The Republicans get a sometimes deserved reputation for starting stupid culture wars. However, I think Kevin Drum observed a while back that the Democrats frequently start culture wars themselves, and somehow convince themselves that the Republicans are to blame. The 'males in females sports' issue is one such culture war. Virtually nobody 20 years ago thought this was reasonable. Then suddenly, this was deemed to be a wise issue for Democrats to get behind. When the Republicans say it is a bad idea, they are definitely fighting a culture war - but they didn't start it!
It's like the people with purple hair from the Hunger Games just tell the lumpen masses what they are going to believe from now on, and they dare not dissent. And yet, they >can< dissent at the ballot box.
Yeah this is my most right wing opinion but it's definitely true. You sometimes hear people say "this affects like .0x% of people why are we arguing about it?". Great so we all agree no men in women's sports and we shouldn't argue about it right? Right?
You can even, I think, justifiably take this critique to the next level.
A *very* routine comment at any progressive-leaning website on this issue is some variation of, "Ugh, Americans would rather have fascism than see trans girls play sports," or, "Ugh, Americans care more about sports than democracy!" But, if you choose to keep pushing for self-ID-based sports participation even when it's manifestly an issue that benefits the fascistic opposition on net, that strongly suggests you're not actually that worried about the survival of democracy!
Once you notice this pattern you see it everywhere. “Idiot voter[s] X preferred corruption and incompetence instead of conceding on this minor meaningless point” with no apparent self-consciousness of the implications. Education polarization has put all of the people who believe that politics should have a teacher figure who adjudicates when one party is misbehaving in the Democratic coalition. Trumpism is seen as a hall pass for doing unpopular things, because the voters aren’t allowed to vote on culture issues until the Republicans behave themselves.
The right wing version of this, though, is mainly centered on villainizing that .0x%.
I've also largely grown to see that these issues are almost always brought up by right wingers. The biggest mistake of most Democrats is that they try to engage in good faith on what few merits there are.
Way to pay yourself on the back. But it’s just not true. The Left pushed this for years. By pushed I mean self ID for gender being a right in all areas. Sports, showers, prisons, everywhere with no questions asked. If you did push back you were smeared as a bigot. Thats a fact.
Historical revisionism is popular now but let’s not revise history that happened just a few years ago. The truth is fresh in my mind.
Online on Twitter and such, I fully believe you. Out in the real world? Things were not quite as clear cut. Even "self pronoun" was something largely put up with. I think, largely, because people just didn't care. One way or the other. (I do think some places went too far appeasing kids. Often by trying to empower them to have an opinion on things they also didn't care about.)
Now, it sucks, as there was a time that online activism was growing in power far far more than makes sense. I think it is still higher in power than it should be, personally.
It kind of fits in with the general notion that online connectivity has been a force that is still not understood well.
It was just online? I’m confused, did you just get here? I had mandatory DEI training at my workplace where they talked about the right way to think about these issues. All the training was left coded. It was as if it was being done by Pedro Pascal.
People lost their jobs by not conforming to the “online on Twitter and such”. Thats the real world.
The Left has this ability to reboot the matrix and act like things that just happened didn’t. Keep taking the blue pill if you want.
Online job training has long been... dubious. Surely you also did the active shooter trainings over the years? Sexual harassment training was usually laughably absurd in how things were presented. As were the conflict of interest trainings. (Well, maybe conflict of interests were not absurd, in light of the current admin...)
The problem in this discourse is a lot like the people that used to advocate heavily for the legalization of marijuana. They were, by far, the biggest weakness to their cause. So, did I see stories of people that lost their jobs over DEI stuff? Yeah. Unfortunately, most stories I saw were not exactly clean stories.
And this is largely playing out in the current environment. I can and do agree that "diversity statements" are dumb. The attack against Harvard right now, though? Canceling grants that have the text "trans"? Hard to square that with the more neutral stances against DEI that you are holding up.
I agree that men shouldn’t play in women’s sports, but (and given the low instances) do we truly have a grasp on the issue? Intersex is 1.7% of the us population with 0.5% having variations.
Do we do what the Olympics did with some kind of testing? Or is it just openly trans or intersex players who are banned? One sounds quite invasive and expensive and the other will lead to secrecy. None of these account for the 1.7% (some of who may be surprised to hear they are intersex).
Again I am 100% in favor of men not playing in women’s sports but there is a lot of complexity here. Something that should be debated based upon the science and the willingness of a subset of the population to be subjected to a level of scrutiny to ensure we get to 100% female only.
1.7% of the population is not Intersex. That statistic was invented by a lying activist academic who deliberately counted conditions that aren't actually Intersex in any useful sense.
Good information to have. Seems like some prominent organizations need to update their information.
Even with the lower numbers, do we either say 0.00018% are intersex so it doesn’t matter (something the original commentator did not like) or go for the 100% with testing to ensure 100% compliance? A one time test for anyone playing female sports.
In general I think we should support strict policing of elite sport and shouldn't care so much about non-elite sport. But not caring so much also means if local parents want to impose restrictions we just let them. In the end if they are ineffective because nobody is going to pay for cheek swabs, well, that's their problem, not ours.
This is one that largely confuses me more than anything else. Coed sports are often the norm in club sports. Because otherwise you don't have enough people to play. Same for church leagues and such. Get whoever you can to play.
For "elite" sports, those already have their own governing bodies. Why do we feel that this is something the federal/state governments need to be a direct part of?
Democrats don't have to stake out a position on the exact definition of gender or sex for sports. The Democrats can and should take the easy position on the transgender sports debate: just don't force anyone to accept openly male-to-female transgender people into girl's/women's sports leagues.
Let the Republican culture warriors dive into the details, where the unpopular decisions are. Let them hang themselves by proposing genital inspections or chromosome testing or whatever. Let them be the ones to tell a girl who found out at age 13 that she has CAIS and XY chromosomes that she has to play on the boy's volleyball team.
I think this was actually a good-faith point that the “.xx%” framing is often brought up by proponents of MtF sports participation in a way that doesn’t favor their side a priori. You can argue the position on the merits but you can’t invoke the small number of people affected by it as a reason in favor of a substantial policy change in and of itself — the counterargument will always be that the utilitarian margin (if any) is too small to justify making it a political priority given limited attention-budgets and legislative time.
That assumes that it’s a major policy shift to begin with. It affects such a small number of people that I believe you can craft policies as needed. It’s a big country. Let federalism do its thing.
I believe it was made in good faith (that’s why I love it here) but foreclosing any kind of alternative to: you were born x, you are now y, except in sports. Period. doesn’t sound open to other ideas.
I think that “natal males can’t participate in women’s sports” is the default policy here, or at least a position that seems extremely defensible to me as being the default relative to which this would be a major policy change. While I think my preferred policy would be for local devolution on a sport-by-sport (and age-by-age and league-by-league) basis, it does seem that at some point you are going to end up with an MtF athlete winning an ordinally-ranked competition (or getting a spot on a limited-size team) and you’re going to have to fight about whether it’s okay to recognize the record or whether that subverts the point of women’s sports. Meanwhile my priors are that the people most in favor of categorical MtF sports participation aren’t going to even want so much as an asterisk put next to the “top women’s times” record list.
I just wouldn’t mind us going through the motions of getting to that point you describe rather than all the fear generated about the what ifs when we’re not really there yet. Remember all the commotion if we made gay marriage legal, people would be marrying their pets??
How on earth did trans-girls and trans women being allowed to play sports with their chosen gender become a hill that anyone wants to die on? I mean it's very small beer compared to criminalizing gender affirming care, if you are going to fight for trans rights.
Democratic politicians and their staff also just need to be comfortable ignoring activists who yell at them on social media. Slacktivists ruin every movement they become a part of.
Because it’s a simple, visible concept that seems obvious to most people, and is genuinely an issue where most of the Democratic Party apparatus has taken an extremely unpopular position.
I’m 100% against men in women’s sports and men in women’s bathrooms. At the same time, there’s nothing obvious about this issue. The issue of intersex is complex and the level of scrutiny that women would need to go through to prove their sex to compete or use the bathroom probably isn’t popular either. That being said, forcing the issue on the population without the debate also isn’t an election winning strategy.
Intersex is a red herring that distracts from the issue of standard males wanting to be treated as female without any qualifications. Trans and intersex issues do not share common facts or common solutions and should not be bundled together.
Intersex is a far larger issue in elite competitive sports than trans women, it just doesn't show up in the American high school/college scene as much. There are no globally elite trans women in sports; meanwhile, Imane Khalif, Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba, and Christine Mboma won Olympic/World medals and set records as intersex women.
Ok, that's still not the same as obvious natal males being encouraged to walk into a women's locker room, and implicates global sex and gender norms (Iran and other countries forcibly ‘transitoning’ people) more than American trans activism.
Ok, let’s say we don’t bundle them together. Clearly there needs to be an enforcement mechanism of who can and can not go into a female bathroom due to the “males wanting to be treated as female without any qualifications.” Is it proactive (ID cards and security) or are we using the honor system with security enforcing the issue when it arises? Who pays for this additional cost?
>That being said, forcing the issue on the population without the debate also isn’t an election winning strategy.<
I agree, but you do realize it's Republicans who are "forcing the issue" right? The public restroom-sports team trans brouhaha is an almost canonical example of the kind of moral panic Republicans like to gin up to play Democrats (and the national media) like a fiddle.
I'm not suggesting the integration of trans people into society isn't a real issue that presents challenges. It is. But it's not a huge issue, and there's really no reason it has to be a NATIONAL one other than the fact that Republicans want it to be national, because they believe it helps them politically. It seems to me that individual sports leagues, school districts, colleges, municipalities and states can work things out without debates in Congress or showboating by politicians.
I don’t think that states rights have a very good track record on these issues. It would also be challenged in courts.
I can see at least one sport or district doing overreach and having dna tests, ID cards, no card- no entry on women’s bathrooms and ensuing 100% compliance.
Which hits on my other point that these laws are just unworkable if they’re based on good faith and don’t require women to have a test to gain access to women only spaces.
The absolute base has to be that legal ID must reflect the true sex of holder. Besides that, the same way we enforced separation before ca. 2000 AD. The public is free to simply tell men they aren't welcome, and men are required by law and custom to stay out.
The biggest thing is to simply make it known that men aren't welcome in women's spaces, period.
I would like you to explain to me why you think it's better for a person who's presenting as female be forced to play on a men's team, or is what you really want is to not have to acknowledge a trans person's existence because it makes you uncomfortable?
"The Republicans get a sometimes deserved reputation for starting stupid culture wars"
rofl, Democrats are ALWAYS the aggressor in the culture wars. It's Democrats that push cultural change. Republicans are the the ones resisting change. The one pushing the change is the aggressor, IE the one that starts the culture war.
Surely the culture war continues because neither side will concede. As such, I don't understand how you can say one side should be held more at fault for perpetuating it. If they weren't both holding to their sincere convictions-progressives continuing to push for new life scripts, words, etc. to be normalized and the right continuing to not regard those things as normal-there wouldn't be a culture war.
It always seemed to me that this is the kind of topic where politicians should just never have gotten involved in the first place. Why not just let the high schools, or the NCAA, or whomever, battle this out? Why should this be a matter of *governance*?
Was supporting interracial marriage a stupid culture war when it was far less popular than even transgender kids in sports when Loving v Virginia passed?
There's also the fact that the trans rights movement succeeds when they highlight the similarities between transwomen and cisgender women. The sports issue highlights the most obvious way there's a physical difference. The rise of leaderless online social movements defined by who yells the loudest has been devastating for progressive politics.
On this reading aren't culture wars basically always started by the left? How would people who want to maintain traditional customs ever start a culture war? e.g. there was clearly a culture war (mostly concluded now) over gay marriage, and it was clearly also started by the left. Is nearly every accusation that the left makes to the tune of conservatives starting culture wars self-deceiving in the way Kevin Drum identified?
(As a conservative I think this is in fact correct, but I want to see if people here push back on it)
“…a Strategic Donor Network that prioritizes electoral strategies based on realities rather than ideological preferences and identity politics….”
Sounds great!
Why isn’t this called, “The Democratic Party”? Why build something that pursues no agenda other than making the party effective, when that is the job of the party?
I’m not opposed to all this, but at some point I need to know where to send my money. I don’t want to send half of it to the Democratic Party, and the other half to “We Would Like The Democratic Party To Win.”
In fairness, if you donate to the DCCC they will send the bulk of your money to frontline members who are disproportionately moderate. Pretty good bang for buck.
To the broader Strategic Donor Network point, I'd like to see more money go to building out a center-left network of think tanks, candidate recruitment operations, etc.
This feels like a straw man. Someone says we should try to win elections by appealing more broadly, and the reaction is, “Well then what do Democrats even stand for?” Come on. That sounds more like someone defending their own fringe views than engaging with reality. If Democrats have a problem, it’s that they’ve alienated too many voters—not that they’ve sold out.
I think it would be very unfortunate for anyone to react to Greg Schultz’ piece by asking, “Well then what do Democrats even stand for?”, by defending their own fringe views, or by accusing the party of having sold out. If you see anyone around here doing those things, let them know that I disapprove of their response.
I think that one reason why some people send money to these interest groups rather than the Democratic Party is because a lot of them are 501(c)(3) charities. Besides the tax deduction, some employers will 100% match their employees' donations to charities (up to a certain amount). So from that point of view, these groups just need to be at least 50% as effective at doing good things as the Democratic Party for them to be worth it. The big question is which ones can actually meet this threshold.
"As Joe Biden’s 2020 primary campaign manager, I saw firsthand that the real Democratic base is made up of moderate voters...."
Thank you! I've been hammering away at that point for a long time. Maybe people will listen to you. A good start on fixing the Democratic Party is to break the habit of mistaking its left wing for its base.
NYT publishes op-eds from a huge variety of people, and is not inherently endorsing those people. Did you remember the op-ed from Tom Cotton around the same time that basically said "send in the military"? Or recently one from RFK Jr talking about Medicaid work requirements?
Dem voters who self-describe as liberal or very liberal slightly outnumber those who self-describe as moderate. So empirically, the “base” is not “moderate.”
Of course, the vast majority of Dem voters are to the right of AOC or Bernie. But equally obviously, the vast majority of Dems are to the left of the median American.
I suppose there’s a case for embracing “moderate” as an applause word irrespective of its actual denotation, but I worry that this can confuse “make policies appeal to moderates,” which is always a good idea, with “accept the normative preferences of moderates.” Sometimes those preferences are bad!
Greg writes: "A key first step is the pulling together of a Strategic Donor Network that prioritizes electoral strategies based on realities rather than ideological preferences and identity politics, a network that recognizes the need for persuasion as well as turnout."
So how do you envision this first step happening? Who is going to do what and when?
I am working on a good-growth (YIMBY/abundance) political effort that would play in primaries that I will have some more info on soon.
One of my goals in this post was to raise the point to donors (and donor advisors....) that we are spending tens and hundreds of millions that contribute to dems losing.... (and governing poorly) -- so first diagnose the problem more accurately
It's disappointing that there's no talk about why Biden pivoted to the left after the primary and during his presidency - that would have actually been interesting to hear Biden's former campaign opine on. Instead, we get the same talking points that we've all been talking about for the past six months
was just going to send the same thing! I have thoughts on this topic too but wanted to start with the broader conversation that what Democrats are spending money on is part of the reason we are losing elections
That article was interesting as a narrative, but it mostly just begged the question. We already knew the campaign/administration moved left by hiring people to the left. That tells us nothing about why.
It would be interesting to read a better account from an outsider who could be a bit more clear eyed.
"We already knew the campaign/administration moved left by hiring people to the left. That tells us nothing about why."
The section https://permanentcampaign.substack.com/i/163646404/why-did-biden-shift-left-during-his-presidency is what you're looking for, I think: there were literally not enough legibly-qualified people to fill the jobs unless you hired left-wingers. Biden only bothered to stretch for illegibly-qualified people to balance visible demographic characteristics (race, gender, etc.), not political leanings or socioeconomic class.
Yeah, primary campaigns can be smaller and focused on states in sequence (don't need to keep as many assets in Iowa once the caucus is done and can focus on South Carolina). The general election campaign needs to be national and simultaneous.
It’s because of coalitionial appeasement and the left wing’s extortion tactics. The activist class and those who have the ears of staffers have been threatening Democrats with Republican trifectas for years. They achieved it in 2016.
I don't know the inside baseball, but one thing that people need to remember is the context of when Biden was sewing up the primary.
It was March and April 2020. The US economy was imploding. Shutdowns were happening, and people had no idea when they would end. Unemployment was going towards Great Depression levels.
It looked like we had another 2008 on our hands, which saw the Democratic party sweep into power and enact large changes to the social safety net. Biden's leftwing pivot seemed to mostly about building up the safety net, rather than cultural issues, at least at first. Then the George Floyd protests happened, and Biden's lead in the race grew to about 10 points in the polls, as Trump's inflammatory rhetoric probably didn't help him with voters. It seemed like Democrats were gonna not only win, but have a landslide on their hands, and all of the past frustrations of the Obama years would be surmounted. In that environment, the cost of going after the priorities of the base made more sense.
The bad Senate polling of 2020 really screwed up people's expectations. Once the idea that Biden could be a transformational president, it was hard to put that idea back in the box. Even once it became clear the Senate majority would be small, the way we won, with the Georgia special election, raised people's expectations too much.
Honestly I just thought it was miraculous to go from a Republican President and Senate to a Democratic trifecta, period. I'm used to consistent Republican control.
I dunno man. So Biden wins in 2020 in large part my forging his own path and lot letting himself get dragged left by “the groups”.
And then he governs as though “the groups” are in charge. You blame these orgs for making changes to the rural broadband bill and yet last I checked Biden was President! At any time he could say “I won in part by not giving in to your demands. So should I now”. You are letting your former boss off the hook here.
And your description of GOP forces is wild to me. These groups are not popular or at the very least their ideas are not popular. Medicaid cuts are hideously unpopular. Overturning Roe Vs Wade is not popular. Their negative impact on the GOP brand is all about the “blotting out of the sun” cult of personality around Trump. Not because the groups have their finger on the pulse of America. I have expected you to claim America is a “center right” nation like we’re still in 1992.
I truly wish your former boss well. He’s a good man who I’m proud to have voted for 2020 and would have happily voted for in 2024 given the alternative. I really hope he makes a full recovery and lives another 20 years.
But I really can’t just let go this whitewashing of the last 4 years either.
I have lots of thoughts on the Biden years and the internal and external push/pull to the left (for no actually good political reason and for the most part no good policy/governance reason..) but didn't want to cloud this broader ecosystem article with an over focus on just the last 4 years
I appreciate the article and the engagement. What I've picked up here at SB is that the push / pull to the left was largely due to the younger staff of the Biden admin, which for whatever reason was allowed to steer the ship. I hope you'll be able to share whether that seems correct or not at some point in the future.
Even in normal times with non-insane groups and regular politics, you have to get people to go along with your plans.
Biden could have made broadband a Priority, and said "we're doing this, get out of the way or get run over." But making broadband a Priority means, definitionally, something else not being a Priority.
"Yeah but Trump does this." Trump can't even pass his tax bill with his own party.
Wait, the idea that Biden was helpless to influence states seems obviously crazy to me. He obviously had a lot of political and moral influence over at least the solid blue states, and indeed it's not like he was demanding the red states, like, liberalize their abortion views or anything. He would've been asking for them to take money to make a broadly unobjectionable infrastructure improvement. A basically competent President who made it a priority could clearly speed up broadband deployment in at least some places.
Yeah, one of the problems of BBB was that it was such a grab bag that there wasn't anything for the average voter to latch onto as a central priority they hoped the president would deliver on.
No one has replied to the second part of your comment here, but it's the one I was most hung up on, too! I basically liked all of Schultz' article (I don't blame him for governance since he's the campaign manager), but his invocation of the right-wing think tank ecosystem also felt totally wild. The orgs he mentioned don't have any clear value system besides pure opportunism. They've consistently changed their mind on every issue during the last eight years except for dismantling regulation wholesale (even regulation that would be good for business in the medium term) and pushing low taxes on rich people and corporations. They don't stand for "liberty...freedom...prosperity...or a conservative legal framework." They did absolutely nothing about the erosion of those values from 2016-2020, and they're doing nothing about it now.
If you are a republican candidate or elected official and you say 'freedom' or 'liberty' or 'free market/reagan capitalism' you know there are organizations which have money, staff, and policies to back you up. Those message frames also help you win a general election.
If you are a democrat, who has your back if you said 'liberty' or 'teddy roosevelt capitalism' ?
It made me think about the asymmetry of 'the groups', which (on both the left and the right) seem to have all of the energy & momentum on their side. There are, as we know, a number of groups & activists dedicated to say moving the Overton window on transgender issues. But there's no activist groups within the Democratic party or the left more broadly, dedicated to preserving the status quo on gender stuff. There are climate-crazed activist groups, but no one without a commercial incentive forms an activist group dedicated to 'we should moderately change US policy as it relates to global warming, but for the most part the status quo is fine'. The activism always goes one way.
So you have a situation where everyone forms activist groups for radical change, but there's no countervailing group organization *against* radical change. It's a huge asymmetry in American politics
Because there's not that many people under 30 to 35 who are willing to be paid below market wages who deeply believe in the above. If you think things are fine or only need small changes, you don't get deeply involved in politics - you open a business or continue to work as an accounts manager or whatever.
Even the 'moderates' are focused on Abundance, not exactly a 'status quo' movement.
Eh. I don't hate this argument, but I don't think that accounts for everything. Lots of people in the upper echelons of these organizations are paying themselves pretty decent salaries, it's all publicly filed info. Example, the President of the ACLU makes $1.3 million a year, all the mid-level execs there seem to make $400-600k, etc. The President of Planned Parenthood makes $900k, and so on.
I actually agree with your basic point, I just think it's not sufficient. At this point in American society it's easier to build an organization that wants to radically change the status quo- all of the energy & momentum is on your side. 'The center cannot hold.... The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity', etc. etc.
Sure, I'm sure you could create some org that pays a bunch of former consults and such very well - Third Way exists!
The issue is getting people to fill out the rest of the staff. You can pay some guy who worked on Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign 600k or whatever, but finding a bunch of 25 year old politically-minded people who believe say, something to the right of the Biden policy on transgender sports (which was basically the actual orgs decide), support the Lankford bill but nothing more on immigration, and would be OK with arguing for work requirements for a child tax credit as opposed to being OK with it as a compromise who don't have more financially advantageous prospects is still insanely small.
I know people occasionally come in and say congressional staffers are fairly non-ideological, but I think that's true and untrue at the same time.
What's sad is that the DLC and the like tended to be better organized than moderate Republicans, who tended to be less organized. Now moderate Democrats are a bit rudderless and moderate Republicans have left office.
This characterization of the Democrats is nothing new for readers of this newsletter, but I think the description of Republicans is insane. Caro and Heritage are not working in lock step to support the Trump agenda, and the trend towards ignoring the views of big business and its lobbies is one of the most significant of the trump era.
That Cato and Heritage are not lock step with Trump administration is the point. They both operate on mission for certain values and not solely electorally focused. I appreciate Cato’s continued advocacy against the Jones Act. It’s not pragmatic given there’s zero chance a Trump administration repeals the Jones Act. That they keep advocating for it gives them a certain credibility.
Right but this is in fact how interest groups aligned with Dems work too. The difference is that Trump has a cult of personality and has sidelined and disempowered these groups, not that they work together well.
But they are working in lock step on the political success of Trump. and of course Heritage literally wrote much of his agenda. Whatever views they may have that differ from Trump's they absolutely are not threatening to withdraw their support or saying failure to adopt their positions will lead to lack of support or further funding for Trump or other Republican coffers.
"Managing Biden’s 2020 Primary, I and the campaign were targeted repeatedly by groups in the Democratic ecosystem pushing policies out of line with voters, including around Medicare for All, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s student debt plan, and extreme environmental positions. But embracing these positions would have complicated winning the general election."
I appreciate we're getting a post here from someone in the actual ring. Fight on. We're all in the cheap seats watching but I can't help but just laugh at the acknowledgement that embracing these "extreme" positions would have complicated an election BUT then just re-reading Biden's **insane** set of Day 1 EOs which not only embraced many of these ideas but then went like ten steps further (e.g., cancelling 5m student loans) and somehow we're all surprised Trump FUCKING SWEPT ALL SEVEN SWING STATES.
It's so true we all voted for Biden and got Warren.
Yeah, it doesn't do a lot of good to build infrastructure to get moderate-coded candidates elected if those candidates turn around and do weird left-wing stuff once they're in office. That's a great way to get a variation of "BUT THEY PIVOTED TO THE CENTER JUST BEFORE THE ELECTION!!!" the next time around.
I don't run elections so bear with me but that also seems like the exact opposite of optimal. Wouldn't you want to say (i.e., pander) the weird stuff during the election and then actually do the popular stuff once in office? Maybe that needle is just impossible hard to thread IRL and Obama was really our once-in-a-generation talent.
And yet despite those Day 1 EOs, Biden was pretty popular until the double whammy of Delta/Omicron and the inflation spike (and some say, the Afghanistan withdrawal) took a whack at his numbers.
I'm making a narrower point. Biden's 2020 Presidential Primary Campaign Manager just told us these proposals were "out of line with voters". Biden then did ~ all of them. Biden's VP then goes on to lose all seven swing states. It has nothing to with national popularity polling but everything to do with winning the swing states. I'm going to trust Biden's 2020 Presidential Primary Campaign Manager that these were all terrible policy choices to win elections.
I understand your point on Harris. I just think you're wrong. The reason for the "longstanding toxic party brand" is just what Greg says, "groups in the Democratic ecosystem pushing policies out of line with voters". Biden unfortunately tarnished the brand worse than anyone with these actions.
I cede the point that Biden made the brand worse once elected. I have a different world view than some of Biden's White House advisors... but that is probably for a book that will never be written...
I thought the Biden student debt policy was terrible politics. But I don't recall the Republicans picking up that ball and running with it. Harris's views on transgender prisoner surgery? Oh you bet.
That's what's so brand damaging about these terrible policies. They're own goals. The Republican's don't have to pick up the ball and run with it. Biden did it for them.
There's no evidence Biden's policy was "terrible politics." The actual Biden policy from everything I've read was a 40/40 policy, but two groups of people really hated it - online centrist writers who already dislike lefties and non-college educated Republican voters.
It wasn't the boon some lefties thought it would be and full forgiveness would've been underwater but at worst, Biden's actual policy was mildly unpopular.
It may be a function in the way I wrote the article, or it may be a function that people like to talk about what they like to talk about - but part of my thesis here is that "we" spend a lot of money on democratic politics and what that money builds reinforces policies and politics that are out of line with the electorate. So it's kind of like my hometown Cleveland Brown, the more money you spend, the more you lose....
"So it's kind of like my hometown Cleveland Brown[s], the more money you spend, the more you lose...."
And *how* they spent their money (and draft capital) very recently....yeesh, that was the worst transaction in NFL history.
Thanks for the article, and also thanks for engaging with we Slow Borers in the comment section, that helps to add more to your argument that we can learn from.
Thinking of the Democrats as the Browns and the party trying to pick a new leader is like the Browns trying to find a really good quarterback is one of the most depressing analogies I've heard in a long time.
Thesis: Fox News is a multi-billion annual in-kind donation to Republicans that also serves as a media training ground for out of office party operatives
Building a Democratic equivalent is difficult as the highly educated voter base wants real news, not propaganda
I think in addition to Fox you have to include the more nebulous right wing internet as well as the barstool podcast universe (Rogan, Theo Von, Flagrant pod, etc). I think we also haven't seriously grappled with the fact that the algorithmic platforms (twitter and tiktok especially) are now explicitly anti-Democratic, and especially anti-moderate Democrat and Republican.
The algorithmically driven media ecosystem optimizes for shitting on centrist liberals, (small l-liberals, including older Chamber of Commerce types) and pushes content from the ends of the horseshoe because it drives engagement via agita.
How do we neoliberal shills operate in this environment? Do we have to engage in the kayfabe? Should we go through our heel era?
I seriously think that centrists and moderates are totally locked out of current media. We still control the old-school mainstream of course, but that's much more akin to us being old school mainline Protestants while the world becomes less religious.
How do we fix this? I think it's some combination of owning the dummies and governing effectively. But it's an incredibly hard problem and I don't have any solutions. Open to suggestions.
I don’t consider this to be a problem at all. The core of this argument is that Democrats have great policies and positions that are getting distorted by the new media landscape, which I don’t agree with. Biden’s policies were unpopular or not executed well enough. He was not heavily underwater on inflation or immigration because of right wing media. Once Democrats adopt better policies and positions, this will not be an issue. In spite of all the spinning and BS, Trump’s tariffs are unpopular.
I don't think that's true. I think Democrats need to recognize the reality that the media deck is now actively stacked against them and work on messaging explicitly. The Republican party popularity (such as it is) is not due to having popular policies, it's because it's a party ruthlessly devoted to messaging and message discipline, rooted in Roger Ailes vision that if Nixon had Fox News he would not have resigned. We face a twofold attack, one from the American right and the other the global authoritarianism, both bent on distorting the information ecosystem such that informed small l-liberal democracy becomes untenable.
Harris lost because Democrats lost the messaging wars years before that. Trump and the right have said absolutely wild shit for years and it doesn't matter because they right wing and barstool ecosystems launder it.
Let me ask you this: if it’s really a matter of Democrats being at a fundamental disadvantage in “messaging infrastructure” rather than a more fundamental issue of voter preferences, shouldn’t it be super easy to reverse this disadvantage and crush republicans?
Surely the Democrats’ donors have far more financial resources than, say, a Joe Rogan. And far more celebrities who are friendly to their cause. (Rogan isn’t even really a hardcore Republican.) Why not pay one of them a gajillion dollars and just give them a left-wing script to read out?
If Fox News is a major structural advantage for Republicans, why isn’t MSNBC a similar advantage for Dems? If you doubled MSNBC’s funding, would this solve the problem? Has MSNBC been too restrained in its negative coverage of Republicans?
Trump won after saying nonsense because it was never about messaging. Voters trusted him more on the economy, immigration, culture issues. None of this was due to messaging. The Trump economy in the first term was objectively better than the Biden economy and voters didn’t blame Trump for Covid. Inflation was lower. These are objective truths and lying about it through messaging was unlikely to succeed.
I would accept the critique that he was a hopeless communicator of his successes that was a big part of his failure. But I don’t really buy the argument that right wing media weren’t a big contributor to his failure also. After all, you hear those same right wing media narratives (many unfair or even untrue) echoed uncritically. It shows those stories are sticking in voters’ brains.
Yeah, true stories like high inflation and border security was a disaster did stick with voters. False stories like Biden was mentally and physically fit and running circles around his younger staff or cabinet members didn’t.
Those newer media outlets are different imo in that they don’t operate explicitly as partisan media, although we can probably now put Twitter/Grok into that category.
Are they locked out? Buttigieg's appearance on the Flagrant podcast seemed to go very well. I really think the Dems need to accept that these are important media outlets and go on.
I don't agree with that. They have operate with enourmous selection bias in what stories they choose to present and how they choose to present and frame them. I know a couple people who get their news primarily from NPR and there are many areas when they have large blindspots.
I remember this most clearly from around summer of 2020, when I was truly attempting to "follow the science" by getting as much ground-level data on Covid as I possibly could. The amount of ignorance my NPR friends on the topic was different, was no better than that of my Fox-News acquaintances.
Sure it’s not to say that there aren’t blind spots in their coverage, like any outlet has but they aren’t operating as an organ of the Democratic Party in the way that Fox does.
I would say they more or less are an organ, also? How would you define that difference?
To me the difference, if there is a difference, is that perhaps the Left-Wing media drives the party, whereas on the Right there might be more of a thing where the party drives the media.
But either way, it amounts to the same things. Especially because, I'd probably frame the reality a bit differently. I think the root issue is that there's a common core of activist / partisans that ultimately drive both media systems and both parties. The type of person that things about politics all the time and is willing to donate time and money to campaigns is the core of both parties and their media ecosystems. So both parties have media's that are effectively organs of their parties.
I noticed a distinct lurch farther left on NPR content the last few years. They've always had a liberal bent but also have traditionally delivered both sides of the stories fairly well. It's likely a reaction to the Trump 1 admin but I felt like was being preached at by the far left "groups" instead of listening to US public radio. And I miss Click and Clack...NPR needs to come up with more content. Wait, Wait is the only game in town now.
I agree with your analysis of NPR, but I always find this critique funny because progressive spaces are filled with snark about, "Nice Polite Republicans," and outrage that NPR's straight news coverage doesn't play a, "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire" alarm bell sound effect whenever it quotes someone from the Trump administration.
NPR is reliant on donations, like any product in this vein it's going to be most responsive to its most engaged (and therefor probably most ideological) audience.
NPR creates an ecosystem that allows college educated progressives to stay in a bubble where they think everyone has their values. The coverage of everything through a trans/genderqueer lens, for instance, created a world where progressives don't realize that's an 80/20 issue where the public is very much against them. CNN running the famous 'fiery, but mostly peaceful protests' chiron, and Joe Scarborough lying though his teeth about Biden's mental capacity are other highlights.
being unaware of the relative popularity of different issues is fairly different from holding just incorrect views about what people have said. Like if you watch Karoline Leavitt she is saying the reconciliation bill will decrease the deficit. That's just a lie, and something that Trump and people in his orbit can get away with because conservatives don't care. Same with them promising to protect medicaid then cutting it.
It's worth remembering that Fox News maxes out under 4 million viewers a night (usually more like 3), so maybe a little more than 1% of the population. Thats good for TV news but bad NFL games will double that or more. It isn't the secret weapon and may well be counter productive to the extent we are seeing some of the more disastrous and unpopular governing decisions best understood as Fox News made public policy. I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe as Casey suggests finding ways to compete in newer, less expressly partisan media would help, but a parallel to Fox has at best a fighting the last war feel to it.
I think it's fighting the last war in the sense that I'm not so sure Cable News is the future of viewership when compared to social media. And it's probably already dwarfed by social media. And - Dems do have CNN and especially MSNBC already + NPR and some other large media brands already.
And to a large extent I think these media brands are audience-driven, and arise in response to audience demand rather than top-down and pushed on the public (I think I may have got that opinion of Matt Yglesias, right here).
I think the real issue is what another commenter called "the barstool sports" media. The non-political shows that only occasionally mention politics are not very friendly to Dems right now. That's not easy to fix because it's completely organic. Joe Rogan and the dozen most popular comedians are not paid shills of the GOP - they simply find the Dems more ridiculous based primarily on the activists that have hijacked the brand and to a certain extent Dem policy in big cities.
Last fall, Trump got upset because Kamala Harris got to go on SNL. To follow federal law, NBC gave Trump a commercial on Sunday Night Football, which gets tens of millions more viewers than SNL.
To be fair, there might be candidates who could wring quite a lot more out of an SNL appearance, because the nature of the air time is quite different. But in terms of raw exposure I'd take the NFL.
Additionally, the demographics skew very old, which is also the case for cable news generally. Out of that 3-4 million (max) only a few hundred thousand are in the 25-54 demo group. The vast majority watching are old cranky boomers. As that generation dies off, cable news will become less influential than it currently is.
Also, MSNBC exists. It’s not like left wing views don’t have a voice on cable news.
"Thats good for TV news but bad NFL games will double that or more."
It's particularly good news for the Dallas Cowboys, who, no matter how terrible they play, will always get oodles of high profile TV windows, at this point due to more people tuning in to root for them to lose.
More seriously, this is entirely correct, and the media base that is friendly to Republicans is much more diffuse, like with everything these days with the rise of the internet, social media, and streaming. Democrats have a lot of work to do across all of those media forms alongside more traditional ones.
Well, it often seems it just want a different kind of much more sophisticated propaganda.
Take the most recent NYT "This Week in Climate." One "report" was basically an op ed about Republicans attempt to repeal most of IRA with zero consideration of whether any part of it might stand improvement. Another was an op ed on how bad Republican are for trying to stop states from suing US fossil fuel companies for damages caused by CO2 emissions by _users_ of fossil fuels everywhere in the world.
The idea of a left-wing Federalist Society, like left-wing Fox News, would never work. The FS exists because the entire profession leans heavily left. For an ambitious lawyer on the right, joining the FS is a way to signal that you have the type of views that can be relied upon if you were to be nominated for a Federal Judgship. For the 85 percent of lawyers on the left, you don’t need that signalling. But coming up with a coherent judicial philosophy (even if it is selectively applied retconned bullshit to justify politically expedient decisions) works far better for the right wing ambitious lawyer because a left leaning ambitious one has the luxury of having an actual universal principled philosophy that sometimes leads to politically inexpedient results then a right winger, for whom that is disqualifying.
I'd agree that a party that's serious about governing should pay extra attention to the ideas of people in swing districts and rather less on the fortunate members in rock solid safe districts. But if being captured by the concerns of the extreme is so destructive why isn't the Republican party suffering more? It's pretty clear that the tone is being set by the extremist members in the safe districts who fear being primaried by someone more extreme. It's pretty clear it got captured by the extremists on abortion.
Finally a word on 'intersectionality'. By definition it's taking a disfavoured minority and then dividing it into something even smaller by focusing on the unfortnates who are members of an additionally disfavoured variable within it. This is no doubt intellectually fascinating and illuminating to those who particulalry need to work with those affected by the multiple disadvantages. But it's useless in terms of winning elections decided by the whole population.
When I was active in Amnesty International (before it became a hard-left only organization) a staffer used to say it was important to focus on general things or we'd end up running campaigns of left-legged Lithuanians. I fear he'd be run out of that organization now.
I think you have to remember that Obama’s best attack on Romney was that Republicans wanted to cut Medicare and Republicans bounced back by dropping that position. Then in 2022, anti-abortion politics killed the GOP in tons of races — after which they really toned it down in 2024 and did better.
I take your well informed facts but it still seems to me that the Republican party ought to be suffering more than it is for being dominated by it's extreme members!
One way to think about this is that because the Republicans have structural advantages in the Senate and often the Electoral College, they can be more extreme while still being competitive. Pretty sure Nate Silver has written about this. Both parties seem to be focussed on how far can we push things while getting past 50%.
They got a big assist from inflation. Voters really hate it. AND they're sitting on a very small House majority. And their brand doesn't appear to be all that great here in May of 2025. In some ways they do appear to be paying a price for their lunacy and extremism. I don't fail to recognize the very real challenge facing Democrats. Things are tough! (Especially looking forward, at Senate math). But sometimes I think we all might benefit from taking stock of the weakness of the GOP's position. It's not just Democrats who are vulnerable.
I believe it is suffering. The fact that it's still doing so well against Democrats shows just how toxic Democrats are.
I strongly believe if Republicans had been smart and nominated someone like Nikki Haley, she would have stomped Harris and would still be very popular at this point in her administration precisely because she wouldn't have done the stupid shit Trump does.
Probably the same but to a lesser extent with a President DeSantis (he's a bit more aggressive than Haley, but still competent)
For me, this is one of Matt's least-convincing talking points. Every day on the campaign trail, Trump said a thousand extreme, crazy things. Every day as President, he does a thousand extreme things. Kamala Harris on the campaign trail said 99 moderate, kitchen-table things for every "far left" thing, and Biden governed as a moderate, center-left President who occasionally made concessions to the left wing of his party (the fact that this article needs to cite rigid rule-making in the implementation of a law expanding broadband access -- something that absolutely infuriated both voters who heard about it -- as an example of left-wing overreach tells you how "far left" the administration was). But Matt just repeats "Trump moderated on Medicare, Trump moderated on abortion." Under the first Trump administration, Republicans came one vote away from repealing the ACA, and they did manage to overturn Roe v. Wade. There is a deeper problem at the levels of education and the media ecosystem if Trump's minimal efforts to appear moderate -- immediately contradicted by his actions while governing -- are convincing to voters, whereas Democrats's repeated, far more consistent and far more deeply rooted in their actual governance, gestures at moderation fall on deaf ears.
We have somehow arrived at the point where Trump can receive a $400 million plane as a gift from Qatar and voters don't view it as a corruption. The sickness cannot be cured by a louder ritual intonation of "EGG PRICES."
I respect, I really do, that this author has forgotten more than I will ever know about campaign strategy. But one idea that readers of this newsletter seem to appreciate is that expert insiders sometimes have blind spots. It must be extremely frustrating when you want to run a 100% moderate campaign, and insider groups push you to run a 90% moderate campaign instead. But Trump ran a 95% extreme campaign full of ranting about vengeance, etc. I'm sorry, but I'm going to believe my lyin' eyes when they tell me that his campaign was extreme in substance and in appearance. I think there are things about him that fall outside of normal political discourse / public policy that connect with voters, and then he is supported by a highly asymetrical media ecosystem that will remain in place and distort public perception even if the Democrats manage to pass a more moderate broadband extension next time.
Matt’s take is that Trump does *crazy* things, but not particularly *right-wing* things. He used the phrase “unhinged moderation” in a famous post about this, and while it’s weird to call it “moderation” because it’s crazy, there’s something right about this phrase.
His take on immigrants is fairly right-wing, but his take on tariffs is not, and his take on vaccines is not, and his take on corruption is not.
I take this point, but especially if we're talking about what Trump *does*, rather than what he *says*, to me he comes off as even more extreme. As you note, Trump's rhetoric and policy are extreme on immigration. The budget the Republicans are trying to pass right now is extreme regarding tax policy (extending the extreme tax policy enacted during the first Trump administration) and access to healthcare. Policies and law around abortion access and women's reproductive healthcare more broadly are only going to get more restrictive.
I think what it really comes down to is whether you view Trump's personalist, highly corrupt view of governance itself as "right wing" or not, since this is another area where his rhetoric and actions match. To me, pardoning the J6 rioters reads as "extreme right"; to you, maybe it's just "crazy." But while there are certainly left-wing authoritarians in the world, I think Trump is part of a global network that clearly reads as extreme right, not just "crazy."
But beyond this, whether Trump is "extreme" in the sense of "far right" or in the sense of "unhinged," a media environment that results in the public perception of Trump as more moderate than Kamala Harris cannot be overcome by even-yet-still-more moderate messaging. I'm not even arguing against the "popularist" campaign strategy in general; it just drives me crazy that Matt takes the public's perception of Trump as moderate as evidence of effective messaging when the Democrats release an absolute avalanche of moderate messaging day in and day out and come to be perceived as extreme. And their moderate messaging is backed up, by and large at least, by their actual governance! Something is heavily distorting public perception and needs to be dealt with as directly as possible.
Trump is well to the right of the pre-2015 establishment consensus on immigration, but he is not particularly far right on that issue compared to the median American voter. With the usual caveats that people seldom have coherent preferences and poll responses are very dependent on phrasing, “deport all illegal immigrants” has near majority support, restricting asylum seekers and hiring more border patrol agents are supermajority positions, etc.
Trump is indeed an aberration in terms of procedural integrity and norms. And that’s very bad! But a) the average voter, empirically, does not care about that that much despite near-unanimous messaging to that effect from all traditional and a good deal media. And b) this doesn’t align to a left-right spectrum in a traditional sense.
Look, I guess all designations of "right" and "left" in politics are subjective, but I'm not sure we should always relativize everything with reference to public opinion. If, in 1941, the Nazis have overwhelming public support in Germany, must we stop describing them as "far right"? Is it definitionally impossible for a popular government to be extreme in its policies? Mass deportation, as messaged, planned, and implemented by the Trump administration, along with the attempted revocation of birthright citizenship, are the product of right-wing xenophobia, rejection of cosmopolitan values, and adoption of blood-and-soil nationalism. If these policies are popular among the public, to me that means "a majority of the public currently holds some far-right beliefs," not "these beliefs are no longer far right."
As Kenny points out, the substance of what is considered "right" and "left" changes over time, which makes for gray areas. Nevertheless, the terms are only useful at all if they denote, at least provisionally, some set of political beliefs independent of public opinion, which, as you say, can be hard to consistently measure anyway. I consider vaccine denialism, given our current political context, a right-wing phenomenon, though I know not too long ago it was more prevalent among a left-wing fringe. For Kenny, on the other hand, this means it doesn't map onto the traditional left-right spectrum, as you say about commitment to democratic procedures and norms. Maybe this means that "left" and "right" are not useful right now as terms in political debate. But if they aren't, it's also hard to know what "extreme" and "moderate" mean. Are they just synonyms of "popular" and "unpopular"?
" Biden governed as a moderate, center-left President who occasionally made concessions to the left wing of his party"
You might believe this, but a strong majority of the country doesn't.
Biden's 35% popularity rating shows that the vast majority of people thought he was a far left disaster who destroyed the Democratic brand. So much so, that Trump looked like a better choice.
But this is just my point. If Biden can govern moderately in style AND substance and come to be viewed as extreme, then it's hard for me to believe that they are just a little bit more moderate messaging away from electoral victory. People are forming their political perceptions in a way that just isn't captured by the substance of today's article.
Well said. Trump ran a campaign that was "moderate" along one dimension but was wildly extreme on a completely different, orthogonal dimension.
Now maybe Matt's point holds because voters only care about that first dimension and so reward the candidate while completely ignoring that new dimension that sticks up outside of that two dimensional plane most politicians live on.
It's interesting. I thought Obama's best attack on Romney was trade. At the very least, it seems Obama's best ad vs. Romney was the one with an Indiana factory worker who's plant was shut down by Bain Capital. But the story is the same both ways. Republicans (or really just Trump) bounced back by dropping the free-trade position.
The problem with the "Republicans became moderate on abortion" take is that Trump had already appointed three justices who were key in the Dobbs decision, which undid decades of precedent. That was always going to be a bigger deal than the specific framing of campaign rhetoric a couple of years later.
Matt has expressed his admiration for the pro-life groups' sense of message discipline in the past. E.g., I don't think they ever protest Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. There's many things wrong with the pro-life movement, but at least some of their leaders have a real sense of how practical politics work that Lefty groups could learn from.
Sure, they keep their mouths shut when their politicians express moderate views, but the idea is that they know those politicians are lying to the public and will push their issues once in office.
At the same time, the biggest change in the status quo of abortion between when Trump left office and the 2024 election was Dobbs. I'm not convinced that there was a critical mass of swing voters who were simultaneously comfortable with Dobbs, who understood the implication of Dobbs for state vs. federal regulation of abortion, but didn't want a nationwide abortion ban, and was also carefully watching changes in campaign rhetoric. It's probably more likely that abortion was simply a more salient issue for voters who came out for midterms than for a presidential election.
But there seems to be decent evidence from the polling following Dobbs that a non-trivial fraction of the electorate has little to no mental connection between Supreme Court justices and the President who appointed them, instead attributing court rulings to whomever the sitting President was at the time. (There were a bunch of polls in early 2024 showing 15 to 20% of registered voters blamed Biden for Roe being overturned.)
I agree with the point, but if anything this weakens the point that Trump moderated on abortion in the campaign had a measurable effect on the election since it points to a decent number of people just not understanding what's going on. The whole Trump moderated issue depends on enough people both sidesing topics like the peaceful transfer of power, vaccines, horse dewormer, and if Russia is more democratic than Ukraine. It's easy to fit what is moderate vs. extreme on Medicare into old mental frameworks, but the "moderate Trump" narrative relies on setting aside these Trump-specific topics. It would be a stronger argument to say that Democrats specifically have to moderate to gain power for structural reasons.
It's unfortunate that intersectionality as practiced devolves into Oppression Olympics discourse, because I think a much more useful application of it is to study how the intersections of multiple identities that we all have provides unique proportions of privilege and oppression in all of us.
I have never heard of the word qualia before, and in trying to learn what that means, it seems that subjectivity is a trait, which I would agree applies in this case, but I still think we can reach some reasonable consensus on how we judge it.
What are you saying? That privilege and oppression are not features of how we interact, but merely private experiential traits that no one else can know about?
In 2025 America, yes, mostly, with a few caveats and room to differ. But legal and social equality clearly reign, and the discourse around privilege and oppression is largely about defining things in such a way that they are implicated in the discussion, not people coming to the fore with obvious examples. The idea of incurring a status such as ‘oppressed ’ because of how you self identify seems to indicate in this direction as well. We're cutting the salami finer and finer but there's a point where people can't be bothered.
The Republican Party has suffered. Do you not remember all the elections they lost from 2017-2023, some of which were pretty bad (e.g. losing a Senate seat in Alabama)?
“ Finally a word on 'intersectionality'. By definition it's taking a disfavoured minority and then dividing it into something even smaller by focusing on the unfortnates who are members of an additionally disfavoured variable within it.”
That is not what intersectionality is at all! It’s about noting that the issues facing black men are different from the issues facing white woman, which are themselves different from the issues facing black women, and that it’s misleading to treat these as additive such that one of these groups is worse off overall than the others.
This is true with the original analytical usage, but there’s pretty clearly an activist definition that’s normative— I.e. , “my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit”
This is a great perspective but I quibble with one piece of the plan in particular.
"A legal organization to counter the Federalist Society offering a forward-looking Democratic vision and building a pipeline for legal talent and thought."
I think a lot of dems fail to fully grasp why FedSoc exists. Due to education polarization, the share of people with generally conservative views graduating from law schools is just wildly smaller than people holding mainline Democratic or further left views. This is all the more true at the elite law schools that produce future candidates for the Federal Judiciary. Even at notoriously "conservative" law schools like UChicago, we are talking being "only" ~60-40 libs as opposed to 80-20 or more in other places.
But because the Art. III bench is nominated by POTUS, the Federal Judiciary is roughly 50-50 libs and conservatives. This creates a massive supply and demand problem on the right that requires an extensive network to identify and cultivate conservative legal talent early through clerkships and the like to produce future judges. The reason there is not a comparably influential liberal FedSoc is precisely because they do not need to have one, they have more than enough supply of talented credentialed lawyers working their way through the system.
Given this disparity I just think efforts to replicate a lib Fed Soc, whether the American Constitution Society or some other new group will just come at a very high opportunity cost relative to the results. I think engagement and moderation is a better approach. I am probably one of the few members of Fed Soc in the SB community, not because I agree with everything people affiliated with the organization think and do (far from it), but because my school's chapter was quite a big tent and I wanted to give voice to a predominately textualist, but center left moderate neoliberal prospective.
I agree that it's possible there will be a high opportunity cost to standing up a true counter to Fed Soc. But what the author and others who argue similarly worry about is that simply relying on the underlying predisposition of law school attendees and graduates produces far too many Merrick Garlands and not enough Ketanji Brown Jacksons, especially at the District, Circuit, and State Appellate levels.
The Federalist Society isn't just a pipeline for spotting talent, it supplies a vocal legal philosophy that works with and shapes the political and governing philosophy of the Republican movement.
The non FedSoc Judges who do currently rise don't come from nowhere, they are all already part of the political process at the state and local level, but it's an ad hoc process lacking direction and focus towards a greater purpose other than individual ambition.
My two cents is that I have a hard time seeing how creating a left-wing version of the Federalist Society could work as such an organization seems likely to swiftly cripple itself through identity politics-driven infighting unless there's really rigorous gatekeeping.
As much as I'm not a fan of the left wing of the Democratic Party, I don't think the center-left's problems are all just getting steamrolled by the left. If the Republicans at this point are running on autopilot and the only policy they can think to cram through Congress is "cut taxes for the rich," Democrats aren't far off. The biggest problem of the Biden administration was inflation, exacerbated by the 2021 stimulus, which many economists at the time warned was too big. But that wasn't really the left's fault, that was just the Democrats running on autopilot. "Pass a spending bill that throws a bone to all our constituents" is the Dem's version of "just cut taxes lol," the policy they do when they're out of ideas. Then there's state government, where most Americans consider the biggest blue states to be pretty badly run. But it's not like that's because the DSA has been running New York and California, those states are run by bog-standard Democrats. So again, what are the Democrats offering? I agree that a party that's more chill on dissenting about trans sports or something is better than one that's not, but they need a positive agenda and they need to demonstrate some successes where they do hold power.
Agreed. It does kind of raise the question of what, specifically, Democratic state legislatures should do with all of their time. Really kind of makes the Texas model look better, where they only show up to legislate a few months every other year. Honestly I kind of think that California, New York et al would be better served by moving to that model- it prevents them from coming up with new, dumb, unnecessary laws to pass! You get the essential stuff done in your few months and otherwise stay at home.
But yes I think the states should be much more deregulatory bodies, not 'let's find new windmills to tilt at' perpetual nanny states
First step is unwinding the bureaucratic clusterf*** they've created. Texas and Florida aren't run by geniuses, they just never created the legal structure to allow hecklers to strangle housing or infrastructure or anything else, they don't spend all day thinking of new and exciting regulations to pass (unless they're jazzed about some culture war BS), and they never created the public sector unions to owe patronage too.
Hell, Washington State is one of the better run blue states in my view, but now we're possibly going to implement statewide "rent stabilization" which could very well screw up the growing areas of the state. They can't help themselves.
The Texas bill under discussion in that NYTimes article hasn’t passed yet. Last day of the session is June 2. The short legislative calendar may yet save us.
Living in one of those poorly governed blue states, it’s not moderate Democrats that are governing badly, it’s elected officials who are considerably to the left of the median nationwide voter.
Well yeah, to the left of the national median. And probably to the left of the median Democratic voter too. What I'm saying is that this is what Democratic governance looks like to most of the country. Sure, Gavin Newsom has (up until recently apparently) social views that are out of step with the median voter, but that's not why people are leaving California. That's more to do with cost of living issues which is at least partially to do with quality of governance issues.
I like this, but was confused by point #3 about the personal liberty think-tank focused on LGBTQ+ issues. Doesn’t the Democratic party already have this in the ACLU, and haven’t they already shown themselves to be more of an electoral drag than a boost? If the ACLU hadn’t helped Trump make the they/them ad, would he even be president right now?
The ACLU is not a legal think tank. They are civil liberties litigators, and their interests occasionally are not even consistent with those of the left. (Defending unpopular speech from the right, being an example.) Brennan Center is awesome but given its narrow (but critical) focus on democracy also is not an analogue of the Federalists.
There is no org I’m aware of that would brand a judge or a lawyer as part of a pool of prospective Democratic president’s appointee to the judiciary.
The ACLU defended the Unite to Right rally, so yep. They are admirably consistent in their defense of free speech, even if one may find some of their clients detestable. Here's a 2024 statement they made to actually amplify that they defend people on the right, too: https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/defending-speech-we-hate
Btw, it's not just free speech stuff. The ACLU has I believe opposed a federal gun registry, so they align with the NRA on that.
The Republicans get a sometimes deserved reputation for starting stupid culture wars. However, I think Kevin Drum observed a while back that the Democrats frequently start culture wars themselves, and somehow convince themselves that the Republicans are to blame. The 'males in females sports' issue is one such culture war. Virtually nobody 20 years ago thought this was reasonable. Then suddenly, this was deemed to be a wise issue for Democrats to get behind. When the Republicans say it is a bad idea, they are definitely fighting a culture war - but they didn't start it!
It's like the people with purple hair from the Hunger Games just tell the lumpen masses what they are going to believe from now on, and they dare not dissent. And yet, they >can< dissent at the ballot box.
Yeah this is my most right wing opinion but it's definitely true. You sometimes hear people say "this affects like .0x% of people why are we arguing about it?". Great so we all agree no men in women's sports and we shouldn't argue about it right? Right?
You can even, I think, justifiably take this critique to the next level.
A *very* routine comment at any progressive-leaning website on this issue is some variation of, "Ugh, Americans would rather have fascism than see trans girls play sports," or, "Ugh, Americans care more about sports than democracy!" But, if you choose to keep pushing for self-ID-based sports participation even when it's manifestly an issue that benefits the fascistic opposition on net, that strongly suggests you're not actually that worried about the survival of democracy!
Once you notice this pattern you see it everywhere. “Idiot voter[s] X preferred corruption and incompetence instead of conceding on this minor meaningless point” with no apparent self-consciousness of the implications. Education polarization has put all of the people who believe that politics should have a teacher figure who adjudicates when one party is misbehaving in the Democratic coalition. Trumpism is seen as a hall pass for doing unpopular things, because the voters aren’t allowed to vote on culture issues until the Republicans behave themselves.
The right wing version of this, though, is mainly centered on villainizing that .0x%.
I've also largely grown to see that these issues are almost always brought up by right wingers. The biggest mistake of most Democrats is that they try to engage in good faith on what few merits there are.
Way to pay yourself on the back. But it’s just not true. The Left pushed this for years. By pushed I mean self ID for gender being a right in all areas. Sports, showers, prisons, everywhere with no questions asked. If you did push back you were smeared as a bigot. Thats a fact.
Historical revisionism is popular now but let’s not revise history that happened just a few years ago. The truth is fresh in my mind.
Online on Twitter and such, I fully believe you. Out in the real world? Things were not quite as clear cut. Even "self pronoun" was something largely put up with. I think, largely, because people just didn't care. One way or the other. (I do think some places went too far appeasing kids. Often by trying to empower them to have an opinion on things they also didn't care about.)
Now, it sucks, as there was a time that online activism was growing in power far far more than makes sense. I think it is still higher in power than it should be, personally.
It kind of fits in with the general notion that online connectivity has been a force that is still not understood well.
It was just online? I’m confused, did you just get here? I had mandatory DEI training at my workplace where they talked about the right way to think about these issues. All the training was left coded. It was as if it was being done by Pedro Pascal.
People lost their jobs by not conforming to the “online on Twitter and such”. Thats the real world.
The Left has this ability to reboot the matrix and act like things that just happened didn’t. Keep taking the blue pill if you want.
Online job training has long been... dubious. Surely you also did the active shooter trainings over the years? Sexual harassment training was usually laughably absurd in how things were presented. As were the conflict of interest trainings. (Well, maybe conflict of interests were not absurd, in light of the current admin...)
The problem in this discourse is a lot like the people that used to advocate heavily for the legalization of marijuana. They were, by far, the biggest weakness to their cause. So, did I see stories of people that lost their jobs over DEI stuff? Yeah. Unfortunately, most stories I saw were not exactly clean stories.
And this is largely playing out in the current environment. I can and do agree that "diversity statements" are dumb. The attack against Harvard right now, though? Canceling grants that have the text "trans"? Hard to square that with the more neutral stances against DEI that you are holding up.
I agree that men shouldn’t play in women’s sports, but (and given the low instances) do we truly have a grasp on the issue? Intersex is 1.7% of the us population with 0.5% having variations.
Do we do what the Olympics did with some kind of testing? Or is it just openly trans or intersex players who are banned? One sounds quite invasive and expensive and the other will lead to secrecy. None of these account for the 1.7% (some of who may be surprised to hear they are intersex).
Again I am 100% in favor of men not playing in women’s sports but there is a lot of complexity here. Something that should be debated based upon the science and the willingness of a subset of the population to be subjected to a level of scrutiny to ensure we get to 100% female only.
1.7% of the population is not Intersex. That statistic was invented by a lying activist academic who deliberately counted conditions that aren't actually Intersex in any useful sense.
Good information to have. Seems like some prominent organizations need to update their information.
Even with the lower numbers, do we either say 0.00018% are intersex so it doesn’t matter (something the original commentator did not like) or go for the 100% with testing to ensure 100% compliance? A one time test for anyone playing female sports.
In general I think we should support strict policing of elite sport and shouldn't care so much about non-elite sport. But not caring so much also means if local parents want to impose restrictions we just let them. In the end if they are ineffective because nobody is going to pay for cheek swabs, well, that's their problem, not ours.
This is one that largely confuses me more than anything else. Coed sports are often the norm in club sports. Because otherwise you don't have enough people to play. Same for church leagues and such. Get whoever you can to play.
For "elite" sports, those already have their own governing bodies. Why do we feel that this is something the federal/state governments need to be a direct part of?
I agree with you there. I imagine there talking points t will be it’s such a small percentage of the population we decided not to do it.
Let's not test every single female athlete.
Democrats don't have to stake out a position on the exact definition of gender or sex for sports. The Democrats can and should take the easy position on the transgender sports debate: just don't force anyone to accept openly male-to-female transgender people into girl's/women's sports leagues.
Let the Republican culture warriors dive into the details, where the unpopular decisions are. Let them hang themselves by proposing genital inspections or chromosome testing or whatever. Let them be the ones to tell a girl who found out at age 13 that she has CAIS and XY chromosomes that she has to play on the boy's volleyball team.
The way you’ve framed it, you’ve foreclosed any kind of discussion. Did you mean it that way?
I think this was actually a good-faith point that the “.xx%” framing is often brought up by proponents of MtF sports participation in a way that doesn’t favor their side a priori. You can argue the position on the merits but you can’t invoke the small number of people affected by it as a reason in favor of a substantial policy change in and of itself — the counterargument will always be that the utilitarian margin (if any) is too small to justify making it a political priority given limited attention-budgets and legislative time.
That assumes that it’s a major policy shift to begin with. It affects such a small number of people that I believe you can craft policies as needed. It’s a big country. Let federalism do its thing.
I believe it was made in good faith (that’s why I love it here) but foreclosing any kind of alternative to: you were born x, you are now y, except in sports. Period. doesn’t sound open to other ideas.
I think that “natal males can’t participate in women’s sports” is the default policy here, or at least a position that seems extremely defensible to me as being the default relative to which this would be a major policy change. While I think my preferred policy would be for local devolution on a sport-by-sport (and age-by-age and league-by-league) basis, it does seem that at some point you are going to end up with an MtF athlete winning an ordinally-ranked competition (or getting a spot on a limited-size team) and you’re going to have to fight about whether it’s okay to recognize the record or whether that subverts the point of women’s sports. Meanwhile my priors are that the people most in favor of categorical MtF sports participation aren’t going to even want so much as an asterisk put next to the “top women’s times” record list.
I just wouldn’t mind us going through the motions of getting to that point you describe rather than all the fear generated about the what ifs when we’re not really there yet. Remember all the commotion if we made gay marriage legal, people would be marrying their pets??
This was my point
Not arguing the point. Arguing that the tactic used by activists cuts against their argument
Whoever tries to change the status quo "starts" the fight. That is like, definitionally true.
How on earth did trans-girls and trans women being allowed to play sports with their chosen gender become a hill that anyone wants to die on? I mean it's very small beer compared to criminalizing gender affirming care, if you are going to fight for trans rights.
Democratic politicians and their staff also just need to be comfortable ignoring activists who yell at them on social media. Slacktivists ruin every movement they become a part of.
Because it’s a simple, visible concept that seems obvious to most people, and is genuinely an issue where most of the Democratic Party apparatus has taken an extremely unpopular position.
I’m 100% against men in women’s sports and men in women’s bathrooms. At the same time, there’s nothing obvious about this issue. The issue of intersex is complex and the level of scrutiny that women would need to go through to prove their sex to compete or use the bathroom probably isn’t popular either. That being said, forcing the issue on the population without the debate also isn’t an election winning strategy.
Intersex is a red herring that distracts from the issue of standard males wanting to be treated as female without any qualifications. Trans and intersex issues do not share common facts or common solutions and should not be bundled together.
Intersex is a far larger issue in elite competitive sports than trans women, it just doesn't show up in the American high school/college scene as much. There are no globally elite trans women in sports; meanwhile, Imane Khalif, Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba, and Christine Mboma won Olympic/World medals and set records as intersex women.
Ok, that's still not the same as obvious natal males being encouraged to walk into a women's locker room, and implicates global sex and gender norms (Iran and other countries forcibly ‘transitoning’ people) more than American trans activism.
Ok, let’s say we don’t bundle them together. Clearly there needs to be an enforcement mechanism of who can and can not go into a female bathroom due to the “males wanting to be treated as female without any qualifications.” Is it proactive (ID cards and security) or are we using the honor system with security enforcing the issue when it arises? Who pays for this additional cost?
How did we keep men out of women's locker rooms in 1994? That's how we do it. It's a solved problem.
>That being said, forcing the issue on the population without the debate also isn’t an election winning strategy.<
I agree, but you do realize it's Republicans who are "forcing the issue" right? The public restroom-sports team trans brouhaha is an almost canonical example of the kind of moral panic Republicans like to gin up to play Democrats (and the national media) like a fiddle.
I'm not suggesting the integration of trans people into society isn't a real issue that presents challenges. It is. But it's not a huge issue, and there's really no reason it has to be a NATIONAL one other than the fact that Republicans want it to be national, because they believe it helps them politically. It seems to me that individual sports leagues, school districts, colleges, municipalities and states can work things out without debates in Congress or showboating by politicians.
Completely correct.
I don’t think that states rights have a very good track record on these issues. It would also be challenged in courts.
I can see at least one sport or district doing overreach and having dna tests, ID cards, no card- no entry on women’s bathrooms and ensuing 100% compliance.
Which hits on my other point that these laws are just unworkable if they’re based on good faith and don’t require women to have a test to gain access to women only spaces.
How did allowing men into women's sports teams and into locker rooms and shelters and prisons become something that people care about?
The children's sports issue is a canard, because once you agree that a male can become female by saying so, the ramifications are obvious.
If separation matters then the honor system isn’t rigorous enough. What identification and enforcement measures are you proposing?
The absolute base has to be that legal ID must reflect the true sex of holder. Besides that, the same way we enforced separation before ca. 2000 AD. The public is free to simply tell men they aren't welcome, and men are required by law and custom to stay out.
The biggest thing is to simply make it known that men aren't welcome in women's spaces, period.
Kids + sports + perceived unfairness = the biggest obsession in suburban America.
It's a country of a third of a billion souls. You're going to find at least a few examples of EVERY kind of advocate.
I would like you to explain to me why you think it's better for a person who's presenting as female be forced to play on a men's team, or is what you really want is to not have to acknowledge a trans person's existence because it makes you uncomfortable?
"The Republicans get a sometimes deserved reputation for starting stupid culture wars"
rofl, Democrats are ALWAYS the aggressor in the culture wars. It's Democrats that push cultural change. Republicans are the the ones resisting change. The one pushing the change is the aggressor, IE the one that starts the culture war.
I feel like arguing about who started it, rather than about who's perpetuating it, is the stupidest way to go about things.
Fair enough, it's definitely the Democrats that keep perpetuating the culture wars too.
For example, if they dropped the Trans thing and we went back to the status quo of say 2010, it would be a non issue pretty quick
Surely the culture war continues because neither side will concede. As such, I don't understand how you can say one side should be held more at fault for perpetuating it. If they weren't both holding to their sincere convictions-progressives continuing to push for new life scripts, words, etc. to be normalized and the right continuing to not regard those things as normal-there wouldn't be a culture war.
It literally requires both sides.
It always seemed to me that this is the kind of topic where politicians should just never have gotten involved in the first place. Why not just let the high schools, or the NCAA, or whomever, battle this out? Why should this be a matter of *governance*?
Was supporting interracial marriage a stupid culture war when it was far less popular than even transgender kids in sports when Loving v Virginia passed?
There's also the fact that the trans rights movement succeeds when they highlight the similarities between transwomen and cisgender women. The sports issue highlights the most obvious way there's a physical difference. The rise of leaderless online social movements defined by who yells the loudest has been devastating for progressive politics.
On this reading aren't culture wars basically always started by the left? How would people who want to maintain traditional customs ever start a culture war? e.g. there was clearly a culture war (mostly concluded now) over gay marriage, and it was clearly also started by the left. Is nearly every accusation that the left makes to the tune of conservatives starting culture wars self-deceiving in the way Kevin Drum identified?
(As a conservative I think this is in fact correct, but I want to see if people here push back on it)
Edit- I see Sean O already said this
Or, dare I point out, the "anti-imperialist" foreign-policy protesters, especially regarding Israel/Palestine...
“…a Strategic Donor Network that prioritizes electoral strategies based on realities rather than ideological preferences and identity politics….”
Sounds great!
Why isn’t this called, “The Democratic Party”? Why build something that pursues no agenda other than making the party effective, when that is the job of the party?
I’m not opposed to all this, but at some point I need to know where to send my money. I don’t want to send half of it to the Democratic Party, and the other half to “We Would Like The Democratic Party To Win.”
In fairness, if you donate to the DCCC they will send the bulk of your money to frontline members who are disproportionately moderate. Pretty good bang for buck.
To the broader Strategic Donor Network point, I'd like to see more money go to building out a center-left network of think tanks, candidate recruitment operations, etc.
This feels like a straw man. Someone says we should try to win elections by appealing more broadly, and the reaction is, “Well then what do Democrats even stand for?” Come on. That sounds more like someone defending their own fringe views than engaging with reality. If Democrats have a problem, it’s that they’ve alienated too many voters—not that they’ve sold out.
I think it would be very unfortunate for anyone to react to Greg Schultz’ piece by asking, “Well then what do Democrats even stand for?”, by defending their own fringe views, or by accusing the party of having sold out. If you see anyone around here doing those things, let them know that I disapprove of their response.
I think that one reason why some people send money to these interest groups rather than the Democratic Party is because a lot of them are 501(c)(3) charities. Besides the tax deduction, some employers will 100% match their employees' donations to charities (up to a certain amount). So from that point of view, these groups just need to be at least 50% as effective at doing good things as the Democratic Party for them to be worth it. The big question is which ones can actually meet this threshold.
Is there a charity that is dedicated to the common sense agenda? That’s what I need.
A lot of this is the fault of campaign finance "reform" which greatly reduced the powers of political parties.
That needs to be fixed. We need to bring back strong parties, which means allowing unlimited donations to parties.
That would fix a lot of problems
"As Joe Biden’s 2020 primary campaign manager, I saw firsthand that the real Democratic base is made up of moderate voters...."
Thank you! I've been hammering away at that point for a long time. Maybe people will listen to you. A good start on fixing the Democratic Party is to break the habit of mistaking its left wing for its base.
And remember, the number one amplifier of left wing views is the "Republican Noise Machine.
Did you forget the MSM exists?
For example, I remember a NYT op-ed "Yes defund the police"
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html
NYT publishes op-eds from a huge variety of people, and is not inherently endorsing those people. Did you remember the op-ed from Tom Cotton around the same time that basically said "send in the military"? Or recently one from RFK Jr talking about Medicaid work requirements?
yeah, didn't the editor lose his job for publishing the Cotton Op-ed?
Yes, the problem is the endless "shadow primary" where donors, the groups, and the media is courted with little to no voter input.
It would help if the media took a more skeptical look at the press releases factories.
What does this mean, though?
Dem voters who self-describe as liberal or very liberal slightly outnumber those who self-describe as moderate. So empirically, the “base” is not “moderate.”
Of course, the vast majority of Dem voters are to the right of AOC or Bernie. But equally obviously, the vast majority of Dems are to the left of the median American.
I suppose there’s a case for embracing “moderate” as an applause word irrespective of its actual denotation, but I worry that this can confuse “make policies appeal to moderates,” which is always a good idea, with “accept the normative preferences of moderates.” Sometimes those preferences are bad!
It probably means people somewhere around Barack Obama and Joe Biden, both of whom were authentically to the left of Joe Manchin or Bill Clinton.
Not saying I want it this way.
Overall: Good analysis and thanks for sharing.
Greg writes: "A key first step is the pulling together of a Strategic Donor Network that prioritizes electoral strategies based on realities rather than ideological preferences and identity politics, a network that recognizes the need for persuasion as well as turnout."
So how do you envision this first step happening? Who is going to do what and when?
I am working on a good-growth (YIMBY/abundance) political effort that would play in primaries that I will have some more info on soon.
One of my goals in this post was to raise the point to donors (and donor advisors....) that we are spending tens and hundreds of millions that contribute to dems losing.... (and governing poorly) -- so first diagnose the problem more accurately
How do you deal with the fact that many of the Groups actually make their money off various elements of Democrats governing poorly?
Any thoughts on the Build America Caucus as a focus for activities along the lines you describe?
It's disappointing that there's no talk about why Biden pivoted to the left after the primary and during his presidency - that would have actually been interesting to hear Biden's former campaign opine on. Instead, we get the same talking points that we've all been talking about for the past six months
I have an article for you!
https://permanentcampaign.substack.com/p/a-former-biden-advisors-analysis
was just going to send the same thing! I have thoughts on this topic too but wanted to start with the broader conversation that what Democrats are spending money on is part of the reason we are losing elections
That article was interesting as a narrative, but it mostly just begged the question. We already knew the campaign/administration moved left by hiring people to the left. That tells us nothing about why.
It would be interesting to read a better account from an outsider who could be a bit more clear eyed.
"We already knew the campaign/administration moved left by hiring people to the left. That tells us nothing about why."
The section https://permanentcampaign.substack.com/i/163646404/why-did-biden-shift-left-during-his-presidency is what you're looking for, I think: there were literally not enough legibly-qualified people to fill the jobs unless you hired left-wingers. Biden only bothered to stretch for illegibly-qualified people to balance visible demographic characteristics (race, gender, etc.), not political leanings or socioeconomic class.
Yeah, primary campaigns can be smaller and focused on states in sequence (don't need to keep as many assets in Iowa once the caucus is done and can focus on South Carolina). The general election campaign needs to be national and simultaneous.
Thanks for sharing - very interesting!
Yeah, a more detailed tick-tock from an insider could have been very illuminating.
Maybe we have to wait for the book.
Book schmook. $0.37 of my $80 yearly subscription went to this post and I want my money's worth, dammit!
Oh, I thought we got good value from today's guest.
It’s because of coalitionial appeasement and the left wing’s extortion tactics. The activist class and those who have the ears of staffers have been threatening Democrats with Republican trifectas for years. They achieved it in 2016.
I don't know the inside baseball, but one thing that people need to remember is the context of when Biden was sewing up the primary.
It was March and April 2020. The US economy was imploding. Shutdowns were happening, and people had no idea when they would end. Unemployment was going towards Great Depression levels.
It looked like we had another 2008 on our hands, which saw the Democratic party sweep into power and enact large changes to the social safety net. Biden's leftwing pivot seemed to mostly about building up the safety net, rather than cultural issues, at least at first. Then the George Floyd protests happened, and Biden's lead in the race grew to about 10 points in the polls, as Trump's inflammatory rhetoric probably didn't help him with voters. It seemed like Democrats were gonna not only win, but have a landslide on their hands, and all of the past frustrations of the Obama years would be surmounted. In that environment, the cost of going after the priorities of the base made more sense.
The bad Senate polling of 2020 really screwed up people's expectations. Once the idea that Biden could be a transformational president, it was hard to put that idea back in the box. Even once it became clear the Senate majority would be small, the way we won, with the Georgia special election, raised people's expectations too much.
Honestly I just thought it was miraculous to go from a Republican President and Senate to a Democratic trifecta, period. I'm used to consistent Republican control.
I dunno man. So Biden wins in 2020 in large part my forging his own path and lot letting himself get dragged left by “the groups”.
And then he governs as though “the groups” are in charge. You blame these orgs for making changes to the rural broadband bill and yet last I checked Biden was President! At any time he could say “I won in part by not giving in to your demands. So should I now”. You are letting your former boss off the hook here.
And your description of GOP forces is wild to me. These groups are not popular or at the very least their ideas are not popular. Medicaid cuts are hideously unpopular. Overturning Roe Vs Wade is not popular. Their negative impact on the GOP brand is all about the “blotting out of the sun” cult of personality around Trump. Not because the groups have their finger on the pulse of America. I have expected you to claim America is a “center right” nation like we’re still in 1992.
I truly wish your former boss well. He’s a good man who I’m proud to have voted for 2020 and would have happily voted for in 2024 given the alternative. I really hope he makes a full recovery and lives another 20 years.
But I really can’t just let go this whitewashing of the last 4 years either.
I have lots of thoughts on the Biden years and the internal and external push/pull to the left (for no actually good political reason and for the most part no good policy/governance reason..) but didn't want to cloud this broader ecosystem article with an over focus on just the last 4 years
I appreciate the article and the engagement. What I've picked up here at SB is that the push / pull to the left was largely due to the younger staff of the Biden admin, which for whatever reason was allowed to steer the ship. I hope you'll be able to share whether that seems correct or not at some point in the future.
Even in normal times with non-insane groups and regular politics, you have to get people to go along with your plans.
Biden could have made broadband a Priority, and said "we're doing this, get out of the way or get run over." But making broadband a Priority means, definitionally, something else not being a Priority.
"Yeah but Trump does this." Trump can't even pass his tax bill with his own party.
How would Biden have forced the states to truncate their processes and get broadband deployed sooner? He's not the Green Lantern.
maybe smarter (less) rules and regulations around deployment?
Wait, the idea that Biden was helpless to influence states seems obviously crazy to me. He obviously had a lot of political and moral influence over at least the solid blue states, and indeed it's not like he was demanding the red states, like, liberalize their abortion views or anything. He would've been asking for them to take money to make a broadly unobjectionable infrastructure improvement. A basically competent President who made it a priority could clearly speed up broadband deployment in at least some places.
Yeah, one of the problems of BBB was that it was such a grab bag that there wasn't anything for the average voter to latch onto as a central priority they hoped the president would deliver on.
No one has replied to the second part of your comment here, but it's the one I was most hung up on, too! I basically liked all of Schultz' article (I don't blame him for governance since he's the campaign manager), but his invocation of the right-wing think tank ecosystem also felt totally wild. The orgs he mentioned don't have any clear value system besides pure opportunism. They've consistently changed their mind on every issue during the last eight years except for dismantling regulation wholesale (even regulation that would be good for business in the medium term) and pushing low taxes on rich people and corporations. They don't stand for "liberty...freedom...prosperity...or a conservative legal framework." They did absolutely nothing about the erosion of those values from 2016-2020, and they're doing nothing about it now.
If you are a republican candidate or elected official and you say 'freedom' or 'liberty' or 'free market/reagan capitalism' you know there are organizations which have money, staff, and policies to back you up. Those message frames also help you win a general election.
If you are a democrat, who has your back if you said 'liberty' or 'teddy roosevelt capitalism' ?
Why would a Democrat be talking about a Republican President, instead of "Franklin Roosevelt capitalism?"
Or is talking about FDR too left-wing?
It made me think about the asymmetry of 'the groups', which (on both the left and the right) seem to have all of the energy & momentum on their side. There are, as we know, a number of groups & activists dedicated to say moving the Overton window on transgender issues. But there's no activist groups within the Democratic party or the left more broadly, dedicated to preserving the status quo on gender stuff. There are climate-crazed activist groups, but no one without a commercial incentive forms an activist group dedicated to 'we should moderately change US policy as it relates to global warming, but for the most part the status quo is fine'. The activism always goes one way.
So you have a situation where everyone forms activist groups for radical change, but there's no countervailing group organization *against* radical change. It's a huge asymmetry in American politics
Because there's not that many people under 30 to 35 who are willing to be paid below market wages who deeply believe in the above. If you think things are fine or only need small changes, you don't get deeply involved in politics - you open a business or continue to work as an accounts manager or whatever.
Even the 'moderates' are focused on Abundance, not exactly a 'status quo' movement.
Eh. I don't hate this argument, but I don't think that accounts for everything. Lots of people in the upper echelons of these organizations are paying themselves pretty decent salaries, it's all publicly filed info. Example, the President of the ACLU makes $1.3 million a year, all the mid-level execs there seem to make $400-600k, etc. The President of Planned Parenthood makes $900k, and so on.
I actually agree with your basic point, I just think it's not sufficient. At this point in American society it's easier to build an organization that wants to radically change the status quo- all of the energy & momentum is on your side. 'The center cannot hold.... The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity', etc. etc.
Sure, I'm sure you could create some org that pays a bunch of former consults and such very well - Third Way exists!
The issue is getting people to fill out the rest of the staff. You can pay some guy who worked on Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign 600k or whatever, but finding a bunch of 25 year old politically-minded people who believe say, something to the right of the Biden policy on transgender sports (which was basically the actual orgs decide), support the Lankford bill but nothing more on immigration, and would be OK with arguing for work requirements for a child tax credit as opposed to being OK with it as a compromise who don't have more financially advantageous prospects is still insanely small.
I know people occasionally come in and say congressional staffers are fairly non-ideological, but I think that's true and untrue at the same time.
What's sad is that the DLC and the like tended to be better organized than moderate Republicans, who tended to be less organized. Now moderate Democrats are a bit rudderless and moderate Republicans have left office.
This characterization of the Democrats is nothing new for readers of this newsletter, but I think the description of Republicans is insane. Caro and Heritage are not working in lock step to support the Trump agenda, and the trend towards ignoring the views of big business and its lobbies is one of the most significant of the trump era.
Cato and Heritage don't like each both professionally and personally.
That Cato and Heritage are not lock step with Trump administration is the point. They both operate on mission for certain values and not solely electorally focused. I appreciate Cato’s continued advocacy against the Jones Act. It’s not pragmatic given there’s zero chance a Trump administration repeals the Jones Act. That they keep advocating for it gives them a certain credibility.
Right but this is in fact how interest groups aligned with Dems work too. The difference is that Trump has a cult of personality and has sidelined and disempowered these groups, not that they work together well.
But they are working in lock step on the political success of Trump. and of course Heritage literally wrote much of his agenda. Whatever views they may have that differ from Trump's they absolutely are not threatening to withdraw their support or saying failure to adopt their positions will lead to lack of support or further funding for Trump or other Republican coffers.
I feel like you haven't been paying attention to Cato for the last few months.
Not Cato, but aside from a few Trump idiosyncrasies, it seems like Heritage is basically running the show.
"Managing Biden’s 2020 Primary, I and the campaign were targeted repeatedly by groups in the Democratic ecosystem pushing policies out of line with voters, including around Medicare for All, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s student debt plan, and extreme environmental positions. But embracing these positions would have complicated winning the general election."
I appreciate we're getting a post here from someone in the actual ring. Fight on. We're all in the cheap seats watching but I can't help but just laugh at the acknowledgement that embracing these "extreme" positions would have complicated an election BUT then just re-reading Biden's **insane** set of Day 1 EOs which not only embraced many of these ideas but then went like ten steps further (e.g., cancelling 5m student loans) and somehow we're all surprised Trump FUCKING SWEPT ALL SEVEN SWING STATES.
It's so true we all voted for Biden and got Warren.
Yeah, it doesn't do a lot of good to build infrastructure to get moderate-coded candidates elected if those candidates turn around and do weird left-wing stuff once they're in office. That's a great way to get a variation of "BUT THEY PIVOTED TO THE CENTER JUST BEFORE THE ELECTION!!!" the next time around.
I don't run elections so bear with me but that also seems like the exact opposite of optimal. Wouldn't you want to say (i.e., pander) the weird stuff during the election and then actually do the popular stuff once in office? Maybe that needle is just impossible hard to thread IRL and Obama was really our once-in-a-generation talent.
Obama didn't do "popular" stuff in office either - see the 2010 midterm results. Yes, the ACA is popular nearly 20 years later.
And yet despite those Day 1 EOs, Biden was pretty popular until the double whammy of Delta/Omicron and the inflation spike (and some say, the Afghanistan withdrawal) took a whack at his numbers.
I'm making a narrower point. Biden's 2020 Presidential Primary Campaign Manager just told us these proposals were "out of line with voters". Biden then did ~ all of them. Biden's VP then goes on to lose all seven swing states. It has nothing to with national popularity polling but everything to do with winning the swing states. I'm going to trust Biden's 2020 Presidential Primary Campaign Manager that these were all terrible policy choices to win elections.
My really narrow point is that those initial actions had little impact on Harris's chances almost four years later.
Inflation, the border and the longstanding toxic party brand were far more important.
I understand your point on Harris. I just think you're wrong. The reason for the "longstanding toxic party brand" is just what Greg says, "groups in the Democratic ecosystem pushing policies out of line with voters". Biden unfortunately tarnished the brand worse than anyone with these actions.
I cede the point that Biden made the brand worse once elected. I have a different world view than some of Biden's White House advisors... but that is probably for a book that will never be written...
Thanks for clarifying and participating. You've set the new highest bar for guest posts. It adds a ton. Thank you.
I thought the Biden student debt policy was terrible politics. But I don't recall the Republicans picking up that ball and running with it. Harris's views on transgender prisoner surgery? Oh you bet.
That's what's so brand damaging about these terrible policies. They're own goals. The Republican's don't have to pick up the ball and run with it. Biden did it for them.
There's no evidence Biden's policy was "terrible politics." The actual Biden policy from everything I've read was a 40/40 policy, but two groups of people really hated it - online centrist writers who already dislike lefties and non-college educated Republican voters.
It wasn't the boon some lefties thought it would be and full forgiveness would've been underwater but at worst, Biden's actual policy was mildly unpopular.
It may be a function in the way I wrote the article, or it may be a function that people like to talk about what they like to talk about - but part of my thesis here is that "we" spend a lot of money on democratic politics and what that money builds reinforces policies and politics that are out of line with the electorate. So it's kind of like my hometown Cleveland Brown, the more money you spend, the more you lose....
"So it's kind of like my hometown Cleveland Brown[s], the more money you spend, the more you lose...."
And *how* they spent their money (and draft capital) very recently....yeesh, that was the worst transaction in NFL history.
Thanks for the article, and also thanks for engaging with we Slow Borers in the comment section, that helps to add more to your argument that we can learn from.
Thinking of the Democrats as the Browns and the party trying to pick a new leader is like the Browns trying to find a really good quarterback is one of the most depressing analogies I've heard in a long time.
and fitting
Thesis: Fox News is a multi-billion annual in-kind donation to Republicans that also serves as a media training ground for out of office party operatives
Building a Democratic equivalent is difficult as the highly educated voter base wants real news, not propaganda
“…a media training ground for out of office party operatives….”
Too true.
But given that fact, it is generous of them to let Pete Buttegieg use their training facilities to stay in shape.
Our strongest soldier. I guess Fox sees benefit in letting iron sharpen iron?
I think in addition to Fox you have to include the more nebulous right wing internet as well as the barstool podcast universe (Rogan, Theo Von, Flagrant pod, etc). I think we also haven't seriously grappled with the fact that the algorithmic platforms (twitter and tiktok especially) are now explicitly anti-Democratic, and especially anti-moderate Democrat and Republican.
The algorithmically driven media ecosystem optimizes for shitting on centrist liberals, (small l-liberals, including older Chamber of Commerce types) and pushes content from the ends of the horseshoe because it drives engagement via agita.
How do we neoliberal shills operate in this environment? Do we have to engage in the kayfabe? Should we go through our heel era?
I seriously think that centrists and moderates are totally locked out of current media. We still control the old-school mainstream of course, but that's much more akin to us being old school mainline Protestants while the world becomes less religious.
How do we fix this? I think it's some combination of owning the dummies and governing effectively. But it's an incredibly hard problem and I don't have any solutions. Open to suggestions.
I don’t consider this to be a problem at all. The core of this argument is that Democrats have great policies and positions that are getting distorted by the new media landscape, which I don’t agree with. Biden’s policies were unpopular or not executed well enough. He was not heavily underwater on inflation or immigration because of right wing media. Once Democrats adopt better policies and positions, this will not be an issue. In spite of all the spinning and BS, Trump’s tariffs are unpopular.
I don't think that's true. I think Democrats need to recognize the reality that the media deck is now actively stacked against them and work on messaging explicitly. The Republican party popularity (such as it is) is not due to having popular policies, it's because it's a party ruthlessly devoted to messaging and message discipline, rooted in Roger Ailes vision that if Nixon had Fox News he would not have resigned. We face a twofold attack, one from the American right and the other the global authoritarianism, both bent on distorting the information ecosystem such that informed small l-liberal democracy becomes untenable.
Harris didn’t lose because of messaging. She went to friendly media and couldn’t answer basic questions.
Harris lost because Democrats lost the messaging wars years before that. Trump and the right have said absolutely wild shit for years and it doesn't matter because they right wing and barstool ecosystems launder it.
Let me ask you this: if it’s really a matter of Democrats being at a fundamental disadvantage in “messaging infrastructure” rather than a more fundamental issue of voter preferences, shouldn’t it be super easy to reverse this disadvantage and crush republicans?
Surely the Democrats’ donors have far more financial resources than, say, a Joe Rogan. And far more celebrities who are friendly to their cause. (Rogan isn’t even really a hardcore Republican.) Why not pay one of them a gajillion dollars and just give them a left-wing script to read out?
If Fox News is a major structural advantage for Republicans, why isn’t MSNBC a similar advantage for Dems? If you doubled MSNBC’s funding, would this solve the problem? Has MSNBC been too restrained in its negative coverage of Republicans?
Trump won after saying nonsense because it was never about messaging. Voters trusted him more on the economy, immigration, culture issues. None of this was due to messaging. The Trump economy in the first term was objectively better than the Biden economy and voters didn’t blame Trump for Covid. Inflation was lower. These are objective truths and lying about it through messaging was unlikely to succeed.
I would accept the critique that he was a hopeless communicator of his successes that was a big part of his failure. But I don’t really buy the argument that right wing media weren’t a big contributor to his failure also. After all, you hear those same right wing media narratives (many unfair or even untrue) echoed uncritically. It shows those stories are sticking in voters’ brains.
Yeah, true stories like high inflation and border security was a disaster did stick with voters. False stories like Biden was mentally and physically fit and running circles around his younger staff or cabinet members didn’t.
Those newer media outlets are different imo in that they don’t operate explicitly as partisan media, although we can probably now put Twitter/Grok into that category.
Are they locked out? Buttigieg's appearance on the Flagrant podcast seemed to go very well. I really think the Dems need to accept that these are important media outlets and go on.
Doesn't the highly educated voter base enjoy NPR? That seems to contradict your second point.
Nobody is immune to propaganda.
NPR (and other mainstream media) is at least trying to give their audience an accurate view of the world so I don’t buy the parallel
I don't agree with that. They have operate with enourmous selection bias in what stories they choose to present and how they choose to present and frame them. I know a couple people who get their news primarily from NPR and there are many areas when they have large blindspots.
I remember this most clearly from around summer of 2020, when I was truly attempting to "follow the science" by getting as much ground-level data on Covid as I possibly could. The amount of ignorance my NPR friends on the topic was different, was no better than that of my Fox-News acquaintances.
Sure it’s not to say that there aren’t blind spots in their coverage, like any outlet has but they aren’t operating as an organ of the Democratic Party in the way that Fox does.
I would say they more or less are an organ, also? How would you define that difference?
To me the difference, if there is a difference, is that perhaps the Left-Wing media drives the party, whereas on the Right there might be more of a thing where the party drives the media.
But either way, it amounts to the same things. Especially because, I'd probably frame the reality a bit differently. I think the root issue is that there's a common core of activist / partisans that ultimately drive both media systems and both parties. The type of person that things about politics all the time and is willing to donate time and money to campaigns is the core of both parties and their media ecosystems. So both parties have media's that are effectively organs of their parties.
I noticed a distinct lurch farther left on NPR content the last few years. They've always had a liberal bent but also have traditionally delivered both sides of the stories fairly well. It's likely a reaction to the Trump 1 admin but I felt like was being preached at by the far left "groups" instead of listening to US public radio. And I miss Click and Clack...NPR needs to come up with more content. Wait, Wait is the only game in town now.
I agree with your analysis of NPR, but I always find this critique funny because progressive spaces are filled with snark about, "Nice Polite Republicans," and outrage that NPR's straight news coverage doesn't play a, "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire" alarm bell sound effect whenever it quotes someone from the Trump administration.
NPR is reliant on donations, like any product in this vein it's going to be most responsive to its most engaged (and therefor probably most ideological) audience.
Doubt.
Edit: ok that was maybe a bit terse.
NPR creates an ecosystem that allows college educated progressives to stay in a bubble where they think everyone has their values. The coverage of everything through a trans/genderqueer lens, for instance, created a world where progressives don't realize that's an 80/20 issue where the public is very much against them. CNN running the famous 'fiery, but mostly peaceful protests' chiron, and Joe Scarborough lying though his teeth about Biden's mental capacity are other highlights.
being unaware of the relative popularity of different issues is fairly different from holding just incorrect views about what people have said. Like if you watch Karoline Leavitt she is saying the reconciliation bill will decrease the deficit. That's just a lie, and something that Trump and people in his orbit can get away with because conservatives don't care. Same with them promising to protect medicaid then cutting it.
It's worth remembering that Fox News maxes out under 4 million viewers a night (usually more like 3), so maybe a little more than 1% of the population. Thats good for TV news but bad NFL games will double that or more. It isn't the secret weapon and may well be counter productive to the extent we are seeing some of the more disastrous and unpopular governing decisions best understood as Fox News made public policy. I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe as Casey suggests finding ways to compete in newer, less expressly partisan media would help, but a parallel to Fox has at best a fighting the last war feel to it.
I think it's fighting the last war in the sense that I'm not so sure Cable News is the future of viewership when compared to social media. And it's probably already dwarfed by social media. And - Dems do have CNN and especially MSNBC already + NPR and some other large media brands already.
And to a large extent I think these media brands are audience-driven, and arise in response to audience demand rather than top-down and pushed on the public (I think I may have got that opinion of Matt Yglesias, right here).
I think the real issue is what another commenter called "the barstool sports" media. The non-political shows that only occasionally mention politics are not very friendly to Dems right now. That's not easy to fix because it's completely organic. Joe Rogan and the dozen most popular comedians are not paid shills of the GOP - they simply find the Dems more ridiculous based primarily on the activists that have hijacked the brand and to a certain extent Dem policy in big cities.
Last fall, Trump got upset because Kamala Harris got to go on SNL. To follow federal law, NBC gave Trump a commercial on Sunday Night Football, which gets tens of millions more viewers than SNL.
To be fair, there might be candidates who could wring quite a lot more out of an SNL appearance, because the nature of the air time is quite different. But in terms of raw exposure I'd take the NFL.
Exactly!
Additionally, the demographics skew very old, which is also the case for cable news generally. Out of that 3-4 million (max) only a few hundred thousand are in the 25-54 demo group. The vast majority watching are old cranky boomers. As that generation dies off, cable news will become less influential than it currently is.
Also, MSNBC exists. It’s not like left wing views don’t have a voice on cable news.
"Thats good for TV news but bad NFL games will double that or more."
It's particularly good news for the Dallas Cowboys, who, no matter how terrible they play, will always get oodles of high profile TV windows, at this point due to more people tuning in to root for them to lose.
More seriously, this is entirely correct, and the media base that is friendly to Republicans is much more diffuse, like with everything these days with the rise of the internet, social media, and streaming. Democrats have a lot of work to do across all of those media forms alongside more traditional ones.
Well, it often seems it just want a different kind of much more sophisticated propaganda.
Take the most recent NYT "This Week in Climate." One "report" was basically an op ed about Republicans attempt to repeal most of IRA with zero consideration of whether any part of it might stand improvement. Another was an op ed on how bad Republican are for trying to stop states from suing US fossil fuel companies for damages caused by CO2 emissions by _users_ of fossil fuels everywhere in the world.
Meh. There’s a lot of left advocacy that is delivered as news. And like Fox, it’s mostly just preaching to the choir and probably doesn’t matter much.
there's already a Democrat equivalent. It's the MSM, NYT, Wapo, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS etc etc
They have all carried water for the Dems for years, that's why Fox took off in the first place.
The idea of a left-wing Federalist Society, like left-wing Fox News, would never work. The FS exists because the entire profession leans heavily left. For an ambitious lawyer on the right, joining the FS is a way to signal that you have the type of views that can be relied upon if you were to be nominated for a Federal Judgship. For the 85 percent of lawyers on the left, you don’t need that signalling. But coming up with a coherent judicial philosophy (even if it is selectively applied retconned bullshit to justify politically expedient decisions) works far better for the right wing ambitious lawyer because a left leaning ambitious one has the luxury of having an actual universal principled philosophy that sometimes leads to politically inexpedient results then a right winger, for whom that is disqualifying.
exactly
The Democratic Party already has a progressive legal framework. It is called Law School.
I'd agree that a party that's serious about governing should pay extra attention to the ideas of people in swing districts and rather less on the fortunate members in rock solid safe districts. But if being captured by the concerns of the extreme is so destructive why isn't the Republican party suffering more? It's pretty clear that the tone is being set by the extremist members in the safe districts who fear being primaried by someone more extreme. It's pretty clear it got captured by the extremists on abortion.
Finally a word on 'intersectionality'. By definition it's taking a disfavoured minority and then dividing it into something even smaller by focusing on the unfortnates who are members of an additionally disfavoured variable within it. This is no doubt intellectually fascinating and illuminating to those who particulalry need to work with those affected by the multiple disadvantages. But it's useless in terms of winning elections decided by the whole population.
When I was active in Amnesty International (before it became a hard-left only organization) a staffer used to say it was important to focus on general things or we'd end up running campaigns of left-legged Lithuanians. I fear he'd be run out of that organization now.
I think you have to remember that Obama’s best attack on Romney was that Republicans wanted to cut Medicare and Republicans bounced back by dropping that position. Then in 2022, anti-abortion politics killed the GOP in tons of races — after which they really toned it down in 2024 and did better.
These dynamics are symmetrical.
I take your well informed facts but it still seems to me that the Republican party ought to be suffering more than it is for being dominated by it's extreme members!
One way to think about this is that because the Republicans have structural advantages in the Senate and often the Electoral College, they can be more extreme while still being competitive. Pretty sure Nate Silver has written about this. Both parties seem to be focussed on how far can we push things while getting past 50%.
They got a big assist from inflation. Voters really hate it. AND they're sitting on a very small House majority. And their brand doesn't appear to be all that great here in May of 2025. In some ways they do appear to be paying a price for their lunacy and extremism. I don't fail to recognize the very real challenge facing Democrats. Things are tough! (Especially looking forward, at Senate math). But sometimes I think we all might benefit from taking stock of the weakness of the GOP's position. It's not just Democrats who are vulnerable.
I believe it is suffering. The fact that it's still doing so well against Democrats shows just how toxic Democrats are.
I strongly believe if Republicans had been smart and nominated someone like Nikki Haley, she would have stomped Harris and would still be very popular at this point in her administration precisely because she wouldn't have done the stupid shit Trump does.
Probably the same but to a lesser extent with a President DeSantis (he's a bit more aggressive than Haley, but still competent)
For me, this is one of Matt's least-convincing talking points. Every day on the campaign trail, Trump said a thousand extreme, crazy things. Every day as President, he does a thousand extreme things. Kamala Harris on the campaign trail said 99 moderate, kitchen-table things for every "far left" thing, and Biden governed as a moderate, center-left President who occasionally made concessions to the left wing of his party (the fact that this article needs to cite rigid rule-making in the implementation of a law expanding broadband access -- something that absolutely infuriated both voters who heard about it -- as an example of left-wing overreach tells you how "far left" the administration was). But Matt just repeats "Trump moderated on Medicare, Trump moderated on abortion." Under the first Trump administration, Republicans came one vote away from repealing the ACA, and they did manage to overturn Roe v. Wade. There is a deeper problem at the levels of education and the media ecosystem if Trump's minimal efforts to appear moderate -- immediately contradicted by his actions while governing -- are convincing to voters, whereas Democrats's repeated, far more consistent and far more deeply rooted in their actual governance, gestures at moderation fall on deaf ears.
We have somehow arrived at the point where Trump can receive a $400 million plane as a gift from Qatar and voters don't view it as a corruption. The sickness cannot be cured by a louder ritual intonation of "EGG PRICES."
I respect, I really do, that this author has forgotten more than I will ever know about campaign strategy. But one idea that readers of this newsletter seem to appreciate is that expert insiders sometimes have blind spots. It must be extremely frustrating when you want to run a 100% moderate campaign, and insider groups push you to run a 90% moderate campaign instead. But Trump ran a 95% extreme campaign full of ranting about vengeance, etc. I'm sorry, but I'm going to believe my lyin' eyes when they tell me that his campaign was extreme in substance and in appearance. I think there are things about him that fall outside of normal political discourse / public policy that connect with voters, and then he is supported by a highly asymetrical media ecosystem that will remain in place and distort public perception even if the Democrats manage to pass a more moderate broadband extension next time.
Matt’s take is that Trump does *crazy* things, but not particularly *right-wing* things. He used the phrase “unhinged moderation” in a famous post about this, and while it’s weird to call it “moderation” because it’s crazy, there’s something right about this phrase.
His take on immigrants is fairly right-wing, but his take on tariffs is not, and his take on vaccines is not, and his take on corruption is not.
I take this point, but especially if we're talking about what Trump *does*, rather than what he *says*, to me he comes off as even more extreme. As you note, Trump's rhetoric and policy are extreme on immigration. The budget the Republicans are trying to pass right now is extreme regarding tax policy (extending the extreme tax policy enacted during the first Trump administration) and access to healthcare. Policies and law around abortion access and women's reproductive healthcare more broadly are only going to get more restrictive.
I think what it really comes down to is whether you view Trump's personalist, highly corrupt view of governance itself as "right wing" or not, since this is another area where his rhetoric and actions match. To me, pardoning the J6 rioters reads as "extreme right"; to you, maybe it's just "crazy." But while there are certainly left-wing authoritarians in the world, I think Trump is part of a global network that clearly reads as extreme right, not just "crazy."
But beyond this, whether Trump is "extreme" in the sense of "far right" or in the sense of "unhinged," a media environment that results in the public perception of Trump as more moderate than Kamala Harris cannot be overcome by even-yet-still-more moderate messaging. I'm not even arguing against the "popularist" campaign strategy in general; it just drives me crazy that Matt takes the public's perception of Trump as moderate as evidence of effective messaging when the Democrats release an absolute avalanche of moderate messaging day in and day out and come to be perceived as extreme. And their moderate messaging is backed up, by and large at least, by their actual governance! Something is heavily distorting public perception and needs to be dealt with as directly as possible.
Trump is well to the right of the pre-2015 establishment consensus on immigration, but he is not particularly far right on that issue compared to the median American voter. With the usual caveats that people seldom have coherent preferences and poll responses are very dependent on phrasing, “deport all illegal immigrants” has near majority support, restricting asylum seekers and hiring more border patrol agents are supermajority positions, etc.
Trump is indeed an aberration in terms of procedural integrity and norms. And that’s very bad! But a) the average voter, empirically, does not care about that that much despite near-unanimous messaging to that effect from all traditional and a good deal media. And b) this doesn’t align to a left-right spectrum in a traditional sense.
Look, I guess all designations of "right" and "left" in politics are subjective, but I'm not sure we should always relativize everything with reference to public opinion. If, in 1941, the Nazis have overwhelming public support in Germany, must we stop describing them as "far right"? Is it definitionally impossible for a popular government to be extreme in its policies? Mass deportation, as messaged, planned, and implemented by the Trump administration, along with the attempted revocation of birthright citizenship, are the product of right-wing xenophobia, rejection of cosmopolitan values, and adoption of blood-and-soil nationalism. If these policies are popular among the public, to me that means "a majority of the public currently holds some far-right beliefs," not "these beliefs are no longer far right."
As Kenny points out, the substance of what is considered "right" and "left" changes over time, which makes for gray areas. Nevertheless, the terms are only useful at all if they denote, at least provisionally, some set of political beliefs independent of public opinion, which, as you say, can be hard to consistently measure anyway. I consider vaccine denialism, given our current political context, a right-wing phenomenon, though I know not too long ago it was more prevalent among a left-wing fringe. For Kenny, on the other hand, this means it doesn't map onto the traditional left-right spectrum, as you say about commitment to democratic procedures and norms. Maybe this means that "left" and "right" are not useful right now as terms in political debate. But if they aren't, it's also hard to know what "extreme" and "moderate" mean. Are they just synonyms of "popular" and "unpopular"?
All of this is extreme. It’s not extreme right though.
"The budget the Republicans are trying to pass right now is extreme regarding tax policy"
people don't consider keeping to pay the same tax rate they are already paying to be extreme.
" Biden governed as a moderate, center-left President who occasionally made concessions to the left wing of his party"
You might believe this, but a strong majority of the country doesn't.
Biden's 35% popularity rating shows that the vast majority of people thought he was a far left disaster who destroyed the Democratic brand. So much so, that Trump looked like a better choice.
But this is just my point. If Biden can govern moderately in style AND substance and come to be viewed as extreme, then it's hard for me to believe that they are just a little bit more moderate messaging away from electoral victory. People are forming their political perceptions in a way that just isn't captured by the substance of today's article.
Well said. Trump ran a campaign that was "moderate" along one dimension but was wildly extreme on a completely different, orthogonal dimension.
Now maybe Matt's point holds because voters only care about that first dimension and so reward the candidate while completely ignoring that new dimension that sticks up outside of that two dimensional plane most politicians live on.
It's interesting. I thought Obama's best attack on Romney was trade. At the very least, it seems Obama's best ad vs. Romney was the one with an Indiana factory worker who's plant was shut down by Bain Capital. But the story is the same both ways. Republicans (or really just Trump) bounced back by dropping the free-trade position.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/the-most-effective-political-ad-of-2012-is-back/434193/
The problem with the "Republicans became moderate on abortion" take is that Trump had already appointed three justices who were key in the Dobbs decision, which undid decades of precedent. That was always going to be a bigger deal than the specific framing of campaign rhetoric a couple of years later.
It's still notable that Trump seems to be saying "no" (so far) to the "ban mifepristone" crowd.
And the pro-life groups seem fine with that so far. Crazy.
Matt has expressed his admiration for the pro-life groups' sense of message discipline in the past. E.g., I don't think they ever protest Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. There's many things wrong with the pro-life movement, but at least some of their leaders have a real sense of how practical politics work that Lefty groups could learn from.
Sure, they keep their mouths shut when their politicians express moderate views, but the idea is that they know those politicians are lying to the public and will push their issues once in office.
But that's not what Trump appears to be doing!
True, but was that something swing voters knew about in 2024?
He actually disclaimed that he was going to impose federal bans on abortion during the campaign last year.
At the same time, the biggest change in the status quo of abortion between when Trump left office and the 2024 election was Dobbs. I'm not convinced that there was a critical mass of swing voters who were simultaneously comfortable with Dobbs, who understood the implication of Dobbs for state vs. federal regulation of abortion, but didn't want a nationwide abortion ban, and was also carefully watching changes in campaign rhetoric. It's probably more likely that abortion was simply a more salient issue for voters who came out for midterms than for a presidential election.
But there seems to be decent evidence from the polling following Dobbs that a non-trivial fraction of the electorate has little to no mental connection between Supreme Court justices and the President who appointed them, instead attributing court rulings to whomever the sitting President was at the time. (There were a bunch of polls in early 2024 showing 15 to 20% of registered voters blamed Biden for Roe being overturned.)
I agree with the point, but if anything this weakens the point that Trump moderated on abortion in the campaign had a measurable effect on the election since it points to a decent number of people just not understanding what's going on. The whole Trump moderated issue depends on enough people both sidesing topics like the peaceful transfer of power, vaccines, horse dewormer, and if Russia is more democratic than Ukraine. It's easy to fit what is moderate vs. extreme on Medicare into old mental frameworks, but the "moderate Trump" narrative relies on setting aside these Trump-specific topics. It would be a stronger argument to say that Democrats specifically have to moderate to gain power for structural reasons.
It's unfortunate that intersectionality as practiced devolves into Oppression Olympics discourse, because I think a much more useful application of it is to study how the intersections of multiple identities that we all have provides unique proportions of privilege and oppression in all of us.
I don't think it's that useful because in 2025 privilege and oppression in America seem like qualia.
I have never heard of the word qualia before, and in trying to learn what that means, it seems that subjectivity is a trait, which I would agree applies in this case, but I still think we can reach some reasonable consensus on how we judge it.
What are you saying? That privilege and oppression are not features of how we interact, but merely private experiential traits that no one else can know about?
In 2025 America, yes, mostly, with a few caveats and room to differ. But legal and social equality clearly reign, and the discourse around privilege and oppression is largely about defining things in such a way that they are implicated in the discussion, not people coming to the fore with obvious examples. The idea of incurring a status such as ‘oppressed ’ because of how you self identify seems to indicate in this direction as well. We're cutting the salami finer and finer but there's a point where people can't be bothered.
The Republican Party has suffered. Do you not remember all the elections they lost from 2017-2023, some of which were pretty bad (e.g. losing a Senate seat in Alabama)?
“ Finally a word on 'intersectionality'. By definition it's taking a disfavoured minority and then dividing it into something even smaller by focusing on the unfortnates who are members of an additionally disfavoured variable within it.”
That is not what intersectionality is at all! It’s about noting that the issues facing black men are different from the issues facing white woman, which are themselves different from the issues facing black women, and that it’s misleading to treat these as additive such that one of these groups is worse off overall than the others.
This is true with the original analytical usage, but there’s pretty clearly an activist definition that’s normative— I.e. , “my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit”
This is a great perspective but I quibble with one piece of the plan in particular.
"A legal organization to counter the Federalist Society offering a forward-looking Democratic vision and building a pipeline for legal talent and thought."
I think a lot of dems fail to fully grasp why FedSoc exists. Due to education polarization, the share of people with generally conservative views graduating from law schools is just wildly smaller than people holding mainline Democratic or further left views. This is all the more true at the elite law schools that produce future candidates for the Federal Judiciary. Even at notoriously "conservative" law schools like UChicago, we are talking being "only" ~60-40 libs as opposed to 80-20 or more in other places.
But because the Art. III bench is nominated by POTUS, the Federal Judiciary is roughly 50-50 libs and conservatives. This creates a massive supply and demand problem on the right that requires an extensive network to identify and cultivate conservative legal talent early through clerkships and the like to produce future judges. The reason there is not a comparably influential liberal FedSoc is precisely because they do not need to have one, they have more than enough supply of talented credentialed lawyers working their way through the system.
Given this disparity I just think efforts to replicate a lib Fed Soc, whether the American Constitution Society or some other new group will just come at a very high opportunity cost relative to the results. I think engagement and moderation is a better approach. I am probably one of the few members of Fed Soc in the SB community, not because I agree with everything people affiliated with the organization think and do (far from it), but because my school's chapter was quite a big tent and I wanted to give voice to a predominately textualist, but center left moderate neoliberal prospective.
I agree that it's possible there will be a high opportunity cost to standing up a true counter to Fed Soc. But what the author and others who argue similarly worry about is that simply relying on the underlying predisposition of law school attendees and graduates produces far too many Merrick Garlands and not enough Ketanji Brown Jacksons, especially at the District, Circuit, and State Appellate levels.
The Federalist Society isn't just a pipeline for spotting talent, it supplies a vocal legal philosophy that works with and shapes the political and governing philosophy of the Republican movement.
The non FedSoc Judges who do currently rise don't come from nowhere, they are all already part of the political process at the state and local level, but it's an ad hoc process lacking direction and focus towards a greater purpose other than individual ambition.
My two cents is that I have a hard time seeing how creating a left-wing version of the Federalist Society could work as such an organization seems likely to swiftly cripple itself through identity politics-driven infighting unless there's really rigorous gatekeeping.
I'm becoming a broken record on this:
As much as I'm not a fan of the left wing of the Democratic Party, I don't think the center-left's problems are all just getting steamrolled by the left. If the Republicans at this point are running on autopilot and the only policy they can think to cram through Congress is "cut taxes for the rich," Democrats aren't far off. The biggest problem of the Biden administration was inflation, exacerbated by the 2021 stimulus, which many economists at the time warned was too big. But that wasn't really the left's fault, that was just the Democrats running on autopilot. "Pass a spending bill that throws a bone to all our constituents" is the Dem's version of "just cut taxes lol," the policy they do when they're out of ideas. Then there's state government, where most Americans consider the biggest blue states to be pretty badly run. But it's not like that's because the DSA has been running New York and California, those states are run by bog-standard Democrats. So again, what are the Democrats offering? I agree that a party that's more chill on dissenting about trans sports or something is better than one that's not, but they need a positive agenda and they need to demonstrate some successes where they do hold power.
Agreed. It does kind of raise the question of what, specifically, Democratic state legislatures should do with all of their time. Really kind of makes the Texas model look better, where they only show up to legislate a few months every other year. Honestly I kind of think that California, New York et al would be better served by moving to that model- it prevents them from coming up with new, dumb, unnecessary laws to pass! You get the essential stuff done in your few months and otherwise stay at home.
But yes I think the states should be much more deregulatory bodies, not 'let's find new windmills to tilt at' perpetual nanny states
First step is unwinding the bureaucratic clusterf*** they've created. Texas and Florida aren't run by geniuses, they just never created the legal structure to allow hecklers to strangle housing or infrastructure or anything else, they don't spend all day thinking of new and exciting regulations to pass (unless they're jazzed about some culture war BS), and they never created the public sector unions to owe patronage too.
Hell, Washington State is one of the better run blue states in my view, but now we're possibly going to implement statewide "rent stabilization" which could very well screw up the growing areas of the state. They can't help themselves.
I think the Texas legislature does incredibly well at passing insanely stupid legislation in the few days they have to meet.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/us/politics/renewable-energy-republicans.html
The Texas bill under discussion in that NYTimes article hasn’t passed yet. Last day of the session is June 2. The short legislative calendar may yet save us.
Maybe they should move to meeting 0 days a year.
Living in one of those poorly governed blue states, it’s not moderate Democrats that are governing badly, it’s elected officials who are considerably to the left of the median nationwide voter.
Well yeah, to the left of the national median. And probably to the left of the median Democratic voter too. What I'm saying is that this is what Democratic governance looks like to most of the country. Sure, Gavin Newsom has (up until recently apparently) social views that are out of step with the median voter, but that's not why people are leaving California. That's more to do with cost of living issues which is at least partially to do with quality of governance issues.
I like this, but was confused by point #3 about the personal liberty think-tank focused on LGBTQ+ issues. Doesn’t the Democratic party already have this in the ACLU, and haven’t they already shown themselves to be more of an electoral drag than a boost? If the ACLU hadn’t helped Trump make the they/them ad, would he even be president right now?
The ACLU is not a legal think tank. They are civil liberties litigators, and their interests occasionally are not even consistent with those of the left. (Defending unpopular speech from the right, being an example.) Brennan Center is awesome but given its narrow (but critical) focus on democracy also is not an analogue of the Federalists.
There is no org I’m aware of that would brand a judge or a lawyer as part of a pool of prospective Democratic president’s appointee to the judiciary.
Thanks Trey, exactly -- Dems love to rely on orgs with no political teeth...
"Defending unpopular speech from the right, being an example."
Do they still do that? Skokie was a really long time ago. They seem pretty ideological these days.
The ACLU defended the Unite to Right rally, so yep. They are admirably consistent in their defense of free speech, even if one may find some of their clients detestable. Here's a 2024 statement they made to actually amplify that they defend people on the right, too: https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/defending-speech-we-hate
Btw, it's not just free speech stuff. The ACLU has I believe opposed a federal gun registry, so they align with the NRA on that.