Trump's pardons of January 6 rioters poll terribly. Obviously, it's fair to conclude from the 2024 election that voters won't prioritize pro-democracy, sanity over, say, economic issues but I don't think the conclusion is Democrats shouldn't bother attacking Trump and Republicans on democracy, the rule of law, corruption, abortion etc. If swing voters didn't like Trump on a host of issues but decided it was worth tolerating to bet on his delivering on issues they cared about more, I think you remind voters again and again of both the steep price they paid for something they didn't get.
I have to admit, I feel despair when I look at the current situation. Nobody has changed their view one iota. One of my smartest, most informed friends just texted out an oped accusing Democrats of "running on DEI," and "ignoring the economy." Then another smart friend chimed in that Democrats had to start campaigning on practical issues, like building roads.
Whatever you think of the Harris, she did NOT run on DEI, or "ignore the economy." These are smart, newspaper reading friends, who are just repeating their priors from ten years ago. If they can't absorb new information, I don't see how people who get their news from TikTok will.
I think we need a little bit of self reflection here. The pandemic scrambled our culture in profound ways and led to real dislocations in deep blue cities and elsewhere. I live in the CA bay area but don't live in San Francisco and was genuinely surprised to hear some of my fellow scientists and engineers (who under normal circumstances would be liberals) complain about the crazy crime situation in SF downtown and how they felt let down by the pandemic school closures. Then between 2021-2023 Biden literally did allow the single largest migrant surge in history whether or not we think it is justified under US asylum law.
I think Biden's Democratic party genuinely did subscribe to a theory of power which equated suffering by itself to virtue. Even their dealings with Ukraine were based on this philosophy. Setting aside normative arguments this was simply never going to fly with the median voter. So when people say Harris ran on DEI this is what they mean.
I am not dodging self-reflection, at all. As it happens, I do live in San Francisco, and your friends are right. The teachers union sent our schools into a death spiral, starting with COVID. Everyone who cared about their children's education put their kids in private school because of the closures, which lowered the quality of the remaining students, prompting more parents to put their kids in private school, further lowering the quality... the union responded by giving themselves a raise.
They are also right that the crime and homelessness is out of control.
What frustrates me is that I have changed my mind based on what I've seen over the past ten years. As you say, Democrats got clobbered on immigration. I myself am extremely pro-immigration, but I can see that Democrats need to move way to the right to be electable. I would never have said that in 2015. I thought San Francisco did an incredibly good job with business closures during the pandemic, but it now looks like Florida had the right approach.
My friend doesn't equate D.E.I. to Ukraine. He equates it with wokeness, BLM, overreach on trans rights, etc. Harris did not run on those things. She did her best to run on basic economic issues. Again, maybe you think she should have broken with Biden harder, or she wasn't inspiring, or whatever. But she didn't run on "de-centering whiteness." That's just my friend's hobbyhorse.
I am not saying that your friend does. My point is if we try to understand the core philosophy of Dems circa 2015-2024 it boils down to the principle that the oppressed have intrinsic virtue and thus their subjective assessment of their own suffering and how to alleviate it cannot be questioned. All we can do is identify the victim in each instance and do what they say. All of the "woke excesses" are downstream of this theory of power.
In the context of Ukraine this translated to the principle "No negotiations regarding the future of Ukraine except on Ukraine's own terms". Even center-left liberals often wondered if Biden was giving Ukraine too much leeway as the war kept dragging on. You should listen to Ezra Klein's interview with Jake Sullivan. So while Biden's Ukraine policy is not perceived as woke/DEI it fits into the general paradigm.
In the real world, where reactionaries exist, the notion that the objectively less powerful get to use their subjective assessment of their own plight to dictate the agenda and the rest of us should follow their lead runs into a brick wall. This is true of Ukraine fighting for freedom or of trans athletes demanding that they be allowed to play women's sports or migrants claiming asylum in huge numbers overwhelming the asylum system.
In terms of Harris not running explicitly on DEI, we need to remember that her selection as VP in 2020 was tainted in the median voter's eyes because Biden loudly declared that he was only considering women. Right wing media made sure that the entire country knew this about her because anything resembling affirmative action for out-group members causes significant cognitive discomfort to the US median voter regardless of the person's qualifications. It also happened to be the case that because she was a CA party politician, she strongly adopted the intersectionality framing around 2020 going with the flow. Just because Harris did not say "DEI" in her 3 month long campaign in 2024 (while also never really giving Obama style philosophical speeches or long form freewheeling interviews clarifying her views) voters were not going to change their mind about her.
I'm sorry, but this is exactly what I mean by putting your priors first. You are annoyed with wokeness. Fine. So am I. But there's no evidence that voters didn't trust Harris because Biden specifically picked a black woman for his VP. In fact, a huge point of Shor's piece is that people like us basically have no contact with the voters who came out for Trump. We don't consume the same media, and we don't know them in real life. We live in alternate dimensions.
Wokeness almost by definition is a phenomenon with the hyper-politically engaged. Anti-wokeness may filter down to non-engaged voters as a sense that white men are the real victims of discrimination, but there is no specificity to it. Even my moderately engaged friends didn't remember anything about Harris from the 2020 primary.
I also think you're entirely off base with Ukraine and "wokeness." My experience with highly Woke Twitter is that they aren't interested in the conflict, because it's two groups of white people fighting each other. If anything, their sympathies are with Russia, because they hate the West, and the West opposes Russia.
People like myself who support Ukraine do it entirely from the perspective that Russia is breaking the international order, which is incredibly scary. And that a fragmented Europe is scary. And a natural sympathy for an invaded people. Whether or not Biden pursued the right strategy, or if he should have pressed Zelenskyy to concede territory is beside the point.
I don't disagree with anything you said but I think we are talking about different things.
On Ukraine, I am talking about how those of us on the center-left might understand the moral framework of the center-left administration we just had. This is not related to how other outside groups or actors perceived or described it.
Harris' loss was probably massively overdetermined and I have no strong opinion on how much any of the woke, DEI, ESG, CRT taboos the right obsessed with mattered ultimately.
We both agree that we live in alternate worlds from the median voter and the most useful thing we can do is to find ways to recruit candidates that live in median-voter-world and make people there feel understood in order to win their vote.
I guess I’m not sure how I started off talking about my friends being totally unable to update their priors, and that was somehow relevant to Biden being too solicitous of Zelenskyy’s feelings.
Biden’s FP is straightforwardly pro-NATO, pro-Europe, pro-existing national order. There’s nothing deeper than that. To the extent it failed, I honestly wonder if it was because of his senility.
1. If the economy is really tanking Trump will force the Fed to start QE again at which point asset values will rise even if main street is in a deep slump. Even if we go into a recession this year by 2026 the first derivative of sentiment will be positive and Trump aligned media will declare it the greatest economy in history!
2. The American economy is very dynamic and once the tariff uncertainty stops, businesses will find ways to be profitable again by hook or crook especially since regulations will be gutted which will also raise stock prices. Lower quintile consumers are increasingly less important to the stock market as consumption growth shifts to high earners.
However assuming we have normal elections the following may save us:
1. The Medicaid cuts which are coming may be enough to flip the house in 2026.
2. To the extent that consumers voted out Biden-Harris because they are feeling high prices and economically stuck, they are going to feel the same or worse in 4 years given Trump's regressive agenda unless he manages to lobotomize them even more using propaganda.
3. If Musk survives long enough to go after Social security and Medicare then some fraction of Trump loving 45-65 demographic will turn against him.
This is of course assuming we don't get dragged into a war against some muslim country because Kash Patel's FBI is asleep at the wheel and a terror attack happens in which case we will have an Orange God King until he dies.
Think you're missing a big point about market sentiment, which is at the moment it reflects business sentiment. Voters won't react because of what the market does - but they will react in the event of a recession, and a recession is where we're headed. In fact, we may be there already. Am speaking from direct experience. I'm a corporate communications advisor. My business is typically a canary in the mineshaft, because when businesses get spooked and stop spending, we're one of the first things that gets cut. We're hired to help clients announce new things, and when they stop launching new things (that is, new products and new services that generate growth), they drop our contracts. This works in reverse, too - we're among the first to know it when a recovery starts. At the moment, our phones have gone silent. It's not just investors who dislike uncertainty - business leaders who can't predict the business environment next week or next month or six months from now decide to hold in place and hoard cash. They also freeze hiring, which spills over into consumer sentiment. All of those things are in play right now. So... the stock market won't disrupt Trump's presidency. But the conditions that created the uncertainty will also tank the economy - and that will carry consequences. I hate to pray for recession, because a lot of people will get hurt. But if that's what it takes to drive a wedge between Trump and his swing-voter support, then, to quote another past president on the verge of a misstep, bring it on.
What if he says the midterms were fraudulent and justifies Republican members of congress refusing to give up their seats again in 2026 because their midterm losses don’t count? Is there anything stopping him from doing that? Because if not, he will. And the sliding favorability numbers won’t mean much.
You think if Trump says the midterms were stolen and his government is investigating and any Republicans who lost didn’t actually lose … that the Republicans will just give their seats to Democrats anyway because that’s not Trump’s formal role? Please give me some of whatever you’ve been smoking since 2016.
cdu chancellor tends to be a long term gig. the previous two were around for ca 15 years each, as was the first person to occupy the post post world war two. there is one exception. how long will the new guy last?
Lots of reasons: Kamala was uninspiring, people were pissed off about high prices/DEI/illegal immigration, etc. etc.
But one huge reason that, frankly, Matt Y hasn't been talking much about is: half of Americans don't care about things that used to be completely obvious and accepted by all Americans regardless of party affiliation. I'm talking things like: Nobody is above the law. The loser in an election concedes and relinquishes power gracefully. It's not ok to use the DOJ to threaten your political opponents or to dole out pardons to violent rioters because they're your supporters. We ought to respect our international alliances and agreements.
Matt's nine-point CSDM is all well and good, but it contains nothing about the above concerns.
You cannot, CAN NOT have a functioning, small-l liberal democracy where only one of the two major parties is in favor of bedrock principles like those I listed above. It's like having a sparring match where only one opponent agrees to refrain from eye-gouging or using a knife.
How the heck do we get back to where our society used to be, where most people at least paid lip service to the basic principles of democracy? No one is above the law, you can't overturn an election if you don't like the result, etc.?
Can we talk more about this in addition to "how badly must the economy be doing before enough swing voters say, gee, maybe voting for Trump wasn't a great idea"?
In this piece, Matt says "it’s clear that, unfortunately, this [Trump is unfit of being POTUS because of Jan 6] is not a compelling message or narrative for swing voters." This clearly turned out to be true, but I don't like the undertone of hopelessness, like public opinion is carved in stone and there's nothing one can do about it: "Welp, swing voters don't give a damn about small-d democratic norms, whaddya gonna do." One might as well have said in 1940, "Welp, white Americans are adamantly opposed to equal rights for Black Americans, so there's nothing to be done." No! The correct thing to do is to ask, "How can we change public opinion enough to enable meaningful progress on equal rights for Black Americans?"
The moral arc of the universe doesn't bend itself. People bend it.
How can be bend the arc of American society towards, "small-d democratic norms are good and necessary, actually"?
This is a problem not just in the USA but across the world. It may take decades for humans to adapt to the emergence of social media and we may be on the other side of another world war or a nuclear accident before people once again realize that small-d democracy is actually good.
I'm not sure people ever cared about it, tbh. Democracies work because there are enough competing power centers to force each other to stay in line. All structures fray over time.
I would give the US more credit. The current small-d democratic structure was put in place after WW-II right after everyone witnessed massive suffering and the US instead of acting like a Mafia boss allowed Europe to rebuild vibrant small-d democracies. There was genuine consensus post WW-II that small-d democracy is good and we have slowly lost that memory.
I don’t think that’s it. I mean, if you time-traveled to 1955 and asked a bunch of ordinary Americans in the street “is it ok to try to overturn an election,” I bet almost all of them would say “of course not, how is this even a question?”
I think they would say that now. But then they would backfill it by saying that the 2020 election was actually stolen from Trump, and Democrats stole the nomination from Bernie, and then installed Harris as a queen, and so Trump was actually doing the right thing and his opponents are the villains.
I mean the US could have had election denial at any time between the civil war and 2008 as massive shifts like Civil rights and the Great depression occurred in this period. Yet it took the rise of social media post 2008 to create the conditions where a large scale conspiracy can take hold.
I'm old enough to remember the voting machine fraud conspiracies of 2004. I think the main differences are the singularity of Donald Trump and the crank realignment meant that the conspiracies were able to reach a larger audience with less responsible pushback.
The public has believed incredibly stupid things in the meantime. I agree that social media has made things much worse. But our democracy has already broken once, with the Civil War.
Voters are stupid and terrible. Full stop. Strong parties were our defense against demagogues, and Trump breached the Republican Party's firewall.
I read an article by an African student in the US once; he said something to the effect of "you kick your democracy around like a soccer ball; you do not realize how fragile this all is."
The real threat comes from a situation where the second half of America starts abandoning rule of law. We're not there, I don't think we're close, but I can think of a few plausible chains of events that get us there.
We are hugely lucky that Trump is 78, old age will probably save us from things getting really bad.
“We are hugely lucky that Trump is 78, old age will probably save us”
Meh, color me skeptical. Sure, a 78-year-old Trump is much less dangerous than a 48-year-old Trump. But he is surrounded by lackeys like Vance who are much younger, as well as intelligent and evil. It’s quite likely that one of them continues what Trump started.
In any case, the problem of “swing voters don’t give a fruit fly’s fart about democratic norms” will remain even after Trump eats the Hamburger of Destiny.
True, but are they like “I hate Vance, I’d rather vote for a Democrat” or “well I don’t like Vance, but he is the handpicked successor of God’s Anointed Servant Trump, so I must support him against the evil DemocRATs”?
So all these guys are gonna fight it out. Vance doesn't have the guts to defenestrate deSantis so it's gonna be a bunch of arguing. Uday and Qusay may try to get in but they don't have dad's charisma.
A lot of people voted just for Trump and no one else. There are people he's activated that will go back home once there's not a Trump to vote for.
I have a lot of Trump-voting family members, and I agree with your last sentence. Without Trump in the race they just won't care very much and the chances they vote at all drop enormously.
I think the spell will likely break with Trump. Trump's endorsed candidates don't do that well electorally. And I don't think he cares enough about Vance to try to prop him up like that regardless.
One thing I worry about is Jr running with the explicit promise that Trump Sr will be pulling the strings, effectively giving him a third term.
Over on Advisory Opinions, Sarah is sounding the alarm about how bad it is that the administration is taking moves against law firms. The point is to get firms afraid to represent the people the administration will pursue. Big Law seemed scared into silence.
Nuclear weapons as deterrents is falling apart. The technology appears to be pretty well known among scientists at this point and would be hard to stop people from having. We likely overestimated the threat previously and underestimate it now. Ukraine seems destined to get nukes at some point and they will likely become conventional weapons of war in that conflict.
I'm very concerned about this no-hearing deportation thing because it's incredibly damaging to our country but it seems Trump and Homan have found a way to pick this fight in the most politically advantageous way possible... generally voters hate procedural defenses for criminal defendants.
I do think many of Biden's decisions are going to look shrewd in the long run despite of the political price he paid making them, but he's going to die as a very unpopular President, unwelcome with his party with few political friends. That's all his fault.
He'll rightly get credit for doing _something_ about net CO2 emissions even if the something was unnecessarily expensive. And he made a first stab at strategic trade policy with China but it was almost smothered but plain old tariff populism. I can't think of anything else.
I don’t agree. His diplomacy in Asia and Ukraine, I think, has been quite good. I think history will vindicate both his handling of Covid and the economy. The CHIPS act was a smart move, and his tactics toward China trade wise were far better than Trump’s. His handling of Covid largely worked too.
I don’t think that voting for Trump ever really made sense on economic grounds, and I grimly suspect that most Trump voters know that.
I think the large majority voted for him because they can’t stand contemporary liberal society, and Trump promised, and is implementing, a return to a deeply prejudiced, hierarchical, and violent social structure (being a cis, white male rapist is a resume booster in today’s GOP).
Of course, the prevailing cultural winds favor that outcome too (ie: Andrew Cuomo’s resurrection), so in part Trump’s success comes from swimming with the rising tide of American degeneracy, rather than, say, opposing legislation banning Trans-athletes from women’s sports because Democrats in Congress (even Fetterman) don’t like demonizing vulnerable minorities.
Consequently, I think Trump is maintaining strong support because he’s delivering on his core promise to his voters, and that promise is better aligned with the direction of American culture than the progressive alternative.
Relatedly, I listened to Ezra Klein’s interview with David Shor about his post-mortem on the election, and he seemed to think that anti-woke stuff mattered, particularly for young men, but maybe not all that much.
Overall, his story is very materialistic. Basically, voters trusted Trump a lot more to raise their standards of living, and nothing else really mattered. It’s a good interview, and you can get the presentation here - https://blueroseresearch.org (the AI stuff at the end is very interesting too).
My issue with the narrative is that Trump is doing what he promised to do economically, notably tariffs, deportations, and a revolution in how government operates, and so far it’s not going very well (he also talked a lot about drill baby drill, but I’m not sure what the current news is in that area). And yet, while his overall approval has gone from around net +12, to net -1.5, his approval among 2024 Trump voters remains overwhelmingly positive.
If 2024 really was an economics story, I’d expect to see more disappointed Trump voters in the data. But they remain elusive.
Agreed. Social media combined with educational sorting in the knowledge economy has broken liberalism and made most of us revert to our old lizard-brained selves. Primitive hierarchies and survivalist impulses which liberalism teaches us to consciously fight are ascendant. However as a political matter Trump made practically all of his gains since 2016 among non-white voters and his white support barely changed. So Trump's main innovation is that he reduced the salience of racial prejudice and managed to exploit other prejudices mainly misogyny that is deeply held in many non-white societies. Democrats and the left broadly therefore cannot continue with the same old race based social justice framing and hope to do well.
I too am very worried and I will be 85 this year. I also would love some good news, but have trouble imagining any really good news coming in the near (next 2 - 4 years) future. If I want to really scare myself, I start imagining scenarios where the Maga/Republicans cancel the next congressional election under some "national emergency situation". Matthew, please explain how that scenario is extremely unlikely. I hope there are some guardrails I have missed. I really do not entertain myself with disaster speculation and have been seriously optimistic and reasonably successful all of my life. That includes the Vietnam war era, though I was looking for academic jobs in Canada at that time.
Probably one of the guardrails against this is that elections are not the responsibility of the Federal Govt, but of the states. I suppose the orange one could write an executive order to cancel the election, but the states don't have to follow (or even acknowledge) that order. I suppose some Republican states might try to cancel, but none of the Democratic states would.
As it is the orange one doesn't seem to care much about Congress anyway.
I think the best hope for Democrats is to regain the House. Have little hope for the Senate. I am only hoping to stop the bleeding, not actual turn anything back. My first worry is just to have midterm-elections. If the Democrats can't win the House in 2026, then the Country has truly turned and that may be game over for the current version of our political/governing system. The House can't stop Trump, but they can impeach him (not convict, just impeach) and try and drive a serious "bipartisan" budget. It is true that Trump can just ignore Congress and keep driving the country with Executive orders. Ultimately it is up to the Courts.
"But what he’s actually doing is creating a huge mess, and it’s not the kind of mess he can hide."
One of the missed opportunities in campaigning against Trump was highlighting the chaos he brings (Mulaney's "a horse is in the hospital!" bit). He hit Harris on chaotic open borders and lawless cities, but a staple of GOP campaigning is turning an opponent's strength into a weakness. People forgot just how chaotic the first Trump admin was. Images of J6, chaos at airports over immigration, and Charlottesville should have been run ad nauseum.
Anyway, the 2024 campaign is water under the bridge, but Dems should be highlighting the daily chaos. The chaos is looked upon favorably by his base, but most normies don't want ever-changing tariffs, a fluctuating stock market, deportations of legal residents, slashing and burning of government agencies if it means chaos and uncertainty.
I think there is some mileage in the "King's Evil Advisors" tactic. Musk is discrediting the President's desire to make the government more efficient. Bessent doesn't have the courage to explain why tariffs are bad. Marco Rubio screwed up the depuration attempt of Kahlil. This does not have to make sense to anyone but low information Trump voters.
"On tariffs, Congress needs to pass laws preventing the president from radically altering trade policy on a whim."
But Trump seems to think he's got that kind of thing doped out:
1) He issues a scofflaw executive order, and his minions in the bureaucracy start implementing it.
2) A judge orders a stop to it.
3) The minions ignore the judge.
4) There ensues a legal battle, during which Trump's order continues to be implemented.
5) If Trump's minions ever face legal consequences, he pardons them. Trump himself has immunity for official acts.
I hope I'm missing something.
Contempt of court is not a criminal conviction Trump can pardon. He could refuse to enforce contempt rulings.
But that has it's own risk for Trump. There is no easy way for Trump to ignore judges totally.
Thanks. Every morsel of hope is welcome.
Trump's pardons of January 6 rioters poll terribly. Obviously, it's fair to conclude from the 2024 election that voters won't prioritize pro-democracy, sanity over, say, economic issues but I don't think the conclusion is Democrats shouldn't bother attacking Trump and Republicans on democracy, the rule of law, corruption, abortion etc. If swing voters didn't like Trump on a host of issues but decided it was worth tolerating to bet on his delivering on issues they cared about more, I think you remind voters again and again of both the steep price they paid for something they didn't get.
I have to admit, I feel despair when I look at the current situation. Nobody has changed their view one iota. One of my smartest, most informed friends just texted out an oped accusing Democrats of "running on DEI," and "ignoring the economy." Then another smart friend chimed in that Democrats had to start campaigning on practical issues, like building roads.
Whatever you think of the Harris, she did NOT run on DEI, or "ignore the economy." These are smart, newspaper reading friends, who are just repeating their priors from ten years ago. If they can't absorb new information, I don't see how people who get their news from TikTok will.
I think we need a little bit of self reflection here. The pandemic scrambled our culture in profound ways and led to real dislocations in deep blue cities and elsewhere. I live in the CA bay area but don't live in San Francisco and was genuinely surprised to hear some of my fellow scientists and engineers (who under normal circumstances would be liberals) complain about the crazy crime situation in SF downtown and how they felt let down by the pandemic school closures. Then between 2021-2023 Biden literally did allow the single largest migrant surge in history whether or not we think it is justified under US asylum law.
I think Biden's Democratic party genuinely did subscribe to a theory of power which equated suffering by itself to virtue. Even their dealings with Ukraine were based on this philosophy. Setting aside normative arguments this was simply never going to fly with the median voter. So when people say Harris ran on DEI this is what they mean.
I am not dodging self-reflection, at all. As it happens, I do live in San Francisco, and your friends are right. The teachers union sent our schools into a death spiral, starting with COVID. Everyone who cared about their children's education put their kids in private school because of the closures, which lowered the quality of the remaining students, prompting more parents to put their kids in private school, further lowering the quality... the union responded by giving themselves a raise.
They are also right that the crime and homelessness is out of control.
What frustrates me is that I have changed my mind based on what I've seen over the past ten years. As you say, Democrats got clobbered on immigration. I myself am extremely pro-immigration, but I can see that Democrats need to move way to the right to be electable. I would never have said that in 2015. I thought San Francisco did an incredibly good job with business closures during the pandemic, but it now looks like Florida had the right approach.
My friend doesn't equate D.E.I. to Ukraine. He equates it with wokeness, BLM, overreach on trans rights, etc. Harris did not run on those things. She did her best to run on basic economic issues. Again, maybe you think she should have broken with Biden harder, or she wasn't inspiring, or whatever. But she didn't run on "de-centering whiteness." That's just my friend's hobbyhorse.
"My friend doesn't equate D.E.I. to Ukraine"
I am not saying that your friend does. My point is if we try to understand the core philosophy of Dems circa 2015-2024 it boils down to the principle that the oppressed have intrinsic virtue and thus their subjective assessment of their own suffering and how to alleviate it cannot be questioned. All we can do is identify the victim in each instance and do what they say. All of the "woke excesses" are downstream of this theory of power.
In the context of Ukraine this translated to the principle "No negotiations regarding the future of Ukraine except on Ukraine's own terms". Even center-left liberals often wondered if Biden was giving Ukraine too much leeway as the war kept dragging on. You should listen to Ezra Klein's interview with Jake Sullivan. So while Biden's Ukraine policy is not perceived as woke/DEI it fits into the general paradigm.
In the real world, where reactionaries exist, the notion that the objectively less powerful get to use their subjective assessment of their own plight to dictate the agenda and the rest of us should follow their lead runs into a brick wall. This is true of Ukraine fighting for freedom or of trans athletes demanding that they be allowed to play women's sports or migrants claiming asylum in huge numbers overwhelming the asylum system.
In terms of Harris not running explicitly on DEI, we need to remember that her selection as VP in 2020 was tainted in the median voter's eyes because Biden loudly declared that he was only considering women. Right wing media made sure that the entire country knew this about her because anything resembling affirmative action for out-group members causes significant cognitive discomfort to the US median voter regardless of the person's qualifications. It also happened to be the case that because she was a CA party politician, she strongly adopted the intersectionality framing around 2020 going with the flow. Just because Harris did not say "DEI" in her 3 month long campaign in 2024 (while also never really giving Obama style philosophical speeches or long form freewheeling interviews clarifying her views) voters were not going to change their mind about her.
I'm sorry, but this is exactly what I mean by putting your priors first. You are annoyed with wokeness. Fine. So am I. But there's no evidence that voters didn't trust Harris because Biden specifically picked a black woman for his VP. In fact, a huge point of Shor's piece is that people like us basically have no contact with the voters who came out for Trump. We don't consume the same media, and we don't know them in real life. We live in alternate dimensions.
Wokeness almost by definition is a phenomenon with the hyper-politically engaged. Anti-wokeness may filter down to non-engaged voters as a sense that white men are the real victims of discrimination, but there is no specificity to it. Even my moderately engaged friends didn't remember anything about Harris from the 2020 primary.
I also think you're entirely off base with Ukraine and "wokeness." My experience with highly Woke Twitter is that they aren't interested in the conflict, because it's two groups of white people fighting each other. If anything, their sympathies are with Russia, because they hate the West, and the West opposes Russia.
People like myself who support Ukraine do it entirely from the perspective that Russia is breaking the international order, which is incredibly scary. And that a fragmented Europe is scary. And a natural sympathy for an invaded people. Whether or not Biden pursued the right strategy, or if he should have pressed Zelenskyy to concede territory is beside the point.
I don't disagree with anything you said but I think we are talking about different things.
On Ukraine, I am talking about how those of us on the center-left might understand the moral framework of the center-left administration we just had. This is not related to how other outside groups or actors perceived or described it.
Harris' loss was probably massively overdetermined and I have no strong opinion on how much any of the woke, DEI, ESG, CRT taboos the right obsessed with mattered ultimately.
We both agree that we live in alternate worlds from the median voter and the most useful thing we can do is to find ways to recruit candidates that live in median-voter-world and make people there feel understood in order to win their vote.
I guess I’m not sure how I started off talking about my friends being totally unable to update their priors, and that was somehow relevant to Biden being too solicitous of Zelenskyy’s feelings.
Biden’s FP is straightforwardly pro-NATO, pro-Europe, pro-existing national order. There’s nothing deeper than that. To the extent it failed, I honestly wonder if it was because of his senility.
100%
The stock market as an indicator is not useful:
1. If the economy is really tanking Trump will force the Fed to start QE again at which point asset values will rise even if main street is in a deep slump. Even if we go into a recession this year by 2026 the first derivative of sentiment will be positive and Trump aligned media will declare it the greatest economy in history!
2. The American economy is very dynamic and once the tariff uncertainty stops, businesses will find ways to be profitable again by hook or crook especially since regulations will be gutted which will also raise stock prices. Lower quintile consumers are increasingly less important to the stock market as consumption growth shifts to high earners.
However assuming we have normal elections the following may save us:
1. The Medicaid cuts which are coming may be enough to flip the house in 2026.
2. To the extent that consumers voted out Biden-Harris because they are feeling high prices and economically stuck, they are going to feel the same or worse in 4 years given Trump's regressive agenda unless he manages to lobotomize them even more using propaganda.
3. If Musk survives long enough to go after Social security and Medicare then some fraction of Trump loving 45-65 demographic will turn against him.
This is of course assuming we don't get dragged into a war against some muslim country because Kash Patel's FBI is asleep at the wheel and a terror attack happens in which case we will have an Orange God King until he dies.
Think you're missing a big point about market sentiment, which is at the moment it reflects business sentiment. Voters won't react because of what the market does - but they will react in the event of a recession, and a recession is where we're headed. In fact, we may be there already. Am speaking from direct experience. I'm a corporate communications advisor. My business is typically a canary in the mineshaft, because when businesses get spooked and stop spending, we're one of the first things that gets cut. We're hired to help clients announce new things, and when they stop launching new things (that is, new products and new services that generate growth), they drop our contracts. This works in reverse, too - we're among the first to know it when a recovery starts. At the moment, our phones have gone silent. It's not just investors who dislike uncertainty - business leaders who can't predict the business environment next week or next month or six months from now decide to hold in place and hoard cash. They also freeze hiring, which spills over into consumer sentiment. All of those things are in play right now. So... the stock market won't disrupt Trump's presidency. But the conditions that created the uncertainty will also tank the economy - and that will carry consequences. I hate to pray for recession, because a lot of people will get hurt. But if that's what it takes to drive a wedge between Trump and his swing-voter support, then, to quote another past president on the verge of a misstep, bring it on.
What if he says the midterms were fraudulent and justifies Republican members of congress refusing to give up their seats again in 2026 because their midterm losses don’t count? Is there anything stopping him from doing that? Because if not, he will. And the sliding favorability numbers won’t mean much.
Trump has no role in deciding who won an election. Neither the courts nor congress will follow Trump on this.
You think if Trump says the midterms were stolen and his government is investigating and any Republicans who lost didn’t actually lose … that the Republicans will just give their seats to Democrats anyway because that’s not Trump’s formal role? Please give me some of whatever you’ve been smoking since 2016.
Exactly that happened in 2020. Trump said he won. Courts ruled against him and congress confirmed Biden as the winner.
cdu chancellor tends to be a long term gig. the previous two were around for ca 15 years each, as was the first person to occupy the post post world war two. there is one exception. how long will the new guy last?
Why are we in this mess?
Lots of reasons: Kamala was uninspiring, people were pissed off about high prices/DEI/illegal immigration, etc. etc.
But one huge reason that, frankly, Matt Y hasn't been talking much about is: half of Americans don't care about things that used to be completely obvious and accepted by all Americans regardless of party affiliation. I'm talking things like: Nobody is above the law. The loser in an election concedes and relinquishes power gracefully. It's not ok to use the DOJ to threaten your political opponents or to dole out pardons to violent rioters because they're your supporters. We ought to respect our international alliances and agreements.
Matt's nine-point CSDM is all well and good, but it contains nothing about the above concerns.
You cannot, CAN NOT have a functioning, small-l liberal democracy where only one of the two major parties is in favor of bedrock principles like those I listed above. It's like having a sparring match where only one opponent agrees to refrain from eye-gouging or using a knife.
How the heck do we get back to where our society used to be, where most people at least paid lip service to the basic principles of democracy? No one is above the law, you can't overturn an election if you don't like the result, etc.?
Can we talk more about this in addition to "how badly must the economy be doing before enough swing voters say, gee, maybe voting for Trump wasn't a great idea"?
In this piece, Matt says "it’s clear that, unfortunately, this [Trump is unfit of being POTUS because of Jan 6] is not a compelling message or narrative for swing voters." This clearly turned out to be true, but I don't like the undertone of hopelessness, like public opinion is carved in stone and there's nothing one can do about it: "Welp, swing voters don't give a damn about small-d democratic norms, whaddya gonna do." One might as well have said in 1940, "Welp, white Americans are adamantly opposed to equal rights for Black Americans, so there's nothing to be done." No! The correct thing to do is to ask, "How can we change public opinion enough to enable meaningful progress on equal rights for Black Americans?"
The moral arc of the universe doesn't bend itself. People bend it.
How can be bend the arc of American society towards, "small-d democratic norms are good and necessary, actually"?
This is a problem not just in the USA but across the world. It may take decades for humans to adapt to the emergence of social media and we may be on the other side of another world war or a nuclear accident before people once again realize that small-d democracy is actually good.
I'm not sure people ever cared about it, tbh. Democracies work because there are enough competing power centers to force each other to stay in line. All structures fray over time.
I would give the US more credit. The current small-d democratic structure was put in place after WW-II right after everyone witnessed massive suffering and the US instead of acting like a Mafia boss allowed Europe to rebuild vibrant small-d democracies. There was genuine consensus post WW-II that small-d democracy is good and we have slowly lost that memory.
I don’t think that’s it. I mean, if you time-traveled to 1955 and asked a bunch of ordinary Americans in the street “is it ok to try to overturn an election,” I bet almost all of them would say “of course not, how is this even a question?”
I think they would say that now. But then they would backfill it by saying that the 2020 election was actually stolen from Trump, and Democrats stole the nomination from Bernie, and then installed Harris as a queen, and so Trump was actually doing the right thing and his opponents are the villains.
I mean the US could have had election denial at any time between the civil war and 2008 as massive shifts like Civil rights and the Great depression occurred in this period. Yet it took the rise of social media post 2008 to create the conditions where a large scale conspiracy can take hold.
I'm old enough to remember the voting machine fraud conspiracies of 2004. I think the main differences are the singularity of Donald Trump and the crank realignment meant that the conspiracies were able to reach a larger audience with less responsible pushback.
The public has believed incredibly stupid things in the meantime. I agree that social media has made things much worse. But our democracy has already broken once, with the Civil War.
Voters are stupid and terrible. Full stop. Strong parties were our defense against demagogues, and Trump breached the Republican Party's firewall.
F**k, you’re probably right.
I read an article by an African student in the US once; he said something to the effect of "you kick your democracy around like a soccer ball; you do not realize how fragile this all is."
The real threat comes from a situation where the second half of America starts abandoning rule of law. We're not there, I don't think we're close, but I can think of a few plausible chains of events that get us there.
We are hugely lucky that Trump is 78, old age will probably save us from things getting really bad.
“We are hugely lucky that Trump is 78, old age will probably save us”
Meh, color me skeptical. Sure, a 78-year-old Trump is much less dangerous than a 48-year-old Trump. But he is surrounded by lackeys like Vance who are much younger, as well as intelligent and evil. It’s quite likely that one of them continues what Trump started.
In any case, the problem of “swing voters don’t give a fruit fly’s fart about democratic norms” will remain even after Trump eats the Hamburger of Destiny.
The voters who like Trump don't like his successors.
True, but are they like “I hate Vance, I’d rather vote for a Democrat” or “well I don’t like Vance, but he is the handpicked successor of God’s Anointed Servant Trump, so I must support him against the evil DemocRATs”?
My instinct is that "Meh, I don't care enough to vote" will be fairly common in 2028 among 2024 Trump voters.
So all these guys are gonna fight it out. Vance doesn't have the guts to defenestrate deSantis so it's gonna be a bunch of arguing. Uday and Qusay may try to get in but they don't have dad's charisma.
A lot of people voted just for Trump and no one else. There are people he's activated that will go back home once there's not a Trump to vote for.
I have a lot of Trump-voting family members, and I agree with your last sentence. Without Trump in the race they just won't care very much and the chances they vote at all drop enormously.
I think the spell will likely break with Trump. Trump's endorsed candidates don't do that well electorally. And I don't think he cares enough about Vance to try to prop him up like that regardless.
One thing I worry about is Jr running with the explicit promise that Trump Sr will be pulling the strings, effectively giving him a third term.
Over on Advisory Opinions, Sarah is sounding the alarm about how bad it is that the administration is taking moves against law firms. The point is to get firms afraid to represent the people the administration will pursue. Big Law seemed scared into silence.
Nuclear weapons as deterrents is falling apart. The technology appears to be pretty well known among scientists at this point and would be hard to stop people from having. We likely overestimated the threat previously and underestimate it now. Ukraine seems destined to get nukes at some point and they will likely become conventional weapons of war in that conflict.
I'm very concerned about this no-hearing deportation thing because it's incredibly damaging to our country but it seems Trump and Homan have found a way to pick this fight in the most politically advantageous way possible... generally voters hate procedural defenses for criminal defendants.
I usually am more subtle about blowing my own horn, but yesterday's substack, "The Market and Policies"
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/the-market-and-policies
was about the policy-economy-stock markets link.
Toot. Toot.
I do think many of Biden's decisions are going to look shrewd in the long run despite of the political price he paid making them, but he's going to die as a very unpopular President, unwelcome with his party with few political friends. That's all his fault.
He'll rightly get credit for doing _something_ about net CO2 emissions even if the something was unnecessarily expensive. And he made a first stab at strategic trade policy with China but it was almost smothered but plain old tariff populism. I can't think of anything else.
I don’t agree. His diplomacy in Asia and Ukraine, I think, has been quite good. I think history will vindicate both his handling of Covid and the economy. The CHIPS act was a smart move, and his tactics toward China trade wise were far better than Trump’s. His handling of Covid largely worked too.
I don’t think that voting for Trump ever really made sense on economic grounds, and I grimly suspect that most Trump voters know that.
I think the large majority voted for him because they can’t stand contemporary liberal society, and Trump promised, and is implementing, a return to a deeply prejudiced, hierarchical, and violent social structure (being a cis, white male rapist is a resume booster in today’s GOP).
Of course, the prevailing cultural winds favor that outcome too (ie: Andrew Cuomo’s resurrection), so in part Trump’s success comes from swimming with the rising tide of American degeneracy, rather than, say, opposing legislation banning Trans-athletes from women’s sports because Democrats in Congress (even Fetterman) don’t like demonizing vulnerable minorities.
Consequently, I think Trump is maintaining strong support because he’s delivering on his core promise to his voters, and that promise is better aligned with the direction of American culture than the progressive alternative.
(shameless plug: https://open.substack.com/pub/seankelleher/p/we-are-living-in-a-golden-age-of?r=jansp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false).
Relatedly, I listened to Ezra Klein’s interview with David Shor about his post-mortem on the election, and he seemed to think that anti-woke stuff mattered, particularly for young men, but maybe not all that much.
Overall, his story is very materialistic. Basically, voters trusted Trump a lot more to raise their standards of living, and nothing else really mattered. It’s a good interview, and you can get the presentation here - https://blueroseresearch.org (the AI stuff at the end is very interesting too).
My issue with the narrative is that Trump is doing what he promised to do economically, notably tariffs, deportations, and a revolution in how government operates, and so far it’s not going very well (he also talked a lot about drill baby drill, but I’m not sure what the current news is in that area). And yet, while his overall approval has gone from around net +12, to net -1.5, his approval among 2024 Trump voters remains overwhelmingly positive.
If 2024 really was an economics story, I’d expect to see more disappointed Trump voters in the data. But they remain elusive.
It takes time to accept that you were wrong. And what also happens is people just conveniently forget who they voted for.
Agreed. Social media combined with educational sorting in the knowledge economy has broken liberalism and made most of us revert to our old lizard-brained selves. Primitive hierarchies and survivalist impulses which liberalism teaches us to consciously fight are ascendant. However as a political matter Trump made practically all of his gains since 2016 among non-white voters and his white support barely changed. So Trump's main innovation is that he reduced the salience of racial prejudice and managed to exploit other prejudices mainly misogyny that is deeply held in many non-white societies. Democrats and the left broadly therefore cannot continue with the same old race based social justice framing and hope to do well.
So let's present a non-"Progressive" alternative: Inclusive Growth/Abundance.
I too am very worried and I will be 85 this year. I also would love some good news, but have trouble imagining any really good news coming in the near (next 2 - 4 years) future. If I want to really scare myself, I start imagining scenarios where the Maga/Republicans cancel the next congressional election under some "national emergency situation". Matthew, please explain how that scenario is extremely unlikely. I hope there are some guardrails I have missed. I really do not entertain myself with disaster speculation and have been seriously optimistic and reasonably successful all of my life. That includes the Vietnam war era, though I was looking for academic jobs in Canada at that time.
Hiram Levy
Probably one of the guardrails against this is that elections are not the responsibility of the Federal Govt, but of the states. I suppose the orange one could write an executive order to cancel the election, but the states don't have to follow (or even acknowledge) that order. I suppose some Republican states might try to cancel, but none of the Democratic states would.
As it is the orange one doesn't seem to care much about Congress anyway.
I think the best hope for Democrats is to regain the House. Have little hope for the Senate. I am only hoping to stop the bleeding, not actual turn anything back. My first worry is just to have midterm-elections. If the Democrats can't win the House in 2026, then the Country has truly turned and that may be game over for the current version of our political/governing system. The House can't stop Trump, but they can impeach him (not convict, just impeach) and try and drive a serious "bipartisan" budget. It is true that Trump can just ignore Congress and keep driving the country with Executive orders. Ultimately it is up to the Courts.
"But what he’s actually doing is creating a huge mess, and it’s not the kind of mess he can hide."
One of the missed opportunities in campaigning against Trump was highlighting the chaos he brings (Mulaney's "a horse is in the hospital!" bit). He hit Harris on chaotic open borders and lawless cities, but a staple of GOP campaigning is turning an opponent's strength into a weakness. People forgot just how chaotic the first Trump admin was. Images of J6, chaos at airports over immigration, and Charlottesville should have been run ad nauseum.
Anyway, the 2024 campaign is water under the bridge, but Dems should be highlighting the daily chaos. The chaos is looked upon favorably by his base, but most normies don't want ever-changing tariffs, a fluctuating stock market, deportations of legal residents, slashing and burning of government agencies if it means chaos and uncertainty.
God bless Mulaney. The horse bit was great.
I think there is some mileage in the "King's Evil Advisors" tactic. Musk is discrediting the President's desire to make the government more efficient. Bessent doesn't have the courage to explain why tariffs are bad. Marco Rubio screwed up the depuration attempt of Kahlil. This does not have to make sense to anyone but low information Trump voters.
But he hires "the best people"!