My tentative take on this disaster is that it's the revenge of fundamentals. There's going to be lots of angst-ridden discussion of what Democrats should have done differently—and what mistakes Kamala Harris made. Indeed this has already begun in earnest. But what if the reality is: the Democrats didn't have a candidate or a strategy that was going to make up the millions of votes by which Donald Trump has apparently won? No, not Michelle Obama, not Gretchen Whitmer, not Andy Beshear, not a Biden step-down in 2023 followed by a spirited primary—maybe none of it would have been enough to save the bacon of an incumbency party that presided over a hideously unwelcome burst of inflation on its watch.
I suspect my take isn't a popular one. We humans like to think we're in charge, which means if we don't get what we want we should've done something different. But maybe, just maybe, enough voters wanted 2019's price level badly enough that they demanded the return of 2019's president.
POSTSCRIPT: None of this means Democrats shouldn't analyze this loss to see what can be improved upon. There's a midterm to fight in two years, and a presidential election in 2028—a Trump free one at that! And a sounder and better executed political strategy would surely have helped in terms of downticket races, and margin of loss. But yes, my own deep hunch is that we've been barreling toward a Trump restoration for a long time: an irresistible tsunami of anti-incumbent sentiment like that witnessed in countless other democracies.
The gains Trump made in blue cities is truly fascinating. Voters are just so frustrated with Dem's ability to deliver on issues of public safety and affordability.
Yep. I would never have voted for him, but as a person who *wants* to believe in the power of government to do good things, I'm having an increasingly hard time actually believing it. Charles Fain Lehman's recent post on "disorder" (https://thecausalfallacy.com/p/its-time-to-talk-about-americas-disorder), and his discussion about it with Ezra Klein, gets at this very effectively IMO.
This seems like a massive issue in that elected Republicans have mostly abandoned/been driven out of the cities. What it seems we need is for some level of party on the "right" to be able to get elected in cities and address *right leaning* issues when they surge (crime/security/order/budget efficiency/high taxes, etc.). Instead, it seems like the Democratic electeds are expected to address both *left* issues and *right* issues and that is really hard to do coalitionally. This spirals up to national politics as a result.
More people should be talking about that article. I was just about to make a similar comment, but saw you had beaten me too it. It explains so much. And really addresses one of the key weaknesses of the Democratic party.
Yes I often bring up the fact the Mayor of LA, Karen Bass, met with the business owners around MacArthur park two years ago and promised to make things better and she hasn’t.
Democrats talks a big game and spend a lot of money but they are not delivering and it is costing them.
I hadn’t thought of the urban shift as related to the crime and disorder situation, Ben. Interesting. Although it does seem like you would flip red for local elections bc what realistically is Trump going to do about shampoo being locked up at the CVS.
That said, Dems and the left really need to get out of their denial on how bad a lot of blue cities look and feel post-COVID. My experience from visiting quite a few of them (Portland, Seattle, LA, DC, Philly, Minneapolis) is really really not good.
I think it's generally uncontroversial that one party states (by state, I also mean countries, cities, etc..) are bad. We tend to make an exception in that theory for our own party, but we probably shouldn't. It's likely very for Alabama that Democrats can't compete there, just like it's very bad for LA that the GOP can't. Only a limited subset of ideas can compete in single party states.
I think a weird thing about modern America is that it's possible to have single-party blue states but the extreme Democratic bias of urban areas means it's sorta not possible to have single-party red states?
Like, in Texas you'll have Democratic city/county governments who interface with Republican state government. In California, you have Democratic city/county governments who interface with Democratic state government.
EDIT: I should add that it's not like there's no possibility of a Republican county/city in California, but they're the small counties/cities, not the big ones that drive a lot of dollars and a lot of media attention.
I would argue that Florida and Texas have been more purple than single party in recent years. The most dynamic parts of Texas are blue-governed big cities and suburbs where both parties have some say. Florida is also pretty mixed, locally, and has had D and R governors and prominent mayors. So that's why they are doing better.
Utah is the sort of single-party state that contradicts my thesis, just as Singapore is internationally. That doesn't mean the overall trend is untrue, though.
I think you could make an argument that Utah has a sort of two-party system between the GOP and the LDS Church. They don't run against each other--far from it--but they are structured, hierarchical, sociopolitical organizations that may exert restraining influences on each other that mimic some of the multi-party dynamic.
Trump has always run comparatively weakly with Mormons, for instance (at least until last night, I haven't looked at those crosstabs).
Crime is really pretty low in Texas relative to fundamentals one might control for.
In any case, the "crime" that most pisses off voters seems to be disorder, such as mentally ill homeless people harassing passersby. Texas does pretty well on that measure, too, outside of Austin.
I'm genuinely amazed that actually seems to have been effective this time versus the previous tries at that stunt and I'd like to read something about why it worked. (My best guess is simply that Abbott did it on a much larger and more prolonged scale than it had been done before.)
When I saw that Trump was doing a televised town hall event in a barber shop in The Bronx a few weeks ago, I thought that was political malpractice. I was wrong.
What kills me is that violent crime has been consistently declining under Biden after spiking globally during the pandemic. Dems didn't cause the crime surge and they're addressing it as competently as anyone else. Its another case of public perceptions being way off from the data and of misattributing all the bad things to incumbents.
You can see that homicides spiked in May 2020 (Floyd) peaked in 2021 and has been slowly declining since then, as Police Depts have focused more limited resources on the most serious crimes. But staffing issues, as well as perceptions or risk / reward and public sentiment, have meant that they've cut back on policing "crimes of disorder" such as speedings, turnstyle jumping, verbal harassment. These latter types of crimes are what the public most often see and perceive as "crime".
Republicans made gains in the cities but are still hugely outnumbered.
I wonder how much of it is due to racial depolarization, which Matt has written about - blacks and Hispanics with conservative views coming to vote Republican. Urban governance issues are real but not new so I hesitate to put much weight on them.
Urban governance issues have become much more acute post-covid.
The cities and regions that swung hardest to Trump are ones with the most immigrants. I think people will write it up as "Hispanics" but immigrants in a place like NJ or Houston are much more diverse than that, and many 1st and 2nd gen ethnicities likely shifted right.
My somewhat-informed guess is educated 3rd gen+ Whites and Black descendants of slavery shifted the least, but it would take too long to explain why I think that.
Seems like a pretty quick explanation really: people who have the biggest cultural gap between their values and Trump's, alongside people with the strongest historical loyalty to the Democrats.
Republicans have the same problem there that Democrats have in rural areas, I think: they’ve given up to the point where they have weak candidates and no bench.
Agreed. I would also submit that Dems need to actually deliver effective government. The difference between operation Warp Speed, and Biden's electric car charger rollout springs to mind.
It's shameful that only a handful have been built.
I don't always agree with Dems on policy but they can't even execute when I do agree with them.
Yeah, I mean I think the boring conventional wisdom on this one will prove true.
I think the leaning into the women vote and scolding the manosohere didn’t help.
This wasn’t a boys vs girls election like the media propagated. Lots of women voted for Trump.
The democrats have to get off this idea that we need the “right” voters. This idea that we don’t want “garbage” people. I’m sorry but garbage people vote. I don’t mean you have to be racist or sexist or disgusting but you have to find a way to connect with some of the people that maybe wouldn’t be your favorite dinner party guests.
We cannot Yaas Kween our way to victory. My hope is that Harris’s defeat puts an end to that delusion.
I have hope for better days ahead. There is a lot of work to be done and none of us should devote too much time to feeling sorry for ourselves. It’s roll up sleeves time, it’s win back the senate and the house time, it’s not the fun part but it’s the part you have to do to get to the fun part.
I know we can do this and I know we can win but victory will have to wait for another day.
I think focusing on the "woke scolding" misses the point a bit. 2020 was, in many ways, "peak woke", but the Dems beat Trump. This was an economics-based election and Dems were punished by voters who hated inflation and wanted the 2016-2020 years back.
I agree that’s the truly salient point here but we are terrible at managing a broad coalition and getting better at it means accepting more people without insane litmus tests.
The GOP also applies some insane litmus tests. I truly just think it's the economy and the border. It's important not to over-index and learn the wrong lessons.
I agree the economy was a key driver. But border issues were also huge. And yes woke issues were part of it. See for example, Harris's insane position to provide gender surgery to illegal aliens in prison.
The celebrity endorsement thing has gotta go. I'm not saying you actively reject the endorsements. I'm saying don't have huge rallies with billionaire entertainers. It probably hurts you, because the odd vote you pick up is more than made up by votes you lose as your identification as an elitist is calcified in the minds of swing voters.
(No, zero evidence on my part obviously, but it's just my hunch. I think it's bad optics.)
I know this doesn't seem fair given his immense wealth, but Musk, because of his constant shit-talking, open drug use, disrespect for authority, rule-breaking, and so forth, doesn't come across as an elite to a lot of people. He comes across as transgressive. Full stop. Pious liberal Democratic celebrity BFFs by contrast are pillars of the establishment. Plus, the latter are/were veritable STAPLES of the Harris campaign. One after another telling us salt of the earth folk how to vote (I honestly think that's how it comes across to many voters).
To reference my OP, I'm not suggesting (far from it!) that NOT appearing with all these celebs would've been a difference-maker in *this particular election*. The inflation headwinds are what did it. It's more of a style thing that I think is unhelpful to Democrats: they're very much now perceived as the Party of the Establishment. Which for a certain portion of the electorate seems like not optimal optics.
I think Elon doesn't count as elite for the same reason Trump doesn't count. Cultural elites mostly hate him. There's a very clear "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic to it. I don't think that heuristic works in this case, because Trump is on no one's side but Trump's and the same is true of Elon, but plenty of people buy it.
I dunno. The strategy worked for Obama. Clinton was a rockstar even before Obama. And JFK was popular with Hollywood.
I think you're onto something though; the electorate has simply changed since Obama. IMO it's not so much about "establishment" or "elites" as it is that the monoculture collapsed. Influencers wield more power than celebs now.
This sums it up really well-- the information environment has changed. There's a picture of Trump with Dana White and Elon Musk that seems to have gone viral among Trump supporters; the Rogan interview was also huge.
The distinction between influencer and celebrity is hard for me to define, but it does mean something and Trump won it.
Yeah, that's where i am now, I thought Trump's influencer-based social media campaign was laughable but indeed it reached who he needed it to reach. Though maybe it was a waste of time and it wasn't that, either. Regardless, I think the electorate is more online than we think.
What changed after Obama is that Democrats are no longer the party of working people, mainly because Obama promised hope and change and delivered a swift bailout for the financial elite (perhaps justifiable as stabilizing after the crash) followed by a painfully slow recovery (made even slower by Republican Congress as a result of anger in 2010).
I think that people here have to step out of their bubble on Musk. Like, I know, everyone on the politically engaged left hates him, but:
* He like pretty single-handedly changed the entire approach of rocketry and, I think, believably if Musk hadn't founded SpaceX we would still be thinking that the SLS is the best we can do.
* I think electric cars would be doing okay without Musk, but we'd probably be like five years behind where we are now.
* And then his impact in other places hasn't been as huge, but he's meaningfully pushed on hard problems.
* And even on Twitter, I think people are memory-holing how everyone on the left was saying two years ago that Twitter wouldn't be able to stay online, that it would collapse, and how much credibility they burned on that, even though I think in general Musk has been somewhat negative for Twitter.
If you look at those accomplishments, the idea that he might be a meaningful force for Trump in a way that Taylor Swift is not a meaningful force for Harris I think makes sense.
I understand where that is coming from but really don't buy it. Trump had more elite buy in including from the actual billionaire class. Trump being an outsider is branding and media ref working far more than it is reality. Without celebrity endorsements people would be daying the exact dame thing about him.
Slow Boring itself has talked time and time again about how so many more billionaires have been backing Trump because they want tax cuts. It isn't even close.
"At least 83 billionaires – two of them centibillionaires with a net worth of more than $100 billion each – are supporting Harris, while 52 billionaires, one a centibillionaire, back Trump.
Of the three centibillionaires, Musk supports Trump. Bill Gates of Microsoft and businessman and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg back Kamala Harris."
Really don’t think it makes a difference, except that people shouldn’t mistake it for something that does make a difference. It can help with fundraising.
That gets buckets of free press, especially in outlets more likely to be seen by younger voters, and there's basically no one who is "anti-Lady Gaga" at this point other than fundamentalist Christians, so I'm very skeptical that was harmful to any materially significant degree on net.
I generally agree with your take. IMO the Democrats need to fundamentally deal with the reality of their more unpopular ideas. When the public strongly indicates the country is on the wrong track, or that it doesn’t like a chaotic border and unfettered immigration, they have to that much more seriously than has been the case thus far.
This is basically correct. But it also means we have to adjust our expectations of what our country can be. I'm not even talking about left vs. right policy debates. I just mean the basic idea that we have a shared national project of building a better small-l small-d liberal democratic system of government and world. That shared national project does not exist anymore and never will again. The right (both foreign and domestic) have essentially won in taking that off the table. From now on, we just need to try to win as much as we can to stop things from getting worse and to prevent the United States from advancing autocracy on the world stage.
Bouncing back will be extremely hard. I'm not saying it's impossible, and I agree we're lucky in one sense that this wasn't a narrow Harris win that involved another insurrection attempt.
But the trendlines aren't looking good. Beutler's right that Trump will basically make all his legal troubles go away. Immunity means he's basically unconstrained, and the Senate majority means he's probably going to be able to replace Sotomayor and/or Kagan. The impending tariff regime will be a major source of corruption. The ruling gutting 14A sets a precedent for SCOTUS saying that states can't enforce 22A against Trump if he runs in 2028.
The literal best case scenario is that he eats the magic Big Mac as soon as possible and Vance struggles to implement P2025 on his own.
So yeah, I don't really see how anything gets better for a long time here.
I'm not betting against Trump's own policies doing him in. He won on inflation and wants to do very inflationary things. As much as the GOP dreams of killing benefits, people don't like that much more than they like inflation. And a lot of GOP people are itching to push on issues like abortion that are also very, very unpopular. I also think actual deportations en masse will prove to be deeply unpopular when people realize how many of their friends and people they do business with are immigrants.
I wholeheartedly agree. I would be ecstatic to be proven wrong on this, but I don’t think ANY of what just happened was based on voters actually understanding what Trump was promising them or why it was inflationary. The economic phenomena are just too complex, and they are too blinded by emotion to understand them.
At this point, I'm extremely skeptical of the electorate's ability to punish him for the dumb things he wants to do. And I think he'll mitigate the worst impacts by making corrupt deals with specific industries. If it all happens slowly instead of all at once, I don't know if the electorate *notices* -- for instance, a consistent 4% inflation for 4 years vs. a 6-month 10% spike.
The ever-ratcheting "this is the very most important election ever" from our political chattering class is probably not helpful, even if it might be correct. You are going to lose sometimes. To have a mindset that each successive election is the potential end of all things... I don't think it's helpful.
I mean this not in the "Trump actually won't be so bad" sense--I think he will be pretty bad, actually--but that after we drown our sorrows for a few days, it's on to cool-eyed analysis in the service of winning the next battle. And I am actually quite (not completely!) confident that the next battle will take place on time by pretty normal rules.
I think that the international juncture at which we stand, the next 4 years could prove to be extremely consequential and undermine our ability to course-correct even if we play everything right, revamp our party from the ground up, and every heightened contradiction goes exactly our way.
That’s my concern. If the world has fundamentally changed in 4 years, and China’s both bankrupting us and denying us key economic inputs (raw materials and finished products), then we’ll be putting out fires left and right. Harris stood a remote chance of rallying the free world in a “Europe + US = acceptable substitute for OBA”. I guess we’ll find out if there’s enough of a free world left by then for us to even rally.
I think you all are misunderstanding me a bit. It is definitely true that you are going to lose sometimes. But it was once the case that whether you won or lost, there were certain core civic ideals that both sides more-or-less shared and that would not change, and therefore even if you thought policy was going to go in the wrong direction, you could also correctly believe that the long-term structure of our government was sound and remained on a broad upward trajectory toward fulfilling those ideals. That's no longer the case, and we have to recognize that. The core principles of our system of government are now just another issue to be litigated every election, and we'll no longer have institutions that can be trusted to embody those ideals regardless of who's in power. Is that the "end of all things"? Maybe not, but it's end of something, and I think it's appropriate to recognize that it's a loss for our country relative to what we had.
What’s wrong with appealing to people’s better nature? To seeing some vile shit (like Tucker’s “spanking” speech) and responding, this is not who we want to be?
I’m speaking more about the constant hall monitoring attitude the left employs to lord moral superiority over what they “think” are bad people but are actually bad people + a bunch of lower class normies.
We are not kind or afford grace sometimes and we lack humor. We take offense quickly and condemn harshly.
I’ve seen a lot of takes over the last few weeks about how you need to cut out Trump voters from your life and I think that is a terrible idea.
We just need to make more attempts to reach folks in different ways, with different surrogates and be relatable.
"We are not kind..." Whereas Trump is a tall frosted glass full of the milk of human kindness.
"We... condemn harshly" Whereas Trump is famously gentle and forgiving with his opponents, and seeks to understand, not condemn.
"We... lack humor" Whereas Trump and his surrogates are bursting with wholesome humor for the whole family! Who doesn't love "Those Latinos, they don't pull out, they come inside just like they did to our country"? What fun!
Look, Bo, I like you and I know you're making a good point, but also I'm in a super goddamn dark place right now, so excuse me for saying:
THIS DOUBLE FUCKING STANDARD IS BEYOND FUCKING EXHAUSTING AND INFURIATING
TRUMP AND HIS ASSHOLE ENABLERS CAN DO WHATEVER THE FUCK THEY WANT, BUT DEMOCRATS ARE ALWAYS WRONG AND NO MATTER WHAT THEY DO IT WILL NEVER BE ENOUGH
Why would I be friends with someone who thinks it's OK to assault women? I don't have any guarantee they won't assault me, or my female friends. Why would I choose to put myself at risk of that?
And also I think it's really important to say: the left has engaged in this project of creeping expansion of all definitions of bad everything in a way that has undermined their ability to actually call out bad behavior.
When I was a kid, if you thought black people were moral degenerates or should be kicked out of the country or have burning crosses put on their lawn, you were racist. Now if you call a black person "articulate" you're racist. This *empowers* the people who think that black people are moral degenerates or should be kicked out of the country or have burning crosses put on their lawn. You have defined 50% of the country *into their coalition*! FOR THEM!
When people hear Matt say that Trump is a rapist, and then offer a fake contrite "okay actually sexual assault" asterisk, what they hear is 15 years of people expanding the definition of sexual assault down to, "Had some sex that in retrospect was ill-advised," and they tune it out, despite the fact that Trump actually did much worse shit than that.
They think it's OK. If you think you can overlook someone being a rapist, then maybe I can believe you're not a rapist but I certainly can't trust you not to have rapey friends who might assault me heh heh heh. Men often overlook that women always have to worry about our physical safety. Constantly, every day, we have to worry about our physical safety. If you tolerate rapists, I don't want to spend time with you.
I don’t know what trauma you have been through and I would never presume to instruct individuals how to interact with the world based on their own experiences.
I would just generally encourage others to find compassion and understanding even when it’s hard or feels unfair. It’s a YMMV situation though.
In the end, we all have to live with our choices and decide what works for us.
To win this fight we are going to have to make peace with some parts of the vast, swirling political currents that are dominating our democratic system.
Yes but I think this was just poisonous propaganda that drove a bunch of people crazy and not an actual “almost all the girls voted one way and all the boys voted another” situation. Like so much, the MAGA folks made it way worse with their shitty media ecosystem vomit.
Because I don't want to feel empathy for the other side's voters today. I don't want to feel it tomorrow. I don't want to feel it next week, or next month, or next year. They are deplorable garbage people and I HATE them. Will I feel this way in 4 years? I don't know. Maybe I won't, and that will be good. Maybe I will, and if I do, I won't feel bad about it.
I just can’t think that way but I understand those who do. Hate, fear, insecurity all of these emotions damaged me for a long time and caused me and those around me great pain.
I think if Thich Nhat Hanh who was rebuilding villages in the Vietnam war while both sides tried to kill him. I try to find inspiration in those that used love to defeat hate.
I know that’s not the path for everyone and I’m no better than anyone else. I’d just encourage you to find a way to have greater compassion. Maybe not today, or tomorrow but someday.
Short term, it was inflation. Which was inevitable. Maybe the ARPA made it 1 or 2% worse than it would have been, but it was baked in from before Biden was even inaugurated.
Longer term, it's simply that a lot of people don't believe in the civic ideals that we were taught to think were core pillars of American society, and they are comfortable tossing those ideals overboard (if they don't affirmatively oppose them). They are fine with the worst aspects of Trumpism, and while it's still possible to defeat Trump in a fair election based on regular pocketbook issues, running on those issues isn't just about messaging. The ability to run of them fluctuates based on facts in the world that aren't totally within anyone's control, and if that's the only way to beat Trump, then it's not possible to beat Trump every time no matter how well you run your campaign.
>>Longer term, it's simply that a lot of people don't believe in the civic ideals that we were taught to think were core pillars of American society,<<
I think you're 100% correct here, but what's to be done about it? I personally believe if you gave voters in 197x a really bad option when the incumbency party ran into trouble, they, too, just like 2024's electorate, might well have opted for the bad choice. But they didn't get that option, because both our parties were serious institutions in those days that cared about the national interest.
We've lost a vital guard rail, and I don't know how we get it back.
I agree about the '70s. Basically, there's nothing to be done about it. It's just a fact about the world that we have to live with. We're not in the business of even attempting to build a city on a hill anymore. That's not possible. Anything we build on that will be torn down 4-8 years later. We're just here to do trench warfare against the illiberals to try to keep things from getting worse.
Long story short: in the battle to build a better world (more prosperous, safer, more just, more tolerant) we took an ill-timed detour trying to "destroy" radical political Islam rather than shoring up Eastern European commitment to liberal democracy and soberly engaging with emerging Chinese economic and hence, military, potential. The (second) Bush presidency was disastrous, and the Obama presidency was mostly clean-up.
I don't think that there really is anything that can be done, unfortunately.
All we can really do right now is hope that Trump is a unique case due to his cult of personality, and that once he exits the stage, we'll return to something approximating pre-Trump Republican politicians in terms of respect for basic American civic norms.
I wouldn't want to bet the farm on that, but I think there's a plausible case to be made for it. We haven't seen anybody else able to capture the same "juice" that Trump does. Candidates like Mark Robinson implode in places where Trump himself would likely be able to succeed.
>I don't think that there really is anything that can be done, unfortunately.<
Possibly the only things that might change the dynamic are: (1) some kind of disaster on the GOP's watch that VERY badly hurts them politically (think 1932) and convinces their elites they need to get serious again about candidate vetting, or (2) Trump proves sui generis in the long run, and his particular "success despite awfulness" attribute ends up being non replicable.
The Republican Party is an actual private legal entity that makes its own rules and can establish whatever vetting criteria it likes with respect to candidacies. It's not *required* to allow in anyone who wishes to compete for its presidential nomination. When David Duke attempted to enter the Democratic Primary in 1988, the DNC ruled any delegates he might win wouldn't be seated at the convention. Democrats effectively *barred* him from running for their party's nomination. Imagine that—a party preemptively blocking cranks and charlatans!
Donald Trump is a convicted felon who tried to overthrow our constitutional order. Republicans could have done to him what Democrats did to Duke.
The people who establish rules and make decision on such things are by definition "elites" — that's what I mean when I employ this term. If Trump, because of his corruption, gross policy ignorance, poor judgment, cognitive decline, personal pique, criminal tendencies, etc—presided over a true disaster that caused large-scale political losses for his party—said party would be well-advised to implement regulations that avoid such a disaster in the future.
Republicans would benefit from doing this, I believe. And so would the country. I'm pretty sure I'd oppose most of the policy initiatives a President Rubio or DeSantis or Haley would pursue. But I could live with them because those people aren't felons, and they'd be unlikely to invite Michael Flynn and RFK JR into their cabinets. I think we'd all breathe a huge sigh of relief if Trump's announced a cabinet of GOP establishment figures and heavyweights. But that's a pipe dream—it'll be gallery of cranks and freaks. It's quite honestly very frightening.
What worries me about that theory is that Hugo Chavez was also sui generis. Everyone agrees that Maduro has none of Chavez's political skills or charisma - pretty much everyone hates him. But if you have enough time to change the rules of your system of government and the DNA of your political culture, then you can make your autocracy at least somewhat self-perpetuating.
Looking at this phenomenon play out repeatedly across the Western world (Le Pen, AfD, Weelders, Netanyahu, Orban, Brexit, etc etc), I think it is very unlikely that there are no other talented populists to be chosen from a land of a third of a billion people. Can't wait for the very serious Buttigieg Shapiro ticket to get spanked by Rogan MrBeast in 2028 at this rate.
I don't think that far-right policies are going away in any way, or that nobody could ever do what Trump did. But it's been 8 years of Trump so far, and nobody else has managed to don the same mantle even remotely successfully.
There's a difference between a "talented populist", which is dangerous enough, and a true cult of personality figure. Trump is the latter.
I think this is the better formulation. For better or worse, I don't know if the electorate *ever* believed in those core pillars we were taught. Hell for the vast preponderance of that nostalgic time, half of America was literally a racial apartheid state!!! The point Charles makes is that what has changed is the institutions and what they feed the perpetually disinterested, selfish, and kinda dumb voters.
This is fully consistent with my view of things, as my longer comment below explains. What I would say in response to this is: (1) Even when we were an apartheid state, we *thought* we were working toward liberal democratic ideals (a more primitive form of them to be sure) and *we were right* that we were working toward those ideals in a comparative sense, relative to what had come before. But now, in contrast, we've elected leaders who self-consciously reject those ideals and want to take us backwards. (2) It's true that we never truly had a supermajority of people who were strongly committed in their heart of hearts to those core pillars. Rather, those pillars were held in place for several decades due to certain historical contingencies, which are now gone. But the effect of that is still a loss for our country.
I think (1) is wrong in so much as I don't think most people through our history thought about liberal democratic ideals particularly much, nor would have cared about them much beyond lip service.
Politicians need money and attention. If the party elite have more control over money and attention, they’ll have leverage.
On the money side, I’d guess we could reform campaign finance law to make it more advantageous for donations to flow through party channels.
On the attention side, you need to make the attention economy less of a competitive rat race and restore gatekeepers.
Ideally human gatekeepers, but maybe AI gatekeepers could work. AI is very expensive, which means few participants, which makes coordination easier in principle. We can ban TikTok, and then Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Apple could agree amongst themselves to bias their AIs to favor “authoritative” sources, like official political parties.
In any case, since Trump personally benefits from the current situation where elites are weak and unable to coordinate, any positive change will probably have to wait until after his term.
Also a lot of people are reallllly uninformed. Like take your lowest estimate for how much they heard about Trump’s badness and his plans and go below that.
One of my hottest takes is that it's perfectly fine for people not to vote if they don't have any strong policy concerns, and that we shouldn't be trying to make everyone vote.
It's very important for democracy for everyone to have the same ability and access to vote, but if low information voters have the same ability to vote but choose not to use it, I think that's fine.
I have been that low information voter. We gained nothing by my votes in 2000, and missed nothing from my lack of votes in 2004. In 2000 I was basically just guessing based on whatever article I had to read at the time and which vibe seemed like it was for "my people".
Voter ID is the only fight I'm aware of. I know you and I were arguing about vote by mail, but to my knowledge there's no fight about that; the states that want it have it and the states that don't, don't.
Well that might be true at present. But debates over felon disenfranchisement, number of polling locations, schedule of mail in votes, etc etc etc, will always be with us. Voter ID is only the most salient right at the moment, and I believe it costs the Democrats far more swing votes than it might save by fighting it.
I agree with you on voter id, both politically and on the merits. But felon enfranchisement is popular politically—it passed in Florida by a wide margin IIRC—and also right on the merits, regardless of whether the resulting voters vote Democratic or not. We have to judge case by case, but I’m not going to stop thinking expanded voter participation is a good thing and a worthy policy goal all else being equal.
"Longer term, it's simply that a lot of people don't believe in the civic ideals that we were taught to think were core pillars of American society,"
Republicans think the exact same about Democrats. See for example, Democrats disregard for gun rights, or religious liberty when it conflicts with LGTBQ+++++
Fun fact Trump actually won the slice of voters that said Democracy was on the ballot. They thought Harris was a bigger threat to Democracy than Trump. See talk about court packing and ending the filibuster.
Gun rights is a fair point, but the religious liberty one is a dumb one, because the whole point is that it's an argument about "religious liberty" attempting to suppress personal liberty; for example, the equal right to get married.
That's not what I'm referring to. I'm talking about using the police power of the state to go after people. For example, bakers that don't want to bake a cake, or florists that don't want to flower arrangement for a gay wedding.
For me, one of the thrilling moments of the 2016 convention was Michelle's line about going high when they go low. But it's now clearer than ever that in difficult circumstances this is just not a winning political strategy. Sadly.
Serious, non-rhetorical question: how much are those civic ideals about America taught in schools these days? Or how much were Gen Z'ers taught those ideals?
They're taught plenty. Civics education is required everywhere. Causal explanations about what's taught in high school are basically always wrong imo.
The biggest problem is the continued dissipation of social capital, Bowling Alone style. Very hard to see a solution for that, especially since it's much worse among the underclass than among the professional class (e.g. contrary to online perception, church attendance is very strongly correlated with education), and for the most part politicians of both sides only understand the latter.
I don't agree that inflation was inevitable or that stimulus made it 1 or 2% worse. I don't think that there's a coherent economic theory that "pandemic must equal large inflation."
Matt has explained this in the past, but there's a reason why inflation was high in every rich country in the world. (1) Everybody spent way less money during the pandemic for obvious reasons, so anyone who didn't lose their jobs during the pandemic had lots of savings built up, which they all spent down at the same time. (2) Because so many white-collar workers were working remotely, lots of people simultaneously went into the market for bigger homes.
1. The buildup of wealth during the pandemic was obviously not mostly about the relatively small savings that people gained by avoiding some leisure activities that they otherwise would've had. It was mostly a result of various government policies, probably primarily stimulus plus allowing people not to spend rent money and still not be evicted.
2. Inflation was not limited to housing.
Inflation was worldwide because it was not in fact only the US who did stimulus and because the world economy is interconnected and when the largest economy in the world does a ton of stimulus and other large economies do smaller-but-still-significant stimulus, everyone gets inflation.
I think every single issue voters care about other than abortion was one that heavily favored republicans. I could see that in the way the VP debate went- Vance was able to crush Walz by constantly going back to actual issues. That's not to say the Republicans are right on the issues (the economy is doing well, America handled inflation better than just about anywhere else in the world, etc.), but a voter who isn't super tapped in can hear the Republicans short, to the point statements about how bad these issues are and nod along in agreement, whereas the Dems needed to convince voters to sit down and read a bunch of published articles in economics journals to agree with their position. Any time a politician has to be like "well, actually, if you think about this from all these different perspectives and take into account the myriad factors at play, you'll see that the situation isn't as bad as my opponent makes it out to be" they're going to have a bad time, especially when the other side can say things like "groceries are too expensive!" and walk away.
The only reason this election wasn't already clearly decided months ago is because Trump is a monster. But if we're just thinking about the issues people care about in their day to day lives, it's not hard to see why the Republican party had a really good night last night.
I'm reminded of an observation from Matt Y where he said he watched Obama and Clinton campaign for Harris and they were much better at breaking these complex issues down and actually explaining them to voters than most current politicians.
So I wonder if there's just a skill that's been lost in the era of bubble media, targeted ads and social media.
100%. I think one thing that’s not talked about enough regarding the MAGA movement of the past 8 years is that the Democrats have put up replacement level or worse candidates time after time. Biden was fine in 2020, but already weaker as a candidate than he was as a younger man (when he was never a GREAT presidential candidate), and HRC and Kamala were both below average as candidates.
The comments on here saying Kamala ran a good campaign kind of blow my mind. She was timid in her decision making, and on the campaign trail she was meandering and squishy on issues she needed to be decisive and clear headed on. She wasn’t historically bad, but she was by no means good. She ran to not lose in a campaign that she needed be aggressively trying to win.
I will forever wonder what MAGA would have become if the Dems had actually run charismatic/visionary candidates against Trump.
Matt was also comparing the men who are considered the two best political talents of the last 40 years to everyone else, which isn't really fair to everyone else.
Matt was pointing out in the podcast with Brian that it seems clear that Kamala that shift right in swing states is less than the shift right in states with no Presidential ads. Seems clear that the Harris campaign actually did succeed in shifting voter opinion.
All of which is to say I agree with your fundamentals take. Brian was noting that the problem is asymmetric media system. And I've been on these comments agreeing that this is a factor for multiple issues. But the fact that every incumbent party has been losing in peer countries is such a clear data point as to what's going on.
Mayyybeee. I’m not sure she’s a realistic option and even if she ran against Trump how confident would you be given the margins we’re seeing ? Not a slam dunk by any means.
Yeah I think she would’ve won. Who will put on a better show means a lot to a non-trivial number of voters. Harris wasn’t even in contention on that front.
Josh Shapiro, John Tester, Joe Manchin: what states that Harris won would have gone to Trump if any of those guys had run as the Democratic nominee? None. And they'd very likely have flipped NC, Pennsylvania, etc.
Remember, it is actually a hugely close election decided by a percent or so in most locations. Given the closeness of the election, I think it's fair to say that anyone who could have performed a couple percent better than Harris would have won (at least against Trump). Of the top of my head Shapiro, Whitmer, Tester, Manchin, Michelle Obama, maybe Tim Kaine or Buttigieg and probably several others I am forgetting.
I completely agree there were headwinds for the Dems...its just that the party chose the candidate least able to overcome those particular issues due to her closeness with the current administration and a demonstrated inability to campaign well. I will also concede she did a much better job campaigning than I thought possible...it was just that she could not get out enough and do thing like the Rogan podcast.
Given all the issues the Dem's needed a very strong campaigner, with minimal attachments to the current administration (and a willingness to throw them under the bus a little), and a more moderate history (remember all the positions Harris took during the 2020 primaries...difficult to take all that back). Harris was none of those things...
I think it’s worthwhile to think about how she was run out of the party, and whether or not her opponents (Hillary etc) were right on the merits at the time.
I think she's an independent(?), but they would all have supported her over Trump if she had been the candidate instead of Biden in 2020, which I thought was interesting.
They were basing that opinion on the 2020 primary, when she was not supporting Trump. If she had been the Dem candidate, they would have voted for her over Trump in 2020. It was the first time in years that any of them would have switched teams. They also liked Tammy Duckworth. They would not have voted for Bernie Sanders, but they respect him for having actual principles, albeit they disagree on his policy choices.
I don't know. They seemed primarily concerned with her foreign policy leanings. They also believed she would be capable of acknowledging that negative consequences can result from her preferred policies.
Your colleagues remember Gabbard from the 2020 primary and have no idea what she’s been doing since then? I’m very doubtful. If they’re “hard core Trump supporters” like you say, they are well aware of her being a strong supporter as well.
One thing I've written here before is that every young Democratic staffer should be forced to listen to one hour of local sports talk radio a day, because nothing else will get you closer to understanding the mindset of the low-info nonpolitical swing voter. It makes a lot of the trends you see in politics instantly recognizable. One is the belief that if things go bad, you should fire the coach. It does not matter if it was the coach's fault. It does not matter if you have a better alternative. The coach has to be held accountable as a matter of principle because you need to send a message that failure isn't acceptable.
Sports fan talk also exposes the lack of serious economic analysis among a big segment of the public. You'll constantly hear proposals of how our side should trade three fourth liners, a fifth round draft pick and a bag of pucks for their franchise player. Or whatever the football/baseball/basketball equivalent of a fourth liner and a bag of pucks is. There's no recognition that their proposal can't possibly work and is stupid.
Interesting to see that there are likely a lot of voters who voted to enshrine Roe at the state level but voted for Trump (who appointed the Justices who repealed it).
Feels like some evidence that this is an anti-incumbent election more than an ideological one (despite the vast ideological differences between the candidates). This was a very strong Dem issue. But still too early to say anything definitive.
It's quite possible to both support the repeal of Roe (which was bad law) and want it returned to the states, and still vote for abortion to be protected in the states.
Or abortion just wasn't that important to a lot of people.
That's where I'm at. I think there will be some important lessons to learn (or re-learn), particularly relating to the border and a broader dissatisfaction with public safety, but in general, this election was likely close to unwinnable due to post-COVID inflation.
I also think a big factor is that Trump has a truly quasi-religious hold on rural Americans. It's a genuine cult of personality. I expect rural areas will remain massively GOP once he's no longer on the ballot, but it's an open question whether they will continue to turn out at the same levels once that emotional connection is gone.
Definitely not, nor am I suggesting that rural voters support conservative policies because of the Trump cult of personality. I'm just curious what rural turnout looks like in the post-Trump world once he's no longer at the top of the ticket. The cult of personality is very real, as we've all seen over the past 8 years.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Trump has brainwashed rural voters into supporting conservative policies. I expect these voters to remain overwhelmingly conservative no matter what happens after Trump. I'm just curious if they will turn out at the same levels absent the emotional connection to the candidate, which is a very, very real thing with Trump.
There are a lot of things about this election that bothered me, but the fact that Trumps successful economic argument was basically "time-machine" is up there.
The problem is more the 4 years of governance than the 3 months of campaigning. And of the 4, it was the first two that counted.
Biden could not have prevented the Fed's allowing an excessive degree of over-target inflation, just as he cannot be blamed for the Fed's delay in starting to cut rates. The best he could have done was to distance the Administration as much as possible (I don't know how much IS possible).
What WAS in the Administration's control was eschewing "McKibbenism," hostility to fossil fuel production and transportation projects. It reduces global emissions of CO2 hardly at all, but it is costly to specific Americans. McKibinism was costly (no claim to cruciality) both in the Senate (Tester, Manchin) and in the Electoral College -- Pennsylvania.
Also in the Administration's control was failure to prepare for the irregular immigrants at the Southern border, to deal expeditiously with asylum claimants. July 2024 legislation coud have been passed in 2021 when Trump could not have blocked it and combined with measures to permit more high-skilled immigrants (like removing the de-facto quota on Indians). The whole conversation should have been about how to maximize the value of immigration, not how to minimize certain costs.
yep, if Democrats had started taking the border seriously in year 1 or even year 2. A lot more people might have believed them instead of trying to pass a weak bill partway through year 4.
I would add that spending could have been cut back when inflation started to become a problem. No need to wait for the Federal reserve.
A primary (or even a mini-primary) would have been a sufficiently high-variance event that you can't say for sure, which was the reason to want a primary: we were losing so we should have rolled the dice more.
100% agree. I think it's almost always about the economy (e.g. see the Bread and Peace Model) and that's also the issue that voters consistently listed as their top issue. So while there could be other factors like immigration, crime or campaign issues to discuss I'd want to see actual evidence that they moved the needle significantly in the end before reaching any conclusion on what else the Democrats need to change.
There's already some talk about loopholes in the 22nd Amendment, unfortunately. It says that someone can't be 'elected' to the office of the Presidency more than twice, but the usual characters are saying that maybe the House choose Trump for a 3rd time so that it doesn't qualify as an election? There's some other stuff to it, it's a whole discussion at this point
The main argument I've seen is to try to claim that the SCOTUS ruling on the 14th Amendment insurrection clause also means that the 22nd Amendment doesn't operate to ban anyone from running for a third term without enabling legislation. (The problem I see most immediately with that argument is that, while it would mean Trump could run again, so could Obama, and I like the odds of a 67 year-old Obama versus an 82 year-old Trump in 2028.)
Presidents trying to weasel their way out of legal/constitutional prohibitions on running for re-election is like *classic* Latin American stuff too. This happens *all the time* there- they try to institute a limit on how many times someone can hold the office, a new president wins, he stacks the court with lackies, then he tries to find a loophole to be able to run again...... I think Bukele is trying to do that now.
The odds of America turning into a richer Brazil are like nonzero!
I agree that in context, Kamala ran about as good of a campaign as she could. There will inevitably be a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking, but it will not be worth the paper it will be written on. She was dealt a bad hand, but played it reasonably well.
This election feels very different from 2016 to me in most ways save one: I feel genuinely bad for Kamala Harris. She's been a dedicated public servant for a long time, and she gave this campaign her all. She would have made a great president, and I was excited by the possibilities of a Harris administration. She deserved better from the electorate. I'll miss her, but I personally hope she remains in politics or at some point returns to public life.
She did run a good campaign. But in an electorate that was R +1.5 R +2 I think not breaking harder with Biden was just a huge misstep. Or, she was just never going to win and Dems really needed to nominate a popular swing state governor. Truly, who knows.
Whatever the case, there is not and has never been an anti-Trump majority coalition in this country. Dems need to get back in the business of winning votes.
I don't see any reason to believe she a ran a good campaign or that this electorate was inevitable. She made numerous mistakes from the very beginning that were plain to see, including not breaking harder with Biden. How can we call it a good campaign when she was making such obvious mistakes?
The problem with this argument is that while yes Harris didn't run a perfect campaign every one of her "mistakes" is a minor foot note compared to Trump.
Yes she didn't have great answers on The View, meanwhile Trump would literally say the most deranged s#*& I've ever heard day in and day out. Yes she could have "won" the debate by more, meanwhile Trump came off as a crazy person, yes she could have reached out to Trump skeptical voters better, Trump reguarly promised to have Democrats imprissioned
The big point we should have learned from 2016 and 2024 is that *campaign effects in presidential elections are quite limited*.
This is not about not giving great answers on The View. She had clear problems, such as her very liberal voting record in the Senate, her disastrous 2020 campaign, and her closeness to the Biden administration, and she did very little to distance herself from any of that. After all, she explicitly said she wouldn't change a thing from the last 4 years.
The more I think about that View answer, it seems so silly but it's so revealing - all the talk about how she sprinted to the center doesn't address the fact that she was fine with very progressive policies for the first three and a half years as VP and as a candidate before that.
I think the argument that if she had come up with a better sound bite then 9 million people in 7 different swing states would have voted different is kind of well, a dumb argument.
I think the claim that if she had stayed in longer in 2020 or done this or that, 8 million odd votes in 7 swings states would have gone a totally different way is very silly.
Which is why she should not have been the VP pick nor the nominee to replace Biden.
In retrospect I think the ship had sailed when Biden decided to run for a second term, many of the individual steps after that decision were rational and reasonable for the party but they couldn't offset the enormous problems with Biden trying to run again.
Does this reinforce Yglesias' argument that Democrats need to actually moderate on policy to win? Voters were willing to go with an absolute lunatic to avoid voting for the candidate who was just fine with loose borders and high inflation until summer of this year.
I think the correct synthesis is not that it was a good campaign but the Harris was hitting above her usual batting average. She was better than she should be expected to be.
I know, like I said above Gavin Newsom would have easily won GA, NC, PA, MI, and WI because his style of politics is just super duper popular with those voters.
Kamala's the football coach that punts down a score with two minutes left. Her campaign didn't make any individual tactical mistakes but neither did they act with the urgency required to win the thing.
How can you break with Biden when you are his VP. She did a solid (not perfect) job with the hand she was dealt. The thing in her control that she could have done better was run on a different message in 2019.
Ben — Did you watch the 60 Minute interview? I don’t think there’s any way you can listen to her repeated non-answers and think she was well prepared or her campaign had thought through her key positions / policies.
What I'm trying to think through is the difference between the campaign, which I think made a lot of good strategic decisions and adopted a lot of the right policies and generally just tried to embody the virtues of normalcy, chillness, and moderation, with her individual failings as a somewhat poor messenger.
I think this is completely independent from Trump. Nate Cohn said this morning her favorability rating was just < 30% vs. 50% for Trump. Her campaign failed to increase her favorability and I don't really see how this is debatable. She didn't "run a good campaign".
I watched the interview on 60 minutes and wanted more substance as well. But both of us (I think) are demanding substance as an ingredient to get us to vote with enthusiasm. The voters who supported him in the battleground states, in the cities where Trump increased his support, and elsewhere weren’t fazed by his lack of policy specifics, his lying, or the things in his speech that would have been a turnoff for both of us. The question is: would a better 60 Minutes interview and more explicit answers on policy have influenced those people who decided in the last couple of weeks to shift to Trump? I think the answer is obvious. If the margins had been a few ten thousand votes in battleground states your argument would stand up. But with these results it doesn’t.
She was an empty suit who dedicated her life to pursuing power. She would have been fine, as empty-suits-as-presidents go, but she was never some heroic figure.
Well you're not going to be able to convince that someone ran a good campaign when they made numerous missteps and errors that were obvious to most at the time
What is the last campaign, for either party, that didn’t “make numerous missteps and errors that were obvious to most at the time”? I’m not immediately coming up with them for Obama, but for all other presidential campaigns of my adult life, of either party, plenty come to mind quickly.
"She was compelling, moved to the center, campaigned in the right places, had good ads, and no real gaffes."
Other than campaigning in swing states, I would argue that none of these are true, or at least not true from the perspective of a swing/undecided voter.
That's great, but *we* deserved a better candidate, one who made smarter choices in 2019, one who did a better job at distancing herself from a president people really don't like, one who picked a better campaign team, one who picked Shapiro instead of Walz, etc. I don't give a damn about Harris's feelings. Her and her team made bad decisions, lost, and should be shunned so that the losers don't keep any leverage in the party.
Not that she shouldn't get respect - Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton weren't bad people either. But they all left electoral politics and that's a good thing.
But that’s not really her fault. Lay blame Ahmed directly where it belongs: at Biden. Dem made a lot of hay about him dropping out in 2022 so that there could be a primary. He refused. the media asked him and raised the question, “Should he be running?” He said yes. He spent a month agonizing on dropping out of the race and when he did, there was almost no time left to do anything else.
I don't think it was a but for cause given the map, but the temperament of a campaign that picked Shapiro amidst the hell being raised by the Groups is the general kind of ethos Dems needed in all strategic decisions this campaign. Thats a campaign that throws Biden underwater on an issue, that goes on Rogan months ago, that called out Dems worst polling issues. That made a dramatic and loud left punching stance on something to create separation.
OK, she should have been further left in 2019, stayed closer to Biden, gone with a worse campaign team, picked Beto O'Rourke for VP and things wouldn't have gone any worse?
Everyone on this site doesn't like to hear it, because they believe there is some decency or fairness or logic to the American vote.
But deep down, I think this whole phenomenon still boils down to the most basic, primitive reasoning. Trump came into power specifically because many people in America could not stand a colored person as president. And Kamala was colored and female, and there is just no overcoming that barrier.
There were posters on in this very site who took her to task as a DEI candidate. There's just no talking people out of the reptilian parts of their brain.
"Trump came into power specifically because many people in America could not stand a colored person as president."
BS.
Obama's margin of victory was WAY higher than either of Trump's.
Also Obama ran as WAY more of a moderate than either Biden or Harris. Obama ran on securing the border. He was also against gay marriage until it became popular. His energy policy was all of the above. He actually worked with Republicans to reduce spending etc etc.
And of course Bill Clinton was even more moderate.
The crazy thing is that Trump is plainly the most indecent human being ever to be on the national stage. And his supporters know it and love him for it.
He is dishonorable in his personal life, cheating on multiple spouses and assaulting women for years. Dishonorable in his professional life, institutionalizing breaches of contract and lawfare as a business model. Corrupt in his political life, plainly focusing on self-enrichment and influenced by conflicts of interest. He lies as he breathes. He is unstable, unfocused, emotional, vindictive and easily manipulated. He disparages the country, its soldiers and public servants. He is unable to self-reflect, learn or empathize. He has no respect for the rule of law and when the very nature of our democracy was at issue, he chose his dangerous lies over the welfare of the country in a bid to stay in power and to disenfranchise the millions that voted against him.
None of this is a secret. As a country we chose an entertaining troll over a public servant. May mercy prevail.
Democrats have in practice been using Trump’s weakness as a candidate to advance elite causes — immigration, LGBT/DEI, anti-policing, and climate are front of mind — which belies the idea that they think Trump is some special threat. These issues don’t command broad support, and I say that as someone who agrees with several of them. Perhaps Democrats thought abortion and differences in candidate quality would give them sufficient tailwinds to ride out the global incumbency crisis, but they clearly need to get closer to public consensus on some of these issues.
As an aside, it’s a travesty that Trump’s gambit on denying an immigration reform bill worked. That episode highlighted the depths of Republican cynicism and the brokenness of congress. Will Democrats ever neutralize this issue or will it continue to be something like the economy or national defense that Republicans are “just better” on, despite the evidence?
The people who did those things didn't believe in the moment that those causes were so unpopular, which was clearly wrong for at least some of them, but was an error in judgment, not an affirmative belief that risking Trump was worth it.
Also, I think the problem is just a lot more fundamental than that. We assume that Harris could have expanded her coalition by moving right, and there's a logic to that, but we don't actually know that those votes were there to be won. I totally support hippie-punching as a matter of principle, but it's not as if punching hippies makes them cease to exist or puts them outside of the Democratic coalition, and right-of-center voters know that. Either right-of-center voters are comfortable with electing a governing coalition that progressives are a part of in order to stop Trump, or they aren't.
I think Harris was mostly stuck with the Biden administration, which was heavily influenced by the 2020 primary, which leaned heavily into the dynamics of the 2016 primary. Dems have been looking left for a while now, and it isn’t working.
The people who went all in on the above mentioned issues may not look like an especially appealing or wise leadership class. “What crazy moral enthusiasm will they go all in on next, and make the rest of us play along?” is a legitimate question after the first Trump term (Jesus it sucks to type that).
There’s an alignment between Democrats, media and many American institutions that’s obvious to everyone but Democrats who think the New York Times is out to get them. That leadership group has fallen for a lot of obvious nonsense, and turned the obvious nonsense into mainstream American culture. And many liberals don’t see it. As soon as something is exposed as nonsense it immediately ceases to matter to us, here in the drum circle (if our information ecosystem even allows us to find out the nonsense was exposed). But everyone else can remember just fine, and they’re pissed off about what the leadership class put them through.
A lot of people don’t see Trump as a viable candidate to lead the country, they see him as the only alternative to a rotten, broken leadership class. And that being dumb doesn’t mean that anyone should be thrilled about that leadership class.
Misinformation isn’t hurting liberals half as badly as true information that they consider harmful, and have refused to confront. Gotta spend all that oxygen reminding everyone that Trump is bad.
I don’t know how to walk it back, but we should never have been making apostates and examples of people who were telling us hard truths, or asking difficult questions. We’ve been too hermetically sealed.
This is spot on. Pretending that the craziness of 2020 either didn’t happen or wasn’t a big deal is not the way to go. And scolding people who are still worried about the judgement of leaders and institutions that went along with it does not work either.
Obama won the 2008 primary in part because he was one of the few politicans who came out against the Iraq invasion when it was in the planning stage. That was another institutional failure where the people who turned out to be correct were relentlessly mocked and generally understood to be very bad people. I kinda think the democrats need someone like that who came out against the craziness of 2020. Biden won the primary in part because he didn’t endorse a lot of the crazier ideas, but we need so one who either wasn’t in politics at the time or is willing to say outright that many of those ideas were terrible
Everyone since 2016 who called out institutional failures in real time got booted out of polite society. Just like Iraq; nothing worse than being right too soon. Phil Donohue becomes unemployable, Bill Kristol and David Frum are like herpes. We should be promoting people who were right in real time, instead of burying them.
Excellent portion of your response- "I totally support hippie-punching as a matter of principle, but it's not as if punching hippies makes them cease to exist or puts them outside of the Democratic coalition, and right-of-center voters know that. Either right-of-center voters are comfortable with electing a governing coalition that progressives are a part of in order to stop Trump, or they aren't."
As a political party, your choice of political coalitions is not entirely or even mostly up to you. Your coalitions choose *you*.
Open primaries, for both major parties, or anything that becomes a major party, with *mandatory* voting, is the only way to water down the extremism of the Party constitutionally advantaged to win majorities.
We have Trump exactly because of open primaries man!! He originally won most of the open primary states in 2016, and lost most of the closed ones. Most US states have open primaries now, today!
But forced open primaries, with mandatory voting, would blur partisan identities, and disempower single issue groups on *all* sides, including the right. It would remove the ability for rural whites to be voting alone unadulterated and unsupervised. It would lead to more bland-ing of both Parties nominees. With vast sections of American geography inaccessible to Democrats for branding reasons, the still numerous demographics and opinion sectors who vote Democratic or non-Republican need to be participating in Republican primaries to be represented. The same would need to happen in reverse in states to provide voter representation and feedback in states where Republicans cannot compete at the state and federal level. Turn the duopoly into the uniparty. It is better than what we have. The emboldened right half of the duopoly, selected by the right-wing party's primary system, favored by geography and its epistemically sealed media ecosystem, that only loses 1 election at a time in the face of *fresh* failure, and bounces back instantly.
Even if it would be, given our duopoly, and partisan monopolies over large geographic areas open primaries should be the rule including dual participation - simply from an equal representation under law perspective. It is a cruel fiction to treat parties as ‘private organizations’ when partisan politicians, appointees and judge determine voting rules and districts, and parties leverage public resources for holding their primary elections. Jurisprudence banned whites only primaries as a denial of representation. Same principle applies to barring opposite party voter participation in primaries where one party is hegemonic.
Democrats didn’t help themselves on immigration by not proposing legislation until they were forced to in order to secure Ukraine funding. Their lack of seriousness on the issue until it was too late is probably the biggest own goal of the cycle IMO.
I don't think so. Migrant crossings are way down. There's no world in which the GOP doesn't make a big deal about immigration regardless of what the actual facts on the ground are.
They are way down in that last few months. It takes time for this stuff to filter down into public consciousness. It's the same thing with crime I think. The actual surge in crime happened during the Trump administration and has been steadily coming back down throughout the Biden admin. But because it crystalized in public consciousness during the Biden admin that "crime is bad now" it attaches a negative affect to him instead of Trump.
In other words, there are long and variable lags between the actual concrete data and public perception, so you can't just "fix" these things a few months out from the election
I think disorder remains high, despite crime going down. Smaller police departments with more heavily scrutinized public interactions have focused efforts on major crime, but as a result they had to stop paying attention to smaller issues like verbal harassment, speeding, turnstyle jumping, etc.
Shootings really are finally back to 2019 levels (although if we had kept on trend, we'd be well below that without an extra 20 thousand deaths). But disorder on public display has not returned to 2019 levels, not even close.
Yeah, that seems plausible to me. I live in a small city and the homelessness problem has gotten pretty out of control (encampments, aggressive panhandling, etc). Would be interesting to look at crime stats though to see if reported lower-level crimes has decreased faster than the violent crime rate.
The world where asylum seekers have disappeared from shelters and city centers might be one where they wouldn't have nearly as much to say, effectively at least.
I don’t think people are following the day-to-day statistics. The fact is that Biden ran on a “kinder” immigration policy and crossings exploded after he took office and remained for most of his presidency.
This is true and obviously they could have done more. But Trump spiked the bill to fix it! I don't know how anyone actually interested in solving the problem can agree with that in good faith.
Democrats only agreed to the reforms in that bill in order to secure Ukraine funding, which was their first priority. Yes, Trump spiking the bill was extremely cynical, but Democrats only came to love the bill afterward when it became a convenient campaign talking point. IOW, Democrats could not reverse years of building perceptions that they didn't care about immigration with talking points about Trump killing that bill.
Very much agreed. If dems had tried to pass a serious border bill in year 1 or year 2 a lot of people might have believed them. trying to pass it mid way during an election year doesn't cut the mustard.
Not to mention while the bill was better than the status quo it was still a VERY weak bill.
Hard disagree. Bush and Obama both tried to pass immigration bills and failed. Immigration hawks are only going to pass a bill on their own terms.
With a potential Republican trifecta, the Democrats crushed on this issue, and the biggest hawk of them all in the White House, they’ll finally get their chance.
Were "DEI", "climate", etc bad for Dems? Maybe! But it feels a bit off for people to immediately pivot to those when "woke" issues were also all present in 2020, when Dems won. By far the biggest problem this election was post-COVID inflation.
I would have said this even if Kamala had narrowly won. Neither this election, nor 2020, nor 2016 should have been close, given (1) Trump is a unique threat and (2) his corruption and personal style are off-putting to a lot of people. I’m trying to express a feeling I’ve had since the end of the Obama presidency that Dems have been out over the skis of popular opinion.
I think an incorrect lesson was learned about the general public's receptivity to rapid social change by the utter collapse of opposition to gay marriage.
I'll own up--I definitely learned this incorrect lesson.
The unfortunate reality is that many American voters do not have the same investment in the basic abstract civic ideals of America that you and I do. To us, it’s obvious why Trump is dangerous (it can’t happen here!) but many people genuinely either don’t understand or don’t care.
"As an aside, it’s a travesty that Trump’s gambit on denying an immigration reform bill worked. That episode highlighted the depths of Republican cynicism and the brokenness of congress."
Biden spent three years doing everything he could to let every illegal alien into the county, and it's Republicans who are cynical for denying him cover for that on the eve of an election?
There's plenty of blame to go around when discussing the immigration issue. Biden should have done more for his entire presidency to address it. Republicans should be good faith partners in office to try and actually solve the issues that the country is facing (ESPECIALLY the ones they claim are the most important and pressing issues!). I don't think Biden's failures mean that Republicans get a free pass to be craven political saboteurs and we just have to shrug our shoulders and say "but Biden's executive orders!"
Biden wasn't asking Republicans to be good faith partners in office. He was asking them to provide political cover for importing millions of illegal aliens earlier in his term. There was absolutely no good faith on his part, so why should Republicans have given him what he wanted?
The bill was negotiated in the Senate with Senate republicans' active participation. Why did they participate? Why did they come out and say that the bill was a good bill?
Honestly, what are you even talking about? This just sounds like partisan shouting that's divorced from facts and reality.
I get why low information voters might think that about illegal aliens, but responsible adults can recognize that Republicans have been playing Lucy and the football on this since the start of the Obama presidency, on top of not trying to pass a bill when they had a legislative trifecta last time. What do you think the odds are they try to pass immigration reform this time around?
Sorry for the long comment, but here are some thoughts I had overnight:
The fascist dictatorship worst-case scenario probably won't happen.
But "America as an idea" is dead. Politicians from both parties have used that phrase, probably most famously Reagan, but here's what that "idea" meant to me. Obviously it goes all the way back to the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address but didn't fully achieve its current form until the postwar consensus: A liberal democracy, where we don't merely hold elections, but where we also actively encourage citizens to be educated about policy, to deliberate, and to participate in the political process - against a backdrop of non-negotiable fundamental rights and the rule of law, where minorities are protected and are guaranteed the ability to have a voice, use the airwaves, etc. - where power is shared and limited - where government agencies and workers, while under the authority of political electeds, serve the people, not the interests of the electeds - where we have strict rules to prevent incumbents seeking reelection from using the government's power to load the deck - and where we advocate on behalf of those values all over the world.
But the problem is that the people don't want all that, or at least not very passionately. They never did, and not just here, but across most of the world. It's human nature for most people not to care much about that stuff. The only reason why those "libdem" ideals were so firmly entrenched here for so many decades was because there was an elite consensus around them, and in a society that had only three TV networks there was no real way for anyone to organize to challenge that elite consensus.
But society has changed. There's no longer an elite consensus in support of libdem ideals, and illiberal ideas can now be taken directly to the people through the internet, not only by American illiberals but even by foreign dictators - and a lot of people are receptive. I'm not saying that a majority of Americans are ideologically committed to autocracy per se, but many don't care about the distinction between a mature liberal-democratic system vs. a system like, say, Turkey or Indonesia - or Hungary - where non-fake elections are held but the rules are often observed in the breach.
Trump will pretty clearly abuse his power for the next four years, but maybe the Democrats will win the White House back in 2028. But even if they do, things will never go back to the way they were. We'll never again have any federal government institutions that are rock-solidly dedicated to libdem principles. If a single year of only-moderately-bad inflation can make people elect an illiberal president, knowing full well who he is and what he's about, then there's no reason to think it won't keep happening. Libdems aren't going to enact perfect policies 100% of the time. All politicians make mistakes, and if the illiberals can regain control of the government every time libdems make a mistake, then the illiberals are going to keep regaining control of the government indefinitely and will put their stamp on it even if they never turn our country into a full-on dictatorship. (And in this case, I don't think the Biden administration even made any unusually significant policy mistakes. Inflation happened all over the world. The administration certainly made some *political* errors, but while I don't excuse those errors, errors like that are also inevitable over time. If your political system requires liberal-democrats to have a perfect record of political judgment to keep power out of illiberal hands, then that's not sustainable.)
That means the days of being proud of American political ideals and institutions are over. We can still be proud of America's culture, diversity, economic vitality, etc., and we'll probably still get to vote in non-sham elections, but we're not a city on a hill politically - not that we were ever perfect, but we at least used to have goals we could believe in. Now there are no longer any institutions here that we can be proud of and are worth dedicating our lives or careers to building. The best-case scenario is that we'll be trading blows with the illiberals for the rest of our lives, purely for harm reduction - depriving them of their ability to abuse power for four years at a time - not on building anything that lasts. The arc of history will not be bending toward justice anytime soon.
This is, of course, a tragedy in one sense, but it was also probably inevitable. It's impossible to sustain and grow a true liberal democracy where at least 50% of the electorate is willing to vote against liberal democracy in any given election - it's a contradiction in terms! If you're going to put power in the hands of the voters, then you also have to give the voters the power to willingly hand their power over to an aspiring autocrat if that's what they want to do. If people are naturally open to that kind of thing, then that's what we deserve. Or in other words, Putin was right about us. The United States *government* may have been committed to liberal democratic ideals for a long while, but the United States never was, deep down. All it took was exposure to an alternate value system, and it could all be brought down like a house of cards.
The world is in for an age of darkness. The damage that this presidency will do is simply too much to amount to anything but a capitulation of the West in Cold War II. The future as it appeared in, say, 2008, is never going to happen. That timeline is unrecoverable.
The rest of our lives will be an exercise in simply finding pockets of prosperity and liberty and hoping we can avoid the impacts of decline and authoritarianism. I’m tempted to say that liberalism is dead, but perhaps the less apocalyptic truth is that it will simply go dormant for some time.
I think we will look back on this election as the one that gave China a definitive hold on the 21st Century. Ignoring all the crazy bullshit he spews endlessly, the most appalling thing about Trump is his weakness. Neither he nor the stupider-than-ever gaggle of crooks surrounding him have any strategic vision for the future or willingness to stand and fight for anything beyond the next bribe from the next autocrat. If the average Trump voter thinks they just elected a "strongman", they are about to be sorely disappointed. Sure - he can beat up on penniless immigrants desperately trying to escape the catastrophic regimes of Central America. But put him in the ring with Xi or Putin or even MBS? He's a joke.
Side note: this will also almost certainly lock in more than 3.5 degrees C warming by 2100, as spewing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere at increased scale is the one thing that Russians, Saudis, Chinese racing for military dominance, AI investors racing for AGI, and America's Trump-voting halfwits can all agree on.
The silver lining is that when China launches their inevitable invasion of TW, they probably won't bother surprise-attacking US Pacific assets. No point if they're going to be unopposed.
Big agree. My guess would be that domestic political instability over a future presidential transition leads to a run on Treasuries, American bond yields spiking, and then Treasuries forever disappearing as the mythical 'risk free asset' in the world's mind. The US will probably turn into a wealthier, more educated Brazil. I still think we'll correct course some later on in the 21st century, but the sheen of the American empire will be forever gone. We'll be a superpower still, but only equal to the other superpowers of China, the EU, and India.
Unfortunately, it seems to be my fate that all this happen within my adult lifetime!
I don't know. It's very hard for me to imagine he will do what he says he will with tariffs because it's so transparently stupid and counter-productive. His best path to greater popularity by far is to simply draft in the positive economic climate created by his predecessor, just as he did after Obama. Keep all the trendlines heading in the same direction, cut the deficit growth moderately to keep bond vigilantes in check. You have to ask what he's fighting for at this point. He's a lame duck, he won't want to enable a strong successor for fear of being overshadowed. If he has any core beliefs at all they revolve around increasing asset values (and of course, putting innocent people in jail), so it's not clear to me why he would risk that for the sake of delivering on his campaign promises to people who are, let's face it, way too stupid to remember or care about anything other than the macro trends.
I'm not going to deny that he's weak, but I don't think weakness is the core problem here. The core problems are that (1) in the conflict between liberal democracy and autocracy, he's on the wrong side, (2) he doesn't see "the United States" (its citizenry and institutions as currently and legally constituted) as "his country" - his country is only a subset of the United States as currently and legally constituted, while another subset of the United States is, to him, a foreign enemy.
I agree that he talks that way and maybe even feels that way, but in the long run, there is just not that much he can do about it without much more public support than he got last night.
> We will look back on this election as the one that gave China a definitive hold on the 21st Century.
I think the key challenge is explaining to people why this should matter to them.
Tons of people want to the US to withdraw from the world and thinks our borders will protect us and TBH my arguments against that don't feel ultra solid (even though I care a lot about the world and want the US to engage). My gut tells me that a world with China in charge looks very bad for the US, but right now few people in America or the global south are buying it.
I actually think it’s easier to convince average voters that China is a threat both economically and militarily than to convince them that NATO is good or that we should pay attention to India and Nigeria. I don’t know what the deal is with Putin / Musk
> The rest of our lives will be an exercise in simply finding pockets of prosperity and liberty and hoping we can avoid the impacts of decline and authoritarianism.
Cold comfort but this is how it's been for the entirety of human history. We grew up thinking we were in another era, but we were just wrong about that the whole time.
I generally agree with you against the reactionary centrists that dominate these comments, but you're dooming a bit here. There is a chance that things go as bad as this, but I think most of the likely outcomes are better.
Yes. This. Perhaps it is the deep confusion resulting from the decline of authoritative news and the rise of social media. Certainly the death of memory of the Great Depression, Second World War and Cold War, which were the sources and origin points for the defense of liberal democracy and the narrative of continuing progress, even allowing for periods of less intensive reform (Eisenhower administration; 1970s/1980s). The determined Federalist Society effort, now largely successful, to ignore, repeal or discredit the judicial move to expand the scope of lawful federal regulatory power over the economy and interpret the Fourteenth Amendment as the second founding and basis for broadened personal rights consistent with the evolution of a civilized society that focuses on protecting disfavored minorities who are disempowered by the political system (goodbye, Carolene Products footnote), is particularly worrisome and mischievous. The 1890s was not a wonderful and happy place, contrary to the arguments of the reactionary nitwits advising El Caudillo. The idea that there are practices and policies that Americans just will not enact and follow, simply because we are civilized people devoted to the rule of law and the ideals of personal liberty, sadly now lies in tatters. I am afraid that, as in the late 1920s, fundamental reform will only follow a massive, wealth-destructive crisis on the scale of the Great Depression - a horrifying thought. The elements in the business community which supported Trump essentially did so on the argument that everything he said was just posturing and that he wouldn't actually do any of it in power. I hope they are right but now we will see if we reap the whirlwind. I fear we will. But at some level, it is just confusion, ignorance, ressentiment and, at a time when the United States is richer than it has ever been, the decadence of a controlling plurality of the citizenry. It will always be curious that a bunch of people who claim to love America so much seem to hate half the people who live in it. I fear things will get worse before they get better.
We're becoming more European in the worst sense - a smaller and more parochial outlook, retreat from defending our values abroad, more about blood and soil than about grand ideals, etc.
Your comment is very correct. Also it's clear there's not a single culprit or one weird trick that would've avoided this. It's pretty much all downstream from the internet breaking the stranglehold elites had on the information environment. You can blame trump or zuckerberg or musk, but once there were no guardrails it was always going to end the same way.
I'm sympathetic to and agree with chunks of this, but I'd probably modify it a bit to say that a lot of voters are just naive about illiberalism. And what elitism & gatekeepers offered were not just preserving liberal democracy, but also you had educated people manning the gates who knew what the warning signs of illiberalism looked like. I think some people in the comments here are overreacting- a ton of voters pulled the lever for Trump but they're not genuinely for authoritarianism, they just don't believe that Trump will do it. Some are low-information, but most are just naive. They think he's all talk, plus the US has been rich & peaceful for so long that they really believe It Can't Happen Here.
What gatekeepers offered were educated people who knew exactly what kind of rhetoric & personalities were bad news. It's striking to me that virtually every Republican elected official in 2016 was anti-Trump, including some very Trumpy figures now. They all knew! Unfortunately, the gatekeeper system is now gone.
And a key part of gatekeeping were political parties not holding wide-open primaries for every rando who wanted to sign up for them. In every other democracy in the world parties screen candidates for office, allowing some & disallowing others. It's boring but true to say, this all started because of the American primary system
This is the part of MY's thesis here I struggle with the most. A bunch of the old guard Republicans (even people from the Trump administration) were at the very least refusing to vote for Trump, but they have no cultural cache left with voters. The Democratic Party effectively has become the institution that rhetorically defends the system as a whole, and thus gets blamed for any failings of the system. I'm not sure how you square that circle without risking tearing down what actually works in America.
If you’re unhappy about the current media landscape, I think it is valuable to note that it is both contingent and temporary. The era of the Big 3 national television networks was a product of the regulation and technology of that time. Our current era is the same.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is just a statute, it can be changed if we wish. And it is a certainty that technology will continue to change.
(I personally am not optimistic about what a world of primarily AI-curated/generated feeds will look like, but I don’t doubt that it will be different.)
While the TCA is a statute that can be changed, the particular resulting events that seem to be most relevant to the current situation were not particularly intended or even foreseen at the time, so I'm skeptical that tinkering with the TCA or other telecommunications regulations will have readily predictable effects.
"In that day you will cry out because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord won’t answer you in that day.” But the people refused to heed Samuel’s warning. Instead they said, “No! There will be a king over us! We will be like all the other nations. Our king will judge us and lead us and fight our battles.”
This is an excellent comment. I feel many of the same things and find it hard to argue against with present realities.
But, I still don’t agree. We should have a sense of history about just how crazy and bleak the places we’ve been to were, and a sense of imagination about how the future will be unpredictably different. What must it have been like to live with the entire world at war? Could someone have predicted the greatest period of human flourishing would follow? Would a Walter Cronkite viewer have been able to envision the media environment we have today? Paradigms will shift. We’re essentially eternally wrong about everything we think will happen.
I wonder if the future paradigm we enter will see politics in general diminished in power. Where real change stems from generating vibrant culture and compassionate behavior. No evidence to point to, but if we’re eternally wrong the maybe the best thing to do once in awhile is to zag instead of zig, and imagine a scenario that seems least possible. While not giving up on politics, I wonder if we should move to stake our claims there.
This is what really gets me. “We really hate inflation so let’s vote for the guy who will make it worse” is so fundamentally bizarre that I feel like the crazy one.
I’m well aware that voters generally don’t go for policy, but how could they not understand something so basic?
Well, a major problem was probably that the mainstream media by and large failed to communicate the expected inflationary effects of tariffs. Because, while people like Matt and Noah Smith, etc., discussed it, I barely noticed any mention of it in popular press outlets other than maybe a one sentence, "Many economists disagree . . . ," kind of statement in the later part of the story. (Which, frankly, was unsurprising to me -- the American mainstream media has been stridently anti-free trade for decades, at least, if not longer.)
I don't know if we're actually disagreeing. My point is that the sequence of backlash to backlash to backlash *is* a "hellscape" in the sense that they are an abandonment of the hopes we were raised with. We are no longer building a city on a hill, we're just fighting trench warfare to stop things from getting worse. We have a duty to do this, and we have reason to believe we can achieve these goals, but the goals are small compared to what we used to think our country was capable of, and we no longer have anything to be proud of, not even aspirationally. That hellscape isn't a "permanent illiberal hellscape," but I never said that.
Harris ran a more or less competent campaign. Biden’s presidency was the most successful in my lifetime. Objectively speaking, the two major policy mistakes he made — immigration and inflation — should not have doomed the Democratic Party in this election.
The only reasonable remaining conclusion is that the voters are incompetent. They are no longer capable of observing objective reality nor understanding its complexities: by this, I mean that they cannot trace the inflation to Trump’s COVID failures nor hold the immigration failure in perspective of an economically miraculous soft landing.
This fact needs to be the basis of any future campaign going forward. It’s not a “post-truth reality”, it’s a “post-objectivity electorate”.
I know, but when most objective measures seem to indicate the American economy is going very well(via comparison to other countries) but people think the party in power has screwed it up ... What do you do?
Don't screw up on inflation and immigration and then lash yourself to the decrepit man at the helm of the operation until he falls apart on live TV and leaves his VP to clean up the mess. That's a start.
Build a society that has two strong, responsible institutional parties, so that when you inevitably lose for thermostatic reasons outside of your conteol, it's to Haley/McCain/Romney/Bush/Dole, not Orban/Netanyahu. But how to build such a society is the real question...
Well one you need to reform campaign finance laws that neutered the parties. Allow unlimited donations to the parties so the money goes there instead of super pacs
Our team had been smug and certain about a lot of objective reality that simply wasn’t that, over the last few years. I think maybe at least a brief period when we read The Best and the Brightest and meditate on humility might be in order.
(Just as an exercise: natural immunity was real, and superior to the vaccine. The vaccine didn’t prevent transmission (as explicitly promised). Was the trucker convoy objectively in the right? Because some of us were in major news media, wishing death on those folks. No one has any regrets; when you bring it up, they just yell even louder).
I’m not interested in a debate, but we’ve been wrong about some pretty important things and rather than examine what went wrong, we just stop talking about it, lest Trump gain some advantage. Maybe throw in some “well Trump’s even worse!” which is exactly the kind of thing you want to hear when you’re looking for accountability (/s). I wish we were as good at being right as we are at telling everyone how smart we are, but that’s not the case.
Christ, if conservatives had gone all in on Rebekah Jones, we’d never, ever let them hear the end of it. When we’re discussing a Supreme Court nominee, how in the hell are high school yearbook quotes of critical importance? We’re not the pack of Cicero’s that we imagine ourselves to be.
Remember when we spent months telling everyone that inflation wasn’t even real, and then it wasn’t all that bad, and then it had existed but it was over? I wonder if Democrats remember. “Biden’s fine, sharp as a tack”; brought to you by your betters, the upper middle class college graduates of America.
If we were as smart as we think we are, we’d find a way to adjust to the almost 2/3 of Americans who don’t even have a college degree, maybe even learn that sometimes they were right, and we screwed up righteously.
Yes, Trump’s worse. But we haven’t provided the shining example of probity and accountability that some people seem to think we have, certainly not to the point of justifying smugness levels that can be detected from space.
The vaccine *did* prevent transmission to an extent against pre-Omicron strains. It was never promised by the experts to prevent transmission against Omicron and following strains.
I see people conflate this often and it's a bit frustrating, as it does underline that the problem in this specific instance (not trying to counter your broader point) truly is "low information".
One of the biggest problems with COVID discourse is that many people talk about the mid-late 2021 and onwards state of play as if the underlying factors never changed, but in fact they shifted dramatically over the course of 2020 and 2021.
Wait, do the boosters prevent Omicron & later transmission? If not, why not? If the original vaccines prevented pre-Omicron transmission, why would that go away with the boosters?
I don't know where you're getting this. I obsessively read everything I could get my hands on in the summer/fall of 2020 with respect to the mRNA vaccine trials, and it was all there in plain English that the prospect of sterilizing immunity was uncertain at best, but that that the jab would help humans fight the virus, and render it less harmful.
It's possible some uniformed people made ill-advised claims, sure, but Operation Warp Speed was a Trump initiative, after all, so the primary responsibility to accurately report information was theirs.
This video is dated May 2021. The Omicron variant emerged in late 2021, and dramatically reduced effectiveness of vaccines in preventing transmission.
I mentioned this in my comment, but a huge problem of COVID discourse, which I've seen even Matt falling into sometimes, is that people project the "end state" of COVID backwards throughout the entire crisis and act as if the factors influencing decision-making were always the same. But they weren't!
99% of people aren't reading the fine print of the trials and studies. But it sure as shit was trumpeted all over the media that you needed to take the vaccine because it would stop transmission and it you didn't you were a piece of shit and other people would LITERALLY die.
>It’s the only logical conclusion. Objective reality exists.<
Another objective reality is blame GOP, Inc: they could have won (maybe even more handily) with a non-lunatic. But they don't care about America. That's the bitter truth.
The objective reality is that Democrats decisively lost and that can’t be reversed in a democracy by blaming voters.
Furthermore, if Democrats follow your analysis and conclude the problem isn’t with Democrats but with the perceived defects of voters, it’s not clear to me how that doesn’t end up as an eternal political dead end.
There are reasons the Biden administration is one of the most unpopular administrations in modern history - a fact that is also objective reality that cannot be ignored.
>>Furthermore, if Democrats follow your analysis and conclude the problem isn’t with Democrats but with the perceived defects of voters, it’s not clear to me how that doesn’t end up as an eternal political dead end.
I was kind of expecting this criticism, and I'm glad you've brought it up.
To be clear, I'm not saying Dems should spend the next four years studiously exploring every last dead end while the world burns around them. That would be dumb.
But let me sketch out a reasonably sane first draft. It looks something like, "We now know that voters simply don't understand basic economic realities like the miraculous soft landing, low unemployment, and GDP growth that is the envy of the developed world. They don't even notice when gas and eggs go right back down to pre-pandemic prices. But the reality is that they have been growing increasingly upset for decades because of a cost crisis. Even as many commodities have become dramatically affordable, major components of basic services have skyrocketed -- housing, education, healthcare, childcare. But although we can definitely conclude that the voters cannot accurately diagnose these complex problems, our party establishment has also utterly failed to offer a genuinely new social contract. Conventional liberal thinking on these issues has been unable to contend with the scale of these problems and refused to offer simple solutions that don't just look like classic attempts to bribe voters with goodies or running deep into left field."
That's about as much as I can get out right now. But the basic idea is, simply acknowledging that the voters were wrong shouldn't be a thought-ending cliche; rather, it should invite an understanding of why they were unable to accept the party's pitch or credit its successes, and why the party was unable to craft a convincing pitch.
"the reality is that they have been growing increasingly upset for decades because of a cost crisis. Even as many commodities have become dramatically affordable, major components of basic services have skyrocketed -- housing, education, healthcare, childcare"
This is really the defining economic problem of our era and the parties have picked different solutions/"solutions":
Democrats:
-Housing: allocate scarce units via lottery to lower-income people, don't increase supply
-Education: subsidize higher education while culturally encouraging more people to attend
-Healthcare: offload costs from individuals to government
-Education: lower cultural status of highly educated people, indirectly reducing enrollment
-Healthcare: reduce private premiums and gov't spending by cutting loose poor and sick people
-Childcare: express rhetorical support for CTC, culturally encourage single-earner families/stay-at-home moms
The Democratic solutions are mostly well-intentioned but mostly ineffective; the Republican solutions are environmentally bad, cruel, and have the quasi-intended side effect of discouraging "non-traditional" lifestyles, but may actually work. (In the same way that unemployment is apparently preferable to inflation to many voters, because unemployment hits fewer people harder.) In order for the Democratic solutions to work, supply of housing needs to be expanded, government needs to cover more premiums/out-of-pocket costs for typical middle-income employed people, and cash transfers need to replace daycare subsidies for parents.
"They don't even notice when gas and eggs go right back down to pre-pandemic prices"
but overall price levels are still way up. And wages have fallen behind the cost of living increases.
Democrats really need to focus on an abundance agenda. Especially bringing down the cost of housing which is usually the worst in blue states were Dems have complete control.
Wages most certainly did *not* fall behind the COL increases at the median. The upper-middle income brackets are actually the only ones that did worse; the lowest brackets did best against the inflation.
I think the real problem is the cost disease, which is why I agree on the abundance agenda.
I don't think this is true, not to a large degree. I want objective reality to exist, I do; but I don't think it does in the way that you think it does or that I want it to.
I'm a Buddhist. We believe in the simultaneous truth of both objective and subjective reality, just that they apply in different contexts.
Rand was a prisoner of her karma.
By contrast, I'm going to need a lot of zen to get through the rest of this life. Because right now, I don't see much besides simply tending to my own slice of tranquility and hoping the world doesn't collapse on me.
Isn't it ok to blame the 43.9% of German voters who voted for the NDSAP in the March 1933 general election? This is not meant to be an entirely facetious question.
It's never the answer for winning elections, but fortunately we aren't political operatives for the most part and call it like it is: The American people are fucking morons.
We aren't particularly special, I agree. And I don't want to just hand-wave away the suffering people have because of the cost crisis. On some level, I even agree with the populists that our establishment has become too ungainly and captured by special interests, incumbents, and stakeholders, all of them having ignored the cost crisis for a long time when they weren't actively exacerbating it. I'll have to dig up this book I read earlier this year for you, about how societies tend to fall because they get too complex to effectively manage themselves.
But this... this was not the way to do it. It's taking us in the wrong direction. Europe benefited in a sick way from having to rebuild after WWII, having cleared away a lot of old, rotting institutions, but that was at an enormous and inhumane cost. I'm not saying I necessarily expect another Holocaust or apocalyptic war, but the crisis ahead of us is just going to get REALLY bad because of this election. Harris might not have been an epically good president, and may have ended up making a bunch of strategic mistakes like Obama did, but it would have been our best shot at navigating the crisis.
Today's outlook looks more like when Hoover won and proceeded to do a bunch of things that made the Great Depression worse. There's just no question that this was the wrong choice.
It was the wrong choice, I agree with the thesis that orange man bad! Bold if true.
Today my sick hope is that he just desperately, desperately wanted to make the federal charges go away and otherwise doesn't give much of a shit about anything (I think this is not an insane possibility).
Not insane. But even 4 years of incompetent kakistocracy can do a lot of damage.
And I'm an avowed opponent of "heightening the contradictions". I don't ever want to throw my lot in with the idea that things should have to get apocalyptically bad (like they did under Hoover) before people are willing to try change.
But I'm also not going to BS myself and refuse to notice that this looks increasingly likely. Economic collapse from Trump running an essentially Chavist state, China invading Taiwan and Russia invading the Baltics while Trump does nothing... those are probably on the forecast even separate from the rest of domestic politics and whether or not Trump establishes an illiberalist managed democracy.
Probably even more terrifying is that the New Axis might have the smarts to wait to drop the hammer (of depriving us of economic inputs like chips etc) until they can either (A) wield it to ensure that Trump gets an autocracy or (B) do maximum damage to any Democratic successor, strangling any neo-Rooseveltian revival in its cradle.
Btw, is it me or are the trolls coming out of the woodwork today? Not you or any of the regulars, just noticing a lot of new names with some... stridently critical... viewpoints today.
Depends on the question. If you ask, "How do I get more votes than my opponent?", then I agree, blaming voters is harmful. But if you're asking "What is the true state of the world?", then David has it exactly right.
Humans are terrible at judging objective reality. In a way this makes sense, since knowing objective truths about the world has little to no bearing on evolutionary outcomes. But it certainly makes me sad.
You can certainly blame the voters. Like many others here, I so fundamentally overestimated the populace and am this morning really seeing with fresh eyes how stupid the average person is.
“We hate inflation so much we’re gonna vote for the guy who promises to make it worse” is objective stupidity.
Nah, the "Folk Theory Of Democracy" is clearly nonsense, voters aren't great, that's why you need party gate keepers to keep someone like Trump from winning the nomination in the first place.
I think that if elections are decided by voters getting fundamental facts and their solutions wrong, it is important to acknowledge that. That isn't to say there aren't other reasons for this voter sentiment or that nothing is wrong with how Dems campaigned but I really do think that addressing the root causes of public perception being that off is important.
True, I’m sticking with “where there is hate let me sow love” as long as possible but I will probably end up also saying “the voters got what they deserve”
You’ve just figured this out?!? Of course they are - and they always have been. But you need to win with the electorate you have not the electorate you want. And you can’t shit all over politicians who are trying to win with the electorate we have.
I didn’t know it. I genuinely thought Kamala was going to win, that there was enough decency and sanity in the electorate to kick Agent Orange to the curb.
More fool me.
I wish you were in LA, David M; you could come to our meetup and commiserate in person.
My money spent at Nate Silver’s was a good investment because it helped me come to terms with the fact that she really could lose, something I didn’t believe in 2016 or 2020.
The campaign itself was fine, actually better than fine considering the circumstances. Jen Dillon and David Plouffe are good at their jobs.
But the candidate was not great. She struggled to give clear answers to predictable, straightforward questions. Given that she was going to be stereotyped as weak (female) and leftist (black Californian), it just wasn’t good enough.
People all over the world are kicking politicians to the curb over inflation and immigration. Even though prices have stabilized, they’re still high.
Candidate wasn’t good enough to overcome the fundamentals seems like a good starting take to me. UGHHHHHHHH.
I’ll go a step further than David and say that a Trump win proves candidate quality at the presidential level doesn’t matter at all. Everything you said about Harris applies doubly to Trump. And she had better favorability.
I agree it doesn't matter very much if the structural picture strongly favors one party or the other. Although I think that's the way it's always been. Close elections are when candidate quality really matters, like 2016, or 2000, or 1976,.
I agree the campaign was good. I think it’s as simple as saying that the inflation and border issues were maybe impossible for Harris (or anyone) to overcome. The voters drew the wrong conclusions about those issues, but I understand why they did so.
“The voters drew the wrong conclusions about those issues”
You have it backwards: The Democrats were ok with lots of illegal immigrants and wanted to spend ever more money on things like subsidizing house buying and having taxpayers who never had the opportunity to attend college pay off the student loans of those who did.
You play “pay off student loans” and I raise you “abolish income taxes via deficit spending”. You cannot seriously try and make the case that voters were being rational about government spending here.
I don't agree with the premise. And to be clear, I am way in the 'hate the orange guy' camp - my argument here is about understanding the Biden administration.
First, as best as I can tell, inflation happened and eventually Biden got it under control, and a surge in amnesty request-based border crossing happened and eventually Biden got it under control. (For the border crossing math, the EK podcast with the head of DHS was eye opening, but I think it might be paywalled now?)
And in both of those things, I think a big problem was that Biden couldn't really *talk his way out of the slowness*.
Biden's problem as a president is that when he opens his mouth to advocate for his own policies, what everyone hears is that he's really really old...like, maybe shouldn't still be president levels of old.
Maybe there's a counter-factual world where Biden dumps spending early to fight inflation and gets it under control a year earlier (I kind of think this wasn't possible because we'd put the money in the economy before we realized what was going to happen) and clamps down on the border sooner, so that it doesn't look like it was "eventual begrudging movement only when he's getting killed on the issue in an election year". (I'm not saying that was why the Biden administration did it, but I am saying that if you're already primed to think that Biden doesn't give a crap about border security, that's what it looks like.)
Maybe in that world the things that piss people off are enough better that it's like Reagan in 84 - we've had a year of sunshine and forgotten what a storm the first year or two was. But I think things objectively settled close enough to the election that it was more like Obama in 2012 - Biden would have had to go out and move mountains in terms of persuasion to make the case that this is "things getting better" and the current administration and its policies need more time.
Biden didn't do that persuasion and I don't think he can at this point in his life. In that context, any replacement level Republican was going to win, and the fact that this was close was mostly due to Trump being uniquely bad at campaigning. Put a middle of the road Republican governor with some business chops out there and you'd have a total landslide.
Persuasion and communication are, in fact, important parts of the job. The president needs to be a good talker. Bill Clinton could’ve handled this without any problems.
I think the correct take is that the media are incompetent. It isn't the job of voters to be competent on issues - they generally have more important things to think about. But, even the best of the MSM (let's call it the NY Times) dropped the ball on a number of issues. I get it - it's a business and they've got to get clicks to prosper, but the average media consumer sees a clickbait headline and that's what they take as reality - even if the clicked story explains the issue 8 paragraphs in. Most readers just won't get that far.
To me that's just MSM outlets adapting to the modern attention economy rather than outright incompetence- if you see their job as informing, yes, it's incompetent, but then you can't do much informing if you're not actually having algorithms serve you to potential readers which means inflaming them.
"Biden’s presidency was the most successful in my lifetime."
This is a "post-objectivity post." Biden's presidency was the most unpopular of your lifetime. Maybe you should reconsider you successful you think it was.
There's no contradiction here. The post you're replying to is about how the average person is dumb and doesn't understand politics. Makes perfect sense they'd dislike a highly effective president.
And I agree with the OP, he was the most successful in my lifetime as well. Before Biden I sincerely believed it would be a cold day in hell before America made any serious effort to reindustrialize.
I don't know that I would call Biden the most successful president of my lifetime, but it's absolutely possible for a president to be both successful and unpopular. Decisions which are good from a governance POV are not always popular!
How is there a contradiction between “Biden was a great president” and “Harris lost because voters live in a world where they are totally unaware of what Biden accomplished”? They’re the same statement.
You really drew the “asshole” straw this morning, eh?
If you vote to deport low income workers and institute tariffs, thus increasing both labor costs and raw material costs, you are not going to see a solution to your perceived problem of high housing costs and high food costs. And your vote is dumb. I'm not running for office, so I can say it's dumb because it is.
There was a paper a while ago that showed in Governor races voters are "quasi-rational," ie they vote on economic conditions whether or not the actual Governor had anything to do with them. Part of that is because in bad economic times governors have painful policy choices, cutting spending and/or raising taxes. That doesn't seem to happen at the federal level, but raising interest rates by the Fed is in many ways equivalent.
And before any gets too down on voters, a separate study indicated that companies do the same, such as giving Oil CEO's big raises when oil prices spike even if though the CEO had nothing to do with it.
I dispute the "most successful." That has to be Clinton, freer trade and fiscal surpluses.
What Obama might have accomplished if Ben Bernanke's Fed had done its job of engineering income-maximizing inflation we'll never know.
Excessive over-target Inflation and not as soft as it should have been landing was the Fed's fault, not Biden's. Yes, the public unfairly attributes macroeconomic performance to Administration, but that's not new and can be addressed.
The border chaos and opportunity for Abbot and DeSantis to demagogue should never have been allowed to happen.
A child allowance woud have been a better use for excessive deficits than the excess cost of IRA. Probably politically, too
Read this earlier today and it reminded me of this type of comment. I've mentioned it a couple of time now but if democrats want to win they need to be empathetic with people when they tell you their struggles, not dismiss it because some aggregate data disagrees with it.
The only "objective" reality here is that this type of attitude is wildly out of touch with the electorate.
So my prediction was way off. Really disappointed by these results. Hoping my worries about how Trump will act in a second term are wrong but we’ll see.
I do feel very sad for your generation. I'm going to be dead in a few years, but you and your generation will have to live with the results of this catastrophe for many decades.
They're not the worst off. They've got time to see things improve. A 21 year old today could be living in vastly improved country by their mid 30s (and hell, Trump should be gone by their mid 20s!). And the really old folks at least have been able to enjoy and benefit from living in a normal country all their lives. It's the middle of lifers like yours truly who are kinda screwed. These four year waits are growing...uh...finite. And yet we've got too much life to live for awful governance not to cast a terrible shadow. In fifteen years I'm going to be...pretty old!
Can't see how we're going to have WWIII considering that we're going to be allies of Russia and China, so which world power are we going to fight with?
Honestly, after I mourn for my children, the next group in my thoughts are the Ukranians. They will suffer horribly for Americans who obsessed about inflation in the world's strongest economy. In abandoning Ukraine we will have lost our international power, lost our credibility, and lost our honor.
Europe is really getting a pass in this blame game. I'm not happy that we reneged on security guarantees, but the Eurozone has to step up at some point if they want to be considered equal participants in leading the world.
To state the obvious: the key is to stave off disaster for the next two years. Looks like Democrats won't take the House, but it looks like the GOP won't increase its majority by much. And that can hopefully set up a strong 2026. And then we go from there...
Trump is likely to be a bit reckless, because he doesn't have reelection to worry about. Which is a scary thought. But also an political opportunity.
I'm curious to see how Trump's lame duck status plays out. If he's an unpopular lame duck does that make the republican party more likely to push back on him?
I think the 2028 Republican primary is going to melt his brain. He is not going to handle well the prospect of no longer being the center of attention, and I can see him sabotaging any candidate he sees as threatening that.
Ha, yeah. One argument I made (probably in vain) to a republican friend to not vote for Trump is something along these lines. Some grifter attorney is going to convince him he can run for a 3rd term and he's going to just go with it. He'll just keep insisting he totally can and torpedo whoever the Republicans try to run in 2028.
See, I was actually coming here to specifically apologize to you because, while I'd seen a Trump EC vote win as plausible, I derided your past take that Trump was on track to win the popular vote. 😞
Same. So many people in these comments have really been dismisisve or Project 2025, Trump's plans to deploy the military against civilians, and his disregard for the rule of law but all of those could be massively harmful even if he doesn't fully succeed. The GOP won because they also got the public to dismiss them, so they're going to have to fight for every inch on them. Still, it's going to be scary and very hard to fight back on.
He also said “I love the uneducated”, and we laughed at him, I laughed at him (or we were appalled instead), but this is something I’ve really come around on. With nearly 2/3 of Americans lacking a college degree, if someone doesn’t at least *like* the uneducated, they should probably find some other line of work.
I think folks need to confront the reality that the Democratic coalition, once again, prioritised some of its interest groups at the expense of both its chances of victory and the interests of the country as a whole. Voters' #1 concern in the election was cost of living. A month ago Biden and Harris came out in support of a union threatening strikes despite its workers making six figure salaries while enforcing rules that make US ports unproductive relative to their foreign peers. That's just one glaring example. Matt listed a whole bunch of similar ones 2 years ago.
This is not new. The biggest blue states having been consistently declining in their share of the US population for decades because it's so much more expensive to live in them. The Democratic coalition has just pretended this is not an indictment of its governance.
The fact some folks are blaming and even *insulting* voters while the Democratic coalition supports some of these unjustifiable policies I think goes a long way to explain why the Democratic party is barely winning 50% of the time against the total mess that is the GOP.
“ The Democratic coalition has just pretended this is not an indictment of its governance.”
The economy being so strong that tons of people want to move there and the people that live there can afford to bid up the price of housing isn’t an indictment of governance. Mississippi has very cheap housing - does that make it a model of good governance?
CA and NY are wonderful places but that's been the case since before they became so dominated by Democratic Party governance. NY's been the US' commercial capital since before the Democratic Party was founded, and Democrats didn't invent Silicon Valley or Wall Street or Broadway or Hollywood or the ports of NY and NJ.
For decades now, while many people have wanted to live there, on net they have been losing population share. That is not a mark of governance success.
"For more than 150 years, California has declared non-compete agreements unenforceable. In 1941, California codified its prohibition on non-competes in California Business and Professions Code"
Don't think the modern Democratic Party can claim much credit for this policy.
But people are literally leaving those places. On a relative basis they are losing population to the sunbelt and growing areas. Some of the biggest, bluest cities are even losing population on an absolute basis. This decline is far more severe if we look at domestic migrants only. The fact that people from El Salvador still find Los Angeles attractive is nice, but not exactly a vote winner.
But anyways - Mississippi is losing population, too, but among red states they are more of the exception than the rule, and their population decline is concentrated in the blue areas of Mississippi anyway.
tl;dr if you're losing domestic population that's an indictment of your government. Looking at housing prices is like looking at a stock's price, if MS plunges 20% tomorrow that's because they are doing something wrong, right now. That it's still a huge market cap stock would be thanks to Bill Gates, not whomever is now running the show.
I live in Jersey, spending time both in sapphire blue NYC suburbs of north NJ and a red corner of the southern jersey shore (where the local congressman Van Drew switched from Democrat to Republican in the first trump era). It's not surprising for me.
In the north there is discontent (only whispered) with the very visible failures of governance that has prioritized progressive aesthetics over governing (the mess that is the montclair school district, the decay and disorder on display for everyone commuting into Manhattan)
And down at the shore it's the same sort of non-urban rightward polarization you see for the non-urban areas another thousand miles inland.
Manhattan is 82% for Kamala, it is the least Trumpy of NYC boroughs. For some reason people outside of Manhattan think it is more of a hellhole than people actually living here. Perhaps it is just educational polarization.
Also his over performance in red states too. I didn’t think he’d win Texas or Florida by double digit margins. Really the swing states were relative bright spots.
It's also that the largest states, where Trump did best, have a ton of international immigrants and 2nd generation voters. I hope at least one of the post-election voting shift analysis can track immigrants as their own segment, because that appears to be the trend I see as I squint at the map.
Democrats keep making a mistake in conflating opposition to anti-Hispanic rhetoric with support for illegal immigration among legal/second-generation immigrants.
#1 This might show Harris-Walz campaign ads were effective
#2 It might also show that purple states, where each party is competitive, actually produce better governance with less complaints than 1-party states. I think by default, we should probably believe that's true, and not try to carve out an exception for single-party governance when it's our party.
I'm not too surprised about NJ. There's a huge amount of discontent in the tri-state area with how state-level Democrats are running the cities in terms of public safety etc.
Every election seems to have some sort of surprise result that makes perfect sense in context. To me, the collapse of support for Democrats in large cities is that surprise.
I wasn't expecting this election to be the one that voters caught up to ineffectual urban Democratic party governance, but after the rent hikes, migrant crisis, homeless encampments, and unchecked public disorder of the last few years, it's not surprising at all.
Again it comes down to “the groups.” The median voter in SF or LA or NYC wants the situation dealt with. But there is a small but loud minority of “advocates” that politicians seem to think speak for the people when they really don’t.
I will say, though, that Miami-Dade moved 19 points right, too. And that's not a place where you can blame blue regional governance for all your troubles. Eyeballing the NYTs vote shift map, I can pick out a few other very blue cities that either didn't shift or just shifted in-line with the suburban and rural counties nearby. DC, Philly, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh
NYC has been run terrible by NY Dems and it's spilling over to the surrounding areas. NY Dems need a major "come to Jesus" moment and to get very real on public safety and on stuff like the meritocratic elite public schools.
"meritocratic elite public schools". What is that about? It feels like something that might drive a relatively small share of the electorate, but that's just a guess.
But crime, yes. And taxes and real estate prices and asylum seekers and homeless.
NY Dems in recent years moved to scrap the meritocratic test-based admissions program for the most elite NY public schools. This caused massive blowback among Asian-American New Yorkers (the majority, I believe, of enrollment) because they felt that they were being targeted by NYC government (and they were).
It certainly affects a more narrow slice of the electorate, but it's important in that it's an example of NY Dems shooting themselves in the foot with a group that is supposed to be a core member of the Dem coalition.
For the sake of argument, do you think it gained votes with Hispanic or Black voters? I'd guess the answer it clearly no, but it's worth thinking about the counterfactual.
Literally everywhere except NoVa and NYC the elite schools thing strikes me as pundit fallacy nonsense, but Chinese NYers (correctly) realized their coalition was getting thrown under the bus on this
Standing in the grocery checkout line in central coast California on Saturday, I observed the Boomer at the front of the line speaking with the bagger, a roughly 30 year old man. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but I heard his reply "...I don't know ma'am, things were pretty good then, no wars, things were cheap." This is the swing voter's level of analysis. People like the Trump Show and don't find it disqualifying if they believe it comes with the 2019 economy. Let's see how much room is left on the national credit card, I guess.
Was it David Frum who (paraphrasing) said that in 2003, the US military went to war, and Americans went to the mall?
Absent transient bursts of shame (deserved/earned or not, not my point) like the final withdraw, the American mind hasn't been "in" Afghanistan since we killed OBL, and probably a lot before.
Trump has, unfortunately, benefited from the timing of crises. Ukraine and Israel make voters uneasy, and there's a sense that "things like this weren't happening with Trump", even though the reality is that it's a simple accident of timing over which no US President has any control.
I don't think this is remotely true. Most world leaders did not have their popularity hurt by COVID, at least not in its first year. If it hurt Trump, it was because of some of the insane things he did in response, which are on him. As for Floyd, that probably helped Trump because the ensuing protests that turned violent were attributed to the Democrats. Biden was doing better in the polls before Floyd than after. (It also, in my opinion, prompted Biden to pick Harris as his VP instead of Klobuchar, although that's obviously me reading tea leaves, not something that's in the public record.)
I think people often forget that Trump was deeply unpopular *before* COVID. COVID certainly didn't help him, but end-of-2019 Trump also likely would have been in serious trouble for a reelection bid.
I don't think the timing of Ukraine is accidental. That is to say, when Trump was in office, Putin was in an advantageous position and was moving the ball a lot on his geopolitical goals, so did not need to take risks or upset the apple cart. When Biden got into office, it put the US back into a straightforwardly adversarial position with Russia, which gave Putin a reason to work more aggressively toward those goals.
The Republicans have made two arguments about Ukraine: the first is that Putin didn't attack when Trump was in office because he feared Trump, which is baloney. But their second argument is true, which is that Trump could end the tension between the US and Russia by essentially switching sides in the war, and that's exactly what will happen.
This is a good example of why I think prioritizing (or even wanting) to expand easy access to voting is a mistake. It's not the worse thing in the world if there are minor barriers like "you must show an ID". The "but more democracy better" arguments always feel semi-religious to me.
It's not more or less, it's how democracy is implemented that is important. I don't want ballot initiatives for every possible question or the minimum age lowered to 14, although those would be "more democratic". Making it super-duper easy to vote just makes it so that the least informed among us have a heavier thumb on the scale.
There were two possible outcomes from this election:
either the liberal ideas embodied in the Declaration and the Gettysburg Address would face a long, grinding struggle with the forces of autocracy, hierarchy, and domination,
or the liberal ideas embodied in the Declaration and the Gettysburg Address would face a long, grinding struggle with the forces of autocracy, hierarchy, and domination.
It would have been nice if my side had wound up with a few more institutional levers in its hands. But the struggle was not going to be won by this election, and it never will be won. There are dark tendencies in human nature that will remain with us always. The balance shifts, but there will be no final victory.
No matter who won yesterday, we were going to be faced with more slow boring. So, after the mourning, we get back to it.
The liberal ideals lost. The Dark Side won - like, Yoda says in TESB that the Dark Side is “fear, anger, aggression,” and that’s what Agent Orange campaigned on. Enough Americans either actively like it or don’t give a fuck because inflation and immigrants eating pets.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m in a very dark place today. Like, Luke Skywalker hanging from the underside of Cloud City having just lost his hand kind of dark.
"The liberal ideals lost.... Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m in a very dark place today."
You're not wrong, except to think that any loss, or any win, is permanent. The struggle will always be there. We lost this round; there will be other rounds.
> either the liberal ideas embodied in the Declaration and the Gettysburg Address would face a long, grinding struggle with the forces of autocracy, hierarchy, and domination,
I agree but it is possible to lose the struggle at least here in our time for the foreseeable future. It may never be fully won or lost in the arc of human history but there's a chance nobody alive today will see forward progress on these ideals
If anything the performance of the Harris campaign exceeded expectations. She was simply a catastrophically poor candidate who never should have been the candidate to begin with. She never should have been VP. Biden never should have/have been allowed to seek a second term. Harris should never have been allowed to seize the nomination uncontested. The staggering inability of the party to choose viable leaders is deeply rooted and thorough. This is even more embarrassing than the Hillary coronation.
I forget the whole obvious list of "not Biden, Harris or Newsom" Democrats floating back in June or July. Most of them win. The current admin is distinctly politically toxic. If I had my pick Jared Polis would be President elect right now. A purple state governor who didn't beclown himself in 2020? GGs
You have to let them fight it out if you want to find out who plays the game well. Bill Clinton beat a sizable field of candidates, wasn’t favored to win, but was just better at politics than everyone else. Gotta play the game if you want to find out who the best players are.
By the time Biden finally stepped down, there's wasn't really much choice but to hand the nomination to Harris. There was no time to hold any sort of contested primary before the convention, and none of the potential contenders had any appetite for dividing the party in July before the election.
I think the counter-factual of what would have happened had Biden announced back in 2022 that he wasn't running for a second term, allowing a full, proper Democratic primary to take place in 2024, would have been interesting. My guess is that Trump would have still won, but perhaps closer.
I feel like the counterfactual is really untested here. If we had had one, would someone other than Harris (or Biden) have won? Would that person then have won in the general?
Furthermore, would whoever won the primary (which is voted on by the most hardcore Democratic voters) have done so by breaking more with Biden and with progressive orthodoxy, or by hewing to it?
By the same token, I think the 1992 and 2008 primaries elevated strong candidates who would not have been elevated by the powers that be within the party.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is crime and disorder. Or, as I like to call it, the Chesa Boudin debacle. This sure seems like an instance where the democratic coalition catered to a tiny number of extremists and by getting their 500k votes lost several million normie votes.
1. Inflation. I don't know how many points the ARPA added to inflation, but if the answer is "not many, inflation would have happened anyways," that's actually worse. That means there was zero reason to pursue inflationary policies whatsoever. Voters said they didn't like it. You can't ignore what they want.
2. Immigration. I don't know how voters feel about legal immigration going forward, but voters have said over and over again that they hate surges of migrants showing up at the border. And Greg Abbott made it everybody's problem by shipping them around the country. Again, gotta listen to the voters.
3. Lying about Biden's age and fitness for the job. Voters thought Biden was too old IN 2020! They just voted for him anyways. Then in 2024, Dems finally admit it was a problem and everybody is expected to not notice that? Come on.
The common thread here is the Democrats spent four years saying "who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes" to voters. By July 2024 it was baked in to the cake. What's Kamala supposed to say? "Yes I was part of the administration that presided over these problems, but Trump will be worse?" Nobody buys that. The alternative is just pretending those problems don't exist, which is what she did. In fairness to her, it's not her fault. There's literally nothing she could have done.
Also, I'm revising my take on abortion back to my initial 2022 take. Voters agree with Dems on the issue mostly, but it doesn't overwhelm all other concerns. And frankly, the idea that abortion is the only thing women care about is kind of insulting.
Nothing Biden (or Trump) did or did not do affected inflation, although he could at least have _tried_ to get people to place the blame on the the Fed where it belonged.
Fiscal policy effects inflation too. I just don't know how much.
Either it was a big effect, in which case it's Biden's fault, or it was a small effect, in which case less of a big deal, but more stupid, because he threw gasoline on an already burning fire.
My tentative take on this disaster is that it's the revenge of fundamentals. There's going to be lots of angst-ridden discussion of what Democrats should have done differently—and what mistakes Kamala Harris made. Indeed this has already begun in earnest. But what if the reality is: the Democrats didn't have a candidate or a strategy that was going to make up the millions of votes by which Donald Trump has apparently won? No, not Michelle Obama, not Gretchen Whitmer, not Andy Beshear, not a Biden step-down in 2023 followed by a spirited primary—maybe none of it would have been enough to save the bacon of an incumbency party that presided over a hideously unwelcome burst of inflation on its watch.
I suspect my take isn't a popular one. We humans like to think we're in charge, which means if we don't get what we want we should've done something different. But maybe, just maybe, enough voters wanted 2019's price level badly enough that they demanded the return of 2019's president.
POSTSCRIPT: None of this means Democrats shouldn't analyze this loss to see what can be improved upon. There's a midterm to fight in two years, and a presidential election in 2028—a Trump free one at that! And a sounder and better executed political strategy would surely have helped in terms of downticket races, and margin of loss. But yes, my own deep hunch is that we've been barreling toward a Trump restoration for a long time: an irresistible tsunami of anti-incumbent sentiment like that witnessed in countless other democracies.
The gains Trump made in blue cities is truly fascinating. Voters are just so frustrated with Dem's ability to deliver on issues of public safety and affordability.
Yep. I would never have voted for him, but as a person who *wants* to believe in the power of government to do good things, I'm having an increasingly hard time actually believing it. Charles Fain Lehman's recent post on "disorder" (https://thecausalfallacy.com/p/its-time-to-talk-about-americas-disorder), and his discussion about it with Ezra Klein, gets at this very effectively IMO.
This seems like a massive issue in that elected Republicans have mostly abandoned/been driven out of the cities. What it seems we need is for some level of party on the "right" to be able to get elected in cities and address *right leaning* issues when they surge (crime/security/order/budget efficiency/high taxes, etc.). Instead, it seems like the Democratic electeds are expected to address both *left* issues and *right* issues and that is really hard to do coalitionally. This spirals up to national politics as a result.
Interesting take! I hadn't really thought about it in this way, but it makes sense. You don't many see 1980s-era-Giuliani type candidates now.
This is also my interpretation of the city swings.
More people should be talking about that article. I was just about to make a similar comment, but saw you had beaten me too it. It explains so much. And really addresses one of the key weaknesses of the Democratic party.
1000 percent. I'm an admittedly extreme case, but it was the predominant factor in my decision to quit city government and leave New York.
I was alive in the 70s and 80s. Democrats ignore this at their peril.
Yes I often bring up the fact the Mayor of LA, Karen Bass, met with the business owners around MacArthur park two years ago and promised to make things better and she hasn’t.
Democrats talks a big game and spend a lot of money but they are not delivering and it is costing them.
I want democrats to win and to produce results.
I hadn’t thought of the urban shift as related to the crime and disorder situation, Ben. Interesting. Although it does seem like you would flip red for local elections bc what realistically is Trump going to do about shampoo being locked up at the CVS.
That said, Dems and the left really need to get out of their denial on how bad a lot of blue cities look and feel post-COVID. My experience from visiting quite a few of them (Portland, Seattle, LA, DC, Philly, Minneapolis) is really really not good.
I think it's generally uncontroversial that one party states (by state, I also mean countries, cities, etc..) are bad. We tend to make an exception in that theory for our own party, but we probably shouldn't. It's likely very for Alabama that Democrats can't compete there, just like it's very bad for LA that the GOP can't. Only a limited subset of ideas can compete in single party states.
Except states like Utah, Florida, Texas etc seem be to governed pretty well.
I think a weird thing about modern America is that it's possible to have single-party blue states but the extreme Democratic bias of urban areas means it's sorta not possible to have single-party red states?
Like, in Texas you'll have Democratic city/county governments who interface with Republican state government. In California, you have Democratic city/county governments who interface with Democratic state government.
EDIT: I should add that it's not like there's no possibility of a Republican county/city in California, but they're the small counties/cities, not the big ones that drive a lot of dollars and a lot of media attention.
Mostly very true.
The most single party red areas are probably small, white cities in the deep south. And those places aren't known for great governance, either.
I would argue that Florida and Texas have been more purple than single party in recent years. The most dynamic parts of Texas are blue-governed big cities and suburbs where both parties have some say. Florida is also pretty mixed, locally, and has had D and R governors and prominent mayors. So that's why they are doing better.
Utah is the sort of single-party state that contradicts my thesis, just as Singapore is internationally. That doesn't mean the overall trend is untrue, though.
I think you could make an argument that Utah has a sort of two-party system between the GOP and the LDS Church. They don't run against each other--far from it--but they are structured, hierarchical, sociopolitical organizations that may exert restraining influences on each other that mimic some of the multi-party dynamic.
Trump has always run comparatively weakly with Mormons, for instance (at least until last night, I haven't looked at those crosstabs).
Crime is just normal in Florida, nothing to get upset about. I guess in Texas fighting crime is a DIY thing.
Crime is really pretty low in Texas relative to fundamentals one might control for.
In any case, the "crime" that most pisses off voters seems to be disorder, such as mentally ill homeless people harassing passersby. Texas does pretty well on that measure, too, outside of Austin.
Portland accidentally created a reverse Florida effect in the burbs. A bunch of moderate Democrats moved here making us bluer.
Philly is ugh.
It’s rough. Too bad. Kinda cool city in better times.
It's not just cities, it's blue states as well. Democrats need to actually be able to govern.
Greg Abbott sending migrants to NYC was genius.
I'm genuinely amazed that actually seems to have been effective this time versus the previous tries at that stunt and I'd like to read something about why it worked. (My best guess is simply that Abbott did it on a much larger and more prolonged scale than it had been done before.)
Also, it made total sense. "If you guys can't handle this, think how a border town of 5,000 feels!"
All those border counties went for Trump last night.
When I saw that Trump was doing a televised town hall event in a barber shop in The Bronx a few weeks ago, I thought that was political malpractice. I was wrong.
What kills me is that violent crime has been consistently declining under Biden after spiking globally during the pandemic. Dems didn't cause the crime surge and they're addressing it as competently as anyone else. Its another case of public perceptions being way off from the data and of misattributing all the bad things to incumbents.
"Dems didn't cause the crime surge"
They largely did, though, by making policing less attractive, letting prisoners out early, declining to prosecute many crimes, etc..
https://jasher.substack.com/p/the-real-time-crime-index-is-live
You can see that homicides spiked in May 2020 (Floyd) peaked in 2021 and has been slowly declining since then, as Police Depts have focused more limited resources on the most serious crimes. But staffing issues, as well as perceptions or risk / reward and public sentiment, have meant that they've cut back on policing "crimes of disorder" such as speedings, turnstyle jumping, verbal harassment. These latter types of crimes are what the public most often see and perceive as "crime".
Yes, but it takes a while for perception to catch up to reality, particularly when local media tends to hype violent crime stories anyway.
Same thing with inflation. Recency is a bitch.
Then why didn’t they vote the Dems in those cities out when they had the chance?
Republicans made gains in the cities but are still hugely outnumbered.
I wonder how much of it is due to racial depolarization, which Matt has written about - blacks and Hispanics with conservative views coming to vote Republican. Urban governance issues are real but not new so I hesitate to put much weight on them.
Urban governance issues have become much more acute post-covid.
The cities and regions that swung hardest to Trump are ones with the most immigrants. I think people will write it up as "Hispanics" but immigrants in a place like NJ or Houston are much more diverse than that, and many 1st and 2nd gen ethnicities likely shifted right.
My somewhat-informed guess is educated 3rd gen+ Whites and Black descendants of slavery shifted the least, but it would take too long to explain why I think that.
Seems like a pretty quick explanation really: people who have the biggest cultural gap between their values and Trump's, alongside people with the strongest historical loyalty to the Democrats.
Republicans have the same problem there that Democrats have in rural areas, I think: they’ve given up to the point where they have weak candidates and no bench.
Agreed. I would also submit that Dems need to actually deliver effective government. The difference between operation Warp Speed, and Biden's electric car charger rollout springs to mind.
It's shameful that only a handful have been built.
I don't always agree with Dems on policy but they can't even execute when I do agree with them.
I’m one of them even though I voted for Harris because Trump wasn’t an option for me.
Yeah, I mean I think the boring conventional wisdom on this one will prove true.
I think the leaning into the women vote and scolding the manosohere didn’t help.
This wasn’t a boys vs girls election like the media propagated. Lots of women voted for Trump.
The democrats have to get off this idea that we need the “right” voters. This idea that we don’t want “garbage” people. I’m sorry but garbage people vote. I don’t mean you have to be racist or sexist or disgusting but you have to find a way to connect with some of the people that maybe wouldn’t be your favorite dinner party guests.
We cannot Yaas Kween our way to victory. My hope is that Harris’s defeat puts an end to that delusion.
I have hope for better days ahead. There is a lot of work to be done and none of us should devote too much time to feeling sorry for ourselves. It’s roll up sleeves time, it’s win back the senate and the house time, it’s not the fun part but it’s the part you have to do to get to the fun part.
I know we can do this and I know we can win but victory will have to wait for another day.
I think focusing on the "woke scolding" misses the point a bit. 2020 was, in many ways, "peak woke", but the Dems beat Trump. This was an economics-based election and Dems were punished by voters who hated inflation and wanted the 2016-2020 years back.
I agree that’s the truly salient point here but we are terrible at managing a broad coalition and getting better at it means accepting more people without insane litmus tests.
The GOP also applies some insane litmus tests. I truly just think it's the economy and the border. It's important not to over-index and learn the wrong lessons.
It's all of the above, you're both right.
I agree the economy was a key driver. But border issues were also huge. And yes woke issues were part of it. See for example, Harris's insane position to provide gender surgery to illegal aliens in prison.
The celebrity endorsement thing has gotta go. I'm not saying you actively reject the endorsements. I'm saying don't have huge rallies with billionaire entertainers. It probably hurts you, because the odd vote you pick up is more than made up by votes you lose as your identification as an elitist is calcified in the minds of swing voters.
(No, zero evidence on my part obviously, but it's just my hunch. I think it's bad optics.)
"The celebrity endorsement thing has gotta go. ... It probably hurts you....."
Ummm... which candidate had Elon Musk on stage with him??
I know this doesn't seem fair given his immense wealth, but Musk, because of his constant shit-talking, open drug use, disrespect for authority, rule-breaking, and so forth, doesn't come across as an elite to a lot of people. He comes across as transgressive. Full stop. Pious liberal Democratic celebrity BFFs by contrast are pillars of the establishment. Plus, the latter are/were veritable STAPLES of the Harris campaign. One after another telling us salt of the earth folk how to vote (I honestly think that's how it comes across to many voters).
To reference my OP, I'm not suggesting (far from it!) that NOT appearing with all these celebs would've been a difference-maker in *this particular election*. The inflation headwinds are what did it. It's more of a style thing that I think is unhelpful to Democrats: they're very much now perceived as the Party of the Establishment. Which for a certain portion of the electorate seems like not optimal optics.
I think Elon doesn't count as elite for the same reason Trump doesn't count. Cultural elites mostly hate him. There's a very clear "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic to it. I don't think that heuristic works in this case, because Trump is on no one's side but Trump's and the same is true of Elon, but plenty of people buy it.
yep
I dunno. The strategy worked for Obama. Clinton was a rockstar even before Obama. And JFK was popular with Hollywood.
I think you're onto something though; the electorate has simply changed since Obama. IMO it's not so much about "establishment" or "elites" as it is that the monoculture collapsed. Influencers wield more power than celebs now.
Kennedy, Clinton annd Obama all have a ton of charisma. Harris is a good enough candidate, but I’d say Trump has a lot more charisma than she does.
"Influencers wield more power than celebs now"
This sums it up really well-- the information environment has changed. There's a picture of Trump with Dana White and Elon Musk that seems to have gone viral among Trump supporters; the Rogan interview was also huge.
The distinction between influencer and celebrity is hard for me to define, but it does mean something and Trump won it.
Yeah, that's where i am now, I thought Trump's influencer-based social media campaign was laughable but indeed it reached who he needed it to reach. Though maybe it was a waste of time and it wasn't that, either. Regardless, I think the electorate is more online than we think.
What changed after Obama is that Democrats are no longer the party of working people, mainly because Obama promised hope and change and delivered a swift bailout for the financial elite (perhaps justifiable as stabilizing after the crash) followed by a painfully slow recovery (made even slower by Republican Congress as a result of anger in 2010).
I think that people here have to step out of their bubble on Musk. Like, I know, everyone on the politically engaged left hates him, but:
* He like pretty single-handedly changed the entire approach of rocketry and, I think, believably if Musk hadn't founded SpaceX we would still be thinking that the SLS is the best we can do.
* I think electric cars would be doing okay without Musk, but we'd probably be like five years behind where we are now.
* And then his impact in other places hasn't been as huge, but he's meaningfully pushed on hard problems.
* And even on Twitter, I think people are memory-holing how everyone on the left was saying two years ago that Twitter wouldn't be able to stay online, that it would collapse, and how much credibility they burned on that, even though I think in general Musk has been somewhat negative for Twitter.
If you look at those accomplishments, the idea that he might be a meaningful force for Trump in a way that Taylor Swift is not a meaningful force for Harris I think makes sense.
Add to this list of accomplishments that Musk somehow managed to make Steve Jobs look like less of a douchebag in retrospect.
I understand where that is coming from but really don't buy it. Trump had more elite buy in including from the actual billionaire class. Trump being an outsider is branding and media ref working far more than it is reality. Without celebrity endorsements people would be daying the exact dame thing about him.
>Trump had more elite buy in including from the actual billionaire class.<
Definitely. But the average voter doesn't know who Bill Ackman is. But they're familiar with Bruce Springsteen.
“ Trump had more elite buy in including from the actual billionaire class.”
I doubt it. Wasn’t Jamie Dimon going for Kamala? I’m sure Bezos and the LA Times owner were fine with Harris winning, but they can read tea leaves.
Slow Boring itself has talked time and time again about how so many more billionaires have been backing Trump because they want tax cuts. It isn't even close.
Doesn't seem to be true:
"At least 83 billionaires – two of them centibillionaires with a net worth of more than $100 billion each – are supporting Harris, while 52 billionaires, one a centibillionaire, back Trump.
Of the three centibillionaires, Musk supports Trump. Bill Gates of Microsoft and businessman and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg back Kamala Harris."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/11/04/billionaires-backing-trump-harris-2024/75936100007/
Different definition of elite. To some it involves “class” (sophistication, education) rather than just wealth.
Really don’t think it makes a difference, except that people shouldn’t mistake it for something that does make a difference. It can help with fundraising.
I read this a couple of days ago and thought, what idiot decided having Lady Gaga at Harris's political rally would help?
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/lady-gaga-oprah-kamala-harris-election-concert-rally-1236053399/
That gets buckets of free press, especially in outlets more likely to be seen by younger voters, and there's basically no one who is "anti-Lady Gaga" at this point other than fundamentalist Christians, so I'm very skeptical that was harmful to any materially significant degree on net.
I generally agree with your take. IMO the Democrats need to fundamentally deal with the reality of their more unpopular ideas. When the public strongly indicates the country is on the wrong track, or that it doesn’t like a chaotic border and unfettered immigration, they have to that much more seriously than has been the case thus far.
This is basically correct. But it also means we have to adjust our expectations of what our country can be. I'm not even talking about left vs. right policy debates. I just mean the basic idea that we have a shared national project of building a better small-l small-d liberal democratic system of government and world. That shared national project does not exist anymore and never will again. The right (both foreign and domestic) have essentially won in taking that off the table. From now on, we just need to try to win as much as we can to stop things from getting worse and to prevent the United States from advancing autocracy on the world stage.
I felt that way when Trump won in 2016. Now I feel like it is what it is.
Bouncing back will be extremely hard. I'm not saying it's impossible, and I agree we're lucky in one sense that this wasn't a narrow Harris win that involved another insurrection attempt.
But the trendlines aren't looking good. Beutler's right that Trump will basically make all his legal troubles go away. Immunity means he's basically unconstrained, and the Senate majority means he's probably going to be able to replace Sotomayor and/or Kagan. The impending tariff regime will be a major source of corruption. The ruling gutting 14A sets a precedent for SCOTUS saying that states can't enforce 22A against Trump if he runs in 2028.
The literal best case scenario is that he eats the magic Big Mac as soon as possible and Vance struggles to implement P2025 on his own.
So yeah, I don't really see how anything gets better for a long time here.
David, politely, the 14A ruling in Colorado v Trump emphatically does not do what you suggest here.
The 14A and immunity rulings established Calvinball as the law of the land. This SCOTUS is gonna repeat the Taney Court.
I'm not betting against Trump's own policies doing him in. He won on inflation and wants to do very inflationary things. As much as the GOP dreams of killing benefits, people don't like that much more than they like inflation. And a lot of GOP people are itching to push on issues like abortion that are also very, very unpopular. I also think actual deportations en masse will prove to be deeply unpopular when people realize how many of their friends and people they do business with are immigrants.
I wholeheartedly agree. I would be ecstatic to be proven wrong on this, but I don’t think ANY of what just happened was based on voters actually understanding what Trump was promising them or why it was inflationary. The economic phenomena are just too complex, and they are too blinded by emotion to understand them.
They deserve their democracy good and hard.
At this point, I'm extremely skeptical of the electorate's ability to punish him for the dumb things he wants to do. And I think he'll mitigate the worst impacts by making corrupt deals with specific industries. If it all happens slowly instead of all at once, I don't know if the electorate *notices* -- for instance, a consistent 4% inflation for 4 years vs. a 6-month 10% spike.
I so strongly agree with you. What is gained, on the individual or societal level, by giving up?
The ever-ratcheting "this is the very most important election ever" from our political chattering class is probably not helpful, even if it might be correct. You are going to lose sometimes. To have a mindset that each successive election is the potential end of all things... I don't think it's helpful.
I mean this not in the "Trump actually won't be so bad" sense--I think he will be pretty bad, actually--but that after we drown our sorrows for a few days, it's on to cool-eyed analysis in the service of winning the next battle. And I am actually quite (not completely!) confident that the next battle will take place on time by pretty normal rules.
Let’s hope you’re right.
I think that the international juncture at which we stand, the next 4 years could prove to be extremely consequential and undermine our ability to course-correct even if we play everything right, revamp our party from the ground up, and every heightened contradiction goes exactly our way.
That’s my concern. If the world has fundamentally changed in 4 years, and China’s both bankrupting us and denying us key economic inputs (raw materials and finished products), then we’ll be putting out fires left and right. Harris stood a remote chance of rallying the free world in a “Europe + US = acceptable substitute for OBA”. I guess we’ll find out if there’s enough of a free world left by then for us to even rally.
I think you all are misunderstanding me a bit. It is definitely true that you are going to lose sometimes. But it was once the case that whether you won or lost, there were certain core civic ideals that both sides more-or-less shared and that would not change, and therefore even if you thought policy was going to go in the wrong direction, you could also correctly believe that the long-term structure of our government was sound and remained on a broad upward trajectory toward fulfilling those ideals. That's no longer the case, and we have to recognize that. The core principles of our system of government are now just another issue to be litigated every election, and we'll no longer have institutions that can be trusted to embody those ideals regardless of who's in power. Is that the "end of all things"? Maybe not, but it's end of something, and I think it's appropriate to recognize that it's a loss for our country relative to what we had.
What’s wrong with appealing to people’s better nature? To seeing some vile shit (like Tucker’s “spanking” speech) and responding, this is not who we want to be?
I know you’re hurting and I’m upset too.
I’m speaking more about the constant hall monitoring attitude the left employs to lord moral superiority over what they “think” are bad people but are actually bad people + a bunch of lower class normies.
We are not kind or afford grace sometimes and we lack humor. We take offense quickly and condemn harshly.
I’ve seen a lot of takes over the last few weeks about how you need to cut out Trump voters from your life and I think that is a terrible idea.
We just need to make more attempts to reach folks in different ways, with different surrogates and be relatable.
"We are not kind..." Whereas Trump is a tall frosted glass full of the milk of human kindness.
"We... condemn harshly" Whereas Trump is famously gentle and forgiving with his opponents, and seeks to understand, not condemn.
"We... lack humor" Whereas Trump and his surrogates are bursting with wholesome humor for the whole family! Who doesn't love "Those Latinos, they don't pull out, they come inside just like they did to our country"? What fun!
Look, Bo, I like you and I know you're making a good point, but also I'm in a super goddamn dark place right now, so excuse me for saying:
THIS DOUBLE FUCKING STANDARD IS BEYOND FUCKING EXHAUSTING AND INFURIATING
TRUMP AND HIS ASSHOLE ENABLERS CAN DO WHATEVER THE FUCK THEY WANT, BUT DEMOCRATS ARE ALWAYS WRONG AND NO MATTER WHAT THEY DO IT WILL NEVER BE ENOUGH
I AM FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF IT
Ok, I'm done shouting now.
Those are all fair points and I understand your anger. It’s deeply troubling and it fucking sucks.
Why would I be friends with someone who thinks it's OK to assault women? I don't have any guarantee they won't assault me, or my female friends. Why would I choose to put myself at risk of that?
Except the vast majority of Trump voters don't actually think that's ok. They voted for Trump in spite of that not because of it.
And also I think it's really important to say: the left has engaged in this project of creeping expansion of all definitions of bad everything in a way that has undermined their ability to actually call out bad behavior.
When I was a kid, if you thought black people were moral degenerates or should be kicked out of the country or have burning crosses put on their lawn, you were racist. Now if you call a black person "articulate" you're racist. This *empowers* the people who think that black people are moral degenerates or should be kicked out of the country or have burning crosses put on their lawn. You have defined 50% of the country *into their coalition*! FOR THEM!
When people hear Matt say that Trump is a rapist, and then offer a fake contrite "okay actually sexual assault" asterisk, what they hear is 15 years of people expanding the definition of sexual assault down to, "Had some sex that in retrospect was ill-advised," and they tune it out, despite the fact that Trump actually did much worse shit than that.
They think it's OK. If you think you can overlook someone being a rapist, then maybe I can believe you're not a rapist but I certainly can't trust you not to have rapey friends who might assault me heh heh heh. Men often overlook that women always have to worry about our physical safety. Constantly, every day, we have to worry about our physical safety. If you tolerate rapists, I don't want to spend time with you.
I don’t know what trauma you have been through and I would never presume to instruct individuals how to interact with the world based on their own experiences.
I would just generally encourage others to find compassion and understanding even when it’s hard or feels unfair. It’s a YMMV situation though.
In the end, we all have to live with our choices and decide what works for us.
To win this fight we are going to have to make peace with some parts of the vast, swirling political currents that are dominating our democratic system.
"This wasn’t a boys vs girls election like the media propagated. Lots of women voted for Trump."
The latter part is true, but a whole lot of high-profile Trump supporters themselves explicitly leaned hard into the "boys vs girls election" concept.
Yes but I think this was just poisonous propaganda that drove a bunch of people crazy and not an actual “almost all the girls voted one way and all the boys voted another” situation. Like so much, the MAGA folks made it way worse with their shitty media ecosystem vomit.
DISLIKE everything after the first sentence.
-1000
Why?
Because I don't want to feel empathy for the other side's voters today. I don't want to feel it tomorrow. I don't want to feel it next week, or next month, or next year. They are deplorable garbage people and I HATE them. Will I feel this way in 4 years? I don't know. Maybe I won't, and that will be good. Maybe I will, and if I do, I won't feel bad about it.
I just can’t think that way but I understand those who do. Hate, fear, insecurity all of these emotions damaged me for a long time and caused me and those around me great pain.
I think if Thich Nhat Hanh who was rebuilding villages in the Vietnam war while both sides tried to kill him. I try to find inspiration in those that used love to defeat hate.
I know that’s not the path for everyone and I’m no better than anyone else. I’d just encourage you to find a way to have greater compassion. Maybe not today, or tomorrow but someday.
Have you considered that that was a major factor in you losing? And that it may actually drive future losses?
Short term, it was inflation. Which was inevitable. Maybe the ARPA made it 1 or 2% worse than it would have been, but it was baked in from before Biden was even inaugurated.
Longer term, it's simply that a lot of people don't believe in the civic ideals that we were taught to think were core pillars of American society, and they are comfortable tossing those ideals overboard (if they don't affirmatively oppose them). They are fine with the worst aspects of Trumpism, and while it's still possible to defeat Trump in a fair election based on regular pocketbook issues, running on those issues isn't just about messaging. The ability to run of them fluctuates based on facts in the world that aren't totally within anyone's control, and if that's the only way to beat Trump, then it's not possible to beat Trump every time no matter how well you run your campaign.
>>Longer term, it's simply that a lot of people don't believe in the civic ideals that we were taught to think were core pillars of American society,<<
I think you're 100% correct here, but what's to be done about it? I personally believe if you gave voters in 197x a really bad option when the incumbency party ran into trouble, they, too, just like 2024's electorate, might well have opted for the bad choice. But they didn't get that option, because both our parties were serious institutions in those days that cared about the national interest.
We've lost a vital guard rail, and I don't know how we get it back.
I agree about the '70s. Basically, there's nothing to be done about it. It's just a fact about the world that we have to live with. We're not in the business of even attempting to build a city on a hill anymore. That's not possible. Anything we build on that will be torn down 4-8 years later. We're just here to do trench warfare against the illiberals to try to keep things from getting worse.
Long story short: in the battle to build a better world (more prosperous, safer, more just, more tolerant) we took an ill-timed detour trying to "destroy" radical political Islam rather than shoring up Eastern European commitment to liberal democracy and soberly engaging with emerging Chinese economic and hence, military, potential. The (second) Bush presidency was disastrous, and the Obama presidency was mostly clean-up.
I don't think that there really is anything that can be done, unfortunately.
All we can really do right now is hope that Trump is a unique case due to his cult of personality, and that once he exits the stage, we'll return to something approximating pre-Trump Republican politicians in terms of respect for basic American civic norms.
I wouldn't want to bet the farm on that, but I think there's a plausible case to be made for it. We haven't seen anybody else able to capture the same "juice" that Trump does. Candidates like Mark Robinson implode in places where Trump himself would likely be able to succeed.
>I don't think that there really is anything that can be done, unfortunately.<
Possibly the only things that might change the dynamic are: (1) some kind of disaster on the GOP's watch that VERY badly hurts them politically (think 1932) and convinces their elites they need to get serious again about candidate vetting, or (2) Trump proves sui generis in the long run, and his particular "success despite awfulness" attribute ends up being non replicable.
"Liked," but at this point I'm genuinely not sure there is a GOP elite *capable* of getting serious about candidate vetting again.
It wasn't the elites that put Trump in Power. But the lack of party power did mean the elites couldn't stop him.
Time for campaign finance reform and to allow unlimited donations to parties again instead of super pacs
The Republican Party is an actual private legal entity that makes its own rules and can establish whatever vetting criteria it likes with respect to candidacies. It's not *required* to allow in anyone who wishes to compete for its presidential nomination. When David Duke attempted to enter the Democratic Primary in 1988, the DNC ruled any delegates he might win wouldn't be seated at the convention. Democrats effectively *barred* him from running for their party's nomination. Imagine that—a party preemptively blocking cranks and charlatans!
Donald Trump is a convicted felon who tried to overthrow our constitutional order. Republicans could have done to him what Democrats did to Duke.
The people who establish rules and make decision on such things are by definition "elites" — that's what I mean when I employ this term. If Trump, because of his corruption, gross policy ignorance, poor judgment, cognitive decline, personal pique, criminal tendencies, etc—presided over a true disaster that caused large-scale political losses for his party—said party would be well-advised to implement regulations that avoid such a disaster in the future.
Republicans would benefit from doing this, I believe. And so would the country. I'm pretty sure I'd oppose most of the policy initiatives a President Rubio or DeSantis or Haley would pursue. But I could live with them because those people aren't felons, and they'd be unlikely to invite Michael Flynn and RFK JR into their cabinets. I think we'd all breathe a huge sigh of relief if Trump's announced a cabinet of GOP establishment figures and heavyweights. But that's a pipe dream—it'll be gallery of cranks and freaks. It's quite honestly very frightening.
What worries me about that theory is that Hugo Chavez was also sui generis. Everyone agrees that Maduro has none of Chavez's political skills or charisma - pretty much everyone hates him. But if you have enough time to change the rules of your system of government and the DNA of your political culture, then you can make your autocracy at least somewhat self-perpetuating.
Someone once said that Trump had a feral brilliance for being able to find the jugular of his enemies. Seems to be the case.
Looking at this phenomenon play out repeatedly across the Western world (Le Pen, AfD, Weelders, Netanyahu, Orban, Brexit, etc etc), I think it is very unlikely that there are no other talented populists to be chosen from a land of a third of a billion people. Can't wait for the very serious Buttigieg Shapiro ticket to get spanked by Rogan MrBeast in 2028 at this rate.
I don't think that far-right policies are going away in any way, or that nobody could ever do what Trump did. But it's been 8 years of Trump so far, and nobody else has managed to don the same mantle even remotely successfully.
There's a difference between a "talented populist", which is dangerous enough, and a true cult of personality figure. Trump is the latter.
Part of the reason that nobody else is able to don the mantle is that Trump wields a sharp knife toward anyone who looks like they might even try.
The first presidential election MrBeast will be constitutionally eligible for isn't until 2036.
Thank God, we still have time.
We need to change campaign finance laws. Allow unlimited donations to the parties again.
It turns out small dollar donations are horrible. You know how you motivate small dollar donations, fear and hatred and rage of the other side.
I think this is the better formulation. For better or worse, I don't know if the electorate *ever* believed in those core pillars we were taught. Hell for the vast preponderance of that nostalgic time, half of America was literally a racial apartheid state!!! The point Charles makes is that what has changed is the institutions and what they feed the perpetually disinterested, selfish, and kinda dumb voters.
This is fully consistent with my view of things, as my longer comment below explains. What I would say in response to this is: (1) Even when we were an apartheid state, we *thought* we were working toward liberal democratic ideals (a more primitive form of them to be sure) and *we were right* that we were working toward those ideals in a comparative sense, relative to what had come before. But now, in contrast, we've elected leaders who self-consciously reject those ideals and want to take us backwards. (2) It's true that we never truly had a supermajority of people who were strongly committed in their heart of hearts to those core pillars. Rather, those pillars were held in place for several decades due to certain historical contingencies, which are now gone. But the effect of that is still a loss for our country.
I think (1) is wrong in so much as I don't think most people through our history thought about liberal democratic ideals particularly much, nor would have cared about them much beyond lip service.
Re: What’s to be done?
Politicians need money and attention. If the party elite have more control over money and attention, they’ll have leverage.
On the money side, I’d guess we could reform campaign finance law to make it more advantageous for donations to flow through party channels.
On the attention side, you need to make the attention economy less of a competitive rat race and restore gatekeepers.
Ideally human gatekeepers, but maybe AI gatekeepers could work. AI is very expensive, which means few participants, which makes coordination easier in principle. We can ban TikTok, and then Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Apple could agree amongst themselves to bias their AIs to favor “authoritative” sources, like official political parties.
In any case, since Trump personally benefits from the current situation where elites are weak and unable to coordinate, any positive change will probably have to wait until after his term.
"On the money side, I’d guess we could reform campaign finance law to make it more advantageous for donations to flow through party channels."
this
Before getting too nostalgic about the courage of 1970’s Republicans, what do you think would have happened if they never found those tapes?
Or if today’s Supreme Court had ruled on US v Nixon?
Also a lot of people are reallllly uninformed. Like take your lowest estimate for how much they heard about Trump’s badness and his plans and go below that.
I've probably said this already, but this is why I don't think it's worth fighting fights about making voting easier and more convenient.
One of my hottest takes is that it's perfectly fine for people not to vote if they don't have any strong policy concerns, and that we shouldn't be trying to make everyone vote.
It's very important for democracy for everyone to have the same ability and access to vote, but if low information voters have the same ability to vote but choose not to use it, I think that's fine.
Of course it's fine! lol.
I have been that low information voter. We gained nothing by my votes in 2000, and missed nothing from my lack of votes in 2004. In 2000 I was basically just guessing based on whatever article I had to read at the time and which vibe seemed like it was for "my people".
Voter ID is the only fight I'm aware of. I know you and I were arguing about vote by mail, but to my knowledge there's no fight about that; the states that want it have it and the states that don't, don't.
Well that might be true at present. But debates over felon disenfranchisement, number of polling locations, schedule of mail in votes, etc etc etc, will always be with us. Voter ID is only the most salient right at the moment, and I believe it costs the Democrats far more swing votes than it might save by fighting it.
I agree with you on voter id, both politically and on the merits. But felon enfranchisement is popular politically—it passed in Florida by a wide margin IIRC—and also right on the merits, regardless of whether the resulting voters vote Democratic or not. We have to judge case by case, but I’m not going to stop thinking expanded voter participation is a good thing and a worthy policy goal all else being equal.
"Longer term, it's simply that a lot of people don't believe in the civic ideals that we were taught to think were core pillars of American society,"
Republicans think the exact same about Democrats. See for example, Democrats disregard for gun rights, or religious liberty when it conflicts with LGTBQ+++++
Fun fact Trump actually won the slice of voters that said Democracy was on the ballot. They thought Harris was a bigger threat to Democracy than Trump. See talk about court packing and ending the filibuster.
Gun rights is a fair point, but the religious liberty one is a dumb one, because the whole point is that it's an argument about "religious liberty" attempting to suppress personal liberty; for example, the equal right to get married.
That's not what I'm referring to. I'm talking about using the police power of the state to go after people. For example, bakers that don't want to bake a cake, or florists that don't want to flower arrangement for a gay wedding.
For me, one of the thrilling moments of the 2016 convention was Michelle's line about going high when they go low. But it's now clearer than ever that in difficult circumstances this is just not a winning political strategy. Sadly.
Serious, non-rhetorical question: how much are those civic ideals about America taught in schools these days? Or how much were Gen Z'ers taught those ideals?
They're taught plenty. Civics education is required everywhere. Causal explanations about what's taught in high school are basically always wrong imo.
The biggest problem is the continued dissipation of social capital, Bowling Alone style. Very hard to see a solution for that, especially since it's much worse among the underclass than among the professional class (e.g. contrary to online perception, church attendance is very strongly correlated with education), and for the most part politicians of both sides only understand the latter.
I don't agree that inflation was inevitable or that stimulus made it 1 or 2% worse. I don't think that there's a coherent economic theory that "pandemic must equal large inflation."
Matt has explained this in the past, but there's a reason why inflation was high in every rich country in the world. (1) Everybody spent way less money during the pandemic for obvious reasons, so anyone who didn't lose their jobs during the pandemic had lots of savings built up, which they all spent down at the same time. (2) Because so many white-collar workers were working remotely, lots of people simultaneously went into the market for bigger homes.
It's an unconvincing explanation.
1. The buildup of wealth during the pandemic was obviously not mostly about the relatively small savings that people gained by avoiding some leisure activities that they otherwise would've had. It was mostly a result of various government policies, probably primarily stimulus plus allowing people not to spend rent money and still not be evicted.
2. Inflation was not limited to housing.
Inflation was worldwide because it was not in fact only the US who did stimulus and because the world economy is interconnected and when the largest economy in the world does a ton of stimulus and other large economies do smaller-but-still-significant stimulus, everyone gets inflation.
I think every single issue voters care about other than abortion was one that heavily favored republicans. I could see that in the way the VP debate went- Vance was able to crush Walz by constantly going back to actual issues. That's not to say the Republicans are right on the issues (the economy is doing well, America handled inflation better than just about anywhere else in the world, etc.), but a voter who isn't super tapped in can hear the Republicans short, to the point statements about how bad these issues are and nod along in agreement, whereas the Dems needed to convince voters to sit down and read a bunch of published articles in economics journals to agree with their position. Any time a politician has to be like "well, actually, if you think about this from all these different perspectives and take into account the myriad factors at play, you'll see that the situation isn't as bad as my opponent makes it out to be" they're going to have a bad time, especially when the other side can say things like "groceries are too expensive!" and walk away.
The only reason this election wasn't already clearly decided months ago is because Trump is a monster. But if we're just thinking about the issues people care about in their day to day lives, it's not hard to see why the Republican party had a really good night last night.
I'm reminded of an observation from Matt Y where he said he watched Obama and Clinton campaign for Harris and they were much better at breaking these complex issues down and actually explaining them to voters than most current politicians.
So I wonder if there's just a skill that's been lost in the era of bubble media, targeted ads and social media.
100%. I think one thing that’s not talked about enough regarding the MAGA movement of the past 8 years is that the Democrats have put up replacement level or worse candidates time after time. Biden was fine in 2020, but already weaker as a candidate than he was as a younger man (when he was never a GREAT presidential candidate), and HRC and Kamala were both below average as candidates.
The comments on here saying Kamala ran a good campaign kind of blow my mind. She was timid in her decision making, and on the campaign trail she was meandering and squishy on issues she needed to be decisive and clear headed on. She wasn’t historically bad, but she was by no means good. She ran to not lose in a campaign that she needed be aggressively trying to win.
I will forever wonder what MAGA would have become if the Dems had actually run charismatic/visionary candidates against Trump.
Matt was also comparing the men who are considered the two best political talents of the last 40 years to everyone else, which isn't really fair to everyone else.
Every time I see Pete Buttigieg talk about the issues I am very impressed by his ability to message clearly
Matt was pointing out in the podcast with Brian that it seems clear that Kamala that shift right in swing states is less than the shift right in states with no Presidential ads. Seems clear that the Harris campaign actually did succeed in shifting voter opinion.
All of which is to say I agree with your fundamentals take. Brian was noting that the problem is asymmetric media system. And I've been on these comments agreeing that this is a factor for multiple issues. But the fact that every incumbent party has been losing in peer countries is such a clear data point as to what's going on.
That's a very interesting observation. It's definitely worth holding onto that thought once full state results are out, and revisiting.
>every incumbent party has been losing in peer countries
Except for Mexico!! I want an explanation of Mexican politics lol
Mexico is poor enough that "give people lots of money even if inflation spikes" is popular.
Yea. Is there any realistic democrat who could have won? I don’t think so.
Unironically probably someone like Mark Cuban.
Easily the best suggestion I've seen.
There are like 8. The incumbent administration is distinctly toxic.
Michelle Obama… Harris has the agreeableness but not the charisma
No! Michelle's speeches are all fan service at this point. They kill with Dems but don't reach undecideds
Press “X” to doubt
Mayyybeee. I’m not sure she’s a realistic option and even if she ran against Trump how confident would you be given the margins we’re seeing ? Not a slam dunk by any means.
She wouldn't have won. She doesn't have a dick.
Yeah I think she would’ve won. Who will put on a better show means a lot to a non-trivial number of voters. Harris wasn’t even in contention on that front.
When people are pissed off about the price of food, I don’t think charisma means that much.
Josh Shapiro, John Tester, Joe Manchin: what states that Harris won would have gone to Trump if any of those guys had run as the Democratic nominee? None. And they'd very likely have flipped NC, Pennsylvania, etc.
Remember, it is actually a hugely close election decided by a percent or so in most locations. Given the closeness of the election, I think it's fair to say that anyone who could have performed a couple percent better than Harris would have won (at least against Trump). Of the top of my head Shapiro, Whitmer, Tester, Manchin, Michelle Obama, maybe Tim Kaine or Buttigieg and probably several others I am forgetting.
I completely agree there were headwinds for the Dems...its just that the party chose the candidate least able to overcome those particular issues due to her closeness with the current administration and a demonstrated inability to campaign well. I will also concede she did a much better job campaigning than I thought possible...it was just that she could not get out enough and do thing like the Rogan podcast.
Given all the issues the Dem's needed a very strong campaigner, with minimal attachments to the current administration (and a willingness to throw them under the bus a little), and a more moderate history (remember all the positions Harris took during the 2020 primaries...difficult to take all that back). Harris was none of those things...
agreed to all of this.
If you combined that with taking immigration seriously a couple of years ago, Trump probably wouldn't be going back to the white house
I work with some hard-core Trump supporters and asked them if they could ever see themselves voting for a Dem. Unanimous yes on Tulsi Gabbard.
OK but... she's a republican now!
I think it’s worthwhile to think about how she was run out of the party, and whether or not her opponents (Hillary etc) were right on the merits at the time.
I think she's an independent(?), but they would all have supported her over Trump if she had been the candidate instead of Biden in 2020, which I thought was interesting.
She registered as a Republican a few weeks ago
But that’s only because she supports Trump… so I’d take that as basically a no.
They were basing that opinion on the 2020 primary, when she was not supporting Trump. If she had been the Dem candidate, they would have voted for her over Trump in 2020. It was the first time in years that any of them would have switched teams. They also liked Tammy Duckworth. They would not have voted for Bernie Sanders, but they respect him for having actual principles, albeit they disagree on his policy choices.
If only Democrats had nominated Zell Miller in 2004, they could've beat Bush!
Trumpers like Tulsi because she's a Republican who pretends to still be a Democrat.
Is this just because of Tulsi going viral for dunking on Kamala or did they like her before that?
I don't know. They seemed primarily concerned with her foreign policy leanings. They also believed she would be capable of acknowledging that negative consequences can result from her preferred policies.
We were discussing the 2020 Dem primary at the time.
Your colleagues remember Gabbard from the 2020 primary and have no idea what she’s been doing since then? I’m very doubtful. If they’re “hard core Trump supporters” like you say, they are well aware of her being a strong supporter as well.
I understand why you don't like what I am trying to tell you.
Agree. With these numbers, I don't think a perfect candidate running a perfect campaign would have won after seeing these numbers.
Essentially, the electorate decided that Trump was a standard enough Republican for electoral purposes and overcame his usual drag on the ticket.
One thing I've written here before is that every young Democratic staffer should be forced to listen to one hour of local sports talk radio a day, because nothing else will get you closer to understanding the mindset of the low-info nonpolitical swing voter. It makes a lot of the trends you see in politics instantly recognizable. One is the belief that if things go bad, you should fire the coach. It does not matter if it was the coach's fault. It does not matter if you have a better alternative. The coach has to be held accountable as a matter of principle because you need to send a message that failure isn't acceptable.
Sports fan talk also exposes the lack of serious economic analysis among a big segment of the public. You'll constantly hear proposals of how our side should trade three fourth liners, a fifth round draft pick and a bag of pucks for their franchise player. Or whatever the football/baseball/basketball equivalent of a fourth liner and a bag of pucks is. There's no recognition that their proposal can't possibly work and is stupid.
I disagree with most of what you're posting today, but this is dead on.
Good take.
Hard agree.
Interesting to see that there are likely a lot of voters who voted to enshrine Roe at the state level but voted for Trump (who appointed the Justices who repealed it).
Feels like some evidence that this is an anti-incumbent election more than an ideological one (despite the vast ideological differences between the candidates). This was a very strong Dem issue. But still too early to say anything definitive.
It's quite possible to both support the repeal of Roe (which was bad law) and want it returned to the states, and still vote for abortion to be protected in the states.
Or abortion just wasn't that important to a lot of people.
"the electorate decided that Trump was a standard enough Republican"
This is the shortest and best summary of what happened that I've yet seen.
That's where I'm at. I think there will be some important lessons to learn (or re-learn), particularly relating to the border and a broader dissatisfaction with public safety, but in general, this election was likely close to unwinnable due to post-COVID inflation.
I also think a big factor is that Trump has a truly quasi-religious hold on rural Americans. It's a genuine cult of personality. I expect rural areas will remain massively GOP once he's no longer on the ballot, but it's an open question whether they will continue to turn out at the same levels once that emotional connection is gone.
Would you describe overwhelmingly Dem voting groups and regions as being held in a quasi-religious grasp by Dems?
I wouldn't quite know how to answer that question myself, but it might suggest answers to your question.
Definitely not, nor am I suggesting that rural voters support conservative policies because of the Trump cult of personality. I'm just curious what rural turnout looks like in the post-Trump world once he's no longer at the top of the ticket. The cult of personality is very real, as we've all seen over the past 8 years.
You can’t stop Democrats from holding San Francisco. Is it a quasi-religious cult or is there a more prosaic explanation?
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Trump has brainwashed rural voters into supporting conservative policies. I expect these voters to remain overwhelmingly conservative no matter what happens after Trump. I'm just curious if they will turn out at the same levels absent the emotional connection to the candidate, which is a very, very real thing with Trump.
Has rural turnout surged under Trump?
Hard no.
'enough voters wanted 2019's price level badly enough that they demanded the return of 2019's president.'
-- Maybe they should have demanded 2019's Congressional composition too.
Presidentialization over voter attention kills Congressional accountability.
There are a lot of things about this election that bothered me, but the fact that Trumps successful economic argument was basically "time-machine" is up there.
The problem is more the 4 years of governance than the 3 months of campaigning. And of the 4, it was the first two that counted.
Biden could not have prevented the Fed's allowing an excessive degree of over-target inflation, just as he cannot be blamed for the Fed's delay in starting to cut rates. The best he could have done was to distance the Administration as much as possible (I don't know how much IS possible).
What WAS in the Administration's control was eschewing "McKibbenism," hostility to fossil fuel production and transportation projects. It reduces global emissions of CO2 hardly at all, but it is costly to specific Americans. McKibinism was costly (no claim to cruciality) both in the Senate (Tester, Manchin) and in the Electoral College -- Pennsylvania.
Also in the Administration's control was failure to prepare for the irregular immigrants at the Southern border, to deal expeditiously with asylum claimants. July 2024 legislation coud have been passed in 2021 when Trump could not have blocked it and combined with measures to permit more high-skilled immigrants (like removing the de-facto quota on Indians). The whole conversation should have been about how to maximize the value of immigration, not how to minimize certain costs.
yep, if Democrats had started taking the border seriously in year 1 or even year 2. A lot more people might have believed them instead of trying to pass a weak bill partway through year 4.
I would add that spending could have been cut back when inflation started to become a problem. No need to wait for the Federal reserve.
A primary (or even a mini-primary) would have been a sufficiently high-variance event that you can't say for sure, which was the reason to want a primary: we were losing so we should have rolled the dice more.
100% agree. I think it's almost always about the economy (e.g. see the Bread and Peace Model) and that's also the issue that voters consistently listed as their top issue. So while there could be other factors like immigration, crime or campaign issues to discuss I'd want to see actual evidence that they moved the needle significantly in the end before reaching any conclusion on what else the Democrats need to change.
Very seriously hoping the 2028 election is a Trump-free one, but that’s not a bet I’d make today.
There's already some talk about loopholes in the 22nd Amendment, unfortunately. It says that someone can't be 'elected' to the office of the Presidency more than twice, but the usual characters are saying that maybe the House choose Trump for a 3rd time so that it doesn't qualify as an election? There's some other stuff to it, it's a whole discussion at this point
The main argument I've seen is to try to claim that the SCOTUS ruling on the 14th Amendment insurrection clause also means that the 22nd Amendment doesn't operate to ban anyone from running for a third term without enabling legislation. (The problem I see most immediately with that argument is that, while it would mean Trump could run again, so could Obama, and I like the odds of a 67 year-old Obama versus an 82 year-old Trump in 2028.)
Presidents trying to weasel their way out of legal/constitutional prohibitions on running for re-election is like *classic* Latin American stuff too. This happens *all the time* there- they try to institute a limit on how many times someone can hold the office, a new president wins, he stacks the court with lackies, then he tries to find a loophole to be able to run again...... I think Bukele is trying to do that now.
The odds of America turning into a richer Brazil are like nonzero!
'make up the millions of votes by which Donald Trump has apparently won'
---that is how the PV estimates are shaking out - 3rd time is the charm for him?
I agree that in context, Kamala ran about as good of a campaign as she could. There will inevitably be a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking, but it will not be worth the paper it will be written on. She was dealt a bad hand, but played it reasonably well.
This election feels very different from 2016 to me in most ways save one: I feel genuinely bad for Kamala Harris. She's been a dedicated public servant for a long time, and she gave this campaign her all. She would have made a great president, and I was excited by the possibilities of a Harris administration. She deserved better from the electorate. I'll miss her, but I personally hope she remains in politics or at some point returns to public life.
She did run a good campaign. But in an electorate that was R +1.5 R +2 I think not breaking harder with Biden was just a huge misstep. Or, she was just never going to win and Dems really needed to nominate a popular swing state governor. Truly, who knows.
Whatever the case, there is not and has never been an anti-Trump majority coalition in this country. Dems need to get back in the business of winning votes.
I don't see any reason to believe she a ran a good campaign or that this electorate was inevitable. She made numerous mistakes from the very beginning that were plain to see, including not breaking harder with Biden. How can we call it a good campaign when she was making such obvious mistakes?
The problem with this argument is that while yes Harris didn't run a perfect campaign every one of her "mistakes" is a minor foot note compared to Trump.
Yes she didn't have great answers on The View, meanwhile Trump would literally say the most deranged s#*& I've ever heard day in and day out. Yes she could have "won" the debate by more, meanwhile Trump came off as a crazy person, yes she could have reached out to Trump skeptical voters better, Trump reguarly promised to have Democrats imprissioned
The big point we should have learned from 2016 and 2024 is that *campaign effects in presidential elections are quite limited*.
This is not about not giving great answers on The View. She had clear problems, such as her very liberal voting record in the Senate, her disastrous 2020 campaign, and her closeness to the Biden administration, and she did very little to distance herself from any of that. After all, she explicitly said she wouldn't change a thing from the last 4 years.
The more I think about that View answer, it seems so silly but it's so revealing - all the talk about how she sprinted to the center doesn't address the fact that she was fine with very progressive policies for the first three and a half years as VP and as a candidate before that.
I think the argument that if she had come up with a better sound bite then 9 million people in 7 different swing states would have voted different is kind of well, a dumb argument.
I think the claim that if she had stayed in longer in 2020 or done this or that, 8 million odd votes in 7 swings states would have gone a totally different way is very silly.
Which is why she should not have been the VP pick nor the nominee to replace Biden.
In retrospect I think the ship had sailed when Biden decided to run for a second term, many of the individual steps after that decision were rational and reasonable for the party but they couldn't offset the enormous problems with Biden trying to run again.
Does this reinforce Yglesias' argument that Democrats need to actually moderate on policy to win? Voters were willing to go with an absolute lunatic to avoid voting for the candidate who was just fine with loose borders and high inflation until summer of this year.
I believe Yglesias has pointed out that Trump actually moderated a lot of positions. SS, Medicare, and now even abortion.
Dems probably need to do the same. Then nominate a normie candidate
I think the correct synthesis is not that it was a good campaign but the Harris was hitting above her usual batting average. She was better than she should be expected to be.
Harris beat my expectations for how well her campaign would go, but those expectations were very low due to her 2020 campaign.
I'm not sure that's true. This was a pretty poor performance
She's a very poor politician.
I know, like I said above Gavin Newsom would have easily won GA, NC, PA, MI, and WI because his style of politics is just super duper popular with those voters.
Kamala's the football coach that punts down a score with two minutes left. Her campaign didn't make any individual tactical mistakes but neither did they act with the urgency required to win the thing.
How can you break with Biden when you are his VP. She did a solid (not perfect) job with the hand she was dealt. The thing in her control that she could have done better was run on a different message in 2019.
Ben — Did you watch the 60 Minute interview? I don’t think there’s any way you can listen to her repeated non-answers and think she was well prepared or her campaign had thought through her key positions / policies.
What I'm trying to think through is the difference between the campaign, which I think made a lot of good strategic decisions and adopted a lot of the right policies and generally just tried to embody the virtues of normalcy, chillness, and moderation, with her individual failings as a somewhat poor messenger.
The thing for me is I really don't see how Gavin Newsom or Josh Shapiro (or insert a candidate of your choice) would have made a big difference here.
Yes it's always good to be better, but the idea some better interviews would have move millions of votes strikes me as just nonsense.
Have you ever listened to Donald Trump talk? It's all just insane nonsense ramblings *that goes on for hours*.
The idea that her giving some better sound bites would have shifted 9 million votes in 7 states just doesn't hold up.
I think this is completely independent from Trump. Nate Cohn said this morning her favorability rating was just < 30% vs. 50% for Trump. Her campaign failed to increase her favorability and I don't really see how this is debatable. She didn't "run a good campaign".
I watched the interview on 60 minutes and wanted more substance as well. But both of us (I think) are demanding substance as an ingredient to get us to vote with enthusiasm. The voters who supported him in the battleground states, in the cities where Trump increased his support, and elsewhere weren’t fazed by his lack of policy specifics, his lying, or the things in his speech that would have been a turnoff for both of us. The question is: would a better 60 Minutes interview and more explicit answers on policy have influenced those people who decided in the last couple of weeks to shift to Trump? I think the answer is obvious. If the margins had been a few ten thousand votes in battleground states your argument would stand up. But with these results it doesn’t.
She was an empty suit who dedicated her life to pursuing power. She would have been fine, as empty-suits-as-presidents go, but she was never some heroic figure.
She did not run a good campaign and Democrats are in trouble if they pretend she did
You’re not going to find agreement here
Easily over half of SB comments in any given thread are talking about how Dems are making a huge mistake and need to learn from it.
Since comments on any article tend to be weighted towards people who disagree with the article, I don't find that to be very compelling.
Well you're not going to be able to convince that someone ran a good campaign when they made numerous missteps and errors that were obvious to most at the time
What is the last campaign, for either party, that didn’t “make numerous missteps and errors that were obvious to most at the time”? I’m not immediately coming up with them for Obama, but for all other presidential campaigns of my adult life, of either party, plenty come to mind quickly.
"She was compelling, moved to the center, campaigned in the right places, had good ads, and no real gaffes."
Other than campaigning in swing states, I would argue that none of these are true, or at least not true from the perspective of a swing/undecided voter.
That's great, but *we* deserved a better candidate, one who made smarter choices in 2019, one who did a better job at distancing herself from a president people really don't like, one who picked a better campaign team, one who picked Shapiro instead of Walz, etc. I don't give a damn about Harris's feelings. Her and her team made bad decisions, lost, and should be shunned so that the losers don't keep any leverage in the party.
Not that she shouldn't get respect - Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton weren't bad people either. But they all left electoral politics and that's a good thing.
But that’s not really her fault. Lay blame Ahmed directly where it belongs: at Biden. Dem made a lot of hay about him dropping out in 2022 so that there could be a primary. He refused. the media asked him and raised the question, “Should he be running?” He said yes. He spent a month agonizing on dropping out of the race and when he did, there was almost no time left to do anything else.
In one month he proved everything his haters said about him for forty years to be totally accurate.
To be fair, this is been the problem for Democrats for forever: they are fucking awful at long-term strategic planning
She lost PA by more than GA. How would Shapiro have made a difference?
The count isn’t done yet. Be careful about guessing which margins were bigger.
Shapiro alone wouldn't have made the difference, which is why I listed a few other things as well.
I don't think it was a but for cause given the map, but the temperament of a campaign that picked Shapiro amidst the hell being raised by the Groups is the general kind of ethos Dems needed in all strategic decisions this campaign. Thats a campaign that throws Biden underwater on an issue, that goes on Rogan months ago, that called out Dems worst polling issues. That made a dramatic and loud left punching stance on something to create separation.
The groups are too powerful in the Dem party. Need to return to Clinton politics
OK, she should have been further left in 2019, stayed closer to Biden, gone with a worse campaign team, picked Beto O'Rourke for VP and things wouldn't have gone any worse?
Everyone on this site doesn't like to hear it, because they believe there is some decency or fairness or logic to the American vote.
But deep down, I think this whole phenomenon still boils down to the most basic, primitive reasoning. Trump came into power specifically because many people in America could not stand a colored person as president. And Kamala was colored and female, and there is just no overcoming that barrier.
There were posters on in this very site who took her to task as a DEI candidate. There's just no talking people out of the reptilian parts of their brain.
"Trump came into power specifically because many people in America could not stand a colored person as president."
BS.
Obama's margin of victory was WAY higher than either of Trump's.
Also Obama ran as WAY more of a moderate than either Biden or Harris. Obama ran on securing the border. He was also against gay marriage until it became popular. His energy policy was all of the above. He actually worked with Republicans to reduce spending etc etc.
And of course Bill Clinton was even more moderate.
The crazy thing is that Trump is plainly the most indecent human being ever to be on the national stage. And his supporters know it and love him for it.
He is dishonorable in his personal life, cheating on multiple spouses and assaulting women for years. Dishonorable in his professional life, institutionalizing breaches of contract and lawfare as a business model. Corrupt in his political life, plainly focusing on self-enrichment and influenced by conflicts of interest. He lies as he breathes. He is unstable, unfocused, emotional, vindictive and easily manipulated. He disparages the country, its soldiers and public servants. He is unable to self-reflect, learn or empathize. He has no respect for the rule of law and when the very nature of our democracy was at issue, he chose his dangerous lies over the welfare of the country in a bid to stay in power and to disenfranchise the millions that voted against him.
None of this is a secret. As a country we chose an entertaining troll over a public servant. May mercy prevail.
Yes, the "folk theory of democracy" is bad
Democrats have in practice been using Trump’s weakness as a candidate to advance elite causes — immigration, LGBT/DEI, anti-policing, and climate are front of mind — which belies the idea that they think Trump is some special threat. These issues don’t command broad support, and I say that as someone who agrees with several of them. Perhaps Democrats thought abortion and differences in candidate quality would give them sufficient tailwinds to ride out the global incumbency crisis, but they clearly need to get closer to public consensus on some of these issues.
As an aside, it’s a travesty that Trump’s gambit on denying an immigration reform bill worked. That episode highlighted the depths of Republican cynicism and the brokenness of congress. Will Democrats ever neutralize this issue or will it continue to be something like the economy or national defense that Republicans are “just better” on, despite the evidence?
The people who did those things didn't believe in the moment that those causes were so unpopular, which was clearly wrong for at least some of them, but was an error in judgment, not an affirmative belief that risking Trump was worth it.
Also, I think the problem is just a lot more fundamental than that. We assume that Harris could have expanded her coalition by moving right, and there's a logic to that, but we don't actually know that those votes were there to be won. I totally support hippie-punching as a matter of principle, but it's not as if punching hippies makes them cease to exist or puts them outside of the Democratic coalition, and right-of-center voters know that. Either right-of-center voters are comfortable with electing a governing coalition that progressives are a part of in order to stop Trump, or they aren't.
I think Harris was mostly stuck with the Biden administration, which was heavily influenced by the 2020 primary, which leaned heavily into the dynamics of the 2016 primary. Dems have been looking left for a while now, and it isn’t working.
The people who went all in on the above mentioned issues may not look like an especially appealing or wise leadership class. “What crazy moral enthusiasm will they go all in on next, and make the rest of us play along?” is a legitimate question after the first Trump term (Jesus it sucks to type that).
There’s an alignment between Democrats, media and many American institutions that’s obvious to everyone but Democrats who think the New York Times is out to get them. That leadership group has fallen for a lot of obvious nonsense, and turned the obvious nonsense into mainstream American culture. And many liberals don’t see it. As soon as something is exposed as nonsense it immediately ceases to matter to us, here in the drum circle (if our information ecosystem even allows us to find out the nonsense was exposed). But everyone else can remember just fine, and they’re pissed off about what the leadership class put them through.
A lot of people don’t see Trump as a viable candidate to lead the country, they see him as the only alternative to a rotten, broken leadership class. And that being dumb doesn’t mean that anyone should be thrilled about that leadership class.
Misinformation isn’t hurting liberals half as badly as true information that they consider harmful, and have refused to confront. Gotta spend all that oxygen reminding everyone that Trump is bad.
I don’t know how to walk it back, but we should never have been making apostates and examples of people who were telling us hard truths, or asking difficult questions. We’ve been too hermetically sealed.
This is spot on. Pretending that the craziness of 2020 either didn’t happen or wasn’t a big deal is not the way to go. And scolding people who are still worried about the judgement of leaders and institutions that went along with it does not work either.
Obama won the 2008 primary in part because he was one of the few politicans who came out against the Iraq invasion when it was in the planning stage. That was another institutional failure where the people who turned out to be correct were relentlessly mocked and generally understood to be very bad people. I kinda think the democrats need someone like that who came out against the craziness of 2020. Biden won the primary in part because he didn’t endorse a lot of the crazier ideas, but we need so one who either wasn’t in politics at the time or is willing to say outright that many of those ideas were terrible
Everyone since 2016 who called out institutional failures in real time got booted out of polite society. Just like Iraq; nothing worse than being right too soon. Phil Donohue becomes unemployable, Bill Kristol and David Frum are like herpes. We should be promoting people who were right in real time, instead of burying them.
Excellent portion of your response- "I totally support hippie-punching as a matter of principle, but it's not as if punching hippies makes them cease to exist or puts them outside of the Democratic coalition, and right-of-center voters know that. Either right-of-center voters are comfortable with electing a governing coalition that progressives are a part of in order to stop Trump, or they aren't."
As a political party, your choice of political coalitions is not entirely or even mostly up to you. Your coalitions choose *you*.
Open primaries, for both major parties, or anything that becomes a major party, with *mandatory* voting, is the only way to water down the extremism of the Party constitutionally advantaged to win majorities.
We have Trump exactly because of open primaries man!! He originally won most of the open primary states in 2016, and lost most of the closed ones. Most US states have open primaries now, today!
Party gatekeepers are a good thing dude
But forced open primaries, with mandatory voting, would blur partisan identities, and disempower single issue groups on *all* sides, including the right. It would remove the ability for rural whites to be voting alone unadulterated and unsupervised. It would lead to more bland-ing of both Parties nominees. With vast sections of American geography inaccessible to Democrats for branding reasons, the still numerous demographics and opinion sectors who vote Democratic or non-Republican need to be participating in Republican primaries to be represented. The same would need to happen in reverse in states to provide voter representation and feedback in states where Republicans cannot compete at the state and federal level. Turn the duopoly into the uniparty. It is better than what we have. The emboldened right half of the duopoly, selected by the right-wing party's primary system, favored by geography and its epistemically sealed media ecosystem, that only loses 1 election at a time in the face of *fresh* failure, and bounces back instantly.
Mandatory voting is unconstitutional and would be struck down by a court. No idea what you're trying to say otherwise
Even if it would be, given our duopoly, and partisan monopolies over large geographic areas open primaries should be the rule including dual participation - simply from an equal representation under law perspective. It is a cruel fiction to treat parties as ‘private organizations’ when partisan politicians, appointees and judge determine voting rules and districts, and parties leverage public resources for holding their primary elections. Jurisprudence banned whites only primaries as a denial of representation. Same principle applies to barring opposite party voter participation in primaries where one party is hegemonic.
Democrats didn’t help themselves on immigration by not proposing legislation until they were forced to in order to secure Ukraine funding. Their lack of seriousness on the issue until it was too late is probably the biggest own goal of the cycle IMO.
I don't think so. Migrant crossings are way down. There's no world in which the GOP doesn't make a big deal about immigration regardless of what the actual facts on the ground are.
They are way down in that last few months. It takes time for this stuff to filter down into public consciousness. It's the same thing with crime I think. The actual surge in crime happened during the Trump administration and has been steadily coming back down throughout the Biden admin. But because it crystalized in public consciousness during the Biden admin that "crime is bad now" it attaches a negative affect to him instead of Trump.
In other words, there are long and variable lags between the actual concrete data and public perception, so you can't just "fix" these things a few months out from the election
I think disorder remains high, despite crime going down. Smaller police departments with more heavily scrutinized public interactions have focused efforts on major crime, but as a result they had to stop paying attention to smaller issues like verbal harassment, speeding, turnstyle jumping, etc.
Shootings really are finally back to 2019 levels (although if we had kept on trend, we'd be well below that without an extra 20 thousand deaths). But disorder on public display has not returned to 2019 levels, not even close.
Yeah, that seems plausible to me. I live in a small city and the homelessness problem has gotten pretty out of control (encampments, aggressive panhandling, etc). Would be interesting to look at crime stats though to see if reported lower-level crimes has decreased faster than the violent crime rate.
The world where asylum seekers have disappeared from shelters and city centers might be one where they wouldn't have nearly as much to say, effectively at least.
I don’t think people are following the day-to-day statistics. The fact is that Biden ran on a “kinder” immigration policy and crossings exploded after he took office and remained for most of his presidency.
This is true and obviously they could have done more. But Trump spiked the bill to fix it! I don't know how anyone actually interested in solving the problem can agree with that in good faith.
Democrats only agreed to the reforms in that bill in order to secure Ukraine funding, which was their first priority. Yes, Trump spiking the bill was extremely cynical, but Democrats only came to love the bill afterward when it became a convenient campaign talking point. IOW, Democrats could not reverse years of building perceptions that they didn't care about immigration with talking points about Trump killing that bill.
Very much agreed. If dems had tried to pass a serious border bill in year 1 or year 2 a lot of people might have believed them. trying to pass it mid way during an election year doesn't cut the mustard.
Not to mention while the bill was better than the status quo it was still a VERY weak bill.
Hard disagree. Bush and Obama both tried to pass immigration bills and failed. Immigration hawks are only going to pass a bill on their own terms.
With a potential Republican trifecta, the Democrats crushed on this issue, and the biggest hawk of them all in the White House, they’ll finally get their chance.
Were "DEI", "climate", etc bad for Dems? Maybe! But it feels a bit off for people to immediately pivot to those when "woke" issues were also all present in 2020, when Dems won. By far the biggest problem this election was post-COVID inflation.
I would have said this even if Kamala had narrowly won. Neither this election, nor 2020, nor 2016 should have been close, given (1) Trump is a unique threat and (2) his corruption and personal style are off-putting to a lot of people. I’m trying to express a feeling I’ve had since the end of the Obama presidency that Dems have been out over the skis of popular opinion.
I think an incorrect lesson was learned about the general public's receptivity to rapid social change by the utter collapse of opposition to gay marriage.
I'll own up--I definitely learned this incorrect lesson.
Same! In hindsight, Dick Cheney’s gay marriage turn should have been a clearer signal about where support for that issue was coming from exactly.
The unfortunate reality is that many American voters do not have the same investment in the basic abstract civic ideals of America that you and I do. To us, it’s obvious why Trump is dangerous (it can’t happen here!) but many people genuinely either don’t understand or don’t care.
We're here to punch hippies, not exercise inferential restraint, John
If COVID hadn't happened I think it's clear that Trump would have walked pretty easily into reelection.
Not sure I agree. He was a historically unpopular president even before COVID.
yes, but I still think he would have beat Biden. Look how close it was during the middle of a pandemic/recession
He might have, but I wouldn't say he would have walked easily into it, given how horrible his approval rating was.
"As an aside, it’s a travesty that Trump’s gambit on denying an immigration reform bill worked. That episode highlighted the depths of Republican cynicism and the brokenness of congress."
Biden spent three years doing everything he could to let every illegal alien into the county, and it's Republicans who are cynical for denying him cover for that on the eve of an election?
There's plenty of blame to go around when discussing the immigration issue. Biden should have done more for his entire presidency to address it. Republicans should be good faith partners in office to try and actually solve the issues that the country is facing (ESPECIALLY the ones they claim are the most important and pressing issues!). I don't think Biden's failures mean that Republicans get a free pass to be craven political saboteurs and we just have to shrug our shoulders and say "but Biden's executive orders!"
Biden wasn't asking Republicans to be good faith partners in office. He was asking them to provide political cover for importing millions of illegal aliens earlier in his term. There was absolutely no good faith on his part, so why should Republicans have given him what he wanted?
The bill was negotiated in the Senate with Senate republicans' active participation. Why did they participate? Why did they come out and say that the bill was a good bill?
Honestly, what are you even talking about? This just sounds like partisan shouting that's divorced from facts and reality.
I get why low information voters might think that about illegal aliens, but responsible adults can recognize that Republicans have been playing Lucy and the football on this since the start of the Obama presidency, on top of not trying to pass a bill when they had a legislative trifecta last time. What do you think the odds are they try to pass immigration reform this time around?
The Trump pogroms are their immigration reform, and their voters voted for them.
Last night's live was crazy. Matt was pounding the table and pleading with Brian to see that the Democratic party is controlled by lizards.
Wow, I guess I have to actually watch this thing!
I tuned in towards the last half. It was crazy.
I think Republicans should have signed on to the immigration bill because it was better than the status quo.
I also think it was a bad bill.
A real bill would do the following.
1. Hire a LOT more immigration judges
2. build a lot more detention centers
3.stop ALL catch and release. Don't release a single person into the country unless they have been approved.
4. If the detention centers fill up then close the border until there's room. Again don't release anyone into the country
5. Build the wall
6. Mandate e-verify
Sorry for the long comment, but here are some thoughts I had overnight:
The fascist dictatorship worst-case scenario probably won't happen.
But "America as an idea" is dead. Politicians from both parties have used that phrase, probably most famously Reagan, but here's what that "idea" meant to me. Obviously it goes all the way back to the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address but didn't fully achieve its current form until the postwar consensus: A liberal democracy, where we don't merely hold elections, but where we also actively encourage citizens to be educated about policy, to deliberate, and to participate in the political process - against a backdrop of non-negotiable fundamental rights and the rule of law, where minorities are protected and are guaranteed the ability to have a voice, use the airwaves, etc. - where power is shared and limited - where government agencies and workers, while under the authority of political electeds, serve the people, not the interests of the electeds - where we have strict rules to prevent incumbents seeking reelection from using the government's power to load the deck - and where we advocate on behalf of those values all over the world.
But the problem is that the people don't want all that, or at least not very passionately. They never did, and not just here, but across most of the world. It's human nature for most people not to care much about that stuff. The only reason why those "libdem" ideals were so firmly entrenched here for so many decades was because there was an elite consensus around them, and in a society that had only three TV networks there was no real way for anyone to organize to challenge that elite consensus.
But society has changed. There's no longer an elite consensus in support of libdem ideals, and illiberal ideas can now be taken directly to the people through the internet, not only by American illiberals but even by foreign dictators - and a lot of people are receptive. I'm not saying that a majority of Americans are ideologically committed to autocracy per se, but many don't care about the distinction between a mature liberal-democratic system vs. a system like, say, Turkey or Indonesia - or Hungary - where non-fake elections are held but the rules are often observed in the breach.
Trump will pretty clearly abuse his power for the next four years, but maybe the Democrats will win the White House back in 2028. But even if they do, things will never go back to the way they were. We'll never again have any federal government institutions that are rock-solidly dedicated to libdem principles. If a single year of only-moderately-bad inflation can make people elect an illiberal president, knowing full well who he is and what he's about, then there's no reason to think it won't keep happening. Libdems aren't going to enact perfect policies 100% of the time. All politicians make mistakes, and if the illiberals can regain control of the government every time libdems make a mistake, then the illiberals are going to keep regaining control of the government indefinitely and will put their stamp on it even if they never turn our country into a full-on dictatorship. (And in this case, I don't think the Biden administration even made any unusually significant policy mistakes. Inflation happened all over the world. The administration certainly made some *political* errors, but while I don't excuse those errors, errors like that are also inevitable over time. If your political system requires liberal-democrats to have a perfect record of political judgment to keep power out of illiberal hands, then that's not sustainable.)
That means the days of being proud of American political ideals and institutions are over. We can still be proud of America's culture, diversity, economic vitality, etc., and we'll probably still get to vote in non-sham elections, but we're not a city on a hill politically - not that we were ever perfect, but we at least used to have goals we could believe in. Now there are no longer any institutions here that we can be proud of and are worth dedicating our lives or careers to building. The best-case scenario is that we'll be trading blows with the illiberals for the rest of our lives, purely for harm reduction - depriving them of their ability to abuse power for four years at a time - not on building anything that lasts. The arc of history will not be bending toward justice anytime soon.
This is, of course, a tragedy in one sense, but it was also probably inevitable. It's impossible to sustain and grow a true liberal democracy where at least 50% of the electorate is willing to vote against liberal democracy in any given election - it's a contradiction in terms! If you're going to put power in the hands of the voters, then you also have to give the voters the power to willingly hand their power over to an aspiring autocrat if that's what they want to do. If people are naturally open to that kind of thing, then that's what we deserve. Or in other words, Putin was right about us. The United States *government* may have been committed to liberal democratic ideals for a long while, but the United States never was, deep down. All it took was exposure to an alternate value system, and it could all be brought down like a house of cards.
100% on board.
The world is in for an age of darkness. The damage that this presidency will do is simply too much to amount to anything but a capitulation of the West in Cold War II. The future as it appeared in, say, 2008, is never going to happen. That timeline is unrecoverable.
The rest of our lives will be an exercise in simply finding pockets of prosperity and liberty and hoping we can avoid the impacts of decline and authoritarianism. I’m tempted to say that liberalism is dead, but perhaps the less apocalyptic truth is that it will simply go dormant for some time.
I think we will look back on this election as the one that gave China a definitive hold on the 21st Century. Ignoring all the crazy bullshit he spews endlessly, the most appalling thing about Trump is his weakness. Neither he nor the stupider-than-ever gaggle of crooks surrounding him have any strategic vision for the future or willingness to stand and fight for anything beyond the next bribe from the next autocrat. If the average Trump voter thinks they just elected a "strongman", they are about to be sorely disappointed. Sure - he can beat up on penniless immigrants desperately trying to escape the catastrophic regimes of Central America. But put him in the ring with Xi or Putin or even MBS? He's a joke.
Side note: this will also almost certainly lock in more than 3.5 degrees C warming by 2100, as spewing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere at increased scale is the one thing that Russians, Saudis, Chinese racing for military dominance, AI investors racing for AGI, and America's Trump-voting halfwits can all agree on.
The silver lining is that when China launches their inevitable invasion of TW, they probably won't bother surprise-attacking US Pacific assets. No point if they're going to be unopposed.
Although Trump will likely let them invade the new TSMC factory in Arizona while they're at it.
Big agree. My guess would be that domestic political instability over a future presidential transition leads to a run on Treasuries, American bond yields spiking, and then Treasuries forever disappearing as the mythical 'risk free asset' in the world's mind. The US will probably turn into a wealthier, more educated Brazil. I still think we'll correct course some later on in the 21st century, but the sheen of the American empire will be forever gone. We'll be a superpower still, but only equal to the other superpowers of China, the EU, and India.
Unfortunately, it seems to be my fate that all this happen within my adult lifetime!
I don't know. It's very hard for me to imagine he will do what he says he will with tariffs because it's so transparently stupid and counter-productive. His best path to greater popularity by far is to simply draft in the positive economic climate created by his predecessor, just as he did after Obama. Keep all the trendlines heading in the same direction, cut the deficit growth moderately to keep bond vigilantes in check. You have to ask what he's fighting for at this point. He's a lame duck, he won't want to enable a strong successor for fear of being overshadowed. If he has any core beliefs at all they revolve around increasing asset values (and of course, putting innocent people in jail), so it's not clear to me why he would risk that for the sake of delivering on his campaign promises to people who are, let's face it, way too stupid to remember or care about anything other than the macro trends.
I'm not going to deny that he's weak, but I don't think weakness is the core problem here. The core problems are that (1) in the conflict between liberal democracy and autocracy, he's on the wrong side, (2) he doesn't see "the United States" (its citizenry and institutions as currently and legally constituted) as "his country" - his country is only a subset of the United States as currently and legally constituted, while another subset of the United States is, to him, a foreign enemy.
I agree that he talks that way and maybe even feels that way, but in the long run, there is just not that much he can do about it without much more public support than he got last night.
> We will look back on this election as the one that gave China a definitive hold on the 21st Century.
I think the key challenge is explaining to people why this should matter to them.
Tons of people want to the US to withdraw from the world and thinks our borders will protect us and TBH my arguments against that don't feel ultra solid (even though I care a lot about the world and want the US to engage). My gut tells me that a world with China in charge looks very bad for the US, but right now few people in America or the global south are buying it.
I actually think it’s easier to convince average voters that China is a threat both economically and militarily than to convince them that NATO is good or that we should pay attention to India and Nigeria. I don’t know what the deal is with Putin / Musk
/ Trump, but it looks bad for Europe.
> The rest of our lives will be an exercise in simply finding pockets of prosperity and liberty and hoping we can avoid the impacts of decline and authoritarianism.
Cold comfort but this is how it's been for the entirety of human history. We grew up thinking we were in another era, but we were just wrong about that the whole time.
I agree. We were the beneficiaries of an extraordinary period, and are still coasting on a lot of that luxury.
I generally agree with you against the reactionary centrists that dominate these comments, but you're dooming a bit here. There is a chance that things go as bad as this, but I think most of the likely outcomes are better.
"reactionary centrists that dominate these comments". Rolls eyes.
Yes. This. Perhaps it is the deep confusion resulting from the decline of authoritative news and the rise of social media. Certainly the death of memory of the Great Depression, Second World War and Cold War, which were the sources and origin points for the defense of liberal democracy and the narrative of continuing progress, even allowing for periods of less intensive reform (Eisenhower administration; 1970s/1980s). The determined Federalist Society effort, now largely successful, to ignore, repeal or discredit the judicial move to expand the scope of lawful federal regulatory power over the economy and interpret the Fourteenth Amendment as the second founding and basis for broadened personal rights consistent with the evolution of a civilized society that focuses on protecting disfavored minorities who are disempowered by the political system (goodbye, Carolene Products footnote), is particularly worrisome and mischievous. The 1890s was not a wonderful and happy place, contrary to the arguments of the reactionary nitwits advising El Caudillo. The idea that there are practices and policies that Americans just will not enact and follow, simply because we are civilized people devoted to the rule of law and the ideals of personal liberty, sadly now lies in tatters. I am afraid that, as in the late 1920s, fundamental reform will only follow a massive, wealth-destructive crisis on the scale of the Great Depression - a horrifying thought. The elements in the business community which supported Trump essentially did so on the argument that everything he said was just posturing and that he wouldn't actually do any of it in power. I hope they are right but now we will see if we reap the whirlwind. I fear we will. But at some level, it is just confusion, ignorance, ressentiment and, at a time when the United States is richer than it has ever been, the decadence of a controlling plurality of the citizenry. It will always be curious that a bunch of people who claim to love America so much seem to hate half the people who live in it. I fear things will get worse before they get better.
We're becoming more European in the worst sense - a smaller and more parochial outlook, retreat from defending our values abroad, more about blood and soil than about grand ideals, etc.
Your comment is very correct. Also it's clear there's not a single culprit or one weird trick that would've avoided this. It's pretty much all downstream from the internet breaking the stranglehold elites had on the information environment. You can blame trump or zuckerberg or musk, but once there were no guardrails it was always going to end the same way.
I'm sympathetic to and agree with chunks of this, but I'd probably modify it a bit to say that a lot of voters are just naive about illiberalism. And what elitism & gatekeepers offered were not just preserving liberal democracy, but also you had educated people manning the gates who knew what the warning signs of illiberalism looked like. I think some people in the comments here are overreacting- a ton of voters pulled the lever for Trump but they're not genuinely for authoritarianism, they just don't believe that Trump will do it. Some are low-information, but most are just naive. They think he's all talk, plus the US has been rich & peaceful for so long that they really believe It Can't Happen Here.
What gatekeepers offered were educated people who knew exactly what kind of rhetoric & personalities were bad news. It's striking to me that virtually every Republican elected official in 2016 was anti-Trump, including some very Trumpy figures now. They all knew! Unfortunately, the gatekeeper system is now gone.
And a key part of gatekeeping were political parties not holding wide-open primaries for every rando who wanted to sign up for them. In every other democracy in the world parties screen candidates for office, allowing some & disallowing others. It's boring but true to say, this all started because of the American primary system
This is the part of MY's thesis here I struggle with the most. A bunch of the old guard Republicans (even people from the Trump administration) were at the very least refusing to vote for Trump, but they have no cultural cache left with voters. The Democratic Party effectively has become the institution that rhetorically defends the system as a whole, and thus gets blamed for any failings of the system. I'm not sure how you square that circle without risking tearing down what actually works in America.
https://theonion.com/historians-politely-remind-nation-to-check-whats-happen-1819572992/
If you’re unhappy about the current media landscape, I think it is valuable to note that it is both contingent and temporary. The era of the Big 3 national television networks was a product of the regulation and technology of that time. Our current era is the same.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is just a statute, it can be changed if we wish. And it is a certainty that technology will continue to change.
(I personally am not optimistic about what a world of primarily AI-curated/generated feeds will look like, but I don’t doubt that it will be different.)
While the TCA is a statute that can be changed, the particular resulting events that seem to be most relevant to the current situation were not particularly intended or even foreseen at the time, so I'm skeptical that tinkering with the TCA or other telecommunications regulations will have readily predictable effects.
"In that day you will cry out because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord won’t answer you in that day.” But the people refused to heed Samuel’s warning. Instead they said, “No! There will be a king over us! We will be like all the other nations. Our king will judge us and lead us and fight our battles.”
- 1 Samuel 8:18-20
This is an excellent comment. I feel many of the same things and find it hard to argue against with present realities.
But, I still don’t agree. We should have a sense of history about just how crazy and bleak the places we’ve been to were, and a sense of imagination about how the future will be unpredictably different. What must it have been like to live with the entire world at war? Could someone have predicted the greatest period of human flourishing would follow? Would a Walter Cronkite viewer have been able to envision the media environment we have today? Paradigms will shift. We’re essentially eternally wrong about everything we think will happen.
I wonder if the future paradigm we enter will see politics in general diminished in power. Where real change stems from generating vibrant culture and compassionate behavior. No evidence to point to, but if we’re eternally wrong the maybe the best thing to do once in awhile is to zag instead of zig, and imagine a scenario that seems least possible. While not giving up on politics, I wonder if we should move to stake our claims there.
This is what really gets me. “We really hate inflation so let’s vote for the guy who will make it worse” is so fundamentally bizarre that I feel like the crazy one.
I’m well aware that voters generally don’t go for policy, but how could they not understand something so basic?
> I’m well aware that voters generally don’t go for policy, but how could they not understand something so basic?
I earnestly think the median voter thinks "inflation will go down" is exactly equivalent to "eggs will go back to the old, lower prices I'm used to".
Trade policy is several orders of magnitude more nuanced and complicated than that.
Well, a major problem was probably that the mainstream media by and large failed to communicate the expected inflationary effects of tariffs. Because, while people like Matt and Noah Smith, etc., discussed it, I barely noticed any mention of it in popular press outlets other than maybe a one sentence, "Many economists disagree . . . ," kind of statement in the later part of the story. (Which, frankly, was unsurprising to me -- the American mainstream media has been stridently anti-free trade for decades, at least, if not longer.)
I don't know if we're actually disagreeing. My point is that the sequence of backlash to backlash to backlash *is* a "hellscape" in the sense that they are an abandonment of the hopes we were raised with. We are no longer building a city on a hill, we're just fighting trench warfare to stop things from getting worse. We have a duty to do this, and we have reason to believe we can achieve these goals, but the goals are small compared to what we used to think our country was capable of, and we no longer have anything to be proud of, not even aspirationally. That hellscape isn't a "permanent illiberal hellscape," but I never said that.
Harris ran a more or less competent campaign. Biden’s presidency was the most successful in my lifetime. Objectively speaking, the two major policy mistakes he made — immigration and inflation — should not have doomed the Democratic Party in this election.
The only reasonable remaining conclusion is that the voters are incompetent. They are no longer capable of observing objective reality nor understanding its complexities: by this, I mean that they cannot trace the inflation to Trump’s COVID failures nor hold the immigration failure in perspective of an economically miraculous soft landing.
This fact needs to be the basis of any future campaign going forward. It’s not a “post-truth reality”, it’s a “post-objectivity electorate”.
Blaming voters is never the answer.
I know, but when most objective measures seem to indicate the American economy is going very well(via comparison to other countries) but people think the party in power has screwed it up ... What do you do?
Don't screw up on inflation and immigration and then lash yourself to the decrepit man at the helm of the operation until he falls apart on live TV and leaves his VP to clean up the mess. That's a start.
Build a society that has two strong, responsible institutional parties, so that when you inevitably lose for thermostatic reasons outside of your conteol, it's to Haley/McCain/Romney/Bush/Dole, not Orban/Netanyahu. But how to build such a society is the real question...
Well one you need to reform campaign finance laws that neutered the parties. Allow unlimited donations to the parties so the money goes there instead of super pacs
It’s the only logical conclusion. Objective reality exists.
Our team had been smug and certain about a lot of objective reality that simply wasn’t that, over the last few years. I think maybe at least a brief period when we read The Best and the Brightest and meditate on humility might be in order.
(Just as an exercise: natural immunity was real, and superior to the vaccine. The vaccine didn’t prevent transmission (as explicitly promised). Was the trucker convoy objectively in the right? Because some of us were in major news media, wishing death on those folks. No one has any regrets; when you bring it up, they just yell even louder).
I’m not interested in a debate, but we’ve been wrong about some pretty important things and rather than examine what went wrong, we just stop talking about it, lest Trump gain some advantage. Maybe throw in some “well Trump’s even worse!” which is exactly the kind of thing you want to hear when you’re looking for accountability (/s). I wish we were as good at being right as we are at telling everyone how smart we are, but that’s not the case.
Christ, if conservatives had gone all in on Rebekah Jones, we’d never, ever let them hear the end of it. When we’re discussing a Supreme Court nominee, how in the hell are high school yearbook quotes of critical importance? We’re not the pack of Cicero’s that we imagine ourselves to be.
Remember when we spent months telling everyone that inflation wasn’t even real, and then it wasn’t all that bad, and then it had existed but it was over? I wonder if Democrats remember. “Biden’s fine, sharp as a tack”; brought to you by your betters, the upper middle class college graduates of America.
If we were as smart as we think we are, we’d find a way to adjust to the almost 2/3 of Americans who don’t even have a college degree, maybe even learn that sometimes they were right, and we screwed up righteously.
Yes, Trump’s worse. But we haven’t provided the shining example of probity and accountability that some people seem to think we have, certainly not to the point of justifying smugness levels that can be detected from space.
The vaccine *did* prevent transmission to an extent against pre-Omicron strains. It was never promised by the experts to prevent transmission against Omicron and following strains.
I see people conflate this often and it's a bit frustrating, as it does underline that the problem in this specific instance (not trying to counter your broader point) truly is "low information".
One of the biggest problems with COVID discourse is that many people talk about the mid-late 2021 and onwards state of play as if the underlying factors never changed, but in fact they shifted dramatically over the course of 2020 and 2021.
Wait, do the boosters prevent Omicron & later transmission? If not, why not? If the original vaccines prevented pre-Omicron transmission, why would that go away with the boosters?
>The vaccine didn’t prevent transmission (as explicitly promised)<
I don't know where you're getting this. I obsessively read everything I could get my hands on in the summer/fall of 2020 with respect to the mRNA vaccine trials, and it was all there in plain English that the prospect of sterilizing immunity was uncertain at best, but that that the jab would help humans fight the virus, and render it less harmful.
It's possible some uniformed people made ill-advised claims, sure, but Operation Warp Speed was a Trump initiative, after all, so the primary responsibility to accurately report information was theirs.
https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-vaccinated-people-become-dead-ends-for-the-coronavirus/
This video is dated May 2021. The Omicron variant emerged in late 2021, and dramatically reduced effectiveness of vaccines in preventing transmission.
I mentioned this in my comment, but a huge problem of COVID discourse, which I've seen even Matt falling into sometimes, is that people project the "end state" of COVID backwards throughout the entire crisis and act as if the factors influencing decision-making were always the same. But they weren't!
Oh: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/22/joe-biden/biden-says-vaccinated-people-cant-spread-covid-19-/
99% of people aren't reading the fine print of the trials and studies. But it sure as shit was trumpeted all over the media that you needed to take the vaccine because it would stop transmission and it you didn't you were a piece of shit and other people would LITERALLY die.
>It’s the only logical conclusion. Objective reality exists.<
Another objective reality is blame GOP, Inc: they could have won (maybe even more handily) with a non-lunatic. But they don't care about America. That's the bitter truth.
The objective reality is that Democrats decisively lost and that can’t be reversed in a democracy by blaming voters.
Furthermore, if Democrats follow your analysis and conclude the problem isn’t with Democrats but with the perceived defects of voters, it’s not clear to me how that doesn’t end up as an eternal political dead end.
There are reasons the Biden administration is one of the most unpopular administrations in modern history - a fact that is also objective reality that cannot be ignored.
>>Furthermore, if Democrats follow your analysis and conclude the problem isn’t with Democrats but with the perceived defects of voters, it’s not clear to me how that doesn’t end up as an eternal political dead end.
I was kind of expecting this criticism, and I'm glad you've brought it up.
To be clear, I'm not saying Dems should spend the next four years studiously exploring every last dead end while the world burns around them. That would be dumb.
But let me sketch out a reasonably sane first draft. It looks something like, "We now know that voters simply don't understand basic economic realities like the miraculous soft landing, low unemployment, and GDP growth that is the envy of the developed world. They don't even notice when gas and eggs go right back down to pre-pandemic prices. But the reality is that they have been growing increasingly upset for decades because of a cost crisis. Even as many commodities have become dramatically affordable, major components of basic services have skyrocketed -- housing, education, healthcare, childcare. But although we can definitely conclude that the voters cannot accurately diagnose these complex problems, our party establishment has also utterly failed to offer a genuinely new social contract. Conventional liberal thinking on these issues has been unable to contend with the scale of these problems and refused to offer simple solutions that don't just look like classic attempts to bribe voters with goodies or running deep into left field."
That's about as much as I can get out right now. But the basic idea is, simply acknowledging that the voters were wrong shouldn't be a thought-ending cliche; rather, it should invite an understanding of why they were unable to accept the party's pitch or credit its successes, and why the party was unable to craft a convincing pitch.
"the reality is that they have been growing increasingly upset for decades because of a cost crisis. Even as many commodities have become dramatically affordable, major components of basic services have skyrocketed -- housing, education, healthcare, childcare"
This is really the defining economic problem of our era and the parties have picked different solutions/"solutions":
Democrats:
-Housing: allocate scarce units via lottery to lower-income people, don't increase supply
-Education: subsidize higher education while culturally encouraging more people to attend
-Healthcare: offload costs from individuals to government
-Childcare: subsidize daycare, waffle on child tax credit, don't increase supply
Republicans:
-Housing: sprawl
-Education: lower cultural status of highly educated people, indirectly reducing enrollment
-Healthcare: reduce private premiums and gov't spending by cutting loose poor and sick people
-Childcare: express rhetorical support for CTC, culturally encourage single-earner families/stay-at-home moms
The Democratic solutions are mostly well-intentioned but mostly ineffective; the Republican solutions are environmentally bad, cruel, and have the quasi-intended side effect of discouraging "non-traditional" lifestyles, but may actually work. (In the same way that unemployment is apparently preferable to inflation to many voters, because unemployment hits fewer people harder.) In order for the Democratic solutions to work, supply of housing needs to be expanded, government needs to cover more premiums/out-of-pocket costs for typical middle-income employed people, and cash transfers need to replace daycare subsidies for parents.
"They don't even notice when gas and eggs go right back down to pre-pandemic prices"
but overall price levels are still way up. And wages have fallen behind the cost of living increases.
Democrats really need to focus on an abundance agenda. Especially bringing down the cost of housing which is usually the worst in blue states were Dems have complete control.
Wages most certainly did *not* fall behind the COL increases at the median. The upper-middle income brackets are actually the only ones that did worse; the lowest brackets did best against the inflation.
I think the real problem is the cost disease, which is why I agree on the abundance agenda.
I don't think this is true, not to a large degree. I want objective reality to exist, I do; but I don't think it does in the way that you think it does or that I want it to.
I never took you for an Ayn Rand fan, David M! I approve.
I'm a Buddhist. We believe in the simultaneous truth of both objective and subjective reality, just that they apply in different contexts.
Rand was a prisoner of her karma.
By contrast, I'm going to need a lot of zen to get through the rest of this life. Because right now, I don't see much besides simply tending to my own slice of tranquility and hoping the world doesn't collapse on me.
A is A is The US economy is doing really well.
Blaming voters is never a political strategy. But the fact is the voters are objectively wrong here. We can say it.
Isn't it ok to blame the 43.9% of German voters who voted for the NDSAP in the March 1933 general election? This is not meant to be an entirely facetious question.
You might as well blame the giraffe for having a long neck. Humans just aren't that wise, virtuous, altruistic, noble, insightful, moral etc.
"You might as well blame the giraffe for having a long neck."
I do.
You want to talk about some smug fuckers -- I'm sick of them looking down on me.
It's never the answer for winning elections, but fortunately we aren't political operatives for the most part and call it like it is: The American people are fucking morons.
People are fucking morons. I don't think we're all that special, at least not in that sense.
We aren't particularly special, I agree. And I don't want to just hand-wave away the suffering people have because of the cost crisis. On some level, I even agree with the populists that our establishment has become too ungainly and captured by special interests, incumbents, and stakeholders, all of them having ignored the cost crisis for a long time when they weren't actively exacerbating it. I'll have to dig up this book I read earlier this year for you, about how societies tend to fall because they get too complex to effectively manage themselves.
But this... this was not the way to do it. It's taking us in the wrong direction. Europe benefited in a sick way from having to rebuild after WWII, having cleared away a lot of old, rotting institutions, but that was at an enormous and inhumane cost. I'm not saying I necessarily expect another Holocaust or apocalyptic war, but the crisis ahead of us is just going to get REALLY bad because of this election. Harris might not have been an epically good president, and may have ended up making a bunch of strategic mistakes like Obama did, but it would have been our best shot at navigating the crisis.
Today's outlook looks more like when Hoover won and proceeded to do a bunch of things that made the Great Depression worse. There's just no question that this was the wrong choice.
It was the wrong choice, I agree with the thesis that orange man bad! Bold if true.
Today my sick hope is that he just desperately, desperately wanted to make the federal charges go away and otherwise doesn't give much of a shit about anything (I think this is not an insane possibility).
Not insane. But even 4 years of incompetent kakistocracy can do a lot of damage.
And I'm an avowed opponent of "heightening the contradictions". I don't ever want to throw my lot in with the idea that things should have to get apocalyptically bad (like they did under Hoover) before people are willing to try change.
But I'm also not going to BS myself and refuse to notice that this looks increasingly likely. Economic collapse from Trump running an essentially Chavist state, China invading Taiwan and Russia invading the Baltics while Trump does nothing... those are probably on the forecast even separate from the rest of domestic politics and whether or not Trump establishes an illiberalist managed democracy.
Probably even more terrifying is that the New Axis might have the smarts to wait to drop the hammer (of depriving us of economic inputs like chips etc) until they can either (A) wield it to ensure that Trump gets an autocracy or (B) do maximum damage to any Democratic successor, strangling any neo-Rooseveltian revival in its cradle.
Btw, is it me or are the trolls coming out of the woodwork today? Not you or any of the regulars, just noticing a lot of new names with some... stridently critical... viewpoints today.
Depends on the question. If you ask, "How do I get more votes than my opponent?", then I agree, blaming voters is harmful. But if you're asking "What is the true state of the world?", then David has it exactly right.
Humans are terrible at judging objective reality. In a way this makes sense, since knowing objective truths about the world has little to no bearing on evolutionary outcomes. But it certainly makes me sad.
It is the correct answer here, it's just not a solution.
You can certainly blame the voters. Like many others here, I so fundamentally overestimated the populace and am this morning really seeing with fresh eyes how stupid the average person is.
“We hate inflation so much we’re gonna vote for the guy who promises to make it worse” is objective stupidity.
Nah, the "Folk Theory Of Democracy" is clearly nonsense, voters aren't great, that's why you need party gate keepers to keep someone like Trump from winning the nomination in the first place.
I think that if elections are decided by voters getting fundamental facts and their solutions wrong, it is important to acknowledge that. That isn't to say there aren't other reasons for this voter sentiment or that nothing is wrong with how Dems campaigned but I really do think that addressing the root causes of public perception being that off is important.
True, I’m sticking with “where there is hate let me sow love” as long as possible but I will probably end up also saying “the voters got what they deserve”
Unless it's the truth.
During a general election campaign, you've got to appeal to voters as they are, or you'll lose.
No. Fuck those deplorable garbage people.
Guess we'll keep losing elections then.
“ voters are incompetent”
You’ve just figured this out?!? Of course they are - and they always have been. But you need to win with the electorate you have not the electorate you want. And you can’t shit all over politicians who are trying to win with the electorate we have.
I always knew it too; it’s just that this has proven how far gone they are.
I didn’t know it. I genuinely thought Kamala was going to win, that there was enough decency and sanity in the electorate to kick Agent Orange to the curb.
More fool me.
I wish you were in LA, David M; you could come to our meetup and commiserate in person.
I really thought she was going to win, maybe easily. I’m not gobsmacked like 2016, but these margins are almost as shocking as that outcome.
My money spent at Nate Silver’s was a good investment because it helped me come to terms with the fact that she really could lose, something I didn’t believe in 2016 or 2020.
The campaign itself was fine, actually better than fine considering the circumstances. Jen Dillon and David Plouffe are good at their jobs.
But the candidate was not great. She struggled to give clear answers to predictable, straightforward questions. Given that she was going to be stereotyped as weak (female) and leftist (black Californian), it just wasn’t good enough.
People all over the world are kicking politicians to the curb over inflation and immigration. Even though prices have stabilized, they’re still high.
Candidate wasn’t good enough to overcome the fundamentals seems like a good starting take to me. UGHHHHHHHH.
I’ll go a step further than David and say that a Trump win proves candidate quality at the presidential level doesn’t matter at all. Everything you said about Harris applies doubly to Trump. And she had better favorability.
I agree it doesn't matter very much if the structural picture strongly favors one party or the other. Although I think that's the way it's always been. Close elections are when candidate quality really matters, like 2016, or 2000, or 1976,.
I agree the campaign was good. I think it’s as simple as saying that the inflation and border issues were maybe impossible for Harris (or anyone) to overcome. The voters drew the wrong conclusions about those issues, but I understand why they did so.
“The voters drew the wrong conclusions about those issues”
You have it backwards: The Democrats were ok with lots of illegal immigrants and wanted to spend ever more money on things like subsidizing house buying and having taxpayers who never had the opportunity to attend college pay off the student loans of those who did.
You play “pay off student loans” and I raise you “abolish income taxes via deficit spending”. You cannot seriously try and make the case that voters were being rational about government spending here.
Who abolished income taxes?
vastly more people pay income taxes than have student loans.
“Penis”
I don't agree with the premise. And to be clear, I am way in the 'hate the orange guy' camp - my argument here is about understanding the Biden administration.
First, as best as I can tell, inflation happened and eventually Biden got it under control, and a surge in amnesty request-based border crossing happened and eventually Biden got it under control. (For the border crossing math, the EK podcast with the head of DHS was eye opening, but I think it might be paywalled now?)
And in both of those things, I think a big problem was that Biden couldn't really *talk his way out of the slowness*.
Biden's problem as a president is that when he opens his mouth to advocate for his own policies, what everyone hears is that he's really really old...like, maybe shouldn't still be president levels of old.
Maybe there's a counter-factual world where Biden dumps spending early to fight inflation and gets it under control a year earlier (I kind of think this wasn't possible because we'd put the money in the economy before we realized what was going to happen) and clamps down on the border sooner, so that it doesn't look like it was "eventual begrudging movement only when he's getting killed on the issue in an election year". (I'm not saying that was why the Biden administration did it, but I am saying that if you're already primed to think that Biden doesn't give a crap about border security, that's what it looks like.)
Maybe in that world the things that piss people off are enough better that it's like Reagan in 84 - we've had a year of sunshine and forgotten what a storm the first year or two was. But I think things objectively settled close enough to the election that it was more like Obama in 2012 - Biden would have had to go out and move mountains in terms of persuasion to make the case that this is "things getting better" and the current administration and its policies need more time.
Biden didn't do that persuasion and I don't think he can at this point in his life. In that context, any replacement level Republican was going to win, and the fact that this was close was mostly due to Trump being uniquely bad at campaigning. Put a middle of the road Republican governor with some business chops out there and you'd have a total landslide.
Persuasion and communication are, in fact, important parts of the job. The president needs to be a good talker. Bill Clinton could’ve handled this without any problems.
I think the correct take is that the media are incompetent. It isn't the job of voters to be competent on issues - they generally have more important things to think about. But, even the best of the MSM (let's call it the NY Times) dropped the ball on a number of issues. I get it - it's a business and they've got to get clicks to prosper, but the average media consumer sees a clickbait headline and that's what they take as reality - even if the clicked story explains the issue 8 paragraphs in. Most readers just won't get that far.
To me that's just MSM outlets adapting to the modern attention economy rather than outright incompetence- if you see their job as informing, yes, it's incompetent, but then you can't do much informing if you're not actually having algorithms serve you to potential readers which means inflaming them.
"Biden’s presidency was the most successful in my lifetime."
This is a "post-objectivity post." Biden's presidency was the most unpopular of your lifetime. Maybe you should reconsider you successful you think it was.
There's no contradiction here. The post you're replying to is about how the average person is dumb and doesn't understand politics. Makes perfect sense they'd dislike a highly effective president.
And I agree with the OP, he was the most successful in my lifetime as well. Before Biden I sincerely believed it would be a cold day in hell before America made any serious effort to reindustrialize.
"Biden's presidency was the most successful in my lifetime" is something my daughter can say, but that's because she is 3 years old
I don't know that I would call Biden the most successful president of my lifetime, but it's absolutely possible for a president to be both successful and unpopular. Decisions which are good from a governance POV are not always popular!
How is there a contradiction between “Biden was a great president” and “Harris lost because voters live in a world where they are totally unaware of what Biden accomplished”? They’re the same statement.
You really drew the “asshole” straw this morning, eh?
If you vote to deport low income workers and institute tariffs, thus increasing both labor costs and raw material costs, you are not going to see a solution to your perceived problem of high housing costs and high food costs. And your vote is dumb. I'm not running for office, so I can say it's dumb because it is.
Bro thinks assuming voters are correct about reality and policy is "objectivity" lmao
Kevin's comment is like saying the valedictorian is the dumbest person in the class because they have no friends.
Yes, voters are incompetent, but theirs is more forgivable than that of your average MSM pundit, politicians and NGO activist.
“Biden’s presidency was the most successful in my lifetime…The only reasonable remaining conclusion is that the voters are incompetent”
The alternative explanation is blindingly obvious, and you are blind to it.
“Siri, what other countries avoided a recession from 2021-2024?”
What’s so great about that line is that he’s totally right, but he just seems like a loser even wondering about the children.
Perhaps you missed it, too?
There was a paper a while ago that showed in Governor races voters are "quasi-rational," ie they vote on economic conditions whether or not the actual Governor had anything to do with them. Part of that is because in bad economic times governors have painful policy choices, cutting spending and/or raising taxes. That doesn't seem to happen at the federal level, but raising interest rates by the Fed is in many ways equivalent.
And before any gets too down on voters, a separate study indicated that companies do the same, such as giving Oil CEO's big raises when oil prices spike even if though the CEO had nothing to do with it.
I see this more as post-COVID PTSD. There’s a need to lash out and Trump feels like a good vehicle for that.
I dispute the "most successful." That has to be Clinton, freer trade and fiscal surpluses.
What Obama might have accomplished if Ben Bernanke's Fed had done its job of engineering income-maximizing inflation we'll never know.
Excessive over-target Inflation and not as soft as it should have been landing was the Fed's fault, not Biden's. Yes, the public unfairly attributes macroeconomic performance to Administration, but that's not new and can be addressed.
The border chaos and opportunity for Abbot and DeSantis to demagogue should never have been allowed to happen.
A child allowance woud have been a better use for excessive deficits than the excess cost of IRA. Probably politically, too
Saying “post-objectivity” makes it sound like there was an objectivity time in the past.
Ehh, it’s more like I’m just saying that voters used to be more responsive to the big macroeconomic indicators.
And I suspect the core problem is that those indicators are uniquely not well suited to quantifying the cost disease crisis.
"I can't afford to-" "Source?!"
Read this earlier today and it reminded me of this type of comment. I've mentioned it a couple of time now but if democrats want to win they need to be empathetic with people when they tell you their struggles, not dismiss it because some aggregate data disagrees with it.
The only "objective" reality here is that this type of attitude is wildly out of touch with the electorate.
Politicians need to be empathetic. Rando voters don’t obviously need to be.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/22/joe-biden/biden-says-vaccinated-people-cant-spread-covid-19-/
It was believed to be true at the time. Why does Biden get a knock here when Trump repeats stuff he knows to be untrue continuously?
They are training our politicians and our media *badly*.
So my prediction was way off. Really disappointed by these results. Hoping my worries about how Trump will act in a second term are wrong but we’ll see.
I do feel very sad for your generation. I'm going to be dead in a few years, but you and your generation will have to live with the results of this catastrophe for many decades.
>I do feel very sad for your generation.<
They're not the worst off. They've got time to see things improve. A 21 year old today could be living in vastly improved country by their mid 30s (and hell, Trump should be gone by their mid 20s!). And the really old folks at least have been able to enjoy and benefit from living in a normal country all their lives. It's the middle of lifers like yours truly who are kinda screwed. These four year waits are growing...uh...finite. And yet we've got too much life to live for awful governance not to cast a terrible shadow. In fifteen years I'm going to be...pretty old!
45 to 65 year olds are the ones who just put Trump in office. They'll be reaping what they just sowed.
Yep. Being a millennial sucks.
Don't be so pessimistic. You've got time to see WWII and then we'll all have this catastrophe the same amount
"You've got time to see WWII [WWIII?] and then we'll all have this catastrophe the same amount"
Good point! Saying that Milan's generation has "many decades" may be too optimistic!
I can always count on the SB community to cheer me up!
Can't see how we're going to have WWIII considering that we're going to be allies of Russia and China, so which world power are we going to fight with?
Honestly, after I mourn for my children, the next group in my thoughts are the Ukranians. They will suffer horribly for Americans who obsessed about inflation in the world's strongest economy. In abandoning Ukraine we will have lost our international power, lost our credibility, and lost our honor.
Europe is really getting a pass in this blame game. I'm not happy that we reneged on security guarantees, but the Eurozone has to step up at some point if they want to be considered equal participants in leading the world.
Don’t forget Taiwan, which may even be more of a concern
We're going help them beat Mongolia's ass - look at a map, they can't even get away, they're right between Russia and China!
To state the obvious: the key is to stave off disaster for the next two years. Looks like Democrats won't take the House, but it looks like the GOP won't increase its majority by much. And that can hopefully set up a strong 2026. And then we go from there...
Trump is likely to be a bit reckless, because he doesn't have reelection to worry about. Which is a scary thought. But also an political opportunity.
I'm curious to see how Trump's lame duck status plays out. If he's an unpopular lame duck does that make the republican party more likely to push back on him?
I think the 2028 Republican primary is going to melt his brain. He is not going to handle well the prospect of no longer being the center of attention, and I can see him sabotaging any candidate he sees as threatening that.
Ha, yeah. One argument I made (probably in vain) to a republican friend to not vote for Trump is something along these lines. Some grifter attorney is going to convince him he can run for a 3rd term and he's going to just go with it. He'll just keep insisting he totally can and torpedo whoever the Republicans try to run in 2028.
See, I was actually coming here to specifically apologize to you because, while I'd seen a Trump EC vote win as plausible, I derided your past take that Trump was on track to win the popular vote. 😞
Same. So many people in these comments have really been dismisisve or Project 2025, Trump's plans to deploy the military against civilians, and his disregard for the rule of law but all of those could be massively harmful even if he doesn't fully succeed. The GOP won because they also got the public to dismiss them, so they're going to have to fight for every inch on them. Still, it's going to be scary and very hard to fight back on.
Things are well set up for your run for Congress in four years, so there's that.
Milan For America!
The truth hurts I know, but it is what it is.
I should add that nobody thinks voters are stupid more than Donald Trump, and he treats them as such and it works.
He also said “I love the uneducated”, and we laughed at him, I laughed at him (or we were appalled instead), but this is something I’ve really come around on. With nearly 2/3 of Americans lacking a college degree, if someone doesn’t at least *like* the uneducated, they should probably find some other line of work.
I think folks need to confront the reality that the Democratic coalition, once again, prioritised some of its interest groups at the expense of both its chances of victory and the interests of the country as a whole. Voters' #1 concern in the election was cost of living. A month ago Biden and Harris came out in support of a union threatening strikes despite its workers making six figure salaries while enforcing rules that make US ports unproductive relative to their foreign peers. That's just one glaring example. Matt listed a whole bunch of similar ones 2 years ago.
This is not new. The biggest blue states having been consistently declining in their share of the US population for decades because it's so much more expensive to live in them. The Democratic coalition has just pretended this is not an indictment of its governance.
The fact some folks are blaming and even *insulting* voters while the Democratic coalition supports some of these unjustifiable policies I think goes a long way to explain why the Democratic party is barely winning 50% of the time against the total mess that is the GOP.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/10/01/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-the-negotiations-between-usmx-and-the-international-longshoremens-association/
https://www.slowboring.com/p/for-the-next-two-years-biden-needs
“ The Democratic coalition has just pretended this is not an indictment of its governance.”
The economy being so strong that tons of people want to move there and the people that live there can afford to bid up the price of housing isn’t an indictment of governance. Mississippi has very cheap housing - does that make it a model of good governance?
CA and NY are wonderful places but that's been the case since before they became so dominated by Democratic Party governance. NY's been the US' commercial capital since before the Democratic Party was founded, and Democrats didn't invent Silicon Valley or Wall Street or Broadway or Hollywood or the ports of NY and NJ.
For decades now, while many people have wanted to live there, on net they have been losing population share. That is not a mark of governance success.
One of the key factors in SVs success is that noncompetes are illegal in CA. That’s very much not a typical conservative policy choice.
"For more than 150 years, California has declared non-compete agreements unenforceable. In 1941, California codified its prohibition on non-competes in California Business and Professions Code"
Don't think the modern Democratic Party can claim much credit for this policy.
https://www.hansonbridgett.com/publication/240507-0460-what-ftcs-ban-non-compete-agreements-will-mean-california
Again is it a D or R issue?
My understanding is that that's mostly a myth/just-so story.
https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/case-noncompetes
noncompete illegallity should be on the ballot in every state in the Union.
Freedom.
But people are literally leaving those places. On a relative basis they are losing population to the sunbelt and growing areas. Some of the biggest, bluest cities are even losing population on an absolute basis. This decline is far more severe if we look at domestic migrants only. The fact that people from El Salvador still find Los Angeles attractive is nice, but not exactly a vote winner.
But anyways - Mississippi is losing population, too, but among red states they are more of the exception than the rule, and their population decline is concentrated in the blue areas of Mississippi anyway.
tl;dr if you're losing domestic population that's an indictment of your government. Looking at housing prices is like looking at a stock's price, if MS plunges 20% tomorrow that's because they are doing something wrong, right now. That it's still a huge market cap stock would be thanks to Bill Gates, not whomever is now running the show.
How much of that is just not messing up a good thing.
Trump’s margin gains in places like NJ and IL were the surprise of the night for me.
I live in Jersey, spending time both in sapphire blue NYC suburbs of north NJ and a red corner of the southern jersey shore (where the local congressman Van Drew switched from Democrat to Republican in the first trump era). It's not surprising for me.
In the north there is discontent (only whispered) with the very visible failures of governance that has prioritized progressive aesthetics over governing (the mess that is the montclair school district, the decay and disorder on display for everyone commuting into Manhattan)
And down at the shore it's the same sort of non-urban rightward polarization you see for the non-urban areas another thousand miles inland.
I think you’re onto something. Crime / quality of life concerns could have penalized Dems in blue cities.
Were it not for the sheer unacceptable nature of Trump I myself would be voting for Republicans over the current progressive Democrats.
Manhattan is 82% for Kamala, it is the least Trumpy of NYC boroughs. For some reason people outside of Manhattan think it is more of a hellhole than people actually living here. Perhaps it is just educational polarization.
The current state of blue city urban governance does not inspire confidence in the Democratic vision.
Also his over performance in red states too. I didn’t think he’d win Texas or Florida by double digit margins. Really the swing states were relative bright spots.
Swing states are where the campaigns were the most active and where people were most reminded of what Trump really is as a result.
It's also that the largest states, where Trump did best, have a ton of international immigrants and 2nd generation voters. I hope at least one of the post-election voting shift analysis can track immigrants as their own segment, because that appears to be the trend I see as I squint at the map.
Democrats keep making a mistake in conflating opposition to anti-Hispanic rhetoric with support for illegal immigration among legal/second-generation immigrants.
Another problem with the electoral college!
#1 This might show Harris-Walz campaign ads were effective
#2 It might also show that purple states, where each party is competitive, actually produce better governance with less complaints than 1-party states. I think by default, we should probably believe that's true, and not try to carve out an exception for single-party governance when it's our party.
I'm not too surprised about NJ. There's a huge amount of discontent in the tri-state area with how state-level Democrats are running the cities in terms of public safety etc.
NYC is wild to me. I live in a purple city.
Every election seems to have some sort of surprise result that makes perfect sense in context. To me, the collapse of support for Democrats in large cities is that surprise.
I wasn't expecting this election to be the one that voters caught up to ineffectual urban Democratic party governance, but after the rent hikes, migrant crisis, homeless encampments, and unchecked public disorder of the last few years, it's not surprising at all.
(New Jersey has margins closer than Texas now!)
Again it comes down to “the groups.” The median voter in SF or LA or NYC wants the situation dealt with. But there is a small but loud minority of “advocates” that politicians seem to think speak for the people when they really don’t.
NJ dropping from +16 to only +5 is truly wild.
I will say, though, that Miami-Dade moved 19 points right, too. And that's not a place where you can blame blue regional governance for all your troubles. Eyeballing the NYTs vote shift map, I can pick out a few other very blue cities that either didn't shift or just shifted in-line with the suburban and rural counties nearby. DC, Philly, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh
NYC has been run terrible by NY Dems and it's spilling over to the surrounding areas. NY Dems need a major "come to Jesus" moment and to get very real on public safety and on stuff like the meritocratic elite public schools.
"meritocratic elite public schools". What is that about? It feels like something that might drive a relatively small share of the electorate, but that's just a guess.
But crime, yes. And taxes and real estate prices and asylum seekers and homeless.
NY Dems in recent years moved to scrap the meritocratic test-based admissions program for the most elite NY public schools. This caused massive blowback among Asian-American New Yorkers (the majority, I believe, of enrollment) because they felt that they were being targeted by NYC government (and they were).
It certainly affects a more narrow slice of the electorate, but it's important in that it's an example of NY Dems shooting themselves in the foot with a group that is supposed to be a core member of the Dem coalition.
For the sake of argument, do you think it gained votes with Hispanic or Black voters? I'd guess the answer it clearly no, but it's worth thinking about the counterfactual.
Literally everywhere except NoVa and NYC the elite schools thing strikes me as pundit fallacy nonsense, but Chinese NYers (correctly) realized their coalition was getting thrown under the bus on this
Yup, it's very much so a specific NYC thing.
Perhaps voters are just pleased with Florida’s Red governance
Standing in the grocery checkout line in central coast California on Saturday, I observed the Boomer at the front of the line speaking with the bagger, a roughly 30 year old man. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but I heard his reply "...I don't know ma'am, things were pretty good then, no wars, things were cheap." This is the swing voter's level of analysis. People like the Trump Show and don't find it disqualifying if they believe it comes with the 2019 economy. Let's see how much room is left on the national credit card, I guess.
No wars? Weren't we still in Afghanistan?
Was it David Frum who (paraphrasing) said that in 2003, the US military went to war, and Americans went to the mall?
Absent transient bursts of shame (deserved/earned or not, not my point) like the final withdraw, the American mind hasn't been "in" Afghanistan since we killed OBL, and probably a lot before.
Trump has, unfortunately, benefited from the timing of crises. Ukraine and Israel make voters uneasy, and there's a sense that "things like this weren't happening with Trump", even though the reality is that it's a simple accident of timing over which no US President has any control.
By the same token, covid and George Floyd were probably big reasons that Trump lost in 2020.
I don't think this is remotely true. Most world leaders did not have their popularity hurt by COVID, at least not in its first year. If it hurt Trump, it was because of some of the insane things he did in response, which are on him. As for Floyd, that probably helped Trump because the ensuing protests that turned violent were attributed to the Democrats. Biden was doing better in the polls before Floyd than after. (It also, in my opinion, prompted Biden to pick Harris as his VP instead of Klobuchar, although that's obviously me reading tea leaves, not something that's in the public record.)
I think people often forget that Trump was deeply unpopular *before* COVID. COVID certainly didn't help him, but end-of-2019 Trump also likely would have been in serious trouble for a reelection bid.
I don't think the timing of Ukraine is accidental. That is to say, when Trump was in office, Putin was in an advantageous position and was moving the ball a lot on his geopolitical goals, so did not need to take risks or upset the apple cart. When Biden got into office, it put the US back into a straightforwardly adversarial position with Russia, which gave Putin a reason to work more aggressively toward those goals.
The Republicans have made two arguments about Ukraine: the first is that Putin didn't attack when Trump was in office because he feared Trump, which is baloney. But their second argument is true, which is that Trump could end the tension between the US and Russia by essentially switching sides in the war, and that's exactly what will happen.
Yes, I should clarify: what I mean to say is that the invasion of Ukraine would have happened regardless of whether Trump or Biden is in power.
This is a good example of why I think prioritizing (or even wanting) to expand easy access to voting is a mistake. It's not the worse thing in the world if there are minor barriers like "you must show an ID". The "but more democracy better" arguments always feel semi-religious to me.
It's not more or less, it's how democracy is implemented that is important. I don't want ballot initiatives for every possible question or the minimum age lowered to 14, although those would be "more democratic". Making it super-duper easy to vote just makes it so that the least informed among us have a heavier thumb on the scale.
What, "slur for a quarter of Americans"?
There were two possible outcomes from this election:
either the liberal ideas embodied in the Declaration and the Gettysburg Address would face a long, grinding struggle with the forces of autocracy, hierarchy, and domination,
or the liberal ideas embodied in the Declaration and the Gettysburg Address would face a long, grinding struggle with the forces of autocracy, hierarchy, and domination.
It would have been nice if my side had wound up with a few more institutional levers in its hands. But the struggle was not going to be won by this election, and it never will be won. There are dark tendencies in human nature that will remain with us always. The balance shifts, but there will be no final victory.
No matter who won yesterday, we were going to be faced with more slow boring. So, after the mourning, we get back to it.
The liberal ideals lost. The Dark Side won - like, Yoda says in TESB that the Dark Side is “fear, anger, aggression,” and that’s what Agent Orange campaigned on. Enough Americans either actively like it or don’t give a fuck because inflation and immigrants eating pets.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m in a very dark place today. Like, Luke Skywalker hanging from the underside of Cloud City having just lost his hand kind of dark.
"The liberal ideals lost.... Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m in a very dark place today."
You're not wrong, except to think that any loss, or any win, is permanent. The struggle will always be there. We lost this round; there will be other rounds.
Oh, Jesus, please don't start Star Wars analogies, I can't deal with another round of brave #Resistance.
But I love Star Wars! The original trilogy; the sequel trilogy sucks.
'Luke Skywalker hanging from the underside of Cloud City having just lost his hand" is an Original Trilogy reference, so it would be #Rebellion!
> either the liberal ideas embodied in the Declaration and the Gettysburg Address would face a long, grinding struggle with the forces of autocracy, hierarchy, and domination,
I agree but it is possible to lose the struggle at least here in our time for the foreseeable future. It may never be fully won or lost in the arc of human history but there's a chance nobody alive today will see forward progress on these ideals
If anything the performance of the Harris campaign exceeded expectations. She was simply a catastrophically poor candidate who never should have been the candidate to begin with. She never should have been VP. Biden never should have/have been allowed to seek a second term. Harris should never have been allowed to seize the nomination uncontested. The staggering inability of the party to choose viable leaders is deeply rooted and thorough. This is even more embarrassing than the Hillary coronation.
Which Democrat could have won this election?
I forget the whole obvious list of "not Biden, Harris or Newsom" Democrats floating back in June or July. Most of them win. The current admin is distinctly politically toxic. If I had my pick Jared Polis would be President elect right now. A purple state governor who didn't beclown himself in 2020? GGs
Yep. Pick a Democrat governor outside of a handful like Newsom, and we'd be looking at a Democrat trifecta this morning.
Delusional.
OK, Republicans probably would have won the senate regardless.
Very much so doubt this, seeing as post-COVID inflation was the main issue. Voters wanted the 2016-2020 economy back.
No chance. Dems couldn't outrun inflation and the border
Not buying the trifecta part. Trump is also distinctly unpopular. Ds needed to be winning split tickets.
You have to let them fight it out if you want to find out who plays the game well. Bill Clinton beat a sizable field of candidates, wasn’t favored to win, but was just better at politics than everyone else. Gotta play the game if you want to find out who the best players are.
By the time Biden finally stepped down, there's wasn't really much choice but to hand the nomination to Harris. There was no time to hold any sort of contested primary before the convention, and none of the potential contenders had any appetite for dividing the party in July before the election.
I think the counter-factual of what would have happened had Biden announced back in 2022 that he wasn't running for a second term, allowing a full, proper Democratic primary to take place in 2024, would have been interesting. My guess is that Trump would have still won, but perhaps closer.
Competitive primaries are important
I feel like the counterfactual is really untested here. If we had had one, would someone other than Harris (or Biden) have won? Would that person then have won in the general?
Furthermore, would whoever won the primary (which is voted on by the most hardcore Democratic voters) have done so by breaking more with Biden and with progressive orthodoxy, or by hewing to it?
The competitive 2020 primary was a top-3 reason Harris lost!
By the same token, I think the 1992 and 2008 primaries elevated strong candidates who would not have been elevated by the powers that be within the party.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is crime and disorder. Or, as I like to call it, the Chesa Boudin debacle. This sure seems like an instance where the democratic coalition catered to a tiny number of extremists and by getting their 500k votes lost several million normie votes.
California voted 70/30 for increased sentencing for drug crimes and theft (prop 36). This is a huge part of it.
Lot of thoughts but I'll boil them down.
Harris' goose was cooked long before July 2024.
Dems made three mistakes:
1. Inflation. I don't know how many points the ARPA added to inflation, but if the answer is "not many, inflation would have happened anyways," that's actually worse. That means there was zero reason to pursue inflationary policies whatsoever. Voters said they didn't like it. You can't ignore what they want.
2. Immigration. I don't know how voters feel about legal immigration going forward, but voters have said over and over again that they hate surges of migrants showing up at the border. And Greg Abbott made it everybody's problem by shipping them around the country. Again, gotta listen to the voters.
3. Lying about Biden's age and fitness for the job. Voters thought Biden was too old IN 2020! They just voted for him anyways. Then in 2024, Dems finally admit it was a problem and everybody is expected to not notice that? Come on.
The common thread here is the Democrats spent four years saying "who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes" to voters. By July 2024 it was baked in to the cake. What's Kamala supposed to say? "Yes I was part of the administration that presided over these problems, but Trump will be worse?" Nobody buys that. The alternative is just pretending those problems don't exist, which is what she did. In fairness to her, it's not her fault. There's literally nothing she could have done.
Also, I'm revising my take on abortion back to my initial 2022 take. Voters agree with Dems on the issue mostly, but it doesn't overwhelm all other concerns. And frankly, the idea that abortion is the only thing women care about is kind of insulting.
But Trump WILL be worse! Orders of magnitude worse! Christ!!!
JFC, I give up. It's like howling at the moon. The moon doesn't care.
A telling conversation occurred between an American and a North Vietnamese general after the war:
American: “You never beat us once.”
North Vietnamese: “True, but irrelevant.”
Hi, FrigidWind. Nice to see you back. Wish the circumstances were different.
We miss you on discord!
Not enough time and brainspace. Substack is absorbing enough.
Bummer.
He will be IF he follows through on the bullshit he's been saying. He very well may not.
Also, voters don't really pay attention to candidates' proposals. But they can evaluate the job of the existing administration.
Agree on 2 and ~ 3 but not 1.
Nothing Biden (or Trump) did or did not do affected inflation, although he could at least have _tried_ to get people to place the blame on the the Fed where it belonged.
Fiscal policy effects inflation too. I just don't know how much.
Either it was a big effect, in which case it's Biden's fault, or it was a small effect, in which case less of a big deal, but more stupid, because he threw gasoline on an already burning fire.