Second Trump Administration = America's FAFO years. We got to coast from 2017-2021 because our institutions were strong, at least to start with. Here's hoping they haven't been eroded too much since then.
I live about one mile from the border of what was Lori Chavez-DeRemer's congressional district. No one here thought she was a "liberal." I made myself unpopular with a group of friends when, back during the very nasty campaign, I described her as "a pretty generic Republican." If you want to see a "liberal" in Congress, look to her successor.
When I was there last winter, I could see the red glow from that direction and there was a bored-looking police person in a yellow vest leaning against a car blocking the road in that direction from the main highway between the city where the airport is (Keflavik) and the big city (Reykjavik). Here's a recent video from an American geologist providing a good summary of the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2wZ4GPA6lM.
If you were a completely amoral, unprincipled, and cynical leader of the Democratic party, someone who cared about winning elections but had no concern whatsoever about policy of any kind, what lesson would you take from this election?
1) OP links to a piece by Eugene Volokh (no radical socialist he!) pointing out at a 1% shift in voting would have shifted both the White House and the House of Representatives to Democratic control.
2) Trump got only a few more votes than he did in 2020 but Harris got a lot fewer than did Biden last time around, so it was Democrats (or at least previous Democratic voters) not turning out that cost them the election, not Republican enthusiasm for Trump.
When I put those things together, I conclude that to get back over the top, Democrats probably don't need to shift policy positions all that much, but to the extent they do, they need to shift right, not left. Why? That's where the people who actually vote are.
Democrats cancel, in furtherance of their crazed woke agenda. Republicans, on the other hand, know right from wrong, and act accordingly, the way all good honest Americans do.
Sure, we can admit we have a problem. If "we" are American Democrats, we probably have a lot of problems. But what you see as the Democrats' problem is almost certainly not what I see as the Democrats' problem and Chris and Saul and everyone else here will see other problems.
The Democrats were not progressive enough.
No, the Democrats were too progressive.
The Democrats didn't bring enough to the table to relieve middle-class economic anxiety in an age of inflation.
No, the Democrats brought all kinds of things to the table to relieve middle-class economic anxiety in an age of inflation, but did a bad job explaining why those things would help. The problem is Democrats just aren't good explainers, see.
Democrats thought that Americans would be able to rise above sexism, and their problem is they just haven't taken the measure of the American people.
No, the problem is that Democrats didn't have the kind of ground game they needed. Sure there were lots of volunteers but knocking on doors and leaving pamphlets doesn't convince anyone.
No, the problem is that Democrats couldn't penetrate to the small number of undecided voters who the election turned on. You can't give a wonky argument to someone who goes through life on vibes!
No, the problem is those voters were hungry for policy solutions to their problems, and all they ever got from the Democrats was vibes!
And on and on it goes.
Admitting there is a problem is not the issue. Choosing the correct problem to admit is. And that's compounded when everyone is diagnosing problems based on their own unexamined priors. I'm probably guilty of that myself, and so are you, good reader.
The Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that President Trump has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the old system of government have been swept away.
My first reaction: Is he even a lawyer? Turns out yes, he is.
So my second reaction: Has he ever run anything more complex than his own Congressional office? No, he has not.
My third reaction: What's his experience with the criminal justice system? Well, he was "a person of interest" in several interstate sex crime allegations. Never amounted to a prosecution, though.
The best baseball I can remember was still the 2018 post-season. Every series was good, exciting, well-played. And the pitch clock and everyone adapting to it has made the game so much more watchable on TV. Best rule change ever.
I had a LOT of fun with the World Series this year. If you'd rather be lucky than good, you'd even more than that like to be both, and that was Games 1 and 5 for Los Angeles. Freddie Freeman earned his MVP and if there's a heaven for baseball players, Fernando Valenzuela was smiling all over this one.
I don't recall a lot of discussion about Franken's likely successor or the safety of his seat, but it's true that was a safe Democratic seat then and that's a fair critique.
I was a Californian then and didn't fully appreciate how large some of the names in Our Tod's polemic against Democrats running cover for Men Behaving Awfully loom in politics here. Neal Goldschmidt is still talked about as if the White House had been in his future (n.b., I do not think the White House was in his future, but maybe the Senate). The events Tod rightly complained of and the "Hey, think of the big picture, not your silly principles," kind of thinking party loyalists urged upon people to urge lining up behind David Wu, happened about ten years after Clinton and seven years before Franken and it feels a lot like what was used for Clinton.
But I'll stand pat on "Franken found himself with zero friends."
The Rise and Return of Trump is a tragedy born of many parents. Andrew is right that this is one of them.
Bill Clinton was Monica Lewinsky's boss. The power imbalance between them was huge. It's not a black-and-white issue; Lewinsky admits that at the time she had a "crush" on the President. But I hope that we've matured enough in the intervening (checks notes) nearly 27 years since the scandal broke to put the power imbalance in that picture.
Andrew is right, however, that Democrats who closed ranks around Clinton dirtied their hands, and did so for strictly partisan motives. This taught Republicans a lesson that they've taken very much to heart since, and it wasn't a good one.
Meanwhile, Democrats learned the right lesson. When Al Franken's scandal broke in 2017, he found himself quickly with zero friends anywhere -- no Republican friends because he was a Democrat, and no Democratic friends because Democrats had learned a lesson by then too. I'd venture to say that Franken's conduct was, while very far from admirable, not nearly as severe as Clinton's.
Philip I have written the darkest essay I've ever written in my life and I'm not going to post it here because it's just too goddamn dark. I'll let Mike's OP essay here stand for a fraction of what I think about Trump, and what his re-election says about America as a culture and Americans as a people, and why it makes me hold my hard-earned license to practice law cheaply.
I think you're thinking of Pauline Kael, a film critic on staff at the New Yorker in 1971. Her actual quote about the 1968 election was:
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.
This is often paraphrased as:
I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.
She did not actually say the paraphrase, and whether the paraphrase or the actual quote is more palatable, I think you have to decide for yourself. But the actual quote demonstrates she was aware she was in a bubble.
Do you think so? I don't. The 13-state West consists of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming -- the Rocky Mountains and points west.
As I look about the west, I see only Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah as solidly red such that Democrats are not even competitive. But I see four coastal states where Republicans are in the same boat, and Colorado and New Mexico look pretty solid for the Dems too. That's six sapphires to three rubies -- and the sapphires are bigger.
The other four -- Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, Montana -- are moving in different directions, but three of these have been electing Democrats at least as much as Republicans lately (in the past decade or so). We'll see what data points get added to those curves today. I'm not optimistic about Tester's chances but it's not for nothing that AZ and NV considered swing states at the Presidential level.
I say the western states are, in aggregate, much more Democratic than Republican.
I'm old enough to remember when nationally-televised advertisements, especially for big sporting events like NFL games, were far too expensive for political campaigns to consider. It might have been Ross Perot or Bill Clinton, I think, who first got enough money to afford a single ad in an NFL game and it was sort of a watershed moment like, "Are we seeing too much money go into these campaigns?"
Re: the Selzer Poll. Poll geeks consider Ann Selzer's Iowa Poll to be the gold standard of state-level polls and admire her for refusing to "herd" her reports. Meanwhile, Nate Cohn wrote in the NYT over the weekend that he is seeing a lot of herding by most of the pollsters, which is to say, they manipulate their report numbers to line up with the consensus so that they don't look like outliers. For her part, Selzer DNGAF if people think she is an outlier, and so she is an outlier here: but maybe she's an outlier because she's the one reporting what she found in her polling results and everyone else is putting a thumb on the scale.
We think Selzer may be on to something because she has a track record of stepping out of the conventional wisdom and being vindicated by actual election results (her poll showed Iowa was swinging towards Trump at the last minute in 2016 when nearly everyone else, myself included, was refusing to take Trump seriously). But of course past performance is no guarantee of future results and Selzer herself would surely acknowledge that. All she'd say is "That's what the poll's results were. Draw your own conclusions."
I think our own Andrew Donaldson drew the right conclusion when he said on his podcast, "Nothing is happening. Nobody knows anything." That's not literally true, but for our purposes it might as well be. There's nothing any of us can do to change or control things; there's probably not a lot the candidates can do to change or control things anymore. Alea iacta est.
Intellectually, I know that's the truth. Now, if only I could lay down my anxiety about it all in alignment with what my rational brain knows to be the case.
David, I've enjoyed reading along with your frequent and sober thoughts about the election as we've moved through the season. Your perspective isn't always exactly the same as mine, although we usually arrive at the same destination. That's fine. That's what it is to be neighbors and people of good faith living together in the same nation.
I too fear that this will not be the case and we're in for another three months of courtroom shenanigans (and hopefully ONLY courtroom shenanigans) and uncertainty. But we can hope that no, we'll get something closer to the Trump folks simply being bad losers and not trying anything subversive. Trump himself? There's no bottom with him. But the people around him maybe have learned their lesson that the wheels of justice may grind slowly but they are inexorable and it doesn't pay to bet against America's institutions.
At least, that's what I hope. I think everyone here, even the folks that I usually disagree with on political matters, hope for something that's at least in the same ballpark.
We'll have dodged a bullet this time. But the problem won't go away.
Ten people go out to eat. Six of them vote "Pizza" and four of them vote "We kill and eat Bob." It's good that pizza won. (Especially for Bob!) But there's still a problem there.
I'm not saying Democrats will have the stones to do this. I don't think they will. But assume for a moment that they find those stones and get enough of a majority in both houses to actually do something like this:
A state which has a law that has the purpose of effect of obstructing access to abortion services within the first trimester, and/or has the purpose or effect of imposing an "undue burden" (as defined by Planned Parenthood v. Casey regardless of the current validity of that legal opinion) to access to abortion services in the second trimester, shall receive no (or perhaps reduced) Medicare funding.
We know that the Federal government can condition receipt of other Federal funding for other purposes based on the state's adoption or rejection of standards the Federal government prefers. Highway funding based on adoption of a minimum legal drinking age, for instance. South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987).
Again, I don't think Democrats have the stones to do this. And what this current SCOTUS would do with it is also another question. But I think it's at least a plausibly Constitutional way to try, under existing valid Constitutional jurisprudence.
On “I Told You So”
Second Trump Administration = America's FAFO years. We got to coast from 2017-2021 because our institutions were strong, at least to start with. Here's hoping they haven't been eroded too much since then.
"
I dunno; Republicans seem to have no trouble with cognitive dissonance.
No, strike that.
VOTERS seem to have no trouble with cognitive dissonance. The issue is Republicans are able to capitalize on that fact while Democrats aren't.
"
I live about one mile from the border of what was Lori Chavez-DeRemer's congressional district. No one here thought she was a "liberal." I made myself unpopular with a group of friends when, back during the very nasty campaign, I described her as "a pretty generic Republican." If you want to see a "liberal" in Congress, look to her successor.
On “Weekend Plans Post: On a Plane to Iceland”
When I was there last winter, I could see the red glow from that direction and there was a bored-looking police person in a yellow vest leaning against a car blocking the road in that direction from the main highway between the city where the airport is (Keflavik) and the big city (Reykjavik). Here's a recent video from an American geologist providing a good summary of the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2wZ4GPA6lM.
On “The Mandate That Wasn’t”
Money is a social construct. Is it unimportant?
"
If you were a completely amoral, unprincipled, and cynical leader of the Democratic party, someone who cared about winning elections but had no concern whatsoever about policy of any kind, what lesson would you take from this election?
1) OP links to a piece by Eugene Volokh (no radical socialist he!) pointing out at a 1% shift in voting would have shifted both the White House and the House of Representatives to Democratic control.
2) Trump got only a few more votes than he did in 2020 but Harris got a lot fewer than did Biden last time around, so it was Democrats (or at least previous Democratic voters) not turning out that cost them the election, not Republican enthusiasm for Trump.
When I put those things together, I conclude that to get back over the top, Democrats probably don't need to shift policy positions all that much, but to the extent they do, they need to shift right, not left. Why? That's where the people who actually vote are.
On “The Four Stages of Post-election Cruelty”
Democrats cancel, in furtherance of their crazed woke agenda. Republicans, on the other hand, know right from wrong, and act accordingly, the way all good honest Americans do.
"
Sure, we can admit we have a problem. If "we" are American Democrats, we probably have a lot of problems. But what you see as the Democrats' problem is almost certainly not what I see as the Democrats' problem and Chris and Saul and everyone else here will see other problems.
The Democrats were not progressive enough.
No, the Democrats were too progressive.
The Democrats didn't bring enough to the table to relieve middle-class economic anxiety in an age of inflation.
No, the Democrats brought all kinds of things to the table to relieve middle-class economic anxiety in an age of inflation, but did a bad job explaining why those things would help. The problem is Democrats just aren't good explainers, see.
Democrats thought that Americans would be able to rise above sexism, and their problem is they just haven't taken the measure of the American people.
No, the problem is that Democrats didn't have the kind of ground game they needed. Sure there were lots of volunteers but knocking on doors and leaving pamphlets doesn't convince anyone.
No, the problem is that Democrats couldn't penetrate to the small number of undecided voters who the election turned on. You can't give a wonky argument to someone who goes through life on vibes!
No, the problem is those voters were hungry for policy solutions to their problems, and all they ever got from the Democrats was vibes!
And on and on it goes.
Admitting there is a problem is not the issue. Choosing the correct problem to admit is. And that's compounded when everyone is diagnosing problems based on their own unexamined priors. I'm probably guilty of that myself, and so are you, good reader.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/11/2024”
The Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that President Trump has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the old system of government have been swept away.
"
My first reaction: Is he even a lawyer? Turns out yes, he is.
So my second reaction: Has he ever run anything more complex than his own Congressional office? No, he has not.
My third reaction: What's his experience with the criminal justice system? Well, he was "a person of interest" in several interstate sex crime allegations. Never amounted to a prosecution, though.
On “Series! Recap of World Series of the 2020s”
The best baseball I can remember was still the 2018 post-season. Every series was good, exciting, well-played. And the pitch clock and everyone adapting to it has made the game so much more watchable on TV. Best rule change ever.
I had a LOT of fun with the World Series this year. If you'd rather be lucky than good, you'd even more than that like to be both, and that was Games 1 and 5 for Los Angeles. Freddie Freeman earned his MVP and if there's a heaven for baseball players, Fernando Valenzuela was smiling all over this one.
On “He Got Away With It”
I don't recall a lot of discussion about Franken's likely successor or the safety of his seat, but it's true that was a safe Democratic seat then and that's a fair critique.
I was a Californian then and didn't fully appreciate how large some of the names in Our Tod's polemic against Democrats running cover for Men Behaving Awfully loom in politics here. Neal Goldschmidt is still talked about as if the White House had been in his future (n.b., I do not think the White House was in his future, but maybe the Senate). The events Tod rightly complained of and the "Hey, think of the big picture, not your silly principles," kind of thinking party loyalists urged upon people to urge lining up behind David Wu, happened about ten years after Clinton and seven years before Franken and it feels a lot like what was used for Clinton.
But I'll stand pat on "Franken found himself with zero friends."
"
The Rise and Return of Trump is a tragedy born of many parents. Andrew is right that this is one of them.
Bill Clinton was Monica Lewinsky's boss. The power imbalance between them was huge. It's not a black-and-white issue; Lewinsky admits that at the time she had a "crush" on the President. But I hope that we've matured enough in the intervening (checks notes) nearly 27 years since the scandal broke to put the power imbalance in that picture.
Andrew is right, however, that Democrats who closed ranks around Clinton dirtied their hands, and did so for strictly partisan motives. This taught Republicans a lesson that they've taken very much to heart since, and it wasn't a good one.
Meanwhile, Democrats learned the right lesson. When Al Franken's scandal broke in 2017, he found himself quickly with zero friends anywhere -- no Republican friends because he was a Democrat, and no Democratic friends because Democrats had learned a lesson by then too. I'd venture to say that Franken's conduct was, while very far from admirable, not nearly as severe as Clinton's.
Or Trump's.
On “Trump’s Ace in the Hole”
Oh gods that mawkish, saccharine Lee Greenwood song.
On “He Got Away With It”
Philip I have written the darkest essay I've ever written in my life and I'm not going to post it here because it's just too goddamn dark. I'll let Mike's OP essay here stand for a fraction of what I think about Trump, and what his re-election says about America as a culture and Americans as a people, and why it makes me hold my hard-earned license to practice law cheaply.
On “The Shepherds have a Credibility Problem”
I think you're thinking of Pauline Kael, a film critic on staff at the New Yorker in 1971. Her actual quote about the 1968 election was:
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.
This is often paraphrased as:
I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.
She did not actually say the paraphrase, and whether the paraphrase or the actual quote is more palatable, I think you have to decide for yourself. But the actual quote demonstrates she was aware she was in a bubble.
On “The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules: The Night Before the 2024 Presidential Election”
Oh, wait, turns out I did know that. I already follow you there, and you follow me back.
I just recycled one of Our Tod's jokes about a certain Twitter personality, because I know Tod won't mind.
"
Do you think so? I don't. The 13-state West consists of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming -- the Rocky Mountains and points west.
As I look about the west, I see only Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah as solidly red such that Democrats are not even competitive. But I see four coastal states where Republicans are in the same boat, and Colorado and New Mexico look pretty solid for the Dems too. That's six sapphires to three rubies -- and the sapphires are bigger.
The other four -- Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, Montana -- are moving in different directions, but three of these have been electing Democrats at least as much as Republicans lately (in the past decade or so). We'll see what data points get added to those curves today. I'm not optimistic about Tester's chances but it's not for nothing that AZ and NV considered swing states at the Presidential level.
I say the western states are, in aggregate, much more Democratic than Republican.
"
Didn't know you were on Bluesky.
On “Final Thoughts Before November Fifth”
I'm old enough to remember when nationally-televised advertisements, especially for big sporting events like NFL games, were far too expensive for political campaigns to consider. It might have been Ross Perot or Bill Clinton, I think, who first got enough money to afford a single ad in an NFL game and it was sort of a watershed moment like, "Are we seeing too much money go into these campaigns?"
LOL those were quaint days indeed.
"
Re: the Selzer Poll. Poll geeks consider Ann Selzer's Iowa Poll to be the gold standard of state-level polls and admire her for refusing to "herd" her reports. Meanwhile, Nate Cohn wrote in the NYT over the weekend that he is seeing a lot of herding by most of the pollsters, which is to say, they manipulate their report numbers to line up with the consensus so that they don't look like outliers. For her part, Selzer DNGAF if people think she is an outlier, and so she is an outlier here: but maybe she's an outlier because she's the one reporting what she found in her polling results and everyone else is putting a thumb on the scale.
We think Selzer may be on to something because she has a track record of stepping out of the conventional wisdom and being vindicated by actual election results (her poll showed Iowa was swinging towards Trump at the last minute in 2016 when nearly everyone else, myself included, was refusing to take Trump seriously). But of course past performance is no guarantee of future results and Selzer herself would surely acknowledge that. All she'd say is "That's what the poll's results were. Draw your own conclusions."
I think our own Andrew Donaldson drew the right conclusion when he said on his podcast, "Nothing is happening. Nobody knows anything." That's not literally true, but for our purposes it might as well be. There's nothing any of us can do to change or control things; there's probably not a lot the candidates can do to change or control things anymore. Alea iacta est.
Intellectually, I know that's the truth. Now, if only I could lay down my anxiety about it all in alignment with what my rational brain knows to be the case.
"
David, I've enjoyed reading along with your frequent and sober thoughts about the election as we've moved through the season. Your perspective isn't always exactly the same as mine, although we usually arrive at the same destination. That's fine. That's what it is to be neighbors and people of good faith living together in the same nation.
I too fear that this will not be the case and we're in for another three months of courtroom shenanigans (and hopefully ONLY courtroom shenanigans) and uncertainty. But we can hope that no, we'll get something closer to the Trump folks simply being bad losers and not trying anything subversive. Trump himself? There's no bottom with him. But the people around him maybe have learned their lesson that the wheels of justice may grind slowly but they are inexorable and it doesn't pay to bet against America's institutions.
At least, that's what I hope. I think everyone here, even the folks that I usually disagree with on political matters, hope for something that's at least in the same ballpark.
On “What If Kamala Wins?”
What if Kamala wins?
We'll have dodged a bullet this time. But the problem won't go away.
Ten people go out to eat. Six of them vote "Pizza" and four of them vote "We kill and eat Bob." It's good that pizza won. (Especially for Bob!) But there's still a problem there.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024”
This. He didn't like being booed by Washington Nationals fans when he was in office, he won't like being booed by college football fans now.
On “What If Kamala Wins?”
I'm not saying Democrats will have the stones to do this. I don't think they will. But assume for a moment that they find those stones and get enough of a majority in both houses to actually do something like this:
A state which has a law that has the purpose of effect of obstructing access to abortion services within the first trimester, and/or has the purpose or effect of imposing an "undue burden" (as defined by Planned Parenthood v. Casey regardless of the current validity of that legal opinion) to access to abortion services in the second trimester, shall receive no (or perhaps reduced) Medicare funding.
We know that the Federal government can condition receipt of other Federal funding for other purposes based on the state's adoption or rejection of standards the Federal government prefers. Highway funding based on adoption of a minimum legal drinking age, for instance. South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987).
Again, I don't think Democrats have the stones to do this. And what this current SCOTUS would do with it is also another question. But I think it's at least a plausibly Constitutional way to try, under existing valid Constitutional jurisprudence.