“ Instead of repeating a single negative adjective about Trump over and over, Democrats should be informing voters about what Harris would do.” It’s not either or. It’s both and!
Voters have been longing for some Dem candidate to give back as good as they get. Centrist pundits and candidates have normalized MAGA invective and lies by not hitting back. It’s time to normalize liberal/progressive views: counterpunching with joy and humor gives women, young people and minorities the courage to affirm what they already know to be true. They don’t need persuading on policy. They need to know that national leaders have their backs, when they confront neighbors, coworkers and “weird” Christian nationalists.
For a swing voter like me, even better than positioning the Democratic ticket as normal would be to tell me what they want to do if elected. Without a primary process she wasn’t required to articulate any policies she would champion as President. Since her ascension, there have been no interviews and no press conferences. Her campaign website has no policy statements. It would be nice to know what she plans on doing, be it normal or otherwise.
It's pretty much the same as Biden, including the toughened border bill. No moderation on student loan forgiveness, for example (she doubled down on that). Sounds like she's endorsing the rent control thing, although I have not heard that as clearly. So far at least, the guiding principle seems to be "Joe woulda won" if only the age and infirmity could be ignored... which seems like a mis-reading of the available data.
I think Ezra Klein has made the point that normie Democratic talking points get ignored by the media so it's hard to get that into the bloodstream. But that's what the money is for!
Allegedly. I'm very serious when I say it's become obvious over the past couple years that there's some sort of loophole to that rule on public posts. Like clockwork on public posts (1) never-before-seen commenters show up, (2) whose comments are strongly at odds with the profile of the average SB commenter, (3) don't seem like the kind of person who would be paying $8 a month to read Matt's writing, and (4) are usually never seen again after making a few comments in the public thread.
So those of us that oppose Trump because democracy are going to have their vote taken advantage of to shove through typical democratic agenda items? Where Dems pretend to have a mandate on those items when really we just don't want trump? I gotta say... It makes it not fun voting with the Left.
Ok, so are you suggesting I go vote for an insurrectionist if I don't prefer the broader goals of the democratic party? I see my vote must not be wanted on the left... I'll make sure to let my Republican friends know, the dozen or so I convinced to vote with the Dems the last few elections... I guess there isn't a home for us on the left..
Lol
Really I had no idea we had a two party system. 🤦♀️
What he's saying is that if Dems really, really, believe that Trump is a threat to the Republic, you would think they would be willing to moderate on some lesser issues in order to pick up enough votes to make sure he did not get elected.
Thank you, exactly.... The black and white thinking That's a part of many people on the left is ridiculous. For some of us it's Trump is a dumpster fire that's a real threat and on the other side is a real threat as well, a gauntlet to be survived or not... I definitely agree that the right should deal with their extremists. But the left just kind of shrugs with theirs. Not to say that there's an equivalency here. If we get big government dems with programs and redistribution and some kind of weird reparations hierarchy and a whole bunch of other crap. It will still be the same political sausage, only with power brokers tied to the government like in every other left-wing country. Sounds pretty crappy to me. The challenge with going with the right is they are completely unmoored to a very illiberal electoral base. Trans rights? Forget it on the right, being an atheist and walking around and getting promotions? Forget it on the right.
But I think the likelihood of this particular top-of-ticket set of Dem candidates setting up an extreme leftwing redistribution/reparations/whatever agenda once in power is a lot less likely than an extreme rightwing agenda being implemented if Trump wins. Democrats do not need to turn themselves into moderate Republicans just because actual moderate Republicans let the loonies take over their party. The far left of the Democrat party may have pulled moderate Dems like Biden a bit farther left than Republicans want him to be, but any normal Democrat is ALWAYS going to be too far left of any normal Republican to suit any Republican voters. To me (as a Democrat) Harris, Walz and Biden are pretty normal Democrats; Trump does not look anything like a historically normal Republican, but a lot of elected Republicans are refashioning themselves in the image of Trump. And I do not think most swing voters are really tuned into the actual policy differences that get discussed here. If we had a multi-party parliamentary system maybe the moderates could form some kind of coalition government, but we do not.
I agree, the moderates loose out in our system. But when Harris goes out and talks about national rent control... Like for no reason... No one is talking about that, Matt Yglesias says it's a bad idea, it really looks.more like far left "own goals" not helpful.... What could moderate pubs do? Fight an entire media echo system? Try everyday Murdoch ruined the wsj.... Biden has more experience and is more moderate the Kamala... Kamala has lots of issues... That have been litigated all over the place. Good luck to her. But to say Republicans let the loonies take over is like blaming a crap ton of regular people for the fall of their country to a dictator... It's not how power structures work, and is the wrong assessment in my view. But yes we are stuck at a place where those of us that are coming over to the democratic party, can align with the NIMBY's and others to create some kind of economic coalition against the economically ruinous propositions of the general left. Free college (join the army) inheritance tax, go jump in a lake.
Form a practical political perspective for Democrats I agree. But as an individual voter, if you believe Trump is a threat to democracy, lesser issues really shouldn't matter. After all, maintaining democracy allows you to vote against those policies next time.
Well, uh, yes. That's how a republic works -- you vote for a representative and then you're stuck with whatever they vote for, and all you can do is hope that they vote in a way you like. You have to decide for yourself whether whatever the representative will vote for once they are in office is tolerable enough to take the risk of voting for them.
Makes a good argument to vote for Trump... The calculus becomes, ruin things or hope the pubs keep Trump reasonably ineffective... Governance through never let a good crisis go to waste sounds really lame... Let's see because Trump is so bad, we can do one step less worse bad stuff. FML
I blame Republicans for robbing the country of a meaningful choice between progressive and conservative policies because they've hitched themselves and those conservative policies to a man who's morally disqualified from office due to trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election.
Re: messaging— I wonder how important issue salience effects are in the context of single-ad tests.
The general theme of your testing is that ads which talk about policy areas where supermajorities of the public like the mainstream Democratic position produce the best responses. Moderating on those issues is actually actively unhelpful because the median voter is already with the Dems on social security, healthcare, abortion, etc.
I wonder if ads talking about moderating on issues where the Dems are seen less favorably— like immigration and criminal justice— underperform because in addition to their message, they temporarily raise the salience of crime and immigration as issues, which makes swingable voters more likely to think about voting Republican. I’d agree that it’s probably for the best to just not talk about that stuff in paid media, but it is going to come up during the campaign, and candidates will have to find ways to manage the damage. I do think that Harris’s emphasis on passing the border security bill is smart in that context; it’ll give her a harm-reducing thing to talk about when it comes up in interviews and debates.
Absolutely. All Democrats holding elected office are all-in on gender ideology and allowing men to legally declare themselves to be women at will. See the federal Equality Act, which is supported by ALL Democrats in Congress and was called out by Biden in every one of his SOTU addresses as a high priority.
This is an extremely stupid response to a real question about whether the existing evidence for childhood gender transition is any good.
If your response can also be used for the question "knowing what we know about intellectual maturity, should we raise the age of consent?", it's probably not a good or coherent one.
One is whether women and girls (biologically defined) should have the right to single-sex spaces, places, events, competitions, etc, from which men and boys (biologically defined) are excluded. Democrats say the answer is NO, that any man or boy who claims a female "gender identity" should be admitted to all such spaces, etc, with no further questions asked, no "gatekeeping" of any kind.
The other question is whether pediatric sex-trait modification drugs and surgeries meet a reasonable standard of safety and efficacy. And here the evidence is overwhelming that they do not. See the UK Cass review for the most complete summary. There have been mulitple other systematic evidence reviews in other European countries (all with not-for-profit health care systems), and all have come to same conclusion. The US is way behind the curve, because our for-profit medical system sees gender surgery as a huge cash cow. There are hundreds of pediatric sex-trait modification surgeries performed in the US every year, and the number is growing exponentially. This is nothing less than an ongoing crime against humanity. And it is primarily gay kids and autistic kids who get cut up.
Where do those links show that this is a high priority for normies?
In any case, they probably shouldn't listen to you creeps since only a week ago you were throwing temper tantrums over someone who was born a woman and identified as a woman winning a women's boxing match.
Male or female is determined by biology. The people in question are males with a DSD. They went through male puberty which is why they are so much stronger than their female opponents.
I can see it being true _here_ in that Trump already gets an incredible amount of negative messaging. The marginal value at this point is just lower than other things, whereas for a normie politician like Romney or Kerry, negative stuff might work. They're not things you've already heard a bunch.
1. Aren't most of the "normal" Democratic messages almost by definition moderate? In the context of Democratic party politics, I would label "moderate" as "stuff everyone supports", or the minimum viable level of leftism, while "progressive" as roghtly "all the moderate stuff, but more". Ex: expand Medicare vs M4A, ARP vs Green New Deal, etc. So saying "normal stuff polls best" is a bit of sleight of hand here to my mind: what we actually see is that a generic center-left agenda polls best, which I think is just the default "moderate" position?
2. Another way to frame that per-queation data at the end of the article is that messaging on Social Security and Medicare is super persuasive, and that this is the issue whose salience it is most important to raise. Given the headline of this article, one might be forgiven for assuming that a "Kamala cracked down on junk fees" as might be a better ad to run than "Trump will destroy entitlements", but that's actually not the case.
Not sure if I’m reading this right but M4A (which includes abolishing private insurance) and GND (which includes a national jobs guarantee plus lots of other extreme stuff) are not moderate policies.
Sorry, maybe I was unclear: I meant that both M4A and GND are the progressive "do the center-left thing but MOAR" version of their moderate alternatives, namely ACA retention/expansion and the ARP
I think "weird" is not really about policy. For example, Vance and the Harris campaign both agree a child tax credit is good policy.
But Vance decided to frame this policy not as a tax credit for families with children, but as raising taxes on childless people to punish them. Who thinks like that? Why would you frame it in such a negative way? There's no other word for that choice but "weird" and people are rightly alarmed by it because they think it reflects something about Vance and the Republicans' attitudes and character.
I think there's something to this, in a way that's hard to measure in a political science survey of this type. It of course can't be the whole campaign, but it does hit on something real.
For those interested in the raw data behind this post, one of the authors shared this on Twitter: "And here's a link to all the messages & by-message results:" https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15ixzsZffRvpDa1LEXJlS9mv6m00zzbDdMfvoG6IIXiA/edit?gid=80075598#gid=80075598
“ Instead of repeating a single negative adjective about Trump over and over, Democrats should be informing voters about what Harris would do.” It’s not either or. It’s both and!
Voters have been longing for some Dem candidate to give back as good as they get. Centrist pundits and candidates have normalized MAGA invective and lies by not hitting back. It’s time to normalize liberal/progressive views: counterpunching with joy and humor gives women, young people and minorities the courage to affirm what they already know to be true. They don’t need persuading on policy. They need to know that national leaders have their backs, when they confront neighbors, coworkers and “weird” Christian nationalists.
For a swing voter like me, even better than positioning the Democratic ticket as normal would be to tell me what they want to do if elected. Without a primary process she wasn’t required to articulate any policies she would champion as President. Since her ascension, there have been no interviews and no press conferences. Her campaign website has no policy statements. It would be nice to know what she plans on doing, be it normal or otherwise.
It's pretty much the same as Biden, including the toughened border bill. No moderation on student loan forgiveness, for example (she doubled down on that). Sounds like she's endorsing the rent control thing, although I have not heard that as clearly. So far at least, the guiding principle seems to be "Joe woulda won" if only the age and infirmity could be ignored... which seems like a mis-reading of the available data.
Sad. Could we just give that money to families in poverty instead?
Sensible, but I'm starting to wonder whether the Democratic leadership is even capable of publicly taking "normal" positions anymore....
Great post.
I think Ezra Klein has made the point that normie Democratic talking points get ignored by the media so it's hard to get that into the bloodstream. But that's what the money is for!
But "expected wild progressive candidate adopts normie positions" could have legs...
I’ve read that advertisements are most effective when delivered shortly before one votes and that their effect decays rapidly.
It might be best to drive fund raising early i. the campaign and then deploy the big bucks and empirically tested messages in October.
Ah, I see -- this post isn't for paid subscribers only. That explains a few things in the comments . . . .
Only paid subscribers can comment.
Allegedly. I'm very serious when I say it's become obvious over the past couple years that there's some sort of loophole to that rule on public posts. Like clockwork on public posts (1) never-before-seen commenters show up, (2) whose comments are strongly at odds with the profile of the average SB commenter, (3) don't seem like the kind of person who would be paying $8 a month to read Matt's writing, and (4) are usually never seen again after making a few comments in the public thread.
It's ok. We welcome all comers. :-)
So those of us that oppose Trump because democracy are going to have their vote taken advantage of to shove through typical democratic agenda items? Where Dems pretend to have a mandate on those items when really we just don't want trump? I gotta say... It makes it not fun voting with the Left.
Welcome to a two-party system. Most leftists experience what you’re talking about every election.
Ok, so are you suggesting I go vote for an insurrectionist if I don't prefer the broader goals of the democratic party? I see my vote must not be wanted on the left... I'll make sure to let my Republican friends know, the dozen or so I convinced to vote with the Dems the last few elections... I guess there isn't a home for us on the left..
Lol
Really I had no idea we had a two party system. 🤦♀️
No, I’m saying you should vote for the Democrats, despite having sincere, meaningful differences with them. Just like I do. :)
So, what you're saying is, by voting against Trump because of democracy, you get ... democracy.
What he's saying is that if Dems really, really, believe that Trump is a threat to the Republic, you would think they would be willing to moderate on some lesser issues in order to pick up enough votes to make sure he did not get elected.
Thank you, exactly.... The black and white thinking That's a part of many people on the left is ridiculous. For some of us it's Trump is a dumpster fire that's a real threat and on the other side is a real threat as well, a gauntlet to be survived or not... I definitely agree that the right should deal with their extremists. But the left just kind of shrugs with theirs. Not to say that there's an equivalency here. If we get big government dems with programs and redistribution and some kind of weird reparations hierarchy and a whole bunch of other crap. It will still be the same political sausage, only with power brokers tied to the government like in every other left-wing country. Sounds pretty crappy to me. The challenge with going with the right is they are completely unmoored to a very illiberal electoral base. Trans rights? Forget it on the right, being an atheist and walking around and getting promotions? Forget it on the right.
But I think the likelihood of this particular top-of-ticket set of Dem candidates setting up an extreme leftwing redistribution/reparations/whatever agenda once in power is a lot less likely than an extreme rightwing agenda being implemented if Trump wins. Democrats do not need to turn themselves into moderate Republicans just because actual moderate Republicans let the loonies take over their party. The far left of the Democrat party may have pulled moderate Dems like Biden a bit farther left than Republicans want him to be, but any normal Democrat is ALWAYS going to be too far left of any normal Republican to suit any Republican voters. To me (as a Democrat) Harris, Walz and Biden are pretty normal Democrats; Trump does not look anything like a historically normal Republican, but a lot of elected Republicans are refashioning themselves in the image of Trump. And I do not think most swing voters are really tuned into the actual policy differences that get discussed here. If we had a multi-party parliamentary system maybe the moderates could form some kind of coalition government, but we do not.
I agree, the moderates loose out in our system. But when Harris goes out and talks about national rent control... Like for no reason... No one is talking about that, Matt Yglesias says it's a bad idea, it really looks.more like far left "own goals" not helpful.... What could moderate pubs do? Fight an entire media echo system? Try everyday Murdoch ruined the wsj.... Biden has more experience and is more moderate the Kamala... Kamala has lots of issues... That have been litigated all over the place. Good luck to her. But to say Republicans let the loonies take over is like blaming a crap ton of regular people for the fall of their country to a dictator... It's not how power structures work, and is the wrong assessment in my view. But yes we are stuck at a place where those of us that are coming over to the democratic party, can align with the NIMBY's and others to create some kind of economic coalition against the economically ruinous propositions of the general left. Free college (join the army) inheritance tax, go jump in a lake.
Form a practical political perspective for Democrats I agree. But as an individual voter, if you believe Trump is a threat to democracy, lesser issues really shouldn't matter. After all, maintaining democracy allows you to vote against those policies next time.
The tooth fairy is hard to vote against
Well, uh, yes. That's how a republic works -- you vote for a representative and then you're stuck with whatever they vote for, and all you can do is hope that they vote in a way you like. You have to decide for yourself whether whatever the representative will vote for once they are in office is tolerable enough to take the risk of voting for them.
Makes a good argument to vote for Trump... The calculus becomes, ruin things or hope the pubs keep Trump reasonably ineffective... Governance through never let a good crisis go to waste sounds really lame... Let's see because Trump is so bad, we can do one step less worse bad stuff. FML
I blame Republicans for robbing the country of a meaningful choice between progressive and conservative policies because they've hitched themselves and those conservative policies to a man who's morally disqualified from office due to trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election.
Re: messaging— I wonder how important issue salience effects are in the context of single-ad tests.
The general theme of your testing is that ads which talk about policy areas where supermajorities of the public like the mainstream Democratic position produce the best responses. Moderating on those issues is actually actively unhelpful because the median voter is already with the Dems on social security, healthcare, abortion, etc.
I wonder if ads talking about moderating on issues where the Dems are seen less favorably— like immigration and criminal justice— underperform because in addition to their message, they temporarily raise the salience of crime and immigration as issues, which makes swingable voters more likely to think about voting Republican. I’d agree that it’s probably for the best to just not talk about that stuff in paid media, but it is going to come up during the campaign, and candidates will have to find ways to manage the damage. I do think that Harris’s emphasis on passing the border security bill is smart in that context; it’ll give her a harm-reducing thing to talk about when it comes up in interviews and debates.
Great insight - thanks. This is the kind of insight I’m looking for that I can’t find in standard free platforms .
Ah yes. Voters hate negative messages and prefer positive ones.
Sure they do.
Sure they do.
The problem with "convincing voters that Harris is normal" is that it is not true.
Harris and Walz are all-in on racist equity and denial of the sex-based rights of women and girls, both of which are hugely unpopular among normies.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/3112331/an-open-letter-to-kamala-harris-from-a-democratic-woman/
Oh god, he’s on this blog now too?
Pro tip: my username is at the top of every one of my comments. Please feel free to skip them.
That's not a position paper/press release/statement from Harris and Walz. Are you sure they're all-in on those things still?
Absolutely. All Democrats holding elected office are all-in on gender ideology and allowing men to legally declare themselves to be women at will. See the federal Equality Act, which is supported by ALL Democrats in Congress and was called out by Biden in every one of his SOTU addresses as a high priority.
Based on what?
Based on their voting records.
What votes?
Equally Act
Normies don't obsess about kids' genitals as much as people like you do
This is an extremely stupid response to a real question about whether the existing evidence for childhood gender transition is any good.
If your response can also be used for the question "knowing what we know about intellectual maturity, should we raise the age of consent?", it's probably not a good or coherent one.
That question was literally never asked in the comment I replied to
There are two different questions here.
One is whether women and girls (biologically defined) should have the right to single-sex spaces, places, events, competitions, etc, from which men and boys (biologically defined) are excluded. Democrats say the answer is NO, that any man or boy who claims a female "gender identity" should be admitted to all such spaces, etc, with no further questions asked, no "gatekeeping" of any kind.
The other question is whether pediatric sex-trait modification drugs and surgeries meet a reasonable standard of safety and efficacy. And here the evidence is overwhelming that they do not. See the UK Cass review for the most complete summary. There have been mulitple other systematic evidence reviews in other European countries (all with not-for-profit health care systems), and all have come to same conclusion. The US is way behind the curve, because our for-profit medical system sees gender surgery as a huge cash cow. There are hundreds of pediatric sex-trait modification surgeries performed in the US every year, and the number is growing exponentially. This is nothing less than an ongoing crime against humanity. And it is primarily gay kids and autistic kids who get cut up.
Normies believe women and girls deserve their own sporting events, locker rooms, and prison cells, without men and boys who claim a "female identity"
http://shewon.org
https://womensliberationfront.org/news
Where do those links show that this is a high priority for normies?
In any case, they probably shouldn't listen to you creeps since only a week ago you were throwing temper tantrums over someone who was born a woman and identified as a woman winning a women's boxing match.
And now out come the personal insults. Sad!
And the 2 boxers in question are male and should not be allowed to compete against women.
Wow. Now we've got people like you calling someone who was born a woman and identifies as a woman a "male". We've really come full circle!
Male or female is determined by biology. The people in question are males with a DSD. They went through male puberty which is why they are so much stronger than their female opponents.
Ah yes. Voters hate negative messages and prefer positive ones.
Sure they do.
Sure they do.
I can see it being true _here_ in that Trump already gets an incredible amount of negative messaging. The marginal value at this point is just lower than other things, whereas for a normie politician like Romney or Kerry, negative stuff might work. They're not things you've already heard a bunch.
Yeah, the theory that Donald Trump just hasn't been the subject of enough negative messaging yet is really one for the ages.
2 thoughts immediately come to mind:
1. Aren't most of the "normal" Democratic messages almost by definition moderate? In the context of Democratic party politics, I would label "moderate" as "stuff everyone supports", or the minimum viable level of leftism, while "progressive" as roghtly "all the moderate stuff, but more". Ex: expand Medicare vs M4A, ARP vs Green New Deal, etc. So saying "normal stuff polls best" is a bit of sleight of hand here to my mind: what we actually see is that a generic center-left agenda polls best, which I think is just the default "moderate" position?
2. Another way to frame that per-queation data at the end of the article is that messaging on Social Security and Medicare is super persuasive, and that this is the issue whose salience it is most important to raise. Given the headline of this article, one might be forgiven for assuming that a "Kamala cracked down on junk fees" as might be a better ad to run than "Trump will destroy entitlements", but that's actually not the case.
Not sure if I’m reading this right but M4A (which includes abolishing private insurance) and GND (which includes a national jobs guarantee plus lots of other extreme stuff) are not moderate policies.
Sorry, maybe I was unclear: I meant that both M4A and GND are the progressive "do the center-left thing but MOAR" version of their moderate alternatives, namely ACA retention/expansion and the ARP
I know this is a big off topic, but just listened to the Pelosi interview in the new yorker.... jfc
I think "weird" is not really about policy. For example, Vance and the Harris campaign both agree a child tax credit is good policy.
But Vance decided to frame this policy not as a tax credit for families with children, but as raising taxes on childless people to punish them. Who thinks like that? Why would you frame it in such a negative way? There's no other word for that choice but "weird" and people are rightly alarmed by it because they think it reflects something about Vance and the Republicans' attitudes and character.
I think there's something to this, in a way that's hard to measure in a political science survey of this type. It of course can't be the whole campaign, but it does hit on something real.