Agreed. In the clear stark light of hindsight Biden should either have not run at all in 2020 in which case likely one of the other center laners or a centrist who sat out because of Biden would have gotten the nod and thumped Trump or he should have said he wasn't running again after the midterms.

It'd be interesting to see who the GOP tries to scrape up to be Speaker if Johnson gets the boot.

He threw a fit because it was a compromise deal that included Dem priorities and because it didn't include a debt limit increase. The nerve of Dems, not giving him everything he'd want and thanking him for the chance to do so. Heheh

On the part of Republican political actors? Probably. But on the part of our resident writers? No I think it's just wishful thinking.

If it's any consolation you can be sure they say the same thing about you.

My point is simpler than that my friend: it's that in these modern times even the liberal (not the left wing identarian but actual honest to god(ess?) liberal) stance on Israel involves a lot of nose holding and genuine moral struggle with regards to Israel. And that's because of the Israeli right. That's not something you can blame on the professors or the Arabs or the luntatic lefties- that's on the Israeli right.
You're angry because you remember a time, only a decade and change ago, when every thoughtful person was pro-Israeli and it wasn't even very close- well those times are past and I don't see many signs of them returning. That's something you're going to have to make peace with and hope that those cracks and chips in the surface vibes you feel aren't precursor tremors of a deeper, and much warned about, shift.

10/7 clouds the matter because Jews =/= Likud/the Israeli right and Likud/the Israeli right is bound up deeply in the 10/7 question and all matters Israeli. Moreover you, not to be too harsh, keep measuring this indicator by the discourse you read online rather than what is actually done by the lefts political actors in the real world.

Uh yeah, I meet that pre-req obviously.

I'm not profoundly concerned about the self-flagellation. The Democratic Party narrowly lost after running an orderly billion dollar campaign against a shambolic Republican operation headed by a carnival barker.

Introspection is a useful thing to do at this point in time for the party. When one factors in the remarkable demographic swings that made up this narrow loss introspection is even more merited. Some very comfortable, loud, strenuous Democratic consultant and advocacy groups have some serious explaining to do.

I wouldn't suggest that a stem to stern ideological revamping is needed but a lot of specific individual stuff needs to be really carefully questioned. Also a lot of old deadwood probably needs to be trimmed- thankfully this loss represents a pretty clean break. There's probably not going to be some blast from the past figure stepping forward to try and lead for '26 or '28.

Yes which is why their ideology is going to peel back like burnt wrapping paper and is already doing so. Sinecured academics and excessively compensated DEI department employees and consultants are neither numerous nor sympathetic enough of a constituency to have much clout long term in an electorate this big.

There are many many more Democrats than the ones that run California and New York. Also you left out insurance from your analysis of Florida which is akin to saying Hiroshima was a lovely place in '45 if you don't pay attention to radioactive fallout.

That is the defense sure. It doesn't work of course. Not with the narrow win Trump turned in.

Well, it being stipulated that as a yellow dog Democrat I'd happily pick a dog turd for the office over a Republican, I'd consider Nikki Haley to be a more conventional and, thus, a more conventionally "tolerable" Republican than either Trump or DeSantis. Likewise Larry Hogan.

I could be cute and say Liz Cheney but that'd be disingenuous since I don't believe any neocon should ever be allowed near the executive office again on overwhelming foreign policy grounds. Haley is, of course, neocon-ish herself but it's not like I have a wealth of Republican options to choose from and I'm trying to take the question seriously.

And, heck, to give Romneybot his due: if I could press a button and swap Trump out with Mitt Romney I'd do so in a flat second with nary a second thought.

And, just to reiterate, if there was a button to swap out Trump for an inert satchel of dog excrement I'd hit it far more readily than I would one for Romney.

Really? DeSantis? Well it's an amusing posture I'll grant but considering how DeSantis ran his campaign I am puzzled how you could make the case that he'd be a half-decent leader of the executive branch. I mean "I'll do every awful thing Trump says he wants to do but I will actually do it instead of flailing around in my own excrement" is a form of competence, I grant, but I don't see it as being closer to being a human being. Trump after all, can point at being Trump as an excuse. DeSantis doesn't have that.

It was a tie right down to election day. Obviously it was, in theory, winnable for Harris. I also didn't see anyone anywhere being silly enough to say Trump was impossible, it's not like it was 2016.

I am glad it's not DeSantis, now, though it's possible DeSantis would have viscously lost to Harris. But it's also utterly irrelevant. DeSantis never came close and that fault for that lies entirely, totally, and completely with the right and right wing voters.

This reminds me a lot of your "Don't you wish Romney had won?" lines. No. I don't wish Romney had won. I'm not moved by the "Vote for this plutocratic vulture capitalist robot or else the GOP will go nuts" line of reasoning.

It's just wishful thinking, alas.

I'm there with you in laying much of this at the feet of Joe Biden and I'm there with being mournful about it because I really did like him and loved his administrations performance in many policy areas.

As for Harris? I have no resentment. She did a remarkable job considering the hand she was dealt. She spun up an impressive campaign in very little time. As for her ideological baggage? That falls back to Joe who put her in the veep spot to begin with. I feel none of the aggrieved, sorrowful "damnit lady" energy I feel for, say HRC. Harris is done and she lost but I think the party and the ideology got a pretty good performance from her and she doesn't owe us much in the way of apologies.

Now you're just changing the subject and projecting. We'll have to wait for the tell all books but probably even those won't be saying "oh we knew we were going to lose so spent a month partying on the donors dime for luls".

Sure, the internicide fight is happening now. GOOD. That's what is supposed to happen after a party loses an election. It didn't happen before the election when it could have caused a landslide defeat. The bad thing was avoided. You're just wrong about that bud.

As for the difference between losing every tossup state and a Landslide? In a Landslide Trump would have 60 senate votes and a huge house margin, not the tiny edge he currently barely eked out.

You and I don’t actually disagree about the voters getting what they vote for and getting it good and hard. I’m all for the Dems using the filibuster in the modern mode that the GOP invented and requiring that everything that they don’t enthusiastically support gets 60 votes but otherwise, yeah, they shouldn’t be trying to soften the blows the GOP looks set to be raining down on their own constituencies.

I agree that the party did a remarkable job all things considered. Getting Biden to drop out once it was absolutely clear that he had to drop out, selecting a successor and uniting behind that successor without wild internicide fights was a remarkable achievement. In any standard story or script that achievement would have been rewarded with victory but in our bleak real work it was rewarded, instead, with a narrow loss.

I disagree that Harris broke from Biden as much as she could have. She could have had coherent answers to the questions about what she would have done differently. She could have taken a more hawkish posture on immigration. She could have had a better answer on the inflation question. Let us note, however, that a LOT of this is Captain Hindsight thinking and I do -NOT- think that Harris stumbled or fumbled into this approach through some kind of incompetence of foolishness. It seems pretty clear to me that Harris and her campaign chose this strategy purposefully and executed it pretty well. To be clear the strategy was this:
-Try to offend no one to the left of the current GOP and also go after centrist GOP voters by making appeals to how awful Trump is and trying to use the neocons support to poach some number of persuadable voters that were represented in the protest vote Nikki Haley got.

This strategy manifested in a couple of ways. To appeal to centrists and the theoretical Haley voters all the identarian stuff was de-emphasized. Pro-Americanism was put front and center. All the 2020 nonsense was memory holed. To appeal to the leftists, however, silence regarding the 2020 policies was the order of the day. Not renunciations. Not reversals. Just saying nothing on the subject.

With hindsight we know this strategy was probably the wrong choice. Brief reasons why:
>The persuadable neocon voters are a fiction- like principles libertarian voters. There just aren’t very many of them on the ground. The time spent feting the neocons was, at best, wasted and, at worst, counterproductive because it activated people, left and right, who justifiably HATE neocons.
>The border stuff was a mistake. The left-wing border groups are full of it and flat out wrong. Latino voters hate open borders or anything close to it. The only masses who appear to appreciate that posture are people who can’t vote.
>the 2020 policies couldn’t just be walked past with silence. Not with Trump and his propaganda networks blasting them repeatedly. There’s not really much evidence that the identarians command masses of voters support- just masses of noisy people on the internet and masses of staffers in the political apparatus, the academy and NGO’s.
I do not think Harris’ strategy was crazy or insane, nor do I think Harris was stupid or inept. You don’t spin up a campaign in as short a time as she did and get as close as she did if you’re demented or inept. She just chose wrong and possibly was stuck because of her own past. Frankly if blame has to be laid anywhere it should be laid at Bidens’ feet.

To address your very fine numbered points:
1. I think that’s plausible but it just gets us a cup of coffee if you add on a couple bucks. I don’t subscribe to the “Harris was inept” crew, the only difference is I also don’t subscribe to the “this couldn’t have been done less perfectly, failure was baked in from jump” crew either.

2. Let’s not pussy foot around it. In addition to the fine points you’re bringing up Asians, much like Jews, are getting the wrong end of this identarian bullsh*t stick and they justifiably don’t like it. Coddling drug addled homeless people enrages poor people who have to put up with them and drug addled homeless people don’t vote but poor people who have to put up with them do. Eliminating academic excellence tracks lets local officials preen for their bubble on social media but it looks awful for the left as a whole. Jewish people and Asian people treasure achievement (as do most other people) and the number of people who vote in favor of it outside the internet fever swamps is a rounding error.

2c. We can’t scream about the electorate we have and expect something different. The actual voters hate the lefts chosen “if you’re not for open borders you’re racist” posture and not even enough relatives of actual undocumented immigrants seem to agree with us. Shrieking at them about it has failed failed failed. Absolutely they’re going to get their faces eaten and thermostatic opinion will swing back again but Biden let the groups dictate his immigration policy and it was disastrously wrong. We do NOT have to go to some kind of Trumpian “build the wall” or “immigrants are criminals poisoning our demographics” racist madness but something closer to Obama’s immigration policy or the deal that Trump sank just this year is NOT unconscionable racist or electoral poison and the leftists claiming that have now horrifically discredited themselves and have royally fished over the very people they claim to be looking out for.

As for your closing thoughts? I agree pretty much in total.

Of course she did- that was the strategy they chose- to embrace Cheney and try and make a play for what proved to be a fictional contingent of principled neocon persuadable rightist voters. Not reveling in getting Cheney's endorsement would have been bad execution of the chosen strategy.

"The stuff you didn’t want to happen if you dumped Biden? Happened.
The stuff you didn’t want to happen if you dumped Harris and had an open convention? Happened."

Flat out wrong Jay. What Dems feared happening if we dumped Biden was a wild internal fight, disunity and a landslide defeat. That didn't happen.

What the Dems got was a very narrow defeat caused both by inflation and by the legacy of 2020 which Harris wasn't able to overcome. How much of that failure was "she didn't try to overcome it" and how much of it was "she tried to overcome it but chose the wrong strategy/couldn't do it" is open to debate.

The article is paywalled but if the survey tracks all the others of its type both the GOP and the Dems opinions of the economy rises and falls depending on who is in the White House but the GOP's swing is twice as strong as the Dems is.

Eh, hard to say. Canada isn't a two party state like the US but the left and right tend to rise and fall in turn. I would expect the conservatives will get a majority since there really is only the Tories on the right whereas the Greens and NDP will cannibalize the Grits from the left. If you're talking historic landslide? I don't think so, I'd doubt it- especially not with the stuff the Tories are babbling which seems like standard issue right wing fare rather than anything new. Long term the Canadian pattern would be that the Liberals lose to a healthy Tory majority. If the Tories rein cut taxes and spending too sharply then they'll get bounced after a cycle and if the Liberals that come back, chastened, don't go crazy on the spending/taxing again then they'll be back in power for a good long run again. Whereas if the Tories are more circumspect with their spending cuts then they could get a longer stint but also won't get the right wing red meat they want done.