Ultimately, real polarization isn't about having very different views about policy -- it's about hating and feeling disliked by the other tribe/party and this happens mostly via culture war issues (so u think ppl like me are inherently bad/racist/sexist/transphobic vs. so you think ppl like me don't deserve equal respect)
And Trump himself is a walking culture war issue.
It didn't matter when he did kinda moderate things his very attitude and behavior offended college educated liberals to the bone and the right loved him *for* that. He could have expanded Obama care and increased immigration and I'm not sure he wouldn't still have increased polarization.
I would like a citation for “indulgence of Russian nationalism.” I’m aware that Trump wanted better relations with Russia but this strikes me as a TDS pander.
I’m not sure that Biden (and some other individuals?) isn’t already doing his best to project moderation. Like, who is supposed to be the moderating agent here? Sure people make choices. I guess I’m curious about how these Warren staffer dynamics work. Why do the Biden people feel the need to bring them in? Seems like there’s something going on with the group dynamic.
I wonder whether any democratic caucus or administration at the state level has resisted Warrenification thru staff creep. Like, sure Biden is complicit in the Warrenizing of his administration. And maybe he could have walked uphill and resisted it. I’m just not sure how steep that hill would have been.
I don’t think trump could have moderated. 1) he doesn’t have the discipline. 2) he alienated the moderate wing of potential GOP staffers. 3) so his administration and orbit were all wingnuts. Taken together, it would have been amazing if he was able to chart a more moderate course
I guess moderation as you describe is generally a good idea, but I don't see a precise connection to electoral outcomes. Your 3 truths about Hillary/Trump are persuasive but hardly undeniable. In elections as close as 2016 and 2020, "Trump won because X" and "Biden won because Y" have a decent chance of being correct but an equally decent chance of being irrelevant. I am not a firm believer in professional campaign analytics wisdom either, and that's why I put most of this in the unknowable category.
If a candidate wants to be more moderate, go ahead, but trying to show a direct connection to outcomes seems futile.
I'm trying to figure out how Biden's "move to the left" post-inauguration either happened or hurt him. When I read Andrew Sullivan (before I cancelled my subscription) he would rail about how the Biden Administration had been captured by trans rights extremists. Really? It's hard to see and Sullivan never offered receipts.
The Biden team (and congressional Democrats) pursued pretty left-wing legislation for quite a while (too long, imo) but actually never passed anything that moderates would hate and they wound up with an excellent legislative record.
Perhaps it was student loans? I think that hurt perceptions of the Biden administration, but that was more interest group politics than being "left wing," but I can concede that one. They overshot on that one.
But as for being captured by progressives? The most obvious instance of that was the Biden team opening up the doors in the transition to the Sunrise Movement (yuck) and putting them on critical transition teams. With what result? The IRA, blessed by Manchin, which is fairly universally seen as the crown jewel and sterling achievement of the administration.
So what is it? Putting Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court? Great choice, and necessary tending to the most critical part of the base.
I agree his leftward shift is way overstated. Even on student loans, where Biden did move left, the Biden proposal was massively compromised: activists wanted total cancelation of all debt, and the administration offered a means-tested, $10-$20K reduction to qualified borrowers.
Biden's big omissions have been regulatory reform and tax reform.
I want to see more analysis/discussion of the efficiency of the IRA subsidies for zero co2 emission energy, storage and CCS In principle the subsides are given the wrong way to investment rather than output. But whether it is significantly wrong or not depends on the details.
Seems wrong to just keep saying "Trump ran as a moderate" when his signature campaign promises were to build the wall and ban Muslims. The first thing to tank his popularity was following through on the Muslim ban. Maybe specify that he ran as a moderate *on economic issues*.
To me "moderate" doesn't mean "well considered policies arrived at by sober analysis." It means, "beliefs don't line up cleanly with the main polarized camps, in a way that scrambles the coalitions a bit."
Trump's rhetoric was extreme in many ways, but his stated positions scrambled the existing politics effectively enough to win.
Well, he also ran in 2016 as a relative moderate on religion (hilariously inept "God talk" aside), LGBTQ issues (he wasn't anti-SSM) and gun control (basically made no mention of it that I can recall and he certainly didn't go out of his way to pose with guns like a lot of GOP candidates did) and "semi-moderately" on abortion (Trump for about 30 seconds actually took the most extreme position on abortion of any of the 2016 GOP candidates -- prosecuting women for murder for having abortions -- but he quickly walked it back and pretty much no one believed him in the first place).
The thing you want to be seen as is "not partisan"
Donald Trump didn't come off as a partisan Republican, and that was a big benefit for him. Swing voters hate polarization and extreme partisans more than they hate extreme ideology itself.
The flaw in the "Bernie would've won" narrative is and always has been that the Sanders primary challenge forced Clinton to take more left-wing positions than she otherwise would have.
We saw in 2020 that the one major candidate who didn't take the bait on Julian Castro's "decriminalize border crossings" bait happened to be the one who won the nomination. Actual Democratic primary voters are pretty well to the right of where the consultant class convinces candidates they are, and most of the successful left-wing primary challenges to incumbents have taken advantage of more mundane factors like an absentee Representative or a diversifying district or an old redistricting fight.
Matt writes: "Perhaps the clearest example of this is Donald Trump, who on Election Day 2016 was seen as a badly flawed candidate with a moderate ideology — more like Clinton, Gerald Ford, or Bush the Elder than Obama, Reagan, or W." Who is doing the seeing? Matt drops in a chart from FiveThirtyEight which came from On the Issues. As 538 explains, "When you totaled up Trump’s ideological score on economic and social issues from the website OnTheIssues — which assigns an ideological grade to politicians’ statements and votes on a scale that we’ve converted to go from -5 (very liberal) to +5 (very conservative) — he came in at +42.5." The numbers in that chart do not reflect public opinion or knowledge. They reflect how data journalists assigned arbitrary numbers to events they interpreted as "conservative " or "liberal", then ran them through a bespoke formula and wrote down their results. That chart is not evidence that voters in 2016 believed Trump was a "moderate."
In my professional life, I’m a hard core math person. I offer this in contrast to what I’m about to say. I think that vibes, mood, momentum, and a general zeitgeist are real and important in politics. I think voters (people) use a lot of motivated reasoning to justify what they want to do, and that gives outsized importance to small moments that can be used as evidence.
So much of the Obama campaign was about creating social permission to vote for him by lowering polarization. David Axelrod has run this campaign multiple times and it’s very effective. So, I agree polarization is a choice.
At the same time I absolutely don’t believe that you could switch Dukakis and Clinton and get the opposite results due to structural factors. There’s just no way Dukakis has the credibility with Southerners and personal charisma to pull it off. Obama had great timing, a great campaign, but also incredible charisma. Real artists made giant posters of his face and put them everywhere. I personally know some one that saw Obama get out of a car in DC, decided he would be President some day, and quit his job to go work for him. Hillary Clinton is not the same. Trump is closer. AOC is closer, if she carefully managed her career to reach that goal. Another vibes thing, I realize. But people are animals.
Seems like the "structural" flipside is that in 1992 Bill Clinton *could* make the choice to punch left because there were so few people out there - left-of-center Americans were so desperate to win that no one was punching rightward at Bill. Whereas that wasn't the case in 2016 or 2020. Hillary punched left because there were so many leftists punching her. That was a bad choice on her part, but it was a legitimately difficult choice, and one that Bill never really had to face.
If there's a reason to be down on Biden in 2024 it's his choice to move towards many Progressive positions on policy, tarnishing his more moderate image. In 2020 Biden was rightly viewed as the more moderate candidate (and this was based on an image Biden spent decades cultivating) and since entering office: Biden has spent nearly three years now damaging his brand. Many Republicans I know will say: "I liked the old Joe Biden, I dislike the new one who caved to all the Sanders people in his White House" and they mean it. Some think he's too old and senile to stand up to them, some just think he changed.
Either way, I think one of Biden's best pitches is when he made a speech and asked the audience if he really looked like a guy who opposed the police and had sympathy for rioters? While I don't think that reversed Democratic losses: I do think it stemmed the tide. Why? Because Biden has a long history of supporting police, a long history of opposing rioters, and had a bunch of Progressives griping about how he supported an evil crime bill during the Clinton administration.
Biden getting a little feisty with Bernie Sanders in that last debate helped him, and sadly Biden does not have many chances to burnish that idea between now and Nov. 2024.
I would not say he has moved to the left on what he campaigned on, but the positions he chose to take are well to the left of where Biden was in 2016. Now as President his positions have more salience and it shows.
Totally agree. I think the missing piece here is that moderate Dems need to more effectively fight the intellectual battle with Leftists who preach a simplistic ideology with bad guys and good guys. Losing the intellectual battle to Leftists on Twitter and on college campuses really does leave Dems with a vulnerable left flank, and indeed Leftists have shown themselves utterly, cravenly willing to desert at the worst times, consequences be damned.
The people running Hilary’s campaign did the country an extreme disservice. There were so many mistakes. Assuming the “handoff” from Obama. Underestimating Trump and his followers, not being tougher during the debates, not controlling the narrative on the email thing. Too much reliance on polling. Most of all, not showing up in Wisconsin. I don’t think left/right policy or even likeability had much to do with it. They just misread the public and ran the wrong campaign. Bad politics.
I think an incredibly obvious break with Reagan-Reagan-Bush was that Obama chose to promote Clinton over Biden.
Obama doesn't seem to respect his former veep at all, and if Pod Save America is any indication, Obama's staffers don't either.
We obviously can't run the counter-factual, but I think Biden would have won in 2016.
Ultimately, real polarization isn't about having very different views about policy -- it's about hating and feeling disliked by the other tribe/party and this happens mostly via culture war issues (so u think ppl like me are inherently bad/racist/sexist/transphobic vs. so you think ppl like me don't deserve equal respect)
And Trump himself is a walking culture war issue.
It didn't matter when he did kinda moderate things his very attitude and behavior offended college educated liberals to the bone and the right loved him *for* that. He could have expanded Obama care and increased immigration and I'm not sure he wouldn't still have increased polarization.
I would like a citation for “indulgence of Russian nationalism.” I’m aware that Trump wanted better relations with Russia but this strikes me as a TDS pander.
I’m not sure that Biden (and some other individuals?) isn’t already doing his best to project moderation. Like, who is supposed to be the moderating agent here? Sure people make choices. I guess I’m curious about how these Warren staffer dynamics work. Why do the Biden people feel the need to bring them in? Seems like there’s something going on with the group dynamic.
I wonder whether any democratic caucus or administration at the state level has resisted Warrenification thru staff creep. Like, sure Biden is complicit in the Warrenizing of his administration. And maybe he could have walked uphill and resisted it. I’m just not sure how steep that hill would have been.
I don’t think trump could have moderated. 1) he doesn’t have the discipline. 2) he alienated the moderate wing of potential GOP staffers. 3) so his administration and orbit were all wingnuts. Taken together, it would have been amazing if he was able to chart a more moderate course
I guess moderation as you describe is generally a good idea, but I don't see a precise connection to electoral outcomes. Your 3 truths about Hillary/Trump are persuasive but hardly undeniable. In elections as close as 2016 and 2020, "Trump won because X" and "Biden won because Y" have a decent chance of being correct but an equally decent chance of being irrelevant. I am not a firm believer in professional campaign analytics wisdom either, and that's why I put most of this in the unknowable category.
If a candidate wants to be more moderate, go ahead, but trying to show a direct connection to outcomes seems futile.
I'm trying to figure out how Biden's "move to the left" post-inauguration either happened or hurt him. When I read Andrew Sullivan (before I cancelled my subscription) he would rail about how the Biden Administration had been captured by trans rights extremists. Really? It's hard to see and Sullivan never offered receipts.
The Biden team (and congressional Democrats) pursued pretty left-wing legislation for quite a while (too long, imo) but actually never passed anything that moderates would hate and they wound up with an excellent legislative record.
Perhaps it was student loans? I think that hurt perceptions of the Biden administration, but that was more interest group politics than being "left wing," but I can concede that one. They overshot on that one.
But as for being captured by progressives? The most obvious instance of that was the Biden team opening up the doors in the transition to the Sunrise Movement (yuck) and putting them on critical transition teams. With what result? The IRA, blessed by Manchin, which is fairly universally seen as the crown jewel and sterling achievement of the administration.
So what is it? Putting Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court? Great choice, and necessary tending to the most critical part of the base.
Anything I'm missing?
I agree his leftward shift is way overstated. Even on student loans, where Biden did move left, the Biden proposal was massively compromised: activists wanted total cancelation of all debt, and the administration offered a means-tested, $10-$20K reduction to qualified borrowers.
Biden's big omissions have been regulatory reform and tax reform.
I want to see more analysis/discussion of the efficiency of the IRA subsidies for zero co2 emission energy, storage and CCS In principle the subsides are given the wrong way to investment rather than output. But whether it is significantly wrong or not depends on the details.
Seems wrong to just keep saying "Trump ran as a moderate" when his signature campaign promises were to build the wall and ban Muslims. The first thing to tank his popularity was following through on the Muslim ban. Maybe specify that he ran as a moderate *on economic issues*.
To me "moderate" doesn't mean "well considered policies arrived at by sober analysis." It means, "beliefs don't line up cleanly with the main polarized camps, in a way that scrambles the coalitions a bit."
Trump's rhetoric was extreme in many ways, but his stated positions scrambled the existing politics effectively enough to win.
Well, he also ran in 2016 as a relative moderate on religion (hilariously inept "God talk" aside), LGBTQ issues (he wasn't anti-SSM) and gun control (basically made no mention of it that I can recall and he certainly didn't go out of his way to pose with guns like a lot of GOP candidates did) and "semi-moderately" on abortion (Trump for about 30 seconds actually took the most extreme position on abortion of any of the 2016 GOP candidates -- prosecuting women for murder for having abortions -- but he quickly walked it back and pretty much no one believed him in the first place).
I don't think the opposite of "extreme" is necessarily "moderate." Sometimes it's just "incoherent."
Objectively, you're correct, but I'm not so sure it works the same way for lower information voters.
I think moderate is the wrong word.
The thing you want to be seen as is "not partisan"
Donald Trump didn't come off as a partisan Republican, and that was a big benefit for him. Swing voters hate polarization and extreme partisans more than they hate extreme ideology itself.
The "Two Corinthians" moment was when I said to the evangelicals I know "really, this is your guy?"
I presume that they would then blurt something about King David and change the subject?
Yes.
The flaw in the "Bernie would've won" narrative is and always has been that the Sanders primary challenge forced Clinton to take more left-wing positions than she otherwise would have.
We saw in 2020 that the one major candidate who didn't take the bait on Julian Castro's "decriminalize border crossings" bait happened to be the one who won the nomination. Actual Democratic primary voters are pretty well to the right of where the consultant class convinces candidates they are, and most of the successful left-wing primary challenges to incumbents have taken advantage of more mundane factors like an absentee Representative or a diversifying district or an old redistricting fight.
Matt writes: "Perhaps the clearest example of this is Donald Trump, who on Election Day 2016 was seen as a badly flawed candidate with a moderate ideology — more like Clinton, Gerald Ford, or Bush the Elder than Obama, Reagan, or W." Who is doing the seeing? Matt drops in a chart from FiveThirtyEight which came from On the Issues. As 538 explains, "When you totaled up Trump’s ideological score on economic and social issues from the website OnTheIssues — which assigns an ideological grade to politicians’ statements and votes on a scale that we’ve converted to go from -5 (very liberal) to +5 (very conservative) — he came in at +42.5." The numbers in that chart do not reflect public opinion or knowledge. They reflect how data journalists assigned arbitrary numbers to events they interpreted as "conservative " or "liberal", then ran them through a bespoke formula and wrote down their results. That chart is not evidence that voters in 2016 believed Trump was a "moderate."
In my professional life, I’m a hard core math person. I offer this in contrast to what I’m about to say. I think that vibes, mood, momentum, and a general zeitgeist are real and important in politics. I think voters (people) use a lot of motivated reasoning to justify what they want to do, and that gives outsized importance to small moments that can be used as evidence.
So much of the Obama campaign was about creating social permission to vote for him by lowering polarization. David Axelrod has run this campaign multiple times and it’s very effective. So, I agree polarization is a choice.
At the same time I absolutely don’t believe that you could switch Dukakis and Clinton and get the opposite results due to structural factors. There’s just no way Dukakis has the credibility with Southerners and personal charisma to pull it off. Obama had great timing, a great campaign, but also incredible charisma. Real artists made giant posters of his face and put them everywhere. I personally know some one that saw Obama get out of a car in DC, decided he would be President some day, and quit his job to go work for him. Hillary Clinton is not the same. Trump is closer. AOC is closer, if she carefully managed her career to reach that goal. Another vibes thing, I realize. But people are animals.
Seems like the "structural" flipside is that in 1992 Bill Clinton *could* make the choice to punch left because there were so few people out there - left-of-center Americans were so desperate to win that no one was punching rightward at Bill. Whereas that wasn't the case in 2016 or 2020. Hillary punched left because there were so many leftists punching her. That was a bad choice on her part, but it was a legitimately difficult choice, and one that Bill never really had to face.
If there's a reason to be down on Biden in 2024 it's his choice to move towards many Progressive positions on policy, tarnishing his more moderate image. In 2020 Biden was rightly viewed as the more moderate candidate (and this was based on an image Biden spent decades cultivating) and since entering office: Biden has spent nearly three years now damaging his brand. Many Republicans I know will say: "I liked the old Joe Biden, I dislike the new one who caved to all the Sanders people in his White House" and they mean it. Some think he's too old and senile to stand up to them, some just think he changed.
Either way, I think one of Biden's best pitches is when he made a speech and asked the audience if he really looked like a guy who opposed the police and had sympathy for rioters? While I don't think that reversed Democratic losses: I do think it stemmed the tide. Why? Because Biden has a long history of supporting police, a long history of opposing rioters, and had a bunch of Progressives griping about how he supported an evil crime bill during the Clinton administration.
Biden getting a little feisty with Bernie Sanders in that last debate helped him, and sadly Biden does not have many chances to burnish that idea between now and Nov. 2024.
In what ways have Biden's policies been to the left of what he campaigned on?
I would not say he has moved to the left on what he campaigned on, but the positions he chose to take are well to the left of where Biden was in 2016. Now as President his positions have more salience and it shows.
Totally agree. I think the missing piece here is that moderate Dems need to more effectively fight the intellectual battle with Leftists who preach a simplistic ideology with bad guys and good guys. Losing the intellectual battle to Leftists on Twitter and on college campuses really does leave Dems with a vulnerable left flank, and indeed Leftists have shown themselves utterly, cravenly willing to desert at the worst times, consequences be damned.
The people running Hilary’s campaign did the country an extreme disservice. There were so many mistakes. Assuming the “handoff” from Obama. Underestimating Trump and his followers, not being tougher during the debates, not controlling the narrative on the email thing. Too much reliance on polling. Most of all, not showing up in Wisconsin. I don’t think left/right policy or even likeability had much to do with it. They just misread the public and ran the wrong campaign. Bad politics.