2024 US Presidential Elections Megathread

[DGuller]

How about this one:  https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/democrats-dishonest-gender-conversation-2024-election/680604/.  I swear I didn't read it until just now, so I didn't take any arguments from there.

During the race, many journalists wrote about the ubiquity—and the grimness—of the Trump ads on trans issues, notably Semafor's David Weigel. But at the time, I was surprised how dismissive many commentators were about their potential effect, given the enormous sums of money involved. My theory was that these ads tapped into a larger concern about Democrats: that they were elitists who ruled by fiat, declined to defend their unpopular positions, and treated skeptics as bigots. Gender might not have been high on voters' list of concerns, but immigration and the border were—and all the same criticisms of Democratic messaging apply to those subjects, too.

[Valmy]

I wasn't dismissive. I knew they were working, I just thought that reflected badly on us. That we just hate and fear trans people so much.

I was glad the Democrats didn't stab the trans people in the back.

They might have found a better way to deal with it than they did but I am glad they didn't just panic and start attacking their own supporters. I don't give a damn how Unpopular those people are, they shouldn't be tossed to the wolves.

As for immigration, that is an issue where the Democrats were politically unable to do the right thing: real immigration reform. And politically unable to do the wrong thing: just cave to the right, because the right wouldn't let them.

Either way they are bad on that issue.

[Valmy]

Anyway this is good. The best time to reflect and reform is right after you lose an election.

This is when all the internal fights can be fought.

[DGuller]

I think the point that every article pasted here made was that it it's not the what that mattered, but the how.  As Fareed Zakaria put it, you can't fight for liberal ideas, no matter how virtuous, with illiberal means.

[Admiral Yi]

I was glad the Democrats didn't stab the trans people in the back.

They might have found a better way to deal with it than they did but I am glad they didn't just panic and start attacking their own supporters. I don't give a damn how Unpopular those people are, they shouldn't be tossed to the wolves.

This is very zero sum rhetoric.

[grumbler]

People love to be gaslighted.  That's why the Republicans won.

I guess I should've clarified that people hate being gaslighted unsuccessfully.

And the lack of success in gaslighting is because people already hate one gaslighting faction and love the other. Gaslighting doesn't cause distaste. The response to gaslighting reflects distaste. 

[Valmy]

I was glad the Democrats didn't stab the trans people in the back.

They might have found a better way to deal with it than they did but I am glad they didn't just panic and start attacking their own supporters. I don't give a damn how Unpopular those people are, they shouldn't be tossed to the wolves.

This is very zero sum rhetoric.

Is there a way to sell out trans people in a way that is a win-win?

[Admiral Yi]

Is there a way to sell out trans people in a way that is a win-win?

Sell out is by definition a lose.

Did Clinton sell out black people?

[Valmy]

I think the point that every article pasted here made was that it it's not the what that mattered, but the how.  As Fareed Zakaria put it, you can't fight for liberal ideas, no matter how virtuous, with illiberal means.

Sure. I hope lessons were learned.

But whatever they are I just don't want it to be: sell out our supporters. The Democrats did all that in the 1990s and it didn't stop the Republicans beating them later anyway.

[Admiral Yi]

Something I have been thinking about for a while is the role played by stoicism.  The belief that when life deals you lemons, you suck it up and make the best of it.  Very related in my mind to rugged individualism.  No handouts please, I can handle this.

This relate very closely to the emerging consensus view that the optimal political strategy for Democrats is to target the white working class.  A handout conflicts with their self identity.

It also relates to identity politics.  If an oppressed minority bitches about their life sucking the response of the stoic is not going to be, yeah, my life sucks too, let's band together and fight The Man.  It's going to be that y'all are a bunch of whiners. Or in the profound words of P.J. O'Rourke, pull up your pants, put your hat on straight and get a job.

The most successful human rights campaigns were built on stoicism.  Gandhi said we will go to prison and bear it.  We will get our skulls cracked and bear it.  We will get gunned down at Amritsar and bear it.  Eventually you (the British) will see our stoicism and respond to it, because you are good people.  MLK followed the same course.  Our 14 year old daughters will put on their one good Sunday dress and be attacked by dogs and fire hoses and we will bear it.

The left needs to develop more stoicism.  Or at least treat stoicism with more respect.

[Oexmelin]

I don't think Trump's campaigns are built on stoicism.

Edit: Nor was Obama's.

[Oexmelin]

From before the election

Nothing made this clearer to me than Monday's front-page story (gift link) in The New York Times about how the Harris campaign is hunting down the remaining undecided voters in swing states. As Reid Epstein and Shane Goldmacher wrote, "Inside the Delaware headquarters of Ms. Harris's campaign, analysts have spent 18 months curating a list of which television shows and podcasts voters consume in the battleground states. Her team has assigned every voter in these states a 'contactability score' from 0 to 100 to determine just how hard that person will be to reach — and who is best to deliver her closing message. The results are guiding Ms. Harris's media and travel schedule, as well as campaign stops by brand-name supporters. For instance, the movie star Julia Roberts and the basketball great Magic Johnson earned high marks among certain voters, so they have been deployed to swing states."

What is with this mad devotion to turning the messiness of human engagement into something that can be scored with the precision of a Wall Street trader assigning a risk level to a derivative? Well, actually, the analogy is kind of apt, though I'm sure the data whizzes driving the Democratic obsession with fine-tuning paid media think they are doing much holier work than Wall Street quants. The same kind of cold-blooded hubris dominates the decision-making of Future Forward, the $700 million SuperPAC that was first anointed by Biden's team as its designated partner for mega-donors. According to a story a week ago (gift link) by Theodore Schleifer and Shane Goldmacher also in the Times, Future Forward has conducted more than 4 million voter surveys and "ranked the effectiveness of more than 300 ads that were run online and on television on behalf of both candidates — down to a tenth of a percentage point of precision in multiple categories." A tenth of a point of precision is nonsense. People shift in intensity of their opinions all the time. Future Forward, they report, has a "dogmatic belief" in the power of late advertising, and so we are now in the midst of a great field test of that theory, along with the entire notion that it's better to spend hundreds of millions on paid advertising even while leaving grassroots organizations in swing states severely underfunded.

All of this makes me shudder with PTSD about how the smartest people in the room who were also powered by the best data and the most money drove Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign into the trash bin of history. Let's not forget that it wasn't the fault of on-the-ground campaigners in Michigan that caused the Clinton team to ignore the warning signs of Trump's rise. It was data whizzes in Brooklyn who told volunteers to stay in Iowa in the last week because their models showed Clinton winning Michigan by 5 points as late as Election Day. As Isaac Dovere-Smith wrote in Politico in a post-mortem that ought to be required reading for all budding politicos, "The only metric that people involved in the operations say they ever heard headquarters interested in was how many volunteer shifts had been signed up — though the volunteers were never given the now-standard handheld devices to input the responses they got in the field, and Brooklyn mandated that they not worry about data entry. Operatives watched packets of real-time voter information piled up in bins at the coordinated campaign headquarters. The sheets were updated only when they got ripped, or soaked with coffee. Existing packets with notes from the volunteers, including highlighting how much Trump inclination there was among some of the white male union members the Clinton campaign was sure would be with her, were tossed in the garbage."

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[DGuller]

I don't think Trump's campaigns are built on stoicism.

Edit: Nor was Obama's.

I keep seeing these kinds of comments about this and that campaign, and I think they inevitably talk past the person being responded to.  Campaigns are sometimes at the mercy of the reputation of the factions they represent.  No, Kamala definitely did not conduct a woke campaign, but she got saddled with the baggage of wokism regardless, and only a deliberate renunciation would have a chance of unsaddling her.

To Yi's point, the left has been associated with endless whining about how life is not fair for this or that segment, and that doesn't appeal to people whose cultural values are rooted in stoicism.  Personally, I myself get annoyed at the endless negativity about opportunities in the US as well.  I'm part of an immigrant community that by and large is very successful, and we're successful because we take advantage of a lot of what this country has to offer.  Frankly all this endless negativity is ungrateful.  US is not without its problems, but lack of opportunities for success in general hasn't been one of them so far.

[Valmy]

I don't think Trump's campaigns are built on stoicism.

Edit: Nor was Obama's.

I keep seeing these kinds of comments about this and that campaign, and I think they inevitably talk past the person being responded to.  Campaigns are sometimes at the mercy of the reputation of the factions they represent.  No, Kamala definitely did not conduct a woke campaign, but she got saddled with the baggage of wokism regardless, and only a deliberate renunciation would have a chance of unsaddling her.

To Yi's point, the left has been associated with endless whining about how life is not fair for this or that segment, and that doesn't appeal to people whose cultural values are rooted in stoicism.  Personally, I myself get annoyed at the endless negativity about opportunities in the US as well.  I'm part of an immigrant community that by and large is very successful, and we're successful because we take advantage of a lot of what this country has to offer.  Frankly all this endless negativity is ungrateful.  US is not without its problems, but lack of opportunities for success in general hasn't been one of them so far.

If the values were really rooted in stoicism then right wing grievance populism like Trump wouldn't be popular. Guys like McCain and Romney would still be running the Republican Party. But they aren't.

I think these ideas are just the kind of centrism that has been firmly rejected by both Republican and Democratic voters.

I get these ideas appeal to you and Yi, but I think they are political values from the 1990s and are currently losers all over the world.

[Valmy]

Trump bailed out the farmers with 2 billion dollars, after his tariffs fucked them, and he and the populist right made sure there were cash payments in the COVID bills and all the stoics were cheering him on. They seem to love handouts to me.

Not sure I want to go into battle with the right wing populists as a supposed leftwing party talking like Ayn Rand. I think no current Republican voters would be tempted by that and Democrat voters would stay home.

There is this myth that there is this significant bloc of never-trump right wing people just waiting to be courted, and the Democrats tried by trotting out all the Republicans who endorsed Harris, but this did very little for her. I just think this is a non-existent political force the Democrats keep thinking exists.

I think there is a way to handle "woke" or whatever in a way that assuages the more hysterical propaganda while keeping Democratic supporters onside.

Likewise I don't think Biden was wrong by going down the supporting Unions and trying to get manufacturing jobs back with things like the CHIPS act. I think those kinds of things might work out. But there might be a better way to sell it.

But I don't know. I guess all this will be fought out in the party right now, so if you think there is a lot of support for something now is the time to get it out there.

And of course the key problem is that you need something core Democratic voters will want in Primaries as well. Otherwise all this carefully considered planning will just lose before it ever gets to the general.