Typical gen x white male Yglesias/Silver fan checking in and finding this lacking. Trump has done a dozen things that are beyond almost any predictions since the first of the year with hardly a mention here while you punch down on resistance libs or pantsuit nation or whomever it is that annoys you most right now.
Well said. At least in this write up, Nate doesn’t seem to give the resistance libs credit for anything. Yglesias himself seems to have a totally different takeaway: “Trump seems to be doing more potentially irreparable harm than I’d have felt comfortable predicting. The resistance libs definitely have not been “right about everything” but they’ve been right about that and that’s important.” Not sure why Nate has such an axe to grind but this is pretty weak.
Agreed. Also, don't forget that Trump tried to send the National Guard to Portland, Chicago, and lots of other blue cities, without any real reason for doing so. The only reason why the National Guard deployment didn't happen is because a federal court order, and the Trump admin is still appealing the court order and hoping the deploy the National Guard to lots of cities later this year.
I'd like to address the statement made "despite the economy not being all that bad."
My job in industry is security and analysis, and part of that is tied to the practical state of the economy. When things are bad, people steal more, firing people causes more issues, doors are left open for hackers, ect.
People describe the economy as K shaped, because there is a separation between around the upper middle class marker as to how things are going. Groceries have gone up as much as 5 to 6% in some regions, a lot of the price increases are on lower quality goods *at the moment*, ect.
However, much of the economic growth is data center driven *and it's circular*. Nvidia givens 200 billion in stock to Open AI, which Open AI uses to buy 200 billion in hardware on paper. Silicon is reserved for chips that have no place to go, which I'm sure won't be released later at a premium so that the chip makers can profit.
What I'm seeing in the security field, meanwhile, is out and out chaos.
Security Audits finding more fraud than I've seen in almost 20 years.
People treating expense accounts like bank accounts.
Stock loss at high numbers, too high to be explained by anything short of internal theft at the warehouse level.
These are not the behaviors of a good economy.
This is the behavior of a fictional economy.
And I think pretty much everyone *knows* it is,
even if they are trying to convince themselves otherwise.
Right, and especially the revisionist history he's engaged in since then. Full pardons to 1600 people who had been given due process and convicted, calling them "hostages", calling the insurrection "orderly and spirited".
The pardons were the "it really is midnight in America" moment for me. Bad enough as a one time event, but obviously the clearest possible signal that: "for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."
Newsom’s gerrymandering while an effective fight back against Republican gerrymandering is not a defense of democracy, it’s a further perversion of it. The narrative doesn’t really align, whether or not it was a good thing as a matter of winning the next election.
Furthermore, if Democrats really wanted to protect democracy they should be onboard with passing voter ID laws. There are real changes to Republican proposals they could force rather than objecting wholesale. For example, funding free US passports for all citizens (removing the financial burden of obtaining a federally recognized and secure ID).
Come on, we know voter ID laws are just a pretext to make it more difficult for certain people to vote. And we know this because there is basically no identified voter fraud.
Arguably Dems should support voter ID on the basis that their coalition is now more engaged and so it might provide an electoral advantage, but it’s kind of hard to pivot on that.
There is ample evidence that the impact of such ID laws is also far less than what the Left factions of the Democrats have promoted.
I am personally indifferent to them and wouldn't otherwise promote HOWEVER as a political lever to obtain other institutional wins that would be more useful in real operational protection of elections, it looks very much like a freebie in reality.
I'd amplify the point about the contradiction between believing Donald Trump is a nightmare while supporting Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. It's not just Trump's election that was due in part to anti-Trump failures, but many of Trump's policies. Anger and despair are unproductive, and resistance libs are not going to change Trump or gain traction with MAGA voters. But liberals can resolve to fix some of their own flaws that helped empower Trump and set him on his course.
For example, acknowledge the catastrophic public health response to CoVID that helped Trump win and got the nut-case RFK appointed. Rather than reflexively opposing the eminently qualified Vinay Prasad and Marty Makary for being RFK selections, take a hard look and see if they aren't actually solving the problems of an entrenched public health bureaucracy. Maybe you don't believe that medical errors are the third-leading cause of death in the US, but isn't it reassuring to have top medical regulators who are willing to consider that possibility? If you don't like their reforms, think about reforms you do want. Don't die on the hill of defending the ancien regime.
Or on immigration, admit that we have a terrible system, cruel to immigrants, unacceptable to most citizens and destructive to the national interest. Sure what Trump is doing is terrible but what's better? Change the law or enforce it, don't do nothing because all options have downsides. I could say similar things about trade, inflation and foreign relations.
And it's not just policy. In what universe was Tim Walz a better VP candidate than Josh Shapiro or Ketanji Brown Jackson a wiser Supreme Court choice than Leondra Kruger? Were woke prosecutors really going to solve the root causes of crime and improve social justice? Is honest and efficient administration of state and local government unimportant compared to progressive values? Can a national party succeed without saying "no" to at least a few splinter fanatics on the left?
Political defeat should lead to reflection and change rather than increasingly shrill shouts of "I told you so."
Nate continues to beat a dead horse on this Biden age thing. And I think he misinterprets what happened.
Nate’s way of looking at it is “If Trump is a massive threat, find someone really popular who isn’t Biden.” But how could we have known who that would be and how they would do? It was very reasonable for the Dem electorate of early 2024 to have concluded instead that “Trump is a massive threat so what gives us the best chance of beating him is going with the guy who beat him last time.”
Just so. The Democrats ignored the warning signs not because of the lack of any alternative, but because they didn't feel like making a change so they didn't go looking for one. I continue not to understand why Nate is wrong to identify this as a mistake.
I can keep going ... there's two years of polling showing that super-majorities of Dem and Dem-leaning voters did NOT want him to run.
On the one hand they're telling us we're facing fascism, and then they run a guy that ~ 70% of their OWN VOTERS didn't want?? That's a "very reasonable" path to victory?
I don't think dead horse is quite right here. Your argument that sticking with Biden and then nominating Harris might have reasonably seemed to be the best chances of beating Trump could be true, especially for people not personally in contact with Biden. Anyway, selecting another candidate certainly risked divisiveness and distraction.
But it's now clear that many Democratic insiders and journalists were well aware of Biden and Harris defects, but failed to agree on decisive action to address the problems. Had they believed Trump's election was a fate worse than death, they could have gotten together long before the debate debacle, and agreed on candidate at least as a contingency plan. And when Harris did get the nomination (or really, the appointment) they would have gotten firmly behind her. Instead factional infighting and personal ambitions led to a deer-in-the-headlights reaction.
Moreover, after the election Trump has gained additional power due to refusal to properly admit the error, leaving reasonable swing voters to reasonably believe that Democratic party leaders are willing to do anything--including pushing a mentally incompetent or totally unqualified President on the country--to retain power. For all of Trump's massive faults, the Republican leadership did not push him on the country--it fought him tooth and nail. If you think Trump is an existential threat, you'd demand a few heads roll, a few reforms be enacted, a few apologies made and a thorough investigation publicized.
The point is not that Democrats chose a bad tactic, which I also happen to believe, but that the leadership did not act like people facing a Pearl Harbor.
Nothing you wrote here is inconsistent with what I posited above, namely: that "'Trump's election [is] a fate worse than death' and therefore the best chance to avert that fate is to stick with the guy who was able to beat Trump."
I said nothing about nominating Harris once it became clear that Biden no longer gave Dems the best chance to avert that fate. I am agnostic on that one.
But again, I don't think you need "decisive action to address the problems" of "Biden's defects" as they were known in 2023. Biden's defects at that point were more in the vein of just "being old", and people -- not unreasonably -- assumed that was baked in to voter perception, as he was also old in 2020 and yet won.
I agree with you, except I think "beating a dead horse" is the wrong analogy. I'm not saying, and I don't think Nate Silver is saying, that sticking with Biden was irrational given what the public knew.
I'm saying that it's inconsistent for leading insiders to have supported Biden if they believed Trump was an existential threat. And it's also inconsistent to continue to defend that decision, and many other decisions in the 2024 election.
If Trump is the worst possible nightmare, Democratic leaders and journalists should have put aside their differences and personal ambitions, chosen a reasonable strategy early, made contingency plans and supported the consensus decision whole-heartedly whether they agreed with it or not. None of those things happened. After failure, they should have seen the need for serious and honest reform.
My personal view is the Democratic party leaders and many progressive journalists aren't that upset about Trump. They see him as an opportunity as he drives swing voters their way and energizes their base, giving them more power and influence in the long run. They tell others he's an existential threat to advance their personal ambitions, like fundamentalist preachers threatening the congregation with Hell, while enjoying sins of the flesh in private.
Of course, Republican insiders and MAGA journalists are no less cynical. It's standard operating procedure for most politicians to make apocalyptic speeches about issues on which they have little personal concern.
“I don't think Nate Silver is saying, that sticking with Biden was irrational given what the public knew.”
I think he is saying this! If you look at the archives, he has been obsessed with the topic of Biden’s age and thinks the Dems should not have nominated him.
“My personal view is the Democratic party leaders and many progressive journalists aren't that upset about Trump.”
I understand your skepticism but I think most progressives are genuinely upset that Trump is in power and by the actions he is taking.
Agreed in particularly that it was very evident that the Protect Democracy shouting and wailing (well founded in the sense that yes, Trump is a real danger) is self-indulgence - it was in 2nd half of 24 campaign and was an obvious non-winner as not converting votes.
Everyone motivated by this factor is already on side.
And that percentage of populatoin motivated by this is not enough to win in most electoral geographies.
Which one can engage in academic hand-wringing abstractly about the moral state of the electoral, abstractions on shared purpose etc - and go nowhere....
Need to convert votes by the paths that the non-converted will listen to. Which given the pattern of floaters are essentially pocket-book, security and not-be-Biden-Admin-2021-23 on immigration (but not Trump II)
OR one can say - my brand is in the dumpster, there's real dislike of it. What's the appeal points that I can change - and how did I manage to lose significant segments of the electrorate (customers in a sense) that within my lifetime were voting fore me (forget the idiotic frozen idea of "base" as we see these things shifting cycle by cycle and it is clearly reifing an abstraction as a real thing)
The reasonable Democrats I know, which is most of them, agree with us but are split on whether the solution is to fall back to core Democratic values--which are still broadly popular--or to embrace the more exciting and energizing progressive visions which are still mostly untested electorally.
With 45% of voters strongly disapproving of Trump, it would seem to be easy to cobble together another 5% with any of a number of approaches. But so far the Democratic party has failed twice and barely succeeded once.
Nate it seems like you missed the forest for the trees again. Goldberg is making the case that the resistance libs warned us that Trump’s behavior was going to be worse than the “consensus” and that he was going to do a bunch of batshit crazy stuff.
And he has been worse! And he has done a bunch of batshit crazy stuff!
I don’t really see how the resistance libs’ lack of specific, testable predictions as to what the bad stuff would be impacts that they were correct about this big picture point.
Many kept saying Trump was running on Project 2025. So pretty much he has behaved just as we expected. I'd even argue that if one wasn't expecting these types of actions, then one wasn't paying attention during the 2024 election cycle. The only surprise is his effectiveness in implementing his vision.
A very fair question. It's not explicitly stated but Project 2025 builds a governing philosophy—unilateralism, transactional alliances, coercive leverage and pressure, and an unconstrained presidency—that makes Trump’s threats toward NATO members entirely consistent with its worldview.
Agree, but you're making my point -- it's a big leap to go from "consistent with a worldview" to "doing a thing". Which is why a large plurality of people think Trump has been worse than anticipated.
"After his first year back in office, just 28% say he has been a better president than they expected. Nearly twice as many (49%) say he has been worse. (Another 20% say he has been “about the same” as they expected.)"
My post is about those of us who took seriously Project 2025 as the Trump agenda. That included bullying friends and foes alike. Sol his appalling Greenland behavior is not surprising. It's an example of the aggressive means to gain financial advantage that Project 2025 advocated.
My post also made the assertion that those who didn't expect a Trump administration Project 2025 agenda should have. I don't think this poll asked about whether voters knew what Project 2025 proposed and whether they had expected Trump to follow that.
There is this constant moving of there goal posts and gaslighting that some people do. "If Trump was to do X, then I would say its definitively worse than I predicted." Then when Trump does that explicit thing, a new line in the sand is drawn as the benchmark. The frog boils. In my personal life I had "normie" Republicans laugh in my face before the election when I said I was afraid that RFK would oversee HHS and Stephen Miller would be on the cabinet. RFK and Stephen Miller are doing horrible things right now that will take decades to move back in the right direction, but we dont feel the immediate effects of something like turning off medical research. Go try to get a COVID vaccine for your kid if they are under 14 years old and tell me how that goes for you.
Your observation #10. I'm pretty much a resistance lib as you call it and I never, ever thought Biden running again was a good idea; even before his mental problems became known. By the end of a second term, if he lived that long, he would have been pushing 90 which was a very, very bad idea.
Clearly not answerable yet, but I’d like to see Nate’s prediction re election integrity for midterms 2026 and presidential 2028. Given Jan 6, and the fact that most of the current administration members are 2020 election denialists - including the heads of the Justice Dept and FBI - does anyone actually think Trump will ever cede power again? And I’m not being snarky - this is a genuine question.
Hashtag Resistance Lib...ertarians. Maybe some of us voted against the slide toward democratic socialism, still stand by it, and can be unhappy about the slide toward national socialism.
IMO you are aligned with most 2024 Trump voters. https://www.270towin.com/2026-house-election/ projects Democrats with a slight 210-206 lead (with 19 tossups) in the House midterms. So, a slight move away from MAGA but not a blue wave.
One point of disagreement I had with the "hysterical" crowd was not about what Trump would *want* to do but rather about what Trump could get away with doing. I still have this disagreement with friends. I highly doubt, for example, that Trump would be able to somehow "cancel" midterm elections.
Another point of disagreement -- the effectiveness of the judiciary. Trump has yet to defy a Supreme Court ruling or -- foot-dragging gamesmanship aside (bad enough) -- persistently violate any court ruling. Trump has lost quite a lot in court, and, while I worry, I tend to think courts have stood up much better than the hysterical crowd expected. When a judge orders that the administration restore funding to Harvard, say, they do it. Meanwhile, the hysterics tend to discount the independence and professional ethos of even conservative judges, who are mostly Federalist Society types and not MAGA hacks. Were Trump able to replace everyone with MAGA hacks, we would be in a terrible situation, but that hasn't happened. (It's definitely worth worrying about going forward, however, which is why it's imperative that Democrats figure out how to control the Senate at some point.)
I agree with Silver that I underestimated the level of Trump's threat to America's global leadership, but I didn't hear very much about that from the hysterics either. I still don't, even as Trump seems intent on blowing up NATO for the stupidest of reasons.
Why are you so convinced that Democrats wouldn't have done worse if Biden dropped out earlier? Biden tailed in the 538 polling averages by 1.5% for months leading into the infamous debate and Harris lost by 1.5%. Biden dropping out earlier would have been seen as an admission that the Democrats policies failed. Then running on the same social Democrats platform, as they surely would have (they weren't nominating a Joe Manchin or RFK Jr.), would have been even more negatively perceived. Likely netting Trump a larger popular vote victory.
It's policies that Democrats lost on. It's why Democrats today are more unpopular than Trump/MAGA/the GOP according to a recent WSJ poll.
Typical gen x white male Yglesias/Silver fan checking in and finding this lacking. Trump has done a dozen things that are beyond almost any predictions since the first of the year with hardly a mention here while you punch down on resistance libs or pantsuit nation or whomever it is that annoys you most right now.
Well said. At least in this write up, Nate doesn’t seem to give the resistance libs credit for anything. Yglesias himself seems to have a totally different takeaway: “Trump seems to be doing more potentially irreparable harm than I’d have felt comfortable predicting. The resistance libs definitely have not been “right about everything” but they’ve been right about that and that’s important.” Not sure why Nate has such an axe to grind but this is pretty weak.
Agreed. Also, don't forget that Trump tried to send the National Guard to Portland, Chicago, and lots of other blue cities, without any real reason for doing so. The only reason why the National Guard deployment didn't happen is because a federal court order, and the Trump admin is still appealing the court order and hoping the deploy the National Guard to lots of cities later this year.
No mention of the Minnesota stuff either.
I'd like to address the statement made "despite the economy not being all that bad."
My job in industry is security and analysis, and part of that is tied to the practical state of the economy. When things are bad, people steal more, firing people causes more issues, doors are left open for hackers, ect.
People describe the economy as K shaped, because there is a separation between around the upper middle class marker as to how things are going. Groceries have gone up as much as 5 to 6% in some regions, a lot of the price increases are on lower quality goods *at the moment*, ect.
However, much of the economic growth is data center driven *and it's circular*. Nvidia givens 200 billion in stock to Open AI, which Open AI uses to buy 200 billion in hardware on paper. Silicon is reserved for chips that have no place to go, which I'm sure won't be released later at a premium so that the chip makers can profit.
What I'm seeing in the security field, meanwhile, is out and out chaos.
Security Audits finding more fraud than I've seen in almost 20 years.
People treating expense accounts like bank accounts.
Stock loss at high numbers, too high to be explained by anything short of internal theft at the warehouse level.
These are not the behaviors of a good economy.
This is the behavior of a fictional economy.
And I think pretty much everyone *knows* it is,
even if they are trying to convince themselves otherwise.
For starting with a note about not missing the forest for the trees, you're really intent on those trees.
Were the resistance libs right about Trump?
January 6th answers this question unambiguously.
Right, and especially the revisionist history he's engaged in since then. Full pardons to 1600 people who had been given due process and convicted, calling them "hostages", calling the insurrection "orderly and spirited".
The pardons were the "it really is midnight in America" moment for me. Bad enough as a one time event, but obviously the clearest possible signal that: "for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."
Newsom’s gerrymandering while an effective fight back against Republican gerrymandering is not a defense of democracy, it’s a further perversion of it. The narrative doesn’t really align, whether or not it was a good thing as a matter of winning the next election.
Furthermore, if Democrats really wanted to protect democracy they should be onboard with passing voter ID laws. There are real changes to Republican proposals they could force rather than objecting wholesale. For example, funding free US passports for all citizens (removing the financial burden of obtaining a federally recognized and secure ID).
Come on, we know voter ID laws are just a pretext to make it more difficult for certain people to vote. And we know this because there is basically no identified voter fraud.
Arguably Dems should support voter ID on the basis that their coalition is now more engaged and so it might provide an electoral advantage, but it’s kind of hard to pivot on that.
There is ample evidence that the impact of such ID laws is also far less than what the Left factions of the Democrats have promoted.
I am personally indifferent to them and wouldn't otherwise promote HOWEVER as a political lever to obtain other institutional wins that would be more useful in real operational protection of elections, it looks very much like a freebie in reality.
I'd amplify the point about the contradiction between believing Donald Trump is a nightmare while supporting Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. It's not just Trump's election that was due in part to anti-Trump failures, but many of Trump's policies. Anger and despair are unproductive, and resistance libs are not going to change Trump or gain traction with MAGA voters. But liberals can resolve to fix some of their own flaws that helped empower Trump and set him on his course.
For example, acknowledge the catastrophic public health response to CoVID that helped Trump win and got the nut-case RFK appointed. Rather than reflexively opposing the eminently qualified Vinay Prasad and Marty Makary for being RFK selections, take a hard look and see if they aren't actually solving the problems of an entrenched public health bureaucracy. Maybe you don't believe that medical errors are the third-leading cause of death in the US, but isn't it reassuring to have top medical regulators who are willing to consider that possibility? If you don't like their reforms, think about reforms you do want. Don't die on the hill of defending the ancien regime.
Or on immigration, admit that we have a terrible system, cruel to immigrants, unacceptable to most citizens and destructive to the national interest. Sure what Trump is doing is terrible but what's better? Change the law or enforce it, don't do nothing because all options have downsides. I could say similar things about trade, inflation and foreign relations.
And it's not just policy. In what universe was Tim Walz a better VP candidate than Josh Shapiro or Ketanji Brown Jackson a wiser Supreme Court choice than Leondra Kruger? Were woke prosecutors really going to solve the root causes of crime and improve social justice? Is honest and efficient administration of state and local government unimportant compared to progressive values? Can a national party succeed without saying "no" to at least a few splinter fanatics on the left?
Political defeat should lead to reflection and change rather than increasingly shrill shouts of "I told you so."
Nate continues to beat a dead horse on this Biden age thing. And I think he misinterprets what happened.
Nate’s way of looking at it is “If Trump is a massive threat, find someone really popular who isn’t Biden.” But how could we have known who that would be and how they would do? It was very reasonable for the Dem electorate of early 2024 to have concluded instead that “Trump is a massive threat so what gives us the best chance of beating him is going with the guy who beat him last time.”
You could have, I don't know, held primaries or something.
No one wanted them because they liked Biden!
Just so. The Democrats ignored the warning signs not because of the lack of any alternative, but because they didn't feel like making a change so they didn't go looking for one. I continue not to understand why Nate is wrong to identify this as a mistake.
Bruh, what?
Biden 2024? Most Democrats say no thank you: AP-NORC poll
https://apnews.com/article/ap-norc-poll-biden-2024-presidential-prospects-c843c5af6775b4c8a0cff8e2b1db03f6
Poll: Two-thirds of Democrat-leaning voters don't want Biden as 2024 nominee
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/07/poll-biden-2024-second-term-democrat-voters-cnn
New CNN poll shows 75% of Dems don’t want Biden to run for re-election: 'Promised the moon,' now ‘frustrated’
https://www.foxnews.com/media/new-cnn-poll-shows-75-dems-dont-want-biden-run-reelection-promised-moon-frustrated?msockid=3ab9bd0e960467b31446acb197666660
I can keep going ... there's two years of polling showing that super-majorities of Dem and Dem-leaning voters did NOT want him to run.
On the one hand they're telling us we're facing fascism, and then they run a guy that ~ 70% of their OWN VOTERS didn't want?? That's a "very reasonable" path to victory?
I don't think dead horse is quite right here. Your argument that sticking with Biden and then nominating Harris might have reasonably seemed to be the best chances of beating Trump could be true, especially for people not personally in contact with Biden. Anyway, selecting another candidate certainly risked divisiveness and distraction.
But it's now clear that many Democratic insiders and journalists were well aware of Biden and Harris defects, but failed to agree on decisive action to address the problems. Had they believed Trump's election was a fate worse than death, they could have gotten together long before the debate debacle, and agreed on candidate at least as a contingency plan. And when Harris did get the nomination (or really, the appointment) they would have gotten firmly behind her. Instead factional infighting and personal ambitions led to a deer-in-the-headlights reaction.
Moreover, after the election Trump has gained additional power due to refusal to properly admit the error, leaving reasonable swing voters to reasonably believe that Democratic party leaders are willing to do anything--including pushing a mentally incompetent or totally unqualified President on the country--to retain power. For all of Trump's massive faults, the Republican leadership did not push him on the country--it fought him tooth and nail. If you think Trump is an existential threat, you'd demand a few heads roll, a few reforms be enacted, a few apologies made and a thorough investigation publicized.
The point is not that Democrats chose a bad tactic, which I also happen to believe, but that the leadership did not act like people facing a Pearl Harbor.
Nothing you wrote here is inconsistent with what I posited above, namely: that "'Trump's election [is] a fate worse than death' and therefore the best chance to avert that fate is to stick with the guy who was able to beat Trump."
I said nothing about nominating Harris once it became clear that Biden no longer gave Dems the best chance to avert that fate. I am agnostic on that one.
But again, I don't think you need "decisive action to address the problems" of "Biden's defects" as they were known in 2023. Biden's defects at that point were more in the vein of just "being old", and people -- not unreasonably -- assumed that was baked in to voter perception, as he was also old in 2020 and yet won.
I agree with you, except I think "beating a dead horse" is the wrong analogy. I'm not saying, and I don't think Nate Silver is saying, that sticking with Biden was irrational given what the public knew.
I'm saying that it's inconsistent for leading insiders to have supported Biden if they believed Trump was an existential threat. And it's also inconsistent to continue to defend that decision, and many other decisions in the 2024 election.
If Trump is the worst possible nightmare, Democratic leaders and journalists should have put aside their differences and personal ambitions, chosen a reasonable strategy early, made contingency plans and supported the consensus decision whole-heartedly whether they agreed with it or not. None of those things happened. After failure, they should have seen the need for serious and honest reform.
My personal view is the Democratic party leaders and many progressive journalists aren't that upset about Trump. They see him as an opportunity as he drives swing voters their way and energizes their base, giving them more power and influence in the long run. They tell others he's an existential threat to advance their personal ambitions, like fundamentalist preachers threatening the congregation with Hell, while enjoying sins of the flesh in private.
Of course, Republican insiders and MAGA journalists are no less cynical. It's standard operating procedure for most politicians to make apocalyptic speeches about issues on which they have little personal concern.
“I don't think Nate Silver is saying, that sticking with Biden was irrational given what the public knew.”
I think he is saying this! If you look at the archives, he has been obsessed with the topic of Biden’s age and thinks the Dems should not have nominated him.
“My personal view is the Democratic party leaders and many progressive journalists aren't that upset about Trump.”
I understand your skepticism but I think most progressives are genuinely upset that Trump is in power and by the actions he is taking.
Agreed in particularly that it was very evident that the Protect Democracy shouting and wailing (well founded in the sense that yes, Trump is a real danger) is self-indulgence - it was in 2nd half of 24 campaign and was an obvious non-winner as not converting votes.
Everyone motivated by this factor is already on side.
And that percentage of populatoin motivated by this is not enough to win in most electoral geographies.
Which one can engage in academic hand-wringing abstractly about the moral state of the electoral, abstractions on shared purpose etc - and go nowhere....
Need to convert votes by the paths that the non-converted will listen to. Which given the pattern of floaters are essentially pocket-book, security and not-be-Biden-Admin-2021-23 on immigration (but not Trump II)
OR one can say - my brand is in the dumpster, there's real dislike of it. What's the appeal points that I can change - and how did I manage to lose significant segments of the electrorate (customers in a sense) that within my lifetime were voting fore me (forget the idiotic frozen idea of "base" as we see these things shifting cycle by cycle and it is clearly reifing an abstraction as a real thing)
The reasonable Democrats I know, which is most of them, agree with us but are split on whether the solution is to fall back to core Democratic values--which are still broadly popular--or to embrace the more exciting and energizing progressive visions which are still mostly untested electorally.
With 45% of voters strongly disapproving of Trump, it would seem to be easy to cobble together another 5% with any of a number of approaches. But so far the Democratic party has failed twice and barely succeeded once.
Nate it seems like you missed the forest for the trees again. Goldberg is making the case that the resistance libs warned us that Trump’s behavior was going to be worse than the “consensus” and that he was going to do a bunch of batshit crazy stuff.
And he has been worse! And he has done a bunch of batshit crazy stuff!
I don’t really see how the resistance libs’ lack of specific, testable predictions as to what the bad stuff would be impacts that they were correct about this big picture point.
Many kept saying Trump was running on Project 2025. So pretty much he has behaved just as we expected. I'd even argue that if one wasn't expecting these types of actions, then one wasn't paying attention during the 2024 election cycle. The only surprise is his effectiveness in implementing his vision.
Where in Project 2025 did it talk about threatening to invade a NATO ally?
A very fair question. It's not explicitly stated but Project 2025 builds a governing philosophy—unilateralism, transactional alliances, coercive leverage and pressure, and an unconstrained presidency—that makes Trump’s threats toward NATO members entirely consistent with its worldview.
Agree, but you're making my point -- it's a big leap to go from "consistent with a worldview" to "doing a thing". Which is why a large plurality of people think Trump has been worse than anticipated.
See this timely poll for evidence: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/article/its-been-1-year-of-trumps-second-term-more-americans-than-ever-think-hes-changing-america-for-the-worse-195730496.html
"After his first year back in office, just 28% say he has been a better president than they expected. Nearly twice as many (49%) say he has been worse. (Another 20% say he has been “about the same” as they expected.)"
My post is about those of us who took seriously Project 2025 as the Trump agenda. That included bullying friends and foes alike. Sol his appalling Greenland behavior is not surprising. It's an example of the aggressive means to gain financial advantage that Project 2025 advocated.
My post also made the assertion that those who didn't expect a Trump administration Project 2025 agenda should have. I don't think this poll asked about whether voters knew what Project 2025 proposed and whether they had expected Trump to follow that.
One summary of this article could be: "Well, I agree the house is on fire, but how hot are those flames REALLY?"
I’d love for the two of you to have a podcast.
There is this constant moving of there goal posts and gaslighting that some people do. "If Trump was to do X, then I would say its definitively worse than I predicted." Then when Trump does that explicit thing, a new line in the sand is drawn as the benchmark. The frog boils. In my personal life I had "normie" Republicans laugh in my face before the election when I said I was afraid that RFK would oversee HHS and Stephen Miller would be on the cabinet. RFK and Stephen Miller are doing horrible things right now that will take decades to move back in the right direction, but we dont feel the immediate effects of something like turning off medical research. Go try to get a COVID vaccine for your kid if they are under 14 years old and tell me how that goes for you.
Your observation #10. I'm pretty much a resistance lib as you call it and I never, ever thought Biden running again was a good idea; even before his mental problems became known. By the end of a second term, if he lived that long, he would have been pushing 90 which was a very, very bad idea.
Not unsubbing coz I value some of your polls, but this is pathetic.
Clearly not answerable yet, but I’d like to see Nate’s prediction re election integrity for midterms 2026 and presidential 2028. Given Jan 6, and the fact that most of the current administration members are 2020 election denialists - including the heads of the Justice Dept and FBI - does anyone actually think Trump will ever cede power again? And I’m not being snarky - this is a genuine question.
Hashtag Resistance Lib...ertarians. Maybe some of us voted against the slide toward democratic socialism, still stand by it, and can be unhappy about the slide toward national socialism.
IMO you are aligned with most 2024 Trump voters. https://www.270towin.com/2026-house-election/ projects Democrats with a slight 210-206 lead (with 19 tossups) in the House midterms. So, a slight move away from MAGA but not a blue wave.
One point of disagreement I had with the "hysterical" crowd was not about what Trump would *want* to do but rather about what Trump could get away with doing. I still have this disagreement with friends. I highly doubt, for example, that Trump would be able to somehow "cancel" midterm elections.
Another point of disagreement -- the effectiveness of the judiciary. Trump has yet to defy a Supreme Court ruling or -- foot-dragging gamesmanship aside (bad enough) -- persistently violate any court ruling. Trump has lost quite a lot in court, and, while I worry, I tend to think courts have stood up much better than the hysterical crowd expected. When a judge orders that the administration restore funding to Harvard, say, they do it. Meanwhile, the hysterics tend to discount the independence and professional ethos of even conservative judges, who are mostly Federalist Society types and not MAGA hacks. Were Trump able to replace everyone with MAGA hacks, we would be in a terrible situation, but that hasn't happened. (It's definitely worth worrying about going forward, however, which is why it's imperative that Democrats figure out how to control the Senate at some point.)
I agree with Silver that I underestimated the level of Trump's threat to America's global leadership, but I didn't hear very much about that from the hysterics either. I still don't, even as Trump seems intent on blowing up NATO for the stupidest of reasons.
Hi Nate,
Why are you so convinced that Democrats wouldn't have done worse if Biden dropped out earlier? Biden tailed in the 538 polling averages by 1.5% for months leading into the infamous debate and Harris lost by 1.5%. Biden dropping out earlier would have been seen as an admission that the Democrats policies failed. Then running on the same social Democrats platform, as they surely would have (they weren't nominating a Joe Manchin or RFK Jr.), would have been even more negatively perceived. Likely netting Trump a larger popular vote victory.
It's policies that Democrats lost on. It's why Democrats today are more unpopular than Trump/MAGA/the GOP according to a recent WSJ poll.