A priest was called to his bedside to deliver last rites, but Jill Biden, who had been ordered to stay out of the room, burst in, yelling at him to leave. “You’re not giving him the last rites. He’s not going to die,” she said, according to an account by Biden’s sister, Valerie.
35 Yes We Kam: Is it Me or is Everything Kamala Harris Does Amazing, Awesome, Amazingly Awesome or Awesomely Amazing?
UPDATE:
Place below CF GOP Supreme Court
Screenshot?
should this stay up top? Or below as rejoinder to Nate Silver?
DONE: Not going to use any more of this as we have MORE than enough below EXCEPT perhaps the LaCivita tweet-just the tweet to aumgent on Texas.
Place this in the 538 section
Interesting to compare G. Elliot Morris’s response vs Silver’s response to Grimmer
Silver DOES make a good point here:
It underscores how little the average pundit understands how to read polls even now-Silver DID make a good prediction there-alas as it enabled people to make money betting on Trump…
Stop Obsessing about Kamala Harris’ (Polling) Bumps – emptywheel
Tweet of the day
(1) dedc79 on X: “@NateSilver538 if we all agree to call you an academic, will you tweet less?” / X
g
UPDATE: He does make a fair point about disposable income-though this was also true in 2012 and Obama proved yet again that incumbency is a big advantage contrary to what Silver claims. But what’s conspicuously missing is even the word: abortion. This has been a force multiplier for Democrats post Dobbs but implicitly Silver just assumes it isn’t a major factor in 2024-arguably it’s the biggest. Indeed, while I still remain skeptical the Dems will win Florida-so as not to get my hopes up-it will be interesting to see what impact the state’s referendum on abortion will have November 5.
Similarly while in the Senate race Jon Tester appears to be in some trouble the one saving grace for him could be Montana also has an abortion referendum on the ballot.
FN: Indeed while many polls show Tester behind in the high single digits it has appeared that the Dems at least have some chance at beating Rick Scott-and Debbie Murascell-Powell has the added wind at her back of the abortion referendum. Now there appears to be even some evidence TED CRUZ could be in peril-though I remain pretty reluctant to jump on this bandwagon yet-would like to see more polls with Cruz only up by 4
Still the fact that Trump’s campaign manager himself seems to think Cruz is in peril is eyebrow raising.
UPDATE:
(20) This was Trump’s election to lose. And he just might. (natesilver.net)
UPDATE: Here he goes again
(20) Silver Bulletin 2024 presidential election forecast (natesilver.net)
🕒 Last update: 12 p.m., Sunday, September 15. A mostly quite strong day of polling for Kamala Harris — but with one big exception, an AtlasIntel poll that shows Trump ahead by 3 or 4 points nationally, depending on which version you use. Outliers happen, but AtlasIntel is a highly-rated pollster and gets a lot of weight in our model, so resist the temptation to unskew or cherry-pick.
Still, the race is now officially back in toss-up range, which we define as each candidate having at least a 40 percent chance of winning. And Harris is even getting some interesting polling in red states, from Iowa to — as I discussed at length in this morning’s newsletter — Alaska”
I mean-what makes Atlasintel a highly rated poll? This continues Silver’s pattern the last month of seemingly alwyas giving the few national polls Harris trails the greatest weight-where 10 or more strong polls for her are neutralized by one with not so great results.
You can pretty much count on one hand the number of national polls she’s trialed in post convention and Silver has namechecked every single one. You can criticize Rosenberg for only looking at polls with her winning-but there have been very few with her losing-nationally-and Silver seems to need to namecheck each and every one.
What will be unburdened by what has been (@ProChoiceMike) / X
Silver gives her a 39% chance, 538 a 61% chance
Should this chapter be the afterword?
Part 1 Introduction
I will admit-I was one of many Democrats on social media greatly concerned about dumping Joe Biden this late in the game. But that seems an awfully long time ago-even though it was just a week ago, indeed just 6 days ago. Yet it feels like 6 lifetimes ago. At least.
Last Sunday afternoon soon after the news that Biden had stepped out of the race, I’d done a poll on my Twitter feed-as like me many of my friends and followers were Ride or Die with Biden.
These numbers pretty much summed up my own feelings-part of me was joyous, but also furious, and a large part of me was ambivalent and bittersweet. Many Democrats felt the same, notably, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett:
Senator John Fetterman also put out a barnburner in the immediate aftermath though he appears to have deleted it in the next few hours and put up a full throated endorsement of Kamala Harris. Whatever else you want to say about Fetterman-and there’s a lot-one very attractive character trait of his is his loyalty, indeed his party loyalty. So he may have terrible Israel takes but he is overall a good Democrat-whatever personal mental issues he may be dealing with-which is good as no matter how some folks hate him for his Israel takes he’s going nowhere until 2028 at the earliest.
Many Dems were upset and disappointed.
The ageism was certainly notable-apparently with all the talk of cancel culture, the one allegedly politically correct line you can engage in with impunity apparently is blatantly crude ageism.
FN:
Conversations about Biden’s age have lacked nuance, says expert — Harvard Gazette
Lacked nuance to say the least. For a contrast for someone who engaged in a far more nuanced conversation, see Lawerence O’Donnell. Find link.
End FN
John Legend certainy spoke to sentiments of many Dems on the afternoon of July 21
FN:
He was though he was also ten toes down in gratitude to President Biden
End FN
Legend’s moving words spoke to the feelings of many Democrats. And it is gratifying to see that some are at least showing some appreciation-he got a round of applause recently at the beach and apparently several kids came over to say hello.
FN:
DonkConnects ♻️™ ➐ on X: “@ProChoiceMike https://t.co/5XvdWcW7ML” / X
Life isn’t fair and both President Biden’s life and Presidency proved it. The story of Joe Biden is truly an amazing one, in his lifetime he had to overcome so much-if one word sums up the theme of his life it’s tragedy or adversity. While it’s easy to think of Biden as this privileged white male elite with all of life’s advantages he didn’t come by it easily. Indeed during the whole post June 27 debate fiasco Morning Mica had given this really moving speech on Morning Joe on all the adversity President Biden had to overcome in the course of his life to get this job so late in life after his time seemed to have passed.
This was on the July 1 episode on the Monday after the debate-in the previous Morning Joe had raised the possibility that Biden needed to drop out. It was incredibly moving-I myself hadn’t known the extent of the life aversity Joe Biden has faced in his life.
But Brzesinksi said Biden has been “counted out” many times throughout his life before bouncing back, from his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns to challenges in his personal life.
She recounted the history of Biden’s tragedies – from the death of his first wife and infant daughter in a 1972 car crash just after he was elected the junior senator from Delaware to suffering two brain aneurysms himself in the late 1980s to his son Beau Biden’s death in 2015 after succumbing to brain cancer.
Think about that. It’s a truism that no parent should have to bury a child-well Joe Biden’s buried two children and his first wife. What’s more both Beau and Hunter Biden as very young children were in the car accident that killed his first wife and daughter.
This was back in 2015:
“I needed my children more than they needed me,” the Vice President, who is mourning the death of his son Beau, said in a speech on May 17
As the Biden family mourns the death of Beau Biden, the former Delaware Attorney General who died on Saturday of brain cancer at 46, it s a sad reminder of the many personal tragedies that have befallen the vice president.
In 1972, just one month after winning his first Senate race, Biden received a phone call telling him his wife and college sweetheart Neilia and their 13-month-old daughter Naomi had been killed in a car accident on their way to buy a Christmas tree.
“By the tone of the phone call, you just knew,” he said in 2012, addressing the families of fallen U.S. soldiers. “You just felt it in your bones: Something bad happened.”
As he left the U.S. Capitol building, “I remember looking up and saying, ‘God,’ as if I was talking to God myself, ‘You can t be good, how can you be good?’ ” he recalled, telling the families, “For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide. Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, because they had been to the top of the mountain, and they just knew in their heart they would never get there again.”
“The couple’s two sons, Beau and Hunter, who were 4 and 3 at the time, were also in the car and badly injured.”
When Biden was sworn into the Senate in 1973, he did so at Beau’s Wilmington, Delaware bedside, which he rarely left.
“I was supposed to be sworn in with everyone else that year in ’73, but I wouldn’t go down. So … the secretary of the Senate [came] to swear me in, in the hospital room with my children,” he recalled in a Yale University commencement address less than two weeks ago.”
Joe Biden’s Family Tragedies (people.com)
Which as we discuss in chapter Biden did it to himself, is what made the way Hunter Biden-his last surviving son-was railroaded into a conviction-and may still face prison-even more heartbreaking as Biden’s political enemies sought to destroy his son to destroy him.
To be sure, as we discussed in that chapter what makes it even worse is that Biden-through his own terminable institutionalism and concern over appearances let it happen. Again, while Biden was so concerned about normal order, normal order would have been entirely consistent with firing David Weiss.
Beyond his family tragedies there’s his personal struggles as a lifelong stutterer-which age only exacerbated later in his term notably in that debate. Still it’s amazing that he got so far-President of the United States-“a kid with a stutter ” coming from such modest beginnings in Scranton.
“Nowhere else on earth could a kid with a stutter — from modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware — one day sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office as president of United States. But here I am.”
Joe Biden’s Family Tragedies (people.com)
Then there was that time after he’d had to leave the 1988 race based on allegations of plagiarism;
UPDATE: Find tweet about all that Biden has overcome in terms of adversity
FN: Though I never got it-if he admitted to using the words of a Labor MP where’s the plagiarism? Seems to me the issue is when someone attempts to pass someone’s words off as their own-a la Melania Trump at the 2016 RNC Convention.
End FN.
soon after this he required brain surgery to remove an aneurysm in what became a near death experience.
“Joe Biden awoke suddenly in his hotel room, curled up on the floor and fully clothed, and felt an electric surge inside his head, “a rip of pain like I never felt before,” as he later recalled. It was 4:10 a.m. on a winter day in 1988.”
The debilitating headaches had been happening for nearly a year, interrupting his first presidential campaign as the 45-year-old Biden popped up to 10 Tylenols a day. He had been diagnosed with a pinched nerve and for a time wore a cervical collar. Now, as he lay on the floor of his hotel room in Rochester, N.Y., the pain was even worse. His legs felt dead, and he struggled to turn his head.
Biden nearly died of a brain aneurysm. Risky surgery changed his life. – The Washington Post
Biden not surprisingly, though is one of those guys however.
Instead of heading to an emergency room, Biden flew home with an aide to Wilmington, Del., where he tried to get some sleep. Awakened hours later by even greater pain, he rushed to St. Francis Hospital. It wasn’t a pinched nerve. Doctors found blood in his spinal fluid, and then a dangerous balloon-shaped bulge — an aneurysm — on an artery wall at the base of the brain. Even worse, Biden’s aneurysm had already burst, leaking blood around the base of his brain.”
Things at this point were pretty dire:
The danger was immense: If the aneurysm burst again and sent blood coursing into his brain, it could mentally and physically disable him — or be fatal.”
The idea it was a near death experience is not mere ad hominem.
Now there was only one hope, the doctors concluded: Biden needed immediate, risky surgery.
The race was on to save Biden’s life.
The story of how Biden survived the aneurysm — as well as a second one and a blood clot — is one of the most revealing if little understood episodes in the life of the 81-year-old president.
A review of the events, as described by the president, his family and his associates, in books and other forums, as well as Washington Post interviews with a surgeon who operated on Biden, provides a nearly moment-by-moment account that reveals new details about how close Biden came to incapacitation or death — and how those events shape him to this day.”
Indeed, when you understand the level of family and personal tragedy Biden has been through it’s perhaps a little easier to understand why so late during the post debate frenzy who was still convinced he could surmount all the odds-and the many naysayers inside his own party.
As Biden now seeks reelection amid voter concerns about his health and age, his opponent — 77-year-old Donald Trump — has alleged without medical evidence that Biden is “cognitively impaired,” an allegation dismissed by the surgeon who operated on Biden.Doctors who treated Biden say he fully recovered and suffered no brain damage. And while some people who have had aneurysm surgery do experience longer-term health repercussions, experts say, there is no evidence that Biden has suffered such consequences — though he has said it significantly changed his outlook on life.
“In those early moments in a Wilmington hospital room, though, the idea that Biden would fully recover, much less become president and seek reelection, seemed remote.”
As unpleasant, miserable, if not down right demoralizing as being at the receiving end of the post debate frenzy must have been does it compare to what he went through in that 1988 hospital or what he’s gone through emotionally for years in terms of the loss of his children and first wife?
But consider what happened the next 30+ years after this near death experience? He continued to flourish in the Senate, then in 2008 while his own campaign again was fairly stillborn he got picked as Obama’s VP which set him up to finally win in his own right in 2020.
So while post debate it might have seemed utterly hopeless for most people looking at it from the outside when you see the level of personal tragedy and adversity Biden had survived and risen above perhaps you can better understand how he could still at that point still believed he could win.
So it’s not so hard to understand how he and his closet supporters in the campaign believed he’d beat all the odds as that’s what his life has always been-rising above all the tragedy, adversity, and indeed all the naysayers.
Of course, post July 21 after Biden finally did drop out those who had making the heaviest weather in the need for him to get out claimed vindication. For more on this see below. But even recently Nate Silver couldn’t resist spiking the ball yet again, one more time.
As someone who was admittedly strongly against the #DumpBiden movement I actually agree. There was a part of me who would have relished him staying in-even now seeing how much easier life has been with a younger, more energetic candidate who can run a much better campaign-as I still think he could have won and because-as we’ll discuss towards the end of this chapter I like Silver’s friends in The River enjoy being contrarian even though I’m a Democrat. I would have loved to see Biden run a kind of Harry Truman 1948 2.0 campaign-who also had very low approval ratings, who had lost the confidence of much of the 1948 Democratic party, indeed two different wings of the party broke away to run third party bids and all the smart money pundits assumed Truman had no chance-“Dewey Beats Truman.”
It was a good dream-Chris Matthews saw it too
Chris Matthews: Biden critics are ‘going to pay for it’ (msn.com)
FN: As we saw above, Bernie actually agrees.
True in retrospect, I have to admit that those of us who thought that the easy way was sticking with Biden were completely mistaken. But this is NOT that our position was as unreasonable as Silver would have had you believe. We will relitigate all this below-for no other reason than for posterity.
It turns out that those of us concerned that dropping Biden was doing things the hard way were wrong but as I’ll discuss in more detail below, this is because nobody anticipated the party unifying behind VP Harris as fast as the Dems did.
Again more on this below. For now it’s simply astonishing how successful Biden’s Presidency was-isn’t over yet in reality but we’re all already thinking of him in the past tense-compared to how little credit he received-literally no credit.
Many have noted that on a policy, substantive level, Biden has had the most successful, transformational Presidency in many years-Chris Hayes regularly notes Biden was essentially the best President he’s had in his lifetime and lists in great detail all the accomplishments and highlights. Many have made this point even notorious Bernie or Busters in 2020 like Kyle Kulinski.
FN: As Hayes documents Biden has made the US economy the envy of the world
How Joe Biden turned the American economy into the ‘envy of the world’ (msnbc.com)
Bernie Sanders argues Biden-who has a picture of FDR on the wall in his Office-is the most progressive President since FDR. I’d quibble with this only slightly-what about LBJ? But the basic point is clear.
FN: Indeed we’ll discuss this more below, but Lawrence O’Donnell did some really great analysis post debate that many of our greatest Presidents might not even be able to win election today in our optics obsessed tv age-when you think about it, many previous Presidents widely considered great today couldn’t have won. Indeed it’s rather apropos for Biden to have FDR’s picture on his wall for more than just the ideologically affinity-FDR himself was infirm-indeed, as Lawrence pointed out, FDR was undeniably in worst shape in 1944 than Biden was in 2024 yet at that same moment-when FDR was literally dying, he’d only live 81 more days post 1945 Inauguration at a time he was also going to international meetings with international leaders which would set the course for the next 80 years of international relations between nations. Could FDR-widely viewed our greatest President ever-been elected just 4 years later in 1948 the first tv election?
End FN
After Biden’s very impressive NATO speech and subsequent press conference, Heather Digby wrote a deep dive into it over at Salon:
“Biden’s performance has been exceptional where it matters: It’s the economy”
“Joe Biden’s administration has been incredibly successful at steering the economy away from recession”
Biden’s performance has been exceptional where it matters: It’s the economy | Salon.com
Indeed, it’s amazing how little folks remember just four years ago, the level of social amnesia is astonishing-if there wasn’t how could so many remember the Trump years as better times? They completely forget the herculean efforts of Biden and his team to defeat Covid which in 2020 was claiming the lives of as much as 3000 Americans per day-ie the equivalent of a daily 9/11.
Back to Salon.
“President Joe Biden held an hour-long press conference Thursday night and answered a range of questions about his age, his competence, his stamina, his health and his future. He also delivered several incisive disquisitions on foreign policy that Donald Trump’s staff would have to use a very large coloring book and possibly a puppet show to explain to him. Not that it would work. He’d probably storm out of the meeting long before they got to the part about China and Russia, yelling about love letters and being a boss.”
The media didn’t seem all that impressed, judging the president’s performance to only be fair to middling and virtually ignoring the substance of what he had to say. Biden offered a serious overview of the nation’s relationship with its allies and adversaries and made some news about Israel, calling for its war in Gaza to end. But everyone was more interested in Biden’s aesthetic performance and how he answered questions about prospective plans to quit the presidential race so any talk of his actual policies is evidently irrelevant. “
Which just underscores the extent yet again of how intellectually bankrupt the usual media horserace boiler plate coverage is. This puts the lie to all the storm and stress the usual media hacks are on about regarding Kamala Harris having yet to do a press conference.
Fruit Loops and Taco Talk – emptywheel
Not surprisingly Chris Cillizza has been a major loss leader of this narrative-but of course, he’s pretty notorious in his general lack of interest in anything substantive.
FN: See interview with media critic Norm Ornstein in 2016.
CHRIS CRUCIAL: Kamala Harris’ no-press strategy (substack.com)
Regarding Cillizza’s heavy weather over Kamala going-at the time of this post on August 4-a whole 14 days as the Democrats presumed nominee without a press conference-the question is what actual value does a press conference have during a Presidential campaign-it’s at least somewhat more relevant regarding the President as they have actual policies to discuss-but how many pressers is a candidate for the Presidency expected to give?
Indeed, in that vein good for Biden in responding to a media question yesterday as to his biggest regret in answering: talking to you guys.
For the media it’s never about substance. So, what exactly is the point? To be sure I would guess at some point she will do a few pressers and perhaps a few sitdown interviews though honestly when you see how much the GOP has been freaking out over this issue I’ve come to think that maybe she shouldn’t rush to do one too quickly just for the fun of seeing their heads explode.
Nikki Haley tells Trump and GOP to ‘quit whining’ about the Harris campaign – MEAWW News
I mean it’s not like Trump was doing any pressers until Biden dropped out and he started losing and Cillizza himself admits Trump’s press conferences are worthless.
But it’s not hard to understand why Biden holds the Beltway press in such disdain seeing as how little they focused on anything but the most superficial in their coverage of him.
Overall, it’s amazing how much Biden accomplished as President vs the utter lack of any political benefit he garnered.
In that vein back to Salon:
Biden’s criticized a lot for failing to effectively communicate his administration’s accomplishments, and there’s something in that. He’s not good at it the way someone like Bill Clinton was, with his ability to rattle off facts and figures while simultaneously explaining how it’s good for average Americans. It’s a special skill. (Donald Trump touts his economic record but it’s all lies, which isn’t the same thing. Just saying “we had the greatest economy the world has ever known” takes no skill — just chutzpah.)”
Again you see the paradox where Biden has a great record but wasn’t perhaps such a great communicator whereas Trump is a charlatan he just says everything was great regardless the facts-and polls repeatedly show many more people thought Trump than Biden would be better on the economy.
At the press conference, however, Biden did make some comments about his economic accomplishments — although nobody seemed to care
Indeed, you just can’t blame Biden if he has disdain for the Beltway pundits as for three and a half years they’ve made all kinds of heavy weather over inflation and now that it’s finally down they just don’t care about it anymore.
FN:
Stein got a lot of pushback on Twitter for this tweet as it seemed like it was a classic case of the media admitting their narrative as bad while continuing to foment it.
Indeed, a major preoccupation of this book has been that once the media gets a bad narrative they see everything through it’s bad lens and no facts can break through which contradict it. Cillizza himself involuntarily made the point just the other day when he PRAISED his speech he made on the campaign trail-for Kamala.
The Morning: Why Joe Biden was so good yesterday
Right off the bat, the very title is fairly stunning when you recall the post June 27 coverage-until July 21. According to this overwhelming media narrative Biden was so old and infirm it was treated as more or less a self evident fact he was in serious cognitive decline with some folks ranting darkly that not only should he drop out of the campaign but he should resign immediately and demanding ‘who’s running the WH NOW?!”
To say nothing of the utterly baseless media pile on that he had Parkison’s.
But now we’re hearing Biden CAN actually give a coherent, indeed really good public speech. How is this possible after hearing all these anonymous sources claiming that June 27 Biden IS how Biden always is now?
On Thursday, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris did their first event together since the former announced he would not seek reelection and the latter emerged as the Democratic replacement nominee.
And one thing stood out to me: Biden was really, really good.
He was pointed. Funny. Charismatic.
It reminded me that this often happens with politicians — they are at their best when they have nothing left to lose.”
So is his cognitive decline in remission? Then Cillizza uses a historical analogy-Al Gore Circa 2000.
I vividly remember the 2000 campaign when then VP Al Gore was widely derided as a boring figure. Which was mostly true!
But then, when Gore ultimately conceded the election to George W. Bush — following an adverse Supreme Court ruling — the speech the outgoing VP gave was powerful and inspiring.”
This is so telling and makes my whole point about the media narrative. Biden was all infirm, in marked cognitive decline, if not legally dead and being kept alive in a jar in the fridge somewhere in the WH between June 27 and July 21. Now-it’s a miracle-he just gave a very good speech. Al Gore was boring-and above I suggested the media particularly Cillizza lack substance!
Was it that Biden was functionally all but a total vegetable between the debate and when he stepped down but suddenly in control of his own faculties again this last Thursday-8/15? and that Gore was BORING the entirely 2000 election UNTIL he conceded?
FN: Putting aside that he shouldn’t have conceded as the GOP Supreme Court stole the election though I digress?
End FN
Well-yes-that’s what Cillizza would have us believe. However, an alternative explanation was that in both cases the narrative changed. After Gore conceded the narrative was over as it was no longer needed ditto Biden being this guy living like a container of veal in the WH kitchen. Now that he was out they can be honest again. Once the narrative changes they’re finally able to see things through a different lens, with different eyes. Ie the narrative colors everything.
So yeah Biden despises them and they deserve to be despised. Back to Slate:
Yesterday, the government also reported that the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits fell again last week and remains at healthy levels. The jobs story is incredible. As someone who has heard politicians screaming “jobs, jobs, jobs!” in every election I can remember, it’s unfathomable to me that this issue appears to have absolutely no salience in this one. It is the best job market since the 1960s, largely due to the Biden administration policies, which we know because the U.S. economic performance is the best in the world. In fact, it’s so good that the World Bank announced last month upgraded estimates that the global economy will expand 2.6% this year on the strength of sustained growth in the United States.”
Best since the 1960s-hmm. Makes sense as he was the most progressive President since LBJ.
But this has not been the media narrative the last 3 and a half years and it’s not the public’s perception.
There was a time when such news would have been heralded as “morning in America” but according to polling, a majority of voters believe Trump would be a better steward of the economy than Joe Biden, which is — as the president would say — malarkey. By virtually all measures, Biden’s economic performance has surpassed Trump’s even before the pandemic.”
Speaking of “Morning in America” as Krugman documented this morning Morning in America really wasn’t Morning in America. At least Reagan’s wasn’t.
Biden is yet no one thinks this. To the contrary polls showed throughout Biden’s entire campaign the public was sure-or at least according to the poll numbers it was sure-Trump is much better on the economy than Biden.
Yet the public believes the opposite.
If we were living in a normal world this would be more important than any other issue in this election. Joe Biden’s administration has been incredibly successful at steering the economy away from recession, and into prosperity the likes of which we haven’t seen in half a century.
But an interesting question is why it wasn’t? I’d argue at least in large part because it hasn’t been the media narrative. That and maybe because Biden was old? But it reminds you all too much of Emailgate Circa 2016 when 60% of Americans post Comey’s July 5 Presser-or at least the 60% of Americans who took this poll-believed Clinton SHOULD have been indicted which was the opposite of the truth.
FN: As we discuss in Chapter No Probable Cause the investigation arguably never should have been opened in the first place.
During most of Biden’s term the main media narrative was inflation and prices-particularly gas and food prices. Even when gas prices dropped in 2023 this made no dent in the dominant narrative that inflation was out of control-and implicitly this was Biden’s fault, or anyway, the public would inevitably blame him for it. Of course, the media COULD have tried to educate the public on economics and point out that the inflation was primarily do to the supply chain shortage post Covid but-the idea the mainstream media would ever do that at least widely, individual reporters may have but this wouldn’t effect the larger narrative, doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Once inflation dropped beneath 3% the media had finally lost interest in this narrative they are in such a frenzy over the debate.
Again, the rules of gravity were very uncharitable to Biden. For years the Left fulminated over Afghanistan yet when he ended it his approval rating which had been over 50% dropped to the low 40s and then into the high 30s and pretty much never recovered. Despite the consensus of many including economists that Biden’s was the “best economic stewardship” anyone has seen in many years the public polls say people think it was Trump who’s the great economic steward.
FN: Interestingly for now at least Harris has pulled close to even with Trump-which is good though surely doesn’t say much for the opinion’s of most Americans at least those who answered these polls-what does Kamala being a much younger and more energetic campaign than Biden have to do with who you believe is the better economic steward-especially as it’s still the same economy?
Then we learned soon after Biden dropped out that he wasn’t drooling all over himself in a senile stupor that last weekend but working on that huge hostage deal with the Russians. Hey if Nate Silver-about much more below-was right and Biden does have cognitive decline this wonderful accomplishment is even more impressive!
Even gas prices they dropped after some really brilliant maneuvering by Biden into the futures market even though the GOP continued to run against gas prices as when they were $2 more at $5 per gallon. Then there is the amazing NATO alliance Biden put together to counter Russia’s aggression
How Joe Biden ‘broke OPEC’ and rewrote the rules for oil trading | Watch (msn.com)
But none of this mattered to the media or the polls not a bit-though again the former has more than a causal relationship to the latter just like the false belief Clinton SHOULD HAVE BEEN indicted. So, among other things this is a failure of the media as once again the public was misinformed-just like they wrongly believed that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, or that Hillary SHOULD HAVE been indicted, where the public not only didn’t know the truth but believed something the opposite of.
This is why the idea that media critics are who need to apologize as Nate Silver suggests doesn’t pass the laugh test
I mean we’re still waiting for the media apology for electing Trump in the first place then amplifying Bill Barr’s Lie that Russia Proved no Collusion then spending the Biden years focused like a laser beam on inflation in a completely superficial way that presumes it’s all Biden’s fault while arguing that the Democrats should stop saying Trump is a threat to democracy.
FN: I will however add this one important qualifier that while based on these many topline indicators the Biden economy has been excellent there IS a legitimate critique-it’s been very good by many metrics it’s been far from a “Goldilocks economy” in the sense of being entirely optimal. The longer term problem for the US economy going back many years has been not unemployment but underemployment and wages-the legacy of what leftist call “neoliberalism” and what I prefer to call Reaganism. We have been in a long term low wage epidemic going back to economic policy changes going back to the mid 1970s-Reaganism begun before Reagan was President The problem was mitigated somewhat during the Biden years but it was not fixed fundamentally.
I don’t agree with everything that Matt Bruenig says here to be sure but I do agree that the central problem remains wages. At the end of the day there remains a supermajority of Americans living paycheck to paycheck
What About Wages? – People’s Policy Project (peoplespolicyproject.org)
So you could argue THIS is why according to these polls Americans are so down on Biden’s economic stewardship. Maybe-the trouble is the bad media framing-in a very superficial, economically illiterate way just assuming correlation is causation so Biden has somehow magically raised the costs of consumer goods-when clearly Covid was the driver in terms of the supply chain and then arguably there’s been a good deal of price gouging by corporate America. Perhaps the reason Americans grade Biden’s economic performance low is because their wages remain low and they’re still living paycheck to paycheck. Unfortunately the media and pollsters haven’t asked the kinds of questions that can confirm this focusing instead like a laser beam on high prices which at the end of the day you can argue are just one symptom of the larger problem of low wages.
I do think Bruenig raises some fair questions:
There are at least two different ways to talk about whether an economy is good or bad and thus whether and to what extent it has gotten better.
The most common approach you see in the national media is to talk about what is essentially just the management of supply, demand, prices, employment, and other similar macroeconomic variables. In this account, a good economy is one that is performing as well as it can within the constraints of the existing economic system, which essentially just means that a good economy is the one where fiscal and monetary policy is keeping the pump properly primed.
Another approach to evaluating the economy, which you see more often in left policy circles, is to to talk about the economic system, economic institutions, the rules of the game, or whatever else you want to call it. In this account, a good economy is one where the underlying institutions that govern things like the welfare state, labor market, and ownership are set up properly and a given government’s economic track record should be evaluated primarily according to the extent to which it moved those rules in the right direction.
What we got out of the Biden administration, legislatively speaking, was a third tranche of COVID stimulus, an infrastructure bill, and a climate bill. There were a few tweaks here and there to welfare state and labor market rules, but in general the problems with those economic policy areas have gone unresolved.
This is not because Biden never promised to do things in these areas nor because Biden made no effort. Biden supported and urged the taking up of the left’s leading labor market reform demand, the pro-union PRO Act. He also supported and tried to pass the Build Back Better legislation that would have made changes in various welfare policy areas, including family benefits and home care benefits.
But these things did not pass. Under the usual canon of Democratic apologism, the left’s disappointment at this failure is not supposed to be waved off by saying actually the economy is good but instead by saying the cause of the failure is a handful of moderates in Congress, not Biden nor the Democratic party writ large.”
It seems to me Buenig’s own admission Biden did try to do some of these deeper progressive policies is significant. Regarding what fault Biden or the Democratic party as such deserves I WILL absolutely blame Biden for his opposition to seriously calling for the end of the filibuster. To be sure his margin for error was very slim as if Manchin/Sinema objected as they clearly did the Senate Dems simply lacked the votes to abolish the infamous relic a la Voltaire.
But I do think Biden should have at least prioritized it, banged the bully pulpit, etc. If he had made it a priority PERHAPS Schumer would have pushed it harder, while with the opposition of Manchin-Sinema they may have lacked the votes arguably there are ways Schumer could have weakened and neutralized the power of the filibuster even if not having the votes to outright abolish it.
OTOH if there is a policy issue I would agree Biden made a big mistake on it was his willingness to allow expanded unemployment benefits to expire pretty quickly-arguably he could have done more via executive power but insisted only Dem Governors could do that but they all were content to let it expire. As Bruenig documents in his analysis the expiration of the Covid welfare payments led to a sharp drop in the loss of income for millions of Americans.
How Has Wealth Changed Under Biden – People’s Policy Project (peoplespolicyproject.org)
Indeed while Biden upon reaching Office quickly sent out the $1400 Covid assistance checks, Kamala had during the campaign-in June 2020-argued along with Bernie that there should be monthly $2,000 checks until the end of Covid.
Kamala Harris Supports $2,000 Monthly Stimulus Checks, Giving People Money – Business Insider
FN: We’ll get into the bizarre widely held media conventional wisdom that Trump either isn’t a threat to democracy or even if he is it’s self evidently a bad political strategy to point this out-you can see this flawed premise even as many media pundits have spoken approvingly as the rise of the Dems’ “Weird” meme. Weird IS an awesome political tactic by the Dems compliments of Tim Wald BUT the media largely fails to understand WHY it is regarding this more below.
End FN
Look when Biden ran in 2020 he vowed to do two things: his election would bring an EPIPHANY for America-even the GOP and Mitch McConnell he insisted-AND that he would be a bridge to the next generation. At least he went one for two.
Despite his very successful and accomplished Presidency where he accomplished so much and achieved so many fine results-at the end of the day his larger narrative was wrong. To be clear there’s no intrinsic shame in this, as I will argue below Obama’s larger narrative was also wrong, if anything even more wrong than Biden-but Biden was certainly wrong in the idea that his election would lead America to going back normal-that is Pre Trump America.
FN:
UPDATE: Very interesting Foer interview on Anthony Scaramucci. Despite Biden’s success there was always this disconnect in terms of narrative-Biden thought if you could get some things done the nation would have an epiphany. That was the fallacy in his core narrative despite his very successful track record.
Biden DID keep his vow to be a bridge-though it didn’t end up how he had intended-the bridge was going to end in 2028 not 2024. Unfortunately no one thanks a bridge. Think about iti-when you drive over a long, large bridge you may be nervous and anxious but once you finish do you look back to thank the bridge? No, it’s only the thankfully rare times a bridge fails that anyone notices-then there’s a huge public outcry.
Nevertheless it is nice to see that SOME folks remember the President’s accomplishments and express gratitude.
UPDATE: Perhaps put in a small epigraph at bottom regarding Kamala Harris and the difference between the hope, joy, and euphoria of her as opposed to Biden’s version which was the false hope you could go back to an idyllic pre Trump era.
Part 3. The Nate Silver wars
However this very may well be, I’m going to for the sake of posterity discuss why I was strongly onTeam Biden Remain during the 24 days between The Debate and Biden stepping down. While in restrospect it’s pretty clear-certainly to me-that dropping Biden for Kamala Harris was the right choice-it seems obvious and self evident now though IF she loses-God help us-it may seem less self evident then though I have to admit I feel fairly confident she is going to win.
Nevertheless the argument for keeping Biden was far more substantive and thoughtful than the short thrift that Nate Silver and Friends gave it. In relitigating the debate here I’ll focus on Silver in particular as he was one of the most prominent pundits pushing for Biden to drop out and amongst this school, his arguments are widely considered to be scientific and data driven.
On July 9 Silver declared:
This is quite untrue. While Silver in his newly published book shows he understands the value of steelmanning even arguments you disagree with he didn’t seem to feel the need regarding the debates over wether Biden should drop out. There was actually a pretty compelling argument to stay with Biden but Silver didn’t feel the need to look at the argument charitably.
Of course, after Biden did drop out Silver couldn’t help spiking the ball.
Nate Silver on X: “Today was a good day for rational behavior. https://t.co/5WxeS26FNq” / X
It’s not surprising he would declare it a victory for rational behavior. To the extent that he’s taking a victory lap for correclty predicting Biden WOULD eventually drop out it’s fair enough as his prediction was proven correct.
(18) Biden has a weak hand – by Nate Silver – Silver Bulletin
However I’m not sure just HOW MUCH credit he deserves. He gets some as he correctly predicted Biden’s withdrawal AND the move from Biden to Kamala Harris has gone pretty well to say the least. However, he goes on to further excoriate Biden and the Democrats for not doing this sooner and here I totally disagree.
No-quite the opposite and this touches on the ad hominem way he simply dismissed the Biden Remainers as it were from the beginning. Meanwhile he continued to spike the ball.
Dumbest of Biden dead-enders-clearly he continued to gloat. But charitability with anyone who disagrees with him was never Nate’s strong suit to say the least. Actually many people did-to say NO ONE believed this self evidently false.
🌻
on X: “So we are going to keep pretending like we didn’t just have an actual primary?” / XBut the problem is Silver never even attempted to accurately represent the case for staying with Biden. Certainly there were some pretty dumb arguments made on #DumpBiden as well. In that vein let’s look at his immediate reaction to Biden stepping down-no doubt he felt more than a measure of vindication at that moment.
Undoubtedly the biggest mistake of my forecasting career was insisting, until relatively late in the race, that Donald Trump wouldn’t win the 2016 Republican nomination for president. I was getting worried that I’d made a similar mistake in my prediction that Joe Biden would eventually exit the 2024 race — something he was insistent he wouldn’t do until he announced his decision to step aside at 1:46 p.m. today.
Biden and Democrats make the rational choice (natesilver.net)
Yes after making pretty much perfect forecasts in 2008 and 2012-he picked 49 out of 50 states right in 2008 and all 50 in 2012, in the 2016 GOP primary Silver even he was human and could like anyone else fall victim to motivated reasoning. As he himself admits the reason it took him so long to admit Trump had a real chance winning the 2016 Republican primary is it seemed to conflict with his model of political campaigns.
My baseline view of politics — what contributed to that bad prediction about Trump — is that political parties engage in something roughly resembling game-theory optimal behavior and undertake reasonably rational strategies in an effort to win elections and fulfill their other objectives. And I didn’t think Trump was a very rational choice for Republicans. I thought he’d have lower chances against Hillary Clinton than another Republican and also that, if elected, he’d undermine many of the Republican Party’s traditional goals in foreign policy and other areas.”
Comparatively I saw Trump coming a mile away-by July, 2015 at the latest it was clear to me there was a very good chance Trump could win the Republican primary. This is because my baseline view of politics is no one ever lost money underestimating the Republican party-the only way anyone ever does is to overestimate them.
FN: Not that I’m claiming to be omni prescient either I had assumed all along Hillary Clinton would win-FWIW as we saw in Chapter A in What Happened, Hillary did kind of see it coming on the night of her defeat she declared “I knew they’d never let me be President.” In retrospect she was entirely right if by “they” you meant the FBI, Dean Baquet, Julian Assange, and Putin, etc.
Here though Silver totally misses the point-as did most of #DumpBiden:
As compared to Republicans’ decision about what to do about Trump, I thought Democrats had more agency about Biden following his disastrous debate. Unlike Republicans in 2016, Democrats hadn’t even bothered to hold a competitive primary — if they had, Biden’s flaws might have been even evident earlier — so the will-of-the-voters argument was weak. And unlike Trump in October 2016 following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape — after which some Republicans called on him to drop out — Biden wasn’t even the Democratic nominee yet since the party convention hadn’t been held. And Biden has always been a loyal Democrat who got a huge boost from the party establishment in wrapping up the nomination in 2020 — not someone who gave his party the middle finger.”
This is the central flaw in Silver and the rest of #DumpBiden: he apparently completely misses the fact that it’s normal for an incumbent party to run its incumbent President unopposed. This was the missing piece in all those calling for Biden to drop out-they all failed to understand this self evident fact-or it should be but somehow it wasn’t to them. Comparing the 2024 Democrats to the 2016 Republicans is therefore total false equivalence. Indeed, this seems to have escaped all the #DumpBiden people-they all complained the Democrats didn’t do an open primary but incumbent parties normally don’t and for very good historical reasons.
This is an issue during the debate Silver completely sidestepped. AFTER Biden stepped down he did a few weeks later suddenly dismiss the incumbency issue after the fact. More on this in a moment. But if you look at the history of Presidential elections since 1932 the correlation is pretty stark. Since then parties which either primaried or otherwise forced out their nominees have a record of 0-5. Comparatively those who ran their incumbent President unopposed had a record of 8-0 through 2020. When Trump lost that year he was the first unopposed incumbent to lose reelection since Herbert Hooever in 1932. Which strongly suggests that an unopposed incumbent has to have had a fairly disastrous Administration not to be reelected-for which both Trump and Herbert Hoover qualified.
Folks like Cenk Uygur during the debate seemed to make a near fetish of a competitive primary-he certainly seems to think that the MORE divisive, toxic, and acrimonious the better. Clearly he strongly believed that but this is not supported by history-quite the opposite. So it was more than a little ironic that he encouraged Biden to do an LBJ.
What the fan fiction open primary folks never got is that the 1968 Democrats LOST. Indeed, there’s a reason parties neither Democrats or Republicans have recently had an open primary when they have incumbency-they lead to defeat. Interestingly there was a period where incumbent parties primaried or otherwise pushed out their nominee often-between 1952-1992-and as noted above, the record is 0-5. Which is why parties don’t do that anymore.
FN: History…
On July 20-the day before Biden would drop out Congressman Jim Clyburn had made exactly this point:
“So, whatever is going to happen, all these people who are interested in getting into the process, the process is open. Get into it. Look at the rules. It’s there. And I have said, you could use this process to effectively have a mini-primary, if that’s what you are interested in having.
But if you go to the convention, have an open process in the convention, it will come out the same way it came out in 1968, 1972, and 1980, when we had contested processes on the floor of the convention. And, in 1980, we lost an incumbent president. And, in 1972, we carried one state, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia, and all of us know what happened in 1968, when we took — we ran Lyndon Johnson out of the race.
What a great record Lyndon Johnson had. We got rid of him over one issue, the Vietnam War. Here we are now using one issue to get rid of a president. The result would be the same.”
Oh Jim Clyburn you had me at LBJ was a great President.
FN: An interesting corollary is on a recent stream Vaush pointed out something the Left never gets: ultimately the Vietnam protests were NOT successful which is true. They succeeded in knocking out the Democrats enabling Nixon to win and carry on the war another 5 years.
End FN
It was this concern animating most Biden Remainers-concern that if we dropped him the process would be a dumpster fire. But Silver never engaged with this point.
What he did do was engage in a lot of asides like this:
Hmm-is it possible it’s a little easier to bench your QB than your incumbent President after the July 1 before the election?
Because even if the open primary people were right-I don’t think they were but for argument’s sake-in principle this question was suddenly being seriously considered as we approached July 1 precisely when primary season was ending. Even if they were right the Democrats should have had an open primary-against any meaningful historical precedent-to suddenly try to do one in July, that is begin a primary just when primary season was ending seemed madness.
As for Silver’s dismissal of the idea that people voted for Biden in the primary:
Not only is it totally uncharitable and untrue-as we’ve discussed there was very real concern about any kind of “open convention” scenario-it’s clearly based on Silver’s seeming misconception that it’s normal for an incumbent party to do an open primary. He seems to think just because there wasn’t an open primary the votes of primary voters don’t matter-and can simply be dropped in a waste basket in Pelosi’s office or somewhere. Clearly the intent of Dem primary voters had been to vote for Biden as in the state his name was off the ballot they wrote it in. The intuition in closed primaries for incumbent parties is that it’s assumed Democrats support their Democratic incumbent, Republicans a Republican incumbent as they had chosen them in the last open primary 4 years ago.
Anyway Nate couldn’t resist continuing to spike the ball.
Here I would disagree as there were certainly some pretty “midwit” ideas coming from #DumpBiden. Like Ryan Grim’s Survivor Dem Open Primary edition.
On July 2 Ryan Grim wrote:
Kamala Harris needs an open convention if she’s going to beat Trump
“A nomination she has handed to her is a poisoned chalice.”
FN: This notion would take less than 20 days to disprove-indeed in exactly 20 days, July 22, the day after Biden dropped out, Kamala already had the nomination locked up by that evening.
On July 2 Grim was fairly euphoric-he like Nate Silver felt vindicated.
What’s so delightful, in a civic sense, is that everyone has an opinion about what should come next. I do too, and I think mine ought to carry a little extra weight since I’ve been arguing for more than a year that Biden should step aside for reasons of patent mental infirmity, and I took plenty of grief for it.”
Patent mental infirmity.
Sure this looks like a guy suffering acute mental infirmity
Screenshot?
Biden welcomes home prisoners released by Russia as plane lands in US – ABC News
And delightful? It wasn’t delightful for Democrats it was a disaster. Here we were just leaving primary season and now the entire party was engaged in a public circular firing squad. The Democrats in Congress weren’t acting like they were running against Donald Trump 2.0 the Absolute Immunity edition-but their own nominee. As clear and dangerous a threat as many rightly believe Trump is what was clear is the party can’t beat Trump without a nominee and at that point the Dem leaders were cannibalizing their own nominee.
Grim thought this was great for the vindication and because he like Cenk fetishes toxic divisive primaries apparently the more acrimonious the better.
Grim continued with the fallacy that Biden was “incapacitated” which was baseless and now looks absurd in light of the high stakes diplomacy he was in at that moment to free the hostages from Russia.
“But first of all, let’s understand why Biden is totally finished, whether he knows it or not. From talking to elected Democrats and other top officials this week (actually, mostly texting, which is how all reporting seems to be done nttow), I can say that they see Biden’s situation as a risk not to the country, not to the party, but to themselves, and that’s what matters.”
If that’s what they said ok sounds plausible-clearly the were deadset on dropping Biden though there still has never been any public polling evidence that Biden was a threat to the Dem Congressional folks
Biden is obviously incapacitated. Anybody who says otherwise is obviously lying. If they claim that he is up to the job in spite of what we’ve seen, they look like liars. Because they are lying. Bob Casey, running for Senate re-election in Pennsylvania, is already getting hit with “Bob Casey knew” attack ads. The premise is that Casey knew how bad he was, but said otherwise. Which is true. No politician wants that handicap in an election, and that’s why you’re seeing elected Democrats backing away from Biden. It’s not clear when he’ll be forced out, but he can’t survive against this.”
Again this is exactly the kind of categorical armchair proclamations of people who are far from medical or mental health experts on cognitive health that folks who do know something about it warn against. This extremely facile, absolutely categorical and certain way of discussing “cognitive decline” or being “incapacitated” is exactly the problem with so much of US politics the last 20 years or so-this same attitude is what led us to the anti vax nonsense where the WHO-a great bogeyman for such “commonsensical” thinking-has recently taken the US off the list of countries who have herd immunity against the measles. As if there’s certainty just by looking whether someone is or isn’t in cognitive decline.
Conversations about Biden’s age have lacked nuance, says expert — Harvard Gazette
This, of course, is the whole problem of judging things through optics. Obviously Biden has lost a step as a campaigner-and at this best he was never a great campaigner. Though he contrary to the narrative of Grim and Friends Biden COULD still fire up a crowd like he did the next week in Michigan.
This goes to teh point Lawrence O’Donnell made post debate on the fallacy of such purely optical analysis-as if everything can be known just by the most casual glance. That Biden can’t put in the time and energy of a compelling campaign does NOT mean he can’t do the job and plenty of evidence shows he still does do the job at a high level.
As Lawrence pointed out some of our greatest Presidents couldn’t be elected today with the superficial focus on optics.
Indeed, it’s pretty clear that FDR and his staff similarly with JFK and his staff and Reagan and his people in 1984 clearly DECEIVED the public on the level of physical health. Yet they’re remembered as great Presidents. JFK had some major health issues regarding Addison’s etc, and as I’d noted above, FDR was effectively dying in 1944 at the same time he was doing Yalta, engaging in negotiations and making decisions that would set the course of US and international relations and policies the last 80 years.
FN: Find pictures with children of freed hostages in prisoner exchange
“So then what? Rep. Jim Clyburn today, in a huge blow to Biden, said that he’d support Kamala Harris if Biden dropped out. That’s fine for him, but if the party as a whole foists her as the nominee, not only will it be a disservice to the public, it will also be a disservice to Kamala Harris herself. Recall that Harris briefly surged in the presidential campaign in 2019 but then under scrutiny collapsed into the low single-digits, dropping out before a single vote was cast. A party that is at its nadir of credibility after its scandalous deception simply doesn’t have the credibility to take Harris from there to the presidency in a matter of just weeks. She’d be crushed, and anybody around her would be nuked with her.”
She’s be crushed and anyone around her would be nuked with her. Prescient huh? Just call him Ryan “Nostradamus” Grim. Talk about “aging well.” I mean just this morning on X Twitter there was this headline:
If this is what being “crushed and nuked” means then to quote Hillary Clinton, Deal me in!
Back to Ryan Grim:
“The key for an open convention to be legitimate in the eyes of the public is that it has to feel open. If the various candidates and their allies are on TV regularly and giving speeches on their behalf, with regular breaking-news around endorsements from big-wigs, unions, environmental groups, etc., it will feel like what we understand today as authentically real and democratic: reality TV. The spectacle will captivate global attention and create a bond between the viewer and the stars of the spectacle – especially if it seems like social media sentiment is playing a real role in how things are unfolding. If that sentiment is seen as helping choose the next nominee, Trump is toast. If Democratic bosses anoint somebody, that person is toast.”
“Linger on the reality TV point for a moment. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Reality TV played, I think, the leading role in electing Trump president. Celebrity Apprentice was the most watched show on television and its tens of millions of viewers (mis)understood that Trump was the person he played on that show. Reality TV is the primary building block of our culture today, for better or for worse. An open convention with confessional-esque interviews and spinoff podcasts is what Democrats need to become one with the public again. Right now, they are a cloistered pack of liars and frauds. If they don’t change that perception, they’ll lose badly, and will deserve to. And Harris will go down in flames.”
Reality tv. The Celebrity Apprentice. In this vein as we will see below there were similar fantasy football scenarios out and about of literally having Oprah Winfrey officiate. Survivor the Dem Open Convention season.
“For party leaders, an open convention is a nightmare, because it means briefly losing control. But come on, Jack: Everybody in contention is a reliable member of the party establishment. You’re not even risking anything. Yes, Harris people lose if Whitmer wins, Whitmer people lose if Pritzker wins, and so on. But come on. You’ll be ok.”
“Chicago can be the moment Democrats return the party to the people. Sort of. Like a good reality TV series, we’ll know a bunch of it is staged, but some of it is real, and all of it is us. At least give us that. Let’s watch what happens live”
It would have been a nightmare for anyone who thought it vitally important that the Democrats and avoid Trump 2.0 the Absolute Immunity Edition as it would have been a complete dumpster fire to which even 1968 would have paled. It would have been maximally divisive with the added problem that millions of Biden voters, particular Black voters, would have felt disenfranchised. Silver’s belief that if it’s not an open primary the votes don’t count is simply wrong.
In any case we did the opposite of this and there’s been no crushing or nuking and Kamala Harris is quite self evidently not “toast.”
Again Nate Silver can call the Dems who disagreed with him dumb and “midwit” all he wants but it’s hard to compete with the kind of fantasy football scenarios Grim and Friends delved into.
How’s this for dumb and midwit?
“Pop singer Taylor Swift and cultural icon Oprah Winfrey are likely to be some of the moderators of the possible “blitz primary”—where potential Democrats will duke it out for the presidential ballot, replacing Joe Biden in the run for Office.”
What’s truly astonishing is that there were allegedly top Democrats making these kinds of proposals.
“In the face of the ongoing turmoil regarding Biden’s candidacy, the Democrat camp has reportedly proposed a plan that would involve the incumbent president stepping down from the ballot and the party carrying out a “blitz primary” process ahead of the Democratic National Convention to determine his replacement.”
“It was reported by Semafor that the plan was the brainchild of Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor who served in the Obama and Clinton administrations and was a volunteer policy adviser to the Biden campaign in 2020, and Ted Dintersmith, education philanthropist and venture capitalist known to have donated to several Democrat campaign.”
This would have been an utter fiasco and led to a debilitating Democratic civil war where the party may have lost the trust with its own base of voters for years. It’s not clear how seriously this was ever entertained by party insiders but we certainly dodged a bullet. What Silver and Ryan Grim fail to get is that in the eyes of Dem voters the primary for Biden-Harris WAS legitimate-again Silver’s problem is he doesn’t seem to realize? that incumbent party’s never have open primaries-after the 40 years between 1952-1992 where parties that engaged in these kinds of wild scenarios put up an 0-5 record. The supposed lack of legitimacy was only ever in the minds of the fan fiction writers.
Again these were people simply very uninformed about how Dem base voters think. For the party to simply skip over the first Black female VP would have been taken as a complete insult and genuinely could have damaged the party for years to come. What was amazing was how folks like these would just deny reality on this even when in front of their noses.
START HERE FOR IMPORTANT EDITING as everything above is pretty much perfect.
Does this tweet belong here or below?
FN: Yglesias tweet Elie Mystal
This was the import of AOC’s warning Instagram video on Friday July 19 that many in the party actually did want to drop Kamala.
Roland Martin
Dems’ WILD Plan: Push Biden Out, DERAIL Kamala Harris 2028! | Roland Martin (youtube.com)
FN: Find link above.
Two days after Biden dropped out though Silver made an interesting observation:
Yes but why is that though? We seamlessly transitioned to Kamala Harris for a few reasons-first because most of us also thought highly of Kamala-indeed ironically she’d been my first choice in the 2020 primary-but more importantly because of this little word Silver uses: the seamlessness of the process. Ie we didn’t have a version of Survivor the DNC Edition a la Ryan Grim.
It’s important to understand WHY things have gone so well for the Democrats since Kamala replaced Biden. It’s because we did the opposite of the whole Oprah Winfrey-Taylor Swift thing that according to the quote above from Semofor high ranking Democrats were seriously discussing-if you believe Semofor. But in terms of who gets to feel vindicated it’s not as straight forward as no doubt many of the #DumpBiden folks might assume.
It’s important to appreciate that Ryan Grim’s predictions proved to be completely wrong.
Should we add links of tweets of people like Bouzy who clearly believed will of voters? Make the point somewherethat Ryan Grim has it totally backwards-coronating or anointing Kamala wasn’t the problem quite the opposite. There was NO legitimacy crisis-NOW IF Kamala had been dumped there would have been your legitimacy crisis.
FN: Again with the categorical certainty which had the inconvenience of proving to be the opposite of the truth. To be clear Grim was hardly alone in this kind of categorical certainty that Kamala COULD NOT BE ANNOINTED and if she were it’d spell disaster. After Biden stepped down, Grim put out essentially the same piece he wrote on July 2 with an update:
The question now is whether the torch will be handed directly to Kamala Harris or whether she’ll have to fight for it at the convention. Biden did not endorse Harris in his letter announcing his decision, instead only thanking her for her counsel. But in a follow-up statement, he endorsed her for president.
The conventional wisdom is that an open convention is simply never going to happen, and if it does it will be a disaster for Democrats — weeks of infighting and chaos that’ll drag the party down.
(18) Biden is out. Here’s the case for an open convention. (substack.com)
Silver himself had argued for a kind of open primary back in June.
End FN
We can debate how conventional it is-there were a lot of folks arguing for a version of Grim’s DNC reality tv scheme-but in this case it had the convenience of being completely accurate.
FN: In speaking of conventional wisdom it’s important to note that a lot of the Savvy pundits argued for a version of the fan fiction scenario.
FN: Like Jerusalem Demas.
The Problem With Coronating Kamala Harris – The Atlantic
Let’s consider the past few weeks in the life of The New York Times. This summer, the paper of record demanded President Joe Biden’s departure from the race. After getting their wish, they had criticism galore, which they expressed by pushing full stories on crystals-loving Marianne Williamson’s complaints that the party needed an open nomination process (without regard for the legal and logistical impossibility of such a process), followed by multiple columns chastising the elevation of the current Vice President, Kamala Harris, to the top of the ticket as a “coronation” (again, despite the fact that she was the only Democrat in the United States who could actually surmount the aforementioned legal and logistical challenges).
Beware the Pundit-Brained Version of the Democratic Convention | The New Republic
End FN
“But that argument is merely a mix of assumption and assertion.”
Well OTOH many arguments are exactly this but, actually no, as we discussed above there is a very clear historical empirical record for this alleged conventional wisdom.
With a little imagination, that chaos could be turned toward the party’s advantage at a time when it’s desperately needed. The argument for coronating Kamala Harris doesn’t consider how it would look for a party that is in the grip of a legitimacy crisis—Democratic elites were the last in the country to acknowledge Biden’s frailty—to foist a new nominee on the public.”
THIS was the central flawed premise in this argument-a flawed premise shared by Grim, Silver, Cenk, Shaid Hamid and indeed many pundits. In reality there WAS NO LEGITIMACY CRISIS.
Democratic voters clearly didn’t think there was.
FN: Silver himself acknowledged a few days post July 21 that Democrats by a margin of about 68% to 7% prferred Kamala which completely debunking the idea that there was any kind of “legitimacy crisis” if Kamala Harris were “coronated.”
Harris is the clear choice of Democratic voters (natesilver.net)
It was based on the failure to understand that incumbent parties don’t have open primaries-we saw above how Silver compared oranges to apples by comparing the incumbent 2024 Democrats and the challenging 2016 Republicans. We also saw how Silver wrongly dismissed the 14 million primary votes for Biden-Harris because it was a closed primary-but again it’s always a closed primary when it’s an incumbent party.
THIS was why Democrats so broadly coalesced around Kamala so fast
FN: Last night on the first night of the DNC convention Christopher Bouzy made this point.
Contrary to Silver’s idea that the 14 million primary votes somehow didn’t count because as is always the case for incumbent parties Biden ran unopposed most Democratic voters supported Kamala Harris replacing him because they think that’s only fair she also garnered those votes in the VP slot.
Arguable some of the following is redundant
Where’s the best place for this Marshall tweet? Below or above?
Regarding his Ingio Blob narrative:
The media’s biggest bias is its centrism | Vox
Quote Nate Silver NYT piece
Next Section: why is Nate Silver still spiking the ball?
UPDATE: August 22
In other astonishing news that no one saw coming Nate is spiking the ball yet again-yesterday which was a full month post Biden dropping out-Nate Silver did a larger deep dive on what he claims is the threat of a “revisionist history of Biden.” What brought this latest spike of the ball seems that he doesn’t like people being too charitable about Biden. Biden’s not the hero Nate insists sanctimoniously he’s the goat the hero is Nancy Pelosi.
It’s interesting how in this last, very long chapter of this book-I certainly HOPE It’s the last chapter as I’ve been working on this since late 2017!-Nate Silver has figured so prominently. I guess that’s because on some level he kind of fascinates me.
I mean what makes him like this? Why does he always go out of his way to try to chide liberals over what is often very small beer-perhaps because he’s real thirsty? I mean I wouldn’t say he’s petty-I wouldn’t say he isn’t either…
I mean seriously-what makes him like this?
What will be unburdened by what has been on X: “So sayeth Nate “Scrooge bah humbug!” Silver” / X
FN:
I’m assuming this latest round of scoffing is related to the focus the last few nights at the DNC with Kamala and Tim Walz’s respective families. Most people were visibly moved. Not Nate. As usual he’s ticked at the Dems though if anything JD Vance brought up the idea that a candidate’s family-or lack thereof-is relevant as a policy issue.
Doug Emhoff on X: “I love you too.” / X
Again her piece is very interesting particularly in the context of Vance’s attack on “childless cat ladies” and his implication that only some kinds of families count-like Kamala isn’t a real parent as her children are step children. More-as she points out-Vance goes as far as opposing battered women leaving their abusive husbands.
Not Nate Silver-evidently the dude truly has icewater in his veins-I’m not SAYING he’s a cold fish but…
End FN
This sort of much ado about nothing where Silver attempts to make very heavy weather over things where the stakes are so low just adds to the sense the man has been on tilt since like 2018.
But seriously since 2018 the question first started being asked: what happened to Nate Silver? Or was he always like this? In 2019 the New Republic asked the question. Actually they opened with a very perspicacious observation about Silver:
His data journalism blog, FiveThirtyEight, is a political website with no politics—or rather, no politics beyond a mute approval of the status quo.”
The Fall of Nate Silver | The New Republic
A mute approval of the status quo. I find it pretty hard to argue this isn’t true. But this is around a time when I think many begin to wonder what happened to Silver. He seemed to have developed a propensity to fight with liberals over what often seemed like quibbles. He certainly seemed to have some kind of axe to grind and specifically with liberal and Democratic types specifically. Interestingly in a recent interview Silver did note that Elon Musk seems to have a chip on his shoulder which is self evidently true. But Silver himself has seemed to have one-though in fairness he’s not as bad as Elon. As to what his complaint is-is it that he feels the status quo during the Trump years was under threat? My sense was that what bothered him during the Trump years was less Trump than the liberal response to Trump.
Did he change, or did we? For weeks now, Nate Silver has been morphing before our eyes into exactly the kind of bloviator he made his name mocking. Tired perhaps of the slow and predictable business of prognostication—the elections so far apart from each other, the long months of waiting and lousy web traffic in between—the founder of data journalism outlet FiveThirtyEight has transformed his Twitter account into a font of provocatively bad opinions. Some of Nate’s Takes have touched on his speciality in data-based political forecasting: He has told us, for instance, not to get too excited about Democratic candidates’ (read: Bernie’s) fundraising numbers because polls, rather than cash, are the best predictor of electoral success, whereas a year ago he was saying just the opposite. But he has also wandered into more exotic territory, offering up a mix of bad policy ideas (elite colleges should admit as many legacy students and children of rich donors as they want) and sanctimonious tone policing (liberals should feel ashamed of themselves for not allowing the president to revel in the murder of ISIS’s chief lieutenant) with the unyielding, over-the-spectacles glare of an imaginary Concerned of Brooklyn Heights.”
Did he change or did we? Awesome on the part of NR as this was the exact question I started having about Nate Silver around this time and probably a number of liberal, progressive types did.
Suddenly, the man best known for acing his forecasts ahead of the 2008 and 2012 elections, and being less wrong about 2016 than all the other poll philologists (he put Trump’s odds of winning the Electoral College at 29 percent whereas competing models had them at 15 or 2 percent), is becoming that quintessentially American expert: the Very Online Blowhard. This has come as a surprise to many, though it shouldn’t. Silver, in the conventional liberal recollection, used to be on the right side of history—a prophetic force guiding political punditry toward a bright new era of rigor and facts. He’s always had a knack for choosing good targets. In 2012, he picked a fight with Joe Scarborough, a man who has built a career on talking over the top of his own wife, and though the result was never really in doubt, skirmishes such as this one cemented Silver’s legend as a scourge of the cable meatheads and teller of difficult, dispassionate truths. In the process, we—the media, the politically engaged public—were blinded to what seem, in retrospect, to be obvious deficiencies in the Silverian view of politics.”
“Away from the polls, Silver’s takes have always been suspect… In 2012, Silver told Charlie Rose that, politically, “I am somewhere between a libertarian and a liberal,” caught in a “kind of Gary Johnson versus Mitt Romney decision.” This is perhaps the only moment in Gary Johnson’s political career from which he has emerged looking better than the other people involved, so I suppose Silver deserves at least some points for originality.”
Gary Johnson vs Mitt Romney… I mean the best known fact about Gary Johnson is that he never heard of Aleppo.
Indeed, Nate still believes that politics is inherenlty rational
Though he later dressed it up as a noble transparency initiative, Silver initially saw data-driven political forecasting as a business opportunity, and nothing about that transactional view of politics has left him in the years since. This is why, for example, Silver has characterized the financial crisis as a failure of prediction rather than a failure of policy, regulation, or political imagination—a claim as bold as it is myopic. And it is why FiveThirtyEight, which Silver conceived in 2008 while drunk on Cajun martinis waiting for a flight out of New Orleans, remains, to this day, a political website with no politics—or rather, no politics beyond a mute approval of the status quo. It’s telling that Republican has-beens like Will and Barone are Silver’s idea of the good conservative, because his own concept of politics is stuck in 1988. He still believes that politics is inherently rational—as if Mitch McConnell had spent his years as Senate majority leader strolling the floor in search of consensus from his pals across the aisle and not pledging to make Barack Obama a one-term president, killing the Supreme Court career of Merrick Garland in utero, or carrying water for the racist sociopath now sitting in the White House. For Silver, politics is a thing that happens to us, not something we ourselves shape, which is why all attempts to wrench it from the cautious center ground of business as usual make him launch, immediately, into online conniptions.”
His own concept of politics stuck in 1988. Lot of gems in that New Republic piece. But when I reflect on this very interesting point it reminds me of my suspicion when Silver opened his first big piece declaring vindication on July 21 with the admission that missing Trump during the Republican primary was the biggest mistake of his career-quoted above.
Undoubtedly the biggest mistake of my forecasting career was insisting, until relatively late in the race, that Donald Trump wouldn’t win the 2016 Republican nomination for president. I was getting worried that I’d made a similar mistake in my prediction that Joe Biden would eventually exit the 2024 race — something he was insistent he wouldn’t do until he announced his decision to step aside at 1:46 p.m. today.”
Biden and Democrats make the rational choice (natesilver.net)
What I wondered is if Silver maybe learned the wrong lesson from.
My baseline view of politics — what contributed to that bad prediction about Trump — is that political parties engage in something roughly resembling game-theory optimal behavior and undertake reasonably rational strategies in an effort to win elections and fulfill their other objectives. And I didn’t think Trump was a very rational choice for Republicans. I thought he’d have lower chances against Hillary Clinton than another Republican and also that, if elected, he’d undermine many of the Republican Party’s traditional goals in foreign policy and other areas.”
If what makes Silver tick is a mute defense of the status quo that status quo is the idea that political parties engage in game-theory optimal behavior. The rise of Trump obviously shook his baseline of politics. However, it seems he dealt with the dissonance by papering over the damage Trump did to his belief by treating Trump like a normal candidate after the fact and ever more. This is very similar to how Chris Licht tried to run CNN after Mort Zucker left. If you just treat Trump like a normal candidate -viola!-he’ll become a normal candidate!
This is why I’d argue Silver has always treated Trump like a completely normal candidate after being burned in the 2016 primary. But this doesn’t solve the damage Trump did to his baseline view, it just sweeps it under the rug. Indeed, what became notale to me during the next few years, during the Trump years is that Silver became more and more offput not by Trump’s antics but by the response of Democrats and much of the media.
And this brings us back to wether Silver changed in like 2018-2019 or was he always like this? I think for many it was as if he suddenly changed-this was certainly my take. And that in some sense he was lashing out at liberals in particular. However, New Republic does also suggest there’s a sense he was never who many thought he was. And depending on who you ask there’s also a decent case he was always like that. Certainly if you talk to Farai Chideya a former employee of Nate back when he ran FiveThirtyEight…
A woman who worked at data journalist Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight news site blasted him as a “terrible boss” on Tuesday as Disney-owned ABC is reportedly looking into shuttering the data-driven news site.
Farai Chideya, who worked as a reporter for FiveThirtyEight during the 2016 election, posted a lengthy tweet thread that went viral on Tuesday. She slammed Silver as a “white male nerd” who ran a “money-losing, failure-of-trendspotting site.”
“I had some wonderful friends and allies at @FiveThirtyEight,” Chideya tweeted on Tuesday. “But Nate Silver was a terrible boss, especially to women and people of color.”
“Someone should do a bit of data journalism on how long women lasted on average there,” she tweeted. “And that made the journalism worse.”
‘Terrible boss’ Nate Silver blasted by ex-employee (nypost.com)
A terrible boss. Especially to women and people of color. Women didn’t last long with Nate according to her. Interesting and seeing his tendency to dismiss views he disagrees with pretty short work doesn’t seem surprising.
Chideya wrote that Silver was a “terrible manager” who “didn’t listen” to his employees’ complaints, particularly “criticism from women on staff.”
She described one incident in which she confronted Silver and threatened to quit if “things didn’t get better.” Chideya tweeted that the incident left him “gobsmacked.”
I remember Nate was facing criticism from women on staff and scheduled what was supposed to be a sneak-attack meeting on gender. I found out about it and told the women on staff, and said if they had anything to say, they should think it through and say it…”
This does sound like Silver:
Silver also was accused of being “part of the problem with American journalism” by failing to adequately appreciate how “race and gender were weaponized” by Donald Trump to win the 2016 presidential election.
According to Chideya, who is black, Silver “dismissed all relevance of race and gender on the metanarrative.”
I mean this is never the kind of narrative Silver is interested in delving into too much-again his narrative is normalcy, optimizing political decisions, etc.
It has been notable how little thrift he’s given the Dobbs Effect-compared to high prices to say nothing of Biden 81-t the last few years despite it being very arguably THE most important issue the next two years-in 2022 he dismissed discussion about it as “hopium” etc and his discussion of it this election cycle has been slim to none.
In a later post Chideya asserts she was accused of being an anti Semite for her criticism of Silver.
Journalist and author Farai Chideya said she came under fire earlier this month and was called an antisemite for saying statistician and journalist Nate Silver was a “terrible boss.” She tagged Silver in her tweet.
“I’ve been called everything from a racist to an antisemite (thanks for pushing back, folks) for calling out my former boss @NateSilver538. I want to say again, as I did in a reply, that Nate was a terrible boss to many men too,” Chideya tweeted on Wednesday, Jan. 25.
“This is not old news. I lived through a case study of the way journalism failed civil society. It was painful watching it from the inside, Chideya added in a follow-up tweet.” Relevant now b/c the failure to cover 2016 competently helped undermine the civil society of today… and tomorrow. Real harms.”
“Nate is not some shotgun-carrying white supremacist. Far worse, for the American newsroom, he is a smug dude who thinks he knows everything and could not see the biggest f*cking political story of our lifetimes even with brand new glasses. He cut stories and narratives we needed,” Chideya elaborated.
Calling Silver a “smug dude who thinks he knows everything” doesn’t seem an unfair characterization of him for anyone familiar with his body of work as we’ve only given a pretty partial taste of above.
It’s probably true regarding the question wether something happened to Nate Silver or he’s always been this way, there is a sense in which he’s always been fairly smug and definitely thinks he knows everything. This was what begun to emerge pretty clearly during Covid-he finds the idea that anyone knows more about anything than he does terribly unlikely-even on a subject like infectious diseases where people like Fauci and Friends learned their specialty through very specialized education and training. Just like fokls like him and Ryan Grim think you can make these grand proclamations on wether or not someone is mentally incapacitated simply by looking at them.
Again it’d be funny if it weren’t deadly serious-as I noted above the whole Know Nothing anti Vaxxer movement that has flourished over the last 24 years or so is not a joke when you considered the dire consequences.
Nevertheless, while Silver has always had certain tendencies I do believe that YES something did happen to him around 2018-2019-interesting that NR wrote that piece prior to the whole Covid thing.
FN: As for Silver’s premise on Covid that public healthcare officials were too risk adverse this is the problem with the very premise that healthcare officials of all people during the height of a pandemic that at its height was killing 3000 Americans per day-ie a daily 9/11 for months-it doesn’t pass the laugh test. It would seem that if there is ANY profession you don’t want folks engaging in “high risk high reward” activities like Silver has recently been romanticizing-it would be Fauci and Friend Circa 2020. And know FWIW I’m not in principle anti risk or contrarian quite the opposite as I discuss towards the end of this-rather long-chapter.
In his recent public blitz to prepare for the publishing of his new book he’s basically admitted something did change during this period. Indeed, to get a much better insight into Silver’s entire Weltanschaung, he developed this pretty striking model of how he thinks the media works post Trump. Again what jumps out at you is that what Silver finds “abnormal” about the Trump years was not Trump but the reaction to him-at least it seems to bother him far more than Trump himself.
In late July, 2023 Silver wrote this article on what he calls the Indigo Blob. What’s notable is he welcomed the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk.
Twitter, Elon and the Indigo Blob
The line between expertise and politics has become increasingly blurry. The demise of “Old Twitter” could help to reverse that.
Twitter, Elon and the Indigo Blob – by Nate Silver
Elon Musk to the rescue.
This post was cooked on a griddle that has the grease stains of 1,000 arguments on and about the Internet. I’ve aimed to keep it to a reasonable length, and a lot of the arguments could be developed further. However, they are not casually tossed-off ideas. They reflect many years of thinking about American politics and many years of experience I’ve had working in the mainstream media (for The New York Times, ESPN and ABC News). Let’s begin with my core hypothesis:
- In American media and political discourse, there has been a fundamental asymmetry during the Trump Era. Left-progressives, liberals1, centrists, and moderate or non-MAGA conservatives all share a common argumentative space. I call this space the Indigo Blob, because it’s somewhere between left-wing (blue) and centrist (purple). The space largely excludes MAGA/right-wing conservatives — around 30 percent2 of the country.
This is interesting on a number of levels starting with the question: is it really accurate to say that MAGA is excluded? It’s striking as you can argue this was largely the premise of Chris Litch when he took over CNN-the mainstream media AKA Silver’s Indigo Blob was just so unfair to Trump supporting Republicans and Litch’s agenda was to detoxify CNN for them. This ended up being an utter failure. More below.
So Silver argues the mainstream media has a modest left wing bias while the Maga world media-Fox, etc-has a huge right wing bias.
In this formulation, -10 reflects maximal left-wing bias and +10 reflects maximal right-wing bias”
Silver has a graphic representation if you want to see it.
On average, right-wing media is much more biased (+9) than the mainstream media (-3). In fact, the average mainstream media story has only a slight hint of left-wing bias, and many mainstream media stories have no bias at all or even have a modest right-wing bias. However, the mainstream media is also much larger than the right-wing media, which aims only for the MAGAiest 25 or 30 percent of the country. That’s the asymmetry. The US has a large mainstream media that on average has a modest left-wing bias — but with some stories that are very biased and others that aren’t biased at all — and a smaller (though still formidable) right-wing media which is flagrantly biased.
- The Indigo Blob also encompasses many ostensibly nonpartisan institutions such as the media, science, government, academia and even many types of businesses. It can be hard to distinguish partisan people and institutions from those that seek to maintain pluralism or nonpartisanship.
If you add up the numbers in the graphic above, you’ll find that they sum to zero. That is, the modest left-wing bias of the mainstream media roughly cancels out the flagrant bias of the (smaller) right-wing media, and vice versa. The equation balances. But which side gets the better half of the deal?
I don’t think it’s close. I think the left does.
Ok… So a few thoughts. First of all IF you accept this framing it’s still not necessarily clear what the problem is. If by Silver’s own narrative 30% are hardcore MAGA and 70% are not why is it a problem or even surprising if MAGA has less presence? Why would you expect a perspective that only 30% of the public agrees with to be represented in the mainstream media as much as the 70% who are non if not anti MAGA?
Let me suggest a counternarrative to the Indigo Blob narrative-or maybe just a different way to look at it. Let us try this thought experiment if we could. Let’s imagine that in American society there were two major parties: one called the Republican party and the other is called the Democratic party.
I know tough to imagine.
And in this American society there are three main cable networks: Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. Where its conventionally understood that the Fox caters to Republicans, MSNBC to Democrats, and CNN those who identify themselves as “intendent”, “neutral” or “nonpartisan” or maybe “centrist.”
I know this is too big a strain of the imagination.
But what do these two parties believe what is their party ideology? The overriding point of contention between the two parties is Republicans believe the world is flat while Democrats believe it’s round.
Which makes things kind of hard for CNN-they want to be independent and centrist-but what is the centrist position between a lie-the world is flat-and the truth the world is round. Assuming this accurately sums up the world we actually live in what sense does it make for Silver to complain that 70% of the media and Twitter before Elon Musk dismiss out of hand the Republican insistence that the world is flat?
It seems to me CNN’s own post Zuckerman experience shows the fallacy of the view that the media is unfair to Trump supporters-who admittedly are the minority. Consider Silver’s words here:
I’ll sometimes see progressives lament that there is no left-wing equivalent to Fox News. Mostly, I agree that there’s an asymmetry. For example, if you average out all of the content on their respective platforms, The New York Times maintains a much higher level of journalistic quality than Fox News does, and is much less partisan.3
However, that’s largely because partisan, progressive, pro-left wing, pro-Democratic Party media is embedded within the mainstream media.”
To the extent that there are a number of people in the mainstream media with liberal views what does this say exactly? The Right wing narrative is that it shows bias. But it’s interesting to consider the kinds of things that MAGA considers biased. Like if you believe that LGBT people should be given the same rights as anyone else this already in the mind of TrumpWorld makes you biased.
Similarly not many people in the mainstream media tell you J6 is a hoax, was no big deal, or that Trump had no role. Does this prove bias? I mean what about scientists? When virtually everyone in the world of serious science believe the world is round-or the theory of evolution, etc-does this mean they are biased against those who believe the world is flat, the sun revolves around it, and in the Creationist myth?
In this vein the real problem with CNN is that in order to play this Centrist game of both sides, “independence” of being “non partisan”, of being a neutral referee etc they have to obscure their own views-that even as they are very uncomfortable admitting it they themselves believe the world is round. So how exactly do they hope to win back MAGA which insists the world is flat?
Litcht’s entire project to win back Trump had to sidestep this entire point-that they themselves believe the world is round so how are they going to win over those who believe it flat?
But the more you think about it Silver’s framing this as a problem is deeply mistaken indeed perverse.
That’s because the Indigo Blob is large enough to be the default. It represents about 70 percent of the country. This is potentially changing as the right wing becomes more aggressive in attacking these institutions, but until the past year or so, it was therefore much safer for supposedly agnostic or nonpartisan institutions such as corporations to express left-leaning viewpoints than right-leaning ones.
What’s more, because the employees of these institutions tend disproportionally to be college-educated — and because educational status is a strong correlate of the Blob/MAGA divide — these institutions are often more left-leaning than the constituents or consumers that they’re designed to serve.
- Twitter is not the sole reason for the existence of the Indigo Blob. Other major reasons include educational polarization and the takeover of the Republican Party by Trump. However, pre-Elon Twitter served as the town square of the Indigo Blob, where its values were debated and determined. It strongly reinforced the existence of the Blob and the asymmetrical arrangement of American political media.
Within the comfort of the Indigo Blob, it’s easy to forget about the other 30 percent of the country. That was particularly true on Twitter, at least until Elon Musk took over the platform.
Exactly-now that Musk took over the 30% public that is MAGA lords it over the 70% that doesn’t. Ie minority rule.Silver’s framing is therefore perverse. He seems offended by the idea that the media lanscape would be balanced more towards the 70% of the country that doesn’t like Trump than the 30% that does which doesn’t suggest very rigorous math skills-to put it in Twitter speak 70% is a lot more than 30% actually8 In apparently wanting something more like 50% for MAGA ironically, he’s implicitly proposing a kind of media version of the disproportionate Senate electoral map-where tiny GOP leaning states like Wyoming or Idaho get the same amount of Senators as California.
But again, the Litcht experience at CNN is very germane to Silver’s argument here as while Litcht obviously didn’t use the phrase “Indigo Blob” he had something like this in mind. But his attempt to readdress the unfairness of not privileging the minority of MAGA viewers over those of the non or anti MAGA majority-just like the US Senate privileges the minority of voters in apportioning power to the electorate was an unmitigated disaster culminating in CNN’s widely panned Trump townhall.
Licht was still coming to terms with the ferocity of the backlash later that night when CNN’s popular Reliable Sources newsletter landed in his inbox. He read the opening line in disbelief: “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” Licht’s own media reporter, Oliver Darcy, wrote.
Inside the Meltdown at CNN – The Atlantic
This was what CNN’s own media reporter wrote. But the criticism was pretty much universal.
“Does CNN count that as an in-kind campaign donation?” the longtime broadcaster Dan Rather tweeted.
Rather’s comment was gentle compared with the torrent of criticism aimed at CNN. “Ready to call it: This was a terrible idea,” the conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru tweeted, just nine minutes into the event. “CNN should be ashamed of themselves,” tweeted Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “This is an absolute joke,” tweeted former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger. “Chris Licht is rapidly becoming the Elon Musk of CNN,” tweeted The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes.
Of course, Nate Silver talk about “contrarian” likes Elon Musk.
FN: There’s this whole narrative about alleged censorship that Musk allegedly bought Twitter to fix but in reality he engages in far more blatant censorship-every single week I multiple times get messages that “this is from an account you muted” and it turns out not be someone I muted but instead a major liberal account I followed. We also have seen Elon many times literally cancel liberal Twitter accounts-notably recently the Dudes for Harris account.
Yet despite it all it didn’t even work-this did NOT lead MAGA to see CNN in a different light.
When the town hall ended, two postgame panels kicked off concurrently, giving network executives the flexibility to switch between reporting and analysis. One panel, anchored by Tapper, was a roundtable of journalists picking apart Trump’s lies. The other, led by Cooper, featured partisan pundits—including Donalds—debating one another. According to the mission that Licht had articulated for me, Tapper’s panel should have starred that night. But it didn’t. Licht made the call to elevate Cooper’s panel (a fact first reported by Puck). This decision may or may not have come from the very top: In the days after the town hall, Zaslav told multiple people that Tapper’s Trump-bashing panel reminded him of Zucker’s CNN. Yet even that MAGA-friendly version wasn’t good enough for Donalds. After criticizing the network on-air, the congressman stepped off the set and then, in full view of the crew as well as his fellow panelists, grabbed his phone and started blasting CNN on Twitter.”
This is the fallacy of Silver framing it as the non Far Right echo chamber excluding the Far Right GOPer audience-they don’t want to be included. This in a nutshell is the problem with Litch’s entire project and the CNN brand more generally. They want to be this kind of neutral referee of squabbling partisans but one of the squabbling partisans believes the world is flat and the other round. And CNN-certainly many at the network anyway-also secretly believe the world is round. So for MAGA they look dishonest and in a sense they are. This is why folks like Brian Stelter didn’t last very long under Litch-he was too honest about believing the world is round.
Why CNN is booting all the Trump critics who work there. (slate.com)
To be clear I’m not claiming-as even Silver doesn’t-that CNN simply is liberal. But they are basically part of what Krugman would call reality based community. On economic issues much of the mainstream media is sort of instinctually fiscally conservative-in a credulous on uninformed way. During the Obama the Beltway pundits pretty widely advocated things like cutting entitlements to balance the budget-what Bill Clinton in the 1990s called ‘balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.”
To this day there’s a fairly widely held premise that Kamala has to quell concerns she’s a “San Francisco liberal.”
FN: The media’s biggest bias is its centrism | Vox
It sometimes seems as if Silver’s Weltanschauung is a kind of preference for contrarianism for its own sake. It’s like someone spent years fighting the dominance of the scientific world by flat earthers but now that the fact that the world is round has finally won they switch to a flat earther ideology-just to be contrarian. Mayb e it’s just that Krugman was right-facts have a well known liberal bias.
As Bill Clinton quite aptly pointed out in his speech last night.
Philip Bump on X: “If you go back to World War II, the gap is wider. https://t.co/DCwf1Oh9BO” / X
And we haven’t even talked about Nate Silver’s least favorite topic-abortion. The position of Trump’s Republican party today that a rape victim has less rights than her rapist doesn’t have 10% support. Yet Silver would assert this 10% at best view should get as much play as the view of 90%?
Look at the end of the day the idea of advocating a false equivalence between those who know the world is round and the flat earther Trump supporters who are both markedly in the minority and wrong is perverse.
It’s NOT that I’m anti contrarian-quite the opposite as I’ll discuss in the finishing part of this chapter but contrarianism for its own sake is senseless.
So clearly Silver sees himself as in a kind of low intensity war, indeed a kind of “cold war” against this alleged Indigo Blob that unfairly caters more to the 70% who aren’t MAGA as opposed to the 30% who are. This then confirms my suspicion going back to around 2018 that Silver seemed to have an axe to grind of some sort with #ResistanceLiberal types-like myself. Again the theory is that the Trump years paradoxically alienated him more from liberals as he wanted to treat Trump as more or less a normal political actor after completely getting Trump wrong in the 2016 GOP primary.
Now with the recent publication of his book, Silver has discussed this more expansively that yes he sees a divide between The River and The Village-with liberal and Democrat leaning types in The Village who fail to understand the genius of risk. Speaking for myself I certainly am not anti risk per se-though again you don’t necessarily want high level risk takers handling a pandemic taking the lives of 3000 people per day-even less am I anti contrarian-indeed as I document below I made a little contrarian bet on Tim Walz in the market the Friday before the week he was picked and made a 500% return. And while I myself love being contrarian-obviously there are times being contrarian is the right move-when the consensus is Flat Earther-and times when it makes no sense-being Flat Earther in an age that knows the world is round. Silver’s categorical lauding of “Risk” almost for its own sake as well as contrarianism seems to miss this point.
So in answer to what happened to Nate Silver-the answer might be that he always had some bad instincts and tendencies but missing the rise of Trump so badly in 2016 paradoxically led him to a kind of Derangement Syndrome against Trump’s opponents. Kind of like some other white males on tilt we can think of-Elon Musk certainly; the funniest case might be Scott Adams who became so obsessed with the idea of his version of a liberal media and cultural landscape a la Silver’s Indigo Blob that after a year of work he tabled his movie version of Dilbert declaring that his own movie-that he had made-was over laden with anti-male ideology.
In fairness to Silver I don’t think his derangement syndrome is as bad as many of these other folks with him it’s not as pronounced; Silver though like CNN knows perfectly well the world is round.
FN:
(19) Joe Biden should drop out – by Nate Silver
Is an 86-year-old Biden being president as ridiculous and untenable as an 82-year-old Trump being president? (Trump just turned 78 so would be 82 by the end of his second term.) For me, the answer is still no. In fact, although this is an increasingly unpopular view, I think Biden’s had a pretty good first term. And if I lived in a swing state2, I’d still vote for Biden — if for no other reason than because I think January 6 is so disqualifying to outweigh everything else.”
So this is the paradox and contradiction in his own position-I want a media fairer to the flat earthers even though I know perfectly well the world is round.
With this excursion into his own intellectual Weltanschauung done let’s go back to his latest spiking of the ball.
Very important that Biden feel the sting apparently. Even though the ad hominin assertion that HE LOST has the inconvenience of being false-we will never know for sure if he lost and I’m much less confident than Silver that he would have-Silver who lampooned Sam Wang for claiming Clinton had a 98% chance of victory in 2016 often sounded like Trump had that in July despite the inconvenient fact that the race never showed more than at most a 4 point Trump lead-right after the convention and the assassination attempt the previous Saturday
This is the sort of thing that prompted the question what happened to Nate Silver in the first place. For if sore losers are a scourge of the earth sore winners like Silver are the same:
Against revisionist history on Biden 2024
You can like the president or his policies. But his campaign was a disaster. And he didn’t just drop out — he lost.”
It’s your wedding day. Congrats! But one of your groomsmen, Joey, is presenting you with a problem. Joey has always been a drinker, but it’s gotten worse since his divorce. And he showed up to the ceremony three sheets to the wind. He nearly tripped during the processional. His toast went way over the line. And then he knocked over his wine glass and spilled Pinot Noir all over your favorite Aunt’s dress. Fortunately, another friend, Nancy, persuaded Joey to call it a night before he made even more of a mess.
How should we feel about Joey? Well, that’s up to you, I suppose. But he’s certainly no hero. Nancy, on the other hand…”
Against revisionist history on Biden 2024 – by Nate Silver
FN: One of the big ironies throughout the entire post debate frenzy was Pelosi emerging as the ringleader in driving Biden out-you have an 84 year old Congresswoman who remains to a large extent the titular head of the House Democrats wagging her finger at the 81 year old President that he’s too old for politics. And notably Pelosi’s speech on night 3 of the DNC was notably anti climatic. In fairness speechifying was never really her strength either.
But compare this to Biden who gave an hour and a half spell binder that led to many curtain calls with calls of ‘Thank you Joe”-and rafters hanging from the ceiling reading the same. To go out on not a very big limb. Biden’s speechifying abilities may not be what it used to be but it’s still way beyond Pelosi’s.
Anyway:
It’s your wedding day. Congrats! But one of your groomsmen, Joey, is presenting you with a problem. Joey has always been a drinker, but it’s gotten worse since his divorce. And he showed up to the ceremony three sheets to the wind. He nearly tripped during the processional. His toast went way over the line. And then he knocked over his wine glass and spilled Pinot Noir all over your favorite Aunt’s dress. Fortunately, another friend, Nancy, persuaded Joey to call it a night before he made even more of a mess.
How should we feel about Joey? Well, that’s up to you, I suppose. But he’s certainly no hero. Nancy, on the other hand…”
Ok so we start with a bad analogy. This groomsmen truly doesn’t give a crap. Biden genuinely believed he could beat Trump and that he had the best chance to.
FN: Below I will consider the argument that he still could have though I obviously admit now that we’re better off with Kamala Harris.
This doesn’t mean he was right but he wasn’t motivated by the groomsman who clearly didn’t care about his friend’s wedding. He was guilty at the last of gross negligence. When you look at Biden’s body of work that is not at all the picture you get.
Not surprisingly Silver has a bug up his ass over Timothy Snyder-this is a very widely held affliction among the mainstream punditocracy. The idea that Trump is a threat to democracy always struck many of them as somehow being over the top-though how can in light of J6 he be considered anything else?
Biden didn’t step aside. He was pushed aside by his party.
Again, apparently, very important that he rub this in. Silver seems to think it important that Biden-and presumably those who defended him-feel the full sting of public opprobrium. Which from the point of the Democratic party makes no sense whether Silver’s characterization is true or not-the party obviously did everything to make Biden feel appreciated for his Presidency and all his years in public service and make him the hero of the story. Why is that? Could it be because even if it weren’t true it’s still totally in the interest of the party to unify-added to the fact that Kamala Harris is running as the VP incumbent of Biden’s Administration? Any time now flagging Biden would only hurt their chances-at this point it’s MAD.
Indeed this is what’s fascinating about Silver-why is it always so important for him to make such a big deal over these fairly minor quibbles-from the point of view of Democrats whether you wanted to drop Biden or remain at this point the only concern is maximum unity and cohesion. But Silver wants there to be like this public recrimination. Which is ironic as he recently used the phrase “strategic empathy.” He apparently has none in this case. Just the other night he was making yet another mountain out of yet another molehill-Biden’s late start time to his speech.
What’s so striking in this kind of typical faux outrage on the part of Silver is who cares? I mean I don’t understand the heavy weather-no matter what the truth is it’s striking only how low the consequence is. On the night of that first night of the convention a few different explanations were put forward.
The DNC explanation:
Some in the media charged the DNC with mismanagement-Silver says that’s unpossible-no conference has ever gotten behind schedule before so it MUST HAVE BEEN intentional.
At the end of the day who cares?-Biden’s speech was still widely watched and regarded by his own party. And even if Silver’s negative gloss were true-not saying it is-there’s no consequence. But Silver feels he hasn’t gotten enough public recognition of his alleged vindication. This is just another example of him making heavy weather to justify his false equivalence a la The Indigo Blob. Let’s suppose the DNC is fudging to save Biden embarrassment? Not saying that is-it’s doesn’t pass the laugh test to claim that had Biden done his speech an hour earlier this meant Trump’s chances of winning suddenly would go up 20% or something-even Silver admits that the choice of VP has maybe a 5% chance of effecting the outcome-see below. It just shows how he much he has to reach to create some huge “scandal” some much ado about nothing that shows something or other bad about “resistance liberals.”
Anyway on to the Timothy Snyder Derangement Syndrome.
Officially, Timothy Snyder is “the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna”. Unofficially, he’s a founding member of a certain prototype that’s familiar on Twitter (and frankly also on Substack): the Resistance Lib Celebrity Historian, hereafter RLCH.
“The RLCH is emblematic of what I call the Indigo Blob phenomenon: the tendency for legitimate non-partisan expertise on the one hand, and cheerleading for the Democratic Party under the auspices of expertise on the other hand, to be deeply entangled. This does not imply that all experts have become partisan hacks. I mean, look, I’m a member of the Indigo Blob too — despite having stumbled into it backward through poker and baseball forecasting — and I think most journalists and academics are basically truth-seeking. But there are a significant minority of experts who think their goal is to help the Democratic Party, who don’t recognize their own tendency toward confirmation bias, or simply enjoy the engagement that being a social media celebrity brings.”
Right how scandalous that an expert who believes the world is round supports the party that believes it is vs the party that thinks its flat and want to take things centuries back to the time when this belief was common. I mean Snyder’s area of expertise is literally the history of totalitarianism but yeah it’s improper for him to publicly support the opposition party to Donald Trump-who only wishes heh could be a totalitarian leader.
Gee I wonder why Trump thinks Venezuela is so awesome now-perhaps because Maduro just successfully did what he failed to do on J6? But sure Nate Silver I too am disillusioned to learn he prefers the Democrats to Trump and never saw it coming. You can study history but it can never be applied to current political issues of today.
If you’re a consumer of political news, then unless you’re really meticulous, it can often be hard to tell which is which.
Well this touches on another assumption-in principle there’s no reason why an expert can’t have a political view point. Silver assumes the norm of Jay Rosen’s View From Nowhere style journalism.
FN: One confusion that Gary Wills 46 years ago pointed out is that in politics the most informed voters are usually the frankest partisans-rather than showcasing this alleged nonpartisan “viewlessness.”
Gary Wills.
But with something like this tweet from Snyder, it isn’t a close call. This is revisionist history and BS — in the Harry G. Frankfurt sense of “bullshit” of causal indifference toward to the truth.
The last sentence of this tweet, that Biden will be regarded kindly by history, is highly plausible, especially if RLCHes like Snyder are responsible for writing it. (For what it’s worth, I do think Biden accomplished a lot in his term.) But the rest of it is bullshit: the equivalent of reframing Joey’s behavior as noble because he merely almost ruined your wedding.
Silver is literally wrong here-it’s not self evident bullshit-it could be right it could be wrong but it’s not self-evident. This is one of his tics-Silver always just presumes if you don’t agree with him you must be either a total fool or deliberately lying. Kind of recalling that female journalist who called him a “smug dude who thinks he knows everything.”
Even less is it self evident that Snyder KNOWS what he’s saying is false. How exactly do you prove he doesn’t believe Biden is a hero for stepping down? This just goes to Silver’s tendency to hyperbole when he comes across a view point he hates.
And indeed, Silver himself without noticing it essentially proves this point regarding his conversations with Ezra Klein on this topic.
Was Biden’s decision “spectacularly strategic”, as Snyder claims? No. It was marking an ‘X’ in the upper-left square of the tic-tac-toe board because it was an utterly obvious play. Reporting on the end-days of Biden’s 2024 campaign makes clear that he only left once he was persuaded that he was going to lose, his reputation sure to be in tatters even among sympathetic historians like Snyder.”
Actually a recent NYT article reports he DIDN’T believe he had no path but did realize that even if he had a path it was going to divide the entire party.
Inside Biden’s Decision to Drop Out of the 2024 Election – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Biden was very likely to lose the general election to Donald Trump.
We’ll discuss this more below, but to this day I will argue Silver greatly overestimated his own certainty, he was way too certain, Biden was going to lose. Interestingly in 2020 he had chided G. Elliot Morris for being too certain Biden would win in August when Biden’s polling lead over Trump was far larger than Trump’s lead in July, 2024 even at is largest straight after the RNC.
FN: Link
Now he gets into something that is likely more fantasy fiction than anything-but this is necessary as without it his entire argument that Snyder told self evident bullshit falls apart.
“And he might also have lost the nomination. Nancy Pelosi and others who wanted him out were not only using their leverage but also credibly threatening to apply even more leverage in the future — the equivalent of telling our pal Joey that if you don’t hail an Uber right now, we’re going to call security and have you escorted out.”
He seems to take real delight in this idea-as he seems to want to see Biden sort of public disgraced-but it’s probably fantasy football.
Democratic convention rules even permit considerable flexibility to delegates to bypass the candidate they were originally pledged to vote for if they can’t do so in “good conscience”. Would the party have taken things that far? When I spoke to Ezra Klein about this — Ezra is approximately 100x times more connected than me among Democratic Party officials — he was skeptical, and thought Biden could have held onto the nomination if he absolutely insisted on it. But who knows. Democrats like Pelosi think this election has existential stakes, and I wouldn’t put it past the party — which has shown a penchant for strategic thinking this year that they’ve sometimes lacked in the past — to take the issue to the convention floor, or to poison-pill Biden’s candidacy to the point where it became completely untenable. It’s Pelosi who deserves the credit for playing hardball — not Biden for belatedly reading the writing on the wall.”
I do give Klein-as well as Silver-some credit as he also predicted on the Friday before Biden dropped out it would probably be Kamala Harris.
FN: Find link.
But as Silver agrees Klein is 100 times more connected to actual Democratic officials I think it’s reasonable to put 100 times more weight on Klein’s opinion here. Had Pelosi dragged it to the convention floor-ie if rather thanthis entirely valedictory and celebratory convention we just finished the last 4 days watching we’d have had the level of divisive toxicity of the Speaker Emeritus trying to somehow wrench it from Biden’s cold, dead hands this would have led us to a worse dumpster fire than 1968-just as Clyburn argued as quoted above.
Indeed, it’s beginning to look like Clyburn not Pelosi may have been the real broker-who per Politico-was pushing the fantasy football style open convention Clyburn had warned about-that would have made the 1968 Dem convention-or maybe even the 1924 convention-look like simpler times.
FN: The 1924 convention was a perhaps even more spectacularly disastrous.
FN:
Adam Carlson on X: “Jim Clyburn is actually who you all think Nancy Pelosi is” / X
If Pelosi and Biden had battled it out the last 4 days it would have pretty much been mutually assured destruction and no matter how it turned out the party’s prospects would have been almost cataclysmically dismal.
In reality though even then Biden would likely have held on if he simply refused to bend-all evidence I saw was that the overwhelming majority of Biden delegates would have stayed with him as had Silver’s friend DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison.
But Harrison got the last laugh as he kept to his August 7 schedule after Kamala locked up the convention about 33 hours after Biden dropped out.
But if this is true-and there’s every reason to take Ezra Klein’s word over Silver’s, or at least 100 reasons-then Silver’s whole narrative is undermined: Biden didn’t have to step down and so does get some measure of credit for choosing party unity over his own ambitions even if he continued to believe there was a path through the end.
But here Silver is exactly wrong which is why he doesn’t IMHO deserve quite as much vindication as he likes to think.
What would have shown the foresight and moral courage Snyder imagines is for Biden to have exited the race earlier — ideally with enough time for Democrats to have a real primary. Voters’ age-related concerns about Biden were about the most persistent and obvious signal that I’ve seen in the polling business since I began covering politics. The problems were evident long before the debate, like in Biden’s refusal to do a Super Bowl interview.”
Silver and that Super Bowl interview LOL.
FN: On Silver’s derangement syndrome over that Super Bowl interview it’s more comic relief than anything. But Silver’s baseless aspersions that Biden being is not able to do the job as President-ie Ryan Grim’s utterly baseless claim that Biden is mentally incapacitated-is frankly kind of irresponsible. As usual he has to oversell when he thinks he’s right-and he always thinks he’s right.
Democrats are also lucky that the Indigo Blob seems to have become largely disinterested in covering Biden’s age and fitness for office now that it’s no longer a horse-race story. Because Biden’s lack of consistent uptime — such as reportedly often being off his A-game in the evenings — is a huge concern if, say, there’s a report of an incoming North Korean ICBM at midnight, a circumstance that requires the president to act with the fate of the world on the line within 6 minutes. Democrats are fading the risk that things in the Middle East or in the financial system don’t spiral out of control and that Biden is up for the task if they do”
The media isn’t interested as it’s so self evident that he is entirely fit to do the job. I mean Silver is freaking out over Biden going to bed at 8:30? Many Presidents have had early bedtimes-both George W. Bush and Obama-both relatively young men in Office did; let’s not even talk about Trump-reportedly he often didn’t even start the day until 11 AM and spent much of the day watching Fox News or playing golf. During his NY trial, of course, he was literally falling asleep in the middle of the day.
As for Silver making heavy weather over “a huge concern” he apparently heard nothing about the recent Russian prisoner swap and the amount of high stakes diplomacy and command of complex logistics it took-surprising Silver heard nothing about this as he’s an expert on everything else had assumed he’d also claim to be an expert on high stakes diplomacy and its complex logistics.
Opinion | Biden the president excels as Biden the candidate gives way – The Washington Post
I challenged anyone to watch this link then tell me Biden isn’t still performing the job as President at a high level.
The Lincoln Projecton X: “”Thanks for bringing us home.” President Biden is a remarkable leader. https://t.co/dOxGsGcRUj” / X
Then there was the recent nabbing of the Mexican drug cartel boss. But none of this stops Silver’s fact free speculation. Saying he’s old and did a bad debate doesn’t prove anything-again FDR was in far worse shape than Biden in 1944 and was in the middle of doing Yalta.
End FN
But much more significantly putting aside the to my mind rather less important question of who deserves credit for “foresight and moral courage”-again I think the real answer may be Clyburn-is that Silver is exactly wrong-so wrong it hurts-that the Democrats would have been better off with a real primary. This can only make sense if you completely dismiss the value of incumbency which Silver implicitly did throughout the entire debate.
During the #DumpBiden frenzy Silver preferred to dismiss #BidenRemainers an ad hominem hand wave-as “the dumbest of dumb deadenders” or “midwit.” However, interestingly a few weeks ago-ie long after Biden did step down-he finally tweeted about incumbency. Interesting that he decided to debunk the importance of incumbency after the fact-ie reverse engineer the argument. During the debate you would never realize from reading him that he even knew what incumbency was-as he never even mentioned it. Then on July 30 he tweeted out this:
FN:
End FN
Again during the debate-post The Debate-he had just been content to dismiss and handwave away #BidenRemain as “the dumbest of deadenders” but now after fact he felt the need to reverse engineer a substantive response. And this IS where the rubber reaches the road-as probably most skeptics of dropping Biden were focused on this topic-I know this was my main concern. Again it was never because on a personal level I preferred Biden to Kamala Harris-as Kamala has been my dream candidate since that first Senate Judiciary hearing where she cross examined Jeff Sessions back in 2017-as I noted above, she would fill the void in my heart when Comey and the NYT stole it from Hillary. Naturally she was my first choice 2020-Biden wasn’t even second that was Elizabeth Warren. Biden was MAYBE third.
So my concern wasn’t that I didn’t like Kamala quite the opposite. My concern wasn’t about individual candidates but incumbency-as discussed above history shows a very strong correlation between incumbent parties running their incumbent President unopposed and winning-8-0 between 1936 and 2012-when Trump lost in 2020 this was the first time an UNOPPOSED incumbent President had lost since Herbert Hoover.
OTOH parties that primaried or otherwise pushed out their incumbent were 0-5 between 1952-1992. Interestingly someone seemingly in agreement with Nate tweeted this:
Using Sean Trende to rest your case is ironic as he was making this argument in the context of why incumbency wouldn’t help Obama…
It’s been argued-by Silver-among others that incumbency doesn’t matter ANYMORE-if so when exactly did it stop mattering?
In any case after seeing that tweet I was waiting for his deep dive into explaining why incumbency in reality gives minimal advantage. Then came the piece linked to above-on the alleged dangers of revisionism on Biden published on Wednesday, 8/21.
So let’s get to the meat of the argument. Right away Silver frames it in a way to make incumbency seem unimportant by including every election going back to George Washington circa 1792. This makes it seem like it has no advantage by including all these elections from the Deadball Era.
What’s true is this: incumbent presidents who win their party’s nomination usually win re-election. Specifically — let’s wind this all the way back to the dawn of the Republic — 23 of 33 who captured their party’s banner won the general election, too. That’s 70 percent, a pretty good hit rate.
But here’s another fact: most incumbent presidents who were eligible to seek re-election did not win another term. In fact, just 23 of 54 did, or 43 percent.”
Of course, this is including Washington deciding not to run for a third term thereby establishing the unofficial norm that Presidents don’t seek a third term-which was kept until FDR-then the GOP Congress passed an Amendment officially limiting it to two in 1948. Beyond that it includes times like the really unstable time between Andrew Jackson’s second term-of course he stepped down voluntarily in 1836-and Lincoln’s win in 1860-when nobody ended up running for a second term.
Silver does go onto acknowledge it-but the 43% number is meaningless.
What accounts for the difference? Well, until the 22nd Amendment — which was passed in 1951 but grandfathered in for the then-incumbent, Harry S. Truman — there was no constitutional limit on the number of terms a president might serve. George Washington established a two-term precedent and most of the other early presdients followed it with few questions asked. But by the early 20th century, many presidents didn’t. Woodrow Wilson wanted a third term until he had a stroke, and remained convinced even afterward that he could still have won one somehow. Then FDR violated the two-term precedent, of course. Truman strongly considered a third term despite having an approval rating similar to Biden’s in the high 30s.”
Actually Truman had won in 1948 despite a 36% approval rating disproving yet another zombie narrative you heard a lot during The Frenzy from Cenk among others that Biden’s 36% approval rating made it impossible for him to in when Truman had the same-that was my fantasy scenario where Biden would pull a Dewey Beats Truman 2.0 and leave egg dripping down the faces of the Savvy pundits a la Nate Silver.
FN: Link on Cenk, et al
LBJ was also eligible for a third term in 1968 because he’d only been elected once, having succeeded John F. Kennedy to the office. His case is more ambiguous — LBJ was non-committal — but it was the New Hampshire primary, where LBJ (as a write-in) got less than 50 percent of the vote, that really drove the point home.
Before the advent of the modern presidential primary system, which evolved rapidly between 1968 and 1980, stubborn old men that didn’t know their own limitations would simply be pushed aside by their parties. There are only a few vestiges of these “smoke-filled room” days left, like the presence of superdelegates and the conscious cause.
Still, there is considerable selection bias in who seeks and wins their party nomination and who doesn’t. The probable losers are usually weeded out, either by themselves or by their party, which biases the incumbent success rate upward. If you look at incumbents who actively sought another term — yes, there are some borderline cases, and I don’t count presidents like Chester A. Arthur in the denominator who were wiser than Wilson about acknowledging their health problems — the batting average is 55 percent. Basically a coin flip.”
You’d have to go into the history to know why every single President didn’t run for a second term-to justify Silver’s assumption that every incumbent who didn’t run again dropped out because they were going to lose-Calvin Coolidge for example was popular and quite possibly would have won reelection.
“I Do Not Choose to Run for President” — The Coolidge Review
Rutherford B. Hayes had promised in 1876 to only serve one term-remember his victory was pretty suspect, it was the product of a fairly corrupt bargain ala the Great Compromise of 1876 where basically the GOP agreed to end Reconstruction if they could win the Presidency.
FN: The Independent lists 6 incumbents who chose not to run.
Six other presidents didn’t run for another term. Here’s what happened then | The Independent
So we’ve already looked at two of these six and neither Hayes or Coolidge fit Silver’s narrative-they were kicked to the curb by their party as their party KNEW WITH CERTAINTY they couldn’t win. In James Buchanan too it was not so much that Buchanan was the proverbial “bad candidate” but it was an extremely precarious moment in US history obviously and he wanted nothing to do with it.
He appeared happy to leave the office. According to the Library of Congress, Buchanan expressed his joy at returning to his home Wheatland when speaking to his successor, Abraham Lincoln.
“My dear sir, if you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man indeed,” he said.
However, in my view the most relevant history is since 1932.
That has implications for our empirical understanding of the presidency. Models like Allan Lichtman’s 13 Keys to the White House which do not account for this selection bias are flawed. Notwithstanding his system’s other subjectivities, Lichtman insisted that Biden was a winner and should stay in the race, which should count as a failed prediction given the reason that Biden quit.”
Nice try but you don’t get to include Biden as a loser as you don’t know what would have happened if he stayed in as Steve Kornacki argued on Rachel Maddow the afternoon of July 21. You can argue selection bias-I would agree there’s a chicken and egg aspect to it-did the 1952 and 1968 Democrats lose the Presidency BECAUSE their incumbents were pushed out or was the fact they were pushed out because they were unlikely to win? However besides the 8-0 record for unopposed incumbents between 1932-2012-until Trump had an Administration as bad as Herbert Hoover-you have the 0-5 record of parties that lost after pushing out their incumbent. Certainly a major part of my concern in July was that the record on dropping-or primarying-the nominee are not good to say the least. So the issue is not just the record of parties who run their incumbent unopposed but of those who don’t.
Silver just declares victory at every turn:
So Biden should be thought of in the same category as Wilson and Truman — as incumbents who sought another term and lost it, because their parties intervened to prevent an electoral disaster. If Harris wins the presidency, historians like Snyder will probably elide that part and Biden will be remembered fondly by the Indigo Blob. But if Harris loses — and this is still basically a 50/50 race — all bets are off.”
Uh no. In reality as none of these candidates ran you will never know what would have happened-although Wilson 2020 is a particularly weird case as his wife was doing most of the work during his second term and would be dead within a year-most of it before women even officially had the vote.
In any case it’s not accurate to claim either the 1920 Democrats or 1952 Democrats “prevented electoral disaster” indeed in both cases the parties actually suffered electoral disaster with their replacement candidates-the 1920 Dems and 1952 Dems both literally lost in landslides further buttressing the point that whatever the reason these various parties dropped their incumbents the record is pretty dismal.
As Silver’s-uh, very good friend G Elliot Morris-points out.
But Silver has no patience for unfalsifiable-he just declares the matter falsified. In any case this was why and most of #BidenRemain were against dumping him-the incumbency issue and more generally the fear that Clyburn drew on in the quote above-of another 1968.
Indeed, Silver himself during early July accurately described the real state of play between #DumpBiden and #BidenRemain. He even offered a pretty good prediction as to where things may end up.
Kamala Harris is probably a mutually agreeable option. I’ll want to write more about Harris if I can find the time. But my strong sense is that people who want Biden out would be perfectly happy with Harris (even if they’d prefer some sort of open nomination process) — whereas people are defending Biden are more indifferent between Biden and Harris (but are strongly against an open process). In technical terms, Harris is probably the choice that would emerge from a negotiation in a game-theory equilibrium — not necessarily the party’s best option to defeat Trump, but the one minimizes the loss function for respective party stakeholders.
(19) Biden has a weak hand – by Nate Silver – Silver Bulletin
Completely right-that was my preference and almost everyone who was skeptical about dropping Biden added that IF you insist on dropping him it HAS TO BE Kamala Harris:
It remains a very interesting question of considerable contention as to what happened internally in the Democratic party between June 27 and July 21. The big question was how the party ended up getting behind Kamala so quickly. One of the primary concerns among #BidenRemain was that Kamala would NOT be the choice. My concern was threefold-my belief that incumbency is a very valuable asset you don’t throwaway so casually. Like most Biden defenders I was categorical that if you did drop Biden it had to be her. However:
A) There were a lot of concerns it wouldn’t be her
B) Even if it were if it took too long to get there the damage would be done.
For me it was this dystopian scenario where the party was running around like a chicken with its head cut off all Summer repudiating its own nominee and talking about a blitz primary literally when primary season was wrapping up. Any kind of open or blitz primary-even if Kamala did emerge victory at the end of it-would condemn the party to spending the entire Summer until the DNC the last week of August without a nominee-a pretty hard way to beat Trump if the party spent almost all July-August engaged in a circular firing squad.
The debate over what really happened during these three and a half weeks continues.
This is not accurate by Obama Bro Favreau here-as Silver himself had noted in the link above, most Biden defenders were indifferent between Biden and Harris but were completely opposed to an open process. And while it may not have been “everyone” a lot of folks DID sing the praises of the fan fiction football scenarios a la Ryan Grim’s Reality TV the DNC edition.
I think Silver framed it correctly above: “But my strong sense is that people who want Biden out would be perfectly happy with Harris (even if they’d prefer some sort of open nomination process) — whereas people are defending Biden are more indifferent between Biden and Harris (but are strongly against an open process)”
As for the idea that she supported an “open process” I mean she SAID THAT then she sewed up the nomination 33 hours after Biden dropped out so if that’s what you mean by open process then to quote Hillary Clinton Deal Me In.
But to claim that there wasn’t a lot of blitz primary people who at least were open to dumping Kamala doesn’t pass the laugh test.
FN: As Josh Marshall documented.
As Marshall notes one of the most absurd aspects of it was these fantasy football scenarios were being proposed just as primary season was ending.
Indeed-it was as if these folks though we had limitless time to debate this-let’s go the entire summer debating this-what time crunch?
End FN
Not all but many did-including according to mainstream reporting, many Congressional Democrats. How many of these high ranking Congressional Dems were into what Josh Marshall called “Thunderdomism” remains an interesting question.
Thunderdomism In the Rearview – TPM – Talking Points Memo
Aaron Sorkin was perhaps the most notorious Thunderdomer-he said Dems should nominate Mitt Romney sooner before Kamala-which means Ryan Grimm didn’t have THE WORST fantasy football Thunderdome blitz primary cum open convention scenario though he was up there.
As for Pelosi while Silver lionizes her presumed role as I argued above I think ultimately it might be Cllyburn who was the true hero. Pelosi for her part was according to reporting in favor of the fan fiction blitz primary cum open convention scenarios. In my opinion no Thunderdomer gets to claim vindication even though things have worked out pretty great. An interesting question what was Pelosi’s agenda exactly?
If you believe the reporting she was Team Fantasy Football cum Thunderdome. Team Oprah Winfrey Primary. There was the Politico piece.
Pelosi voiced support for an open nomination process if Biden drops out – POLITICO
This piece is admittedly ambiguous as it says Pelosi was in support of “an open process”-technically Kamala was too as Favreau pointed out; if she was in favor essentially what happened-where Kamala was nominated in 33 hours then ok. But there were other sources that questioned this-there was AOC’s Instagram that warned many leading Democrats actually wanted to drop Kamala and there was Roland Martin who asserted inside knowledge that Pelosi had at some point tried to push Kamala off the ticket
(535) Dems’ WILD Plan: Push Biden Out, DERAIL Kamala Harris 2028! | Roland Martin – YouTube
UPDATE: Marcy Wheeler also believes Pelosi didn’t want Kamala.
8-9-24 Emptywheel Fridays on the Nicole Sandler Show (youtube.com)
Indeed in his Thunderdomism piece, Marshall relates he was asked recently how he looks what he had written regarding Ezra Klein-who had been pushing to dump Biden pretty early.
I got an email last night from a reporter doing a piece on Ezra Klein and his prominence in Democratic politics. They asked me how I felt my own piece criticizing his Thunderdome primary proposal held up given recent events and whether I saw Klein’s arguments differently now. It was an interesting question. So I thought I’d share with you what I wrote. I’m not identifying the journalist or the publication. Because I’m not trying to get a jump on them or get in the way of their piece. I’m doing it because it’s a good and interesting question. I took some time to write out a response and I thought you might be interested in seeing it.
It’s a very good question. The campaign so far has certainly played out quite differently than I expected. After I got your note I went back and reread each piece to refresh my memory because not only has a lot changed since then but there were several iterations of that conversation between February and July. I think my piece holds up pretty well, or I am quite comfortable standing behind it, pick your metaphor. My point was never that there weren’t major challenges to Biden’s candidacy. It’s that Ezra had no plan to do anything about it beyond what seemed me to be magical thinking – convincing Jill Biden or Antia Dunn to convince Biden to step down, holding an illegitimate Thunderdome open primary/convention, tossing aside Harris, who was Biden’s only legitimate replacement etc. To me there was too much ignoring how politics actually works and a too cavalier attitude toward basic democratic legitimacy.
In my way of thinking if you have a very non-ideal path and no viable alternative, it’s better to focus on doing your best on the non-ideal path than spending your time wishing that or talking about wishing that there was a better one. From a more sympathetic perspective, this may be a basic difference in how Ezra and I view things. I’m very practical. That brass tacks practicality may represent a failure of imagination. But Ezra’s proposals struck me at the time as imaginary – and thus not viable. And that’s why I think they never happened. No open convention, or mini-primary, no tossing aside Kamala Harris.”
The facts and the possibilities all changed that night in June. ”
Let me say that Klein-and again Silver-deserve some measure of credit as he had telegraphed on Friday, July 19 that the party would likely end up coalescing behind Kamala-though perhaps no one anticipated how quickly this happened.
The question that remains is how much danger was there every of doing these very bad ideas?
Because things worked out so well because we didn’t do Thunderdome Fantasy Football-had we done iit that would have been a disaster. So anyone pushing it doesn’t get to declare vindication-or at leas far from total vindication.
For example Cenk Ugyur was urging Biden to do an LBJ failing to understand 1968 was a disaster for the party-and ironically even for those whose top or single issue was ending Vietnam.
So after Biden stepped down and the party unified so quickly, Cenk was dismayed.
No that’s not what we needed then and thank God we didn’t do that-“vetting” means ripping her apart publicly doing GOP oppo for them. Again Cenk totally misunderstands history-he thinks there’s something magical about divisive, toxic, acrimonious primaries where as it’s the complete opposite.
FN: At least Cenk, unlike Silver was finally gracious.
End FN
Because when Silver in his screed against alleged Biden revisionism piece said this it demonstrates he still doesn’t get the big lesson from all this either:
And although you could say that at least things worked out well in the end — Kamala Harris’s campaign is off to a good start, certainly — an earlier withdrawal would probably have been the percentage play. It was far from obvious that Harris would be so prepared for the moment, and even now her chances are only about 50/50. A proper primary would have provided for more optionality. With the benefit of hindsight, I think we can say that Harris would have been the favorite. But maybe someone like Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro or Wes Moore would have emerged instead and given Democrats even better odds.
Here I completely disagree. I argue things ended up optimally. IMO one of the best pieces of the number of pieces Marshall wrote on this was this one where he touched on-yet again-dominance politics. He argued that dominance politics applies not just to candidates but parties-and that if the Dems did these absurdist blitz primary open convention scenarios they’d make an absolute joke of themselves.
- On the question of Biden dropping out, I hear people say, “surely there’s another leading Democrat who is up to this challenge?” Or, “how can it be there’s no way to do this?” Or, to me personally, “why can’t you see that this is the obvious thing to do?” The best way I can answer this is to say that my assumption is that switching candidates now is the equivalent of pricing in 10 or 20 debate-night disasters. That doesn’t include how the next person does. I mean the simple act of making the switch. I’m not asking you to believe that’s true for the moment. Maybe you disagree and that’s fine. But if you’re trying to understand my reasoning, that is a significant part of what it’s based on. Needless to say, you need to be certain the current plan is hopeless and that person X is going to really knock it out of the park if you make the switch. Again, I have my own assumptions and theories that get me to this conclusion. I note it here just to give you a sense of why, while I’m not ruling anything out, I’m still very skeptical about a switch.
More Thoughts on the Debate and Its Aftermath – TPM – Talking Points Memo
Indeed, and regarding my position I’m STILL far from sure Biden’s chances were as hopeless as Silver insists they were-more on this below. But I completely agree with Marshall’s point that Fantasy Football Reality Tv Thunderdome Convention led by Oprah Winfrey would have been a disaster that could have destroyed the party for years.
FN: Even though Winfrey did have a heck of a convention speech in a situation the opposite of Thunderdome.
Of course folks like Klein, Silver, and Yglesias seemed congenitally incapable of understanding why dropping Kamala Harris would quite possibly destroy the party not just for this election but for years-putting aside if Trump won again democracy itself might well be over. He simply dismissed the idea that this would lead to great anger in the AA base-not just African Americans either speaking as a huge Kamala Harris supporter myself.
Yglesias simply refused to understand that dropping Kamala Harris would have been hugely divisive to the party.
FN: Of course I’m half AA…
Back to Josh Marshall:
Here’s one reason I think switching equals 10 to 20 debate night-level disasters. We’ve spoken a lot over the years about dominance politics. There’s Trump’s predatory version of it. And then there’s the looser version of it that governs all American politics. Probably politics in a lot of other places too. But American politics is what I know. Some people think, “Look, our policies are popular. People worry about this one guy’s age. Pull off the bandage. Swap out candidates. Sure it will be bumpy. But that question mark disappears. Democrats will get excited. It will be a new day.” Maybe. But I’m skeptical. The election is not just about two people. It’s about two teams, both strutting on the national stage saying we’re smart, we’re strong, we know how to do this, give us the keys. Switching candidates amounts to saying, “In fact we were idiots. We said it was this guy. But actually we were wrong, or maybe we lied to you. And to be clear we are formally affirming that we were wrong and we’re agreeing to talk about being wrong for the rest of the campaign. And now we’re kind of desperately scrambling to come up with something totally different. And this new person — actually they’re the one, even though we said that other guy was the one. And really they’re the one even though we don’t know them that well.” Trump’s pitch has been: “The world is on fire. This doddering old fool is MIA and can’t fix anything. I can fix it. Give me the keys.” Now he’ll say: “Look at them. They said Joe could do it. Now they admit he can’t. Now they’re fighting amongst themselves. They’re a mess. They’re liars and idiots. They can’t do anything. Gimme the keys.”
Completely agree with this. Now what Marshall was discussing here was specifically the blitz primary fantasy football open convention scenario. Silver in the quote above is making the argument that Biden should have gotten out much earlier-like maybe in late 2023 giving the Democrats a better chance. But I think Marshall’s point applies here too. I think it would still have made the Dems look like a joke-implicitly it would mean the Dems couldn’t run on Biden’s-as Silver himself agrees-successful Administration as the last 4 years, indeed, implicitly to drop your incumbent is a perceived admission you’ve failed-why vote for the Democrats as they admitted they’ve failed the last 4 years would be the GOP narrative. . And this goes back to Silver wrongly dismissing the big advantage of incumbency, Indeed, a corollary to the big advantage of incumbency is that Silver and so many others totally underestimate is the misestimation of a competitive primary. Indeed, what the amazing success of the Kamala Harris campaign demonstrates is that a competitive primary is a necessary EVIL. This evil is only necessary when a party is out of power. So for the Democrats to choose it when they didn’t have to would have been madness.
Again I still don’ t buy that Bien’s real chances on July 21 was 74% as Silver’s model claimed-and he repeatedly insisted that he thought even his own model overestimated Biden’s real chances which he argued were half even that-ie about 12.5%?
Comparatively post Nate Silver FivethirtyEight-his best friend G Elliot Morris LOL-gave Biden even on the morning of July 21 a just under 50% chance of winning. Unsurprisingly Silver has a few things about 538 none of it good-if you believe G. Elliot and Friends Biden had a 48% chance of victory while Harris now has a 58% chance. Silver no doubt will argue that is not credible.
But then how credible is his model in claiming Biden had a 26% chance-at best-while Trump now still has like a 46% chance despite Trump’s current polling deficit per Silver being 4% which is where Silver had Biden on July 21. And Bidne’s 4% deficit was a few days after the RNC. Yet he had only a 26% if not 13% chance while Trump in the same position still has a 46% chance?
UPDATE:
Now it’s even more pronounced today 8/28 as Silver now has Kamala up 3.8 in the average yet back down 52-47% in odds of winning. This result is arguably just as counterintuitive as 538’s probability of a Biden win was-Harris is up about the same as the polling average had Trump over Biden the last weekend before Joe got out.
Should this much weight be put on the basis of the one Emerson poll?
UPDATE:
To be clear what I believe is dubious is the idea that Biden’s chances were as low as Silver would have it. Indeed on the day Biden dropped out the immediate media narrative was that Biden had finally accepted he had NOT path-“the path was gone.” There was this very strange media narrative that Biden had either entirely lost his faculties because he still thought he had a path OR his close advisors were “lying to him” about his chances. This was why I viewed the #DumpBiden folks so skeptically-they were clearly willing to galslight with impunity for what they considered the greater good of taking Biden down.
The public polls absolutely still showed on Wednesday July 17 a tossup. Yes Biden had mostly trailed since last October-but not always and the deficit was never greater than the margin for error. Even after the worst coverage imaginable for three and a half weeks the polls still showed a tossup. So why was Biden either out of his mind or BEING LIED TO in believing he still had a path? The polls certainly indicated that.
Then Adam Schiff publicly called for Biden to drop out and then the bottom fell out even further as this begun yet a new feeding frenzy of Congressional Dems calling for him to drop out.
However, in the immediate aftermath of Biden dropping out the media claimed that Biden was shown private polling that proved he had NO chance. This still seemed hard to believe-what exactly is NO chance? Hadn’t Silver lampooned Sam Wang in 2016 for claiming Hillary was guaranteed to win? Yet he-and much of the media-spoke as if Trump’s win was guaranteed.
Then I saw Steve Kornacki’s appearance on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow.
He debunked the claim in Politico that “the path was gone”-by definition that will forever be unfalsifiable for all history.
Why Biden finally dropped out – POLITICO
He wasn’t convinced there was NO path-indeed according to the NBC average Biden was still down just 45-43. He did note that there were a few bad numbers recently in the swing state pollsters To be clear there was like one or two polls like this and has Kornacki said these weren’t the best polls but he agreed they were concerning. But 2 points is nothing-all Biden needed was a very normal size polling error to win-if the 4 point error was in the other direction in 2024 I strongly suspect was the case.
Indeed, even late in the game Kornacki had made the case there WAS still a path open for Biden.
Certainly-I was prepared to vote for him if he were in a coma or legally dead and I know many who agreed.
The obvious comparison was 2016:
Steve Kornacki: A party can get it wrong — and has before
“Analysis: Trump survived a rebellion that sought to dislodge him from the presidential race and then beat an unpopular opponent. Sound familiar?”
Steve Kornacki: A party can get it wrong — and has before (nbcnews.com)
Kornacki sets the stage:
“Battleground polls look bad. Forecasting models are gloomier. States assumed to be safely in their column now seem in play.”
“The realization that their presidential candidate has no realistic path to victory is sweeping the party. Panicked leaders are speaking out, more and more by the hour. Dozens are now publicly demanding their candidate exit the race. And the other party is licking its chops, thinking big not just about a win but about a landslide up and down the ballot.”
“It’s happening now with Democrats and President Joe Biden, yes, but it’s also happened before. It was eight Octobers ago when Republicans erupted in panic at the latest — and most dramatic, to date — uproar around their nominee, Donald Trump. The release of the “Access Hollywood” tape convinced scores of major Republicans that Trump’s path to victory had gone from small to nonexistent, and a frantic 36-hour push to dislodge him from the top of the ticket ensued. You know the rest.”
As for the situation in 2024-note Kornacki wrote this on the Friday before Biden ended up stepping down:
“Our latest NBC News poll, released early this week, offers a set of findings for Biden that are, by any historical standard, grim. Among registered voters, 58% disapprove his job performance, 53% have a negative personal view of him and 65% say his physical and mental health represents a “major” concern. Only 33% of Democrats say they’re satisfied with him as their party’s nominee.
“And yet, in our poll, Biden still trails Trump by just 2 points, 45%-43%. That’s the same deficit he faced in our previous poll, back in April. And it comes weeks after his horrendous debate showing and amidst increasingly harsh criticism from his own party.”
“It suggests that, as shocking as Biden’s public performance was for many of his allies, most Americans had long ago recognized and processed his decline. Earlier polling data backs that up. And many of those voters had also long ago concluded that they’d still prefer a clearly diminished Biden to another Trump term. Notably, Trump’s negative rating in our poll is 53%, the same as Biden’s. It certainly seems that Trump’s very real weaknesses are at least keeping Biden in the game.”
Again at least based on public information there’s scant evidence that Biden had NO path or that HIS PATH IS GONE.
Regarding the GOP electoral college advantage Kornacki-as both Silver and G. Elliot had noted-has actually diminished this time.
“It’s also true Trump already enjoyed a substantial Electoral College advantage in both 2016 and 2020, when he lost the popular vote by millions of votes. Based on that, the fact that Trump is ahead by any margin in national polling — something that was essentially never the case in the previous two elections — would seem to suggest that he’s not just ahead but far ahead in the battlegrounds. And, indeed, recent swing state polling has generally been more favorable to Trump than national polling.”
Yes BUT then there is the likelihood of a polling error of some kind-if 2024 doesn’t end up having some kind of polling error it will be the first in history. Just a normal polling error-say of the 4 point error we had in 2020 but going in Biden’s direction this time would have elected him.
“But there’s also reason to suspect that Trump’s Electoral College advantage will be significantly reduced, maybe even eliminated, this time around, due to the changing nature of his demographic coalition. If true, then a small Trump lead in national polling wouldn’t be as dire for Biden. And while there are some high-quality swing state surveys now in circulation, state-level data from well-established pollsters is much less abundant than at the national level.”
Again the narrowing of the EC advantage meant the polling error hardly needed to be huge-just 4 points going the other way this time as was quite reasonable. Think about it-the polls in 2020 had Biden up by close to double digits so if you had to guess which direction the error would be it was quite logical to presume in Trump’s direction. But with polls showing Biden down 1-2 points it was quite reasonable making the Simon Rosenberg point that if Biden were really losing the popular vote to Trump it would be only the second time since 1988 the GOP won it then there’s the force multiplier that Dobbs has been-but which Silver and most mainstream commentary has dismissed out of hand with a wave of the hand-supposedly this string of referendums the Dems have won on abortion has 0 correlation with a Presidential election-the people who came out especially just to vote for abortion rights will forget its even on the ballot during a Presidential. year even though very clearly the Dems are the party of Roe the GOP of Dobbs. At present there are a number of abortion referendums in places like Florida and Arizona; it will be interesting to see if this has no impact as Silver and Friends presume.
As for Biden in contradiction to the Politico piece above-‘Why Biden dropped out’ a recent NYT piece reports Biden ALWAYS thought he had a path but ultimately dropped out because of the level of division it was causing in his own party-his recognition that to pull it off he’d have to run against his own party as much as against Trump and the GOP as well as the mainstream media-to say nothing of Nate Silver a la Ryan Grim cum Ezra Klein. He’d have to run against the entire establishment. Now as I argued above this DOES have precedent-Truman 1948 a la Dewey Beats Truman. But at some point it becomes hard to continue to argue that sticking with him is the easier choice.
Inside Biden’s Decision to Drop Out of the 2024 Election – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
But to the extent this is accurate as to why he dropped out-he was NOT convinced he couldn’t win but that it was too divisive for the party-contra to Nate Silver’s insistence, Biden comes out looking better-he did in a sense fall on his own sword even though he still felt he had a chance to win.
To be sure had he stayed in we’d likely have been in the world of M.A.D.-where the Democrats may well have destroyed themselves the last month. Instead we got what Jim Clyburn called for as quoted above-by the time we got to this week in Chicago it WAS a lovefest and who could have imagined this just a month ago?
In this vein the hero is Clyburn-who was willing to accept it was time for Biden to step down but was categorical in rejecting the idea of a fantasy football Thunderdome convention. Also contrary to Silver I will argue we got the best case scenario in not just that Biden dropped out but WHEN he did.
Once again, Josh Marshall had an excellent post regarding why this was optimal. Marshall starts by noting that the convention have left the Trump campaign going off tilt by continuing to frame Trump as the incumbent:
“How Kamala Made Trump the Incumbent.”
This morning on Twitter, Tim Murtaugh, a former Trump campaign spokesman, concluded a tweet attacking Harris by writing: “Her whole vacant message sounds like it’s from a party that’s out of power. But they’re her messes.” Through the spittle and frustration you can see him making a point which quite understandably has Trump’s campaign angry and bewildered. Harris has made Trump into the incumbent with her as the challenger running on a campaign message to turn the page. Whether this is fair or true or any number of other descriptors you might come up with, there’s little doubt that it is an accurate description of the campaign we are in the midst of. The Trump campaign itself is telling us this, almost in spite of itself. And it’s worth taking a moment to consider how exactly this manages to be the case. Since Harris is not only a member of the incumbent party. She’s literally the incumbent Vice President.”
I can’t explain it entirely myself because I haven’t been able to completely understand it. But I can point to several key parts of the puzzle.
One big driver of all of this is the blitz campaign, something that never could have been planned or executed in advance. It had to be as big a surprise to the team executing it as the team getting steamrolled by it.”
This I think is a big key-it’s a big surprise to the team executing it to-certainly as a Democrat the entire specter is just as amazing to me as it is for Trump supporters which is why they’re trying to concoct all these dark conspiracies about a coup against Biden. This has worked out so optimally it HAS to have BEEN PLANNED-right? It’s a natural human tendency to think this way. Who planned this so well? Maybe no one-Clyburn maybe a little…
But this underscores another reason Silver is wrong that we should be ticked at Biden for denying us an open primary:
“It’s important to remember that barely a month ago the Trump campaign ran a four-day convention aimed at a man who has now retired from politics if not yet from elective office. The central theme of their convention was Trump’s miraculous deliverance from an attempted assassination which barely anyone can even remember. For both those reasons, Trump gained zero forward momentum from his convention and was basically idling in neutral when the Harris juggernaut hit them. The Harris campaign has moved so fast that Trump’s hasn’t been able to reposition or retool or reconceptualize the race before she’s off to the next thing. It’s an illustration of the concept of OODA loops which we’ve used before as a tool to understand campaign dynamics and which helped explain why Trump’s 2016 campaign dispatched opponents so rapidly.”
This whole blitz campaign is a huge advantage for Kamala. Indeed Silver himself admitted belatedly that maybe she really can just ride the memes to victory.
FN:
And yet there’s a part of me — just a part — that would buy a ticket to ride out the memementum. That thinks this is so crazy that it just might work. That thinks it was probably a mistake for Harris to pick Tim Walz instead of Josh Shapiro, but that not wanting to disrupt the campaign’s favorable trajectory with a higher-risk pick was a valid consideration. The case rests on three factors that are somewhat unusual to the circumstances of this campaign:
- It’s a sprint, not a marathon
From Biden’s withdrawal on July 21 to Election Day on Nov. 5 is 107 days. That’s a long time by international standards — our friends in the United Kingdom just had an entire election in six weeks — but short as compared to modern American elections, which can last for almost two years. (Barack Obama was de facto running for the 2008 election by December 2006, for instance.)
I’m very much a believer in playing the long game, and that’s one reason I hate any strategy that involves spreading bullshit and hoping you don’t get called on it. As Mike Pesca points out, for instance, partisan media critics that scolded the press for covering obviously valid questions about Biden’s age wound up embarrassing themselves — and for that matter didn’t really do any favors to Democrats, either. Biden just wasn’t going to be able to duck-and-weave his way through an entire campaign by working the refs.
But Harris? Well, Donald Trump is in the midst of a terrible news cycle. Then the DNC starts in 9 days. Parties typically get a boost in their polling following their conventions, which makes it easier to sustain the good vibes. And then it will be Labor Day, the traditional stretch run of the campaign. While there will probably be a difficult news cycle or two for Harris — that’s why the Trump campaign is asking for more debates, it wants more opportunities to trip her up — it’s possible she just speed-runs her way through 11/5.”
Kamala Harris can’t meme her way to victory. Or can she? (natesilver.net)
End FN
It’s a sprint not a marathon-exactly. This was only made possible because Biden waited so late until he stepped down-contrary to the carping of Silver and Mike Pesca. You’re welcome. Had he dropped out on July 1 rather than July 21 there might have been time for Survivor The DNC Season where even in the best scenario where Kamala emerged the nominee after a very disruptive and chaotic convention in late August the damage would have been done.
There’s much more in Marshall’s piece worth reading-like Trump himself has sort of made himself the incumbent considering he still to this day hasn’t even admitted he lost.
Harris’ campaign has essentially redefined the last eight years as the Trump Era, or perhaps the Trump-Biden Era, if you will — the first four years dominated by Trump’s malignant degeneracy and the second by the looming fear of Trump’s return.”
In truth I’d argue it’s not the Trump-Biden Era but just the Trump Era; as I argued earlier in this chapter Biden WAS the bridge he vowed but his narrative that his election would be an epiphany that would end the Trump Era has been proven wrong-during his admittedly very successful and accomplished term, Trump’s shadow loomed large.
But this underscores the sense in which switching to Kamala has been the best case scenario-both switching to her but also the timing that made this a sprint not a marathon.
The fact that she’s been able to do this while centering praise for Joe Biden’s accomplishments and even his heroism is a testament to the campaign’s ability. But there are some reasons it’s been possible. ”
What the Kamala campaign has managed to do is have the best of both worlds-of kind of doing the impossible: having their cake while eating it too enjoying most of the benefits of incumbency while swapping out for a younger, much more energetic candidate and campaign. And getting to run as the challenger. This is only possible because the party coalesced and coalesced quickly behind her which happened because of how exquisitely late Biden dropped out.
She’s running as this fascinating kind of hermaphroditic candidate-who’s the incumbent VP but has the energy and enthusiasm of the challenger a la Obama 2008. Indeed while the modelers-including Alan Litchman-don’t give her points for incumbency I’d argue as the VP of the incumbent Administration she’s a kind of quasi incumbent-while she doesn’t get the 3 points normally awarded an incumbent perhaps she should get 1.5 to 2 points as a quasi incumbent?
Pretty ironic that Trump is complaining about being treated like the incumbent seeing as he’s still never admitted he lost 2020.
UPDATE: The AP Press has noted this same hermaphrodite dynaic where she gets to have her cake and eat it to.
UPDATE: In a new article published today-8/20-Haaretz has noticed the same
Kamala Harris Fuels a Beautifully Heretical View of the World – U.S. News – Haaretz.com
FN: Kind of feel his worried friend-that’s how I was much of the year-place below in final section?
So what all this shows bottom-line is that: open primaries are necessary evils which are necessary when you’re the challenger-arguably the reason the Dems tried to “anoint” Hillary in 2016 was the intuitive understanding that primaries are necessary evils you’d obviously prefer to avoid unless you have no choice-trouble was in 2016 they had no choice.
The 2024 Dems would not have been expected to do an open primary contrary to Silver-Grim-Klein-Uygur et al-as it was the incumbent party. Dropping Biden certainly seems to have been the right move but only because they were able to do it so late in the game WITHOUT a primary and this was BECAUSE Biden waited to drop out until the last minute. Contrary to Ryan Grim, Shadi “I won’t be told to read the room” Hamid and other alarmists about the dangers of “coronating” or “anointing” Kamala Harris my argument during July was that IF you were going to drop Biden it should be Kamala and that this should basically be presented the next day as a fait accompli-ie you WANT a coronation
And this was what happened-even though presented as an “open process.” So the danger of a coronation wasn’t the problem it was the solution as is abundantly just over a month later. Basically what the Democratic leaders realized the final weekend was the solution to chaos is order. OTOH the Thunderdomers cum fantasy footballers proposed even further chaos, chaos on steroids.
UPDATE: Almost two months later some on the #DumpBiden continue to spike the ball-Terrell Starr has a good rejoinder today, 9/12:
8/25/2024
UPDATE:
On the morning of 8/28 I saw the following tweet:
I replied:
It’s one thing to claim that Silver was right-I think it’s pretty qualified as he’s wrong about some other pretty important things where had the Democrats listened to him it could have been bad if not disastrous-I tend to think disastrous.
Even more in my view is for Cenk Ugyur to claim vindication-Destiny was happy enough to let him have it as things are looking pretty great for Team Democrat at present
Destiny Runs Into Cenk At The DNC… (youtube.com)
but substantively I don’t think Cenk WAS right or even if he and Silver were right that the Democrats would be better off dropping Biden they were wrong in what they saw as the optimal Democratic course of action-a competitive primary which I will go to the grave arguing could have damaged the party for years-not just 2024 though it’s hard to imagine how grim politics would have been post a second Trump victory.
Obviously this chapter has in many ways set up Nate as a kind of foil-but I have spelled his name right AND I also bought The Edge.
I just started reading it-more precisely listening to it-yesterday driving for Spark Driver-after being deactivated at the end of March with Doordash I finally have a new delivery gig-Spark D isn’t bad though they have this fairly obnoxious policy of giving customers 24 hours to take back their tip…-and a really enjoying it.
However I do have to take issue with what he said here about applying game theory to politics-and how political folks exaggerate the importance of elections. This likely goes to the heart of why he sticks in the craw of a lot of liberals-certainly I find this pretty problematic-as it’s not just wrong but IMV dangerously wrong.
I just have to be honest-this strikes me as a very privilleged position to take-this is also why I despite Briana Joy Grey-because she as a self admittedly very privileged person encourages people NOT to vote-under the claptrap of frustrated Marxist-Leninists everywhere that it’s great if folks don’t vote to HEIGHTEN THE CONTRADICTIONS.
Silver is certainly not on the Far Left to say the least but the way I see it is anyone is personally insulated from the results of elections is a fairly privileged soul and really shouldn’t sit back and tell us why it really doesn’t matter terribly much who wins-maybe if you’re wealthy and privileged that’s true.
To be clear Silver has never said anyone shouldn’t vote but he tends to make the stakes sound pretty trivial-if he doesn’t matter much who wins elections why bother? Indeed why have democracy at all if it makes little difference?
But what about women in a post Dobbs world-where in many parts of the country a woman has less rights than her rapist? What about immigrants and their families who Trump is now threatening with mass deporations? What about the 60% supermajority of Americans-who very much unlike Nate Silver, Ryan Grim, Cenk Ugyur to say nothing of Shadmi Hamid-we’ll have much more to say about him further down-live paycheck to paycheck?
It may not matter who wins election for these elites-but it’s quite different for the little people. To be clear I’m NOT anti elite per se-I’m a liberal not a Marxist so I’m not outraged that wealthy elite people exist per se.
FN: As Gary Wills says no society you can ever imagine is going to not have elites-and the mad desire to try has created great harm and destruction-major lesson of the 20th century.
“Conscience of a Conservative”-link.
As a liberal I don’t hate you if you’re rich-but if you are apocalyptic at very modest rises in your tax rate I kind of do just a little bit. And if you smugly dismiss elections as it doesn’t effect YOU I hate you even more.
FN: Makes you think of FDR: the forces of monopoly and capital are united against me in their hatred and I welcome their hatred.
THIS goes to the heart of that NR article we cited above about Nate Silver’s opposing politics “beyond a mute approval of the status quo.”
The Fall of Nate Silver | The New Republic
This is why incidentally I like YouTube streams like Vaush, Destiny, and Keffals-though I guess she’s gone alas, because of all that toxcity. They are rich and privileged but they don’t say elections don’t matter or of low consquence. Even if they aren’t in the working class or struggling working class they’re in solidarity with us.
End of UPDATE
UPDATE 2.0:
There Nate Silver goes again screenshot?
Here much as I hate to give him credit Hasan is right.
(554) Zuckerberg Reveal The Reason Covide Content Censorship | Hasanabi reacts – YouTube
I mean in what way would the world be a better place if there had been MORE covid disinformation? Again these are the kind of elites it’s tough not to despite-“more covid disinformation please!”
Zuckerberg also claimed there was some EVIL earth shattering repression of the Hunter Biden laptop stuff which despite all the assumptions made by the GOP co-conspirators-like Zuckerberg? is he now officially joining Elon Musk? Silver himself admits Silicon Valley has been moving Right a la “The River”-has never been proven NOT to have come from Russian disinfo AND BTW has still never even been proven to be Hunter Biden’s laptops-but details.
FN: You can quibble wether Zuckerberg is “Republican leaning” or not”-based on Silver’s own The River narrative it’s plausible. There is a piece out that suggests what’s motivating Zuckerberg here is more pragmatic-ie naked self interest-he’s giving the GOP a bone especially with a case on Meta soon going before the Republican Supreme Court-the Bush v. Gore Court, the Dobbs Court, the Trump Court any of these are accurate and more.
UPDATE:
The latest from Nate Silver’s river:
What will be unburdened by what has been on X: “The latest from @NateSilver538 ‘s River” / X
UPDATE: Of course Elon remains wholly lacking in irony
Elon Musk on X: “Sounds like a First Amendment violation” / X
I mean he should know.
Meanwhile you have conservatives trying to get liberals fired from their jobs if they said something they found offensive after Trump got shot grazed by shrapenl?
I mean Nate believes this-I guess. As we saw in his manifesto on the Indigo Blob he believed at the time at least that Elon Musk buying Twitter would be a BOON the world.
Speaking of the Indigo Blob theory this is just one of many examples you can point to that completely undermine it to the point it doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Specifically on the alleged outrage of Facebook not putting out enough Right wing covid disinfo Elon Musk has been the opposite of a free speech absolutist-he claims to be outraged over covid disinfo not seeing the light of day yet:
Here Musk goes again:
To be sure my guess is he’s probably both Republican leaning AND a political coward.
Zuckerberg’s new Washington game – POLITICO
UPDATE: Ok it may just be total abject fear. Seeing the heavy handed way Trump is trying to intimidate Zuckerberg does Silver want to stand by the idea of just taking Zuckberg’s statement this week completely at face value?
End FN
Let the people eat covid disinfo-who cares about the 60% supermajority of Americans living paycheck to paycheck-the real crime is that some wealthy Republican leaning elites are wailing ‘Muh covid dsinfo.”
Even Silver’s assertion that this has NOT been all warmed over already doesn’t pass the laugh test-uh Matt Taibbi anyone? What fails the laugh test even more spectacularly is Silver’s gripe that “the errors run all in one direction”-really? LOL
The irony is that these (self)righteous and fastidious opponents of “government censorship” and “cancel culture” are fine with the level of censorship that Elon Musk engages in regularly-far more heavy handedly than ANYTHING in Taibbi’s Twitter Files-to call those files a joke is too mild a description.
Have you ever seen Nate Silver put up caustic tweets about all the big liberal accounts getting muted-I mentioned this above it happens all the time-to say nothing of literally CANCELLED-much more heavy handed than anything anyone has accused Joe Biden of.
FN: At least Silver hasn’t gone as far as Glenn Greenwald openly cheering liberals being deplatformed -‘You got what you deserve!’ though you suspect if he and Greenwald ever met over drinks Nate would probably give him a high five.
UPDATE: Ok in fairness this isn’t really an accurate criticism of Nate:
The 70% prediction HAS aged well. He DID say Kamala would be an upgrade over Biden-though I still think he was ovverly pessimistic on Biden, In fairness no one anticipated she’d be this good-I’m the biggest Kamala stan around at least among male! and I never bought she’s a “bad candidate” but was myself fairly bearish on her chances as the media narrative around here had been so negative-basically since the second debate back in 2019. Her coverage had been positively Hillary Clinton like-what matters in politics often, alas, is not wether someone IS a bad candidate-after all it’s a matter of opinion by definition-but if the MEDIA has decided you are. Again 70% was actually a very good prediction-I admit as a liberal Hillary supporter I hadn’t wanted to hear it but he was right-he had made the point repeatedly that Clinton was very likely to win the popular vote-like Obama she had about a 90% chance according to his model but her chances for the electoral college were the worry.
He DID however prefer an open primary and this is where he was dead wrong. It’s also true that he’s just this really insufferable dude-who since 2018 or so has this big chip on his shoulder, perhaps for some good or at least undderstandable reasons like people claiming he gave a bad 2016 general election prediction-his primary WAS a dumpster fire as he acknowledges.
But it’s true that he’s a hard guy to root for-interestingly he discusses unlikable people in poker the crowd roots against. On Twitter Nate has been that guy the last few years.
Screenshot?
That about says it.
How much of this below is worth keeping-or already was used above?
Think this is above
Is this used above? It belongs in the both ways thing-didn’t I quote Marshall from this piece?
She’s kind of the best of both worlds
How Kamala Made Trump the Incumbent – TPM – Talking Points Memo
Maybe up in the discussion of what happened that last weekend
IF this is true it’d suggest Biden’s move was seismic-and it would correlate with AOC’s IG video and Roland Martin’s argument before Biden dropped out that Pelosi had asked Biden to drop Kamala Harris
Not all but many did-including according to mainstream reporting, many Congressional Democrats. How many of these high ranking Congressional Dems were into what Josh Marshall called “Thunderdomism” remains an interesting question.
.”
Part 4 . Is Kamala more amazing, awesome, based, or all of the above?
VP Debate: Maybe subsume 5 into 4?
UPDATE: Kamala Harris is reported to be planning to announce her VP pick by Tuesday 8/6. As is typical Nate Silver is drawing a hard line in the sand going all in for Shapiro with the hard sell. This is typical of him-he never expresses the slightest bit of uncertainty-he makes his pick and then dismisses anyone who disagrees as “the dumbest of deadenders”, “the midwit idea of all time” wholly intellectually indefensible, an idea with little to no justification for it for anyone who knows what they’re talking about.
On Twitter-or X as he and Elon Musk call it-Nate tweeted out this:
FN:
So right away we see a similar modus operandi for him on a few different levels. First just like with Biden he treats the poll numbers of PA voters as entirely dispositively.
Just in case there was any ambiguity, Nate followed up with a few more tweets:
FN:
End FN
I responded with a snarky tweet to the effect of why should I read it as I know what it’s going to say-Shapiro is the best, indeed, the only pick-other than maybe Gretchen Whitmer-as he makes sense in swing state terms.
But, of course, after sending Silver this tweet that presumably he didn’t read, I immediately clicked on the link to read his piece.
Again the typical Nate Silver patented hard sell-prove you’re not an idiot and accept my position.
Above we saw that he referenced PA polls that show Shapiro has a high favorability rating-which he takes to be pretty much dispositive-as opposed to “weird dudes on Twitter” at which my ears begin burning as I felt seen. More on what this snarky reference to “weird dudes on Twitter” is about as it has some relation to the candidate most widely held up as an alternative to Shapiro the last few days.
In the piece he starts with a question from one of his readers:
OK, now onto the question. Carlos Zevallos asks:
Since you just wrote about asking non model questions, but allowed other political questions, I would love to get your view on the dem veepstakes: specifically, if you were a Harris advisor, who would you suggest she pick and why? And also, do you think Shapiro’s advantage for possibly getting her over the top in PA outweighs the critiques some progressives are making of his pro Israel stance, to the point of say, possibly depressing pro Palestinian turnout in Detroit or Minneapolis? I know vp nominees don’t matter too much, but in such a close election?
I’d tell her to pick Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania.”
When I read Carlos’ question it was clear to me this was pretty much right down the plate for Nate as it focuses the main substantive reason not to choose Shapiro as depressing the anti Zionists of the Far Left as if this is the ONLY or main reason when it’s actually not. As Silver already wrote an article a few months ago arguing that the voters likely to not vote for Biden-and now Kamala-based on Biden being too supportive of Israel was likely small as a percentage of the electorate.
Indeed, interestingly, Christopher Bouzy with whom Nate Silver butted heads with during the whole #DumpBiden thing actually had made this same argument himself back in March-that Israel-Gaza was unlikely to greatly effect the election.
FWIW I do actually agree with this take-to be sure at one point I was worried about the Gaza Effect; then I saw the freakout over Biden is 81 after The Debate and realized that was NOT the big landmine facing the Democrats-among other effects The Debate completely sidelined Gaza as a salient election issue.
However, there are other potential headwinds with Shapiro-while him being too Pro Israel or too anti Pro Palestinian protester might by itself not be such a big problem taken together with some of these other issues you can at least imagine Shapiro giving the campaign some problems-it’s plausible he could at least give them a few.
Anyway, back to Silver-who doesn’t even look or consider these other headwinds assuming he’s even aware of them and apparently, he’s not. As usual the reasons to agree with Nate are obvious:
“The reasons to pick Shapiro are obvious.”
They always are.
There’s a certain species of political writer — defining characteristics include overestimating the importance of “vibes” and underestimating the importance of the median voter theorem — that George Orwell may have had in mind with his aphorism “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” David Roberts for instance:
Why Shapiro? What’s the positive case? Well, Shapiro is the extremely popular governor of what is by far the most important swing state. He’s highly charismatic and he’s qualified. He seems to want the job. This is about as obvious as things get in politics. You need a good reason to not pick Shapiro — and as I’ll cover here, the arguments against Shapiro are pretty bad.
Uh huh. “Vibes” are not a thing worth taking seriously. As per Nate the case for Shapiro is so obvious, he has no patience for Roberts in simply asking straightforwardly: what is the case for Shapiro? That he doesn’t know that it’s not self evident and obvious leaves Nate to not hold David Roberts in very high esteem:
More generally, he employs essentially the same argument he used against what he called the Biden DeadEnders-dismiss them as basically having few if any good arguments in their favor. The question is not why you should pick Shapiro but how can you NOT?!
In this same vein he dismisses the arguments for not doing so as pretty bad.
How bad?
Heck, you could argue that Shapiro was the best pick even in the absence of the Pennsylvania factor. Say he was the extremely popular governor and two-term former attorney general of New Jersey instead — not deep blue, exactly, but also not a swing state. He still laps the rest of the white dudes Harris is considering in telegenic political talent, he’s in prime VP age (51) and he has executive experience. He’d certainly be on Harris’s short list and he might be #1.”
Pennsylvania is one hell of a tiebreaker, though. It has a 35 percent chance of being the tipping-point state, the state that’s decisive in a close election, much higher than any other.
He certainly has an impressive resume though so do the other candidates-indeed they also have executive experience.
This potential for PA to be the tipping point state is not trivial to say the least-it certainly COULD decide the election as he develops in more detail. He argues in about 10% of electoral universes choosing Shapiro could be decisive.
And on the other hand, there are only so many things that are within a campaign’s control. Maybe the race won’t wind up being that close. Maybe there’s another bout of inflation or Trump way overperforms his polls again. Or maybe her current momentum continues and Harris coasts to a surprisingly easy victory. Probably in 90 percent of universes, campaign strategy within reasonable bounds isn’t decisive. But the VP pick is a pretty big lever the 10 percent of the time that it does matter. What we can definitely say is that if that 4 percent chance comes up, Democrats are going to be deeply regretful that they didn’t pick Shapiro.”
Ok with such good reasons to pick Shapiro what are the reasons not to? Shockingly Silver doesn’t think any of the reasons not to pick Shapiro are remotely compelling.
“The reasons not to pick Shapiro are poor.”
So what are those reasons?
There are three major strains of objections that you’ll hear to Shapiro, and they commingle in somewhat uncomfortable ways. First, that he’s too moderate for the party base, particularly on the war in Gaza and school vouchers; second, that a certain segment of the left would object to the pick, undermining party “unity”; and third, that he’s Jewish (proudly and observantly so). This latter factor gets uncomfortable and sometimes seems as though it verges on concern trolling: if people express concern that other voters won’t vote for a Jewish candidate, I sometimes wonder if they’d vote for one themselves.”
Ok so not only is he focusing solely on the Israel-Gaza issue but he further over determines the question by suggesting that anti Semitism is driving the objections to Shapiro-though, again, he focuses only one objection-that by itself, as noted above, isn’t enough to make a compelling argument against Shapiro.
Anyway Nate first knocks down a total strawman-as if Shapiro being Jewish is really widely held objection to picking him. After all, her own husband is Jewish so anyone greatly motivated by anti Semitic animus probably isn’t voting for her anyway-such a person is also likely a racist, indeed Silver himself pointed out it’s unlikely a virulent anti Semite is voting for the first Black and Asian and first female Presidential candidate.
So let’s dispense with this issue first. Are there people out there who wouldn’t vote for a Jewish vice president? Yes. Next question: are there people out there who wouldn’t vote for a Jewish vice president, but would vote for a Black woman for president who has a Jewish husband? Yes, there are probably some — it’s a big country with many different flavors of racism and anti-Semitism — but not many. ”
Total strawman. Note that the former female employee we quoted from above was also accused of anti Semitism for criticizing Silver.
But more importantly, we have data that whatever positive or negative effects that Shapiro’s Jewishness has on voter perceptions of him, they net out in a way that is unambiguously popular: Shapiro won 57 percent of the vote as he was elected to the governorship in 2022, winning the race by 15 points. So while I could riff for another paragraph or two about how the identity politics of the VP pick become creepy — why only white guys? — let’s move on.
Shapiro’s moderation is an electoral asset, not a liability. The progressive left vastly overestimates how much of the public is with them in their views on Gaza (particularly younger voters, most of whom are moderates). It’s not so much that the public is rabidly pro-Netanyahu so much as that most people don’t treat the issue as a priority. As best as I can tell, Biden was losing somewhere between 0.5 percent and 0.8 percent of the electorate from people who thought he was too pro-Israel — maybe some subfraction of that winds up back in the Democratic column for Harris-Tim Walz but not for Harris-Shapiro, I guess, but it’s small. Most of these guys are bluffing. The more partisan actors on the left like Roberts will grumble on Twitter and then fall in line. And the more anti-establishment left are not the most reliable coalition partners anyway, always looking for a pretext to flex away from the pragmatic moderate side of the Democratic Party.”
What you think of this depends to a large extent what how you define “moderate”-I’d argue that the Dem base is not Far Left progressive but Center Left progressive-but again Shapiro has other headwinds beyond Israel-Gaza that Silver apparently is unaware of.
Indeed, while the Israel-Gaza stuff by itself probably won’t be too hard to navigate, what does worry me a little more is the story of a Josh Shapiro staffer.
While Silver may dismiss “vibes” or “guys into vibes” the fact is until now the vibes with the Kamala Harris campaign have been great and obviously, we don’t want to see anything undermine it.
FN: It’s kind of weird-much more on weird below, another liberal Dem meme Nate doesn’t like, Nate basically hates fun at least when liberals have fun as he’s in a crusade against what he falsely believes is media liberal hegemony-for Silver to dismiss “vibes” as that’s what campaigns and candidates are largely about-the issue with the Biden campaign was vibes OBVIOUSLY speaking even as someone who argued vociferously for staying with Biden the vibes have improved dramatically since Kamala replaced him.
And while the Israel-Gaza by itself likely won’t do that any thing with the slightest whiff of a sexual harassment cum #MeToo scandal could. Not necessarily, to be sure, the Tara Reid thing never got legs-I’d argue because there was no there there. And, of course, there may be no there there in this scandal either. But it’s obvious at this point the GOP is desperate.
GOP senators say Trump caught ‘off guard’ by Harris’s strength (msn.com)
This desperation is underscored by the attempt over the weekend to make a scandal out of Kamala Harris’ HUSBAND having an affair in HIS FIRST MARRIAGE.
This from a party who’s Presidential nominee had an affair with a porn star-of somewhat dubious consensuality-while his wife was pregnant with his son and this is one of the more mild credible allegations against Trump aka Grab em by the p*ssy of sexual harassment and assault. But of course if the story around Shapiro’s staffer gets traction the mainstream media-who contrary to Silver’s bad narrative-is NOT liberal and is fine electing Trump again through their bad coverage-won’t notice any distinctions.
At this point there may be nothing to the story about the Shapiro aide. But again the Republican party is desperate-they know they’re in big trouble. Trump never had a plan B for if Biden stepped down and he and his party have failed to land any punches against Kamala yet-indeed Trump has more than once missed completely and punched himself in the face like last week at the meeting with the Black journalists.
Whatever there is to the Shapiro aide story it has to have more to it than Kamala’s husband in his first marriage-where his first wife strongly supports Kamala Harris and has put out a supportive statement for her ex husband.
Again, if Shapiro is the nominee-and again to be clear I have no metaphysical opposition to him being the nominee; my position here is more Devil’s Advocate not the mirror image of Silver’s position where anyone arguing for anyone other than Shapiro is basically a moron-he does suggest he’d also be open to Gretchen Whitmer-and this story DOES get traction you can imagine the trajectory of the questions.
Shapiro will likely claim he knew nothing about it and as soon as he learned about this misconduct he showed his staffer the door as there’s no place for that kind of misconduct in his campaign. Assuming that story checks out it still won’t be over. The next question will be if he didn’t know why didn’t he know? Shouldn’t he have known? Did he really not know? Is his level of inattention really what you want in an executive indeed the person just a heart beat from the Presidency?
And beyond how this happened on his watch and he didn’t know, and why he didn’t know, why did it happen? What was it about Shapiro’s office, his character that allowed this to happen in his office? Did he himself in some way contribute or allow a culture like this to happen? Speaking of which have there been other cases of staffer misconduct? Is there toxic misogyny in his office? Maybe next GOP operatives would do a fishing expedition of Shapiro himself-MAYBE he himself has some skeletons in HIS closet-maybe pay some troopers like with Bill Clinton in Little Rock in early 1990s…
Again this is hypothetical it may well not gain much or any traction-it is true that to an extent stories get a lot of play depending in the current mood or vibes of the media environment. As we noted above, Biden even in 2020 hardly set the world on fire as a candidate but nobody really cared. Trump tried to make an issue of Biden “running a campaign from his basement” but nobody cared and it got no traction. In 2024 suddenly everyone cared that Biden wasn’t this enthusiastic, dynamic campaigner.
FN: The idea of Biden also resigning was never a good one-on this at least, I disagreed with Allan Litchman-certainly not from the campaign perspective; that Harris is currently only the candidate for President not also the President is a big advantage for her-it enables her to run an energetic, dynamic campaign. While as I’ve detailed-in great detail lol-the virtues of incumbency it is true that a structural disadvantage of running as an incumbent is you DO HAVE the job of BEING PRESIDENT as opposed to only just running for it.
So the Shapiro staffer story may not get much traction. But it’s certainly at least possible. Again, I’m NOT opposed to Shapiro if that’s what Kamala decides so long as they catch this story as part of the search and deeply vet it.
Fillipovic is right that it’s quite possible at least ONE of these guys have such a skeleton and Shapiro’s staffer story COULD be that skeleton.
Beyond that the UAW who was full throatedly supportive of Biden thanks to his very strong union record doesn’t love Shapiro-or Mark Kelly for that matter. Their preferred choices are: Tim Walz and Andy Beshear.
UPDATE: There is simply more stuff out there than other candidiates perhaps as he’s the favorite. But another story about a mysterious crime while he was prosecutor with dead body etd
Find link
UAW president says Beshear, Walz are union’s “top two” VP picks for Harris (msn.com)
Speaking of Walz guess it’s time to lay my own cards on the table-I’ve been trying to focus on Silver’s position before talking about my own. Again the key is mine is NOT the mirror opposite of his. His position is that if you don’t agree with him it’s OBVIOUSLY Shapiro you’re a moron. Mine is his position that Shapiro is self evidently the best choice MAY be right-as for most of the last few weeks it was mine too.
And again I’m fine with whomever she chooses. Totally disagree with the Left’s tendency to make everything a litmus test-it HAS TO BE A it BETTER NOT BE B. That’s not how you build political alliances and movements.
Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆🌴🥥🇺🇸 on X: “My favorite VP choice will be the one Kamala Harris picks.” / X
For it’s not so much that I decided Shapiro is not a good pick but that I came to think that Tim Walz is an interesting dark horse alternative. Part of it was SOME concern over the Shapiro staffer story though I do think it’s quite possible the campaign could navigate it. But again-why would you want to go through that if you don’t have to?
The vibe with the Kamala campaign has been so amazingly awesome, so based, why would you want to mess it up if you don’t have to? Around about Wednesday-Thursday-7/31-8/1-I begin to think that maybe this momentum with Kamala will continue-this is the advantage with this race now being a sprint not a marathon, further underscoring my argument that Biden got out at the optimal moment. Seeing as there’s only like 93 days left until the election it’s certainly POSSIBLE this level of energy and enthusiasm could be maintained all the way to November 6. In other words MAYBE Kamala doesn’t need Shapiro to win PA.
Just because Nate Silver loves G. Elliot Morris so much-LOL-let me link to 538’s current polling averages:
In favor again of Silver the numbers so far seem to show PA a little less pro Kamala than Wisconsin and Michigan. But even so she has now gone ahead in the PA average. And the momentum is clearly in her favor-yes it COULD stop-but my sense is it will continue FWIW.
UPDATE: More confirmation for my bias…
In other words I find this scenario Silver listed above most likely:
“Or maybe her current momentum continues and Harris coasts to a surprisingly easy victory.”
I’m not sure yet HOW easy but suspect she’s going to get all three Rustbelt states and the suspense will end up being which of Sunbelt states does she garner-Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina-and at this point I suspect she’ll get at least a few of them.
If this is true then maybe she doesn’t have to pick based on swing state considerations maybe she can go to who matches her great whimsy vibes.
And it just seemed to me Tim Walz is the candidate who most matches this moment, this wonderful vibe. Indeed, just how much he seems to match this moment is when you remember that he started this The GOP is Weird meme-that, of course, Nate Silver hates as he hates when liberals have fun!
Within a few days all of us Twitter liberals-who Silver says don’t matter unlike his friends who think Trump is fine-nothing dangerous or abnormal about at all who he thinks the campaign should cater to-were going viral with the observation that Trump and Vance are JUST WEIRD. And added bonus is he appears to be entirely scandal free-but of course the Kamala team will vet to confirm this.
Again this just makes him seem a perfect choice in this moment:
“Democrat Who Started Trump ‘Weird’ Comment a ‘Great’ VP Option: Mary Trump”
“I think he would be great,” she said during her daily livestream. “He’s got great presence. He tells it like it is and he also makes it clear, to the extent that it wasn’t clear, that the last thing in the world Donald Trump needed was a vice presidential candidate on his ticket who’s weirder than he is. How is that even possible, right?”
In any case on Friday 8/2 I decided to take a page from Nate Silver’s book and put my money where my mouth is-he says he’d bet that Biden would step out-and spent a few dollars on Walz. Of course unlike Silver’s bet mine was with the underdog so there’s a great risk to reward ratio-I bought the position based on 1 in 5 odds, ie if Walz IS the nominee that’s a 500% gain. At such a cheap price my main regret is I didn’t have more to put on it-unfortunately I’m a recently deactivated Doordash driver but I digress.
After doing this what did worry me a little was when I saw a number of Youtubers on the #OnlineLeft who support Walz. Which IS good on its face. I mean you can knock me over with a feather that suddenly much of the online Left is #CoconutPilled
WE SERVE THE COCONUT ARMY. PREPARE TO BE UNBURDENED (youtube.com)
Even Hasan Piker for now at least is somewhat supportive. However I do take Silver’s point that all these leftists behind Walz could be a counter-indicator
HOWEVER, it’s not so simple as the Center-n the Democratic party more the Center Left-wants Shapiro and the Left wants Walz-indeed I myself am Center Left not Left.
For one thing, quite surprisingly two members in good standing of the online Left support Shapiro-Ryan Grim and Cenk Uygur which I’ll admit thew me for a loop. Cenk wrote a Newsweek piece endorsing Shapiro-this despite the hyperbolic attacks Shapiro made against the pro Palestinian protesters
Ryan Grim also tweeted in favor of Shapiro:
On the other hand it’s not just leftists who are high on Walz-Bernie likes him a lot but so does Nancy Pelosi.
Bernie Sanders and labor leaders set their sights on Gov. Tim Walz for Harris’ VP (msn.com)
As Vice President Harris weighs her choice for running mate, House Democrats are increasingly advocating for a former colleague: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
First elected to Congress in 2006, Walz served in the House for 12 years and rose to become the top Democrat on the powerful Veterans Affairs Committee before heading home in 2019 to lead the North Star State.”
The amiable Walz was not only popular on Capitol Hill, but he also had the distinction of being the highest-ranking enlisted soldier in the history of Congress — a status that endeared him to Pentagon supporters in both parties.
That unique resume — combined with his Midwestern roots, liberal policy record and fierce defense of the Biden administration on the campaign trail this year — have made him a top prospect among a growing list of Democrats on Capitol Hill, who say he’d be a strong asset to the Democratic ticket as Harris vies to keep former President Trump from a second term in the White House.
“My sentimental favorite is Tim Walz,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (Mass.), the top Democrat on the powerful Rules Committee. “He was a great member of Congress. The people I know in Minnesota tell me he’s a great governor. … But more importantly, he’s a good guy. He’s down to earth, he’s the real deal, there’s nothing phony about him, and he calls ‘em as he sees ‘em, and he tells it like it is, and I appreciate the candor.”
House progressives are also on board:
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also singled out Walz as a particularly appealing vice presidential pick. She pointed to Walz’s track record backing labor unions and working families as a key reason for her support.
“I want somebody who’s really strongly pro-labor and understands labor, because this is a big part of the working-class agenda and making sure that we win working-class votes,” Jayapal said.
Even former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) appears to be leaning in Walz’s favor. A source familiar with the California Democrat’s thinking told The Hill she “is always especially fond of former House colleagues” when asked about Harris’s running mate, a nod to Walz.
Yet another argument for Tim Walz: he’d likely be a big vote getter among rural Whites. There are a lot of arguments for Walz. Where Kamala Harris’s ‘White-Boy Summer’ goes from here (msn.com)
Indeed, as Will Stancil says, Walz IS the unity pick.
So again he seems like the optimal pick for this moment and that I can make a few dollars is a bonus but no matter what this is NOT a litmus test and if she chooses Shapiro or anyone else I’m still all in.
Indeed Silver MAY be right here in terms of how the Kamala team is looking at this:
Josh Shapiro is the bold, confident choice. It’s the choice that says you want to win and will give no quarter to bad-faith actors who would stand in your way. It’s the choice that says you understand the electoral math. But it’s also a choice that says you aren’t worried about being upstaged by a guy who could clearly be some sort of generational political talent. If Shapiro is the pick, I expect we’ll see a lot of him, particularly as Democrats think that it’s smart tactics to press Shapiro’s charisma advantage against Vance. It’s clearly the highest upside play, and the Harris campaign has been adroit enough so far — and has such overwhelming support from most of the Democratic Party — that it can probably manage the downsides. So Harris should go all-in.”
Maybe though I find his accusation that anyone either in any way questioning picking Shapiro OR simply-as I am-looking to make a good case for an alternative is “bad faith”-I find his allegation of bad faith as bad faith. And I do understand the electoral math just that another kind of bold could be to say you don’t need to choose the conventional pick for swing states as you’re going to win them anyway and go for the guy who meets the moment of your campaign. That could also be going all in in a different way.
UPDATE: Ok last thing on Walz we’ll see soon presumably -tomorrow at latest-but:
Tim Walz Makes Sudden Schedule Change Amid VP Buzz (msn.com)
Always danger of confirmation bias but…
All by way of saying for me it’s really NOT anti Shaprio it’s totally pro Walz in this case with the icing on the cake being the market price was so good.
(4) Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆🌴🥥🇺🇸 on X: “My favorite VP choice will be the one Kamala Harris picks.” / X
UPDATE: Ok I lied man it’s so close. I was determined to at least finish this part of this chapter before decision time and met THAT deadline at least LOL
End UPDATE
UPDATE 2.0: 8/6 Oh my God I feel sort of like the dog who caught the car-it actually happened.. I love this pick for her on many levels not the least of which she defied not just the conventional wisdom but Nate Silver-the ultimate gatekeeper of the CW. Last night the markets suddenly swung sharply to Walz and Silver finally just gave up in trying to explain it-note that on principle he sees the market predictions as more important than the predictions of analysts-but as it started contradicting his prediction he threw up his hands.
Meanwhile there’s already early evidence confirming my assertion above that Walz IS the unity candidate
(1) emptywheel (Midwest) on X: “The pick of both Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin.” / X
FN: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on X: “Dems in disconcerting levels of array” / X
This piece undermines the fallacy that the Walz was solely a choice of the Left-I see even some online leftists are conceiving this as a victory of the Left over “neoliberals” or the evil “New Democrats” actually both the progressive and New Democrat caucuses preferred Walz.
Why Pelosi and other House Dems were privately pushing Walz (msn.com)
Chris Cillizza another charter member of the smart money got it wrong.
Opinion | Tim Walz offers a lot to the Democratic ticket – The Washington Post
FN: Interestingly after she picked Walz a piece at the-post Nate Silver-538 pointed out later, most candidates DON’T choose a swing state candidate
End FN
FN:
rolandsmartin on X: “100% correct!” / X
Nate responds:
Tim Walz is a Minnesota Nice choice – by Nate Silver
UPDATE: Nate does it again
Not clear if this belongs here or above
Finally-vibes over electoral math. Above we saw Nate dividing the world into vibes guys and electoral math guys-so score one for vibes guys.
As Vaush said on his stream tonight it’s as if Walz was hatched in a lab he’s such a great candidate-or maybe he’s a super soldier
FN: On every level-while JD Vance does his theater criticism about “cat ladies” for women who don’t have kids-though Kamala has kids but in Vance’s reactionary mind stepchildren don’t count-Walz and his wife had tried to have children for eight years then finally needed to do IVD.
. At the end of the day it became clear to me that Walz was the right choice as once again he matched the vibes of Kamala’s happy warrior campaign. Her campaign has all the memes-and he both midwifed the weird meme-more on this below-AND the name Walz itself has become a meme.
UPDATE: Wow
Not sure where some of the below belongs-placement questions
Above we’d asked the question: what happened to Nate Silver-assuming he wasn’t always like this. Just the other day he was at it again-taking shots at G. Elliot Morris.
You have to wonder if this is classic projection-‘he who smelt it…’ to accuse 538 of such a thing makes you question the motives of not them but Silver himself There’s no evidence this idea of using data to help or not help one campaign or another has ever occurred to 538 but clearly it has occurred to Nate Silver. Perhaps he himself has done such things in the past to make his own categorical declarations and prognostications look better?
Question where this update belongs
UPDATE: Thinking also of Nate’s new book that contrasts the good guys in Crypto and Poker with the Center Left liberals who don’t get it
He may claim that he doesn’t want Trump to win but his material interests might want Trump-as Trump is definitely on the side of the crypto Bros.
How Election 2024 Has Pit Hollywood Against Silicon Valley (hollywoodreporter.com)
Does this belong here or in Nate Silver wars’ section
Nate Silver is certainly far from always right in his patented vehement declarations:
Nate Silver bad takes
Also bet on Ron Desantis
Eric Grant on X: “@NateSilver538 Have you disclosed yet that you’re on the Trump/Vance payroll?” / X
Not sure where this point about Biden belongs yet but
(2) Darryn M. Briggs on X: “He… doesn’t have to do this, you know? This dude is just different.” / X
Maybe in the Biden part in the Nate Silver section? Or maybe this section works?
End UPDATE
Section weird
Speaking of Tim Walz-the whole weird thing. Again Nate doesn’t like it as he’s opposed to liberal fun and serendipity as he wrongly thinks liberals have this huge media hegemony.
But the whole “Republicans are weird” is a brilliant political strategy-and meme which is party of what’s so great about it-it’s both a meme and a strategy-memes are also great for strategy. Unlike Nate who just doesn’t get it on fun-he’s not a fan-much of the media seems to like it. But nevertheless they are framing it wrongly.
They seem to like “weird” in the sense that they counterpoise it to calling Trump a threat to democracy-in this the media and Silver are sympatico as he also dislikes calling Trump a threat to democracy-as we saw above he has a lot of older friends according to himself that think Trump is not remotely a threat to democracy or anything like that but are open to voting for either him or Harris-but unlike them he also hates “weird” but the Beltway journos seem to like it as they think it’s the end of calling Trump a threat to democracy-which seems to offend their basic sensibility-American exceptionalism etc.
In this vein Noah Rosenblum declared:
So here Rosenblum begs the question leading one to expect he’s going to answer it in the follow-up tweets of his thread but you’d be wrong,, he never does leaving the question hanging
. Now one thing that is very common in the media is claiming to be making a totally positive point but leaving hints that in reality there is a normative point they’re really concerned with. Here the positive point would seem to be that accusing Trump of being a threat to democracy is bad politics. THIS is a very widely asserted claim-again Silver himself clearly believes this or at least wants to.
Yet it’s hard not to suspect there’s also a normative point buried in here.
Rosenblum loves them you see he just doesn’t think they say anything that matters or is worth listening to.
I mean by this premise you can’t make ANY historical analogy as by definition ANY time or place is not the same as the current time and place you’re in, or for that matter any other time or place-it’s always distinct. By definition we can’t be France if we live in the US and can’t be 1933 if this is 2024. But if you can’t compare anything in history to anything else you’ve pretty much written history off per se, whereas by definition learning is about drawing patterns-it’s kind of a central genius of human cognition as such. How do you say “never again” if you eschew historical analogy in principle?
Analogies are not asserting different events are the same event-obviously-but that there are nevertheless a number of interesting correlations. But this seems to me to be a common tic of mainstream pundits like Rosenbum-they have no use for history. Is the claim that it’s impossible for a democracy to be imperiled? That what happened in Germany can NEVER happen here? Quite possibly that is what Rosenbaum thinks-as that’s the ideology of American Exceptionalism-it can’t happen here.
FN: You see that also in things like the more scientific fields like Neoclassical economics where it’s treated as self evidently irrelevant “What Keynes really meant”-who cares? Just like the history of economic thought allegedly doesn’t matter-it’s not just the economics field but also in American philosophy: who cares about the history of philosophical thought, you know, we’re PRAGMATISTS a la Rorty. I guess in a sense perhaps we’re talking about a distinctly American attitudes of our intellectual elites? That nothing matters beyond what you happened to eat for breakfast this morning in terms of history? I still remember how by February-March of 2001, liberals were being lectured for STILL talking about Bush v. Gore-and the trivial fact that Bush stole the election; ok but it was a long time ago, three whole months. Get over it.
End FN
So on the politics of “Weird” it’s a mixed picture-much of the media seems to approve but only to the extent that they misconstrue it. In a recent interview with Greg Sargent, Jill Abramson discussed why she thought calling Trump “weird” is a great strategy but then contrasted it to calling him a threat to democracy-again this has been a very widely held media narrative. She argued that “Weird” is a major improvement as ‘What does a threat to democracy even mean?’
DailyBlast link
I have to admit I find her confusion on this point confusing.
FN: This is not to scorn Jacobson who’s one of the best mainstream journalists out there IMO as is Greg Sargent- we’re just talking yet again-a common point in this entire book-about the media’s tendency towards certain widely held almost universal narratives.
Why is the very idea of a threat to democracy too abstract and abstruse an idea to understand or even imagine? Especially in light of J6 and the fact that just about a week before her interview with Sargent, the Supreme Court had just given Trump absolute immunity?
Again it’s notable how widely held this media narrative has been.
But as usual if you’re looking for the absolutely worst take on any issue you have look for-yep-Shadi Hamid. This has been clear to me since I first became aware of his Twitter feed in 2015 and here too Shadi doesn’t disappoint. As we saw above he had the among worst takes during #DumpBiden-the fan fiction 5 week primary cum brokered convention.
Indeed a few weeks go he declared that Trump is NOT an existential threat to democracy and Biden and the rest of the elite Democrats don’t think he is either despite what they say
This after he’d engaged in so much heavy weather over the party nominating Kamala Harris effectively one day after Biden stepped down.
OTOH he seems not to think Trump is any kind of existential threat to democracy. But OTOH he does seem to think that the Democratic party by simply running its incumbent President as is normal for incumbent parties since the era of FDR and when they decided to take the very unusual move of repudiating their own incumbent-above we looked in considerable detail at the history that shows dropping the incumbent is almost NEVER the better choice-quickly unified around their incumbent Vice President perhaps are an existential threat to democracy-or so you might think by the heavy weather Hamid and others engaged in.
Freddie deBoer on Democracy and the Democrats (wisdomofcrowds.live)
Regarding his argument that Trump is not an existential threat to elites this might be true for them-assuming they aren’t people Trump considers his political enemies, like the people who have investigated and prosecuted him-but what about the women living in a post Dobbs America,, Brown-Trump is promising mass deportations- and Black Americans-he’s promising absolute immunity for police? What about the 60% supermajority of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck?
UPDATE: Although judging by what Trump and his own supporters have been saying the idea that he’s a threat to democracy doesn’t seem as outrageous as Hamid-deBoer et al like to think.
9/4: Today it emerged that Tim Pool and his fellow GOP co-conspirators were being paid with Russian money at their YouTube channel. FWIW Pool claims to know nothing about it but even if so clearly the Russians could hardly have asked for more in terms of what they got for their money in terms of Pool. He says this front company for RT had no role in creative control of his content
-but if so they don’t need it as Russia friendly as Pool’s content is -Pool is someone who claims that Ukraine is the biggest threat not just to America but the world and that “we owe Russia an apology.”
CF. Dylan Burns and Timcast.
Pool has engaged in virulent anti Ukraine rhetoric the last few years so it’s not hard to get why this Russian shell company chose him of one the commentators they’d be happy to fund
(598) Tim Pool Becomes Stooge for Russia – YouTube
Tim Pool Has ZERO Empathy For Civilian Casualties In Ukraine (youtube.com)
End UPDATE
Now his new bad narrative is that Kamala-Walz have decided he’s right and Trump is not an an existential threat.
First of all, why does he claim “mixed results” seeing as they’ve now beaten Trump three consecutive election cycles? Again there are two different questions: HAS democracy been under threat and IS running on this point a good political strategy? There are some-like Brian Stelter-in a recent Vanity Fair Hive-who argue it’s been shown not to be a good strategy even though he does think Trump DOES threaten democracy.
FN: Get Vanity Fair link
But Hamid wants to go beyond this positive point to the normative assertion Trump is not an existential threat. Now much as I’m loath to admit it he and I actually agreed on Wahl-he’d been kvetching that the party was able to unify behind Kamala with NO disruption or chaos at all-he against all history and logic like Cenk thinks the more divisive and toxic things get the better, and that it would have been a fine thing for the Dems to have been stuck wondering around like the proverbial chicken with its head cutoff and no nominee between July 21 and the better part of the next month before the convention-he did finally change his position on Kamla Harris.
He apparently was very pleased when she chose Walz-he’d seen Josh Shapiro as especially anti Palestinian-, and since he did an aboutface on her he like much of the media celebrates the politics of “weird.”
Having decided he likes Kamala Harris after all and that he likes weird he comes to same narrative as many pundits have-that it’s great she and Walz are calling Trump weird as that means they don’t think he’s a threat to democracy
The clearest message from the Harris camp so far: Biden was doing it wrong. The vice president is quietly but firmly replacing her boss’ approach with an untested one that radically updates the way Democrats compete against former president Donald Trump.
The largest — and smartest — shift has to do with the subject of democracy, which was one of Biden’s favorite issues.”
And we should note the media-particularly Shadi Hamid’s-least favorite issue-again Silver also doesn’t like it.
This past spring, one of his closest advisers said that the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump’s threat to the republic would be the “overwhelming” focus of his reelection campaign. Biden’s first few ads posted on YouTube mentioned democracy seven times, with multiple allusions to Jan. 6. Harris’s ads on the platform have been silent on the issue, referencing neither democracy nor the storming of the Capitol. Her speeches have mentioned democracy four times. Biden brought it up 17 times in campaign speeches given before he dropped out; she hasn’t spoken of Jan. 6 at all.”
Well I guess January 6 was no big deal then-ok so for the first time in US history the losing Presidential candidate refused to recognize the transfer of power-I mean so what? Swing state voters-according to the Savvy pundit class, who by Hamid’s own admission are so privileged and insulated that they aren’t personally threatened by a second Trump term-don’t care about that. They have no problem if their votes are thrown out and the losing candidate is enthroned a la what Maduro just did in Venezuela.
So that’s it according to the pundits-just like Bush v Gore was memoryholed within a few weeks-where the candidate who lost the election was sworn in thanks to the interference of the Republican Supreme Court-now January 6 officially doesn’t matter. This is also the position of Noah Rosenblum we’d looked at above. He too pronounces 1/6 old news.
This was the spin the entire mainstream punditry was very eager to put on it-there’s nothing undemocratic just a generic promise to “do your bidding”-put this way what even is the threat? By definition isn’t that what any politician is supposed to do-“do the bidding” of the voters who elected them? This attempt to clean up and normalize Trump here doesn’t even pass the laugh test but it’s what the Savvy are going with because NOTHING can threaten US democracy-that doesn’t happen here.
Anyway back to Hamid:
This is a good move on her part. As dangerous as Trump might be, he is not a mortal threat. There are few, if any, plausible scenarios in which he could transform the United States into an autocracy. If Trump wins a second term, American democracy might suffer, but it will not die. U.S. institutions are strong, resilient and capable of withstanding considerable pressure. Alarmism might rally the base, but it risks desensitizing voters, who have been hearing that democracy is under threat since 2016.”
Wow for eight whole years. I mean no way could the threat to democracy extend beyond eight years-unpossible. But again, as noted above, this argument makes it sound as if the Democrats have been beaten by Trump again and again-if they have been warning about a threat to democracy for EIGHT WHOLE YEARS the correlation is they’ve beaten him three straight elections and looking pretty good for a fourth at this point. But calling him a threat to democracy is the kiss of death according to these tut tutting pundits.
But this idea that Trump is not a mortal threat doesn’t pass the laugh test. I mean what would a Shadi Hamid consider a moral threat? I mean if refusing to recognize the transfer of power and now being given absolute immunity by his own handpicked Supreme Court doesn’t qualify as a “mortal threat” it’s not clear there’s anything he would see as such.
Yet he clears there are few if any-he thinks it’s possible there are NO scenarios that could end democracy under a second Trump term. Despite the fact that we came very close on January 6 and he’s only continued to foment the Big Lie that, really, he WON THAT ELECTION.
Let’s quote Hamid again:
If Trump wins a second term, American democracy might suffer, but it will not die. U.S. institutions are strong, resilient and capable of withstanding considerable pressure.”
Really-institutions will save us? That’s what Shadi Hamid is going with? You could have fooled me. Let’s look at what our institutions have done to withstand Trump’s pressure the last year. HIs GOP Supreme Court-5 of the 6 GOP Justices were appointed by GOP Presidents who lost the popular vote and whose very legitimacy itself was in question as discussed elsewhere in this book-delayed Jack Smith’s 1/6 investigation making sure that there can be no verdict until after the election. Then they simply handwaved away the 14th Amendment that disallows elected officials who engaged in political insurrection from running again by claiming-baselessly-he had to have been impeached first.
Then the Republican Supreme Court gratuitously took up Trump’s legal team’s baseless claim that he can’t be prosecuted for January 6 because everything he was accused of was part of his official duties-yep, trying to bully Mike Pence into not certifying the election results, his attempt to extort Republican officials in various states, notably Georgia, all of this was within his official duties.
Then the GOPers on the Court waited until the last day of the session on July 1 to extend Absolute Immunity to Trump way behind anything he’d even asked for. This ruling effectively puts Trump above the law. While Hamid pontificates how it’s Unpossible for Trump to end democracy arguably that ruling already does. This is why the talk from Noah Rosenblum quoted above that January 6 is old news-we already went through that and we survived is so absurd. We survived barely but it wasn’t inevitable that we would and a second Trump term would be a Trump who now has absolute immunity-ie essentially CAN shoot someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it so long as he claims it was part of his official duties AND this second term Trump will be bent on revenge for all the investigations and prosecutions against him. AND he’ll have absolute license now to engage in any kind of revenge or reprisal-so long as-nod nod wink wink-it’s in his official duties-I don’t think it will be very hard for him to convince Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh-or for that matter John Roberts-it was part of his official duties.
UPDATE:
UPDATE: Greg Sargent does an even deeper dive into what a-God help us-second Trump term with Absolute Immunity could look like:
Trump’s Slow-Burn Authoritarianism | The New Republic
FN: Silver himself interestingly was on Bulwark this afternoon and acknowledged that the tendency to dismiss January 6 is largely driven by Survivor Bias. However, he also made a comment that it’s impossible to define protecting democracy as never allowing the Republicans to win again which is ironic on a few levels as when you think about it, the Republican party has won the popular vote once since 1988-and that by a whisker and as he was wrongly sworn in in 2000, even 2004 deserves an asterisk. So while he seems to think acting as if the GOP can NEVER win is untenable that’s actually been the position of majority of voters since 1988.
Then the Trump hack judge in Florida delayed the case regarding all the classified information Trump stole when he finally did leave the WH then she finally killed it on clearly specious grounds.
Judge Aileen Cannon dismisses the Trump classified documents case (nbcnews.com)
Then you have the Georgia case where Trump tried to install fake alternative electors which was chugging along pretty effectively but then on the phony pretense of a sexual affair, the case was damaged and sidelined.
FN:
So these allegedly strong institutions are betting 1.000 so far-in Trump’s favor.
FN: There is the Manhattan hush money case where there-may-be sentencing on 9/18 but now that Trump has Absolute Immunity for official duties-everything he does from now own he will claim is official duties and the GOP Supreme Court will accept everything he says at face value-we’ll see if there’s ANY accountability left.
Yet Shadi Hamid claims this is not a mortal threat to democracy-when it’s arguable democracy is already done at least vis a vis Trump who now has the powers of a King.
Yet he claims it’s not democracy but fascism which is over or so he claimed back in 2022.
FN:
The End of Fascism – by Shadi Hamid – Wisdom of Crowds
I won’t get into exactly what he alleges is the real definition of fascism as it’s absurdly narrow and idiosyncratic-it’s not his own he alleges to some other writer who for some reason says unless a movement is in opposition to Anglo American hegemony it’s not fascist-which is an absurdly specific and baseless condition. Clearly if to be fascist you have to be opposed to Anglo American hegemony then no movement in America could EVER be fascist.
The main point seems to be that Hamid denies that Trump is an existential threat. And that allegedly there are NO existential threats at least in America for some reason.
In our existential setting, the immoral can easily become moral. This is the story of political battle, after all. We are led into overreach, because we come to believe that exceptional measures are necessary to put down what we perceive to be an existential threat. So, let’s stop perceiving it as an existential threat. Unless, of course, it’s actually existential. Do we really think that about this political moment? If your answer to that question is “yes,” then it is not enough to merely say yes. You must also explain what saying yes actually entails. Either a word has practical import or it doesn’t.”
Sure-I mean if a father abuses his children the best way to end it is to stop calling it abuse-Wala it’s no longer existential.
Again for the privileged chattering classes from which Hamid belongs it may well seem that Trump is NOT an existential threat. He may well be right that at least some of the elite Democrats don’t think Trump is either-during the #DumpBiden frenzy the Maine Democrat Jared Golden came out with an article asserting: Trump is going to win and that’s ok. It won’t be the end of democracy.
For he and Shadi Hamid and the other tut tutting Savvy elites this may well be true. What’s truly reprehensible is to talk over the heads of millions of Americans for whom Trump IS an existential threat. Returning to Hamid’s Washington Post article where he praises Kamala Harris-but especially as she supposedly doesn’t think Trump is an existential threat anymore:
Harris’s strategy is different. First of all, she laughs on the campaign trail more than four times as often as Biden did, as measured by C-SPAN transcripts. Talking about serious issues doesn’t require constant seriousness. Nor does it require overstating threats from the other side.”
I agree that one of the many wonderful aspects of Harris’ campaign is she brings whimsy and joy. A new t shirt on Amazon has a picture of her and Walz under the words “Make America Happy Again.” BUT she does NOT agree with Hamid that the threat of Trump has been overstated. And the issue of being joyful is defiance against Donald Trump’s America-the best anecdote to the toxicity that he has infected into our body politic is joy. Indeed Fox News host Jessie Watters recently complained that his mother has become a “Kamala fanatic” and keeps talking about joy.
Ie this is not about Hamid’s narrative that the Democrats have been joyless because they wrongly think Trump is an existential threat but rather they’ve discovered the best way to combat the existential threat which is Trump with joy. Joy is totally foreign to Trump’s movement which is all about making things so toxic and miserable tht people give up on the idea that there can be any positive role for politics and government in the US
She has spoken more about abortion and border security, mentioning these issues more than twice as frequently as Biden did. This, too, is smart politics. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has been an electoral boon for Democrats, and Harris has been the administration’s unofficial messenger on abortion. The vice president’s immigration focus is the boldest choice, because voters trust Republicans far more on the issue. But Harris is right to try to neutralize one of her — and her party’s — biggest weaknesses.”
I applaud that she’s talking much more about abortion than Biden-that was a major problem with Biden-as has been noted many times as pro life Catholic in his private life it was never easy for him to discuss abortion.
FN: This was a concern I personally had about him in 2016 when many were arguing Biden should enter the race and was preferrable to Hillary. Biden had back in 1982 at one point supported a Congressional proposal of an abortion ban.
Post Dobbs he came to understand the issue was literally his best chance at reelection BUT he clearly was always a little awkward in how he discussed it.
But this hardly means Trump is NOT an existential threat. Indeed, what Hamid as well as many pundits miss, “freedom” and “democracy” are hardly mutually exclusive concerns. And the issue of abortion is so potent precisely because for many women, the issue of abortion rights IS existential. Post Dobbs, in many parts of the country a 13 year old rape victim has less rights than her rapist. Indeed, between the Dobbs decision in June 2022 and January 1, 2024 nearly 65,000 women and girls became pregnant due to rape in Dobbs states.
Note that the fight goes beyond even opposition to abortion, but also the abortion pill, and indeed birth control which underscores this crusade by the pro lifers forced birthers is about taking away control from women on wether and when they become pregnant-the goal is clearly to reduce women to the level of birthing machines so as to turn back the clock to the 1950s.
Again this is not a crusade likely to ever impact a Shadi Hamid, a Noah Rosenblum, or a Jared Golden but for these women and girls it absolutely is existential. Indeed at Trump’s disastrous press conference this week, he-beyond falsely claiming that no one cares about abortion anymore and that ‘everyone” supported overturning Roe-claimed to make exceptions in cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother-which is cold comfort considering his own VP opposes abortion in the case of rape, incest as well as divorce for battered women.
Indeed, JD Vance is the point person for Project 2025 which clearly calls for a national abortion ban. Wether or not Hamid considers the prospect of such a country “existential” it is for millions of women and their families.
Indeed, Rick Wilson on The Lincoln Project had an extremely moving story of just one couple in Texas where thanks to their draconian anti abortion law with NO exceptions-where the wife/mother was almost killed effectively by not being allowed to have an abortoin even after the unborn child was dead.
She was very lucky to have survived. Tell her and her husband-who told this heartbreaking story to Rick Wilson this is not an existential threat
As much as this mainstream, privileged elite pundits try to normalize and trivialize things to the extent that elections are little more than a debate between those who like chocolate vs those who prefer vanilla ice cream, millions don’t have the luxury of being this blase.
The irony is before he wrote this article he’d appealed on Twitter to “the Hivemind to help him “steelman” his argument that Trump is NOT an existential threat to democracy
FN: Note that the other side of the question besisdes IF Trump IS a threat to democracy but wether this is a good political startegy the widely held mainstream media assumption is that it’s not based presumably on selected polls-whereas my instinct as Ive argued throughout this book is to be much more skeptical of questoin begging media narratives and that regarding polls they can be made to say almost anything depending on how you frame it. While Hamid and Friends always have a poll to supposedly prove swing voters don’t care about democracy, there is some fairly compellling counter evidence in 2022 to suggest it CAN be a compelling issue in places like Wisconsin as Democrats like Obama and Biden went to Wisconsin and helped defeat election deniers
So my focus on the normative point of Trump’s existential threat rather than the media’s preferred positive frame of wether or not talking about the existential threat that Trump is amounts to a good political strategy does NOT mean I concede the Savvy assumption it’s not a good strategy and there IS in fact some persuasive counter indicators that suggest the opposite of this media narrative.
End FN
FN: In addition this clip gives the lie to the idea that Kamala Harris doesn’t consider Trump a threat to democracy and the Constitutional order.
More evidence that many voters care very much about something as allegedly abstract and hard to define as democracy
Kenny Akers on X: “…………….. https://t.co/cK9b7HhtaC” / X
Yet he went on to do NO steelmanning
The way Trump could end democracy is not hard to find-just look at what Maduro did in Venezuela just did. Despite losing the vote by 35 points he simply refused to leave. Again we have the Survivor Fallacy-because Trump failed it’s assumed he HAD to fail that he could never have succeeded here as Maduro did. This ignores that he came very close. Had Pence gone along with his scheme and refused to certify the results and a few more Senate GOP leaders went along and a few more GOP state officials what then? We’d have been smack dab in the middle of a Constitutional crisis.
Glenn Greenwald had debated Destiny a few months ago and insisted that this still would have been “no big deal”-as the courts would have EVENTUALLY ruled against Trump. A few thoughts on that. First that would still be a very disquieting, appalling thing-it would set a new norm where a sitting President could actually delay the transfer of power for months. How is this anything but a huge deal? Beyond that seeing how the GOP Supreme Court HAS in fact ruled this year it’s not easy to be so confident that it would have ruled against Trump.
In any case the Supreme Court-which had ruled against Trump a few times during the 2020 attempted coup-has seemingly become more radicalized itself the last four years-and now this Court has given Trump has Absolute Immunity
What the media pundits miss about “weird” is it’s not an either/or between “Trump is weird” or “Trump is a threat to democracy”-the point of “weird” is that he’s both.
“Column: With a single word — ‘weird’ — Democrats may have found Republicans’ kryptonite”
Last week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz went viral with his observation that former president and current GOP nominee Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance are “just weird.” After Trump wildly attacked Vice President and leading Democratic candidate Kamala Harris on “Fox and Friends,” the Harris campaign responded with a scathing press release titled “Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance” that included in its bullet-point takeaways: “Trump is old and quite weird?”
Since then the word has become a byword among Harris supporters, used to describe everything from Trump’s continued, and quite baffling, non sequiturs about “the late, great Dr. Hannibal Lecter” to Vance’s openly misogynistic charges that the Democratic Party is run by “childless cat ladies” and that people who do not have biological children are sociopaths.
“Weird” is the new “weak” — and it is driving Republican leaders crazy.
That is telling in itself. Democrats have also used “felon,” “rapist,” “Nazi,” “liar” and “fascist” to describe Trump, which most Republican leaders have simply taken in stride (felon being, of course, irrefutably true).
But “weird”? That conservative politicians and pundits think is childish and mean.”
Column: With a single word — ‘weird’ — Democrats may have found Republicans’ kryptonite (msn.com)
CF:
Brooks: GOP melts down after Walz calls Trump and Vance weirdness ‘weird’ (msn.com)
But it’s not that Trump is no longer felon, rapist, Nazi, liar, or fascist-just that weird is a shorthand for that and all the many other things Trump is. It’s like cyber code-rather than have to list everything every time time you have a short simple word that tells the computer to go through all the steps every time.
David Frum gets it:
Vautism Speaks 🔞 on X: “When the “you’re weird” argument is both true and effective:” / X
Vaush was right-as evidence of its effectiveness appeared quickly.
FN: Vaush did a pretty good stream a week ago makes pretty much the point I’m making her-one of the best ways to defeat fascism is to laugh at them and expose them to ridicule. NOTE what he says-laughing at fascists is a very effective way to defeat them-he’s hardly denying Trump IS a fascist.
Hillary too got into the fun:
The beauty of it is it continues to break Far Right GOPer brains
UPDATE:
UPDATE: Yep the Weird thing is really working
Once again, regarding the whole fascist thing, it’s clear that the mainstream punditocracy has some serious animus against Tim Snyder-we saw Noah Rosenblum’s pretense of loving his “colleagues in the authoritarianism ” while dismissing their work out of hand as in any way relevant to understanding US politics-because, let’s face it-that can’t happen here.
It’s clear that it was folks like Snyder and Ann Applebaum Rosenblum was thinking of but it turns out that Hamid also is no fan of Snyder-unsurprisingly.
Interestingly however, while Hamid celebrates Harris-Walz for supposedly implicitly at least repudiating the idea that Trump is an existential threat it turns out that Walz doesn’t see history like most of these Savvy pundits who have no interest in history and insist that fascism simply can’t happen here.
Turns out Walz wrote a master thesis on Holocaust education. Notably it was considered controversial there too-again my premise that US elites are allergic to history that’s anything more than odd knowledge society stuff-a bunch of stuff happened in the past without relevance to us today
In response to Hamid’s criticisms of Snyder on Twitter for his blatant support of the Democrats Hamid was asked if academics should be active in opposing fascism.
(1) Shadi Hamid on X: “@DAaronovitch Sure” / X
Fairly feeble, terse “Sure.” Because he doesn’t mean it-his position is fascism is something that happened in maybe Germany, Italy-Spain?-in the mid 1930s and that’s all, It has never happened again. Or at least it can never happen in America today. The absurd idea of his friend Adam Tooze that fascism is only something that can happen exactly as it happened in the 1930s-only if it’s framed as against Anglo American hegemony underscores the illiteracy of so many pundits about what fascism actually is. Indeed, in looking over that article again I realized that Hamid is one of these End of History folks for whom there’s literally “nothing new under the sun.”
Ergo Trump can’t be an existential threat-nothing is because-it’s the End of History.
But speaking of Hitler one clear similarity between him and Donald Trump is the extreme, fanatical xenophobia. While Hitler’s regime is treated as entirely singular, it’s notable that the Nazis were to a disquieting extent, inspired by the draconian anti immigration laws passed in the US in 1924.
Immigration Act of 1924 – Wikipedia
“In 1928, Hitler wrote approvingly of how the 1924 Immigration Act excluded from the United States “strangers of the blood,” i.e. non-whites. Later, he wrote in a sequel to Mein Kampf that the image of the United States as a melting pot had been replaced by a scientific race-selection process embedded in the 1924 act.
When America’s Racist Immigration Law Inspired Hitler – Long Island Wins
They were also inspired by US Jim Crow laws
How the Nazis Used Jim Crow Laws as the Model for Their Race Laws | Truthout
So the idea that in any sense fascism “can’t happen here” is only possible with great historical ignorance-of course, most of these pundits are greatly ignorant of history.
UPDATE: Last week’s DNC particularly the last night, particularly the Kamala’s acceptance speech made it clear the politics of weird aren’t replacing the politics of democracy in peril but rather a new way to frame it. Many pundits seemed a little befuddled
Why is it either/or?
Part 6: Is Kamala more amazing, awesome, or based?
As you contemplate the shocking rise and viral explosion of Kamala Harris’ campaign on this Saturday morning 8/10 it’s simply impossible to believe this all happened in what is still now under three weeks. The day Biden dropped out from the campaign seems like many lifetimes ago, so many it’s almost hard to believe it ever happened. It’s scarcely believable how much difference 19 days can make. It also underscores how fickle political fortune is, how so much in politics in terms of success or failure is about timing.
Again, as I discussed above regarding the Nate Silver wars, my opposition to the #DumpBiden movement was never because I held Kamala Harris herself in low esteem-quite the opposite. Indeed, Nate Silver in another moment he wasn’t going out of his way to be as snarky and dismissive as possible-‘the dumbest of the dumb Biden deadenders”-showed he could be quite accurate in the true motivations of many of us #BidenRemainers.
While I have criticized the fantasy football fantasies of Silver and Friends-I’ve listed the others above: Shadi Hamid, Cenk Ughur, Ryan Grim, Ezra Klein, it’s a long list-Silver’s take here proved exactly right, indeed prophetic.
Kamala Harris is probably a mutually agreeable option. I’ll want to write more about Harris if I can find the time. But my strong sense is that people who want Biden out would be perfectly happy with Harris (even if they’d prefer some sort of open nomination process) — whereas people are defending Biden are more indifferent between Biden and Harris (but are strongly against an open process). In technical terms, Harris is probably the choice that would emerge from a negotiation in a game-theory equilibrium — not necessarily the party’s best option to defeat Trump, but the one minimizes the loss function for respective party stakeholders.
(17) Biden has a weak hand – by Nate Silver – Silver Bulletin
This proved to be exactly right-Kamala was the unity candidate-as well as the position of we Biden Remainers-certainly I was NOT opposed in principle to Kamala Harris as the nominee-quite the opposite as I’ll discuss below-but I was strongly against an open process. Because as I explained above, an open primary is a necessary EVIL WHEN you are NOT the incumbent party; as the Democrats ARE the incumbent party the notion that we would voluntarily CHOOSE to have an open primary especially at this late date-just when the open primary season was ending at the end of June people were calling for us to do that compressing it into 5 weeks in July seemed like simple madness to me and many of my fellow Dems in the base-aka Silver’s ‘dumbest of deadenders’
The irony for me was that Kamala Harris was ALWAYS my favorite, optimal candidate-since I first saw her at that Senate Judiciary Committee hearing when she cross examined Jeff Sessions on his lies about his Russian ties so effectively. It was at that moment a new dream was born: that I would see the day when she was sworn in as President-at this moment she filled the void in my heart left after Comey and his Republican friends at the FBI stole it from Hillary Clinton.
It goes without saying that Kamala had been my first choice in 2020, my second had been Elizabeth Warren, Biden was only my third choice. My issue with #DumpBiden 2024 was not personal: Joe Biden vs Kamala Harris but who Biden represented as the incumbent nominee. However I was always clear that if the Democrats insisted on dumping Biden then Kamala was the ONLY replacement-assuming the Dems had any actual concern with winning the election and for much of the first three weeks in July I had some doubts. For a few reasons: the least of important at that time was she was in a perfect world my favorite candidate. What mattered was not my own ultimate preferences but winning the election. The main reason was I still believed the best strategy was sticking with Biden-not because of him himself but because he was the incumbent President. So if you dropped him Kamala it seemed to me was the next best thing-the incumbent Vice President for whom it would be a far more seamless process in switching than any other candidate-which would be basically going back to the drawing board.
Then as the first Black, female nominee had she been dropped this would have led to a civil war in the party-even if she’d been nominated in late August after the better part of a month long civil war the damage would have been done.
Nevertheless, no one imagined things going as swimmingly well as it has. Again Silver continues to spike the ball.
I mean when the media apologizes for electing Trump Circa 2016 we’ll talk. Silver next tweeted part of him wished Biden could have stayed in-believing it would vindicate himself vs the “Biden deadenders”
LOL I totally believe this and sort of feel the same way-as I STILL think his chance of winning was much better than his official 25% estimate much less his claim that it was likely half that-so 12.5% Really? Remember when Silver was rebuking G. Elliot Morris back in the 2020 campaign for being ‘overly certain’ in August 2020 of Biden’s victory-and Morris’ odds were basically just south of 90% where Silver claimed the race was in Trump’s favor in early July 2024?
Silver does admit that he never envisioned Harris doing this well. Heck nobody does-she was my dream candidate and I certainly didn’t’. Indeed as a Kamala Harris stan I was where many Black voters reportedly were-stick to the plan. Harris will get her chance-in 2028.
Here’s Why Black Voters Are Sticking With Joe Biden – Bloomberg
When Silver claimed that Biden had a 25% chance-though he actually thought it was really more 12.5%-and that Kamala might be more like 35%-I actually felt he was half right-I did suspect her chances wouldn’t be great, where I disagreed-and still do to this day is that Biden’s chances were really that low-indeed, in the post Silver 538 model his chances never dipped far below 50%.
So nobody anticipated her catching fire like she did-Silver’s own model now gives her about a 53% chance at EC victory, not even huge fan of hers like yours truly. And what this whole whirlwind of events underscores more than anything is that in politics it’s all about timing. Political fortune is an entirely fickle mistress and you just have be there at the right time-you must come at the right time. Unfortunately, Hillary was always too early-the country couldn’t get over its misogynistic past, not quite ready to scale Hillary’s “highest, hardest, glass ceiling.” They never did quite get Ready for Hillary though I personally had been ready since 1992 when in the first election I was eligible to vote I was a big fan of Bill but an even bigger fan of Hillary.
One of the problems with Silver’s insistence that “online liberals” like myself accept that other allegedly far more typical Americans see the world a far different way than I do is it’s like Keyne’s proverbial beauty contest-the analogy for the stock market where you have to guessimate other people’s preferences presumably with very different preferences than your own. When I consider the last 32 years it kind of feels as if the average person in the street is finally where I was in 1992.
FN:: In his appearance on Bulwark yesterday, Silver was dismissive of liberals who act as if protecting democracy means making sure the Republicans NEVER win an election again. Put that way that seems persuasive YET if you look at how voters have actually voted starting in 1992, a majority of voters have apparently believed over the last 30 years that the Republicans can NOT be trusted winning the WH not even once-seeing as the not so Grand Ole Party has only one the popular vote once since 1988 and that by a whisper and that was only possible for W’s stolen “win” in 2000.
So while I know Nate finds opinion polls on how people intend to vote more compelling than their actual votes.
To me I never put much stock in the concern Biden may not have been able to complete a second term because the way I looked at it was-that was true but who cares? Feature not a bug, that’s what the VP app is for-that she was my favorite candidate in the first place was just another feature, more icing on the cake. Silver himself had admitted that even a greatly diminished Biden with “cognitive decline” was preferable to another Trump term.
FN: Find Silver link
But Silver assumed that the proverbial person in the street wouldn’t see it that way.
Again though it’s all about timing. The country wasn’t ready for a woman President in 1992. In 2008 it still wasn’t.
FN: Shirley Chisolm had said that in her time in public office she faced more discrimination and bias as a woman than as an African American.
Obama himself admitted in 2016 that Hillary had gone through everything she did in 2008 while walking backwards and in heels-Ginger to his Fred Astaire.
End FN
After what they did to Hillary I discovered Kamala. It turns out Hillary herself was also watching that hearing with Jeff Sessions and she too was impressed with the idea that Kamala might very well be President one day in the near future. The baton was passed.
But in 2020 it still wasn’t quite Kamala’s time. OTOH in the immediate George Floyd era, there was a decent amount of antipathy towards prosecutors-remember the anti Kamala hashtag on Twitter in 2019-#KamalaisaCop?
It wasn’t the time for prosecutors-although here in 2024 with Trump managing to seemingly elude all accountability again it feels like a time for prosecutors aka her campaign slogan The prosecutor vs the felon. Similarly in 2020 the public STILL wasn’t ready to elect a woman President YET even within my own Democratic party I spoke to many female Dems who felt that 2016 proved the country won’t vote for a woman and as urgent and imperative it was that we beat Donald Trump we had to unify behind the most electable white male which turned out to be Joe Biden.
Again political fortune is fickle and turns on a dime. As noted above nobody cared that Biden is not a terribly dynamic speaker and candidate-he never was. In 2020 Trump groused about him running a campaign from his basement-but nobody cared. Indeed, the middle of Covid this just seemed responsible.
Silver-Ezra Klein-Ryan Grim-and Friends had been trying to make heavy weather about Biden’s age for a year or more-some had started in 2022 and nobody paid too much attention. But suddenly after that debate everything changed. And suddenly what seemed impossible happened overnight-Kamala Harris sewed up the nomination overnight and became the leader of this superdynamic campaign with people saying she is like Obama 2008 but perhaps with more energy.
As for any apologizing to the #DumpBiden crowd-my main concern was a disruptive, divisive, toxic dumpterfire Summer where the party was in a civil war until the end of August thereby leaving the Democrats spending the better part of two months fighting not Donald Trump but themselves. This didn’t happen to say the least. What I didn’t anticipate was how quickly the party would unify behind Kamala and how much energy and enthusiasm this would generate so quickly and how fast she’d rise up in the polls.
Suddenly it’s the right time for a woman to run on top of the ticket just like in 2008 suddenly it was the right time for a Black man.
There are so many ways to quantify how much energy and enthusiasm the Kamala campaign has generated-the explosion in campaign funding where they had $81 million the first day in small donations and adding large donations it was a quarter of a billion the first day, with an explosion also in campaign volunteers. While the Biden campaign had been seeing about 100 new volunteers per day Kamala had over 100,000 thousand the first day. After Walz was chosen this led to a $36 million dollar haul.
Harris campaign raises $36M in 24 hours after Walz pick (msn.com)
Then there are the huge crowds that certainly do recall 2008.No doubt it’s not just her surging polls-she’s now clearly leading the polls both nationally and in the Rustbelt swing states-a Sienna poll released today-always a bad pollster for Biden-showed kamala leading in all three swing states by the same 50-46 margin.
but her huge crowd sizes that led Trump to offer of his own accord to do that disastrous press conference the other day and then reverse himself and agree to the ABC debate on September 10-while proposing others; for once he’s losing the earned media fight and is getting a little desperate.
But perhaps the best measure of all of just how viral her campaign is going are the memes. They’re just so many: what will be unburdened by what has been, you didn’t fall from a coconut tree you emerged from a context, we’re not going back, when we fight we win. Make America Happy Again-the whole joy thing.
There’s the whole Brat Summer thing-Kamala IS Brat. As a Gen xer I still don’t quite get what it means to say that Kamala IS Brat-as opposed to A Brat… not for not having tried, but clearly it’s something good-and that particular green is a great color scheme.
Especial kudos for the Gen Xer Kamala-indeed technically she’s a very young Boomer but as an Xer I proclaim she’s close enough-is her campaign adopted the green background on her Kamala hq page-leaning into the whole Charli xcx thing
As Rick Wilson said in a Lincoln Project stream soon after Kamala replaced Biden the proliferation of pro Kamala memes gets under Trump’s skin as he knows that this is more than just a political but a cultural phenomenon which looms large in elections as culture is about what folks unlike those of us obsessed with politics all the time-it’s for more casual voters and the young-the Zoomers, etc.
What’s really been notable is Trump’s utter failure to figure out how to campaign against Kamala Harris. It very much is the story of a football team that has been preparing to beat the quarterback of their arch rival for years-the GOP has been plotting Biden’s defeat going back at least to 2018 when Trump tried to blackmail Zelensky into opening a phony investigation into Biden.
A month ago Trump had reportedly been planning a landslide.
Trump Is Planning for a Landslide Win – The Atlantic
Trump and his campaign had been focusing like a laser beam on Biden being old for four years. But ultimately apparently they were too successful-they became the proverbial dog who caught the car. They had been pushing the narrative that Biden was too old and finally on June 27 they convinced everyone even the Democrats.
This led to the one thing they hadn’t planned for like the NFL team whose defensive line is so successful against their chief rival’s QB that they drive him out of the championship game with 30 seconds left in the first half. They’d completely dominated the first half chasing the opponent’s franchise QB all over the field, blitzing him on every down to the point he can’t get a single play off, sacking him 10 times, forcing a few fumbles, with like 3 pics. But going in with the final half ticking down for one more sack he’s knocked out the game and out for the season.
And the lightly considered understudy on the bench comes in the second half-and they have NO ANSWER for him. And that’s where Trump and the GOP have been post July 21. Because they have no answers for Kamala Harris-and as often happens in these sorts of games-to stick with the analogy-a team in this position never figures this new QB out during this game. Again the GOP had been focused and researching how to beat Biden for six years. And it turns out without the crutch of running against Biden being too old they don’t have much of anything.
This Is Exactly What the Trump Team Feared – The Atlantic
On the evening of Super Tuesday, March 5, shortly before Donald Trump effectively ended the Republican primary and earned a general-election rematch with President Joe Biden, I asked the co-managers of Trump’s presidential campaign what they feared most about Biden.
“Honestly, it’s less him,” Chris LaCivita told me. “And more—”
“Institutional Democrats,” Susie Wiles said, finishing her partner’s thought.
It was a revealing exchange, and a theme we would revisit frequently. The Democratic Party, Wiles and LaCivita would tell me in conversations over the coming months, was a machine—well organized and well financed, with a record of support from the low-propensity voters who turn out every four years in presidential contests. Ordinarily, they explained, Democrats would have structural superiority in a race like this one. But something was holding the party back: Biden.
LaCivita and Wiles expected the campaign’s narrative to be controlled by Democrats from the beginning: Trump, after all, had sabotaged the peaceful transition of power after the 2020 election, incited an attack on the U.S. Capitol, and, more recently, faced numerous criminal prosecutions and the possibility of jail time. And yet Biden offered an opening. Already the oldest president in American history, he began to show signs of rapid deterioration in 2023. This would make the campaign a game of survival more than skill, each candidate needing to convince voters that he was less unqualified than his opponent.”
FN: Note to that this completely debunks Shadi Hamid’s narrative discussed above that January 6 is irrelevant to voters in 2024.
In the race to clear historically low hurdles, Trump began pulling ahead. Polls showed him making unprecedented gains with those low-propensity demographics, specifically Black and Hispanic voters—not because of anything he was doing particularly well, but because of apathy and disillusionment within the Democratic base. As far back as springtime, the numbers told a straightforward story: Biden was not going to win. Democrats could only look on, powerless, as the president denied the party’s young bench—and its organizational machine—a chance to change the narrative.
Biden’s departure from the presidential race this afternoon—hours after his top surrogates had insisted that he would carry on—is the culmination of a remarkable pressure campaign, launched after his calamitous June 27 debate performance and aimed at pushing the president into retirement. On the Republican side, it caps a frenetic four-month stretch in which Trump’s campaign went from cocky about Biden’s deficiencies to fearful of his ouster to stunned at the sudden letter from Biden doing the thing Republicans thought he’d never do.
Republicans I spoke with today, some of them still hungover from celebrating what felt to many like a victory-night celebration in Milwaukee, registered shock at the news of Biden’s departure. Party officials had left town believing the race was all but over. Now they were confronting the reality of reimagining a campaign—one that had been optimized, in every way, to defeat Biden—against a new and unknown challenger. “So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race,” a clearly peeved Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social. “Now we have to start all over again.”
Indeed with Biden out it’s striking how the GOP’s only real asset was Biden’s age. Again there’s a reason why the GOP has won the popular vote once since 1988-and that by a whisper. Starting with Bill Clinton in the 1990s their only path to victory was to focus not on ideas or policy-as voters prefer the Democrats on actual ideas and policy-but rather to the extent that they could personally destroy specific Democratic Presidential candidates-Clinton as a corrupt womanizer, Gore somehow unlikable and boring-which hardly seems unforgivable but the media bought into this weird narrative, Hillary Clinton likable using private email-as most high public officials do, but that’ doesn’t matter, after all Trump was only 3 years younger than Biden anyway. Biden was too old. It took the GOP years to develop the too old narrative. But now that it’s gone they have nothing.
Ideally they’d like to do to Kamala what they do to every Democratic nominee-in some sense assassinate their character or reputation. But as they weren’t expecting this switch they haven’t planned anything and any obvious attack on her is quite likely to make them look worse than her-making them look sexist, racist or probably both.
Outside of that they don’t have much. Trump has tried the “San Francisco liberal” argument and many in the media seem to think that’s pretty impressive-though as usual you should always question the media narrative, if there’s anything this book is about it’s about this, among other things-like you should never trust the Republican party. Trump has tried at times to tell this story but it hasn’t gained any great traction yet-he doesn’t care that much about this either preferring the personal attacks. Then when he tries to stick to the San Franciso liberal thing he gets into trouble with the whole Willie Brown thing-which is basically the story he wants to tell of how Kamala didn’t get to where she is because of her own work and qualifications but-because she’s a woman-she basically slept her way to the top.
Trump struggles to find line of attack against Harris: ‘They are literally grasping at straws’
“She’s not Joe Biden.”
As Republicans rev up their anti-Kamala Harris campaign, they’re having a hard time finding a consistent line of attack.
In recent days, Republicans have slammed the vice president for everything from her handling of immigration and her past as a prosecutor to her “terrible,” “horrible” and “mean” demeanor. On Wednesday, Donald Trump called Harris a “radical, left lunatic,” then branded her “nasty” in a Fox News interview the following day — an echo of insults Trump leveled against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
As Republicans rev up their anti-Kamala Harris campaign, they’re having a hard time finding a consistent line of attack.
In recent days, Republicans have slammed the vice president for everything from her handling of immigration and her past as a prosecutor to her “terrible,” “horrible” and “mean” demeanor. On Wednesday, Donald Trump called Harris a “radical, left lunatic,” then branded her “nasty” in a Fox News interview the following day — an echo of insults Trump leveled against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Trump’s allies, meanwhile, have argued she is actively engaged in a conspiracy to hide Biden’s apparent decline or that she’s just another Biden altogether. Some have engaged in explicitly racist and sexist attacks, calling her a “DEI hire” or bashing her for not having biological children. Others say she laughs too much. More criticized her for endorsing consumer policies such as bans on plastic straws and eating red meat. And none of her rivals seem willing to correctly pronounce her name.
“They are literally grasping at straws,” said Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chair of the Minnesota Republican Party. “Republicans desperately wanted to run against Joe Biden. … The introduction of Harris into the race, I think, has upended their attacks and their strategies.”
Trump’s stillborn “Laffin’ Kamala’ attack underscores the extent to which he’s flailing against her and has nothing.
He initially called her “Laffin’ Kamala,” mocking her laugh, before cycling through other epithets, including “Crooked,” an insult he had used against both Hillary Clinton and Mr. Biden. Lately, he has favored “Crazy Kamala.”
Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
But the attack on her laugh is more than merely ineffective, because in fact one of the most appealing aspects of her you can argue is her laugh and her ability to laugh easily. Indeed IMO her laugh is wonderful I can listen to it every day of the week and twice on Sunday-that’s just me but it seems that all the thousands going to her rallies seem to agree. But an interesting question is why Trump and his GOP co-conspirators have such a problem with her laugh.
Republicans keep harping on Harris’s laugh, like it’s a bad thing
“Trump tells jokes but seldom laughs. He seems unnerved by how easily it comes to his opponent.”
The National Republican Senatorial Committee, run by Donald Trump ally Steve Daines of Montana, issued a memo on July 22 attacking Vice President Harris. The memo included a section titled “Weird,” attempting to throw back at Democrats a description they’ve been lobbing at Trump and running mate JD Vance.”
Yes-they keep fruitlessly trying to reciprocate “Weird.”
But for them Kamala’s laugh is weird a take which itself is-weird. Trump and his party’s contempt for mirth and whimsy is itself WEIRD-how weird is the GOP let us count the ways… This hatred of Kamala’s very appealing and joyful laughter is another weird thing about the Republican party. Boo laughing!
Opinion | Why Trump and Republicans don’t like it when Kamala Harris laughs – The Washington Post
Indeed how often have the GOP tried to attack Kamala in ways which have totally backfired-not just because the attack falls flat but the thing they mean to criticize strikes many people as good. Part of the euphoric joyful nature of Kamala’s campaign is her easy, appealing laughter.
Keffals-herself!-made this point.
koofal on X: “republicans whenever they try to cancel kamala harris https://t.co/S91BlwvrNq” / X
She gets this is on the nose
FN: I was so jazzed when Keffals returned to streaming for about two and a half days but it didn’t last…
Indeed since Kamala became the nominee I changed my Twitter hashtag to What will be unburdened by what has been. But I actually came across of her saying this repeatedly on a YouTube compilation put together conservatives making fun of her for saying it many times-the suggestion is that because she has said this phrase many times they’re basically the only words she knows-again a woman of color so they hint she’s not very bright, a DEI higher-similar to the attacks they levied against Obama.
I believe I came across this compilation originally on Vaush. But the important point is that they thought it made her look terrible-a laughing flake who you can’t take seriously and uses this one bad canned line all the time as it’s the only thing she’s committed to memory while I-and many others-actually found it very charming.
It’s a catchy line and she delivers it in a very catchy way-and it makes a serious metaphysical point too when you think about it.
While conservatives put together this compilation to scoff at her but it turns out-ahem-normal people find it quite catchy and appealing. Indeed, even “The wheels on the bus” comes across she comes across in a good light-she’s whimsical, joyful, and fun.
I mean to each his own but I could literally watch this every day and twice on Sundays-again her wonderful disarming laugh is very appealing for anyone not completely weird in the Vance-Trump sense who basically hate happiness and joy. For most actual humans, mirth is a good thing, actually.
So you see this dynamic that Keffals pointed to in the screenshot above that the GOP would keep trying to “cancel” Kamala or dogpile her on the usual Right wing theater criticism and it totally backfires-like they tried to mock What will be unburdened by what has been and scorn it and many of us actually EMBRACED it and found it kind of charming and indeed kind of thought provoking. In the next few days after Kamala first replaced Biden-by the fight night after Biden dropped out she was effectively the nominee-this dynamic where GOP attempts at mocking or deriding her kept backfiring and boomeranging was widely noted on Twitter.
FN:
FN:
Rick Wilson on X: “Exhibit 419 that the RNC Research has a KHive mole running the account.” / X
koofal on X: “oh noo… oh dear.. i would absolutely HATE that… haha https://t.co/52kya4KVWH” / X
Perhaps nothing underscores the extent to which GOP attacks on her have been not just ineffective but have completely backfired than an early attempt by Newsmax to put up “Harris Facts” chyrons during her first speech soon after becoming the presumed nominee.
Newsmax Dragged For ‘Harris Facts’ Chyrons During Speech: PHOTOS – Comic Sands
It completely backfired as all the warnings about “Harris facts” were about very popular policies: One warned that she supported Medicare for All-which is very popular
FN: Particularly in the form of a public option; you could argue a little less as single payer-as this could lead to many losing their healthcare plan who are happy with it which is why as a liberal I support “Universal healthcare” or “Medicare for All” in the sense of all who want it.
It also warned that “she investigated fossil fuels” and “Supports Massive Corporate Tax Hike” which suggests the reason they have struggled so much to come up with an effective attack is they have no clue which polices are actually popular with the voters-not surprising for the party of minority rule-who only wins via undemocratic relics like the electoral college, the undemocratic apportionment of Senators, and the GOP Supreme Court where 5 of 6 conservative Justices were appointed by Republican Presidents who won a minority of the vote. Outside of running against Biden being old they have nothing once it becomes about substance rather than the usual GOP focus on character assassination.
While the GOP attacks Harris for her infectious, winning laugh, a major part her appeal-that Walz has fit right in with-is the mirth and whimsy vibe. For this reason, as noted above one of the many memes of the meme rich campaign is Make America Happy Again. That the idea of joy and euphoria have connected with so many people underscores how toxic our politics have gotten for the 9 years since Trump first strolled down that escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 and how many are so relieved to finally have a chance to feel good again.
Again as I’ve made clear in this chapter I had opposed dropping Biden but that’s because I was concerned-as many Democrats were-that they would try to skip Kamala Harris and that even if they didn’t I was concerned they would drag out the process-there was talk about dragging things out until the convention in late August about ‘no anointment’ when an anointment was exactly what was needed, anointment is ALWAYS preferrable as discussed at lenght above an open primary is a necessary EVIL when you are the OUT OF POWER PARTY-had this been the case this would have effectively left the party without a nominee for the better part of the Summer. I hadn’t anticipated just how seamlessly and efficiently the Dems would get behind Kamala. But now it’s hard to even believe Biden stepping down happened in our lifetime it seems so long ago and what’s become clear subsequently is this was how it was always supposed to have gone.
After all as Trump stole the election from a such a strong, qualified female candidate in Hillary it’s only fitting that his political career will end losing to another very strong, qualified female candidate. And the fact that Kamala has pulled close to even in favorability polls-she’s even gone right side up in a few, with Walz being right side up in all early polls for him-feels like we are truly going full circle-after all Hillary had a 64% approval rating until the Emailgate fiasco and then saw her numbers tank into the low 40s and high 30s which started an era where no one in high office, certainly nobody in the WH has a positive favorability rating; you could say this is one of the defining characteristics of the Trump Era. Her victory-I’m allowing myself to get all vibed out and confident-will finally end this toxic era.
UPDATE: Speaking of which a new poll that came out yesterday showed Harris with 53% approval 44% disapproval. It was pointed out that Obama at this time in the 2008 campaign was 55%.
Polling USA on X: “Obama was polling around 55% favorables in August 2008 Take that as you will” / X
But if anything this seems more impressive as 2008 was such a different time-even at the worst moments in the 2008 primary, Hillary’s numbers never got lower than 48% at worst. Again the Trump Era has been the time when literally everybody in politics has upside down approval and favorability-which is why again, you wonder if Kamala’s improved favorables and Tim Walz’s numbers which have been positive across the board might harken to a post Trump Era.
FN: This idea of a politics of joy is very widespread at the moment
Make America Happy Again-the politics of joy
(17) The Friday Brief – Rick Wilson’s Substack
Olga Nesterova on X: “This, ladies and gentlemen, is JOY. https://t.co/DJsTFdQgOn” / X😊
End FN:
It turns out the one thing that can beat Trump’s toxicity is the joy that comes from the happy warrior campaign of Harris-Walz. That the GOP thinks this is actually a bad thing underscores the extent to which they are out of touch indeed WEIRD.
UPDATE: Yep the Weird thing is really working
Speaking of vibes-even Nate Silver has opened himself a little to the idea that MAYBE THERE IS something to the whole vibes thing. Which just shows how powerful her vibes are-even the ultimate anti vibes naysayer has opened himself to the possibility.
And yet there’s a part of me — just a part — that would buy a ticket to ride out the memementum. That thinks this is so crazy that it just might work. That thinks it was probably a mistake for Harris to pick Tim Walz instead of Josh Shapiro, but that not wanting to disrupt the campaign’s favorable trajectory with a higher-risk pick was a valid consideration.”
He then says the case rests on three factors-that are unusual in the campaign but 1 if what I keep coming back to: it’s a sprint not a marathon.
I’m very much a believer in playing the long game, and that’s one reason I hate any strategy that involves spreading bullshit and hoping you don’t get called on it. As Mike Pesca points out, for instance, partisan media critics that scolded the press for covering obviously valid questions about Biden’s age wound up embarrassing themselves — and for that matter didn’t really do any favors to Democrats, either. Biden just wasn’t going to be able to duck-and-weave his way through an entire campaign by working the refs.
But Harris? Well, Donald Trump is in the midst of a terrible news cycle. Then the DNC starts in 9 days. Parties typically get a boost in their polling following their conventions, which makes it easier to sustain the good vibes. And then it will be Labor Day, the traditional stretch run of the campaign. While there will probably be a difficult news cycle or two for Harris — that’s why the Trump campaign is asking for more debates, it wants more opportunities to trip her up — it’s possible she just speed-runs her way through 11/5.”
(17) Kamala Harris can’t meme her way to victory. Or can she? (natesilver.net)
That is basically my theory of the case at present. But this is also why I disagree about Pesca. If you admit that it being a sprint not a marathon helps her then that only happened because the Democrats didn’t do what Silver, Pesca, Shadi Hamid, Ezra Klein. Cenk Uygur, Ryan Grim, et al-ie, again, as I argue above things have gone optimally precisely because the Dems DID NOT have an open primary-again Silver’s premise that they should have seems to totally miss that incumbent parties normally don’t do open primaries.
FN: Just in case you don’t believe that Silver literally doesn’t know this-and I wasn’t necessarily asserting he was ignorant of this basic historical fact-he was on The New Liberal Podcast today to hawk his new book and he argued that the Democratic party hasn’t had a real open primary since 2008 for young voters once again totally misconstruing the fact that parties in the modern era at least-we saw his attempt to add the Dead Ball era of politics in the 19th century to argue otherwise-prefer to run their incumbent President unopposed all else being equal.
So there would never have been a primary in 2012-while, yes, because of Biden’s age and the concerns about his ability to run the campaign necessary 2024 has turned into the exception that proves the rule-but there was no universe in which the Democrats were ever NOT going to run Obama unopposed. In 2016 there was an open primary-arguably the Democrats had hoped to avoid the open primary by running HRC but this didn’t work to say the least-in terms of preventing an open primary I mean. The desire on the part of the Dems to avoid it was understandable as once again an open primary is a necessary EVIL.
And in 2020 there was an open primary with 14 candidates-not sure why Silver argues that wasn’t an open primary. But again, as noted above, many Democrats by January, 2020 were sick of the open primary as it leads to all these sectarian divisions and toxic divisions. By then most of us in the Center Left were hungry for any Bernie alternative-at one point even considering Mike Bloomberg-the Black base had gotten interested in him for a few months. Then Clyburn got behind Biden and the rest was history.
Again, Silver’s fundamental misconception is the same of Cenk and Friends-he fails to understand that open primaries suck. Things have worked out so well here because we didn’t have one-Kamala WAS anointed. Totally a feature not bug. Interestingly enough, the New Liberal host gets that as he had commented that maybe parties will catch on that primaries aren’t so great-but it’s not clear if Silver caught his point here.
End FN
Indeed Kamala-mania also quickly reached Europe.
‘Kamala-mania’ also catching on in Europe (msn.com)
But I thought this piece by Jonathan V. Last touched on the point that it’s the fact that Kamala-Walz have become this meme upon memes upon more memes-Walz himself is a separate meme as Midwest Princess and as everyone’s favorite Sitcom Dad; and of course, Walz started the whole “Weird” thing this worries Trump as he understands the power of memes as this touches more than politics but the culture.
We are seeing signs of panic from Donald Trump because he recognizes something in Kamala Harris that he has not seen in any other opponent: The beginnings of a cultural movement that vibrates at a level beyond politics.
He sees that Kamala Harris is drawing heat.
(15) Pro-Wrestling Explains Why Trump Is Scared of Kamala (thebulwark.com)
Last argued he came to understand the importance of “drawing heat” from his interest in pro wrestling.
Heat has been Trump’s political lodestar.
It explains why he pursued the Obama-birther story so doggedly even before he was running for president. It explains why he stopped talking about Operation Warp Speed. He’s even talked about heat explicitly, making fun of Republican audiences who yawn when he mentions about tax cuts but go crazy when he does trans issues.
In his lizard brain, Trump sees drawing heat as the pathway to dominating the culture and thus winning elections.
In this way, Trump is a savant. He has drawn heel heat more successfully than any figure in the history of American politics and used that power to take complete ownership of a political party.”
So from Trump’s perspective, you can understand why he was so vexed by Joe Biden in 2020. No one really cared about Biden,4 who drew no heat, one way or the other. Biden was just kind of there, taking moderate positions and running a boring, effective campaign operation.
In Trump’s mind, his loss to Biden was the political equivalent of Hulk Hogan dropping the championship belt to some forgettable, mid-card talent. That’s not supposed to happen.
Yes! Regarding Biden this underscores my point above that it’s about the right time. In 2008 it wasn’t the right time for Hillary or even 2016 as the country still wasn’t ready for a woman. Then in 2020 with Kamala Harris it still wasn’t time for a woman to become President as even many Democratic women felt the party needed to get behind the most electable White male.
FN: In this sense, Avenati’s big sin wasn’t THINKING the Dems needed a White male to win it was saying the quiet part out loud.
So 2020 was Biden’s moment. But then Dobbs happened and then June 27, 2024 happened and suddenly Biden’s moment had passed and suddenly the electorate was suddenly ready to vote for a woman for President-so it took us four elections to finally elect a woman-again I’m very confident.
Speaking of Hillary this is for her as much as it’s for anyone-indeed, as I said above I’ve dreamt of the day that Kamala would win the Presidency since 2017 and there’s good evidence that’s when HRC too begun to think she might be the candidate to finally scale “the highest, hardest glass ceiling.”
Part of response: Opinion | Hillary Clinton: How Kamala Harris Can Win and Make History – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
UPDATE: The schedule for next week’s convention just came out happy to see Hillary is speaking-her and Biden speak Monday though agree that ideally I’d like to have seen her introduce Kamala to commemorate the moment where we looked poised to finally scale this highest, hardest, glass ceiling.
End FN
Kamala Harris has succeeded—suddenly, unexpectedly—in drawing tremendous amounts of heat.
The first indication was her fundraising in the 24 hours following Biden’s withdrawal. Then there was her campaign launch in Milwaukee, where a crowd of more than 3,000 packed a fieldhouse and went crazy for her. There have been Kamala memes organically flooding the internet and now the weird, meetup style Zoom calls (Black Women for Harris, White Dudes for Harris) that have become sensations—organizing voters, raising millions of dollars, and rallying celebrities to her cause.
These are the kinds of indicators that Donald Trump understands and they signal that Harris is close to achieving escape velocity where she draws so much heat that she ceases to be an ordinary politician and becomes a larger cultural figure.
But perhaps nothing underscores just how awesome the vibes of Kamala-Walz are more than this recent Reddit post-I mean REDDIT?!
(1) Wæs on X: “incredible things are happening on reddit https://t.co/KhhTa6oRzW” / X
Walz himself is a meme and started the weird meme.
Link HRC”s endorsement.
Reddit joins the KHive
UPDATE:
UPDATE: Biden’s time was in 2020 but by 2024 it was up. His narrative though that his election would leave to an “epiphany” never struck me as terribly plausible-indeed Frank Foer argued in his book on Biden that Biden often seemed to be the only person in America who believed that.
Place above this update above or below?
End FN
(17) The Media Thought Misleaders – by Mike Pesca (substack.com)
UPDATE: Not sure where these links fit in
Maybe this goes in Shadi Hamid section?
Peter Thiel’s Pre-Nazi Germany Comparison to US Resurfaces (msn.com)
Multiracial Democracy is on the Ballot-and so is ethnofascism:
This has been the book that would never end giving way to this chapter-the chapter that would never end. MAYBE though this is FINALLY the last chapter-famous last words as I’ve thought the book was over more than few times before! But maybe with the hope, the joy, and yes the euphoria of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz this is finally it.
As I’ve discussed elsewhere in this book my big mistake was not doing sequels. Then I reached the point where it was simply impossible to do them as I’d written so much material already. My trouble in 2018 is I wanted to square a kind of circle-to write a book that did everything-documented what happened in 2016 because of my concern that what happened would be forgotten or-as it already was being forgotten-SOMEONE had to remember and that apparently would have to be me. But I also wanted to provide the history so it was clear that in reality what haened in 2016 was NOT as much as an abberation as many think-yes in 2016 the Republican party colluded with Russia but it had colluded with South Vietnam in 1968, and with Iran’s Ayatollah in 1980 and had also cheated in 1972 a la Watergate, in 2000-a la Bush v. Gore-and PERHAPS I learned in the course of the book even in 1988-based on Lee Atwater’s own deathbed confessions.
Which was fine. The idea of writing exhaustively of what happened in 2016 and shwoing that it didn’t start then indeed, Trump to a large extent ran the same campaign the GOP has been running since 1946-after all, Trump’s righthand man Roger Stone learned at the knee of none other than Tricky Dick himself-again Stone had an important role in 1972 in delivering the Canucks letter to the Manchester Union Leader which drove Ed Muski out of the race.
The problem for this book was the third goal: to also be entirely up to date. The trouble with the Trump Era is that history is no longer about what happened decades ago but minutes. Again June 27 or July 21 seem like lifetimes ago. It’s like contemplating the stars-where we see them light years after they’d actually made the movements they seem to be making now.
As of today-4:28 AM on 8/14/2024 it’s beginning to seem like 2024 is shaping up to be a pretty good year for democracy. This is surprising as for much of 2024 there’s been this terrible sense of foreboding that fascism is coming back. The forces of fascism has seemed to be on the march all over the place: in the US in Europe, in Russia and Ukraine. To say nothing of Israel-Hamas.
For much of 2024 which I think of starting on October 7, 2023 things looked fairly grim. Trump was basically leading in all-or at least most-of the polls since October 2023. For much of 2024 Israel’s brutal offensive in Gaza-in response to Hamas’ brutal terrorist attack on October 7 seemed destined to go on forever or at least well past November 6, 2024 where quite honestly I fretted that this could be what defeats Biden. October 7 and its aftermath seemed to color everything with that bad sense of foreboding I mentioned above. While there as some talk of conspiracy theories behind October 7-and others quick to dismiss them-it was hard to miss the fact that the October 7 did come at a pretty opportune time for Netanyahu-after all, without 10/7 he quite possibly was on his way out. That Bibi’s brutal response-to a brutal terrorist attack on 10/7-could potentially hurt Biden was from Netanyahu’s point of view a feature not a bug. As Youtuber Vaush says fascists like fascists.
For much of 2024 I’d caustically declare that if Biden wins in November it will be because of Dobbs and if he loses it will be because of Gaza.
As for the desire of many of us that Trump would in any sense be held accountable by the legal system it seemed to more and more become a pipe dream. With his handpicked GOP Supreme Court it became pretty clear Trump was unlikely to face any prison time prior to the election. During 2024 the Republican Supreme Court quickly disabused us of any doubt they were shy about ruling on a completely partisan basis. By the end of June-during the post debate frenzy it was tough no to be pretty pessimistic. The following week the Supreme Court would shock even those most pessimistic about how much their ruling would favor Trump giving him more immunity and power than even the most presumptuous legal demands. Meanwhile the Dems seemed determined to spend most of the Summer engaging in a circular firing squad-if they had waited until the convention to pick their nominee as many had wanted-Silver-Ezra Klein-Shadi Hamid-Cenk Ugur-Ryan Grim, etc-they’d have effectively been without a nominee for close to two months. Pretty hard to beat Trump if you don’t even have a candidate.
So early July was the absolute nadir of doom and gloom in terms of the American picture. Although it did demonstrate that contrary to my fears Gaza was NOT a gamechanger-as Nate Silver DID say; I never claimed he’s always wrong or that he’s not pretty talented though interestingly Christopher Bouzy-who’s emerged as a kind of nemesis on Twitter also had predicted back in March that Gaza wasn’t going to have a major electoral effect.
But to further set the haunting sense of foreboding in 2024, it wasn’t just about the US but the international scene. There has recently been some pretty good news coming out of the Russia-Ukraine war-ie Ukraine seems like it may well be winning.
Certainly with Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region the case for a Ukraine victory-for “peace” not in the John Mearsheimer Orwellian definition of “peace” as Ukraine giving up 40% of the country-some of its richest and most valuable parts-to Russia in exchange for it but a genuine peace that is favorable on Ukraine’s terms-is far more bullish.
(465) Putin Has Lost – Peace In Ukraine Is Coming – YouTube
Konstantin-the Russian dissident who fled Russia the day Putin invaded Ukraine-argues persuasively that Putin may be ready to tap out soon and end the war on more favorable terms for Ukraine than one could have imagined just recently. Indeed things looked pretty different back in March and early April. Konstantin names several factors for his argument: he discusses an interesting change in narrative on the Ukraine war in Russia post Putin’s election “win”-suddenly “peace” is being spoken of as a GOOD thing actually and there’s talk that Russia needs to focus on its own needs and not “waste” all this focus on foreign countries.
If you’re interested this is a very good video to learn more about the picture but it’s clear Putin has done a total narrative shift where now the war is barely spoken about. Konstantin has also noted a change in Zelensky’s tone-“If the world wants us to negotiate we will.”
This suggests that he believes he can get more favorable terms now. Konstantin also discusses something else pretty interesting I wasn’t aware of-that China has been kind of pulling back from supporting Russia on a few levels important to Russia’s economic welfare starting in around February Chinese banks started rejecting direct Russian payments.
Over 98% of Chinese banks do not accept direct payments from Russia (msn.com)
Then came April which was the fateful month when Mike Johnson FINALLY agreed to an aide package. IF it’s true that Russia is now losing-and the Kursk incursion certainly seems to suggest that-you have to think that this was the moment Russia lost it. It’s very hard to imagine we’re here today-and Ukraine is where it is today-if Johnson didn’t finally relent to a deal.
FN: To be sure now there’s this narrative which is pretty rich that that Ukraine is so unhappy with Biden it would rather gamble on either Trump or Kamala
Ukraine Might Breathe a Sigh of Relief — Whether Trump or Harris Wins – POLITICO
Which simply doesn’t pass the laugh test. To be sure-there is some legit criticism that Biden has been a little overly cautious in supporting Ukraine-in terms of tying their hands too much in terms of taking the fight to the enemy-though the Biden WH has made clear the Kursk incursion is fine. But how exactly can the GOP criticize Biden for not being strong enough in supporting Ukraine when they delayed aid for eight months? And Trump continues to make all kinds of pro Putin statements-recently praising PUTIN for the hostage deal but not Biden. Then there’s JD Vance. Notably even in his recent widely panned as tedious don’t call it an interview with Elon Musk he repeated the Russian talking point Vance always uses that Biden caused the war by telling Ukraine it could join Nato-which on the one hand it’s not true Biden had not done this it also doesn’t pass the laugh test that this is the main
Now will Harris be a little better on Ukraine-I’m honestly not sure though there are some signs she may be a little more aggressive less cautious-in certain areas. This has been the suggestion Terrell Starr of Black Diplomats.
FN: On a recent Gaslitnation episode
It seems that for Russia to end this war on favorable terms they had to prevent the new aid package for Ukraine and as hard as the Putin wing of the Republican party tried-led by Margery Taylor Greene-they weren’t able to hold it off forever. At just the last moment-when Ukraine still had a chance, Johnson finally agreed.
FN: For which Johnson deserves a good amount of criticism-as he had been told in January that Ukraine couldn’t go longer than April without more aid.
Indeed, any credit Johnson gets for finally getting there has to be counterbalanced with how long it took him to get there-that eight month layover could have been fatal. He waited for the last possible minute. Indeed, another one of the many ill effects 10/7 had on our politics both foreign and domestic was that it seemed to risk sidelining Ukraine as an issue-the narrative at the time was “Ukraine fatigue” to the extent this was ever real it was soley the provenance of a number of members in the Republican party and it seemed clear that many House GOPers would have been happy to table further support for Ukraine while doubling down on support for Israel. Then when the Democrats refused to agree to this they were willing to live with Israel being denied its aid too-underscoring that the thing that seems to animate the GOP House in recent years is less getting what they want but making sure liberals don’t get what they want.
End FN
The final nail in the coffin for Putin’s war was his failure to do a big oil deal with China in June after the elction.
Putin Still Fails to Secure His Much-Desired Deal with China (msn.com)
Meanwhile things were looking very dicey in France a few months ago when Marcon did a snap election-it seemed as if Maria La Pen’s party was on its way to victory. But thanks to an alliance between liberal and leftist parties this vicotry was prevented.
France election 2024 live: NFP wins most seats, Macron’s bloc second, Le Pen’s in third | CNN
Then there was Labour’s big victory in the UK, although honesty the biggest surprise to me is not that the Tories were beaten soundly but that it took 16 years to beat them considering the scale of their misrule.
FN: One thing I’ve never understood is why there’s this prohibition in Britain about even discussing another Brexit vote seeing the amount of lies that were told on the Brexit side in 2016-the Russian collusion, etc-the missing $360 billion pounds for NIH, etc-and considering it was 52-48% why it’s considered an afront to democracy to suggest voters might reconsider-considering that most now say they regret it.
The main narrative seems to be that anyone who suggests Britons didn’t know exactly what they were voting for in 2016 is a condescending elitist suggesting they’re smarter than the voters. But how did anyone really know what they were voting for in 2016 as it was proposal for which the economic effects are highly complex and multi dimensional added to the fact of all the lies told and that the vote was so small? If doing a redo on a referendum is “condescending” then the 2016 vote itself was condescending as there had been a vote in 1975 where a 67% supermajority of the Brits voted for it? Why was it ok to set that aside but not a much loser vote under a haze of confusion and disinformation? But for now, at least there remains a taboo in revisiting it even though most people agree they hate it. Classically British situation-I say this as someone who was born there; I’m a dual citizen…
End FN
So altogether the picture looks very different than it looked just a month ago and much of the year. Now things look a lot better for Team Democracy. The only lose thread remains Israel-Gaza where Netanyahu seems determined to keep it going contrary to even most people in his own cabinet and defense officials-like his US counterpart Trump he needs to stay in power to stay out of prison. Still there’s evidence Biden is willing to push back harder this time-wether or not hard enough remains to be seen.
(1) Shaiel Ben-Ephraim on X: “In the very likely event that Israel and Hamas cannot agree in the summit on Doha, the Biden administration is planning to unveil a new framework for a ceasefire and put immense pressure on both sides to accept it. It is believed that this framework will be based on the…” / X
Nevertheless this is the closet we’ve come yet to an agreement to end the Israeli incursion into Gaza-this coming summit in Doha is being framed as a kind of Camp David Summit 3.0
Meanwhile Mitch MConnell is worried-as well he might be-as if Kamala wins, the Dems hold onto the Senate and take back the House it’s a whole new ballgame-and the old ballgame was McConnell’s obstructionist regime dominated by the GOP Supreme Court he was so relentless in enthroning. If the Dems do win across the board
FN: Frank Luntz is arguing at the present this is the most likely outcome at the moment
we finally have a chance to: Make America a Democracy Again
Mitch McConnell Outlines His Three Fears if Kamala Harris Wins (msn.com)
Before even reading it-honestly, I didn’t need to read it-to know his biggest fear is ending the filibuster.
“The first thing they’ll do is get rid of the [Senate] filibuster,” he said.
Several Democrats advocate for ending the filibuster, the Senate’s procedural tactic for blocking or delaying legislation by extending debate and requiring a supermajority to end it.”
Of course they will-if they don’t do this it’s malpractice. Indeed a recent piece by Nate Cohn-unintentionally-touches on the centrality of ending the filibuster to the Democrats achieving anything in their own agenda
Ms. Harris is a new face; to some extent, she might help satisfy the electorate’s desire for change, simply by being someone other than Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden. But she is still part of the Biden administration; she will be hobbled by many of the same challenges faced by Mr. Biden, and it’s not clear whether she is better positioned to overcome them. To do so, she would probably need to offer an optimistic and hopeful vision for the future, backed by a plausible agenda — something that her 2020 campaign largely failed to accomplish.
In fairness to Ms. Harris, it would be challenging for any Democrat today to advance a clear agenda for the future. Mr. Biden struggled to do so in his re-election campaign. The party has held power for almost 12 of the last 16 years, and it has exhausted much of its agenda; there aren’t many popular, liberal policies left in the cupboard. As long as voters remain dissatisfied with the status quo and the Democratic nominee, a campaign to defend the system might not be the slam dunk Democrats once thought it was
If Harris Is the Nominee, It Still Won’t Be Easy to Beat Trump – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Above I referenced Silver’s comment in a podcast episode with New Liberal about the idea that liberals can’t simply run against the GOP ever winning the WH again as a long term strategy. On its face that seems a reasonable point BUT then I argued that what’s interesting is that going by how voters have actually voted starting in 1992 it’s arguable that’s how they have voted-they’ve voted as if it’s a pretty big gamble to ever entrust the GOP to power again-indeed this is also how they’ve voted for Senate since about 2000 but the obscurantist Senate electoral math which gives such disproportionate power to small less populous states obscures this as the EC obscures this at the Presidential level.
However, Cohn inadvertently touches on another long term problem Democrats have had which has led to much of the IMO over the top fulminations against the allegedly dastardly “neoliberal Democratic Establishment.” Because while it’s true that the Democrats since 2008 have had power 12 of 16 years AT THE PRESIDENTIAL level-part of Cohn’s problem though is he ignores Congress, a party which controls the WH but not Congress is already greatly limited on what they can do unless they’re willing to be pretty aggressive at the executive power game and Dem “institutionalist” types have been more reticent than Trump was during his 4 years-the second part of Cohn’s second sentence in his final paragraph is NOT at all true-liberal progressive policies have hardly been “exhausted” quite the opposite.
No offense intended to Cohn but clearly he’s not someone deeply steeped in the weeds of policy-as, of course, most voters aren’t. The reason that it’s quite untrue that liberal progressive policies have been exhausted is because to pass a progressive agenda the Democrats need not just the WH but both Houses of Congress.
If you go look at the last 16 years since the start of Obama’s first term in early 2009, the Democrats have held the Presidency and both Houses of Congress only twice during that time-the first two years in Obama’s term until the huge GOP Tea Party wave election of 2010, then they had the first two years of Biden’s Administration. In this case the Dems actually greatly outperformed historical precedent in an off year election actually adding a seat to the Senate and only barely losing the House by a tiny margin. But that’s enough to end any ability of the party to control the agenda as the House is now led by the GOP Speaker and Committee Chairmen and Chairwomen.
So during this 16 year period the Dems only had even the most basic prerequisite of passing a liberal progressive agenda in 4 years. But even in those 4 years it’s the Democrats’ advantage was not as straight forward as you might assume-because the Left has wrongly assumed some dastardly nefarious treachery on the part of the Dem establishment in those short windows the Dems did technically have full control-particularly in Obama’s first two years. With Biden though by July 21 many of the Left-at least the Online Left-suffered from some fairly chronic Biden Derangement Syndrome-this contempt was less about his actual legislative record-some of which have even conceded he did surprisingly well in terms of a liberal progressive scorecard considering how narrow his majority was.
FN: Much of it was around Israel-Gaza and then the whole age thing became such a meme.
The first Obama two years has taken on a certain mythology among the Left-aka the Bernie or Bro cum Bernie or Busters, the Tankies… 2009-10 proved the perversity of the Establishment in not passing their dream progressive agenda. And I do think there are significant ways in which Obama wasn’t aggressive enough-there are issues in terms of tactics regarding process that could have been better-particularly how he took Chuck Grassley’s word on it that the GOP was willing to seriously negotiate a healthcare plan so long as he didn’t pursue a public option . Ironically-as these folks have all this Clinton Derangement Syndrome but Hillary might have done better in 2009-10 as she would have seen it coming at least.
She had seen what GOP obstruction had done to do to Bill in 1994l, indeed she had warned in 2008 against Obama’s “celestial choirs singing”-as usual responding with prose to Obama’s poetry: “I know how tough this is going to be” to no avail.
Clinton’s ’08 slaps still sting Obama – POLITICO
The Time Hillary Was Right About Obama in 2008 – The Atlantic
Honestly there was always something dubious about Obama’s narrative-“there is not Red state America or Blue state America there is only the United States of America.” This Obama big idea of dialogue, bipartisanship, of rolling up your sleeves and WORKING TOGETHER was what one the election for him what made him a two term President-again it’s all about being at the right place at the right time. The right time for Obama was that speech he gave that night at the Kerry DNC convention, that night he gave the speech that would lead to him being a two term Presidency. But the narrative was always somewhat dubious. Mitch McConnell seemed to refute it every day.
There are some who argue that what is going on in 2024 with Kamala Harris is not just similar to Obama 2008 but perhaps even greater. And I’m open to this idea. The hope, joy, and indeed euphoria of the Kamala-Walz base is different in kind. The Obama hope and change of 2008 was based on this notion of a politics that is above politics of a kind of Immaculate Conception of politics, that Obama will by himself magically bring us to a post partisan era-sort of like Joe Biden was a bridge as promised but wrongly imagined his victory as bringing an “epiphany” to US politics and even to Mitch McConnell’s Republican party.
I’m confident of the future of the Harris-Walz base because I think that this base of Democratic voters is not the one in 2008 which dreamed it could win without fighting, political victory without political combat.
The Kamala base of today has been through the wars of the Trump Era which now knows all too well that Hillary was right in 2008 when she declared:
“I could stand up here and say: let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified,” Clinton said, voice dripping with contempt long since discarded.
“The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know that we should do the right thing, and the world would be perfect,” Clinton added. “Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this will be. You are not going to wave a magic wand…”
Clinton’s ’08 slaps still sting Obama – POLITICO
And this is what the Democratic party has slowly learned the hard way these last 16 years.
And this book which has so far only taken just under 7 years.
For whatever reason in this last hopefully truly final chapter of this book it’s interesting that Nate Silver has come u repeatedly. But I have to admit I find it pretty fascinating that Silver counterpoises Center Left liberals like me-perhaps he means the elites as opposed to mere voters like myself?-when I personally have nothing against The River per se. In 2007-2008 I actually tried my hand in some activities from Nate’s River.
I actually made a few dollars shorting Bank of America in 2008-the analysts kept making buy calls on the banks when it was clear to me they were primed to tank soon and did end up making $8500 on an initial $2,500 worth of BAC puts. Indeed I had tried my own hand at online poker in 2006 before the GOP Congress banned it.
The argument seems to be that The River has a different attitude towards risk-they thrive on it.
There is also a personality cluster that can be found in the River. These traits are a little bit more self-explanatory. People in The River are trying to beat the market. In sports betting, the average player loses money because the house takes a cut of every bet. So if you follow the consensus, you’ll eventually go broke. Investing is more forgiving; just putting your money in index funds still has a positive expected value. Still, professional traders are trying to do better than the market-average return.
So part of the job of people in The River inherently involves being critical of consensus thinking, often to the point of being contrarian. Silicon Valley in particular is proud of its contrarianism—although it can be conformist in its own way. Some people in The River can turn these traits off in interpersonal settings, but others can have a hard time. It’s not a coincidence many Riverians like to get in fights about politics on the Internet.”
Relatedly, people in The River are often intensely competitive. They’re so competitive, in fact, that they make decisions that can be irrational, gambling even once they’re essentially already set for life (think about Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter when he was then the world’s richest person and one of its most admired). If you haven’t gambled against other people before, I have to tell you: it can be quite stimulating. Winning money feels good, feeling as though you’ve outsmarted an opponent feels good, and when the two coincide, your brain is literally flooded with dopamine. It’s no surprise that people chase the rush, sometimes to their own demise.
Finally, I put risk tolerance in the personality cluster because being willing to break from the herd and go against the consensus is certainly not the safest professional path. Entrepreneurs tend to have high levels of openness to experience and low levels of neuroticism, the “Big 5” personality traits that correlate best with risk tolerance.
Poker Pros, Crypto Kings, and Tech Titans: Nate Silver’s Guide to “The River” | Vanity Fair
I myself certainly get the appeal of this kinds of preferences and tendencies I clearly have some of them myself-just in the short time I played at some River activities in 2007-2008 I experienced some of these moments-certainly had a Dopamine high after making a 330% gain by betting against the consensus I was seeing in favor of the bank stocks on CNBC in late 2008. If I have any issue with The River it may simply be the reality that as a recently deactivated Doordash driver I can’t really afford to play it. Though as I discussed above, I did put-inspired by Silver’s dares for people to bet their conviction-a few dollars on Walz and it was a nice rush when he actually was the nominee.
But why The River has an issue with liberal Democrats like me-I don’t see why that should be. In my mind as a liberal I don’t have any principled issue with rich people so long as they pay their taxes and do what they can to be decent corporate citizens.
UPDATE: Welcome Nate Silver
The biggest gain is in Pennsylvania — from Biden’s 28 percent to Harris’s 59 percent — which is obviously a huge win for Democrats given that Pennsylvania is the most likely tipping-point state. (Maybe she didn’t need Josh Shapiro after all.)
Where Harris has improved the most on Biden (natesilver.net)
As I discussed above this idea was what made me consider Walz-I came to suspect she could win PA without Shapiro so why not play to the guy whose own vibes best match the moment?
End UPDATE
Honestly much less than coming down on the activities of the River my concern is that the Dems pursue policies that fix the low wage epidemic we’ve suffered in this country for over 20 years. That’s what the Dems hopefully focus on after-they actually restore democracy-by ending the filibuster and… what’s next? Let’s go back to Mitch McConnell’s top three fears list.
HIs first fear was rightly the end of the filibuster. Number 2 and 3:
McConnell said his second concern about a Harris presidency was that “you’ll have two new states: D.C., Puerto Rico. That’s four new Democratic senators in perpetuity.”
Many Democratic lawmakers support statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Harris has previously signed onto statehood legislation in Congress.
Puerto Rico, an unincorporated U.S. territory, will vote in November on a nonbinding measure regarding its statehood. Harris has not yet stated her stance on the matter.
McConnell said his third fear was that Democrats would try to pack the Supreme Court, referring to expanding the number of justices on the bench.
President Joe Biden recently outlined his vision for Supreme Court reform, which did not include adding more justices. Harris has said she supports the president’s reforms.
McConnell said his second concern about a Harris presidency was that “you’ll have two new states: D.C., Puerto Rico. That’s four new Democratic senators in perpetuity.”
Many Democratic lawmakers support statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Harris has previously signed onto statehood legislation in Congress.
Puerto Rico, an unincorporated U.S. territory, will vote in November on a nonbinding measure regarding its statehood. Harris has not yet stated her stance on the matter.
McConnell said his third fear was that Democrats would try to pack the Supreme Court, referring to expanding the number of justices on the bench.
President Joe Biden recently outlined his vision for Supreme Court reform, which did not include adding more justices. Harris has said she supports the president’s reforms.
I’m all for statehood for DC and Puerto Rico-it’s only right for them to get full representation-after all this was what we fought the Revolutionary war with Britain about…
But packing the Court is a higher priority. First end the filibuster then expand the court-without 1 you never get to 2. As for Kamala my assumption is she’l support expanding the court. She did support it in 2020-actually she was a little more careful but did express openness to the idea.
Harris Has Expressed Being “Open” to Supreme Court Expansion | Truthout
But I suspect she’ll support it if the Congressional Dems support it strongly.
FN: Again this is why I have great hope from Adam Schiff’s Senate campaign as he’ll be an important voice off the bat in the Senate next year for these essential priorities.
Again my optimism for both success in November, and for Kamala Harris’s Presidency is pretty much boundless at this point. I do think as President she will do something special for our country. A major part of this will be both being the first female candidate and not just Black but biracial. While Trump keeps sticking his foot in his mouth over it, I believe she will be able to make record numbers of Americans feel seen and represented. What we are on the cusp of I believe is a genuine multiracial democracy-this has been what the last 58 years of partisan warfare has been abbout-starting with 1966 after the tide started turning against LBJ and the explosion of the Watts riots, et.
For almost 60 years the country has fought this political war but I believe with Kamala’s victory we can finally return to a politics lacking in toxicity again. You’re already seeing how much she is bringing people together within the party. Her and Walz.
I continue to be astounded-in the best kind of way-how much goodwill Tim Walz has wrought. I was just watching yet another episode of Sam Seder’s Majority Report with Krystal Ball on and there all Coconut Pilled and even more Walz Pilled. I mean this is the Online Left. Sam Seder to be clear was never Bernie or Bust-this is not the Nazbol Left but both Ball and Seder’s co-host had pledged to never vote for Biden after Gaza. But they are all in on Kamala but even more all in on Walz. Her and Walz have already squared the circle in garnering so much support on the Online Left. As we saw above, her choice of Walz united everyone in the party between AOC and Joe Manchin
I think only during her term will we finally realize just how toxic our politics have been so long-that we’d forgotten its’ possible to feel good about politics and government. That’s by design-the agenda of the GOP since Reagan was to insist that government doesn’t work and can do nothing right and then prove it when they take it over.
FN: Indeed, it’s just recently reached beyond 60 years since Reagan’s GE speech at the 1964 Convention-‘they say we’ve never had it so good.’
Turns out THEY were right-the postwar era between 1945 and the mid 1970s was the Golden Age of the US if not world economy-what leftists rather caustically call “the Fordist Era.”
In a fairly fascinating book, Tutt refers to FDR as a “Soft Bonapartist” as liberals we CAN note that the “Soft Bonapartist” a la Fordist Era had the convenience of being very successful. Indeed it was not untrue to say in 1964-1965 that we “never had it so good”-the postwar, FDR-LBJ Era was a time of record prosperity with a rising tide that lifted if not every boat a great many. While the US has always had the self image of a middle class nation, in this period it became more of a reality with a broad middle class seeing a rising standard of living-including among African Americans. Then the multi racial civil rights-led by MLK but joined by many White liberals-fight to end Jim Crow culminated in 1965 when LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act.
Indeed, Tutt later admits this himself.
Find quotes.
But all this Reagan. Barry Goldwater and the Republican Right looked askance at-they didn’t like how good we had it. This book has detailed these last 60 years-Nixon upon stealing the election in 1968 blackmailed Fortas off the Supreme Court and the GOP has controlled the SJC ever since. The recent outrage of Trump’s Absolute Immunity is just the latest in this legacy, this 60 year GOP war against the US middle class. A Harris win-along with a Dem majority in Congress-could finally get us back to where we were in 1965
So my guess is that 2025-2026 will be a disaster for the Right as Americans will finally realize what they’ve been stealing from us all these years-government CAN work and does help once you take it away from those trying to drown it in a bathtub.
Silver says he and his friends at The River are contrarians-the irony is that wether or not his framing puts me on the side of The Village or not I too am a contrarian. I feel like I’ve been one for 32 years since Bill Clinton’s near landslide win ended the 24 year period of GOP domination of the Presidency. Again I always liked Bill-his was hte first election I was old enough to vote in. But I liked Hillary even better. I was all for Bill and after he won his first term was all in on him winnig his second.
Still at the back of my mind I’d always hoped Hillary would have her day. But in 2008 the country wasn’t ready and in 2016 they still weren’t ready for Hillary despite me being ready since 1992.
It was notable how big the cheers were for Hillary at the DNC when she spoke last Monday. Indeed there were so loud it delayed the start of her speech.
AS HRC noted: something is happening in America
One point Peggy Noonan got right was that many women who were with Hillary 2016 feel this is THEIR moment for vindication.
No question a large part of the extended applausie and enthusiastic reception HRC got that night was about this-she contextualized this campaign.
CF:
Place above
Hillary Clinton gets her Trump revenge moment – Live Updates – POLITICO
Meanwhile Kamala has seen her approval rise to 50% or better in many polls. This is a pretty seismic shift as during the #TrumpEra the rule of physics has basically kept everyone under 50%-perhaps Harris’s-and even more Walz’s-positive approval polls are symptoms of moving past the toxic #TrumpEra.
So I feel in a sense like a long term contrarian whom it seems like finally the consensus is finally getting closer to my position. In 1992 at a time when I supported Bill but supported HRC even more many-women as well as men-that Hillary was too uppity.
I had read Susan Faludi’s Backlash as a rather terrifying cautionary tale-particularly vivid for me was the story of how thanks to Bob Bork and Friends a woman had been forced to carry a pregnancy to term that killed her. Then after she was dead they brought out the fetus-which had also died-in a baby’s baseball uniform to justify condemning her to death.
FN:
Now post Dobbs this is a normal occurrence-many women have been condemned to death after being compelled to bring a pregnancy to term that endangers their own life.
Yet at the time after a college class I took prescirbed this book many female classmates took shots at Faludi as if she were the unreaonable one. The Backlash was real and not just men.
In 2008 Hillary lost. In 2016 she lost and when I raised concerns about Biden regarding the fact he once supported an amendment in 1982 against abortion-then touted as a replacement-I was told by a female fellow Twitterer that as I male I was trying to tell women what to do in raising concerns that Biden didn’t have a great record on choice!
After Comey and Friends stole it from HRC in 2016 I discovered Kamala in 2017 at that Senate Judiciary hearing. In 2020 I supported her for President . But many of my fellow Dems-women as well as men, and I’d spoken to enough of them-believed that 2016 made it too risky to nominate a woman at the top of the ticket. However after Biden won she was selected for Veep-this was the Faustian bargain-there was a lack of confidence Kamala could win in her own right but part of the-implicit-quid pro quo that Biden had with women and voters of color was he chose Kamala for the second slot.
In 2024 I planned to “stick to the plan”-as many Dem voters, particularly Black voters were arguing-presuming it wasn’t the time for her yet.
FN: See above.
Then the debate happened and everything changed. It was amazing how quickly opinions can change. Again it’s about the right time. For years the assumption in politics is the country wouldn’t elect an African American President. In 2020 it was still presumed it wouldn’t elect a woman. Ever since Kamala’s tough second debate in 2019 she’d been pronounced a Bad Candidate and little in the coverage of last 4 years suggested otherwise.
Then that debate happened. In 2020 nobody really cared that Biden was according to Trump running a campaign “from his basement”-suddenly a lot of people cared. Suddenly a switch was flicked somewhere and voting for a woman for President was seen as no big deal. This how big changes and transformations always happen. Me I feel like a long time contrarian who suddenly discover a lot of people agreeing with me.
Unlike Nate Silver perhaps I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth and after years of fighting the illusion that the earth is flat suddenly change sides now that the consensus is finally where I have been the last 30 years just to continue to be contrarian.
Epilogue: 9/20/24
So this is FINALLY the end of the book. For the final hurrah I figured I’d make my November 5 prediction. Silver of course has been on and on for weeks on how close this election is and how either candidate could win-it’s practically a coin flip. And-of course-he’s been getting a lot of push back-these days it’s rare for him to send out a tweet that’s NOT ratioed.
Just on Thursday-yesterday 9/19 that is-he was complaining about all these crazy members of The Village on liberal Twitter sending all these crazy tweets.
Have you ever been to Milwaukee? I’m probably going to get some unsubscribes from Milwaukee-area readers, so let me just say up front that I like Milwaukee. Milwaukee’s great. My parents met at the University of Wisconsin, so I’ve always felt some affinity for the Badger State. But when I used to live in Chicago, I found that I’d wind up going to Milwaukee only about once a year. The reason is that it took about a year to forget that the cost of going to Milwaukee — booking a train ticket and a hotel for a couple of nights, plus the time it took to get there — wasn’t quite worth it to do so often when Chicago was also pretty great, and great in somewhat the same ways that Milwaukee is. (For instance, having a lakefront and a lively bar scene.)
Similarly, it takes about three years to forget about the emotional cost of being an avatar for people’s election-related anxieties. That’s a little harder to place a price on. And conveniently — or inconveniently — elections only happen once every four years. (Midterms don’t count: people aren’t nearly so insane about them.)
I thought I could thread the needle with a subscriber newsletter, and particularly by putting the probabilistic component of the model behind a paywall. We’d keep the probabilities our little secret among a self-selected and sympathetic group. But that part didn’t really work.
Or maybe the problem is that it worked too well.
I never expected the sort of traffic or subscriptions that we’ve wound up getting at Silver Bulletin. We’re the #3 Substack in our category and probably pretty close to that in the overall Substack ecosystem since I’m reliably informed that our category (“U.S. Politics”) is by far the biggest category. Without getting into specifics, I’ve never been so widely read, and the conversion from drive-by readers to paid subscriptions has gone well, too.
But that means the self-selected, let’s-keep-it-between-ourselves plan was doomed from the start. The paid subscribers are generally a reasonably well-behaved group, but they make up a minority of the audience for any post. And that’s before we get into how the Silver Bulletin forecasts are discussed on social media. With the audience that we have, the paywalled components of the model frequently “leak” and there isn’t really enough time in the day in an election year to police this. On Twitter in particular, there can be complete context collapse. People treat probabilistic predictions as deterministic ones, e.g. if Trump goes from a 48 percent chance of winning Wisconsin to a 52 percent chance, you’ll get a lot of Nate Silver is calling Wisconsin for Trump!!! even though the forecast expresses a high degree of uncertainty and nothing in the model has really changed. And that’s on a good day. There are a lot of partisans — some acting in good faith and some not — who can become literally conspiratorial about the model.
(23) Don’t let randomness make a fool of you – by Nate Silver
As I discussed above he’s right about 2016-the conventional wisdom-as a Nietzschean I tend to feel this is a contradiction in terms-completely missed the idea that he made a probalistic forecast that held up pretty well-alas. On his larger point though I’m pretty skeptical: ” We’d keep the probabilities our little secret among a self-selected and sympathetic group. But that part didn’t really work..”
I’m pretty skeptical that he really tried to keep it a secret among his alleged self-selected and sympathetic group. If he really wanted to he wouldn’t send all these snarky tweets on often daily basis clearly meant to troll liberals. As for his self-selected and sympathetic group-I think even this is a little less simple than he’d like to think.
“But that means the self-selected, let’s-keep-it-between-ourselves plan was doomed from the start. The paid subscribers are generally a reasonably well-behaved group, but they make up a minority of the audience for any post.”
If you’ve followed me throughout this entire final chapter how sympathetic would you say I am of Nate Silver? But I’m actually a paid subscriber-keep your friends close and your…
Probably a nontrivial number of his paid subscribers are the same libs ratioing him all day on Twitter: Indeed it’s plausible his snarky tweets actually jack up his numbers-so at the end of the day he’s crying all the way to the bank. From his standpoint it’s probably good to generate controversy-and he knows the scorned #ResistanceLibs are probably a large part of his own readership-including perhaps his paid audience he assumes are more sympathetic. At the end of the day wether they are sympathetic or not perhaps matters less than if they pay.
He then went on with his common refrain:
Look, the election is probably going to be close. The Biden-Trump election might not have been close, but Democrats were smart enough to replace their candidate, and the Harris-Trump election probably will be close.”
Again, on one hand it’s probably good for Nate’s business for there to be constant headlines that the election is close-obviously you’d expect the modelers to get better traffic if it’s believed the election is close while controversy about an alleged close election further drives traffic. I’m not saying this is why he says its close just noting the correlations. I’m also not saying it’s not why.
What’s interesting though is Trump’s numbers are about where Biden’s were when he dropped out yet Silver thought he had almost no chance-though in 2016 he lampooned Sam Wang for giving Clinton a 98% chance, Silver hasn’t sounded as if he thought Biden’s chances in 2024 were much higher than 2%. Yet Trump’s about where Biden was. Indeed, Trump’s been down by 2-3 points much more consistently and longer than Biden was-his numbers only hit this level in the aftermath of June 27 and weeks of fallout with large numbers in his own party publicly suggesting he should drop out, followed by Trump being shot and the RNC convention. Indeed it was only that last Thursday before Biden would drop out that his numbers tanked a little-prior to they’d actually been holding up pretty well-state as well as national.
In the last few weeks it certainly has been notable that Silver’s model has been considerably more cautious about Kamala’s chances than other similarly prominent models.
FN:
End FN
End FN
FN: Regarding the aside about a connection to a political gambling company Silver has had a stock answer:
Many people reading Silver’s forecast tend to place great importance on whether their preferred candidate is a slight favorite (which makes them feel relieved) or a slight underdog (which makes them feel anxious and/or angry). Silver always insists that that’s the wrong way to think about it and that such a race can very easily go either way, but few take his advice.
Accordingly, the uproar over the current forecast, from people who want Harris to win, has been quite pronounced. “Who bought #NateSilver and how much did he go for?” actress Bette Midler posted on X. Baseless conspiracy theories have been hatched that Silver’s recently announced gig as an adviser to the online prediction market Polymarket is spurring him to do the bidding of right-wing billionaires and skew his analysis against Harris. (Silver has strongly denied those claims. “Peter Thiel isn’t paying me any more than he’s paying someone who works for Facebook or Lyft,” he recently posted on X.)
What happened to Nate Silver | Vox
Not directly-though Polymarket IS paying him and Thiel funded Polymarket so this answer isn’t dispositive. Wether or not there’s a conflict of interest I don’t know-you could argue there’s at least one of appearances… which doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a conflict in fact.
FN: Vox uses the same title-What happened to Nate Silver-the New Republic used in 2019 though Vox breaks little new ground-if any-and largely accepts Silver’s narrative for the last word.
indeed, speaking of headlines, Nate certainly has a fan in none other than Donald Trump.
I mean Silver DID have Trump’s odds of victory very recently as high as 64%. OTOH Silver has been criticizing folks for making a great deal about the difference between 40% and 60% odds but OTOH he himself has often picked Twitter fights and made heavy weather over small differences in various models-again, above we looked at the shade he through at 538 in 2020 for allegedly being too bullish on Biden.
He or at least his model HAS recently seemed to have a pro Trump bias or at least tendency since a few days after the DNC convention. One controversy has been his aggressive adjustment of post convention polls-he argues this is simply what his model has always done it’s how it’s programmed. But it has led to some pretty counterintuitive results
Bonier also pointed out that in Wisconsin Silver’s own average showed Harris up by 2.8% at this point yet he gave her just a 50-50 chance of winning the state.
Even now though with the DNC a month in the rearview mirror there remain these striking anomalies in Silver’s model. Even now he gives Trump a 61% chance of winning NC even though in the average he’s up by .1%-yep, a tenth of a point-indeed you see a similar dynamic in GA and AZ in Silver’s model today, September 21.
Kamala is down less than a point in both states yet Trump gets a 64% probability of victory complements of Silver’s model
FN:
Silver Bulletin 2024 presidential election forecast (natesilver.net)
UPDATE: Silver, of course, had yet another primer on his model yesterday. And ironically as I’d just yesterday morning been pointing it out, he notes that the average only has her down by .1%
Could the insane revelations about Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson make a difference to the presidential race in North Carolina? Well, Trump leads by only 0.1 percentage point in our polling average there, so it wouldn’t need to make much of a difference to swing the outcome. I generally don’t believe in “reverse coattails” — the top-of-the-ticket can effect down-ballot races, but usually not the other way around. Still, Harris is running ads based on Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement of Robinson, and maybe you can tell a story where some suburban center-right voters sit out the election, whereas they’d have turned out for a more normal GOP gubernatorial candidate.
“Nonetheless, the model is just a bit skeptical of the polling here. Despite the tie in the current polling averages, it has Trump as the slight favorite instead of a true 50/50 race based on the other factors it considers. But it isn’t crazy to think North Carolina could be bluer than Georgia — the states are similar but not identical, as North Carolina is whiter and was more D-leaning than Georgia in elections before 2020. ”
Speaking of GA:
Georgia is another state where the polls have been highly accurate — and that’s bad news for Harris since as you can see in the table, there’s a lot of Trump +2s in the recent data. In fact, there hasn’t been a single poll showing Harris ahead by 3 or more points all cycle long. Still, there’s a 9 percent chance that Georgia winds up being the tipping-point state, as it very nearly was in 2020: it could substitute for Michigan or Wisconsin if the Blue Wall splits its votes. That could lead to a highly messy outcome for the country because of a decision by the state’s Trump-sympathetic Election Board to require a hand count of ballots.”
I mean sure but again the AVERAGE is just .9%. Also of course, Trump led in very few polls in 2016. Yes he DIDN’T win the popular vote but the margin of 2.1% was lower than most of the polls during the cycle-very few had her leading by that small an amount-it’s called a polling error. Just like in 2020 very few had Biden only up by 4. Seeing as Trump is leading by less than a point in these three Sunbelt states it would take a pretty small error to…
Indeed, while Nate post the convention always finds a framing most advantageous to Trump-again he repeatedly refers to the polling errors of 2016 and 2020-another way to view the swing state averages is that not only does she lead in 4 of the 7 swing states-putting aside Florida which has notably tightened recently though, of course, Trump remains a big favorite there-but her leads in the states she leads are more robust than Trump’s leads. Silver declares yet again this is the closet race EVER pretty much.
In 16 years of running election forecasts, I’ve never seen such a close election.
Our polling averages in seven swing states — in alphabetical order: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — are within 2 percentage points. A systematic polling error, or a shift in the race in the final six weeks of the campaign, could result in one candidate sweeping all of these states. In our simulations this morning, Kamala Harris swept all seven of these battlegrounds 20 percent of the time, and Donald Trump did in 23 percent of the simulations.
But that leaves a majority of cases where the election will probably be close, and it’s worth sorting through the electoral math in case it is. So that’s what today’s newsletter is about. It’s going to be rather prosaic…”
Well-first of all, she’s actually up by 2.4% in Michigan-obviously not the main point but… More importantly and notably it’s much closer in the swing states Trump is leading than Kamala’s states-he leads in these 3 Sunbelt states by less than a point where has her numbers are hovering closer to 2% in the Rustbelt states-there have been a few polls where she leads by 5 in PA the last day to boot…
FN: As of 9/22
So the fact that his model can see more scenarios where Trump sweeps all 7 swing states than Harris is interesting as it will require a smaller polling error for Kamala to sweep all 7 than for Trump.
Overall, I suspect-we’ll know in less than 2 months-his model is a little too pessimistic for Harris-and optimistic for Trump LOL. Again I think the 2016 primary still looms large as he completely discounted Trump’s strength then and has perhaps the last few cycles overcorrected by overestimating it now. In another recent post he argued that this is Trump’s race to lose-though he says Trump may lose it.
(24) This was Trump’s election to lose. And he just might. (natesilver.net)
He does make a fair point on the economy-that I discussed above. While on the macro level the numbers of the Biden Administration have been fairly sterling, disposable income has been stagnant which is pretty important for voters. With all the bs criticism Biden-Harris has gotten over things like inflation or food prices-in the sense while these have been real problems they weren’t caused by Biden AND overall inflation is now tamed, though food prices and other goods remain high-one legitimate criticism of him, which I discussed above, is that he let expanded unemployment benefits expire too early
FN: Personally I think they should have been permanent though the Democrats lacked the votes to get this done the last 4 years
and unlike what Harris had said in June 2020, he’d only done the relief payments for one month. While I’m not an Andrew Yang fan he did have a very good idea-he had 1 good idea and many forgettable ideas-that is the UBI.
In the long term I believe UBI and/or the JG-Job Guarantee-is going to be necessary to deal with the supermajority of Americans still living paycheck to paycheck. However, having said all of this, recent polls have actually shown Kamala is now tied with Trump on who is better for the economy.
But I think overall, Silver is missing some things relevant to the fundamental picture. One is incumbency which as we have seen he claims against all evidence is not a major advantage-history shows it’s a massive advantage. Then there’s the Dobbs Effect which neither he nor his model seem very impressed with. Despite the fact that as Bulwark notes the Dobbs Effect has been a force multiplier for the Democrats the last 2 years.
FN: find link.
As Charlie Sykes noted back in July, 2022 the Dobbs Backlash is real.
(24) The Dobbs Backlash is Real – by Charlie Sykes – The Bulwark
But for the most part Silver hasn’t been REAL impressed with the very real Dobbs Backlash.
Indeed, if there’s anyone that likely typifies The Village in Silver’s mind it’s probably Simon Rosenberg-for 4 years Silver has spoken snidely of “Hopium.” In this vein, Rosenberg recently tweeted thus:
No doubt Silver would point out that Rosenberg only features the polls Harris is leading. No doubt that’s always been what he does-Rosenberg calls his own website “Hopium” and it seems a big part of his goal is to give Dem voters ground to hope. Now of course more important than feeling optimistic the Democrats will win is wether they do in fact win. All the hopium in the world will be worthless if she loses November 5.
And if Rosenberg focuses soley on good Dem polls most polls post debate have been good-there have been like 2 post debate national polls-outside Rasmussen-that haven’t shown Harris leading and it just happens that Silver has given those two polls the greatest weight in his average-X and Sienna.
Even in the case of Sienna it was notable that while it showed the race a tie it was a 1 or 2 point gain for Harris relative to the poll they released the Sunday before the debate. It’s also notable he doesn’t give the Sienna PA state poll as much weight which showed her up 4 points-as it had back in August. Why is Sienna the most reliable poll in the world-even if it’s an outlier-in national polls but less important in a state poll-according to Nate the likeliest tipping point state?
If you can criticize Simon Rosenberg for looking only at the 10 post debate polls that show her with a lead not the two which don’t how about Silver giving the 2 that don’t show her leading more weight than the other 10 that do?
And Rosenberg’s actual argument on 2024 is persuasive He focuses on two major fundamentals that Silver completely ignores: Dobbs and as discussed above, the fact that the Republican party has won the popular vote only once since 1988-again that by a whisker in 2004 which wouldn’t have been possible without first winning stealing the 2000 election when W did NOT win the popular vote.
Neither of these pretty notable factors are given much thrift by Silver if at all. So, it was pretty ironic when he tweeted thusly the other day:
It’s just pretty ironic that suddenly he thinks history matters seeing as he completely ignores the last two years of post Dobbs history-for some reason that’s all those elections the Dems have won on the referendums, etc are irrelevant as this is a Presidential election which is supposedly not just a different animal but a different species to hear Silver and other conventionally minded pundits tell it; he completely ignores the fact that GOP has won the popular vote once since 1988-that gives his model no pause-and he completely ignored the very compelling historical evidence on the power of incumbency during the #DumpBiden debate-after the fact he did put out a deep historical excursion that basically misconstrued indeed distorted this history to dismiss this incontrovertible fact.
But the fact that the last two polling errors underestimated Trump-that’s the only history that matters.
And as I try to finally end this heroically long final chapter in this heroically long book I’ve worked on for such a heroically long time-again November 2017-I will finish with a falsifiable prediction of my own.
The problem with the conventional wisdom is that it always prepared to fight the last war. There’s no bigger piece of conventional wisdom today than that since the polls underestimated Trump in 2016 and 2020 there’s a considerable danger they will do so again. This is the problem with CONVENTIONAL wisdom-what Nietzsche would call a contradiction in terms.
It’s important to remember the conventional wisdom of 2016 was that Trump was basically guaranteed to lose as that’s what the story the polls seemed to tell through most of the election-beyond the fact that: he’s Donald Trump! He obviously is entirely unqualified and unsuitable to be President and to elect him would be the cruelest joke the American people could impose on themselves-but then, of course, the British people had just imposed Brexit on themselves so…
In 2020 the story the polls seemed to tell was that Biden was going to win by a very large margin-the final averages had him up close to 9 points as he’d been throughout most the election. Biden did end up winning still comfortably by a little over 4.5 points-though as Silver would point out it was fairly nip and tuck in the swing states.
But in retrospect, if there had been a betting market on predicting the polling error it would have been logical to take the under. History shows the largest polling errors tend to happen when the averages show a very wide lead-the biggest error I believe was 1996 which had Clinton up by 16 whereas he ended up winning by “only” 8 points.
2024 is quite different. The conventional wisdom sees it from the context of 2016 and 2020 but what no one is talking about is 2022 and Dobbs. The conventional wisdom in 2022 was very bullish on the GOP-“Red Wave!”-and this if anything aged less well than 2016 and 2020 except nobody talks about it too much-just as no one in the mainstream media-Nate’s Purple Indigo Blob-has spoken of Hillary’s emails ever again-after they’d served their purpose and ensured THAT WOMAN never occupy the Oval Office.
As to why no one discusses it-it comes down a lot of what makes the mainstream media tick: the pack mentality. The beauty of running with the pack for the media is that if everyone is wrong basically no one is wrong and no one will ever be called out or held accountable.
So while everyone is looing at 2024 through the lens of 2016/2020 no one seems to get that Dobbs changed everything. Here in 2024 if you could bet on the direction of the polling error I’d definitely recommend the over. Part of this is just simple logic-if the polls show as they did in 2020 Biden up in the high single digits the smart money was the under-just like in the NFL while overwhelming favorites usually win they frequently fall short of lines that are too large.
But here in 2024 post Dobbs where the current polling averages show her up close to 3 points?
FN: According to Silver the average polling miss has been about 3.2%-indeed Silver here states that the polls weren’t great in 2020 but then that’s pretty normal. Uh-trust the polls?!
The Polls Weren’t Great. But That’s Pretty Normal. | FiveThirtyEight
End FN.
Think of it this way-IF you could bet on O/U on the polling average -you can’t as far as I’m aware, alas-AND you know that historically the polling error is about 3 points then which would you think is more likely?
That in reality she’s up more like 6 points or struggling for a popular vote tie? From my point of view it’s a no-brainer: obviously the over in light once again of the fact that the Republican party has won the popular vote once since 1988.
UPDATE from G Elliot Morris:
Based on the last 28 years of Presidential election history it’s far more plausible she’ll have 350 EVs than a popular vote tie.
And I will finish my heroically long-Herculean?-book with some falsifiable predictions. I believe she will win and that the polling error will be in her favor-unlike the last 2 elections but like Obama in 2012 the error will be in the Dems favor this time.
Ok then but what about the states? My prediction is she wins the three Rustbelt states. Indeed, for more gist for my mill that Silver and his model have being overly leaning in Trump’s favor, for a few weeks his model showed Harris losing the EC by losing PA while winning MI and WI. This too is ironic as in 2016 he’d argued it was very unlikely that Clinton would lose just one of the 3 RB states-they would likely rise and fall together. I will predict the polling error is in her favor-which if the typical error is 2 to 3 points could put her up with a margin of more like 5-6 points.
And I think while she won’t need it if she wins RB she’ll win at least a few of the Sunbelt states and it would not shock me if she runs the table here to-winning GA, AZ, and NC-remember polling errors may average 2-3 points in national elections but at the state level they’re usually bigger and the current averages have Trump leading all 3 states by under 1 point.
Finally I will argue that Florida is a dark horse for a Kamala surprise-Silver himself offers Florida as a half a swing state. The numbers have tightened considerably since she got in the race-as they have in the Sunbelt polls.
Why do I so argue? For a few reasons-the polls have tightened and Rick Scott is suddenly under pressure in his Senate race against Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.
FN: As apparently is-believe it or not and still can’t believe it-Ted Cruz in Texas.
End FN
AND-abortion is on the ballot there-as it is in Arizona AND Montana-which COULD save Jon Tester. Indeed, a big part of my belief in a polling error in Kamala’s favor is once again the Dobbs Effect. While Silver-and most pundits-have said little if anything about Dobbs and just presume a Presidential election is a completely different animal if not species-I’m very curious to see how it may impact these states that have abortion measures on the ballot.
I have to admit to no little skepticism on this assumption by Silver and Friends that the folks who have all been going out to vote in non Presidential elections-by definition anyone who goes out to vote on a referendum is likely more highly motivated than those who show up only for the Presidential-are going to forget they care about abortion because it’s a Presidential election especially as in a number of important states-for the Senate as well as Presidential and blithely vote for Trump not realizing that he’s who outlawed abortion in the first place and it will likely only get worse if he were-God help us-to win again.
So there are my falsifiable predictions-she wins, the polling error is in her favor, she sweeps the RB and wins at least a few Sunbelt states. OTOH my conjectures is she may well run the table in SB as well and could win as a darkhorse in Florida.
Again it’s like Harris’ husband said at one point-it comes down to Dobbs and democracy. Just recently a WSJ article revealed that the Biden WH is now pessimistic on a Gaza ceasefire before the election.
“There’s no chance now of it happening,” an official from an Arab country added shortly after the operation against Hezbollah. “Everyone is in a wait-and-see mode until after the election. The outcome will determine what can happen in the next administration.”
Exclusive | U.S. Officials Concede Middle East Peace Deal Out of Reach During Biden’s Term – WSJ
Everything will be determined in the next administration-ie, everything depends on this election. The future of Gaza, abortion rights, democracy itself much less if Trump ever faces ANY accountability for his crimes.
UPDATE: Similarly as Zelensky makes his big pitch to the UN and the Biden WH for winning the war the big wildcard remains who wins on November 5. Until then you have to expect both Netanyahu and Putin hedge their bets in the hope of a Trump victory.
Volodymyr Zelensky’s Victory Plan for Ukraine: 3 Key Takeaways – Newsweek
Only then will either likely seriously consider what their endgame would look like. Again everything comes down to November 5.
See you on the flipside-that is November 6.
9/22/2024