Still a classic every democrat should read. So it’s now 2025 and I Just sat through a county democratic convention here in NC a potential swing state. I heard people argue that we needed to pass a resolution taking a Strong stance in favor of gender affirming care for minors to mobilize the base so we can win in 2026. That resolution passed overwhelmingly!!
Is this a serious political party interested in winning elections?
I had tried to speak against the resolution but was not recognized, nobody spoke against it. I was told afterward that speaking against the resolution might have lead to a sanction for transphobia.
This is not the way to beat a vulnerable Paul Tillis in 2026
This is good, but I feel it misses some context without noting Bush/Cheney wn in part on this bass, with Karl Rove explicitly claiming as much. I think years later we can say Rove likely was wrong, and that anyway the progressive coalition is different enough from the GOP one as to make that strategy viable for one and not the other.
I think the genesis of this 'mobilization' strategy began in the late 197Os when the Democratic Party began organizing along single-issue lines and racial causes to recruit after the disastrous Vietnam years. That decision determined four decades of interest groups on the left competing for funding and political attention. Within constituencies like environmentalism or nuclear disarmament, or women's issues etc, groups competed with each other, leading to more extreme and narrow demands, diffusing a coherent forward-looking message. To the point some women[s groups today demand abortion rights up to the delivery room and some justice groups wanting to defund the police. Trump won and unified the Democrats message against his politics of retrenchment.
The left today suffers from a weak grasp or political strategy to build a lasting majority, which has to include the white working class. The real dead end would be Republican success at identifying itself as the 'white party' against the Democrats' representating people of color along with a contingent college educated whites . Republicans are doubling down with their new warnings of Replacement Theory. Obama ran against Hillary in an attempt to broaden the vision of Democrats beyond single issue, which themselves can never advance by and in themselves.
Mobilization is a great strategy done with canvassing and registering of voters. Sometimes mobilization around issues -- Medicaid expansion and gun violence were great issue in Virginia in 2017, but it's issue by issue, cycle by cycle, and place by place specific. Especially if the goal is to win races down to the dogcatcher level.
I think Democrats made a big mistake in not doing on the ground campaigning in 2020. You don't have to get much closer than 6 feet for more than a few moments. Volunteers could have been asked to get tested before campaigning so no one need fear them.
If we did the standard neoliberal solution to climate change and put a tax on CO2 and then rebated the money back would the typical American actually end up paying net $100 a year?
Since energy use is strongly correlated with income, a per capita rebate of 100% of the revenues would be quite progressive, especially if the specific plan taxes the rebate (given progressive income tax rates). If you rebated 100% of the revenue to households evenly, adjusted for size (kids getting 1/2 shares), about 2/3 of all households, and about the same proportion of the middle income quintile, would come out ahead, according to this study:
Though rebating all the revenues has an economic advantage (it makes the total policy non-contractionary, which will matter once the fee gets large, as it has to to get the last 25% or so of emissions) and could have a political advantage it there were significant numbers of small government conservatives. But if the Senate does add a carbon fee to reconciliation it will almost certainly keep some of the revenue to help with funding the bill. If they distribute only half the revenue, they'd have to means-test it down to the median income to get the same distributional effects for the bottom half as in the study. I'd guess they'd distribute ~60-70%, which will allow for a higher cutoff but probably not as high as Biden's 'middle-class' 400k (one of the EV tax credit proposals had a $800k cutoff. Not sure what they ended up with.
Tony Blair has an excellent interview piece on the perils of single issue polling that I've linked to before. Margaret Thatcher was rolling over Labour, but all the Labour party issues except unilateral nuclear disarmament polled superbly. Turns out the polls don't mean what you think they mean.
1. The country is not as 'with' progressives as they like to think. Progressives like to claim, for instance, that the country is 'with' them on abortion. No, the country is decidedly not 'with' progressives on abortion. The polling suggests a highly ambivalent electorate which, while supportive of some abortion rights, certainly supports restrictions, occasionally significant ones. So, in other words, abortion which is "Safe, Legal, and Rare" might be a winning message. Or perhaps one which access to abortion exists, but we try our darnedest to convince people to keep the baby and expand access to maternal care, and adoption services. This is decidedly not the progressive position on abortion, which takes an absolutist stance on abortion rights.
2. Bernie Sanders twice ran on the theory that progressive policy would get out the vote. Twice he failed. Progressive candidates (Jaime Harrison, Sara Gideon, etc) did not change the electorates of their states. In fact moderates, once again, out performed their progressive peers. There is no evidence that progressives have any sense on how to win in American politics (except in academia).
The Democratic Party is turned into knots in ways the Republicans simply are not. Joe Biden has not done as great a job uniting the factions as we'd like. The more I watch this presidency the more I fear he will go down as a Jimmy Carter figure; the last vestige of a dying coalition, which will turn into decades of Trumpists winning elections (and no not because the GOP rigged the results).
I like this, and I think there's tension with MY's Sinema take. If the problem is that the party caters too much to the left, then doesn't it make sense to give a wider berth to moderate politicians?
She is popular, though. She has higher favorables than Mark Kelly and her support among AZ independents/republicans is high. Before this latest kerfuffle, she was polling majority support from AZ dems (and I don't know that it's dropped, I just haven't seen any more recent polling).
It's clear that she infuriates progressives but appeals to moderates. Doesn't that speak directly to the Dems' problem of going left and losing the center?
I can’t find anything that shows her with higher favorability than Kelly until very recently, so it’s not clear to me that it’s true she has stable popularity. Maybe she does, or maybe this is a turning point, but it’s not clear to me!
Sinema is also in a swing state where there may be more room to court moderate Republicans than left-wing Dems. I wonder if she is banking on Republicans who respect her swinging her way in the even she gets a a nutter GOP challenger like Sharron Angle or Christine O'Donnell.
This is not a new phenomena. The people on the far left who characterize themselves as progressives have been around awhile. I vividly remember the celebratory comments in the left wing blogs after Obama's rather disastrous first midterm election cycle. Many were quite ecstatic that they had purged so many of those darned blue dogs from the Democrats congressional caucus. I did not believe people could be that dumb about politics but there you are. They can.
The exact same phenomena in the GOP right now with the attempted ongoing purge of Gonzalez, Kinzinger, Cheney, and all the other "communist-democRAT RINOs" who don't bow down before the king.
Those who believe in a mechanical Hotelling/Downsian view of politics, when the Republicans scurried to the right,(*) they opened up a huge opportunity for the Democrats to occupy the center. That the Democrats didn't leap at that chance is a question worth pondering. Was it a miscalculation? Was it that the Democrats' understanding of the world was biased by their most ideological activists? Or maybe it was some weird anti-thermostatic action whereby your opponents becoming more radical somehow permits and motivates you to become more radical in turn.
In any case, a blown opportunity.
(*) Yup, Trump did not offer a Paul Ryan-type agenda when running in 2016. But it's not like he made defending entitlements a central plan; he really just took the issue off the table so he could move way to the right on cultural issues. (And once in office he was perfectly happy to follow the traditional conservative Republican policy playbook.)
Ezra Klein mentioned a number of times that the Bernie-sphere had a hard time understanding that there is a large share of the electorate with authentically conservative views across all issues spaces. Many on the left believe that if you could just get the "true" message through to people West Virginia would turn blue.
This is especially tough on immigration where we had 40 years of governing to the left of elite consensus that was to the left of popular opinion. There's no real way to restore that governing by consensus so the liberals/left are stuck between trying to ignore it, losing elections on it, or changing their views none of which is a great option.
What is so interesting to me about this is that Bernie himself absolutely understands that lots of people have conservative views (see his former stances on guns) but somehow was not able to communicate this effectively to the majority of the ideological movement that he became the figure-head for. By 2020 he had just given up and gone full progressive groupthink in his campaign. I honestly don't think it served him well in the primary.
I think what this post gets right is that there are a lot of unpopular political messages that (1) are generally associated with the Democratic party and (2) tend to move swing voters away from Democrats in elections. "Defund the police" is the best example. Matt seems to be saying that the people who are disseminating these messages are pursuing a bad strategy to achieve progressive electoral goals. The implication is that better message discipline, in some general sense, could help to realize those goals.
What I find odd, though, is that you can certainly find a sometimes comical lack of message discipline on the right as well (think of Marjorie Taylor-Greene). Biden's campaign, on the other hand, was pretty disciplined and played to swing voters. However, for some reason, swing voters seem not to associate far right-wing messages with the Republican party in the same way they associate far left-wing messages with Democrats.
Who, then, needs to exercise message discipline? It looks like on the left, you need several powerful institutions to do so in addition to candidates. On the right, by contrasts, candidates aren't too vulnerable to a lack of message discipline by Newsmax, OANN, and large swathes of their elected representatives. I'm genuinely puzzled by this-- curious to know people's thoughts.
The way American politics works, the Right doesn't need to win as many Americans' votes as the Left to wield power. (Senate, Electoral College, House districts.) So they can afford to let their crazies run wilder and alienate people.
I think the right is suffering from its crazies pulling the swing voters. See the GA senate elections. In 2017, the GOP controlled the House, Senate, and Presidency. Four years later they are shut out of all three.
I think the answer is that the right suffering from its extreme edge. But realistically, the right has very few major policy changes they are trying to enact right now. Voters are choosing between people who are essentially for the status quo who say crazy things, or for people that are advancing some fairly radical changes. If you like those changes, this seems like a good thing. If you aren't sure or don't think you will like them, that change is scary.
*by people I mean both parties and party related groups.
Excellent post and seems like there could be a new coalition of center left with college educated voters and the big businesses where they work and have influence. With news this morning that the House GOP leadership removed the @USChamber from its strategy calls on reconciliation…it shows a furthering schism of big biz and the GOP. We should capitalize on that…if our far left would allow..
Still a classic every democrat should read. So it’s now 2025 and I Just sat through a county democratic convention here in NC a potential swing state. I heard people argue that we needed to pass a resolution taking a Strong stance in favor of gender affirming care for minors to mobilize the base so we can win in 2026. That resolution passed overwhelmingly!!
Is this a serious political party interested in winning elections?
I had tried to speak against the resolution but was not recognized, nobody spoke against it. I was told afterward that speaking against the resolution might have lead to a sanction for transphobia.
This is not the way to beat a vulnerable Paul Tillis in 2026
This is good, but I feel it misses some context without noting Bush/Cheney wn in part on this bass, with Karl Rove explicitly claiming as much. I think years later we can say Rove likely was wrong, and that anyway the progressive coalition is different enough from the GOP one as to make that strategy viable for one and not the other.
I think the genesis of this 'mobilization' strategy began in the late 197Os when the Democratic Party began organizing along single-issue lines and racial causes to recruit after the disastrous Vietnam years. That decision determined four decades of interest groups on the left competing for funding and political attention. Within constituencies like environmentalism or nuclear disarmament, or women's issues etc, groups competed with each other, leading to more extreme and narrow demands, diffusing a coherent forward-looking message. To the point some women[s groups today demand abortion rights up to the delivery room and some justice groups wanting to defund the police. Trump won and unified the Democrats message against his politics of retrenchment.
The left today suffers from a weak grasp or political strategy to build a lasting majority, which has to include the white working class. The real dead end would be Republican success at identifying itself as the 'white party' against the Democrats' representating people of color along with a contingent college educated whites . Republicans are doubling down with their new warnings of Replacement Theory. Obama ran against Hillary in an attempt to broaden the vision of Democrats beyond single issue, which themselves can never advance by and in themselves.
Mobilization is a great strategy done with canvassing and registering of voters. Sometimes mobilization around issues -- Medicaid expansion and gun violence were great issue in Virginia in 2017, but it's issue by issue, cycle by cycle, and place by place specific. Especially if the goal is to win races down to the dogcatcher level.
I think Democrats made a big mistake in not doing on the ground campaigning in 2020. You don't have to get much closer than 6 feet for more than a few moments. Volunteers could have been asked to get tested before campaigning so no one need fear them.
If we did the standard neoliberal solution to climate change and put a tax on CO2 and then rebated the money back would the typical American actually end up paying net $100 a year?
Since energy use is strongly correlated with income, a per capita rebate of 100% of the revenues would be quite progressive, especially if the specific plan taxes the rebate (given progressive income tax rates). If you rebated 100% of the revenue to households evenly, adjusted for size (kids getting 1/2 shares), about 2/3 of all households, and about the same proportion of the middle income quintile, would come out ahead, according to this study:
https://citizensclimatelobby.org/household-impact-study/
Though rebating all the revenues has an economic advantage (it makes the total policy non-contractionary, which will matter once the fee gets large, as it has to to get the last 25% or so of emissions) and could have a political advantage it there were significant numbers of small government conservatives. But if the Senate does add a carbon fee to reconciliation it will almost certainly keep some of the revenue to help with funding the bill. If they distribute only half the revenue, they'd have to means-test it down to the median income to get the same distributional effects for the bottom half as in the study. I'd guess they'd distribute ~60-70%, which will allow for a higher cutoff but probably not as high as Biden's 'middle-class' 400k (one of the EV tax credit proposals had a $800k cutoff. Not sure what they ended up with.
Tony Blair has an excellent interview piece on the perils of single issue polling that I've linked to before. Margaret Thatcher was rolling over Labour, but all the Labour party issues except unilateral nuclear disarmament polled superbly. Turns out the polls don't mean what you think they mean.
There are lots of inaccurate polls out there. On climate, Data for Progress claimed to find that "Voters Support the Clean Electricity Performance Program," whereas very few even well-educated voters interested in climate have even heard of it. https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/9/30/voters-support-the-clean-electricity-performance-program
Thank you. A few additional thoughts:
1. The country is not as 'with' progressives as they like to think. Progressives like to claim, for instance, that the country is 'with' them on abortion. No, the country is decidedly not 'with' progressives on abortion. The polling suggests a highly ambivalent electorate which, while supportive of some abortion rights, certainly supports restrictions, occasionally significant ones. So, in other words, abortion which is "Safe, Legal, and Rare" might be a winning message. Or perhaps one which access to abortion exists, but we try our darnedest to convince people to keep the baby and expand access to maternal care, and adoption services. This is decidedly not the progressive position on abortion, which takes an absolutist stance on abortion rights.
2. Bernie Sanders twice ran on the theory that progressive policy would get out the vote. Twice he failed. Progressive candidates (Jaime Harrison, Sara Gideon, etc) did not change the electorates of their states. In fact moderates, once again, out performed their progressive peers. There is no evidence that progressives have any sense on how to win in American politics (except in academia).
The Democratic Party is turned into knots in ways the Republicans simply are not. Joe Biden has not done as great a job uniting the factions as we'd like. The more I watch this presidency the more I fear he will go down as a Jimmy Carter figure; the last vestige of a dying coalition, which will turn into decades of Trumpists winning elections (and no not because the GOP rigged the results).
I like this, and I think there's tension with MY's Sinema take. If the problem is that the party caters too much to the left, then doesn't it make sense to give a wider berth to moderate politicians?
Not all middle candidates and positions are popular
She is popular, though. She has higher favorables than Mark Kelly and her support among AZ independents/republicans is high. Before this latest kerfuffle, she was polling majority support from AZ dems (and I don't know that it's dropped, I just haven't seen any more recent polling).
It's clear that she infuriates progressives but appeals to moderates. Doesn't that speak directly to the Dems' problem of going left and losing the center?
I can’t find anything that shows her with higher favorability than Kelly until very recently, so it’s not clear to me that it’s true she has stable popularity. Maybe she does, or maybe this is a turning point, but it’s not clear to me!
Sinema is also in a swing state where there may be more room to court moderate Republicans than left-wing Dems. I wonder if she is banking on Republicans who respect her swinging her way in the even she gets a a nutter GOP challenger like Sharron Angle or Christine O'Donnell.
Particularly if the candidate is Trump-aligned, given the McCain/Trump animosity.
Ron Brownstein has been so wrong, and taken so many people with him, that the damage is hard to calculate.
And I'll be the one to say it: It all played/plays into the Great Replacement theory.
This is not a new phenomena. The people on the far left who characterize themselves as progressives have been around awhile. I vividly remember the celebratory comments in the left wing blogs after Obama's rather disastrous first midterm election cycle. Many were quite ecstatic that they had purged so many of those darned blue dogs from the Democrats congressional caucus. I did not believe people could be that dumb about politics but there you are. They can.
The exact same phenomena in the GOP right now with the attempted ongoing purge of Gonzalez, Kinzinger, Cheney, and all the other "communist-democRAT RINOs" who don't bow down before the king.
Puppies are infrastructure.
Those who believe in a mechanical Hotelling/Downsian view of politics, when the Republicans scurried to the right,(*) they opened up a huge opportunity for the Democrats to occupy the center. That the Democrats didn't leap at that chance is a question worth pondering. Was it a miscalculation? Was it that the Democrats' understanding of the world was biased by their most ideological activists? Or maybe it was some weird anti-thermostatic action whereby your opponents becoming more radical somehow permits and motivates you to become more radical in turn.
In any case, a blown opportunity.
(*) Yup, Trump did not offer a Paul Ryan-type agenda when running in 2016. But it's not like he made defending entitlements a central plan; he really just took the issue off the table so he could move way to the right on cultural issues. (And once in office he was perfectly happy to follow the traditional conservative Republican policy playbook.)
Ezra Klein mentioned a number of times that the Bernie-sphere had a hard time understanding that there is a large share of the electorate with authentically conservative views across all issues spaces. Many on the left believe that if you could just get the "true" message through to people West Virginia would turn blue.
This is especially tough on immigration where we had 40 years of governing to the left of elite consensus that was to the left of popular opinion. There's no real way to restore that governing by consensus so the liberals/left are stuck between trying to ignore it, losing elections on it, or changing their views none of which is a great option.
What is so interesting to me about this is that Bernie himself absolutely understands that lots of people have conservative views (see his former stances on guns) but somehow was not able to communicate this effectively to the majority of the ideological movement that he became the figure-head for. By 2020 he had just given up and gone full progressive groupthink in his campaign. I honestly don't think it served him well in the primary.
Even in 2016, there was no trace of his former (and apparently heartfelt) stance on immigration,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0
by the time of his March debate with Hillary in Miami:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/10/jorge-ramos-pressed-clinton-and-sanders-very-hard-on-not-deporting-children-and-thats-okay/
"Democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others"
I think what this post gets right is that there are a lot of unpopular political messages that (1) are generally associated with the Democratic party and (2) tend to move swing voters away from Democrats in elections. "Defund the police" is the best example. Matt seems to be saying that the people who are disseminating these messages are pursuing a bad strategy to achieve progressive electoral goals. The implication is that better message discipline, in some general sense, could help to realize those goals.
What I find odd, though, is that you can certainly find a sometimes comical lack of message discipline on the right as well (think of Marjorie Taylor-Greene). Biden's campaign, on the other hand, was pretty disciplined and played to swing voters. However, for some reason, swing voters seem not to associate far right-wing messages with the Republican party in the same way they associate far left-wing messages with Democrats.
Who, then, needs to exercise message discipline? It looks like on the left, you need several powerful institutions to do so in addition to candidates. On the right, by contrasts, candidates aren't too vulnerable to a lack of message discipline by Newsmax, OANN, and large swathes of their elected representatives. I'm genuinely puzzled by this-- curious to know people's thoughts.
The way American politics works, the Right doesn't need to win as many Americans' votes as the Left to wield power. (Senate, Electoral College, House districts.) So they can afford to let their crazies run wilder and alienate people.
I think the right is suffering from its crazies pulling the swing voters. See the GA senate elections. In 2017, the GOP controlled the House, Senate, and Presidency. Four years later they are shut out of all three.
I think the answer is that the right suffering from its extreme edge. But realistically, the right has very few major policy changes they are trying to enact right now. Voters are choosing between people who are essentially for the status quo who say crazy things, or for people that are advancing some fairly radical changes. If you like those changes, this seems like a good thing. If you aren't sure or don't think you will like them, that change is scary.
*by people I mean both parties and party related groups.
Excellent post and seems like there could be a new coalition of center left with college educated voters and the big businesses where they work and have influence. With news this morning that the House GOP leadership removed the @USChamber from its strategy calls on reconciliation…it shows a furthering schism of big biz and the GOP. We should capitalize on that…if our far left would allow..
This is excellent.