Read an article in the Times this morning profiling Black farmers in Georgia. A common complaint is that they are disappointed in promises they felt were made by Biden that never materialized. One farmer in particular holds Biden responsible for an loan forgiveness program that never happened because white farmers sued to stop it, as it was a program that was targeted at Black farmers.
Two other farmers were also featured, with one saying she doesn't see Biden as any better for Black farmers than Trump, and the other going further and saying he's just going to vote for Trump this time (while wearing a shirt quoting MLK "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere").
I feel the dynamic is based on the fact that people were in fact extremely ready for Trump to leave office as things sucked really bad, but they're holding Biden accountable for every disappointment and challenge since then, while forgetting that the source of their misery in January 2021 was in fact Trump.
Not the point of your post but it’s a good jumping off point for me to note that I have extreme skepticism of “man on the street” news stories about people’s politics. After that HoffPo takedown of Selena Zito.
To refresh your memory, Zito got famous for these dispatches from Trump country and parlayed the popularity of these pieces into a gig at National News outlet and a book deal*. Problem of course is her anecdotes with “regular” folks strained credulity and in a few cases appeared to be outright lies. The most egregious (to me) was claiming someone was a “lifelong Democrat” who switched to voting for Trump who with two seconds of googling you can see is a local RNC chair (there’s a reason this became a running gag with NYtimespitchbot).
The thing that was amazing to me was seeing how prevalent this was everywhere! Zito just took this kind of reporting to an extreme. But over and over again I’d read an article of some reporter interviewing some “regular” voter and with 5 seconds of googling I find out he/she is the head of an activist group with a very particular agenda.
So upshot of this. I’d be very curious if there is any background info of these people and looking up their backstories. If past is any guide, I’d guess at least one has very relevant backstory that puts into question how “random” this interview was
*The fact these dispatches from Trump country was so good for Zito’s career is almost certainly a big driver of why so many of these trips diners in Trump country stories were written from 2017-2020
It's a really interesting form of journalism (like I would love to interview random people about their political preferences) but I put it much more on the entertaining side than informative. That's what cold hard polls are for!
It's also kind of bizarre, since we know empirically that there are in fact a lot of people who voted for Obama and then Trump, so it should not have been that hard to find such people. But reporters kept interviewing regular Republicans, probably because they made up more dramatic and interesting lies than the truth the actual Obama-Trump voters said (which was probably just 1000x variations of "oh yeah I like Obama, but Hillary's so status quo. I like change")
Big agree on that. And it's all based on the media's complete shock that Trump could've ever been elected in the first place, so they went narrative hunting.
Honestly I think yeah the local RNC people cosplaying as undecided just give better material to talk about than actual undecided voters and writers are going to be onto that like catnip. A focus group of actual undecideds would be pretty boring i think.
Yup, undecided voters aren't "well, Biden didn't do this, so I'm not voting/voting for Trump (outside of young college-aged voters), it's more 'well, stuff was cheaper and I'm bored, so why not?'
Almost certainly. The RNC chair, or head of an activist group or even a heavy news watcher is very likely going to know the "correct" talking points, especially the first one. The RNC chair is very likely very aware or been coached to give answers that are going to fit pre-existing narratives. Like right now, I'm betting there is a reporter interviewing said "man on the street" who's giving some answer like "You know, I voted for Joe in 2020 and Hilary in 2016. I though the could bring some calm to the country. But we're more divided than ever and I see him on today and he looks so lost. How's he supposed to stare down America's enemies? I've never voted for a Republican in my life, but sometimes you gotta make that hard choice and vote for the candidate who's just more with it".
Of course Trump has displayed way more signs of cognitive decline than Biden. But that answer would be the perfect "both sides" anecdote for the Peter Bakers of the world.
Or reasons that were just plain incoherent or based on actual falsehoods. Voters often have extremely esoteric reasons why they vote they way they do. But given what we know about "swing" voters, this is especially likely true with this group. So an actual "swing" voters response as to why they switched their vote from Obama to Trump or heck from Trump to Biden in 2020 has a decent chance of being one that doesn't fit any pre-existing narrative and probably kind of bizarre.
Yeah, there are people who voted for Trump in 2016 because they wanted to keep Obama and Hillary Clinton replaced him, so they think she's responsible for him leaving office.
There are people who think that Trump was a good president apart from COVID, so we brought in Biden to fix COVID and now we can go back to Trump.
There are people who heard any of a variety of nonsensical conspiracy theories.
But also there are people who have a bee in their bonnet about some very specific issue. Like there's a railroad crossing down the road and they want a bridge, or gates, or they want the gates removing so they can make their own judgment, and they'll determine their vote on the entire presidency on this.
In the UK, I've literally knocked on a door and been told that whether the bins are collected weekly or every two weeks is the most important factor in how they will vote. The best bit was that was a European election, and when I asked "do you think the EU should be deciding that?" they were offended...
I think you live in the UK, but, eerily, your "bee in the bonnet" issue is exactly what is being hotly debated between Amtrak and a town in the county adjacent to mine. And you make a good point about people voting on their own weird niche issues.
People are people everywhere, and the same issues come up everywhere.
The mainline from London to Norwich has been steadily sped up over the last decade or so, and much of that has involved removing crossings, either just closing them, or consolidating several into a single bridge or whatever - if there are no crossings, the train can run faster. People have very strong opinions on what should happen with a crossing that they drive over every day on the way to and from work.
I did a bit of campaigning for a friend in Suffolk, and a bunch of people had exactly this issue. Stuck in my head as an example. Especially as all of them said "everyone thinks X" when, in fact, three doors down their neighbour had said "everyone thinks Y".
Chris Hayes' article on this from the 2004 election is great. (But click this link at your own risk: my browser's giving me some sort of warning about it. https://chrishayes.org/articles/decision-makers)
I genuinely would like to know the vetting process of how these focus groups or “man on the street” stories are put together. Because I’m pretty certain on multiple occasions I’ve seen the same supposed “undecided” voter interviewed for multiple elections. Who with two seconds of googling you see is a pretty down the line GOP voters.
Like genuinely, what is the vetting process. Is it like, “I know a guy who knows a guy in Georgia. We’ll just interview him”? Do these news organizations know these people are not actually undecided? If I had to guess the real issue is certain people have learned where to show up to be part of these panels and then just lie about being “undecided”. But that’s still not a great look for news orgs if that’s what’s going on.
It wasn't just about, "I like change." A major aspect of Obama's appeal was, "No Black America, no White America, etc." -- & Hillary was playing identity politics to the hilt. To top it off, she had all the appeal of Nurse Ratched -- or as Obama himself put it (ever-so-wryly), "You're likeable enough, Hillary."
Misogyny? Not quite: just the sort of personality (& attitude) that gave Trump an opportunity to portray himself (in contrast) as McMurphy.
A much more trivial version of this is that when media outlets run "lifestyle trends" articles spotlighting one or two or three young people, invariably living in Brooklyn or whatever, as examples for the trend in question, it often turns out that the young people spotlighted are in the writer's personal friend group (or are friends of their friends) and are not representative of anything.
Yeah, although I'd say those "trend" pieces are kind of famously obnoxious and get dunked all the time sort for that reason. I remember there was one that tried to argue that "Chinatown" was the new hip place to live. And they had a quote from someone that said "Anyone who's anyone, lives in Chinatown". My reaction was only Niles or Frasier Crane in the show "Frasier" would say anything like this. There's zero percent chance someone unprompted used this statement. What likely happened is a reporter said "would you say anyone who's anyone lives in Chinatown" and the response was some version of "I guess".
Also, narrator voice; Chinatown is not a "trendy" place to move in NYC.
Incidentally, I could not figure out why I was disappointed in that article, and you've put your finger right on it. Not that it was badly written or uninteresting, but it's the type of content I simply wish journalists wouldn't indulge in. I know I probably just shouldn't let it bother me, but it annoys me a lot more when it's *my* side/writers who give in to this indulgence.
(Or perhaps I should simply lean into this and find 94 other things that I think everyone else is doing wrong and post it on a church door somewhere)
Not to pick on Milan, but I was amused that his lead-in to the article was that only 2 of the 5 friends were voting for Biden, and then it turned out that actually a third would have been willing to vote for Biden but just won't be in the country for the election.
Sure, but what's the point of writing it unless b) is being asserted? In general, the number of people who care what Milan's specific circle of friends think is measure 0.
Yes. It’s often just lazy reporting. E.g., Trump campaign provides contact information of supporters. Well, with that sample, you’re going to find some Black farmers supporting Trump. It isn’t even necessary that they are fictional-they simply are really rare.
But so much of political reporting is infected by this “non-random sample” problem. Stories exist because they are pitched by the candidates’ teams. Facts are fed by the two teams.
Yeah, at this point, I discount this sort of reporting as noise at best and actively fake at worst. News outlets go for it anyway because it’s more click-generating than observing the extremely consistent polling data showing immigration, inflation, crime, and Biden’s age as key issues for his disapprovers (and concern about reproductive rights and Trump’s fitness for office weighing heavily on the other side.)
Remember when the pro-choice and pro-life demonstrators were yelling at each other in front of the Supreme Court, and then they all spontaneously started chanting "Fuck Joe Biden"?
Half my Twitter feed is Muslims denouncing Biden as an evil Zionist puppet, but that's because I'm not a typical American. I imagine a lot more voters consume the kind of social media that attacks him for being an anti-Semite.
I wonder how representative are these farmers though? Obviously, Biden is polling worse than his 2020 performance, but it's like 3-5% worse in the two way.
If we look at mainstream media voter coverage he's lost 40% from every single demo. But, at least they found a successor to the Trump supporters at a diner genre.
Key note "While 64,574 of Georgia’s farmers are caucasian, the ethnic makeup of Georgia’s producers is more diverse than expected. There are 2,870 African American producers; 922 Hispanic producers; 524 American Indian producers; 494 Asian producers and 43 Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander producers."
The fact there is a whole deep dive feature in the New York Times is just another example to me that the idea of "real" Americans being farmers just won't die despite being wildly outdated for decades.
My husband grew up on a farm in the South. I am frankly shocked that there are still over 65,000 farmers of any race in Georgia. I wonder how they are classifying farms.
Wouldn't shock me at all if we found out these "farmers" weren't actually farmers. If I had to guess, they probably are. But again, given what I noted above wouldn't surprise me if there is more to the story about their occupations.
Another thing is that at least one of those farmers seems to be a Trump 2020 voter. Can't be sure because I don't think he said, but when explaining his Trump support he cited aid he received in 2019...
Because black farmers in the South were historically discriminated against by USDA, and because the Supreme Court hadn't yet issued the college-admissions ruling which banned affirmative action for groups that have suffered historical discrimination?
The loan forgiveness may or may not have been a good idea but it wasn't "blatantly illegal" until the courts said it was. USDA had been running preferential programs for black farmers well before Biden took office, so this wasn't a radically new initiative.
There should be a term for things that exist for a long time,but everyone knows they will be struck down in court. I think it is common in tax structures and selection policies.
The term is desuetude: "a doctrine that causes statutes, similar legislation, or legal principles to lapse and become unenforceable by a long habit of non-enforcement or lapse of time. It is what happens to laws that are not repealed when they become obsolete. It is the legal doctrine that long and continued non-use of a law renders it invalid, at least in the sense that courts will no longer tolerate punishing its transgressors."
Perhaps the most prominent example of it today is federal marijuana laws. A previous example was laws against contraception, which prompted the Supreme Court to say in Poe v. Ulman, "'Deeply embedded traditional ways of carrying out state policy ...' – or not carrying it out – 'are often tougher and truer law than the dead words of the written text.'"
After a while it also becomes an equal protection violation to prosecute one person for violating a law that everyone else is openly and flagrantly violating without prosecution.
I think this is right to a large degree — but with the nuance that the source of people’s misery in January 2021 was not Trump, but another wave of Covid, schools being closed, high crime, higher unemployment, etc.
So people looking back on 2021 focus on how they hated Covid, rather than how they disliked Trump irrespective of Covid. And since Covid caution ended up being coded to Democrats — and lack of Covid caution coded to Trump — that makes them angry at Biden.
Democrats overpromising a populist racial agenda to farmers that any halfway literate judge can see violates Civil Rights law and Trump talking about how McKinley's tariffs were neat is truly on the nose. Now they just need some progressives to start hawking an alternative currency before some nutjob from Portland murders Trump in his second term, and we can get an eccentric Vice President JD Vance distrusted by the Republican business wing. All of this has happened before and will happen again.
It exasperates me that no one points out the obvious here: the Doha Agreement fixed the go-to-zero date for US forces at a point three months beyond the 2021 inauguration. The timeframe was already too short to allow for any real adjustment on the Afghan government's part, so it would have made hardly any logistical difference to make it a little shorter and have the withdrawal in midwinter, outside the fighting season.
The whole point, fairly obviously, was to give Trump the opportunity to reassess after the November election. If he'd won he could have torn it up and kept the force structure at Obama's levels. I doubt that would have worked, because the Taliban would have resumed attacks on US troops, but whatever went wrong in Trump's second term would have been less dramatic than a Saigon-style collapse.
When Biden won, Trump's initial impulse was to go to zero before the inauguration, to make things as chaotic as possible for his team. His military advisors talked him out of that but he still drew down to just 2500 troops, which probably wouldn't have been enough to defend Kabul alone in the face of a determined attack. At that point Saigon 2.0 was more or less inevitable, and I can't help thinking it may have been the outcome Zalmay Khalilzad (also a Republican) wanted all along.
A-fucking-men. It’s downright embarrassing any time I hear someone say that *BIDEN* was responsible for the shit show withdrawal.
It’s an epistemically disqualifying litmus test. In my book, anyone who lays the blame at Biden’s feet instantly identifies theirself as a fundamentally unserious person and a bad fucking pundit.
I'm going to pull rank here and point out that I probably know more about this subject than most SB readers, because it's been one of my little obsessions since coming back to Kabul.
There were definitely major operational errors, mostly made by the State Department, but I don't think better White House leadership would have made a lot of difference. (And I also think people don't acknowledge the incredibly disruptive effect that COVID had: partly because government employees were locked down, and partly because hardly anyone was paying attention to Afghanistan.)
Agree. Afghanistan was about a decade of my life as an intelligence analyst. There’s lots of blame to spread around but the effort to absolve the Biden admin from any of it is just wrong. We (the US) made fundamental and unequivocal mistakes in the Spring and Summer of the withdrawal that cannot be pinned on Trump.
To be clear, I'm not trying to *absolve* him of "any of it". I'm just saying that anyone who STARTS by talking about his errors is missing the forest for the trees.
A couple months of fumbling a hot potato sure looks dramatic, but it's downright idiotic when pundits fail to FIRST ask how it got so hot in the first place.
Anyone who starts on Afghanistan with Trump's errors is also missing the forest for the trees.
The key errors were made by Bush. Obama then made the error of being afraid to pull out. Trump made a deal that forced a pullout, and Biden executed it. Trump and Biden are, at least comparatively, the good guys in this story. They removed the US from a place we had no business being in, where we continued to be because hawks are too immature to accept the notion that we might ever lose a war.
I agree with the caveat that Trump made a *cynical and cowardly* deal, and then squib-kicked the hot-potato to make sure it was maximally uncatchable besides being hot in the first place.
There are quite a few puzzles still to be unraveled. For me the biggest one is "who gave the order to evacuate Bagram, and why?" I don't think it could have been anyone but the commander-in-chief.
Follow me on Twitter if any interest in Afghanistan survives :)
The simple answer is that the force reductions didn’t allow holding Bagram, the embassy, and Kubul airport at the same time.
The fundamental error, which cannot be blamed on Trump, is the assumption that government forces would hold at least the capitol and core areas for months at least. Hence why there was no sense of urgency to process Visas for Afghan allies. There wasn’t a contingency plan in place in case that assumption was wrong.
However, the signs of a potential collapse were becoming pretty clear by mid June to the open source community - I have a hard time believing no one in government saw them as well.
We won’t know the full story because no one is interested in lessons learned and the various agencies (WH staff, DoD, State, Intel community) are all pointing fingers at each other.
So how long should Biden have put a halt on moving forward after inauguration to allow him to make appointments and for those people to hire their people and for those people to reevaluate the plans and adopt their own? People acting like Presidents show up with their people in place to implement their plans on day 1. Trump had withdrawn 86% of American forces from Afghanistan before Biden was even inaugurated.
The Afghanistan War Commission will come up with some answers, but that's years in the future.
You may be right about Bagram (I'm not a military guy and can't judge) but it's striking that there's been so little transparency about the decision process. If it wasn't defensible in July, they should say so.
I mean, that's totally true, but as you say, it's not really Biden's fault.
Like, sure, under the "Green Lantern Theory Of Governance", of course he could have just willed himself to do a better job.
But the GLToG is a by-joke because that's an absurd way of thinking about things! So, I maintain that even *starting* any analysis of what happened by looking at *Biden's* errors alone is just a fundamentally misguided framework.
It’s not Biden’s personal fault, that is true. But the errors that were made were made by the Biden Administration and the administration is responsible for them.
I don't see how Trump leaving them a 3-month window for deciding what to do is an "error" the Biden administration made.
Again, I'm not disputing that errors were made during the execution or during the entire 7-month stretch leading up to it. I'm just saying, 3 months is not much time to make a major geopolitical decision, and 4 months after that is not much time to plan a major withdrawal, especially if the last guy left the whole State department a mess.
Three months is plenty of time. After all, when push came to shove, the no notice emergency withdrawal was planned and executed in a bit more than a week.
The military had already planned for the 1 May date and just needed the order to execute. The delay was because the WH was reviewing Afghanistan policy in part because the military and others didn’t want to withdraw. The WH eventually overruled that desire and extended the withdrawal date after which the military immediately began drawing down.
The whole notion that 7 months is not enough time to plan and execute the withdrawal of 2,500 troops is factually not true. The problem is that these decisions get stuck churning in the political and bureaucratic halls in DC.
There's also just no way for a major military withdrawal to go down with *no* events. And reporters wanted something to report on, and Republicans wanted something to cynically complain about. Everybody got their wish.
What are some good sources or at the time reporting about this, if I wanted to go down the rabbit hole? I'm also really interested in the withdrawal and it's sad how, to some, it seems to have set the tone for the rest of Biden's term.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee held hearings on the withdrawal last autumn. They've published lightly redacted transcripts of most of their interviews, though not yet all of them.
There are also two CENTCOM internal investigations of the Abbey Gate bombing. A redacted version of the first one was FOIAed by the Washington Post and a redacted version of the second one by me. You can find the full text of both reports posted to my Substack:
That's thousands of pages of documentation, so it's a very deep rabbit hole. If you want to start with something shorter check out the State Department's After Action Review on Afghanistan, released last June:
Note that this is an 87-page report, but that pages 21 through 84 are missing. I recommend following my Substack or Twitter account just in case the missing pages turn up at some point in the future... 🙄
Were the failures to get interpreters out on State? Does the fact that State answers to the WH affect your view, or is it something where the fuckup is only apparently higher up the chain ex post?
One of the biggest sources of the chaos at the airport was that some genius at the State Department decided to send out entry permits via text message, which of course were immediately copied and sent to thousands of ineligible people. (QR code, hello?)
I agree in theory that the President is ultimately responsible for anything that a cabinet department gets wrong, but if any individual president was responsible for gutting and demoralizing the bureaucracy at State I'd say it was Trump, not Biden.
I also get the sense that US military personnel were unhappy with the way the British government handled its side of the evacuation process. But everything in the public record that looks as if it may have been criticism of the UK has been redacted.
The visa process for interpreters and others had been a complete shit-show for at least a decade. State under Biden started to make efforts to speed things up but they hadn’t really gone anywhere.
Right. Focusing on the ephemeral chaos of that final week withdrawal, instead of the preceding years of policy failure and kicking the can down the road, when it was obvious there was no light at the end of the tunnel in the previous policy but nobody had the courage and leadership to end it, is the epitome of short-term thinking and missing the forest for the trees.
The biggest failure was not getting our Afghan allies out of the country. I've got no clue how Trump would have handled them, likely because he thinks they are all "suckers." But Biden had seven months to figure something out, and for someone who is supposedly so empathetic, he just, didn't.
How high would tariffs need to be raised to in order to replace income tax? I suspect the level would be so high that it would defacto ban legal imports of anything, meaning no tariffs would be raised at all. You would end up with people smuggling mangoes and coffee into the US as though it was fentanyl.
There aren’t many things that would make me fall back on my Italian heritage and try to join the mob, but “becoming a parmesan cheese kingpin” would be one of them.
Read an article in the Times this morning profiling Black farmers in Georgia. A common complaint is that they are disappointed in promises they felt were made by Biden that never materialized. One farmer in particular holds Biden responsible for an loan forgiveness program that never happened because white farmers sued to stop it, as it was a program that was targeted at Black farmers.
Two other farmers were also featured, with one saying she doesn't see Biden as any better for Black farmers than Trump, and the other going further and saying he's just going to vote for Trump this time (while wearing a shirt quoting MLK "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere").
I feel the dynamic is based on the fact that people were in fact extremely ready for Trump to leave office as things sucked really bad, but they're holding Biden accountable for every disappointment and challenge since then, while forgetting that the source of their misery in January 2021 was in fact Trump.
Not the point of your post but it’s a good jumping off point for me to note that I have extreme skepticism of “man on the street” news stories about people’s politics. After that HoffPo takedown of Selena Zito.
To refresh your memory, Zito got famous for these dispatches from Trump country and parlayed the popularity of these pieces into a gig at National News outlet and a book deal*. Problem of course is her anecdotes with “regular” folks strained credulity and in a few cases appeared to be outright lies. The most egregious (to me) was claiming someone was a “lifelong Democrat” who switched to voting for Trump who with two seconds of googling you can see is a local RNC chair (there’s a reason this became a running gag with NYtimespitchbot).
The thing that was amazing to me was seeing how prevalent this was everywhere! Zito just took this kind of reporting to an extreme. But over and over again I’d read an article of some reporter interviewing some “regular” voter and with 5 seconds of googling I find out he/she is the head of an activist group with a very particular agenda.
So upshot of this. I’d be very curious if there is any background info of these people and looking up their backstories. If past is any guide, I’d guess at least one has very relevant backstory that puts into question how “random” this interview was
*The fact these dispatches from Trump country was so good for Zito’s career is almost certainly a big driver of why so many of these trips diners in Trump country stories were written from 2017-2020
It's a really interesting form of journalism (like I would love to interview random people about their political preferences) but I put it much more on the entertaining side than informative. That's what cold hard polls are for!
This would be a fun column or podcast that I would consume.
It's also kind of bizarre, since we know empirically that there are in fact a lot of people who voted for Obama and then Trump, so it should not have been that hard to find such people. But reporters kept interviewing regular Republicans, probably because they made up more dramatic and interesting lies than the truth the actual Obama-Trump voters said (which was probably just 1000x variations of "oh yeah I like Obama, but Hillary's so status quo. I like change")
Big agree on that. And it's all based on the media's complete shock that Trump could've ever been elected in the first place, so they went narrative hunting.
That did NOT include non-stop coverage of "emails!"
My biggest frustration with that whole line of coverage was when an article said "but it raises questions".
What were those questions? No one will ever know.
Well… for a narrative that didn’t involve free air time and buttery males, anyway.
Honestly I think yeah the local RNC people cosplaying as undecided just give better material to talk about than actual undecided voters and writers are going to be onto that like catnip. A focus group of actual undecideds would be pretty boring i think.
Sarah Longwell actually does that as a podcast and it’s less boring and more infuriating.
Yup, undecided voters aren't "well, Biden didn't do this, so I'm not voting/voting for Trump (outside of young college-aged voters), it's more 'well, stuff was cheaper and I'm bored, so why not?'
Almost certainly. The RNC chair, or head of an activist group or even a heavy news watcher is very likely going to know the "correct" talking points, especially the first one. The RNC chair is very likely very aware or been coached to give answers that are going to fit pre-existing narratives. Like right now, I'm betting there is a reporter interviewing said "man on the street" who's giving some answer like "You know, I voted for Joe in 2020 and Hilary in 2016. I though the could bring some calm to the country. But we're more divided than ever and I see him on today and he looks so lost. How's he supposed to stare down America's enemies? I've never voted for a Republican in my life, but sometimes you gotta make that hard choice and vote for the candidate who's just more with it".
Of course Trump has displayed way more signs of cognitive decline than Biden. But that answer would be the perfect "both sides" anecdote for the Peter Bakers of the world.
And the content would be hated because regular people don’t like content that exposes just how uninformed and irrational regular people usually are.
Or reasons that were just plain incoherent or based on actual falsehoods. Voters often have extremely esoteric reasons why they vote they way they do. But given what we know about "swing" voters, this is especially likely true with this group. So an actual "swing" voters response as to why they switched their vote from Obama to Trump or heck from Trump to Biden in 2020 has a decent chance of being one that doesn't fit any pre-existing narrative and probably kind of bizarre.
Yeah, there are people who voted for Trump in 2016 because they wanted to keep Obama and Hillary Clinton replaced him, so they think she's responsible for him leaving office.
There are people who think that Trump was a good president apart from COVID, so we brought in Biden to fix COVID and now we can go back to Trump.
There are people who heard any of a variety of nonsensical conspiracy theories.
But also there are people who have a bee in their bonnet about some very specific issue. Like there's a railroad crossing down the road and they want a bridge, or gates, or they want the gates removing so they can make their own judgment, and they'll determine their vote on the entire presidency on this.
In the UK, I've literally knocked on a door and been told that whether the bins are collected weekly or every two weeks is the most important factor in how they will vote. The best bit was that was a European election, and when I asked "do you think the EU should be deciding that?" they were offended...
I think you live in the UK, but, eerily, your "bee in the bonnet" issue is exactly what is being hotly debated between Amtrak and a town in the county adjacent to mine. And you make a good point about people voting on their own weird niche issues.
People are people everywhere, and the same issues come up everywhere.
The mainline from London to Norwich has been steadily sped up over the last decade or so, and much of that has involved removing crossings, either just closing them, or consolidating several into a single bridge or whatever - if there are no crossings, the train can run faster. People have very strong opinions on what should happen with a crossing that they drive over every day on the way to and from work.
I did a bit of campaigning for a friend in Suffolk, and a bunch of people had exactly this issue. Stuck in my head as an example. Especially as all of them said "everyone thinks X" when, in fact, three doors down their neighbour had said "everyone thinks Y".
Chris Hayes' article on this from the 2004 election is great. (But click this link at your own risk: my browser's giving me some sort of warning about it. https://chrishayes.org/articles/decision-makers)
I genuinely would like to know the vetting process of how these focus groups or “man on the street” stories are put together. Because I’m pretty certain on multiple occasions I’ve seen the same supposed “undecided” voter interviewed for multiple elections. Who with two seconds of googling you see is a pretty down the line GOP voters.
Like genuinely, what is the vetting process. Is it like, “I know a guy who knows a guy in Georgia. We’ll just interview him”? Do these news organizations know these people are not actually undecided? If I had to guess the real issue is certain people have learned where to show up to be part of these panels and then just lie about being “undecided”. But that’s still not a great look for news orgs if that’s what’s going on.
You can't see voting history but they could at least check party registration or if they have voted in a primary right?
It seems like some level of vetting should be possible.
This is exactly what Sarah Longwell does in "The Focus Group" podcast. (https://www.thebulwark.com/s/thefocusgroup)
It's really great, except that you have to listen to voters explain their positions in a way that sometimes makes me want to slit my wrists.
It wasn't just about, "I like change." A major aspect of Obama's appeal was, "No Black America, no White America, etc." -- & Hillary was playing identity politics to the hilt. To top it off, she had all the appeal of Nurse Ratched -- or as Obama himself put it (ever-so-wryly), "You're likeable enough, Hillary."
Misogyny? Not quite: just the sort of personality (& attitude) that gave Trump an opportunity to portray himself (in contrast) as McMurphy.
I feel similarly when they have "undecided voters" panels and it turns out have voted for the same party for the last 10 elections.
"undecided" voters are people who have made up their minds but are "just asking questions"
A much more trivial version of this is that when media outlets run "lifestyle trends" articles spotlighting one or two or three young people, invariably living in Brooklyn or whatever, as examples for the trend in question, it often turns out that the young people spotlighted are in the writer's personal friend group (or are friends of their friends) and are not representative of anything.
Yeah, although I'd say those "trend" pieces are kind of famously obnoxious and get dunked all the time sort for that reason. I remember there was one that tried to argue that "Chinatown" was the new hip place to live. And they had a quote from someone that said "Anyone who's anyone, lives in Chinatown". My reaction was only Niles or Frasier Crane in the show "Frasier" would say anything like this. There's zero percent chance someone unprompted used this statement. What likely happened is a reporter said "would you say anyone who's anyone lives in Chinatown" and the response was some version of "I guess".
Also, narrator voice; Chinatown is not a "trendy" place to move in NYC.
To be fair, Milan did one of these himself fairly recently.
Incidentally, I could not figure out why I was disappointed in that article, and you've put your finger right on it. Not that it was badly written or uninteresting, but it's the type of content I simply wish journalists wouldn't indulge in. I know I probably just shouldn't let it bother me, but it annoys me a lot more when it's *my* side/writers who give in to this indulgence.
(Or perhaps I should simply lean into this and find 94 other things that I think everyone else is doing wrong and post it on a church door somewhere)
Yup - the actual polling was fine, but Milan then put his finger on the scale by putting the focus on his buddies.
Not to pick on Milan, but I was amused that his lead-in to the article was that only 2 of the 5 friends were voting for Biden, and then it turned out that actually a third would have been willing to vote for Biden but just won't be in the country for the election.
It's fine if (a) it's disclosed, (b) the writer isn't arguing that it's a trend.
Sure, but what's the point of writing it unless b) is being asserted? In general, the number of people who care what Milan's specific circle of friends think is measure 0.
For context. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/columnist-salena-zito-trump-swing-voters_n_5b8581afe4b0162f471cf3ac
Yes. It’s often just lazy reporting. E.g., Trump campaign provides contact information of supporters. Well, with that sample, you’re going to find some Black farmers supporting Trump. It isn’t even necessary that they are fictional-they simply are really rare.
But so much of political reporting is infected by this “non-random sample” problem. Stories exist because they are pitched by the candidates’ teams. Facts are fed by the two teams.
Yeah, at this point, I discount this sort of reporting as noise at best and actively fake at worst. News outlets go for it anyway because it’s more click-generating than observing the extremely consistent polling data showing immigration, inflation, crime, and Biden’s age as key issues for his disapprovers (and concern about reproductive rights and Trump’s fitness for office weighing heavily on the other side.)
Remember when the pro-choice and pro-life demonstrators were yelling at each other in front of the Supreme Court, and then they all spontaneously started chanting "Fuck Joe Biden"?
This is all so exasperating
That happened at a Gaza protest too
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/unity-pro-palestine-and-pro-israel-protestors-chant-fck-joe-biden-in-unison/
Even more predictable.
Half my Twitter feed is Muslims denouncing Biden as an evil Zionist puppet, but that's because I'm not a typical American. I imagine a lot more voters consume the kind of social media that attacks him for being an anti-Semite.
I wonder how representative are these farmers though? Obviously, Biden is polling worse than his 2020 performance, but it's like 3-5% worse in the two way.
If we look at mainstream media voter coverage he's lost 40% from every single demo. But, at least they found a successor to the Trump supporters at a diner genre.
I would say the bigger problem with this type of story is there extremely few farmers and even fewer black farmers in Georgia. https://www.gfb.org/news/ag-news/post/ag-census-results-show-size-of-georgia-farms-shifted
Key note "While 64,574 of Georgia’s farmers are caucasian, the ethnic makeup of Georgia’s producers is more diverse than expected. There are 2,870 African American producers; 922 Hispanic producers; 524 American Indian producers; 494 Asian producers and 43 Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander producers."
The fact there is a whole deep dive feature in the New York Times is just another example to me that the idea of "real" Americans being farmers just won't die despite being wildly outdated for decades.
There are nearly 600,000 people employed in the meatpacking industry. I'd be interested in an nyt profile on their voter preferences
I imagine most of them are not eligible voters.
I would be interested in whether the rate of veganism among them is higher or lower than the national average...
I was just at a diner outside Macon and *all* the black farmers said they're voting for Trump
What was her reason?
My husband grew up on a farm in the South. I am frankly shocked that there are still over 65,000 farmers of any race in Georgia. I wonder how they are classifying farms.
Yeah, there are definitely all sorts of "farms" in every state that are likely legally classified as farms for tax reasons. For my home state of NY. https://www.tax.ny.gov/research/property/assess/valuation/ag_overview.htm
Wouldn't shock me at all if we found out these "farmers" weren't actually farmers. If I had to guess, they probably are. But again, given what I noted above wouldn't surprise me if there is more to the story about their occupations.
But it was the Biden admin, not the New York Times, that had the idea to focus on this!
Another thing is that at least one of those farmers seems to be a Trump 2020 voter. Can't be sure because I don't think he said, but when explaining his Trump support he cited aid he received in 2019...
Why was Biden promising a program that was blatantly illegal?
Because black farmers in the South were historically discriminated against by USDA, and because the Supreme Court hadn't yet issued the college-admissions ruling which banned affirmative action for groups that have suffered historical discrimination?
The loan forgiveness may or may not have been a good idea but it wasn't "blatantly illegal" until the courts said it was. USDA had been running preferential programs for black farmers well before Biden took office, so this wasn't a radically new initiative.
It was always illegal the court had just not issued a ruling stating such yet (technically). They were interpreting existing law not legislating.
There should be a term for things that exist for a long time,but everyone knows they will be struck down in court. I think it is common in tax structures and selection policies.
The term is desuetude: "a doctrine that causes statutes, similar legislation, or legal principles to lapse and become unenforceable by a long habit of non-enforcement or lapse of time. It is what happens to laws that are not repealed when they become obsolete. It is the legal doctrine that long and continued non-use of a law renders it invalid, at least in the sense that courts will no longer tolerate punishing its transgressors."
Perhaps the most prominent example of it today is federal marijuana laws. A previous example was laws against contraception, which prompted the Supreme Court to say in Poe v. Ulman, "'Deeply embedded traditional ways of carrying out state policy ...' – or not carrying it out – 'are often tougher and truer law than the dead words of the written text.'"
After a while it also becomes an equal protection violation to prosecute one person for violating a law that everyone else is openly and flagrantly violating without prosecution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desuetude
Unqualified Immunity?
To get votes from ignorant rubes? Don’t hate the player, hate the game. As they say…
I think this is right to a large degree — but with the nuance that the source of people’s misery in January 2021 was not Trump, but another wave of Covid, schools being closed, high crime, higher unemployment, etc.
So people looking back on 2021 focus on how they hated Covid, rather than how they disliked Trump irrespective of Covid. And since Covid caution ended up being coded to Democrats — and lack of Covid caution coded to Trump — that makes them angry at Biden.
Fauci has lot to answer for!
Democrats overpromising a populist racial agenda to farmers that any halfway literate judge can see violates Civil Rights law and Trump talking about how McKinley's tariffs were neat is truly on the nose. Now they just need some progressives to start hawking an alternative currency before some nutjob from Portland murders Trump in his second term, and we can get an eccentric Vice President JD Vance distrusted by the Republican business wing. All of this has happened before and will happen again.
Well, these voters have a point. I mean, Roe got overturned on Biden's watch, right?
More and more, this is turning into the FAFO election.
Well said on Afghanistan.
It exasperates me that no one points out the obvious here: the Doha Agreement fixed the go-to-zero date for US forces at a point three months beyond the 2021 inauguration. The timeframe was already too short to allow for any real adjustment on the Afghan government's part, so it would have made hardly any logistical difference to make it a little shorter and have the withdrawal in midwinter, outside the fighting season.
The whole point, fairly obviously, was to give Trump the opportunity to reassess after the November election. If he'd won he could have torn it up and kept the force structure at Obama's levels. I doubt that would have worked, because the Taliban would have resumed attacks on US troops, but whatever went wrong in Trump's second term would have been less dramatic than a Saigon-style collapse.
When Biden won, Trump's initial impulse was to go to zero before the inauguration, to make things as chaotic as possible for his team. His military advisors talked him out of that but he still drew down to just 2500 troops, which probably wouldn't have been enough to defend Kabul alone in the face of a determined attack. At that point Saigon 2.0 was more or less inevitable, and I can't help thinking it may have been the outcome Zalmay Khalilzad (also a Republican) wanted all along.
A-fucking-men. It’s downright embarrassing any time I hear someone say that *BIDEN* was responsible for the shit show withdrawal.
It’s an epistemically disqualifying litmus test. In my book, anyone who lays the blame at Biden’s feet instantly identifies theirself as a fundamentally unserious person and a bad fucking pundit.
I'm going to pull rank here and point out that I probably know more about this subject than most SB readers, because it's been one of my little obsessions since coming back to Kabul.
There were definitely major operational errors, mostly made by the State Department, but I don't think better White House leadership would have made a lot of difference. (And I also think people don't acknowledge the incredibly disruptive effect that COVID had: partly because government employees were locked down, and partly because hardly anyone was paying attention to Afghanistan.)
Agree. Afghanistan was about a decade of my life as an intelligence analyst. There’s lots of blame to spread around but the effort to absolve the Biden admin from any of it is just wrong. We (the US) made fundamental and unequivocal mistakes in the Spring and Summer of the withdrawal that cannot be pinned on Trump.
To be clear, I'm not trying to *absolve* him of "any of it". I'm just saying that anyone who STARTS by talking about his errors is missing the forest for the trees.
A couple months of fumbling a hot potato sure looks dramatic, but it's downright idiotic when pundits fail to FIRST ask how it got so hot in the first place.
Anyone who starts on Afghanistan with Trump's errors is also missing the forest for the trees.
The key errors were made by Bush. Obama then made the error of being afraid to pull out. Trump made a deal that forced a pullout, and Biden executed it. Trump and Biden are, at least comparatively, the good guys in this story. They removed the US from a place we had no business being in, where we continued to be because hawks are too immature to accept the notion that we might ever lose a war.
I agree with the caveat that Trump made a *cynical and cowardly* deal, and then squib-kicked the hot-potato to make sure it was maximally uncatchable besides being hot in the first place.
Biden wasn't forced to do anything. We never should have pulled out
There are quite a few puzzles still to be unraveled. For me the biggest one is "who gave the order to evacuate Bagram, and why?" I don't think it could have been anyone but the commander-in-chief.
Follow me on Twitter if any interest in Afghanistan survives :)
The simple answer is that the force reductions didn’t allow holding Bagram, the embassy, and Kubul airport at the same time.
The fundamental error, which cannot be blamed on Trump, is the assumption that government forces would hold at least the capitol and core areas for months at least. Hence why there was no sense of urgency to process Visas for Afghan allies. There wasn’t a contingency plan in place in case that assumption was wrong.
However, the signs of a potential collapse were becoming pretty clear by mid June to the open source community - I have a hard time believing no one in government saw them as well.
We won’t know the full story because no one is interested in lessons learned and the various agencies (WH staff, DoD, State, Intel community) are all pointing fingers at each other.
So how long should Biden have put a halt on moving forward after inauguration to allow him to make appointments and for those people to hire their people and for those people to reevaluate the plans and adopt their own? People acting like Presidents show up with their people in place to implement their plans on day 1. Trump had withdrawn 86% of American forces from Afghanistan before Biden was even inaugurated.
The Afghanistan War Commission will come up with some answers, but that's years in the future.
You may be right about Bagram (I'm not a military guy and can't judge) but it's striking that there's been so little transparency about the decision process. If it wasn't defensible in July, they should say so.
I mean, that's totally true, but as you say, it's not really Biden's fault.
Like, sure, under the "Green Lantern Theory Of Governance", of course he could have just willed himself to do a better job.
But the GLToG is a by-joke because that's an absurd way of thinking about things! So, I maintain that even *starting* any analysis of what happened by looking at *Biden's* errors alone is just a fundamentally misguided framework.
It’s not Biden’s personal fault, that is true. But the errors that were made were made by the Biden Administration and the administration is responsible for them.
I don't see how Trump leaving them a 3-month window for deciding what to do is an "error" the Biden administration made.
Again, I'm not disputing that errors were made during the execution or during the entire 7-month stretch leading up to it. I'm just saying, 3 months is not much time to make a major geopolitical decision, and 4 months after that is not much time to plan a major withdrawal, especially if the last guy left the whole State department a mess.
Three months is plenty of time. After all, when push came to shove, the no notice emergency withdrawal was planned and executed in a bit more than a week.
The military had already planned for the 1 May date and just needed the order to execute. The delay was because the WH was reviewing Afghanistan policy in part because the military and others didn’t want to withdraw. The WH eventually overruled that desire and extended the withdrawal date after which the military immediately began drawing down.
The whole notion that 7 months is not enough time to plan and execute the withdrawal of 2,500 troops is factually not true. The problem is that these decisions get stuck churning in the political and bureaucratic halls in DC.
There's also just no way for a major military withdrawal to go down with *no* events. And reporters wanted something to report on, and Republicans wanted something to cynically complain about. Everybody got their wish.
What are some good sources or at the time reporting about this, if I wanted to go down the rabbit hole? I'm also really interested in the withdrawal and it's sad how, to some, it seems to have set the tone for the rest of Biden's term.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee held hearings on the withdrawal last autumn. They've published lightly redacted transcripts of most of their interviews, though not yet all of them.
There are also two CENTCOM internal investigations of the Abbey Gate bombing. A redacted version of the first one was FOIAed by the Washington Post and a redacted version of the second one by me. You can find the full text of both reports posted to my Substack:
https://anacard.substack.com/p/abbey-gate-documents
That's thousands of pages of documentation, so it's a very deep rabbit hole. If you want to start with something shorter check out the State Department's After Action Review on Afghanistan, released last June:
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/State-AAR-AFG.pdf
Note that this is an 87-page report, but that pages 21 through 84 are missing. I recommend following my Substack or Twitter account just in case the missing pages turn up at some point in the future... 🙄
Were the failures to get interpreters out on State? Does the fact that State answers to the WH affect your view, or is it something where the fuckup is only apparently higher up the chain ex post?
One of the biggest sources of the chaos at the airport was that some genius at the State Department decided to send out entry permits via text message, which of course were immediately copied and sent to thousands of ineligible people. (QR code, hello?)
I agree in theory that the President is ultimately responsible for anything that a cabinet department gets wrong, but if any individual president was responsible for gutting and demoralizing the bureaucracy at State I'd say it was Trump, not Biden.
I also get the sense that US military personnel were unhappy with the way the British government handled its side of the evacuation process. But everything in the public record that looks as if it may have been criticism of the UK has been redacted.
The visa process for interpreters and others had been a complete shit-show for at least a decade. State under Biden started to make efforts to speed things up but they hadn’t really gone anywhere.
Also highly affected by COVID, because the in-person interviews stopped
Fauci has a lot to answer for.
Right. Focusing on the ephemeral chaos of that final week withdrawal, instead of the preceding years of policy failure and kicking the can down the road, when it was obvious there was no light at the end of the tunnel in the previous policy but nobody had the courage and leadership to end it, is the epitome of short-term thinking and missing the forest for the trees.
The biggest failure was not getting our Afghan allies out of the country. I've got no clue how Trump would have handled them, likely because he thinks they are all "suckers." But Biden had seven months to figure something out, and for someone who is supposedly so empathetic, he just, didn't.
Pulling out was a bad idea. Trump was wrong, Biden should have reversed.
The war in Ukraine almost certainly happened because of Afghanistan
How high would tariffs need to be raised to in order to replace income tax? I suspect the level would be so high that it would defacto ban legal imports of anything, meaning no tariffs would be raised at all. You would end up with people smuggling mangoes and coffee into the US as though it was fentanyl.
Paul Krugman said yesterday he's crunching the numbers on that. He thinks it might be around 133 percent.
For reference >> https://x.com/paulkrugman/status/1801296665451593868
Or parmesan cheese.
There aren’t many things that would make me fall back on my Italian heritage and try to join the mob, but “becoming a parmesan cheese kingpin” would be one of them.
I believe the preferred nomenclature for a parmesan kingpin is "The Big Cheese."
That would be grate(d).
Oh come on, it was hanging right there!
"I would be a grateful customer if you'd kindly deliver some to Chicago".
Well, I would.