I think a real dive into the weeds on the finances/messaging of “the groups” or one in particular would be interested. I am particularly curious how post Obergefell, the gay rights advocacy groups pivoted to trans rights, rather than declaring victory and going home.
Well they had a lot of money banked for what they expected to be a long, expensive fight for marriage equality and then they unexpectedly just won a few years earlier than hoped.
The whole mission creep thing has really infiltrated so many non-profit spaces (including colleges.) It just seems to be a whole edifice of rent seeking.
What does a trans rights win on the federal level look like? It feels more like a social acceptance movement than anything that ends with new federal policy.
All these issues are tricky and filled with tons of nuance. Is there some widely held consensus on when a person has transitioned from one gender to another? Is it amount of time lived in a certain gender, appearance, hormones, etc? All the issues you listed should be decided more at the state and local levels until a consensus appears. National politicians aren't putting anything on the table to consider.
These aren’t mutually exclusive. Activists will always want to advocate for something, even when it’s outside the scope of what people originally signed up for.
Post Obergefell, there was a real temporary debate about shifting the focus to homeless gay youth, which is a real problem of gay kids being thrown out of their home or running away because they don't feel accepted. It was a major internal concern for a lot of gay rights groups that had been sidelined a bit for strategic reasons to focus on gay marriage, but then fell off the radar.
I reject that narrative framing on gay marriage then trans rights. The problem seems to be that actually trans people had all the rights of changing their gender markers on legal documents, getting surgery, having access to gendered facilities in all 50 states. Then the woke weenies broke it by putting Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of a magazine and making her woman of the year during their ultra virtue signaling phase. Then the next year you had the bathroom laws in North Carolina and Republican strategists learned this was a wedge issue and so then you had everyone have to spin up a fight for Trans rights. Throw some sports in there and you have the perfect tabloid ready moral panic that Americans have loved since the Salem witch trials.
But remember, NC backtracked on the bathroom law! In 2018, DeSantis in Florida said it wasn't worth discussing. We can debate why it reversed again a few years later. I personally think it's because activists kept pushing the envelope, and the sports issue is what finally caused it to break through with the average voter.
It doesn't matter. The point is trans people had everything and activist lefties screwed it up for them. Under the guide of visibility and whatever crap that they lost their brains on for the last 15 years.
Knowing that that's what the right does come on. It's child's Play to develop a better strategy, but drumming up right-wing resistance helps you drum up left-wing funding as well. I get sick of this crap of look. We're blameless. Our techniques and bedside manner were correct if it wasn't for those rascally rabbits the Republicans it's their fault really. I can think a few examples where you have full rights and visibility. Screws it up for you and yet that was the left's plan visibility equality yada yada yada God I really dislike those people.
I don't want to overgeneralize because there are a lot of exceptions, but many gay people feel part of a larger queer community that includes trans people. They also understand what it's like to be discriminated against and hated for aspects that are fundamental to who you are. So the pivot makes sense.
An actual data based version of this argument would be great, because Matt keeps finding obscure "groups" he says are the deep state of the democratic party, but not showing how they're any different than other groups he'd prefer around abundance, market policies, education, or abortion. I personally don't see the connection between gay rights groups pivoted to advancing trans rights in any meaningful way, except that it became a novelty in the culture industry that gave way to being a boogieman in right-wing media.
LCV is hardly an "obscure group". They go back to 1970 and their scorecards rating Members of Congress are very well-known, are mentioned in ads, as were endorsements going back decades.
I agree that more reporting in needed to supplement some of Matt's writing. One of my frustrations is that there seems to be less coverage of the inner works of the dem party and leftist advocacy groups. So everyone is left guessing.
These groups depend on donors, that's their real customer. They don't want to "win" and then disestablish. No one wants to dismantle an organization they've built, especially one that has money and influence. Adjusting the project to keep donors on board makes perfect sense in that context.
I'd love to see a "deep dive" on right leaning "groups" as well given I suspect a lot of the same dynamics are at play. The cult of personality around Trump has sort of scrambled a lot of normal political dynamics but I would have to believe a lot of the same dynamics ("mission creep", need to spend a war chest, finding that "new" cause so to continue to get donors to give you money) have to be at play.
Abortion is to me the big example here. Matt has noted that one consequence of the cult of personality around Trump is that he personally can just diffuse this issue and make it go away as a problem for the GOP. But those "pro life" groups are well funded and didn't just go away. I wonder for example how much their influence is at play with these draconian abortion bans in places like Texas and other red states. I know the "dream" of Texas going blue is maybe farther away than I even thought in 2024, but it's clearly not as right leaning as it was 20-25 years ago. Which means I feel pretty confident in saying that Texas' abortion restrictions are well to the right of the median voter and how much "pro life" groups ensure this dynamic holds in the state.
Matt's connections are within the Democratic party so he's going to have more "insider" knowledge than GOP. Unfortunately, a lot of the more honest right wingers are not really tied into the interior dynamics of GOP "groups" anymore (their honestly is basically why they are not part of the Trump camp), but there has to be someone Matt can maybe interview about this topic on the right (given Ross Douthat is BFF with JD, maybe Ross is a candidate?)
What happens then to pro-life activism when Trump leaves the scene? How long are they going to be satisfied with no action on a national ban when it's clear that the current "states rights" policy does very little to reduce abortions, given the large number of states where it is legal and the abortion pill?
The only right-wing Group equivalents I can think of are pro-life groups and the NRA (and its various splinters). There certainly are other advocacy groups, but I think their influence is more through think tanks and direct donations rather than by skewing primary outcomes. Does anyone on the right think "gee, Grover Norquist likes this guy, I'd better vote for him?"
I agree, a deeper dive into the groups, trying to untangle them and figure out how they're related, would be very worthwhile. It's research that doesn't exist anywhere outside of maybe some political operative private files. Would love to see Matt tackle it to provide as public research. (Or at least public for anyone willing to pay his substack fee, LOL.)
Great column. Matt fires a thoughtful and provocative shot across the progressive bow - we'll see this topic and LCV's questionnaire in the discourse later today.
Part of the issue is that "Groups" don't think it's their job to prioritize electability. They view politics as a sort of free market (or alternatively, an adversarial system like our legal system) where the right outcome will emerge from all the actors pursuing their own self-interest. In LCV's mind, it's LCV's job to push maximally for conservation-related goals, and it's candidates' job to balance LCV's demands with other political goals including electability.
So, I tend to think that if you confronted LCV and said "this isn't good for electability," they might well respond, "of course it isn't." They just think the "system" will take care of it. So if you want to get them to change their behavior, it isn't enough to talk about electability. You have to get to the root of the matter and persuade them that the system they envision doesn't exist, and that unless every Group acts responsibly, takes electability into account, and pulls its own punches, everyone's going to go down in flames together.
"Part of the issue is that "Groups" don't think it's their job to prioritize electability. They view politics as a sort of free market (or alternatively, an adversarial system like our legal system) where the right outcome will emerge from all the actors pursuing their own self-interest"
Or as we call it in the vernacular, the Ta-Nehisi Coates.
TNC is advocating for what he believes (popular or not), but he isn’t pressuring elected officials to adopt his positions. He explicitly argued against that on Ezra’s podcast. That’s a pretty big difference!
His advocating for it de facto is pressuring elected officials. One of the good push backs from Ezra was telling him "I know you don't like to admit this, but you have a lot of influence". His, "I'm just a writer, it's just my job to write truth" is the same as the Groups saying, we're activists, it's just our job to advocate not to worry about electing"
I say that as a big fan of THC. I think it is his biggest flaw.
What you're saying is true, but no matter how much influence a writer has, if they're not directly weighing in on elections then they're still at a much greater remove from the political arena than groups that explicitly weigh in and indicate that they view candidate A as better/worse than candidate B.
Sure everyone has influence, but I don’t think that means that no one should express an unpopular or electorally harmful option. (coughonebillionamericanscough)
In any case, I think TNC is pretty far from the canonical example of a groups influencer, as the person I was responding to seems to think.
This seems to not understand how people work. If TNC is yelling at you, an elected official, that you are doing something bad (or less than good), there will be a bunch of people who yell with him because of his influence.
That's pressure you will feel!
edit - Pressure you will feel if you align with TNC. Republican's won't care, because they don't care about TNC or his supporters. But Democrats do, so they feel pressure.
One mystery that Matt has pointed out is that the republican groups are much more chill and focused on electability, with exhibit A being their not freaking out when trump backed off of abortion maximalism during the campaign. I am sympathetic to this argument, but I wonder if anyone has studied this more systematically. It would be interesting to see if Rs groups questions were different, if R members responded to fewer questionnaires, etc.
I kind of wonder if across the board there's a staffing problem where other potential employers end up employing what would be the optimal employee of a lot of these groups: increasingly the private sector for people focused on renewable energy; public defender officers, Big Law, and (until recently) DOJ for people focused on civil rights issues, etc. The people who are left for a lot of NGOs, particularly second-tier NGOs, are these days people who used to have Tumblr accounts circa 2014.
Yea I think that's a decent way to describe them doing a version of completely normal politics but they've optimized on being adversarial/escalation of conflict and less on strategically thinking about where their push can help the most if they're explicitly delving into electoral politics.
Partially this is because everyone in the conservation/environmental nonprofit space has been swallowed up by the borg of ur-leftist jargon and racial justice intersectional frameworks that have also taken over virtually every other area of progressive advocacy.
It’s been this way ever since Dave Foreman lost the internal battle within Earth First! and David Brower became left-pilled in the ‘80s.
Broadly agree, but IMO the "groups" don't prioritize electability or intellectual/policy coherence because their job is to prioritize the interests of their primary "customer" - donors. The groups are also in competition with each other for those donor dollars, and this is especially true in the environmental space, where numerous groups vie for funding. Compromising with reality or logic, rather than adhering to absolutism, will cause those dollars to be allocated to a different group.
I looked up LCV's numbers, and this strategy has worked well for them. They've gone from ~$38 million in donations in the 2016 election year to ~$68 million in 2023. Unfortunately, 2024 numbers aren't available because the 990 isn't published.
But they aren’t. If they wanted to say their job is to maximally push for conservation goals and actually did that they’d abandon the everything bagel elements of their program. They have explicitly decided their way to a majority is in coalition and “solidarity” with unions and racial justice groups and the rest of the progressive ecosystem and thus they are targeting their program to that and not simply pushing for conservation goals.
I would like to read a better takedown of the groups, while also addressing the public/private sector aspect of liberalism that allows them to have such influence. When being in government isn't exactly a glamorous job, but using connections made in government to become a lobbyist is a rather lucrative lifestyle, how does one square the circle? When you have weak political parties and candidates don't have unified fronts or positions on these issues, there's inherent incentive to have NGOs that coordinate with politicians in multiple states, or multiple terms, or if you're something like AIPAC or the NRA or Corn Refiners Association, you want to have relationships with whoever in which ever party will pick up the phone.
While I feel like LGBTQ+ and racial justice groups are probably the least helpful electorally, it seems like labor groups are on the wrong side of like every single issue.
(Some may say they’re good on housing but northeastern social conservatives are like the NIMBYist people on planet earth so I’m skeptical.)
A pro-growth agenda would likely be skeptical of excessive government spending (kinda bad for school teachers) and would be all-in on automation (very bad for teamsters)
I don't think that's right on school teachers, exactly. Pro-growth would probably privilege education spending over say income transfers to the elderly. And if pro-growth works, government spending can grow without growing or somewhat trailing growth of the economy.
“Labor” in many areas is just shorthand for teachers, nurses, and state workers.
Rhode Island passed an asinine assault weapons ban earlier this year that was shoved down voters throats via bullying from Democratic state party leaders and out-of-state activists from Bloomberg funded groups.
Activists commissioned a poll of local AFL-CIO workers that showed ~50-60% approval of the AWB among its members as a way of giving it some kind of blue collar endorsement, but failed to mention that like half of the AFL CIO in RI represents teachers and nurses who were already “captured” by the activist messaging anyway.
Regardless, they never consider that barely passing a controversial measure with a 50-60% approval is not really a big picture “win” when it mobilizes your opponents to such an extent.
There were over 2,000 people who stayed up until 2 am to speak out against this ban - a significant chunk of them surely were registered Democrats. This matters in a state that just had its lowest D+ margin win since 1988 and where 50,000 swing votes can turn the state red.
Brown's "Fuck Off" only gets better when you read the tantrum of a response given by the Ratepayers alliance. I think jamming your finger in the groups eye (figuratively of course) could be a good signalling mechanism to coordinate the Democratic reform movement. Adherence only to the Common Sense Democratic Manifesto, no pledges to groups.
Heh my first thought on this line of thought (after reading Matts article and prior to clicking into the comments) was unless the groups are really not savvy, disagreement with them doesn't really get you much and could just give them publicity as defenders of justice telling truth to power (if reporters bite on that). But maybe the issue is something the politician wants to raise saliance of but probably not?
I think the case we'd like to make is that the groups have the situation backwards. They need to be useful to politicians to get things they need. They think politicians need to be useful to them (often in dogmatic and unproductive ways that brook no tradeoffs) to earn their support. In a multiparty system that would work fine, but in a two party system you know who is better for you and who isn't. Obama (really Rahm Emmanuel) did a good job of this. I think there's a SB Post about it calling the veal pen. We need to retvrn to the veal pen.
The LCV are poor coalition partners because they don’t recognize tradeoffs. Their agenda excites 25–30 percent of voters and offends more than it attracts, yet they behave as if ideological purity can substitute for majorities. As between groups that understand the importance of prosperity and the inevitability of tradeoffs, and those that don’t, I prefer the former. That’s why Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans—whatever their flaws—make better partners than green groups whose politics are indifferent to cost, practicality, or the durability of public consent.
Well they WOULD make better coalition partners if they didn't tend to in fact support anti-growth policies like trade and immigration restrictions and damn-the deficits- tax reduction.
Given that you need a majority to govern, you need either the chamber of commerce or the greens. Very hard to please both. I share more values with the chamber of commerce.
I sort of have the green aesthetic. I like the outdoors and smallish houses, and I dislike big trucks. I’m totally ok avoiding material excess. However, my idea of simplicity is still a ridiculously high material standard in historical terms and I want more working stiffs to enjoy something close to what I do.
1. To what extent do Green Left Groups lead to new votes in electoral geographies that are needed (or to what extent do you pile up excess votes in restricted geographies, e.g. urbane urban-to-suburban while missing votes on the margin in areas where the added vote on the margin tips result)
2. To what extent do the Groups drive Everything Bagelism that leads again to lost votes on the margins in key geographies wehre the marginal vote makes the difference between Win or Lose.
The thing is these sorts of questionnaires have always existing it’s just the politicians were much better at just ignoring the questions they didn’t want to answer or just saying no. And Democrats on the Hill still do ignore the groups all the time on things when they don’t agree with them (as they should). What we really need is elected officials to have a bit more courage/leadership on these sorts of these things. If you look at the infamous ACLU questionnaire for instance, as opposed to Kamala Harris, Joe Biden just never filled it out. What we need is candidates and elected officials to look at these things both from the perspective of what’s good for their state/district but also just to consider overall which of these policy ideas is good/bad. Because it wasn’t always the culture you just said yes to everything on such a questionnaire (and nor were you expected).
This was going to be my question, is what’s changed? Are the questionnaires new, are the questions different, or is the level of “yes”-ing greater than before? Or some combination?
My sense is that the groups have pushed further left in their demands but its also the case that groups have always asked for unrealistic or politically risky things. I think the level of candidates and elected officials is also yes though by a good amount and there's alot more of the sense of people not wanting people to mad at them. Whereas before there was this. And I think there's also an element that the 2016 and 2020 primaries were a big part of that shift as has been the election of Trump (because there's a certain mentality of if Trump can get away with what we gets away with why can't we). Groups like LCV still should think through how best to effective and what not but you need more elected officials and candidates just being willing to say no and live with people being mad at them (because they'll get over it).
It should be standard practice to share these questionnaires, and candidates’ responses to them, publicly. The groups should own their policy commitments, and the candidates should own their answers. If they can’t, then there’s a problem with the questions.
Reading candidates' short paragraph answers to a questionnaire is my favorite way to get informed before a primary election, since there are so many candidates to sift through. But yes/no checklist questions are reductive, and yes/no endorsements are even more reductive still.
It's an interesting piece for sure, but that two-dimensional plot doesn't leave a lot of room for the nuance of individual issues, which is the drum Matt's been banging over the last year or more. Yes, most D voters want to see action on climate change and if you ask them, they'll tell you that. But what specific action? And what are you willing to sacrifice? That's where the consensus breaks down.
I agree, I found that argument to be unpersuasive. Sure, 50% of Democrats might say they want M4All or a Green New Deal, but those poll questions are never asking voters about the trade offs. There's a reason why Vermont doesn't have Medicare For All. There's a reason why Washington doesn't have a 100% green economy.
And I think a lot of elected officials do not know this! They're trying to read the temperature of the public, a nice organization with a nice cause comes in their office with a good poll. And they're very liberal staffers tell them to believe.
The more I read about the inner workings of the political world, the less I understand why anyone would willingly choose to make their career in that ecosystem. It seems so very ... depressing.
These sorts of polls aren't designed to accurately assess public opinion, they're designed to prove that X is popular regardless of whether X is actually popular.
Yes, this is my drumbeat of the Tony Blair video about why single issue polling is unreliable, the 5 second, 30 second and 3 minute conversation about the same issue may change the results you would get from the poll.
Never mind that your candidate's positions may poll well, but everything put together the candidate doesn't do that well.
He’s probably oversimplifying, it depends on the issue. On immigration sure Democratic primary voters are further left than Republican primary voters are right. Different dynamic on healthcare.
I think actually immigration and healthcare crystallize Mailman’s point perfectly. On Ds best issue (healthcare), R voters are closer to the centrist position compared to how far D voters are to the centrist position on Rs best issue (immigration).
Wait so do you think R voters are more right wing on healthcare than Ds are left on healthcare? IMO it is more like even R voters are more in the center on healthcare but R electeds are more right wing, which is what gives Rs space to move to the center since their own voters are closer to the center than them, especially on healthcare.
First of all the only Japanese shitboxes on the market are Nissan Sentras and Mitsubishi Mirages. Stellantis pulled their European shitboxes from the market and trying to sell Fiats under the Dodge or Jeep label.
What precisely is the problem with Japanese trucks? I'm genuinely curious. I've never owned a truck (they are expensive and require large parking spaces), so I don't have a lot of experience telling the difference between the various models. What's wrong with them? Genuinely curious.
He's presumably talking about small cars that Americans don't like and American companies don't build, rather than large Japanese trucks built for the US market which compete quite well in their segments.
I’ve come to think that poll questions on these issues aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
Even if they perfectly captured voters attitudes on a particular issue, they are one dimensional and don’t capture intensity or prioritization.
Gift link to a relevant NYT piece about gun control: when actual issues were put on state referendums, they performed much worse than the polling would suggest.
I consider issue-based polls to be mostly worthless because it's too easy for the polltaker to intentionally word the question to produce whatever result they want.
The only reason I say "mostly" rather than "completely" is that issue polls, when used properly, can still be used to measure trends, since, when the same question is repeated, whatever bias exists in the wording will be exactly the same each time. But, that's about it.
I can only speak to my area of focus (gun policy). The polling is atrocious.
Gallup poll still asks people whether or not they would favor a ban on all handguns. I have no clue why. They’ve been asking that question since the 70s (which was probably the last time that idea was ever seriously considered).
At its core policy-level, most major gun control debate is about quibbling over statutory definitions and the power vested to bureaucracies.
But all gun control polls gauge the favorability of shorthand buzzwords like “do you support ‘universal background checks?’” That is a clever activist shorthand that has a clear positive bias (background checks are good, more background checks are better).
Most people don’t know how background checks work in their current form, or what’s at stake when we talk about “universal background checks.”
But do you doubt the main point that in order capture the swing voters they need, Ds have to reach further from their own center than Rs do? And that D voters have more liberal and ideologically cohesive than the R voters are conservative?
Nate Cohn in his piece about Zohran made a similar point about how liberal the Dem base has become even since 2016, which opens an opportunity for left insurgencies but creates problems in generals and swing states.
Yes, this is my drumbeat of the Tony Blair video about why single issue polling is unreliable, the 5 second, 30 second and 3 minute conversation about the same issue may change the results you would get from the poll.
Never mind that your candidate's positions may poll well, but everything put together the candidate doesn't do that well.
Washington has the highest gas prices of the lower 48 states and I think that's intentional; the government wants carbon pricing to make the lives of exurban people in WA more expensive so they will change. Today's piece by Yglesias is waiting for a powerful politician to successfully subordinate these ideological activists, similar to what happened in the GOP circa 2015. It might work!
The cap and trade bill was only responsible for a small portion of the overall gas price. Even if it were repealed, gas prices would still be among the highest in the country, anyway. Repealing it would have also blown a hole in numerous state and local budgets, as funding for all of the projects financed by the cap and trade bill would have suddenly disappeared.
Step (1): influential centrists bloggers learn a lot more about climate change and energy transition issues than they currently do.
Step (2): some of these folks form actual advocacy groups (or get involved with them) that have a targeted plan for speeding up the energy transition in an affordability-friendly way.
I have yet to see any details other than “just get rid of some laws” that really fit the bill for either of these steps. “Abundance” is incredibly vague on the details, particularly the details of how you remove environmental restrictions specifically for new energy construction. What’s the Greenpeace/MoveOn-style pro-growth environmental advocacy group I can look into for these issues after reading one of Matt’s posts? Does it even exist?
As a general matter what the Abundance talk has been about is regulatory simplification, streamlining and general making things easier - getting into gory details on permits etc is likely a loser, talking "cutting red-tape, rationalising regulation to be small business friendly, help get things Done, make America Build Again" is good sloganeering counter to MAGA type slogans
Over definition and over-explaining is very much a professional class disease.
i don't find this data very convincing. the scatterplot is difficult to interpret: the distances on it represent differences in answers to poll questions, which means the structure of the plot is highly sensitive to the choice of questions. if you were to ask only about issues that unite democrats and divide republicans (and in 2016 there were plenty of these) you'd get a similar shape with a tight blue ball and a diffuse red cloud.
more importantly, a preference for left wing policy does not mean primary voters cannot vote strategically. but i cant find anything in this piece (maybe i missed something) connecting cohesive liberal beliefs to unstrategic primary behavior
Sure they can vote strategically but do you take the point that Dem voters are more liberal and ideologically cohesive than the R voters are conservative? Imo the story Matt is trying to paint about how it’s all bc of annoying activists just seems too easy an explanation of what’s happened here in left of center politics.
The evidence that President Vance will be real just keeps piling up! Get ready for the guy who will make Donald Trump look like he’s in touch with reality.
Lol, as Millman writes: “What stands in the way of the Democrats seizing it? Only that the people who fund, staff and lead the party are all out of touch with what ordinary Americans believe and want. That, in itself, is kind of an extraordinary admission—if you take away the donors, the staff and the leadership, who’s left to reform the party? Mounk’s answer, presumably, would be: the voters. Which voters, though?”
This is quite an interesting article and a very useful point about the challenge that an ideologically-cohesive liberal base poses for outreach-oriented Dems
I strongly suspect Vance has no chance unless he inherits the seat... This is unrelated to a Republican winning. When all else fails you can just try to steal the election since there doesn't seem to be any reason not to.
We only get President Vance if he inherits the seat. It’s very likely 2028 will be another back swing. The only thing a Democratic Party in control needs to do is curtail the excesses of progressives again and actually get shit built.
“The Groups” vs. “centrist” pundits (e.g. The Argument, which consists of a couple Effective Altruists and a socialist) seems a little like the Coates-Klein debate.
Both sides of the debate share similar values. It’s like a debate between Catholic priests who take Scripture very seriously and ordinary devout Catholics who are constrained by the practicalities of life while admiring the purity of priests’ faith.
The Coates prescription for electoral strategy is terrible, and it’s good that this faction is no longer able to bully the “centrists.” Nevertheless, I’m not sure that the Klein side has a winning formula: to the extent that voters disagree with Democrats on values, I’m not sure the Kleins of the world will fool anyone by simply downplaying their beliefs.
I think Democratic thought leaders may need to be more introspective about their values before they can return to a position of strength. This is going to require more than simple tactical adjustments.
But like, the groups are often wrong on the merits. I don't dislike labor groups (for example) because I think they hurt us in elections, I dislike them because they make our country and economy weaker to benefit a small special interest.
My point is that I don’t think these intra-party disagreements have *that* much to do with Democrats’ weakness.
If the Klein/Yglesias types were understood to be fully in charge, would Dems start trouncing Republicans? I’m not sure voters really think of them as centrists either.
Somehow becoming *more* pessimistic about the future of our governance is not the way I wanted to start my work week…at least the post is strategically unpaywalled.
"carbon sequestration using natural climate solutions" takes hundreds of thousands of years, as far as we can tell. Going fully electric by 2035 is quite the "interim" step toward net zero.
The main content of this piece is unremarkable but to play devil's advocate on one detail, one area where the League of Conservation Voters appear to have a more grounded and realistic belief than either labor unions or Slow Boring is in recognising that carbon capture doesn't work.
That is *a* question, but so is 'would such-and-such politician waste vast sums on the building of a plant that emits more carbon than it would ever capture?'
It's a very big problem that this technology doesn't work outside the lab. If it did, it would solve lots of problems, but instead it doesn't, which means that the best 'carbon removal' technology remains trees, bogs, etc, and not building things which remove those natural features. If you're worried about the quantum of greenhouse gas emissions as opposed to the political realities, then degrowth still makes the most sense in a world where carbon capture tech doesn't work.
If you actually care about stopping global warming instead of stopping people from capitalist prosperity, you absolutely spend the money to make technological solutions work in the future while building a ton of nuclear plants right now, and run against the League of Communist Voters who are circulating questionnaires to stop you.
I'm not suggesting that there shouldn't be R&D into carbon capture technology.
The question is what people who care about 'the science' and not about the political realities (because not everyone has to be a political strategist, in a healthy polity it is the role of many people to simply advocate for what they think is right) should argue for right now, and I'm saying it's sad but based on a more realistic assessment of the technology right now to dismiss handwaving about how carbon capture tech means trade-offs don't exist as nonsense.
People should simply support spending a ton of money on every kind of technology that will potentially allow massive capitalist consumption while reducing global warming, because voters don't want to consume less energy and will vote against any attempt to make them.
What do you mean by "it doesn't work"? A lot of things can be hiding in that statement and there's lots of room to shuffle between mottes and baileys.
It could mean
* Not economically viable. Okay, and definitely it won't be without a price on carbon. Depends where we move the needle.
* Not energetically viable. I'm pretty sure that the laws of thermodynamics say we can't burn any fossil fuel and use that energy to capture CO2 back out of the atmosphere[1] CO2 back, at least in a stable form, so any marginal non-CO2 energy production is better spent displacing a CO2-emitting source.
* You just can't capture carbon at all. They're all lying. I don't think this is true.
But if we keep displacing CO2 producing energy sources, some time in the next 10-30 years we will hit the point where it's dumb to further decarbonize energy production. So even if it's a 2:1 ratio to get back the CO2, it becomes the right move. At we're going to want to be scaling that, and being ready to scale that means learning by building small- and then moderate-sized real world facilities. Not hundreds of them, but definitely dozens.
[1] Just bottling up the CO2 at the emitting plant? Maybe.
The Canadian federal government is about to do a deal with Alberta that would have the latter commit much more strongly to capturing emissions from the tar sands. Will be the ultimate test case for CCS.
Well - yes carbon capture doesn't work economically overall (ex-specific targeted direct use cases). And probably the overall economics are unlikely to work out in foreseeable future.
However, to make this an ideological point rather than an allow technical, market-based development is a serious problem - here it rather seems probaby they are taking the position largely from the Lefty Greeny view that the entire subject is a stalking horse for the evil nasty moustache twirling villans that are the Oil & Gas companies. And sometimes that's not per se false but there is no good reason to take outright political position against versus rooting your policy in good economics
(Now mind you I am not really very much favorable at this time to carbon capture demarches as it is investment nonsense, but so long as one does not go down road of massive deployment subsidies, there's no reason to take position against it)
I was reflecting on some on the way that pro-migration groups in the UK operate, and wondering at their lack of strategy. Unlike the US, a lot of our groups are laser focused on the tactics with no thought of whether or not their tactic now will undermine what they want in the future.
It kind of seems that groups in the US are the other way round - they only have strategy and no tactics, albeit the strategies seem to be competing and contradictory.
It has actually changed my mind on how the UK 3rd sector operates - maybe they are right to pursue the here and now as much as they do (although the sector I work in disparagingly refers to "politics" like politics isn't central to what they want to change).
I know it's just an aside at the end, but every time the mercury restrictions come up, I have to push back. I actually read the EPA report from a few years ago justifying the rule and found the causal chain of evidence very weak. Essentially it was that a tiny additional amount of mercury was going to get into the soil, leach into the freshwater, be taken up by fish, be eaten by mostly poor pregnant women who catch their own, and cause a decrease in the IQ of their babies by a few thousandths of a point. These infinitesimally lower-IQ kids would grow up and be worse at their jobs, thus lowering their economic value. It was only by aggregating these otherwise imperceptible effects over thousands of people that they could claim with a straight face that the economic cost of the rule was less than the impact of the pollution. Now maybe you say "we're a rich country and we shouldn't have to deal with any mercury getting into the environment, even if the risk is practically nil", and I would consider that argument. But if this is the logic used for one rule imposed, how many others are on shaky foundations?
Have we considered the possibility that some of these groups are a right wing plot? I get horseshoe theory but I’m talking about right wingers literally starting/funding these groups to rip the Democrat party apart.
While there might be some real fringey "false flag" groups, any of the larger organizations (like LCV) are presumably legit due to how difficult it would be to keep up the cover over any prolonged length of time due to the degree of routine intermixing between NGO personnel and political staff.
I think a real dive into the weeds on the finances/messaging of “the groups” or one in particular would be interested. I am particularly curious how post Obergefell, the gay rights advocacy groups pivoted to trans rights, rather than declaring victory and going home.
Well they had a lot of money banked for what they expected to be a long, expensive fight for marriage equality and then they unexpectedly just won a few years earlier than hoped.
They could have just given every willing Americans some nice rainbow socks and little American flags.
“Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cIgSTjzrmRg
The whole mission creep thing has really infiltrated so many non-profit spaces (including colleges.) It just seems to be a whole edifice of rent seeking.
I think an “advocacy industrial complex” has been mentioned before?
Yes.
Maybe they just… thought defending trans people was the right thing to do?
What does a trans rights win on the federal level look like? It feels more like a social acceptance movement than anything that ends with new federal policy.
Guaranteed coverage of trans related medical care. No opt outs. Hate speech regulations?
Yep I would oppose all of that
Fighting blatantly discriminatory laws has historically proven to be one of the fastest routes to social acceptance.
I thought ENDA was a reasonable goal, but it didn't make it.
Aren't there tons of state level fights? Bathroom bills, banning child transition care, drivers license gender markers, trans females in sports.
All these issues are tricky and filled with tons of nuance. Is there some widely held consensus on when a person has transitioned from one gender to another? Is it amount of time lived in a certain gender, appearance, hormones, etc? All the issues you listed should be decided more at the state and local levels until a consensus appears. National politicians aren't putting anything on the table to consider.
National Self-Identification law like Scotland had.
These aren’t mutually exclusive. Activists will always want to advocate for something, even when it’s outside the scope of what people originally signed up for.
Maybe!
Post Obergefell, there was a real temporary debate about shifting the focus to homeless gay youth, which is a real problem of gay kids being thrown out of their home or running away because they don't feel accepted. It was a major internal concern for a lot of gay rights groups that had been sidelined a bit for strategic reasons to focus on gay marriage, but then fell off the radar.
I reject that narrative framing on gay marriage then trans rights. The problem seems to be that actually trans people had all the rights of changing their gender markers on legal documents, getting surgery, having access to gendered facilities in all 50 states. Then the woke weenies broke it by putting Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of a magazine and making her woman of the year during their ultra virtue signaling phase. Then the next year you had the bathroom laws in North Carolina and Republican strategists learned this was a wedge issue and so then you had everyone have to spin up a fight for Trans rights. Throw some sports in there and you have the perfect tabloid ready moral panic that Americans have loved since the Salem witch trials.
But remember, NC backtracked on the bathroom law! In 2018, DeSantis in Florida said it wasn't worth discussing. We can debate why it reversed again a few years later. I personally think it's because activists kept pushing the envelope, and the sports issue is what finally caused it to break through with the average voter.
It doesn't matter. The point is trans people had everything and activist lefties screwed it up for them. Under the guide of visibility and whatever crap that they lost their brains on for the last 15 years.
You’re blaming “activist lefties” while also saying that Republicans deliberately worked to normalize anti-trans sentiment.
Knowing that that's what the right does come on. It's child's Play to develop a better strategy, but drumming up right-wing resistance helps you drum up left-wing funding as well. I get sick of this crap of look. We're blameless. Our techniques and bedside manner were correct if it wasn't for those rascally rabbits the Republicans it's their fault really. I can think a few examples where you have full rights and visibility. Screws it up for you and yet that was the left's plan visibility equality yada yada yada God I really dislike those people.
I don't want to overgeneralize because there are a lot of exceptions, but many gay people feel part of a larger queer community that includes trans people. They also understand what it's like to be discriminated against and hated for aspects that are fundamental to who you are. So the pivot makes sense.
An actual data based version of this argument would be great, because Matt keeps finding obscure "groups" he says are the deep state of the democratic party, but not showing how they're any different than other groups he'd prefer around abundance, market policies, education, or abortion. I personally don't see the connection between gay rights groups pivoted to advancing trans rights in any meaningful way, except that it became a novelty in the culture industry that gave way to being a boogieman in right-wing media.
LCV is hardly an "obscure group". They go back to 1970 and their scorecards rating Members of Congress are very well-known, are mentioned in ads, as were endorsements going back decades.
lol. Try again. Nobody knows about them.
Or pivot to pro-growth? That is better for supporters of gay rights supporters than trans rights.
I agree that more reporting in needed to supplement some of Matt's writing. One of my frustrations is that there seems to be less coverage of the inner works of the dem party and leftist advocacy groups. So everyone is left guessing.
Is this what Andrew Sullivan has been blowing up about recently?
These groups depend on donors, that's their real customer. They don't want to "win" and then disestablish. No one wants to dismantle an organization they've built, especially one that has money and influence. Adjusting the project to keep donors on board makes perfect sense in that context.
I'd love to see a "deep dive" on right leaning "groups" as well given I suspect a lot of the same dynamics are at play. The cult of personality around Trump has sort of scrambled a lot of normal political dynamics but I would have to believe a lot of the same dynamics ("mission creep", need to spend a war chest, finding that "new" cause so to continue to get donors to give you money) have to be at play.
Abortion is to me the big example here. Matt has noted that one consequence of the cult of personality around Trump is that he personally can just diffuse this issue and make it go away as a problem for the GOP. But those "pro life" groups are well funded and didn't just go away. I wonder for example how much their influence is at play with these draconian abortion bans in places like Texas and other red states. I know the "dream" of Texas going blue is maybe farther away than I even thought in 2024, but it's clearly not as right leaning as it was 20-25 years ago. Which means I feel pretty confident in saying that Texas' abortion restrictions are well to the right of the median voter and how much "pro life" groups ensure this dynamic holds in the state.
Matt's connections are within the Democratic party so he's going to have more "insider" knowledge than GOP. Unfortunately, a lot of the more honest right wingers are not really tied into the interior dynamics of GOP "groups" anymore (their honestly is basically why they are not part of the Trump camp), but there has to be someone Matt can maybe interview about this topic on the right (given Ross Douthat is BFF with JD, maybe Ross is a candidate?)
What happens then to pro-life activism when Trump leaves the scene? How long are they going to be satisfied with no action on a national ban when it's clear that the current "states rights" policy does very little to reduce abortions, given the large number of states where it is legal and the abortion pill?
The only right-wing Group equivalents I can think of are pro-life groups and the NRA (and its various splinters). There certainly are other advocacy groups, but I think their influence is more through think tanks and direct donations rather than by skewing primary outcomes. Does anyone on the right think "gee, Grover Norquist likes this guy, I'd better vote for him?"
I agree, a deeper dive into the groups, trying to untangle them and figure out how they're related, would be very worthwhile. It's research that doesn't exist anywhere outside of maybe some political operative private files. Would love to see Matt tackle it to provide as public research. (Or at least public for anyone willing to pay his substack fee, LOL.)
Great column. Matt fires a thoughtful and provocative shot across the progressive bow - we'll see this topic and LCV's questionnaire in the discourse later today.
Part of the issue is that "Groups" don't think it's their job to prioritize electability. They view politics as a sort of free market (or alternatively, an adversarial system like our legal system) where the right outcome will emerge from all the actors pursuing their own self-interest. In LCV's mind, it's LCV's job to push maximally for conservation-related goals, and it's candidates' job to balance LCV's demands with other political goals including electability.
So, I tend to think that if you confronted LCV and said "this isn't good for electability," they might well respond, "of course it isn't." They just think the "system" will take care of it. So if you want to get them to change their behavior, it isn't enough to talk about electability. You have to get to the root of the matter and persuade them that the system they envision doesn't exist, and that unless every Group acts responsibly, takes electability into account, and pulls its own punches, everyone's going to go down in flames together.
"Part of the issue is that "Groups" don't think it's their job to prioritize electability. They view politics as a sort of free market (or alternatively, an adversarial system like our legal system) where the right outcome will emerge from all the actors pursuing their own self-interest"
Or as we call it in the vernacular, the Ta-Nehisi Coates.
TNC is advocating for what he believes (popular or not), but he isn’t pressuring elected officials to adopt his positions. He explicitly argued against that on Ezra’s podcast. That’s a pretty big difference!
His advocating for it de facto is pressuring elected officials. One of the good push backs from Ezra was telling him "I know you don't like to admit this, but you have a lot of influence". His, "I'm just a writer, it's just my job to write truth" is the same as the Groups saying, we're activists, it's just our job to advocate not to worry about electing"
I say that as a big fan of THC. I think it is his biggest flaw.
What you're saying is true, but no matter how much influence a writer has, if they're not directly weighing in on elections then they're still at a much greater remove from the political arena than groups that explicitly weigh in and indicate that they view candidate A as better/worse than candidate B.
Sure everyone has influence, but I don’t think that means that no one should express an unpopular or electorally harmful option. (coughonebillionamericanscough)
In any case, I think TNC is pretty far from the canonical example of a groups influencer, as the person I was responding to seems to think.
This seems to not understand how people work. If TNC is yelling at you, an elected official, that you are doing something bad (or less than good), there will be a bunch of people who yell with him because of his influence.
That's pressure you will feel!
edit - Pressure you will feel if you align with TNC. Republican's won't care, because they don't care about TNC or his supporters. But Democrats do, so they feel pressure.
Does TNC really yell at people? I’ve read him for decades and that’s not really his thing.
He "yelled" at Ezra Klein for writing the article about Charlie Kirk he didn't like!
What "group" does TNC have? How is that different than the abundance lobby, or the crypto lobby, or the NRA for that matter?
One mystery that Matt has pointed out is that the republican groups are much more chill and focused on electability, with exhibit A being their not freaking out when trump backed off of abortion maximalism during the campaign. I am sympathetic to this argument, but I wonder if anyone has studied this more systematically. It would be interesting to see if Rs groups questions were different, if R members responded to fewer questionnaires, etc.
I kind of wonder if across the board there's a staffing problem where other potential employers end up employing what would be the optimal employee of a lot of these groups: increasingly the private sector for people focused on renewable energy; public defender officers, Big Law, and (until recently) DOJ for people focused on civil rights issues, etc. The people who are left for a lot of NGOs, particularly second-tier NGOs, are these days people who used to have Tumblr accounts circa 2014.
Yea I think that's a decent way to describe them doing a version of completely normal politics but they've optimized on being adversarial/escalation of conflict and less on strategically thinking about where their push can help the most if they're explicitly delving into electoral politics.
Partially this is because everyone in the conservation/environmental nonprofit space has been swallowed up by the borg of ur-leftist jargon and racial justice intersectional frameworks that have also taken over virtually every other area of progressive advocacy.
It’s been this way ever since Dave Foreman lost the internal battle within Earth First! and David Brower became left-pilled in the ‘80s.
Broadly agree, but IMO the "groups" don't prioritize electability or intellectual/policy coherence because their job is to prioritize the interests of their primary "customer" - donors. The groups are also in competition with each other for those donor dollars, and this is especially true in the environmental space, where numerous groups vie for funding. Compromising with reality or logic, rather than adhering to absolutism, will cause those dollars to be allocated to a different group.
I looked up LCV's numbers, and this strategy has worked well for them. They've gone from ~$38 million in donations in the 2016 election year to ~$68 million in 2023. Unfortunately, 2024 numbers aren't available because the 990 isn't published.
I agree with this 90%, but what about the random union and racial justice prithees from the LCV?
But they aren’t. If they wanted to say their job is to maximally push for conservation goals and actually did that they’d abandon the everything bagel elements of their program. They have explicitly decided their way to a majority is in coalition and “solidarity” with unions and racial justice groups and the rest of the progressive ecosystem and thus they are targeting their program to that and not simply pushing for conservation goals.
I would like to read a better takedown of the groups, while also addressing the public/private sector aspect of liberalism that allows them to have such influence. When being in government isn't exactly a glamorous job, but using connections made in government to become a lobbyist is a rather lucrative lifestyle, how does one square the circle? When you have weak political parties and candidates don't have unified fronts or positions on these issues, there's inherent incentive to have NGOs that coordinate with politicians in multiple states, or multiple terms, or if you're something like AIPAC or the NRA or Corn Refiners Association, you want to have relationships with whoever in which ever party will pick up the phone.
While I feel like LGBTQ+ and racial justice groups are probably the least helpful electorally, it seems like labor groups are on the wrong side of like every single issue.
(Some may say they’re good on housing but northeastern social conservatives are like the NIMBYist people on planet earth so I’m skeptical.)
Labor groups want to increase labor inputs for every task and wages.
There is no reason for a school teacher or a Teamster to oppose a pro-growth agenda. It's the leaders that are the problem.
A pro-growth agenda would likely be skeptical of excessive government spending (kinda bad for school teachers) and would be all-in on automation (very bad for teamsters)
I don't think that's right on school teachers, exactly. Pro-growth would probably privilege education spending over say income transfers to the elderly. And if pro-growth works, government spending can grow without growing or somewhat trailing growth of the economy.
yeah it's tenuous. teachers' concerns are pretty orthogonal to growth concerns
“Labor” in many areas is just shorthand for teachers, nurses, and state workers.
Rhode Island passed an asinine assault weapons ban earlier this year that was shoved down voters throats via bullying from Democratic state party leaders and out-of-state activists from Bloomberg funded groups.
Activists commissioned a poll of local AFL-CIO workers that showed ~50-60% approval of the AWB among its members as a way of giving it some kind of blue collar endorsement, but failed to mention that like half of the AFL CIO in RI represents teachers and nurses who were already “captured” by the activist messaging anyway.
Regardless, they never consider that barely passing a controversial measure with a 50-60% approval is not really a big picture “win” when it mobilizes your opponents to such an extent.
There were over 2,000 people who stayed up until 2 am to speak out against this ban - a significant chunk of them surely were registered Democrats. This matters in a state that just had its lowest D+ margin win since 1988 and where 50,000 swing votes can turn the state red.
In my home town of Auckland, New Zealand, the incumbent mayor currently campaigning for re-election, Wayne Brown, has a unique solution for The Groups: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/574806/f-off-auckland-mayor-wayne-brown-tells-auckland-ratepayers-alliance
Brown's "Fuck Off" only gets better when you read the tantrum of a response given by the Ratepayers alliance. I think jamming your finger in the groups eye (figuratively of course) could be a good signalling mechanism to coordinate the Democratic reform movement. Adherence only to the Common Sense Democratic Manifesto, no pledges to groups.
Heh my first thought on this line of thought (after reading Matts article and prior to clicking into the comments) was unless the groups are really not savvy, disagreement with them doesn't really get you much and could just give them publicity as defenders of justice telling truth to power (if reporters bite on that). But maybe the issue is something the politician wants to raise saliance of but probably not?
I think the case we'd like to make is that the groups have the situation backwards. They need to be useful to politicians to get things they need. They think politicians need to be useful to them (often in dogmatic and unproductive ways that brook no tradeoffs) to earn their support. In a multiparty system that would work fine, but in a two party system you know who is better for you and who isn't. Obama (really Rahm Emmanuel) did a good job of this. I think there's a SB Post about it calling the veal pen. We need to retvrn to the veal pen.
Yes, interesting suggeston, pratical.
The LCV are poor coalition partners because they don’t recognize tradeoffs. Their agenda excites 25–30 percent of voters and offends more than it attracts, yet they behave as if ideological purity can substitute for majorities. As between groups that understand the importance of prosperity and the inevitability of tradeoffs, and those that don’t, I prefer the former. That’s why Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans—whatever their flaws—make better partners than green groups whose politics are indifferent to cost, practicality, or the durability of public consent.
Well they WOULD make better coalition partners if they didn't tend to in fact support anti-growth policies like trade and immigration restrictions and damn-the deficits- tax reduction.
Given that you need a majority to govern, you need either the chamber of commerce or the greens. Very hard to please both. I share more values with the chamber of commerce.
Interesting. We share a lot of our political leanings, but I have more in common with the greens.
I sort of have the green aesthetic. I like the outdoors and smallish houses, and I dislike big trucks. I’m totally ok avoiding material excess. However, my idea of simplicity is still a ridiculously high material standard in historical terms and I want more working stiffs to enjoy something close to what I do.
Well I think analytically
1. To what extent do Green Left Groups lead to new votes in electoral geographies that are needed (or to what extent do you pile up excess votes in restricted geographies, e.g. urbane urban-to-suburban while missing votes on the margin in areas where the added vote on the margin tips result)
2. To what extent do the Groups drive Everything Bagelism that leads again to lost votes on the margins in key geographies wehre the marginal vote makes the difference between Win or Lose.
The thing is these sorts of questionnaires have always existing it’s just the politicians were much better at just ignoring the questions they didn’t want to answer or just saying no. And Democrats on the Hill still do ignore the groups all the time on things when they don’t agree with them (as they should). What we really need is elected officials to have a bit more courage/leadership on these sorts of these things. If you look at the infamous ACLU questionnaire for instance, as opposed to Kamala Harris, Joe Biden just never filled it out. What we need is candidates and elected officials to look at these things both from the perspective of what’s good for their state/district but also just to consider overall which of these policy ideas is good/bad. Because it wasn’t always the culture you just said yes to everything on such a questionnaire (and nor were you expected).
This was going to be my question, is what’s changed? Are the questionnaires new, are the questions different, or is the level of “yes”-ing greater than before? Or some combination?
My sense is that the groups have pushed further left in their demands but its also the case that groups have always asked for unrealistic or politically risky things. I think the level of candidates and elected officials is also yes though by a good amount and there's alot more of the sense of people not wanting people to mad at them. Whereas before there was this. And I think there's also an element that the 2016 and 2020 primaries were a big part of that shift as has been the election of Trump (because there's a certain mentality of if Trump can get away with what we gets away with why can't we). Groups like LCV still should think through how best to effective and what not but you need more elected officials and candidates just being willing to say no and live with people being mad at them (because they'll get over it).
Half the time when they are filled out, they are filled out by a staffer who is already overworked on other things. Why not just ignore a lot of them?
Cause they often come with a PAC check when you do get a group endorsement. And not every questionnaire is necessarily problematic.
It should be standard practice to share these questionnaires, and candidates’ responses to them, publicly. The groups should own their policy commitments, and the candidates should own their answers. If they can’t, then there’s a problem with the questions.
Reading candidates' short paragraph answers to a questionnaire is my favorite way to get informed before a primary election, since there are so many candidates to sift through. But yes/no checklist questions are reductive, and yes/no endorsements are even more reductive still.
Noah Millman makes an interesting case against your diagnosis, showing through data quite convincingly that the issue are Dem voters, not the donors or the groups: https://open.substack.com/pub/gideons/p/the-democrats-have-met-the-enemy?r=4j3ri7&utm_medium=ios
It's an interesting piece for sure, but that two-dimensional plot doesn't leave a lot of room for the nuance of individual issues, which is the drum Matt's been banging over the last year or more. Yes, most D voters want to see action on climate change and if you ask them, they'll tell you that. But what specific action? And what are you willing to sacrifice? That's where the consensus breaks down.
I agree, I found that argument to be unpersuasive. Sure, 50% of Democrats might say they want M4All or a Green New Deal, but those poll questions are never asking voters about the trade offs. There's a reason why Vermont doesn't have Medicare For All. There's a reason why Washington doesn't have a 100% green economy.
Those polling questions are also just “yes/no” questions. They’re not presenting partisan pro/con arguments. When you do that support drops a lot.
And I think a lot of elected officials do not know this! They're trying to read the temperature of the public, a nice organization with a nice cause comes in their office with a good poll. And they're very liberal staffers tell them to believe.
According to issue polls, voters support increased spending, lower taxes, and balanced budget amendments.
The more I read about the inner workings of the political world, the less I understand why anyone would willingly choose to make their career in that ecosystem. It seems so very ... depressing.
These sorts of polls aren't designed to accurately assess public opinion, they're designed to prove that X is popular regardless of whether X is actually popular.
Yes, this is my drumbeat of the Tony Blair video about why single issue polling is unreliable, the 5 second, 30 second and 3 minute conversation about the same issue may change the results you would get from the poll.
Never mind that your candidate's positions may poll well, but everything put together the candidate doesn't do that well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPqc9xEqRTY
He’s probably oversimplifying, it depends on the issue. On immigration sure Democratic primary voters are further left than Republican primary voters are right. Different dynamic on healthcare.
I think actually immigration and healthcare crystallize Mailman’s point perfectly. On Ds best issue (healthcare), R voters are closer to the centrist position compared to how far D voters are to the centrist position on Rs best issue (immigration).
Wait so do you think R voters are more right wing on healthcare than Ds are left on healthcare? IMO it is more like even R voters are more in the center on healthcare but R electeds are more right wing, which is what gives Rs space to move to the center since their own voters are closer to the center than them, especially on healthcare.
'Do you want a Green New Deal?'
Yes
'Do you want a Green New Deal if you aren't allowed to buy a big truck and have to settle for a EuroJap shitbox instead?'
No
First of all the only Japanese shitboxes on the market are Nissan Sentras and Mitsubishi Mirages. Stellantis pulled their European shitboxes from the market and trying to sell Fiats under the Dodge or Jeep label.
What precisely is the problem with Japanese trucks? I'm genuinely curious. I've never owned a truck (they are expensive and require large parking spaces), so I don't have a lot of experience telling the difference between the various models. What's wrong with them? Genuinely curious.
He's presumably talking about small cars that Americans don't like and American companies don't build, rather than large Japanese trucks built for the US market which compete quite well in their segments.
Oh, that wasn't clear. I know a lot of people who like their Toyota Tacomas. Thanks for clarifying.
I’ve come to think that poll questions on these issues aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
Even if they perfectly captured voters attitudes on a particular issue, they are one dimensional and don’t capture intensity or prioritization.
Gift link to a relevant NYT piece about gun control: when actual issues were put on state referendums, they performed much worse than the polling would suggest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/upshot/gun-control-polling-votes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rU8.clYx.FP4X4ylmf2EJ&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
I consider issue-based polls to be mostly worthless because it's too easy for the polltaker to intentionally word the question to produce whatever result they want.
The only reason I say "mostly" rather than "completely" is that issue polls, when used properly, can still be used to measure trends, since, when the same question is repeated, whatever bias exists in the wording will be exactly the same each time. But, that's about it.
I agree - I view it similarly.
I can only speak to my area of focus (gun policy). The polling is atrocious.
Gallup poll still asks people whether or not they would favor a ban on all handguns. I have no clue why. They’ve been asking that question since the 70s (which was probably the last time that idea was ever seriously considered).
At its core policy-level, most major gun control debate is about quibbling over statutory definitions and the power vested to bureaucracies.
But all gun control polls gauge the favorability of shorthand buzzwords like “do you support ‘universal background checks?’” That is a clever activist shorthand that has a clear positive bias (background checks are good, more background checks are better).
Most people don’t know how background checks work in their current form, or what’s at stake when we talk about “universal background checks.”
But do you doubt the main point that in order capture the swing voters they need, Ds have to reach further from their own center than Rs do? And that D voters have more liberal and ideologically cohesive than the R voters are conservative?
Nate Cohn in his piece about Zohran made a similar point about how liberal the Dem base has become even since 2016, which opens an opportunity for left insurgencies but creates problems in generals and swing states.
Yes, this is my drumbeat of the Tony Blair video about why single issue polling is unreliable, the 5 second, 30 second and 3 minute conversation about the same issue may change the results you would get from the poll.
Never mind that your candidate's positions may poll well, but everything put together the candidate doesn't do that well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPqc9xEqRTY
Washington has the highest gas prices of the lower 48 states and I think that's intentional; the government wants carbon pricing to make the lives of exurban people in WA more expensive so they will change. Today's piece by Yglesias is waiting for a powerful politician to successfully subordinate these ideological activists, similar to what happened in the GOP circa 2015. It might work!
They had a ballot proposition to get rid of their cap and trade program and it lost.
Yes I'm quite painfully aware from working with people on that.
I was surprised, I thought it'd get the boot.
The cap and trade bill was only responsible for a small portion of the overall gas price. Even if it were repealed, gas prices would still be among the highest in the country, anyway. Repealing it would have also blown a hole in numerous state and local budgets, as funding for all of the projects financed by the cap and trade bill would have suddenly disappeared.
Step (1): influential centrists bloggers learn a lot more about climate change and energy transition issues than they currently do.
Step (2): some of these folks form actual advocacy groups (or get involved with them) that have a targeted plan for speeding up the energy transition in an affordability-friendly way.
I have yet to see any details other than “just get rid of some laws” that really fit the bill for either of these steps. “Abundance” is incredibly vague on the details, particularly the details of how you remove environmental restrictions specifically for new energy construction. What’s the Greenpeace/MoveOn-style pro-growth environmental advocacy group I can look into for these issues after reading one of Matt’s posts? Does it even exist?
As a general matter what the Abundance talk has been about is regulatory simplification, streamlining and general making things easier - getting into gory details on permits etc is likely a loser, talking "cutting red-tape, rationalising regulation to be small business friendly, help get things Done, make America Build Again" is good sloganeering counter to MAGA type slogans
Over definition and over-explaining is very much a professional class disease.
https://www.climateactioncampaign.org/
The moderate, sensible, abundance climate people. They explicitly position themselves against the more radical ones.
Actually, I gave you the wrong link. This is a problem with all these different climate groups. Here's the group I meant.
https://citizensclimatelobby.org/
i don't find this data very convincing. the scatterplot is difficult to interpret: the distances on it represent differences in answers to poll questions, which means the structure of the plot is highly sensitive to the choice of questions. if you were to ask only about issues that unite democrats and divide republicans (and in 2016 there were plenty of these) you'd get a similar shape with a tight blue ball and a diffuse red cloud.
more importantly, a preference for left wing policy does not mean primary voters cannot vote strategically. but i cant find anything in this piece (maybe i missed something) connecting cohesive liberal beliefs to unstrategic primary behavior
Sure they can vote strategically but do you take the point that Dem voters are more liberal and ideologically cohesive than the R voters are conservative? Imo the story Matt is trying to paint about how it’s all bc of annoying activists just seems too easy an explanation of what’s happened here in left of center politics.
The evidence that President Vance will be real just keeps piling up! Get ready for the guy who will make Donald Trump look like he’s in touch with reality.
Lol, as Millman writes: “What stands in the way of the Democrats seizing it? Only that the people who fund, staff and lead the party are all out of touch with what ordinary Americans believe and want. That, in itself, is kind of an extraordinary admission—if you take away the donors, the staff and the leadership, who’s left to reform the party? Mounk’s answer, presumably, would be: the voters. Which voters, though?”
This is quite an interesting article and a very useful point about the challenge that an ideologically-cohesive liberal base poses for outreach-oriented Dems
I would consider that preference setting is in part driven by the groups.
This is just a long-winded way of saying get ready for President Vance, because Democrats and their supporters are going to get greedy again.
I strongly suspect Vance has no chance unless he inherits the seat... This is unrelated to a Republican winning. When all else fails you can just try to steal the election since there doesn't seem to be any reason not to.
We only get President Vance if he inherits the seat. It’s very likely 2028 will be another back swing. The only thing a Democratic Party in control needs to do is curtail the excesses of progressives again and actually get shit built.
Where can I go to see the alternative strategy? Give me an example of an advocacy group that’s “doing this right” and not a book or some blog posts.
Maybe the California YIMBY groups are the closest? Otherwise I can’t think of any, instead there are some candidates who are centrist.
“The Groups” vs. “centrist” pundits (e.g. The Argument, which consists of a couple Effective Altruists and a socialist) seems a little like the Coates-Klein debate.
Both sides of the debate share similar values. It’s like a debate between Catholic priests who take Scripture very seriously and ordinary devout Catholics who are constrained by the practicalities of life while admiring the purity of priests’ faith.
The Coates prescription for electoral strategy is terrible, and it’s good that this faction is no longer able to bully the “centrists.” Nevertheless, I’m not sure that the Klein side has a winning formula: to the extent that voters disagree with Democrats on values, I’m not sure the Kleins of the world will fool anyone by simply downplaying their beliefs.
I think Democratic thought leaders may need to be more introspective about their values before they can return to a position of strength. This is going to require more than simple tactical adjustments.
But like, the groups are often wrong on the merits. I don't dislike labor groups (for example) because I think they hurt us in elections, I dislike them because they make our country and economy weaker to benefit a small special interest.
My point is that I don’t think these intra-party disagreements have *that* much to do with Democrats’ weakness.
If the Klein/Yglesias types were understood to be fully in charge, would Dems start trouncing Republicans? I’m not sure voters really think of them as centrists either.
Somehow becoming *more* pessimistic about the future of our governance is not the way I wanted to start my work week…at least the post is strategically unpaywalled.
"carbon sequestration using natural climate solutions" takes hundreds of thousands of years, as far as we can tell. Going fully electric by 2035 is quite the "interim" step toward net zero.
I think it means planting forests
That doesn't sequester carbon. When trees die they decompose and release CO2 back into the atmosphere.
Doesn't a lot of it get buried in the soil though? That's how coal forms in the first place, more or
If we ever successfully develop carbon capture technology, we should call it Megatree.
The main content of this piece is unremarkable but to play devil's advocate on one detail, one area where the League of Conservation Voters appear to have a more grounded and realistic belief than either labor unions or Slow Boring is in recognising that carbon capture doesn't work.
Doesn't work...yet.
The question is whether they would support it if further development shows it can work. I strongly suspect they would not support it.
That is *a* question, but so is 'would such-and-such politician waste vast sums on the building of a plant that emits more carbon than it would ever capture?'
It's a very big problem that this technology doesn't work outside the lab. If it did, it would solve lots of problems, but instead it doesn't, which means that the best 'carbon removal' technology remains trees, bogs, etc, and not building things which remove those natural features. If you're worried about the quantum of greenhouse gas emissions as opposed to the political realities, then degrowth still makes the most sense in a world where carbon capture tech doesn't work.
If you actually care about stopping global warming instead of stopping people from capitalist prosperity, you absolutely spend the money to make technological solutions work in the future while building a ton of nuclear plants right now, and run against the League of Communist Voters who are circulating questionnaires to stop you.
I'm not suggesting that there shouldn't be R&D into carbon capture technology.
The question is what people who care about 'the science' and not about the political realities (because not everyone has to be a political strategist, in a healthy polity it is the role of many people to simply advocate for what they think is right) should argue for right now, and I'm saying it's sad but based on a more realistic assessment of the technology right now to dismiss handwaving about how carbon capture tech means trade-offs don't exist as nonsense.
People should simply support spending a ton of money on every kind of technology that will potentially allow massive capitalist consumption while reducing global warming, because voters don't want to consume less energy and will vote against any attempt to make them.
What do you mean by "it doesn't work"? A lot of things can be hiding in that statement and there's lots of room to shuffle between mottes and baileys.
It could mean
* Not economically viable. Okay, and definitely it won't be without a price on carbon. Depends where we move the needle.
* Not energetically viable. I'm pretty sure that the laws of thermodynamics say we can't burn any fossil fuel and use that energy to capture CO2 back out of the atmosphere[1] CO2 back, at least in a stable form, so any marginal non-CO2 energy production is better spent displacing a CO2-emitting source.
* You just can't capture carbon at all. They're all lying. I don't think this is true.
But if we keep displacing CO2 producing energy sources, some time in the next 10-30 years we will hit the point where it's dumb to further decarbonize energy production. So even if it's a 2:1 ratio to get back the CO2, it becomes the right move. At we're going to want to be scaling that, and being ready to scale that means learning by building small- and then moderate-sized real world facilities. Not hundreds of them, but definitely dozens.
[1] Just bottling up the CO2 at the emitting plant? Maybe.
The Canadian federal government is about to do a deal with Alberta that would have the latter commit much more strongly to capturing emissions from the tar sands. Will be the ultimate test case for CCS.
I sincerely hope it's a huge success. I suspect it won't be.
Username checks out!
Well - yes carbon capture doesn't work economically overall (ex-specific targeted direct use cases). And probably the overall economics are unlikely to work out in foreseeable future.
However, to make this an ideological point rather than an allow technical, market-based development is a serious problem - here it rather seems probaby they are taking the position largely from the Lefty Greeny view that the entire subject is a stalking horse for the evil nasty moustache twirling villans that are the Oil & Gas companies. And sometimes that's not per se false but there is no good reason to take outright political position against versus rooting your policy in good economics
(Now mind you I am not really very much favorable at this time to carbon capture demarches as it is investment nonsense, but so long as one does not go down road of massive deployment subsidies, there's no reason to take position against it)
I was reflecting on some on the way that pro-migration groups in the UK operate, and wondering at their lack of strategy. Unlike the US, a lot of our groups are laser focused on the tactics with no thought of whether or not their tactic now will undermine what they want in the future.
It kind of seems that groups in the US are the other way round - they only have strategy and no tactics, albeit the strategies seem to be competing and contradictory.
It has actually changed my mind on how the UK 3rd sector operates - maybe they are right to pursue the here and now as much as they do (although the sector I work in disparagingly refers to "politics" like politics isn't central to what they want to change).
The value they get is feeling good about themselves.
20 years these people would have rooted for their local sports team and thought posting "YANKEES SUCK" was doing their part and then they'd go home.
I know it's just an aside at the end, but every time the mercury restrictions come up, I have to push back. I actually read the EPA report from a few years ago justifying the rule and found the causal chain of evidence very weak. Essentially it was that a tiny additional amount of mercury was going to get into the soil, leach into the freshwater, be taken up by fish, be eaten by mostly poor pregnant women who catch their own, and cause a decrease in the IQ of their babies by a few thousandths of a point. These infinitesimally lower-IQ kids would grow up and be worse at their jobs, thus lowering their economic value. It was only by aggregating these otherwise imperceptible effects over thousands of people that they could claim with a straight face that the economic cost of the rule was less than the impact of the pollution. Now maybe you say "we're a rich country and we shouldn't have to deal with any mercury getting into the environment, even if the risk is practically nil", and I would consider that argument. But if this is the logic used for one rule imposed, how many others are on shaky foundations?
Have we considered the possibility that some of these groups are a right wing plot? I get horseshoe theory but I’m talking about right wingers literally starting/funding these groups to rip the Democrat party apart.
While there might be some real fringey "false flag" groups, any of the larger organizations (like LCV) are presumably legit due to how difficult it would be to keep up the cover over any prolonged length of time due to the degree of routine intermixing between NGO personnel and political staff.
I don't think they are on purpose. Although oil companies are happy to support a bill to ban powerlines for hydropower.