I’m looking forward to seeing how the post-Biden Democratic Party takes shape. It will be different in ways we can’t know yet, but it’s a mystery to me how will it evolve.
I’ve seen two arguments about how Dems should move forward that both ring true to me, but they are potentially in conflict. The first is that losing an election fairly narrowly under decidedly anomalous circumstances shouldn’t prompt a party to fundamentally change.
The second is that institutions in this country are broken and have been for a long time, and the resulting discontent gives rise to demagogues and makes it perilous to seem to defend the status quo.
My sense was the “status quo” Biden and then Harris were defending was liberal democracy itself. On the domestic side, Biden made solid attempts to dismantle a status quo that really does suck by empowering workers and taking steps to make the rich pay their fair share, and Harris indicated she’d continue that.
But maybe that approach was too subtle for the relative handful of low-info swing voters who decide close elections. If they’re pissed about the pandemic or price of eggs or whatever, they’ll punish the party in power. That landed on Trump in 2020, and it landed on Biden (and Harris-Walz) in 2024.
This piece from Josh Marshall suggests that while yes, it obviously sucks that Trump won, it’s liberating in the Pottery Barn sense for Democrats. That’s because Trump and the kleptocratic billionaires are now the establishment. [gift link]
2024 was a deeply disappointing year. It capped two or three years that all had the feeling of playing out bad hands — a presidency defined by the jagged aftermath of COVID (a first-in-half-a-century inflation shock being the jaggedest), an increasingly frail president who couldn’t easily be replaced without doing even more damage than having him run for reelection. This doesn’t address decisions that should have been and could have been made differently. I focus on these because they were based on earlier decisions or events which were either right at the time or very difficult to avoid. Again, that steely but trapped feeling of playing out bad hands.
In 2025 we all face the consequences of those failures. But we are equally liberated from much of that history. Everybody is being dealt a new hand. We can make decisions differently, with more clarity, with less paralyzing concern over sunk costs. If there’s a message of the Biden years, it’s that there’s no simply going back to whatever we thought was the system that more or less worked before Trump arrived on the scene. You have to go forward on the basis of all we’ve seen over the last decade.
I think billionaires — including and maybe even especially over-leveraged and publicly subsidized frauds like Trump and Musk — always were the establishment. It’s nothing new. Teddy Roosevelt called the same type “malefactors of great wealth” 130 years ago.
Plutocrats of previous generations bankrolled conservative politicians to secure favorable tax treatment and deregulation. But that’s not the platform the conservative pols ran on because low taxes for rich people and weak public safety and environmental protections aren’t popular.
Old school conservative pols, like the current crop, mostly ran on bigotry and culture war bullshit and advanced the plutocrat agenda behind the scenes. Trump and Musk cut out the middleman and merged the front and back of house agendas.
Who knows, maybe that will be clarifying? We’ll see.
Open thread.
Baud
I think the establishment always means us. Even when people soured on Bush and Trump, I’ve never seen them referred to as the establishment.
KatKapCC
Okay, I didn’t get much sleep last night so maybe I’m being slow and dumb, but help me out here:
I know what Pottery Barn is but my brain isn’t sussing out what this phrasing means.
jlredford
@KatKapCC: “You broke it, you bought it.”
KatKapCC
@jlredford: Ahhh okay.
JML
When GOp policies do nothing to bring down prices or increase wages for vast majority of people, we’ll see just how important being able to hate with impunity is to people. People have voted against their economic interests many times before. That said, the social issues the GOP are throwing around don’t exactly have universal acceptance even among republicans. And as we need to keep reminding everyone (especially because it infuriates The Giant Orange Asshole), they did not win in a landslide, or even have a substantial victory in 20204. they narrowly won a closely contested race in which the media put the thumb on the scale for them.
hrprogressive
The Democratic Party has, IMO, already failed at Task #2 – because instantly after Trump won, a number of Democrats couldn’t wait to pony up to the “let’s work together and be bipartisan” trough, and, they failed to pass the torch of leadership by electing a dying old white man in Gerry Connolly instead of a young progressive woman of color in AOC.
Rebuild the entire party, or this pattern will continue, because the establishment, corporate-friendly Democrats just do not give a shit about what younger generations want, will not cede their power and wealth to “do good”, and will apparently not cede any of this power willingly or graciously.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@KatKapCC: I had the same question
tobie
I’m too tired to think this through. The venom in the threads on BJ makes me think the Dem Party is going to split. As a normie, mainstream Dem, I believe we underestimate the influence not just of oligarchs but of foreign powers in shaping the perceptions of Americans. Until we understand the full media environment and the influence of major players (Musk, Zuckerberg, Murdoch) as well as foreign adversaries on all the social media platforms, we’re pissing in the wind IMHO. Perception’s reality, I’m told.
Villago Delenda Est
I have but one word for this topic: tumbrels.
DFH
Dems ran on preserving democracy, yelling urgently that the toddler had picked up the hammer. Many Americans decided what the toddler could break wasn’t worth having or fixing, and some decided that the precious breakable didn’t belong to or serve them, so f the rest. Many of them, and more, are ignorant if not stupid. Dems/us did what we could, but the majority of Pottery Barn customers broke what they could. Natural selection will play out.
“Who knows, maybe that will be clarifying? We’ll see.”
Villago Delenda Est
@Baud: The “Eastern Liberal Establishment” as it was referred to back in those fabulous 60s.
Old School
@Dorothy A. Winsor:@KatKapCC:
It’s off topic, but the “Pottery Barn Rule” doesn’t actually exist. It was cited by Thomas Friedman and Bob Woodward in the 2003 lead-up to the Iraq War. The claim was that Colin Powell used it, but I see he denied calling it that.
Chris Johnson
@tobie: You gotta be careful about that because the same people stoking the MAGA fires are as busy as they can be, keeping us split and screeching at each other. They don’t even have to be literally here, though we’ve seen the odd working troll. They can just fill Twitter and Bluesky and the MSM with divisive garbage and people track it in.
Not like the stakes aren’t high. It’s a lot easier to generate internicene warfare when you’re not even in this country and your goal is to make ALL of us fight each other. Nothing needing to be built, and nobody needs to win, so it’s way more straightforward than if they had to, y’know, produce a WINNING side that had power and stuff.
So don’t get too ruffled by how savage everything is. Even if it’s not bad actors, it is the mud in which we trudge and we track it in, when we come out of the cold looking for some shelter.
It is what it is. I’ll be satisfied if most of my friends aren’t raging incoherently at me most of the time. They can do it some of the time as long as I can warm up by the woodstove before returning to the damn cold.
hrprogressive
@DFH:
Part of the problem is that the Democratic Party has spent the last 4-10 years going “OMG TRUMP BAD MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVER ZOMG DEMOCRACY!!!”
Only for a bunch of them to go “Well, the GOP won, let’s shake hands and be bipartisan”
Most “normie” voters already believe “Both Sides Bad!”, and this behavior does nothing to disabuse them of that notion.
The Democratic Party has Stockholm Syndrome with a concept of governing, and with an opposition party, that just do not exist any longer, and they can’t even bring themselves to admit it in a way that is material.
waspuppet
I think that’s up to Democrats. The two phrases they need to remember are “Well, Donald Trump sure $&@“ed THAT one up, didn’t he?” and, in response to any policy question, “What are you asking ME for?”
tobie
@Chris Johnson: Well, you warmed this old lady’s heart with your comment. Thank you. There are very few things I understand, but I have experience with wood stoves, and when a cold snap hits, nothing makes me happier than to keep my house warm with my two stoves. I’ll think of that as a metaphor for the cold world we’re entering into. How much warmth can I spread? Thanks, really, for your post. It lifted my spirits.
Jeffro
run against corruption, run against great wealth, Ds!
and TAX THE RICH JUST BECAUSE
ETA: also, what Villago said
John S.
@tobie:
I don’t think our little microcosm is necessarily reflective of the world at large. The only real danger I see in the Democratic Party having a schism is if the old guard fails to make way for young blood or if we fail to support the more vulnerable members of our coalition.
As long as we look after our people and pass the torch to the next generation, we’ll be fine.
ETA: I love my wood stove, too.
Eric S.
@KatKapCC: Thanks, I was equally lost on the meaning.
trollhattan
The always annoying James Carville might be right, regardless. We shall see how the next 1.5 years unfold.
cmorenc
The event relatively early in his term that made it difficult for Biden to get any traction was the bloody ugly but graphic-on-video final Afghan withdrawal at Kabul airport. That is exactly the point where Biden’s approval rating nosedived from mid/to-upper 50s to low 40s. After that event, a majority of the public would never thereafter give Biden benefit of positive presumption, and made it far harder to hold public faith in his handling of the economy or any other issue.
True, the Afghan withdrawal fiasco was set up by the terrible withdrawal deal Trump and his SOS Mike Pompeo negotiated during their final weeks in office – with the Taliban, cutting out the Afghan govt and army from the negotiations. Biden should probably have refused to go through with it unless the situation was renegotiated for a slower, more realistically doable plan with all parties copied in.
Also, Biden the old pol should have recognized the potential electoral potency of the border crossings and pushed through a border bill along the lines of the one Trump torpedoed.
Bottom line: it wasn’t flaws in basic D platform that did us in, so much as tactical errors in taking on (or failure to do so) on the issues Ds were most viscerally vulnerable on – because those failures made it difficult to get credit for his genuine accomplishments, or for economic recovery from the pandemic.
Can’t help wonder whether Trump would have honored his own deal with the Taliban had he been re-elected – and thus no longer served the purpose of sabotaging Biden early in Biden’s Administration if Biden won.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: The following are just observations about “establishment” candidates. I think many other factors play much more significant roles in vote outcomes, but:
Bush I was considered establishment. Didn’t win a 2nd term; lost to what was then considered a non-establishment candidate.
Bush II was such an absolute fuck-up that nobody wanted to be associated with him. He was bad for the brand and generally disowned by the establishment, which decided he needed a nanny (Dick Cheney) to be allowed to go forward. He won a 2nd term against possibly the most establishment of establishment Dems.
Trump won against two establishment Dems. He did lose to one after his first term, which is a reminder of what an absolutely fucking idiot he is.
So, all things being equal, which they are not, being seen as “the establishment” candidate has been negative for a long time.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh:
I’ll grant you Bush I.
I still don’t think Republicans are typically viewed as the establishment, except in a “both parties are the same” sense.
hitchhiker
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
This is OT, but since you’re here I have to follow up. Earlier today you mentioned that you were getting a CT scan after months of ear pressure/muffled hearing.
Those are my exact symptoms, down to the timing. I had one doctor tell me it was an infection & give me antibiotics. No change. Another who said it was just post nasal drip and use Afrin. No change. Then an ENT who said if I waited it would go away. It didn’t. Finally the ENT suggested getting a tube, I did. Still no change.
Sorry to hijack this thread, but I’m obviously very curious about what you learned. They say I have eustachian tube dysfunction, which is, as far as I can tell, fancy language for what I told them back in September: it feels like there’s pressure in my right ear, and I can’t hear as well as I can out of the other one.
Suzanne
The danger that I see, and I mentioned this in the previous thread…. I was born in 1980, and so my formative political events were 9/11, Islamophobia, and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. I would not say that really anyone in my social circle has memory of government, or the Democratic Party, working especially well. And all of my friends vote the right way. But the wins of the civil rights era, even the win of the ACA….. that’s almost a generation ago at this point. When faith is lost that government can be a force for good in people’s lives, that’s a hard thing to come back from. I hope that we can.
Steve LaBonne
I think it can be both / and. The Democrats didn’t do anything particularly wrong to lose a close election so there are no immediate, narrowly political solutions. But the Republicans have destroyed almost every unwritten rule / norm / expectation that made the political system work, to the point where the old system is pretty much dead. Something new will have to rise from the ashes. It may not be good, on the other hand the Republicans may fuck up badly enough to clear the ground for something both new and good. All I know for sure is that the Dick Durbins of the world have no useful function in this environment. All the lessons they have learned in their careers are worse than irrelevant.
zhena gogolia
@trollhattan: He is not right.
Fair Economist
I think the exit polls posted a few days ago are very illuminating:
Black voters: no change from 2020
White voters: no change from 2020
Latino voters: big shift to Trump from 2020
Hard to see how inadequate liberalism, establishment bias, bad messaging, etc. affect only Latinos. But one thing that *could* is that conservatives took over Univision, the main Spanish-language media company. So I continue to think the biggest problem is that conservatives run the media and that the solution is to build up an *actual* liberal media, by supporting and reading such liberal platforms as actually exist.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Biden signed a lot of good bills when Dems controlled Congress. People can feel how they feel, but I find the evidence pretty solid.
John S.
@zhena gogolia:
Why is he wrong?
Steve LaBonne
@Fair Economist: This is why some of us kept pointing out that there was no call for jumping to conclusions until the data came completely into focus.
Torrey
@Chief Oshkosh:
I won’t argue with that analysis, except to note that Biden’s association with being “establishment” in 2020 wasn’t as strong as the promise of him being a “stability” candidate–“return to normalcy” (see also Warren Harding, who won in 1920 under surprisingly similar conditions).
Dorothy A. Winsor
@hitchhiker: I’m so sorry you’ve had these symptoms. Also a little scared because nothing seems to help you and that’s ominous for me.
I see the ENT about the scan results a week from today. I’ll try to remember to post about them.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: Well, there are other Republicans who I considered ‘establishment’. Maybe we don’t think of them in this context because they lost right out of the gate. Dole comes to mind. Similarly, Romney. Probably others.
Madeleine
I have an odd request/question for the BJ community. My great-niece is a French-US dual citizen who is an undergrad at a French university. Her major is international business and marketing.
She is required to find a 3-5 month internship outside of France and its territories. Her university has no center that helps with such placements, only a database of previous students’ placements.
She is fully bilingual in English and French. She is most interested in California, New York City (which she has visited), or another large city.
Her mother contacted me in case I might have information or contacts, which I do not.
If any of you might be able to help–with Information or advice or whatever–I would be most appreciative
Betty Cracker
@hrprogressive: I hear you, and i was pissed about the AOC snub too. But I think it’s much too soon to conclude that nothing will change. It might shake out the way you predict, but there could also be a real opportunity for meaningful change hiding in the shit sandwich of Trump 2.0.
The party moved in a more progressive direction in response to the first Trump term. Could happen again. As Marshall noted, the cards have been reshuffled.
Steve LaBonne
@hitchhiker: Ugh. I hope they can get you sorted out soon.
Old School
@John S.:
I wouldn’t necessarily say Carville is wrong. Comments about “the price of eggs” exist for good reason. Inflation was probably enough to swing the election.
However, the barrage of Trump ads I recall focused on crime, the border, and trans rights.
Suzanne
@Baud: My BIL, who is very progressive and a Bernie stan, voted for Biden while holding his nose. But…. my BIL also overcame a drug addiction and worked really hard and got a college degree while delivering pizzas and living at home. He has a small amount of student debt. It was going to be wiped out, but then we all know what happened. He was unbelievably excited when he thought it was going to be forgiven and was similarly extremely disappointed when the SCOTUS crapped on that.
I have also written here about the lead pipe replacement in my neighborhood two summers ago. Fantastic work! Not a single peep about how it came to be funded from anywhere. I literally called the foreman of the project and asked if it was funded by the infrastructure bill. He said, “Uhhh, I think so?”. No fliers or signs, nothing from our neighborhood association. So all this great work happened…. and no one knows who gets the credit.
kindness
I just hope by the ’28 elections Democrats have moved on from blaming Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Mind you, Republicans will never ever stop blaming them for everything. That isn’t what I’m talking about.
Baud
@Suzanne:
The information environment is challenging for us.
Chief Oshkosh
@Torrey: Agreed, Biden was viewed as the “stability” candidate, which isn’t the same as an “establishment” candidate. Hell, I like Biden, but even a quivering bowl of jello would’ve look stable sitting next to Trump.
scav
@kindness: Although the next seemingly inevitable step will be blaming other Democrats in whatever room they inhabit.
Josie
@Fair Economist: This sounds logical to me. I have always thought the media bias was super hard to overcome. Now that bias is available in Spanish as well as in English.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@hrprogressive: I actually had a doorknocker hit me up with “support my candidate because she reaches across the aisle.” I told that one, “In this climate I think we need LESS bupartisanship, NOT more.” He did not know what to say to that. Which is the entire problem.
The concept of 100% resistance to the GQP is still not reaching some Dem pols. Too many seem to think that if we are nice to the Rethugs they’ll play ball. I don’t know what version of the last quarter century they experienced, but that hasn’t been true since before Gingrich got the SOTH gavel. We need an all-out effort to thwart their agenda; assuming that if we give up important stuff they’ll throw us a bone is naive at best. “F#ck Your Feelings” works both ways, and it’s time our leadership acted like it.
John S.
@Old School:
Agreed. But I’m always curious when commenters make prima facie claims without a scintilla of explanation.
John S.
@scav:
I’m sure picking at the scabs every day will improve the situation tremendously.
Martin
But is liberal democracy worth defending if it’s unable to achieve results for the electorate? A lot of good ideas die from bad execution.
We can argue whether liberal democracy here is the issue – I don’t believe that it is necessarily as many European nations are making a better show of it than we are, or whether the political implementation in the US which pit Democrats and Republicans into battling over the margins and ignoring the core issues, is the real problem. But that political system is even more strongly guarded than the implementation of government is.
There are no meaningful debates any longer about whether the two party system needs to change (necessitating an elimination of the electoral college), campaign finance reform, and so on. Democrats have made a bit of progress toward more inclusive voting, and reducing gerrymandering, mostly but not entirely in service to the party. It’s not nothing, but it’s not going to change the nature of the game.
TBone
My inner cynic keeps reminding me it’s all about the Benjamins. Citizens United. Breakdown of campaign funding in PA shows the way:
spotlightpa.org/news/2024/12/pennsylvania-election-top-donors-pacs-attorney-general-jeff-yass-state-…
Until George Soros teams up with some more superheroes like Howard Buffet to form a united front (in my dreams) composed of dollars, we’re pissing into the wind. Maybe Ralph Nader wasn’t such a crank after all.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_the_Super-Rich_Can_Save_Us!
hitchhiker
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I’m telling myself that I’ve enjoyed 72 years and counting of nearly perfect health, and that if I have to put up with a weird feeling in one ear until I shuffle off, I really don’t get to complain.
For what it’s worth, in none of my visits to the ENT did he seem even a little concerned about it. Which is frustrating, but also somewhat reassuring. It’s just one of those things.
I’m really interested in what they see in you, though ….
zhena gogolia
@Old School: Racism and misogyny.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Baud:
What we’re hearing in comments like that is a typical Totebagger Radio/Atlantic, white listener/reader: brainwashed since 1980 that both sides do it, the 10 worst words in the english language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”, let the marketplace decide, blah, blah, blah. As I’ve said, the effects of Reagan’s policies are terribly baked into our society and it comes out with self-professed progressives promoting policies originally funded by billionaire right wingers like Theil and the Kochs but who are basically Libertarians in Trench Coats in outlook.
It’s essentially NextGen yuppy “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” crap we saw in the 80s/90s that’s been taken up by “new liberals” such as Yglesias, Dylan Matthews, Noah Smith, Eric Levitz, Little Ezra Klein and a whole host of others. The cherry pick “poor gubmint” across the federal-to-local spectrum, conveniently never mentioning even the big ticket “gubmint wins” like the ACA or so much of the stuff Biden got funded.
Martin
@TBone: My fear is that capitalism has so completely dominated the landscape that democracy is forever lost to it (short a small army of Luigis to right the ship). Campaign finance reform is the bandaid on the wound, but at some point you need to take the weapon away that is causing the injury – and that’s extreme income inequality. Take that away and campaign finance reform is barely needed.
RevRick
Having just concluded watching the 25-part series on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era on Great Courses+, I can say with confidence that a great many Robber Barons went to their graves unmolested, save for some occasional bad press.
In a previous post, I made the curious assertion that 1973 was the year that broke America. What I was referring to was how economic factors were shattering the New Deal welfare state. First, 1973 marked a significant de-linking of productivity and wage growth. Second, 1973 marked the beginning of OPEC oil power. Third, it marked a substantial uptick in underlying inflation. Fourth, it marked the beginning of stagflation, which had it source in repeated credit crunches that put enormous pressure on commercial banks. In 1950, US commercial banks held over 50% of global assets; by 1980, not one was in the top 25 worldwide. Financial wizards were looking for all sorts of work-arounds to the strictures limiting interest on savings accounts. And because the stock market actually lost ground though the 70s, the income and wealth shares of the top 1% fell to their lowest levels ever.
Keynesian economics didn’t provide a satisfactory answer to the dilemma of stagflation. Neither could the Fed. Nor was the US prepared to deal with the coming deindustrialization that would hammer our heavy industries. At the same time, crime rates really soared in the 70s and would continue to do so through the 80s. America was dirty and felt broken.
The establishment of government leaders, academia, and stodgy business leaders had led us into what seemed like a dead end.
Many of today’s billionaires are people who either broke previous business models: think the Waltons of Walmart or who had innovated entirely new products: think Zuckerberg of Facebook. The thing about the establishment is that it is established, so even though they used established business means to get to the top of the heap, they can avoid the label establishment. Even moreso, though everything they have done has been disruptive, there are things closer at home that feel more disruptive in terms of social relations. And that tail has been clearly pinned on the Democratic donkey.
Suzanne
@Martin:
Sarah Longwell said, on one of her Focus Group episodes, that she gets the sense that many voters see democracy almost like a luxury good.
Which is…. rough.
KatKapCC
@zhena gogolia: The fact that white male pundits want to pretend that racism and misogyny had nothing to do with it tells me that, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum, they are part of the problem.
glory b
@hrprogressive: But the “work together” bunch seems to consist primarily of progressives, starting with Bernie Sanders and winding up with Jayapal.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Steve LaBonne:
In other words, tire rims and anthrax.
How we as *Democrats* move forward on this is definitely gonna be an issue, hell, it’s not unlike how we progressed leading up to the 92 election, the debates in the Aughts regarding “more/better Dems” and how to adapt to an opposing party dedicated to chucking out the norms.
And that started with Dubya. It simply restarted under massive steroids when the Orange Fart Cloud was elected.
TBone
@Martin: inequality is the root cause, of course! But see, e. g., Kristen Sinema about campaign finance. Whinemom flew to Europe to party woo hoo!
Steve LaBonne
@Suzanne: Especially since the truth is quite the opposite- authoritarian regimes impoverish their citizens and funnel wealth upward to the ruling clique and its hangers-on. As we are about to see demonstrated in practice.
Baud
I haven’t kept up with the news today so I don’t know if this is accurate. If so, wow.
Llelldorin
@Baud: It’s closer to say that the media situation has developed not necessarily to the advantage of the Democratic Party.
TBone
@RevRick: great work! My parents married in ’73 and everything you mentioned is a crystal clear memory for me, especially when we’d visit NYC in the 70s.
Baud
@RevRick:
Maybe Trump will be able to do something about income inequality.
John S.
@KatKapCC:
Yes, racism and misogyny were hugely important factors. But if you think that’s the one weird trick to explain why we lost the election (across the board and not just the presidency), you’re probably going to be very disappointed in future election results.
Bill Arnold
@trollhattan:
He is not right.
– First, misogyny and racism played a huge role.
– Second, it wasn’t “the economy”. It was a manufactured and relentlessly pushed negative portrayal of/narrative about the economy.
The Oct 2024 economy (measures including inflation, unemployment rate, interest rates) was dramatically better than the Oct 1984 economy when Ronald Reagan, showing visible signs of dementia (including in a debate), won re-election with 525 electoral votes, with a campaign slogan of “Morning In America”. (1988 also had the GOP winning another with landslide and with a worse economy than Oct 2024.)
Steve LaBonne
@Llelldorin: The media, like the voters, are going to get what they were jonesing for, good and hard. Let’s see how they end up liking it.
Martin
@Madeleine: Finance internships in the US are tricky as they tend to have established relationships with US universities. My sense is that places like PIMCO who are outside of Wall Street might be easier to do.
I’d also have her call McGill’s Career Center and see if they could give some pointers. Internships in Quebec or Toronto might be a bit more stable right now. I have no idea what the visa situation for internships in the US is going to look like this year.
Geminid
The debate about the future course of the Democratic Party will be long, contentious and long. I’ll probably get sucked in since I am argumentative by nature, but I’ll be wasting my time because I don’t expect the debate will amount to much in the end. Debates on abstract questions rarely do.
The 2026 midterm primaries will be where “the rubber meets the road,” and I expect there will be plenty of challenges to incumbents. There will likely be a lot of retirements by older Representatives also, and these open seat primaries will be hotly contested. The midterm primaries will shape the future course of the Party in a more practical way than any debate.
We’ll see a couple primaries for Governor this year, in Virginia and New Jersey; also, primaries at the state legislative level.
I don’t think there will be any suspense in Virginia. Reps. Bobby Scott and Abigail Spanberger don’t have any big issues to fight over that I can see. Considering that state Senator L. Louise Lucas has donned her boxing gloves on Scott’s behalf, increased funding for Virginia’s Tidewater region may be the biggest one. The 45 year-old Spanberger should beat the 77 year-old Scott handily, and then flatten Lt. Governor Sears in November.
New Jersey’s primary looks wide open though, with two or three mayors and Reps. Sherrill and Gottheimer in the mix. Gottenheimer and Sherrill won’t lack for money, but just for fun I’m hoping WaterGirl sets up a funding page for Josh Gottheimer with the thermometer starting at Absolute Zero.
We could also get a bonus primary this year, if Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar takes a plea deal or lose at trial in his corruption case. That primary should get plenty of attention. So will the general election, what with the Rio Grande Valley becoming a Republican/Democrat battleground.
TBone
@Baud: oh shit
Fair Economist
Addendum: I’m not saying that improved policies on the economy or immigration, or better messaging, won’t help; but it’s just so brutal overcoming the media bias. Trump’s Afghanistan withdrawal deal tied Biden’s hands; almost all of our troops were out and the Taliban had thousands of extra troops that Trump had given them. Biden couldn’t have stayed, or done much to change the outcome, because he didn’t have any people there. But the media never pointed out the problem was that Trump had already surrendered to the Taliban.
Likewise with the economy. Biden generated the best job growth in American history, the first relative increase in working-class wages in decades, and the first increases in US manufacturing employment since the 70’s. But all the media would talk about was inflation, which was actually mostly caused by the Federal Reserve’s insane money printing in 2020 (again, out of Biden’s hands), and the imminent recession which never happened.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@cmorenc: Dems in general, and unfortunately Biden in particular, have proven increasingly unwilling (unable?) to spot GQP policy land mines and work around them. At the same time, laying our own seems to be unpopular somehow, as if “playing nice” somehow showed signs of becoming a winning strategy. I hate to say it, but I do wish our side were a bit rougher and nastier foe a change.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Yes, but when we’re talking about stuff being done at specific places in meat space, our tax dollars can pay to have physical SIGNS put up saying what bill the funding came from and who was responsible for it. There should have been a sign like that at the entrance to Suzanne’s neighborhood with Joseph R. Biden’s signature at the bottom.
That part of the info environment shouldn’t be the least bit problematic. If there’s a next time we’re back in power, we have to stop hiding our lamp under a goddamn bushel.
A Ghost to Most
I’m done listening to the talkers. I’ve given it 50 years, and here we are. Apologists and enablers for the selfish and self-righteous. YMMV.
KatKapCC
@John S.: You win the gold in putting words in someone else’s mouth. Did I say those were the only reasons? I said that many pundits, most of them white men, act like racism and misogyny had nothing to do with it. I did not say they had absolutely everything to do with it. But if it makes you feel better to be condescending, by all means, proceed apace.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Not looking forward to the coming weeks, months, years.
Baud
Iphone users are in luck.
JML
@Suzanne: You’re seeing the results of 45 years of GOP propaganda pushed by the Reagan Cultists and the right-wing noise machine led by FauxNews. Government has worked well (at least under Democratic control) but the media drumbeat is always that government does work, government fails, government is a bureaucratic mess.
In many ways though the Democratic Party works better than it did in the 70’s and 80’s, where you had party leaders unable to put their egos aside to support a president from their own party, or cutting deals with GOP presidents that sold out their own principles. we’re a smarter and more unified party now, it’s just that the GOP is so much more intransient than basically any political party in this country’s history without any consequences for it.
Hells bells, a GOP congress is utterly useless, an embarrassing garbage fire floating in a sewer of filth, corruption, and insanity…and it doesn’t seem to matter?!?
zhena gogolia
@Bill Arnold: Thank you for taking the trouble to explain this point, which should be obvious to anyone paying attention. Which is not James Carville.
different-church-lady
I have a third argument: the psychological gap between what ought to be unacceptable in a president and a kind of weaponized lizard-brain hatred has become so large that normal rules of American politics no longer apply. It’s something we have not seen in living memory, and Democrats have been caught off-guard by the depth of it. We need to break the code, but that’s not going to be easy nor fast. “One weird trick” or “SHE NEVER DID (blank)” is not going to solve it. And it’s not about institutions or status-quo — it’s about the advancement in psychological manipulation.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Who knows whether a sign would have mattered to people? Many people ignored lots of information that was presented to them.
Suzanne
@Steve LaBonne: For a lot of people, politics and democracy is just about arguing. And that’s unpleasant, and exhausting.
I do think infrastructure specifically has the capacity to be effective in changing this mindset in ways that other political issues are not. It’s highly visible and affects people in their day-to-day lives. “Democrats shaved five minutes off your commute” would be a fantastic message.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Agree. Many Dems don’t want to accept how normalized hating us has become, and don’t want to deal with the consequences of that.
different-church-lady
@Suzanne:
Looking at you, cable news and MSM.
John S.
@Bill Arnold:
If only Democrats had run on that message, we would have had a stupendous victory!
Oh wait, they did try that and it landed with a huge thud. Because the average voter doesn’t pore over this stuff.
And besides, it’s all about the feels now.
glory b
@Betty Cracker: AOC tried to primary some of her fellow Dems out of office, Hakeem Jeffries, Sharice Davids and Shontel Brown come to mind, voted against a lot of Dem bills (at some point, someone pointed out that Matt Gaetz voted with the Dems more than the Squad did), made some dumb moves she hasn’t lived down yet.
She still hasn’t managed to move a bill out of committee.
Maybe she’s learning that this isn’t the way to win friends. It’s hard to try to primary someone out of their position and then ask them to back you up.
Also, the ranking member is required to work closely with the Chair (a Republican) in order to get things done. It’s not a participation trophy.
different-church-lady
@Baud: It’s not even about hating us — it’s just about hating and resentment being generally redefined as virtue.
John S.
@KatKapCC:
I didn’t realize it was a contest.
Whatever game we’re playing, I’m sure you win hands down. You’re just so much better than the rest of us.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Occasionally something bad will happen to bad people, and I’ll hold on to those moments.
Steve LaBonne
@JML: I don’t think anything short of a real catastrophe- eg. debt default, getting into a war that goes badly- will jolt most voters into paying attention to Republican inability to govern. Unfortunately I think there’s a pretty good chance of something like that.
Martin
@Fair Economist: Two things:
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: Plan a visit to New Castle, PA a couple of years from now to see how things worked out for them.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
I think much of that is tied to hating us. But it does seem to be branching out into other areas.
KatKapCC
@John S.: What on Earth is your problem? I made a comment which you chose to willingly misrepresent to talk down to me, and when I ask you not to do so, you double down. Did I kill your dog or something? Nothing I have said indicates that I think I’m better than anyone. But you sure seem to have a hard time with a woman telling you that you might have said or done something wrong.
RevRick
@Villago Delenda Est: It dates back to the 40s, when Taft-type Republicans complained about Thomas Dewey.
satby
@different-church-lady: I agree. And we keep expecting logic and rational behavior from people who can’t act on either due to that psychological manipulation.
TBone
We’re looking at the Turd Reich, incoming, and that’s not hyperbole. These fucks have learned from the previous wave of fascism how to tinker better, faster, longer . . .
karen marie
@trollhattan: Except that – again – Carville is wrong. Voters were grossly misinformed about the economy. Was there inflation? Yes. Was that inflation due to something Biden or Democrats had done? No. Did Biden’s policies help lower inflation? Yes. Did the US have less inflation than other countries? Yes.
Sure, “it’s the economy, stupid,” but people are going to vote based on their understanding. In 2024 the MSM – led by the fucking NYT – refused to report anything positive for the Biden administration with regard to the economy or anything else.
Carville can get stuffed.
Belafon
@hrprogressive: “Normie” voters didn’t see Biden with Trump. You did.
tobie
@Suzanne: This is not a new situation, as much as it feels like it is. Robert Altman’s movie “Nashville” (1975) ends with the devastating song,
It don’t worry me
It don’t worry me
You may say I ain’t free
But it don’t worry me.
I heard that Keith Carradine wrote the song. Whatever the case, it indicates that American’s put a lot of things — glitz, glamor, comfort — before democracy and freedom.
JanieM
@Martin:
Madeline wrote: “My great-niece is a French-US dual citizen.”
You wrote: “I have no idea what the visa situation for internships in the US is going to look like this year.”
Why would she need a visa if she’s a US citizen?
Geminid
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): I don’t know how it is where you are, but successful Democratic politicians here in Virginia talk up bipartisanship because the electorate splits 35% Democrat, 33% Republican and 32% Independent. Neither party’s candidates can win without carrying half or more of the Independent vote, and most Indies like to hear candidates talk of bipartisanship.
This is a matter of messaging and not policies, and I think Democrats who get all strung out over this issue are making a mountain out of a molehill.
Llelldorin
The basic problem is that Carville is right, but in the most superficial and least useful way possible.
He’s right that Democrats were punished for not focusing on the economy. The part that he ignores is that they were punished despite in fact focusing on the economy for the past four years.
In a world where the media provides biased reportage, that doesn’t matter. What the media were demanding as proof of a “focus on the economy” was wholesale betrayal of women and minorities, not solid economic measures. To their credit the Democrats didn’t take that bait.
Alce _e_ardillo
@hitchhiker: any vertigo, or hearing loss? One side or both sides?
the health care provider (now in retirement) can’t help himself at time…
John S.
@KatKapCC:
Oh yeah, you know it. I’m a huge misogynist and a racist too. You know so much about me.
My problem is that you and a lot of others go all groupthink when commenters make vapid statements about shit that should just be taken at “face value” and then act like assholes when anyone dares to ask why.
Arrogance doesn’t suit any gender.
Lily
“liberating in the Pottery Barn sense” 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
different-church-lady
@Martin:
Saying this is true I’d like to see an analysis as to why. There were plenty of efforts targeted to small biz. If they somehow missed Latino/a/x there’s a concrete lesson to be learned from it.
Anyway
Is Tom Suozzi (D-NY) a progressive? He has a “let’s work together on immigration, crime” piece out.
Suzanne
@JML:
I know.
One of the things that I always find inspiring is when there’s some sort of government benefit or program…. and there’s not a stack of paperwork to determine eligibility, or a million exceptions. When it’s easy!
I will note that I have had this kind of “pleasant surprise” exactly twice in my personal interactions with government. One was when I signed SuzMom up for health insurance after the ACA was passed. Couldn’t get the website to work, but was able to get her a silver plan with one phone call. The woman who helped us out was so friendly and easy to work with, and she explained things to SuzMom so well. My mind was seriously blown. The second was when I got on the Biden SAVE plan for student loan repayment. Previously, I had to submit a very lengthy form in December of every year, and much of it was information from my taxes. Nevertheless, it was hours of my time. But…. with the SAVE plan, there was an option to click a box to import all the information from my taxes, and then all I had to do was click one more box saying that there were no changes. BRILLIANCE!
Shit like this matters.
different-church-lady
@Llelldorin:
Only in the sense that they didn’t focus on “the economy” to the exclusion of everything else.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@karen marie:
It’s essentially what was said in #71: “it’s just so brutal overcoming the media bias.”
Pundits like him with a national profile, still never acknowledge that or if a couple do, never on a consistent basis.
glory b
@Anyway: I said “primarily,” not “completely.”
tobie
@satby: Call it disinfo, cyber ops, psychological manipulation…it really is a huge problem here. I’ve been following the German reaction to Musk’s intervention in their upcoming election. I’m not making predictions but the MSM there is pissed at the intervention.
different-church-lady
@tobie: Yeah, well the Germans have a bit more ‘experience’ with this phenomenon, shall we say.
Belafon
@Fair Economist:
There are a couple of places that liberals can hold onto, MSNBC and NPR, but both of them are going to require things that we aren’t known for: Commitment and money.
I see far too many saying we should punish NPR by not funding them. But we live in a world where oligarchs will throw away $44B to make a platform do what they want. If Congress pulls the last bit of funding NPR receives from the government, it will have to fill it by finding the money somewhere. And it’ll be all too easy for some rich guy to pay for it on the condition that the good reporters go. We need to donate, and then challenge them by calling in and writing when they fall short.
Similarly with MSNBC. Watch and then contact them when things aren’t right. Challenge the people they have on as guests.
Llelldorin
@different-church-lady: It’s worse than that — they were punished for not doing exactly the thing they were actually doing. The gap between reality and what got through the media was immense in 2024.
Martin
@Bill Arnold: Don’t confuse what the government considers to be useful measures of ‘the economy’ with what everyone else does. As far as the government is concerned, if Elon Musk earned 12 trillion dollars this year and everyone earned less, half of the national economic measures would improve.
Just because the media wanted to talk about the price of eggs, doesn’t mean that’s what voters were referring to.
tobie
@different-church-lady: True, and Musk is interfering there as a Yankee. That’s bound to raise some hackles.
Baud
zhena gogolia
@John S.: The Democrats ran on that message. It didn’t work because the reason people voted for Trump was not the economy, not one bit. They were going on month-long Italian vacations while complaining about the economy and voting for Trump. It was racism and misogyny.
wonkie
I think that one thing that needs to be clarified is the link between Dem policies and programs and the positive real life effects on voters. I am sick of enabling voters with good policy when they turn around and vote R–like white union men or red state voters who get FEMA or red states where new industries are being built. I think that from now on when Dems have the chance to do an act of good government it should be clearly contigent upon the beneficiaries publicly acknowledging who to thank by literally thanking publicly. Red state governors need to publicly thank Dems for FEMA, for infrastructure. Unions bosses need to publicly thank Dems for pro-labor appointees to the Labor Relations Board. In fact, before even passing the funding for good government policies, the next D Pres should invited R politicians, union leaders etc into the Oval office and say, “You aren’t getting goodies if you keep spewing crap about evil Democrats. I want a public statement of thank you for this made on TV in your home state before I release the funds.
I am fed to the max with people who accept Dem good government and piss all over us in the next election.
KatKapCC
@John S.: Good lord, man. I am asking in all sincerity, what is wrong with you?
For one thing, I’m white and I have no idea what race you are, so I did not accuse you of racism. I pointed out that your comments toward me have been notably rude, and yes, when a man is rude to a woman for no valid reason, that can often indicate that said man has some issues with women that he should be looking at. I did not insult you or call you names or anything. I only pushed back on your misrepresentation of my original comment, and that was enough to get you be snide as hell with me over and over again. I truly do not understand what your fucking problem is.
And to call it “groupthink” that a few of us are noting that racism and misogyny were factors in the election is really weird. I mean, why on Earth would that claim NOT be taken at face value, unless you don’t think racism and misogyny had any role at all. That’s the kind of thinking I would expect from a right-winger, which I assume you are not, so again, I am thoroughly confused. I DO think economic factors played a role too, but I also think that there is a lot of prejudice in this nation and that ALSO played a role, and I am not alone in that view. So now it’s “groupthink” for a few people to agree on something???
And LOL at you daring to call me an asshole when you came at me with nothing but condescension and snideness right from the get-go.
Explain to me why it is arrogant for a woman to have an opinion? Please, we’d all love to hear it. Why was it arrogant for me to state a differing viewpoint and then stick to it, especially since I am not the only one even just in this thread with that same viewpoint?
Your comments are usually not like this. I’ve never seen you act like such an unmitigated dick before. I seriously think you need to take a step back and ask yourself what the fuck has gotten into you. But I for one am done with your petty bullshit.
different-church-lady
@Martin: A primary Biden mistake was trying to use statistics to wave away vibes.
But at the same time there was plenty of evidence that people were being irrational between their own incomes and their views of the overall economy. Or, as I keep putting it, “Everyone has 40,000 dollars for a car, but nobody has 4 dollars for eggs.”
Booger
@Dorothy A. Winsor: That seems awfully fast for an Ent to respond to anything.
John S.
@Martin:
But it’s so much more satisfying to just call voters stupid and dismiss them. Why even bother to scratch the surface of why people think or feel the way they do?
Old Man Shadow
I expect many Democrats will take the message away from 2024 that liberalism isn’t popular and they should be more business friendly and DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE
WARLGBTQ People!different-church-lady
@Baud: Every Cybertruck on the road is one more than I can believe someone actually paid good money for.
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
I’d say it would still be needed, but as you’re saying, political power naturally tends to wind up wherever economic power is. So if we ever get another bite at the apple, we need substantial changes to tax and other laws that not only make it a lot harder to build megabillion fortunes, but start knocking the existing megabillion fortunes down to size.
Bill Arnold
@Fair Economist:
Yeah, that was relentless. Always, continuously, a recession was highly probable a few months in the future. It affected people, including corporate-persons looking for excuses for layoffs.
The Audacity of Krope
And I’ve been assured that July was a one-off. Democrats, like Republicans, chose bigotry. That’s why they lost.
different-church-lady
@lowtechcyclist: I’d be perfectly happy to let them keep their fortunes, as long as we could figure out a way to prevent them from buying our governance with it.
John S.
@KatKapCC:
You know what? My sincere apologies. You’re right, I am usually not this irascible. I’m traveling today and more cranky than usual (which is not often).
It’s really not you, more that your comment was a vector to others who have been driving me crazy lately. It has nothing to do with you being a woman.
Sorry if I upset you. Really.
Eunicecycle
@Baud: so you kill yourself? Definitely an irrational response.
gvg
@Baud: Disagree. Republican’s are usually the establishment. Everything is wired for republicans. They are the daddy party. It can’t be wrong if a republican does it etc.
Professor Bigfoot
@zhena gogolia: It’s a difficult thing to acknowledge.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Baud:
Bwahahahahahahaha, what a difference a quarter makes:
Turns Out, Tesla’s Cybertruck Is a Hit
In Q3, it was the #3 selling EV in ‘Murka. Guess that market got saturated pretty damn fast. :)
The piece you linked to estimates 9-12K Wankpanzers were sold in Q4. Heh heh, even better:
finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-annual-ev-sales-decline-140709554.html
I’m waiting for everybody else’s North American Q4 sales to be released. Mary Barra at GM’s got be looking pretty smugly happy going into 2025…assuming her lobbyists along with Ford’s are working overtime on the incoming loons.
Baud
@gvg:
I agree that they are. What I’m saying is that label doesn’t stick to them in a negative way. It doesn’t mean they never lose, but they rarely lose to a Dem in the ground that they are the establishment candidate in the race.
Another Scott
@trollhattan: ???
That strikes me as a colossally stupid take.
Record high stock market, near record-low unemployment, reasonably slow and stable gas prices, Carville’s old enough to know what a bad economy* looks like.
* Yes, inflation spiked, grocery prices rose a lot, housing prices rose a lot. But that’s not a “bad economy”. A bad economy is when there’s 10% unemployment and 15% interest rates and gas prices have doubled or tripled and the stock market has tanked and there’s no end in sight and all the rest. A Misery Index under 7% is very good – it was nearly 10% at the end of Eisenhower. Words have meaning, and the press insisting on making part of Biden’s economy to be the same as the early 1980s is malpractice.
It’s good to see that I’ve not missed much by ignoring Carville’s hot takes.
[/rant]
My $0.02.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
We’ll see. One quarter is too small a sample size. But doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the negative press.
zhena gogolia
@Professor Bigfoot: It sure seems to be. It seems to enrage people for some reason.
different-church-lady
@Suzanne: Oh come on, surely Biden’s team… uh… sent out a Tweet or something…
Bill Arnold
@John S.:
Media in the USA: Feelies are described as a form of “imbecile” entertainment that allows the masses to be controlled by fulfilling their desires.
( “1932 dystopian sci-fi novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. ” )
trollhattan
In which I’m introduced to the term “vibecession.”
Gretchen
@glory b: AOC tried to primary Sharice Davids out? That would have been a stupid move if she did, since Sharice flipped a red seat. I just got a flyer from the Democratic Party today, bragging about how the district went for Trump in 2016 and has trended more Democratic in every election since then.
I do think AOC came in not really knowing how things worked and has learned since then that she has to play nice with her own side.
lowtechcyclist
@RevRick:
Second through fourth were really all one thing. And really the only answer to stagflation due to skyrocketing oil prices would have been an effort to massively reduce our dependence on petroleum – to make it a “moral equivalent of war” in President Carter’s phrase, which got ridiculed by our media. (MEOW!)
glory b
@Steve LaBonne: Yeah, I was wondering about that. As a black woman living in a black neighborhood, I didn’t “feel” the shift to Trump that the media claimed black men were making.
John S.
@Bill Arnold:
That checks out.
Gin & Tonic
@Martin:
She’d need a work permit of some sort for Canada.
Professor Bigfoot
@John S.: I think someone on another thread mentioned the “too many girls” phenomenon: that when too many women start working in an industry/area, men leave it. And once feminized men don’t want to do that work anymore (the coal miners who rejected the idea of becoming nurses.)
The Democratic Party is quite literally the party led by women and Black people.
If you don’t think this alone isn’t sufficient for most straight white men to reject it out of hand, perhaps there’s something you don’t see.
Martin
@different-church-lady: A few things:
Prior to Covid latinos were making headway closing the wealth gap with white Americans and they lost considerable ground since 2020. Not very much of Biden’s signature economic bills benefits small businesses like these. Most of that funding helps large corporations.
WTFGhost
One thing that I will never, ever, forgive is the sense that BIden was proven to be too frail, too weak, too stupid, too OLD, to run for re-election. He was *proven* to be none of those things. The kewl kids *SAID* he was, and it became establishment wisdom.
Establishment wisdom is the complete opposite of “fact”. Alas, it drives decision making.
different-church-lady
@trollhattan:
Those are the same darn thing.
Belafon
@different-church-lady: It’ll be easier to raise taxes on them than to end Citizens United.
Chief Oshkosh
@TBone: Really? I’m not seeing much of a downside here (other than, of course, the injuries suffered by the 7 bystanders).
different-church-lady
@Martin:
Oh, uh, about that…
Belafon
@different-church-lady: You would like to think so, but they voted in Ohio to allow abortion and for Republicans.
Martin
@Gin & Tonic: That’s generally not a problem for a student internship.
raven
Go Dawgs!!!
Another Scott
@cmorenc: There was nothing that Biden could re-negotiate. See U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan (12 page .pdf) at the WhiteHouse.
Donnie intentionally tied Biden’s hands.
FWIW.
Best wishes,
Scott.
The Audacity of Krope
Those are two of the vanishingly small list of Democrats I don’t blame.
Old School
hitchhiker
@Alce _e_ardillo: No vertigo, no symptoms at all except a persistent feeling of fullness and (using simple earbuds to check) hearing on that side is muffled.
I believed the ENT when he said that making a tiny hole in the eardrum and putting in a tube would relieve both symptoms. The hearing is better, though now things are a bit echoey, but the feeling of fullness is unchanged.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@different-church-lady:
And, the residential pipe replacement program done under the auspices of a Biden bill is another good, very specific example of…wait for it…good government resulting directly in a positive good: removing lead pipes!
We had the same thing happen throughout Denver during the Plague Times including our house; I can show everybody tomorrow at the Denver Meetup — shameless plug — the exciting entry point in the brick wall I’d just rebuilt in the basement.
The City did put out press releases from time to time on the project status and always mentioned the funding source was the infrastructure bill, but like the few signs I’ve seen along the interstates about some project “brought to you by” the infrastructure bill, the pronouncements in the releases were massively understated.
Kay
@Martin:
How did Biden’s covid relief not help Latino small business? I helped tens of small businesses in my county. We got very good at it – could plug them into both state relief efforts and federal, we were mixing and matching! . Biden did three iterations of PPP and restaurant relief, each was simpler and more accessible than the last. We got a single person DJ business a years compensation by sending several emails with PDF attachments and having the bank do his app. He cried.
It was an amazing government effort. They shoved billions of dollars out the door in record time. A pure pleasure to help small business people with.
Chief Oshkosh
@Fair Economist: IOWs, Biden/Harris’s loss was largely if not entirely due to bad press.
Beyond the baked-in racism and misogyny, I agree.
Belafon
@Old School: Democrats should file an investigation into her campaign.
gene108
@JML:
Nobody is going to care about the price of eggs in another 18 days. MAGA will be fed reasons why it’s not a problem by the media and/or why it is beyond anyone’s ability to control.
The two most insidious things about right-wing media are its ability to influence the MSM and set the narrative for almost everyone, and its ability to whitewash so much bad Republican behavior and policies.
I fully expect both aspects of right-wing media to work furiously and largely successfully over the next four years.
I think most people will be lulled into complacency regarding anything Trump does.
Professor Bigfoot
@John S.: It’s not dismissing them.
It’s recognizing that since it’s white male Christian supremacy that ACTUALLY motivates them, we don’t know how the hell we get them at all.
Unless, of course, we abandon civil rights for marginalized communities, that is. THAT might get them back.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: True, but it’s low-hanging fruit and couldn’t hurt.
Professor Bigfoot
@zhena gogolia: But it’s explained by the exact same phenomenon— which they then turn into an argument as to why racism and misogyny WEREN’T the major, defining drivers of this election.
Eunicecycle
@Another Scott: I hope Joe is leaving landmines (figuratively!) all over the place for Trump.
John S.
@Professor Bigfoot:
Where did I say that I didn’t see it?
Don’t bother looking. You won’t find it.
eemom
@zhena gogolia:
@Professor Bigfoot:
Those people who will not acknowledge racism and misogyny enrage me.
And omfg, how anyone in their right mind could nod in agreement with that worthless shithack carville in the year 2025 just….bewilders me.
tomtofa
Real wages (taking inflation into account) decreased from 2020 to 2024, most sharply in ’22-’23, most sharply in big cities.
The rise in prices and mortgage interest rates was easy for everyone to see.
The constant Democratic campaign message of how much we’ve improved people’s lives probably fell a little flat.
John S.
@Professor Bigfoot:
Keep looking for more straw men to knock down, Professor. Me, at the top of this very thread:
You’re talking to the wrong Jewish guy.
Kay
@Martin:
Some of our less reputable small businesses couldn’t apply because they don’t actually pay taxes on some or all of their income but they had the good sense to keep quiet on the WHY no one could help them.
Another Scott
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): I’m reminded of Jimmy Carter’s political history (repost):
(Emphasis added.)
Carter did good things as governor of Georgia and helped to move civil rights forward. But he ran a racist campaign to win the race.
People are flawed and we’re going to disagree with others on many things. My bottom line is: Do we want incremental progress via messy processes of flawed people working together, or do we want to risk losing the progress we’ve made by insisting on purity?
YMMV.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
billtheXVIII
“The first is that losing an election fairly narrowly under decidedly anomalous circumstances shouldn’t prompt a party to fundamentally change.”
Respectfully disagree: If losing to Donald Trump of all peoiple – twice – isn’t enough to bring about fundamental change in the democratic party, nothing is.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
If the information is right there on a physical sign where people have to see it every day, then we’ve circumvented what is normally described as the “information environment” – what people see in the media and online.
Maybe they still won’t believe it, but I’m not sure what that has to do with the ‘information environment.’
Regardless, it’s something that wasn’t done that we could have done. If there’s a next time, there’s no reason not to try it.
Martin
Democrats have been raising the issue of income inequality for over a decade, indicative of a bad economy. Younger conservatives are now as concerned about income inequality as most democrats.
The stock market doesn’t help most people. And you have to ask where the gains in the stock market have come from – increased housing costs, increased transportation costs, etc. A strong stock market is good for the national economy, but if most people aren’t benefitting from gains in the national economy, if all of those gains are going to billionaires, then it becomes a contrarian indicator.
Boeing and Intels failures are both directly being blamed on management prioritizing investors over long-term stability of the company. Same for a number of automakers. Two years ago about 6% of CA tech workers were laid off from corporations that were almost all reporting record profits. Historically profits and a rising stock market indicated an investment in jobs and wages. That’s not happening now – in fact it’s just the opposite. The US economy is being gutted by the rich. About 8% of US GDP (and growing rapidly) is controlled by private equity, and they don’t share.
Kelly
Oh my Yes! As a resident of very Republican rural Oregon I can report that the casual hating on the liberals is constant. The locals are incredibly gullible. I grew up here, left to earn my degree in Eugene, had my career in the Portland metro, retired back to the old home range. As balding, buzz cut, white man with a gray beard they always assume I’m one of them so I hear it all.
tobie
@tomtofa: This strikes me as historical revisionism. No Dem was bragging that the economy was great when inflation spiked. Sure, the admin tried to emphasize where it was making gains while acknowledging the pain of high grocery prices.
For what it’s worth, wage growth outpaced inflation from Feb 2023 to Nov 2024, which would have been the year-and-a-half in which the campaign was waged.
Baud
@billtheXVIII:
The assumption here is that Donald Trump is an unattractive candidate. In fact, he’s a highly attractive candidate to half of the US, precisely because their culture is fundamentally different than ours.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@Martin: what I don’t understand is that media has been directly affected by PE firms squeezing out every dollar out of legacy media vehicles and then throwing them away. One would think they would cover this stuff in a more adversarial fashion. Instead they’re either fawning pieces or they appear to be intimidated by these people.
Bill Arnold
@Martin:
Whatever. I picked those three (unemployment, interest rates, inflation) because they were easy to find historical data for, and they are relevant to most people.
Pick your own other measures (not cherry pick; pick something you care about), and compare Oct 2024 to Oct 1984.
The Audacity of Krope
Exactly this. The only story about the economy the media wanted to tell was inflation. There were good things happening too. We never heard about them. You had to know where to look.
Actually, there was a short period of “unemployment too low😱” stories. We live in a degenerate culture.
Martin
@lowtechcyclist: It would have helped. Every institution that has tested this stuff knows that simple information regarding how something was paid for, etc. pays off because it gets the community correcting its own misinformation. At universities we always made it clear what was being paid for by student fees. We’d put stickers on fucking everything to indicate how it was paid for, because is solved so many problems.
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
Huh. I know of a number of local (MD) businesses that got bailed out with loans in the $200K to $2M range that were forgiven. Not sure why Latino businesspersons weren’t able to take advantage of that same program, but “competing against large corporations” seems to be a bad position for local businesses to be in, regardless, but I can’t see why that would have gotten them passed over for assistance when they applied.
different-church-lady
@Martin: Oh, like those stickers Biden put on all the gas pumps! /s
Chief Oshkosh
@Martin:
Eh, but if all the pensions are gone and the prevalent retirement funding options we have is SS and our 401K(/403B)s, then I’d have to disagree.
trollhattan
@Baud:
See as evidence, the margins achieved by God-Emperor Ronaldus Reaganus I. PBUH. We did manage to claw back after that, but only following the sad intervening GHWB term. His “whipped Saddam” honeymoon did not last long enough.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@Baud: the $20 will be added onto Apple products in some stupid extra fee. I know Android has issues and Apple has the better product but I hate the way Apple makes extra bucks over stuff that they should offer for free. Just as bad as Verizon and ATT with their little extra charges.
Professor Bigfoot
@John S.: Nonetheless, you seem to miss the depth to which those straight whtie male Christian supremacists will go to establish that supremacy.
Though you may be Jewish, I don’t doubt you present in this country as a straight white man.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist:
Our culture is entirely visual. Do it.
The most ironic part of this for me….. when they did the lead pipe replacement project in my neighborhood, we got fliers on the door letting us know about dates of distribution, when we would have to move the cars, etc. And there were cones and signs up for the entire summer saying which parts of the street would be worked on that week. Signs should have read, “Infrastructure under this street replaced by your U.S. Government from XXXX to XXXX”.
Lots of us don’t read the local rags….. smack us over the head with it!
different-church-lady
@Suzanne: “But that would be gauche.”
Kay
@lowtechcyclist:
Well, it wouldn’t have. Any small business could apply. Any. At one point in Ohio they could retain employees (including themselves) at half time while collecting state unemployment, a federal bump and Ohio jobshare ( a different state program)
There’s a reason the US did better than any other country – we helped people. For the first time in my life my government stepped in to help people in an econo.ic crisis instead of just letting them fall off a cliff. We rescued them. Some of them could not believe it – they were like peering behind me like there was a “catch”. There was no catch. It was an earnest relief effort.
different-church-lady
@Kay: And I’m still stunned both sides of the aisle got along for it. Even Trump didn’t put up any obstacles.
tobie
@lowtechcyclist: If you don’t pay taxes, or don’t have employees, you didn’t qualify for PPP. Think Mom-and-Pop enterprises with an occasional helper paid under the table. There are tons of small businesses like this–house painter, dry wall installer, home improvement, etc.
On the other hand, most small enterprises like this continued working during the pandemic.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
Because TFG has turned me into a small petty person who enjoy schadenfreude in huge servings I hope the two bombings scare people away from TFG’s resorts and from buying Apartheid Clyde’s exploding machines.
Steve LaBonne
@Chief Oshkosh: Pensions also depend on investment income.
different-church-lady
@tobie: Huh. So if you don’t pay into the system, you don’t get anything back. Weird, huh?
Suzanne
@different-church-lady: The statistic from my advertising days was, at the time, people needed to see something a minimum of seven times before they remembered it at all. It’s probably more now. And that’s not even having a positive or negative impression. That’s just first-level awareness.
Ruckus
@Baud:
They aren’t the establishment but they are in charge of it.
Which is the main problem. They are not actually in charge of the whatever they are in charge of, it’s what they want to be in charge of. And both of them want money and power – the power is to control the money. Because they give a rats ass about anything but them and their bank account(s).
different-church-lady
@tobie: Actually, I just remembered my best friend qualified for PPP with no employees.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kay:
Yet another great example of good government leading to a positive good in the macro sense.
At least it’s good government with a Dem like Biden in charge. If it had been the Orange Fart Cloud…that’s a ‘what if’ I’m glad we never got to see.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: 🎯
trollhattan
Dino tracks, UK edition!
Pics at the link.
Rusty
@Fair Economist: I can’t find the link, but there was an article on how inflation affected various groups, and Latinos had it the worst. I also think concerns of losing work to undocumented immigrants resonated more with lower income workers, Latinos having a higher percentage of those than whites, so that hurt too. In combination the economy hurt the Democrats more particularly with this group.
different-church-lady
@Suzanne: “Seven times? Let’s not talk of it the first.”
Martin
@Bill Arnold: No, my point is that the government measures the things they care about and can influence. They don’t necessarily measure the things that people care about. This is a common consideration in data science. The government doesn’t measure whether workers feel they are getting a fair share of the corporate profits. They don’t measure income inequality. They don’t measure whether workers feel there are more opportunities for them. They don’t measure whether voters feel corporations have too much power. These are all economic issues.
And the media have their own biases in terms of what they report on. Egg prices is easy because you can walk a reporter to any grocery store and you have a story. Columbia was the center of the student protest story because national reporters can walk over to Times Square and take the number 1 train to Columbia in about 12 minutes. A lot of what they push to the top is just due to laziness.
UncleEbeneezer
@John S.: We literally just pushed out an old Dem to have a much younger Dem in the top spot with the most power possible in our party and a chance to be the leader of the free world. Does the Dem Party get credit for that with these young people? I’m gonna guess the answer is: of course not.
different-church-lady
@Rusty: Then they should really love the tariffs.
Martin
@JanieM: I missed the US citizen part – I only internalized the French citizen.
Geminid
@glory b: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t actually try to primary Hakeem Jeffries. That was just some loose talk her Chief of Staff and Press Secretary made after the Caucus elections in November of 2019. They were mad that their candidate, California Rep. Barbara Lee lost the contest for Caucus Chairman to Jeffries.
Afterwards, the two made some war talk about primarying Jeffries to Politico reporter Lauren Barron-Lopez, and said they had a Black woman lined up for the job. Representative-elect Ocasio-Cortez denounced the story the next day, but as was pointed out, she didn’t deny it, probably because Barron-Lopez had her hotheaded staffers in tape.
Jeffries was pretty funny when Politico asked him about this. “Democracy is a beautiful thing,” he said as he welcomed a primary. “Spread Love, it’s the Brooklyn Way.” For some reason people took the Biggie Smalls quote as a veiled threat; perhaps because it was.
That wasn’t the last time Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff and press secretary got her in trouble. She ended up cutting Chakrabarti and Trent loose loose in August the next year, after they they threw fuel on the fire that erupted after a vote on emergency border funding the month before.
Chakrabarti, Trent and their Justice Democrats outfit had been instrumental in Ocasio-Cortez’s win over Joe Crowley, but they made a lot of enemies once she was in office and she didn’t need them anymore.
tobie
@different-church-lady: Your friend must have reported her income, though. No?
The Audacity of Krope
I’ve been rewatching Cowboy Bebop. A dialogue exchange I just heard speaks well to the title of this post.
Martin
@different-church-lady: Everyone is always irrational about their own incomes and their views of the overall economy. Democrats view of the economy has immediately worsened in anticipation of a set of proposed policies that we believe will make the economy worse – therefore the economy is worse.
That’s gotten increasingly difficult to contextualize as we turn to social networks for that context, which have very different biases than what you get from your neighbors or national networks.
different-church-lady
@tobie: Yeah, totally on the up and up, but just a situation where for some reason even though there were no additional ’employees’ a PPP loan covered it instead of extended unemployment.
trollhattan
Hmm, confess to have not been listening to Donny because reasons, but this is the first I’ve read he supports sunsetting the SALT cap. This Californian would find it very helpful; more even than two-buck eggs.
Ruckus
@hrprogressive:
It’s politics.
If you don’t get in and play the game you have ZERO voice.
And if you refuse to play by the rules and play to steal everything, tied down or not, you SHOULDN’T have a voice.
But we have shitforbrains – again. And here I thought people actually learned something the last time. Woe is me. I forgot that some people don’t learn well – or really, really are stupid as fuck.
And no, I’m not sorry about the language.
UncleEbeneezer
@Baud: The Establishment is: The Dem Party, loyal Dem voters, the CBC, Planned Parenthood, NAACP etc.
Any person or group that supports the Dem Party is part of The Establishment™.
The only way to remove that stigma is to gripe about Democrats, demand a third party, etc. Defending The Dem Party/DNC etc., in any way, just makes you even more Establishment.
Renie
@Anyway: I live in Tom Suozzi’s district. He says that cuz the MAGAts here have been spreading for years the false facts that MS13 is going to take over. MSM is big on highlighting any crime facts as being out of control. ie., NYC. which has had a decline in crime.
Fair Economist
@different-church-lady: Actually Biden’s team was pretty relentless about their accomplishments. Constant press releases; Biden talked up his accomplishments in every speech he made; and, yes lots of tweets. Didn’t matter because the press reported none of it. Even Democrats would say Biden should talk up his stuff in his speeches when he *already was*.
scav
@Rusty: Here might be the research, although likely not the exact article you saw (they’re breaking things out by multiple subgroups). Fed Reserve Bank of MN Breaking down inflation by race, age, parenthood, and more
The Audacity of Krope
I read that. Somehow NYT paywall didn’t prevent me. Maybe they wanted to be sure people read it.
Those are two of Republicans’ worst issues. He also made some anti-trans noises shortly after the election.
Fuck Suozzi.
different-church-lady
@Fair Economist: Biden was extremely bad at working the refs.
Gin & Tonic
@Martin:
My son, a US citizen, attended McGill, then after graduation stayed in Montreal for an internship and employment. This was a few years back, but I recall different paperwork at every step.
Bill Arnold
@tomtofa:
Not what I see in the (FRED) data. Real (CPI adjusted) earnings spiked higher on average during the COVID-19 recession (because lower-income people were laid off), and were mostly above the 2019 Q4 levels.
FRED: Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over (CPI adjusted, seasonally adjusted) (pull left slider to 2019 for clarity)
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Another Scott: My point is that Dems have been campaigning like the progress we have made is at once too fragile to risk and at the same time an unshakeable bedrock from which to make merely incremental advances, while the GQP has been taking a piledriver and dynamite to it all and celebrating the carnage.
I am not insisting on purity. What I am demanding is the ‘nads to fight back against an opposition that has no interest whatsoever in working with us and uses “bipartisanship” to get what they want without delivering anything in return.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
Hey, I’m on your side.
But we live in a country that so many refuse to vote for the side of humanity that has never had the loudest voice in the country. Is it humanity overall? Other countries have women in power and do well, so I’d say no.
We had a shot with a woman that struck me as more than qualified. Far more than the person that won, after proving that he was NEVER qualified.
Maybe not enough wanted her to be the first. Maybe this country still is attempting to live as if it’s a century ago, as in 1925. Maybe this country isn’t anywhere near ready for equality. I say that because we ended up with a proven shitforbrains. Again. Maybe many of the people in this country can’t learn or live in reality. Maybe I’m full of it. I don’t think so.
Another Scott
@tomtofa: Eh?
FRED – Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over (LES1252881600Q) .
What I see is that they’ve been pretty steadily increasing since a low in 2022 Q2.
(There was a huge runup in the Pandemic because companies suddenly needed delivery people, etc.)
Best wishes,
Scott.
Glory b
@UncleEbeneezer: Right!
I think what people forget is that every time Dems try to promote a good thing, a bunch of progressives are ready to sh*t on it, not good enough, too late, what about (issue of the day), how dare they talk up a good thing when (issue du jour) is still happening, etc, etc.
Republicans are full throated about EVERYTHING they manage to accomplish, Biden was the most progressive president in decades & constantly got grief from his own side.
If those who purportedly support us shit on us constantly, why would anyone bother to vote for us if they weren’t already inclined to?
Jill Stein said THE MOST IMPORTANT THING was for Dems to lose, by the way.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
How has shitforbrains been good for the economy?
hitchhiker
@Suzanne: I sometimes tell the story from my math-teaching days of trying to get 17 yr olds to get their heads around certain tricky precalculus concepts.
I taught them, assigned homework, and then tested them. They didn’t do well.
We went over the test, and then I wrote a new one that was very like the first one. They didn’t do well.
We went over it again. They seemed to be comprehending. I wrote a third test, and this time we went over it BEFORE I gave it to them.
They took it, and still didn’t do well. This was a very small class, and at that time I’d been teaching successfully for about a decade. I still don’t know what it was about this group and/or that material — but the experience did make me a believer in how very difficult it can be to bring people to understand things.
Much harder than you’d imagine.
Fair Economist
@tomtofa: Real wages went UP under Biden, to the highest ever recorded: americanprogress.org/article/americans-wages-are-higher-than-they-have-ever-been-and-employment-is-n…
I’m sure you’ve heard otherwise, and that’s the power of conservative manipulation of the media.
Glory b
@tomtofa: BUT that’s not rue.
Look at the significant increase in spending on vacations and non essentials.
People did that and still complained,even though our economy was the best in the world.
There’s a reason The Economist magazine had a cover depicting a jewel encrusted hard hat.
The Audacity of Krope
From where I stood, that was the simplistic centrists and the media that panders to their dumb prejudices.
knittingbull
@hitchhiker: I have eustachian tube dysfunction and I was prescribed Flonase (back then prescription but now otc). It’s a steroid but it seemed to work. ymmv
@hitchhiker
edited for sucky spelling
UncleEbeneezer
In exciting news: we just got our tix for the Frida Kahlo Museum in February when we are in Coyoacan. After the museum we booked a guided food tour of that area of the city :P. Can’t wait. The guided tour we did in Valladolid was one of the best parts of our trip to the Yucatan. Something about strolling (or driving) around for hours with someone who really knows and loves the history/culture…it’s one of the best things to do when traveling.
Suzanne
@hitchhiker:
Oh my God, yeah.
The stats from my advertising days were, like, bleak. About how people need to find out about things from different sensory sources — auditory, visual, still images, video, personal contact, etc. How trust in a brand or company is built, how name recognition alone takes forever, never mind conveying any actual content. How people can remember seven words maximum. How quickly people forget. How emotion-driven it all is, and how peer pressure is such a strong thing even for adults. How getting anything to stand out from all this fucken noise that we’re all surrounded by, all the time, is so, so hard.
And, as I have said before…. Trump is good at nothing except for this. He’s good at selling shit to stupid people. He’s had a lifetime of practice managing and shaping his image. He has lizard-brain instinct for this era.
Hofstatter said we had a paranoid style in American politics? True. I don’t even know what to call the Trump style. I would say “casino style”, but even that conveys a level of order that isn’t there.
John S.
@Professor Bigfoot:
You don’t know me, so kindly stick this opinion inside the orifice where the others come from.
I swear, it never ceases to amaze me how so many of you presume to know who the fuck any of us are from comments on a blog.
Kathleen
@tobie: I agree with you. Any “hot takers” who ignore the role racism and targeted, well funded and coordinated propaganda attacks against Democrats played in 2016 and 2024 Presidential losses and only focus on how the Democrats are doomed are not dealing in root cause analysis which would yield a helpful roadmap for the future. But that would take real work
ETA The right, the left, the media, and foreign entities have all declared war on the Democratic Party. Like it or not it’s the last governmental thin line between democracy and fascism.
Geminid
@Gretchen: This event occurred before Sharice Davids first won election in 2018. The Kansas primaries were held a couple weeks after Ocasio-Cortez’s sensational victory over Joe Crowley in late June. The new star and Bernie Sanders flew to Kansas City to rally with Brent Welder, who had worked on Sanders’ 2016 campaign. Davids won the primary and went on to beat the Republican incumbent.
A lot of people (like me) still held this against Ocasio-Cortez because Davids was a talented young politician, a lesbian and a Native, while Welder was a mediocre, middle-aged White carpetbagger from the Missouri side of Kansas City.
Ironically, on their way to Kansas Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez flew right past Chicago where Marie Newman was locked in a tight primary race with Blue Dog Rep. Dan(?) Lipinski. He was one of the last “Pro-Life” Democrats left in the House, and Newman wound up knocking him out the next cycle.
Neuman came up a few hundred votes short in 2018 though, and Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez might have made a difference. But Marie Neuman did not fit the Justice Democrats template. Unlike Welder, she had supported Clinton in 2016 and was more interested in women’s rights than mobilizing the “Working Class.”
John S.
@UncleEbeneezer:
I honestly couldn’t say. I’m 47, so I don’t qualify as part of that cohort. I could certainly poll my 14 nieces and nephews who are primarily between 17 and 30.
But I suspect you are correct.
JaySinWA
@Old School: It’s a typo in Sinema’s report. It was champagne not Campaign expenses.
Steve LaBonne
@Suzanne: Timeshare salesman style?
Chris
@Fair Economist:
Yep.
People really don’t want the lesson to be as stupidly simple as “right-wing control of the media is more total and more active now than it’s ever been, it now even reaches into demographics that it’s previously neglected, and it’s spent the last four years carpet-bombing the airwaves with nothing but anti-Democratic propaganda.” Because it’s hard to even know where to start combating that. But that’s by far the most convincing explanation of 2024, and things like the shift in the Latino community especially reflect it.
Steve LaBonne
@Chris:
That doesn't fit my priors, so it can't be correct.MomSense
I cannot stress enough how little most people pay attention to the day to day, ups and downs, ins and outs of politics. For those people it is as simple as unemployment was really high, the covid response was chaotic and they just wanted things to turn around. They voted for Biden in 2020 but they were not Biden voters. They were just expressing how fed up they were with how things were at the end of 2020 with school closures, unemployment, etc. They just wanted the economy to improve. We who pay attention know that COVID disruption to supply chain etc created price increases. We know why gas prices went up. We know that unemployment was low and new jobs were high. Most people do not know that. They are struggling with food and gas prices, putting more on credit, struggling to pay bills, seeing housing costs increase (out of range for many), heating and cooling and maintenance costs increased. They see businesses reducing hours and not able to staff so everything takes longer. They don’t think short staffed means booming economy. They feel inconvenienced and reminded of more things that just don’t work well in their daily lives.
Biden was absent for most of the last year before the first debate. He was not very visible or vocal. He certainly was not out their stumping for his policy successes or defining Trump who was campaigning the whole time. When the administration touted their good economic numbers it felt out of touch to ordinary people.
We tend to talk in facts and figures to people and that does not resonate. People are attuned to narrative, to brand identity, and to social cues. We were talking past most people. We just were not meeting them where they lived.
I’m not talking about the MAGATs. They are very informed, poorly and bizarrely, but they are full of information. The sky is not the same color in their world. They are about 45% of the electorate. They are not our target audience. We are fighting for a very small percentage who are not consumers of news. We largely did not connect with them. Some of that was the over reliance on traditional media and some of that was the message and also the messenger.
Kathleen
@Geminid: She also said she was targeting the CBC. It wasn’t just Jeffries.
UncleEbeneezer
@John S.: It’s super-frustrating. Dems don’t get much credit from any age group but the problem seems to be especially bad with younger people. There’s a lot of talk about the need for Dems to appeal to young voters but very little acknowledgement of the fact that Dems get little/no love from young voters, even when they try or even succeed. The assumption that voters will reward Dems for their attempts/achievements (a tenuous theory at best) seems even less true in practice with younger voters. The Inflation Reduction Act, ending the Afghanistan War, Student Loan Forgiveness…all of these things are what young voters supposedly would reward. Young voters don’t show up on Election Day (compared to other age demos) and they don’t reward good governance. Is it any wonder that Dems are reluctant to spend their time and resources on such a demographic group? I’m not saying Dems should ignore them (or any other demo) but I do understand why they aren’t the biggest priority.
suzanne
@Steve LaBonne: I would say “used-car salesman style”, but that doesn’t capture the speed of his visual communication style.
Steve LaBonne
@UncleEbeneezer: I would never advocate for heightening the contradictions but it’s going to happen regardless so let’s see if it actually works.
Kathleen
@Geminid: Her Chief of Staff also called Sharice a “racist”. I think that’s when she or whoever finally gave him the boot. After he was gone she still ran primary candidates against the Dem endorsed candidate (blue seats only) because that was the Justice Dem business model. Also Justice Dem business model was to challenge Dem incumbents in blue seats only. They never ran against a Republican to flip a read seat like so many of the talented reps in the class of 2018 did.
Captain C
@Old School:
“I wanted to go party in Europe and I’m not running again, so screw you all!”
Captain C
@gene108:
FTFY
John S.
@UncleEbeneezer:
Personally, I want to drill into this with my family to get a better sense of things. I don’t expect to find any magic answers since these kids vary dramatically (as to be expected). But I am actually less concerned about the 17-25 year olds than I am about the ones who are older.
Kay
@tobie:
Not true. Sole propietorships were covered. So were independent contractors. ANY small business. We did double digits single person interior painting contractors. Nary an employee in sight. A disc jockey. A lady who has a magnetic sign on her car and comes to your house to groom your dog. A wedding photographer. The Tree Man – a tree trimmer.
Glory b
@The Audacity of Krope: Which centrists were lined up to sh*t on Democrats?
The Audacity of Krope
@Glory b: Sinema and Manchin from the get-go.
Most of the rest of the prominent D establishment figures this past July.
Glory b
@UncleEbeneezer: Exactly. Why would anyone move heaven and earth over a group whose participation has been spotty even since numbers have been collected?
People have this belief that some day, once we learn ONE WEIRD TRICK, they will turn out.
As I’ve pointed out, AOC couldn’t even get 100 people to turn out for a rally for Bowman in NYC, her own back yard.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
What about S corps with no employees?
Glory b
@The Audacity of Krope: LIke who? Name a few who actually planned to stay in office.
Geminid
@Glory b: That happened with the Infrastructure bill. It took many Denocrats months to get past the gaslighting “progressives” engaged in about the bill, and some never did.
Much of this had to do with the decoupling of Infrastructure from the Build Back Better bill. Biden’s people initially supported supported coupling the two bills, but by November of 2021 they and Congressional leaders concluded the BBB could not win the neccesary Senate votes. They felt they needed to put a win on the board and there was already broad support for the Infrastructure bill, so Infrastructure was put on the House floor and all but six House Democrats voted for it.
But the decoupling controversy spilled over onto the Infrastructure bill itself, and many Democrats were persuaded that this win was a loss. That was unfortunate, because this was a good piece of legislation, and most Progressive Caucus members said so after it passed with their votes.
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Yes. The owner of the business may apply.
The Audacity of Krope
@Glory b: Schiff. Tester. Brown. Warren. Pelosi. Just the first few off the top of my head.
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
We did the one man shop of the guy who has a truck mounted power washer and cleans all the windows of all the Aldis in NW OH and eastern MI.
He does well, that guy!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
The people I know were advised by their accountant that they could be given that PPP money but the government could always come back and demand it back if they decided they didn’t really qualify for it, so they opted for an SBA loan instead to avoid that risk
Professor Bigfoot
@John S.: As you will. I shan’t reveal my true opinion of you and your obvious attitude. Good day, ser.
Geminid
@Kathleen: I didn’t hear that they went after the CBC collectively. I know that Justice Democrats did go after CBC member Lacey Clay in 2018 and 2020, and Cori Bush beat him the second time around. But Bush lost her primary this year and Wesley Bell will represent Missouri’s 1st CD in this coming Congress.
I think Justice Democrats sponsored a challenger to Ohio CBC memberJoyce Beatty in 2020 with no success.
Now that the Justice Democrats have made a bad name for themselves, they’ve taken to operating under the Brand New Congress label they started with originally. I expect we’ll see of Brand New Congress candidates in next year’s Democratic primaries.
RevRick
@The Audacity of Krope: A record number of judicial confirmations. The American Rescue Plan. The Infrastructure Bill. The Chips and Science Act. The Inflation Reduction Act.
Our most conservative Senator, Joe Manchin, voted for all these substantial measures.
Starfish (she/her)
@hitchhiker: If it is postnasal drip, don’t use Afrin because it can lead to rebound congestion. Listen to the other person in the thread that said to use Flonase or Nasonex.
I am a little skeptical about it being postnasal congestion and also asymmetrical like that.
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
We didn’t do those. Dentists got a lot here locally. Completely fair, they were shut down – no revenue at all. Still there some grumbling because the dollar amount was so high – dentistry is very profitable in an established practice. People have no idea. My dentist became a vegetarian and got extremely fit while he was shut down for 6 months. He was mad he couldn’t go skiing.
Betty
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I suffered from this condition and what worked for me was a high-powered antibiotic, the second one the ENT tried. It released a cascade of infected stuff. Just my experience,and your problem might be different.
Miss Bianca
@Professor Bigfoot: Word.
@WTFGhost: Word also, too.
Cheez Whiz
In an election won by razor-thin margins in a depressed turnout nothing landed on anybody. The idea that there must be A Reason is so very attractive, but at some point the laundry list of reasons becomes no reason at all and you wind up playing whack-a-mole until the next election.
What the Democratic party should do is understand why the turnout was low, and why the joyful warrior/Trump is a fascist/we’re not going back was shrugged off by voters. Given the campaign Trump ran these are very depressing questions, but you have to appeal to the voters you have, not the voters you wish you had.
Kathleen
@Geminid: I read that several members of CBC complained to Pelosi at the time.
Kathleen
@Professor Bigfoot: A person I follow on X relayed that she and a writer from a liberal publication (not named) got into a discussion about substance vs style. The Xeeter told the writer that she thought Lauren Underwood deserved more attention than “stars” like AOC because Rep Underwood has solid legislative record and is highly respected by her peers. The writer (not named) dismissed Underwood as “being on the plantation”.
Geminid
@Kathleen: This was after a vote on emergency border funding in July of 2019. An amendment proposed by the Progressive Caucus went down when the other Democrats joined Republicans to vote it down.
Some Progressive Caucus members were outraged about the vote, and both Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Mark Pocan and Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s Chief of Staff made inflammatory social media posts comparing the moderate New Democrat caucus to the “Southern Democrats” who notoriously blocked civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
Now the New Democrats were outraged. Reporters saw Max Rose and another Democrat corner Pocan on the House floor the next day and give him a thorough cussing. Bitter charges and countercharges flew for days.
At one point, New Democrat Terry Sewell, who happened to be the first Black valedictorian at Selma High School, let reporters know she had requested a meeting with Ocasio-Cortez three days before so they could discuss whether or not Sewell was a “Southern Democrat,” and that she was still waiting for a reply.
The rancorous dispute went on for over a week, until Pramila Jayapal , the other Progressive Caucus co-chairman, met with Speaker Pelosi and made peace talk.
I thought afterwards that House Democrats came out of this fight the stronger for it. The greater understanding and respect between the caucus’s two wings stood them in good stead in the next Congress, when Democrats passed important bills with only a five member majority
That was it for Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff though. At one point, Chakrabarti got into a Twitter debate with First Nations advocate Julian Noise Cat in which he referred to Kansas Representative Davids as “Sharice.”
Big mistake! A couple days later Hakeem Jeffries sent out a post “From the Office of the Caucus Chairman” telling Chakrabarti that she was Representative Davids to him, and instructing him to “Keep. Her. Name. Out. Of. Your. Mouth.”
Jeffries was pretty brutal about it. Then a few weeks later, Ocasio-Cortez’s office announced that Chakrabarti and press secretary Corbin Trent were moving on to new opportunities.
Note: I remember this stuff in such detail because I used to be very obsessive about the Justice Democrats. I first ran into this blog through an Adam Silverman post about Walid Shaheed, who succeeded Chakrabarti as Justice Democrats chief.
I became more relaxed about them after the primary for Marcia Fudges’s Cleveland-area seat. That was in August of 2021,after Fudge became HUD Secretary. Nina Turner did not run as a Justice Democrat but she was ran with the same crowd, and once Shontelle Brown beat Turner by 7(?) points I figured the JDs had peaked.
rikyrah
It was never about the price of eggs😒😒
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
I was more upset about Crockett than AOC.
Prefer Underwood to AOC . Underwood who actually does the work.
CatFacts
@Madeleine: It’s not a large coastal city, but south Louisiana may be an option as it has a long history with the Francophone world. From what I hear from friends there the state has been trying to promote these ties.
A quick Google indicates that Louisiana has a state agency called CODOFIL (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana) and Tulane, LSU and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette all have French majors and Francophone studies grad programs. Maybe someone at one of these places might have some ideas?
Aussie Sheila
@Rusty:
Immigrants here in Oz are largely represented in small business because in the first generation they have neither the qualifications to enter professions nor the capital to be in ‘big business’. Any politics that ignores this truth is bound to fail.
The idea that recent immigrants would be attracted to an ‘easy immigration’ platform is nuts. I agree with strong immigration platforms.
I would never look to recent immigrants to support them.
Anyway
Great. Now do Sharice Davids. Given that Geminid’s is her biggest Stan I’m sure we’ll get to the truth of that claim. =)
FWIW I identify as an establishment Dem (not registered) and don’t care about the internecine fights but some of the incited claims seem far-fetched .
still waiting for a cite on the MattGaetz voted more with Ds than the squad …
Anyway
that could also be bcos Bowman had royally shit the bed with his constituents and there was no winning them back.
Jay
@Aussie Sheila:
Here, most new Immigrants work retail or other low level jobs, either in their communities because of language issues, or out in “the world” if their English or French is good.
The next, smaller percentage come here as skilled workers, Nurses, Doctors, Engineers, etc, providing that their language skilles in French or English is up to par and their Certs are recognized in Canada.*
The next smaller percentage come here on “Golden Visa’s”, they buy their way in.
It takes 5 years to go from being a new Immigrant to being a Citizen and be allowed to vote, as a minimum.
*Phrabinder was a taxi driver I took to the airport one day. We talked and I learned he was a Computer Engineer in Pakistan. There was a major shortage of Tech Workers at the time. I put him intouch with our Head Engineer and wrote him a recommendation letter. 3 weeks later, when I few back to YVR, he was working on the assembly line for quite a bit more and better hours than as a taxi driver. The Company also paid for the course work he needed to get to bring his Certs up to Canadian Standards. 2 years later, he was an Engineer working in the Engineering Department.
Geminid
@Anyway: There is a constituent of Sharice Davids who has spoken up for her several times here but not on this thread. I would say she is a bigger “stan” of Rep. Davids than I am. Although I do think very highly of the Kansas Representative.
A couple other commenters and I discuss Rep. Davids on this thread at ##144, 243, 254 and 279.
You can get the gist of the “primary Jeffries” story in a Politico article by Laura Barron Lopez published in mid-November of 2018. That was right after the Caucus elections by the incoming Congress members.
It was a two-day story but New York and national media covered it because they covered just about any controversy involving Rep-elect Ocasio-Cortez.
I made no claim comparing Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s voting record and Matt Gaetz’s. Someone else made that one, so don’t wait for me to provide a cite, ask them.
Most of these internecine fights date from the period 2017-2021 and they were real. No one is making them up. They continued on a more local basis this last cycle in the Missouri 1st CD and New York 16th CD primaries involving Reps. Bush and Bowman.
I am not responsible for claims made by others. I did give some general thoughts on upcoming primaries at #69.
Anyway
Oh, didn’t mean to imply that you were the source of the Matt Gaetz and squad comparison. I was just listing it in the claims that need to be followed up … my bad if it came across that way
ETA – did Sharice Davis face a primary challenger backed by AOC
ETA2 – working weird hours …
Geminid
@Anyway: Brent Welder and Sharice Davids were two of five candidates competing in the 2018 primary for the Kansas 3rd CD that covers the Kansas side of Kansas City and suburban counties. Sen. Sanders and Rep-elect flew in to support Welder who had worked for Sanders’ 2016 campaign.
Davids won and went on to beat incumbent Republican Kevin Yoder that November. She was one of 40 Democrats to flip Republican seats that year. That was the first set of elections I followed on the internet and I’ve stayed interested in those forty Democrats since.
There were some very talented Democrats in the Class of 2018, especially among the forty who flipped seats. Two of those, Andy Kim and Elissa Slotkin, start terms as Senators tomorrow and two more, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, are running for Governor this year in New Jersey and Virginia respectively.
Sorry I was so sharp with you. I have a mean, argumentative streak that comes out from time to time, like it did a couple mornings ago with another commenter. Plus, I’ve been in a cranky mood ever since November 5.
I guess I’m not the Lone Ranger in that respect. I really need to concentrate more on clean energy news, and research the evolution of the Islamic religion in Anatolia; Sufi stuff. That might keep me out of trouble.
Aussie Sheila
@Jay:
Sure, but even before immigrants become citizens in this country they can own their businesses. Quite rightly.
My point is that in this country, where immigration prior to Covid was running at close to one million persons a year in a nation of 25 million, any political campaign that proclaimed their approach to immigrants was to loosen the criteria for entry, would be riding for a hiding. From immigrants.
That isn’t to say I approve of ‘hard borders’. I don’t. I like immigration where immigrants can quickly and easily obtain citizenship and thus voting rights. I do not approve of a flood of immigrants that are always ‘illegal’, where such procedures lead to undocumented people being sweated for labour in the absence of the ballot to relieve their lot.
Such a situation is unconscionable, or should be, to anyone calling themselves ‘centre left’, let alone anything further left.
Aussie Sheila
@Aussie Sheila:
Oh and birthright citizenship doesn’t make the US situation any better. It amounts to the proposition that you can labour all your life, pay taxes, and never have the right to vote, and it’s all okay because your children will be able to vote.
It’s a revolting regime.