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.
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.
Well that is the "woke" business in a nutshell- the established powers embracing this new symbolism without substance and new language signaling because they can easily do so without making any substantial concessions or painful choices. Shouldn't be a surprise that the Dems politicians do it too and, yeah, it's very much a lot of elderly folks in very comfortable prestigious jobs clinging tightly to them because they don't want to let go.
Justin is a dead man walking. He didn't learn ol Johnny Cretchien's lessons and went hog wild. It's gonna be a bitter cold run in the wilderness for the grits.
As an outspoken centrist I'm gonna go on record and say I disagree with Nancy Pelosi on this. AOC has been a trooper and deserved the nod. This is just obviously personal politics in that Pelosi jumped in to help an old friend and that just doesn't help the party in the long run. I think AOC should have gotten the job.
Sure, that is possible but some seriously important and central people in the GOP would have to have their oxen really
(primarily around taxes) significantly gored and considering that Trump seems to be going in the opposite direction with DOGE and Ryanism seeming to be in the offing; and seeing as Trump himself is one of those people who'd have their oxen gored if taxes went up on them I'd not bet for it.
The identarian set is noisy and well connected to the Democratic activist and staffer class but if they're angry the worst they can do is contact staffers or media figures who can contact/get the attention of actual Democratic decision makers and politicians. Whereas if the GOP money men get angry they can have GOP Senators and Congresscritters and Governors on the phone in minutes.
Yeah Harris tried to reach everyone AND alienate no one to her left or in Bidens' administration. I think a pretty good case can be made that:
A) the attempt at appealing to neocons was a perennial failure. Ignore Nikki Haley's protest vote, the Bulwark crowd and their ilk. The neocons don't command an actual constituency of voters that aren't already in the tent. Every second on Cheney was a wasted second.
B) The attempt to keep the Biden crew happy was probably a mistake. She should have thrown the old man under the bus on immigration policy and possibly on the inflation question (though she might have been able to finesse that one if she'd directly faced it without blaming Biden necessarily). She wasn't going to lose voters for hurting Bidens' feelings.
C) She was wildly over considerate of the left wing groups. In hindsight we know she should have probably broke ranks with them on some elements of immigration policy (like dropping back to Obama era stances) and gone even harder on crime questions. Instead she campaigned as a moderate by not saying anything on those issues, which let her get painted by her past 2020 positions. If she hadn't run as she did in 2020 maybe it could have worked but with that record. No, wasn't going to happen.
D) and the final error was getting sucked into Trumps gravitational well. Every minute spent talking about how awful Trump was, was probably wasted. Everyone who knew was already onboard, anyone not on board would consider it irrelevant or funny or just part of the conspiracy against him. This is probably Trumps political super power- tricking his opponents into talking about how he's a pile of excrement in a human-ish shape instead of talking about things the persuadable voters actually care about. Hilldog fell into it, so did the entire GOP lineup in 2015, and so did Harris.
I sit corrected, I saw so many folks inveigling that she lost ground on both sides because of Bidens' actions on Gaza that I assumed without looking that it was true. The point stands, just leave Jewish voters off the list, bless them.
I'd still bet on the Dems over the Republicans on that question because for the Dems to get to that quadrant requires, by and large, simply being unfashionable to a noisy but electorally small set. For the GOP to get requires that they cross an electorally small but very financially powerful (in the GOP) constituency.
Sure, and I agree- and have noted elsewhere, that giving any credence to the neocon/libertarian set is a terrible mistake Harris made and that Dems have made for quite a long time. When I think about all the bandwidth and time Harris wasted, flat out wasted, trying to appeal to Cheney centrists who just don't exist as a voting block, well that is dispiriting.
That's also not, I think, controversial- I don't think it's a mistake Dems are likely to make again if for no other reason than that we're plumb out of neocon figures, thank goodness, but losing ground with Asians, Jews or Historic amounts of lost ground with Hispanics? I don't think that can all be blamed on inflation or asymmetrical hack gappery, especially when it looks like a lot of those losses can be laid at the feet of our own avant garde leftist hacks.
Sure, and kicking poor JB around is a liberal honored tradition here but I think it obscures more than it illuminates. JB isn't a conservative (no matter how much you cast it upon him).
It remains true that inflation is the most likely and central culprit for the Dems loss, but the losses in specific demographics? Hispanics? Other minority communities? That bad? It seems dubious and a lot of info suggests that our least appealing and most screechy left wing groups are not just wrong about the voters/communities they claim to speak for but ludicrously, terribly wrong. And that's a serious problem that needs to be considered no matter whether Jay annoys you or not.
You realize that a double blind trial like what you're talking about would involve exposing unvaccinated (placebo) children to fishin polio? Doing it back when no vaccine existed is one thing but doing that now? You don't see any problems with that?
On “Are Republicans Waking Up?”
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.
On “From Semafor: Kamala Harris’ digital chief on Democrats ‘losing hold of culture’”
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.
On “Are Republicans Waking Up?”
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.
On “From Semafor: Kamala Harris’ digital chief on Democrats ‘losing hold of culture’”
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.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024”
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.
"
It's Mark Penn, he hasn't been anything but harmful for, what, twenty five years? Longer?
"
Well that is the "woke" business in a nutshell- the established powers embracing this new symbolism without substance and new language signaling because they can easily do so without making any substantial concessions or painful choices. Shouldn't be a surprise that the Dems politicians do it too and, yeah, it's very much a lot of elderly folks in very comfortable prestigious jobs clinging tightly to them because they don't want to let go.
"
Justin is a dead man walking. He didn't learn ol Johnny Cretchien's lessons and went hog wild. It's gonna be a bitter cold run in the wilderness for the grits.
"
As an outspoken centrist I'm gonna go on record and say I disagree with Nancy Pelosi on this. AOC has been a trooper and deserved the nod. This is just obviously personal politics in that Pelosi jumped in to help an old friend and that just doesn't help the party in the long run. I think AOC should have gotten the job.
On “From Semafor: Kamala Harris’ digital chief on Democrats ‘losing hold of culture’”
Sure, that is possible but some seriously important and central people in the GOP would have to have their oxen really
(primarily around taxes) significantly gored and considering that Trump seems to be going in the opposite direction with DOGE and Ryanism seeming to be in the offing; and seeing as Trump himself is one of those people who'd have their oxen gored if taxes went up on them I'd not bet for it.
The identarian set is noisy and well connected to the Democratic activist and staffer class but if they're angry the worst they can do is contact staffers or media figures who can contact/get the attention of actual Democratic decision makers and politicians. Whereas if the GOP money men get angry they can have GOP Senators and Congresscritters and Governors on the phone in minutes.
"
Yeah Harris tried to reach everyone AND alienate no one to her left or in Bidens' administration. I think a pretty good case can be made that:
A) the attempt at appealing to neocons was a perennial failure. Ignore Nikki Haley's protest vote, the Bulwark crowd and their ilk. The neocons don't command an actual constituency of voters that aren't already in the tent. Every second on Cheney was a wasted second.
B) The attempt to keep the Biden crew happy was probably a mistake. She should have thrown the old man under the bus on immigration policy and possibly on the inflation question (though she might have been able to finesse that one if she'd directly faced it without blaming Biden necessarily). She wasn't going to lose voters for hurting Bidens' feelings.
C) She was wildly over considerate of the left wing groups. In hindsight we know she should have probably broke ranks with them on some elements of immigration policy (like dropping back to Obama era stances) and gone even harder on crime questions. Instead she campaigned as a moderate by not saying anything on those issues, which let her get painted by her past 2020 positions. If she hadn't run as she did in 2020 maybe it could have worked but with that record. No, wasn't going to happen.
D) and the final error was getting sucked into Trumps gravitational well. Every minute spent talking about how awful Trump was, was probably wasted. Everyone who knew was already onboard, anyone not on board would consider it irrelevant or funny or just part of the conspiracy against him. This is probably Trumps political super power- tricking his opponents into talking about how he's a pile of excrement in a human-ish shape instead of talking about things the persuadable voters actually care about. Hilldog fell into it, so did the entire GOP lineup in 2015, and so did Harris.
"
I sit corrected, I saw so many folks inveigling that she lost ground on both sides because of Bidens' actions on Gaza that I assumed without looking that it was true. The point stands, just leave Jewish voters off the list, bless them.
"
I'd still bet on the Dems over the Republicans on that question because for the Dems to get to that quadrant requires, by and large, simply being unfashionable to a noisy but electorally small set. For the GOP to get requires that they cross an electorally small but very financially powerful (in the GOP) constituency.
"
Sure, and I agree- and have noted elsewhere, that giving any credence to the neocon/libertarian set is a terrible mistake Harris made and that Dems have made for quite a long time. When I think about all the bandwidth and time Harris wasted, flat out wasted, trying to appeal to Cheney centrists who just don't exist as a voting block, well that is dispiriting.
That's also not, I think, controversial- I don't think it's a mistake Dems are likely to make again if for no other reason than that we're plumb out of neocon figures, thank goodness, but losing ground with Asians, Jews or Historic amounts of lost ground with Hispanics? I don't think that can all be blamed on inflation or asymmetrical hack gappery, especially when it looks like a lot of those losses can be laid at the feet of our own avant garde leftist hacks.
"
Sure, and kicking poor JB around is a liberal honored tradition here but I think it obscures more than it illuminates. JB isn't a conservative (no matter how much you cast it upon him).
It remains true that inflation is the most likely and central culprit for the Dems loss, but the losses in specific demographics? Hispanics? Other minority communities? That bad? It seems dubious and a lot of info suggests that our least appealing and most screechy left wing groups are not just wrong about the voters/communities they claim to speak for but ludicrously, terribly wrong. And that's a serious problem that needs to be considered no matter whether Jay annoys you or not.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/9/2024”
You often assume an ironic or enigmatic posture so I am inquiring to be certain.
"
You realize that a double blind trial like what you're talking about would involve exposing unvaccinated (placebo) children to fishin polio? Doing it back when no vaccine existed is one thing but doing that now? You don't see any problems with that?