"But beating Republicans in North Carolina is obviously more relevant to the broad question of how to stop MAGA than beating Andrew Cuomo in a primary in New York City!"
I don't think that this offhanded aside is accurate. History and every indication suggests that Cuomo would have immediately bent the knee to Trump, up-to-and-including looking the other way at Minneapolis-style ICE raids in NYC.
At the very least they are equally important (edge to Cooper if Dems end up as a +1 majority in the Senate), but that's just an argument for candidate-electorate fit.
I couldn't agree more but this feels an awful lot like wanting voters to approach elections as high minded elites, which they basically won't do. The best they can do is try to imagine which candidate other people will like better and vote for that guy, which they do when they're desperate to win (Kerry, Biden) or vote for the boring guy when he's the heir apparent (Gore). 2008 was an outlier in a good way because there were two appealing candidates and John Edwards.
It says something that half of the Republican presidents of my lifetime have been celebrities, with the other half being Bushes. That hasn't been healthy for America.
Local races will always contain some question about the locality's relation *to* the nation and, in that context, being comparatively boring or plain-spoken can be an advantage. I'm still surprised how far some people can get in politics without passing even basic entry-level competence for public speaking, but whatever, congratulations: you don't even have to speak fluently or confidently to become governor of a top-12 state. Yay?
To be President, however, is to embody the greatness of a peerless continental hyper-power. If big changes are needed, one must credibly speak for them. If only little changes are needed, one must credibly embody the greatness of what already exists. Either way requires a more expansive view of the country and more iron in the blood than the parties have been able to muster for some time.
How is a string of surgical campaigns and paper thin margins not the most boring thing already?
My most "can't say that out loud" take in politics is that a high voter turnout is actually bad. It usually means one of two things:
1.) Politics/the government began to meddle in your life in such a way that you had no choice than to go vote in order to stop it (abortion bans, self-inflicted economic crises, stupid wars)
2.) Or the electorate got extremely fired up about some dumb shit, driving a lot of uninformed voters to the polls. (Culture wars, racism, Israel/Palestine)
As Matt says, if a lot of voters feel like they don't HAVE to go vote, that is often downstream of a benign societal situation. It should be the goal that people don't feel forced to care about politics!
I remember when I was a kid in the 90s and early 00's, pundits here in Germany would be hand-wringing about the low voter turnout in our state and federal elections (which was routinely in the 50s and low 60s). Now our voter turnout is 80 percent, and seeing how the AfD performs, most of those pundits probably regret curling that monkey's paw.
Primaries are universally terrible but I don’t even think we can “go back” at this point. If you ended primaries tomorrow the ppl currently in the smoke filled rooms would collectively be too MAGAfied or NGO progressive blob brained to make any strategic decision calibrated for the boring general electorate as is. The toothpaste can’t get back in the tube.
It would help if there were less (like approximatley zero) poling of who is ahead an behind, and more on changing positions on policies. Yes, this is sort of like quntum physiscs in that the particle does not HAVE a position untill it is measured, but this is just all the more reason to meaure it.
"I’m still not entirely sure what went down with Biden-era immigration policy, but it’s clear that on some level the administration made a mistake."
Democrats really need a (correct) underatanting that ie WAS a mistake and how it happened, because Republicans DO have a coherent (bat-s__t-crazy) story. It was a polciy to replace conservative white voters with socialist leaning brown voters.
Ironically, most of the actual great replacements throughout history (where the existing local population was exterminated or displaced, not merely added to) were done by white conservatives… that’s why 4.5/6 inhabited continents are run by people of European descent. It’s just some kind of weird projection for them to assume brown people would act in the same way.
Regarding the footnote, the Tri-Cities means to me Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland, but similarly, I don't expect anyone outside the Northwest to immediately know that.
In reading this, what I feel Matt is looking for is not necessarily less entertaining politics, but specifically more for primary voters to vote more responsibly for candidates that are more electable. A lot of primary voters struggle with wanting to vote their conscience at that stage, when they should be more tactically minded about how their vote will shape the general election. The challenge will be to get primary voters to accept that responsibility. It'll probably take learning the hard way via massive failures, and since primary races are so diffuse across the country, there may always be people learning (and then forgetting and relearning) the hard way....
Ironically, as we saw in the last competitive Democratic presidential primary, voters consider the strategic logic and elect boring candidates in key races all the time. The media is overindexing on Mamdami, Platner, and AES, but that doesn't mean voters have or will.
Mamdani is a good attention grabber, but another reason the media overindexes on him is that they always overindex way too much on the city of New York.
This is a fundamentally hopeless project. Americans are deeply divided by values, understanding of the good life, views on key public policy questions, class, race, and more. Furthermore, people who know what is happening in politics and understand what is at stake in modern American politics are the ones who are very divided. Absent a major reconfiguration of coalitions and social life, America, we're not going to become less divided. The problem with knowledge is that it's hard to make it go away. The people aren't going to stop understanding that Republicans are on the side of exurban, less cosmopolitan vslues and the Democrats are on the other side. Instead, we have to figure out a workable politics for a country with genuinely divided, high-stakes politics where lots of people understand what's going on.
I do not agree that there is that much disagreement on values, but yes, there are big disagreements about what kind of policies lead to what kind of results.
Seems like 90% of political battles are really particularly "high-stakes". Questions like "does medicare get expanded to the last dozen or two states" really doesn't impact all that many americans.
And most of the other divisions you mention aren't especially hopelessly ground in. Racial voting patterns are much less entrenched than they used to be. "Class-based" patterns have increased in terms of education, but great decreased in terms of income, as "high stakes" material issues have receded in favor of truly high stakes issues like "can a trans woman play high school soccer".
The article engages on that level too, though. It makes a direct appeal to electability in a competitive landscape where the marginal voter hates both candidates, while also correctly pointing out that this dynamic is regrettable.
Moderation mediates how those dynamics play out politically, which is not nothing. Politics can be boring even with high partisan social sorting, and IMO even that might not be as resilient in the long term as it seems right now.
"And why was [recovery from the 2008 financial crisis] too slow? 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."
And AFAIK, they STILL have a "incorrect analysis of the macroeconomic situation;" Matt certainly shows one. The slow recovery was the result of _the Fed_ for reasons I think have never been adequately plumbed, did not provide enough monetary stimulus to rapidly restore full employment. Congress should have focused on
a) providing _relief_ to people (or even economic sectors) that were especially harmed by the Fed's malfeasance, making unemployment insurance a higher percent of lost income and tying the amounts and duration to the unemployment rate, for example, providing ais to cities on the basis of their lost tax revenue
and
b) (harder to do) investing in things that acquire positive net present values because they use unemployed people machines and real estate. [These would have to be "shovel-ready" but that would not be the criterion for selection.]
This would certainly have been more productive than trying to figure out a deficit that would compensate (gap-fill) for the Fed's ongoing mistake.
And since there was a lot of silly noise complaining that the aunt of monetary stimulus that the Fed WAS doing was "inflationary" and "debasing the Dollar," a pubic defense of Bernanke (without implying that what he was doing all that was possible or that it was _enough_) of would have helped.
One additional thing exciting candidates do: they get ideas into public circulation, so that they can effectively change the policy landscape in the future. M4A would not be the big political force it is without Bernie Sanders pushing it into the conversation. {deleted distrating example}. And so on.
There's an obvious missing piece in this analysis even from a Yglesias perspective: being charismatic is important for coalition management. Obama could keep the groups under control because he had independent standing with them. Clinton could because he had beaten them.
Biden's immigration mistakes were tied to his weak hand at coalition management with the pro-immigration groups.
Picking a President has a further leadership dimension than a Senator or Representative. You can literally pick Darlene Graham and you will be fine in the former. Though I wouldn't recommend it.
This is an interesting point, but really, what could the groups have done to Biden if he'd defied them? I don't think they could have organized a successful primary challenge against him. They could have attacked him for not being sufficiently leftwing on immigration or the environment but those attacks probably would have helped in the general election. The one thing they could have done (which the pro-Palestinian activists did) would be to disrupt his speeches or rallies, but again I'm not sure it would hurt him to be seen as an opponents of open borders.
Pre-negative polarization, a moderate politician could also credibly threaten to go across the aisle. Unfortunately, since the Republican congressional defection in the early 2010s, the base on both sides is rabid enough that this only happens in Secret Congress now.
"But beating Republicans in North Carolina is obviously more relevant to the broad question of how to stop MAGA than beating Andrew Cuomo in a primary in New York City!"
I don't think that this offhanded aside is accurate. History and every indication suggests that Cuomo would have immediately bent the knee to Trump, up-to-and-including looking the other way at Minneapolis-style ICE raids in NYC.
At the very least they are equally important (edge to Cooper if Dems end up as a +1 majority in the Senate), but that's just an argument for candidate-electorate fit.
I couldn't agree more but this feels an awful lot like wanting voters to approach elections as high minded elites, which they basically won't do. The best they can do is try to imagine which candidate other people will like better and vote for that guy, which they do when they're desperate to win (Kerry, Biden) or vote for the boring guy when he's the heir apparent (Gore). 2008 was an outlier in a good way because there were two appealing candidates and John Edwards.
It says something that half of the Republican presidents of my lifetime have been celebrities, with the other half being Bushes. That hasn't been healthy for America.
I'm not sure if this is good or bad, better said, or left unsaid, but Crowley reminds me of Norbit.
Local races will always contain some question about the locality's relation *to* the nation and, in that context, being comparatively boring or plain-spoken can be an advantage. I'm still surprised how far some people can get in politics without passing even basic entry-level competence for public speaking, but whatever, congratulations: you don't even have to speak fluently or confidently to become governor of a top-12 state. Yay?
To be President, however, is to embody the greatness of a peerless continental hyper-power. If big changes are needed, one must credibly speak for them. If only little changes are needed, one must credibly embody the greatness of what already exists. Either way requires a more expansive view of the country and more iron in the blood than the parties have been able to muster for some time.
How is a string of surgical campaigns and paper thin margins not the most boring thing already?
My most "can't say that out loud" take in politics is that a high voter turnout is actually bad. It usually means one of two things:
1.) Politics/the government began to meddle in your life in such a way that you had no choice than to go vote in order to stop it (abortion bans, self-inflicted economic crises, stupid wars)
2.) Or the electorate got extremely fired up about some dumb shit, driving a lot of uninformed voters to the polls. (Culture wars, racism, Israel/Palestine)
As Matt says, if a lot of voters feel like they don't HAVE to go vote, that is often downstream of a benign societal situation. It should be the goal that people don't feel forced to care about politics!
I remember when I was a kid in the 90s and early 00's, pundits here in Germany would be hand-wringing about the low voter turnout in our state and federal elections (which was routinely in the 50s and low 60s). Now our voter turnout is 80 percent, and seeing how the AfD performs, most of those pundits probably regret curling that monkey's paw.
I will point out that the only other country that has a strong primary system is Argentina and their politics are also a mess.
Primaries are universally terrible but I don’t even think we can “go back” at this point. If you ended primaries tomorrow the ppl currently in the smoke filled rooms would collectively be too MAGAfied or NGO progressive blob brained to make any strategic decision calibrated for the boring general electorate as is. The toothpaste can’t get back in the tube.
It would help if there were less (like approximatley zero) poling of who is ahead an behind, and more on changing positions on policies. Yes, this is sort of like quntum physiscs in that the particle does not HAVE a position untill it is measured, but this is just all the more reason to meaure it.
"I’m still not entirely sure what went down with Biden-era immigration policy, but it’s clear that on some level the administration made a mistake."
Democrats really need a (correct) underatanting that ie WAS a mistake and how it happened, because Republicans DO have a coherent (bat-s__t-crazy) story. It was a polciy to replace conservative white voters with socialist leaning brown voters.
Ironically, most of the actual great replacements throughout history (where the existing local population was exterminated or displaced, not merely added to) were done by white conservatives… that’s why 4.5/6 inhabited continents are run by people of European descent. It’s just some kind of weird projection for them to assume brown people would act in the same way.
Regarding the footnote, the Tri-Cities means to me Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland, but similarly, I don't expect anyone outside the Northwest to immediately know that.
In reading this, what I feel Matt is looking for is not necessarily less entertaining politics, but specifically more for primary voters to vote more responsibly for candidates that are more electable. A lot of primary voters struggle with wanting to vote their conscience at that stage, when they should be more tactically minded about how their vote will shape the general election. The challenge will be to get primary voters to accept that responsibility. It'll probably take learning the hard way via massive failures, and since primary races are so diffuse across the country, there may always be people learning (and then forgetting and relearning) the hard way....
Ironically, as we saw in the last competitive Democratic presidential primary, voters consider the strategic logic and elect boring candidates in key races all the time. The media is overindexing on Mamdami, Platner, and AES, but that doesn't mean voters have or will.
Mamdani is a good attention grabber, but another reason the media overindexes on him is that they always overindex way too much on the city of New York.
This is a fundamentally hopeless project. Americans are deeply divided by values, understanding of the good life, views on key public policy questions, class, race, and more. Furthermore, people who know what is happening in politics and understand what is at stake in modern American politics are the ones who are very divided. Absent a major reconfiguration of coalitions and social life, America, we're not going to become less divided. The problem with knowledge is that it's hard to make it go away. The people aren't going to stop understanding that Republicans are on the side of exurban, less cosmopolitan vslues and the Democrats are on the other side. Instead, we have to figure out a workable politics for a country with genuinely divided, high-stakes politics where lots of people understand what's going on.
My greatest hope is politics becomes the ends of the horseshoe versus a unified middle, and the middle proves to be larger.
That said, I'm not holding my breath for that outcome.
I do not agree that there is that much disagreement on values, but yes, there are big disagreements about what kind of policies lead to what kind of results.
Seems like 90% of political battles are really particularly "high-stakes". Questions like "does medicare get expanded to the last dozen or two states" really doesn't impact all that many americans.
And most of the other divisions you mention aren't especially hopelessly ground in. Racial voting patterns are much less entrenched than they used to be. "Class-based" patterns have increased in terms of education, but great decreased in terms of income, as "high stakes" material issues have receded in favor of truly high stakes issues like "can a trans woman play high school soccer".
The article engages on that level too, though. It makes a direct appeal to electability in a competitive landscape where the marginal voter hates both candidates, while also correctly pointing out that this dynamic is regrettable.
I don't think moderation is either here or there. Moderation helps candidates win, but it doesn't change the factors I described.
Moderation mediates how those dynamics play out politically, which is not nothing. Politics can be boring even with high partisan social sorting, and IMO even that might not be as resilient in the long term as it seems right now.
"And why was [recovery from the 2008 financial crisis] too slow? 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."
And AFAIK, they STILL have a "incorrect analysis of the macroeconomic situation;" Matt certainly shows one. The slow recovery was the result of _the Fed_ for reasons I think have never been adequately plumbed, did not provide enough monetary stimulus to rapidly restore full employment. Congress should have focused on
a) providing _relief_ to people (or even economic sectors) that were especially harmed by the Fed's malfeasance, making unemployment insurance a higher percent of lost income and tying the amounts and duration to the unemployment rate, for example, providing ais to cities on the basis of their lost tax revenue
and
b) (harder to do) investing in things that acquire positive net present values because they use unemployed people machines and real estate. [These would have to be "shovel-ready" but that would not be the criterion for selection.]
This would certainly have been more productive than trying to figure out a deficit that would compensate (gap-fill) for the Fed's ongoing mistake.
And since there was a lot of silly noise complaining that the aunt of monetary stimulus that the Fed WAS doing was "inflationary" and "debasing the Dollar," a pubic defense of Bernanke (without implying that what he was doing all that was possible or that it was _enough_) of would have helped.
One additional thing exciting candidates do: they get ideas into public circulation, so that they can effectively change the policy landscape in the future. M4A would not be the big political force it is without Bernie Sanders pushing it into the conversation. {deleted distrating example}. And so on.
There's an obvious missing piece in this analysis even from a Yglesias perspective: being charismatic is important for coalition management. Obama could keep the groups under control because he had independent standing with them. Clinton could because he had beaten them.
Biden's immigration mistakes were tied to his weak hand at coalition management with the pro-immigration groups.
Picking a President has a further leadership dimension than a Senator or Representative. You can literally pick Darlene Graham and you will be fine in the former. Though I wouldn't recommend it.
This is an interesting point, but really, what could the groups have done to Biden if he'd defied them? I don't think they could have organized a successful primary challenge against him. They could have attacked him for not being sufficiently leftwing on immigration or the environment but those attacks probably would have helped in the general election. The one thing they could have done (which the pro-Palestinian activists did) would be to disrupt his speeches or rallies, but again I'm not sure it would hurt him to be seen as an opponents of open borders.
Do you think it is Charisma or some different quality around authority and competence?
Pre-negative polarization, a moderate politician could also credibly threaten to go across the aisle. Unfortunately, since the Republican congressional defection in the early 2010s, the base on both sides is rabid enough that this only happens in Secret Congress now.