One thing I said to activists since 2019 is "Even if you don't believe in the Median Voter Theorem, you better believe Joe Biden does". If he is uncertain of votes on his left flank, MVT implies he has to go to the middle to restore his majority. So it you are going to "pressure" Joe Biden, you should consider the fact that he will respond to your pressure the exact opposite of the way you think he will. Whereas if you champion a progressive cause that is already broadly popular, he will be bound to join you.
Case in point, raising the salience of the Gaza's grievance against Israel, given the status of Israel in US politics, only encourages Biden to reiterate public support Israel and gives him less room to maneuver in criticizing Netanyahu. Anyone has a right to make their voice heard on the atrocities being committed in Gaza, but the theory of political change for "uncommitted" is just totally wrong here.
It felt good, and it was a welcome release of energy. There's been a perception the last twelve years at least, that Republicans have gotten away with political murder over and over again, from the Tea Party to birthers to Trump to whatever the nihilistic insanity they're running on in 2022 and 2024.
Liberals, comparatively, haven't been able to do that. They've had to appeal to a coalition, not a cult; a majority, not a minority; a broad electoral alliance, not a smartly gerrymandered rump. They've not been able to let their passions and emotions fly in a public setting to nearly the same extent as their MAGA opponents appear to do on a daily, hourly basis.
A presidential primary, for whatever reason, fit the bill as the forum in which to let their freakiest freak flag fly. Emotionally, it just felt right.
Which is not to say it was politically wise or strategically non-stupid. But feelings are odd things. :/
"I find the... dialogue on Twitter to be pretty frustrating..." I'm not on twitter, and every time I hear anyone talking about twitter, I feel very content about that state of affairs.
I think it’s worth pointing out that free and fair elections in 2028 or 2032 are, unfortunately, far from a given of Trump, or someone like him, returns to power. His utter contempt and enmity towards democracy, even in the narrow procedural sense, is abundantly clear.
Agree entirely. But I think what’s buried here is the “should.” Yes, an aggressively progressive activist pressure campaign is usually counterproductive to your overall cause and will lead you to lose out on moderate wins. So the pragmatist says you *should not* do that. But the moralist is not interested in incrementalism or compromise. Their goal is to persuade as many people as possible to agree with their values, and the more public/powerful the target, the better. It is a conversion movement, not a political one, simple as that. You *should* hold politicians accountable and you *should* be loud and proud because it’s for a “good (moral) cause.” Their moral conviction is so strong, compromise or even failing to be sufficiently enthusiastic in your public pressure campaign are ipso facto immoral. It’s not about winning, it’s about converting.
Inherit to Matt’s argument here is pragmatism and its conflict with aspiration. How do we think about what is possible next year vs the next decade? I think some conflict amongst progressives is rooted in the rate of progress. Are you a 10mph progressive or a 100mph progressive? Both want to make progress and ultimately get to a similar place but one want to get there now...the other wants to play it safer and get there later. He’ll some conservatives may even be 1mph progressives. When the 100mph progressives fly by the 1mph progressives look like they are going backwards!
"They were specifically asking candidates to come out — in public, in high-salience venues like debates — in favor of ideas that were both unpopular and wildly unrealistic in legislative terms. And I still don’t know why. "
I've been thinking about this and something that comes to mind is that they know their ideas are unpopular and they know that getting these ideas onto the partisan map is a great way to help them become more popular.
Research suggests that most people are not familiar with many policy issues and if you ask them general questions about it, they will give you an opinion on it, but it won't be very strongly held. However, if you prime them by presenting it by a politician they like (or dislike), their opinion will change to match their partisan preferences and the opinion will likely be more strongly held.
So a position may start with only 15-20% of popular supports, but if you can can turn it into a partisan political issue, you probably won't get to majority support, but you could probably move the needle to 30-40%. Every time the other side attacks your politicians for your issue, it hardens opinions on your side in support - which also answers why they won't back down now.
Democrats may lose elections - but issue advocates are gaining support for their issues through the magic of partisanship.
Generally it is more important to show you understand people than agree with them. Politician who can show their potential voters they understand them can differ on specific policies. Politicians who do this (most don’t have the ability) can actually provide leadership. One’s who can’t, and try to gain favor by picking the right set of issues, end up being a dog wagged by their tail. Trump for example was a bad manager (&person) but a good leader. He shaped his voters views on many issues not the other way around. Although I think he faked it on abortion.
Generically speaking, if there is a public policy idea that I strongly support but is (currently) unpopular, what would be the most productive way for me to spend my time (and maybe my money)?
So much of left-wing activism seems to be a cargo-cult version of right-wing activism, that is deeply envious of groups like the NRA or various pro-life groups (or anti-tax groups), who seem to be able to coerce politicians into very strict compliance with their agenda.
What the left-wing groups don't seem to appreciate is the actual popularity of the positions of many of those groups. The American public is generally very squishy about abortion, and relatively sympathetic to the general pro-life argument (even if they prefer legal abortion). The general NARAL position of free abortions for everyone at any time is much less attractive. Same with the NRA - they seem to take extreme positions, but a general "don't ban guns" position is broadly popular.
Meanwhile, Sunrise and other groups take the least-possible popular positions on topics that are in general unpopular, doubling down on the crazy and making themselves completely toxic. It's no wonder that they can't make the same progress as their right-wing counterparts!
One thing where I think you can demonstrably point to ballot box harm is energy - the aforementioned fracking ban activism, and the pledges to end all new federal oil & gas leasing (or drilling, depending on the candidate).
In terms of inflation and messaging on "we care about your gas and energy prices", pushing for these (never getting to 60 votes) ideas has put the Administration in a bind where they have to try and triangulate some bizzare "do more production frackers, but no new leases or drilling, but Iran and Venezuela and OPEC+R please produce more, but also oil companies are evil, but high prices are good because of the energy transition and we should all get EVs anyway, but high prices are bad..." ad infinitum... Because the alternative is walking back those pledges and changing course.
I'm not an elections expert, but I find it hard to believe that won't matter in a high inflation environment, whether with swing Congressional seats or with a 2024 election...
I think a lot of it has to do with activists promising things that are not possible or at least not possible without consequences people find unacceptable. And most of the public is not going to fall for the line that it would absolutely pose if not for those greedy corporations. Energy has to come from somewhere. And if you ban fracking you constrain the supply so the price will go up.
Note: I'm intentionally not even getting into what actual effects banning fracking would have meant to energy prices and the resultant impacts that would have on public opinion.
To a certain extent, Congress being unable to pass things, especially during the Obama administration allowed maximalist activists to grab power and take hold of the situation. After all, if nothing is going to get passed anyway, why work for the "reasonable" solution, when the reasonable solution is DOA as well.
Now, I know, stuff did get done. But, how much of that did even somewhat politically active people on Facebook or Twitter hear about, as opposed to the 964th reasonable center-left idee getting killed by the filibuster?
Also, what pushes left-wing maximalist ideas is hearing about what is viewed as right-wing maximalist ideas being pushed in conservative states. If Wyoming, Iowa, and Florida can pass crazy bill x, why can't California at least pass rent control (regardless of the actual merits or lack thereof).
I think it would be useful to propose an alternate vision for how activist organizations should function. What should organizations that are devoted to issues that are unpopular do if not try to convince politicians to adopt their stances? Plenty of ideas are unpopular for a long time until they're popular. I think we're all better off for the years of gay rights activists trying to bring awareness to their message, even when it would have been an unpopular stance for a politician to take.
You've persuasively argued what they should not do, because it works against their ultimately goal. What should they do? How should they direct the energy of their fired up members? More effort towards convincing the public? More effort towards pushing those lagging on an issue rather pulling those on the leading edge?
I think that's the answer. This is what the original "Overton Window" concept was about, and MattY pretty much explicitly says that's the role of activist organizations when the positions they promote are unpopular: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-myth-of-the-overton-window?s=r
They should only turn to pressuring politicians once their view is within the realm of popular opinion. They should start with the safest pols once the idea starts to get some traction, and only quietly until it becomes a firmly mainstream view.
I think it's a function of the fact that public persuasion is hard and slow. It's easy to miss while it's happening. That both makes it less appealing (the delayed gratification thing) to activists and less noticeable when activists are doing it. One of the quickest examples like, ever, is marriage equality, and that still took like 25 years.
This strikes me as an issue where a strong party apparatus would help a lot. Being able to say to activist groups "help us keep message discipline and we'll ensure you get this piece of small progress" should help curb the instinct to publicly jump out ahead on an issue.
But maybe this is where political gridlock rears its ugly head. What can you promise when nothing can get done?
I’m fearful that a lot of progressives greatly misread the damage that over-zealous pandemic policies did for us, especially among working class voters. I think that early in the pandemic, as a direct result of Trump and other Republicans’ insanely irresponsible view to ignore the pandemic, many progressives changed how they viewed NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions - masking, distancing, shutting down indoor dining- everything except vaxing) from “important tools to help deal with this pandemic” to “a public talisman that I take this emergency seriously, unlike the horrible Republicans I already hated”. I don’t think they ever understood the perspective that much of the country was unhappy with continued insistence of NPIs even after vaccine availability as well as a failure of leaders to provide clear and transparent metrics as to when these interventions would be made optional. Yet because so many progressives are viewing these things as talismans they have a big blind spot on this: “why are you demanding clear metrics? Masks aren’t that big a deal- they show you care, DON”T YOU CARE?” Left out of that is the fact that occasionally being asked to wear a mask to enter a grocery store is very different from being asked to wear one all day if you work there.
My view is that we should assume NPIs will be unpopular and we should limit their usage and rapidly update our guidance as we learn more about effectiveness. If we find out that cloth masks are almost worthless (which we have), then we should either update our mask mandates to require better masks or kill the mandate entirely. We should develop clear and transparent rules and make a commitment to the community that our NPIs go up based on X metric and as soon as it comes down we pull them down. In short we should be doing everything we can to communicate to as broad a public as possible that we recognize the burdens that we are asking people to take and as a result we are doing everything we can to minimize them. And our failure to do that is costing us with many otherwise winnable voters.
I was actually told by someone who is very left-leaning that even if mask mandates aren’t doing much to stop the spread of the virus, they’re still a good thing because the Trump voters hate them. This is not a healthy way to evaluate restrictions that supposedly have a public health purpose.
We have the data right now. Hong Kong has excellent mask compliance and they are literally being killed by COVID right now because a lot of their elderly didn’t get vaccinated.
I think you and Ezra said this plenty of times, mostly in the context of Medicare for All, but the entire point of all this virtue signaling in terms of policy preferences was the Activist Lefts ill formed game to get Bernie Sanders elected in the Democratic Primary.
- Bernie was the clear choice by most activist for 2020.
- His entire brand was basically being to the Left of everyone else in the Democratic Party.
- His entire motivational brand has always been staking out aspirational positions, via messaging bills like Medicare For All, to anchor the debate.
- Sadly, this anchoring only really works when you yourself aren't also the most likely candidate most likely to win...it only works when you basically presume your a lost cause and you only want to shift the discussion incrementally.
- Since this didn't happen in a vacuum, everyone else in the caucus who thought they stood a good chance of beating Trump in a general (a LOT of people, all of whom were hoodwinked by consultants looking to cash in), had to run campaigns relative to Sanders'...and because so many campaigns burn out before NH, and political hobbyist make up so much of the bandwidth in that ecosystem...these candidates tuned messages to this segment of voters.
- This meant that many of them endorsed many of his ideas / bills (like Medicare for All) to close the cap between him (which ultimately didn't fool any of the activist, who were already all in on Sanders from the get). However it did result in Sanders moving even FURTHER Left and revise these bills to reposition himself because most of the energy in these campaigns were about minute differences between many very Progressive candidates. This is why people got so pissy when the "Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that, and it's more Progressive than Sanders' plan" news cycle started.
- Ultimately, this ended up monopolizing the many entire news cycles during the early debates...and was a complete waste of time for everyone.
Finally, it's really tragic when you consider that the whole "plan" was a bit of a Progressive Activist Trojan Horse campaign, and at times many of them (like AOC) "said the quite part out loud", like she did right before Bernie won Nevada, saying basically everyone knew M4A would not pass and that we would have to "settle" for a public option (which we haven't even got THAT yet...).
Personally, I wonder often how activist would have managed in a world where Bernie won, and somehow beat Trump...considering he would never be able to deliver on the majority of his own promises. Manchin would still be the key vote. I'd like to believe that in a "good faith" world, they would turn on him just like they turned on Obama when he cut deals to get something rather than nothing...but i also realize...that's probably not true, as he was too powerful of an influence to burn that bridge with.
One thing I said to activists since 2019 is "Even if you don't believe in the Median Voter Theorem, you better believe Joe Biden does". If he is uncertain of votes on his left flank, MVT implies he has to go to the middle to restore his majority. So it you are going to "pressure" Joe Biden, you should consider the fact that he will respond to your pressure the exact opposite of the way you think he will. Whereas if you champion a progressive cause that is already broadly popular, he will be bound to join you.
Case in point, raising the salience of the Gaza's grievance against Israel, given the status of Israel in US politics, only encourages Biden to reiterate public support Israel and gives him less room to maneuver in criticizing Netanyahu. Anyone has a right to make their voice heard on the atrocities being committed in Gaza, but the theory of political change for "uncommitted" is just totally wrong here.
I think I know why activists did this:
It felt good, and it was a welcome release of energy. There's been a perception the last twelve years at least, that Republicans have gotten away with political murder over and over again, from the Tea Party to birthers to Trump to whatever the nihilistic insanity they're running on in 2022 and 2024.
Liberals, comparatively, haven't been able to do that. They've had to appeal to a coalition, not a cult; a majority, not a minority; a broad electoral alliance, not a smartly gerrymandered rump. They've not been able to let their passions and emotions fly in a public setting to nearly the same extent as their MAGA opponents appear to do on a daily, hourly basis.
A presidential primary, for whatever reason, fit the bill as the forum in which to let their freakiest freak flag fly. Emotionally, it just felt right.
Which is not to say it was politically wise or strategically non-stupid. But feelings are odd things. :/
"I find the... dialogue on Twitter to be pretty frustrating..." I'm not on twitter, and every time I hear anyone talking about twitter, I feel very content about that state of affairs.
I think it’s worth pointing out that free and fair elections in 2028 or 2032 are, unfortunately, far from a given of Trump, or someone like him, returns to power. His utter contempt and enmity towards democracy, even in the narrow procedural sense, is abundantly clear.
No activist group forced Harris to come out in favor of federally mandated busing. That was a self-own.
Agree entirely. But I think what’s buried here is the “should.” Yes, an aggressively progressive activist pressure campaign is usually counterproductive to your overall cause and will lead you to lose out on moderate wins. So the pragmatist says you *should not* do that. But the moralist is not interested in incrementalism or compromise. Their goal is to persuade as many people as possible to agree with their values, and the more public/powerful the target, the better. It is a conversion movement, not a political one, simple as that. You *should* hold politicians accountable and you *should* be loud and proud because it’s for a “good (moral) cause.” Their moral conviction is so strong, compromise or even failing to be sufficiently enthusiastic in your public pressure campaign are ipso facto immoral. It’s not about winning, it’s about converting.
Inherit to Matt’s argument here is pragmatism and its conflict with aspiration. How do we think about what is possible next year vs the next decade? I think some conflict amongst progressives is rooted in the rate of progress. Are you a 10mph progressive or a 100mph progressive? Both want to make progress and ultimately get to a similar place but one want to get there now...the other wants to play it safer and get there later. He’ll some conservatives may even be 1mph progressives. When the 100mph progressives fly by the 1mph progressives look like they are going backwards!
"They were specifically asking candidates to come out — in public, in high-salience venues like debates — in favor of ideas that were both unpopular and wildly unrealistic in legislative terms. And I still don’t know why. "
I've been thinking about this and something that comes to mind is that they know their ideas are unpopular and they know that getting these ideas onto the partisan map is a great way to help them become more popular.
Research suggests that most people are not familiar with many policy issues and if you ask them general questions about it, they will give you an opinion on it, but it won't be very strongly held. However, if you prime them by presenting it by a politician they like (or dislike), their opinion will change to match their partisan preferences and the opinion will likely be more strongly held.
So a position may start with only 15-20% of popular supports, but if you can can turn it into a partisan political issue, you probably won't get to majority support, but you could probably move the needle to 30-40%. Every time the other side attacks your politicians for your issue, it hardens opinions on your side in support - which also answers why they won't back down now.
Democrats may lose elections - but issue advocates are gaining support for their issues through the magic of partisanship.
Generally it is more important to show you understand people than agree with them. Politician who can show their potential voters they understand them can differ on specific policies. Politicians who do this (most don’t have the ability) can actually provide leadership. One’s who can’t, and try to gain favor by picking the right set of issues, end up being a dog wagged by their tail. Trump for example was a bad manager (&person) but a good leader. He shaped his voters views on many issues not the other way around. Although I think he faked it on abortion.
Who is being led by Joe Biden?
Generically speaking, if there is a public policy idea that I strongly support but is (currently) unpopular, what would be the most productive way for me to spend my time (and maybe my money)?
Take yourself out for a nice meal. Or get a dog, maybe.
So much of left-wing activism seems to be a cargo-cult version of right-wing activism, that is deeply envious of groups like the NRA or various pro-life groups (or anti-tax groups), who seem to be able to coerce politicians into very strict compliance with their agenda.
What the left-wing groups don't seem to appreciate is the actual popularity of the positions of many of those groups. The American public is generally very squishy about abortion, and relatively sympathetic to the general pro-life argument (even if they prefer legal abortion). The general NARAL position of free abortions for everyone at any time is much less attractive. Same with the NRA - they seem to take extreme positions, but a general "don't ban guns" position is broadly popular.
Meanwhile, Sunrise and other groups take the least-possible popular positions on topics that are in general unpopular, doubling down on the crazy and making themselves completely toxic. It's no wonder that they can't make the same progress as their right-wing counterparts!
One thing where I think you can demonstrably point to ballot box harm is energy - the aforementioned fracking ban activism, and the pledges to end all new federal oil & gas leasing (or drilling, depending on the candidate).
In terms of inflation and messaging on "we care about your gas and energy prices", pushing for these (never getting to 60 votes) ideas has put the Administration in a bind where they have to try and triangulate some bizzare "do more production frackers, but no new leases or drilling, but Iran and Venezuela and OPEC+R please produce more, but also oil companies are evil, but high prices are good because of the energy transition and we should all get EVs anyway, but high prices are bad..." ad infinitum... Because the alternative is walking back those pledges and changing course.
I'm not an elections expert, but I find it hard to believe that won't matter in a high inflation environment, whether with swing Congressional seats or with a 2024 election...
I think a lot of it has to do with activists promising things that are not possible or at least not possible without consequences people find unacceptable. And most of the public is not going to fall for the line that it would absolutely pose if not for those greedy corporations. Energy has to come from somewhere. And if you ban fracking you constrain the supply so the price will go up.
Note: I'm intentionally not even getting into what actual effects banning fracking would have meant to energy prices and the resultant impacts that would have on public opinion.
To a certain extent, Congress being unable to pass things, especially during the Obama administration allowed maximalist activists to grab power and take hold of the situation. After all, if nothing is going to get passed anyway, why work for the "reasonable" solution, when the reasonable solution is DOA as well.
Now, I know, stuff did get done. But, how much of that did even somewhat politically active people on Facebook or Twitter hear about, as opposed to the 964th reasonable center-left idee getting killed by the filibuster?
Also, what pushes left-wing maximalist ideas is hearing about what is viewed as right-wing maximalist ideas being pushed in conservative states. If Wyoming, Iowa, and Florida can pass crazy bill x, why can't California at least pass rent control (regardless of the actual merits or lack thereof).
I think it would be useful to propose an alternate vision for how activist organizations should function. What should organizations that are devoted to issues that are unpopular do if not try to convince politicians to adopt their stances? Plenty of ideas are unpopular for a long time until they're popular. I think we're all better off for the years of gay rights activists trying to bring awareness to their message, even when it would have been an unpopular stance for a politician to take.
You've persuasively argued what they should not do, because it works against their ultimately goal. What should they do? How should they direct the energy of their fired up members? More effort towards convincing the public? More effort towards pushing those lagging on an issue rather pulling those on the leading edge?
> More effort towards convincing the public?
I think that's the answer. This is what the original "Overton Window" concept was about, and MattY pretty much explicitly says that's the role of activist organizations when the positions they promote are unpopular: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-myth-of-the-overton-window?s=r
They should only turn to pressuring politicians once their view is within the realm of popular opinion. They should start with the safest pols once the idea starts to get some traction, and only quietly until it becomes a firmly mainstream view.
Why doesn't this take place more? Or does it but it's just not as salient? Is it the delayed gratification vs. the instant of pressuring a politician?
I think it's a function of the fact that public persuasion is hard and slow. It's easy to miss while it's happening. That both makes it less appealing (the delayed gratification thing) to activists and less noticeable when activists are doing it. One of the quickest examples like, ever, is marriage equality, and that still took like 25 years.
This strikes me as an issue where a strong party apparatus would help a lot. Being able to say to activist groups "help us keep message discipline and we'll ensure you get this piece of small progress" should help curb the instinct to publicly jump out ahead on an issue.
But maybe this is where political gridlock rears its ugly head. What can you promise when nothing can get done?
I’m fearful that a lot of progressives greatly misread the damage that over-zealous pandemic policies did for us, especially among working class voters. I think that early in the pandemic, as a direct result of Trump and other Republicans’ insanely irresponsible view to ignore the pandemic, many progressives changed how they viewed NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions - masking, distancing, shutting down indoor dining- everything except vaxing) from “important tools to help deal with this pandemic” to “a public talisman that I take this emergency seriously, unlike the horrible Republicans I already hated”. I don’t think they ever understood the perspective that much of the country was unhappy with continued insistence of NPIs even after vaccine availability as well as a failure of leaders to provide clear and transparent metrics as to when these interventions would be made optional. Yet because so many progressives are viewing these things as talismans they have a big blind spot on this: “why are you demanding clear metrics? Masks aren’t that big a deal- they show you care, DON”T YOU CARE?” Left out of that is the fact that occasionally being asked to wear a mask to enter a grocery store is very different from being asked to wear one all day if you work there.
My view is that we should assume NPIs will be unpopular and we should limit their usage and rapidly update our guidance as we learn more about effectiveness. If we find out that cloth masks are almost worthless (which we have), then we should either update our mask mandates to require better masks or kill the mandate entirely. We should develop clear and transparent rules and make a commitment to the community that our NPIs go up based on X metric and as soon as it comes down we pull them down. In short we should be doing everything we can to communicate to as broad a public as possible that we recognize the burdens that we are asking people to take and as a result we are doing everything we can to minimize them. And our failure to do that is costing us with many otherwise winnable voters.
I was actually told by someone who is very left-leaning that even if mask mandates aren’t doing much to stop the spread of the virus, they’re still a good thing because the Trump voters hate them. This is not a healthy way to evaluate restrictions that supposedly have a public health purpose.
We have the data right now. Hong Kong has excellent mask compliance and they are literally being killed by COVID right now because a lot of their elderly didn’t get vaccinated.
I think you and Ezra said this plenty of times, mostly in the context of Medicare for All, but the entire point of all this virtue signaling in terms of policy preferences was the Activist Lefts ill formed game to get Bernie Sanders elected in the Democratic Primary.
- Bernie was the clear choice by most activist for 2020.
- His entire brand was basically being to the Left of everyone else in the Democratic Party.
- His entire motivational brand has always been staking out aspirational positions, via messaging bills like Medicare For All, to anchor the debate.
- Sadly, this anchoring only really works when you yourself aren't also the most likely candidate most likely to win...it only works when you basically presume your a lost cause and you only want to shift the discussion incrementally.
- Since this didn't happen in a vacuum, everyone else in the caucus who thought they stood a good chance of beating Trump in a general (a LOT of people, all of whom were hoodwinked by consultants looking to cash in), had to run campaigns relative to Sanders'...and because so many campaigns burn out before NH, and political hobbyist make up so much of the bandwidth in that ecosystem...these candidates tuned messages to this segment of voters.
- This meant that many of them endorsed many of his ideas / bills (like Medicare for All) to close the cap between him (which ultimately didn't fool any of the activist, who were already all in on Sanders from the get). However it did result in Sanders moving even FURTHER Left and revise these bills to reposition himself because most of the energy in these campaigns were about minute differences between many very Progressive candidates. This is why people got so pissy when the "Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that, and it's more Progressive than Sanders' plan" news cycle started.
- Ultimately, this ended up monopolizing the many entire news cycles during the early debates...and was a complete waste of time for everyone.
Finally, it's really tragic when you consider that the whole "plan" was a bit of a Progressive Activist Trojan Horse campaign, and at times many of them (like AOC) "said the quite part out loud", like she did right before Bernie won Nevada, saying basically everyone knew M4A would not pass and that we would have to "settle" for a public option (which we haven't even got THAT yet...).
Personally, I wonder often how activist would have managed in a world where Bernie won, and somehow beat Trump...considering he would never be able to deliver on the majority of his own promises. Manchin would still be the key vote. I'd like to believe that in a "good faith" world, they would turn on him just like they turned on Obama when he cut deals to get something rather than nothing...but i also realize...that's probably not true, as he was too powerful of an influence to burn that bridge with.