What's Matt's thing against Ilhan Omar? I don't know why she's his model of a bad Democrat. The worst thing I know about her is that it seems she made some fairly shady payments to her husband as part of her campaign. Obviously there are some Israel-aligned Dems who don't like her, but I don't think she's any different on that score than the other Squad reps.
After his baseball career ends, if he put his mind to it, Aaron Judge could probably put up some of the biggest Split Ticket WARs ever seen. Whichever party he chose, either way. MLB players are very R-leaning.
It seems to me that many of the same pathologies of the woke/progressive movement in the 2016-2022 time span have now taken hold in MAGA land, and they are doing just as much damage.
If being off-message gets you dragged on social media, ridiculed in partisan media, and leads to your career being wrecked, you will just be *really careful* to never be off-message. You will read the room carefully, and speak nonsense today, and opposite nonsense tomorrow, as needed. You will silence anyone who might point out that the current direction or rhetoric of your movement are headed for disaster, as well as people who point out that the current rhetoric or policies being pursued don't make any sense or won't work or are actively counterproductive.
Social media and related internet stuff is really great conformity-enforcing and dissent-suppression technology, and that's a *great* way to blind yourself to errors you're making and walk right off a cliff.
I very sincerely hope that when this MAGA fever passes, conservatives/MAGAs lose the hardcore conformity-enforcement and liberals/progressives don't build theirs back up.
BTW, the actual answer to the question - because Trump is largely doing things Republicans like so there's no reason to be upset at him. Even for all the online talk, most Republicans are OK w/ bombing brown people indiscriminately and will accept higher gas prices.
Like, before the combo of 10/7 and Biden's age issues, he was largely very popular w/ actual Democratic voters even as his approval rating sucked overall because he was doing things most Democrats like and there wasn't much infighting. There was some small 'Bidenomics' arguments, but nobody outside of Twitter knew they existed.
The reason why there was public Democratic infighting is because there was non-ideological (age) and ideological (Israel) fights w/ real splits.
So, unless Trump comes out for an actual tax hike on rich people or a pro-union labor policy (actually pro-labor, not some corrupt giveaway to a specific union), he'll be fine w/ most Republicans and there won't. be any public pushback within the party.
After all, Bush needed an unpopular war that killed a large-ish number of troops and was obviously not going well and in the public, an economic collapse, and an obvious public policy failure in Katrina to hit the true depths.
I also think there's myth the post-midterms environment will change things, but remember, every possible POTUS candidate wants Trump's blessing and anybody running in 2028 will still want his endorsement, to head off a primary challenge if anything.
Were there ideological or non-ideological intra-party fights in the 2010 and 2014 cycles? Because Dems in those midterms had no trouble distancing themselves from Obama, or trying to at least. My recollection is that Obama remained quite popular with Dem voters but cratered with swing voters and most downballot Dems ran away from him outside safe seats. So the question still looms as to why downballot Republicans in competitive seats aren’t running from Trump under similar circumstances.
My take is that it’s because the GOP has turned itself into a cult of personality and primary voters will tolerate no heresies.
Not...really, at least nothing close to the past few cycles. Even the competitive primaries weren't really that much on substance.
Also, I'd argue a partially reason why 2010 & 2014 was so bad for the Democrats is you had Democrats not in R+20, but R+5 seats basically refusing to act like a Democrat so they didn't win over swing voters _and_ they also lost turnout from Democrats in those seats.
But putting that argument aside, part of it is yes, Obama isn't a vindictive weirdo who will make your life hell for opposing him and more importantly, you wouldn't lose a primary even in a swing seat for running away from Obama.
But also, there is no Republican outside of Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and kind of Brian Kemp and Brian Fritzpatrick who has been successful running as anything but pro-Trump, but even in Georgia, there was no Kempian candidate - his Lt. Governor was super-MAGA and the healthcare guy who won the primary was also MAGA but as a businessman.
The reason they aren't running from Trump is no real successful examples. In 2010, there were successful examples (even though they largely failed in 2010 & 2014) of a centrist Democrat running away from an unpopular Democratic President and winning.
I think that’s the point though. There are very few examples of them running away from Trump and winning because the GOP is a personality cult these days. If you embrace Trump you might lose a general but you might not. If you contradict Trump you’re guaranteed to lose your primary and maybe get a bunch of death threats also. Because it’s a personality cult and not a political party.
But also, Trump is largely doing things Republican voters like. If he suddenly said, 'I want to raise taxes on rich, mandate union elections for all businesses, allow abortion 'til time of birth, and sanction Israel', there would be backlash. The reason why GOP voters flipped on free trade which I know is an example people love to use is it was never a high salience issue.
Even the Iraq War stuff was more, 'the GOP establishment were wimps instead of real men taking what they want - I would've just taken the oil instead of wasting American money and soldiers on helping out Those People' than actual isolationism.
The reason why the cult of personality works is he's reflecting the id of the median GOP voter. If he wasn't reflecting that id, there'd be no cult though. I think that is something people miss.
I’m not so sure. Yes, the ride-and-die MAGA cultists will, but what about the less committed ones? Not to mention the Median Undecided Voters, who may not vote for Democrats because “ew icky socialists who will pay for illegal immigrants to have trans surgery and eat my dog,” but maybe at least they’ll be sufficiently disillusioned with MAGA to stay home? Silver linings!
Yeah Matt is fond of (correctly) pointing out that the far left theory of the case that you can basically juice turnout and get non voting working class voters to vote for you by going harder left on economics is quite dubious as a theory...in Presidential elections.
But in midterms (and primaries and local races), turnout and specifically who does and doesn't turn out is more determinative. It's the secret sauce as to how DSA is able to win a bunch primaries.
Point being, it's sort of forgotten that a big reason GOP losses were not larger in 2018 and likely why they were still able to flip senate seats is GOP turnout was actually quite high historically (in the scenario where said party won the Presidency two years prior). But this is with a booming economy. Economy is actually doing ok (read recently that the Michigan consumer survey shouldn't be taken seriously anymore as they changed their methodology and now are way overindexed on Democratic voters), but it's clearly not as good as it was in 2018 (inflation alone). Every coalition includes the "soft" supporter by definition. Or supporters who generally are predisposed to vote for one party over the other but are disillusioned with President. Given Trump's approval rating right now, there's pretty decent evidence that a lot of pretty solid Republicans are not happy with Trump. So how likely is it they come out to vote...especially given how little GOP politicians seem willing to separate themselves from Trump (remember in 2018, there were still a lot of true "Never Trump" voters. As in, they maybe voted Libertarian in 2016, but were perfectly happy to vote for GOP Congressmen and Senators. Think those voters are basically Dems now (Call them Bulwark Democrats). Of course Dems then lost ground with working class voters and Hispanic voters...but not only Hispanic voters swung back (for obvious reasons) but Dems lost ground with exactly the type of voters who are less likely to show up to vote.
Maybe I'm inbibing too much hopium, but I suspect polling is understating likely Dem advantage in November, in part for the reasons I just laid out.
I mean, Trump has what 80% approval ratings among Republicans right now. Obviously, it is hurting him among swing voters, but people expected much worse from these gas prices. China deciding to do Trump a solid for whatever reason also helped and yes, $7 or $8/gallon gas might be political death, but $5/gallon gas isn't new to voters.
It sucks, but much like the tariffs, it's baked into the cost of owning the libs and why there isn't open pushback against Trump. Even the people you'd tihnk might more openly push him on this (the remaining neocons, etc.) are supporting of this War and upset Trump isn't doing more!
I'm not talking about the dumb swing voters in all this - they already turned on Trump.
I'm aware that China is really rolling out EVs, solar and making other big shifts away from petroleum, BUT what is the play here? China isn't dumb and they could easily turn the screw on trump if they wanted to. I guess by subsidizing every small country in the Pacific rim (Europe too I guess) they are becoming the less big bad.
No one knows for sure but two theories I've heard on why China kept the price of oil from spiking are:
1) They apparently have been working for years on a plan to deal with oil getting cut off after they invade Taiwan and this was a test run of their plan.
2) They're an export led economy and they'd likely suffer serious economic consequences if oil got to $200/barrel and caused a worldwide recession.
The big question that the party needs to ask is; what's better, for a candidate who'll make a great senator to win by 1 or by a candidate who will make a bad senator to win by 5? The left needs to realize that you can't change anything in the minority and the center needs to come to terms with the fact that a majority of primary voters don't care about WAR stats. They want candiates that they like and agree with to win.
This is not true at all. If you listen to what voters are saying, they prioritize electability a lot.
What's going on is that voters no longer trust the party to tell them who is electable, because the party's idea of who is electable keeps spitting out lemons like Haley Stevens.
I mean, you don't get extra votes for winning by 5 points instead of 1.
Like there are obviously more effective possible Wisconsin GOP candidates than Ron Johnson and have been helped by bad decisions by the Wisconsin Dems, but he still won and is closer to the median Republican primary voter than some Scott Walker type.
Karl Rove was basically right - the point in politics isn't to win 55% smashing victories, it's to win what you can and then declare yourself having a mandate regardless.
Down ballot coat tails are a thing, and so are mandates! A world where Biden smashed Trump by a landslide and picked up a clean trifecta is a world where Bidenomics and BBB would'v had a better shot at winning because A) More Biden-aligned Dems would be elected and B) Dems skeptical of those policies would feel more pressure to vote "Aye" (with some tweaks I'm sure) because of the magnitude of the mandate. Unserious comment, I'm sorry
More to the point, leading 51/49 leaves a great deal of room for unpleasant surprises, last minute scandals or scandal-shaped stories that nudge the outcome a bit, etc. After the election, the guy who won by one vote is still a senator, just as (as with the famous joke) the guy who graduated last in his class from medical school is still a doctor. But before the election, the guy who is expected to win by 3 points is substantially less likely to end up being a senator than the guy who's expected to win by 8 points.
1) In general, if you win by 1 in a highly favorable environment, that strongly implies you're going to lose reelection sooner rather than later. (US Senators are admittedly a semi-exception due to their unusual 6-year terms that more readily allow them to surf the "peaks" of a couple election cycles and/or dodge recessions, depending on when they were elected.)
2) In the current political environment, being in a position to win by a narrow margin makes it easier for Republican officials to steal your election and deny you a seat altogether -- "If it's not close, they can't cheat" as the saying goes.
If you aim to win by only 1 point, you are way more likely to lose, and winning the senate requires winning EVERY swingable race IIUC.
Note: polls are far from perfect. Even a +5 in polls can translate to a loss on election day. Nate Silver said just today that "the average error in polls in presidential primaries since 2000 is around 9 points of vote margin" and it seems like all the Abdul El-Sayed vs Haley Stevens polls were wrong by more than 5 points.
The key recent driver is the Iran war's effect on gas prices and thus transportation inputs to most goods. But this of course is why Republicans aren't going to break; unlike Democrats, they generally trust the national security process against US adversaries. During the Biden admin, half of the GOP House caucus voted for Ukraine aid in 2024. We all know holding a line against Russia was going to drive up gas prices compared to swift defeat for Ukraine, but it was the right thing to support anyways for long run stability. Staying in the Middle East contrary to Iran's wishes functions similarly; there is short term gain to folding and packing up precisely as Yglesias has called for, long term loss for energy security to both European and East Asian members.
We will see what this looks like for the Dem House caucus in 2027 and 2028, but I suspect foreign policy will be a major sticking issue for his marginal votes to remain Speaker. On the tariff, Yglesias is correct the center-right should be asking more questions of the Trump White House on what is necessary to contain China's exports and no more. However, the tariff is in an interesting position because while it drives up prices of inputs, it has large numbers of political supporters and opponents across both party caucuses. Democrats want that revenue for their 2028 platform, not the center-right to assure the president's ability to raise taxes is both more limited and clearly unpopular. That should motivate the center-right further.
Is this really true for current Republicans? A lot of MAGA types were until recently very vocally opposed to exactly the kind of foreign policy misadventure we're engaged in with Iran.
I doubt it was a major selling point (foreign policy is low on list of voter issues), but his whole thing is if he went into Iraq he would do it to win. He's not an ideological paleocon. He thinks the military should get bigger. This is obvious from listening to him talk about foreign policy. And now he's kind of the foreign policy establishment in America and Hillary Clinton is telling the Europeans in FT to get along with his Board of Peace plan.
Republicans' "only plan to win seats in the face of Trump’s unpopularity is to gerrymander."
"The situation, instead, is that party leaders have successfully achieved what Democrats can only dream of: They’ve suppressed internal dissent from official caucus politics, they’re avoiding bitter primaries, and they don’t have angry donors."
The GOP is "continuing to follow a historically unpopular leader with almost no dissent."
You believe all this, and think giving the GOP an opportunity to pass the SAVE Act is a good idea?
Yglesias thinks a bipartisan Voter ID bill is an easy win for improving Democratic image with Trump-negative-but-not-voting-Dem voters we see in all the polls. He's probably not wrong in intra-Dem logic, where many of his shrewdest observations come; there is far less of a group to piss off by doing a form of Voter ID than folding to a bipartisan bill on most other Dem issues.
Because he doesn't think the SAVE Act is in fact going to disproportionately depress Democratic turnout. He's aware that some Republicans do think that, but he thinks they're wrong.
Al-Sayed lost Wayne Co. The black voters did not vote for him en masse. Is that an opportunity for Mike Rodgers? Of course it is, will he exploit it? HAHAHAHAHAHHAH. No
Al -Sayed win isn’t great for Democrats. In a world where an independent might “lean” one way or the other, along with the politically homeless, Democrats and Republicans appearing less crazy may be all you have to do.
What gives me heartburn is that I am forced to choose which type of cancer I want. Brain or Liver cancer with my vote. So of course I will write-in SMOD. Sweet meteor of Death.
I think anything that helps flip the majority to be Democrats is largely a net good. Such that I would still think him winning is a good thing. And I still have more faith in the Democrat establishments than I do anything even remotely Republican.
It would be nice if fewer of the progressive candidates would spend time trying to damage said establishments.
El Sayed being gracious in his victory over Stevens would win some brownie points from me. I await his statement and however he reaches out to Stevens and the half of the Democrats who voted against him.
Electing a candidate as weak as Stevens would have been bad for Democrats. As far as your heartrending choice about whether to support a Trump-defending Republican or just allow one to win by not voting: you're politically homeless because you failed to defend your home. The beautiful thing about America is that it's absolutely your right to repeat that mistake on a national level, when all the chips are down. Just don't expect the outcomes to be any better.
You mean when something like the cretinous JD Vance wins because Democrats nominated AOC?
Steven is a normie progressive, and that makes her weak? I guess you are a DSA type, which is cool; each to their own. Al-Sayed is not my cup of tea; I do not like performative politicians. He is filled with populist drivel. Populism infected the GOP, and now it is coming for Democrats. It’s not like Democrats are running away with popularity. Enjoy the ride.
I'm not a DSA type at all. I'm a "elect people who have fire in their soul and know how to fight" type. There was no deep well of political opposition to a moderate candidate: this election was Stevens' to lose. But she managed to lose it, to a relatively charismatic outsider. That reflects bad candidate quality.
If fighting just looks like your being an A hole, its worthless. Can you name an incumbent Democrat who isn’t fighting Trump? You guys have one guy who is standing up for Israel and thinks it's a bad idea not to back America in a war. Yeah, yeah, he was stupid for starting it but still I want us to succeed. I must admit however, Trump is a shitty general
What this suggests to me is that, while being a great speaker is really important for a presidential candidate, it's a lot less important for a senator or anything below a senator. And this is borne out by the fact that the vast majority of time that I've actually heard senators or representatives speak in front of an audience, they're boring and bad at it!
People are basically voting for parties, and beyond that I'd guess the most important things are whether you can either say or do things that will distinguish you in a positive or helpful way from your party or say or do things that distinguish you in a negative way from your party. So in an environment like Michigan now where generic democrats are more popular than generic republicans, I think a boring candidate would have done great.
I don’t know what people want in a Senator, but I think it involves candidates who normalize things and can behave courageously even if the policies aren’t always what everyone agrees with. Nobody wants a cowards. From a policy perspective, we are deep in a well of broken norms and we are falling deeper. The conventionalist view is that we should respond to each new broken norm by doing nothing, and that is the issue I'm associating with (lack of) "fight". This has gradually been eroding Democratic political power. Only recently has the Democratic party reluctantly acceded to the radical view that you should respond to norm-breaking with a tentative but matched, symmetrical response. This means that Republicans are only head by 5-10 seats during redistricting instead of 10-15. And even this tepid failure was a big deal for institutionalist Democrats. We need candidates who can do better.
ISTM that a major problem for all of us as voters is to distinguish between:
a. What a politician says he cares about/believes/will try to do.
b. What he actually cares about/believes/will try to do.
I think the "fire in the soul" thing ties mainly into this. Yes, you say you're going to fight for M4A or to push back on Trump's executive overreaches and corruption, but how do I know you will do that when it's hard or costs you something? "Moderate" can mean having not-very-strong beliefs and so being blown toward the middle/popular stuff by the winds, or having strong beliefs toward particular moderate policies. The first kind of moderation seems likely to give you people who will take few risks and spend little effort accomplishing their stated moderate goals against opposition; the second kind seems likely to give you people who will take risks and work hard to accomplish those goals.
I think this sort of conversation benefits from being specific. I was strongly in favor of the democratic retaliatory gerrymander, and think that's a great example of effectively "fighting." It was also, as you point out, done by very establishment figures in the Democratic party.
With the senate: I don't see any useful ways for senators to break norms or fight if the Democrats get fewer than 51 senate seats. Any power that 50 senators (without the VP) have is a function of the internal rules of the senate, which can just be changed by the majority. If Democrats fall short of 51, all of their power in the Senate will be a product of what they can convince one, or two, or however many Republican senators they need to do with them, so effectively "fighting" will mean forming alliances with Republicans.
And even if Democrats get 51 seats, the question of how hard they fight will be decided by the *least* willing Senator, not the most willing Senator.
So, I think that if you want to fight Trump, the priorities in the Senate should be:
#1: A candidate who can win their senate seat
#2: A candidate who won't be the least willing member of the Democratic coalition to do bold, norm-breaking stuff to stop Trump
#3: A candidate who will be able to make effective alliances with Republicans
My sense, which might be wrong, is that the sort of person who is most publicly a "fighter" is often not the right candidate for #1 and #3, and isn't better on #2 than anyone but the most conservative or risk-averse candidates. I'm thinking, for instance, of how Jamaal Bowman liked to get in shouting matches with Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene--it got press and looked tough but what was it ever going to accomplish? Even something like Cory Booker (who I love) doing a 25 hour filibuster--it cheered a lot of Democrats up, was very impressive and I don't think was hurtful, but it's sideshow stuff.
I don't know much about Stevens--maybe she would have been the most risk-averse Democrat and the person standing in the way of bold, tough action. But my sense is that she was a very generic, very middle of the road democrat who likely would have followed party leadership on tactical and strategic questions.
I can't picture what Abdul El-Sayed will do to "fight harder" that compares in importance to a) being less likely to win the general election and b) creating an impression that Democrats are radicals that will make it harder for other Democrats to win their elections. I think the most likely way that I'm wrong that El-Sayed is bad for the project of stopping Trump is that I'm wrong about him being a bigger electoral liability, not that I'm wrong that he'll fight harder in a meaningful and constructive way.
I generally agree with this. Republicans are far too complacent. There is no way to look at the last ten years and not see a 50/50 country. It is hard to look at the last 26 years and not think the bad democrat president was better than the good republican president. And the only presidential elections that haven't been close in that time were won by Obama. Heck, even the culture wars of the '90s mostly broke to the left.
And yet Republicans, and Trump, came in with a tyrannical arrogance - and it seemed to work for them for about 100 days. But they have been in denial about the completely predictable blowback, their response was to double down on their ugliness and it has made rhem more unpopular (and appear more incompetent) and yet they remain in denial about it.
Their response was to try to rig the electoral system. They have not (yet) been successful at that, but they still could be if a few things go their way -- and Democrats continue to ignore the structural risks, the same way Biden did.
I wish this article had some thoughts about why this phenomenon is happening. What are the ideological, media-related, or material facts that lead to this difference between the parties right now? Obviously, Matt isn't the kind of journalist who is going to go interview a bunch of Republican voters about this, but I would like his thoughts.
As I said upthread, I don't think it's that complicated - unlike w/ Biden post 10/7 and as his age thing got worse, Trump isn't doing anything Republicans actually dislike.
Being mean to immigrants, bombing brown people without any real pushback, and so on are all things the core Trump voter is a fan of, even if it's nationally unpopular.
Obviously, there is a 'right-wing media is saying nothing bad about Trump' part, but also even if they watched CNN or read the New York Times, they'd be like, 'yeah, the libs don't like this but I like what he's doing.'
I agree with this take. I've yet to meet a MAGA person in real life that will say anything negative about a Trump policy or anything he has done or is doing. They frankly don't care, and their revealed preference vs stated preferences show where they really stand on issues.
I think it's simpler than that. Anyone who pushes back on Trump's actions or policies get retaliation, which ranges from "lots of people start saying mean things about you and maybe some of them are dangerous nutcases" to "Trump endorses some true believer to run against you in the primary, the party gives them lots of money, and you lose your seat." This is really effective at shutting down dissent and pushback.
He's still getting some pushback, as with the compensation fund for the 1/6 rioters. But he's been *really effective* at punishing anyone who stands against him, with many of his former prominent allies being pushed out of power after crossing him on anything. (And this hasn't translated to passing many laws, note. Perhaps because congressmen can play a lot of procedural games to slow down that sort of thing in ways that are somewhat hard to nail down and punish?)
My guess is that this strategy is extremely fragile. It works while he seems like he's going to remain very powerful and able to punish anyone who crosses him. But the hour that this no longer appears to be true, I think the strategy won't work anymore, and probably he will find himself with a *ton* of opposition within his party.
I mean, as long as he's President and has 75% approval w/ Republican voters, why wouldn't it continue to work?
Even in 2028, there is going to be no serious candidate that criticizes Trump in any real way. Yes, Cornyn and Tillis got a fake promise about the compensation fund, but even that is weak crap compared to any other President.
Also, you're talking about politicians - I was talking about voters. Yes, politicians don't want to lose primaries or lose post-election job possibilities. But Republican voters just largely think what Trump is doing is good and right.
1.) The politicians care more about their personal lives - aka, not being ostracized in their Trump-y country club/business world and/or want to be able to grift via the right-wing industrial complex post-political life or worse (actual physical threats).
2.) The politicians who might lose in 2026 know the only thing worse than saying nothing about Trump and losing is criticizing Trump and losing and having no post-losing plan for their life. Massie can pull it off because he's a weirdo w/ his own non-political related life.
3.) Most Republican voters and I bet plenty of Republican politicians either think what Trump is doing is good _or_ don't know/care about the bad things. Like, to a Trump voter, what 'political failures' are happening that's the fault of Trump and not the libs and sellout RINOs?
"The politicians care more about their personal lives - aka, not being ostracized in their Trump-y country club/business world and/or want to be able to grift via the right-wing industrial complex post-political life or worse (actual physical threats)."
When I was a kid I remember it was almost a common trope for some athlete to get a question from a reporter that was "what do you say to your critics who said you couldn't win the big game" and the response was invariably "Oh I don't listen to the haters. I just believed in myself and worked hard knew I could get here". Now the one exception to this was Michael Jordan. He basically was not quiet about how he would use any slight or even a made up slight as motivation (if you're a hardcore basketball fan, you knew a lot of this before "The Last Dance").
So one of the revelations with Twitter was, how utter BS this all was. Jordan was just more psychotic about it. But rando Twitter used with 50 followers writes "KD sucks" (or some equivalent) and Kevin Durant is writing back some response tweet.
Where am I going with this. Twitter was a real revelation as to how thin skinned how many members of the "elite" really are; sports elite, business elite and yes political elite. But also, how hard they took any criticism or blowback at all. It's astonishingly clear how pre social media, how little various powers that be heard bad stuff about them...at all. And how taken aback elites are at even randos throwing out even light criticism.
What's point my point. My point is I 1,000% believe that one reason a lot of GOP pols don't break with Trump more than they should is because they're worried what their buddies on the golf course who are Trump fans might say. I sincerely believe it could be that petty and that stupid.
Seems like a combination of Trump being (1) highly charismatic and so able to command the loyalty of the party base (Matt has written about this a bunch, and identified Zohran Mamdani as someone on the Democratic side who can likewise do this); (2) sui generis, such that it's hard to imagine replacing him with someone else; and (3) petty and vindictive, such that he punishes dissent against him even when doing so is bad for his party's prospects of success.
The core Trump voter (who is not an "establishment Republican") is fairly isolationist - they oppose the "invade the world, invite the world, in hock to the world" ideology that dominated the Bush-era Republican party. But the money and the media not-entirely-hostile attention are on the more globalist parts of the party - Musk, Collins, etc.
Trump has angered his base a lot with the Iran invasion, but there aren't credible contenders who the base trusts to keep pushing immigration and outsourcing down and stay out of foreign military adventures. And there isn't a clear source of funding for an isolationist insurgency.
Yeah I assure you guys, in the real right wing discussion boards people are very mad about the Iran War and have been from day 1, but they believe that keeping a united front behind Trump is the only chance against the institutional power of the Dems.
I think this gets it wrong - the actual isolationist group was a small chunk of the online base. The core Trump voter wants to be involved in the world but in a way where America is dominant, everybody kneels, and nobody fights back. So, bombing Iran a bunch w/ no real amount of American deaths is fine to them.
The actual 'cut military funding, leave our bases, etc.' is maybe 10% of the GOP base which is why Tucker now has negative favorability among Republican voters.
How can you tell whether your picture of the world or Sam's is more accurate? I don't know how many people on the right are like this, but certainly I've seen a fair bit of discomfort with Trump's war from the intellectual end of the right.
Again, all it took was a few criticisms from Trump for Tucker's favorability w/ Trump voters to be now negative. He was the guy if there was a real 'base' that was isolationist to get behind and that failed. He'll still have his niche, but he came at the king and missed.
The truly isolationist wing of the GOP is overepresented among the intellectual end of the right and always has been to a certain extent. Look at even the Iraq War - it had like 90% support among Republicans, but there was much more disagreement among the intellectual classes.
I'm not saying Trump voters are neocons, I'm saying they're bullies. Which is different from both the Bill Kirstol 'bring liberty' and the Tucker Carlson 'withdraw from it all' worldviews.
Sure, but Tucker is also for that, but because he was against Trump, he's now underwater. So no, I don't think isolationism in the way Tucker or say, the American Conservative argued for is important to the Trump base.
They want a strongman. It isn't unique to Trump or America, it's just some basic defect of the human brain -- probably one that made a lot of sense when we lived in caves, but doesn't make sense in countries with advanced economies and nuclear weapons.
Right, I mean the basic, core, defining psychological attribute of Republicans is that they like authoritarianism and dislike the aspects of democracy that give equal weight to disfavored groups.
This shows up every time it's surveyed, has done since time immemorial, and yet people are still in denial about it. Democracy as a system of government is in deep trouble because the right hates it and the left doesn't care enough to defend it.
As I recall, this was research that defined authoritarianism in very clear partisan ways, and was pretty transparently crafted to give a politically pleasing story rather than to understand the truth.
There’s both. The research about simple partisanship is messy. But the research showing that social conservatives are more rigid and score traditional authority relationships more highly seems to be more robust. How that maps to partisanship depends on the makeup of your political coalitions.
I think, however, we can certainly say that the Trump/MAGA population of our country is highly attracted to authoritarianism. Maybe they all would be Democrats if Trump had run as a D.
Disincentivize these anti-democratic attacks by ensuring that their sponsors' interests are directly harmed in retaliation. We don't achieve a functional society because everyone naturally gets along, we live in one because everyone deems cooperation to be more beneficial than the alternative.
I mean this is the theory of escalating to de-escalate but we have seen no indication that this will work... it seems to me the Right has a much greater appetite for escalation and would win in a world of continuous one-upsmanship in political dirty pool like selective prosecutions/pardons/corruption investigations, etc.
There are a lot of people waiting to be Trump's successor. None of them with 10% of his star power, perhaps because he's uniquely charismatic, perhaps because he doesn't tolerate being upstaged.
To what extent can this Republican non-squabbling be explained by the fact that Trump loyalists keep winning primaries? And if that extent is large, is there just a lag in the Trump hatred, or is the electorate actually just really fond of populist xenophobia, and sees Trump as just not living up to his own standard?
As someone who lives in WI-3 and who has been a big Cooke cheerleader in the past, I don’t know how Matt can call her a Blue Dog if she is heavily promoting her Sanders endorsement. Those two identities seem diametrically opposed, no? Can someone (preferably Matt) explain how these so-called moderate Dems can eat their cake in the primary by tacking hard left, but then have it for later, too, in the general by somehow earning back the support of anti-Trump moderate GOP voters? Will they somehow forget the “eat the rich” Sanders messaging during the primary?? We aren’t taking about NYC — WI-3 is pretty rural and working class/blue collar when you get right down to it.
Is this an endorsement she actively sought out, or is she maybe just wielding it as "Please do not murder me" armor against the crowd that sees Matt supporting her and wants blood accordingly?
Idk (and I don’t care). It’s off-putting enough for me to see it (I’d be happier to see a “I am refusing Sanders’ endorsement” messaging), and there is a 0% chance I’ll vote for Van Orden in the general. Imagine what an on-the-fence Van Orden voter thinks. Seems like a real deal breaker from my perspective. Wisconsin has an open primary system, so there’s nothing stopping Cooke from trying to win the primary with GOP votes instead of tacking left to court progressive Dems.
I literally have volunteered to help the Cooke campaign and am now rethinking it, simply because she’s promoting the Sanders endorsement. It’s cringe and sus as the kids would say.
"Abdul El-Sayed seems like a distinctly bad candidate to me, and I think he’ll underperform the fundamentals.2 That said, the whole point here is that given the current political environment in Michigan (D+6.5 generic ballot), he’s likely to win the race even while performing quite poorly."
I believe polling shows it pretty much a tossup between El-Sayed and Rogers (and if it were Stevens, they mostly show Stevens beating Rogers).
You can't trust polling taken during a contested primary. It also reflects the fact that a lot of on-sides people don't like the candidate, since they support his opponent. Give it three weeks for things to settle.
Sure, but it seems also that Yglesias' conjecture that El-Sayed will likely win the race is premature as well. I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that, other than that it'll be competitive
All Yglesias is saying is that the Democrats have a big generic lead (and I think 6.5 points really understates how bad it will be by November, since gas prices are likely to increase before then.) That's all we can really say right now, since the polling seems to be shit. Beginning a race with a big head start is a good sign for any candidate.
Oh, the polling was fine. Polling aggregators gave El Sayed a 13 point margin over Stevens which was not much more than an order of magnitude too great, so only about 1300% off. I mean, it's not like the polls were off by *two* orders of magnitude.
It’s entirely possible that the polls are terribly wrong and the people of Michigan are actually really happy with how Trump II is working out and eager to give a generic Republican a shot. Maybe this is totally a 50/50 generic race. If you believe that, you can happily poo-poo the polls and live in one world. I’ll choose to live in another world, even if I have to do so on nothing but my own faith (and my ability to read gas station price boards).
Still watching to see if the Max Miller nonsense in Ohio will blow back on any other Rs running this cycle. I think that seat is flippable (it's a mix of rural and somewhat socially conservative Cleveland suburbs), and the Dem candidate seems fine, while Miller is an absolute garbage person. Former father in law Bernie Moreno finally announced how horrible he thinks Miller is (if someone threw boiling water on your daughter, would you wait a few months to denounce him, or drop kick him into Lake Erie? What is wrong with these people?). John Husted just glitched when asked about it, and Ramaswamy still had his endorsement on his website this week. Five days left for Ohio Republicans to sort it out. Turnout will make the difference, given that the MAGA loyalists most likely to be okay with voting for Miller despite the evidence are usually low-info rural voters who may not participate in a mid-term without Trump on the ballot (and to be fair, probably aren't paying attention to the congressional race at all), and Dem voters in those suburbs are likely more motivated, while swing voters in both areas should be put off by Miller.
Miller could still drop out, or the Republicans could try to push him out, but so far it doesn't look like that's going to happen -- he is doubling down on staying in, at least as of today. He had a call with Trump who told him that things aren't looking good, but Trump also called him a fine person or some such nonsense, and honestly this guy doesn't seem like he'd take a subtle hint.
What's Matt's thing against Ilhan Omar? I don't know why she's his model of a bad Democrat. The worst thing I know about her is that it seems she made some fairly shady payments to her husband as part of her campaign. Obviously there are some Israel-aligned Dems who don't like her, but I don't think she's any different on that score than the other Squad reps.
She is just statistically a larger electoral underperformed than even other members of the squad
https://split-ticket.org/full-wins-above-replacement-war-database/
After his baseball career ends, if he put his mind to it, Aaron Judge could probably put up some of the biggest Split Ticket WARs ever seen. Whichever party he chose, either way. MLB players are very R-leaning.
It seems to me that many of the same pathologies of the woke/progressive movement in the 2016-2022 time span have now taken hold in MAGA land, and they are doing just as much damage.
If being off-message gets you dragged on social media, ridiculed in partisan media, and leads to your career being wrecked, you will just be *really careful* to never be off-message. You will read the room carefully, and speak nonsense today, and opposite nonsense tomorrow, as needed. You will silence anyone who might point out that the current direction or rhetoric of your movement are headed for disaster, as well as people who point out that the current rhetoric or policies being pursued don't make any sense or won't work or are actively counterproductive.
Social media and related internet stuff is really great conformity-enforcing and dissent-suppression technology, and that's a *great* way to blind yourself to errors you're making and walk right off a cliff.
I very sincerely hope that when this MAGA fever passes, conservatives/MAGAs lose the hardcore conformity-enforcement and liberals/progressives don't build theirs back up.
BTW, the actual answer to the question - because Trump is largely doing things Republicans like so there's no reason to be upset at him. Even for all the online talk, most Republicans are OK w/ bombing brown people indiscriminately and will accept higher gas prices.
Like, before the combo of 10/7 and Biden's age issues, he was largely very popular w/ actual Democratic voters even as his approval rating sucked overall because he was doing things most Democrats like and there wasn't much infighting. There was some small 'Bidenomics' arguments, but nobody outside of Twitter knew they existed.
The reason why there was public Democratic infighting is because there was non-ideological (age) and ideological (Israel) fights w/ real splits.
So, unless Trump comes out for an actual tax hike on rich people or a pro-union labor policy (actually pro-labor, not some corrupt giveaway to a specific union), he'll be fine w/ most Republicans and there won't. be any public pushback within the party.
After all, Bush needed an unpopular war that killed a large-ish number of troops and was obviously not going well and in the public, an economic collapse, and an obvious public policy failure in Katrina to hit the true depths.
I also think there's myth the post-midterms environment will change things, but remember, every possible POTUS candidate wants Trump's blessing and anybody running in 2028 will still want his endorsement, to head off a primary challenge if anything.
Were there ideological or non-ideological intra-party fights in the 2010 and 2014 cycles? Because Dems in those midterms had no trouble distancing themselves from Obama, or trying to at least. My recollection is that Obama remained quite popular with Dem voters but cratered with swing voters and most downballot Dems ran away from him outside safe seats. So the question still looms as to why downballot Republicans in competitive seats aren’t running from Trump under similar circumstances.
My take is that it’s because the GOP has turned itself into a cult of personality and primary voters will tolerate no heresies.
Not...really, at least nothing close to the past few cycles. Even the competitive primaries weren't really that much on substance.
Also, I'd argue a partially reason why 2010 & 2014 was so bad for the Democrats is you had Democrats not in R+20, but R+5 seats basically refusing to act like a Democrat so they didn't win over swing voters _and_ they also lost turnout from Democrats in those seats.
But putting that argument aside, part of it is yes, Obama isn't a vindictive weirdo who will make your life hell for opposing him and more importantly, you wouldn't lose a primary even in a swing seat for running away from Obama.
But also, there is no Republican outside of Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and kind of Brian Kemp and Brian Fritzpatrick who has been successful running as anything but pro-Trump, but even in Georgia, there was no Kempian candidate - his Lt. Governor was super-MAGA and the healthcare guy who won the primary was also MAGA but as a businessman.
The reason they aren't running from Trump is no real successful examples. In 2010, there were successful examples (even though they largely failed in 2010 & 2014) of a centrist Democrat running away from an unpopular Democratic President and winning.
I think that’s the point though. There are very few examples of them running away from Trump and winning because the GOP is a personality cult these days. If you embrace Trump you might lose a general but you might not. If you contradict Trump you’re guaranteed to lose your primary and maybe get a bunch of death threats also. Because it’s a personality cult and not a political party.
Sure - I don't think we really disagree.
But also, Trump is largely doing things Republican voters like. If he suddenly said, 'I want to raise taxes on rich, mandate union elections for all businesses, allow abortion 'til time of birth, and sanction Israel', there would be backlash. The reason why GOP voters flipped on free trade which I know is an example people love to use is it was never a high salience issue.
Even the Iraq War stuff was more, 'the GOP establishment were wimps instead of real men taking what they want - I would've just taken the oil instead of wasting American money and soldiers on helping out Those People' than actual isolationism.
The reason why the cult of personality works is he's reflecting the id of the median GOP voter. If he wasn't reflecting that id, there'd be no cult though. I think that is something people miss.
>Republicans… will accept higher gas prices
I’m not so sure. Yes, the ride-and-die MAGA cultists will, but what about the less committed ones? Not to mention the Median Undecided Voters, who may not vote for Democrats because “ew icky socialists who will pay for illegal immigrants to have trans surgery and eat my dog,” but maybe at least they’ll be sufficiently disillusioned with MAGA to stay home? Silver linings!
Yeah Matt is fond of (correctly) pointing out that the far left theory of the case that you can basically juice turnout and get non voting working class voters to vote for you by going harder left on economics is quite dubious as a theory...in Presidential elections.
But in midterms (and primaries and local races), turnout and specifically who does and doesn't turn out is more determinative. It's the secret sauce as to how DSA is able to win a bunch primaries.
Point being, it's sort of forgotten that a big reason GOP losses were not larger in 2018 and likely why they were still able to flip senate seats is GOP turnout was actually quite high historically (in the scenario where said party won the Presidency two years prior). But this is with a booming economy. Economy is actually doing ok (read recently that the Michigan consumer survey shouldn't be taken seriously anymore as they changed their methodology and now are way overindexed on Democratic voters), but it's clearly not as good as it was in 2018 (inflation alone). Every coalition includes the "soft" supporter by definition. Or supporters who generally are predisposed to vote for one party over the other but are disillusioned with President. Given Trump's approval rating right now, there's pretty decent evidence that a lot of pretty solid Republicans are not happy with Trump. So how likely is it they come out to vote...especially given how little GOP politicians seem willing to separate themselves from Trump (remember in 2018, there were still a lot of true "Never Trump" voters. As in, they maybe voted Libertarian in 2016, but were perfectly happy to vote for GOP Congressmen and Senators. Think those voters are basically Dems now (Call them Bulwark Democrats). Of course Dems then lost ground with working class voters and Hispanic voters...but not only Hispanic voters swung back (for obvious reasons) but Dems lost ground with exactly the type of voters who are less likely to show up to vote.
Maybe I'm inbibing too much hopium, but I suspect polling is understating likely Dem advantage in November, in part for the reasons I just laid out.
I mean, Trump has what 80% approval ratings among Republicans right now. Obviously, it is hurting him among swing voters, but people expected much worse from these gas prices. China deciding to do Trump a solid for whatever reason also helped and yes, $7 or $8/gallon gas might be political death, but $5/gallon gas isn't new to voters.
It sucks, but much like the tariffs, it's baked into the cost of owning the libs and why there isn't open pushback against Trump. Even the people you'd tihnk might more openly push him on this (the remaining neocons, etc.) are supporting of this War and upset Trump isn't doing more!
I'm not talking about the dumb swing voters in all this - they already turned on Trump.
80% amongst Republicans is really bad for him though! He's usually been upwards of 90.
I'm aware that China is really rolling out EVs, solar and making other big shifts away from petroleum, BUT what is the play here? China isn't dumb and they could easily turn the screw on trump if they wanted to. I guess by subsidizing every small country in the Pacific rim (Europe too I guess) they are becoming the less big bad.
No one knows for sure but two theories I've heard on why China kept the price of oil from spiking are:
1) They apparently have been working for years on a plan to deal with oil getting cut off after they invade Taiwan and this was a test run of their plan.
2) They're an export led economy and they'd likely suffer serious economic consequences if oil got to $200/barrel and caused a worldwide recession.
The big question that the party needs to ask is; what's better, for a candidate who'll make a great senator to win by 1 or by a candidate who will make a bad senator to win by 5? The left needs to realize that you can't change anything in the minority and the center needs to come to terms with the fact that a majority of primary voters don't care about WAR stats. They want candiates that they like and agree with to win.
This is not true at all. If you listen to what voters are saying, they prioritize electability a lot.
What's going on is that voters no longer trust the party to tell them who is electable, because the party's idea of who is electable keeps spitting out lemons like Haley Stevens.
Michigan primary voters did not vote for El-Sayed because they thought he was more electable.
Source: I made it up
I mean, you don't get extra votes for winning by 5 points instead of 1.
Like there are obviously more effective possible Wisconsin GOP candidates than Ron Johnson and have been helped by bad decisions by the Wisconsin Dems, but he still won and is closer to the median Republican primary voter than some Scott Walker type.
Karl Rove was basically right - the point in politics isn't to win 55% smashing victories, it's to win what you can and then declare yourself having a mandate regardless.
Down ballot coat tails are a thing, and so are mandates! A world where Biden smashed Trump by a landslide and picked up a clean trifecta is a world where Bidenomics and BBB would'v had a better shot at winning because A) More Biden-aligned Dems would be elected and B) Dems skeptical of those policies would feel more pressure to vote "Aye" (with some tweaks I'm sure) because of the magnitude of the mandate. Unserious comment, I'm sorry
More to the point, leading 51/49 leaves a great deal of room for unpleasant surprises, last minute scandals or scandal-shaped stories that nudge the outcome a bit, etc. After the election, the guy who won by one vote is still a senator, just as (as with the famous joke) the guy who graduated last in his class from medical school is still a doctor. But before the election, the guy who is expected to win by 3 points is substantially less likely to end up being a senator than the guy who's expected to win by 8 points.
Except that:
1) In general, if you win by 1 in a highly favorable environment, that strongly implies you're going to lose reelection sooner rather than later. (US Senators are admittedly a semi-exception due to their unusual 6-year terms that more readily allow them to surf the "peaks" of a couple election cycles and/or dodge recessions, depending on when they were elected.)
2) In the current political environment, being in a position to win by a narrow margin makes it easier for Republican officials to steal your election and deny you a seat altogether -- "If it's not close, they can't cheat" as the saying goes.
If you aim to win by only 1 point, you are way more likely to lose, and winning the senate requires winning EVERY swingable race IIUC.
Note: polls are far from perfect. Even a +5 in polls can translate to a loss on election day. Nate Silver said just today that "the average error in polls in presidential primaries since 2000 is around 9 points of vote margin" and it seems like all the Abdul El-Sayed vs Haley Stevens polls were wrong by more than 5 points.
Yeah exactly, there's no way to predict the actual election results, so it would be foolish to field candidates you expect to win narrowly.
The key recent driver is the Iran war's effect on gas prices and thus transportation inputs to most goods. But this of course is why Republicans aren't going to break; unlike Democrats, they generally trust the national security process against US adversaries. During the Biden admin, half of the GOP House caucus voted for Ukraine aid in 2024. We all know holding a line against Russia was going to drive up gas prices compared to swift defeat for Ukraine, but it was the right thing to support anyways for long run stability. Staying in the Middle East contrary to Iran's wishes functions similarly; there is short term gain to folding and packing up precisely as Yglesias has called for, long term loss for energy security to both European and East Asian members.
We will see what this looks like for the Dem House caucus in 2027 and 2028, but I suspect foreign policy will be a major sticking issue for his marginal votes to remain Speaker. On the tariff, Yglesias is correct the center-right should be asking more questions of the Trump White House on what is necessary to contain China's exports and no more. However, the tariff is in an interesting position because while it drives up prices of inputs, it has large numbers of political supporters and opponents across both party caucuses. Democrats want that revenue for their 2028 platform, not the center-right to assure the president's ability to raise taxes is both more limited and clearly unpopular. That should motivate the center-right further.
Trump does not have a plan in Iran though. He has no idea what he is doing whatsoever.
Is this really true for current Republicans? A lot of MAGA types were until recently very vocally opposed to exactly the kind of foreign policy misadventure we're engaged in with Iran.
>Republicans… generally trust the national security process against US adversaries.
Uh, wasn’t one of Trump’s major selling points in 2024 that he’ll put America first and won’t start any more wars in the Middle East?
I doubt it was a major selling point (foreign policy is low on list of voter issues), but his whole thing is if he went into Iraq he would do it to win. He's not an ideological paleocon. He thinks the military should get bigger. This is obvious from listening to him talk about foreign policy. And now he's kind of the foreign policy establishment in America and Hillary Clinton is telling the Europeans in FT to get along with his Board of Peace plan.
No one trusts anything Trump says though.
Republicans' "only plan to win seats in the face of Trump’s unpopularity is to gerrymander."
"The situation, instead, is that party leaders have successfully achieved what Democrats can only dream of: They’ve suppressed internal dissent from official caucus politics, they’re avoiding bitter primaries, and they don’t have angry donors."
The GOP is "continuing to follow a historically unpopular leader with almost no dissent."
You believe all this, and think giving the GOP an opportunity to pass the SAVE Act is a good idea?
Yglesias thinks a bipartisan Voter ID bill is an easy win for improving Democratic image with Trump-negative-but-not-voting-Dem voters we see in all the polls. He's probably not wrong in intra-Dem logic, where many of his shrewdest observations come; there is far less of a group to piss off by doing a form of Voter ID than folding to a bipartisan bill on most other Dem issues.
Also, voter ID requirements probably benefit Democrats over Republicans if they're enforced uniformly.
Because he doesn't think the SAVE Act is in fact going to disproportionately depress Democratic turnout. He's aware that some Republicans do think that, but he thinks they're wrong.
Al-Sayed lost Wayne Co. The black voters did not vote for him en masse. Is that an opportunity for Mike Rodgers? Of course it is, will he exploit it? HAHAHAHAHAHHAH. No
Al -Sayed win isn’t great for Democrats. In a world where an independent might “lean” one way or the other, along with the politically homeless, Democrats and Republicans appearing less crazy may be all you have to do.
What gives me heartburn is that I am forced to choose which type of cancer I want. Brain or Liver cancer with my vote. So of course I will write-in SMOD. Sweet meteor of Death.
I think anything that helps flip the majority to be Democrats is largely a net good. Such that I would still think him winning is a good thing. And I still have more faith in the Democrat establishments than I do anything even remotely Republican.
It would be nice if fewer of the progressive candidates would spend time trying to damage said establishments.
El Sayed being gracious in his victory over Stevens would win some brownie points from me. I await his statement and however he reaches out to Stevens and the half of the Democrats who voted against him.
Sadly, I don't have high hopes on this. I fully expect some sour grapes to linger. Remember, he didn't just go after Stevens, but also Whitmer.
My expectation is his acceptance speech will include a lot of anti-establishment rhetoric. :(
Electing a candidate as weak as Stevens would have been bad for Democrats. As far as your heartrending choice about whether to support a Trump-defending Republican or just allow one to win by not voting: you're politically homeless because you failed to defend your home. The beautiful thing about America is that it's absolutely your right to repeat that mistake on a national level, when all the chips are down. Just don't expect the outcomes to be any better.
You mean when something like the cretinous JD Vance wins because Democrats nominated AOC?
Steven is a normie progressive, and that makes her weak? I guess you are a DSA type, which is cool; each to their own. Al-Sayed is not my cup of tea; I do not like performative politicians. He is filled with populist drivel. Populism infected the GOP, and now it is coming for Democrats. It’s not like Democrats are running away with popularity. Enjoy the ride.
I'm not a DSA type at all. I'm a "elect people who have fire in their soul and know how to fight" type. There was no deep well of political opposition to a moderate candidate: this election was Stevens' to lose. But she managed to lose it, to a relatively charismatic outsider. That reflects bad candidate quality.
Great we have two parties that just want to fight. Perfect.
I mean, that's definitely preferable to a situation where only one is willing to fight.
If fighting just looks like your being an A hole, its worthless. Can you name an incumbent Democrat who isn’t fighting Trump? You guys have one guy who is standing up for Israel and thinks it's a bad idea not to back America in a war. Yeah, yeah, he was stupid for starting it but still I want us to succeed. I must admit however, Trump is a shitty general
I don't know enough about Stevens to weigh in on her quality as a politician, but I think "fire in your soul" is hugely overrated for most politicians when it comes to winning general elections. Most people will never hear a senatorial candidate speak, or will hear them one or two times in passing. Only about 2/3 of senators know what party their senator is from (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/americans-are-more-aware-who-represents-them-than-you-might-assume/) and less than 1/4 of millennials (can't find anything for people in general) know the name of at least one of their senators (https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/most-americans-cant-recall-most-first-amendment-rights/).
What this suggests to me is that, while being a great speaker is really important for a presidential candidate, it's a lot less important for a senator or anything below a senator. And this is borne out by the fact that the vast majority of time that I've actually heard senators or representatives speak in front of an audience, they're boring and bad at it!
People are basically voting for parties, and beyond that I'd guess the most important things are whether you can either say or do things that will distinguish you in a positive or helpful way from your party or say or do things that distinguish you in a negative way from your party. So in an environment like Michigan now where generic democrats are more popular than generic republicans, I think a boring candidate would have done great.
I don’t know what people want in a Senator, but I think it involves candidates who normalize things and can behave courageously even if the policies aren’t always what everyone agrees with. Nobody wants a cowards. From a policy perspective, we are deep in a well of broken norms and we are falling deeper. The conventionalist view is that we should respond to each new broken norm by doing nothing, and that is the issue I'm associating with (lack of) "fight". This has gradually been eroding Democratic political power. Only recently has the Democratic party reluctantly acceded to the radical view that you should respond to norm-breaking with a tentative but matched, symmetrical response. This means that Republicans are only head by 5-10 seats during redistricting instead of 10-15. And even this tepid failure was a big deal for institutionalist Democrats. We need candidates who can do better.
ISTM that a major problem for all of us as voters is to distinguish between:
a. What a politician says he cares about/believes/will try to do.
b. What he actually cares about/believes/will try to do.
I think the "fire in the soul" thing ties mainly into this. Yes, you say you're going to fight for M4A or to push back on Trump's executive overreaches and corruption, but how do I know you will do that when it's hard or costs you something? "Moderate" can mean having not-very-strong beliefs and so being blown toward the middle/popular stuff by the winds, or having strong beliefs toward particular moderate policies. The first kind of moderation seems likely to give you people who will take few risks and spend little effort accomplishing their stated moderate goals against opposition; the second kind seems likely to give you people who will take risks and work hard to accomplish those goals.
I think this sort of conversation benefits from being specific. I was strongly in favor of the democratic retaliatory gerrymander, and think that's a great example of effectively "fighting." It was also, as you point out, done by very establishment figures in the Democratic party.
With the senate: I don't see any useful ways for senators to break norms or fight if the Democrats get fewer than 51 senate seats. Any power that 50 senators (without the VP) have is a function of the internal rules of the senate, which can just be changed by the majority. If Democrats fall short of 51, all of their power in the Senate will be a product of what they can convince one, or two, or however many Republican senators they need to do with them, so effectively "fighting" will mean forming alliances with Republicans.
And even if Democrats get 51 seats, the question of how hard they fight will be decided by the *least* willing Senator, not the most willing Senator.
So, I think that if you want to fight Trump, the priorities in the Senate should be:
#1: A candidate who can win their senate seat
#2: A candidate who won't be the least willing member of the Democratic coalition to do bold, norm-breaking stuff to stop Trump
#3: A candidate who will be able to make effective alliances with Republicans
My sense, which might be wrong, is that the sort of person who is most publicly a "fighter" is often not the right candidate for #1 and #3, and isn't better on #2 than anyone but the most conservative or risk-averse candidates. I'm thinking, for instance, of how Jamaal Bowman liked to get in shouting matches with Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene--it got press and looked tough but what was it ever going to accomplish? Even something like Cory Booker (who I love) doing a 25 hour filibuster--it cheered a lot of Democrats up, was very impressive and I don't think was hurtful, but it's sideshow stuff.
I don't know much about Stevens--maybe she would have been the most risk-averse Democrat and the person standing in the way of bold, tough action. But my sense is that she was a very generic, very middle of the road democrat who likely would have followed party leadership on tactical and strategic questions.
I can't picture what Abdul El-Sayed will do to "fight harder" that compares in importance to a) being less likely to win the general election and b) creating an impression that Democrats are radicals that will make it harder for other Democrats to win their elections. I think the most likely way that I'm wrong that El-Sayed is bad for the project of stopping Trump is that I'm wrong about him being a bigger electoral liability, not that I'm wrong that he'll fight harder in a meaningful and constructive way.
I generally agree with this. Republicans are far too complacent. There is no way to look at the last ten years and not see a 50/50 country. It is hard to look at the last 26 years and not think the bad democrat president was better than the good republican president. And the only presidential elections that haven't been close in that time were won by Obama. Heck, even the culture wars of the '90s mostly broke to the left.
And yet Republicans, and Trump, came in with a tyrannical arrogance - and it seemed to work for them for about 100 days. But they have been in denial about the completely predictable blowback, their response was to double down on their ugliness and it has made rhem more unpopular (and appear more incompetent) and yet they remain in denial about it.
"There is no way to look at the last ten years and not see a 50/50 country."
If you're swimming in the correct media ecosystem, sure you can not see that!
And most politically-involved people are indeed swimming in such a media ecosystem.
Their response was to try to rig the electoral system. They have not (yet) been successful at that, but they still could be if a few things go their way -- and Democrats continue to ignore the structural risks, the same way Biden did.
I wish this article had some thoughts about why this phenomenon is happening. What are the ideological, media-related, or material facts that lead to this difference between the parties right now? Obviously, Matt isn't the kind of journalist who is going to go interview a bunch of Republican voters about this, but I would like his thoughts.
As I said upthread, I don't think it's that complicated - unlike w/ Biden post 10/7 and as his age thing got worse, Trump isn't doing anything Republicans actually dislike.
Being mean to immigrants, bombing brown people without any real pushback, and so on are all things the core Trump voter is a fan of, even if it's nationally unpopular.
Obviously, there is a 'right-wing media is saying nothing bad about Trump' part, but also even if they watched CNN or read the New York Times, they'd be like, 'yeah, the libs don't like this but I like what he's doing.'
I agree with this take. I've yet to meet a MAGA person in real life that will say anything negative about a Trump policy or anything he has done or is doing. They frankly don't care, and their revealed preference vs stated preferences show where they really stand on issues.
I think it's simpler than that. Anyone who pushes back on Trump's actions or policies get retaliation, which ranges from "lots of people start saying mean things about you and maybe some of them are dangerous nutcases" to "Trump endorses some true believer to run against you in the primary, the party gives them lots of money, and you lose your seat." This is really effective at shutting down dissent and pushback.
He's still getting some pushback, as with the compensation fund for the 1/6 rioters. But he's been *really effective* at punishing anyone who stands against him, with many of his former prominent allies being pushed out of power after crossing him on anything. (And this hasn't translated to passing many laws, note. Perhaps because congressmen can play a lot of procedural games to slow down that sort of thing in ways that are somewhat hard to nail down and punish?)
My guess is that this strategy is extremely fragile. It works while he seems like he's going to remain very powerful and able to punish anyone who crosses him. But the hour that this no longer appears to be true, I think the strategy won't work anymore, and probably he will find himself with a *ton* of opposition within his party.
I mean, as long as he's President and has 75% approval w/ Republican voters, why wouldn't it continue to work?
Even in 2028, there is going to be no serious candidate that criticizes Trump in any real way. Yes, Cornyn and Tillis got a fake promise about the compensation fund, but even that is weak crap compared to any other President.
Also, you're talking about politicians - I was talking about voters. Yes, politicians don't want to lose primaries or lose post-election job possibilities. But Republican voters just largely think what Trump is doing is good and right.
But why isn't anyone upset about the political failures, including politicians that it's directly harming?
1.) The politicians care more about their personal lives - aka, not being ostracized in their Trump-y country club/business world and/or want to be able to grift via the right-wing industrial complex post-political life or worse (actual physical threats).
2.) The politicians who might lose in 2026 know the only thing worse than saying nothing about Trump and losing is criticizing Trump and losing and having no post-losing plan for their life. Massie can pull it off because he's a weirdo w/ his own non-political related life.
3.) Most Republican voters and I bet plenty of Republican politicians either think what Trump is doing is good _or_ don't know/care about the bad things. Like, to a Trump voter, what 'political failures' are happening that's the fault of Trump and not the libs and sellout RINOs?
"The politicians care more about their personal lives - aka, not being ostracized in their Trump-y country club/business world and/or want to be able to grift via the right-wing industrial complex post-political life or worse (actual physical threats)."
When I was a kid I remember it was almost a common trope for some athlete to get a question from a reporter that was "what do you say to your critics who said you couldn't win the big game" and the response was invariably "Oh I don't listen to the haters. I just believed in myself and worked hard knew I could get here". Now the one exception to this was Michael Jordan. He basically was not quiet about how he would use any slight or even a made up slight as motivation (if you're a hardcore basketball fan, you knew a lot of this before "The Last Dance").
So one of the revelations with Twitter was, how utter BS this all was. Jordan was just more psychotic about it. But rando Twitter used with 50 followers writes "KD sucks" (or some equivalent) and Kevin Durant is writing back some response tweet.
Where am I going with this. Twitter was a real revelation as to how thin skinned how many members of the "elite" really are; sports elite, business elite and yes political elite. But also, how hard they took any criticism or blowback at all. It's astonishingly clear how pre social media, how little various powers that be heard bad stuff about them...at all. And how taken aback elites are at even randos throwing out even light criticism.
What's point my point. My point is I 1,000% believe that one reason a lot of GOP pols don't break with Trump more than they should is because they're worried what their buddies on the golf course who are Trump fans might say. I sincerely believe it could be that petty and that stupid.
The modern Republican party always takes on the character of their national leader more than the Democrats do.
Also they have a national leader; Democrats don't.
To quote Ezra Klein "The Republican Party has become authoritarian. The Democratic Party has become bureaucratic."
Seems like a combination of Trump being (1) highly charismatic and so able to command the loyalty of the party base (Matt has written about this a bunch, and identified Zohran Mamdani as someone on the Democratic side who can likewise do this); (2) sui generis, such that it's hard to imagine replacing him with someone else; and (3) petty and vindictive, such that he punishes dissent against him even when doing so is bad for his party's prospects of success.
My perspective:
The core Trump voter (who is not an "establishment Republican") is fairly isolationist - they oppose the "invade the world, invite the world, in hock to the world" ideology that dominated the Bush-era Republican party. But the money and the media not-entirely-hostile attention are on the more globalist parts of the party - Musk, Collins, etc.
Trump has angered his base a lot with the Iran invasion, but there aren't credible contenders who the base trusts to keep pushing immigration and outsourcing down and stay out of foreign military adventures. And there isn't a clear source of funding for an isolationist insurgency.
Yeah I assure you guys, in the real right wing discussion boards people are very mad about the Iran War and have been from day 1, but they believe that keeping a united front behind Trump is the only chance against the institutional power of the Dems.
I think this gets it wrong - the actual isolationist group was a small chunk of the online base. The core Trump voter wants to be involved in the world but in a way where America is dominant, everybody kneels, and nobody fights back. So, bombing Iran a bunch w/ no real amount of American deaths is fine to them.
The actual 'cut military funding, leave our bases, etc.' is maybe 10% of the GOP base which is why Tucker now has negative favorability among Republican voters.
How can you tell whether your picture of the world or Sam's is more accurate? I don't know how many people on the right are like this, but certainly I've seen a fair bit of discomfort with Trump's war from the intellectual end of the right.
Again, all it took was a few criticisms from Trump for Tucker's favorability w/ Trump voters to be now negative. He was the guy if there was a real 'base' that was isolationist to get behind and that failed. He'll still have his niche, but he came at the king and missed.
The truly isolationist wing of the GOP is overepresented among the intellectual end of the right and always has been to a certain extent. Look at even the Iraq War - it had like 90% support among Republicans, but there was much more disagreement among the intellectual classes.
I'm not saying Trump voters are neocons, I'm saying they're bullies. Which is different from both the Bill Kirstol 'bring liberty' and the Tucker Carlson 'withdraw from it all' worldviews.
It's not isolationism that's key, it's the whole package most critically including (much) lower immigration.
Sure, but Tucker is also for that, but because he was against Trump, he's now underwater. So no, I don't think isolationism in the way Tucker or say, the American Conservative argued for is important to the Trump base.
It's bullyism + lower immigration.
I think it's just that trump has some strange effect over the republican party
I don't understand it, but it's very much real
They want a strongman. It isn't unique to Trump or America, it's just some basic defect of the human brain -- probably one that made a lot of sense when we lived in caves, but doesn't make sense in countries with advanced economies and nuclear weapons.
Right, I mean the basic, core, defining psychological attribute of Republicans is that they like authoritarianism and dislike the aspects of democracy that give equal weight to disfavored groups.
This shows up every time it's surveyed, has done since time immemorial, and yet people are still in denial about it. Democracy as a system of government is in deep trouble because the right hates it and the left doesn't care enough to defend it.
Except of course for the left's love affair with big authoritarian leftists governments like communism...
As I recall, this was research that defined authoritarianism in very clear partisan ways, and was pretty transparently crafted to give a politically pleasing story rather than to understand the truth.
There’s both. The research about simple partisanship is messy. But the research showing that social conservatives are more rigid and score traditional authority relationships more highly seems to be more robust. How that maps to partisanship depends on the makeup of your political coalitions.
I think, however, we can certainly say that the Trump/MAGA population of our country is highly attracted to authoritarianism. Maybe they all would be Democrats if Trump had run as a D.
I mean what's the left supposed to do? Win every election for 100 years?
Disincentivize these anti-democratic attacks by ensuring that their sponsors' interests are directly harmed in retaliation. We don't achieve a functional society because everyone naturally gets along, we live in one because everyone deems cooperation to be more beneficial than the alternative.
I mean this is the theory of escalating to de-escalate but we have seen no indication that this will work... it seems to me the Right has a much greater appetite for escalation and would win in a world of continuous one-upsmanship in political dirty pool like selective prosecutions/pardons/corruption investigations, etc.
Right but I want to understand it!
It's a 'who is the alternative?' thing. Who is willing to secure the border and reverse the de facto open borders of the prior years?
There are a lot of people waiting to be Trump's successor. None of them with 10% of his star power, perhaps because he's uniquely charismatic, perhaps because he doesn't tolerate being upstaged.
To what extent can this Republican non-squabbling be explained by the fact that Trump loyalists keep winning primaries? And if that extent is large, is there just a lag in the Trump hatred, or is the electorate actually just really fond of populist xenophobia, and sees Trump as just not living up to his own standard?
Trump loyalists keep winning primaries because all the candidates are Trump loyalists.
As someone who lives in WI-3 and who has been a big Cooke cheerleader in the past, I don’t know how Matt can call her a Blue Dog if she is heavily promoting her Sanders endorsement. Those two identities seem diametrically opposed, no? Can someone (preferably Matt) explain how these so-called moderate Dems can eat their cake in the primary by tacking hard left, but then have it for later, too, in the general by somehow earning back the support of anti-Trump moderate GOP voters? Will they somehow forget the “eat the rich” Sanders messaging during the primary?? We aren’t taking about NYC — WI-3 is pretty rural and working class/blue collar when you get right down to it.
Is this an endorsement she actively sought out, or is she maybe just wielding it as "Please do not murder me" armor against the crowd that sees Matt supporting her and wants blood accordingly?
Idk (and I don’t care). It’s off-putting enough for me to see it (I’d be happier to see a “I am refusing Sanders’ endorsement” messaging), and there is a 0% chance I’ll vote for Van Orden in the general. Imagine what an on-the-fence Van Orden voter thinks. Seems like a real deal breaker from my perspective. Wisconsin has an open primary system, so there’s nothing stopping Cooke from trying to win the primary with GOP votes instead of tacking left to court progressive Dems.
I literally have volunteered to help the Cooke campaign and am now rethinking it, simply because she’s promoting the Sanders endorsement. It’s cringe and sus as the kids would say.
*on the phone*
"Jocelyn, look, I just need you to find 14,899 votes. For the 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦, baby—do it for the 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦."
"Abdul El-Sayed seems like a distinctly bad candidate to me, and I think he’ll underperform the fundamentals.2 That said, the whole point here is that given the current political environment in Michigan (D+6.5 generic ballot), he’s likely to win the race even while performing quite poorly."
I believe polling shows it pretty much a tossup between El-Sayed and Rogers (and if it were Stevens, they mostly show Stevens beating Rogers).
You can't trust polling taken during a contested primary. It also reflects the fact that a lot of on-sides people don't like the candidate, since they support his opponent. Give it three weeks for things to settle.
Sure, but it seems also that Yglesias' conjecture that El-Sayed will likely win the race is premature as well. I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that, other than that it'll be competitive
All Yglesias is saying is that the Democrats have a big generic lead (and I think 6.5 points really understates how bad it will be by November, since gas prices are likely to increase before then.) That's all we can really say right now, since the polling seems to be shit. Beginning a race with a big head start is a good sign for any candidate.
Oh, the polling was fine. Polling aggregators gave El Sayed a 13 point margin over Stevens which was not much more than an order of magnitude too great, so only about 1300% off. I mean, it's not like the polls were off by *two* orders of magnitude.
It’s entirely possible that the polls are terribly wrong and the people of Michigan are actually really happy with how Trump II is working out and eager to give a generic Republican a shot. Maybe this is totally a 50/50 generic race. If you believe that, you can happily poo-poo the polls and live in one world. I’ll choose to live in another world, even if I have to do so on nothing but my own faith (and my ability to read gas station price boards).
Still watching to see if the Max Miller nonsense in Ohio will blow back on any other Rs running this cycle. I think that seat is flippable (it's a mix of rural and somewhat socially conservative Cleveland suburbs), and the Dem candidate seems fine, while Miller is an absolute garbage person. Former father in law Bernie Moreno finally announced how horrible he thinks Miller is (if someone threw boiling water on your daughter, would you wait a few months to denounce him, or drop kick him into Lake Erie? What is wrong with these people?). John Husted just glitched when asked about it, and Ramaswamy still had his endorsement on his website this week. Five days left for Ohio Republicans to sort it out. Turnout will make the difference, given that the MAGA loyalists most likely to be okay with voting for Miller despite the evidence are usually low-info rural voters who may not participate in a mid-term without Trump on the ballot (and to be fair, probably aren't paying attention to the congressional race at all), and Dem voters in those suburbs are likely more motivated, while swing voters in both areas should be put off by Miller.
So there's nothing akin to Platner that they can do?
Miller could still drop out, or the Republicans could try to push him out, but so far it doesn't look like that's going to happen -- he is doubling down on staying in, at least as of today. He had a call with Trump who told him that things aren't looking good, but Trump also called him a fine person or some such nonsense, and honestly this guy doesn't seem like he'd take a subtle hint.
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What is wrong with these people
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Partisanship rots the brain and blinds people to facts and truth
As has long been said, “I’m not a member of an organized political party, I’m a Democrat”
Why are Unitarians so bad at singing hymns? Because they’re too busy arguing over what they mean.