An alternate explanation as to why Harris underperformed Democratic Senate candidates: voters blamed the administration for high inflation but largely gave the rest of the federal government (i.e. Congress) a pass.
As to the fundamentals portion of the model miscalculating Trump's eventual margin in the popular vote, I suggest viewing Ezra Klein's recent appearance on "Pod Save America" where he told Democratic partisans to "shut the fuck up" about crime and the economy. Voter fury about the direction of the country was substantial and the Democrats telling ordinary citizens that they were imagining things was a terrible approach.
This is just an anecdote, but a few months ago I was eating dinner at a restaurant with some friends. The waitress was black and we were discussing politics so we asked her who she was voting for.
I must be telling the story wrong because no one is surprised that she answered "Trump". The straw that broke the camel's back? She has a 9 year old nephew and an 11 year old niece and they were being harassed by the homeless as they walked to school every day. She, her sister and her mother all called the cops only to be told that the police could do nothing.
Is this a crime? Does it get recorded somewhere and boost reported crime statistics? Of course not. But I suspect that experiences like this are a major component behind why city dwellers feel that life has gotten worse. And, as Ezra Klein noted, Trump saw much larger gains in urban areas than the suburbs or rural precincts.
Yea I’m in California and the new bill increasing crime persecution passed by a substantial majority. Crime may officially be low but that’s simply because people aren’t being prosecuted.
Also keep in mind that the NCVS and the UCR typically are pretty close to one another but they diverged in a major way starting in 2022, with the NCVS showing historic increases in reported crime victimization.
That's not consistent with a narrative of falling crime, it's consistent with a narrative where crime is going up but people don't bother calling the police.
But is it really that useful to prosecute people? Prison doesn’t help people, it’s costly and brutal, and bad for families. Government rehab and psych programs could at least help with crime…as well as community centers and outreach…in a long-term way
We’ve had waves of people walk into stores steal stuff and walk out repeatedly, keeping the threshold under $950 so it stays a misdemeanor, which is often still not prosecuted. California got to go the three strikes law to felony conversion in 2020 and overwhelmingly just voted it back in this year. What else do you do here.
It’s a problem that people are impatient and don’t think long-term about solutions but I guess you can try to build those solutions while combatting crime. Poverty is a real reason for crime too that’s a more long-term issue to work on
No one actually had this option, nor would it be an easy sell, but if they tested the programs some places and had considerably improved results they might be able to. I think it's worth it, obviously. I'm a mercy not punishment person
I seriously doubt we have the money or workforce for a bunch of decentralized, psych and rehab based programs, particularly in high cost Blue cities. I think there would need to be centralized programs, perhaps in custodial situations.
Well, I think it’s a long-term development idea, where you’d have to experiment and start with small case studies. Preventing criminals to begin with would help, combatting income inequality at least by being fierce on antitrust if not taxes and things would help the country so much with its turning so helplessly to the crazy. Urban planning and stuff. Yeah, it’s just hard when at least half but probably more of the time impatient “crack down on crime” politicians get easy wins we’ll see what happens; it’s a little scary to imagine Trump’s possible measures
I can’t find your Laken Riley comment for some reason. The stats I’ve heard on illegal immigrant crime is it’s lower than citizens for the same crimes. To me that makes sense. If you’re an illegal immigrant there’s way more incentive not to get caught. To me, if you’re upset about Laken Riley and you vote for Trump it makes zero sense, he’s an unrepentant rapist who has gotten away with it more than once. You should definitely get taken away from society for violent crimes but I don’t see the incentive in making prison such a hellhole that it only makes people worse. I don’t see people who commit crimes in general as irredeemable human beings
My question to you is what do you do with the specific individual that murdered Laken Riley. He's in police custody right now. What should society do to him?
So maybe the “crime contributed to a sense we were on the wrong track” doesn’t hold up as an argument for the election result since we voted to elect a candidate who is a criminal and is surrounded by other criminals. I think it might have been something else. Stick with inflation… that argument works better for you.
I think this is the right read. If you look at Canada where provincial elections happen on random schedules relative to the federal election, a lot of the premiers (governor equivalents) have been re-elected recently and/or remain popular, even as the Federal incumbent is down 15-20 points in the polls.
Basically I think it’s equivalent to how when things aren’t going well for a sports team midseason, they fire the head coach, not the sports science person. One throat to choke is enough.
If Trump is good at anything, he’s good at sales, the ruthless, do-anything-to-win, cult-leader kind. It’s hard, you have to fight ten times harder if you’re going against a party with as few scruples about misleading their voters as Republicans. Republicans do not want to help workers or poor people. They are always lying
I would say that the Democratic party over the last four years did pretty much nothing for the working class over the last four years and as a consequence Trump just won.
Trump literally blocks our highly conservative immigration compromise for his own election purposes and no one bitches about that, they all think he is their savior on immigration. It’s just bs man. We did our best given Trump and Republicans’ obstinate political games
What I heard though back then was they were trying to reduce the need for immigration by working in central and South America. I do think this issue wasn’t his highest priority and they let it go too long but it was so hard with Manchin and Sinema to get anything through and even though a lot of people don’t prioritize climate, that was the right thing for Biden to do
I’m for compassionate inclusive and functional immigration system myself. Of course I would be right? But anyway as an environmental advocate I really think the world needs less nationalism not more
I can’t read anything you said beyond “as a.” Something f-Ed up with my app or internet…I think Dems did a lot considering their limitations with Congress. The Inflation Reduction act created a lot of jobs but it was a miracle given the situation, we didn’t have both houses really either half of Biden’s presidency. We could’ve done more. But why blame democrats when Republicans were the glaring reason any legislation didn’t happen???
Well the jobs were good-paying ones with security. Reagan was the one who got the government out of what was good for workers vis a vis big business, and Democrats like Clinton and Obama listened but it wasn’t good in the long run for workers to not have unions, republicans would never vote for adequate wage increases or govt help with healthcare that would make people be able to pay higher prices. Inflation we’ve discussed. The top economists have over and over been amazed by how well we recovered, even if that isnt all because of Biden. Antitrust is a way to stimulate competition as you know so corporations are forced to lower prices to be competitive…it’s longer term tho. So we were mostly blamed for things that weren’t our fault and if high prices are bad tariffs are not the answer but no one heard that pretty obvious point
Why would you say that? My impression was that they passed the Inflation Reduction Act and ever since Inflation has been rapidly falling. They pass the CHIPS act and ever since manufacturing has been booming. Wages have advanced 4% over inflation this last year. The economy is roaring. That is not why Trump won. Guess again. Something to do with feelings.
>An alternate explanation as to why Harris underperformed Democratic Senate candidates: voters blamed the administration for high inflation but largely gave the rest of the federal government (i.e. Congress) a pass.<
There may be some of that. But a simpler explanation may simply be that Democratic Senate candidates were generally fighting like hell to win. But in some of those states the Harris campaign quite understandably made no effort to compete.
Gallego is a really talented politician, and put in the work. (Like, he went in-person to meet every single tribal council, including hiking down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. From what I've read, he's the only living politician in the state to have done that.)
I don't interpret the sentence "Harris outperformed Senate candidates" to mean only "states everyone is looking at" but rather, I thought it referred to all Senate races. And yes, Harris obviously campaigned hard in those three states (she just didn't campaign hard in the *majority* of states where Senate races were taking place).
So I agreed with half of what you wrote, but on reflection I do need to lodge an objection to the second half.
People were, to a large degree, imagining things! Yes they were genuinely experiencing inflation, but imagining that it was Biden’s fault. They imagined that real wages had declined when in fact they increased. They imagined that crime was going up (it was going down). They imagined that illegal immigrants were invading (crossings are down).
And at least part of the reason they imagined this is that Fox News and other media didn’t disabuse them of this notion, either for ideological or audience-driven reasons.
I don’t think you can blame Democrats for at least trying to tell people that their perception doesn’t match reality. You just also need to do other stuff.
#3 is absolutely not true. That’s why I said real wages. They were briefly lower in 2022 as inflation outpaced wage gains, since then wage gains have materially outpaced inflation.
Those things don’t bother me, except I worry if people don’t have enough to put food on the table, and have to work three jobs. My own first concern is to avoid the horrors we are currently headed toward climate-wise. I’m a long term person. But I also have needs that require a healthy functioning bureaucracy
Crossings were down after three and half years of sky high rates that were 100% Biden’s fault. He lifted all of Trump’s restrictions on his first day in office.
"all"? i think he was trying to be humane, which voters did want. to me, immigration is largely a boogeyman issue motivated by racism and the failure of Republicans to spend money to make the system functional
It was still fucked up how people saw the economy. I mean, it was the inflation but why couldn’t they have made some argument about how we did better than our peers at recovering and inflation was worldwide? Also that everyone blames the administration for inflation, but it would’ve happened under Trump and he wouldn’t have brought about as good a recovery as we have now? I guess you can’t go into these “details” because it feels defensive, it just seems wrong that everyone was voting on the basis of something that was bullshit
There were some academic studies that suggested that Biden's stimulus contributed to a good portion of the inflation.
Trump at least had an excuse for sending out stimulus checks: the country was still dealing with lockdowns and high unemployment was rampant as a result. By the time Biden got to office the lockdowns were largely a thing of the past. What was the justification for sending out additional stimulus when the economy was already in recovery?
US inflation was often much lower than other countries’, though. There is no way Biden was responsible for a “good portion” of inflation and it’s clearly silly that people blame the president/incumbent party for a global problem.
4 basis points is 0.04%. Do you mean 4 percentage points (as in, inflation would have been 4% not 8% without stimulus)? If so, not a chance it had that much impact.
I saw studies that said that was a factor, but cutting child poverty in half isn’t a bad result, and there would’ve been inflation anyway, and the main issues were the Covid supply chain problems and the exacerbation of the problem with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the gas prices issue. Also, price gouging due to monopolies; the Biden admin was doing good antitrust work but it’s a long slow process. Inflation is largely the Fed’s jurisdiction though and that was completely not realized by voters it feels like
Stimulating a recovering economy didn't help. There was always going to be some inflation as the world recovered from Covid but excess stimulus poured gas onto a fire.
Keep bringing them on … Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth. Giuliani would be a good Assistant AG or Supreme Court Justice … the tide will never turn and none of this will backfire… ever
No question about that. Acute signs of national decay and corruption. We are devolving. Disappointing that people don’t care, but it isn’t surprising. We get what we deserve.
I mostly liked this because of "blamed the administration for high inflation but largely gave the rest of the federal government (i.e. Congress) a pass." I think ordinary citizens were overreacting for sure. It wasn't that different than before even if you use stats to prove it was worse, I just think Republicans were great at fearmongering, not that hard a thing to be great at. I also don't think homelessness was really the administration's fault for the most part, nor was inflation (but I already argued that below).
Calling it transitory was one of the dumbest pr moves I’ve ever seen. Somehow they outdid themselves by bragging that inflation was lower recently, which shows just how grossly they misunderstood the average voter — great news, your 20% higher prices from 2-3 yrs will only go up another percent or two next year and you should thank us for that.
I think people are suggesting culturally and on economic levels Latinos voted Trump. I don’t want to just speculate and say something that’s a generalization about a race. Certainly religion is a factor but maybe they’re susceptible to some of the same temptations as white people and white women who voted against their own equal rights
frankly illegal immigrants work for lower wages and I’m against that. it’s inhumane and it creates conflict over these unskilled jobs. that is the fault of the people running all those operations. it’s fucked up that our economy is reliant on this slave-like labor. women get raped with impunity. if you learn about these like meat packing places it’s horrifying
I actually don’t think so, I think there’s a lot of racist fear eg replacement theory…only citizens can vote so this means they are anti legal immigration
In any case I’m for increased legal immigration, pathways to citizenship, all that. It would be expensive of course. Deportations also expensive and tearing up families etc
I can’t read the whole thing. Will get back later. I think there are lots of different reasons Latinos voted for Trump but still white people were the killers
Well, still, they should’ve voted for the party that went quite far out of their comfort zone to make an immigration deal but they chose someone who didn’t even do what he said he would with the wall
those variables with an n of one presidential election. However, a string fish can swim upstream, so if Harris were materially better than the battleground senate candidates, she would have at least matched their vote totals. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect the presidential nominee to be a better candidate than a swing state senator. in fact, that’s why we have primaries.
It's a complicated issue. Those swing state Senate candidates, for example, were running ads where they broadcast their closeness to Trump while keeping their distance from Biden.
being biden’s vp did not help. however, harris did not have to seek the nomination just because biden backed out. she chose to value her ambition over her country.
at the time, it seemed like the safest bet. it was rather late. i think biden would've been great if he hadn't aged too much. lingering effects of worldwide not just us covid inflation was the real issue. it was kind of grand of her to step up in a way, you could also surmise. it was an uphill race so maybe not good for her in truth. plus there was the money
Sometimes, things are not all that complicated. When prices rise by 20% roughly in 3-4 years time period for a country in which 50% of the population has a hard time coming up with 500 bucks in an emergency, those are headwinds that are going to be difficult to overcome. If Trump had been a strong candidate, she would have lost by 10-15 points. The fact that she came this close is largely a testimony to Trump's flaws.
I'm in my mid 60s and I haven't seen price rises like this during my adult years. And there's nothing Biden could have done about inflation since it was due to a globalized supply chain. That mistake was the brain child of the bean counters during the neoliberal era. Built to minimize cost, it was never designed to be resilient in the face of disruptions.
Bottom line is that Covid is what enabled Joe Biden to eke out a win in 2020. On the other hand, Trump's 2024 win is due to Covid's lingering price rises.
Yes, sometimes, life is just that simple. "It's the economy, stupid."
I think the narrative separation and the visceral hatred of Democrats after the excesses since 2016 is not understood. The red states are largely unreachable for a Democrat. The Russia stuff, the questionable counts in 2020, the insistence on Trump being a criminal - no one in Red America believes that except the cranks. The presumption is that all the investigations and lawfare were politically motivated and you will never shake that belief.
I’m telling you the truth here with the full expectation that the Democrat freak show of collusion, rape and government overthrow on 1/6 is going to cost you more elections, which is ironic because the guy will never be on a ballot again. But maybe you’ll wise up by the 2030s. You need a consistent national narrative or you are just going to keep losing.
Yes it is _completely_ under Democratic control. You go to where the people are, you don't attract them to where you are. That never works.
Earning trust is step 1. People don't trust Democrats. Retail politics is how you earn that trust. You do things you say you are going to do, and have meaningful outcomes people can understand. IRA was useless in that regard - no one attaches that name to any significant benefit. What's the point of political acts if you aren't going to get credit for them?
After you earn that trust, you can move them in your direction. Probably not all the way, but this is how change is enacted. Not by passing laws, but by changing the culture.
Fetterman is a good example of how this trust could be earned. First, even though he's a stroke victim, he appears to be the smartest person in the Democratic party because he regularly sees right through what Trump is doing and calls it out in a way that even a Trump supporter could listen to and possibly question Trump about.
His response to the announced nomination of Matt Gaetz was to accuse Trump of "God-level trolling" (which made me laugh because it's so true) and wondered what his more reasonable colleagues across the aisle were going to think about this. I personally think Gaetz would be like the second coming of Ed Meese. But that response was an intelligent one that actually works. Democrats should try that more often.
Trump was so good at getting Democrats to attack his person, it was like the second coming of Bill Clinton in that regard. Except Trump was better - he deflected with ease and never had to say any crap about "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" or have a personal debate about "what is, is". Every moment someone is attacking his person, his ideas are being disseminated and taking root all over.
Retail politics, not technocracy or identity politics, is the future. Just like it was the past. I fully expect a recurrence of "FDR on the brain" just like Republicans had for 30 years after his death.
It’s also worth noting that Obama drove blacks to the polls like no other. 2008 marks the only year of any American election where black turnout exceeded white turnout. Whatever voted Obama lost for being black, I’m fairly certain he also gained for being black.
Nah.... That may make for good discussions within groups like this, but the average low-information voter that shops at Walmart probably isn't even aware of topics like those. What they do pay attention to is the fact a dozen eggs just jumped by a buck or their housing just increased by a couple hundred dollars. They see those things every week. Anybody that knows politics well knew that the Ds were facing very strong headwinds given inflation.
I've been watching American presidential elections since 1980. People vote their pocketbook - first and foremost. Not to say that there aren't other issues, but those other issues only become important after considering their economic situation.
My favorite element of this election cycle is the prevalence of “low-information” as a euphemism for stupid. It may have been somewhat common in prior cycles but I don’t remember it. I quite like it, though.
Actually, the low-information / stupid Walmart shopper was never going to vote for Harris. They were likely non-voters, but if they voted it would be Trump.
I completely understand the coping mechanism of blaming the electorate as being stupid or racist or misogynist (or all of the above), and believing that we ran a flawless campaign with a wonderful candidate and we were hamstrung by exogenous factors. The result is still fresh and raw so it makes sense.
The reality is that 2019-24 democratic policy positions on open borders, defunding police, criminal prosecution, green new deal, taxation / economy, identity politics, are all quite unpopular with independents / moderates in the electorate. My hope, as a non-progressive democrat, is that the party soon realizes that either a) our policy positions are wrong, or b) we have failed to educate, persuade and convince the electorate that our policy positions are correct. I have faith (albeit could be naive) that the powers that be will act accordingly.
I don’t consider ‘low information’ to be stupid, at all. They just have other priorities than people who are commenting here. They are not into politics, like some of us. I respect that they have other priorities in life. My last partner was exactly like this. She had no idea of specific policy positions and would not have been aware of the potential progressive policies that have been floated in recent years. However, she was aware of how Trump treated people and formed her opinion of who to vote for based on those impressions.
BTW, I am an Irish-Catholic traditional D from Chicago, who now lives in Ireland. Like you, I am close to the political center. I just don’t see how you win an election when prices rise by 20% in 4 years. If Trump hadn’t been such a poor candidate, the R could have won by 8+ points - independent of other past D policy positions.
If you are in your mid-60s, you seem to be forgetting the 1970s (about the time you were in high school). Inflation was 6% to 10% for long enough that it just felt normal. Then, when Paul Volker (fed chair) decided to break inflation's back he raised interest rates enough that mortgage rates were in the 15% - 18% range in the early 80s. That threw the economy into recession.
Yeah, Trump trashed the economy with Covid and Biden took a somewhat inflationary path out of it (remember a lot of the inflation came from the Covid-induced supply chain screwups). But it worked. That recession that everyone forecast never arrived.
This was a different path than what Obama took when he was handed the economy that GW Bush had trashed. But, Obama was criticized for 8 years by everyone for growing the economy too slowly.
Yes, I remember the inflation of the late 70s/early 80s well. I was in college then. However, it was quite different than our recent inflation since we had wage inflation in tandem with price inflation back then. In addition, it had been a part of the economy for a long period of time. Another difference was that labor contracts, and eventually SS, had COLA provisions (cost of living adjustments), so everything was rising at the same time. In addition, we were much more unionized at the time, so more people would actually get a COLA. However, don’t get me wrong, the inflation of that time period wasn’t good.
Fed Chairman Paul Volker eventually jacked up interest rates such that the prime rate hit 21% in early 80s. This resulted in the severe 1982 recession where unemployment hit 10.8% nationwide and was especially hard in the industrial Midwest. Unemployment in Michigan was 22% and 25% in Rockford, Ill. But this broke the back of inflation.
What was so severe this time around was that there was no significant wage increases except for SS, which has automatic COLA (which owes its origins to the inflation of the 70s). It was a sudden and dramatic spike for many people who haven’t seen much in the way of wages increases for almost a generation. There’s no way they could have handled it.
Real wages are higher today than when Biden started … so we had wage inflation in excess of price inflation 2021-2024 (in fact, lower income worker wage inflation has been part of price inflation the past 4 years.)
The '08 crash was not really directly the fault of the Bush government though. It was rampant speculation on mortgages that eventually blew up in everyone's faces. The only way Bush could have stopped it is if they had one of the like 5 people in the country that realized what kind of time bomb the American housing market was. Go watch The Big Short if you need a proper explanation.
I agree that Covid is why Trump lost in 2020. I didn't even take an interest in that election: I knew Trump would lose. A country won't keep the same leader after going through a trauma like that.
> 50% of the population has a hard time coming up with 500 bucks in an emergency
This is often repeated, but it isn't true. 63% of American adults say they can just pay a $400 emergency expense and another 24% say they can finance it. (source: Page 31 of https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2023-report-economic-well-being-us-households-202405.pdf). Lending Tree will report that ~50% number for a $1000 expense, but that's the same survey with the ridiculous "living paycheck to paycheck" numbers, so I'm not inclined to take it seriously.
About historical inflation, I think 1980 would like a word. But yeah, people really hated the inflation of 2021-2023.
Every year, for the last 15 years or so, I’d see articles appear stating how much reserves exist for a certain portion of the population. The figures vary slightly from year to year, but the theme is the last same. A significant portion of the population lives largely month to month, hoping no unanticipated bill comes in. This is a group, whose wages have stagnated for over a generation, and lives in tremendous economic anxiety. I have much more detail on subjects like this in my book entitled, “Winning the Race among Nations for Economic Superiority”, which is available on Amazon.
See my comments about the late 70s/early 80s inflation in other comments above this one.
Yes, but that was after a decade of high inflation. Everyone knew that it had taken place before Regan was elected. In fact, he won a landslide in 1980 because of this very fact. Sure the first two years of his term still had high inflation, but by year 3 it had abated and by 1984, the economy was humming with inflation gone. Hence his landslide victory in 1984.
You can thank Paul Volker - the Fed Chairman at the time. He jacked up interest rates to values now considered unthinkable. The prime rate hit 21% and resulted in the very severe 1982 recession. See my other previous comments above.
Inflation wasn't gone, it continued at a relatively high rate (by today's terms) for most of the 80s, but it was so much less than we had gotten used to, we were happy. You are correct that Carter got the blame for the early 80s economy. He was inept in office and didn't help his cause much.
Your are technically correct. I'm almost 67 and was working professionally at that time. However, there were COLAs in the labor contracts at that time, so wages were somewhat keeping up with the cost increases. A lot of the cause for the inflation were the 2 Arab oil embargos back in 1973 and 1979 and their aftereffects. At that time, there was much less globalization, which also played a role in the higher prices. Carter was a lousy president (but excellent afterwards), but there wasn't much he could do about inflation.
The thing I love most about Nate’s work is his willingness to tread into waters he knows people won’t like but to do so very self aware. “you don’t need another middle-aged white Substacker” is that kind of self awareness that people with his following miss a lot.
Even when I disagree with Nate (which is often in the matters of analysis),
The fact that he gives his full thoughts and identifies his own flaws makes it a refreshing experience in these days where the Performative Perfection Prophets. Arguments and discussions in good faith and all that.
I think that the larger political climate is also changing. There's been a lot of speculation that the woke tide has crested and is now in retreat. AOC, for example, just removed her pronouns from her Twitter/X bio.
Andy Beshear is one of the most pro-trans rights Dems and he’s being touted as a moderate by the article and comments so I feel like nobody knows what they’re talking about anymore.
I really fucking hate people casting LGBTQ+ issues as left or right wing. There’s nothing political about being trans. Had the republicans not made us enemy #1 there would probably be more trans republicans than just Blaire White and Caitlyn Jenner
By and large nobody cares about trans people. The issues are biological men competing in women's sports and the question of whether or not young children should be eligible for treatment. Look at what Moulton is saying.
The republicans themselves talk about “parents rights” to raise their children but then won’t let people raise their kids according to their doctors best advice if they’re trans?
Parents rights don't extend to child abuse. You can't lock your kid in a shed in the winter overnight.
By the same token parents who want to transition their kids at a very early age probably isn't Kosher in my book. Part of growing up is getting drunk and getting laid. It's monstrous to interfere in that process. Minor children cannot enter into legally binding contracts because the law and society in general don't believe they have the maturity to understand what they're getting into.
Transgender women on HRT are not biological men. Their testosterone levels are kept on par with a cis woman's by anti-androgenic medication, and their levels of athleticism are comparable to cis women's as a result.
Furthermore, policing trans women for being "too strong" or "having an unfair advantage" directly leads to cis women being transvestigated or subjected to invasive testing.
My initial thought after hearing about AOC removing her pronouns is that they abandon the trans thing for now but stick with racial issues. And from someone that would be more "anti-woke", I just don't see the racial thing ever going away because I just don't see representation ever being attained to the level that would be satisfactory to them. I think it might wain in the near future but return again in some other form.
What kind of representation though? Because it's plausible to me that you might see Hispanic representation in the ranks of Republican voters rise substantially over the coming years.
I think Kamala Harris was always bad at this, and the democrats were just too afraid of the social backlash to say so.
Biden didn't do her any favors, that is true. Depending on how "tinfoil hat" you want to get, I wouldn't be surprised if he deliberately sabotaged her. But Kamala lost this all on her own.
The only winner here is Pelosi and Schumer, who in one fell stroke managed to get rid of both Biden and Harris who they clearly viewed as dead weight for the party and opens the door to a more "preferred" candidate in 2028.
Only in the never-never land of the Democratic Party is Gretchen Whitmer a moderate. By that do you just mean that she isn't a communist? Most of us would think of a moderater as someone who's liberal on some issues, conservative on others, a compromiser on others, but more or less halfway between conservative and liberal. In the present Senate there are only three such, and one, Manchin, is retiring. The other two are Collins and Murkowski. Everyone else is clearly left or right, some farther out than others. If you want to call main line Democrats "moderate", does that mean you're willing to call, say, Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn moderates? I thought not. So the word "moderate", like the word "centrist", basically means in line with the DNC, the Big Three networks, the NYT and the WaPo. It covers ground that 20 years ago would have been considered liberal.
> It covers ground that 20 years ago would have been considered liberal.
Isn't that the nature of politics? That's what the "progression" in progressivism means lol.
There's lots of points of view that are considered moderate now that were extremely liberal 50 years ago, and conversely, points of view that were moderate 50 years ago but considered extremely conservative/reactionary today.
Absolutely right! People are called "extremist right-wingers" for positions that were those of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes. People are kicked out of the Democratic Party for positions that were the positions of their legendary Democratic fathers and uncles, or for positions they held six years earlier as vice-presidential candidates of the Democratic Party (Joe Lieberman). Here's the kicker. If you foolishly go along with the demands of these "progressives", don't imagine that those demands stop there. Having created a new thesis out of the previous (liberal) thesis and the (progressive) antithesis, that thesis is then challenged by a new (even more progressive) thesis. That is the Marxist/Hegelian philosophy.
That is not so. Republicans are calling positions of Nixon, Reafan and the Bushes as "too left wing to even be talked about." Are you attempting to gaslight us?
I'm not trying to imply that progressives are always right, because they're not. But sometimes they are, and then it's not surprising when those points of view start being considered moderate.
I find it extraordinary that over 50% of voters saw Harris as “extreme”. By the standards of every other OECD country, her economic positions would be pretty close to mainstream, and if supporting the rights of LGBTQ people and people of color is considered extreme, that says more about the voters than it does about her. The right (which by any reasonable measure is in fact extreme) has been very effective at demonizing policies that likely benefit the majority of the population.
America doesn't believe a woman can be President. Congress yes, President no. Also 54% of American adults have a 6th grade reading level or below. Democrats needs to run white males and talk simple to appeal to this population. FML.
Nikki Haley was actually doing pretty solid numbers all things considered. I was really rooting for some kind of miracle turnaround in the primaries there just so that we could have the irony that the first woman president was a Republican. (I think Nikki Haley would have won against most Democrat challengers in a landslide).
I don’t disagree that persisting high prices and Biden’s unpopularity contributed to Trump’s win but it is appalling to me how Nate and others in these comments either ignore or dismiss the impact of sexism, racism, voter suppression and an aggressive disinformation campaign with important contributions from Elon Musk and Putin.
Biden started off as a virtually 'dead' President in 2020 and continued to be protected by the liberal media for the years following up until his debate with Trump in 2024 - when even the liberal media could no longer carry on its protective pretence about his neurological state that had existed from 2020.
The liberal media - including Nate - is a victim of its own self-comforting fantasies. Trump won because he kept saying the liberal emperors have no clothes. The people agreed with him and voted accordingly. This is why Harris lost.
How can she be "replacement level" while underperforming by 2 pts?
By my math, she would have held the Blue Wall and become president if she did better by 2pt.
Improving by 1% means changing the mind of 1% of voter.
How many people have a hard time believing that Clinton or Obama could have converted an extra 1%? (Of course, these were exceptional politicians, but still).
Am I the only one who heard Kamala talk and felt like I was hearing an imposter? The word salad, the lack of confidence, the common habit of giving terrible answers to basic questions.
It felt like someone grabbed a random person off the street, gave then a few speach lessons, and said "Now it's up to you to save Democracy. Go."
And this isn't a female thing. Hillary or Liz Cheney never made me feel like this.
She was more articulate, had ideas of her own, had a stronger platform with way more explicit policy positions (compare this https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/ with anything the Harris campaign released). You might dislike Hillary, but to me at least she looked far more genuine. She seemed to run her campaign, for better or worse, in a way Harris never did.
I agree with your assessment of Harris. But Trump is so terrifyingly god-awful on every metric, any decent person should have beat him. Could Hillary have done it this year given what we know about him now and the nightmare we experienced the first time? The second Trump administration will be the same nightmare on quadruple steroids, a combination of stunning incompetence, criminality, absurdity and abomination.
1) Harris ran a flawed campaign, making the safe choice at nearly every juncture without taking the risks (picking Shapiro, going on Rogan) that could have meaningfully moved the needle. She played like a team that knew it was ahead and was trying to burn time, but no matter what public polls you were looking at the race was close and she didn’t have the instincts to put it away (whereas Trump probably takes too many risks)
2) Harris was a flawed candidate for the political moment. She knew the path to victory was presenting as a moderate and trying to force a referendum on Trump, but her history of being one of the most progressive senators made her the wrong vehicle for that message.
3) Democrats got complacent and stopped listening. Because Harris had drawn record fundraising and *they* were excited for her, they were sure everybody else was as well unless they were already solidly pro-Trump. For evidence of this, see the people who are still mocking those who voted for Trump because the price of eggs was too high.
That was my take as well. Distance yourself from Biden, get angry at the way things are, tell people how you are going to make their life better, and show people how dangerous to their pocketbooks Trump's inflationary proposals are. The debate was a clear moment to do this, yet she spent most of her time pivoting away from the economy and making her case. For whatever reason, she was talking past the voters she needed to reach.
Underdogs can't afford to simply play to their base when polling shows that their base (black and Latino voters) are souring on the economy and aren't happy with the direction of the country.
> It could be that ... Trump was an above-average candidate — I tend not to buy the latter given Trump’s long-term electoral track record (he lost the popular vote against Hillary Clinton!), but he’s gotten more popular over time.
At this point we should stop underestimating Trump. He has beaten the polls three times now. I don't think that's a fluke.
A much different perspective than what everyone's post-game report is, I'm thinking Ezra Klein's viral clip.
Regarding replacement level, I guess she did make it this far so she was at least replacement level but man some of those clips of her speaking off the cuff are so bad it's hard to think that's replacement level. The one that stands out to me the most is, "we don't speak Christmas". Uhg.
She just has a different way of speaking that isn’t linear. I do too, I definitely don’t think it would help in an election but it doesn’t mean she’s dumb or something. It’s not good for sound bites
I often wonder if Harris was having mini-strokes. She IS 60, after all. People do, by then, if they are going to have them. Her not being able to speak plain was fatal to her election.
Not so, but far otherwise: mini-strokes are early and can go on for years but they are crippling, gradually, for language and cognition. Hopefully no one here will ever have them.
I don’t watch any cable news and I did watch the debate she did well nice and prepped. Plenty of clips of her making absolutely no sense buddy, and everyone sees it whether you want to believe it or not. Really doesn’t matter because she’ll never win public office ever again.
Minus 3% for being a woman. Minus 3% for being Black. That’s from the git go. Kamala did great. The campaign needed to emphasize every day how Biden/Harris got us out of Trump’s recession, got the price of gas, inflation and interest down and is going after price gougers who haven’t followed. But they didn’t. It’s always the economy, stupid.
Also, Bibi cost her Michigan. Finally, at least for the lit drops and canvassing I did, the GOTV in Michigan was targeting Democrats rather than non-Republicans. In Michigan, an Unknown tends to vote Democratic.
Yes but they also sucked at that. Did Harris even once bring up that Biden led the USA to better inflation than Europe? Trump kept insisting the fed drop rates meanwhile which would have made inflation worse. But instead dems just pursued the “he’s racist Hitler” angle
Actually she lost Michigan by like more than the entire Muslim population in Michigan when I checked right after the election. She would have had to find some more votes elsewhere even if she got every single Muslim voter to the polls and voting for her (and assuming that some of them didn't already vote for her).
A few 100% points of agreement: Kamala Harris was a bad pick for VP. I wasn't a huge fan of hers when Biden picked her (and I got into a couple arguments about this too), but honestly VP picks are not as determinative as people think so I let it slide. I was wrong that losing in 2020 would be the end of Trump, and Harris wound up being the heir apparent to Biden in 2024. (I also made the comparison that both Biden and Harris were chosen largely because of their identity).
What I don't agree with is whether it mattered much. IIRC: most Democratic candidates did perform better than Harris, but it was largely because lots of Trump voters voted for him, and him alone. This was the inverse (IIRC) of 2020 where a lot of Republicans voted for their Republican candidate but left the Presidential vote blank. A different Democrat would have had to reverse that trend, which I think would have been more difficult (but not impossible).
I also don't agree that Biden giving Harris the 'root cause' of immigration and Voting Rights was an attempt to undermine Harris, it's normal for the President to assign tough tasks to the VP. Obama assigned Biden the task of pulling out of Iraq, hardly a 'good' part of the portfolio, along with ensuring that the money from the infrastructure bill got spent correctly, and on guns. None of these are great issues, but Biden survived them. At the end of the day your portfolio is not your destiny and Harris was not great at either tasks (which is not to say that it was her fault that things did not succeed either). Had Biden given Harris a bunch of innocuous tasks that would have been its own form of problems because then Republicans could have attacked Harris for being an insubstantial Vice-President.
I don' think Biden was wrong to be worried about Harris beating Trump. As this analysis shows: Harris was a replacement level candidate! The problem that the Biden team was not that they underestimated Harris, it was that they overestimated themselves. Granted: that's a huge miss, I am not suggesting otherwise, but it can be true that Biden was dead wrong about himself, while also being right about Harris.
Finally, for all the handwringing on how awful Biden is, I don't think Nate is giving Biden enough credit for being right, when almost the entire Democratic Party was wrong, in 2020 about the electorate. Biden was also right, when his boss Barack Obama was wrong, about Hillary Clinton in 2016. Of course Biden's career in politics is done, as are Ted Kauffman & Steve Riccheti (both of whom are also quite old anyway), so Nate will get his wish.
Michigan: Harris 2.730 M votes, Slotkin 2.707 M, Harris +0.84%
Wisconsin : Harris 1.668 M, Baldwin 1.672 M, Harris -0.23%
Pennsylvania : Harris 3.403 M, Casey : 3.365 M, Harris +1.1%
Harris didn't underperform the Senate Ds, at least not as much as the ratios Nate cites implies.
Trump overperformed.
Edit below ... I found tabular data at the Green Papers (Noon Pacific time, 11/15) so I was able to do this for all states where there was a senate election also.
Harris ran ahead of the D candidate in (increasing order of margin):
Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Maine, Florida, Delaware, New Jersey, California, Vermont, Tennessee, Mississippi, West Virginia, Massachusetts, Indiana, Wyoming, Maryland, and Utah.
17 states, and 16 where she ran behind
Special note about Maine - there was a Democratic candidate also, and King + Costello together were ahead of Harris, so probably more accurate to say she ran behind in 17 states.
In terms of total votes in all the states, Harris did run behind Senate Ds, by a spectacular 0.07% (including Costello's votes).
You are assuming the Trump voters all voted for Trump and not against Harris. But that’s not true. 9% or so of voters who disapproved of Trump voted for him. Trumps inflated numbers vis a vis R senate candidates could reflect disgust with Harris
if you wanted to be rigorous, you’d have to compare the undervote in these races to the undervotes in past races. a generic senate candidate experiences undervote compared to the presidential candidate.
i don’t know from what you posted how D senate candidates’ undervotes measure up historically. you seemed to think any undervote was unusual.
i would loooove a rigorous article on whether r senate candidates experienced an unusually large undervote
An alternate explanation as to why Harris underperformed Democratic Senate candidates: voters blamed the administration for high inflation but largely gave the rest of the federal government (i.e. Congress) a pass.
As to the fundamentals portion of the model miscalculating Trump's eventual margin in the popular vote, I suggest viewing Ezra Klein's recent appearance on "Pod Save America" where he told Democratic partisans to "shut the fuck up" about crime and the economy. Voter fury about the direction of the country was substantial and the Democrats telling ordinary citizens that they were imagining things was a terrible approach.
This is just an anecdote, but a few months ago I was eating dinner at a restaurant with some friends. The waitress was black and we were discussing politics so we asked her who she was voting for.
I must be telling the story wrong because no one is surprised that she answered "Trump". The straw that broke the camel's back? She has a 9 year old nephew and an 11 year old niece and they were being harassed by the homeless as they walked to school every day. She, her sister and her mother all called the cops only to be told that the police could do nothing.
Is this a crime? Does it get recorded somewhere and boost reported crime statistics? Of course not. But I suspect that experiences like this are a major component behind why city dwellers feel that life has gotten worse. And, as Ezra Klein noted, Trump saw much larger gains in urban areas than the suburbs or rural precincts.
Yea I’m in California and the new bill increasing crime persecution passed by a substantial majority. Crime may officially be low but that’s simply because people aren’t being prosecuted.
Also keep in mind that the NCVS and the UCR typically are pretty close to one another but they diverged in a major way starting in 2022, with the NCVS showing historic increases in reported crime victimization.
That's not consistent with a narrative of falling crime, it's consistent with a narrative where crime is going up but people don't bother calling the police.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimization-2023
Slight uptick in crime.
Same rough percentage of non-reported crime.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/08/violent-crime-data-2022-mystifying/
Oh really? I’ve seen one person bring this up a month ago, but they said the opposite and that the two match rn. I’ll check it out.
Here's an article on the NCVS for 2022 that points out the big increase in reported crimes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/08/violent-crime-data-2022-mystifying/
IIRC there was no drop off in 2023's NCVS.
Oh wow.
Interesting data on this in
https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/ncvsnibrscpc22.pdf
But is it really that useful to prosecute people? Prison doesn’t help people, it’s costly and brutal, and bad for families. Government rehab and psych programs could at least help with crime…as well as community centers and outreach…in a long-term way
At least somebody who's in jail cannot find new victims.
They get worse in jail not better.
So what's the alternative? Leave them out on the streets where they can keep finding new victims?
We’ve had waves of people walk into stores steal stuff and walk out repeatedly, keeping the threshold under $950 so it stays a misdemeanor, which is often still not prosecuted. California got to go the three strikes law to felony conversion in 2020 and overwhelmingly just voted it back in this year. What else do you do here.
It’s a problem that people are impatient and don’t think long-term about solutions but I guess you can try to build those solutions while combatting crime. Poverty is a real reason for crime too that’s a more long-term issue to work on
The voters apparently disagree.
No one actually had this option, nor would it be an easy sell, but if they tested the programs some places and had considerably improved results they might be able to. I think it's worth it, obviously. I'm a mercy not punishment person
I seriously doubt we have the money or workforce for a bunch of decentralized, psych and rehab based programs, particularly in high cost Blue cities. I think there would need to be centralized programs, perhaps in custodial situations.
Well, I think it’s a long-term development idea, where you’d have to experiment and start with small case studies. Preventing criminals to begin with would help, combatting income inequality at least by being fierce on antitrust if not taxes and things would help the country so much with its turning so helplessly to the crazy. Urban planning and stuff. Yeah, it’s just hard when at least half but probably more of the time impatient “crack down on crime” politicians get easy wins we’ll see what happens; it’s a little scary to imagine Trump’s possible measures
lol, yeah “defund the prisons” is a great successor to Defund the Police! The Dems should totally run with this great idea!!
I can’t find your Laken Riley comment for some reason. The stats I’ve heard on illegal immigrant crime is it’s lower than citizens for the same crimes. To me that makes sense. If you’re an illegal immigrant there’s way more incentive not to get caught. To me, if you’re upset about Laken Riley and you vote for Trump it makes zero sense, he’s an unrepentant rapist who has gotten away with it more than once. You should definitely get taken away from society for violent crimes but I don’t see the incentive in making prison such a hellhole that it only makes people worse. I don’t see people who commit crimes in general as irredeemable human beings
My question to you is what do you do with the specific individual that murdered Laken Riley. He's in police custody right now. What should society do to him?
And what do you do with rapists like Donald Trump?
Apparently so - what a country - makes you proud!
Will of the voters and all that.
Elect him to the presidency?
She was a 7% er ..God Bless her ..Moving on
I don’t think that was Biden’s fault though, that was a local problem
Crime contributed to a sense that the country was on the wrong path and that was perceived by Democrats to be a problem for the incumbent.
This was especially true of Trump’s crimes (and Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, etc.)
And yet here we are with Trump back in office.
So maybe the “crime contributed to a sense we were on the wrong track” doesn’t hold up as an argument for the election result since we voted to elect a candidate who is a criminal and is surrounded by other criminals. I think it might have been something else. Stick with inflation… that argument works better for you.
Don't think you're doing it intentionally, but you're mischaracterizing Ezra Klein's words:
he said "shut the fuck up" to the people claiming inflation and crime weren't a big deal; not to the ones saying they were
Yeah, that's my meaning. Typed too fast.
I think this is the right read. If you look at Canada where provincial elections happen on random schedules relative to the federal election, a lot of the premiers (governor equivalents) have been re-elected recently and/or remain popular, even as the Federal incumbent is down 15-20 points in the polls.
Basically I think it’s equivalent to how when things aren’t going well for a sports team midseason, they fire the head coach, not the sports science person. One throat to choke is enough.
The leftist NDP squeaked in by a tiny margin in B.C. a few weeks ago. Their winning margin was down from the past election.
there were also a lot of Trump voters who simply voted for Trump and left the entire ballot blank
In 2020 the Rs said ballots like that for Biden were proof of fraud.
If Trump is good at anything, he’s good at sales, the ruthless, do-anything-to-win, cult-leader kind. It’s hard, you have to fight ten times harder if you’re going against a party with as few scruples about misleading their voters as Republicans. Republicans do not want to help workers or poor people. They are always lying
I would say that the Democratic party over the last four years did pretty much nothing for the working class over the last four years and as a consequence Trump just won.
Trump literally blocks our highly conservative immigration compromise for his own election purposes and no one bitches about that, they all think he is their savior on immigration. It’s just bs man. We did our best given Trump and Republicans’ obstinate political games
Biden let illegal immigration soar to insane levels in 2021, 2022 and 2023. That's all on him.
What I heard though back then was they were trying to reduce the need for immigration by working in central and South America. I do think this issue wasn’t his highest priority and they let it go too long but it was so hard with Manchin and Sinema to get anything through and even though a lot of people don’t prioritize climate, that was the right thing for Biden to do
One way you know you're looking at a solid, workable plan is that it does *not* start with "First, we fix Honduras."
Whatever they tried didn't work.
I’m for compassionate inclusive and functional immigration system myself. Of course I would be right? But anyway as an environmental advocate I really think the world needs less nationalism not more
I think most people have a positive view of legal immigration but have serious issues with open borders.
I can’t read anything you said beyond “as a.” Something f-Ed up with my app or internet…I think Dems did a lot considering their limitations with Congress. The Inflation Reduction act created a lot of jobs but it was a miracle given the situation, we didn’t have both houses really either half of Biden’s presidency. We could’ve done more. But why blame democrats when Republicans were the glaring reason any legislation didn’t happen???
The issue really wasn't jobs, the unemployment rate is low. The problem Is inflation.
Well the jobs were good-paying ones with security. Reagan was the one who got the government out of what was good for workers vis a vis big business, and Democrats like Clinton and Obama listened but it wasn’t good in the long run for workers to not have unions, republicans would never vote for adequate wage increases or govt help with healthcare that would make people be able to pay higher prices. Inflation we’ve discussed. The top economists have over and over been amazed by how well we recovered, even if that isnt all because of Biden. Antitrust is a way to stimulate competition as you know so corporations are forced to lower prices to be competitive…it’s longer term tho. So we were mostly blamed for things that weren’t our fault and if high prices are bad tariffs are not the answer but no one heard that pretty obvious point
Lina Khan is apparently an admirer of Matt Gaetz.
Black unemplyement hit a record low under Biden ..please try again
And yet it looks like Harris got fewer black voters re s than Biden.
Why would you say that? My impression was that they passed the Inflation Reduction Act and ever since Inflation has been rapidly falling. They pass the CHIPS act and ever since manufacturing has been booming. Wages have advanced 4% over inflation this last year. The economy is roaring. That is not why Trump won. Guess again. Something to do with feelings.
Maybe Google the effect that the economy had on the election. The consensus among talking heads was that it was not positive.
Indeed, talking heads talk to the hand. The four years of economic growth and best economy in the past few decades was dissed by the talking heads.
Great.
All that inflation was clearly imaginary.
Oh I see it now somehow, well anyway.
This was a response to Slaws comment about swing state candidates
>An alternate explanation as to why Harris underperformed Democratic Senate candidates: voters blamed the administration for high inflation but largely gave the rest of the federal government (i.e. Congress) a pass.<
There may be some of that. But a simpler explanation may simply be that Democratic Senate candidates were generally fighting like hell to win. But in some of those states the Harris campaign quite understandably made no effort to compete.
Yeah, but the states that everyone is looking at are MI, WI and PA. There's no way Harris gave those states a pass.
Also AZ.
Gallego is a really talented politician, and put in the work. (Like, he went in-person to meet every single tribal council, including hiking down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. From what I've read, he's the only living politician in the state to have done that.)
Kari Lake was a terrible candidate though. And the scuttlebutt was that Brown's campaign in NV was just incompetent.
I don't interpret the sentence "Harris outperformed Senate candidates" to mean only "states everyone is looking at" but rather, I thought it referred to all Senate races. And yes, Harris obviously campaigned hard in those three states (she just didn't campaign hard in the *majority* of states where Senate races were taking place).
So I agreed with half of what you wrote, but on reflection I do need to lodge an objection to the second half.
People were, to a large degree, imagining things! Yes they were genuinely experiencing inflation, but imagining that it was Biden’s fault. They imagined that real wages had declined when in fact they increased. They imagined that crime was going up (it was going down). They imagined that illegal immigrants were invading (crossings are down).
And at least part of the reason they imagined this is that Fox News and other media didn’t disabuse them of this notion, either for ideological or audience-driven reasons.
I don’t think you can blame Democrats for at least trying to tell people that their perception doesn’t match reality. You just also need to do other stuff.
You're entitled to your opinion but not your own alternative facts.
1. Crime is worse now than in 2019.
2. Illegal immigration under the Biden administration was much higher than Trump's first term.
3. Relative spending power decreased because while wages went up prices increased even faster.
Also this absolutely not does not show crime was higher in 2022 than 2019 - and it’s only gone down since 2022
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/
What was the homicide rate in 2019?
What is it today?
#3 is absolutely not true. That’s why I said real wages. They were briefly lower in 2022 as inflation outpaced wage gains, since then wage gains have materially outpaced inflation.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1znFb
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/16/when-wage-growth-is-likely-to-catch-up-to-inflation.html
1. not that much, and it's not high across a longer period of time
3. people spent their asses off anyway it appears, but perhaps it is more complex, and the solutions, like anti-trust, are not short-term
Those things don’t bother me, except I worry if people don’t have enough to put food on the table, and have to work three jobs. My own first concern is to avoid the horrors we are currently headed toward climate-wise. I’m a long term person. But I also have needs that require a healthy functioning bureaucracy
Everyone has their own individual priorities. The bulk of the electorate clearly rejected Biden.
Crossings were down after three and half years of sky high rates that were 100% Biden’s fault. He lifted all of Trump’s restrictions on his first day in office.
"all"? i think he was trying to be humane, which voters did want. to me, immigration is largely a boogeyman issue motivated by racism and the failure of Republicans to spend money to make the system functional
It was still fucked up how people saw the economy. I mean, it was the inflation but why couldn’t they have made some argument about how we did better than our peers at recovering and inflation was worldwide? Also that everyone blames the administration for inflation, but it would’ve happened under Trump and he wouldn’t have brought about as good a recovery as we have now? I guess you can’t go into these “details” because it feels defensive, it just seems wrong that everyone was voting on the basis of something that was bullshit
There were some academic studies that suggested that Biden's stimulus contributed to a good portion of the inflation.
Trump at least had an excuse for sending out stimulus checks: the country was still dealing with lockdowns and high unemployment was rampant as a result. By the time Biden got to office the lockdowns were largely a thing of the past. What was the justification for sending out additional stimulus when the economy was already in recovery?
US inflation was often much lower than other countries’, though. There is no way Biden was responsible for a “good portion” of inflation and it’s clearly silly that people blame the president/incumbent party for a global problem.
The study that I saw (cited in the WaPo) was something like four basis points attributable to stimulus.
And the point was that the US wasn't the only government that tried to juice the economy with stimulus and suffered from inflation as a result.
4 basis points is 0.04%. Do you mean 4 percentage points (as in, inflation would have been 4% not 8% without stimulus)? If so, not a chance it had that much impact.
Sorry, percentage points. Roughly half of the 8-9% annual inflation rate.
I am not an economist, but the people behind that paper definitely are.
I saw studies that said that was a factor, but cutting child poverty in half isn’t a bad result, and there would’ve been inflation anyway, and the main issues were the Covid supply chain problems and the exacerbation of the problem with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the gas prices issue. Also, price gouging due to monopolies; the Biden admin was doing good antitrust work but it’s a long slow process. Inflation is largely the Fed’s jurisdiction though and that was completely not realized by voters it feels like
Stimulating a recovering economy didn't help. There was always going to be some inflation as the world recovered from Covid but excess stimulus poured gas onto a fire.
The open border was a huge issue that was 100% Biden’s fault.
Keep bringing them on … Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth. Giuliani would be a good Assistant AG or Supreme Court Justice … the tide will never turn and none of this will backfire… ever
If you think that the average voter recognizes any of those name, much less cares who they are, you are completely deluded.
Bring them on, all of them! They can run on decriminalizing rape next time (only lame woke people care about stuff like that)
I fear you are doomed to be disappointed.
No question about that. Acute signs of national decay and corruption. We are devolving. Disappointing that people don’t care, but it isn’t surprising. We get what we deserve.
Or, Alternatively, the other side just won.
I mostly liked this because of "blamed the administration for high inflation but largely gave the rest of the federal government (i.e. Congress) a pass." I think ordinary citizens were overreacting for sure. It wasn't that different than before even if you use stats to prove it was worse, I just think Republicans were great at fearmongering, not that hard a thing to be great at. I also don't think homelessness was really the administration's fault for the most part, nor was inflation (but I already argued that below).
Calling it transitory was one of the dumbest pr moves I’ve ever seen. Somehow they outdid themselves by bragging that inflation was lower recently, which shows just how grossly they misunderstood the average voter — great news, your 20% higher prices from 2-3 yrs will only go up another percent or two next year and you should thank us for that.
I think people are suggesting culturally and on economic levels Latinos voted Trump. I don’t want to just speculate and say something that’s a generalization about a race. Certainly religion is a factor but maybe they’re susceptible to some of the same temptations as white people and white women who voted against their own equal rights
I guess. It’s not my fault people are easily swayed against immigrants. It was motivated by compassion and his own sense of what his voters wanted
In my personal experience the people that dislike illegal immigration the most are legal immigrants.
There are plenty of people who don't have a problem with legal immigration but who have valid objections to the illegal variety.
frankly illegal immigrants work for lower wages and I’m against that. it’s inhumane and it creates conflict over these unskilled jobs. that is the fault of the people running all those operations. it’s fucked up that our economy is reliant on this slave-like labor. women get raped with impunity. if you learn about these like meat packing places it’s horrifying
I actually don’t think so, I think there’s a lot of racist fear eg replacement theory…only citizens can vote so this means they are anti legal immigration
So why did so many Hispanics cross over and vote for Trump?
Cause they hate Black women ..
In any case I’m for increased legal immigration, pathways to citizenship, all that. It would be expensive of course. Deportations also expensive and tearing up families etc
I can’t read the whole thing. Will get back later. I think there are lots of different reasons Latinos voted for Trump but still white people were the killers
Well, what are those reasons?
Ok it said what I thought it would. I can see it only once I reply sometimes
Well, still, they should’ve voted for the party that went quite far out of their comfort zone to make an immigration deal but they chose someone who didn’t even do what he said he would with the wall
You aren’t going to disentangle all
those variables with an n of one presidential election. However, a string fish can swim upstream, so if Harris were materially better than the battleground senate candidates, she would have at least matched their vote totals. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect the presidential nominee to be a better candidate than a swing state senator. in fact, that’s why we have primaries.
It's a complicated issue. Those swing state Senate candidates, for example, were running ads where they broadcast their closeness to Trump while keeping their distance from Biden.
being biden’s vp did not help. however, harris did not have to seek the nomination just because biden backed out. she chose to value her ambition over her country.
at the time, it seemed like the safest bet. it was rather late. i think biden would've been great if he hadn't aged too much. lingering effects of worldwide not just us covid inflation was the real issue. it was kind of grand of her to step up in a way, you could also surmise. it was an uphill race so maybe not good for her in truth. plus there was the money
Sometimes, things are not all that complicated. When prices rise by 20% roughly in 3-4 years time period for a country in which 50% of the population has a hard time coming up with 500 bucks in an emergency, those are headwinds that are going to be difficult to overcome. If Trump had been a strong candidate, she would have lost by 10-15 points. The fact that she came this close is largely a testimony to Trump's flaws.
I'm in my mid 60s and I haven't seen price rises like this during my adult years. And there's nothing Biden could have done about inflation since it was due to a globalized supply chain. That mistake was the brain child of the bean counters during the neoliberal era. Built to minimize cost, it was never designed to be resilient in the face of disruptions.
Bottom line is that Covid is what enabled Joe Biden to eke out a win in 2020. On the other hand, Trump's 2024 win is due to Covid's lingering price rises.
Yes, sometimes, life is just that simple. "It's the economy, stupid."
I think people forget how divided the country is. The 08 recession led to Obama only winning by 7.5%. The days of double digit victories are over.
I think the narrative separation and the visceral hatred of Democrats after the excesses since 2016 is not understood. The red states are largely unreachable for a Democrat. The Russia stuff, the questionable counts in 2020, the insistence on Trump being a criminal - no one in Red America believes that except the cranks. The presumption is that all the investigations and lawfare were politically motivated and you will never shake that belief.
I’m telling you the truth here with the full expectation that the Democrat freak show of collusion, rape and government overthrow on 1/6 is going to cost you more elections, which is ironic because the guy will never be on a ballot again. But maybe you’ll wise up by the 2030s. You need a consistent national narrative or you are just going to keep losing.
Yup - the people who get their news from Fox are largely unreachable.
But that has nothing to do with the Democratic message.
Yes it is _completely_ under Democratic control. You go to where the people are, you don't attract them to where you are. That never works.
Earning trust is step 1. People don't trust Democrats. Retail politics is how you earn that trust. You do things you say you are going to do, and have meaningful outcomes people can understand. IRA was useless in that regard - no one attaches that name to any significant benefit. What's the point of political acts if you aren't going to get credit for them?
After you earn that trust, you can move them in your direction. Probably not all the way, but this is how change is enacted. Not by passing laws, but by changing the culture.
Fetterman is a good example of how this trust could be earned. First, even though he's a stroke victim, he appears to be the smartest person in the Democratic party because he regularly sees right through what Trump is doing and calls it out in a way that even a Trump supporter could listen to and possibly question Trump about.
His response to the announced nomination of Matt Gaetz was to accuse Trump of "God-level trolling" (which made me laugh because it's so true) and wondered what his more reasonable colleagues across the aisle were going to think about this. I personally think Gaetz would be like the second coming of Ed Meese. But that response was an intelligent one that actually works. Democrats should try that more often.
Trump was so good at getting Democrats to attack his person, it was like the second coming of Bill Clinton in that regard. Except Trump was better - he deflected with ease and never had to say any crap about "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" or have a personal debate about "what is, is". Every moment someone is attacking his person, his ideas are being disseminated and taking root all over.
Retail politics, not technocracy or identity politics, is the future. Just like it was the past. I fully expect a recurrence of "FDR on the brain" just like Republicans had for 30 years after his death.
You don't convert the zealots.
You work to reach the people who aren't brainwashed.
And for the record, Meese was qualified.
You try to convince everyone who will listen.
*everyone* is brainwashed, particularly Democrats. All led by propaganda from their chosen media.
Define 'qualified'. Meese got his experience largely from being in Reagan's wake after he was Governor of CA. He did very little on his own.
This is kinda a random comment to leave on this. Has almost nothing to do with what I said
Read above your post, sorry. I had one shot in a parking lot on my phone.
Obama ran behind Congress in PV. (Edit: Oops, not true.)
I expect a 1992 Bill Clinton-esque candidate would have been a dramatic blowout. White + male + charismatic + clear center left.
I think it’s more accurate to say McCain ran ahead of the congress PV. Obama and the congress had a near identical PV
Oops - my bad. You are right, and even more so by vote.
It’s also worth noting that Obama drove blacks to the polls like no other. 2008 marks the only year of any American election where black turnout exceeded white turnout. Whatever voted Obama lost for being black, I’m fairly certain he also gained for being black.
He also got a fair amount of white crossover vote. And some of us - like me - stayed home so that senile old coot McCain wouldn't get into office.
Obama’s race cost him 2-3 points. He was able to win because of very strong fundamentals and exceptional political acumen tend discipline.
How do you judge that? Obama got nearly identical to congress PV
Hmm…so it had nothing to do with immigration, policing, identity politics, etc.? Interesting take.
Nah.... That may make for good discussions within groups like this, but the average low-information voter that shops at Walmart probably isn't even aware of topics like those. What they do pay attention to is the fact a dozen eggs just jumped by a buck or their housing just increased by a couple hundred dollars. They see those things every week. Anybody that knows politics well knew that the Ds were facing very strong headwinds given inflation.
I've been watching American presidential elections since 1980. People vote their pocketbook - first and foremost. Not to say that there aren't other issues, but those other issues only become important after considering their economic situation.
My favorite element of this election cycle is the prevalence of “low-information” as a euphemism for stupid. It may have been somewhat common in prior cycles but I don’t remember it. I quite like it, though.
Actually, the low-information / stupid Walmart shopper was never going to vote for Harris. They were likely non-voters, but if they voted it would be Trump.
I completely understand the coping mechanism of blaming the electorate as being stupid or racist or misogynist (or all of the above), and believing that we ran a flawless campaign with a wonderful candidate and we were hamstrung by exogenous factors. The result is still fresh and raw so it makes sense.
The reality is that 2019-24 democratic policy positions on open borders, defunding police, criminal prosecution, green new deal, taxation / economy, identity politics, are all quite unpopular with independents / moderates in the electorate. My hope, as a non-progressive democrat, is that the party soon realizes that either a) our policy positions are wrong, or b) we have failed to educate, persuade and convince the electorate that our policy positions are correct. I have faith (albeit could be naive) that the powers that be will act accordingly.
Anyway, we’ll agree to disagree here.
I don’t consider ‘low information’ to be stupid, at all. They just have other priorities than people who are commenting here. They are not into politics, like some of us. I respect that they have other priorities in life. My last partner was exactly like this. She had no idea of specific policy positions and would not have been aware of the potential progressive policies that have been floated in recent years. However, she was aware of how Trump treated people and formed her opinion of who to vote for based on those impressions.
BTW, I am an Irish-Catholic traditional D from Chicago, who now lives in Ireland. Like you, I am close to the political center. I just don’t see how you win an election when prices rise by 20% in 4 years. If Trump hadn’t been such a poor candidate, the R could have won by 8+ points - independent of other past D policy positions.
The correct term is “rational ignorance.” And it’s a fully bipartisan phenomenon.
If you are in your mid-60s, you seem to be forgetting the 1970s (about the time you were in high school). Inflation was 6% to 10% for long enough that it just felt normal. Then, when Paul Volker (fed chair) decided to break inflation's back he raised interest rates enough that mortgage rates were in the 15% - 18% range in the early 80s. That threw the economy into recession.
Yeah, Trump trashed the economy with Covid and Biden took a somewhat inflationary path out of it (remember a lot of the inflation came from the Covid-induced supply chain screwups). But it worked. That recession that everyone forecast never arrived.
This was a different path than what Obama took when he was handed the economy that GW Bush had trashed. But, Obama was criticized for 8 years by everyone for growing the economy too slowly.
Yes, I remember the inflation of the late 70s/early 80s well. I was in college then. However, it was quite different than our recent inflation since we had wage inflation in tandem with price inflation back then. In addition, it had been a part of the economy for a long period of time. Another difference was that labor contracts, and eventually SS, had COLA provisions (cost of living adjustments), so everything was rising at the same time. In addition, we were much more unionized at the time, so more people would actually get a COLA. However, don’t get me wrong, the inflation of that time period wasn’t good.
Fed Chairman Paul Volker eventually jacked up interest rates such that the prime rate hit 21% in early 80s. This resulted in the severe 1982 recession where unemployment hit 10.8% nationwide and was especially hard in the industrial Midwest. Unemployment in Michigan was 22% and 25% in Rockford, Ill. But this broke the back of inflation.
What was so severe this time around was that there was no significant wage increases except for SS, which has automatic COLA (which owes its origins to the inflation of the 70s). It was a sudden and dramatic spike for many people who haven’t seen much in the way of wages increases for almost a generation. There’s no way they could have handled it.
Real wages are higher today than when Biden started … so we had wage inflation in excess of price inflation 2021-2024 (in fact, lower income worker wage inflation has been part of price inflation the past 4 years.)
Yep, and Reagan beat Carter in a (real) landslide.
The '08 crash was not really directly the fault of the Bush government though. It was rampant speculation on mortgages that eventually blew up in everyone's faces. The only way Bush could have stopped it is if they had one of the like 5 people in the country that realized what kind of time bomb the American housing market was. Go watch The Big Short if you need a proper explanation.
I agree that Covid is why Trump lost in 2020. I didn't even take an interest in that election: I knew Trump would lose. A country won't keep the same leader after going through a trauma like that.
Canada and France did - presumably because during COVID their leaders actually addressed the challenges rather than making them worse.
New Zealand and Japan too.
> 50% of the population has a hard time coming up with 500 bucks in an emergency
This is often repeated, but it isn't true. 63% of American adults say they can just pay a $400 emergency expense and another 24% say they can finance it. (source: Page 31 of https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2023-report-economic-well-being-us-households-202405.pdf). Lending Tree will report that ~50% number for a $1000 expense, but that's the same survey with the ridiculous "living paycheck to paycheck" numbers, so I'm not inclined to take it seriously.
About historical inflation, I think 1980 would like a word. But yeah, people really hated the inflation of 2021-2023.
Every year, for the last 15 years or so, I’d see articles appear stating how much reserves exist for a certain portion of the population. The figures vary slightly from year to year, but the theme is the last same. A significant portion of the population lives largely month to month, hoping no unanticipated bill comes in. This is a group, whose wages have stagnated for over a generation, and lives in tremendous economic anxiety. I have much more detail on subjects like this in my book entitled, “Winning the Race among Nations for Economic Superiority”, which is available on Amazon.
See my comments about the late 70s/early 80s inflation in other comments above this one.
To be fair, it's not as simple as 'the economy, stupid' -- it's more that 'stupid people don't understand the economy'.
But yes, that was the majority of it.
"a country in which 50% of the population has a hard time coming up with 500 bucks in an emergency"
This is false and has been debunked many times.
"I'm in my mid 60s and I haven't seen price rises like this during my adult years."
Are people in their 20s adults? Because inflation was almost certainly worse in the late 70s to early 80s when you were in your early 20s.
See my comments to these just above this comment.
This.
prices rose faster in the early 80s
Yes, but that was after a decade of high inflation. Everyone knew that it had taken place before Regan was elected. In fact, he won a landslide in 1980 because of this very fact. Sure the first two years of his term still had high inflation, but by year 3 it had abated and by 1984, the economy was humming with inflation gone. Hence his landslide victory in 1984.
You can thank Paul Volker - the Fed Chairman at the time. He jacked up interest rates to values now considered unthinkable. The prime rate hit 21% and resulted in the very severe 1982 recession. See my other previous comments above.
Inflation wasn't gone, it continued at a relatively high rate (by today's terms) for most of the 80s, but it was so much less than we had gotten used to, we were happy. You are correct that Carter got the blame for the early 80s economy. He was inept in office and didn't help his cause much.
Your are technically correct. I'm almost 67 and was working professionally at that time. However, there were COLAs in the labor contracts at that time, so wages were somewhat keeping up with the cost increases. A lot of the cause for the inflation were the 2 Arab oil embargos back in 1973 and 1979 and their aftereffects. At that time, there was much less globalization, which also played a role in the higher prices. Carter was a lousy president (but excellent afterwards), but there wasn't much he could do about inflation.
The thing I love most about Nate’s work is his willingness to tread into waters he knows people won’t like but to do so very self aware. “you don’t need another middle-aged white Substacker” is that kind of self awareness that people with his following miss a lot.
Agreed.
Even when I disagree with Nate (which is often in the matters of analysis),
The fact that he gives his full thoughts and identifies his own flaws makes it a refreshing experience in these days where the Performative Perfection Prophets. Arguments and discussions in good faith and all that.
I think that the larger political climate is also changing. There's been a lot of speculation that the woke tide has crested and is now in retreat. AOC, for example, just removed her pronouns from her Twitter/X bio.
Andy Beshear is one of the most pro-trans rights Dems and he’s being touted as a moderate by the article and comments so I feel like nobody knows what they’re talking about anymore.
I really fucking hate people casting LGBTQ+ issues as left or right wing. There’s nothing political about being trans. Had the republicans not made us enemy #1 there would probably be more trans republicans than just Blaire White and Caitlyn Jenner
By and large nobody cares about trans people. The issues are biological men competing in women's sports and the question of whether or not young children should be eligible for treatment. Look at what Moulton is saying.
The republicans themselves talk about “parents rights” to raise their children but then won’t let people raise their kids according to their doctors best advice if they’re trans?
Logic that one out for me.
Parents rights don't extend to child abuse. You can't lock your kid in a shed in the winter overnight.
By the same token parents who want to transition their kids at a very early age probably isn't Kosher in my book. Part of growing up is getting drunk and getting laid. It's monstrous to interfere in that process. Minor children cannot enter into legally binding contracts because the law and society in general don't believe they have the maturity to understand what they're getting into.
Neither the parents nor the kids are ever the one “transitioning” them or themselves.
It’s a long process with multiple teams of doctors and therapists.
The fine, let it be a long process with somebody that's over the age of 18.
equating well-studied medical practices to child abuse is asinine
Transgender women on HRT are not biological men. Their testosterone levels are kept on par with a cis woman's by anti-androgenic medication, and their levels of athleticism are comparable to cis women's as a result.
Furthermore, policing trans women for being "too strong" or "having an unfair advantage" directly leads to cis women being transvestigated or subjected to invasive testing.
Further reading: https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/four-myths-about-trans-athletes-debunked
Not unless those biological women are taking massive amounts of testosterone.
My initial thought after hearing about AOC removing her pronouns is that they abandon the trans thing for now but stick with racial issues. And from someone that would be more "anti-woke", I just don't see the racial thing ever going away because I just don't see representation ever being attained to the level that would be satisfactory to them. I think it might wain in the near future but return again in some other form.
Democrats have to deal with the fact that attracting black and Latino voters require different strategies.
What kind of representation though? Because it's plausible to me that you might see Hispanic representation in the ranks of Republican voters rise substantially over the coming years.
If that happens all bets are off I think.
I don't just mean politically, also CEOs, actors, and other roles.
Love the article.
I think Kamala Harris was always bad at this, and the democrats were just too afraid of the social backlash to say so.
Biden didn't do her any favors, that is true. Depending on how "tinfoil hat" you want to get, I wouldn't be surprised if he deliberately sabotaged her. But Kamala lost this all on her own.
The only winner here is Pelosi and Schumer, who in one fell stroke managed to get rid of both Biden and Harris who they clearly viewed as dead weight for the party and opens the door to a more "preferred" candidate in 2028.
Pelosi isn’t all that great herself. We could’ve won those midterms easily
Pelosi is good at sordid greasy smoke filled room politics. Appealing to voters, she's average at best.
I’m not an expert by any means on Pelosi, but apparently she’s overrated as someone trying to keep or gain the House
Only in the never-never land of the Democratic Party is Gretchen Whitmer a moderate. By that do you just mean that she isn't a communist? Most of us would think of a moderater as someone who's liberal on some issues, conservative on others, a compromiser on others, but more or less halfway between conservative and liberal. In the present Senate there are only three such, and one, Manchin, is retiring. The other two are Collins and Murkowski. Everyone else is clearly left or right, some farther out than others. If you want to call main line Democrats "moderate", does that mean you're willing to call, say, Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn moderates? I thought not. So the word "moderate", like the word "centrist", basically means in line with the DNC, the Big Three networks, the NYT and the WaPo. It covers ground that 20 years ago would have been considered liberal.
> It covers ground that 20 years ago would have been considered liberal.
Isn't that the nature of politics? That's what the "progression" in progressivism means lol.
There's lots of points of view that are considered moderate now that were extremely liberal 50 years ago, and conversely, points of view that were moderate 50 years ago but considered extremely conservative/reactionary today.
Absolutely right! People are called "extremist right-wingers" for positions that were those of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes. People are kicked out of the Democratic Party for positions that were the positions of their legendary Democratic fathers and uncles, or for positions they held six years earlier as vice-presidential candidates of the Democratic Party (Joe Lieberman). Here's the kicker. If you foolishly go along with the demands of these "progressives", don't imagine that those demands stop there. Having created a new thesis out of the previous (liberal) thesis and the (progressive) antithesis, that thesis is then challenged by a new (even more progressive) thesis. That is the Marxist/Hegelian philosophy.
That is not so. Republicans are calling positions of Nixon, Reafan and the Bushes as "too left wing to even be talked about." Are you attempting to gaslight us?
Reagan amnestied 10M immigrants.
Nixon created the EPA.
Bush started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I'm not trying to imply that progressives are always right, because they're not. But sometimes they are, and then it's not surprising when those points of view start being considered moderate.
It’s a myth that “the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.”
I find it extraordinary that over 50% of voters saw Harris as “extreme”. By the standards of every other OECD country, her economic positions would be pretty close to mainstream, and if supporting the rights of LGBTQ people and people of color is considered extreme, that says more about the voters than it does about her. The right (which by any reasonable measure is in fact extreme) has been very effective at demonizing policies that likely benefit the majority of the population.
America doesn't believe a woman can be President. Congress yes, President no. Also 54% of American adults have a 6th grade reading level or below. Democrats needs to run white males and talk simple to appeal to this population. FML.
The first women president will be from the Republican party.
Nikki Haley was actually doing pretty solid numbers all things considered. I was really rooting for some kind of miracle turnaround in the primaries there just so that we could have the irony that the first woman president was a Republican. (I think Nikki Haley would have won against most Democrat challengers in a landslide).
I don’t disagree that persisting high prices and Biden’s unpopularity contributed to Trump’s win but it is appalling to me how Nate and others in these comments either ignore or dismiss the impact of sexism, racism, voter suppression and an aggressive disinformation campaign with important contributions from Elon Musk and Putin.
Yes. Racism was the reason that Trump gained among Hispanics and Asians. Latino communities voted for Trump because of racus.
Keep telling yourself the Dems didn’t go too far left. Lose more elections.
Biden started off as a virtually 'dead' President in 2020 and continued to be protected by the liberal media for the years following up until his debate with Trump in 2024 - when even the liberal media could no longer carry on its protective pretence about his neurological state that had existed from 2020.
The liberal media - including Nate - is a victim of its own self-comforting fantasies. Trump won because he kept saying the liberal emperors have no clothes. The people agreed with him and voted accordingly. This is why Harris lost.
Nate called for Biden to drop out from age concerns like a year before anyone else did
How can she be "replacement level" while underperforming by 2 pts?
By my math, she would have held the Blue Wall and become president if she did better by 2pt.
Improving by 1% means changing the mind of 1% of voter.
How many people have a hard time believing that Clinton or Obama could have converted an extra 1%? (Of course, these were exceptional politicians, but still).
Am I the only one who heard Kamala talk and felt like I was hearing an imposter? The word salad, the lack of confidence, the common habit of giving terrible answers to basic questions.
It felt like someone grabbed a random person off the street, gave then a few speach lessons, and said "Now it's up to you to save Democracy. Go."
And this isn't a female thing. Hillary or Liz Cheney never made me feel like this.
Hillary was a far better candidate than Harris. I'm willing to die on that hill.
That's a hell of a hill to die on considering how broadly disliked Hillary Clinton was. Mind elaborating just for my curiosity?
She was more articulate, had ideas of her own, had a stronger platform with way more explicit policy positions (compare this https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/ with anything the Harris campaign released). You might dislike Hillary, but to me at least she looked far more genuine. She seemed to run her campaign, for better or worse, in a way Harris never did.
Fwiw I think they were both pretty bad candidates, I just was curious what pushed you one way or the other between them.
I agree with your assessment of Harris. But Trump is so terrifyingly god-awful on every metric, any decent person should have beat him. Could Hillary have done it this year given what we know about him now and the nightmare we experienced the first time? The second Trump administration will be the same nightmare on quadruple steroids, a combination of stunning incompetence, criminality, absurdity and abomination.
I think a few things are true:
1) Harris ran a flawed campaign, making the safe choice at nearly every juncture without taking the risks (picking Shapiro, going on Rogan) that could have meaningfully moved the needle. She played like a team that knew it was ahead and was trying to burn time, but no matter what public polls you were looking at the race was close and she didn’t have the instincts to put it away (whereas Trump probably takes too many risks)
2) Harris was a flawed candidate for the political moment. She knew the path to victory was presenting as a moderate and trying to force a referendum on Trump, but her history of being one of the most progressive senators made her the wrong vehicle for that message.
3) Democrats got complacent and stopped listening. Because Harris had drawn record fundraising and *they* were excited for her, they were sure everybody else was as well unless they were already solidly pro-Trump. For evidence of this, see the people who are still mocking those who voted for Trump because the price of eggs was too high.
That was my take as well. Distance yourself from Biden, get angry at the way things are, tell people how you are going to make their life better, and show people how dangerous to their pocketbooks Trump's inflationary proposals are. The debate was a clear moment to do this, yet she spent most of her time pivoting away from the economy and making her case. For whatever reason, she was talking past the voters she needed to reach.
Underdogs can't afford to simply play to their base when polling shows that their base (black and Latino voters) are souring on the economy and aren't happy with the direction of the country.
> It could be that ... Trump was an above-average candidate — I tend not to buy the latter given Trump’s long-term electoral track record (he lost the popular vote against Hillary Clinton!), but he’s gotten more popular over time.
At this point we should stop underestimating Trump. He has beaten the polls three times now. I don't think that's a fluke.
Yes, but one of those times he beat the polls… and lost the election. Two out of three ain’t bad but he’s not teflon.
A much different perspective than what everyone's post-game report is, I'm thinking Ezra Klein's viral clip.
Regarding replacement level, I guess she did make it this far so she was at least replacement level but man some of those clips of her speaking off the cuff are so bad it's hard to think that's replacement level. The one that stands out to me the most is, "we don't speak Christmas". Uhg.
She just has a different way of speaking that isn’t linear. I do too, I definitely don’t think it would help in an election but it doesn’t mean she’s dumb or something. It’s not good for sound bites
I often wonder if Harris was having mini-strokes. She IS 60, after all. People do, by then, if they are going to have them. Her not being able to speak plain was fatal to her election.
I think only fat white guys that eat too many tv dinners get strokes at 60.
Not so, but far otherwise: mini-strokes are early and can go on for years but they are crippling, gradually, for language and cognition. Hopefully no one here will ever have them.
#1, you’re a troll.
#2, if you watched the debate, or anything more than sound bites of Harris on Fox News, you’d know that she’s an eloquent speaker.
I don’t watch any cable news and I did watch the debate she did well nice and prepped. Plenty of clips of her making absolutely no sense buddy, and everyone sees it whether you want to believe it or not. Really doesn’t matter because she’ll never win public office ever again.
I was actually responding to the troll Phebe. But Harris could easily win governor of CA.
Minus 3% for being a woman. Minus 3% for being Black. That’s from the git go. Kamala did great. The campaign needed to emphasize every day how Biden/Harris got us out of Trump’s recession, got the price of gas, inflation and interest down and is going after price gougers who haven’t followed. But they didn’t. It’s always the economy, stupid.
Also, Bibi cost her Michigan. Finally, at least for the lit drops and canvassing I did, the GOTV in Michigan was targeting Democrats rather than non-Republicans. In Michigan, an Unknown tends to vote Democratic.
Hard to say being black cost her votes when she outperformed Biden with white voters. I do think being a woman carries an electoral penalty.
Yes but they also sucked at that. Did Harris even once bring up that Biden led the USA to better inflation than Europe? Trump kept insisting the fed drop rates meanwhile which would have made inflation worse. But instead dems just pursued the “he’s racist Hitler” angle
Actually she lost Michigan by like more than the entire Muslim population in Michigan when I checked right after the election. She would have had to find some more votes elsewhere even if she got every single Muslim voter to the polls and voting for her (and assuming that some of them didn't already vote for her).
A few 100% points of agreement: Kamala Harris was a bad pick for VP. I wasn't a huge fan of hers when Biden picked her (and I got into a couple arguments about this too), but honestly VP picks are not as determinative as people think so I let it slide. I was wrong that losing in 2020 would be the end of Trump, and Harris wound up being the heir apparent to Biden in 2024. (I also made the comparison that both Biden and Harris were chosen largely because of their identity).
What I don't agree with is whether it mattered much. IIRC: most Democratic candidates did perform better than Harris, but it was largely because lots of Trump voters voted for him, and him alone. This was the inverse (IIRC) of 2020 where a lot of Republicans voted for their Republican candidate but left the Presidential vote blank. A different Democrat would have had to reverse that trend, which I think would have been more difficult (but not impossible).
I also don't agree that Biden giving Harris the 'root cause' of immigration and Voting Rights was an attempt to undermine Harris, it's normal for the President to assign tough tasks to the VP. Obama assigned Biden the task of pulling out of Iraq, hardly a 'good' part of the portfolio, along with ensuring that the money from the infrastructure bill got spent correctly, and on guns. None of these are great issues, but Biden survived them. At the end of the day your portfolio is not your destiny and Harris was not great at either tasks (which is not to say that it was her fault that things did not succeed either). Had Biden given Harris a bunch of innocuous tasks that would have been its own form of problems because then Republicans could have attacked Harris for being an insubstantial Vice-President.
I don' think Biden was wrong to be worried about Harris beating Trump. As this analysis shows: Harris was a replacement level candidate! The problem that the Biden team was not that they underestimated Harris, it was that they overestimated themselves. Granted: that's a huge miss, I am not suggesting otherwise, but it can be true that Biden was dead wrong about himself, while also being right about Harris.
Finally, for all the handwringing on how awful Biden is, I don't think Nate is giving Biden enough credit for being right, when almost the entire Democratic Party was wrong, in 2020 about the electorate. Biden was also right, when his boss Barack Obama was wrong, about Hillary Clinton in 2016. Of course Biden's career in politics is done, as are Ted Kauffman & Steve Riccheti (both of whom are also quite old anyway), so Nate will get his wish.
In absolute numbers,
Michigan: Harris 2.730 M votes, Slotkin 2.707 M, Harris +0.84%
Wisconsin : Harris 1.668 M, Baldwin 1.672 M, Harris -0.23%
Pennsylvania : Harris 3.403 M, Casey : 3.365 M, Harris +1.1%
Harris didn't underperform the Senate Ds, at least not as much as the ratios Nate cites implies.
Trump overperformed.
Edit below ... I found tabular data at the Green Papers (Noon Pacific time, 11/15) so I was able to do this for all states where there was a senate election also.
Harris ran ahead of the D candidate in (increasing order of margin):
Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Maine, Florida, Delaware, New Jersey, California, Vermont, Tennessee, Mississippi, West Virginia, Massachusetts, Indiana, Wyoming, Maryland, and Utah.
17 states, and 16 where she ran behind
Special note about Maine - there was a Democratic candidate also, and King + Costello together were ahead of Harris, so probably more accurate to say she ran behind in 17 states.
In terms of total votes in all the states, Harris did run behind Senate Ds, by a spectacular 0.07% (including Costello's votes).
So no, Harris was not worse than the Senate D's
You are assuming the Trump voters all voted for Trump and not against Harris. But that’s not true. 9% or so of voters who disapproved of Trump voted for him. Trumps inflated numbers vis a vis R senate candidates could reflect disgust with Harris
What?
I just gave you the actual data.
Her actual vote count was essentially the same as the Senate D candidate.
You are the one ascribing motivation and building a narrative around it.
Your data fits two narratives. People who didn’t care about senate races may have voted either a) for trump or b) against harris.
also, it’s pretty common for the undervote to grow as you go down ballot.
Regardless of those options or any other hypotheticals, it is simply incorrect to say that Harris underperformed compared to the senate Ds.
if you wanted to be rigorous, you’d have to compare the undervote in these races to the undervotes in past races. a generic senate candidate experiences undervote compared to the presidential candidate.
i don’t know from what you posted how D senate candidates’ undervotes measure up historically. you seemed to think any undervote was unusual.
i would loooove a rigorous article on whether r senate candidates experienced an unusually large undervote
In straight up comparisons, Harris did about the same as Senate Ds.
No need for PhD level analysis.
You are getting wrapped up in Harris vs some other thing or another metric.
That wasn't what Nate wrote about.