> That doesn’t mean Democrats should only nominate people with solid progressive values who lose tons of races. It means that Democrats should try to find nominees with decidedly conservative views on at least some cultural issues and run them in culturally conservative parts of the country. There is no scenario in which Louisiana sends an abortion rights champion to the Senate or Oklahoma elects a champion of asylum-seekers’ interests. We might as well try to elect people who’ll support Medicaid and be progressive enough on taxes that they aren’t trying to blow up the deficit.
Great! Now we just need to get the social justice warriors on board with this lol.
I think a Big Idea that MY may be missing that would render a lot of Leftist factionalism/purity testing more coherent to him as a strategy is the idea that there are two models for electoral change:
Model A: marginal change over time ("slow boring of hard boards"). You grind out victories at the margin and incrementally improve things. You accept a "big tent" that allows heterodox party members since they can help you win seats at the margin.
Model B: wholesale change in a time of crisis ("in Chinese the character for 'crisis' also means 'opportunity'*): You maintain ideological discipline and bide your time until a crisis causes an electoral wipeout of the incumbents. Then you sweep in and enact institutional/systemic change that is generationally durable.
I think reasonable people can disagree about which model is best, but I think both should at least be coherent positions that we can debate. And I think narratively for the Model B-ers, the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent underwhelming legislation (Obamacare without even a public option) was a cautionary tale that if you let your party become too moderate, then you will never get anything even close to what you want *even in the rare moments where the party actually has the power to make it real*.
Admittedly the Model B-ers are never going to say "our approach renders the party unpopular and mostly in the wilderness for long stretches of time until a big crisis comes along, but on balance it is still the best strategy". Instead they will, either by motivated thinking or basic ingenuousness, insist that not only are their views ideologically pure but ALSO optimal for electability at the margin if only XYZ weren't the case or if only such-and-such wasn't in charge.
Wish MattY was willing to show some humility for once and openly say "Sorry guys, I was wrong. It turns out that moderates are not the noble arbiters of common sense wisdom I thought they were." but I suppose this article will have to do. Yes, it was abundantly clear to anyone that has actually lived in a swing district that those voters are just as weirdly quixotic as everyone else, they're just cross-pressured in ways that can make them look like pragmatic centrists if you're only looking at red versus blue point differentials. "Moderate" doesn't make much outside of single issues. You can be a "moderate" on immigration, but calling people moderates because they hold lots of extreme views on a bunch of stuff that averages out on the political compass is silly. Trump's wildly labor-left views on trade don't cancel out his wildly right-wing views on law and order. It just means he's created a novel political coalition we haven't seen before. Which was, again, obvious but for some reason MattY wanted to pretend that Trump was a middle-road compromise candidate like 2020 Biden was.
In fact, MattY spent the entire "why Dems lost" reflection period doing the exact same thing he criticizes in this article. He's been advocating for the entire party to get steamrolled by the "crushing bus of moderation" even though his particular brand of moderation only plays well in specific districts and not even all the swing districts. He was trying to suppress viewpoints that didn't conform to his prescribed strategy and move the entire party platform concurrently. That's not promoting heterogeneity! I don't even think he realizes he's contradicting his past self!
Realizing that ones preferred "moderate" policy is not only hard to explain but also unlikely to be popular is good?
The question now is, Can you reward the idiosyncratic lizard brain of the median voter while conducting good policy? Is technocratic populism possible? If so people like MattY should work on that instead of telling everyone to understand economics.
It's the economy stupid. Voters can forget about cultural/policy disagreements if they feel great about the economy. If they don't feel great about the economy, they'll bring up all their other grievances. Moreover, people literally become more conservative and zero-sum when they feel anxious about their finances.
If you want a new lesson, I would say that everyone was overly optimistic about social media and the civic engagement it would foster. It turns out that most of what even the most engaged and informed voters have to say just isn't worth a whole lot. Sure, you should listen to their emotional concerns but their policy ideas are probably worthless. Humans are really good at inventing entire orthodoxies to rationalize feelings that are fundamentally driven by baser instincts. If you try to enact what voters and activists say they want, they'll turn on you down the line when it doesn't deliver the results they expected. And they won't even have the courtesy to acknowledge the change of heart, they'll just insist real price controls have never been tried.
So the correct way to govern is to project charismatic vibes that voters like but otherwise conduct technocratic policy that will achieve good ends. And if voters or interest groups confront you about it, say some vague platitude or lie. Your accomplishments will be evaluated at the ballot box not by angry comments.
Outperforming in idiosyncratic swing districts using talented localists is important but does not
solve the core problem facing Dems. At the presidential level voters off late clearly prefer strong position taking but Dems are unable to field any candidate that can do so without losing in a land slide.
Trump, if you strip out all the corruption has a very simple persona "A shady but successful* businessman who really hates illegals". This is fundamentally a winning brand. Everything else is noise.
Dems currently do not have a national identity with majority appeal and Abundance won't cut it because no one sees it as an identity marker. I am not sure what it will be until Trump screws up on some as yet unknown issue and then Dems can assume the identity of "whatever is the opposite of Trump" on that issue. Tariffs were shaping to be such an issue but since he has scaled them back massively I am not sure it will be salient come 2026 let alone 2028.
Firing every single humanities educated Dem operative and recruiting random people off the street and paying them to do political work will probably improve massively over current outcomes for the Dem party.
I understand MGP's take on "regular garbage collection" because even though I live in an urban area, I own a SFH and sort my garbage into 3 separate streams: compostable, recyclable, and landfill. (Sorting is done on initial discard except for my father-in-law's garbage, which my OCD sorts when we get it from him. [He lives behind us.])
What really gets me (my OCD again) is even though at my office we have 3 separate bins, people seem unable to determine which bin to be used for which garbage. It's not rocket science, 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.
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!
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?
You bring up some Bush and early Obama era Blue Dog votes but what killed the Blue Dogs was that they got wiped out in the 2010 midterms. I think Dems took the lesson that moderation and heterodoxy in that regard was a dead end.
I think an underrated reason why there's less politicians taking 'moderate' votes compared to the early 2000's is pretty simple - more direct interaction with the type of people who will be affected by your vote.
This isn't to say they didn't have gay or DREAMer constituents, but yes, The Groups have been louder but also in general, LGBT people, immigrants, and other constituents have more direct ways to contact representatives and their staff than they did in 2003.
It's one thing to vote for a gay marriage ban in 2003 if you've not that had that many direct interactions with gay constituents as opposed to 2023 when you or your staffers may know transgendered people directly, through campaigning and so forth because all of these groups are more open in society as compared to 2003 or whenever your preferred moment of Democratic moderation is.
Politicians are human beings too and if somebody they personally like, 'this will make my life worse', it's difficult to vote against that, unless you're a Republican of course.
This is also a major factor in why college educated, urban voters have more "cosmopolitan views." They actually interact with the potential victims of reactionary policies.
Plus, even non-urban areas have gotten more cosmopolitan in many ways - open gay couples in suburban areas, Atlanta suburbs going from 90% white to like 50% white in 20 years, and so on. There just simply a lot of congressional districts that a Democrat can win _and_ there isn't a healthy 'liberal' population that'd push back on a Democratic congressperson essentially cutting the knees out of their own constituents.
So, I have a LOT of thoughts, but I'm going to focus on this: Matt Y advocates basically running anyone and everyone who is a) likely to win and b) a marginal improvement over a Republican/MAGA on at least one issue.
Which makes sense, but at what point does this become counterproductive?
One of the critiques of Democrats I keep reading over and over is that Democrats are a bunch of wishy-washy, mushy nobodies who don't stand for anything other than "we're not Trump," and that's just not enough. Don't voters respect you more if you actually take a stand on something?
"We might as well try to elect people who’ll support Medicaid and be progressive enough on taxes that they aren’t trying to blow up the deficit."
Cool, now imagine a hypothetical purple swing districts populated mostly by well-off, Ayn Rand-loving libertarians who disdain Trump for his constant lying and flirtation with autocracy, but who really, really hate high taxes that support Medicaid patients who mooch off of productive citizens. What do you do? You want to win that district, right? So, do you run a Democrat who's like, "I know my party is for Medicaid and high taxes, but not me! I will support all the things you like and none of the things you don't like, vote for me!"
And if Matt Y says, "No, that's not what I want," I reply, "But what's the substantive difference between my hypothetical scenario and your embrace of the degrowth-loving MGP or Jared "Trump's not so bad ackshully" Golden?"
Aristotle taught that virtue is the mean between two vices. Is good politics the mean between rigid orthodoxy and having no values at all/just telling voters anything and everything they want to hear?
The kind of moderation that wins southern Orange County or outer Harris county or the Atlanta suburbs is different from the kind of moderation that wins in rural Maine or rural Oregon or rural Michigan. The party has to have room for both kinds of moderates, even though they are nearly diametrically opposed to each other.
I understand that, but my question is: what is the right balance between "we are a big tent" and "we have some principles/we stand for something other than We Are Not Trump"?
what's wrong with supporting the libertarian leaning gal (or guy... are we talking a garry johnson type character?) who will, if elected, push for those views within the party caucus? doesn't mean the party will move much as a result, but she might have a marginal effect and might even get reelected as a result.
a) in my opinion, supporting "let's gut Medicaid/FU poor sick people" is wrong morally; it's not what I want this country to be
b) it was more of a challenge to Matt Y. He used this example, "as long as the candidate is for Medicaid and against big tax cuts, it's cool to throw trans activists/the environment/immigration under the bus," so I asked him: OK, but what if you had to compromise on Medicaid and taxes too? How far would you go? What is your non-negotiable "the line must be drawn here, no further," and do you think such a thing even exists?
"Don't voters respect you more if you actually take a stand on something?"
Sure, which is why a lot of moderates like Matt think moderate Democrats should be unafraid to take moderate stances on issues, and which he is highlighting how Golden and MGP are willing to take heterodox stances even if he disagrees with them.
I honestly don't want any single party to have a large majority anymore, given the tendency to pass ridiculous and costly legislations even with a thin majority in a trifecta. I would like the Congress to pass very narrowly scoped legislations till there is some consensus on how to solve the big issues like debt. The focus should be on outcomes and winning back the trust of the voters. I think the evidence is clear that only pundits and politicians care about 1000 page legislations. Voters don't like big changes and care mostly about outcomes.
As someone from WA, the suburbs in MGP’s district are the whitest of white flight Portland, they’re not Beaverton where Intel is headquartered, they’re full of people who call Portland “urban”. WA-03 is also 76% white and only 30% college-educated, that’s why she acts like *waves hands*.
Like, given WA-03 has the approximate educational attainment as the state of Alabama and is much whiter than Alabama, it’s a miracle that Trump only won the district by a few points. Pacific Northwest whites are just built different, southern and Midwestern whites could never!
Plus, Jamie Herrera-Butler, who’s (somehow) vocally anti-abortion, repped WA-03 for a decade and would still be in Congress had she not lost her primary to Joe Kent. When Herrera-Butler ran for Washington Public Lands Commissioner in 2024, even though she lost, she won WA-03 with 57% of the vote, running ahead of Trump by 7.
Bernie Sanders distanced himself from liberal values on gun control? Maybe way back in the day, but once he began running for President, that is absolutely not true. He was smack in the middle of the liberal consensus on gun control policy:
That's what Matt said. He used to hold those views and was able to outrun Democrats (including even Obama in Vermont in 2012), then adopted more conventional liberal values on things like gun control by 2020 and then underperformed Harris in 2024.
The ending got me.
> That doesn’t mean Democrats should only nominate people with solid progressive values who lose tons of races. It means that Democrats should try to find nominees with decidedly conservative views on at least some cultural issues and run them in culturally conservative parts of the country. There is no scenario in which Louisiana sends an abortion rights champion to the Senate or Oklahoma elects a champion of asylum-seekers’ interests. We might as well try to elect people who’ll support Medicaid and be progressive enough on taxes that they aren’t trying to blow up the deficit.
Great! Now we just need to get the social justice warriors on board with this lol.
I think a Big Idea that MY may be missing that would render a lot of Leftist factionalism/purity testing more coherent to him as a strategy is the idea that there are two models for electoral change:
Model A: marginal change over time ("slow boring of hard boards"). You grind out victories at the margin and incrementally improve things. You accept a "big tent" that allows heterodox party members since they can help you win seats at the margin.
Model B: wholesale change in a time of crisis ("in Chinese the character for 'crisis' also means 'opportunity'*): You maintain ideological discipline and bide your time until a crisis causes an electoral wipeout of the incumbents. Then you sweep in and enact institutional/systemic change that is generationally durable.
I think reasonable people can disagree about which model is best, but I think both should at least be coherent positions that we can debate. And I think narratively for the Model B-ers, the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent underwhelming legislation (Obamacare without even a public option) was a cautionary tale that if you let your party become too moderate, then you will never get anything even close to what you want *even in the rare moments where the party actually has the power to make it real*.
Admittedly the Model B-ers are never going to say "our approach renders the party unpopular and mostly in the wilderness for long stretches of time until a big crisis comes along, but on balance it is still the best strategy". Instead they will, either by motivated thinking or basic ingenuousness, insist that not only are their views ideologically pure but ALSO optimal for electability at the margin if only XYZ weren't the case or if only such-and-such wasn't in charge.
Wish MattY was willing to show some humility for once and openly say "Sorry guys, I was wrong. It turns out that moderates are not the noble arbiters of common sense wisdom I thought they were." but I suppose this article will have to do. Yes, it was abundantly clear to anyone that has actually lived in a swing district that those voters are just as weirdly quixotic as everyone else, they're just cross-pressured in ways that can make them look like pragmatic centrists if you're only looking at red versus blue point differentials. "Moderate" doesn't make much outside of single issues. You can be a "moderate" on immigration, but calling people moderates because they hold lots of extreme views on a bunch of stuff that averages out on the political compass is silly. Trump's wildly labor-left views on trade don't cancel out his wildly right-wing views on law and order. It just means he's created a novel political coalition we haven't seen before. Which was, again, obvious but for some reason MattY wanted to pretend that Trump was a middle-road compromise candidate like 2020 Biden was.
In fact, MattY spent the entire "why Dems lost" reflection period doing the exact same thing he criticizes in this article. He's been advocating for the entire party to get steamrolled by the "crushing bus of moderation" even though his particular brand of moderation only plays well in specific districts and not even all the swing districts. He was trying to suppress viewpoints that didn't conform to his prescribed strategy and move the entire party platform concurrently. That's not promoting heterogeneity! I don't even think he realizes he's contradicting his past self!
Realizing that ones preferred "moderate" policy is not only hard to explain but also unlikely to be popular is good?
The question now is, Can you reward the idiosyncratic lizard brain of the median voter while conducting good policy? Is technocratic populism possible? If so people like MattY should work on that instead of telling everyone to understand economics.
It's the economy stupid. Voters can forget about cultural/policy disagreements if they feel great about the economy. If they don't feel great about the economy, they'll bring up all their other grievances. Moreover, people literally become more conservative and zero-sum when they feel anxious about their finances.
If you want a new lesson, I would say that everyone was overly optimistic about social media and the civic engagement it would foster. It turns out that most of what even the most engaged and informed voters have to say just isn't worth a whole lot. Sure, you should listen to their emotional concerns but their policy ideas are probably worthless. Humans are really good at inventing entire orthodoxies to rationalize feelings that are fundamentally driven by baser instincts. If you try to enact what voters and activists say they want, they'll turn on you down the line when it doesn't deliver the results they expected. And they won't even have the courtesy to acknowledge the change of heart, they'll just insist real price controls have never been tried.
So the correct way to govern is to project charismatic vibes that voters like but otherwise conduct technocratic policy that will achieve good ends. And if voters or interest groups confront you about it, say some vague platitude or lie. Your accomplishments will be evaluated at the ballot box not by angry comments.
Outperforming in idiosyncratic swing districts using talented localists is important but does not
solve the core problem facing Dems. At the presidential level voters off late clearly prefer strong position taking but Dems are unable to field any candidate that can do so without losing in a land slide.
Trump, if you strip out all the corruption has a very simple persona "A shady but successful* businessman who really hates illegals". This is fundamentally a winning brand. Everything else is noise.
Dems currently do not have a national identity with majority appeal and Abundance won't cut it because no one sees it as an identity marker. I am not sure what it will be until Trump screws up on some as yet unknown issue and then Dems can assume the identity of "whatever is the opposite of Trump" on that issue. Tariffs were shaping to be such an issue but since he has scaled them back massively I am not sure it will be salient come 2026 let alone 2028.
Firing every single humanities educated Dem operative and recruiting random people off the street and paying them to do political work will probably improve massively over current outcomes for the Dem party.
I understand MGP's take on "regular garbage collection" because even though I live in an urban area, I own a SFH and sort my garbage into 3 separate streams: compostable, recyclable, and landfill. (Sorting is done on initial discard except for my father-in-law's garbage, which my OCD sorts when we get it from him. [He lives behind us.])
What really gets me (my OCD again) is even though at my office we have 3 separate bins, people seem unable to determine which bin to be used for which garbage. It's not rocket science, people!
I want Slow Boring as a Twitch stream so we can have an emote for Big Ass Truck
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.
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!
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?
You bring up some Bush and early Obama era Blue Dog votes but what killed the Blue Dogs was that they got wiped out in the 2010 midterms. I think Dems took the lesson that moderation and heterodoxy in that regard was a dead end.
I think an underrated reason why there's less politicians taking 'moderate' votes compared to the early 2000's is pretty simple - more direct interaction with the type of people who will be affected by your vote.
This isn't to say they didn't have gay or DREAMer constituents, but yes, The Groups have been louder but also in general, LGBT people, immigrants, and other constituents have more direct ways to contact representatives and their staff than they did in 2003.
It's one thing to vote for a gay marriage ban in 2003 if you've not that had that many direct interactions with gay constituents as opposed to 2023 when you or your staffers may know transgendered people directly, through campaigning and so forth because all of these groups are more open in society as compared to 2003 or whenever your preferred moment of Democratic moderation is.
Politicians are human beings too and if somebody they personally like, 'this will make my life worse', it's difficult to vote against that, unless you're a Republican of course.
This is also a major factor in why college educated, urban voters have more "cosmopolitan views." They actually interact with the potential victims of reactionary policies.
Plus, even non-urban areas have gotten more cosmopolitan in many ways - open gay couples in suburban areas, Atlanta suburbs going from 90% white to like 50% white in 20 years, and so on. There just simply a lot of congressional districts that a Democrat can win _and_ there isn't a healthy 'liberal' population that'd push back on a Democratic congressperson essentially cutting the knees out of their own constituents.
So, I have a LOT of thoughts, but I'm going to focus on this: Matt Y advocates basically running anyone and everyone who is a) likely to win and b) a marginal improvement over a Republican/MAGA on at least one issue.
Which makes sense, but at what point does this become counterproductive?
One of the critiques of Democrats I keep reading over and over is that Democrats are a bunch of wishy-washy, mushy nobodies who don't stand for anything other than "we're not Trump," and that's just not enough. Don't voters respect you more if you actually take a stand on something?
"We might as well try to elect people who’ll support Medicaid and be progressive enough on taxes that they aren’t trying to blow up the deficit."
Cool, now imagine a hypothetical purple swing districts populated mostly by well-off, Ayn Rand-loving libertarians who disdain Trump for his constant lying and flirtation with autocracy, but who really, really hate high taxes that support Medicaid patients who mooch off of productive citizens. What do you do? You want to win that district, right? So, do you run a Democrat who's like, "I know my party is for Medicaid and high taxes, but not me! I will support all the things you like and none of the things you don't like, vote for me!"
And if Matt Y says, "No, that's not what I want," I reply, "But what's the substantive difference between my hypothetical scenario and your embrace of the degrowth-loving MGP or Jared "Trump's not so bad ackshully" Golden?"
Aristotle taught that virtue is the mean between two vices. Is good politics the mean between rigid orthodoxy and having no values at all/just telling voters anything and everything they want to hear?
Thoughts?
The kind of moderation that wins southern Orange County or outer Harris county or the Atlanta suburbs is different from the kind of moderation that wins in rural Maine or rural Oregon or rural Michigan. The party has to have room for both kinds of moderates, even though they are nearly diametrically opposed to each other.
I understand that, but my question is: what is the right balance between "we are a big tent" and "we have some principles/we stand for something other than We Are Not Trump"?
what's wrong with supporting the libertarian leaning gal (or guy... are we talking a garry johnson type character?) who will, if elected, push for those views within the party caucus? doesn't mean the party will move much as a result, but she might have a marginal effect and might even get reelected as a result.
What's wrong with it?
a) in my opinion, supporting "let's gut Medicaid/FU poor sick people" is wrong morally; it's not what I want this country to be
b) it was more of a challenge to Matt Y. He used this example, "as long as the candidate is for Medicaid and against big tax cuts, it's cool to throw trans activists/the environment/immigration under the bus," so I asked him: OK, but what if you had to compromise on Medicaid and taxes too? How far would you go? What is your non-negotiable "the line must be drawn here, no further," and do you think such a thing even exists?
"Don't voters respect you more if you actually take a stand on something?"
Sure, which is why a lot of moderates like Matt think moderate Democrats should be unafraid to take moderate stances on issues, and which he is highlighting how Golden and MGP are willing to take heterodox stances even if he disagrees with them.
I honestly don't want any single party to have a large majority anymore, given the tendency to pass ridiculous and costly legislations even with a thin majority in a trifecta. I would like the Congress to pass very narrowly scoped legislations till there is some consensus on how to solve the big issues like debt. The focus should be on outcomes and winning back the trust of the voters. I think the evidence is clear that only pundits and politicians care about 1000 page legislations. Voters don't like big changes and care mostly about outcomes.
Are we witnessing the emergence of the "Matthew Crawford Democrat?"
As someone from WA, the suburbs in MGP’s district are the whitest of white flight Portland, they’re not Beaverton where Intel is headquartered, they’re full of people who call Portland “urban”. WA-03 is also 76% white and only 30% college-educated, that’s why she acts like *waves hands*.
Like, given WA-03 has the approximate educational attainment as the state of Alabama and is much whiter than Alabama, it’s a miracle that Trump only won the district by a few points. Pacific Northwest whites are just built different, southern and Midwestern whites could never!
Plus, Jamie Herrera-Butler, who’s (somehow) vocally anti-abortion, repped WA-03 for a decade and would still be in Congress had she not lost her primary to Joe Kent. When Herrera-Butler ran for Washington Public Lands Commissioner in 2024, even though she lost, she won WA-03 with 57% of the vote, running ahead of Trump by 7.
"need to accept that he probably knows what he’s doing and that the right choice is to let Jared cook."
Careful! That's what Subway thought too!
Bernie Sanders distanced himself from liberal values on gun control? Maybe way back in the day, but once he began running for President, that is absolutely not true. He was smack in the middle of the liberal consensus on gun control policy:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/4/18236537/bernie-sanders-gun-control-president-campaign-2020
That's what Matt said. He used to hold those views and was able to outrun Democrats (including even Obama in Vermont in 2012), then adopted more conventional liberal values on things like gun control by 2020 and then underperformed Harris in 2024.