I would argue that Harris is running a brilliant campaign so far. She is trying to be the "Generic Democrat" that sometimes shows up in polls. Say little of substance, avoid unscripted moments, look good and smile a lot.
We all saw her during the 2020 primary. She isn't a good extemporaneous speaker and she was too willing to adopt dumb positions. So she isn't doing either of those things this time around. "Be Generic Democrat and let Trump lose" is a good strategy.
I don't get the sense that Romney would ever endorse her.
And please tell me why she has to solicit the endorsement. If Romney thinks Trump is that great a threat to democracy and the stable world order, why doesn't he just get off his butt and endorse her?
There's a lot of "well I shouldn't HAVE to" that's deployed in politics and I think it's almost always people trying to justify themselves. You can turn it around just as easily: if Harris thinks Trump is that great a threat to democracy and the stable world order, why doesn't she just get off her butt, swallow her pride a little, and ask Romney for an endorsement?
Regardless of what people should or shouldn't do, the reality of politics is that you can sometimes get people to do something by asking them or doing some horse trading that they won't do unprompted. I have no idea if a Romney endorsement is on the table or not, but if it is, it's not crazy to ask Harris to make some trades -- whether in personal social niceties or mild policy concessions commensurate with the value of the endorsement -- to achieve it.
My question would be more whether the juice is worth the squeeze. If Harris just has to privately grovel for Romney's endorsement, fine. But his orthodox policy views are incredibly unpopular. I think any concession she gives him on that front (free trade? Tax cuts? Anti-abortion?) could cost her more votes than she wins.
In terms of vibes, I agree a Romney endorsement would help Republicans who loathe her policy, but loathe Trump at least as much set aside their concerns and vote for her.
Matt's case for chasing Murkowski's and Peltola's endorsements seems much more straightforward. You get the same voters a Romney endorsement can sway, the policy concessions are specific to Alaska, and could even burnish her moderate credentials, and possibly even put Alaska in play.
I mean if everyone truly believes that Trump is an existential threat to our democracy than Nikki Haley would have the D-nomination (as she would be presumed to be a near 100% favorite to win). The fact that this is conceptually laughable means that people don’t really see Trump as an existential threat.
I don't agree. I'm a Democrat and I would still prefer a 100% chance of a Nikki Haley presidency over a 95% chance of a Harris/Walz win. But some things are simply outside the realm of possibility. It's like saying that if Democrats truly believed that Trump was an existential threat, they would try to assassinate him.
People seem to have missed what a Herculean effort it took to convince Biden to step aside and coalesce around Harris. I've never been prouder of my party.
The problem is, those of us who have investments in the stock market are doing pretty darn well, unlike the majority of Americans who are very unhappy. It’s hard to see how aligning with someone who lost as an “out of touch patrician” helps us. Anyone who admires Romney as being law-abiding and upholding traditional norms is not going to vote for Trump anyway, but “never Trump” Republicans seem to have limited sway with voters.
Exactly. This election will be one or lost on vibes -- "all" Harris has to do is convince voters that she's sane, responsible, listens to the voters and won't do anything crazy. And will be a lot more uplifting and positive a presence than Trump, whose histrionics are wearing thin eight years on. Getting mired in too-specific policy debates, spending time and political capital arguing over specifics that are up the Congress anyway, can only hurt.
I don't really agree with this (or John). I think this was a good description of the 2020 election, but Trump 'wearing thin eight years on' is demonstrably not true given that his favorables are now higher than they used to be. Primarily because he's been out of the spotlight a bit, clearly not in the White House, the media doesn't cover all of his Truth Social posts the way they used to his tweets, etc. 2020 was just a referendum on Trump, but 2024 simply isn't.
Low-information voters forgot about 1/6 and all of Trump's crazy antics, and have a hazily positive memory of his presidency now. Again, Trump's favorable ratings are higher now than they used to be. Matt's thesis in this piece is correct, Harris & company should be trying harder
His favorables are higher because every Republican's favorables are higher than in 2020. That's just the challenger party effect.
I don't know how often I can repeat this but Nikki Haley probably would have won 320 electoral college votes or something. Any generic republican would be a 60/40 favorite right now.
Yep, it definitely seemed like Trump was planning to campaign mostly from the golf course while keeping a light rally schedule on the steam of Biden's age and unpopularity and not much else. The change in the ticket has upset that plan for him - a month ago after the GOP Convention Trump supporters were musing about Trump maybe winning NJ on top of all the swing states and sunbelt states. Now he's going to have go back and work for PA and WI, let alone AZ and GA. Which means he's going to have to spend a lot more time on the campaign trail than the 78 year old candidate (who was hoping to hide behind his even older rival's age) may be even capable of doing, let alone yeah, the more visible Trump is, the more the public is reminded what they don't like about Trump...
On one hand I agree that Kamala should be pursuing the low-information swing vote, but on the other hand, the risk of alienating progressive voters freaks me out.
I'm all on Team Kamala, but my super progressive twenty-something daughter is less impressed. I'm worried about voters like her getting alienated. You'd think that the theat of 4 more years of Trump (and a possible fasicst dictatorship afterwards) would be enough to get these lefty zoomers to the polls. But you'd be mistaken.
Obviously, I don't suggest that Harris veer to the left either. She just has to walk a very fine line. It just basically sucks to be a Democrat. Trump can blather on about whatever insane dementia-influenced hateful nonsense comes into his disgusting orange head - and not lose a single vote (including even insulting veterans). While Harris can slightly misspeak on Gaza or the Economy and lose her lead.
It's not fair, but it's the world we live in. And I think the Harris campaign is doing a surprisingly decent job.
I think that Democrats have been consistently really slow to recognize that their apocalyptic rhetoric is desensitizing. In sometimes kind of unfair ways! Like, I really do buy that a Trump victory would be really, really, really bad. But it's still the case that I've heard from my largely lefty political circle that every single Republican presidential candidate in my adult life is an apocalyptically bad choice (so that's GWB, GWB, McCain, Romney, Trump, Trump, and Trump, sadly enough).
Similarly, I think that the left has really underestimated how much they turned "you're racist" from a critique that had real sting and inspired a response to background noise to the right (and, increasingly, to the middle as well).
Probably the same thing is true in reverse -- I think the right wing has really defanged their ability to critique truly worrying turns against the strong market-oriented consensus by claiming that every Democrat in the world is secretly an actual honest-to-god Communist just waiting to reimpose stalinism, or that any kind of nuanced immigration concept constitutes de facto open borders. But I'm immersed in a blue social milieu, so I hear the left wing stuff more.
I usually avoid talking politics, but a conservative relative of mine insisted and I happened to say of Vance "He's a real fuckin' weirdo," and my conservative relative AGREED! LOL!
The weird thing works because its so true. They can't deny it.
I know this isn’t helpful to say, but super progressives really, REALLY need to pull their heads out of… the sand, let’s be polite here, and support Harris already! I have less than zero patience for people who say “Kamala is insufficiently progressive, so I’m sitting this election out! Let Trump win, that’ll learn them!” No.
Keep in mind that a twenty-year-old has experienced Trump as the dominant political figure since they were eleven. They at most have hazy memories of Obama. To them, Trump is normal.
That being said, I think progressive turnout is also hugely overrated. Convincing a borderline voter to come out is worth one vote. Getting a swing voter is worth two. Add that to the fact that moving far enough left to get that borderline voter may actually cost you the swing voter, you've gotten + 1 - 2.
I don’t mince words with my more progressive 16-year old (who obviously can’t vote anyway). Be slightly disappointed with the Democrat or be crushed and fearful of a Trump presidency. At least you can point to the damage he’s already caused.
Trump currently has -9.6 net favorability and only 43% view him favorably, according to 538. That makes him one of the most unpopular presidential candidates in modern history.
Voters don't want Trump but Kamala has to convince them she's a safe choice, especially if they aren't all that enamored with Democrats either.
His favorability rating was 29% in January 2021. 43% is obviously a big increase from 29%, so I feel comfortable with my statement that 'Trump 'wearing thin eight years on' is demonstrably not true given that his favorables are now higher than they used to be'. Also, Matt makes the exact same point in today's article, also with a link to the 538 chart (which showed him at 38% 2 years ago)
I listened to the latest Ezra pod over the weekend on Manliness. Per that discussion, Dems are hemorrhaging support from young men. It might be that Trump is wearing thin but then it's clear that the overhang from all the Future is Female stuff is worse. Which might also be just "vibes" so I don't disagree, but I do disagree that all Harris needs to do is remain sane. She needs to win back support to win this race.
From what I’ve seen, at least Harris isn’t emphasizing her gender the way Hillary Clinton did, though unfortunately it’s not always easy to get supporters to STFU about stuff like that. The best thing about her campaign that I can see is that she is just running as Democrat, not “first black female.” But the issue of abortion is clearly a key issue this year, as one of the few things where the choice will actually make a big difference people’s lives. Sadly abortion has since become, for many Republicans, a matter of identity rather than values or interests—thirty or forty years ago, it used to be men supported abortion rights as much as or more than women did.
Thirty or forty years ago, young people were having more sex, so access to abortion was considered a positive among young men as it could keep them from being stuck supporting a kid.
With young people having less sex, there are a lot more incels who have come to hate women in general and think only “Chads” are getting laid. What good is abortion access to someone who doesn’t have sex and doesn’t see that changing anytime soon?
In fact, if anything one of the more striking parts of about this survey is it looks like support for abortion rights started in upward climb somewhere around 2008 with a small dip in 2015/2016 likely due to election and Hilary's presence on the ticket (if I had to guess, though open to other suggestions for the dip)*. Seems like pretty good data that a lot of the "surprise" as far as the reaction to the Dobbs decision was the result of too many pundits who had as their frame of reference the early 2000s and hadn't updated their priors**. I think what Dobbs did is make the issue one more salient in voters minds as far as voting behavior.
Also, see my comment below. These survey results which show young voters much more supportive of abortion rights than older voters is further indication to me that young men being more right wing might be pretty exaggerated and a data point skewed by a specific displeasure with Joe Biden being the Democratic nominee.
* Other possibility is with Trump as GOP nominee, there was a mistaken assumption from too many voters that there wasn't much danger to abortion rights.
Were those survey results about Democrats losing support from young men were done before or after Biden dropped out? I haven't listened to the podcast yet (I plan to), so maybe this was addressed. But if various polling experts are right, one of the biggest places Harris has picked up support over Biden is young voters. Given women are overwhelmingly Democrat these days (especially under 35), it stands to reason a lot of that pick up in support is from young men.
Given what we've seen in a few other countries, there does seem to be some gender divide going on politically with young voters (South Korea is one of the more fascinating and insane examples if polling is right). But I really do wonder if these various essays showing how young men are supposedly becoming super right wing over extrapolating too much some very Biden specific weakness with young voters the past 2-3 years.
Uh, okay. I don't have any particular stake in this, I didn't cherry-pick anything. I went looking at the polls, actually, for a different reason -- I wanted to check whether Steven was right that there was much more support to hemorrhage. But when I looked at them, I couldn't see any real sign that there had been any loss of support.
Do you have some reason to believe that those polls are wrong? If so, what is that reason? Honest question.
I think the young men the Democrats lost are already lost to them. I don't think there is much more of them to hemmorage. The anti-Democrat feeling amongst young men is directly linked to #MeToo. The further we get from MeToo the better for Democrats.
"Contrary to conventional wisdom on Twitter, the latest Pew poll (n = 7,569) shows no major political gender gap among Gen Z.
18-29 Men: Harris +24
18-29 Women: Harris +28"
Now, are these numbers maybe not 100% correct. Perhaps.
But, I do think the apocalyptic talk about the situation is largely from people of a certain political valence who think certain things supported by left-leaning young women is politically toxic because they don't personally like it.
See my post above regarding abortion and Pew survey findings. There's an increasing amount of evidence that men 18-29 being right wing was really a lot of young men not particularly enamored by Biden.
Wouldn't surprise me if there is at least some shift rightward from men likely as a backlash some left wing identity politics around gender. But surveys pre Biden dropping out was likely exaggerating this shift a lot.
Suspect it's the same with young black voters. There was a small but real shift in African American vote in 2020 rightwards. But polling pre July, 2024 was showing a generational shift in voting not seen since 1964. Which would have strained credulity.
By the way if I'm not mistaken the right ward shift was disproportionately concentrated in young Hispanic or young Black men. Wouldn't surprise me if Trump gets say 10% of the votes of Black voters in 2024. In 2020 it was 8% vs. 6% in 2016. 10% could be the key in places like PA or GA. But that's wildly off from some polling showing Trump getting upwards of 30% which again strained credulity.
Exactly - want to tell me Trump will get 12% of the black vote and 45% of the Hispanic vote? Sure, whatever. But, we are not seeing the greatest racial realignment since the Civil Rights Act, even if Biden would've stayed in.
On the men front, if I remember that study and not confusing them with other ones people freaked out about online, a majority of both young men and women had no specific ideology, but the report of the percentages removed both of those groups of people.
Again, I can see Harris +30 among women 18-29 and Harris +15 among men 18-29 even though I don't think it's likely, but Trump is not winning young men or coming close, no matter what the crosstabs currently show.
Well, I wasn't quite fair to Ezra, but speaking more broadly of a general center-left overreaction. But, I do think Ezra probably isn't aware of the full data on this that shows a far more muddled picture than any clear proof of some big move to the right among young men.
He is a empathetic, reasonably deep thinker, but this can also mean giving too much credence based on the arguments he gets, especially if it's something relatively low salience he doesn't have that much of a background with.
I listened to that podcast you mentioned this past weekend though and it didn't quite make the same argument about young men actually leaving, though. There was some talk of it, but not quite in the way other parts of the center-left (including this Substack when Milan used his buddies views to really force a certain viewpoint about young voters) where it's just assumed men are being run out of the Democratic party.
But, like i said, because of his own tendencies and the background of his guests, it does give a little more credence to the argument than I think really exists.
Ironically, because both the type of person who would overreact to people like Tate's relatively popularity among dumb 15 year old boys on the Left and the type of person on the Right who would point this as proof of some real backlash among young men are both far more likely to be a guest on Ezra's podcast than somebody who just looks more deeply at the actual data and doesn't see much of a real shift.
Well, politics is about addition and subtraction. You win new groups, you lose old groups. Sometimes the latter just aren't your target anymore. How would Kamala "win back" these young dudes? Shoot the shit with Joe Rogan for a two hour sitdown and crack fart jokes?
The fart jokes seems stupid but yeah -- Ezra thought Harris should push hard for a Rogan interview. It worked wonders for Bernie. It's the #1 podcast by - a country mile - in overall reach.
It is vibes and general societal sentiment. Young men are increasingly alienated and less educated so yeah that will give you a general shift towards Republicans.
This is way too complacent. People mostly don't care about policy details, but even low-information voters are angry about inflation, illegal immigration, and crime/a general sense of disorder. I realize those are vague things and there are sound policy explanations about how Biden has addressed those problems, but they're still vulnerabilities that Harris needs to affirmatively address in a way that will resonate with low-information swing voters. "Orange Man Bad/Weird, Kamala Normal" won't cut it (or it might cut it, but it'll be a lot closer that it needs to be.)
Well, pushing strongly for the Lankford immigration bill (which gives Republicans 75% of what they want), talking about putting crooks away as DA and AG, and blasting corporations for price gouging (given that actual inflation is now nothing to worry about) would seem to be smart ways of trying to defuse issues which by now are sharply diminishing anyway. What would you have her do that she's not currently doing?
I wasn't saying that Harris hasn't been trying to address her vulnerabilities -- she has, although I agree with Matt that she should be more aggressive. My "too complacent" comment was in response to the original comment on this thread: "This election will be one or lost on vibes -- "all" Harris has to do is convince voters that she's sane, responsible, listens to the voters and won't do anything crazy. And will be a lot more uplifting and positive a presence than Trump, whose histrionics are wearing thin eight years on. Getting mired in too-specific policy debates, spending time and political capital arguing over specifics that are up the Congress anyway, can only hurt."
But hasn’t Harris kind of started laying out policy planks that rely on congress? Dumb stuff like no tax on tips (why?), the claim that she’ll stop price gouging, etc - she can’t actually do any of that unilaterally! Why even bother to say she will?
Trump is saying he can fix everything—can’t rely on people understanding the federal government to know that’s not true, because obviously most of them don’t. Some 17% (I forget which poll) think Biden was responsible for Roe v. Wade being overturned, because it happened on his watch.
Anyone who has ever worked in a job that relies on tips should understand pretty easily why that’s popular. No idea how much revenue would have to be made up, or even how likely it is it could pass Congress, but it’s an obvious crowd-pleaser.
Well it’s not a crowd pleaser for those of us who don’t get tips but have to give them. If anything like that passes, it’ll be abused terribly and encourage wages get shifted more away from employers and onto customers.
I think tipping culture has gotten completely out of hand, and has exhausted my feeling of obligation to tip more that I had even before COVID. Considering there’s no lower minimum wage for tipped workers where I live, I will absolutely cut my tipping to the bare minimum for traditionally tipped professions, and zero to anything that doesn’t actually involve personal service.
I think to Matt's point, it seems like the Trump campaign has been derelict in its approach. I don't understand why they just don't run ads of her saying stuff from the 2020 campaign or some of her bad tv VP moments - and do that over and over again. Even if she has ads that say she's changed her position, they can run on "how soon do you think she'll change back?"
Some of the Republican PACs are already running ads on this theme, and it’s a staple argument in conservative media, but it doesn’t seem to be moving the needle much with the voters.
I think that they’d probably be more successful if Trump and Vance were better at using the earned media from their public appearances to push the narrative, but they’ve had horrible message discipline this cycle.
The problem is that they keep stepping on whatever paid media they're putting out there with their laughable performances on earned media -- both Trump and (spectacularly!) Vance.
Indeed! And Trump has been noticeably worse at making good use of earned media this cycle than he has been in the past. (I’d argue that it was actually one of his campaign’s big strengths in 2016.) He’s been slipping cognitively, and picking up a VP who has terrible instincts on this stuff really hasn’t helped.
Yeah, they seem really determined to find some sort of personalized attack line, but their attempts so far have fallen really flat.
Trump’s characterizations of Biden and Clinton (eg: Biden is old and senile, Clinton is crooked) had some genuine bite because they aligned with common voter perceptions and they touched on issues where voters had serious concerns (it is in fact quite bad for the president to be crooked or senile). The personal attacks that Trump has directed at Harris are largely either unconvincing (she clearly isn’t “low IQ”, and she even more obviously isn’t worse-looking than Trump) or irrelevant (nobody cares about Harris’s laugh).
Harris also benefits from having a general low profile after Biden was elected. Even her lousy "border czar" thing was never huge news. Despite a pretty mixed record in her CA political run (and the possibility of being associated with all the lousy things happening in CA--explicitly San Francisco Bay Area--- as a CA politician) people seem to be giving her a pass because she doesn't have that many big mistakes on the national level, so it's almost like she doesn't have a record at all for most voters.
Trump can and will figure out an attack that sticks, but doesn't do so in the context of his own strengths and the landscape of each election. "Sleepy Joe" didn't work in 2000 because voters were hungry for normal and a reduction of Trump's chaos, but it was working in 2024 when Biden was seen as ineffectual and Trump as vigorous. Contrast it with Obama's 2008 Change You Can Believe In, which simultaneously highlighted his strength as an outsider and contrasted it against Clinton's biggest weakness of being seen as untrustworthy.
Voters are likely to see Trump as more capable and Harris as more sensible. If I were Trump, I'd focus on "what's she hiding?" It links the idea that there is a cover up of Biden's frailties and Harris's flip flopping over the years. It contrasts with how he's seen as authentic (not truthful, but authentic) and she historically has not.
A strange phenomenon happens with hyperpartisan people: they tend to associate an opposite-party candidate's personal traits, such as looks and speech, with their own aversion to that person's politics, and they generalize this highly subjective assessment as if it were objectively true. Probably, this works in reverse as well; partisans begin to idealize their own candidates. Years ago, I commented to a Republican friend of mine on how stylish and attractive Barack and Michele Obama were, and he told me he didn't find them so in the slightest. I was rather astonished, since it seemed so obvious that Obama was handsome.
With Kamala's laugh, I'm sure these folks on the right really do find it nails-on-a-chalkboard irritating, so they can't fathom why this isn't landing.
“Bitch eating crackers” syndrome. (Although I would note that some politicians I pretty strongly disagree with, like Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Nikki Haley, Nancy Mace, and Kristi Noem are quite good-looking.)
I agree price gouging rules are extremely popular, but didn't the preview of her speech suggest price controls well outside the range of what one might classify as "price gouging"?
Matt himself said that the actual speech was different than the "preview" of her speech, but when I google the previews now it seems like it's always saying "gouging" but with no limits on being tied to natural disasters.
I guess the actual remarks say "exploit crises" so hopefully she's just talking about the most popular type.
You do understand that when she talks like this, her *real* message is "I feel your pain" and by the time she is in office, and inflation has dropped so much that no one gives a damn anymore, then whatever "policy" she is proposing now will be dead and buried?
Based on other comments today, a lot of people include "price gouging" among "price controls". Technically I guess they are a control on prices but that feels way far out.
I suppose Rent Control is another, and many states I think also have limits on what an electric company can charge you for electricity.
Before Biden stepped aside I was impressed by her iron determination to stay light years away from anything and everything that looked like she was leading a palace coup, speculating that she'd read up on how Gerald Ford had conducted himself at the same time exactly 50 years earlier... But my estimate was still just "She's not going to do any worse than Biden."
Harris' ability was a speaker was discussed by Matt and Brian on the Politix pod. As Senator, Harris had several positive moments as a speaker. The question is perhaps more expertise. She spent most of her career as a prosecutor, then as a Senator she was on the judiciary committee.
It's possible as VP she's had a chance to broaden her experience and will now be a strong speaker on a broader range of topics, although probably legal issues will remain her strongest suit.
Biden misused her. She should have been his fix the border bulldog. She could have been tough and gotten away with it more easily than Biden himself. It should still be a subsidiary theme, contrasting that "non-weird" position to Trump's "weird" position of deporting millions of workers.
Didn’t he basically put her in the border role only to have her kind of reject the assignment? How would your preferred version of events have been different?
There wasn’t much upside without congressional action (which he should have sought sooner even if trump ended up torpedoing it the same way) remember early on the continuation of trumps executive orders were largely considered illegal outside of the pandemic emergency- it still isn’t clear his current orders will stand either. The alternative would have been to be much more creative- maybe a comprehensive realignment with Mexico or some other idea.
Yeah one problem here is that it's not that clear to me running away from Biden's actual legislative record is the right call here. Voters displeasure with Biden seems primarily about age (problem solved) and inflation (which is falling. And as far as we know a new pandemic (furiously knocking on wood) isn't on the cards meaning now supply chain snarls and no need for a Covid stimulus that at least exacerbated inflation).
Like are there a ton of voters outside of unpersuadable Trump supports who are against IRA or the Chips Act? Matt has noted that Biden probably tried to appease leftists a bit too much in certain areas, but mostly this involved out of the limelight issues like banning natural gas exports. A policy that has Matt laid out was probably wrong on the merits. But also a policy that only political junkies like us are aware of. The most high profile policy that maybe would be off putting to normies where Biden (and Harris) maybe compromised with the Left is student loan forgiveness. We've discussed before I have very mixed feelings about this policy. But again, this is not on the table as a policy as far I can tell.
Remember, Sandersistas were the reason Democrats were coerced into silly appeasement messaging in 2019. Their self immolation has collapsed their influence.
It's kind of weird to me that Matt wants her to move more toward the center while he really likes and approves of her proposed policies to increase housing, with its implications for messing with local government control.
You can believe the latter's an important issue and maybe even good policy. But, I'm sorry, those two are in direct contradiction with each other. He should be telling her to put a sock in it on the housing stuff.
I agree with Matt that she shouldn't be comfortable with her current margin, but it's also smart to see just how high she can ride the wave of enthusiasm. If she peters out here, she can adjust her messaging.
Some of her choices are permanent, like her VP. But many others are not.
Also, minor quibble, but Matt has repeatedly used the term "complacent," and that doesn't apply at all. Risk averse is not complacent. Complacency can also mean taking unnecessary risks. If Harris was rolling out even more progressive policy, THAT would be complacent.
Agreed, and notably "generic democratic" is outperforming what people were estimating for her a few months ago. There's a Scott Alexander post from June that shows prediction markets for her, while above Biden, were still below 50%. So it seems like she's doing something right.
On the price gouging stuff I want to make the case that this is a prime example of Harris ignoring activists and making the popularist move, just like on immigration.
The “price gouging” rhetoric IS the break with Biden to normal voters. Normal voters associate Biden with high prices, so they see Harris promising to crack down on price gouging as breaking with him. Slow Boring readers will say “well these are just the same things Biden was proposing” but to swing voters this is very new and compelling stuff. We’ve seen in our polling from before the NC speech that she’s seen more favorable on inflation than Biden, and that speech only drives that contrast.
Her economic policies are also seen as more moderate than Biden’s. Perhaps not on the traditional left-right axis, but this price gouging stuff has simply overwhelmingly support (talking upwards of 70%). And we have some recent polling that will come out showing that Harris’ economic policies are seen as more moderate and seen more favorably than Biden’s.
We’re talking about the US here and the measures we’re talking about might lead to temporary shortages of some items during times of high demand. That means items are more likely though who have the time to look for them rather than those with higher ability to pay. It’s not fully clear if non-elites really have more time but they certainly have less money. Nobody is talking about Venezuela.
And it switches Harris from playing defense to playing offense.
The media / right love complaining about grocery prices because people love complaining about grocery prices, but the right has not actually articulated any plans to address the issue other than hand-wave about how life was so much better in 2019 (and also propose a series of policies that would actually make inflation worse).
But, if Democrats only stick to arguments like “inflation is back down to target levels” or “inflation was bad all over the globe in 2021” or “but Trump’s policies will make inflation worse”, I think many voters just don’t find that satisfying — it feels defensive and reactive.
Switching to offense — demonstrating to voters that you want to take action, and action against “price gouging,” something the average 55 year old suburbanite loves to complain about — forces Trump to play defense. Now *the Right* looks like wet blankets, complaining about socialist price controls.
Yeah it is such a no-brainer even though I hate it, it's surprising people can't see that. It also seems like a much more obvious way to appeal to people than deficit reduction too.
Yeah, I think that Matt is weirdly in denial about where public opinion on this is. (And to a certain extent this has been a shared problem for moderate Democrats now that Popularism is goring their oxen instead of the Left’s.)
Don't you think the "price gouging" rhetoric is playing with fire, though?
If she wins, one of the following will happen:
1) She does large-scale price capping or similar, which is economically ruinous
2) She does some token action with minimal economic impact, leaving her open to criticism from both the right ("she did this and it was bad") and from AOC/Bernie types ("we need to go much further and do Economically Ruinous Thing")
3) She does nothing, and leaves herself open to being accused of lying
4) She makes steps towards 1) or 2) but is blocked by Congress or SCOTUS. Which is maybe the best-case scenario and probably helps her in the 2026 midterms, but it still keeps the issue salient in a way it shouldn't be
I can *maybe* see an argument for what's she's doing if you sincerely believe that Trump is a threat in a way that Generic Republican isn't - the political cost of bad policy now is worth it if it punts him to 2028 when he'd be twice-losing and truly decrepit.
In general, I think there's a big difference between being popularist in terms of the rhetorical emphasis you place on different policies (which is fine) and being popularist to the extent of actually promoting bad policy (which is very dangerous).
She's clearly going to do #2. Two years of (hopefully) naturally cooled inflation will put it mostly in the rearview by the midterms, and even so by 2028. The first price gouging proposals say as much: they are very time and scope limited, ensuring that they can just go quietly into the night N years from now when the news cycle has moved on.
This of course assumes that inflation continues to secularly cool, which I think it will. If that happens, people will remember her token price gouging bills about as much as they remember Biden's post victory masking policy - ie, not much at all.
# 2 is probably also Trumps real "inflation plan" - win in 2024 and reap the predicted next year or so of falling inflation and prices finally falling to match, and claim complete credit for "fixing inflation" - much like what he did in 2016 when he won the election in an economy with 4% unemployment in falling, strong wage and job growth (basically the economy for the next 3 years of his term), but his having campaigned on the "economic disaster" of the Obama years that many associated with the 2009-2014 years of recession + slow growth/recovery combined with an increased partisan divide in economic perceptions allowed him to do that and get away with it - and is why his 2024 campaign has now benefited from that "2019 nostalgia" (another bit of Trumpian "magic" is disappearing his final year in Office!), he's hoping to repeat that playbook in 2024-2025. Trump knows very well which way inflation is going and knows that whoever is sitting in the White House by the end of 2025 will reap the benefit of strong voter approval for a much more normal inflationary and pricing economy, he just has to get there first and say what he needs in the meantime (making sure to blame Biden - and by extension - Harris and Democrats).
The problem, though, with Trump is that while Harris may be tossing out some shiny objects to ride that same wave and expectations of a 2025 economy, the one of a few policies that Trump does seem to be actually committed to is the idea of tariffs, which could be a real policy he would follow through *even if the economy is doing great* by 2025. It's not like he's running for re-election if he blows it with imposing the tariffs he's talking about to any degree, but the idea of tariffs is something that's caught in his brain folds like a piece of popcorn in a tooth, as part of his overall pre-dispostion to be opposed to anything "global" or "international" in nature. The second policy he would most definitely follow through with (if he gets a Republican Congress that is) is another big tax cut on the rich, without a doubt, which would also be a massive deficit driver and will drive up interest rates (the inflation fighting tool that most voters absolutely hate!) as a result. Without getting too deep in the weeds, Harris's campaign should absolutely spend the effort to campaign against these two very likely and marquee Trump policies that he's promising will "fight inflation" will actually be inflation drivers... Chip away at the most cogent policies he's offering, on the most cogent issue he has!
The chances of Democrats winning three presidential elections in a row is fine. I mean Id love a Kamalatopia where we all experience previously unseen levels of prosperity, social trust and subjective enjoyment, but 90% of her focus should be on winning this election.
Maybe she’d only have to take credit for the FTC failing to approve the Kroger-Albertson’s merger. My populist hindbrain says price-gouging=grocery stores exploiting Covid / bird flu and then continuing to raise prices. And THEN mergers will only decrease competition and engender local monopolies (if you’re lucky location-wise) and food deserts it you’re not.
I think that a lot of people have a general sense that the endless mergers in the grocery and drug store sector has led to fewer actors and fewer choices and that makes price gouging easier even without a full monopoly. I think there is some truth to that.
In my own well resourced neighborhood, we have gone from having three grocery stores - two small local chains and one Kroger owned Fred Meyer to just one small local and Fred Meyer and Fred Meyer since Covid has been a shit show - low staffing ratios, empty shelves, locked product, and lots of visible security. My teenage daughter doesn't like to shop there because it gives a "society has failed vibe." Prices are high and the experience sucks. The independent grocery store was bougie and always had high prices but their prices haven't increased as much and the experience is very nice. It hard to escape the sense that with our Safeway closed post merger that Fred Meyer decided it could get away with charging near- bougie prices with shit serve and a high profit margin because the only alternative for lower prices is folks actually leaving the neighborhood and searching out a grocery outlet or buying bulk at Costco.
Similarly, we used to have three function drug stores. One was a one off local store, one was a local chains, one was a Wallgreens. Wallgreens closed after a merger. One of the local stores closed due to pressure from the chains and the Riteaid bought our local chain and promptly made it suck and they are now closing stores everywhere and the remaining ones have near empty shelves, high prices, and "for lease signs". "Does anyone know of any decent pharmacy nearby now that Rite Aid ruined Bartell's?" is one of the most frequent posts on our neighborhood Facebook group.
I can only imagine how shitty choices must be in less well resourced areas.
I think she could have the FTC crack down on mergers and possibly even demand some break ups of prior mergers into smaller companies and both not abandon capitalism but also actually help with folks sense that a lack of competition and greed is hurting their pocket book and quality of life.
What will happen is a version of (4): Republicans will win the Senate and she'll pin the blame on them.
That said I think worrying about what the Harris-Walz administration would do is putting the cart before the horse. First step is to win the damn thing!
Yes. The problem with Biden's approach was that he didn't seem to be speaking the language of the people, who are mad mad mad about how much more they are paying for basic goods than they were 4 years ago. I have to admit, there are grocery stores I won't shop at any more because they've obviously jacked up prices beyond where inflation would put them. Of course, I believe consumer behavior will take care of this problem, but a little muscle from the government is probably not going to hurt.
I'm not sure a pivot to focus on austerity and deficit reduction is a winner for Harris - I much prefer the idea of figuring out what would get moderate surrogates like Peltola (or Romney or Murkowski!) to come out swinging for you. To me, that all smacks of energy and permitting. That would also probably help with Texas.
I don't think she needs to pivot much more on immigration either - they have neutralized the issue well just by pointing to the border deal that Trump killed. Law and order? Here's a tape of Trump praising Walz calling in the troops to quiet things down.
Energy seems like the next best thing to make up more middle ground. Inflation is odd here - seems like voters are genuinely sticking blame for that on Biden and giving Harris a bit of a pass. Either way, she and Walz have been messaging on supply side affordability and correctly calling out Trump's plans as inflationary. Maybe they can just amplify that.
Talking about deficit reduction in a non-specific way is a winner, any actual specifics are a political loser, which Matt knows or should. So, she should talk about it mostly in a non-specific way but include prescription drug negotiations, fair share of taxes for the rich and some sort of vaguely plausible process to review spending. And that's it.
Matt made this point on Politix a few days ago but Harris should promise Peltola and Murkowski they will get to literally write all federal Alaska policy in exchange for an endorsement. Only 3 EVs but the bipartisanship is huge on vibes.
What is the benefit for Kamala is Peltola endorses her? This hurts Peltola (ties her to someone who will lose Alaska) and doesn't help Kamala ("House Democrat endorses Democrat" isn't a story).
It would be foolish for her to talk about austerity and deficit reduction as part of her campaign in anything more than the most platitudinal way. If there's a "Boy Who Cried Wolf" issue in American politics it's deficits. People have been told that deficits were bad and would cause bad things for the past 40 plus years, and there has never been a single problem caused by deficits that is palpable to the American people.
If there are budget constraints that come about because of the deficit they're going to be fought over and decided in the back room negotiations of a giant reconciliation bill --- and there is zero way to predict what that will end up looking like. Telling people today that some program they like is going to be cut, or worse telling anyone they're taxes will go up is just not worth the political cost if for no other reason than you would be lying because you really have no idea what the final outcome will look like.
I think this take is right. Reading the article before reading this, I was mentally going through a rolodex of positions to moderate on, and couldn't come up with anything beyond energy where I would say there'd be positive expected value of moderating. Immigration you could, but since Harris has already said she supports the immigration deal Trump killed; it would be getting really in-the-weeds to say I'd go further with X, Y, and Z. *Maybe* say in passing "I wish President Biden pursued this deal earlier while I was focused with the root causes internationally, which helped but was never a cure-all. It's clear we needed an all-of-the-above immigration reform." Anything more detailed would just confuse the low-info voters that are swingable, and risk losing more in the coalition.
Austerity is low-salience right now even if it's economically the correct one that I'd hope Harris would pursue in practice. I don't think moderation on low-salience issues helps all that much, since low-info / swing voters by definition entirely vote on high-salience issues.
Abortion, *maybe* bringing back the safe/legal/rare talk and talking about expanding the safety net would help reduce abortions would be good, but if her current schtick is working in the swing states, why risk upsetting the apple cart.
Energy is the only thing I think she could improve on, and only if the Sunrise Movement promises not to knee-cap her. I'd hope her team would have those discussions and Sunrise would understand the assignment as well, but as previous Slow Boring articles have said, they probably wouldn't, in which case there's more risk in moderating and losing some of the young people that are now energized. But that's a problem with Sunrise, not Harris.
Honestly if Sunrise acts up I think the party would gleefully throw them under the bus. Perfect group to triangulate against especially with the IRA passed.
Maybe, but a previous article mentioned an anecdote where a (low-information) young person was considering staying home / not voting for Harris because of climate, and Matt failed to convince her otherwise. I think there's a lot more risk of that sort of dynamic having a differential impact if Sunrise seriously acted up. At least compared to the current strategy status-quo with environment than say, Gaza / Israel. Which, I should probably have also bracketed as a candidate. I think the Gaza single-issue people are also in this camp of not playing nice, and it's high-salience, so ripe for moderation. But the Gaza people are smaller and won't be satisfied with anything Harris says short of hard-left positions, and so probably she could moderate on that as well without much (additional) negative impact. But honestly anything more to the right of the Biden/Harris status quo I'd probably having trouble sleeping at night if I were Harris.
Putting energy into emphasizing the ("normal") military background of Walz (and, eg, surrogates like Buttigieg) seems like a no-brainer; likewise holding campaign events on military bases, and otherwise finding ways to flag-wave a bit (Harris is the VP: surely she could deputize for a couple of medal-award ceremonies?).
I'd go further: we need to build more ships and shells anyway, so she should talk about that more - or maybe pass the bulk of that portfolio over to Walz, but otherwise raise its salience in the campaign. Maybe combine it with an event praising union workers in a Midwestern military-hardware factory.
There are probably better ideas than those, but you get where I'm going. It's a vibe, sure, but shouldn't risk current Harris voters (and, to the extent it pisses off any of them will only strengthen the vibes with the target audience), and is 100% honest in the sense that that's who these folks are (Walz, Buttigieg, et all), and what a Democrat administration will do. Just... campaign on it a bit.
I agree that tax reform has to be within the currently political palatable range. But there is an argument to be mde to the median voter that deficits rob you and your children of growth, of higher future incomes and Trump's support for extending the "Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act of 2017) is pernicious.
That argument has been made to median voters for the past 40 years, and frankly it's been a lie. We've been running deficits with only a very few small exceptions since the Ford Administration, and nobody can reliably link any problem a median voter today is feeling because of that deficit spending.
ETA, I'm not saying deficits are perpetually good, or won't cause problems in the future. I wouldn't even say they haven't caused any problems existent today. Just that the direct tie to a problem today is nebulous at best, and every doom scenario deficit hawks swore to me would happen has failed to come to fruition.
>I’m hoping we see a convention that is laser-focused on persuadable voters — on retaining Romney-Biden voters and regaining Obama-Trump voters — rather than on placating intra-party dissent.<
Agreed. This is why I haven't been particularly worried about the prospect of even quite energetic and aggressive protests in Chicago. Nobody wants violence, of course. And I suppose if the scene in Chicago goes from "energetic" all the way to "chaotic" that might be bad for Democrats.
But in general, I'd guess the specter of hard leftists angrily protesting that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and the Democratic Party aren't sufficiently radical and left wing isn't something that is going to bother your typical persuadable voter. Might even help persuade a few to vote Democrat.
Yeah, there’s a real “thread the needle” opportunity with these protests given how detached from reality they seem. Some sort of joke or dismissive remark I think can go a long way. I suspect the number of swing voters who are going to change their vote based on the latest Israel/Gaza conflict is non-existent. But the number of of swing voters who are maybe hesitant because they have vague memories of Harris’ primary campaign and worry she’s going to guided by (dare I say) “weird” leftists is probably substantial. Or at least statistically significant enough to swing states like GA or PA. Some sort of signal that you’re not going to let the crazies run the asylum could go a long way to persuading on the fence voters.
It depends on how the media treat the protests. If the takeaway is "chaos follows the Democrats" (preferably with cool video of cops fighting the hippies), that would be bad.
From a more conservative side it looks like this: it feels supremely unfair that Republicans have to cater to these MAGA populist lunatics in order to enact a sane suite of policy preferences whereas the democrats can propose price controls and explode the size of the regulatory state every election because they pick sane seeming people to lead that charge, instead of gameshow hosts.
It’s a very depressing election for a market loving moderate.
As a pro market guy, I think democrats are an easy choice over Trump. Markets crave predictability. Democrats offer that, especially compared to what would almost be corrupt and uneven decision making concerning tariffs under Trump deux.
That is indeed my calculus but it’s not exactly a happy choice. They will a do bunch of obviously wrong things that make life worse and more annoying for business and consumers and really everyone, while raising taxes and wasting the resulting revenue, but at least they won’t do crazy shit like break the Fed, so vote for them anyway is a decidedly “hold your nose” pitch and I am not surprised that people with more risk tolerance than me or a stronger belief that the Trump term would be a carbon copy of the first term rather than crazy stuff than I hold calculate differently.
Really, we don’t know how much will actually happen—in real life there are always compromises, even if they got majorities in both houses there would still be bargaining. I think one of the things they’re hoping for is that prices level off enough that they can take credit for conquering inflation without actually having to do much of anything.
Yes and congress will probably be deadlocked if they win. However they will at minimum make a bunch of terrible (from my perspective) agency and judicial appointments. Beats the end of democracy, but it would be nice to vote against the current regulatory overreach across DOJ, SEC, FTC and other letter agencies without voting for Fascist Clowns. Alas.
As Matt points out, Harris didn’t suggest price controls. That being said, there are price controls in many states and they seem popular including in states such as, checks notes, Texas.
I’m not confident they don’t want price controls. It feels like they pulled back at the last moment on the messaging due to negative feedback but are still into the idea. I hope Harris doubles down on the supply side plans going forward instead.
Trump was never a gameshow host, calling him that is an insult to actual gameshow hosts, who tend to be bright, competent people. Trump was a reality show star—someone who acts out with cameras running, and then directors/producers make a coherent storyline out of carefully edited snippets of the footage.
MAGA populists are the Republican party. They made a deal with alternative media populists decades ago so that they could pursue their agenda of tax cuts, privatizing Social Security, defunding Medicaid, and block granting Medicare. The latter policies failed so Republicans chose to empower MAGA populists and explode fiscal deficits with tax cuts. The TCJA did not spur economic growth.
And negotiating drug prices are not price controls. It's fiscal austerity and prudence.
Yes this is the depressing part. A large enough minority (perhaps even a plurality) of passionate MAGA people hold a blocking position on Republican candidates. It sucks for the rest!
It would be IFF Republican actually espoused a sane policy agenda once in office. Extending the "Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act of 2017" trade restrictions, immigration restrictions/deportation's, nothing on reducing net CO2 emissions, trying to repeal w/o replacing ACA with something better ain't it.
I try not to let it color my view too much but it was hilariously the “Tax Cuts for Everyone But You, Who Gets a Massive Hike” Act from my perspective.
The TCJA increased some taxes on the wealthy via capping SALT deductions. A major overlooked factor is that the law also shrunk the size of the tax base rather than broadening (the U.S. tax code is highly progressive as it is when compare to Europe.)
"[Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act of 2117] did not really provide economic benefits for the deficits it incurred." is he British understatement of the century!
Capping SALT compared to just higher rates is bad in that it goes against taxing consumption over taxing income. Taxes paid are not consumption.
It also pissed off a lot of coastal bastions of the Republican Party. Orange County, CA turned blue for the first time ever on pretty much this issue. I despised Trump and didn’t vote for him in 2016, but now the Republicans are dead to me after the SALT cap. It’s also a marriage penalty as you don’t get the cap raised to $20k if you file jointly.
Perhaps you should focus your ire on voting against local and state level politicians whom you believe to be over-taxing your property without providing commensurate benefits instead of on the Federal government for no longer making it easier for them to do so?
There are significantly more self-identifying "conservatives" than self-identifying "liberals" or "progressives" in the US. Because of this disparity, Dems need to win self-identifying "moderates" by almost 2-to-1 to win nationally--and, on the flip side, Republicans just need to be competitive with self-identifying "moderates" to win (assuming Republicans have consolidated their conservative base, which they have). Likewise, the Republican Party consists much more of self-identifying "conservatives" than the Democratic Party consists of "liberals"--until the Obama administration more registered Democrats identified as "moderate" than "liberal"...and a huge chunk of Dems still identify as "moderate" today, much larger than the chunk of moderates in the Republican Party. So, yes, Republicans can run harder to the right than Democrats can run to the left, because Democrats need to win a lot more moderates in order to win than Republicans do.
"free to act"? Do you mean "Free to torpedo what should have been an easy walk to a trifecta government by nominating the only candidate that could lose?"
If it were a Vanilla Republican, Biden would likely not have stepped down, because the polls would be so bad that everyone would know that swapping him out wouldn't make a difference anyway. Dems would just be looking to 2028.
The fact that a) Trump was a weak enough candidate to make victory possible and b) a Trump win would be MUCH worse for the country than a vanilla R win is what led to Biden stepping down.
This playbook also happened in 2022. Republicans could have nominated vanilla Rs and probably taken the senate (and also gotten a bigger house majority). Instead they fucked around and found out by nominating nutjobs like Dr. Oz and Hershell Walker.
The EC tilt swings back and forth and is barely in the GOP's favor this cycle. Lots of Blue small states: Vermont, Rhode Island.
The Dems "waste" a lot of the popular vote racking up margins in California, NY and Illinois, but those states are steadily losing voters to Texas and Florida and the whole Sun Belt. It gets closer to evening out or even becoming a GOP problem every cycle.
I am definitely crossing my fingers for a future election where the Democrat wins the EC while losing the popular vote on account of narrowing winning TX. I will happily accept when Republicans ask to abolish the Electoral College for future elections.
The Senate will probably be a problem for a long time, though. I think Dems should strategize on turning Mountain West states blue. (And DC statehood if there is ever an opportunity.)
Yes, it would be great the valence of some of these things flip so people might be willing to compromise and pick the best solutions without getting too partisan about it. I don't think anyone like the EC, it's kind of shocking that we haven't abolished it after 250 years of ups and downs and swings left and right.
But isn't there some sort of Blue-State-Pact where they've agreed to pledge their EC votes to the winner of the popular vote count?
I oppose making DC a state - first of all, it’s arguably unconstitutional - and risks escalation on the right by splitting Texas up into up to five different states.
Texas is purported to be the only state that can do this without approval by Congress as The Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas to the United States contained language permitting Texas to split up into as many as five states, and passed both houses of Congress. Further, Texas v. White was decided by the Supreme Court confirming that secession from the United States is not legal, and so Texas never left the Union in fact, so its original language admitting it to the Union could be argued to still be legal.
I don’t know that such an effort could happen, there’s plenty of arguments on both sides of the issue, but it would tie both parties in a pretzel; Republicans would be arguing that secession is illegal (so the original language stands and Texas can split), while Democrats would be arguing that secession was legal, so Texas had to be readmitted to the Union so the original admission language is no longer of effect.)
It would make for interesting political and legal theater, but I feel very strongly that we ought not pulling that thread by admitting new states, lest we unravel the sweater entirely, as it were.
My solution to the representation issue is to give all of DC back to Maryland (as was done with the original part that was Virginia), and shrink the District down to just the parts where the federal government buildings are, and really nobody lives, save the President and Vice President and their families.
The take that Harris chickened out by not choosing Shapiro is too East coast and too online.
I just can't believe that they made a decision based on fear of nutty pro-Hamas online agitators. Nobody actually cares about them. My guess is the Walz decision was made, correctly, because Shapiro is basically the same person as Harris and the Democratic Party, correctly, needs to have people involved that aren't overeducated coastal lawyers.
My take has long been that Harris decided her VP pick wasn’t gonna determine the election, and she’d vowed to follow her instincts in the campaign anyway, so she went with the guy she vibed with most.
Politicos in general tend to reject that take, but I think it’s the Occam’s-Razor right one for what we’ve seen.
Who knows what happened behind the scenes, but Walz strikes me as the kind of guy I'd prefer to lunch with weekly than Shapiro. Politicians can and should be cold-blooded but they're also human.
Agree and disagree. I think they should be concerned re pro Palestinian demonstrators as division and disorder are never a good look (think DNC 1968), I think it was reasonable to assume Shapiro would have triggered that, even if his views on Israel are not that different from Walz, the perception is that he is more pro Israel.
I am more concerned that Harris is doubling down on her progressive look with the price controls which even most liberal economists dont support, the 25K homeowners benefit which is a setup to the next foreclosure crisis by giving high risk people homes, and then Trump and her trying to outdo themselves with cutting taxes on SS and tips with, of course, no mention of what will replace that tax revenue and nary a word about a balanced budget which is a big concern for Independents .
The momentum with Kamala is certainly there, and Biden would have gotten creamed, but I think that she will have a much harder time if she continues to pivot left instead of center.
None of that matters on either side. If Trump is elected, he's too incompetent and indifferent to do anything he promises, and that's assuming he even wants to do it. I doubt he remembers he promised not to tax tips. An aide probably reminds him before speeches where that's applicable.
Harris won't have Congress, so assuming she's not lying about what she wants to do, she still won't be able to do it.
You’re missing the point. Shapiro the 2024 VP candidate was *more* critical of Israel than some of the other contenders who didn’t receive anything approaching the same heat. He also didn’t differ from the others on his approach to protesters. Explaining the unique animosity he faced by stuff he allegedly said or did as a kid decades ago makes little sense assuming the protestors point is to affect the future admin’s policy. If however the point isn’t that at all but rather to punish and marginalize those who grew up Jewish (highly correlated with strong and often naive forms of Zionism) and still be a proud Jew - then it does so perfectly. But to punish or attempt to marginalize someone for being Jewish IS antisemitism. See also here:
No I dont disagree, I think Harris was avoiding the pushback, and not a bad move. Now when you actually look at Shapiro and Walz' current views, and I hardly concern myself with somebody's opinion in high school, they really are not that different. Shapiro has been critical of Netanyahu nor is it on voters minds though clearly it would piss off the left and riots at the convention are never a good look.
I am more concerned about Harris doubling down on her progressive viewpoints with the price controls and free mortgage money that she will alienate centrists like myself, though I will hold my nose and vote for the not Trump, and then neither candidate seems to ever mention debt, Trump with his tax cuts and Harris with benefits galore.
I agree with much that is written here, including the dangers of complacency. That said I wonder if Trump is going to get his act together. He's an old dog who doesn't seem that interested in learning new tricks and the sheer strength of the Harris revival (not merely catching up to Trump but actually overtaking him in 4 or so weeks makes me wonder if we're in an unprecedented electoral cycle. I'm still scratching my head that a sitting Vice-President who wasn't that popular before her ascention is generating such Obama-level enthusiasm and appears to be seen as being an agent of change.
Kevin Williamson over at The Dispatch sums it up perfectly: "Trump’s three big problems as a candidate are precisely the same qualities that mitigated the worst of what might have been a much worse Trump presidency the last time around: He is lazy, he is stupid, and he is childish."
Yes but if he was just those things he would never have gotten close to office in the first place. He’s those things plus a canny and instinctive street fighter, and a gifted entertainer. Never count him out
If Hollywood gave out lifetime achievement awards for being a celebrity for no reason, the award could be named after Trump. He's been a fixture in the popular culture for as long as I can remember -- he deserves at least grudging respect for that, because it is a genuine achievement. He's played in a very tough game for a long time and done quite well compared to most.
When his Twitter feud with Rosie O’Donnell died down in the early Obama era I was glad that I would never have to hear about him again because I figured by that time he was finally done.
“The less you respect Trump’s substance – and I respect it very little – the more you’re forced to admire whatever combination of charisma, persuasion, and showmanship he uses to succeed without having any.”
A lazy 78 year old would not be campaigning for president. A lazy 68 year old rich guy would not enter electoral politics, he would worry about his golf handicap or his yacht or find a new mistress.
Probably not lazy in general, but lazy in ways that impact campaign performance. He is not really interested in learning policy details or new tactics, and he does not want to work for a crowd. The first campaign, he easily drew big, enthusiastic crowds based on his basic messaging and a lot of novelty; as crowd size and enthusiasm has waned, so has his own enthusiasm for actually going out and doing campaign travel, given the relatively drop in activity.
This discussion has not included ego and his starting $ assets, by most any measure his ego with the help of his stupidity, laziness and childishness is resulting in a negative $ balance sheet and negative public policy. In the 50’s McCarty had great influence until he did not.
One explanation may just be that most Americans pay so little attention to politics that they have no idea who the sitting Vice President is. In 2106 Trump was the shiny new object, while Clinton was, well, a Clinton. Maybe Harris is just the shiny new object in 2024 and Trump's skill at making himself known is backfiring.
Her weakness appears to have been that she was the VP to an unpopular President and that people didn’t know much about her. This being the U.S., there was probably some racism and sexism involved as well.
"This being the U.S." should be replaced with "This being a nation of human beings"
Everyone has some tribalism in them. The US is better than most other countries at having a multicultural and pluralistic society. I get tired of the knee-jerk America-bashing.
Can't say I don't occasionally indulge in America-bashing (or at least America-poking), but on this point, you are quite correct. The roots of racism run deep within humanity, probably starting with a preference for one's own mother's face. The U.S. has done a passable job at reckoning with this impulse. Still, there's progress that could be made, given that one of our two major political parties currently has a high tolerance for racism.
Yes, sure? People who want to vote for Donald Trump are going to deny being racist. You do you, but this is racist and it should be disqualifying to anyone who isn’t racist.
That wasn’t meant as America-bashing. You are correct that we do a good job with multiculturalism. Donald Trump is running an overtly racist campaign. So that’s not a dealbreaker to anyone who votes for him. And that’s a lot of people.
I don't think I'd describe his campaign as "overtly racist," though I suppose people could argue about what that means for a really long time.
He's certainly run a racially insensitive campaign. I think that blithely labeling him or his various pronouncements as "racist" does a lot to make people suspicious of other more clearly legitimate criticisms of him.
I guess you’re not on Truth Social. He’s reposting people who say if, you don’t vote for Trump these people are going to rape you or the women in your life, these people are committing crimes, with pictures of black and brown people. It’s explicit.
I really, really don't want to go on Truth Social, but I think you're not giving an example of overt racism. Trump's signature issue is illegal immigration. Most migrants (and certainly the caricature of them) are not white. So if he wants to vilify illegal immigrants, of course he's going to show pictures of non-white people.
Yes, it's racially insensitive, but that doesn't strike me as overtly racist. My bet is that most Trump-curious voters (and the increasing numbers of non-white Trump supporters) don't think it's overtly racist either.
At some point, one would think he would remember that he wants to stay out of jail, and the most effective way for him to do that is to win the 2024 election.
Maybe conventional wisdom is wrong, but conventional wisdom is:
-- Harris is bad at electoral politics, as evidenced by the fact that she's never won a single primary delegate and barely won her statewide races in CA
-- Despite this, Harris is either tied or slightly ahead of Trump, indicating that Trump is an even worse candidate electorally
if those two things are true...then man Hillary has to be the worst candidate since, idk, Dukakis.
If that’s the conventional wisdom, then it’s pretty clearly wrong.
1. Harris is clearly good at electoral politics. Her political instincts to get out of the 2020 primary early are what led to her being picked as VP and now being the likely next President.
2. We are a divided nation. Both parties have a floor above 40%, so any presidential election is going to be close.
Harris is good at politics within the Democratic Party. She has never had to appeal to swing voters before. She is also is not good at extemporaneous speaking.
I would argue that a primary performance like Harris's has less than 0 correlation with overall electability. Joe Biden flamed out of 3 presidential primary campaigns, sometimes quite humiliatingly. He still won eventually, and beat an incumbent President. As Etienne pointed out, Harris had the sense and timing to know when to pull out. That decision has gotten her closer to the Presidency than any candidate in that race, other than Biden. The Harris campaign seems to be pretty good at timing actually, as shown by her sowing up party support pretty quickly after Biden dropped out.
I think Trump is clearly a worse candidate than he was in 2016. He wasn't just a morass of personal grievance then; he talked about what people cared about.
IMO pre-Kamala (/pre-Vance) Trump was running a better campaign than he did in 2016 or 2020; he was better at message discipline (admittedly compared to his own low standards) and sticking to the "strength vs weakness" theme against Biden that was going really well for him (and I suspect was particularly effective with the younger non-white voters that he was making gains with). But now it's pretty clear that he only had this in him for a Biden matchup in particular; he's a lot more typically scattershot against Harris.
I agree that Trump is a worse candidate than in 2016, but unfortunately, Republicans are a worse group of voters than they were in 2016. The playing field has simply shrunk alarmingly and it's worrisome that pretty much anything can happen.
It's worth noting that Hillary in 2016 won the popular vote and had a fairly comfortable polling lead - on average, better than Harris' lead now! - for most of the campaign. And she probably would have won were it not for the Comey letter (Nate Silver wrote a very persuasive article about this).
Don't get me wrong, she was still a crappy candidate. Joe Biden or Martin O'Malley probably would have won, maybe even easily. Then again, Trump was also a crappy candidate; Marco Rubio probably wins the popular vote against Hillary.
I am not sure Rubio could have quite harnessed anti-Clinton sentiment the way Trump did. With a less pugilistic Republican, I think it would have been closer, and he may not have been able to squeak out a victory in the Blue Wall states the way Trump did.
I keep hearing that Tony Gwynn was an awesome hitter but then I did some research and found that he completely failed to get a hit two thirds of the time.
Clinton’s line about the “basket of deplorables” almost certainly cost her that election. I guarantee that pissed off more people than Trump’s margin of victory in the key states.
In general I agree with the thrust of this article. But a few maybe bones of contention and one sort of follow up.
Regarding the immigration issue. Hasn’t she already done a big pivot to the center? She correctly admonished Trump for killing the immigration enforcement bill from the summer. And she’s already said she would sign a similar bill if elected. Like she’s basically doing what you asked already.
Regarding deficit reduction. I’ll repeat myself here. On the merits you are correct. And hopefully “secret Congress” will do some deficit reduction bill. But seriously what swing voter actually cares about the deficit? Heck outside of nerds like us, how many voters could even tell you why deficit actually matters (and no, stupid and wrong analogies about how if ppl need to tighten belts government should too doesn’t count). It’s odd because one of the people who taught me that the belief that vast swaths of voters either care about the deficit or could tell you why it matters, was maybe the best example of “inside the beltway” thinking about the electorate, was Matt Yglesias.
Lastly, regarding inflation. I continue to maintain that the most important foreseeable variable for the election is a Fed rate cut in September. At this point it seems very like there will be one and the question is how much will they cut (25 bps vs 50 bps). Seeing that costs for stuff like buying or leasing a new car have gone down I feel like should have a pretty big psychological impact.
"But seriously what swing voter actually cares about the deficit?"
Swing voters care about deficit reduction like they do the environment. They want you to talk about how you will do it, but not actually do it because they don't want taxes raised or programs cut.
I think one big problem is that I think the public's very general view of saving the environment is at least a big picture level correct. Whereas, I actually think a lot normie opinion about deficits is literally wrong. Outside of hardcore Trump supporters, I think based on anecdote and polling the public can see that smog is bad, dirty drinking water is not good for you and yes rising temperatures is not good for the planet. As you say, the public at large has shown a lack of interest in actual solutions like a carbon tax. But at least intuitively it seems as though public is correct.
One problem with deficits is that deficits are actually not always bad. And thinking about deficits like household budget is actually extremely problematic.
I would say the best pure political reason to encourage Harris to turn to deficit reduction in 2025 if she were to win is the one Robert Rubin gave to Clinton; the market will reward you. Deficit reduction should lead to lower borrowing costs, which should lead to lower crowding out from government borrowing which should lead an investment boom. And voila you get to run for reelection overseeing a booming economy. It's the thing that made me bang my heads against the wall in 2009 when "Blue Dog" Democrats in swing districts or swing states helped cut down the size of the stimulus*. I was like "Guys, who cares if Fred Hiatt in WaPo is giving you "credit" for supposed fiscal responsibility. If unemployment is close to 10% instead of closer to 7% (given size of the recession, unemployment would have likely been at least somewhat elevated even with a bigger stimulus) there's basically zero percent chance you're winning your purple district". And so it came to pass.
*I think one of the big problems with deficits and economic policy in general is I think we underrate how many senators or congressmen don't actually have a good grasp of even basic economics. A lot of them were probably coached by consultants to say the right things in primaries and general elections. I remember this was one of the big eye opening moments for Matt as a young blogger when had the chance to go to an event with Jim DeMint as a speaker (remember him?). DeMint was at the time supposedly an ideas man in the GOP. Matt got a chance to ask him an in the weeds policy question and it was clear to Matt that DeMint actually had no idea what Matt was talking about.
Deficit reduction is a substitute for "good government fiscal management." Most people have as much idea about environmental policy as they do about the appropriate fiscal approach. The impact of different types of particulate emission is something that is at best understood by experts in the field, and even then they are often wrong - same for economists and the economy. Legislators are usually not experts in any of these things, their job is to understand the trade offs between sets of policies (less pollution costs more) and vote based on their understanding of what would be best - though they often fail at this as well.
“but I think we should assume that Trump will find his footing at some point before November.” I see no reason to assume this. His rallies are tiny, he refuses to admit he’s wrong, his stump speech is boring, his campaign - for years - is just him whining & misunderstanding what tariffs are.
I keep thinking back to 2016 where the Trump campaign was dead in the water after the Access Hollywood tapes, but managed to regain their footing in part by pivoting to some well-executed "Drain the swamp" messaging. That was a sharp contrast to their unimaginative campaign finale in 2020, where they resorted to teasing some hail-mary, campaign-saving new development that ultimately never arrived. I think 2024 is gonna be more like 2020 than 2016 in that regard. Trump is even older and even more stubborn and less-disciplined compared to 2016. This whole "Outsider taking on the swamp" thing lost its core argument, because well, he's no outsider anymore. (Plus he has shown to be the swampiest creature of all.) And keep in mind: Even with their well-executed pivot in 2016, Trump still would've lost if not for the e-mail thing.
I'd like to think this, but in both 2016 and 2020 there was lots of commentary about how poorly his campaigns were run but both elections were super close. Maybe the third time is the charm but we'll just have to see.
I know obviously you have to have some confidence in yourself to be writing a daily politics substack, but some reason this one just came across as incredibly arrogant. Why is the Harris campaign being "complacent" by not running their campaign exactly the way Matt Yglesias thinks they should run it?
I don't know, politics is hard and nobody really knows what the winning strategy is!
Truthfully, it's kind of hard to read this and figure out exactly what you want her to do. I know there's a link to the shake-the-etch-a-sketch post, but this post seems to alternately complain that she's not breaking with Biden enough but also looking too progressive? Emphasizing that she backs Bidenomic policies is the effort to rebrand from her policies from the 2020 campaign. You talked in that "shake" post about how she should just do it all at once and not try to relitigate every single position change. Well the easiest way to do that is to say that she's moved to Biden's positions after working with him for four years, something that at least provides a rationale beyond "I'm changing my positions because I never believed in them in the first place".
Near the end you say, "Still, I think it is somewhat risky to pass up the opportunity to break with the Biden record on economics and turn in a more Clintonite direction of deficit reduction rather than new spending." Okay, come on. How exactly is "deficit reduction" a winning message in Florida and Texas or any hard Senate race? Is that going to win a single vote? I appreciate you as a public intellectual figure trying to raise the salience of deficit reduction and get people talking about it as important again, but that's a very far distance from saying it's something that can win votes.
It's interesting to see how the 1992 Democratic party platform discussed deficits. Seemingly strong language, but really just a stick to beat the Republicans over the head with, tax the rich, and be very vague about anything that might touch things most Americans valued:
"Addressing the deficit requires fair and shared sacrifice of all Americans for the common good. In 12 Republican years a national debt that took 200 years to accumulate has been quadrupled. Rising interest on that debt now swallows one tax dollar in seven. In place of the Republican supply-side disaster, the Democratic investment, economic conversion and growth strategy will generate more revenues from a growing economy. We must also tackle spending, by putting everything on the table; eliminate nonproductive programs; achieve defense savings; reform entitlement programs to control soaring health care costs; cut federal administrative costs by 3 percent annually for four years; limit increases in the "present budget" to the rate of growth in the average American's paycheck; apply a strict "pay as you go" rule to new non-investment spending; and make the rich pay their fair share in taxes. These choices will be made while protecting senior citizens and without further victimizing the poor. This deficit reduction effort will encourage private savings, eliminate the budget deficit over time, and permit fiscal policies that can restore America's economic health."
It is obviously spin as would the GOP but at least they are talking about it. I havent heard either of the current mention debt or how they are going to pay for either Trumps tax cuts or Harris' benefits.
Another very positive point in Harris-Walz favor (substantively and politically) is that unlike Trump-Vance, Harris-Walz do not hate and despise their opponents voters. For Harris-Walz to say something weird like, "I am your vengeance" is unthinkable.
I agree with you, but unfortunately, tons of Republican voters vote for Trump *precisely* because they believe that Harris, Biden et al. hate, despise, and have contempt for people like them. How do we convince them that it's not so? And it's not just about Democratic politicians; it's the whole academia, mainstream media, entertainment, Hollywood - they all are out to crush the average, non-college-educated American.
If 45% of the electorate believes this crap it's unfortunate, but I can live with it. Trump getting 45% of the vote means a solid Democratic victory, verging on a landslide.
But it’s really sad and disturbing on principle! I don’t want 45% of the population to believe that the ruling elites hate them. How would you like to live in a country where you believed that those in charge hate you?
It’s easy to make fun of the “NYT reporter visits a diner in rural Ohio” genre, but we’ve got to find some way to reach these people.
Well, it's more 35% think that, plus 10% are petit bougouise business owners who'd vote for the devil himself to keep taxes low and lessen labor's power as much as possible.
I mean, those people think we hate them because some mix of the fact elitists think LGBTQ should be able to live open and equal lives, women should have reproductive rights, and that racism and sexism are still fairly large issues in society.
Yes, yes, maybe on the latter, the so-called Left has gone too far, but any anti-woke centrist who actually tried to argue their views on race and sex to this 35% core would get called a leftist within 19 seconds.
These people want a vastly different world and hate that Hollywood, academis, etc. want their children to also think LGBTQ people are cool, abortion is OK, and a multicultural society is totally normal.
Votes have a good idea of who politicians prioritize. There's a reason that blacks Americans have voted for Democrats at an 85%+ level for decades despite being generally more conservative than the average white Democrat. Similarly, but not quite as much for other minority groups of all types (racial, ethnic, sexuality).
Those voters know that even Republicans who don't "hate" them, they won't prioritize them the same way. That is also true in reverse. The question of "what's the matter with Kansas" is that those voters know who will prioritize their interests (interests is not the same as economics!) more.
What “interests” of ordinary voters has Trump prioritized, other than cutting taxes on the rich and trolling the libs? Or are you saying that those interests trump (forgive me) everything else?
"Compared with Americans, Canadians have VERY different opinions on health care and guns, for starters, which is a polite way of saying that the median Canadian thinks it's bugf*cking insane that in America, health care is a privilege* but owning a gun is a right, rather than vice versa."
If you're someone who likes their current health insurance, hears horror stories about the wait in Canada's healthcare system, and enjoys owning a gun - then this VERY common liberal perspective seems like its not in your interest. I could provide a host of other examples depending on the issue, but at the core of it just recognize for good and ill, people have different priorities/preferences/interests.
I too would prefer a more moderate Harris (and would have preferred a more moderate Biden) but I am not sure I buy this as political advice.
“Your strategy seems to be working way better than everyone expected and now you have a narrow advantage instead of a large hole; time to take some big risks!” is a counterintuitive sell.
Seems like continue to avoid mistakes, position yourself as a normal Democrat inheritor to the broad Obama then Biden style of governance, while the opposition headed up an old crazy man continues to do crazy things, is a good and obvious strategy. If it stops working that is the time to take some risks.
I think you are wishing that “adopt your [and my!] policy preferences” is good advice and would be inclined to give it no matter the polling.
Yeah i sit on the left edge of the D coalition but this kind of thing is something i especially was every bit as guilty of as anybody else. It's just being nice to ourselves when we tell ourselves that well, it may not be immediately popular but there's a reserve army of voters who really want what we're selling, so regardless of the merits, etc.
And yes, just trying to stay the course and keep things chill seems like a more viable course than trying to persuade everyone about fiscal responsibility.
A lot of the difficulty of politics happens off-camera. By all reports Harris worked extremely hard and strategically to get the team aligned. She's also made some smart staffing decisions, like David Plouffe.
The greedflation thing (not real!) and these bad price control ideas were disappointing though. Of course I still pick her over Trump, but puts me in the uncomfortable position of counting on her NOT to do at least one of the things she talks about...
Market consolidation is an issue in the economy across a whole number of sectors. The problem with people who use the term "greedflation" is that they tend to not like economists.
Market consolidation is a good populist issue that cuts across party lines. It has something for small and medium business owners as well as individuals who don't like the powerless feeling of insignificance that comes from an economy dominated by corporate behemoths that don't even seem to have people working at them, just chatbots and labyrinthine "customer service" that seems designed more like a fortification system intended to prevent any consumer from actually penetrating the bureacracy and getting help.
Agree that excess consolidation and monopoly pricing are bad and should be fought. But that's not "greedflation".
Also support corporate taxes that would pick up any "excess profits" problems. But that's still not a "greedflation" situation nor does it require new tools.
In total yes, but voters really do not understand inflation. When polled, I think the most wanted "solutions" to it are tax and interest rate CUTS. This past week, I've seen a lot of finger wagging from self-described popularity, with some notable exceptions. People should have priorities, but popularists should be careful to beat allegations that they're just browbeating centrist technocrats.
I've seen very few details on this, and the Harris campaign seemed to mostly be testing the waters with it. My impression, is that it's pretty piddling and more likely to focus on antitrust than Venezuela-style price controls.
I would argue that Harris is running a brilliant campaign so far. She is trying to be the "Generic Democrat" that sometimes shows up in polls. Say little of substance, avoid unscripted moments, look good and smile a lot.
We all saw her during the 2020 primary. She isn't a good extemporaneous speaker and she was too willing to adopt dumb positions. So she isn't doing either of those things this time around. "Be Generic Democrat and let Trump lose" is a good strategy.
I think what would really put her in the brilliant camp is if she started openly soliciting endorsements from Romney etc.
I don't get the sense that Romney would ever endorse her.
And please tell me why she has to solicit the endorsement. If Romney thinks Trump is that great a threat to democracy and the stable world order, why doesn't he just get off his butt and endorse her?
I think Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan of Georgia has a claim to be our finest politician. Conservative Republican in a somewhat red southern state. And he just comes out and says, "I'm for Harris." (https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/13/politics/video/geoff-duncan-republicans-for-harris-sot-lcl-digvid) If you believe in our country, Mitt, it's not *that* hard.
There's a lot of "well I shouldn't HAVE to" that's deployed in politics and I think it's almost always people trying to justify themselves. You can turn it around just as easily: if Harris thinks Trump is that great a threat to democracy and the stable world order, why doesn't she just get off her butt, swallow her pride a little, and ask Romney for an endorsement?
Regardless of what people should or shouldn't do, the reality of politics is that you can sometimes get people to do something by asking them or doing some horse trading that they won't do unprompted. I have no idea if a Romney endorsement is on the table or not, but if it is, it's not crazy to ask Harris to make some trades -- whether in personal social niceties or mild policy concessions commensurate with the value of the endorsement -- to achieve it.
My question would be more whether the juice is worth the squeeze. If Harris just has to privately grovel for Romney's endorsement, fine. But his orthodox policy views are incredibly unpopular. I think any concession she gives him on that front (free trade? Tax cuts? Anti-abortion?) could cost her more votes than she wins.
In terms of vibes, I agree a Romney endorsement would help Republicans who loathe her policy, but loathe Trump at least as much set aside their concerns and vote for her.
Matt's case for chasing Murkowski's and Peltola's endorsements seems much more straightforward. You get the same voters a Romney endorsement can sway, the policy concessions are specific to Alaska, and could even burnish her moderate credentials, and possibly even put Alaska in play.
It all then comes down to what a Romney endorsement is worth vs. what price he would demand. And the answer “pay any price” is not the right answer.
"mild policy concessions commensurate with the value of the endorsement"
I mean if everyone truly believes that Trump is an existential threat to our democracy than Nikki Haley would have the D-nomination (as she would be presumed to be a near 100% favorite to win). The fact that this is conceptually laughable means that people don’t really see Trump as an existential threat.
I don't agree. I'm a Democrat and I would still prefer a 100% chance of a Nikki Haley presidency over a 95% chance of a Harris/Walz win. But some things are simply outside the realm of possibility. It's like saying that if Democrats truly believed that Trump was an existential threat, they would try to assassinate him.
People seem to have missed what a Herculean effort it took to convince Biden to step aside and coalesce around Harris. I've never been prouder of my party.
Your logic is pretty flawed here and I bet you can figure out why.
The problem is, those of us who have investments in the stock market are doing pretty darn well, unlike the majority of Americans who are very unhappy. It’s hard to see how aligning with someone who lost as an “out of touch patrician” helps us. Anyone who admires Romney as being law-abiding and upholding traditional norms is not going to vote for Trump anyway, but “never Trump” Republicans seem to have limited sway with voters.
Never Trump is a tiny portion of the electorate, but there aren't many persuadable voters. They are a decent slice of that persuadable group.
The best case I think of is maybe a prominent endorsement at least suggests helps cement her as a "normie" / "safe" choice.
That seems to assume that Mitt Romney is “normal”—he may be a good guy, but not exactly normal.
Hmm, I meant more "if you can get an endorsement from across the aisle then you're not that radical"
I suppose it could code also as "elites gonna elite" which wouldn't be as helpful.
How dare workers demand reasonable wages and working hours!
It sounds like there’s a movement among republicans in Arizona, including sitting mayors.
Exactly. This election will be one or lost on vibes -- "all" Harris has to do is convince voters that she's sane, responsible, listens to the voters and won't do anything crazy. And will be a lot more uplifting and positive a presence than Trump, whose histrionics are wearing thin eight years on. Getting mired in too-specific policy debates, spending time and political capital arguing over specifics that are up the Congress anyway, can only hurt.
I don't really agree with this (or John). I think this was a good description of the 2020 election, but Trump 'wearing thin eight years on' is demonstrably not true given that his favorables are now higher than they used to be. Primarily because he's been out of the spotlight a bit, clearly not in the White House, the media doesn't cover all of his Truth Social posts the way they used to his tweets, etc. 2020 was just a referendum on Trump, but 2024 simply isn't.
Low-information voters forgot about 1/6 and all of Trump's crazy antics, and have a hazily positive memory of his presidency now. Again, Trump's favorable ratings are higher now than they used to be. Matt's thesis in this piece is correct, Harris & company should be trying harder
His favorables are higher because every Republican's favorables are higher than in 2020. That's just the challenger party effect.
I don't know how often I can repeat this but Nikki Haley probably would have won 320 electoral college votes or something. Any generic republican would be a 60/40 favorite right now.
I think an underrated benefit of Harris's lead is that she's forcing him to campaign more and thus remind people of how much they dislike him.
Yep, it definitely seemed like Trump was planning to campaign mostly from the golf course while keeping a light rally schedule on the steam of Biden's age and unpopularity and not much else. The change in the ticket has upset that plan for him - a month ago after the GOP Convention Trump supporters were musing about Trump maybe winning NJ on top of all the swing states and sunbelt states. Now he's going to have go back and work for PA and WI, let alone AZ and GA. Which means he's going to have to spend a lot more time on the campaign trail than the 78 year old candidate (who was hoping to hide behind his even older rival's age) may be even capable of doing, let alone yeah, the more visible Trump is, the more the public is reminded what they don't like about Trump...
On one hand I agree that Kamala should be pursuing the low-information swing vote, but on the other hand, the risk of alienating progressive voters freaks me out.
I'm all on Team Kamala, but my super progressive twenty-something daughter is less impressed. I'm worried about voters like her getting alienated. You'd think that the theat of 4 more years of Trump (and a possible fasicst dictatorship afterwards) would be enough to get these lefty zoomers to the polls. But you'd be mistaken.
Obviously, I don't suggest that Harris veer to the left either. She just has to walk a very fine line. It just basically sucks to be a Democrat. Trump can blather on about whatever insane dementia-influenced hateful nonsense comes into his disgusting orange head - and not lose a single vote (including even insulting veterans). While Harris can slightly misspeak on Gaza or the Economy and lose her lead.
It's not fair, but it's the world we live in. And I think the Harris campaign is doing a surprisingly decent job.
I think that Democrats have been consistently really slow to recognize that their apocalyptic rhetoric is desensitizing. In sometimes kind of unfair ways! Like, I really do buy that a Trump victory would be really, really, really bad. But it's still the case that I've heard from my largely lefty political circle that every single Republican presidential candidate in my adult life is an apocalyptically bad choice (so that's GWB, GWB, McCain, Romney, Trump, Trump, and Trump, sadly enough).
Similarly, I think that the left has really underestimated how much they turned "you're racist" from a critique that had real sting and inspired a response to background noise to the right (and, increasingly, to the middle as well).
Probably the same thing is true in reverse -- I think the right wing has really defanged their ability to critique truly worrying turns against the strong market-oriented consensus by claiming that every Democrat in the world is secretly an actual honest-to-god Communist just waiting to reimpose stalinism, or that any kind of nuanced immigration concept constitutes de facto open borders. But I'm immersed in a blue social milieu, so I hear the left wing stuff more.
This is why "He sure is weird, right?" is so much more effective than "He is a fascist".
Yep!
I usually avoid talking politics, but a conservative relative of mine insisted and I happened to say of Vance "He's a real fuckin' weirdo," and my conservative relative AGREED! LOL!
The weird thing works because its so true. They can't deny it.
She needs to pursue the older voters, youngsters don’t vote in enough numbers.
I know this isn’t helpful to say, but super progressives really, REALLY need to pull their heads out of… the sand, let’s be polite here, and support Harris already! I have less than zero patience for people who say “Kamala is insufficiently progressive, so I’m sitting this election out! Let Trump win, that’ll learn them!” No.
Keep in mind that a twenty-year-old has experienced Trump as the dominant political figure since they were eleven. They at most have hazy memories of Obama. To them, Trump is normal.
That being said, I think progressive turnout is also hugely overrated. Convincing a borderline voter to come out is worth one vote. Getting a swing voter is worth two. Add that to the fact that moving far enough left to get that borderline voter may actually cost you the swing voter, you've gotten + 1 - 2.
No one will learn anything good from a Trump victory. “The worse the better” is not a good strategy.
I don’t mince words with my more progressive 16-year old (who obviously can’t vote anyway). Be slightly disappointed with the Democrat or be crushed and fearful of a Trump presidency. At least you can point to the damage he’s already caused.
Trump currently has -9.6 net favorability and only 43% view him favorably, according to 538. That makes him one of the most unpopular presidential candidates in modern history.
Voters don't want Trump but Kamala has to convince them she's a safe choice, especially if they aren't all that enamored with Democrats either.
His favorability rating was 29% in January 2021. 43% is obviously a big increase from 29%, so I feel comfortable with my statement that 'Trump 'wearing thin eight years on' is demonstrably not true given that his favorables are now higher than they used to be'. Also, Matt makes the exact same point in today's article, also with a link to the 538 chart (which showed him at 38% 2 years ago)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/01/20/how-we-know-the-drop-in-trumps-approval-rating-in-january-reflected-a-real-shift-in-public-opinion/
Was January 2021 8 years ago?
Exactly. Jan 2021 would be a low point for any candidate who lost and did not concede.
This does not seem like a comment with any value.
How much of that was due to him being shot and the RNC bounce, though?
I listened to the latest Ezra pod over the weekend on Manliness. Per that discussion, Dems are hemorrhaging support from young men. It might be that Trump is wearing thin but then it's clear that the overhang from all the Future is Female stuff is worse. Which might also be just "vibes" so I don't disagree, but I do disagree that all Harris needs to do is remain sane. She needs to win back support to win this race.
From what I’ve seen, at least Harris isn’t emphasizing her gender the way Hillary Clinton did, though unfortunately it’s not always easy to get supporters to STFU about stuff like that. The best thing about her campaign that I can see is that she is just running as Democrat, not “first black female.” But the issue of abortion is clearly a key issue this year, as one of the few things where the choice will actually make a big difference people’s lives. Sadly abortion has since become, for many Republicans, a matter of identity rather than values or interests—thirty or forty years ago, it used to be men supported abortion rights as much as or more than women did.
Thirty or forty years ago, young people were having more sex, so access to abortion was considered a positive among young men as it could keep them from being stuck supporting a kid.
With young people having less sex, there are a lot more incels who have come to hate women in general and think only “Chads” are getting laid. What good is abortion access to someone who doesn’t have sex and doesn’t see that changing anytime soon?
Interestingly enough it actually doesn't appear as though there is much of a gender divide on abortion if these Pew results are to be believed. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/
In fact, if anything one of the more striking parts of about this survey is it looks like support for abortion rights started in upward climb somewhere around 2008 with a small dip in 2015/2016 likely due to election and Hilary's presence on the ticket (if I had to guess, though open to other suggestions for the dip)*. Seems like pretty good data that a lot of the "surprise" as far as the reaction to the Dobbs decision was the result of too many pundits who had as their frame of reference the early 2000s and hadn't updated their priors**. I think what Dobbs did is make the issue one more salient in voters minds as far as voting behavior.
Also, see my comment below. These survey results which show young voters much more supportive of abortion rights than older voters is further indication to me that young men being more right wing might be pretty exaggerated and a data point skewed by a specific displeasure with Joe Biden being the Democratic nominee.
* Other possibility is with Trump as GOP nominee, there was a mistaken assumption from too many voters that there wasn't much danger to abortion rights.
** Feel pretty certain the slow but steady rise in support for abortion rights is directly related to this chart. https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx
Generally don’t see a gender divide, but women care more about the issue than men do on both sides.
Were those survey results about Democrats losing support from young men were done before or after Biden dropped out? I haven't listened to the podcast yet (I plan to), so maybe this was addressed. But if various polling experts are right, one of the biggest places Harris has picked up support over Biden is young voters. Given women are overwhelmingly Democrat these days (especially under 35), it stands to reason a lot of that pick up in support is from young men.
Given what we've seen in a few other countries, there does seem to be some gender divide going on politically with young voters (South Korea is one of the more fascinating and insane examples if polling is right). But I really do wonder if these various essays showing how young men are supposedly becoming super right wing over extrapolating too much some very Biden specific weakness with young voters the past 2-3 years.
Is it true that Dems are hemorrhaging support from young men?
I looked at this article (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/aug/05/young-men-voters-us-election-trump-harris), and while its narrative gloss is that, the chart it shows seems to me to show that young men are roughly as conservative as they've always been (while young women have become much more liberal).
This article shows the same thing: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/are-young-men-becoming-conservative/
This article looks at all men, not just young men, but again shows stability among males: https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx
Uh, okay. I don't have any particular stake in this, I didn't cherry-pick anything. I went looking at the polls, actually, for a different reason -- I wanted to check whether Steven was right that there was much more support to hemorrhage. But when I looked at them, I couldn't see any real sign that there had been any loss of support.
Do you have some reason to believe that those polls are wrong? If so, what is that reason? Honest question.
I think the young men the Democrats lost are already lost to them. I don't think there is much more of them to hemmorage. The anti-Democrat feeling amongst young men is directly linked to #MeToo. The further we get from MeToo the better for Democrats.
The idea this is happening, as I pointed out in another thread is...questionable.
https://x.com/GiancarloSopo/status/1823829680660865192
"Contrary to conventional wisdom on Twitter, the latest Pew poll (n = 7,569) shows no major political gender gap among Gen Z.
18-29 Men: Harris +24
18-29 Women: Harris +28"
Now, are these numbers maybe not 100% correct. Perhaps.
But, I do think the apocalyptic talk about the situation is largely from people of a certain political valence who think certain things supported by left-leaning young women is politically toxic because they don't personally like it.
See my post above regarding abortion and Pew survey findings. There's an increasing amount of evidence that men 18-29 being right wing was really a lot of young men not particularly enamored by Biden.
Wouldn't surprise me if there is at least some shift rightward from men likely as a backlash some left wing identity politics around gender. But surveys pre Biden dropping out was likely exaggerating this shift a lot.
Suspect it's the same with young black voters. There was a small but real shift in African American vote in 2020 rightwards. But polling pre July, 2024 was showing a generational shift in voting not seen since 1964. Which would have strained credulity.
By the way if I'm not mistaken the right ward shift was disproportionately concentrated in young Hispanic or young Black men. Wouldn't surprise me if Trump gets say 10% of the votes of Black voters in 2024. In 2020 it was 8% vs. 6% in 2016. 10% could be the key in places like PA or GA. But that's wildly off from some polling showing Trump getting upwards of 30% which again strained credulity.
Exactly - want to tell me Trump will get 12% of the black vote and 45% of the Hispanic vote? Sure, whatever. But, we are not seeing the greatest racial realignment since the Civil Rights Act, even if Biden would've stayed in.
On the men front, if I remember that study and not confusing them with other ones people freaked out about online, a majority of both young men and women had no specific ideology, but the report of the percentages removed both of those groups of people.
Again, I can see Harris +30 among women 18-29 and Harris +15 among men 18-29 even though I don't think it's likely, but Trump is not winning young men or coming close, no matter what the crosstabs currently show.
You think Ezra fits that description? I think he's probably the most level-headed, rational analyst (columnist?) out there.
Well, I wasn't quite fair to Ezra, but speaking more broadly of a general center-left overreaction. But, I do think Ezra probably isn't aware of the full data on this that shows a far more muddled picture than any clear proof of some big move to the right among young men.
He is a empathetic, reasonably deep thinker, but this can also mean giving too much credence based on the arguments he gets, especially if it's something relatively low salience he doesn't have that much of a background with.
I listened to that podcast you mentioned this past weekend though and it didn't quite make the same argument about young men actually leaving, though. There was some talk of it, but not quite in the way other parts of the center-left (including this Substack when Milan used his buddies views to really force a certain viewpoint about young voters) where it's just assumed men are being run out of the Democratic party.
But, like i said, because of his own tendencies and the background of his guests, it does give a little more credence to the argument than I think really exists.
Ironically, because both the type of person who would overreact to people like Tate's relatively popularity among dumb 15 year old boys on the Left and the type of person on the Right who would point this as proof of some real backlash among young men are both far more likely to be a guest on Ezra's podcast than somebody who just looks more deeply at the actual data and doesn't see much of a real shift.
Well, politics is about addition and subtraction. You win new groups, you lose old groups. Sometimes the latter just aren't your target anymore. How would Kamala "win back" these young dudes? Shoot the shit with Joe Rogan for a two hour sitdown and crack fart jokes?
The fart jokes seems stupid but yeah -- Ezra thought Harris should push hard for a Rogan interview. It worked wonders for Bernie. It's the #1 podcast by - a country mile - in overall reach.
Harris shouldn't - she'd put her foot in her mouth, or (at best) just come off as awkward and lame - but Walz sure as hell should.
It is vibes and general societal sentiment. Young men are increasingly alienated and less educated so yeah that will give you a general shift towards Republicans.
This is way too complacent. People mostly don't care about policy details, but even low-information voters are angry about inflation, illegal immigration, and crime/a general sense of disorder. I realize those are vague things and there are sound policy explanations about how Biden has addressed those problems, but they're still vulnerabilities that Harris needs to affirmatively address in a way that will resonate with low-information swing voters. "Orange Man Bad/Weird, Kamala Normal" won't cut it (or it might cut it, but it'll be a lot closer that it needs to be.)
Well, pushing strongly for the Lankford immigration bill (which gives Republicans 75% of what they want), talking about putting crooks away as DA and AG, and blasting corporations for price gouging (given that actual inflation is now nothing to worry about) would seem to be smart ways of trying to defuse issues which by now are sharply diminishing anyway. What would you have her do that she's not currently doing?
I wasn't saying that Harris hasn't been trying to address her vulnerabilities -- she has, although I agree with Matt that she should be more aggressive. My "too complacent" comment was in response to the original comment on this thread: "This election will be one or lost on vibes -- "all" Harris has to do is convince voters that she's sane, responsible, listens to the voters and won't do anything crazy. And will be a lot more uplifting and positive a presence than Trump, whose histrionics are wearing thin eight years on. Getting mired in too-specific policy debates, spending time and political capital arguing over specifics that are up the Congress anyway, can only hurt."
But hasn’t Harris kind of started laying out policy planks that rely on congress? Dumb stuff like no tax on tips (why?), the claim that she’ll stop price gouging, etc - she can’t actually do any of that unilaterally! Why even bother to say she will?
They let stupid people vote so tell them stupid things to get them to vote for you.
I want to both like and dislike this comment.
The is/ought distinction at its finest.
Sigh.
Maybe harsher than I'd put it, but yeah sure.
Of course - but that seems counter to convincing people you’re “sane [and] responsible”.
This
Trump is saying he can fix everything—can’t rely on people understanding the federal government to know that’s not true, because obviously most of them don’t. Some 17% (I forget which poll) think Biden was responsible for Roe v. Wade being overturned, because it happened on his watch.
The “no tax on tips” thing was actually a Trump proposal a week or so ago that she seems to have picked up.
Anyone who has ever worked in a job that relies on tips should understand pretty easily why that’s popular. No idea how much revenue would have to be made up, or even how likely it is it could pass Congress, but it’s an obvious crowd-pleaser.
Well it’s not a crowd pleaser for those of us who don’t get tips but have to give them. If anything like that passes, it’ll be abused terribly and encourage wages get shifted more away from employers and onto customers.
I think tipping culture has gotten completely out of hand, and has exhausted my feeling of obligation to tip more that I had even before COVID. Considering there’s no lower minimum wage for tipped workers where I live, I will absolutely cut my tipping to the bare minimum for traditionally tipped professions, and zero to anything that doesn’t actually involve personal service.
No taxes on tips is popular in Nevada. No other reason.
I think to Matt's point, it seems like the Trump campaign has been derelict in its approach. I don't understand why they just don't run ads of her saying stuff from the 2020 campaign or some of her bad tv VP moments - and do that over and over again. Even if she has ads that say she's changed her position, they can run on "how soon do you think she'll change back?"
Some of the Republican PACs are already running ads on this theme, and it’s a staple argument in conservative media, but it doesn’t seem to be moving the needle much with the voters.
I think that they’d probably be more successful if Trump and Vance were better at using the earned media from their public appearances to push the narrative, but they’ve had horrible message discipline this cycle.
The problem is that they keep stepping on whatever paid media they're putting out there with their laughable performances on earned media -- both Trump and (spectacularly!) Vance.
Indeed! And Trump has been noticeably worse at making good use of earned media this cycle than he has been in the past. (I’d argue that it was actually one of his campaign’s big strengths in 2016.) He’s been slipping cognitively, and picking up a VP who has terrible instincts on this stuff really hasn’t helped.
They are hypefixated on her laugh which is very dumb
Yeah, they seem really determined to find some sort of personalized attack line, but their attempts so far have fallen really flat.
Trump’s characterizations of Biden and Clinton (eg: Biden is old and senile, Clinton is crooked) had some genuine bite because they aligned with common voter perceptions and they touched on issues where voters had serious concerns (it is in fact quite bad for the president to be crooked or senile). The personal attacks that Trump has directed at Harris are largely either unconvincing (she clearly isn’t “low IQ”, and she even more obviously isn’t worse-looking than Trump) or irrelevant (nobody cares about Harris’s laugh).
Harris also benefits from having a general low profile after Biden was elected. Even her lousy "border czar" thing was never huge news. Despite a pretty mixed record in her CA political run (and the possibility of being associated with all the lousy things happening in CA--explicitly San Francisco Bay Area--- as a CA politician) people seem to be giving her a pass because she doesn't have that many big mistakes on the national level, so it's almost like she doesn't have a record at all for most voters.
Trump can and will figure out an attack that sticks, but doesn't do so in the context of his own strengths and the landscape of each election. "Sleepy Joe" didn't work in 2000 because voters were hungry for normal and a reduction of Trump's chaos, but it was working in 2024 when Biden was seen as ineffectual and Trump as vigorous. Contrast it with Obama's 2008 Change You Can Believe In, which simultaneously highlighted his strength as an outsider and contrasted it against Clinton's biggest weakness of being seen as untrustworthy.
Voters are likely to see Trump as more capable and Harris as more sensible. If I were Trump, I'd focus on "what's she hiding?" It links the idea that there is a cover up of Biden's frailties and Harris's flip flopping over the years. It contrasts with how he's seen as authentic (not truthful, but authentic) and she historically has not.
A strange phenomenon happens with hyperpartisan people: they tend to associate an opposite-party candidate's personal traits, such as looks and speech, with their own aversion to that person's politics, and they generalize this highly subjective assessment as if it were objectively true. Probably, this works in reverse as well; partisans begin to idealize their own candidates. Years ago, I commented to a Republican friend of mine on how stylish and attractive Barack and Michele Obama were, and he told me he didn't find them so in the slightest. I was rather astonished, since it seemed so obvious that Obama was handsome.
With Kamala's laugh, I'm sure these folks on the right really do find it nails-on-a-chalkboard irritating, so they can't fathom why this isn't landing.
“Bitch eating crackers” syndrome. (Although I would note that some politicians I pretty strongly disagree with, like Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Nikki Haley, Nancy Mace, and Kristi Noem are quite good-looking.)
Then, add and now she wants to institute communist price controls
By all means make the election a referendum on price gouging
I agree price gouging rules are extremely popular, but didn't the preview of her speech suggest price controls well outside the range of what one might classify as "price gouging"?
Read it and decide for yourself. She kept things vague.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/08/16/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-at-a-campaign-event-in-raleigh-nc/
Matt himself said that the actual speech was different than the "preview" of her speech, but when I google the previews now it seems like it's always saying "gouging" but with no limits on being tied to natural disasters.
I guess the actual remarks say "exploit crises" so hopefully she's just talking about the most popular type.
You do understand that when she talks like this, her *real* message is "I feel your pain" and by the time she is in office, and inflation has dropped so much that no one gives a damn anymore, then whatever "policy" she is proposing now will be dead and buried?
I think communist price controls are popular, or else they wouldn't be law in so many US states.
Which states are those? Or more to the point, what do you mean by “price controls”?
Based on other comments today, a lot of people include "price gouging" among "price controls". Technically I guess they are a control on prices but that feels way far out.
I suppose Rent Control is another, and many states I think also have limits on what an electric company can charge you for electricity.
A.D. answered this well. But what does Mathew (who my comment responded to) mean by price controls?
Before Biden stepped aside I was impressed by her iron determination to stay light years away from anything and everything that looked like she was leading a palace coup, speculating that she'd read up on how Gerald Ford had conducted himself at the same time exactly 50 years earlier... But my estimate was still just "She's not going to do any worse than Biden."
Was happy to be wrong about that.
Harris' ability was a speaker was discussed by Matt and Brian on the Politix pod. As Senator, Harris had several positive moments as a speaker. The question is perhaps more expertise. She spent most of her career as a prosecutor, then as a Senator she was on the judiciary committee.
It's possible as VP she's had a chance to broaden her experience and will now be a strong speaker on a broader range of topics, although probably legal issues will remain her strongest suit.
Biden misused her. She should have been his fix the border bulldog. She could have been tough and gotten away with it more easily than Biden himself. It should still be a subsidiary theme, contrasting that "non-weird" position to Trump's "weird" position of deporting millions of workers.
Didn’t he basically put her in the border role only to have her kind of reject the assignment? How would your preferred version of events have been different?
There wasn’t much upside without congressional action (which he should have sought sooner even if trump ended up torpedoing it the same way) remember early on the continuation of trumps executive orders were largely considered illegal outside of the pandemic emergency- it still isn’t clear his current orders will stand either. The alternative would have been to be much more creative- maybe a comprehensive realignment with Mexico or some other idea.
Yeah one problem here is that it's not that clear to me running away from Biden's actual legislative record is the right call here. Voters displeasure with Biden seems primarily about age (problem solved) and inflation (which is falling. And as far as we know a new pandemic (furiously knocking on wood) isn't on the cards meaning now supply chain snarls and no need for a Covid stimulus that at least exacerbated inflation).
Like are there a ton of voters outside of unpersuadable Trump supports who are against IRA or the Chips Act? Matt has noted that Biden probably tried to appease leftists a bit too much in certain areas, but mostly this involved out of the limelight issues like banning natural gas exports. A policy that has Matt laid out was probably wrong on the merits. But also a policy that only political junkies like us are aware of. The most high profile policy that maybe would be off putting to normies where Biden (and Harris) maybe compromised with the Left is student loan forgiveness. We've discussed before I have very mixed feelings about this policy. But again, this is not on the table as a policy as far I can tell.
Remember, Sandersistas were the reason Democrats were coerced into silly appeasement messaging in 2019. Their self immolation has collapsed their influence.
I'd want to get through the convention before deeming their influence "collapsed."
It's kind of weird to me that Matt wants her to move more toward the center while he really likes and approves of her proposed policies to increase housing, with its implications for messing with local government control.
You can believe the latter's an important issue and maybe even good policy. But, I'm sorry, those two are in direct contradiction with each other. He should be telling her to put a sock in it on the housing stuff.
"Local government control"? Libertarians are generally against zoning. Government control is government control -- local or otherwise.
I agree with Matt that she shouldn't be comfortable with her current margin, but it's also smart to see just how high she can ride the wave of enthusiasm. If she peters out here, she can adjust her messaging.
Some of her choices are permanent, like her VP. But many others are not.
Also, minor quibble, but Matt has repeatedly used the term "complacent," and that doesn't apply at all. Risk averse is not complacent. Complacency can also mean taking unnecessary risks. If Harris was rolling out even more progressive policy, THAT would be complacent.
Yes, picking JD Vance was complacent, I'd say.
Agreed, and notably "generic democratic" is outperforming what people were estimating for her a few months ago. There's a Scott Alexander post from June that shows prediction markets for her, while above Biden, were still below 50%. So it seems like she's doing something right.
On the price gouging stuff I want to make the case that this is a prime example of Harris ignoring activists and making the popularist move, just like on immigration.
The “price gouging” rhetoric IS the break with Biden to normal voters. Normal voters associate Biden with high prices, so they see Harris promising to crack down on price gouging as breaking with him. Slow Boring readers will say “well these are just the same things Biden was proposing” but to swing voters this is very new and compelling stuff. We’ve seen in our polling from before the NC speech that she’s seen more favorable on inflation than Biden, and that speech only drives that contrast.
Her economic policies are also seen as more moderate than Biden’s. Perhaps not on the traditional left-right axis, but this price gouging stuff has simply overwhelmingly support (talking upwards of 70%). And we have some recent polling that will come out showing that Harris’ economic policies are seen as more moderate and seen more favorably than Biden’s.
I agree with this. Going after profiteering is classic popularism and its the elites who hate price controls, not the masses.
Everyone loves price controls. They just hate shortages which is what price controls lead to.
It’ll really suck for everyone though (though maybe a bit more for elites).
Yes, it’s the elites in Venezuela who are truly suffering…
We’re talking about the US here and the measures we’re talking about might lead to temporary shortages of some items during times of high demand. That means items are more likely though who have the time to look for them rather than those with higher ability to pay. It’s not fully clear if non-elites really have more time but they certainly have less money. Nobody is talking about Venezuela.
And it switches Harris from playing defense to playing offense.
The media / right love complaining about grocery prices because people love complaining about grocery prices, but the right has not actually articulated any plans to address the issue other than hand-wave about how life was so much better in 2019 (and also propose a series of policies that would actually make inflation worse).
But, if Democrats only stick to arguments like “inflation is back down to target levels” or “inflation was bad all over the globe in 2021” or “but Trump’s policies will make inflation worse”, I think many voters just don’t find that satisfying — it feels defensive and reactive.
Switching to offense — demonstrating to voters that you want to take action, and action against “price gouging,” something the average 55 year old suburbanite loves to complain about — forces Trump to play defense. Now *the Right* looks like wet blankets, complaining about socialist price controls.
Is it just me, or are people here on fire with the trenchant comments on political strategy today?
Yeah it is such a no-brainer even though I hate it, it's surprising people can't see that. It also seems like a much more obvious way to appeal to people than deficit reduction too.
Yeah, I think that Matt is weirdly in denial about where public opinion on this is. (And to a certain extent this has been a shared problem for moderate Democrats now that Popularism is goring their oxen instead of the Left’s.)
Don't you think the "price gouging" rhetoric is playing with fire, though?
If she wins, one of the following will happen:
1) She does large-scale price capping or similar, which is economically ruinous
2) She does some token action with minimal economic impact, leaving her open to criticism from both the right ("she did this and it was bad") and from AOC/Bernie types ("we need to go much further and do Economically Ruinous Thing")
3) She does nothing, and leaves herself open to being accused of lying
4) She makes steps towards 1) or 2) but is blocked by Congress or SCOTUS. Which is maybe the best-case scenario and probably helps her in the 2026 midterms, but it still keeps the issue salient in a way it shouldn't be
I can *maybe* see an argument for what's she's doing if you sincerely believe that Trump is a threat in a way that Generic Republican isn't - the political cost of bad policy now is worth it if it punts him to 2028 when he'd be twice-losing and truly decrepit.
In general, I think there's a big difference between being popularist in terms of the rhetorical emphasis you place on different policies (which is fine) and being popularist to the extent of actually promoting bad policy (which is very dangerous).
She's clearly going to do #2. Two years of (hopefully) naturally cooled inflation will put it mostly in the rearview by the midterms, and even so by 2028. The first price gouging proposals say as much: they are very time and scope limited, ensuring that they can just go quietly into the night N years from now when the news cycle has moved on.
This of course assumes that inflation continues to secularly cool, which I think it will. If that happens, people will remember her token price gouging bills about as much as they remember Biden's post victory masking policy - ie, not much at all.
# 2 is probably also Trumps real "inflation plan" - win in 2024 and reap the predicted next year or so of falling inflation and prices finally falling to match, and claim complete credit for "fixing inflation" - much like what he did in 2016 when he won the election in an economy with 4% unemployment in falling, strong wage and job growth (basically the economy for the next 3 years of his term), but his having campaigned on the "economic disaster" of the Obama years that many associated with the 2009-2014 years of recession + slow growth/recovery combined with an increased partisan divide in economic perceptions allowed him to do that and get away with it - and is why his 2024 campaign has now benefited from that "2019 nostalgia" (another bit of Trumpian "magic" is disappearing his final year in Office!), he's hoping to repeat that playbook in 2024-2025. Trump knows very well which way inflation is going and knows that whoever is sitting in the White House by the end of 2025 will reap the benefit of strong voter approval for a much more normal inflationary and pricing economy, he just has to get there first and say what he needs in the meantime (making sure to blame Biden - and by extension - Harris and Democrats).
The problem, though, with Trump is that while Harris may be tossing out some shiny objects to ride that same wave and expectations of a 2025 economy, the one of a few policies that Trump does seem to be actually committed to is the idea of tariffs, which could be a real policy he would follow through *even if the economy is doing great* by 2025. It's not like he's running for re-election if he blows it with imposing the tariffs he's talking about to any degree, but the idea of tariffs is something that's caught in his brain folds like a piece of popcorn in a tooth, as part of his overall pre-dispostion to be opposed to anything "global" or "international" in nature. The second policy he would most definitely follow through with (if he gets a Republican Congress that is) is another big tax cut on the rich, without a doubt, which would also be a massive deficit driver and will drive up interest rates (the inflation fighting tool that most voters absolutely hate!) as a result. Without getting too deep in the weeds, Harris's campaign should absolutely spend the effort to campaign against these two very likely and marquee Trump policies that he's promising will "fight inflation" will actually be inflation drivers... Chip away at the most cogent policies he's offering, on the most cogent issue he has!
The chances of Democrats winning three presidential elections in a row is fine. I mean Id love a Kamalatopia where we all experience previously unseen levels of prosperity, social trust and subjective enjoyment, but 90% of her focus should be on winning this election.
Maybe she’d only have to take credit for the FTC failing to approve the Kroger-Albertson’s merger. My populist hindbrain says price-gouging=grocery stores exploiting Covid / bird flu and then continuing to raise prices. And THEN mergers will only decrease competition and engender local monopolies (if you’re lucky location-wise) and food deserts it you’re not.
I think that a lot of people have a general sense that the endless mergers in the grocery and drug store sector has led to fewer actors and fewer choices and that makes price gouging easier even without a full monopoly. I think there is some truth to that.
In my own well resourced neighborhood, we have gone from having three grocery stores - two small local chains and one Kroger owned Fred Meyer to just one small local and Fred Meyer and Fred Meyer since Covid has been a shit show - low staffing ratios, empty shelves, locked product, and lots of visible security. My teenage daughter doesn't like to shop there because it gives a "society has failed vibe." Prices are high and the experience sucks. The independent grocery store was bougie and always had high prices but their prices haven't increased as much and the experience is very nice. It hard to escape the sense that with our Safeway closed post merger that Fred Meyer decided it could get away with charging near- bougie prices with shit serve and a high profit margin because the only alternative for lower prices is folks actually leaving the neighborhood and searching out a grocery outlet or buying bulk at Costco.
Similarly, we used to have three function drug stores. One was a one off local store, one was a local chains, one was a Wallgreens. Wallgreens closed after a merger. One of the local stores closed due to pressure from the chains and the Riteaid bought our local chain and promptly made it suck and they are now closing stores everywhere and the remaining ones have near empty shelves, high prices, and "for lease signs". "Does anyone know of any decent pharmacy nearby now that Rite Aid ruined Bartell's?" is one of the most frequent posts on our neighborhood Facebook group.
I can only imagine how shitty choices must be in less well resourced areas.
I think she could have the FTC crack down on mergers and possibly even demand some break ups of prior mergers into smaller companies and both not abandon capitalism but also actually help with folks sense that a lack of competition and greed is hurting their pocket book and quality of life.
What will happen is a version of (4): Republicans will win the Senate and she'll pin the blame on them.
That said I think worrying about what the Harris-Walz administration would do is putting the cart before the horse. First step is to win the damn thing!
I agree with this analysis. This is the pivot. Biden in general seemed incapable of making this rhetoric land.
Yes. The problem with Biden's approach was that he didn't seem to be speaking the language of the people, who are mad mad mad about how much more they are paying for basic goods than they were 4 years ago. I have to admit, there are grocery stores I won't shop at any more because they've obviously jacked up prices beyond where inflation would put them. Of course, I believe consumer behavior will take care of this problem, but a little muscle from the government is probably not going to hurt.
Do swing voters believe that presidents can control prices without creating shortages?
I guess I am too neoliberal to be a man of the people on this one.
I'm not sure a pivot to focus on austerity and deficit reduction is a winner for Harris - I much prefer the idea of figuring out what would get moderate surrogates like Peltola (or Romney or Murkowski!) to come out swinging for you. To me, that all smacks of energy and permitting. That would also probably help with Texas.
I don't think she needs to pivot much more on immigration either - they have neutralized the issue well just by pointing to the border deal that Trump killed. Law and order? Here's a tape of Trump praising Walz calling in the troops to quiet things down.
Energy seems like the next best thing to make up more middle ground. Inflation is odd here - seems like voters are genuinely sticking blame for that on Biden and giving Harris a bit of a pass. Either way, she and Walz have been messaging on supply side affordability and correctly calling out Trump's plans as inflationary. Maybe they can just amplify that.
Can anyone think of a politician who has seen their political fortune swing in such a short amount of time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_in_the_Stone_(1963_film)
The classic example is Winston Churchill seizing power following the Norway Debate.
It is, in a word, weird (or maybe unusual is a better term for what's going on).
Talking about deficit reduction in a non-specific way is a winner, any actual specifics are a political loser, which Matt knows or should. So, she should talk about it mostly in a non-specific way but include prescription drug negotiations, fair share of taxes for the rich and some sort of vaguely plausible process to review spending. And that's it.
Well, this does put at risk losing the entire critical voting bloc of folks belonging to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, but, yeah, pretty much.
Matt made this point on Politix a few days ago but Harris should promise Peltola and Murkowski they will get to literally write all federal Alaska policy in exchange for an endorsement. Only 3 EVs but the bipartisanship is huge on vibes.
What is the benefit for Kamala is Peltola endorses her? This hurts Peltola (ties her to someone who will lose Alaska) and doesn't help Kamala ("House Democrat endorses Democrat" isn't a story).
Murkowski sure.
She's not going to win Alaska.
It would be foolish for her to talk about austerity and deficit reduction as part of her campaign in anything more than the most platitudinal way. If there's a "Boy Who Cried Wolf" issue in American politics it's deficits. People have been told that deficits were bad and would cause bad things for the past 40 plus years, and there has never been a single problem caused by deficits that is palpable to the American people.
If there are budget constraints that come about because of the deficit they're going to be fought over and decided in the back room negotiations of a giant reconciliation bill --- and there is zero way to predict what that will end up looking like. Telling people today that some program they like is going to be cut, or worse telling anyone they're taxes will go up is just not worth the political cost if for no other reason than you would be lying because you really have no idea what the final outcome will look like.
I think this take is right. Reading the article before reading this, I was mentally going through a rolodex of positions to moderate on, and couldn't come up with anything beyond energy where I would say there'd be positive expected value of moderating. Immigration you could, but since Harris has already said she supports the immigration deal Trump killed; it would be getting really in-the-weeds to say I'd go further with X, Y, and Z. *Maybe* say in passing "I wish President Biden pursued this deal earlier while I was focused with the root causes internationally, which helped but was never a cure-all. It's clear we needed an all-of-the-above immigration reform." Anything more detailed would just confuse the low-info voters that are swingable, and risk losing more in the coalition.
Austerity is low-salience right now even if it's economically the correct one that I'd hope Harris would pursue in practice. I don't think moderation on low-salience issues helps all that much, since low-info / swing voters by definition entirely vote on high-salience issues.
Abortion, *maybe* bringing back the safe/legal/rare talk and talking about expanding the safety net would help reduce abortions would be good, but if her current schtick is working in the swing states, why risk upsetting the apple cart.
Energy is the only thing I think she could improve on, and only if the Sunrise Movement promises not to knee-cap her. I'd hope her team would have those discussions and Sunrise would understand the assignment as well, but as previous Slow Boring articles have said, they probably wouldn't, in which case there's more risk in moderating and losing some of the young people that are now energized. But that's a problem with Sunrise, not Harris.
Honestly if Sunrise acts up I think the party would gleefully throw them under the bus. Perfect group to triangulate against especially with the IRA passed.
Maybe, but a previous article mentioned an anecdote where a (low-information) young person was considering staying home / not voting for Harris because of climate, and Matt failed to convince her otherwise. I think there's a lot more risk of that sort of dynamic having a differential impact if Sunrise seriously acted up. At least compared to the current strategy status-quo with environment than say, Gaza / Israel. Which, I should probably have also bracketed as a candidate. I think the Gaza single-issue people are also in this camp of not playing nice, and it's high-salience, so ripe for moderation. But the Gaza people are smaller and won't be satisfied with anything Harris says short of hard-left positions, and so probably she could moderate on that as well without much (additional) negative impact. But honestly anything more to the right of the Biden/Harris status quo I'd probably having trouble sleeping at night if I were Harris.
Could National Defense be another one?
Putting energy into emphasizing the ("normal") military background of Walz (and, eg, surrogates like Buttigieg) seems like a no-brainer; likewise holding campaign events on military bases, and otherwise finding ways to flag-wave a bit (Harris is the VP: surely she could deputize for a couple of medal-award ceremonies?).
I'd go further: we need to build more ships and shells anyway, so she should talk about that more - or maybe pass the bulk of that portfolio over to Walz, but otherwise raise its salience in the campaign. Maybe combine it with an event praising union workers in a Midwestern military-hardware factory.
There are probably better ideas than those, but you get where I'm going. It's a vibe, sure, but shouldn't risk current Harris voters (and, to the extent it pisses off any of them will only strengthen the vibes with the target audience), and is 100% honest in the sense that that's who these folks are (Walz, Buttigieg, et all), and what a Democrat administration will do. Just... campaign on it a bit.
I agree that tax reform has to be within the currently political palatable range. But there is an argument to be mde to the median voter that deficits rob you and your children of growth, of higher future incomes and Trump's support for extending the "Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act of 2017) is pernicious.
That argument has been made to median voters for the past 40 years, and frankly it's been a lie. We've been running deficits with only a very few small exceptions since the Ford Administration, and nobody can reliably link any problem a median voter today is feeling because of that deficit spending.
ETA, I'm not saying deficits are perpetually good, or won't cause problems in the future. I wouldn't even say they haven't caused any problems existent today. Just that the direct tie to a problem today is nebulous at best, and every doom scenario deficit hawks swore to me would happen has failed to come to fruition.
I think immigration is more that the issue has become a little less salient since crossings have declined
>I’m hoping we see a convention that is laser-focused on persuadable voters — on retaining Romney-Biden voters and regaining Obama-Trump voters — rather than on placating intra-party dissent.<
Agreed. This is why I haven't been particularly worried about the prospect of even quite energetic and aggressive protests in Chicago. Nobody wants violence, of course. And I suppose if the scene in Chicago goes from "energetic" all the way to "chaotic" that might be bad for Democrats.
But in general, I'd guess the specter of hard leftists angrily protesting that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and the Democratic Party aren't sufficiently radical and left wing isn't something that is going to bother your typical persuadable voter. Might even help persuade a few to vote Democrat.
Yeah, there’s a real “thread the needle” opportunity with these protests given how detached from reality they seem. Some sort of joke or dismissive remark I think can go a long way. I suspect the number of swing voters who are going to change their vote based on the latest Israel/Gaza conflict is non-existent. But the number of of swing voters who are maybe hesitant because they have vague memories of Harris’ primary campaign and worry she’s going to guided by (dare I say) “weird” leftists is probably substantial. Or at least statistically significant enough to swing states like GA or PA. Some sort of signal that you’re not going to let the crazies run the asylum could go a long way to persuading on the fence voters.
It depends on how the media treat the protests. If the takeaway is "chaos follows the Democrats" (preferably with cool video of cops fighting the hippies), that would be bad.
It feel supremely unfair how Democrats always seem like they need to thread a needle while Republicans a free to act only on their worst impulses.
From a more conservative side it looks like this: it feels supremely unfair that Republicans have to cater to these MAGA populist lunatics in order to enact a sane suite of policy preferences whereas the democrats can propose price controls and explode the size of the regulatory state every election because they pick sane seeming people to lead that charge, instead of gameshow hosts.
It’s a very depressing election for a market loving moderate.
As a pro market guy, I think democrats are an easy choice over Trump. Markets crave predictability. Democrats offer that, especially compared to what would almost be corrupt and uneven decision making concerning tariffs under Trump deux.
That is indeed my calculus but it’s not exactly a happy choice. They will a do bunch of obviously wrong things that make life worse and more annoying for business and consumers and really everyone, while raising taxes and wasting the resulting revenue, but at least they won’t do crazy shit like break the Fed, so vote for them anyway is a decidedly “hold your nose” pitch and I am not surprised that people with more risk tolerance than me or a stronger belief that the Trump term would be a carbon copy of the first term rather than crazy stuff than I hold calculate differently.
Really, we don’t know how much will actually happen—in real life there are always compromises, even if they got majorities in both houses there would still be bargaining. I think one of the things they’re hoping for is that prices level off enough that they can take credit for conquering inflation without actually having to do much of anything.
Yes and congress will probably be deadlocked if they win. However they will at minimum make a bunch of terrible (from my perspective) agency and judicial appointments. Beats the end of democracy, but it would be nice to vote against the current regulatory overreach across DOJ, SEC, FTC and other letter agencies without voting for Fascist Clowns. Alas.
As Matt points out, Harris didn’t suggest price controls. That being said, there are price controls in many states and they seem popular including in states such as, checks notes, Texas.
I’m not confident they don’t want price controls. It feels like they pulled back at the last moment on the messaging due to negative feedback but are still into the idea. I hope Harris doubles down on the supply side plans going forward instead.
Checking my notes - what price controls does _Texas_ have?
(EDIT: Or if you simply meant that they would be popular in Texas but aren't here now, which ones and source?)
Quick google, would this count? https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/consumer-protection/disaster-and-emergency-scams/how-spot-and-report-price-gouging
Yes, this.
I agree price gouging laws are popular (partly because people don't think of the 2nd order effects) but I wouldn't consider them price controls.
I suppose it's possible that that's what Étienne meant.
All those asshats selling toilet paper out of cars during the first few weeks of covid were gouging. I am glad cops arrested those people.
Trump was never a gameshow host, calling him that is an insult to actual gameshow hosts, who tend to be bright, competent people. Trump was a reality show star—someone who acts out with cameras running, and then directors/producers make a coherent storyline out of carefully edited snippets of the footage.
That’s fair haha. Mostly I like it because it reminds me of one of my favorite digs from Ghostbusters.
MAGA populists are the Republican party. They made a deal with alternative media populists decades ago so that they could pursue their agenda of tax cuts, privatizing Social Security, defunding Medicaid, and block granting Medicare. The latter policies failed so Republicans chose to empower MAGA populists and explode fiscal deficits with tax cuts. The TCJA did not spur economic growth.
And negotiating drug prices are not price controls. It's fiscal austerity and prudence.
Yes this is the depressing part. A large enough minority (perhaps even a plurality) of passionate MAGA people hold a blocking position on Republican candidates. It sucks for the rest!
The MAGA populists are like, 70-80% of consistent Republican voters; it’s their party now.
You are not helping the depression!!!
It would be IFF Republican actually espoused a sane policy agenda once in office. Extending the "Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act of 2017" trade restrictions, immigration restrictions/deportation's, nothing on reducing net CO2 emissions, trying to repeal w/o replacing ACA with something better ain't it.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/an-unfair-evaluation-of-bidens-economic
I try not to let it color my view too much but it was hilariously the “Tax Cuts for Everyone But You, Who Gets a Massive Hike” Act from my perspective.
Ditto.
The TCJA increased some taxes on the wealthy via capping SALT deductions. A major overlooked factor is that the law also shrunk the size of the tax base rather than broadening (the U.S. tax code is highly progressive as it is when compare to Europe.)
But overall the TCJA did not really provide economic benefits for the deficits it incurred. https://www.aeaweb.org/issues/773?to=17806
"[Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act of 2117] did not really provide economic benefits for the deficits it incurred." is he British understatement of the century!
Capping SALT compared to just higher rates is bad in that it goes against taxing consumption over taxing income. Taxes paid are not consumption.
It also pissed off a lot of coastal bastions of the Republican Party. Orange County, CA turned blue for the first time ever on pretty much this issue. I despised Trump and didn’t vote for him in 2016, but now the Republicans are dead to me after the SALT cap. It’s also a marriage penalty as you don’t get the cap raised to $20k if you file jointly.
Perhaps you should focus your ire on voting against local and state level politicians whom you believe to be over-taxing your property without providing commensurate benefits instead of on the Federal government for no longer making it easier for them to do so?
Spoiler alert: there will be no price controls next year.
I wouldn't say that. Republicans acting on their worst impulses is why this election is competitive at all.
There are significantly more self-identifying "conservatives" than self-identifying "liberals" or "progressives" in the US. Because of this disparity, Dems need to win self-identifying "moderates" by almost 2-to-1 to win nationally--and, on the flip side, Republicans just need to be competitive with self-identifying "moderates" to win (assuming Republicans have consolidated their conservative base, which they have). Likewise, the Republican Party consists much more of self-identifying "conservatives" than the Democratic Party consists of "liberals"--until the Obama administration more registered Democrats identified as "moderate" than "liberal"...and a huge chunk of Dems still identify as "moderate" today, much larger than the chunk of moderates in the Republican Party. So, yes, Republicans can run harder to the right than Democrats can run to the left, because Democrats need to win a lot more moderates in order to win than Republicans do.
"free to act"? Do you mean "Free to torpedo what should have been an easy walk to a trifecta government by nominating the only candidate that could lose?"
If it were a Vanilla Republican, Biden would likely not have stepped down, because the polls would be so bad that everyone would know that swapping him out wouldn't make a difference anyway. Dems would just be looking to 2028.
The fact that a) Trump was a weak enough candidate to make victory possible and b) a Trump win would be MUCH worse for the country than a vanilla R win is what led to Biden stepping down.
This playbook also happened in 2022. Republicans could have nominated vanilla Rs and probably taken the senate (and also gotten a bigger house majority). Instead they fucked around and found out by nominating nutjobs like Dr. Oz and Hershell Walker.
Agreed, and I think this is largely a downstream consequence of the unfairness of the Electoral College and the Senate.
The EC tilt swings back and forth and is barely in the GOP's favor this cycle. Lots of Blue small states: Vermont, Rhode Island.
The Dems "waste" a lot of the popular vote racking up margins in California, NY and Illinois, but those states are steadily losing voters to Texas and Florida and the whole Sun Belt. It gets closer to evening out or even becoming a GOP problem every cycle.
I am definitely crossing my fingers for a future election where the Democrat wins the EC while losing the popular vote on account of narrowing winning TX. I will happily accept when Republicans ask to abolish the Electoral College for future elections.
The Senate will probably be a problem for a long time, though. I think Dems should strategize on turning Mountain West states blue. (And DC statehood if there is ever an opportunity.)
Yes, it would be great the valence of some of these things flip so people might be willing to compromise and pick the best solutions without getting too partisan about it. I don't think anyone like the EC, it's kind of shocking that we haven't abolished it after 250 years of ups and downs and swings left and right.
But isn't there some sort of Blue-State-Pact where they've agreed to pledge their EC votes to the winner of the popular vote count?
Meet me in Missoula?
I oppose making DC a state - first of all, it’s arguably unconstitutional - and risks escalation on the right by splitting Texas up into up to five different states.
Texas is purported to be the only state that can do this without approval by Congress as The Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas to the United States contained language permitting Texas to split up into as many as five states, and passed both houses of Congress. Further, Texas v. White was decided by the Supreme Court confirming that secession from the United States is not legal, and so Texas never left the Union in fact, so its original language admitting it to the Union could be argued to still be legal.
I don’t know that such an effort could happen, there’s plenty of arguments on both sides of the issue, but it would tie both parties in a pretzel; Republicans would be arguing that secession is illegal (so the original language stands and Texas can split), while Democrats would be arguing that secession was legal, so Texas had to be readmitted to the Union so the original admission language is no longer of effect.)
It would make for interesting political and legal theater, but I feel very strongly that we ought not pulling that thread by admitting new states, lest we unravel the sweater entirely, as it were.
My solution to the representation issue is to give all of DC back to Maryland (as was done with the original part that was Virginia), and shrink the District down to just the parts where the federal government buildings are, and really nobody lives, save the President and Vice President and their families.
The take that Harris chickened out by not choosing Shapiro is too East coast and too online.
I just can't believe that they made a decision based on fear of nutty pro-Hamas online agitators. Nobody actually cares about them. My guess is the Walz decision was made, correctly, because Shapiro is basically the same person as Harris and the Democratic Party, correctly, needs to have people involved that aren't overeducated coastal lawyers.
My take has long been that Harris decided her VP pick wasn’t gonna determine the election, and she’d vowed to follow her instincts in the campaign anyway, so she went with the guy she vibed with most.
Politicos in general tend to reject that take, but I think it’s the Occam’s-Razor right one for what we’ve seen.
Who knows what happened behind the scenes, but Walz strikes me as the kind of guy I'd prefer to lunch with weekly than Shapiro. Politicians can and should be cold-blooded but they're also human.
Agree and disagree. I think they should be concerned re pro Palestinian demonstrators as division and disorder are never a good look (think DNC 1968), I think it was reasonable to assume Shapiro would have triggered that, even if his views on Israel are not that different from Walz, the perception is that he is more pro Israel.
I am more concerned that Harris is doubling down on her progressive look with the price controls which even most liberal economists dont support, the 25K homeowners benefit which is a setup to the next foreclosure crisis by giving high risk people homes, and then Trump and her trying to outdo themselves with cutting taxes on SS and tips with, of course, no mention of what will replace that tax revenue and nary a word about a balanced budget which is a big concern for Independents .
The momentum with Kamala is certainly there, and Biden would have gotten creamed, but I think that she will have a much harder time if she continues to pivot left instead of center.
None of that matters on either side. If Trump is elected, he's too incompetent and indifferent to do anything he promises, and that's assuming he even wants to do it. I doubt he remembers he promised not to tax tips. An aide probably reminds him before speeches where that's applicable.
Harris won't have Congress, so assuming she's not lying about what she wants to do, she still won't be able to do it.
You’re missing the point. Shapiro the 2024 VP candidate was *more* critical of Israel than some of the other contenders who didn’t receive anything approaching the same heat. He also didn’t differ from the others on his approach to protesters. Explaining the unique animosity he faced by stuff he allegedly said or did as a kid decades ago makes little sense assuming the protestors point is to affect the future admin’s policy. If however the point isn’t that at all but rather to punish and marginalize those who grew up Jewish (highly correlated with strong and often naive forms of Zionism) and still be a proud Jew - then it does so perfectly. But to punish or attempt to marginalize someone for being Jewish IS antisemitism. See also here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/opinion/josh-shapiro-democrats-israel.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
No I dont disagree, I think Harris was avoiding the pushback, and not a bad move. Now when you actually look at Shapiro and Walz' current views, and I hardly concern myself with somebody's opinion in high school, they really are not that different. Shapiro has been critical of Netanyahu nor is it on voters minds though clearly it would piss off the left and riots at the convention are never a good look.
I am more concerned about Harris doubling down on her progressive viewpoints with the price controls and free mortgage money that she will alienate centrists like myself, though I will hold my nose and vote for the not Trump, and then neither candidate seems to ever mention debt, Trump with his tax cuts and Harris with benefits galore.
I agree with much that is written here, including the dangers of complacency. That said I wonder if Trump is going to get his act together. He's an old dog who doesn't seem that interested in learning new tricks and the sheer strength of the Harris revival (not merely catching up to Trump but actually overtaking him in 4 or so weeks makes me wonder if we're in an unprecedented electoral cycle. I'm still scratching my head that a sitting Vice-President who wasn't that popular before her ascention is generating such Obama-level enthusiasm and appears to be seen as being an agent of change.
Kevin Williamson over at The Dispatch sums it up perfectly: "Trump’s three big problems as a candidate are precisely the same qualities that mitigated the worst of what might have been a much worse Trump presidency the last time around: He is lazy, he is stupid, and he is childish."
https://thedispatch.com/article/trump-lazy-stupid-childish/
Yes but if he was just those things he would never have gotten close to office in the first place. He’s those things plus a canny and instinctive street fighter, and a gifted entertainer. Never count him out
If Hollywood gave out lifetime achievement awards for being a celebrity for no reason, the award could be named after Trump. He's been a fixture in the popular culture for as long as I can remember -- he deserves at least grudging respect for that, because it is a genuine achievement. He's played in a very tough game for a long time and done quite well compared to most.
When his Twitter feud with Rosie O’Donnell died down in the early Obama era I was glad that I would never have to hear about him again because I figured by that time he was finally done.
This is true. He ranks up there with other Hall of Famers like Paris Hilton and the Kardashians.
The first annual Trump Undeserving Celebrity in the male category goes to Wolf Blitzer, and in the female category to Katie Perry.
I agree with you, but we’ve yet to see that come out in the past 2 months.
Scott Alexander had a great line about this:
“The less you respect Trump’s substance – and I respect it very little – the more you’re forced to admire whatever combination of charisma, persuasion, and showmanship he uses to succeed without having any.”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/19/book-review-the-art-of-the-deal/
A lazy 78 year old would not be campaigning for president. A lazy 68 year old rich guy would not enter electoral politics, he would worry about his golf handicap or his yacht or find a new mistress.
Probably not lazy in general, but lazy in ways that impact campaign performance. He is not really interested in learning policy details or new tactics, and he does not want to work for a crowd. The first campaign, he easily drew big, enthusiastic crowds based on his basic messaging and a lot of novelty; as crowd size and enthusiasm has waned, so has his own enthusiasm for actually going out and doing campaign travel, given the relatively drop in activity.
He's undisciplined; he’s not lazy.
This discussion has not included ego and his starting $ assets, by most any measure his ego with the help of his stupidity, laziness and childishness is resulting in a negative $ balance sheet and negative public policy. In the 50’s McCarty had great influence until he did not.
The class snobbery oozing from your comment really sums up where the Democratic Party is right now.
(https://xkcd.com/859/
(I hate you because I clicked on this.
)))
Best comment on here.
One explanation may just be that most Americans pay so little attention to politics that they have no idea who the sitting Vice President is. In 2106 Trump was the shiny new object, while Clinton was, well, a Clinton. Maybe Harris is just the shiny new object in 2024 and Trump's skill at making himself known is backfiring.
Her weakness appears to have been that she was the VP to an unpopular President and that people didn’t know much about her. This being the U.S., there was probably some racism and sexism involved as well.
"This being the U.S." should be replaced with "This being a nation of human beings"
Everyone has some tribalism in them. The US is better than most other countries at having a multicultural and pluralistic society. I get tired of the knee-jerk America-bashing.
Can't say I don't occasionally indulge in America-bashing (or at least America-poking), but on this point, you are quite correct. The roots of racism run deep within humanity, probably starting with a preference for one's own mother's face. The U.S. has done a passable job at reckoning with this impulse. Still, there's progress that could be made, given that one of our two major political parties currently has a high tolerance for racism.
Yes, sure? People who want to vote for Donald Trump are going to deny being racist. You do you, but this is racist and it should be disqualifying to anyone who isn’t racist.
https://x.com/trumpwarroom/status/1823379465914741234?s=46&t=xjTH4wABpxhTMjQjxu7dqA
And this doesn’t even get into the fact that most immigrants commit less crime than the native-born.
That wasn’t meant as America-bashing. You are correct that we do a good job with multiculturalism. Donald Trump is running an overtly racist campaign. So that’s not a dealbreaker to anyone who votes for him. And that’s a lot of people.
I don't think I'd describe his campaign as "overtly racist," though I suppose people could argue about what that means for a really long time.
He's certainly run a racially insensitive campaign. I think that blithely labeling him or his various pronouncements as "racist" does a lot to make people suspicious of other more clearly legitimate criticisms of him.
I guess you’re not on Truth Social. He’s reposting people who say if, you don’t vote for Trump these people are going to rape you or the women in your life, these people are committing crimes, with pictures of black and brown people. It’s explicit.
I really, really don't want to go on Truth Social, but I think you're not giving an example of overt racism. Trump's signature issue is illegal immigration. Most migrants (and certainly the caricature of them) are not white. So if he wants to vilify illegal immigrants, of course he's going to show pictures of non-white people.
Yes, it's racially insensitive, but that doesn't strike me as overtly racist. My bet is that most Trump-curious voters (and the increasing numbers of non-white Trump supporters) don't think it's overtly racist either.
I think we're way past the time when we give Trump the benefit of the doubt on anything.
If he wants to show people he's not a racist, he's welcome to prove it.
How do you prove you aren't racist?
Racism and sexism in the US vanished in the last six weeks?
Even if this is intended as a joke, it crosses the line. I’m deleting and consider this a warning
If this is the joke I think it is then it's not okay.
At some point, one would think he would remember that he wants to stay out of jail, and the most effective way for him to do that is to win the 2024 election.
Maybe conventional wisdom is wrong, but conventional wisdom is:
-- Harris is bad at electoral politics, as evidenced by the fact that she's never won a single primary delegate and barely won her statewide races in CA
-- Despite this, Harris is either tied or slightly ahead of Trump, indicating that Trump is an even worse candidate electorally
if those two things are true...then man Hillary has to be the worst candidate since, idk, Dukakis.
If that’s the conventional wisdom, then it’s pretty clearly wrong.
1. Harris is clearly good at electoral politics. Her political instincts to get out of the 2020 primary early are what led to her being picked as VP and now being the likely next President.
2. We are a divided nation. Both parties have a floor above 40%, so any presidential election is going to be close.
Harris is good at politics within the Democratic Party. She has never had to appeal to swing voters before. She is also is not good at extemporaneous speaking.
I would argue that a primary performance like Harris's has less than 0 correlation with overall electability. Joe Biden flamed out of 3 presidential primary campaigns, sometimes quite humiliatingly. He still won eventually, and beat an incumbent President. As Etienne pointed out, Harris had the sense and timing to know when to pull out. That decision has gotten her closer to the Presidency than any candidate in that race, other than Biden. The Harris campaign seems to be pretty good at timing actually, as shown by her sowing up party support pretty quickly after Biden dropped out.
I think Trump is clearly a worse candidate than he was in 2016. He wasn't just a morass of personal grievance then; he talked about what people cared about.
IMO pre-Kamala (/pre-Vance) Trump was running a better campaign than he did in 2016 or 2020; he was better at message discipline (admittedly compared to his own low standards) and sticking to the "strength vs weakness" theme against Biden that was going really well for him (and I suspect was particularly effective with the younger non-white voters that he was making gains with). But now it's pretty clear that he only had this in him for a Biden matchup in particular; he's a lot more typically scattershot against Harris.
I agree that Trump is a worse candidate than in 2016, but unfortunately, Republicans are a worse group of voters than they were in 2016. The playing field has simply shrunk alarmingly and it's worrisome that pretty much anything can happen.
It's worth noting that Hillary in 2016 won the popular vote and had a fairly comfortable polling lead - on average, better than Harris' lead now! - for most of the campaign. And she probably would have won were it not for the Comey letter (Nate Silver wrote a very persuasive article about this).
Don't get me wrong, she was still a crappy candidate. Joe Biden or Martin O'Malley probably would have won, maybe even easily. Then again, Trump was also a crappy candidate; Marco Rubio probably wins the popular vote against Hillary.
I am not sure Rubio could have quite harnessed anti-Clinton sentiment the way Trump did. With a less pugilistic Republican, I think it would have been closer, and he may not have been able to squeak out a victory in the Blue Wall states the way Trump did.
I keep hearing that Tony Gwynn was an awesome hitter but then I did some research and found that he completely failed to get a hit two thirds of the time.
Ted Williams was almost as bad. #overrated
Clinton’s line about the “basket of deplorables” almost certainly cost her that election. I guarantee that pissed off more people than Trump’s margin of victory in the key states.
In general I agree with the thrust of this article. But a few maybe bones of contention and one sort of follow up.
Regarding the immigration issue. Hasn’t she already done a big pivot to the center? She correctly admonished Trump for killing the immigration enforcement bill from the summer. And she’s already said she would sign a similar bill if elected. Like she’s basically doing what you asked already.
Regarding deficit reduction. I’ll repeat myself here. On the merits you are correct. And hopefully “secret Congress” will do some deficit reduction bill. But seriously what swing voter actually cares about the deficit? Heck outside of nerds like us, how many voters could even tell you why deficit actually matters (and no, stupid and wrong analogies about how if ppl need to tighten belts government should too doesn’t count). It’s odd because one of the people who taught me that the belief that vast swaths of voters either care about the deficit or could tell you why it matters, was maybe the best example of “inside the beltway” thinking about the electorate, was Matt Yglesias.
Lastly, regarding inflation. I continue to maintain that the most important foreseeable variable for the election is a Fed rate cut in September. At this point it seems very like there will be one and the question is how much will they cut (25 bps vs 50 bps). Seeing that costs for stuff like buying or leasing a new car have gone down I feel like should have a pretty big psychological impact.
"But seriously what swing voter actually cares about the deficit?"
Swing voters care about deficit reduction like they do the environment. They want you to talk about how you will do it, but not actually do it because they don't want taxes raised or programs cut.
I think one big problem is that I think the public's very general view of saving the environment is at least a big picture level correct. Whereas, I actually think a lot normie opinion about deficits is literally wrong. Outside of hardcore Trump supporters, I think based on anecdote and polling the public can see that smog is bad, dirty drinking water is not good for you and yes rising temperatures is not good for the planet. As you say, the public at large has shown a lack of interest in actual solutions like a carbon tax. But at least intuitively it seems as though public is correct.
One problem with deficits is that deficits are actually not always bad. And thinking about deficits like household budget is actually extremely problematic.
I would say the best pure political reason to encourage Harris to turn to deficit reduction in 2025 if she were to win is the one Robert Rubin gave to Clinton; the market will reward you. Deficit reduction should lead to lower borrowing costs, which should lead to lower crowding out from government borrowing which should lead an investment boom. And voila you get to run for reelection overseeing a booming economy. It's the thing that made me bang my heads against the wall in 2009 when "Blue Dog" Democrats in swing districts or swing states helped cut down the size of the stimulus*. I was like "Guys, who cares if Fred Hiatt in WaPo is giving you "credit" for supposed fiscal responsibility. If unemployment is close to 10% instead of closer to 7% (given size of the recession, unemployment would have likely been at least somewhat elevated even with a bigger stimulus) there's basically zero percent chance you're winning your purple district". And so it came to pass.
*I think one of the big problems with deficits and economic policy in general is I think we underrate how many senators or congressmen don't actually have a good grasp of even basic economics. A lot of them were probably coached by consultants to say the right things in primaries and general elections. I remember this was one of the big eye opening moments for Matt as a young blogger when had the chance to go to an event with Jim DeMint as a speaker (remember him?). DeMint was at the time supposedly an ideas man in the GOP. Matt got a chance to ask him an in the weeds policy question and it was clear to Matt that DeMint actually had no idea what Matt was talking about.
"It's the thing that made me bang my heads against the wall"
It's fun when we learn interesting facts about our fellow SB commenters. :-)
Deficit reduction is a substitute for "good government fiscal management." Most people have as much idea about environmental policy as they do about the appropriate fiscal approach. The impact of different types of particulate emission is something that is at best understood by experts in the field, and even then they are often wrong - same for economists and the economy. Legislators are usually not experts in any of these things, their job is to understand the trade offs between sets of policies (less pollution costs more) and vote based on their understanding of what would be best - though they often fail at this as well.
This.
Easy to forget: a 56% chance of winning doesn’t mean poised to win 56-44, it means (to nearest approximation) poised to flip a coin
“but I think we should assume that Trump will find his footing at some point before November.” I see no reason to assume this. His rallies are tiny, he refuses to admit he’s wrong, his stump speech is boring, his campaign - for years - is just him whining & misunderstanding what tariffs are.
I keep thinking back to 2016 where the Trump campaign was dead in the water after the Access Hollywood tapes, but managed to regain their footing in part by pivoting to some well-executed "Drain the swamp" messaging. That was a sharp contrast to their unimaginative campaign finale in 2020, where they resorted to teasing some hail-mary, campaign-saving new development that ultimately never arrived. I think 2024 is gonna be more like 2020 than 2016 in that regard. Trump is even older and even more stubborn and less-disciplined compared to 2016. This whole "Outsider taking on the swamp" thing lost its core argument, because well, he's no outsider anymore. (Plus he has shown to be the swampiest creature of all.) And keep in mind: Even with their well-executed pivot in 2016, Trump still would've lost if not for the e-mail thing.
His rallies aren't actually tiny. You sometimes see videos of empty seats, but they largely have high attendance.
I think Matt's larger point is good -- Trump is a weak candidate, yes, but assuming your opponent will face-plant is a risky strategy.
I'd like to think this, but in both 2016 and 2020 there was lots of commentary about how poorly his campaigns were run but both elections were super close. Maybe the third time is the charm but we'll just have to see.
He'll probably have a huge surge when he's sentenced for the hush money trial in September.
Trump surged at the end of the campaign cycle in both 2016 and 2020.
I know obviously you have to have some confidence in yourself to be writing a daily politics substack, but some reason this one just came across as incredibly arrogant. Why is the Harris campaign being "complacent" by not running their campaign exactly the way Matt Yglesias thinks they should run it?
I don't know, politics is hard and nobody really knows what the winning strategy is!
Truthfully, it's kind of hard to read this and figure out exactly what you want her to do. I know there's a link to the shake-the-etch-a-sketch post, but this post seems to alternately complain that she's not breaking with Biden enough but also looking too progressive? Emphasizing that she backs Bidenomic policies is the effort to rebrand from her policies from the 2020 campaign. You talked in that "shake" post about how she should just do it all at once and not try to relitigate every single position change. Well the easiest way to do that is to say that she's moved to Biden's positions after working with him for four years, something that at least provides a rationale beyond "I'm changing my positions because I never believed in them in the first place".
Near the end you say, "Still, I think it is somewhat risky to pass up the opportunity to break with the Biden record on economics and turn in a more Clintonite direction of deficit reduction rather than new spending." Okay, come on. How exactly is "deficit reduction" a winning message in Florida and Texas or any hard Senate race? Is that going to win a single vote? I appreciate you as a public intellectual figure trying to raise the salience of deficit reduction and get people talking about it as important again, but that's a very far distance from saying it's something that can win votes.
It seems like you are challenging an opinion writer for having an opinion.
Deficit reduction is exactly what appeals to Never Trumper Rs and centrists. It did work for Clinton, the last president to balance a budget. Although the country is 50/50 on more or less spending, social welfare, etc. it is a good 60-40 on reducing the deficit ( https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/24/6-facts-about-americans-views-of-government-spending-and-the-deficit/ )
It's interesting to see how the 1992 Democratic party platform discussed deficits. Seemingly strong language, but really just a stick to beat the Republicans over the head with, tax the rich, and be very vague about anything that might touch things most Americans valued:
"Addressing the deficit requires fair and shared sacrifice of all Americans for the common good. In 12 Republican years a national debt that took 200 years to accumulate has been quadrupled. Rising interest on that debt now swallows one tax dollar in seven. In place of the Republican supply-side disaster, the Democratic investment, economic conversion and growth strategy will generate more revenues from a growing economy. We must also tackle spending, by putting everything on the table; eliminate nonproductive programs; achieve defense savings; reform entitlement programs to control soaring health care costs; cut federal administrative costs by 3 percent annually for four years; limit increases in the "present budget" to the rate of growth in the average American's paycheck; apply a strict "pay as you go" rule to new non-investment spending; and make the rich pay their fair share in taxes. These choices will be made while protecting senior citizens and without further victimizing the poor. This deficit reduction effort will encourage private savings, eliminate the budget deficit over time, and permit fiscal policies that can restore America's economic health."
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1992-democratic-party-platform
It is obviously spin as would the GOP but at least they are talking about it. I havent heard either of the current mention debt or how they are going to pay for either Trumps tax cuts or Harris' benefits.
Another very positive point in Harris-Walz favor (substantively and politically) is that unlike Trump-Vance, Harris-Walz do not hate and despise their opponents voters. For Harris-Walz to say something weird like, "I am your vengeance" is unthinkable.
I agree with you, but unfortunately, tons of Republican voters vote for Trump *precisely* because they believe that Harris, Biden et al. hate, despise, and have contempt for people like them. How do we convince them that it's not so? And it's not just about Democratic politicians; it's the whole academia, mainstream media, entertainment, Hollywood - they all are out to crush the average, non-college-educated American.
If 45% of the electorate believes this crap it's unfortunate, but I can live with it. Trump getting 45% of the vote means a solid Democratic victory, verging on a landslide.
Just don't go above that number, please.
But it’s really sad and disturbing on principle! I don’t want 45% of the population to believe that the ruling elites hate them. How would you like to live in a country where you believed that those in charge hate you?
It’s easy to make fun of the “NYT reporter visits a diner in rural Ohio” genre, but we’ve got to find some way to reach these people.
Well, it's more 35% think that, plus 10% are petit bougouise business owners who'd vote for the devil himself to keep taxes low and lessen labor's power as much as possible.
I mean, those people think we hate them because some mix of the fact elitists think LGBTQ should be able to live open and equal lives, women should have reproductive rights, and that racism and sexism are still fairly large issues in society.
Yes, yes, maybe on the latter, the so-called Left has gone too far, but any anti-woke centrist who actually tried to argue their views on race and sex to this 35% core would get called a leftist within 19 seconds.
These people want a vastly different world and hate that Hollywood, academis, etc. want their children to also think LGBTQ people are cool, abortion is OK, and a multicultural society is totally normal.
Votes have a good idea of who politicians prioritize. There's a reason that blacks Americans have voted for Democrats at an 85%+ level for decades despite being generally more conservative than the average white Democrat. Similarly, but not quite as much for other minority groups of all types (racial, ethnic, sexuality).
Those voters know that even Republicans who don't "hate" them, they won't prioritize them the same way. That is also true in reverse. The question of "what's the matter with Kansas" is that those voters know who will prioritize their interests (interests is not the same as economics!) more.
What “interests” of ordinary voters has Trump prioritized, other than cutting taxes on the rich and trolling the libs? Or are you saying that those interests trump (forgive me) everything else?
To provide a very blunt example:
"Compared with Americans, Canadians have VERY different opinions on health care and guns, for starters, which is a polite way of saying that the median Canadian thinks it's bugf*cking insane that in America, health care is a privilege* but owning a gun is a right, rather than vice versa."
If you're someone who likes their current health insurance, hears horror stories about the wait in Canada's healthcare system, and enjoys owning a gun - then this VERY common liberal perspective seems like its not in your interest. I could provide a host of other examples depending on the issue, but at the core of it just recognize for good and ill, people have different priorities/preferences/interests.
I too would prefer a more moderate Harris (and would have preferred a more moderate Biden) but I am not sure I buy this as political advice.
“Your strategy seems to be working way better than everyone expected and now you have a narrow advantage instead of a large hole; time to take some big risks!” is a counterintuitive sell.
Seems like continue to avoid mistakes, position yourself as a normal Democrat inheritor to the broad Obama then Biden style of governance, while the opposition headed up an old crazy man continues to do crazy things, is a good and obvious strategy. If it stops working that is the time to take some risks.
I think you are wishing that “adopt your [and my!] policy preferences” is good advice and would be inclined to give it no matter the polling.
Yeah i sit on the left edge of the D coalition but this kind of thing is something i especially was every bit as guilty of as anybody else. It's just being nice to ourselves when we tell ourselves that well, it may not be immediately popular but there's a reserve army of voters who really want what we're selling, so regardless of the merits, etc.
And yes, just trying to stay the course and keep things chill seems like a more viable course than trying to persuade everyone about fiscal responsibility.
I've been surprised by Kamala's strong performance, but I haven't seen anything in her performance that deserves the credit.
Doing 20-minute speeches written by someone else with no challenging questions is a very low bar.
There's just overwhelming relief to be done with Biden, and a demand for newness.
Remember when RFK jumped to 20-something percent in the polls based on nothing other than not being Trump or Biden?
I just hope that the newness can do its work long enough to get us through the election.
But if she can squeak out a win, I fully expect 4 years full of head-slapping moments, then a repeat of "she's not up for this" going into 2028.
Just like 2020, today's compromises set the stage for tomorrow's problems.
A lot of the difficulty of politics happens off-camera. By all reports Harris worked extremely hard and strategically to get the team aligned. She's also made some smart staffing decisions, like David Plouffe.
The greedflation thing (not real!) and these bad price control ideas were disappointing though. Of course I still pick her over Trump, but puts me in the uncomfortable position of counting on her NOT to do at least one of the things she talks about...
Market consolidation is an issue in the economy across a whole number of sectors. The problem with people who use the term "greedflation" is that they tend to not like economists.
Market consolidation is a good populist issue that cuts across party lines. It has something for small and medium business owners as well as individuals who don't like the powerless feeling of insignificance that comes from an economy dominated by corporate behemoths that don't even seem to have people working at them, just chatbots and labyrinthine "customer service" that seems designed more like a fortification system intended to prevent any consumer from actually penetrating the bureacracy and getting help.
https://youtu.be/H54BxzFoI44?si=f-Enwv6M7sy6Cp39
Agree that excess consolidation and monopoly pricing are bad and should be fought. But that's not "greedflation".
Also support corporate taxes that would pick up any "excess profits" problems. But that's still not a "greedflation" situation nor does it require new tools.
"Market consolidation is an issue..."
It's an issue, but that doesn't mean it's a problem.
In total yes, but voters really do not understand inflation. When polled, I think the most wanted "solutions" to it are tax and interest rate CUTS. This past week, I've seen a lot of finger wagging from self-described popularity, with some notable exceptions. People should have priorities, but popularists should be careful to beat allegations that they're just browbeating centrist technocrats.
I've seen very few details on this, and the Harris campaign seemed to mostly be testing the waters with it. My impression, is that it's pretty piddling and more likely to focus on antitrust than Venezuela-style price controls.