Thread by @whstancil

Here's what the GOP gets that Democrats really, truly struggle with: Politics is about way more than policy. Politics is not about voters saying "Which policy platform do I prefer?" It's about making cultural, emotional and, factional appeals.

https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/1367168394081030146

The problem is that moderate liberals and centrist Dems typically have two responses to this.

The first is to say "Well that just means we have to redouble efforts, and do things that are EVEN MORE POPULAR." But it still doesn't work because that's not what politics is about.

The second is to say "Well, we have to appeal to the cheap seats some! We have to start punching hippies! Talk about cancel culture!" Yglesias has been on this train some lately - frankly, it sounds smart to older white dudes, because they, personally, enjoy punching hippies.

The problem with THIS approach is that you're not making good cultural, emotional, factional appeals - you're just mimicking the GOP. And in doing so, you're also opening fire within your own coalition, at some of your most loyal voters. We need those people!

It's actually easier to envision a Democratic politics based around mocking environmentalists and "wokeism" somewhere like New York City - where you have plenty of voters to spare - than in a purple state, where making war on younger progressives is a potentially fatal mistake.

The solution here is actually not all that complicated - it's to try to build a set of rhetorical and cultural and emotive appeals that can rival the GOP's. What does that look like? It can look like a lot of things! There's no one algorithmically correct politics.

Pugilism is good for that, but it's best directed at the other guys, not your own base (ask Sherrod Brown or John Fetterman).

This is actually a pretty traditionalist view of politics - that good politicians go out there and excite people (with positive AND negative emotions) and reframe how they think, and they use that excitement to build support. History shows there are many, many ways to do it.

But it's not a view of politics that is easily reducible to a bunch of numerical analysis. FDR was an epochal political figure in way his predecessor wasn't, his rhetoric and personality have echoed through decades of history. Why? Well, a statistician would struggle to tell you.

One problem we have is that we've outsourced all our top-tier political analysis to a bunch of guys who are essentially versions of Nate Silver - people who have a statistical hammer and thus want to find statistical nails to explain everything with.

That's blinded us to the infinite possibilities for creative political rhetoric and coalition building, and to the vital, indispensable role of things like leadership and moral clarity and celebrity.

We end carefully managing party positions and policy proposals to try to get electoral results. Because it's the only lever susceptible to our analysis, it's the only one we ever try to pull, and it never occurs to us that maybe it's not really hooked up to as much as we think.

One other thing: finding good politics is often a process of instinct and trial-and-error. There's really no way to figure out with polls, in advance, what is going to work.

Polls are good at predicting elections because elections are simple and a poll can perfectly reflect the choice in a ballot booth. But politics more broadly isn't like that - you can't poll what someone WOULD feel about an issue or a politician if the cultural context shifts.

Trump himself is the best example of this. Pretty much anyone who could read a poll, myself included, expected his politics to be a huge disaster for the GOP. It wasn't - it hurt in some ways, but worked out well for them in others.

Under Trump, a lot of Republicans ended up fanatically supporting stuff it's hard to imagine they would have said they supported in advance. His demagogic politics transformed the whole environment in hard-to-foresee ways.

When someone says "What should Democrats do to win more elections?" anyone who claims to know for sure is either deluded or lying. There are lot of theories and we should probably try lots of them out, see what works.

Here's what we shouldn't do: sit around with a bunch of spreadsheets and try to figure out the pitch-perfect policy platrom. Real political success is proven on the field, not in the lab. Human beings have a knack for this, so promote good leaders and let them do their thing.