Yes I find myself more drawn to both Josh Shapiro and Mamdani than Harris/ Newsom type politics. I have tried to think about why I viewed Mamdani’s moderation, who I find far too left wing especially on foreign policy, more sympathetically than Harris’s flip flops.
Maybe I’m overthinking but I think it’s because with Mamdani, you could sense real convictions underneath and watch him actively narrow them under the responsibility of governing. I remember listening to him on the NYTimes Daily podcast being pressed about apologizing to police and his past rhetoric, I was convinced he understood the need to respect officers and that he no longer wanted to defund the department. But when asked whether the NYPD is systemically racist, you could hear the pause, the belief he still held, and then the choice to say “no.” It sounded like someone painfully swallowing a conviction in order to lead responsibly, and carrying the discomfort of that choice. That visible friction felt almost human. His youth probably matters too, it’s easier to extend grace when someone seems to be learning, awkwardly and in public, what responsibility demands.
I never felt that kind of inner tension with Harris. Her shifts often felt like emptiness being rearranged, not conviction being disciplined. Don’t mean to make too much out of this, obviously all politicians are a mix of policy convictions and careerist ambitions. Yet even though I think Josh Shapiro would be the best candidate out of the current lot, I do think a genuinely untainted young outsider that appears earnest would be the best option for 2028. There is an incredible amount of grace that would be extended to that person’s journey. It was also basically what we got with Bill Clinton and Obama.
I agree Harris was a disaster. The thing that kills me is Dems have now run three presidential campaigns in a row where the final, closing message to voters was "Vote for us because we're not Donald Trump and will adhere to basic societal norms." There are young Americans who will cast votes in the 2028 election who were two years old in 2012 and literally do not remember the last time a Democratic presidential candidate made an electoral pitch on the merits of their own ideas and policies instead of a specific repudiation to Donald Trump.
Whoever the candidate is in 2028 needs to have something to stand on that is not the status quo. I know major blocks within the Democratic Party will consider this heretical, but I genuinely don't care if it's someone from the moderate bloc or the progressive bloc. Just give the country someone with actual ideas they're passionate about and willing to fight for. I don't care if it's AOC or Buttigieg or Pritzker or Warnock or Ossoff, just for the love of god we cannot nominate another empty, status quo "norms and values" candidate (which Newsom seems to be positioning himself to run as).
Harris is an unserious person. She has zero interest or ability to dissect issues, consider various options and make informed decisions. Rather, she panders to the leftist echo chamber that she inhabits. She very obviously has no real interest in the issues. She only seeks power.
In a populist age, I am not sure how useful "conservative vs liberal" labels are any more. Trump isn't a conservative (he wants to tear stuff down, not conserve it), he doesn't hold to conservative positions in any sense (not a social conservative, which probably helps him with middle of the road types; not an economic conservative in that he doesn't like either trade or markets much; etc.). I'm not sure what the more useful labels are, but there are plenty of areas of substantive agreement (limiting credit card interest rates, protectionism, strong executive power (at least while people I agree with are in charge), etc.) between the "left" and "right" these days. So while Sanders is further "left" and Trump is further "right", there seem to me to be a lot of substantive overlap even if the means/constituencies who would benefit are somewhat different depending on which one is in charge.
The rump Reagan conservatives are a shrinking part of the R coalition; the Shapiro/Beshar wing of the Ds is pretty small as well in terms of influence over the national party. So long as both parties cater to their populist wings, the non-populists get the crumbs and mostly win in states that are marginal to their party's core constituency or where their party wants to win so badly that it is willing to tolerate heretics. It would be interesting to see what data you have/what your view is of whether we are in a permanent realignment of the Rs and Ds something like what is going on in the UK, where Labour and the Tories are sinking and populist "left" (Greens) and "right" (Reform) are rising (see the upcoming by-election and the local elections in May, where both of those look to do quite well). Our system doesn't allow for new parties quite as easily as the UK's does, and both of our parties are in at least slightly better shape than either Labour or the Tories are there, but it seems like there are considerable parallels. But given the barriers to entry for any new party here, it looks like we may be headed to a world of two populist parties and a lot of disaffected non-populist voters without a home.
Perhaps this is more a function of my age than anything else, but something that jumped out at me was how well voters' perceptions of George W Bush's views matched their own ideologies. It seems like the rise of Trump has benefited his reputation, particulary among voters on the left, without hurting him with conservatives.
I know GWB has risen considerably in my own personal estimation. At the time GWB was president, I gave him no credit for good intentions. I just assumed any & every president would be a person who cared about helping all Americans, not just the ones who voted for him. I assumed any & every president would be doing their best to implement policies that would help America as a whole, and not just themselves personally.
In retrospect, this was a foolish delusion of mine. Not giving GWB credit for his good intentions now seems unforgivably naive. In the face of a presidency run on selfishness, greed, and vindictive pettiness, with reckless disregard for any consequences that will be borne by others, I have been shown that not only is the bottom significantly lower than I thought, but there might not be a bottom at all.
In Obama's memoir from his presidency one of the things he gives Bush a lot of credit for is taking action during the 2008 financial crisis. Bush did something that was very unpopular, but seen as economically necessary (bank bailouts). A lot of presidents at the end of their term would have punted something like that to the next guy.
In an environment like we have now where winning elections is more important than actually governing there might have been a different outcome to a crisis like that.
This always happens to Republicans after the fact. 20 years from now some other Republican will be the new Hitler, and Democrats will be wondering out loud why he couldn't be more like Trump.
Kamala Harris cannot win any national election and probably can't even win a Democrat Primary. Have people forgotten she dropped out of the Primaries in 2019 before a single vote was even cast?
I think the most interesting sentence is "... that more successful communicators can convince voters that they're on their side."
I've always thought the right/left or conservative/liberal paradigm is an oversimplified way to view politics, and for me personally, where I perceive someone falls on that paradigm is not the most important thing I look for in a candidate.
For me, the most important candidate qualities are squishy concepts like intelligence, leadership, and character. That said, I have no illusions that I actually have enough information to judge politicians accurately on these characteristics, so I end up gravitating towards those that are good communicators. It makes me trust them and gives me the impression they have those characteristics. Of course it's not just communication (Bill Clinton was a great communicator and I've always found him repulsive), but it goes a long way.
Shocks me that Harris is even being considered as a candidate for 2028.
I saw the Daily Show spoof/attack on Newsom, so he is beginning to sustain attacks from the left now, not just the right. As a Californian I find him personally not effective or appealing, but Dems in California seem to like him. I'm skeptical about his national appeal.
AOC is probably the most authentic one out of the leaders. She is too much of a leftie for me, but she is way more likeable than Kamala or Newsom. I also wonder if there would be much of a difference between an AOC or Newsom and Harris. The Dem party, as you put, is just an indigo blog of progressiveness. As you've mentioned there are splits with abundance types and others, but really to me I think they all represent more or less the same thing.
Good article. The chart is complicated but makes a lot of sense. Fetterman is arguably better representing his constituants than many Senators. However, I have to chuckle at the ending assertion that Democrats should have chosen a better candidate than Kamala. They didn't get a choice! Kamala was the pick by default, which I blame primarily on Jill Biden and the Biden inner circle, with an assist from any other prominent party figure that didn't stand up to her and make him honor his 2020 pledge. I am pretty sure why this was allowed - it was because Dem leadership agreed with me that Kamala would NOT have been chosen by primary voters - and she is who the establishment always wanted (even back in 2020, one of the reason Dems HATE Tulsi more than Trump was her epic takedown of Kamala). As to why the establishment wanted her? I suspect that they thought she was easily controllable, why that would be the thinking that I'll let you all figure out (I suspect excellent blackmail material).
I wonder if anyone believes Harris had a real shot in a real primary. She failed in 2019. She was invisible during the Biden Administration. When Biden quit, she was unable to get un-tied to Biden and all those memes. I remember a dude told me he couldn't vote for her because he couldn't stand the way her laughed. Ridiculous of course but he was not alone out there brainwashed by negative memes against Harris.
Regardless what stance she took that last three months, she would lose anyways. She was not political savvy enough to salvage that crappy situation she got herself in.
Seems to me we need to step away from common politics due to red blue division. Both parties are driving people away. Reality is no one can satisfy the list of issues for either party. So with that in mind I would support identification of the top six issues in the USA without regard to party. I would then support a business person with no serious political ties to address the top six plus any emergencies that might show up. Both issues and person(s) need to be identified. You are in position to achieve that goal with your vast polling experience.
Yes I find myself more drawn to both Josh Shapiro and Mamdani than Harris/ Newsom type politics. I have tried to think about why I viewed Mamdani’s moderation, who I find far too left wing especially on foreign policy, more sympathetically than Harris’s flip flops.
Maybe I’m overthinking but I think it’s because with Mamdani, you could sense real convictions underneath and watch him actively narrow them under the responsibility of governing. I remember listening to him on the NYTimes Daily podcast being pressed about apologizing to police and his past rhetoric, I was convinced he understood the need to respect officers and that he no longer wanted to defund the department. But when asked whether the NYPD is systemically racist, you could hear the pause, the belief he still held, and then the choice to say “no.” It sounded like someone painfully swallowing a conviction in order to lead responsibly, and carrying the discomfort of that choice. That visible friction felt almost human. His youth probably matters too, it’s easier to extend grace when someone seems to be learning, awkwardly and in public, what responsibility demands.
I never felt that kind of inner tension with Harris. Her shifts often felt like emptiness being rearranged, not conviction being disciplined. Don’t mean to make too much out of this, obviously all politicians are a mix of policy convictions and careerist ambitions. Yet even though I think Josh Shapiro would be the best candidate out of the current lot, I do think a genuinely untainted young outsider that appears earnest would be the best option for 2028. There is an incredible amount of grace that would be extended to that person’s journey. It was also basically what we got with Bill Clinton and Obama.
I agree Harris was a disaster. The thing that kills me is Dems have now run three presidential campaigns in a row where the final, closing message to voters was "Vote for us because we're not Donald Trump and will adhere to basic societal norms." There are young Americans who will cast votes in the 2028 election who were two years old in 2012 and literally do not remember the last time a Democratic presidential candidate made an electoral pitch on the merits of their own ideas and policies instead of a specific repudiation to Donald Trump.
Whoever the candidate is in 2028 needs to have something to stand on that is not the status quo. I know major blocks within the Democratic Party will consider this heretical, but I genuinely don't care if it's someone from the moderate bloc or the progressive bloc. Just give the country someone with actual ideas they're passionate about and willing to fight for. I don't care if it's AOC or Buttigieg or Pritzker or Warnock or Ossoff, just for the love of god we cannot nominate another empty, status quo "norms and values" candidate (which Newsom seems to be positioning himself to run as).
Harris is an unserious person. She has zero interest or ability to dissect issues, consider various options and make informed decisions. Rather, she panders to the leftist echo chamber that she inhabits. She very obviously has no real interest in the issues. She only seeks power.
In a populist age, I am not sure how useful "conservative vs liberal" labels are any more. Trump isn't a conservative (he wants to tear stuff down, not conserve it), he doesn't hold to conservative positions in any sense (not a social conservative, which probably helps him with middle of the road types; not an economic conservative in that he doesn't like either trade or markets much; etc.). I'm not sure what the more useful labels are, but there are plenty of areas of substantive agreement (limiting credit card interest rates, protectionism, strong executive power (at least while people I agree with are in charge), etc.) between the "left" and "right" these days. So while Sanders is further "left" and Trump is further "right", there seem to me to be a lot of substantive overlap even if the means/constituencies who would benefit are somewhat different depending on which one is in charge.
The rump Reagan conservatives are a shrinking part of the R coalition; the Shapiro/Beshar wing of the Ds is pretty small as well in terms of influence over the national party. So long as both parties cater to their populist wings, the non-populists get the crumbs and mostly win in states that are marginal to their party's core constituency or where their party wants to win so badly that it is willing to tolerate heretics. It would be interesting to see what data you have/what your view is of whether we are in a permanent realignment of the Rs and Ds something like what is going on in the UK, where Labour and the Tories are sinking and populist "left" (Greens) and "right" (Reform) are rising (see the upcoming by-election and the local elections in May, where both of those look to do quite well). Our system doesn't allow for new parties quite as easily as the UK's does, and both of our parties are in at least slightly better shape than either Labour or the Tories are there, but it seems like there are considerable parallels. But given the barriers to entry for any new party here, it looks like we may be headed to a world of two populist parties and a lot of disaffected non-populist voters without a home.
Perhaps this is more a function of my age than anything else, but something that jumped out at me was how well voters' perceptions of George W Bush's views matched their own ideologies. It seems like the rise of Trump has benefited his reputation, particulary among voters on the left, without hurting him with conservatives.
I know GWB has risen considerably in my own personal estimation. At the time GWB was president, I gave him no credit for good intentions. I just assumed any & every president would be a person who cared about helping all Americans, not just the ones who voted for him. I assumed any & every president would be doing their best to implement policies that would help America as a whole, and not just themselves personally.
In retrospect, this was a foolish delusion of mine. Not giving GWB credit for his good intentions now seems unforgivably naive. In the face of a presidency run on selfishness, greed, and vindictive pettiness, with reckless disregard for any consequences that will be borne by others, I have been shown that not only is the bottom significantly lower than I thought, but there might not be a bottom at all.
In Obama's memoir from his presidency one of the things he gives Bush a lot of credit for is taking action during the 2008 financial crisis. Bush did something that was very unpopular, but seen as economically necessary (bank bailouts). A lot of presidents at the end of their term would have punted something like that to the next guy.
In an environment like we have now where winning elections is more important than actually governing there might have been a different outcome to a crisis like that.
This always happens to Republicans after the fact. 20 years from now some other Republican will be the new Hitler, and Democrats will be wondering out loud why he couldn't be more like Trump.
Kamala Harris cannot win any national election and probably can't even win a Democrat Primary. Have people forgotten she dropped out of the Primaries in 2019 before a single vote was even cast?
I think the most interesting sentence is "... that more successful communicators can convince voters that they're on their side."
I've always thought the right/left or conservative/liberal paradigm is an oversimplified way to view politics, and for me personally, where I perceive someone falls on that paradigm is not the most important thing I look for in a candidate.
For me, the most important candidate qualities are squishy concepts like intelligence, leadership, and character. That said, I have no illusions that I actually have enough information to judge politicians accurately on these characteristics, so I end up gravitating towards those that are good communicators. It makes me trust them and gives me the impression they have those characteristics. Of course it's not just communication (Bill Clinton was a great communicator and I've always found him repulsive), but it goes a long way.
Shocks me that Harris is even being considered as a candidate for 2028.
I saw the Daily Show spoof/attack on Newsom, so he is beginning to sustain attacks from the left now, not just the right. As a Californian I find him personally not effective or appealing, but Dems in California seem to like him. I'm skeptical about his national appeal.
AOC is probably the most authentic one out of the leaders. She is too much of a leftie for me, but she is way more likeable than Kamala or Newsom. I also wonder if there would be much of a difference between an AOC or Newsom and Harris. The Dem party, as you put, is just an indigo blog of progressiveness. As you've mentioned there are splits with abundance types and others, but really to me I think they all represent more or less the same thing.
Good article. The chart is complicated but makes a lot of sense. Fetterman is arguably better representing his constituants than many Senators. However, I have to chuckle at the ending assertion that Democrats should have chosen a better candidate than Kamala. They didn't get a choice! Kamala was the pick by default, which I blame primarily on Jill Biden and the Biden inner circle, with an assist from any other prominent party figure that didn't stand up to her and make him honor his 2020 pledge. I am pretty sure why this was allowed - it was because Dem leadership agreed with me that Kamala would NOT have been chosen by primary voters - and she is who the establishment always wanted (even back in 2020, one of the reason Dems HATE Tulsi more than Trump was her epic takedown of Kamala). As to why the establishment wanted her? I suspect that they thought she was easily controllable, why that would be the thinking that I'll let you all figure out (I suspect excellent blackmail material).
I wonder if anyone believes Harris had a real shot in a real primary. She failed in 2019. She was invisible during the Biden Administration. When Biden quit, she was unable to get un-tied to Biden and all those memes. I remember a dude told me he couldn't vote for her because he couldn't stand the way her laughed. Ridiculous of course but he was not alone out there brainwashed by negative memes against Harris.
Regardless what stance she took that last three months, she would lose anyways. She was not political savvy enough to salvage that crappy situation she got herself in.
Is this “Part III: Nice guys finish last”? Lol
Seems to me we need to step away from common politics due to red blue division. Both parties are driving people away. Reality is no one can satisfy the list of issues for either party. So with that in mind I would support identification of the top six issues in the USA without regard to party. I would then support a business person with no serious political ties to address the top six plus any emergencies that might show up. Both issues and person(s) need to be identified. You are in position to achieve that goal with your vast polling experience.