I really do think that a particular paradox of American politics is that some of the best political candidates are mediocre to extremely bad politicians. I’m not nearly as hard on Presidents Clinton and Obama as many are but I absolutely think that partly due to their Republican Houses of Congress, they were better candidates than they were presidents. Hillary Clinton on the other hand would have been a better president than either Obama or her husband than she was a presidential candidate.
Education is freedom for women and (heterosexual) marriage is a prison for women in a way both of these entities are not for men, which is why many Republicans are so intent on keeping women barefoot and pregnant . There's such a huge statistical difference in how college vs. non-college women vote and married vs. single women, especially white women, and not nearly as much of a difference for men! That story from the ‘08 Obama canvasser about how a young woman opened the door with a kid on each hip and whispered that she was voting for Obama but they were Republicans, and if her husband found out what she was doing, he’d kill her and her kids as well, has haunted me for over a decade.
Democrats: Go Directly to the Center by Ruy Teixeira was very salient, not that anybody’s going to listen to him. I’ve been yelling that white voters flipped Arizona and Georgia (and the Blue Wall of the Midwest from 2016) since November of 2020 but people just ignore me so maybe they’ll listen to Teixeira.
Start with Arizona. (Here I use unpublished data from the States of Change project, since Catalist has not released data for these states.) Arizona did not escape the nationwide pattern of Hispanic voters moving toward Trump. As a result, despite the underlying trend toward more eligible Latino voters and excellent turnout performance, the overall CDM of Arizona Hispanic voters actually went down by a little over a point in 2020, reflecting a sharp drop on Hispanic working class support. On the other hand, the CDM of white voters, driven both by college-educated and working class voters, improved by around 5 points—more than enough to account for the shift in Arizona to a Democratic advantage in 2020. In other words, it was white voters, not Hispanics, who won Arizona for Biden.
In Georgia, the most important part of the nonwhite vote, black voters, had lower Democratic margins as well as slightly reduced voter share due to declining relative turnout (that is, their turnout went up less than other groups). As a result, the CDM of black voters in 2020 actually declined by a point and a half in the state, driven, as with Hispanics in Arizona, by working class voters. Also as in Arizona, the Democratic shift from a deficit in 2016 to an advantage in 2020 can be accounted for entirely by a sharp shift toward the Democrats among white voters, both college and noncollege. This shift was the major factor behind Democrats carrying the state.
Unpopular Opinion: Republican senators treated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson horribly in committee but like, I guarantee you that all of them who ultimately vote against her confirmation to the United States Supreme Court would have also voted against any white, male judge that Biden nominated because they don’t want any pro-choice, anti death penalty judges on the Court, even if she’s replacing a liberal justice and isn’t changing the court’s conservative bent. That being said, they should still vote for her because it’d make them look good to the uninformed median voter but I guess they can’t get over their own egos and almost the entire Democratic caucus voting against all of Trump’s justices. Besides, it’s not like voters will remember the very specific circumstances of those justices and will just remember Dems were intractable.
Matthew Yglesias mostly gets it in his Substack about Joe Manchin but I think House Progressives including the Squad publicly calling Manchin racist and an agent of Jim Crow absolutely aren’t helping Democrats get Manchin on board with Biden’s agenda.
I’m permanently Team “Democrats Should Hire More Hypercompetitive Control Freaks Who Refuse to Lose” because the Republican party does it constantly, and it work. There’s zero point to winning the “battle of ideas” if we lose the “battle of votes!!!” Clearly, the issues the majority of people claim to agree with Democrats on are lower in salience than the issues that make them to vote Republican. Democratic partisans are going to HAVE to accept the party’s platform isn’t as popular as people think, especially if the 2022 midterms go how me and every political pundit expects them go for Democrats, and we’re going to have to evaluate what needs to change on that platform so we can win more elections and not bring about single-party Republican rule for the next decade.
I’ll end this piece with an excerpt from the book version of Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen’s Renegades: Born in the USA and with the Langston Hughes poem, “Let America be America Again.”
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