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Well, here we go: Inauguration Day is coming soon and by the time we do the next mailbag, Donald Trump will be president (again).
It still doesn’t feel entirely real to me, but it’s happening.
Tom McNulty: Thoughts on Mark Cuban 2028? Seems like the ultimate outsider who will work within the system, especially since a heterodox businessman with 99% name recognition seems has been a successful candidate profile recently. Could he win a Democratic primary?
He absolutely “could win,” and I hope he takes a very serious look at it.
Beyond that, it’s very hard to handicap his actual odds, both because of the inherent uncertainty of events and also because, obviously, it would depend on what he actually says and does. But moderate Democrats would benefit from a champion who is not seen as a face of the political establishment in the way that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were. Most conventionally, that would mean a governor or a freshman senator like Obama 2008. But a businessman and celebrity with a record of civic engagement but no time spent in office would fit the bill really well, too.
The other thing he’d have going for him is that if he ran, people would cover him and pay attention to what he says.
This is a really big deal in a primary. Take someone like Montana Governor Steve Bullock in the 2020 cycle. Put Bullock in a pairwise comparison with Bernie Sanders, and he would easily win the majority of voters who kept telling pollsters all cycle that they prioritized electability over socialism. He beats Elizabeth Warren on those grounds easily, too. But I also think he beats Joe Biden. If you sat down and actually thought seriously about Steve Bullock, you would either reach the conclusion, “I want someone very left-wing so I won’t vote for Bullock” or else, “Yeah, Bullock seems like a really strong electability candidate.” And most Democrats wanted a really strong electability candidate! So why didn’t Bullock win? Well, almost nobody ever sat down and actually thought seriously about him. Getting attention is hard if you’re not a former vice president or someone who appeals to noisy activist types. It’s not impossible — just ask Pete Buttigieg — but it is hard, and it’s very important in a crowded primary field.
Cuban would have an instant advantage in the attention game, almost regardless of what he chose to say. Of course, people might not like what he says. And I truly don’t know what he would say. But I think if he said smart, practical stuff, people would be into it.
Michael Adelman: I’m an environmental engineer who works on water facilities in Southern California. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills listening to leading Republicans tell wild lies about our water supply as a way of blaming the libs for the wildfires. The immediate spread of viral bullshit by prominent officials after a disaster strikes me as a new phenomenon, and there seems to be a general problem here - because the public is culturally right-wing, people are inclined to trust GOP bullshit and they want to believe wild lies about the libs. So the GOP can and will mash this button when anything bad happens, ultimately including things that happen under Trump. It’s a problem during disasters when viral bullshit can do actual harm, and it’s a problem for the viability of liberalism generally. What do we do about this? I feel like unless we find messengers with sufficient cultural conservative credibility, we’re just going to get routed like this on every issue regardless of substance. And people are going to get hurt as a result!
It’s an incredibly depressing situation.
Some of it, which is not specific to conservatives, is just the nature of the wide-open media environment created by the internet.
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