For me, this was an extremely insightful read, and included many things I hadn't observed. I was reluctant to plunk down the $ for the subscription, but now, wow, I am glad I did. There is a level of understanding here you just can't find anywhere else, and unfortunately that includes the ABC version of 538. I desperately want Harris to win, but I appreciate that Silver Bulletin is going to give me a dose of reality whether I like it or not, and that is worth the money.
Also, I thought her story about how she decided to become a prosecutor (after her childhood friend was sexually abused) was really effective. It signaled that she’s dedicated to fighting on the behalf of women, but avoided any rhetoric that could turn off centrist voters or be spun negatively by conservatives.
I think she came across as a Generic Presidential Candidate, but I mean that in a good way. She was the movie version. Optimistic, forward-looking, patriotic, focused on the middle class. Normal. And to be honest, all of that is quite an achievement given the barriers she would break by getting elected.
It also feels like a decent read from her campaign on how to differentiate the two campaigns in a way that isn't just thr Biden style "Trump is a threat and really bad." That rhetoric is there somewhat, but she's clearly trying to strike the forward tone to contrast the Trump campaign style of this being a dire situation of impending disaster.
Clinton chose the color white because it’s associated with the female suffrage movement. We can talk about how it came across to someone who didn’t know that, but that was the reason.
I recall this being widely discussed in the lead up to the speech. If anyone in the general public was aware of the speech they likely would have been aware of the color choice. But it’s also important to not that most people don’t pay much attention to things like clothing choice during a DNC speech. We watch this stuff because we’re nerds.
Nate was wrong about the association (I had no idea Queen Elizabeth wore a white dress) but wearing white was another example of Clinton emphasizing gender above all else, by associating herself with the suffragettes. The arrogance was assuming she was going to be the first female president before she’d even won.
I agree with your point but think it was the wrong choice in trying to win the election. Maybe it shouldn't but that would turn some people off. Maybe save those tributes for after you win. Also acknowledge it is easy to critique in hindsight.
The injection of "Privilege" had me sitting up a little straighter. I've always considered myself privileged. Growing up in the 50s and 60s, white, middle class, access to a private school, and college paid by my father, who did not go. But to hear a black woman say that to a room filled with many life stories different from mine was something else. Her mother instilled that knowledge in her. We are all privileged. And with privilege comes service. And like her mother told her, stop complaining. Do something. I pulled a "Gus" and started crying.
Left and right, we can nearly all agree that Hillary Clinton was the worst major Presidential candidate since the 80s. It's good that there's still something that can bring people together. 🥰
You can love Hillary, think she would have been a great President, and still think she was the worst Presidential candidate since the 80s. Candidate is quite a different job than President.
I agree, she wasn't an ideal candidate. I would venture to guess that she's probably in Nate's league in terms of intelligence, but often the most intelligent people struggle with coming off as "normal". Hillary just didn't have the gift of plausibly passing herself off as one of the great unwashed, while Kamala has it down pat. I don't know if much of this is due to her upbringing or a trait she developed long the way.
I also don't know what's going to happen on November 5th (I defer to Nate's reading of the poll tea-leaves!!), but everything about Kamala radiates the fact that she's going to have a lot of fun over the next 74 days, and will thoroughly enjoy every opportunity to send a zinger Trump's way!!! She reminds me of a contemporary SueAnn Nivens, but without the evil undertones.
Remember, Hillary began life as a Republican. She worked for the Goldwater campaign. She also endured a lot of abuse and traitorous behavior in public from her husband. That would make it very hard for her to open herself publicly to the enthusiastic joy that seems to have been a basic part of Kamala's life experience.
I'm not objective, but I at least try to look at things as objectively as possible. In what sense was she a terrible candidate? Donald Trump was a terrible candidate. The enduring shock of the 2016 election is that he won in spite of being a terrible candidate. I think that looms so large in people's minds that they forget that every candidate in living memory has had gaffes and bungled speeches — even the winners. Are you really going to sit here and argue that she was worse at being a candidate than Bob Dole? Ross Perot? Mitt Romney? On what basis?
The fact that Hilary had been a first lady didn't help. But that she has always been the smartest person in the room, but no one notices her, made her a strange combination of insecure, annoyed and a little entitled. She seems, outside of politics, to be a fun and worldly person worth having a beer with. Kamala, on the other hand, is not just someone you'd want to have a beer with, she's someone you'd want to go on vacation with!
In 2016, there were a lot of factors that led to the loss. Everyone, including Hilary, thought she was going to win easily, so a lot of people sat it out. No one believed Trump was really as much of an "unserious" liar, sore loser, complainer, and a**hole as he is. They actually wanted to give an outsider a try. Hilary collapsed after all the talk of her being sickly. The f'ing email stupidity. The press couldn't get enough of Trump. And yes, she talked WAY too much about being a woman, and barely visited the midwest (insecure, annoyed about Bernie being popular there, and entitled that she had it locked up). Ugh. Why'd you get me started thinking about this again? Maybe the lessons are important.
First of all, Clinton had more than double Trump's ad spend in Michigan and Pennsylvania. In Wisconsin, she underspent Trump, but she spent 5x as much as Trump on ads in Iowa, which didn't end up mattering.
Second, we can look at campaign visits, but I'll preface this section by saying that a regression analysis showed rallies had almost no impact on state-by-state results in 2016. Pennsylvania: 15-14 visits (Clinton-Trump). Michigan 4-7. Wisconsin 0-5. Iowa 4-6.
Third, those states you call the upper midwest were called the "Blue Wall." They weren't swing states. Wiconsin had gone blue since 1984. Obama won it by 7% in 2012. Almost every poll had Clinton up 5-12% in 2016. ZERO polls showed her behind. There was no reason to think it would be so close. It's a similar story in Michigan: hadn't gone red since 1988. Obama won by 10% in 2012. Only one poll showed her behind (by 2%). SEVEN polls showed her winning by DOUBLE DIGITS. I won't belabor the point, but it's pretty much the same for Pennsylvania. Blue since 1984, Obama won by 6, etc. etc.
So not only does it not make sense to say she "failed to campaign hard" in the upper midwest, but you can't even reasonably make the argument that she should have campaigned harder in the upper midwest given what we/she knew in 2016. If that was really the best argument, then do you now take back what you said about her running a poor campaign?
No one covered her speeches and rallies. The media decided they weren't engaging - and they really weren't. She wasn't liked. Truth seems to be that if you lose elections, you continue to lose elections. Once she had lost to Obama, it was not a good idea for her to be the candidate. I thought the same thing about Biden in 2020. He barely won. He is not as well-liked as people try to say he is. Very very few (not none) who have lost primaries have ever gone on to win the Presidency. I'm glad Kamala got out after 5 minutes into the primary in 2019. It seems more irrelevant.
I agree Clinton was not nearly the politician her husband was, and no match for Obama. That speaks only to stagecraft; her skills as president would have undoubtedly been exemplary given her intelligence, wonkiness and years of experience (and her mind-boggling public-facing strength in the face of unthinkable betrayal by her so-called ‘partner’). To win in American politics you have to have steak AND sizzle. In 2016, unfortunately, you apparently didn’t even need steak. I think Nate nailed it, especially with his photographic examples of Clinton and Harris.
This is where I land. I am almost 100% in line with her politics ("a hemispheric common market with free trade and open borders" anyone?). But she was a thoroughly awful candidate and did not know her audience at any point. I tend to think 2008 Hillary would have smashed Trump, but by 2016 she was so out of touch.
Romney could be equally bad. But maybe Romney and Clinton suffered from the same problems (cold, elite, technocratic, basket of deplorables/47%). They both felt strongly they would win contrary to evidence (in Romney’s case the polling should have hit him in the face, but it didn’t).
It’s annoying to me that campaigning skills have so little predictive value to how well you govern. It’s almost like you have to compete at the Olympics in wrestling and if you win you get to do the marathon after.
Contrary to what evidence in 2016? It's easy to Monday morning quarterback a past election, but if you're trying to imply that there was plenty of ignored contemporaneous evidence that Clinton would lose in 2016, I don't believe you. Donald Trump overperformed polls by 7-8% in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin while simultaneously underperforming polls by ~3% in states like Nevada.
It would be one thing to suggest that public opinion shifted late in the campaign, driven by events like Comey's letter 11 days before the election. It's entirely another thing to suggest that Clinton felt strongly that she would win contrary to evidence. I ask again: what evidence?
To be honest I think she could have won in a different cycle.
The main reason she lost in 2016 is that she was the insider and Trump was the outsider in the year of Brexit and a global populist movement. One that is still going on btw.
Let's not also forget that we all watched her approval take a precipitous dive after the 11th hour statement from Comey in late October. Coupled with the fact that she still won the popular vote anyway, we were only one or two distinct events away from a very different outcome.
This is your occasional reminder that “the popular vote” is meaningless in the current system because the total would be completely different if voters in red and blue states weren't locked in.
I am of course aware or the electoral college, I only mention it to illustrate that it was a close race that could have gone another way. let's not forget Hillary's competition when it comes to "worst candidate" even in the timeframe you provide. Dole, McCain and Romney all lost their presidential bids by wider electoral margins than Hillary.
The idea that Hillary is a generationally bad candidate, just like the idea that trumps victory was a mandate for right wing populism or the idea that Biden's election was a decisive rejection of it (not claiming you think either of these), comes from people assigning the zeitgeist to the winner in hindsight when the reality is, as Slaw said, sneezing on the wrong baby could have changed everything.
Trump won in 2016 by 56k votes. He lost in 2020 by 44k votes. This is out of over a hundred million cast nationally. When the margins are that tight farting while you're kissing a baby could cost you the election.
My take is that Brexit was extraordinarily close as well and since 2016 we've seen the rise of populists and outsiders like Le Pen, Wilders, Orban, Duterte, etc. etc. around the planet. I lean hard on demographic factors. It's happening in too many different countries to be coincidence.
Not following your math. Trump lost in 2020 by 7 million votes. If you are counting only battleground states due to the electoral college, Trump lost by over 80K votes in Pennsylvania alone.
Math--"Trump won in 2016 by 56k votes. He lost in 2020 by 44k votes"
Those are the votes that swung the SWING STATES in one direction or another. Who cares about those electorally irrelevant states like California and New York?
That math doesn't generalize. For one, there is no magic line that separates a battleground state from a non-battleground state. For another, no state is electorally irrelevant. Votes may count less in California, because of the electoral college, but the electoral votes are still needed, and hence the popular votes are needed. It's arbitrary to define GA, AZ, and WI as "the swing states." You can pose an infinite number of hypotheticals with various states, but that doesn't mean that candidates won or lost by a number that corresponds to an arbitrary hypothetical.
Trump lost in 2016 by that logic and yet somehow still took office.
Trump lost GA by around 10k votes in 2020 iirc, out of millions cast. The total margins in GA, AZ anf WI comes to about 44k and if Trump had won all three he would have been re-elected.
I agree that HRC* (as well as any other remotely serious** contender for the 2008 nom, e.g. Edwards, Richardson, Biden, etc.) would almost certainly have won in 2008, assuming that the R primary campaign went as it did in reality.
* always an insider, her gender notwithstanding, so losing the "change" vibes wars to Obama, who was also IMHO a generational _campaigning_ talent, best since WJC and Reagan before him.
I think her biggest problem was unlikeability. You can say that is sexist. Trump was unlikeable But maybe that is not a conflict. For a woman to get elected in 2016 she needed to be more likeable
The holy based part of the speech was when she morphed into Margaret Thatcher and you just know she’s gonna bitch slap Russia / China / Iran.
Also the 2nd person speaking before her was giga-chad Adam kinzinger - the campaign is doing a full courtship of Nikki Haley voters. (Something Bidens campaign was too arrogant to do)
I was pleasantly surprised. She was very strong in some parts and appeared Presidential. Remains to be seen whether she has improved in debates and interviews. Hillary ran like someone who thought she had the election in the bag and ran a very cautious, boring campaign. Harris is running like she's in a close race. Obama mentioned that in his speech as well (that it's going to be a tight race).
On CNN one of the commentators from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard said that Hillary's campaign manager should be indicted for malpractice it was so bad. I've forgotten his name, sorry.
Right. David R. Gergen was the consultant who said he should be prosecuted for malpractice. Gergen has served in various positions under Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Is now a professor of public service and founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Harris has been a fantastic candidate so far, and anyone who wanted Biden to continue should be devastated at how terrible their takes were. I'm particularly thinking of one person who uses Dr. in all her tweets.
Your clip pulling should have led to more insight from pundits on, "If she makes a switch to being moderate, can she be effective there?" Her past speeches and the original boom should have led to more analysis about "What would she look like in a compressed and moderated timeframe?" instead of "Will she run as the height of her 2020 Medicare for All" takes?
Instead, they all assumed folks would be livid at Biden getting passed up.
It was clear that Biden was headed for defeat, so obviously we needed to roll the dice; but I admit I wasn't expecting much from Harris, considering her 2020 primary campaign. All I was hoping for was "less of an underdog than Biden, and with less risk of total catastrophe."
Harris has handled things much better, and the electorate has responded much more strongly, than I imagined.
If Harris wins (and I know that's an if, certainly not something I'm taking for granted or deluding myself into thinking is a guarantee), I will be very, very curious to see how her administration and the wider Democratic Party apparatus handles a retrospective on what happened between the debate and the decision to drop out.
I really hope it isn't something that gets swept under the rug or dropped in the name of party unity. It is genuinely impossible to overstate how disastrous and short-sighted the decision making of people like DNC chair Jamie Harrison, campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon, and most of the Democratic Twitter influencers was in the debate aftermath. They almost drove the party and the whole country off a cliff to serve the ego of one person.
Obviously no one can really do anything about the Twitter influencers other than stop listening to them, but I personally don't see how the party can ever trust Jamie Harrison or Jen O'Malley Dillon in a position of decision making authority ever again. And that sucks, because they have done good work in the past and seemed like competent people who could help the party. Their decisions to circle the wagons around Biden revealed such a flaw of sound judgement that if I were the next Democratic presidential candidate in 28 or 32, I wouldn't let them come anywhere close to the circle of trust.
I agree that it was blindingly obvious that Biden was too old to be re-elected. But he won the primaries, he gained the delegates, and it is emphatically NOT the job of the people you mention to sabotage or undermine the candidate. In fact, their job is the opposite. You could say they should have resigned but then someone else would do the job. I was more infuriated with Sanders and AOC, for example, who are not paid to promote the presumptive candidate.
Bernie and AOC are by far the smartest members in their faction in congress, and their strategy was pretty well-informed:
1. They clearly knew Biden was going to drop out, based on closed-door discussions they would've partaken in with the rest of their party
2. They also knew the party establishment - Pelosi, Schumer would be the ones pulling the strings to organize Biden's withdrawal.
3. Therefore, them continuing to publicly support Biden made it look like the party as a whole rejected him, rather than the progressive wing organizing an uprising against him. Much better optics overall.
Don't really buy that, because if that was true, the thing they would have done was just sit out of the argument. Instead they really went to bat for Biden in a way that was odd and which suggested they thought the effort to toss Biden was somehow obviously counterproductive.
AOC went on Instagram Live to answer questions about her position and seemed visibly worried about the possibility of Biden dropping out. Bernie did an interview with Issac Chotiner where he admitted Biden clearly had memory issues but backed him strongly anyway.
My analysis for what was going on with them after actually observing their behavior is that they see the president as a bundle of policies, and so saw the effort to toss Biden as insane because his replacement would be the same bundle of policies but after a bunch of extra fighting. It really never occurred to them that the president is a person and so could be bad in a way distinct from being more conservative.
Your first point is an incredibly bold, evidence free assertion. I'd bet a lot of money that neither Schumer or Pelosi knew Biden was going to drop out. Neither Bernie or AOC knew he'd drop out. Because NOBODY knew, Biden was insistent on staying, nobody could force him out, and that was why there was a real public battle to make it happen.
The only reason Biden won the primaries is because his campaign, with the acceptance of the DNC, withheld relevant information about the health and competence of the candidate. The amount of unscripted events Biden has done in the past two years is unacceptable, and the only reason that happened is because people on his staff realized that the more people saw Biden off the teleprompter, the more they would realize he cannot serve another four years.
I don't accept the excuse that they were just doing their job, because they chose to do that job! Unlike the public, the people running his campaign had access to the president and saw his competence and fitness level. JOD chose to be Biden's campaign manager knowing full well that he was not fit for office and ran a campaign strategy based around running out the clock on any real challenge from the party. Jamie Harrison chose to push a lie about ballot access in order to make the political choice to attempt a rushed virtual roll call. Those choices reveal profound cowardice and lack of judgment.
Someone with the character, strength, and judgment required to be a senior operative in a political party would have resigned rather than run or abet a campaign of deception for a candidate not physically capable of the office.
Let’s not pretend that was a real primary, though. Biden had no real opponents—the whole cast of rising stars who auditioned for Harris’s VP did not go up against him. They would have given him a run for his money and possibly handed him a defeat if they had. How many people do you know who voted in a Democratic primary this year?
The reason Biden had no real opponents is because nobody thought they could win.
Dean Phillips is pretty much the definition of a “generic Democrat” and he got like 10% of the vote. If Dem partisans really thought Biden was so weak why didn’t they park their votes with Phillips?
Let's not pretend it didn't happen, though. It was a real primary that actually happened. There are actual numbers from 50 states (I presume) showing how many people voted and for whom. Remember Michigan and the Uncommiteds? Just because it was completely lame, and effectively uncontested, doesn't change the roles of the campaign manager and the head of the DNC.
Have talked to quite a few people who are marveling at the contrast from her performance in 2020 and as VP. The confidence, the positivity, the finesse, the extremely high level of non-weirdness. And yes, how much will it matter? Trying to anticipate the unexpected over the next 70 some days.
I think a ton of this boils down to the fact that for a lot of the loudest of the Dem primary base, prosecutors were not being held in a good light in 2020, so she wasn't really being herself then. Now? Now, there's lots of reasons that her prosecutorial background is helpful and she seems much more herself.
It's because she has been 100% scripted since announcing a run this time, whereas last time she actually spoke off the cuff, as she normally speaks, and people didn't like it
It probably matters quite a lot! Before she became the nominee and adopted the general rhetorical style and pivot on stuff like immigration and criminal justice that she’s been using since, she had terrible favorables and polled badly in head to heads against Trump. Her staggering improvement since then has made her genuinely competitive.
I think the timeframe is more like 50 days, the first debate is right around the corner and I doubt a ton changes macro level until then. They'll hype the hell out of his key that debate is, but after that is when plenty of unknown is likely to pop out and change narratives.
Nate ascribes these differences to candidate effects but there's another important explanation: the deeply sexist double standard that is applied to women's ambition in politics (and other walks of life for that matter). It's obvious that both Hillary and Harris are incredibly ambitious people (our whole political system is based on ambition after all https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed55.asp) but Hillary's rise was a brutal 30 plus year battle royal and so all sorts of negative attributes get stamped on her from that and her ambition gets seen as a bad thing (she's vain, grasping, greedy, entitled, what an evil Lady McBeth, gotta vote for Trump!) While Harris was able to step in in a parliamentary style candidate switch and dodge those charges by pretending that she doesn't seek power, oh no, it was thrust upon her you see.
It's nonsense of course, but nonsense the we will swallow because of our double standard in these matters. Pretty unfair, but then again politics ain't bean bags, as they say.
(Also sorry but Nate's line about "a coronation" is ridiculous. Even if you hate Hillary she really did win all those primaries, it was Harris who was (smartly!) "coronated" by party actors here.)
If Nate wants to say "here are my 2016 tweets saying I didn't think Clinton was giving a very good speech" I would be interested to read them. Otherwise this post seems pretty results-based.
This made me curious, so I went and found the FiveThirtyEight live blog of the 2016 convention. Here are all of Nate's quotes that have to do with the content of the speech:
"Is it optimism or patriotism? There’s certainly been some defense of Obama’s accomplishments over the past eight years, as you’d expect from the incumbent party. But a lot of it is about articulating American values, with Democrats trying to co-opt some traditionally conservative and Republican values as their own."
"I wonder how much this speech is with the BernieBooers in mind. There aren’t a lot of long, quiet, drawn-out sections — instead an applause line every 15 seconds — which robs it of a little dynamism."
"As with Obama’s speech, there’s been almost no criticism of Republicans. Just criticism of Trump."
"After Trump’s speech last week, I said Clinton could respond by with a 1964 strategy — playing to the center, and touting her fitness for office as compared with her opponent — or a 2012 strategy, playing more to her base. There’s more 1964 than 2012 in this speech so far."
"I’ll just say this about Clinton’s speech: I’d written up a long item about my sense of where we stood after the convention, and I didn’t have to change very much at all after Clinton’s speech. It was about what we should have expected based on the themes of the convention overall and tonight specifically."
Seems like it came across as a pretty mid speech, for whatever that's worth. This did remind me how awkward the overabundance of applause lines was
Whether or not he found it mid, the “1964 or 2012” part suggests he found it to be focused on the center and her fitness for office, which isn’t the impression one gets from today’s post. Thanks for finding this, really interesting!
Yeah you would get the sense from the zeitgeist that Democrats trying to reclaim patriotism this year is a new thing—but 2016 was right after Hamilton!
It is probably true that liberal patriotism coded as cringe after Trump won, but viewing 2016 through that lens is a sort of results-based bias.
One thing I think you’re kind of getting at but not quite hitting on here is just how long Hillary was basically an heir apparent. The moment she ran for Senate there was a sense that it was inevitable that she’d one day be the Democratic presidential candidate. She already came on the scene with some collateral baggage from the end of her husband’s second term and all the Lewinsky drama, and then the GOP political apparatus had a decade and a half of knowing that she’d likely one day be the opposing candidate at the top of the ballot. They just had so much time to lay the ground work to paint her in such a way that people “just didn’t like her”. How many other recent presidential candidates were obviously waiting in the wings for that long? I can’t think of any between my living memory and my knowledge of history. Half of them weren’t even household names until well into the primaries. 2008 was supposed to be the year for which she’d been incubated to take the role of Presidential candidate, and then Obama came in on a whirlwind. She had to wait another 8 years, all during which the GOP still knew she’d one day run and were able to keep chipping away at her. By the time she became the candidate in 2016, she was politically “overripe”.
I don't know how you can equate "married to a president" with "a brutal 30 plus year battle" -- Hillary's candidacy would just flat out not have happened, if she hadn't been first lady. Contrast that with the fact that until Kamala was elected senator of CA, I didn't even know her husband's first name -- and I live in CA. Kamala has orders of magnitude more credibility for truly earning her place than does someone who essentially married their way into being politically relevant. And that's before addressing racial barriers Kamala has faced, that Hillary has not.
Witness all the people who're dying to see Michelle Obama run for something, no matter how many times she says she's not interested. If Michelle DID run, say for senate -- you couldn't fairly say she'd got that chance on her own merits. Her merits, and Hillary's, are impressive and necessary, but insufficient: there are millions of smart, highly educated, savvy women with successful professional careers in America. There are only twenty-odd women senators. The main reason Hillary moved from the first group to the second, was a guy named Bill. You can't say that about Kamala.
"Brutal 30 plus year battle": HRC was a major political figure during the 90's, the whole First Lady cookie bake-off was created by her enemies to shame her for her comments about baking cookies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Lady_Bake-Off. Rush declared that she murdered Vince Foster and there was a massive investigation into this. Conservatives routinely portrayed her as a communist lesbian she demon.
Whatever you think of her she was very much in the eye of the storm.
Totally - HRC was in the public eye 25 years, suffering the withering effects of the right's hate against her from '91 to '16. She made the cardinal sin of not "going away" - going from 1st Lady, to Senator, to Presidential Candidate, to SOS, to Presidential Candidate, to Nominee. That and the impact of overall Clinton fatigue really hurt her. No, she wasn't the most natural, dynamic candidate like BO or BC, but she was better than Gore or GWB. Clearly, KH learned a lot in 4 years and has really paid attention. The short cycle here and the lack of being defined by the right works in her favor.
I'd put it this way: Biden is kind of the exception. For a long time Dems had successful candidates for the presidency that ran as fresh faced outsiders: Obama, Bill, Carter, JFK etc voters seem to like that and while Harris was the VP she is kind of new on the national stage in a lot ways.
Actually Hillary was expected by her graduation class to be the first woman president. Her friends were very confused about why she went off to Arkansas with Bill Clinton.
The coronation remark is not about Hillary winning primary contests; it's about her overweening sense of entitlement and the way it emanated from her. She has the cold patrician poise of museum board ladies and nonprofit CEOs. A kind of self-satisfied stiffness and a pseudo-warmth that reads to ordinary people as elitist and smug but in a calculated and restrained and thus phony way. We all knew that she thought she deserved to win in 2016. We all knew she resented Obama in '07-'08. Even back then the coronation vibes were strong!
Yes, Harris may have had the nomination handed to her, but she doesn't come off like Hillary. She is doing much much better than I expected at seeming relatable and positive in an authentic but palatable way. I bet if you asked people which woman they'd want to get tipsy with, the answer would be Harris and not Hillary.
I don't think this kind of "theatre criticism as political analysis" is helpful, it largely boils down to someone just saying "I despise that women", which is fine, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it's not substantive.
Gotta love that preening arms-akimbo tone: "this isn't helpful." You're choosing not to hear the critique and instead just complain about misogyny. But there is a difference between how Clinton is perceived and how Harris is coming across. And you can bitch that it's theater criticism, but optics and performance are part of politics. And if I recall there is plenty of data about how Clinton is perceived. Over and over again I see people with your take and tone somehow insisting that something isn't meaningful just because you don't think that's the way it should be. I don't get it.
Nate, pundit mode continues not to look good on you. There is just so much conjecture and so many unfounded assertions in here. I can read that anywhere. Please, stick to your strengths.
If you don't like it, don't read it. Myself, I enjoy reading Silver's point of view on this stuff, even when it's not backed up by data. (For one thing, he's clear about the fact that it's not backed up by data, instead of dragging in some bogus statistics to dress it up.)
Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes not, but it's always worth a read.
Nate has been known to miss on his pundit takes much more frequently compared to his polling analysis takes, but this was a genuinely good piece that succinctly summed up the differences between the Harris campaign's messaging and Hillary's campaign messaging. One of his better pieces, albeit he's still committed to using the word "wokeness" which doesn't read very well, "Social Justice Leftism" is a much less loaded term that describes what he's talking about.
Yes, but the editor would only publish them if there is some substance to the critique. "So much conjecture and so many unfounded assertions" without giving one example? And the tsktsking, "it doesn't look good on you, stick to your strengths." Just so.... patronizing. Patron's privilege, I guess.
Ok for just one example, how about using random screenshots of Hilary and Kamala to try and make a point about vibes or something? Where is the rigor in that?
Couldn't disagree more. I thought this was an outstanding analysis. Some data is self-explanatory. Some is not. For me, this piece was brimming with juicy insights.
Some data points considered: 1) Facial expressions, 2) Language style differences, 3) Topics covered, 4) Approach to gender, 5) Mentions of race, 6) Redefinition of privilege, 7) Handling of Gaza. A speech does not contain self-explanatory data, like poll numbers. But it does contain data that can be analyzed.
Eh, I thought this one was equally bad. But even if I agreed with you, I’d object to this piece because I don’t want Nate to spend his time on punditry, I want him to spend his time on polling / model insights!
lol what exactly is wrong with Nates wrong here? Tbh you are the person who doesn’t seem to have any knowledge other than unfounded assertions on your side.
I’ve been following Nate since he’s been writing about 2012. I’ve always seen Nate making all of the pundit overall, and he’s been generally good at because no one but a Vulcan thinks one can always think no one should write pundits.
When the gender breakdown of interest in those subjects does not overwhelming favor males as it does currently, then they will no longer be "male-coded".
I found this to be super interesting. The campaign is framing Kamala in an entirely different light than the Clinton campaign framed Hillary...and it's working.
As a candidate Biden preached unity and moderation. How did that turn out? You can blame the attack driven Republicans, but jujitsu style flipping the opponent can be as effective as putting on the brass knuckles and duking it out. My bet is President Harris will abandon all of the niceties she has been touting, and go full House and Senate lefty immediately after she delivers a conciliatory inauguration address.
So I'll take it that you are forecasting a Democratic House and Senate?
Sounds good.
But FYI, we actually have progressives in SF, and Harris isn't one of them. In fact they consistently campaigned against her whenever there was an option.
Some call full lefty stuff like housing policy offering tax breaks for new hime buyers, expanded child tax credits, etc. but those policies are popular when polled om their own.
Full on hare crackdown on price gouging would be more left, but also harder to implement in a full "force business to do what I want" way one frames it.
I'm hopeful that her housing policy will be what's been percolating in California and in climate wings: pushing urban areas to have more density.
Housing is expensive because we sprawl, and that severely limits how many people can live in the most desirable areas. Supply and demand are badly out of balance in those areas, with predictable outcomes.
So, boost supply in desirable areas by building upwards and denser. Most other countries do it.
We'll see though. If it turns out to be "tax breaks for first time homeowners" and that's it, I'll be pretty disappointed.
Fair point, and I think your solution is pretty safe in terms of her proposing it and folks most impacted "urban centers" being supportive.
Rural housing would be a stiffer task for her to provide solutions and get buy in. Either governors in red states will balk or those voters will get some partisan cues to dislike top down help. But it's a huge economic problem, states trying to lure businesses to rural areas struggle to offer enough housing to support additional workforce for new business. So they either offer tax breaks to business or only see cheap rental units go up.
At least if that happens, the government will actually be doing something to try and better the country, as opposed to under the GOP where there goal is as little government action as possible, beyond tax cuts.
For me, this was an extremely insightful read, and included many things I hadn't observed. I was reluctant to plunk down the $ for the subscription, but now, wow, I am glad I did. There is a level of understanding here you just can't find anywhere else, and unfortunately that includes the ABC version of 538. I desperately want Harris to win, but I appreciate that Silver Bulletin is going to give me a dose of reality whether I like it or not, and that is worth the money.
Nate says "Gender is not my beat"... but actually (IMO as a gender studies professor) this is an excellent gender read.
Also, I thought her story about how she decided to become a prosecutor (after her childhood friend was sexually abused) was really effective. It signaled that she’s dedicated to fighting on the behalf of women, but avoided any rhetoric that could turn off centrist voters or be spun negatively by conservatives.
I think she came across as a Generic Presidential Candidate, but I mean that in a good way. She was the movie version. Optimistic, forward-looking, patriotic, focused on the middle class. Normal. And to be honest, all of that is quite an achievement given the barriers she would break by getting elected.
It also feels like a decent read from her campaign on how to differentiate the two campaigns in a way that isn't just thr Biden style "Trump is a threat and really bad." That rhetoric is there somewhat, but she's clearly trying to strike the forward tone to contrast the Trump campaign style of this being a dire situation of impending disaster.
To me, it felt like there was a lot more negativity and dwelling on the awfulness of Trump than I had expected!
I felt the opposite. I was refreshingly surprised by how little she spent focused on him and the danger blah blah
And instead focused on the future
All this means is different people had different expectations
Perhaps you might try explaining what you mean about more negativity and how much awful has been at Trump.
Clinton chose the color white because it’s associated with the female suffrage movement. We can talk about how it came across to someone who didn’t know that, but that was the reason.
And how many swing voters in 2016 knew that?
Don't know, but what I just wrote, verbatim, was "we can talk about how it came across to someone who didn't know that."
Both statements are true. Reiterating your statement, impatiently, does not advance the discourse
Would not say I was impatient, sounds like projection
I recall this being widely discussed in the lead up to the speech. If anyone in the general public was aware of the speech they likely would have been aware of the color choice. But it’s also important to not that most people don’t pay much attention to things like clothing choice during a DNC speech. We watch this stuff because we’re nerds.
Nate was wrong about the association (I had no idea Queen Elizabeth wore a white dress) but wearing white was another example of Clinton emphasizing gender above all else, by associating herself with the suffragettes. The arrogance was assuming she was going to be the first female president before she’d even won.
Weird I thought she chose white because she converted to Catholicism to court Midwest votes and was having her 1st communion.
Thanks. I was going to point that out
See
💯
I agree with your point but think it was the wrong choice in trying to win the election. Maybe it shouldn't but that would turn some people off. Maybe save those tributes for after you win. Also acknowledge it is easy to critique in hindsight.
Yeah, could be
I had and have no idea if that is why she chose white but I will tell you most people especially men had no idea
Cool. I do know, and it's why I pointed it out, and also why I noted that some people might not have known.
The injection of "Privilege" had me sitting up a little straighter. I've always considered myself privileged. Growing up in the 50s and 60s, white, middle class, access to a private school, and college paid by my father, who did not go. But to hear a black woman say that to a room filled with many life stories different from mine was something else. Her mother instilled that knowledge in her. We are all privileged. And with privilege comes service. And like her mother told her, stop complaining. Do something. I pulled a "Gus" and started crying.
Left and right, we can nearly all agree that Hillary Clinton was the worst major Presidential candidate since the 80s. It's good that there's still something that can bring people together. 🥰
You can love Hillary, think she would have been a great President, and still think she was the worst Presidential candidate since the 80s. Candidate is quite a different job than President.
Right, this is the point. She was a terrible *candidate*, and everyone objective can agree on that.
I agree, she wasn't an ideal candidate. I would venture to guess that she's probably in Nate's league in terms of intelligence, but often the most intelligent people struggle with coming off as "normal". Hillary just didn't have the gift of plausibly passing herself off as one of the great unwashed, while Kamala has it down pat. I don't know if much of this is due to her upbringing or a trait she developed long the way.
I also don't know what's going to happen on November 5th (I defer to Nate's reading of the poll tea-leaves!!), but everything about Kamala radiates the fact that she's going to have a lot of fun over the next 74 days, and will thoroughly enjoy every opportunity to send a zinger Trump's way!!! She reminds me of a contemporary SueAnn Nivens, but without the evil undertones.
Remember, Hillary began life as a Republican. She worked for the Goldwater campaign. She also endured a lot of abuse and traitorous behavior in public from her husband. That would make it very hard for her to open herself publicly to the enthusiastic joy that seems to have been a basic part of Kamala's life experience.
I'm not objective, but I at least try to look at things as objectively as possible. In what sense was she a terrible candidate? Donald Trump was a terrible candidate. The enduring shock of the 2016 election is that he won in spite of being a terrible candidate. I think that looms so large in people's minds that they forget that every candidate in living memory has had gaffes and bungled speeches — even the winners. Are you really going to sit here and argue that she was worse at being a candidate than Bob Dole? Ross Perot? Mitt Romney? On what basis?
The fact that Hilary had been a first lady didn't help. But that she has always been the smartest person in the room, but no one notices her, made her a strange combination of insecure, annoyed and a little entitled. She seems, outside of politics, to be a fun and worldly person worth having a beer with. Kamala, on the other hand, is not just someone you'd want to have a beer with, she's someone you'd want to go on vacation with!
In 2016, there were a lot of factors that led to the loss. Everyone, including Hilary, thought she was going to win easily, so a lot of people sat it out. No one believed Trump was really as much of an "unserious" liar, sore loser, complainer, and a**hole as he is. They actually wanted to give an outsider a try. Hilary collapsed after all the talk of her being sickly. The f'ing email stupidity. The press couldn't get enough of Trump. And yes, she talked WAY too much about being a woman, and barely visited the midwest (insecure, annoyed about Bernie being popular there, and entitled that she had it locked up). Ugh. Why'd you get me started thinking about this again? Maybe the lessons are important.
Failed to campaign hard in the upper midwest would be best argument for why she ran a poor campaign.
I don't buy that.
First of all, Clinton had more than double Trump's ad spend in Michigan and Pennsylvania. In Wisconsin, she underspent Trump, but she spent 5x as much as Trump on ads in Iowa, which didn't end up mattering.
Second, we can look at campaign visits, but I'll preface this section by saying that a regression analysis showed rallies had almost no impact on state-by-state results in 2016. Pennsylvania: 15-14 visits (Clinton-Trump). Michigan 4-7. Wisconsin 0-5. Iowa 4-6.
Third, those states you call the upper midwest were called the "Blue Wall." They weren't swing states. Wiconsin had gone blue since 1984. Obama won it by 7% in 2012. Almost every poll had Clinton up 5-12% in 2016. ZERO polls showed her behind. There was no reason to think it would be so close. It's a similar story in Michigan: hadn't gone red since 1988. Obama won by 10% in 2012. Only one poll showed her behind (by 2%). SEVEN polls showed her winning by DOUBLE DIGITS. I won't belabor the point, but it's pretty much the same for Pennsylvania. Blue since 1984, Obama won by 6, etc. etc.
So not only does it not make sense to say she "failed to campaign hard" in the upper midwest, but you can't even reasonably make the argument that she should have campaigned harder in the upper midwest given what we/she knew in 2016. If that was really the best argument, then do you now take back what you said about her running a poor campaign?
No one covered her speeches and rallies. The media decided they weren't engaging - and they really weren't. She wasn't liked. Truth seems to be that if you lose elections, you continue to lose elections. Once she had lost to Obama, it was not a good idea for her to be the candidate. I thought the same thing about Biden in 2020. He barely won. He is not as well-liked as people try to say he is. Very very few (not none) who have lost primaries have ever gone on to win the Presidency. I'm glad Kamala got out after 5 minutes into the primary in 2019. It seems more irrelevant.
I agree Clinton was not nearly the politician her husband was, and no match for Obama. That speaks only to stagecraft; her skills as president would have undoubtedly been exemplary given her intelligence, wonkiness and years of experience (and her mind-boggling public-facing strength in the face of unthinkable betrayal by her so-called ‘partner’). To win in American politics you have to have steak AND sizzle. In 2016, unfortunately, you apparently didn’t even need steak. I think Nate nailed it, especially with his photographic examples of Clinton and Harris.
I agree. But in some quarters you’ll be told it’s sexist to consider her a poor candidate.
"Nearly" everyone. Initially I made that mental mistake of conflating "worst candidate" with a bad or inept person.
This is where I land. I am almost 100% in line with her politics ("a hemispheric common market with free trade and open borders" anyone?). But she was a thoroughly awful candidate and did not know her audience at any point. I tend to think 2008 Hillary would have smashed Trump, but by 2016 she was so out of touch.
Romney could be equally bad. But maybe Romney and Clinton suffered from the same problems (cold, elite, technocratic, basket of deplorables/47%). They both felt strongly they would win contrary to evidence (in Romney’s case the polling should have hit him in the face, but it didn’t).
You never know, but they both probably would have been good Presidents. Being a candidate is quite a different thing.
It’s annoying to me that campaigning skills have so little predictive value to how well you govern. It’s almost like you have to compete at the Olympics in wrestling and if you win you get to do the marathon after.
Contrary to what evidence in 2016? It's easy to Monday morning quarterback a past election, but if you're trying to imply that there was plenty of ignored contemporaneous evidence that Clinton would lose in 2016, I don't believe you. Donald Trump overperformed polls by 7-8% in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin while simultaneously underperforming polls by ~3% in states like Nevada.
It would be one thing to suggest that public opinion shifted late in the campaign, driven by events like Comey's letter 11 days before the election. It's entirely another thing to suggest that Clinton felt strongly that she would win contrary to evidence. I ask again: what evidence?
To be honest I think she could have won in a different cycle.
The main reason she lost in 2016 is that she was the insider and Trump was the outsider in the year of Brexit and a global populist movement. One that is still going on btw.
Let's not also forget that we all watched her approval take a precipitous dive after the 11th hour statement from Comey in late October. Coupled with the fact that she still won the popular vote anyway, we were only one or two distinct events away from a very different outcome.
This is your occasional reminder that “the popular vote” is meaningless in the current system because the total would be completely different if voters in red and blue states weren't locked in.
I am of course aware or the electoral college, I only mention it to illustrate that it was a close race that could have gone another way. let's not forget Hillary's competition when it comes to "worst candidate" even in the timeframe you provide. Dole, McCain and Romney all lost their presidential bids by wider electoral margins than Hillary.
The idea that Hillary is a generationally bad candidate, just like the idea that trumps victory was a mandate for right wing populism or the idea that Biden's election was a decisive rejection of it (not claiming you think either of these), comes from people assigning the zeitgeist to the winner in hindsight when the reality is, as Slaw said, sneezing on the wrong baby could have changed everything.
The popular vote is far from meaningless. Run a logistic regression and you’ll find it’s a very good predictor of winning the electoral college.
Trump won in 2016 by 56k votes. He lost in 2020 by 44k votes. This is out of over a hundred million cast nationally. When the margins are that tight farting while you're kissing a baby could cost you the election.
My take is that Brexit was extraordinarily close as well and since 2016 we've seen the rise of populists and outsiders like Le Pen, Wilders, Orban, Duterte, etc. etc. around the planet. I lean hard on demographic factors. It's happening in too many different countries to be coincidence.
Not following your math. Trump lost in 2020 by 7 million votes. If you are counting only battleground states due to the electoral college, Trump lost by over 80K votes in Pennsylvania alone.
Math--"Trump won in 2016 by 56k votes. He lost in 2020 by 44k votes"
Those are the votes that swung the SWING STATES in one direction or another. Who cares about those electorally irrelevant states like California and New York?
That math doesn't generalize. For one, there is no magic line that separates a battleground state from a non-battleground state. For another, no state is electorally irrelevant. Votes may count less in California, because of the electoral college, but the electoral votes are still needed, and hence the popular votes are needed. It's arbitrary to define GA, AZ, and WI as "the swing states." You can pose an infinite number of hypotheticals with various states, but that doesn't mean that candidates won or lost by a number that corresponds to an arbitrary hypothetical.
That's a very arbitrary choice of state when Biden had narrower margins to a loss with even closer states than Pennsylvania.
Trump lost in 2016 by that logic and yet somehow still took office.
Trump lost GA by around 10k votes in 2020 iirc, out of millions cast. The total margins in GA, AZ anf WI comes to about 44k and if Trump had won all three he would have been re-elected.
Finally a more nuanced comment. She lost due to a multitude of external factors.
All these problems are always multivariate. But I have to think that demographic change has got to be one of the biggest contributors.
I agree that HRC* (as well as any other remotely serious** contender for the 2008 nom, e.g. Edwards, Richardson, Biden, etc.) would almost certainly have won in 2008, assuming that the R primary campaign went as it did in reality.
* always an insider, her gender notwithstanding, so losing the "change" vibes wars to Obama, who was also IMHO a generational _campaigning_ talent, best since WJC and Reagan before him.
** So excluding e.g. Gravel or Kucinich.
Glad you included "nearly".
And yet the "worst major Presidential candidate since the 80s" somehow won the popular vote, 48.2% to 46.1%.
I think her biggest problem was unlikeability. You can say that is sexist. Trump was unlikeable But maybe that is not a conflict. For a woman to get elected in 2016 she needed to be more likeable
Joe Biden: Hold my beer.
Is it bad when I agree with almost everything Nate said? Surely I should go back and find a few points of contention?
The holy based part of the speech was when she morphed into Margaret Thatcher and you just know she’s gonna bitch slap Russia / China / Iran.
Also the 2nd person speaking before her was giga-chad Adam kinzinger - the campaign is doing a full courtship of Nikki Haley voters. (Something Bidens campaign was too arrogant to do)
This comment made me physically cringe - liberalism overdose
Why do you think Biden was not courting Haley voters? I thought Biden tried to build a very big tent.
By refusing to make public appearances, Biden wasn’t really courting any voters lol
this lol
in one interview, chris christie literally said Biden never called him
Why would anyone call Chris Christie?
Food eating contests?
I was pleasantly surprised. She was very strong in some parts and appeared Presidential. Remains to be seen whether she has improved in debates and interviews. Hillary ran like someone who thought she had the election in the bag and ran a very cautious, boring campaign. Harris is running like she's in a close race. Obama mentioned that in his speech as well (that it's going to be a tight race).
On CNN one of the commentators from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard said that Hillary's campaign manager should be indicted for malpractice it was so bad. I've forgotten his name, sorry.
Robby Mook
Right. David R. Gergen was the consultant who said he should be prosecuted for malpractice. Gergen has served in various positions under Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Is now a professor of public service and founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Harris has been a fantastic candidate so far, and anyone who wanted Biden to continue should be devastated at how terrible their takes were. I'm particularly thinking of one person who uses Dr. in all her tweets.
Your clip pulling should have led to more insight from pundits on, "If she makes a switch to being moderate, can she be effective there?" Her past speeches and the original boom should have led to more analysis about "What would she look like in a compressed and moderated timeframe?" instead of "Will she run as the height of her 2020 Medicare for All" takes?
Instead, they all assumed folks would be livid at Biden getting passed up.
It was clear that Biden was headed for defeat, so obviously we needed to roll the dice; but I admit I wasn't expecting much from Harris, considering her 2020 primary campaign. All I was hoping for was "less of an underdog than Biden, and with less risk of total catastrophe."
Harris has handled things much better, and the electorate has responded much more strongly, than I imagined.
If Harris wins (and I know that's an if, certainly not something I'm taking for granted or deluding myself into thinking is a guarantee), I will be very, very curious to see how her administration and the wider Democratic Party apparatus handles a retrospective on what happened between the debate and the decision to drop out.
I really hope it isn't something that gets swept under the rug or dropped in the name of party unity. It is genuinely impossible to overstate how disastrous and short-sighted the decision making of people like DNC chair Jamie Harrison, campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon, and most of the Democratic Twitter influencers was in the debate aftermath. They almost drove the party and the whole country off a cliff to serve the ego of one person.
Obviously no one can really do anything about the Twitter influencers other than stop listening to them, but I personally don't see how the party can ever trust Jamie Harrison or Jen O'Malley Dillon in a position of decision making authority ever again. And that sucks, because they have done good work in the past and seemed like competent people who could help the party. Their decisions to circle the wagons around Biden revealed such a flaw of sound judgement that if I were the next Democratic presidential candidate in 28 or 32, I wouldn't let them come anywhere close to the circle of trust.
I agree that it was blindingly obvious that Biden was too old to be re-elected. But he won the primaries, he gained the delegates, and it is emphatically NOT the job of the people you mention to sabotage or undermine the candidate. In fact, their job is the opposite. You could say they should have resigned but then someone else would do the job. I was more infuriated with Sanders and AOC, for example, who are not paid to promote the presumptive candidate.
Bernie and AOC are by far the smartest members in their faction in congress, and their strategy was pretty well-informed:
1. They clearly knew Biden was going to drop out, based on closed-door discussions they would've partaken in with the rest of their party
2. They also knew the party establishment - Pelosi, Schumer would be the ones pulling the strings to organize Biden's withdrawal.
3. Therefore, them continuing to publicly support Biden made it look like the party as a whole rejected him, rather than the progressive wing organizing an uprising against him. Much better optics overall.
Don't really buy that, because if that was true, the thing they would have done was just sit out of the argument. Instead they really went to bat for Biden in a way that was odd and which suggested they thought the effort to toss Biden was somehow obviously counterproductive.
AOC went on Instagram Live to answer questions about her position and seemed visibly worried about the possibility of Biden dropping out. Bernie did an interview with Issac Chotiner where he admitted Biden clearly had memory issues but backed him strongly anyway.
My analysis for what was going on with them after actually observing their behavior is that they see the president as a bundle of policies, and so saw the effort to toss Biden as insane because his replacement would be the same bundle of policies but after a bunch of extra fighting. It really never occurred to them that the president is a person and so could be bad in a way distinct from being more conservative.
Your first point is an incredibly bold, evidence free assertion. I'd bet a lot of money that neither Schumer or Pelosi knew Biden was going to drop out. Neither Bernie or AOC knew he'd drop out. Because NOBODY knew, Biden was insistent on staying, nobody could force him out, and that was why there was a real public battle to make it happen.
The only reason Biden won the primaries is because his campaign, with the acceptance of the DNC, withheld relevant information about the health and competence of the candidate. The amount of unscripted events Biden has done in the past two years is unacceptable, and the only reason that happened is because people on his staff realized that the more people saw Biden off the teleprompter, the more they would realize he cannot serve another four years.
I don't accept the excuse that they were just doing their job, because they chose to do that job! Unlike the public, the people running his campaign had access to the president and saw his competence and fitness level. JOD chose to be Biden's campaign manager knowing full well that he was not fit for office and ran a campaign strategy based around running out the clock on any real challenge from the party. Jamie Harrison chose to push a lie about ballot access in order to make the political choice to attempt a rushed virtual roll call. Those choices reveal profound cowardice and lack of judgment.
Someone with the character, strength, and judgment required to be a senior operative in a political party would have resigned rather than run or abet a campaign of deception for a candidate not physically capable of the office.
Let’s not pretend that was a real primary, though. Biden had no real opponents—the whole cast of rising stars who auditioned for Harris’s VP did not go up against him. They would have given him a run for his money and possibly handed him a defeat if they had. How many people do you know who voted in a Democratic primary this year?
The reason Biden had no real opponents is because nobody thought they could win.
Dean Phillips is pretty much the definition of a “generic Democrat” and he got like 10% of the vote. If Dem partisans really thought Biden was so weak why didn’t they park their votes with Phillips?
Let's not pretend it didn't happen, though. It was a real primary that actually happened. There are actual numbers from 50 states (I presume) showing how many people voted and for whom. Remember Michigan and the Uncommiteds? Just because it was completely lame, and effectively uncontested, doesn't change the roles of the campaign manager and the head of the DNC.
Have talked to quite a few people who are marveling at the contrast from her performance in 2020 and as VP. The confidence, the positivity, the finesse, the extremely high level of non-weirdness. And yes, how much will it matter? Trying to anticipate the unexpected over the next 70 some days.
I think a ton of this boils down to the fact that for a lot of the loudest of the Dem primary base, prosecutors were not being held in a good light in 2020, so she wasn't really being herself then. Now? Now, there's lots of reasons that her prosecutorial background is helpful and she seems much more herself.
It's because she has been 100% scripted since announcing a run this time, whereas last time she actually spoke off the cuff, as she normally speaks, and people didn't like it
There’s no doubt in my mind that she’s being coached. And she didn’t write the speech. But she wisely is agreeing to coaching.
Hilary was either doing more on her own or had poorer help.
Or listening to Bill who seemed intent on sabotaging her 😔
It probably matters quite a lot! Before she became the nominee and adopted the general rhetorical style and pivot on stuff like immigration and criminal justice that she’s been using since, she had terrible favorables and polled badly in head to heads against Trump. Her staggering improvement since then has made her genuinely competitive.
I think the timeframe is more like 50 days, the first debate is right around the corner and I doubt a ton changes macro level until then. They'll hype the hell out of his key that debate is, but after that is when plenty of unknown is likely to pop out and change narratives.
Nate ascribes these differences to candidate effects but there's another important explanation: the deeply sexist double standard that is applied to women's ambition in politics (and other walks of life for that matter). It's obvious that both Hillary and Harris are incredibly ambitious people (our whole political system is based on ambition after all https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed55.asp) but Hillary's rise was a brutal 30 plus year battle royal and so all sorts of negative attributes get stamped on her from that and her ambition gets seen as a bad thing (she's vain, grasping, greedy, entitled, what an evil Lady McBeth, gotta vote for Trump!) While Harris was able to step in in a parliamentary style candidate switch and dodge those charges by pretending that she doesn't seek power, oh no, it was thrust upon her you see.
It's nonsense of course, but nonsense the we will swallow because of our double standard in these matters. Pretty unfair, but then again politics ain't bean bags, as they say.
(Also sorry but Nate's line about "a coronation" is ridiculous. Even if you hate Hillary she really did win all those primaries, it was Harris who was (smartly!) "coronated" by party actors here.)
If Nate wants to say "here are my 2016 tweets saying I didn't think Clinton was giving a very good speech" I would be interested to read them. Otherwise this post seems pretty results-based.
This made me curious, so I went and found the FiveThirtyEight live blog of the 2016 convention. Here are all of Nate's quotes that have to do with the content of the speech:
"Is it optimism or patriotism? There’s certainly been some defense of Obama’s accomplishments over the past eight years, as you’d expect from the incumbent party. But a lot of it is about articulating American values, with Democrats trying to co-opt some traditionally conservative and Republican values as their own."
"I wonder how much this speech is with the BernieBooers in mind. There aren’t a lot of long, quiet, drawn-out sections — instead an applause line every 15 seconds — which robs it of a little dynamism."
"As with Obama’s speech, there’s been almost no criticism of Republicans. Just criticism of Trump."
"After Trump’s speech last week, I said Clinton could respond by with a 1964 strategy — playing to the center, and touting her fitness for office as compared with her opponent — or a 2012 strategy, playing more to her base. There’s more 1964 than 2012 in this speech so far."
"I’ll just say this about Clinton’s speech: I’d written up a long item about my sense of where we stood after the convention, and I didn’t have to change very much at all after Clinton’s speech. It was about what we should have expected based on the themes of the convention overall and tonight specifically."
Seems like it came across as a pretty mid speech, for whatever that's worth. This did remind me how awkward the overabundance of applause lines was
Whether or not he found it mid, the “1964 or 2012” part suggests he found it to be focused on the center and her fitness for office, which isn’t the impression one gets from today’s post. Thanks for finding this, really interesting!
Yeah you would get the sense from the zeitgeist that Democrats trying to reclaim patriotism this year is a new thing—but 2016 was right after Hamilton!
It is probably true that liberal patriotism coded as cringe after Trump won, but viewing 2016 through that lens is a sort of results-based bias.
One thing I think you’re kind of getting at but not quite hitting on here is just how long Hillary was basically an heir apparent. The moment she ran for Senate there was a sense that it was inevitable that she’d one day be the Democratic presidential candidate. She already came on the scene with some collateral baggage from the end of her husband’s second term and all the Lewinsky drama, and then the GOP political apparatus had a decade and a half of knowing that she’d likely one day be the opposing candidate at the top of the ballot. They just had so much time to lay the ground work to paint her in such a way that people “just didn’t like her”. How many other recent presidential candidates were obviously waiting in the wings for that long? I can’t think of any between my living memory and my knowledge of history. Half of them weren’t even household names until well into the primaries. 2008 was supposed to be the year for which she’d been incubated to take the role of Presidential candidate, and then Obama came in on a whirlwind. She had to wait another 8 years, all during which the GOP still knew she’d one day run and were able to keep chipping away at her. By the time she became the candidate in 2016, she was politically “overripe”.
I don't know how you can equate "married to a president" with "a brutal 30 plus year battle" -- Hillary's candidacy would just flat out not have happened, if she hadn't been first lady. Contrast that with the fact that until Kamala was elected senator of CA, I didn't even know her husband's first name -- and I live in CA. Kamala has orders of magnitude more credibility for truly earning her place than does someone who essentially married their way into being politically relevant. And that's before addressing racial barriers Kamala has faced, that Hillary has not.
Witness all the people who're dying to see Michelle Obama run for something, no matter how many times she says she's not interested. If Michelle DID run, say for senate -- you couldn't fairly say she'd got that chance on her own merits. Her merits, and Hillary's, are impressive and necessary, but insufficient: there are millions of smart, highly educated, savvy women with successful professional careers in America. There are only twenty-odd women senators. The main reason Hillary moved from the first group to the second, was a guy named Bill. You can't say that about Kamala.
"Brutal 30 plus year battle": HRC was a major political figure during the 90's, the whole First Lady cookie bake-off was created by her enemies to shame her for her comments about baking cookies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Lady_Bake-Off. Rush declared that she murdered Vince Foster and there was a massive investigation into this. Conservatives routinely portrayed her as a communist lesbian she demon.
Whatever you think of her she was very much in the eye of the storm.
Totally - HRC was in the public eye 25 years, suffering the withering effects of the right's hate against her from '91 to '16. She made the cardinal sin of not "going away" - going from 1st Lady, to Senator, to Presidential Candidate, to SOS, to Presidential Candidate, to Nominee. That and the impact of overall Clinton fatigue really hurt her. No, she wasn't the most natural, dynamic candidate like BO or BC, but she was better than Gore or GWB. Clearly, KH learned a lot in 4 years and has really paid attention. The short cycle here and the lack of being defined by the right works in her favor.
I'd put it this way: Biden is kind of the exception. For a long time Dems had successful candidates for the presidency that ran as fresh faced outsiders: Obama, Bill, Carter, JFK etc voters seem to like that and while Harris was the VP she is kind of new on the national stage in a lot ways.
Actually Hillary was expected by her graduation class to be the first woman president. Her friends were very confused about why she went off to Arkansas with Bill Clinton.
The coronation remark is not about Hillary winning primary contests; it's about her overweening sense of entitlement and the way it emanated from her. She has the cold patrician poise of museum board ladies and nonprofit CEOs. A kind of self-satisfied stiffness and a pseudo-warmth that reads to ordinary people as elitist and smug but in a calculated and restrained and thus phony way. We all knew that she thought she deserved to win in 2016. We all knew she resented Obama in '07-'08. Even back then the coronation vibes were strong!
Yes, Harris may have had the nomination handed to her, but she doesn't come off like Hillary. She is doing much much better than I expected at seeming relatable and positive in an authentic but palatable way. I bet if you asked people which woman they'd want to get tipsy with, the answer would be Harris and not Hillary.
I don't think this kind of "theatre criticism as political analysis" is helpful, it largely boils down to someone just saying "I despise that women", which is fine, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it's not substantive.
Gotta love that preening arms-akimbo tone: "this isn't helpful." You're choosing not to hear the critique and instead just complain about misogyny. But there is a difference between how Clinton is perceived and how Harris is coming across. And you can bitch that it's theater criticism, but optics and performance are part of politics. And if I recall there is plenty of data about how Clinton is perceived. Over and over again I see people with your take and tone somehow insisting that something isn't meaningful just because you don't think that's the way it should be. I don't get it.
Nate, pundit mode continues not to look good on you. There is just so much conjecture and so many unfounded assertions in here. I can read that anywhere. Please, stick to your strengths.
If you don't like it, don't read it. Myself, I enjoy reading Silver's point of view on this stuff, even when it's not backed up by data. (For one thing, he's clear about the fact that it's not backed up by data, instead of dragging in some bogus statistics to dress it up.)
Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes not, but it's always worth a read.
Nate has been known to miss on his pundit takes much more frequently compared to his polling analysis takes, but this was a genuinely good piece that succinctly summed up the differences between the Harris campaign's messaging and Hillary's campaign messaging. One of his better pieces, albeit he's still committed to using the word "wokeness" which doesn't read very well, "Social Justice Leftism" is a much less loaded term that describes what he's talking about.
Imagine being a writer and having someone in the peanut gallery say something like this. Jeez.
Imagine critiquing a piece of writing - what a concept!
Letters to the editor existed for a reason.
Yes, but the editor would only publish them if there is some substance to the critique. "So much conjecture and so many unfounded assertions" without giving one example? And the tsktsking, "it doesn't look good on you, stick to your strengths." Just so.... patronizing. Patron's privilege, I guess.
Ok for just one example, how about using random screenshots of Hilary and Kamala to try and make a point about vibes or something? Where is the rigor in that?
He was making a point about voter appeal, and I thought those “random” screen shots underlined the point effectively.
Couldn't disagree more. I thought this was an outstanding analysis. Some data is self-explanatory. Some is not. For me, this piece was brimming with juicy insights.
Such as? Beyond the length of the speech, which assertions were backed by data?
Some data points considered: 1) Facial expressions, 2) Language style differences, 3) Topics covered, 4) Approach to gender, 5) Mentions of race, 6) Redefinition of privilege, 7) Handling of Gaza. A speech does not contain self-explanatory data, like poll numbers. But it does contain data that can be analyzed.
I really don’t think that two random screenshots of facial expressions counts as data.
OK. I mentioned six other areas.
Eh, I think he's hit-or-miss as a pundit. His piece from a couple of days ago was pretty bad, but this one was solid imo
That's my general thought too. He's no better than the other pundits at punditing - but he does have good takes like this one.
Right, he’s a replacement level pundit and an above replacement level modeller / forecaster. So he should just do that!
Eh, I thought this one was equally bad. But even if I agreed with you, I’d object to this piece because I don’t want Nate to spend his time on punditry, I want him to spend his time on polling / model insights!
patronizing
/ˈpātrəˌnīziNG/
adjective
apparently kind or helpful but betraying a feeling of superiority; condescending.
Definitely agree with you on that. I subscribe mainly for the models
"I can read that anywhere"...
But you don't, do you?
Because if you did, you would be OK with Nate doing it too.
lol what exactly is wrong with Nates wrong here? Tbh you are the person who doesn’t seem to have any knowledge other than unfounded assertions on your side.
I’ve been following Nate since he’s been writing about 2012. I’ve always seen Nate making all of the pundit overall, and he’s been generally good at because no one but a Vulcan thinks one can always think no one should write pundits.
Totally disagree. I only come here for the pundit articles like this one.
Great article. But one request - in the year of 2024, can we not refer to space and AI as “male-coded”?
When the gender breakdown of interest in those subjects does not overwhelming favor males as it does currently, then they will no longer be "male-coded".
https://x.com/BillKristol/status/1826950713622036770
I found this to be super interesting. The campaign is framing Kamala in an entirely different light than the Clinton campaign framed Hillary...and it's working.
As a candidate Biden preached unity and moderation. How did that turn out? You can blame the attack driven Republicans, but jujitsu style flipping the opponent can be as effective as putting on the brass knuckles and duking it out. My bet is President Harris will abandon all of the niceties she has been touting, and go full House and Senate lefty immediately after she delivers a conciliatory inauguration address.
I'll take that bet any day.
So I'll take it that you are forecasting a Democratic House and Senate?
Sounds good.
But FYI, we actually have progressives in SF, and Harris isn't one of them. In fact they consistently campaigned against her whenever there was an option.
We can only hope.
Depends on how one defines the terms.
Some call full lefty stuff like housing policy offering tax breaks for new hime buyers, expanded child tax credits, etc. but those policies are popular when polled om their own.
Full on hare crackdown on price gouging would be more left, but also harder to implement in a full "force business to do what I want" way one frames it.
I'm hopeful that her housing policy will be what's been percolating in California and in climate wings: pushing urban areas to have more density.
Housing is expensive because we sprawl, and that severely limits how many people can live in the most desirable areas. Supply and demand are badly out of balance in those areas, with predictable outcomes.
So, boost supply in desirable areas by building upwards and denser. Most other countries do it.
We'll see though. If it turns out to be "tax breaks for first time homeowners" and that's it, I'll be pretty disappointed.
Fair point, and I think your solution is pretty safe in terms of her proposing it and folks most impacted "urban centers" being supportive.
Rural housing would be a stiffer task for her to provide solutions and get buy in. Either governors in red states will balk or those voters will get some partisan cues to dislike top down help. But it's a huge economic problem, states trying to lure businesses to rural areas struggle to offer enough housing to support additional workforce for new business. So they either offer tax breaks to business or only see cheap rental units go up.
At least if that happens, the government will actually be doing something to try and better the country, as opposed to under the GOP where there goal is as little government action as possible, beyond tax cuts.
“As a candidate Biden preached unity and moderation. How did that turn out? ”
He won.