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.

First GOP Debate Review

Hello, is this thing on? 

I haven't been blogging much anymore for various reasons but the fact that I actually took the time to watch the GOP's first presidential debate makes me feel obligated to write something up about it. So here goes:

Well that was awful. One thing that struck me as an overall theme of this Trump-lacking debate was how very much it is now Trump's party (with some notable dissents). 

To keep things quick, and because I've decided to write this without looking at other people's reaction online let's just do bullet points.

• The narrative divide: There's a pretty giant divide in the GOP these days between old schoolers like Mike Pence who talks about a sort of Reagan's idea of "Morning in America" moment they want to bring about (the former VP seems to have mentioned Dutch more than five times) and folks like Vivek Ramaswamy arguing for a Trump style "American Carnage" master narrative. To put it simply this is a major change for the optimism of presidents like Reagan and the Bushes of my younger days. 
• Vivek Ramaswamy seems to have "won" the debate: That is he probably got the most camera time and really raised his profile. I'd expect a "bump" in the polling, but I doubt that will last. Why have this know-nothing internet celebrity figure when you can have Trump, the platonic archetype?
• DeSantis did fine, which probably means he "lost" the debate: Sure he did a decent job of delivering his lines, but I didn't see much to change the current dynamics with Trump as front runner and him as a distant second. It's not the end of the world, RDS can still win, but this is yet another blown opportunity for him.
• The crazy doesn't stop: It's kind of wild that "bomb/invade Mexico" has become a mainstream position of various GOP candidates for president. That seems like a really poorly though out idea. It's also sad, Mexico isn't a failed state, it's a country with problems but nice stuff too.
• Less of the "woke" stuff: Nobody really used that term, and there was just one question about trans people, I don't know what this means but I expected more.
• Everyone else: Well Christie was fun yelling at Ramaswamy, but a lot of meh other than that. 

In conclusion? It's still Trump's party and you can cry if you want to.

Feel The Bidenmentum!

One thing I've noticed recently is that there's been a number of liberals, often in the media, pushing the idea that it's time for Biden to hang up his spikes and let someone new run in 2024. Michelle Goldberg wrote a typical example of this recently, citing Biden's age as a major campaign liability due to media optics:

...chances are good that Biden’s competitor will be someone much younger, like Ron DeSantis, who will be 46 in 2024. Barring some radical shift in the national mood, the candidates will be vying for leadership of a deeply dissatisfied country desperate for change. For Democrats, the visual contrast alone could be devastating.

I understand her point, people oftentimes use the term "cringe" about Biden for real reasons. But here's where I think the Biden haters are wrong, there's just no good reason to assume that voters actually care about this stuff.

Afterall, Biden was the so called "cringe" candidate of the 2020 nomination cycle who ended up winning pretty easily despite what could be best called a "minimalist" campaign (Minnesota is a good example: his entire enterprise seems to have consisted of 30 people in a bowling alley for their election night party, while Bernie Sanders supposedly had hundreds of dedicated activists all over the state. And Biden won.)

Moreover these sorts of analysis suffer from a version of what Matt Yglesias calls "The Pundit's Fallacy", that is the idea that the key to winning elections is to do whatever the author of a given piece of punditry wants that politician to do. In Goldberg's case not replacing Biden with someone, "...like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia."

Meanwhile, unlikely speculation about television optics, the advantage of incumbency is a very real thing. There's a reason why only three incumbent presidents lost reelection since the Second World War. Given a choice of "more of the same" or "time for a change" the American electorate, for whatever reasons, tends to favor not rocking the boat baring something like a bad economy or a devastating pandemic. In fact, while the historical comparisons are less helpful, this seems to be a theme throughout American history going back to the 1790s.

To be fair Goldberg, and other's, argument is that voters will desperately want major changes in 2024, but I really don't see that. The 2022 midterms were hardly a change election with incumbents doing pretty well. As far as I can tell the degree people express dissatisfaction in polling seems to be more of a COVID hangover than people calling for a whole rethinking of the welfare state.

Finally, I think Goldberg is a bit presumptuous to assume that her preferred candidates would end up replacing Biden. Instead of Warnock the Democrats might very well end up with Bernie Sanders, an even older white guy! Or Kamala Harris who, for better or for worse, is deeply tied to the Biden Administration already. Or even some dark horse type candidate like JB Pritzker. The one thing you could count on is it would be a crazy free for all with everyone and their mom running that could easily turn into a progressive policy auction just like the 2020 cycle where the new nominee is stuck with a bunch of deeply unpopular positions.

I'll stick with the advantages of incumbency thank you very much.

Anything of course can happen. For all we know Biden might have a heart attack tomorrow. But the reality is that Biden is the Democrats best shot at holding on to the White House. People who claim that democracy hangs in the balance in the election of 2024 should act like they really believe this and get onboard the Biden Train. 

Minneapolis' Recent Election Explained

Well that just happened.

There of course is a lot to unpack in what can only describe as Minneapolis's most important election in decades. And having lived through those days of "fire and fury" I have a lot of opinions. But in the sprit of Julia Azari's excellent recap of what happened in Virginia, I'll go with four big points:

Jacob Frey Is The Come Back Kid

If you had asked me is early July of 2020 what mayor Jacob Frey's political future was I would have told you that it was quite likely he wouldn't seek reelection, if only because there's no way he could win. Indeed I thought there was a decent chance he would resign as he seemed at times to have taken things on a personal level.

But what a difference a year and a half can make! 

We seemed to have witnessed one of the biggest political comebacks, since, I dunno, Richard Nixon? To be fair a lot of things broke in Frey's favor. For reasons that remain unclear he never attracted a big competitor and thus his main opponents where a community activist who had never held elected office and a former state legislator who used to represent a suburb of St. Paul.

Likewise his opponents focused on what I saw as a bizarre strategy of not coordinating around a specific alternative candidate, and instead just urging people to vote for anyone but Frey. At first glance it might seem to make sense as Minneapolis has a nonpartisan "top three" ranked choice voting system...but in reality refusing to coordinate around a specific alternative to a incumbent is a pretty poor strategy. As Rick Flair would say "to be the man, you have to beat the man." That is to say you can't just Tweet #dontrankFrey and hope for the best. Or rather you can do that, but I wouldn't expect it work.

Urban Politics Often Isn't About Ideology

It's popular in commentary about Minneapolis politics to discuss conflicts in terms of ideology. So Frey is described as a "centrist" or "on the right" when in reality in the broader context of American politics he's a ridiculously flaming liberal. Likewise Axios Twin Cities tried to make some sense of this with a helpful map about the five incumbents that lost reelection on the city council, and it sort of works. But not really. Is Jason Chavez really more "to the left" than Alondra Cano was? Than Gary Schiff was? At a certain point it's arguing about how many angles can dance on the head of a pin.

I'd argue that the real dividing line in Minneapolis politics was over Frey and the Question Two amendment. To over simplify: after George Floyd was murdered and the riots happened Minneapolis politics became polarized around the idea that Jacob Frey was the problem and had to go, and those who opposed getting rid of him for whatever reason. It also polarized around the idea that the MPD was the problem and it had to go, and those who opposed this idea for whatever reason. 

In short, this isn't a story about who's on the "left" and "right" and who's a "progressive" or a "centrist" but rather specific positions around those big questions.

Values Are Vague, Referenda Are Concrete

One theme of "the discourse" around the results is progressives announcing profound frustration with other progressives who ended up voting for Frey or voting down Question Two. This usually comes in terms of the idea that someone isn't "living their values." But the thing about values is they are vague. What does it mean to say "Black Lives Matter", to put a lawn sign in your yard stating such? That you support "dismantling" the police department and creating a whole new institutions from scratch? Or something else?

At the end of the day a voter in a referendum is being asked to make a specific choice ie "yes" or "no" to a specific question. In this case a specifically worded question that was written to leave the door open to "abolishing the police" (hence the use of "may" rather than "shall"). And a lot of voters, including many liberals with Black Lives Matter lawn signs decided, for whatever reason, to vote no.

To bring it back to lawn signs I remember seeing someone who had a "No Justice, No Peace!" sign AND and Frey sign. You might think that's crazy, I thought it was quite funny, but to this person those values aligned. 

Sometimes Activist Groups Aren't That Representative

A popular story about Minneapolis politics over the last year and a half is that of Jacob Frey as the out of touch white liberal being confronted by protestors furious (and rightly so!) about injustice (see this classic photo). And while there's some truth to this, it's also true that Frey's support among older black voters in North Minneapolis was a key part of his success, and those same voters were part of why Question Two was defeated as well.

It reminds me a bit about Elizabeth Warren who succeeded in winning the support of a number of black activist groups but could win over black voters. And I don't mean this a putdown about lefty activists groups, but just as a statement of reality. Just because a group claims to speak for folks, doesn't necessarily mean they actually do.

A Theory Of Social Media Meltdowns

Hello everyone. I've been taking a long break from blogging during the Rampjaar that has been 2020 for a bunch of different reasons, but seeing as we (probably) saved The Republic by electing Joe Biden and, in God's good time, we will get some sort of vaccine to end COVID, I have decided to "get back on the horse", as they say.

(I should also say I was a bit inspired by a lot of people doing things like launching their own online projects, or leaving standard journalism to brave the wilds of Substack, or pointing out that the old internet of Blog World was in many ways a lot better that the often times insane brave new world of social media.)

So with that here's my first attempt at posting in a while.

 

One thing you hear a lot about if you spend too much time on the internet is various very online and often social media driven meltdowns*, where an organization or institution, usually closely connected to the internet, makes a questionable (or not questionable!) decision, and then all hell breaks loose inside it in a very public way you can watch in real time.

Remember that time the New York Times decided to publish Tom Cotton's terrible Op-Ed? Classic meltdown. Or see this 2019 piece about a number of the social media driven meltdowns in the world of young adult literature. Likewise columnists in top tier media outlets leaving is its own subset of meltdowns, see the saga of Bari Weiss, or the meltdown about Kevin Williamson getting the boot. Or if you'd like a "ripped from the headlines" example, see the recent meltdown at Random House over if they should publish a self-help book from best selling author, and controversial weirdo, Jordan Peterson.  

These events are hardly that important in the grand scheme of things, but for those of us who spend way to much time online (which thanks to the virus is a lot of us these days) they can be very prominent when they break.

When they happen, they tend to create a enormous amount of online content where people fight about them and "what they mean". These takes run the gambit from "this was fair" to "this was unfair" to "this shows a dangerous new ideology" to "some one is getting their just desserts" to all sorts of thing about "wokeness" and "free speech" and God only knows what else.

But I was always struck by there being a weird sort of dynamic in these meltdowns that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Then I remembered a great old post and Twitter thread by Bloomberg's Noah Smith. He compared these sorts of dynamics to the Japanese concept of gekokujo.

Gekokujo is a Japanese concept that roughly means "the lower rules the higher" or "the low overcomes the high." Once upon a time, it would refer to lords of the lower ranks in the nobility overthrowing or controlling more senior lords in pre-modern Japan. But as Noah points out one of the classic examples of this is the so called "February 26 Incident" in 1936, where a influential clique of lower level officers in the Army attempted a coup to seize control of the military and government. They failed, and many of their leader were executed, but ironically, the Japanese military and government largely adopted their policies of sidelining civilian leaders, extreme militarism, and imperial expansion.

It didn't end well, to say the least.

This example may be extreme, but that's why I thought about it in terms of various online meltdowns. A lot of this stuff is a sort of gekokujo attempt by lower level people in very online and social media adjacent organizations to "over come the high" of that organization by leveraging the internet and especially social media.

Note that as Noah points there is nothing inherently wrong with this: "As an example of how gekokujo can do good, it's wonderful that the econ profession is finally trying to rid itself of sexism. That would never have happened without the support of social media. That was a heroic episode of gekokujo!" 

You could also argue that a lot of what happened around the whole #metoo movement in Hollywood was a sort of gekokujo push to get rid of people like Harvey Weinstein and others, and as the hashtag shows social media support was a big part of this.

Noah argues that the big danger of of gekokujo is a sort of backlash it can lead too, but I don't think that's what's going on with these sorts of very online social media meltdowns. Instead I'd point out some other specific problems that keep popping up:

1. Gekokujo campaigns have a tendency to get out of control: The Bari Weiss example is telling. No her career is not some important national issue, and I don't care for her much either. But if you're a progressive media person and start out trying to criticize the writing of one of the few non-progressive writers in your newsroom and end up arguably creating a classic "hostile work environment" for your lesbian coworker, maybe you should step back and ask yourself, "what are we doing here?" Or see the strange case of David Shor, the smart progressive political data guru who who faced a classic use of gekokujo online tactics to try kick him out of the small world of progressive data campaign people for tweeting an academic paper people didn't like. (Or see some of the truly bizarre stuff from The Online Young Adult Fiction Wars.)

2. Gekokujo tends to lead to group think: Many of the very elite media organizations I've outlined above that have engaged in these sorts of meltdowns seem to been stuck dumbfounded by recent political events. The New York Times is instructive: according to in-house conservative writer Ross Douthat when it came time to write their various "the case for..." pieces about who the next Democratic presidential nominee should be, none of the liberal columnists he works with were willing to do it for Joe Biden and so it fell to him. Why were these highly paid writers totally out of touch with what actual Democratic primary voters think? Likewise see the City of New York's swing of 7.6% towards Trump, more than any other state in the union, but I don't a recall a single pre-election story about this possibility. Gekokujo campaigns might cause your to lose focus on things like what voters in your own community actually think. And of course they can, one theme of these kinds of campaigns is that they take a lot of work to get going.

3. Who is the actual little guy? One of the themes in all these meltdowns is that the "lows" in gekokujo campaign aren't really that in terms of society, even if the fights are often always fought in those terms. Lower level staffer in The Atlantic or New York Times are hardly the truly disposed in our society. Is overthrowing the leaders of flagship publications really about creating a more just society? A better political press? Or could it be about something a little more self interested?

The big point here isn't that these individual meltdowns are some grave national crisis. It's that they show a peculiar sort of dynamic in a certain type of organization, some of which are quite influential, that seems increasingly common. And since this dynamic has the potential for real consequences, good and bad, it should be seen as something to actually treat seriously.

*I decided to call these events "meltdowns" in honor of the epic Gawker meltdown that was a trailblazer of this phenomena and also because I wanted to stress the similarities of these types of individual events rather than the unique circumstances that surround each one. If you are outraged and want to organize a social media campaign to cast me into the outer darkness please don't, but feel free to sound off in the comments!

Handicapping The Democratic Field V

With 10 days left before the Iowa Caucuses now seems like a great time to revisit where things in the Democratic field stand.

Following other posts I've written like this I'm going to continue to rate candidates in terms of their likeliness via broadly defined tiers. However I'm going to add something new, taking a (very, very) rough guess at the percentages of a given outcome and see where they line up with 538's cool new prediction model on who will win the nomination. So with an eye towards how idiotic this will probably look in three months, let's jump right in! (Also if you'd like to see how my thinking from about this has changed just click on the 2020 tag at the bottom of this post).

TIER 1:
Joe Biden: Simply put Biden has been and remains the front runner in the 2020 Democratic nomination cycle. Despite negative coverage by much of the press, and the never ending "gaffes" we hear so much about, he remains on top by most measures. In 538's national poll tracker he's about 6.5 points above Bernie, and over 10 points above Elizabeth Warren. Likewise he has a large lead in endorsements compared to his nearest competitor, 226 points to Warren's 81 by 538's methodology.  More over Biden's support among state legislators, another metric of party support, is the best with him having the most endorsements overall, and probably more importantly having a sizable contingent of endorsements from all four early states, unlike his competitors. And finally he has significant support from unions (see this awesome tracker somebody made), with only Bernie Sanders also having formal support among this key aspect of the Democratic coalition. To be sure, this hardly guarantees success, there is no national primary after all, and endorsements might be less valuable now that they appear to have been in past cycles. But never the less Biden is the front runner.
-538's odds of Biden winning more than half of the delegates as of 1/24: 41%
-Longwalk's guesstimate: I'd go a bit higher, as I guess his older, multiracial coalition is more durable than most suspect and there's a reasonable chance he could see a flood of party support after Iowa. Let's say 50%.

TIER 2A:
Elizabeth Warren: Warren seems to have basically been treading water since I last wrote about the race back at the beginning of December. She's in 3rd place in national polling at around 15% while generally tying Pete for fourth in Iowa and New Hampshire. Likewise she's gathered some more endorsements over January and is in second place after Biden by 538's count, but her pace of new support isn't very impressive. She picked up 13 new endorsement points in January compared to Biden's 54, Bloomberg's 22, Pete's 10, Bernie's 7, Bennet's 3, and Steyer's 1. That's not very impressive. Never the less she is well positioned as a big tent unity candidate if Biden and/or Bernie falter in early states.
-538's odds of Warren winning more than half of the delegates as of 1/24: 13%
-Longwalk's guesstimate: That seems low to me, I'll go with 25%.

TIER 2B:
Bernie Sanders: I've been bearish on Bernie's chances for a long time, mainly because he's a factional candidate running in a party that values coalition building and big-tentism. But I can't deny he has real support in the form of close polling in Iowa with Joe Biden and a small recent lead in New Hampshire while being second nationally. Likewise he recently passed Klobuchar and moved into third place in endorsement support. So despite my longstanding doubts, it is quite possible Bernie can succeed. Having said that I still think Warren and Biden are far more likely.
-538's odds of Bernie winning more than half of the delegates as of 1/24: 23%
-Longwalk's guesstimate: Due to the above factors I still think this is high, but having gotten this far and retaining real support means Bernie has a chance. I'll go with 10%, and feel free to mock me when he wins (I can then point out you don't know how probability works).

TIER 3A:
Pete Buttigieg: Since early December Pete has gone down in national polls from about 10% to 7.5% basically tying him with a rising Bloomberg. In addition, his support in Iowa and New Hampshire has declined making him roughly tied for fourth with Warren in both. Likewise, he remains weak when comes to party support, with his tiny roster of state legislators being pretty noteworthy, at least to me. But despite these difficulties it's his total lack of support among non-white voters in general and black voters in particular, that remains his biggest challenge. Could he win Iowa and somehow dramatically upend this race? I guess anything is possible, but at this point in the race he strikes me as a longshot.
-538's odds of Pete winning more than half of the delegates as of 1/24:7%
-Longwalk's guesstimate: Seems about right!

TIER 3B
Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bloomberg: I see both of these candidates as extreme long shots, but for very different reasons. Klobuchar has run a classic "Iowa or bust!" campaign hoping to use a victory there to launch a bandwagon that everyone will climb aboard, similar to what happened with John Kerry in the 2004 cycle, or Jimmy Carter way back in '76. Unfortunately while she has improved her standing in Iowa into the high single digits, she's still way behind everyone else. Moreover she seems to have little to no support in states after that. In that sense I really don't see it happening for her.
-538's odds of Klobuchar winning more than half of the delegates as of 1/24: Essentially Nil (538 gives everyone but the "Big Four" a .6% combined chance of winning).
-Longwalk's guesstimate: Hey, Trump's president right? So let's say 3%.

Michael Bloomberg has been trending up in national polls after spending God knows how much money of TV ads and hiring an army of staffers. Likewise he's been able to parlay his extensive connections with mayors and other Democratic political actors into some real endorsements, earning him 33 points by 538's counting, right behind Pete's 36. At this point he's no longer someone who can be dismissed. But at the same time the fact that he's skipping the early states, something that has never worked for other candidates who've tried it, and has a record that's deeply out of touch with the contemporary Democratic Party makes him a major long shot in my view. But then again look who's president!
-538's odds of Bloomberg winning more than half of the delegates as of 1/24: Essentially Nil.
-Longwalk's guesstimate: Hey, Trump's president right? So let's say 3%.

TIER 3C:
Contested Convention: As far back as I can remember journalists and pundits have fantasized about this outcome and thus every four years people try desperately to try to find ways bring the dream to life, and this cycle is no exception. But a mid-20th Century style convention in Milwaukee where the ultimate nominee is unknown when the convention is gaveled in remains really unlikely. Why? Well Dave Hopkins summed this up nicely last spring when professional take writers first got excited about it. Simply put such an outcome is unlikely because the winnowing based process we've already seen happening will only accelerate once voting starts, the front loaded calendar might end the process soon rather than later, the Democratic Party isn't "highly fractious", and party elites will work incredibly hard to prevent what would undoubtedly be a disaster in the modern era where there simply are no "brokers" to "broker" the convention.
-538's odds of a contested convention as of 1/24: 16%.
-Longwalk's guesstimate: Something really remote, let's say 2%.

TIER 4:
Everybody else. Sorry, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.

Handicapping The Democratic Field IV

With Kamala Harris dropping out unexpectedly this week, now's a great time to update where I think the Democratic field stands (as well as find a new candidate, as she was my top pick!)

As I see it the race remains kind of typical of past wide open Democratic cycles like 2004, 1992, and 1988. That is the Democrats started out with a large field of perhaps 40 people and it's slowly but surely been winnowed down to 15 as of right now. Oh there's been some bumps along the way, a vanity gazillionaire candidacy here, a "why-are-you-getting-in-now?" there, 10,001 media cycles about "gaffes". But from on a macro level it's more or less that things are proceeding pretty normally for the Democrats (unlike how they did for the Republicans in the 2016 cycle).

With that said I like the idea of differentiating between "officially winnowed" that is when a candidate says they are done (like Harris did this week) and "functionally winnowed" where a candidate can no longer win but are still "running". As an example, Montana governor Steve Bullock was "functionally winnowed" not long after he announced because he went nowhere in terms of polling, fundraising, or endorsements. Meanwhile Cory Booker was functionally winnowed at some point over the last few months by my reckoning as he failed to breakthrough to voters and thus appears to be on his way to not qualifying for the December debate, arguably his last chance to make his case to a large audience. 

Accordingly I will follow my model of ranking the candidates by tiers and then go through the remaining candidates who I'd consider "functionally winnowed" and what's going on with them.

Tier 1A:
Joe Biden: Folks he remains the frontrunner. Despite never ending "gaffes", despite a progressive press that often mocks him as a buffoon, despite being almost as old as Bernie, despite all the predictions that he couldn't win (see here, here, here, and here) he remains the front runner. That is to say he remains a comfortably 10 or more points ahead of his closes rival Bernie Sanders in Real Clear Politics (RCP) poll tracker and continues to lead comfortably in endorsements, two metrics that historically get increasingly predictive as we get closer to Iowa. Moreover his multi-racial coalition of older, more working class supporters don't seem to care about the "gaffes" or the negative coverage he gets. This doesn't mean he's going to win, a lot could still happen, but he's in the lead. A good comparison in terms of Democratic nomination politics might be Walter Mondale in the 1984 cycle, but in a slightly weaker position. But then again Mondale won the nomination.

Tier 1B:
Elizabeth Warren: November was a bad month for Warren, she's fallen over 12 points in RCP's national tracker and her endorsements have slowed to a crawl (she got just two House Reps in 538's tracker was in November). But even so that puts her in third place nationally in the polls and second place in endorsements which are real strengths. And she has a vast army of progressive donors and activists backing her up. In other works she's taken some steps back recently but I still see her as someone who could possibly put together a big tend coalition and win in the end.

Tier 2A:
Pete Buttigieg: Pete's had a great run of polling as of late shooting up to 11 percent nationally in RCP's tracker. That's a real accomplishment, but the reason I'd leave him out of the top tier is that he remains incredibly weak in two key sectors. For one he seems to have little to no support among non-white voters in general and black voters in particular. The reality in today's Democratic Party is you simply can not be the nominee without significant support from black voters, the last one able to do it was Dukakis in 1988, and a lots changed since then. Secondly he's just really weak with Democratic Party actors. In 538's endorsement tracker he's at 25 points compared to Biden's 161. Both of these are major hurdles to overcome and I remain skeptical he can do it in the remaining two months before Iowa. But again  lot can still change.

Tier 2B:
Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar: I remain quite bearish on Bernie's chances. I suppose anything is possible but nothing I've seen since I last wrote about this in July has fundamentally changed my view of him as a factional candidate running in a party that values coalition building and big-tentism. He has caught up to Amy Klobuchar in endorsements, but he also had a heart attack, which I guess is rude to point out but always struck me as a big deal. Again anything is possible, but I personally just don't see it, especially since he remains at 16 or so percent nationally despite running nonstop for five years and having higher than 90 percent name recognition. Klobuchar is kind of the opposite in that she is way behind everyone else in national polling, but has shown and uptick in Iowa and is poised to possibly surge. Will this happen? Well the door is closing for her, and the December debate might be her last chance, but Iowa is a strange place and something could still happen.

Tier 3:
Michael Bloomberg: I really doubt Michael Bloomberg will be the nominee. He's spent part of his career as a Republican. He's given to Republicans as recently as 2016. His track record in New York City is admirable to many, but not so much among key Democratic constituencies. He's also not contesting the early states. Having said that he has more money than God and apparently wants to spend it all on television advertising. Can he win? Again Trump shows anything is possible, but I doubt it. 

And that's kind of it, everyone else strikes me as being "functionally winnowed", I run through what's going on bullet point style:

• Michael Bennet: I guess he really hates being in the Senate and so wants to be doing this for a while longer, but I don't see him winning (if he ever was a plausible nominee).
• Cory Booker: A once promising candidate, it just didn't work out for him as he's never broken out. Apparently he's going to stick around and give speeches about "what it all means" but yeah he's done, especially since he has his day job to get back to.
• Julian Castro: Like Booker he's toast but also wants to stick around and highlight various issues and causes and such. Good for him, but it's over and that he only has a platform because he's still running and that can't last forever.
• John Delaney: To paraphrase David Karol: "He's a wealthy retiree, this is his hobby now." I have no idea when he'll formally drop out, but he's finished.
• Tulsi Gabbard: I have no idea what's going on here. Maybe auditioning for a sweet gig as a talking head on Fox News bashing Democrats all day? Maybe she'll have to settle for Russia Today? Who knows, who cares.
•  Deval Patrick: Maybe there's a new type of winnowing here? Let's called it the unwinnowed, that is someone who runs in the "invisible primary", gets winnowed, then comes back from the dead like a zombie for more! Interesting sub-field of candidates to study I guess, but yeah he's not going to win.
•  Tom Steyer: Basically John Delaney, but with much, much more money.
•  Marrianne Williamson: Selling books.
•  Andrew Yang: Yang is only famous and only has a platform because of running, so probably won't be leaving anytime soon, but he's also not going to win.

-->--> In other words the Democrats are still dealing with a lot of candidates but expect a lot to continue to drop out between now and Iowa, or just stop being relevant.

Impeachment Reloaded

Back in the spring I wrote a longish post about where I stood on the whole issue of if the House should impeach Trump. I made a number of arguments about why I thought proceeding with impeachment then based on "Russiagate" stuff would have few upsides and many potential downsides. As I put it then, " I'm fairly confident of this: impeaching Trump without hope of conviction by the Senate and removal from office is a bad idea basically all around."

So how do I think this piece holds up now that we are seeing Trump ask foreign governments to go after his political rivals? Well at the risk of appearing to want to have my cake and eat it too I'd argue that my position made sense then, but things seem to really have changed over the last two weeks. In other words while I still think my skepticism of impeachment back then made sense, it's hard for me to not see it as necessary or even inevitable now.

I won't go over all my old points, but I do think things really have changed. The thing to remember here is impeachment is a political not legal process. That is to say rather than being about questions of law, whether it will make sense or work is really based on if the politics of it will work. And it seems to me that the politics of impeachment are now working.

To begin with, it appears that we are seeing real movement on the popularity of impeachment with 538's new cool tracker showing the public moving for a fairly substantial 10 plus point opposition to impeachment, to a new slight plurality of support after the Ukraine bombshell hit. To be fair this is hardly a giant shift, but it is real and shows that Ukraine revelations seemed to have really changed the game. 

Likewise we've seen a major shift in how many GOP party actors are responding to this new crisis  (and Trump's subsequent King Charles I style behavior) compared to their response to previous Trump created crises. Back when the Mueller Report came out, most GOP party actors took to defending Trump and toting the White's House's line that it was a witch hunt, or a "nothing burger" etc.

But recently we are seeing something quite different with two Republican governors expressing support for impeachment proceedings. Likewise we've seen a number of statements from prominent senators that, while aren't the same a backing impeachment, are a far cry from past support for the Trump Administration. And other Senators just refuse to say anything.  

This is a pretty big deal. Oftentimes we like to think of political opposition or support for something as being binary, where you're either for or against it. But in politics support is largely a variable with a whole spectrum of support or opposition to a given action or position. Think of a campaign endorsement, if someone agrees to endorse your campaign it could mean a number of different thing from just saying "Okay you can put my name on your website" on one end of the spectrum to "I can wait to start campaigning for you and helping you fundraise!" on the other end.

The same sort of dynamic is going on with Republicans and impeachment. One one end of the spectrum Republican politicians can just go with "Fake news!" or trot out the White House's latest talking points, while on the other end they could call for Trump to resign. Just saying nothing, that is refusing to defend the president in public, thus is actually not good at all for Trump and somewhere in the middle.

Finally, I'd argue that a major different between Ukraine stuff and Russia stuff (we really need to find better terminology for these things) is that for better or for worse the American public are big believers in the philosophy of "look forward, not back." And that reality is a big part about why the reactions to Russia appear quite different the recent reactions to Ukraine. The Russia stuff was largy about Trump's misconduct in the past and tied up in people's complex feelings about the 2016 elections.

But the Ukraine scandal is quite different as it's about current and ongoing misconduct by the president, not past events. Likewise it's fundamentally about the future election of 2020, and if Trump will use his position as POTUS to try to unduly influence the elction via his powers of office and the nation's foreign policy, rather than about relitigating 2016. 

Oh yeah that and the story of Trump and Russia is a pretty epic saga, while Ukrainegate is based on simple, uncontested facts. The American public is not big on dense, complicated stories.

At this point I'm not going to make a prediction about if Trump will be impeached and if so if he'll be removed from office. But that outcomes now seems at least possible, which means the Democrats' political calculus should change quite a bit from where it was back in the spring. In other words, since this a political process the fact that the politics of it now seem to work means the Democrats moving forward makes a lot of sense.

What Liberal Billionaires Want

Recently ThinkProgress, a long running news site published by the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress was shut down.

The news caused quite the stir on the more liberal portions of the internet. It was a staple of progressive online politics over the years and it's one of those more obscure websites that you might not have heard of but cast a pretty long shadow. The Daily Beast summed up it's impact as:

At its peak, there were few more important pieces of unapologetically progressive, online real estate than ThinkProgress. The site combined original reporting with an attack-dog mentality to target Republican lawmakers and conservative ideas. A testament to its success is found in the list of prominent alumni currently working in politics and journalism. That list includes Faiz Shakir, who now serves as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager; Amanda Terkel, the D.C. bureau chief of the Huffington Post; Nico Pitney, the political director at NowThis; Alex Seitz-Wald, a top campaign reporter for NBC News; Ali Gharib, a senior news editor at The Intercept; and Matt Yglesias, one of the founding members of Vox. 

If you follow online progressive writing that's a pretty impressive roster.

Personally I'm not very interested in the ins and outs of why this happened. Suffice to say after years of putting money into an ideologically oriented liberals news venture liberal megadonors in CAP's orbit decided to put it elsewhere, thus causing the site to be shut down. And the most notable of these has to be Tom Steyer who's decided to quit CAP's board and plow his money into his vanity presidential campaign.

It's fair to say that conservative mega donors take a very different approach. Over the decades they've spent huge sums of money to bankroll long term ideological projects on everything from a push to shrink the welfare state to rolling back the regulatory state to advocating for reductions in immigration.

This also applies to online news sites where there's a host of newer sites backed by real conservative money (you can find online if you want, I'm not going to bother to link).

Online there was a lot of heated discussion over this news. With all sorts of progressive and "Left" folks claiming it showed a serious missallocation of resources. The words "stupid" and "corrupt" got thrown around a lot as well.

I suppose it's possible that this is just stupidity, but I think it could be just another good example of how the two parties are actually more asymmetrical than we are often led to believe.

As political scientists David Hopkins and Matt Grossman point out in their book Asymmetrical Politics, one way to think about the two parties is that the Republicans tend to be more of a ideologically driven movement while the Democrats tend to be more of a coalition that comes together in order to win elections.

From that position long term ideological media projects would seem particularly hard for Democratically aligned groups like CAP to keep going. After all, coalitions change over time and it makes sense that projects like a more liberal minded news website could become less important over the years, especially because a lot of online news and commentary sites are like that these days.

More over lots of liberal gazillionaires seem to like more shot term measurable projects, like the bus lanes recently put in by Minneapolis funded in part by Bloomberg Philanthropies. These bus lanes might not change the game in the long term about how the public thinks about transportation and climate change, but the are creating real measurable improvements that also serve as a proof of concept on how to improve existing infrastructure for a more transit friendly future.

Add in the fact that the more progressive policies these sorts of sites would advocate for almost by definition are going to include those that could hurt the material interests liberal billionaires (like saying we should tax billionaires more), and the long term connection between these sorts of megadonors and efforts like ThinkProgress becomes even more tenuous.  

That's not to say that there's no value in long term investment in training young progressive journalists or other ideological oriented projects. Tom Steyer spending his money on keeping ThinkProgress going is surely much more useful for liberals than blowing it on early state ads so he can get into the debates.  But there appear to real problems to the idea of trying to replicate The National Review but for liberals online, and looking for a different model than "Tom Steyer should bankroll us forever" probably makes sense.

Handicaping the Democratic Field III

Well the first round the Democratic debates just happened last week and so I thought it would be a good time to check in on where things stand at this point in the 2020 election cycle.

Obviously there hasn't been a lot of dramatic upheaval over the weekend, but still I think there have been enough changes to justify an update. Especially since we probably won't see a whole lot of changes until the next round of debates at the end of July.

One non-candidate trend that I thought was important to acknowledge was just how popular these debates were with over 18 million people watching the second one on TV or online (the first debate had about 15 million viewers). It's hard to tell what sort of effects this popularity might have on either the nomination or the general election in 2020, but this overwhelming level of engagement by Democrats seems like a notable part of the 2020 election cycle.

The conventional wisdom appears to be that Biden had a pretty lousy night and a number of other candidate, especially Kamala Harris, did much better. Rather than parse those takes, I'd rather focus on developments since then with a focus on where party actors seem to be lining up. With that in mind I'll use the tier system I've used before to try and rank where I think things stand.

Tier 1:
Joe Biden: While I'll agree he had a pretty bad night and his poll numbers have gone down a bit, folks he's still the front runner. Looking at the RCP poll aggregator he remains about 12 points above Bernie, his nearest rival and 13.5 above Harris and Warren his next closet challengers. To be sure that's a pretty big hit from where he was just a few weeks ago, but he's still very much in the lead. But while poll respondents are fickle, party actors tend to stick with their picks, and Biden remains in the lead with party actors picking up two major endorsements since the debate with Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms backing him. This puts him at 102 points in 538's endorsement tracker compared to his closet rival Kamala Harris at 75, a small but very real lead. Moreover Biden's endorsement remain the most diverse of the whole field both in terms of types of supporters and also geography. He's in a weaker position than he was at the start of June but he remains the front runner, at least for now.

Tier 2A: 
Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris: Harris and Warren remain in the best position to beat Biden. Harris' widely praised debate performance has helped her shoot up since then to basically tie Warren at around 13.5% in RCP's poll aggregator. Meanwhile a wave a positive news coverage has helped Warren go up in the polls as well since the beginning of June. If there is a major difference between the two at this point I'd say that Harris is much stronger in endorsements. Over June she picked up six more House Members, only one of which was from California showing a broader geographical base of support that she's sported in the past. With Warren one thing that strikes me as a real weak point is how despite the weeks of glowing coverage in the media and a well received debate performance she hasn't added a single new endorsement to 538's tracker since mid-May. Seriously, why can't Warren get other Democrats to support her?

Tier 2B: 
Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker: These are the two candidates who strike mes as being most likely to be able to make the jump to Warren and Harris's level, but each has some pretty major weaknesses. Booker remains stuck in the doldrums in polling at around 3% despite a well received debate performance. However Booker does have an impressive list of supporters from New Jersey giving him an important base and I suppose he could spiral up sometime in future just like Harris recently did, so don't write him off. Mayor Pete has a different set of problems, his polling numbers have come down some and he hasn't been able to line up much party support but he's still doing better than Booker in the polls and raised an impressive $24 million this quarter which could easily keep him viable through Iowa. His big problem right now is something close to a total lack of support from non-white people. See this recent Quinnipiac University poll that has him at 0% among black voters. There's just no way he can win if he can't fix this, but the good news is he has time to try.

Tier 2C:
Bernie Sanders: This may seem weird since I'm moving the number two guy in the polls down but I really think Bernie is in trouble. Over at CNN Harry Enten does a good job of laying out some of the grim news in recent polling for Bernie (despite almost universal name recognition he's going down and especially weak in Iowa these days, a state he almost won four years ago). But I think the problems are even bigger for him than that. The fact of the matter is he's running a "factional candidacy" where he basically has this chunk of the party dead set behind him and he's trying to take over the whole party with it George McGovern style. The problem is Democrats seem to still want someone who can build a big tent coalition style campaign and that really leave him SOL. While I suppose he could still try to reboot his campaign, his debate performance, which was basically just him giving his 2016 stump speech over and over again in response to every question, just makes me really doubtful of this.

Tier 3A:
Julian Castro, Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar: This is basically the group of people I think have the best chance of being able to make the jump into the second tier. Each has their own problems and none is doing particular well in polls but they seem like plausible contenders if they get some lucky breaks so they have that going from them. Klobuchar and Castro have the very real problem of needing better polling to qualify for the September debate, but Castro was able to parlay a strong debate performance into fundraising and Klobuchar has a strong base of Minnesota endorsements. Beto is in a bit of a different boat as he already had a major surge in press coverage and polling only to see it fade away, but lighting can always strike twice.

Tier 3B:
Jay Inslee, Steve Bullock: In another cycle either of these could have been plausible contenders but they don't seem to be going anywhere. Then again both are successful governors and have at least some party support in terms of endorsements so I suppose they have a chance to try to get things going over the summer, but they remain pretty far behind Tier 3A.

Tier 3C:
Kristen Gillibrand, Michael Bennet: This is basically the tier for 3B people with even bigger problems. With Bennet it's a total lack of endorsements or polling support despite a well received debate performance among some journalists. I don't know what's gone wrong for Gillibrand but her incredible weaknesses in polling and endorsements after months of going full bore makes her seem pretty likely to drop out soon if things don't change.

Tier 4:
Delaney, Gabbard, Moulton, Ryan, Swalwell, de Blasio, Hickenlooper: This basically the tier of Representatives going nowhere, a mayor of New York City going nowhere, and a former popular governor who's campaign is falling apart while also going nowhere. They are really unlikely to win at this point, but I suppose anything is possible in the Age of Trump, (after all Castro was able to escape Tier 4 with a good debate performance by my reckoning!)

Tier 5: 
Everyone else: This is everyone else, they are running for some reason.

(Special case: Stacey Abrams: If she did run I'd guess I'd put her in Tier 4 at this point. If she was considering running for president her decision to sit things out until the fall was a major blunder with the race having moved on and resources being captured by other campaigns all summer long. I also doubt she could qualify for any debates at this point, a lesson Steve Bullock learned after he decided to take a wait and see approach. Finally, I suspect her decision to frame her choice in terms of what's best for her rather than the country or voters wouldn't serve her well if she did run. Sure didn't work for Beto.) 

I'll check back in after the second round of debates!