What Yglesias is failing to take note of in this Debbie Downer piece is that, in 2026, Democrats will have master political strategist David Hogg on their side.
I don't believe David Hogg is remotely like Trump in the corruption department. I just think he's too inexperienced, and doesn't perceive the world very accurately.
Yes? I'm comparing them by pointing out that Trump is worse. This White House doesn't even bother with fig leafs about donating to some third-party charity. It's just straight pay-to-play.
I am talking about moral corruption, but I am probably wrong on that. I am just upset he is using Democratic Party resources to primary and ratfuck sitting Democrats.
I read he's been told "no" by this superiors: DNC leaders are required to be neutral in primaries. Not sure if it'll stick, or if he'll obey orders. I agree his plan to primary incumbent Democrats is moronically counterproductive, and is flat out unacceptable in a DNC official.
For all the faults of factionalist leftists, centrists and moderates spend so much time moaning and wringing their hands about it. Broadening the tent won’t happen by complaining Sanders is getting more attention.
Like Matt says, what is the plan? Moderates could be out there holding events and pushing their agendas. Why aren’t they?
On the plus side, moderates could earn points by just telling him to shut the fuck up as often and as loudly as possible. Matt is unwilling to acknowledge the Dems' 69-D chess strategy here.
I recall that Tweet where Mr. Hogg invited gun owners to leave the party. It was being played over and over again on social media once he was put on the DNC. I'm putting off my resignation so far. I have been a registered D all my life, as well as a union shop steward in two unions and board member in one. Sadly, I fail the Hogg purity test, having grown up in a rural area where hunting and shooting tin cans was not considered a grievous character flaw. I'll have to see if his worldview prevails, as I suppose the few other remaining middle of the road Democrats might be doing.
But if the sort of Hoggwash I speak of prevails, it sure does reduce the chances of a "big tent" Democratic party winning those Flyover states and getting that Senate majority.
Exactly. I feel like there are a lot of Dem leaders who remember the looming GOP majority of the Bush era and how it turned on a dime in 2006 and then the sinking economy led to 60 D senators in 2008 and figure the same thing will somehow just happen with Trump. But to paraphrase Rick Pitino, Blanche Lincoln is not walking through that door. Max Baucus is not walking through that door. Byron Dorgan is not walking through that door.
I'm hardly the first to say this, but if you look at who the 60 D senators were in 2009-10, it's absolutely incredible that they got consensus on the ACA. Someone like Blanche Lincoln was 20 points underwater and knew she was probably losing reelection and voted for it anyway.
It’s underrated the extent to which the ACA vote was the most politically courageous action certainly in a generation - bunch of senators and congresspeople not only committed career suicide but arguably cemented their districts / states as Republican for a generation to get it passed.
To me, it’s indisputable that this was a perfect example of being politically courageous / putting policy above your career and the only debate should be whether it was worth it.
I thought absolutely yes for a long time, but now with the benefit of hindsight knowing the solid R bloc in the senate would be enablers of authoritarianism and insurrection I’m a lot less sure.
Oh for sure. I don't think anyone could have reasonably predicted this at the time, it was a worthwhile sacrifice at the time.
That being said, it's obviously true - since the Blanche Lincolns of the world got wiped out, the Democrats have been completely noncompetitive in those areas. Maybe not the end of the world with a somewhat sane opposition, but really problematic now.
I'm probably super out of the loop on this, but ... aren't people in the end appreciating ACA? How come Dems can't turn that into a positive message? (Or I'm mixing it up with some Medicare thing? But wasn't that also passed as part of the ACA?)
for something that stuck, the ACA was the most politically courageous vote. but imo, the house voting for cap and trade was more courageous in maybe 09/10 (cant remember) but it didnt stick, so doesnt matter.
I'm young so maybe you can educate me on the politics/expectations at the time, but that seemed more stupid than brave? It's one thing to torch your majority to *pass* transformational legislation but why torch your career on a bill that can't pass? Was it generally asssumed DOA in the senate? Southwest Virginia's congressman voted for it despite repping one of the top 10 coal producing districts in the country and he lost by 3 or 4 points, was it worth it in order to have the bill die in the senate?
One of the big problems with modern politics is we burn tremendous amounts of political capital taking positions we can't implement anyway, which is very different from burning political capital to actually pass something good.
Let's expand on this and ask the question: if they were running next year, how many of these Democratic Senators from 2009 would be likely to win:
Baucus (MT), Harkin (IA), Rockefeller (WV), Conrad (ND), Dorgan (ND), Feingold (WI), Tim Johnson (SD), Landrieu (LA), Lincoln (AR), Pryor (AR), Bayh (IN), Nelson (FL), McCaskill (MO), Tester (MT), Hagan (NC), Begich (AK)
Maybe a couple would pull out a win. Most probably not. Partly it's because of the terrible Democratic brand, as Matt rightly argues. But mostly it's because these states have really, really changed since 2009.
None of those folks came out of nowhere in their states. But the partisan divide has deepened such that there probably are very few people like them in their states now. They were all likely the most moderate of the then democrats in the state. The most moderate dems in those states are probably not as moderate because the dem side has been squeezed and the R side has radicalized. What needs to happen is the national party has to go find whoever is the most moderate dem today, and then persuade them to shift right, and then support the hell out of them while protecting them on their left flank. But I guess that's MY's complaint, no one at the top of the party is even contemplating doing it.
I agree but I was just saying that if these exact same people with the exact same stands ran today most of them would still lose. Maybe that's because of the toxic national brand which they couldn't run away from or maybe it's because the state has changed so much, but either way it's not really about candidate recruitment.
There's truth to that for sure, but we also don't need to win in Arkansas neccesarily, Texas or Ohio would do just fine. Someone with even Jon Tester's views, who's way to the left of most of those folks, probably wins re-election in Ohio this year, if Tester had Manchins views (also to the left of many of those folks), he probably wins re-election. We really know what to do to get D+20, D+15, D+10, D+5 overperformances, we just run the D+20 candidates in 70-30 R states, the D+15 candidates in 60-40 R states etc. so they overperform a lot but still lose, gotta shift basically all the red/purple state guys a notch to the center
Yes, this seems about right. That was what we needed for 60 Dems in the Senate, and those days are gone for a very long time. The same for the Republicans ever having 60 in the Senate.
States are always changing, but these Senators and the party were adaptable and flexible to that, so they could change along with the states and continue to win.
Until we stop being the party that sounds like a mom telling you what not to do, we don’t have a chance. Wake me up if that happens but until then I don’t have the time to pay attention to a party that sticks to a loser strategy.
80% of the work could just be going back to cool, charismatic, confident dads, like Bill and Barack. Who makes light fun of the prissy killjoys in his stump speech.
"You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. What's wrong with that? Come on. There are some issues that we face, that you don't have to pass a law, but that doesn't mean folks can't have some sense and some respect for other people and, you know, some people might not want to see your underwear — I'm one of them."
A LOT of obama's appeal was modeling an old school "family values" conservative lifestyle but crossing that with essentially a generic liberal policy agenda.
No what I'm responding to is the contention in this thread that Democrats became a party that "shames you for having fun" and is the party of "mom telling you what to do." In my mind, Obama was dedicated and hardworking guy who embodied and advocated a pretty virtuous path and was in his own way somewhat judgmental.
So I'm not too sure why people think the party has changed that much, except that some of the worse parts of the left have been released into the wild?
If Harris said this people would absolutely say its cliched virtue signaling:
"But now, my life revolves around my two little girls. And what I think about is what kind of world I’m leaving them. Are they living in a country where there’s a huge gap between a few who are wealthy and a whole bunch of people who are struggling every day? Are they living in a country that is still divided by race? A country where, because they’re girls, they don’t have as much opportunity as boys do? Are they living in a country where we are hated around the world because we don’t cooperate effectively with other nations? Are they living a world that is in grave danger because of what we’ve done to its climate?
And what I’ve realized is that life doesn’t count for much unless you’re willing to do your small part to leave our children — all of our children — a better world. Even if it’s difficult. Even if the work seems great. Even if we don’t get very far in our lifetime."
To make your point, shouldn’t you cite speeches Harris actually gave and was criticized for and show that they were similar to Obama’s speeches he was praised for?
I guess the way to solve this is to figure out how moms manage to help their children grow up not just safe but thriving, without adopting this tone. Do you just need to have more effective children, or are there strategies you can learn?
Are you saying that the electorate are children? I think it is crazy that you think the problem is “Communicate as a Mom effectively” and not “Stop acting like a mom because YOU ARE NOT MY MOM”
The problem is that people think that anyone who tries to make things better for you must inherently be treating you as a child, and that treating you as a child is bad. I think the job of the government is to help make things better for us, and unfortunately one of the main models we have of that is one that people resent. And it’s not just the “you are not my mom” part - this thread began with the observation that many kids are equally resentful when it *is* their mom. The question is how to do good without triggering resentment, and effective parents are one good model for that (though sometimes it seems to rely on better children who just don’t resent people for caring about them).
I don't think that's the right diagnosis of the mom issue. In the 90s it was the conservatives who felt like nagging moms. Because they were the ones trying to impose values on the public that the public mostly didn't share.
That's when you end up on the wrong side of this dynamic. Not from trying to make policy, but from trying to enforce unpopular values.
I think this entire chain of logic is incredibly flawed and problematic. It presumes that if I have an idea about how to make things better, and you don't like it, that you are wrong simply because I am "Mom" and I know better.
It discounts the idea that maybe the other person
- doesn't think the problem I am trying to solve is, in fact, a problem
- agrees about the problem but thinks my solution is ass, and wants to do a different thing instead
But maybe the other person is right, and I am wrong? Have I considered that? If I have, and still think I am right, then how should I persuade them? Should I even try (note that "agree to disagree" is a viable outcome among adult allies, but is not in a parent/child relationship)?
Effective parenting is a TERRIBLE model for this, it is not "one good model" for this. The other people just are not your children.
I think between 1976-2016 there was relatively bipartisan elite alignment that free trade and immigration should not be central campaign issues because the electorate has bad views on these. This is similarly true of certain conspiracy theories, like anti-vax sentiment. I'm not exactly sure how this fits into the parenting metaphor, but it's definitely the case that the parties suppressed certain issues that could have been electoral winners and kept those who tried to profit from them (like Pat Buchanan, etc) to the fringes.
That is sort of fair, but breaks down if you keep asking the “elites” to take ridiculous stances as litmus tests that then undermine them because you force the issues to become partisan.
Like, it is patently ridiculous that someone asked Harris about surgeries for Trans people in prison (it’s also pretty ridiculous that she did not answer some variation of “Why tf are you wasting my time with this question? The president has bigger fish to fry”, but that is yet another matter)
I think you are misunderstanding the discussion here.
Most of the discussion I have about politics, and that is had on this forum, is on the merits. If someone wants to discuss the merits of the policy, talking about whether something is or isn't actually a problem, or disagreeing with the proposed solution, I'm happy to do that.
But there are some people who want to change the subject to become one of complaining that people are treating them like children. It was only in response to that that I said there is a problem of figuring out how to get people to stop feeling insulted by people trying to work on policy.
also on the substance nanny state liberal policies like hard smoking crackdowns are some of the most effective quality of life measures in history. I understand this stuff became politically toxic around 2010 or so but it's a huge shame that bloomberg-ish policies have been totally excised from public debate because they worked great.
I'm not convinced this sort of policy became any more or less toxic - if anything, I think Bloomberg's attempted soda size crackdown came at the one moment when that sort of policy was closest to being acceptable in public debate.
Smoking crackdowns were usually waged largely on behalf of non-smokers, and not primarily focused on saving people from themselves. It's unfortunate that there's not a similar angle we can take on gambling.
Yeah i'm not too sure... but I know there was a time when some cities were thinking of experimenting with a sugar tax but that seems basically dead now.
It's true the restaurant/public smoking bans were largely justified by second hand smoke. But there are numerous other policies that were part of the anti-smoking campaign - (1) punitive taxes (2) advertising bans (3) lawsuits against tobacco companies (4) massive social stigmatization of smoking.
Just on taxes, it was a challenge to get liberals onside since tobacco taxes are technically regressive, but I think funnelling the funds raised to very progressive uses like CHIP expansion helped.
It's interesting that the Dems seem to be a bit overly strict on candidate selection making it tough to compete in some races, while Republicans are throwing away winnable races by allowing some terrible candidates(perhaps the only qualification is loyalty to Trump).
If Republicans had just run normal people in every race we could have been in an even deeper hole.
There is no plan. In some ways, this may be the reverse image of the Maga takeover of the GOP. The moderate leadership is afraid that they cannot hold the party together without pandering to the left. And the left is not interested in winning, they’re interested in winning an interparty status game as Matt so clearly laid out on Friday. Because if the Democrats win, the left-wing will not see their status rise, and therefore are not interested in helping.
The only answer I can think of is to coopt the left-wing by making them believe that their status will rise as a fact of an overall democratic win. Other alternatives seem highly impractical in our polarized environment. But that is such a difficult project, that I can see how the Dem leadership is able to rationalize themselves into a “one day at a time” strategy.
The left is filled with epistemological and rhetorical nihilists. Even as their ideas become less popular, less salient, and as they lose more elections and seats they act even more entitled and even more morally righteous. And yet when we should be cutting out rectal polyps like David Hogg, Democrats decide to double down on the failed policy of appeasing the implacable.
I think this is correct. I think it's only the next Presidential nominee who can really change the party's national brand. I am not hugely optimistic there, but I think there's an outside chance if someone emerges channeling outsider energy and charisma.
In the meantime the Dem Senate election committee needs to get as heterodox in their recruitment as possible. But, I just looked up the DSCC head, Kristen Gilibrand, so not at all optimistic there.
The thing is that Bernie Sanders *himself* is pretty popular, including with moderates and independents. The problem is that basically every other elected official who is a part of his movement isn’t.
This is exactly what makes arguing with leftists about Bernie so tedious. I know Bernie is popular! I'm not a moron. But also concede that everyone associates with his full slate of policies constantly underperforms.
No real argument from me, except: I think Bernie, being associated with wanting to "break things" — doesn't inspire the vitriol among conservatives and moderates that a lot of Democrats do. I'd rather go with "Liz Warren hates me" or "David Hogg hates me."
Oh for sure they had fat volumes of oppo ready to go had he prevailed in the primary in 2016. And he would have lost, I suspect. I do think Sanders might have won the general election in 2020, though.
Funny I'd flip those. Sanders had really high favorables in 2016 and Trump's were atrocious, Sanders' were better than Trump's in 2020 but the gap was dramatically smaller than in 2016. Even if you nerf Sanders in '16 to his '20 favorables which is a huge drop he still comfortably beats Trump. Hillary was almost the only dem who could've lost to Trump in '16, Trump had a negative 25 point net favorables in '16, it was like -8 in '20 and -6 in '24
One reason he had high favorables in 2016 is that the Republicans didn’t lay a glove on him. Rightly or wrongly, they thought he would be an easier general election opponent, and were hoping he would prevail over Hillary Clinton. The GOP absolutely would’ve unloaded on him with deafening artillery. The moment he became the nominee.
So maybe AOC is the answer? Just like Obama could be more centrist because, hey, he's Black, so too an increasingly pragmatic AOC can keep the progressives quiet while thinking she's on their side whereas in reality she's a pretty cagy politician who is learning the game and figuring out how to build a winning coalition.
There are at least signs that that is how she's thinking.
You and others have laid out the problems with the left, but the "establishment" has a different problem; I have no clue what they stand for. They aren't making a case for themselves at all. Of any faction, why do I feel least out of step with the center-left? Well, the entire Republican party has gone insane, and I'm not on the left, so I default to the center-left. So like many others here, "we're not Trump" is good enough for me. But It's not good enough for the average voter. They need a positive agenda, not just a negative one.
If his whole thing is going to be "Trump sucks," well... that might be enough. He is president now, which he wasn't last time, so he'll actually have a record to run against.
Divide and conquer should work well enough to scatter the leftist political influencers as long as there is a strong enough center. The center can evolve as well, particularly if that generates more leftist infighting.
We may even want to strategically fund and promote particularly potent, new voices that attack the eatablished Bernie, Biden, Warren synthesis. Moreover our ever more fragmented media ecosystem, algorithmic bias, and generative AI all seem likely to disproportionately harm these fractions. Notably their revenue and cost structures.
We shouldn't blindly hope this works. Yet we have a multitude of options for managing these threats as well beneficial structural changes in the tech and media ecosystem as well as helpful labor market dislocations. I'm personally quite optimistic!
Only a dramatic hostile takeover a la Trump 2016 is going to change the fundamental orientation and coalition of the Democratic Party that was crystallized by Obama, a teleological triumph of reason that ends politics forever on the unstoppable wave of the young and nonwhite.
Individual local low-salience races can't change a brand that well-established. And so that being the case, 2028 is the earliest change can arrive.
The Dan Osborn One Weird Trick of removing the D from the ticket is strange and defeatist and hard to implement and a huge longshot, all true. But it's POSSIBLE. Changing the Democratic brand by low-wattage moderate issue positioning in midterm races isn't possible. 2026 is too short of a timeline for that to work.
“The plan” from what I can tell, is to “fight oligarchy”. But that makes me nervous for a few reasons. 1) It’s not clear to me that working-class people - who we desperately need to win more of- are all that focused on “oligarchs”. Here in NYC, their concerns are more about housing costs and public safety/disorder. It’s not that they are in love with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but attacking them doesn’t address those issues. But also- 2) - if you’re going to go all-in against oligarchs, what do you do about Alex Soros? Do you not want his money? Sure Bernie and AOC are big enough stars that they can fund with small dollar donations, but I don’t think we have many more leaders who can pull that off. This is going to empower a handful of social media stars, but it’s not a plan for winning actual power.
I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but I would bet very, very strongly (and large) that Amazon polls better than any politician in the country.
Bezos has been out of $AMZN for nearly 4 years. [1] Think he still has some emeritus chairman role or something inconsequential. At most his ~10% holding of $AMZN and associated voting power is what matters.
Even good that he left before transforming his public image--similar to Gates and dissimilar to Musk. The public may actually like him more if Bezos is just a Bond villain who competes w/ Musk to dominate space and online media, while being vaguely associated w/ selling books to fellow nerds three decades ago.
I don't know how to win the Senate. What I do know is that a lot of Democrats want "fighters". After Romney lost to Obama, a lot of Republicans wanted "fighters" too. And they didn't want to fight to accomplishing anything or even win elections. Republicans wanted fighting for the sake of fighting, and that is how we got Trump. It would be a negative development if Democrats followed the same path.
He did more than just moderate. He radically broke with the GOP on free-trade and adopted the ~ progressive left, anti-NAFTA position. Shoot ... he might have gone even further than Bernie. It's really impossible to pin Trump down on the pre-Trump left-right dimensions.
All of this discourse about how Dems should strategize to win seems a bit like aliens trying to reason from first principles and unreliable issue polling about how to win a human election.
Yes, of course it’s possible in principle that omniscient Dem strategists would figure it out. But having basically no theory of mind when it comes to the persuadable population is a crippling disadvantage. (Everyone is still fighting about whether people in Iowa are all secret communists waiting for the Marxist Messiah.)
Even if Dems *could* figure out exactly what people want and messaged accordingly, I’m still not sure they’d be in great shape. (Imagine the alien politicians all take issue positions you agree with after discussing at length “how do we get the human idiots to vote for us”? Moreover, you know that in private aliens are all weirdos who are obsessed with stuff like Christian theology. Would you vote for them?)
I think you're right about this, and what it boils down to is a credibility problem. It's not just about finding a different type of message It's about finding different types of people.
And how do you fund said "robust safety net" with low taxes? Magic pixie dust?
It would be a lot easier to give people what they want if the things people wanted were logically consistent. I want to be slim and fit while having a large slice of cheesecake and multiple servings of chocolate every day, but that doesn't make it a realistic goal.
Tax something that people don't mind, move fast, keep things changing (tax credits on this and that) to make sure people feel you are helping them specifically (fuck with grocery shops a lot, make them put out silly signs about how much the government is helping with food), tax rich people, tax big companies that people already hate (banks, telecoms), tariffs (well, Trump overplayed this), crack the whip at licensing organizations to increase the supply of healthcare workers, allow more generics, go hard on housing (in cities ignore historical things, fast-track anything that is using an existing already inbuilt area), etc.
Of course in the US this requires a bit of vertical integration (local-state-federal) politics, but ... again, populists solved this!
Bingo. Foster a Heartland Party, for Real Americans, run by ex-GOP staffers, and advertise it to the gills. Run it in every gettable state. Bring in talent. It'll take time and consistency to rack up wins. Network. Foster a sense of community.
The country will never be safe without a non-authoritarian right-wing option.
The plan in Ohio can be simple enough. Find a Fetterman type and give him a slightly longer leash on immigration and trans issues.
I’m not sure there’s any evidence a child tax credit polls poorly in Ohio. Taxing the rich to help struggling families raise kids seems politically savvy to me.
People really want to believe that "tax the rich" is a big political winner, but I think it's low-salience to non-rich people and high-salience to rich people in a way that makes it a loser. My evidence for this is the political fortunes of the Republican and Democratic parties over the last N years.
When Republicans have nothing to say besides "we should cut taxes," they struggle, but as soon as they have any other issues, nobody cares if they cut taxes for the rich, and Democrats I think have been consistently unable to make much hay out of, "we'll tax the rich."
There is a lot of evidence that “tax the rich” is a big political winner. Future Forward’s ad testing found that the most effective Harris ads were ones hitting Trump on tax cuts for the rich!
Interesting. How do you reconcile this with what Michael Sullivan is saying, i.e., that Democrats' consistent position on this hasn't helped them win consistently? I see a couple possibilities.
1. Low-engagement voters somehow don't know that Democrats are the party that wants to tax rich people. I don't know for sure, but this seems unlikely to me because (a) Democratic politicians are always going on and on about "broligarchy" and billionaires, and (b) people who know partisan liberals have surely also observed that those people tend to be against the rich and complain that they don't pay their fair share. (If people don't even know that Democrats want to tax the rich, on what information are they basing their votes? If they're so hard to reach, does messaging strategy even matter?)
2. People are generally favorable towards the idea of taxing the rich, but it ranks very low on their list of priorities. (By what measure is an ad "effective" in this study? Does effective mean that people like the message or that the message is likely to be pivotal in their voting behavior?)
3. This issue is, in fact, a huge political winner, and it's the only thing keeping Democrats from doing even worse (say, getting 35-40% of the vote instead of 50%).
That doesn’t tell you anything about whether the ads were effective or not. Dan Osborn lost his Senate race, does that mean his strategy/messaging was useless?
Every argument for child tax credit seems to assume that the fiscal baseline is fine and all you need is a bit more in taxes to pay for this new program. The baseline is not close to being fine and it’s going to get worse with an extension of TJCA and whatever they have cooking in the Congress right now.
I live in Ohio and have watched it slide from purple to red over the past few cycles; I don't know if a Fetterman type is enough. We have elected very few statewide Dems except Sherrod Brown (who mostly benefited from name recognition and a few wonky election cycles the past few times around) and one governor (Ted Strickland) who was to the right on guns and was running against a not-very-good Republican candidate in Kenneth Blackwell. There are very few emerging stars in the state party that anyone outside of their particular fiefdom has heard of; the bench is thin; and developing good candidates in the legislature has been stymied by gerrymandering and the legislature's willingness to ignore public will on redistricting, multiple times over, thanks to Republicans' full control over the state government and the entire redistricting process. It's pretty demoralizing to realize I can't think of a single Ohio Democrat who could beat Bernie effing Moreno.
That feels overly pessimistic, a senator the left of the average senate democrat came within a few points of winning. I know Brown has legacy name rec/incumbency, but if he just had his old positions on immigration and energy he probably wins? Tim Ryan is somewhat more moderate coded now but he's genuinely not that moderate, and got 47% of the two-way vote in a D president midterm. It's obviously a tough challenge but it seems like they haven't really tried the hard moderation they'd need. If Manchin can run 40 points ahead in WV do we really think a similar candidate couldn't get 10-15 points you need for Ohio?
Well, you'd need a candidate, and Ohio Democrats don't have one. For governor next year, Amy Acton, the former health official who led the COVID response here, is running as a Democrat, and while she seems like an okay person, she is tethered to really negative issue that automatically loses at least 50% of the vote here if not more. The other declared candidates are Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican AG Dave Yost (who was endorsed by Giant Asshole Ken Blackwell), and we might see current/recently appointed Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel (who was a popular Ohio State coach) join the fray. On the Dem side, we might see Sherrod Brown or Tim Ryan run for Gov., but who knows? In Ramaswamy vs. Acton polling, the former DOGE-ite probably wins, so we get governor Ramaswamy, and it's bad enough I have to live with President Trump -- if I have to live in a state where one of these dipshits is directly mucking around with the schools and the roads and Medicaid administration and everything else I will probably jump in Lake Erie and swim to Canada. Brown probably has the best chance of any Democrat whose name I recognize; a second not awful option might be Coach Tressel as the next republican governor, who everyone says is a decent human being and, thus, hopefully not Trump-lite or (worse) Musk-lite. A few other Congressional and state reps have expressed interest, but I stay fairly up to date on Ohio politics, and I can barely tell you who any of them are other than Chris Redfern, who was a Dem party chair who did not exactly set the party up for long term success.
Your guess is as good as mine. In 2024, there as a drop of 2% to 5% turnout in traditional Dem strongholds like Franklin and Cuyahoga county, so turnout efforts might help, but mostly in an off year election. Trump won Ohio by around 11 points in 2024. Vance only won his senate seat by 7 points. Mike DeWine won his last election by 25 points, outperforming both of them, so there is some segment of normie voter that is probably up for grabs, but not sure how much. Both Vance and Dewine beat very blah Democratic candidates. Tim Ryan, who ran against Vance, is a pro-fossil fuel Dem from a district that went heavily for Trump 3 times. I guess the point being that you'd need a Democrat kind of like Ryan, but who has enough notoriety or charisma to beat someone like Vance, but sweet Jesus how low of a bar is THAT? Not low enough, apparently.
If the brand is trashed, it's easier to start a new brand. A culturally conservative Heartland Party. Flip the script and reduce GOP federal power at any cost.
Fwiw David Shor's polling has the Child Tax Credit about even nationally so probably below water somewhat in Ohio. I think taxing the rich to lower the deficit, inflation, interest rates, + much more conservative positions on immigration/trans/crime/fracking/guns would work.
Aren’t struggling families low propensity voters relative to the people who would be taxed to fund this? Also it appears that lower income brackets are positively correlated with Trump voting share, so helping this voting bloc reproduce in view of an already-demonstrated indifference or hostility to the party rather famously more in favor of social welfare programs isn’t obviously a winner (in the sense of being "politically savvy") and may be political malpractice. Ed.: although I should note it's an open question.
struggling families are about the only thing i care about other than my own family. and smart working and lower middle class kids who need rigorous standardized tests to prove they can compete against the rich kids.
taxing the rich polls well. helping struggling parents polls well as long as they aren’t welfare queens. the only skill needed is framing benefits where they don’t look like welfare
This is one of the most defeatist and depressing columns I've ever read on SB.
In Matt's opinion, Republican support in states like Iowa and Ohio is a fact of nature, like a blizzard or a wildfire. There's nothing to be done about it! All you can do is feed enough sacrifices into the flames (gun control! clean energy! anything The Groupz(TM) want!) and hope you will be spared.
How about a little more focus on how to build more popular support for Democratic candidates? I'm not saying "make the median voter in Missouri supportive of trans rights," I'm talking something like the Common Sense Manif- uh, like I said before, the Common Sense Platform, if you call it a Manifesto you sound like a commie 😊
How? I don't know how, I'm a weird nerdy PMC person, but there has to be a way, clone Buttigieg fifty times and unleash him on every podcast and YouTube channel you can find, don't just throw up your hands and go "welp, the Republicans have rock-solid support, there's nothing you can do." No! That support didn't spring fully formed like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, it's the result of lots of Republican strategists and communicators hard at work.
Meanwhile, here's a gem from today's NYT:
"After Federal Cuts, Food Banks Scrounge and Scrimp:
Sara Busse [in West Virginia] needed to make a hot meal for 40 needy seniors. She had promised a main dish, a starch, a vegetable, a fruit and a dessert.
In the past, she had gotten many of those ingredients for free from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
This time, she had dried cranberries, crackers and vegetable soup.
“What am I supposed to do?” she said. “What am I supposed to cook?”
Find stories like that and amplify them! Ask the people of red states, is this what you wanted? Is this what you support? Because this is what you get with a Republican Congress!
Didn't this woman also say that she voted for Trump 3x and still considers herself a Trump supporter? Or is that someone else they had interviewed? Like I don't even know anymore. 70% of MAGA Republicans also think the economy is getting better because of Trump's trade war, so part of it is that the Dems need more Pete B's and Andy B's in the party. The overall national brand is just toxic to some voters, why they still support Republicans I have no idea, but I think it's the podcast and media environment they engage with.
You don’t get it. Democrats have embraced policies that WE - middle of the road voters - find completely unpalatable to be dealbreakers. Letting in 15 million illegals is the biggest and most obvious one that lost me. Discriminating against whites, men, and Asians (DEI) is also something I find morally repugnant. The anti cop, weak on crime mindset. I’m also Jewish and pro Israel, but I acknowledge that one is not something most moderates care as much about.
But to be clear, I’m not voting for any democrat unless I am convinced they are not aligned with the mainstream Democratic Party on these issues. Fetterman and Ritchie Torres come to mind.
I mean, if people see the elderly going hungry because their local food bank can’t afford enough food, and they say “f yeah, that’s what we voted for,” then I genuinely don’t know how to appeal to such people.
All my life, I believed that most Americans are basically decent, that they want to do the right thing and that includes helping others. If that’s gone…
Ok, so where are all these decent people who simply don’t share my ideology? Are they stepping up and saying, “Government should not subsidize food banks. But I don’t want seniors to go hungry, so I’m going to generously donate to food banks out of my own pocket!”
No doubt some of them are doing just that, but most likely, not enough. Otherwise Sara in West Virginia would be giving a very different interview to the NYT: “I was very troubled when Trump cut off USDA subsidies my food bank relies on, but then all my Trump-voting friends and neighbors pulled together to support the food bank and now we have plenty for everyone, it’s been wonderful to see!”
Sure, there are decent people in Trump country. There are also “I’ve got mine, FU” kind of people.
Yeah, tbh I feel like replacing the Senate leadership is the way to go - good news Dick Durbin is retiring but I really think it’s due for Chuck Schumer to go…
I think he’s a shrewd tactician (like the budget handling was epitome of it even if it was emotionally disturbing, I think it paid off by focusing the fire on Trump). But the issue is he seems fundamentally afraid of left - essentially Dem’s version of McConell.
And while I’m more of an advocate of balancing when to fight and when to cooperate - considering the type of force Bernie faction (or more accurately activist type), I feel like he’s currently a little too caving.
1) Talk to all your friends and family members about voting for moderate candidates in the primaries. Right now, mainly the most partisan Democrats participate. Not good for getting moderates elected
2) Find at least one truly moderate candidate at any level that you like, and give them your time and/or money. Ideally they would represent you, but if there's not a good option in your district/town, find somebody else to support.
3) Join the Democratic Party on the local level, ideally with some like-minded people, and fight to steer the party in the right direction. It is not good enough to simply write blogs and make comments. If you think the status quo is this bad, then get off the sideline, and try to make things better.
A lot actually, not so much as a literal institution but as an informal group of party regulars, activists, donors, and electeds. I'm very involved in the local democratic party and this group of a couple hundred people if that has a huge say in who gets elected in our county of 600,000 people. Our county is traditionally red but increasingly purple to light blue in the Trump era and a lot of democratic primaries are basically decided by a couple interested candidates talking amongst themselves and some folks in the local primary and deciding who's going to run, some primaries but not many. If 50 likeminded democrats got seriously involved it could meaninfgully shift the politics of a congressional district sized locality.
Obviously the party raises money, coordinates doorknocking and all that stuff but at it's core they play a big part in shaping who the party nominates. Voters of course always have the final say but it's hard to run for local office without institutional support so a lot of candidates don't if they can't win that backing.
I think running candidates in un-winnable states even in that lose, is part of the way of changing the Party's baseline. There is no reason that a gung-ho high-growth/Abundance pro-trade, pro high skill immigrant, pro progressive tax-and-reduce deficit, turn away all but genuine political asylum seekers at the border, guns only as an adjunct to crime fighting/policing-prosecution, pro fossil fuel production and transportation, throw-NEPA-under-the-bus, pro Fifth Amendment, expand paid for social insurance candidate should not win 50 states.
My counterpoint to this is that while leftists are generally unpopular and are incapable of governing decently (see: Brandon Johnson), the centrists really haven’t covered themselves in glory either.
The greatest argument against centrism is Keir Starmer, who is as centrist and “moderate” as they come, won a huge majority in the UK and then pissed it away to the point where Labo(u)r might end up a third party [1] because he was too scared to make progress on any of the issues he correctly identified during the campaign. The stupid part is that his public messaging is that the UK needs bitter medicine to get over its malaise, but he’s instead chosen to piss and moan about fiscal constraints instead of, say, fixing the insane planning system.
There’s obviously a two axes chart of progressive-moderate and supine-brave. And Noah Smith does day that combative centrism is the way forward. However, as one SBer (Polytropos, I think, not quoting this verbatim as I can’t find it) said “moderate but not cucked is the way, but unfortunately cuckedness and moderation seem to go together”.
A concrete example is the fight over upzoning in IL [2]. Anyone with half a brain knows that IL is losing population, and anyone half-affiliated with Dem politics has seen the 2030 census projections. Yet Dems haven’t got the cojones to push it through, because they’re too scared of their shadows.
Moving forward, concrete solutions include nuking the filibuster, expanding the lower courts and passing crucial reforms to permitting, taxation, healthcare and immigration. Act like you’re gonna lose congress in 2030, because that’s how politics works, and pass all your shit in 2 years. Give the public some goodies that leaven the bitter medicine. I know that this will cause heartburn for the SB crypto-republicans, but doing nothing isn’t a long term option, and your ideology played no small part in leading us here. Yes, the ACA did lead to democrats losing seats. It still pays dividends. In terms of personnel, it means getting rid of all those conditioned to cowardice by Dems long decades of defeat in the 70s-80s. It also means getting rid of the idiots who babble on about “comity/reach across the aisle” (thankfully Durbin will fuck off, except now we have Fetterman, who decides he’ll play nice with Trump on everything other than transgender issues where the Dem position is wildly unpopular- literally the moronic political instincts of Sinema).
For now, this means pulling the knives out in blue trifecta states and going hell for leather in fixing housing, infrastructure and bureaucracy. Yes, progressives in CA and NY have some stupid ideas about these but it’s also moderates that sink housing there as well. There’s nothing stopping these states from building a bureau that designs transit/public housing/airports etc to rent costs. We HAVE to annihilate the “we tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” mentality.
What are examples of GOOD governance? And are they actually a result of political ideology, or more a combination of good policy, good politics, charisma and a favorable political climate?
Best blue state governance I can think of is CO. Yes, there’s no single factor that led to it, but that doesn’t absolve individuals from the obligation to work hard for it. As I said, ‘We HAVE to annihilate the “we tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” mentality.’
I’d love to read follow ups to this, where we go state by state and deep dive into: 1. Who are statewide elected Dems 2. What are the polling nuances of the state 3. Therefore how could it become competitive
I think the obvious answer is to stop playing small ball. I think there’s a point to be made that the GOP ran away with cultural conventions because they started thinking big.
Democrats need to swing for the fences on lowering the cost of living, the cost of education, the quality of infrastructure etc. and then be out in the media constantly pushing those positions. If someone’s slightly off message, pull a Trump and go after the media for misreporting it.
I mean, yeah, there's lots of opportunities to "swing big", but the Rs did it with culture war chum that doesn't have a direct bottom-line impact on the budget. You could get some traction out of "Abundance"-style reforms that have long-term COLA impacts, but when you talk about education and infrastructure, you're either taking on unions directly or raising taxes. These are real policies that you can't just hand-wave the details on, including their budgetary effects. This is a much harder lift, and the bigger the swing, the harder it becomes in the current fiscal environment.
Truth of the matter is, the next president is likely to be very constrained by the geopolitical circumstances and federal balance sheet they're handed. In that context, the best "big swing" might be going hard on return to normalcy and turning the page on both MAGA and "woke" and focusing on long-term renewal and investment of the country.
In other words, we will once again have to spend all our political capital just cleaning up the mess the Republicans leave behind, and the mess is worse every time. Obama after Bush, Biden after Trump 1, and somebody after Trump 2. Each time the country starts deeper off in the hole.
Biden created his own mess. If he had only limited his role to cleaning up after Trump, he would have been more popular. No one voted for him to become the next FDR.
There are different dynamics between two parties, one which wants to govern and has to pursue policies toward that aim, and one that is happy scoring cheap political points and punishing its opponents.
The Democrats absolutely should *not* swing for the fences because Americans are fundamentally conservative in that they're not interested in big changes outside of dire emergencies. Promise them, oh, Medicare for All, and enjoy watching your opponents win elections.
What Yglesias is failing to take note of in this Debbie Downer piece is that, in 2026, Democrats will have master political strategist David Hogg on their side.
You mean Saint Hogg?
No, Boss Hogg.
I can't believe that little twerp has wangled his way into DNC leadership just from surviving a school shooting.
He also wrangled a Harvard degree.
More confirmation that Democrats give too much deference to the Ivy’s.
An academically unqualified American white male getting into Harvard could have been a great opportunity for conservative reach-out!
They should boot that loser and traitorous liar out. He has the same corruption and entitlement as Trump about him.
I don't believe David Hogg is remotely like Trump in the corruption department. I just think he's too inexperienced, and doesn't perceive the world very accurately.
Hogg is the old-style corruption, "give my organization $1 million or we will have a die-in at your grocery store."
Trump is the new-style "just give me $1 million and you can have a meeting with me, or just buy my memecoin."
Ahh, the old Al Sharpton move. I’m happy we are so multicultural that others pick up on it.
You're really comparing Hogg to Trump?
I'm the opposite of a fan of his, but sheesh.
Yes? I'm comparing them by pointing out that Trump is worse. This White House doesn't even bother with fig leafs about donating to some third-party charity. It's just straight pay-to-play.
I am talking about moral corruption, but I am probably wrong on that. I am just upset he is using Democratic Party resources to primary and ratfuck sitting Democrats.
I read he's been told "no" by this superiors: DNC leaders are required to be neutral in primaries. Not sure if it'll stick, or if he'll obey orders. I agree his plan to primary incumbent Democrats is moronically counterproductive, and is flat out unacceptable in a DNC official.
He needs to be whacked with a newspaper and told “no.”
For all the faults of factionalist leftists, centrists and moderates spend so much time moaning and wringing their hands about it. Broadening the tent won’t happen by complaining Sanders is getting more attention.
Like Matt says, what is the plan? Moderates could be out there holding events and pushing their agendas. Why aren’t they?
Isn't that Ezra Klein pushing his book?
Had me in the first half
On the plus side, moderates could earn points by just telling him to shut the fuck up as often and as loudly as possible. Matt is unwilling to acknowledge the Dems' 69-D chess strategy here.
Do I detect a bit of sarcasm here?
I recall that Tweet where Mr. Hogg invited gun owners to leave the party. It was being played over and over again on social media once he was put on the DNC. I'm putting off my resignation so far. I have been a registered D all my life, as well as a union shop steward in two unions and board member in one. Sadly, I fail the Hogg purity test, having grown up in a rural area where hunting and shooting tin cans was not considered a grievous character flaw. I'll have to see if his worldview prevails, as I suppose the few other remaining middle of the road Democrats might be doing.
But if the sort of Hoggwash I speak of prevails, it sure does reduce the chances of a "big tent" Democratic party winning those Flyover states and getting that Senate majority.
I don’t agree with much of what he says but if he pokes the Democratic blob enough for it to come up with some strategy, I’ll buy him a beer.
Exactly. I feel like there are a lot of Dem leaders who remember the looming GOP majority of the Bush era and how it turned on a dime in 2006 and then the sinking economy led to 60 D senators in 2008 and figure the same thing will somehow just happen with Trump. But to paraphrase Rick Pitino, Blanche Lincoln is not walking through that door. Max Baucus is not walking through that door. Byron Dorgan is not walking through that door.
“…Blanche Lincoln is not walking through….”
And if Lincoln, Baucus and Dorgan did walk through the door, how would their positions on the issues be received by the online discourse monitors?
I'm hardly the first to say this, but if you look at who the 60 D senators were in 2009-10, it's absolutely incredible that they got consensus on the ACA. Someone like Blanche Lincoln was 20 points underwater and knew she was probably losing reelection and voted for it anyway.
It’s underrated the extent to which the ACA vote was the most politically courageous action certainly in a generation - bunch of senators and congresspeople not only committed career suicide but arguably cemented their districts / states as Republican for a generation to get it passed.
To me, it’s indisputable that this was a perfect example of being politically courageous / putting policy above your career and the only debate should be whether it was worth it.
I thought absolutely yes for a long time, but now with the benefit of hindsight knowing the solid R bloc in the senate would be enablers of authoritarianism and insurrection I’m a lot less sure.
“ now with the benefit of hindsight … I’m a lot less sure.”
Which is compatible with it having been the right choice for those agents at that time, given what they knew and could reasonably expect.
As one of the people whose ability to lead a functional life depends on the ACA, I am grateful every day they made that call. FWIW
That hindsight is doing an awful lot of work. Vote for ACA => facilitate Trumpian authoritarianism is a very tenuous connection.
Oh for sure. I don't think anyone could have reasonably predicted this at the time, it was a worthwhile sacrifice at the time.
That being said, it's obviously true - since the Blanche Lincolns of the world got wiped out, the Democrats have been completely noncompetitive in those areas. Maybe not the end of the world with a somewhat sane opposition, but really problematic now.
I'm probably super out of the loop on this, but ... aren't people in the end appreciating ACA? How come Dems can't turn that into a positive message? (Or I'm mixing it up with some Medicare thing? But wasn't that also passed as part of the ACA?)
for something that stuck, the ACA was the most politically courageous vote. but imo, the house voting for cap and trade was more courageous in maybe 09/10 (cant remember) but it didnt stick, so doesnt matter.
I'm young so maybe you can educate me on the politics/expectations at the time, but that seemed more stupid than brave? It's one thing to torch your majority to *pass* transformational legislation but why torch your career on a bill that can't pass? Was it generally asssumed DOA in the senate? Southwest Virginia's congressman voted for it despite repping one of the top 10 coal producing districts in the country and he lost by 3 or 4 points, was it worth it in order to have the bill die in the senate?
One of the big problems with modern politics is we burn tremendous amounts of political capital taking positions we can't implement anyway, which is very different from burning political capital to actually pass something good.
Let's expand on this and ask the question: if they were running next year, how many of these Democratic Senators from 2009 would be likely to win:
Baucus (MT), Harkin (IA), Rockefeller (WV), Conrad (ND), Dorgan (ND), Feingold (WI), Tim Johnson (SD), Landrieu (LA), Lincoln (AR), Pryor (AR), Bayh (IN), Nelson (FL), McCaskill (MO), Tester (MT), Hagan (NC), Begich (AK)
Maybe a couple would pull out a win. Most probably not. Partly it's because of the terrible Democratic brand, as Matt rightly argues. But mostly it's because these states have really, really changed since 2009.
None of those folks came out of nowhere in their states. But the partisan divide has deepened such that there probably are very few people like them in their states now. They were all likely the most moderate of the then democrats in the state. The most moderate dems in those states are probably not as moderate because the dem side has been squeezed and the R side has radicalized. What needs to happen is the national party has to go find whoever is the most moderate dem today, and then persuade them to shift right, and then support the hell out of them while protecting them on their left flank. But I guess that's MY's complaint, no one at the top of the party is even contemplating doing it.
I agree but I was just saying that if these exact same people with the exact same stands ran today most of them would still lose. Maybe that's because of the toxic national brand which they couldn't run away from or maybe it's because the state has changed so much, but either way it's not really about candidate recruitment.
There's truth to that for sure, but we also don't need to win in Arkansas neccesarily, Texas or Ohio would do just fine. Someone with even Jon Tester's views, who's way to the left of most of those folks, probably wins re-election in Ohio this year, if Tester had Manchins views (also to the left of many of those folks), he probably wins re-election. We really know what to do to get D+20, D+15, D+10, D+5 overperformances, we just run the D+20 candidates in 70-30 R states, the D+15 candidates in 60-40 R states etc. so they overperform a lot but still lose, gotta shift basically all the red/purple state guys a notch to the center
Yes, this seems about right. That was what we needed for 60 Dems in the Senate, and those days are gone for a very long time. The same for the Republicans ever having 60 in the Senate.
States are always changing, but these Senators and the party were adaptable and flexible to that, so they could change along with the states and continue to win.
Until we stop being the party that sounds like a mom telling you what not to do, we don’t have a chance. Wake me up if that happens but until then I don’t have the time to pay attention to a party that sticks to a loser strategy.
80% of the work could just be going back to cool, charismatic, confident dads, like Bill and Barack. Who makes light fun of the prissy killjoys in his stump speech.
how much complaining about certain democrats being killjoys is just sexism?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-brothers-should-pull-up-their-pants/
"You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. What's wrong with that? Come on. There are some issues that we face, that you don't have to pass a law, but that doesn't mean folks can't have some sense and some respect for other people and, you know, some people might not want to see your underwear — I'm one of them."
Wouldn’t the equivalent of this for Kamala be her scolding women specifically? Did she do that a lot?
Some of this stuff he targets at black fathers specifically but definitely not all of it.
https://www.politico.com/story/2008/06/text-of-obamas-fatherhood-speech-011094
A LOT of obama's appeal was modeling an old school "family values" conservative lifestyle but crossing that with essentially a generic liberal policy agenda.
Did Harris get criticized for espousing old school family values? I don’t remember that.
You are saying that Harris was criticized for saying the same things as Obama because of sexism, right?
No what I'm responding to is the contention in this thread that Democrats became a party that "shames you for having fun" and is the party of "mom telling you what to do." In my mind, Obama was dedicated and hardworking guy who embodied and advocated a pretty virtuous path and was in his own way somewhat judgmental.
So I'm not too sure why people think the party has changed that much, except that some of the worse parts of the left have been released into the wild?
If Harris said this people would absolutely say its cliched virtue signaling:
"But now, my life revolves around my two little girls. And what I think about is what kind of world I’m leaving them. Are they living in a country where there’s a huge gap between a few who are wealthy and a whole bunch of people who are struggling every day? Are they living in a country that is still divided by race? A country where, because they’re girls, they don’t have as much opportunity as boys do? Are they living in a country where we are hated around the world because we don’t cooperate effectively with other nations? Are they living a world that is in grave danger because of what we’ve done to its climate?
And what I’ve realized is that life doesn’t count for much unless you’re willing to do your small part to leave our children — all of our children — a better world. Even if it’s difficult. Even if the work seems great. Even if we don’t get very far in our lifetime."
To make your point, shouldn’t you cite speeches Harris actually gave and was criticized for and show that they were similar to Obama’s speeches he was praised for?
I guess the way to solve this is to figure out how moms manage to help their children grow up not just safe but thriving, without adopting this tone. Do you just need to have more effective children, or are there strategies you can learn?
Are you saying that the electorate are children? I think it is crazy that you think the problem is “Communicate as a Mom effectively” and not “Stop acting like a mom because YOU ARE NOT MY MOM”
The problem is that people think that anyone who tries to make things better for you must inherently be treating you as a child, and that treating you as a child is bad. I think the job of the government is to help make things better for us, and unfortunately one of the main models we have of that is one that people resent. And it’s not just the “you are not my mom” part - this thread began with the observation that many kids are equally resentful when it *is* their mom. The question is how to do good without triggering resentment, and effective parents are one good model for that (though sometimes it seems to rely on better children who just don’t resent people for caring about them).
I don't think that's the right diagnosis of the mom issue. In the 90s it was the conservatives who felt like nagging moms. Because they were the ones trying to impose values on the public that the public mostly didn't share.
That's when you end up on the wrong side of this dynamic. Not from trying to make policy, but from trying to enforce unpopular values.
I think this entire chain of logic is incredibly flawed and problematic. It presumes that if I have an idea about how to make things better, and you don't like it, that you are wrong simply because I am "Mom" and I know better.
It discounts the idea that maybe the other person
- doesn't think the problem I am trying to solve is, in fact, a problem
- agrees about the problem but thinks my solution is ass, and wants to do a different thing instead
But maybe the other person is right, and I am wrong? Have I considered that? If I have, and still think I am right, then how should I persuade them? Should I even try (note that "agree to disagree" is a viable outcome among adult allies, but is not in a parent/child relationship)?
Effective parenting is a TERRIBLE model for this, it is not "one good model" for this. The other people just are not your children.
I think between 1976-2016 there was relatively bipartisan elite alignment that free trade and immigration should not be central campaign issues because the electorate has bad views on these. This is similarly true of certain conspiracy theories, like anti-vax sentiment. I'm not exactly sure how this fits into the parenting metaphor, but it's definitely the case that the parties suppressed certain issues that could have been electoral winners and kept those who tried to profit from them (like Pat Buchanan, etc) to the fringes.
That is sort of fair, but breaks down if you keep asking the “elites” to take ridiculous stances as litmus tests that then undermine them because you force the issues to become partisan.
Like, it is patently ridiculous that someone asked Harris about surgeries for Trans people in prison (it’s also pretty ridiculous that she did not answer some variation of “Why tf are you wasting my time with this question? The president has bigger fish to fry”, but that is yet another matter)
I think you are misunderstanding the discussion here.
Most of the discussion I have about politics, and that is had on this forum, is on the merits. If someone wants to discuss the merits of the policy, talking about whether something is or isn't actually a problem, or disagreeing with the proposed solution, I'm happy to do that.
But there are some people who want to change the subject to become one of complaining that people are treating them like children. It was only in response to that that I said there is a problem of figuring out how to get people to stop feeling insulted by people trying to work on policy.
also on the substance nanny state liberal policies like hard smoking crackdowns are some of the most effective quality of life measures in history. I understand this stuff became politically toxic around 2010 or so but it's a huge shame that bloomberg-ish policies have been totally excised from public debate because they worked great.
I'm not convinced this sort of policy became any more or less toxic - if anything, I think Bloomberg's attempted soda size crackdown came at the one moment when that sort of policy was closest to being acceptable in public debate.
Smoking crackdowns were usually waged largely on behalf of non-smokers, and not primarily focused on saving people from themselves. It's unfortunate that there's not a similar angle we can take on gambling.
Side note: gambling certainly can have very bad effects on people other than the gamblers themselves.
Source, my husband’s uncle, who got divorced because his wife would gamble irresponsibly and get the whole household in financial trouble.
Yeah i'm not too sure... but I know there was a time when some cities were thinking of experimenting with a sugar tax but that seems basically dead now.
It's true the restaurant/public smoking bans were largely justified by second hand smoke. But there are numerous other policies that were part of the anti-smoking campaign - (1) punitive taxes (2) advertising bans (3) lawsuits against tobacco companies (4) massive social stigmatization of smoking.
Just on taxes, it was a challenge to get liberals onside since tobacco taxes are technically regressive, but I think funnelling the funds raised to very progressive uses like CHIP expansion helped.
Scolding and governing are different things.
The scolding is apparently not very effective, and it is unpopular enough that if we do it, we’ll lose our chance to govern.
I agree. People shouldn’t scold. But I don’t want to be all scold-y about that either, because that turns the scolders off too.
Don’t forget shaming you for having fun :)
Children usually run to their moms when they have a booboo. And we have a yuuuge booboo right now.
But gotta be the mom who gives it a little kiss and a band-aid, not the one who says "WHAT DID YOU THINK WOULD HAPPEN, DUMMY?!"
It's interesting that the Dems seem to be a bit overly strict on candidate selection making it tough to compete in some races, while Republicans are throwing away winnable races by allowing some terrible candidates(perhaps the only qualification is loyalty to Trump).
If Republicans had just run normal people in every race we could have been in an even deeper hole.
Republicans are going to run a bunch of George Santoses and we are still going to have trouble selecting palatable candidates for normal people.
There is no plan. In some ways, this may be the reverse image of the Maga takeover of the GOP. The moderate leadership is afraid that they cannot hold the party together without pandering to the left. And the left is not interested in winning, they’re interested in winning an interparty status game as Matt so clearly laid out on Friday. Because if the Democrats win, the left-wing will not see their status rise, and therefore are not interested in helping.
The only answer I can think of is to coopt the left-wing by making them believe that their status will rise as a fact of an overall democratic win. Other alternatives seem highly impractical in our polarized environment. But that is such a difficult project, that I can see how the Dem leadership is able to rationalize themselves into a “one day at a time” strategy.
The left is filled with epistemological and rhetorical nihilists. Even as their ideas become less popular, less salient, and as they lose more elections and seats they act even more entitled and even more morally righteous. And yet when we should be cutting out rectal polyps like David Hogg, Democrats decide to double down on the failed policy of appeasing the implacable.
I think this is correct. I think it's only the next Presidential nominee who can really change the party's national brand. I am not hugely optimistic there, but I think there's an outside chance if someone emerges channeling outsider energy and charisma.
In the meantime the Dem Senate election committee needs to get as heterodox in their recruitment as possible. But, I just looked up the DSCC head, Kristen Gilibrand, so not at all optimistic there.
We do not need the "help" of the Left to win. A bit of antagonism could even help. "Bernie Sanders hate me" could be a badge of honor in some states.
The thing is that Bernie Sanders *himself* is pretty popular, including with moderates and independents. The problem is that basically every other elected official who is a part of his movement isn’t.
This is exactly what makes arguing with leftists about Bernie so tedious. I know Bernie is popular! I'm not a moron. But also concede that everyone associates with his full slate of policies constantly underperforms.
Every losing football team's most popular player is the backup quarterback until they have to actually start.
Society if Bernie had won in 2016:
No real argument from me, except: I think Bernie, being associated with wanting to "break things" — doesn't inspire the vitriol among conservatives and moderates that a lot of Democrats do. I'd rather go with "Liz Warren hates me" or "David Hogg hates me."
Had Bernie been the Dem nominee, I'm pretty confident that the Republicans would not have handled him with kid gloves.
Oh for sure they had fat volumes of oppo ready to go had he prevailed in the primary in 2016. And he would have lost, I suspect. I do think Sanders might have won the general election in 2020, though.
Funny I'd flip those. Sanders had really high favorables in 2016 and Trump's were atrocious, Sanders' were better than Trump's in 2020 but the gap was dramatically smaller than in 2016. Even if you nerf Sanders in '16 to his '20 favorables which is a huge drop he still comfortably beats Trump. Hillary was almost the only dem who could've lost to Trump in '16, Trump had a negative 25 point net favorables in '16, it was like -8 in '20 and -6 in '24
One reason he had high favorables in 2016 is that the Republicans didn’t lay a glove on him. Rightly or wrongly, they thought he would be an easier general election opponent, and were hoping he would prevail over Hillary Clinton. The GOP absolutely would’ve unloaded on him with deafening artillery. The moment he became the nominee.
So maybe AOC is the answer? Just like Obama could be more centrist because, hey, he's Black, so too an increasingly pragmatic AOC can keep the progressives quiet while thinking she's on their side whereas in reality she's a pretty cagy politician who is learning the game and figuring out how to build a winning coalition.
There are at least signs that that is how she's thinking.
Freddie wrote a piece about how AOC is a centrist sellout hack now, so she’s got that going for her 😊
Still not sure if she’s moderate enough to win the Median Swing Suburban Voter Guy tho
That's good news!
Biden 2020 - Trump 2024 voter here. No way in hell would I ever vote for AOC. I switched to Trump because of immigration, Israel, and DEI.
You and others have laid out the problems with the left, but the "establishment" has a different problem; I have no clue what they stand for. They aren't making a case for themselves at all. Of any faction, why do I feel least out of step with the center-left? Well, the entire Republican party has gone insane, and I'm not on the left, so I default to the center-left. So like many others here, "we're not Trump" is good enough for me. But It's not good enough for the average voter. They need a positive agenda, not just a negative one.
JB Pritzker is very much part of the establishment. Dems could do worse in my view.
Dude's a fucking brawler:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXjR_8zMiPA&ab_channel=WMUR-TV
But his whole thing is based on being a fighter, and apparently every democratic consultant/strategist is terrified of that.
If his whole thing is going to be "Trump sucks," well... that might be enough. He is president now, which he wasn't last time, so he'll actually have a record to run against.
Khan Pritzker stand up!
Divide and conquer should work well enough to scatter the leftist political influencers as long as there is a strong enough center. The center can evolve as well, particularly if that generates more leftist infighting.
We may even want to strategically fund and promote particularly potent, new voices that attack the eatablished Bernie, Biden, Warren synthesis. Moreover our ever more fragmented media ecosystem, algorithmic bias, and generative AI all seem likely to disproportionately harm these fractions. Notably their revenue and cost structures.
We shouldn't blindly hope this works. Yet we have a multitude of options for managing these threats as well beneficial structural changes in the tech and media ecosystem as well as helpful labor market dislocations. I'm personally quite optimistic!
would love to hear more about these options and beneficial structural changes...
Only a dramatic hostile takeover a la Trump 2016 is going to change the fundamental orientation and coalition of the Democratic Party that was crystallized by Obama, a teleological triumph of reason that ends politics forever on the unstoppable wave of the young and nonwhite.
Individual local low-salience races can't change a brand that well-established. And so that being the case, 2028 is the earliest change can arrive.
The Dan Osborn One Weird Trick of removing the D from the ticket is strange and defeatist and hard to implement and a huge longshot, all true. But it's POSSIBLE. Changing the Democratic brand by low-wattage moderate issue positioning in midterm races isn't possible. 2026 is too short of a timeline for that to work.
“The plan” from what I can tell, is to “fight oligarchy”. But that makes me nervous for a few reasons. 1) It’s not clear to me that working-class people - who we desperately need to win more of- are all that focused on “oligarchs”. Here in NYC, their concerns are more about housing costs and public safety/disorder. It’s not that they are in love with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but attacking them doesn’t address those issues. But also- 2) - if you’re going to go all-in against oligarchs, what do you do about Alex Soros? Do you not want his money? Sure Bernie and AOC are big enough stars that they can fund with small dollar donations, but I don’t think we have many more leaders who can pull that off. This is going to empower a handful of social media stars, but it’s not a plan for winning actual power.
I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but I would bet very, very strongly (and large) that Amazon polls better than any politician in the country.
Maybe, but Bezos probably doesn’t
Bezos has been out of $AMZN for nearly 4 years. [1] Think he still has some emeritus chairman role or something inconsequential. At most his ~10% holding of $AMZN and associated voting power is what matters.
Even good that he left before transforming his public image--similar to Gates and dissimilar to Musk. The public may actually like him more if Bezos is just a Bond villain who competes w/ Musk to dominate space and online media, while being vaguely associated w/ selling books to fellow nerds three decades ago.
[1] May 26 2021 - Jeff Bezos to formally step down as Amazon CEO on July 5, Andy Jassy to take over - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/26/jeff-bezos-to-formally-step-down-as-amazon-ceo-on-july-5.html
Do you think the average voter knows literally any of this?
when he went to suck Trump's dick in January he did it for his Amazon stocks, no? I'd say he has a very consequential role.
Because the only thing people know about Bezos is his yacht and sending Katy Perry to space.
I don't know how to win the Senate. What I do know is that a lot of Democrats want "fighters". After Romney lost to Obama, a lot of Republicans wanted "fighters" too. And they didn't want to fight to accomplishing anything or even win elections. Republicans wanted fighting for the sake of fighting, and that is how we got Trump. It would be a negative development if Democrats followed the same path.
As Matt has written multiple times before, Trump didn’t just fight. He also moderated on many issues like Medicare, SS and abortion.
He did more than just moderate. He radically broke with the GOP on free-trade and adopted the ~ progressive left, anti-NAFTA position. Shoot ... he might have gone even further than Bernie. It's really impossible to pin Trump down on the pre-Trump left-right dimensions.
Being a fighter is being loud, posting a lot, etc. Dems ought to recruit loud centrists.
All of this discourse about how Dems should strategize to win seems a bit like aliens trying to reason from first principles and unreliable issue polling about how to win a human election.
Yes, of course it’s possible in principle that omniscient Dem strategists would figure it out. But having basically no theory of mind when it comes to the persuadable population is a crippling disadvantage. (Everyone is still fighting about whether people in Iowa are all secret communists waiting for the Marxist Messiah.)
Even if Dems *could* figure out exactly what people want and messaged accordingly, I’m still not sure they’d be in great shape. (Imagine the alien politicians all take issue positions you agree with after discussing at length “how do we get the human idiots to vote for us”? Moreover, you know that in private aliens are all weirdos who are obsessed with stuff like Christian theology. Would you vote for them?)
I think you're right about this, and what it boils down to is a credibility problem. It's not just about finding a different type of message It's about finding different types of people.
Is it really that hard to figure out what people want?
Ask them they will tell you
Culturally right, with a robust safety net and low taxes
"robust safety net and low taxes"
And how do you fund said "robust safety net" with low taxes? Magic pixie dust?
It would be a lot easier to give people what they want if the things people wanted were logically consistent. I want to be slim and fit while having a large slice of cheesecake and multiple servings of chocolate every day, but that doesn't make it a realistic goal.
Populists solved this.
Tax something that people don't mind, move fast, keep things changing (tax credits on this and that) to make sure people feel you are helping them specifically (fuck with grocery shops a lot, make them put out silly signs about how much the government is helping with food), tax rich people, tax big companies that people already hate (banks, telecoms), tariffs (well, Trump overplayed this), crack the whip at licensing organizations to increase the supply of healthcare workers, allow more generics, go hard on housing (in cities ignore historical things, fast-track anything that is using an existing already inbuilt area), etc.
Of course in the US this requires a bit of vertical integration (local-state-federal) politics, but ... again, populists solved this!
Bingo. Foster a Heartland Party, for Real Americans, run by ex-GOP staffers, and advertise it to the gills. Run it in every gettable state. Bring in talent. It'll take time and consistency to rack up wins. Network. Foster a sense of community.
The country will never be safe without a non-authoritarian right-wing option.
You, like I, must be listening to the Sarah Longwell Focus Group podcasts.
Voters, God love 'em. They're something, all right.
The plan in Ohio can be simple enough. Find a Fetterman type and give him a slightly longer leash on immigration and trans issues.
I’m not sure there’s any evidence a child tax credit polls poorly in Ohio. Taxing the rich to help struggling families raise kids seems politically savvy to me.
People really want to believe that "tax the rich" is a big political winner, but I think it's low-salience to non-rich people and high-salience to rich people in a way that makes it a loser. My evidence for this is the political fortunes of the Republican and Democratic parties over the last N years.
When Republicans have nothing to say besides "we should cut taxes," they struggle, but as soon as they have any other issues, nobody cares if they cut taxes for the rich, and Democrats I think have been consistently unable to make much hay out of, "we'll tax the rich."
There is a lot of evidence that “tax the rich” is a big political winner. Future Forward’s ad testing found that the most effective Harris ads were ones hitting Trump on tax cuts for the rich!
Interesting. How do you reconcile this with what Michael Sullivan is saying, i.e., that Democrats' consistent position on this hasn't helped them win consistently? I see a couple possibilities.
1. Low-engagement voters somehow don't know that Democrats are the party that wants to tax rich people. I don't know for sure, but this seems unlikely to me because (a) Democratic politicians are always going on and on about "broligarchy" and billionaires, and (b) people who know partisan liberals have surely also observed that those people tend to be against the rich and complain that they don't pay their fair share. (If people don't even know that Democrats want to tax the rich, on what information are they basing their votes? If they're so hard to reach, does messaging strategy even matter?)
2. People are generally favorable towards the idea of taxing the rich, but it ranks very low on their list of priorities. (By what measure is an ad "effective" in this study? Does effective mean that people like the message or that the message is likely to be pivotal in their voting behavior?)
3. This issue is, in fact, a huge political winner, and it's the only thing keeping Democrats from doing even worse (say, getting 35-40% of the vote instead of 50%).
Basically (3). The Democratic Party is pretty successful at winning elections
That doesn’t tell you anything about whether the ads were effective or not. Dan Osborn lost his Senate race, does that mean his strategy/messaging was useless?
Every argument for child tax credit seems to assume that the fiscal baseline is fine and all you need is a bit more in taxes to pay for this new program. The baseline is not close to being fine and it’s going to get worse with an extension of TJCA and whatever they have cooking in the Congress right now.
I live in Ohio and have watched it slide from purple to red over the past few cycles; I don't know if a Fetterman type is enough. We have elected very few statewide Dems except Sherrod Brown (who mostly benefited from name recognition and a few wonky election cycles the past few times around) and one governor (Ted Strickland) who was to the right on guns and was running against a not-very-good Republican candidate in Kenneth Blackwell. There are very few emerging stars in the state party that anyone outside of their particular fiefdom has heard of; the bench is thin; and developing good candidates in the legislature has been stymied by gerrymandering and the legislature's willingness to ignore public will on redistricting, multiple times over, thanks to Republicans' full control over the state government and the entire redistricting process. It's pretty demoralizing to realize I can't think of a single Ohio Democrat who could beat Bernie effing Moreno.
Nothing that a good Trump-caused recession can't help cure.
That feels overly pessimistic, a senator the left of the average senate democrat came within a few points of winning. I know Brown has legacy name rec/incumbency, but if he just had his old positions on immigration and energy he probably wins? Tim Ryan is somewhat more moderate coded now but he's genuinely not that moderate, and got 47% of the two-way vote in a D president midterm. It's obviously a tough challenge but it seems like they haven't really tried the hard moderation they'd need. If Manchin can run 40 points ahead in WV do we really think a similar candidate couldn't get 10-15 points you need for Ohio?
Well, you'd need a candidate, and Ohio Democrats don't have one. For governor next year, Amy Acton, the former health official who led the COVID response here, is running as a Democrat, and while she seems like an okay person, she is tethered to really negative issue that automatically loses at least 50% of the vote here if not more. The other declared candidates are Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican AG Dave Yost (who was endorsed by Giant Asshole Ken Blackwell), and we might see current/recently appointed Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel (who was a popular Ohio State coach) join the fray. On the Dem side, we might see Sherrod Brown or Tim Ryan run for Gov., but who knows? In Ramaswamy vs. Acton polling, the former DOGE-ite probably wins, so we get governor Ramaswamy, and it's bad enough I have to live with President Trump -- if I have to live in a state where one of these dipshits is directly mucking around with the schools and the roads and Medicaid administration and everything else I will probably jump in Lake Erie and swim to Canada. Brown probably has the best chance of any Democrat whose name I recognize; a second not awful option might be Coach Tressel as the next republican governor, who everyone says is a decent human being and, thus, hopefully not Trump-lite or (worse) Musk-lite. A few other Congressional and state reps have expressed interest, but I stay fairly up to date on Ohio politics, and I can barely tell you who any of them are other than Chris Redfern, who was a Dem party chair who did not exactly set the party up for long term success.
what’s your plan, buck eye?
Your guess is as good as mine. In 2024, there as a drop of 2% to 5% turnout in traditional Dem strongholds like Franklin and Cuyahoga county, so turnout efforts might help, but mostly in an off year election. Trump won Ohio by around 11 points in 2024. Vance only won his senate seat by 7 points. Mike DeWine won his last election by 25 points, outperforming both of them, so there is some segment of normie voter that is probably up for grabs, but not sure how much. Both Vance and Dewine beat very blah Democratic candidates. Tim Ryan, who ran against Vance, is a pro-fossil fuel Dem from a district that went heavily for Trump 3 times. I guess the point being that you'd need a Democrat kind of like Ryan, but who has enough notoriety or charisma to beat someone like Vance, but sweet Jesus how low of a bar is THAT? Not low enough, apparently.
If the brand is trashed, it's easier to start a new brand. A culturally conservative Heartland Party. Flip the script and reduce GOP federal power at any cost.
Fwiw David Shor's polling has the Child Tax Credit about even nationally so probably below water somewhat in Ohio. I think taxing the rich to lower the deficit, inflation, interest rates, + much more conservative positions on immigration/trans/crime/fracking/guns would work.
guns are definitely an issue I neglected.
Aren’t struggling families low propensity voters relative to the people who would be taxed to fund this? Also it appears that lower income brackets are positively correlated with Trump voting share, so helping this voting bloc reproduce in view of an already-demonstrated indifference or hostility to the party rather famously more in favor of social welfare programs isn’t obviously a winner (in the sense of being "politically savvy") and may be political malpractice. Ed.: although I should note it's an open question.
struggling families are about the only thing i care about other than my own family. and smart working and lower middle class kids who need rigorous standardized tests to prove they can compete against the rich kids.
That's a claim about good policy rather than good politics, though.
taxing the rich polls well. helping struggling parents polls well as long as they aren’t welfare queens. the only skill needed is framing benefits where they don’t look like welfare
This is one of the most defeatist and depressing columns I've ever read on SB.
In Matt's opinion, Republican support in states like Iowa and Ohio is a fact of nature, like a blizzard or a wildfire. There's nothing to be done about it! All you can do is feed enough sacrifices into the flames (gun control! clean energy! anything The Groupz(TM) want!) and hope you will be spared.
How about a little more focus on how to build more popular support for Democratic candidates? I'm not saying "make the median voter in Missouri supportive of trans rights," I'm talking something like the Common Sense Manif- uh, like I said before, the Common Sense Platform, if you call it a Manifesto you sound like a commie 😊
How? I don't know how, I'm a weird nerdy PMC person, but there has to be a way, clone Buttigieg fifty times and unleash him on every podcast and YouTube channel you can find, don't just throw up your hands and go "welp, the Republicans have rock-solid support, there's nothing you can do." No! That support didn't spring fully formed like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, it's the result of lots of Republican strategists and communicators hard at work.
Meanwhile, here's a gem from today's NYT:
"After Federal Cuts, Food Banks Scrounge and Scrimp:
Sara Busse [in West Virginia] needed to make a hot meal for 40 needy seniors. She had promised a main dish, a starch, a vegetable, a fruit and a dessert.
In the past, she had gotten many of those ingredients for free from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
This time, she had dried cranberries, crackers and vegetable soup.
“What am I supposed to do?” she said. “What am I supposed to cook?”
Find stories like that and amplify them! Ask the people of red states, is this what you wanted? Is this what you support? Because this is what you get with a Republican Congress!
Didn't this woman also say that she voted for Trump 3x and still considers herself a Trump supporter? Or is that someone else they had interviewed? Like I don't even know anymore. 70% of MAGA Republicans also think the economy is getting better because of Trump's trade war, so part of it is that the Dems need more Pete B's and Andy B's in the party. The overall national brand is just toxic to some voters, why they still support Republicans I have no idea, but I think it's the podcast and media environment they engage with.
You don’t get it. Democrats have embraced policies that WE - middle of the road voters - find completely unpalatable to be dealbreakers. Letting in 15 million illegals is the biggest and most obvious one that lost me. Discriminating against whites, men, and Asians (DEI) is also something I find morally repugnant. The anti cop, weak on crime mindset. I’m also Jewish and pro Israel, but I acknowledge that one is not something most moderates care as much about.
But to be clear, I’m not voting for any democrat unless I am convinced they are not aligned with the mainstream Democratic Party on these issues. Fetterman and Ritchie Torres come to mind.
Then we all get the government they deserve.
Insert one of the Founding Fathers (Washington?) saying, "Our form of government is suitable only for a virtuous people, not any other."
I mean, if people see the elderly going hungry because their local food bank can’t afford enough food, and they say “f yeah, that’s what we voted for,” then I genuinely don’t know how to appeal to such people.
All my life, I believed that most Americans are basically decent, that they want to do the right thing and that includes helping others. If that’s gone…
Ok, so where are all these decent people who simply don’t share my ideology? Are they stepping up and saying, “Government should not subsidize food banks. But I don’t want seniors to go hungry, so I’m going to generously donate to food banks out of my own pocket!”
No doubt some of them are doing just that, but most likely, not enough. Otherwise Sara in West Virginia would be giving a very different interview to the NYT: “I was very troubled when Trump cut off USDA subsidies my food bank relies on, but then all my Trump-voting friends and neighbors pulled together to support the food bank and now we have plenty for everyone, it’s been wonderful to see!”
Sure, there are decent people in Trump country. There are also “I’ve got mine, FU” kind of people.
Yeah, tbh I feel like replacing the Senate leadership is the way to go - good news Dick Durbin is retiring but I really think it’s due for Chuck Schumer to go…
I think he’s a shrewd tactician (like the budget handling was epitome of it even if it was emotionally disturbing, I think it paid off by focusing the fire on Trump). But the issue is he seems fundamentally afraid of left - essentially Dem’s version of McConell.
And while I’m more of an advocate of balancing when to fight and when to cooperate - considering the type of force Bernie faction (or more accurately activist type), I feel like he’s currently a little too caving.
I imagine Brian Schatz could be a better leader
I was going to suggest Patty Murray, but I didn't realize she's 74.
Yeah… she’s def old…
I also feel like Warnock could be a good one maybe - esp if Georgia runs further to the left.
I’m personally happier with Hakeem Jeffries as he seems to be able to counter a good distance w the most leftist faction
She's also frequently won staff polls on "dumbest senator" over her career
I agree change would be good gut the Dems, but I don’t see Shatz moderating much. Now Fetterman and Hickenlooper leading the Dems…
Here's a plan:
1) Talk to all your friends and family members about voting for moderate candidates in the primaries. Right now, mainly the most partisan Democrats participate. Not good for getting moderates elected
2) Find at least one truly moderate candidate at any level that you like, and give them your time and/or money. Ideally they would represent you, but if there's not a good option in your district/town, find somebody else to support.
3) Join the Democratic Party on the local level, ideally with some like-minded people, and fight to steer the party in the right direction. It is not good enough to simply write blogs and make comments. If you think the status quo is this bad, then get off the sideline, and try to make things better.
What does the party even do at the local level anymore?
A lot actually, not so much as a literal institution but as an informal group of party regulars, activists, donors, and electeds. I'm very involved in the local democratic party and this group of a couple hundred people if that has a huge say in who gets elected in our county of 600,000 people. Our county is traditionally red but increasingly purple to light blue in the Trump era and a lot of democratic primaries are basically decided by a couple interested candidates talking amongst themselves and some folks in the local primary and deciding who's going to run, some primaries but not many. If 50 likeminded democrats got seriously involved it could meaninfgully shift the politics of a congressional district sized locality.
Obviously the party raises money, coordinates doorknocking and all that stuff but at it's core they play a big part in shaping who the party nominates. Voters of course always have the final say but it's hard to run for local office without institutional support so a lot of candidates don't if they can't win that backing.
Good question, and maybe part of the problem if the answer is little to nothing. I'm slowly starting to get more involved on a more local level
I think running candidates in un-winnable states even in that lose, is part of the way of changing the Party's baseline. There is no reason that a gung-ho high-growth/Abundance pro-trade, pro high skill immigrant, pro progressive tax-and-reduce deficit, turn away all but genuine political asylum seekers at the border, guns only as an adjunct to crime fighting/policing-prosecution, pro fossil fuel production and transportation, throw-NEPA-under-the-bus, pro Fifth Amendment, expand paid for social insurance candidate should not win 50 states.
My counterpoint to this is that while leftists are generally unpopular and are incapable of governing decently (see: Brandon Johnson), the centrists really haven’t covered themselves in glory either.
The greatest argument against centrism is Keir Starmer, who is as centrist and “moderate” as they come, won a huge majority in the UK and then pissed it away to the point where Labo(u)r might end up a third party [1] because he was too scared to make progress on any of the issues he correctly identified during the campaign. The stupid part is that his public messaging is that the UK needs bitter medicine to get over its malaise, but he’s instead chosen to piss and moan about fiscal constraints instead of, say, fixing the insane planning system.
There’s obviously a two axes chart of progressive-moderate and supine-brave. And Noah Smith does day that combative centrism is the way forward. However, as one SBer (Polytropos, I think, not quoting this verbatim as I can’t find it) said “moderate but not cucked is the way, but unfortunately cuckedness and moderation seem to go together”.
A concrete example is the fight over upzoning in IL [2]. Anyone with half a brain knows that IL is losing population, and anyone half-affiliated with Dem politics has seen the 2030 census projections. Yet Dems haven’t got the cojones to push it through, because they’re too scared of their shadows.
Moving forward, concrete solutions include nuking the filibuster, expanding the lower courts and passing crucial reforms to permitting, taxation, healthcare and immigration. Act like you’re gonna lose congress in 2030, because that’s how politics works, and pass all your shit in 2 years. Give the public some goodies that leaven the bitter medicine. I know that this will cause heartburn for the SB crypto-republicans, but doing nothing isn’t a long term option, and your ideology played no small part in leading us here. Yes, the ACA did lead to democrats losing seats. It still pays dividends. In terms of personnel, it means getting rid of all those conditioned to cowardice by Dems long decades of defeat in the 70s-80s. It also means getting rid of the idiots who babble on about “comity/reach across the aisle” (thankfully Durbin will fuck off, except now we have Fetterman, who decides he’ll play nice with Trump on everything other than transgender issues where the Dem position is wildly unpopular- literally the moronic political instincts of Sinema).
[1] https://cms.findoutnow.co.uk/app/uploads/2025/04/23rd-April-VI-Find-Out-Now-1.xlsx
[2] https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocTypeID=HB&DocNum=4795&GAID=17&SessionID=112&LegID=152563
For now, this means pulling the knives out in blue trifecta states and going hell for leather in fixing housing, infrastructure and bureaucracy. Yes, progressives in CA and NY have some stupid ideas about these but it’s also moderates that sink housing there as well. There’s nothing stopping these states from building a bureau that designs transit/public housing/airports etc to rent costs. We HAVE to annihilate the “we tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” mentality.
Great points!
I assume “no all part” = “no small part”?
Yes, fixed.
Being in CA saddens me because the potential is everywhere but gets squandered.
What are examples of GOOD governance? And are they actually a result of political ideology, or more a combination of good policy, good politics, charisma and a favorable political climate?
Best blue state governance I can think of is CO. Yes, there’s no single factor that led to it, but that doesn’t absolve individuals from the obligation to work hard for it. As I said, ‘We HAVE to annihilate the “we tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” mentality.’
I’d love to read follow ups to this, where we go state by state and deep dive into: 1. Who are statewide elected Dems 2. What are the polling nuances of the state 3. Therefore how could it become competitive
In this nationalized politics, few nuances remain.
Good idea!
I think the obvious answer is to stop playing small ball. I think there’s a point to be made that the GOP ran away with cultural conventions because they started thinking big.
Democrats need to swing for the fences on lowering the cost of living, the cost of education, the quality of infrastructure etc. and then be out in the media constantly pushing those positions. If someone’s slightly off message, pull a Trump and go after the media for misreporting it.
I mean, yeah, there's lots of opportunities to "swing big", but the Rs did it with culture war chum that doesn't have a direct bottom-line impact on the budget. You could get some traction out of "Abundance"-style reforms that have long-term COLA impacts, but when you talk about education and infrastructure, you're either taking on unions directly or raising taxes. These are real policies that you can't just hand-wave the details on, including their budgetary effects. This is a much harder lift, and the bigger the swing, the harder it becomes in the current fiscal environment.
Truth of the matter is, the next president is likely to be very constrained by the geopolitical circumstances and federal balance sheet they're handed. In that context, the best "big swing" might be going hard on return to normalcy and turning the page on both MAGA and "woke" and focusing on long-term renewal and investment of the country.
In other words, we will once again have to spend all our political capital just cleaning up the mess the Republicans leave behind, and the mess is worse every time. Obama after Bush, Biden after Trump 1, and somebody after Trump 2. Each time the country starts deeper off in the hole.
Biden created his own mess. If he had only limited his role to cleaning up after Trump, he would have been more popular. No one voted for him to become the next FDR.
There are different dynamics between two parties, one which wants to govern and has to pursue policies toward that aim, and one that is happy scoring cheap political points and punishing its opponents.
The Democrats absolutely should *not* swing for the fences because Americans are fundamentally conservative in that they're not interested in big changes outside of dire emergencies. Promise them, oh, Medicare for All, and enjoy watching your opponents win elections.