Where do we go from here?

[aGDevil2k]

She could’ve won regardless of Biden if she had tried to actually distance herself from him. Talking about the failures of the Harris campaign is imperative to understanding how we move forward. The party has learned no lessons.

A VP is never going to distance, fairly, from the P.

The party has learned no lessons? In the 3 weeks of your evaluation period?

 

[Paine]

A VP is never going to distance, fairly, from the P.

The party has learned no lessons? In the 3 weeks of your evaluation period?

The party has learned no lessons since 2016. Should’ve been more clear. Your point about her not being able to distance from POTUS as VP isn’t without merit, but the fact that she didn’t even try is damning.

The folks who ran her campaign should be exiled from the party. It’s likely they’ll be welcomed to run it back in 2028.

 

[gtyellowjacket]

You are dreaming. $25,000 of taxpayer money to first-time home buyers? How is that centrist?

And she proposed an anti-price gouging law, But didn't really go into a whole lot of detail on what may constitute an emergency. But her stump speech talked about how food prices shot up during covid when supply chains were disrupted but lamented the fact that food prices haven't gone back down when supply chains have normalized. So is she going to say it's okay for a covid-like disruption to increase food prices but now that the covid emergency is passed normal supply and demand somehow constitutes an emergency? That seems to be what She is implying.

I get it. Both candidates made ridiculous promises they have no hope of keeping and that's the way campaigns work. But to wave our hands and say that Price controls and tax money giveaways to young people in hopes that they will vote for her is rational centrist policy is pretty absurd.

Price controls aren’t centrist policy, but she wasn’t advocating for that. It’s not hand waving, it’s the truth.

$25,000 down payment assistance to first time home buyers is a center left policy, nothing more nothing less. It’s not radical by any means. It’s telling that these are the policies being picked to demonstrate that she ran a far left campaign.

Did Trump run a centrist campaign?

No. Trump did not run a centrist campaign.

But just saying that price controls or $25,000 checks to first-time home buyers is centrist or that Harris 's price control policy wasn't a price control policy doesn't really make it so.

 

[Paine]

No. Trump did not run a centrist campaign.

But just saying that price controls or $25,000 checks to first-time home buyers is centrist or that Harris 's price control policy wasn't a price control policy doesn't really make it so.

Ok. It also doesn’t make it so to say that Harris advocated “price controls” when that’s obviously not true. I don’t care about the housing assistance argument. Say it’s left wing if you want, it’s not a policy of economic populism which is what we’re arguing about here.

 

[gtyellowjacket]

Ok. It also doesn’t make it so to say that Harris advocated “price controls” when that’s obviously not true. I don’t care about the housing assistance argument. Say it’s left wing if you want, it’s not a policy of economic populism which is what we’re arguing about here.

How is giving away free tax money not an economic populism policy? That's exactly what it is.

And frankly a policy to control grocery prices is a price control policy. I'm not sure how you can say it's anything else but I would be somewhat interested in your thought process.

 

[Paine]

How is giving away free tax money not an economic populism policy? That's exactly what it is.

And frankly a policy to control grocery prices is a price control policy. I'm not sure how you can say it's anything else but I would be somewhat interested in your thought process.

Please pull up the policy for me. If the policy doesn’t say anything about price controls and the candidate didn’t say anything about price controls, how is it a price control policy? It was a price gouging policy, that’s it.

I don’t think you understand the definition of economic populism if you think it’s about “giving away money.”

You’ve shown time and time again that you really don’t think about these things that deeply, and you don’t seem to actually be interested in the point of the discussion.

 

[gtyellowjacket]

Please pull up the policy for me. If the policy doesn’t say anything about price controls and the candidate didn’t say anything about price controls, how is it a price control policy? It was a price gouging policy, that’s it.

I don’t think you understand the definition of economic populism if you think it’s about “giving away money.”

You’ve shown time and time again that you really don’t think about these things that deeply, and you don’t seem to actually be interested in the point of the discussion.

Are we arguing if a policy that prevents price gouging is a policy that controls prices? Because to me a policy that controls prices in a "emergency" is a price control policy, especially if politicians are the ones that get to declare the emergency.

Here is Kamala's quote from one of her Raleigh speeches. Does that sound like an emergency to you? It sounds more to me like whenever a politician's approval ratings were declining, they would declare an emergency and try to control prices.

“We all know that prices went up during the pandemic when the supply chains shut down and failed, but our supply chains have now improved, and prices are still too high,” said Harris.

 

[superrific]

It talks about populism as a winning strategy. The article barely mentions whether Bernie would’ve won in 2016/2020 or not. Just a headline meant to get people to click, though obviously didn’t work with some of the posters here.

I wouldn’t have posted it if it was just about “would Bernie have won?” That’s something we’ve talked about ad infinitum here and not something Shakir or Klein think is relevant really. The article is just a transcript of Klein’s podcast episode with Shakir if you’d rather listen.

Thank you for posting that. I'm curious for your take. I'd say it's clear that Faiz didn't convince Ezra.

I think Faiz made lots of good points, as you do when discussing these issues. But he really, really didn't have a response to two important points:

1. Sure, describing the benefits of a policy can get people in a poll to say they love it. But those questions are hiding the downsides. The downsides, as it turns out, are highly unpopular. It's like saying, "we should all eat more steak. It's full of protein, it's easy to prepare and it tastes great!" When you frame it like that, how could you oppose it? But when you add, "oh, it's also high in calories, fat and cholesterol; it's expensive compared to other meat, and cattle farming is environmentally destructive," the picture changes, yes?

2. The Joe Manchin issue. Now, I've seen people dismiss this point as "we don't need WV anyway" which is fair at the presidential level but WV does have two Senators. Fine. The larger point is that it does not seem to be at all true that progressive candidates do well in non-liberal areas. Rather, the opposite seems to be true: people who live in purple areas want purple candidates. They don't want Bernie Sanders populism. Jared Golden was another name mentioned as a contrast to Bernie. Could be the same guy, but the voters are different.

Certainly the candidates think that tacking to the center is better than tacking to the left. It's weird for Faiz to attribute Manchin's success in WV to the way he connects with his constituents, and then ignore the fact that Manchin obviously thinks his constituents do not want Bernie Sanders policies for whatever reason. I mean, isn't that a real tension, if not full contradiction?

In general, Faiz's only response to this was "it's untested" at a national level. True. It's been tested at lower levels and the "tack center" view seems to be much better supported. But as you and I have discussed, it's true that we haven't tried it at a presidential level -- well, not exactly that. We've also discussed how it's hard to put up a risky, untested strategy when the stakes are so high. Each Senate seat we lose can take a long time to win back.

3. I guess the point is that it's always easy to find fault. Most of the progressive criticism of pragmatists is negative. It's, "you lost elections in 2000, 2004 and 2016 that you should have won" (we'll hold off on putting 2024 in there just yet). Yes, those elections were lost. Maybe Dems had a bad strategy. But what's the alternative? Ignoring the culture issues that seem to dominate the negative partisanship on the other side?

I don't watch Fox News, but my understanding from people who do is that culture war issues dominate there. And all the Trump people I interact with focus so much more on culture war issues than economic ones. Maybe that's just my crowd, but it's also true on this board. We get 10x the amount of anti-trans stuff from our conservative posters than any economic issue. We get a lot of cultural grievance of all stripes.

I get that you're aiming at the most persuadable 4-5%, but that's not much margin to work with. If we want to restore the Dem brand -- should that be necessary -- and start appealing more to the working classes in general, we're going to need more than 4%. And that means we're going to have to dive into the culture war stuff that seems to animate American politics so much more than economic issues.

 

[Paine]

Thank you for posting that. I'm curious for your take. I'd say it's clear that Faiz didn't convince Ezra.

I think Faiz made lots of good points, as you do when discussing these issues. But he really, really didn't have a response to two important points:

1. Sure, describing the benefits of a policy can get people in a poll to say they love it. But those questions are hiding the downsides. The downsides, as it turns out, are highly unpopular. It's like saying, "we should all eat more steak. It's full of protein, it's easy to prepare and it tastes great!" When you frame it like that, how could you oppose it? But when you add, "oh, it's also high in calories, fat and cholesterol; it's expensive compared to other meat, and cattle farming is environmentally destructive," the picture changes, yes?

2. The Joe Manchin issue. Now, I've seen people dismiss this point as "we don't need WV anyway" which is fair at the presidential level but WV does have two Senators. Fine. The larger point is that it does not seem to be at all true that progressive candidates do well in non-liberal areas. Rather, the opposite seems to be true: people who live in purple areas want purple candidates. They don't want Bernie Sanders populism. Jared Golden was another name mentioned as a contrast to Bernie. Could be the same guy, but the voters are different.

Certainly the candidates think that tacking to the center is better than tacking to the left. It's weird for Faiz to attribute Manchin's success in WV to the way he connects with his constituents, and then ignore the fact that Manchin obviously thinks his constituents do not want Bernie Sanders policies for whatever reason. I mean, isn't that a real tension, if not full contradiction?

In general, Faiz's only response to this was "it's untested" at a national level. True. It's been tested at lower levels and the "tack center" view seems to be much better supported. But as you and I have discussed, it's true that we haven't tried it at a presidential level -- well, not exactly that. We've also discussed how it's hard to put up a risky, untested strategy when the stakes are so high. Each Senate seat we lose can take a long time to win back.

3. I guess the point is that it's always easy to find fault. Most of the progressive criticism of pragmatists is negative. It's, "you lost elections in 2000, 2004 and 2016 that you should have won" (we'll hold off on putting 2024 in there just yet). Yes, those elections were lost. Maybe Dems had a bad strategy. But what's the alternative? Ignoring the culture issues that seem to dominate the negative partisanship on the other side?

I don't watch Fox News, but my understanding from people who do is that culture war issues dominate there. And all the Trump people I interact with focus so much more on culture war issues than economic ones. Maybe that's just my crowd, but it's also true on this board. We get 10x the amount of anti-trans stuff from our conservative posters than any economic issue. We get a lot of cultural grievance of all stripes.

I get that you're aiming at the most persuadable 4-5%, but that's not much margin to work with. If we want to restore the Dem brand -- should that be necessary -- and start appealing more to the working classes in general, we're going to need more than 4%. And that means we're going to have to dive into the culture war stuff that seems to animate American politics so much more than economic issues.

Thanks for the detailed response. I agree that Faiz didn’t seem to convince Ezra. Their argument was very similar to many we’ve had and they came to the same point that we have.

I agree that Dems will have to change their tune on some cultural issues. It goes to what we’ve both talked about in terms of an economic focused message + faith based message.

Red state Dem governors (and even some Rep governors in red states) are good examples to look to when examining how to handle these culture issues.

Andy Beshear does it through his faith. He’s vetoed anti-trans legislation in Kentucky and makes it clear that trans people are humans deserving of the same rights as everyone else. From there you can pivot to talking about universal rights, including economic rights.

Something along the lines of “we are all God’s children” has been a premise of the liberal left for a long time.

I really appreciate you bringing the religious aspect into this because I think it has helped my thinking. Not in terms of being naïve about what evangelical religious people actually tend to vote on, because my family is full of them. But in terms of crystallizing a message that has worked for left movements in the United States multiple times: universalist messaging wrapped in semi-religious to outright religious language.

 

[Mulberry Heel]

NBC's Chuck Todd said on the last day of October that the Harris Campaign calculated they could not win unless they pulled the Nikki Haley REPUBLICAN voters. That's just stunning to me and appears to be what happened. The stunning part is that there weren't 4-5% gettable voters for Democrats. This indicates a pretty big refresh of the Democratic image will be needed.

I make a prediction that the 2028 Democratic Primary will come down to a boring Bill Clinton centrist type vs a Bernie Sanders enthusiasm type.

As this election proved: enthusiasm gets you the money, it gets you the ground game, its gets the celebrities out for you, it gets the huge rallies.........but if its not paired with something that appeals to small town America, it runs into trouble on election day.

I've read that as well, and I think it was a miscalculation on their part. I don't think they needed Nikki Haley Republican voters to win. Instead it seems clear from the voting results that what they really needed to do was to hang on to Biden's 81 million 2020 voters, which they failed to do. She spent a vast sum of money relentlessly trying to win over Republicans who were uneasy about Trump, and yet she ended up getting almost the exact same percentage of Republican votes that Biden did - 6%. Democrats need to give up on the idea that there are Republicans who are persuadable - they're not. Instead they need to work more on actually getting their own base out to vote, and winning back minority voters that Republicans have been able to peel away.

 

[Paine]

Democratic Elites Embraced the Identity Politics They Decry

After eight years of using shallow “identity politics” as a cudgel against the Left, Democratic pundits and elected officials are now blaming leftists themselves for the fact that such politics took over the party.

jacobin.com

Really good read regarding the identity politics piece of this.

 

[superrific]

Thanks for the detailed response. I agree that Faiz didn’t seem to convince Ezra. Their argument was very similar to many we’ve had and they came to the same point that we have.

I agree that Dems will have to change their tune on some cultural issues. It goes to what we’ve both talked about in terms of an economic focused message + faith based message.

Red state Dem governors (and even some Rep governors in red states) are good examples to look to when examining how to handle these culture issues.

Andy Beshear does it through his faith. He’s vetoed anti-trans legislation in Kentucky and makes it clear that trans people are humans deserving of the same rights as everyone else. From there you can pivot to talking about universal rights, including economic rights.

Something along the lines of “we are all God’s children” has been a premise of the liberal left for a long time.

I really appreciate you bringing the religious aspect into this because I think it has helped my thinking. Not in terms of being naïve about what evangelical religious people actually tend to vote on, because my family is full of them. But in terms of crystallizing a message that has worked for left movements in the United States multiple times: universalist messaging wrapped in semi-religious to outright religious language.

I don't know much about Faiz. I've not seem him that much, probably because he's more of a behind the scenes guy.

Ezra Klein is super smart. That doesn't mean he's the best political strategist, but he shouldn't be ignored on any issue he weighs in on. He usually has things to contribute.

One of his points this year has been that liberals need to reclaim the mantle of building things. So many of the GOP attacks on "regulation" are bad faith, but Ezra says that over-regulation is indeed an issue when it comes to housing construction, that liberals have tried to incorporate so much stuff into housing policy that it's really hard to do anything. So many approvals and studies required. It's a very good point.

One problem with a lot of liberal policy these days is that it seeks to pile every concern into every issue. For instance (and this can be a longer conversation), the way we talk about the minimum wage. Minimum wages can never be anti-poverty programs. That's not how they work or what they do. They are supposed to basically give some protection to workers who have no leverage in bargaining and are thus pure price-takers. The minimum wage levels the battlefield, so to speak. But the right minimum wage is not a "living wage." It's the wage that would lead to the most welfare for the people who earn it. If that's not a "living wage" then we have to find other ways to address that. The "living wage" movement will just end up wiping people out at the lowest rung of the ladder. Well, it certainly could. If the minimum wage is too high, people will be unemployed.

This is especially true in housing policy, permitting, zoning and the like.

 

[Paine]

I don't know much about Faiz. I've not seem him that much, probably because he's more of a behind the scenes guy.

Ezra Klein is super smart. That doesn't mean he's the best political strategist, but he shouldn't be ignored on any issue he weighs in on. He usually has things to contribute.

One of his points this year has been that liberals need to reclaim the mantle of building things. So many of the GOP attacks on "regulation" are bad faith, but Ezra says that over-regulation is indeed an issue when it comes to housing construction, that liberals have tried to incorporate so much stuff into housing policy that it's really hard to do anything. So many approvals and studies required. It's a very good point.

One problem with a lot of liberal policy these days is that it seeks to pile every concern into every issue. For instance (and this can be a longer conversation), the way we talk about the minimum wage. Minimum wages can never be anti-poverty programs. That's not how they work or what they do. They are supposed to basically give some protection to workers who have no leverage in bargaining and are thus pure price-takers. The minimum wage levels the battlefield, so to speak. But the right minimum wage is not a "living wage." It's the wage that would lead to the most welfare for the people who earn it. If that's not a "living wage" then we have to find other ways to address that. The "living wage" movement will just end up wiping people out at the lowest rung of the ladder. Well, it certainly could. If the minimum wage is too high, people will be unemployed.

This is especially true in housing policy, permitting, zoning and the like.

Interesting thoughts. Shakir is def more behind the scenes. He’s been in Democratic politics for a while now. Floated for DNC chair but apparently not interested. Believe he works for More Perfect Union now, which is doing some great work.

I tend to agree with Klein re: housing. NIMBYism needs to be purged from the party. The larger point about building things is well taken and part of the issue with the Democratic brand. Biden did a bit of this but industrial policy has been missing for so long that it wasn’t felt soon enough.

Again, the messaging has to be simple and match the policy. People, no matter how politically sophisticated, understand fixing and building infrastructure.

 

[superrific]

Democratic Elites Embraced the Identity Politics They Decry

After eight years of using shallow “identity politics” as a cudgel against the Left, Democratic pundits and elected officials are now blaming leftists themselves for the fact that such politics took over the party.

jacobin.com

Really good read regarding the identity politics piece of this.

It would be more effective if it wasn't primarily concerned with relitigating 2016. I mean, it's a broadside against the Democratic Party over a decade, all in a few paragraphs. That is never going to work, so we get passages like this:

"The reality is, the kind of divisive “identity politics” that Jentleson, Slotkin, and others in this crowd are complaining about was embraced by the centrist wing of the party as a strategy to halt Sanders and the movement behind him. Many of the same figures who embraced this approach in 2016 and 2020 now claim it sunk the Democrats in 2024."

That is not the reality, and it's almost laughable that it's being posed as such. The idea that the Democrats embraced what is being here called identity politics (you and I know that everything is identity politics) in order to beat Bernie Sanders is unreal. The Democrats have been embracing this politics for decades. Why did Clinton need a Sister Souljah moment? Identity politics. It was an attempt to disassociate himself from Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, which as the name implies, was heavily into minority identity politics. In fact, one could argue that it was little else but that. And Jesse was a major player in Dem politics back then.

The Dems did not need a conspiracy to defeat Bernie, and this soft "stop the steal" stuff that still persists is really fucking annoying. To this author, I would say: make your point. Quit with the nonsense theories about Dems inventing ways to defeat Bernie even if it meant we would lose the general. That's bullshit. It always has been bullshit. If you want to take a Bernie-style message to the people, argue that point. Stop playing victim.

 

[superrific]

Interesting thoughts. Shakir is def more behind the scenes. He’s been in Democratic politics for a while now. Floated for DNC chair but apparently not interested. Believe he works for More Perfect Union now, which is doing some great work.

I tend to agree with Klein re: housing. NIMBYism needs to be purged from the party. The larger point about building things is well taken and part of the issue with the Democratic brand. Biden did a bit of this but industrial policy has been missing for so long that it wasn’t felt soon enough.

Again, the messaging has to be simple and match the policy. People, no matter how politically sophisticated, understand fixing and building infrastructure.

One thing I would have liked to see more of was the fantastic response to the collapsed interstate in Philly. They got right on it and fixed it in record time. That would have been a way to show the Biden administration actually doing things, whereas Trump talks and talks about infrastructure but doesn't do shit because he doesn't know how.

Now maybe that would have been more of an emphasis if Shapiro had been on the ticket, or maybe it's just too small-bore to move the needle much. I don't know. I'm not good at that level of detail when it comes to messaging. It sure seems to me, though, that a good answer to "Haitians are eating pets" would be "No, what they do -- along with all Americans -- is fix our roads and collapsed bridges. The roads and bridges Trump promised to fix in his first term but it was always just a con."

In fairness to everyone involved in this discussion, it's hard to know what works because we've never quite faced this. The GOP has been institutionally dishonest for a long time, but Trump obviously rachets up the mendacity to new levels. Nobody has ever run a presidential campaign based completely on lies, with little effort to hide that it's all fabrication. I would have thought there would be a limit to the Trump bullshit that Americans would swallow. A very high limit, but a limit, right? Like, when Trump says that migrants are running towns in the Midwest, people who live in the Midwest know that's just bullshit. When the mayor and governor had to come out and say, no they are lying about Springfield, that would cost them, right? It did not.

Trump has proven that a strategy of 100%, 24/7 lying actually works. How do you run against that without becoming the same damn thing? That's the question.

 

[finesse]

It's a basic that "Man bites dog" gets a lead.

 

[AlbionAmerican]

The idea that the Democrats can run as economic populists anymore into the future is so out of touch with reality. It 100% is a losing strategy going forward because all the GOP has to do is demagogue that to oblivion.

The socialism campaign worked when Millennials (the largest voting block in America now) were younger. As a Millennial, I can tell you quite clearly we are not economically ideological. To the extent Millennials were ideological it was on social issues, which is why Obama did so well at the time he did. However, once their self-interests kicked in, that's when Sanders campaign worked. Same goes for Trump in this past election, I know a lot of people around my age who swung from Biden to Trump because they aren't Democrats, they aren't ideological, they dont want a revolution, they really just want a normal life where they can make a living and life isn't overly expensive. Dont let the elite Millennials trick you here, they aren't representative of the majority of the generation.

We're actually quite a pragmatic generation all in all, at least my cohort of slightly older Millennial. Which is why pragmatic politics appealing to Millennials, who are now in a completely different stage of life than when Bernie Sanders emerged, needs to be considered going forward. There are perhaps economic messages that work for Millennials now which wouldn't have previously, but also need to consider that what sells to the educated Millennials will not with the non-college educated Millennials, so the messaging has to be more unified around things that benefit the entire generation. Promising to cancel college debt for instance backfires, unless its combined with a policy that's also helping the non-college educated ones too. Same goes for the childcare tax credit, that only helps the people who are remotely stable enough to even consider having children, for many people there's a logjam of other problems they are up against before a childcare tax credit would be a worthy policy for them to vote on.

Democrats really screwed the pooch on housing, that would have been the issue but we'll see where housing prices stand in the years to come. I'd like to see Democrats go after Airbnb nationally, as well as people parking their money in our finite supply of property around the country. The amount of foreign money sitting in domestic real estate is a major factor for why housing is more expensive, yet Democrats just talk about building more housing, which is NOT the solution. We have plenty of housing, and we can easily drive down housing prices by running on policies that will make it far more expensive for private equity and foreign entities to control OUR housing supply. Democrats need to run at the problem, not maintain the problem for the benefit of the donor class who simply try to come up with these half-ass solutions. The GOP certainly isn't going to take this issue on either so its really low picking fruit.

 

[Healing]

Same goes for Trump in this past election, I know a lot of people around my age who swung from Biden to Trump because they aren't Democrats, they aren't ideological, they dont want a revolution, they really just want a normal life where they can make a living and life isn't overly expensive.

We're actually quite a pragmatic generation

What?

 

[Paine]

What?

I have no idea what this person is talking about. I’m pretty sure millennials voted for Harris in higher numbers than any other generation.

 

[AlbionAmerican]

I have no idea what this person is talking about. I’m pretty sure millennials voted for Harris in higher numbers than any other generation.

Perhaps I got that wrong, thought I saw a swing towards Trump with Millennials. Nonetheless, I have anecdotal cases where people I know were so fed up with Biden they either didnt vote or voted Trump, but they weren't Democrats (nor were Republicans). But could just be anecdotal rather than a trend.