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Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
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12 Oct, 3 tweets, 1 min read
I feel like it's relevant to the popularism debate that maybe the single most unpopular decision of Obama's presidency ended up playing arguably the single biggest part of his re-election campaign news.gallup.com/poll/116107/am…
Joe Biden's famous 2012 convention line was "Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!"

Only one of these two things polled well!
If you break down the crosstabs, "The auto bailout is an unpopular idea favored by out-of-touch liberal elites that working class swing voters in the Midwest want nothing to do with" would have been a perfectly fine reading at the time too

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More from @BenjySarlin

Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
8 Oct
This is great, like a whole year of politics twitter distilled and critiqued (that's a better thing than it sounds, I swear)
The one thing I'd mention is that there are huge broad political trends Shor is great at identifying, but the reason so many "this is what the next 10 years look like" predictions fail is that they're constantly overtaken by events.
Changes in party demographics have had a huge influence on what those parties want and do in office, for example. But electorally, they're small potatoes versus 9/11, Iraq, the Great Recession, COVID, even Afghanistan now, etc etc etc. And those events also remake the parties.
Read 5 tweets
Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
30 Jul
The most controversial part among R's of Mitch McConnell backing infrastructure is whether it helps or hurts Democrats trying to pass their $3.5T megabill.

The key q here is how likely R's think Manchin/Sinema are to kill it and under what circumstances. nbcnews.com/politics/congr…
The anti-deal take is shared by folks like Trump and Cruz and articulated here by @philipaklein. D's say the two bills are linked and must pass in tandem. If you pass one, you're triggering the other one. If you kill it, you might blow them all up. nationalreview.com/corner/joe-man…
R's got VERY excited, for example, when Manchin said this during talks
Read 8 tweets
Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
21 Jul
. @Nate_Cohn is right lack of resistance to Biden's economic agenda is a big deal. But I think even he undersells the scale of the policy, which may also affect the politics. It isn't just "infrastructure," it's climate, health care, education, taxes... nytimes.com/2021/07/20/us/…
In Obama era, the theory was presidents have a unique ability to focus on ONE big sweeping reform, barn storm the country gathering support, and tell Congress to hammer it out. That's how ACA worked. Biden is different....
D's seem to be almost borrowing from Trump's playbook of doing too many controversial things at once for opponents to focus on anything. Items that individually would be career-defining in past WH's like universal pre-K are afterthoughts right now that barely even get discussed.
Read 9 tweets
Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
6 Jul
What’s keeping democracy scholars up at night: An overturned election.

A party remade by Trump’s 2020 election lies could be much harder to stop in 2024.

“We should not pretend these dangers are fantastical or that these are absurd hypotheticals”

nbcnews.com/politics/polit…
In 2020, a handful of GOP officials in key roles stood up to an all-out campaign to throw out the election results and install Trump as president again.

Will they still be there in 2024 if affirming those election lies is the key test in GOP primaries? washingtonpost.com/politics/repub…
. 46% of GOP support state legislatures overturning 2020 vote, per research by @leedrutman.

Once that’s on the table, you get to scary places real quick. For one it creates a perverse incentive to run a botched election in order to justify politicians deciding results later. Image
Read 4 tweets
Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
29 Jun
Deep dive by @JeffreyASachs into the anti-CRT bills and how — regardless of whether you agree with their core concerns — the legislative language could prevent teaching even basic history and concepts arcdigital.media/p/laws-aimed-a…
One thing I appreciate about @JeffreyASachs approach to this story is acknowledging that both A) there is a partisan political effort going on that's deliberately lumping a lot of stuff together under "CRT" and B) there IS an actual change here that people are reacting to.
Because "CRT" is deliberately used as a vague catch-all term to categorize and then demonize things its critics don't like, you get a muddled debate where elites are arguing 1970s academic texts and long-running philosophy debates and average people about something else.
Read 6 tweets
Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
24 Jun
Biden says bipartisan infrastructure deal has to be paired with D-only reconciliation bill.

"If this is the only thing that comes to me I'm not signing. It's in tandem."

Asked about Pelosi plan to hold first bill in House until second bill arrives, says he supports it.
Biden and D leaders are quite clear heading into the bipartisan deal that it's all contingent on a reconciliation bill passing with other D priorities. R's are approving this deal knowing that's Biden's publicly stated plan. So are Manchin and Sinema.
Doesn't mean it's going to work! But everyone is going in with clear eyes here.
Read 4 tweets

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