Sam asks: "don’t they kind of have a point that Obama’s choices led to Trump?"
The most substantial choice Obama made that "led to Trump" was repeatedly insulting him at the 2011 White House Correspondent's Dinner. The man has very thin skin and holds onto personal grievances like a mother clutching her baby.
I have never understood that argument, Trump did worse than Romney among White voters, the swing that win him the election was from Black and Latino voters.
That's a very misleading statement - white working-class voters swung heavily towards Trump, while black turnout fell substantially. But even then: It's obviously true that Republicans lost their minds over the president being Black, which obviously helped the racist guy spinning birth certificate theories secure the Republican nomination. Like, what are we even talking about?
People are weird and complicated but that theory just doesn't work, they loved birthirism when Herman Cain did it and briefly he was the leader of the GOP field. Trump's appeal was to Ohio working class it was less effective in the South and most obviously he won over people who backed Obama twice.
Is your assertion that birtherism can't be racist if some black people engaged in it? Or is it that they would willing to vote for a black person doing birtherism, so that is proof they aren't racist?
I thought the largest portion of that "swing" was the Black vote not turning out for Democrats?
That said, the root of the claim is more that Republican media really doubled down on identity politics. Amazingly, they got to do so while claiming that it was Democrats that were identity focused. In large because the liberal scene has a hard time talking about color politics.
A bigger factor is Clinton IMO. She ran a bad campaign and was a bad candidate and if she had done just a little bit better, Trump’s political ambitions would have been strangled in the crib.
This whole "the president is a failure if they're not followed by a third term" idea makes me want to set myself on fire. By this absurd litmus test, literally the only successful US president since WW2 was Ronald Reagan.
Yes, if the ghost of FDR had appeared to you on election night in 2012 and said "Obama will win but in four years the GOP will win the EC but lose the popular vote because of a economic slowdown and a 'time for a change' among many voters" you would have been like "Yeah that sounds like a very plausible outcome."
The overall trend is quite normal even if nominating a know nothing game show host is pretty atypical, but it turns out candidate effects in presidential elections are small.
This is also my analysis on 2016. Clinton was the wrong fit for the moment for a bunch of reasons that have been recounted ad nauseum but the natural, thermostatic forces against any Democrat may have been overwhelming. The only thing that made it interesting was the nomination by the GOP of a person understood as a totally non-serious candidate, the media coronation of Clinton on that basis, followed by an eked out "upset" in the electoral college.
One of my unproven and maybe unprovable theories is that almost everything thats happened since has been based on really crazy mis- and/or over interpretations of what happened in that election, and that it's why both parties are in the cellar with the American public.
Also let's give some credit to the GOP primary field which was somehow both comically too crowded and also couldn't produce a single decent alternative to Trump.
I think that once Obama won reelection after then, unfortunately the results were baked in. Hillary Clinton was probably going to be the nominee even if Obama froze her out of his administration or chosen a different VP. "Obama losing to Romney to stop the rise of Trump" would have been outlandish to say back then, but here we are, on this terrible timeline.
They weren't exactly backed in, Clinton only needed to win over an extra 0.37% of Wisconsin voters and Trump would never happen, it isn't hard to imagine a world where a more competent Clinton or an alternative candidate would be able to do that.
While I don’t per se think it was the wrong decision on his part, it seems pretty obvious in retrospect that Comey’s letter to Congress on the Weiner laptop directly tipped the election to Trump. I suppose you could blame Rep. Jason Chaffetz for releasing the letter, but that should have been expected by Comey
People have been grappling with Trump's 2016 victory for a decade now, looking in vain for the One True Reason it happened.
The truth is there are a half dozen things that—had any one of which gone differently—would have resulted in a different outcome. That's the way it is with close elections.
Of course many different things could have tipped the election, but Comey’s letter was the highest impact (a roughly 2 point swing in opinion polling following it), closest to the election, and in the hands of essentially a single individual. I think it makes sense to highlight it.
That's the part I think is questionable. It was the most easily measurable thing, sure, and it was the latest. But what if:
(1) Hillary chooses Bernie as her running mate? or
(2) Bernie exits the nomination fight a month earlier and campaigns hard for the ticket? or
(3) Hillary listens to campaign advisers urging her to spend more time in the Midwest? or
(4) She follows the time-honored general election playbook of tacking to the center? or
(5) Chinese monetary policy in 2015-2016 is more expansionary? or
(6) Jill Stein doesn't run? or
(7)
There are just so many things that could have swung that election. Clinton won the popular vote; she just needed to win it by a VERY slightly larger margin. Given the weakness of their nominee, the GOP needed everything to go perfectly. And that's what they got.
That works both ways, without the Access Hollywood tape Trump would probably be leading in the polls in October and would have more support from Republican Grandees.
I don’t see how it wasn’t the wrong decision. Completely setting aside the electoral consequences, I still believe it was improper and inconsistent on his part.
I really don't buy this at all. Trump winning the nomination was an incredibly close thing* and he nearly lost it several times and was highly dependent on things like winner take all/most delegate rules, Cruz winning Iowa, Kasich refusing to drop out etc etc. Same with the general election: there's a really strong argument the outcome was just about the Comey Letter which of course Comey didn't have to send right before E-day: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/
I think the most substantial thing Obama did that led to Trump was defeating John McCain and Mitt Romney. Both of those were moderate-vibed, and the Fox-poisoned Republican base lost faith in the idea of moderating to win as a result.
But beating his election opponents was literally Obama’s job. It makes no sense to blame him. If you want to blame any Democrat blame Hillary, whose job it was to beat Trump.
I mean agree but I actually think the most important part of that night as far as what it told us about the future is something I learned on the “Central Air” podcast; he was there as a guest of the Washington Post. Talk about a “brown M&M’s” moment as far as MSM culpability in Trumps rise.
I think this is overblown. Trump didn’t decide to run for president because Obama said he won’t be president. Obama said Trump won’t be president because Trump had said he’s going to run for president (for a third time).
This is grotesquely overshadowed by the handling of Hillary Clinton's emails by the Obama DOJ, it was the dumpster fire that wouldn't quit for the last three weeks of the campaign. Nipping that in the bud early, literally skipping to the end where Comey said "nothing here!" Would have been a heroic intervention by Obama, even if horrifically illiberal (in the mildest possible way, but severe by their standards nonetheless). Trump didn't expect to win, was surprised to win, and the emails where the decisive factor.
This I think is very important: "My interpretation is that in a profound way, progressive anger at the establishment is actually driven by complacency. They believe Trump and the G.O.P. are so weak that it’s almost trivially easy to beat them, and Democrats should be trying harder to shoot the moon on governance after they win. I don’t think that this is correct. I think the base case is that Republicans hold the Senate, expand their control over the judiciary, and head into a jump ball of a 2028 election with maps skewed in their favor, a fundraising edge, and an increasingly consolidated Musk/Ellison media sphere."
Unless and until Democrats can become broadly competitive geographically in a way something like the 80s-90s (roughly) where they could still compete with farmers etc, being structurally limited to urbane educated urbanites and sub-urbanite geography is a long-term weakness that will lead to repeats of Biden-2020 type momentary 'storm-surges' that deceive the activist class into thinking they are achieving their pet agenda, that the water level -to use my own dumb analogy- is permanently higher but it's really just a storm-surge (the storm being reaction against Trumpy overreach) and then fall backs
Going to yes-and: “trivially easy to beat them AND the reason they aren’t beating them with the obvious left-wing economic message I prefer is because the Democratic establishment is all corrupt and in hock to its donors.”
Well... I think there is a fundamental analytical error to use the phrase "are run pretty incompetently" as this incorrectly embeds the idea that the sides are "run" as in managed in any coherent sense.
Since the ill-considered "reforms" from 1970s onwards have essentially emptied parties of any kind of real central control at all, what we see as parties are just big Brand Names that are out in the wild, out of control of their supposed brand owners.
I am personally of a view that the 1970s onwards reforms, more "democratic" primaries, other naive "more transparency" (as like the naive idealist actions on abstractions making "pork" in bills harder) were gross mistakes that mistook intellectuals idealised actors for something real (and mistaking the habits and agendas of the political obsessives [for the self-flattering, "high information voters"] as fundamental assumptoin for general populace, a kind of liberal-lefty New Man approach (people as we want them to be not as they really are)
I completely agree, but I also wonder if the DNC chair was more proactive, better organised and tougher could they solve lots of their issues.
They can't guarantee to win primaries, but they could get donors, Obama and their best operatives to back a single under 70 moderate in lots of races which would tilt things in the favour of a single unified message.
The core issue is that both of DNC and RNC have limited real control in any legal sense - and in the end w/o that the control over the brand gets swept away.
I also think working class white women identify with Paula Jones more than Hilary, and Trump was able to exploit the complacency and Clinton-worship of the DNC live on TV. She looked relieved to be running against him to a degree that made me nervous at the time, to share two of my most conservative takes.
I would generally agree, except have you seen the national party apparatus as it is now? I can't imagine the Democratic party doing better with the people running that having more power. Now in the universe where that role means something, perhaps other people are running it. But then it becomes a question of how those people are chosen - and I have little confidence that the "groups" that are key Democratic constituencies now would make clearly better choices.
The RNC only has one problem, they are well organised and disciplined it is just the person on charge is lazy, indisciplined and doesn't care that much.
I don’t think it is that hard to come up with plausible strong general election candidates. The problem is them making it through the primary. Nikki Haley would have trounced Joe Biden in 2020.
But I think the key here is not Presidential campaigns. Absent shenanigans, and without knowing what weird things may happen, it's most likely a Democrat is the next POTUS.
But at the Senate level, it's likely that Democrats do not hold the Senate in any near time future. That's where the change needs to come, not in a better POTUS candidate, but in a better down ballot brand that reflects our actual federal political structure.
I don't think the Dems are favored to win the Senate. In order to do that they need to run the table on current "toss-up" states, Maine, Ohio, MI, and NC, and then take a very red state. Alaska or Texas.
Outside of NC and maybe MI, they could easily lose one or every one of the other races.
It's not just better candidates, the whole Dem brand is an anchor around candidates' necks. Bullock was viewed more favorably than Daines, but people knew if they voted for him it would help put the Dems in charge. When voters believe the idea of the Dems being in charge is so bad that they have to vote for the candidate they like less, you're sunk.
Hell, I'm old enough to remember when Mitt Romney was considered an out-of-touch, arrogant rich man who couldn't relate to the common voter, and that's why he lost.
Of course, he is a veritable Abraham Lincoln compared with what we have in the White House right now. *spits*
Ugh, yes. I am spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to deactivate Gemini in various places because its results are annoying to me. I want to use it only when I CHOOSE to use it.
It’s awful that Google has not only copied openAI’s plan to put clickbait into the end of every AI response, but they’ve also done it in the AI response to search queries, where it’s not even obvious how or where to type a follow up using that clickbait.
How do you like Kagi? I am about ready to bite the bullet and pay for it. Whenever I search for a hotel, musical venue, etc., tons not-direct-links (e.g. Trivago) come up before the links to the actual site. I figure the time and aggravation saved will be worth it.
It's good! The search product works well, though I was coming from DuckDuckGo so take that with a grain of salt. The base Kagi assistant also gives you access to quite a few good models through a standardized interface. Really you get out what you put into it; the custom search rankings, filters (especially for journal articles and forums), and learning the !/@ system take a bit of time but are worth it for power users.
When I use Google (Chrome, MacOS) there are several tabs to specify the kind of results I want. One is "AI Mode" another (seems to be the default) is "All."
In my experience, anyone who actually has a preference among models prefers Claude. The others are used by people who are sticking with some sort of default provided by their situation.
Even amongst employers Claude seems to be used by a kind of narrow population of people who are doing better off than most people who get AI paid for at work.
My wife is in charge of implementing AI stuff in a finance non-profit she uses Claude and the engineers do but most of the peons use copilot. I’ve heard more than one arrangement like this. I use copilot at work because it’s what the company pays for and it has the privacy features we need to put data into it.
But when i use GPT or Claude I’m often happier with the results.
At my (relatively large) company we generally only allow Claude for roles where we can trust people to not be idiots. It is easier to idiot proof Copilot (because of data loss prevention and some other things) and so it is the only one enabled by default for all employees. I'm not sure how widespread this is across the corporate world as a whole tho.
That plus you have to pay for Claude and copilot, and their main target market is programmers. Meta and Googles numbers are getting padded out by people using their AIs just from the chat window or search bar, I suspect if you only took people paying for Gemini Pro the slice would look very similar to Claude.
I’m (so far) using the free version of Claude and it’s working pretty well for me. Not writing code, just planning travel, looking at purchase options, very high-level research questions etc.
My company has copilot and I hate it, at least the way they have it set up, it’s just intrusive and annoying.
Claude is also going to be the choice of model for people that are interested in AI safety and writing software, which tends to be an upscale group for obvious reasons
I think that a decent number of people migrated from OpenAI to Anthropic due to the squabble with Hegseth. I suspect these people are disproportionately high-information and not fans of the Trump administration, which correlate with high incomes.
I'm suspecting they're not including the open source Llama models in that number. I mostly use Llama derivatives when I'm doing local but pretty sure there's no way of tracking that beyond unique downloads on Huggingface.
If you're a younger, male, ideologically normal Dem politician, wearing a suit is one of the factors that's most likely to inspire hatred from the left. These are people who perceive themselves as rebels raging against the machine, and a young man in a suit feels like a generational traitor. (Of course, wearing dadcore zips and things of that nature projects the same vibe and will inspire just as much hatred.)
But since Mamdani is a socialist, he can get away with suit-wearing and in fact benefit from how it softens his image with older normie voters. Not unlike Nixon going to China, or as Matt has written about in the past, how black Dems like Obama are better able to take moderate positions on AA.
But bottom line is that Matt gives the correct answer as "sport jacket with slacks or nice jeans and a shirt with more texture or pattern than you’d wear with a suit." And contra Matt, I don't think this is *that* hard to pull off. You don't have to be a fashion expert to do it - just go to Banana Republic.
Derek Guy was how I learned that if we wear coats without ties the coat should be a sport coat or blazer and not a suit. I admit to having occasionally worn a suit without a tie, but I stopped once Derek set me straight.
I grew up internalizing a lot of the rules of fashion that Derek Guy now dispenses as advice (as someone who wore a suit and other formal clothes quite a bit), but since branching out into the real world I have become more and more aware that essentially zero percent of people in the last couple decades come into adulthood with a comfortable handle on men’s sartorial rules. Derek Guy’s advice to this set is invaluable.
Isn't thar just good general sartorial advice, you should wear clothes that to try to address your weaknesses. Look casual if you are a lawyer, wear a suit if you are a plumber.
No. Like I don't think it would be a good idea for Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttigieg to go around wearing Fetterman-style hoodies and shorts. It only goes one way. As I said above, they should stop at the Banana Republic level of casualness.
i think you should dress for the role you’re trying to convey. in my client facing role as a software eng, we intentionally dress down in front of clients to message “we’re not like those stiff consultants who only deliver ppts”. in the same vein, a lawyer should try to dress as lawyerly as possible
or Todd Snyder or Buck Mason for a bit better quality, a little bit more expensive. and the color palette at Buck Mason is pretty much designed so that any one piece will go with almost any other piece from then. making it even easier for dudes.
But MattY is generally correct that considered casual dressing is significantly harder than suit-tie....though please please get a suit that fits.
I recommend to MY’s editors to use parentheses when introducing an unfamiliar acronym. For example, “registered voters (RV) and likely voters (LV)”. After you introduce the acronym, you can use it as you wish. The introduction of these acronyms should be in the text itself, and not require the reader to look at the small text within a figure. It’ll just help with readability.
"This person for whatever reason believed that a survey of GLP-1 users would reveal a lot of dissatisfaction"
It's the "for whatever reason" that I'm curious about. It's one thing to knowingly cater to the audience's preference for negativity, but it's another thing to be sucked in and that negativity to become one's worldview.
There is consensus reality and there is online clickbait doomerism and it's concerning that the too online have lost track of consensus reality.
I don't think, for example, that the author thought internally, "These things are amazing and I need to find a negative angle to get clicks." They thought exactly what they said - they expected negativity.
I'm not even sure that negativity would have been especially telling, honestly. Like assume you're a type-1 diabetic with a closed-loop insulin pump: keeping your blood sugar controlled automatically is pretty fucking great relative to the counterfactuals of either no treatment or monitoring plus injections, but the part where you also have to deal with the monitoring, care, and maintenance of an insulin pump is nevertheless extremely inconvenient *even granting* that it's a huge welfare win.
I don't know about that. I know a family of six and one kid was diagnosed with diabetes as a child back in the 50s and she died in her 30s after amputations, blindness, etc. Part of consensus reality is that understanding.
My point is just that "my revealed preference is obviously to engage in this behavior or transaction because it is strongly welfare-enhancing but, nevertheless, certain aspects of it are extremely irritating" is just the human condition. The fact that GLP-1s are extremely effective along a host of QoL dimensions wouldn't necessarily be expected to prevent people finding things to bitch about, basically because the hedonic treadmill exists. That doesn't mean that even people who had bad things to say would necessarily have preferred that GLP-1 drugs didn't exist or that they intended to go off them -- indeed *that* would have been genuinely surprising.
GLP-1 drugs seem to hit an inherent sense of "conservation of benefits" people have toward new technologies. There is a strong sense that new technologies can't actually be >90% beneficial, there must be drawbacks that we haven't discovered yet or aren't being published. There's also a sense that weight reflects on the morality of humans and losing weight without suffering is somehow an unethical or unfair shortcut.
(I write this every time they come up, but GLP-1 drugs are a huge miss by western governments. These drugs should be available at roughly the cost and convenience of a flu shot.)
I think that the shadow of the opioid crisis hangs over a lot of this discussion too. I think that has put people into a very skeptical mindset about any new drugs developed that seem “too good to be true”.
Agreed. And I think the negativity bias still plays a part here where something cannot simply be "good" or "mostly good". There has to be some hidden downside somewhere. I also think folks are trained to look for discrimination or inequality of outcomes wherever they might be, so there's also a feeling that even something mostly good for most people must be worse for marginalized groups in some way.
Ironically, the dissatisfaction most GLP-1 users probably face at the moment is the negative social/media response to their usage of a drug that otherwise improve their lives.
I was expecting Matt to write something like "if I had been born a couple of generations ago or any time prior, almost certainly my opinions on sexual morals, sexuality, and gender would be astonishingly retrograde by today's standards."
And no shade on Matt. I think this is true of all of us.
It's useful to remember that people in the past, as well as people in other societies today and people with less cosmopolitan politics here in the US, didn't reason themselves into bigotry from first principles; they inherited the ideas that were dominant in their culture. And we ourselves probably have moral blind spots we don't see.
This is true to a degree but can be overstated; a lot of enlightenment thinkers still read like liberals and progressives today. I don’t think it’s crazy for an educated progressive today to think they would’ve been Thoreau back then. Also, they had accepted homosexuality even in Ancient Greece.
They did not accept homosexuality in Ancient Greece in any way that we would understand today - there were no married gay couples back then. They did sanction certain same-sex sexual relationships that we would consider child abuse.
I was very much thinking about this as part of my top level comment about the Progressive Era, where that was much different than it is today. I would have also been curious if Matt would have been swept in by Prohibition, or stuck to his usual line of having only heavy Pigouvian taxes. (Or whatever it would have been termed back then since Pigou was just entering the scene.)
> I would have also been curious if Matt would have been swept in by Prohibition
Almost certainly yes. If you can talk yourself into prohibiting sports gambling based on the harms it presents in 2026, the harms of alcohol in 1926 were a couple orders of magnitude worse.
Blaming Obama for 2016 is a strange choice when Hillary Clinton is the more obvious target.
Obama still had high approval ratings (in the 50s) throughout 2016, vs Clinton's 2016 ratings were in the 40s -> "among the worst ever measured for presidential candidates" per Gallup.
I do think it is TOTALLY fair to blame the party apparatus that anointed Hillary! Bad plan, and I was saying so in 2015. (But before any Bernie fans think I'm on their side, no, the real question is how the field was precleared of "normal" contenders such that an unexpected socialist was even on stage as a possible option.)
Yes, though she probably would have been a one term President, and it's possible Trump would have been able to get the Republican nomination and beat her in 2020.
I suspect the governance strategy on economic issues would have been similar had he won in 2016. There's a really interesting clip from the leadup to the primary in 2016 of Biden talking about Sanders and he clearly had a pretty good sense of his appeal and seemed more favorable to him than other "establishment" Democrats (and side note, astonishing to compare his clarity and effectiveness as a speaker here to the end of his presidency): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li4PG7nmlyM. Some of the other stuff that the party shfited left on post-2016, maybe not though. I also suspect that the economic governance would have worked better politically and substantitvely, because he wouldn't have been dealing with the post-COVID inflation that made all leaders unpopular and at that point, the economy was still wildly understimulated.
That being said: even if in retrospect, he looks like a better general election candidate, I actually don't think he wins the primary if he runs. He wasn't even polling especially well as a hypothetical candidate (usually was in the 15-20% range, and was actually behind Sanders once he started getting more media attention). We saw from his previous (and even future) primary campaigns that he's not a great retail campaigner. I know some people say that if Biden was in the race, some of the more conservative or moderate support Bernie got that was likely primarily an anti-Hillary vote would have gone to him. But there were also a lot of Democratic primary voters that were quite receptive to party leader signals and Clinton had spent years locking up institutional party support (it's hard to imagine Clyburn coming to his rescue like in 2020). So it's likely that he isn't able to fully displace her, and then the better he does, the *more* likely it is Bernie wins because the "establishment" lane is split (this could be particularly relevant in Iowa, which was a nail-biter and an environment Biden proved he's not good enough at campaigning in to win).
I've also heard Matt point out on podcast appearances that navigating the gender politics of running against Clinton would be especially tough in this context (the universal establishment backing was especially strong among famous women in national politics, including more moderate ones that would theoretically be amenable to him). There was a lot of acrimony between Hillary and Bernie's camps about this, but Bernie, whatever you make of the merits of his positions, could legitimately say he had different positions and a different ideology than Clinton and he was running for that reason. What would Biden say? Even if the electability argument is accepted by most in retrospect, what would him actually making it look like? Just doing the Obama "you're likeable enough" debate moment over and over? I think the "Biden would have won" stuff is true if you get the ifs in place, but I don't see them lining up in the primary.
Well Obama basically anointed Hillary as his successor and convinced no one but Bernie to run against her, so blaming Hillary is sort of implicitly blaming Obama
Honestly it has been so long that I cannot remember - is that claim true? I don't recall it really. I mean obviously preferring her over Sanders, but did he really help clear the field?
Yeah, I've never seen reporting saying Obama talked anyone out of running, except some whispers that Biden got a message that Obama wouldn't immediately endorse him --- which would have been a negative endorsement given he was VP. But other than Hilary, Biden would have been the most obvious choice, and almost no sitting VP doesn't get the party's nomination if they want it. There was no other field to clear. One of either Biden or Hilary were going to be the nominee, anybody else would have been the longest of long shots, and known it.
I was a little bit involved in state level politics '08 -'16, and what a lot of people who make the claim about the nominating process being rigged don't understand is just how hard Clinton worked during that time to shore up support for herself among state level democrats. If you were active at all back then you knew that Hilary, and Bill as her proxy, always showed up when you needed them. Whether it was to headline a rubber chicken fundraiser in the dead of winter, or get on the local news by appearing at a rally, or whatever it was you needed to bump up support, they were willing to show up to do the grind of getting people and dollars to support you and turn out to vote for you.
Neither Bernie nor anyone else had been putting in that kind of ground work for eight years, and that's why when actual primary day rolled around, actual democratic primary voters pulled the lever for the person they knew and respected.
I mean, looking into things that could have been done differently by Clinton or Democrats makes some sense. Blaming them for the brain rot that has occupied Republicans feels very misguided, to me.
Worse, it seems far more likely to spread some rot into Democrats than it is to address any actual problems.
On the generic ballot, Matt ignores the obvious point that the generic ballot is generic, and for lots of reasons Democrats still aren’t that popular. But when people come to pull the lever for a specific candidate, it’s a different ballgame. I wonder if part of the reason for the disconnect between Trump’s plummeting approval ratings and the relatively close generic ballot is that although Trump is technically a Republican he’s really just Trump, sui generis party. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s quite a few people who don’t connect Trump and the Republicans nearly as closely as, for example they associate Kamala Harris and the Democrats.
Thank you very much for answering my question, Matt! I perhaps should not have been surprised that you feel that you would stand firm to your takes at any point in history.
That 1968 analysis is good. The one period I was really thinking of soon after I submitted that question is if you were born soon after the Civil War, and were thrust right into the transition from the Gilded Age into the Progressive Era. I could have seen you fit in with all kinds of Progressive policy. I'm guessing you would have especially liked what Henry George had to say, of course, and I would have been curious how much you would have been swayed by the trust busting mentality and the social causes of that time.
Given his ancestry, had Matt come of age after 1900, he either would have been a socialist agitator in New York or rolling cigars in Ybor City, Florida.
The remaining question about 1968 is whether MY would have gone "Clean for Gene" in the New Hampshire primary -- supporting the principled anti-war candidate but dressing in a suit and tie with short hair so as not to offend the moderate voters...
Once again, people should just wear whatever they feel most comfortable in, and care much less about what others look like. If Zohran Mamdani likes his tie, great. If others don't for themselves, also great.
While of course it’s a free country, this is the advice I would give politicians that I want to lose while I would absolutely tell politicians I want to win to spend more time that they currently do on picking outfits that improve their public perception. Usually this means more conformance with social norms not less.
Well, if we're talking about literal books, the author doesn't choose the cover and often not even the title, but when it comes to fashion, yes, agreed.
Completely agree. People expect male politicians to dress in a manner that exudes dull competence. Barack Obama and his tan suit might be taken as an exception here, but I think he benefitted from a) being very handsome by politician standards, and b) 'latitude in fashion choices' being one of the very few areas in which African American men are at an advantage over white ones in societal regard.
Ronald Reagan also wore brown and tan suits...at certain times of year and for specific occasions. He was also unquestionably the best-dressed president since at least JFK.
I don't think it is controversial to say that how you dress is a major signal to others. Is why we have costumes in theater, as an easy example.
To that end, for very public jobs, it shouldn't be controversial that people expect certain behavior from people based on how they dress.
It feels lame that the advice should be "dress similar to the popular character that you want to be seen as" for most folks. But, there you go.
Should you relegate someone to only their appearance? Of course not. But that is a very different thing than advising people to dress the part they want to play.
It never fails to confuse me that the same people complaining about progressives being woke scolds policing people’s word choices will all hype each other up about policing people’s clothing choices.
Agreed. It doesn't matter how nice it is, or how perfectly it fits, if you feel miserable in it, you'll look miserable in it.
Also, match the outfit to the activity. Making a speech, standing on a stage, walking and shaking hands? Wear a nice-fitting suit and tie, which emphasizes movement and action, draws the eye up and down, and makes you look taller, thinner, and broad-shouldered. Sitting in an armchair for a roundtable discussion? Ditch the tie, which will bunch up and make you look shorter, and go with a blazer/sport coat and non-matching slacks, chinos, or jeans. Make sure the jacket isn't too broad in the shoulders, or you'll look like you're shrinking into it. And make sure your clothes contrast with the upholstery. If you need a pop of color, get a pocket square.
A small correction to the intro on AI usage - this shows usage of AI *services*, not models. Copilot is a service (actually an array of not-very-related related services) that gives users access to multiple models including the Claude family and GPT family
“The second is that not only does the audience love negative stories, it also loves to express negativity about the media. So any time the audience discovers that journalists are biased toward seeking out negative stories, it likes to dunk on the media for being biased. But that bias is simply journalists reflecting back the audience’s own bias.”
I will say that, while I am someone that loves to dunk on the media for excessive negativity, I both click on and directly financially support (shout out to Tim Lee’s “Understanding AI”) media that presents positive stories about science and technology. I’m sure I’m not representative of the public at large, but I felt compelled to mention it as I was pretty negative on the media in the replies of that question.
Can I suggest you’re really creating a “Heads I win”/“Tails you lose” framing of the Democrats political chances in 2026 and 2028? So if Dems don’t win both the House and the Senate, we should be disappointed, but if they do take both chambers that creates a danger of Dems being complacent and not nominating someone more moderate in 2028 who may turn off casual voters. So basically no matter what happens the “Dems in Disarray” headline is ready to go mid November.
I should also note that the questioner brought up Nate Silver and per his last post it’s not actually all that clear the Dems generic ballot lead is all that alarming or that out of line with current Presidential approval rating. In fact it seems to be almost exactly where it should be based on his analysis. Now I don’t want Dems to “meet” expectations, I want them to exceed. Especially given the realities of the senate map. But no it’s not actually true that (as of now) Dems are underperforming.
It really is amazing to me how much “Dems in disarray” mindset just will never die.
I dunno. Maybe I'm just pessimistic this morning but to me the bar is something like the 111th Congress. The Republicans were in a very bad moment then which of course helped but they were also still a lot more 'normal' as a political party. And yet no serious person thinks thats on the horizon, with the Senate super majority, etc. We shouldn't be afraid to ask why that is or to kid ourselves about why something that was achievable not that long ago no longer is.
I’ll repeat. Meeting expectations based purely on Nate’s analysis of previous midterms is not my bar. I want to exceed it! So I agree.
But read Matt’s answer. It’s basically even if Dems over perform the 111th Congress if it doesn’t involve Dems moderating by a significant degree it’s basically a failure because of the dangers posed in 2028. In other words, he’s making a version of the “pundit fallacy” argument; unless Dems wins using exactly the strategy I propose it must be a failure.
I guess I read him differently. And look if that level of blowout happens then I'll agree, MY's senses (and my own) were off and it's very much worth looking at why. But even if the Democrats do really well within more plausible parameters, say a 20 vote majority in the house (current projections I see show something like a 15 or 16 vote majority) and an even less probable 2 or 3 vote majority in the Senate I think it will be fairly read as a stronger than anticipated backlash to Trump, but not a fix to the structural problems facing the party.
Dems in Disarray can never be wrong. It is the universal constant of American politics. To admit that it might be wrong is to violate the central tenet of reactionary centrism.
Outstanding take on Edinburgh, Matt. Street design matters so much, and greenfield development needs to get it right, because it's so extremely difficult to change after it's established. The huge messes of spaghetti style suburbia are going to haunt so much of America for a long time.
Feels like Edinburgh is an odd choice for that idea? The streets were not original to the area and there are some interesting underground segments that speak more to how long the area has been developed.
Honestly, take any successful city and you are likely to find areas that have been built and rebuilt over the years. Money tends to linger in areas that provide natural connections to commerce.
Rebuilding is expensive. But so is building, all told. And the incentives are to double down on successful sites. Of course, this is easier if you don't have regulations preventing it. This was even true in the US. Just look up Spite Mounds in Seattle.
FWIW, and I am not saying this disqualifies him or anything, but I know Matt is very concerned about trans stuff taking down the party and Wiener is very likely the single farthest left politician on trans issues with any prominence in the entire party. He believes in and writes bills that seriously espouse all the positions Matt finds extreme.
So there's a serious tradeoff with him, from Matt's perspective.
Sam asks: "don’t they kind of have a point that Obama’s choices led to Trump?"
The most substantial choice Obama made that "led to Trump" was repeatedly insulting him at the 2011 White House Correspondent's Dinner. The man has very thin skin and holds onto personal grievances like a mother clutching her baby.
A pretty embarrassing beginning to trump’s hero’s journey arc.
That, and being black. Big mistake on his part.
I have never understood that argument, Trump did worse than Romney among White voters, the swing that win him the election was from Black and Latino voters.
That's a very misleading statement - white working-class voters swung heavily towards Trump, while black turnout fell substantially. But even then: It's obviously true that Republicans lost their minds over the president being Black, which obviously helped the racist guy spinning birth certificate theories secure the Republican nomination. Like, what are we even talking about?
People are weird and complicated but that theory just doesn't work, they loved birthirism when Herman Cain did it and briefly he was the leader of the GOP field. Trump's appeal was to Ohio working class it was less effective in the South and most obviously he won over people who backed Obama twice.
Again: I'm talking about his NOMINATION
Is your assertion that birtherism can't be racist if some black people engaged in it? Or is it that they would willing to vote for a black person doing birtherism, so that is proof they aren't racist?
Herman Cain was a minstrel
I thought the largest portion of that "swing" was the Black vote not turning out for Democrats?
That said, the root of the claim is more that Republican media really doubled down on identity politics. Amazingly, they got to do so while claiming that it was Democrats that were identity focused. In large because the liberal scene has a hard time talking about color politics.
It's more about how Trump personally found Obama's blackness as a personal insult.
yeah huge unforced error imo
Thanks Obama!
A bigger factor is Clinton IMO. She ran a bad campaign and was a bad candidate and if she had done just a little bit better, Trump’s political ambitions would have been strangled in the crib.
Yea, Clinton sucking is much more of a contributing factor than anything Obama did, unless you want to say he should have stepped aside for Hillary.
This whole "the president is a failure if they're not followed by a third term" idea makes me want to set myself on fire. By this absurd litmus test, literally the only successful US president since WW2 was Ronald Reagan.
Yes, if the ghost of FDR had appeared to you on election night in 2012 and said "Obama will win but in four years the GOP will win the EC but lose the popular vote because of a economic slowdown and a 'time for a change' among many voters" you would have been like "Yeah that sounds like a very plausible outcome."
The overall trend is quite normal even if nominating a know nothing game show host is pretty atypical, but it turns out candidate effects in presidential elections are small.
This is also my analysis on 2016. Clinton was the wrong fit for the moment for a bunch of reasons that have been recounted ad nauseum but the natural, thermostatic forces against any Democrat may have been overwhelming. The only thing that made it interesting was the nomination by the GOP of a person understood as a totally non-serious candidate, the media coronation of Clinton on that basis, followed by an eked out "upset" in the electoral college.
One of my unproven and maybe unprovable theories is that almost everything thats happened since has been based on really crazy mis- and/or over interpretations of what happened in that election, and that it's why both parties are in the cellar with the American public.
As Matt liked to say back when, O'Malley would have won: https://cnsmaryland.org/2012/02/01/omalley-goes-shirtless-for-polar-bear-plunge/
Making Hillary Clinton Secretary of State and supporting her nomination were both mistakes President Obama made
I think it was more her mistake in taking an executive post (other than governor of NY which, of course wasn’t in the cards).
Also let's give some credit to the GOP primary field which was somehow both comically too crowded and also couldn't produce a single decent alternative to Trump.
(I clapped)
Trump's skin is so think you can see the orange congealed fat. It's like an angry pot of chili you left in the fridge overnight.
I think that once Obama won reelection after then, unfortunately the results were baked in. Hillary Clinton was probably going to be the nominee even if Obama froze her out of his administration or chosen a different VP. "Obama losing to Romney to stop the rise of Trump" would have been outlandish to say back then, but here we are, on this terrible timeline.
They weren't exactly backed in, Clinton only needed to win over an extra 0.37% of Wisconsin voters and Trump would never happen, it isn't hard to imagine a world where a more competent Clinton or an alternative candidate would be able to do that.
While I don’t per se think it was the wrong decision on his part, it seems pretty obvious in retrospect that Comey’s letter to Congress on the Weiner laptop directly tipped the election to Trump. I suppose you could blame Rep. Jason Chaffetz for releasing the letter, but that should have been expected by Comey
People have been grappling with Trump's 2016 victory for a decade now, looking in vain for the One True Reason it happened.
The truth is there are a half dozen things that—had any one of which gone differently—would have resulted in a different outcome. That's the way it is with close elections.
Of course many different things could have tipped the election, but Comey’s letter was the highest impact (a roughly 2 point swing in opinion polling following it), closest to the election, and in the hands of essentially a single individual. I think it makes sense to highlight it.
>...but Comey’s letter was the highest impact<
That's the part I think is questionable. It was the most easily measurable thing, sure, and it was the latest. But what if:
(1) Hillary chooses Bernie as her running mate? or
(2) Bernie exits the nomination fight a month earlier and campaigns hard for the ticket? or
(3) Hillary listens to campaign advisers urging her to spend more time in the Midwest? or
(4) She follows the time-honored general election playbook of tacking to the center? or
(5) Chinese monetary policy in 2015-2016 is more expansionary? or
(6) Jill Stein doesn't run? or
(7)
There are just so many things that could have swung that election. Clinton won the popular vote; she just needed to win it by a VERY slightly larger margin. Given the weakness of their nominee, the GOP needed everything to go perfectly. And that's what they got.
That works both ways, without the Access Hollywood tape Trump would probably be leading in the polls in October and would have more support from Republican Grandees.
And most were boring and non-central to Trumpism, like moderation on Medicare and Social Security.
The election was so close that basically any of those little things not happening would’ve likely been enough to tip it towards her.
I don’t see how it wasn’t the wrong decision. Completely setting aside the electoral consequences, I still believe it was improper and inconsistent on his part.
People are going to find this annoying, but this likely happens in a scenario where Bernie never runs and Clinton is in fact coronated.
I really don't buy this at all. Trump winning the nomination was an incredibly close thing* and he nearly lost it several times and was highly dependent on things like winner take all/most delegate rules, Cruz winning Iowa, Kasich refusing to drop out etc etc. Same with the general election: there's a really strong argument the outcome was just about the Comey Letter which of course Comey didn't have to send right before E-day: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/
*see the Duke of Wellington on Waterloo etc etc
I think the most substantial thing Obama did that led to Trump was defeating John McCain and Mitt Romney. Both of those were moderate-vibed, and the Fox-poisoned Republican base lost faith in the idea of moderating to win as a result.
But beating his election opponents was literally Obama’s job. It makes no sense to blame him. If you want to blame any Democrat blame Hillary, whose job it was to beat Trump.
I mean agree but I actually think the most important part of that night as far as what it told us about the future is something I learned on the “Central Air” podcast; he was there as a guest of the Washington Post. Talk about a “brown M&M’s” moment as far as MSM culpability in Trumps rise.
That, and appointing Jim Comey.
It was such a delicious burn that it was worth Trump becoming President and everything that has happened since.
I think this is overblown. Trump didn’t decide to run for president because Obama said he won’t be president. Obama said Trump won’t be president because Trump had said he’s going to run for president (for a third time).
This is grotesquely overshadowed by the handling of Hillary Clinton's emails by the Obama DOJ, it was the dumpster fire that wouldn't quit for the last three weeks of the campaign. Nipping that in the bud early, literally skipping to the end where Comey said "nothing here!" Would have been a heroic intervention by Obama, even if horrifically illiberal (in the mildest possible way, but severe by their standards nonetheless). Trump didn't expect to win, was surprised to win, and the emails where the decisive factor.
This I think is very important: "My interpretation is that in a profound way, progressive anger at the establishment is actually driven by complacency. They believe Trump and the G.O.P. are so weak that it’s almost trivially easy to beat them, and Democrats should be trying harder to shoot the moon on governance after they win. I don’t think that this is correct. I think the base case is that Republicans hold the Senate, expand their control over the judiciary, and head into a jump ball of a 2028 election with maps skewed in their favor, a fundraising edge, and an increasingly consolidated Musk/Ellison media sphere."
Unless and until Democrats can become broadly competitive geographically in a way something like the 80s-90s (roughly) where they could still compete with farmers etc, being structurally limited to urbane educated urbanites and sub-urbanite geography is a long-term weakness that will lead to repeats of Biden-2020 type momentary 'storm-surges' that deceive the activist class into thinking they are achieving their pet agenda, that the water level -to use my own dumb analogy- is permanently higher but it's really just a storm-surge (the storm being reaction against Trumpy overreach) and then fall backs
Going to yes-and: “trivially easy to beat them AND the reason they aren’t beating them with the obvious left-wing economic message I prefer is because the Democratic establishment is all corrupt and in hock to its donors.”
It isn't that hard to beat the GOP or for the Republicans to beat the Democrats. Both sides are run pretty incomenpletely.
A candidate of the calibre of Obama, Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Mitt Romney would have won any of the last three elections easily.
Well... I think there is a fundamental analytical error to use the phrase "are run pretty incompetently" as this incorrectly embeds the idea that the sides are "run" as in managed in any coherent sense.
Since the ill-considered "reforms" from 1970s onwards have essentially emptied parties of any kind of real central control at all, what we see as parties are just big Brand Names that are out in the wild, out of control of their supposed brand owners.
I am personally of a view that the 1970s onwards reforms, more "democratic" primaries, other naive "more transparency" (as like the naive idealist actions on abstractions making "pork" in bills harder) were gross mistakes that mistook intellectuals idealised actors for something real (and mistaking the habits and agendas of the political obsessives [for the self-flattering, "high information voters"] as fundamental assumptoin for general populace, a kind of liberal-lefty New Man approach (people as we want them to be not as they really are)
I completely agree, but I also wonder if the DNC chair was more proactive, better organised and tougher could they solve lots of their issues.
They can't guarantee to win primaries, but they could get donors, Obama and their best operatives to back a single under 70 moderate in lots of races which would tilt things in the favour of a single unified message.
The core issue is that both of DNC and RNC have limited real control in any legal sense - and in the end w/o that the control over the brand gets swept away.
They shouldn't need legal control, they should be able to exert influence. They are politicians.
If one does not have legal controls, one is a mere influencer and mere influencers are rolled all the time.
What "should be" is how early stage investors get ripped off. Legal levers or it's all Pinky Promises.
See Trump takeover.
I also think working class white women identify with Paula Jones more than Hilary, and Trump was able to exploit the complacency and Clinton-worship of the DNC live on TV. She looked relieved to be running against him to a degree that made me nervous at the time, to share two of my most conservative takes.
I would generally agree, except have you seen the national party apparatus as it is now? I can't imagine the Democratic party doing better with the people running that having more power. Now in the universe where that role means something, perhaps other people are running it. But then it becomes a question of how those people are chosen - and I have little confidence that the "groups" that are key Democratic constituencies now would make clearly better choices.
The apparatus creates the incentives.
There is no actual power nor structure, there are old skeletons and marketing machines.
We have now the results of the 70s-80s onwards
More succinctly, President Trump is a result of too much democracy.
Agreed. In particular campaign finance reform crippled the parties
The RNC only has one problem, they are well organised and disciplined it is just the person on charge is lazy, indisciplined and doesn't care that much.
I don’t think it is that hard to come up with plausible strong general election candidates. The problem is them making it through the primary. Nikki Haley would have trounced Joe Biden in 2020.
But I think the key here is not Presidential campaigns. Absent shenanigans, and without knowing what weird things may happen, it's most likely a Democrat is the next POTUS.
But at the Senate level, it's likely that Democrats do not hold the Senate in any near time future. That's where the change needs to come, not in a better POTUS candidate, but in a better down ballot brand that reflects our actual federal political structure.
The DNC should be much better at recruitment in Red states, that is their job. The Dems are favourites to win the senate so it isn't that impossible.
I don't think the Dems are favored to win the Senate. In order to do that they need to run the table on current "toss-up" states, Maine, Ohio, MI, and NC, and then take a very red state. Alaska or Texas.
Outside of NC and maybe MI, they could easily lose one or every one of the other races.
Polymarket says they have a 53% chance at the moment.
Coin flip in other words.
(Pedantic: DSCC)
It's not just better candidates, the whole Dem brand is an anchor around candidates' necks. Bullock was viewed more favorably than Daines, but people knew if they voted for him it would help put the Dems in charge. When voters believe the idea of the Dems being in charge is so bad that they have to vote for the candidate they like less, you're sunk.
yes. regional geography attention, otherwise one is in urbane (sub)urbanite ghettoes railing about the Fox News dupes... (and other cope explanations)
Hell, I'm old enough to remember when Mitt Romney was considered an out-of-touch, arrogant rich man who couldn't relate to the common voter, and that's why he lost.
Of course, he is a veritable Abraham Lincoln compared with what we have in the White House right now. *spits*
“Claude skewing more upscale and Meta skewing more downscale”
It probably signifies Claude is used by well off people employers.
Gpt is definitely the average Joe’s google replacement
Nah, Gemini. Because it pops up first in a google search
And Meta and Grok and Gemini are embedded into things people use for free regularly.
Ugh, yes. I am spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to deactivate Gemini in various places because its results are annoying to me. I want to use it only when I CHOOSE to use it.
It’s awful that Google has not only copied openAI’s plan to put clickbait into the end of every AI response, but they’ve also done it in the AI response to search queries, where it’s not even obvious how or where to type a follow up using that clickbait.
Kagi search will only show you an AI response when you end the query in a question mark, which is how it should be.
How do you like Kagi? I am about ready to bite the bullet and pay for it. Whenever I search for a hotel, musical venue, etc., tons not-direct-links (e.g. Trivago) come up before the links to the actual site. I figure the time and aggravation saved will be worth it.
It's good! The search product works well, though I was coming from DuckDuckGo so take that with a grain of salt. The base Kagi assistant also gives you access to quite a few good models through a standardized interface. Really you get out what you put into it; the custom search rankings, filters (especially for journal articles and forums), and learning the !/@ system take a bit of time but are worth it for power users.
What is Kagi? A paid search tool?
Yes. No ads, no sponsored results, no trackers, a promise that the most relevant results will be at the top.
When I use Google (Chrome, MacOS) there are several tabs to specify the kind of results I want. One is "AI Mode" another (seems to be the default) is "All."
Huh, I don't get that when I use Google, but I have turned off AI results for general searches. Unfortunately, they keep popping up elsewhere. Grr.
I use Gemini simply because I have a free enterprise version via my employer.
In my experience, anyone who actually has a preference among models prefers Claude. The others are used by people who are sticking with some sort of default provided by their situation.
Sadly GPT is better at math, so I am forced to interact with its terrible personality
Right, I should have mentioned that exception - if you want to prove a theorem you’ll use ChatGPT, but you won’t prefer it.
Even amongst employers Claude seems to be used by a kind of narrow population of people who are doing better off than most people who get AI paid for at work.
My wife is in charge of implementing AI stuff in a finance non-profit she uses Claude and the engineers do but most of the peons use copilot. I’ve heard more than one arrangement like this. I use copilot at work because it’s what the company pays for and it has the privacy features we need to put data into it.
But when i use GPT or Claude I’m often happier with the results.
At my (relatively large) company we generally only allow Claude for roles where we can trust people to not be idiots. It is easier to idiot proof Copilot (because of data loss prevention and some other things) and so it is the only one enabled by default for all employees. I'm not sure how widespread this is across the corporate world as a whole tho.
same for copilot - i use it fairly regularly but only because my employer pays for the enterprise version
That plus you have to pay for Claude and copilot, and their main target market is programmers. Meta and Googles numbers are getting padded out by people using their AIs just from the chat window or search bar, I suspect if you only took people paying for Gemini Pro the slice would look very similar to Claude.
I’m (so far) using the free version of Claude and it’s working pretty well for me. Not writing code, just planning travel, looking at purchase options, very high-level research questions etc.
My company has copilot and I hate it, at least the way they have it set up, it’s just intrusive and annoying.
Claude is also going to be the choice of model for people that are interested in AI safety and writing software, which tends to be an upscale group for obvious reasons
I think that a decent number of people migrated from OpenAI to Anthropic due to the squabble with Hegseth. I suspect these people are disproportionately high-information and not fans of the Trump administration, which correlate with high incomes.
Same goes for Copilot.
I'm suspecting they're not including the open source Llama models in that number. I mostly use Llama derivatives when I'm doing local but pretty sure there's no way of tracking that beyond unique downloads on Huggingface.
The suit-and-tie answer is great. I've commented on related issues before. https://www.slowboring.com/p/aoc-deserved-the-oversight-job/comment/82432666 -- https://www.slowboring.com/p/friday-thread-bd7/comment/102366566
If you're a younger, male, ideologically normal Dem politician, wearing a suit is one of the factors that's most likely to inspire hatred from the left. These are people who perceive themselves as rebels raging against the machine, and a young man in a suit feels like a generational traitor. (Of course, wearing dadcore zips and things of that nature projects the same vibe and will inspire just as much hatred.)
But since Mamdani is a socialist, he can get away with suit-wearing and in fact benefit from how it softens his image with older normie voters. Not unlike Nixon going to China, or as Matt has written about in the past, how black Dems like Obama are better able to take moderate positions on AA.
But bottom line is that Matt gives the correct answer as "sport jacket with slacks or nice jeans and a shirt with more texture or pattern than you’d wear with a suit." And contra Matt, I don't think this is *that* hard to pull off. You don't have to be a fashion expert to do it - just go to Banana Republic.
Derek Guy was how I learned that if we wear coats without ties the coat should be a sport coat or blazer and not a suit. I admit to having occasionally worn a suit without a tie, but I stopped once Derek set me straight.
I grew up internalizing a lot of the rules of fashion that Derek Guy now dispenses as advice (as someone who wore a suit and other formal clothes quite a bit), but since branching out into the real world I have become more and more aware that essentially zero percent of people in the last couple decades come into adulthood with a comfortable handle on men’s sartorial rules. Derek Guy’s advice to this set is invaluable.
likewise lol
Isn't thar just good general sartorial advice, you should wear clothes that to try to address your weaknesses. Look casual if you are a lawyer, wear a suit if you are a plumber.
No. Like I don't think it would be a good idea for Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttigieg to go around wearing Fetterman-style hoodies and shorts. It only goes one way. As I said above, they should stop at the Banana Republic level of casualness.
No. Double down on your strengths. People definitely prefer to spend money on the well-dressed lawyer. It ain't close.
i think you should dress for the role you’re trying to convey. in my client facing role as a software eng, we intentionally dress down in front of clients to message “we’re not like those stiff consultants who only deliver ppts”. in the same vein, a lawyer should try to dress as lawyerly as possible
or Todd Snyder or Buck Mason for a bit better quality, a little bit more expensive. and the color palette at Buck Mason is pretty much designed so that any one piece will go with almost any other piece from then. making it even easier for dudes.
But MattY is generally correct that considered casual dressing is significantly harder than suit-tie....though please please get a suit that fits.
I recommend to MY’s editors to use parentheses when introducing an unfamiliar acronym. For example, “registered voters (RV) and likely voters (LV)”. After you introduce the acronym, you can use it as you wish. The introduction of these acronyms should be in the text itself, and not require the reader to look at the small text within a figure. It’ll just help with readability.
"This person for whatever reason believed that a survey of GLP-1 users would reveal a lot of dissatisfaction"
It's the "for whatever reason" that I'm curious about. It's one thing to knowingly cater to the audience's preference for negativity, but it's another thing to be sucked in and that negativity to become one's worldview.
There is consensus reality and there is online clickbait doomerism and it's concerning that the too online have lost track of consensus reality.
I don't think, for example, that the author thought internally, "These things are amazing and I need to find a negative angle to get clicks." They thought exactly what they said - they expected negativity.
I'm not even sure that negativity would have been especially telling, honestly. Like assume you're a type-1 diabetic with a closed-loop insulin pump: keeping your blood sugar controlled automatically is pretty fucking great relative to the counterfactuals of either no treatment or monitoring plus injections, but the part where you also have to deal with the monitoring, care, and maintenance of an insulin pump is nevertheless extremely inconvenient *even granting* that it's a huge welfare win.
I don't know about that. I know a family of six and one kid was diagnosed with diabetes as a child back in the 50s and she died in her 30s after amputations, blindness, etc. Part of consensus reality is that understanding.
My point is just that "my revealed preference is obviously to engage in this behavior or transaction because it is strongly welfare-enhancing but, nevertheless, certain aspects of it are extremely irritating" is just the human condition. The fact that GLP-1s are extremely effective along a host of QoL dimensions wouldn't necessarily be expected to prevent people finding things to bitch about, basically because the hedonic treadmill exists. That doesn't mean that even people who had bad things to say would necessarily have preferred that GLP-1 drugs didn't exist or that they intended to go off them -- indeed *that* would have been genuinely surprising.
GLP-1 drugs seem to hit an inherent sense of "conservation of benefits" people have toward new technologies. There is a strong sense that new technologies can't actually be >90% beneficial, there must be drawbacks that we haven't discovered yet or aren't being published. There's also a sense that weight reflects on the morality of humans and losing weight without suffering is somehow an unethical or unfair shortcut.
(I write this every time they come up, but GLP-1 drugs are a huge miss by western governments. These drugs should be available at roughly the cost and convenience of a flu shot.)
I think that the shadow of the opioid crisis hangs over a lot of this discussion too. I think that has put people into a very skeptical mindset about any new drugs developed that seem “too good to be true”.
Agreed. And I think the negativity bias still plays a part here where something cannot simply be "good" or "mostly good". There has to be some hidden downside somewhere. I also think folks are trained to look for discrimination or inequality of outcomes wherever they might be, so there's also a feeling that even something mostly good for most people must be worse for marginalized groups in some way.
Ironically, the dissatisfaction most GLP-1 users probably face at the moment is the negative social/media response to their usage of a drug that otherwise improve their lives.
I was expecting Matt to write something like "if I had been born a couple of generations ago or any time prior, almost certainly my opinions on sexual morals, sexuality, and gender would be astonishingly retrograde by today's standards."
And no shade on Matt. I think this is true of all of us.
It's useful to remember that people in the past, as well as people in other societies today and people with less cosmopolitan politics here in the US, didn't reason themselves into bigotry from first principles; they inherited the ideas that were dominant in their culture. And we ourselves probably have moral blind spots we don't see.
This is true to a degree but can be overstated; a lot of enlightenment thinkers still read like liberals and progressives today. I don’t think it’s crazy for an educated progressive today to think they would’ve been Thoreau back then. Also, they had accepted homosexuality even in Ancient Greece.
Age gap relationships, even.
Just plain old pederasty which carried on in the Abbasid and Ottoman periods as well. Just read about Gide and Wild in Algiers.
Crazy that we just let Grover Cleveland be president, but even at that Trump is worse
They did not accept homosexuality in Ancient Greece in any way that we would understand today - there were no married gay couples back then. They did sanction certain same-sex sexual relationships that we would consider child abuse.
Hell, Michel de Montaigne reads like a pretty modern guy; you can imagine many of them being adaptable to modern mores, to an extent.
Still it's sensible not to take this too far. We all share the prejudices of our time, but some of us just less so.
I was very much thinking about this as part of my top level comment about the Progressive Era, where that was much different than it is today. I would have also been curious if Matt would have been swept in by Prohibition, or stuck to his usual line of having only heavy Pigouvian taxes. (Or whatever it would have been termed back then since Pigou was just entering the scene.)
> I would have also been curious if Matt would have been swept in by Prohibition
Almost certainly yes. If you can talk yourself into prohibiting sports gambling based on the harms it presents in 2026, the harms of alcohol in 1926 were a couple orders of magnitude worse.
Difference being we had prohibition of gambling in most places only a few years ago and that was totally fine
There were cultural elements to Prohibition that might have also been mitigating factors for Matt, though.
Blaming Obama for 2016 is a strange choice when Hillary Clinton is the more obvious target.
Obama still had high approval ratings (in the 50s) throughout 2016, vs Clinton's 2016 ratings were in the 40s -> "among the worst ever measured for presidential candidates" per Gallup.
I do think it is TOTALLY fair to blame the party apparatus that anointed Hillary! Bad plan, and I was saying so in 2015. (But before any Bernie fans think I'm on their side, no, the real question is how the field was precleared of "normal" contenders such that an unexpected socialist was even on stage as a possible option.)
Clinton was a bad candidate and if she was just a little less bad, Trump would have lost and the last decade would be far different.
say it with me, friends: "Martin O'Malley would have won!"
Yes, though she probably would have been a one term President, and it's possible Trump would have been able to get the Republican nomination and beat her in 2020.
Yes I think Biden would have won in 2016 and probably governed differently too
I suspect the governance strategy on economic issues would have been similar had he won in 2016. There's a really interesting clip from the leadup to the primary in 2016 of Biden talking about Sanders and he clearly had a pretty good sense of his appeal and seemed more favorable to him than other "establishment" Democrats (and side note, astonishing to compare his clarity and effectiveness as a speaker here to the end of his presidency): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li4PG7nmlyM. Some of the other stuff that the party shfited left on post-2016, maybe not though. I also suspect that the economic governance would have worked better politically and substantitvely, because he wouldn't have been dealing with the post-COVID inflation that made all leaders unpopular and at that point, the economy was still wildly understimulated.
That being said: even if in retrospect, he looks like a better general election candidate, I actually don't think he wins the primary if he runs. He wasn't even polling especially well as a hypothetical candidate (usually was in the 15-20% range, and was actually behind Sanders once he started getting more media attention). We saw from his previous (and even future) primary campaigns that he's not a great retail campaigner. I know some people say that if Biden was in the race, some of the more conservative or moderate support Bernie got that was likely primarily an anti-Hillary vote would have gone to him. But there were also a lot of Democratic primary voters that were quite receptive to party leader signals and Clinton had spent years locking up institutional party support (it's hard to imagine Clyburn coming to his rescue like in 2020). So it's likely that he isn't able to fully displace her, and then the better he does, the *more* likely it is Bernie wins because the "establishment" lane is split (this could be particularly relevant in Iowa, which was a nail-biter and an environment Biden proved he's not good enough at campaigning in to win).
I've also heard Matt point out on podcast appearances that navigating the gender politics of running against Clinton would be especially tough in this context (the universal establishment backing was especially strong among famous women in national politics, including more moderate ones that would theoretically be amenable to him). There was a lot of acrimony between Hillary and Bernie's camps about this, but Bernie, whatever you make of the merits of his positions, could legitimately say he had different positions and a different ideology than Clinton and he was running for that reason. What would Biden say? Even if the electability argument is accepted by most in retrospect, what would him actually making it look like? Just doing the Obama "you're likeable enough" debate moment over and over? I think the "Biden would have won" stuff is true if you get the ifs in place, but I don't see them lining up in the primary.
You make a lot of excellent points. I don't know if biden could have beat hillary in the primary.
But i'm almost certain he would have beat trump in the general election in twenty sixteen
He just didn't have as many negatives as hillary did
which was basically the Biden 2020 campaign & it worked
Well Obama basically anointed Hillary as his successor and convinced no one but Bernie to run against her, so blaming Hillary is sort of implicitly blaming Obama
Honestly it has been so long that I cannot remember - is that claim true? I don't recall it really. I mean obviously preferring her over Sanders, but did he really help clear the field?
This seems a balanced take: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/obama-hillary-clinton-endorsement-224153
Anyhow, let's still note this is not against Obama's policies, and the high support Obama & his policies had while he was in office.
Yeah, I've never seen reporting saying Obama talked anyone out of running, except some whispers that Biden got a message that Obama wouldn't immediately endorse him --- which would have been a negative endorsement given he was VP. But other than Hilary, Biden would have been the most obvious choice, and almost no sitting VP doesn't get the party's nomination if they want it. There was no other field to clear. One of either Biden or Hilary were going to be the nominee, anybody else would have been the longest of long shots, and known it.
I was a little bit involved in state level politics '08 -'16, and what a lot of people who make the claim about the nominating process being rigged don't understand is just how hard Clinton worked during that time to shore up support for herself among state level democrats. If you were active at all back then you knew that Hilary, and Bill as her proxy, always showed up when you needed them. Whether it was to headline a rubber chicken fundraiser in the dead of winter, or get on the local news by appearing at a rally, or whatever it was you needed to bump up support, they were willing to show up to do the grind of getting people and dollars to support you and turn out to vote for you.
Neither Bernie nor anyone else had been putting in that kind of ground work for eight years, and that's why when actual primary day rolled around, actual democratic primary voters pulled the lever for the person they knew and respected.
I mean, looking into things that could have been done differently by Clinton or Democrats makes some sense. Blaming them for the brain rot that has occupied Republicans feels very misguided, to me.
Worse, it seems far more likely to spread some rot into Democrats than it is to address any actual problems.
On the generic ballot, Matt ignores the obvious point that the generic ballot is generic, and for lots of reasons Democrats still aren’t that popular. But when people come to pull the lever for a specific candidate, it’s a different ballgame. I wonder if part of the reason for the disconnect between Trump’s plummeting approval ratings and the relatively close generic ballot is that although Trump is technically a Republican he’s really just Trump, sui generis party. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s quite a few people who don’t connect Trump and the Republicans nearly as closely as, for example they associate Kamala Harris and the Democrats.
Thank you very much for answering my question, Matt! I perhaps should not have been surprised that you feel that you would stand firm to your takes at any point in history.
That 1968 analysis is good. The one period I was really thinking of soon after I submitted that question is if you were born soon after the Civil War, and were thrust right into the transition from the Gilded Age into the Progressive Era. I could have seen you fit in with all kinds of Progressive policy. I'm guessing you would have especially liked what Henry George had to say, of course, and I would have been curious how much you would have been swayed by the trust busting mentality and the social causes of that time.
Given his ancestry, had Matt come of age after 1900, he either would have been a socialist agitator in New York or rolling cigars in Ybor City, Florida.
The remaining question about 1968 is whether MY would have gone "Clean for Gene" in the New Hampshire primary -- supporting the principled anti-war candidate but dressing in a suit and tie with short hair so as not to offend the moderate voters...
Once again, people should just wear whatever they feel most comfortable in, and care much less about what others look like. If Zohran Mamdani likes his tie, great. If others don't for themselves, also great.
While of course it’s a free country, this is the advice I would give politicians that I want to lose while I would absolutely tell politicians I want to win to spend more time that they currently do on picking outfits that improve their public perception. Usually this means more conformance with social norms not less.
Yeah, you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but everybody who sells books knows that the cover is a big part of what sells the book.
You should judge a book by every page in it, but the author him/herself decided that this was the very most important page.
Well, if we're talking about literal books, the author doesn't choose the cover and often not even the title, but when it comes to fashion, yes, agreed.
Completely agree. People expect male politicians to dress in a manner that exudes dull competence. Barack Obama and his tan suit might be taken as an exception here, but I think he benefitted from a) being very handsome by politician standards, and b) 'latitude in fashion choices' being one of the very few areas in which African American men are at an advantage over white ones in societal regard.
I never wear a tie myself, would hate the imposition of it if I had to, yet I expect male politicians to wear them when they are on official business. I find it genuinely cringeworthy to see them dressed like this instead: https://assets.thelocal.com/cdn-cgi/rs:fit:850/quality:75/plain/https://apiwp.thelocal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/AFP__20230923__1669764640__v3__Preview__UkShadowOppositionLeadersAttendMontrealGloba.jpg@webp
Awful.
Ronald Reagan also wore brown and tan suits...at certain times of year and for specific occasions. He was also unquestionably the best-dressed president since at least JFK.
That's the high finance uniform now. Ties have been abandoned by nearly all clients, but not the nice suit and tailored shirt
I don't think it is controversial to say that how you dress is a major signal to others. Is why we have costumes in theater, as an easy example.
To that end, for very public jobs, it shouldn't be controversial that people expect certain behavior from people based on how they dress.
It feels lame that the advice should be "dress similar to the popular character that you want to be seen as" for most folks. But, there you go.
Should you relegate someone to only their appearance? Of course not. But that is a very different thing than advising people to dress the part they want to play.
This is unpatriotic, but I've always thought the Iranian no-tie/high-buttoned shirts look really cool.
It never fails to confuse me that the same people complaining about progressives being woke scolds policing people’s word choices will all hype each other up about policing people’s clothing choices.
Agreed. It doesn't matter how nice it is, or how perfectly it fits, if you feel miserable in it, you'll look miserable in it.
Also, match the outfit to the activity. Making a speech, standing on a stage, walking and shaking hands? Wear a nice-fitting suit and tie, which emphasizes movement and action, draws the eye up and down, and makes you look taller, thinner, and broad-shouldered. Sitting in an armchair for a roundtable discussion? Ditch the tie, which will bunch up and make you look shorter, and go with a blazer/sport coat and non-matching slacks, chinos, or jeans. Make sure the jacket isn't too broad in the shoulders, or you'll look like you're shrinking into it. And make sure your clothes contrast with the upholstery. If you need a pop of color, get a pocket square.
A small correction to the intro on AI usage - this shows usage of AI *services*, not models. Copilot is a service (actually an array of not-very-related related services) that gives users access to multiple models including the Claude family and GPT family
“The second is that not only does the audience love negative stories, it also loves to express negativity about the media. So any time the audience discovers that journalists are biased toward seeking out negative stories, it likes to dunk on the media for being biased. But that bias is simply journalists reflecting back the audience’s own bias.”
I will say that, while I am someone that loves to dunk on the media for excessive negativity, I both click on and directly financially support (shout out to Tim Lee’s “Understanding AI”) media that presents positive stories about science and technology. I’m sure I’m not representative of the public at large, but I felt compelled to mention it as I was pretty negative on the media in the replies of that question.
Can I suggest you’re really creating a “Heads I win”/“Tails you lose” framing of the Democrats political chances in 2026 and 2028? So if Dems don’t win both the House and the Senate, we should be disappointed, but if they do take both chambers that creates a danger of Dems being complacent and not nominating someone more moderate in 2028 who may turn off casual voters. So basically no matter what happens the “Dems in Disarray” headline is ready to go mid November.
I should also note that the questioner brought up Nate Silver and per his last post it’s not actually all that clear the Dems generic ballot lead is all that alarming or that out of line with current Presidential approval rating. In fact it seems to be almost exactly where it should be based on his analysis. Now I don’t want Dems to “meet” expectations, I want them to exceed. Especially given the realities of the senate map. But no it’s not actually true that (as of now) Dems are underperforming.
It really is amazing to me how much “Dems in disarray” mindset just will never die.
I dunno. Maybe I'm just pessimistic this morning but to me the bar is something like the 111th Congress. The Republicans were in a very bad moment then which of course helped but they were also still a lot more 'normal' as a political party. And yet no serious person thinks thats on the horizon, with the Senate super majority, etc. We shouldn't be afraid to ask why that is or to kid ourselves about why something that was achievable not that long ago no longer is.
I’ll repeat. Meeting expectations based purely on Nate’s analysis of previous midterms is not my bar. I want to exceed it! So I agree.
But read Matt’s answer. It’s basically even if Dems over perform the 111th Congress if it doesn’t involve Dems moderating by a significant degree it’s basically a failure because of the dangers posed in 2028. In other words, he’s making a version of the “pundit fallacy” argument; unless Dems wins using exactly the strategy I propose it must be a failure.
I guess I read him differently. And look if that level of blowout happens then I'll agree, MY's senses (and my own) were off and it's very much worth looking at why. But even if the Democrats do really well within more plausible parameters, say a 20 vote majority in the house (current projections I see show something like a 15 or 16 vote majority) and an even less probable 2 or 3 vote majority in the Senate I think it will be fairly read as a stronger than anticipated backlash to Trump, but not a fix to the structural problems facing the party.
Yeah, I mean we need a supermajority not just a majority
It's absolutely the case that MY will consider it a failure if Democrats win in '26 and '28 without "moderating".
That was in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Wrong answer, my friend, wrong answer.
Dems in Disarray can never be wrong. It is the universal constant of American politics. To admit that it might be wrong is to violate the central tenet of reactionary centrism.
Yep, cause leftism is most certainly not obstinate or reactionary.
THANK YOU! That answer of Matt’s really had me headdesking
Except Democrats in Congress have recalibrated some to Trump 2.0 and are playing the hand they’ve been dealt about as well as they can.
Outstanding take on Edinburgh, Matt. Street design matters so much, and greenfield development needs to get it right, because it's so extremely difficult to change after it's established. The huge messes of spaghetti style suburbia are going to haunt so much of America for a long time.
Edinburgh is nice mainly because it has an awesome castle in the middle; we should make more castles.
Boise has a "castle"! https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6037555,-116.1749444,3a,75y,67.11h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s-8GnP4Hulzs4y8MhPW_ZOA!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D0%26panoid%3D-8GnP4Hulzs4y8MhPW_ZOA%26yaw%3D67.1092316524583!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDQyMS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Meh, I could overrun that thing in a couple of hours with a few mercenaries and some cheap siege equipment.
Awesome!
Cool, but I like the house in Beverly Hills I pass by on my jogs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spadena_House
Edinburgh was where JK Rowling lived when she wrote Harry Potter. The influence is very tangible.
Feels like Edinburgh is an odd choice for that idea? The streets were not original to the area and there are some interesting underground segments that speak more to how long the area has been developed.
Honestly, take any successful city and you are likely to find areas that have been built and rebuilt over the years. Money tends to linger in areas that provide natural connections to commerce.
Rebuilding is expensive. But so is building, all told. And the incentives are to double down on successful sites. Of course, this is easier if you don't have regulations preventing it. This was even true in the US. Just look up Spite Mounds in Seattle.
FWIW, and I am not saying this disqualifies him or anything, but I know Matt is very concerned about trans stuff taking down the party and Wiener is very likely the single farthest left politician on trans issues with any prominence in the entire party. He believes in and writes bills that seriously espouse all the positions Matt finds extreme.
So there's a serious tradeoff with him, from Matt's perspective.
Can you elaborate on this with any specifics? I hadn’t realized that.