It really is mystifying that the Dems were like “let’s just do our damndest to make blue collar Catholics locked in GOP voters.” Just a stunning own goal that’s totally incomprehensible from the outside.
If the unstated thing that Dems allegedly did to cause this was moving left on abortion, polling shows that more than 60% of white Catholics support legal abortion.
If the unstated thing is something else, can you please state what it is?
The Democratic Party hasn't merely "moved left" on abortion. It has become extremely hostile (ie litmus tests) to politicians exhibiting even a modicum of nuance on the issue. The corollary to the "60%" figure you is that 40% of a big group of voters are pretty strongly cross-pressured into voting GOP even when they agree with Democrats on other issues. The "safe, legal, rare" formulation seemed fine at the time, and provided a safe harbor for a lot of voters.
I think there was also a mistake of assuming that abortion would make more people single issue voters. That makes sense on literally a single issue ballot referendum, but it’s not a deciding factor for people on every race
There is a large group of people who were basically pro-choice but made uncomfortable by abortion. I understand why people would like this group to have a more understanding attitude about the reasons why people get abortions. But *politicians* should actively court their votes. It isn't the job of the Democratic Party to change these ambivalent voters minds, it is the job of the Democratic Party to protect abortion rights.
I think also with declining birth rates and greater use of birth control and relative affluence (can afford to fly my daughter to Colorado or Canada for an abortion) - a lot of people made the calculus that "sure the GOP might end abortion rights, but I can live with that..."
It was also a high salience issue for the type of people who will vote in midterm elections, but not necessarily for swing voters who only come out in presidential election years.
My family could- with a lot of exceptions let me be clear, a lot of them just don’t vote anymore- swallow the Democratic Party taking the opposite side of the church on essentially every social issue. They could not take that AND NAFTA.
Sure. Plenty of voters prioritize economic nationalism, no doubt. But plenty prioritize healthcare, or taxes on the rich, or Social Security. Last time I looked, blue collar service workers outnumbered blue collar factory workers by about four to one.
I mostly agree that it’s the rise in democratic antipathy to social conservatism that’s the main culprit here, but over time Catholics had less economic reason to vote for them (white collar because they might benefit more from lower taxes, blue collar because national dems kind of lost their touch with blue collar workers)
My sense is that the upwardly mobile Catholics who were all secretly pro choice and maybe super double secretly voting for Republicans in the 70s-90s have split, with a lot of them "coming home" to the Democrats but others remaining Trump skeptical Republicans but Republicans nonetheless. The rest have drifted right along with the rest of the working class. By the numbers this has been a really bad trade off.
Bob Casey remained a Democrat in good standing so this is clearly overstated. And Casey's own personal positions didn't help him outrun Harris in any event. The number of people who agree with Dems on all the other issues besides abortion, and then vote for the GOP as a result, has to be near zero.
Bob Casey voted to scrap the filibuster in order to pass an abortion bill more liberal than the pre-dobbs status quo. He remained in good standing by becoming dramatically more liberal on abortion!
Sure, but there probably are a lot of voters who agree with Dems on some issues, and agree with the GOP on some issues, and abortion tips them one way or the other. And the fact that some ancient Democrats can get the wrong position grandfathered in doesn't mean it's viable for anyone younger.
I agree with you and MattY that allowing a little more latitude on abortion would help a bit, but abortion is still undoubtedly one of Dems' strongest issues and it's weird that OP focused on it when there's a billion other areas where we've been much weaker
Yeah, the fact that this is the most liked comment here today is weird. "How dare the Democrats move left on an issue this constituency moved left on" is a weird explanation for the Democrats losing a constituency.
Abortion is a good issue when the debate is banning it vs. not banning it. That puts the "safe, legal, and rare" people on the D side. Keeping it as a good issue is dependent on not losing the "safe, legal, and rare" people.
I find the framing of “The Democratic Party” in this kind of situation pretends parties has far more control and influence over members and voters than they do. America became more polarized over abortion. Of course party actors followed suit
Which really puts the whole parent comment narrative here into question. The Catholic Church put a lot more emphasis on things like good works, charity, and environmental concerns in the past decade and de-emphasized conservative approaches on abortion and LGBT issues compared to the past. A majority of American Catholics are at least nominally pro-choice. The last Catholic president was Biden.
The fact that the narrative here doesn't use the word "unions" is revealing.
That poll contains a lot more nuance: Clear majorities of Catholics, for example, oppose access to abortion pills through the mail. Catholics are a good deal more flexible in opposing certain or all aspects of abortion: About a third wouldn’t vote for candidates with whom they don’t align on abortion law. “In all or most cases” obscures more than it reveals.
Pew does say that but they also include Catholics who dissociate from the church. Frankly not sure how that splits out- regular attenders for other denominations look different in some hard to predict ways
I don't think that much was lost by making room for candidates who call themselves "personally pro-life" or who want abortion to be "safe, legal and rare." Or even genuinely pro-life candidates from red states, or cross-pressured voters who are pro-life but nevertheless anti-Trump (it seems like Pope Leo was one of these voters).
Speaking as a white Catholic Democrat, there's a difference between respecting the idea that abortion needs to be safe and legal in at least some circumstances (which I personally do) and wanting to put it at the emotional center of your politics (which I honestly don't love). Wasn't there a mobile abortion/vasectomy van at the DNC last year? I would still vote for Kamala over Trump no matter what, but that kind of stunt around a serious and nuanced moral issue was a huge turn off for me.
I mean, a white guy from the south side/suburbs of Chicago (my ancestry! go Sox!) is going to have particularly retrograde views on race given the last hundred years of neighborhood turnover.
It's because the delusion amongst progressives about "The Emerging Democratic Majority" is very strong, even after two major losses. Even after the loss of Blue Collar Whites, Hispanic Males, and Conservative Blacks to the GOP.
If Trumpism is a cult, then today's Progressivism has become a religion, complete with its faith in the universe eventually awarding Democrats for their courage in standing up for the right thing. This faith is in contrast to the reality that we live in a democracy where whomever is most appealing to voters wins.
It's time to dump the religion and get back to reality.
Democratic Party has taken the opposite side of the Catholic Church on most (all?) questions of personal conduct in the United States- and has demanded fealty to pretty extreme positions to be a viable candidate, and starting with Clinton began to promote free market policies that while in aggregate were good things, where there are losers they tend to be blue collar workers (and the workers certainly thought of themselves as the likely losers).
the catholic church doesn't have very popular political views honestly, the anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, pro-asylum party would get like 30% of the vote haha.
- Abortion became more salient for a bunch of reasons, most of them not having to do with specific decisions made by democrats (whoever they are).
- Religion matters less and less to americans as an identity, and 'blue-collar' became more of the identity than 'blue-collar catholic'
- Catholics are people and subject to the same trends and forces as everyone else.
The problem with your comment is not quite this though. The problem is you're acting like a specific decision was made by a specific person or group of people, but really there are a lot of trends that have nothing to do with catholics or democrats that come into play.
Also catholics aren't a huge constituency and it's not at all clear to me optimizing for that group really made sense for any individual actors at a federal level
Catholics are a huge constituency- 20% of adults in the US- that used to vote as a monolith for a single party, and no longer do so. There was a Catholic on the democratic presidential ticket for 60 straight years from Smith in 28 (and only had a break in 88). Catholics were called the largest swing vote in the United States in 2000. It’s a pretty big deal that they’ve left the Democratic Party, and yeah I think the party made a choice to let that happen.
This is kind of the point, though. A lot of liberal American Catholics have just left the church, making Catholics a smaller, but more right leaning, demographic group.
There's also the point that the most progressive modern Pope came into power at a time that the church hierarchy had hurt its standing among lay American Catholics with the sex abuse scandal a decade earlier and never fully recovered.
This comment should in many ways, shows the disproportionality of Matt's audience when it comes to gender and how it totally ignores a giant swath of regular, committed Democratic voters care deeply about.
Yeah, if abortion is one of your top issues, you're not going to want a pro-life Democrat who's going to break rank with the party and vote for anti-abortion legislation with the Republicans because of their convictions. That's essentially just electing someone who will do the opposite of what you want them to do just because the other party...is also going to do the opposite of what you want them to do. That's why pro-life candidates get primaried.
Right - a pro-life Democrat in let's say Texas or South Carolina is fine when the Democrat's have a majority. A pro-life Democrat when the Republican's have a majority is one more vote for abortion restrictions for Democratic women in South Carolina and Texas.
Shockingly, pro-choice women don't want to risk that, the same way weirdly, people get why gun owners don't want to risk an anti-gun politician for policy x either.
Forgive me if I'm misreading, but is this meant to fall back on the old and totally incorrect implication that women are largely to the "left" of men on abortion?
Yes, actual pro-life/pro-choice views among the general populace are pretty even by gender. That doesn't really matter when it comes to internal Democratic party politics.
It's a bad take on a number of levels. It also has very little to do with the article. I have never suspected a substack comment was manipulating votes before that but being the top comment right now is extremely strange
Eh, a comment that dunks on the Left for their view on an issue a lot of Matt's disproportionally male audience doesn't care as deeply about as other Democratic voters while using just enough statistics to seem smart is a completely unsurprising comment to rise to the top.
MGP is quite the throwback to a kind of hippie I haven’t seen the likes of since the 70s. But if she can hold an otherwise hostile seat on the basis of some semi-literate sermonizing, I’m all for it.
Sure. But her anti-urban rants and "performative ruralism" in the Ezra Klein Show were nearly unlistenable. Her claims that "elites" don't respect "working people" strike me as clichéd talking points. I don't know anyone who disrespects construction workers or auto mechanics. And so-called "email workers" are workers too, and not necessarily wealthy members of an elite class. I think we can promote rural towns and blue-collar workers along with urban dwellers and office workers, rather than pitting them against each other.
Blue collar people *think* white collar workers disrespect them, or perhaps more honestly, they performatively hold that belief as a cover for class resentment toward people who have easier jobs that pay more (because they are more valuable). Whether or not office workers actually say that is kind of immaterial (though, I think it's worth noting that relatively few white collar workers are in a hurry to show up to country bonfires and knock back beers with electricians... you can hold a derogatory opinion without being dumb enough to express it out loud)
I think both sides are completely right! They don't like the other people, usually for perfectly understandable reasons, and have a strong sense that the other people don't like them, again for perfectly understandable reasons.
The distinction is that educated professionals have much more relative status and we are in a venue where the only culturally blue collar guys are probably richer than the rest of us because they're mid-career and running some kind of owner-operated firm.
I think if I was entering the workforce right now, I'd feel much better about having a blue collar technical skill (plumbing, welding, HVAC, etc.) than a humanities degree, unless it was from an elite university.
I could see this being true in the very narrow context of what young people might want to pursue in 2025, but it's objectively not the case that people who are mid-career in blue collar work are in any way better off than people who are mid-career in white collar work (again, with the exception of a tiny handful of very competent blue collar businessmen who turned their trade into their own business)
That said, I think the near future of the labor market is deeply unsettled, and I would hesitate to provide any concrete advice. We could end up in a world where young engineers are totally screwed, or a world where an engineering degree is the only reliable path remaining to a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle
I have a BS in Botany and Landscape Design and started my own contracting business so I'm kind of straddling both worlds. Some of my coworkers in the trenches were some of my favorite friends but even so beyond occasional family birthday events we didn't really hang out with each other because outside of work we didn't have that much in common. That didn't mean one or the other were looked down upon or not "liked". Socially my friends are mostly college educated or well read and so we have similar intellectual curiosities.
But we're talking about economic class, right? TBH in my experience that teacher is more likely to be blue collar than white collar in culture and socialization as well as income and geography. The teacher and the plumber live in the same part of town, for instance.
But they're both blue collar jobs which often make substantially less than white collar jobs, which is the comp. The thrust of my comment is that white collar people can afford to hang out in blue collar places but not vice versa, which is relevant to the critique that blue collar people don't make an effort to socialize with white collar people.
I once saw someone online as defining this sentiment as living in Nebraska and being obsessed with the idea that a poetry professor at Bennington College in Vermont that you've made up in your head looks down on you. I think it's also funny that the most direct version of an elite insulting everyone else was Vivek Ramaswamy right before he left DOGE.
Status anxiety in this era is very odd. You can see people living lives of seemingly absurd luxury on any social media platform and think, "wow, this is really annoying because I believe I deserve to be just as well off as this random 20-something". Those aren't real people or anyone you actually know, but it's also different from seeing celebrities living lives of unfathomable luxury on TV 20 years ago -- a couple people get lucky by being famous vs. this sense that there is some vast class of overpaid coastal office workers who have so much more status than you for reasons you don't really understand.
I catch myself having this same reaction when I see people blessed enough to somehow afford living in NYC. It makes me angry, like, wow, I didn't deserve a charming urbanist lifestyle in my early-to-mid 20s? Why does this person get everything I've ever wanted? But then I remember, objectively, I am doing fine and am better off than most people, and poor people who live near me don't make social media content showing off their glamorous lives in the trailer park.
There are multiple modes to “somehow afford living in NYC.” There are very high-income folks who have $1.7M apartments, eat out most nights, go clubbing on the weekends, see the top Broadway shows in their initial run, hire a dog walker because who has time, etc. And there are folks who hold down decent jobs, make big compromises on lifestyle to hold down costs, etc. Social media can allow the latter to pretend to be more like the former.
JD Vance pulling off an incredible scheme by writing a book about how much he hated growing up in his hometown and thinks everyone who lives there is only nominally a human being, thereby securing himself status among a group of anti-egalitarian rightist elites, and then projecting an image as a defender of those people because none of them read books and have any idea what's in it. Truly one of the right-wing populists of all time.
If you think about it, JD Vance is basically the Ibram X. Kendi of the right (was the guy who happened to have written a somewhat relevant book at the right time, even if most people talking about it didn't actually read it) and somehow turned that into the Vice Presidency. Kendi meanwhile just got an overfunded think tank he mismanaged.
When commentors here, a place where people with PHDs outnumber those that are just HS graduates, state that most Americans are stupid, who are blue collar voters supposed to believe they are talking about?
I don't think the average white collar person reads Slow Boring or other snobby elitist blogs, though. And in fairness to us, our snobbishness extends far beyond people without college degrees. The average BA holder is kind of a dumbass!
Exactly. The Democratic Party is the party of people who will openly state that everyone with an IQ below 125 is an idiot. It's a party of intellectual elitists too stupid to understand why most of America doesn't like them. Too stupid to understand that nothing online stays in it's own silo. They can see how you talk about them. And it's not nicely. It's a joke to you, but it's not to the guy working at Walmart. He doesn't like you because he knows you don't respect him at all.
"The Democratic Party is the party of people who will openly state that everyone with an IQ below 125 is an idiot."
Yes, this is totally true. The evidence for this is overwhelming. In fact, those Democrats talk about nothing other than what idiots people below an IQ of 125 are. Really, just the scum of the earth, those dumb folks.
To be honest I think you're entirely making this up. It is absolutely true that somewhat heterodox centrist substack blogs are filled with people who have disdain for the average person. This has nothing to do with the Democratic Party. No party official or politician has ever said anything like "everyone with an IQ below 125 is an idiot." I think you're confusing Kamala Harris with, like, Richard Hanania.
I think you missed the entire right wing tech bro culture here. They don’t even try to hide the fact that they think about IQ cutoffs for being a person of worth. At least the Democrats don’t put it so crudely!
Matt was on Politix today saying that basically it was good when you had to have professional writers to make the news because that biased the news to be less atavistic and more cosmopolitan... with YouTube any idiot can get a following, and that is bad.
I think it is funny that Matt can say this as a "moderate in good standing" but if some accountant in suburban Chicago says this it's elitist. I think either way it's probably true.
i think my point here is that "elitism" has been flipped on its head where it's essentially a pejorative used by the true elites (opinion influencers) to insult people who are roughly their class colleagues in the rest of the country who have basically the same opinions but do not temper them through the same political lens.
Yes, if you completely redefine elite to include podcast hosts, but not the people who run every important institution in our country this is a very valid point.
Matt gets called out for elitism every day on social media, so weird choice, but he does demonstrate some self-awareness about his position in society that a lot of people here lack.
"Blue collar people *think* white collar workers disrespect them"
I *know* many of them disrespect at least my job as an HVAC contractor, because I experienced that disrespect when, as a relatively bright (but school-hating) kid from an white collar family, I got to watch the faces and overhear the conversations of my parents' social circle when I decided to go to community college, when I decided to go into the trades, etc.
Most of my coworkers won't have experienced this disrespect in near the same way as they came from a blue collar background and it was almost expected they would do this sort of job. They might have even gotten "relative respect" as this job might have been considered the best available to them. That doesn't mean they don't know the disrespect side is there.
But sure, white collar workers probably don't disrespect me *personally*. Most of them are perfectly nice to me when I go into their house and fix their air conditioner (except when they get mad at me for charging too much - then their real opinion of my work's value comes out).
Blue collar people hold more conservative views and over the last 20 years, progressives have essentially said many of those views are "BAD" and people who hold them are "BAD PEOPLE."
To quote someone from yesterday's afternoon thread who is an avowed progressive:
"I admit somewhere else in the thread and have multiple times - 35% to 40% of the country are terrible people. They're lost. This has always been true and sometimes, the number was much higher."
Let's flip this situation: when pro-lifers call pro-choice people "baby killers" does that make someone pro-choice want to make a nuanced response, or does it make them want to say FU to the pro-lifer? Its similar when progressives tell someone that beliefs they had their entire life is not just wrong, it makes them culturall repugnant.
Matt talks about how politics is often one side winning, doing something that makes them unpopular and then losing. Rinse and repeat for the other side. That seems also to be true culturally. The price of progressive cultural victories over the last 20 years is not undoing all they've done. Its that their victories led to attitudes and actions which made them unpopular, and they are now experiencing the backlash to that.
One half is that the values and needs of white collar and blue collar workers tend to vary widely. It's kind of like the trend I've noticed in the urbanist movement. Urban, walkable neighborhoods are great if you work from home, or report to a single office. It's less valuable for most blue collar work, where having a personal vehicle is far more valuable for a host of reasons.
For the other half, think about her comment about needing to teach a physics student how to use extremely basic mechanical advantage. A lot of blue collar workers will interact with the white collar side of their profession, and find how many points where book knowledge doesn't translate to practical understanding. For my part, I work in a largely blue collar profession which relates to several white collar academic fields. Almost every time I see a study or statement from the academics, I'm skeptical they have any idea what they're talking about, primarily because of how often those ideas and research methods run directly counter to my own day to day experience.
I don't have issues with elected officials saying performative stuff to connect with their constituents. But the discourse on "elites" really has become it's own weird entity disconnected from reality. We're at the point that the characters on The Office would be considered elites because they work in an office, some have college degrees, and sometimes go to New York. The great thing about complaining about elites is that you never really have to define the term. If anything, it's become a way for people to direct the vague anger people feel about living in an imperfect world that used to be directed into anti-Semitism, so at least the anti-elite sentiment is preferrable to that.
Totally agree. Can we not respect the work of "regular people" (which MGP defines as people working with their hands, I guess) without running down the office drones whose work is just as grinding and generally disrespected?
I work a civil service job, and while no one has dirt under their nails, there are modestly paid analysts and administrative employees doing an honest day's work. Are they not "working people" too?
If we kind of discard the "elite" nomenclature the new political settlement among college educated professionals that I observe is people have relatively "conservative" lifestyles in practice (stable marriages, commitment to work, very high priority on kids' education) but there is almost an active push against "preaching what you practice" as a political solution.
Indeed rather than talking up the value of "staying in school" as a notion of discipline and willpower, people would rather talk about racial disparities, socioeconomic problems, or the problems that phones are causing for everyone.
Is the practice of having an in-group expectation that everyone follow the same track with an overall feeling it won't be communicated out a bit weird and possibly "elitist?" I suppose. Is it worse than being openly judgmental? Who's to say?
Exactly 👍 the term should be reserved for actual economic elites like most senators and ceos and high income businessmen. Rick Scott of florida is a prime example of a conservative that caters to the voters by claiming that he is a real anti elite. Bull he needs to be seen as an elite
I don't think it's performative on her part. If she's telling the truth about refusing to give her kids toys, it seems like she's a genuine bonafide weirdo.
I'm hoping someone will follow up on all the dumb comments made by many around the internet about how we're canceling christmas and it's fine... now that trump has decided to un-cancel christmas what's her take? and scott bessent? etc. etc.
This is kind of the problem with talking to politicians on your own side to some extent. If Klein pushes too hard on this in the interview, he risks making her look like a total weirdo or weakening her cultural connection to her constituents. On the other hand, if you were hanging out with a friend and they said the same thing, you would definitely try to find out if your friend had this whole weird side to them that you never knew about.
We're generations passed the era of only rich kids only having toys bought in stores. "I’m a big believer in dirt and string and sticks" as a reason not to ever buy your kid toys sounds like some Dustbowl/Depression nostalgia. It's something the dad in A Christmas Story might say about his own childhood, which was 1980's nostalgia about the 1950's. A kid pushing a rubber wheel down the street with a stick is a movie shorthand that a movie takes place before WWII. This wasn't about limiting kids screentime and telling them to go play outside. Toy commercials became commonplace in the 1980s!
Well, she IS a total weirdo, but the type of weirdo a lot of people here aspire to be like. It would be like if some cowboy was representing a district that was half Dallas suburbs, half in the sticks. Well, there are some actual cowboys there and then a lot of people who think cowboys are cool. Similar to here. There are definitely some accountants here who think they're rugged mountain men who in touch with nature or something. So her shtick is odd, but it makes sense.
frankly I do not have a lot of respect for someone who would make a sober assessment of the facts and then trust Donald Trump to perform an important role. He is impulsive, dishonest, cruel, vindictive, and incurious.
Libs obviously don't respect Trump voters very much, but Trump voters--at least the evangelical ones--sincerely believe libs are corrupted by Satan. That's not a hyperbolic snark, that's a verbatim quote from a conservative acquaintance. This isn't to say that you shouldn't be empathetic and reach across the aisle, but expect to do most of the heavy-lifting.
The other issue is having Democrats like MGP validate right wing talking points like "city dwellers look down on real Americans from the heartland" ultimately has a negative effect on the Democratic brand as a whole while boosting her at the party's expense.
"I don't know anyone who disrespects construction workers or auto mechanics"
Sure, not openly. I'm sure they're positive about those jobs for people who "can't do any better". But how would they feel if their own kid wanted to become a construction worker or auto mechanic? How about you feel about your kids?
My kids are free to do whatever they want for a living. Your job or career are only one piece of who you are. I taught my three boys that and they have taken it to heart. Myself I worked "regular jobs" from gas stations and washing dishes to waiting tables in bartending for almost 15 years. I never felt ashamed, but I also realized it wasn't something that I wanted to do as I was older, because of the physical toll. I spent 12 years piecemealing mailing through college and now work in IT. I've seen both types of job, and there is respect in both. But I don't respect either side denigrating the other. There is honor in honest work of any type.
But talking points they are and she is definitely not wrong . She got elected in trump country I think we democrats need to get her appeal, performative or no.
Her appeal is running down one set of workers to appeal to another set of workers, and if it gets her elected that's fine. But let's call it for what it is: performative and in my opinion, wrong.
"But her anti-urban rants and "performative ruralism""
I don't feel like that's a fair comparison of what actually happened at all. While I certainly don't agree with all of her views, I can see why she's managed to overperform the way she has.
She's definitely someone I would consider giving a vote.
She did say she'd prefer to have trash service but doesn't want to live in a city. That said, her auto shop is in Portland, so it's not like she boycotts cities.
A hippie that doesn’t mind the mills and the tree cutting! I think she has a deep appreciation of nature and the country but also the people who live there 😎
Regarding climate, averting one degree celsius of global warming takes 2200 gigatons of emissions reductions. The U.S. emits roughly 6.23 CO2 equivalent gigatons a year (methane emissions are multiplied by 30, nitrous oxide by almost 300). The U.S. would have to zero out its own emissions for roughly 300 years to avert one degree of warming.
How did climate austerity ever get a political constituency? The only way enough people will ever reduce emissions enough to matter is technological improvement. Arguing “let’s design and build awesome new things” is much easier ask than “live more humbly than your grandparents or expect to swim to work.” And yet the doomers and ascetics captured the commanding heights of the discourse. There’s something about liberals (and certain religious conservatives) that valorizes self abnegation. My hot take is moderate voters don’t like self abnegation and will only do it when facing urgent threats. Climate change is such a slow moving problem— there will be decades to mitigate and adapt— that moderates will never go for self abnegation.
I strongly suspect European moderates who embrace austerity greatly overestimate how effective their sacrifices are.
Sure keeping it to one degree is impossible. Even two is looking increasingly unlikely, but the marginal impact of every degree increases, as things get hotter. Yes, it will involve some living with hotter temperatures. That's baked in, but there is also a balance to strike. We would mightily struggle to adapt to a world with no mitigation, which in the long run would make us poorer. Fortunately, we're doing some things, even if we could do more.
I do think that Matt, you, and the large majority of Americans underweight the impacts of climate change, and that's life. I'm more interested in finding a compromise than setting out a totalizing goal that just backfires and kills all climate action.
What is that limit? I'm not a politician, so I don't have to make the hard choice here. Even a West Virginian senator who had substantial family stakes in coal mining was willing to spend a lot of money and political capital on mitigation, so I believe that there's a coalition there.
This has come up a few times, but I’m surprised that some commenters think Slow Boring underestimates the risk of climate change.
It really is scary! But 2.5 is better than 3.5 and there is unfortunately not much the US can do under the constraints of its own politics and the fact that climate change is a truly global problem. Pointing that out isn’t underrating the fact that yes, a hotter world will lead to many scary and unforeseen consequences.
Grappling seriously with the best ways of confronting the climate change challenge is probably Matt's weakest point. His proposals are paltry and he spends the vast majority of his efforts on trashing the idiot climate groups. They deserve it, but not to the exclusion of dealing seriously with the issue.
What role can the US play in helping poorer, less developed nations pass over building reliance on fossil fuels and go directly to renewables?
How can we both protect American car makers from the apparently superior and cheaper Chinese EVs and yet make sure they don't use that shield as a way to undermine progress on this front?
How would we encourage smart young people to devote their careers to, e.g., building software for a better energy grid and not to building yet more addictive social media?
In general when is it advisable for the government to apply sticks (mandates) and carrots (incentives) in order to facilitate the electrification of the economy? E.g., what would a smarter more flexible EV mandate look like? Should the government mandate that in *new* housing construction, all appliances have to be electric?
And yes, permitting reform a thousand times. Along with upzoning and curtailing stupid historical zone preservation and other braindead NIMBY stuff.*
What would be good for a start is to grapple with the likely, specific, challenges associated with a 2.5 degree change. Rather than the current approach of just saying “well a 3.5 degree change will be worse”.
In my opinion, given the amount of infrastructure and immigration required to deal with a 2.5 degree change humanely, and the issues we currently have with both, it hard to see a happy ending here.
Most of the biggest barriers to addressing climate change are at least partially rooted in the public incorrectly thinking that solutions will require their standard of living to go down. We need people to realize that the solutions involve better stoves (Impulse), better cars, cheaper and better AC + heating, and lower energy prices in the future. Getting the idiot climate groups to
1. Stop prostelyzing a degrowth version of the future and harkening people back to a 1970s "put a sweater on" and "take a lukewarm shower from water stored in black hoses on your roof" mindset
2. Prioritize climate change instead of conservation, NIMBYism, and random goals ("stop late-stage capitalism!")
will make progress on the other barriers much easier.
The only way you do it is by making renewables the low cost leader. Because it's China, India and the other developing countries that are going to move the needle.
That and a big switch to regenerative farming to suck up all that extra carbon.
And to do all that we need an effective partnership between the government and private actors working to make these be winners in the free market. That won't happen by magic.
I mean, David is making a pretty extreme argument for not doing mitigation and riding out the effects of warming. I think that others, including Matt have a more nuanced case to make. That's fine, and I actually like Matt's case around energy abundance. Still, I think that many here, including Matt can underweight the value of mitigation and play up the costs, more than is warranted.
Matt's energy abundance argument leaves me cold. Yes of course we need to produce fossil fuels while we undergo the transition to renewables and electrifying everything. Performatively cutting back on fossil fuels will simply lead to the defeat of all climate efforts. But Matt's take seems to begin and end with "produce more fossil fuels." The rest is like an exercise left to the student; he really doesn't have a good take on how we do the transition thing.
Too much of Matt's writing reads as, "man, these climate groups are dumb and ultimately bad for fighting climate change so I'll spend 90% of my effort on trashing them." It should be 10% -- time to move on and get serious.
Every year the temperatures go up, renewables get cheaper, and the easiest to access fossil fuels are consumed.
You transition by gradually increasing use of renewables over time as the political climate gets friendlier as the economic tradeoffs improve and the actual climate gets hotter.
I don’t think it requires us to tie ourselves in knots with complicated policy ideas now.
But it won't happen by magic. The US produces few of the solar panels that we install here. By policy, we get very few from China anymore, but we do get them from other nations whose exports we've put tariffs on. What should we do about this? The market won't fix this on its own.
Maybe I've got this wrong, but I think his position is that it doesn't make sense to marginally increase the adoption of existing/proven clean technologies in the US (eg EVs) because that doesn't move the needle enough to be worth it.
Instead that money should go toward 1) research funding for new clean tech ideas and 2) help with financing first of a kind builds of riskier clean tech projects through things like the Loan Programs Office (eg geothermal and advanced nuclear).
My initial post would have gotten 5-10 likes before the 2024 election, and will end up with 30-35. This despite several people blocking me.
The SB community is more deferential to public opinion on climate than it used to be, I am no longer a voice in the wilderness on this. The days where I have to challenge Matt for living in an urbanist bubble on this issue are largely behind us.
As one of the people who initially raised this, I want to clarify what I meant a bit more (and then just go back to reading the posts!).
1. SB has offered a persuasive critique of how “the groups” — and by extension many Democrats — have approached climate politics. I think much of that critique is right.
2. It’s also clear that the team takes climate change seriously and sees it as an important problem.
3. That said, I’ve come away with the impression that while SB believes Democrats have misjudged the politics of climate, it also believes they’ve made a misstep in ranking it as a top policy priority, relative to other issues.
4. To use a hypothetical: if a policymaker could press one of two magic buttons — one that reduces U.S. GHG emissions by 20% at no cost, and another that expands public healthcare coverage by 20% at no cost — my sense is SB would recommend pressing the healthcare button.
5. I may be misunderstanding SB’s view, but if that is indeed the position, I would advocate pressing the climate button.
I'm not posting this to be argumentative, it's kind of refreshing to disagree with the editorial line on something!
If I wanted to worry about problems that lie 50+ years in the future, I would be far more worried about nuclear war than climate change. There will almost certainly be a pandemic that kills millions before climate change kills similar numbers. Indeed, most countries still have higher mortality rates in the winter than the summer. Climate ascetics are whack.
Gaming out “the limit” is not really useful. It might be useful if you were world emperor and could control emissions in India and China, but no such office exists.
The critical path is making zero emission power cheap. Plenty of middle class dudes who would embrace R and D to build these technologies and modest subsidies to deploy them are put off by austerity.
I am confident that human beings in 100 years will be able to adapt to whatever climate we give them. I would like to make things easier for them by working on the technologies, and we really have done a great job of making solar cheap. Now do that for nuclear and make it cheap enough you can use it for commercial shipping and possibly big airplanes and the problem would be solved. No one needs to carpool or give up their big ass truck.
As someone who plans to be alive in fifty years, eh maybe. I don't want to spend my golden years ensconced in an air-conditioned bubble. Humanity is unlikely to be extinguished, sure, but a penny of prevention can also beat a pound of cure. People who will be alive in decades are underrepresented, as is the non-human world. These things have value to many, including myself. We have differing priorities, and that's that.
The pawning it off on India and China view is at least ten years out of date. These countries emit more than the US, but they're also investing a ton in emissions reductions, and seem to be doing so at a rapid clip. India certainly has more to lose from a warming planet than we do. Technology investments are critical here, but they are happening and can lessen the prisoner's dilemma problem around solely relying on emissions reductions. I don't think degrowth is the answer here, but many climate skeptical have shifted to thinking that this is the only way to fight climate change. That's just as deeply wrong and misguided as what the people who want degrowth say.
“ I don't want to spend my golden years ensconced in an air-conditioned bubble.”
Assuming arguendo you live fifty years and are still capable of enjoying the outdoors then, nothing the U.S. can do in that time frame will meaningfully affect the climate. If we magically reduced emissions to 0 today, it would be 0.16 degrees cooler in 50 years than if emissions remain constant.
Missing from this entire conversation is what the marginal mitigation trade-offs cost and what their benefits are.
We're surely going to need to adapt. Maybe growing our economy 1% more each year for the next 50 years is the right way to do that. Or maybe growing our economy 0.9% more for the next 10 years and then back to 1% can take off the worst of the bad cases, so the adaptations needed are less.
We can limit atmospheric warming by using to technology to block sunlight and take CO2 out of the atmosphere. But apparently such technology is verboten.
The former carries enormous costs in terms of growing seasons (in addition to moral hazard) and the latter has no proven economic or even technological model although it's conceptually fine. The risks with DAC are more in the vein of "do nothing and assume we'll have this in 50 years," which is not a plan.
Look at the huge increase in red during May. Guess what's happening then, tillage.
Regenerative farming, combines no till planting, with cover cropping, mob grazing and other techniques to stop the soil destruction and build the soil, and it can store a huge amount of CO2
Effects, at least for sulfur, appear to be highly localized. You can see on the temperature change maps exactly where the shipping lanes are, with the big jump after they moved to low sulfur marine fuel.
The term "Manhattan Project for X" is probably overused, but large government investment in DAC and storage would genuinely be a good thing. If Democrats want to spend tens of trillions dollars and all their political capital for generations on a Green New Deal, why not spend less on money and political capital DAC?
As for blocking sunlight, we know what happens when volcanoes pump SO2 into the stratosphere. Such an effort would have to be an international project and not exceed what say, Pinatubo did in 1991. But it works.
Notably missing from the article is estimates of the costs. Either measure, economic or energy.
My rough expectation is that it takes the same amount of energy to pull a unit of CO2 out of the air as it took to put that CO2 in the air. We're going to need 2x our current energy output coming from solar wind nuclear geothermal in order to start reversing course.
'This problem is hard to why bother trying?' is an attitude that would get rightly mocked around here on any other issue around here except climate change
I take the point not to be "the problem is hard so why bother trying," but rather, "the strategy that most people interested in the problem are advocating can not work."
That’s a false dichotomy. To win control of a legislature, you have to win the tipping point seat, which is usually pretty moderate. But once a party has control, policy choice aren’t quite so binary. Even if that tipping point legislator doesn’t support aggressive climate change mitigations, the party can advance pro-climate legislation. they can make deals with the moderate members in exchange for supporting a bill, etc.
In addition, as MY frequently points out, there’s a huge difference between publicly advocating for an issue and advancing it. Compare Bush and Obama’s approaches to education reform. Bush’s policies were somewhat heterodox within the Republican Party (although very carefully and skillfully triangulated). He made it the centerpiece of his campaign and it helped him build a moderate brand. Obama knew that, if he publicly advocated for education reform, it would galvanize the right against his proposals. So he did the work quietly.
My entire comment is about finding that compromise. I'm more willing to push, and think that the possibility space is wider than many here. This is my issue with this whole popularism debate. It's really a meta argument about the need for issue prioritization and how to think about. For people like Matt, his biggest issue seems to be protecting entitlement spending. For me, it's climate. There's disagreement on priorities, and that's fine.
The problem of me becoming an olympic sprinter is hard. The problem of me becoming world chess champion is hard. The problem of me becoming a billionaire or a concert pianist is hard. I have not bothered trying and I’m glad.
No David, but do you take care of your body like at all? You're just repeating a nirvana fallacy. We're not gonna head off climate change completely. People who eat healthy and exercise will still die some day. That doesn't mean that there isn't a balance of mitigation and acceptance.
Agree but there are things that can and therefore should be done to speed up the development and adoption of new technologies and, on current and evolving margins, encourage substituting zero and lower net CO2 emitting technologies. And some of those things are so costly they should be rejected. It is hard intellectual work to know the difference.
And while I wholly agree with the anti-austerity vibe, it IS true that reducing net CO2 emissions is not _costless_ and it is dishonest to sell high-cost policies on false pretenses that they are costless.
But the thing is that it can be costless, and the issue should be framed that way. Expediting permitting and easing the way for natural gas production and exports (and replacing coal and oil) don't have significant costs. Easing the regulatory burden of nuclear energy is costless. Developing new fission and fusion technologies may be costless if you subtract investment from NPV of the products of those investments. Solar panels on my roof save me money (and give me some redundancy in the event of power failure).
Even "austerity" solutions are costless if you realize that the solution is better than what came before: I'm happy to pay more for efficient LED light bulbs that last forever, have adjustable color temperature, and don't get hot. My hybrid car is way cool and also way more powerful than anything available for a similar price 30 years ago.
It’s not cost less in developing countries that relies on fossil fuels to escape energy poverty and don’t have the infrastructure to immediately decarbonize.
Well anything cost effective has by definition a lower cost than the eventual harm it avoids.
But sure the barrier-removing side of climate change is "costless." And I'm sure not opposed to selling low cost measures as costless to the consumer but I am high-cost solutions. And I want environmental advocates and policy makers to know the difference.
Fair enough, though you're straw-manning my point. My point was not that new fission and fusion technologies (for example) are costless because they mitigate climate change, which has a (potentially high) cost. My point was that they by themselves may be costless, because they may ultimately be used to produce energy more cheaply than we produce it now.
"it is dishonest to sell high-cost policies on false pretenses that they are costless."
I'm reminded of the T.S. Eliot quote: "bad poets borrow; good poets steal." Bad politicians try to get good policies passed by being upfront and honest with people about all the hidden costs. Really good politicians get good policies passed by wrapping the truth in a bodyguard of, well, statements that are less than completely true, shall we say.
The serious people working on developing approaches for dealing with climate change are as far from the self-abnegation types as you can find.
Like the lawyers say, can we stipulate to the fact that the climate groups are all idiots and then move on to more productive debate about what we are and should be doing?
I generally agree. Even if the math were different, voluntary or forced reductions in energy use will never, ever work. compare the current climate movement to the depopulation movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The prediction that population growth would destroy the planet was wrong. the prediction that global warming will do the same may prove to be right. But both are rooted in an anti-progress, self-flagellating aesthetic. If the planet wasn’t warming, this ideology would find another rationale for saying humans are bad and should be stopped.
you didn’t say this, but your argument is very close to the “China and India produce so much CO2 that the US’s efforts are pointless” one. Do you view it that way, would you pursue aggressive climate mitigation through technological innovation, something else?
I’ve always aligned with the Tom Friedman view that we should be massively supporting green tech. The bet might not pay off, but it’s a good bet to make. The irony is that the obstacle to doing this is the climate left. By publicly fighting with human progress, they’ve pushed away people who would otherwise have been open to supporting innovation.
PS - while I have no ability to judge the likelihood of technological innovation working, I’ve found the Terraform Industries concept incredibly exciting. The basic logic is that declining cost of solar energy production will soon make climate-neutral production of natural gas economically positive. The barriers are more engineering than science. It has the basic economic structure of the fossil fuel industry (high initial capex investment for low marginal cost production), with possibly lower marginal costs. But it would also enable highly distributed and smaller scale production. If many places could have local, climate neutral fuel production, it’s transformative for the economy and society, not just the planet.
I want China and India to reduce CO2 emissions at low cost, too.
I think it is clear I'm in favor of supporting green tech up to the cost effective point. Support for R&D is something else.
One of the additional advantages of a tax on net CO2 emissions is that implementing it in conjunction with a border adjustment applied to imports from countries that do NOT have a net emissions tax gives everyone an incentive to adopt the least cost policy
You make it sound like 1 degree of warming is a negligible amount to accomplish. A full degree of global temperature rise is huge! That’s nearly 25% of the more pessimistic projections!
And I guess it adds up - the US is about 25% of emissions and 300 years is about the time from the Industrial Revolution to the end of the century where these numbers are usually measured.
I think it's important to distinguish between climate measures that are purely about sacrificing economic well-being for the sake of the climate vs. climate measures which lower costs and improve the economy in the long run. The former category includes stuff like government-funded machines that suck carbon dioxide out of the air, as is generally not worth funding, as the costs far outweigh the benefits.
But, the bulk of the Democrats' actions on climate is the second category, which includes stuff such as solar and wind energy, heat pumps, and electric cars. It doesn't take rocket science to realize that, as cheaper sources of fossil fuels get tapped out, companies must turn to more expensive sources, which means the long-term cost of fossil fuels only goes up and up and up, often exacerbated by oil companies forming mini cartels to drive up prices. To avoid crippling energy bills down the line, we need alternatives, but in the early stages, investment in these alternatives requires government support, as it takes quite a bit of time and investment for these technologies to become profitable.
Then, there's the whole issue pollution's impact on human health, which, ever since the environmental movement pivoted to climate change, everyone seems to have forgotten about. Chronic exposure to large quantities of car and truck exhaust is bad, and can cause cancer, not to mention that fossil-fueled machinery of all types is loud, smelly, and generally obnoxious. I've been to plenty of outdoor gatherings, for example, where the atmosphere was significantly degraded by having to shout to the heard over the food truck's generators (and avoid being downwind of them), and the noise from gas powered leaf blowers, pressure washers, chainsaws, etc. has made it nearly impossible for me to walk my dog in my own neighborhood a good portion of the day (at last Monday-Friday).
On the issue of California's EV mandate, I personally do believe that 2035 is too soon. But, I also believe that states should have the right to regulate pollution within their own borders, and to tell states that they can't is government overreach (and, no, I don't sympathize with the argument that California loses the right to regulate its own air because it is too big). I also believe that, even if it were allowed to go through, California would end up delaying it on its own, so it wouldn't actually take effect in 2035 (although, CA politicians would wait as long as possible before doing so).
In summary, I think most of the Inflation Reduction Act was good policy, even if not so great politics, and that messaging should be less about the climate and more about:
1) Democrats want to give consumers choices about energy, Republicans want everyone to be captive to a handful of fossil fuel companies for all of their energy needs, in order to line their profits.
2) Climate aside, pollution going into people's lungs is bad, and Democrats support taking reasonable-cost measures to reduce it, when possible. Republicans believe that pollution is a public good, and want people to breathe in as much of the stuff as possible (e.g. to bolster the economy by creating health care jobs when people get sick?)
1) Getting the correct message out in a way that's believable to the average swing voter is going to be difficult since Democrats' environment messaging has been all about climate, climate, climate for the past decade. Voters have to be able to trust that Democrats are not out to raise everybody's energy just to slightly nudge climate numbers on a spreadsheet. How to get to this point, I'm not totally sure.
2) In spite of "drill, baby, drill", the policies of Democrats are, in many ways, better for the domestic oil industry than Trump's policies (think, tariffs on steel and other materials, for instance, plus the impact of a stable economy on construction and travel). Even in a future where all cars move off of oil, the oil industry is not disappearing; there is still plastic, airplanes, etc.
3) Different uses of fossil fuels have different levels of what I call "obnoxiousness", which is some combination of noise, local pollution, and how many people are nearby to breathe/smell it. Efforts to move off of fossil fuels in cases where it increases cost should generally focus on situations where the obnoxiousness is large and the cost increase is small, taking into account that obnoxiousness is not necessarily correlated with climate impact in all cases. For example, a leaf blower ranks very highly on the scale of obnoxiousness, in spite not actually using that much fuel. Whereas, a gas burning power plant may have a high climate impact, but a relatively low level of obnoxiousness if very few people live or work near it. In general, this is best done on the regulatory side at the local level (*), but the federal government still has a role to play in encouraging investment to make the alternative technology affordable.
(*) Although, many red states pre-empty this with state law, in order to show the libs who's boss.
One piece that's nebulous on this is "finding nominees." In the old timey cigar filled room days the Oklahoma Democratic Party was very much it's own thing from the New York Democratic Party. Today is that true?
To the extent that you have competitive primaries the highly motivated highly tuned in to politics voters in OK and NY are probably 60%-70% overlapped. A candidate likely has to hit the same highly publicized and charged national policies and issues.
The election committees have a sort of secondary role in the recruitment side, but that also has a bit of a fake, "this is a national Democrat's idea of a Successful Oklahoma Democrat is."
I think primaries are in a bad middle ground. The smoke filled rooms are gone. It's seen as per se illegitimate of parties tilt things away from the non-representative primary voters to thinking about the broader constituencies. Otoh, parties do still lock in endorsements, funding, and recruitment. That stuff has an effect and leads to gerontocracy, conformism (as opposed to the individualism that Matt champions here), and failure to change with the times. America either needs to embrace having smaller, stronger parties, or so away with them altogether.
There's a lot to this. I think the mass proliferation of primaries has been a huge mistake but there's no easy switch to go back, not merely because of public backlash but because the instincts of today's smoke filled rooms is quite likely to be even worse than just leaving it to voters. Anymore the best moderating force is likely to try and increase primary turnout among normies so that its not all 3 sigma politico hardos who pay for newsletters voting in primaries.
The Canadian system seems to be a reasonable compromise. Here’s how it works most of the time:
1. A formalized local association (Electoral District Association, EDA) of a party has regular meetings year round where they discuss various issues, elect officers and vet prospective local candidates.
2. As an election approaches, they shortlist candidates and then settle on one.
3. The whole party apparatus vets the shortlist intensively for any issues.
4. The party leader does have the ability to overrule the EDA in case they select a nutjob (or to parachute in a favored star candidate), but this is infrequent and done with the understanding that it shouldn’t be a regular occurrence.
There’s obvious flaws to this (branch stacking, EDA capture, the decline of social capital etc) but I think it provides a reasonable balance.
Nominee selection is a coordination and name recognition-building problem, so unless somebody is coming into the race with a very strong pre-existing brand, organized interest groups do actually play a substantial significant role in candidate selection. There are limits to how much of it they can do (think about, eg: that time that SBF tried to get an internet Rationalist into an Oregon House seat and generated a ton of backlash), but they do have significant influence.
Local media is also important here. There were local positions in the last election where literally the only information I could find online was if local parties endorsed them and not even their relevant issue positions. And I live in Virginia, which is not exactly ignored by the media.
I think Matt’s mostly incorrect on his second guessing of the declining value of moderation. The media environment and political culture really has changed in a way that makes voters less likely to ticket split than they were in 2006.
To use an example of a politician that Matt talks about all the time, do we think it’s a coincidence that Susan Collins ran ahead McCain by 40 in 2008 & “only” ran ahead of trump by ~15 in 2020? Or that she’s gotten way more conservative over the decades? If anything, I’d say it’s the opposite, she probably had More high profile breaks with trump than she did with bush, and yet her political overperformance has more than halved.
Matt really does his cause of moving towards popularism no favors when he makes totalizing arguments like this. It reminds me of when he said that he would do better than Walz in his southern MN district because of his moderation. That might've just been been light trolling on a podcast, but my eyes nearly rolled out of my head at that.
I think heterodoxy to signal alignment with your constituents on various issues, where they're generally at odds with your national party is a good strategy. I like that way of putting it. To a lot of progressives, moderation means pre-surrrendering on important issues to satisfy, not large numbers of your voters, but special interests. See Kyrsten Sinema, who tbf, Matt criticized a good bit for doing the dumb parts of moderation, but not the savvy bits, like Golden.
I think the synthesis here is that constituents want a candidate who they see as representing them. Aligning yourself with your district over your party is probably a pretty good, generizable strategy that fits in a substack aimed at a national audience. In some cases that will move Democrats to the right, on others to the left. I would like from Matt more writing and ideas as to why this doesn't happen more. Golden not really engaging with the national press is interesting. I'd like to hear more about this than Matt being annoyed with his Twitter beefs.
I think that line about out-performing Walz perfectly captures what irks me so much about popularism.
Where I agree with Matt is that in order to win, the most important thing is to credibly signal that your preferences are close to voters'. (Whether you call this "moderate" is really a matter of taste.)
This is why I agreed with his takes so much in 2020-2022. Democrats taking far-left positions in order to turn out a secret stash of extremists is a credible signal of *precisely the opposite*!
But recently, his position seems to be that it's easy to signal that you have the right preferences -- anyone with the right issue polling can do it. Just
1. Stake out a hodgepodge of popular policy positions on issues.
2. Say some vaguely culturally moderate stuff.
I think what this misses is that credible signaling is hard! Any idiot can do (1) and (2), but if everyone understands that said idiot is doing it only to get votes, no one will believe it.
People like Obama/Clinton actually had to be talented at signaling their preferences. This is like 90% of the battle, and Matt seems to believe that it isn't a thing (hence why he thinks he'd be politically successful in Minnesota).
I’m confused as to how this is disagreeing with the piece. It’s obviously not true that anyone can go anywhere and just say moderate things, but democrats underestimate how much freedom they have to actually do so. It’s a major problem!
I don't disagree with the piece (nor did I say this in my comment). Following the advice in my points (1) and (2) is generally necessary but not sufficient to win.
What I'm disagreeing with is what I perceive to be Matt's general worldview on optimal electoral strategy. You say it's obvious that just saying moderate things isn't necessarily effective, but everything I've read from Matt here (as well as on Twitter, podcasts like the above, etc.) indicates to me that he *does* actually think simply saying moderate things is 90% of the battle.
I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of electoral advice given to Democrats on this Substack is "don't worry about charisma/authenticity/etc., just say moderate stuff." This is why Matt thinks he can win an election in Minnesota!
Is this unfair? Is there somewhere that Matt indicates his worldview is closer to mine -- i.e., that credible signaling is hard, and optimal electoral strategy should concern itself with the "credible" part?
I think the Minnesota thing is a joke (have not listened to the podcast.) And I’m not sure what the best ration of moderation/autheniticy works. But the best performing candidates aren’t Obama level political talents, they just seem to command trust among their constituents because they share their values.
Again, the advice boiled down to "say moderate stuff" (instead of the ridiculous strategy Democrats are now pursuing, which is to say "I would like to be moderate!").
Of course this is marginally better, but the point is that even if these candidates do follow that advice, I don't think anyone will believe that they've become moderate. Nothing about the advice in that article solves the credibility problem.
100% true... people use the "well the voters won't find it authentic" line as an excuse to not bother trying. As Matt said re performative moderation, however, you do have to actually say specifically moderate things and not just generically punch left.
Matt can’t convincingly put on the affectations of a midwestern normie. His squeaky voice alone would be a major turnoff. I, an Indo-Canadian immigrant am more capable of connecting with the suburban voters that he’s targeting (they’re my literal neighbors).
I've been doing a long lit review on this topic, a lot of the debates here are how you define small.
From the average of studies I've collected, the average effect size from a standard deviation of moderation within party (say going from the 50th percentile most liberal dem to the 85th pctl most conservative) is something like 1% (2% vote margin) of vote share for us house/state legislative elcetions, and 1.5% (3% vote margin) of vote share for pres/senate/gov.
This is small in some sense, but also huge in another. If Maggie Hassan had the views of a normie liberal democrat instead of being somewhat moderate Obamacare gets repealed in 2016. If Hillary Clinton had run as an actual moderate in 2016 none of us remember who Donald Trump is. If Dems had nominated Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro in 2024 the world looks very dfifferent right now.
The effect size has declined, but uncertain is not really true, the overwhelmingly body of research still finds a small but real effect, and small is relative. 2% of the vote isn't huge in some sense but it's oftentimes the difference between winning and losing massively important elections.
I read that article until I learned it has to do with state legislative elections. In those elections, funding and candidate effort loom much larger than in federal races.
declining, sure. however, the house is closer than in has been in my life time and the senate is closer than average. a few points in a few elections can be huge.
15% is still a lot though, more than enough to win most races handily. So just because moderation value has gone down in significance doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing.
I agree with that, but Matt specifically said that he thinks that the academic truism that the electoral benefits of moderation have declined is wrong, and I think that’s wishful thinking on his part.
I think this misses some of the larger shifts in Maine's political landscape, as a resident of the Grand State of Maine myself. Note this is all perception and hearsay, the ultimate form of evidence. In 2008, Maine's population was diminishing, and we saw a huge influx of new residents starting in 2020 that have pulled the state politically toward Massachusetts (especially here in the south, the best part). Paul LePage won with a plurality of the vote (thanks, Cutler, enjoy prison) in 2011 and 2019, then lost by 13% in 2022. Meanwhile, the groups who most enjoyed Collins' pork-y style of politics (lumber, ship building, your various pulling-things-out-of-the-ocean industries) continued to reduce in size because they're bad jobs and people want to do better.
I agree with Matt that Trump is much more of a northern Maine sort of guy- his (lies) about not cutting Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security really resonated with a very poor, very old district. It is an area in which tariffs (especially on Canada) have been popular my entire life. If anything, I'd argue that Trump is the one showing the value of moderation on key issues in areas like ME-2.
I don't disagree with your point, but it does seem notable that Collins is literally only the Republican in New England's entire Congressional detachment. She has been for the last 8 years now. The whole region has been shifting towards the Dems, not just Maine
Yes, Susan Collins is mostly winning on her decades of reputation as a moderate plus some points just for name recognition and incumbency. Lots of Maine voters are in the habit of voting for her, and she doesn't do anything that pisses them off enough to change their minds.
I have real doubts that if she were starting out today, even if she could get through a Republican primary, that her moderate Republican views would be enough to overcome the current partisan bias and the actual shift left of Maine voters.
I suspect Jared Golden eyes her seat, and he's playing the moderation game but on the Maine of today's D+7 side of the tracks.
I agree that members of congress should reflect the values and interests if their constituents, not try to change them. But I do think they should try to change constituents’ minds about what concrete policies advance those values and interests.
So I’ve mentioned before that broadly I agree with you. Joe Manchin frustrated me immensely from 2021 to 2024. And yes I do think some his motivations were less than pure or quite frankly odd. But end of the day he was by far the best Democrats were going to do in West Virginia and Democrats thinking some Bernie style alternative would win that state are being delusional.
I bring up Manchin deliberately because there an examples of senators who give your critics I think some genuine ammunition. I’ve brought up the fact that I was represented in the senate for years by Joe Lieberman. There’s no way you can describe his key role in killing the public option in 2009 by saying he was just being realistic about the partisan lean of his state. Maybe you can make a bank shot argument about the importance of the insurance industry and Pharma in CT. But reflecting the overall political views of his median constituent? Yeah no way.
Or to bring it to modern day. John Fetterman has views on Israel that aren’t just to the right of the median Dem in PA but quite frankly as far as I can tell to the right of median pro Israel supporter. Hi statements would make even The Free Press blush (maybe). Is this some great political strategy to represent his state
Ok so based on the Nymag article, Fetterman is a unique case where his medical issues are perhaps causing some serious erratic behavior. What about Sinema? With hindsight, it’s extremely hard to look at her actions and not see that she was a blatant sell out who needlessly voted to the right on a number of issues that can’t explained by AZ being a swing district.
I bring all this up just sort of ask you to have some sympathy for the people who criticize your stance on boosting moderates. And just note that there is some reason to at least have some skepticism of someone who advocates for your stance here. A stance that I will repeat in the big picture I agree with.
I think the biggest problem for the Democratic Party is they don’t want the kind of person who would win a statewide seat in Tennessee or Louisiana in the Democratic Party. I say Tennessee and Louisiana because they will elect the occasional democratic governor, it’s not impossible.
The “Democratic Party” is not a monolithic entity. Indeed, it barely exists as the term “party” is traditionally understood. David Hogg probably doesn’t want Joe Manchin in the party. Chuck Schumer probably does.
"...substitute in "Democratic Primary Voters"...."
Is the idea that DPV's in a statewide Tennessee election don't want the kind of person who can win a statewide seat in TN, or that DPV's in a presidential election -- say in NH or SC -- don't want the kind of person who can win a statewide seat in TN?
If the DPVs of SC are choosing the wrong presidential nominee for Montana, that's one kind of problem. If the DPVs of TN cannot select a gubernatorial candidate who can win TN, then that's a hard problem -- it's either simply a judgment that TN cannot be won by a Democrat, or seems like an indictment of the primary process in general. Which do you intend?
Electing David Hogg to anything sure seems like a signal, and it’s a signal the Democratic Party in sum wants more of whatever it is he stands for, which is mostly not gonna fly in Louisiana.
It’s been a long time since TN had a Democratic governor, and it would be very difficult for the party to win statewide. In 2018, they very wisely nominated a well-liked and very moderate former governor for the Senate seat, and although he overperformed very impressively, he still lost by around ten points. Probably could work in a somewhat less red state, though.
Manchin was not just a VAR Senator from West Virginia. His positions were generally better than most other Senators. Having a work requirement for a child tx credit was not ideal but better than no child tax credit at all. He was just right about permitting reform to allow building a gas pipeline from WV to New England. He should have been celebrated and emulated as how to be a Democratic Senator from Oklahoma or Texas.
There’s a difference between having views perfectly matching one’s constituency and building an authentic brand as being an independent. Fetterman should be the template for many dems. His Israel-Gaza views haven’t sunk him.
I think Matt covers this well. All politicians have to choose their battles. there are probably fights that would cost Fetterman his seat. But they are fewer than people think. He probably has secret views that he holds back on. I think Matt still underrates style, but the formula is clearly a mix of an independent brand with well-chosen moderate/heterodox policies, with positive party relationships and political skill.
The thing about his Israel-Gaza views is that I'm not sure they were prominent in any of his campaigns. Being generally pro-Israel isn't going to sink any candidate, and most people don't care about the issue one way or the other.
Right, most voters don't care much about Israel, but of the swing voters who do a lot are pro-Israel. Also voters who don't care much are often broadly sympathetic to Israel. In a general election it's not a bad thing to be pro-Israel.
PA voter here. Fetterman was elected in a non-Presidential election year, beating Dr. Oz., seen as an un-serious weirdo carpetbagger, who ranted about expensive crudite. Governor was also up for election where Shapiro beat Mastriano, a christain nationalist, Q-anon spouting, literal J6 insurrectionist. Neither election was a very difficult choice for the average normie voter. If McCormick had overcome Oz in the GOP primary, Fetterman probably still would have beat him based on the winds of 2022. But I don't think there is any doubt that he would have lost in 2024 v McCormick, especially considering that PA brand-name Casey couldn't win re-election.
Matt directly addressed this point in a recent piece. His argument was that, because the Democratic brand is so immoderate, the kind of person who runs as a moderate is a bona fide iconoclast who kinda hates Democrats. Whereas if the tent were more expansive, you'd have an easier time recruiting team players who just happen to hold moderate views.
Do his comments on Israel matter to winning the Senate back? Serious question. I suspect voting intentions on Israel are not that important, and to the extent they are important in places like Pennsylvania, his opinions don't hurt him. It would be useful to find something that Fetterman is doing that is actually hurting him. Agree about Sinema, who was in it for the cash and later financial opportunities from day one as a grifter, it appears.
The NY Mag article was pretty damning, not on Israel, but on his mental health. He is barely functioning in his duties, is not making public appearances, and has a horrendous record of even showing up to cast votes. Not sure if all that has crossed into normie consciousness, but strategically, he absolutely needs to resign now to take care of his health. It would also let Shapiro choose a new Senator and give that person time to cook before the 2028 election.
Agree with all this. A lot of people very active in Democratic politics may not like to hear this, but I’m not convinced Israel is a main driver of votes and to the extent it is, being seen as pro-Israel isn’t necessarily a vote loser. His health concerns seem to be serious.
He endorsed John McCain for President and then spoke at the RNC in 2008. He committed himself to opposing the first real viable African American candidate for President, a man who made pains to moderate where necessary not come across as to radical (honestly Obama is possibly one of the better examples Matt could have used in this post), because he was friends with the GOP candidate? I mean honestly, at a certain point you have to ask "what did you expect?"
But even if you take Lieberman's side and say the Democratic party should have been more supportive post 2008 and that explains his bucking the party on stuff like Public Option, it still means that he was moderating his positions not out of some rational analysis regarding getting the vote of the median voter in CT, but out of personal pique.
That's my point. Lieberman was mad and realized Senate Democrats needed him more than he needed them. He won an election as an independent and had all the leverage. Killing policies was his payback.
"Her electoral base includes suburbs of Portland, but it’s a district that Trump wins because numerically, the “suburbs of Portland” part isn’t all that compared to the district’s rural hinterland."
Broken record on this, but the suburbanite part of the district is growing and is a major reason she was able to pull off an upset in 2022. Clark County (the suburby part of the district, although the Northern and Eastern parts are already the boonies) grew from 425k residents in 2010 to 521k in 2023. Clark's voting history is kind of odd. It used to have a sort of Reagan Democrat pattern to it with a lot of unionized loggers, voting for Reagan and then Clinton (and Dukakis interestingly), then grew in to more of a suburban county and voted for Bush twice, and then flipped for Obama and never looked back. The flip from 2012 to 2016 was uhh... zero. Obama won the county by 0.22% and Clinton won it by 0.15%. Since then it's only gotten bluer including in 2012 when Kamala Harris expanded Biden's lead from 5% to 7%.
Anyways, the rest of the district is exactly as Matt describes; Democratic since the New Deal, then a massive flip for Trump and never looking back. Cowlitz County to the North voted for Obama by 4% and then Trump by 14%. But those areas aren't growing as much as Clark. MGP overperformed in those areas but still didn't win Cowlitz County. Without the growth in Clark she would have lost.
And of course her opponent both times was completely insane so that helps.
Right, Matt's wrong about this. Trump won the district 50-47 but MGP won 51.7-47.9, overperforming Harris by 4.7%. Clark County cast just over 2/3 of the votes in the district last year. Harris won Clark County 51.8-44.8, while MGP won 56.2-43.3. If you look at the numbers, she overperformed Harris by more in the rural counties than she did in Clark, although she overperformed everywhere. As you note, Clark becoming bluer has been balanced out by the other counties (which are not unlike Jared Golden's district) becoming redder. MGP lost Cowlitz County by 10 points, but Harris lost by 20, a much better overperformance than she had in Clark. The difference was even more stark in Lewis County, which is slightly larger than Cowlitz (2nd largest in the district after Clark) and much redder. There, Trump beat Harris by nearly 33 points while MGP only lost by 21.5. So yes she would have lost without Clark growing but she also would have lost (at least the first time) without her significant overperformance in the rural areas that she still lost (except for Pacific County, which she won while Harris lost). Back when Brian Baird represented the 3rd it included Olympia so it was structurally bluer. It was redrawn to be a relatively solid red district in 2022. In any event, Clark County is "all that" compared to the rest of the district, but it's still purple and a modest D win there won't offset big D losses elsewhere in the district, which is why MGP losing by less in Lewis and Cowlitz counties mattered a lot. So tl;dr the rural stuff probably helped.
Yeah, MGP overperformed everywhere, but she overperformed more in the rurals. So I won't disparage her rural bonafides. I would prefer it if she didn't pretend like the urban residents of her district didn't exist though lol
Did she? Or is she just personally about the rural stuff because that's her lifestyle preference? She still has a degree from Reed and her husband works in Portland.
Look, I voted for her and I'd do it again, but I listened to the Ezra Klein interview. Her whole shtick is that there's something wrong with us not knowing how to repair our own stuff and that it's wrong to use single use plastics and stuff like that. Ok that's fine if she wants to liver her life that way. I don't. And there are plenty of residents of her district with other concerns that, at least in that interview, she didn't really address. Maybe she's done some other interviews where she talks a bit more about the issues addressing Clark County, but I didn't hear them there.
A former staffer to Congressman Tim Walz explained to me the real issue . . . those who compete to win elections in deep blue districts have had too few reps in a purple environment to grasp how a quirky electorate votes. Someone like Jon Ossoff knows that if he supports Israel in Georgia he will gain a few Evangelicals while not losing many voters on the left. Maura Healey may do well running Massachusetts but she is out over her skis when she attempts to score points on the national level because of inexperience. This particular staffer was bemoaning the Walz' shift from savvy purple district Congressman to traditional progressive Governor and VP candidate.
That kind of undercuts his argument doesn't it? Walz had the reps but they didn't help him.
But I think generally the staffer was correct. Even for politically savvy people it is hard to imagine an environment that is just very far outside the norm of your own.
What would the explanation be for Walz's cratering support in rural Minnesota before he was named the VP nom? The DFL under his leadership has basically lost all their traditional strength in rural Minnesota under his leadership as Governor.
This is the period of 2019-2025, right? This is the same time that the Republican Party lost their traditional strength in Harris county and Orange County as well. This is plausibly all just the nationalization of politics and the realignment in the Trump/Sanders era.
“[C]andidates should run if and only if they believe they can effectively represent the views of their future constituents while remaining consistent with their personal values.”
This is profoundly true. As a young man, I wanted to be a judge, both for the prestige and because I have a vocation for peacefully settling disputes. For a few years, I’ve realized my views of criminal justice are just too different for me to get elected without being a two faced scoundrel.
I would still like to be an arbitrator, maybe that will happen some day.
Didn’t Jimmy Carter run as a segregationist in a ploy to gain votes only to face turn in his inaugural speech and declare that the era of segregation in Georgia was over?
Likewise LBJ, who owed his political career and Senate leadership to hardcore segregationists like Richard Russell - only to deliver the Voting Rights Act.
But I'm pretty sure today's media environment makes this all but impossible. The nationalization of all politics combined with relentless, adversarial scrutiny guarantees that no candidate will be able to get away with that in high-salience issues ever again.
(Unless deepfakes obliterate our basic trust in media.)
Something crystalized for me ruminating about this post and the push back you get from Progressives that I think sort of squares the circle of this debate; conflating "independence" with "moderation".
It's interesting you brought up Bernie. Because one thing that's become clear in the almost 10 years since his primary challenge is that a decent chunk of his support was NOT from voters who had particularly left wing views. And I think it's clear to me now that a huge part of that non-progressive support was that he was not actually a Democrat. It's cliche for politicians to talk about how they're not part of the "Beltway elite", but it's cliche for a reason. And Bernie (at least circa 2015) was definitely NOT part of the "Beltway elite" despite being a Congressman and Senator. Yes he held some heterodox positions on guns and immigration in 2015, but that was really part of a general "outsider" persona he represented. By 2020, even though he still technically was an Independent/Socialist and still is today, he was firmly in the the left wing faction of the Democratic party. In other words, the success of his primary run in 2015/16 had the perverse effect of diminishing his "outsider" cred. Yes, there is his moving left on cultural issues, but again it's part in parcel of a bigger story.
I think we forget before Obama, it had been decades since a sitting senator had become President. There's a reason for that. And even with Obama, it probably helped, not hurt that he had been a Senator for such a short time.
And getting back to the perennial "how did Trump win" debate that I participated in recently. I think we (and I) underestimate that a small but significant number of voters don't see Trump really has a Republican but really that ultimate "outsider". Now those of us who write on this substack know the GOP is basically Trump at this point. But there are a lot of voters who don't see it that way. And also helps explain why Trumpism is clearly less popular than Trump. And to give a very recent example. As insincere as Trump's announcement regarding prescription drugs was, honestly, is there any prominent politician who would have even uttered a coherent version of this statement in the last, I dunno, 30 years?!
So I think it's important to recognize there is absolutely a sweet spot Venn Diagram of "moderation" and "independent thinking". But it's not a 100% overlap and it's not actually clear to me the "moderate" side is more important than the demonstration you're "independent".
As Matt pointed out, a lot of Bernie's non-progressive crossover support came from his more moderate views on guns and immigration, support which he lost once he took the mainstream liberal stances on those issues.
On Trump and Trumpism, one major difference between Trump and the average MAGA Republican is that the MAGA Republican often still espouses traditional Republican views on entitlements and abortion, whereas Trump has often taken more moderate positions on those issues.
I also think it's worth expanding Bernie's views on immigration were really rooted in the labor movement; specifically creating unfair competition for low-wage workers. I think he was the only Dem that broke with the 2007 immigration reform bill for example.
IIRC Sherrod Brown was also very critical along similar grounds. Like Bernie, he broke on a couple key issues (Immigration and Climate/Energy) in Brown's case, but that heterodoxy had largely subsided by the Trump era. Too bad, I think Brown with his 2008 views on Immigration and Energy may have won last year!
Brown is super interesting. I think he nailed it in his Op-ed: "Then Trump came along and switched the script, breaking with the GOP’s long-standing free-trade stance to denounce NAFTA and other agreements, promote more protectionist policies and make promises such as ending taxes on overtime. “Republicans are now, for the first time, actually trying to talk to workers,” Brown said.
That’s part of it for sure, especially in the midwest but reading Sherrod Brown since the election it’s all “NAFTA neoliberalism blah blah blah” the fact that he doesn’t even mention energy issues or immigration in his long new republic piece is telling. I think a lot of people on the left like Sherrod and Bernie desperately want the explanation for dem losses among working class voters to be exclusively explained by trade deals and not being economically left enough but I don’t think the evidence is there. I think probably 10 Obama-Trump voters decisively swung due to immigration for every one on trade
But what is the evidence for this? Again, we're narrowing to the 2015/16 primary (by definition Bernie voters) I know immigration was obviously a big topic in that campaign. But a voter super motivated by immigration in a right wing direction was almost certainly going to end up a Trump voter.
Look I'm willing to look at survey results that provides evidence that Bernie's support in 2015 had a lot to do with his stances on gun control and immigration. But I remember that primary and that was definitely NOT a huge part of that primary campaign.
I should also caveat that a decent amount of his support was clearly just an anti-Hillary protest vote. I know there is debate about just how many Bernie voters ended up voting for Trump, but it's more than zero and I think it's very likely this cohort of voters had a particular anti-Hilary animus motivating their vote.
But again, that I think strengthens my point. A lot of Hilary's electoral weakness was the result of her being seen as quite possibly the ultimate Washington insider.
What about non-policy reasons why someone may be popular? E.g. if someone runs an effective office that is capable of looking after constituents’ problems, or someone that puts in the effort to turn up to local schools etc?
(This is just a thought from Australia where candidates typically don’t stray from the party line, but where popular local members still can run well ahead of national trends)
My default assumption - although this is very much an assumption rather than a belief formed by exposure to robust evidence - is that there are too many voters per district (and certainly per Senate seat) for this to work, in general. You can’t be the personal friend of hundreds of thousands to millions of people.
My hometown had a Democratic Congressman with this type of reputation as a member of the community beyond just being a politician. It also helped he was a combat veteran. When he died, the local Democratic Party did get a more blue collar-oriented union guy, but he's never been able to build a real relationship with his constituents in the same way. Part of this is the nationalization of politics, but part of this is that not everyone has that right type of folksy charisma even if they win elections.
Helping 1,000s or 10,000s of people directly may not be possible. But - a guy good reputation an be made through word of mouth as someone who was able to help constituent a out of a particularly unfair situation, and someone who at least has the capability and empathy to hear out constituent concerns.
Or to put it differently - you can loose a lot of support by being incompetent and/or an arsehole.
Maybe I feel this way bc I’m a data person but my galaxy brain wonders messaging robot strategy might work the best if the candidate
1. Leans into likes of David Shor or Lakshya Jain and emphasizes on the messages they pick and deprioritizes messages that poll bad
2. Is a good actor
I feel like issues with messaging robot strategy come down to
1. They are likely to pick an idea pushed by the loudest voice rather than what the data suggests
2. vast majority of ppl are not good at sounding sincere even if the idea is not actually what they believe in - the exceptions I can think of are Obama and Buttigieg
The latter point is why I think charisma has become weirdly underrated on the Democratic side. In part because we keep nominating political heirs for President.
But a charismatic candidate can make people believe that they "feel their pain," or that "yes we can," or whatever. I don't disagree with Matt on the position taking at all, and charisma may read different in Brooklyn than rural Nebraska. However, once we get to statewide and national office being able to deliver a message and talk to different groups while being perceived as sincere and compelling is pretty important.
Charisma is hard - whatever helps you with some audiences usually turns off others. People like Trump, George W Bush, and John Edwards had real charisma with some audiences, but their performances always turn me off. Buttigieg has perfect charisma for me, but I think other people dislike that.
Politicians certainly dissemble about their beliefs on individual issues. Is there any successful politician who has claimed to be conservative but is really liberal?
Mostly due to your endorsement of his video, I saw Nathan Sage in person in Iowa and can attest that he fits the “elect people who’ll support Medicaid and be progressive enough on taxes that they aren’t trying to blow up the deficit” test. He’s definitely more on the Bernie side but can’t help but keep emphasizing that he joined the military because he was too poor to go to college otherwise, and now feels like he doesn’t have enough money to send his daughter to college. And when asked about higher Ed in the from someone who was mad about republican proposals to get rid of parent plus loan loopholes, he gave the intuitive response that everyone should be able to go to college, republicans hate college “because they want you to be dumb,” but that tuition should be lowered and loans are bad instead of saying that higher ed funding should be increased.
This is exactly the piece I needed from Matt. I am fully onboard with moderating and running more moderate and culturally conservative candidates in purple districts. What I needed was an acknowledgement that sometimes these candidates have dumb views. That sometimes the median voter that we all worships is WRONG about stuff.
This piece actually sounds like it's geared towards persuading progressives. At the end of the day, progressives are the ones those of us on the center-left need to persuade. It's just not going to be effective to say everybody hates your radical views so stop being a stupid @$$hole. Most people are going to double down on their views or tune you out. Yet I see this kind of article from The Liberal Patriot and WelcomePAC all the time (for the record I think WelcomePAC really does do great work). It's lost on to me why so many on the center-left communicate with progressives this way. This is exactly the behavior we abhor progressives using against Trump voters.
You absolutely nailed why I can't stand The Liberal Patriot even when I agree with Ruy's prescriptions. It's the "Shut the fuck up, lefty, don't you know everyone hates you" attitude that's deeply offputting.
Exactly! I agree with most of their output too but I think their rhetoric is counterproductive. It’s centrists writing to other centrists about why progressives need to change their rhetoric and beliefs. They are right about a ton of stuff but the tone is counterproductive.
Yeah, it can very easily be construed as creating a permission structure to vote for Republicans, because progressives are just as dangerous, which I'm going to assume is not actually his goal.
Probably the kind of person who subscribes to newsletters like this one and spends more time getting angry with progressives than conservatives because of their media diet.
What do you think is more likely to keep someone like this in the Democratic tent: a media environment where it's taboo to criticize progressives as a Democrat or one where it's okay to be a Democrat and also not like progressives?
Sam I absolutely agree with you about appealing to the middle. That is why I have repeatedly endorsed Dems moderating positions. I am in complete agreement with you on that.
My contention is that TLP doesn’t have a good approach to arguing for the changes Dems need to make to persuade the middle to vote for them. The behavior and rhetoric that needs to change is from progressives. My argument is condescending to and shaming progressives is unlike to alter their approach.
I don’t think the TLP’s readership is disaffected centrists. If so TLP would essentially be saying “progressives are the worst. Vote for the party that most of them call home.” I think TLP’s readership is annoyed center lefties like us that want to get their daily dose of progressive bashing.
That's because progressives aren't their audience. There are lots of non-progressive people out there who may or may not be Democrats, but generally don't like Trump or the GOP and want to learn why Democrats lost and ideas for what Democrats can do to win going forward.
At a point, there's diminishing returns to trying to persuade progressives. Either they already largely agree with people like Matt and Ezra Klein and will vote Democrat no matter what and don't need to be persuaded or they'll just continue to be obstinate and unsatisfied no matter what the rest of us do.
Sam, I get your perspective but the rhetoric and behavior that needs to change is that of progressives. Maybe my perspective is wrong (wouldn’t be the first or last time) but I always read TLP pieces as trying to persuade Dems to act differently or adopt more moderate positions. My argument is that you catch more flies with honey. I think a lot of the center-left has become so negatively polarized against progressives and identity politics that they have stopped trying to engage progressives into more viable positions and rhetoric. To be clear, many progressives really did go off the deep end but they just won’t be persuaded with condescension.
Most TLP pieces can be summed up as “Hey reader I agree with. We are totally right and here are the same arguments I made in 5 other articles proving we are right. The people that are wrong are hopeless and cringe. Americans hate them.”
Most people can’t be shamed or embarrassed out of toxic views. The hard boards must be bored slowly.
People in the middle also need to be persuaded. There are lots of politically homeless in the middle, some who used to Democrats and others who used to be lifelong Republicans and many who are just getting into politics and dislike both parties.
If appealing to progressives is the only focus and the middle gets ignored, then we're perpetuating the same problem that got us into this mess in the first place!
It really is mystifying that the Dems were like “let’s just do our damndest to make blue collar Catholics locked in GOP voters.” Just a stunning own goal that’s totally incomprehensible from the outside.
If the unstated thing that Dems allegedly did to cause this was moving left on abortion, polling shows that more than 60% of white Catholics support legal abortion.
If the unstated thing is something else, can you please state what it is?
The Democratic Party hasn't merely "moved left" on abortion. It has become extremely hostile (ie litmus tests) to politicians exhibiting even a modicum of nuance on the issue. The corollary to the "60%" figure you is that 40% of a big group of voters are pretty strongly cross-pressured into voting GOP even when they agree with Democrats on other issues. The "safe, legal, rare" formulation seemed fine at the time, and provided a safe harbor for a lot of voters.
I think there was also a mistake of assuming that abortion would make more people single issue voters. That makes sense on literally a single issue ballot referendum, but it’s not a deciding factor for people on every race
There is a large group of people who were basically pro-choice but made uncomfortable by abortion. I understand why people would like this group to have a more understanding attitude about the reasons why people get abortions. But *politicians* should actively court their votes. It isn't the job of the Democratic Party to change these ambivalent voters minds, it is the job of the Democratic Party to protect abortion rights.
The good ol' "safe, legal, and rare" was a home run here.
I think also with declining birth rates and greater use of birth control and relative affluence (can afford to fly my daughter to Colorado or Canada for an abortion) - a lot of people made the calculus that "sure the GOP might end abortion rights, but I can live with that..."
It was also a high salience issue for the type of people who will vote in midterm elections, but not necessarily for swing voters who only come out in presidential election years.
My family could- with a lot of exceptions let me be clear, a lot of them just don’t vote anymore- swallow the Democratic Party taking the opposite side of the church on essentially every social issue. They could not take that AND NAFTA.
Sure. Plenty of voters prioritize economic nationalism, no doubt. But plenty prioritize healthcare, or taxes on the rich, or Social Security. Last time I looked, blue collar service workers outnumbered blue collar factory workers by about four to one.
I mostly agree that it’s the rise in democratic antipathy to social conservatism that’s the main culprit here, but over time Catholics had less economic reason to vote for them (white collar because they might benefit more from lower taxes, blue collar because national dems kind of lost their touch with blue collar workers)
My sense is that the upwardly mobile Catholics who were all secretly pro choice and maybe super double secretly voting for Republicans in the 70s-90s have split, with a lot of them "coming home" to the Democrats but others remaining Trump skeptical Republicans but Republicans nonetheless. The rest have drifted right along with the rest of the working class. By the numbers this has been a really bad trade off.
Bob Casey remained a Democrat in good standing so this is clearly overstated. And Casey's own personal positions didn't help him outrun Harris in any event. The number of people who agree with Dems on all the other issues besides abortion, and then vote for the GOP as a result, has to be near zero.
Bob Casey voted to scrap the filibuster in order to pass an abortion bill more liberal than the pre-dobbs status quo. He remained in good standing by becoming dramatically more liberal on abortion!
Sure, but there probably are a lot of voters who agree with Dems on some issues, and agree with the GOP on some issues, and abortion tips them one way or the other. And the fact that some ancient Democrats can get the wrong position grandfathered in doesn't mean it's viable for anyone younger.
I agree with you and MattY that allowing a little more latitude on abortion would help a bit, but abortion is still undoubtedly one of Dems' strongest issues and it's weird that OP focused on it when there's a billion other areas where we've been much weaker
Yeah, the fact that this is the most liked comment here today is weird. "How dare the Democrats move left on an issue this constituency moved left on" is a weird explanation for the Democrats losing a constituency.
Abortion is a good issue when the debate is banning it vs. not banning it. That puts the "safe, legal, and rare" people on the D side. Keeping it as a good issue is dependent on not losing the "safe, legal, and rare" people.
I find the framing of “The Democratic Party” in this kind of situation pretends parties has far more control and influence over members and voters than they do. America became more polarized over abortion. Of course party actors followed suit
“…polling shows that more than 60% of white Catholics support legal abortion”
Without restrictions? I doubt that.
Evangelical Protestants surpassed Catholics as the main anti-abortion constituency decades ago.
Probably in church attendance, too, and other aspects of religious practice.
"In all or most cases" https://www.prri.org/research/abortion-views-in-all-50-states-findings-from-prris-2023-american-values-atlas/
Which really puts the whole parent comment narrative here into question. The Catholic Church put a lot more emphasis on things like good works, charity, and environmental concerns in the past decade and de-emphasized conservative approaches on abortion and LGBT issues compared to the past. A majority of American Catholics are at least nominally pro-choice. The last Catholic president was Biden.
The fact that the narrative here doesn't use the word "unions" is revealing.
That poll contains a lot more nuance: Clear majorities of Catholics, for example, oppose access to abortion pills through the mail. Catholics are a good deal more flexible in opposing certain or all aspects of abortion: About a third wouldn’t vote for candidates with whom they don’t align on abortion law. “In all or most cases” obscures more than it reveals.
Right, that 60% definitely includes a lot of "safe, legal, and rare" people.
Pew does say that but they also include Catholics who dissociate from the church. Frankly not sure how that splits out- regular attenders for other denominations look different in some hard to predict ways
I guess if you include ethnically Catholic, but non-believing, sure.
I don't think that much was lost by making room for candidates who call themselves "personally pro-life" or who want abortion to be "safe, legal and rare." Or even genuinely pro-life candidates from red states, or cross-pressured voters who are pro-life but nevertheless anti-Trump (it seems like Pope Leo was one of these voters).
The opposite approach is to demand lockstep agreement on everything (as when Planned Parenthood announced its support for defunding the police: https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/blog/defunding-the-police-what-it-means-and-why-planned-parenthood-supports-it.)
Speaking as a white Catholic Democrat, there's a difference between respecting the idea that abortion needs to be safe and legal in at least some circumstances (which I personally do) and wanting to put it at the emotional center of your politics (which I honestly don't love). Wasn't there a mobile abortion/vasectomy van at the DNC last year? I would still vote for Kamala over Trump no matter what, but that kind of stunt around a serious and nuanced moral issue was a huge turn off for me.
Pope Leo’s brother is on line one.
EDIT to provide link: https://nypost.com/2025/05/12/us-news/pope-leo-xivs-oldest-brother-stands-by-sharing-foul-mouthed-anti-pelosi-post/
I mean, a white guy from the south side/suburbs of Chicago (my ancestry! go Sox!) is going to have particularly retrograde views on race given the last hundred years of neighborhood turnover.
I didn’t see anything about race in that Post piece. What’d I miss?
It's because the delusion amongst progressives about "The Emerging Democratic Majority" is very strong, even after two major losses. Even after the loss of Blue Collar Whites, Hispanic Males, and Conservative Blacks to the GOP.
If Trumpism is a cult, then today's Progressivism has become a religion, complete with its faith in the universe eventually awarding Democrats for their courage in standing up for the right thing. This faith is in contrast to the reality that we live in a democracy where whomever is most appealing to voters wins.
It's time to dump the religion and get back to reality.
Can you please explain this comment. I come from a long line of blue collar Catholics and I don't get it.
Democratic Party has taken the opposite side of the Catholic Church on most (all?) questions of personal conduct in the United States- and has demanded fealty to pretty extreme positions to be a viable candidate, and starting with Clinton began to promote free market policies that while in aggregate were good things, where there are losers they tend to be blue collar workers (and the workers certainly thought of themselves as the likely losers).
the catholic church doesn't have very popular political views honestly, the anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, pro-asylum party would get like 30% of the vote haha.
This is a dumb take
You are welcome to explain the cratering vote share of Catholics voting for Dems from 90% to majority republicans today, then.
Well it's not hard.
- Abortion became more salient for a bunch of reasons, most of them not having to do with specific decisions made by democrats (whoever they are).
- Religion matters less and less to americans as an identity, and 'blue-collar' became more of the identity than 'blue-collar catholic'
- Catholics are people and subject to the same trends and forces as everyone else.
The problem with your comment is not quite this though. The problem is you're acting like a specific decision was made by a specific person or group of people, but really there are a lot of trends that have nothing to do with catholics or democrats that come into play.
Also catholics aren't a huge constituency and it's not at all clear to me optimizing for that group really made sense for any individual actors at a federal level
Catholics are a huge constituency- 20% of adults in the US- that used to vote as a monolith for a single party, and no longer do so. There was a Catholic on the democratic presidential ticket for 60 straight years from Smith in 28 (and only had a break in 88). Catholics were called the largest swing vote in the United States in 2000. It’s a pretty big deal that they’ve left the Democratic Party, and yeah I think the party made a choice to let that happen.
There's also the fact that union members started voting against unions.
This take kind of ignores who was the Pope for the last decade and which way he leaned politically.
Hard not to overindex on Douthat and First things weirdos but it doesn’t seem like he got along with American Catholics
This is kind of the point, though. A lot of liberal American Catholics have just left the church, making Catholics a smaller, but more right leaning, demographic group.
There's also the point that the most progressive modern Pope came into power at a time that the church hierarchy had hurt its standing among lay American Catholics with the sex abuse scandal a decade earlier and never fully recovered.
The most recent number I saw was that Pope Francis's approval rating among American Catholic Republicans was 53%.
This isn't new. Working class Catholics began moving out of the New Deal coalition in the late 1960s before anyone heard the word "woke".
This comment should in many ways, shows the disproportionality of Matt's audience when it comes to gender and how it totally ignores a giant swath of regular, committed Democratic voters care deeply about.
Yeah, if abortion is one of your top issues, you're not going to want a pro-life Democrat who's going to break rank with the party and vote for anti-abortion legislation with the Republicans because of their convictions. That's essentially just electing someone who will do the opposite of what you want them to do just because the other party...is also going to do the opposite of what you want them to do. That's why pro-life candidates get primaried.
Right - a pro-life Democrat in let's say Texas or South Carolina is fine when the Democrat's have a majority. A pro-life Democrat when the Republican's have a majority is one more vote for abortion restrictions for Democratic women in South Carolina and Texas.
Shockingly, pro-choice women don't want to risk that, the same way weirdly, people get why gun owners don't want to risk an anti-gun politician for policy x either.
Forgive me if I'm misreading, but is this meant to fall back on the old and totally incorrect implication that women are largely to the "left" of men on abortion?
Among Democratic voters, it's not untrue.
Yes, actual pro-life/pro-choice views among the general populace are pretty even by gender. That doesn't really matter when it comes to internal Democratic party politics.
this is silly. the us is extremely accommodating when it comes to making religious people comfortable, granting exemptions based on religion etc.
It's a bad take on a number of levels. It also has very little to do with the article. I have never suspected a substack comment was manipulating votes before that but being the top comment right now is extremely strange
Eh, a comment that dunks on the Left for their view on an issue a lot of Matt's disproportionally male audience doesn't care as deeply about as other Democratic voters while using just enough statistics to seem smart is a completely unsurprising comment to rise to the top.
MGP is quite the throwback to a kind of hippie I haven’t seen the likes of since the 70s. But if she can hold an otherwise hostile seat on the basis of some semi-literate sermonizing, I’m all for it.
Sure. But her anti-urban rants and "performative ruralism" in the Ezra Klein Show were nearly unlistenable. Her claims that "elites" don't respect "working people" strike me as clichéd talking points. I don't know anyone who disrespects construction workers or auto mechanics. And so-called "email workers" are workers too, and not necessarily wealthy members of an elite class. I think we can promote rural towns and blue-collar workers along with urban dwellers and office workers, rather than pitting them against each other.
Blue collar people *think* white collar workers disrespect them, or perhaps more honestly, they performatively hold that belief as a cover for class resentment toward people who have easier jobs that pay more (because they are more valuable). Whether or not office workers actually say that is kind of immaterial (though, I think it's worth noting that relatively few white collar workers are in a hurry to show up to country bonfires and knock back beers with electricians... you can hold a derogatory opinion without being dumb enough to express it out loud)
Are blue collar workers knocking down office doors demanding to go to happy hours with white collar workers? That goes both ways.
I think both sides are completely right! They don't like the other people, usually for perfectly understandable reasons, and have a strong sense that the other people don't like them, again for perfectly understandable reasons.
The distinction is that educated professionals have much more relative status and we are in a venue where the only culturally blue collar guys are probably richer than the rest of us because they're mid-career and running some kind of owner-operated firm.
I think if I was entering the workforce right now, I'd feel much better about having a blue collar technical skill (plumbing, welding, HVAC, etc.) than a humanities degree, unless it was from an elite university.
I could see this being true in the very narrow context of what young people might want to pursue in 2025, but it's objectively not the case that people who are mid-career in blue collar work are in any way better off than people who are mid-career in white collar work (again, with the exception of a tiny handful of very competent blue collar businessmen who turned their trade into their own business)
That said, I think the near future of the labor market is deeply unsettled, and I would hesitate to provide any concrete advice. We could end up in a world where young engineers are totally screwed, or a world where an engineering degree is the only reliable path remaining to a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle
I have a BS in Botany and Landscape Design and started my own contracting business so I'm kind of straddling both worlds. Some of my coworkers in the trenches were some of my favorite friends but even so beyond occasional family birthday events we didn't really hang out with each other because outside of work we didn't have that much in common. That didn't mean one or the other were looked down upon or not "liked". Socially my friends are mostly college educated or well read and so we have similar intellectual curiosities.
Can a grocery store cashier or plumber afford to go to the same places?
A plumber can easily make more than a high school teacher.
But we're talking about economic class, right? TBH in my experience that teacher is more likely to be blue collar than white collar in culture and socialization as well as income and geography. The teacher and the plumber live in the same part of town, for instance.
I can drink beer at my house quite affordably.
The plumber has to have more training to do the job and the job is much more technology-proof. I don't think they're really comparable.
But they're both blue collar jobs which often make substantially less than white collar jobs, which is the comp. The thrust of my comment is that white collar people can afford to hang out in blue collar places but not vice versa, which is relevant to the critique that blue collar people don't make an effort to socialize with white collar people.
I once saw someone online as defining this sentiment as living in Nebraska and being obsessed with the idea that a poetry professor at Bennington College in Vermont that you've made up in your head looks down on you. I think it's also funny that the most direct version of an elite insulting everyone else was Vivek Ramaswamy right before he left DOGE.
Status anxiety in this era is very odd. You can see people living lives of seemingly absurd luxury on any social media platform and think, "wow, this is really annoying because I believe I deserve to be just as well off as this random 20-something". Those aren't real people or anyone you actually know, but it's also different from seeing celebrities living lives of unfathomable luxury on TV 20 years ago -- a couple people get lucky by being famous vs. this sense that there is some vast class of overpaid coastal office workers who have so much more status than you for reasons you don't really understand.
I catch myself having this same reaction when I see people blessed enough to somehow afford living in NYC. It makes me angry, like, wow, I didn't deserve a charming urbanist lifestyle in my early-to-mid 20s? Why does this person get everything I've ever wanted? But then I remember, objectively, I am doing fine and am better off than most people, and poor people who live near me don't make social media content showing off their glamorous lives in the trailer park.
There are multiple modes to “somehow afford living in NYC.” There are very high-income folks who have $1.7M apartments, eat out most nights, go clubbing on the weekends, see the top Broadway shows in their initial run, hire a dog walker because who has time, etc. And there are folks who hold down decent jobs, make big compromises on lifestyle to hold down costs, etc. Social media can allow the latter to pretend to be more like the former.
My sister's first apartment in New York had only one sink, so it was a bathroom sink with a garbage disposal in it.
This
hillbilly elegy is an incredibly elitist book.
JD Vance pulling off an incredible scheme by writing a book about how much he hated growing up in his hometown and thinks everyone who lives there is only nominally a human being, thereby securing himself status among a group of anti-egalitarian rightist elites, and then projecting an image as a defender of those people because none of them read books and have any idea what's in it. Truly one of the right-wing populists of all time.
If you think about it, JD Vance is basically the Ibram X. Kendi of the right (was the guy who happened to have written a somewhat relevant book at the right time, even if most people talking about it didn't actually read it) and somehow turned that into the Vice Presidency. Kendi meanwhile just got an overfunded think tank he mismanaged.
Peter Thiel, defender of the common man.
Written by a hillbilly cosplayer
A thing about MGP is that she has an econ degree from Reed College, which is a relatively elitist place by Northwest standards.
When commentors here, a place where people with PHDs outnumber those that are just HS graduates, state that most Americans are stupid, who are blue collar voters supposed to believe they are talking about?
The most insulting rhetoric used here tends to be directed at online leftists.
I don't think the average white collar person reads Slow Boring or other snobby elitist blogs, though. And in fairness to us, our snobbishness extends far beyond people without college degrees. The average BA holder is kind of a dumbass!
Exactly. The Democratic Party is the party of people who will openly state that everyone with an IQ below 125 is an idiot. It's a party of intellectual elitists too stupid to understand why most of America doesn't like them. Too stupid to understand that nothing online stays in it's own silo. They can see how you talk about them. And it's not nicely. It's a joke to you, but it's not to the guy working at Walmart. He doesn't like you because he knows you don't respect him at all.
When I'm online, it's rarely liberals that I see referencing IQ. That tends to be a tech right thing.
"The Democratic Party is the party of people who will openly state that everyone with an IQ below 125 is an idiot."
Yes, this is totally true. The evidence for this is overwhelming. In fact, those Democrats talk about nothing other than what idiots people below an IQ of 125 are. Really, just the scum of the earth, those dumb folks.
To be honest I think you're entirely making this up. It is absolutely true that somewhat heterodox centrist substack blogs are filled with people who have disdain for the average person. This has nothing to do with the Democratic Party. No party official or politician has ever said anything like "everyone with an IQ below 125 is an idiot." I think you're confusing Kamala Harris with, like, Richard Hanania.
I think you missed the entire right wing tech bro culture here. They don’t even try to hide the fact that they think about IQ cutoffs for being a person of worth. At least the Democrats don’t put it so crudely!
Matt was on Politix today saying that basically it was good when you had to have professional writers to make the news because that biased the news to be less atavistic and more cosmopolitan... with YouTube any idiot can get a following, and that is bad.
I think it is funny that Matt can say this as a "moderate in good standing" but if some accountant in suburban Chicago says this it's elitist. I think either way it's probably true.
i think my point here is that "elitism" has been flipped on its head where it's essentially a pejorative used by the true elites (opinion influencers) to insult people who are roughly their class colleagues in the rest of the country who have basically the same opinions but do not temper them through the same political lens.
Yes, if you completely redefine elite to include podcast hosts, but not the people who run every important institution in our country this is a very valid point.
Matt gets called out for elitism every day on social media, so weird choice, but he does demonstrate some self-awareness about his position in society that a lot of people here lack.
I like bonfires and beer. Count me in
"Blue collar people *think* white collar workers disrespect them"
I *know* many of them disrespect at least my job as an HVAC contractor, because I experienced that disrespect when, as a relatively bright (but school-hating) kid from an white collar family, I got to watch the faces and overhear the conversations of my parents' social circle when I decided to go to community college, when I decided to go into the trades, etc.
Most of my coworkers won't have experienced this disrespect in near the same way as they came from a blue collar background and it was almost expected they would do this sort of job. They might have even gotten "relative respect" as this job might have been considered the best available to them. That doesn't mean they don't know the disrespect side is there.
But sure, white collar workers probably don't disrespect me *personally*. Most of them are perfectly nice to me when I go into their house and fix their air conditioner (except when they get mad at me for charging too much - then their real opinion of my work's value comes out).
Blue collar people hold more conservative views and over the last 20 years, progressives have essentially said many of those views are "BAD" and people who hold them are "BAD PEOPLE."
To quote someone from yesterday's afternoon thread who is an avowed progressive:
"I admit somewhere else in the thread and have multiple times - 35% to 40% of the country are terrible people. They're lost. This has always been true and sometimes, the number was much higher."
Let's flip this situation: when pro-lifers call pro-choice people "baby killers" does that make someone pro-choice want to make a nuanced response, or does it make them want to say FU to the pro-lifer? Its similar when progressives tell someone that beliefs they had their entire life is not just wrong, it makes them culturall repugnant.
Matt talks about how politics is often one side winning, doing something that makes them unpopular and then losing. Rinse and repeat for the other side. That seems also to be true culturally. The price of progressive cultural victories over the last 20 years is not undoing all they've done. Its that their victories led to attitudes and actions which made them unpopular, and they are now experiencing the backlash to that.
One half is that the values and needs of white collar and blue collar workers tend to vary widely. It's kind of like the trend I've noticed in the urbanist movement. Urban, walkable neighborhoods are great if you work from home, or report to a single office. It's less valuable for most blue collar work, where having a personal vehicle is far more valuable for a host of reasons.
For the other half, think about her comment about needing to teach a physics student how to use extremely basic mechanical advantage. A lot of blue collar workers will interact with the white collar side of their profession, and find how many points where book knowledge doesn't translate to practical understanding. For my part, I work in a largely blue collar profession which relates to several white collar academic fields. Almost every time I see a study or statement from the academics, I'm skeptical they have any idea what they're talking about, primarily because of how often those ideas and research methods run directly counter to my own day to day experience.
I don't have issues with elected officials saying performative stuff to connect with their constituents. But the discourse on "elites" really has become it's own weird entity disconnected from reality. We're at the point that the characters on The Office would be considered elites because they work in an office, some have college degrees, and sometimes go to New York. The great thing about complaining about elites is that you never really have to define the term. If anything, it's become a way for people to direct the vague anger people feel about living in an imperfect world that used to be directed into anti-Semitism, so at least the anti-elite sentiment is preferrable to that.
Totally agree. Can we not respect the work of "regular people" (which MGP defines as people working with their hands, I guess) without running down the office drones whose work is just as grinding and generally disrespected?
I work a civil service job, and while no one has dirt under their nails, there are modestly paid analysts and administrative employees doing an honest day's work. Are they not "working people" too?
If we kind of discard the "elite" nomenclature the new political settlement among college educated professionals that I observe is people have relatively "conservative" lifestyles in practice (stable marriages, commitment to work, very high priority on kids' education) but there is almost an active push against "preaching what you practice" as a political solution.
Indeed rather than talking up the value of "staying in school" as a notion of discipline and willpower, people would rather talk about racial disparities, socioeconomic problems, or the problems that phones are causing for everyone.
Is the practice of having an in-group expectation that everyone follow the same track with an overall feeling it won't be communicated out a bit weird and possibly "elitist?" I suppose. Is it worse than being openly judgmental? Who's to say?
Exactly 👍 the term should be reserved for actual economic elites like most senators and ceos and high income businessmen. Rick Scott of florida is a prime example of a conservative that caters to the voters by claiming that he is a real anti elite. Bull he needs to be seen as an elite
I don't think it's performative on her part. If she's telling the truth about refusing to give her kids toys, it seems like she's a genuine bonafide weirdo.
I'm hoping someone will follow up on all the dumb comments made by many around the internet about how we're canceling christmas and it's fine... now that trump has decided to un-cancel christmas what's her take? and scott bessent? etc. etc.
Probably something to the effect of "we make Christmas Trees here" :D
This is kind of the problem with talking to politicians on your own side to some extent. If Klein pushes too hard on this in the interview, he risks making her look like a total weirdo or weakening her cultural connection to her constituents. On the other hand, if you were hanging out with a friend and they said the same thing, you would definitely try to find out if your friend had this whole weird side to them that you never knew about.
We're generations passed the era of only rich kids only having toys bought in stores. "I’m a big believer in dirt and string and sticks" as a reason not to ever buy your kid toys sounds like some Dustbowl/Depression nostalgia. It's something the dad in A Christmas Story might say about his own childhood, which was 1980's nostalgia about the 1950's. A kid pushing a rubber wheel down the street with a stick is a movie shorthand that a movie takes place before WWII. This wasn't about limiting kids screentime and telling them to go play outside. Toy commercials became commonplace in the 1980s!
Well, she IS a total weirdo, but the type of weirdo a lot of people here aspire to be like. It would be like if some cowboy was representing a district that was half Dallas suburbs, half in the sticks. Well, there are some actual cowboys there and then a lot of people who think cowboys are cool. Similar to here. There are definitely some accountants here who think they're rugged mountain men who in touch with nature or something. So her shtick is odd, but it makes sense.
If you haven’t heard libs disrespect Trump voters, then I guess you haven been talking to actual libs
frankly I do not have a lot of respect for someone who would make a sober assessment of the facts and then trust Donald Trump to perform an important role. He is impulsive, dishonest, cruel, vindictive, and incurious.
I know you don’t. That’s my point. You should try harder to empathize with people who think differently than you.
If you had a job to offer would you give it to Donald trump? What are the reasons this could possibly be a good idea?
You’re missing the point
Libs obviously don't respect Trump voters very much, but Trump voters--at least the evangelical ones--sincerely believe libs are corrupted by Satan. That's not a hyperbolic snark, that's a verbatim quote from a conservative acquaintance. This isn't to say that you shouldn't be empathetic and reach across the aisle, but expect to do most of the heavy-lifting.
Correct. In fact, that’s the point, to cultivate more empathy! We are all humans after all.
In other words, that shit doesn't scale
The other issue is having Democrats like MGP validate right wing talking points like "city dwellers look down on real Americans from the heartland" ultimately has a negative effect on the Democratic brand as a whole while boosting her at the party's expense.
"I don't know anyone who disrespects construction workers or auto mechanics"
Sure, not openly. I'm sure they're positive about those jobs for people who "can't do any better". But how would they feel if their own kid wanted to become a construction worker or auto mechanic? How about you feel about your kids?
My kids are free to do whatever they want for a living. Your job or career are only one piece of who you are. I taught my three boys that and they have taken it to heart. Myself I worked "regular jobs" from gas stations and washing dishes to waiting tables in bartending for almost 15 years. I never felt ashamed, but I also realized it wasn't something that I wanted to do as I was older, because of the physical toll. I spent 12 years piecemealing mailing through college and now work in IT. I've seen both types of job, and there is respect in both. But I don't respect either side denigrating the other. There is honor in honest work of any type.
But talking points they are and she is definitely not wrong . She got elected in trump country I think we democrats need to get her appeal, performative or no.
Her appeal is running down one set of workers to appeal to another set of workers, and if it gets her elected that's fine. But let's call it for what it is: performative and in my opinion, wrong.
I don't think her ruralism is all that performative -- she really does seem to practice what she preaches.
"But her anti-urban rants and "performative ruralism""
I don't feel like that's a fair comparison of what actually happened at all. While I certainly don't agree with all of her views, I can see why she's managed to overperform the way she has.
She's definitely someone I would consider giving a vote.
She did say she'd prefer to have trash service but doesn't want to live in a city. That said, her auto shop is in Portland, so it's not like she boycotts cities.
I’ll bet her constituents, who are very different than you (or me!) gobble that stuff up though.
A hippie that doesn’t mind the mills and the tree cutting! I think she has a deep appreciation of nature and the country but also the people who live there 😎
I don’t think she’s an illiterate, I think she’s someone who enjoyed The Overstory and Ministry for the Future even more than Ezra Klein did.
Regarding climate, averting one degree celsius of global warming takes 2200 gigatons of emissions reductions. The U.S. emits roughly 6.23 CO2 equivalent gigatons a year (methane emissions are multiplied by 30, nitrous oxide by almost 300). The U.S. would have to zero out its own emissions for roughly 300 years to avert one degree of warming.
How did climate austerity ever get a political constituency? The only way enough people will ever reduce emissions enough to matter is technological improvement. Arguing “let’s design and build awesome new things” is much easier ask than “live more humbly than your grandparents or expect to swim to work.” And yet the doomers and ascetics captured the commanding heights of the discourse. There’s something about liberals (and certain religious conservatives) that valorizes self abnegation. My hot take is moderate voters don’t like self abnegation and will only do it when facing urgent threats. Climate change is such a slow moving problem— there will be decades to mitigate and adapt— that moderates will never go for self abnegation.
I strongly suspect European moderates who embrace austerity greatly overestimate how effective their sacrifices are.
Sure keeping it to one degree is impossible. Even two is looking increasingly unlikely, but the marginal impact of every degree increases, as things get hotter. Yes, it will involve some living with hotter temperatures. That's baked in, but there is also a balance to strike. We would mightily struggle to adapt to a world with no mitigation, which in the long run would make us poorer. Fortunately, we're doing some things, even if we could do more.
I do think that Matt, you, and the large majority of Americans underweight the impacts of climate change, and that's life. I'm more interested in finding a compromise than setting out a totalizing goal that just backfires and kills all climate action.
What is that limit? I'm not a politician, so I don't have to make the hard choice here. Even a West Virginian senator who had substantial family stakes in coal mining was willing to spend a lot of money and political capital on mitigation, so I believe that there's a coalition there.
This has come up a few times, but I’m surprised that some commenters think Slow Boring underestimates the risk of climate change.
It really is scary! But 2.5 is better than 3.5 and there is unfortunately not much the US can do under the constraints of its own politics and the fact that climate change is a truly global problem. Pointing that out isn’t underrating the fact that yes, a hotter world will lead to many scary and unforeseen consequences.
Grappling seriously with the best ways of confronting the climate change challenge is probably Matt's weakest point. His proposals are paltry and he spends the vast majority of his efforts on trashing the idiot climate groups. They deserve it, but not to the exclusion of dealing seriously with the issue.
What proposals would you like to see covered more on this publication?
How do we move people from ICEVs to EVs? What is the role of government in seeing that happen?
What are the best strategies for electrifying industry? Can government policy help?
How can smart centrists and center-left people keep progress going on moving toward renewables when under MAGA and Republicans there is likely to be considerable backsliding? (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/us/politics/renewable-energy-republicans.html)
What role can the US play in helping poorer, less developed nations pass over building reliance on fossil fuels and go directly to renewables?
How can we both protect American car makers from the apparently superior and cheaper Chinese EVs and yet make sure they don't use that shield as a way to undermine progress on this front?
How would we encourage smart young people to devote their careers to, e.g., building software for a better energy grid and not to building yet more addictive social media?
In general when is it advisable for the government to apply sticks (mandates) and carrots (incentives) in order to facilitate the electrification of the economy? E.g., what would a smarter more flexible EV mandate look like? Should the government mandate that in *new* housing construction, all appliances have to be electric?
And yes, permitting reform a thousand times. Along with upzoning and curtailing stupid historical zone preservation and other braindead NIMBY stuff.*
* E.g., this article I just saw: the University of Southern California just blocked a new apartment building that would block some sign they had for the Coliseum by buying the property and telling the developer to take a hike. (https://la.urbanize.city/post/usc-buys-site-3851-s-grand-avenue-neutralize-development-blocking-coliseum-sign?utm_source=Urbanize+Newsletter&utm_campaign=700a4e56e5-news-la-daily-2025-05-14&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f2c8779a36-700a4e56e5-199781352
What would be good for a start is to grapple with the likely, specific, challenges associated with a 2.5 degree change. Rather than the current approach of just saying “well a 3.5 degree change will be worse”.
In my opinion, given the amount of infrastructure and immigration required to deal with a 2.5 degree change humanely, and the issues we currently have with both, it hard to see a happy ending here.
Most of the biggest barriers to addressing climate change are at least partially rooted in the public incorrectly thinking that solutions will require their standard of living to go down. We need people to realize that the solutions involve better stoves (Impulse), better cars, cheaper and better AC + heating, and lower energy prices in the future. Getting the idiot climate groups to
1. Stop prostelyzing a degrowth version of the future and harkening people back to a 1970s "put a sweater on" and "take a lukewarm shower from water stored in black hoses on your roof" mindset
2. Prioritize climate change instead of conservation, NIMBYism, and random goals ("stop late-stage capitalism!")
will make progress on the other barriers much easier.
The only way you do it is by making renewables the low cost leader. Because it's China, India and the other developing countries that are going to move the needle.
That and a big switch to regenerative farming to suck up all that extra carbon.
And to do all that we need an effective partnership between the government and private actors working to make these be winners in the free market. That won't happen by magic.
I'm fine with that. I'm fine with investing money into R&D research to make renewables cheaper.
I'm also a big proponent of regulatory reform to make it easier to get projects approved, especially the transmission lines so badly needed.
What I'm not fine with is trying to achieve this via fiat by doing dumb shit like trying to ban gas cars, or gas stoves, or by making appliances suck
I mean, David is making a pretty extreme argument for not doing mitigation and riding out the effects of warming. I think that others, including Matt have a more nuanced case to make. That's fine, and I actually like Matt's case around energy abundance. Still, I think that many here, including Matt can underweight the value of mitigation and play up the costs, more than is warranted.
Matt's energy abundance argument leaves me cold. Yes of course we need to produce fossil fuels while we undergo the transition to renewables and electrifying everything. Performatively cutting back on fossil fuels will simply lead to the defeat of all climate efforts. But Matt's take seems to begin and end with "produce more fossil fuels." The rest is like an exercise left to the student; he really doesn't have a good take on how we do the transition thing.
Too much of Matt's writing reads as, "man, these climate groups are dumb and ultimately bad for fighting climate change so I'll spend 90% of my effort on trashing them." It should be 10% -- time to move on and get serious.
Every year the temperatures go up, renewables get cheaper, and the easiest to access fossil fuels are consumed.
You transition by gradually increasing use of renewables over time as the political climate gets friendlier as the economic tradeoffs improve and the actual climate gets hotter.
I don’t think it requires us to tie ourselves in knots with complicated policy ideas now.
But it won't happen by magic. The US produces few of the solar panels that we install here. By policy, we get very few from China anymore, but we do get them from other nations whose exports we've put tariffs on. What should we do about this? The market won't fix this on its own.
Maybe I've got this wrong, but I think his position is that it doesn't make sense to marginally increase the adoption of existing/proven clean technologies in the US (eg EVs) because that doesn't move the needle enough to be worth it.
Instead that money should go toward 1) research funding for new clean tech ideas and 2) help with financing first of a kind builds of riskier clean tech projects through things like the Loan Programs Office (eg geothermal and advanced nuclear).
Are you characterizing Matt's position? That's not how I read it.
My initial post would have gotten 5-10 likes before the 2024 election, and will end up with 30-35. This despite several people blocking me.
The SB community is more deferential to public opinion on climate than it used to be, I am no longer a voice in the wilderness on this. The days where I have to challenge Matt for living in an urbanist bubble on this issue are largely behind us.
As one of the people who initially raised this, I want to clarify what I meant a bit more (and then just go back to reading the posts!).
1. SB has offered a persuasive critique of how “the groups” — and by extension many Democrats — have approached climate politics. I think much of that critique is right.
2. It’s also clear that the team takes climate change seriously and sees it as an important problem.
3. That said, I’ve come away with the impression that while SB believes Democrats have misjudged the politics of climate, it also believes they’ve made a misstep in ranking it as a top policy priority, relative to other issues.
4. To use a hypothetical: if a policymaker could press one of two magic buttons — one that reduces U.S. GHG emissions by 20% at no cost, and another that expands public healthcare coverage by 20% at no cost — my sense is SB would recommend pressing the healthcare button.
5. I may be misunderstanding SB’s view, but if that is indeed the position, I would advocate pressing the climate button.
I'm not posting this to be argumentative, it's kind of refreshing to disagree with the editorial line on something!
If I wanted to worry about problems that lie 50+ years in the future, I would be far more worried about nuclear war than climate change. There will almost certainly be a pandemic that kills millions before climate change kills similar numbers. Indeed, most countries still have higher mortality rates in the winter than the summer. Climate ascetics are whack.
Gaming out “the limit” is not really useful. It might be useful if you were world emperor and could control emissions in India and China, but no such office exists.
The critical path is making zero emission power cheap. Plenty of middle class dudes who would embrace R and D to build these technologies and modest subsidies to deploy them are put off by austerity.
I am confident that human beings in 100 years will be able to adapt to whatever climate we give them. I would like to make things easier for them by working on the technologies, and we really have done a great job of making solar cheap. Now do that for nuclear and make it cheap enough you can use it for commercial shipping and possibly big airplanes and the problem would be solved. No one needs to carpool or give up their big ass truck.
As someone who plans to be alive in fifty years, eh maybe. I don't want to spend my golden years ensconced in an air-conditioned bubble. Humanity is unlikely to be extinguished, sure, but a penny of prevention can also beat a pound of cure. People who will be alive in decades are underrepresented, as is the non-human world. These things have value to many, including myself. We have differing priorities, and that's that.
The pawning it off on India and China view is at least ten years out of date. These countries emit more than the US, but they're also investing a ton in emissions reductions, and seem to be doing so at a rapid clip. India certainly has more to lose from a warming planet than we do. Technology investments are critical here, but they are happening and can lessen the prisoner's dilemma problem around solely relying on emissions reductions. I don't think degrowth is the answer here, but many climate skeptical have shifted to thinking that this is the only way to fight climate change. That's just as deeply wrong and misguided as what the people who want degrowth say.
“ I don't want to spend my golden years ensconced in an air-conditioned bubble.”
Assuming arguendo you live fifty years and are still capable of enjoying the outdoors then, nothing the U.S. can do in that time frame will meaningfully affect the climate. If we magically reduced emissions to 0 today, it would be 0.16 degrees cooler in 50 years than if emissions remain constant.
Missing from this entire conversation is what the marginal mitigation trade-offs cost and what their benefits are.
We're surely going to need to adapt. Maybe growing our economy 1% more each year for the next 50 years is the right way to do that. Or maybe growing our economy 0.9% more for the next 10 years and then back to 1% can take off the worst of the bad cases, so the adaptations needed are less.
If you look at Britain or Germany, they’ve given up more than 0.1 point of growth and have already done it longer than 10 years.
2 or 2 and a half degrees of warming won't do this, sure. 3, 4, or 5 might.
That’s not on the table in your life time.
"The critical path is making zero emission power cheap. "
THIS
We can limit atmospheric warming by using to technology to block sunlight and take CO2 out of the atmosphere. But apparently such technology is verboten.
The former carries enormous costs in terms of growing seasons (in addition to moral hazard) and the latter has no proven economic or even technological model although it's conceptually fine. The risks with DAC are more in the vein of "do nothing and assume we'll have this in 50 years," which is not a plan.
"and the latter has no proven economic or even technological model although it's conceptually fine."
This is not true. Regenerative farming can do it.
Regenerative farming practices stop the destruction of top soil, and start building it up. This stores a huge amount of carbon in the soil.
Look at this NASA timelapse of CO2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1SgmFa0r04
Look at the huge increase in red during May. Guess what's happening then, tillage.
Regenerative farming, combines no till planting, with cover cropping, mob grazing and other techniques to stop the soil destruction and build the soil, and it can store a huge amount of CO2
Growing seasons? Curious what you mean here.
I would assume that if we start micromanaging solar radiation and temperature we could improve agricultural productivity, rather than the reverse.
And I don’t get the moral hazard if we’re talking specifically about American climate change policy.
“If you fix the symptoms of the problem with this hack, that reduces the incentive to fix the underlying cause.”
“Sure, but since the underlying cause is emissions from China/India, we can’t fix the underlying cause.”
AIUI all the irradiance approaches to reduce insolation are macromanaging rather than micromanaging.
Effects, at least for sulfur, appear to be highly localized. You can see on the temperature change maps exactly where the shipping lanes are, with the big jump after they moved to low sulfur marine fuel.
The term "Manhattan Project for X" is probably overused, but large government investment in DAC and storage would genuinely be a good thing. If Democrats want to spend tens of trillions dollars and all their political capital for generations on a Green New Deal, why not spend less on money and political capital DAC?
As for blocking sunlight, we know what happens when volcanoes pump SO2 into the stratosphere. Such an effort would have to be an international project and not exceed what say, Pinatubo did in 1991. But it works.
There are a bunch of CO2 capture programs happening in full view of governments, so that isn't verboten.
It may be easier to pull it from the ocean.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ocean-carbon-removal
Notably missing from the article is estimates of the costs. Either measure, economic or energy.
My rough expectation is that it takes the same amount of energy to pull a unit of CO2 out of the air as it took to put that CO2 in the air. We're going to need 2x our current energy output coming from solar wind nuclear geothermal in order to start reversing course.
Unless you can get China, India and the other developing countries to drastically cut their emissions as well, it really doesn't matter.
And the only way to do that is through technological innovation and literally making green the lowest cost solution.
That should entirely be the focus.
'This problem is hard to why bother trying?' is an attitude that would get rightly mocked around here on any other issue around here except climate change
I take the point not to be "the problem is hard so why bother trying," but rather, "the strategy that most people interested in the problem are advocating can not work."
That’s a false dichotomy. To win control of a legislature, you have to win the tipping point seat, which is usually pretty moderate. But once a party has control, policy choice aren’t quite so binary. Even if that tipping point legislator doesn’t support aggressive climate change mitigations, the party can advance pro-climate legislation. they can make deals with the moderate members in exchange for supporting a bill, etc.
In addition, as MY frequently points out, there’s a huge difference between publicly advocating for an issue and advancing it. Compare Bush and Obama’s approaches to education reform. Bush’s policies were somewhat heterodox within the Republican Party (although very carefully and skillfully triangulated). He made it the centerpiece of his campaign and it helped him build a moderate brand. Obama knew that, if he publicly advocated for education reform, it would galvanize the right against his proposals. So he did the work quietly.
My entire comment is about finding that compromise. I'm more willing to push, and think that the possibility space is wider than many here. This is my issue with this whole popularism debate. It's really a meta argument about the need for issue prioritization and how to think about. For people like Matt, his biggest issue seems to be protecting entitlement spending. For me, it's climate. There's disagreement on priorities, and that's fine.
The problem of me becoming an olympic sprinter is hard. The problem of me becoming world chess champion is hard. The problem of me becoming a billionaire or a concert pianist is hard. I have not bothered trying and I’m glad.
No David, but do you take care of your body like at all? You're just repeating a nirvana fallacy. We're not gonna head off climate change completely. People who eat healthy and exercise will still die some day. That doesn't mean that there isn't a balance of mitigation and acceptance.
Agree but there are things that can and therefore should be done to speed up the development and adoption of new technologies and, on current and evolving margins, encourage substituting zero and lower net CO2 emitting technologies. And some of those things are so costly they should be rejected. It is hard intellectual work to know the difference.
And while I wholly agree with the anti-austerity vibe, it IS true that reducing net CO2 emissions is not _costless_ and it is dishonest to sell high-cost policies on false pretenses that they are costless.
But the thing is that it can be costless, and the issue should be framed that way. Expediting permitting and easing the way for natural gas production and exports (and replacing coal and oil) don't have significant costs. Easing the regulatory burden of nuclear energy is costless. Developing new fission and fusion technologies may be costless if you subtract investment from NPV of the products of those investments. Solar panels on my roof save me money (and give me some redundancy in the event of power failure).
Even "austerity" solutions are costless if you realize that the solution is better than what came before: I'm happy to pay more for efficient LED light bulbs that last forever, have adjustable color temperature, and don't get hot. My hybrid car is way cool and also way more powerful than anything available for a similar price 30 years ago.
It’s not cost less in developing countries that relies on fossil fuels to escape energy poverty and don’t have the infrastructure to immediately decarbonize.
Well anything cost effective has by definition a lower cost than the eventual harm it avoids.
But sure the barrier-removing side of climate change is "costless." And I'm sure not opposed to selling low cost measures as costless to the consumer but I am high-cost solutions. And I want environmental advocates and policy makers to know the difference.
Fair enough, though you're straw-manning my point. My point was not that new fission and fusion technologies (for example) are costless because they mitigate climate change, which has a (potentially high) cost. My point was that they by themselves may be costless, because they may ultimately be used to produce energy more cheaply than we produce it now.
I like LED's better to. What I don't like is government outlawing incandescent bulbs.
That goes double for all the efficiency mandates that make appliances not work, showers suck, bans gas stoves or gas cars.
I will fully oppose those measures, and vote against any candidates that support them.
"it is dishonest to sell high-cost policies on false pretenses that they are costless."
I'm reminded of the T.S. Eliot quote: "bad poets borrow; good poets steal." Bad politicians try to get good policies passed by being upfront and honest with people about all the hidden costs. Really good politicians get good policies passed by wrapping the truth in a bodyguard of, well, statements that are less than completely true, shall we say.
The serious people working on developing approaches for dealing with climate change are as far from the self-abnegation types as you can find.
Like the lawyers say, can we stipulate to the fact that the climate groups are all idiots and then move on to more productive debate about what we are and should be doing?
I generally agree. Even if the math were different, voluntary or forced reductions in energy use will never, ever work. compare the current climate movement to the depopulation movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The prediction that population growth would destroy the planet was wrong. the prediction that global warming will do the same may prove to be right. But both are rooted in an anti-progress, self-flagellating aesthetic. If the planet wasn’t warming, this ideology would find another rationale for saying humans are bad and should be stopped.
you didn’t say this, but your argument is very close to the “China and India produce so much CO2 that the US’s efforts are pointless” one. Do you view it that way, would you pursue aggressive climate mitigation through technological innovation, something else?
I’ve always aligned with the Tom Friedman view that we should be massively supporting green tech. The bet might not pay off, but it’s a good bet to make. The irony is that the obstacle to doing this is the climate left. By publicly fighting with human progress, they’ve pushed away people who would otherwise have been open to supporting innovation.
PS - while I have no ability to judge the likelihood of technological innovation working, I’ve found the Terraform Industries concept incredibly exciting. The basic logic is that declining cost of solar energy production will soon make climate-neutral production of natural gas economically positive. The barriers are more engineering than science. It has the basic economic structure of the fossil fuel industry (high initial capex investment for low marginal cost production), with possibly lower marginal costs. But it would also enable highly distributed and smaller scale production. If many places could have local, climate neutral fuel production, it’s transformative for the economy and society, not just the planet.
I want China and India to reduce CO2 emissions at low cost, too.
I think it is clear I'm in favor of supporting green tech up to the cost effective point. Support for R&D is something else.
One of the additional advantages of a tax on net CO2 emissions is that implementing it in conjunction with a border adjustment applied to imports from countries that do NOT have a net emissions tax gives everyone an incentive to adopt the least cost policy
You make it sound like 1 degree of warming is a negligible amount to accomplish. A full degree of global temperature rise is huge! That’s nearly 25% of the more pessimistic projections!
And I guess it adds up - the US is about 25% of emissions and 300 years is about the time from the Industrial Revolution to the end of the century where these numbers are usually measured.
I think it's important to distinguish between climate measures that are purely about sacrificing economic well-being for the sake of the climate vs. climate measures which lower costs and improve the economy in the long run. The former category includes stuff like government-funded machines that suck carbon dioxide out of the air, as is generally not worth funding, as the costs far outweigh the benefits.
But, the bulk of the Democrats' actions on climate is the second category, which includes stuff such as solar and wind energy, heat pumps, and electric cars. It doesn't take rocket science to realize that, as cheaper sources of fossil fuels get tapped out, companies must turn to more expensive sources, which means the long-term cost of fossil fuels only goes up and up and up, often exacerbated by oil companies forming mini cartels to drive up prices. To avoid crippling energy bills down the line, we need alternatives, but in the early stages, investment in these alternatives requires government support, as it takes quite a bit of time and investment for these technologies to become profitable.
Then, there's the whole issue pollution's impact on human health, which, ever since the environmental movement pivoted to climate change, everyone seems to have forgotten about. Chronic exposure to large quantities of car and truck exhaust is bad, and can cause cancer, not to mention that fossil-fueled machinery of all types is loud, smelly, and generally obnoxious. I've been to plenty of outdoor gatherings, for example, where the atmosphere was significantly degraded by having to shout to the heard over the food truck's generators (and avoid being downwind of them), and the noise from gas powered leaf blowers, pressure washers, chainsaws, etc. has made it nearly impossible for me to walk my dog in my own neighborhood a good portion of the day (at last Monday-Friday).
On the issue of California's EV mandate, I personally do believe that 2035 is too soon. But, I also believe that states should have the right to regulate pollution within their own borders, and to tell states that they can't is government overreach (and, no, I don't sympathize with the argument that California loses the right to regulate its own air because it is too big). I also believe that, even if it were allowed to go through, California would end up delaying it on its own, so it wouldn't actually take effect in 2035 (although, CA politicians would wait as long as possible before doing so).
In summary, I think most of the Inflation Reduction Act was good policy, even if not so great politics, and that messaging should be less about the climate and more about:
1) Democrats want to give consumers choices about energy, Republicans want everyone to be captive to a handful of fossil fuel companies for all of their energy needs, in order to line their profits.
2) Climate aside, pollution going into people's lungs is bad, and Democrats support taking reasonable-cost measures to reduce it, when possible. Republicans believe that pollution is a public good, and want people to breathe in as much of the stuff as possible (e.g. to bolster the economy by creating health care jobs when people get sick?)
A couple of related points I'd like to mention:
1) Getting the correct message out in a way that's believable to the average swing voter is going to be difficult since Democrats' environment messaging has been all about climate, climate, climate for the past decade. Voters have to be able to trust that Democrats are not out to raise everybody's energy just to slightly nudge climate numbers on a spreadsheet. How to get to this point, I'm not totally sure.
2) In spite of "drill, baby, drill", the policies of Democrats are, in many ways, better for the domestic oil industry than Trump's policies (think, tariffs on steel and other materials, for instance, plus the impact of a stable economy on construction and travel). Even in a future where all cars move off of oil, the oil industry is not disappearing; there is still plastic, airplanes, etc.
3) Different uses of fossil fuels have different levels of what I call "obnoxiousness", which is some combination of noise, local pollution, and how many people are nearby to breathe/smell it. Efforts to move off of fossil fuels in cases where it increases cost should generally focus on situations where the obnoxiousness is large and the cost increase is small, taking into account that obnoxiousness is not necessarily correlated with climate impact in all cases. For example, a leaf blower ranks very highly on the scale of obnoxiousness, in spite not actually using that much fuel. Whereas, a gas burning power plant may have a high climate impact, but a relatively low level of obnoxiousness if very few people live or work near it. In general, this is best done on the regulatory side at the local level (*), but the federal government still has a role to play in encouraging investment to make the alternative technology affordable.
(*) Although, many red states pre-empty this with state law, in order to show the libs who's boss.
One piece that's nebulous on this is "finding nominees." In the old timey cigar filled room days the Oklahoma Democratic Party was very much it's own thing from the New York Democratic Party. Today is that true?
To the extent that you have competitive primaries the highly motivated highly tuned in to politics voters in OK and NY are probably 60%-70% overlapped. A candidate likely has to hit the same highly publicized and charged national policies and issues.
The election committees have a sort of secondary role in the recruitment side, but that also has a bit of a fake, "this is a national Democrat's idea of a Successful Oklahoma Democrat is."
I think primaries are in a bad middle ground. The smoke filled rooms are gone. It's seen as per se illegitimate of parties tilt things away from the non-representative primary voters to thinking about the broader constituencies. Otoh, parties do still lock in endorsements, funding, and recruitment. That stuff has an effect and leads to gerontocracy, conformism (as opposed to the individualism that Matt champions here), and failure to change with the times. America either needs to embrace having smaller, stronger parties, or so away with them altogether.
There's a lot to this. I think the mass proliferation of primaries has been a huge mistake but there's no easy switch to go back, not merely because of public backlash but because the instincts of today's smoke filled rooms is quite likely to be even worse than just leaving it to voters. Anymore the best moderating force is likely to try and increase primary turnout among normies so that its not all 3 sigma politico hardos who pay for newsletters voting in primaries.
Jungle primaries would help and do seem doable
The Canadian system seems to be a reasonable compromise. Here’s how it works most of the time:
1. A formalized local association (Electoral District Association, EDA) of a party has regular meetings year round where they discuss various issues, elect officers and vet prospective local candidates.
2. As an election approaches, they shortlist candidates and then settle on one.
3. The whole party apparatus vets the shortlist intensively for any issues.
4. The party leader does have the ability to overrule the EDA in case they select a nutjob (or to parachute in a favored star candidate), but this is infrequent and done with the understanding that it shouldn’t be a regular occurrence.
There’s obvious flaws to this (branch stacking, EDA capture, the decline of social capital etc) but I think it provides a reasonable balance.
Nominee selection is a coordination and name recognition-building problem, so unless somebody is coming into the race with a very strong pre-existing brand, organized interest groups do actually play a substantial significant role in candidate selection. There are limits to how much of it they can do (think about, eg: that time that SBF tried to get an internet Rationalist into an Oregon House seat and generated a ton of backlash), but they do have significant influence.
Local media is also important here. There were local positions in the last election where literally the only information I could find online was if local parties endorsed them and not even their relevant issue positions. And I live in Virginia, which is not exactly ignored by the media.
I think Matt’s mostly incorrect on his second guessing of the declining value of moderation. The media environment and political culture really has changed in a way that makes voters less likely to ticket split than they were in 2006.
To use an example of a politician that Matt talks about all the time, do we think it’s a coincidence that Susan Collins ran ahead McCain by 40 in 2008 & “only” ran ahead of trump by ~15 in 2020? Or that she’s gotten way more conservative over the decades? If anything, I’d say it’s the opposite, she probably had More high profile breaks with trump than she did with bush, and yet her political overperformance has more than halved.
Matt really does his cause of moving towards popularism no favors when he makes totalizing arguments like this. It reminds me of when he said that he would do better than Walz in his southern MN district because of his moderation. That might've just been been light trolling on a podcast, but my eyes nearly rolled out of my head at that.
I think heterodoxy to signal alignment with your constituents on various issues, where they're generally at odds with your national party is a good strategy. I like that way of putting it. To a lot of progressives, moderation means pre-surrrendering on important issues to satisfy, not large numbers of your voters, but special interests. See Kyrsten Sinema, who tbf, Matt criticized a good bit for doing the dumb parts of moderation, but not the savvy bits, like Golden.
I think the synthesis here is that constituents want a candidate who they see as representing them. Aligning yourself with your district over your party is probably a pretty good, generizable strategy that fits in a substack aimed at a national audience. In some cases that will move Democrats to the right, on others to the left. I would like from Matt more writing and ideas as to why this doesn't happen more. Golden not really engaging with the national press is interesting. I'd like to hear more about this than Matt being annoyed with his Twitter beefs.
I think that line about out-performing Walz perfectly captures what irks me so much about popularism.
Where I agree with Matt is that in order to win, the most important thing is to credibly signal that your preferences are close to voters'. (Whether you call this "moderate" is really a matter of taste.)
This is why I agreed with his takes so much in 2020-2022. Democrats taking far-left positions in order to turn out a secret stash of extremists is a credible signal of *precisely the opposite*!
But recently, his position seems to be that it's easy to signal that you have the right preferences -- anyone with the right issue polling can do it. Just
1. Stake out a hodgepodge of popular policy positions on issues.
2. Say some vaguely culturally moderate stuff.
I think what this misses is that credible signaling is hard! Any idiot can do (1) and (2), but if everyone understands that said idiot is doing it only to get votes, no one will believe it.
People like Obama/Clinton actually had to be talented at signaling their preferences. This is like 90% of the battle, and Matt seems to believe that it isn't a thing (hence why he thinks he'd be politically successful in Minnesota).
I’m confused as to how this is disagreeing with the piece. It’s obviously not true that anyone can go anywhere and just say moderate things, but democrats underestimate how much freedom they have to actually do so. It’s a major problem!
I don't disagree with the piece (nor did I say this in my comment). Following the advice in my points (1) and (2) is generally necessary but not sufficient to win.
What I'm disagreeing with is what I perceive to be Matt's general worldview on optimal electoral strategy. You say it's obvious that just saying moderate things isn't necessarily effective, but everything I've read from Matt here (as well as on Twitter, podcasts like the above, etc.) indicates to me that he *does* actually think simply saying moderate things is 90% of the battle.
I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of electoral advice given to Democrats on this Substack is "don't worry about charisma/authenticity/etc., just say moderate stuff." This is why Matt thinks he can win an election in Minnesota!
Is this unfair? Is there somewhere that Matt indicates his worldview is closer to mine -- i.e., that credible signaling is hard, and optimal electoral strategy should concern itself with the "credible" part?
I think the Minnesota thing is a joke (have not listened to the podcast.) And I’m not sure what the best ration of moderation/autheniticy works. But the best performing candidates aren’t Obama level political talents, they just seem to command trust among their constituents because they share their values.
Matt wrote an article suggesting that Democrats should be authentically moderate just like a week ago.
Again, the advice boiled down to "say moderate stuff" (instead of the ridiculous strategy Democrats are now pursuing, which is to say "I would like to be moderate!").
Of course this is marginally better, but the point is that even if these candidates do follow that advice, I don't think anyone will believe that they've become moderate. Nothing about the advice in that article solves the credibility problem.
100% true... people use the "well the voters won't find it authentic" line as an excuse to not bother trying. As Matt said re performative moderation, however, you do have to actually say specifically moderate things and not just generically punch left.
Matt can’t convincingly put on the affectations of a midwestern normie. His squeaky voice alone would be a major turnoff. I, an Indo-Canadian immigrant am more capable of connecting with the suburban voters that he’s targeting (they’re my literal neighbors).
Moderation is like the white vote. Its value has declined and yet its importance remains enormous.
The latest political science research has basically debunked 'enormous' at this point. The effect size is small, uncertain, and declining
https://goodauthority.org/news/do-moderate-candidates-really-do-better-in-elections/
I've been doing a long lit review on this topic, a lot of the debates here are how you define small.
From the average of studies I've collected, the average effect size from a standard deviation of moderation within party (say going from the 50th percentile most liberal dem to the 85th pctl most conservative) is something like 1% (2% vote margin) of vote share for us house/state legislative elcetions, and 1.5% (3% vote margin) of vote share for pres/senate/gov.
This is small in some sense, but also huge in another. If Maggie Hassan had the views of a normie liberal democrat instead of being somewhat moderate Obamacare gets repealed in 2016. If Hillary Clinton had run as an actual moderate in 2016 none of us remember who Donald Trump is. If Dems had nominated Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro in 2024 the world looks very dfifferent right now.
The effect size has declined, but uncertain is not really true, the overwhelmingly body of research still finds a small but real effect, and small is relative. 2% of the vote isn't huge in some sense but it's oftentimes the difference between winning and losing massively important elections.
I read that article until I learned it has to do with state legislative elections. In those elections, funding and candidate effort loom much larger than in federal races.
Declining returns to moderation for federal elections has been well-documented for a while now
https://www.wpsanet.org/papers/docs/wos2015.pdf
declining, sure. however, the house is closer than in has been in my life time and the senate is closer than average. a few points in a few elections can be huge.
Extra upvote, that's pretty insightful.
15% is still a lot though, more than enough to win most races handily. So just because moderation value has gone down in significance doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing.
I agree with that, but Matt specifically said that he thinks that the academic truism that the electoral benefits of moderation have declined is wrong, and I think that’s wishful thinking on his part.
Maybe the value of moderation has declined for Republicans, but not for Democrats?
Neither party has tried to be moderate as a whole since 2008 so we don't really know if it's actually declined
I think this misses some of the larger shifts in Maine's political landscape, as a resident of the Grand State of Maine myself. Note this is all perception and hearsay, the ultimate form of evidence. In 2008, Maine's population was diminishing, and we saw a huge influx of new residents starting in 2020 that have pulled the state politically toward Massachusetts (especially here in the south, the best part). Paul LePage won with a plurality of the vote (thanks, Cutler, enjoy prison) in 2011 and 2019, then lost by 13% in 2022. Meanwhile, the groups who most enjoyed Collins' pork-y style of politics (lumber, ship building, your various pulling-things-out-of-the-ocean industries) continued to reduce in size because they're bad jobs and people want to do better.
I agree with Matt that Trump is much more of a northern Maine sort of guy- his (lies) about not cutting Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security really resonated with a very poor, very old district. It is an area in which tariffs (especially on Canada) have been popular my entire life. If anything, I'd argue that Trump is the one showing the value of moderation on key issues in areas like ME-2.
Oooh, a fellow Mainer here on SB. Nice.
I don't disagree with your point, but it does seem notable that Collins is literally only the Republican in New England's entire Congressional detachment. She has been for the last 8 years now. The whole region has been shifting towards the Dems, not just Maine
Yes, Susan Collins is mostly winning on her decades of reputation as a moderate plus some points just for name recognition and incumbency. Lots of Maine voters are in the habit of voting for her, and she doesn't do anything that pisses them off enough to change their minds.
I have real doubts that if she were starting out today, even if she could get through a Republican primary, that her moderate Republican views would be enough to overcome the current partisan bias and the actual shift left of Maine voters.
I suspect Jared Golden eyes her seat, and he's playing the moderation game but on the Maine of today's D+7 side of the tracks.
Bush was far more conservative than Trump. Maybe Collins hasn’t changed much.
Did she have a serious opponent in 2008?
Yes, the sitting representative of ME-1 (which was less distinct politically from ME-2 then).
Her opponent was if anything more serious in 08 than in 20, he was the congressman from one of Maine’s two congressional districts.
"or a Khmer Rouge attitude toward city-dwellers"
Tough but fair :)
"...a Khmer Rouge attitude toward city-dwellers...."
It was actually frustration with the spelling of Pnomh Penh. Sorry, Phnom Phen. Wait: Phomn Pneh. Ah, fuck it -- just kill them all.
i would trust her more if she wore glasses
I agree that members of congress should reflect the values and interests if their constituents, not try to change them. But I do think they should try to change constituents’ minds about what concrete policies advance those values and interests.
So I’ve mentioned before that broadly I agree with you. Joe Manchin frustrated me immensely from 2021 to 2024. And yes I do think some his motivations were less than pure or quite frankly odd. But end of the day he was by far the best Democrats were going to do in West Virginia and Democrats thinking some Bernie style alternative would win that state are being delusional.
I bring up Manchin deliberately because there an examples of senators who give your critics I think some genuine ammunition. I’ve brought up the fact that I was represented in the senate for years by Joe Lieberman. There’s no way you can describe his key role in killing the public option in 2009 by saying he was just being realistic about the partisan lean of his state. Maybe you can make a bank shot argument about the importance of the insurance industry and Pharma in CT. But reflecting the overall political views of his median constituent? Yeah no way.
Or to bring it to modern day. John Fetterman has views on Israel that aren’t just to the right of the median Dem in PA but quite frankly as far as I can tell to the right of median pro Israel supporter. Hi statements would make even The Free Press blush (maybe). Is this some great political strategy to represent his state
Ok so based on the Nymag article, Fetterman is a unique case where his medical issues are perhaps causing some serious erratic behavior. What about Sinema? With hindsight, it’s extremely hard to look at her actions and not see that she was a blatant sell out who needlessly voted to the right on a number of issues that can’t explained by AZ being a swing district.
I bring all this up just sort of ask you to have some sympathy for the people who criticize your stance on boosting moderates. And just note that there is some reason to at least have some skepticism of someone who advocates for your stance here. A stance that I will repeat in the big picture I agree with.
I think the biggest problem for the Democratic Party is they don’t want the kind of person who would win a statewide seat in Tennessee or Louisiana in the Democratic Party. I say Tennessee and Louisiana because they will elect the occasional democratic governor, it’s not impossible.
The “Democratic Party” is not a monolithic entity. Indeed, it barely exists as the term “party” is traditionally understood. David Hogg probably doesn’t want Joe Manchin in the party. Chuck Schumer probably does.
When you read "Democratic Party", just substitute in "Democratic Primary Voters" and it makes a lot more sense.
Handing the nomination process over to millions of non-political experts hasn’t necessarily worked great!
"...substitute in "Democratic Primary Voters"...."
Is the idea that DPV's in a statewide Tennessee election don't want the kind of person who can win a statewide seat in TN, or that DPV's in a presidential election -- say in NH or SC -- don't want the kind of person who can win a statewide seat in TN?
Both
"Both."
If the DPVs of SC are choosing the wrong presidential nominee for Montana, that's one kind of problem. If the DPVs of TN cannot select a gubernatorial candidate who can win TN, then that's a hard problem -- it's either simply a judgment that TN cannot be won by a Democrat, or seems like an indictment of the primary process in general. Which do you intend?
Electing David Hogg to anything sure seems like a signal, and it’s a signal the Democratic Party in sum wants more of whatever it is he stands for, which is mostly not gonna fly in Louisiana.
Except the DNC just got rid of Hogg because he wanted the party to add more young, heterosexual males to the coalition.
I know he talked about that, but I was under the assumption they got rid of him because he wanted to primary moderate candidates.
Most Democrats think that, but the DNC subcommittee trying to get rid of him is doing so for DEI reasons:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/dnc-panel-recommends-redo-vote-david-hogg-malcolm-kenyatta-rcna206337
That's what Hogg thinks it is too. There's also the Malcolm Kenyatta factor here.
It’s been a long time since TN had a Democratic governor, and it would be very difficult for the party to win statewide. In 2018, they very wisely nominated a well-liked and very moderate former governor for the Senate seat, and although he overperformed very impressively, he still lost by around ten points. Probably could work in a somewhat less red state, though.
Louisiana is a great example of this.
Manchin was not just a VAR Senator from West Virginia. His positions were generally better than most other Senators. Having a work requirement for a child tx credit was not ideal but better than no child tax credit at all. He was just right about permitting reform to allow building a gas pipeline from WV to New England. He should have been celebrated and emulated as how to be a Democratic Senator from Oklahoma or Texas.
There’s a difference between having views perfectly matching one’s constituency and building an authentic brand as being an independent. Fetterman should be the template for many dems. His Israel-Gaza views haven’t sunk him.
I think Matt covers this well. All politicians have to choose their battles. there are probably fights that would cost Fetterman his seat. But they are fewer than people think. He probably has secret views that he holds back on. I think Matt still underrates style, but the formula is clearly a mix of an independent brand with well-chosen moderate/heterodox policies, with positive party relationships and political skill.
The thing about his Israel-Gaza views is that I'm not sure they were prominent in any of his campaigns. Being generally pro-Israel isn't going to sink any candidate, and most people don't care about the issue one way or the other.
Right, most voters don't care much about Israel, but of the swing voters who do a lot are pro-Israel. Also voters who don't care much are often broadly sympathetic to Israel. In a general election it's not a bad thing to be pro-Israel.
PA voter here. Fetterman was elected in a non-Presidential election year, beating Dr. Oz., seen as an un-serious weirdo carpetbagger, who ranted about expensive crudite. Governor was also up for election where Shapiro beat Mastriano, a christain nationalist, Q-anon spouting, literal J6 insurrectionist. Neither election was a very difficult choice for the average normie voter. If McCormick had overcome Oz in the GOP primary, Fetterman probably still would have beat him based on the winds of 2022. But I don't think there is any doubt that he would have lost in 2024 v McCormick, especially considering that PA brand-name Casey couldn't win re-election.
That crudite ad was one of the weirdest political ads I've seen since Fiorina's demon sheep without being as fun.
Do you mean 2024 rather than 2026?
Yes! Fixed. Thank you
Good point, I’ve definitely overestimated his electoral strength since PA is so crucial in presidential elections. Important reminder
Matt directly addressed this point in a recent piece. His argument was that, because the Democratic brand is so immoderate, the kind of person who runs as a moderate is a bona fide iconoclast who kinda hates Democrats. Whereas if the tent were more expansive, you'd have an easier time recruiting team players who just happen to hold moderate views.
Do his comments on Israel matter to winning the Senate back? Serious question. I suspect voting intentions on Israel are not that important, and to the extent they are important in places like Pennsylvania, his opinions don't hurt him. It would be useful to find something that Fetterman is doing that is actually hurting him. Agree about Sinema, who was in it for the cash and later financial opportunities from day one as a grifter, it appears.
The NY Mag article was pretty damning, not on Israel, but on his mental health. He is barely functioning in his duties, is not making public appearances, and has a horrendous record of even showing up to cast votes. Not sure if all that has crossed into normie consciousness, but strategically, he absolutely needs to resign now to take care of his health. It would also let Shapiro choose a new Senator and give that person time to cook before the 2028 election.
Agree with all this. A lot of people very active in Democratic politics may not like to hear this, but I’m not convinced Israel is a main driver of votes and to the extent it is, being seen as pro-Israel isn’t necessarily a vote loser. His health concerns seem to be serious.
This. There are a lot of moderate Jewish voters in PA who will vote for a pro-Israel D but not an anti-Israel D.
Lieberman was pissed at the Democratic Party for abandoning him.
I think you're actually proving my point.
He endorsed John McCain for President and then spoke at the RNC in 2008. He committed himself to opposing the first real viable African American candidate for President, a man who made pains to moderate where necessary not come across as to radical (honestly Obama is possibly one of the better examples Matt could have used in this post), because he was friends with the GOP candidate? I mean honestly, at a certain point you have to ask "what did you expect?"
But even if you take Lieberman's side and say the Democratic party should have been more supportive post 2008 and that explains his bucking the party on stuff like Public Option, it still means that he was moderating his positions not out of some rational analysis regarding getting the vote of the median voter in CT, but out of personal pique.
That's my point. Lieberman was mad and realized Senate Democrats needed him more than he needed them. He won an election as an independent and had all the leverage. Killing policies was his payback.
Personal pique and the fact that he got a lot of financial support from pharma and insurance companies.
Yet he still never stopped caucusing with the Senate Ds.
Manchin and Sinema had way more leverage than Lieberman and they never stopped caucusing with Senate Ds.
"Her electoral base includes suburbs of Portland, but it’s a district that Trump wins because numerically, the “suburbs of Portland” part isn’t all that compared to the district’s rural hinterland."
Broken record on this, but the suburbanite part of the district is growing and is a major reason she was able to pull off an upset in 2022. Clark County (the suburby part of the district, although the Northern and Eastern parts are already the boonies) grew from 425k residents in 2010 to 521k in 2023. Clark's voting history is kind of odd. It used to have a sort of Reagan Democrat pattern to it with a lot of unionized loggers, voting for Reagan and then Clinton (and Dukakis interestingly), then grew in to more of a suburban county and voted for Bush twice, and then flipped for Obama and never looked back. The flip from 2012 to 2016 was uhh... zero. Obama won the county by 0.22% and Clinton won it by 0.15%. Since then it's only gotten bluer including in 2012 when Kamala Harris expanded Biden's lead from 5% to 7%.
Anyways, the rest of the district is exactly as Matt describes; Democratic since the New Deal, then a massive flip for Trump and never looking back. Cowlitz County to the North voted for Obama by 4% and then Trump by 14%. But those areas aren't growing as much as Clark. MGP overperformed in those areas but still didn't win Cowlitz County. Without the growth in Clark she would have lost.
And of course her opponent both times was completely insane so that helps.
Is this an “angry at California for sending everyone here” district?
Oh my God yes. I got that shit when I moved here lol
>And of course her opponent both times was completely insane so that helps.
This is basically WA politics in a nutshell.
They put up a pretty good candidate for governor and he overperformed Trump, but not enough.
Right, Matt's wrong about this. Trump won the district 50-47 but MGP won 51.7-47.9, overperforming Harris by 4.7%. Clark County cast just over 2/3 of the votes in the district last year. Harris won Clark County 51.8-44.8, while MGP won 56.2-43.3. If you look at the numbers, she overperformed Harris by more in the rural counties than she did in Clark, although she overperformed everywhere. As you note, Clark becoming bluer has been balanced out by the other counties (which are not unlike Jared Golden's district) becoming redder. MGP lost Cowlitz County by 10 points, but Harris lost by 20, a much better overperformance than she had in Clark. The difference was even more stark in Lewis County, which is slightly larger than Cowlitz (2nd largest in the district after Clark) and much redder. There, Trump beat Harris by nearly 33 points while MGP only lost by 21.5. So yes she would have lost without Clark growing but she also would have lost (at least the first time) without her significant overperformance in the rural areas that she still lost (except for Pacific County, which she won while Harris lost). Back when Brian Baird represented the 3rd it included Olympia so it was structurally bluer. It was redrawn to be a relatively solid red district in 2022. In any event, Clark County is "all that" compared to the rest of the district, but it's still purple and a modest D win there won't offset big D losses elsewhere in the district, which is why MGP losing by less in Lewis and Cowlitz counties mattered a lot. So tl;dr the rural stuff probably helped.
Yeah, MGP overperformed everywhere, but she overperformed more in the rurals. So I won't disparage her rural bonafides. I would prefer it if she didn't pretend like the urban residents of her district didn't exist though lol
Did she? Or is she just personally about the rural stuff because that's her lifestyle preference? She still has a degree from Reed and her husband works in Portland.
Look, I voted for her and I'd do it again, but I listened to the Ezra Klein interview. Her whole shtick is that there's something wrong with us not knowing how to repair our own stuff and that it's wrong to use single use plastics and stuff like that. Ok that's fine if she wants to liver her life that way. I don't. And there are plenty of residents of her district with other concerns that, at least in that interview, she didn't really address. Maybe she's done some other interviews where she talks a bit more about the issues addressing Clark County, but I didn't hear them there.
*including in 2024 when Kamala Harris...
A former staffer to Congressman Tim Walz explained to me the real issue . . . those who compete to win elections in deep blue districts have had too few reps in a purple environment to grasp how a quirky electorate votes. Someone like Jon Ossoff knows that if he supports Israel in Georgia he will gain a few Evangelicals while not losing many voters on the left. Maura Healey may do well running Massachusetts but she is out over her skis when she attempts to score points on the national level because of inexperience. This particular staffer was bemoaning the Walz' shift from savvy purple district Congressman to traditional progressive Governor and VP candidate.
That kind of undercuts his argument doesn't it? Walz had the reps but they didn't help him.
But I think generally the staffer was correct. Even for politically savvy people it is hard to imagine an environment that is just very far outside the norm of your own.
His argument was that Walz was beholden to Harris and her policy positions so his political acumen was worthless.
What would the explanation be for Walz's cratering support in rural Minnesota before he was named the VP nom? The DFL under his leadership has basically lost all their traditional strength in rural Minnesota under his leadership as Governor.
This is the period of 2019-2025, right? This is the same time that the Republican Party lost their traditional strength in Harris county and Orange County as well. This is plausibly all just the nationalization of politics and the realignment in the Trump/Sanders era.
Shift from purple congressional district to pressure from a more and more urbanist extreme left in the Governor's role.
“[C]andidates should run if and only if they believe they can effectively represent the views of their future constituents while remaining consistent with their personal values.”
This is profoundly true. As a young man, I wanted to be a judge, both for the prestige and because I have a vocation for peacefully settling disputes. For a few years, I’ve realized my views of criminal justice are just too different for me to get elected without being a two faced scoundrel.
I would still like to be an arbitrator, maybe that will happen some day.
Didn’t Jimmy Carter run as a segregationist in a ploy to gain votes only to face turn in his inaugural speech and declare that the era of segregation in Georgia was over?
Likewise LBJ, who owed his political career and Senate leadership to hardcore segregationists like Richard Russell - only to deliver the Voting Rights Act.
But I'm pretty sure today's media environment makes this all but impossible. The nationalization of all politics combined with relentless, adversarial scrutiny guarantees that no candidate will be able to get away with that in high-salience issues ever again.
(Unless deepfakes obliterate our basic trust in media.)
"...I have a vocation for peacefully settling disputes. For a few years, I’ve realized my views of criminal justice are just too different...."
Self-knowledge is important.
Something crystalized for me ruminating about this post and the push back you get from Progressives that I think sort of squares the circle of this debate; conflating "independence" with "moderation".
It's interesting you brought up Bernie. Because one thing that's become clear in the almost 10 years since his primary challenge is that a decent chunk of his support was NOT from voters who had particularly left wing views. And I think it's clear to me now that a huge part of that non-progressive support was that he was not actually a Democrat. It's cliche for politicians to talk about how they're not part of the "Beltway elite", but it's cliche for a reason. And Bernie (at least circa 2015) was definitely NOT part of the "Beltway elite" despite being a Congressman and Senator. Yes he held some heterodox positions on guns and immigration in 2015, but that was really part of a general "outsider" persona he represented. By 2020, even though he still technically was an Independent/Socialist and still is today, he was firmly in the the left wing faction of the Democratic party. In other words, the success of his primary run in 2015/16 had the perverse effect of diminishing his "outsider" cred. Yes, there is his moving left on cultural issues, but again it's part in parcel of a bigger story.
I think we forget before Obama, it had been decades since a sitting senator had become President. There's a reason for that. And even with Obama, it probably helped, not hurt that he had been a Senator for such a short time.
And getting back to the perennial "how did Trump win" debate that I participated in recently. I think we (and I) underestimate that a small but significant number of voters don't see Trump really has a Republican but really that ultimate "outsider". Now those of us who write on this substack know the GOP is basically Trump at this point. But there are a lot of voters who don't see it that way. And also helps explain why Trumpism is clearly less popular than Trump. And to give a very recent example. As insincere as Trump's announcement regarding prescription drugs was, honestly, is there any prominent politician who would have even uttered a coherent version of this statement in the last, I dunno, 30 years?!
So I think it's important to recognize there is absolutely a sweet spot Venn Diagram of "moderation" and "independent thinking". But it's not a 100% overlap and it's not actually clear to me the "moderate" side is more important than the demonstration you're "independent".
As Matt pointed out, a lot of Bernie's non-progressive crossover support came from his more moderate views on guns and immigration, support which he lost once he took the mainstream liberal stances on those issues.
On Trump and Trumpism, one major difference between Trump and the average MAGA Republican is that the MAGA Republican often still espouses traditional Republican views on entitlements and abortion, whereas Trump has often taken more moderate positions on those issues.
I also think it's worth expanding Bernie's views on immigration were really rooted in the labor movement; specifically creating unfair competition for low-wage workers. I think he was the only Dem that broke with the 2007 immigration reform bill for example.
IIRC Sherrod Brown was also very critical along similar grounds. Like Bernie, he broke on a couple key issues (Immigration and Climate/Energy) in Brown's case, but that heterodoxy had largely subsided by the Trump era. Too bad, I think Brown with his 2008 views on Immigration and Energy may have won last year!
Brown is super interesting. I think he nailed it in his Op-ed: "Then Trump came along and switched the script, breaking with the GOP’s long-standing free-trade stance to denounce NAFTA and other agreements, promote more protectionist policies and make promises such as ending taxes on overtime. “Republicans are now, for the first time, actually trying to talk to workers,” Brown said.
https://archive.is/epeHb#selection-543.1-543.65 or
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/22/sherrod-brown-democrats-nafta-2024/
And he's been right since the start. Just go back and listen to his and Obama's 2008 speeches:
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2008/06/20/ohioans-star-in-obama-s/23836972007/
I think this a big part of how you win in Ohio.
That’s part of it for sure, especially in the midwest but reading Sherrod Brown since the election it’s all “NAFTA neoliberalism blah blah blah” the fact that he doesn’t even mention energy issues or immigration in his long new republic piece is telling. I think a lot of people on the left like Sherrod and Bernie desperately want the explanation for dem losses among working class voters to be exclusively explained by trade deals and not being economically left enough but I don’t think the evidence is there. I think probably 10 Obama-Trump voters decisively swung due to immigration for every one on trade
But what is the evidence for this? Again, we're narrowing to the 2015/16 primary (by definition Bernie voters) I know immigration was obviously a big topic in that campaign. But a voter super motivated by immigration in a right wing direction was almost certainly going to end up a Trump voter.
Look I'm willing to look at survey results that provides evidence that Bernie's support in 2015 had a lot to do with his stances on gun control and immigration. But I remember that primary and that was definitely NOT a huge part of that primary campaign.
I should also caveat that a decent amount of his support was clearly just an anti-Hillary protest vote. I know there is debate about just how many Bernie voters ended up voting for Trump, but it's more than zero and I think it's very likely this cohort of voters had a particular anti-Hilary animus motivating their vote.
But again, that I think strengthens my point. A lot of Hilary's electoral weakness was the result of her being seen as quite possibly the ultimate Washington insider.
The evidence for this is in his Senate races, where he outperformed Obama in 2012 and underperformed Harris in 2024.
What about non-policy reasons why someone may be popular? E.g. if someone runs an effective office that is capable of looking after constituents’ problems, or someone that puts in the effort to turn up to local schools etc?
(This is just a thought from Australia where candidates typically don’t stray from the party line, but where popular local members still can run well ahead of national trends)
My default assumption - although this is very much an assumption rather than a belief formed by exposure to robust evidence - is that there are too many voters per district (and certainly per Senate seat) for this to work, in general. You can’t be the personal friend of hundreds of thousands to millions of people.
My hometown had a Democratic Congressman with this type of reputation as a member of the community beyond just being a politician. It also helped he was a combat veteran. When he died, the local Democratic Party did get a more blue collar-oriented union guy, but he's never been able to build a real relationship with his constituents in the same way. Part of this is the nationalization of politics, but part of this is that not everyone has that right type of folksy charisma even if they win elections.
Helping 1,000s or 10,000s of people directly may not be possible. But - a guy good reputation an be made through word of mouth as someone who was able to help constituent a out of a particularly unfair situation, and someone who at least has the capability and empathy to hear out constituent concerns.
Or to put it differently - you can loose a lot of support by being incompetent and/or an arsehole.
One part of why AOC & Tilab have not gotten the same backlash as Bush & Bowman did in part was because they have much better constituent services.
Maybe I feel this way bc I’m a data person but my galaxy brain wonders messaging robot strategy might work the best if the candidate
1. Leans into likes of David Shor or Lakshya Jain and emphasizes on the messages they pick and deprioritizes messages that poll bad
2. Is a good actor
I feel like issues with messaging robot strategy come down to
1. They are likely to pick an idea pushed by the loudest voice rather than what the data suggests
2. vast majority of ppl are not good at sounding sincere even if the idea is not actually what they believe in - the exceptions I can think of are Obama and Buttigieg
"...majority of ppl are not good at sounding sincere...."
Cue the joke about the old politician's advice to the young politician:
"The most important thing in politics is sincerity. Once you can fake that, the rest is easy."
Yeah, and a lot of politicians think they pull it off but I doubt they do lol
The latter point is why I think charisma has become weirdly underrated on the Democratic side. In part because we keep nominating political heirs for President.
But a charismatic candidate can make people believe that they "feel their pain," or that "yes we can," or whatever. I don't disagree with Matt on the position taking at all, and charisma may read different in Brooklyn than rural Nebraska. However, once we get to statewide and national office being able to deliver a message and talk to different groups while being perceived as sincere and compelling is pretty important.
Yea, that too at the national level.
In the ideal world, the candidate can speak different messages on different channels and to different constituents with enough “authenticity”
My galaxy brain take is, combining some no name character actor with David Shor can be a match made in the heaven
Charisma is hard - whatever helps you with some audiences usually turns off others. People like Trump, George W Bush, and John Edwards had real charisma with some audiences, but their performances always turn me off. Buttigieg has perfect charisma for me, but I think other people dislike that.
Politicians certainly dissemble about their beliefs on individual issues. Is there any successful politician who has claimed to be conservative but is really liberal?
As I recall H.W. Bush and Gore switched their pro-life/pro-choice stances, so that might be an example.
(Edit: Although he wasn't actually successful _against_ Clinton & Gore, I think he had switched prior and used it for his 1988 run)
Mostly due to your endorsement of his video, I saw Nathan Sage in person in Iowa and can attest that he fits the “elect people who’ll support Medicaid and be progressive enough on taxes that they aren’t trying to blow up the deficit” test. He’s definitely more on the Bernie side but can’t help but keep emphasizing that he joined the military because he was too poor to go to college otherwise, and now feels like he doesn’t have enough money to send his daughter to college. And when asked about higher Ed in the from someone who was mad about republican proposals to get rid of parent plus loan loopholes, he gave the intuitive response that everyone should be able to go to college, republicans hate college “because they want you to be dumb,” but that tuition should be lowered and loans are bad instead of saying that higher ed funding should be increased.
He seems promising. And loves to cuss.
Yeah he didn’t actually cuss too much, it didn’t seem strategic when he did, he just got fired up about how republicans hate poor people
This is exactly the piece I needed from Matt. I am fully onboard with moderating and running more moderate and culturally conservative candidates in purple districts. What I needed was an acknowledgement that sometimes these candidates have dumb views. That sometimes the median voter that we all worships is WRONG about stuff.
This piece actually sounds like it's geared towards persuading progressives. At the end of the day, progressives are the ones those of us on the center-left need to persuade. It's just not going to be effective to say everybody hates your radical views so stop being a stupid @$$hole. Most people are going to double down on their views or tune you out. Yet I see this kind of article from The Liberal Patriot and WelcomePAC all the time (for the record I think WelcomePAC really does do great work). It's lost on to me why so many on the center-left communicate with progressives this way. This is exactly the behavior we abhor progressives using against Trump voters.
You absolutely nailed why I can't stand The Liberal Patriot even when I agree with Ruy's prescriptions. It's the "Shut the fuck up, lefty, don't you know everyone hates you" attitude that's deeply offputting.
Exactly! I agree with most of their output too but I think their rhetoric is counterproductive. It’s centrists writing to other centrists about why progressives need to change their rhetoric and beliefs. They are right about a ton of stuff but the tone is counterproductive.
Yeah, it can very easily be construed as creating a permission structure to vote for Republicans, because progressives are just as dangerous, which I'm going to assume is not actually his goal.
Construed by who?
Probably the kind of person who subscribes to newsletters like this one and spends more time getting angry with progressives than conservatives because of their media diet.
What do you think is more likely to keep someone like this in the Democratic tent: a media environment where it's taboo to criticize progressives as a Democrat or one where it's okay to be a Democrat and also not like progressives?
Sam I absolutely agree with you about appealing to the middle. That is why I have repeatedly endorsed Dems moderating positions. I am in complete agreement with you on that.
My contention is that TLP doesn’t have a good approach to arguing for the changes Dems need to make to persuade the middle to vote for them. The behavior and rhetoric that needs to change is from progressives. My argument is condescending to and shaming progressives is unlike to alter their approach.
I don’t think the TLP’s readership is disaffected centrists. If so TLP would essentially be saying “progressives are the worst. Vote for the party that most of them call home.” I think TLP’s readership is annoyed center lefties like us that want to get their daily dose of progressive bashing.
That's because progressives aren't their audience. There are lots of non-progressive people out there who may or may not be Democrats, but generally don't like Trump or the GOP and want to learn why Democrats lost and ideas for what Democrats can do to win going forward.
At a point, there's diminishing returns to trying to persuade progressives. Either they already largely agree with people like Matt and Ezra Klein and will vote Democrat no matter what and don't need to be persuaded or they'll just continue to be obstinate and unsatisfied no matter what the rest of us do.
Sam, I get your perspective but the rhetoric and behavior that needs to change is that of progressives. Maybe my perspective is wrong (wouldn’t be the first or last time) but I always read TLP pieces as trying to persuade Dems to act differently or adopt more moderate positions. My argument is that you catch more flies with honey. I think a lot of the center-left has become so negatively polarized against progressives and identity politics that they have stopped trying to engage progressives into more viable positions and rhetoric. To be clear, many progressives really did go off the deep end but they just won’t be persuaded with condescension.
Most TLP pieces can be summed up as “Hey reader I agree with. We are totally right and here are the same arguments I made in 5 other articles proving we are right. The people that are wrong are hopeless and cringe. Americans hate them.”
Most people can’t be shamed or embarrassed out of toxic views. The hard boards must be bored slowly.
People in the middle also need to be persuaded. There are lots of politically homeless in the middle, some who used to Democrats and others who used to be lifelong Republicans and many who are just getting into politics and dislike both parties.
If appealing to progressives is the only focus and the middle gets ignored, then we're perpetuating the same problem that got us into this mess in the first place!