Not sure why Nate continues to ignore what I personally assume were the actual reasons they didn't go with Shapiro: his coverup of the sexual harassment scandal in his office and the PA Supreme Court's reopening of the Ellen Greenberg case. Popular in his own state or not, the dude's scandal-prone, and you better bet the GOP would've hammered that relentlessly.
Yeah, for someone who is normally critical of the blob, Nate seems awfully willing to parrot their narrative that Shapiro opposition is solely related to Gaza. The drip of new revelations re the sexual harassment thing seems bad and the fact that not just the left, but folks like Fetterman were against him was concerning. I expect we’ll learn at some point that some stuff came up in the vetting
No one should be surprised that Fetterman was against him. They are political rivals fighting for oxygen in the same constituencies. They have very similar ambitions. Their paths have crossed before and likely will again now that Shapiro got passed over. Fetterman is probably very glad that he was able to keep Shapiro from lapping him.
Fair enough, but my point is that opposition to Shapiro was broad. His critics included a pro-Israel senator who has been tacking to the center (and who, as you note, may have had other motivations), teachers' unions, and labor, among others.
Of course, had Fetterman not have that stroke, I think he’d have been in the conversation for VP. His appeal to a LOT of groups not normally Democratic voters, while himself being pretty progressive on economic issues, and the fact that his wife was undocumented might let him be the “only Nixon could go to China” story on immigration reform.
Fetterman would come with the same Senate seat problem as Kelly though. Sure Shapiro would pick his replacement but then I believe that person would have to run in the 2026 midterms as an unelected member of the presidents’ party, which would be much harder to win than Fetterman will probably have in 2028. If you’re a Dem with VP ambitions, being a Senator from a swing state is probably not the best way to get there right now. Honestly, governor from a swing state hurts too if you’re not in your last term anyway. Can’t afford to make holding onto the veto power in a swing state if there’s a chance a GOP legislature would change state election laws or create a partisan gerrymander of their house seats. Not with this Supreme Court that seems inclined to let state legislatures get away with any shenanigans that aren’t explicitly forbidden in the constitution or federal law.
My disagreement with Nate is less about what specific allegations he brought up or didn't and more about his larger analysis. The following is all he had to say about Shapiro's downside in this piece: "And also, the reasons for not picking Shapiro aren’t great. Democrats in the political bubble overstate the salience of the Gaza issue and understate the benefits of moderation, and that’s before getting into the issue of Shapiro’s Jewishness."
Aside from the sexual harassment and murder case scandals, a wide range of constituencies of varying ideological stripes had concerns with Shapiro. As I noted earlier, his critics included a pro-Israel senator who has been tacking to the center (and who, admittedly, may have had other motivations), teachers' unions, and labor, among others. Nate's two sentences above are an unfair representation of the case against Shapiro IMO
Yeah, Nate is blind on this one. You can’t be the campaign of Women’s Rights and Progress for Women when your VP-pick has a PR nightmare waiting to torpedo everything you stand for with a sexual harassment cover-up for a political advisor/friend. Rs would eat that alive. The race is about KH and DJT and having side controversies for the KH campaign would tamp down the momentum and raise a dark cloud over the convention.
This, this is exactly it. Sources now saying Kamala just didn't "get a good feeling" from her meeting with Shapiro, and that his Boosters that obnoxiously (and without advance notice!) turned a rally for Kamala into a 'Josh for VP' party a week or so ago were the tipping points. There was just something off. I don't think right now is the time to be scrounging for fractional +EV when I don't think all of the information about Shapiro is on the table - variance and knowledge too low to use that approach IMO.
Yeah it doesn't fit into the online Left vs Moderate culture war, but the Greenberg thing especially struck me as a huge liability that also had the potential to keep springing new surprises before the election. The case just got re-opened, no wants an October Surprise destroying their news cycle.
The online Left vs Moderate culture war is ridiculous. We are in an election where the old categories are irrelevant.
The only category that matters this time is Pro-democracy (Harris/Walz) vs anti-democracy (trump/Vance).
Pick your side. When Harris and Walz win (if the pro- democracy coalition stays united), other differences can be sorted out. And there will be another presidential election in 2028.
To much of the electorate, saying “you are pro democracy” does not imply you were for Harris/Watz and anti-Trump/Vance. For those, and there are many, who believe that the 2020 election was stolen, being “pro democracy” meant being for Trump/Vance and anti-democracy being Harris/Walz.
An underlying problem is we make assumptions about how the other tribe sees things. In this case, both sides are claiming they are the pro-democracy side. Their voters believe them.
There is fact, on the one hand, and personal perception and belief, on the other. The 2020 election was not stolen. There are not two equal sides about that.
In the context of 2024: One candidate, twice impeached, had tried to overturn a free and fair election by making false accusations, trying to induce state office holders to break election laws, and inciting mob violence (anti-democracy). The other was the sitting Vice President, former U.S. Senator, and former elected attorney general of the largest state, who upheld her oath of office and pledged a peaceful transfer of power (pro-democracy). Those are facts--no two equal sides about them.
Rational people are not obliged to either accept or respect claims based on lies just because others believe them.
I fully agree with everything you just described. But too many Americans don't agree and elected the coup leader. That's a problem we must solve. We must figure out how to reach out to our many fellow citizens, the majority, and convince them that they were conned. It's either that--try to reclaim our democracy by understanding and reaching out--or give up on democracy.
I also don't understand why Nate hasn't addressed it. Especially with Trump's felony convictions related to Stormy Daniels, Shapiro's involvement in a hush money case related to sexual harassment would be a clear jumping off point for Trump's campaign to push a claim of political persecution while his opponent was involved in the same thing. A Shapiro VP pick would undermine one of the key character arguments against Trump which seems way more consequential than "Minnesota mannerisms may not translate outside the state," whatever that means.
Nate’s stance on Gaza being unimportant is simply wrong. The midwestern states have a high number of muslim voters which makes the issue have higher importance in the states that happen to be swing states.
Biden won PA by ~80k votes and there are ~150k muslims in PA.
Biden won MI by ~150k votes and there are ~250k muslims in MI.
Even though most of the country (myself included) don’t care about this issue, it’s actually worth considering for the midwest strategy.
I'm someone to whom the issue matters a lot, but I also get that we're a loud minority (personally speaking, pretty much every one of Shapiro's issues was singularly disqualifying for me). But even with that said, the notion that Shapiro would simultaneously deliver PA but *not* negatively impact the vote in MI just seems silly to me.
I'm another someone to whom the issue matters greatly, and run in several circles where that sentiment is strong. Many in those circles are younger, casual voters who will absolutely stay home if they're not excited by the ticket. Nate seems to be completely/willfully ignoring the impact of potentially reduced turnout for those turned off by taking the wrong side of the issue.
I think we can sum it up like this: Shapiro's "attack surface" had way too many points/aspects and would give Trump and Republicans too many targets to choose from and I'm guessing the thinking is that Kamala wants to draw all the fire to herself because she thinks she can handle it (and thus far, that has been the case). Reading what Trump and Republicans are saying to today, it's all "he is just like her!" which is another way of saying "eh, we got nothing on this guy". I mean, you are not going to steal too many headlines with "this Democrat is a Democrat!" Kamala is the star of this ticket, and she definitely should remain the main topic going forward.
Sure he would. Democrats are traditionally very incompetent and absolutely would've let him get this far (and usually would've let him win, but they seem to have wisened up the last few weeks).
Swing voters don't really care about whether someone used an NDA in a sexual harassment settlement. And regardless, Republicans couldn't attack Shapiro on the NDA without reminding voters of Trump's numerous and severe sexual harassment and assault issues.
I'm sure Republicans would have tried to stir up conspiracy theories about the Greenberg case, but Shapiro was so tangentially involved that I don't think that would have been a particularly effective line of attack.
One thing swing voters DO care most about is crime. Republicans are going to have a field day making ads with footage of Minneapolis's third precinct burning. The Walz pick will make one of their most effective lines of attack even more potent.
Republicans specialize in attacking their enemies on their perceived strengths. Sure they can. The point they will make is that Democrats are hypocrites. The attack has the advantage of being accurate.
But virtually all of the people who care whether a candidate has committed (or in Shapiro's case, had an aide who committed) sexual harassment are voting for Harris anyway. At worst, you maybe cause a couple hundred swing state voters to stay home over the harassment settlement.
Hundreds of thousands of moderate swing voters are highly susceptible to the "Democrats are soft on crime" attack. The Walz pick hands them the video footage to hammer home that message. It doesn't matter that Walz had minimal ability to stop the arson and vandalism. Republicans will play that footage constantly and talk about how long it took Walz to call in the national guard. That is going to be very compelling to thousands of centrist voters in swing states.
Because of the progressive obsession with fairness to the exclusion of other virtues (see Haidt), charges of hypocrisy--even fallacious tu quoques--hit the Dems different and harder.
Agreed. I am personally a vocally pro-Palestine leftist, but I objectively saw the Ellen Greenberg case as the biggest liability. I don’t believe Shapiro personally did anything nefarious, but the narrative would have been that he covered up a murder somehow
If Walz was in on it then maybe he should have been charged. Regardless that article isn't about the guy that got killed by the cop, it's about the riots that followed.
The way he's spent the 24 hours since the Walz announcement retweeting bluntly disingenuous nonsense designed to vindicate him and make Walz look like a bad pick (an anonymous Trump staffer claiming without evidence that they had conducted a whisper campaign to sour Dems on Shapiro; an out-of-context MSNBC clip that makes it sound like Walz is anti-free speech) makes me considerably less likely to give him the benefit of the doubt in that regard.
I don't follow. If anything, that implies it's even more likely that he doesn't know, and is just going off of his own priors thoughts on Shapiro. And Twitter is definitely where a lot of the "Gaza argument" buzz is, so that would also probably help explain his focus on that.
Again, not saying the other stuff isn't important, but I don't think it's particularly common knowledge.
I mean, I don't know, I figure if he's engaged enough to draft two whole articles about it to one of the largest audiences on Substack then he has an obligation to know all the basic angles--and yeah, the sexual harassment and Ellen Greenberg stuff has admittedly been buried by mainstream press in favor of Shapiro's positioning on Gaza, but I don't consider myself all that plugged into lefty discourse and I knew about it. So to me either he's being disingenuous (which is my assumption) or he's being plain ignorant (which might be worse).
Right. The lack of Ivy degrees on the Dem side is an interesting counterpoint to the R ticket, with two Ivy League "elite" grads trying to appeal to the non-college educated white demographic.
Harris doesn’t have an Ivy League degree and the university of California university system is elite among public institutions while Howard is elite among HBCUs - but fair point
I think Walz is pretty bland and invisible, which makes sense if you don't want to rock the boat. Look at JD Vance.
On the other hand when I think of the Walz pick the term that springs to mind is "politics as usual". That's fine for a normal cycle but given what's happening in France, the UK, Germany, Argentina, the Netherlands, etc. the Dems had better hope that what's sloshing around in Europe doesn't wash up on these shores.
Exactly, watching that speech, especially back to back with Shapiro, I can see exactly what she saw.
Not that Shapiro wasn’t on fire himself, but it was a very different…tone? Walz oozes “authentically grounded”.
He reaches towards Obama-Trump voters that are actually very down with populous progressive economic policies (that Trump/Vance are aping), but hang up on the Culture War stuff.
Trying to paint this guy as “West Coast elite/liberal” isn’t going to stick.
I was referring to middle America as in the geographic area, not the middle class. But really I should have specified midwest. And yes, that includes blue collar workers. He grew up in a small town, he's a former teacher, high school football coach, army national guard vet. That's a super relatable and admirable guy to any midwesterner, including blue collar. Great speaker, funny, energetic. If he can defend his handling of 2020 protests/riots which is where they're hitting him most (I think he can), he'll be a great asset.
Which is why they need to get him speaking in front of as many people as possible fast. They can paint him how they want, but the way he talks about those issues (freedom and mind your own business), together with his regular guy vibe, will likely go a long way to reaching at least some blue collar Obama/Trump voters. Of course they need be exposed to him to have that effect. What those voters resent the most, aside from specific policies, are costal elites, and he is far from that.
They split the vote with Nigel Farage's Reform party. If you ignore actual vote totals you could make the same argument about France where a far left coalition held of Le Pen with tactical voting.
This is a good point. If you weren’t going pick based on geography, I would have gone with Mayor Pete, as I think he’s probably the smartest and deftest in conversation politician I’ve seen in my lifetime. But his McKinsey association and (let’s face it) his being gay are impediments to some folks who are ambivalent about the elites having similar backgrounds. Knowing that he was an NCO tells me that he’s no silver spoon guy.
If Walz is the safe pick then Vance is just the opposite. At the Atlanta rally he told a story about praying that his mother would wake up after she OD'd. Quite the contrast.
For those not in the know, 20 years is the normal retirement age. It is completely expected that anyone staying past 20 is liable to to take their retirement and run whenever they no longer have an active service commitment. Unless he made some kind of explicit promise that he'd extend, this is a complete nothing burger.
Maybe don't make assumptions. I did read the article and all it says in this regard is that Walz, "allegedly assur[ed] his fellow troops he would join them." Even if you take this at face value, this could simply be a case of misinterpreting his words; saying something as innocuous as "When we deploy," could be understood as him saying he was planning to join them, when perhaps all he intended was to speak for the unit as a whole. Now, it's possible he did make an explicit promise that he broke and that would definitely be shitty, but that's not necessarily what happened based on the limited reporting in the article
In a letter posted to Facebook in 2018 as he first ran for governor, retired Command Sergeants Major Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr said Walz retired from his 24-year tenure in the National Guard after learning that his battalion would be deployed to Iraq, despite allegedly assuring his fellow troops he would join them.
“On May 16th, 2005, [Walz] quit, betraying his country, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war,” Behrends and Herr wrote.
"...the Democratic Party’s instincts to triangulate instead of the boldness the Harris campaign has displayed so far." I feel like this is an odd take. Walz is the bold choice because he isn't ideologically moderate. He isn't from the tipping point state. Does that make him a worse pick? Maybe. But, he is the bold pick.
I also wouldn't undervalue reporting that Walz was the favorite of both Pelosi and Sanders. As a Walzpiller, I think it's more that his messaging style meets the moment. Shapiro is Obama-esque. Walz sounds more like Sanders on the stump. And that is a better counter to Trumpism.
I agree, choosing Shapiro would've screamed "we're cold and calculating", which is the image democrats typically project. Walz is a bolder, more energizing choice.
Walz is definitely more in the "affable & smart grandpa" category than he is in the "power hungry person bidding their time until they can take over" category.
Harris needs to show boldness by moving to the center because her biggest problem is that most people think of her as too far left. Also frankly the fact that progressives have all decided that swing voters will love Walz makes me deeply skeptical that swing voters will love him, because progressives are generally garbage at figuring out what will actually appeal to swing voters.
I doubt he'll do much harm, but I saw someone on Twitter say something like "Walz is a white-collar person's idea of who will appeal to blue collar people," and I have a strong hunch this is true. Admittedly, it's just a hunch, but I think Shapiro was clearly the higher-upside pick.
I guess, I struggle to buy that progressives don't do well with Obama-Trump style swing voters. Walz won MN-1 in 2016 by a hair where Clinton lost 38-53. I think that moderates overvalue the salience of Clinton-Obama politics in a world where Democrats need more grassroots [read pro-worker, pro-union] appeal in the Midwest.
Pelosi is also an interesting point here. Her political instincts have always been good, and her support of Walz is also an important signal that there may be more going on with Shapiro's vetting. Shapiro looked good on paper, but represents a backwards-looking vision of the Democratic party.
Walz's track record in MN-1 is a feather in his cap, sure, but statewide elections are more relevant for a Presidential race he's done so-so there - basically about as well as you'd expect for a generic Democrat in Minnesota.
I think Pelosi's instincts are great on the level of inside-baseball politics (and it's possible there was some inside-baseball reason to pick Walz over Shapiro, though I'm inclined to think they should have gone with Beshear or Kelly if there was an issue with Shapiro specifically) but electorally...she's only ever won elections in *San Francisco.* Pelosi's role in getting Biden to drop out illustrates this; she was great at all the maneuvering and cajoling necessary to get him to step aside but she was hardly ahead of the curve there.
(I don't mean this as a knock on Pelosi, by the way; inside-baseball politics is a legitimate skill and one that we could probably use more of. It's just largely orthogonal to being able to win elections, especially national elections.)
As for Walz....Idunno. I'm not super familiar with him and this is all just a hunch. But Twitter progressives have been going on about how normie swing voters are gonna love him because he's a football coach and seems like a nice guy and blahblahblah for weeks, and, like....Twitter progressives are total morons when it comes to this stuff. So it just makes me skeptical. But I will admit that that is a different constituency than the kind of pro-union, pro-worker types you are talking about, so maybe Walz does actually have that kind of appeal. And that could appeal to swing voters, I guess. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
I think Walz has done a lot better than a generic Democrat in MN. Sometimes people don't realize how competitive statewide races often are in MN because it has voted D for president so consistently. Of the last five MN governors, only 2 were Democrats (Walz & Dayton), and Walz's margins of victory (+11 & +7) were a lot better than Dayton's (+5 & +0.5). Walz also outperformed Tina Smith's Senate election (+5) and Al Franken (+0.1 and +10). Klobuchar has outperformed Walz, but I wouldn't call Klobuchar a generic Democrat.
Yeah, Twitter progressives tendency to fixate on Gaza misses the boat IMO. Vouchers and corporate tax cuts are the knocks on Shapiro from a policy standpoint.
Who knows, maybe Shapiro would have been the better pick, but he's the sort of candidate that plays well with a consolidating Dem primary electorate (like Obama, Clinton, and Biden). He feels very beltway-adjacent. Trump is at his most comfortable attacking that kind of politics.
The thing that a lot of lefties (including, but not limited to, Twitter progressives) do not realize is that pissing them off is good politics for Democrats at the national level. The reason for this is simple - we live in a country that is 40% moderate, 40% conservative, and 20% liberal. Therefore, the left-of-center party needs win a bunch of moderates, and they need to loudly and publicly embrace moderation to win national elections.
Josh Shapiro pisses off the left. Picking him would have been (correctly) seen as picking a fight with the left and - here's what lefties don't want to hear - *this would be a net positive for the Harris campaign.* And it doesn't really matter why Josh Shapiro pisses off the left; the salient fact is that he does.
Harris has, thus far, embraced more moderate messaging and quietly tacked to the center on a number of issues. But she has not loudly and publicly picked any fights with the left. She certainly *could* do this with Walz as her VP candidate, but the fact that she chose him could be - though may not be - an indicator that she will shy away from doing this in the manner that Biden did. And to the extent that it is an indicator of that, it's very, very bad sign if you actually want Harris to win (which I do).
This to me is waaaay too 5d chess. Even Manchin called Walz a good pick. At the end of the day, picking Walz was an exercise in approval voting. Shapiro-stans didn't have an objection to Walz, so she picked the least disliked option.
Pissing off your own voters isn't good political strategy even if you believe in the median voter theorem. There were valid reasons to pick Shapiro (as Nate pointed out), but this isn't one of them.
40% "moderate" also includes a whole lot of voters who are disaffected. Undecided voters aren't paying attention to pissed off Twitter lefties. Own the libs is a base play by Trump, not an outreach play.
My hunch isn't really so much about Gaza (which, I agree, is a bad fixation of Twitter progressives), and more about Walz's personality, or - to use the parlance of the times - his vibes.
Sarah Palin is an interesting analogy here. I think Sarah Palin was the kind of woman that right-wingers thought would appeal to moderate suburban moms. And it kind of worked, briefly, until it really, really, didn't. Because intensely political right-wingers exist in a weird little bubble and don't actually know what would appeal to moderate suburban moms.
I don't think Walz is likely to be as disastrous as Palin and his failure mode would certainly be different; he's got a longer track record and doesn't seem like an idiot. But I have a strong hunch that there is something or some things in Walz's track record and/or personality that progressives literally *cannot* see - maybe something about what he did during the Floyd riots, maybe something with trans issues, maybe something he's said or even just the way he talks - that turns off swing voters, or at least limits his appeal to them. I will readily admit this is just a hunch, and I'm just some guy on the internet - make of it what you will.
Of course, hovering above all this is the fact that historically VP picks don't matter much. Although in this instance it's a gauge of Kamala Harris' decisionmaking and the results, while not disastrous, do raise some questions.
Walz campaigned as a moderate in that election and Clinton did not campaign as a moderate.....So exactly the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
That's a reductive (and inaccurate) take. He ran on an economically progressive platform on things like education, labor, and healthcare. The main attack line from Hagedorn was on spending. Go back and watch their debate if you'd care to see it. Clinton ran to the right of him on several of these things (remember the TPP).
There's a way to market progressive policies to undecideds and disaffecteds.
Fair enough and my mistake and error. I'm not going to watch the video right now but I will take your word for it. I'm only learning about Tim Walz now that he's VP, so thank you for the information and help on that. So he's actually been progressive throughout his career making it even more absurd that Nate calls him moderate.
Not sure why Nate continues to ignore what I personally assume were the actual reasons they didn't go with Shapiro: his coverup of the sexual harassment scandal in his office and the PA Supreme Court's reopening of the Ellen Greenberg case. Popular in his own state or not, the dude's scandal-prone, and you better bet the GOP would've hammered that relentlessly.
Yeah, for someone who is normally critical of the blob, Nate seems awfully willing to parrot their narrative that Shapiro opposition is solely related to Gaza. The drip of new revelations re the sexual harassment thing seems bad and the fact that not just the left, but folks like Fetterman were against him was concerning. I expect we’ll learn at some point that some stuff came up in the vetting
No one should be surprised that Fetterman was against him. They are political rivals fighting for oxygen in the same constituencies. They have very similar ambitions. Their paths have crossed before and likely will again now that Shapiro got passed over. Fetterman is probably very glad that he was able to keep Shapiro from lapping him.
Fair enough, but my point is that opposition to Shapiro was broad. His critics included a pro-Israel senator who has been tacking to the center (and who, as you note, may have had other motivations), teachers' unions, and labor, among others.
Of course, had Fetterman not have that stroke, I think he’d have been in the conversation for VP. His appeal to a LOT of groups not normally Democratic voters, while himself being pretty progressive on economic issues, and the fact that his wife was undocumented might let him be the “only Nixon could go to China” story on immigration reform.
Fetterman would come with the same Senate seat problem as Kelly though. Sure Shapiro would pick his replacement but then I believe that person would have to run in the 2026 midterms as an unelected member of the presidents’ party, which would be much harder to win than Fetterman will probably have in 2028. If you’re a Dem with VP ambitions, being a Senator from a swing state is probably not the best way to get there right now. Honestly, governor from a swing state hurts too if you’re not in your last term anyway. Can’t afford to make holding onto the veto power in a swing state if there’s a chance a GOP legislature would change state election laws or create a partisan gerrymander of their house seats. Not with this Supreme Court that seems inclined to let state legislatures get away with any shenanigans that aren’t explicitly forbidden in the constitution or federal law.
In Nate’s defense, he did mention the possibility of a vetting issue. I can understand not wanting to be specific about particular allegations
My disagreement with Nate is less about what specific allegations he brought up or didn't and more about his larger analysis. The following is all he had to say about Shapiro's downside in this piece: "And also, the reasons for not picking Shapiro aren’t great. Democrats in the political bubble overstate the salience of the Gaza issue and understate the benefits of moderation, and that’s before getting into the issue of Shapiro’s Jewishness."
Aside from the sexual harassment and murder case scandals, a wide range of constituencies of varying ideological stripes had concerns with Shapiro. As I noted earlier, his critics included a pro-Israel senator who has been tacking to the center (and who, admittedly, may have had other motivations), teachers' unions, and labor, among others. Nate's two sentences above are an unfair representation of the case against Shapiro IMO
Yeah, Nate is blind on this one. You can’t be the campaign of Women’s Rights and Progress for Women when your VP-pick has a PR nightmare waiting to torpedo everything you stand for with a sexual harassment cover-up for a political advisor/friend. Rs would eat that alive. The race is about KH and DJT and having side controversies for the KH campaign would tamp down the momentum and raise a dark cloud over the convention.
Shapiro's apparent emulation of Obama's speech pattern is also kind of weird. To my admittedly untrained eye he just didn't come through as genuine.
This, this is exactly it. Sources now saying Kamala just didn't "get a good feeling" from her meeting with Shapiro, and that his Boosters that obnoxiously (and without advance notice!) turned a rally for Kamala into a 'Josh for VP' party a week or so ago were the tipping points. There was just something off. I don't think right now is the time to be scrounging for fractional +EV when I don't think all of the information about Shapiro is on the table - variance and knowledge too low to use that approach IMO.
I didn't like it. "White Obama" is a very easy label that will stick.
Yeah it doesn't fit into the online Left vs Moderate culture war, but the Greenberg thing especially struck me as a huge liability that also had the potential to keep springing new surprises before the election. The case just got re-opened, no wants an October Surprise destroying their news cycle.
The online Left vs Moderate culture war is ridiculous. We are in an election where the old categories are irrelevant.
The only category that matters this time is Pro-democracy (Harris/Walz) vs anti-democracy (trump/Vance).
Pick your side. When Harris and Walz win (if the pro- democracy coalition stays united), other differences can be sorted out. And there will be another presidential election in 2028.
To much of the electorate, saying “you are pro democracy” does not imply you were for Harris/Watz and anti-Trump/Vance. For those, and there are many, who believe that the 2020 election was stolen, being “pro democracy” meant being for Trump/Vance and anti-democracy being Harris/Walz.
An underlying problem is we make assumptions about how the other tribe sees things. In this case, both sides are claiming they are the pro-democracy side. Their voters believe them.
There is fact, on the one hand, and personal perception and belief, on the other. The 2020 election was not stolen. There are not two equal sides about that.
In the context of 2024: One candidate, twice impeached, had tried to overturn a free and fair election by making false accusations, trying to induce state office holders to break election laws, and inciting mob violence (anti-democracy). The other was the sitting Vice President, former U.S. Senator, and former elected attorney general of the largest state, who upheld her oath of office and pledged a peaceful transfer of power (pro-democracy). Those are facts--no two equal sides about them.
Rational people are not obliged to either accept or respect claims based on lies just because others believe them.
Hi Nancy,
I fully agree with everything you just described. But too many Americans don't agree and elected the coup leader. That's a problem we must solve. We must figure out how to reach out to our many fellow citizens, the majority, and convince them that they were conned. It's either that--try to reclaim our democracy by understanding and reaching out--or give up on democracy.
I also don't understand why Nate hasn't addressed it. Especially with Trump's felony convictions related to Stormy Daniels, Shapiro's involvement in a hush money case related to sexual harassment would be a clear jumping off point for Trump's campaign to push a claim of political persecution while his opponent was involved in the same thing. A Shapiro VP pick would undermine one of the key character arguments against Trump which seems way more consequential than "Minnesota mannerisms may not translate outside the state," whatever that means.
Nate’s stance on Gaza being unimportant is simply wrong. The midwestern states have a high number of muslim voters which makes the issue have higher importance in the states that happen to be swing states.
Biden won PA by ~80k votes and there are ~150k muslims in PA.
Biden won MI by ~150k votes and there are ~250k muslims in MI.
Even though most of the country (myself included) don’t care about this issue, it’s actually worth considering for the midwest strategy.
I'm someone to whom the issue matters a lot, but I also get that we're a loud minority (personally speaking, pretty much every one of Shapiro's issues was singularly disqualifying for me). But even with that said, the notion that Shapiro would simultaneously deliver PA but *not* negatively impact the vote in MI just seems silly to me.
I'm another someone to whom the issue matters greatly, and run in several circles where that sentiment is strong. Many in those circles are younger, casual voters who will absolutely stay home if they're not excited by the ticket. Nate seems to be completely/willfully ignoring the impact of potentially reduced turnout for those turned off by taking the wrong side of the issue.
If those were the real reasons, he would have never made it to top 2.
Fair enough, but it's unthinkable to me that they weren't significant factors (especially since the PA Supreme Court decision is brand-new).
I would say if the choice had anything to do with Israel, he wouldn’t have made it to the top 2.
I think we can sum it up like this: Shapiro's "attack surface" had way too many points/aspects and would give Trump and Republicans too many targets to choose from and I'm guessing the thinking is that Kamala wants to draw all the fire to herself because she thinks she can handle it (and thus far, that has been the case). Reading what Trump and Republicans are saying to today, it's all "he is just like her!" which is another way of saying "eh, we got nothing on this guy". I mean, you are not going to steal too many headlines with "this Democrat is a Democrat!" Kamala is the star of this ticket, and she definitely should remain the main topic going forward.
I’m not convinced of that. The PA EC votes would make it very tempting to power through to final call, even if you know there’s moderate risk.
Sure he would. Democrats are traditionally very incompetent and absolutely would've let him get this far (and usually would've let him win, but they seem to have wisened up the last few weeks).
Swing voters don't really care about whether someone used an NDA in a sexual harassment settlement. And regardless, Republicans couldn't attack Shapiro on the NDA without reminding voters of Trump's numerous and severe sexual harassment and assault issues.
I'm sure Republicans would have tried to stir up conspiracy theories about the Greenberg case, but Shapiro was so tangentially involved that I don't think that would have been a particularly effective line of attack.
One thing swing voters DO care most about is crime. Republicans are going to have a field day making ads with footage of Minneapolis's third precinct burning. The Walz pick will make one of their most effective lines of attack even more potent.
Republicans specialize in attacking their enemies on their perceived strengths. Sure they can. The point they will make is that Democrats are hypocrites. The attack has the advantage of being accurate.
But virtually all of the people who care whether a candidate has committed (or in Shapiro's case, had an aide who committed) sexual harassment are voting for Harris anyway. At worst, you maybe cause a couple hundred swing state voters to stay home over the harassment settlement.
Hundreds of thousands of moderate swing voters are highly susceptible to the "Democrats are soft on crime" attack. The Walz pick hands them the video footage to hammer home that message. It doesn't matter that Walz had minimal ability to stop the arson and vandalism. Republicans will play that footage constantly and talk about how long it took Walz to call in the national guard. That is going to be very compelling to thousands of centrist voters in swing states.
Walz is a base pick, while Shapiro would be triangulating for moderates. We'll see.
We had people waving off Clinton's shenanigans and even offering to re-enact them themselves because they agreed with his politics.
NSFW: https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/scott-whitlock/2021/07/24/cringe-journalist-offered-oral-sex-bill-clinton-keep-abortion
That is really topical. Is Jay Leno available for this round table?
Because of the progressive obsession with fairness to the exclusion of other virtues (see Haidt), charges of hypocrisy--even fallacious tu quoques--hit the Dems different and harder.
Agreed. I am personally a vocally pro-Palestine leftist, but I objectively saw the Ellen Greenberg case as the biggest liability. I don’t believe Shapiro personally did anything nefarious, but the narrative would have been that he covered up a murder somehow
"scandal prone" and as you define it. See the other side?
Walz has his own baggage though.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/us/tim-walz-george-floyd-criticism.html
Cops shouldn't murder people in the middle of the street. Walz was on it.
If Walz was in on it then maybe he should have been charged. Regardless that article isn't about the guy that got killed by the cop, it's about the riots that followed.
Maybe those two things are related?
Did you read that article?
I was alive when George Floyd was killed.
He's only 19 months into his term, so not a good sign.
Is it possible he just hasn't heard about that controversy? All I've heard w.r.t. Shapiro is people talking about Gaza.
The way he's spent the 24 hours since the Walz announcement retweeting bluntly disingenuous nonsense designed to vindicate him and make Walz look like a bad pick (an anonymous Trump staffer claiming without evidence that they had conducted a whisper campaign to sour Dems on Shapiro; an out-of-context MSNBC clip that makes it sound like Walz is anti-free speech) makes me considerably less likely to give him the benefit of the doubt in that regard.
I don't follow. If anything, that implies it's even more likely that he doesn't know, and is just going off of his own priors thoughts on Shapiro. And Twitter is definitely where a lot of the "Gaza argument" buzz is, so that would also probably help explain his focus on that.
Again, not saying the other stuff isn't important, but I don't think it's particularly common knowledge.
I mean, I don't know, I figure if he's engaged enough to draft two whole articles about it to one of the largest audiences on Substack then he has an obligation to know all the basic angles--and yeah, the sexual harassment and Ellen Greenberg stuff has admittedly been buried by mainstream press in favor of Shapiro's positioning on Gaza, but I don't consider myself all that plugged into lefty discourse and I knew about it. So to me either he's being disingenuous (which is my assumption) or he's being plain ignorant (which might be worse).
What did he cover up? The Ellen Greenberg case was 6 years before he became AG
For clarification purposes Walz was an NCO this + no law degree brings something to democratic national politics that should be acknowledged.
He also doesn’t have an elite university degree, which sets him apart from basically every major democrat (other than Biden)
Mankato State is joke to you...!?
(get outta here 'kato, nobody's going to call you Minnesota State)
He went to Chadron State in Nebraska…
And Harris?
Right. The lack of Ivy degrees on the Dem side is an interesting counterpoint to the R ticket, with two Ivy League "elite" grads trying to appeal to the non-college educated white demographic.
Harris doesn’t have an Ivy League degree and the university of California university system is elite among public institutions while Howard is elite among HBCUs - but fair point
Right. Harvard, Yale, Princeton... Howard.
...a CSM? Holy shit, I did not know that.
amusingly they made him retire at master sergeant because he didnt finish Sergeants Major Academy before leaving lol
A cop and a sergeant, I like it.
Sad!
I think Walz is pretty bland and invisible, which makes sense if you don't want to rock the boat. Look at JD Vance.
On the other hand when I think of the Walz pick the term that springs to mind is "politics as usual". That's fine for a normal cycle but given what's happening in France, the UK, Germany, Argentina, the Netherlands, etc. the Dems had better hope that what's sloshing around in Europe doesn't wash up on these shores.
I would have agreed till I heard his Philadelphia speech. The guy is a GREAT speaker and will definitely connect with moderate/middle America voters.
Exactly, watching that speech, especially back to back with Shapiro, I can see exactly what she saw.
Not that Shapiro wasn’t on fire himself, but it was a very different…tone? Walz oozes “authentically grounded”.
He reaches towards Obama-Trump voters that are actually very down with populous progressive economic policies (that Trump/Vance are aping), but hang up on the Culture War stuff.
Trying to paint this guy as “West Coast elite/liberal” isn’t going to stick.
I thought Harris was supposed to connect to middle American voters. Who's the blue collar magnet?
I was referring to middle America as in the geographic area, not the middle class. But really I should have specified midwest. And yes, that includes blue collar workers. He grew up in a small town, he's a former teacher, high school football coach, army national guard vet. That's a super relatable and admirable guy to any midwesterner, including blue collar. Great speaker, funny, energetic. If he can defend his handling of 2020 protests/riots which is where they're hitting him most (I think he can), he'll be a great asset.
He's already being painted by the opposition as a far left progressive who is way out of touch with thr middle on issues like sex changes for minors.
LOL
Which is why they need to get him speaking in front of as many people as possible fast. They can paint him how they want, but the way he talks about those issues (freedom and mind your own business), together with his regular guy vibe, will likely go a long way to reaching at least some blue collar Obama/Trump voters. Of course they need be exposed to him to have that effect. What those voters resent the most, aside from specific policies, are costal elites, and he is far from that.
UK conservatives just had a crushing defeat so not sure what your point is.
They split the vote with Nigel Farage's Reform party. If you ignore actual vote totals you could make the same argument about France where a far left coalition held of Le Pen with tactical voting.
Reform party got 5 seats while Labor got 411.
I'm not sure what your point is. Did you read my comment?
So Britain has a first past the post system....
Lib Dem voters strongly preferred Labour to the Conservatives. In a hypothetical instant runoff / preferential election, it looks like Labour would still have won easily. Poll data on preferences: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Internal_PartyRanking_240709_W.pdf
The conservatives were in power for over a decade and are presiding over a recession now.
Sure: their loss wasn't a great mystery. They weren't robbed, though.
The strongest supported conclusion from the data seems to be that it's generally a bad time for incumbents.
This is a good point. If you weren’t going pick based on geography, I would have gone with Mayor Pete, as I think he’s probably the smartest and deftest in conversation politician I’ve seen in my lifetime. But his McKinsey association and (let’s face it) his being gay are impediments to some folks who are ambivalent about the elites having similar backgrounds. Knowing that he was an NCO tells me that he’s no silver spoon guy.
I'd like to know his story about coming out to his parents as a McKinsey consultant.
LOL!
If Walz is the safe pick then Vance is just the opposite. At the Atlanta rally he told a story about praying that his mother would wake up after she OD'd. Quite the contrast.
This is out there too now.
https://nypost.com/2024/08/06/us-news/tim-walz-embellished-military-career-for-years-dropped-from-national-guard-unit-ahead-of-iraq-deployment/
That monster retired from the National Guard after only... 24 years.
For those not in the know, 20 years is the normal retirement age. It is completely expected that anyone staying past 20 is liable to to take their retirement and run whenever they no longer have an active service commitment. Unless he made some kind of explicit promise that he'd extend, this is a complete nothing burger.
Maybe read the article before you comment.
Maybe don't make assumptions. I did read the article and all it says in this regard is that Walz, "allegedly assur[ed] his fellow troops he would join them." Even if you take this at face value, this could simply be a case of misinterpreting his words; saying something as innocuous as "When we deploy," could be understood as him saying he was planning to join them, when perhaps all he intended was to speak for the unit as a whole. Now, it's possible he did make an explicit promise that he broke and that would definitely be shitty, but that's not necessarily what happened based on the limited reporting in the article
In a letter posted to Facebook in 2018 as he first ran for governor, retired Command Sergeants Major Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr said Walz retired from his 24-year tenure in the National Guard after learning that his battalion would be deployed to Iraq, despite allegedly assuring his fellow troops he would join them.
“On May 16th, 2005, [Walz] quit, betraying his country, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war,” Behrends and Herr wrote.
To be fair the allegation is that he bailed right before they were deployed to combat.
To be fair he already served in Afghanistan. Did you?
Did you read that article?
Are you aware that he could have retired with full pension 4 years earlier?
Scott Walker in nearby Wisconsin wasn't a college grad at all, if memory serves.
"...the Democratic Party’s instincts to triangulate instead of the boldness the Harris campaign has displayed so far." I feel like this is an odd take. Walz is the bold choice because he isn't ideologically moderate. He isn't from the tipping point state. Does that make him a worse pick? Maybe. But, he is the bold pick.
I also wouldn't undervalue reporting that Walz was the favorite of both Pelosi and Sanders. As a Walzpiller, I think it's more that his messaging style meets the moment. Shapiro is Obama-esque. Walz sounds more like Sanders on the stump. And that is a better counter to Trumpism.
I agree, choosing Shapiro would've screamed "we're cold and calculating", which is the image democrats typically project. Walz is a bolder, more energizing choice.
Walz is definitely more in the "affable & smart grandpa" category than he is in the "power hungry person bidding their time until they can take over" category.
I sure hope Tim Walz's version of affable is better than Larry David's!
Harris needs to show boldness by moving to the center because her biggest problem is that most people think of her as too far left. Also frankly the fact that progressives have all decided that swing voters will love Walz makes me deeply skeptical that swing voters will love him, because progressives are generally garbage at figuring out what will actually appeal to swing voters.
I doubt he'll do much harm, but I saw someone on Twitter say something like "Walz is a white-collar person's idea of who will appeal to blue collar people," and I have a strong hunch this is true. Admittedly, it's just a hunch, but I think Shapiro was clearly the higher-upside pick.
I guess, I struggle to buy that progressives don't do well with Obama-Trump style swing voters. Walz won MN-1 in 2016 by a hair where Clinton lost 38-53. I think that moderates overvalue the salience of Clinton-Obama politics in a world where Democrats need more grassroots [read pro-worker, pro-union] appeal in the Midwest.
Pelosi is also an interesting point here. Her political instincts have always been good, and her support of Walz is also an important signal that there may be more going on with Shapiro's vetting. Shapiro looked good on paper, but represents a backwards-looking vision of the Democratic party.
Walz's track record in MN-1 is a feather in his cap, sure, but statewide elections are more relevant for a Presidential race he's done so-so there - basically about as well as you'd expect for a generic Democrat in Minnesota.
I think Pelosi's instincts are great on the level of inside-baseball politics (and it's possible there was some inside-baseball reason to pick Walz over Shapiro, though I'm inclined to think they should have gone with Beshear or Kelly if there was an issue with Shapiro specifically) but electorally...she's only ever won elections in *San Francisco.* Pelosi's role in getting Biden to drop out illustrates this; she was great at all the maneuvering and cajoling necessary to get him to step aside but she was hardly ahead of the curve there.
(I don't mean this as a knock on Pelosi, by the way; inside-baseball politics is a legitimate skill and one that we could probably use more of. It's just largely orthogonal to being able to win elections, especially national elections.)
As for Walz....Idunno. I'm not super familiar with him and this is all just a hunch. But Twitter progressives have been going on about how normie swing voters are gonna love him because he's a football coach and seems like a nice guy and blahblahblah for weeks, and, like....Twitter progressives are total morons when it comes to this stuff. So it just makes me skeptical. But I will admit that that is a different constituency than the kind of pro-union, pro-worker types you are talking about, so maybe Walz does actually have that kind of appeal. And that could appeal to swing voters, I guess. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
I think Walz has done a lot better than a generic Democrat in MN. Sometimes people don't realize how competitive statewide races often are in MN because it has voted D for president so consistently. Of the last five MN governors, only 2 were Democrats (Walz & Dayton), and Walz's margins of victory (+11 & +7) were a lot better than Dayton's (+5 & +0.5). Walz also outperformed Tina Smith's Senate election (+5) and Al Franken (+0.1 and +10). Klobuchar has outperformed Walz, but I wouldn't call Klobuchar a generic Democrat.
Fair enough - that's good to hear!
Yeah, Twitter progressives tendency to fixate on Gaza misses the boat IMO. Vouchers and corporate tax cuts are the knocks on Shapiro from a policy standpoint.
Who knows, maybe Shapiro would have been the better pick, but he's the sort of candidate that plays well with a consolidating Dem primary electorate (like Obama, Clinton, and Biden). He feels very beltway-adjacent. Trump is at his most comfortable attacking that kind of politics.
A further, perhaps clarifying, thought:
The thing that a lot of lefties (including, but not limited to, Twitter progressives) do not realize is that pissing them off is good politics for Democrats at the national level. The reason for this is simple - we live in a country that is 40% moderate, 40% conservative, and 20% liberal. Therefore, the left-of-center party needs win a bunch of moderates, and they need to loudly and publicly embrace moderation to win national elections.
Josh Shapiro pisses off the left. Picking him would have been (correctly) seen as picking a fight with the left and - here's what lefties don't want to hear - *this would be a net positive for the Harris campaign.* And it doesn't really matter why Josh Shapiro pisses off the left; the salient fact is that he does.
Harris has, thus far, embraced more moderate messaging and quietly tacked to the center on a number of issues. But she has not loudly and publicly picked any fights with the left. She certainly *could* do this with Walz as her VP candidate, but the fact that she chose him could be - though may not be - an indicator that she will shy away from doing this in the manner that Biden did. And to the extent that it is an indicator of that, it's very, very bad sign if you actually want Harris to win (which I do).
This to me is waaaay too 5d chess. Even Manchin called Walz a good pick. At the end of the day, picking Walz was an exercise in approval voting. Shapiro-stans didn't have an objection to Walz, so she picked the least disliked option.
Pissing off your own voters isn't good political strategy even if you believe in the median voter theorem. There were valid reasons to pick Shapiro (as Nate pointed out), but this isn't one of them.
40% "moderate" also includes a whole lot of voters who are disaffected. Undecided voters aren't paying attention to pissed off Twitter lefties. Own the libs is a base play by Trump, not an outreach play.
Well if left-of-center doesn’t vote that’s still a lot of people potentially.
My hunch isn't really so much about Gaza (which, I agree, is a bad fixation of Twitter progressives), and more about Walz's personality, or - to use the parlance of the times - his vibes.
Sarah Palin is an interesting analogy here. I think Sarah Palin was the kind of woman that right-wingers thought would appeal to moderate suburban moms. And it kind of worked, briefly, until it really, really, didn't. Because intensely political right-wingers exist in a weird little bubble and don't actually know what would appeal to moderate suburban moms.
I don't think Walz is likely to be as disastrous as Palin and his failure mode would certainly be different; he's got a longer track record and doesn't seem like an idiot. But I have a strong hunch that there is something or some things in Walz's track record and/or personality that progressives literally *cannot* see - maybe something about what he did during the Floyd riots, maybe something with trans issues, maybe something he's said or even just the way he talks - that turns off swing voters, or at least limits his appeal to them. I will readily admit this is just a hunch, and I'm just some guy on the internet - make of it what you will.
Of course, hovering above all this is the fact that historically VP picks don't matter much. Although in this instance it's a gauge of Kamala Harris' decisionmaking and the results, while not disastrous, do raise some questions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/us/tim-walz-george-floyd-criticism.html
Walz campaigned as a moderate in that election and Clinton did not campaign as a moderate.....So exactly the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
That's a reductive (and inaccurate) take. He ran on an economically progressive platform on things like education, labor, and healthcare. The main attack line from Hagedorn was on spending. Go back and watch their debate if you'd care to see it. Clinton ran to the right of him on several of these things (remember the TPP).
There's a way to market progressive policies to undecideds and disaffecteds.
https://www.mankatofreepress.com/news/elections/video-tim-walz-and-jim-hagedorn-debate/html_c64aa176-519a-11e4-adee-072fd28da9ba.html
Fair enough and my mistake and error. I'm not going to watch the video right now but I will take your word for it. I'm only learning about Tim Walz now that he's VP, so thank you for the information and help on that. So he's actually been progressive throughout his career making it even more absurd that Nate calls him moderate.