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5 Nov, 5 tweets, 1 min read
Part of what makes so much political analysis so confounding and frustrating is that the deep structural polarization means that almost everything in electoral politics happens on the margins. 1/x
Imagine you’re in a room of 100 people in which 53 are wearing t-shirts and 47 are wearing sweatshirts. You step outside for a moment and when you come back 6 people have put on sweatshirts.
You might not even notice! You sure as hell wouldn’t say “OH MY GOD WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO YOU PEOPLE!?! I THOUGHT THIS WAS A T-SHIRT ROOM AND NOW ITS A SWEATSHIRT ROOM! WTF!?!!?”
But that exact same shift, in the context of many many many US elections would be *enormous* and definitive and toggle power from coalition to the other.
And so from an analytical perspective there’s gonna be a ton of focus on why those six people put on sweatshirts. But the room has barely changed!

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More from @chrislhayes

Chris Hayes Profile picture
6 Nov
People should read some 19th century leftist writing to discover that both working class and rural reactionary politics are not, um, exactly new phenomena.

Vanguardism emerged for a reason!
You can find a great intro to these debates via @mikeduncan in his phenomenal Revolutions Podcast on the Russian Revolution. You can skip the Russia-specific stuff and focus on the early stuff about Marx and Bakunin, and then there's a lot more later around Lenin v Kautsky.
Link here:

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rev…
Read 4 tweets
Chris Hayes Profile picture
4 Nov
One thing that stands out to me is how ubiquitous the notion that Democrats *should* be winning by big margins, and *should* have a durable ruling coalition, is across different ideological factions in the broad center to left coalition.
Now everyone has their different views about What They're Doing Wrong, etc.. Lots of the critiques are good and draw blood, and have merit at the margins. And, look, I get that GOP governance has been an absolute horrifying deadly disaster across two administrations now!
And but also: It's a big, complicated country with lots of conservatives! We're very closely divided, politically. I've noticed, interestingly enough, conservative growing more resigned to that & putting their faith in instutions they can control: state government in red states..
Read 6 tweets
Chris Hayes Profile picture
29 Oct
Media gossip aside, the country continues to accelerate into the worst mass death catastrophe its experienced in 75 years.
A staggering percentage of households with children are food insecure and 100,000 small businesses are teetering on the edge of failure.
The effects of this calamity, a preventable one, or at the very least a far more manageable one, fall disproportionately on those who are poor, working class, and non-white.
Read 4 tweets
Chris Hayes Profile picture
28 Oct
This piece from @rmc031 about school safety amidst Covid is a really worthwhile read. It pumps the breaks on the level of certainty we have that "the science says" in-person schooling is totally fine. Since she quotes me, I want to add some thoughts (1/x)

prospect.org/coronavirus/wh…
As she argues, our knowledge in this sphere is provisional and incomplete and also in places contradictory (for example children's viral load/contagiousness).

But the problem of course is that policy - across all kinds of spheres - has to be made under uncertainty.
There are things we do have a pretty clear picture of, like what the absolute highest risk environments are: nursing homes, meat packing plants, nightclubs, packed indoor worship services with singing, bars, college house parties, etc...
Read 18 tweets
Chris Hayes Profile picture
20 Oct
A lot of the defenses of Trump on Covid remind me of the years-long effort to defend Bush's Iraq War policy. Lots of special pleading and contortions until everyone kind of just gave up, slunk away and quietly admitted it was a colossal mistake.
In the end, no one really did much soul-searching or reckoning. It was just kinda "whoops!" that became "end endless wars!" as a slogan but never actual policy and an attempt to decry the libs for being the deep state, #actually.
But the brutal fact is that two consecutive GOP presidencies have led the country into epochal disasters, widespread misery and mass death and there's a reason that's the case.
Read 4 tweets
Chris Hayes Profile picture
15 Oct
OK, so from my interviews with a ton of epidemiologists over the last bunch of months, here's a pretty straightforward plan to suppress the virus and get the US to something like, say, 90% of normal life. Three steps!
1) Mask Up: Short of a national order (which strikes me as tough, enforcement-wise) getting all governors to issue state-wide mask orders would be enormously helpful. Messaging is vital. CDC data shows how important AZ's order was in suppressing its summer outbreak.
2) Bar Rescue: Have the federal government pay every last bar, restaurant, nightclub, theatre and concert venue to stay closed for the next nine months. You'd remove *enormous* pressure to reopen things that aren't safe, and it probably pays for itself.
Read 7 tweets

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