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.
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
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.
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 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 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.
I think Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s differing posture toward Mamdani says more about Clinton than Obama. Al Gore, famously nurtured by ultra pro-Israel writers like Marty Peretz, was interviewed by Tim Miller where he was gushing (a little bit too much imo) about how impressed and excited he was about Mamdani. Clinton seems uniquely terrible and bitter in a way that even when I agree with her substantively, it makes me not want to agree with her because she comes across as ungenerous and just petty. The Bernie left was often unfair to her, but the resentment clearly runs both ways and it shows.
Unlike with Clinton, there’s a public record of Mamdani calling Obama “evil” for drone strikes and yet Obama is able to let go and understand it’s part of politics. I find it particularly aggravating that Clinton still implies that everyone who doesn’t agree with her is just “misinformed”. She would’ve been a great president but man she’s a terrible politician
Clinton has every right to denounce the leftists that worked so hard to get Trump elected in 2016. The level of mendacity, misogyny, and malevolence of so many of these political actors was insane.
I still see people lie about the 2016 primary results and regurgitate “corporate DNC” nonsense.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
On Mamdani being a “first but not representative” - remember that the median south Asian immigrant who grew up in New York is probably politically a lot closer to Reihan Salam than Mamdani- and Salam would not have had the appeal that Mamdani had in the “commie corridor” of white progressive places like Park Slope.
I don’t think this is true because Salam is a Republican and South Asian immigrant voters generally vote for Democrats (IIRC Indian-Americans are the most Democratic Asian ethnicity) especially in New York which is a blue state to begin with.
Mamdani overwhelmingly won South Asian voters, he struggled a bit with East Asian voters but he absolutely sweeped the floor with Muslim voters so this is not correct.
That’s fair. But only 4 percentage points? And you’ve got the ethnic confound- how would a candidate with Mamdani’s ethnic background but Cuomo’s politics have done in those areas- I think a lot better!
It's interesting that Matt still thinks Amazon's competition is other places that sell toilet paper. That is not where they are building a monopoly or where they make real money.
It’s not a monopoly. But he’s argued this before by saying you can go to target. But Amazon would like to build a monopoly in cloud storage and is currently the largest with AWS. Meta would like to be a monopoly in ad sales and may actually overtake google (again not a monopoly). The delivering of goods that Amazon does is more marketing than profiting. I’m just tired of talking about these companies without focusing on what they really are scaling to do. Buying on Amazon is a good way to get a counterfeit part. They don’t care. It’s not what they care about.
I agree and we should keep an eye on them. But we should keep an eye on what they are trying to scale to be and not get distracted by what we believe they are doing. Google and meta owning the ad tech AND mostly making money on ad sales absolutely impacts competition. But that’s two companies so not a monopoly let’s all be fine with it.
Yeah, I try to "boycott" Amazon because they won't sell their Audible exclusive audiobooks to libraries, even at the hugely inflated prices Amazon charges, but I know it is useless because if I use the internet, and, especially, when my workplace stores online content that it creates, I can't get away from using Amazon.
I had to reread that article Matt linked since it was written such a long time ago. I wish I had reread it a few weeks ago when I was getting cornered by multiple friends that were convinced that Amazon had a monopoly in retail that must be broken up. I wish I had the details of Matt's article more handy to have made a better argument--there's always next time!
And he did well to confirm my strong position that anti-competitive behavior is the worst in rent seeking via government regulation than it is by bigness.
Wal Mart is a trillion dollar company. They can get things from their store to your door in an hour if you pay for it. I don’t think they’re doing badly.
"In a “good” midterm, you take control of both houses of Congress. That’s important not just as a political benchmark, but because if you want to stop backsliding on the rule of law you need to be able to prevent the MAGAfication of the judiciary."
I obviously don't want this to happen but I'm kind of curious to see how a 51-50 Senate would behave, especially if Collins is in the 51 (plus Murkowski). Of course Fetterman, and possibly someone like Peltola, would be in the 50, and Thune would control the floor. It would be an interesting dynamic.
"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."
What makes it hard is that this is not how they conceptualize it in their minds. Half of them have convinced themselves that "shooting the moon" would be *more* popular than compromising on policy. The other half are nonwonks who don't care very much about governance after they win, they just want maximalist theater now (even though the much maligned Schumer-Jeffries approach actually seems to have worked pretty well lately).
I spoiled Matt's answer on the California governor race because he spoiled it on Twitter yesterday, and let's just say that most Slow Borers here did *not* approve of his (since it's draft week) "Matt Mahan No Matter What" take.
This is a common thing in politics where the desire to be strategic to effectively support one’s partisan tribe clashes with one’s desire to support the best candidate. Reasonable people can fall on either side of that line. There are times when I’ve held my nose and made the strategic choice and other times when I’ve voted for what I think is the best candidate.
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.
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
yeah huge unforced error imo
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
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.
That, and appointing Jim Comey.
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.
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 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 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.
I think Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s differing posture toward Mamdani says more about Clinton than Obama. Al Gore, famously nurtured by ultra pro-Israel writers like Marty Peretz, was interviewed by Tim Miller where he was gushing (a little bit too much imo) about how impressed and excited he was about Mamdani. Clinton seems uniquely terrible and bitter in a way that even when I agree with her substantively, it makes me not want to agree with her because she comes across as ungenerous and just petty. The Bernie left was often unfair to her, but the resentment clearly runs both ways and it shows.
Unlike with Clinton, there’s a public record of Mamdani calling Obama “evil” for drone strikes and yet Obama is able to let go and understand it’s part of politics. I find it particularly aggravating that Clinton still implies that everyone who doesn’t agree with her is just “misinformed”. She would’ve been a great president but man she’s a terrible politician
Ironically, given their reputations, it’s an example of her being more authentic than Obama.
Clinton has every right to denounce the leftists that worked so hard to get Trump elected in 2016. The level of mendacity, misogyny, and malevolence of so many of these political actors was insane.
I still see people lie about the 2016 primary results and regurgitate “corporate DNC” nonsense.
“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
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.
same for copilot - i use it fairly regularly but only because my employer pays for the enterprise version
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!"
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.
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.
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.
That was in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Wrong answer, my friend, wrong answer.
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.
On Mamdani being a “first but not representative” - remember that the median south Asian immigrant who grew up in New York is probably politically a lot closer to Reihan Salam than Mamdani- and Salam would not have had the appeal that Mamdani had in the “commie corridor” of white progressive places like Park Slope.
I don’t think this is true because Salam is a Republican and South Asian immigrant voters generally vote for Democrats (IIRC Indian-Americans are the most Democratic Asian ethnicity) especially in New York which is a blue state to begin with.
Almost everyone is a Democrat in NYC so this is all relative. Having said that, the more politically conservative Democrat- Cuomo- outperformed Mamdani in the most Asian districts in NYC: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/05/nyregion/nyc-mayor-election-results-mamdani-cuomo.html?unlocked_article_code=1.dVA.-Ic6.Fk0VdbPOVQJE&smid=nytcore-ios-share
Mamdani overwhelmingly won South Asian voters, he struggled a bit with East Asian voters but he absolutely sweeped the floor with Muslim voters so this is not correct.
The table says Mamdani still won mostly Asian areas (just by less than he won mostly black or Hispanic areas) but lost mostly white areas.
That’s fair. But only 4 percentage points? And you’ve got the ethnic confound- how would a candidate with Mamdani’s ethnic background but Cuomo’s politics have done in those areas- I think a lot better!
It's interesting that Matt still thinks Amazon's competition is other places that sell toilet paper. That is not where they are building a monopoly or where they make real money.
In which market(s) does Amazon hold a monopoly?
It’s not a monopoly. But he’s argued this before by saying you can go to target. But Amazon would like to build a monopoly in cloud storage and is currently the largest with AWS. Meta would like to be a monopoly in ad sales and may actually overtake google (again not a monopoly). The delivering of goods that Amazon does is more marketing than profiting. I’m just tired of talking about these companies without focusing on what they really are scaling to do. Buying on Amazon is a good way to get a counterfeit part. They don’t care. It’s not what they care about.
In some sense, every business "wants" to be a monopoly -- to garner every sale available to them.
I agree and we should keep an eye on them. But we should keep an eye on what they are trying to scale to be and not get distracted by what we believe they are doing. Google and meta owning the ad tech AND mostly making money on ad sales absolutely impacts competition. But that’s two companies so not a monopoly let’s all be fine with it.
In the Amazon context, what does "I agree and we should keep an eye on them" mean from a regulatory/government intervention perspective?
Yeah, I try to "boycott" Amazon because they won't sell their Audible exclusive audiobooks to libraries, even at the hugely inflated prices Amazon charges, but I know it is useless because if I use the internet, and, especially, when my workplace stores online content that it creates, I can't get away from using Amazon.
I had to reread that article Matt linked since it was written such a long time ago. I wish I had reread it a few weeks ago when I was getting cornered by multiple friends that were convinced that Amazon had a monopoly in retail that must be broken up. I wish I had the details of Matt's article more handy to have made a better argument--there's always next time!
And he did well to confirm my strong position that anti-competitive behavior is the worst in rent seeking via government regulation than it is by bigness.
Wal Mart is a trillion dollar company. They can get things from their store to your door in an hour if you pay for it. I don’t think they’re doing badly.
Rackspace lost and Azure isn't as good. Markets work like that sometimes.
"In a “good” midterm, you take control of both houses of Congress. That’s important not just as a political benchmark, but because if you want to stop backsliding on the rule of law you need to be able to prevent the MAGAfication of the judiciary."
I obviously don't want this to happen but I'm kind of curious to see how a 51-50 Senate would behave, especially if Collins is in the 51 (plus Murkowski). Of course Fetterman, and possibly someone like Peltola, would be in the 50, and Thune would control the floor. It would be an interesting dynamic.
"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."
What makes it hard is that this is not how they conceptualize it in their minds. Half of them have convinced themselves that "shooting the moon" would be *more* popular than compromising on policy. The other half are nonwonks who don't care very much about governance after they win, they just want maximalist theater now (even though the much maligned Schumer-Jeffries approach actually seems to have worked pretty well lately).
Aren’t there rumors that Murkowski would be open to switching caucuses if the senate was 50-50? That would be interesting.
I'll believe that when it happens.
I spoiled Matt's answer on the California governor race because he spoiled it on Twitter yesterday, and let's just say that most Slow Borers here did *not* approve of his (since it's draft week) "Matt Mahan No Matter What" take.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/thursday-discussion-post-c70/comment/248195181
This is a common thing in politics where the desire to be strategic to effectively support one’s partisan tribe clashes with one’s desire to support the best candidate. Reasonable people can fall on either side of that line. There are times when I’ve held my nose and made the strategic choice and other times when I’ve voted for what I think is the best candidate.
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
Awesome!