Mailbag: Overton window myths

Plus a plan for Texas and the NYC mayoral race

The big news of the week continues to be the unsteady but forward progress of the Republican Party’s Big Beautiful Bill.

I don’t think that it’s a deliberate strategy that the details and contours of the bill keep shifting; GOP leadership is genuinely struggling with narrow majorities and a lack of planning. But the constant shifts do mean that it’s been hard to communicate what exactly is in the legislation at any given moment.

But let’s be clear: Even though the details keep shifting, we’re talking about lower living standards for the poor and a massive increase in federal deficits and borrowing costs, along with a potentially devastating blow to geothermal and nuclear energy, all as the cost of a regressive tax cut. It’s bad.

For other “Republicans are bad” news, read this from Emily Amick on the heartbreaking and awful Adriana Smith case in Georgia.

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Alan Thiessen: Matt, you often urge Democratic candidates to be more moderate. Yes, moderates win more elections, but they follow along helplessly as Republicans drag the Overton window to the right. Is there a path forward for Democrats that will enable them to win elections while resisting the right-wing authoritarian dystopia?

I just don’t think this is true.

If you go back 20 years, the big issues of the day were the war in Iraq, privatizing Social Security, and Republicans wanting to pass a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Democrats won the latter two fights on policy, and “won the argument” about Iraq. Then, the Affordable Care Act happened, Dodd-Frank passed, and marriage equality was won. Republicans were talking about privatizing Medicare, but they lost that fight and stopped talking about it. ACA repeal failed under Trump. There was a very partial rollback of Dodd-Frank under Trump. Now he’s back in office, and he’s pushing Medicaid cuts that I think are genuinely terrible but still represent a more restrained health care agenda than the old ACA repeal effort. Obama’s stance on gay marriage from 2008 would put him on the rightward fringe of the Republican Party today.

Of course, there are other more complicated dynamics you could talk about, like immigration, where the left hasn’t made much policy progress. On the other hand, there are more immigrants both in absolute numbers and as a share of the population today than there were five or ten or fifteen years ago.

More broadly, I think that the Overton Window is not always the best framing device for thinking about policy change. I wrote about it back when Slow Boring first launched, and we’ll probably have a longer updated piece on this soon.

Comment is Not Free: You’ve mentioned a lot about democrats saying a centrist message. Let’s say that they do this, is the progressive vote needed to win? If so, how would you gain the votes and on what issues would you move to the left on?

Let’s take an extreme example. Say someone is running for governor of Texas on a “narrow target” campaign that has exactly two planks:

1. Accept federal Medicaid expansion money

2. Legalize first trimester abortions

Gun control? Nothing. Climate? Nothing. Racial equity? Nothing. LGBT rights? Nothing. Texas has incredibly right-wing public policy on a wide range of issues, and the candidate is promising no change on any of them. Why? Well, because Texas is very conservative, so to win in Texas, you need to stick to a small number of very popular progressive issues. Do you need progressive votes to win along with the votes of almost every moderate and a handful of conservatives in the state? Absolutely. You absolutely need the votes of people who are passionate about banning assault weapons, passionate about climate change, passionate about trans rights, about late-term abortions and labor unions and dozens of other things. You need their votes.

And I think, in this scenario, that you should get their votes because you are going to expand Medicaid and legalize first trimester abortions and Greg Abbott isn’t going to do either of those things.

It seems to me that on the internet, moderates often get unduly whiny about left-wing abstentionists. I said many times during the campaign that Trump winning would be worse for Palestine, and if people wanted to dispute that analysis factually, I was happy to have the argument. But what I mostly saw was people who conceded the point, but felt too angry about Biden’s policy to actually advocate for Kamala Harris. If that’s how you feel, that’s how you feel. To me, Medicaid expansion and first trimester abortion in Texas would be a pretty big deal, and I’d be enthusiastic to vote for someone who delivers that stuff.

Adam: What are your thoughts on UK Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s speech this week on his promise to dramatically cut immigration and proclaiming the UK is at risk of becoming an ‘island of strangers’?