It’s not just the talking heads. Many, if not most staffers think and talk this way. Dem electeds should require all applicants to staff jobs write an essay on current politics without using terms like BIPOC, “centering”, “lived experience”, “black and brown bodies”, “spaces” etc.
Well reasoned. As was your nyt article. But Biden should never have run for a second term. His first term rationale was to save and repair from Trump but should have kept his word and transitioned to a younger generation. Harris was a poor VP pick. His plunge to the left perplexing and hard to understand.
Clearly the Democrats went collectively nuts c. 2019 - 2021 and many politicians like Harris adopted policies far to the left of those that they espoused before or since. My take was that that whole period was a kind of drunken bender they've recovered from. The Republican take was that was the moment when Democrats briefly showed their true colours, and deep down they are all waiting for the ripe moment to empty the prisons, defund the police, illegalize private health insurance, and force all schools to teach DEI instead of algebra. Apparently a lot of people buy the Republican take.
After the various elections in 2017 and 2018, I was very confident that Democrats had started to figure things out and would cruise to an easy win over Trump.
That first primary debate in 2019 just absolutely crushed my optimism and filled me with a sense of dread that Democrats were going to double down and continue to make the same mistakes that led to Trump's victory in the first place.
That string of primary debates was the second most stressful period of my entire life. None of the candidates were strong enough, either, or had some fatal flaw, like Biden's age. There's a much deeper field now, at least.
Agree. I am still puzzled by Biden breaking hard left. James Clyburn got Biden the nomination with SC and Super Tuesday so he was beholden to him And he was competing against Bernie for the nomination so he had to go left to get the nomination and capture the Bernie wing. But he was never a lefty and could have gone back to the middle. And why did he commit to black woman as VP? Harris was not a strong primary candidate. He could have committed to a woman if he had to commit at all. Maybe Clyburn’s price ?
Yes, as I recall Biden committed to choose a woman VP early on, and then, after James Clyburn saved his candidacy, he felt bound to nominate an African-American, who had to be a woman, too. The painful thing to me is that Kamala Harris turned out to be tough, visionary, and strategic, but no one had expected much of her, and it was too late to turn things around.
Ivan's comment is so insightful. I think Democrats went nuts far earlier than 2019 with what James Carville calls "faculty lounge speak" etc., and all it came to a head in 2019 - 2021 with that insanely long series of primary debates that fatally wounded all of them.
Biden never promised to nominate a black woman, and two of the women who went though the vetting process and were reported by the New York Times as "finalists" were white: Elizabeth Warren and Gretchen Whitmer. I do think a lot of Democrats (probably including many within the Biden campaign) had developed an idea after George Floyd that the pick needed to be black, and I suspect the vet of Warren was more of an effort to make the left feel taken seriously than a real consideration. But I don't know what the point of vetting Gretchen Whitmer was if you had absolutely, positively decided to nominate only a black woman.
Neither "black" nor "woman" is a meaningful qualification for public office, and it was a mistake for Biden to imply that it is. (Equally, neither is "white" or "man".)
Equally flawed was President Biden's performative announcement that his Supreme Court nominee would be a black woman. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was a well-qualified nominee with a solid record, fully worthy of the appointment, and has demonstrated that since taking up the position. His prior restriction of the candidate list hints of the finger of "affirmative action" on the selection scale.
Organizations do go through the motions of vetting multiple candidates even or especially when they already know who they will hire. You're probably right that his mind wasn't absolutely made up, and Whitmer is from Michigan, a key state, in addition to her political talent. I wonder if they didn't hit it off, or if he got a ton of pressure to go with Harris. Maybe someday that book will be written.
Agree v I was in error. He first only said woman vp. I am not so much with you about her being visionary I did not hear much vision Especially on foreign policy where she had no idea what to say about Gaza other than there must be a ceasefire
To compound matters, Biden’s late departure guaranteed that Harris would be the nominee. Had there been a primary, we would have had the opportunity to select someone who wouldn’t be looked upon as part of the incumbent administration. A swing-stater would have been nice, too. Cynically, though, I think Democrats would still have chosen Harris as the heir apparent. But we will never know.
I remember Josh calling Harris, in 2020, something like "the Biden of VP choices" because she was so unoffensive. I can't criticize him much because I just nodded along. We were wrong.
I'm not entirely sure we'd be inaugurating Klobuchar, especially if she had been the VP. The COVID-induced economic problems would be the same, and if she were the VP, she'd be tied to the Biden administration and be held to account for its perceived economic missteps.
Biden picking Klobuchar might've signaled a more moderate tone and a more moderate tone might've led to fewer inflationary policies and better messaging due to an administration with less of Warren staffers and their out-of-touch academic leftist.
They might've had a bigger victory in 2020 and more room to lose some voters and still win in 2024.
Maybe, but the fundamentals of the supply chain problems from COVID-19 made inflation almost inevitable, and a lack of stimulus to help keep people afloat might have meant a recession as well. It was almost certainly a Kobayashi Maru situation.
Inflation might have been inevitable but when your administration stakes its entire reputation on a bunch of inflationary policies and inflation happens, it's not unreasonable for people to point the finger at you.
Supply chain problems and similar temporary issues like mass chicken killing to prevent epidemic spread don't necessarily cause inflation. Prices go up temporarily but tend to drop again when supply issues are resolved. Goosing the economy by increasing the available spendable money tends to persist, partly because central banks are properly quite wary of the results of monetary deflation.
I tend to agree. It's worth pointing out that Klob (who for the record was my #1 pick for POTUS in 2020) ran her weakest race of her Senatorial career last week, against a total level 10 freak show of a GOP opponent. Or to your point, maybe not her *weakest* race, but her smallest margin.
Yeah, although I think I probably follow Minnesota news a bit more than you do. It's really hard to overstate just how much of a freak show Royce White was (apparently, maybe still is) as a candidate. Makes Sharron Angle look like GHWB.
Ouch!!! I'm suddenly remembering that there was an analysis in 2019 or 2020 by Nate Silver or someone like that which showed that based on the margins Klobuchar had achieved across her state in Red districts that she was the most likely of all the Democratic candidates to win nationally. Do you remember that?
The fundamentals were a serious problem, but I think a better candidate could have explained "listen, this was all inevitable from covid, all the inflation we didn't get in 2020 got pushed out, and here are the objective comparisons across the industrialized countries."
And if Klobuchar went on The View and was asked what she would've done differently than Biden, she wouldn't freeze up.
Which is why Biden should have stepped down after the 22 election. Sadly, though, Democratic voters would probably have picked whoever was VP in the primaries. Normally, incumbency is not a bad thing. But these ain’t normal times.
Maybe part of what Josh is saying is that Klobuchar might have helped keep Biden from making some of the mistakes that Josh has highlighted? That inflation could have been less without those mistakes?
I agree with you that Klobuchar probably wouldn't have won either, though. It will take someone far more charismatic.
As a white woman who does not think that my demographic characteristics are terribly revealing I appreciate this. It’s sad to me because I honestly feel like the left raising the salience of identity issues so much helps make voting for Trump easier for non-white people because the message on the left is that almost all white people are pretty racist and since they are the majority why not just vote for the honest racist who tells it to your face and says he’ll cut your taxes. I really hope that we can get back to appreciating that we are not in a situation of structural racism anymore and stop trying to shame people into voting for Democrats— that’s never going to work with enough people to matter.
I agree with you that shaming doesn't work. Someone (I wish I could remember who) said that the US is much less racist now than it used to be, but when "racist" became an insult, no one wanted to deal with it any further.
But are we not in a situation of structural racism anymore? For example, my perception is that how White people are treated by police is still very different from how Black and Hispanic people are treated. Trump could still call Harris stupid and his followers would believe him, even though she demolished him in the debate, simply because they assume a Black woman is stupid. What am I missing?
I think that there is interpersonal racism that can influence police behavior but I don’t think there are systems and policies discriminating against people based on race. But I understand that the legacies of structural racism have all kinds of echoes today that make life harder for Black people specifically but I think the best way to address that is to understand that history and make policies that are fair across the board.
Walter Lippmann* pointed out about a century ago that we all rely on stereotypes for a variety of reasons. One reason is that they significantly reduce the effort of making decisions. Another is that most of those in common use encapsulate some truth.
OK. Or more subtle means that would help address some of these echoes without relying on explicit targeting. For example, Mike Madrid explained that Harris's proposed housing program would be particularly beneficial to Latinos because a high percentage of construction workers are Latinos, because many Latinos have risen to middle class status now and want to buy homes but are hurt by high housing prices, and because the specified price range matched what many Latinos were looking for. But this program would have been open to everyone and would have benefitted many others, too (had it worked).
Whether it's a current policy or a legacy, I don't see how black people are going to catch up. For example, there's a very nice community in Queens where housing is underpriced simply because it became majority black. If you need collateral for a loan, you are at a disadvantage, just because you happened to be born in that area. And there is still discrimination against African-Americans seeking to buy houses or get loans. There have been fairly recent court cases about this in the DC area. While the answer is fairness for everyone, how do African-Americans ever catch up?
I think we probably agree a lot. Personally I would support explicit reparations to address historical discrimination against the descendants of those who were enslaved but I highly doubt that will ever be politically possible. But I think you can target programs for lower income groups and they will help because discrimination has made Black people disproportionately lower income. That’s what Obama did by making the Medicaid expansion a central part of the ACA. I am not suggesting that racism doesn’t have a incredible influence on outcomes today but I am suggesting that framing all policies in terms of how they impact racial groups seems to have backfired and the price of that failure will not be paid by the white bourgeoisie but rather by those who rely on Medicaid or who expend a higher percentage of their income on goods that will be hit by tariffs.
It is quite a way from obvious why "a very nice community in Queens where housing is underpriced simply because it became majority black" is a problem. It should make it easier for black people to own homes, especially if laws that prohibit loan discrimination based on race are enforced vigorously.
I just don't think you should come to any conclusions about the US from an election Trump won 51x49 that you wouldn't believe if he lost 49x51.
This also applies to how some people describe parts of the country as simply "red" or "blue" when that's just a representation of the median voter. A state like Ohio went from "cool, blue collar, union" state when Obama won it 53x47, but is now "bad racist state" when Trump wins it 53x47 too.
Finally, as someone from Brazil, people's image of Latin Americans as natural progressives is just ridiculous given that my country elected Bolsonaro (and those that immigrate to US tend to be more right wing, because otherwise they might choose Portugal).
I think this is a great point in terms of the absolute percentages, and on some level you are correct altogether. We can't forget that almost as many Americans DID vote for a multiracial woman for president the first time in history.
At the same time, I think part of what people are reacting to is the real or imagined trends or trajectories and potential endpoints. When Obama won, it seemed like there was a trend toward America becoming more tolerant and just. Now it seems clear that there is a trend of Trump getting more support over time with everyone except college-educated women, even as Trump and his party have gotten more extreme over time. Maybe that was always present but simply held in check or disguised, or maybe we don't see ourselves clearly, but I find it profoundly shocking because it seems to be setting us back all the way to the 1950s.
I'm horrified by Trump's reelection and dread the consequences, from the millions of people who will suffer and die needlessly to satisfy Trump's and Vance's pathetic insecurities and lust for revenge, to wondering if I'll finally get Covid and die after RFK Jr. bans vaccination or a medication that I need to survive.
Nonetheless, I feel this incredible lightness of being as the burden of defending all the wrong-headed and totally counterproductive Democratic policies falls away. I can thoroughly enjoy Josh's articles without the cognitive dissonance that made them painful before I gave up hope that things would turn out OK if I just pretended they were.
I don't know where we'll be fours years from now. I fear Trump and the people behind him will be able to take things too far for any recovery in my lifetime. I hope, instead, that this election will shock enough people out of their complacency or delusion so that people like Josh and Sarah Longwell and all of us here will be able create a new, successful, and more sustainable small-d democratic coalition. We'll see.
I like the potential fruit from a different analysis of demographics, itemizing not which subsets voted for Trump, but which subsets are going to be affected by various policies that Trump has pledged to pursue. So: high tariff walls most hurt import-oriented companies like Walmart and their lowest-income customers. Mass deportations most affect agriculture and service industry employers and the communities in which their employees live. A blank check and political cover for hard-line Israeli policies hurts Palestinian Americans. Etc. Any members of those groups might have voted for Trump in any amounts, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be prioritized in how he and his Party will govern, and they’re all potentially fertile places to rebuild a winning Democratic coalition in future.
The bleakly funny thing is that the usual empty brainworm progressive reframing, "hispanic voters" -> "voters experiencing hispanicness", is actually somewhat useful here.
Fundamentally, they need to want to buy what we want to sell. Right now, they're not buying what we're selling.
I was so happy when Biden won in 2020. Now it just seems like a Pyrrhic victory. Maybe it would have been better for Trump to win in 2020. We would have been spared so many people’s minds being poisoned by the Big Lie, and there would have been no Jan 6. He would have been the President to preside over inflation and be blamed for it. And we would be rid of him two months from now, and maybe looking forward to the inauguration of President Newsom or Whitmer. What was even the point of the last four years?
Biden still got a ton of long term legislation passed that the US has not begun to feel the effects of, and he smartly position most of that investment in Red States that Trump is unlikely to be able to take away. Not to say he shouldn't have stepped down, but his administration won't be leaving us with nothing. I wouldn't call it pyrrhic because it WILL matter on the long run
January 20, 2021, was one of the most joyous days of my life, so I agree with you in a lot of ways, but I'm not sure. A lot of us wouldn't be around today if Biden hadn't brought in Andy Slavitt to ramp up Covid vaccine production and distribution in 2021. It was probably better for millions or even billions of people that the US economy had a soft landing rather than precipitating a global recession. And Trump would have had no guard rails in that second term, either. He would have brought in all the worst people then and become an autocrat sooner, perhaps.
MY alternate history fantasy is that Biden's son Beau didn't die of brain cancer, Biden was the nominee in 2016 instead of Hillary, and he beat Trump. Trump didn't get to pervert the GOP and pack the Supreme Court extremists. Roe v Wade stands, and the Supreme Court never gave presidents broad immunity. Lost world!
For decades we have been told in various contexts that people in various demographic categories have more similarities than differences; that characteristics that roughly follow a normal curve the means may differ, but the overlap area is very large. And those who tell us this now seem gobsmacked that it is really true: people in various demographic groups, even those "of color" have opinions and voting propensities that overlap significantly.
As people increasingly are viewed, and view themselves, as simply "American," often in addition to perceived race or ethnicity or religion, the more they are likely to share the same spectrum of opinions and attitudes that drive voting behavior. The identitarian intelligentsia that dominates the academic world and churns out teachers at lower levels has obscured or ignored it, and made new "discoveries" like intersectionalism to paper over the conflicting facts temporarily.
Facts can't be ignored forever. Theories that run against them eventually will have to be discarded, to be superseded by theories that are (at least) consistent with reality. Democrats have been given a lesson in 2024, and Republicans seem to have implicitly learned it, although partially and not all of them. It remains for us to see how things will work out given the flaws, both human and intellectual, of the President-elect, his appointees, and the legislators.
For me, the most concerning thing about the election has been how negative the average American's view of undocumented migrants has become - the vast majority of folks never encounter these people, nor are they competing for the same jobs or houses. Undocumented groups commit fewer crimes, and they pay into social security without getting any benefit. Fentanyl is proven to be primarily trafficked though legal ports of entry. What's behind the animosity? I work in real estate, so I can see how reliant we are on these people - it's actually an amazing deal for the average American, so what gives? Are they just a convenient scapegoat?
In my local meetings people are already circling the wagons on which voters to blame. I would've written the exact same headline. It's like blaming the soccer ball after losing a match.
Emotions are raw and people think they were robbed of their Kamala, so it must be by the forces of evil. I go grey-rock when they bring it up.
I do wonder how we objectively evaluate the claims of people like Josh who thinks this is a clear message that Democrats need to moderate, versus people like Freddie who thinks this is a clear message that Democrats need to be staunchly progressive. I'm the Josh camp, but I'm not sure what the best method is to prove we're right.
I agree with you on this - very well stated. And speaking to this post and your New York Times article - I think first of all we Democrats need to figure out what it is we stand for. And equally important, what is not part of our core values.
What in the Dickens is “whiteness?”
It’s not just the talking heads. Many, if not most staffers think and talk this way. Dem electeds should require all applicants to staff jobs write an essay on current politics without using terms like BIPOC, “centering”, “lived experience”, “black and brown bodies”, “spaces” etc.
> What in the Dickens is “whiteness?”
Being on time.
Well reasoned. As was your nyt article. But Biden should never have run for a second term. His first term rationale was to save and repair from Trump but should have kept his word and transitioned to a younger generation. Harris was a poor VP pick. His plunge to the left perplexing and hard to understand.
Clearly the Democrats went collectively nuts c. 2019 - 2021 and many politicians like Harris adopted policies far to the left of those that they espoused before or since. My take was that that whole period was a kind of drunken bender they've recovered from. The Republican take was that was the moment when Democrats briefly showed their true colours, and deep down they are all waiting for the ripe moment to empty the prisons, defund the police, illegalize private health insurance, and force all schools to teach DEI instead of algebra. Apparently a lot of people buy the Republican take.
After the various elections in 2017 and 2018, I was very confident that Democrats had started to figure things out and would cruise to an easy win over Trump.
That first primary debate in 2019 just absolutely crushed my optimism and filled me with a sense of dread that Democrats were going to double down and continue to make the same mistakes that led to Trump's victory in the first place.
That string of primary debates was the second most stressful period of my entire life. None of the candidates were strong enough, either, or had some fatal flaw, like Biden's age. There's a much deeper field now, at least.
Agree. I am still puzzled by Biden breaking hard left. James Clyburn got Biden the nomination with SC and Super Tuesday so he was beholden to him And he was competing against Bernie for the nomination so he had to go left to get the nomination and capture the Bernie wing. But he was never a lefty and could have gone back to the middle. And why did he commit to black woman as VP? Harris was not a strong primary candidate. He could have committed to a woman if he had to commit at all. Maybe Clyburn’s price ?
Yes, as I recall Biden committed to choose a woman VP early on, and then, after James Clyburn saved his candidacy, he felt bound to nominate an African-American, who had to be a woman, too. The painful thing to me is that Kamala Harris turned out to be tough, visionary, and strategic, but no one had expected much of her, and it was too late to turn things around.
Ivan's comment is so insightful. I think Democrats went nuts far earlier than 2019 with what James Carville calls "faculty lounge speak" etc., and all it came to a head in 2019 - 2021 with that insanely long series of primary debates that fatally wounded all of them.
Biden never promised to nominate a black woman, and two of the women who went though the vetting process and were reported by the New York Times as "finalists" were white: Elizabeth Warren and Gretchen Whitmer. I do think a lot of Democrats (probably including many within the Biden campaign) had developed an idea after George Floyd that the pick needed to be black, and I suspect the vet of Warren was more of an effort to make the left feel taken seriously than a real consideration. But I don't know what the point of vetting Gretchen Whitmer was if you had absolutely, positively decided to nominate only a black woman.
Neither "black" nor "woman" is a meaningful qualification for public office, and it was a mistake for Biden to imply that it is. (Equally, neither is "white" or "man".)
Equally flawed was President Biden's performative announcement that his Supreme Court nominee would be a black woman. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was a well-qualified nominee with a solid record, fully worthy of the appointment, and has demonstrated that since taking up the position. His prior restriction of the candidate list hints of the finger of "affirmative action" on the selection scale.
Organizations do go through the motions of vetting multiple candidates even or especially when they already know who they will hire. You're probably right that his mind wasn't absolutely made up, and Whitmer is from Michigan, a key state, in addition to her political talent. I wonder if they didn't hit it off, or if he got a ton of pressure to go with Harris. Maybe someday that book will be written.
Agree v I was in error. He first only said woman vp. I am not so much with you about her being visionary I did not hear much vision Especially on foreign policy where she had no idea what to say about Gaza other than there must be a ceasefire
To compound matters, Biden’s late departure guaranteed that Harris would be the nominee. Had there been a primary, we would have had the opportunity to select someone who wouldn’t be looked upon as part of the incumbent administration. A swing-stater would have been nice, too. Cynically, though, I think Democrats would still have chosen Harris as the heir apparent. But we will never know.
I remember Josh calling Harris, in 2020, something like "the Biden of VP choices" because she was so unoffensive. I can't criticize him much because I just nodded along. We were wrong.
Did I say that? I hope I didn't say that.
I was sure it was on your twitter from soon after Biden chose her in 2020, but I can't search. It's possible I'm hallucinating it.
I'm not entirely sure we'd be inaugurating Klobuchar, especially if she had been the VP. The COVID-induced economic problems would be the same, and if she were the VP, she'd be tied to the Biden administration and be held to account for its perceived economic missteps.
Biden picking Klobuchar might've signaled a more moderate tone and a more moderate tone might've led to fewer inflationary policies and better messaging due to an administration with less of Warren staffers and their out-of-touch academic leftist.
They might've had a bigger victory in 2020 and more room to lose some voters and still win in 2024.
Maybe, but the fundamentals of the supply chain problems from COVID-19 made inflation almost inevitable, and a lack of stimulus to help keep people afloat might have meant a recession as well. It was almost certainly a Kobayashi Maru situation.
Inflation might have been inevitable but when your administration stakes its entire reputation on a bunch of inflationary policies and inflation happens, it's not unreasonable for people to point the finger at you.
Supply chain problems and similar temporary issues like mass chicken killing to prevent epidemic spread don't necessarily cause inflation. Prices go up temporarily but tend to drop again when supply issues are resolved. Goosing the economy by increasing the available spendable money tends to persist, partly because central banks are properly quite wary of the results of monetary deflation.
I tend to agree. It's worth pointing out that Klob (who for the record was my #1 pick for POTUS in 2020) ran her weakest race of her Senatorial career last week, against a total level 10 freak show of a GOP opponent. Or to your point, maybe not her *weakest* race, but her smallest margin.
Her smallest margin ever still entailed winning by 16 points in a state Harris won by 4 (with the governor as her running mate).
Yeah, although I think I probably follow Minnesota news a bit more than you do. It's really hard to overstate just how much of a freak show Royce White was (apparently, maybe still is) as a candidate. Makes Sharron Angle look like GHWB.
Ouch!!! I'm suddenly remembering that there was an analysis in 2019 or 2020 by Nate Silver or someone like that which showed that based on the margins Klobuchar had achieved across her state in Red districts that she was the most likely of all the Democratic candidates to win nationally. Do you remember that?
I found it:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/amy-klobuchar-2020-democratic-nomination-kickoff/
I mean, that's one of several reasons *why* she was originally my #1 pick for president.
The fundamentals were a serious problem, but I think a better candidate could have explained "listen, this was all inevitable from covid, all the inflation we didn't get in 2020 got pushed out, and here are the objective comparisons across the industrialized countries."
And if Klobuchar went on The View and was asked what she would've done differently than Biden, she wouldn't freeze up.
Which is why Biden should have stepped down after the 22 election. Sadly, though, Democratic voters would probably have picked whoever was VP in the primaries. Normally, incumbency is not a bad thing. But these ain’t normal times.
Maybe part of what Josh is saying is that Klobuchar might have helped keep Biden from making some of the mistakes that Josh has highlighted? That inflation could have been less without those mistakes?
I agree with you that Klobuchar probably wouldn't have won either, though. It will take someone far more charismatic.
As a white woman who does not think that my demographic characteristics are terribly revealing I appreciate this. It’s sad to me because I honestly feel like the left raising the salience of identity issues so much helps make voting for Trump easier for non-white people because the message on the left is that almost all white people are pretty racist and since they are the majority why not just vote for the honest racist who tells it to your face and says he’ll cut your taxes. I really hope that we can get back to appreciating that we are not in a situation of structural racism anymore and stop trying to shame people into voting for Democrats— that’s never going to work with enough people to matter.
I agree with you that shaming doesn't work. Someone (I wish I could remember who) said that the US is much less racist now than it used to be, but when "racist" became an insult, no one wanted to deal with it any further.
But are we not in a situation of structural racism anymore? For example, my perception is that how White people are treated by police is still very different from how Black and Hispanic people are treated. Trump could still call Harris stupid and his followers would believe him, even though she demolished him in the debate, simply because they assume a Black woman is stupid. What am I missing?
I think that there is interpersonal racism that can influence police behavior but I don’t think there are systems and policies discriminating against people based on race. But I understand that the legacies of structural racism have all kinds of echoes today that make life harder for Black people specifically but I think the best way to address that is to understand that history and make policies that are fair across the board.
Walter Lippmann* pointed out about a century ago that we all rely on stereotypes for a variety of reasons. One reason is that they significantly reduce the effort of making decisions. Another is that most of those in common use encapsulate some truth.
* "Public Opinion", 1921
OK. Or more subtle means that would help address some of these echoes without relying on explicit targeting. For example, Mike Madrid explained that Harris's proposed housing program would be particularly beneficial to Latinos because a high percentage of construction workers are Latinos, because many Latinos have risen to middle class status now and want to buy homes but are hurt by high housing prices, and because the specified price range matched what many Latinos were looking for. But this program would have been open to everyone and would have benefitted many others, too (had it worked).
Whether it's a current policy or a legacy, I don't see how black people are going to catch up. For example, there's a very nice community in Queens where housing is underpriced simply because it became majority black. If you need collateral for a loan, you are at a disadvantage, just because you happened to be born in that area. And there is still discrimination against African-Americans seeking to buy houses or get loans. There have been fairly recent court cases about this in the DC area. While the answer is fairness for everyone, how do African-Americans ever catch up?
I think we probably agree a lot. Personally I would support explicit reparations to address historical discrimination against the descendants of those who were enslaved but I highly doubt that will ever be politically possible. But I think you can target programs for lower income groups and they will help because discrimination has made Black people disproportionately lower income. That’s what Obama did by making the Medicaid expansion a central part of the ACA. I am not suggesting that racism doesn’t have a incredible influence on outcomes today but I am suggesting that framing all policies in terms of how they impact racial groups seems to have backfired and the price of that failure will not be paid by the white bourgeoisie but rather by those who rely on Medicaid or who expend a higher percentage of their income on goods that will be hit by tariffs.
Absolutely, I agree with everything you're saying here. Thanks for explaining so clearly!
It is quite a way from obvious why "a very nice community in Queens where housing is underpriced simply because it became majority black" is a problem. It should make it easier for black people to own homes, especially if laws that prohibit loan discrimination based on race are enforced vigorously.
I just don't think you should come to any conclusions about the US from an election Trump won 51x49 that you wouldn't believe if he lost 49x51.
This also applies to how some people describe parts of the country as simply "red" or "blue" when that's just a representation of the median voter. A state like Ohio went from "cool, blue collar, union" state when Obama won it 53x47, but is now "bad racist state" when Trump wins it 53x47 too.
Finally, as someone from Brazil, people's image of Latin Americans as natural progressives is just ridiculous given that my country elected Bolsonaro (and those that immigrate to US tend to be more right wing, because otherwise they might choose Portugal).
I think this is a great point in terms of the absolute percentages, and on some level you are correct altogether. We can't forget that almost as many Americans DID vote for a multiracial woman for president the first time in history.
At the same time, I think part of what people are reacting to is the real or imagined trends or trajectories and potential endpoints. When Obama won, it seemed like there was a trend toward America becoming more tolerant and just. Now it seems clear that there is a trend of Trump getting more support over time with everyone except college-educated women, even as Trump and his party have gotten more extreme over time. Maybe that was always present but simply held in check or disguised, or maybe we don't see ourselves clearly, but I find it profoundly shocking because it seems to be setting us back all the way to the 1950s.
I'm horrified by Trump's reelection and dread the consequences, from the millions of people who will suffer and die needlessly to satisfy Trump's and Vance's pathetic insecurities and lust for revenge, to wondering if I'll finally get Covid and die after RFK Jr. bans vaccination or a medication that I need to survive.
Nonetheless, I feel this incredible lightness of being as the burden of defending all the wrong-headed and totally counterproductive Democratic policies falls away. I can thoroughly enjoy Josh's articles without the cognitive dissonance that made them painful before I gave up hope that things would turn out OK if I just pretended they were.
I don't know where we'll be fours years from now. I fear Trump and the people behind him will be able to take things too far for any recovery in my lifetime. I hope, instead, that this election will shock enough people out of their complacency or delusion so that people like Josh and Sarah Longwell and all of us here will be able create a new, successful, and more sustainable small-d democratic coalition. We'll see.
I like the potential fruit from a different analysis of demographics, itemizing not which subsets voted for Trump, but which subsets are going to be affected by various policies that Trump has pledged to pursue. So: high tariff walls most hurt import-oriented companies like Walmart and their lowest-income customers. Mass deportations most affect agriculture and service industry employers and the communities in which their employees live. A blank check and political cover for hard-line Israeli policies hurts Palestinian Americans. Etc. Any members of those groups might have voted for Trump in any amounts, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be prioritized in how he and his Party will govern, and they’re all potentially fertile places to rebuild a winning Democratic coalition in future.
The bleakly funny thing is that the usual empty brainworm progressive reframing, "hispanic voters" -> "voters experiencing hispanicness", is actually somewhat useful here.
Fundamentally, they need to want to buy what we want to sell. Right now, they're not buying what we're selling.
1. The voter is always right.
2. Repeat #1 until everyone gets it.
I was so happy when Biden won in 2020. Now it just seems like a Pyrrhic victory. Maybe it would have been better for Trump to win in 2020. We would have been spared so many people’s minds being poisoned by the Big Lie, and there would have been no Jan 6. He would have been the President to preside over inflation and be blamed for it. And we would be rid of him two months from now, and maybe looking forward to the inauguration of President Newsom or Whitmer. What was even the point of the last four years?
Biden still got a ton of long term legislation passed that the US has not begun to feel the effects of, and he smartly position most of that investment in Red States that Trump is unlikely to be able to take away. Not to say he shouldn't have stepped down, but his administration won't be leaving us with nothing. I wouldn't call it pyrrhic because it WILL matter on the long run
January 20, 2021, was one of the most joyous days of my life, so I agree with you in a lot of ways, but I'm not sure. A lot of us wouldn't be around today if Biden hadn't brought in Andy Slavitt to ramp up Covid vaccine production and distribution in 2021. It was probably better for millions or even billions of people that the US economy had a soft landing rather than precipitating a global recession. And Trump would have had no guard rails in that second term, either. He would have brought in all the worst people then and become an autocrat sooner, perhaps.
MY alternate history fantasy is that Biden's son Beau didn't die of brain cancer, Biden was the nominee in 2016 instead of Hillary, and he beat Trump. Trump didn't get to pervert the GOP and pack the Supreme Court extremists. Roe v Wade stands, and the Supreme Court never gave presidents broad immunity. Lost world!
Josh, quit obfuscating. Everyone knows why the Democrats got their butt kicks in this cycle and who is to blame.
You guessed it, Frank Stallone.
For decades we have been told in various contexts that people in various demographic categories have more similarities than differences; that characteristics that roughly follow a normal curve the means may differ, but the overlap area is very large. And those who tell us this now seem gobsmacked that it is really true: people in various demographic groups, even those "of color" have opinions and voting propensities that overlap significantly.
As people increasingly are viewed, and view themselves, as simply "American," often in addition to perceived race or ethnicity or religion, the more they are likely to share the same spectrum of opinions and attitudes that drive voting behavior. The identitarian intelligentsia that dominates the academic world and churns out teachers at lower levels has obscured or ignored it, and made new "discoveries" like intersectionalism to paper over the conflicting facts temporarily.
Facts can't be ignored forever. Theories that run against them eventually will have to be discarded, to be superseded by theories that are (at least) consistent with reality. Democrats have been given a lesson in 2024, and Republicans seem to have implicitly learned it, although partially and not all of them. It remains for us to see how things will work out given the flaws, both human and intellectual, of the President-elect, his appointees, and the legislators.
For me, the most concerning thing about the election has been how negative the average American's view of undocumented migrants has become - the vast majority of folks never encounter these people, nor are they competing for the same jobs or houses. Undocumented groups commit fewer crimes, and they pay into social security without getting any benefit. Fentanyl is proven to be primarily trafficked though legal ports of entry. What's behind the animosity? I work in real estate, so I can see how reliant we are on these people - it's actually an amazing deal for the average American, so what gives? Are they just a convenient scapegoat?
What is the data we're waiting for the Census/Catalist/Pew to release?
In my local meetings people are already circling the wagons on which voters to blame. I would've written the exact same headline. It's like blaming the soccer ball after losing a match.
Emotions are raw and people think they were robbed of their Kamala, so it must be by the forces of evil. I go grey-rock when they bring it up.
I do wonder how we objectively evaluate the claims of people like Josh who thinks this is a clear message that Democrats need to moderate, versus people like Freddie who thinks this is a clear message that Democrats need to be staunchly progressive. I'm the Josh camp, but I'm not sure what the best method is to prove we're right.
I agree with you on this - very well stated. And speaking to this post and your New York Times article - I think first of all we Democrats need to figure out what it is we stand for. And equally important, what is not part of our core values.
I wrote this all up here (way too long to stuff it all in a comment) - https://liberalandlovingit.substack.com/p/the-democratic-party-core-values
What are the core values of the Democratic Party? Note - everything is not a good answer.