"We can’t tell ourselves that making the ideological moves necessary to win in Texas — where non-Hispanic whites are less than 50 percent of the citizen voting-age population — constitutes a morally unacceptable betrayal of vulnerable minorities."
Whoa whoa whoa, obviously I'm all for making the ideological moves, but this is in a paragraph about winning back the Senate. We're not talking about replacing Cornyn with a Democrat, right? Because I've gotta tell you, I'm just hoping we don't replace Cornyn with Ken Paxton.
Less than a year ago, Allred's campaign was trying to defeat Ted Cruz by bringing in Liz Cheney for speeches and running an ad about the (2021!) Texas Freeze with a voiceover by an actor doing a terrible Cruz impersonation in a risibly fake Texas accent. Democrats are not good at campaigning for US Senate seats in Texas, to put it mildly.
“There’s no emergency requiring the dispatch of National Guard personnel into cities where they’re not wanted”
There is too. You have just gotten acclimated to it. The situation in our cities is outrageous, and it has been for 50 years. People are getting killed, robbed and assaulted every day. Recent gains are hard to credit with democrats faking the numbers, but the crime rates have improved over the decades, even so they are still outrageous.
TL;DR: unless you're in one of the targeted groups (like Jews in Nazi Germany) or a political dissident, living under an authoritarian regime is not self-evidently awful. There's the danger of too many people basically shrugging and saying "well my neighborhood isn't a dystopian hellhole, so how bad can things be, really?" and habituating themselves to more and more government abuses of power.
Hey, I haven't seen dysphemistic treadmill on these threads for a while, where did he go? I hope he's ok. Maybe we need to introduce the concept of "authoritarian treadmill"? The government gradually moving away from small-d democratic norms at a pace the average citizen will accept or just not notice?
I largely agree with this just wanted to make one point. Wasn’t the map in 2018 uniquely bad? The democrats were defending 26 seats while the Rs were only defending 9. They won 24 but even if they won 27 the Rs would have kept the senate. I think just the sheer number of seats they had up then made 2018 unique. Now there is no excuse in 2026 where the Rs are defending 22 and the Ds are only defending 13 but 2018 was different
Which seats are up is what matters most. MY is pleading with the party establishment to actually contest enough states to win a majority (instead of just over-perform compared to expectations), and to do that means fielding and supporting significantly moderate candidates in states Trump won 3 times.
As a Korean vet, I had many discussions with shipmates. We were young and naive, but often quite passionate about our positions. One thing I remember is that I was confident that our differing positions would never lead to any of us shooting at one another. I think and hope that is still true of military veterans. We can be passionate in our beliefs but must not forget the oaths we took to uphold the constitution and the respect we had for all those with whom we served. There are approximately 9 million vets in the US who are older than 65. I would like to see these vets organized in peaceful demonstrations that flood the areas where the president is sending troops and masked armed agents with no ID. The vets would represent all political persuasions and make clear that we have a military to protect and keep all of us safe. Our active duty troops should not be ordered to confront or shoot demonstrators protecting our democracy.
I maintain that there are many reasons for optimism.
1. US of A has very good fundamentals. No major hostile armies on the borders, extremely fertile soil, plenty of water and other natural resources. So it is likely to remain a materially rich land.
2. Central government seeing half the population as enemies is not a great sign, but look at China. It killed like 100 million of its own people 50 years ago, focusing on educated city dwellers, and look at it now. Just one or two generations later it’s a pretty survivable place to live. Arguably better than just survivable!
3. Compounding growth means that over even medium timespans, societies able to be smart and innovative tend to outcompete hidebound traditionalist ones. So being educated and creative is still good overall. Even if you live in a crap country, your kid might be able to move to a less crap place and win a Nobel in chemistry.
4. In the course of history, the US had often gotten extremely lucky breaks. Past performance is no guarantee etc, as it turns out. But hope is always there.
5. I honestly think that the worst case is bounded by Pinochet’s Chile, not by Khmer Rouge.
It's hard to take an outside observer anthropologist perspective when you and your kids are living in the society where the most probable outcome is a Sino-Russia style kleptocratic surveillance state and the tail risk includes Pinochet’s Chile.
Sure, maybe we can just concede that the US experiment in government "Of the people, by the people, for the people" has failed in our time FWIW and choose to focus only on the tangible stuff but the "compounding growth" assumption gets iffy if you deviate too far from the system of rule of law. So I would not take it for granted.
In case it wasn’t completely clear, my anthropological optimism is a bit tongue in cheek! I do live in this country.
More to the specifics of your comment - I don’t think Chile is a worse scenario relative to China/Russia.
Pinochet’s regime murdered about 3000 people in a country of 10M. Prorated to the US pop, it’s about 100K. That’s a rounding error by the Stalin/Mao standards. So in that sense my take is quite optimistic.
If you're still talking about 'Trump judges serving after Trump is removed from power', then it's you who is acting excessively complacent about what's going on.
There is no return to Status Quo Ante after this - either American Democracy gets completely reshaped, with Trump's minions removed from ever participating again, or it fails. Those are the stakes, and people like Matt who continue to pretend that we'll ever go back to the way things used to work are a problem.
Matt being a "slow borer" cannot imagine paradigm shifts, it goes against his entire philosophy. He only thinks in terms of incremental nip and tuck.
So even if Trump violates a 1000 different norms via UET and puts in a pliant judiciary thus instituting a post-liberal democracy, Matt can only imagine talking about zoning code updates and whether Chris Coons should be really expected to vote to close the carried interest loop hole and so on.
I have come to the conclusion that if Trump figuratively makes the trains run on time, then nothing else will matter and he got dealt a very good hand on the economy except for the vibes piece.
Trump is running a 6-7% deficit high-end supply side stimulus program of tax cuts + pollution (don't call it de-regulation) + crony capitalism + low interest rates + corporate incentives while nevertheless keeping a lid on inflation via regressive low-end austerity (tariffs, student debt collection, SNAP cuts etc.). Given the magnitude of the high-end stimulus and the wealth effects it is creating, my baseline expectation is that Trump's approval on the economy will improve heading into the mid-terms unless all the AI investment actually starts tangibly squeezing the job market by replacing large swaths of workers. The latter looks somewhat less likely than earlier predictions suggested some months ago. So all in all its a high-end stimulus powered casino economy where everyone should be feeling good by next fall.
So the odds do not favor the survival of liberal democracy in the US.
This argument relies on wealth being spread equally. It's the top 10% and AI spending that's keeping everything afloat. That's not enough to win elections.
True. In my relatively rosy picture for Trump I am deliberately discounting Democratic warnings of hardship for low income cost pressured voters because I am not sure how many of them are the median voter if they are mostly groups democrats care about. I do not doubt that inequality will rise dramatically.
I am also assuming that
- The wealth effect of asset price inflation will "trickle down" in the short term to the median voter and make them marginally happier
- That the casino will not blow up before the mid-terms, ie., the AI spending will continue for another year or so at least.
I think beyond 2026, the picture gets really complicated for Trump
- If AI is not replacing workers quickly enough and the capex is seen as wasteful then the bubble bursts and we go into recession.
- If AI actually starts replacing people (which is its whole selling point) then voter angst will shoot through the roof and people way more entitled than I am will be reaching for the pitch forks.
There's a cost of living crisis. I don't see that changing. The question is whether democrats have a message to increase the wealth of the bottom 90% while listening to the voter on reasonable immigration reform. Healthcare premiums are one area and a good start.
I agree there is a cost of living crisis. But is it geographically distributed to hurt Trump or hurt Democrats? We already know blue state citizens are unhappy due to cost of living but their "incumbents" are democrats. I honestly do not know if the median voter in FL, TX, IA, NC, GA, ME, OH now blames Trump for cost of living or if sufficient numbers of voters are directly inconvenienced by tariffs in these regions to choose to flip their vote. I am not sure anyone knows because
a) We assume the cost of living crisis is less acute in red states
b) Dems have no credibility on any issue in these states.
Also perversely, if Dems succeed at fixing the Obamacare insurance premium issue, they will make things easier for Trump not harder because no swing voter will remember a premium increase they never saw come 2026.
I certainly agree that Dems have to center concrete material concerns ie., affordability + jobs + crime but building the lost credibility will take time.
Meanwhile we just have to hope the mid-term turn-out differential will do the job because I do not expect Trump's popularity to tank any further and if anything, it is more likely to stabilize or recover from here on out barring unforeseen events.
Less than 13 months out from the Senate elections, it seems exceedingly unlikely that you are going to be able to win a Senate majority without winning a seat or two in a state where Trump is still somewhat popular. The real life moderates who hold swing House and Senate seats are much less fervently anti-Trump than the party as a whole because Trump isn't deeply hated amongst the voters they represent. Do people think you're going to elect someone to the Senate in Texas or Iowa who runs on opposing everything Trump does?
If winning the Senate is the most important thing in the world, there's few things you could do to make is more unlikely than pushing for more and more polarization around Trump specifically.
That "murder has been falling since before Trump took office" graph is very unimpressive. It shows murders spiking in the wake of 2020 and then working their way back down to the level prior to that which Trump had in his first term.
I don't think there's any mystery here. Does anyone really think that Trump and Miller are going to simply hand the reins over to whoever wins the next presidential election? That Trump will be out campaigning for JD Vance? Trump was preparing to not accept the results of the election versus Biden for months before the election. It was obvious that he wouldn't accept a loss.
I'd say it is just as obvious now that Trump intends to remain president after the next election. In typical Trump fashion, he'll put forward multiple, contradictory justifications for this and hope that something sticks. But clearly the most promising option for Trump and Miller (which Miller in particular isn't even being subtle about) is declaring an emergency that indefinitely postpones the election. Will it work? Who knows? But I don't think there's any doubt that they'll try.
Touting good news is counterproductive. Good news is for people who want to get reelected, or who want their successor to get elected. This holds no value for Trump. He needs emergencies.
I don’t think it’s likely that Trump will try to delay or cancel the election. Too much risk of scaring the normies. It’s more likely that he’ll try to tamper with election results somehow (“I just need you to find me 11,700 more votes” on steroids).
The centrality of social media among young people makes it much more difficult for left-wing leaders to exert any type of discipline on their 20-something followers. Groups can now organize themselves outside of traditional hierarchical corporate structures with social media.
In addition, social media often serves to gin up a crowd rather than have them engage in strategic reflection. Maybe it is time for Leftist leaders to tell their followers to get off social media and organize the old fashion way? Crazy, I know.
I would sleep better at night if I thought the people on our side are basically competent and giving things their best shot. I really want to defer to expertise and experienced judgment.
But then . . .
I watch the unfolding shutdown and I think that while maybe it will turn out okay (or more likely disappear with no consequences whatsoever) I keep hearing from people who should know better things that make me throw up my hands in despair. The last was Pod Save America where hosts Dan Pfeiffer and Alex Wagner were saying that healthcare is the Democrats' best issue and the best case, which they devoutly wished for, was for the Democrats to force the Republicans to extend the ACA subsidies via the shutdown, a mechanism they praised as "raising the salience of premium hikes." (As if people otherwise wouldn't notice when their premiums double.)
Just shoot me now.
They, and apparently Democrats in Congress, seemed to miss the email which said that the *only thing that matters* is what helps the Democrats do as well as possible next November. And insulating people from the pain of higher premiums couched in an overarching message that Democrats and Republicans reached across the aisle to accomplish things in a bipartisan manner is the farthest thing from helping the Democrats in the midterms I can imagine.
But apparently these guys don't get Politics 101. They still think that their only role is to legislate and to help people and protect them from anything bad happening, even when by so doing they are enabling Trump and the Republicans to do *all* the other terrible things they intend on, as Matt so ably lays out. They are willfully and with open eyes taking away one of their most powerful messages against the Republicans in next year's elections.
I simply don't understand why these experienced and putatively smart people can't see this.
"If you’re not thinking about how everything you do makes it easier or harder to win in the states that Democrats need to carry — states that voted for Trump three times in a row — then you’re not really in the game."
A bold statement! I'm not yet sold on it, but I don't disagree, either.
Great post. The same rigor as all your posts but a bit more passion and emotion. Made it all the more compelling - and scary - to read.
"We can’t tell ourselves that making the ideological moves necessary to win in Texas — where non-Hispanic whites are less than 50 percent of the citizen voting-age population — constitutes a morally unacceptable betrayal of vulnerable minorities."
Whoa whoa whoa, obviously I'm all for making the ideological moves, but this is in a paragraph about winning back the Senate. We're not talking about replacing Cornyn with a Democrat, right? Because I've gotta tell you, I'm just hoping we don't replace Cornyn with Ken Paxton.
Less than a year ago, Allred's campaign was trying to defeat Ted Cruz by bringing in Liz Cheney for speeches and running an ad about the (2021!) Texas Freeze with a voiceover by an actor doing a terrible Cruz impersonation in a risibly fake Texas accent. Democrats are not good at campaigning for US Senate seats in Texas, to put it mildly.
“There’s no emergency requiring the dispatch of National Guard personnel into cities where they’re not wanted”
There is too. You have just gotten acclimated to it. The situation in our cities is outrageous, and it has been for 50 years. People are getting killed, robbed and assaulted every day. Recent gains are hard to credit with democrats faking the numbers, but the crime rates have improved over the decades, even so they are still outrageous.
Recommended reading from Brian Beutler's Substack: https://www.offmessage.net/p/the-median-experience-of-tyranny
TL;DR: unless you're in one of the targeted groups (like Jews in Nazi Germany) or a political dissident, living under an authoritarian regime is not self-evidently awful. There's the danger of too many people basically shrugging and saying "well my neighborhood isn't a dystopian hellhole, so how bad can things be, really?" and habituating themselves to more and more government abuses of power.
Hey, I haven't seen dysphemistic treadmill on these threads for a while, where did he go? I hope he's ok. Maybe we need to introduce the concept of "authoritarian treadmill"? The government gradually moving away from small-d democratic norms at a pace the average citizen will accept or just not notice?
I largely agree with this just wanted to make one point. Wasn’t the map in 2018 uniquely bad? The democrats were defending 26 seats while the Rs were only defending 9. They won 24 but even if they won 27 the Rs would have kept the senate. I think just the sheer number of seats they had up then made 2018 unique. Now there is no excuse in 2026 where the Rs are defending 22 and the Ds are only defending 13 but 2018 was different
Which seats are up is what matters most. MY is pleading with the party establishment to actually contest enough states to win a majority (instead of just over-perform compared to expectations), and to do that means fielding and supporting significantly moderate candidates in states Trump won 3 times.
As a Korean vet, I had many discussions with shipmates. We were young and naive, but often quite passionate about our positions. One thing I remember is that I was confident that our differing positions would never lead to any of us shooting at one another. I think and hope that is still true of military veterans. We can be passionate in our beliefs but must not forget the oaths we took to uphold the constitution and the respect we had for all those with whom we served. There are approximately 9 million vets in the US who are older than 65. I would like to see these vets organized in peaceful demonstrations that flood the areas where the president is sending troops and masked armed agents with no ID. The vets would represent all political persuasions and make clear that we have a military to protect and keep all of us safe. Our active duty troops should not be ordered to confront or shoot demonstrators protecting our democracy.
I maintain that there are many reasons for optimism.
1. US of A has very good fundamentals. No major hostile armies on the borders, extremely fertile soil, plenty of water and other natural resources. So it is likely to remain a materially rich land.
2. Central government seeing half the population as enemies is not a great sign, but look at China. It killed like 100 million of its own people 50 years ago, focusing on educated city dwellers, and look at it now. Just one or two generations later it’s a pretty survivable place to live. Arguably better than just survivable!
3. Compounding growth means that over even medium timespans, societies able to be smart and innovative tend to outcompete hidebound traditionalist ones. So being educated and creative is still good overall. Even if you live in a crap country, your kid might be able to move to a less crap place and win a Nobel in chemistry.
4. In the course of history, the US had often gotten extremely lucky breaks. Past performance is no guarantee etc, as it turns out. But hope is always there.
5. I honestly think that the worst case is bounded by Pinochet’s Chile, not by Khmer Rouge.
My optimism is obviously not boundless.
It's hard to take an outside observer anthropologist perspective when you and your kids are living in the society where the most probable outcome is a Sino-Russia style kleptocratic surveillance state and the tail risk includes Pinochet’s Chile.
Sure, maybe we can just concede that the US experiment in government "Of the people, by the people, for the people" has failed in our time FWIW and choose to focus only on the tangible stuff but the "compounding growth" assumption gets iffy if you deviate too far from the system of rule of law. So I would not take it for granted.
In case it wasn’t completely clear, my anthropological optimism is a bit tongue in cheek! I do live in this country.
More to the specifics of your comment - I don’t think Chile is a worse scenario relative to China/Russia.
Pinochet’s regime murdered about 3000 people in a country of 10M. Prorated to the US pop, it’s about 100K. That’s a rounding error by the Stalin/Mao standards. So in that sense my take is quite optimistic.
I haven’t seen One Battle After Another yet, but the fawning over French 75 that I keep seeing in reviews really makes me despair.
If you're still talking about 'Trump judges serving after Trump is removed from power', then it's you who is acting excessively complacent about what's going on.
There is no return to Status Quo Ante after this - either American Democracy gets completely reshaped, with Trump's minions removed from ever participating again, or it fails. Those are the stakes, and people like Matt who continue to pretend that we'll ever go back to the way things used to work are a problem.
Matt being a "slow borer" cannot imagine paradigm shifts, it goes against his entire philosophy. He only thinks in terms of incremental nip and tuck.
So even if Trump violates a 1000 different norms via UET and puts in a pliant judiciary thus instituting a post-liberal democracy, Matt can only imagine talking about zoning code updates and whether Chris Coons should be really expected to vote to close the carried interest loop hole and so on.
I have come to the conclusion that if Trump figuratively makes the trains run on time, then nothing else will matter and he got dealt a very good hand on the economy except for the vibes piece.
Trump is running a 6-7% deficit high-end supply side stimulus program of tax cuts + pollution (don't call it de-regulation) + crony capitalism + low interest rates + corporate incentives while nevertheless keeping a lid on inflation via regressive low-end austerity (tariffs, student debt collection, SNAP cuts etc.). Given the magnitude of the high-end stimulus and the wealth effects it is creating, my baseline expectation is that Trump's approval on the economy will improve heading into the mid-terms unless all the AI investment actually starts tangibly squeezing the job market by replacing large swaths of workers. The latter looks somewhat less likely than earlier predictions suggested some months ago. So all in all its a high-end stimulus powered casino economy where everyone should be feeling good by next fall.
So the odds do not favor the survival of liberal democracy in the US.
The administration is exceedingly incompetent. They might luck out of course.
This argument relies on wealth being spread equally. It's the top 10% and AI spending that's keeping everything afloat. That's not enough to win elections.
True. In my relatively rosy picture for Trump I am deliberately discounting Democratic warnings of hardship for low income cost pressured voters because I am not sure how many of them are the median voter if they are mostly groups democrats care about. I do not doubt that inequality will rise dramatically.
I am also assuming that
- The wealth effect of asset price inflation will "trickle down" in the short term to the median voter and make them marginally happier
- That the casino will not blow up before the mid-terms, ie., the AI spending will continue for another year or so at least.
I think beyond 2026, the picture gets really complicated for Trump
- If AI is not replacing workers quickly enough and the capex is seen as wasteful then the bubble bursts and we go into recession.
- If AI actually starts replacing people (which is its whole selling point) then voter angst will shoot through the roof and people way more entitled than I am will be reaching for the pitch forks.
There's a cost of living crisis. I don't see that changing. The question is whether democrats have a message to increase the wealth of the bottom 90% while listening to the voter on reasonable immigration reform. Healthcare premiums are one area and a good start.
I agree there is a cost of living crisis. But is it geographically distributed to hurt Trump or hurt Democrats? We already know blue state citizens are unhappy due to cost of living but their "incumbents" are democrats. I honestly do not know if the median voter in FL, TX, IA, NC, GA, ME, OH now blames Trump for cost of living or if sufficient numbers of voters are directly inconvenienced by tariffs in these regions to choose to flip their vote. I am not sure anyone knows because
a) We assume the cost of living crisis is less acute in red states
b) Dems have no credibility on any issue in these states.
Also perversely, if Dems succeed at fixing the Obamacare insurance premium issue, they will make things easier for Trump not harder because no swing voter will remember a premium increase they never saw come 2026.
The premiums for 2027 will be released before the election in 2026.
You only build credibility overtime by concentrating on affordability issues and governing well. It takes time but you have to start somewhere.
I certainly agree that Dems have to center concrete material concerns ie., affordability + jobs + crime but building the lost credibility will take time.
Meanwhile we just have to hope the mid-term turn-out differential will do the job because I do not expect Trump's popularity to tank any further and if anything, it is more likely to stabilize or recover from here on out barring unforeseen events.
Less than 13 months out from the Senate elections, it seems exceedingly unlikely that you are going to be able to win a Senate majority without winning a seat or two in a state where Trump is still somewhat popular. The real life moderates who hold swing House and Senate seats are much less fervently anti-Trump than the party as a whole because Trump isn't deeply hated amongst the voters they represent. Do people think you're going to elect someone to the Senate in Texas or Iowa who runs on opposing everything Trump does?
If winning the Senate is the most important thing in the world, there's few things you could do to make is more unlikely than pushing for more and more polarization around Trump specifically.
That "murder has been falling since before Trump took office" graph is very unimpressive. It shows murders spiking in the wake of 2020 and then working their way back down to the level prior to that which Trump had in his first term.
I don't think there's any mystery here. Does anyone really think that Trump and Miller are going to simply hand the reins over to whoever wins the next presidential election? That Trump will be out campaigning for JD Vance? Trump was preparing to not accept the results of the election versus Biden for months before the election. It was obvious that he wouldn't accept a loss.
I'd say it is just as obvious now that Trump intends to remain president after the next election. In typical Trump fashion, he'll put forward multiple, contradictory justifications for this and hope that something sticks. But clearly the most promising option for Trump and Miller (which Miller in particular isn't even being subtle about) is declaring an emergency that indefinitely postpones the election. Will it work? Who knows? But I don't think there's any doubt that they'll try.
Touting good news is counterproductive. Good news is for people who want to get reelected, or who want their successor to get elected. This holds no value for Trump. He needs emergencies.
I don’t think it’s likely that Trump will try to delay or cancel the election. Too much risk of scaring the normies. It’s more likely that he’ll try to tamper with election results somehow (“I just need you to find me 11,700 more votes” on steroids).
"That Trump will be out campaigning for JD Vance? "
Oh I very much doubt that, he'll be busy undermining him.
The centrality of social media among young people makes it much more difficult for left-wing leaders to exert any type of discipline on their 20-something followers. Groups can now organize themselves outside of traditional hierarchical corporate structures with social media.
In addition, social media often serves to gin up a crowd rather than have them engage in strategic reflection. Maybe it is time for Leftist leaders to tell their followers to get off social media and organize the old fashion way? Crazy, I know.
I would sleep better at night if I thought the people on our side are basically competent and giving things their best shot. I really want to defer to expertise and experienced judgment.
But then . . .
I watch the unfolding shutdown and I think that while maybe it will turn out okay (or more likely disappear with no consequences whatsoever) I keep hearing from people who should know better things that make me throw up my hands in despair. The last was Pod Save America where hosts Dan Pfeiffer and Alex Wagner were saying that healthcare is the Democrats' best issue and the best case, which they devoutly wished for, was for the Democrats to force the Republicans to extend the ACA subsidies via the shutdown, a mechanism they praised as "raising the salience of premium hikes." (As if people otherwise wouldn't notice when their premiums double.)
Just shoot me now.
They, and apparently Democrats in Congress, seemed to miss the email which said that the *only thing that matters* is what helps the Democrats do as well as possible next November. And insulating people from the pain of higher premiums couched in an overarching message that Democrats and Republicans reached across the aisle to accomplish things in a bipartisan manner is the farthest thing from helping the Democrats in the midterms I can imagine.
But apparently these guys don't get Politics 101. They still think that their only role is to legislate and to help people and protect them from anything bad happening, even when by so doing they are enabling Trump and the Republicans to do *all* the other terrible things they intend on, as Matt so ably lays out. They are willfully and with open eyes taking away one of their most powerful messages against the Republicans in next year's elections.
I simply don't understand why these experienced and putatively smart people can't see this.
JVL made the same point recently on The Bulwark.
"If you’re not thinking about how everything you do makes it easier or harder to win in the states that Democrats need to carry — states that voted for Trump three times in a row — then you’re not really in the game."
A bold statement! I'm not yet sold on it, but I don't disagree, either.