I know the paper Matt quoted about primary voters not being more extreme was an attempt to scientifically look at those sorts of things, but that is absolute BS. Having attended a few caucuses in a primary, the extreme flavor was strong. How couldn't it be? People that care the most show up to those events to choose candidates. Even Matt admits what would happen if someone doesn't fill out the questionnaire that one of 'the groups' sends. The primary system is part of the problem.
Have leadership put the word out to regular members of Congress and candidates that they are not to answer these endorsement questionnaires until they have been approved by party leadership.
Then, have leadership talk to the groups and negotiate a questionnaire that avoids excessive and unpopular asks. Make it clear that they will not be included in the party tent if they do not do their part to help win elections by moving to the center.
Then kick out any groups that won’t play ball and tell Democrats in Congress not to return their calls.
Question: If you could wake up tomorrow and be no one else but yourself would you? Ok, that questions makes less sense outside the context it’s typical asked—than I thought it would. Though, I wouldn’t doubt you might be picking-up on what I’m alluding to here despite the disjoined scowling from everyone else. But none of that matters, what matters is the trend, and I see it as clear as freakin day in Slow Boring, and I recognize it because it’s the same trend* I witnessed at my second attempt at coding—which in the first two hours I had surpassed my first attempt’s efforts of nearly 4 weeks. If Trauma or traumatic experiences can be viewed as a delayed reaction to negative stimuli then what is a delayed reaction to something overwhelmingly positive? That my friend is exactly the thought coursing through my fledgling veins as I merge and become one with the body politic of a faithful readership. *arguably unrelated date sets w/ unique variables to those sets producing hyper-dynamic curves exhibiting a recognizable self/similarity would technically represent the ‘same trend’ - an personality, I’d say that’s more productive than Rocket Science.
Like at what point are the leaders for the Dems in the Senate and Congress going to take a stand and lead? It seems like all these special interest groups care more about fundraising and taking moral stances than actually winning elections, and they just continue to give easy ammunition to persuadable and low information voters because Dems don't get out ahead of their ridiculous rhetoric. They'd want to have their cake and eat it too, and will purity test all of us into a Trumptatorship.
You'd think if they cared about the environment, they'd want to roll out solar and new infrastructure for transmission as much as possible. Why does it seem like all their demands are zero sum and non-negotiable? I have no issue with the "groups" having power or lobbying per se, but when the groups that say they want clean energy are actually hurting and prohibiting clean energy we have a problem and failure is basically guaranteed.
Like who is setting the agenda's and rolling out the questionnaires for the groups? It's like they think they can guilt trip the median voter or is it all academics who actually don't talk to anyone not in their bubble.
My take is that "the groups" are always going to be the groups. They are never going to moderate their messaging because of their nature. The lesson is for Democratic lawmakers to grow backbones and refuse to let themselves be sucked into supporting electorally toxic positions because of fear of the groups.
As Matt suggests in other pieces, they can do this by staking out mildly conservative but popular positions on issues that pretty much everyone agrees with. With the environmentalist groups they can become advocates for nuclear or for "abundance" policies in energy.
My take is that the groups are actually less popular and influential with voters than most lawmakers think. Very online left-of-center types need to accept that the electorate is more centrist than they would like. Elections are won with the electorate you have, not the electorate you want.
After reading the LCV questionnaire I'd say it's a little unfair to claim it defines "clean" energy as "wind, solar, and advanced geothermal (no nuclear)".
Unfortunately, the questionnaire doesn't define "clean energy". It does list "wind, solar, and advanced geothermal" as examples of "clean renewable energy sources", but it's pretty clear that the list isn't exhaustive. More importantly, nowhere does it say that "clean" includes only renewables.
Meanwhile, in the very same paragraph, the questionnaire refers to "clean energy tax incentives, which were included in the IRA". I don't know whether the IRA itself uses the word "clean", but it's widely known that those tax incentives included nuclear power. Also, the word "clean" is widely used among energy experts to mean low-carbon, including nuclear.
The word "nuclear" doesn't appear anywhere in the questionnaire. That drives me nuts, but my guess is the omission is intentional, due to the strong disagreement over nuclear within the environmental community. Environmental organizations have figured out that if they say anything at all about nuclear power, pro or con, it will alienate a sizable fraction of their donors. So the LCV questionnaire doesn't clearly define "clean", allowing everyone to interpret the word however they wish.
However, here's another item from 2023 quoting the North Carolina LCV Director of Governmental Relations condemning Duke Energy for "building more dirty fossil fuel gas plants and expensive, unproven nuclear plants − replacing coal ash with dirty gas and nuclear waste": https://www.lcv.org/media-center/this-week-in-climate-action-august-25-2023/
Yes/No questions are terrible because the best answer to all those questions is "it depends". For example. Pro-life questionnaire: 1. Do you believe it's okay to kill babies (yes/no). Everyone would say no but that doesn't mean you support pro-life policies. Pro-choice questionnaire: 1. Do you believe the government should determine a person's health choices (yes/no). Everyone would say no but that doesn't mean you support pro-choice policies. All candidates should refuse to fill out such a questionnaire. A proper question on a questionnaire needs to be, "In less than 1,000 words, what is your position on ....."
It seems to me like Democrats need a "hero". Someone like Obama (or Trump on the other side) who is popular enough to win a presidential primary without worrying about the existing party apparatus.
Yes. This party needed a hostile takeover as long back as 2016, Sanders came close but failed.
Obama lucked out by opposing the Iraq war when it was still popular which gained him credibility with the party youth as an outsider and he used up his political capital with the party's left flank (youth + black voters) to moderate and win the general because Iraq was no longer a wedge issue. It was unambiguously deemed a failure and GWB also tanked the economy for good measure.
It is very hard to replicate that kind of timing and luck.
After reading another take on the how beholden the Dems are to groups that do nothing to advance their electoral goals, I’m more and more convinced SRW’s take is the only way forward with the Democrats.
It wasn’t simply a “blow up the two party” system idea. By allowing for proportional and ranked/ approval voting, it would naturally lead to more a dissolution of the two parties as they currently are.
So Magical Process that leads somehow to a broad strcutural change across the US (although needing 50 states resolving) - magical transformation thinking.
But allowing for the magical national transformation via 50 polities (or more really given sub-state level) this leads 'naturally' to dissolution of two parties....
I have nothing against the concept of experimentation with evolving the system trying ranked voting. It is however pure magical transformation wishful thinking to put this as "only way forward" or even to advance the a priori assumption that it naturally does anything - in fact it rather to me resembles the kind of thinking beyind the 1970s era reforms that progressives back that ended up demonstrably having quite perverse real results,
Magic wands won't change this, Magic Wants are Cope.
the era before Clinton was something similar in grim feeling to my outside eyes - certainly the Democrats do love to hand wring.
Stopping searching of Identarian Candidates and go with "sexy good at scale campaigning" (Obama ended up there - one wouldn't have believed it early on, Clinton was master: in both cases my memory is voted for either the 2nd time but memory of voting is an iffy thing and I don't per se trust my own, but anyway I wasn't a historical D voter, but a profile brought in)
Pushing for a strategy that supports proportional and rank/ approval voting isn’t magic words. It’s an actual strategy. But disagree all you want. Hoping we get some unbelievably charismatic leader to bring Dems out of this morass seems more wishful. My larger point is the party is extremely unpopular, mostly because of their association with the progressive left, and they’ve done nothing different to change that perception.
Thanks for sharing. I have been calling the Dems a Zombie party that needs to be dismantled and reconstructed but I like the aspiration to be "A fertile corpse" better.
Political opinion polls that arrive in my email or snailmail are unceremoniously dumped. They are donation requests that use the survey gimmick to get the attention of the reader. When opened the response is scanned for a donation and then discarded. The lackeys that open them are not interested in my opinion.
This is an excellent piece, and a very good companion for Jonathan Chait's piece in the Atlantic today, "Democrats Still Have No Idea What Went Wrong". It's not like nobody's telling them:
He wrote an article for the Atlantic before the election talking about Kamala's centrist campaign was working. And now hes blaming the left and trashing Kamala? Cmom. Not a good article at all
I have to say if it were not so worrisome (as favoring Trump & MAGA continuing to win) this would be quite amusing at some level. Also if one has read a lot of Orwell like road to wigam pier this really feels like a rerun of the 30s Left (except in touchy-feely translation)
"Numerous speakers warned against throwing any progressive constituency “under the bus,” a phrase that has become a term of art in the factional battle. It stands for the idea that Democrats should not retreat from positions taken on behalf of allies, however unpopular they may be. No compromise with the electorate was the conference’s standing order" - last is quite sourly funny reference (and "The party’s progressives seem determined to reeducate the public rather than compromise for their votes. This is a seductive approach if the goal is ideological purity. It is a problem only if the party hopes to win elections.")
I know the paper Matt quoted about primary voters not being more extreme was an attempt to scientifically look at those sorts of things, but that is absolute BS. Having attended a few caucuses in a primary, the extreme flavor was strong. How couldn't it be? People that care the most show up to those events to choose candidates. Even Matt admits what would happen if someone doesn't fill out the questionnaire that one of 'the groups' sends. The primary system is part of the problem.
Here’s an idea:
Have leadership put the word out to regular members of Congress and candidates that they are not to answer these endorsement questionnaires until they have been approved by party leadership.
Then, have leadership talk to the groups and negotiate a questionnaire that avoids excessive and unpopular asks. Make it clear that they will not be included in the party tent if they do not do their part to help win elections by moving to the center.
Then kick out any groups that won’t play ball and tell Democrats in Congress not to return their calls.
Question: If you could wake up tomorrow and be no one else but yourself would you? Ok, that questions makes less sense outside the context it’s typical asked—than I thought it would. Though, I wouldn’t doubt you might be picking-up on what I’m alluding to here despite the disjoined scowling from everyone else. But none of that matters, what matters is the trend, and I see it as clear as freakin day in Slow Boring, and I recognize it because it’s the same trend* I witnessed at my second attempt at coding—which in the first two hours I had surpassed my first attempt’s efforts of nearly 4 weeks. If Trauma or traumatic experiences can be viewed as a delayed reaction to negative stimuli then what is a delayed reaction to something overwhelmingly positive? That my friend is exactly the thought coursing through my fledgling veins as I merge and become one with the body politic of a faithful readership. *arguably unrelated date sets w/ unique variables to those sets producing hyper-dynamic curves exhibiting a recognizable self/similarity would technically represent the ‘same trend’ - an personality, I’d say that’s more productive than Rocket Science.
Like at what point are the leaders for the Dems in the Senate and Congress going to take a stand and lead? It seems like all these special interest groups care more about fundraising and taking moral stances than actually winning elections, and they just continue to give easy ammunition to persuadable and low information voters because Dems don't get out ahead of their ridiculous rhetoric. They'd want to have their cake and eat it too, and will purity test all of us into a Trumptatorship.
You'd think if they cared about the environment, they'd want to roll out solar and new infrastructure for transmission as much as possible. Why does it seem like all their demands are zero sum and non-negotiable? I have no issue with the "groups" having power or lobbying per se, but when the groups that say they want clean energy are actually hurting and prohibiting clean energy we have a problem and failure is basically guaranteed.
Like who is setting the agenda's and rolling out the questionnaires for the groups? It's like they think they can guilt trip the median voter or is it all academics who actually don't talk to anyone not in their bubble.
I guess LCV is off my contributions list…
Does the GOP have an equivalent of the Group?
Maybe the groups have learned nothing, but have the politicians? Remains to be seen.
A key lesson from 2024 is:
Don't answer questionnaires put forward by "the groups" unless you really, really want to defend the position.
My take is that "the groups" are always going to be the groups. They are never going to moderate their messaging because of their nature. The lesson is for Democratic lawmakers to grow backbones and refuse to let themselves be sucked into supporting electorally toxic positions because of fear of the groups.
As Matt suggests in other pieces, they can do this by staking out mildly conservative but popular positions on issues that pretty much everyone agrees with. With the environmentalist groups they can become advocates for nuclear or for "abundance" policies in energy.
My take is that the groups are actually less popular and influential with voters than most lawmakers think. Very online left-of-center types need to accept that the electorate is more centrist than they would like. Elections are won with the electorate you have, not the electorate you want.
After reading the LCV questionnaire I'd say it's a little unfair to claim it defines "clean" energy as "wind, solar, and advanced geothermal (no nuclear)".
Unfortunately, the questionnaire doesn't define "clean energy". It does list "wind, solar, and advanced geothermal" as examples of "clean renewable energy sources", but it's pretty clear that the list isn't exhaustive. More importantly, nowhere does it say that "clean" includes only renewables.
Meanwhile, in the very same paragraph, the questionnaire refers to "clean energy tax incentives, which were included in the IRA". I don't know whether the IRA itself uses the word "clean", but it's widely known that those tax incentives included nuclear power. Also, the word "clean" is widely used among energy experts to mean low-carbon, including nuclear.
The word "nuclear" doesn't appear anywhere in the questionnaire. That drives me nuts, but my guess is the omission is intentional, due to the strong disagreement over nuclear within the environmental community. Environmental organizations have figured out that if they say anything at all about nuclear power, pro or con, it will alienate a sizable fraction of their donors. So the LCV questionnaire doesn't clearly define "clean", allowing everyone to interpret the word however they wish.
A search for "nuclear" on the LCV website and a quick spin through the results suggests that they are inconsistent on the subject.
This is a 2023 press release praising Minnesota for adopting a plan for 100% "carbon-free sources" that specifically mentions nuclear energy as part of the mix of sources: https://www.lcv.org/media-center/minnesota-to-receive-100-of-its-energy-from-carbon-free-sources-by-2040/
However, here's another item from 2023 quoting the North Carolina LCV Director of Governmental Relations condemning Duke Energy for "building more dirty fossil fuel gas plants and expensive, unproven nuclear plants − replacing coal ash with dirty gas and nuclear waste": https://www.lcv.org/media-center/this-week-in-climate-action-august-25-2023/
Yes/No questions are terrible because the best answer to all those questions is "it depends". For example. Pro-life questionnaire: 1. Do you believe it's okay to kill babies (yes/no). Everyone would say no but that doesn't mean you support pro-life policies. Pro-choice questionnaire: 1. Do you believe the government should determine a person's health choices (yes/no). Everyone would say no but that doesn't mean you support pro-choice policies. All candidates should refuse to fill out such a questionnaire. A proper question on a questionnaire needs to be, "In less than 1,000 words, what is your position on ....."
It seems to me like Democrats need a "hero". Someone like Obama (or Trump on the other side) who is popular enough to win a presidential primary without worrying about the existing party apparatus.
Mark Kelly?
Mark Cuban?
Yes. This party needed a hostile takeover as long back as 2016, Sanders came close but failed.
Obama lucked out by opposing the Iraq war when it was still popular which gained him credibility with the party youth as an outsider and he used up his political capital with the party's left flank (youth + black voters) to moderate and win the general because Iraq was no longer a wedge issue. It was unambiguously deemed a failure and GWB also tanked the economy for good measure.
It is very hard to replicate that kind of timing and luck.
[Stupid comment deleted with my apologies]
Matt linked to the questionnaire itself in the article
Thanks. Dunno how I missed that.
After reading another take on the how beholden the Dems are to groups that do nothing to advance their electoral goals, I’m more and more convinced SRW’s take is the only way forward with the Democrats.
https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/10/04/a-fertile-corpse/index.html
That is trading one form of magical thinking for another.
"Blowing up the two party system" is nonsense. Pure magical thinking and not actually an actionable electoral goal...
It wasn’t simply a “blow up the two party” system idea. By allowing for proportional and ranked/ approval voting, it would naturally lead to more a dissolution of the two parties as they currently are.
Assertion based on presumptions
So Magical Process that leads somehow to a broad strcutural change across the US (although needing 50 states resolving) - magical transformation thinking.
But allowing for the magical national transformation via 50 polities (or more really given sub-state level) this leads 'naturally' to dissolution of two parties....
I have nothing against the concept of experimentation with evolving the system trying ranked voting. It is however pure magical transformation wishful thinking to put this as "only way forward" or even to advance the a priori assumption that it naturally does anything - in fact it rather to me resembles the kind of thinking beyind the 1970s era reforms that progressives back that ended up demonstrably having quite perverse real results,
I mean the status quo for Dems sure as hell is bleak. Losing to Trump should’ve shaken them out of their slumber. Instead, we get more of the same.
Magic wands won't change this, Magic Wants are Cope.
the era before Clinton was something similar in grim feeling to my outside eyes - certainly the Democrats do love to hand wring.
Stopping searching of Identarian Candidates and go with "sexy good at scale campaigning" (Obama ended up there - one wouldn't have believed it early on, Clinton was master: in both cases my memory is voted for either the 2nd time but memory of voting is an iffy thing and I don't per se trust my own, but anyway I wasn't a historical D voter, but a profile brought in)
Pushing for a strategy that supports proportional and rank/ approval voting isn’t magic words. It’s an actual strategy. But disagree all you want. Hoping we get some unbelievably charismatic leader to bring Dems out of this morass seems more wishful. My larger point is the party is extremely unpopular, mostly because of their association with the progressive left, and they’ve done nothing different to change that perception.
Thanks for sharing. I have been calling the Dems a Zombie party that needs to be dismantled and reconstructed but I like the aspiration to be "A fertile corpse" better.
Political opinion polls that arrive in my email or snailmail are unceremoniously dumped. They are donation requests that use the survey gimmick to get the attention of the reader. When opened the response is scanned for a donation and then discarded. The lackeys that open them are not interested in my opinion.
I see no evidence whatsoever where the League of Conservation Voters has ever swung a primary in modern times.
Matt never made that claim
This is an excellent piece, and a very good companion for Jonathan Chait's piece in the Atlantic today, "Democrats Still Have No Idea What Went Wrong". It's not like nobody's telling them:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/10/democratic-party-strategy-progressives/684453/?gift=RAVYN02FqjkLo3BrTYr0GqVGhSpUskdm5eL1kB93JZg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
He wrote an article for the Atlantic before the election talking about Kamala's centrist campaign was working. And now hes blaming the left and trashing Kamala? Cmom. Not a good article at all
I have to say if it were not so worrisome (as favoring Trump & MAGA continuing to win) this would be quite amusing at some level. Also if one has read a lot of Orwell like road to wigam pier this really feels like a rerun of the 30s Left (except in touchy-feely translation)
"Numerous speakers warned against throwing any progressive constituency “under the bus,” a phrase that has become a term of art in the factional battle. It stands for the idea that Democrats should not retreat from positions taken on behalf of allies, however unpopular they may be. No compromise with the electorate was the conference’s standing order" - last is quite sourly funny reference (and "The party’s progressives seem determined to reeducate the public rather than compromise for their votes. This is a seductive approach if the goal is ideological purity. It is a problem only if the party hopes to win elections.")