Pick posted:

Yellen tapped for treasury.

DTurtle posted:

Very nice to see this thread back! It was terrific - and I hope we can maintain a good level of discourse.

Talking about 2022, I found the column by Paul Krugman in the NY Times as quite a good take:

Emphasis mine

quote:

On the determinants of winning, there’s a lively debate within the Democratic Party right now about what went wrong down-ballot in 2020 and what to do about it going forward. Several moderate House Democrats, who represent light-red districts, argue that the party suffered from its association with unpopular left-wing demands like “Defund the police” and ideological labels like “socialism.” They seem to suggest that all party members must distance themselves from radical social movements. Progressives, meanwhile, have argued that the Black Lives Matter protests actually aided Democrats by driving a surge in nonwhite voter registration — which, when combined with the work of organizations like Stacey Abrams’s New Georgia Project, and canvassing efforts like those spearheaded by Ilhan Omar and Rhasida Tlaib — spurred an increase in nonwhite turnout that was indispensable to Biden’s victory. They further maintain that the Democrats’ problems with rural white voters stem from the party’s tendency to “shy away from conversations about race”: You can only neutralize white racial resentment by directly confronting it. Instead of keeping “issues of economic justice and racial justice in separate siloes,” the party must reframe racism as a greedy elite’s strategy for “dividing and conquering” workers. Finally, the left argues that the party must increase its investment in organizing infrastructure, using the so-called Reid machine in Nevada as a model.

How well do either of these analyses line up with your own views?

I think it’s important for us to be clear-eyed about what happened in 2020. We’re not going to know exactly what happened until there’s more analysis of precinct results. But I think that the county-level data we have tells a pretty clear big-picture story. Which is that we won the presidency because, one, while we lost non-college-educated white voters, we kept those defections to a relatively low level, and two, a bunch of moderate Republicans who had voted for Trump in 2016 decided to vote for Biden this time.

Turnout was up, but it was up for both parties. According to Nate Cohn’s estimates, Black turnout was probably up by around 8 percent, but non-Black turnout was up by something like 15 to 20 percent. So we had the highest-turnout election in a century, and despite that, we still only won because a bunch of people switched their votes in our direction.

quote:

If the most effective possible campaign intervention only nets you two points max, that seems inauspicious for Democrats making enough inroads with non-college-educated whites to compete in the Senate.

Right, so everybody in politics likes to debate the particulars of campaign tech and strategy. But elections are won or lost primarily on the basis of these broad structural forces and each party’s national brand. Which are related.

So the median voter in the presidential election is about 50 years old, watches about six hours of TV a day, and mostly gets their news from mainstream sources. And that means that, if you want to influence what this person believes, you’re probably not going to get them at the door or even through a paid message. They’re going to form their opinions based on how the media reports on and characterizes the parties.

You can see this in Georgia. Nothing really unique happened there. The state behaved as you would expect given that we had already bottomed out with non-college-educated whites and had room to grow with college-educated whites, who were alienated by the GOP’s Trump-era brand as conveyed by mainstream reporting. And we know that this is a national, structural phenomenon — and not primarily a product of state-level actions or micro-targeting — because the gains we made in the Atlanta suburbs were nearly identical to gains we made in similarly educated counties in other parts of the country.

So how do you change a party’s national brand?

This does get to your earlier question and to this very real tension that exists right now in the Democratic Party. Voters are now determining their opinions about parties in a unified way and not reading about individual local candidates. There’s arguably less local news. But people’s consumption of local news has definitely decreased, while their consumption of national news has increased. So it’s hard for candidates in redder areas to differentiate themselves from the national party than it used to be. This is part of why ticket-splitting is declining.

And that does create some awkward trade-offs. Like, it is now true that what a left-wing congressperson in a deep-blue district says will get transmitted adversarially by the Republican media, and to a significant extent by the mainstream media, to people who disagree. And those people won’t say, “Oh, this left-wing congressperson, well, he’s crazy. But Max Rose? He’s dope.” They’re just going to say, “Oh, Democrats support socialism now, because there’s this one socialist congressperson.”

I think the reality now is that whenever any elected Democrat goes out and says something that’s unpopular, unless the rest of the party very forcefully pushes back — in a way that I think is actually very rare within the Democratic Party currently — every Democrat will face an electoral penalty. And that’s awkward. But I think it’s a natural consequence of polarization and ticket-splitting declining. I think progressives try to get around this awkward reality by saying, “Well, Republicans are going to demonize us no matter what we say or do.” But I don’t think that kind of nihilism is justified. What they say actually does matter. Parties and candidates that say less controversial things, and are associated with less-controversial ideas, win more elections.

I think that the only option that we have is to move toward the median voter. And I think that really comes down to embracing the popular parts of our agenda and making sure that no one in our party is vocally embracing unpopular things. I know that sounds reactionary. But moderates don’t have a monopoly on popular ideas and progressives don’t have one on unpopular ideas. There are a lot of left-wing policies that are both popular and transformational. Worker co-determination. A federal job guarantee. There’s still a lot we can do.

Main Paineframe posted:

The question here is this: what does he mean by "recovery"? Does he mean a return to the pre-COVID economy, or does he just mean returning to having a sufficient yearly GDP increase? The classes which were well-off enough to keep their jobs will certainly ramp up spending, but that doesn't mean the millions of jobs lost are necessarily going to return in the same way. COVID-19 has been a big incentive for employers to revamp and automate, reducing human roles and physical presence wherever possible. This involved a lot of up-front investments that wouldn't normally be worth it, but now employers have already made those investments, so many of the changes will likely stick.

quote:

Finally, while Biden should make the most of good economic news, he should try to build on success, not rest on his laurels. Short-term booms are no guarantee of longer-term prosperity. Despite the rapid recovery of 1982-1984, the typical American worker earned less, adjusted for inflation, at the end of Reagan’s presidency in 1989 than in 1979.

And while I’m optimistic about the immediate outlook for a post-vaccine economy, we’ll still need to invest on a large scale to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, improve the condition of America’s families (especially children) and, above all, head off catastrophic climate change.

So even if I’m right about the prospects for a Biden boom, the political benefits of that boom shouldn’t be cause for complacency; they should be harnessed in the service of fixing America for the long run.

Mooseontheloose posted:

I don't know if its me spending too much time in D&D but I find the depiction of most (democratic anyways) politicians cartoonish. They aren't sitting in some campaign bunker going MUHAHA I am going enforce the whims of capital for I AM AGAINST THE PROLETEARIATE. They are human people who are influenced by the people and staff around them.

Mooseontheloose posted:

So I used to do an A/T thread about my time doing campaigns. I've run a few state senate campaigns, been an organizer for a few federal campaigns, and do policy work for a living. Happy to ask questions here if people have internal campaign operation questions.

quote:

"I believe that there are many areas that we can point at in centralized democratic operations that are extraordinarily weak. For example, our digital campaigning is very weak. This is an area where Republicans are actually quite strong."

"I believe that many Republicans were very effective at digital organizing strategy as well, whereas the Democratic Party is still campaigning largely as though it's 2005. And I know a lot of us don't want to hear this, but 2005 was 15 years ago. So we can do better."

Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times earlier this week she tried to help swing district Democrats.

"And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory."

doingitwrong posted:

What's your opinion on AOC's claim that democrats in purple states are losing because their digital operations are extraordinarily weak?
https://www.axios.com/aoc-democrats-digital-operation-bbb7fc6f-b370-478a-8984-900455437f49.html

doingitwrong posted:

What's your opinion on AOC's claim that democrats in purple states are losing because their digital operations are extraordinarily weak?
https://www.axios.com/aoc-democrats-digital-operation-bbb7fc6f-b370-478a-8984-900455437f49.html

Jaxyon posted:

I think a lot of people misunderstand someone explaining why someone in politics behaves a certain way as creating a defense of that person. As if adding nuance is intended to disguise the impact. IMO, it's important to understand how someone arrives at a certain point because then you can figure out what the levers are, if any, for pushing them in a different direction. Many politicians are awful people and behave in awful ways, but in consistently and predictably awful ways due to their support systems, as you say.

I think that many politicians are going to enforce the whims of capital and be against the proletariat, but aren't necessarily conscious of exactly what they're doing. They're being manipulated by backers and aides as well, all of whom have their own agendas, that also align with that of capital.

As I've seen it put before....leaving a bag of cash on the ground and then everyone grabs money from it til it's gone doesn't mean there is a conspiracy of capitalism. It's just literally the expected result given the influences and interests of anyone who encounters it. No organized conspiracy needed.

Main Paineframe posted:

The question here is this: what does he mean by "recovery"? Does he mean a return to the pre-COVID economy, or does he just mean returning to having a sufficient yearly GDP increase? The classes which were well-off enough to keep their jobs will certainly ramp up spending, but that doesn't mean the millions of jobs lost are necessarily going to return in the same way. COVID-19 has been a big incentive for employers to revamp and automate, reducing human roles and physical presence wherever possible. This involved a lot of up-front investments that wouldn't normally be worth it, but now employers have already made those investments, so many of the changes will likely stick.

Krugman posted:

And while I’m optimistic about the immediate outlook for a post-vaccine economy, we’ll still need to invest on a large scale to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, improve the condition of America’s families (especially children) and, above all, head off catastrophic climate change.

Krugman posted:

...
Biden’s plan would roll back that corporate tax cut, replacing it with spending programs likely to yield much more bang for the buck. In particular, much of the spending would be on infrastructure and education — that is, outlays aimed at strengthening the economy in the long run, as well as boosting it over the next few years.

When Moody’s ran this program through their model, it concluded that by the end of 2024, real gross domestic product would be 4.5 percent higher than under a continuation of Trump’s policies, translating into an additional 7 million jobs. Goldman Sach’s estimates are similar: a 3.7 percent gain in G.D.P.
...

Mooseontheloose posted:

:

1) Democrats are older right now.

Eric Cantonese posted:

I apologize for posting something that might have already been discussed pretty thoroughly, but NY Magazine's interview with David Shor seems like a pretty decent distillation of every argument the "wonks" will be making about how Democrats need to appeal to more moderate voters.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/david-shor-analysis-2020-election-autopsy-democrats-polls.html



The idea of having to tack constantly to what 55 year old television news watchers want is pretty depressing. I guess that's why I feel like it's probably true.


From how I read those comments, particularly the bolded part, he is seeing more of a big GDP increase with less debt loads to overcome than in 2008. It's not necessarily a prediction of a full return to the old status quo.

Eric Cantonese posted:

I apologize for posting something that might have already been discussed pretty thoroughly, but NY Magazine's interview with David Shor seems like a pretty decent distillation of every argument the "wonks" will be making about how Democrats need to appeal to more moderate voters.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/david-shor-analysis-2020-election-autopsy-democrats-polls.html

quote:

We spoke about this last time but, there’s been this 20-year — or arguably 40-year — trend toward less ticket-splitting on the Senate, House, and state-legislative levels. That continued. The ultimate correlations between presidential vote share and Senate vote share was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016.

Interesting. After a week of wringing my hands over Susan Collins’s landslide reelection in Maine, I’d begun to assume otherwise.

Yeah. There were exceptions, but overall, correlation was higher. And then in the House, just about every Democrat in a very red district lost, whether it was Colin Peterson or Joe Cunningham. Same thing on the state-legislative level. So there’s a systematic decline in ticket-splitting going on. Twenty years ago, heavily white, non-college-educated states like Montana were already wildly overrepresented in the Senate. But we could recruit a charming liberal and win. And that doesn’t seem to be true anymore.

OddObserver posted:

I guess what bothers me about this is, well, shouldn't the GOP be tarred with their Peter Kings and Ted Cruzes and the likes? That may speak to gaps in media strategy or the like.

Harold Fjord posted:

Specific districts aside, older than Republicans? I don't think I'd have expected that. But this does seem like it risks approaching circularity/self fulfillment a la: "Kids don't vote so don't bother trying to get them to"

OddObserver posted:

I guess what bothers me about this is, well, shouldn't the GOP be tarred with their Peter Kings and Ted Cruzes and the likes? That may speak to gaps in media strategy or the like.

Epinephrine posted:

One other interesting snippet I think's worth pointing out. One theory of 2020 was that Dems lost downballot because of ticket-splitting. This doesn't look to be the case [bolding mine]:

So essentially what happened was that in 2018 a turnout gap favoring Democrats helped usher in a blue wave. Then this year turnout was massive across the board, negating that advantage and resulting in losses.

NoDamage posted:

I'm not sure how to reconcile this with his claim above that Biden only won because a bunch of moderate Republicans switched their votes from Trump to Biden. Wouldn't that suggest ticket-splitting on the Republican side?

Eric Cantonese posted:

I apologize for posting something that might have already been discussed pretty thoroughly, but NY Magazine's interview with David Shor seems like a pretty decent distillation of every argument the "wonks" will be making about how Democrats need to appeal to more moderate voters.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/david-shor-analysis-2020-election-autopsy-democrats-polls.html

quote:

In spite of the economy, the pandemic, and the abominable campaign that Trump ran, he still almost beat Biden, and in a way that made it clear anyone else outside of Biden’s lane would have lost; we did get our realignment and did take the burbs, but the fact is he simply hit on a potentially viable counter for our coalition during presidential years.

The Dems have problems. They aren’t really internal; if the Dems had the GOP’s House and Senate structural advantage every cycle our entire agenda would be locked in stone this decade. Alas, we have massive –external- problems; until we happen to luck into a trifecta and fix the maps, number of states, and SCOTUS, we cannot proceed with the agenda that the left wants, and even getting any real part of it across is abominably tricky. Meanwhile, if the chuds who came out in droves for Trump stay motivated, we are potentially looking at a Presidential map that requires a D+5 PV margin to be competitive. It’s dire out there.

But all is not lost, and part of it is that we actually have structural –advantages- for 2022 even if (as this post assumes) we do *not* take Georgia’s Senate seats in January. [If we do it’s a massive bonus, but I wanted to focus on the worst case where Biden essentially rules by EO.] The conventional wisdom holds that we will lose the House and not come close to the Senate. IMO, thanks to the GOP’s sweep in 2010, it’s wrong.

In the Senate, the GOP’s successes in ’10 and maintaining most of their seats in ‘16 puts them on the defensive again in 2022. Looking at the marginal seats, we’ll probably keep Kelly in AZ, will have a competitive race in NH, maybe NV…and that’s it. I think we lose one of these seats tops as NV/AZ have a terrible GOP bench and NV’s is middling. On their end, we threaten them in IA (Grassley is ancient and prob retiring), NC, PA (likely an easy flip of an open seat), WI, the special GA seat if Loeffler wins, and maybe FL (Rubio) plus an AK wildcard if Murk is primaried. IMO we start as favorites for three of these seats and are roughly 50/50 to win the Senate from here.

In the House, the new maps will spell death for some of our marginal seats but we will not face a 2010 or 2014 type wipeout. In 2010, we were overexposed in huge numbers because the Southern realignment destroyed all of our incumbents in dozens of suddenly red seats. Most of our losses this cycle were in overreaches from 2018 that we couldn’t keep in the long term, and in 22, our incumbents will mostly be in D-trending areas in which the GOP don’t have great pickoff targets. At the same time, our base should still be mobilized and active.

I say this because 2022 will still be all about Trump. The great thing about the orange man from our point of view is that he will never stop posting. His base –will not- turn out for random senators (just like in 2018); instead, they will continue to face the choice of memory holing him (and getting the “betrayers” label that’s potentially a kiss of electoral death) or sticking with him on his journey into the wilderness and saying all the racisms out loud. We’ve proven our coalition can be mobilized by hatred of the orange man even in off cycles, and we’ve gotten a taste for voting; we will not demobilize so easily again. Their base still has to learn this, and unlike 2010, the President (probably) isn’t black or actively pissing them off.

We also have two other huge advantages:

1)Unlike this year, next year we will actually have a vaccine. By the end of 2021, anyone who wants one will have gotten one for free. The remaining antivaxxers, i.e. mostly chuds, will be marginalized into irrelevance as proof of vaccination will almost definitely be required to do *waves hands at long list of things here including any kind of important job or international travel*, which is actually really important for all the chuds in any positions of authority and especially the moneyed class – they’ll have some tough choices to make that will alienate the Q sector very quickly. Meanwhile, the vaccine will allow public spaces to reopen ASAP and spur an economic boom. As bad an economy as Biden inherits, it has nowhere to go but up as soon as a vaccine is ready. Most importantly, all of this is –not- reliant on stimulus, student loan relief, and whatever other scraps the Dems can claw out of the Senate.

2)SCOTUS will do its best to murder all the good things lol. The 2020 GOP escaped disaster by letting Trump be the lightning rod that took the hits for them. But in 2022, a SCOTUS that does its best to kill Obamacare, Roe, and everything else we care about exposes the GOP to a potentially horrific midterm. The suburbs were already pissed enough about Trump; the moment SCOTUS touches any of the third rails, they will be apopleptic.

In summary, I think we are potentially set up for the best midterms that an incumbent president’s party has had since 2002 and can capitalize on them further than anyone thinks possible today. In 2018, I was overly optimistic on the type of turnout Trump could create on his side in 2020, but because everyone always fights the last war, it’s very likely that we will all be overly pessimistic on the type of turnout the Dems can generate in 2022 while overestimating Trump’s influence on their own team. We’ll see if I’m right, but assuming a vaccine is out there and widely available by the end of next year, I think Joe Biden might just luck into yet another successful election.

Bird in a Blender posted:

It actually seems kind of obvious when looking at the senate outcomes that there was very little ticket splitting. Maine being the only exception. Every other state, the senate and presidential results were fairly close.

dwarf74 posted:

So Philadelphia certified.

Are we seriously waiting on this court case for the state to be certified?

https://twitter.com/Commish_Schmidt/status/1331025453906358273?s=19

Pick posted:

I do think that the vaccine and the huge amount of liquid money out there that many middle-class people are absolutely going bananas in their eagerness to spend, will result in another quick economic uptick.

goethe.cx posted:

The fact that treasury secretary wasn’t someone like Tim Geithner bodes well

quote:

How Progressive Will Joe Biden’s Administration Be?

Caution! Navel gazing ahead.

So Joe Biden has decided on Tony Blinken as his secretary of state. What should we think of this?

On the one hand, I think we all have a pretty low bar these days. Blinken is a fairly ordinary human being. He’s experienced and knowledgable. He doesn’t have any desire to destroy the State Department. Foreign leaders will get along with him just fine. Based on this, hooray! Good choice.

On the other hand, Blinken is fairly hawkish, having supported both the Libya incursion and some kind of military intervention in Syria. Barack Obama, who had finally started to understand the national security blob a little better by then, vetoed any action in Syria, so we dodged that bullet. Unfortunately, it’s not clear if Blinken has learned any of the same lessons. Based on this, meh. We could do better. Why not someone like Sen. Chris Murphy instead?

Joe Biden is not a hard lefty, so it’s hardly surprising to see him choosing pretty mainstream aides so far. That’s what we collectively voted for, and that’s what we’re going to get, especially in the highest profile appointments. What’s more, I’m willing to cut him substantial slack with national security appointments. There is, literally, no progressive wing of the national security establishment with any real influence. Behind all the yelling and screaming, Democrats and Republicans are pretty much the same on NatSec issues, with smallish differences on the margin and not much else. This means that even if Biden did appoint someone more progressive, they’d just run into a brick wall of opposition: in the White House, in Congress, in the intelligence agencies, in the military, and in think tanks. It’s all but impossible to buck this, and Biden probably doesn’t really want to in the first place. He’s got bigger fish to fry.

This is a dangerous way of thinking—whew, at least it’s not a Trumpie!—and it will apply less and less once we get past the top three or four cabinet positions. In other areas, there are big differences between Democrats and Republicans and there are plenty of progressives with real clout. We should expect to see some riskier appointments at Labor, HHS, Energy, EPA, and so forth. If we don’t, it would mean Biden is basically kissing off the progressive wing of the party.

We’ll start to hear more about those appointments in early December, and that’s when we’ll truly be able to get a concrete idea of just what Biden’s administration will look like. Until then, I’d resist jumping to any conclusions.

Pick posted:

I do think that the vaccine and the huge amount of liquid money out there that many middle-class people are absolutely going bananas in their eagerness to spend, will result in another quick economic uptick. Even if it's not all the way back to *mumble mumble*, it'll be easily and obviously and tangibly better than people's memory of Trump's final year. And 2020 will be the year he's remembered for--period. Nobody even remembers 2019 right now. 2020 was a vast national trauma year and it has Trump all over it.

2008 was an Obama year, despite him not taking office until 2009; but 2020 was not a Biden year. Biden's year starts 2021.

Sarcastr0 posted:

Sarcastr0 posted:

i say swears online posted:

unless CT has an incredibly quick turnaround time on appointments, no senator will be part of biden's cabinet. calling into question the wonkiness of this article