In this video, the two talking heads cover a whole lot of ground. I mostly agree with them. If you don’t, then God bless, and have a nice day.
Toward the end, they turn to trying to suss out what’s going on in Trump’s brain. I particularly commend that part of the video.
In case you don’t know:
Rick Wilson is a former Republican and former Republican political consultant. He currently writes political opinion pieces and is a political talking head on YouTube and elsewhere. He has written two books, including Everything Trump Touches Dies.
During the video Wilson refers, at one point, to his “misspent youth.” He may be thinking about the time he created the ad that defeated Max Cleland—a war hero paralyzed by his wounds—by implying that Cleland supported Al-Qaida.
Will Saletan has been writing on public affairs since 1996. He has also written two books. Sometimes he’s right, and sometimes he’s not. In 2003 he wrote a book arguing that conservatives had won the public debate about abortion rights. Well, if they had won it in 2003, they have lost it now; look at the headlines out of Missouri today. In 2023, he wrote The Corruption of Lindsey Graham: A case study in the rise of authoritarianism.
The last time Donald Trumpwas president, he travelled to Youngstown, Ohio, among the most depressed of America’s rust belt cities, and promised voters the impossible.
The high-paying steel, railroad and car industry jobs that once made Youngstown a hard-living, hard-drinking blue collar boom town were coming back, he said. “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house,” he crowed to a rapturous crowdin 2017. “We’re going to fill up those factories – or rip ”em down and build brand new ones.”
None of that happened. Indeed, within 18 months, General Motors (GM) announced that it was suspending operations at its one remaining manufacturing plant outside Youngstown, throwing 5,000 jobs into jeopardy in a community with little else to cling to. Trump’s reaction was to say the closure didn’t matter, because the jobs would be replaced “in, like, two minutes”.
That, too, did not happen. People moved away, marriages broke down, depression soared and, locals say, a handful of people took their own lives.
Ordinarily, politicians who promise the moon and fail to deliver get punished at the ballot box. But that did not happen to Trump either. Instead, he has steadily built up his popularity in Youngstown, a city that was once a well-oiled Democratic party machine but has now turned into one of his most remarkable bases of working-class support.
“Does [Trump] understand at all what you’re going through?” Joe Biden asked Ohio votersduring the 2020 presidential campaign, referring directly to the GM closure. “Does he see you where you are and where you want to be? Does he care?”
To which the answer, in Youngstown, has been an astonishing and vigorous “yes”.
Trump might have lost to Biden overall that year, but he became the first Republican presidential candidate in almost half a centuryto win in Youngstown and surrounding Mahoning County. This past November, he extended his margin there to a decisive 13 points, giving so much cover to local Republican party candidates that they won a majority of county-wide offices for the first time in 90 years.
Anyone seeking to understand the earthquake that has shaken US politics – to the point where a convicted felon, serial liarand twice-impeachedformer president can return to the White House in triumph, as Trump will do on 20 January – might learn a lot from the disillusioned working-class voters of northeast Ohio.
They tell blunt, profanity-laden stories of watching their city slump ever deeper into decline and express a real bleakness about the future. They see a political class corrupted by big-money donors who, they say, don’t care about communities like theirs. White voters point to conversations about justice – for racial minorities, for the children of immigrants, for women worried about losing their reproductive rights, for transgender teenagers – and question why nobody ever talks about justice for them.
Few expect Trump to fix everything or believe him when he says he will. What they do believe is that the system is broken and corrupt, just as Trump says it is, and that a candidate who promises to tear it down and start again might just be on to something. …
When Youngstown first sank into decline in the 1980s, voters turned to a populist congressman named Jim Traficant, a Democrat who had a Trump-like disregard for the ordinary rules of political decorum and was widely adored because he would stand up for his constituents in Washington and yell at his colleagues to stop ignoring them.
Traficant was also a crook, with long-standing ties to the Youngstown mob and a pattern of taking bribes and falsifying his taxes that eventually sent him to prison for seven years – but most of his working-class voters didn’t care. In their view, politics was corrupt and government authority fundamentally untrustworthy, but he at least was on their side. “We got the best politicians money can buy,” Joe the former railroad worker joked.
Now they see the same virtues – and the same flaws – in Trump. As Acierno explained: “The Democrats and the Republicansare all a den of crooks. Only one side lies about being crooks, and one doesn’t. If you’re going to be a crook, I’d rather know it than be lied to.”
Trump, in other words, comes across as someone who doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what he is, and that perceived authenticity counts for more with many Youngstown voters than his character flaws or even his policy positions. They’d rather have his gut instincts, ugly as they often are, over the carefully scripted messaging of a Democrat like Kamala Harris or even a mainstream Republican.
Tex Fischer, a Republican state representative who cut his teeth working on Mitt Romney’s doomed 2012 presidential campaign, said Trump had done the party a huge favour by ripping the old order apart because it chimed with voters’ anti-establishment instincts and gave them real hope for the change they thirst for.
“When Romney came to Youngstown,” Fischer recalled, “he wore blue jeans and rolled up his sleeves, and nobody bought it. Trump doesn’t pretend – here he comes in his suit and tie and gold jewellery, and people respect that.”
Local Democratsdon’t necessarily disagree. “American voters have a unique ability to smell bullshit, and they smell bullshit with the Democrats,” said Dave Betras, a former Democratic party county chair who believes his party’s brand has to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Betras said Trump’s success was a symptom of the Democrats’ failure to address the catastrophic impact of international trade agreements on manufacturing jobs in the US – a failure he pins on Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – and its further failure, under Obama, to take any meaningful action against Wall Street or the big banks after the housing collapse of 2007-08.
“Most Americans think the system is rigged. And Trump shuffled the deck on us,” Betras said. “Not only does Trump say this thing is rigged, but he says: ‘I know, because I rigged it. I was part of the rigging.’”
Trump, in other words, has exposed the Democrats as hollow and ineffectual as much as he has proposed any viable alternative. …
In contrast to other parts of the country, where political disagreements over Trump have ended lifelong friendships and split families apart, Youngstown is remarkable for the consensus between people of opposing views about the underlying problems and the frustrations that stem from them. They disagree only on the remedy.
Some Trump supporters are actually alarmed by parts of his platform – one cigarette shop patron said he was worried the future administration might make his kidney dialysis unaffordable – but their anger at the Democrats outweighs those concerns.
Some anti-Trump voters, conversely, agree that the Democrats have abandoned the working class but believe that backing Trump is the worst possible answer. “I never liked Trump even when he was only a builder in New York … because he stiffed union workers and he generally seemed like a douche bag,” said Tim O’Hara, a former president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union at Lordstown. “One thing I wasn’t then and I’m not now is a racist, misogynistic, uninformed dipshit who enjoys supporting a rapist, felon, traitor … These people have no clue yet what they’ve done, but they will find out.”
Then there is a third group of voters who loathed both presidential candidates and wished they’d had some other choice. “We were screwed either way,” said Sonja Woods, one of the GM workers forced out in 2018 who is also an official with the UAW. “We’ve been lied to, let down. It’s disappointing.”
Woods’ personal story expresses much of the heartache and frustration felt across the community. After the closure of GM’s Lordstown plant – presented not as a closure at first, but as something more temporary – she was forced to commute to a GM job in Kentucky. Between the cost of renting an apartment and driving back and forth, she lost money over the next six years and had to rely on her husband’s salary to make ends meet. When she returned to Youngstown to work for a car battery company called Ultium, a new joint venture between GM and a South Korean firm, she was devastated to see that the old Lordstown plant, once a symbol of US industry, now belonged to Foxconn, a Chinese company. The job losses had gutted the community, including a number of schools and businesses that had shuttered in her absence.
“It was desolate, eerie,” she said.
Woods, like many in Youngstown, sympathises with Trump’s zero-sum view of the world – that if one group is benefitting, it is usually at the expense of another. Seeing Afghan refugees move into government-subsidised housing when she had to finance her move to Kentucky infuriated her. Reading about Biden’s plans to forgive student debt when she paid off her daughter’s student loans in full struck her as deeply unfair.
She was unwilling to give the Biden administration much credit for spurring clean-energy businesses like her current employer, and she was too angry at GM to place much, if any, blame on Trump for allowing the old plant to close. What she saw, rather, was a general indifference from the political class, especially now that Ohiois no longer regarded as a swing state. “Nobody showed up in Youngstown this time, not Trump or Kamala,” she observed. “There are a lot of bitter people, and I’m one of them.”
Conversation at the Struthers cigarette shop reflected many of these complex, contradictory feelings. The retired blue-collar workers offered hints of the misogyny O’Hara mentioned – they said they didn’t like Harris’s “Hollywood girlboss” energy – and clearly responded to the Trump campaign’s aggressive but unsubstantiated charge that the Democrats were more interested in subsidising gender reassignment surgery than in helping working people.
None, though, were Trump ideologues. They spoke with contempt of two Maga true believers who came into the cigarette shop and started swinging fists at anyone who disagreed with them. Their worries were about the cost of living and taking care of friends they’ve loved for decades and what it means to be working class in an era that has either outsourced or mechanised the work they used to do.
“They are waiting for us older white guys to just die and get out of the way,” Paul the retired aluminium worker said. He did not say it forlornly, though. He and his friends are tough people, and nobody in Youngstown is going down without a fight.
If Americans under Trump are demonstrably and undeniably hurting as much as they were under President Biden, he’ll weave stories and hurl accusations that absolve him of responsibility and assign it to his political foes. And he’ll find many more takers than he would have before we could all customize the reports we receive so that our designated heroes remain unblemished, our appointed villains irredeemable, our biases affirmed.
And before our entrenchments in such cinched corridors of pseudoreality zapped our powers of discernment. “We’re living in a world where facts instantly perish upon contact with human minds,” George Packer wrote in The Atlantic this month. “Local news is disappearing, and a much-depleted national press can barely compete with the media platforms of billionaires who control users algorithmically, with an endless stream of conspiracy theories and deepfakes. The internet, which promised to give everyone information and a voice, has consolidated in just a few hands the power to destroy the very notion of objective truth.” …
The next best thing to results is illusions. And a record of accomplishments isn’t necessary in a hall of mirrors, not if it’s big and blinding enough.
By contrast, Jerusalem Demsas, who writes for The Atlantic, writes,
[T[he Democratic Party’s performance in the 2024 presidential election has led some to doubt whether the feedback loops necessary for good policy—and a healthy democracy—even exist.
This episode of Good on Paper pushes back against the pessimists. Interpreting signals from voters is complicated, and so much is contingent on which issues are salient when they head to the ballot box. But the political scientist Hunter Rendleman’s research indicates that when states rolled out Earned Income Tax Credit programs—a benefit for working-class Americans—voters rewarded governors who implemented the policy with higher vote shares and approval ratings.
“I think I’m an optimist on sophistication,” Hunter told me. “I think a lot of times political scientists are a bit pessimistic on individuals’ capacities to actually know what’s going on to them because it is quite complicated. But we don’t often set up our analyses or studies in a way to give voters the benefit of the doubt.”
George Packer, also writing in The Atlantic, tries for a balanced view:
The Trump Reaction is more fragile than it now seems. Trump’s behavior in the last weeks of the campaign did not augur a coherent second presidency. He will surround himself with ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots, and because he has no interest in governing, they will try to fill the vacuum and turn on one another. The Trump administration, with a favorable Congress, will overreach on issues such as abortion and immigration, soon alienating important parts of its new coalition. It will enact economic policies that favor the party’s old allies among the rich at the expense of its new supporters among the less well-off. It’s quite possible that, approaching 80, Trump will find himself once more among the least popular presidents in the country’s history. But in the meantime, he will have enormous latitude to abuse his power for enrichment and revenge, and to shred the remaining ties that bind Americans to one another, and the country to democracies around the world.
The Trump Reaction will test opponents with a difficult balancing act, one that recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about a first-rate intelligence holding two opposed ideas in mind while still being able to function. The Democratic Party has to undertake the necessary self-scrutiny that starts with the errors of Biden, Harris, and their inner circle, but that extends to the party’s long drift away from the most pressing concerns of ordinary Americans, toward the eccentric obsessions of its donors and activists. But this examination can’t end in paralysis, because at the same time, the opposition will have to act. Much of this action will involve civil society and the private sector along with surviving government institutions—to prevent by legal means the mass internment and deportation of migrants from communities in which they’ve been peacefully living for years; to save women whose lives are threatened by laws that would punish them for trying to save themselves; to protect the public health from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s security from Tulsi Gabbard, and its coffers from Elon Musk. …
A few weeks before the election, Representative Chris Deluzio, a first-term Democrat, was campaigning door-to-door in a closely divided district in western Pennsylvania. He’s a Navy veteran, a moderate on cultural issues, and a homegrown economic populist—critical of corporations, deep-pocketed donors, and the ideology that privileges capital over human beings and communities. At one house he spoke with a middle-aged white policeman named Mike, who had a Trump sign in his front yard. Without budging on his choice for president, Mike ended up voting for Deluzio. On Election Night, in a state carried by Trump, Deluzio outperformed Harris in his district, especially in the reddest areas, and won comfortably. What does this prove? Only that politics is best when it’s face-to-face and based on respect, that most people are complicated and even persuadable, and that—in the next line from the Fitzgerald quote—one can “see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
This is a companion to the post immediately below, What Word Best Describes Trump Suppporters?—wherein another blogger debates with herself about whether that word is “stupid” or something even worse.
Well, dear reader, if you are a person of some maturity, you have learned that there are many ways of being smart, and many ways of being stupid.
And if you are situationally self-aware you are aware that Trump managed to put together a plurality based on a portfolio of folks suffering from a very wide variety of ways of being stupid.
And if you are capable of strategic thinking, you will have figured out that the way forward is to bust open the Trump’s fragile coalition of racists, anti-vaxxers, Christianist nationalists, people in a moral panic over transgender rights, and the terminally illiterate and uninformed.
James Carville writes,
I thought Kamala Harris would win. I was wrong. While I’m sure we Democrats can argue that the loss wasn’t a landslide or take a little solace in our House performance, the most important thing for us now is to face that we were wrong and take action on the prevailing “why.”
I’ve been going over this in my head for the past two months, all the variables, all the what-ifs, all the questions about Joe Biden’s re-election decisions and what kind of Democrat or message might have worked against Donald Trump. I keep coming back to the same thing. We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is and it always will be the economy, stupid. We have to begin 2025 with that truth as our political north star and not get distracted by anything else. …
Mr. Trump, for the first time in his political career, decisively won by seizing a swath of middle-class and low-income voters focused on the economy. Democrats have flat-out lost the economic narrative. The only path to electoral salvation is to take it back. Perception is everything in politics, and a lot of Americans perceive us as out to lunch on the economy — not feeling their pain or caring too much about other things instead.
To win back the economic narrative, we must focus on revving up a transformed messaging machine for the new political paradigm we now find ourselves living in. It’s about finding ways to talk to Americans about the economy that are persuasive. Repetitive. Memorable. And entirely focused on the issues that affect Americans’ everyday lives.
This starts with how we form our opposition. First of all, we have got to stop making Mr. Trump himself our main focus; he can’t be elected again. Furthermore, it’s clear many Americans do not give a rat’s tail about Mr. Trump’s indictments — even if they are justified — or about his antidemocratic impulses or about social issues if they cannot provide for themselves or their families.
Mr. Trump won the popular vote by putting the economic anger of Americans front and center. If we focus on anything else, we risk falling farther into the abyss. Our messaging machine must sharply focus on opposing the unpopular Republican economic agenda that will live on past him. Vocally oppose the party, not the person or the extremism of his movement. I don’t always agree with Wall Street, but Jamie Dimon was right when he saidthat Democrats’ railing against “ultra-MAGA” was insulting and politically tone-deaf. Denouncing other Americans or their leader as miscreants is not going to win elections; focusing on their economic pain will, as will contesting the Republican economic agenda. …
Let’s start by forcing [Republicans] to oppose a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Let’s make Roe v. Wade an economic messaging issue and force them to block our attempts to codify it into law. And let’s take back the immigration issue by making it an economic issue and force the G.O.P. to deny bipartisan reform that expedites entry for high-performing talentand for those who will bring business into our nation. This year the Democratic Party leadership must convene and publish a creative, popular and bold economic agenda and proactively take back our economic turf. Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress and force them to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.
Finally, Democrats must trudge headfirst with this economic agenda into the new media paradigm we now live in. I am an 80-year-old man and can see clearly that we are barreling toward a nontraditional and decentralized media environment. Podcasts are the new print newspapers and magazines. Social platforms are a social conscience. And influencers are digital stewards of that conscience. Our economic message must be sharp, crisp, clear — and we must take it right to the people. To Democratic presidential hopefuls, your auditions for 2028 should be based on two things: 1) How authentic you are on the economy and 2) how well you deliver it on a podcast.
The road ahead will not be easy, but there are no two roads to choose from. The path forward could not be more certain: We live or die by winning public perception of the economy.
Thus it was, thus it is, and thus it forever shall be.
The Politico piece appears to be mostly straightforward reporting of what people said in focus groups—the people in question being several categories of wishy-washy, definitely non-elite voters. Takeaway: “In a trio of focus groups, even voters whopreviously backed Democrats cast the party as weak and overly focused on diversity and elites, according to research by the progressive group Navigator Research.”
If you care about American democracy, the N.Y. Times article is most definitely worth a read. In it, Frank Bruni of the Times moderates an email conversation among himself, Tim Ryan, the former congressman, and two others. (“Ms. Shenker-Osorio is the host of the podcast “Words to Win By.” Ms. Smith was a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.”)
Some highlights:
Lis Smith: The Democratic brand is in the toilet. Many of the Democrats who succeeded this cycle — our best over-performers in House races, for instance — are people who ran against the Democratic Party brand. Trump tore down the blue wall in the industrial Midwest, but he also expanded his vote the most in our bluest and most urban areas. …
Tim Ryan: The Dems got pinned as the status quo party on inflation, instability, insecurity and every other issue facing working people. Trump was the change candidate in a year when 65 percent of people thought we are on the wrong track. And they failed to redefine themselves on the culture issues on which they were on the other side of 60 percent to 70 percent of Americans. …
Anat Shenker-Osorio: … Voters, outside of hard partisans, think most politicians lie at least some of the time. I know — we just asked them in a survey. Seventy-two percent of them said this of Republican leaders and 70 percent said this of Democrats. This is astonishingly good for authoritarians. What it means, and we hear this in nearly every focus group we do, is that they discount the threats of MAGA. It sounds like this: “Well, Trump’s just saying things. He doesn’t really mean them.” So, he gets to keep his base engaged and enraged, while also seeming like the guy who’s just going to give you a personally signed check.
Meanwhile, it’s absolutely detrimental to Democrats because their purported achievements, desirable agenda and dire warnings are all not credited as real. Nationally, extrapolating from AP VoteCast data, 19 million Biden 2020 voters sat it out this time. This was mainly a lurching couch-ward, not rightward. Why? Voters here and around the world are looking around at what there is on offer and saying: not this. …
Smith: We need to look to who succeeded and overperformed this cycle and why. Some of the top overperformers in House races couldn’t have had more disparate profiles — Pat Ryan, Jared Golden, Tom Suozzi, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Angie Craig. What they had in common was that they were willing to run against the party brand, they met voters where they are on their frustrations with the border and public safety issues, and they talked more about their vision for the future than how bad Donald Trump is. I’d also throw in another thing — these members largely were among the first to call for Joe Biden to step down as nominee. They weren’t in the crew of Democrats who told voters not to believe what they’d seen with their own eyes in that first debate.
Shenker-Osorio: If you want to look at successes that seem to defy “conventional wisdom,” to me that’s Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky. He has consistently run on, not from, his values, mixing economic populism with a clear and powerful explanation for the siren song of the right wing: scapegoating, hate peddling and fear mongering. Beshear creates the biggest possible “we” and then conveys why right-wing attacks on groups that have been intentionally “othered” are Trojan horses to enable widespread harms, from taking away our freedoms, to controlling our lives, to screwing over our livelihoods. …
The largest voting bloc in the United States is almost always voter-eligible nonvoters. Folks are opting out of participation for a reason — and it’s feeling as if neither party is actually focused on making life better for working people. Democrats cannot be running as the protectors of norms and institutions, and yes, that includes democracy, because democracy never bought anyone dinner.
Bruni: I’m encouraged, in a way, that I don’t sense Democrats spoiling to fight Trump on every initiative and at every turn. Democrats cannot live on a diet of sour grapes, and that kind of blanket resistance could look less like principle than like reflexive obstructionism and haughty dismissal of election results, and could doom Democrats to failure in the fights that count the very most. Which are those? Which of Trump’s proposals must Democrats do all in their power to defeat and — maybe just as important — are there proposals or general priorities of his that aren’t awful and that Democrats should try to find ways to work with him on?
Ryan: We should be all over the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. food reform initiative. We don’t have to agree with him on everything and we can fight him on other things. It is criminal what we have allowed to happen. We are basically poisoning our own people, driving up health care costs, lowering productivity while it’s all being subsidized by the taxpayer for American farmers to grow crops that go into fake food.
We should put forward a dozen recommendations on the “department of government efficiency” effort. Our federal government is so wasteful and bloated that we should be able to come up with major reforms to save money and help government provide better services.
Smith: We don’t actually know what Trump is serious about doing as president yet. Unlike Tim, I don’t think Kennedy was picked to take on Big Ag and Big Food — I think all of that is being used as a smokescreen for his truly dangerous views on things like vaccines. We should fight Trump and Kennedy tooth and nail if they sow doubt about lifesaving vaccines for polio and M.M.R., because that will actually have life-or-death consequences for Americans (see what Kennedy did in Samoa).
But broadly, we shouldn’t just oppose things because Trump supports them. If he really wants to build more American manufacturing or cut taxes for the middle class we should be for it.
Mr. Guastella works for the Center for Working Class Politics, an institution not previously within my radar screen, but one that probably should be within our awareness.
The article is published by the Guardian, so you can read if for free. Its message is broadly consistent with a theme that I have been pushing: that we progressives need to listen to the non-college-educated working class once again, hear their concerns, and form a coalition with them to advance our common interests, versus the ultra-wealthy business elites.
After damning the Democrats and Kamala Harris for not embracing the working class, Guastella writes,
OK, so Harris represented limousine liberals, that still doesn’t explain why blue-collar voters would choose an uber-wealthy playboy like Trump, not to mention his billionaire henchman Elon Musk, over her. And, according to analyses from the Center for Working Class Politics, working-class voters did prefer Trump. But we don’t need some description of “false consciousness” to understand why this might be. The fact is working-class people do not have a genuine political home in our new Gilded Age, they are forced to ally either with billionaires in the Republican party or Democratic liberal elites in hopes that someone will allay their concerns. Fixing this requires a politics that confronts both. …
Almost all of the content of American politics – the candidates, the policies, the priorities – concerns the top 20% of the income and wealth hierarchy. Remember, less than 2% of members of Congress come from working-class backgrounds. Working-class candidates face immense political obstacles because they have neither the money, nor the credentials – won in the halls of elite schools, conferences and institutions – needed to break into the fortress of American government. Many voted for Trump in the hopes that he could take a wrecking ball to the whole thing.
Having made these important points, Guastella then segs into the argument that Democrats must reverse course not only on economic issues but also on non-economic cultural and values issues:
Though, it will not be enough for the left to protest the billionaire economy. An honest assessment of progressive liabilities is in order. Those on the left must confront the cultural elite that has pushed the party away from workers on all sorts of non-economic issues. While Trump and his billionaires won’t be able to adequately represent the economic interests of the working class, liberals must recognize that their party doesn’t represent their values. The Democrats captured by highly credentialed clerics has led them to embrace the cultural values of an aristocratic elite. From crime, to climate, to gender politics, and the border, mainstream liberal opinion is much further from the views of workers than many liberals are willing to admit. And this too is a class story.
Well, Knock! Knock! I Have Two Important Things to Say About Embracing Alleged Working Class Culture and Values.
First important thing: Yes, yes, it’s high time to reconsider some issues. For example, lots of minority people feel that aggressively pushing DEI can make them look like “token hires”—not the accomplished, fully deserving people they are.
Second important thing: But while we’re doing all this cultural/value reconsidering, let’s insert a step: think carefully about what is the right thing to do, not the thing to do that might improve your messaging.
And here is why we need to actually consider the right thing to do: because, ladies and germs, the right thing to do will probably, at the end of the day, also be the politically expedient thing to dol.
I want to make two distinct points about facing MAGA on immigration. I believe that each of my two points is terribly important. (You might not share that opinion, and if you don’t share it, then bless your heart. It’s a free country—at least for the moment.)
Point One: Really Bad Situational Awareness and Strategy
That aptly named Mr. Karma, who is a staff writer for The Atlantic, offers up a lengthy, thorough, and brutal exposition of the Democratic political malpractice that led to the loss of Latino support in 2024 and to the catastrophic Trump victory.
Although I am no expert on the topic, I find Karma’s analysis persuasive. If you are interested in Democratic victories going forward, then I urge you to read it.
Point Two: A Vital Missing Piece of the Analysis—What’s the Right Thing to do About Immigration?
The immigration question is really two issues: 1) What legal standards ought to govern who can, and who cannot, immigrate to the United States, and how are these legal standards best enforced? 2) What should be done about the 11 million plus undocumented people who already live here? Should all of them be deported? Some of them? If only some of them, how to decide who gets to stay and who has to leave?
These are hard questions. Very hard questions. In large measure, because many considerations need to be taken into account in answering them. And because those considerations point in all sorts of different directions.
One of these considerations, among many others, is what is politically feasible. What proposed answers can someone of good will, acting in good faith, present to the American people and obtain their consent?
Because no matter how fair and wise your preferred approach might be, trying to push that approach without public buy-in will only make matters worse.
And conversely: shouldn’t you at least try to identify a sound, moral policy and then see whether you can sell that policy? Shouldn’t you try that approach first, before leaping into a discussion about which bumper sticker slogan is most likely to sell?
And, by the way, I don’t fault Mr. Karma for writing an article on political inside baseball rather than an article on what is good and sound public policy. He and his editors get to choose the topic on which they want to write.
I’m just saying: realize that any analysis of political inside baseball, no matter how fine the analysis, needs to be married to good, defensible public policy.
The article goes into some statistical detail to refute a theory that you might not have heard about; I know I haven’t. The refuted theory is that shifts toward Republicans in big cities were a reaction to perceived local Democratic Party mismanagement of urban problems.
No, say the authors. Majority-white areas shifted relatively little. Majority-nonwhite areas shifted toward the Republicans—a lot.
And, in areas that had received a lot of migrants since 2021, there was a really, really big shift to the right. Or, at least, so says the article.
It’s a longish piece. My shorthand summary doesn’t do it justice. You probably want to read it for yourself.
My takeaways? (1) Identity politics is a hound dog that no longer hunts. (2) We badly need to come to a reasonable consensus on immigration—and try to take that issue off the table.
Mr. Schale, a self-described “political hack,” has a lot of things to get off his chest. Worth a full read. Some things that particularly caught my eye:
We must be smarter about how we use data. Right now, we use data as a crutch. We were addicted to ad-testing, to the point that it drove decision-making more this cycle than the desire or need to tell a story. We overuse analytics to find the most “efficient” ways to communicate with voters, meaning in many cases, we just don’t talk to huge swaths of both our base, or to Republicans. Data also allow campaigns to avoid accountability for decisions—just blame the outcome on following the analytics. Data are vital, but should work for the campaign—not the other way around.
We must deal with the right’s tremendous advantage in delivering content.After 2020, I had a billionaire ask me what I thought would be useful going forward. My advice was to spend a billion dollars building out an ecosystem like the right to deliver information to not only our base but persuadable voters. There was an acknowledgement of the problem, but that was all. I worry that coastal Democrats don’t fully grasp just how much of a disadvantage we face on the news consumption front—especially podcasts and social media—and that to solve it, we need a donor or two willing to invest significant capital. …
The truth is we got here because our brand sucks. We tend to put voters in different buckets—black, Hispanic, young, gay, etc.—and treat these groups like they are more progressive than they really are, and somehow unique from each other. At the same time, we’ve made decisions to stop talking to large chunks of the electorate. …
Truth be told, thanks to “smart” election technology—in this case, campaign analytics and modeling—we increasingly don’t talk to voters in large swaths of states.
In seven minutes, Paul Solomon of the PBS Newshour tries to summarize “Why so many Americans are dissatisfied with the seemingly solid economy.” For a seven-minute discussion, Solomon and his guests lay out the issues fairly well.
Please take a hard look. Maybe watch it a second time, because the situation is a little complicated.
And then answer this question:
What the Hell Do We Say to Esther?
Let me give you four alternatives. Which message is most truthful, and which message is most likely to help us take our country back? Which will it be—A, B, C, or D?
A. The Identity Message
“Listen up, lady—and take a look in the mirror. Racism and misogyny still run rampant in this country. And you have just missed a chance to vote for a highly competent person, Kamala Harris, who is, like you, an African-American woman. What a shame! Clearly, you are not a credit to your race.”
B. The Me-Or-Your-Lying-Eyes Message
“As the saying goes, who are you gonna believe: me or your lying eyes?
“For God’s sake, woman, you’re an accountant. Don’t you read the Financial Times? Don’t you read the Wall Street Journal? Don’t you know that we have had a great recovery under the Biden-Harris administration? Don’t you know that inflation is coming down?
“Instead of reading legitimate news sources, you must have been duped into reading the wrong Facebook pages. Get a grip on.”
C. The Just-You-Wait Message
“You say you’re concerned about inflation. But your man Trump has three signature policies that are bound to increase inflation and make your life more miserable: massive tariffs and trade wars, mass deportations that will disrupt the economy, and tax cuts for the wealthy that will overstimulate the economy and drive up prices.
“You thought the last four years were bad? Wait till you see how things are going by 2026!
“We’ll see you at the polls in the next election. Until then, we don’t really have anything to say to you.”
D. The Let-Us-Listen-and-Engage Message
“In the last election, a lot of people were blindsided by the failure of the demography-is-destiny theory of American politics. We were blindsided by the fact that so many people did not understand the threat that Trump poses. And we were blindsided by just how bad things are for a lot of working class people.
“Well, on reflection, we’re glad that you have decided to weigh your perceived economic interests over your ethnic and gender identity. In that regard, you set a fine example for some white people who grieve for the loss of some of their privilege—and for some toxic males who are feel threatened by feminism.
“Now, let’s sit down and have a really serious discussion about the everyday economic difficulties you face, and about how government can make things better. Let’s develop a real economic program to run on in 2026.”
On December 2, Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark wrote,
Like Biden, I’m a sucker for norms. You know that. But I think we need to be more realistic about them.
(1) They’re not “norms” anymore. They’re preferences. Unless a practice is recognized as normal and essential by the entire political system, it’s merely a stylistic preference. Like choosing pistachio over chocolate.
(2) Adhering to a stylistic practice does not increase the chance of restoring it as a “norm.” People often say that we need to uphold a broken norm now so that it will be re-adopted in the future. There is not a lot of evidence to suggest that these B follows A. Will Republican presidential candidates release their tax returns in 2024 because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris released their tax returns in 2024? I doubt it.
If you want to adhere to a norm, you should not do so under the misapprehension that you are reestablishing it. The immediate benefits—whatever they may be—must suffice.
(3) A “norm” is not a suicide pact. Pretend—just for a moment—that Kash Patel is confirmed as FBI director and he begins his 10-year term in February of 2025.
Now pretend that, in 2028 some Democrat is elected president.
Should “norms” prevent that incoming Democrat from summarily firing Director Patel?⁶
But firing Patel without cause would make this Democratic POTUS just as bad as Trump! Wouldn’t Democrats be honor-bound to allow Patel to continue his tenure?
All of which is to say that our thinking about norms should be more hard-headed. This is not to say that you must fight fire with fire, or an eye for an eye.
It is very much notto say that, “If Trump does Bad Thing X then the forces of liberalism must do Bad Thing X in return.” In general, you should strive to live your values.
But we shouldn’t cling to memories of an age which has already passed if doing so means perpetuating an illiberalism.
Facing MAGA 