He must have been drunk again
— Jim Manley (@jamespmanley.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 11:43 PM
===
(Backstory)
Let's see what's going on here!
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) has posted more than a dozen times since Friday that he deserves credit for his state getting $1 billion, or as he prefers to write it, $1,000,000,000.— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 8:00 AM
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He keeps posting a letter he sent to WI Gov. Tony Evers on July 2, pleading with Evers to hurry up and pass a state budget with a higher Medicaid provider tax rate in it, before the BBB passes.
State budget with higher tax rate in it = higher federal match. vanorden.house.gov/sites/evo-su…— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 8:04 AM
===
Van Orden claims his letter, on July 2, is proof that he is the reason the governor and WI state legislature moved fast to pass a state budget with a higher Medicaid provider tax rate, and secured that extra $1B a year.
Except Evers’ spokesperson told me Van Orden played no role in any of this.— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 8:07 AM
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Me: Was Van Orden was the reason the WI governor + state legislators moved fast to pass a state budget and secure this $1 billion in federal funds every year?
WI governor's spokesperson:— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 8:10 AM
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Gov. Evers worked with Dems in the WI congressional delegation for months to monitor potential federal changes to hospital payments under Trump’s bill, says Evers' spox.
Van Orden didn’t reach out to Evers’ office until June 30 — after Evers and GOP state leaders had already reached a budget deal.— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 8:15 AM
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“Put simply, if Congressman Van Orden wanted to take credit for supporting Medicaid and protecting Wisconsinites’ access to healthcare, perhaps he shouldn’t have voted to gut Medicaid and kick 250,000 Wisconsinites off their healthcare," said Evers' spokesperson. www.huffpost.com/entry/derric…
— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 8:16 AM
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So why does Van Orden keeps taking credit for getting his state $1,000,000,000 in federal money when he apparently had nothing to do with it?
Trump's tax law, which he voted for, is extremely unpopular and he's in a competitive House seat.— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 9:38 AM
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Join me, and let’s take back Wisconsin’s 3rd: secure.actblue.com/donate/cooke…
— Rebecca Cooke (@rebeccaforwi.bsky.social) June 16, 2025 at 10:04 AM
On The Road – dmkingto – SF Bay Area Benches, round 2
mappy!
Maybe it should be one of many attempted “deflections” … ; – )
Baud
He’s counting on people wanting to believe Republicans because the alternative is us.
Princess
His constituents will believe it and will continue to vote for him.
Meanwhile, Democratic governors in blue and especially purple states will be blamed for every nursing home and hospital closure that happens under their watch because of the tax bill.
Baud
@Princess:
That’s the Republican plan. Let’s not assume it’ll work just because it has a fair shot at working.
mappy!
Should we assume it’s going to work because it’s been an effective game plan for the past sixty years?
Baud
@mappy!:
No. Because we’ve won as much as we’ve lost over the past 60 years.
I get that we think the chance is it working should be zero. But just because it works half the time does not mean it works all of the time.
Suzanne
The cravenness and utter shamelessness of these people rarely fail to bowl me over. Like, this guy clearly hates the Big Turd, and his constituents do, too, and he knows it. What would have happened to him if he hadn’t voted for it? Some arm-twisting? Don’t get to sit at the cool kids’ table?
Martin
@Princess: I don’t think that’s inevitable. We’ve been able to hang policies around their necks before, and voters are fairly family with the bill for this sort of bill, and is polling at -30. That’s a pretty big hole for them to be starting from.
Princess
@Baud: It will certainly get a big assist from the liberal news media like the NYT.
Baud
@Princess:
SSDD.
I have a 1% hope that the NYT’s war on Mandani will actually persuade some people to see that paper as it really is. But I assume at some point the NYT will run a hit piece on an “establishment” Dems (other than Biden) and all will be forgiven.
Steve LaBonne
The GOP already has many defectives. Wait, what’s that you say?
Suzanne
@Martin: BTW, I have only been tangentially aware of some drama here in recent days, but I enjoy your thoughtful comments and I hope you feel welcome here.
satby
Should We Politicize the Texas Flood? Absolutely – Paul Krugman
mappy!
@Baud: However, musing… I don’t recall the media being so one-sided as it is currently, which can be a decisive factor… (They do control all three branches, plus the media, at least presently.)
Baud
@mappy!:
It can absolutely be decisive.
The media has been one-sided against us for a while. I’m not sure how to make comparisons in terms of coverage. Obviously, the media today isn’t above paying Trump bribes for favorable regulatory treatment.
mappy!
Sometimes we work with small victories, and go from there. The BOE budget passed on the third try…
Baud
MagdaInBlack
@Martin: I’d like to add my voice to what Suzanne said at #12
Baud
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
My guess would be a Trump-backed primary opponent next year.
Nelle
@MagdaInBlack: I’m on the “me too” bench. You know how there are certain commenter’s who you attend to with heightened attention? Martin is one for me. And I’m missing Ozark. Oh, and where is Immantize (sp)?
Betty Cracker
Isn’t Van Orden the weirdo who had a meltdown and started screaming at a bunch of kids when he saw them (congressional pages, IIRC) lying on the floor of the Rotunda for a group shot? He berated them for being disrespectful. Probably didn’t say jack when Trump pardoned the goons who beat cops and smeared shit on the walls.
Media bias is a perennial problem, but I don’t think it will be easy for Repubs to blame Dems for the wildly unpopular Trump/GOP bill that Trump branded in his own inimitable mush-brained style and hyped relentlessly. He’ll keep crowing about his “win” even if vulnerable House members wish he’d shut the hell up about it.
rusty
Yes, the media is against us. That said, we still need to keep pushing and tying the consequences to the policies of the right. I don’t think we can always see the consequences, but I do think we are laying the foundation of the failures being tied to the policies. For example, there was money for a warning system in Texas, but they refused the money because it was from Biden. We need to keep showing how gutting FEMA led to this anemic response to the flood. Moving even folks at the margin will eventually give us the wins we need at the ballot box.
Trivia Man
We all know the easy fix for him. All he needs is one state legislator to introduce him at an event with “Our state is lucky to have him. His leadership as a liaison between the republican majority in congress and our state Assembly and Senate gives wisconsin strong input into federal legislation.”
The liar version: “He worked tirelessly through June to help my office craft a state budget that maximizes our state’s efficient use of federal funds and supports President Trump as he MAGA.”
Bonus for his opponent if she asks him to take a breathalyzer test on stage at a debate.
Melancholy Jaques
Wisconsin 3rd CD is R+3, 89% white, 56% rural. He’s pretty safe, but I’d still call him a liar in social media.
TONYG
@Suzanne: The notion that these assholes are “afraid of Trump” is laughable. What, exactly, would have happened if he had defied Trump? Would he have been physically harmed? Would ICE thugs have sent his family to South Sudan? At worst he might be primaried successfully and then he’d have to get a real job – just like a normal person. I see that Van Orden is a former Navy Seal, so I imagine that he views himself as having a big swinging dick. But he seems like a Hegseth-style fake tough guy to me.
lowtechcyclist
@Melancholy Jaques:
R+3 is flippable in even a mild Dem wave. He isn’t safe at all, unless we prematurely concede defeat.
Kathleen
@Baud: As Hakeem Jeffries said about Rethugs during his 8 hour speech, “Their shamelessness is their super power.” Perfection.
BellyCat
Capitalism means we get the media we deserve.
Social media disruption bots serve up whackadoodle shit and the media then jumps on it for the clicks.
The media supply will always meet the demand.
TONYG
@lowtechcyclist: An 89% white district. Yes, it’s certainly a mystery why the voters there keep electing assholes like Van Orden. I’m classified as “white” myself, but white people in this country really are a cancer.
Kathleen
@Betty Cracker: News Media: “Hold our locally sourced and brewed craft beers.”
Baud
Did someone mention the media?
Steve Paradis
Brave Sir Robin ran away . . .
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Baud
A valid question.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
randy khan
It almost seems like taking credit for things Democrats did is in the Republican officeholders’ handbook.
The Audacity of Krope
That’s a ghoulish question right there. Thanks for that, ABC.
Baud
@The Audacity of Krope:
The ghoulish question would be:
Republicans stripped their rural base of Medicaid funds. Can they successfully persuade those voters to blame Democrats?
Thor Heyerdahl
@TONYG: all those years ago Gene Wilder said it best about “people of the land”
lowtechcyclist
@TONYG:
OK, give up now, throw in the towel, wave the white flag, if that’s how you want to be. I don’t have to listen to this crap.
tobie
Have there been any deep dives into what this ugly bill means for inner city hospitals? Rural hospitals got a $50 billion carve out in the bill. As Evers action shows, there was a way to get more money for rural hospitals through matching grant requirements. My rural county has been awash in state and federal subsidies for some time. Dems too frontloaded things for rural regions (broadband, road repair, etc) in the infrastructure bill and inflation reduction act. Meanwhile cities like Detroit. Baltimore and Milwaukee languish. In every way our political system favors land over people.
CCL
@Baud: oh my, sounds just like nyt pitchbot.
JML
This tool is exactly the sort of guy to go after and beat. He’s a liar and a fool and screwed over his own district. Bet you he’s been hiding from his constituents too. WI has made some good strides lately, time to go for another one.
Jeffg166
There’s a sucker born every minute and you can fool some of the people all of the time.
Moondoggus
@Suzanne:
he would lose his job as Representative. Trump would successfully primary him.
Despite all the complaints from Congress Critters about how awful their job is, there are very, very, few resignations. Only when it’s clear they will lose reelection.
or die in office. Am I right in thinking that more Representatives have died in office than resigned this year?
JWR
But I heard Greg Abbott confidently say of the floods that “we were ready for this event”. Well, aside from all the death and destruction, that is. But aside from that, we were ready! /GOP Speak
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@TONYG:
They’re *politically* afraid of Hair Furor.
Sure, this clown lives in an 89% white district so should be “safe”. He is…until somebody further to the right of him who wants his job can slither under and even lower bar to prove MAGA/Hair Furor loyalty/bona fides.
There’s always somebody out there “worse” in that regard and that’s what these clowns fear. And the ability of the Orange Fart Cloud to attract their vote, at least when he’s on the ballot.
RevRick
@Baud: What the NYT or WashPO say or not say is not 1/1000th as important as how the LaCrosse Tribune or WXOW Channel 19 covers it. These battles will be carried out on local media.
Baud
People keep talking about the fear of being primaried from the right, as if that’s a reflection on Trump rather than Republican primary voters and, ultimately, general election voters.
RevRick
@Baud: The DCCC has identified 29 target Congressional districts. You can be damn sure the will hang the Big Ugly Abomination around everyone of those GOP Representatives necks and they have the receipts to prove it. Their advertising will seek to do two things: make Democrats furious and eager to crawl over glass to punish the GOPer and discourage marginal GOP voters from showing up.
Midterm elections are all about reshaping the electorate, not persuasion.
Jeffro
It will be interesting to see when, and how, the GOP solves its collective action problem in opposing unpopular trump BS
Unintentionally, I’m sure. But it’ll happen.
How many of them will follow him all the way down the spiral when he tries to interfere with/intimidate Americans about/attempts to cancel the midterms? Not all of them.
Baud
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
And if it’s a reflection on general election voters, then isn’t this an indictment of our citizenry in general?
I put it to you, Baud: isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society?
Well, you can do what you want, but I won’t sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!
(Sorry, couldn’t resist ;-)
Jeffro
more of this, please: Younger Dems Are Sick of Their Party’s Status Quo
if the Times does a good thing for the wrong reasons, it’s still a good thing ;)
(gift link)
Interesting that Spanberger, Gallego, and other Dem up-and-comers are part of this. And they’re anti-anti-Mamdani, too. Hint hint, establishment.
Personally, I like “New Day Democrats” but “Majority Dems” is good, too!
I’d encourage folks to read the whole thing
TONYG
@Betty Cracker: Politics aside, there is something deeply weird about many of the Republican political figures these days. And their white constituents keep re-electing them.
Melancholy Jaques
@RevRick:
Agree about the importance of the local media, but what they say and what stories they run are influenced by FTFNYT and WaPo. So are social media newsfeeds.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Do you think the only reason we’ve had only one black president and no women presidents in our 250 year history is because black people and women are poor campaigners?
TONYG
@Baud: Yes. If not for the fact that approximately half of the Americans who bother to vote are racist assholes, Donald Trump would be the answer to a trivia question — a former reality TV star who before that had been a bankrupt real estate developer.
The Pale Scot
I found a good article about Ai ruining our minds,
piratedan
Well, if are talking about actual fear, I think Democrats being assassinated is a slight step up from being politically embarrassed, but perhaps these GOP types are so wafer thin in actual humanity that their political “image” is all they have.
It is mildly ironic that the GOP is so afraid of their own voters that its practically a full-time job keeping them aimed at targets other than themselves.
RevRick
@TONYG: The Wisconsin 3 district was represented by Democrat Ron Kind from 1997-2023. It’s a definite swing district.
RevRick
@Melancholy Jaques: A local TV station fact-checked Van Orden on their 11 o’clock newscast last night. The NYT and WashPO only report on national trends.
Geminid
@Moondoggus: Representatives typically do not resign when they think they’ll lose an election. Instead they announce their retirement and serve out their term.
Resignations are more rare; usually Reps retire to take other jobs. That was the case with Mark Greene (TN?) last week. In the last Congress, two Dems resigned for this reason: David Cicciline (RI) and a Representative from upstate New York.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Jeffro:
All people part of Abundance Coachella wankfest recently, aka, the center-right of the party and the Klein/MattY/Smith/Stancil/Atlantic/Vox/New Liberalism trickle-down types.
The Audacity of Krope
@Baud: There are degrees of ghoulish; but I agree, the second is more so.
Suzanne
@Jeffro: I have some, let’s say, differences of opinion with some of the pols in that group. But I do think there’s some important generational shifts happening and much of the older Dems aren’t as responsive as they could be.
Housing, education, transportation, childcare, etc….. are unaffordable as fuck right now. It was a flashing red light a couple of years ago and it’s screaming sirens now.
Baud
@The Audacity of Krope:
The first isn’t IMHO.
Gin & Tonic
@Geminid: It’s “Cicilline.”
Ramalama
@Steve LaBonne: Watching the Defectives. Reminds me of the Elvis Costello song.
tobie
@Jeffro: Was there really an “establishment” candidate in the NYC mayoral race? I don’t think so. While Cuomo got some big endorsements, no one was enthusiastic about him. He’s an absolute creep. I think if a Dem like Daniel Goldman had run for NYC mayor, the race would have looked different. It seems like many New Yorkers decided their choices sucked, and the fact that the usually reliable voter base of Dems age 40 and over didn’t turn out reflects that.
We do have rhetorical deficit on the Dem side right now and that’s a problem. It crosses ideological lines. We need representatives who speak with passion but also candor. Honesty might be our best weapon in opposing a Republican regime tht consistently and unabashedly lies.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
That was from Animal House. I meant that entirely as a joke!
Baud
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Oh I know. I decided to use it to make a point.
satby
@Baud: some people resist the idea that we should hold voters accountable for their votes (they refer to it as “blaming voters”), but I think that it’s reasonable to do so. Jim Wright has long said “if you want a better government, be a better citizen”.
Looking for a cite for that quote I found many, but the one I’ll link to is his heartbreaking post last November 6th.
TONYG
@Baud: “I put it to you, Baud: isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society?” Good “Animal House” reference!
JWR
Slightly O/T, (and something I’ve not been able to ignore), but there’s a really good Amanpour & Co today (Via CNN):
They also talk about the U.S. backed “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” and the way death seems to follow it around.
Belafon
How is the Democratic party supposed to appeal to immature white men if women keep running for office?
Betty Cracker
@Jeffro: Steve M (No More Mr. Nice Blog guy) made an interesting observation on Bluesky the other day. Paraphrasing: one reason Republicans win despite their unpopular agenda is that they have managed to sell themselves as insurgents against the status quo and so-called elites even when Repubs hold all the power, even when they are by any meaningful metric “the elites.”
I think there’s some truth to that.
Suzanne
@tobie:
My argument would be that endorsing a candidate that no one is enthusiastic about because he’s a known quantity who has been in the club for a long time is…. exactly the kind of “establishment” nonsense that many Dem voters clearly objected to. I found the endorsements of Cuomo, honestly, reprehensible. Incredibly dispiriting.
I don’t live in NYC, but I probably would have ranked Lander first if I did. But the degree to which the NYT, and a fair amount of Dems, are trying to take down Mamdani is really fucken gross. He’s a talented dude, and he’s growing the tent precisely when it needs to grow. Maybe follow that lead.
TONYG
@tobie: To me, the ultimate weirdo in the NYC mayoral race is the Republican candidate — Curtis Sliwa. What??? I guess he travelled by Time Machine from 1983. Next there will be a concert tour by A Flock of Seagulls.
Baud
@satby:
“Accountability” is a loaded word. There’s no legal way to hold a voter accountable for their vote any more than we can hold a jury accountable for their verdict. And that’s as it should be. (By contrast, a corporate board member can extreme circumstances be legally accountable for violating their fiduciary duty.)
But we as citizens can certainly recognize that a large share of our problems flows from the decisions our fellow citizens make, and that those decisions reflect their values and character.
It’s unsatisfying because so many people on our side are authoritarian in their outlook, and there’s no authoritarian response here that fits within the liberal morality space. (Right wingers have no problem punishing citizens for their politics, as we’ve seen.)
Geminid
@RevRick: I read that there is a lawsuit in Wisconsin that challenges the Republican drawn Congressional map as an impermissable gerrymander. This lawsuit could be decided by Wisconsin’s Supreme Court after being tried in a lower court.
Most states have laws intended to limit gerrymandering. Often they are in the state’s constitution. These laws vary from state to state, and there’s even more variation in how the states’ supreme courts enforce them. In 2022 New York’s Court of Appeals upheld a lower court decision striking down the map Albany Democrats drew. The lower court then appointed a special master who drew a map favorable to Republicans.
That same cycle, Illinois Democrats drew a more extreme gerrymander that the Illinois supreme court upheld. Different courts, and (I think) different underlying laws.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Yeah, but the status quo they rage against is liberal social values.
p.a.
@Baud:The ghoulish question would be:
Republicans stripped their rural base of Medicaid funds. Can they successfully persuade those voters to blame Democrats?
@JWR: But I heard Greg Abbott confidently say of the floods that “we were ready for this event”. Well, aside from all the death and destruction, that is. But aside from that, we were ready! /GOP
Let’s not forget, these are the same, or same type of voter (new generation), who bought into G W Bush’s “He kept us safe” reelection bullshit AFTER 9/11
TONYG
@Belafon: Likewise — How can the Democratic Party appeal to racist white people if they insist on running candidates with brown skin?
H.E.Wolf
PSA: Full moon today. Emotions tend to run high.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the pessimistic half of the Electoral-Vote blog team be… more optimistic than usual in today’s post, on several different topics.
Some of those topics are directly relevant to this comment thread, which was also a nice surprise.
If you’d like a lot of detail and some mild snark, Electoral-Vote blog will scratch that itch.
electoral-vote.com/
LAC
@Jeffro: sincere question: who/what is the establishment party?
TONYG
@Betty Cracker: The contemporary right-wing definition of “elite” is a librarian or a public school teacher or a college adjunct professor. You know, people who know how to read. Real Americans don’t want any of that book learnin’
CCL
@The Pale Scot: Wait, what? You were a student in my class? /s
Geminid
@Gin & Tonic: Thank you for the correction.
I’m curious: what do you think of Rep. Gabe Amo, Cicilline’s replacement?
RaflW
@Suzanne: So I certainly don’t want us to be craven. But we need to be at least a titch shameless. The way Krugman advises today. And the highlighted paragraph is KEY.
We have to strike fast. Like, now.
Denali5
@Suzanne: I don’t know, but the assassination of a Democratic State congresswoman in a neighboring state certainly caught my eye.
Suzanne
@RaflW: Agree. But I almost always agree with Krugman.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: For their base, I agree that’s true. It’s all culture war bullshit for that audience. An example of that would be Yale/Harvard Law grad and millionaire Ron DeSantis shitting on poorly paid public middle school history teachers for allegedly making white kids feel bad about their history.
That said, I think the anti-establishment rhetoric goes beyond culture war bullshit and taps into anti-establishmentarian leanings of swing voters who hate politics and mealy-mouthed politicians in general. It’s cynical as hell, but a carnival barker like Trump knows how to tap into that animus and come across as “different,” which can be enough in a close race.
I’m not saying there’s anything genuine about Trump’s or the GOP’s anti-establishment pose. We have only to look at the actual legislation they pass to see that it’s bullshit — deregulation, favorable tax treatment for rich people and shredding the social safety net, same as it ever was. But the “vibes” are anti-establishment.
Baud
@Denali5:
Even though the Dems aren’t the big manly men with fancy guns, I can’t think of a single one that has shied away because of right wing violence.
lowtechcyclist
@satby:
I’ve been thinking for awhile that if we ever get the trifecta back, one reasonable way to do this is to push policies aimed at helping metro areas in general, and central cities and inner suburbs as much as possible, and give a lot less attention and support to policies aimed at aiding rural America.
We don’t need to go on a vendetta against rural areas the way Hair Furor is going after cities in blue states, but we can shift the emphasis a great deal to favor the people who are most inclined to vote for us. Stuff like mass transit, programs to convert half-empty office buildings to residential (or tear down and replace when conversion won’t work), and the like.
TONYG
@Suzanne: I was naive enough to think that Cuomo’s political career was over after he resigned as governor in 2021 while under investigation for serial sexual harassment. Nope. I guess that was a positive thing in the minds of some NYC voters. What is “interesting” about Cuomo is that, after he resigned, all of the investigations of him were shut down. Is that how it works? If a Walmart employee quits his job while being investigated for crimes then the investigations stop? Or are some people more equal than others?
tobie
@Suzanne: How many elected Dems endorsed Cuomo? As far as I can tell, very, very few. An establishment candidate would have racked up endorsements from state officials but this didn’t happen in the race. It’s so easy to say the establishment sucks, we need new ideas, because in general that’s true. Vibrant parties, like animate beings, evolve. But the idea that there was an establishment candidate in this race strikes me as wrong. Not even Hillary Clinton got involved for good reason.
Anyhow…I’m all for demanding that the party adapt to changing issues & conditions. But griping about the Dem’s pitch misses the boat on the challenges the party faces. We have social media landscape that has effectively branded Dems as weak. Mamdani’s real success was not the emphasis on affordability–Kamala Harris’ entire Presidential campaign was about affordability–but on how to break through social media and reach voters, even when the platforms would seem to be geared against you.
Belafon
@Baud: A big difference between the parties: Democrats will vote for things that help people even if it might hurt them electorally, such as voting for Republican bills that fund the government. Republicans will vote against bills that could be seen as helping Democrats even if their own constituents would be hurt by them not passing.
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker:
Yes. He is exceedingly good at performing feelings. It reads as “authenticity” and “saying it like it is”.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I’ve been hearing people on our side railing pushing antiestablishmentarism for at least two decades. Aside from a handful of successes, they haven’t sold it to primary or general election voters in that whole time. (Obama vs. Clinton doesn’t count since Obama is considered establishment today). And then the get bitter about their failure and start spreading conspiracy theories about the establishment and the DNC.
So while the idea of a Democratic Trump that doesn’t rely on punching down to win over voters is a nice theory, it’s a theory for young, inexperienced Dems, not old jaded Dems like me.
narya
@Betty Cracker: @Baud: And they are losing the so-called “culture war” by miles. Their fashion sense is shit (for men and women, with an emphasis on LOTS of artifice for all), their “humor” isn’t funny, and they insist on straight/white as default (even as they steal liberally from other cultures/identities and even as they violate their own rules all the time).
Suzanne
@tobie: Here’s a partial list:
President Bill Clinton
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros
New York Governor David Paterson
Mayor Mike Bloomberg
Queens Democratic Party & Chairman Greg Meeks
Congressman Jim Clyburn
Congressman Adriano Espaillat
Congressman George Latimer
Congressman Tom Suozzi
Congressman Ritchie Torres
I will agree with you that Mamdani is exceedingly good at all the messaging, communications, vibes-y stuff (that I have been roasted around here for saying that our side should get better at). What just kills me are the crabs in a bucket on our side who see someone doing well and instead of being excited or supportive, are trying to tear him down instead.
JML
@Baud: The anti-establishment movements in Democratic politics have been going on much longer than that of course and happens at least once in every generation. It’s probably slightly worse in the last decade or so in part because people are living longer and the boomers simply refused to retire and pass the torch.
I’ve wondered if this is a part of the GenX dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party writ large: it could be argued that generally it’s never had it’s chance to call the shots; the boomers never went away and then the millennials demanded to be let in the room and GenX has in some ways been shunted aside…
It’s too simplistic and doesn’t really explain policy shifts, but it is sort of interesting…
TONYG
@RaflW: As far as I can see, the deaths of those girls in Texas were due to deliberate failures at the local, county and state levels — followed by Elon (on behalf of Trump) crippling the National Weather Service. Ultimately the idiot voters who put the people in power are to blame. But I think that it’s already being swept into the Memory Hole.
Jackie
O/T This headline is gonna make FFOTUS’s head explode; and make immigrants lives in more peril:
The entire NBC report is worth reading.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I think Obama in 2008 definitely counts as a successful antiestablishment candidate within the party and also in that year’s general election versus McCain. He was fortunate to draw Romney as an opponent in 2012 — there was no way to credibly sell Mitt as an insurgent. Arguably Bill Clinton in the 1992 general election benefited from the antiestablishment impulse too.
Also, I want to note that in NO WAY am I advocating for a “Democratic Trump,” but I do think it’s worth keeping the “establishment” albatross in mind. As we’ve seen, a far superior candidate who appears to be defending a disliked status quo is vulnerable to the machinations of a demagogue. It’s one factor among many, but it can be decisive.
Denali5
@Suzanne: Perhaps the Democrats thought that Cuomo could still attract voters after the harassment charges were made against him, like Trump. I don’t know. I thought Cuomo did a good job during Co-vid. I think it was a mistake for him to think he could be elected as Mayor, but stranger things have happened.
Geminid
@TONYG: I’ve noticed that while Cuomo, Adams and a third Independent– Jim Walden– are talking about uniting behind one candidate, so far Curtis Sliwa has given the idea the cold shoulder and says he won’t drop out in order to stop Mamdani.
Adams favors the idea but says he’s gotta be the unity candidate, while Cuomo shows no inclination to drop out and endorse Adams.
I don’t think there is any way the stop-Mamdani movement can succeed if Sliwa stays in. And if he were to drop out along with two of the three Independents, I think Mamdani will still win that two-candidate race.
The way I see it, Mamdani will win this election unless he blunders, and he seems too sure-footed a poltician to blunder. That’s why I’ve said there is a lot manufactured drama over this race.
There’s a certain amount of exaggeration also. If an elected New York Democrat has not yet endorsed Mamdani,they are portrayed as trying to block him. But there is a difference between the two postures. I’ll believe these Democratic politicians are trying to block Mamdani if and when they endorse one of his opponents, and not until then.
WaterGirl
@JML: We raised funds for Rebecca Cooke in the last cycle, and I’m sure we will again.
We didn’t get it last time, but it’s gettable.
TONYG
@Jackie: This cruel idiocy of “deportation quotas” e is going to lead to the abduction and deportation of U.S. citizens. Maybe that’s already happening.
tobie
@Suzanne: That’s not a huge list and one could even say that Mandami scored the most prized establishment endorsement in NYC. The UFT (which is a huge political player in NYC) endorsed him in the primary. All this is to say the ‘establishment’ didn’t coalesce around a singe figure IMO because so many of the candidates, and especially Cuomo, were flawed. I hope Mandami wins in the general and does great things for NYC. The lesson I draw from his campaign is how to create enthusiasm and engagement on social media. As much as I love great oratory, it’s not what moves people any longer. It comes off as speechifying right now. But candor seems to be what people are aching for.
TONYG
@Geminid: Curtis Sliwa seems like a guy whose fifteen minutes of fame ended when MTV music videos were a hot new phenomenon.
satby
@Baud: so many people on our side are authoritarian in their outlook, and there’s no authoritarian response here that fits within the liberal morality space.
Totally agree. Some of the most angry on our side would be fine with an authoritarian “on their team”; and it seemed like a lot of the frustration with Biden being an “institutionalist” was that he wasn’t acting in an authoritarian way.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Baud:
Uhh… but Obama wasn’t “considered establishment” in 2008, while HRC definitely was.
And I recall that he rode that “fresh face” vibe to his resounding victory in Nov. Helps explain the difference in margin between 2008 and 2012. Maybe we should run an exciting new candidate every time!
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Betty Cracker: 100% agree.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Even if view Obama and Bill Clinton that way, the reality is you haven’t seen widespread effects anywhere else in the federal or state electoral system except for a few isolated places like AOC’s primary win. There doesn’t have to be a revolution, but there has to be sustained progress over a long period of time, and there hasn’t been (the antiestablishment folks don’t seem happy with the progress).
The future is not the past, and I’ll support any Democrat who wins their primary, but I’m done getting invested in rhetoric.
TONYG
I had to look up Jim Walden the other day because I’d never heard of the guy. He’s a lawyer who’s spent the past 23 years defending corporate white-collar criminals. Basically a more obnoxious version of Saul Goodman. Now that’s somebody who the average New Yorker will really want to support!
Baud
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
IIRC. It was John Edwards that excited the antiestablishment folks. It was only after he dropped out that people gravitated toward Obama as the fresh face.
One of Obama’s early endorsers was Ted Kennedy, a liberal but a thoroughly establishment figure.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
I’d have thought that being anti-establishment would involve punching up.
Republicans fake ‘punching up’ by painting college professors and the like, and liberal social values in general, as the ‘elites’ so that by opposing them, they can pretend to be punching up. ISTM there’s plenty of targets out there for actual punching up on the part of Democrats, whether or not they’re young and inexperienced.
Kathleen
@tobie: I think Dems are focused on winning mid terms and I think each candidate/incumbent has to communicate in such a way that is authentic for him and her and offer what his/her district needs most.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
I don’t think so. That’s what it would have to mean for us. For right wingers, it means undoing liberal gains.
ETA
There are plenty of targets for punching up. The hard part is convincing enough voters to support that.
Suzanne
@Denali5: Apparently there was a feeling that Cuomo “was punished enough” and had “paid his dues” by being forced to resign.
The fact that some of those people are now getting wrapped around the axle by Mamdani’s college application strikes me as…. disingenuous.
Kathleen
@satby: I did not know about his cancer. Will miss his voice. What a powerful piece.
tobie
@Kathleen: Definitely agree. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy, but authenticity in whatever form it takes is key.
satby
I don’t live in NYC and so am agnostic on which Democrat wins 😉 but a cautionary tale about confusing rhetoric with reality is Chicago, where Mayor Johnson has historically low popularity, even with his base voters. Big city mayor is not an entry level position.
Baud
@satby:
Well, there’s only one Democrat who can win now. And yes, hopefully the reality will live up to the rhetoric, unlike in Chicago.
satby
@Kathleen: the cancer Stonekettle refers to is Trump. He had a health scare that turned out not be be cancer. But that column spoke, and still speaks for a lot of us. And foretold a lot of what’s occurred since. I link hoping people will read the source material because everyone can’t keep up with everything.
Suzanne
@tobie:
Every cultural era has its own style, and different media showcase (or punish) different skills. The style of the last 15-20 years or so is very much this unscripted, emotional, unhierarchical communication. And the rise of podcasts supports these long, sometimes rambly conversations, whereas the viral “vertical” video shows off these punchy moments.
I have to say, the idea that people wanted the president to be “boring again” is one of those things that seemed to me to be such a fundamental misreading of the environment that it bordered on malpractice. Why would anyone look at American society and think that people want less content?! That they want less performance?!
Jackie
@TONYG:
It IS ALREADY happening. The point the NBC article makes is under FFOTUS, more arrests and detention of immigrants (and legal US citizens) are happening, BUT many aren’t getting deported – thanks to federal judges insisting on due process. They’re trapped in ICE holding facilities.
lowtechcyclist
@tobie:
But (a) it’s not complete, and (b) it’s chock full of heavy hitters. Maybe it didn’t have much effect in NYC, but we’re also talking about how younger voters nationally feel about whether the Dems are too ‘establishment,’ and these endorsements certainly sent the wrong message to them.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I agree with your last point. That was liberal projection onto the rest of the electorate. Even many of the people who hate Trump love Trump. We should be wary of everyone we don’t know.
Suzanne
@Baud: That is not just liberal projection. It is specifically older people wanting to return to an older style. It is out of touch in the extreme.
When we are flummoxed as to why our candidate read as old, when the opponent did not, we should consider why that is.
Jeffro
110%
Baud
@Suzanne:
My answer is because Trump punches down and people (whites and men in particular) wanted that, and didn’t care about age. I know other people have different theories.
ETA: I decline to give credence to the idea that Harris presented as old compared to Trump.
ETA2: It’s the same reason a wimp like Trump presents as manly.
dnfree
@Martin: Agreeing with others that I think of you as one of the reasonable voices here.
Jeffro
I like it.
Help make the metro areas more livable, affordable, etc AND publicize the heck out of it.
In theory, this makes them bigger (possibly, big enough to swamp the thinly-populated rural areas) and even more fired up to vote for Dems.
Big & Bold BLUE!
make rural areas pale pink again!
Jeffro
Absolutely.
They don’t have to tear him down…if they can’t say anything nice, they can just keep their lips zipped.
tobie
@lowtechcyclist: Mandami had heavy hitters too from AOC and Bernie Sanders to Letitia James. And with institutional forces like the UFT, SEIU in NY and Manhattan Dems, he had powerful backing. All this convinces me that there was no establishment candidate around which the state’s party brass coalesced. Maybe that’s good, maybe that’s bad. Dems are a big tent party, and they have different constituencies to appeal to.
Politics has become religion in this country. It’s there to channel the id, and populists, left and right, have aimed their fire at the so-called ‘establishment’ (the deep state, elites, globalists, fat cats, etc). It doesn’t surprise me that GenZ likes that but I have no truck with it.
Bokonon
One of the methods the right wing uses is to bury these things in emotions and sentiment and prayer – we are always asked to weep and rend our garments for the victims of the latest “senseless tragedy” splashed across our screens. This distracts everyone from clear-minded accountability. Once the emotions fade and the news cycle shifts, then we are on to the next tragedy … and the next … and the next. They really aren’t crazy or random or senseless at all. They are completely predictable. But we are choosing not to do anything to prevent them.
Suzanne
@Baud: Trump reads as funny to a lot of people. I don’t think Harris read as old next to him, but there is a lot of discourse out there about women and humor, and how it is often read as unfeminine, mean, emasculating, attention-seeking.
RaflW
@TONYG: One of the dastardly things the GOP has figured out is that they can tap into the lifelong feeling that a lot of people have of “no one likes a know it all” and apply that to anyone with policy chops. Brand them all ‘elites’.
It’s elites who want you vaccinated. Elites made you wear your seatbelt. Elites sit in their fancy offices and make your life a string of annoyances. And so on.
But I never imagined it would reach the point where we’re abandoning NASA, hampering or even closing wide areas of NIH & CDC, defunding much of higher ed’s research into science, etc.
Anti-elite has become anti-knowledge. Which is bananas!
Geminid
@TONYG: An Emerson poll released a few days before the NYC primary asked respondents about general.election matchups. It showed Curtic Sliwa at 13% with Cuomo the Dem nominee, and at 16% with Mamdani the Dem nominee.
Mamdani polled at 35%, Sliwa 16%, Adams 15% and Walden 6%; with 28% undecided.
One thing that stands out about this poll is that it substantially underestimated Mamdani’s primary strength. Like other polls, it modeled the 2021 electorate while this year saw a surge of Mamdani support among voters who did not come out in 2021.
I figure Emerson’s findings as to general election similarly understated Mamdani’s support. This is one reason I believe he will win this November.
Another reason is an appraisal of Mamdani’s political skills posted by NYT reporter Emma Fitzimmons. It’s from campaign consultant Neil Kwatra, whose company worked for the Cuomo campaign:
Baud
@Suzanne:
I agree with that. He presents as a caricature, the type of white male doofus popularized by Archie Bunker to Homer Simpson, and a lot of people who aren’t necessarily hateful don’t look past that to see the evil done to innocent people or to this country’s future.
Jeffro
@Suzanne: trumpov is entertaining to many folks; in that sense, he’s an amusement (if not actually amusing) to them.
The problem of course is, we don’t need an entertainer, even a benign one, running our government. But we have a malicious clown, and because of the ‘clown’ part, many don’t see the ‘malicious’ part.
Bokonon
I agree. People in this country have started prioritizing emotions and reactions and self-expression as something more genuine than logic, something that always needs to be respected and listened to. And what we are getting is a lot of sloppy, non-linear, illogical and badly informed FEELINGS and MOMENTS about things.
And then those people go around reacting and emoting and posing themselves.
Donald Trump understands all this. The Republican Party understands all this. This is why they are in the content-creation and reality TV business full time.
Suzanne
@Baud: So on the topic of women and humor….. I remember reading, years ago (can’t find a link, sorry), some social scientists polled men and women about what they meant when they said that they find “a good sense of humor” attractive in a partner. Overwhelmingly, women defined “having a good sense of humor” as making jokes, and men largely defined it as laughing at my jokes. So these gendered expectations are still very real.
But humor is probably one of the most potent ways for politicians to connect in this era. Stewart, Colbert, etc. mixed these things up. And making a joke is one of the best ways to show off intelligence in that unscripted way, show off personability and cross cultural boundaries, and not be trapped by politician-speak.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jeffro: I see all clowns that way. And that’s why none of them have killed me yet.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bokonon: A new Romantic Age?
Suzanne
@Bokonon: I agree that the Republicans are only offering trashy entertainment to fill the hole when good government used to be, and that’s a real tragedy. But I also think that being good at the media environment and being good at governing don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Fuck, normal-ass Dems like us here donate tons of money to these campaigns. Hire some smart people with it! Listen to them! These aren’t FSM-bestowed talents, these are skills that can be developed. And when you do have candidates who show promise…. support them!
Kathleen
@satby: Thank you for the clarification. I’m at work so my mind is leaping LOL! Everything he said is right on.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Baud:
In my recollection, he excited the labor-left. The folks who wanted to talk about income inequality. (This was basically me in 2007, and I was a strong Edwards supporter at the time.) Different crowd than was drawn to Obama.
As for Teddy, his endorsement made Obama’s primary win possible – Obama needed a big endorsement from a liberal establishment figure (exactly because Obama was an outsider, not in spite of it), and needed this in order to beat Clinton, not McCain.
TurnItOffAndOnAgain
delete
Ksmiami
@Suzanne: I’ve said for years that Dems needed to break with their consultants and hire the best Ad agencies to be funny, irreverent merciless
Martin
@Suzanne: @MagdaInBlack: @Nelle:
Thank you all. Sorry for being the source of so much of that drama – but sometimes we gotta surface things to move forward.
frosty
The Guardian has a quiz on how much you know about the Budget Busting Bill. I got 10/10. Thanks Balloon-Juice!
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/10/trump-bill-big-beautiful-quiz
Captain C
@Baud:
Sustained progress won’t ever happen if the antiestablishment types keep voting Democrats out after only giving them two years to fix the latest Republican disaster each time. I’m not sure what they expect to happen, and I don’t know how to convince them that you can’t get everything you want instantly, especially if you’re quick to give up.
Captain C
@satby: I suspect that if/when he wins, Mamdani will have plenty of experienced help, starting with Brad Lander and hopefully Adrienne Adams (the good Adams) to help him work the levers of power in NYC.
Bokonon
I agree with both of you. One of my deep and abiding frustrations with the Democrats is that they ask for money for critical and desperate campaigns. … and they ask for money … and ask for still more money.
And then they plow all that money into the same damn blah-blah-blah advertisements and blah-blah-blah mass media buys and traditional blah-blah-blah messaging, while the GOP candidates are out running circles around them. And then the Democrats lose.
And then the Democrats send out more fundraising requests saying “With our big unified effort, we made this election so close! Help us prevent [blank] Republican from enacting their extreme agenda that’s so so bad for America!”
I mean … GODDAMIT people. Stop giving yourself a gold star for coming in second. Stop praising yourself. Junk the playbook. Junk the scripts. Junk the old ways of doing things that aren’t working. Maybe those consultants and media strategies and messages should be tossed out when they lose elections, and replaced with something that wins. Hmmmmm? A little bit of ruthlessness? A little bit of accountability? Stop playing defense all the time?
The Audacity of Krope
Ah, the same type of voters who think both sides make some good points and bad points and wish they’d just work together. I’ll offer a theory. These precise voters are the cause of mealy-mouthed politicians.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud:
Well, if enough MAGA voters die or are too incapacitated to vote because of lack of Medicaid-associated healthcare, then yes, cuts to Medicaid might help us out-vote the dimwits.
Martin
@Geminid: I think the most interesting analysis around Mamdani is how he beat Cuomo with so much less money. And it was even more of an imbalance than it looked in the final analysis because in his run from 1% polling to being a real contender, he had almost no money. A lot of what he had in the end came right at the end.
In democratic orthodoxy, that’s not supposed to be possible. So much of how Democrats pick candidates is around their ability to fund raise. So much of what drives the Democratic strategy is those consultants (who drive the need for money, because they want it) and the ways it gets spent on ads and the like. Trump won despite Harris raising more money. That relationship between money and votes is not as reliable as the DNC thinks it is. (And if you want to know what I think people think of as ‘the establishment’ it’s the part of the party that think in those terms – that an energetic, charismatic candidate who can connect well with voters is worse than someone who looks like a TV politician who can get millions of dollars out of their attorney friends, and big donors. And a lot of voters (include me in that) feel that candidates who can authentically navigate the new ways that voters connect with the world – social media, virality, etc. are going to outperform those who can’t. MTG is very authentic in the viral language of the right and Crockett/AOC/Frost are very authentic in the viral language of the left. You don’t need to be young to have that natural understanding, but it’s a skill a LOT more young people have.)
And so in those terms Cuomo was the establishment guy because a bunch of billionaires showered money on him to pay a thousand consultants to run a zillion TV ads on PIX11 calling Mamdani an antisemite, while Mamdani was putting up TikTok videos of him interviewing Halal carts asking them what they’d charge for a plate if he made this small policy change.
There was nothing particularly socialist about the street vendor license fee. That could very well be a republican policy (cutting regulation for small business owners) but it was a connection to voters because he personally (not some polling outfit out of DC) is out doing the work on something that directly impacts affordability of a common item and putting it up on TikTok in an entertaining way. Not filtering it through an ad agency is a big part of the value here because everyone is being managed for optics and we don’t trust that shit. I think Elissa Slotkin could do the same thing around centrist democratic polices if that medium were natural to her.
Martin
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Same here. Edwards was 100% labor left.
Darkrose
@Baud: I don’t really understand this comment. Folks on Bluesky aren’t infuriated with the NYT because they’re attacking our fave. We’re furious because they’ve finally gone full mask off and hood on.
The paper that kept insisting that German Jews were overreacting to the nice Herr Hitler published a non-story about Mamdani’s application to a college he didn’t get into when he was 17. The story was based on hacked data provided to them by a known white supremacist the lead writer follows on Substack. Said writer was allowed to provide anonymity to the source; when the Guardian revealed his name, the Times just called him “an academic who opposes affirmative action.”
Said writer is also part of NYT’s crack team of transphobes—you know, the ones who wrote some of the pieces Roberts cited in his opinion that trans kids have no rights. The Times and the Atlantic are largely responsible for mainstreaming TERF bullshit in the US.
Not to mention their role in sanewashing Trump, but her emails, bashing Biden and Harris, publishing Judith Miller’s lies to help gin up the case for thr Iraq War, and manufacturing a scandal out of a failed real estate deal to try to bring Clinton down.
The Times continues to defend their non-story by saying “people are talking about it so it must be important.” The paper of record runs on vibes, comforting the comfortable and gaslighting the afflicted as they do everything possible to afflict them further. They could endorse Mamdani tomorrow and they’d still be a disgrace.
Chief Oshkosh
@RevRick: NYT and WaPo set the left-side margins of political discourse, though. If any local news outlet provides coverage that can possibly be perceived as being “even more liberal than the NYTimes,” welp, that news outlet going to go through some things.
Baud
@Darkrose:
Your history is correct. But the NYT keeps on trucking with liberal dollars and attention. Some people are currently mad about how the NYT is covering Mamdani, but I don’t think that will do any lasting damage to the paper.
Ruckus
@Baud:
They might not care about the evil done to innocent people or to this country’s future.
Some people don’t see anything more than what is right in front of them, and when I say right in front of them I mean no more than what they can see in a closed room with the lights out at midnight. They don’t think in any kind of futuristic way or concept. If I’m being nice I say they have their eyes closed, and if I’m not in that nice a mood I say they have their head up their own ass. And often so far up that there seems to be no way they can contemplate a rational, reasonable, world. All they see is, what’s that 4 letter word? And the worst part is they think having one’s head up their exit port is normal, because otherwise they’d figure out how to pull their head out. But it takes a lot to get them to even contemplate doing this, let alone attempting to.
Geminid
@Captain C: Also, Mamdani has 4 years experience as a New York State Assemblyman. He seems like he would be a fast learner and that experience should stand him in good stead, especially since many of a New York Ciity Mayor’s powers are conditioned by state law.
Fun fact: Mamdani was born in Uganda, and the incumbent Assemblywoman he beat to win his seat was born in what was then Rhodesia. Now it’s Zimbabwe.
Captain C
@Baud:
If by that you mean damage to their bottom line, probably not.
If you mean to their reputation, well, at this point, the anti-Mamdani nonsense is just bouncing rubble, given decades of Foot Parkinson’s, Sanewashing, Butter Emails, WMDs. Whitewater, a Pulitzer for printing Stalinist propaganda, and the various Hitler apologetics that they seemed fine with running before it became obvious even to the FTFNYT that maybe they shouldn’t be praising him.
Emily B.
@Martin: Just chiming in to underline what Suzanne, Nelle, and MagdaInBlack have already said. Your thoughtful comments are always worth a careful read.
satby
@Captain C: if I had lived in NYC, I would probably have ranked Lander first, and they do seem to have a good, supportive working relationship. So I agree, he can certainly be potentially successful. I hope so, because progressive government has been dealt a significant blow whenever one of them is elected and then is ineffective or just lousy at the job.
Ruckus
@Martin:
You don’t need to be young to have that natural understanding, but it’s a skill a LOT more young people have.
A lot of people, as they age, seem to believe that whatever they think is the right way to think, and that thinking selfishly is normal. And for a lot of humans it is their normal. They get fixated in their process of growth, that they’ve gone as far as necessary. And as greed is a normal human concept that we all have as a protective concept of survival one has to grow to get the concept that the world – and humanity is a bit different that it was not all that long ago. Mainly in that we can communicate in ways that didn’t exist not all that long ago. Like what we are doing now. And we have, if shitforbrains doesn’t screw everything up, the possibility that enough of us are mature enough to understand that we all are born, live, and die and we should make the in-between part better for all of us, not just the few wealthy ones. Which is why we pay income tax based upon income and wealth.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Suzanne: I agree 💯
Soprano2
@JWR: I heard a “This American Life” episode where they talked to doctors who had been in Gaza, and how many of them reported a significant amount of children and teenagers who had been shot in the head or the chest. All of them had worked in war zones before, and they all said they had never seen anything like it before. They said it was almost certain that these kids were shot deliberately. It’s not an untold story, but it’s not a story that was on the front page of any paper either. Lots of terrible things are happening there that most people know nothing about.
Soprano2
@lowtechcyclist: That was all in service of the desperate attempt to win back the votes of the only person the press believes actually matters, the person who they believe is the “average” voter – the white man. That’s why so much was directed at rural areas, it was a futile attempt to show them that Democrats care about them too. You know, the voters who already believe we give everything to “those people” in the cities even when we don’t.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: That’s not why they’re trying to tear him down. It’s because the R’s are branding him as a communist and a socialist, and all these Dems are terrified that will rub off on them if Mamdani is successful. They’ve been told for decades that these things are bad, thus their reaction. If he were just as charismatic but was selling a centrist agenda, they would all be lining up behind him as the bright new talent.
Soprano2
You mean the people who were complaining because Biden’s DOJ didn’t arrest FFOTUS on January 21, 2021?
WTFGhost
@Baud: Whooo, look at Baud, being Mr. Cheerful.
But it’s true: we know Republicans will shift the blame.
It’s also true, ordinary people are getting sick of the BS Republicans try to stuff down our throats, and, right now, Trump thinks all he has to do is keep tightening the screws, and we’ll wilt, because he wins elections that way, when people are complacent.
But people aren’t complacent any longer. We’re seeing people with green cards having them challenged, and canceled, and having people then shipped off, potentially to foreign hellholes, because Trump thinks cruelty looks strong. People think he looks cruel, not strong, and he’s going to keep looking cruel because he doesn’t have any other play.
I mean, what’s he going to do, walk into a federal detention site, and throw rolls of paper towels at the prisoners? He might try that (AGAIN!!!), but it won’t work.
WTFGhost
@Steve LaBonne: Not the defectives, the defectORS, who might be less defective.
@Baud: I suspect every reporter gives the grumpy old peckerheads party bribes in “how we will cover your criminals.”
“You won’t directly quote Trump without cleaning up his language. You will quote all peckerheads we make available to you for grumpy old commentary. And you will observe the solemnity and dignity of the Presidency, even if Trump sounds like a four year old, including the potty training accident, in the middle of the conversation.”
@Betty Cracker: Yes, Van Orden is the drunken weirdo. He also yelled at those kids.
@TONYG: He would have had to become a highly paid lobbyist. But, on the minus side, he’d be spending the rest of his life with Republicans, which is a pretty depressing possibility.
Oh, they’re physically afraid of him too, now. It was all fun and games, when Dems would get the death threats, but now, Murkowski has a sad because her Deep Concerns no longer protect her!
Remember, all it takes is one moment, and sudden death can take you from 100 yards away. A clean shot, you might not even have time to become aware that you’re dying before the lights go out. These people have been wanting *children* to have their own AR-15, and, if you’ve trained at all, 100 yards is an easy shot.
And this is why they’ve been talking about guns, remember? Second Amendment Solutions? So, this is all home grown, Republicans have brought this all down on their own heads, and now whine and moan that, sure, they winked and nodded that Democrats protect child molesters, but now, people are thinking *REPUBLICANS* can be bad, and that’s *dangerous*. People could get hurt!!!
WTFGhost
@Jeffro: It’s fear; Democrats really do have battered spouse syndrome.
The thing is, as people always say, no one ever votes for the abused spouse, they vote for the abuser, who at least gets things done and knows what he wants. You can’t be the nice person in the middle who gets slapped around.
sixthdoctor
Hey, Ken Paxton’s wife filed for divorce! And I don’t know if this guy has an inside track, but if Cornyn was responsible via an info dump, well, that’s just magically delicious!
Trivia Man
@Moondoggus: when i ran for congress 20+ years ago i fid the math. The US congress had a higher incumbent reelection rate than the Russian Duma.
Trivia Man
@Jeffro: bonus: rescue the youth trapped in those dying rural communities. Help them move places with more opportunities and compassion.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Baud: I think that is partly true. I think one thing that appeals to some about Trump is that he ignores the process and the rules and gets results. That’s horrifying to me, because I think what he’s doing is awful. However, I get the frustration with the glacial pace of basically everything in the government under non-Trump leadership. Biden got a ton passed through Congress but a lot of it took years to implement. As much as Scott’s Agenda hates them, the Abundance Dems are right that requiring so much red tape to get things done hurts us with the general public. We have to become more responsive
Martin
@Baud: It might in New York.
The NYT is a weird organ in that it’s a local paper with a national reach (and can suck at both – remember when they missed George Santos being a completely fraudulent politician running in their backyard which became really obvious the second anyone looked at his campaign?) but it does need the local support to some degree and really what it’s revealing itself to be in the city is increasingly the paper of the rich assholes, and if the broader public reject it, it’s hard for a paper to not become the thing they are perceived to be because they will ultimately always serve the customers they have left. And don’t underestimate how much of their revenue has come off of newsstand sales around the city. Not sure how much that’s still a thing, but it used to be a pretty huge thing. NYC is wired for pedestrian convenience.
Martin
@Ruckus: I think a real generational divide is the ability for young people to be unguarded. Older generations have always had certain rules of decorum and what was appropriate in public and lots of forms of communication were so expensive that you wouldn’t dare go in front of a video camera without makeup and a script and nice clothes and all that. And as this stuff commoditizes and becomes commonplace those conventions steadily go away, but if you grew up with that and internalized it’s hard to let go of. And I think that’s why older politicians often struggle with that – they came up in a space where you had to manage that image in every way and younger politicians tend to not think in those terms. So a public that comes to like that kind of engagement as a consumer is attracted to authentic politicians, but a lot of politicians aren’t practiced at being authentic – in fact they’re practiced at being inauthentic.
I think part of Trump superpower here is that because he’s a narcissist, he’s mask-on all the time, to such a degree that it’s the only thing anyone knows about him probably even his kids, but he’s so practiced at it that it looks authentic even when it’s a complete lie. So he’ll say inappropriate shit, which proves he’s not guarded, and also lie about his most basic intentions which comes off as totally authentic. So he’s doing the new way to campaign, going bonkers on Twitter and all that, and shaping how politics is going to be communicated (whether it should be done this way is sort of immaterial at this point) which is a lot closer to how Jasmine Crocket communicates than it is to how Chuck Schumer communicates, which is why she tends to be more effective than him, even though he might have better policy ideas, and experience and all that. The substance isn’t the issue, but what you can get voters to hear is. Schumer et al (there are a lot I’d put in this category) struggle to get voters to hear it because the mechanism and affect is relatively foreign to them, but not really to Crockett, AOC, etc. Trump is better able to communicate bad ideas than most democrats are able to communicate good ones. And the bad ideas will win out in that environment. And Dems keep trying to throw money at the problem, because that’s a solution Schumer is very good at (to his credit, we do still need money) but it’s not a substitute.
I don’t even think it’s necessarily stubbornness, rather the way the world has changed is such that if you were raised believing that this part of your personality is private and there’s a huge cost to revealing too much of yourself publicly, even if you recognize that’s the thing the modern political space requires, it doesn’t mean you can get there. It’s REALLY hard to be open in a way that every voice previously said to never be open about. And political consultants were reinforcing that for ages – don’t gaffe, don’t misspeak, it’s destroy your career, remember Howard Dean? And like, that was two decades ago, man, that world doesn’t exist any longer.
Martin
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Eh. Like, my problem with the Abundance Agenda is that while I do think they have some good observations in there, so much of the ‘red tape’ arguments are complete bullshit.
I think it’s a little more subtle than that. Yes, red tape can be a problem but they (and everyone) makes the argument that it’s impossible to build in California due to red tape at the state level. No. I live in a city that has added an entire city’s worth of housing every decade since I moved here. It went from 100K to 325K in 30 years. We’re going to add another 50K in the next 5 years. We’re building more housing than pretty much anywhere in the US, and I’ve worked with the planning commission as a citizen rep and I talk to the city planners and all that and I’ve asked them and they said, no, it wasn’t particularly difficult. There are specific things you need to do and if you understand the benefit of those things you do them and it’s pretty easy. And if you think that stuff is bullshit you struggle.
But there’s a different dynamic which isn’t ‘government waste fraud and abuse’ which I think Democrats are more guilty of and that is a paralysis for fear of it getting worse for someone. That’s not a formal process issue like red tape would be, it’s an informal decision making issue that causes us to be indecisive in a perfect is the enemy of good kind of sense. I think it’s well intentioned – we have this really challenging coalition and we don’t want black voters to be on the receiving end of the getting worse, or immigrants or the LGBTQ community and so on, and so we work so hard to be inclusive that we maybe undermine the result – it takes too long, we get voted out, and so on. Sometimes the latter turns into the former, but I think there’s too much focus on the former and not enough on the latter.
I think one of the biggest benefits that came out of the Biden-Harris transition was that the whole thing happened fast. There was an instinct to ‘oh we need to have a primary, we need to let other candidates throw into the ring’ and like ‘no, we do not fucking have that kind of time – Harris is already on the ballot, it has to be her’. And yeah, some people didn’t like that, but that was the party embracing the ‘perfect is the enemy of the good’ in a way that I think was very energizing for Dems – oh, we can make decisions quickly, look at us!
(I’m not trying to make a point regarding the merits of Biden or Harris, merely that the party had a crisis to respond to and did so quickly, and doing it quickly had merit and I think at least some of the positive response wasn’t entirely enthusiasm about Harris but enthusiasm that we were organized and effective as a party and could put in the work to get on top of it.)