Thread by @lwoodhouse

I’ve gone to Texas to interview lifelong Latino Democrats who switched to GOP, and I’ve interviewed black voters in Oakland who voted Trump or very reluctantly voted for Harris. Obama came up again and again as one of the major reasons they became disillusioned with the Dems.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1862508228833161601

Here's how two black voters in Oakland experienced the Obama years. One specifically pointed to his failure to support cramdown during the financial collapse as key to her falling out with him. If this doesn't directly bear out what Sirota is saying then I don't know what would.

Here's a Latino former Democrat in South Texas. In this case, it wasn't Obama's betrayal of his populist promises that turned him off, but it obviously was also not Dems' "failure to emulate" the shining example of Barack Obama that cost them this voter.

I'm curious what ex-Dem voters @mattyglesias interviewed who told him that if only the Dems were still like Clinton and Obama, they would have voted for Harris.

Note btw that David *did not say* Dems needed "to be more left-wing." That's Matt putting words in his mouth. He said Obama betrayed his populist message and embraced neoliberalism, which is clearly not synonymous with "more left-wing" given that the right-wing party successfully picked up the populist mantle the Dems left behind.

And in fact, given that "left-wing" is now commonly understood as socially progressive aka "woke," it makes complete sense that voters would say Dems are too left-wing and also believe they're insufficiently populist. Wokeness was from the start deployed specifically to kill left-wing populism. substack-proxy.glitch.me/articles/leigh…