I think what “democracy” means for Democrats has come to mean upholding the power of an unelected bureaucracy that doesn’t really respond to political tides…the so-called “deep state.” In practice all Democratic politicians do in this system is vote to fund the bureaucracy then to trust the generals and the bureaucrats with implementation. And in a low trust environment that is a major and permanent disadvantage
I honestly do not mean this comment to be snotty, but watching this reminds me of why I did not subscribe to Politix.
You guys talk over each other way too much. The conversation is not sufficiently coherent or focussed. You would do better to pass a series of text messages back and forth, where people have a little time to organize and polish their rejoinder, and the messages have a hard character limit. This took a lot of time to watch and there really was not much information in it.
I had to unsubscribe from the Politix sub. I agree with you, but I can't spend 2025 listening to you and Brian have the same argument again and again in more and more exasperated tones of voice. Given the outcome, I would love to see you put out more audio content about policy stuff! Your stuff on The Weeds in Trump's first term was what first drew me in as a Matt Y fan. I feel like that's really critical to have over the next few years! And the few you've done under Slow Boring have been great, too.
Making my way through Matt and Brian’s discussion. It’s interesting.
Matt: Democrats need to be a little more moderate across the board. Knock off the woke cancel culture stuff. Stop with the righteousness on picayune policy positions. Be more normal. It’s okay to disagree on stuff. Not every issue is a moral crisis.
Brian: No we need to hold those positions but just be better at being dicks. We need to be more ruthless. We need to be more like Republicans but without the lying.
True. Which also helps explain why not only did he interrupt Matt, he'd interrupt him just to make a crappy point while Matt was trying to make a good, thoughtful one.
If Trump's presidency leads to even moderately inflationary policies (via income tax cuts, tariffs, low interest rates, etc.), he's going to be super unpopular, and it will cost Republicans in 2026 and 2028. That may even help reduce the odds of some worst-case scenarios; it's hard to become a despot without popular support, and it's hard to have popular support if you screw up the economy.
If he actually does everything he says he's going to do (mass deportations, global trade war, RFK HHS, etc), he'll very clearly be deeply unpopular. I'm curious the extent to which he actually follows through with the crank stuff this time.
My fellow Slow Borers, can we do a bit of brainstorming of "what can I do that will actually be productive, not performative, at reducing the damage Agent Orange will inflict on our country/the world?"
Of course, it depends on what he actually ends up doing, and there are so many sickening options it's hard to know where to start:
-firing civil servants and replacing them with clueless lackeys/sycophants
-cutting off any aid to Ukraine
-telling NATO to go f*ck itself
-getting away scot-free with all his past crimes and misdemeanors
-massive corruption/favor-peddling
-f*cking our economy over with tariffs, massive deportations of illegal immigrants who do important jobs like construction and fruit picking, and cutting taxes on the rich
-probably destroying Obamacare, out of spite if nothing else
-who the hell knows what happens to abortion rights in red states
-climate is officially f*cked, Trump hates clean energy because liberals like it and Trump hates everything liberal elites like
-prosecution/possibly imprisonment of political opponents/anyone he doesn't like for bullshit reasons
-doing away with elections and becoming a dictator (this one is very unlikely because he's shown he can win fair and square, so why bother?)
-general coarsening of our public discourse, greater acceptability of public lewdness and sexist/racist "jokes"
-what did I miss?
It's a lot.
There's not much any regular citizen can do. I still don't know if my Congressman is going to be the Republican Scott Baugh (currently leading by 3000 votes) or the Democrat Dave Min; if it's Min I can call him about issues, but what can he realistically do?
Couple things I can think of off the top of my head:
-donate more to charities that help people abroad. Helping people in need is always good! I may not stop Trump from doing crazy harmful sh*t, but I can provide a poor child in Africa with a dose of antibiotics, and that's not nothing.
-organize on the state/local level to fight for more clean energy and denser housing/YIMBYism. Ideally find an organization that is into effective action and not performative posturing.
-Anything else? What else? Please help me brainstorm this. (I wouldn't be averse to being part of an "underground railroad" for women from red states seeking abortions, but that's pretty extreme.)
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.
An interesting story for me has been the disintegration of family and personal ideals over the past 20 years.
It used to be admirable to get good grades, buy a home, marry, have children, live within your means, and so on. I feel like this is how I was raised (as a Midwestern millennial)
I remember distinctly during the GWB years how they started denigrating people with good educations. But GWB was still a family man and those family ideals held true.
Almost on a dime, the GOP with Trump pivoted from "family values" to "meet people where they are." Suddenly Trump is an ideal because many come from divorced families. Many feel that cheating or stealing is the only way to get ahead.
To me, this is more significant than any election. Should we stop aspiring to go to a good college and get married once? Even if we fall short of the ideal, at least it existed. I'm trying not to over-dramatize here but it really seems like a good portion of the population is content with "whatever happens, happens".
I haven't had the heart to look at specific results. But it has long struck me as odd that we agree that the most significant political event of the last ten years was COVID, and yet almost none of the discussion of the political environment concerns long-tail effects of loss of voter trust in the political establishment following shutdown/mask/mandates foibles and fiascos. Maybe there's no message that can address that. But if Harris had been down in the polls headed into mid-September, I think having a frank discussion about what she would have done differently would have been her best bet.
I just don't think it's that big of a deal for lots of voters. Voters were more broadly supportive of the shutdowns at the time in polling than people circling back on COVID often acknowledge, and most people haven't had to think about COVID in years. Most of the voters who were the most agitated about COVID restrictions were already conservatives, so it's not like you're losing gettable votes.
I would expect that it's potentially still a significant issue for parents in liberal states that refused to reopen schools in a timely fashion, but other than that, I think most people are just over it.
IDK. Id love to see some polling. How many voters that supported shutdowns at the time still feel that way after learning of the educational setbacks, or learning of the success that less restrictive approaches had in whatever country gets cherry picked to prove these sorts of things? Same deal with masks: There are plenty of studies making the rounds about the overstated effectiveness of various types of masks. I don't pretend to know whether they're valid, but how many voters read an abstract someone posted on Facebook and now think Democrats kind of fetishized masks?
Of course, pandemic response does not come up in surveys of top issues. But are we sure that COVID hasn't affected the degree to which previously persuadable voters can trust Democratic messaging? Harris and Biden had a great pitch to make on the economy, but clearly median voters didn't go for it. Maybe they aren't as credulous when 100% of economists say that tariffs are dumb as hell. And I still think that the growth of Bro/Rogan culture was a direct response to gyms getting shut down, and general resentment over the perception that fit people were being forced to make sacrifices for those who increased their vulnerability to COVID though poor lifestyle choices. I'm not endorsing that, but I dont think they were the only subgroup to go on a political journey like that during COVID.
What doesn’t get discussed is the majority of it happened during the Trump administration. Yet people want to say those who objected to masks and shutdowns want to protest it by reelecting the guy who presided over the whole thing?
I know that's the stock response. But as irrational as voters can be, it's rational for voters that prioritize candidates likely to impose the fewest rules during the next pandemic to vote for Trump. A less cautious Harris campaign could have devoted some messaging to explaining why she, too, would be less heavy handed than Dr. Fauchi might prefer.
I wonder where they are sourcing that fact? Aren't exit polls unreliable?
To my eyeballing of voter shift maps, it looks like shifts right were greatest in the areas with the most immigrants, and immigrants are mostly non-white. It will probably get written up as a "hispanic shift" but the reality might be that West Africans, Armenians and Filipinos, for example, moved just as much to Trump.
I worked late yesterday. One of those annoying and unplanned things where I left the office around 5:30PM, went home and took a shower, and upon emerging clean and relaxed had three missed calls a two texts from a colleague who had a client demanding significant updates to some pending proposal pricing, due back to them no later than 7AM today. The zoom meeting wrapped up between 9:30 and 10:00 last night.
This morning I arose more or less around my usual time, and after stretching and some pushups, I checked the important news and was pleased to see that Hurricane Rafael’s forecast track had turned very noticeably westward overnight. Too bad for my friends in Houston, but they know the deal, and I have a 8AM flight this Friday (heading to Maine’s Trump country!) that will benefit from more miles between it and Rafael.
Oh, and, huh: Another Trump presidency. That’s not ideal, but let’s all please not pretend that President Harris was going to be any great bargain.
In marked contrast with the average person here (hell, even compared to the 95th percentile person here), I am very much a fan of our federalism, state sovereignty, subsidiarity, regional quirks (it’s “soda” that we drink and “sneakers” that we wear on our feet, despite what your errant upbringing may have taught you), and the degree to which - because of our institutions - what happens in DC is largely irrelevant to my life. It’s largely irrelevant to your life, too, except to the extent you invite it in.
I didn’t want a President Harris. I didn’t (and don’t) want a President Trump, but here we are. Don’t fall into the grave sin of despair; live your life.
Yeah, I had to deal with INS back in the day for my wife. The experience did not leave me with the sense that the Federal Government should be given more to do.
It means that if your city is struck by a natural disaster, you would like FEMA to be more-or-less functional, not full of Trump's cronies as proposed in Project 2025. It's a counterexample to your assertion that what happens in DC is irrelevant to your life.
I don’t know what you think FEMA has to offer besides money:
“As of Monday morning, just 9 percent of FEMA’s personnel, or 1,217 people, were available to respond to the hurricane or other disasters…”
For context, for Hurricane Milton, the state of Florida arranged for 30,000 electric repair personnel. There were also 5,000 National Guard troops activated in advanced of Milton, and countless EMS and law enforcement personnel on call to respond. Could FEMA also chip in with some manpower? Sure, but I wouldn’t bet my life on their response.
Kind of a weird take using "soda" in the regional quirks example when all the data is that "soda" has been progressively conquering more and more of the country over the last few decades.
Sometimes! No, I was strictly thinking in terms of reasons why I return to rural Kentucky. There are other pop-ins, but I mostly go for holidays and funerals.
I just hope blue cities and states focus on what they can control. I hope they're not distracted by this and they manage to work on the local issues instead of being distracted by this.
I agree with Matt’s on the discussion with Beutler. You have to put yourself out there and get into the arena. Trump and Vance fought for this. They went into hostile places and made their case. They opened themselves up to any question by anyone. Harris and Walz played it safe. Now I’m not convinced if they would have been more open and done things like Rogan it would have been the difference. They were swimming upstream against some fundamentals. But the right candidate getting into the arena would make a difference. Most Americans don’t give a fuck about Beyoncé or Mark Ruffalo or insert Hollywood star. Maybe this helps some but they do want you to mix it up and show them who you are. Hell they’re even willing to accept some warts. We are all human. But they don’t like the appearance of fakeness. In 2020, Biden was a little old but still got in the arena and he’s not fake. Harris seems fake and scripted. This does not play well with working class people of any groups.
So I agree with Matt. A tough, relatable but still smart and articulate candidate matters. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. Harris is not that no matter how much MSNBC types say she is. Tim Walz is not that.
The Democratic electorate got it right in 2020. They were short changed of their opportunity this year and party elites got their way. Go back to the electorate in 2028. The Dems need their candidates to get ready for the fight now. Go on the bro podcasts and go on The View. Get comfortable disagreeing with people in person but still being chill. Get in the ring. Take positions. Lead. The current Biden and Harris strategy of curating yourself is over. Fight.
True and to be clear I don’t think they are a big negative I just don’t think they’re the positive that merits the campaign spending too much time with them. All the news coverage of Brat Kamala (seems so stupid now) because of some young celebrity text isn’t the same as talking to Rogan for 2 hours and revealing to people who you really are.
The Joe Biden gracefully stepped down narrative is now busted. I took heat in this space for saying so months ago. Democrats NEEDED a primary to make contact with voters. Joe’s old man arrogance screwed that up. We can glide to victory on vibes. Nope.
Back in 2016, before the election, I remeber being struck by something that a right-leaning friend said to me. He told me that he would have been a Bernie supporter had he not conceded the Democratic primary to Clinton earlier that year. It was a show of weakness he couldn't forgive. Instead, my friend fervently supported Trump. The ideological inconsistency was lost on him. He saw both Trump and Sanders as agents of desperately needed change.
Now, looking back, I think that the largest source of untapped energy in American politics is an economically left/socially ambivalent segment of the electorate who view the current economic system as unfair. As evidence, take a look at the paid sick leave ballot measures that succeeded in places like Nebraska and Missouri. Yes, the language of a dying economic right is still with us (Kamala is a "socialist", she'll raise your taxes, etc.), but the energy is clearly on the left of the economic spectrum.
>He told me that he would have been a Bernie supporter had he not conceded the Democratic primary to Clinton earlier that year.<
Wait, what? Sanders fought until he bitter end. He didn't endorse Hillary until after the DC primary in mid June, when she became the presumptive nominee.
This is true. Trump's initial popularity, and even his 1st term achievements, were in many ways due to moving left. Medicare and SS. And he did that big prison sentencing reform, for example. In the not so distant past, trade protectionism was a left idea.
I feel like a theme I have heard a few times here and in other places is something along the lines of "border crossings are down now, people who don't understand this are being mis-informed or not getting the information they need". Similarly for inflation over the summer, when there was a lot of focus on the latest monthly numbers and whether it was "under control".
To me this misses two points. The first is you're not going to get credit for solving a problem that (it is perceived) you created. The second is that damage has been done and even if more isn't accumulating, what's already happened isn't reversed.
In this video the improvement in illegal immigration numbers not being more favorable to KH is discussed as an information problem. The integral of the function is the measure of the effects, not the current value. I think when it comes to understanding public opinion, too much focus is on the current value.
To go further I'd say that a focus on the current value instead of the integral or sum total of the effects is a sign of someone who is not experiencing any of the effects. Someone who is "out of touch" one might say.
I think what “democracy” means for Democrats has come to mean upholding the power of an unelected bureaucracy that doesn’t really respond to political tides…the so-called “deep state.” In practice all Democratic politicians do in this system is vote to fund the bureaucracy then to trust the generals and the bureaucrats with implementation. And in a low trust environment that is a major and permanent disadvantage
I honestly do not mean this comment to be snotty, but watching this reminds me of why I did not subscribe to Politix.
You guys talk over each other way too much. The conversation is not sufficiently coherent or focussed. You would do better to pass a series of text messages back and forth, where people have a little time to organize and polish their rejoinder, and the messages have a hard character limit. This took a lot of time to watch and there really was not much information in it.
I had to unsubscribe from the Politix sub. I agree with you, but I can't spend 2025 listening to you and Brian have the same argument again and again in more and more exasperated tones of voice. Given the outcome, I would love to see you put out more audio content about policy stuff! Your stuff on The Weeds in Trump's first term was what first drew me in as a Matt Y fan. I feel like that's really critical to have over the next few years! And the few you've done under Slow Boring have been great, too.
Making my way through Matt and Brian’s discussion. It’s interesting.
Matt: Democrats need to be a little more moderate across the board. Knock off the woke cancel culture stuff. Stop with the righteousness on picayune policy positions. Be more normal. It’s okay to disagree on stuff. Not every issue is a moral crisis.
Brian: No we need to hold those positions but just be better at being dicks. We need to be more ruthless. We need to be more like Republicans but without the lying.
I score this for Matt, obviously.
It was so annoying how much that other guy kept interrupting Matt.
He was upset
True. Which also helps explain why not only did he interrupt Matt, he'd interrupt him just to make a crappy point while Matt was trying to make a good, thoughtful one.
If Trump's presidency leads to even moderately inflationary policies (via income tax cuts, tariffs, low interest rates, etc.), he's going to be super unpopular, and it will cost Republicans in 2026 and 2028. That may even help reduce the odds of some worst-case scenarios; it's hard to become a despot without popular support, and it's hard to have popular support if you screw up the economy.
If he actually does everything he says he's going to do (mass deportations, global trade war, RFK HHS, etc), he'll very clearly be deeply unpopular. I'm curious the extent to which he actually follows through with the crank stuff this time.
My fellow Slow Borers, can we do a bit of brainstorming of "what can I do that will actually be productive, not performative, at reducing the damage Agent Orange will inflict on our country/the world?"
Of course, it depends on what he actually ends up doing, and there are so many sickening options it's hard to know where to start:
-firing civil servants and replacing them with clueless lackeys/sycophants
-cutting off any aid to Ukraine
-telling NATO to go f*ck itself
-getting away scot-free with all his past crimes and misdemeanors
-massive corruption/favor-peddling
-f*cking our economy over with tariffs, massive deportations of illegal immigrants who do important jobs like construction and fruit picking, and cutting taxes on the rich
-probably destroying Obamacare, out of spite if nothing else
-who the hell knows what happens to abortion rights in red states
-climate is officially f*cked, Trump hates clean energy because liberals like it and Trump hates everything liberal elites like
-prosecution/possibly imprisonment of political opponents/anyone he doesn't like for bullshit reasons
-doing away with elections and becoming a dictator (this one is very unlikely because he's shown he can win fair and square, so why bother?)
-general coarsening of our public discourse, greater acceptability of public lewdness and sexist/racist "jokes"
-what did I miss?
It's a lot.
There's not much any regular citizen can do. I still don't know if my Congressman is going to be the Republican Scott Baugh (currently leading by 3000 votes) or the Democrat Dave Min; if it's Min I can call him about issues, but what can he realistically do?
Couple things I can think of off the top of my head:
-donate more to charities that help people abroad. Helping people in need is always good! I may not stop Trump from doing crazy harmful sh*t, but I can provide a poor child in Africa with a dose of antibiotics, and that's not nothing.
-organize on the state/local level to fight for more clean energy and denser housing/YIMBYism. Ideally find an organization that is into effective action and not performative posturing.
-Anything else? What else? Please help me brainstorm this. (I wouldn't be averse to being part of an "underground railroad" for women from red states seeking abortions, but that's pretty extreme.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi, FrigidWind. Nice to see you back. Wish the circumstances were different.
Not enough time and brainspace. Substack is absorbing enough.
An interesting story for me has been the disintegration of family and personal ideals over the past 20 years.
It used to be admirable to get good grades, buy a home, marry, have children, live within your means, and so on. I feel like this is how I was raised (as a Midwestern millennial)
I remember distinctly during the GWB years how they started denigrating people with good educations. But GWB was still a family man and those family ideals held true.
Almost on a dime, the GOP with Trump pivoted from "family values" to "meet people where they are." Suddenly Trump is an ideal because many come from divorced families. Many feel that cheating or stealing is the only way to get ahead.
To me, this is more significant than any election. Should we stop aspiring to go to a good college and get married once? Even if we fall short of the ideal, at least it existed. I'm trying not to over-dramatize here but it really seems like a good portion of the population is content with "whatever happens, happens".
I haven't had the heart to look at specific results. But it has long struck me as odd that we agree that the most significant political event of the last ten years was COVID, and yet almost none of the discussion of the political environment concerns long-tail effects of loss of voter trust in the political establishment following shutdown/mask/mandates foibles and fiascos. Maybe there's no message that can address that. But if Harris had been down in the polls headed into mid-September, I think having a frank discussion about what she would have done differently would have been her best bet.
I just don't think it's that big of a deal for lots of voters. Voters were more broadly supportive of the shutdowns at the time in polling than people circling back on COVID often acknowledge, and most people haven't had to think about COVID in years. Most of the voters who were the most agitated about COVID restrictions were already conservatives, so it's not like you're losing gettable votes.
I would expect that it's potentially still a significant issue for parents in liberal states that refused to reopen schools in a timely fashion, but other than that, I think most people are just over it.
IDK. Id love to see some polling. How many voters that supported shutdowns at the time still feel that way after learning of the educational setbacks, or learning of the success that less restrictive approaches had in whatever country gets cherry picked to prove these sorts of things? Same deal with masks: There are plenty of studies making the rounds about the overstated effectiveness of various types of masks. I don't pretend to know whether they're valid, but how many voters read an abstract someone posted on Facebook and now think Democrats kind of fetishized masks?
Of course, pandemic response does not come up in surveys of top issues. But are we sure that COVID hasn't affected the degree to which previously persuadable voters can trust Democratic messaging? Harris and Biden had a great pitch to make on the economy, but clearly median voters didn't go for it. Maybe they aren't as credulous when 100% of economists say that tariffs are dumb as hell. And I still think that the growth of Bro/Rogan culture was a direct response to gyms getting shut down, and general resentment over the perception that fit people were being forced to make sacrifices for those who increased their vulnerability to COVID though poor lifestyle choices. I'm not endorsing that, but I dont think they were the only subgroup to go on a political journey like that during COVID.
What doesn’t get discussed is the majority of it happened during the Trump administration. Yet people want to say those who objected to masks and shutdowns want to protest it by reelecting the guy who presided over the whole thing?
I know that's the stock response. But as irrational as voters can be, it's rational for voters that prioritize candidates likely to impose the fewest rules during the next pandemic to vote for Trump. A less cautious Harris campaign could have devoted some messaging to explaining why she, too, would be less heavy handed than Dr. Fauchi might prefer.
But people always say don’t worry about what he says go by what he did. He lead the Covid response. Why shouldn’t we judge him by what he did?
NBC reporting that Trump lost the white vote. Do we get to stop blaming white people yet?
I wonder where they are sourcing that fact? Aren't exit polls unreliable?
To my eyeballing of voter shift maps, it looks like shifts right were greatest in the areas with the most immigrants, and immigrants are mostly non-white. It will probably get written up as a "hispanic shift" but the reality might be that West Africans, Armenians and Filipinos, for example, moved just as much to Trump.
I worked late yesterday. One of those annoying and unplanned things where I left the office around 5:30PM, went home and took a shower, and upon emerging clean and relaxed had three missed calls a two texts from a colleague who had a client demanding significant updates to some pending proposal pricing, due back to them no later than 7AM today. The zoom meeting wrapped up between 9:30 and 10:00 last night.
This morning I arose more or less around my usual time, and after stretching and some pushups, I checked the important news and was pleased to see that Hurricane Rafael’s forecast track had turned very noticeably westward overnight. Too bad for my friends in Houston, but they know the deal, and I have a 8AM flight this Friday (heading to Maine’s Trump country!) that will benefit from more miles between it and Rafael.
Oh, and, huh: Another Trump presidency. That’s not ideal, but let’s all please not pretend that President Harris was going to be any great bargain.
In marked contrast with the average person here (hell, even compared to the 95th percentile person here), I am very much a fan of our federalism, state sovereignty, subsidiarity, regional quirks (it’s “soda” that we drink and “sneakers” that we wear on our feet, despite what your errant upbringing may have taught you), and the degree to which - because of our institutions - what happens in DC is largely irrelevant to my life. It’s largely irrelevant to your life, too, except to the extent you invite it in.
I didn’t want a President Harris. I didn’t (and don’t) want a President Trump, but here we are. Don’t fall into the grave sin of despair; live your life.
Nine out of ten people in my personal and professional lives are foreign-born.
Yeah, I had to deal with INS back in the day for my wife. The experience did not leave me with the sense that the Federal Government should be given more to do.
"what happens in DC is largely irrelevant to my life"
Next time a hurricane strikes Miami, better hope Trump hasn't had time to go Project 2025 on FEMA's ass.
I’m not sure what that means.
It means that if your city is struck by a natural disaster, you would like FEMA to be more-or-less functional, not full of Trump's cronies as proposed in Project 2025. It's a counterexample to your assertion that what happens in DC is irrelevant to your life.
I don’t know what you think FEMA has to offer besides money:
“As of Monday morning, just 9 percent of FEMA’s personnel, or 1,217 people, were available to respond to the hurricane or other disasters…”
For context, for Hurricane Milton, the state of Florida arranged for 30,000 electric repair personnel. There were also 5,000 National Guard troops activated in advanced of Milton, and countless EMS and law enforcement personnel on call to respond. Could FEMA also chip in with some manpower? Sure, but I wouldn’t bet my life on their response.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/climate/hurricane-milton-fema-staff-shortage.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Qk4.iTVB.HfdYSPpVFMYt&smid=url-share
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2024/10/07/power-crews-still-working-helene-complicates-florida-milton-response/75562110007/
Kind of a weird take using "soda" in the regional quirks example when all the data is that "soda" has been progressively conquering more and more of the country over the last few decades.
The quirks are the people calling it “pop” or, bless their hearts, “coke.”
Someone clearly hasn’t met a 50+ Bostonian who calls it “tonic”
I grew up calling everything coke, dropped it with the accent before I left. Go right back to calling it coke at holidays and funerals.
Do funeral parlors in your hometown serve beverages?
Sometimes! No, I was strictly thinking in terms of reasons why I return to rural Kentucky. There are other pop-ins, but I mostly go for holidays and funerals.
I just hope blue cities and states focus on what they can control. I hope they're not distracted by this and they manage to work on the local issues instead of being distracted by this.
I agree with Matt’s on the discussion with Beutler. You have to put yourself out there and get into the arena. Trump and Vance fought for this. They went into hostile places and made their case. They opened themselves up to any question by anyone. Harris and Walz played it safe. Now I’m not convinced if they would have been more open and done things like Rogan it would have been the difference. They were swimming upstream against some fundamentals. But the right candidate getting into the arena would make a difference. Most Americans don’t give a fuck about Beyoncé or Mark Ruffalo or insert Hollywood star. Maybe this helps some but they do want you to mix it up and show them who you are. Hell they’re even willing to accept some warts. We are all human. But they don’t like the appearance of fakeness. In 2020, Biden was a little old but still got in the arena and he’s not fake. Harris seems fake and scripted. This does not play well with working class people of any groups.
So I agree with Matt. A tough, relatable but still smart and articulate candidate matters. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. Harris is not that no matter how much MSNBC types say she is. Tim Walz is not that.
The Democratic electorate got it right in 2020. They were short changed of their opportunity this year and party elites got their way. Go back to the electorate in 2028. The Dems need their candidates to get ready for the fight now. Go on the bro podcasts and go on The View. Get comfortable disagreeing with people in person but still being chill. Get in the ring. Take positions. Lead. The current Biden and Harris strategy of curating yourself is over. Fight.
Part of the problem with celebrity supporters is that they will attract news coverage even if you try to avoid directly interacting with them.
True and to be clear I don’t think they are a big negative I just don’t think they’re the positive that merits the campaign spending too much time with them. All the news coverage of Brat Kamala (seems so stupid now) because of some young celebrity text isn’t the same as talking to Rogan for 2 hours and revealing to people who you really are.
The Joe Biden gracefully stepped down narrative is now busted. I took heat in this space for saying so months ago. Democrats NEEDED a primary to make contact with voters. Joe’s old man arrogance screwed that up. We can glide to victory on vibes. Nope.
Back in 2016, before the election, I remeber being struck by something that a right-leaning friend said to me. He told me that he would have been a Bernie supporter had he not conceded the Democratic primary to Clinton earlier that year. It was a show of weakness he couldn't forgive. Instead, my friend fervently supported Trump. The ideological inconsistency was lost on him. He saw both Trump and Sanders as agents of desperately needed change.
Now, looking back, I think that the largest source of untapped energy in American politics is an economically left/socially ambivalent segment of the electorate who view the current economic system as unfair. As evidence, take a look at the paid sick leave ballot measures that succeeded in places like Nebraska and Missouri. Yes, the language of a dying economic right is still with us (Kamala is a "socialist", she'll raise your taxes, etc.), but the energy is clearly on the left of the economic spectrum.
There’s tons of room for economic leftism out here if it doesn’t get tarred with toxic leftist culture.
>He told me that he would have been a Bernie supporter had he not conceded the Democratic primary to Clinton earlier that year.<
Wait, what? Sanders fought until he bitter end. He didn't endorse Hillary until after the DC primary in mid June, when she became the presumptive nominee.
It doesn't make any sense to me either, but that's how he put it.
This is true. Trump's initial popularity, and even his 1st term achievements, were in many ways due to moving left. Medicare and SS. And he did that big prison sentencing reform, for example. In the not so distant past, trade protectionism was a left idea.
I feel like a theme I have heard a few times here and in other places is something along the lines of "border crossings are down now, people who don't understand this are being mis-informed or not getting the information they need". Similarly for inflation over the summer, when there was a lot of focus on the latest monthly numbers and whether it was "under control".
To me this misses two points. The first is you're not going to get credit for solving a problem that (it is perceived) you created. The second is that damage has been done and even if more isn't accumulating, what's already happened isn't reversed.
In this video the improvement in illegal immigration numbers not being more favorable to KH is discussed as an information problem. The integral of the function is the measure of the effects, not the current value. I think when it comes to understanding public opinion, too much focus is on the current value.
To go further I'd say that a focus on the current value instead of the integral or sum total of the effects is a sign of someone who is not experiencing any of the effects. Someone who is "out of touch" one might say.