I was perfectly willing to vote for - and did vote for -boring Michael Dukakis. He was a capable technocrat who would have made a perfectly good president, and wouldn't have felt the need to go to war in the Middle East.
I think Matt is underestimated the extent to which the imperative to stand out in a Presidential primary is downstream of zero-sum primaries. Ultimately it will become a top-two fight, usually with a factional subtext. But every other candidate serves as a spoiler for the top two fight. So the first mission of every candidate is to make sure they have a way to break into the top two, and do that especially by appealing directly to a narrow faction while alienating another faction.
Whereas if we had approval voting for primaries, it would select for the least controversial and most unifying candidates. One might think it would be tantamount to handing the party over to the groups, but I don't think policy demanding would be such an effective tactic. The groups don't match the primary electorate. So if they insist on a maximizalist position, they lose, whereas if they can articulate a moderate position as sufficient, they win.
The existence of primaries is one of the things tearing this country apart. Far from giving people a greater say in their government they give the most involved and angry control while papering over the fact that we don't have real contestation (multimember districts etc) in the official election.
If it was up to me we would eliminate the primaries as such and -- for those parties who want public input -- every presidential or house election you could also vote for party delegates who then make the choices about who to run for various offices.
Get a moderate who can pull off the 2012-Biden-veep-debate condescension and people would love it. Need obvious competence - like Mark Kelly, nothing beats an astronaut - and give them a few well placed eye rolls, a few "there you go agains," a few "I knew jack kennedys," and just cynically criticize these idiots and say "actually listen to the guys who didnt get us into losing wars but just did the things to make the country better."
I will just say first I am missing the point from the data table about why Rivet was a stronger performer than the others on the list. Cook says the district is R+1, and she is heavily favored this year, but a D winning a seat like that by 6 or 8 points in 2026 will not be at all remarkable.
And especially in Congress - who even knows what “boring competence” would mean or how it would manifest itself? Is it strategic voting/position-taking? Is she demonstrably better at constituent service? I guess I just don’t get the relevance of House candidate races when you are talking about running for POTUS.
But to that point - taking Beshear as an example - does he have boring competence, or is he just boring? Judging a Governor’s performance is fairly difficult - it’s actually a much easier job than a big city mayor, and very 30,000 foot. I have not heard of him as particularly competent or wonky or knowledgeable or anything. He has taken a couple of smart positions and has a good sincerity vibe.
I think “boring” is the wrong frame. I know people are comfortable with vanilla, inoffensive candidates in OH, for example - I guess that’s about the same as boring. But POTUS is totally different.
We all sort of understand what it takes to win a POTUS nomination, even if we can only specify it after the fact sometimes. Awesome fund raising, superior organization in the early states, and the right configuration of candidates dropping out/staying in as the race proceeds. Some who have succeeded at this have definitely been somewhat boring, but then there is the Obama/Bill Clinton model - both “boring” (competent, wonky) and great communicators.
So “boring” doesn’t work for me as a frame- unless that means you have a behemoth organization (not always Jeb) and other strengths. A “boring” candidate can definitely win a D POTUS primary - and probably will in 2028.
I’m not sure that people can control what they’re interested in (“volition over what we find exciting”). Take working out. Some people hate the activity because it’s boring, and some people do it anyway because they’re interested in looking good. But no one idk meditates (?) on either to change their level of interest in the activity or the result or the balance between the two
I'd take the contra on this point. People can control what interests them. It is just hard to do it. Especially when you aren't under the massive threat of boredom.
Now, you can't just snap and discipline people with tough love into being interested in something. But you can, essentially, build interests by just taking away other options for a bit. Essentially, hunger is the best spice.
Of course, this is not really helpful to politics, I don't think.
I'll also add, I'm exceptionally skeptical of things like WAR. The sample size of elections is far too small to rely on it. Bill Clinton's vote share in the 96 election based on the economy points at a mediocre politician which essentially no one believes.
Gotta look at 2-party vote. Clinton’s share of the 2-party vote in 1996 was 55%, better than Obama 2008 and the best Dem presidential showing since LBJ in 1964.
Well, because congressional Democrats had an incorrect analysis of the macroeconomic situation and when the White House made its stimulus proposal, it did so based on an incorrect analysis of the legislative dynamics.
This gives the White House too much of a pass. Larry Summers was cutting the request down from the WH end based on a belief it was too large.
Underrating the intrinsic value of charisma is a longtime blind spot for political analysts, because we don't have an "IQ for charisma" - we can't actually measure it, so it's hard to do analysis on things that aren't measurable or objectively quantifiable.
Charisma gets you a lot more in life than just winning primaries. It allows you to *win more arguments in more situations* which is clutch in a government designed to be hinged on influence more than raw power.
On the double-hater issue, I'm a long-time traditional Republican who fell into this category for the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections. In 2016, I went 3rd party. There was NO way I was going to vote for Hillary Clinton, and Trump figured to be incompetent, though not off the rails (unlike his current term, where he's both). In 2020 I held my nose and voted for Biden, expecting him to govern as a moderate, but he went full-on progressive. Harris had campaigned in 2020 as a progressive, plus she struck me - and still strikes me - as being as dumb as a box of rocks. I voted 3rd party again, and whenever I feel a tinge of regret I just go back and watch a video clip like one of these.
The first one is an AI fabrication (self-evidently so, in my opinion) so it appears you've created a closed loop where you decide someone is dumb and then eagerly consume fictional content to confirm your judgement.
I decided it long before that video was available; in fact, during the 2020 campaign. I just find it a soothing reminder. And what's your excuse for the second one?
Say you're talking with someone you have some disagreements with and, they share some factoid that they say makes them feel more secure in their political opinions. You find incontrovertible proof that this "fact" is actually false. When you confront them, they don't apologize. They don't reflect on how this falsehood came to be integrated in their understanding of the world. They don't even say, "Oops!" before moving on. They show *complete indifference* to what is true and what is false, and they even say that they *still* find the admitted falsehood comforting. At that point, what value would you expect to get out of the conversation? What would you actually be expecting to get in return for the continued investment of your valuable time?
I'm not in a conversation with anyone, so I don't see how your thought experiment remotely applies. I've already explained to you that I formed my view that Harris is both: 1) a progressive, and 2) as dumb as a box of rocks all the way back in 2020 (and had begun to form it even earlier). Almost everything she said or did post-2020 merely confirmed my assessment of both elements. I had plenty of opportunity to watch her in action as vice-president. And anyone who's being honest knows Biden only selected her due to pressure from James Clyburn. Biden actually wanted Gretchen Whitmer.
I would love if politics was more boring and focused on technical economic policy. But on the electability point: I made a graph showing Democratic senate candidates' performance in the last two cycles compared to Harris' 2024 performance. You can see the hated "corporate democrats" or whatever show up consistently more competitive in red states than super left-wing candidates. https://www.threads.com/@postlibertarian/post/DcjYWdNFX5u
It is interesting the idea that more moderate candidates do better is so controversial. Not sure it would always apply to presidential races, but it seems true at the senate level!
While I agree "electable" and "exciting" in a primary is not the same as "electable" and "exciting" in a general election, I can't agree that excitement doesn't matter a whole lot in general elections - especially presidential. at least since 1980, the only time the less charismatic presidential candidate won was Biden over Trump - and Biden barely won despite Trump being the most scandal plagued president ever and the election occurs during the greatest disruption since ww2.
if you want a moderate to win the white house, you need Dwayne the Rock Johnson, Matt Damon or someone like that to take up the centrist cause. Mark Cuban 10 years ago.
Well, and it's also relevant that we just actively decided to have a primary process that rewards these things — based on the impression that it'd be more democratic, despite zero data suggesting that it would be more democratic, because the mechanic itself (direct voting amongst membership) trends democratic relative to a bunch of things like caucuses and conventions.
But — leaving aside the broader question about whether 'democratic' is a coherent concept that applies to membership organizations like parties that operate institutionally — the process itself just empirically never became especially democratic. Tiny amounts of very unrepresentative people vote in primaries, with the result that candidates who are both i) not well-suited for the general and ii) not well-representative of the broad interests of Americans wind up percolating to the top.
I mean, the 2026 MI Senate primary got 1.5 million votes. Slotkin got 2.7 million votes in 2024. By the same token, the primary Rivet won her nominatin in 2024 had 80,000 votes while she got 217,000 votes in the primary - weird how there's no worries that primary was 'unrepresentative' despite less voters as a percentage of Democratic voters turned out.
The anti-primary people need a better idea 'those people you don't trust get to decide who you vote for' because I'd rather be ruled by a mob I disagree with than ruled by my Betters who try to shove a choice down my throat.
The actual reality is the reason voters don't turn out for primaries isn't either as my lefty friends argued, there is no true lefty candidate or as now upset centrists argue, all the candidates are too left-wing and in hock to the evil evil Groups, it's they don't care that much about politics.
For all the talk, I bet older primaries as a percentage got even less turnout, yet centrists would say that was more representative because elites who controlled much of the money got to basically decide who'd be the nominee.
> weird how there's no worries that primary was 'unrepresentative' despite less voters as a percentage of Democratic voters turned out.
Because that's not what "representative" means. A poll with a larger sample isn't necessarily more representative than a poll with a smaller sample. Adding a bunch of people to your sample will make it less representative if they shift the demographics in a way not mirrored in the general population.
In the context of primaries, the primary voters are the sample and the likely voters who would consider voting Democrat are the population. The quality of the primary process should mainly be judged on whether it the population's opinions have been proportionately sampled, with turnout a secondary concern.
Weird how when the centrists win a primary, it's "see lefties, you don't even have support within the party" but when the lefties win a primary, it's "actually you only won because primary turnout is unrepresentative."
Doesn't that really depend on the scope of the primary? A statewide primary with low turnout is bound to be unrepresentative whereas at lower levels it could easily skew one way or the other.
I am not totally sure how to respond to any of this, since while I don’t think your argument is bad or anything, I also don’t understand how it’s especially related to much of what I’m saying. My only point is that primaries are membership organizations for which intuitions about ‘democratic representation’ don’t and need not apply, in addition to the fact that their putatively ‘more democratic’ mechanic isn’t especially democratic - since, like you say, most people just aren’t that interested in politics.
I mean, by that argument, why have elections at all? Most people aren't that interested in politics in general. Just install a bunch of technocrats who know better.
No - exactly not this! The difference is that “general” elections are held to constitute a government, which involves the mechanics of deploying force and resources towards the ends a society desires. A political party is a completely different thing than that: charged with neither governance nor security imperatives, it is a private membership organization constructed towards the purpose of supporting and advocating for particular candidates geared towards a particular slate of orientational policy preferences (and, originally, conducting policy analysis surrounding those preferences towards the end of candidate governance). But this is just a categorically distinct thing!
I was perfectly willing to vote for - and did vote for -boring Michael Dukakis. He was a capable technocrat who would have made a perfectly good president, and wouldn't have felt the need to go to war in the Middle East.
Sigh.
I think Matt is underestimated the extent to which the imperative to stand out in a Presidential primary is downstream of zero-sum primaries. Ultimately it will become a top-two fight, usually with a factional subtext. But every other candidate serves as a spoiler for the top two fight. So the first mission of every candidate is to make sure they have a way to break into the top two, and do that especially by appealing directly to a narrow faction while alienating another faction.
Whereas if we had approval voting for primaries, it would select for the least controversial and most unifying candidates. One might think it would be tantamount to handing the party over to the groups, but I don't think policy demanding would be such an effective tactic. The groups don't match the primary electorate. So if they insist on a maximizalist position, they lose, whereas if they can articulate a moderate position as sufficient, they win.
The existence of primaries is one of the things tearing this country apart. Far from giving people a greater say in their government they give the most involved and angry control while papering over the fact that we don't have real contestation (multimember districts etc) in the official election.
If it was up to me we would eliminate the primaries as such and -- for those parties who want public input -- every presidential or house election you could also vote for party delegates who then make the choices about who to run for various offices.
Get a moderate who can pull off the 2012-Biden-veep-debate condescension and people would love it. Need obvious competence - like Mark Kelly, nothing beats an astronaut - and give them a few well placed eye rolls, a few "there you go agains," a few "I knew jack kennedys," and just cynically criticize these idiots and say "actually listen to the guys who didnt get us into losing wars but just did the things to make the country better."
Not sure if the toothpaste can be but back in the tube. Isn’t this just the latest part of society to be subsumed into entertainment
I will just say first I am missing the point from the data table about why Rivet was a stronger performer than the others on the list. Cook says the district is R+1, and she is heavily favored this year, but a D winning a seat like that by 6 or 8 points in 2026 will not be at all remarkable.
And especially in Congress - who even knows what “boring competence” would mean or how it would manifest itself? Is it strategic voting/position-taking? Is she demonstrably better at constituent service? I guess I just don’t get the relevance of House candidate races when you are talking about running for POTUS.
But to that point - taking Beshear as an example - does he have boring competence, or is he just boring? Judging a Governor’s performance is fairly difficult - it’s actually a much easier job than a big city mayor, and very 30,000 foot. I have not heard of him as particularly competent or wonky or knowledgeable or anything. He has taken a couple of smart positions and has a good sincerity vibe.
I think “boring” is the wrong frame. I know people are comfortable with vanilla, inoffensive candidates in OH, for example - I guess that’s about the same as boring. But POTUS is totally different.
We all sort of understand what it takes to win a POTUS nomination, even if we can only specify it after the fact sometimes. Awesome fund raising, superior organization in the early states, and the right configuration of candidates dropping out/staying in as the race proceeds. Some who have succeeded at this have definitely been somewhat boring, but then there is the Obama/Bill Clinton model - both “boring” (competent, wonky) and great communicators.
So “boring” doesn’t work for me as a frame- unless that means you have a behemoth organization (not always Jeb) and other strengths. A “boring” candidate can definitely win a D POTUS primary - and probably will in 2028.
I’m not sure that people can control what they’re interested in (“volition over what we find exciting”). Take working out. Some people hate the activity because it’s boring, and some people do it anyway because they’re interested in looking good. But no one idk meditates (?) on either to change their level of interest in the activity or the result or the balance between the two
I'd take the contra on this point. People can control what interests them. It is just hard to do it. Especially when you aren't under the massive threat of boredom.
Now, you can't just snap and discipline people with tough love into being interested in something. But you can, essentially, build interests by just taking away other options for a bit. Essentially, hunger is the best spice.
Of course, this is not really helpful to politics, I don't think.
how do you control what interests you
I said how. Take away all alternatives and be terribly bored. For a long time.
I'll also add, I'm exceptionally skeptical of things like WAR. The sample size of elections is far too small to rely on it. Bill Clinton's vote share in the 96 election based on the economy points at a mediocre politician which essentially no one believes.
Gotta look at 2-party vote. Clinton’s share of the 2-party vote in 1996 was 55%, better than Obama 2008 and the best Dem presidential showing since LBJ in 1964.
Well, because congressional Democrats had an incorrect analysis of the macroeconomic situation and when the White House made its stimulus proposal, it did so based on an incorrect analysis of the legislative dynamics.
This gives the White House too much of a pass. Larry Summers was cutting the request down from the WH end based on a belief it was too large.
Underrating the intrinsic value of charisma is a longtime blind spot for political analysts, because we don't have an "IQ for charisma" - we can't actually measure it, so it's hard to do analysis on things that aren't measurable or objectively quantifiable.
Charisma gets you a lot more in life than just winning primaries. It allows you to *win more arguments in more situations* which is clutch in a government designed to be hinged on influence more than raw power.
On the double-hater issue, I'm a long-time traditional Republican who fell into this category for the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections. In 2016, I went 3rd party. There was NO way I was going to vote for Hillary Clinton, and Trump figured to be incompetent, though not off the rails (unlike his current term, where he's both). In 2020 I held my nose and voted for Biden, expecting him to govern as a moderate, but he went full-on progressive. Harris had campaigned in 2020 as a progressive, plus she struck me - and still strikes me - as being as dumb as a box of rocks. I voted 3rd party again, and whenever I feel a tinge of regret I just go back and watch a video clip like one of these.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FgwGNfh48Oo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bSTqokjNEE
Given the current state of the Republican party, I could easily vote for a Democrat like Andy Beshear or Roy Cooper. But an AOC? No. Never.
The first one is an AI fabrication (self-evidently so, in my opinion) so it appears you've created a closed loop where you decide someone is dumb and then eagerly consume fictional content to confirm your judgement.
I decided it long before that video was available; in fact, during the 2020 campaign. I just find it a soothing reminder. And what's your excuse for the second one?
Say you're talking with someone you have some disagreements with and, they share some factoid that they say makes them feel more secure in their political opinions. You find incontrovertible proof that this "fact" is actually false. When you confront them, they don't apologize. They don't reflect on how this falsehood came to be integrated in their understanding of the world. They don't even say, "Oops!" before moving on. They show *complete indifference* to what is true and what is false, and they even say that they *still* find the admitted falsehood comforting. At that point, what value would you expect to get out of the conversation? What would you actually be expecting to get in return for the continued investment of your valuable time?
I'm not in a conversation with anyone, so I don't see how your thought experiment remotely applies. I've already explained to you that I formed my view that Harris is both: 1) a progressive, and 2) as dumb as a box of rocks all the way back in 2020 (and had begun to form it even earlier). Almost everything she said or did post-2020 merely confirmed my assessment of both elements. I had plenty of opportunity to watch her in action as vice-president. And anyone who's being honest knows Biden only selected her due to pressure from James Clyburn. Biden actually wanted Gretchen Whitmer.
But politics *IS* pro wrestling!
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/donald-trump-america-really-hulk-hogan-america-wrestling-kayfabe-david-shoemaker-vince-mcmahon
I would love if politics was more boring and focused on technical economic policy. But on the electability point: I made a graph showing Democratic senate candidates' performance in the last two cycles compared to Harris' 2024 performance. You can see the hated "corporate democrats" or whatever show up consistently more competitive in red states than super left-wing candidates. https://www.threads.com/@postlibertarian/post/DcjYWdNFX5u
It is interesting the idea that more moderate candidates do better is so controversial. Not sure it would always apply to presidential races, but it seems true at the senate level!
While I agree "electable" and "exciting" in a primary is not the same as "electable" and "exciting" in a general election, I can't agree that excitement doesn't matter a whole lot in general elections - especially presidential. at least since 1980, the only time the less charismatic presidential candidate won was Biden over Trump - and Biden barely won despite Trump being the most scandal plagued president ever and the election occurs during the greatest disruption since ww2.
if you want a moderate to win the white house, you need Dwayne the Rock Johnson, Matt Damon or someone like that to take up the centrist cause. Mark Cuban 10 years ago.
Could a politician do well by really leaning into the "I'm boring" message? Put it in the ads, talk about it all the time, and say why that's good.
Well, and it's also relevant that we just actively decided to have a primary process that rewards these things — based on the impression that it'd be more democratic, despite zero data suggesting that it would be more democratic, because the mechanic itself (direct voting amongst membership) trends democratic relative to a bunch of things like caucuses and conventions.
But — leaving aside the broader question about whether 'democratic' is a coherent concept that applies to membership organizations like parties that operate institutionally — the process itself just empirically never became especially democratic. Tiny amounts of very unrepresentative people vote in primaries, with the result that candidates who are both i) not well-suited for the general and ii) not well-representative of the broad interests of Americans wind up percolating to the top.
And maybe we could just not do this?
I mean, the 2026 MI Senate primary got 1.5 million votes. Slotkin got 2.7 million votes in 2024. By the same token, the primary Rivet won her nominatin in 2024 had 80,000 votes while she got 217,000 votes in the primary - weird how there's no worries that primary was 'unrepresentative' despite less voters as a percentage of Democratic voters turned out.
The anti-primary people need a better idea 'those people you don't trust get to decide who you vote for' because I'd rather be ruled by a mob I disagree with than ruled by my Betters who try to shove a choice down my throat.
The actual reality is the reason voters don't turn out for primaries isn't either as my lefty friends argued, there is no true lefty candidate or as now upset centrists argue, all the candidates are too left-wing and in hock to the evil evil Groups, it's they don't care that much about politics.
For all the talk, I bet older primaries as a percentage got even less turnout, yet centrists would say that was more representative because elites who controlled much of the money got to basically decide who'd be the nominee.
> weird how there's no worries that primary was 'unrepresentative' despite less voters as a percentage of Democratic voters turned out.
Because that's not what "representative" means. A poll with a larger sample isn't necessarily more representative than a poll with a smaller sample. Adding a bunch of people to your sample will make it less representative if they shift the demographics in a way not mirrored in the general population.
In the context of primaries, the primary voters are the sample and the likely voters who would consider voting Democrat are the population. The quality of the primary process should mainly be judged on whether it the population's opinions have been proportionately sampled, with turnout a secondary concern.
Weird how when the centrists win a primary, it's "see lefties, you don't even have support within the party" but when the lefties win a primary, it's "actually you only won because primary turnout is unrepresentative."
Doesn't that really depend on the scope of the primary? A statewide primary with low turnout is bound to be unrepresentative whereas at lower levels it could easily skew one way or the other.
I am not totally sure how to respond to any of this, since while I don’t think your argument is bad or anything, I also don’t understand how it’s especially related to much of what I’m saying. My only point is that primaries are membership organizations for which intuitions about ‘democratic representation’ don’t and need not apply, in addition to the fact that their putatively ‘more democratic’ mechanic isn’t especially democratic - since, like you say, most people just aren’t that interested in politics.
I mean, by that argument, why have elections at all? Most people aren't that interested in politics in general. Just install a bunch of technocrats who know better.
No - exactly not this! The difference is that “general” elections are held to constitute a government, which involves the mechanics of deploying force and resources towards the ends a society desires. A political party is a completely different thing than that: charged with neither governance nor security imperatives, it is a private membership organization constructed towards the purpose of supporting and advocating for particular candidates geared towards a particular slate of orientational policy preferences (and, originally, conducting policy analysis surrounding those preferences towards the end of candidate governance). But this is just a categorically distinct thing!