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.