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.
“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.
To be clear, I'm not saying that "Trump is bad for oil and gas executives" is a winning campaign line itself, I'm saying that it's more fertile recruitment ground than you'd think prima facie.
As far as threading the needle, I don't think it's too hard--something like, "$70-80/bbl is good for the Texas economy and for consumers." I think people are fine with $3 gasoline at this point, so I think you make the argument for stability in the economy (including oil and gas), and getting rid of the tariffs that are making prices higher for all goods.
I don't think his energy strategy is so much lowering oil prices as forcing anyone who needs energy to get it from U.S. oil companies by blocking alternatives. If anything, his policies are *raising* oil prices because tariffs on equipment used in oil drilling make drilling more expensive. I also listened to a podcast talking about how many oil producers who like to lower their costs by powering their rigs with solar and wind-generated electricity, rather than diesel generators, but of course, Trump is blocking that too.
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.
From an EV perspective it doesn't really make sense to pursue this. Kalshi gives Democrats a 25% chance at taking the TX Senate seat next year. Even if you think that's a little high (I do), they've got a better shot than they do in, like, Wyoming or Alabama. Meanwhile I don't think an independent candidate would have more than like a 40% shot at beating the GOP, and to have any hope at all the Democrats would have to clear the field and not split the anti-Trump vote. I don't think 40% of a Susan Collins is more valuable than 25% of a Joe Manchin.
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.
It's tangential, but not irrelevant. I think it's in Democrats' collective interest to force retirement on people who are obviously too old so that the collective brand can get younger and fresher, and also to allow more rising stars to actually rise into prominent positions. I'd personally like to see the party encourage retirement for everyone over 70 in a safe seat.
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.
My 2¢ is that no political pundit I know of supports octogenarian candidates. This is purely driven by the revealed preferences of the voters themselves. Which ironically makes this sentiment one of the most elitist opinions out there.
I think you could start an entire Substack that discusses *only* the revealed preferences of the voters themselves, and it would be pretty fascinating and also very discouraging. Next, do restrictive zoning laws.
With zoning it’s not even revealed preferences, sometimes it’s expressed preferences! See the question on affordable housing I wrote for the NYC poll. (The weighting issues that caused me to be way off on the mayoral primary aren’t a concern for the housing question because that one was asked of all NYC registered voters.)
- previous person resigns their post (usually to run for a higher office)
- new person gets a temporary appointment or runs basically unopposed in a special election with strong endorsements
- by the time the regular election comes around they have incumbency advantage and breeze through the primary, probably unopposed
- the general election always goes to the Democrat
Thus, the people's voice never actually gets heard, and MA remains dominated by smoke filled rooms, and therefore is governed quite effectively. The only proper way to choose our next senator is to do it half way through Markey's term.
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.
Americans voted for a retard twice over an eminently qualified candidate, so I don’t trust the intelligence of the average American to vote us out of this mess. The average voter does little to no investigations on prospective candidates and vote based on vibes.
Americans still after my entire lifetime of the GOP acting like Satanic hell spawn, yet voters hustled think Dems are to cringe and vote for the party that advocated against American values, and American prosperity. I don’t know how much fucking around the electorate does before they find out that populism is a garbage philosophy.
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!
It was unfortunate when 77 year old Ted Kennedy dropped dead and was replaced by a R. Seems unlikely that would happen in the Trump era, but still not a great precedent. At least my 80 year old senator (Durbin) is not running again.
Policy isn't really that important for a safe seat Dem Senator. There are probably a dozen people who could win a Massachusetts senate general election with differences in policy preferences that produce zero outcomes differently from each other.
But politics isn't just about the specific policies supported by a random senator, it's also about the perception of the party. People perceive the Democratic party as being a sclerotic gerontocracy who can't keep with the times because everyone in there is ancient and desperately trying to cling to power. Given equal policy outcomes, it's absolutely better to have a younger person in Markey's (or King's, or Warren's, or name your favorite 75+ senator) seat if it helps the national brand win more elections.
Well the people are retards then, like if somebody though Joe Biden was less cognitively fit for office than Donald Trump, the belong in an asylum not the ballot box. I care about good policy passing to benefit Americans I'm not going to get caught up on vibes because Americans are too dumb to deserve being the Leader of the free world. Our country is literally being destroyed by one political party, and all critiques you have about Dems pail in comparison to the blatant hatred of America the Republican party has.
Markey stepping down wouldn't negatively affect policy at all. Nor would any of the other 75+ year old Dems in safe seats. They'd be replaced by someone with pretty much exactly the same politics as them, just younger. Obviously the republican party is much worse, that's why winning is so important. And winning when you're viewed as the party of ancient politicians clinging to power is more difficult. There's no downside to having our eldest safe seat senators step down and be replaced by younger senators.
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 do you think wins if Auchincloss and Moulton both run? Seems like Markey will have a good shot to rerun his successful 2020 campaign strategy of painting himself as the only true progressive in the race.
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.
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?)
My experience in a constituent service office a very long time ago was mostly helping people interface with government agencies. More of like an information service than actually doing anything. Sometimes writing letters on behalf of people that were vague and to me probably pointless. Sometimes getting people flags and tours from the Capitol.
Again, just one experience a long time ago, but I have a hard time believing that “constituent service” happens at a scale big enough to matter at all. I think what people more mean by this is “visible in the community” rather than specifically constituent services.
If you're having problems with a federal agency of any kind, your representative's staff will help you. Back when my dad and I would go to Pete Stark's town halls, he'd always start out with a preamble about how if you need help with social security, Medicare, or COBRA, he had a staff member at the side of the hall you could give your phone number to and she'd follow up with you. That way he wouldn't have to spend the whole town hall fielding questions about those topics.
It's probably an inefficient use of our representatives' resources, but our government services can be really complicated and annoying, so it's not terribly surprising that they fill this niche.
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.
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 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?
There's no perfect solution, but I'm come around the notion that the least bad option is to make supreme court positions elected directly by voters, have the supreme court judges choose the appeals court judges underneath them, and the appeals court judges choose the district court judges underneath them.
This keeps the number of judges on the ballot relatively small, by having voters weigh on only on the races that are most important. And it is quite often the only popular check available in states with gerrymandered legislatures. See Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for an example of why state supreme Court judges need to be elected, not appointed. And, yes, in a fantasy world where it was possible to go back to 1787 and tweak the Constitution, I would argue that, even for the U.S. supreme court, the process of appointment by the president and confirmation by the Senate was a mistake, and that these people should be elected (and for defined terms, not for life) as well.
As to the argument that being able to appoint lower court judges would make the higher court judges too powerful, it's not power that the higher court judges don't have anyway, since they literally have the power to overrule the lower court judges' rulings.
Of course, in safe states, elected supreme court judges would just be partisan hacks, but they're partisan hacks anyway under the current system, so it would at least be no worse.
It's tempting to say, come up with a commission of legal experts to appoint the judges, but somebody has to decide who gets to be on this commission, and if not the voters or the politicians, than who? Allowing current judges to choose their successors just entrenches the power of whomever already had power before such a system gets adopted. We know both parties would pull every maneuver they possibly could to take control over such a commission, and I don't think there exists a good answer as to how to ensure that such a commission is filled with people who are genuinely beholden only to the law and don't care whether Democrats or Republicans get to control policy.
Yeah deciding who should be on a selection commission a hard problem, the best solution is probably some kind of random selection similar to a jury with the pool limited to licensed attorneys with at least a certain number of years of experience and a clean disciplinary record, maybe make them take an advanced version of the bar exam too and only let people above a certain score in the pool.
But the best realistic solution probably has to be direct election.
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
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
They've got a Basic Law. Close enough for government work. You are getting hung up on terms, which is something you do a lot. And colonial courts in Palestine and other areas with British jurisprudence had as well, which shaped the Israeli justice system. It was hardly created in a vacuum.
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.
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.
As a practicing lawyer, elected judiciaries are horrendous and really no way to run a railroad. Mixed systems like the "Missouri Plan" where both the bar and politicians have roles in the appointment process work well.
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.
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?
Maybe some offshore, like off California or Florida where it's very restricted by law. But yes, US oil/gas infrastructure is close to built out by location, we keep getting more through improvements in technology.
One of the best courses I took at TAMU was an oil & gas economics class that dove into a lot of this stuff. It was fascinating. The US (at that point, and probably still) had the lowest per-well oil production in the world; the US was averaging ~40 barrels per day per well. Depreciated infrastructure is cheap to run! The US had about one million oil wells at that point, the most in the world.
Countries on the Persian Gulf and North Sea had absurdly high per-well production. IIRC Kuwait was top of the world on this metric.
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.
Again, this is where I'm a NIMBY, namely I don't want extractive industries in my backyard. I am pleased to benefit from other people doing it so am in no way supportive of any sort of national ban. Now where this becomes a problem is if we end up in a Nord Stream 2 situation, which before January 20th I wouldn't have considered even remotely likely.
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.
The simple answer is that party leaders don't have the luxury of choosing what their own party stands for. That vacuum gets filled by a cacophony of interest groups, plus viral posts on social media that could be put forth by anybody, the vast majority of who do not answer to the party leaders.
The only person who has any ability to cut through this is the party's presidential nominee, but that's only possible in a presidential election year, and even then, requires a charismatic candidate with a clear vision, rather than simply a candidate who listens to the "groups" and seeks to find consensus. In 2024, Democrats did not have such a candidate. Maybe they will in 2028. One can hope.
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.
I've never understood why people treat him as a particularly smart or interesting person. His biography is interesting, but his most prominent example about marriage makes no sense. Poor people aren't going to get married less because Yale students/grad students are insufficiently judgmental about single moms.
"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)
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)
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.
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.
Agree. The DNC has nothing better to do anyway and Ken Martin is worse than a damp squib and the more they delay starting the primaries the more damage the party will endure.
I don't think anyone is left that is interested in challenging Jeffries and Schumer while playing an inside game, and ultimately caucus leadership is about winning over your members not playing to the public.
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.*
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.
>A perplexing aspect of the controversy is that prominent scientists continue to publish studies in leading scientific journals that they say provide compelling evidence for the natural-origins hypotheses. Yet rather than resolving the issue, each new piece of evidence seems to widen the divide further.
>In many parts of the world, including the US, France and Germany, public opinion is increasingly shifting towards lab-leak theories, despite the lack of definitive evidence.
>The core issue behind the Covid-19 origins controversy is fundamentally a crisis of trust rather than a mere information problem.
Bro, come on. This whole article is merely an attempt to validate public distrust despite literally admitting (presumably to legally cover their ass) that scientists continue to find more evidence supporting zoonotic origin.
Despite what the headline may imply, the author is careful not to give any direct credence to lab leak hypothesis. Instead, her argument (which I disagree with) is that the left shares equal fault for the politicization of science and subsequent spread of covid misinformation and so it's in poor taste to try to place the blame squarely on the right.
Crazy conspiracies are NOT more prevalent on the right. The left believes that men can be women, that Trump pissed on a hotel bed in Russia, that Adam wasn’t full of Schiff about Russia, Russia, Russia. They believed that Biden was “the best Biden ever”.
I’ve already mentioned global warming and the absurdities they believed about that. The China Virus? It was “nearly molecularly impossible” that it could be a lab leak. Democrats were deplatforming people for saying they thought it was likely a lab leak. Read that again; it is shocking!
Democrats widely believed that we could not vote normally in the 2020 election because of covid but that BLM protests were acceptable. They put forth the crazy conspiracy that the biggest threat to domestic tranquility is white supremacists, gaslighting us about the actual crime statistics. Democrats still believe that Trump called a bunch of white supremacists “Good people”
You think using “Hunter’s laptop” is a sign of low intelligence? Haha, that’s a convenient belief. I see it as a sign of shorthand, that is readily understood, for something that would take more words to describe. I see why it stings, though. I want to point out a quote that according to you is ipso facto evidence of low IQ: “ Hunter's laptop turned out to be legit”. Joe Rogan? Me, Ryan Hanemann? No, it was you…just above.
Basically all of the above are things best discussed with a therapist.
I expect anyone who read's Matt's blog to be smart and wise enough not to operate at this level. As one example, you should be able to clearly article what exactly the Russia investigation found and didn't find, even if you think that it was overblown. Sentences like "that Adam wasn’t full of Schiff about Russia, Russia, Russia" are very odd things for an adult to say.
Russian intelligence hacked several important Democrats in the lead up to the 2016 elections and released the contents to hurt the Democrats. News companies also made a huge deal out of Hillary's emails which together with the Comey letter hurt her in the election.
Several companies created guidelines on how to handle hacked materials, and when this extremely implausible and insane story popped up, they made the wrong call. They shouldn't have done it.
What would have happened if they hadn't done that? How would that have changed anything?
Funny you should pick election denial. The first instances of this were the 2000 election and the 2016 election. Hillary is still saying it was stolen. Conspiracists everywhere!
The 2000 election was a mess - the Supreme Court stopped the vote, in the end Bush had the actual votes to win either way, many of the voters who voted for Bush clearly didn't mean too, but that's not how the rules worked so Bush won.
The point is Gore called and conceded. So did Hillary.
It's complicated. I never believed the initial claims made by Trump about dominion voting machines, and that kind of nonsense.
I do believe that a lot of the election laws were changed with the intention of defeating Trump. But they were changed. Some of them were changed illegally. For example, too close to the election to comply with the state laws.
As if to confirm the accusation that we on the right are all conspiracists, I think there was a deep state effort to get rid of Trump. I think this included Republicans.
You asked, do I think it was stolen. Not by my definition. But certainly it was stolen by the definition taught to us by a generation of Democrats starting with Al Gore and running through Hillary Clinton.
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.
I remember when SNL used to do Celebrity Jeopardy skits, the main shared cultural assumption was that most celebrities are really dumb. At some point, a bunch of parts of the political spectrum decided that "no, that's elitist, celebrities have to be smart, otherwise they wouldn't be famous." Even before Rogan shifted more to the right, every time I would come across his podcast, it was the stupidest thing I had heard in months. There's the question of how the Democrats need to culturally shift for votes, but there's also the conversation about how we're becoming a sloppy country across the board that goes beyond parties and elections.
Linked to this, we're in a supercharged age of parasocial connection to entertainers, where people make liking those entertainers part of their own worldview and self worth in a way that probably wasn't true 20-40 years ago.
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.
I agree with your conclusion, but also think its emblematic of how positions have changed. If you had name Rogan's positions in 2012, he likely would have been considered not just liberal, but progressive. Both he and the Democratic party have moved!
To me Rogan, Musk and also many people who went from Biden '20 to Trump '24 did not do so because of positions that would have even been typically salient prior to 2018.
Primarily it was about very specific excesses of the "Me Too" movement and the protests following George Floyd's murder, and their frustration with liberal attitudes toward Covid especially in '21 and '22.
For someone who purports to be as future-oriented as Musk, it will be interesting to look back and analyze how dumb his reasons were for changing his political views in 20 years.
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.
Exactly, Rogan is just a member of the Greek chorus. He has no real priorities you can appeal to as the basis of a political alliance. You'd have an easier time allying with Brian Kemp.
another example of this is Tulsi Gabbard has some views that code liberal but we all know how it would go if you were to try to strike a deal with her based on a shared interest in reducing intervention and foreign policy adventurism... pretty sure that wouldn't really end up working out.
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...
Yes, I'm sure Bolton's mustache purred with delight when American bombs fell on Iran. At bottom, because the GOP is currently organized around a single personality "conservatism" is whatever Il Duce says it is. Defining any left-right dichotomy is increasing an exercise in nailing Jell-O to the wall.
But it is still very weird an unhelpful that people like Rogan get coded as "conservative" because they diverge on a line item from the list of approved views the very-online left maintain. Ditto for MAGA, of course, where you have check each morning to see what the correct opinion about Epstein is lest you become part of the Democrat Hoax of releasing the documents or the Biden Coverup of not releasing them.
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.
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.
Das P is basically correct. The progressive caucus isn't very big nor wields much real political power. The moderate party and media establishment was the agency and power behind all of the things that provoked reactionary backlash. The fact that some of those establishment politicians/pundits are now trying to pretend that they were fooled by left-wing progressives is pretty fucking craven.
Who is this supposed to win over? Moderates and conservatives hear that Democrats are a bunch of empty suits who will easily fold to any activist group that leans on them. Liberals and progressives hear that Democrats are a bunch of empty suits who will easily fold to any populist strongman that leans on them. No one trusts the Democratic party to stand up for their interests.
I don't think that's true at all. The Dem Party and party aligned interest groups have become much more liberal since 2012. People wanting to moderate to win more elections like Matt are very much not in the driver's seat right now. See how people in the Biden White House did read Matt's post but never implemented them, instead they listened to The Groups which remain very influential (ie "the establishment").
"Who is this suppose to win over" non-college voters of all sorts of different backgrounds who have left the Democratic Party over social issues over the last few election cycles.
None of these Groups have any real political power, they can only influence politicians indirectly through grass roots activism and donor pressure. But if your argument is that these things aren't actually representative of your voters, then why the hell did you acquiesce to the Groups? Well because to be a moderate is to be someone who acquiesces to things. Someone who seeks common ground; who looks to invite critics into the coalition rather than alienate them. This is a commendable attitude. The world needs open-minded collaborators.
But then a zero-sum mentality emerged in the wake of covid inflation and the right took advantage, "Nah, fuck those people, they stole your birthright." And some moderates immediately cowered, "AYEEE! We're sorry we didn't mean to accept THOSE people into the coalition! The left deceived us. We're cool now though, please take us back!" That's not commendable at all. It's weak. It's feckless. Party approval polls confirm that everyone sees this attitude as weak and feckless.
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.
It's a pretty bad sign for a candidate if people are already preemptively coming up with excuses for him losing the general election before he's even won the primary.
Absolutely, the establishment is who opened up the border and allowed 7 million migrants to enter and create chaos. The establishment is who pushed Title IX trans rights into every school creating a moral panic around children. The establishment is who told people that the economy is doing great and that inflation is no big deal. The establishment is who said Biden is perfect and better than ever and is fit to run again. The establishment invented the wokeness it now "claims" to oppose but does not do so in any meaningful way.
I'm convinced that the Democratic establishment hasn't crowned itself it honors over the last decade, but let's be real - Trump is a anti establishment candidate which is why he won.
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.
"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.
Now, Before the Midterms: There should be a massive effort to place a billboard on every major highway on the outskirts of every major town in every Red District in the Country identifying by name the U.S. Representative who voted for the Big Ugly Bill listing the eventual damages it will do to its citizens. The same should be done in every State with a Republican Senator up for reelection. Much of the bad stuff will not be apparent to voters until after the midterms; consequently, Democratic Party messaging between now and then is critical! We need to be in Republican Faces Every Day like they are in ours.
JUST AN EXAMPLE: " Your Representative in Congress, (first name, last name) Just Voted to slash Your Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP Benefits to Pay for Tax Cuts for the Rich! VOTE HIM (HER) OUT."Is that a slight overstatement of facts? Certainly, but that's what Republicans do all the time and we need to counterattack using the same tactics and be UBIQUITOUS about it, e.g., Billboards.
Each Billboard's message presupposes that Democrats in that District are smart enough to identity the hot button issues that will resonate with the intended Republican audience in that District, be it Taxes, FEMA Support, Economy, Medical Coverage, Infrastructure, Tariffs, etc. If Dems can't pinpoint the right issues, then billboards will have little effect.
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.
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.
That was a fascinating race. As fascinating to me is that the Democratic winner ended up leaving the party and would have no chance of being a Democratic nominee now. Very illustrative of Matt's points.
If Mary Peltola runs she’ll be the Democratic nominee. She deviates from them plenty. The idea that you have to be pure to be a Democrat is false. Matt is way too pessimistic about that. They’ve made good recruits in key races and if they need to differ they will and there won’t be much blowback outside of the online world.
Those are the two issues I know of off the top of my head, but they're big ones, especially energy. Of all the problems Democrats have had from moving leftward, energy is number one and it's a big deal in Alaska.
As to whether there is less diversity among Democrats, you're right, but it's for a good reason. You wouldn't know it from listening to or reading much of the discourse, but the country has moved leftward a lot during this century. In 2006, for example, gay marriage was illegal and don't ask, don't tell was the law. Many Democrats either supported that or treaded lightly on it. Those aren't the law anymore and every Democrat agrees with that. Republicans used to be vocally anti-gay, but now are either supportive of gay rights or don't talk about it.
Not too long ago, we were debating privatizing Social Security. That's not true today. We used to argue over how much to cut entitlements, but not anymore, although that may change soon. Democrats used to run away from the ACA, but now embrace it enthusiastically, even in solidly red states.
On abortion, Democrats in many places used to have to be against it or wishy-washy. After Dobbs, public opinion has moved decisively in favor of the pro-choice position. Even in most red states, pro-choice is a winner.
Democrats do need to moderate on some issues, but the need to is less stark than it was even a short while ago. They've won on a whole host of issues and are either on offense or those issues are no longer argued over.
Democrats' vulnerability on cultural issues is in large part because Republicans have thrown in the towel on many economic issues. If they revert back to their Paul Ryanesque ways, it will be every Democrats' dream come true.
I write about these things regularly on my newsletter. The link to it is below if you're interested.
Where we seem to disagree is not that the American public has moved left on many issues, it has. But that the Democratic party has moved even further left and quite quickly. I think Matt is an excellent example - he was very progressive in 2008, but would now be considered mainstream liberal. Mainstream liberal opinions in 2008 are now considered out of bounds. And that last part is the key. Its not just that people disagree over subjects, but that you aren't allowed to be a Democrat politician in good standing if you diverge across a large swath of issues.
This is extremely problematic for the Senate. There are millions of progressive on the coasts who pull the median viewpoint in the US to the left, but that leaves Democrats in much of the rest of the country out alignment with the majority of their would be constituents.
"Democrats' vulnerability on cultural issues is in large part because Republicans have thrown in the towel on many economic issues. If they revert back to their Paul Ryanesque ways, it will be every Democrats' dream come true."
Yes, if Republicans are out of alignment with the public on economic issues this will allow the Democrats to be somewhat out of alignment on social issues. But if they don't revert back, then you could see how Democrats would need to moderate on social issues substantially?
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.
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).
I'm not sure I follow. Markets think there is a 30% chance that Democrats win a majority because its possible that things get so bad that it creates a really strong Democratic wave election that correlates sufficiently to give Democrats a majority. That's very different than creating a default expectation that Democrats will pick up 2-3 seats.
Most prediction maps I've seen show it a tossup as to whether Republicans or Democrats gain seats in 2026. I think its slightly more likely for Democrats to stay even or pick up one seat then for Republicans to gain, but I haven't seen anyone say they think its over 50% that Democrats pick up 2-3 seats.
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.
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.
“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.
To be clear, I'm not saying that "Trump is bad for oil and gas executives" is a winning campaign line itself, I'm saying that it's more fertile recruitment ground than you'd think prima facie.
As far as threading the needle, I don't think it's too hard--something like, "$70-80/bbl is good for the Texas economy and for consumers." I think people are fine with $3 gasoline at this point, so I think you make the argument for stability in the economy (including oil and gas), and getting rid of the tariffs that are making prices higher for all goods.
I don't think his energy strategy is so much lowering oil prices as forcing anyone who needs energy to get it from U.S. oil companies by blocking alternatives. If anything, his policies are *raising* oil prices because tariffs on equipment used in oil drilling make drilling more expensive. I also listened to a podcast talking about how many oil producers who like to lower their costs by powering their rigs with solar and wind-generated electricity, rather than diesel generators, but of course, Trump is blocking that too.
Wouldn’t this person almost certainly caucus with the Republicans and vote for MAGA judges though?
Getting 1 or 2 people conservatives who will oppose Trump's worst things should be seen as an absolute win.
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.
For a Texas senator, I’ll take whatever dissent I can get.
This is more or less a "value over replacement" situation. Perfect, enemy of the good, all that.
From an EV perspective it doesn't really make sense to pursue this. Kalshi gives Democrats a 25% chance at taking the TX Senate seat next year. Even if you think that's a little high (I do), they've got a better shot than they do in, like, Wyoming or Alabama. Meanwhile I don't think an independent candidate would have more than like a 40% shot at beating the GOP, and to have any hope at all the Democrats would have to clear the field and not split the anti-Trump vote. I don't think 40% of a Susan Collins is more valuable than 25% of a Joe Manchin.
I hate the idea, but anything to take back the Senate and stop Trump is on the table, so sign me up.
George W Bush is tanned, rested, and ready
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.
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.
It's tangential, but not irrelevant. I think it's in Democrats' collective interest to force retirement on people who are obviously too old so that the collective brand can get younger and fresher, and also to allow more rising stars to actually rise into prominent positions. I'd personally like to see the party encourage retirement for everyone over 70 in a safe seat.
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.
Love to see Matt writing about the nuts-and-bolts of winning power; love to see Milan calling out gerontocracy.
My 2¢ is that no political pundit I know of supports octogenarian candidates. This is purely driven by the revealed preferences of the voters themselves. Which ironically makes this sentiment one of the most elitist opinions out there.
Binary choices don’t reveal that much. I suspect the relevant preference is for a name they know
I think you could start an entire Substack that discusses *only* the revealed preferences of the voters themselves, and it would be pretty fascinating and also very discouraging. Next, do restrictive zoning laws.
With zoning it’s not even revealed preferences, sometimes it’s expressed preferences! See the question on affordable housing I wrote for the NYC poll. (The weighting issues that caused me to be way off on the mayoral primary aren’t a concern for the housing question because that one was asked of all NYC registered voters.)
“Revealed preferences” would be a great name for a Substack, just saying.
The way elected officials are chosen in MA is:
- previous person resigns their post (usually to run for a higher office)
- new person gets a temporary appointment or runs basically unopposed in a special election with strong endorsements
- by the time the regular election comes around they have incumbency advantage and breeze through the primary, probably unopposed
- the general election always goes to the Democrat
Thus, the people's voice never actually gets heard, and MA remains dominated by smoke filled rooms, and therefore is governed quite effectively. The only proper way to choose our next senator is to do it half way through Markey's term.
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.
Americans voted for a retard twice over an eminently qualified candidate, so I don’t trust the intelligence of the average American to vote us out of this mess. The average voter does little to no investigations on prospective candidates and vote based on vibes.
Americans still after my entire lifetime of the GOP acting like Satanic hell spawn, yet voters hustled think Dems are to cringe and vote for the party that advocated against American values, and American prosperity. I don’t know how much fucking around the electorate does before they find out that populism is a garbage philosophy.
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!
It was unfortunate when 77 year old Ted Kennedy dropped dead and was replaced by a R. Seems unlikely that would happen in the Trump era, but still not a great precedent. At least my 80 year old senator (Durbin) is not running again.
So no actual issue then.
I feel like I’ve been pretty clear that my issue is that he’s just too old but you seem unwilling to accept that as a valid concern
Policy isn't really that important for a safe seat Dem Senator. There are probably a dozen people who could win a Massachusetts senate general election with differences in policy preferences that produce zero outcomes differently from each other.
But politics isn't just about the specific policies supported by a random senator, it's also about the perception of the party. People perceive the Democratic party as being a sclerotic gerontocracy who can't keep with the times because everyone in there is ancient and desperately trying to cling to power. Given equal policy outcomes, it's absolutely better to have a younger person in Markey's (or King's, or Warren's, or name your favorite 75+ senator) seat if it helps the national brand win more elections.
Well the people are retards then, like if somebody though Joe Biden was less cognitively fit for office than Donald Trump, the belong in an asylum not the ballot box. I care about good policy passing to benefit Americans I'm not going to get caught up on vibes because Americans are too dumb to deserve being the Leader of the free world. Our country is literally being destroyed by one political party, and all critiques you have about Dems pail in comparison to the blatant hatred of America the Republican party has.
Markey stepping down wouldn't negatively affect policy at all. Nor would any of the other 75+ year old Dems in safe seats. They'd be replaced by someone with pretty much exactly the same politics as them, just younger. Obviously the republican party is much worse, that's why winning is so important. And winning when you're viewed as the party of ancient politicians clinging to power is more difficult. There's no downside to having our eldest safe seat senators step down and be replaced by younger senators.
Mental fitness can change a lot in six years for someone who's elderly though.
You mean like Stroke-Face McGee in the White House, who was clearly mentally incompetent both times he was elected?
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 do you think wins if Auchincloss and Moulton both run? Seems like Markey will have a good shot to rerun his successful 2020 campaign strategy of painting himself as the only true progressive in the race.
Who would be a good replacement?
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 have my preferences but there’s a strong bench in Massachusetts and I think there should be an open primary.
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
Anyone would be better than Markey (and Warren for that matter)
Worst fantasy football league ever.
Dick Durbin can't block for shit.
I lold
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?)
My experience in a constituent service office a very long time ago was mostly helping people interface with government agencies. More of like an information service than actually doing anything. Sometimes writing letters on behalf of people that were vague and to me probably pointless. Sometimes getting people flags and tours from the Capitol.
Again, just one experience a long time ago, but I have a hard time believing that “constituent service” happens at a scale big enough to matter at all. I think what people more mean by this is “visible in the community” rather than specifically constituent services.
Roughly, representatives can Speak To The Manager at a government agency on your behalf
If you're having problems with a federal agency of any kind, your representative's staff will help you. Back when my dad and I would go to Pete Stark's town halls, he'd always start out with a preamble about how if you need help with social security, Medicare, or COBRA, he had a staff member at the side of the hall you could give your phone number to and she'd follow up with you. That way he wouldn't have to spend the whole town hall fielding questions about those topics.
It's probably an inefficient use of our representatives' resources, but our government services can be really complicated and annoying, so it's not terribly surprising that they fill this niche.
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.
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.
Liquor abundance
Your state needs more Massholes
I am/was one, so I did my part.
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 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?
Should be neutral because Republican-appointed judges would’ve never even issued the previous decision blocking the gerrymander.
There's no perfect solution, but I'm come around the notion that the least bad option is to make supreme court positions elected directly by voters, have the supreme court judges choose the appeals court judges underneath them, and the appeals court judges choose the district court judges underneath them.
This keeps the number of judges on the ballot relatively small, by having voters weigh on only on the races that are most important. And it is quite often the only popular check available in states with gerrymandered legislatures. See Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for an example of why state supreme Court judges need to be elected, not appointed. And, yes, in a fantasy world where it was possible to go back to 1787 and tweak the Constitution, I would argue that, even for the U.S. supreme court, the process of appointment by the president and confirmation by the Senate was a mistake, and that these people should be elected (and for defined terms, not for life) as well.
As to the argument that being able to appoint lower court judges would make the higher court judges too powerful, it's not power that the higher court judges don't have anyway, since they literally have the power to overrule the lower court judges' rulings.
Of course, in safe states, elected supreme court judges would just be partisan hacks, but they're partisan hacks anyway under the current system, so it would at least be no worse.
It's tempting to say, come up with a commission of legal experts to appoint the judges, but somebody has to decide who gets to be on this commission, and if not the voters or the politicians, than who? Allowing current judges to choose their successors just entrenches the power of whomever already had power before such a system gets adopted. We know both parties would pull every maneuver they possibly could to take control over such a commission, and I don't think there exists a good answer as to how to ensure that such a commission is filled with people who are genuinely beholden only to the law and don't care whether Democrats or Republicans get to control policy.
Yeah deciding who should be on a selection commission a hard problem, the best solution is probably some kind of random selection similar to a jury with the pool limited to licensed attorneys with at least a certain number of years of experience and a clean disciplinary record, maybe make them take an advanced version of the bar exam too and only let people above a certain score in the pool.
But the best realistic solution probably has to be direct election.
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?
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
They've got a Basic Law. Close enough for government work. You are getting hung up on terms, which is something you do a lot. And colonial courts in Palestine and other areas with British jurisprudence had as well, which shaped the Israeli justice system. It was hardly created in a vacuum.
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.
Yes, and I'm not going to take judicial advice from someone who defended Kavanagh perjuring himself to get a Supreme Court appointment.
I don't think that's an accurate characterization. Appointments to the Israeli Supreme Court are governed by a law passed by the Knesset.
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.
As a practicing lawyer, elected judiciaries are horrendous and really no way to run a railroad. Mixed systems like the "Missouri Plan" where both the bar and politicians have roles in the appointment process work well.
All of those are bad ideas.
Selection by a legislative committee is the best I can come up with.
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.
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?
Maybe some offshore, like off California or Florida where it's very restricted by law. But yes, US oil/gas infrastructure is close to built out by location, we keep getting more through improvements in technology.
One of the best courses I took at TAMU was an oil & gas economics class that dove into a lot of this stuff. It was fascinating. The US (at that point, and probably still) had the lowest per-well oil production in the world; the US was averaging ~40 barrels per day per well. Depreciated infrastructure is cheap to run! The US had about one million oil wells at that point, the most in the world.
Countries on the Persian Gulf and North Sea had absurdly high per-well production. IIRC Kuwait was top of the world on this metric.
Just one day I want to see one of the moderators write: Fake news!
In my idiolect, this is usually spelled "[citation needed]".
I still wouldn’t want to drink from an aquifer under a fracking rig, but there are relatively few instances of that happening.
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.
Again, this is where I'm a NIMBY, namely I don't want extractive industries in my backyard. I am pleased to benefit from other people doing it so am in no way supportive of any sort of national ban. Now where this becomes a problem is if we end up in a Nord Stream 2 situation, which before January 20th I wouldn't have considered even remotely likely.
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.
The simple answer is that party leaders don't have the luxury of choosing what their own party stands for. That vacuum gets filled by a cacophony of interest groups, plus viral posts on social media that could be put forth by anybody, the vast majority of who do not answer to the party leaders.
The only person who has any ability to cut through this is the party's presidential nominee, but that's only possible in a presidential election year, and even then, requires a charismatic candidate with a clear vision, rather than simply a candidate who listens to the "groups" and seeks to find consensus. In 2024, Democrats did not have such a candidate. Maybe they will in 2028. One can hope.
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?
I've never understood why people treat him as a particularly smart or interesting person. His biography is interesting, but his most prominent example about marriage makes no sense. Poor people aren't going to get married less because Yale students/grad students are insufficiently judgmental about single moms.
The ultimate luxury belief is that the U.S. should defend taiwan if china wants to annex it. I hope we don’t draw that line.
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.
Actually, criminals own(*) cars, just like everybody else.
(*) or, since they are criminals after all, steal them
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.
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
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.
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)
But nothing in the South is as Beautiful as Rainier. Even the Alps don’t compare.
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.
Only Washington, Oregon, and California are over $4. The next highest is Nevada at $3.88, then Idaho and Arizona at $3.50.
I just got gas for $3.89/gallon in Chicago on Monday. (And it's typically much cheaper in the 'burbs and cheaper than that in WI.)
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.
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.
Agree. The DNC has nothing better to do anyway and Ken Martin is worse than a damp squib and the more they delay starting the primaries the more damage the party will endure.
DNC delenda est.
I don't think anyone is left that is interested in challenging Jeffries and Schumer while playing an inside game, and ultimately caucus leadership is about winning over your members not playing to the public.
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.*
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.
Are you one-handing it while carrying the groceries home?
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.
Not true that “all subsequent investigation definitively aligned with the zoonotic origin theory” according to this article in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/25/covid-lab-leak-theory-right-conspiracy-science
>A perplexing aspect of the controversy is that prominent scientists continue to publish studies in leading scientific journals that they say provide compelling evidence for the natural-origins hypotheses. Yet rather than resolving the issue, each new piece of evidence seems to widen the divide further.
>In many parts of the world, including the US, France and Germany, public opinion is increasingly shifting towards lab-leak theories, despite the lack of definitive evidence.
>The core issue behind the Covid-19 origins controversy is fundamentally a crisis of trust rather than a mere information problem.
Bro, come on. This whole article is merely an attempt to validate public distrust despite literally admitting (presumably to legally cover their ass) that scientists continue to find more evidence supporting zoonotic origin.
Despite what the headline may imply, the author is careful not to give any direct credence to lab leak hypothesis. Instead, her argument (which I disagree with) is that the left shares equal fault for the politicization of science and subsequent spread of covid misinformation and so it's in poor taste to try to place the blame squarely on the right.
Crazy conspiracies are NOT more prevalent on the right. The left believes that men can be women, that Trump pissed on a hotel bed in Russia, that Adam wasn’t full of Schiff about Russia, Russia, Russia. They believed that Biden was “the best Biden ever”.
I’ve already mentioned global warming and the absurdities they believed about that. The China Virus? It was “nearly molecularly impossible” that it could be a lab leak. Democrats were deplatforming people for saying they thought it was likely a lab leak. Read that again; it is shocking!
Democrats widely believed that we could not vote normally in the 2020 election because of covid but that BLM protests were acceptable. They put forth the crazy conspiracy that the biggest threat to domestic tranquility is white supremacists, gaslighting us about the actual crime statistics. Democrats still believe that Trump called a bunch of white supremacists “Good people”
You think using “Hunter’s laptop” is a sign of low intelligence? Haha, that’s a convenient belief. I see it as a sign of shorthand, that is readily understood, for something that would take more words to describe. I see why it stings, though. I want to point out a quote that according to you is ipso facto evidence of low IQ: “ Hunter's laptop turned out to be legit”. Joe Rogan? Me, Ryan Hanemann? No, it was you…just above.
Basically all of the above are things best discussed with a therapist.
I expect anyone who read's Matt's blog to be smart and wise enough not to operate at this level. As one example, you should be able to clearly article what exactly the Russia investigation found and didn't find, even if you think that it was overblown. Sentences like "that Adam wasn’t full of Schiff about Russia, Russia, Russia" are very odd things for an adult to say.
"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.
Who is they?
Russian intelligence hacked several important Democrats in the lead up to the 2016 elections and released the contents to hurt the Democrats. News companies also made a huge deal out of Hillary's emails which together with the Comey letter hurt her in the election.
Several companies created guidelines on how to handle hacked materials, and when this extremely implausible and insane story popped up, they made the wrong call. They shouldn't have done it.
What would have happened if they hadn't done that? How would that have changed anything?
Who won the 2020 election?
Funny you should pick election denial. The first instances of this were the 2000 election and the 2016 election. Hillary is still saying it was stolen. Conspiracists everywhere!
It's not funny, it's just basic table stakes.
The 2000 election was a mess - the Supreme Court stopped the vote, in the end Bush had the actual votes to win either way, many of the voters who voted for Bush clearly didn't mean too, but that's not how the rules worked so Bush won.
The point is Gore called and conceded. So did Hillary.
And your answer?
It's complicated. I never believed the initial claims made by Trump about dominion voting machines, and that kind of nonsense.
I do believe that a lot of the election laws were changed with the intention of defeating Trump. But they were changed. Some of them were changed illegally. For example, too close to the election to comply with the state laws.
As if to confirm the accusation that we on the right are all conspiracists, I think there was a deep state effort to get rid of Trump. I think this included Republicans.
You asked, do I think it was stolen. Not by my definition. But certainly it was stolen by the definition taught to us by a generation of Democrats starting with Al Gore and running through Hillary Clinton.
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.
I remember when SNL used to do Celebrity Jeopardy skits, the main shared cultural assumption was that most celebrities are really dumb. At some point, a bunch of parts of the political spectrum decided that "no, that's elitist, celebrities have to be smart, otherwise they wouldn't be famous." Even before Rogan shifted more to the right, every time I would come across his podcast, it was the stupidest thing I had heard in months. There's the question of how the Democrats need to culturally shift for votes, but there's also the conversation about how we're becoming a sloppy country across the board that goes beyond parties and elections.
Celebrities have gotten really good at stage managing a media profile that makes them look both accessible and intelligent.
Linked to this, we're in a supercharged age of parasocial connection to entertainers, where people make liking those entertainers part of their own worldview and self worth in a way that probably wasn't true 20-40 years ago.
It's just changed from liking genres to liking specific artists, otherwise it's the same.
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.
I agree with your conclusion, but also think its emblematic of how positions have changed. If you had name Rogan's positions in 2012, he likely would have been considered not just liberal, but progressive. Both he and the Democratic party have moved!
To me Rogan, Musk and also many people who went from Biden '20 to Trump '24 did not do so because of positions that would have even been typically salient prior to 2018.
Primarily it was about very specific excesses of the "Me Too" movement and the protests following George Floyd's murder, and their frustration with liberal attitudes toward Covid especially in '21 and '22.
For someone who purports to be as future-oriented as Musk, it will be interesting to look back and analyze how dumb his reasons were for changing his political views in 20 years.
It's also an open question how much buying Twitter and filling his head with too-online garbage played in changing his worldview.
Great point. Issue salience changes and that can have a huge impact on how people view their political affiliation.
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.
Exactly, Rogan is just a member of the Greek chorus. He has no real priorities you can appeal to as the basis of a political alliance. You'd have an easier time allying with Brian Kemp.
another example of this is Tulsi Gabbard has some views that code liberal but we all know how it would go if you were to try to strike a deal with her based on a shared interest in reducing intervention and foreign policy adventurism... pretty sure that wouldn't really end up working out.
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...
It seems to me that Trump is a lot more interventionist than Biden was though.
Yes, I'm sure Bolton's mustache purred with delight when American bombs fell on Iran. At bottom, because the GOP is currently organized around a single personality "conservatism" is whatever Il Duce says it is. Defining any left-right dichotomy is increasing an exercise in nailing Jell-O to the wall.
But it is still very weird an unhelpful that people like Rogan get coded as "conservative" because they diverge on a line item from the list of approved views the very-online left maintain. Ditto for MAGA, of course, where you have check each morning to see what the correct opinion about Epstein is lest you become part of the Democrat Hoax of releasing the documents or the Biden Coverup of not releasing them.
This is the Dems’ problem in a nutshell
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.
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.
NAFM's username checks out from just the last election cycle!
I remember IOKIYAR...
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.
I have absolutely no patience for illiberal culture warriors. I tolerate them only so far as they can be manipulated for votes.
"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.
Das P is basically correct. The progressive caucus isn't very big nor wields much real political power. The moderate party and media establishment was the agency and power behind all of the things that provoked reactionary backlash. The fact that some of those establishment politicians/pundits are now trying to pretend that they were fooled by left-wing progressives is pretty fucking craven.
Who is this supposed to win over? Moderates and conservatives hear that Democrats are a bunch of empty suits who will easily fold to any activist group that leans on them. Liberals and progressives hear that Democrats are a bunch of empty suits who will easily fold to any populist strongman that leans on them. No one trusts the Democratic party to stand up for their interests.
I don't think that's true at all. The Dem Party and party aligned interest groups have become much more liberal since 2012. People wanting to moderate to win more elections like Matt are very much not in the driver's seat right now. See how people in the Biden White House did read Matt's post but never implemented them, instead they listened to The Groups which remain very influential (ie "the establishment").
"Who is this suppose to win over" non-college voters of all sorts of different backgrounds who have left the Democratic Party over social issues over the last few election cycles.
None of these Groups have any real political power, they can only influence politicians indirectly through grass roots activism and donor pressure. But if your argument is that these things aren't actually representative of your voters, then why the hell did you acquiesce to the Groups? Well because to be a moderate is to be someone who acquiesces to things. Someone who seeks common ground; who looks to invite critics into the coalition rather than alienate them. This is a commendable attitude. The world needs open-minded collaborators.
But then a zero-sum mentality emerged in the wake of covid inflation and the right took advantage, "Nah, fuck those people, they stole your birthright." And some moderates immediately cowered, "AYEEE! We're sorry we didn't mean to accept THOSE people into the coalition! The left deceived us. We're cool now though, please take us back!" That's not commendable at all. It's weak. It's feckless. Party approval polls confirm that everyone sees this attitude as weak and feckless.
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.
It's a pretty bad sign for a candidate if people are already preemptively coming up with excuses for him losing the general election before he's even won the primary.
Yes El-Sayed is not a good candidate. He is stuck in a bubble and will not pass the "white hard-hat" test.
Graham Planter in Maine: Probably a strong anti-establishment candidate.
El-Sayed in MI: A weak lost-cause anti-establishment candidate.
How is Platner "anti-establishment"? In what ways would he disagree with mainstream establishment leadership like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren?
You think it was the "establishment" that led to Trump?
Absolutely, the establishment is who opened up the border and allowed 7 million migrants to enter and create chaos. The establishment is who pushed Title IX trans rights into every school creating a moral panic around children. The establishment is who told people that the economy is doing great and that inflation is no big deal. The establishment is who said Biden is perfect and better than ever and is fit to run again. The establishment invented the wokeness it now "claims" to oppose but does not do so in any meaningful way.
I'm convinced that the Democratic establishment hasn't crowned itself it honors over the last decade, but let's be real - Trump is a anti establishment candidate which is why he won.
We should change the name from "establishment" to "The Bad Thing", more descriptive and fun
There can be more than one "The bad thing", for instance Trump is certainly "The #1 bad thing" but the establishment is also a specific bad thing.
Exactly, bad things like El-Sayed and the 2024 version of the "Pro-Palestine" movement, glad we got that all cleared up.
"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.
"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.
> Donald Trump has lost a lot of cases in court, which is typically what happens when you do a lot of illegal shit.
I dunno man! I think that most of the time when someone does a lot of illegal shit, they lose exactly once in court.
It's only the privileged who get to lose many cases.
Now, Before the Midterms: There should be a massive effort to place a billboard on every major highway on the outskirts of every major town in every Red District in the Country identifying by name the U.S. Representative who voted for the Big Ugly Bill listing the eventual damages it will do to its citizens. The same should be done in every State with a Republican Senator up for reelection. Much of the bad stuff will not be apparent to voters until after the midterms; consequently, Democratic Party messaging between now and then is critical! We need to be in Republican Faces Every Day like they are in ours.
JUST AN EXAMPLE: " Your Representative in Congress, (first name, last name) Just Voted to slash Your Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP Benefits to Pay for Tax Cuts for the Rich! VOTE HIM (HER) OUT."Is that a slight overstatement of facts? Certainly, but that's what Republicans do all the time and we need to counterattack using the same tactics and be UBIQUITOUS about it, e.g., Billboards.
Each Billboard's message presupposes that Democrats in that District are smart enough to identity the hot button issues that will resonate with the intended Republican audience in that District, be it Taxes, FEMA Support, Economy, Medical Coverage, Infrastructure, Tariffs, etc. If Dems can't pinpoint the right issues, then billboards will have little effect.
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.
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!
That was a fascinating race. As fascinating to me is that the Democratic winner ended up leaving the party and would have no chance of being a Democratic nominee now. Very illustrative of Matt's points.
If Mary Peltola runs she’ll be the Democratic nominee. She deviates from them plenty. The idea that you have to be pure to be a Democrat is false. Matt is way too pessimistic about that. They’ve made good recruits in key races and if they need to differ they will and there won’t be much blowback outside of the online world.
"If Mary Peltola runs she’ll be the Democratic nominee. She deviates from them plenty. "
As best I can tell, there are two(?) major areas where she disagrees with the standard Democratic position - energy and guns. Are there others?
Beyond that, do you at least agree there is less diversity among Democratic senators than there has been in the past? If so, why do you think that is?
Those are the two issues I know of off the top of my head, but they're big ones, especially energy. Of all the problems Democrats have had from moving leftward, energy is number one and it's a big deal in Alaska.
As to whether there is less diversity among Democrats, you're right, but it's for a good reason. You wouldn't know it from listening to or reading much of the discourse, but the country has moved leftward a lot during this century. In 2006, for example, gay marriage was illegal and don't ask, don't tell was the law. Many Democrats either supported that or treaded lightly on it. Those aren't the law anymore and every Democrat agrees with that. Republicans used to be vocally anti-gay, but now are either supportive of gay rights or don't talk about it.
Not too long ago, we were debating privatizing Social Security. That's not true today. We used to argue over how much to cut entitlements, but not anymore, although that may change soon. Democrats used to run away from the ACA, but now embrace it enthusiastically, even in solidly red states.
On abortion, Democrats in many places used to have to be against it or wishy-washy. After Dobbs, public opinion has moved decisively in favor of the pro-choice position. Even in most red states, pro-choice is a winner.
Democrats do need to moderate on some issues, but the need to is less stark than it was even a short while ago. They've won on a whole host of issues and are either on offense or those issues are no longer argued over.
Democrats' vulnerability on cultural issues is in large part because Republicans have thrown in the towel on many economic issues. If they revert back to their Paul Ryanesque ways, it will be every Democrats' dream come true.
I write about these things regularly on my newsletter. The link to it is below if you're interested.
https://coldpoliticaltakes.substack.com/
Where we seem to disagree is not that the American public has moved left on many issues, it has. But that the Democratic party has moved even further left and quite quickly. I think Matt is an excellent example - he was very progressive in 2008, but would now be considered mainstream liberal. Mainstream liberal opinions in 2008 are now considered out of bounds. And that last part is the key. Its not just that people disagree over subjects, but that you aren't allowed to be a Democrat politician in good standing if you diverge across a large swath of issues.
This is extremely problematic for the Senate. There are millions of progressive on the coasts who pull the median viewpoint in the US to the left, but that leaves Democrats in much of the rest of the country out alignment with the majority of their would be constituents.
"Democrats' vulnerability on cultural issues is in large part because Republicans have thrown in the towel on many economic issues. If they revert back to their Paul Ryanesque ways, it will be every Democrats' dream come true."
Yes, if Republicans are out of alignment with the public on economic issues this will allow the Democrats to be somewhat out of alignment on social issues. But if they don't revert back, then you could see how Democrats would need to moderate on social issues substantially?
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.
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).
The *base expectation* should be Democrats winning 2-3 seats where they are behind? I'm curious how you arrive at that conclusion?
Based on the prediction markets, if you think that’s way off you could make a lot of money buying the other side of those bets.
I'm not sure I follow. Markets think there is a 30% chance that Democrats win a majority because its possible that things get so bad that it creates a really strong Democratic wave election that correlates sufficiently to give Democrats a majority. That's very different than creating a default expectation that Democrats will pick up 2-3 seats.
Most prediction maps I've seen show it a tossup as to whether Republicans or Democrats gain seats in 2026. I think its slightly more likely for Democrats to stay even or pick up one seat then for Republicans to gain, but I haven't seen anyone say they think its over 50% that Democrats pick up 2-3 seats.
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.