Steelmaning Josh Shapiro

There is a form of argument that’s become more popular online that seeks to invert the old trope of “strawmanning” an argument. That is, rather than set up a weak version of an argument to knock down like, well a strawman, you make the hardest possible case for an argument, a “steelman” as it were, so then you can knock it down too, I guess. 

Argumentative tricks aside, I think the whole concept of “steelmanning” can be helpful when thinking about politics, not because it tells you what’s going to happen, but rather how it helps to clarify what could in fact happen. 

There were a million and one reasons to think Trump could never become president the day he came down that escalator, and yet here we are. Likewise there were just as many to doubt Obama could win in 2005, but this is also a thing that did in fact happen. Thus as the 2028 presidential cycle heats up, I think steelmanning can be a useful way to think about this stuff. 

To be clear, these posts aren’t going to be about winning a general election, if you learned one thing from The Trump Years it should be this: candidate effects in presidential elections are small, if you’re the nominee of a major party you can win. If even a know nothing game show host who boasted on tape about sexually assaulting women can win, well then anyone can, even you! So clearly the real question is about party nominations, which is what these posts will focus on. 

Accordingly I’m going to start with Josh Shapiro (kind of a lay up to be honest) but I plan to work at tougher nuts as we go through this. So, yes, the "Invisible Primary” is well underway (New Hampshire, like Monday, gets here sooner than you’d think!) 

THE STEELMAN CASE FOR JOSH SHAPRIO

Please take a comfortable seat and close your eyes. Take three deep breaths. Now purge your mind of all you know about the chaos in the Middle East. Yes, all the carnage and horror, the wars and insanity, the gas prices(!) and violent absurdity. Yes, set that aside. Now in your mind picture a man, he is handsome with nice hair. He’s the sort of man you’d like to live across the street from. A committed professional yes, but also a family man, with a loving wife and adoring children. He likes sports, and can make intelligent comments while watching a game. He looks good in a suit, and blue jeans too. And he has nice hair, did I mention that?

Now imagine this man is the governor of the most important state in the Electoral College and is probably going to steam roll his opponent by double digits this November.

Now open your eyes and see the guy you wished you married or was your roomie in college: Joshua David Shapiro.

That’s basically the argument. He’s “presidential” and he’s super popular in the most important state in presidential politics. There it is. 

Okay that would make for an anti-climatic blog post so I’ll add in some stuff, but seriously, don’t over think it. If Dems are desperate to win in 2028, there’s your man. 

But if that’s not enough here’s some more:

Shapiro is a proven fundraiser and as a governor of a big state has a real fundraising base to draw from, Philly is a major commercial center after all. Also, and I want to be very careful how I phrase this…so let me say it this way: I think as a candidate for president Josh Shapiro would be able to put together a substantive national fundraising network to complement his natural fundraising base back home in PA. Okay, did I do that right?

Basically Shapiro might not be the biggest fundraiser of the cycle but he can put enough cash for his campaign and allied superPACs together to be viable and duke it out say between New Hampshire, Super Tuesday and beyond if it comes to that.

THE CASE AGAINST

To be blunt, becoming president is, well, hard, even if Trump was able to do it. I have over 20 people in my Google sheet tracking Dems who are making moves for 2028 and we are just getting started here. So in all likelihood Shapiro won’t be the nominee, just because, well it’s hard and a lot of other people could win.

But I have been seeing a real uptick in people doing lazy thinking that Shapiro just can’t win because he’s Jewish, or perhaps Democratic primary voters are too antisemitic* to vote for him.

I don’t think that argument holds up to much scrutiny. Which isn’t to say antisemitism hasn’t been a real force in American history (it has!) or that we haven’t seen a major increase in antisemitism recently (we really have!), it’s that I don't see those realities translating into a Jew being unable to win Democratic primary elections. 

Here in Minnesota (not a particularly Jewish state) we have a long proud history of electing Jewish senators for years. South Minneapolis isn’t exactly Williamsburg, but we kept electing Frank Hornstein for 20 years, we couldn’t get enough of the guy!

Or to put it another way, if Democratic primary voters won’t vote for a Jew in primary elections…then why do they keep nominating Shapiro for governor in Pennsylvania? 

This isn’t to say that Shapiro doesn’t have a real challenge on his hand in navigating Gaza, and his faith, the war with Iran, and the recent massive public shifts in opinion about Israel blah blah blah. These are real challenges he will have to face. But it’s not clear to me that these are harder challenges to address than say Secretary Mayor Pete’s well documented struggles with winning black voters or Harris’s problem with the contemporary Democratic Party’s deep skepticism of nominees who lost and want to run again. 

Will Shapiro win? Probably not, but you could say that about basically every Democratic contender at this point. The thing to remember is he certainly has a shot. As much as a skinny kid with a funny name and grand designs once did, long ago.

*James Kirchick basically makes this argument at the end of a recent episode of Barro et al's pod

The Walz Post

Walz dropping out of the governor's race is obviously a big deal but I don't want to spend a lot time right now rehashing what is currently being highly hashed. Instead I want to focus I've seen of sloppy takes floating around recently and so I wanted to clear things up.

Despite claims to the contrary there is zero evidence that Walz was "connected to" or "involved in" or "committed" fraud (for example I saw Mike Pesca's claiming this on Twitter). What clearly has happened was there was a bunch of fraud while he was governor and this became a real political problem because the mainstream media here turned into a big running story (as in "MN FRAUD CRISIS" every night on local news) and many DFL people basically told Walz he should hang up his spikes. Add it whole " the buck stops here" ethos and his position became increasingly untenuous.

Personally I think Walz deserves some props from Democrats for doing the strategic and non-selfish thing by deciding to quit long before the primary because there are stronger candidates to take his place. This is also evidence of the Democrats actually learning real lessons from the last 10 years, like the idea of leaving on the high note rather than fighting epic political death battles for personal reasons (see also lots of very old Democratic House members decided to retire).

This is also good reminder that if Biden had dropped out a year earlier he'd probably be remembered by his party and a lot of the media in a pretty different light. Even though it's still quite likely the Dems lose in 2024 (probably with Harris as the nominee because being the VP gives you real advantages in the McGovern-Fraser system and Dems just really like nominating VP's, see Gore and Mondal and...Biden) because that's what happened to pretty much every incumbent party in a developed democracy in 2024.

Walz will be a punching bag for a week or two and then everyone will move on to Trump bombing Havana or whatever and he'll probably leave office with a above water approval rating.

I know a lot of members of the chattering classes will see this as a distinction without difference but the details do matter in my opinion.

I'll also say that I do think Walz still could have won anyway, and the predictions of doom were a bit overblown. Candidate effects are real, but they are also fairly small, especially with a known quantity like an incumbent governor. The main driver here isn't media cycles or interview skills, it's structural things like Trump dismal aproval rating, the public souring on the economy, and the very real dreaded "Six Year Itch" . And by those metrics 2026 is shaping up to be a banner year for the Dems for structural reasons. In other words if it does turning into "Klobberin' Time" the odds of the DFL holding the mansion in St. Paul went from like 75% to 98% or insert numbers of your chosing. Which is why Walz dropping out, should actually make DFLers feel glad, if personally frustrated.

Best of 2025!

What can I say? Not exactly a great year.

But inspired by a friend's post I'm going to try to be positive and give you my best stuff of the year. So let's go!

Favorite movie: One Battle After Another

This film really shows Paul Thomas Anderson, one of the greatest directors of his generation at the height of his powers. And backed with a great cast (right down to all the ex-military guys playing it as straight as Lee Marvin) it was just a lot of fun to watch.

It’s at times incredibly serious, but also at times laugh out loud funny.

It’s also clearly a substantive political film about the times we are living through. But also since PTA is a non-didactic filmmaker makes it so much better than a lot of similar attempts. Team Trump are obviously not a bunch of groypers…but…uhhh…aren’t some of them not not that too?

Likewise the “French 75s” are neither particularly heroic, nor effective, nor people you should look up to. And the film hints that maybe their actions sort of backfired and accidentally caused the whole outcome they were trying to stop to begin with. Other highlights include my boy Leonardo as a stoner “girl dad” and Benicio del Toro as a beer buzzed karate sensei. Also one of the best performances of Sean Penn’s career (which is saying a lot!).

Favorite Book: The Secret History.

This cult classic was a great read, but hard to sum up, so I'll just quote the back of my paperback:  “Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.” Very much worth your time, especially in winter.

Favorite New Podcast: On the one hand the “centrists*”on Central Air can be kind of annoying at times. On the other hand they make good points, which always makes for a good pod. Points including insights like: price controls are actually bad. And Mamdani is great for #content but the discourse about him is pretty overrated, sorry he's not the future of politics. What makes part of this pod interesting is these are contentious issues these days! For example the mayor elect's advisors seem actually believe that the key to a prosperous New York is strict price controls on [squints at notes] beer at baseball games.

*a term generally used in political writing as a pejorative insult, not descriptively. So like "tory" or "queer" maybe it's something people should try to take back and own?

Some Thoughts On Elon vs Trump

Here are a few thoughts about the Big Story:

This whole epic falling out was nothing if not predictable. There's just no way those two egomaniacs could work together for the next four years and both seem to have wanted different things out of the relationship. Trump seems to have viewed Elon as a bit of a stalking horse tasked with doing unpopular things, largely getting revenge on all the groups/people/institutions Trump hates. While Elon seems to have fallen into the old Franz von Papen trap where you think Trump is a someone you can control while you get to be the power behind the throne. 

But as other's who tried this with Trump have found out it doesn't work and in the end Trump discards those aspiring Grey Eminences Thomas Cromwell style (too many metaphors I know) when it suits him.  

This seems like a heck of a lot bigger than a president replacing a chief of staff (which is always a big deal but still pretty common historically speaking) for a number of reasons.

Elon had a far greater role in running than any other white house chief of staff in history (there's a reason I referenced Wolf Hall above!) and Elon remains a giant larger than life person (the world's richest man! Who owns a website super popular with media people! etc etc) who will likely remain a major force in politics and business for the foreseeable future. 

Just compare Elon's position to that of Don Regan* who was Reagan's chief of staff in 1985 and 1986. There's a big epic story here but the TLDR version is Regan was terrible at the job and sailed the ship into the iceberg with Iran-Contra and alienating Congress. Regan also made many enemies inside Dutch's inner circle and eventually Reagan's people were finally able to talk him into dumping ole Don and by all accounts wasn't a very amicable divorce.

So Don, took his brutal revenge. He wrote a book making fun of Reagan as being old and out of touch with what was going on (YMMV on if this was true) and made a lot of funny claims about Nancy involving astrologists (YMMV on that as well).

Then Regan went back to his big house in Virginia and spent the rest of his life painting landscape painting.

Elon probably won't be going away like that. And back then the whole Regan/Reagan thing was seen as a big deal that everyone in DC talked about for six months or so.

*Reagan's chief of staff was named Regan? What can I say, the 80's were a confusing time.

American Political Ideology Explained (New York City Grocery Store Edition)

So I saw people fighting about this on Twitter (sorry I refuse to call it X) and I thought it was, in it’s own strange way, a good way to illustrate differences between ideologies in contemporary American politics.

My main objection to this plan isn’t that it’s “communism” (it isn’t, just look at any number of municipal booze stores in Minnesota) but rather it wouldn’t work as any such store actually owned and run by the City of New York would inevitably be bogged down by an absurd number of rules and requirements ($28 an hour starting wage, union transported and locally sourced food, how do we know these casavas were ethically sources? etc.) so it's easy to see these stores operating in the red (while probably not have a great array of products or service). 

There are of course grocery stores like this in America, and they tend to get shut down (such is the logic of a market economy) but I guess they could be run indefinitely if the city decided to keep hemorrhaging money to keep them running?

Anyway I do think the question of “how should the next Mayor of New York City address the issue of food insecurity in our communities?” is helpful to differentiate ideologies. Here’s roughly how I see most important political ideologies in America these days answering:

• Left Ideology (think Zohran Mamdani himself): Capitalism simply can’t work, read Marx, it will inevitably fail. So the solution is to build a system of grocery stores run by the City of New York that will operate at a loss to provide food to those who need it.
• Current Liberal Ideology (think Joe Biden or Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey): The city should give grants to NGOs and community based organizations to distribute food, this should be monitored through a rigorous process of grant reporting and such.
• New Liberal/Neoliberal ideology (think this book): Just give people who need food a debit card to buy it, we could call it SNAP
• Old Conservative ideology (Think Scott Walker): They can get a SNAP card but it needs to be worth less and we need strict rules on what can be bought…no sharp cheddar!
• MAGA ideology (Think Elon): The “food insecure” will be sent to one of our new Kennedy Wellness Centers, where a program of rigorous vegetable/fruit harvesting and group therapy sessions will make them whole and cure them of the woke mind virus. (Note failure to report to your Wellness Center may result in deportation to El Salvador or being turned into biodiesel)

This doesn't cover everything in American political ideology of course, but in terms of "how should the welfare state be structured" I think it does help illuminate stuff.

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.

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.