It Was Always Going To Be Trump
Screengrab from FoxNews coverage of Iowa Caucuses (NewsCorp)
The 2024 Iowa caucuses are in the books with no surprises. With 99 percent reporting, Donald Trump was the clear favorite with 51 percent of the vote. Ron DeSantis eked out a second-place finish with 21 percent, two points ahead of Nikki Haley. Vivek Ramaswamy picked up three delegates for his fourth-place finish with seven percent before dropping out. Asa Hutchinson also showed up but barely.
Aside from Donald Trump, the big winner of the night was the polling industry. The results were very close to the FiveThirtyEight and Real Clear Politics averages. The big difference between the polling and the actual results was that Ron DeSantis outperformed his numbers. That might have been due to differences in the expected turnout.
But the top-line result was no surprise. Donald Trump has been the frontrunner in both Iowa and national Republican polling since the averages started keeping track in May 2023. Despite talk of challenges from DeSantis and a late surge from Haley, Trump’s position within the GOP has only gotten stronger.
Well, maybe one person was surprised. As late as yesterday, Erick Erickson was still saying, “DeSantis could really stun people. He has the most impressive operation in Iowa.” Erickson also predicted a DeSantis win last month.
There was a time when it looked as though the story might have been different. For that, we have to look back to the days following the Republican midterm disaster of 2022. After watching numerous MAGA candidates snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in what should have been winnable races, there was some hope that Republican voters would see the folly of persisting on the same trumpy course in 2024.
Alas, the Republican introspection did not last long.
Entrance polls from the caucuses illustrate the problem. Per CBS News, the most important factor for caucus-goers was that a candidate “shares my values” at 40 percent. That was followed closely by 34 percent who wanted someone who “fights for people like me.” Only 12 percent said the “right temperament” while 11 percent wanted someone who “can beat Joe Biden.”
These results confirm what I have long believed about Republicans, namely that they prefer a fighter to a winner. Three-quarters of Republican voters don’t care if Trump would make a good president or if he can beat Biden. As a result, the party is likely to get a train wreck of a candidate who can’t beat Biden.
Going further, 64 percent of caucus-goers say that Trump is “fit to be president even if convicted of a crime” and 65 percent don’t believe that Biden won a legitimate victory in 2020. These data points are illustrative of the bubble of confirmation bias that has enveloped Republicans in the Trump years.
The fact that Republicans don’t acknowledge that Trump lost goes a long way toward explaining Trump’s commanding lead. Republican voters think of him as an incumbent and he polls as such.
This bubble of confirmation bias is largely the fault of cowardly Republican officials and media personalities who won’t tell their base the truth. Most Republicans are afraid of Trump’s base. Republican politicians are afraid that they will be primaried by MAGA candidates. Republican pundits are afraid of the MAGA cancel culture that does not tolerate criticism of The Former Guy.
They are also afraid for their lives and their families in the face of MAGA threats. My Republican congressman was one of several who received death threats after refusing to vote for Jim Jordan as House Speaker last year. It’s no surprise that he is retiring this year.
The fear of violence also explains the wave of Trump endorsements over the weekend. Among those rushing to express loyalty to Trump at the last minute were Marco Rubio, Doug Burgum, and Mike Lee, who somehow thought that there was a “binary choice” three days before the first nominating contest in the nation, a caucus that included at least half a dozen candidates.
This reminds me of a good movie that I watched over the holidays called “8-Bit Christmas.” The movie is reminiscent of an 80s version of “A Christmas Story,” and one of the memorable moments is when a father talks to his son about trying to find a Cabbage Patch doll for his daughter.
I couldn’t find the full clip, unfortunately, but the quote goes something like this, “I don’t negotiate with terrorists. I give them what they want.”
As I wrote recently, Nikki Haley has a shot at winning New Hampshire, but after that, her prospects look bleak unless there is a major shift. Donald Trump is almost certainly going to be the Republican nominee. And he’s almost certainly going to lose in November. Polling is already starting to shift towards Biden after a brief Trump surge.
In 2016, the Republican Party supported Trump reluctantly against Hillary. In 2020 and 2024, they doubled and tripled down on him because they like him. This is especially disappointing of the 55 percent of Iowa Christians who supported Trump, the most unchristlike candidate in the race.
I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Republicans won’t accept this year’s Trump defeat any more than they did the last one. And I’m very concerned that MAGA will resort to violence once again as a result.
This is entirely consistent with story after story about rural, and/or low information suburban Republican voters who don’t believe their own party is listening to them. Most of those stories then blame Democrat’s for not listening either, without ever really talking about what these voters really want form their politicians.
Cowardice and greed for power is running amok in the GOP. This is the movement they built over the last 40 years. They can’t change it from outside, and Democrats can’t actually save them.Report
There was a lot of beard stroking punditry after 2016, trying to explain why people voted Trump. One of the common themes was that they didn’t share his racism or misogyny or boorishness, but were somehow just um, picking the lesser of two evils, or maybe they were just economically anxious yeah that’s it, or ahh, were tired of that unlikeable woman.
But all those myths have been shattered by the 2018, 2020, 2022 election cycles. The Republican voting base wants Trump, they love who he is and what he represents.
It doesn’t matter who his opponent is, it doesn’t matter what events transpire, it doesn’t matter what his policies are because his status as head of an ethno-nationalist party is all that matters.Report
Whenever I see an instance of people who obviously know full well who Donald Trump really is and choosing him nevertheless, I recall 1 Samuel 8.
When Samuel grew old, he appointed his sons as judges for Israel. The name of his firstborn was Joel and the name of his second was Abijah, and they served at Beersheba. But his sons did not walk in his ways. They turned aside after dishonest gain, and accepted bribes and perverted justice.
So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. They said to him, ‘You are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.’
But when they said, ‘Give us a king to lead us,’ this displeased Samuel. …[God drops some wisdom on Samuel] … Samuel said to the people who were asking him for a king, “This is what the king who will reign over you will do He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to play his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your men-servants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and when you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you that day.’
But the people refused to listen to Samuel. ‘No!’ They said. ‘We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.’
Some people just plain want a king. You can tell them, “A king will bring war,” and they won’t care. You can tell them, “A king will leave you less prosperous than before” and they won’t care. You can tell them, “A king will make you less free,” and they won’t care. They want what they want.
How you can look at people like Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orban and say, “Yeah, I want that!” is beyond me, but I’m not someone who wants a king. When someone does want a king, they know who they want to be king, and that’s what they want.
About all I can say after Iowa is, maybe they don’t want the word “king” to be used, but it’s evidently what they want.Report
They don’t want a king. They don’t actually expect that Donald Trump is going to tell them to do anything. If anything, that’s part of the appeal.
What they want is overt public proof that you can be a total jerk without being forced to suffer public punishment for it, that saying something dumb or mean isn’t the end of your life.
They wanted what the guy being discussed in this essay wants:
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/07/my_name_is_michael_bay_and_i_j.htmlReport
That a hilarious piece of writing.
“And then [Bush] looked at America and said, these f*cktards couldn’t find Iraq on a map of Iraq labeled ‘Iraq’, no way are these Raymond loving motherf*ckers going to understand anything about labor costs and the inevitability of falling foreign reserve accumulation. Let’s go with ‘WMDs.'””Report
They don’t want a king to tell THEM what to do, they want a king to tell THOSE PEOPLE what to do.
As they themselves have told us repeatedly, conservatives are outside the mainstream, no longer the dominant group, and low status and they are aggrieved and want someone who will be their retribution to install them where they believe they should be in the social hierarchy.Report
They don’t want a king. They want someone to say “screw you” to the guys who have been saying “screw you” to them.
Trump does that by walking into the room with that haircut.Report
I would agree that are in favor of leopards eating most other peoples’ faces, but dislike it when the leopard tries to eat their face.
No, I really think that these folks want a king, in practical reality if not necessarily in name. That’s one reason why it’s important to them that the leader think like they do, why the leader like and dislike the same things they do, and less important that the leader take power and govern through legal channels.
Since power is seen in absolute terms (the king can do anything, it’s for the rest of us to obey, and that’s the way it should be) that’s how they can be confident that the leopard won’t eat their faces.Report
I wouldn’t call it “leopards eating faces” as much as “jobs lost to ‘free trade'”.
Everybody likes it when other peoples’ jobs are lost to free trade.
“I never thought free trade would cause me to lose *MY* job”, Free Trade Party Voter sobs.
See also: Refugees coming into town.Report
I was reminded recently of Kevin Williamson’s Big White Ghetto thesis and ended up reading some of the essays he was writing for National Review during the Trump presidency. I know he is semi-canceled now, but it struck me as an interesting counter narrative to the one about the forgotten working class in Appalachia and the rust belt, abandoned to their terrible fate while everyone else got fat on globalization. It made me wonder if the triumph of the latter, and the willingness of Evangelical Christians to make a deal with the devil, hasn’t caused us to overlook a different but nevertheless major chasm in the Republican coalition that Trump could prove to be Trump’s undoing.Report
Nobody ever seems to ask why the political effects of job losses due to globalization only seemed to affect white workers.Report
Because their vote swings.
Why in the world would you talk about people you’ve already got in the bag who lost their jobs due to free trade?
Note: Don’t say “globalization”. That makes it sounds like something Democrats support but Republicans don’t. Call it “free trade”. That makes it sound like something that Republicans support but Democrats don’t.Report
Are you kidding me? People ask those kinds of questions constantly. Just read any major legacy media publication. The problem is that anyone asking it already knows exactly what they think the answer is.Report
In the 1950s, which is when a lot of these movements and our sense of reality for what is “normal” was created, American workers were competing against dead bodies (killed in WW2) and destroyed factories.
Civil Rights didn’t happen for another 20 years so the amazingly well paid American worker was White.
Unwinding that has indeed caused political effects.Report
That’s part of it but it’s also just demographics. The rust belt and parts of the country that ran on mining and related industry are mostly whiter than average and historically at least always have been.Report
Youngstown, Ohio is almost half black.
And black workers were very well represented in the northern factories, so much so that the tide of black people migrating from the agricultural South to industrial North in the first half of the 20th century was called the Great Migration.
They were usually excluded from the higher paying union jobs but they formed a large part of the industrial workforce.
And of course when the factories fled, they were among the hardest hit.
So why haven’t they jumped on the Trump wagon?
And for that matter, Trumps base is mostly white comfortable middle and upper middle income people.
And of course his base doesn’t give two craps about trade policy one way or the other.
Immigration they care about, but not because of jobs.Report
Trumps base is mostly white comfortable middle and upper middle income people.
NPR says Trump’s base is mostly Whites without a College Degree.
I’m not sure “comfortable middle and upper middle income” is how I’d describe that group.Report
I would.
They tend to be white people who make their money in non-college ways like owning a small business.
In 2020 Biden won the vote of those earning less than $100K, while Trump won those earning above.Report
Per a google search Trump was the first Republican to win Youngstown since 1972. Make of it what you will.Report
Without even checking I would bet it was due almost entirely to the white vote because virtually all demographic groups which Trump wins are modified by the adjective “White”.
It isn’t to say he doesn’t have support among the <$100K demographic, but again, it is modified by that word “White”.
Which gets back to my original observation that somehow the "Economic Anxiety", "Precarity" and "Anti-Globalization" phenomenon only seems to afflict white folks or at least, only when someone needs to explain Trump's support.
There is this persistent myth that his base is somehow not supportive of his racism, misogyny and scorn for democracy, but are somehow just voting for him for um, some sort of high minded principled reasons, or dry abstract policy issues.
Bullcrap. They know who he is, and they like it.Report
You can check out the demographics of Youngstown here.
And here is from an article talking about how Youngstown, itself, went for Biden but the county, as a whole, went for Trump:
Report
Yeah that tracks.
White blue collar voters who have the mysterious ailment, while the black guy who worked next to him on the assembly line was miraculously spared.Report
Does it matter that until very recently they (or at least a critical mass of them) voted Democrat? And if they still were we wouldn’t be talking about another close election but about how much Biden was going to run up the score?
It wasn’t the stone age that Ohio was part of Obama’s ‘coalition of the ascendant.’ it was barely over 10 years ago.Report
Just adding it’s ridiculous that a reference to a writer who argues that hardcore Trump country is so full of drug addicted, welfare dependent, morally stunted people that it wouldn’t matter if the jobs came back because they couldn’t do them leads to this conversation. Can’t have someone omitting the same argument we’ve already had a billion times and that is doubtlessly in progress somewhere else on the site, no siree.Report
And international trade policy backed by both parties cost them all their jobs. Democrats wanted to fund job retraining and investment in newer or different jobs. Republicans gave them someone to blame. Someone to blame so they were distracted from how much the GOP is invested in international free trade as policy. They wanted someone to blame more.Report
As I was alluding to above I think both narratives have truth to them. On the one hand it’s hard to debate that globalization has hit certain places harder than others and has become the source of a slow festering political crisis. The US is hardly unique in that and all rich countries are dealing with some version of it.
On the other a lot of these places are a $10 bus ticket away from much greener pastures. It’s a big country that still has a lot of opportunity, yet a culture of grievances, some real, some imagined, fed by cynical conservative media, has convinced them to go all in on charlatans and false promises.Report
It’s more then a $10 bus ticket. Its rent. Its schools (As we have discussed). its healthcare. Its pride. Its family. It’s irrational and strong emotional attachment to places of birth. It continues to be really bad to expect everyone in every place to simply overcome these on their own just because it keeps them trapped in economic distress.Report
Sure, which, like I said, is why I think both perspectives have truth to them. My point is that they aren’t just victims of trade deals and global economic forces but also of themselves, which is why it is such a challenging set of problems.Report
As I see it, they weren’t really victims of themselves until those policies closed their economic apertures; and then they were victims of themselves because cultural, educational and economic forces didn’t help them redirect. Put another way, these situations are massive failures of the Rugged Individual myth.Report
Does it matter that until very recently they (or at least a critical mass of them) voted Democrat?
If you see it as Manichean, it makes more sense.
Bad people can vote for Democrats for years. Biding their time. Waiting for the most important election of our lifetimes and then WHAM. They get rid of Chesa. WHAM. They get rid of people on the school board. WHAM. They close their store.
Having bad people in the community who vote for Democrats isn’t a virtue.Report
The party of unspecified grievance rides again! I’ve never seen the word they used more often than when I see Trump supporters talk about things they don’t like.Report
How have liberals been saying screw you to them?Report
By being liberals.Report
My go-to example back in 2016 was Hillary Clinton bragging about how she was going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.
But this is something we’ve discussed before.Report
Where did the winemom hurt you? Show us on the doll.Report
Saul, you’re not going to get me to vote for Trump.
But I appreciate you trying.Report
How have liberals been saying screw you to them?
I’m reasonably sure the gov has been getting bigger and more intrusive.
More importantly, we’ve found that it’s more effective to charge up our own side and treat the other side as an enemy. BSDI of course.
If the Presidency is super important and it’s absolutely important that our side have it because the other side is evil, then Every Candidate wants to run as the great savior.
The guy who transforms the social/political landscape.
If we’re going to run the Presidential election as tribal politics, then part of that package is a king.Report
Much of that growth is at the state and local level, and there its a more even red-blue split. frankly the biggest intrusive growth seems to be Team Red’s belief that it can and should an will regulate women’s reproductive freedoms.Report
No one ever get’s mad at Samuel’s sons.Report
If anyone ever thought otherwise, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I wanna sell.
That being said, the silver lining is that he did not do as well as expected or the polling indicated. Trump is still very unpopular with most of the country.
I will now be taking bets on how long it will take for Pinky or JB to say something trolly.Report
Which pollsters do you prefer?Report
I prefer looking at the 2022 and 2023 election results.Report
The 2024 Republican primaries are sinecures for political journalists and political operators.Report
There is a fundamental problem in this country that a lot of people do not take politics or policy seriously and treat everything like a combination of Heath Ledger’s Joker and the Silly Party sketch from Monty Python with some middle school class clown thrown in.
People like Vivek Ramsaway, Dean Phillips, and/or Robert F. Kennedy, and others like Marianne Williamson are not serious people. They launch vanity campaigns based on a combination of weird issues, hang ups, and some middle-school miscreant trolling. If they were serious people, they would do the hard work of starting with a lower and often legislative office like city council or state assembly, and work their way up.
Instead they just act outlandish for a few months on their own dime or the dimes of people who like chaos for giggles and then go away.
The media for whatever reason feels the need to cover the clown show. Dean Phillips, a non-entity trying to become the Democratic nominee, just released a statement stating if elected he would consider Elon Musk and Bill Ackman for his cabinet. I learned about this from Bloomberg. I think the media likes reporting on the clowns because they are lazy, policy is hard, and miscreants are more fun. If you suggest that they do not need to report on Dean Phillips or RFK Jr. or Marianne Williamson or Vivek, they get prissy and state you are not the serious person.
And then there are people who just seem to be nihilists and like the chaos and giggles too and go on like a peanut gallery when someone tries to be serious. Or they dislike that teacher Ms. Democratic Party states there is enough money for a school dance but not enough money to get Taylor Swift to perform at said dance. Plus, a gentle reminder to study for the big midterm in two Thursday’s.
Blah.Report
It’s hard to make the case that unserious people shouldn’t run when we’re headed for Trump’s third nomination. The press is definitely a problem, but moreso the voters.Report
Matt Yglesias had a post a week or two ago that in passing compared Trump to Marion Barry which I thought was kind of interesting and isn’t one I necessarily ever would have thought of.Report
It might be more illustrative than people want to think.
Marion Barry has a base of mostly poor, mostly marginalized and outcast black people who saw him as giving a big middle finger to The Establishment.Report
Both have a similar dark bon vivant personality as well.Report
Matt Yglesias does not seem to be the first person to come up with the comparison. While searching for this, I found that Forbes made the same observation in January 2017.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/01/27/trump-is-the-white-marion-barry/?sh=f03bcad4bd24Report
Interesting. Less original than I thought I guess.Report
It still gives me a certain sense of vertigo, the whole Trump thing. I remember in 2016 how incredulous I was that the GOP would nominate Donald fishing Trump. A reject from the left, a nakedly obvious con man, convicted fraudster and vapid TV personality who stood against everything the GOP elite stood for. Surely, they couldn’t embrace… this? It’d mean that all the worst things our own side had said about the GOP for ages would be proven true. How could they?
And then in November ’16 the vertigo got worse. How could our own side lose to this clown? Sure, Comeys’ indefensible intervention shaved some points. Sure, the media’s desperate clownish attempts to balance the unbalanced exaggerated every HRC flaw while papering over Trumps own idiocies. But HRC never should have let it get this close? How could we?
And the incredulity just remains- an odd incomprehension. I mean, nominating Trump a first time when he could at least plausibly be multiple possible outcomes. But the quantum wave function has long since collapsed- we all know what Trump is now and what he’ll do. This is what the party of Reagan has come to? Greens should get a turbine out to Simi Valley in California because surely the Gipper’s corpse is spinning in his grave. I mean, honestly, how could they?
So, then we cycle back around to ourselves. We have an incumbent Democratic President and a pretty good economy by the numbers if not the vibes. What states did Trump lose that we can expect him to win now? Georgia? Arizona? Pennsylvania? Wisconsin? If Trump has dominated his party surely the fragment of never Trumper voters will doom his candidacy? As close as the races have been this millenium only a couple of points should be fatal to the GOP’s cause. But, then I remind myself, one thing you can be assured of is that Trump will cut taxes on the wealthy. Is that really all it’ll take? Really, could we?Report
A lot of Republicans, maybe an overwhelming majority of Republicans, want a fascist-authoritarian government where they don’t have to listen to “uppity” people whether they be women, religious minorities, racial minorities, sexual/gender minorities, or a combination thereof say anything back to them about bigoted and assumptive remarks. People like Mike Johson want a white, heterosexual, Christian nationalist theology. Other people think Democrats just want mandatory genderqueer lessons in middle school and their dreams on what this entails border on the obscene. Nothing can convince them of the truth. Also everyone with a business is going to be forced into a reeducation camp by Joe Biden and subject to Maoist struggle sessions.
Now I don’t think this is the majority of Americans but it is still tens of millions of people and it is futile listening to the soft-peddlers for resentment who think we have to constantly bend of backwards to “understand” the Trump voter. Much of it is done as bad-faith trolling anyway. The same goes for the media.Report
They believe the lies: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/15/poll-majority-iowa-gop-caucus-goers-dont-believe-biden-legitimately-won-2020/Report
Hold on a sec. You guys had already decided that the Republicans would nominate someone as bad as Trump, so on what basis do you get to look disappointed today? From my perspective, we just went to a near 0% chance of a non-moron in early 2025. And this’ll be a twenty-year stretch. By the next election we’ll have people voting who have never seen a competent president. Unless your team has been hiding its doubts, you’re looking at Joe Biden and saying “yay, we could have him as a leader again”. I’d love to have a 50% chance of not feeling embarrassed.Report
Well, full confession, I considered Trump a less bad option in ’16 because I presumed he’d be more likely to lose- joke was on me that it was the reverse.
And for Dems we haven’t really found our own Presidents in the last couple decades particularly bad. Clinton was not exactly a moral paragon but he was a very capable politician and got a lot done. Obama was a pretty luke warm retail and big picture politician but was a very upstanding person- and, again, he got a lot eon. It’s beyond me what any right wingers beef with him is beyond “he isn’t a right winger” or if they buy into the various made up scandals they invented to try and feel less bad about W.Report
Don’t take Pinky as someone to interact with in good faith.Report
Their beef was that he’s an uppity Negro. They just don’t want to say so out loud.Report
I blame the rise of identity politics on Obama. He won the 2008 race on aspirational speeches, but by 2012 he turned resentful. I think he believed what Philip just said, that people didn’t like him because of his race. I guess I shouldn’t say that Obama was incompetent, but he was stupid in that Ivy League way that makes a person incurious. On the other hand, when I say “competent” I’m usually factoring in experience, and he was lacking in that. (I also didn’t vote for Bush in the 2000 primary because he only had 6 years as a governor.) It’s pretty bad that our current standard for competence is the ability to finish a sentence and not fall over, and neither of our likely candidates comfortably clears that standard.Report
You ascribe a lot more power to Obama than I would if you think he created identity politics.Report
Created, no, but he did more than OJ for steering race relations in the US in the wrong direction.Report
Oh? How?Report
You mean other than by being black?Report
My recollection is that if anything Obama triangulated on identity politics.Report
This is not a leading question: what do you mean by triangulation here?Report
That’s right. It’s not a leading question. A leading question is a question that suggests the desired answer. A question beginning with what, who, when, where, why, or how usually isn’t leading.Report
I mean that I never saw him as embracing it to anything close to the level someone who believes in identity politics would find remotely satisfying while also never rejecting it in a way opponents would be remotely happy with.Report
This comports with my own recollections.Report
I’ve heard those criticisms of Obama by conservatives before but have never really gotten it. I’m obviously pretty skeptical of identity politics and recall cringing at comments here and there but always chocked it up to Obama having to keep a really broad coalition together, which of course includes people more supportive of the identity pitch.
Even then his entire political persona always struck me as very deeply steeped in what today’s identitarian activists would deride as ‘respectability politics.’ I’ve heard that there are prominent voices in the civil rights activist space that lament his failure as the first black president to prioritize race and push for expressly race based policymaking.
I am not sure he made anyone happy on this subject which for me is probably about the best that anyone could expect for successful governance.Report
I’ve heard those criticisms of Obama by conservatives before but have never really gotten it.
What’s there to “get”?Report
You’ve never heard an argument that you understood but still disagreed with it?Report
Many. Then there are the arguments I understand and disagree with but the arguers insist I do not understand. One of us, at least, must be wrong, but I see no reason to assume that the arguer understands what he is arguing better than I do.
So what don’t you “get”?Report
I don’t get the basis of the argument. Is this a trick question?Report
You’re assuming there is one. I don’t think there is, or that the people making the claim care.Report
I can remember some of those too. The tan suit nonsense. The Tamir Rice derangement. It’d be considered enormously weak tea now days but back then it was odd.Report
I really think that Obama’s election, and subsequent re-election was a defining moment for white conservatives that drove them mad.
The Onion’s headline- “Shrieking White Hot Ball Of Rage Early 2016 Frontrunner” seems eerily prescient now.
There were all those interviews with Tea Party folk who screamed “I feel like I’m losing my country” which foreshadow the revanchist MAGA slogan.
For the first time, white people could no longer pretend they were the dominant force in American society.Report
white people could no longer pretend they were the dominant force in American society.
We had a “transformational” pro-government guy in the WH who was dismantling how people got their health care and telling business owners that “they didn’t build” their business.
Summing this up to “racism” is a way to avoid dealing with those sorts of issues.Report
Do you really remember “the tan suit nonsense”? I remember maybe two whack-job conservative outlets complaining about it. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert talked about it a lot though.Report
Congressman Peter King was a wack job? I thought so, of course, but I’m gratified to hear you did too.Report
Hi. Pleased to meet you. I’m apparently the first conservative you’ve ever talked to.Report
Hah!Report
Joe Biden is quite competent. 22 straight months of job growth – out of a pandemic that cost 1 million Americans their lives. Wage growth at 4-5% annually (which beats the last two GOP presidents). Corporate profits up; more drilling allowed then in prior GOP administrations while we permit and support offshore wind and a growing solar industry. Apparently wanting more of that is somehow wrong?Report
Why do people even bother? There is no Democratic office holder that would actually be acceptable to PinkyReport
You assume my answer to him was meant only for him.Report
I think you need to expound on what your criteria for competence are.Report
I realize I’m more talking it out than stating it here, but I rambled through most of it in my reply to North.Report
Experience? I’m with you there. Honestly, beyond the money making opportunities after holding the office, the only other reason I can think of for being president is the power. The conundrum the voter has is do we actually want someone in that office who really wants it?Report
The people I’ve known who run for office have generally been people who met office-holders and realized that they could do better. I don’t hold it against someone that they want political office. But I’ve long said that for the presidency, I want eight years of high-level government experience: Cabinet, Governor, Senate, significant role in House, significant rank in military. Maybe 2-4 years of business background or running an Olympics can be substituted in. I’ll admit that last one was a bit ad hoc.Report
Biden was a congressman, senator, and VP. Seems he checks all your boxes here.Report
Biden checks a lot of boxes. Decades of experience in crafting policy and getting things done. I think his legislative and executive experiences are solid pluses. Ditto his law degree and legal experience.
He’s missing military experience and I can’t tell if he has any private business experience.
It’s impossible to find someone who has everything but it’s worthwhile looking at trade offs.
His age is a problem. I don’t think he’s been enabling the loony left (which is why he’s not especially popular with the Left).
Let’s look at him on the issues…
Social issue stances I largely agree.
He’s pro-free trade.
His stances on China are sane.
He’s clueless on Health Care and just supports the current system.
He’s pro-labor… ish.
He opposes means-testing Social Security.
His foreign policy historically has been mixed but I’ll give him a pass since he seems to be getting Ukraine and Israel right.
(This is my first deep dive on his policy stances).Report
To clarify: I’m not saying that a person has to have every one of those offices, only that I expect eight years in any offices of that prominence so that we can tell if he is competent. And I’m definitely not saying that Biden lacks a resume. One could argue that nothing on Biden’s resume shows competence, and/or that he’s displayed behaviour that indicates he’s not functioning near where he should be.
Maybe I should have written an essay about the subject of competence, because I’m not doing a great job painting a full picture with two-paragraph comments.Report
You aren’t getting off that easy for moving goalposts. You said
Joe Biden served in the Senate (I was wrong about the House) from1973 to 2009. Wikipedia tells us he chaired Senate Judiciary from 1987 to 1995 and was a ranking minority member from 1981 to 1987 and again from 1995 to 1997. He was also on Senate Foreign Relations. And he served as VP for 8 years.
He meets your stated criteria for competence through long standing service at senior ranks of government.Report
Biden meets my criteria for experience. Experience permits us to predict competence, assuming the individual isn’t declining.Report
He is no more declining then his likely opponent – who I might remind you can’t read what’s in front of him on a teleprompter.Report
“can’t read what’s in front of him on a teleprompter”
Can’t or Won’t?
Biden not knowing what he’s saying is Declining.
Trump not knowing what he’s saying is Ascending.Report
No one here is disappointed the Trump won Iowa, nor will we be surprised or alarmed or in any way not aware when he wins the nomination. The GOP base will not be embarrassed by that at all.
We remain frustrated that the GOP establishment won’t own the mistake of elevating him initially, nor will they publicly accede to the devastation he will wring out in their name.Report
The “GOP establishment” attempted to prevent his elevation and failed. The rules don’t let them do anything serious.
His big cheerleaders were the media, especially the mainstream media. The Left was more than thrilled to elevate him because he was seen and someone who couldn’t possibly prevent HRC from winning. By focusing on him they gave her a 100% chance of winning according to their “polls”.
After the election someone counted and decided he got an extra $2B in free advertising.Report
The additional problem is that attempts to prevent his elevation add to his populist bona fides.
See? The establishment is against me too!
LOOK, THEY’RE GETTING THE COURTS INVOLVED NOWReport
I’ve gone back and forth on this in my mind for a while. It’s easy to be convinced Trump winning was a watershed, realignment, paradigm shift moment. Maybe it was. However I think it’s also possible that it was a much more of a freak thing that required every break possible going Trump’s way, including running against the incumbent party going for a 3rd term in an austerity environment and an opponent with very unique baggage. Even with all that he still lost the popular vote and barely eked out an electoral college victory. He probably still has to run the table a second time to be re elected, which is of course still very possible and needs to be taken seriously.
Nevertheless it’s hard for me to see how a socially moderate Democratic party that’s willing to be a little economically populist in a strategic way doesn’t win more times than not. It’s all a matter of willingness to commit to going there.Report
Moderate is a word appealing to many but hard to define with specificity. It is more than the middle between whatever Trump says and the Squad says or more likely the fever dream imagination of the squad.
Also the Democratic Party is actually economically populist/left with Biden canceling the student loans he can and actually appointing a pro-worker NLRBReport
Well sure but how immoderate has Biden been? Not very if you ask me. Yet the media, to say nothing of the right wing media, acts like Bernie got into office.Report
This is why I hate words like moderate, center, and populist. They are void for vagueness.
They sound good to a lot of people. Who wouldn’t want to be described as moderate with all its implications of being above the fray, somber, serious, non-partisan, rational, reasonable, etc?
But defining what is and what is not moderation is in the eye of the beholder and there are also lazy people who look at the Republican position, the Democratic position, and imagine something in the center of those positions as being “moderate.” But the Republican position on so many things is so far to the right-wing and reactionary that it can pull positions to the right if you use the rubic I described.
I also have no idea what he means by populist here because the Democratic Party is actually being economically populist under Biden. He is appointing pro-employee/pro-worker people to the NLRB, he is using the powers he can to cancel student debt and make the repayment schedule non-onerous, he is trying to get manufacturing back to the United States more, he went on an actual picket line for an actual union as opposed to Trump speaking to a bunch of coerced workers at a non-union factory under threat of termination.
But there are still a lot of people out there who code everything to white guy. An economically “populist” means it pleases some old-fashioned hard hate white guy like John Goodman’s character during the 1980s run of Roseanne. There is an absolutely stubborn refusal to acknowledge that blue-collar workers now are much more likely to be women and/or other minorities working as things like home health aides or nurses’ assistants or barristas/retail or other service positions. It has to be manly (and presumably but not always white men) doing manly things.
Plus when these guys mean moderate, I think it largely means, “I don’t mind gay people especially if it is too women kissing and doing other things on the internet but the slightest mention of structural racism makes me feel like I am about to be sent it a reeducation camp filled with 10-hour Maoist struggle sessions every other day and AOC is hot but she also makes me feel like my testicles are going to shrivel up like I am a ten-year old boy again. And I bet that person over there with the pink hair wants to introduce mandatory genderqueer sessions during recess at the elementary school my kid attends.”
Biden has done actually economically populist things and people somehow think Trump and the GOP are economically populist even though all they offer is tax cuts for plutocrats and corporations because they see a bunch of boorish white guys with a lack of formal education credentials croon for Trump. It is pathetic and wrong.
FWIW, I think Biden’s superpower has always been figuring out where the exact median Democrat is and sticking his position there. He did that during the Clinton 90s as the Senator for MBNA and he did it during the Obama years with his “slip up” on gay marriage.
The median Democrat is probably somewhere at the intersection of a dreaded “winemom” in her 30s to 50s and an African-American woman involved with her church (this person may or may not be a wine mom). And my interaction over the past few years is that there are a lot of guys who might not be Trumpist, might not be Rufo, but still feel kind of emasculated if associated with the “women’s party” and also, if they have daughters, still have some retrograde views on “Daddy’s little girl” and worry that she is going to find him so uncool when she hits adolescence.Report
Yeesh Saul see my response to North. Everyone is so defensive here lately.
Maybe you should consider why it is some pretty anodyne, mildly pro-Democrat, Trump isnt as strong as he seems, comment causes you to write a long screed insinuating that person is racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise deeply retrograde. And to your larger point it is annoying to have to associate with people knee jerk do exactly what you just did. Luckily it’s policy preferences that keeps me to the left, not these silly cultural things.Report
He’s not allowed to talk like that around his wife anymore, so he does it here.Report
It is not my style but there are certainly plenty of things I could say about aging, childless, urban professionals with no real skin in any game mistaking their arrested development for a form of politics, and who wouldn’t know all the oppressed people they claim to stand up for from a fly in their lattes. Especially when they decide to play commisar and double especially when they have so lately lamented their exclusion from the warped taxonomy of intersectional victim culture.Report
I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it’s that, as a supporter of Israel, he’s, like, the OT Jaybird of his circle. Everybody is waaaaaay to his left and they point out that he’s the reactionary racist who has to walk on eggshells.
So he comes here and he’s *FINALLY* on the left for once.
And he treats us the way his friends treat him. He’s not treating us poorly, by his lights. This is how friends treat each other.Report
Maybe so. Either way I don’t think armchair psychoanalysis or creation of a bunch of people as abstractions to be the subjects of ‘just so’ stories illustrating who they deep down really are is particularly illuminating of anything other than maybe the poster’s own obsessions. Anyway I’ve already said more than I like to on this particular theme and will politely bow out of the thread.Report
Fair enough. I just think that it’s important to come up with “why in the hell would he say something like that? Like, out loud? Where people can hear him?” answers that make sense on a personal level rather than give an answer like “HA! He’s representative of his side! I KNEW IT!”Report
Yeah, but you don’t want to be burying an actual person’s voice under your assumptions about his motivations.Report
HehReport
The take away was supposed to be that I still like our chances (re: POTUS at least).
I do think there are tweaks that could be made in terms of picking house and senate candidates in purple or light red areas but not tweaks that would be understood as reinventing the party.Report
I have happy days when I am where you’re at. The finding that most low info voters literally don’t -believe- that it’s going to be Trump again as the GOP standard bearer bolsters that.
But I also remember how complacent I was in ’16. Trump rejected all the republitarian orthodoxy root and branch- how could they vote for him? I should have asked myself how many actual voters libertarians command.Report
Since 2016 we’ve gone through four election cycles and it should be blindingly obvious that Trump is NOT a freak aberration.
There are virtually no non-Trumpist Republicans left.
DeSantis, Abbot, Youngkin, the Republicans at every level from school board to Senate.
They all have different personalities and styles but every single one fully embraces the Christian Nationalist authoritarian package, even if simply by acquiescence.
There is not a single one who can be counted on to stand up and defend democracy and the rule of law.Report
I agree with you with respect to the Republican party and Republican loyalists but the existence of Obama to Trump voters is pretty well established as is the wishy washiness of cross pressured voters in vitally important states. I don’t think anyone has to love them but as a political party I think it’s really important for the Democrats to win them to prevent Trump’s return to office.Report
You won’t win them. At least if the one I have encountered down here are any indication.Report
The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions:
“White evangelicals,” Guth found, “are invariably the most populist: more likely to favor strong leadership (even when that means breaking the rules), to distrust government, to see the country on the ‘wrong’ track, and to think that the majority should always rule (and minorities adapt).”
Guth also found that
another salient trait of populist politics is the willingness to ignore democratic civility. We constructed a ‘rough politics’ score from three A.N.E.S. items: whether protesters deserve what they get if they are hurt in demonstrating, whether the country would be better off if it got rid of “rotten apples,” and whether people are “too sensitive” about political discourse. Here the usual pattern recurs: Evangelical affiliation, evangelical identity and biblical literalism predicts agreement with those assertions, while religious minorities, secular folks and “progressives” tend to demur.
Guth ranked religious groups on their level of support for conservative populism and found that
Evangelicals end up far above any other religious group, with about two-thirds falling into the populist category. White Catholics, mainline Protestants and Latter-day Saints have significant numbers in that group, but far fewer than evangelicals and nowhere near a majority. The religiously unaffiliated and minority ethnoreligious groups have few populists — often very few — with Jews, agnostics/atheists, Black Protestants and members of world religions the most anti-populist.
Guth wrote that his “findings help us understand what many have struggled to comprehend: how can white evangelical Protestants continue to provide strong support for President Donald Trump, whose personal values and behavior trample on the biblical and ethical standards professed by that community.”
The most common explanation, according to Guth,
is that white evangelicals have a transactional relationship with the president: as long as he nominates conservative jurists and makes appropriate gestures on abortion and sexual politics, they will support him.
“The evidence here,” he wrote, “suggests a more problematic answer”:
White evangelicals share with Trump a multitude of attitudes, including his hostility toward immigrants, his Islamophobia, his racism, and nativism, as well as his “political style,” with its nasty politics and assertion of strong, solitary leadership. Indeed, Trump’s candidacy may have “authorized” for the first time the widespread expression of such attitudes.”Report
Prediction: you will get a lot of responses about how this is not a good or productive way to talk and damn few saying: “This is not so.”Report
It is real easy for me to picture religion as an entry into fascism 101.
All powerful leader who is defined as Good even though he’s doing heinous deeds. Anyone who isn’t a member of our group will be tortured until they join. Magic thinking. Anyone who is on the wrong side of whatever we want to do is Evil and should be killed. Any deed in service to the all powerful leader/group is defined as Good.
Having said that, I’m not sure to what degree this is just part of the human condition.Report
I’ve said elsewhere that many people, maybe most, trace a line around the things they love or hate, then shop for a God who agrees with them.Report
That’s a really deep thought.Report
Occasionally, someone shows up in the threads discussing the whole “Progressives and Israel” thing and they talk about how the Intersectionality Crew treats people of Jewishness.
Like, when it came to BLM, Jews were big on Black Lives Mattering.
When it comes to undocumented wanderers and mendicants, Jews were big on Open Borders.
Now, when Hamas comes in and slaughters a bunch of hippie chicks at a music festival, the Intersectionality Crew does *NOT* come out and say “thanks for supporting us, now it’s our turn to support you”, they, instead, talk about Decolonization and whatnot.
This is what transactional support looks like. Trump delivered to the Evangelicals.
Instead of being principled like the Intersectionality Crew, they said “thanks for supporting us, now it’s our turn to support you”.
The question is: Is it better to support principled people?
Or transactional ones?Report
I’m coming around to the idea that Evangelical support for Trump isn’t transactional at all.Report
Was Roe v. Wade ended? If you want to take the position that it wasn’t a big deal for Roe to be overturned and it didn’t change anything, that’d be a interesting position and I’d see how someone could hold it.
But if you see ending Roe as something that Evangelicals had been going for for decades, I could see how that would be an example of Trump delivering something.Report
The point that Saul is making, and I agree with it, is that Trump wasn’t overturning Roe simply because he had to deliver on a promise.
He would have done it anyway because that’s who he is.
Evangelicals aren’t supporting a racist authoritarian bully because that’s the only way to overturn Roe. They would support one anyway because that’s who they are.
Its not a transaction, its a meeting of minds.Report
So there is this whole “sympatico” thing going on between Trump and the Evangelicals and that’s why Evangelicals support him?
Yeah.
That’s much less principled than you guys supporting Biden.Report
I never said it was unprincipled.
I said they share the same principles.Report
Man, I wish that there were a politician out there who shared my principles.
I’d vote for that guy IN A FREAKING HEARTBEAT.
Or gal.Report
I also think there is still a lot default apology for Evangelicals and a lot of people in the secular media seem to take them way too much at face value when they profess their faith.Report
The sorts of transactional and principled actions don’t play out the way Jay’s post makes it out to be. Generally, people do what they want to do with very little open negotiation or horse trading. When one side is upset at another faction, it is usually because the upset side misunderstood what the other faction was about.
Jews thought that Hamas’ actions during the Simchat Torah massacre were so obviously atrocious that they couldn’t imagine people just immediately making it about Palestine and forgetting what Hamas did. It turns out we Jews were entirely wrong about this, the more innocent of us were at least, and it was very possible for the Pro-Palestinian faction to basically just ignore the Simchat Torah massacre and act like Israel just got up and started fighting in Gaza out of malicious desire. The Intersectional faction doesn’t want or really need Jews, so they can do as they please.Report
At least in my area of the woods, I think the intensity of the current Israel-Hamas War in Oakland is more about local politics than the actual conflict. Oakland local politics is divided between people who want Oakland to remain the minority radical city in the Bay Area and those that see it as a rapidly gentrifying city and want it to be the hipster Brooklyn of the Bay Area.
In other places in the Bay Area, the gentrification debate has been basically settled in favor of gentrification. The Jews and Muslims of Santa Clara County might be at loggerheads in the Israel-Hamas War but there isn’t a faction against gentrification. By taking a very Pro-Palestinian stance, certain Oakland residents are basically trying to save Oakland as the radical city in the Bay.Report
If what we mean by “gentrification” is “people moving into the community”, the country is *FULL* of people opposed to gentrification.
It’s somewhat easy to keep poor people out of your community if there are a lot of people who want to move in: Sell to the highest bidder.
If you want to keep highest bidders out? You only have but so many tools in your toolkit.
“WE SUPPORT PALESTINE!” doesn’t strike me as likely to work well, but… hey. It’s not like they can pass a law or something.Report
The very loud Pro-Palestinian faction wants Oakland to remain the radical city of the Black Panthers not Williamsburg by the Bay.Report
They need to somehow figure out how to make people sell their houses to only the right kind of people but not sell them to the wrong kind of people even if the wrong kind of people have the asking price for the house.Report
“another salient trait of populist politics is the willingness to ignore democratic civility. ”
You mean like when someone says “I don’t CARE that you’re my grandmother, if you refuse to say that what’s happening in Palestine is genocide then you’re a RACIST and a ZIONIST and I’m STAYING IN AUSTIN this Christmas”?
Or like when a mob of protestors hangs around outside a judge’s house, would you call that “populist willingness to ignore democratic civility”?Report
Morgan Stanley CEO Jamie Dimon thinks Democrats should listen to MAGA because it is better than listening to them vote for people who push for more regulations and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations: https://thehill.com/business/4413609-dimon-democrats-should-grow-up-listen-to-trump-supporters/Report
Dimon must be one of those “economically anxious” types we hear so much about.Report
Yeah, he seems the type to close a store if it loses money.Report