1) I spoke with @davidshor about his autopsy of the 2024 campaign. Based on voter file data, 26 million voter interviews, and precinct returns, he reaches a few conclusions.
One is that if all registered voters had turned out, Trump would have won a landslide:
@davidshor 2) TikTok appears to make its users more Republican.
@davidshor 3) Trump probably narrowly won younger voters. The gender gap among 18 year olds is also the highest ever observed. Trump won *nonwhite* 18-year-old men.
@davidshor 4) We also discussed a tension in Shor's polling: Voters say that Democrats should be more moderate, but also, want them to deliver "major change"
Shor argues that economic populism can appeal to such voters, and that Harris's promise to "take on landlords" was her best message
@davidshor 5) One point Shor emphasized: Nihilism about electoral politics is not justified. "lol nothing matters" may feel true. But voters do sometimes respond to changes in reality and positioning vox.com/politics/40336…
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Trump and Musk are trying to usurp Congress's authority over spending -- and the impending debt limit fight might give them a golden opportunity to complete their power grab
This is concerning, since Trump's lawlessness is making a debt limit breach more likely. Republicans (almost certainly) need Democratic cooperation to raise the debt ceiling. But Trump is undermining the entire basis of bipartisan dealmaking:
BCBS told some extremely overpaid specialists (median salary: $430,600) that they would be cutting their pay by applying some of Medicare's payment rules.
This is how single-payer works: Squeeze rentier providers, lower costs.
If you're outraged by this, you're getting played!
fwiw, I get it. The wording of the announcement sounded bad (as the anesthesiologists wanted it to)! But now there are leftists on here calling for the assassination of an insurance CEO because her company did exactly what they ostensibly want bureaucrats to do under M4A
To be clear, my point here is not that there couldn't be any bad outcomes for patients. It's that the alternative to capping pay rates to doctors who make $400,00+ a year is to have everyone pay higher premiums to support their extortionary billing
1) Fwiw, I think one key part of the "Abundance" argument is that the corporate elite aren't the *only* bad actors in the political economy; upper-middle class folks who prioritize myopic (or classist) quality-of-life concerns above shared prosperity are also a problem...
2) And I think anti-monopolist discourse sometimes serves to absolve this class (whose considerable size allows it to wield immense power) of responsibility for the social problems it principally creates...
3) This can take the form of giving excessive analytical weight to corporate malfeasance that is real and worthy of condemnation but which contributes only marginally to a given social problem...
1) Over the past four years, Dems gave $36 billion to the Teamsters, walked a picket line with the UAW, and aligned trade and education policy with the AFL-CIO's interests.
But this was not enough to prevent their share of the union vote from falling.
2) The forces driving non-college voters out of the Democratic tent - e.g. our forever culture war over cosmopolitanism - look stronger than unions' capacity to liberalize their members.
Controlling for demographics, union members are now barely more Democratic than other voters
3) One recent study suggests that all this shouldn't be surprising -- since unions' capacity to make their members more progressive has always been exaggerated. vox.com/politics/37802…
1) The question of whether it is politically productive for progressives to project contempt for mainstream Democrats is distinct from the question of whether mainstream Democrats should be more progressive.
imo the last 10 years have provided ample cause for doubting the former
2) I feel like an implication of Matt Karp's argument is that a major obstacle to egalitarian reform in the U.S. is progressives/leftists' insufficient willingness to withhold praise from mainstream Democrats. And that strikes me as delusional.
3) America is one of the richest countries that's ever existed. Voters in wealthy countries tend to exhibit status-quo bias and oppose tax increases. Much of the working-class does not like immigrantion. 90 percent of U.S. workers are not in a union...
1) Many have misconstrued this tweet as an apology for Hamas. It isn't; the tweet immediately follows one in which I highlight the fact that Hamas burned families alive. I recently wrote a piece expressing my moral revulsion at leftwing apologias for Hamas nymag.com/intelligencer/…
2) For weeks, I have argued that the fixation of some leftists on whether Hamas cut off the heads of infants was bizarre, since it isn’t any less morally hideous to shoot or burn an infant to death than to cut off their heads. Here is an excerpt from one such exchange:
3) Nevertheless, the question of whether Hamas beheaded infants has been a subject of controversy. Last night, I suggested that the recently published forensic pathologists’ report indicated that Hamas had cut off infants’ heads...