conservatives seem to understand liberal thought a lot better than liberals understand conservative though.
Probably due to the left's domination of the culture and institutions. To take a really easy example. If you are a conservative that went to college you are REALLY informed on how the left thinks. But college won't teach you jack shit on how the right really thinks (though I'm sure there will be plenty of caricatures)
"there is a good bit of research that Conservatives seem to understand liberal thought a lot better than liberals understand conservative though."
I know there were studies showing this going back a long-ways pre-COVID, but I'm genuinely wondering whether that has been checked in the last five years or so, because from a purely anecdotal standpoint that no longer seems to be true. (Which is why I no longer hang out in right-leaning spaces on-line -- I got tired of arguing with people who were, AFAICT, sincerely convinced that Obama was a Maoist sent to institute Sharia over the U.S.)
There are huge numbers of people who don’t feel that way who are regularly voting for Republicans. I think that’s where we’re not looking. Kind of the “everyone who opposes me is dumb or crazy” trap.
Yes, but I don't think that rebuts the point that those studies need to be redone periodically to confirm that their findings remain valid. I mean, there have been plenty of studies in recent years showing substantial increases in levels of conspiratorial/paranoid beliefs amongst American conservatives over the past 20 or so years. It would be somewhat surprising to find out that *isn't* degrading conservatives' abilities to accurately "read" liberal thought, while probably conversely moving conservatives more toward long-held liberal stereotypes about them.
>post 9-11 polling bump/patriotism run amok fever dream we were in from 9/12/2021 to about late 2023 (when Iraq war insurgency was clearly in full bloom)
By the way, I've said before but experience going to protests (and speaking at protests) against the Iraq War is why I maybe have more sympathy for the Palestinian protestors and the Columbia protestors specifically. My sympathy isn't for the protestors with the truly abhorrent anti-Semitic views. But more that I saw up close how easy it is for extremists or people with their own agendas can hijack these things and become the story.
This is one reason why I have always thought that protests were a poor outlet for political outrage. What is the last *political* protest that really got what it wanted?
Domestically? Probably the pro-life movement and overturning Roe vs. Wade. Definitely think those annual "right to life" rallies in DC played a role. And I think those rallies show how political protests can make a difference; they have to have long term plans/goals, they have to have message discipline and they have to be organized. Inchoate marching through the streets is I think a waste of time.
If I were to rate the influence of the pro life rallies compared to almost any other tactic they tried, it would be very low. At best, I would say that it allowed people who were prolife to have a sense that there is a large number of fellow supporters out there and to keep trying. But in terms of influencing outsiders, it would be limited at best.
When I was doing political work, ages ago, I understood that protests were supposed to be part of a larger plan. Not so much in the Trump era.
I remember people taking to the streets, around the country, when Hillary lost and I was thinking “um, what’s the ask, here? What do they want?” It just seems like people do it now kind of aimlessly and I think it’s somewhere between pointless and counterproductive.
This has always been the case, going back certainly to the original labor movement. It’s why I hate the “look, I found a bad person in a crowd of 10,000!” tactic even when it’s used on people I disagree with.
Having said that, some movements and protests have a lot more awful people than others.
Bon courage everyone. If you’re not driving seniors to the polls, it’s a good time to turn off the phone and immerse yourself in a book, a project, or nature. Even a video game. We won’t know for a long while anyway.
Here’s my personal pledge. If Trump wins, I will be very unhappy, but I won’t fall apart and I certainly won’t stop loving my country. Whatever happens, we are still the luckiest people in human history.
We got this.
Where my Slow Boring gamers at?! If my gf didn't have to watch the election coverage for work, I'd absolutely be distracting myself with a few hours of Horizon Forbidden West on my PS5 tonight.
I have to process scrap in factorio
I launched my first ever rocket the other day. 290 hours in.
I guess they just came out with Factorio: Space Age.
I've never played either (although it's been on my radar)
Any opinions on which?
EDIT: Nevermind - it's a DLC... the review wasn't clear at the start.
Play the base game.
I’ve been playing BG3 with my daughter, which has been fun.
I'm 50% likely to finish my current run tonight.
I wonder if it'd be too depressing to play Frostpunk 2, a game about a civilization that, having achieved some semblance of survival against a climate apocalypse, finds itself teetering on the edge of collapsing in on itself due to internal divisions and politics.
After all that work I did in Frostpunk 1 actually getting us stable and warm (enough)
Au contraire. In Frostpunk 2 you have the power to fix it! (:
Hopefully out playing a board game with my brother tonight instead of watching results.
Ever heard of Axis & Allies & Zombies?
I have not, but I haven't played Axis & Allies in 20 years.
I hope we'll finish our Slay the Spire current coop run (it's an excellent board game port of the computer game, made better with the coop features)
My friends and I have been playing lots of Rivals of Aether of late. Hoping that provides a good distraction.
Rivals 1 or 2? If two, how is it?
2 and it's really fun. Never played the first but I'm a long time smash player (melee, brawl, and ultimate).
What’s that one?
It's a platform fighting game similar to Super Smash Bros.
In 2020 I bought and played the entirety of Return of the Obra Dinn while waiting for the election to be called. This year I was thinking about finally playing Disco Elysium, but I've also got a second playthrough of the Witcher 3 going that I might just lose myself in.
Upvote for Disco Elysium!
People keep telling me I need to play Obra Dinn!
I played Obra Dinn once by myself, I did pretty poorly in solving the mysteries, mostly impatience. However, another time I had some friends over and what started as a way to pass a couple hours became a 4–5-hour collaborative play through where we got 100%. Really satisfying.
I probably couldn't tell you anything about it that you haven't heard a thousand times before, but I highly recommend it!
I really liked Papers Please
All excellent choices, I have a conundrum where I *want* to re-read the Witcher books (which are really really good, and everyone should read [at least the "first" two short story collections]) before replaying Witcher 3 which isn't necessary but gives you more world and character context via all kinds of small details. But that is also a huge time commitment, and I also just want to play the game again. My solution has been to procrastinate and play other games/read other books.
I played a strong dumb character in Disco Elysium.
There is no wrong way to play, but I strongly suggest dropping points in Inland Empire and Shivers - I think the best writing in the game is under their passive skill checks.
DE and replaying W3 are both on my To Do lists. Just need to find the time!
I’m going to do some COD Zombies as a meditative exercise.
maybe a good moment to get back into beat saber.
Great call!
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. I bought it a couple weeks ago, but I've barely had time to play. Tonight is the night.
I've been working thru Immortals of Aveum lately.
when i saw the latest planet of the apes movie, i couldn't help but wonder whether they reused some of the graphics from horizon in their cgi. beautiful game.
One of the first games I've ever played where I'll literally just pan the camera around sometimes to take in the views.
Halo Master Chief Collection on Steam! Maybe revisit Divinity: Original Sin 2 if I need something less fast paced.
This is exactly what I'm playing. I figured I would be the last remaining gamer who hadn't played hfw.
Loving it. My only issue is that the side quests are so good that I keep forgetting to play the main story!
You may have inspired me to play some Elden Ring tonight. When I am working to git gud, everything else goes away.
My retired mother is keeping my son today since school is out, so I will have to tolerate some MSNBC briefly while picking up my son. But I hope to get out of there quickly and attend to more sane pursuits.
So great. One I get through HFW I may go back and finally go through the DLC for it.
Although, for my money, I still think FS's more linear stories are best. I can replay Sekiro and Bloodborne dozens of times, whereas ER I put away about halfway through my second playthrough.
One of my best friends is a huge FS fan and he’s insistent that I would love Bloodborne so I probably need to give that one a shot. ER was the first video game I had taken on in 10 years or so, mainly played it at first just to hang out with old friends who played.
I think the DLC is outstanding, fwiw. Excellent boss fights even in the dungeons, and an enormous world for a DLC. They made the world much more vertical which made it intriguing for me; I love the exploring as much as the fighting.
Bloodborne is an all-time great game IMHO. So is Sekiro. If you like ER I would definitely recommend giving them a shot.
Playing Redacted. It's a Hades clone but really digging it.
Not tonight, but I've got a wide spread of games, currently playing Nier Automata and Xenoblade, Splatoon with friends, Outer Wilds to calm down.
I've been thinking a lot about Disco Elysium recently, when things calm down, I'd love to figure out which Slow Borers are willing to admit to being dirty Moralists. Kingdom of Conscience....
I believe I was berated in-game for being a dirty Moralist / Moderate. So I guess I'll own up to it.
Yeah, I own it too. The game deals it out to everyone pretty good. Is Moralism just about control, do we play with ideas disposably, like children with toys? I don't think so, but of course I don't, I'm a no-good moderate.
I did harm minimization and tried to solve the murder. That made me a moralist.
I superlike™️ this comment and join in your pledge. Thank you!
I set myself up for a no-phone evening, uninterrupted. Jiu-jitsu from 6:15 to 8:45, hitting a movie immediately after, phone off from 6:15 to the morning. No amount of doomscrolling is gonna change anything, and if the results go the way I hope (Harris), I can always go back and look at that live reaction stuff later.
I'm having an election party, but not turning on the TV or letting anyone talk about the election until 9ish. Also, got a marathon in a few weeks so I'm gonna try to fit in a 16 mile run in the afternoon and listen to a few hours of Bob Dylan singing about America.
Woah awesome good luck with both those endeavors
I’ll have to be near my kids so I’m thinking of getting my rower down and seeing how far I can go in 2hrs.
until 9 pm you could turn on the rolling thunder revue
First: "It's not dark yet, but it's gettin' there" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pndhO5DcSI0)
Then: "Everything is Broken" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pndhO5DcSI0_)
Or maybe: "The Million Dollar Bash" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGUQgty1e3g)
That's funny, this is actually my super bowl.I'm ordering pizza and watching t v all night
Note I don't actually watch sports
I’ve been on a pretty responsible diet but I also will be ordering pizza tonight. There will also be chocolate cake.
You don't have to watch sports to host a giant Super Bowl party, I do. It's like Christmas - it has entered the civil sphere where you don't have to be a pious practitioner to celebrate.
yeah, I do sometimes go over to a Super Bowl party at the inlaws and it's fine.
But still nothing like election night excitement for me !
This is awesome. I completely agree. We are going to a fancy dinner, phones off, and staying till it closes. There's no point in tormenting ourselves.
I did BJJ for about two years and picked up a blue belt, then quit earlier this year. I'm thinking about trying judo.
Your 1st sentence is my life story, except I did it for much longer (without getting my purple, sniff). Now I'm too old and injured to get back into BJJ.
I also dabbled in judo for a hot minute. Not sure how old you are, or how tall you are, but man judo is a tough one to get into as an adult. The injury rate is sky freaking high, much more so than BJJ. The whole point of the sport is explosive, high-amplitude throws at velocity. Getting hit with something like an uchi mata when you're resisting, and you didn't spend your childhood learning how to breakfall.... And it's worse if you're tall, because you have that much further to fall and hit the mat
I've thought about getting into judo. I'm also 7'0". Are you suggesting that would be a bad idea? Anything you would recommend?
Are you legitimately seven feet tall? But yeah, judo is no bueno man. Have you tried BJJ? Or striking? You'd kill some people either way if that's really your height haha
I really am yes. I used to do Taekwondo as a kid, but that's all the martial arts experience I've got. Haven't really done anything for ~18 years or so.
I turn 40 in a couple weeks and I'm 6'2", so maybe I shouldn't.
I don't wanna sound like your Mom, but I cannot recommend strongly enough not starting judo at age 40 lol.
Did you just lose interest in BJJ? I had to stop because of my shoulder. I always found no gi much more interesting & athletic, I kind of lost interest in the whole gi metagame as it's played these days. (OK great, you wrapped my sleeves up in worm guard or whatever, I could just punch you in a real fight, this is really not even remotely close to being a martial art). But if I still had 2 functioning shoulders I'd mostly do no gi with the MMA guys a few times a week
Here to second (third?) this. We had an Olympian teaching Judo at my BJJ gym for a while, so the teaching was excellent, and I went to it a few times, but hitting the deck that many times at 40 is a terrible, terrible idea. There's a reason why you hear that most of the bad injuries in BJJ come from uncontrolled falls.
I pretty much just lost interest and didn't feel like going. I didn't have any injuries. I went to a small no-gi gym (10P affiliate).
Came here to say this. Big if true! 😜🤣
My wife and I are going to see the movie Conclave tonight for this reason; force ourselves to shut our phones off. We've been telling friends to not watch any cable news until earliest 9-10 PM. All the updates at like 8 are going to be "breaking news Trump wins West Virginia and Harris wins Massachusetts" or "breaking news, with 1% vote in, Pennsylvania is too close to call". And then there will be conversations with the 15 panelists about what these early results mean and there will be 15 opinions based on absolutely nothing because they need to fill air time.
It's a great movie and a great *election movie* above all!
I basically feel this way but I confess that if Trump wins I will be leaning on my love of California more than the US and struggling to understand why so many people think the status quo is so terrible because I agree with you that we are so lucky to live here now and I don’t understand why a message that is the opposite of that is so appealing to so many.
Unfortunately if Trump wins, those of us living in Red States (Florida myself) will be constantly reminded of said win and have it thrown in our faces. You can't even go to a football game in Florida anymore without being inundated with MAGA flags and Trump hats.
I remember thinking that the Obama nonsense in 2008 was annoying, but goddamn do Trump supporters have that beat. Memes like "giant pickup truck with Trump flags" are so cringey.
They’re not cringe if you don’t care. If you don’t care, it’s just random people doing their thing.
Gross
I promise to continue to advocate exactly the same Neo-Social Democratic positions -- fast growth and more redistribution -- as I articulated here:
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/choice
I'm playing through every Halo game via the Master Chief Collection. Hella nostalgia, the gameplay is still good, especially from 2 onwards, and the story is still interesting.
My wife, on the other hand, has to pay attention for her job, and it's taking a toll on both of us.
I think it will be ok in the long run, though. America is young, still, and working out problems that very few societies have had to grapple with, and I'm confident that we will continue to be better every day, and there's no other time and place I would rather be.
Amen especially on how fortunate we are. I find myself constantly reminding my child of this.
I agree I have taken a break from election coverage and don’t even know what they are predicting with the exception of predictit.org. This has freed up time to introduce my son to Mario kart and I would otherwise have missed discovering he is not very good at this and will need additional training with me over the next few weeks.
I should note I have also discovered I am not that good either (he handed me controller to win the next round and I got 11th last night) so maybe need to get him a coach.
Battlestar Galactica rewatch.
I would also encourage everyone to avoid sweeping conclusions about the country (we rejected or embraced fascism; etc...) based on who wins by 1-2% in PA, WI, MI, AZ and NV.
No matter who wins, we have an evenly split country where each Party has positioned themselves to capture nearly 50% of the voting public. May we hope and pray our leaders act in the best interests of ALL citizens and not only the ones who voted for them.
If Trump wins, I won't necessarily think the country rejected fascism (we know from the polls that democracy isn't the single issue for the vast majority of voters.) But if Trump loses, we would have avoided fascism, which is very much worth celebrating!
And I do think once Trump is gone, the GOP will slowly close the page on this dark chapter.
Growing up in a household that embraced conservative talk radio I can tell you the Trumpist wing was always there but it was a rump movement that was kept in check by the “yacht club” Republicans (this a phrase Rush Limbaugh used back in the 90’s).
MAGA is here to stay because it’s been here and it will not give up the crown easily.
I disagree only because nobody can Trump like Trump. Desantis, Haley, Vance...they are all pale imitators. Nobody has the bombast, image, and humor that Trump does.
The GOP will still do stupid things but I can't see this specific strain of revenge politics sticking without the guy.
Whatever comes up after Trump will make for a different GOP, that's for sure.
Though I do think that, if he loses, people are underestimating the possibility he'll be the nominee again in 2028. He'll only be 82.
No, not saying it's a super strong possibility. And I do think if he loses, anti-Trump sentiment in GOP circles will grow. And heck, Trump may not even want to run again. But I honestly don't think a successful run for the nomination on his part is such a remote possibility.
100% he will declare for 2028 if he loses. Aileen Cannon will make sure his cell remains empty until then at least.
Cannon isn't the only game in town. Trump has sentencing in his New York case in three weeks. While being sent to prison before a defendant's appeals are exhausted is vanishingly rare in white collar cases, if I were the NY AG, I'd be logging every public statement Trump makes starting at 5 PM EST today to be able to comprehensively document to the trial court whether he's fomenting violence against election officials, etc. and argue that he should be jailed immediately due to the risk of further criminal activity while his appeals are proceeding.
This seems correct to me! If Trump loses, Republicans haven't walked away from an election night happy in ten years!! That has to result in some sort of course correction.
agreed. But if Trump wins, will Dems do their needed course correction? Drop the woke culture war nonsense, and get serious about fixing immigration?
I think Dems are more likely to stay serious about fixing those issues if they win than if they lose.
They proposed a bill to “fix immigration”. GOP killed it. Not sure what more you want them to do.
I don't think that's true. First, human nature means it's very hard for people, individually or collectively, to admit they're the problem and their mistakes need to be corrected. And in terms of success, the Republicans haven't triumphed, but they haven't really lost decisively either. The Supreme Court looking like it's locked down ideologically for years to come is a huge ongoing win, as were the big tax cuts of 2017, most of which aren't going to be rolled back.
With a 50-50 country what everybody first worries about is not losing anybody at the margin, so that leads to no big change. Then you look for how to gain at the margin, and that's what the 2025 project is really all about --- how to solidify power so that you can wield more than your share even if your share should only be 50%.
"With a 50-50 country what everybody first worries about is not losing anybody at the margin, so that leads to no big change."
I think if this was true, MAGA wouldn't have gained the power it did. There were definitely elements of it in Republican politics prior to 2016, but there is a substantive and significant difference in the politics of 2012 vs 2024.
Yeah, this is the point I keep making -- it's just too implausible that GOP megadonors are going to be happy to keep flushing hundreds of millions of dollars down a gold-plated toilet every election cycle until Donald Trump dies or becomes too incapacitated to run.
Once Trump is not on the ballot anymore, the Democratic Party is highly vulnerable to a smarter, disciplined version of Trump without his personal baggage. Trump's personal weaknesses have masked many of the failures of the Democratic Party. It's important to remember that Biden is still very unpopular and waxing eloquent on what a great success his Presidency has been hasn't persuaded many voters in the middle.
Except that there's reasonable evidence that "smarter, disciplined" is contrary to what a large number of marginal voters find appealing about Trump and it also appears that "personal baggage" is a major contributor to Trump's appeal as well.
Yet to see any evidence that Trump doesn’t repel marginal voters because of his personal flaws. Overall, voters prefer him on the economy and immigration by big margins but his net favorability is very negative.
IMO if America rejects Trumpism it will probably be judged by history as a non-trivial triumph for the American experiment. Resisting authoritarianism is not easy, and many countries have failed. As per Matt's recent NYT article, incumbents are getting crushed in America's peer democracies, and Trump's had a lot of help from powerful actors, foreign and domestic.
Numerous American individuals and some institutions have stood up to Trump (to varying degrees). They deserve credit whatever the outcome but especially if it proves sufficient to bend the arc of history towards justice, if that's not too earnest of a statement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/opinion/trump-harris-inflation.html
Not to pick on you, but this is kinda my point. America isn't going to "reject Trumpism" if he loses (unless there is some massive polling error and he loses 40+ states), and we won't have "embraced" authoritarianism if he wins. We have the electorate we have.
Ok to avoid semantics, if Trump loses the election. To illustrate why this counts as rejection IMO: do you know exactly how many Hungarians voted for Orban? Does it matter? Or is what matters that Hungary doesn’t really have a democracy any more?
John: I think you're being too nit picketty. We're always going to have some voters who support any imaginable outcome. So when we anthropomorphize "America" when it votes, the best we can really do is talk about margins, and percentages. In other words, if a *majority* of Americans end up rejecting the authoritarianism-adjacent candidacy, it doesn't seem that much of a stretch to claim that, well, America indeed "rejected" Trumpism. At least this time*.
*The verb "reject" in English doesn't imply permanency.
In a real sense, if Trump loses the election twice, how can he hold his iron grip on the GOP? Wouldn't the establishment attempt to take back control?
The normal thing is for losers to be discredited and for the party to seek new ideas/figures. I'm not sure if we live in normal times any more but that would be a rejection of trumpism.
I think they will try to replicate Trump with another figure but the problem is that these people won’t have a relationship with a block of voters like Trump does.
Agree, but I would say that they won't attract a cult of personality the way he has. I don't get it, but somehow it exists.
I agree, but then I remember that guy who got the Romney tattoo on his face.
Those people will always exist!
"Wouldn't the establishment attempt to take back control?"
Isn't Trumpism the establishment now?
The logical thing for GOP elites to do if he loses is to quietly encourage all his legal cases to come to a conclusion and see him in jail for a while, all while loudly denouncing the process in public. Maybe not what will/would actually happen, but would be the sensible play.
"The logical thing for GOP elites to do if he loses is to quietly encourage all his legal cases to come to a conclusion."
I don't know what that means. I don't think that's how our justice system works. You mean, work to cut off funding for his lawyers? What else?
Maybe next time there's a Supreme Court ruling that would essentially destroy one or more of the cases, there's a 'surprise' result?
"Wouldn't the establishment attempt to take back control?"
What is this "establishment" of which you speak? I'm sure the National Review will dance on his supposed grave (until he rises from it and they, cowering, bend the knee again). But MAGA *is* the Republican establishment.
He will immediately declare for 2028 and everyone will continue to be afraid of him.
If Trump loses today but (of course) claims victory denied due to fraud and cheating, I'm not sure what the Republican response will be. Who has the credibility and desire to point the finger at him and contend for leadership of the party? Obviously, not J.D. Vance. I'm struggling to come up with a name.
After 2020 (and especially after Jan. 6), Trump was seen as a spent force and rather pathetic. (Remember his paltry and underpowered declaration that he was running?) DeSantis tried to fill the gap and we know how that turned out. Anyone coming for the king now will remember this sequence of events and think that maybe the smartest thing to do is keep your head down and wait for the Cheeseburger from Heaven to do what they're all praying for.
Maybe. I do think that Trump's age will be a factor; he'll be 82 in 2028. If he loses quickly tonight, I could see someone deciding to put knuckledusters on and have a go.
I'd be really interested in seeing some possible names. I can think of one truly serious one: Brian Kemp. Maybe Greg Abbott. I wonder if either of them would be willing to take on Trump, especially if it's a very close defeat. And especially after seeing what happened to Ron DeSantis.
In 2016 the talk was of a murder-suicide. Somebody in the field needed to go after Trump hard, sacrificing their own candidacy to take him down and clear the field for one of the more establishment guys to take the nomination. It never happened.
If we get to 2026, and inshallah Trump is not President but claims to be running again/still, they'll face the same problem. The only difference there might be compared to 2022-4 is that politicians at that level have enormous egos, and they can't keep themselves in check that long. So I at least think there will be a robust primary. Whether anyone but Trump could emerge from a crowded field is something my crystal ball cannot discern.
I think if Harris wins Iowa, it won't be a rejection of "Trumpism" but a reaction to Dobbs, which is bog standard Republicanism.
If Harris wins the election, on the margin it will mostly be about abortion, not Trump. Half of the population is actually fine with Trump because apparently for a few months in 2019 they thought things were going well or something.
Yes and no. It'll partly be because of Dobbs - but how many Republicans are crossing over to vote against Trump because of the man himself but are otherwise ok with Dobbs?
I continue to believe that comparing Harris’ performance to the performance of incumbents in other democracies with 4+ viable parties is apples and oranges.
Going back to 1988, the lowest vote share received by a Democratic or Republican presidential candidate in an election without Ross Perot on the ballot is 46%. Because there are normally only two parties of any importance contesting the election, Americans just don’t move their votes around that much.
I think the comparison to unpopular incumbents losing around the world would be more applicable to our case is if, for example, a Jeremy Corbin-led Labour trounced the Tories. And did so with more than the 34% of the vote they actually got. Instead, a normie Labour leader got somewhat less of the popular vote than Labour usually gets (en route to a smashing parliamentary victory).
I mean, in the shocking French parliamentary election, the National Rally only got 143 of 577 seats (and in the 2022 presidential election, Macron blew away LePen).
I think the US is unique in that an objectively unqualified candidate who is one of the worst human beings on the planet is guaranteed perhaps as much as half of the vote. Truly a case of American exceptionalism.
Throwing Trump out of office the first time was a really big deal. It rarely happens to normal presidents, and it is super rare when it comes to illiberal leaders.
That we have to come back around and prevent him from coming back again just seems cosmically unfair, as Archer would say, "eat a dick, universe."
Man, if Trump wins after going full LOL, Nothing Matters mode for the last two weeks of the campaign, I am going to take the under on your hope and prayer.
Back in 2016, I thought something like “Trump probably isn’t going to win, but the fact that he won a major party nomination and is probably going to get at least 40% of the vote has pretty alarming implications on its own terms.”
I was wrong about the first part but right about the second. Even if we live in the “Selzer Poll is 100% real” universe and Harris wins by Obama ‘08 margins, there’s going to be a lot of deprogramming to do.
And even for all the big electoral numbers Obama got, the GOP immediately pivoted to recalcitrance and the tea movement.
One of my biggest pet peeves of coastal liberals looking at a "red" state and assuming they should be left behind or are all racists simply because a majority of people who bothered to vote elected the bad man. There are a lot of Democrats in Alabama and more Trump supporters in New York City than in all of Wyoming!
Living in Texas for nine years but still knowing all my friends on the coasts made it clear how big of an issue this is.
Upvoting your comment on the merits, and I wish I could deliver an additional upvote for your username, which is most salient on a day like today!
I think if Trump wins it does show how much immigration has been a killer for the Dems and more broadly how unpopular there brand has become that Trump even has a chance.
If the Republicans had any brains and nominated someone like Nikki Haley then Harris would have been crushed
Or even in the interests of the people who DID vote for them. Neither party is well aligned for that, although Democrat's are better aligned
I want Matt to apply his Will and Grace thought to how much the rise of anti-heroes in movies and TV is responsible for Trump.
"Liked," because I think there is something to "anti-heroism" as being corrosive to civic virtue, but I'm not sure it's particularly to blame for Trump.
Agreed on the internet assist part, but it's mostly performative, which is just another indictment of social media as much as any other cause.
I kind of feel that too, but nothing lasts forever. At some point he *will* be gone, and maybe the energy that powers both assholishness and derangement (=/= right v left, both exist on each side IMO) will dissipate and we'll collectively remember that our success as a species depends on cooperation.
Some British media traditions (and laws) on election day that I think some Americans would appreciate knowing about:
1. We call it "Polling Day".
2. Regulated media (TV and radio) are not allowed to report on the campaigns while the polls are open (7am to 10pm), so the news leads with "the polls are open, people are voting" and then runs stories that have nothing to do with the election; this tends to act as something of a relief and definitely has a calming influence on me.
3. People tend to take their dogs for a walk, tie them up outside the polling station, go in and vote and then leave: this has created a social media tradition of taking a photo of the dog with the Polling Station sign (which is an iconic plain black on white design), which results in the wonderful hashtag #DogsAtPollingStations, which many people spend much of the day scrolling through - far better than doomscrolling.
4. We have an uncannily accurate exit poll, which is kept absolutely secret and then released at 10pm. It hasn't been significantly wrong since 1992 - it's nailed eight elections in a row to under 1%. Unsurprisingly, John Curtice, the head of the exit polling operation, has become something of a cult figure among election fandom.
Don't forget 5. The race to declare!
Certain local governments vie to be the first to declare - usually in the North East. So polls close at 10pm and the first couple of results come in at around 10.50pm. These are always safe urban labour seats so don't mean anything, but does mean you get about four hours of discussion about some random seat and what it all means, before the other results start rolling in (most of the time it means not much at all)
Having been a candidate in a safe urban labour seat that didn't declare until after 5am, I'm so jealous of Sunderland and Newcastle that I couldn't bear to mention it, but yes.
Its great, you can turn up to the count to support your candidate and still get to work the next day because you're in bed at a reasonable time.
Yes it very annoyingly means that Sunderland ends up taking an absolutely central place in the discourse, since - as mentioned by the OP - the 'narrative' of an election tends to be formed by the first few results rather than the vast majority of them.
Similar to Dixville Notch here.
Watching the most recent British election was quite soothing. I do find it odd that your results arent reported in earnest til 2-5 am GMT. But it is quaint how, during summer elections, they literally count through the sunrise.
It's very simple: we gather all the ballots for a district ("constituency") together in one place before counting, which means that those ballots are in a car for several hours in rural areas.
Then we don't release any numbers at all until the count is complete, so there are no partial results. So you get nothing and then an entire constituency all at once.
In 1997, when Tony Blair won and there was a really optimistic mood about a new PM, he flew from his constituency count down to London and made a speech outside the Royal Festival Hall, just as dawn was breaking (in May, so not quite as early as in July this year), and he started it with "A new dawn has broken, has it not?"
If you're In The Know you can get result impressions early from people attending the counts. I've had some depressing evenings and exciting ones where you quickly get a feel for who is winning. When you see things about a glum faced candidate team hours before the results its because they are watching ballots getting counted and see they aren't showing up as much as they needed!
Oh absolutely, there's a joke that there's always a Lib Dem in a corner with a laptop who knows exactly what is going on, and I have been that Lib Dem on occasion.
i am curious about 2. is social media also regulated in some form during this period?
No regulations on social media for this period. But the tradition weighs fairly heavily on people: you get discussion of who will win rather than of the issues, by and large.
My prediction is Harris 292, MI PA WI NC NV. We’ll see soon enough.
From your lips to God's ears.
I'm back up to 215 on bench after taking a summer hiatus to drop weight. Gonna push for 225 before EOY. Got any goals for yourself?
I got to "I'm back up to 215" after reading, "My prediction is Harris 292," and I nearly spit my coffee out before getting to "on bench . . . ."
Yeah, it feels like these guys should have been pushing to get to 270 by Election Day. Wimps!
270 (lbs) to Win!
Yeah, same here. David M-With-Too-Many-Syllables, don't scare me like that!
OO, I have a new nickname for it: "Yoda-sniping".
"225 on bench, I shall lift."
GRAMMAR-SNIPED!
This was my intent. I'm glad I sniped at least SOMEONE, although I hope your coffee and your clothes are okay.
Fortunately, it was just "nearly"!
I'm at 275lb on the bench. Trying to hit 300lb before I hit 50 in a bit less than three years. I just need to not get hurt for a couple of months, lol
Nice! I’ll probably be lucky to ever get there.
I'm still predicting Trump with 287 (AZ, NV, GA, NC, PA).
https://www.270towin.com/maps/v71rk
:'-(
Between this thread and last night's thread, I've only seen predictions for Harris winning. So I'll be a pessimist: my prediction is that Harris loses PA, and it's game over.
I'm ok with that as long as Republicans take the senate and prevent any court packing nonsense
Kamala Harris won 12 more simulations than Donald Trump out of 80,000 Nate Silver runs. This is 100% over, Trump will be dumped!
I mean when you consider she only needs to win one and she won 12, that’s a landslide right there as far as I’m concerned.
I saw that and I’m like, Nate. Not helping man. 😂
NATE SILVER PERSONALLY GUARANTEES THAT HARRIS WILL WIN.
There will be many many angry tweets/threads saying this.
With an event as infrequent as a presidential election, how does Nate ever know whether or not his probability calculation is accurate?
prediction are always hard especially about the future
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jb6H14gVWjM&pp=ygUjUGxhbiA5IGZyb20gb3V0ZXIgc3BhY2UgdGhlIGZ1dHVyZSA%3D
I wondered that when reading his book, especially about AI risk.
If I pull a p(doom) out of my ass and compare it someone else's p(doom), how would you go about validating any of it? Even with subject matter expertise.
There isn’t really anything it could mean for someone to do the *right* probability calculation. You can measure one score of “accuracy” as the squared difference between the probability and the truth value, or another measure as the negative logarithm of the probability you gave to the truth (each of these is useful for different sorts of model training in statistics or machine learning, or presumably animal brain evolution) and then you can test your model over time to see whether it’s generally being more or less accurate than some other model. But every model is only going to be reliable in different environmental conditions, and there’s no objective way to say what set of circumstances are the right environmental conditions to be assuming.
His probabilities just strike me as unfalsifiable in a way that grates on me. Unless his model gives someone a 100% chance of winning, it can always be right.
If I am looking at KenPom or ESPN BPI for the likelihood a team wins a game, I have a way to check to see if out of the games where teams have a 70% chance to win, win around 70% of those games.
Well, they do projections for more than just the presidential races. Across the hundreds of house races Nate's model has been pretty well calibrated. You can also look at state-by-state results to see how accurate those have been.
Of course, there are also substantial differences between house races and presidential elections. So your criticism certainly still has merit, but it's not quite as bad as it looks if your only data points are the final outcomes for presidential elections.
I think it helps not to view it as a binary yes/no. If Nate said Harris was going to win by 2 points and she actually won by 10 that'd be a black mark on his record even though the media would probably treat that better than if Trump won by 0.5 points instead.
I have this impression about almost all expert opinion in political science.
I want this to be over.
Yes, it's not exactly thrilling to realise it's probably going to be going on for a week or more yet. Need to find a way to stop states doing nonsense like 'as long as you've postmarked your ballot by election day'. Daft way to do things.
I'll put my money on, "It won't be going on for a week or more yet," so you can laugh at me next Tuesday.
I think people are too deceived by uncertainty around the polls meaning "needs to come down to every vote dragging in." The most likely scenario is a moderate polling error in one direction or another leading to a relatively decisive result.
EDIT much later: This is the difference between saying, "Because there's a 50-50 chance of each side of the coin, I don't know if it'll be heads or tails" and "Because there's a 50-50 chance of each side of the coin, I predict it will come down on the edge."
Most states with early voting close the early voting sites a couple days before Election Day. Mail voting states should announce a postmark deadline for mail ballots a few days early (though keep drop boxes at election sites open up until the day).
It'll be at least 4 and possibly 8 years before that's the case.
Depends. If Trump loses and either dies or goes to prison, then it's over. Otherwise, I think he's the candidate again
I think that's unlikely. He'll be 82 in 2028 and has already started showing some pretty serious signs of mental aging.
Biden turns 82 this month, and had his campaign balked at the early debate, he'd likely be on the ballot right now. And Trump's hold on the GOP is vastly stronger than Biden's is on the Democratic Party.
Am I predicting Trump will be the nominee in 24 if he loses today? No. But I think the odds are more like 30% than 3%. He's not just the champion of the single biggest faction of today's Republican Party. He's their God-Emperor.
Pretty clear that Biden would have lost had he stayed in the race. Trump will have lost two times in a row, and will be unlikely to be able to do his rallies without it becoming extremely clear he's lost it.
At some point, people want to back a winner.
A conservative family member told me that if Harris wins I should move to a red state because MS13 will overrun California. She offered her home for us to stay in if we needed to, she was “very worried” we would be killed in our beds if we stay. She was very serious.
She left me with this “Trump is the only one who can save us”.
The fear is real y’all.
Wow. Last election a formerly anti-Trump republican friend said he voted Trump bc if Biden won, there would just be more and more rioting and protesting. Which was so obviously not going to be true and made no logical sense. I’m not sure if he ever acknowledged how wrong he was.
Tbf, there was more and even more terrible rioting and protesting, just not the kind he probably was envisionng.
Touché
I'm in Colorado and the "Venezuelan gangs are taking over" meme has been... interesting.
There's an empanada truck on every corner!!!1!!!!111one
Where, I really want an empanada right now.
That was always one of the most hilarious complaints- taco trucks will be on every corner ! Don’t threaten me with a good time.
I'm hoping for an arepa pabellon
It's a tale as old as time, always invent a boogeyman beyond your immediate realm to foist your problems on. In the days when the supernatural was real, it was witches or mages or satan. In the middle ages it became the turks or the moors. In the modern era it's these "dangerous immigrants."
It's all bullshit and always has been.
Noah Smith this morning: Here are four good reasons to vote against Trump AND four good reasons to vote for Harris: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/four-reasons-not-to-vote-for-trump
Freddie de Boer this morning: I voted for Jill Stein because the Democrats suck ass, they're soulless corporate shills who stand for nothing and are further right than they were back when I voted for Nader in 2000, all you assholes gotta convince me why I should have voted for Harris and not just against Trump.
Ladies and gentlemen, the reason why I continue to subscribe to Noah and not to Freddie.
I honestly believe that every moron who votes for Stein is just a voter who would abstain anyway if she weren't on the ballot. Everyone that is worried she is helping Trump win is extremely misinformed.
Stein voters are have no more influence on the outcome than the idiots who do write in votes for "Free Palestine" or whatever. They are just abstainers.
I don't think is true. I have a relative who voted Nader in 2000 (in a blue state) and has voted Dem every election since.
The Democratic party has to pick between the far left and moderates who believe in a market based economy. Right now, it's trying to straddle both boats and doing a terrible job.
The narrative I’m hoping will materialize is that the good citizens of America, including the more prosperous members of the working class, realize we have a common interest in being as unlike like Weimar as possible and vote against the insurrectionist. Maybe the Selzer poll augurs Midwestern good sense.
This darkly reminds me of a recent episode with one of the Substack racists... he renounced his white nationalism and white supremacy on the grounds that he spent some time living in rural American and couldn't stand how much his fellow whites resembled mouth-breathing 1920s-30s Rhinelanders in their complacency and ignorant entitlement.
Not sure I have a point here, other than that I think this election will determine whether the famous quote about America "doing the right thing, once all other options have been exhausted" will prove true once more.
“This apparent piece of information is noise and you shouldn’t update much on it” is always useful advice when true, and I’m glad that you’re saying it despite your material interests as a pundit. Brave to stand up against Big Hot Take.
Also, for the love of god don’t draw inferences from Dixville Notch; it’s an n=6 sample and three of them are literally different people who didn’t live there in 2020 (5 voters in 2020; one died, another moved out, three new ones moved in.)
Pretty sure the Dixville Notch crosstabs are the basis for Allan Lichtman's secret 14th Key.
"Harry Potter and the Secret of the Fourteenth Key" is now the title for my next fanfic . . . .
Amazed I’ve never read a “if Democrats really thought Trump was a fascist they’d move to Dixville Notch and swamp the vote there” take.
DOOOOOOM!
There are also “half of Haley primary voters are voting for Harris!” hopium takes.
HOOOOPPPEEE!
I’m letting go of hope and embracing freedom!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fVs_f_R6ZxQ&pp=ygUPbWlkbmlnaHQgZ29zcGVs
Also, don't take inferences from all those breathless stories along the lines of "the lines at the polling places go for blocks showing incredible enthusiasm and turnout in this election!" when the result is always, "pretty much the same turnout as every election."
It's all filler until we get definitive results.
I know the whole point of the post is that I’m not supposed to care about data points like this, but I appreciate this context. It did not feel like a great sign!
This is it America the Day of Days. To borrow from Eisenhower:
“You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you…Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”
"Please, for the love of God, do not draw strong inferences about American society based on exit poll cross tabs"
Too late, Matt! One of the three Dixville Notch Trump voters was a Mexican-American lesbian -- Harris' support among women, Hispanics, AND the LGBTQ community has clearly imploded and the only question now is whether Trump carries the District of Columbia since a meltdown of this magnitude necessarily presages Trump exceeding 75% of the vote in every state.
But one of the four Republicans crossed the aisle to vote for Harris. In catering to these special interest groups, Trump has suffered a catastrophic implosion among his base! It’s still 50/50 if you ask me.
Interesting. I would not have thought the lesbian population of Dixville to be so high! 😂
Not the point of the post but Bobos in Paradise really is a terrible book. And I had this take back in college when it was the book of the moment to read and Brooks was at the height of his influence. It was just really clear to me that Brooks was trying to make a lazy “democrats are out of touch elites and republicans are salt of the earth ‘real Americans’ take”. I genuinely took the book personally. Its popularity also clearly was helped by the post 9-11 polling bump/patriotism run amok fever dream we were in from 9/12/2021 to about late 2023 (when Iraq war insurgency was clearly in full bloom). Here was this book putting intellectual sheen on the supposed GOP super majority that was supposedly taking shape based on GOP supposedly being the party of “real Americans”.
Given I had to read this book in college it’s maybe not surprising that I have deep seated dislike for this book beyond its real flaws. Having said that man o man was I glad for that Atlantic takedown that pointed out Brooks at best exaggerated his observations about what goes on in supposed “blue towns” and “red towns” (as Matt noted all of his supposed observations of rich democrats were probably observations of rich Dubya voters) and worst seeming complete falsehoods.
*one of the nauseating things about the “GOP is the party of real America” takes is how often they came from centrist or left of center writers. A random example is the movie Junebug. Probably now most famous as the launching pad for Amy Adams career. I actually ended up liking that movie. But man it’s seared into my brain how many movie critics focused on how the movie had this finger on the pulse of how elite city dwelling libs just don’t get people in “good” small town America. And these critics were almost certainly libs! Talk about overcompensating. So yeah if you’re wondering where some of my critiques of the Times comes from.
David Brooks is what the NYTimes think a conservative is, which doesn't speak well of either David Brooks or the NYTimes.
I think David French, and to a lesser extent Ross Douthat, do a decent job for the NYT of conveying conservative thought. What I think they don't capture, and what probably would be too much for the Times board or its readers, is the Id of conservativism --- the despise and pure distaste modern conservatives have for mainstream liberal ideas and people.
Vance and some others embody this in that what they really feel is very reactionary, in the sense that at their core they really don't think people who are different from them, by race, by gender, by religion, by sexuality, should ever really be considered equal to them.
"Vance and some others embody this in that what they really feel is very reactionary, in the sense that at their core they really don't think people who are different from them, by race, by gender, by religion, by sexuality, should ever really be considered equal to them."
Which is why Vance is married to an Indian women???
This is just the same old tired leftist caricatures Maybe true in 1970, not true now.
Meh, that being the Id of conservatism is about as accurate as liberalism's Id being arrogant conceit. You can find a lot of both, but you're missing the rose for the fertilizer if that's all you see.
I'm not sure who the conservatives are these days. The Bulwark?
The Republican party seems pretty radical these days. Along with being a personality cult.
I agree that they are a personality cult, but radicalism is an interesting question. I think temperamentally they are more radically, but Matt has made the point that Trump in particular has moderated on policy quite a bit. Is there some other area/policy where you would say they have become more radical?
Sure. Politicizing the Department of Justice. Gutting the Civil Service. Vast use (and likely corrupt abuse) of the President’s tariff powers. Trashing a long-lived consensus on the US’s role in maintaining peace and the global world order. Normalizing personal behavior in our President that would have rightly been seen as disqualifying before Trump.
Also, I don’t believe in Trump’s supposed “moderation.” I believe his administration would take serious restrictive action on reproductive pharmaceuticals. I suspect if it came to his desk he would most likely sign a national abortion ban. I don’t believe he would protect Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA but would sign legislation that would seriously damage them.
His could be the most radical administration in our history, limited only by Trump’s laziness.
False equivalency. Yes, of course liberals have their id/dark side. But the Trumpists (I won't call them conservatives; nothing conservative about them) seem driven by their id/resentment/negative feelings (fear, hate of "the other") to a greater extent that liberals are. Liberals are enriched for pointy-headed wonks and nerds who are like, "Let's think about this rationally. Which candidate represents the greatest hope of implementing positive change or at least not messing up the already-existing good things?"
Highly recommended reading: the difference between Conflict and Mistake theory. Liberals tend to be Mistake Theorists; Trumpists and leftists, Conflict Theorists. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
I agree there is a difference between Trumpist/leftists and conservatives/liberals despite there being a lot of overlap between who they vote for. But he didn't say Trumpists, so...
The other in this case though is leftist not people of a different race.
Thinking that the left is overly obsessed with identity isn’t the same thing as disliking members of other identities.
“…they really don't think people who are different from them, by race, by gender, by religion, by sexuality, should ever really be considered equal to them”
It wasn’t conservatives who referred to their fellow Americans as deplorables and garbage. Where did you get the idea that conservatives hate people?
You can find plenty of examples of Republican politicians making the direct or slightly oblique claim that the real America or the real Americans are those in “the heartland” as opposed to the big city, as if it’s more authentically American to have grown up in down state Illinois or rural Texas or Ohio than to have grown up in LA, Brooklyn, or North Philadelphia. And you can point to innumerable things Trump has said, or Vance’s childless cat lady bit. How else do you explain their combined Haitians eating cats and dogs crap? The only way you don’t hear that and think it’s utter bullshit that couldn’t possibly be true is if you start with a mindset that “of course that’s something THOSE people could do”.
But what I’m really trying to get at comes from my own personal experience. I’m an upper middle class, upper middle age white guy who spent most of the last quarter century in Michigan and Ohio. Sure, this isn’t 30 - 40 years ago when it was still common for people to say out loud that black athletes weren’t really cut out to be quarterback, or women really could never have what it takes to be in charge of men doing man type work. But first, not all the people who said that stuff are dead, nor have they all changed their minds.
To my point, it’s clear, in conversation after conversation that I’ve been in, at times when guys feel free to be candid, that they believe that sure some women and some people of color can be equals and leaders, but they are exceptional for their group not normal. And they believe that there is something fundamentally lesser about people who aren’t like them: if you’re not white, not male, not straight, not base line Christian. And they resent the hell out of the fact that they have to behave and at least pretend to think differently.
This is the part I always have trouble explaining. I’m not trying to pass moral judgment here. These are my neighbors, my fellow scout leaders, my friends and acquaintances. I consider them good people, but their attitudes are retrograde and they really are angry that the world no longer defaults to seeing their needs and views as normal. They don’t like that other people’s voices now matter as much as theirs. It’s who they are, it’s how they feel, and it’s why they like Trump. They see him as sharing their resentment.
I grew up around conservatives. Lots of them hate anyone different from them (or want to convert them to their religion, which is a form of hate)
I am definitely in the camp of thinking it's a mistake WaPo and the Times didn't have a Trump supporter as one of its columnists for reasons I think you're alluding to. I think it also is a (small) contributor to the "sane washing" of Trump for a variety of reasons.
I put Douthat down as a Trump supporter, albeit in a supercilious, condescending way, which is so Douthatian.
I feel like one could have never read anything by David Brooks and missed nothing.
I feel bad for David Brooks. I’ve read a couple of his books and he’s really good. I’m a big fan. But, absolutely nobody other than me seems to like this dude. Every article he writes in the Times gets extreme vitriol in the comments. Zero Republicans like him. Seeing him get bashed here has to mean that pretty much everyone hates him. Is it because he looks and sounds like a know-it-all dweeb? Most of his writing is about positive topics and he challenges readers to think differently. Maybe nobody likes that.
I like late David Brooks. He writes beautifully about liberalism, empathy for others and what the good life might entail.
Yeah back in the aughts he was awful, since Trump he’s been much better.
It's good when people can gain value from people's writing. If you find value, I'm glad. I never have from his work. I've given up reading him at this point and haven't read an article from him in years.
I like him! I certainly disagree with him a lot, but I actually appreciated some of his NYT pieces and felt bad for him with everyone bashing him in the comments.
What did you enjoy about his books?
I enjoyed both Road to Character and The Second Mountain. I guess both are life journey type books, written at different stages of his life. I think the hero’s journey story where we set off in one direction, face challenges, change course and conquer is very relative to a lot of people.
I can see why you’d like those two! They seem very introspective, and if they jive with your own inner life well I imagine they’d be pretty great reads.
I think a lot of people have Bobos in Paradise and his column in mind when critiquing him.
The last one was actually pretty good.
On the other hand there is a good bit of research that Conservatives seem to understand liberal thought a lot better than liberals understand conservative though.
Probably due to the left's domination of the culture and institutions. To take a really easy example. If you are a conservative that went to college you are REALLY informed on how the left thinks. But college won't teach you jack shit on how the right really thinks (though I'm sure there will be plenty of caricatures)
"there is a good bit of research that Conservatives seem to understand liberal thought a lot better than liberals understand conservative though."
I know there were studies showing this going back a long-ways pre-COVID, but I'm genuinely wondering whether that has been checked in the last five years or so, because from a purely anecdotal standpoint that no longer seems to be true. (Which is why I no longer hang out in right-leaning spaces on-line -- I got tired of arguing with people who were, AFAICT, sincerely convinced that Obama was a Maoist sent to institute Sharia over the U.S.)
There are huge numbers of people who don’t feel that way who are regularly voting for Republicans. I think that’s where we’re not looking. Kind of the “everyone who opposes me is dumb or crazy” trap.
Yes, but I don't think that rebuts the point that those studies need to be redone periodically to confirm that their findings remain valid. I mean, there have been plenty of studies in recent years showing substantial increases in levels of conspiratorial/paranoid beliefs amongst American conservatives over the past 20 or so years. It would be somewhat surprising to find out that *isn't* degrading conservatives' abilities to accurately "read" liberal thought, while probably conversely moving conservatives more toward long-held liberal stereotypes about them.
>post 9-11 polling bump/patriotism run amok fever dream we were in from 9/12/2021 to about late 2023 (when Iraq war insurgency was clearly in full bloom)
2021 - 2023? Off by 20 years, no?
Ugh yes, 2003.
By the way, I've said before but experience going to protests (and speaking at protests) against the Iraq War is why I maybe have more sympathy for the Palestinian protestors and the Columbia protestors specifically. My sympathy isn't for the protestors with the truly abhorrent anti-Semitic views. But more that I saw up close how easy it is for extremists or people with their own agendas can hijack these things and become the story.
This is one reason why I have always thought that protests were a poor outlet for political outrage. What is the last *political* protest that really got what it wanted?
Domestically? Probably the pro-life movement and overturning Roe vs. Wade. Definitely think those annual "right to life" rallies in DC played a role. And I think those rallies show how political protests can make a difference; they have to have long term plans/goals, they have to have message discipline and they have to be organized. Inchoate marching through the streets is I think a waste of time.
If I were to rate the influence of the pro life rallies compared to almost any other tactic they tried, it would be very low. At best, I would say that it allowed people who were prolife to have a sense that there is a large number of fellow supporters out there and to keep trying. But in terms of influencing outsiders, it would be limited at best.
When I was doing political work, ages ago, I understood that protests were supposed to be part of a larger plan. Not so much in the Trump era.
I remember people taking to the streets, around the country, when Hillary lost and I was thinking “um, what’s the ask, here? What do they want?” It just seems like people do it now kind of aimlessly and I think it’s somewhere between pointless and counterproductive.
Probably civil rights in the 1960's
I think gay rights/AIDS-related protests in the 1980s and early 1990s had some net positive outcome for those movements.
maybe. I think Hollywood slowly putting more gay stuff in the TV had a lot more of an effect. Will & Grace etc
This has always been the case, going back certainly to the original labor movement. It’s why I hate the “look, I found a bad person in a crowd of 10,000!” tactic even when it’s used on people I disagree with.
Having said that, some movements and protests have a lot more awful people than others.
My new favorite "not very predictive but fun" site: https://sixtysixwards.com/turnout-tracker/
Harris is doing well in Philly, guess that means she wins!
Hey Ben, time to declare it Beer O'Clock
Tonight I’d love a post on 25 things any new president can do to unlock housing growth.
Not as ambitious as what you're asking for, but you might like this: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/11/4/5-things-for-the-next-president-to-do