I agree with the idea that detailing super-specific policy agendas isn’t great politics, but I might take it one step further. I think “cheap talk” about policy in general might not be super effective at swinging votes. (Nor are baseball-announcer-style statistics like “there was a larger fall in entry by asylum seekers under Biden than under Trump, as long as you ignore the huge previous rise under Biden.”) I don’t think anyone believes that if Dems actually get power, they’ll pass simple and focused economic policies rather than huge bills where they endlessly brag about the enormous amounts of money spent (on what?).
The Dems’ problem is deeper. They need to *credibly* signal that their values are aligned with those of most Americans. I could definitely see how some Americans would think Democrats care *more* about the welfare of asylum seekers than that of citizens in red states. I could also see Americans thinking that Dems care more about throwing tons of money at climate than they care about inflation, which is conveniently blamed on factors outside of Biden’s control (see the hilariously named “Inflation Reduction Act”).
To credibly signal something, you need to pay a cost. So it’s imperative that Kamala piss off the left flank when she’s trying to signal that she actually cares about the issues that are important to Americans. Sure, maybe this is “vibes” rather than “policy.” But I think Americans would understand this as a credible signal because it’s likely that Kamala actually cares what the Groups think of her.
I think this is about right. She's done an admirable job rapidly consolidating the party. My gut says that to win she will need to eventually do or say something that doesn't seem calculated to appeal to a left leaning focus group. The concern is that she's never done that before but it's the path to a permission structure for the people she needs to vote for her to do so.
I keep saying this: even in California (or Massachusetts or New York or Maryland) gaining a reputation for being soft on crime isn't exactly a dependable path to political success.
“Dems care more about throwing tons of money at climate than they care about inflation”.
A reminder that inflation has come down tremendously. I’m aware that this might not be what median voters think but it’s objectively true.
But to maybe buttress your point a bit. This is part of why I think an actual Fed rate cut of even just 25 bps is so important. If regular Americans can see that borrowing money for stuff like new cars got even a smidgen cheaper it really helps the cause to show we’ve “defeated” inflation.
The rate of inflation has come down, the inflated prices have not. YOU and I and all the smart people here at Slow Boring know that they never will, but some pandering on this one may be in order.
Also—and I don't know how this tests—but I'd hope it's not impossible to tie Trump's tax cut plans to the risk of inflation. Something like "Trump's give aways to billionaires will send prices soaring."
I'm not opposed to trying this out, either, but I sense a lot of persuadable voters—especially in places like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—**support** raising tariffs.
I mean that's a little much. Of course prices can come down. Used car prices drove *a lot* of the aggregate inflation measurement in 2020-2021 and the price levels have fallen 30% since the Dec. 2021 peak. Just one example, but anything that was driven up by a supply constraint has and will come down. In the case of used cars -- it was a "demand-induced supply constraint" so yeah, tied 100% to the stimulus but still a supply constraint.
EDIT: New car prices have fallen too but the Fed measures those differently so they didn't have as much impact on the inflation measurement and those are more tied interest rates.
Ok fair, some prices can come down. I am specifically thinking of a woman I know who complained about $7 yogurt at the grocery store and said "hopefully we change that in November!". People are dumb.
Maybe I am too pessimistic, maybe you are right. I do remember seeing Target announcing they were lowering a lot of prices too. Still doesn't seem like anything that voters are willing to be upbeat about though, not sure how to resolve that!
Yes, I was thinking this too. Some prices were elevated above the inflation rate and have fallen back. There was a period where I couldn’t buy a loaf of bread for less than $5. Recently I’ve been paying more like $3. Similar with chips. I was going to buy some and nothing less than $5 for a bag. I didn’t buy them. Bad vibes. But now I can get a cheap bag for like $3 again. Good vibes.
Agree. Which is why the rate cut could actually be quite important to normie voters if it happens. I'm a bad advocate for this position because I work in real estate finance; interest rates are a huge part of my everyday work life.
But buying a house and buying a care are probably the number 1 and number 2 biggest purchases in people's lives. Having the cost of borrowing drop even in a little would be a big thing that I think even normies would notice. Even though most people aren't buying houses or cars on a regular basis, most people likely know someone who is interested or exploring buying a house or buying car.
No, I wouldn't lie, but I wouldn't pull my hair out about coming up with a policy that would actually make prices go down. I just wouldn't claim "inflation is down!" when (dumb) voters are gonna say "Are you kidding me, I just spent $300 at the grocery store!". Maybe like "We're going to keep fighting inflation and _____"- raise taxes on windfall profits for corporations, stop Trump from putting tariffs in place, suspend the gas tax, I dunno, something! Just don't try to split hairs and teach voters that "Acktually, (push up glasses) inflation is down already!"
The message on the economy should be: "Getting through the pandemic and the disastrous Trump policies was difficult and Americans took some hits during that interlude, but thanks to efforts by the Biden-Harris administration, we've made a lot of progress and things are finally on the upswing. But as Democrats we know deep in our hearts that people are still feeling that shock and we need to work hard to make more progress. We've come this far -- let's keep going and not go back. Elect me and I promise you that we'll finish the job."
Jerome Powell is absolutely not a hero. Most of the inflation surge was caused by monetary policy errors and easily foreseeable at the time. Biden should have replaced Powell in 2022 with someone committed to bringing inflation down more rapidly.
I'm curious what steps you think that Powell should have done that he didn't?
Because I'm pretty sure that if Powell had jacked up interest rates much faster, then the economy wouldn't have been able to handle it and hit a recession.
Having the correct policy goals and communicating clearly make individual interest rate decisions less consequential. In 2020 the Fed put in place its FAIT policy (Flexible Average Inflation Targeting), which was a pretty good policy. The problem was that in the midst of the inflation surge Powell et al decided that their implementation of the FAIT policy was not symmetric, i.e. the Fed would make up for inflation undershoots but not overshoots, which entailed a loss of credibility as to how committed the Fed was to keep inflation on target. This was the big mistake. If they had insisted on keeping the target symmetric then even ignoring the early warning signs that the inflation surge was not transitory wouldn't have been that costly.
A recession is always a possibility when a central bank gets itself into the position of needing to fight inflation. But consider that a brief recession might have been much better politically for Biden than what ended up occurring. And to weigh in on the tactic of interest rates, the inflation surge began in the summer of 2021 and the Fed did not being to raise interest rates above zero until the spring of 2022, so this was a tactical error.
1) There is good evidence that the fed raising rates in 2015 early after a small increase inflation caused the economy to slow unnecessarily.
2) In this current cycle, a significant amount of inflation was caused by supply shocks and fiscal excess. The fed had little control over either and the former has resolved itself out fairly well. Jacking up interest rates sharply due to supply shocks is a brutal way to address inflation since it can't address the problem directly, it can ONLY address the inflationary aspect by decreasing the money supply available to people indiscriminately.
3) Biden is struggling with a good economy and inflation. There was no way to avoid some inflation, so having a bad economy on top would have been devastating politically.
We can repeat this till we’re blue in the face, but prices remain high and people are pissed. That’s what they mean when they complain about inflation. Doesn’t matter if it’s not technically inflation - this response just makes us sound like pedantic gaslighters.
“They need to *credibly* signal that their values are aligned with those of most Americans.”
This doesn’t sound like an assessment of the party that has had more people vote for it in 5 of the last 6 elections.
Democrats’ values are more aligned with the average American’s than Republicans on almost all major issues (immigration being the one notable exception).
And they’ve only ever been a coin toss in the election. When the stakes are this high, it would be a good idea to be more than just “slightly closer to the median than Crimes Georg”
To nitpick this a bit, Democrats won a plurality of votes in 2012 but Republicans won more seats--that was the aftermath of the heavy gerrymandering the GOP did in many states after the 2010 Census.
My point still stands that Democrats can't win the House. And its odd that no Democrat seems to care about this. Republicans at least care about winning the presidency even though they can't. I don't that a party is aligned with the vibes of most Americans if they can't win the most democratic branch of government. Sure, since 1992, Democrats have gone on a streak of winning the presidency, controlling it for 20 of 32 years. But in that same timespan they have concurrently controlled the House for 6 total years. Americans don't want to be led by weirdo Republicans, but they also don't want radical progressive policies.
Where they're leaving points on the board is not retaliating with gerrymandering of their own after SCOTUS issued Rucho v. Common Cause. I'm all for ending gerrymandering but if it doesn't happen on the federal level, then on the state level they have to return fire, as much as I hate it.
I'm not a huge fan of gerrymandering, but outside of 2012, the house majority has reflected accurately the winner of the majority of voters in House races - and 2012 had about a 1% vote difference nationally.
If we forbade gerrymandering and then Republicans lost the House several times despite winning a majority of the vote perhaps we could finally get them on board with moving to multi member districts. On the other hand, I suspect that Democrats might find that its not such a great way of representing the will of the people after all...
I would not say that "20 of 32 years" is a streak, and it's all about what year you use as a cutoff. Republicans have controlled the presidency for 4 of the last 8 years, 12 of the last 24, and 24 of the last 44.
I us 1994 a major electoral inflection point because that was the year of the last party coalition realignment. Democrats had a Congressional supermajority from 1932-1994, and then Republicans won it back.
If we look at who won a majority of the national two-party vote, it's Republicans 7, Democrats 5 in the last 12 elections.* If the Democrats win this year, it's 7 and 6 (Democrats have a slight edge in polls and models). In other words, just like for the Senate and the White House, we're very polarized, votes are very close, and the two sides have basically split and rotated power for many years now.
* Yup, 2012 was the anomaly, the only time for decades where the winner of the national two-party vote lost the House.
"This doesn’t sound like an assessment of the party that has had more people vote for it in 5 of the last 6 elections."
Democrats' political weaknesses tend to be in "culture" or "values" related, but they usually make up for it in strengths that usually described as "pocketbook" issues, like taxes on the rich or supporting Medicare.
But that's not really what the OP was talking about. They are talking about signaling "we're like you, we believe in the same things you are". As opposed to "we're competent managers of the government" or many other things where everybody basically wants the same thing (peace and security) but there are disagreements on how to achieve it (more military spending, aid to Israel / Ukraine / etc)
I don't see immigration as being an exception at all. Of course Democrats abhor the racist and paranoid language that Trump uses when he talks about immigration, but when it comes to actual policy and legislation we just need to point out that yes, Trump killed the bipartisan bill because he cares more about being President than actually addressing immigration in a sensible and effective manner (which doesn't include silly walls and floating barriers.)
It always feels weird to me to count 1992. Clinton might well have won outright in a 2 way race, but I really feel like we should just throw out the data point as an outlier.
It's dumb that her identity is an issue, but since MAGA is absolutely going to make it an issue, she could also potentially use a bit of political jujitsu and wield intersectionality as both a sword and a shield while punching a few hippies.
To the left: are you seriously going to torpedo the candidacy of a black/asian women and the child of immigrants unless you extract an election-losing promise to enact a far-left progressive wish-list of ideas that will never pass congress?
To the rest of the non-MAGA electorate: see, being a black/asian women and the child of immigrants does not mean blind adherence to a far-left progressive wish-list of ideas that will never pass congress!
"are you seriously going to torpedo the candidacy of a black/asian women and the child of immigrants unless you extract an election-losing promise to enact a far-left progressive wish-list of ideas that will never pass congress?"
I mean, the answer to that from the far-left is just "yes".
I think she was smart to harshly disavow it, while also not drawing a ton of attention to it. It’s not an issue that is going to move swing voters anyway. Immigration and crime and like deficit reduction have more bang for buck.
I thought maybe “it’s bad to tear down the flag in front of Union Station and burn it.” Also probably don’t scribble “Hamas is coming.”
She’s constitutionally incapable of doing that though. The Dems fundamentally think these people’s hearts are in the right place, and that’s a problem for them.
I agree with you — what I meant is that most Dems think anti-Israel protestors’ hearts are in the right place, and the Hamas supporters are just a little too over-zealous for understandable reasons. But they’re all willing to at least pay lip service to the idea that Hamas is bad.
More importantly, though, Dems *aren’t* willing to loudly declare that the flag-burning contingent fucking sucks. Which should be easy for any American leader to do, frankly.
“ Dems *aren’t* willing to loudly declare that the flag-burning contingent fucking sucks. Which should be easy for any American leader to do, frankly.”
I agree that the flag-burners should be kicked in the nuts, metaphorically speaking, by all Dem office-holders.
But I still think it’s a mistake to talk about “the Dems”‘when you just mean a small percentage of Democrats.
Haven’t a majority of Dems been reluctant to kick these guys in the nuts, though?
I guess I don’t really know what Dem politicians think of these protesters, but if you read left-of-center columnists as an indicator, I think you see a certain sense of admiration for these kids who just go a little too far.
Yes, but it was a written statement that *I think* was calculated not to draw a ton of attention. (She delivered lengthier televised remarks about Bibi later.) She also really framed it as some bad apples when the reality has been that the Hamas fans have been seriously involved in organizing these protests.
Can you be more specific about what you want her to do? It kinda seems like she did exactly what you asked for and then you said she didn't so now I'm confused. Is it a more general rejection of pro-Palestine / anti-Israel / anti-Netanyahu people?
Definitely for me. So she definitely has my solid blue state vote because ... yeah, Trump. But if she wants my campaign donation $$$ then I need to hear a vocal and forceful anti-Palestine protesters (e.g., these protesters are supporting terrorism) and a much tough stance on shoplifting which continues to hollow out urban cores.
I felt like what we got was how Trump treated Charlottesville: “very fine people on both sides, except the white supremacists who I condemn completely.” That was a terrible way to respond!
I would’ve liked her to respond the way the left responded to Charlottesville. (Ok fine, maybe less forcefully, but these guys were still scrapping with cops and committing other prosecutable offenses.)
It's going to be 2055, and you guys as you're retired will be desperate for a Sister Soulja movement to give you the same hippie punching thrill in your leg Bill Clinton did when he made sure to be on-site for the execution of a mentally disabled man.
This is the core problem with Kamala. She already shook the etch-a-sketch so many times she's completely incapable of developing credibility. Sometimes position taking is just signaling about the current moment, that's when the flip flop can be useful, but with Kamala her entire career is an exercise in avoiding ever committing to anything. She's already way to far into "I have no clue what she actually thinks" territory too turn this to an advantage.
I think the youngsters are just so glad to see a new face that they don't care about her past. Plenty of voters don't even know what state attorneys general actually do (I myself have only a vague idea - to me it means someone held an office that requires an understanding of how the law works at the level of State government.)
I see the incumbent backlash in local elections where people just vote for the challenger without even thinking about it. Here we get an incumbent backlash in favor of an incumbent(!)
I genuinely find it uncomfortable that there’s a whole genre of advice given to democrats all the time, and it may be good advice that you need to go pick a fight with people far to weak to fight back.
Like you need to go pick a fight with already extremely marginal people and make sure they know no one cares about them is like routine advice and the Republican alternative is like you need to say nice things about social security and Medicare to reasonably comfortable crowds.
You don't have to pick fights with genuinely weak people, there's plenty of comfortable people out there who advocate for who they deem as the weakest, and say dumb things and do bad things, that's an easy target to punch at the left on.
"There's plenty of comfortable people out there who advocate for who they deem as the weakest" -- prattling endlessly on NPR, brought to you by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John D. & Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, Eric and Wendy Schmidt," etc.
Yeah, genuinely weak people. Tell that to Joe Six-Pack if you want to lose an election.
Yeah, honestly in my view picking these fights probably exposes the target more and probably wouldn't help all that much in a larger election. I think it's best to just message more toward where you want to be rather than punching inside the camp in particular.
To the best of my recollection, Obama avoided "Sister Souljah" behavior. He simply kept a disciplined silence about a lot of issues. On gay marriage, for instance, he did not go out of his way to kick the gays. He just didn't make gay marriage an affirmative policy of his own.
Maybe there are other areas where Obama did pick on the already marginalized, for political advantage?
Obama absolutely had a Sister Souljah moment, when he said his own kids shouldn't get affirmative action. He was nicer and more artful than Clinton was, but that was a massive rebuke to the way affirmative action is practiced in academia where well off applicants of color who are seen as prospective donors get massive preferences.
Yes, but in action, Obama put two pro-affirmative action SC Justice's on the Court and did nothing in actual policy to weaken affirmative action.
If Kamala says some performative stuff about immigration, but then does nothing that bad to pro-immigration people like me, then there'll be no real backlash, but Matt and much of the commentariat want the rightr-wing immigration bill to be passed, instead of a better bill created by an actual Democratic or bipartisan group of Senator's instead of just signing on to the most right-wing bill currently available.
It's interesting you bring up Obama and gay marriage because I have different take. Here's what he said while running in 2007:
“I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian — for me — for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.” - April 17, 2008, while running for president, defining marriage at the Saddleback Presidential Forum.
I remember him saying that at the time and being *very* shocked he said it so directly. Probably also why he won Iowa by 10 points.
Speaking as a married gay man. On the one hand I was disappointed he didn't support marriage equality, on the other hand, not being an idiot, I 100% knew he would be better for me on that issue than McCain
Yes. And Obama had also came out in support of gay-marriage way back during his first IL senate run so I think most informed voters chalked some of these firmer statements during the Presidential race up as pandering but my point here was just that I don't think he was totally silent about it. He actually pandered. And won convincingly.
Here's a big difference - most gay people knew Obama was lying, and saying what he needed on gay marriage to get election, and then would put pro-gay marriage people on the Court or pass whatever other pro-LGBT policies or regulations possible, because they trusted Obama.
At the moment, a lot of progressives don't trust the Democratic Party, especially when people like Matt specifically says they shouldn't just talk moderate, but pass moderate bills.
It is absolutely correct and wise to say something to the effect of "If you spray paint 'Hamas is coming' on an American monument, know that *America* will be coming for *you* and we punch harder."
What is the best evidence on the "Michigan problem" and Muslim communities? How big an electoral issue is this for her to worry about? Can she make up losses by tacking hard and letting those who want a strong anti-Israel message vote for who, Jill Stein?
I don’t exactly have a problem with something this narrow. I’m not sure that moves the needle. It seems to me like the advice is usually quite a bit more than you should respect the law when you protest.
That people will end up with no one to turn to even when they’re doing the very vanilla not extreme version of that.
Like I worry about tone policing people out of their circle of empathy. Like when i see a protest movement did something annoying I see a lot of sick wishing that they were killed for it. Like dehumanization lurks behind so many culture war fronts.
Like maybe you really don’t like peta, I’m not much of a fan. But if you respond in a way that conflates vegans with peta I get more torture porn comments on my cookie review videos. This dynamic all over the place, I don’t think you can talk about trans sports without feeding the people who just are grossed out by girls with 🐓. I don’t know that you can talk about Palestine protestors who do dumb shit without spreading the idea that they’re all doing dumb shit.
The people who are like "run down the protestors!" aren't going to be made more psychotic by a liberal politician saying that burning the flag and saying "Hamas is coming" are shitty things to do, those people have different personal problems and weird views they're living with. It's normies toward the middle who need reassurance that the Democrats aren't going to enable the worst elements of their coalition if they gain/maintain power.
"The most important thing is to piss off lefties" is this comments section at its most self parodic, and demonstrates again that this is a Republican blog read by Republican readers written by a Republican blogger, all of whom maintain a totally empty attachment to being "center left" because they think it's social unpalatable to be explicitly conservative.
Don't you have a PhD? How could you have earned one with such poor reading comprehension skills? There's a big difference between "pissing off lefties" and "AVOIDING pissing off moderates who are nervous about pronouns or Hamas or the border or gun rights."
I'd be tickled pink if Harris could both (1) win 99% of persuadable voters AND (2) not piss off a single lefty. She'd win a landslide! But since that's not feasible—and because the road to 270 electoral votes go through the moderates in places like Green Bay and Tucson—I'd urge her to be willing to risk pissing off a few of the former (especially the most extreme ones, like, uh, you) to get the bulk of the latter. Such a strategy seems more likely to nail down purple states than tailoring the message to drive up margins in California and Massachusetts.
I'm actually being nice, in that my comment implies the possibility that he's operating in good faith and genuinely doesn't perceive the necessity to win the votes of moderates. And, while perhaps that's unlikely...who knows? He certainly comes across as earnest.
Freddie, I am going to make one good-faith attempt to get through to you.
Matt Y says, correctly: “The median voter is a non-college-educated middle-aged white guy in a suburb.” That’s who you need to convince to vote for your candidate.
Median Voter doesn’t give a sh*t about trans rights or Gaza; he’s scared of illegal immigrants and pissed off about high prices.
Matt Y wants to move to the right to at least try to win Median Voter’s support, not to hurt you or spite you.
The choice isn’t “Kamala Harris or magic gay Marxist unicorn who will make all my policy dreams come true;” the choice is Kamala Harris or Donald “You Won’t Have to Vote Anymore “ Trump.
This isn’t complicated, and I’m at a loss as to why you don’t understand it, or pretend not to. Politics is the art of the possible, not the art of b*tching online at people who don’t meet your standards of ideological purity.
I'm genuinely curious what the list of seven things that "women married to laid-off-ironworkers-turned-Uber-Eats-drivers in the Rust Belt" would support.
Not sure what mute is, but blocking is useless - he just can’t like your posts. I finally reported him - he just continues to lie, not read the actual posts, and not engage with any pushback.
I have heard Harris mention an "assault weapons ban" at least twice since her campaign began, which strikes me as a conspicuously high frequency in such a short timespan. "They want to ban abortion, we want to ban assault weapons," etc.
Not sure where the polling is on this, but it seems like an unwise subject to promote. I think MY has, in the past, advocated for Democrats not mentioning guns at all. Every reliable Democratic voter understands that the party is trustworthy on gun control stances, so there's nothing to be gained but lots to be lost in associating oneself with the taking away of any firearms in the minds of heterodox swing voters in purple country.
I believe assault rifle bans poll around 60%. But I agree, it’s the vibe of that policy, it makes people assume she’s more liberal on other issues. Ie. crime
Even here, where people are in like the top 3% of policy knowledge, we can't even be clear if we're talking about "Assault Weapons" or assault rifles, let alone what the hell an "assault weapon" is. The utter inability to speak coherently about the relevant policy is reason #1 the Dems need to avoid the issue. It seems completely impossible for them to not jam their entire foot in their mouth every other sentence.
A good politician would never fall into that pedantic trap. She'd say something like "I'm against weapons that are built specifically for killing massive numbers of innocent people. I'm against weapons that are useless for hunting or protecting your loved ones in your home but only good for terrorizing people and mowing down little kids sitting in their classroom."
"Assault weapon" generally means "semiautomatic rifle", though it's an odd phrasing (a weapon is a tool, whether it's used for assault or not is up to its user). It probably derives from the incorrect belief that the "AR" in AR-15 stands for "Assault Rifle".
1. In actual function "Assault Weapon" often tends to exclude things like M1 Garand/M1 Carbine/Mini-14, making the actual definition more like "semiauto rifle with a pistol grip".
2. It's worse than that because the law doesn't actually have a coherent definition of a "rifle" to begin with. The law is mostly concerned vaguely with concealability and makes no distinctions between rifle and handgun ammunition which could actually be relevant.
3. The definition gets even further muddled by the explicit inclusion of things like the Tec-9 which is a handgun that is entirely less functional/capable in every way than any Glock in existence.
Take this FWIW, but I think the people who worry about an AWB get themselves WAY too wrapped around the axle on the details.
And I don't say that because I don't think the details matter -- they absolutely do! But you're overindexing.
The anti-AWB crowd rightly points out that the term "assault weapon" conjures scary connotations while eliding details that presumably would convince people to agree with you**. But you've got it upside-down: Normies. Don't. Give. A. Shit. About. The. Details.
** I'm intentionally leaving out the question of intentionality, because I don't think narratives require intention to work their magic, and it's a stupid rabbit-hole of an argument to get stuck down.
My read on the normies is that they apply the infamous obscenity test to AWs: "I know [an assault weapon] when I see it". Arguing details makes you look pedantic and obsessive, when what people are really trying to tell you is that they don't give a shit about your details, they just don't want to get killed in a mass shooting.
Again, take it or leave it. But my advice is simply to address this bigger fear instead of trying to convince normies that they shouldn't be afraid of pistol grips or telescoping stocks. If there's anything that therapy and life experience have taught me, it's that arguing people out of their feelings is a fool's errand.
Ed: Just to put my own opinion on the table, I think Harris should STFU about an AWB, and argue for a national red flag law, if she even bothers to talk about the subject. Red flags are a clear winner with very few downsides like AWBs have.
Oh I agree with you. The people who keep the AWB on the Dem agenda don't give a shit about the details, because they don't give a shit about the 2nd Amendment and think we should just confiscate all the semi-autos and be done with it. The problem is that that's not actually popular broadly. So if you want gun control to be a winning issue for you as a dem you have to distinguish yourself from the anti-2a confiscationists by caring about the details, or you should just shut up about it.
Basically the AWB is peak, "say it without saying it" on being anti-2A.
I appreciate your point 1 regarding pistol grips. I hadn't thought before about exactly what seems to intuitively separate the ontological category of an AR-15 from, say, a Ruger 10/22, but on reflection it's absolutely the presence of a pistol grip.
Unironically, I think this (along with, IMO, magazine size) might actually cleave reality at the joints were it to be used as a touchstone for a hypothetical "assault weapons ban," (assuming that not all semiautomatic weapons were banned categorically.) The pistol grip's marginal ergonomic utility for close-to-mid-range aiming and handling seems like it differentially enables nefarious uses (outside the hands of the military and law enforcement), whereas banning pistol grips would appear to have absolutely negligible effect on current hunting and target long gun applications.
This all begs the question of why ban this specific class of guns though? The ratio of "Assault weapons" used for recreation and sporting relative to use for crime is astronomically better than that for pistols. The issue isn't just that "Democrats want to ban assault rifles because they look scary and they don't care about how it impacts lawful gun owners who they don't really like," plays well with voters in swing states, it's that, that genuinely seems to be the bulk of the substance behind these efforts
I feel like everyone in the Harris campaign needs to reread Mark Schmitt and Josh Marshall on the perils of "policy literalism." Or in Schmitt's formulation, "it's not what you say about your policies, it's what your policies say about you."
I'd even buy them a few subscriptions! I'm already donating pico-trillions to the Harris campaign; what's a few more pico-trillions if it will get them to campaign competently?
I don't care how gun control polls. Only anti-gun control people vote on the issue; other people just hold a weak position and can't really be motivated.
Yep, this is the key point -- all evidence leans toward there being almost no single-issue pro-gun control voters, while there are a significant number of single-issue anti-gun control voters, so pro-gun control messaging is genuinely always or almost always a net negative on votes for the pro-gun control candidate in the general election. The only semi-reliable venue for positively using it is in a Democratic primary race and that's not relevant here.
Agreed. If Harris wins a sizeable victory, I look forward to the discussion of the question in the Democratic party: "Primaries as a way to choose our nominee: A bad idea? Or a really really bad idea?"
“ but it seems like an unwise subject to promote….there's nothing to be gained but lots to be lost in associating oneself with the taking away of any firearms….”
Totally agree. She already has the gun-control vote locked up. Its political malpractice to talk about this.
Given the continued urban/rural skew in voting. Given the actual number of gun owners is going down (although they are buying more guns). Are we actually sure gun control is still a bad issue to run on?
I’m wondering if this really is like abortion. A lot of GOP aligned pundits or politicians didn’t realize this isn’t 2001 anymore. Religious attendance is plummeting. And likely explains in part why so many were flat footed at the backlash to Dobbs.
My James Carville hat on, I likely agree with you both. Places like Wisconsin or Arizona may come down to like 500 votes and there probably is just enough cross pressured voters “I love my guns and I love my Medicare” that it’s probably not a great issue to run on. And yes there is no issue that benefits from our skewed electoral system, especially within states, than guns. But I would really like some data on this. Is our mental picture from 10 years ago about gun control still accurate
There was a huge spike in first time gun buyers in 2020, so the household numbers are actually probably up a bit recently.
Edit: Gallup's poll on this has the trend being flat back to ~1995. If you think the minor fluctuations are more than noise it went from 37% in 2019 to 45% in 2022 then back to 42% in 2023, but I tend to think "flat" is the correct way to think about it.
If the NRA was even mildly competent (snorts), they would have set up a left-coded gun rights organization in 2017 that aims to train women and people of color to fight back against fascism with their own guns. Talk about the racist history of gun control, etc. Play up the history of militant anti-fascist groups, whether that's John Brown or the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, Allied troops in WW2, and anti-racist punks. Celebrate the Battle of Cable Street every year. You'd get a groundswell of millions of new, leftwing gun owners, who'd then probably pass along gun ownership to their children, and so on. And once you own guns you then become much more skeptical about regulation. It'd be the most effective gun rights move in a hundred years.
I say this as someone who occasionally hangs out on r/liberalgunowners
What could that possibly mean, in practice? Shoot cops when they are trying to arrest a woman / minority?
At least in the case of women they could credibly say that her biggest threat is likely to be a man who outweights / outmuscles her. But for a minority, the statistical threat is likely to be another minority man, not some 50 year old NRA member.
No one beside DSA members is worried about "the Battle of Cable Street" or this other weird obscure marxist history stuff. "Violently overthrow the government" is not going to win over millions of left-wing women.
You think anyone here at Slow Boring is going to disagree with that?
Yeah, the electorate may be moving, glacially, towards a new position on guns. But here as elsewhere I would tell Harris to be like Obama and lead from behind.
I'm just envisioning a combative, mildly confused senior citizen proudly marching around with his AR-15, ready to defend Medicare against the greedy government. I love it
I have maintained that there is not better distillation of both median voter brain and why politics and policy are the way they are than this statement.
Having lived and watched the irrational growth of ammo shops, gun safe sales, and firearms stores during every Democratic administration over 40 years in Montana don’t highlight this issue. Not that Montana plays a large role in national politics and I believe rational gun owners are starting to push back against the NRA faction,this is a no win wedge issue with many swing voters. Gun policy needs thoughtful legislation and messaging while separating the urban gang environment from the sport firearms and hunting environment, insuring, calming and preserving the latter.
"Not that Montana plays a large role in national politics"
Jon Tester would like a word. Not at all a crazy scenario that Montana becomes the tipping point state as to who controls the senate. So yeah that alone may call for downplaying gun control at the top of the ticket.
We want to keep Trump out of the White House. Everything else is secondary. This is not the time to talk about gun control. If pressed on it by the media, just say you're against mass murder and move on as quickly as you can.
Pro-life and anti-gun control are both conservative positions, so Republicans are safer moving away from being so pro-life in pursuit of the middle. Democrats should likewise move away from pro-gun control positions if they want to make gains in red areas, which they need to do in order to gain electoral votes and Congressional seats. There is no way that a Democrat will be *less* pro-gun control than their Republican opponent, so it's a net gain for gun control when Democrats gain votes, even if they're less bound to passing legislation because they de-emphasized the issue.
Especially because the “assault weapons ban” is an idiotic mostly cosmetic approach.
If you want to reduce the lethality of mass shootings then magazine size, caliber and rate of fire are the things you should look at, not flash hiders.
Just let the weapons look cool and make it somewhat harder to have access to those more powerful rifles.
Sometimes conservatives bring up handguns but the average 9mm is just less lethal. You hear about people getting shot 3 or 4 times with a 9mm and surviving, you almost never hear that about someone shot multiple times with a .223, 7.62 or .308 for a reason. We need a physics based approach to what guns are considered more dangerous, not a “looks scary” approach.
"We need a physics based approach to what guns are considered more dangerous, not a 'looks scary' approach."
That makes sense, but I'm pretty sure you first need women to stop being the base of the Democratic party to get an approach like that implemented. (Sorry to be sexist, but every woman I've ever had a discussion about gun control with, whether on-line or in real life, has been very firmly -- even explicitly -- in the camp of the top priority being banning things that look scary and any attempt to explain anything about relative lethality, frequency of use in crimes, etc. will be waved off as "mansplaining" or otherwise dismissed out of hand, no matter how politely presented.)
I do know a boy mom whose argument about the "looks scary" part is that it's like "cool" smoking ads that make guns seem more fun, her boys want to shoot guns partially because of how badass they look. I can get that argument a little bit but smoking has zero usefulness and it isn't explicitly, constitutionally protected. It's just a different issue with its own unique problem set.
On the other hand, prior to the invention of vaping, there wasn't really a substitute good for smoking. Conversely, less-badass looking but perfectly practical long guns are a dime a dozen and predate the AR-15 by decades to centuries. This suggests the possibility of an aesthetics-based ban being more practical to implement (I tend to think "cool looking guns" probably has a fairly substantial effect in providing them appeal to people who think it projects a masculine image. Hell, it's Harley Davidson's whole marketing strategy.)
As I noted to David Coffin above, it may be that this actually all just comes down to pistol grips....
This is one of the reasons I wish we had more women on this board or on PoliticsStack generally. Pro-gun or pro-nuanced-and-specific gun control women exist! There are dozens of us! Dozens!
I should clarify that when I said, "every woman I've ever had a discussion about gun control with," I was meaning every woman who was a proponent of gun control. Hanging out in libertarian/ancap circles, I have encountered a very small handful of women who were simply opposed to gun control.
Exhibit #534 why this comment section is 95% dudes.
"Why can't these silly women care more about the subtle difference gun a & gun b instead of the people that have been killed more easily because of access to these types of guns in general. Women, am I right, dudes?"
The actual reality is those women would probably be OK with all the guns being banned, they just know it's politically a dead letter, which is why they don't really care. Ironically, they'd be all on board for a handgun ban, but that's even more dead for an assault weapons ban, for all the talk of these silly women not getting that handguns are actually more dangerous or whatever the argument is.
#NotAllWomen: My wife pushed us to get firearms during 2020. She also got her concealed carry license. The "mostly peaceful" protests turned her into a very strong advocate of her 2nd Amendment rights.
Except that, if your actual concern is to reduce people being killed, then surely you would want to enact gun control laws that actually address the features of guns that most closely correspond to killing people (as Bo said, magazine size, muzzle velocity, bullet weights and other properties like those), NOT banning bayonet lugs, flash suppressors, barrel shrouds, etc. that have little to no relation to the actual lethality of the weapon.
Like I said, I think the actual reality is the vast amount of women who are pro-gun control _and_ heavily support said efforts _and_ get involved in conversation over assault weapons bans basically just want all guns outside of boring single-shot hunting rifles banned, so they don't really care about the above, but they also know that having a handgun is popular.
That's why they don't care about your arguments, because if the gun they want banned is not as bad as the gun you describe, they still want the less gun banned as well. Whatever path leads to less guns in society is a positive for them
To be ideologically fair, it's the opposite of why conservatives why bad abortion bills - because they actually mainly just want all abortions banned, but know that's unpopular.
It's mostly barrel length, not caliber, that determines lethality, via velocity.
Edit: it's complicated, but velocity is pretty important, and 9mm is a wide, heavy round compared to rifle calibers, and moves fairly slow. But hits are what matter, so rifles have an advantage because you can get two hands on the gun, and they shoot flat beyond 25m or so, which handgun calibers generally don't.
The flip side is that it's a lot easier to have a pistol on you, and hollow points are very destructive at short range.
I think we don't see a lot of deaths from rifle calibers because criminals don't usually carry rifles.
Yeah, especially when states like NY are trying to ban body armor. Defeating body armor is almost totally dependant on high velocity from a longer barrel.
He seemed pretty accurate to me. A question, since I know nothing about hunting rifles, could he have gotten off the same number of shots in the same time with a hunting rifle?
The truth is Trump only survived because the guy was pretty incompetent. Trying to take a headshot at 150+ yards with iron sights is less than ideal even for a good shooter. A couple hundred bucks on an optic would have made it pretty trivial. Of course, you only really have to take the headshot because you picked a 5.56 rifle to begin with that wouldn't be reliably lethal center mass. A WWI army surplus 1903 Springfield aimed center mass had better odds than what this kid tried, let alone any modern bolt-action with a scope. Follow-up shots are an irrelevant concept for an amateur shooter like this, chances he gets a second round on target after missing the first is basically nill.
I agree with Dave Coffin, if he'd bothered to use his grandfather's old bolt-action hunting rifle he probably would've made the shot. No one knowledgeable would use an AR as a sniper rifle, that's not what it's meant to be
....mmm. If he had a proper optic and knew how to shoot, the AR would have been fine out to 300+ yards. There are a lot of good AR marksman platforms. But being a not good shooter with an off the rack gun was the biggest impediment to hitting his shot.
Given the videos we saw of him squirming around on the roof without a gun visible and the additional size / ergonomic awkwardness / added marginal difficulty of hiding of an optic, I think there's a credible argument that using an AR with ironsights *might* have actually been the optimal way to attempt to get more than zero shots off before being countersniped.
Like, yes, obviously having an optic on a 7.62 / 30-06 would be likely to succeed in on the first shot, but only if he were alive long enough to line it up.
Agreed, and she should stay far away from initiating this issue unless it's something like "as a prosecutor, I worked to stop criminals from getting dangerous weapons".
The only think to say a bout guns should be in the context of getting guns out of the hands of criminals, especially to minimize the likelihood of a police officer encounter in an armed suspect and make it unnecessary for civilians to need arms for self protection. Like fossil fuels, work on reducing the demand for guns over the supply.
Even here you have to split hairs carefully. "Keep guns out of the hands of criminals" mostly gets read as "Restrict the lawful sale and carry of firearms" by a large chunk of voters, because that is in fact what the people saying it usually mean.
Explicitly leaning into prosecuting the use of guns in violent crime is a good idea though.
Why are gun owners so pro-gun stores selling guns to criminals? Seem like they aren't very law and order if it means they have to fill out an additional form or wait 5 extra days to get a gun or whatever.
If you buy a gun from a licensed dealer in the US, you absolutely fill out a form that goes to the ATF/FBI, who conducts a criminal/restricted person check. This can happen quickly or not. But it absolutely happens. This is widely accepted as reasonable. If you pass the check, you are able to purchase the firearm. This happens every time you buy a gun.
What is not reasonable or acceptable is having some state or local bureaucrat make a personal decision on whether or not you deserve to have a gun. This is what happens in Illinois and New York, for example. It's basically a Certificate of Need which can be rejected for any reason without justification. This is what gun owners do not accept as reasonable, and a lot of the anger about it is because well connected people get permits/FOID cards, regular citizens don't, AND it doesn't keep criminals from getting guns, videlicet Chicago.
Background checks and licensing and such actually tend to poll fairly well, even among gun owners. The problem is that most of the political fights about them are not about making licensing requirements universal and effective, they're about minimizing the number and types of arms that can be sold.
Seems an AWB will motivate every conservative and AR owner to drag themselves to the polls if even on their deathbed.
At one time, there was talk about making these available with a license, similar but not equivalent to NFA items. Now it is a litmus test for Dems to want to ban them. Which is why many call me a DINO.
sure, they are more lethal, but handguns are still the weapon of choice for most gun crime. Fix the real problems, which are often drugs, alcoholism, poverty, and illiteracy, and shootings will go down. One only has to look at a heat map of any city to know where people are shooting each other.
Agreed. One reason I think Mark Kelly would not be the best choice is that it would automatically raise the gun issue (because of Gabby Giffords). People on the left would love that; I think it's an electoral loser. Just drop it.
Since the assassination attempt against their Orange King, I would have thought at least some Republicans would be more in favor of tighter gun control? Or is that wishful thinking on my part?
Yea, that's an incoherent hope. Restricting the kind of rifle good for long range assassinations is wildly outside the normal parameters of debatable gun control. Trump was lucky kid's dad had an AR-15 lying around. If he owned a cheap bolt-action hunting rifle with a scope instead Trump is probably dead right now.
I would counsel Harris that the last thing she needs to worry about is pissing off libertarians. I mean, you never want to lose a dozen votes, but sometimes you just have to.
>If Republicans are smart (ha), they'll be throwing the "California" charge at her non-stop<
I assume a firehose of that is on its way any day now. They're going to hit her hard on that case involving the death penalty for a convicted cop killer. I hope she's ready (and I'll say: I think her campaign has been remarkably nimble and sure-footed so far, so I expect they will be ready).
Less than a week after Kamala because the de facto candidate Elon went all-in attacking his trans kid and ranting about the woke mind virus and Trump started talking about how we won't need elections anymore if his lovely Christians elect him in 2024.
Almost immediately, front page articles sprouted on the NY Times and Washing Post talking about trans rights, hormone blockers, "dead naming" and interviewing experts on authoritarians, musing about strong men, etc.
In other words: Elon and Trump successfully baited journalists (all of whom seem to be under 30) into writing reactionary, hyperbolic stories retreading the most toxic, losing culture-war issues for Democrats and plastering them on the front page (for clicks!).
I have been biting my nails waiting for Kamala to utter the words "gender-affirming care" or "fascist" and drop 10 points in the polls. But as far as I can tell she hasn't! Instead, she and her surrogates have been talking about how weird Trump and Vance are and how they're getting weirder, mentioning Project 2025 in every sentence and then laughing at what clowns they are.
Chef's kiss!
These are, I think, green shoots, signs that Kamala has surrounded herself with Etch-A-Sketch shakers who want to drive the message that Trump is weird loser who should be laughed at, that MAGA wants to go back to when men clubbed women and dragged them into their caves and that Kamala... probably has a vision for the future... they're still fleshing that last one out.
PS my old-boomer parents, for the first time in their lives, signed up to volunteer for the nascent Harris campaign. And we live in a real-deal swing state. We'll see what appears on the Etch-A-Sketch, but anecdotally, there is real enthusiasm for giving it a good shake and seeing what else is on offer besides tired old—and incredibly weird—Trump rants.
I forget the exact wording, but it was a classic Trump Says Something Ambiguous to Goad The Left phrasing, complete with plausible deniability. The reaction from the media is what I was mostly paying attention to.
“You won’t have to vote anymore” (to Christians). I think the most charitable interpretation is that he is lying, because the only election-free route to policy aims, appointing a right-wing SCOTUS for the foreseeable future, has already been achieved and is unlikely to move at all in the next four years. The least charitable interpretation is obviously that he will act anti-electorally like he has tried to in the past. But then again he’s also lied a lot in the past, so…
I think the most charitable read is “I will have fixed all your problems in four years so you won’t need to care about politics anymore” The most likely interpretation I think is “I’ll be done with politics after winning this election so I don’t care if you vote or not after it”
Right, but that goes back to the first two cases. Anything he can do outside of the Supreme Court can be undone legislatively, unless he’s promising something illegal.
I think that over the course of the last month or two, the realization that Trump really could win again - and that a second term would be different and worse than the first - has really sunk in among establishment liberals. The same types of people who laughed Trump him off during the 2016 general, spent their time dicking around running ads in Texas, and paraded out as many aggressively progressive celebs as they could to celebrate the imminent first woman president with a "haha, eat shit, redneck men!" vibe have learned that they need a different approach this time, and that they need to win in an environment that, aside from many Republicans being below-average candidates, is not favorable for Democrats.
That is a sound take. I also think that the volcanic exuberance around "I guess it's going to be Kamala now" surprised everyone and the realization that Trump really could *lose* is taking hold. At least, that's how I felt when the Harris campaign and its surrogates did not immediately rise to the bate and start wokesplaining how those comments harm communities.
Yep, it seems like the rollout of Harris to the broader Democratic party/supporters is the current focus, and it's going fine. Hopefully they can keep it up as she interacts more and more with the broader electorate.
Yes, it remains unclear how much this realization that a different approach is needed has sunk in in politics. But there is evidence it has started to sink in in commerce, such as in how movies are made and promoted.
That article points to the lack of references to climate change in Twisters as evidence that Hollywood is done pushing progressive values and just wants to entertain. Scroll down a bit and there is an opinion piece entitled "Twisters Was a Spectacle That Missed a Huge Opportunity" because, naturally, it didn't mention the role of climate change.
I cannot imagine the tedium of being a person who cannot enjoy an action movie because it didn't take the opportunity to remind the audience to feel bad about enjoying the movie. Or someone who boycotts Disney because two female cartoon characters kiss in the background of a two-second shot.
My sincere hope is that the Harris campaign learned its lesson about being too online and confusing Twitter for real life and understands that the vast majority of the electorate enjoys enjoying things that are fun because they are fun.
Personally, I always thought This Wizard of Oz missed an opportunity to hit harder about the linkage between fossil fuels and tornados, instead of obliquely yammering on about monetary policy and the danger of following the yellow brick road to a gold-only standard instead of silver too.
See I go the other way, when Dorothy got to the Emerald City she should have seen the Wizard impaled upon a gold cross, and he should have told her that her silver slippers only work at the holy ratio of 16:1.
It's a really great column, but I'm chiming in to violently object to the idea of running on "Project 2025 but it's good." That's terrible branding: people (correctly) understand Project 2025 to be *radical.* Dems should keep that as the scary boogeyman (which it is!), and run on a moderate platform of fighting for affordability while restoring our freedom, decency, and small-d democratic values. (Basically what is said in the latter part of the column)
Honestly, one of the planks in the platform should just be "Stop Project 2025."
I'm surprised Dems aren't running a lot harder on this. It lets them match thermostatic opinion and the status quo, and lets them role out all the weirdest, dumbest stuff from Project 2025, like abolishing the weather service, and just say they are against it.
I'd like to see Matt (or anyone else) explain WTF happened in the 2019-20 Democratic Primary. The positions are so wild and beyond anything Democrats have enacted historically. Republicans have been jumping for joy at an ad recounting Harris' positions from that time.
In my opinion, it was the Black Lives Matter movement. What started as a slogan morphed into an umbrella banner for every far, far left policy option. The combination of the importance of Black voters in the primary along with the zenith of CRT teaching rendered the Party incapable of pushback to any proposal put forth, no matter how wacky.
It's not a coincindence that our host left Vox during this same period. The illiberal tendencies of the far left were in ascendence during that time. The bright spot, though, is that Vox's loss is our gain.
I have seen far more analysis of how Obama broke right-wing brains than introspection about how Trump broke left-wing brains. But whether there is a causal relationships or not, it is true that people dressed up in tricorne hats adorned with teabags when Obama was president and pink pussy-hats when Trump was president. And neither choice of headgear preceded a period of sane, sober-minded political and social movements.
This is the line of argument I try to use against my Trump-supporting friends: "Trump, whether you think it is fair or not, is the most polarizing politician of our lifetimes. All the things you fear the most -- protests that include violence, rising crime, confiscatory taxation, radical proposals -- are made more likely by his presence on the ticket. So vote for somebody else."
Given that Haley only got 14% in the Florida Primary (DeSantis had already dropped out by then), I don't think I had much success.
I have friends and family who have sadly contracted the anti-woke mind virus and credulously argue that all of those things are already happening, but much worse, in Joe Biden's America.
I will never forget that in 2020, one of the official stated positions of BLM was deconstructing the nuclear family. They wiped it from their website pretty quickly after George Floyd's murder, but they were still a fundamentally Marxist organization. Maybe it was an early example of the "everything bagel" approach, but I'm not sure we can find a single good result from what that group of charlatans did, and certainly not enough to balance out all the bad ones.
What even is an "Official stated position of BLM"? I'm aware that there is (was?) a small grifter organization that called themselves that and claimed to speak for the broader movement, but I'm not aware of any of its personalities or big waves it made in media or activism. If they speak for BLM activism, then I'm the Space Pope.
I think that's the root of much of the "everything bagel" stuff. There wasn't anyone for people to look to, no centralizing force keeping people on message. This isn't unique to US politics. Look at the Yellow Vests in France or the incoherent demands of Brexit supporters. I think that social media has lowered the floor for protests and activism, but it's removed any guardrails for message discipline. Stuff quickly goes off the rails.
The website blacklivesmatter.com was started by the originators of the hashtag and subsequent movement. They still raise millions of dollars every year.
If you want to claim that the movement exists independent of them, fine, it's just three words and hard to "own" in any real sense. But this is about as official as it ever could have been.
Yes. That said, there are good arguments that the fetishizing of the atomized nuclear family since WW2 has been public policy mistake -- not the best option for children, for parents, or society as a whole.
Hillary got, for want to a better term, pilloried for merely pointing out that "it takes a village" to raise children well without putting undue burden solely on individual nuclear parents or leaving behind children unlucky enough to have parents unable to meet that burden. So I would not advise any presidential candidate to go there, but it is a valid topic. Just not for a lowest-common-denominator national presidential campaign.
I disagree on the merits (families are really the ONLY people who have the bandwidth and love for children) but I will also just say the politics of left wing attacks on the family are so bad that even Hillary's anodyne language about villages was toxic.
The party that sticks with suburban parents wins elections.
Families aren’t historically nuclear. The insistence on the nuclear family as the housing arrangement has been central to much of the housing crisis of the past several decades.
That wasn't a policy. People DON'T LIKE living with their parents if they can help it. As society got richer people wanted their own place and got it.
Yes, historically people lived in abject poverty and as a result of that were forced to live with lots of extended relatives (BTW, contributing to a great deal more child sexual abuse, which nobody did anything about). The nuclear family is superior.
It's a rhetorical (and substantive) minefield, to be sure. But, when you dig a little deeper, past the surface-level partisan scratching and clawing on this issue, what you find is actually bipartisan agreement that part of the burden of having and rearing children *should* be socialized. Hence JD Vance, for example, talking about tax expenditure subsidies for childrearing.
Hillary was pilloried for stretching a trite proverb far past its breaking point in a transparently cynical attempt to justify a panoply of liberal federal programs.
Once you've crossed over the main hurdle of agreeing, as both parties have, that we've created a society where childrearing imposes such costs and burdens on individual nuclear parents that it's not reasonable to expect them to bear it without state assistance, i.e., that childrearing is a collective public and not purely private responsibility, then, it seems to me, you're just quibbling over the optimal form, manner, and degree of public assistance.
You say Hillary's view was "transparently cynical"; I say it was transparently earnest, but expressed in the only manner and language that Democrats of her vintage know and can imagine, that of top-down "liberal federal programs" as opposed to, for example, more locally controlled, bottom-up forms of delivering the assistance.
“…as both parties have, that we've created a society where childrearing imposes such costs and burdens on individual nuclear parents that it's not reasonable to expect them to bear it without state assistance…”
I do not think that there is agreement on that other than on education.
It was Black voters in the primary that got us Joe Biden—who was more popular with black voters, and yet not so much with the more extreme CRT types. It was mostly affluent white progressives that were big on the “defund the police” nonsense.
Also, probably it was a perfect intersection of when staffers on these campaigns were of the age that these ideas were really popular with their group AND were old enough to be more senior staffers that had the ear of their candidates.
I prefer an unfiltered Matt here -- even one we choose to pay for -- versus the one who had to live in the culture of Vox writers looking for safe spaces and running to HR to complain about an anodyne statement supporting free speech.
I don't entirely buy that...there was a real race to see who could be crazier in crowded lefty lane much earlier on. I thought this was just the weird logic of partisan primaries: if you're running to get votes from the most mobilized party base voters, and you're competing against other people for them, there's a race to to the fringe.
The lefty lane turned out to be a dead end, but that that wasn't totally obvious to everyone way before Biden took the nomination was, I think, a sign of real divisions within the democratic coalition.
I don't think many people appreciate just how lucky we got that Biden was the nominee or how smart and important the combination of Clyburn endorsement plus rapid moderate lane consolidation was for winning.
This doesn’t sound like someone who has followed the past several decades of moderates trying to consolidate third party support or moderates trying all their balanced budget commissions.
It takes up a huge amount of newspaper space (e.g., a significant fraction of David Brooks and occasional Thomas Friedman columns), and the attention of members of Congress (in the case of all those balanced budget commissions of the past twenty years).
I would say it wasn’t luck—it looked crazy before the Clyburn endorsement, but that turned out to be the signal that let everyone coalesce around a single moderate candidate (who was considered by many to be too old, but then, so was his main competitor on the left). I don’t think most people were that enthusiastic about Biden himself, but saw that emphasizing continuity with Obama and heading off a convention fight were more important than “falling in love” with the nominee.
It was the absolute peak of party group power. So you had very very left position taking and deep policy discussions about policies that never would have been enacted.
American voters’ policy preferences genuinely shifted leftward after 2016— because of thermostatic reaction to Trump and because Millennials (whose most important formative political experience was the 2008 recession and its aftermath) started entering the electorate in large numbers.
The effect was even more significant for the Democratic primary electorate— and another order of magnitude more so for left of center and highly politically engaged people. For anyone who wasn’t a well-regarded former vice President to a popular president, going left was the most plausible route to getting media attention, donations, volunteers, and staff. (And even Biden both ran and governed further left than most would have expected)
(I’d add that this is part of the reason why Democratic politicians are much more cautious about hippie-punching than a lot of commenters here would like them to be— and aren’t necessarily being irrational in that caution.)
Well in 2016, Bernie Sanders mobilized a disinformation campaign and pushed for a "contested convention." He and his staffers ran a campaign against Democrats with nominal left messaging (when it was mostly misogyny.)
Sanders reran the playbook in 2020, and Democrats tried to appease the insurgent. It's quite funny seeing how so many of Sanders' campaign staffers have become Anti-Anti-Trump. Anti-Anti-Putin. You know, pro-Trump and pro-Putin.
I’ll never forget the conversation I had with a Bernie Bro friend in 2016. He said he would vote for Trump over Hillary because he would rather “blow it all up” than let Hillary be president. He also added that, “it doesn’t matter because “they” have fixed it for Hillary anyway so Trump won’t win.”
Most of the time it was unsubstantiated conjectures or some sort of "duplicitous evil corporate woman" trope with those people. It was never anything substantive.
You're right, politics should only ever move right, never left. And Democrats will certainly achieve victory by trying to be the right-wing American political party. That will surely succeed.
As annoying as Freddie can in SB comment sections, this piece was excellent, and along with his writing an mental health, one of the reasons I continue to appreciate his substack.
I think the thing is he's incapable of argument or discussion. There was a moment where he was like, "You think I'm afraid of argument? I'm great at argument, I was raised in the Shaolin temple," etc., but it's funny because it's completely untrue. He can't steelman a position, he can't respond to evidence, he resorts to namecalling immediately. So long as he's just shooting off his own salvos, and the targets are deserving, he's okay, but he has no ability to engage once the initial ammo is gone.
It’s what happened to all of American society. Dem primaries and were just a symptom. It’s a question for sociologists and anthropologists honestly. My hunch is something a long the lines of mass hysteria.
Emphasizing the role of Congress in determining the details does other good things, in addition to avoiding needless debates and unwise commitments.
It also lets her celebrate Biden’s own accomplishments and the bipartisan nature of his legislative record.
“Joe was able to reach across the aisle to bring both parties together in crafting the legislation that has brought us jobs and growth. I will continue to work with Republicans in Congress to enact bipartisan legislation that works for the American people.”
Normies, tote-baggers, and op-ed writers eat up that bipartisan stuff.
Harris would also be smart to run on divided government.
“After this election, the Senate will probably be controlled by Republicans; the House may be too. As a Democrat in the White House, I will work with a Republican Congress to find sensible compromises that all Americans can agree on. But if Donald Trump wins and Republicans control all three branches, they will do extreme, radical things that will shock normal Americans.”
Like bipartisanship, divided government is a fetish of low-information voters and the columnists who write for them. The belief that divided government is better is a stupid belief, but Harris would not be stupid to appeal to it, esp given that the premise is very likely to be true.
I don't think the preference for bipartisanship and divided government is as irrational as you portray it to be. Instead it's mostly compositional effects.
For divided government some fraction of voters really do prefer that the government not do a whole lot. This fraction plus the fraction who wants a rightwing trifecta is probably a majority of voters when a leftwing trifecta is in power. The converse is true when a rightwing trifecta is in power.
For bipartisanship the notion that an idea agreed upon by both parties is probably better than one that can't garner a majority is a decent heuristic. The problem of course is that politicians will refuse to work together for entirely political reasons even when they actually agree on policy. Those actions are driven by primary voters who are mostly just different people from the ones who want bipartisanship.
Cf. Thomas above -- voters are resistant to change. Make the other side look like the revolutionaries, make yourself look like the stable, even-keeled side.
Which part is wrong? Is it that Republican members of Congress can pass more legislation when there's a Republican president, or that there are some deeply strange people in the Republican caucus?
Maybe this is just a recipe for electoral success and hence it's ok to advocate for bad stuff, but what exactly is "price gouging" other than demagoguery?
Price gouging is when companies price their products too high. Predatory pricing is when they price too low. Collusion is when they price equal to a competitor.
Well, as one example: price gouging is when a health insurance company steers patients to its wholly-owned pharmacy subsidiary, where it then charges them a higher out-of-pocket copay/coinsurance for a prescription, than they would have to pay if they bypassed insurance entirely and just paid cash for the prescription at an independent pharmacy. And that's before you get to whether the insurance company also charges an additional amount to the patient's self-insured employee health plan, i.e., to the company the patient works for.
Why are health insurance companies able to do this? What does it say about the state of competition in the health insurance market that they can get away with this without losing business to competitors that don't rip off their customers like this? How has the health insurance market been so badly misregulated that we see practices like this going on for years, and nothing happens?
Price gouging is when a seller charges a very high price for a good that is in very short supply, and the demand for that good is very high (or perhaps, entirely inelastic). In those cases customers do not have alternative methods like the one you describe to get the goods cheaper, because the supply doesn't exist.
Somebody charging a very high price for a good in and of itself isn't price gouging, if customers can just choose not to pay it, or to buy it from other sources.
What Allan Thoen is describing sounds to me like some sort of, for lack of a better term, market misconduct. The insurance company uses market power (in this case, vertical integration) to extract more money from its customers, through higher copays, higher premiums to patient and employer, etc. It would be a better example if the patient did not have recourse to an independent pharmacy, and was just forced to pay inflated prices -- which definitely sounds like the kind of thing antitrust regulation is meant to counter.
Yes, it's definitely sketchy. It's just not "price gouging". And I think using the correct terms is important, otherwise one ends up with "solutions" that address the wrong problems, or make things worse.
I would add that the higher price has to not have been the incentive for the supply in the first place. If you go out of your way to supply something in limited supply and high demand, it's better that you supply it for the high price than you don't supply it at all
Agree, I wasn't making a moral statement. I actually think price gouging is one of those "good, actually" things.
Like if an evil villain sets off a device in Gotham City that destroys all the water, I actually WANT a bunch of people to be highly motivated to go to their local Costcos, fill their trucks to the brim with bottled water, and drive them to Gotham.
I don't consider this an example of what I think most people consider price gouging, which is just setting prices high. Witness Elizabeth Warren's complaints about supermarket pricing.
The part of the situation you describe that involves steering is what I find objectionable. Otherwise, if a company (including a pharmacy) wants to charge more than its competitors, let'em go ahead and try.
I have lots of thoughts, at different levels of generality. At a fairly high level of generality: the pace of government is slow, and the pace of business is fast. When government tries to use a micromanaging approach to regulate a market as massive as that for healthcare goods and services, of which the market for health insurance is just one part (how those goods and services get paid for), the almost inevitable result will be that individual companies run circles around the slow, myopic regulators and quickly figure out that their best efforts are directed at finding profitable crevices and corners in the regulatory gaps. And the overall result is a hidebound, uncompetitive market. At least at the federal level, a different regulatory mindset, less focused micromanaging details -- because that's what hinders pro-competitive changes -- and more focused on ensuring outcomes, is what's needed.
Reading over these comments I see higher levels of “to win the election, she should tell people I’m right about my personal bugbear” than I ever thought possible.
The GOP "platform" this year was enraging to read due to its Ridiculously Unnecessary Capitalizations and its third grade reading level, not to mention the blatant lies and fabrications. (Cue the "that's not how any of this works!" lady.) But to its credit, it was short, easy to read, and actually addressed things that their base and swing voters seem to care about. I agree with Matt and think this "Keep It Simple for the Stupids" approach is worth mimicking, a bit. I don't necessarily agree with Matt's 7 or their order but, like the first time he did it a while back, I think the exercise is worthwhile. I hope Kamala puts inflation higher on the list and keeps guns off of it.
For as much as platforms matter, it's about sending signals to surrogates about what they should say and journalists about what the priorities are. So to that extent, less policy detail is good!
Inflation needs to be addressed, but I'm struggling to see a politically viable message other than attacking Trump's batshit 10% tariffs that he's so proud of.
The median voter doesn't understand how or why inflation works, so it's lunacy to talk about it. Just say "We're going to go after price-gouging, we're going to go after predatory lending, we're going to fight for consumer rights" and let people read into that whatever they want as the Fed does the real work off-camera.
Plus, I'd imagine as a two term Cali AG she probably had a case or two involving state level anti-trust laws or unfair business practice prosecutions? "As Attorney General in our largest state, I hit back hard to protect consumers when blah blah blah..."
"Trump's trillion dollar tax cuts for his rich friends will blow up the deficit and send prices soaring. Economists agree this would be a disaster just as we're getting inflation under control."
(This approach avoids denial of the recent inflation problems—which isn't tenable—but also puts out there in a not overly braggy way the factual information that our nasty inflation shock is in fact over).
Include lots of graphics showing headlines warning about the red ink that will flow from Trump's tax cuts for the rich. Maybe include a headshot of Musk or some other rich Republicans.
That's a good place to start. One thing I was mulling over, what if you did some kind of tax break on any WIC-qualifying items? Problem is that's a state tax, not a federal one, but maybe you could come up with something simple (that wouldn't involve federal tax deductions). Maybe you call on states to do it. Or I think there's a potential approach along the lines of "corporate fat cats are getting rich off of higher prices and Donald Trump wants them to pay even lower taxes- I want to raise their taxes and get that money back in your pocket where it belongs" blah blah...
Hey everyone. I’m just here to say that this is exactly what I told my brother that Harris should do. Unless she puts out new, this is my policies… She’s always gonna be tied to her past ramblings.
I think people are misconstruing the Ezra comment. I don't think it was a shot at Ezra; it was a shot at people who think individual liberal columnists control the Democratic Party. I could be wrong but I think that makes a lot more sense.
This is good advice. Harris has had a great launch and consolidated the base. But my fear is they get addicted to the fan service positive feedback, and keep feeding it with Lefty applause lines.
But, having the party united behind her means the vast majority of the party will nod along with any ambiguities or minor heresies as smart politics in service of beating the orange conman.
Changing positions doesn't hurt.....because Trump and Vance have done it?
That's a very low bar. In fact, we are not voting for Harris because of positions she took during her disastrous 2020 campaign.
We have voted Democratic for 50 straight years.
My wife was in the first group of police officers in Seattle in 1975. Spent her entire career in various aspects of law enforcement doing things for minorities, that you wouldn't believe.
We listened to two videos yesterday of Kamala Harris defending DeFund the Police. Moving resources from policing to social workers. In both videos she stated that hiring more police officers does not reduce crime.
I was a scientist. I have read the research. Combining my wife's and my knowledge, we can say that Harris is so totally wrong as to be unbelievable.
Not only does more policing reduce crime, but it benefits low income and minority areas the most.
She is anti-police, although she has yet to issue the words "DeFund the Police" currently. It's been found to be a loser, so she changed her tune. But not because she was "wrong" or will admit she was "wrong."
Her answer to policing? Make everybody middle class because there isn't crime in middle class areas. Listen to the videos. I'm serious.
So, we are not voting for her. She wants to condemn people who used to depend upon Democrats for their safety to more crime, she makes up facts like Trump does, and she is part of a movement that trashes my wife's life work.
So, for us, everything everyone has said is still with us, powerfully. They can change, but only if they fully admit why they changed and what they learned.
p.s. One thing my wife did: She noticed they only arrested girls for prostitution charges. So she sought, and got, permission to set up stings. So she dressed up looking like the girls and walked the streets. Started arresting the men. If you can see my wife today, 50 years later, you'd know it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Go do that, Harris. My wife protected people. You won't.
“She is anti-police, although she has yet to issue the words "DeFund the Police" currently”
Only you can decide what would persuade you to vote for her, but I wonder what makes you so sure that her 2020 position is her “authentic” position on the police. Surely her many years working in prosecutors’ offices, culminating in being District Attorney and then Attorney General, are more suggestive of her true stance?
You should see the videos. She tried to talk to please everybody, not being courageous enough to challenge Defunding the Police. And she made up facts, as we said. That's makes "working in prosecutors' offices" even worse--after all of that time she spits in the face of virtually all literature on policing and on all police officers' experiences on policing. I mean, how does that even compute?
Look at the story in today's NYT about policing and traffic stops. It's awful. People are being killed in record numbers by cars, and policing of the streets in that way has fallen drastically. I.e., less policing = more crime. And it has dropped for the reason we said: too many Progressives are looking to prove that police are racist.
And she refuses to correct her appalling beliefs. Well, minorities and low income individuals are the victims of those traffic issues in numbers far greater than their proportion in the community. Once again, stances like hers have ended up with people getting killed--the very people we, as Democrats, used to protect.
Also, being elected to those offices in a state like California, and never once having to risk her own life, and making up facts, is not persuasive at all to us.
As Vice President, what she do about it? About what she did with the border. Nothing.
Your first paragraph seems to reiterate what I said rather than refute it: *she was trying to please everybody,* because she wanted to win a primary. That doesn't speak to her truly opposing the police. But I won't try to talk you out of your voting intentions.
Thank you for a nice conversation that doesn't immediately degenerate into name calling. Nice to talk with an adult.
One thing about voting for President that is not talked about, but that affects virtually everyone strongly, is that people vote not just for the candidate but rather because they identify with the candidates' fellow citizens. It is a lot of the reason people will vote for Trump even though they know all about him....but they know a lot of Republicans, have all of their lives, and so vote with their "tribe."
We don't identify, any longer, with Harris' "community." They are, in very powerful voices, anti-police. Every police officer is a racist. We don't agree with a lot of Progressive positions. We don't want to be in their "tribe." Almost all of whom get their "knowledge" (as Harris was doing) about policing from anecdotes, not from data or from experience.
Here is what I mean by that. My wife and I did a back of the envelope calculation a few months ago:
According to her, on a typical day, a police officer will have 20 "stops"/contacts with the public per day. (not counting in corrections, etc.) Multiply that by the number of officers there are in this country (well over 700,000), and you get 14 million stops/encounters each day. Multiply that by 365 and you get 5 billion+ stops per year. What this means is that these powerful and ugly (true) anecdotes of bad interactions between some police and the public are actually extremely rare. And that leads to a different framing of the problem (and different solutions) than the popular one that police need "reforming." Or that Harris should advocate Defunding. For someone in the field, not realizing the big picture of policing is absolutely unforgivable.
Continuing on with the idea that we vote for our tribe, not really for a candidate, you have probably read comments in publications what Progressives think of conservatives as people. It's beyond ugly when they are so much more like them than different. We don't want to be a part of a tribe that thinks Trump voters are abominable people. We have family and friends who are Trump voters. How many Progressives have taken even a few minutes to chat with one?
I don't see her position in this. I don't see her refuting Defunding. All I see is the very telling idea that "well Trump did it too!" Which basically is a way of deflecting from having to take a position and says that we have nothing to say except "we're like Trump, but he's worse."
Thanks for sending me this. Confirms what I have been saying.
https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/kamala-supported-defund-the-police I will vote for Harris, but this is a point of view that needs to be considered. Public Safety is a huge issue in our cities and Kamala was totally hypocritical during the summer of 2020. I'm pretty sure my son, who is also SPD, will not vote for her.
I agree with the idea that detailing super-specific policy agendas isn’t great politics, but I might take it one step further. I think “cheap talk” about policy in general might not be super effective at swinging votes. (Nor are baseball-announcer-style statistics like “there was a larger fall in entry by asylum seekers under Biden than under Trump, as long as you ignore the huge previous rise under Biden.”) I don’t think anyone believes that if Dems actually get power, they’ll pass simple and focused economic policies rather than huge bills where they endlessly brag about the enormous amounts of money spent (on what?).
The Dems’ problem is deeper. They need to *credibly* signal that their values are aligned with those of most Americans. I could definitely see how some Americans would think Democrats care *more* about the welfare of asylum seekers than that of citizens in red states. I could also see Americans thinking that Dems care more about throwing tons of money at climate than they care about inflation, which is conveniently blamed on factors outside of Biden’s control (see the hilariously named “Inflation Reduction Act”).
To credibly signal something, you need to pay a cost. So it’s imperative that Kamala piss off the left flank when she’s trying to signal that she actually cares about the issues that are important to Americans. Sure, maybe this is “vibes” rather than “policy.” But I think Americans would understand this as a credible signal because it’s likely that Kamala actually cares what the Groups think of her.
I think this is about right. She's done an admirable job rapidly consolidating the party. My gut says that to win she will need to eventually do or say something that doesn't seem calculated to appeal to a left leaning focus group. The concern is that she's never done that before but it's the path to a permission structure for the people she needs to vote for her to do so.
She did it all the time in San Francisco. She knows how to do it.
Good to hear. Ty
I mean ... she did write this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_on_Crime
Which leans right if anything.
I keep saying this: even in California (or Massachusetts or New York or Maryland) gaining a reputation for being soft on crime isn't exactly a dependable path to political success.
“Dems care more about throwing tons of money at climate than they care about inflation”.
A reminder that inflation has come down tremendously. I’m aware that this might not be what median voters think but it’s objectively true.
But to maybe buttress your point a bit. This is part of why I think an actual Fed rate cut of even just 25 bps is so important. If regular Americans can see that borrowing money for stuff like new cars got even a smidgen cheaper it really helps the cause to show we’ve “defeated” inflation.
The rate of inflation has come down, the inflated prices have not. YOU and I and all the smart people here at Slow Boring know that they never will, but some pandering on this one may be in order.
I think that's what the anti-price gouging/energy abundance agenda would tackle.
Also—and I don't know how this tests—but I'd hope it's not impossible to tie Trump's tax cut plans to the risk of inflation. Something like "Trump's give aways to billionaires will send prices soaring."
"Trump's giveaways to billionaires will send prices soaring"?
It should be emphasized that so, too, would his indiscriminate tariffs!
I'm not opposed to trying this out, either, but I sense a lot of persuadable voters—especially in places like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—**support** raising tariffs.
I mean that's a little much. Of course prices can come down. Used car prices drove *a lot* of the aggregate inflation measurement in 2020-2021 and the price levels have fallen 30% since the Dec. 2021 peak. Just one example, but anything that was driven up by a supply constraint has and will come down. In the case of used cars -- it was a "demand-induced supply constraint" so yeah, tied 100% to the stimulus but still a supply constraint.
EDIT: New car prices have fallen too but the Fed measures those differently so they didn't have as much impact on the inflation measurement and those are more tied interest rates.
Ok fair, some prices can come down. I am specifically thinking of a woman I know who complained about $7 yogurt at the grocery store and said "hopefully we change that in November!". People are dumb.
Yogurt prices are coming down too!! We love Siggis and I remember it getting up to like $2.25 but it's now pretty regularly around this $1.50 level.
https://www.jewelosco.com/shop/product-details.960062909.html
Maybe I am too pessimistic, maybe you are right. I do remember seeing Target announcing they were lowering a lot of prices too. Still doesn't seem like anything that voters are willing to be upbeat about though, not sure how to resolve that!
We need a 10% tariff on Greek yogurt! Good American yogurt producers are being pummeled by foreign yogurt flooding the domestic market!
Yes, I was thinking this too. Some prices were elevated above the inflation rate and have fallen back. There was a period where I couldn’t buy a loaf of bread for less than $5. Recently I’ve been paying more like $3. Similar with chips. I was going to buy some and nothing less than $5 for a bag. I didn’t buy them. Bad vibes. But now I can get a cheap bag for like $3 again. Good vibes.
Agree. Which is why the rate cut could actually be quite important to normie voters if it happens. I'm a bad advocate for this position because I work in real estate finance; interest rates are a huge part of my everyday work life.
But buying a house and buying a care are probably the number 1 and number 2 biggest purchases in people's lives. Having the cost of borrowing drop even in a little would be a big thing that I think even normies would notice. Even though most people aren't buying houses or cars on a regular basis, most people likely know someone who is interested or exploring buying a house or buying car.
You mean, say that prices will come down? Doesn’t that lead to a “read my lips, no new taxes” attack in 2028?
No, I wouldn't lie, but I wouldn't pull my hair out about coming up with a policy that would actually make prices go down. I just wouldn't claim "inflation is down!" when (dumb) voters are gonna say "Are you kidding me, I just spent $300 at the grocery store!". Maybe like "We're going to keep fighting inflation and _____"- raise taxes on windfall profits for corporations, stop Trump from putting tariffs in place, suspend the gas tax, I dunno, something! Just don't try to split hairs and teach voters that "Acktually, (push up glasses) inflation is down already!"
The message on the economy should be: "Getting through the pandemic and the disastrous Trump policies was difficult and Americans took some hits during that interlude, but thanks to efforts by the Biden-Harris administration, we've made a lot of progress and things are finally on the upswing. But as Democrats we know deep in our hearts that people are still feeling that shock and we need to work hard to make more progress. We've come this far -- let's keep going and not go back. Elect me and I promise you that we'll finish the job."
Yeah, don't take the bait and argue about inflation. Just pivot to how strong the economy is overall talk about what future looks like.
You're absolutely right, which is why Jerome Powell is an American hero.
Jerome Powell is absolutely not a hero. Most of the inflation surge was caused by monetary policy errors and easily foreseeable at the time. Biden should have replaced Powell in 2022 with someone committed to bringing inflation down more rapidly.
I'm curious what steps you think that Powell should have done that he didn't?
Because I'm pretty sure that if Powell had jacked up interest rates much faster, then the economy wouldn't have been able to handle it and hit a recession.
Having the correct policy goals and communicating clearly make individual interest rate decisions less consequential. In 2020 the Fed put in place its FAIT policy (Flexible Average Inflation Targeting), which was a pretty good policy. The problem was that in the midst of the inflation surge Powell et al decided that their implementation of the FAIT policy was not symmetric, i.e. the Fed would make up for inflation undershoots but not overshoots, which entailed a loss of credibility as to how committed the Fed was to keep inflation on target. This was the big mistake. If they had insisted on keeping the target symmetric then even ignoring the early warning signs that the inflation surge was not transitory wouldn't have been that costly.
A recession is always a possibility when a central bank gets itself into the position of needing to fight inflation. But consider that a brief recession might have been much better politically for Biden than what ended up occurring. And to weigh in on the tactic of interest rates, the inflation surge began in the summer of 2021 and the Fed did not being to raise interest rates above zero until the spring of 2022, so this was a tactical error.
I think this is wrong on a couple of fronts:
1) There is good evidence that the fed raising rates in 2015 early after a small increase inflation caused the economy to slow unnecessarily.
2) In this current cycle, a significant amount of inflation was caused by supply shocks and fiscal excess. The fed had little control over either and the former has resolved itself out fairly well. Jacking up interest rates sharply due to supply shocks is a brutal way to address inflation since it can't address the problem directly, it can ONLY address the inflationary aspect by decreasing the money supply available to people indiscriminately.
3) Biden is struggling with a good economy and inflation. There was no way to avoid some inflation, so having a bad economy on top would have been devastating politically.
You are the hero we need!
We can repeat this till we’re blue in the face, but prices remain high and people are pissed. That’s what they mean when they complain about inflation. Doesn’t matter if it’s not technically inflation - this response just makes us sound like pedantic gaslighters.
“They need to *credibly* signal that their values are aligned with those of most Americans.”
This doesn’t sound like an assessment of the party that has had more people vote for it in 5 of the last 6 elections.
Democrats’ values are more aligned with the average American’s than Republicans on almost all major issues (immigration being the one notable exception).
And they’ve only ever been a coin toss in the election. When the stakes are this high, it would be a good idea to be more than just “slightly closer to the median than Crimes Georg”
And Republicans have won the House of Representatives in 8 of the 12 elections in that same timespan.
To nitpick this a bit, Democrats won a plurality of votes in 2012 but Republicans won more seats--that was the aftermath of the heavy gerrymandering the GOP did in many states after the 2010 Census.
My point still stands that Democrats can't win the House. And its odd that no Democrat seems to care about this. Republicans at least care about winning the presidency even though they can't. I don't that a party is aligned with the vibes of most Americans if they can't win the most democratic branch of government. Sure, since 1992, Democrats have gone on a streak of winning the presidency, controlling it for 20 of 32 years. But in that same timespan they have concurrently controlled the House for 6 total years. Americans don't want to be led by weirdo Republicans, but they also don't want radical progressive policies.
Where they're leaving points on the board is not retaliating with gerrymandering of their own after SCOTUS issued Rucho v. Common Cause. I'm all for ending gerrymandering but if it doesn't happen on the federal level, then on the state level they have to return fire, as much as I hate it.
I'm not a huge fan of gerrymandering, but outside of 2012, the house majority has reflected accurately the winner of the majority of voters in House races - and 2012 had about a 1% vote difference nationally.
If we forbade gerrymandering and then Republicans lost the House several times despite winning a majority of the vote perhaps we could finally get them on board with moving to multi member districts. On the other hand, I suspect that Democrats might find that its not such a great way of representing the will of the people after all...
I would not say that "20 of 32 years" is a streak, and it's all about what year you use as a cutoff. Republicans have controlled the presidency for 4 of the last 8 years, 12 of the last 24, and 24 of the last 44.
I us 1994 a major electoral inflection point because that was the year of the last party coalition realignment. Democrats had a Congressional supermajority from 1932-1994, and then Republicans won it back.
The first real computerized and statistically optimized gerrymandering effort too.
If we look at who won a majority of the national two-party vote, it's Republicans 7, Democrats 5 in the last 12 elections.* If the Democrats win this year, it's 7 and 6 (Democrats have a slight edge in polls and models). In other words, just like for the Senate and the White House, we're very polarized, votes are very close, and the two sides have basically split and rotated power for many years now.
* Yup, 2012 was the anomaly, the only time for decades where the winner of the national two-party vote lost the House.
"This doesn’t sound like an assessment of the party that has had more people vote for it in 5 of the last 6 elections."
Democrats' political weaknesses tend to be in "culture" or "values" related, but they usually make up for it in strengths that usually described as "pocketbook" issues, like taxes on the rich or supporting Medicare.
Fairness on pocketbook issues is a value.
But that's not really what the OP was talking about. They are talking about signaling "we're like you, we believe in the same things you are". As opposed to "we're competent managers of the government" or many other things where everybody basically wants the same thing (peace and security) but there are disagreements on how to achieve it (more military spending, aid to Israel / Ukraine / etc)
But saying “we think rich people should pay their fair share” is a perfectly good way to signal “we believe in the same things as you.”
I don't see immigration as being an exception at all. Of course Democrats abhor the racist and paranoid language that Trump uses when he talks about immigration, but when it comes to actual policy and legislation we just need to point out that yes, Trump killed the bipartisan bill because he cares more about being President than actually addressing immigration in a sensible and effective manner (which doesn't include silly walls and floating barriers.)
7 of the last 8 presidential elections. 2004 is the only time a Republican won the popular vote since 1988.
It always feels weird to me to count 1992. Clinton might well have won outright in a 2 way race, but I really feel like we should just throw out the data point as an outlier.
Haha you’re totally right, I don’t know why my brain stopped at Bush vs Gore
It's dumb that her identity is an issue, but since MAGA is absolutely going to make it an issue, she could also potentially use a bit of political jujitsu and wield intersectionality as both a sword and a shield while punching a few hippies.
To the left: are you seriously going to torpedo the candidacy of a black/asian women and the child of immigrants unless you extract an election-losing promise to enact a far-left progressive wish-list of ideas that will never pass congress?
To the rest of the non-MAGA electorate: see, being a black/asian women and the child of immigrants does not mean blind adherence to a far-left progressive wish-list of ideas that will never pass congress!
"are you seriously going to torpedo the candidacy of a black/asian women and the child of immigrants unless you extract an election-losing promise to enact a far-left progressive wish-list of ideas that will never pass congress?"
I mean, the answer to that from the far-left is just "yes".
She should be on the lookout for a Sista Solja moment.
I think she was smart to harshly disavow it, while also not drawing a ton of attention to it. It’s not an issue that is going to move swing voters anyway. Immigration and crime and like deficit reduction have more bang for buck.
I thought maybe “it’s bad to tear down the flag in front of Union Station and burn it.” Also probably don’t scribble “Hamas is coming.”
She’s constitutionally incapable of doing that though. The Dems fundamentally think these people’s hearts are in the right place, and that’s a problem for them.
“ The Dems fundamentally think these people’s hearts are in the right place….”
Some Dems, and some loud ones. But most Dems emphatically do not think that Hamas has its heart in the right place.
I agree with you — what I meant is that most Dems think anti-Israel protestors’ hearts are in the right place, and the Hamas supporters are just a little too over-zealous for understandable reasons. But they’re all willing to at least pay lip service to the idea that Hamas is bad.
More importantly, though, Dems *aren’t* willing to loudly declare that the flag-burning contingent fucking sucks. Which should be easy for any American leader to do, frankly.
“ Dems *aren’t* willing to loudly declare that the flag-burning contingent fucking sucks. Which should be easy for any American leader to do, frankly.”
I agree that the flag-burners should be kicked in the nuts, metaphorically speaking, by all Dem office-holders.
But I still think it’s a mistake to talk about “the Dems”‘when you just mean a small percentage of Democrats.
They're not Democrats. They're radicals who have no agenda beyond yelling at Democrats.
The DSA excommunicated AOC for being insufficiently anti-Zionist. Now they're threatening to get Big Mad if Shapiro is her pick for VP
Haven’t a majority of Dems been reluctant to kick these guys in the nuts, though?
I guess I don’t really know what Dem politicians think of these protesters, but if you read left-of-center columnists as an indicator, I think you see a certain sense of admiration for these kids who just go a little too far.
Is it a mistake that cross pressured voters in swing states could easily make?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-american-flag-burning-union-station-dc-hamas-israel/
But erm...she did do that?
What do you mean she's constitutionally incapable of doing that? That's *exactly* what she did!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-american-flag-burning-union-station-dc-hamas-israel/
Yes, but it was a written statement that *I think* was calculated not to draw a ton of attention. (She delivered lengthier televised remarks about Bibi later.) She also really framed it as some bad apples when the reality has been that the Hamas fans have been seriously involved in organizing these protests.
But that's not what you implied in your original post. You implied she didn't say anything when point of fact she did.
Can you be more specific about what you want her to do? It kinda seems like she did exactly what you asked for and then you said she didn't so now I'm confused. Is it a more general rejection of pro-Palestine / anti-Israel / anti-Netanyahu people?
Definitely for me. So she definitely has my solid blue state vote because ... yeah, Trump. But if she wants my campaign donation $$$ then I need to hear a vocal and forceful anti-Palestine protesters (e.g., these protesters are supporting terrorism) and a much tough stance on shoplifting which continues to hollow out urban cores.
I felt like what we got was how Trump treated Charlottesville: “very fine people on both sides, except the white supremacists who I condemn completely.” That was a terrible way to respond!
I would’ve liked her to respond the way the left responded to Charlottesville. (Ok fine, maybe less forcefully, but these guys were still scrapping with cops and committing other prosecutable offenses.)
It's going to be 2055, and you guys as you're retired will be desperate for a Sister Soulja movement to give you the same hippie punching thrill in your leg Bill Clinton did when he made sure to be on-site for the execution of a mentally disabled man.
This is the core problem with Kamala. She already shook the etch-a-sketch so many times she's completely incapable of developing credibility. Sometimes position taking is just signaling about the current moment, that's when the flip flop can be useful, but with Kamala her entire career is an exercise in avoiding ever committing to anything. She's already way to far into "I have no clue what she actually thinks" territory too turn this to an advantage.
I think the youngsters are just so glad to see a new face that they don't care about her past. Plenty of voters don't even know what state attorneys general actually do (I myself have only a vague idea - to me it means someone held an office that requires an understanding of how the law works at the level of State government.)
I see the incumbent backlash in local elections where people just vote for the challenger without even thinking about it. Here we get an incumbent backlash in favor of an incumbent(!)
I genuinely find it uncomfortable that there’s a whole genre of advice given to democrats all the time, and it may be good advice that you need to go pick a fight with people far to weak to fight back.
Like you need to go pick a fight with already extremely marginal people and make sure they know no one cares about them is like routine advice and the Republican alternative is like you need to say nice things about social security and Medicare to reasonably comfortable crowds.
You don't have to pick fights with genuinely weak people, there's plenty of comfortable people out there who advocate for who they deem as the weakest, and say dumb things and do bad things, that's an easy target to punch at the left on.
"There's plenty of comfortable people out there who advocate for who they deem as the weakest" -- prattling endlessly on NPR, brought to you by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John D. & Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, Eric and Wendy Schmidt," etc.
Yeah, genuinely weak people. Tell that to Joe Six-Pack if you want to lose an election.
Yeah, honestly in my view picking these fights probably exposes the target more and probably wouldn't help all that much in a larger election. I think it's best to just message more toward where you want to be rather than punching inside the camp in particular.
To the best of my recollection, Obama avoided "Sister Souljah" behavior. He simply kept a disciplined silence about a lot of issues. On gay marriage, for instance, he did not go out of his way to kick the gays. He just didn't make gay marriage an affirmative policy of his own.
Maybe there are other areas where Obama did pick on the already marginalized, for political advantage?
Obama absolutely had a Sister Souljah moment, when he said his own kids shouldn't get affirmative action. He was nicer and more artful than Clinton was, but that was a massive rebuke to the way affirmative action is practiced in academia where well off applicants of color who are seen as prospective donors get massive preferences.
Also ... has everyone just forgotten this speech:
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-politics/obama-tells-blacks-they-must-take-responsibility-idUSN14476593/
Yes, but in action, Obama put two pro-affirmative action SC Justice's on the Court and did nothing in actual policy to weaken affirmative action.
If Kamala says some performative stuff about immigration, but then does nothing that bad to pro-immigration people like me, then there'll be no real backlash, but Matt and much of the commentariat want the rightr-wing immigration bill to be passed, instead of a better bill created by an actual Democratic or bipartisan group of Senator's instead of just signing on to the most right-wing bill currently available.
It's interesting you bring up Obama and gay marriage because I have different take. Here's what he said while running in 2007:
“I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian — for me — for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.” - April 17, 2008, while running for president, defining marriage at the Saddleback Presidential Forum.
I remember him saying that at the time and being *very* shocked he said it so directly. Probably also why he won Iowa by 10 points.
Speaking as a married gay man. On the one hand I was disappointed he didn't support marriage equality, on the other hand, not being an idiot, I 100% knew he would be better for me on that issue than McCain
Yes. And Obama had also came out in support of gay-marriage way back during his first IL senate run so I think most informed voters chalked some of these firmer statements during the Presidential race up as pandering but my point here was just that I don't think he was totally silent about it. He actually pandered. And won convincingly.
Here's a big difference - most gay people knew Obama was lying, and saying what he needed on gay marriage to get election, and then would put pro-gay marriage people on the Court or pass whatever other pro-LGBT policies or regulations possible, because they trusted Obama.
At the moment, a lot of progressives don't trust the Democratic Party, especially when people like Matt specifically says they shouldn't just talk moderate, but pass moderate bills.
I mean, they will pass potentially the most left-leaning bill they _can_ (to a point) but sometimes a moderate bill is all you can get.
I thought Obama was going to give me moderate results on marriage equality, but he'd give me what he could.
It is absolutely correct and wise to say something to the effect of "If you spray paint 'Hamas is coming' on an American monument, know that *America* will be coming for *you* and we punch harder."
What is the best evidence on the "Michigan problem" and Muslim communities? How big an electoral issue is this for her to worry about? Can she make up losses by tacking hard and letting those who want a strong anti-Israel message vote for who, Jill Stein?
I don’t exactly have a problem with something this narrow. I’m not sure that moves the needle. It seems to me like the advice is usually quite a bit more than you should respect the law when you protest.
It might not move the needle forward much but it can keep it from moving back.
And what are the broader aspects that you're worried about?
That people will end up with no one to turn to even when they’re doing the very vanilla not extreme version of that.
Like I worry about tone policing people out of their circle of empathy. Like when i see a protest movement did something annoying I see a lot of sick wishing that they were killed for it. Like dehumanization lurks behind so many culture war fronts.
Like maybe you really don’t like peta, I’m not much of a fan. But if you respond in a way that conflates vegans with peta I get more torture porn comments on my cookie review videos. This dynamic all over the place, I don’t think you can talk about trans sports without feeding the people who just are grossed out by girls with 🐓. I don’t know that you can talk about Palestine protestors who do dumb shit without spreading the idea that they’re all doing dumb shit.
The people who are like "run down the protestors!" aren't going to be made more psychotic by a liberal politician saying that burning the flag and saying "Hamas is coming" are shitty things to do, those people have different personal problems and weird views they're living with. It's normies toward the middle who need reassurance that the Democrats aren't going to enable the worst elements of their coalition if they gain/maintain power.
If casting a net catches too many people, I’m okay with it.
I won’t be silent about bad apples for fear of tainting the bushel.
"The most important thing is to piss off lefties" is this comments section at its most self parodic, and demonstrates again that this is a Republican blog read by Republican readers written by a Republican blogger, all of whom maintain a totally empty attachment to being "center left" because they think it's social unpalatable to be explicitly conservative.
Don't you have a PhD? How could you have earned one with such poor reading comprehension skills? There's a big difference between "pissing off lefties" and "AVOIDING pissing off moderates who are nervous about pronouns or Hamas or the border or gun rights."
I'd be tickled pink if Harris could both (1) win 99% of persuadable voters AND (2) not piss off a single lefty. She'd win a landslide! But since that's not feasible—and because the road to 270 electoral votes go through the moderates in places like Green Bay and Tucson—I'd urge her to be willing to risk pissing off a few of the former (especially the most extreme ones, like, uh, you) to get the bulk of the latter. Such a strategy seems more likely to nail down purple states than tailoring the message to drive up margins in California and Massachusetts.
It's paywalled, but I think you can still read the headline even if you aren't subscribed: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/people-who-cant-understand-the-written
There are plenty of self proclaimed PhDs on Twitter who aren't much better...
I'm actually being nice, in that my comment implies the possibility that he's operating in good faith and genuinely doesn't perceive the necessity to win the votes of moderates. And, while perhaps that's unlikely...who knows? He certainly comes across as earnest.
I have a PhD, but even I know name calling as an initial response is not very thoughtful.
Why the *FUCK* are you like this, bro?
My daily, unfriendly reminder that no one likes a Marxist.
Oh, the Marxists hate the Fascists
And the Theocrats hate the Wokesters
And the Hindus hate the Muslims
And everybody hates the Jews
(with apologies to Tom Lehrer)
Freddie, I am going to make one good-faith attempt to get through to you.
Matt Y says, correctly: “The median voter is a non-college-educated middle-aged white guy in a suburb.” That’s who you need to convince to vote for your candidate.
Median Voter doesn’t give a sh*t about trans rights or Gaza; he’s scared of illegal immigrants and pissed off about high prices.
Matt Y wants to move to the right to at least try to win Median Voter’s support, not to hurt you or spite you.
The choice isn’t “Kamala Harris or magic gay Marxist unicorn who will make all my policy dreams come true;” the choice is Kamala Harris or Donald “You Won’t Have to Vote Anymore “ Trump.
This isn’t complicated, and I’m at a loss as to why you don’t understand it, or pretend not to. Politics is the art of the possible, not the art of b*tching online at people who don’t meet your standards of ideological purity.
If your opinions had merit, then you wouldn’t need to resort to lying Freddie.
I'm genuinely curious what the list of seven things that "women married to laid-off-ironworkers-turned-Uber-Eats-drivers in the Rust Belt" would support.
Does mute not work? I have FDB muted but still see his posts.
Not sure what mute is, but blocking is useless - he just can’t like your posts. I finally reported him - he just continues to lie, not read the actual posts, and not engage with any pushback.
I realized that most of these apply to the feed which I don’t use. Mute will hide him from your feed. It’s a start.
> People sometimes blame me for this, though my recollection is that it’s Ezra Klein’s fault.
OK, that was legitimately laugh-out-loud funny. I love when you sneak this stuff in.
“Ezra catches a stray” was def not on my bingo card for this morning.
It's funny because it's true
Incredible pot shot at Ezra.
BURRRRNNN!!
This. Literally LOLed at this line.
I have heard Harris mention an "assault weapons ban" at least twice since her campaign began, which strikes me as a conspicuously high frequency in such a short timespan. "They want to ban abortion, we want to ban assault weapons," etc.
Not sure where the polling is on this, but it seems like an unwise subject to promote. I think MY has, in the past, advocated for Democrats not mentioning guns at all. Every reliable Democratic voter understands that the party is trustworthy on gun control stances, so there's nothing to be gained but lots to be lost in associating oneself with the taking away of any firearms in the minds of heterodox swing voters in purple country.
I believe assault rifle bans poll around 60%. But I agree, it’s the vibe of that policy, it makes people assume she’s more liberal on other issues. Ie. crime
Even here, where people are in like the top 3% of policy knowledge, we can't even be clear if we're talking about "Assault Weapons" or assault rifles, let alone what the hell an "assault weapon" is. The utter inability to speak coherently about the relevant policy is reason #1 the Dems need to avoid the issue. It seems completely impossible for them to not jam their entire foot in their mouth every other sentence.
I just imagined an interview w/ Harris where someone asks her what the definition of an assault weapon is and...I don't have faith in her response...
A good politician would never fall into that pedantic trap. She'd say something like "I'm against weapons that are built specifically for killing massive numbers of innocent people. I'm against weapons that are useless for hunting or protecting your loved ones in your home but only good for terrorizing people and mowing down little kids sitting in their classroom."
"Assault weapon" generally means "semiautomatic rifle", though it's an odd phrasing (a weapon is a tool, whether it's used for assault or not is up to its user). It probably derives from the incorrect belief that the "AR" in AR-15 stands for "Assault Rifle".
1. In actual function "Assault Weapon" often tends to exclude things like M1 Garand/M1 Carbine/Mini-14, making the actual definition more like "semiauto rifle with a pistol grip".
2. It's worse than that because the law doesn't actually have a coherent definition of a "rifle" to begin with. The law is mostly concerned vaguely with concealability and makes no distinctions between rifle and handgun ammunition which could actually be relevant.
3. The definition gets even further muddled by the explicit inclusion of things like the Tec-9 which is a handgun that is entirely less functional/capable in every way than any Glock in existence.
Take this FWIW, but I think the people who worry about an AWB get themselves WAY too wrapped around the axle on the details.
And I don't say that because I don't think the details matter -- they absolutely do! But you're overindexing.
The anti-AWB crowd rightly points out that the term "assault weapon" conjures scary connotations while eliding details that presumably would convince people to agree with you**. But you've got it upside-down: Normies. Don't. Give. A. Shit. About. The. Details.
** I'm intentionally leaving out the question of intentionality, because I don't think narratives require intention to work their magic, and it's a stupid rabbit-hole of an argument to get stuck down.
My read on the normies is that they apply the infamous obscenity test to AWs: "I know [an assault weapon] when I see it". Arguing details makes you look pedantic and obsessive, when what people are really trying to tell you is that they don't give a shit about your details, they just don't want to get killed in a mass shooting.
Again, take it or leave it. But my advice is simply to address this bigger fear instead of trying to convince normies that they shouldn't be afraid of pistol grips or telescoping stocks. If there's anything that therapy and life experience have taught me, it's that arguing people out of their feelings is a fool's errand.
Ed: Just to put my own opinion on the table, I think Harris should STFU about an AWB, and argue for a national red flag law, if she even bothers to talk about the subject. Red flags are a clear winner with very few downsides like AWBs have.
Oh I agree with you. The people who keep the AWB on the Dem agenda don't give a shit about the details, because they don't give a shit about the 2nd Amendment and think we should just confiscate all the semi-autos and be done with it. The problem is that that's not actually popular broadly. So if you want gun control to be a winning issue for you as a dem you have to distinguish yourself from the anti-2a confiscationists by caring about the details, or you should just shut up about it.
Basically the AWB is peak, "say it without saying it" on being anti-2A.
I appreciate your point 1 regarding pistol grips. I hadn't thought before about exactly what seems to intuitively separate the ontological category of an AR-15 from, say, a Ruger 10/22, but on reflection it's absolutely the presence of a pistol grip.
Unironically, I think this (along with, IMO, magazine size) might actually cleave reality at the joints were it to be used as a touchstone for a hypothetical "assault weapons ban," (assuming that not all semiautomatic weapons were banned categorically.) The pistol grip's marginal ergonomic utility for close-to-mid-range aiming and handling seems like it differentially enables nefarious uses (outside the hands of the military and law enforcement), whereas banning pistol grips would appear to have absolutely negligible effect on current hunting and target long gun applications.
This all begs the question of why ban this specific class of guns though? The ratio of "Assault weapons" used for recreation and sporting relative to use for crime is astronomically better than that for pistols. The issue isn't just that "Democrats want to ban assault rifles because they look scary and they don't care about how it impacts lawful gun owners who they don't really like," plays well with voters in swing states, it's that, that genuinely seems to be the bulk of the substance behind these efforts
I also think AR-15s with wood stocks wouldn't be banned because they don't look scary, whereas metal stocks do look scary.
"...it’s the vibe of that policy...."
I feel like everyone in the Harris campaign needs to reread Mark Schmitt and Josh Marshall on the perils of "policy literalism." Or in Schmitt's formulation, "it's not what you say about your policies, it's what your policies say about you."
Or they could subscribe to Slow Boring.
I'd even buy them a few subscriptions! I'm already donating pico-trillions to the Harris campaign; what's a few more pico-trillions if it will get them to campaign competently?
Someone needs to do a geographic distribution of this poll to see if there is a skew that everyone expects, and to what extent.
Agree - how does it poll in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin?
I don't care how gun control polls. Only anti-gun control people vote on the issue; other people just hold a weak position and can't really be motivated.
Yep, this is the key point -- all evidence leans toward there being almost no single-issue pro-gun control voters, while there are a significant number of single-issue anti-gun control voters, so pro-gun control messaging is genuinely always or almost always a net negative on votes for the pro-gun control candidate in the general election. The only semi-reliable venue for positively using it is in a Democratic primary race and that's not relevant here.
Agreed. If Harris wins a sizeable victory, I look forward to the discussion of the question in the Democratic party: "Primaries as a way to choose our nominee: A bad idea? Or a really really bad idea?"
How popular is it in this diner in Bucks County, PA?
Having spent most of my life in Bucks/Montgomery county, these people have a lot of guns.
Where? Certainly not Wisconsin Arizona and Michigan
“ but it seems like an unwise subject to promote….there's nothing to be gained but lots to be lost in associating oneself with the taking away of any firearms….”
Totally agree. She already has the gun-control vote locked up. Its political malpractice to talk about this.
Given the continued urban/rural skew in voting. Given the actual number of gun owners is going down (although they are buying more guns). Are we actually sure gun control is still a bad issue to run on?
I’m wondering if this really is like abortion. A lot of GOP aligned pundits or politicians didn’t realize this isn’t 2001 anymore. Religious attendance is plummeting. And likely explains in part why so many were flat footed at the backlash to Dobbs.
My James Carville hat on, I likely agree with you both. Places like Wisconsin or Arizona may come down to like 500 votes and there probably is just enough cross pressured voters “I love my guns and I love my Medicare” that it’s probably not a great issue to run on. And yes there is no issue that benefits from our skewed electoral system, especially within states, than guns. But I would really like some data on this. Is our mental picture from 10 years ago about gun control still accurate
There was a huge spike in first time gun buyers in 2020, so the household numbers are actually probably up a bit recently.
Edit: Gallup's poll on this has the trend being flat back to ~1995. If you think the minor fluctuations are more than noise it went from 37% in 2019 to 45% in 2022 then back to 42% in 2023, but I tend to think "flat" is the correct way to think about it.
If the NRA was even mildly competent (snorts), they would have set up a left-coded gun rights organization in 2017 that aims to train women and people of color to fight back against fascism with their own guns. Talk about the racist history of gun control, etc. Play up the history of militant anti-fascist groups, whether that's John Brown or the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, Allied troops in WW2, and anti-racist punks. Celebrate the Battle of Cable Street every year. You'd get a groundswell of millions of new, leftwing gun owners, who'd then probably pass along gun ownership to their children, and so on. And once you own guns you then become much more skeptical about regulation. It'd be the most effective gun rights move in a hundred years.
I say this as someone who occasionally hangs out on r/liberalgunowners
"fight back against fascism"
What could that possibly mean, in practice? Shoot cops when they are trying to arrest a woman / minority?
At least in the case of women they could credibly say that her biggest threat is likely to be a man who outweights / outmuscles her. But for a minority, the statistical threat is likely to be another minority man, not some 50 year old NRA member.
No one beside DSA members is worried about "the Battle of Cable Street" or this other weird obscure marxist history stuff. "Violently overthrow the government" is not going to win over millions of left-wing women.
The NRA has been subordinate to the Republican party's cultural priorities since before I can remember. Fuck those guys.
I'm much more of an "Armed minorities are harder to oppress." gun rights person.
Yeah, I mean the flaw in my theory is the idea that the NRA would ever willingly arm black people lol.
Hmm, let's examine why then-governor Reagan signed a law banning open carry in the 60s..... https://www.history.com/news/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-support-mulford-act
You might like this ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_auXN7DzfY&t=3s
Backing up your point about the spike in gun ownership: at my wife's insistence, we became first time gun owners in 2020.
“But I would really like some data on this.”
You think anyone here at Slow Boring is going to disagree with that?
Yeah, the electorate may be moving, glacially, towards a new position on guns. But here as elsewhere I would tell Harris to be like Obama and lead from behind.
Sure you don't have to own a gun to be against Dem gun-control proposals.
>“I love my guns and I love my Medicare”
I'm just envisioning a combative, mildly confused senior citizen proudly marching around with his AR-15, ready to defend Medicare against the greedy government. I love it
"Keep your government hands off my Medicare." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/get-your-goddamn-governme_b_252326
I have maintained that there is not better distillation of both median voter brain and why politics and policy are the way they are than this statement.
Having lived and watched the irrational growth of ammo shops, gun safe sales, and firearms stores during every Democratic administration over 40 years in Montana don’t highlight this issue. Not that Montana plays a large role in national politics and I believe rational gun owners are starting to push back against the NRA faction,this is a no win wedge issue with many swing voters. Gun policy needs thoughtful legislation and messaging while separating the urban gang environment from the sport firearms and hunting environment, insuring, calming and preserving the latter.
"Not that Montana plays a large role in national politics"
Jon Tester would like a word. Not at all a crazy scenario that Montana becomes the tipping point state as to who controls the senate. So yeah that alone may call for downplaying gun control at the top of the ticket.
We want to keep Trump out of the White House. Everything else is secondary. This is not the time to talk about gun control. If pressed on it by the media, just say you're against mass murder and move on as quickly as you can.
Pro-life and anti-gun control are both conservative positions, so Republicans are safer moving away from being so pro-life in pursuit of the middle. Democrats should likewise move away from pro-gun control positions if they want to make gains in red areas, which they need to do in order to gain electoral votes and Congressional seats. There is no way that a Democrat will be *less* pro-gun control than their Republican opponent, so it's a net gain for gun control when Democrats gain votes, even if they're less bound to passing legislation because they de-emphasized the issue.
I thought that number of gun owning households have remained pretty steady - see for example
https://www.statista.com/statistics/249740/percentage-of-households-in-the-united-states-owning-a-firearm/
Especially because the “assault weapons ban” is an idiotic mostly cosmetic approach.
If you want to reduce the lethality of mass shootings then magazine size, caliber and rate of fire are the things you should look at, not flash hiders.
Just let the weapons look cool and make it somewhat harder to have access to those more powerful rifles.
Sometimes conservatives bring up handguns but the average 9mm is just less lethal. You hear about people getting shot 3 or 4 times with a 9mm and surviving, you almost never hear that about someone shot multiple times with a .223, 7.62 or .308 for a reason. We need a physics based approach to what guns are considered more dangerous, not a “looks scary” approach.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2018/02/24/seeing-the-gun-debate-through-a-doctors-eyes/#1a34b8923a16
"We need a physics based approach to what guns are considered more dangerous, not a 'looks scary' approach."
That makes sense, but I'm pretty sure you first need women to stop being the base of the Democratic party to get an approach like that implemented. (Sorry to be sexist, but every woman I've ever had a discussion about gun control with, whether on-line or in real life, has been very firmly -- even explicitly -- in the camp of the top priority being banning things that look scary and any attempt to explain anything about relative lethality, frequency of use in crimes, etc. will be waved off as "mansplaining" or otherwise dismissed out of hand, no matter how politely presented.)
I do know a boy mom whose argument about the "looks scary" part is that it's like "cool" smoking ads that make guns seem more fun, her boys want to shoot guns partially because of how badass they look. I can get that argument a little bit but smoking has zero usefulness and it isn't explicitly, constitutionally protected. It's just a different issue with its own unique problem set.
On the other hand, prior to the invention of vaping, there wasn't really a substitute good for smoking. Conversely, less-badass looking but perfectly practical long guns are a dime a dozen and predate the AR-15 by decades to centuries. This suggests the possibility of an aesthetics-based ban being more practical to implement (I tend to think "cool looking guns" probably has a fairly substantial effect in providing them appeal to people who think it projects a masculine image. Hell, it's Harley Davidson's whole marketing strategy.)
As I noted to David Coffin above, it may be that this actually all just comes down to pistol grips....
This is one of the reasons I wish we had more women on this board or on PoliticsStack generally. Pro-gun or pro-nuanced-and-specific gun control women exist! There are dozens of us! Dozens!
I should clarify that when I said, "every woman I've ever had a discussion about gun control with," I was meaning every woman who was a proponent of gun control. Hanging out in libertarian/ancap circles, I have encountered a very small handful of women who were simply opposed to gun control.
Exhibit #534 why this comment section is 95% dudes.
"Why can't these silly women care more about the subtle difference gun a & gun b instead of the people that have been killed more easily because of access to these types of guns in general. Women, am I right, dudes?"
The actual reality is those women would probably be OK with all the guns being banned, they just know it's politically a dead letter, which is why they don't really care. Ironically, they'd be all on board for a handgun ban, but that's even more dead for an assault weapons ban, for all the talk of these silly women not getting that handguns are actually more dangerous or whatever the argument is.
#NotAllWomen: My wife pushed us to get firearms during 2020. She also got her concealed carry license. The "mostly peaceful" protests turned her into a very strong advocate of her 2nd Amendment rights.
Except that, if your actual concern is to reduce people being killed, then surely you would want to enact gun control laws that actually address the features of guns that most closely correspond to killing people (as Bo said, magazine size, muzzle velocity, bullet weights and other properties like those), NOT banning bayonet lugs, flash suppressors, barrel shrouds, etc. that have little to no relation to the actual lethality of the weapon.
Like I said, I think the actual reality is the vast amount of women who are pro-gun control _and_ heavily support said efforts _and_ get involved in conversation over assault weapons bans basically just want all guns outside of boring single-shot hunting rifles banned, so they don't really care about the above, but they also know that having a handgun is popular.
That's why they don't care about your arguments, because if the gun they want banned is not as bad as the gun you describe, they still want the less gun banned as well. Whatever path leads to less guns in society is a positive for them
To be ideologically fair, it's the opposite of why conservatives why bad abortion bills - because they actually mainly just want all abortions banned, but know that's unpopular.
It's mostly barrel length, not caliber, that determines lethality, via velocity.
Edit: it's complicated, but velocity is pretty important, and 9mm is a wide, heavy round compared to rifle calibers, and moves fairly slow. But hits are what matter, so rifles have an advantage because you can get two hands on the gun, and they shoot flat beyond 25m or so, which handgun calibers generally don't.
The flip side is that it's a lot easier to have a pistol on you, and hollow points are very destructive at short range.
I think we don't see a lot of deaths from rifle calibers because criminals don't usually carry rifles.
Which is why it is funny that a lot of “assault weapon bans” require longer barrels.
Yeah, especially when states like NY are trying to ban body armor. Defeating body armor is almost totally dependant on high velocity from a longer barrel.
I suspect that had Thomas Crooks just had a handgun, he wouldn't have been up on that roof.
I mean the "assault weapon" he had at hand was also a pretty terrible choice compared to basically any hunting rifle.
He seemed pretty accurate to me. A question, since I know nothing about hunting rifles, could he have gotten off the same number of shots in the same time with a hunting rifle?
The truth is Trump only survived because the guy was pretty incompetent. Trying to take a headshot at 150+ yards with iron sights is less than ideal even for a good shooter. A couple hundred bucks on an optic would have made it pretty trivial. Of course, you only really have to take the headshot because you picked a 5.56 rifle to begin with that wouldn't be reliably lethal center mass. A WWI army surplus 1903 Springfield aimed center mass had better odds than what this kid tried, let alone any modern bolt-action with a scope. Follow-up shots are an irrelevant concept for an amateur shooter like this, chances he gets a second round on target after missing the first is basically nill.
Not even close if it were bolt-action. 2 if he were lucky, 3 if he were exceptionally lucky and practiced his ass off.
You need to define the terms. Do you mean a bolt action rifle? No. But any semi automatic rifle, yes.
A hunting rifle is the rifle you are hunting with.
I agree with Dave Coffin, if he'd bothered to use his grandfather's old bolt-action hunting rifle he probably would've made the shot. No one knowledgeable would use an AR as a sniper rifle, that's not what it's meant to be
....mmm. If he had a proper optic and knew how to shoot, the AR would have been fine out to 300+ yards. There are a lot of good AR marksman platforms. But being a not good shooter with an off the rack gun was the biggest impediment to hitting his shot.
Given the videos we saw of him squirming around on the roof without a gun visible and the additional size / ergonomic awkwardness / added marginal difficulty of hiding of an optic, I think there's a credible argument that using an AR with ironsights *might* have actually been the optimal way to attempt to get more than zero shots off before being countersniped.
Like, yes, obviously having an optic on a 7.62 / 30-06 would be likely to succeed in on the first shot, but only if he were alive long enough to line it up.
Deleted because I misremembered the M1 Garand as being bolt-action.
Agreed, and she should stay far away from initiating this issue unless it's something like "as a prosecutor, I worked to stop criminals from getting dangerous weapons".
The only think to say a bout guns should be in the context of getting guns out of the hands of criminals, especially to minimize the likelihood of a police officer encounter in an armed suspect and make it unnecessary for civilians to need arms for self protection. Like fossil fuels, work on reducing the demand for guns over the supply.
Even here you have to split hairs carefully. "Keep guns out of the hands of criminals" mostly gets read as "Restrict the lawful sale and carry of firearms" by a large chunk of voters, because that is in fact what the people saying it usually mean.
Explicitly leaning into prosecuting the use of guns in violent crime is a good idea though.
Why are gun owners so pro-gun stores selling guns to criminals? Seem like they aren't very law and order if it means they have to fill out an additional form or wait 5 extra days to get a gun or whatever.
That's not how any of this actually works.
If you buy a gun from a licensed dealer in the US, you absolutely fill out a form that goes to the ATF/FBI, who conducts a criminal/restricted person check. This can happen quickly or not. But it absolutely happens. This is widely accepted as reasonable. If you pass the check, you are able to purchase the firearm. This happens every time you buy a gun.
What is not reasonable or acceptable is having some state or local bureaucrat make a personal decision on whether or not you deserve to have a gun. This is what happens in Illinois and New York, for example. It's basically a Certificate of Need which can be rejected for any reason without justification. This is what gun owners do not accept as reasonable, and a lot of the anger about it is because well connected people get permits/FOID cards, regular citizens don't, AND it doesn't keep criminals from getting guns, videlicet Chicago.
Background checks and licensing and such actually tend to poll fairly well, even among gun owners. The problem is that most of the political fights about them are not about making licensing requirements universal and effective, they're about minimizing the number and types of arms that can be sold.
Seems an AWB will motivate every conservative and AR owner to drag themselves to the polls if even on their deathbed.
At one time, there was talk about making these available with a license, similar but not equivalent to NFA items. Now it is a litmus test for Dems to want to ban them. Which is why many call me a DINO.
sure, they are more lethal, but handguns are still the weapon of choice for most gun crime. Fix the real problems, which are often drugs, alcoholism, poverty, and illiteracy, and shootings will go down. One only has to look at a heat map of any city to know where people are shooting each other.
But they’re motivated anyway. Is such a ban unpopular with persuadable, independent voters?
I definitely think the cohort of "would vote dem but for gun policy", cross pressured voters outnumbers the inverse group. Especially in swing states.
Agreed. One reason I think Mark Kelly would not be the best choice is that it would automatically raise the gun issue (because of Gabby Giffords). People on the left would love that; I think it's an electoral loser. Just drop it.
Since the assassination attempt against their Orange King, I would have thought at least some Republicans would be more in favor of tighter gun control? Or is that wishful thinking on my part?
Yea, that's an incoherent hope. Restricting the kind of rifle good for long range assassinations is wildly outside the normal parameters of debatable gun control. Trump was lucky kid's dad had an AR-15 lying around. If he owned a cheap bolt-action hunting rifle with a scope instead Trump is probably dead right now.
Agree on guns and basically any issue that includes the word "ban" in the headline.
Politics is the art of subtraction and addition.
I would counsel Harris that the last thing she needs to worry about is pissing off libertarians. I mean, you never want to lose a dozen votes, but sometimes you just have to.
OK. It's just that the word "libertarian" is triggering for me and my brain shuts down.
>If Republicans are smart (ha), they'll be throwing the "California" charge at her non-stop<
I assume a firehose of that is on its way any day now. They're going to hit her hard on that case involving the death penalty for a convicted cop killer. I hope she's ready (and I'll say: I think her campaign has been remarkably nimble and sure-footed so far, so I expect they will be ready).
Maybe just respond that the convicted killer will spend the rest of his natural life in prison and will never see the light of day?
Less than a week after Kamala because the de facto candidate Elon went all-in attacking his trans kid and ranting about the woke mind virus and Trump started talking about how we won't need elections anymore if his lovely Christians elect him in 2024.
Almost immediately, front page articles sprouted on the NY Times and Washing Post talking about trans rights, hormone blockers, "dead naming" and interviewing experts on authoritarians, musing about strong men, etc.
In other words: Elon and Trump successfully baited journalists (all of whom seem to be under 30) into writing reactionary, hyperbolic stories retreading the most toxic, losing culture-war issues for Democrats and plastering them on the front page (for clicks!).
I have been biting my nails waiting for Kamala to utter the words "gender-affirming care" or "fascist" and drop 10 points in the polls. But as far as I can tell she hasn't! Instead, she and her surrogates have been talking about how weird Trump and Vance are and how they're getting weirder, mentioning Project 2025 in every sentence and then laughing at what clowns they are.
Chef's kiss!
These are, I think, green shoots, signs that Kamala has surrounded herself with Etch-A-Sketch shakers who want to drive the message that Trump is weird loser who should be laughed at, that MAGA wants to go back to when men clubbed women and dragged them into their caves and that Kamala... probably has a vision for the future... they're still fleshing that last one out.
PS my old-boomer parents, for the first time in their lives, signed up to volunteer for the nascent Harris campaign. And we live in a real-deal swing state. We'll see what appears on the Etch-A-Sketch, but anecdotally, there is real enthusiasm for giving it a good shake and seeing what else is on offer besides tired old—and incredibly weird—Trump rants.
FWIW that's not what Trump said
I forget the exact wording, but it was a classic Trump Says Something Ambiguous to Goad The Left phrasing, complete with plausible deniability. The reaction from the media is what I was mostly paying attention to.
“You won’t have to vote anymore” (to Christians). I think the most charitable interpretation is that he is lying, because the only election-free route to policy aims, appointing a right-wing SCOTUS for the foreseeable future, has already been achieved and is unlikely to move at all in the next four years. The least charitable interpretation is obviously that he will act anti-electorally like he has tried to in the past. But then again he’s also lied a lot in the past, so…
I think the most charitable read is “I will have fixed all your problems in four years so you won’t need to care about politics anymore” The most likely interpretation I think is “I’ll be done with politics after winning this election so I don’t care if you vote or not after it”
Right, but that goes back to the first two cases. Anything he can do outside of the Supreme Court can be undone legislatively, unless he’s promising something illegal.
This is generalizable to any promise any presidential candidate makes, so it can hardly be an indictment of Trump specifically.
I think that over the course of the last month or two, the realization that Trump really could win again - and that a second term would be different and worse than the first - has really sunk in among establishment liberals. The same types of people who laughed Trump him off during the 2016 general, spent their time dicking around running ads in Texas, and paraded out as many aggressively progressive celebs as they could to celebrate the imminent first woman president with a "haha, eat shit, redneck men!" vibe have learned that they need a different approach this time, and that they need to win in an environment that, aside from many Republicans being below-average candidates, is not favorable for Democrats.
That is a sound take. I also think that the volcanic exuberance around "I guess it's going to be Kamala now" surprised everyone and the realization that Trump really could *lose* is taking hold. At least, that's how I felt when the Harris campaign and its surrogates did not immediately rise to the bate and start wokesplaining how those comments harm communities.
Yep, it seems like the rollout of Harris to the broader Democratic party/supporters is the current focus, and it's going fine. Hopefully they can keep it up as she interacts more and more with the broader electorate.
Yes, it remains unclear how much this realization that a different approach is needed has sunk in in politics. But there is evidence it has started to sink in in commerce, such as in how movies are made and promoted.
To wit:
Hollywood’s Message to Red States: Our Movies Are for You https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/28/business/media/hollywood-movies-red-state-audiences.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
That article points to the lack of references to climate change in Twisters as evidence that Hollywood is done pushing progressive values and just wants to entertain. Scroll down a bit and there is an opinion piece entitled "Twisters Was a Spectacle That Missed a Huge Opportunity" because, naturally, it didn't mention the role of climate change.
I cannot imagine the tedium of being a person who cannot enjoy an action movie because it didn't take the opportunity to remind the audience to feel bad about enjoying the movie. Or someone who boycotts Disney because two female cartoon characters kiss in the background of a two-second shot.
My sincere hope is that the Harris campaign learned its lesson about being too online and confusing Twitter for real life and understands that the vast majority of the electorate enjoys enjoying things that are fun because they are fun.
Personally, I always thought This Wizard of Oz missed an opportunity to hit harder about the linkage between fossil fuels and tornados, instead of obliquely yammering on about monetary policy and the danger of following the yellow brick road to a gold-only standard instead of silver too.
See I go the other way, when Dorothy got to the Emerald City she should have seen the Wizard impaled upon a gold cross, and he should have told her that her silver slippers only work at the holy ratio of 16:1.
Except crucified on a cross of gold, in honor of the memorable speech given by Bryan the Cowardly Lion.
It's a really great column, but I'm chiming in to violently object to the idea of running on "Project 2025 but it's good." That's terrible branding: people (correctly) understand Project 2025 to be *radical.* Dems should keep that as the scary boogeyman (which it is!), and run on a moderate platform of fighting for affordability while restoring our freedom, decency, and small-d democratic values. (Basically what is said in the latter part of the column)
Honestly, one of the planks in the platform should just be "Stop Project 2025."
I'm surprised Dems aren't running a lot harder on this. It lets them match thermostatic opinion and the status quo, and lets them role out all the weirdest, dumbest stuff from Project 2025, like abolishing the weather service, and just say they are against it.
Trump keeps saying he doesn't care about Project 2025, it's not his ideas, and he hasn't read it.
I'd like to see Matt (or anyone else) explain WTF happened in the 2019-20 Democratic Primary. The positions are so wild and beyond anything Democrats have enacted historically. Republicans have been jumping for joy at an ad recounting Harris' positions from that time.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/conservatives-praise-brilliant-swing-state-gop-ad-attacking-harris-blueprint
In my opinion, it was the Black Lives Matter movement. What started as a slogan morphed into an umbrella banner for every far, far left policy option. The combination of the importance of Black voters in the primary along with the zenith of CRT teaching rendered the Party incapable of pushback to any proposal put forth, no matter how wacky.
It's not a coincindence that our host left Vox during this same period. The illiberal tendencies of the far left were in ascendence during that time. The bright spot, though, is that Vox's loss is our gain.
I have seen far more analysis of how Obama broke right-wing brains than introspection about how Trump broke left-wing brains. But whether there is a causal relationships or not, it is true that people dressed up in tricorne hats adorned with teabags when Obama was president and pink pussy-hats when Trump was president. And neither choice of headgear preceded a period of sane, sober-minded political and social movements.
This is the line of argument I try to use against my Trump-supporting friends: "Trump, whether you think it is fair or not, is the most polarizing politician of our lifetimes. All the things you fear the most -- protests that include violence, rising crime, confiscatory taxation, radical proposals -- are made more likely by his presence on the ticket. So vote for somebody else."
Given that Haley only got 14% in the Florida Primary (DeSantis had already dropped out by then), I don't think I had much success.
I have friends and family who have sadly contracted the anti-woke mind virus and credulously argue that all of those things are already happening, but much worse, in Joe Biden's America.
A 10,000-word essay about how hats in politics are generally bad is clearly indicated.
" 10,000-word essay about how hats in politics...."
Followed by another 10k on counterfactual history of hats:
"But what if the Prussian army of 1870 had worn the Phrygian cap instead of the Pickelhaub?"
Hats are the bumper sticker of the head! Anyone with a political-themed one is probably a whackjob!
I will never forget that in 2020, one of the official stated positions of BLM was deconstructing the nuclear family. They wiped it from their website pretty quickly after George Floyd's murder, but they were still a fundamentally Marxist organization. Maybe it was an early example of the "everything bagel" approach, but I'm not sure we can find a single good result from what that group of charlatans did, and certainly not enough to balance out all the bad ones.
What even is an "Official stated position of BLM"? I'm aware that there is (was?) a small grifter organization that called themselves that and claimed to speak for the broader movement, but I'm not aware of any of its personalities or big waves it made in media or activism. If they speak for BLM activism, then I'm the Space Pope.
I think that's the root of much of the "everything bagel" stuff. There wasn't anyone for people to look to, no centralizing force keeping people on message. This isn't unique to US politics. Look at the Yellow Vests in France or the incoherent demands of Brexit supporters. I think that social media has lowered the floor for protests and activism, but it's removed any guardrails for message discipline. Stuff quickly goes off the rails.
The website blacklivesmatter.com was started by the originators of the hashtag and subsequent movement. They still raise millions of dollars every year.
https://blacklivesmatter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2022-BLM-PUBLIC-DISCLOSURE-COPY.pdf
If you want to claim that the movement exists independent of them, fine, it's just three words and hard to "own" in any real sense. But this is about as official as it ever could have been.
Yes. That said, there are good arguments that the fetishizing of the atomized nuclear family since WW2 has been public policy mistake -- not the best option for children, for parents, or society as a whole.
Hillary got, for want to a better term, pilloried for merely pointing out that "it takes a village" to raise children well without putting undue burden solely on individual nuclear parents or leaving behind children unlucky enough to have parents unable to meet that burden. So I would not advise any presidential candidate to go there, but it is a valid topic. Just not for a lowest-common-denominator national presidential campaign.
I disagree on the merits (families are really the ONLY people who have the bandwidth and love for children) but I will also just say the politics of left wing attacks on the family are so bad that even Hillary's anodyne language about villages was toxic.
The party that sticks with suburban parents wins elections.
Families aren’t historically nuclear. The insistence on the nuclear family as the housing arrangement has been central to much of the housing crisis of the past several decades.
That wasn't a policy. People DON'T LIKE living with their parents if they can help it. As society got richer people wanted their own place and got it.
Yes, historically people lived in abject poverty and as a result of that were forced to live with lots of extended relatives (BTW, contributing to a great deal more child sexual abuse, which nobody did anything about). The nuclear family is superior.
It's a rhetorical (and substantive) minefield, to be sure. But, when you dig a little deeper, past the surface-level partisan scratching and clawing on this issue, what you find is actually bipartisan agreement that part of the burden of having and rearing children *should* be socialized. Hence JD Vance, for example, talking about tax expenditure subsidies for childrearing.
Bearing some of the social costs of childcare (which, yes, has broad support) is not the same as leftist critiques of the role of parents.
Hillary was pilloried for stretching a trite proverb far past its breaking point in a transparently cynical attempt to justify a panoply of liberal federal programs.
Once you've crossed over the main hurdle of agreeing, as both parties have, that we've created a society where childrearing imposes such costs and burdens on individual nuclear parents that it's not reasonable to expect them to bear it without state assistance, i.e., that childrearing is a collective public and not purely private responsibility, then, it seems to me, you're just quibbling over the optimal form, manner, and degree of public assistance.
You say Hillary's view was "transparently cynical"; I say it was transparently earnest, but expressed in the only manner and language that Democrats of her vintage know and can imagine, that of top-down "liberal federal programs" as opposed to, for example, more locally controlled, bottom-up forms of delivering the assistance.
“…as both parties have, that we've created a society where childrearing imposes such costs and burdens on individual nuclear parents that it's not reasonable to expect them to bear it without state assistance…”
I do not think that there is agreement on that other than on education.
Marxists were doing "everything bagel" 100 years ago. They love that "united front" stuff.
It was Black voters in the primary that got us Joe Biden—who was more popular with black voters, and yet not so much with the more extreme CRT types. It was mostly affluent white progressives that were big on the “defund the police” nonsense.
Very true. Hence why I attributed it specifically to the BLM movement, not Black voters. Those things were not, and are not, the same thing at all.
Also, probably it was a perfect intersection of when staffers on these campaigns were of the age that these ideas were really popular with their group AND were old enough to be more senior staffers that had the ear of their candidates.
“Vox's loss is our gain.”
Sort of. Now we pay to read him.
I prefer an unfiltered Matt here -- even one we choose to pay for -- versus the one who had to live in the culture of Vox writers looking for safe spaces and running to HR to complain about an anodyne statement supporting free speech.
Matt at Vox c. 2015-2017 was unfiltered. It was the 2018-2020 period where things got weird at many places on that site.
For me, it was Post-Trump (2016). Site become un-readable.
Things got really weird around 2018. Thankfully that cultural zeitgeist popped and normal people can call stupid ideas silly in public again.
Money well spent in exchange for an actually functioning comments section, something Matt and Ezra strongly opposed creating on Vox.
I never mind paying for things I value.
Me neither, I was kind of being rueful for fun.
I don't entirely buy that...there was a real race to see who could be crazier in crowded lefty lane much earlier on. I thought this was just the weird logic of partisan primaries: if you're running to get votes from the most mobilized party base voters, and you're competing against other people for them, there's a race to to the fringe.
The lefty lane turned out to be a dead end, but that that wasn't totally obvious to everyone way before Biden took the nomination was, I think, a sign of real divisions within the democratic coalition.
I don't think many people appreciate just how lucky we got that Biden was the nominee or how smart and important the combination of Clyburn endorsement plus rapid moderate lane consolidation was for winning.
Moderates tend not to be delusional.
This doesn’t sound like someone who has followed the past several decades of moderates trying to consolidate third party support or moderates trying all their balanced budget commissions.
I feel like that's fringe moderate stuff, though.
It takes up a huge amount of newspaper space (e.g., a significant fraction of David Brooks and occasional Thomas Friedman columns), and the attention of members of Congress (in the case of all those balanced budget commissions of the past twenty years).
I would say it wasn’t luck—it looked crazy before the Clyburn endorsement, but that turned out to be the signal that let everyone coalesce around a single moderate candidate (who was considered by many to be too old, but then, so was his main competitor on the left). I don’t think most people were that enthusiastic about Biden himself, but saw that emphasizing continuity with Obama and heading off a convention fight were more important than “falling in love” with the nominee.
It was the absolute peak of party group power. So you had very very left position taking and deep policy discussions about policies that never would have been enacted.
American voters’ policy preferences genuinely shifted leftward after 2016— because of thermostatic reaction to Trump and because Millennials (whose most important formative political experience was the 2008 recession and its aftermath) started entering the electorate in large numbers.
The effect was even more significant for the Democratic primary electorate— and another order of magnitude more so for left of center and highly politically engaged people. For anyone who wasn’t a well-regarded former vice President to a popular president, going left was the most plausible route to getting media attention, donations, volunteers, and staff. (And even Biden both ran and governed further left than most would have expected)
(I’d add that this is part of the reason why Democratic politicians are much more cautious about hippie-punching than a lot of commenters here would like them to be— and aren’t necessarily being irrational in that caution.)
Well in 2016, Bernie Sanders mobilized a disinformation campaign and pushed for a "contested convention." He and his staffers ran a campaign against Democrats with nominal left messaging (when it was mostly misogyny.)
Sanders reran the playbook in 2020, and Democrats tried to appease the insurgent. It's quite funny seeing how so many of Sanders' campaign staffers have become Anti-Anti-Trump. Anti-Anti-Putin. You know, pro-Trump and pro-Putin.
I’ll never forget the conversation I had with a Bernie Bro friend in 2016. He said he would vote for Trump over Hillary because he would rather “blow it all up” than let Hillary be president. He also added that, “it doesn’t matter because “they” have fixed it for Hillary anyway so Trump won’t win.”
Glad that all worked out.
Most of the time it was unsubstantiated conjectures or some sort of "duplicitous evil corporate woman" trope with those people. It was never anything substantive.
"Fascist Pantsuit Woman Bad."
You're right, politics should only ever move right, never left. And Democrats will certainly achieve victory by trying to be the right-wing American political party. That will surely succeed.
You've blocked me so you won't see this, but I really liked this piece of yours and have recommended it multiple times recently https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/dreams-that-didnt-come-true
As annoying as Freddie can in SB comment sections, this piece was excellent, and along with his writing an mental health, one of the reasons I continue to appreciate his substack.
I think the thing is he's incapable of argument or discussion. There was a moment where he was like, "You think I'm afraid of argument? I'm great at argument, I was raised in the Shaolin temple," etc., but it's funny because it's completely untrue. He can't steelman a position, he can't respond to evidence, he resorts to namecalling immediately. So long as he's just shooting off his own salvos, and the targets are deserving, he's okay, but he has no ability to engage once the initial ammo is gone.
He’s an avowed communist and AFAIK support of the Soviet Union.
Good culture writer, bad about politics, terrible morals - at least in his online behavior.
It’s what happened to all of American society. Dem primaries and were just a symptom. It’s a question for sociologists and anthropologists honestly. My hunch is something a long the lines of mass hysteria.
I think it was the Bernie 2016 effect. His wild success then set the tone for 2019-2020 and everyone else hurried to catch up to him.
Emphasizing the role of Congress in determining the details does other good things, in addition to avoiding needless debates and unwise commitments.
It also lets her celebrate Biden’s own accomplishments and the bipartisan nature of his legislative record.
“Joe was able to reach across the aisle to bring both parties together in crafting the legislation that has brought us jobs and growth. I will continue to work with Republicans in Congress to enact bipartisan legislation that works for the American people.”
Normies, tote-baggers, and op-ed writers eat up that bipartisan stuff.
Harris would also be smart to run on divided government.
“After this election, the Senate will probably be controlled by Republicans; the House may be too. As a Democrat in the White House, I will work with a Republican Congress to find sensible compromises that all Americans can agree on. But if Donald Trump wins and Republicans control all three branches, they will do extreme, radical things that will shock normal Americans.”
Like bipartisanship, divided government is a fetish of low-information voters and the columnists who write for them. The belief that divided government is better is a stupid belief, but Harris would not be stupid to appeal to it, esp given that the premise is very likely to be true.
I don't think the preference for bipartisanship and divided government is as irrational as you portray it to be. Instead it's mostly compositional effects.
For divided government some fraction of voters really do prefer that the government not do a whole lot. This fraction plus the fraction who wants a rightwing trifecta is probably a majority of voters when a leftwing trifecta is in power. The converse is true when a rightwing trifecta is in power.
For bipartisanship the notion that an idea agreed upon by both parties is probably better than one that can't garner a majority is a decent heuristic. The problem of course is that politicians will refuse to work together for entirely political reasons even when they actually agree on policy. Those actions are driven by primary voters who are mostly just different people from the ones who want bipartisanship.
Love this approach - emphasize that electing Trump empowers the real crazy fundamentalist weirdos lurking deeper in the Republican Party.
Cf. Thomas above -- voters are resistant to change. Make the other side look like the revolutionaries, make yourself look like the stable, even-keeled side.
What we really need is some kind of revolution of culture. Something to get the students fired up.
Your attitude is toxic to the country, and is what gives Trump his power, and why he will probably win.
Which part is wrong? Is it that Republican members of Congress can pass more legislation when there's a Republican president, or that there are some deeply strange people in the Republican caucus?
Underrated messaging point in many campaigns. Bases hate it but it is a great argument for swing voters.
Maybe this is just a recipe for electoral success and hence it's ok to advocate for bad stuff, but what exactly is "price gouging" other than demagoguery?
Price gouging is when companies price their products too high. Predatory pricing is when they price too low. Collusion is when they price equal to a competitor.
I love this line.
“… what exactly is "price gouging" other than demagoguery?”
The point is, if you’re buying your demagoguery retail, you’re paying too much.
Well, as one example: price gouging is when a health insurance company steers patients to its wholly-owned pharmacy subsidiary, where it then charges them a higher out-of-pocket copay/coinsurance for a prescription, than they would have to pay if they bypassed insurance entirely and just paid cash for the prescription at an independent pharmacy. And that's before you get to whether the insurance company also charges an additional amount to the patient's self-insured employee health plan, i.e., to the company the patient works for.
Why are health insurance companies able to do this? What does it say about the state of competition in the health insurance market that they can get away with this without losing business to competitors that don't rip off their customers like this? How has the health insurance market been so badly misregulated that we see practices like this going on for years, and nothing happens?
That is not price gouging.
Price gouging is when a seller charges a very high price for a good that is in very short supply, and the demand for that good is very high (or perhaps, entirely inelastic). In those cases customers do not have alternative methods like the one you describe to get the goods cheaper, because the supply doesn't exist.
Somebody charging a very high price for a good in and of itself isn't price gouging, if customers can just choose not to pay it, or to buy it from other sources.
What Allan Thoen is describing sounds to me like some sort of, for lack of a better term, market misconduct. The insurance company uses market power (in this case, vertical integration) to extract more money from its customers, through higher copays, higher premiums to patient and employer, etc. It would be a better example if the patient did not have recourse to an independent pharmacy, and was just forced to pay inflated prices -- which definitely sounds like the kind of thing antitrust regulation is meant to counter.
Yes, it's definitely sketchy. It's just not "price gouging". And I think using the correct terms is important, otherwise one ends up with "solutions" that address the wrong problems, or make things worse.
I would add that the higher price has to not have been the incentive for the supply in the first place. If you go out of your way to supply something in limited supply and high demand, it's better that you supply it for the high price than you don't supply it at all
Agree, I wasn't making a moral statement. I actually think price gouging is one of those "good, actually" things.
Like if an evil villain sets off a device in Gotham City that destroys all the water, I actually WANT a bunch of people to be highly motivated to go to their local Costcos, fill their trucks to the brim with bottled water, and drive them to Gotham.
I don't consider this an example of what I think most people consider price gouging, which is just setting prices high. Witness Elizabeth Warren's complaints about supermarket pricing.
The part of the situation you describe that involves steering is what I find objectionable. Otherwise, if a company (including a pharmacy) wants to charge more than its competitors, let'em go ahead and try.
Do you have a view as to what the answer is to your questions?
I have lots of thoughts, at different levels of generality. At a fairly high level of generality: the pace of government is slow, and the pace of business is fast. When government tries to use a micromanaging approach to regulate a market as massive as that for healthcare goods and services, of which the market for health insurance is just one part (how those goods and services get paid for), the almost inevitable result will be that individual companies run circles around the slow, myopic regulators and quickly figure out that their best efforts are directed at finding profitable crevices and corners in the regulatory gaps. And the overall result is a hidebound, uncompetitive market. At least at the federal level, a different regulatory mindset, less focused micromanaging details -- because that's what hinders pro-competitive changes -- and more focused on ensuring outcomes, is what's needed.
Mark Cuban on line 1.
price gouging is what happens when companies have too much market power
Spam telephone calls. :)
Reading over these comments I see higher levels of “to win the election, she should tell people I’m right about my personal bugbear” than I ever thought possible.
"...she should tell people I’m right about my personal bugbear...."
"Harris can win, but only by repudiating the Pundit's Fallacy. For details, read my Substack."
It's only July, I expect us to triple self-serving bugbear attacks by October!
The GOP "platform" this year was enraging to read due to its Ridiculously Unnecessary Capitalizations and its third grade reading level, not to mention the blatant lies and fabrications. (Cue the "that's not how any of this works!" lady.) But to its credit, it was short, easy to read, and actually addressed things that their base and swing voters seem to care about. I agree with Matt and think this "Keep It Simple for the Stupids" approach is worth mimicking, a bit. I don't necessarily agree with Matt's 7 or their order but, like the first time he did it a while back, I think the exercise is worthwhile. I hope Kamala puts inflation higher on the list and keeps guns off of it.
For as much as platforms matter, it's about sending signals to surrogates about what they should say and journalists about what the priorities are. So to that extent, less policy detail is good!
Inflation needs to be addressed, but I'm struggling to see a politically viable message other than attacking Trump's batshit 10% tariffs that he's so proud of.
The median voter doesn't understand how or why inflation works, so it's lunacy to talk about it. Just say "We're going to go after price-gouging, we're going to go after predatory lending, we're going to fight for consumer rights" and let people read into that whatever they want as the Fed does the real work off-camera.
Plus, I'd imagine as a two term Cali AG she probably had a case or two involving state level anti-trust laws or unfair business practice prosecutions? "As Attorney General in our largest state, I hit back hard to protect consumers when blah blah blah..."
No one here calls it "Cali." But otherwise, spot on.
I happen to think that LL Cool J would enjoy an SB subscription, shame he’s not already here.
I hear Cali all the time in both So- and NorCal.
"Trump's trillion dollar tax cuts for his rich friends will blow up the deficit and send prices soaring. Economists agree this would be a disaster just as we're getting inflation under control."
(This approach avoids denial of the recent inflation problems—which isn't tenable—but also puts out there in a not overly braggy way the factual information that our nasty inflation shock is in fact over).
Include lots of graphics showing headlines warning about the red ink that will flow from Trump's tax cuts for the rich. Maybe include a headshot of Musk or some other rich Republicans.
That's a good place to start. One thing I was mulling over, what if you did some kind of tax break on any WIC-qualifying items? Problem is that's a state tax, not a federal one, but maybe you could come up with something simple (that wouldn't involve federal tax deductions). Maybe you call on states to do it. Or I think there's a potential approach along the lines of "corporate fat cats are getting rich off of higher prices and Donald Trump wants them to pay even lower taxes- I want to raise their taxes and get that money back in your pocket where it belongs" blah blah...
WTF is up with conservatives and the weird capitalizations?
I got strong “Donald Trump wrote parts of this himself” vibes from it
Yes, it bothered me how many on the liberal side mocked it for being short and punchy.
Hey everyone. I’m just here to say that this is exactly what I told my brother that Harris should do. Unless she puts out new, this is my policies… She’s always gonna be tied to her past ramblings.
Rory -- Great to see you!
Another shrewdly un-paywalled post. Posting is praxis! Share widely!
I think people are misconstruing the Ezra comment. I don't think it was a shot at Ezra; it was a shot at people who think individual liberal columnists control the Democratic Party. I could be wrong but I think that makes a lot more sense.
This is good advice. Harris has had a great launch and consolidated the base. But my fear is they get addicted to the fan service positive feedback, and keep feeding it with Lefty applause lines.
But, having the party united behind her means the vast majority of the party will nod along with any ambiguities or minor heresies as smart politics in service of beating the orange conman.
Calling him the "orange conman" is a boost to Trump.
Changing positions doesn't hurt.....because Trump and Vance have done it?
That's a very low bar. In fact, we are not voting for Harris because of positions she took during her disastrous 2020 campaign.
We have voted Democratic for 50 straight years.
My wife was in the first group of police officers in Seattle in 1975. Spent her entire career in various aspects of law enforcement doing things for minorities, that you wouldn't believe.
We listened to two videos yesterday of Kamala Harris defending DeFund the Police. Moving resources from policing to social workers. In both videos she stated that hiring more police officers does not reduce crime.
I was a scientist. I have read the research. Combining my wife's and my knowledge, we can say that Harris is so totally wrong as to be unbelievable.
Not only does more policing reduce crime, but it benefits low income and minority areas the most.
She is anti-police, although she has yet to issue the words "DeFund the Police" currently. It's been found to be a loser, so she changed her tune. But not because she was "wrong" or will admit she was "wrong."
Her answer to policing? Make everybody middle class because there isn't crime in middle class areas. Listen to the videos. I'm serious.
So, we are not voting for her. She wants to condemn people who used to depend upon Democrats for their safety to more crime, she makes up facts like Trump does, and she is part of a movement that trashes my wife's life work.
So, for us, everything everyone has said is still with us, powerfully. They can change, but only if they fully admit why they changed and what they learned.
p.s. One thing my wife did: She noticed they only arrested girls for prostitution charges. So she sought, and got, permission to set up stings. So she dressed up looking like the girls and walked the streets. Started arresting the men. If you can see my wife today, 50 years later, you'd know it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Go do that, Harris. My wife protected people. You won't.
“She is anti-police, although she has yet to issue the words "DeFund the Police" currently”
Only you can decide what would persuade you to vote for her, but I wonder what makes you so sure that her 2020 position is her “authentic” position on the police. Surely her many years working in prosecutors’ offices, culminating in being District Attorney and then Attorney General, are more suggestive of her true stance?
You should see the videos. She tried to talk to please everybody, not being courageous enough to challenge Defunding the Police. And she made up facts, as we said. That's makes "working in prosecutors' offices" even worse--after all of that time she spits in the face of virtually all literature on policing and on all police officers' experiences on policing. I mean, how does that even compute?
Look at the story in today's NYT about policing and traffic stops. It's awful. People are being killed in record numbers by cars, and policing of the streets in that way has fallen drastically. I.e., less policing = more crime. And it has dropped for the reason we said: too many Progressives are looking to prove that police are racist.
And she refuses to correct her appalling beliefs. Well, minorities and low income individuals are the victims of those traffic issues in numbers far greater than their proportion in the community. Once again, stances like hers have ended up with people getting killed--the very people we, as Democrats, used to protect.
Also, being elected to those offices in a state like California, and never once having to risk her own life, and making up facts, is not persuasive at all to us.
As Vice President, what she do about it? About what she did with the border. Nothing.
Your first paragraph seems to reiterate what I said rather than refute it: *she was trying to please everybody,* because she wanted to win a primary. That doesn't speak to her truly opposing the police. But I won't try to talk you out of your voting intentions.
Thank you for a nice conversation that doesn't immediately degenerate into name calling. Nice to talk with an adult.
One thing about voting for President that is not talked about, but that affects virtually everyone strongly, is that people vote not just for the candidate but rather because they identify with the candidates' fellow citizens. It is a lot of the reason people will vote for Trump even though they know all about him....but they know a lot of Republicans, have all of their lives, and so vote with their "tribe."
We don't identify, any longer, with Harris' "community." They are, in very powerful voices, anti-police. Every police officer is a racist. We don't agree with a lot of Progressive positions. We don't want to be in their "tribe." Almost all of whom get their "knowledge" (as Harris was doing) about policing from anecdotes, not from data or from experience.
Here is what I mean by that. My wife and I did a back of the envelope calculation a few months ago:
According to her, on a typical day, a police officer will have 20 "stops"/contacts with the public per day. (not counting in corrections, etc.) Multiply that by the number of officers there are in this country (well over 700,000), and you get 14 million stops/encounters each day. Multiply that by 365 and you get 5 billion+ stops per year. What this means is that these powerful and ugly (true) anecdotes of bad interactions between some police and the public are actually extremely rare. And that leads to a different framing of the problem (and different solutions) than the popular one that police need "reforming." Or that Harris should advocate Defunding. For someone in the field, not realizing the big picture of policing is absolutely unforgivable.
Continuing on with the idea that we vote for our tribe, not really for a candidate, you have probably read comments in publications what Progressives think of conservatives as people. It's beyond ugly when they are so much more like them than different. We don't want to be a part of a tribe that thinks Trump voters are abominable people. We have family and friends who are Trump voters. How many Progressives have taken even a few minutes to chat with one?
Thanks again.
Here's what Kamala's campaign just released in response to being called anti-police; https://x.com/GregTSargent/status/1817973955741024318/photo/1
Here is another perspective on that video you provided. She's the best we can do?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C93AkvGBlci/
I don't see her position in this. I don't see her refuting Defunding. All I see is the very telling idea that "well Trump did it too!" Which basically is a way of deflecting from having to take a position and says that we have nothing to say except "we're like Trump, but he's worse."
Thanks for sending me this. Confirms what I have been saying.
https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/kamala-supported-defund-the-police I will vote for Harris, but this is a point of view that needs to be considered. Public Safety is a huge issue in our cities and Kamala was totally hypocritical during the summer of 2020. I'm pretty sure my son, who is also SPD, will not vote for her.
I think I’m considering it!