That the median voter thinks Democrats will open the border is an epic messaging failure. These are the wages of quietly continuing Trump’s asylum policy without telling anyone. Democrats should have pushed an immigration bill with strong enforcement measures and Biden should have used the bully pulpit to make the party’s position clear. Instead, Democrats are hemorrhaging Latino votes at the same time blue collar white folks think Democrats want open borders. It’s the worst of both worlds.
This article was basically written to give moderate republicans like me permission to vote for a democratic senator. And even though I know that, it totally worked. I don’t live in a swing state but maybe someone else reading this with similar politics does. Well done. At minimum I won’t feel bad if the dems keep the senate now.
When I read about the ambassador-nominee to Brazil being held up by Republicans because she once said moving the embassy to Jerusalem was stupid, I thought to myself: "Huh, that sounds really bad for such a minor issue. But Matt is usually fair when criticizing the GOP, so must be the case."
But I was curious as to who this Elizabeth Bagley is, so off to the rabbit hole I went.
Turns out, back in 1998, she had what she describes as a "free flowing conversation" with a journalist where her comments "fit into the traditional tropes of anti-Semitism," according to Democratic Senator Ben Cardin. She said she regretted her "poor choice of words" where she said money was why US lawmakers support Israel. She has tried to back away from her comments by saying she was "very sorry about that choice of words and none of them reflect any of my thinking then or now."
She is a major fundraiser for the Party. She married an heir to the RJ Reynolds tobacco fortune and has raised millions of dollars over the years. Long associated with the Clintons, she gave over $1M to the Clinton Foundation. Has a house on Nantucket and DC.
Highlighting opposition to her as an example of irrational opposition seems unfair. And reducing that opposition to objecting to her saying moving the embassy was stupid appears to be really unfair.
Turns out, there are about 27% of 194 ambassador positions are open as of 7/15/22. At the same point during the Trump administration, there were 28% unfilled. So almost exactly the same.
Just your periodic reminder that when you read something about how terrible and irrational one party is acting, it is worth taking those statements with a huge grain of salt. Sometimes it might be true, but oftentimes it is not. Matt is better than most but still is prone to exaggerating small differences for partisan purpose.
I think this hits the great understated reason not to put Republicans in charge of Congress. Instead of working with moderate Democrats to steer policy in a slightly more conservative direction they will simply create government and possibly fiscal dysfunction.
So, should we assume based on this piece that Matt believes it's a foregone conclusion that Congress will NOT deal with the debt ceiling in the lame duck session? The mind positively reels at the gross stupidity or fecklessness on the part of Democrats if they don't take action (ditto the Electoral Count Reform Act).
Also, Matt writes:
>>I’m concerned about overturning the 2024 election.<<
Is he saying here that he worries that big GOP margins next week will translate into gains that will persist in November of 2024? Because, again, it's the latter election's Congress that certifies the Electoral College vote, right?
What those polls tell me is that the GOP is still able to get the Democrats stuck on the message that they are soft on crime and soft on the border, while Republicans still get to ride on the perception that they are the party of "energy abundance", and I scare quote that because I have high confidence that that's code for the very narrow slice of energy that means "lower gas prices", and not the holistic picture of energy abundance that Matt has laid out in the past. And despite Matt's best efforts, cuts in entitlement programs don't make the list. It tells me that Democrats are still struggling in the messaging department.
> I don’t know what will happen exactly, but the [debt] crisis or standoff will be at least somewhat economically damaging, and it won’t end with cuts-only entitlement reform.
We can and should avoid this showdown by increasing the debt limit through reconciliation in the lame duck session. I still don’t understand our Democratic leadership’s aversion to increasing the limit along partisan lines.
The potential global financial meltdown when all market participants need to account for the possibility of the US Federal Government defaulting on any of its financial obligations are beyond imagination. Particularly with the massive US Treasury market being foundational to all global dollar financing. This isn’t just a run-of-the-mill government shutdown when we fail to pass a budget; this is financial nuclear armageddon.
If the concern is Republicans campaigning in 2024 on something like “Democrats increased the debt limit to 35T!” then we should increase the limit to something absurd like a googol dollars (1 followed by 100 zeros). Make it clear that this is a ridiculous, likely unconstitutional, artificial constraint that serves no purpose. With such an esoteric and generally incomprehensible number most voters won’t even be able to apprehend this as any sort of concrete concern.
My guess is that our leadership believes that Republicans will always back down and we can avoid any potential partisan attack. Yet we can neutralize the potential for attacks and eliminate the tail risk of Republicans taking this game of chicken all the way to global financial annihilation.
I think this piece does a really fantastic job laying out the complete lack of a constructive GOP policy agenda. I do think you handwave the “sweeping reconciliation bill” point. It seems trivially obvious that if Dems won, BBB and HR1 would go immediately onto the congressional agenda. I don’t see how they would pass, but what indication has been given that Ds moved on from those ideas?
There's something conspicuously absent from this analysis of what will or won't happen if GOP takes both houses of Congress. What happens with Ukraine funding? McCarthey has already signaled that he's open to cutting Ukraine funding if he's Speaker.
Now this could just be postering and a negotiating tactic. It seems right now there are plenty of votes to keeping funding for Ukraine going. But I would NOT count on that continuing on the GOP side. There's the obvious, who on the GOP side is getting Russia money. I know, I know, it's a rabbit hole that can lead to not so helpful places. But considering what we know about the NRA, considering how many GOP officials spent July 4th in Moscow in 2017*, considering previous comments made by Paul Ryan, I feel pretty confident that the number of GOP officials who have some sort of financial connections to Russia is more than zero.
But even beyond that, even if GOP officials are not at all connected financially to Russia, they are very interested in making sure they win re-election in 2024. And given the dynamics of gerrymandering, the biggest danger to re-election is losing a primary. And GOP primary voters seem to be very alarmingly pro-Putin. Purely from saving your own political hide aspect, wouldn't be shocked if some of the pro giving Ukraine aid start to flip. What happens if Tucker Carlson does a weeklong special program live from Moscow (given his statements about Putin and given that he already did this in Hungary, a real possibility btw) and GOP House members started getting feedback from the large contingent of GOP primary voters who are Tucker fans? And then there are the GOP House members who are likely just flat-out Pro-Putin out of personal preference.
Beyond the actual dynamics of the war itself, there's the secondary effects. Voters say the number one issue is inflation. You know what's a huge driver or at least impact on inflation? The war in Ukraine. It seems extremely clear that Putin is hoping a GOP controlled Congress can do the work his army clearly is not capable of doing. Aid to Ukraine is likely going to be a huge impact on Putin's next move which will obviously impact the trajectory of energy markets.
It's just odd to me that Matt would leave out a pretty big issue where who controls the House and/or Senate could have a huge impact.
* I'm aware that foreign policy is almost always way down on the list of voter concerns in any election barring a situation where there are significant numbers of American troops involved (and most importantly dying) in a "hot" war. But I feel extremely confident that the typical median voter is pretty anti-Putin at this point (as opposed to GOP base). And I also feel pretty confident that the typical median voter is not aware that large swathes of the GOP, including Ron Johnson, spent July 4th, 2017 in Moscow. If Mandela Barnes (or other Dem candidates) hasn't had any ads or brought up this fact about Johnson or the other GOPers who went to Moscow, that is a real failure to me.
Your "cop-friendly" and "cop-skeptical" paragraphs say the same thing, with the difference of an "un-":
"The rise in crime is caused by police willfully shirking their duty to protect the public, because they don't like being criticized. The criticisms to which they object are:
fair (cop-skeptical version)
unfair (cop-friendly version)."
When even your attempt to be friendly leaves the police willfully shirking their duty because they don't like being criticized, then I'd say you're either bad at supporting cops, or the cops' behavior is insupportable.
Two things. I'm a moderate who doesn't generally vote for Democrats, but I'll be voting for Maggie Hassan and Chris Pappas this year for precisely the reasons that Matt outlines. I want an opposition party who is principled and if it takes losing a few elections to get there, I think that's the price to pay. Second, I know it would be politically bad for Biden to say something like: "Whether there are more or fewer police in Detroit, San Francisco, or San Antonio is not something that should be decided by the federal government, but by the citizens of those cities - if you have strong opinions on how to reform policing in your city vote for a mayor and city council who agree with you on those issues", but it would really be a breath of fresh air.
I agree completely with the narrow points you've been making on crime, but watching you and others dance around the real issue has convinced me that the Democratic party simply isn't ready to fix anything. I cast my first ever vote for a Republican as a result.
The problem is that a powerful minority of Democratic officials are de facto anarchists. Republicans won't actually fix anything on crime but certain Democrats will absolutely work to make it worse. The example that bothers me most personally is how here in Seattle the local county kept the jails on Covid standards until a couple of months ago, well after schools were fully reopened. The "surprise side effect" is that the jail simply couldn't accept as many new prisoners and so quite a few convicted criminals never did any time. Given that the county executive has discussed how he would like to close the jail in five years this doesn't seem accidental!
I understand that you aren't going to argue too strongly against Democrats right before an election but I think you're severely underestimating just how toxic this dynamic is. Just to take one example, it's _clearly_ why the attack on Paul Pelosi was a below the fold article and why it's difficult for Democrats to argue for such common sense measures as giving Nancy a security detail. Imagine the attack ads if she does get one: "There are several thousand mentally ill drug addicts roaming the streets of San Francisco. Democrats believe Nancy Pelosi deserves to be protected from them while the rest of the city has to fend for themselves".
The anarchists have to be purged from the party. There's no other path forward.
This article makes no mention of Biden's veto. The republicans will not pass anything this term because it can't be put into law past democratic president. The only question on the ballot is do you approve of the Democrats performance and future agenda.
I feel many of the same frustrations as Matt wrt to the police activity discussion. ‘Back the blue’ does sometimes seem to be suggesting that cops just can’t be criticized at all. But in specific people are pointing to a variety of what they say are politically motivated criminal charges leveled at POs and it’s unfair to ignore this. There is a real question about how many weak cases should be pursued following viral video, and what effect that has on cops more broadly.
feel like commentators here (and not MY!) forget that like 90% of the reason dems will lose on tuesday is because inflation has been double digits for the last year and outpaced wage growth + it’s a midterm under a dem president.
if you told someone in 2000 who into a coma and just woke up to guess what the midterm results would be, they’d probably guess right.
That the median voter thinks Democrats will open the border is an epic messaging failure. These are the wages of quietly continuing Trump’s asylum policy without telling anyone. Democrats should have pushed an immigration bill with strong enforcement measures and Biden should have used the bully pulpit to make the party’s position clear. Instead, Democrats are hemorrhaging Latino votes at the same time blue collar white folks think Democrats want open borders. It’s the worst of both worlds.
This article was basically written to give moderate republicans like me permission to vote for a democratic senator. And even though I know that, it totally worked. I don’t live in a swing state but maybe someone else reading this with similar politics does. Well done. At minimum I won’t feel bad if the dems keep the senate now.
When I read about the ambassador-nominee to Brazil being held up by Republicans because she once said moving the embassy to Jerusalem was stupid, I thought to myself: "Huh, that sounds really bad for such a minor issue. But Matt is usually fair when criticizing the GOP, so must be the case."
But I was curious as to who this Elizabeth Bagley is, so off to the rabbit hole I went.
Turns out, back in 1998, she had what she describes as a "free flowing conversation" with a journalist where her comments "fit into the traditional tropes of anti-Semitism," according to Democratic Senator Ben Cardin. She said she regretted her "poor choice of words" where she said money was why US lawmakers support Israel. She has tried to back away from her comments by saying she was "very sorry about that choice of words and none of them reflect any of my thinking then or now."
She is a major fundraiser for the Party. She married an heir to the RJ Reynolds tobacco fortune and has raised millions of dollars over the years. Long associated with the Clintons, she gave over $1M to the Clinton Foundation. Has a house on Nantucket and DC.
Highlighting opposition to her as an example of irrational opposition seems unfair. And reducing that opposition to objecting to her saying moving the embassy was stupid appears to be really unfair.
Turns out, there are about 27% of 194 ambassador positions are open as of 7/15/22. At the same point during the Trump administration, there were 28% unfilled. So almost exactly the same.
Just your periodic reminder that when you read something about how terrible and irrational one party is acting, it is worth taking those statements with a huge grain of salt. Sometimes it might be true, but oftentimes it is not. Matt is better than most but still is prone to exaggerating small differences for partisan purpose.
I think this hits the great understated reason not to put Republicans in charge of Congress. Instead of working with moderate Democrats to steer policy in a slightly more conservative direction they will simply create government and possibly fiscal dysfunction.
So, should we assume based on this piece that Matt believes it's a foregone conclusion that Congress will NOT deal with the debt ceiling in the lame duck session? The mind positively reels at the gross stupidity or fecklessness on the part of Democrats if they don't take action (ditto the Electoral Count Reform Act).
Also, Matt writes:
>>I’m concerned about overturning the 2024 election.<<
Is he saying here that he worries that big GOP margins next week will translate into gains that will persist in November of 2024? Because, again, it's the latter election's Congress that certifies the Electoral College vote, right?
What those polls tell me is that the GOP is still able to get the Democrats stuck on the message that they are soft on crime and soft on the border, while Republicans still get to ride on the perception that they are the party of "energy abundance", and I scare quote that because I have high confidence that that's code for the very narrow slice of energy that means "lower gas prices", and not the holistic picture of energy abundance that Matt has laid out in the past. And despite Matt's best efforts, cuts in entitlement programs don't make the list. It tells me that Democrats are still struggling in the messaging department.
> I don’t know what will happen exactly, but the [debt] crisis or standoff will be at least somewhat economically damaging, and it won’t end with cuts-only entitlement reform.
We can and should avoid this showdown by increasing the debt limit through reconciliation in the lame duck session. I still don’t understand our Democratic leadership’s aversion to increasing the limit along partisan lines.
The potential global financial meltdown when all market participants need to account for the possibility of the US Federal Government defaulting on any of its financial obligations are beyond imagination. Particularly with the massive US Treasury market being foundational to all global dollar financing. This isn’t just a run-of-the-mill government shutdown when we fail to pass a budget; this is financial nuclear armageddon.
If the concern is Republicans campaigning in 2024 on something like “Democrats increased the debt limit to 35T!” then we should increase the limit to something absurd like a googol dollars (1 followed by 100 zeros). Make it clear that this is a ridiculous, likely unconstitutional, artificial constraint that serves no purpose. With such an esoteric and generally incomprehensible number most voters won’t even be able to apprehend this as any sort of concrete concern.
My guess is that our leadership believes that Republicans will always back down and we can avoid any potential partisan attack. Yet we can neutralize the potential for attacks and eliminate the tail risk of Republicans taking this game of chicken all the way to global financial annihilation.
I think this piece does a really fantastic job laying out the complete lack of a constructive GOP policy agenda. I do think you handwave the “sweeping reconciliation bill” point. It seems trivially obvious that if Dems won, BBB and HR1 would go immediately onto the congressional agenda. I don’t see how they would pass, but what indication has been given that Ds moved on from those ideas?
There's something conspicuously absent from this analysis of what will or won't happen if GOP takes both houses of Congress. What happens with Ukraine funding? McCarthey has already signaled that he's open to cutting Ukraine funding if he's Speaker.
Now this could just be postering and a negotiating tactic. It seems right now there are plenty of votes to keeping funding for Ukraine going. But I would NOT count on that continuing on the GOP side. There's the obvious, who on the GOP side is getting Russia money. I know, I know, it's a rabbit hole that can lead to not so helpful places. But considering what we know about the NRA, considering how many GOP officials spent July 4th in Moscow in 2017*, considering previous comments made by Paul Ryan, I feel pretty confident that the number of GOP officials who have some sort of financial connections to Russia is more than zero.
But even beyond that, even if GOP officials are not at all connected financially to Russia, they are very interested in making sure they win re-election in 2024. And given the dynamics of gerrymandering, the biggest danger to re-election is losing a primary. And GOP primary voters seem to be very alarmingly pro-Putin. Purely from saving your own political hide aspect, wouldn't be shocked if some of the pro giving Ukraine aid start to flip. What happens if Tucker Carlson does a weeklong special program live from Moscow (given his statements about Putin and given that he already did this in Hungary, a real possibility btw) and GOP House members started getting feedback from the large contingent of GOP primary voters who are Tucker fans? And then there are the GOP House members who are likely just flat-out Pro-Putin out of personal preference.
Beyond the actual dynamics of the war itself, there's the secondary effects. Voters say the number one issue is inflation. You know what's a huge driver or at least impact on inflation? The war in Ukraine. It seems extremely clear that Putin is hoping a GOP controlled Congress can do the work his army clearly is not capable of doing. Aid to Ukraine is likely going to be a huge impact on Putin's next move which will obviously impact the trajectory of energy markets.
It's just odd to me that Matt would leave out a pretty big issue where who controls the House and/or Senate could have a huge impact.
* I'm aware that foreign policy is almost always way down on the list of voter concerns in any election barring a situation where there are significant numbers of American troops involved (and most importantly dying) in a "hot" war. But I feel extremely confident that the typical median voter is pretty anti-Putin at this point (as opposed to GOP base). And I also feel pretty confident that the typical median voter is not aware that large swathes of the GOP, including Ron Johnson, spent July 4th, 2017 in Moscow. If Mandela Barnes (or other Dem candidates) hasn't had any ads or brought up this fact about Johnson or the other GOPers who went to Moscow, that is a real failure to me.
Your "cop-friendly" and "cop-skeptical" paragraphs say the same thing, with the difference of an "un-":
"The rise in crime is caused by police willfully shirking their duty to protect the public, because they don't like being criticized. The criticisms to which they object are:
fair (cop-skeptical version)
unfair (cop-friendly version)."
When even your attempt to be friendly leaves the police willfully shirking their duty because they don't like being criticized, then I'd say you're either bad at supporting cops, or the cops' behavior is insupportable.
Two things. I'm a moderate who doesn't generally vote for Democrats, but I'll be voting for Maggie Hassan and Chris Pappas this year for precisely the reasons that Matt outlines. I want an opposition party who is principled and if it takes losing a few elections to get there, I think that's the price to pay. Second, I know it would be politically bad for Biden to say something like: "Whether there are more or fewer police in Detroit, San Francisco, or San Antonio is not something that should be decided by the federal government, but by the citizens of those cities - if you have strong opinions on how to reform policing in your city vote for a mayor and city council who agree with you on those issues", but it would really be a breath of fresh air.
I agree completely with the narrow points you've been making on crime, but watching you and others dance around the real issue has convinced me that the Democratic party simply isn't ready to fix anything. I cast my first ever vote for a Republican as a result.
The problem is that a powerful minority of Democratic officials are de facto anarchists. Republicans won't actually fix anything on crime but certain Democrats will absolutely work to make it worse. The example that bothers me most personally is how here in Seattle the local county kept the jails on Covid standards until a couple of months ago, well after schools were fully reopened. The "surprise side effect" is that the jail simply couldn't accept as many new prisoners and so quite a few convicted criminals never did any time. Given that the county executive has discussed how he would like to close the jail in five years this doesn't seem accidental!
I understand that you aren't going to argue too strongly against Democrats right before an election but I think you're severely underestimating just how toxic this dynamic is. Just to take one example, it's _clearly_ why the attack on Paul Pelosi was a below the fold article and why it's difficult for Democrats to argue for such common sense measures as giving Nancy a security detail. Imagine the attack ads if she does get one: "There are several thousand mentally ill drug addicts roaming the streets of San Francisco. Democrats believe Nancy Pelosi deserves to be protected from them while the rest of the city has to fend for themselves".
The anarchists have to be purged from the party. There's no other path forward.
This article makes no mention of Biden's veto. The republicans will not pass anything this term because it can't be put into law past democratic president. The only question on the ballot is do you approve of the Democrats performance and future agenda.
I feel many of the same frustrations as Matt wrt to the police activity discussion. ‘Back the blue’ does sometimes seem to be suggesting that cops just can’t be criticized at all. But in specific people are pointing to a variety of what they say are politically motivated criminal charges leveled at POs and it’s unfair to ignore this. There is a real question about how many weak cases should be pursued following viral video, and what effect that has on cops more broadly.
A party that managed to thread the needle on finding all the ideas voters like would clean up:
- Massive >>unashamed<< enforcement of the Mexican border. Asylum greatly restricted.
- Don't do anything doctrinaire with healthcare. Anyone promising Medicaid for all or privatising something or other can fuck off.
- More cops. No talk of defunding them, and anyone that even glances at that policy is banished from the party.
- Abortion is legal but with restrictions like in European countries.
- Full steam ahead on oil. Climate change is real, but right now restricting oil production just means importing more.
- Anyone with weird ideas to do with transsexualism, racial demagoguery of left or right wing types, or idiotic conspiracy theories never sees power.
feel like commentators here (and not MY!) forget that like 90% of the reason dems will lose on tuesday is because inflation has been double digits for the last year and outpaced wage growth + it’s a midterm under a dem president.
if you told someone in 2000 who into a coma and just woke up to guess what the midterm results would be, they’d probably guess right.