Typical. A young pup like you just cannot appreciate the advantages of being represented by someone whose arterial plaque has almost completely occluded the blood flow to their brain.
Really? Wow. Time stops for no one, huh. I guess it makes sense that she’s a year older than my mom. But I met her at a rally in 2020 and thought she was pretty spry.
Perhaps not, but it seems irrelevant to the question of control of the Senate; I can't imagine him losing to a Republican unless something really extreme happens, and even if he dies we have a Democratic governor who'd appoint his replacement.
Not concerned about him losing to a Republican, I’m concerned about cognitive decline. Markey will be 86 at the end of his next term. 1/3 of people over 85 have dementia.
That's just ageist nonsense. I'm as cognitively sharp as ever.
Why, if 1/3 of people over 85 had dementia, then that would mean that 100% of people would have it when they are 1/3 the age of 85, which would be... carry the 4... 39! Now, are you really going to tell me that in 1939, everyone had dementia? That's a little before my time, of course, but the '39 Yankees had Joltin' Joe Dementia, the best hitter of all time, at least he was then, and wasn't that wife of his something hot, too, what was her name? Woo, we used to think she was the cat's meow.
We should not have an 70+ year old running for election in any safe(ish) seat in the country, and we should have candidates lining up in the primaries to discourage them from such foolish actions.
Remember that OBBB likely would not have passed but for the selfishness of the late Gerry Connelly (D-VA - 75), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ, 77) and Sylvester Turner (D-TX - 70). These men ran for re-election in safe seats, despite serious health problems, and we get to pay the price.
I guess now’s a good time to drop this anecdote: on Election Day 2020 I was working the polls and Ayanna Pressley dropped by to give us some donuts. I asked for a picture, she asked me my age, I said 17, and she said “I’ll keep the seat warm for you.”
Who actually cares what their age is. If you're using age for a proxy of mental fitness, why not just you know, evaluate the candidate on their mental fitness. Massachusetts is going to elect whatever dem is on the ballot so why do you even care, do you want a 30 year old with Markey's policies?
Yeah I think a 30 year old with Markey’s policies would be better than an 80+ year old with Markey’s policies. If Markey agrees to undergo regular cognitive tests and promises to resign if he starts showing signs of decline that would be great too but I doubt that he will.
Not to mention that if (when) he kicks the bucket, it'd be good to have somebody in the job who already knows the job and has the legitimacy of being elected by the voters, not praying that the governor makes a good choice and the new person can hit the ground running.
Dianne Feinstein didn't do anybody any favors sticking around in the senate and neither will Markey.
Why, is there something inherently wrong with an 80 yes old candidate, or are you using it as a proxy for mental competence. If that is the case why not just judge his mental competence on the merits? Do you have any actual critiques of his policy, or is this just a "vibes bad" schtick?
I agree that voters should evaluate candidates' acuity on the merits rather than using age as a proxy, but the wrinkle is that a Senate term is 6 years and voters can't consider what a person's condition will be at the end of that time because it isn't yet known. The possibility of an 80-year-old experiencing decline over the next 6 years is non-negligible and something that I think voters might reasonably take into account when deciding who to vote for, whereas with someone much younger I think being concerned about that particular issue would not be reasonable.
Yes I think there is something inherently wrong with an 80 year old candidate—they are at much higher risk of serious health issues and/or mental decline and/or death. Markey’s policy views are fine by me, I supported him in his last primary, but he’s too old now and he should step aside!
I think we've progressed in this country to the point we don't care whether or not you're a bastard. They don't have to actually have the last name Kennedy.
Texas Democrat working in the oil and gas industry chiming in to say that I think the absolute best option would be to recruit a retired oil and gas exec to run as an independent, with the platform of “Trump is bad for our state’s oil and gas industry.” Which is true! Tariffs are terrible, trade wars are terrible for commodity businesses, and Trump is very clear that he wants low oil prices! Throw in some stuff about being a good Christian man that contrasts with Trump. The modal Texan (AND the modal oil and gas executive) doesn’t like Democrats but also doesn’t like Trump at all. “We need an independent voice that will stop these harmful tariffs,” something along those lines.
Right exactly! Generally speaking oil and gas executives have moved left for education polarization reasons, just like in other industries. The way they talk about environmental performance is light-years different than 15-20 years ago, but of course they are generally not Democrats, because Democrats are hostile to the oil and gas industry. That's why I think a Manchin-style independent, caucusing with Democrats to be a check on Trump, is the needle to thread here.
“Trump is very clear that he wants low oil prices!”
Um, l’m second to no one on this comment thread in my incandescent hatred of Trump, but in this case, isn’t Trump simply expressing the popular position? Almost every American wants cheap oil, because it means cheap gasoline for filling up your big-ass truck and overall lower cost of living.
If your best case against Trump is “he wants low oil prices and he’s not a good Christian,” then I’m super dubious about your ability to win anything. (Trump has never been a good Christian and it hasn’t stopped good devout white Evangelicals from being his most reliable voting bloc, so.)
I'm saying Trump's desire for low oil prices, and resulting pressure on the oil and gas industry, is a source of vulnerability with a) oil and gas executives specifically and b) Texans generally. Not that a Texas Senate candidate should run around calling for $100/bbl, but "Trump's trade wars and pushing Saudi to pump more barrels are hurting Texas and Texans" I think is viable
That makes sense, and I want to keep an open mind, but is "this policy is bad for oil and gas executives" a strong attack line? How popular are fat-cat oil executives?
Trump is a bundle of contradictions, not the least of which is that he's a spoiled rich boy who styles himself The Champion of the Common Forgotten Folk. If you run against him based on "he's hurting big oil companies' profits," aren't you buying into the framing of "Trump wants you to have cheap oil, so he's on your side against greedy rich elites?"
Put another way, how do you successfully thread the needle between "Texans need/want a strong oil industry for their economy" and "Texans want cheap gasoline for their big-ass trucks and SUVs"? There's an inherent contradiction here.
Once again, Matt hits hard with his New Hampshire erasure. I bet he didn't even stop at the NH state liquor store on I 95 on his way home from Maine.
Anyhow, I'm worried about how the NH Senate race shakes out with Shaheen's retirement. This adds a pretty big wild card.
Pappas is favored to take the seat, but NH is fickle and despite leaning Dem, currently has a Republican governor and a Republican controlled legislature. If Ayotte was running for the seat, I'd be very worried. At least the current R lineup doesn't seem super strong.
Still, the Dems holding that seat is not a sure bet at all imo.
Completely OT, but a couple weeks ago a little bell went off in my head and I realized that living in north central Connecticut there are NH liquor stores less than an hour away from me up I-91, and I don't actually have to go all the way to Portsmouth. Now all my liquor is cheap, not just what I bring back from vacation.
Four year, four years I've been here, and this just occurred to me.
The fact that the WAR metric suggests that Rashida Tlaib might be a better statewide candidate in Michigan than Haley Stevens is a nice demonstration of the WAR metric's limitations. If recent Senate races in Michigan have proven anything, it's that Michigan Dems will turn out in droves for even the most uninspiring Dem candidate (hello, Gary Peters!), so the whole game is running someone who is appealing enough to the centrists and liberal Republicans that you can beat the freak show candidates that the Michigan Republicans often run. Rashida Tlaib is perhaps the only Michigan Dem who would probably bleed Dem votes to the Republicans in a statewide race.
I don’t think you can extrapolate WAR from a congressional district to a state in this case. Her district contains a lot of Arab-Americans and she is supposedly very good at constituent services. This means she overperforms the Dem top line in her district but that’s not likely (IMO) statewide.
(Come to think of it, I’m not sure if her WAR also reflects Kamala’s severe underperformance in Tlaib’s district due to frustrations about Gaza.)
What constituent services does a Representative even perform? (Serious question. I find it weird to think of any situation in which we would *want* a dependency on the personal attention of a representative to matter, but apparently some such situations exist?)
Big agree with this. The whole concept of WAR is pretty sketchy, you could be an above-average performer in a district but that has no relationship with the broader state electorate. Also, Lakshya is I'm sure a very nice guy, but his model is closed and he has a fulltime job doing something else- it's basically a couple of guys 'doing their own research' in their spare time. With a closed model no one else can really check his work
What has Rashida Tlaib done in office? All the other Squad members seem to work legislation and contribute, but I’m having trouble coming up with anything she has done.
It looks like I'm probably going to lose this linguistic battle, but I wish the acronym used instead is VORP (Value Over Replacement Politician), since unlike WAR it's making up a new word that doesn't have a completely different meaning when sounded.
I hate its application to politics though. In baseball, you are literally approximating how many "wins" a player would provide over a replacement level player. In politics, we're talking about one election at a time- there's only one "win" to be had.
You’re looking at a metaphor here, not a simile. In politics, WAR is usually meant to discuss candidate fit to the district or election, a kind of candidate selection process evaluation. Although mostly used in inter-party conflicts, this is meant as a measure of the politicians’ fit for their prospective constituents in that particular moment rather than their loyalty to party principles and party success.
This is similar to baseball in that baseball wins are a sign that your team has selected players that best fit the division of the league your team plays in and the schedule that division hands you. Division in politics is akin to electoral district, and schedule represents the basket of issues voters are considering during a specific election.
Considering political wins as equivalent to value sounds like you’re interested more in basic national party success than fit for constituents/districts/issues. That may be why you don’t like it. I would posit most who believe the metaphor of WAR is relevant view political success as flowing directly from candidate fit.
As someone notes above, you could do unusually well in an individual Congressional district for any kind of random reason that wouldn't translate to the broader state (or country). Commenter above notes that Tlaib might do well in her district because it contains a lot of Arab-Americans, but that's not true of the entire state. It's OK to say she's an electoral overperformer *in one specific region*, but you can't necessarily translate that into her being unusually skilled at politics overall. Whereas an unusually skilled pitcher or whatever is skilled in all baseball games. The sports analogy doesn't translate
Seems like a Bayesian vs frequentist debate: can we assign probabilities to events that only occur once? WAR for a congressional district in 2024 might differ from a statewide race in 2026.
CoT is arguing that VORP (another baseball term with a multi-decade lineage) would be the superior option. I think he's saying that that "wins above replacement" isn't as semantically meaningful, since the metric (in the politics sphere) isn't counting actual wins but is assessing performance relative to replacement level. This is semantically closer to "Value" than "Wins", hence the superiority of VORP vice WAR as the choice for acronym to port over.
That’s a fair point although my talk of decades was more about the massive and complete cultural dominance of the term WAR over the past two decades and the comparative difficulty of making VORP relevant so it even can be a metaphor for the median person. Should have been specific. Rejecting the commonly used and acceptably term for a word much less used but slightly more technically correct in the metaphor is a common way liberals and progressives handicap themselves when communicating their ideas.
My understanding is that VORP was more directly about runs generated or saved (individual player) whereas WAR develops a more holistic view of skills a player can contribute (positive feature) like baserunning/fielding and makes the team results derived from those individual talents the true goal (positive feature). Perhaps I’m wrong about my understanding of WAR and VORP but I’d see VORP as troublingly simple in comparison. VORP doesn’t seem to take even static factors like ballpark into account! Playing at Petco Park is nothing like playing at yankee stadium.
I think you may be stuck on taking “wins” as a too literally or too specifically to get the same value from the whole metaphor.
The idea that the President appoints the judges who are then supposed to check him seems like potentially a fatal flaw in the system. Judges ought to be selected by an entirely different process that doesn’t involve elected officials—sortition, chosen by bar associations, meritocratic selection through testing on legal subjects, even directly elected by voters ideally in separate elections.
I can’t like your comment because as a working lawyer in a state with an elected judiciary, it makes that judiciary terrible at the day-to-day work of law. You get some real incompetents on the bench who frequently make decisions at odds with the expectations of the parties and the obvious interpretation of the law. I’m not talking about making hard decisions in close cases, I’m talking about making decisions contrary to the clear text of statute because they either don’t like it, don’t like you, don’t like your client, or (and this boggles the mind but I’ve seen it) they’ve managed not to understand it.
It also hypercharges tendencies to legislate from the bench by giving them a sense of popular legitimacy. Judges in Philadelphia in particular have been observed to have a bad habit of substituting their own judgment for that of qualified executive agencies—particularly municipal agencies—in areas where the agencies are supposed to have discretion. While this is technically a bit more justifiable than outright ignoring statutes, it corrupts the judiciary in a different way to my mind. (Putting my cards on the table, I tend towards legislative supremacy as a judicial philosophy, which to me means looking for excuses to defer to the executive as well as the legislative if the legislative branch has explicitly given the executive agency discretion. It’s an abundance/state capacity thing.)
But you are right that unchecked executive appointments are not great either. Something like the British system, using a commission and an open application process is far superior. New Jersey gestures in this direction as well, although I don’t like that the commission is not technically required to approve—it’s a convention. That said, NJ does include a useful concept by having the initial appointment be for 7 years, which can be extended to life (well, age 70) if the commission, Senate, and Governor agree.
Pennsylvania’s elected Supreme Court ended an egregious gerrymander created by a gerrymandered legislature, that by itself outweighs whatever negatives of judicial election. Given gerrymandering, legislatures themselves have even less democratic legitimacy than judges who can at least claim to have won a popular vote statewide.
Does the NC Supreme Court election that overturned a previous decision blocking a gerrymander and re-enabling a gerrymander reinforce or weaken your belief in elected judges?
Weren’t they at least providing some check on Netanyahu though? There were the huge protests before 10/7 when Netanyahu tried to nerf the judiciary. And Israel is always bragging about how they have an Arab on their Supreme Court, would that have happened under a different selection process?
A different selection process isn’t a silver bullet and your society is just screwed if most people are authoritarians but it is something.
Israel literally doesn't even have a Constitution, but one day in the 90s the court said "we hereby grant ourselves the power to strike down any laws that we personally disagree, because reasons" and no one stopped them. They just..... made it up.
As much as I dislike US judicial review, they're at least *pretending* to be interpreting a document. The Israel Supreme Court strikes down laws based on vibes. It's completely, utterly arbitrary. For example they recently invalidated a real estate tax law because they decided that the legislators who passed it had been working for too long (the vote was in the evening), so they couldn't meaningfully consent. They micromanage details of laws the legislature passed, zeroing out budgetary items as they see fit.
Oh, and they sort of control their own appointments too, so the legislature can't nominate their own choice of judges. The Israeli Supreme Court is (along with Brazil's) my poster child for judicial review gone really, really bad
Did you read what he wrote? No, the US Supreme Court has never gotten anywhere close to doing what the Israeli Supreme Court did. Imagine that instead of Owen Roberts changing his vote on New Deal legislation, the Supreme Court took over their own nominations and said that Congress couldn't overturn that.
1. .......the US had a constitution in the early 19th century, Israel still to this day does not. If they don't have a constitution, on what basis is the court striking down legislation? Literally vibes man- personal pique.
The Israeli court claims for itself the right to abjure laws it finds 'unreasonable'. How is that different from, say, Iran having an unelected Council of Elders who can strike down laws too? Because they went to law school?
2. The US Constitution notes that it it the 'supreme law of the land', implying courts had to prefer it over conflicting statutes. Again, Israel literally does not have one
3. Colonial courts had already struck down some laws prior to the Marbury decision (like North Carolina in 1787). Multiple founding fathers including Hamilton had at least discussed approvingly of the concept of judicial review
It's stood up pretty good over the last 250 years. In fact, I would argue that it's certainly performing better than either the presidency or congress.
Matt asks: “If your incumbents in Pennsylvania and Colorado are already against a fracking ban, and your hopes for winning a majority run through Alaska and Texas and Ohio, then why can’t we bring back the ‘all-of-the-above’ energy policy as the Democratic Party platform?”
Opposition to fracking is a luxury belief for many soft environmentalists. The Pennsylvania polling is instructive. A progressive group, the Ohio River Valley Institute, claims 58% support for a ban in Pennsylvania. I don’t trust that number, but progressives can wave it around. More neutral polls show the electorate split: about 42% for a ban, 40% against, and many undecided.
But here’s the rub: a lot of that 42% would change their mind the instant gas hit $4 a gallon and local jobs disappeared. “Ban fracking” sentiment probably plays well with affluent Republicans on the Main Line. Democratic leaders are more comfortable courting those voters than grappling with working-class pro-fracking voters whose views on race and gender they find inconvenient.
When the polling is even, the party prefers country-club Republicans to ancestral Democrats. Sad.
There can’t be many places in the United States where there is economic potential for non-fracking extraction, other than the places where it’s already being done pretty thoroughly, can there?
I haven't looked at something more recent, isn't there is a tradeoff in ground water quality still inherent to the project? Like I do agree they've improved by learning.
There is, yes. They’ve gotten better at preventing contamination and sequestering dirty water, but this of course presents groundwater depletion issues.
So the real answer is to campaign on a fracking ban and then don't do it. Or better yet, do something symbolic that promotes "safer, cleaner, more abundant energy" that also does not actually ban fracking.
See Washington and California show real Americans that progressives will make gas cost $4.19 a gallon if you let them. And then we wonder why Pennsylvania and Michigan flipped.
Yeah I mean I really know I’m in Mississippi when I stop to buy gas ($2.xx vs $4.xx), cigarettes ($7 vs $12), and a coke or energy drink (at least double in Seattle due to our “sugary drink” sin tax)
The advantage of his term is that he can pretend it’s neutral about where on the political spectrum it sits, even though he only applies it to people on the left and center left.
It's one of those terms (like "dead internet") where the definition people assume looking at it blind is a better tool than the actual definition by the original writer.
"Get rid of all the cops" is a belief rich people can afford, because they live in rich neighborhoods with rich neighbors and no public transport and criminals aren't going to take an Uber to their neighborhood to commit crimes. Meanwhile, poor people in poor neighborhoods need the police.
Is "we should slash the top marginal tax rate and pay for it by gutting Medicaid" also a "luxury belief"? Because it seems to fit the definition but I've never seen it applied to that kind of thing.
cf. Handicap principle/costly signals. Luxury beliefs are also sometimes weapons in intra-political circles, where people will adopt more extreme positions in order to win a factional fight by signalling their commitment to the cause (for an example from the right, see the belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 election)
Joe Rogan is NOT conservative; he is a liberal. That the left considers him conservative is a sign of how loopy and authoritarian the left has become. Here is an AI listing of Rogan’s main political beliefs. It looks like those of The NYT editorial board circa 2000:
Long-held beliefs
Social issues: Rogan has long supported socially liberal stances, including same-sex marriage, gun rights [Poster’s Note: Rogan is against gun control, so a conservative stance here], and legalizing recreational drugs like cannabis.
Healthcare and social safety nets: He supports universal healthcare and universal basic income. He has also discussed his family's experience with welfare, highlighting the importance of a social safety net.
Foreign policy: Rogan has been critical of American "military adventurism" and has shown cynicism toward international affairs.
Free speech and "cancel culture": He strongly supports free speech and has often used his platform to criticize "cancel culture".
Distrust of authority: Distrust of authority is a core component of Rogan's political outlook. He believes this distrust extends to many mainstream political and media figures.
To be fair, Rogan’s views are hard to pin down and he often tries to match the person he’s interviewing. He sounds pretty liberal interviewing Bernie Sanders and a lot more conservative interviewing Jordan Peterson. But I agree that he has basically humane politics that would be far preferable to the average Republican and the left should try to work with him.
"The average Democrat is better educated, more intelligent, and better informed than Rogan."
What is your reasoning for this?
I'm fairly ignorant about Rogan, but I'm pretty confident that the average Democratic voter is pretty average and generally uninformed. The average Republican voter even more so. Given that Rogan has gotten into this at all suggest a greater knowledge and understanding than most voters.
"Approximately 65% of Americans concur that extraterrestrials exist, and about 51% say that UFO sightings reported by members of the U.S. military represent visits from intelligent aliens, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C."
Sure they are, lol. That is a conceit that democrats have. They manufacture college graduates out of complete morons, then call themselves the better educated party. Almost everywhere the democrats rule there is a maelstrom of violent crime, fatherless children, emotional depression, low education performance and reliance on government handouts. You’ll point to red states poor education performance, but even these are dragged down by heavily concentrated democratic areas.
Do you ever stop? It is impossible to take you seriously when every word out of your mouth is how anyone who isn't MAGA is literally the worst thing in the world.
Joseph, I was responding to a guy who was saying Republicans are conspiracists, etc. I’m a Republican. I could have just responded with, “Do you ever stop? Blah, blah” Instead I gave him examples to penetrate his certainties. If I don’t read something along the lines of, “Republicans suck”, I generally will never insult the other guy. But when I do…
Ryan, I strongly urge you never to come visit LA. One needs nerves of steel to walk out your front door. My go-to move is just to start blasting with my AR-15 upon exiting my home and then dash from tree to tree as I try to make my way up the street.
I don’t think you can reduce Rogan’s politics to issue positioning. For example, Rogan has consistently dabbled in conspiracy theories by inviting on guests like Alex Jones and embracing some theories himself. He also has a strong anti-intellectual streak. I watched a recent video where he fell for an AI video of Tim Walz and then when told it was AI explained that the fact that he fell for it showed what kind of person Walz was. In 2024, conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism are strongly Republican coded.
“In 2024, conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism are strongly Republican coded.” We Republicans do have some crazy conspiracies. Nutsy us, we still believe Hunter’s laptop was real, that covid was probably a lab leak, and that the earth’s temperature in 2025 (2050 at the absolute latest) will not be 3.5 to 6.5 degrees warmer than it was in 1990.
It's so tiring. TLDR: The left has plenty of stupid gullible people, but conspiracies are FAR more prevalent on the right, and generally much more significant.
* Global Warming: Some morons believe in overly aggressive warming scenarios, though we've also done better than expected (while unfortunately also getting to the point where the better scenarios (e.g. < 1.5C) are now off the table). Meanwhile almost everyone on the right is in complete denial.
* Hunter: Hunter's laptop turned out to be legit, in what is still to this day and insane and hard to believe story, and Facebook & Co had been badly burned by this kind of thing and overreacted. They should've been more even handed, but freaked out under pressure. What is the significance of Hunter's laptop?
* Lab Leak: This is STILL really unclear, and I've read hundreds of pages about the topic (sad). Discussion shouldn't have been suppressed, though I feel at least sympathetic given that Trump was calling it the China Virus.
RFK Jr. is literally the head of the CDC right now, a man who believes in more conspiracy theories than the number of vaccines a kid has to take in their first 18 years of life.
Using the term "Hunter's laptop" is an instant indicator of someone having low intelligence and/or bathing in a really bad information environment.
The lab leak thing isn't even unclear. All subsequent investigation definitively aligned with the zoonotic origin theory, virtually no one in the scientific community takes the lab theory seriously anymore. Conservatives latched onto a brief moment where there was enough uncertainty to consider lab leak as a plausibility and then immediately moved on once that started to change.
I wouldn't even let them have the lab leak theory. Why were they so insistent on the lab leak? Why is an incidental lab mishap more embarrassing for China than a wet market breakout that reveals how underdeveloped their country is outside of the urban core? I think it's pretty obvious why. Conservative China Hawks were absolutely flirting with a Chinese bioweapon conspiracy. They backtracked to "librul scientists are suppressing lab leak" as a face-saving measure.
I'm sorry, i don't take seriously the opinion of an absolute weak-mind who thinks the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person is covid restrictions.
The worst thing that happened to most normie Americans in their lifetime was Covid restrictions though (at least in a societal sense, of course individuals can face worse individual misfortunes like cancer). We’re quite privileged that nothing that bad ever happens to us so the reaction to Covid restrictions seems understandable and a lot of Americans share it.
I guess remembering 2008 makes you old now? That’s kind of crazy, but that was basically before social media really got going (iPhone came out in 2007, so hardly anyone had a smartphone then. Obama famously used a Blackberry in those days).
I’m 25 and have no strong political memory of 2008. On the other hand, I was strongly impacted by COVID restrictions, and for other people my age, this is the single most relevant and notable government policy within memory.
Justified or not, this contributes to the fact that Gen Z has swung much more conservative in recent years.
He's very much not a liberal, he even endorsed Trump as president. Many people closer to the center have a mix of left and right coded views, being able to name a few liberal beliefs does not make him a liberal.
Joe Rogan is on the other side of the libertarian looking glass from Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and Penn Jillette. All four men have a strong anti-establishment streak and liberty maximalist views. But whereas Rogan was swayed by Trump's flattering rhetoric, the other three deduced Trump was an untrustworthy narcissist who only paid lip-service to their ideology. There's really no other way to describe this other than education polarization in action. Rogan fell for a con the other three were smart enough to suss out. It's not particularly surprising when you examine their body of work as comics. Rogan's jokes are mostly blunt shock humor whereas the other three engage in all manner of subtlety, misdirection, and satire.
Can the Democrats "win back" Rogan? Eh, I think that ship's sailed, not in the immediate future at least. When voters switch allegiances they tend to "forget" their past voting record. It's an ego preservation tactic; people loathe admitting they were wrong. Rogan doesn't have that option, he's too publicly invested in the conservative ecosystem at this point. He'll need a face-saving excuse, like a populist Democrat to play anti-establishment to the ruling Republican party so he can pretend he's been "abandoned" by the GOP.
Joe Rogan's publicly stated views broadly align with MAGA, so he is branded "conservative". I have spent my entire adult life on university campuses, theoretically surrounded by a sea of far-left liberals and progressives who should hate Joe Rogan (post News Radio, of course). Yet Rogan's publicly stated views broadly align with mine and my colleagues'. (And it seems like his podcast is mostly about MMA and standup comedy? But he had some dumb ideas about covid vaccines so now he's a fascist according to The Left?)
If I were to walk out of my office and ask a random undergrad how they feel about US military intervention, I bet they'd also broadly agree with Rogan's position---until five minutes ago it was *conservatives* who were interventionist hawks (see: Bush 44). Certainly they'd align with him on universal healthcare, the social safety net, distrust of authority...
I think there is a category error liberals make when discussing Rogan and also RFK Jr.
Ezra Klein had an episode saying "MAHA is the wrong answer to a good question" or something. But this is really a category error. The purpose of identifying where you identify overlapping areas of concern so you can identify overlapping solutions. Since RFK Jr's policy ideas frankly do not have anything to do with what he says are the problems in any meaningful way (he is totally silent on agribusiness/farm staple crop subsidies, industrial pollution, etc. and other things that are drivers of health) it's not possible to develop a policy.
I think with Rogan it is similar. Rogan has some vibes that code liberal/left, but he is essentially so flighty and has such poor habits of mind that he and people like him cannot be counted on as allies in forming responses to problems, even when he agrees with liberals on what the problems are.
Rogan will have an algorithm that'll tell him what views get higher engagement. It's important for democrats to listen to the show to identify what that is.
This is an (almost completely) excellent post. I love the deep dive!
I just got stopped at this one, regarding Alaska and an "all of the above" energy strategy:
"then why can’t we bring back the “all-of-the-above” energy policy as the Democratic Party platform?"
We can't because there *isn't* a "Democratic Party platform." Presidential nominees have a "platform" as reflected in the convention platform (except when they don't: see Republicans). Even if many prominent Democrats wanted to endorse an "all of the above" approach now, how would that happen and how would that bind the party as a whole? There are many, many actors within the party and they don't, and can't, act in a coordinated way (we're not a tribal cult, like the followers of the Orange God).
Until we have a nomination race, we won't have any mechanism to state what the next brand of the party will be.
You're probably right, but at least amongst House and Senate members and nominees it should be possible to coordinate messages.
With Trump stupidly destroying, well, everything, but specifically here all renewable energy sources, the party should be able to come out for an all of the above strategy, by calling it "affordable energy costs for everyone", and then just get all the candidates to just be quiet about stupid things like no fracking or no pipelines, etc.
They should say that they’re going to quadruple energy taxes on those who vote for Republicans to subsidize free gas and electricity for those who vote for Democrats, of course.
Politicians are, or should be, well practiced at not answering the question asked, or avoiding the hard part of any statement.
They don't need to say the same thing, they need to not say something that will hurt their fellow members, and most importantly not say something that will hurt the candidates in the close races. Tlaib will not lose an election because she doesn't say end fracking. So she should never say she wants to end fracking. She can signal her concerns about climate change with all sorts of statements in favor of clean energy.
What about transpeople? Running in her district, what is she allowed to say and what must she not say?
It would be great if every member of the party weighed their words heavily in terms of how it affects the party brand as a whole, but it's not yet clear to me what that means.
That's why we need a presidential nomination contest to show what the leader of the party believes the party stands for. And that's why I wish contenders would declare their candidacy *right now.*
Newt Gingrich came up with "Contract with America" under Clinton when the GOP was shut out of power.
Paul Ryan was clearly the ideological leader of the GOP under Obama and pushed an Ayn Randian vision for the future.
So you don't necessarily need a Presidential candidate to have a national platform.
Hakeem Jeffries/Chuck Schumer are weak personalities selected by donors to be pliant tools. They have no original ideas or the courage of their conviction to forcefully advocate for anything.
They were both leaders of the House Republicans with some influence on the rest of the party (Gingrich because he led the revolt that toppled 40 years of Democratic control of the House). Senate Republicans didn't take their marching orders from either of them.
I don't disagree with you about Jeffries/Schumer, but who in the party could have anything like the influence of Ryan, let alone Gingrich?
Ro Khanna is certainly out there articulating something different and he could be someone who can put together a national platform but he is running for President and seems to have no interest in the speakership.
I would even be open to someone like MGP running for speaker just to change the party's image and providing it with a spokesperson with a rural populist vibe. But the identity wings of the party will not support her for leadership.
On the Senate side it is a real graveyard of ideas. Warren/Sanders are old hat at this point and their moment has passed. So there is no one.
That may be a little harsh (or maybe not) but that's why I'd like to see the presidential nomination process start immediately and not in a year and a half.
El-Sayed strikes me as a good example of a lot of what's wrong with the Dem party. He reeks of entitlement as in "I have a moral birthright to the nomination and no it is simply never, ever acceptable to disagree with me" while also going all in on Tim Walz style "identitarian" politics, ie all it takes to win over a group of voters is to nominate people who descriptively represent those voting blocks. Like the theory that you can totally win over non-college white voters in the Midwest who have left the Democratic Party if you nominate a white guy with a Carharts duck hunting jacket and a pickup truck, while totally ignoring the issues that actual drove those voters away (immigration, crime, LGBT stuff etc etc etc), just with El-Sayed he goes after a much smaller group of voters that will probably be harder to win back!
He could still win because Trump is unpopular and candidate effects are smaller these days but he's clearly a bad choice, which is why Zohran and Bernie will spend months campaigning for him LOL.
"El-Sayed strikes me as a good example of a lot of what's wrong with the Dem party"
That makes no sense at all. El-Sayed is an outsider, not an establishment Democrat and the DSCC will likely not support him even if he wins the primary.
Are you saying that people to the left of the Democratic party should not exist at all? It's a two party system. Everyone no matter where they sit ideologically need to compete on one of the two party tickets. If the Dems+GOP allowed for third parties El-Sayed would run under a different label but that is not the system we have.
I think this is a great example of why the term "establishment" just isn't very helpful, nobody ever explains what they mean by it other say it's a Bad Thing that they aren't part of.
If Schumer is actively courting a non-incumbent candidate to run in a primary, or if Matt Y is endorsing them, such a candidate is establishment.
El-Sayed is almost certainly not establishment because in the event that he wins the Dem primary, the DSCC would cut his funding and it would rather lose Michigan and let the GOP keep the Senate than support his candidacy and try to win Michigan.
The establishment is self-evidently a bad thing because by definition, it is what led us to Trump.
Sure, I too wish everyone was somehow a secular liberal and we didn't have right-wing bigots or left-wing fools trying to fight the bigots using tactically idiotic means. But the two sides are not equivalent in my view.
Hahaha why is it so idpol-inflected? The actual target of crypto policy is young men, but she has to say black men instead so nobody thinks she’s appealing to swing voters?
That sounds right -- none of the anti-Brown ads here in Ohio really focused on Crypto as far as I can remember. The segment of the population that is really enthusiastic about crypto seems kind of small; same with the fervently anti-crypto crowd.
Their thinking is probably that young men like crypto and they need young men. My thinking is young men like sex much more than crypto and Democrats need an aesthetic that isn’t derisive towards male sexuality.
Republicans requiring id to surf the net is a vote winner for dems. You don't need to mention porn. Just say you'll have a law that makes it illegally to do so.
no. you use cookies to find out who is looking at porn and then, a few weeks before election, send them targeted ads (banner, email, whatever) explaining that republicans have imposed the age verification stuff
(Except why should people of voting age care about age verification? Go for "Republicans are banning your porn! Join Democrats in saying they'll have to claw it from our moist, sweaty hands".)
Which would also be very unpopular. People like their vices, in Nepal they just burned down parliament after the government tried to ban social media. If you’re going to be popularist, social vice-type things seems to be one of the most harmless areas you could moderate and even beat Republicans on like Democrats in the past were seen as the less paternalistic party.
Not many people do, but it's far and way the best way to enforce identity verification without forcing people to upload pictures of their passports and driver licenses to a (hackable) database. If social media companies were required to adopt it we would live in a better world.
"it’s irresponsible not to have tried to recruit Kristen McDonald Rivet."
I am gonna disagree with Matt here for 2 reasons: 1. Rivet's seat is crucial for hanging onto a House majority; it's entirely possible that it would swing to Republicans if she ran for Senate instead. 2. I don't think it's reasonable to expect Rivet to give up a seat she fought incredibly hard for and won by the skin of her teeth after a single term.
I’m glad to see you’ve become ever so slightly less pessimistic about the senate. You didn’t even mention Georgia! Progress!
In the case of Platner, we’ll see what happens but he’s a competitive shooter so I don’t think guns are going to be a problem. The piece from Silver Bulletin was really good. You shouldn’t be so despondent about that race. Collins hasn’t faced an environment as bad as what next year is shaping up to be. She may not even run again.
Prediction markets give Democrats a 30% chance to win the Senate which would require 4 seats: https://kalshi.com/markets/controls/senate-winner/controls-2026. That’s unlikely but not that unlikely. The base expectation should be Democrats winning 2 or 3 net seats (probably Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio as the third).
Historically Democrats struggled in runoffs and their candidates were hardly superstars on paper. Nobody knew who Warnock and Ossof was a punchline.
That’s why we shouldn’t be fatalistic about states next year. Platner and Turek could turn out to be forces. Hinson could wind up flopping.
The best example though is from 2006 in Virginia. If you’re not familiar with that race check it out on Wikipedia. The Democrat was seen as hopeless and the Republican was a future presidential candidate.
I learned long ago to not have any base expectations. We don’t know what things will look like in a year. Just think back to the last time Democrats won the senate. Who had it on their bingo card in 2019 that Democrats would win the senate by winning runoffs in Georgia?
Georgia was predictable, you just had the extrapolate the trends from the last couple of elections and you’d get to a tied state in 2020. The big Senate surprise from 2020 was Democrats losing Maine.
And it didn’t happen until around Labor Day 2006! Prior to that George Allen was supposed to be a lock and would’ve won absent that. Nobody expected that to happen before it did. We just aren’t good at predicting the future, which is why the fatalistic pessimism about 2026 is unwarranted.
If you're all in on the Peronism, then sure, I don't see it...
If not, someone has to be the opposition... Would've been nice if the Republicans had shown character and strength in 2024 and we'd be in excellent shape right now (the Democrats deserved to lose). Americans just keep on stacking up failure after failure.
I don’t find the evidence for 1. terribly compelling. I don’t see his comments rising to the level of “incitement”, and don’t think that Jan. 6 rose to the level of a riot.
Election interference in Georgia looks pretty serious. I’ve said before on this platform that this looks like a legitimate complaint.
But this doesn’t seem that risible, in that the Georgia Secretary of State said “No” and no harm appears to have followed from his request.
It’s just not that compelling an argument that I’d want someone who hates me, is bad at governance and objectively hates America and Americans to have power instead.
I feel like Democrats seem to think that if their opponent has flaws, they somehow deserve to win, and also have utter contempt for people who just aren’t that into politics.
I was a pretty standard not-into-politics voter who voted Biden in 2020. I wouldn’t have if I’d know he was such a bad Dad and raised his son to be a meth head or had realised that his son was getting paid $8 million a year to do nothing at all for Burisma just because his Dad was VP.
And once you realise that there are a bunch of people, like me, who thought that journalism and academia were roughly like they were in the late 80’s, and so they think objectivity is still valued and honest inquiry leads the conversation, and then realise that they end up taking NPR and NYT and WaPo at face value - and those organisations are fully complicit Democrat propaganda machines now - then it becomes necessary to exhaustively check everything, and it turns out the Democrats don’t have much to say that’s objectively true.
His ties are too long and he always chooses red ones. Other than that, he's perfect, I love him, and he's the greatest President -- what am I saying, greatest *human* -- ever.
I can see that lots of people don’t like him, but I haven’t really heard why.
There’s someone later in the comments who has taken the question the way it was intended, so I’ll carry on with them, and if you have a set of criticisms then lay them out.
If you don’t like the federal government taking over businesses and universities and shutting down scientific research and tearing up all our alliances and destroying our governmental information services, you might think that any party is better than the Republican Party right now.
I don’t like the Federal Government getting involved in businesses at all, but this has happened many, many times and I’m not sure why it’s different when Trump does it to when anyone else does it, c.f. GM, Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, et al.
The Universities are no longer conducting research. Their experiments don’t replicate, scientists are forced to be complicit in widespread anti-Asian and anti-White racist regimes to disadvantage students or they are fired, plagiarism is rife (Claudine Gay is a plagiarist), and Universities are also billionaires with no accountability. I don’t have sympathy for the Universities.
They should not be funded by the taxpayer. They should repay the grant money from their endowments for any research that either doesn’t replicate or is shown to be plagiarism.
US alliances aren’t great, but it’s because they are objectively a bad deal for the US. Why should the American taxpayers foot the bill for free medical care and vast censorship programs in the UK and Germany? Europeans should pay for their own defence and adopt American values.
I’m not happy about the erosion of government information services, but it’s been ongoing for some time. The widespread conspiracy to downgrade robbery to theft and attempted murder to assault in the D.C. police force can hardly be lain at Trump’s door. The Head of the BLS was innumerate and was cooking the books.
But we should still be collecting information, and I wish we were doing more to do so.
You haven’t mentioned it, but the tariffs are also objectively bad.
This paints a picture of mixed results, and then we don’t know what the Dems stand for, so they’re not preferable, which is why they only have 20% approval.
I personally don’t have a problem with the government taking a 10% stake in Intel and in fact I think that’s how the CHIPS Act ought to have been structured in the first place. My problem is with what it says about the rule of law if the President can just decide on a whim that these grants from legislation passed several years before he took office are now instead purchases of equity.
"scientists are forced to be complicit in widespread anti-Asian and anti-White racist regimes to disadvantage students or they are fired"
Ok, I really do have to go soon, but I want to address this, because I am a scientist at a large public university in California.
This just isn't how it works. Yes, there were cases of extreme woke overreach during the heyday of DEI activism (2020-ish +/- a couple years). But I myself, as a scientist, have never felt in any way "forced to be complicit" in discriminating against Asian or white students. I've reviewed grad student applications, I have two grad students in my lab (both Asian-American as it happens), I've taught courses, and nobody - not my department chairman, not the dean, not an activist group - ever sat me down and sternly told me, "You're being too nice to the white and Asian students, you must immediately start racistly discriminating against them or you're FIRED!"
Sure, there are kooks and extremists, but the vast, vast majority of us academic scientists just want to do our research and be good mentors to our students, and most of us, except a few assholes, want a welcoming atmosphere for anyone - white, Asian, Black, Hispanic - who is willing and able to do the lab work.
I really want to believe this, and would really prefer if this were generally true.
But the UC system required diversity statements for tenure track positions as part of the Academic Personnel Manual in section 210-1.d until March 19th of this year, 2025, so I think you are either lying, or don’t think diversity statements are ethically compromised, or work outside if the UC system (but surely you know how the UC system worked if you are in academia in California even if you are not in the UC system directly).
I am not lying. Yes, it's true that UC required diversity statements for faculty positions. For mine, I wrote some generic boilerplate about welcoming and learning from diverse perspectives etc. and I got hired.
FYI, when I reviewed grad student applications (and I'm talking *before* Trump 2.0), diversity statements were *not* a required part of the grad student application. Sure, some students would throw an "As a first-generation Honduran immigrant..." or something like that into their Personal Statement, but it was never a decisive factor in admitting or rejecting anyone, the truth is that in the last application cycle (fall of 2024), we had 700+ applicants for 27 slots, so by necessity we had to turn down a lot of qualified people. Anti-Asian or anti-white discrimination had nothing to do with it.
I appreciate the effort, especially as I know you are pressed for time.
That doesn’t sound as horrific as the admissions comments that have been made public at Columbia and Harvard, but it also feels like it is surplus to requirements.
Why would a Physics or Chemistry lab need to be welcome to all?
Surely we should just welcome people who are good at Physics or Chemistry, no matter where they might be from, and the quality of the research will speak for itself.
> I’m not sure why it’s different when Trump does it to when anyone else does it, c.f. GM, Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, et al.
Trump just demanded a stake for no reason, and got it. GM was part of a taxpayer bailout, and the government never got equity. The others never got any government bailout.
The difference is that when the president demands fealty and gets it, he is acting like a fascist, while when the regulators follow the law, they are just following the law.
> The Universities are no longer conducting research. Their experiments don’t replicate, scientists are forced to be complicit in widespread anti-Asian and anti-White racist regimes to disadvantage students or they are fired
Citation needed on there being any difference in rate of replicability of research in the past few decades compared to any previous time in history. If you know what science is (ie, the attempt to understand things that no one yet understands) you should realize that there’s going to be a significant amount that is incorrect in there, unless you have the kind of perfectionist standards that prevent any progress on anything.
Also, citation needed on a scientist being fires for opposing affirmative action.
> I don’t have sympathy for the Universities.
I don’t care about your feelings. No one needs sympathy. What we need is an attempt to run society in ways that make it work, not emotional outbursts aimed at destroying things just because you don’t feel sympathy.
> The Head of the BLS was innumerate and was cooking the books.
The head of the BLS was doing science as it has always been done - gathering flawed data and trying to synthesize things from it, and revising it as better data comes in. Anyone who insists on perfection from the get-go has decided that we don’t need to learn, and doesn’t understand the point of information.
> we don’t know what the Dems stand for, so they’re not preferable
Democrats stand for taking a flawed government and making it better, bit by bit, and trying to undo the work of the destroyer who has no interest in anything working.
I don’t believe the former head of the BLS was innumerate. I do believe Peter Navarro to be, and Lutnick and Greer are not far behind.
The two issues I care the most about, as a Westerner with an economics degree, are public lands / environment and economic policy.
You don’t hear much in any media about the former, but Trump’s admin has been the most hostile to public lands in my lifetime; they’ve cut the funding for FS/BLM/NPS/FWS, laid off 30-50% of the employees from each of those agencies, slashed funding for wildland firefighters, and revoked conservation funding for local districts. This has hurt a lot of small seasonal rec communities in Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming that I care quite a bit about.
They tried to eliminate the Land & Water Conservation Fund and sell public lands in the West as part of the OBBB; both of those clauses failed after widespread outrage. I’m proud of my Idaho delegation for standing up to Mike Lee and Doug Burgum on this, but the attempt was despicable and the White House initially supported both provisions.
This admin is also revoking the Public Lands Rule, seeking to revoke the Roadless Rule, and as of today they’ve just kneecapped the LWCF.
As for economics, the announcement and attempted explanation of the tariffs earlier this year finally convinced me that the president is functionally senile or retarded.
I know a lot of independents don’t understand why Trump inspires such rage in Democrats, and I’m trying to be very specific to avoid any reasonable accusation of TDS. Please don’t respond by trying to say that Democrats are also bad. It’s irrelevant and I agree with you.
Again, not nearly enough time to answer your question properly, but I consider Trump’s shittiest appointment to be RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary. That man is going to get actual Americans killed with his antivax nonsense.
My 2¢ is that we should not have an 80 year old running for re-election in Massachusetts
100% agree. They belong in the white house!
constitution should raise the age from 35 to 75 for minimum age to be prez
Why set the bar so low? Only the toughest people should be president! If you can't make it to 100 you're not qualified.
Finally, a bipartisan comment!
"...we should not have an 80 year old...."
Typical. A young pup like you just cannot appreciate the advantages of being represented by someone whose arterial plaque has almost completely occluded the blood flow to their brain.
If I was 8 years older…
Charles Sumner, Daniel Webster, John F. and Edward M. Kennedy, Milan Singh
You’d have enough arterial plaque to compete
I thought you meant Warren at first, but she’s apparently a sprightly 76!
Really? Wow. Time stops for no one, huh. I guess it makes sense that she’s a year older than my mom. But I met her at a rally in 2020 and thought she was pretty spry.
Women tend to age more slowly than men.
Perhaps not, but it seems irrelevant to the question of control of the Senate; I can't imagine him losing to a Republican unless something really extreme happens, and even if he dies we have a Democratic governor who'd appoint his replacement.
Not concerned about him losing to a Republican, I’m concerned about cognitive decline. Markey will be 86 at the end of his next term. 1/3 of people over 85 have dementia.
"...1/3 of people over 85 have dementia...."
That's just ageist nonsense. I'm as cognitively sharp as ever.
Why, if 1/3 of people over 85 had dementia, then that would mean that 100% of people would have it when they are 1/3 the age of 85, which would be... carry the 4... 39! Now, are you really going to tell me that in 1939, everyone had dementia? That's a little before my time, of course, but the '39 Yankees had Joltin' Joe Dementia, the best hitter of all time, at least he was then, and wasn't that wife of his something hot, too, what was her name? Woo, we used to think she was the cat's meow.
Where was I?
Still doesn't seem relevant to the question of control of the Senate.
Love to see Matt writing about the nuts-and-bolts of winning power; love to see Milan calling out gerontocracy.
We should not have an 70+ year old running for election in any safe(ish) seat in the country, and we should have candidates lining up in the primaries to discourage them from such foolish actions.
Remember that OBBB likely would not have passed but for the selfishness of the late Gerry Connelly (D-VA - 75), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ, 77) and Sylvester Turner (D-TX - 70). These men ran for re-election in safe seats, despite serious health problems, and we get to pay the price.
Around the same age that the other Massachusetts senator will be when her next election draws closer....
I guess now’s a good time to drop this anecdote: on Election Day 2020 I was working the polls and Ayanna Pressley dropped by to give us some donuts. I asked for a picture, she asked me my age, I said 17, and she said “I’ll keep the seat warm for you.”
Who actually cares what their age is. If you're using age for a proxy of mental fitness, why not just you know, evaluate the candidate on their mental fitness. Massachusetts is going to elect whatever dem is on the ballot so why do you even care, do you want a 30 year old with Markey's policies?
Yeah I think a 30 year old with Markey’s policies would be better than an 80+ year old with Markey’s policies. If Markey agrees to undergo regular cognitive tests and promises to resign if he starts showing signs of decline that would be great too but I doubt that he will.
Not to mention that if (when) he kicks the bucket, it'd be good to have somebody in the job who already knows the job and has the legitimacy of being elected by the voters, not praying that the governor makes a good choice and the new person can hit the ground running.
Dianne Feinstein didn't do anybody any favors sticking around in the senate and neither will Markey.
Why, is there something inherently wrong with an 80 yes old candidate, or are you using it as a proxy for mental competence. If that is the case why not just judge his mental competence on the merits? Do you have any actual critiques of his policy, or is this just a "vibes bad" schtick?
I agree that voters should evaluate candidates' acuity on the merits rather than using age as a proxy, but the wrinkle is that a Senate term is 6 years and voters can't consider what a person's condition will be at the end of that time because it isn't yet known. The possibility of an 80-year-old experiencing decline over the next 6 years is non-negligible and something that I think voters might reasonably take into account when deciding who to vote for, whereas with someone much younger I think being concerned about that particular issue would not be reasonable.
Yes I think there is something inherently wrong with an 80 year old candidate—they are at much higher risk of serious health issues and/or mental decline and/or death. Markey’s policy views are fine by me, I supported him in his last primary, but he’s too old now and he should step aside!
Who would be a good replacement?
I have my preferences but there’s a strong bench in Massachusetts and I think there should be an open primary.
I'm sure there's some kind of shit-faced Kennedy rolling around in a gutter somewhere.
I think we've progressed in this country to the point we don't care whether or not you're a bastard. They don't have to actually have the last name Kennedy.
I don't live in MA so i dont follow politics their closely but i really like what i've heard from Jake Auchincloss so far
Texas Democrat working in the oil and gas industry chiming in to say that I think the absolute best option would be to recruit a retired oil and gas exec to run as an independent, with the platform of “Trump is bad for our state’s oil and gas industry.” Which is true! Tariffs are terrible, trade wars are terrible for commodity businesses, and Trump is very clear that he wants low oil prices! Throw in some stuff about being a good Christian man that contrasts with Trump. The modal Texan (AND the modal oil and gas executive) doesn’t like Democrats but also doesn’t like Trump at all. “We need an independent voice that will stop these harmful tariffs,” something along those lines.
Tillerson for Texas.
Wouldn’t this person almost certainly caucus with the Republicans and vote for MAGA judges though?
Not if they’re outside the Trump cult.
Right exactly! Generally speaking oil and gas executives have moved left for education polarization reasons, just like in other industries. The way they talk about environmental performance is light-years different than 15-20 years ago, but of course they are generally not Democrats, because Democrats are hostile to the oil and gas industry. That's why I think a Manchin-style independent, caucusing with Democrats to be a check on Trump, is the needle to thread here.
Getting 1 or 2 people conservatives who will oppose Trump's worst things should be seen as an absolute win.
For a Texas senator, I’ll take whatever dissent I can get.
“Trump is very clear that he wants low oil prices!”
Um, l’m second to no one on this comment thread in my incandescent hatred of Trump, but in this case, isn’t Trump simply expressing the popular position? Almost every American wants cheap oil, because it means cheap gasoline for filling up your big-ass truck and overall lower cost of living.
If your best case against Trump is “he wants low oil prices and he’s not a good Christian,” then I’m super dubious about your ability to win anything. (Trump has never been a good Christian and it hasn’t stopped good devout white Evangelicals from being his most reliable voting bloc, so.)
I'm saying Trump's desire for low oil prices, and resulting pressure on the oil and gas industry, is a source of vulnerability with a) oil and gas executives specifically and b) Texans generally. Not that a Texas Senate candidate should run around calling for $100/bbl, but "Trump's trade wars and pushing Saudi to pump more barrels are hurting Texas and Texans" I think is viable
That makes sense, and I want to keep an open mind, but is "this policy is bad for oil and gas executives" a strong attack line? How popular are fat-cat oil executives?
Trump is a bundle of contradictions, not the least of which is that he's a spoiled rich boy who styles himself The Champion of the Common Forgotten Folk. If you run against him based on "he's hurting big oil companies' profits," aren't you buying into the framing of "Trump wants you to have cheap oil, so he's on your side against greedy rich elites?"
Put another way, how do you successfully thread the needle between "Texans need/want a strong oil industry for their economy" and "Texans want cheap gasoline for their big-ass trucks and SUVs"? There's an inherent contradiction here.
I hate the idea, but anything to take back the Senate and stop Trump is on the table, so sign me up.
The next time running a thinly-veiled Democrat as an independent in a red state works will be the first. It's simply a strategy that has never worked.
Meanwhile, it will have done nothing to fix the more fundamental issue of Democrats being unpopular in the state.
Worst fantasy football league ever.
Dick Durbin can't block for shit.
I lold
Once again, Matt hits hard with his New Hampshire erasure. I bet he didn't even stop at the NH state liquor store on I 95 on his way home from Maine.
Anyhow, I'm worried about how the NH Senate race shakes out with Shaheen's retirement. This adds a pretty big wild card.
Pappas is favored to take the seat, but NH is fickle and despite leaning Dem, currently has a Republican governor and a Republican controlled legislature. If Ayotte was running for the seat, I'd be very worried. At least the current R lineup doesn't seem super strong.
Still, the Dems holding that seat is not a sure bet at all imo.
Completely OT, but a couple weeks ago a little bell went off in my head and I realized that living in north central Connecticut there are NH liquor stores less than an hour away from me up I-91, and I don't actually have to go all the way to Portsmouth. Now all my liquor is cheap, not just what I bring back from vacation.
Four year, four years I've been here, and this just occurred to me.
Your state needs more Massholes
I canvassed for Pappas when I lived in Boston and he was running for Congress! He came by and talked to us before one of the events. I wish him well.
The fact that the WAR metric suggests that Rashida Tlaib might be a better statewide candidate in Michigan than Haley Stevens is a nice demonstration of the WAR metric's limitations. If recent Senate races in Michigan have proven anything, it's that Michigan Dems will turn out in droves for even the most uninspiring Dem candidate (hello, Gary Peters!), so the whole game is running someone who is appealing enough to the centrists and liberal Republicans that you can beat the freak show candidates that the Michigan Republicans often run. Rashida Tlaib is perhaps the only Michigan Dem who would probably bleed Dem votes to the Republicans in a statewide race.
I don’t think you can extrapolate WAR from a congressional district to a state in this case. Her district contains a lot of Arab-Americans and she is supposedly very good at constituent services. This means she overperforms the Dem top line in her district but that’s not likely (IMO) statewide.
(Come to think of it, I’m not sure if her WAR also reflects Kamala’s severe underperformance in Tlaib’s district due to frustrations about Gaza.)
Speaking as an ex-Detroiter, I have a hard time believing her WAR reflects anything BUT Gaza
Yea I think I'd characterize it as if you have a poor performance in WAR at the district level...why isn't that a red flag for state level?
Not that higher positive numbers are useless though!
What constituent services does a Representative even perform? (Serious question. I find it weird to think of any situation in which we would *want* a dependency on the personal attention of a representative to matter, but apparently some such situations exist?)
Big agree with this. The whole concept of WAR is pretty sketchy, you could be an above-average performer in a district but that has no relationship with the broader state electorate. Also, Lakshya is I'm sure a very nice guy, but his model is closed and he has a fulltime job doing something else- it's basically a couple of guys 'doing their own research' in their spare time. With a closed model no one else can really check his work
> most uninspiring Dem candidate (hello, Gary Peters!)
Have you seen him on a Harley Davidson Pan America Dual Sport zipping across Michigan?
Talking to everyday Michiganders, and Michigeese?
Have you? Have you?
What has Rashida Tlaib done in office? All the other Squad members seem to work legislation and contribute, but I’m having trouble coming up with anything she has done.
It looks like I'm probably going to lose this linguistic battle, but I wish the acronym used instead is VORP (Value Over Replacement Politician), since unlike WAR it's making up a new word that doesn't have a completely different meaning when sounded.
I am convinced that in the baseball world WAR won out because it sounds cool and tough whereas VORP sounds sci-fi.
WAR is a baseball term being applied to politics. It’s been around what, multiple decades now?
I hate its application to politics though. In baseball, you are literally approximating how many "wins" a player would provide over a replacement level player. In politics, we're talking about one election at a time- there's only one "win" to be had.
You’re looking at a metaphor here, not a simile. In politics, WAR is usually meant to discuss candidate fit to the district or election, a kind of candidate selection process evaluation. Although mostly used in inter-party conflicts, this is meant as a measure of the politicians’ fit for their prospective constituents in that particular moment rather than their loyalty to party principles and party success.
This is similar to baseball in that baseball wins are a sign that your team has selected players that best fit the division of the league your team plays in and the schedule that division hands you. Division in politics is akin to electoral district, and schedule represents the basket of issues voters are considering during a specific election.
Considering political wins as equivalent to value sounds like you’re interested more in basic national party success than fit for constituents/districts/issues. That may be why you don’t like it. I would posit most who believe the metaphor of WAR is relevant view political success as flowing directly from candidate fit.
Is it not coherent to say that a better candidate wins 20% more of 1 election, therefore has 0.2 WAR?
As someone notes above, you could do unusually well in an individual Congressional district for any kind of random reason that wouldn't translate to the broader state (or country). Commenter above notes that Tlaib might do well in her district because it contains a lot of Arab-Americans, but that's not true of the entire state. It's OK to say she's an electoral overperformer *in one specific region*, but you can't necessarily translate that into her being unusually skilled at politics overall. Whereas an unusually skilled pitcher or whatever is skilled in all baseball games. The sports analogy doesn't translate
Seems like a Bayesian vs frequentist debate: can we assign probabilities to events that only occur once? WAR for a congressional district in 2024 might differ from a statewide race in 2026.
CoT is arguing that VORP (another baseball term with a multi-decade lineage) would be the superior option. I think he's saying that that "wins above replacement" isn't as semantically meaningful, since the metric (in the politics sphere) isn't counting actual wins but is assessing performance relative to replacement level. This is semantically closer to "Value" than "Wins", hence the superiority of VORP vice WAR as the choice for acronym to port over.
Agreed, "wins" in the plural is a bit awkward in the political sense.
That’s a fair point although my talk of decades was more about the massive and complete cultural dominance of the term WAR over the past two decades and the comparative difficulty of making VORP relevant so it even can be a metaphor for the median person. Should have been specific. Rejecting the commonly used and acceptably term for a word much less used but slightly more technically correct in the metaphor is a common way liberals and progressives handicap themselves when communicating their ideas.
My understanding is that VORP was more directly about runs generated or saved (individual player) whereas WAR develops a more holistic view of skills a player can contribute (positive feature) like baserunning/fielding and makes the team results derived from those individual talents the true goal (positive feature). Perhaps I’m wrong about my understanding of WAR and VORP but I’d see VORP as troublingly simple in comparison. VORP doesn’t seem to take even static factors like ballpark into account! Playing at Petco Park is nothing like playing at yankee stadium.
I think you may be stuck on taking “wins” as a too literally or too specifically to get the same value from the whole metaphor.
The idea that the President appoints the judges who are then supposed to check him seems like potentially a fatal flaw in the system. Judges ought to be selected by an entirely different process that doesn’t involve elected officials—sortition, chosen by bar associations, meritocratic selection through testing on legal subjects, even directly elected by voters ideally in separate elections.
I can’t like your comment because as a working lawyer in a state with an elected judiciary, it makes that judiciary terrible at the day-to-day work of law. You get some real incompetents on the bench who frequently make decisions at odds with the expectations of the parties and the obvious interpretation of the law. I’m not talking about making hard decisions in close cases, I’m talking about making decisions contrary to the clear text of statute because they either don’t like it, don’t like you, don’t like your client, or (and this boggles the mind but I’ve seen it) they’ve managed not to understand it.
It also hypercharges tendencies to legislate from the bench by giving them a sense of popular legitimacy. Judges in Philadelphia in particular have been observed to have a bad habit of substituting their own judgment for that of qualified executive agencies—particularly municipal agencies—in areas where the agencies are supposed to have discretion. While this is technically a bit more justifiable than outright ignoring statutes, it corrupts the judiciary in a different way to my mind. (Putting my cards on the table, I tend towards legislative supremacy as a judicial philosophy, which to me means looking for excuses to defer to the executive as well as the legislative if the legislative branch has explicitly given the executive agency discretion. It’s an abundance/state capacity thing.)
But you are right that unchecked executive appointments are not great either. Something like the British system, using a commission and an open application process is far superior. New Jersey gestures in this direction as well, although I don’t like that the commission is not technically required to approve—it’s a convention. That said, NJ does include a useful concept by having the initial appointment be for 7 years, which can be extended to life (well, age 70) if the commission, Senate, and Governor agree.
Pennsylvania’s elected Supreme Court ended an egregious gerrymander created by a gerrymandered legislature, that by itself outweighs whatever negatives of judicial election. Given gerrymandering, legislatures themselves have even less democratic legitimacy than judges who can at least claim to have won a popular vote statewide.
Does the NC Supreme Court election that overturned a previous decision blocking a gerrymander and re-enabling a gerrymander reinforce or weaken your belief in elected judges?
The idea, so charming in its naivete, was that the Senate would be there to check him.
Israel does that and their supreme court is even worse
Weren’t they at least providing some check on Netanyahu though? There were the huge protests before 10/7 when Netanyahu tried to nerf the judiciary. And Israel is always bragging about how they have an Arab on their Supreme Court, would that have happened under a different selection process?
A different selection process isn’t a silver bullet and your society is just screwed if most people are authoritarians but it is something.
What’s wrong with Israel’s Supreme Court?
Israel literally doesn't even have a Constitution, but one day in the 90s the court said "we hereby grant ourselves the power to strike down any laws that we personally disagree, because reasons" and no one stopped them. They just..... made it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Laws_of_Israel#The_Constitutional_Revolution_of_1992%E2%80%931995
As much as I dislike US judicial review, they're at least *pretending* to be interpreting a document. The Israel Supreme Court strikes down laws based on vibes. It's completely, utterly arbitrary. For example they recently invalidated a real estate tax law because they decided that the legislators who passed it had been working for too long (the vote was in the evening), so they couldn't meaningfully consent. They micromanage details of laws the legislature passed, zeroing out budgetary items as they see fit.
Oh, and they sort of control their own appointments too, so the legislature can't nominate their own choice of judges. The Israeli Supreme Court is (along with Brazil's) my poster child for judicial review gone really, really bad
You mean they did exactly what the US Supreme Court did in the early 19th century?
Did you read what he wrote? No, the US Supreme Court has never gotten anywhere close to doing what the Israeli Supreme Court did. Imagine that instead of Owen Roberts changing his vote on New Deal legislation, the Supreme Court took over their own nominations and said that Congress couldn't overturn that.
I don't think that's an accurate characterization. Appointments to the Israeli Supreme Court are governed by a law passed by the Knesset.
1. .......the US had a constitution in the early 19th century, Israel still to this day does not. If they don't have a constitution, on what basis is the court striking down legislation? Literally vibes man- personal pique.
The Israeli court claims for itself the right to abjure laws it finds 'unreasonable'. How is that different from, say, Iran having an unelected Council of Elders who can strike down laws too? Because they went to law school?
2. The US Constitution notes that it it the 'supreme law of the land', implying courts had to prefer it over conflicting statutes. Again, Israel literally does not have one
3. Colonial courts had already struck down some laws prior to the Marbury decision (like North Carolina in 1787). Multiple founding fathers including Hamilton had at least discussed approvingly of the concept of judicial review
It's stood up pretty good over the last 250 years. In fact, I would argue that it's certainly performing better than either the presidency or congress.
That's digging a trench to set the bar in, and then being happy they didn't trip stepping across it.
Matt asks: “If your incumbents in Pennsylvania and Colorado are already against a fracking ban, and your hopes for winning a majority run through Alaska and Texas and Ohio, then why can’t we bring back the ‘all-of-the-above’ energy policy as the Democratic Party platform?”
Opposition to fracking is a luxury belief for many soft environmentalists. The Pennsylvania polling is instructive. A progressive group, the Ohio River Valley Institute, claims 58% support for a ban in Pennsylvania. I don’t trust that number, but progressives can wave it around. More neutral polls show the electorate split: about 42% for a ban, 40% against, and many undecided.
But here’s the rub: a lot of that 42% would change their mind the instant gas hit $4 a gallon and local jobs disappeared. “Ban fracking” sentiment probably plays well with affluent Republicans on the Main Line. Democratic leaders are more comfortable courting those voters than grappling with working-class pro-fracking voters whose views on race and gender they find inconvenient.
When the polling is even, the party prefers country-club Republicans to ancestral Democrats. Sad.
I take a NIMBY view towards fracking,:please flyover country, ruin your ground water and enjoy your earthquakes while I burn your gas to heat my home.
Everybody wins.
That's kind of an old school way of looking at fracking. It's gotten a lot safer.
And still has to be weighed against other types of fossil fuel extraction.
There can’t be many places in the United States where there is economic potential for non-fracking extraction, other than the places where it’s already being done pretty thoroughly, can there?
Just one day I want to see one of the moderators write: Fake news!
In my idiolect, this is usually spelled "[citation needed]".
I haven't looked at something more recent, isn't there is a tradeoff in ground water quality still inherent to the project? Like I do agree they've improved by learning.
There is, yes. They’ve gotten better at preventing contamination and sequestering dirty water, but this of course presents groundwater depletion issues.
I still wouldn’t want to drink from an aquifer under a fracking rig, but there are relatively few instances of that happening.
So the real answer is to campaign on a fracking ban and then don't do it. Or better yet, do something symbolic that promotes "safer, cleaner, more abundant energy" that also does not actually ban fracking.
Gas is less than $4/gallon? Who knew?*
*ok I knew bc I visit Mississippi sometimes, but I’m thrilled to see it at $4.19 these days
Only Washington, Oregon, and California are over $4. The next highest is Nevada at $3.88, then Idaho and Arizona at $3.50.
See Washington and California show real Americans that progressives will make gas cost $4.19 a gallon if you let them. And then we wonder why Pennsylvania and Michigan flipped.
Massachusetts is at $3.13. Don't tar all of us with what those weirdo surfers on the West Coast do.
In June I spent a half day in Boston on the way back from Europe. Y’all are European in a chill, aesthetic, I want to go there kind of way.
What do you say about $2.69? My first thought is Georgia is pretty awesome. Our houses are cheap too! Georgia abundance for the win!
Yeah I mean I really know I’m in Mississippi when I stop to buy gas ($2.xx vs $4.xx), cigarettes ($7 vs $12), and a coke or energy drink (at least double in Seattle due to our “sugary drink” sin tax)
What exactly is a "luxury belief" in this context? (I've read the Rob K. Henderson essay, the question is how it specifically applies here.)
I’ve never understood why Rob Henderson seemingly invented this concept. Isn’t it just limousine liberalism?
The advantage of his term is that he can pretend it’s neutral about where on the political spectrum it sits, even though he only applies it to people on the left and center left.
Yeah. Isn’t thinking you can gut the safety net the epitome of a luxury belief?
It's one of those terms (like "dead internet") where the definition people assume looking at it blind is a better tool than the actual definition by the original writer.
What's the definition people assume looking at it blind?
You see, rich people tell other people not to track while they are all fracking in their own backyards.
It's a belief that poor people can't afford.
"Get rid of all the cops" is a belief rich people can afford, because they live in rich neighborhoods with rich neighbors and no public transport and criminals aren't going to take an Uber to their neighborhood to commit crimes. Meanwhile, poor people in poor neighborhoods need the police.
Is "we should slash the top marginal tax rate and pay for it by gutting Medicaid" also a "luxury belief"? Because it seems to fit the definition but I've never seen it applied to that kind of thing.
cf. Handicap principle/costly signals. Luxury beliefs are also sometimes weapons in intra-political circles, where people will adopt more extreme positions in order to win a factional fight by signalling their commitment to the cause (for an example from the right, see the belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 election)
This seems like a bad and confusing name for the concept.
A believes will abandon once it hits their pocket books.
If it’s a belief that you buy into more as your income increases, just call it a “normal belief.”
Democrats have traditionally done well with inferior beliefs and constantly chase Giffen beliefs.
Joe Rogan is NOT conservative; he is a liberal. That the left considers him conservative is a sign of how loopy and authoritarian the left has become. Here is an AI listing of Rogan’s main political beliefs. It looks like those of The NYT editorial board circa 2000:
Long-held beliefs
Social issues: Rogan has long supported socially liberal stances, including same-sex marriage, gun rights [Poster’s Note: Rogan is against gun control, so a conservative stance here], and legalizing recreational drugs like cannabis.
Healthcare and social safety nets: He supports universal healthcare and universal basic income. He has also discussed his family's experience with welfare, highlighting the importance of a social safety net.
Foreign policy: Rogan has been critical of American "military adventurism" and has shown cynicism toward international affairs.
Free speech and "cancel culture": He strongly supports free speech and has often used his platform to criticize "cancel culture".
Distrust of authority: Distrust of authority is a core component of Rogan's political outlook. He believes this distrust extends to many mainstream political and media figures.
To be fair, Rogan’s views are hard to pin down and he often tries to match the person he’s interviewing. He sounds pretty liberal interviewing Bernie Sanders and a lot more conservative interviewing Jordan Peterson. But I agree that he has basically humane politics that would be far preferable to the average Republican and the left should try to work with him.
Far preferable than the average democrat, that’s for sure.
The average Democrat is better educated, more intelligent, and better informed than Rogan.
He's just a much better podcaster which probably translates into being a better politician.
"The average Democrat is better educated, more intelligent, and better informed than Rogan."
What is your reasoning for this?
I'm fairly ignorant about Rogan, but I'm pretty confident that the average Democratic voter is pretty average and generally uninformed. The average Republican voter even more so. Given that Rogan has gotten into this at all suggest a greater knowledge and understanding than most voters.
Rogan is the type of guy you can talk into believing you've been on an alien spaceship.
"Approximately 65% of Americans concur that extraterrestrials exist, and about 51% say that UFO sightings reported by members of the U.S. military represent visits from intelligent aliens, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C."
Sure they are, lol. That is a conceit that democrats have. They manufacture college graduates out of complete morons, then call themselves the better educated party. Almost everywhere the democrats rule there is a maelstrom of violent crime, fatherless children, emotional depression, low education performance and reliance on government handouts. You’ll point to red states poor education performance, but even these are dragged down by heavily concentrated democratic areas.
Do you ever stop? It is impossible to take you seriously when every word out of your mouth is how anyone who isn't MAGA is literally the worst thing in the world.
Joseph, I was responding to a guy who was saying Republicans are conspiracists, etc. I’m a Republican. I could have just responded with, “Do you ever stop? Blah, blah” Instead I gave him examples to penetrate his certainties. If I don’t read something along the lines of, “Republicans suck”, I generally will never insult the other guy. But when I do…
The fact that people engage with him in good faith is basically a form of affirmative action for conservatives.
Ryan, I strongly urge you never to come visit LA. One needs nerves of steel to walk out your front door. My go-to move is just to start blasting with my AR-15 upon exiting my home and then dash from tree to tree as I try to make my way up the street.
I've been told this is actual footage of you trying to go get groceries https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL9fnVtz_lc&pp=ygUTaGVhdCBndW5maWdodCBzY2VuZQ%3D%3D
LA's a big place. There's definitely areas I wouldn't feel safe going. And others that are just fine.
I don’t think you can reduce Rogan’s politics to issue positioning. For example, Rogan has consistently dabbled in conspiracy theories by inviting on guests like Alex Jones and embracing some theories himself. He also has a strong anti-intellectual streak. I watched a recent video where he fell for an AI video of Tim Walz and then when told it was AI explained that the fact that he fell for it showed what kind of person Walz was. In 2024, conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism are strongly Republican coded.
“In 2024, conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism are strongly Republican coded.” We Republicans do have some crazy conspiracies. Nutsy us, we still believe Hunter’s laptop was real, that covid was probably a lab leak, and that the earth’s temperature in 2025 (2050 at the absolute latest) will not be 3.5 to 6.5 degrees warmer than it was in 1990.
Who won the 2020 election?
It's so tiring. TLDR: The left has plenty of stupid gullible people, but conspiracies are FAR more prevalent on the right, and generally much more significant.
* Global Warming: Some morons believe in overly aggressive warming scenarios, though we've also done better than expected (while unfortunately also getting to the point where the better scenarios (e.g. < 1.5C) are now off the table). Meanwhile almost everyone on the right is in complete denial.
* Hunter: Hunter's laptop turned out to be legit, in what is still to this day and insane and hard to believe story, and Facebook & Co had been badly burned by this kind of thing and overreacted. They should've been more even handed, but freaked out under pressure. What is the significance of Hunter's laptop?
* Lab Leak: This is STILL really unclear, and I've read hundreds of pages about the topic (sad). Discussion shouldn't have been suppressed, though I feel at least sympathetic given that Trump was calling it the China Virus.
RFK Jr. is literally the head of the CDC right now, a man who believes in more conspiracy theories than the number of vaccines a kid has to take in their first 18 years of life.
Using the term "Hunter's laptop" is an instant indicator of someone having low intelligence and/or bathing in a really bad information environment.
The lab leak thing isn't even unclear. All subsequent investigation definitively aligned with the zoonotic origin theory, virtually no one in the scientific community takes the lab theory seriously anymore. Conservatives latched onto a brief moment where there was enough uncertainty to consider lab leak as a plausibility and then immediately moved on once that started to change.
I wouldn't even let them have the lab leak theory. Why were they so insistent on the lab leak? Why is an incidental lab mishap more embarrassing for China than a wet market breakout that reveals how underdeveloped their country is outside of the urban core? I think it's pretty obvious why. Conservative China Hawks were absolutely flirting with a Chinese bioweapon conspiracy. They backtracked to "librul scientists are suppressing lab leak" as a face-saving measure.
"What is the significance of Hunter's laptop?"
That they got a bunch of former CIA people to say that it was an foreign intelligence ploy, and then suppressed the story
But yes, the RFK thing is worse.
I'm sorry, i don't take seriously the opinion of an absolute weak-mind who thinks the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person is covid restrictions.
The worst thing that happened to most normie Americans in their lifetime was Covid restrictions though (at least in a societal sense, of course individuals can face worse individual misfortunes like cancer). We’re quite privileged that nothing that bad ever happens to us so the reaction to Covid restrictions seems understandable and a lot of Americans share it.
I have this weird memory about 2008. Maybe it's just me.
I guess remembering 2008 makes you old now? That’s kind of crazy, but that was basically before social media really got going (iPhone came out in 2007, so hardly anyone had a smartphone then. Obama famously used a Blackberry in those days).
I’m 25 and have no strong political memory of 2008. On the other hand, I was strongly impacted by COVID restrictions, and for other people my age, this is the single most relevant and notable government policy within memory.
Justified or not, this contributes to the fact that Gen Z has swung much more conservative in recent years.
That's fine, but his so-called weak mind means he has very malleable views and imo it's fine for Dems to do what they can to leverage that.
Matt going on his show was surely a win for Matt and for the positions he cares about. Same with Sanders. Seems similar to Pete B. going on Fox news.
I didn’t ask you to take him seriously; I asked you to not mislabel him as a conservative. If he is weak-minded he is a weak minded liberal.
He's very much not a liberal, he even endorsed Trump as president. Many people closer to the center have a mix of left and right coded views, being able to name a few liberal beliefs does not make him a liberal.
Joe Rogan is on the other side of the libertarian looking glass from Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and Penn Jillette. All four men have a strong anti-establishment streak and liberty maximalist views. But whereas Rogan was swayed by Trump's flattering rhetoric, the other three deduced Trump was an untrustworthy narcissist who only paid lip-service to their ideology. There's really no other way to describe this other than education polarization in action. Rogan fell for a con the other three were smart enough to suss out. It's not particularly surprising when you examine their body of work as comics. Rogan's jokes are mostly blunt shock humor whereas the other three engage in all manner of subtlety, misdirection, and satire.
Can the Democrats "win back" Rogan? Eh, I think that ship's sailed, not in the immediate future at least. When voters switch allegiances they tend to "forget" their past voting record. It's an ego preservation tactic; people loathe admitting they were wrong. Rogan doesn't have that option, he's too publicly invested in the conservative ecosystem at this point. He'll need a face-saving excuse, like a populist Democrat to play anti-establishment to the ruling Republican party so he can pretend he's been "abandoned" by the GOP.
That is an incisive observation!
Joe Rogan's publicly stated views broadly align with MAGA, so he is branded "conservative". I have spent my entire adult life on university campuses, theoretically surrounded by a sea of far-left liberals and progressives who should hate Joe Rogan (post News Radio, of course). Yet Rogan's publicly stated views broadly align with mine and my colleagues'. (And it seems like his podcast is mostly about MMA and standup comedy? But he had some dumb ideas about covid vaccines so now he's a fascist according to The Left?)
If I were to walk out of my office and ask a random undergrad how they feel about US military intervention, I bet they'd also broadly agree with Rogan's position---until five minutes ago it was *conservatives* who were interventionist hawks (see: Bush 44). Certainly they'd align with him on universal healthcare, the social safety net, distrust of authority...
This is the Dems’ problem in a nutshell
I think there is a category error liberals make when discussing Rogan and also RFK Jr.
Ezra Klein had an episode saying "MAHA is the wrong answer to a good question" or something. But this is really a category error. The purpose of identifying where you identify overlapping areas of concern so you can identify overlapping solutions. Since RFK Jr's policy ideas frankly do not have anything to do with what he says are the problems in any meaningful way (he is totally silent on agribusiness/farm staple crop subsidies, industrial pollution, etc. and other things that are drivers of health) it's not possible to develop a policy.
I think with Rogan it is similar. Rogan has some vibes that code liberal/left, but he is essentially so flighty and has such poor habits of mind that he and people like him cannot be counted on as allies in forming responses to problems, even when he agrees with liberals on what the problems are.
Rogan will have an algorithm that'll tell him what views get higher engagement. It's important for democrats to listen to the show to identify what that is.
This is an (almost completely) excellent post. I love the deep dive!
I just got stopped at this one, regarding Alaska and an "all of the above" energy strategy:
"then why can’t we bring back the “all-of-the-above” energy policy as the Democratic Party platform?"
We can't because there *isn't* a "Democratic Party platform." Presidential nominees have a "platform" as reflected in the convention platform (except when they don't: see Republicans). Even if many prominent Democrats wanted to endorse an "all of the above" approach now, how would that happen and how would that bind the party as a whole? There are many, many actors within the party and they don't, and can't, act in a coordinated way (we're not a tribal cult, like the followers of the Orange God).
Until we have a nomination race, we won't have any mechanism to state what the next brand of the party will be.
You're probably right, but at least amongst House and Senate members and nominees it should be possible to coordinate messages.
With Trump stupidly destroying, well, everything, but specifically here all renewable energy sources, the party should be able to come out for an all of the above strategy, by calling it "affordable energy costs for everyone", and then just get all the candidates to just be quiet about stupid things like no fracking or no pipelines, etc.
Jared Golden and Rashida Tlaib need to coordinate messages? Perhaps meet in the middle? I don't think that's the way politics works.
But sure, at a certain level of abstractness ("low energy costs") they can say similar things. But what do they say in the second sentence?
They should say that they’re going to quadruple energy taxes on those who vote for Republicans to subsidize free gas and electricity for those who vote for Democrats, of course.
Politicians are, or should be, well practiced at not answering the question asked, or avoiding the hard part of any statement.
They don't need to say the same thing, they need to not say something that will hurt their fellow members, and most importantly not say something that will hurt the candidates in the close races. Tlaib will not lose an election because she doesn't say end fracking. So she should never say she wants to end fracking. She can signal her concerns about climate change with all sorts of statements in favor of clean energy.
Sure, I can see that.
What about transpeople? Running in her district, what is she allowed to say and what must she not say?
It would be great if every member of the party weighed their words heavily in terms of how it affects the party brand as a whole, but it's not yet clear to me what that means.
That's why we need a presidential nomination contest to show what the leader of the party believes the party stands for. And that's why I wish contenders would declare their candidacy *right now.*
Newt Gingrich came up with "Contract with America" under Clinton when the GOP was shut out of power.
Paul Ryan was clearly the ideological leader of the GOP under Obama and pushed an Ayn Randian vision for the future.
So you don't necessarily need a Presidential candidate to have a national platform.
Hakeem Jeffries/Chuck Schumer are weak personalities selected by donors to be pliant tools. They have no original ideas or the courage of their conviction to forcefully advocate for anything.
Contract with America was only introduced six weeks before the 94 midterms. That said I doubt Jeffries or Schumer is up to doing a similar thing.
They were both leaders of the House Republicans with some influence on the rest of the party (Gingrich because he led the revolt that toppled 40 years of Democratic control of the House). Senate Republicans didn't take their marching orders from either of them.
I don't disagree with you about Jeffries/Schumer, but who in the party could have anything like the influence of Ryan, let alone Gingrich?
Ro Khanna is certainly out there articulating something different and he could be someone who can put together a national platform but he is running for President and seems to have no interest in the speakership.
I would even be open to someone like MGP running for speaker just to change the party's image and providing it with a spokesperson with a rural populist vibe. But the identity wings of the party will not support her for leadership.
On the Senate side it is a real graveyard of ideas. Warren/Sanders are old hat at this point and their moment has passed. So there is no one.
That may be a little harsh (or maybe not) but that's why I'd like to see the presidential nomination process start immediately and not in a year and a half.
I’m still not ready to love again after Sara Gideon and Cal Cunningham broke my heart
I'm old enough to remember when a sex scandal/marital infidelity was enough to destroy someone's election chances.
El-Sayed strikes me as a good example of a lot of what's wrong with the Dem party. He reeks of entitlement as in "I have a moral birthright to the nomination and no it is simply never, ever acceptable to disagree with me" while also going all in on Tim Walz style "identitarian" politics, ie all it takes to win over a group of voters is to nominate people who descriptively represent those voting blocks. Like the theory that you can totally win over non-college white voters in the Midwest who have left the Democratic Party if you nominate a white guy with a Carharts duck hunting jacket and a pickup truck, while totally ignoring the issues that actual drove those voters away (immigration, crime, LGBT stuff etc etc etc), just with El-Sayed he goes after a much smaller group of voters that will probably be harder to win back!
He could still win because Trump is unpopular and candidate effects are smaller these days but he's clearly a bad choice, which is why Zohran and Bernie will spend months campaigning for him LOL.
"El-Sayed strikes me as a good example of a lot of what's wrong with the Dem party"
That makes no sense at all. El-Sayed is an outsider, not an establishment Democrat and the DSCC will likely not support him even if he wins the primary.
Are you saying that people to the left of the Democratic party should not exist at all? It's a two party system. Everyone no matter where they sit ideologically need to compete on one of the two party tickets. If the Dems+GOP allowed for third parties El-Sayed would run under a different label but that is not the system we have.
I think this is a great example of why the term "establishment" just isn't very helpful, nobody ever explains what they mean by it other say it's a Bad Thing that they aren't part of.
If Schumer is actively courting a non-incumbent candidate to run in a primary, or if Matt Y is endorsing them, such a candidate is establishment.
El-Sayed is almost certainly not establishment because in the event that he wins the Dem primary, the DSCC would cut his funding and it would rather lose Michigan and let the GOP keep the Senate than support his candidacy and try to win Michigan.
The establishment is self-evidently a bad thing because by definition, it is what led us to Trump.
"Are you saying that people to the left of the Democratic party should not exist at all?"
would be nice...
Wishful thinking should not be confused for an argument.
And note I feel the same about the hard right kooks
Sure, I too wish everyone was somehow a secular liberal and we didn't have right-wing bigots or left-wing fools trying to fight the bigots using tactically idiotic means. But the two sides are not equivalent in my view.
I have absolutely no patience for illiberal culture warriors. I tolerate them only so far as they can be manipulated for votes.
"Democrats’ instinct to make crypto the thing to moderate on after losing in 2024 feels a little pathetic,"
In fairness Harris did some vague Crypto gesturing in her own Harris way:
https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/1845993766441644386?lang=en
Hahaha why is it so idpol-inflected? The actual target of crypto policy is young men, but she has to say black men instead so nobody thinks she’s appealing to swing voters?
Who is supposed to be the target for moderate crypto messaging? Young men? Lobbyists?
Both, but especially lobbyists since they have a lot of money and are willing to spend it on negative ads.
That sounds right -- none of the anti-Brown ads here in Ohio really focused on Crypto as far as I can remember. The segment of the population that is really enthusiastic about crypto seems kind of small; same with the fervently anti-crypto crowd.
All the temporarily embarrassed millionaires who think they’ll get rich from it, same as the target for a lot of political messaging.
Their thinking is probably that young men like crypto and they need young men. My thinking is young men like sex much more than crypto and Democrats need an aesthetic that isn’t derisive towards male sexuality.
Republicans requiring id to surf the net is a vote winner for dems. You don't need to mention porn. Just say you'll have a law that makes it illegally to do so.
1. "Republicans want to ban porn"
2. Text that to every young man
3. Democratic landslide!!
no. you use cookies to find out who is looking at porn and then, a few weeks before election, send them targeted ads (banner, email, whatever) explaining that republicans have imposed the age verification stuff
This is the kind of thing a Super PAC could work with the porn companies to do. Best to keep it at arms length from the DNC
Brilliant!
(Except why should people of voting age care about age verification? Go for "Republicans are banning your porn! Join Democrats in saying they'll have to claw it from our moist, sweaty hands".)
ummm, because it’s shut down youporn and pornhub in red states. it’s a pretext to ban free porn
“This campaign is sponsored by NordVPN”
Moderating on crypto seems like the kind of thing that’s relatively harmless, no one is really strongly against crypto.
Me, I'm strongly against crypto.
Me too, but if it helps win the Senate, sign me up.
I'm really strongly against crypto but I also don't know if I have a policy proposal out there to express it.
Seize all the crypto and make it a crime to own? Also, bomb any location where ransomware originates
These red state restrictions on youporn and pornhub might cost republicans a point or two.
We exist, we’re just real weirdos.
It's like being against lottery tickets and Draft Kings...
Which would also be very unpopular. People like their vices, in Nepal they just burned down parliament after the government tried to ban social media. If you’re going to be popularist, social vice-type things seems to be one of the most harmless areas you could moderate and even beat Republicans on like Democrats in the past were seen as the less paternalistic party.
It's just not worth the political capital... It's not at all harmless but it's not like Grandfather Nurgle running HHS or Lysenko running USDA.
Ironically, the best way to deal with the porn bans is to use crypto-based decentralized ID. It's a complicated argument, though.
I have no crypto based id. I own zero crypto….
Not many people do, but it's far and way the best way to enforce identity verification without forcing people to upload pictures of their passports and driver licenses to a (hackable) database. If social media companies were required to adopt it we would live in a better world.
"it’s irresponsible not to have tried to recruit Kristen McDonald Rivet."
I am gonna disagree with Matt here for 2 reasons: 1. Rivet's seat is crucial for hanging onto a House majority; it's entirely possible that it would swing to Republicans if she ran for Senate instead. 2. I don't think it's reasonable to expect Rivet to give up a seat she fought incredibly hard for and won by the skin of her teeth after a single term.
I’m glad to see you’ve become ever so slightly less pessimistic about the senate. You didn’t even mention Georgia! Progress!
In the case of Platner, we’ll see what happens but he’s a competitive shooter so I don’t think guns are going to be a problem. The piece from Silver Bulletin was really good. You shouldn’t be so despondent about that race. Collins hasn’t faced an environment as bad as what next year is shaping up to be. She may not even run again.
Prediction markets give Democrats a 30% chance to win the Senate which would require 4 seats: https://kalshi.com/markets/controls/senate-winner/controls-2026. That’s unlikely but not that unlikely. The base expectation should be Democrats winning 2 or 3 net seats (probably Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio as the third).
Historically Democrats struggled in runoffs and their candidates were hardly superstars on paper. Nobody knew who Warnock and Ossof was a punchline.
That’s why we shouldn’t be fatalistic about states next year. Platner and Turek could turn out to be forces. Hinson could wind up flopping.
The best example though is from 2006 in Virginia. If you’re not familiar with that race check it out on Wikipedia. The Democrat was seen as hopeless and the Republican was a future presidential candidate.
Oh right, I haven’t heard the word “macaca” in years!
I learned long ago to not have any base expectations. We don’t know what things will look like in a year. Just think back to the last time Democrats won the senate. Who had it on their bingo card in 2019 that Democrats would win the senate by winning runoffs in Georgia?
Georgia was predictable, you just had the extrapolate the trends from the last couple of elections and you’d get to a tied state in 2020. The big Senate surprise from 2020 was Democrats losing Maine.
And it didn’t happen until around Labor Day 2006! Prior to that George Allen was supposed to be a lock and would’ve won absent that. Nobody expected that to happen before it did. We just aren’t good at predicting the future, which is why the fatalistic pessimism about 2026 is unwarranted.
The biggest problem I have with this analysis is that I can’t see why I’d want the Democrats to win.
If you're all in on the Peronism, then sure, I don't see it...
If not, someone has to be the opposition... Would've been nice if the Republicans had shown character and strength in 2024 and we'd be in excellent shape right now (the Democrats deserved to lose). Americans just keep on stacking up failure after failure.
The tariffs are objectively bad, and I’m unsure what we’re doing in the Southern Caribbean.
That said, actual Juan Peron would be preferable to the Democrats right now.
Actual Juan Peron would be preferable to Donald Trump right now.
I’m not sure that’s true, but my perspective is coloured by living in the Falklands until the late seventies.
Why do you think Trump is bad?
Sir, today is a workday and I don’t have the 3+ hours it would take to answer your question fully.
Super brief version:
1. Inciting a riot on Jan 6 to try to prevent peaceful transition of power
2. Pressuring an elected official to “find me 11,700 more votes,” I.e. vote fraud
Both of those ought to have disqualified him from ever being elected to anything again, regardless of anything else he’s done.
I don’t find the evidence for 1. terribly compelling. I don’t see his comments rising to the level of “incitement”, and don’t think that Jan. 6 rose to the level of a riot.
Election interference in Georgia looks pretty serious. I’ve said before on this platform that this looks like a legitimate complaint.
But this doesn’t seem that risible, in that the Georgia Secretary of State said “No” and no harm appears to have followed from his request.
It’s just not that compelling an argument that I’d want someone who hates me, is bad at governance and objectively hates America and Americans to have power instead.
I feel like Democrats seem to think that if their opponent has flaws, they somehow deserve to win, and also have utter contempt for people who just aren’t that into politics.
I was a pretty standard not-into-politics voter who voted Biden in 2020. I wouldn’t have if I’d know he was such a bad Dad and raised his son to be a meth head or had realised that his son was getting paid $8 million a year to do nothing at all for Burisma just because his Dad was VP.
And once you realise that there are a bunch of people, like me, who thought that journalism and academia were roughly like they were in the late 80’s, and so they think objectivity is still valued and honest inquiry leads the conversation, and then realise that they end up taking NPR and NYT and WaPo at face value - and those organisations are fully complicit Democrat propaganda machines now - then it becomes necessary to exhaustively check everything, and it turns out the Democrats don’t have much to say that’s objectively true.
His ties are too long and he always chooses red ones. Other than that, he's perfect, I love him, and he's the greatest President -- what am I saying, greatest *human* -- ever.
It’s a good faith question.
I can see that lots of people don’t like him, but I haven’t really heard why.
There’s someone later in the comments who has taken the question the way it was intended, so I’ll carry on with them, and if you have a set of criticisms then lay them out.
If you don’t like the federal government taking over businesses and universities and shutting down scientific research and tearing up all our alliances and destroying our governmental information services, you might think that any party is better than the Republican Party right now.
Hi, Kenny.
Thank you for writing.
I don’t like the Federal Government getting involved in businesses at all, but this has happened many, many times and I’m not sure why it’s different when Trump does it to when anyone else does it, c.f. GM, Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, et al.
The Universities are no longer conducting research. Their experiments don’t replicate, scientists are forced to be complicit in widespread anti-Asian and anti-White racist regimes to disadvantage students or they are fired, plagiarism is rife (Claudine Gay is a plagiarist), and Universities are also billionaires with no accountability. I don’t have sympathy for the Universities.
They should not be funded by the taxpayer. They should repay the grant money from their endowments for any research that either doesn’t replicate or is shown to be plagiarism.
US alliances aren’t great, but it’s because they are objectively a bad deal for the US. Why should the American taxpayers foot the bill for free medical care and vast censorship programs in the UK and Germany? Europeans should pay for their own defence and adopt American values.
I’m not happy about the erosion of government information services, but it’s been ongoing for some time. The widespread conspiracy to downgrade robbery to theft and attempted murder to assault in the D.C. police force can hardly be lain at Trump’s door. The Head of the BLS was innumerate and was cooking the books.
But we should still be collecting information, and I wish we were doing more to do so.
You haven’t mentioned it, but the tariffs are also objectively bad.
This paints a picture of mixed results, and then we don’t know what the Dems stand for, so they’re not preferable, which is why they only have 20% approval.
I personally don’t have a problem with the government taking a 10% stake in Intel and in fact I think that’s how the CHIPS Act ought to have been structured in the first place. My problem is with what it says about the rule of law if the President can just decide on a whim that these grants from legislation passed several years before he took office are now instead purchases of equity.
"scientists are forced to be complicit in widespread anti-Asian and anti-White racist regimes to disadvantage students or they are fired"
Ok, I really do have to go soon, but I want to address this, because I am a scientist at a large public university in California.
This just isn't how it works. Yes, there were cases of extreme woke overreach during the heyday of DEI activism (2020-ish +/- a couple years). But I myself, as a scientist, have never felt in any way "forced to be complicit" in discriminating against Asian or white students. I've reviewed grad student applications, I have two grad students in my lab (both Asian-American as it happens), I've taught courses, and nobody - not my department chairman, not the dean, not an activist group - ever sat me down and sternly told me, "You're being too nice to the white and Asian students, you must immediately start racistly discriminating against them or you're FIRED!"
Sure, there are kooks and extremists, but the vast, vast majority of us academic scientists just want to do our research and be good mentors to our students, and most of us, except a few assholes, want a welcoming atmosphere for anyone - white, Asian, Black, Hispanic - who is willing and able to do the lab work.
I really want to believe this, and would really prefer if this were generally true.
But the UC system required diversity statements for tenure track positions as part of the Academic Personnel Manual in section 210-1.d until March 19th of this year, 2025, so I think you are either lying, or don’t think diversity statements are ethically compromised, or work outside if the UC system (but surely you know how the UC system worked if you are in academia in California even if you are not in the UC system directly).
I am not lying. Yes, it's true that UC required diversity statements for faculty positions. For mine, I wrote some generic boilerplate about welcoming and learning from diverse perspectives etc. and I got hired.
FYI, when I reviewed grad student applications (and I'm talking *before* Trump 2.0), diversity statements were *not* a required part of the grad student application. Sure, some students would throw an "As a first-generation Honduran immigrant..." or something like that into their Personal Statement, but it was never a decisive factor in admitting or rejecting anyone, the truth is that in the last application cycle (fall of 2024), we had 700+ applicants for 27 slots, so by necessity we had to turn down a lot of qualified people. Anti-Asian or anti-white discrimination had nothing to do with it.
Thank you.
I appreciate the effort, especially as I know you are pressed for time.
That doesn’t sound as horrific as the admissions comments that have been made public at Columbia and Harvard, but it also feels like it is surplus to requirements.
Why would a Physics or Chemistry lab need to be welcome to all?
Surely we should just welcome people who are good at Physics or Chemistry, no matter where they might be from, and the quality of the research will speak for itself.
> I’m not sure why it’s different when Trump does it to when anyone else does it, c.f. GM, Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, et al.
Trump just demanded a stake for no reason, and got it. GM was part of a taxpayer bailout, and the government never got equity. The others never got any government bailout.
The difference is that when the president demands fealty and gets it, he is acting like a fascist, while when the regulators follow the law, they are just following the law.
> The Universities are no longer conducting research. Their experiments don’t replicate, scientists are forced to be complicit in widespread anti-Asian and anti-White racist regimes to disadvantage students or they are fired
Citation needed on there being any difference in rate of replicability of research in the past few decades compared to any previous time in history. If you know what science is (ie, the attempt to understand things that no one yet understands) you should realize that there’s going to be a significant amount that is incorrect in there, unless you have the kind of perfectionist standards that prevent any progress on anything.
Also, citation needed on a scientist being fires for opposing affirmative action.
> I don’t have sympathy for the Universities.
I don’t care about your feelings. No one needs sympathy. What we need is an attempt to run society in ways that make it work, not emotional outbursts aimed at destroying things just because you don’t feel sympathy.
> The Head of the BLS was innumerate and was cooking the books.
The head of the BLS was doing science as it has always been done - gathering flawed data and trying to synthesize things from it, and revising it as better data comes in. Anyone who insists on perfection from the get-go has decided that we don’t need to learn, and doesn’t understand the point of information.
> we don’t know what the Dems stand for, so they’re not preferable
Democrats stand for taking a flawed government and making it better, bit by bit, and trying to undo the work of the destroyer who has no interest in anything working.
I don’t believe the former head of the BLS was innumerate. I do believe Peter Navarro to be, and Lutnick and Greer are not far behind.
The two issues I care the most about, as a Westerner with an economics degree, are public lands / environment and economic policy.
You don’t hear much in any media about the former, but Trump’s admin has been the most hostile to public lands in my lifetime; they’ve cut the funding for FS/BLM/NPS/FWS, laid off 30-50% of the employees from each of those agencies, slashed funding for wildland firefighters, and revoked conservation funding for local districts. This has hurt a lot of small seasonal rec communities in Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming that I care quite a bit about.
They tried to eliminate the Land & Water Conservation Fund and sell public lands in the West as part of the OBBB; both of those clauses failed after widespread outrage. I’m proud of my Idaho delegation for standing up to Mike Lee and Doug Burgum on this, but the attempt was despicable and the White House initially supported both provisions.
This admin is also revoking the Public Lands Rule, seeking to revoke the Roadless Rule, and as of today they’ve just kneecapped the LWCF.
As for economics, the announcement and attempted explanation of the tariffs earlier this year finally convinced me that the president is functionally senile or retarded.
I know a lot of independents don’t understand why Trump inspires such rage in Democrats, and I’m trying to be very specific to avoid any reasonable accusation of TDS. Please don’t respond by trying to say that Democrats are also bad. It’s irrelevant and I agree with you.
To stop/prevent at least some of Trump’s shitty policies and appointments?
I’m glad you at least have some kind of outcome based thinking.
Which policies and appointments do you think are shitty?
Again, not nearly enough time to answer your question properly, but I consider Trump’s shittiest appointment to be RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary. That man is going to get actual Americans killed with his antivax nonsense.
Don’t feed the sea lion, drosophilist
That's where I'm at, I want Republicans to lose because of Trump. But I also want Dems to lose because of the many policy differences.
So I get to cheer no matter who loses.
This is great positive thinking!
You win a little bit either way.
Glass half-full!