Last night was a bad night. There’s no way around it, and there’s nothing that happened that I am particularly pleased about. The silver lining here is we have lessons from last time that can guide us.
Do not overreact. Do not give them the satisfaction of our anguish.
We must identify what our top priorities are and focus all our actions on doing what we can do to protect or advance those priorities. We cannot dismiss out of hand opportunities to advance priorities because they came from the bad guys. We must focus ruthlessly on our priorities and let go/refuse to react to things that do not matter to our priorities. We must get comfortable working with anyone who shares a priority with us, even if we share nothing else.
We have to stop playing 4-D chess about public opinion. Our first consideration cannot be “how will this do with [group]” because it is now clear we don’t have much of an idea of how to play that game anymore. The information system is too fragmented and despite our efforts it’s clear that we still somehow missed some aspects of what was coming. All we can do is say “will this advance a thing I care about?"
When real threats emerge we must do all we can to protect against them, but we must coldly calculate what is and is not a threat. We cannot act like everything is on fire - everything is not on fire, and we only have so much water to put the real fires out.
We must tend to our gardens. This means taking a hard look at why the future of America is, as of today, in red states and not in blue states. We must restore dynamism to our blue states and in so doing make them a model the rest of the country wants to emulate.
We must continue to support the mission of preparing America for a new era of geopolitical conflict. We must continue to advance the on- and friend-shoring of strategic industries and work with any and all partners willing to join us.
I found comfort this morning in the serenity prayer - may god grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Prioritize, plan, and act. Do not overreact. Do not give in to despair.
I agree that this is about much more than the campaign, but I do wish the campaign had focused more on the issues on which we will most need to oppose Trump: deficits/tax increases, immigration as a positive economic issue, and friend-shoring trade.
Maybe now is a good time to negotiate on getting rid of the electoral college. It's a ticking time bomb, anyway, and the one good thing about a clear Trump victory is we don't have to worry about the chaos ensuing from faithless electors or state legislatures going rogue. One day we will have to worry about that.
I also think now is a good time to deprioritize fighting for voter id laws. They just don't matter in any practical way and the reality is people who can't show an ID are trending Republican, if they aren't there already. I recently saw Fetterman's appearance on Joe Rogan and the top comments were almost all "seems like a cool guy, I would have considered supporting him until he started talking about voter IDs"
It's a real issue in terms of losing votes and creates opportunities for bad actors (read: Trump, in this case) to delegitimize legitimate elections. I know you and I know there's no real fraud, but that's not how a big chunk of the electorate think.
It's less Ids and more which are counted and who pays for them. For instance, if I remember correctly, veterans ids and gun licenses count in Texas but not student IDs.
It's very funny how gullible media types think the average American is. They'll openly have discussions on the internet like
"How do we get our straight news publication to act as Democrats' defense attorney? Should we write `fascist Donald Trump' in every headline? Maybe with a capital F?"
Then also
"Why do those morons internalize all that misinformation when we have the unvarnished truth right here in our newspaper?"
As folks think how to do better in 2028, I hope there is some rigorous self-reflection and not just casting blame at factional opponents. Brian Beutler arguing on this pod it's the media's fault voters didn't view Democrats as bipartisan when he wrote the day before the election that if Harris wins, "I expect to spend most days monitoring her administration and congressional Democrats for signs of appeasement [of Republicans]", to be frank, is how I think not to do it.
I think it'd be better to consider, to take the immigration example Beutler spoke about, how to get a Presidential nominee who didn't endorse decriminalising the border on camera, and how to reduce the influence of the groups who led to that outcome in your coalition. That review should be occurring on every issue where Democrats struggled with voters.
British Labour went from a once in a century defeat to a once in a century victory in 5 years. They had *a lot* of luck. But they also changed their policy and personnel a lot. They did not wait for the media to do the job for them.
It seems like the biggest driver of both Labour's victory and the Democrats' defeat is their relationship to their respective incumbencies at the moment of the election. It's nice that Labour learned how to stop shooting itself in the foot, but it's also entirely conceivable they would have won by only an ever-so-slightly-smaller margin if they'd enacted none of their reforms and run some Corbynite again.
Notably, Starmer's approval rating was actually as bad as Corbyn's in 2019; the difference was just how discredited the Tories had become. (Weirdly though, the inverse is true for the US: Harris wasn't popular but all indications were she was noticeably more popular than Hillary and she would have beaten Trump solidly if he still had 2016 approval ratings. The problem was that Trump has also grown more popular.)
This is completely false. Starmer’s approval ratings in the election year varied from +18 to -31%, average -2%. Corbyn’s approval ratings varied from -27% to -60% (!), average -42%. So there is every reason to think that if Labour had run a candidate with Corbynite popularity in 2024, that candidate would have lost nearly as badly as Corbyn did in 2019.
What a disappointing night. I'm not surprised at the result -- it was a coin flip according to the polls after all -- but the movement toward Trump across 90% of the counties (including in traditional Blue states) does surprise me.
I'm very interested in seeing demographic shifts on who moved to Trump, although the results suggests it's very broad-based.
The only areas where voters moved left were relatively educated, booming suburban areas like Colorado Springs (I think, eyeballing the maps) and Atlanta.
I think it is too difficult for "progressives" to see the truth: The "progressive" movement has abandoned Trump voters. One big way is that over and over and over in opinion articles and in comments to them people say and/or imply that Trump voters are stupid, misogynist racists.
So, they struck back. Trump was their tool.
It isn't an intellectual issue to dissect. It is a psychological one.
....and it has been predicted by me on every comment board I have subscribed to: telling people that what they are saying is something that Donald Trump thanks them for.
We need our old Democratic Party back. Boot out "progressives." This is the second time they have given us Trump.
IT wasn't the progressives who got us into this mess. It was the wishy washy ,not clear to anyone what they stood for, liberals. Look at Bernie Sanders. People know what he stands for and respect him. Kamala as a former prosecutor was better at attacking Trump than putting forth a vision. Also, I do think a big segment of the population wants to get back at the liberals who they feel disrespect them.
I just saw a post from a guy who I followed, huge Democrat. He had several post arguing that the problem is that the working class is dumb. Democrats should stop trying to help them. Etc.. He sort of verbalized, what many working lads already intuitively understand.
And it made me think of what I perceived to be the Democrats biggest problem. They will inevitably spend the next four years as the resistance. A part of being the resistance means tacking to the left. Immigration, transgender issues, other social positions, which aren’t exactly the hot button issues of the working class.
Then, in three years, they will have to inevitably tack to the center. But of course their credibility will be doubted. Camila did as well as she could, but I suspect her attacked back to the center regarding all the fracking and other issues just wasn’t believed by many voters.
I guess Democrats have to look at the bright side, which is it’s very unlikely that the Republicans can find a Trump like figure in the future. I honestly have no idea how the Republican Party is going to trend in the future.
OK, here’s to the system of checks and balances preventing bad shit from happening. Let’s see how smart you were founding fathers.
“ A part of being the resistance means tacking to the left.”
I doubt that. The DEI thing is petering out per that big NYTimes article the other day. And there was a big research scandal about puberty blockers that should put that issue to bed.
One big factor that doesn’t get talked about is the death of Twitter and how much impact Twitter had on the media’s perception to reality. Without that echo chamber it’s harder for hyper verbal media types to convince themselves that the issues of the day are as left wing as they hope.
The fact that the Dems didn't win the popular vote *should* discourage resistance-style politics.
Currently so many Dems have a "I'm just going to put my head down for 4 years" mindset. I know it's early days, but I remember "we need to fight, resistance, etc" sprung up right away in 2016.
Imho the most likely future is the Dems will organize and energize around whatever problems Trump encounters or major overreaches he goes for. Specific action groups will be protesting all along, but rank-and-file won't be energized until he does something genuinely unpopular.
I think the entire thesis Brian posits here is THE core reason democrats have struggled with elections. It’s not a matter of people being fed incorrect media diets — it’s people actively choosing to repudiate the attitudes and norms of liberals. The bottom line is people have heard about the Trump corruption and fascism and just don’t buy it. There’s a certain patronization that pundits like Brian exude that people notice — it’s a lack of respect for their agency and interests that makes people thinks Dems are out of touch. Screaming about fascism or whatever doesn’t matter if the average voter thinks Democrats are cancel culture metropolitan losers.
Doesn't help that NY, California and Illinois are all shedding population. When people are "voting with their feet" against the flagship blue states, it gives a lot of credibility to complaints about blue state governance.
Number 1 on my list is simply that Joe Biden is the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the executive branch.
We didn’t have enough time for a candidate to hone a message, definitely not enough time to get certain key groups comfortable with this candidate - a woman of color. (It’s not some accident that she performed poorly with Hispanics and Black men) - to say nothing of enough time to choose the right candidate.
And on top of that Biden should have stepped down. Complete the transition. Harris wasn’t ever going to escape being tied to the Biden - so might as well have benefited from all the trappings and stature of the job; pictures in the Oval Office, state dinners, the seal, and the big blue plane.
On the issues front, Dems are still paying a price for losing our collective minds on identity politics/wokery issues, crime, immigration, and a few other areas - all done out of opposition to Trump’s assholery in 2016-2021. Biden 2020 drew as much of a straight flush as Trump did in 2016 by being the one person you couldn’t paint with that brush - but Harris was too easy to associate with that period of madness. She wisely moved way to the center in the last 4 months, but it was too little too late.
And the lesson of that of course is: don’t allow Trump to pull us offsides in the next 4 years like he did before.
1. Harris ran a good campaign. I think she should have done more hostile media, including Rogan’s show, but the margin of defeat is too large for any of those tactical decisions to matter.
2. Since 2012 the Democrats have moved left on gun control, energy and immigration and have changed the way they talk about race and sex. Meanwhile the Republicans have rhetorically moderated on social security and healthcare. The Republican message appeals to more people right now.
3. Democrats need to pivot back to early Obama positions on those issues for the simple reason that they aren’t competitive in enough states right now. They have no path to power if they get blown out in Ohio, Florida, Indiana and Iowa and never win in North Carolina.
4. Trump inherits a strong economy. If he controls his worst impulses like across the board tariffs, he could go down as a Reagan-esque legend on the right.
I just saw a quote from a “progressive” saying that what this election shows is that democrats need to move further to the left to bring in new voters.
I see this sentiment quite often but to really critique it you need to know what they mean by “further to the left”. Like are they referring to the identitarian and climate left or the new industrial policy and YIMBY left?
Trump has created a Bismarckian coalition of the lower educated of all races and the rich. This is extremely bad news for the Democrats because this coalition will always outnumber college educated folks.
I was much more shocked and disappointed in 2016, given a transition from a good politician and man in Obama to what Trump is.
In 2024, we see the reality of Biden holding on long past the point his mental faculties allowed. I think they could have overcome inflation with some clear, aggressive language (and without preceding it with cringe “Let me be clear” bullshit they’ve all abused since Bernie). But they didn’t defend the economy and also allowed two years of fake aslyum claims to flood the country which, contrary to past illegal immigration, taxpayers were then required to pay for.
Republicans and voters could pin that on Harris - and she never offered a clear defense why.
Democrats felt good about the “weird” punchline in the middle of the summer. And it’s true, electing a guy who pals around with a pedophile and professes his wish to fuck his daugter is pretty weird. And yet, pretending a guy in an 80s who can barely get out a sentence should still be president is also weird. As is not acting sooner when we were flooded with tens of thousands of fake asylum claims, and is all the bs language policing and save trans kids” hysteria.
Stay away from California or blue city politicians. Start meeting voters where they are again.
Tim Walz WAS their attempt at meeting small-town and rural voters where they are. Born in a small town, didn’t go to a fancy Ivy League college, veteran, likes state fairs and hunting, projects Midwestern Dad vibes.
I swear to God, no matter what the Democrats do, someone will find fault with it.
You can't just do something once and say "see, we tried". That's like saying you should practice an instrument more, and after a week you expect to get into the orchestra.
To gain blue collar voters, guys who connect with them have to be central to their image, not tacked on at the end.
VP doesn’t matter. The election ads that ran all weekend weren’t about Walz. If Walz won the primary and ran *and* we still lost like this, that woe is me belief might have more validity.
The turn on immigration was also pretty transparently a cynical reaction to Trump's advantage on that issue (although at the same time, I suspect most swing voters would be too oblivious to even be aware that it was transparently a cynical reaction, so that probably did not make that much of a difference by itself).
I think the problem Matt is identifying is much deeper than what he says. The challenge is that people broadly on the left, especially those that consume media, are just way more interested in policy and policy change than similar people on the right. So maybe you could stop getting people written out of the coalition for having the wrong policy view, but you can't make people stop talking about all their policy views.
Just to put this in the terms Matt did, the reason the GOP has a coalition including RFK Jr, Trump, Vance, Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk is that each of them either doesn't care what the federal government does at all or cares only about a very narrow aspect of it. That dynamic is just not replicable on the left.
In regard to the meat of the actual post: complaining about the media environment seems entirely pointless to me. The media is the way it is because of structural forces outside of any single person or group's control, as Matt has pointed out numerous times. There is no realistic world in which we get the content directors of the N most popular media outlets that non-partisans still trust in a room to adjust their reporting in a way that is productive for Democrats.
The closest we've come to this is the now-necessary asterisk that every media organization adds to Trump's claims about election ("President Trump claims that XYZ election was rigged, which we must remind you is NOT true"). I don't think this sort of thing has yet convinced anyone of anything. The way that media can actually steer the national conversation is by deciding what to cover and what to ignore, but because 1. 95%+ of staffers at major media organizations are very left wing, and 2. media outlets pander to their readers' interests and biases (the ones that stay in business, anyway), you'll never be able to avoid the endless public hand-wringing over issues that Democrats would rather everyone just shut up about for 5 minutes.
All that to say: the media environment is what it is, and Democrats need to figure out how to win around it, not by conjuring a new one into existence. That could involve genuinely adopting more moderate positions, or finding their own "teflon" post-truth populist a la Trump, or some other yet-unimagined innovation. But saying "progressive media is counterproductive" is like saying "the weather is counterproductive" - that's true, but you have the play the field as it lies.
Matt's experience going on Rogan seems to be pretty radicalizing to him in terms of how he views the progressive wing.
I'm not sure he made the point super clearly but I think he is right that the Democrats have a credibility problem with the more "bro-y" section of the electorate.
In trying to avoid the Pundit's Fallacy Matt seemed pretty unwilling to be pinned down on specific issues that Dems should of moderated on although for Rogan and Musk, Trans stuff seemed to be a reason they moved right.
My feeling is that vibes mattered more than policy positions.
Brian's feeling that we need a more favorable media environment is one that I still don't quite get.
Perhaps I am underestimating Twitter and the Rogan podcast (and Fox) compared to basically the entire rest of the field which seems to be on the side of the Dems.
We do, but more favorable to the positions that Democrats ought to be prioritizing, rapid growth with more robust social insurance, support for liberal regimes and movements abroad. And while it is true they are constrained by their readers just as politicians are constrained by voters, they have some agency and should use it.
Last night was a bad night. There’s no way around it, and there’s nothing that happened that I am particularly pleased about. The silver lining here is we have lessons from last time that can guide us.
Do not overreact. Do not give them the satisfaction of our anguish.
We must identify what our top priorities are and focus all our actions on doing what we can do to protect or advance those priorities. We cannot dismiss out of hand opportunities to advance priorities because they came from the bad guys. We must focus ruthlessly on our priorities and let go/refuse to react to things that do not matter to our priorities. We must get comfortable working with anyone who shares a priority with us, even if we share nothing else.
We have to stop playing 4-D chess about public opinion. Our first consideration cannot be “how will this do with [group]” because it is now clear we don’t have much of an idea of how to play that game anymore. The information system is too fragmented and despite our efforts it’s clear that we still somehow missed some aspects of what was coming. All we can do is say “will this advance a thing I care about?"
When real threats emerge we must do all we can to protect against them, but we must coldly calculate what is and is not a threat. We cannot act like everything is on fire - everything is not on fire, and we only have so much water to put the real fires out.
We must tend to our gardens. This means taking a hard look at why the future of America is, as of today, in red states and not in blue states. We must restore dynamism to our blue states and in so doing make them a model the rest of the country wants to emulate.
We must continue to support the mission of preparing America for a new era of geopolitical conflict. We must continue to advance the on- and friend-shoring of strategic industries and work with any and all partners willing to join us.
I found comfort this morning in the serenity prayer - may god grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Prioritize, plan, and act. Do not overreact. Do not give in to despair.
I agree that this is about much more than the campaign, but I do wish the campaign had focused more on the issues on which we will most need to oppose Trump: deficits/tax increases, immigration as a positive economic issue, and friend-shoring trade.
Maybe now is a good time to negotiate on getting rid of the electoral college. It's a ticking time bomb, anyway, and the one good thing about a clear Trump victory is we don't have to worry about the chaos ensuing from faithless electors or state legislatures going rogue. One day we will have to worry about that.
I also think now is a good time to deprioritize fighting for voter id laws. They just don't matter in any practical way and the reality is people who can't show an ID are trending Republican, if they aren't there already. I recently saw Fetterman's appearance on Joe Rogan and the top comments were almost all "seems like a cool guy, I would have considered supporting him until he started talking about voter IDs"
It's a real issue in terms of losing votes and creates opportunities for bad actors (read: Trump, in this case) to delegitimize legitimate elections. I know you and I know there's no real fraud, but that's not how a big chunk of the electorate think.
I really don't understand why the broad left is so fervently against showing ID to vote. It really does not seem like a big deal to me at all.
It's less Ids and more which are counted and who pays for them. For instance, if I remember correctly, veterans ids and gun licenses count in Texas but not student IDs.
It's very funny how gullible media types think the average American is. They'll openly have discussions on the internet like
"How do we get our straight news publication to act as Democrats' defense attorney? Should we write `fascist Donald Trump' in every headline? Maybe with a capital F?"
Then also
"Why do those morons internalize all that misinformation when we have the unvarnished truth right here in our newspaper?"
As folks think how to do better in 2028, I hope there is some rigorous self-reflection and not just casting blame at factional opponents. Brian Beutler arguing on this pod it's the media's fault voters didn't view Democrats as bipartisan when he wrote the day before the election that if Harris wins, "I expect to spend most days monitoring her administration and congressional Democrats for signs of appeasement [of Republicans]", to be frank, is how I think not to do it.
I think it'd be better to consider, to take the immigration example Beutler spoke about, how to get a Presidential nominee who didn't endorse decriminalising the border on camera, and how to reduce the influence of the groups who led to that outcome in your coalition. That review should be occurring on every issue where Democrats struggled with voters.
British Labour went from a once in a century defeat to a once in a century victory in 5 years. They had *a lot* of luck. But they also changed their policy and personnel a lot. They did not wait for the media to do the job for them.
It seems like the biggest driver of both Labour's victory and the Democrats' defeat is their relationship to their respective incumbencies at the moment of the election. It's nice that Labour learned how to stop shooting itself in the foot, but it's also entirely conceivable they would have won by only an ever-so-slightly-smaller margin if they'd enacted none of their reforms and run some Corbynite again.
Notably, Starmer's approval rating was actually as bad as Corbyn's in 2019; the difference was just how discredited the Tories had become. (Weirdly though, the inverse is true for the US: Harris wasn't popular but all indications were she was noticeably more popular than Hillary and she would have beaten Trump solidly if he still had 2016 approval ratings. The problem was that Trump has also grown more popular.)
This is completely false. Starmer’s approval ratings in the election year varied from +18 to -31%, average -2%. Corbyn’s approval ratings varied from -27% to -60% (!), average -42%. So there is every reason to think that if Labour had run a candidate with Corbynite popularity in 2024, that candidate would have lost nearly as badly as Corbyn did in 2019.
What a disappointing night. I'm not surprised at the result -- it was a coin flip according to the polls after all -- but the movement toward Trump across 90% of the counties (including in traditional Blue states) does surprise me.
I'm very interested in seeing demographic shifts on who moved to Trump, although the results suggests it's very broad-based.
The only areas where voters moved left were relatively educated, booming suburban areas like Colorado Springs (I think, eyeballing the maps) and Atlanta.
Yep, I thought a Trump EC vote win was pretty plausible going into this, but I NEVER though Trump would actually win the popular vote.
I think it is too difficult for "progressives" to see the truth: The "progressive" movement has abandoned Trump voters. One big way is that over and over and over in opinion articles and in comments to them people say and/or imply that Trump voters are stupid, misogynist racists.
So, they struck back. Trump was their tool.
It isn't an intellectual issue to dissect. It is a psychological one.
....and it has been predicted by me on every comment board I have subscribed to: telling people that what they are saying is something that Donald Trump thanks them for.
We need our old Democratic Party back. Boot out "progressives." This is the second time they have given us Trump.
IT wasn't the progressives who got us into this mess. It was the wishy washy ,not clear to anyone what they stood for, liberals. Look at Bernie Sanders. People know what he stands for and respect him. Kamala as a former prosecutor was better at attacking Trump than putting forth a vision. Also, I do think a big segment of the population wants to get back at the liberals who they feel disrespect them.
I just saw a post from a guy who I followed, huge Democrat. He had several post arguing that the problem is that the working class is dumb. Democrats should stop trying to help them. Etc.. He sort of verbalized, what many working lads already intuitively understand.
And it made me think of what I perceived to be the Democrats biggest problem. They will inevitably spend the next four years as the resistance. A part of being the resistance means tacking to the left. Immigration, transgender issues, other social positions, which aren’t exactly the hot button issues of the working class.
Then, in three years, they will have to inevitably tack to the center. But of course their credibility will be doubted. Camila did as well as she could, but I suspect her attacked back to the center regarding all the fracking and other issues just wasn’t believed by many voters.
I guess Democrats have to look at the bright side, which is it’s very unlikely that the Republicans can find a Trump like figure in the future. I honestly have no idea how the Republican Party is going to trend in the future.
OK, here’s to the system of checks and balances preventing bad shit from happening. Let’s see how smart you were founding fathers.
“ A part of being the resistance means tacking to the left.”
I doubt that. The DEI thing is petering out per that big NYTimes article the other day. And there was a big research scandal about puberty blockers that should put that issue to bed.
One big factor that doesn’t get talked about is the death of Twitter and how much impact Twitter had on the media’s perception to reality. Without that echo chamber it’s harder for hyper verbal media types to convince themselves that the issues of the day are as left wing as they hope.
For the Democrats sake, I hope you are right.
The fact that the Dems didn't win the popular vote *should* discourage resistance-style politics.
Currently so many Dems have a "I'm just going to put my head down for 4 years" mindset. I know it's early days, but I remember "we need to fight, resistance, etc" sprung up right away in 2016.
Imho the most likely future is the Dems will organize and energize around whatever problems Trump encounters or major overreaches he goes for. Specific action groups will be protesting all along, but rank-and-file won't be energized until he does something genuinely unpopular.
It’s hard to be the resistance when Trump won the popular vote by 3 votes. Like this is what voters wanted
I think the entire thesis Brian posits here is THE core reason democrats have struggled with elections. It’s not a matter of people being fed incorrect media diets — it’s people actively choosing to repudiate the attitudes and norms of liberals. The bottom line is people have heard about the Trump corruption and fascism and just don’t buy it. There’s a certain patronization that pundits like Brian exude that people notice — it’s a lack of respect for their agency and interests that makes people thinks Dems are out of touch. Screaming about fascism or whatever doesn’t matter if the average voter thinks Democrats are cancel culture metropolitan losers.
Doesn't help that NY, California and Illinois are all shedding population. When people are "voting with their feet" against the flagship blue states, it gives a lot of credibility to complaints about blue state governance.
Number 1 on my list is simply that Joe Biden is the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the executive branch.
We didn’t have enough time for a candidate to hone a message, definitely not enough time to get certain key groups comfortable with this candidate - a woman of color. (It’s not some accident that she performed poorly with Hispanics and Black men) - to say nothing of enough time to choose the right candidate.
And on top of that Biden should have stepped down. Complete the transition. Harris wasn’t ever going to escape being tied to the Biden - so might as well have benefited from all the trappings and stature of the job; pictures in the Oval Office, state dinners, the seal, and the big blue plane.
On the issues front, Dems are still paying a price for losing our collective minds on identity politics/wokery issues, crime, immigration, and a few other areas - all done out of opposition to Trump’s assholery in 2016-2021. Biden 2020 drew as much of a straight flush as Trump did in 2016 by being the one person you couldn’t paint with that brush - but Harris was too easy to associate with that period of madness. She wisely moved way to the center in the last 4 months, but it was too little too late.
And the lesson of that of course is: don’t allow Trump to pull us offsides in the next 4 years like he did before.
1. Harris ran a good campaign. I think she should have done more hostile media, including Rogan’s show, but the margin of defeat is too large for any of those tactical decisions to matter.
2. Since 2012 the Democrats have moved left on gun control, energy and immigration and have changed the way they talk about race and sex. Meanwhile the Republicans have rhetorically moderated on social security and healthcare. The Republican message appeals to more people right now.
3. Democrats need to pivot back to early Obama positions on those issues for the simple reason that they aren’t competitive in enough states right now. They have no path to power if they get blown out in Ohio, Florida, Indiana and Iowa and never win in North Carolina.
4. Trump inherits a strong economy. If he controls his worst impulses like across the board tariffs, he could go down as a Reagan-esque legend on the right.
I just saw a quote from a “progressive” saying that what this election shows is that democrats need to move further to the left to bring in new voters.
No one can actually think that…can they?
Somehow, yes. They do. These are often the same people insisting swing voters don't exist, and polls always skew right.
I see this sentiment quite often but to really critique it you need to know what they mean by “further to the left”. Like are they referring to the identitarian and climate left or the new industrial policy and YIMBY left?
I am pretty sure the thought process ends at "left." That this is incoherent doesn't come into play.
Freddie de Boer does.
Dems should probs be more populist while paring it with a severe moderation on social issues but idk if that’s “left”
Trump has created a Bismarckian coalition of the lower educated of all races and the rich. This is extremely bad news for the Democrats because this coalition will always outnumber college educated folks.
I was much more shocked and disappointed in 2016, given a transition from a good politician and man in Obama to what Trump is.
In 2024, we see the reality of Biden holding on long past the point his mental faculties allowed. I think they could have overcome inflation with some clear, aggressive language (and without preceding it with cringe “Let me be clear” bullshit they’ve all abused since Bernie). But they didn’t defend the economy and also allowed two years of fake aslyum claims to flood the country which, contrary to past illegal immigration, taxpayers were then required to pay for.
Republicans and voters could pin that on Harris - and she never offered a clear defense why.
Democrats felt good about the “weird” punchline in the middle of the summer. And it’s true, electing a guy who pals around with a pedophile and professes his wish to fuck his daugter is pretty weird. And yet, pretending a guy in an 80s who can barely get out a sentence should still be president is also weird. As is not acting sooner when we were flooded with tens of thousands of fake asylum claims, and is all the bs language policing and save trans kids” hysteria.
Stay away from California or blue city politicians. Start meeting voters where they are again.
Tim Walz WAS their attempt at meeting small-town and rural voters where they are. Born in a small town, didn’t go to a fancy Ivy League college, veteran, likes state fairs and hunting, projects Midwestern Dad vibes.
I swear to God, no matter what the Democrats do, someone will find fault with it.
You can't just do something once and say "see, we tried". That's like saying you should practice an instrument more, and after a week you expect to get into the orchestra.
To gain blue collar voters, guys who connect with them have to be central to their image, not tacked on at the end.
VP doesn’t matter. The election ads that ran all weekend weren’t about Walz. If Walz won the primary and ran *and* we still lost like this, that woe is me belief might have more validity.
Do Dems need to run a celebrity candidate of their own to "meet voters where they are"? Who could conceivably fit that bill? The Rock?
I don't think that they should, but it would have to be Mark Cuban, right?
Something tells me The Rock is no Trump.
The real story was Biden was just too slow. Too slow on inflation. Too slow on immigration
The turn on immigration was also pretty transparently a cynical reaction to Trump's advantage on that issue (although at the same time, I suspect most swing voters would be too oblivious to even be aware that it was transparently a cynical reaction, so that probably did not make that much of a difference by itself).
I think the problem Matt is identifying is much deeper than what he says. The challenge is that people broadly on the left, especially those that consume media, are just way more interested in policy and policy change than similar people on the right. So maybe you could stop getting people written out of the coalition for having the wrong policy view, but you can't make people stop talking about all their policy views.
Just to put this in the terms Matt did, the reason the GOP has a coalition including RFK Jr, Trump, Vance, Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk is that each of them either doesn't care what the federal government does at all or cares only about a very narrow aspect of it. That dynamic is just not replicable on the left.
This is a very good comment.
Ugh, what a disappointing night...
In regard to the meat of the actual post: complaining about the media environment seems entirely pointless to me. The media is the way it is because of structural forces outside of any single person or group's control, as Matt has pointed out numerous times. There is no realistic world in which we get the content directors of the N most popular media outlets that non-partisans still trust in a room to adjust their reporting in a way that is productive for Democrats.
The closest we've come to this is the now-necessary asterisk that every media organization adds to Trump's claims about election ("President Trump claims that XYZ election was rigged, which we must remind you is NOT true"). I don't think this sort of thing has yet convinced anyone of anything. The way that media can actually steer the national conversation is by deciding what to cover and what to ignore, but because 1. 95%+ of staffers at major media organizations are very left wing, and 2. media outlets pander to their readers' interests and biases (the ones that stay in business, anyway), you'll never be able to avoid the endless public hand-wringing over issues that Democrats would rather everyone just shut up about for 5 minutes.
All that to say: the media environment is what it is, and Democrats need to figure out how to win around it, not by conjuring a new one into existence. That could involve genuinely adopting more moderate positions, or finding their own "teflon" post-truth populist a la Trump, or some other yet-unimagined innovation. But saying "progressive media is counterproductive" is like saying "the weather is counterproductive" - that's true, but you have the play the field as it lies.
Matt's experience going on Rogan seems to be pretty radicalizing to him in terms of how he views the progressive wing.
I'm not sure he made the point super clearly but I think he is right that the Democrats have a credibility problem with the more "bro-y" section of the electorate.
In trying to avoid the Pundit's Fallacy Matt seemed pretty unwilling to be pinned down on specific issues that Dems should of moderated on although for Rogan and Musk, Trans stuff seemed to be a reason they moved right.
My feeling is that vibes mattered more than policy positions.
It's definitely not "cool" to say you're a Democrat if you're a guy under 40, unless you hang with PhDs
Matt doesn’t want to say what to moderate on because it’s probably unpopular among this group, but on most cultural issues dem should
Brian's feeling that we need a more favorable media environment is one that I still don't quite get.
Perhaps I am underestimating Twitter and the Rogan podcast (and Fox) compared to basically the entire rest of the field which seems to be on the side of the Dems.
We do, but more favorable to the positions that Democrats ought to be prioritizing, rapid growth with more robust social insurance, support for liberal regimes and movements abroad. And while it is true they are constrained by their readers just as politicians are constrained by voters, they have some agency and should use it.