One thing that feels missing here is examples of "Democrats . . . burrowing-in on a very particular style of politics that simply has a limited range of appeal." Like, I get that "Latinx" is annoying and I'm sure you're right that it's an arcane bit of academic jargon that has no connection to the communities to which it's supposed to be respectful. But have actual Democratic politicians running actual campaigns *actually* leaned in to this sort of thing, or are Republicans just working overtime to associate Democrats with a bunch of free-floating pablum from randos on Twitter (+ Joy Reid)?
I'm curious about this too. I realize that this post is more of an opening salvo, but it seems thin on real-world examples. Were Cal Cunningham, Sarah Gideon, etc., leaning into "campus left" rhetoric? Seems like the opposite, if anything. Democrats may be tarred with that brush writ large, but to me, Republicans are going to seize on even the most minor examples possible no matter what candidates themselves do/don't do. Is the Dem establishment supposed to unilaterally shut down Tumblr on the off chance that one of their catchphrases gets some traction?
Ironically, seems like MY might be engaging in the same "bubble" navel-gazing that he accuses progressive groups of doing. Does anyone outside of twitter really care about this stuff? Isn't it more likely that Latin voters in TX care more about the economy, about Trump promising to re-open businesses so they can actually earn money? Beto's post-election reflections didn't mention woke politics at all -- bigger concerns were lack of actual campaigning in border communities, pitiful digital presence, and overall taking these votes for granted.
You could argue that Dems take this stuff for granted because they take Trump's racism for granted, sure, but is that coming from the progressive side? I saw *way* more concern about lack of actionable plans and (working-class) Latin engagement from the DSA side of twitter than from the mainstream side. It's people like Joy Reid whose primary message is "Trump bad," without much substance beyond that. And Reid is certainly not getting any marching orders from progressive academia, to say the least.
Understood. I’m just struggling to translate that into electoral mistakes on the part of Democrats. Academia has always come up with avant-garde ideas and phrases. So what was the fundamental mistake of Collin Peterson, Sarah Gideon, et al?
If they were just screwed by the left’s heated rhetoric and there’s nothing any candidate can do about it, what then? The Democratic Party can’t police tone on Twitter; any attempts to do so would backfire spectacularly. Plenty of moderate dems lost red/swing districts in 2010, too, even after Obama spent two years trying to assuage white conservative fears.
Meanwhile, the progressive left at least has some actionable post-mortem items: invest in year-round in-person canvassing. Lean more on digital, with a focus on reaching groups that don’t consume traditional media or listen to politicians. This is echoed by grassroots-but-more-moderate figures like Beto and Abrams.
I guess what I’m saying is that a Bernie type seems far more likely to reach voters in Florida who voted for both Trump and a $15 minimum wage than a Biden/Clinton type. I see far more focus on healthcare, wages, etc on DSA Twitter than I do on moderate Dem Twitter.
In his most recent interview for NY Mag, David Shor made a pretty compelling case that as politics and races on the federal level become more nationalized, all candidates in a given party can be harmed by unpopular positions taken by prominent figures in their caucus. Worth checking out.
The Senate RNC Twitter account is manned by idiots. Did they think leftists were going to vote Republican? They should have been saying Kelly didn’t say anything wrong and criticizing leftists, not agreeing with them.
Yeah, this is one of two flaws in the argument. It seems obviously true that moderates do slightly better than progressives in swing and red districts, but my first job in politics was working for Elaine Marshall when she ran against (and beat) Cal Cunningham in the 2010 Democratic primary for Senate, and we ran way to his left. He's a moderate. You can argue he would have won had it not been for the sex scandal, but no one thought he would run more than a point or so ahead of Biden in the best case scenario. It's a hard sell to the left "You have to give up on big ideas and any more attempts at social and cultural change so that some former hedge fund manager can overperform Biden by two points in Iowa."
Which is the second problem, which is that there's not really a strategy here to change. The DCCC isn't throwing its money and energy behind socialists running in red states; it's trying to push moderates in swing districts. There is no one in charge of activists who can tell them to stop saying "Defund the police," the DSA isn't an actual branch of the Democratic Party they can get in line, and if Democrats are responsible for what every person to the left of Mitt Romney with a keyboard and a Twitter login says online, we're screwed.
To the last point, the Dem establishment is obviously struggling with how to at least occasionally throw the Twitter/academic left under the bus without alienating people in a harmful way. Joe Manchin has the leverage to do it blatantly and without repercussions ("defund, my butt") but it's harder for others; I actually think Biden walked this line pretty well by insisting that he's not a socialist (without insulting anyone) but at the same time sublimating some left-wing rhetoric into more palatable bromides around justice and respect. That seems like the way forward.
Transportation policy sadly does not drive a ton of clicks, but one reason I'm excited about this opportunity is the chance to go deeper on that kind of thing.
Matt, this is exciting for you! I feel like I owed you $80 for the tweets alone.
Comment - Doesn't personality/charisma also greatly impact the ability to win close campaigns? Issues are obviously important, but the ability to explain, convince, inspire, and get someone to look past certain policy positions is also key. Trump, Manchin, AOC, Tester, Buttigieg, Beto, and even Obama all seemed to overperform their expected policy-based outcomes due to their character and style. And charisma-challenged folks like Gore, Kerry, Romney, and Hillary all surely underperformed due to this metric. (Ronald Reagan might be the ur-text). Think about Dwayne Johnson - he would be a presidential front runner regardless of which party he was running for. I know this is a policy shop, but shouldn't we think about promoting and encouraging people with this skill set (Buttigieg comes to mind)?
I think charisma probably matters a TON in primaries and in situations like where you're AOC and you want to get attention for your ideas. But I think a lot of the best-performing general election candidates are people like Amy Klobuchar or Tammy Baldwin — almost deliberately boring.
That's probably true at a sub-presidential level, except to say that Gary Peters is obviously the most deliberately boring candidate there could be and was struggling to differentiate himself from the equally blandly named GOP candidate until a late influx of cash and promotion.
Charisma is a big part of politics, but that all wraps into a specific package. Plenty of voters (although not a majority by any stretch) care about a policy-driven campaign. But honestly, I think most people who are moderately engaged (or less) understand that no matter what a politician says, the odds of he or she getting more than 1/3 of what they campaign on is minimal. That's why charisma and attitude matter. It's not just "who you want to get a beer with," but it's about who you trust to make decisions because they share your goals and values. I know a lot of Trump voters that were appalled by him on a personal level but were willing to vote for him in 2016 because they assumed that, when push came to shove, he'd make decisions that were aligned with their broad perspectives and be influenced by particular groups of people.
This Biden victory utterly devastated my previously-held pet theory that you can't win the presidency anymore without being funny. When viewed through that lens, the past 3 decades of winners and losers kinda makes sense to me.
It is pretty irritating how the GOP can seemingly make shit up about what our policy planks are (eg defund the police, Biden will raise your taxes and ban fracking) while we can't seem to ever get through to people about how crazy extreme a lot of their plank is. Is it just a messaging failure on our part, or is it more structural issues?
Also, it would be fantastic if states like CA or NY could -actually- set examples and be really well-run states instead of continually wasting the potential. It's better than a red state, but some of the stuff that goes on here is quite frankly an embarrassment.
how is it better than a red state? Any particular red state you have in mind?
For years, arrogant residents of California and New York have been advising red state Americans that they carry them with their federal taxes. Then the tax cut came that removed those states abilities to siphon federal taxes off for state and local taxes that were deducted straight off of federal returns. now they're moving. hahahaha
And red states are telling em, Welcome, just don't bring the same stupid ideas you enacted in NY and CA down here and make our state a place we want to move away from as well.
Hey Matt. Big fan. Cool to see you doing your own thing!
Few questions for you.
As you’re probably aware, some of your opinions on immigration aren’t particularly popular. I remember one Weeds podcast a while back discussing it and to paraphrase, the gist of what you said was something like: sometimes you just have to make your argument and if you lose you lose. IIRC in that same conversation you expressed contempt for Yascha Mounk’s suggestion that maybe the left should heed David Frum’s advice and accept the right’s hard line on immigration.
I’m very sympathetic to the notion that some of the left’s attitudes on cultural issues are off-putting to a lot of voters and imo counterproductive from the standpoint of winning elections. But, everyone who is politically active has the issue(s) they care most about, where they essentially feel the way you do on immigration—you advocate for it because you think it’s right and if you lose you lose.
If you think the party should trim its sails to appeal to more culturally conservative voters, how do you determine which sails to trim? Who’s issue(s) get thrown under the bus?
Also, shouldn’t any strategy of pragmatic sail trimming to appeal to right-leaning voters try to differentiate between the relative unpopularity of a given issue in terms of raw polling and the magnitude of the dislike in the individual voters? Meaning, couldn’t it be the case that using the term Latinx might be mildly annoying to the vast majority of the Latino electorate but not very relevant to how they cast their vote, and that while a more open immigration policy might enjoy more support it could be a dealbreaker for many more people than the Latinx issue?
Well what I think (and what I think most left-wing activists would agree with) is that it's not everyone's job to win elections. Sometimes your job is to go out there and try to change minds.
But here's where I disagree with the activists. There isn't a ton of sense in trying to pressure elected officials to take up unpopular causes. If you look at a big progressive success story like marriage equality, the politicians are a lagging indicator. You win the case with intellectuals, with cultural figures, with young people, and you watch the numbers go up — then you let the politicians follow. You don't "demand" things that are politically toxic.
But more than that, activists are ALSO voters typically associated with a party, and so how do you prevent the opposition from painting the other side's elected officials with the relatively unpopular positions of the activists in their party's tent?
I love this point. Because I feel like I (and many others) can do something with it. Kind of an a-ha moment. I bet you've said this before and I just missed it but it feels like something that could stand to be shouted from the rooftops (which I will now be doing).
I agree with that fully. But were there Dem politicians running in Latino districts on a "Latinx" platform because that's what a small number of activists demanded? If that's the case it was certainly off my radar
Latinx went completely over my head. I thought they were talking about young people with the x, like Generation x but spanish speaking. I doubt the Hispanic community even ran into the term much. My question is with mostly Mexican immigrants making up places like Texas and a lot of the new immigrants being from Central America, do Hispanics actually just agree with a more Obama era immigration policy?
Yes to be clear, I don't think the word "Latinx" is causing anyone's voting behavior. Rather, it's a sign of thinking from inside a bubble.
And to your point. From inside the lefty activist bubble it's taken for granted that immigration restrictionism is a form of racist anti-Latinx politics that will offend Latinx voters. The reality is that Mexican-American voters simply may not have any special sympathy for indigenous asylum seekers from Central America.
I'm a left-leaning political junkie and I didn't know what Latinx was exactly either for a long time even though I had a hunch that was directionally correct. I only brought up the immigration thing as an example of something I know Matt advocates for that isn't particularly popular with a large number of voters, and to spark a conversation about how you easy it is to scapegoat one particular progressive position and also how to know when to compromise on it.
In general, I think progressives should do a much better job of forthrightly defending their positions rather than sacrificing them to the right. But I also take Matt's point that there are some things they could probably dump like "Latinx" that shouldn't be very important in the grand scheme of things
But my theory is that Latinx isn’t all that important because I doubt it reaches the voters. However, immigration policies that affect the supply and demand for low skilled labor likely does reach Hispanic voters.
Agreed. That's what I was trying to say in my post. I doubt the Latinx thing is on many Latino voters' radar compared to immigration policy, reactions to the BLM movement, etc
Mostly subscribing for the T-shirts that say "I Am Boring" on the front. (Those are coming, surely? Take my money.) (Yes, more of it.) Meanwhile, looking forward to reading some Yglesias Unbound.
There should be a German word for "The feeling when the only writer you'd even consider subscribing to a Substack to read... launches a Substack."
Love the piece. My disconnect is that voters seem to be responding to culture (corporate wokeness, what Fox said that AOC says, etc) rather than you what Biden actually does and says. (Biden was explicitly against defund the police, but that didn't seem to penetrate). So even if you run a moderate PA Senate candidate, can they overcome being painted with the extremes of leftist culture? Is this a candidate problem, or a cultural disconnect problem? Does a PA moderate Senate candidate have to explicitly campaign against wokeness to cut through? Could such a person every win a Dem primary?
I think this is a Dem messaging problem. If you watch R's they all sing the same song. D's, because of their inherent diversity, are all saying something a little different. It makes it impossible for our messages to ever get through clearly.
Ah, so you'd like more 'oneness and sameness' from your coalition - I have a Karen Stenner book you're gonna *love* :-)
Joking aside - don't we all obsess about factional arguments among our own coalition/party, while lumping the opposition together in a big bucket marked 'The Other', which seems (to us) to speak with a unified voice? In part because we (rationally) don't invest time or cognitive effort into learning about the internal fights and fissures among people we think of as 'generally wrong about things.'
If you were the kind of person who passionately backed a particular side in debates between (say) libertarian, evangelical, Breitbart/populist and Q-Anon Republicans, maybe you’d also feel enormously frustrated at all the 'RINOs' and/or 'crazies' and/or 'cucks' messing up the purity of your preferred messaging?
Such people do exist, of course (people just crazy enough to invest mind-boggling energy on the interecine squabbles of people they universally abhor). They're called "Jane Coaston" and we're glad they're out there.
The problem I see: there’s the 40% that will passionately back anything with an R next to it. The 40-48% of Trump voters don’t even like him, voted for him anyway. We talk about all of his voters as if they’re the 40%; the other group doesn’t exist.
The 40-48% is who we need to think about. The Obama to Trump voters, both times, voted for maximum change. The system is rotten to them, something fundamentally wrong.
I think it’s economics. If you don’t have a college degree, and can’t afford one for your kids, your family is not upwardly mobile and isn’t going to be. Who can convince people that they can and will change that? Democrats are utterly lacking in a vision for this country. I’m willing to bet that Republicans are going to develop one, even if they end up with zombie Reaganism again in practice.
What do you think of claims that supposed political "moderates" aren't really all that moderate at all; they're just inconsistent (e.g., some voters who love Trump-y attacks on wokeness but also favor a higher minimum wage or universal healthcare, or others who are very culturally woke but strongly in favor of deregulation)? If this is true, doesn't that imply that there's a much larger disconnect between image and substance in American politics than is usually conceived of, and that true cross-aisle coalition politics ought to be possible on narrow policy grounds (even in a Biden administration where dems are the legislative minority)?
I think moderate-as-inconsistent plays into this dynamic. Very few voters are going to agree with either candidate in a given race about everything. Even a very left-wing or very right-wing person will have a few idiosyncratic views.
When you start characterizing disagreement about something as "racist" — like it's racist if you agree with Trump's asylum policies — I think that says to people "we don't want you in our coalition." Even if only 25% of people do agree with Trump's asylum policies and 90 percent of those people are hardcore right-wingers who'd never vote for your anyway, alienating 2 percent of the population by calling them racist isn't a great idea.
Couldn’t agree more. The relentless scolding, on the ground and from the media, is awful.
If anything, the left needs to get woke on class. I’ve seen so many people just crapping on things that broke people (of any color) do. It’s frankly disgusting.
65% of Americans lack a 4 year degree, and the bubble lefties (white professionals) talk about them as if they deserve whatever happens to them.
Democrats need vision, and it needs to be economic, IMHO. The woke business ends up front and center because, what else are they about?
And among the working class (I used to be a union organizer and still try to watch closely), China really is huge. We’re buying products made by slave labor, they have *actual* concentration camps, and when someone complains the response is basically “that’s the way it goes, learn to code”. And then we’re expected to care about trivial offenses and 10 year old tweets?
The echo chamber is killing the left, because it *is* the mainstream media. I don’t know the answer but, again, with Democrats lacking vision, the unbelievably self-regarding people in the bubble becomes representative.
And while I’m ranting: dump Pelosi and Schumer. 2 people who are associated with almost every hated policy in the last few decades can’t be the face of your party. Pelosi should be forcibly retired after that Blitzer interview.
The education schism between the parties seems pretty emblematic where the Ds go wrong. Ppl support higher minimum wage and expanded HC (the latter at least when the get it), but many of these same ppl don't support Ds. I think one part of this is that every Ds solution to a problem is more education. Rahm Emanuel running around talking about retraining, a solution that has failed time and again is ridiculous. If you developed a specific trade skill, or any worked for years in a less specifically trained blue collar jobs, you may not be interested in sitting in a class room to learn new skills. You learned by doing when your brain was young and malleable, and yet, what do we offer as an alternative? And many of those ppl are mid-30's and older! Even most ppl who love education aren't champing at the bit to learn brand new complex skills mid-career. Yet, the Ds main solution to economic change is "education." I would feel pretty angry to if my concerns about economic displacement were always met with "move" and "learn a totally new set of skills." Even the idea that young ppl who don't love classroom learning should go to college for a shot at a stable career is ridiculous.
I say this as someone who spent may years thinking we need to move and retrain ppl.
Congrats on this new project, Matt. Looking forward to it. On the off chance you're taking requests, I'd love to see a post about the potential *political* benefits of relocating federal agencies outside D.C. You hooked me on the economic merits of this idea in One Billion Americans (and in your Vox piece from a few years back), as I work on economic development in rural/declining areas. It seems like Dems could leverage some conservatives' (Hawley, Blackburn) interest in the idea to expand support for government -- and therefore the party -- in key states.
"Latinx" has always made my Cubana wife and all her amigas latinas cringe. So wonderful that I never need to visit the Vox site again and sift through Ezra's "takes as performance art". Congrats Matt and I wish you the best of success. Yglesias Unbridled!!!
I don’t think the people in the bubble and in media have any idea how much credibility they’ve lost on Russia, among other screwups, in the last few years. They should be bringing on people who got it right, instead of clinging to all the people who gave us Iraq and the WoT.
Quick favor: could you update the billing receipt to contain ONLYFANS so I'm less embarrassed when my wife asks about the credit card statement?
Aaand jokes like this are gonna keep me reading the comments.
Seconded.
haha, I'll see what I can do
I can't believe I subscribed to a substack.
It's been a year full of surprises
On Friday the 13th of 2020 no less.
I can't believe I'm not even the first Ilya to subscribe to this substack.
Here we are on the IDW.
lol same... only for Matt!
*tents fingers* eexcellent
You wore me down with the One Billion Americans promo and now I will spend money on anything you tell me to.
See, that's the spirit
One thing that feels missing here is examples of "Democrats . . . burrowing-in on a very particular style of politics that simply has a limited range of appeal." Like, I get that "Latinx" is annoying and I'm sure you're right that it's an arcane bit of academic jargon that has no connection to the communities to which it's supposed to be respectful. But have actual Democratic politicians running actual campaigns *actually* leaned in to this sort of thing, or are Republicans just working overtime to associate Democrats with a bunch of free-floating pablum from randos on Twitter (+ Joy Reid)?
I'm curious about this too. I realize that this post is more of an opening salvo, but it seems thin on real-world examples. Were Cal Cunningham, Sarah Gideon, etc., leaning into "campus left" rhetoric? Seems like the opposite, if anything. Democrats may be tarred with that brush writ large, but to me, Republicans are going to seize on even the most minor examples possible no matter what candidates themselves do/don't do. Is the Dem establishment supposed to unilaterally shut down Tumblr on the off chance that one of their catchphrases gets some traction?
Ironically, seems like MY might be engaging in the same "bubble" navel-gazing that he accuses progressive groups of doing. Does anyone outside of twitter really care about this stuff? Isn't it more likely that Latin voters in TX care more about the economy, about Trump promising to re-open businesses so they can actually earn money? Beto's post-election reflections didn't mention woke politics at all -- bigger concerns were lack of actual campaigning in border communities, pitiful digital presence, and overall taking these votes for granted.
You could argue that Dems take this stuff for granted because they take Trump's racism for granted, sure, but is that coming from the progressive side? I saw *way* more concern about lack of actionable plans and (working-class) Latin engagement from the DSA side of twitter than from the mainstream side. It's people like Joy Reid whose primary message is "Trump bad," without much substance beyond that. And Reid is certainly not getting any marching orders from progressive academia, to say the least.
I don't think "Latinx" is an important cause of anything per se, but it's a very high profile *illustration* of the bubble phenomenon.
Understood. I’m just struggling to translate that into electoral mistakes on the part of Democrats. Academia has always come up with avant-garde ideas and phrases. So what was the fundamental mistake of Collin Peterson, Sarah Gideon, et al?
If they were just screwed by the left’s heated rhetoric and there’s nothing any candidate can do about it, what then? The Democratic Party can’t police tone on Twitter; any attempts to do so would backfire spectacularly. Plenty of moderate dems lost red/swing districts in 2010, too, even after Obama spent two years trying to assuage white conservative fears.
Meanwhile, the progressive left at least has some actionable post-mortem items: invest in year-round in-person canvassing. Lean more on digital, with a focus on reaching groups that don’t consume traditional media or listen to politicians. This is echoed by grassroots-but-more-moderate figures like Beto and Abrams.
I guess what I’m saying is that a Bernie type seems far more likely to reach voters in Florida who voted for both Trump and a $15 minimum wage than a Biden/Clinton type. I see far more focus on healthcare, wages, etc on DSA Twitter than I do on moderate Dem Twitter.
In his most recent interview for NY Mag, David Shor made a pretty compelling case that as politics and races on the federal level become more nationalized, all candidates in a given party can be harmed by unpopular positions taken by prominent figures in their caucus. Worth checking out.
Noteworthy that Mark Kelly, the only Democratic Senate candidate who both outperformed Biden and won, didn't exactly lean into the bubble's preferred language: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/blog/meet-press-blog-latest-news-analysis-data-driving-political-discussion-n988541/ncrd1239799#blogHeader
The Senate RNC Twitter account is manned by idiots. Did they think leftists were going to vote Republican? They should have been saying Kelly didn’t say anything wrong and criticizing leftists, not agreeing with them.
Yeah, this is one of two flaws in the argument. It seems obviously true that moderates do slightly better than progressives in swing and red districts, but my first job in politics was working for Elaine Marshall when she ran against (and beat) Cal Cunningham in the 2010 Democratic primary for Senate, and we ran way to his left. He's a moderate. You can argue he would have won had it not been for the sex scandal, but no one thought he would run more than a point or so ahead of Biden in the best case scenario. It's a hard sell to the left "You have to give up on big ideas and any more attempts at social and cultural change so that some former hedge fund manager can overperform Biden by two points in Iowa."
Which is the second problem, which is that there's not really a strategy here to change. The DCCC isn't throwing its money and energy behind socialists running in red states; it's trying to push moderates in swing districts. There is no one in charge of activists who can tell them to stop saying "Defund the police," the DSA isn't an actual branch of the Democratic Party they can get in line, and if Democrats are responsible for what every person to the left of Mitt Romney with a keyboard and a Twitter login says online, we're screwed.
To the last point, the Dem establishment is obviously struggling with how to at least occasionally throw the Twitter/academic left under the bus without alienating people in a harmful way. Joe Manchin has the leverage to do it blatantly and without repercussions ("defund, my butt") but it's harder for others; I actually think Biden walked this line pretty well by insisting that he's not a socialist (without insulting anyone) but at the same time sublimating some left-wing rhetoric into more palatable bromides around justice and respect. That seems like the way forward.
Admittedly the only one he appears to have sent, but here’s the president-elect using Latinx in a tweet: https://twitter.com/joebiden/status/1153791650205855752?s=21
It’s a really bizarre phenomenon that’s effected all levels of elite liberal discourse despite, you know, no one using it in real life!
Kamala Harris uses it regularly in her tweets it seems
Kamala Harris also uses her pronouns in her bio. puke puke puke
Best of luck with this new outlet! I’m especially excited for any new housing and transit policy discussions.
Transportation policy sadly does not drive a ton of clicks, but one reason I'm excited about this opportunity is the chance to go deeper on that kind of thing.
Matt, this is exciting for you! I feel like I owed you $80 for the tweets alone.
Comment - Doesn't personality/charisma also greatly impact the ability to win close campaigns? Issues are obviously important, but the ability to explain, convince, inspire, and get someone to look past certain policy positions is also key. Trump, Manchin, AOC, Tester, Buttigieg, Beto, and even Obama all seemed to overperform their expected policy-based outcomes due to their character and style. And charisma-challenged folks like Gore, Kerry, Romney, and Hillary all surely underperformed due to this metric. (Ronald Reagan might be the ur-text). Think about Dwayne Johnson - he would be a presidential front runner regardless of which party he was running for. I know this is a policy shop, but shouldn't we think about promoting and encouraging people with this skill set (Buttigieg comes to mind)?
I think charisma probably matters a TON in primaries and in situations like where you're AOC and you want to get attention for your ideas. But I think a lot of the best-performing general election candidates are people like Amy Klobuchar or Tammy Baldwin — almost deliberately boring.
That's probably true at a sub-presidential level, except to say that Gary Peters is obviously the most deliberately boring candidate there could be and was struggling to differentiate himself from the equally blandly named GOP candidate until a late influx of cash and promotion.
Charisma is a big part of politics, but that all wraps into a specific package. Plenty of voters (although not a majority by any stretch) care about a policy-driven campaign. But honestly, I think most people who are moderately engaged (or less) understand that no matter what a politician says, the odds of he or she getting more than 1/3 of what they campaign on is minimal. That's why charisma and attitude matter. It's not just "who you want to get a beer with," but it's about who you trust to make decisions because they share your goals and values. I know a lot of Trump voters that were appalled by him on a personal level but were willing to vote for him in 2016 because they assumed that, when push came to shove, he'd make decisions that were aligned with their broad perspectives and be influenced by particular groups of people.
This Biden victory utterly devastated my previously-held pet theory that you can't win the presidency anymore without being funny. When viewed through that lens, the past 3 decades of winners and losers kinda makes sense to me.
It wasn’t the taller man, but the funnier man! Trump wasn’t nearly as funny this cycle. Kung flu was good but too soon.
Maybe, yeah, but we just had charisma black hole Joe Biden win the white house, so it's clearly not the -only- thing we need.
What Biden needed most was Trump getting the vote out for him. Jeb Bush would have beaten Biden.
It’s a little slow around here. When does the boring of hard boards start?
We are boring!
It is pretty irritating how the GOP can seemingly make shit up about what our policy planks are (eg defund the police, Biden will raise your taxes and ban fracking) while we can't seem to ever get through to people about how crazy extreme a lot of their plank is. Is it just a messaging failure on our part, or is it more structural issues?
Also, it would be fantastic if states like CA or NY could -actually- set examples and be really well-run states instead of continually wasting the potential. It's better than a red state, but some of the stuff that goes on here is quite frankly an embarrassment.
how is it better than a red state? Any particular red state you have in mind?
For years, arrogant residents of California and New York have been advising red state Americans that they carry them with their federal taxes. Then the tax cut came that removed those states abilities to siphon federal taxes off for state and local taxes that were deducted straight off of federal returns. now they're moving. hahahaha
And red states are telling em, Welcome, just don't bring the same stupid ideas you enacted in NY and CA down here and make our state a place we want to move away from as well.
If a few hundred thousand CA and NY residents moved to small, red states, the Senate problem would be solved!
Maybe. Maybe after fleeing CA Rogan and Elon will not support that stupidity going forward.
Hey Matt. Big fan. Cool to see you doing your own thing!
Few questions for you.
As you’re probably aware, some of your opinions on immigration aren’t particularly popular. I remember one Weeds podcast a while back discussing it and to paraphrase, the gist of what you said was something like: sometimes you just have to make your argument and if you lose you lose. IIRC in that same conversation you expressed contempt for Yascha Mounk’s suggestion that maybe the left should heed David Frum’s advice and accept the right’s hard line on immigration.
I’m very sympathetic to the notion that some of the left’s attitudes on cultural issues are off-putting to a lot of voters and imo counterproductive from the standpoint of winning elections. But, everyone who is politically active has the issue(s) they care most about, where they essentially feel the way you do on immigration—you advocate for it because you think it’s right and if you lose you lose.
If you think the party should trim its sails to appeal to more culturally conservative voters, how do you determine which sails to trim? Who’s issue(s) get thrown under the bus?
Also, shouldn’t any strategy of pragmatic sail trimming to appeal to right-leaning voters try to differentiate between the relative unpopularity of a given issue in terms of raw polling and the magnitude of the dislike in the individual voters? Meaning, couldn’t it be the case that using the term Latinx might be mildly annoying to the vast majority of the Latino electorate but not very relevant to how they cast their vote, and that while a more open immigration policy might enjoy more support it could be a dealbreaker for many more people than the Latinx issue?
Well what I think (and what I think most left-wing activists would agree with) is that it's not everyone's job to win elections. Sometimes your job is to go out there and try to change minds.
But here's where I disagree with the activists. There isn't a ton of sense in trying to pressure elected officials to take up unpopular causes. If you look at a big progressive success story like marriage equality, the politicians are a lagging indicator. You win the case with intellectuals, with cultural figures, with young people, and you watch the numbers go up — then you let the politicians follow. You don't "demand" things that are politically toxic.
But more than that, activists are ALSO voters typically associated with a party, and so how do you prevent the opposition from painting the other side's elected officials with the relatively unpopular positions of the activists in their party's tent?
I love this point. Because I feel like I (and many others) can do something with it. Kind of an a-ha moment. I bet you've said this before and I just missed it but it feels like something that could stand to be shouted from the rooftops (which I will now be doing).
I agree with that fully. But were there Dem politicians running in Latino districts on a "Latinx" platform because that's what a small number of activists demanded? If that's the case it was certainly off my radar
The VP nominee, for example, uses this language pretty regularly.
https://twitter.com/kamalaharris/status/1185220760241147904?lang=en
“VP nominee”. Is that a slip or are you holding out for GSA certification?
Latinx went completely over my head. I thought they were talking about young people with the x, like Generation x but spanish speaking. I doubt the Hispanic community even ran into the term much. My question is with mostly Mexican immigrants making up places like Texas and a lot of the new immigrants being from Central America, do Hispanics actually just agree with a more Obama era immigration policy?
Yes to be clear, I don't think the word "Latinx" is causing anyone's voting behavior. Rather, it's a sign of thinking from inside a bubble.
And to your point. From inside the lefty activist bubble it's taken for granted that immigration restrictionism is a form of racist anti-Latinx politics that will offend Latinx voters. The reality is that Mexican-American voters simply may not have any special sympathy for indigenous asylum seekers from Central America.
Bueno... may not have? hahahahaha
I'm a left-leaning political junkie and I didn't know what Latinx was exactly either for a long time even though I had a hunch that was directionally correct. I only brought up the immigration thing as an example of something I know Matt advocates for that isn't particularly popular with a large number of voters, and to spark a conversation about how you easy it is to scapegoat one particular progressive position and also how to know when to compromise on it.
In general, I think progressives should do a much better job of forthrightly defending their positions rather than sacrificing them to the right. But I also take Matt's point that there are some things they could probably dump like "Latinx" that shouldn't be very important in the grand scheme of things
But my theory is that Latinx isn’t all that important because I doubt it reaches the voters. However, immigration policies that affect the supply and demand for low skilled labor likely does reach Hispanic voters.
Agreed. That's what I was trying to say in my post. I doubt the Latinx thing is on many Latino voters' radar compared to immigration policy, reactions to the BLM movement, etc
Mostly subscribing for the T-shirts that say "I Am Boring" on the front. (Those are coming, surely? Take my money.) (Yes, more of it.) Meanwhile, looking forward to reading some Yglesias Unbound.
There should be a German word for "The feeling when the only writer you'd even consider subscribing to a Substack to read... launches a Substack."
May I propose: Unterstapelabfindem
Love the piece. My disconnect is that voters seem to be responding to culture (corporate wokeness, what Fox said that AOC says, etc) rather than you what Biden actually does and says. (Biden was explicitly against defund the police, but that didn't seem to penetrate). So even if you run a moderate PA Senate candidate, can they overcome being painted with the extremes of leftist culture? Is this a candidate problem, or a cultural disconnect problem? Does a PA moderate Senate candidate have to explicitly campaign against wokeness to cut through? Could such a person every win a Dem primary?
I mean Biden won! If House Democrats did as well as Biden, that would be an improvement.
Has anyone done a comparison of Biden to House D candidates by district or do we need more final results for that?
I think this is a Dem messaging problem. If you watch R's they all sing the same song. D's, because of their inherent diversity, are all saying something a little different. It makes it impossible for our messages to ever get through clearly.
Ah, so you'd like more 'oneness and sameness' from your coalition - I have a Karen Stenner book you're gonna *love* :-)
Joking aside - don't we all obsess about factional arguments among our own coalition/party, while lumping the opposition together in a big bucket marked 'The Other', which seems (to us) to speak with a unified voice? In part because we (rationally) don't invest time or cognitive effort into learning about the internal fights and fissures among people we think of as 'generally wrong about things.'
If you were the kind of person who passionately backed a particular side in debates between (say) libertarian, evangelical, Breitbart/populist and Q-Anon Republicans, maybe you’d also feel enormously frustrated at all the 'RINOs' and/or 'crazies' and/or 'cucks' messing up the purity of your preferred messaging?
Such people do exist, of course (people just crazy enough to invest mind-boggling energy on the interecine squabbles of people they universally abhor). They're called "Jane Coaston" and we're glad they're out there.
The problem I see: there’s the 40% that will passionately back anything with an R next to it. The 40-48% of Trump voters don’t even like him, voted for him anyway. We talk about all of his voters as if they’re the 40%; the other group doesn’t exist.
The 40-48% is who we need to think about. The Obama to Trump voters, both times, voted for maximum change. The system is rotten to them, something fundamentally wrong.
I think it’s economics. If you don’t have a college degree, and can’t afford one for your kids, your family is not upwardly mobile and isn’t going to be. Who can convince people that they can and will change that? Democrats are utterly lacking in a vision for this country. I’m willing to bet that Republicans are going to develop one, even if they end up with zombie Reaganism again in practice.
What do you think of claims that supposed political "moderates" aren't really all that moderate at all; they're just inconsistent (e.g., some voters who love Trump-y attacks on wokeness but also favor a higher minimum wage or universal healthcare, or others who are very culturally woke but strongly in favor of deregulation)? If this is true, doesn't that imply that there's a much larger disconnect between image and substance in American politics than is usually conceived of, and that true cross-aisle coalition politics ought to be possible on narrow policy grounds (even in a Biden administration where dems are the legislative minority)?
I think moderate-as-inconsistent plays into this dynamic. Very few voters are going to agree with either candidate in a given race about everything. Even a very left-wing or very right-wing person will have a few idiosyncratic views.
When you start characterizing disagreement about something as "racist" — like it's racist if you agree with Trump's asylum policies — I think that says to people "we don't want you in our coalition." Even if only 25% of people do agree with Trump's asylum policies and 90 percent of those people are hardcore right-wingers who'd never vote for your anyway, alienating 2 percent of the population by calling them racist isn't a great idea.
Couldn’t agree more. The relentless scolding, on the ground and from the media, is awful.
If anything, the left needs to get woke on class. I’ve seen so many people just crapping on things that broke people (of any color) do. It’s frankly disgusting.
65% of Americans lack a 4 year degree, and the bubble lefties (white professionals) talk about them as if they deserve whatever happens to them.
Democrats need vision, and it needs to be economic, IMHO. The woke business ends up front and center because, what else are they about?
And among the working class (I used to be a union organizer and still try to watch closely), China really is huge. We’re buying products made by slave labor, they have *actual* concentration camps, and when someone complains the response is basically “that’s the way it goes, learn to code”. And then we’re expected to care about trivial offenses and 10 year old tweets?
The echo chamber is killing the left, because it *is* the mainstream media. I don’t know the answer but, again, with Democrats lacking vision, the unbelievably self-regarding people in the bubble becomes representative.
And while I’m ranting: dump Pelosi and Schumer. 2 people who are associated with almost every hated policy in the last few decades can’t be the face of your party. Pelosi should be forcibly retired after that Blitzer interview.
"this"
The education schism between the parties seems pretty emblematic where the Ds go wrong. Ppl support higher minimum wage and expanded HC (the latter at least when the get it), but many of these same ppl don't support Ds. I think one part of this is that every Ds solution to a problem is more education. Rahm Emanuel running around talking about retraining, a solution that has failed time and again is ridiculous. If you developed a specific trade skill, or any worked for years in a less specifically trained blue collar jobs, you may not be interested in sitting in a class room to learn new skills. You learned by doing when your brain was young and malleable, and yet, what do we offer as an alternative? And many of those ppl are mid-30's and older! Even most ppl who love education aren't champing at the bit to learn brand new complex skills mid-career. Yet, the Ds main solution to economic change is "education." I would feel pretty angry to if my concerns about economic displacement were always met with "move" and "learn a totally new set of skills." Even the idea that young ppl who don't love classroom learning should go to college for a shot at a stable career is ridiculous.
I say this as someone who spent may years thinking we need to move and retrain ppl.
Congrats on this new project, Matt. Looking forward to it. On the off chance you're taking requests, I'd love to see a post about the potential *political* benefits of relocating federal agencies outside D.C. You hooked me on the economic merits of this idea in One Billion Americans (and in your Vox piece from a few years back), as I work on economic development in rural/declining areas. It seems like Dems could leverage some conservatives' (Hawley, Blackburn) interest in the idea to expand support for government -- and therefore the party -- in key states.
Good idea
"Latinx" has always made my Cubana wife and all her amigas latinas cringe. So wonderful that I never need to visit the Vox site again and sift through Ezra's "takes as performance art". Congrats Matt and I wish you the best of success. Yglesias Unbridled!!!
They hated Matt because he told the truth..
I don’t think the people in the bubble and in media have any idea how much credibility they’ve lost on Russia, among other screwups, in the last few years. They should be bringing on people who got it right, instead of clinging to all the people who gave us Iraq and the WoT.
As any longtime fan knows your comment sections on your old blogs always sucked. Do you have plans to make the comment section here better than that?
Yes! The fact that this is a comment section for actual subscribers means that:
a) I am committed to engaging here in a real way and
b) It should not be full of trolls
Never underestimate trolls.