Thank you for these recommendations, Matt. To this list I would add Dan Osborn, the Independent in the race to become the next Senator from Nebraska. There is no Democratic candidate in this race, and Pete Ricketts, the incumbunt Republican billionaire-lacking-charisma, is eminently beatable. Last year, Dan outperformed Kamala in the state by 15+% in his race against Deb Fischer; he's now known throughout the state; he's already tied with Ricketts in the polls; and he's exactly the rare non-MAGA candidate who can flip this critical Senate seat.
Is there a way to give money to political candidates without having my contact information sold to other candidates and groups who incessantly email and worse, text? I would be much more likely to donate if I knew I wasn’t going to be spammed.
Unsure how the methods would work here, but I’d love to see a study that tried to see if spam political messaging actually reduces aggregate donation.
My suspicion, and this informed by my work in the industry (albeit with a non spammy firm) is that they do it because it really does work even while pissing off a lot of people into not donating.
I agree, there must be some evidence, or perception, that the spam works. Maybe the short term returns justify the practice, but in terms of building a longer term relationship with recurring donations it is a huge disincentive to donate.
It feels disrespectful. If I care enough about your and your cause to give you money, why is there an expectation that you'll try to profit off my generosity.
What I want to know is why, from a psychological perspective, 1300% is apparently the maximum alleged matching amount that will induce people to donate at a positive rate of return. (Seriously, in the 2020 election cycle I watched GOP-oriented fundraising emails ramp the alleged match higher and higher, but it very clearly has topped out at 1300%, so there's got to be some sort of cap on even the most gullible people's credulity, because I can't otherwise see why it hasn't escalated further.)
Those emails "TRUMP IS ABOUT TO 💣💣💣DESTROY💣💣💣 AMERICA!" or "(((THEY))) ARE AFTER TRUMP, DONATE NOW TO SHOW (((THEM))) WE'RE NOT SCARED!" are the survivors of dozens or even hundreds of rounds of A/B testing.
There's a lot that's unsure in politics about what works, but the consultancy firms that rake in a percentage of donations are 100% on the ball in terms of maximizing donations.
They can A/B test the direct response to an email. It’s much harder to test how individual emails like this affect donation to related causes on future occasions. If it causes 10% donations in recipients, but decreases donations by 0.1% on 200 future occasions, then it is net negative, but will show up as very positive in the tests they can do.
Yeah. I haven’t donated to a candidate in 10+ years (outside of local candidates with Seattle’s “democracy vouchers.”) Nor signed a petition. And the reason why is my already cluttered to hell inbox.
Does the same go for Wikipedia? I gave them $5 ten years ago and I still routinely get emails that sound like they're trying to extort me or they cheated on me and "owe me an explanation".
The best one I've seen was one my brother got that was along the lines of:
"This is Donald Trump! I tried to contact you about renewing your MAGA membership, but you didn't respond.
There were some real extreme-dark-pattern fundraising techniques being done by elected Republicans surrounding Trump's impeachment/indictments. "DONATE TO HELP DONALD TRUMP!" You'd click on a link and give hundreds of dollars, it would be repeating without explaining that clearly, and only like 1% went to Trump, the rest went to the specific politician.
I think I've mentioned here before, but I'll repeat myself that I'm absolutely amazed that there have been no consumer protection lawsuits brought that I'm aware of over a lot of GOP-related fundraising activities in the past few years. (I know there is ample case law that politicians cannot be sued for breaking *campaign promises* under consumer protection statutes, but fundraising emails that, e.g., fail to disclose that the charge will be recurring, falsely represent that specific matching amounts will be given, that the donor's name will be entered in a drawing to have a 1-on-1 dinner with Donald Trump, etc., all seem clearly distinguishable from those precedents, especially when those fundraising emails are very often from third-party organizations, not the actual candidate's own campaign.)
I get the sense that in all forms of advertising/PR in general, it's really hard to model and measure the specific counterfactual of "this person was a potential customer, but our advertising/outreach annoyed them out of supporting us." For instance, I'll never buy Liberty Mutual insurance because I hate their ads so much, but how would they even know?
Yes, a good rule of thumb in political fundraising is regardless of what you think personally of a tactic if they are doing it, it's because it does in fact work as unlike say sign wars (which probably don't matter and are more about tradition than anything else) finance people really do test different strategies and compare them over time. Dating myself but there used to be a ton of dancing cowboy ads online that were idiotic, but apparently they did get people to click: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/business/media/18adco.html
... Those worked? Who clicked on those? They always looked to me like something in a feardotcom-style movie that leads a demon to possess your soul over the internet.
I've commented here before that I quite likely received more fundraising emails from Bob Casey's campaign in 2024 than the campaigns of every other candidate that year combined (often multiple emails from Casey in the same day) despite: (1) never having lived in PA, (2) never having visited PA or had any relatives living there, (3) never having donated to a Democratic candidate anywhere, and (4) having been a registered Republican for my entire voting life.
I got a ton of those as well, although I have had to register as a Dem owing to living in cities where the primary is often the most important vote. This cycle I got a lot with disturbing end-times vibes that I eventually figured out were related to the state judicial elections.
Even if individual candidates don’t share information, isn’t there the fact that donations in general are public record for transparency reasons? I’m not sure if the public records include phone numbers or not, but I would think you could cross reference them with other information that would.
Write a paper check and mail it. Just give them your name, occupation, and snail mail address (you’ll probably get some junk mail, but that’s probably less of a bother than spamming).
They must use the same strategy that retailers and spammers rely on: yeah they know it's obnoxious as hell but studies show they can get a few percent extra customers/responses for shoving this crap repeatedly down our throats. Great. All it gets me to do is unsubscribe so while they're getting a few extra donors they're losing a lot of folks like me.
I generally donate the old fashioned way (a paper check sent in the mail). I'm not going to say that strategy has completely insulated me from email spam, but it certainly cuts down on it. And I get to take the credit card fees out of the equation.
I share your ambivalence about national security hawkishness being used as a signal for moderation. I would like the party to move to the center on crime, public safety, and education reform, I’m not sure I support the sanctions on Cuba.
One of the things that’s stuck with me about Ruben Gallego was him introducing legislation to kick out Russian students from American universities after Putins invasion. It was such a batshit legislation to propose, my chemistry lab partner from russia was an apolitical nerd and was super worried about whatever the hell Gallego was trying to do (Gallego failed eventually). It’s one of the reasons I hesitate to get on the Ruben 2028 bandwagon. IMO someone with such reflexively hawkish instincts should not be president, given how much power over foreign policy the president has.
There was a weird, brief and largely inconsequential time, where justified liberal support for Ukraine flirted with xenophobic anti-Russian sentiment, it dissipated quickly but the fact some liberals wanted to drop Russian books and composers for a period did point to something wrong.
Yep, friends of mine on social media were freaking out about classical-music stations airing previously scheduled performances of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. I pointed out that the big political issue in Tchaikovsky's era was the liberation of the serfs (!). And the episodes of boycotting Russian restaurants in the States and demanding purity statements from musicians in North America *with family back in Russia* were dispiriting. It was a bizarre couple of months!
Yes though not sure it was just “liberal”; in the early days it was a broad swathe of the public indulging in anti-Russia xenophobia. It was a revealing moment because it didn’t map onto the typical US culture war stuff. Though part of what it revealed was that libs are as hungry as anyone else for someone to hate.
More than anything it's idiotic and benefits Putin as he can point to "Russophobia" in the West. Also, nothing would damage Putin's Russia more than Europe and the US admitting millions of young, well educated Russians who don't want to live in a cold, miserable, imperialist Banana Republic.
Wow I did not know he did that. That should be disqualifying. I support Ukraine but it was dispiriting to see how many institutions just decided to go after random individual Russians who probably didn’t even support the war. By contrast, I don’t think even the most strongly anti-Israel politicians would’ve supported similar legislation banning Israeli students after the Gaza War.
Yeah, some of the most anti-Russia people I've met have been Russians who made a point of immigrating here because they were so unhappy in Russia. Obviously, that's not universally true, but it was strange to see Democrats openly endorsing discrimination on the basis of national origin.
I'd like to +1 this without signing on to the final sentence. Every politician I've seen in my lifetime has done something equally stupid, or worse, and we've got to work with what we've got
I know multiple people who fled Putin’s regime. This sort of law would sweep up them. Worse than deplorable, it is illogical. He has not thought through who immigrates here.
Sounds like a bad policy to me as well, but maybe the number of students from that country at US universities is really small? I haven't looked into it.
The point is what such reflexive hawkishness reveals about a potential Gallego presidency. Foreign policy is an area where the president has a lot of unilateral power and I just don’t think anyone with such innately hawkish instincts should be president. The fact that this legislation didn’t really have any domestic constituency that more polarizing topics like Israel have and he still decided to introduce the legislation is revealing to me. It signals a kind of an innate hawkishness that worries me as much as the crazy tankie isolationist.
It isn't really hawkishness, Russian students in America aren't a key Putin constituency, it doesn't serve any purpose or signal aggression, it is just bigotry.
I was commenting on the action not his soul. It seemed to be a common thing in the 2019-2023 period, where a totally normal moderate would say an absurd or offensive thing that went against everything they stood for and now they pretend they never said it.
A lot of it comes down to the fact that the hawks ended up being right about Russia and China, so they have more credibility in the party than they did during Obama era
Probably smaller at the undergrad level (although even there it would still be an atrocious decision) but I have known a lot of Russian PhD students in my field (off the top of my head, probably more than any non-US country other than India, China, Iran, and Israel).
e: I guess I should specify that I’m a computer scientist, although I think Russia is probably decently represented in most of the hard sciences at least?
My chemistry grad school advisor was Russian, and many of his other grad students were from the former Soviet sphere (Kazakhs and Poles, mostly). I never finished my PhD, but I have a soft spot for the dry Russian sense of humor. He wasn’t the most ethical boss, but he was both brilliant and hilarious
It’s not a top 20 source of students. Even places like Nepal, Thailand, Peru, and Kuwait send more students. But there are more Russian students than Australian in the United States. And as John K notes, it’s quite a noticeable number in graduate programs in mathematical sciences.
I didn’t know Gallego had done that. That’s super shitty! WTAF, Senator? Russian students in the US are likely to be either apolitical or opponents of the Putin regime! We should welcome them, not kick them out for something they had no control over!
Chinese students should at the very least be barred from using WeChat and otherwise monitored. The whole apparatus of CCP surveillance of Chinese students needs to go.
I suspect if Gallego actually runs, it will be one of those cases where an impressive electoral performer in their own state just doesn't have the charisma or juice for a presidential campaign (a la DeSantis).
That sounds like a terrible and frankly bigoted policy. That said, did it seem like the bill was actually going to become law, or was this a messaging bill designed for Gallego to appear performatively tough in foreigners? I think that matters, because Dems, especially in border states, are going to need to do a lot of performative toughness if they ever want the Senate back
Re: public safety, I posted a comment that probably will be buried down-thread, because I don't wake up early enough to get in early before the comments flood... One of the things that impressed me about Cait Conley was that when I talked with her about policing and crime, she had independently come up with an idea that sounded _very_ much like Matt's Police For America -- working to build up the pipeline of good officers, to help cities hire the folks they need to do effective policing. (If you dig down through the comments and search my username you can find my more detailed remarks.) She and Manny Rutinel (in Colorado) are the the two red-to-blue candidates that I've personally talked to with whom I'm most impressed for this cycle.
One other consideration re: Jeff Duncan - he could be the John Bel Edwards of Georgia and finally take up the full Medicaid expansion. Dems periodically winning governorships in red states has been (alongside referenda) one of the most important factors in the steady forward march of Medicaid expansion to 40 states.
We should be putting up competitive gubernatorial candidates in the 10 holdout states cycle after cycle until Medicaid expansion reaches all of them. This is an area where electoral success for Dems leads to direct, tangible benefits for people's lives. And it's one of the best issues we have. Medicaid expansion won outright by referendum in places as red as Idaho and Oklahoma - people love it! Running on cultural moderation plus Medicaid expansion could be viable (to a first approximation) essentially anywhere.
In many of those states, the appropriate D strategy (assuming your primary concern is policy outcomes in aggregate) is probably to run candidates whose positions are literally "Republican on basically ever national policy except Medicare expansion".
That's right - you basically say "I love guns. I love cops and my truck has a Thin Blue Line decal. I'm for border security and deportations. I love our troops, and I love seeing them crack down on the commies and criminals in blue states. AND I'll expand Medicaid."
A Dem who campaigns like this could be viable in almost any state. Although this is way to the right of me personally I think it pretty much describes the median voter.
But what do they campaign on that most Democrats actually agree with (other than Medicaid)? Or is it time for the Democrats to become a single-issie party (for campaign purposes) of Medicare for All?
To be clear- I'm talking about the ACA Medicaid expansion. Dems running in the 10 remaining holdout states that haven't implemented the expansion should focus relentlessly on this issue. And of course the 10 holdout states are much more conservative than the average state - we're talking mainly about the Deep South and Wyoming. So these are not places where you can say almost anything that most Dems agree with outside of "I love Medicaid."
That said - this is good advice for Federal Dems too. Currently we are a basically uncompetitive opposition (especially in the Senate), and Dems not seriously trying to win enables Republican extremism and abuse. The only way we change this is to be dramatically more right-wing, especially on the issues I listed. So I'd love to hear Senate candidates in Trump +10 states (which decide the majority) talking like this too.
You can still say a few other things that Dem voters agree with. Financial regulation and clean water are important, and Republicans threaten both. Dems are better at creating jobs. Dems won't try to dictate your personal life. But we need to show voters that we care as much as they do about the economy, AND we're up against the fundamental problem that (with the exception of Medicaid) voters agree with Trump and the GOP about most things.
I think you meant “Medicaid” rather than “Medicare” expansion…and rather than Republican on policy, maybe just former Republicans, i.e., the pre-Trump Republican party. I’m supporting a former Republican (running now as a Democrat) for governor of Florida, he’s a basically a never-Trumper and I don’t even know what his policy positions are for the most part.
I'd be stunned if Medicaid expansion doesn't end up being one of those positions (and it's badly needed in Florida!).
Otherwise if it's David Jolly you're talking about, I feel like the main thing I've heard him talk about is flood insurance (which I gather is also a big deal).
Has Duncan taken a position on Medicaid expansion? His website (which as far as I can tell doesn't have an issues page) talks about how he pitched for Georgia Tech in the College World Series but I don't see anything about that issue.
I've seen some social media posts from Duncan about expanding health coverage. When he has an issues page, I would be shocked if Medicaid expansion *doesn't* feature prominently.
I am not aware of anyone who has won a governorship as a Dem since 2014 in a non-expansion state and not at least tried to implement Medicaid expansion. And the vast majority of them have succeeded!
We know Duncan was opposed to expanding Medicaid in 2020. You'd think he would want to make his conversion apparent. Maybe he will, but as someone who actually lives in Georgia I see no reason to rush to support him until he makes clear where he stands.
Good stuff -- thanks for sharing. He does seem to have the Bill Kristol view that to effectively oppose Trump writing some op-eds isn't enough, you need to take up arms in the opposing army. Maybe he will consolidate support from Democratic voters.
Hey team - quick correction from North Carolina here. You should absolutely donate to NC Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls - it's vital that she wins. Just wanted to note that Democrats currently hold two, not three, seats on our state supreme court. Earls (and Riggs, who won in '24) are those two.
What this means is that if Earls holds her seat, then Democrats need to flip just 2 more seats to win a 4-3 majority on our state's highest court. In 2028, there are 3 seats up for election, all held by Republicans who have voted to protect Republican partisan gerrymandering. So if Earls wins, Dems need to flip just 2 of those 3 to flip control of the court. (Likewise, if she loses, they need to flip all 3.)
"And yet in all this time, there were no big Jared Golden features in national magazines"
While I share most of Matt's frustration, a national magazine feature or glowing praise from Brooklyn liberals probably would have undermined his candidacy in his particular district. For all we know, he was offered the national feature and turned it down. And if I were a centrist representing a light red district, I would welcome criticism from the far left, left, or even center-left
The real truth, of course, is that progressives are more concerned about winning the future of the Democratic Party than optimizing for 2026, i.e., stopping Trump.
I say that without judgment. I don't hold that view--I'd prefer a somewhat moderate Democrat like Golden over the smaller chance a more progressive candidate wins that seat. But I do feel that way about people who were very recently Republicans like some on this list running in Democratic primaries. If the way for Democrats to "win" is to elect Republicans who jumped ship from Trump *after* he won the presidency, what's even the point of the party anymore? So I won't, for example, be supporting Duncan.
It's funny, maybe I'm being just a mirror image of Late Blooming but I've found myself identifying less and less with the Democrats over this kind of tension, contradiction, whatever you want to call it. Trump is either a break the glass, all hands on deck, five alarm fire or he isn't. I think he is and the Biden administration's failure to approach it that way in any manner other than rhetoric has my loyalty and positive feelings towards the Democrats lower than they have been in my entire adult lifetime. I'm still voting for them for the time being, not that it matters in my deep blue district, but I do wonder how much of the damage to the brand comes from the completely justified perception that, however one feels about the policy positions, these are fundamentally unserious people, deeply interested in everything except for that which actually matters.
Democrats have ruined so much trust via hyperbolic language. Fascism, climate crisis, healthcare collapse, systemic injustice, etc. The language that something is a massive existential concern is not met with the same urgency or heavy response the rhetoric entails undermines credibility.
Progressive hyperbolic escalation on social media feeds into this distrust too.
And the fact that many Democratically controlled governments are failing at addressing problems (e.g.: cost of living, crime, homelessness, aging infrastructure) further exacerbates trust.
This really is an all politicians problem. There literally is no more obvious example of hyperbolic speech than Trump himself. Americans have simply become too comfortable with it to the point that they participate without much reflection about whether they are being hyperbolic themselves. They say the claim, and defend it first as literally true, and then retreat to arguing they were only speaking symbolically or generalizing. But they don’t even think about whether that’s true until confronted with counterpoints. Their mental models simply are not complex enough for that.
Yea the degeneration of the center right in this manner really is something. I can't imagine the mental gymnastics someone has to do to conclude that the solution to their various problems, gripes, issues, whatever with the broader left or the American establishment generally is to put the biggest dumbass possible in charge of it all.
Yep. Trump is an existential threat to democracy in the rhetoric but when it’s time to make policy he’s just another Republican. Climate change is an existential threat to *human life on Earth* when Democrats give speeches but not scary enough to make it easy to build nuclear plants. And when every CEO in the country is promising to spend trillions of dollars to build a computer to do your job at 5% of the cost, so they can take away your job and immiserate you, Democrats are mum. They’d be the worst people in the world, if it wasn’t for MAGA Republicans.
At least the Paul Ryan Republicans, like the aforementioned CEOs, are pretty mask-off about the idea that you don’t deserve a good life (maybe don’t deserve a life?) if you’re not part of the capitalist class. I’m not sure that a lot of Democrats (think of e.g. Chuck Schumer here) really disagree at heart, but they pretend not to, and that’s worse.
When it comes to Schumer and Congressional Democrats I think it’s the gerontocracy effect more than anything else. To regulate tech we need young people in office
I hear ya. I switched to Independent a couple decades ago though I usually vote Democrat simply because they're the less worse option. What happened to the JFKs, FDRs, Teddy Roosevelts, Trumans, and Ike's? Does it take disastrous circumstances to get substantial candidates (ie--Great Depression, WWII, etc )? Are our Bizarro world politics just an archetypal symptom of waning empire?
Yea that's what keeps me up at night when I think about my kids' future. Some level of relative decline was probably inevitable given the historically unparalleled level of ascendancy we had after the Cold War. But we're still a very well placed country to stay strong and prosperous indefinitely if we play our hand with even minimal competence. Instead it seems like we're hell bent on an orgy of self indulgence and self destruction.
I think the Republican party has been MAGA-esque for longer than Trump has been in power, and that it's more important to have an actual liberal party if you're going to stop the illiberal slide in American politics. That's consistent with having a big tent, just not so big it includes recent Republican elected officials.
I think "Did you stand up against egregious abuses of power to the detriment of your own career" is a pretty straight-forward standard to use, and both candidates highlighted above meet that criteria.
I also think that, from an electoral math perspective, the Ds just can't afford to be that choosey if they ever want to win in the Senate. If you deny representation to anyone who was an R before, how can you expect to get votes from people who voted R in the past? And if you're rejecting those voters, you have no majority.
I think it's unreasonable to expect, and people do not in fact expect, parties to nominate former members of the opposing party in exchange for the votes of swing voters or switch voters.
Also, there just aren't that many people in the electorate who are basically Bush/Ryan era Republicans who are now open to voting Democrat. The Harris/Cheney road show seems to not have been a winning electoral strategy. There is, of course, a good reason for this: part of the appeal of the wage war & slash the welfare state policies of Bush/Ryan Republicans *was* cruelty, and a large part of thei voting base are perfectly comfortable with Trump who more openly exhibits that quality.
If they're the best candidate for the district, why on Earth not? I'm not saying you're obligated to nominate a defector. My position (contra yours) is that the option should remain on the table. And then you should choose the best option to win the seat.
Maybe we have slightly different ideas of the proposal.
My objection to Democrats nominating Republicans is not that they *were* Republicans so much as that they *are* Republicans. Generally, having been a Republican up until 2022 or so is a good indicator that one holds Republican views. "The party left me; I didn't leave the party." I'm just saying that's an option Democrats shouldn't exercise. I'd put Duncan, Cheney, etc., in that camp.
The idea isn't to punish people for having been Republicans and then defecting but rather to have minimal standards for what the Democratic Party stands for.
As a separate issue, I would question the judgment and sincerity of someone who says, "Yeah, I was a Republican up until 2022 but now I agree with most Democratic Party positions." If someone had a good explanation for the change of heart--maybe they encountered the ghost of FDR on the road to Damascus--maybe.
The option will always be on the table. People can (and do) vote for who they believe will best represent them. But since I don't believe a former Republican will best represent me, I'm not going to vote for one unless my back is against the wall.
Honestly, my biggest problem with the R-to-D politicians is that they run out of gas really quickly. Charlie Crist is now a political non-entity. Hagel really didn't do much for the Obama Administration as SoD.
Poor Republican duped into accepting impurity in their blood via Donolnd Trump (ex-D), or any number of Demcrats who flipped to R in House notably and have in 21st century continued on.
Harris lost for her campaign and the perception as well documented by Silver et al of being Too Left due to never clearly dumping her old Woke / Proggy positions of the 10s-early20s.
While I appreciate your initial post engaging with mine, which sparked an interesting (to me) discussion, generally you've just thrown out lazy Twitter-tier strawman points, so I'm adding you to my ignore/mute list.
I tend to think liberal Dems would be more effective embracing homeless right liberals instead of pandering to the populist horseshoe.
It would certainly offer much better governance.
Edit: Or at least Left and Right liberals both need to think clearly about how to effectively marginalize the populist horseshoe, even if that doesn't necessarily mean a coalitional realignment. The right liberal wing has completely collapsed in terms of institutional power. The left liberals need to hold the line instead of embracing red vs brown politics.
What do you mean by "right liberal" and "populist horseshoe"?
If by right-liberals you mean Blue Dogs, they seem to be doing OK. If you mean people who were Republicans from the era between roughly Reagan to GWB, I'd dispute that most of them were that liberal.
If by populist horsehoe you mean a style of politics, I think that is somewhat orthogonall to this debate. If you mean a lack of commitment to democratic norms, I think (a) Democratic/progressive populists haven't really exhibited this in the US, and (b) it's hard to be the one party in favor of democratic norms while the other flouts them. If you mean policies that tend to have a populist character--"tax the rich," "stop insurance companies from putting profits over people," "secure the borders--then I'd say some populist ideas are good and some are bad, and that it's good when the good ideas get cross-party support.
I mean the Free Minds and Free Markets wing of the old R three legged stool. Obviously they had the executive power enthusiasts mostly in the Foreign Policy Hawk leg, and the Buchananite populists and theocrats and racists in the Social Conservative leg, but, prior to about 2017 or so, there were plenty of Republicans who were constitutionalist, pluralist, market liberals before they were purged by the Trumpists. Lots of these people still exist and they are much more aligned with constraining the power of MAGA than the labor protectionist or "overthrow capitalism" wings of the populist left who covet that power for themselves..
I guess my view would be that there are few principled libertarians in US politics, and that the actual history of libertarianism in the US as a political as opposed to intellectual movement, starting with Goldwater, was laundering segregationist arguments in terms of freedom of association. I think you see this in the Reagan coalition, which embraced the Southern strategy, "welfare queens" rhetoric, etc. The Tea Party was allegedly a free market response to Obama which quickly and without much comment folded into Trump.
I do think there are many free market intellectuals who sincerely hold those views, and Democrats should be open to citing them in white papers and engaging with them on policy-crafting, etc. I just don't think it's a real electoral coalition.
Part of me wants to welcome the Brian Sandovals into the Democratic Party, but my worry is that if every sane Republican becomes a moderate Democrat, there's no one left among the Republicans to be an internal moderating force. Also, these types tend to be relatively upscale and can help win in places like Virginia and Colorado, but I don't know how viable they are in places like Pennsylvania.
Just anecdotally, as someone who's spent my whole life living in Pennsylvania swing districts, it's not hardly the state of union steel workers/meat packers that it was 50 years ago.
Yes yes, a 'big tent' so long as it is not actually big, welcoming so long as one is only engaging with the Converted who have the right history of correct thinking.
That is in the end not a Big Tent at all but the pretending about Big Tent while keeping the impure heathen at appropriate non-polluting arms length.
An ideological "Limpieza de Sangre, no Republican Cooties allowed.
Otherwise Actual politics requires an actually effective party to actually win and not merely posture.
Else you end up excactly where the Democrats are now - having quite successfully self-limited own-appeal and shrunk their own reach geographically, and socio-economically.
But that's part of the ongoing argument, isn't it? "The important thing is to win," okay, great. But what do we support and stand for after we've won? Just "not Trump"? While that's an excellent thing to stand for, it's inadequate. I personally also find "housing abundance!!!" inadequate on its own. I want to know what the platform is, and then the leftists and the moderates start fighting, and it all starts all over again.
In 2006, did we know what we supported after we won? I don't think we did! We just knew "we're going to beat Bush and all the things we don't like about Bush." The 2008 primary campaign and general election were about determining what our governing priorities would be. I think that it's putting the cart before the horse to say "we need to figure out our agenda for when control Congress but not the White House"—there is no agenda to be had in that instance! The presidential nominee, and then president, is the de facto leader of the party.
I think those were the olden days, Tom. There was a sort of general shared understanding of what each party, in general, stood for. That's out the window now! Do we stand for free transition surgery for illegal immigrant felons in prison? Do we stand for moderate tweaks to the tax code? Do we support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as written, or do we support the policies that are illegal that extend DEI into ridiculous territory? There are parallel, more dramatic questions for the Republicans. So yes, *now* I want to know more about the platform. Have we decided that abortion rights can go out the window, as Ezra Klein has suggested, even though they're very popular? (Yeah I went there. It's my hobby horse. And I still want an answer.)
Does the new Republican party really support the unitary executive theory? Or are there Republicans who support checks and balances? Because I'm never voting for the former, but I would consider the latter, in some limited circumstances. Hell, I didn't even realize what an overwhelming hold the unitary executive theory had on Republicans until the last 12 months!
TL;DR: Times change. I now need to know what the party supports before I vote for or against it.
Funny thing is that most Republicans who jumped to Democrats adjust their positions to be more in line with Democrats. Sociologically people adopt the norms and values of those in their social group (this is what has happened to Anti-Trump Republicans over time.)
The converse is also an explanation for Republicans’ transformation.
The Bulwark team is an excellent example of this... But unlike regular Dem types they like free markets and don't police their own speech much (or at least Tim Miller doesn't). As someone who's very much disenchanted with the progressive left but angrier at the right then ever these are very much my people.
The supermajority position on abortion is “not personally thrilled with it but let’s not be too draconian about it.”
This position is underspecified, of course. Which means that someone who holds it can probably be talked into anything from “ban after six weeks unless life is at stake ” on one extreme to “maybe limit it in the third trimester without a good reason” on the other. And they can pick whichever position in their personal Overton window that’s closest to the median opinion among people they choose to caucus with for other reasons.
Of course this doesn’t apply to the 30 or 40% of people who have really strong ideological beliefs here, but that’s a smaller group than the wishy-washy middle.
I still think there is a binary divide there, one where most GOP voters and Trump are on the pro-choice side even if they have reservations about abortion. Most issues are a distraction, the vast majority of abortions and the core of the debate is abortions in the first trimester without a medical necessity, abuse or incest.
I fully understand pro-life Dems and pro-choice Reps or many of the complicated patchwork of ideologies in every big tent party, my question is how many people change every part of their moral views when they change party.
Yes, I agree. While I'm happy they've seen the light about Trump, I disagree we should be welcoming them into the ranks of elected Democratic politicians. If they didn't turn tail on the GOP long before Trump, they'll *never* be actual Democrats. They'll be Republicans who hate Trump is all. No thank you.
From the Bluekskyism that is quite prevalent, and the pattern of Flipping from late 20th century into 21st Century, I have to suspect this is prevalent amongst Democrt partisans..... and likely quite explanatory in part for why that pattern of Reps is very heavily D to R and not the other way.
Brilliant success, Democrats have done quite well hin this, being so broadly competitive geographically, expanding their play... ah wait no completely the opposite.
I sympathize with what I think you mean, but “registered Republican” is a pisspoor litmus test. I’m as partisan a Democrat as they come, but if I lived in a red state with closed primaries, I’d be a registered Republican. I can even respect moderates in deep red states who strategically run as Republicans bc that’s the only way to have a chance of winning, if their actual beliefs line up more with moderate Dems. The last group is a shrinking breed if not completely dead, but there were still some in the GWB era, I think. There are likely to be plenty of recent folks in the former group.
If we’re going to have a litmus test beyond “not MAGA,” which is debatable, I lean towards “no cuts to the safety net.”
It's not enough they convert. They need to eat dirt, and apologize to my face. To me, personally. And wash my car. Don't forget that second coat of wax, Biff.
No, I don't. I don't care what they do. I'm just not going to vote for them and I really don't see giving them a place at the table of Democratic politics. They hate Trump, and I'm glad for their vote against him. But to turn the Democratic party itself into a vessel for all things anti-Trump, no matter how anti-choice, anti-worker and otherwise antagonistic to the Democratic platform they may be otherwise, seems like a bad way to go.
What on Earth does this even mean? "I'd rather have a Republican in office than a Democrat who used to be a Republican be became disgusted with them and now wants them to lose"?? This is self-defeating and naive.
I didn't say that. I said I'd rather have someone committed to Democratic principles AND committed to beating Trump rather than someone not committed to Democratic principles but wants to beat Trump. If my ONLY two choices are Republican Lite and Republican MAGA, then of course I'll vote the former, reluctantly. But those usually are not the only two choices.
The context of the discussion is a recommendation about a primary vote in a statewide race in a state that has two Dem senators, both presumably well to the left of Geoff Duncan.
I understand that, and have sympathy for it. I'm glad I don't live in those places. I am only saying I would *not* support it and I believe it is bad for the future of the party to turn whatever power they have over to the Romneys and Cheneys of the world.
What if they build more power by incorporating those people who are more right-wing than you would like but who would caucus with Democrats and thus vote for the legislation and majority leaders and Supreme Court nominees and whatnot that you prefer (at least relative to what we’re getting with a GOP trifecta)? That worked pretty well from 2008 to 2010, especially relative to what we have now.
"I believe it is bad for the future of the party to turn whatever power they have over to the Romneys and Cheneys of the world."
This is an interesting description. If you are up for a hypothetical, I'd be interested hearing whether you would prefer a party where
1) almost every Democratic senator is ideologically within a narrow similar to Angela Alsobrooks that can occasionally get 51 seats in good years
2) a truly bigger tent party has a range of voices going from Mamdani or further left and also further to the right as in Duncan or Justin Amash but can get to 59 seats in good years?
I think most of the people arguing against you are thinking that #2 is a much better option, but you seem to be implying that #1 is a better option.
And voila, self-marginsalisation of the partisan-sect based politics. the impure sinners will polute the waters.
How about if they do self-flagellation, repent the sin of being of the opposite political party and engage on a pilgrimage to an appropriate identarian conference?
Compare and contrast with the delight of the Republicans when they have a D convert....
and then one can profitabily reflect on which party has self-excluded from large swaths of the Electoral geography for Senate and EC.
Edited Later to Add: Wiki summary pages on Party Flips (House, Senate)
[while certainly flawed and incompletee, and this only House and Senate the emergent late 20th ongoing into 21st century rather tells a story of the Opposition being quite happy to capitalise on flips.
It is not probably worth the effort to do State levels but I would strongly suspect that in Swing / BattleGround where Dems were once broadly competitive one would see a rather similar strongly in one direction flow.
I think a good part of the appeal of Yglesias' substack is people who, for whatever reason, think they're under seige from college students who are woke or whatever.
I'd just like the Democratic Party to have roughly the distribution of views it did in the late 2000s, after it arrived at the consensus that the Iraq War was a mistake, but with less homophobia/transphobia. I think that's a better path to electoral victory (Obama) and a better way to resisting a dangerous administration (Bush). I believe people on the progressive left belong in the tent, as do moderates, whats-the-matter-with-kansas types, etc. I do not believe Bush or Romney era Republicans belong in the tent.
But if you look at the actual party that existed in 2008, it did include a lot of people whose views you would now exclude. Including in elected offices. The elected offices that allowed for the judges that decided Oberkfell and the officials who passed the ACA.
The current party, a party that excludes anybody to the right of Obama, is a minority party destined to give ground on every important issue.
I'd love for us to be a country where a majority overwhelmingly thinks like Obama and Pelosi, and sees Bernie Sanders as only slightly left of center. But I don't live in that country.
Yes, I completely agree, and I'm not sure why that seems to engender so much hostility here except that my guess is there are a lot of former Bush and Romney types who subscribe. I personally would rather have a party made up of Bernies and Schumers and Mamdanis and Testers than Kinzingers and Liz Cheneys and Joe Walches, but that would get me ratio'd here.
This really does reveal that for progressives, the threat posed by MAGA isn’t really different than the broader political disagreement about policy. In fact, I would guess a lot of Progressives like the destruction of our democratic systems of checks and balances in the hope that due to some mystical intervention, somehow they are ultimately the ones who wield the unlimited executive powers and crush dissent.
>Before proceeding with the list, though, I wanted to talk a little bit about Golden because I’m pretty angry about the situation.<
I'm angry about the situation, too. But I personally think the real problem is the weird way political parties operate in the United States, and how their operation intersects with the state laws that determine ballot access and (critically) partisan labelling on these ballots. Even if the Democratic Party had PRE nominated Jared Golden and said there's no need for a primary, they'd be SOL if a challenger to Golden entered the primary election and won. Not only would that challenger be on the general election ballot, that challenger (and not Democratic Party-endorsed Jared Golden) would enjoy the designation "Democrat" on the ballot.
What do people think about the alternative hypothesis that Jared Golden just isn't very good with media? Josh Shapiro who is cut from the same cloth as a center left moderate overperformer is the CONSTANT subject of various pieces about the future of the democratic party. My theory is that Shapiro is just good at media, Golden just isn't.
Though I think there are also a bunch of important differences in *how* they moderate. A Jewish lawyer from suburban Philadelphia moderates in a very different way from a marine from rural Maine. The media types know a lot of people like the former and can read them as friendly in a way that they find harder with the latter.
A while ago, Matt said that Golden explicitly eschewed national media coverage and mostly engaged with local press. He didn't really elaborate on it, but I found it interesting.
I think Josh Shapiro is more interesting to writers because the media is obsessed with Israel-Palestine and he is a Zionist. He isn't profiled just because he's an overperforming moderate but because he's a flashpoint and a lot of young people hate him.
Isn't that somewhat of a good thing, though? When your elevator pitch is, "You know me, I'm not like those other Democrats" having Democratic-coded media parachuting in to say how wonderful you are kind of undermines that.
I know it's anathema to most politicians, but there are strategic advantages to not being liked by certain groups. To take another example, every Democratic Senate candidate running against an incumbent should be against Chuck Schumer becoming Majority Leader, and Chuck Schumer needs to just shut up and live with it. It's the cleanest break-with-the-disaster of 2024 message. Be unpopular so your party can win.
(I'll note Pelosi always had candidates say they would not support her for speaker, never uttered a word of complaint, and never lost a leadership vote. She knew what she was doing.)
Great, so we're left with ONLY people in politics who have the emotional stability of a POW camp survivor. That will be great for the country. Next you'll be telling me that bullying is good because it weeds our the weak from the strong.
>It's rather the Democratic aligned elite media ecosystem just never really gave him the time of day.<
That can add to the problem, sure, but it really wouldn't *be* much of a problem if, as in other rich democracies, political parties in the United States possessed a full and unfettered right to nominate whoever they like. Or, to put it another way, a primary challenge can do damage even to even quite well-liked and admired incumbents, never mind centristy mavericks like Jared Golden. Leftists—including those in the elite media—often get it wrong as to who maximizes the chances of winning a general election, or else they're perfectly happy to see the Democratic candidate lose the race.
Why not simply take away their influence on the nomination process? The way we run our elections is bonkers.
Progressives have been practicing this weird coerce and extort politics for like a decade. It’s like they want to mimic the Tea Party, but they don’t have a path to an electoral majority if they succeed in forcing their positions. Republicans are advantaged by structural geographic factors, the fact they at least meet some of the cultural values of their voters, and the fact progressives hold much of this country in contempt for mundane reasons.
What they’re doing is exactly what you said, and then hoping that a once-in-a-generation Obama-esque talent will pop up on their side and deliver victory. That’s why they’re so excited about Mamdani: they think he’s that talent.
Everybody can’t be President, it’s ridiculous that we hold every elected official to that standard. Mamdani has done Democrats a great favor by showing them how to run a campaign—not everyone has the talent for it, but I’m sure a lot of people do, and we need to have an eye out for those people who know how to navigate the 21st century media ecosystem.
He can be a cultural force, he can never be President. It is possible for someone to influence culture without being President (and it is definitely possible to be President without influencing culture, as with the most recent Democratic POTUS).
Our constitutional structure wasn't designed for a system of two quasi-official major parties, but nonetheless the primary and ballot access reforms may have been an improvement over the status quo when first adopted over a century ago.
But that was then. Now the status quo is that we have the equivalent of two established state parties, governed by nobody.
It's hard to predict how it would play out, in the very different information and communication environment to today and tomorrow, if we did away with the past century's worth of laws that privilege the two established parties, and fully separated party and state, so that parties were again fully private organizations without specific privileges granted by law. But my bet is it would make possible a flowering of new coalitions and political configurations.
Very unlikely. The constitution may not have been explicitly designed for a Two party system, but a first past the post presidential system systematically favors that outcome.
There's a reason it keeps popping up. The Whigs attempt to run regional candidates in 1836 was a failure attempted out of weakness as was the Democrat's 1860 attrmpt.
The current hollow party system additionally means it's easier path to take over an existing party than create a new one. I wish we had more regionalization in the parties, but not sure it can be sustained in the current environment.
I live in the district next to Jared Golden's, and I can tell you *exactly* why the national media is not falling all over themselves to promote him. It's because he is the House version of Kyrsten Sinema. I personally think he brings most of the shit he gets on himself, and for no good reason-Matt has to know he wrote an article for the Bangor Daily News last year saying how fine it was all going to be when Trump got reelected, and he's been a big proponent of Trump's tariffs. There was no need for any of that. He's just a prickly guy.
(And besides, the inside dope is that he was *really* pissed about having a primary challenger.)
What major Democratic initiatives has Golden blocked? Or maybe he supported Mike Johnson for Speaker over Hakeem Jeffries (hey, it's possible I didn't hear about it!).
Politics isn't for little children. IOW, who the fuck cares about Golden's occasional forays into Trump-whispering if he's an infinitely better and more reliable VOTE for decency in the House of Representatives? Do you really not care about substantive results? Do you really think sending Paul LePage to Washington instead of Jared Golden would be in Maine or America's interest*? Because that's what's extremely likely to happen.
*On second thought don't answer that. I get serious horseshoe vibes from you.
It's interesting that Golden doesn't have the highest Heritage Action (i.e., basically pro-conservative) voting score among congressional Democrats. Last Congress, he got a 26% rating. Others with the same rating: Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna. Those with a higher rating (28%): AOC and Rashida Tlaib.
Unlike Sinema Golden puts up numbers. If the Dems lose the seat with his challenger as the nominee he will look much more like Manchin. It's not like Manchin was right about everything, he was just much better than the realistic options.
Yes, that is very true. The GOP nominee for that seat is likely to be Paul LePage, our 80ish year old "Trump before Trump" former governor, who remains relatively popular in the 2nd CD even if he can't break 20% in the 1st. Golden may have lost that seat anyway this time around (although a blue wave would obviously have helped him a lot)
Strong disagree. Krysten Sinema doesn’t get enough hate for having an absolutely bizarre set of policy stances. For example, she basically single handedly saved the carried interest tax loophole. It primarily benefits hedge funds and private equity, which have a very limited presence in AZ, so it’s not a local issue. It’s also not popular or populist because it solely benefits a tiny slice of extremely rich people. It strongly gives, “sold out to corporate lobbyists”.
Sinema is basically the poster child for why I have sympathy for Democrats or Progressives who are suspicious of "we need more moderates" stance. There is moderation in theory (I support Dems on 90% of issue, but on one or two high profile issues like immigration or gun control that swing voters notice, I will break from the party) and moderation in practice (I will support an end to the government shutdown because I'm more committed to archaic and idiotic senate procedures than winning the political fight).
I defended Manchin given the partisan lean of his state. But Sinema really is the ultimate riposte that progressives can give to Matt. As you say, who the heck is the swing voter in Arizona who's coming around to voting for Sinema because she defended the carried interest loophole. Or worse, when she breaks with the party on an Dem issue that actually has a decent amount of support from at least some GOP voters (see her vote on $15 minimum wage).
I also have said before that Matt is sort of forgetting that a lot of what Blue Dog Dems did back 15-20 years ago to show moderation was basically cut down or cut out provisions of basically any bill that came their way just for the sake of showing they were moderate. Like it wasn't even about objecting to a provision that maybe particularly harms their district or state. It was just cutting down a bill for the sake of showing moderation. It was basically the worst form of "inside the beltway" thinking about what moderation should be. I just wish Matt remembered that he was one of the people who first enlightened me to how dumb this thinking was back then.
> For example, she basically single handedly saved the carried interest tax loophole
The median voter is often the deciding vote but they don't do things "single-handedly." They do it because there were already enough votes from one side to push the issue into their view.
I remember the complaints from sitting Democratic Senators that it was "undemocratic" for 2 Senators to stop a bill, but it wasn't 2 Senators, it was 51 Senators.
Because I don't think he needed to do that to win. I think it was unnecessary pandering and, more to the point, the chance to put a thumb in the eye of the Maine Democratic Party, who of course support him but also can't stand him.
Well, you can believe what you'd like about me, but I know my state. For years, until 2014, the 2nd CD in Maine was represented by a gay union organizer. His voters didn't all die and get replaced by MAGA diehards in the course of a few years.
The other thing to remember is that Maine uses ranked choice voting for national elections, which is how Golden has won every single time. He's almost nobody's first choice up there, really.
"His voters didn't all die and get replaced by MAGA diehards in the course of a few years."
No, but you're on here explicitly saying you wouldn't welcome those voters back into the Democratic Party and it's pretty clear that a lot of Democrats agree with you, which is a major reason why the only Democrat they might vote for is Golden.
I have zero idea where you got my statement that the 2nd CD is not culturally MAGAville with the absurd premise in that reply. I simply would not prefer to see the Democratic party welcome never trumpers *to positions of influence within the party* when the only thing we really have in common is hating Trump. They still don't support a Democratic platform and I'm not going to support a Republican who doesn't like Trump when more than likely I have an actual Democrat-be it a Chuck Schumer or a Bernie Sanders type-for whom to cast my ballot. It has nothing to do with Jared Golden.
Democrats have been able to attract some competent and talented people who have been pushed out of the Republican Party. This might make “Democrats center right” to some, but it’s an opportunity created by Trump. It would be silly not to take advantage of this opportunity to reposition on social and economic issues.
You say it might be silly not to take advantage of the Trump-created opportunity, but the D's don't have a great recent record of taking advantage of Trump-created opportunities....
Ehh, golden would have won the primary and every mod has a challenger. Maybe don’t just chicken out of running. This blog held him up as the paragon of independent, tough, winning candidate only for him to fold from a primary challenger
I voted for Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, for the first time since McGovern. I wrote in candidates for the last three Presidential elections. There is not a Republican left in National Office save Rand Paul, who at least will point out to the President that blowing up the lowest level drug smugglers is illegal. But I generally don’t vote for libertarians; one exception was the pot grower who ran in 2016. William Weld was his VP choice, and he is sane.
My issue with voting Democrat is simple. Are they loony? I can live with center-left over MAGA loony. There are two requirements they have to meet: first, a realization that spending other people's money is no longer a viable strategy. We have a progressive tax scheme. The well-off already pay the majority of the taxes. If you want to squeeze them a little more, fine, but there has to be a realization that taxing the millionaires and billionaires will not solve our fiscal dilemma.
The second thing they have to acknowledge is the fiscal reality of our entitlement programs. Around 2034, SS will become insolvent, requiring a mandatory 23% benefit reduction. Covering your ears when this is pointed out and yelling la la la la la in order to ignore the issue is not a serious way to act.
MAGA and Trump believe in the tooth fairy and that she will take care of it. Current Democrat leadership is no better. The Progressive Caucus as a whole also accepts this fantasy, as does the American public.
Populism has infected both Parties; it has caused them to lie to the American voter, and the American voter also accepts this fantasy.
A SS fix will require tax or a reduction in benefits; there is no other way around it. Same with Medicare. Voters will complain and scream, "I paid for my benefit.” No you didn’t. You roughly paid 2/3 of your benefit with your employer's help. You roughly paid 1/3rd of your Medicare benefit.
Taxes are coming; if the voters want European-style benefits, borrowing money is no longer a viable option. America is effectively broke, the free lunch is over, and unless something is done, the standard of living will go down.
An anthem for Democrats is a reduction in spending. I’d like to hear one serious Democrat come up with a reduction of some sort. Sure, they might say cut the military, a crappy option in a world where more countries are challenging our power. It may happen, but if they cannot come up with another reduction, they are not a serious candidate.
Sadly the delusional cheerleaders for the financial system are still pushing tax cuts and stimulus spending. Its amazing how many of the populace don't realize it's not free money. Politicians selling us down the road for votes.
You have perfectly described populism. It is a virus. Each candidate sees how many lies and false promises they can make. When Harris said she also would support no tax on tips, she was disqualified in my eyes. Why in the hell should that one group be blessed with not paying income tax? There was only one reason Trump did it, Nevada, they have a lot of tipped workers in Las Vegas. He won the state, and I can hear Harry Reid now. “Well, it worked didn't it"
Maybe if they pay the stimulus in DigiTrumpBucks (tm) they can get around this. They didn’t sell US policy to the crypto industry for nothing, did they?
> A SS fix will require tax or a reduction in benefits
Congress just needs to pass a law saying that in 2034 forward, benefits remain on the same schedule.
In 2033, SS payments will exceed receipts by about 1.0% of GDP. The 1.0% will come from the SSTF redeeming treasury bonds, the money for which will come from the general fund.
In 2034, SS payments will exceed receipts by about 1.0% of GDP. The 1.0% will come from the general fund.
And we’ll have to come up with the money. Not sure we can add that to the 20 trillion we are currently overspending in the next 10 years. The $2 trillion a year in deficits are killing us. How much more will we have to borrow, because Medicare will also be insolvent shortly thereafter.
It's a problem but it has nothing to do with the exhaustion of the SSTF. It could be gone today and the situation would be the same.
(... The exhaustion of the SSTF technically gives Congress an out: do nothing, let benefits get slashed, now save 1.0%GDP of the deficit that's about 6%GDP. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSDFYGDP I am willing to bet against Congress doing that.)
Not if they like their job. They all see to be nearing 80 years of age so it seems the grist they can make on insider trading is worth staying till they die in offixe
So, Jared Golden, the Democrats’ MVP in Congress, is not running for reelection, and Matt Y focuses his annoyance on … progressives and “media cool kids in Brooklyn” who weren’t sufficiently nice or appreciative of Golden, so now he’s leaving! Look what you made him do!
It’s like an intraparty version of Murc’s Law: anything that goes wrong is the fault of those no-good, meanie lefty progressives!
Sigh. Look, I’m sure that being a Democrat in Congress nowadays sucks absolute ass, and it’s easy for me to judge when I don’t have to deal with it myself. But also, come on. The recurring critique of the Democrats is that we’re too soft and feminine, and we need to be all manly and tough and macho and FYF to appeal to more working class men. In light of that, a man (and a veteran no less, if I remember correctly) going “womp womp, I’m leaving my seat, most likely to be won by a Republican, because people are too mean to me” is unseemly.
Dude do you have kids? Because I think framing it as “wah people are being mean to me” is pretty disingenuous. I’m a woman, but I can tell you the most manly, macho thing a guy can do in my eyes is say he’s putting aside his personal ego to protect his children. He explicitly said he wanted to step away from the ugliness it was exposing his children too. If you want to make yourself feel better by acting like that’s wimpy, go ahead, but it takes balls. The question is did Democrats do what they could to make the environment his family was exposed to better or worse while he was in office and if the answer isn’t better, why on earth not, given how valuable he was?
It's really disappointing, and I can't understand it from a "true believer", wanting to make a difference perspective. Which means it's something else, something less heroic and potential more human (fallible). But with his performance, he probably had a shot at Senate or Governor one day (of his choosing), and gave up on it
Or it's the added stress of having to drain resources in a primary battle and then having to fight yet another uphill battle in the general election, all to give more power to people who actively make you and your family's life more miserable.
No one really knows for sure why he's not running, but I think it's silly the way people on the left like you clearly disdain him but also get really mad at him for not running.
It's not Golden's fault that the left is too stupid to win in swing districts.
I wasn't aware congressional seats were given in perpetuity to whomever won a primary and general once.
But I'm sure in a way Matt is right, in the sense Jared Golden was likely annoyed he actually had to win over Democratic voters and appeal to them for the first time in nearly a decade as opposed to just play both sides are bad guy for an entire campaign.
Plus it didn't help as seen in polling that just maybe, his dumb pro-tariff stance wasn't actually that popular in this district and it wasn't the progressives that made him support that.
All I'm going to say is Omar & Tilab both faced far more serious primary campaigns than Dunlap likely was and they didn't take their ball and go home.
Golden won the Democratic primary every year he was on the ballot, so clearly he was successful in winning over Democratic voters.
But if you're right, then if a dumb cowardly moderate with no support from Democratic voters like Golden could win this district, then surely a True Progressive with the full support of The Base should be able to easily win.
How much do you think Dunlap will win this district by if he wins the primary? 5 points? 10?
I'm not saying Dunlap will win, but at a certain point, if you want to be the Democratic party nominee, you have to win over Democratic voters, especially when those Democratic voters have another choice.
I don't think Jared Golden should've dropped out.
I think Jared Golden should've proven himself to be the great politician all the centrists and moderates claim he is.
He did win over 90% of the Democratic voters in every election.
Compare that to someone like Zohran Mamdani who only won 66% of Democrats despite his only opponents being a Republican and a Trump-endorsed sexual predator.
But again, if everything is saying is accurate, then Dunlap will win easily. He only won't win easily if you're wrong.
He never actually had significant primary competition until this time, which he turned tail and ran. I bet a competitive primary would've resulted in far more votes in said primary than any other past primary Golden was involved in.
I never said Dunalp was guaranteed to win and it's weird you keep claiming that.
At the end of the day, when the time came, Jared Golden thought it was above him to actually compete for the votes of Democratic primary voters when they may actually be in question.
Good list. Moulton is an interesting one, he got his start taking on a corrupt congressional couple in a primary challenge. Then got a bit over his skis in challenging Pelosi and exploring a Presidential campaign briefly that had no traction.
But, he gotten some other stuff right and Markey is basically a seat filler at this point. He's not dangerous, because literally no one is following him or remembers he's there most of the time. However, he's very much a replacement level blue state Senator who doesn't need a six year contract extension.
>"Progressive nonprofits ran ads criticizing him for opposing the budget resolution and other inconsequential votes, joining Republicans on stuff that would have passed one way or another. Indivisible chapters organized anti-Golden protests."
1. Golden is the strong manly-man politician that can win in a Trumpy district precisely because neither he nor his manly-man constituents care what woke wussies in the media say
2. Golden is retiring because progressive wokesters in some blue city were mean to him even though they had zero power over his own district (which is manly and Trumpy)
Was Golden secretly wanting the love and admiration of the people he claimed were out of touch idiots? Or is there some other reason?
These are good questions and raise some issues regarding Golden's motivation. However, he is also human and it's quite possible that he was hurt by the attacks on him from his own party.
Aren't attacks by the party to be worn as a badge of honor and a sign of authenticity? Being attacked by the "squad" should make someone more popular in Trump country not less just as being attacked by billionaires should make you more popular in progressive cities.
Sure, if you're cold blooded. But it's no fun to read the attacks on you and it's normal to be concerned about what your kids will read about you (when they're old enough; his aren't yet).
Did anyone call Golden a 9/11 cheering America hating muslim communist anti-semite (Would that be Obama or Mamdani BTW)? I agree it would be bad if your kids read that about you. Isn't every single squad member like AOC getting the most horrific death threats from Trumpists and billionaire fanboys?
Politics is not for the faint-hearted sure, but the degree of hostility and concrete power imbalances matter.
I honestly don't buy it because no one (except George Washington) ever gave up power because some randos with no actual power were impotently yelling at them.
If Golden is valued so much, did anyone stop Hakeem "word salad" Jeffries who holds actual power from personally wining and dining Golden to make him feel like the Marilyn Monroe of the party? Did "the groups" stop Jeffries from appointing Golden to important roles?
My guess is that Golden was probably offered a nice hedge fund role if he vacates the seat to the GOP by not even running as an incumbent and he took it. It is all good as a personal decision for him and his family. Matt trying to blame powerless randos for this is what is comical.
Thank you for these recommendations, Matt. To this list I would add Dan Osborn, the Independent in the race to become the next Senator from Nebraska. There is no Democratic candidate in this race, and Pete Ricketts, the incumbunt Republican billionaire-lacking-charisma, is eminently beatable. Last year, Dan outperformed Kamala in the state by 15+% in his race against Deb Fischer; he's now known throughout the state; he's already tied with Ricketts in the polls; and he's exactly the rare non-MAGA candidate who can flip this critical Senate seat.
Time to launch "WrenchPAC" the PAC focused on electing Dem aligned people who are good with wrenches to Congress.
Is there a way to give money to political candidates without having my contact information sold to other candidates and groups who incessantly email and worse, text? I would be much more likely to donate if I knew I wasn’t going to be spammed.
Unsure how the methods would work here, but I’d love to see a study that tried to see if spam political messaging actually reduces aggregate donation.
My suspicion, and this informed by my work in the industry (albeit with a non spammy firm) is that they do it because it really does work even while pissing off a lot of people into not donating.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/trump-is-terrified-of-your-grassroots
I agree, there must be some evidence, or perception, that the spam works. Maybe the short term returns justify the practice, but in terms of building a longer term relationship with recurring donations it is a huge disincentive to donate.
It feels disrespectful. If I care enough about your and your cause to give you money, why is there an expectation that you'll try to profit off my generosity.
What I want to know is why, from a psychological perspective, 1300% is apparently the maximum alleged matching amount that will induce people to donate at a positive rate of return. (Seriously, in the 2020 election cycle I watched GOP-oriented fundraising emails ramp the alleged match higher and higher, but it very clearly has topped out at 1300%, so there's got to be some sort of cap on even the most gullible people's credulity, because I can't otherwise see why it hasn't escalated further.)
Those emails "TRUMP IS ABOUT TO 💣💣💣DESTROY💣💣💣 AMERICA!" or "(((THEY))) ARE AFTER TRUMP, DONATE NOW TO SHOW (((THEM))) WE'RE NOT SCARED!" are the survivors of dozens or even hundreds of rounds of A/B testing.
There's a lot that's unsure in politics about what works, but the consultancy firms that rake in a percentage of donations are 100% on the ball in terms of maximizing donations.
They can A/B test the direct response to an email. It’s much harder to test how individual emails like this affect donation to related causes on future occasions. If it causes 10% donations in recipients, but decreases donations by 0.1% on 200 future occasions, then it is net negative, but will show up as very positive in the tests they can do.
Yeah. I haven’t donated to a candidate in 10+ years (outside of local candidates with Seattle’s “democracy vouchers.”) Nor signed a petition. And the reason why is my already cluttered to hell inbox.
Does the same go for Wikipedia? I gave them $5 ten years ago and I still routinely get emails that sound like they're trying to extort me or they cheated on me and "owe me an explanation".
The best one I've seen was one my brother got that was along the lines of:
"This is Donald Trump! I tried to contact you about renewing your MAGA membership, but you didn't respond.
<Shady link>"
There were some real extreme-dark-pattern fundraising techniques being done by elected Republicans surrounding Trump's impeachment/indictments. "DONATE TO HELP DONALD TRUMP!" You'd click on a link and give hundreds of dollars, it would be repeating without explaining that clearly, and only like 1% went to Trump, the rest went to the specific politician.
George Santos one of them but not even the specific example I was thinking of. https://x.com/JakeSherman/status/1730604017053483244
I think I've mentioned here before, but I'll repeat myself that I'm absolutely amazed that there have been no consumer protection lawsuits brought that I'm aware of over a lot of GOP-related fundraising activities in the past few years. (I know there is ample case law that politicians cannot be sued for breaking *campaign promises* under consumer protection statutes, but fundraising emails that, e.g., fail to disclose that the charge will be recurring, falsely represent that specific matching amounts will be given, that the donor's name will be entered in a drawing to have a 1-on-1 dinner with Donald Trump, etc., all seem clearly distinguishable from those precedents, especially when those fundraising emails are very often from third-party organizations, not the actual candidate's own campaign.)
Another reason to love George Santos!
I read that a bunch went out to dementia patients who kept donating money.
I'd bet, on the basis of It Sounds About Right, that:
a) Most people put serious thought into their donations, and most donations come from people who have considered opinions that aren't easily changed
b) The marginal person who decides to donate on the basis of an unsolicited message is a credulous and emotionally labile moron
So marketers correctly choose to optimize for the morons even though most donors aren't morons.
It might be hard to test the alternative because I'm not sure people would find a "we won't spam you" commitment to be credible.
I don't know about aggregate donation, but it decreases MY donations.
Could be that spam overall reduces donations, but increases donations to _your_ candidate relative to not doing it. A prisoners dilemma.
I get the sense that in all forms of advertising/PR in general, it's really hard to model and measure the specific counterfactual of "this person was a potential customer, but our advertising/outreach annoyed them out of supporting us." For instance, I'll never buy Liberty Mutual insurance because I hate their ads so much, but how would they even know?
Agreed. The spam clearly works, because they keep doing more of it. Seems the numbers of "small dollar donations" is direct evidence that it works.
Yes, a good rule of thumb in political fundraising is regardless of what you think personally of a tactic if they are doing it, it's because it does in fact work as unlike say sign wars (which probably don't matter and are more about tradition than anything else) finance people really do test different strategies and compare them over time. Dating myself but there used to be a ton of dancing cowboy ads online that were idiotic, but apparently they did get people to click: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/business/media/18adco.html
... Those worked? Who clicked on those? They always looked to me like something in a feardotcom-style movie that leads a demon to possess your soul over the internet.
Maybe they were, but people clicked on em
I have the same concern. I get tons of political spam from PA, where I have never lived but gave a small donation to a candidate years ago. I hate it.
I've commented here before that I quite likely received more fundraising emails from Bob Casey's campaign in 2024 than the campaigns of every other candidate that year combined (often multiple emails from Casey in the same day) despite: (1) never having lived in PA, (2) never having visited PA or had any relatives living there, (3) never having donated to a Democratic candidate anywhere, and (4) having been a registered Republican for my entire voting life.
I got a ton of those as well, although I have had to register as a Dem owing to living in cities where the primary is often the most important vote. This cycle I got a lot with disturbing end-times vibes that I eventually figured out were related to the state judicial elections.
Even if individual candidates don’t share information, isn’t there the fact that donations in general are public record for transparency reasons? I’m not sure if the public records include phone numbers or not, but I would think you could cross reference them with other information that would.
Donations over a certain threshold are, but you can stay below the threshold. For Congress it's $200
Write a paper check and mail it. Just give them your name, occupation, and snail mail address (you’ll probably get some junk mail, but that’s probably less of a bother than spamming).
Checks haha who has those anymore
Unfortunately, my checks have my phone number on them.
Block it out.
Yeah, that's a good idea. At least they don't have my email.
They must use the same strategy that retailers and spammers rely on: yeah they know it's obnoxious as hell but studies show they can get a few percent extra customers/responses for shoving this crap repeatedly down our throats. Great. All it gets me to do is unsubscribe so while they're getting a few extra donors they're losing a lot of folks like me.
One way that looks promising is oath.vote, who say that they won't share your contact info: https://helpcenter.oath.vote/oath-help-center/how-does-oath-keep-my-data-and-contact-info-private
I generally donate the old fashioned way (a paper check sent in the mail). I'm not going to say that strategy has completely insulated me from email spam, but it certainly cuts down on it. And I get to take the credit card fees out of the equation.
FYI if they text you and you say “stop” they are required by law to not text you again and you can sue them
I share your ambivalence about national security hawkishness being used as a signal for moderation. I would like the party to move to the center on crime, public safety, and education reform, I’m not sure I support the sanctions on Cuba.
One of the things that’s stuck with me about Ruben Gallego was him introducing legislation to kick out Russian students from American universities after Putins invasion. It was such a batshit legislation to propose, my chemistry lab partner from russia was an apolitical nerd and was super worried about whatever the hell Gallego was trying to do (Gallego failed eventually). It’s one of the reasons I hesitate to get on the Ruben 2028 bandwagon. IMO someone with such reflexively hawkish instincts should not be president, given how much power over foreign policy the president has.
There was a weird, brief and largely inconsequential time, where justified liberal support for Ukraine flirted with xenophobic anti-Russian sentiment, it dissipated quickly but the fact some liberals wanted to drop Russian books and composers for a period did point to something wrong.
Yep, friends of mine on social media were freaking out about classical-music stations airing previously scheduled performances of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. I pointed out that the big political issue in Tchaikovsky's era was the liberation of the serfs (!). And the episodes of boycotting Russian restaurants in the States and demanding purity statements from musicians in North America *with family back in Russia* were dispiriting. It was a bizarre couple of months!
Might have also pointed out that Tchaikovsky was gay (a punishable offense in his time)
Yes though not sure it was just “liberal”; in the early days it was a broad swathe of the public indulging in anti-Russia xenophobia. It was a revealing moment because it didn’t map onto the typical US culture war stuff. Though part of what it revealed was that libs are as hungry as anyone else for someone to hate.
More than anything it's idiotic and benefits Putin as he can point to "Russophobia" in the West. Also, nothing would damage Putin's Russia more than Europe and the US admitting millions of young, well educated Russians who don't want to live in a cold, miserable, imperialist Banana Republic.
Wow I did not know he did that. That should be disqualifying. I support Ukraine but it was dispiriting to see how many institutions just decided to go after random individual Russians who probably didn’t even support the war. By contrast, I don’t think even the most strongly anti-Israel politicians would’ve supported similar legislation banning Israeli students after the Gaza War.
Yeah, some of the most anti-Russia people I've met have been Russians who made a point of immigrating here because they were so unhappy in Russia. Obviously, that's not universally true, but it was strange to see Democrats openly endorsing discrimination on the basis of national origin.
I'd like to +1 this without signing on to the final sentence. Every politician I've seen in my lifetime has done something equally stupid, or worse, and we've got to work with what we've got
I know multiple people who fled Putin’s regime. This sort of law would sweep up them. Worse than deplorable, it is illogical. He has not thought through who immigrates here.
Sounds like a bad policy to me as well, but maybe the number of students from that country at US universities is really small? I haven't looked into it.
The point is what such reflexive hawkishness reveals about a potential Gallego presidency. Foreign policy is an area where the president has a lot of unilateral power and I just don’t think anyone with such innately hawkish instincts should be president. The fact that this legislation didn’t really have any domestic constituency that more polarizing topics like Israel have and he still decided to introduce the legislation is revealing to me. It signals a kind of an innate hawkishness that worries me as much as the crazy tankie isolationist.
It isn't really hawkishness, Russian students in America aren't a key Putin constituency, it doesn't serve any purpose or signal aggression, it is just bigotry.
I actually don’t think Gallego is bigoted I just think he’s kind of dumb and not ready for prime time.
I was commenting on the action not his soul. It seemed to be a common thing in the 2019-2023 period, where a totally normal moderate would say an absurd or offensive thing that went against everything they stood for and now they pretend they never said it.
Sure it is psychotic nevertheless and doesn’t reflect well on Gallegos decision making skills on a non-ideological level.
A lot of it comes down to the fact that the hawks ended up being right about Russia and China, so they have more credibility in the party than they did during Obama era
Probably smaller at the undergrad level (although even there it would still be an atrocious decision) but I have known a lot of Russian PhD students in my field (off the top of my head, probably more than any non-US country other than India, China, Iran, and Israel).
e: I guess I should specify that I’m a computer scientist, although I think Russia is probably decently represented in most of the hard sciences at least?
My chemistry grad school advisor was Russian, and many of his other grad students were from the former Soviet sphere (Kazakhs and Poles, mostly). I never finished my PhD, but I have a soft spot for the dry Russian sense of humor. He wasn’t the most ethical boss, but he was both brilliant and hilarious
Russians can be very deadpan.
It’s not a top 20 source of students. Even places like Nepal, Thailand, Peru, and Kuwait send more students. But there are more Russian students than Australian in the United States. And as John K notes, it’s quite a noticeable number in graduate programs in mathematical sciences.
I didn’t know Gallego had done that. That’s super shitty! WTAF, Senator? Russian students in the US are likely to be either apolitical or opponents of the Putin regime! We should welcome them, not kick them out for something they had no control over!
Chinese students should at the very least be barred from using WeChat and otherwise monitored. The whole apparatus of CCP surveillance of Chinese students needs to go.
I suspect if Gallego actually runs, it will be one of those cases where an impressive electoral performer in their own state just doesn't have the charisma or juice for a presidential campaign (a la DeSantis).
That sounds like a terrible and frankly bigoted policy. That said, did it seem like the bill was actually going to become law, or was this a messaging bill designed for Gallego to appear performatively tough in foreigners? I think that matters, because Dems, especially in border states, are going to need to do a lot of performative toughness if they ever want the Senate back
Re: public safety, I posted a comment that probably will be buried down-thread, because I don't wake up early enough to get in early before the comments flood... One of the things that impressed me about Cait Conley was that when I talked with her about policing and crime, she had independently come up with an idea that sounded _very_ much like Matt's Police For America -- working to build up the pipeline of good officers, to help cities hire the folks they need to do effective policing. (If you dig down through the comments and search my username you can find my more detailed remarks.) She and Manny Rutinel (in Colorado) are the the two red-to-blue candidates that I've personally talked to with whom I'm most impressed for this cycle.
One other consideration re: Jeff Duncan - he could be the John Bel Edwards of Georgia and finally take up the full Medicaid expansion. Dems periodically winning governorships in red states has been (alongside referenda) one of the most important factors in the steady forward march of Medicaid expansion to 40 states.
We should be putting up competitive gubernatorial candidates in the 10 holdout states cycle after cycle until Medicaid expansion reaches all of them. This is an area where electoral success for Dems leads to direct, tangible benefits for people's lives. And it's one of the best issues we have. Medicaid expansion won outright by referendum in places as red as Idaho and Oklahoma - people love it! Running on cultural moderation plus Medicaid expansion could be viable (to a first approximation) essentially anywhere.
In many of those states, the appropriate D strategy (assuming your primary concern is policy outcomes in aggregate) is probably to run candidates whose positions are literally "Republican on basically ever national policy except Medicare expansion".
That's right - you basically say "I love guns. I love cops and my truck has a Thin Blue Line decal. I'm for border security and deportations. I love our troops, and I love seeing them crack down on the commies and criminals in blue states. AND I'll expand Medicaid."
A Dem who campaigns like this could be viable in almost any state. Although this is way to the right of me personally I think it pretty much describes the median voter.
But what do they campaign on that most Democrats actually agree with (other than Medicaid)? Or is it time for the Democrats to become a single-issie party (for campaign purposes) of Medicare for All?
To be clear- I'm talking about the ACA Medicaid expansion. Dems running in the 10 remaining holdout states that haven't implemented the expansion should focus relentlessly on this issue. And of course the 10 holdout states are much more conservative than the average state - we're talking mainly about the Deep South and Wyoming. So these are not places where you can say almost anything that most Dems agree with outside of "I love Medicaid."
That said - this is good advice for Federal Dems too. Currently we are a basically uncompetitive opposition (especially in the Senate), and Dems not seriously trying to win enables Republican extremism and abuse. The only way we change this is to be dramatically more right-wing, especially on the issues I listed. So I'd love to hear Senate candidates in Trump +10 states (which decide the majority) talking like this too.
You can still say a few other things that Dem voters agree with. Financial regulation and clean water are important, and Republicans threaten both. Dems are better at creating jobs. Dems won't try to dictate your personal life. But we need to show voters that we care as much as they do about the economy, AND we're up against the fundamental problem that (with the exception of Medicaid) voters agree with Trump and the GOP about most things.
I think you meant “Medicaid” rather than “Medicare” expansion…and rather than Republican on policy, maybe just former Republicans, i.e., the pre-Trump Republican party. I’m supporting a former Republican (running now as a Democrat) for governor of Florida, he’s a basically a never-Trumper and I don’t even know what his policy positions are for the most part.
I'd be stunned if Medicaid expansion doesn't end up being one of those positions (and it's badly needed in Florida!).
Otherwise if it's David Jolly you're talking about, I feel like the main thing I've heard him talk about is flood insurance (which I gather is also a big deal).
Has Duncan taken a position on Medicaid expansion? His website (which as far as I can tell doesn't have an issues page) talks about how he pitched for Georgia Tech in the College World Series but I don't see anything about that issue.
I've seen some social media posts from Duncan about expanding health coverage. When he has an issues page, I would be shocked if Medicaid expansion *doesn't* feature prominently.
I am not aware of anyone who has won a governorship as a Dem since 2014 in a non-expansion state and not at least tried to implement Medicaid expansion. And the vast majority of them have succeeded!
We know Duncan was opposed to expanding Medicaid in 2020. You'd think he would want to make his conversion apparent. Maybe he will, but as someone who actually lives in Georgia I see no reason to rush to support him until he makes clear where he stands.
That's a fair position on your part - this is a pretty high stakes issue!
The good news is he does now seem to be making explicit statements that he is for Medicaid expansion, for example:
"Duncan touted policies such as doubling the Georgia Rural Hospital Tax Credit program and expanding Medicaid."
https://www.savannahnow.com/story/news/state/2025/10/02/geoff-duncan-campaigns-in-savannah-with-focus-on-healthcare/86463056007/?gnt-cfr=1&gca-cat=p&gca-uir=true&gca-epti=z113028p116950c116950d00----v113028b0030xxd003065&gca-ft=136&gca-ds=sophi
I also saw an interview clip where he said outright that he was wrong to oppose expansion before.
Good stuff -- thanks for sharing. He does seem to have the Bill Kristol view that to effectively oppose Trump writing some op-eds isn't enough, you need to take up arms in the opposing army. Maybe he will consolidate support from Democratic voters.
Five seasons in and we get a new character? Is the first mention of your brother?
This does in fact have strong Michelle Trachtenberg on Buffy energy.
RIP
Very sad ending I agree
"Am I a key?"
Hey team - quick correction from North Carolina here. You should absolutely donate to NC Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls - it's vital that she wins. Just wanted to note that Democrats currently hold two, not three, seats on our state supreme court. Earls (and Riggs, who won in '24) are those two.
What this means is that if Earls holds her seat, then Democrats need to flip just 2 more seats to win a 4-3 majority on our state's highest court. In 2028, there are 3 seats up for election, all held by Republicans who have voted to protect Republican partisan gerrymandering. So if Earls wins, Dems need to flip just 2 of those 3 to flip control of the court. (Likewise, if she loses, they need to flip all 3.)
Earls for Justice: https://earls4justice.com
Updated. Thank you!
Thanks for the link. Just made my donation.
"And yet in all this time, there were no big Jared Golden features in national magazines"
While I share most of Matt's frustration, a national magazine feature or glowing praise from Brooklyn liberals probably would have undermined his candidacy in his particular district. For all we know, he was offered the national feature and turned it down. And if I were a centrist representing a light red district, I would welcome criticism from the far left, left, or even center-left
Good point. Every politician on this list should contact Mamdani's press team to stage a twitter fight with him.
The real truth, of course, is that progressives are more concerned about winning the future of the Democratic Party than optimizing for 2026, i.e., stopping Trump.
I say that without judgment. I don't hold that view--I'd prefer a somewhat moderate Democrat like Golden over the smaller chance a more progressive candidate wins that seat. But I do feel that way about people who were very recently Republicans like some on this list running in Democratic primaries. If the way for Democrats to "win" is to elect Republicans who jumped ship from Trump *after* he won the presidency, what's even the point of the party anymore? So I won't, for example, be supporting Duncan.
Well, the point would be Stopping MAGA
If one actually believes the MAGA threat.
Mostly however Left-Democrats are LARPing about fascism and have zero real sense of it.
It's funny, maybe I'm being just a mirror image of Late Blooming but I've found myself identifying less and less with the Democrats over this kind of tension, contradiction, whatever you want to call it. Trump is either a break the glass, all hands on deck, five alarm fire or he isn't. I think he is and the Biden administration's failure to approach it that way in any manner other than rhetoric has my loyalty and positive feelings towards the Democrats lower than they have been in my entire adult lifetime. I'm still voting for them for the time being, not that it matters in my deep blue district, but I do wonder how much of the damage to the brand comes from the completely justified perception that, however one feels about the policy positions, these are fundamentally unserious people, deeply interested in everything except for that which actually matters.
Democrats have ruined so much trust via hyperbolic language. Fascism, climate crisis, healthcare collapse, systemic injustice, etc. The language that something is a massive existential concern is not met with the same urgency or heavy response the rhetoric entails undermines credibility.
Progressive hyperbolic escalation on social media feeds into this distrust too.
And the fact that many Democratically controlled governments are failing at addressing problems (e.g.: cost of living, crime, homelessness, aging infrastructure) further exacerbates trust.
This really is an all politicians problem. There literally is no more obvious example of hyperbolic speech than Trump himself. Americans have simply become too comfortable with it to the point that they participate without much reflection about whether they are being hyperbolic themselves. They say the claim, and defend it first as literally true, and then retreat to arguing they were only speaking symbolically or generalizing. But they don’t even think about whether that’s true until confronted with counterpoints. Their mental models simply are not complex enough for that.
The growth of casual mendacity is probably one of worst consequences of social media.
Yea the degeneration of the center right in this manner really is something. I can't imagine the mental gymnastics someone has to do to conclude that the solution to their various problems, gripes, issues, whatever with the broader left or the American establishment generally is to put the biggest dumbass possible in charge of it all.
Nihilism and the schmexiness of Obama destroy conservatives in the Republican Party. They either left or they made a deal with the devil.
This is how I feel. Just ridiculous that Ed Markey even exists in a world where Trump poses the threat that he does.
Yep. Trump is an existential threat to democracy in the rhetoric but when it’s time to make policy he’s just another Republican. Climate change is an existential threat to *human life on Earth* when Democrats give speeches but not scary enough to make it easy to build nuclear plants. And when every CEO in the country is promising to spend trillions of dollars to build a computer to do your job at 5% of the cost, so they can take away your job and immiserate you, Democrats are mum. They’d be the worst people in the world, if it wasn’t for MAGA Republicans.
Or even Paul Ryan Republicans
At least the Paul Ryan Republicans, like the aforementioned CEOs, are pretty mask-off about the idea that you don’t deserve a good life (maybe don’t deserve a life?) if you’re not part of the capitalist class. I’m not sure that a lot of Democrats (think of e.g. Chuck Schumer here) really disagree at heart, but they pretend not to, and that’s worse.
I'm far from being a Schumer fan but I don't think that's a fair characterization at all.
When it comes to Schumer and Congressional Democrats I think it’s the gerontocracy effect more than anything else. To regulate tech we need young people in office
I hear ya. I switched to Independent a couple decades ago though I usually vote Democrat simply because they're the less worse option. What happened to the JFKs, FDRs, Teddy Roosevelts, Trumans, and Ike's? Does it take disastrous circumstances to get substantial candidates (ie--Great Depression, WWII, etc )? Are our Bizarro world politics just an archetypal symptom of waning empire?
Yea that's what keeps me up at night when I think about my kids' future. Some level of relative decline was probably inevitable given the historically unparalleled level of ascendancy we had after the Cold War. But we're still a very well placed country to stay strong and prosperous indefinitely if we play our hand with even minimal competence. Instead it seems like we're hell bent on an orgy of self indulgence and self destruction.
I think the Republican party has been MAGA-esque for longer than Trump has been in power, and that it's more important to have an actual liberal party if you're going to stop the illiberal slide in American politics. That's consistent with having a big tent, just not so big it includes recent Republican elected officials.
I think "Did you stand up against egregious abuses of power to the detriment of your own career" is a pretty straight-forward standard to use, and both candidates highlighted above meet that criteria.
I also think that, from an electoral math perspective, the Ds just can't afford to be that choosey if they ever want to win in the Senate. If you deny representation to anyone who was an R before, how can you expect to get votes from people who voted R in the past? And if you're rejecting those voters, you have no majority.
I think it's unreasonable to expect, and people do not in fact expect, parties to nominate former members of the opposing party in exchange for the votes of swing voters or switch voters.
Also, there just aren't that many people in the electorate who are basically Bush/Ryan era Republicans who are now open to voting Democrat. The Harris/Cheney road show seems to not have been a winning electoral strategy. There is, of course, a good reason for this: part of the appeal of the wage war & slash the welfare state policies of Bush/Ryan Republicans *was* cruelty, and a large part of thei voting base are perfectly comfortable with Trump who more openly exhibits that quality.
If they're the best candidate for the district, why on Earth not? I'm not saying you're obligated to nominate a defector. My position (contra yours) is that the option should remain on the table. And then you should choose the best option to win the seat.
Maybe we have slightly different ideas of the proposal.
My objection to Democrats nominating Republicans is not that they *were* Republicans so much as that they *are* Republicans. Generally, having been a Republican up until 2022 or so is a good indicator that one holds Republican views. "The party left me; I didn't leave the party." I'm just saying that's an option Democrats shouldn't exercise. I'd put Duncan, Cheney, etc., in that camp.
The idea isn't to punish people for having been Republicans and then defecting but rather to have minimal standards for what the Democratic Party stands for.
As a separate issue, I would question the judgment and sincerity of someone who says, "Yeah, I was a Republican up until 2022 but now I agree with most Democratic Party positions." If someone had a good explanation for the change of heart--maybe they encountered the ghost of FDR on the road to Damascus--maybe.
The option will always be on the table. People can (and do) vote for who they believe will best represent them. But since I don't believe a former Republican will best represent me, I'm not going to vote for one unless my back is against the wall.
Honestly, my biggest problem with the R-to-D politicians is that they run out of gas really quickly. Charlie Crist is now a political non-entity. Hagel really didn't do much for the Obama Administration as SoD.
Yes the unreasonableness of it all
Poor Republican duped into accepting impurity in their blood via Donolnd Trump (ex-D), or any number of Demcrats who flipped to R in House notably and have in 21st century continued on.
Harris lost for her campaign and the perception as well documented by Silver et al of being Too Left due to never clearly dumping her old Woke / Proggy positions of the 10s-early20s.
Trying to shift blame to Cheney is ... Cope.
While I appreciate your initial post engaging with mine, which sparked an interesting (to me) discussion, generally you've just thrown out lazy Twitter-tier strawman points, so I'm adding you to my ignore/mute list.
I tend to think liberal Dems would be more effective embracing homeless right liberals instead of pandering to the populist horseshoe.
It would certainly offer much better governance.
Edit: Or at least Left and Right liberals both need to think clearly about how to effectively marginalize the populist horseshoe, even if that doesn't necessarily mean a coalitional realignment. The right liberal wing has completely collapsed in terms of institutional power. The left liberals need to hold the line instead of embracing red vs brown politics.
What do you mean by "right liberal" and "populist horseshoe"?
If by right-liberals you mean Blue Dogs, they seem to be doing OK. If you mean people who were Republicans from the era between roughly Reagan to GWB, I'd dispute that most of them were that liberal.
If by populist horsehoe you mean a style of politics, I think that is somewhat orthogonall to this debate. If you mean a lack of commitment to democratic norms, I think (a) Democratic/progressive populists haven't really exhibited this in the US, and (b) it's hard to be the one party in favor of democratic norms while the other flouts them. If you mean policies that tend to have a populist character--"tax the rich," "stop insurance companies from putting profits over people," "secure the borders--then I'd say some populist ideas are good and some are bad, and that it's good when the good ideas get cross-party support.
What do you mean when you say the Blue Dogs seem to be doing okay? They got nearly wiped out in 2010 and 2014. Manchin retired, Golden is retiring…
I mean the Free Minds and Free Markets wing of the old R three legged stool. Obviously they had the executive power enthusiasts mostly in the Foreign Policy Hawk leg, and the Buchananite populists and theocrats and racists in the Social Conservative leg, but, prior to about 2017 or so, there were plenty of Republicans who were constitutionalist, pluralist, market liberals before they were purged by the Trumpists. Lots of these people still exist and they are much more aligned with constraining the power of MAGA than the labor protectionist or "overthrow capitalism" wings of the populist left who covet that power for themselves..
I guess my view would be that there are few principled libertarians in US politics, and that the actual history of libertarianism in the US as a political as opposed to intellectual movement, starting with Goldwater, was laundering segregationist arguments in terms of freedom of association. I think you see this in the Reagan coalition, which embraced the Southern strategy, "welfare queens" rhetoric, etc. The Tea Party was allegedly a free market response to Obama which quickly and without much comment folded into Trump.
I do think there are many free market intellectuals who sincerely hold those views, and Democrats should be open to citing them in white papers and engaging with them on policy-crafting, etc. I just don't think it's a real electoral coalition.
Part of me wants to welcome the Brian Sandovals into the Democratic Party, but my worry is that if every sane Republican becomes a moderate Democrat, there's no one left among the Republicans to be an internal moderating force. Also, these types tend to be relatively upscale and can help win in places like Virginia and Colorado, but I don't know how viable they are in places like Pennsylvania.
Just anecdotally, as someone who's spent my whole life living in Pennsylvania swing districts, it's not hardly the state of union steel workers/meat packers that it was 50 years ago.
Yes yes, a 'big tent' so long as it is not actually big, welcoming so long as one is only engaging with the Converted who have the right history of correct thinking.
That is in the end not a Big Tent at all but the pretending about Big Tent while keeping the impure heathen at appropriate non-polluting arms length.
An ideological "Limpieza de Sangre, no Republican Cooties allowed.
Otherwise Actual politics requires an actually effective party to actually win and not merely posture.
Else you end up excactly where the Democrats are now - having quite successfully self-limited own-appeal and shrunk their own reach geographically, and socio-economically.
Isn’t it most important of all to win? If you’re in the minority, it doesn’t really matter how liberal you are, right?
But that's part of the ongoing argument, isn't it? "The important thing is to win," okay, great. But what do we support and stand for after we've won? Just "not Trump"? While that's an excellent thing to stand for, it's inadequate. I personally also find "housing abundance!!!" inadequate on its own. I want to know what the platform is, and then the leftists and the moderates start fighting, and it all starts all over again.
In 2006, did we know what we supported after we won? I don't think we did! We just knew "we're going to beat Bush and all the things we don't like about Bush." The 2008 primary campaign and general election were about determining what our governing priorities would be. I think that it's putting the cart before the horse to say "we need to figure out our agenda for when control Congress but not the White House"—there is no agenda to be had in that instance! The presidential nominee, and then president, is the de facto leader of the party.
I think those were the olden days, Tom. There was a sort of general shared understanding of what each party, in general, stood for. That's out the window now! Do we stand for free transition surgery for illegal immigrant felons in prison? Do we stand for moderate tweaks to the tax code? Do we support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as written, or do we support the policies that are illegal that extend DEI into ridiculous territory? There are parallel, more dramatic questions for the Republicans. So yes, *now* I want to know more about the platform. Have we decided that abortion rights can go out the window, as Ezra Klein has suggested, even though they're very popular? (Yeah I went there. It's my hobby horse. And I still want an answer.)
Does the new Republican party really support the unitary executive theory? Or are there Republicans who support checks and balances? Because I'm never voting for the former, but I would consider the latter, in some limited circumstances. Hell, I didn't even realize what an overwhelming hold the unitary executive theory had on Republicans until the last 12 months!
TL;DR: Times change. I now need to know what the party supports before I vote for or against it.
Funny thing is that most Republicans who jumped to Democrats adjust their positions to be more in line with Democrats. Sociologically people adopt the norms and values of those in their social group (this is what has happened to Anti-Trump Republicans over time.)
The converse is also an explanation for Republicans’ transformation.
The Bulwark team is an excellent example of this... But unlike regular Dem types they like free markets and don't police their own speech much (or at least Tim Miller doesn't). As someone who's very much disenchanted with the progressive left but angrier at the right then ever these are very much my people.
I stopped listening to the Bulwark because they got too whiny. Kind of like how I got sick of Krugman.
Dispatch > Bulwark. (Even though Bulwark’s general tenor is closer to my personal politics.)
Do people change their strongly held moral views on abortion when they decide they don't like Trump?
The supermajority position on abortion is “not personally thrilled with it but let’s not be too draconian about it.”
This position is underspecified, of course. Which means that someone who holds it can probably be talked into anything from “ban after six weeks unless life is at stake ” on one extreme to “maybe limit it in the third trimester without a good reason” on the other. And they can pick whichever position in their personal Overton window that’s closest to the median opinion among people they choose to caucus with for other reasons.
Of course this doesn’t apply to the 30 or 40% of people who have really strong ideological beliefs here, but that’s a smaller group than the wishy-washy middle.
I still think there is a binary divide there, one where most GOP voters and Trump are on the pro-choice side even if they have reservations about abortion. Most issues are a distraction, the vast majority of abortions and the core of the debate is abortions in the first trimester without a medical necessity, abuse or incest.
Not every person believes every line of a party's platform.
And FWIW, Trump's position on abortion isn't far from the median American's...
I fully understand pro-life Dems and pro-choice Reps or many of the complicated patchwork of ideologies in every big tent party, my question is how many people change every part of their moral views when they change party.
Yes, I agree. While I'm happy they've seen the light about Trump, I disagree we should be welcoming them into the ranks of elected Democratic politicians. If they didn't turn tail on the GOP long before Trump, they'll *never* be actual Democrats. They'll be Republicans who hate Trump is all. No thank you.
"actual Democrats" is a poor way to approach politics, particularly as a disadvantaged party.
Surely by "actual Democrats" he means safety-net liberals and not left populist independents like Bernie Sanders. /s
I mean anyone who didn't used to be a registered Republican until 2019. You could just ask me instead of making assumptions.
From the Bluekskyism that is quite prevalent, and the pattern of Flipping from late 20th century into 21st Century, I have to suspect this is prevalent amongst Democrt partisans..... and likely quite explanatory in part for why that pattern of Reps is very heavily D to R and not the other way.
Brilliant success, Democrats have done quite well hin this, being so broadly competitive geographically, expanding their play... ah wait no completely the opposite.
I sympathize with what I think you mean, but “registered Republican” is a pisspoor litmus test. I’m as partisan a Democrat as they come, but if I lived in a red state with closed primaries, I’d be a registered Republican. I can even respect moderates in deep red states who strategically run as Republicans bc that’s the only way to have a chance of winning, if their actual beliefs line up more with moderate Dems. The last group is a shrinking breed if not completely dead, but there were still some in the GWB era, I think. There are likely to be plenty of recent folks in the former group.
If we’re going to have a litmus test beyond “not MAGA,” which is debatable, I lean towards “no cuts to the safety net.”
Maybe. I think that's a fairly small and unrepresentative group of people though.
I don't agree.
Of course, you want the Heathen to Convert.
that's religion, not mass electoral politics.
It's not enough they convert. They need to eat dirt, and apologize to my face. To me, personally. And wash my car. Don't forget that second coat of wax, Biff.
Hair Shirts, must have hair shirts.
No, I don't. I don't care what they do. I'm just not going to vote for them and I really don't see giving them a place at the table of Democratic politics. They hate Trump, and I'm glad for their vote against him. But to turn the Democratic party itself into a vessel for all things anti-Trump, no matter how anti-choice, anti-worker and otherwise antagonistic to the Democratic platform they may be otherwise, seems like a bad way to go.
You're strange...and muted, since you have nothing to add.
What on Earth does this even mean? "I'd rather have a Republican in office than a Democrat who used to be a Republican be became disgusted with them and now wants them to lose"?? This is self-defeating and naive.
I didn't say that. I said I'd rather have someone committed to Democratic principles AND committed to beating Trump rather than someone not committed to Democratic principles but wants to beat Trump. If my ONLY two choices are Republican Lite and Republican MAGA, then of course I'll vote the former, reluctantly. But those usually are not the only two choices.
But for many districts and states in this country, "Republican Lite" and "Republican MAGA" ARE the only two options. This is the crux.
The context of the discussion is a recommendation about a primary vote in a statewide race in a state that has two Dem senators, both presumably well to the left of Geoff Duncan.
And how many Democrats have won statewide seats for state government offices?
I understand that, and have sympathy for it. I'm glad I don't live in those places. I am only saying I would *not* support it and I believe it is bad for the future of the party to turn whatever power they have over to the Romneys and Cheneys of the world.
What if they build more power by incorporating those people who are more right-wing than you would like but who would caucus with Democrats and thus vote for the legislation and majority leaders and Supreme Court nominees and whatnot that you prefer (at least relative to what we’re getting with a GOP trifecta)? That worked pretty well from 2008 to 2010, especially relative to what we have now.
"I believe it is bad for the future of the party to turn whatever power they have over to the Romneys and Cheneys of the world."
This is an interesting description. If you are up for a hypothetical, I'd be interested hearing whether you would prefer a party where
1) almost every Democratic senator is ideologically within a narrow similar to Angela Alsobrooks that can occasionally get 51 seats in good years
2) a truly bigger tent party has a range of voices going from Mamdani or further left and also further to the right as in Duncan or Justin Amash but can get to 59 seats in good years?
I think most of the people arguing against you are thinking that #2 is a much better option, but you seem to be implying that #1 is a better option.
And voila, self-marginsalisation of the partisan-sect based politics. the impure sinners will polute the waters.
How about if they do self-flagellation, repent the sin of being of the opposite political party and engage on a pilgrimage to an appropriate identarian conference?
Compare and contrast with the delight of the Republicans when they have a D convert....
and then one can profitabily reflect on which party has self-excluded from large swaths of the Electoral geography for Senate and EC.
Edited Later to Add: Wiki summary pages on Party Flips (House, Senate)
[while certainly flawed and incompletee, and this only House and Senate the emergent late 20th ongoing into 21st century rather tells a story of the Opposition being quite happy to capitalise on flips.
Senate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_senators_who_switched_parties (more ambiguous, and smaller sample set to be sure)
House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_representatives_who_switched_parties
It is not probably worth the effort to do State levels but I would strongly suspect that in Swing / BattleGround where Dems were once broadly competitive one would see a rather similar strongly in one direction flow.
Imagine exaggerating this much.
It happens a lot around here. Snark replaces any real attempt to understand, especially when one has a take not in line with the groupthink.
I think a good part of the appeal of Yglesias' substack is people who, for whatever reason, think they're under seige from college students who are woke or whatever.
I'd just like the Democratic Party to have roughly the distribution of views it did in the late 2000s, after it arrived at the consensus that the Iraq War was a mistake, but with less homophobia/transphobia. I think that's a better path to electoral victory (Obama) and a better way to resisting a dangerous administration (Bush). I believe people on the progressive left belong in the tent, as do moderates, whats-the-matter-with-kansas types, etc. I do not believe Bush or Romney era Republicans belong in the tent.
But if you look at the actual party that existed in 2008, it did include a lot of people whose views you would now exclude. Including in elected offices. The elected offices that allowed for the judges that decided Oberkfell and the officials who passed the ACA.
The current party, a party that excludes anybody to the right of Obama, is a minority party destined to give ground on every important issue.
I'd love for us to be a country where a majority overwhelmingly thinks like Obama and Pelosi, and sees Bernie Sanders as only slightly left of center. But I don't live in that country.
Yes, I completely agree, and I'm not sure why that seems to engender so much hostility here except that my guess is there are a lot of former Bush and Romney types who subscribe. I personally would rather have a party made up of Bernies and Schumers and Mamdanis and Testers than Kinzingers and Liz Cheneys and Joe Walches, but that would get me ratio'd here.
Your whole premise here is that you won't vote for anyone who doesn't fully embrace Democratic groupthink, even if their opponent is far worse.
Quote me exactly where I said that.
We'll just disagree on the merits here.
This really does reveal that for progressives, the threat posed by MAGA isn’t really different than the broader political disagreement about policy. In fact, I would guess a lot of Progressives like the destruction of our democratic systems of checks and balances in the hope that due to some mystical intervention, somehow they are ultimately the ones who wield the unlimited executive powers and crush dissent.
>Before proceeding with the list, though, I wanted to talk a little bit about Golden because I’m pretty angry about the situation.<
I'm angry about the situation, too. But I personally think the real problem is the weird way political parties operate in the United States, and how their operation intersects with the state laws that determine ballot access and (critically) partisan labelling on these ballots. Even if the Democratic Party had PRE nominated Jared Golden and said there's no need for a primary, they'd be SOL if a challenger to Golden entered the primary election and won. Not only would that challenger be on the general election ballot, that challenger (and not Democratic Party-endorsed Jared Golden) would enjoy the designation "Democrat" on the ballot.
It's a stupid freaking system. I hate it.
I don't think the problem is that the Democratic Party should have pre nominated Golden.
It's rather the Democratic aligned elite media ecosystem just never really gave him the time of day.
Those types balk at people who aren’t downwardly mobile socialites with fancy degrees from elite exclusionary colleges and universities.
There is a reason large swaths of the country resent and mock NYC and its centrality to discourse.
This is basically any article Defector has written on politics ever.
What do people think about the alternative hypothesis that Jared Golden just isn't very good with media? Josh Shapiro who is cut from the same cloth as a center left moderate overperformer is the CONSTANT subject of various pieces about the future of the democratic party. My theory is that Shapiro is just good at media, Golden just isn't.
Though I think there are also a bunch of important differences in *how* they moderate. A Jewish lawyer from suburban Philadelphia moderates in a very different way from a marine from rural Maine. The media types know a lot of people like the former and can read them as friendly in a way that they find harder with the latter.
A while ago, Matt said that Golden explicitly eschewed national media coverage and mostly engaged with local press. He didn't really elaborate on it, but I found it interesting.
I think Josh Shapiro is more interesting to writers because the media is obsessed with Israel-Palestine and he is a Zionist. He isn't profiled just because he's an overperforming moderate but because he's a flashpoint and a lot of young people hate him.
Isn't that somewhat of a good thing, though? When your elevator pitch is, "You know me, I'm not like those other Democrats" having Democratic-coded media parachuting in to say how wonderful you are kind of undermines that.
I know it's anathema to most politicians, but there are strategic advantages to not being liked by certain groups. To take another example, every Democratic Senate candidate running against an incumbent should be against Chuck Schumer becoming Majority Leader, and Chuck Schumer needs to just shut up and live with it. It's the cleanest break-with-the-disaster of 2024 message. Be unpopular so your party can win.
(I'll note Pelosi always had candidates say they would not support her for speaker, never uttered a word of complaint, and never lost a leadership vote. She knew what she was doing.)
Yep. The best thing some of these candidates could get would be AOC or Kamala criticizing them in the national press
Except having lots of groups hate you and constantly advertise and demonstrate against you has to be exhausting. Especially for a house backbencher.
Then they are weak and deserve to lose
Great, so we're left with ONLY people in politics who have the emotional stability of a POW camp survivor. That will be great for the country. Next you'll be telling me that bullying is good because it weeds our the weak from the strong.
>It's rather the Democratic aligned elite media ecosystem just never really gave him the time of day.<
That can add to the problem, sure, but it really wouldn't *be* much of a problem if, as in other rich democracies, political parties in the United States possessed a full and unfettered right to nominate whoever they like. Or, to put it another way, a primary challenge can do damage even to even quite well-liked and admired incumbents, never mind centristy mavericks like Jared Golden. Leftists—including those in the elite media—often get it wrong as to who maximizes the chances of winning a general election, or else they're perfectly happy to see the Democratic candidate lose the race.
Why not simply take away their influence on the nomination process? The way we run our elections is bonkers.
Progressives have been practicing this weird coerce and extort politics for like a decade. It’s like they want to mimic the Tea Party, but they don’t have a path to an electoral majority if they succeed in forcing their positions. Republicans are advantaged by structural geographic factors, the fact they at least meet some of the cultural values of their voters, and the fact progressives hold much of this country in contempt for mundane reasons.
What they’re doing is exactly what you said, and then hoping that a once-in-a-generation Obama-esque talent will pop up on their side and deliver victory. That’s why they’re so excited about Mamdani: they think he’s that talent.
Which is odd because he could never be President and thus unable to lead the party without a change to the Constitution.
But then again we are talking about people who get all their knowledge from social media.
Everybody can’t be President, it’s ridiculous that we hold every elected official to that standard. Mamdani has done Democrats a great favor by showing them how to run a campaign—not everyone has the talent for it, but I’m sure a lot of people do, and we need to have an eye out for those people who know how to navigate the 21st century media ecosystem.
Reread Daniel’s comment and how he describes Mamdani as their Obama. The fact is that he can never grow into such a national role or cultural force.
He can be a cultural force, he can never be President. It is possible for someone to influence culture without being President (and it is definitely possible to be President without influencing culture, as with the most recent Democratic POTUS).
yes it is a stupid system. the 1970s "reforms' created doors for basically ad-hoc takeovers of powerful brands
Our constitutional structure wasn't designed for a system of two quasi-official major parties, but nonetheless the primary and ballot access reforms may have been an improvement over the status quo when first adopted over a century ago.
But that was then. Now the status quo is that we have the equivalent of two established state parties, governed by nobody.
It's hard to predict how it would play out, in the very different information and communication environment to today and tomorrow, if we did away with the past century's worth of laws that privilege the two established parties, and fully separated party and state, so that parties were again fully private organizations without specific privileges granted by law. But my bet is it would make possible a flowering of new coalitions and political configurations.
Very unlikely. The constitution may not have been explicitly designed for a Two party system, but a first past the post presidential system systematically favors that outcome.
There's a reason it keeps popping up. The Whigs attempt to run regional candidates in 1836 was a failure attempted out of weakness as was the Democrat's 1860 attrmpt.
The current hollow party system additionally means it's easier path to take over an existing party than create a new one. I wish we had more regionalization in the parties, but not sure it can be sustained in the current environment.
At this point I can’t help but wonder if “Independent” would be a more appealing ballot line, so long as there’s only one of them.
I live in the district next to Jared Golden's, and I can tell you *exactly* why the national media is not falling all over themselves to promote him. It's because he is the House version of Kyrsten Sinema. I personally think he brings most of the shit he gets on himself, and for no good reason-Matt has to know he wrote an article for the Bangor Daily News last year saying how fine it was all going to be when Trump got reelected, and he's been a big proponent of Trump's tariffs. There was no need for any of that. He's just a prickly guy.
(And besides, the inside dope is that he was *really* pissed about having a primary challenger.)
What major Democratic initiatives has Golden blocked? Or maybe he supported Mike Johnson for Speaker over Hakeem Jeffries (hey, it's possible I didn't hear about it!).
Politics isn't for little children. IOW, who the fuck cares about Golden's occasional forays into Trump-whispering if he's an infinitely better and more reliable VOTE for decency in the House of Representatives? Do you really not care about substantive results? Do you really think sending Paul LePage to Washington instead of Jared Golden would be in Maine or America's interest*? Because that's what's extremely likely to happen.
*On second thought don't answer that. I get serious horseshoe vibes from you.
It's interesting that Golden doesn't have the highest Heritage Action (i.e., basically pro-conservative) voting score among congressional Democrats. Last Congress, he got a 26% rating. Others with the same rating: Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna. Those with a higher rating (28%): AOC and Rashida Tlaib.
https://heritageaction.com/scorecard/members/118
Unlike Sinema Golden puts up numbers. If the Dems lose the seat with his challenger as the nominee he will look much more like Manchin. It's not like Manchin was right about everything, he was just much better than the realistic options.
Yes, that is very true. The GOP nominee for that seat is likely to be Paul LePage, our 80ish year old "Trump before Trump" former governor, who remains relatively popular in the 2nd CD even if he can't break 20% in the 1st. Golden may have lost that seat anyway this time around (although a blue wave would obviously have helped him a lot)
Strong disagree. Krysten Sinema doesn’t get enough hate for having an absolutely bizarre set of policy stances. For example, she basically single handedly saved the carried interest tax loophole. It primarily benefits hedge funds and private equity, which have a very limited presence in AZ, so it’s not a local issue. It’s also not popular or populist because it solely benefits a tiny slice of extremely rich people. It strongly gives, “sold out to corporate lobbyists”.
Sinema is basically the poster child for why I have sympathy for Democrats or Progressives who are suspicious of "we need more moderates" stance. There is moderation in theory (I support Dems on 90% of issue, but on one or two high profile issues like immigration or gun control that swing voters notice, I will break from the party) and moderation in practice (I will support an end to the government shutdown because I'm more committed to archaic and idiotic senate procedures than winning the political fight).
I defended Manchin given the partisan lean of his state. But Sinema really is the ultimate riposte that progressives can give to Matt. As you say, who the heck is the swing voter in Arizona who's coming around to voting for Sinema because she defended the carried interest loophole. Or worse, when she breaks with the party on an Dem issue that actually has a decent amount of support from at least some GOP voters (see her vote on $15 minimum wage).
I also have said before that Matt is sort of forgetting that a lot of what Blue Dog Dems did back 15-20 years ago to show moderation was basically cut down or cut out provisions of basically any bill that came their way just for the sake of showing they were moderate. Like it wasn't even about objecting to a provision that maybe particularly harms their district or state. It was just cutting down a bill for the sake of showing moderation. It was basically the worst form of "inside the beltway" thinking about what moderation should be. I just wish Matt remembered that he was one of the people who first enlightened me to how dumb this thinking was back then.
Sinema was a member of the Green Party prior though.
> For example, she basically single handedly saved the carried interest tax loophole
The median voter is often the deciding vote but they don't do things "single-handedly." They do it because there were already enough votes from one side to push the issue into their view.
I remember the complaints from sitting Democratic Senators that it was "undemocratic" for 2 Senators to stop a bill, but it wasn't 2 Senators, it was 51 Senators.
I'll definitely agree Sinema deserved what she got, which is essentially booted out of office. Golden never misrepresented himself at least.
You should say better: he’s the house version of Joe Manchin!
Oh wait, Joe Manchin’s seat is now taken by a Republican.
I'm not sure where I said he wasn't better than John Justice.
Because I don't think he needed to do that to win. I think it was unnecessary pandering and, more to the point, the chance to put a thumb in the eye of the Maine Democratic Party, who of course support him but also can't stand him.
Well, you can believe what you'd like about me, but I know my state. For years, until 2014, the 2nd CD in Maine was represented by a gay union organizer. His voters didn't all die and get replaced by MAGA diehards in the course of a few years.
The other thing to remember is that Maine uses ranked choice voting for national elections, which is how Golden has won every single time. He's almost nobody's first choice up there, really.
"His voters didn't all die and get replaced by MAGA diehards in the course of a few years."
No, but you're on here explicitly saying you wouldn't welcome those voters back into the Democratic Party and it's pretty clear that a lot of Democrats agree with you, which is a major reason why the only Democrat they might vote for is Golden.
I have zero idea where you got my statement that the 2nd CD is not culturally MAGAville with the absurd premise in that reply. I simply would not prefer to see the Democratic party welcome never trumpers *to positions of influence within the party* when the only thing we really have in common is hating Trump. They still don't support a Democratic platform and I'm not going to support a Republican who doesn't like Trump when more than likely I have an actual Democrat-be it a Chuck Schumer or a Bernie Sanders type-for whom to cast my ballot. It has nothing to do with Jared Golden.
Democrats have been able to attract some competent and talented people who have been pushed out of the Republican Party. This might make “Democrats center right” to some, but it’s an opportunity created by Trump. It would be silly not to take advantage of this opportunity to reposition on social and economic issues.
You say it might be silly not to take advantage of the Trump-created opportunity, but the D's don't have a great recent record of taking advantage of Trump-created opportunities....
No, they are better at creating opportunities for trump to get power
Sure is going great for Keir Starmer's Labour Party! There are no costs at all to completely abandoning your values and long-held policy commitments.
Ehh, golden would have won the primary and every mod has a challenger. Maybe don’t just chicken out of running. This blog held him up as the paragon of independent, tough, winning candidate only for him to fold from a primary challenger
Bingo.
I voted for Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, for the first time since McGovern. I wrote in candidates for the last three Presidential elections. There is not a Republican left in National Office save Rand Paul, who at least will point out to the President that blowing up the lowest level drug smugglers is illegal. But I generally don’t vote for libertarians; one exception was the pot grower who ran in 2016. William Weld was his VP choice, and he is sane.
My issue with voting Democrat is simple. Are they loony? I can live with center-left over MAGA loony. There are two requirements they have to meet: first, a realization that spending other people's money is no longer a viable strategy. We have a progressive tax scheme. The well-off already pay the majority of the taxes. If you want to squeeze them a little more, fine, but there has to be a realization that taxing the millionaires and billionaires will not solve our fiscal dilemma.
The second thing they have to acknowledge is the fiscal reality of our entitlement programs. Around 2034, SS will become insolvent, requiring a mandatory 23% benefit reduction. Covering your ears when this is pointed out and yelling la la la la la in order to ignore the issue is not a serious way to act.
MAGA and Trump believe in the tooth fairy and that she will take care of it. Current Democrat leadership is no better. The Progressive Caucus as a whole also accepts this fantasy, as does the American public.
Populism has infected both Parties; it has caused them to lie to the American voter, and the American voter also accepts this fantasy.
A SS fix will require tax or a reduction in benefits; there is no other way around it. Same with Medicare. Voters will complain and scream, "I paid for my benefit.” No you didn’t. You roughly paid 2/3 of your benefit with your employer's help. You roughly paid 1/3rd of your Medicare benefit.
Taxes are coming; if the voters want European-style benefits, borrowing money is no longer a viable option. America is effectively broke, the free lunch is over, and unless something is done, the standard of living will go down.
An anthem for Democrats is a reduction in spending. I’d like to hear one serious Democrat come up with a reduction of some sort. Sure, they might say cut the military, a crappy option in a world where more countries are challenging our power. It may happen, but if they cannot come up with another reduction, they are not a serious candidate.
Sadly the delusional cheerleaders for the financial system are still pushing tax cuts and stimulus spending. Its amazing how many of the populace don't realize it's not free money. Politicians selling us down the road for votes.
You have perfectly described populism. It is a virus. Each candidate sees how many lies and false promises they can make. When Harris said she also would support no tax on tips, she was disqualified in my eyes. Why in the hell should that one group be blessed with not paying income tax? There was only one reason Trump did it, Nevada, they have a lot of tipped workers in Las Vegas. He won the state, and I can hear Harry Reid now. “Well, it worked didn't it"
Maybe if they pay the stimulus in DigiTrumpBucks (tm) they can get around this. They didn’t sell US policy to the crypto industry for nothing, did they?
Out of curiosity, what in particular compelled you to vote for Sherrill?
My desire is to see MAGA thrown into the dustbin of history.
> A SS fix will require tax or a reduction in benefits
Congress just needs to pass a law saying that in 2034 forward, benefits remain on the same schedule.
In 2033, SS payments will exceed receipts by about 1.0% of GDP. The 1.0% will come from the SSTF redeeming treasury bonds, the money for which will come from the general fund.
In 2034, SS payments will exceed receipts by about 1.0% of GDP. The 1.0% will come from the general fund.
And we’ll have to come up with the money. Not sure we can add that to the 20 trillion we are currently overspending in the next 10 years. The $2 trillion a year in deficits are killing us. How much more will we have to borrow, because Medicare will also be insolvent shortly thereafter.
It's a problem but it has nothing to do with the exhaustion of the SSTF. It could be gone today and the situation would be the same.
(... The exhaustion of the SSTF technically gives Congress an out: do nothing, let benefits get slashed, now save 1.0%GDP of the deficit that's about 6%GDP. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSDFYGDP I am willing to bet against Congress doing that.)
Not if they like their job. They all see to be nearing 80 years of age so it seems the grist they can make on insider trading is worth staying till they die in offixe
So, Jared Golden, the Democrats’ MVP in Congress, is not running for reelection, and Matt Y focuses his annoyance on … progressives and “media cool kids in Brooklyn” who weren’t sufficiently nice or appreciative of Golden, so now he’s leaving! Look what you made him do!
It’s like an intraparty version of Murc’s Law: anything that goes wrong is the fault of those no-good, meanie lefty progressives!
Sigh. Look, I’m sure that being a Democrat in Congress nowadays sucks absolute ass, and it’s easy for me to judge when I don’t have to deal with it myself. But also, come on. The recurring critique of the Democrats is that we’re too soft and feminine, and we need to be all manly and tough and macho and FYF to appeal to more working class men. In light of that, a man (and a veteran no less, if I remember correctly) going “womp womp, I’m leaving my seat, most likely to be won by a Republican, because people are too mean to me” is unseemly.
Dude do you have kids? Because I think framing it as “wah people are being mean to me” is pretty disingenuous. I’m a woman, but I can tell you the most manly, macho thing a guy can do in my eyes is say he’s putting aside his personal ego to protect his children. He explicitly said he wanted to step away from the ugliness it was exposing his children too. If you want to make yourself feel better by acting like that’s wimpy, go ahead, but it takes balls. The question is did Democrats do what they could to make the environment his family was exposed to better or worse while he was in office and if the answer isn’t better, why on earth not, given how valuable he was?
She can of course speak for herself, but drosophilist is a woman with two kids (one a newborn).
It's really disappointing, and I can't understand it from a "true believer", wanting to make a difference perspective. Which means it's something else, something less heroic and potential more human (fallible). But with his performance, he probably had a shot at Senate or Governor one day (of his choosing), and gave up on it
Or it's the added stress of having to drain resources in a primary battle and then having to fight yet another uphill battle in the general election, all to give more power to people who actively make you and your family's life more miserable.
No one really knows for sure why he's not running, but I think it's silly the way people on the left like you clearly disdain him but also get really mad at him for not running.
It's not Golden's fault that the left is too stupid to win in swing districts.
I wasn't aware congressional seats were given in perpetuity to whomever won a primary and general once.
But I'm sure in a way Matt is right, in the sense Jared Golden was likely annoyed he actually had to win over Democratic voters and appeal to them for the first time in nearly a decade as opposed to just play both sides are bad guy for an entire campaign.
Plus it didn't help as seen in polling that just maybe, his dumb pro-tariff stance wasn't actually that popular in this district and it wasn't the progressives that made him support that.
All I'm going to say is Omar & Tilab both faced far more serious primary campaigns than Dunlap likely was and they didn't take their ball and go home.
Golden won the Democratic primary every year he was on the ballot, so clearly he was successful in winning over Democratic voters.
But if you're right, then if a dumb cowardly moderate with no support from Democratic voters like Golden could win this district, then surely a True Progressive with the full support of The Base should be able to easily win.
How much do you think Dunlap will win this district by if he wins the primary? 5 points? 10?
I'm not saying Dunlap will win, but at a certain point, if you want to be the Democratic party nominee, you have to win over Democratic voters, especially when those Democratic voters have another choice.
I don't think Jared Golden should've dropped out.
I think Jared Golden should've proven himself to be the great politician all the centrists and moderates claim he is.
He did win over 90% of the Democratic voters in every election.
Compare that to someone like Zohran Mamdani who only won 66% of Democrats despite his only opponents being a Republican and a Trump-endorsed sexual predator.
But again, if everything is saying is accurate, then Dunlap will win easily. He only won't win easily if you're wrong.
He never actually had significant primary competition until this time, which he turned tail and ran. I bet a competitive primary would've resulted in far more votes in said primary than any other past primary Golden was involved in.
I never said Dunalp was guaranteed to win and it's weird you keep claiming that.
At the end of the day, when the time came, Jared Golden thought it was above him to actually compete for the votes of Democratic primary voters when they may actually be in question.
Good list. Moulton is an interesting one, he got his start taking on a corrupt congressional couple in a primary challenge. Then got a bit over his skis in challenging Pelosi and exploring a Presidential campaign briefly that had no traction.
But, he gotten some other stuff right and Markey is basically a seat filler at this point. He's not dangerous, because literally no one is following him or remembers he's there most of the time. However, he's very much a replacement level blue state Senator who doesn't need a six year contract extension.
On the Golden "retirement".
>"Progressive nonprofits ran ads criticizing him for opposing the budget resolution and other inconsequential votes, joining Republicans on stuff that would have passed one way or another. Indivisible chapters organized anti-Golden protests."
1. Golden is the strong manly-man politician that can win in a Trumpy district precisely because neither he nor his manly-man constituents care what woke wussies in the media say
2. Golden is retiring because progressive wokesters in some blue city were mean to him even though they had zero power over his own district (which is manly and Trumpy)
Was Golden secretly wanting the love and admiration of the people he claimed were out of touch idiots? Or is there some other reason?
+1000
Golden ought to say to both progressive activists and MAGA, “they hate me, and I WELCOME THEIR HATRED!”
These are good questions and raise some issues regarding Golden's motivation. However, he is also human and it's quite possible that he was hurt by the attacks on him from his own party.
Aren't attacks by the party to be worn as a badge of honor and a sign of authenticity? Being attacked by the "squad" should make someone more popular in Trump country not less just as being attacked by billionaires should make you more popular in progressive cities.
Sure, if you're cold blooded. But it's no fun to read the attacks on you and it's normal to be concerned about what your kids will read about you (when they're old enough; his aren't yet).
Did anyone call Golden a 9/11 cheering America hating muslim communist anti-semite (Would that be Obama or Mamdani BTW)? I agree it would be bad if your kids read that about you. Isn't every single squad member like AOC getting the most horrific death threats from Trumpists and billionaire fanboys?
Politics is not for the faint-hearted sure, but the degree of hostility and concrete power imbalances matter.
Yes, it's a nasty business and I'd prefer he stay in office.
But humans react differently to attacks and maybe the attacks on him were too much for him. I have no idea.
I honestly don't buy it because no one (except George Washington) ever gave up power because some randos with no actual power were impotently yelling at them.
If Golden is valued so much, did anyone stop Hakeem "word salad" Jeffries who holds actual power from personally wining and dining Golden to make him feel like the Marilyn Monroe of the party? Did "the groups" stop Jeffries from appointing Golden to important roles?
My guess is that Golden was probably offered a nice hedge fund role if he vacates the seat to the GOP by not even running as an incumbent and he took it. It is all good as a personal decision for him and his family. Matt trying to blame powerless randos for this is what is comical.