for the mods: i love long posts, i love an annotated transcript-type approach, i love a cultural autopsy, as it were, and i am already impatient for parts II & III. This is the content i subscribed for. keep choppin
> The metaphor I can't get out of my head for Harris’s brand is some hopelessly confused concept for a restaurant: say, one billing itself as a “Cajun-influenced, vegan-friendly, Tex-Mex cantina and speakeasy”. If I accused such a restaurant of lacking vision, the proprietor might say “What do you mean? We're a Cajun-influenced, vegan-friendly, Tex-Mex cantina and speakeasy! The vision couldn't be any clearer!”.
This is perfect. And not just for Harris's brand, but the counterpart to this: how Harris framed Trump. It was hopelessly confused.
I think they were pretty consistent in framing Trump. The repeated theme was "threat to democracy", the problem was that voters just didn't believe it and didn't care.
They really did struggle to define the Harris campaign though. There just wasn't really any kind of central policy theme or elevator pitch. If you ask a Trump supporter what he was going to change as president, they'd probably give a pretty short "stop illegal immigration and bring down inflation". If you asked a 2008 Obama voter, they'd probably say he's going to fix healthcare and end the war in Iraq. If you ask a Kamala voter in 2024 I don't know what they'd really say.
Here are Fourteen Progressivist Notions That Led American Voters To Reject Progressivism in the 2024 Election
1. DEI -- diversity, equity, and inclusion -- is an essential social idea, because people of color can't improve their own lives.
2. Gender isn't biological, it's a matter of personal choice, so everyone has the right to have theirs changed at public expense, including prisoners and elementary school children
3. Because gender is a matter of personal choice young men have a right to compete in women’s sports, and shower with the other participants.
4.Black lives matter, so the abolition of the police is essential.
5. Unrestricted abortion, even up to birth, is a woman’s right.
6. The border is a creation of racist xenophobes, so we must welcome all who wish to cross it into our country.
7. Israel’s defense of its right to exist is treachery.
8. Astronomical increases in government spending along with severe regulation of production won't increase prices.
9.Global warming is caused by man's CO2 emissions.
10. Banning all internal combustion engines and requiring that all vehicles be electric will stop global warming.
11. Making gun ownership illegal will make us all safer.
12. Environmental, social and corporate- governance (ESG) is the key to better corporations that create more jobs for all of us and lower prices too.
13. Price controls have always worked and never created shortages
14. Mr. Trump’s power to resist all of the above notions and to persuade others to resist them is racist and fascist.
Yeah I don’t give much weight to Nate’s first post that it was about the campaign. I think the answer was to govern more as a centrist, less regulation and clearer on the issues. It’s very easy to sell a good product. Now I know at least one person who’s going to say that Harris and the Democrats didn’t have those progressive policies - the same was said of Biden in 2020 and Harris never really fought back on the issues. Voters aren’t dumb.
Agreed - as the campaign went on I was feeling this - and this seems to be partially a result of the college campus style/reflexs of what Silver calls the Village.
Pity - the early Harris campaign felt like it could break out of egg-headism (as an egg-head myself I say bluntly egg-heads are normally really-poor marketers...)
Nate, I love your punditry and political analysis and am here for it, but please drop the “Village” and “River” thing. I’m not sure if these terms were just a creation for your book or not, but the complexity you’re describing doesn’t fit neatly into two camps and I think it undercuts a lot of the solid argument you’re making.
In a recent “Risky Business” episode, “Will Trump Bring the River to Washington,” Nate trotted out the River and Village metaphors, and his co-host, Maria Konnikova, said:
“We’re talking about the River versus the Village, Trump is very much of the Village, right? He is very establishment, old New York family, money. The times he’s tried to foray into the River like the casino business, he’s bankrupted it. He’s proven himself to not be very adept when he does Riverian things. I think we need to realize that he is the Village as well.”
Nate then responded that he thinks Trump is in neither the River nor the Village because he was not accepted in the latter.
I find the metaphors insightful, but they only seem to be valuable tools when applied to critique Democratic or institutional high-level decision-making. I don’t get how they apply to, say, the decision-making of the Trump campaign or to American politics more broadly.
Trump and Musk have diagnoses that make them buck the conventional wisdom. I do think that a lot of Americans will be exhausted by the end of the four years.
The Village is definitely a thing. The phrase captures a collective that self identifies, sometimes quietly, as a progressive movement and is willing to adopt progressive norms and police its members’ language. The village can ostracize, it can organize and it often expects conformity.
And also captures the counterproductive consensus-based decision structure where anyone on the team gets to have their most asinine policy desires folded into the platform. So you end up having a policy platform that looks like just what it is...an attempt to say 300 different things simultaneously including some extremist very unpopular ones.
I think it's that Nate hasn't done ENOUGH worldbuilding here.
For instance, why does this river only have a single town on it?
Is it a very short river? Or a very big town, so that the town goes effectively all around the river? In which case I suspect you'd get some in-town diversity.
Or perhaps the landscape around is so treacherous that the people can only agglomerate in one village?
But then we would have another group, call 'em the Forest.
In sum, I agree.
Nate's missing the Ents and it's messing with his narrative.
You really should have phrased this Mean Girls style: "Stop trying to make village and river happen, they're not going to happen".
I personally don't mind them since I largely understand what he's trying to say, but the tribal breakdowns aren't obvious from the names, so they're not catchy.
Unfortunately, he spent years writing that book that was entirely based around this concept, so I think he will be cramming everyone and everything into this metaphor for at least a few more years, regardless of how well they fit into this model.
In telling stories, what an analyst needs to do, you must use clusters, segmentation, etc to make a coherent story. So dropping isn't really a realistic option.
I personally have no issues following them, but it does seem like people sometimes have a hard time following them. It seems suggesting an iteration is more appropriate. If people don't fit into two segments, the first thought would be: add more?
Though I believe Nate talks about two segments because they are his expertise areas. Perhaps be thinks they are the greatest drivers of predicting the sort of outcomes he's predicting. I dunno.
In which case. Maybe add sub groups. If there's a village there can be an east side and a west side sort of break down. Top side. Whatever works.
Keeping O’Malley Dillion and her Biden acolytes to run the campaign was the biggest and most egregious mistakes of the campaign. Even today Dillion thinks that it was a well run campaign and Harris fate was predetermined.
I think Harris's fate *was* predetermined because she sucks as a candidate. The more people saw of her in any unscripted situation, the less they liked her. So, for example, while some say it was a mistake for her to not go on Rogan, I think the opposite is true.
Maybe something the campaign could have done would have made a difference at the margins -- e.g., won a swing state or two. But, to take a poker analogy, when you're dealt 7-2 UTG at a full table but refuse to fold, chances are you're going to lose.
“The more people saw of her in any unscripted situation, the less they liked her.”
I said this when she became the candidate and a hundred liberal Silver Bulletin readers furiously blew up my notifications. But I was right, and it was obvious to anyone impartial (I'm a foreign observer) because it's exactly what happened in her 2019 campaign.
Yes, no doubt. That's why the whole 107 days excuse is so ridiculous. Harris ages like a ham sandwich left outside on a hot summer day. They also note that she wasn't very well known prior to the campaign. Wrong! She was well known, she just wasn't well-liked or well-regarded, even by the vast majority of elite Dem leadership.
There’s no there there with Harris. I have no idea what her theory of herself is as a politician.
Her rise seems to be as a palace schemer, who is very good at moving levers of power behind the scenes with other elites, but her relationship with the general populace is strange.
Except by far the best moment of the campaign for her was the debate where she completely dominated Trump. Trump probably won this election by hiding from another debate.
She has been in politics for decades. If by this point she has been unable or (more likely) unwilling to put in the work to improve her speaking skills, she never will.
That's definitely not true - it could happen (though I don't think it will).
And remember she's pretty new to the national stage and sometimes these things have to be learned on the job. There's just no substitute to practice when you're an actual candidate.
My claim is not 100% sure to be true, just as 7-2 UTG is not 100% sure to lose in poker. But because Harris is both lazy and stupid, my claim is at least 95% sure to be true. It's not "definitely not true" unless by that you mean "having anything less than 100% certainty".
But could she have swapped out the campaign leadership team and gotten the fund raising and organizing tasks rolling as quickly and effectively as they did. I doubt it. Sometimes you have to play the hand you are dealt, even if it is a bad hand.
Yeah, this is what Nate meant about seeming like NPCs... she had a huge head start with all the Biden money and all the new money coming in. Money was not the limiting factor here. And if O'Malley was such a great fundraiser, why not just demote her to fundraising instead of running everything?
Why not? It's a big party with a lot of experienced campaign staff from all over the country. It kind of feels in hindsight like another example of just taking the safest path of least resistance. It was easier, and avoided any potential internal conflicts or blowback from the old staff, but it also doesn't seem like the moves of a person who wants to forge their own path separate from their predecessor, which was arguably her undoing.
Sometimes the path of least resistance is the optimal path, especially if one doesn't have a lot of time.
Not hindsight but she only did "half" of what I thought she needed to do at the time. Initially, she needed to unite her base, get the campaign operations up and running, and bring in big dollars quickly. She did those things very well pre Labor Day.
Then she needed to pivot, I thought, to the center on three issues: the economy, the border/migration, and saying in hindsight that she and Biden were wrong on vaccine mandates and censorship. She did none of those things, each alienating more than enough voters to have swung the election.
In hindsight, how could she have been more successful in the first phase? But she was 0 for 3 in the second phase. Looking back, she probably only needed to be 1 for 3.
Just because she lost a tight race does not mean every step along the way was an error.
Couldn't or didn't want to? What Biden policy do you think she wanted to do differently but was playing it safe? She had the perfect excuse: "We accomplished a lot and learned a lot. We will continue the best parts of the approach and improve where we can. In particular, we will evolve these ways..."
Yes, if she had morphed into a Joe Manchin policy wise, she may well have won the election. Thus differences were not things she believed in. But it would have been playing it safe from a pure Machiavellian political perspective.
When I said she couldn't take action on her own, I was responding to Cian saying that her failure to change the campaign leadership did not seem like a person who wanted to forge her own path, which I agree with.
As far as disagreeing with Biden's policies, I don't think she was "playing it safe." I do think she's closer to Manchin, in fact, in terms of what she actually believes, and that the differences were things she believed in. I'd guess she's more conservative than Biden on immigration, the economy, and student loans, for instance.
But really she just needed to be authentic and stand up for something, anything, just take a stand.
Ok, we just have different opinions. I think her views didn't differ much from Biden's policies. I think she was authentic. And I think she miscalculated thinking emphasizing abortion was the way to win the election. (Folks for whom abortion is the key issue, whether Pro Life or Pro Choice, turn out anyways. They aren't the swing voters who decide at the end IMO.) But that was the path she wanted to forge.
I'm not particularly interested in Harris's 107 day campaign. Maybe she could have won, maybe she couldn't. I am far more interested in Biden's 3.5 years of governing prior to that. There's basically two issues that hurt Democrats: inflation and immigration. Immigration is 100% the administration's fault, while inflation less so, maybe 30-40% (I am including messaging in here as well, something like a bipartisan deficit reduction committee). It's very possible that if Biden had signed his asylum executive order three years earlier, Kamala Harris would be president-elect right now.
I think this may be at the heart of Trump's political genius: He gets his opponents so worked up that they do incredibly stupid things. I can think of an instance from 2016ish when Marco Rubio decided it would be a good idea to make comments about the size of Trump's hands and use those as some kind of indicator for the size of other parts.
I don't know if it is intentional, but Trump (frequently with some assistance from Fox News) is great at baiting his opponents into acting in ways that are against their best interests.
Biden dropped Trump's immigration policies to reduce inflation while keeping corporations happy. Inflation was mostly caused by fatter corporate profits, but also somewhat by higher wages. Increasing immigration decreased inflationary pressures on wages. This also made blue collar working class voters upset because their wages became depressed compared to inflation.
This is completely wrong. Biden's moves on immigration had nothing to do with inflation, and corporate profits can't cause inflation (if they did we would have seen a lot of inflation in the 30 years before Covid).
That's way too speculative. A much simpler response as previously alluded to is that he was listening to immigration groups and wanted to contrast himself with the egregious excesses Trump had regarding the border (separations, a useless wall). He basically overcorrected.
> Throughout the Pod Save America transcript, for instance, the staffers complain over and over again about how little time they had to work with. Well, guess what: as Ben Yelin points out, that’s largely on them.
I'm not convinced that the staffers had any ability to get him to drop out, though. He's a stubborn fuck and he only got out when the party forced the issue. He was not going to listen to his staffers. He was listening to his family, who of course wanted him to stay in.
It is true that Biden ultimately owns his failure, but that doesn't excuse the wagon circling that went on. People who knew Biden was unfit engaged in a campaign to actively mislead the American public into thinking he was up for four more years in office, which is inexcusable. His true inner circle should have known even before the debate, but after the debate there was no longer any excuse. Anyone who chose to defend Biden after that debate performance demonstrated a profound lack of judgment and cannot be trusted in an important role in Democratic politics ever again.
But that's sidestepping the point: would the lack of wagon-circling have done anything? If you're a senior staffer before that disastrous debate, do you think that a public resignation is going to move the needle on this? I think given what happened post-debate, that Biden stayed in for weeks even as high-ranking party members publicly called for him to step down, we must know that the answer is "no".
After the debate, yes, I think it's clear something could've been done by staffers. But the difference between the debate and the stepping down was (as the article mentions) 24 days. Is anyone prepared to argue that would've made the difference here?
The real problem was what Biden did after stepping down, and the article mentions it: endorsing Harris. Which comes back to Biden's agency... not the agency of the staffers.
Beyond keeping Biden in the race longer than he should have, the staffers circling the wagons (who have been doing so for at least a couple of years now, this didn't start with the debate) gave the electorate the impression that the Democrats were fraudulent gaslighters who would rather cling to power than do what's right for the country.
They demonstrated that party leadership cares more about their influence and power than they do about responsibility or even electability, in a way that was viscerally apparent and understandable to basically anybody with even a modicum of objective observational skills.
Within a couple of days of watching party leaders call us "bed-wetters" and insisting that "Joe Biden *will* be the nominee", any argument about this election being important was rendered moot, as their actions spoke much louder than their words. Even people like myself who detest Trump and can't forgive him for his electoral scheme crimes started to think, "Maybe this isn't as bad they're saying; they clearly don't act like they care at all, why should I?" I came around to changing my mind back to the election being important, but I'm sure plenty of others were less-inclined.
Circling the wagons for so long in the face of such obvious evidence has damaged the party brand, moreso than a lot of Democrats (voters included) maybe realize. Because most fatally, after watching people lie so brazenly for weeks despite basically everybody knowing it was lies, another important question has been raised in the minds of many voters: What else are these people lying to me about?
I think that part of their problem is that they felt they had successfully executed this playbook in 2024. They hid him away in a basement in Delaware as much as possible, shielding him from any potential situation where he could be exposed. I am sure they were very proud of themselves for getting it over the goal line in 2020. Clearly 2020 was a completely different environment when you could get away with that, and he was a lot more lucid then. However, I think that win gave the team a bit of hubris so they could gaslight themselves into thinking that it could be done again, thus extending the Biden prop-up phase.
It's so strange because to me circling the wagons around a clearly diminished (putting it lightly) Biden indicated just how important they thought beating Trump was.
I think if Nikki Haley had been running they would have been much less risk averse. And despite all the hindsight-fueled takes in these comments, jettisoning your incumbent president with 107 (I had to do it) days left in the race is reasonably perceived as the riskier move (esp. for Villagers who thrive on familiarity and experience -- nobody has experience with doing that).
I'm confident plenty of people here believe Biden was clearly going to lose and so keeping him on as the candidate was the riskier course. Now you can save your time saying as much in replies to me because I already made the point for you!
I guess I would need a definition of decent. I think Harris did far better than he would have, and I think he would have lost. My only point is that for a group of risk averse people (i.e., the people close to Biden), sticking with Biden despite his obvious flaws was potentially viewed as the better option when compared to a completely unknown series of events that had the potential to spiral out of control in any one of 100 different directions.
I get the optics, and that your reaction is probably one that many people had, but a), I don't think the staffers choice was that simple, b) party leadership actually did force him out so it's a bit disingenuous to say party leadership protected him, and c) it is incredibly annoying that there is this huge double standard in terms of the parties' honesty. The first two points are straightforward. Regarding my third point, if a party lying to the electorate is a concern, the completely spineless, humiliating return to Trump adulation that Republican party leadership displayed mere months after having supposedly banished him for Jan 6, should have nauseated any semi objective undecided or independent voter.
Instead here we are complaining that democratic leadership weren't willing to basically invoke the 25th despite Biden actually doing a remarkably competent job in terms of policy (was it not one of the most productive legislative terms of the last 20 years, despite not having full control of congress?) his first two years. It's obvious in hindsight that internally they should have been more forceful in pushing him out before the primaries, but it's not so obvious how their response should have differed after the debate... It was a truly unprecedented historic situation they found themselves in, and any overly aggressive action could have created divisions which would have been harder to heal, and then we would be blaming the democratic disarray for the loss. So for all those reasons I wholly agree that there is only one person to blame in the whole saga and that's Joe Biden for breaking his promise to not pursue another term.
It was "productive legislatively" because there was a major crisis, not because Biden did some crackerjack job. And frankly I think a lot of that legislation was pretty bad.
The worst of covid had passed by the time the infrastructure legislation was signed,, and definitely in the background once the chips and inflation reduction act passed. I don't see how covid influence any of those. And say what you will, but presidents (including Trump) had offered infrastructure bills for 30 years without delivering, so there's that. I can see how Republicans aren't fond of the IRA considering they tend to downplay climate change, but the chips act was long overdue to rein in China, protect our national security and bring high tech manufacturers back... Taken as a whole those were real achievements, even if Biden himself was quickly deteriorating.
Perhaps "promise" is too strong of a word... But he certainly implied he wouldn't run for a second term, and that he would be a bridge to a younger generation.
Right, they actually did well after the debate. The issue people are having is before the debate, but I don't think there was much any individual could do.
I mostly agree with everything you've said here except that I think the average non-political junkie wasn't really thinking too much about this before the debate. Certainly most people I know seemed to think everything was humming alojg as normal and were completely shocked when they saw debate clips. I think there was opportunity to bring that conversation to the forefront much sooner. But the Democrats need more assholes who can step out and draw the lightning.
The average voter is the one that is the most important,
but the least thought about.
Their views, and their judgement, are often overlooked for 'the obvious facts' as those who debate endlessly amongst each other do.
But the Average voter's lack of engagement means that they walk into each new election without the blinders of political zealotry. They don't exist in the bubble. They saw what happened, and the ones who leaned Democrats mostly decided it wasn't worth their time to vote this time.
The counterpoint to that is because they do not weigh the sins of the past as heavily against a new face, their opinions can turn much faster than the entrenched.
It caught the Conservatives by surprise in 2020/2022, and it caught the Democrats by surprise in 2024.
And, as someone who is probably the closest to a true independent in this madhouse of a comment section, let me state that Instead of trying to catch lighting, try catching some Authenticity. Or at least someone who feels like they live in the real world.
Ruben Gallego would be a good baseline for your side, with that 7-ish point different between him and Harris. Read up on his, ask yourselves why he worked when others in the state didn't.
Yes, not circling the wagons absolutely would have done something. It took weeks for high ranking party members to go public with their calls for him to step down after they had apparently pressured him in private. The biggest reason Biden didn't step down is because he was surrounded by yes people in his campaign who kept telling him he was the best chance to beat Trump.
In a sane, functional, rational political party, that debate performance would have been met with immediate condemnation from the entire party, and senior campaign officials would have quit rather than attempted to perpetrate fraud on the American public. Biden would have released a statement the next day saying he was stepping down, preventing weeks of bickering.
No, Biden didn't step down because he's stubborn and he believed he was the best chance to beat Trump. He purposely put yes-men around him. If one of them stopped being a yes-man Biden probably would have fired him
Democrats were publicly defending Biden long after the debate performance. I recall Schumer saying he was with Biden a week or so afterwards. Once the party as a whole mobilized to privately urge him to drop out he did so. I'm not sure why you seem to think that nothing could have been done by anyone any earlier to get him to pull out. The party dithered for weeks, finally mobilized, then he dropped out. Why do you think that the dithering was irrelevant? If they had not dithered and instead moved in unison to force him out immediately then it's likely he would have done so much sooner.
I agree that the people around him were cowardly and unwilling to publicly do anything, but Nate addressed that in the article (the Village is full of risk averse people pleasers). But you also seem to be saying that even if the staff had resigned en masse (or even just some high profile/leadership figures) that it still wouldn't have moved the needle at all. Why do you think that? If his campaign chair had come out and said "behind closed doors it's clear the President isn't capable of leading this country for four more years. I can't support him" then that absolutely would have been earth shattering news that would have put immense pressure on others to call for him to step aside. Which, again, is what ultimately forced him to do so.
Remember, we're looking back with hindsight and we now know that he actually could be forced out. At the time, this was very much in doubt. I personally thought there was no way of forcing him out, since he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by staying in.
This is a collective action problem. No one person had the power to do anything. Forcing him out was a process that took time and had to be done gradually.
I do think that the upper echelons of the Democratic party (the ones who knew Biden was having cognitive issues) could have done something much earlier to get him to step down: encouraged a serious primary challenger. Dean Phillips didn't want to do it himself initially, but no prominent Democrat was willing to stick their neck out and try, largely because the upper echelons of the party are too good at defending their own and not good enough at recognizing when the ship is way off course and needs to be righted. Democratic primary voters thought Biden was too old, but without a serious alternative to vote for, they took their cues from the party leaders and voted for him anyway.
Nate's comment about "Red-teaming" a Harris campaign earlier in the year was something I thought of immediately after the debate. Biden said he was staying in the race, but assumed that behind the scenes there must be people developing "Harris for President" campaign infrastructure.
I was curious if there would be any early leaks such as a printing company getting an order for new campaign signs, or advertisers gearing up new commercials. There weren't any of those leaks, which leads to the comment from the transcript that they really did start cold when Biden dropped out as opposed to having a team running in the background for "just in case".
Part of that I think is that the moment you start to Red Team Biden dropping out you're breathing life into that reality and Biden desperately didn't want anything that might create that momentum, but somebody within the party should have been willing to lead that effort as a responsible contingency.
I think resignations would have been a huge story and definitely would have made the bottom fall out faster than it did, and probably could have gotten the conversation started earlier if they happened before the debate. The Biden drop out was not treated as inevitable even after the debate. It certainly became more likely, but conventional wisdom on it ebbed and flowed over the next 3 5 weeks because the people around him were working to keep him there. When it was announced it was semi-surprising news.
If everyone just immediately jumped ship, or even a significant portion of insiders broke with him publicly, we wouldn't have had that.
I would go so far as to say I can’t imagine voting for ANY Dem who supported Biden’s decision to run again in 2024 - ignoring majorities of the voters, including Democratic voters, who clearly indicated in polling for YEARS they did not want him to be the nominee. What political party in its right mind nominates a candidate a majority of its OWN VOTERS doesn’t want? Especially when the opponent is Trump - in their own words, a potential fascist? It’s literally stupid. And stupid people shouldn’t be running the government.
I'd have a hard time voting for someone who thought it made sense for him to stay president, but drop out of the race and anoint his unelected VP. It was a coup and it was wrong. And if he can't run, he shouldn't be president. It's hypocritical for him to stay president.
There were levers to pull other than "convince Biden" directly. They could've spent their time convincing Pelosi, talking to his cabinet, leaking more bad news to the press earlier, etc.
Ultimately they proved themselves loyal to the boss above all else, presumably due to their own self-preservation instincts. That's the kind of trait bosses like, but it doesn't equate to competence (take a look at Trump's inner circle).
These clowns spent a year gaslighting us and trying to convince us that no, Biden is just fine. They failed already - in a sense, they'd already lost an election once!
It's easy to say it now, but Harris should've thrown them all under the bus and tried something different.
Honestly, the part that is absolutely Harris' failure is that she wasn't standing up a shadow campaign for months before the disastrous debate. She had to have seen the same polls everyone else had about Democrats wishing he wouldn't run again. Even if all she was doing was calling key people and saying "Hey, if Biden drops out, will you come on to my campaign?", she should've had something ready other than starting completely cold.
I agree with Cian’s point that it would have gotten out. My initial instinct, like yours, is that she should have started preparing. But when I think though the scenarios, I don’t think it would have been a good move (see below), purely thinking through her self interest. The only way it makes sense is if she believes a) she can strong-arm Biden into supporting and endorsing her despite taking actions that undermine him, b) the benefits of having a few more weeks to prepare outweigh the damage done by Biden’s team working against her or forcing a competition for the nomination, and c) she was likely to win at the end.
1. Remain the loyal solider, don’t prepare to run or try to force Biden out, and Biden stays in the race. Biden gets crushed in November. Harris is partially damaged goods. It’s easy to blame the loss on Biden. She’s probably the front-runner for the ‘28 nomination. But let’s say it’s a 30% chance since she’ll still have all the baggage of her weak ‘20 primary campaign and all the institutional branding that hurt her this year.
2. What happened: remain the loyal soldier, don’t prepare, but Biden drops out. We know the outcome. Her chance of being the nominee is much less than scenario 1 as she owns more of the loss.
3. Prepare to run and/or undermine Biden, and Biden stays in the race. Biden gets crushed. Harris has virtually no chance of being the ‘28 nominee because Biden and his team bury her in the media and in the party. She gets more blame for the loss because she undermined him.
4. Prepare to run and/or undermine Biden and Biden drops out. Biden’s team leaks what’s happening before he drops out — they treated her like crap for four years and were even undermining her to help keep his candidacy alive. Biden doesn’t endorse her and she ends up having to spend time, at best, shoring up delegates. At worst, there’s some sort of competitive process. She might win, but she might not. It’s hard to see this having a higher likelihood of winning than what actually happened. And she’s still more damaged in the party than #1.
There's no way that would have been kept quiet, and before the debate, indicating Biden was too old to run again was still extremely taboo for any insiders to suggest. I don't think Dean Philips was ever so forward as to suggest Biden needed to drop out because he was incapable of doing the job.
Unfortunately I don't think Harris really had the kind of ruthlessly personality to try and go around him either. I don't think she saw it as her place to try and push him out and didn't seem to have any real vision of her own that she was motivated to persue.
I don't think it was self preservation so much as just being too nice. Democrats generally succeed when they have someone who isn't afraid to be an asshole. But I don't think Biden had one of those.
Spot on article. I kept waiting for the end, thinking, why hasn't he mentioned education. Closely related to that is the concept of knowledge workers, versus all others. I think the resentment stems from this divide, which actually coincides with urban dwelling. In the end though, it does come down to economics. Not necessarily a working class vs middle or upper class, but the educated affluent versus the non educated that are struggling. If democrats refocus on pulling up the non educated (eg revitalizing vocational and technical training at massive scale) and yes keep helping women break into leadership, while also talking about the problems plaguing men at the bottom (deaths of despair/opiods, less education, a break down in roles which haven't been replaced), then maybe they would get to solving issues which people care about.
Yeah, Biden arguably IS the asshole who had a chip on his shoulder but he was the only one of his team who was. That's great for building staff loyalty, but not for building ambitious successors
I just don't see any of that doing much. Pelosi was only galvanized to act after the debate where Biden's cognitive issues were clearly on display in a way that the country could not deny.
"Pelosi was only galvanized to act after the debate"
But it wasn't right after the debate. It took many weeks for her to finally tell him he had to drop out. Pelosi's staff reiterated a week after the debate that she had full confidence in the President. She wasn't as strident in defense as others, but in the days and week following the debate she was saying that she trusted his judgment and saying he needed to do interviews to reassure people that he could do the job. I give her credit for being better than many others, but anyone who saw the debate knew within the first 20 minutes that Joe needed to go.
What people say in public may not be what they say in private. I think a more likely explanation is that Pelosi and others came to the same conclusion in the aftermath of the debate and then gradually changed their tone to apply increasing pressure on Biden over 3.5 weeks. Because he was so unwilling, the public tone of those trying to get him to drop out became more strident and later began leaking their moves.
I absolutely agree that that seems like a likely description of what happened. But that's very different than a claim that the party immediately began calling for his ouster, or that if they had it would not have mattered (JC's point). If the party had moved in unison the day after the debate to say "clearly, Biden is not capable and needs to step down" then he would have done so much sooner.
The party is not a single actor though, and can't move in unison. It takes a while for that process to happen and not everyone wanted to do it that quickly
Would it have done much to accelerate the timeline had these Biden loyalists "cracked" earlier? Maybe not. But if they'd made a stand earlier, then they would've at least proven *themselves* as people worth listening to.
Instead, to use Nate's gambling terminology, they were clearly "nits" - cautiously toeing the line and staying loyal to the boss - rather than "degens" - willing to take a big risk for big possible gains.
The Harris campaign needed people willing to take those risks, because we can now clearly see the outcome of a "cautious" campaign. Those same cautious Biden loyalists are the ones who ran her cautious campaign into the ground.
It's possible *no* strategy could have won, but we have evidence that a "low risk" strategy failed, so that leaves only trying a "high risk" strategy as a plausible counterfactual.
Are you talking about Biden staffers? Or party bigshots? Those are two different groups with two very different views and motivations.
I don't understand how you think there were big possible gains here. The whole problem was that there was no advantage to anyone to sticking his neck out.
I agree Kamala needed to take more risks. But taking more risks is not the same as being pointlessly stupid and disloyal. And I don't understand how Biden's staffers going against him is anything other than pointlessly stupid and disloyal. Not to mention, in my view, it'd be extremely unethical.
His staff would have had an uphill battle, but they do have influence. For example, they did convince him to flip on vaccine mandates. When asked in April 2021, he said that would be immoral and illegal. But the staff kept pushing and by September he was on board. Which ended up getting about 8,400 military personnel dismissed.
This is what I find so frustrating, though. If you’re aware that your elderly grandfather is no longer able to safely operate a car, you have a responsibility to take his keys away. And if you don’t, and there’s an accident and someone gets hurt, well that’s sorta on Grandpa - but it’s MORESO on you for not stepping in when you knew better.
But that was the Democratic Party, right? By many accounts, party members at all levels were aware, well before the debate, that Biden was not up to a second term, AND that his prospects were terrible. Yet, not wanting to damage their own careers - even as THEY THEMSELVES were calling Trump a fascist- they still let Grandpa drive the car. And we, and the country, are the ones getting hurt.
Well they all knew Trump wasn't actually a fascist, or they might have acted like it.
Driving a car isn't democratically elected, though. Biden had won all the primaries. I just don't know what people could have done. Before the debate his condition wasn't obvious to the public so undeniably.
I wonder if anyone talked about invoking the 25th amendment - but even that wouldn't stop him from running again.
I’m actually talking about last fall, when Biden first insisted on running again - pre-primary. The electorate was aware of Biden’s liabilities - in multiple polls, upwards of 70% didn’t want him to run again. And behind the scenes Dems were fretting about his prospects, but they said nothing.
Dean Phillips offered the Dems a wedge in the door before it slammed shut. If even a few of them had insisted on debates, it would have exposed Biden’s liabilities MUCH sooner. If Biden had persisted in staying in the race, and the media had covered Phillips fairly, then the primary voters would have had another viable option, even if eventually someone more high profile jumped in and became the nominee. That’s all Phillips was trying to do - give his party an escape hatch to run someone who could beat Trump. Instead they (and a complicit MSM) threw him under the fucking bus.
I think this is a fairly persuasive argument but it also looks like so many other post-mortems in which pundits point to whatever already bothered them as the cause of failure. Many of them are also fairly persuasive. It makes me skeptical that any of it is correct. Maybe that general skepticism is the best stance for now, though it doesn’t feel very productive.
Well in some sense in an election this close any improvement in a number of directions would have produced a victory. So there are a lot of plausible counterfactuals to bandy about.
You could easily hold the position the assassination attempt was what turned the election. I know that is what I felt at the time. But then obviously so much more happened.
For those who have been on the internet for a long time, Andreessen is known as the creator of Netscape. For those newer to the scene, he's one of the world's top venture capitalists. And for regular podcast listeners, he's one of the most fascinating guests invited to shows. With a broad range of interests, original thinking, and a great sense of humor, listening to him is always engaging, no matter the topic.
In this podcast, Rogan and Andreessen reflect on the recent elections, with Andreessen sharing how he went from being a staunch Democrat — having voted for Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, Hillary, and Biden — to a Trump supporter. One of the main triggers for this shift, and a hot topic on Twitter, is Andreessen’s account of "debanking," a term referring to banks refusing services to problematic entrepreneurs. This began under Obama and continued under Biden.
According to Andreessen, the Obama administration pressured banks to deny services to owners of businesses that, while legalized in the early 2010s at the state or national level, were not federally approved. This primarily targeted newly legalized businesses such as marijuana cultivation and escort services (legalized prostitution), as well as long-standing industries like civilian firearms manufacturing and sales. These business owners found their accounts suddenly closed, with no other banks willing to serve them. Under Biden, Andreessen claims this extended to crypto and fintech startup founders, and, about two years ago, to entrepreneurs making political statements the Biden administration disliked.
One might think Andreessen is exaggerating or fabricating, but after his comments, a flood of confessions emerged on Twitter. Tech startup founders began sharing dozens of stories about similar experiences in recent years, having previously been too afraid to speak out due to fears of further trouble. Some of these founders revealed that, because of longstanding relationships with their bankers, they were confidentially told the account closures were due to pressure from authorities.
"What do you do when this happens to you?" Rogan asks toward the end of the conversation.
"Endorse Trump," Andreessen laughs.
This is only a small portion of the interview, but Andreessen's broader insights paint a picture of how, in recent years, the U.S. has started to resemble a totalitarian country like China. The Democratic administration, he argues, exerts control and pressure not directly but through ostensibly independent yet fully state-controlled firms and NGOs. Toward the end, Andreessen directly compares recent U.S. developments to China.
I highly recommend this interview to anyone on the left to better understand why they are now disliked. Andreessen is not lying — like most in Silicon Valley, he consistently supported Democrats until very recently. Even if you don't believe what he says, you should take it into account because this shift hasn't just happened to him; post-election surveys show that nearly all groups in American society have moved to the right.
Nice excuse not buying it for one second. I think silicon valley entrepreneurs had been waiting for the right moment to finally align their financial interests with the party that best represents those interests. Perhaps they believed that after all these years of threatening to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, democrats just might do it. When Musk, who many greatly admire, jumped ship, it was perfect cover to do the same.
If this policy started with Obama and he voted for Obama, Clinton, and Biden, then what he really means is that he didn't give a shit about this it until it affected him. I'm so exhausted with the amount of power the wealthy have in our society. They can decide on a whim that X is now better than Y and the rest of us poor folks just have to suffer through it.
Obama started it in 2013 after he won his second election (see Operation Choke Point). In 2016, Mark probably thought Trump was far worse than Clinton.
According to wikipedia, the operation "was officially ended In August 2017, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) settled multiple lawsuits by promising to Congress additional training for its examiners and to cease issuing 'informal' and 'unwritten suggestions' to banks." So in 2020, Mark had every reason to believe that this dubious practice was a thing of the past.
Considering in that same interview Andreeson also completely incorrectly explains was a "politically exposed person" is (a term that anyone who's worked at any bank will know from mandatory training), I'm not buying anything else he says about how baning works.
Occams razor is that Andreeson is a rich investor who dislikes regulations and over the past few years, Democrats have been trying to regulate Silicon Valley more and more. Republicans have too to a lesser extent, but Trump does not have any underlying principles and can be easily bought out, so supporting him gets you what you want more easily.
"Second, it suffered from the problem of too much agreeableness, a characteristic Village trait since the Village tends to emphasize communal consensus over individual achievement. There was, most obviously, far too much deference to Biden. But there was also an unwillingness to ruffle feathers with other progressive constituencies who might have gotten upset by a bolder approach."
The Indigo Blob is probably disproportionately staffed by women, and if not, women have exerted a great deal of influence on the party's direction overall. The agreeableness problem is prevalent among women behaviorally, generally speaking. Women largely drove these progressive constituencies they didn't want to upset. Democrats need, quite honestly, more men and women to be willing to tell the women in the Indigo Blob that they're incorrect about so much. I also struggle to understand the repercussions leadership expects from the Indigo Blob. Nate may have alluded to this in a previous post, but they probably can't articulate the consequences when asked. Professional class women, I've seen socially, have a particular disdain for class politics, which is why Hillary's woke interpretation won over Sanders.
This was not well argued. He is saying that because there is no one definition of "working class", one doesn't exist at all. It's a postmodern straw man. Yeah, I know that unions are on the decline. But class is now very clearly a matter of whether you have a degree and have certain tastes. The definition of class evolves. Bernie had success among a wide swath of the population because he purposely avoided the language of race and gender identity politics and talked about material issues. That's what I mean by class politics. The two are stylistically and rhetorically different.
It's a terrible article. The key to understanding classes is that they are different cultures. Different cultures with different answers to questions like how do you live, what do you do for fun, what media do you like, what do you eat and drink, what are your values.
Having a college degree is just a side effect, since Red Culture generally doesn't value higher education, but plenty of people in Red Culture do have college degrees, and plenty of people in Blue Culture don't.
I can't prove any of this. It's based on my experience in female PMC spaces, specifically for those who worked in the Indigo Blob for about ten years until I was kicked out (insufficiently woke in 2020): intuition and observation. I was never in the blob, but this group had many male friends until the entry of too many women ruined it. In 2016, they couched their intense dislike of Sanders in his identity (projected onto him) as a white man. They refused to address his substantial critiques of Hillary and saw her and themselves as perpetual victims of sexism in politics and work. She was being unfairly characterized as being a shill for Goldman Sachs, for example, because of her sex. They refused to address the Goldman Sachs speeches. The one time I tried to bring any of this up, one woman commented saying that she just wanted to stop getting rape threats from Bernie Bros on Twitter. I don't buy that was a thing anymore, but maybe it was. Either way, they'd ALWAYS find a way to get out of addressing the argument and make it about the person's identity. There was no acknowledgment of Bernie's supporters being quite diverse because the white bro narrative was convenient for disqualifying him. I met zero women socially who talked about class politics until last week. No one wants to talk about it among my friends - only about abortion.
Edit: The PMC largely comes from PMC backgrounds. The PMC is increasingly female, therefore it is likely that most of the PMC women I've met came from well off backgrounds, anyway. And that's what they can't deal with. See also, Liam Kofi Bright on White Psychodrama.
This is one of the things I never understand about society. Definitely with men, but also generally emotional violence is easily much more harmful compared to how it is treated.
Obviously words are not murder. But some scrap on the playground is treated as some major transgression possibly even needing suspension/expulsion when almost certainly the injuries will be gone in days. Meanwhile much more serious and long term emotional harms and behaviors are sort of treated as NBD.
We are too harsh on actual violence and not harsh enough on emotional/social violence.
And yet, the same people doling out social violence do scream "words are violence" while carrying it out, as though the OTHER person has been violent toward them by standing up to them. I've encountered this standard behavior among women and girls in all sorts of contexts. The personal experiences I've had with women over politics are why I detest the Democratic brand--not because of anything Harris or any individual politician has done. They are the reason I voted L - the social-emotional violence in the form of exclusion and lost friendship over divergent opinions.
It's because of who's committing the physical violence (boys) and who's committing the emotional violence (girls).
It's an example of sexism in society (against men).
Basically as a society we've paid a lot of attention to the ways men tend to not kind to women, but almost no attention to the ways women tend to not be kind to men.
It is cutthroat behavior in service of two goals: 1—keeping the social hierarchy from toppling, and 2—ensuring the woman in power doesn't lose her position by being exposed as a morally bankrupt person. Liberal women need to be able to see themselves as morally upstanding even as they destroy people for deviant opinions. It's why you see women cutting their competition down by cynically deploying concern over marginalized people.
To be very economist-y about this, it just sounds really rational.
And in some way, the ultimate feminism?
The expectation that women would be some sort of enlightened ruler when put in a position of power seems... odd. That's not equality. That's putting an onus on women to be better people than men for some reason.
Wouldn't the most fair read be that, if women are truly the equals of men, then we should expect that there would be women who would equal the most enlightened of male rulers as well as the nastiest, most beady-eyed, self-serving dudes out there?
A priori, I would expect that if there's really no intrinsic moral betterness among the males or the females (and I have no a priori reason to think someone's more or less ethical because of their sex), then the distribution should be about the same.
So we should get some royal pricks and some royal sweethearts, and the group in power will be clever about maintaining its power. Whatever the sex of the people holding it. And using the most effective tools to do so, whichever they are.
I take your point and agree - there really is no reason for women to behave better than men when they have power. At the same time, they inflict emotional violence and police the boundaries of groups. Humans need groups to survive. I also agree that this is evolutionarily necessary because in and out groups will always exist. We will never transcend the need to form tribes. In modern society, however, men must change their behavior and share power. Laws police literal violence. Emotional violence can't be policed but leaves people damaged.
My dismay about the whole thing is due to women rhetorically papering over their cruelty by appealing to morality and the need to protect the marginalized. Men don't justify their shitty behavior using such language. Because women justify it thus, you can't call it what it is - sociopathy.
Yes, obviously, except since ethics serves as a limitation on possible strategies, it handicaps anyone who cares about it. Also the people who want to control others will be the most determined to win.
As someone who thinks Trump was and will be a terrible president, you hit the nail on the head in saying that the Democrat establishment never acted like he was the existential threat that they claimed. Because he's probably not. Terrible presidents still are term limited and I don't believe he's going to become a dictator. And obviously not that many people do. So while I'd never vote for him, he'll be gone one day. At which point I'll vote for whoever has the best policies.
I think a lot of people assume that it won't be that bad, based on the the first term. And while I in no way think that he will end democracy, I think it's hard to overstate how much damage he will do. Dismantling a functioning political and foreign policy structure that took 70 years to build and created staggering prosperity and global stability is easy once you understand how it works and have people knowledge enough and willing to do the technical work required to dismantle it (which he didn't have the first term). The near impossible part will be putting the pieces back together again. Once the genie of authoritarianism, norm breaking, state dismantling, populism, and chaos is let out of the bottle in the world's most influential country, it's a race to the bottom.
I get the frustration... It wasn't functioning. But the diagnosis and prescription that this election symbolize is pretty terrible in my view. Boiling problems down to illegal immigration (which definitely was a problem) and inflation (which was global and unfortunately irreversible in terms of actually bringing prices down), was simply focusing on tertiary symptoms. The real problem in the system is the hollowing out of manufacturing, unfettered lobbying, and later on tech monopolies. Ironically union busting, citizens united and regressive taxation were all republican platforms which contributed to the problem. Still dismantling "everything" will not fix any of those problems. All it will do is create chaos and power vacuums at home and abroad.
>Once the genie of authoritarianism, norm breaking, state dismantling, populism, and chaos is let out of the bottle in the world's most influential country, it's a race to the bottom.
I mean both parties (probably slightly lead by the Republicans) have been on this path for 20+ years. Trump is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the two parties, and the political/lobbying class around them all of which needs to be razed to the ground.
I largely agree. But a) trump will most definitely not raze them to the ground and b) Who do you think lobbyists work for? Corporate America. Who has Trump tapped for his administration? Corporate America. He's simply cutting out the middle man. So even if he miraculously razed them to the ground, to replaced it with what? Oligarchy? Makes no sense.
Even in some hypothetical scenario where he chose to flout the constitutional prohibition on third and subsequent terms and no one with the power to stop him bothered to try, he's still effectively "term-limited" by human life expectancy (especially for someone of his weight class). And he's already showing the cognitive signs of aging, maybe not quite to the degree that Biden is but still very noticeably.
> This reflects poorly on Biden and frankly makes him seem like a narcissist.
Lol, did you just realize this?
A fun exercise is to guess which presidents were narcissists, sociopaths, or neither. I think the last president who was neither was probably George HW Bush.
I don't think anyone who isn't at least somewhat of a narcissist could ever get to the point of running for president. Maybe 100+ years ago. I don't understand that culture. But in the modern era it's required.
I still maintain that the Dems' "threat to democracy" talking point hurt them almost as much as it helped them. One man's "convicted felon" is another man's "lawfare", and the exit polling bore that out.
>And some of it may have been the various trials against Trump, which made him more sympathetic among his base.
This tracks with our Polymarket postmortem, where it seemed like large gains in Trump's win odds were the trials (Federal and NY conviction), the Butler PA shooting, and after the VP debate.
The Harris campaign did have a clear vision, it was just the wrong vision:
1. A federal Pro Choice law legalizing abortion in all cases in all 50 states. Every speech she kept emphasizing "send me the bill and I will sign it."
2. Trump is really very very very ... very very very bad.
3. Everything else doesn't really matter. One has to vote for sanity over issues.
My frustration with the "Trump is bad" messaging was the focus on him as a person and on "threat to democracy/fascism," not on what his policies would do, their threat to the common man/woman. We politically engaged left-of-center types know what his policies would, now will, do. All the low involvement voters and/or Fox News, right wing media consuming voters don't. Hell, with inflation as a core issue, Harris/Trump should have been hitting over & over the tariff/inflation connection. (With immigration as an issue, it's harder to focus on the deportation/inflation connection.)
I do not think it was the lack of tie-in of tariffs/deportations with inflation that was an issue. It was the claims that the economy is doing great and the earlier high inflation should be ignored. It was a message saying believe me and not your shrinking wallet. That's what so infuriated voters.
My son, long prior to the election, talked about the on-going gaslighting engaged in by the Biden Administration. One example was inflation. Another was his age-based decline. Another was, in my view, Israel and Gaza -- our ability to rein in Israel's on-going bombing of civilians in their hunt for Hamas.
Project 2025 was (is) extremely unpopular. Enough so that he had to distance himself from it. But they should not have allowed him to do so so successfully.
The problem with Trump is that he has the unique ability to shape shift into whatever a supporter wants him to be. He's held stances that should piss off just about everyone, but everyone knows he's dishonest and transactional, so they all get to tell themselves "oh that thing I don't like, he's just doing that for show to impress some other group, but I know deep down he's going to do the stuff I want". So the mega conservative Christian nationalists get to tell themselves that "yeah, he's publicly distancing himself from Project 2025 and all it's plans, but we know he has to say that to win, he's still going to do it once he has power" and the the MAGA capitalists and Joe Rogan types who just like the Trump show and owning the libs get to tell themselves "yeah he's got to appeal to the Christians, but we know he's a sleazy New York businessman who doesn't care about that stuff, there's no way he'll actually do those Project 2025 things, he's even saying he has no interest in it".
I think the economy perception problem goes back to the 2020 campaign. Trump in his first three years in office effectively mortgaged long-term economic stability for short-term growth. The signs started to show in the summer of 2019 when top advisors were telling him a 2020 recession was inevitable. But then came the pandemic and Trump effectively marketed "the economy was great due to my leadership and then this unforeseen pandemic happened." Biden neither pushed back on Trump's great economy myth nor that the Obama administration's NSC warned Trump of an impending pandemic. (It's why I've always thought Susan Rice should have been his VP pick. She was making these two points back then, especially the latter.) By not focusing on this in 2020, Trump's assertions became accepted by voters. By 2024 it's not clear that there was a path to undo the dichotomy of the public thinking Trump was great with the economy and Biden was terrible. To paraphrase James Carville: "It's the perception of the economy, stupid!"
Am I hopelessly out of touch because I think the “Cajun-influenced, vegan-friendly, Tex-Mex cantina and speakeasy” sounds relatively coherent and easy to understand?
Like, it would be one thing if it was a "a kosher sushi joint with Peruvian-inspired small plates." But you've basically described a normal trendy Austin restaurant!
for the mods: i love long posts, i love an annotated transcript-type approach, i love a cultural autopsy, as it were, and i am already impatient for parts II & III. This is the content i subscribed for. keep choppin
Agreed!
> The metaphor I can't get out of my head for Harris’s brand is some hopelessly confused concept for a restaurant: say, one billing itself as a “Cajun-influenced, vegan-friendly, Tex-Mex cantina and speakeasy”. If I accused such a restaurant of lacking vision, the proprietor might say “What do you mean? We're a Cajun-influenced, vegan-friendly, Tex-Mex cantina and speakeasy! The vision couldn't be any clearer!”.
This is perfect. And not just for Harris's brand, but the counterpart to this: how Harris framed Trump. It was hopelessly confused.
I think they were pretty consistent in framing Trump. The repeated theme was "threat to democracy", the problem was that voters just didn't believe it and didn't care.
They really did struggle to define the Harris campaign though. There just wasn't really any kind of central policy theme or elevator pitch. If you ask a Trump supporter what he was going to change as president, they'd probably give a pretty short "stop illegal immigration and bring down inflation". If you asked a 2008 Obama voter, they'd probably say he's going to fix healthcare and end the war in Iraq. If you ask a Kamala voter in 2024 I don't know what they'd really say.
They would get together their favorite 300 left leaning NGOs and ask them what they should say.
That bit you quoted is my favorite part of Nate's essay. Hilarious!
Here are Fourteen Progressivist Notions That Led American Voters To Reject Progressivism in the 2024 Election
1. DEI -- diversity, equity, and inclusion -- is an essential social idea, because people of color can't improve their own lives.
2. Gender isn't biological, it's a matter of personal choice, so everyone has the right to have theirs changed at public expense, including prisoners and elementary school children
3. Because gender is a matter of personal choice young men have a right to compete in women’s sports, and shower with the other participants.
4.Black lives matter, so the abolition of the police is essential.
5. Unrestricted abortion, even up to birth, is a woman’s right.
6. The border is a creation of racist xenophobes, so we must welcome all who wish to cross it into our country.
7. Israel’s defense of its right to exist is treachery.
8. Astronomical increases in government spending along with severe regulation of production won't increase prices.
9.Global warming is caused by man's CO2 emissions.
10. Banning all internal combustion engines and requiring that all vehicles be electric will stop global warming.
11. Making gun ownership illegal will make us all safer.
12. Environmental, social and corporate- governance (ESG) is the key to better corporations that create more jobs for all of us and lower prices too.
13. Price controls have always worked and never created shortages
14. Mr. Trump’s power to resist all of the above notions and to persuade others to resist them is racist and fascist.
That may not be all, but it's a start.
It's like a Fox News description of the Harris campaign platform. It's an absolute strawman.
Yeah I don’t give much weight to Nate’s first post that it was about the campaign. I think the answer was to govern more as a centrist, less regulation and clearer on the issues. It’s very easy to sell a good product. Now I know at least one person who’s going to say that Harris and the Democrats didn’t have those progressive policies - the same was said of Biden in 2020 and Harris never really fought back on the issues. Voters aren’t dumb.
Yes. Global warming is clearly caused by women’s emissions.
Lol. Like cow burps.
Agreed - as the campaign went on I was feeling this - and this seems to be partially a result of the college campus style/reflexs of what Silver calls the Village.
Pity - the early Harris campaign felt like it could break out of egg-headism (as an egg-head myself I say bluntly egg-heads are normally really-poor marketers...)
Nate, I love your punditry and political analysis and am here for it, but please drop the “Village” and “River” thing. I’m not sure if these terms were just a creation for your book or not, but the complexity you’re describing doesn’t fit neatly into two camps and I think it undercuts a lot of the solid argument you’re making.
Yeah, agreed. I do like "Indigo Blob" more, or better yet, the term Curtis Yarvin / Mencius Moldbug used, the Cathedral.
In a recent “Risky Business” episode, “Will Trump Bring the River to Washington,” Nate trotted out the River and Village metaphors, and his co-host, Maria Konnikova, said:
“We’re talking about the River versus the Village, Trump is very much of the Village, right? He is very establishment, old New York family, money. The times he’s tried to foray into the River like the casino business, he’s bankrupted it. He’s proven himself to not be very adept when he does Riverian things. I think we need to realize that he is the Village as well.”
Nate then responded that he thinks Trump is in neither the River nor the Village because he was not accepted in the latter.
I find the metaphors insightful, but they only seem to be valuable tools when applied to critique Democratic or institutional high-level decision-making. I don’t get how they apply to, say, the decision-making of the Trump campaign or to American politics more broadly.
So Scott Alexander has a piece about the Red Tribe, Blue Tribe, and Grey Tribe.
The Village is the Blue Tribe, and the River is the Grey Tribe. Nate is correct - Trump is not in either.
Trump and Musk have diagnoses that make them buck the conventional wisdom. I do think that a lot of Americans will be exhausted by the end of the four years.
Musk falsely claims to have autism. Trump, as far as I know, does not claim any diagnosis, and neither actually has any diagnoses.
The Village is definitely a thing. The phrase captures a collective that self identifies, sometimes quietly, as a progressive movement and is willing to adopt progressive norms and police its members’ language. The village can ostracize, it can organize and it often expects conformity.
And also captures the counterproductive consensus-based decision structure where anyone on the team gets to have their most asinine policy desires folded into the platform. So you end up having a policy platform that looks like just what it is...an attempt to say 300 different things simultaneously including some extremist very unpopular ones.
Yes! Please. These terms are insufferable and inscrutable.
He's pot-committed to them at this point though
I think it's that Nate hasn't done ENOUGH worldbuilding here.
For instance, why does this river only have a single town on it?
Is it a very short river? Or a very big town, so that the town goes effectively all around the river? In which case I suspect you'd get some in-town diversity.
Or perhaps the landscape around is so treacherous that the people can only agglomerate in one village?
But then we would have another group, call 'em the Forest.
In sum, I agree.
Nate's missing the Ents and it's messing with his narrative.
We are stuck with River and Village until Nate's next book.
At which point it will be all about Clouds and Crowds.
Huh? Why?
To be fair, the way the elite reacts to people who try to go off-reservation does make me think of the giant beach ball attacking Patrick McGoohan.
I am not a number! I am a free man!
You really should have phrased this Mean Girls style: "Stop trying to make village and river happen, they're not going to happen".
I personally don't mind them since I largely understand what he's trying to say, but the tribal breakdowns aren't obvious from the names, so they're not catchy.
Pretty sure that was a mean girls reference.
Unfortunately, he spent years writing that book that was entirely based around this concept, so I think he will be cramming everyone and everything into this metaphor for at least a few more years, regardless of how well they fit into this model.
In telling stories, what an analyst needs to do, you must use clusters, segmentation, etc to make a coherent story. So dropping isn't really a realistic option.
I personally have no issues following them, but it does seem like people sometimes have a hard time following them. It seems suggesting an iteration is more appropriate. If people don't fit into two segments, the first thought would be: add more?
Though I believe Nate talks about two segments because they are his expertise areas. Perhaps be thinks they are the greatest drivers of predicting the sort of outcomes he's predicting. I dunno.
In which case. Maybe add sub groups. If there's a village there can be an east side and a west side sort of break down. Top side. Whatever works.
Scott Alexander has a piece about the Red Tribe, Blue Tribe, and Grey Tribe.
As far as I can tell, the Village is the Blue Tribe and the River is the Grey Tribe.
Keeping O’Malley Dillion and her Biden acolytes to run the campaign was the biggest and most egregious mistakes of the campaign. Even today Dillion thinks that it was a well run campaign and Harris fate was predetermined.
I think Harris's fate *was* predetermined because she sucks as a candidate. The more people saw of her in any unscripted situation, the less they liked her. So, for example, while some say it was a mistake for her to not go on Rogan, I think the opposite is true.
Maybe something the campaign could have done would have made a difference at the margins -- e.g., won a swing state or two. But, to take a poker analogy, when you're dealt 7-2 UTG at a full table but refuse to fold, chances are you're going to lose.
“The more people saw of her in any unscripted situation, the less they liked her.”
I said this when she became the candidate and a hundred liberal Silver Bulletin readers furiously blew up my notifications. But I was right, and it was obvious to anyone impartial (I'm a foreign observer) because it's exactly what happened in her 2019 campaign.
Yes, no doubt. That's why the whole 107 days excuse is so ridiculous. Harris ages like a ham sandwich left outside on a hot summer day. They also note that she wasn't very well known prior to the campaign. Wrong! She was well known, she just wasn't well-liked or well-regarded, even by the vast majority of elite Dem leadership.
Skills develop over time. They require practice. Had she practiced many unscripted appearances, she could have improved her skills.
There’s no there there with Harris. I have no idea what her theory of herself is as a politician.
Her rise seems to be as a palace schemer, who is very good at moving levers of power behind the scenes with other elites, but her relationship with the general populace is strange.
She’s a nihilist, Lebowski. She believes in nothing.
That’s her theory of herself. She leans way left but she believes in nothing.
Say what you will about National Socialism, at least it's an ethos.
Maybe given her some electroshock therapy and hope a new personality emerged?
Except by far the best moment of the campaign for her was the debate where she completely dominated Trump. Trump probably won this election by hiding from another debate.
I mean, sure, if you take how much she sucks as a constant, then yes, but that's not what anyone means by predetermined.
Skills develop over time. They require practice. Had she practiced many unscripted appearances, she could have improved her skills.
She has been in politics for decades. If by this point she has been unable or (more likely) unwilling to put in the work to improve her speaking skills, she never will.
That's definitely not true - it could happen (though I don't think it will).
And remember she's pretty new to the national stage and sometimes these things have to be learned on the job. There's just no substitute to practice when you're an actual candidate.
My claim is not 100% sure to be true, just as 7-2 UTG is not 100% sure to lose in poker. But because Harris is both lazy and stupid, my claim is at least 95% sure to be true. It's not "definitely not true" unless by that you mean "having anything less than 100% certainty".
Wow, that's crazy. No ability to learn from or even recognize her mistakes. I agree, she should have been fired on Day 1.
But could she have swapped out the campaign leadership team and gotten the fund raising and organizing tasks rolling as quickly and effectively as they did. I doubt it. Sometimes you have to play the hand you are dealt, even if it is a bad hand.
Yeah, this is what Nate meant about seeming like NPCs... she had a huge head start with all the Biden money and all the new money coming in. Money was not the limiting factor here. And if O'Malley was such a great fundraiser, why not just demote her to fundraising instead of running everything?
Why not? It's a big party with a lot of experienced campaign staff from all over the country. It kind of feels in hindsight like another example of just taking the safest path of least resistance. It was easier, and avoided any potential internal conflicts or blowback from the old staff, but it also doesn't seem like the moves of a person who wants to forge their own path separate from their predecessor, which was arguably her undoing.
Sometimes the path of least resistance is the optimal path, especially if one doesn't have a lot of time.
Not hindsight but she only did "half" of what I thought she needed to do at the time. Initially, she needed to unite her base, get the campaign operations up and running, and bring in big dollars quickly. She did those things very well pre Labor Day.
Then she needed to pivot, I thought, to the center on three issues: the economy, the border/migration, and saying in hindsight that she and Biden were wrong on vaccine mandates and censorship. She did none of those things, each alienating more than enough voters to have swung the election.
In hindsight, how could she have been more successful in the first phase? But she was 0 for 3 in the second phase. Looking back, she probably only needed to be 1 for 3.
Just because she lost a tight race does not mean every step along the way was an error.
Exactly. She just couldn't take action on her own.
Couldn't or didn't want to? What Biden policy do you think she wanted to do differently but was playing it safe? She had the perfect excuse: "We accomplished a lot and learned a lot. We will continue the best parts of the approach and improve where we can. In particular, we will evolve these ways..."
Yes, if she had morphed into a Joe Manchin policy wise, she may well have won the election. Thus differences were not things she believed in. But it would have been playing it safe from a pure Machiavellian political perspective.
When I said she couldn't take action on her own, I was responding to Cian saying that her failure to change the campaign leadership did not seem like a person who wanted to forge her own path, which I agree with.
As far as disagreeing with Biden's policies, I don't think she was "playing it safe." I do think she's closer to Manchin, in fact, in terms of what she actually believes, and that the differences were things she believed in. I'd guess she's more conservative than Biden on immigration, the economy, and student loans, for instance.
But really she just needed to be authentic and stand up for something, anything, just take a stand.
Ok, we just have different opinions. I think her views didn't differ much from Biden's policies. I think she was authentic. And I think she miscalculated thinking emphasizing abortion was the way to win the election. (Folks for whom abortion is the key issue, whether Pro Life or Pro Choice, turn out anyways. They aren't the swing voters who decide at the end IMO.) But that was the path she wanted to forge.
I'm not particularly interested in Harris's 107 day campaign. Maybe she could have won, maybe she couldn't. I am far more interested in Biden's 3.5 years of governing prior to that. There's basically two issues that hurt Democrats: inflation and immigration. Immigration is 100% the administration's fault, while inflation less so, maybe 30-40% (I am including messaging in here as well, something like a bipartisan deficit reduction committee). It's very possible that if Biden had signed his asylum executive order three years earlier, Kamala Harris would be president-elect right now.
All he had to do was keep Trump's policies in place!
I think this may be at the heart of Trump's political genius: He gets his opponents so worked up that they do incredibly stupid things. I can think of an instance from 2016ish when Marco Rubio decided it would be a good idea to make comments about the size of Trump's hands and use those as some kind of indicator for the size of other parts.
I don't know if it is intentional, but Trump (frequently with some assistance from Fox News) is great at baiting his opponents into acting in ways that are against their best interests.
True, but I'm not sure that's why Biden dropped Trump's immigration policies - it was more that he was listening to immigration groups.
Biden dropped Trump's immigration policies to reduce inflation while keeping corporations happy. Inflation was mostly caused by fatter corporate profits, but also somewhat by higher wages. Increasing immigration decreased inflationary pressures on wages. This also made blue collar working class voters upset because their wages became depressed compared to inflation.
This is completely wrong. Biden's moves on immigration had nothing to do with inflation, and corporate profits can't cause inflation (if they did we would have seen a lot of inflation in the 30 years before Covid).
That's way too speculative. A much simpler response as previously alluded to is that he was listening to immigration groups and wanted to contrast himself with the egregious excesses Trump had regarding the border (separations, a useless wall). He basically overcorrected.
I liked the separations and wall personally. The wall was legislated and built under previous presidents as well.
> Throughout the Pod Save America transcript, for instance, the staffers complain over and over again about how little time they had to work with. Well, guess what: as Ben Yelin points out, that’s largely on them.
I'm not convinced that the staffers had any ability to get him to drop out, though. He's a stubborn fuck and he only got out when the party forced the issue. He was not going to listen to his staffers. He was listening to his family, who of course wanted him to stay in.
It is true that Biden ultimately owns his failure, but that doesn't excuse the wagon circling that went on. People who knew Biden was unfit engaged in a campaign to actively mislead the American public into thinking he was up for four more years in office, which is inexcusable. His true inner circle should have known even before the debate, but after the debate there was no longer any excuse. Anyone who chose to defend Biden after that debate performance demonstrated a profound lack of judgment and cannot be trusted in an important role in Democratic politics ever again.
But that's sidestepping the point: would the lack of wagon-circling have done anything? If you're a senior staffer before that disastrous debate, do you think that a public resignation is going to move the needle on this? I think given what happened post-debate, that Biden stayed in for weeks even as high-ranking party members publicly called for him to step down, we must know that the answer is "no".
After the debate, yes, I think it's clear something could've been done by staffers. But the difference between the debate and the stepping down was (as the article mentions) 24 days. Is anyone prepared to argue that would've made the difference here?
The real problem was what Biden did after stepping down, and the article mentions it: endorsing Harris. Which comes back to Biden's agency... not the agency of the staffers.
Beyond keeping Biden in the race longer than he should have, the staffers circling the wagons (who have been doing so for at least a couple of years now, this didn't start with the debate) gave the electorate the impression that the Democrats were fraudulent gaslighters who would rather cling to power than do what's right for the country.
They demonstrated that party leadership cares more about their influence and power than they do about responsibility or even electability, in a way that was viscerally apparent and understandable to basically anybody with even a modicum of objective observational skills.
Within a couple of days of watching party leaders call us "bed-wetters" and insisting that "Joe Biden *will* be the nominee", any argument about this election being important was rendered moot, as their actions spoke much louder than their words. Even people like myself who detest Trump and can't forgive him for his electoral scheme crimes started to think, "Maybe this isn't as bad they're saying; they clearly don't act like they care at all, why should I?" I came around to changing my mind back to the election being important, but I'm sure plenty of others were less-inclined.
Circling the wagons for so long in the face of such obvious evidence has damaged the party brand, moreso than a lot of Democrats (voters included) maybe realize. Because most fatally, after watching people lie so brazenly for weeks despite basically everybody knowing it was lies, another important question has been raised in the minds of many voters: What else are these people lying to me about?
I think that part of their problem is that they felt they had successfully executed this playbook in 2024. They hid him away in a basement in Delaware as much as possible, shielding him from any potential situation where he could be exposed. I am sure they were very proud of themselves for getting it over the goal line in 2020. Clearly 2020 was a completely different environment when you could get away with that, and he was a lot more lucid then. However, I think that win gave the team a bit of hubris so they could gaslight themselves into thinking that it could be done again, thus extending the Biden prop-up phase.
*2020, not 2024
He was fine in 2020 though. His cognitive decline didn't get bad till this year.
It's so strange because to me circling the wagons around a clearly diminished (putting it lightly) Biden indicated just how important they thought beating Trump was.
I think if Nikki Haley had been running they would have been much less risk averse. And despite all the hindsight-fueled takes in these comments, jettisoning your incumbent president with 107 (I had to do it) days left in the race is reasonably perceived as the riskier move (esp. for Villagers who thrive on familiarity and experience -- nobody has experience with doing that).
I'm confident plenty of people here believe Biden was clearly going to lose and so keeping him on as the candidate was the riskier course. Now you can save your time saying as much in replies to me because I already made the point for you!
You think Biden would have had a decent chance of winning if he'd stayed in, though?
I guess I would need a definition of decent. I think Harris did far better than he would have, and I think he would have lost. My only point is that for a group of risk averse people (i.e., the people close to Biden), sticking with Biden despite his obvious flaws was potentially viewed as the better option when compared to a completely unknown series of events that had the potential to spiral out of control in any one of 100 different directions.
I get the optics, and that your reaction is probably one that many people had, but a), I don't think the staffers choice was that simple, b) party leadership actually did force him out so it's a bit disingenuous to say party leadership protected him, and c) it is incredibly annoying that there is this huge double standard in terms of the parties' honesty. The first two points are straightforward. Regarding my third point, if a party lying to the electorate is a concern, the completely spineless, humiliating return to Trump adulation that Republican party leadership displayed mere months after having supposedly banished him for Jan 6, should have nauseated any semi objective undecided or independent voter.
Instead here we are complaining that democratic leadership weren't willing to basically invoke the 25th despite Biden actually doing a remarkably competent job in terms of policy (was it not one of the most productive legislative terms of the last 20 years, despite not having full control of congress?) his first two years. It's obvious in hindsight that internally they should have been more forceful in pushing him out before the primaries, but it's not so obvious how their response should have differed after the debate... It was a truly unprecedented historic situation they found themselves in, and any overly aggressive action could have created divisions which would have been harder to heal, and then we would be blaming the democratic disarray for the loss. So for all those reasons I wholly agree that there is only one person to blame in the whole saga and that's Joe Biden for breaking his promise to not pursue another term.
It was "productive legislatively" because there was a major crisis, not because Biden did some crackerjack job. And frankly I think a lot of that legislation was pretty bad.
The worst of covid had passed by the time the infrastructure legislation was signed,, and definitely in the background once the chips and inflation reduction act passed. I don't see how covid influence any of those. And say what you will, but presidents (including Trump) had offered infrastructure bills for 30 years without delivering, so there's that. I can see how Republicans aren't fond of the IRA considering they tend to downplay climate change, but the chips act was long overdue to rein in China, protect our national security and bring high tech manufacturers back... Taken as a whole those were real achievements, even if Biden himself was quickly deteriorating.
But to be clear - Biden never promised to not run again.
Perhaps "promise" is too strong of a word... But he certainly implied he wouldn't run for a second term, and that he would be a bridge to a younger generation.
Right, they actually did well after the debate. The issue people are having is before the debate, but I don't think there was much any individual could do.
I mostly agree with everything you've said here except that I think the average non-political junkie wasn't really thinking too much about this before the debate. Certainly most people I know seemed to think everything was humming alojg as normal and were completely shocked when they saw debate clips. I think there was opportunity to bring that conversation to the forefront much sooner. But the Democrats need more assholes who can step out and draw the lightning.
The average voter is the one that is the most important,
but the least thought about.
Their views, and their judgement, are often overlooked for 'the obvious facts' as those who debate endlessly amongst each other do.
But the Average voter's lack of engagement means that they walk into each new election without the blinders of political zealotry. They don't exist in the bubble. They saw what happened, and the ones who leaned Democrats mostly decided it wasn't worth their time to vote this time.
The counterpoint to that is because they do not weigh the sins of the past as heavily against a new face, their opinions can turn much faster than the entrenched.
It caught the Conservatives by surprise in 2020/2022, and it caught the Democrats by surprise in 2024.
And, as someone who is probably the closest to a true independent in this madhouse of a comment section, let me state that Instead of trying to catch lighting, try catching some Authenticity. Or at least someone who feels like they live in the real world.
Ruben Gallego would be a good baseline for your side, with that 7-ish point different between him and Harris. Read up on his, ask yourselves why he worked when others in the state didn't.
Why do you think he did?
Yes, not circling the wagons absolutely would have done something. It took weeks for high ranking party members to go public with their calls for him to step down after they had apparently pressured him in private. The biggest reason Biden didn't step down is because he was surrounded by yes people in his campaign who kept telling him he was the best chance to beat Trump.
In a sane, functional, rational political party, that debate performance would have been met with immediate condemnation from the entire party, and senior campaign officials would have quit rather than attempted to perpetrate fraud on the American public. Biden would have released a statement the next day saying he was stepping down, preventing weeks of bickering.
No, Biden didn't step down because he's stubborn and he believed he was the best chance to beat Trump. He purposely put yes-men around him. If one of them stopped being a yes-man Biden probably would have fired him
Democrats were publicly defending Biden long after the debate performance. I recall Schumer saying he was with Biden a week or so afterwards. Once the party as a whole mobilized to privately urge him to drop out he did so. I'm not sure why you seem to think that nothing could have been done by anyone any earlier to get him to pull out. The party dithered for weeks, finally mobilized, then he dropped out. Why do you think that the dithering was irrelevant? If they had not dithered and instead moved in unison to force him out immediately then it's likely he would have done so much sooner.
I agree that the people around him were cowardly and unwilling to publicly do anything, but Nate addressed that in the article (the Village is full of risk averse people pleasers). But you also seem to be saying that even if the staff had resigned en masse (or even just some high profile/leadership figures) that it still wouldn't have moved the needle at all. Why do you think that? If his campaign chair had come out and said "behind closed doors it's clear the President isn't capable of leading this country for four more years. I can't support him" then that absolutely would have been earth shattering news that would have put immense pressure on others to call for him to step aside. Which, again, is what ultimately forced him to do so.
Remember, we're looking back with hindsight and we now know that he actually could be forced out. At the time, this was very much in doubt. I personally thought there was no way of forcing him out, since he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by staying in.
This is a collective action problem. No one person had the power to do anything. Forcing him out was a process that took time and had to be done gradually.
I do think that the upper echelons of the Democratic party (the ones who knew Biden was having cognitive issues) could have done something much earlier to get him to step down: encouraged a serious primary challenger. Dean Phillips didn't want to do it himself initially, but no prominent Democrat was willing to stick their neck out and try, largely because the upper echelons of the party are too good at defending their own and not good enough at recognizing when the ship is way off course and needs to be righted. Democratic primary voters thought Biden was too old, but without a serious alternative to vote for, they took their cues from the party leaders and voted for him anyway.
Nate's comment about "Red-teaming" a Harris campaign earlier in the year was something I thought of immediately after the debate. Biden said he was staying in the race, but assumed that behind the scenes there must be people developing "Harris for President" campaign infrastructure.
I was curious if there would be any early leaks such as a printing company getting an order for new campaign signs, or advertisers gearing up new commercials. There weren't any of those leaks, which leads to the comment from the transcript that they really did start cold when Biden dropped out as opposed to having a team running in the background for "just in case".
Part of that I think is that the moment you start to Red Team Biden dropping out you're breathing life into that reality and Biden desperately didn't want anything that might create that momentum, but somebody within the party should have been willing to lead that effort as a responsible contingency.
I think resignations would have been a huge story and definitely would have made the bottom fall out faster than it did, and probably could have gotten the conversation started earlier if they happened before the debate. The Biden drop out was not treated as inevitable even after the debate. It certainly became more likely, but conventional wisdom on it ebbed and flowed over the next 3 5 weeks because the people around him were working to keep him there. When it was announced it was semi-surprising news.
If everyone just immediately jumped ship, or even a significant portion of insiders broke with him publicly, we wouldn't have had that.
I would go so far as to say I can’t imagine voting for ANY Dem who supported Biden’s decision to run again in 2024 - ignoring majorities of the voters, including Democratic voters, who clearly indicated in polling for YEARS they did not want him to be the nominee. What political party in its right mind nominates a candidate a majority of its OWN VOTERS doesn’t want? Especially when the opponent is Trump - in their own words, a potential fascist? It’s literally stupid. And stupid people shouldn’t be running the government.
I'd have a hard time voting for someone who thought it made sense for him to stay president, but drop out of the race and anoint his unelected VP. It was a coup and it was wrong. And if he can't run, he shouldn't be president. It's hypocritical for him to stay president.
There were levers to pull other than "convince Biden" directly. They could've spent their time convincing Pelosi, talking to his cabinet, leaking more bad news to the press earlier, etc.
Ultimately they proved themselves loyal to the boss above all else, presumably due to their own self-preservation instincts. That's the kind of trait bosses like, but it doesn't equate to competence (take a look at Trump's inner circle).
These clowns spent a year gaslighting us and trying to convince us that no, Biden is just fine. They failed already - in a sense, they'd already lost an election once!
It's easy to say it now, but Harris should've thrown them all under the bus and tried something different.
Honestly, the part that is absolutely Harris' failure is that she wasn't standing up a shadow campaign for months before the disastrous debate. She had to have seen the same polls everyone else had about Democrats wishing he wouldn't run again. Even if all she was doing was calling key people and saying "Hey, if Biden drops out, will you come on to my campaign?", she should've had something ready other than starting completely cold.
I agree with Cian’s point that it would have gotten out. My initial instinct, like yours, is that she should have started preparing. But when I think though the scenarios, I don’t think it would have been a good move (see below), purely thinking through her self interest. The only way it makes sense is if she believes a) she can strong-arm Biden into supporting and endorsing her despite taking actions that undermine him, b) the benefits of having a few more weeks to prepare outweigh the damage done by Biden’s team working against her or forcing a competition for the nomination, and c) she was likely to win at the end.
1. Remain the loyal solider, don’t prepare to run or try to force Biden out, and Biden stays in the race. Biden gets crushed in November. Harris is partially damaged goods. It’s easy to blame the loss on Biden. She’s probably the front-runner for the ‘28 nomination. But let’s say it’s a 30% chance since she’ll still have all the baggage of her weak ‘20 primary campaign and all the institutional branding that hurt her this year.
2. What happened: remain the loyal soldier, don’t prepare, but Biden drops out. We know the outcome. Her chance of being the nominee is much less than scenario 1 as she owns more of the loss.
3. Prepare to run and/or undermine Biden, and Biden stays in the race. Biden gets crushed. Harris has virtually no chance of being the ‘28 nominee because Biden and his team bury her in the media and in the party. She gets more blame for the loss because she undermined him.
4. Prepare to run and/or undermine Biden and Biden drops out. Biden’s team leaks what’s happening before he drops out — they treated her like crap for four years and were even undermining her to help keep his candidacy alive. Biden doesn’t endorse her and she ends up having to spend time, at best, shoring up delegates. At worst, there’s some sort of competitive process. She might win, but she might not. It’s hard to see this having a higher likelihood of winning than what actually happened. And she’s still more damaged in the party than #1.
There's no way that would have been kept quiet, and before the debate, indicating Biden was too old to run again was still extremely taboo for any insiders to suggest. I don't think Dean Philips was ever so forward as to suggest Biden needed to drop out because he was incapable of doing the job.
Unfortunately I don't think Harris really had the kind of ruthlessly personality to try and go around him either. I don't think she saw it as her place to try and push him out and didn't seem to have any real vision of her own that she was motivated to persue.
I don't think it was self preservation so much as just being too nice. Democrats generally succeed when they have someone who isn't afraid to be an asshole. But I don't think Biden had one of those.
Spot on article. I kept waiting for the end, thinking, why hasn't he mentioned education. Closely related to that is the concept of knowledge workers, versus all others. I think the resentment stems from this divide, which actually coincides with urban dwelling. In the end though, it does come down to economics. Not necessarily a working class vs middle or upper class, but the educated affluent versus the non educated that are struggling. If democrats refocus on pulling up the non educated (eg revitalizing vocational and technical training at massive scale) and yes keep helping women break into leadership, while also talking about the problems plaguing men at the bottom (deaths of despair/opiods, less education, a break down in roles which haven't been replaced), then maybe they would get to solving issues which people care about.
Yeah, Biden arguably IS the asshole who had a chip on his shoulder but he was the only one of his team who was. That's great for building staff loyalty, but not for building ambitious successors
I just don't see any of that doing much. Pelosi was only galvanized to act after the debate where Biden's cognitive issues were clearly on display in a way that the country could not deny.
"Pelosi was only galvanized to act after the debate"
But it wasn't right after the debate. It took many weeks for her to finally tell him he had to drop out. Pelosi's staff reiterated a week after the debate that she had full confidence in the President. She wasn't as strident in defense as others, but in the days and week following the debate she was saying that she trusted his judgment and saying he needed to do interviews to reassure people that he could do the job. I give her credit for being better than many others, but anyone who saw the debate knew within the first 20 minutes that Joe needed to go.
What people say in public may not be what they say in private. I think a more likely explanation is that Pelosi and others came to the same conclusion in the aftermath of the debate and then gradually changed their tone to apply increasing pressure on Biden over 3.5 weeks. Because he was so unwilling, the public tone of those trying to get him to drop out became more strident and later began leaking their moves.
I absolutely agree that that seems like a likely description of what happened. But that's very different than a claim that the party immediately began calling for his ouster, or that if they had it would not have mattered (JC's point). If the party had moved in unison the day after the debate to say "clearly, Biden is not capable and needs to step down" then he would have done so much sooner.
The party is not a single actor though, and can't move in unison. It takes a while for that process to happen and not everyone wanted to do it that quickly
Wasn’t George Clooney the first big Democrat ally to go after Biden after Obama signed off on his Op Ed about how bad Biden looked at a fundraiser.
Would it have done much to accelerate the timeline had these Biden loyalists "cracked" earlier? Maybe not. But if they'd made a stand earlier, then they would've at least proven *themselves* as people worth listening to.
Instead, to use Nate's gambling terminology, they were clearly "nits" - cautiously toeing the line and staying loyal to the boss - rather than "degens" - willing to take a big risk for big possible gains.
The Harris campaign needed people willing to take those risks, because we can now clearly see the outcome of a "cautious" campaign. Those same cautious Biden loyalists are the ones who ran her cautious campaign into the ground.
It's possible *no* strategy could have won, but we have evidence that a "low risk" strategy failed, so that leaves only trying a "high risk" strategy as a plausible counterfactual.
Are you talking about Biden staffers? Or party bigshots? Those are two different groups with two very different views and motivations.
I don't understand how you think there were big possible gains here. The whole problem was that there was no advantage to anyone to sticking his neck out.
I agree Kamala needed to take more risks. But taking more risks is not the same as being pointlessly stupid and disloyal. And I don't understand how Biden's staffers going against him is anything other than pointlessly stupid and disloyal. Not to mention, in my view, it'd be extremely unethical.
His staff would have had an uphill battle, but they do have influence. For example, they did convince him to flip on vaccine mandates. When asked in April 2021, he said that would be immoral and illegal. But the staff kept pushing and by September he was on board. Which ended up getting about 8,400 military personnel dismissed.
This is what I find so frustrating, though. If you’re aware that your elderly grandfather is no longer able to safely operate a car, you have a responsibility to take his keys away. And if you don’t, and there’s an accident and someone gets hurt, well that’s sorta on Grandpa - but it’s MORESO on you for not stepping in when you knew better.
But that was the Democratic Party, right? By many accounts, party members at all levels were aware, well before the debate, that Biden was not up to a second term, AND that his prospects were terrible. Yet, not wanting to damage their own careers - even as THEY THEMSELVES were calling Trump a fascist- they still let Grandpa drive the car. And we, and the country, are the ones getting hurt.
Well they all knew Trump wasn't actually a fascist, or they might have acted like it.
Driving a car isn't democratically elected, though. Biden had won all the primaries. I just don't know what people could have done. Before the debate his condition wasn't obvious to the public so undeniably.
I wonder if anyone talked about invoking the 25th amendment - but even that wouldn't stop him from running again.
I’m actually talking about last fall, when Biden first insisted on running again - pre-primary. The electorate was aware of Biden’s liabilities - in multiple polls, upwards of 70% didn’t want him to run again. And behind the scenes Dems were fretting about his prospects, but they said nothing.
Dean Phillips offered the Dems a wedge in the door before it slammed shut. If even a few of them had insisted on debates, it would have exposed Biden’s liabilities MUCH sooner. If Biden had persisted in staying in the race, and the media had covered Phillips fairly, then the primary voters would have had another viable option, even if eventually someone more high profile jumped in and became the nominee. That’s all Phillips was trying to do - give his party an escape hatch to run someone who could beat Trump. Instead they (and a complicit MSM) threw him under the fucking bus.
His staffers could have just gone to the WSJ or whatever. Yes they can't literally impeach him, but they could easily ruin him.
They totally made their bed with their decisions.
And said what?
And why would they do that? If only one of them did it, it wouldn't affect anything.
I think this is a fairly persuasive argument but it also looks like so many other post-mortems in which pundits point to whatever already bothered them as the cause of failure. Many of them are also fairly persuasive. It makes me skeptical that any of it is correct. Maybe that general skepticism is the best stance for now, though it doesn’t feel very productive.
Well in some sense in an election this close any improvement in a number of directions would have produced a victory. So there are a lot of plausible counterfactuals to bandy about.
You could easily hold the position the assassination attempt was what turned the election. I know that is what I felt at the time. But then obviously so much more happened.
Joe Rogan Experience #2234 - Marc Andreessen
For those who have been on the internet for a long time, Andreessen is known as the creator of Netscape. For those newer to the scene, he's one of the world's top venture capitalists. And for regular podcast listeners, he's one of the most fascinating guests invited to shows. With a broad range of interests, original thinking, and a great sense of humor, listening to him is always engaging, no matter the topic.
In this podcast, Rogan and Andreessen reflect on the recent elections, with Andreessen sharing how he went from being a staunch Democrat — having voted for Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, Hillary, and Biden — to a Trump supporter. One of the main triggers for this shift, and a hot topic on Twitter, is Andreessen’s account of "debanking," a term referring to banks refusing services to problematic entrepreneurs. This began under Obama and continued under Biden.
According to Andreessen, the Obama administration pressured banks to deny services to owners of businesses that, while legalized in the early 2010s at the state or national level, were not federally approved. This primarily targeted newly legalized businesses such as marijuana cultivation and escort services (legalized prostitution), as well as long-standing industries like civilian firearms manufacturing and sales. These business owners found their accounts suddenly closed, with no other banks willing to serve them. Under Biden, Andreessen claims this extended to crypto and fintech startup founders, and, about two years ago, to entrepreneurs making political statements the Biden administration disliked.
One might think Andreessen is exaggerating or fabricating, but after his comments, a flood of confessions emerged on Twitter. Tech startup founders began sharing dozens of stories about similar experiences in recent years, having previously been too afraid to speak out due to fears of further trouble. Some of these founders revealed that, because of longstanding relationships with their bankers, they were confidentially told the account closures were due to pressure from authorities.
"What do you do when this happens to you?" Rogan asks toward the end of the conversation.
"Endorse Trump," Andreessen laughs.
This is only a small portion of the interview, but Andreessen's broader insights paint a picture of how, in recent years, the U.S. has started to resemble a totalitarian country like China. The Democratic administration, he argues, exerts control and pressure not directly but through ostensibly independent yet fully state-controlled firms and NGOs. Toward the end, Andreessen directly compares recent U.S. developments to China.
I highly recommend this interview to anyone on the left to better understand why they are now disliked. Andreessen is not lying — like most in Silicon Valley, he consistently supported Democrats until very recently. Even if you don't believe what he says, you should take it into account because this shift hasn't just happened to him; post-election surveys show that nearly all groups in American society have moved to the right.
Wow, thank you. This is amazing, and I think a big part of why Trump won. (It's "debanking" though)
Thank you, I fixed the silly typo.
Nice excuse not buying it for one second. I think silicon valley entrepreneurs had been waiting for the right moment to finally align their financial interests with the party that best represents those interests. Perhaps they believed that after all these years of threatening to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, democrats just might do it. When Musk, who many greatly admire, jumped ship, it was perfect cover to do the same.
If this policy started with Obama and he voted for Obama, Clinton, and Biden, then what he really means is that he didn't give a shit about this it until it affected him. I'm so exhausted with the amount of power the wealthy have in our society. They can decide on a whim that X is now better than Y and the rest of us poor folks just have to suffer through it.
Obama started it in 2013 after he won his second election (see Operation Choke Point). In 2016, Mark probably thought Trump was far worse than Clinton.
According to wikipedia, the operation "was officially ended In August 2017, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) settled multiple lawsuits by promising to Congress additional training for its examiners and to cease issuing 'informal' and 'unwritten suggestions' to banks." So in 2020, Mark had every reason to believe that this dubious practice was a thing of the past.
Considering in that same interview Andreeson also completely incorrectly explains was a "politically exposed person" is (a term that anyone who's worked at any bank will know from mandatory training), I'm not buying anything else he says about how baning works.
Occams razor is that Andreeson is a rich investor who dislikes regulations and over the past few years, Democrats have been trying to regulate Silicon Valley more and more. Republicans have too to a lesser extent, but Trump does not have any underlying principles and can be easily bought out, so supporting him gets you what you want more easily.
Explain? What's a politically exposed person and what does he say it is?
I appreciate the callout of agreeableness:
"Second, it suffered from the problem of too much agreeableness, a characteristic Village trait since the Village tends to emphasize communal consensus over individual achievement. There was, most obviously, far too much deference to Biden. But there was also an unwillingness to ruffle feathers with other progressive constituencies who might have gotten upset by a bolder approach."
The Indigo Blob is probably disproportionately staffed by women, and if not, women have exerted a great deal of influence on the party's direction overall. The agreeableness problem is prevalent among women behaviorally, generally speaking. Women largely drove these progressive constituencies they didn't want to upset. Democrats need, quite honestly, more men and women to be willing to tell the women in the Indigo Blob that they're incorrect about so much. I also struggle to understand the repercussions leadership expects from the Indigo Blob. Nate may have alluded to this in a previous post, but they probably can't articulate the consequences when asked. Professional class women, I've seen socially, have a particular disdain for class politics, which is why Hillary's woke interpretation won over Sanders.
I don't think class politics are the future any more than identity politics are. I agree with Noah Smith here:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-doesnt-really-have-a-working
We need more universal appeals to americans rather than dividing up the pie in various ways (that was one of Obama's biggest strengths.)
So, a disdain for class politics isn't a bad thing imo. Too much agreeableness is though--I agree with Nate on that.
This was not well argued. He is saying that because there is no one definition of "working class", one doesn't exist at all. It's a postmodern straw man. Yeah, I know that unions are on the decline. But class is now very clearly a matter of whether you have a degree and have certain tastes. The definition of class evolves. Bernie had success among a wide swath of the population because he purposely avoided the language of race and gender identity politics and talked about material issues. That's what I mean by class politics. The two are stylistically and rhetorically different.
It's a terrible article. The key to understanding classes is that they are different cultures. Different cultures with different answers to questions like how do you live, what do you do for fun, what media do you like, what do you eat and drink, what are your values.
Having a college degree is just a side effect, since Red Culture generally doesn't value higher education, but plenty of people in Red Culture do have college degrees, and plenty of people in Blue Culture don't.
Terrible article. He doesn't seem to understand class at all - classes are cultures. Different ways of living with different values.
Thanks for sharing! That's a great article
Biden should be quoting the other Buffett... "some people claim there's a woman to blame, but I know it's my own damn fault."
I like and am fascinated by this comment. Can you elaborate on professional women having a disdain for class politics?
I can't prove any of this. It's based on my experience in female PMC spaces, specifically for those who worked in the Indigo Blob for about ten years until I was kicked out (insufficiently woke in 2020): intuition and observation. I was never in the blob, but this group had many male friends until the entry of too many women ruined it. In 2016, they couched their intense dislike of Sanders in his identity (projected onto him) as a white man. They refused to address his substantial critiques of Hillary and saw her and themselves as perpetual victims of sexism in politics and work. She was being unfairly characterized as being a shill for Goldman Sachs, for example, because of her sex. They refused to address the Goldman Sachs speeches. The one time I tried to bring any of this up, one woman commented saying that she just wanted to stop getting rape threats from Bernie Bros on Twitter. I don't buy that was a thing anymore, but maybe it was. Either way, they'd ALWAYS find a way to get out of addressing the argument and make it about the person's identity. There was no acknowledgment of Bernie's supporters being quite diverse because the white bro narrative was convenient for disqualifying him. I met zero women socially who talked about class politics until last week. No one wants to talk about it among my friends - only about abortion.
Edit: The PMC largely comes from PMC backgrounds. The PMC is increasingly female, therefore it is likely that most of the PMC women I've met came from well off backgrounds, anyway. And that's what they can't deal with. See also, Liam Kofi Bright on White Psychodrama.
What does PMC mean?
Professional managerial class
How do they feel about things like the child tax credit or family leave?
Among my friends and professional circles I’ve heard not a single person mention either.
interestingly, your anecdotes portray these ladies as a little cutthroat, which would go against the "agreeableness" grain
or am I missing something?
I think it is a "mean girls" thing and has roots in high school social structures.
Social ostracism can deliver far deeper bruising than a fist fight, especially in comparison to typical school yard fights among boys.
The threat is part of what drives the agreeableness.
This is one of the things I never understand about society. Definitely with men, but also generally emotional violence is easily much more harmful compared to how it is treated.
Obviously words are not murder. But some scrap on the playground is treated as some major transgression possibly even needing suspension/expulsion when almost certainly the injuries will be gone in days. Meanwhile much more serious and long term emotional harms and behaviors are sort of treated as NBD.
We are too harsh on actual violence and not harsh enough on emotional/social violence.
And yet, the same people doling out social violence do scream "words are violence" while carrying it out, as though the OTHER person has been violent toward them by standing up to them. I've encountered this standard behavior among women and girls in all sorts of contexts. The personal experiences I've had with women over politics are why I detest the Democratic brand--not because of anything Harris or any individual politician has done. They are the reason I voted L - the social-emotional violence in the form of exclusion and lost friendship over divergent opinions.
It's because of who's committing the physical violence (boys) and who's committing the emotional violence (girls).
It's an example of sexism in society (against men).
Basically as a society we've paid a lot of attention to the ways men tend to not kind to women, but almost no attention to the ways women tend to not be kind to men.
This is because society privileges women.
Aha, this makes sense. It also sounds like a nightmare.
The game theory of this seems so interesting, though.
It is cutthroat behavior in service of two goals: 1—keeping the social hierarchy from toppling, and 2—ensuring the woman in power doesn't lose her position by being exposed as a morally bankrupt person. Liberal women need to be able to see themselves as morally upstanding even as they destroy people for deviant opinions. It's why you see women cutting their competition down by cynically deploying concern over marginalized people.
To be very economist-y about this, it just sounds really rational.
And in some way, the ultimate feminism?
The expectation that women would be some sort of enlightened ruler when put in a position of power seems... odd. That's not equality. That's putting an onus on women to be better people than men for some reason.
Wouldn't the most fair read be that, if women are truly the equals of men, then we should expect that there would be women who would equal the most enlightened of male rulers as well as the nastiest, most beady-eyed, self-serving dudes out there?
A priori, I would expect that if there's really no intrinsic moral betterness among the males or the females (and I have no a priori reason to think someone's more or less ethical because of their sex), then the distribution should be about the same.
So we should get some royal pricks and some royal sweethearts, and the group in power will be clever about maintaining its power. Whatever the sex of the people holding it. And using the most effective tools to do so, whichever they are.
I take your point and agree - there really is no reason for women to behave better than men when they have power. At the same time, they inflict emotional violence and police the boundaries of groups. Humans need groups to survive. I also agree that this is evolutionarily necessary because in and out groups will always exist. We will never transcend the need to form tribes. In modern society, however, men must change their behavior and share power. Laws police literal violence. Emotional violence can't be policed but leaves people damaged.
My dismay about the whole thing is due to women rhetorically papering over their cruelty by appealing to morality and the need to protect the marginalized. Men don't justify their shitty behavior using such language. Because women justify it thus, you can't call it what it is - sociopathy.
Yes, obviously, except since ethics serves as a limitation on possible strategies, it handicaps anyone who cares about it. Also the people who want to control others will be the most determined to win.
As someone who thinks Trump was and will be a terrible president, you hit the nail on the head in saying that the Democrat establishment never acted like he was the existential threat that they claimed. Because he's probably not. Terrible presidents still are term limited and I don't believe he's going to become a dictator. And obviously not that many people do. So while I'd never vote for him, he'll be gone one day. At which point I'll vote for whoever has the best policies.
I think a lot of people assume that it won't be that bad, based on the the first term. And while I in no way think that he will end democracy, I think it's hard to overstate how much damage he will do. Dismantling a functioning political and foreign policy structure that took 70 years to build and created staggering prosperity and global stability is easy once you understand how it works and have people knowledge enough and willing to do the technical work required to dismantle it (which he didn't have the first term). The near impossible part will be putting the pieces back together again. Once the genie of authoritarianism, norm breaking, state dismantling, populism, and chaos is let out of the bottle in the world's most influential country, it's a race to the bottom.
I hope he dismantles it - that's why we voted for him. It needs to go. It was definitely not functioning well.
I get the frustration... It wasn't functioning. But the diagnosis and prescription that this election symbolize is pretty terrible in my view. Boiling problems down to illegal immigration (which definitely was a problem) and inflation (which was global and unfortunately irreversible in terms of actually bringing prices down), was simply focusing on tertiary symptoms. The real problem in the system is the hollowing out of manufacturing, unfettered lobbying, and later on tech monopolies. Ironically union busting, citizens united and regressive taxation were all republican platforms which contributed to the problem. Still dismantling "everything" will not fix any of those problems. All it will do is create chaos and power vacuums at home and abroad.
>Once the genie of authoritarianism, norm breaking, state dismantling, populism, and chaos is let out of the bottle in the world's most influential country, it's a race to the bottom.
I mean both parties (probably slightly lead by the Republicans) have been on this path for 20+ years. Trump is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the two parties, and the political/lobbying class around them all of which needs to be razed to the ground.
I largely agree. But a) trump will most definitely not raze them to the ground and b) Who do you think lobbyists work for? Corporate America. Who has Trump tapped for his administration? Corporate America. He's simply cutting out the middle man. So even if he miraculously razed them to the ground, to replaced it with what? Oligarchy? Makes no sense.
All that is fair enough, though I disagree on some finer points.
Even in some hypothetical scenario where he chose to flout the constitutional prohibition on third and subsequent terms and no one with the power to stop him bothered to try, he's still effectively "term-limited" by human life expectancy (especially for someone of his weight class). And he's already showing the cognitive signs of aging, maybe not quite to the degree that Biden is but still very noticeably.
Also he doesn't particular seem to want to be President so much as clown his haters.
> This reflects poorly on Biden and frankly makes him seem like a narcissist.
Lol, did you just realize this?
A fun exercise is to guess which presidents were narcissists, sociopaths, or neither. I think the last president who was neither was probably George HW Bush.
I don't think anyone who isn't at least somewhat of a narcissist could ever get to the point of running for president. Maybe 100+ years ago. I don't understand that culture. But in the modern era it's required.
Bernie ran though
Yes, which only strengthens the point about needing to be a narcissist to run
You think he's a narc? How? I don't see it
Stop trying to make "The Village" happen!
I still maintain that the Dems' "threat to democracy" talking point hurt them almost as much as it helped them. One man's "convicted felon" is another man's "lawfare", and the exit polling bore that out.
Yup. I think it probably hurt them more than it helped them.
>And some of it may have been the various trials against Trump, which made him more sympathetic among his base.
This tracks with our Polymarket postmortem, where it seemed like large gains in Trump's win odds were the trials (Federal and NY conviction), the Butler PA shooting, and after the VP debate.
https://news.polymarket.com/p/trying-to-kill-and-convict-trump
The Harris campaign did have a clear vision, it was just the wrong vision:
1. A federal Pro Choice law legalizing abortion in all cases in all 50 states. Every speech she kept emphasizing "send me the bill and I will sign it."
2. Trump is really very very very ... very very very bad.
3. Everything else doesn't really matter. One has to vote for sanity over issues.
My frustration with the "Trump is bad" messaging was the focus on him as a person and on "threat to democracy/fascism," not on what his policies would do, their threat to the common man/woman. We politically engaged left-of-center types know what his policies would, now will, do. All the low involvement voters and/or Fox News, right wing media consuming voters don't. Hell, with inflation as a core issue, Harris/Trump should have been hitting over & over the tariff/inflation connection. (With immigration as an issue, it's harder to focus on the deportation/inflation connection.)
Hi Andrew,
I do not think it was the lack of tie-in of tariffs/deportations with inflation that was an issue. It was the claims that the economy is doing great and the earlier high inflation should be ignored. It was a message saying believe me and not your shrinking wallet. That's what so infuriated voters.
My son, long prior to the election, talked about the on-going gaslighting engaged in by the Biden Administration. One example was inflation. Another was his age-based decline. Another was, in my view, Israel and Gaza -- our ability to rein in Israel's on-going bombing of civilians in their hunt for Hamas.
The Biden administration's humanitarian efforts in the Gaza/Israel war reminds me of the saying "no good deed goes unpunished."
Project 2025 was (is) extremely unpopular. Enough so that he had to distance himself from it. But they should not have allowed him to do so so successfully.
The problem with Trump is that he has the unique ability to shape shift into whatever a supporter wants him to be. He's held stances that should piss off just about everyone, but everyone knows he's dishonest and transactional, so they all get to tell themselves "oh that thing I don't like, he's just doing that for show to impress some other group, but I know deep down he's going to do the stuff I want". So the mega conservative Christian nationalists get to tell themselves that "yeah, he's publicly distancing himself from Project 2025 and all it's plans, but we know he has to say that to win, he's still going to do it once he has power" and the the MAGA capitalists and Joe Rogan types who just like the Trump show and owning the libs get to tell themselves "yeah he's got to appeal to the Christians, but we know he's a sleazy New York businessman who doesn't care about that stuff, there's no way he'll actually do those Project 2025 things, he's even saying he has no interest in it".
Hi Andrew,
I think the economy perception problem goes back to the 2020 campaign. Trump in his first three years in office effectively mortgaged long-term economic stability for short-term growth. The signs started to show in the summer of 2019 when top advisors were telling him a 2020 recession was inevitable. But then came the pandemic and Trump effectively marketed "the economy was great due to my leadership and then this unforeseen pandemic happened." Biden neither pushed back on Trump's great economy myth nor that the Obama administration's NSC warned Trump of an impending pandemic. (It's why I've always thought Susan Rice should have been his VP pick. She was making these two points back then, especially the latter.) By not focusing on this in 2020, Trump's assertions became accepted by voters. By 2024 it's not clear that there was a path to undo the dichotomy of the public thinking Trump was great with the economy and Biden was terrible. To paraphrase James Carville: "It's the perception of the economy, stupid!"
Am I hopelessly out of touch because I think the “Cajun-influenced, vegan-friendly, Tex-Mex cantina and speakeasy” sounds relatively coherent and easy to understand?
Like, it would be one thing if it was a "a kosher sushi joint with Peruvian-inspired small plates." But you've basically described a normal trendy Austin restaurant!
Antioch,
I THINK (not sure) that “kosher” and “sushi” don’t belong in the same neighborhood
I've eaten at a kosher sushi place - I deliberately picked an example of something unintuitive, but not impossible.
No, it’s not hard for sushi to be kosher.
Not really. A few sushi dishes (for example crab, or other shellfish) are not Kosher, but regular fish-based options are fine.
That sushi and kosher are not mutually exclusive is a great insight, for which I am grateful. Truly.
That info is a pleasant break from politics.
My guess the median voter would think the food sucks there too just like they thought Harris sucked.
You should take that seriously but not literally.