1 - my half joking solution to Columbus Day (the OG woke holiday made to recognize Italianx contributions to America) is to rename it Amerigo Vespucci day since he's a nice guy who made some maps and has the New World named after him
2 - CT also allows fusion voting and WFP also works with the state Democratic party on nominations
3 - I am going to re-up and slightly modify a comment made a few weeks back that was smacked around a bit because I used the word "breakup" in terms of the post-Trump GOP. It seems to me that the presidential competitiveness of the Trump GOP requires Trump's unique ability to activate low propensity voters and that no other GOP leader has that juice. Even if Trump wins this election I think there will be another election in 2028. I think the odds of a pretty nasty post-Trump reckoning within the GOP are high and they risk becoming more akin to the California GOP but at a national level. In California you have quasi-one party rule, but as we Borers know there's growing factions of YIMBY vs NIMBY, process vs results, etc. Is the future of American politics California? What happens if post-Trump the GOP realizes it just isn't competitive nationally? Or, how does the GOP emerge from Trump as a competitive party? What does that party look like?
I have a deeper cut than Vespucci: Phillip Mazzei.
He was a friend of Jefferson who actually wrote the first drafts of the most famous words in the English language: “… that all men are created equal…”.
Jefferson gave him some land from Monticello to start a winery that still remains to this day; the first Italian winery in America. He was an abolitionist, so he imported free Italian workers and paid them good wages just next door to Jefferson’s plantation as a way to prove to his friend that free labor was not only morally righteous but also vastly superior.
I can think of no better an exemplar of Italian Americans in the founding of our nation.
Also, I really wish more of the Italian American community knew more of the story of how we GOT Columbus Day. I’ve argued to my dad that we should never have accepted it because it was the 19th-century Anglos trying to foist a “hero” on us the same way they invented a bunch of other dumb narratives at the time (“people thought the world was FLAT!” == absolutely not true, a Victorian concoction to make themselves feel more enlightened than Continentals).
But it always seems to fall flat. IMO it’s just another sad example of the power of anchoring bias, and why we shouldn’t go inculcating children with bullshit historical myths.
Re: (1) Was it Matt who I think not entirely jokingly noted we should rename it Garibaldi Day? Dude was an absolute legend and it's sad he's remembered mostly for the biscuit nowadays!
It wasn't a scam though, it was a reaction to a real problem (anti-Italian and anti-Catholic bigotry) that resulted in a real tragedy and was president Benjamin Harrison's finest hour.
It's an interesting story and I think it's weird it was never taught in school as part of the "Columbus was very very bad bad bad bad bad" unit they made me go through several times.
I mean, that’s not really the read I got from it. Seems like he could have just as easily been pandering?
I dunno. Even if it was just honest transactionalism guided by a sense of trying to do the right thing, I’m still not all that impressed by him culminating a social movement (for this holiday) that was ultimately a mistake heavily reflecting contemporary Victorian-inspired WASP prejudices and mythologized narratives that turned out to be hideously manufactured.
Like, just to shift contexts to draw a contrast… if I were Black, I’d be proud of MLK Jr. Day, and I’d also consider it one of Reagan’s rare redeeming accomplishments for having declared a day after him. And yes, in the decades since, we’ve learned that the guy wasn’t squeaky clean in his personal life, but we’re pretty secure in the knowledge that he was clean enough to admire for the great positive accomplishments he made.
Now, let’s imagine that MAGA wins this election and plunges America into 100 years of historical revisionism. 120 years from now, I’m a Black man in a society just recently emerging from MAGA bullshit, and in that intervening time, Mark Robinson, Proud Black Nazi, who in the early years of the Trump Dictatorship period owned a bunch of New Slaves, had gotten revised into some sort of MAGA saint. *I* know this is all bullshit, but unfortunately a majority of my fellow Black Americans have been indoctrinated over the last century by their white MAGA oppressors into practically worshipping this guy. I’m not going to look fondly on some president who declares Mark Robinson Day just because he’s taking the “Black” side of some present-day controversy.
Or take the Mongols. If I’m a modern Mongolian, I know that we have a complicated relationship with Genghis Khan’s legacy. The dude is literally on the leaderboard for History’s Greatest Mass Murderers, but also a huge chunk of my countrymen are literally descended from him. But if a bunch of us immigrated to China for jobs, and the Chinese government that has always just barely tolerated my people has convinced a bunch of my fellow Mongolian-Chinese to worship GK declared a Genghis Khan Day as a way of taking the Mongolian side of some present-day racial controversy… I’d still regard it as bullshit, if not highly suspect.
The point here is not to shit on Harrison, it’s just to say that my complaint isn’t ABOUT Harrison, it’s about the shitty narrative — the *scam* of a narrative — that he just happened to pick up and run with, and do something that a bunch of my Italian American ancestors were happy about at the time. If we as a people were misled by the supposedly good thing he did for us, then it wasn’t actually all that good.
If it's "just pandering" then so is creating MLK day and apologizing (and paying reparations) to Japanese Americans who where interned during WW2. I guess the question is if you think those things were good or bad.
Either way it's an interesting story and weird nobody ever talks about it.
It's sure interesting! The point of my overlong rant was that MLK Day and the internment reparations were GOOD pandering.
After all, to some extent, ALL politics is pandering. But the good pandering is what stands the test of time. Columbus Day hasn't stood that test. And rather than punishing today's Italian-Americans for the Victorians' and Harrisons' mistakes, we should celebrate Mazzei Day instead.
Really obvious wishful thinking. Nikki Haley would be killing it. JEB probably would be too. Trump has a stranglehold on the primaries, but isn't very attractive to the middle. How many times does this need to be said?
One take I haven't seen percolating yet but feels elementally true to me is that which ever party wins in 3 weeks is probably going to get absolutely boatraced in 2028. If Harris wins, its incredibly difficult for a party to win three consecutive terms, particularly if people essentially cast Harris' victory not as a mandate but a final vanquishing of trump and wish by then to move on from the last ~15 years of politics. If Trump wins, his now highly inflationary economic agenda along with personal deficiencies will almost certainly leave him less popular by 2028 than he was in 2019 pre pandemic. And no-non Trump MAGA figure has proven they can carry the juice. So I can conceive the losing party on either end will retool and refine their message and messenger, probably to dominating effect. Is it so hard to see Haley beating Harris or Buttigieg beating Vance in the 350 range?
Idk if there are any Skowronek-heads among the slow borers but in 2020-2021 there was a ton of talk that Trump was going to be the final disjunctive sunset of the Reagan Paradigm and that Biden represented the new progressive Regime making administration.(https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/opinion/biden-president-progressive.html) I think history has proven that this era of political time has had at least 2 additional cycle left, and the real disjunctive presidency of this era might be POTUS 47, only to be replaced by a dominating POTUS 48 who can set the agenda and terms of debate for the 2030s and beyond.
Obama was the last President of the Reagan Era. We’re in an in-between period right now. The old world is dead and the new one is not yet born, that sort of thing.
I don't disagree but this is more or less the exact definition of a disjunctive presidency in Skowronek's framework. One would have expected that Trump 45 would have given way to a new Regime making paradigm. But the parties are so closely divided rn that it may take an extra cycle to reach that point of consensus building. And in some ways, Biden has had similar hallmarks of both a regime making and a disjunctive president, so we are in an extended disjunctive haze, quite possibly of three consecutive one term presidents, something that hasn't been seen since the late 1800's
It's very hard to win three straight, but we've never had a situation where the person going for three straight was also the incumbent. I do worry about Harris' ability to govern in popular way and/or run a good campaign from scratch - she's run a pretty good campaign this year, but her past electoral track record was not that impressive and I think it's possible that the unusual circumstances of her nomination this year allowed her to run in a way that minimized her weaknesses. But the "three straight elections" issue doesn't worry me as much as it normally would.
If Trump wins, I think we'll see him attempt pretty massive abuses of power that you'd only expect to see in a banana republic. They probably won't fully succeed, but they will make 2028 extremely chaotic.
Honestly, I don’t even know if we’d make it to 2028 without a constitutional crisis. The next president is most likely going to deal with a recession sometime between now and 2027. Trump doesn’t have the same cushiony pre-COVID conditions he had 5 years ago; even taking his economic agenda on modest terms (a smaller tariff, less ambitious tax cuts for the rich, less ambitious healthcare reforms), still basically any action he took would highly risk triggering a recession in ways he got away with before COVID but won’t this time around. And if the recession gets bad enough, he’ll end up facing a Democratic House that’s out for blood.
If Trump wins, the *best-case* scenario is that he waffles on his tariff pledge after the business community nixes it, but they still allow him to tinker at the edges enough that he plunges the country into stagflation or an inflationary recession (perhaps a 3% across-the-board tariff instead of 10%, something stupid like that). All of this keeps his goons distracted from executing on Project 2025 -- they all start running for the exits and don't stay long enough to implement their favorite authoritarian policies. The wheels fall off the whole thing, and he steps down in 2026 having declared he's fulfilled his MAGA promise.
Again, that's just me spinning an irresponsibly optimistic "best" case. No one should take this as a serious reason to doubt the danger he poses.
The point of bringing that up, though, was that the big problem I see with your take is that while I understand the phenomenological pattern of 3rd-consecutive-term races, I don't see the actual mechanism by which either party would be in position to boatrace the other. If Trump wins, the "middle of the distribution" scenario is that he enacts large chunks of P2025 that basically cement GOP minoritarian rule without sparking a large enough backlash to overturn his actions. I'm not sure the Democrats would so much "boatrace" him in 2028 alone, as they'd simply be waging a 4-year-long political insurgency against him.
And conversely, if Harris wins and successfully fends off whatever second coup attempt Trump mounts between November and Inauguration Day, I think the GOP gets stuck in a holding pattern until Trump dies. As I said yday, they can't jettison him because he's buttressing their turnout numbers, but they also can't win pure majorities with him either. He won't leave the scene on his own volition. And once he dies, the party dissolves into anocracy (look it up, it's a fun poli-sci term!): multiple independent power centers who each lack the decisive edge to win control over the entire party.
So yeah, I don't think that's a party that boatraces Harris in 2028. Sure, stranger things have happened; maybe if Trump dies in like February, the GOP has enough time to collapse and rebuild. A point in favor of this would be that I think one of the major reasons for our era of parity is that both parties have sufficiently competent professional campaign wings that they've basically fought the last two decades to a stalemate, and despite Trump's depredations, most of these professionals haven't actually left the party (unlike the true exiles like Cheney or pseudo-exiles like Romney). Buuuuut... in the face of the general chaos and anocracy, I don't think the professionals could actually help any of their preferred actors reconstruct the party that fast. The right-wing propaganda machine is basically running on fumes and has lost its own ability to stay coherent; the grievances are flying in all directions, and I think they've hit the point where the only thing holding it all together is Trump and the base's ability to project their specific grievances onto him. Without him... it just collapses. No boatrace, just a whimpering rump of a party having itself a marathon struggle session while the rest of America moves on. Harris sails to re-election, becomes a quasi-Reagan-like figure who reshapes politics by becoming the mold our politicians try to emulate for the next several decades, and Rubio wins in 2032 by presenting in the Clintonian-synthesis tradition as the GOP's Harris-like response to Harris's Reagan-like figure.
>>he steps down in 2026 having declared he's fulfilled his MAGA promise<<
Trump faces too much legal jeopardy to voluntarily give up the protections of presidential immunity two years early. This will never, EVER happen.
He may not serve a full term if he wins, who knows? But if that's the case it won't be due to his voluntary resignation, but because he doesn't live that long.
I appreciate the effort of imagination here. I think a much simpler explanation of Trump 2.0 is just really high inflation and a ton of policies people dislike and when he cannot run in 2028, JD is dragged down by his wake just as Harris is now. Conversely I just think it will be hard for Harris to independently hold that much support as an incumbent. Funny enough, she may actually benefit from her likely inability to enact broad policy without control of congress, as opposed to where Biden is now due to being able to enact so much, too much, of his agenda. But I don't think the retooling premise is that hard to imagine. Who would have guessed how strong republicans would be in 1980 on the day Nixon resigned? I think republicans will definitely change their view and message if they lose. They arguably did so after Romney, just not in the way the Autopsy directed them to do so. Same for Democrats, if Harris loses, I think we will see an effort to reform the party to be more electorally viable.
I think that if Trump is still feeling up to it in 2028, he runs and dares SCOTUS to DQ him. And even if they do, he runs JD (or a replacement) as a Medvedev-like cutout and then dares them to prevent some sort of shenanigan to circumvent 22A.
Also, if Harris loses while winning the popular vote (most likely scenario if she loses), then among other things, Dems spend the next 4 years campaigning to abolish the EC. It would become the central national push. At least one more state would ratify the NIPVC by 2028, and several others would pass resolutions calling for an A5 constitutional convention specifically directed to abolish the EC.
I hate that this idea has taken such a hold of ppl. I can't even begin to put into words how utterly bananas a leap it is to say because SCOTUS ruled in Dobbs or even the Immunity case in a way ppl don't like that now they will just literally ignore the most unambiguous words of the Constitution and pretend a "two" isnt there. It's ultimately not even up to trump if he runs again, its up to the diffuse secretaries of states to put him on ballots again, any one of whom would have standing to sue in federal court to stop him. There's not a district court in America that would uphold that challenge by trump. Not one.
Further if Polls are to be believed the most likely Trump victory scenario is he just straight beats her, not a PV/EV split. I agree that if he does split, Dems are gonna lose their friggin' minds around the Electoral College and honestly the whole constitutional framework.
I agree that not even this Court would allow Trump to run for a third term. For Trump to stay in office (officially, not with a Medvedev cutout) he'd have to do something really crazy like try to cancel the election altogether or have judges and political opponents arrested. I can't see that working out for him in the end, although he could use the pardon power to cause quite a bit of havoc.
it is certainly an out there scenario, but there are paths it can go down. SCOTUS could just start by saying it's not ripe unless or until there is an election. They could then claim it's not justiciable and that it's up to Congress to stop or decide.
Why is it such a bananas leap? There can be very little question that Trump himself would somehow be above trying.
In 2021, 8 Senators and 139 House Members voted to not certify the election. What is so distinctive about being a member of the Supreme Court that we can believe that their character is guaranteed to be better than those 147 members? They're drawn from the same pool, and would face all the same pressures, inducements, and motivations.
I don't believe it is at all likely, but I no longer default to believing it's unthinkable.
I fundamentally disagree with that perspective. There are very good reasons for what you call a “bananas leap”, and you seem like an otherwise cogent person, so I think if you can’t countenance those reasons’ existence, then we don’t really have anything productive left to discuss.
Haha. It’s a sports metaphor. Started in crew/rowing. Idea is that a team ahead at the midway point almost never is caught from behind. Now it’s used as a synonym for a drumming defeat.
They're not really active in my town; it's mostly just a secondary line for Dems who want to show they're going the extra mile here. It *would* be a relatively useful signal for progressives vs. moderates, but the WFP makes it so easy to get their endorsement, even the moderates usually seek it just to say they've got it. And WFP accumulates so little toxicity, it costs the endorsees barely anything to accept it.
They are good for local elections in terms of door knocking and GOTV. I have not found them to be bad partners in any sense, nor have I found them to be super effective. Generally nice people who tend to help Democrats.
I have thought for a while that the best way for a US third party would be to not jump into the high-profile, high-visibility presidential race where everyone has an incentive to punch on you left and right as a spoiler. Instead, you'd target specific seats in Congress that are winnable and only run there on a focussed agenda, then create a workable small coalition of high-leverage votes in Congress to drive that agenda (in a knife's edge majority like the current US house has, you'd effectively be a swing block). This would probably give you a high profile to drive the conversation, and you would basically build up the infrastructure over a decade before ever wading into a presidential race.
Why do both major US small parties (libertarian and green) struggle to break into the US house?
Libertarians are cranks who won’t see past first principles to effectively practice politics and American (as opposed to European) Greens are neopastoralist degrowthers.
I remember JoJo being pretty moderate, with a platform that wasn't particularly hyper-focused on the usual taxation stuff and didn't seem like it would be particularly offensive to either moderate Dems or moderate GOPs.
Of course, going by Matt's theory, this was the exact wrong strategy at the exact wrong time in 2020, and the results definitely support that.
Isn't this mostly a selection effect? If you're willing to compromise enough to govern you're willing to join one of the major parties. As the share of less ideological party members dwindles the environment becomes increasingly hostile to less ideological members in a vicious cycle.
I am happy to have the cranks a part of the political ecosystem. The mainstream people get bogged down in group think and take dumb positions like a herd of mindless buffalo walking off the edge of a cliff.
Libertarians and Greens struggle because the presidential race is the big-time and frankly more interesting and exciting to focus on, even when it's a hopeless cause. For local candidates generally, it's far easier to piggyback on the national brand of a party than to create and grow a distinct brand.
Because competent libertarian and green-leaning people run in Democratic primaries in places where the Greens or Libertarian's could win. In theory, the Libertarian's should have 35 seats in the wacky NH legislature where there's 400 reps for a state the size of NH.
I'd start even smaller and more modestly - target state legislatures and medium-size city elections. It seems like it would be massively easier and cheaper to campaign, win, and gradually build up name recognition and support in a handful of states and/or metro areas over a few election cycles before targeting the US House, let alone the presidency. And there are a handful of state legislature seats held by various independents and third parties, but by and large their success rate is still pretty dismal.
Most people are voting against the other party at least as much as they are voting for their party. In that situation, you have to make credible commitments that you won't work with the "other party" to the extent that it negates the advantage of being a middle party willing to work with both sides.
If you're interested in 3rd parties I'd advocate for America switching to a 2 round electoral system, like the French do. This should open up space for them and make the system much more dynamic. Have multiple candidates from multiple parties run for House, Senate, and Presidency, with an initial vote in early October. The top 2 vote getters move on to the 2nd round in November. (If you wanted to use approval voting in the 1st round, I mean sure, fine).
A 2 round system allows anyone to compete, but the crucial difference between it versus proportional representation is that 2 rounds usually ends up with a majoritarian result- 1 party (usually) wins a majority of seats. PR would divide the House and Senate between multiple squabbling parties, a chaotic arrangement that makes passing legislation almost impossible. (Plus, you'd lack the safety valve of early elections). The 2 round system combines the best of both worlds- anyone can run, incumbent parties can't rely on their base and partisanship to win 50% of the elections, yet the ultimate result is a manageable government with a 1 party majority- fairly selected by the voters
Had America adopted proportional representation in the Progressive Era, I think we would have seen parties emerge similar to the Scandinavian countries because there was no state church. In such a world, I think we'd have an Agrarian party of folks like Golden.
When people say (and I'm not saying you're saying this) that, but for this one little thing (the electoral college, the filibuster, lack of proportional representation), we could have this great Scandinavian thing (universal healthcare, less inequality, more enlightened political debate), I wonder whether they're missing a larger cultural point.
Maybe the reason we're not like Scandinavia is because we're less culturally homogeneous (and hence have less trust in political institutions and solutions), more culturally libertarian, and perhaps because we realize we actually have it pretty good and don't want to rock the boat.
I would agree that it is unlikely we'd have a Scandinavian style welfare system, but I do think the public discourse would absolutely be more enlightened then what we see today if we had a multi-party system.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the quite substantial legal obstacles third parties face in getting ballot access. The Ds and Rs have a shared interest in locking out 3rd parties and they do a pretty good job of putting up barriers, Perhaps a future column could look at those issues.
Not to quibble but: shouldn't Osborn be getting hard money donations from leftist small donors, not just moderate small donors?
I understand that not many progressives think this way, but that's part of the problem. If your favorite politician is Bernie Sanders or AOC, it ought to be obvious that replacing a conservative Republican senator with a centrist independent is a good thing.
He's gotten some positive attention from leftist publications (IE. The Prospect). I'm not sure how that's translated to votes, but I think there is factional battle on the left about candidates who are pro economic populist like Osborn but are not pure on socially liberal issues.
Good to know. With respect, I think Matt has been talking a little too much lately about what "moderate Democrats" should do, when what he actually means is that Democrats across the board should be willing to moderate when it's strategically advantageous.
If the main argument for doing that is that it helps you win elections you'd otherwise lose, then the whole point (it seems to me) is that you should do it even if the moderate positions aren't the ones you prefer. He's not really addressing the audience he needs to address.
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Read about Duverger’s Law. Ahkil Reed Amar has almost a chapter in “America’s Unwritten Constitution” on the almost mathematical impossibility of third party success with a FPTP voting system. I agree with Matt’s take on the failure of so-called Third Party Candidates to actually committing to developing a viable third party, which would involve lots of grass roots organizing, fund raising, posting candidates in many local and state elections, and so on. Perot, Nader, Johnson, Stein, Kennedy: all “run for president,” then disappear, sometimes forever, sometimes for 4 years.
About a year ago I read Ken Block’s “Disproven,” which spends its first half discussing the month or so of his time serving for the Trump campaign as a fact checker on the various election fraud claims. Mostly he focused on debunking the claims by the various “expert”witnesses, such as Matt Braynard. While some of Trump’s younger lawyers listened to him, Trump and his most vocal supporters didn’t.
While that was interesting in and of itself, the second half goes into ways the election system could be improved. One aspect he focused on was how third parties could be made more viable. A couple of years earlier he had been a third party candidate, I believe in Connecticut.
I know it wasn't a paywalled one, so not a target for holidayization, but I was kinda hoping for an extended riff on the OG Columbus Day post from 2022, which was very On Brand (and reminded me that David R used to be A Thing). It genuinely does baffle me that I'd never once heard about the true origins of a well-known federal holiday until my 30s, and as a mostly unrelated throwaway tangent on a politics blog too. Felt especially pertinent as a San Franciscan...like I actually meet people who go out of their way to "correct" that it's Indigenous Peoples Day, acktually, and this is Justice for oppressed UMD*s, and the whole Steven Spielberg. Do they know the story? Probably not, and even if they did, they probably don't care! That sort of well-intentioned division-stoking and history-revision just seems rather counterproductive given current trends; I'm grateful for whichever anonymous soul marks up our workplace holiday signs each year with "Italian Heritage Day". Someone has to, and no one else will.
WRT third parties, I notice that those influence graphs generally slope downwards. A hypothetical (I) Trump woulda been a huge modern spike, but alas. Even RFK ended up endorsing Trump anyway, and that campaign's been a complete sideshow compared to other recent 3rd runs, which themselves were relative blips compared to historically. Perhaps this is due to the increasing nationalization of politics + hollowing out of local news/attention to local government? With the gulf between parties growing ever wider (even/especially at the surface-appearances level, which I bet counts more than actual policy variance), it gets harder and harder to justify the "well they're basically the same, I'll vote 3rd party for a real difference" rationalize.
Often we frame "don't vote third party" as admonishing someone to weigh in on the top two candidates and sacrificing their pet issue. But its striking that third parties are actively harmful to their cause, by removing their strongest supporters from the electorate. No one did more damage to the libertarian cause than Gary Johnson in 2016 and no one did more damage to the green cause than Jill Stein in 2016.
Aside from regional races, I think the other path forward for third parties is to do a "general election primary". First someone like Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or RFK Jr runs as a third party candidate in the general election. But then they commit to not being a spoiler - they ask their supporters to tell pollster if you want Gary Johnson to be president, which you can safely do without actually throwing away your vote. Then Gary Johnson commits to dropping out in September if his polling isn't at least 30%. When dropping out, he tries to drive a hard bargain on behalf of his decisive chunk of supporters, and talks to Clinton and Trump about the terms of his endorsement. Both candidate offer Johnson a cabinet position, and several key policy promises, and know his small pocket of supporters might be strong enough to swing it on behalf of his supporters.
Why doesn't it work like this? First, People are reluctant to tell pollsters they back the third party candidate while they really care about the two main candidates. Second, third parties are helmed by anti-establishment types that don't believe in the spoiler effect so they don't usually drop out. Third, when third party leaders do drop out, their endorsement doesn't carry enough weight that they can actually deliver their supporters. This last one is key, because if you simply drop out and the campaigns fight for the freed up voters, then its like you never ran in the first place. But to have leverage the supporters - who just a moment ago were ready to see Johnson as president - Johnson needs them to trust whatever deal he strikes on their behalf. This is basically proxy voting without an enforcement mechanism.
RFK Jr basically followed this template, except his campaign was fake so he never intended to support anyone other than Trump and didn't secure anything from Trump on foreign policy or the environment that former RFK Jr supporters can trust. Another model of this would be the labor unions, but the labor union leadership has notably neither rewarded Biden-Harris for their patronage nor can reliably deliver their members anymore. Going back to Matt's thesis - third parties might work, but we are too low-trust for third parties!
"No one did more damage to the libertarian cause than Gary Johnson in 2016"
Eh, hard disagree. The goal of the Libertarian presidential candidate is to "cover the spread" -- i.e., win more votes than the difference between the major party candidates in at least key states (preferably also nationwide) -- which Johnson did.
Yes but instead of paying that off to achieve Libertarian policy goals, he ensured that chunk of voters played no role in one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime.
I'll agree he achieved his goal, but in this case the goal is directly opposite from the Libertarian cause.
No one should be angrier about this than Libertarian true believers.
To get political power, you have to either have to get your candidates elected, or you have to get policy concessions from the person who does get elected. But to simply withhold your vote is actually a worse outcome than simply leaving your Libertarian-minded supporters to their own decisions.
If 2016 was merely show of force, they definitely failed to pay it off in 2020 either. It's a strategic blunder.
I am with many heterodox people who are not voting for Trump (because he’s a bad person) and struggle to vote for Harris. Harris was not selected as the party nominee through the normal (D) democratic process. The Democratic Party has been righteous about democracy as a political strategy against Trump. I struggle with this hypocrisy. Harris could loudly and clearly articulate her values here by simply acknowledging the unusual circumstance that lead to her nomination. She could then declare as leader of the Democratic Party she believes in democracy and would support and encourage a robust primary in four years. She would not follow the normal path of the incumbent. This simple act would show strength and it would show a true commitment to democracy. It would influence my vote by giving me a reason to respect her. Lead Kamala.
It is true I don’t like the outcome. Backroom deal making for the nominee is not our country’s norm for winning a parties nomination. Voting and winning delegates is. I am sure you can make a case for it being democratic
but that case is atypical.
You’re also right that you can’t force Shapiro and Whitmer and Msyor Pete to run. But you can take a different approach as a party and not steamroll opponents with the political power of being the incumbent. Harris could lead this process in good faith and it would put her in a place of grace. Living up to the enormous amount of lip service the Democrats have given to the importance of our Democracy.
I think this show of strength could help her with voters like myself and make a difference in the election. In addition to being sound in OUR democratic values, it’s good politics.
It’s also good for the Democratic Party. Because if she does great then it will be a nonissue and people probably will not run against her and even if the did she would win. But if she does poorly and has low approval ratings then this would have already been agreed upon as the process and she will loose and the Democrats will get a better nominee. She has already gotten her free pass nomination. You don’t get two free passes even if you’re unpopular.
It was atypical, to be sure. But there *was* a primary, delegates were selected, and *they* are the ones who ultimately gave their support to Harris. The process was followed exactly as written; having a new 50-state primary is what would have not only been chaotic but a violation of the rules everyone agreed to.
> But you can take a different approach as a party and not steamroll opponents with the political power of being the incumbent.
I don't even know what this would look like. But regardless, no campaign advisor would ever recommend this strategy (and would probably be fired immediately for even bringing it up). I think you'd be better off spending the effort convincing someone else to make a real run at her actually. *If* she wins in November, I think it sets up the same dynamic where no one wants to challenge her in 2028 (any invitations from her as you suggest will not seem nor probably be genuine). Then suddenly we're going to get a glut of dems running for 2032, many of them has-beens who missed their chance when they had it.
She could rise above the politics and embrace democratic values. I understand it is hard to imagine but it is possible. I would respect her for it and I think others would too. She needs every advantage she can get. People think she’s weak and insecure. This would push hard against that narrative. None of this matters if she doesn’t win. This would help her win.
I don’t care about the values of campaign advisors.
"No one in this party would/could compete in the primary against an octogenarian who dropped out of the race six months later for health reasons" is not a good argument for putting that party in power. No one wants to lead this party. Ms Harris is brave for trying.
When people can say things like "Richard Leland Levine" without having screaming ghouls descend on them from every direction, we'll know we're somewhere different. Until then, it's loons vs loons to anyone with a working brain.
"Harris was not selected as the party nominee through the normal (D) democratic process."
I'm not a Democrat and I'm not voting for Harris unless there's a huge polling shift toward Trump, but if anyone actually cares about this issue in this particular race, they have rocks in their head. Literally the only things Harris needs to point to are (1) she's not Donald Trump and (2) her political views as expressed over the past several years are within a standard deviation of the median national Democratic officeholder. That's it. How she became the Democratic candidate absent use of actual violent felonies or something like that should be completely irrelevant to one's vote.
I appreciate your thoughts. I think the process matters. Democrats have said the norms matter. She could illustrate that through a commitment to act accordingly. And frankly it only benefits the Democratic Party if she commits to a full and robust primary if she wins and then becomes very unpopular. We just did this. Is there no learning here?
She did everything precisely according to the norms. We had the usual full and robust primary campaign that we usually have when a first term incumbent is in office, and it went how it usually does. It was unusual for the winner of the primaries to step down before the convention, but because he did, we had the standard process in place - the delegates voted for the candidate they preferred. If Harris wins, very likely we will have a primary that looks a lot like the 2024 and 2012 primaries, where a few halfhearted protest candidates run but no one other than the incumbent gets significant numbers of votes, and they are re-nominated easily.
While I can see that someone who believes that popular voting should determine things might wish that there had been a popular voting process in place for replacing a nominee after the primaries and before the conventions, there isn’t a process in place for that, and it would have required some messing with the rules. And for better or worse, the existing process prevents candidates from being drafted - all the votes occur downstream from individuals choosing whether or not it is in their interest to put their name in.
To be clear, I don’t blame her for the fact that your first sentence is untrue. It’s Joe Biden’s fault. He should have been a more thoughtful and introspective leader. He wasn’t and still denies his own frailty.
This to me is the kind of reasoning a guy like Josh Barro was making on podcasts. And he was completely wrong. We must go with Biden. It’s his choice 100%. It would be bad if the Democrats change candidates. There is nothing the Party can do. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong…
Parties are bad at optimizing their electoral outcomes because they get lost in the individual candidates who optimize their individual interests.
Recent events should show us there are different ways to go about things and conventional thinking (I noticed a bit of a pun there) may not be optimal thinking. This is why I like Nate Silver and all of his EV talk. Parties are operating far below maximizing EV. And they are because the people in politics are not as smart as they think they are. Josh Barro is a good example.
1 - my half joking solution to Columbus Day (the OG woke holiday made to recognize Italianx contributions to America) is to rename it Amerigo Vespucci day since he's a nice guy who made some maps and has the New World named after him
2 - CT also allows fusion voting and WFP also works with the state Democratic party on nominations
3 - I am going to re-up and slightly modify a comment made a few weeks back that was smacked around a bit because I used the word "breakup" in terms of the post-Trump GOP. It seems to me that the presidential competitiveness of the Trump GOP requires Trump's unique ability to activate low propensity voters and that no other GOP leader has that juice. Even if Trump wins this election I think there will be another election in 2028. I think the odds of a pretty nasty post-Trump reckoning within the GOP are high and they risk becoming more akin to the California GOP but at a national level. In California you have quasi-one party rule, but as we Borers know there's growing factions of YIMBY vs NIMBY, process vs results, etc. Is the future of American politics California? What happens if post-Trump the GOP realizes it just isn't competitive nationally? Or, how does the GOP emerge from Trump as a competitive party? What does that party look like?
I have a deeper cut than Vespucci: Phillip Mazzei.
He was a friend of Jefferson who actually wrote the first drafts of the most famous words in the English language: “… that all men are created equal…”.
Jefferson gave him some land from Monticello to start a winery that still remains to this day; the first Italian winery in America. He was an abolitionist, so he imported free Italian workers and paid them good wages just next door to Jefferson’s plantation as a way to prove to his friend that free labor was not only morally righteous but also vastly superior.
I can think of no better an exemplar of Italian Americans in the founding of our nation.
Incredible
Also, I really wish more of the Italian American community knew more of the story of how we GOT Columbus Day. I’ve argued to my dad that we should never have accepted it because it was the 19th-century Anglos trying to foist a “hero” on us the same way they invented a bunch of other dumb narratives at the time (“people thought the world was FLAT!” == absolutely not true, a Victorian concoction to make themselves feel more enlightened than Continentals).
But it always seems to fall flat. IMO it’s just another sad example of the power of anchoring bias, and why we shouldn’t go inculcating children with bullshit historical myths.
It is pretty funny since Columbus himself would have had no concept of being "Italian".
It’s my own personal Italian Heritage Day story. I always make sure to trot it out every year.
What day would be a good day to remember him?
Re: (1) Was it Matt who I think not entirely jokingly noted we should rename it Garibaldi Day? Dude was an absolute legend and it's sad he's remembered mostly for the biscuit nowadays!
Garibaldi was born on the 4th of July!
The real story of why Columbus Day was created is quite interesting and tragic, kind of weird they never taught it to me in school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings
Only wierd because they didn’t want us to know how much of a scam it was.
It wasn't a scam though, it was a reaction to a real problem (anti-Italian and anti-Catholic bigotry) that resulted in a real tragedy and was president Benjamin Harrison's finest hour.
It's an interesting story and I think it's weird it was never taught in school as part of the "Columbus was very very bad bad bad bad bad" unit they made me go through several times.
I mean, that’s not really the read I got from it. Seems like he could have just as easily been pandering?
I dunno. Even if it was just honest transactionalism guided by a sense of trying to do the right thing, I’m still not all that impressed by him culminating a social movement (for this holiday) that was ultimately a mistake heavily reflecting contemporary Victorian-inspired WASP prejudices and mythologized narratives that turned out to be hideously manufactured.
Like, just to shift contexts to draw a contrast… if I were Black, I’d be proud of MLK Jr. Day, and I’d also consider it one of Reagan’s rare redeeming accomplishments for having declared a day after him. And yes, in the decades since, we’ve learned that the guy wasn’t squeaky clean in his personal life, but we’re pretty secure in the knowledge that he was clean enough to admire for the great positive accomplishments he made.
Now, let’s imagine that MAGA wins this election and plunges America into 100 years of historical revisionism. 120 years from now, I’m a Black man in a society just recently emerging from MAGA bullshit, and in that intervening time, Mark Robinson, Proud Black Nazi, who in the early years of the Trump Dictatorship period owned a bunch of New Slaves, had gotten revised into some sort of MAGA saint. *I* know this is all bullshit, but unfortunately a majority of my fellow Black Americans have been indoctrinated over the last century by their white MAGA oppressors into practically worshipping this guy. I’m not going to look fondly on some president who declares Mark Robinson Day just because he’s taking the “Black” side of some present-day controversy.
Or take the Mongols. If I’m a modern Mongolian, I know that we have a complicated relationship with Genghis Khan’s legacy. The dude is literally on the leaderboard for History’s Greatest Mass Murderers, but also a huge chunk of my countrymen are literally descended from him. But if a bunch of us immigrated to China for jobs, and the Chinese government that has always just barely tolerated my people has convinced a bunch of my fellow Mongolian-Chinese to worship GK declared a Genghis Khan Day as a way of taking the Mongolian side of some present-day racial controversy… I’d still regard it as bullshit, if not highly suspect.
The point here is not to shit on Harrison, it’s just to say that my complaint isn’t ABOUT Harrison, it’s about the shitty narrative — the *scam* of a narrative — that he just happened to pick up and run with, and do something that a bunch of my Italian American ancestors were happy about at the time. If we as a people were misled by the supposedly good thing he did for us, then it wasn’t actually all that good.
If it's "just pandering" then so is creating MLK day and apologizing (and paying reparations) to Japanese Americans who where interned during WW2. I guess the question is if you think those things were good or bad.
Either way it's an interesting story and weird nobody ever talks about it.
It's sure interesting! The point of my overlong rant was that MLK Day and the internment reparations were GOOD pandering.
After all, to some extent, ALL politics is pandering. But the good pandering is what stands the test of time. Columbus Day hasn't stood that test. And rather than punishing today's Italian-Americans for the Victorians' and Harrisons' mistakes, we should celebrate Mazzei Day instead.
Really obvious wishful thinking. Nikki Haley would be killing it. JEB probably would be too. Trump has a stranglehold on the primaries, but isn't very attractive to the middle. How many times does this need to be said?
One take I haven't seen percolating yet but feels elementally true to me is that which ever party wins in 3 weeks is probably going to get absolutely boatraced in 2028. If Harris wins, its incredibly difficult for a party to win three consecutive terms, particularly if people essentially cast Harris' victory not as a mandate but a final vanquishing of trump and wish by then to move on from the last ~15 years of politics. If Trump wins, his now highly inflationary economic agenda along with personal deficiencies will almost certainly leave him less popular by 2028 than he was in 2019 pre pandemic. And no-non Trump MAGA figure has proven they can carry the juice. So I can conceive the losing party on either end will retool and refine their message and messenger, probably to dominating effect. Is it so hard to see Haley beating Harris or Buttigieg beating Vance in the 350 range?
Idk if there are any Skowronek-heads among the slow borers but in 2020-2021 there was a ton of talk that Trump was going to be the final disjunctive sunset of the Reagan Paradigm and that Biden represented the new progressive Regime making administration.(https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/opinion/biden-president-progressive.html) I think history has proven that this era of political time has had at least 2 additional cycle left, and the real disjunctive presidency of this era might be POTUS 47, only to be replaced by a dominating POTUS 48 who can set the agenda and terms of debate for the 2030s and beyond.
Obama was the last President of the Reagan Era. We’re in an in-between period right now. The old world is dead and the new one is not yet born, that sort of thing.
Yes, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem PA to be born
I don't disagree but this is more or less the exact definition of a disjunctive presidency in Skowronek's framework. One would have expected that Trump 45 would have given way to a new Regime making paradigm. But the parties are so closely divided rn that it may take an extra cycle to reach that point of consensus building. And in some ways, Biden has had similar hallmarks of both a regime making and a disjunctive president, so we are in an extended disjunctive haze, quite possibly of three consecutive one term presidents, something that hasn't been seen since the late 1800's
It's very hard to win three straight, but we've never had a situation where the person going for three straight was also the incumbent. I do worry about Harris' ability to govern in popular way and/or run a good campaign from scratch - she's run a pretty good campaign this year, but her past electoral track record was not that impressive and I think it's possible that the unusual circumstances of her nomination this year allowed her to run in a way that minimized her weaknesses. But the "three straight elections" issue doesn't worry me as much as it normally would.
If Trump wins, I think we'll see him attempt pretty massive abuses of power that you'd only expect to see in a banana republic. They probably won't fully succeed, but they will make 2028 extremely chaotic.
>never
FDR? Hello?
LBJ would have been running for his party’s third straight.
Honestly, I don’t even know if we’d make it to 2028 without a constitutional crisis. The next president is most likely going to deal with a recession sometime between now and 2027. Trump doesn’t have the same cushiony pre-COVID conditions he had 5 years ago; even taking his economic agenda on modest terms (a smaller tariff, less ambitious tax cuts for the rich, less ambitious healthcare reforms), still basically any action he took would highly risk triggering a recession in ways he got away with before COVID but won’t this time around. And if the recession gets bad enough, he’ll end up facing a Democratic House that’s out for blood.
If Trump wins, the *best-case* scenario is that he waffles on his tariff pledge after the business community nixes it, but they still allow him to tinker at the edges enough that he plunges the country into stagflation or an inflationary recession (perhaps a 3% across-the-board tariff instead of 10%, something stupid like that). All of this keeps his goons distracted from executing on Project 2025 -- they all start running for the exits and don't stay long enough to implement their favorite authoritarian policies. The wheels fall off the whole thing, and he steps down in 2026 having declared he's fulfilled his MAGA promise.
Again, that's just me spinning an irresponsibly optimistic "best" case. No one should take this as a serious reason to doubt the danger he poses.
The point of bringing that up, though, was that the big problem I see with your take is that while I understand the phenomenological pattern of 3rd-consecutive-term races, I don't see the actual mechanism by which either party would be in position to boatrace the other. If Trump wins, the "middle of the distribution" scenario is that he enacts large chunks of P2025 that basically cement GOP minoritarian rule without sparking a large enough backlash to overturn his actions. I'm not sure the Democrats would so much "boatrace" him in 2028 alone, as they'd simply be waging a 4-year-long political insurgency against him.
And conversely, if Harris wins and successfully fends off whatever second coup attempt Trump mounts between November and Inauguration Day, I think the GOP gets stuck in a holding pattern until Trump dies. As I said yday, they can't jettison him because he's buttressing their turnout numbers, but they also can't win pure majorities with him either. He won't leave the scene on his own volition. And once he dies, the party dissolves into anocracy (look it up, it's a fun poli-sci term!): multiple independent power centers who each lack the decisive edge to win control over the entire party.
So yeah, I don't think that's a party that boatraces Harris in 2028. Sure, stranger things have happened; maybe if Trump dies in like February, the GOP has enough time to collapse and rebuild. A point in favor of this would be that I think one of the major reasons for our era of parity is that both parties have sufficiently competent professional campaign wings that they've basically fought the last two decades to a stalemate, and despite Trump's depredations, most of these professionals haven't actually left the party (unlike the true exiles like Cheney or pseudo-exiles like Romney). Buuuuut... in the face of the general chaos and anocracy, I don't think the professionals could actually help any of their preferred actors reconstruct the party that fast. The right-wing propaganda machine is basically running on fumes and has lost its own ability to stay coherent; the grievances are flying in all directions, and I think they've hit the point where the only thing holding it all together is Trump and the base's ability to project their specific grievances onto him. Without him... it just collapses. No boatrace, just a whimpering rump of a party having itself a marathon struggle session while the rest of America moves on. Harris sails to re-election, becomes a quasi-Reagan-like figure who reshapes politics by becoming the mold our politicians try to emulate for the next several decades, and Rubio wins in 2032 by presenting in the Clintonian-synthesis tradition as the GOP's Harris-like response to Harris's Reagan-like figure.
>>he steps down in 2026 having declared he's fulfilled his MAGA promise<<
Trump faces too much legal jeopardy to voluntarily give up the protections of presidential immunity two years early. This will never, EVER happen.
He may not serve a full term if he wins, who knows? But if that's the case it won't be due to his voluntary resignation, but because he doesn't live that long.
Good point! I’d counter that a friendly successor could grant him a Nixon-like pardon.
I assume he would pardon himself before he stepped down.
Not that this egomaniac would ever step down.
I appreciate the effort of imagination here. I think a much simpler explanation of Trump 2.0 is just really high inflation and a ton of policies people dislike and when he cannot run in 2028, JD is dragged down by his wake just as Harris is now. Conversely I just think it will be hard for Harris to independently hold that much support as an incumbent. Funny enough, she may actually benefit from her likely inability to enact broad policy without control of congress, as opposed to where Biden is now due to being able to enact so much, too much, of his agenda. But I don't think the retooling premise is that hard to imagine. Who would have guessed how strong republicans would be in 1980 on the day Nixon resigned? I think republicans will definitely change their view and message if they lose. They arguably did so after Romney, just not in the way the Autopsy directed them to do so. Same for Democrats, if Harris loses, I think we will see an effort to reform the party to be more electorally viable.
I think that if Trump is still feeling up to it in 2028, he runs and dares SCOTUS to DQ him. And even if they do, he runs JD (or a replacement) as a Medvedev-like cutout and then dares them to prevent some sort of shenanigan to circumvent 22A.
Also, if Harris loses while winning the popular vote (most likely scenario if she loses), then among other things, Dems spend the next 4 years campaigning to abolish the EC. It would become the central national push. At least one more state would ratify the NIPVC by 2028, and several others would pass resolutions calling for an A5 constitutional convention specifically directed to abolish the EC.
I hate that this idea has taken such a hold of ppl. I can't even begin to put into words how utterly bananas a leap it is to say because SCOTUS ruled in Dobbs or even the Immunity case in a way ppl don't like that now they will just literally ignore the most unambiguous words of the Constitution and pretend a "two" isnt there. It's ultimately not even up to trump if he runs again, its up to the diffuse secretaries of states to put him on ballots again, any one of whom would have standing to sue in federal court to stop him. There's not a district court in America that would uphold that challenge by trump. Not one.
Further if Polls are to be believed the most likely Trump victory scenario is he just straight beats her, not a PV/EV split. I agree that if he does split, Dems are gonna lose their friggin' minds around the Electoral College and honestly the whole constitutional framework.
I agree that not even this Court would allow Trump to run for a third term. For Trump to stay in office (officially, not with a Medvedev cutout) he'd have to do something really crazy like try to cancel the election altogether or have judges and political opponents arrested. I can't see that working out for him in the end, although he could use the pardon power to cause quite a bit of havoc.
it is certainly an out there scenario, but there are paths it can go down. SCOTUS could just start by saying it's not ripe unless or until there is an election. They could then claim it's not justiciable and that it's up to Congress to stop or decide.
Why is it such a bananas leap? There can be very little question that Trump himself would somehow be above trying.
In 2021, 8 Senators and 139 House Members voted to not certify the election. What is so distinctive about being a member of the Supreme Court that we can believe that their character is guaranteed to be better than those 147 members? They're drawn from the same pool, and would face all the same pressures, inducements, and motivations.
I don't believe it is at all likely, but I no longer default to believing it's unthinkable.
I fundamentally disagree with that perspective. There are very good reasons for what you call a “bananas leap”, and you seem like an otherwise cogent person, so I think if you can’t countenance those reasons’ existence, then we don’t really have anything productive left to discuss.
"boatraced"
From the context of the rest of your comment, I can get that this apparently means, "decisively defeated," but what the heck is the origin of it?
Haha. It’s a sports metaphor. Started in crew/rowing. Idea is that a team ahead at the midway point almost never is caught from behind. Now it’s used as a synonym for a drumming defeat.
Thank you!
What's wrong with the Patron Saint of Italy, St Francis of Assisi? His feast day is October 4th, a perfectly cromulent day.
Too many Catholic overtones for a secular holiday.
All those Protestant Italians!
I suspect most Italians wouldn't have a problem with it.
In Colorado, we've got Mother Cabrini Day on the first Monday of October as an official state holiday, but that doesn't really translate nationwide.
Forever stuck in my mind is a Firesign Theatre bit where Spanish conquistadors go marching off singing “God Bless Vespucciland!”
Re (2) is it worth voting on the WFP line in CT? Does the WFP do useful stuff?
They're not really active in my town; it's mostly just a secondary line for Dems who want to show they're going the extra mile here. It *would* be a relatively useful signal for progressives vs. moderates, but the WFP makes it so easy to get their endorsement, even the moderates usually seek it just to say they've got it. And WFP accumulates so little toxicity, it costs the endorsees barely anything to accept it.
They are good for local elections in terms of door knocking and GOTV. I have not found them to be bad partners in any sense, nor have I found them to be super effective. Generally nice people who tend to help Democrats.
I have thought for a while that the best way for a US third party would be to not jump into the high-profile, high-visibility presidential race where everyone has an incentive to punch on you left and right as a spoiler. Instead, you'd target specific seats in Congress that are winnable and only run there on a focussed agenda, then create a workable small coalition of high-leverage votes in Congress to drive that agenda (in a knife's edge majority like the current US house has, you'd effectively be a swing block). This would probably give you a high profile to drive the conversation, and you would basically build up the infrastructure over a decade before ever wading into a presidential race.
Why do both major US small parties (libertarian and green) struggle to break into the US house?
Libertarians are cranks who won’t see past first principles to effectively practice politics and American (as opposed to European) Greens are neopastoralist degrowthers.
> Greens are neopastoralist degrowthers
And so are lots of people in California, so why can't they win a seat there, for example?
The Greens used to at least get decently far in San Francisco supervisor and mayoral races, but I haven't heard much about them on that level lately.
I remember JoJo being pretty moderate, with a platform that wasn't particularly hyper-focused on the usual taxation stuff and didn't seem like it would be particularly offensive to either moderate Dems or moderate GOPs.
Of course, going by Matt's theory, this was the exact wrong strategy at the exact wrong time in 2020, and the results definitely support that.
Isn't this mostly a selection effect? If you're willing to compromise enough to govern you're willing to join one of the major parties. As the share of less ideological party members dwindles the environment becomes increasingly hostile to less ideological members in a vicious cycle.
I am happy to have the cranks a part of the political ecosystem. The mainstream people get bogged down in group think and take dumb positions like a herd of mindless buffalo walking off the edge of a cliff.
Libertarians and Greens struggle because the presidential race is the big-time and frankly more interesting and exciting to focus on, even when it's a hopeless cause. For local candidates generally, it's far easier to piggyback on the national brand of a party than to create and grow a distinct brand.
Because competent libertarian and green-leaning people run in Democratic primaries in places where the Greens or Libertarian's could win. In theory, the Libertarian's should have 35 seats in the wacky NH legislature where there's 400 reps for a state the size of NH.
Instead, those types just win primaries.
I'd start even smaller and more modestly - target state legislatures and medium-size city elections. It seems like it would be massively easier and cheaper to campaign, win, and gradually build up name recognition and support in a handful of states and/or metro areas over a few election cycles before targeting the US House, let alone the presidency. And there are a handful of state legislature seats held by various independents and third parties, but by and large their success rate is still pretty dismal.
Lol this is basically the Yang Forward Party plan.
Most people are voting against the other party at least as much as they are voting for their party. In that situation, you have to make credible commitments that you won't work with the "other party" to the extent that it negates the advantage of being a middle party willing to work with both sides.
In New Haven, it's Italian Heritage Day!
Unfortunately we do not get school off
Form an encampment and protest!
Happy Canadian Thanksgiving folks
If you're interested in 3rd parties I'd advocate for America switching to a 2 round electoral system, like the French do. This should open up space for them and make the system much more dynamic. Have multiple candidates from multiple parties run for House, Senate, and Presidency, with an initial vote in early October. The top 2 vote getters move on to the 2nd round in November. (If you wanted to use approval voting in the 1st round, I mean sure, fine).
A 2 round system allows anyone to compete, but the crucial difference between it versus proportional representation is that 2 rounds usually ends up with a majoritarian result- 1 party (usually) wins a majority of seats. PR would divide the House and Senate between multiple squabbling parties, a chaotic arrangement that makes passing legislation almost impossible. (Plus, you'd lack the safety valve of early elections). The 2 round system combines the best of both worlds- anyone can run, incumbent parties can't rely on their base and partisanship to win 50% of the elections, yet the ultimate result is a manageable government with a 1 party majority- fairly selected by the voters
Had America adopted proportional representation in the Progressive Era, I think we would have seen parties emerge similar to the Scandinavian countries because there was no state church. In such a world, I think we'd have an Agrarian party of folks like Golden.
When people say (and I'm not saying you're saying this) that, but for this one little thing (the electoral college, the filibuster, lack of proportional representation), we could have this great Scandinavian thing (universal healthcare, less inequality, more enlightened political debate), I wonder whether they're missing a larger cultural point.
Maybe the reason we're not like Scandinavia is because we're less culturally homogeneous (and hence have less trust in political institutions and solutions), more culturally libertarian, and perhaps because we realize we actually have it pretty good and don't want to rock the boat.
I would agree that it is unlikely we'd have a Scandinavian style welfare system, but I do think the public discourse would absolutely be more enlightened then what we see today if we had a multi-party system.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the quite substantial legal obstacles third parties face in getting ballot access. The Ds and Rs have a shared interest in locking out 3rd parties and they do a pretty good job of putting up barriers, Perhaps a future column could look at those issues.
Not to quibble but: shouldn't Osborn be getting hard money donations from leftist small donors, not just moderate small donors?
I understand that not many progressives think this way, but that's part of the problem. If your favorite politician is Bernie Sanders or AOC, it ought to be obvious that replacing a conservative Republican senator with a centrist independent is a good thing.
He's gotten some positive attention from leftist publications (IE. The Prospect). I'm not sure how that's translated to votes, but I think there is factional battle on the left about candidates who are pro economic populist like Osborn but are not pure on socially liberal issues.
Good to know. With respect, I think Matt has been talking a little too much lately about what "moderate Democrats" should do, when what he actually means is that Democrats across the board should be willing to moderate when it's strategically advantageous.
If the main argument for doing that is that it helps you win elections you'd otherwise lose, then the whole point (it seems to me) is that you should do it even if the moderate positions aren't the ones you prefer. He's not really addressing the audience he needs to address.
Hello - I am looking for help, and I cannot find a Substack customer service number to follow up. I used an AI chatbot on the support page several times this weekend, but my issue was not resolved and I'm trying to follow up with a human.
I subscribed to slowboring two weeks ago, but I seem to have created two accounts rather than just one. My credit card has been charged twice, and I cannot figure out what email address I need to use to cancel the extra account.
My goal is to find a human at Substack with whom I can talk. Do any of the frequent users have a telephone number they can direct me to?
Thank you very much for your help!
Hi Walker, I'm sorry about this! I don't see another subscription with a similar name on our list, and we unfortunately can't help without knowing the email address associated with the subscription you want to cancel. But if you email support@substack.com, you should be able to connect with a human who can look into this.
Great, I will try that. Thank you, Kate.
You’re also welcome to email me (staff is always first name@slowboring.com) if you’re still having trouble reaching someone.
"My credit card has been charged twice"
Don't forget to dispute the second charge with your credit card company. Having (e.g.) CapitolOne on your side is very useful in getting (e.g.) Substack customer service to wake up and pay attention.
Soooo basically you’re saying that Yang’s Forward Party was actually based on a correct theory.
Read about Duverger’s Law. Ahkil Reed Amar has almost a chapter in “America’s Unwritten Constitution” on the almost mathematical impossibility of third party success with a FPTP voting system. I agree with Matt’s take on the failure of so-called Third Party Candidates to actually committing to developing a viable third party, which would involve lots of grass roots organizing, fund raising, posting candidates in many local and state elections, and so on. Perot, Nader, Johnson, Stein, Kennedy: all “run for president,” then disappear, sometimes forever, sometimes for 4 years.
About a year ago I read Ken Block’s “Disproven,” which spends its first half discussing the month or so of his time serving for the Trump campaign as a fact checker on the various election fraud claims. Mostly he focused on debunking the claims by the various “expert”witnesses, such as Matt Braynard. While some of Trump’s younger lawyers listened to him, Trump and his most vocal supporters didn’t.
While that was interesting in and of itself, the second half goes into ways the election system could be improved. One aspect he focused on was how third parties could be made more viable. A couple of years earlier he had been a third party candidate, I believe in Connecticut.
I know it wasn't a paywalled one, so not a target for holidayization, but I was kinda hoping for an extended riff on the OG Columbus Day post from 2022, which was very On Brand (and reminded me that David R used to be A Thing). It genuinely does baffle me that I'd never once heard about the true origins of a well-known federal holiday until my 30s, and as a mostly unrelated throwaway tangent on a politics blog too. Felt especially pertinent as a San Franciscan...like I actually meet people who go out of their way to "correct" that it's Indigenous Peoples Day, acktually, and this is Justice for oppressed UMD*s, and the whole Steven Spielberg. Do they know the story? Probably not, and even if they did, they probably don't care! That sort of well-intentioned division-stoking and history-revision just seems rather counterproductive given current trends; I'm grateful for whichever anonymous soul marks up our workplace holiday signs each year with "Italian Heritage Day". Someone has to, and no one else will.
WRT third parties, I notice that those influence graphs generally slope downwards. A hypothetical (I) Trump woulda been a huge modern spike, but alas. Even RFK ended up endorsing Trump anyway, and that campaign's been a complete sideshow compared to other recent 3rd runs, which themselves were relative blips compared to historically. Perhaps this is due to the increasing nationalization of politics + hollowing out of local news/attention to local government? With the gulf between parties growing ever wider (even/especially at the surface-appearances level, which I bet counts more than actual policy variance), it gets harder and harder to justify the "well they're basically the same, I'll vote 3rd party for a real difference" rationalize.
*Use Minority Designation
Often we frame "don't vote third party" as admonishing someone to weigh in on the top two candidates and sacrificing their pet issue. But its striking that third parties are actively harmful to their cause, by removing their strongest supporters from the electorate. No one did more damage to the libertarian cause than Gary Johnson in 2016 and no one did more damage to the green cause than Jill Stein in 2016.
Aside from regional races, I think the other path forward for third parties is to do a "general election primary". First someone like Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or RFK Jr runs as a third party candidate in the general election. But then they commit to not being a spoiler - they ask their supporters to tell pollster if you want Gary Johnson to be president, which you can safely do without actually throwing away your vote. Then Gary Johnson commits to dropping out in September if his polling isn't at least 30%. When dropping out, he tries to drive a hard bargain on behalf of his decisive chunk of supporters, and talks to Clinton and Trump about the terms of his endorsement. Both candidate offer Johnson a cabinet position, and several key policy promises, and know his small pocket of supporters might be strong enough to swing it on behalf of his supporters.
Why doesn't it work like this? First, People are reluctant to tell pollsters they back the third party candidate while they really care about the two main candidates. Second, third parties are helmed by anti-establishment types that don't believe in the spoiler effect so they don't usually drop out. Third, when third party leaders do drop out, their endorsement doesn't carry enough weight that they can actually deliver their supporters. This last one is key, because if you simply drop out and the campaigns fight for the freed up voters, then its like you never ran in the first place. But to have leverage the supporters - who just a moment ago were ready to see Johnson as president - Johnson needs them to trust whatever deal he strikes on their behalf. This is basically proxy voting without an enforcement mechanism.
RFK Jr basically followed this template, except his campaign was fake so he never intended to support anyone other than Trump and didn't secure anything from Trump on foreign policy or the environment that former RFK Jr supporters can trust. Another model of this would be the labor unions, but the labor union leadership has notably neither rewarded Biden-Harris for their patronage nor can reliably deliver their members anymore. Going back to Matt's thesis - third parties might work, but we are too low-trust for third parties!
"No one did more damage to the libertarian cause than Gary Johnson in 2016"
Eh, hard disagree. The goal of the Libertarian presidential candidate is to "cover the spread" -- i.e., win more votes than the difference between the major party candidates in at least key states (preferably also nationwide) -- which Johnson did.
Yes but instead of paying that off to achieve Libertarian policy goals, he ensured that chunk of voters played no role in one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime.
I'll agree he achieved his goal, but in this case the goal is directly opposite from the Libertarian cause.
No one should be angrier about this than Libertarian true believers.
To get political power, you have to either have to get your candidates elected, or you have to get policy concessions from the person who does get elected. But to simply withhold your vote is actually a worse outcome than simply leaving your Libertarian-minded supporters to their own decisions.
If 2016 was merely show of force, they definitely failed to pay it off in 2020 either. It's a strategic blunder.
I voted third party. Im over the drama and don’t see this election as existential as the media makes it out to be.
I am with many heterodox people who are not voting for Trump (because he’s a bad person) and struggle to vote for Harris. Harris was not selected as the party nominee through the normal (D) democratic process. The Democratic Party has been righteous about democracy as a political strategy against Trump. I struggle with this hypocrisy. Harris could loudly and clearly articulate her values here by simply acknowledging the unusual circumstance that lead to her nomination. She could then declare as leader of the Democratic Party she believes in democracy and would support and encourage a robust primary in four years. She would not follow the normal path of the incumbent. This simple act would show strength and it would show a true commitment to democracy. It would influence my vote by giving me a reason to respect her. Lead Kamala.
Everything about the process was democratic (even though it really didn't need to be), you just didn't like the outcome.
And how will she force people to actually run when no one even bothered to make what was arguably a much better run at her this year?
It is true I don’t like the outcome. Backroom deal making for the nominee is not our country’s norm for winning a parties nomination. Voting and winning delegates is. I am sure you can make a case for it being democratic
but that case is atypical.
You’re also right that you can’t force Shapiro and Whitmer and Msyor Pete to run. But you can take a different approach as a party and not steamroll opponents with the political power of being the incumbent. Harris could lead this process in good faith and it would put her in a place of grace. Living up to the enormous amount of lip service the Democrats have given to the importance of our Democracy.
I think this show of strength could help her with voters like myself and make a difference in the election. In addition to being sound in OUR democratic values, it’s good politics.
It’s also good for the Democratic Party. Because if she does great then it will be a nonissue and people probably will not run against her and even if the did she would win. But if she does poorly and has low approval ratings then this would have already been agreed upon as the process and she will loose and the Democrats will get a better nominee. She has already gotten her free pass nomination. You don’t get two free passes even if you’re unpopular.
It was atypical, to be sure. But there *was* a primary, delegates were selected, and *they* are the ones who ultimately gave their support to Harris. The process was followed exactly as written; having a new 50-state primary is what would have not only been chaotic but a violation of the rules everyone agreed to.
> But you can take a different approach as a party and not steamroll opponents with the political power of being the incumbent.
I don't even know what this would look like. But regardless, no campaign advisor would ever recommend this strategy (and would probably be fired immediately for even bringing it up). I think you'd be better off spending the effort convincing someone else to make a real run at her actually. *If* she wins in November, I think it sets up the same dynamic where no one wants to challenge her in 2028 (any invitations from her as you suggest will not seem nor probably be genuine). Then suddenly we're going to get a glut of dems running for 2032, many of them has-beens who missed their chance when they had it.
You’re right because of politics.
She could rise above the politics and embrace democratic values. I understand it is hard to imagine but it is possible. I would respect her for it and I think others would too. She needs every advantage she can get. People think she’s weak and insecure. This would push hard against that narrative. None of this matters if she doesn’t win. This would help her win.
I don’t care about the values of campaign advisors.
"No one in this party would/could compete in the primary against an octogenarian who dropped out of the race six months later for health reasons" is not a good argument for putting that party in power. No one wants to lead this party. Ms Harris is brave for trying.
When people can say things like "Richard Leland Levine" without having screaming ghouls descend on them from every direction, we'll know we're somewhere different. Until then, it's loons vs loons to anyone with a working brain.
"Harris was not selected as the party nominee through the normal (D) democratic process."
I'm not a Democrat and I'm not voting for Harris unless there's a huge polling shift toward Trump, but if anyone actually cares about this issue in this particular race, they have rocks in their head. Literally the only things Harris needs to point to are (1) she's not Donald Trump and (2) her political views as expressed over the past several years are within a standard deviation of the median national Democratic officeholder. That's it. How she became the Democratic candidate absent use of actual violent felonies or something like that should be completely irrelevant to one's vote.
I appreciate your thoughts. I think the process matters. Democrats have said the norms matter. She could illustrate that through a commitment to act accordingly. And frankly it only benefits the Democratic Party if she commits to a full and robust primary if she wins and then becomes very unpopular. We just did this. Is there no learning here?
She did everything precisely according to the norms. We had the usual full and robust primary campaign that we usually have when a first term incumbent is in office, and it went how it usually does. It was unusual for the winner of the primaries to step down before the convention, but because he did, we had the standard process in place - the delegates voted for the candidate they preferred. If Harris wins, very likely we will have a primary that looks a lot like the 2024 and 2012 primaries, where a few halfhearted protest candidates run but no one other than the incumbent gets significant numbers of votes, and they are re-nominated easily.
While I can see that someone who believes that popular voting should determine things might wish that there had been a popular voting process in place for replacing a nominee after the primaries and before the conventions, there isn’t a process in place for that, and it would have required some messing with the rules. And for better or worse, the existing process prevents candidates from being drafted - all the votes occur downstream from individuals choosing whether or not it is in their interest to put their name in.
To be clear, I don’t blame her for the fact that your first sentence is untrue. It’s Joe Biden’s fault. He should have been a more thoughtful and introspective leader. He wasn’t and still denies his own frailty.
This to me is the kind of reasoning a guy like Josh Barro was making on podcasts. And he was completely wrong. We must go with Biden. It’s his choice 100%. It would be bad if the Democrats change candidates. There is nothing the Party can do. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong…
Parties are bad at optimizing their electoral outcomes because they get lost in the individual candidates who optimize their individual interests.
Recent events should show us there are different ways to go about things and conventional thinking (I noticed a bit of a pun there) may not be optimal thinking. This is why I like Nate Silver and all of his EV talk. Parties are operating far below maximizing EV. And they are because the people in politics are not as smart as they think they are. Josh Barro is a good example.