Notice how they define “wokeness” or “leftism” along the lines of just banging your head against the wall with unpopular positions. This lets them define any campaign that’s not outright insane as following their “ideas.”
Arguing that leftists can NEVER win and that we need to worship Bill Clinton forever because they’ll all campaign in bell hooks quotes and then saying “wow I was right all along” when they don’t do that and win.
Like what the fuck was the point of those studies you promoted about leftists being too neurotic to function politically if it turns out that you’re also vindicated when they run a masterful campaign. We need some consistency here!
Was your argument that politicians should just run good campaigns, and that there was never an ideological component to it? Then you weren’t SAYING ANYTHING!!!!!
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Nobody brings it up because nobody trusts polling anymore but if you look at the national average this election you clearly see Harris shedding two points (i.e., the margin in WI, MI, PA and GA) after early September, which is around when she started the Liz Cheney world tour.
The narrative has been so centered around her uphill battle and the headwinds and whatnot that nobody has ever accused her people of blowing a lead. But if you take the polls literally, they…blew a lead.
Her polling trendline tracks so closely with how her rhetoric changed that it feels fake. Like there’s no way it’s this simple.
These states voting D at the Senate level, plus NC Dems winning half of the state’s statewide contests, means that non-Harris Democrats won in enough states to get over 270 electoral votes. This was an electorate Ds could have won with—they just didn’t want Biden or Harris.
Even in states that didn’t split, downballot Dems outran Kamala across the board. Maryland, where the popular moderate former Governor Larry Hogan ran, was the sole exception.
It’s hard to stress how much of a break this is from everything we saw in past Trump-era elections. Between 2016 and 2020, not a single Dem won a senate race in a Trump state. Incumbents never consistently outran the top of the ticket. Nonincumbents almost never did.
From this to the Selzer poll to special elections, all of the big indicators that succeeded at clocking Trump’s strength in 2016 and 2020 went totally bust this year. Nate Cohn was absolutely right; turnout dynamics have changed too much to use them as a baseline as I did.
The likely cause of this appears to be Dobbs causing Dems to solidify their strength with high-prop, high-engagement voters in a way that prevented those groups from depicting shifts in attitudes as they did in the past.
This isn’t a new insight at all, ofc—Cohn proved that this was definitively the case with special elections way back earlier this year. I had hope that WA’s higher turnout could allow it to still be useful, but neither it nor the state at large was predictive of national shifts.
I don't think it's recognized yet just how dangerous it is to have a Democratic candidate practically outsourcing her foreign policy to neocon think tanks like CNAS while parading around her Dick Cheney endorsement.
In 2019, Kamala’s top foreign policy advisor was Michèle Flournoy, who supported war in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and was nearly Hillary Clinton's Defense Secretary. Flournoy was endorsed for that role by Iraq War architects Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol inthesetimes.com/article/center…
At CNAS, Flournoy billed the UAE $250,000 in exchange for writing certain policy papers favorable to the monarchy and lobbying the Obama admin to send them further military aid. Somehow this is all legal.
he should have thought about staying true to his mission instead of scoffing at every single objection to his priors for an entire election cycle and including firms run by literal high schoolers called “patriot polls” in his models because they fit those priors. but oh well.
he blew three of the most pivotal senate races of the election, forecasted overall chamber control wrong and massively overrated Republican strength in the house. he did worse than both other statistical models and subjective raters. like I’m sorry but you need to deliver.
And this is while the polls in 2022 were generally pretty accurate if you just had the sense to exclude obviously cooked junk data from hack firms. He made the decision not to do so because he thought there would be a red wave. Nobody did this to him.