Showing posts with label Kamala Harris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kamala Harris. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

The Correct Analogy for the 2024 Election

Well that just happened. I have a number of thoughts on this but until I get time to put them down in detail here's a summery of what I think.

However one thing I did want to point out is that people are missing the correct analogy when it comes to what happened this cycle. Nate Silver recently made a typically error by using a Homer Simpson analogy which is obviously totally off. Harris and Biden are pretty different people and switching the candidate out was clearly the correct move, even if the Democrats still didn't win.

It bears repeating, but no matter how many times media people claim otherwise one can run a good campaign, even a perfect one, and still lose an election.

As I see if Democrats had kept Biden they probably would have ended with something like a 1980 style blow out in the Electoral College and with the GOP winning say 7-10 Senate seats and a 20+ majority in the House. Instead the candidate switch and Harris's pretty good campaign resulted in a close election with much smaller loses in Congress and state governments. That's a really big difference!

The fact is there are important difference between a comfortably large House majority and one where deaths and retirements might put the chamber in play between now and 2026. Likewise any single Senator can have real influence and the smaller the GOP majority the harder it is to confirm awful people like Matt Gaetz.

The correct 2024 analogy we are all looking for was from Oliver Stone's crazy but great football movie Any Given Sunday. The film features over-the-hill coach Tony D'Mato (Al Pacino) trying to guide the once great Miami Sharks back to glory. His plans all fall apart at the beginning of the film when his star but aging QB Jack "Cap" Rooney (that's Biden) is injured and has to be replaced by the young questionable talent Willie Beaman (that's Harris).

It's a pretty standard sports drama from then onward. Willie turns out to be better than anyone expected, he just needed someone to show him how to believe in himself you see, or at least not to act like a jackass all the time and the Sharks look like they might be able to win the Superbowl, sorry Pantheon Cup. I'd add that because of it's great ensemble cast, well written subplots, and interesting things to say about the myth and business of sports is actually a pretty good film, even if Oliver Stone made some odd choices (if you know you know).

But this isn't a standard Hollywood movie, it's an Oliver Stone film, so it ends with the "big game" being the league championship with Harris, sorry, Willie being able to squeak out a win in the final seconds.

The Super Bowl occurs off screen and in the final scene as the credits run we learn the Sharks lost. It was not to be.

To me that's basically what happened. Harris improbably became the nominee and then came agonizingly close to winning but alas didn't. The norm media people are socialized into is to always portray the losing presidential campaign is incompetent and run by idiots. But in this case it's not true, it was a pretty good campaign! Just not good enough to overcome the same headwinds that have sunken every other democratic government with an election this year other than Luxembourg.

Had Coach D'Mato cut Captain Jack earlier could they have won? Maybe, but like in sports it's just hard to know for sure. Maybe Willie would have done worse, maybe the real problem was choices made long ago as D'Mato points out to the owner that "Maybe if I had gotten the linemen I wanted maybe our quarterback would still be walking!" We'll just never know, but the idea Harris was "bad at politics" is clearly wrong.

One can run a good campaign, even a perfect one, and still lose an election.

Monday, October 16, 2023

What People Get Wrong About Harris in 2020

Here's a quick post about something I think a lot of people get wrong about Vice President Kamala Harris's 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Folks like Nate Silver look at how she dropped out fairly early during the 2020 cycle and sight that as iron clad proof that "she's bad at politics", but a presidential nomination isn't like being on Survivor where the longer you last the better you've done at all. 

Instead it's more like a poker game at a tournament where there are some high risk/high reward strategies that maximize your chance to win but mean you could go bust quickly, and some strategies (like how I play poker, you just never bet) that maximize the time you stay in but make it really, really unlikely you'll win the table/tournament. 

To review, after Harris's big break out debate moment where she knocked Biden she got a ton of free media coverage and her fundraising surged. Hoping to maximize her advantages of this major break she went with a high risk/high reward strategy of staffing up nationally in order to maximize her chances of winning if she caught fire and she pulled an upset in an early state and/or had to hang in for a long drawn out battle. Unfortunately for her the debate moment turned out to be a one off moment, not a major breakthrough with the public or donors and so the money ran out fairly quickly (a national campaign staff leads to quite the "burn rate" for a campaign) and so she had to drop out. 

Meanwhile a candidate like Amy Klobuchar went with the low risk strategy of conserving her money for the long run and so she was able to stay in much longer. Under the "Survivor Model" this means she ran a better campaign, but in reality Klobuchar had little campaign infrastructure (even in her own state) to be able to take advantage of a break through if she got lucky and one occurred.

In other words her strategy kept her in race for a while, but she was never a major threat to Biden once the field narrowed, hence why she quickly dropped out and endorsed him. Meanwhile Harris going "all in on" that early great hand didn't work out, but it was still a smart move if she wanted to actually win the big enchilada and not just stick around in the game for as long as possible

You can see other good examples of how the "Survivor Model" doesn't hold up in past races as well. Under this theory in 1988 Jesse Jackson ran a great campaign and thus he was a very skilled politician, after all he took it all the way to the convention, the last Tribal Council! Likewise Jerry Brown in 1992 held out the longest against Bill Clinton, and thus ran a great campaign as well. But in reality The Duke's real threats in 1988 were people who dropped out early due to scandals like Gary Hart and Joe Biden not a factional candidate like Jackson, who never appealed much to the party other that his coalition of some white liberals and black voters. Likewise the candidates who had a chance to actually beat Bill Clinton in 1992 were probably guys like Mario Cuomo (who dropped out before New Hampshire), Tom Harkin, and Bob Kerrey not a candidate like Brown who appealed largely to just his own personality based faction and people who hated The Big Dog, or Paul Tsongas who was pretty out of step with the mainstream of his party on a number of issues.