Thread by @joshtpm

So much of the “popularism” discussion seems like people talking past each other. Like should you pick popular positions or build movements to build support for things that are good. I don’t really know where to go with that. But one point is the issue of polling and …

2/ fooling yourself with polling, a very common thing. I think of the conversation a few years ago about Medicare 4All when there were lots of polls showing it with huge support. But these were polls that generally asked something like would you support letting everyone …

3/ join Medicare. Obviously huge support. No countering w costs, abolishing private insurance, etc etc. I’m not trying to relitigate that argument. We’d be better off with almost any of the plans in Europe etc. but those polls really did convince a lot of people that M4A was …

4/ super popular and the problem was party insiders and corporate Dems who wouldn’t run on something obviously so popular. For those who weren’t following this once you presented respondents with *the counter-arguments you’ll hear in the wild* …

5/ support falls from maybe high 60s to like 40% or below. So not only do you convince yourself it will go well if you grab the chainsaw bar when it’s running you also sow lots of demoralization within your coalition because something must not be on the up and up …

6/ if the establishment or electeds of whoever else won’t get behind policies which are good and super popular. So that’s a problem. Then you get to the related problem of policy literalism: the idea that voters make rational candidate choices on the basis of evaluating …

7/ policy positions. That of course is something that is almost never the case. And it’s what gets you to: our policies are actually super popular and the reason we don’t win elections is because our consultants and elected officials suck. Or it gets you to ….

8/ wow Joe Manchin should clue in a bit because these spending bills are super popular in West Virginia and also it’s a poor state so they need all the help they can get. There is a real problem and a pervasive one with people - sometimes people who really do know ….

9/ better either fooling themselves or fooling others about what different groups of voters think. My controversial opinion is that we should do that less. Now having said all this, I think one of Shor’s shortcomings and maybe this is just his hyperbole but I think …

10/ it’s a bar to people absorbing his better points is that if you listen to him you basically get the idea that Democrats or educated city Democratic are a tribe of myopic and deeply out of touch weirdos whose views are so wildly different from what normal Americans think …

11/ that they need to make a kind of concerted effort to disregard everything that seems obvious to them to ever have any hope of electing anyone to anything. This is a bit hard to reconcile the fact that for the last few decades Democrats almost always get the most …

12/ votes in high turnout quadrennial elections. Obviously that’s not much of a consolation prize if you lose the election and even more if you get most votes and are completely locked out of power at the federal level. But it is at least an indication that this …

13/ rather hyperbolic vision is a bit overstated. Democrats face inbuilt structural disadvantages. A major part of their political coalition has cultural views that are either different from or out of touch with or a few years in advance of the rest of the country.

14/ But we’ve been here before. Or perhaps we’ve never left here. There was “PC” in the 80s and 90s. These are real issues the Democratic coalition needs to deal with. But it’s more a question of realism and coalitional management.

15/ After all the 50s/60s Civil Rights movement was in electoral terms a pretty big loser for Democrats over a period of at least two or three decades. Presumably we don’t think being the party that aligned with that was a mistake.

16/ These are complicated. Sometimes w no good answers in political terms. But they’re not as new as folks suggest.