A consistent dynamic right now is Democrats lose elections and obsess about why they lost, and how they could change, and Republicans lose elections and...don't.

But the California recall should really be a moment of reflection for them.
One problem with the way narrativize elections is we focus on the flowers, not the soil. That is to say: We look at candidates as independent of the voters that choose them. But they’re not.

And Elder really, really wasn’t.
He wasn’t endorsed by the CA GOP. He didn't have institutional backing.

He had name recognition, and his Trumpy approach reflected what the CA Republican base wanted.

And that terrified the rest of California, and led to a complete collapse in recall support.
The weird geographic skew of the electoral college and the Senate are keeping Republicans in the game nationally, but this is a pretty broad dynamic, and a bad one for them. They really aren't able to talk their base into making strategic choices.
I'm not saying Republicans were ever likely to win the recall. But when they had the chance to beat Davis, they united behind the moderate Schwarzenegger, and they won.

In 2020, Democrats did something similar with Biden, and won.
A party that routinely can't do this, for whatever reason, is going to lose a lot of close elections it would otherwise win. And Republicans have gotten bad at it, both nationally and in key states.
Trump's legacy is particularly poisonous here. He's made it that much easier for Republicans who lose to promote conspiracies about how the election was stolen from them, rather than how they screwed it up.

Elder went right to that playbook. washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…
A party that mistrusts polls, the entire mainstream media, and all negative election results is not going to be a party that's good at learning from loss.

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More from @ezraklein

2 Sep
I update my views when policy changes, not before.

Most of of what I emphasize in here, like SB9 and universal pre-k for 4 year olds, passed in the last few months.

In my view, this piece would've been crazy to write in February.
Just one example: The forerunner to SB9, SB1120, had died a few months before, when the Assembly passed it minutes before the clock stopped, and so the Senate couldn't vote on it.

Everyone involved in that fiasco should be ashamed. Valuable lost time. latimes.com/homeless-housi…
One reason I focus on housing so much is I'm less impressed by policy where Newsom and the Dems are just spending down a surplus.

That's good to do in just ways, but that money won't always be there. It's governing on easy mode.
Read 8 tweets
2 Sep
I don't think most Californians know how much Newsom and the Democratic legislature have done in the last 18 months.

To be honest, I didn't know a lot of it, until I sat down to pick through their record. But it's impressive. nytimes.com/2021/09/02/opi…
And I want to take the moment to disagree with my friend @tylercowen's case for Larry Elder.

Tyler's view is that California Democrats need a wake-up call and the legislature could stop Elder from doing anything really nuts. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
But on issues like housing, where symbolic gestures have dominated, California's Democrats have woken up. The state is on the cusp of ending single-family zoning!

Wrecking the political coalition that's finally moving policy on this issue would be madness.
Read 5 tweets
26 Aug
This is worth reading, as it illustrates a peculiar pathology in modern conservatism: The idea that the US government is too incompetent to execute domestic policy well, but it has extraordinary control over outcomes in countries it invades.
Cooke's argument — again, read it for yourself — is that because I believed Elizabeth Warren could have mounted a stronger domestic response to COVID, I'm a hypocrite for saying events in Afghanistan had spun beyond our control, and a reckoning with our overreach is overdue.
But you see this all the time. The same people who say the US government would make a mess out of a national healthcare system will tell you we can invade Iran, Iraq, Syria, etc, and remake their societies.
Read 9 tweets
27 Jul
I’ve been listening to @annielowrey think (and rage) about this topic for years, and I’m so glad to see this article come out.

Once you start looking for time taxes, you see them everywhere, and they are a profound failure of both governance and justice. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
And don't think this is just a problem of Republican governance. Democrats have created more than their fair share of time taxes, and that has, in turn, undermined both their goals and the public's relationship to government.
Every campaign cycle we are suffused in plans to cut income and corporate taxes. I want to see plans to cut time taxes.
Read 4 tweets
8 Jul
In California, vaccinations are going well (10th in the nation!), COVID cases are down, there’s a $76b surplus, the economy is booming.

So what’s dominating our politics?

A recall election most Californians oppose to oust a governor we mostly like. nytimes.com/2021/07/08/opi…
The danger here is the recall could win. Not because recalling Newsom is popular. 57% oppose it. But those who favor it are paying much more attention.

We could end up with Gov. Caitlyn Jenner because most Californians ignore this as a distraction. ppic.org/blog/voter-ent…
This speaks to a larger problem in CA governance: A host of ideas meant to give the people more control over the government that have, over time, decayed into avenues organized interests use to get their way.

For instance:
Read 7 tweets
1 Jul
It is hard to view your own country objectively. There is too much cant and myth, too many stories and rituals.

So over the past week, I’ve been asking foreign scholars of democracy how the fights over the American political system look to them. nytimes.com/2021/07/01/opi…
And this, from @IvanKrastev, is sobering.
Read 4 tweets

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