Politicking Bits & Pieces
Do you think we’re entering a period of competitive authoritarianism?
I think we’re entering a period of mass stupidity, other than that idk
You said that New Jersey is going to be purple in the future. What is causing this, and how can it be prevented and reversed? I want to get ahead of problems rather than just respond to them.
People of color are going right and white voters aren’t shifting left fast enough (or at all in many places) to prevent it. From 2020 to 2024, the only group to go left was white women, specifically non-college white women.
For instance, New York and New Jersey both saw crazy shifts right and that’s because they’re both roughly 55% white, meaning they’re 45% non-white, and they were two of the states that went furthest right based on the country at large. By precinct data:
This chart shows how the election would have gone if only non-white people voted. The only state Trump would have outright won is Iowa, so Harris would have gotten 525 electoral votes, but look at how NJ and NY (and California and New Mexico) look compared to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. Basically, white voters are why NY and NJ are so blue, not POC at this point. The entire western half of the country is so much lighter blue because of the Hispanic shift right!
I understand the pessimism about the Senate but I can't bring myself to write it off completely. If the midterm elections were held today the Dems wouldn't stand a CHANCE or retaking the Senate. But we've got over a year between now and the midterms. Public opinion is already moving against this administration, even on immigration, his strongest issue. And again, we have 12+ months of embarrassing fuckups from this admin and general middle fingers to his base. Another variable we can't account for this far out is candidate quality. Trumpism without Trump doesn't have a great track record (just ask Herschel Walker, Kari Lake, and Roy Moore) and it's arguably cost Republicans some winnable races. Like don't be Pollyanna-ish but maybe Dems should swing for the fences. AND ANOTHER THING thermostatic public opinion alone can’t put Congressional democrats over the top. There needs to be SERIOUS investment in social media presence, attacking hard on the unpopular aspects of not just the Big Beautiful Bill but everything this admin has been doing. In states like Iowa they need to go ALL IN on voter registration efforts (Laura Belin did a good article on this in Bleeding Heartland). so yeah maybe they’re not gonna flip Kansas but as the saying goes shoot for the moon land among the stars.
I’m not dooming to like, be cool, I’m just saying that my understanding of human nature has been historically correct even though I wish it wasn’t haha.
And, the reason voters are now more pro-immigration is that Trump actually shut down the border, nobody is coming in because they’re all too scared to do so. The sentiment will flip the moment a Democrat is back in the White House.
I think Dems are messaging against OBBB as much as they can, they’re constantly posting videos and infographics about it and begging people to care. But, the problem is that people don’t pay attention, and the media gets more clicks and coverage when it posts about other topics, immigration, whatever Epstein shit is going on, etc. so they’re incentivized to not extensively cover the fact millions of people are getting kicked off their health insurance.
Also, the problem with people that are plugged into politics being Democrats is that the people who aren’t plugged in are now Republicans, and they also skew poorer, so naturally, the people that read the news don’t care that much about people they don’t know losing their health insurance. The ACA repeal was a big deal because everybody knows people with preexisting conditions, everybody has children on their parents’ insurance until they were 26 or were those children, but college-educated Democrats aren’t often hanging out with people on Medicaid because of how little social mobility there is, and it shows.
Do you think that people are less sexist to Kamala compared to Hillary? Asking because I don't live in America but I am online a lot and look at US politics a lot on my time online and it seems like people like Kamala Harris so much better than Hillary Clinton. Is it because she's nice and smiley compared to mean ol' Hillary? Or is it because they didn't know how bad Donald Trump would be then and are scared of him now? I know you're not omniscient, just thought I'd ask for your opinion on the matter.
I think sexism was less salient in 2024 than it was in 2016, and I think active misogynists disliked Kamala and Hillary equally, but I think passive misogynists hated Hillary way more than Kamala.
Like, when people say that Hillary engaged in “identity politics” in 2016, they’re not talking about anti-racism or LGBT stuff, which Obama did too, they’re talking about feminism, and how Hillary identified as the first female candidate of a major political party. Kamala shied away from that moniker, and she didn’t wear white during her DNC acceptance speech and all, almost certainly because of how Hillary was treated and how she lost, but I don’t think it worked because at the end of the day, Kamala is still a woman, and people couldn’t ignore that.
The main difference is that the men who knifed Kamala weren’t white men, they were men of color. There’s something to be said for how men are more vitriolic towards women of their own race (meaning white or non-white) that “break” the rules, stuff like not having kids of their own, being very ambitious, etc., but that might be too speculatory.
The thing about racism with regards to Kamala is that there are some virulently racist white people who loathe non-white people and would never vote for them, but there are way too many Obama-Trump voters, especially in the Midwest, for racism to be the deciding factor to Kamala’s loss. Kamala also did markedly better in the Midwest than the Sunbelt, which is far more racially diverse!
At the end of the day, I think that white people as a whole are less racist than men of color are sexist, and that’s … not a fun thought to wrap my brain around.
How do Democrats win back the median American when they fundamentally desire evil things?
Wait for a recession and/or another war that the United States is directly involved in
How do you find compassion for people you think are awful and will never really change?
I’ve had a lot of therapy over the years, and what I worked the most on is learning to accept that I can’t control everything, including other people’s behavior. All I can do is my very best to make the world a better place. You can’t change what is until you understand and accept what is, and what is might just be people that are fundamentally and irredeemably awful.
This is a bit of a weird perspective, but do you think there's something to be said about how Democrats are losing support because of a feeling of abandonment from marginalized groups?
My first gut reaction after last November was that Democrats lost because they felt too "socially radical" for the median voter, and that the median voter just kinda sucked. So they need to move to the center, right?
Now, I'm not so sure. One of the biggest issues in the election was immigration. The current admin's policies are WILDLY unpopular in their extremity (see this past weekend), and they weren't exactly hidden or unknown. Except... The Dems tried to appeal to the "tough on immigration" sentiment by having Kamala go to ICE detention centers and the like.
So what voters were being offered was.... Republicans, and Republican-lites. So why wouldn't they vote for the ones who seemed like they would at least be hard-line and effective about it?
There's also something to be said for messaging and policy creating opinion, as opposed to following it. Eg, support for transgender rights was steadily growing, until it received a MASSIVE backslide once it became part of the Republican party's messaging. And Dems just kinda... Cede that ground with milquetoast efforts to make it more "moderate". The Overton window on tons of issues has shifted a LOT- trans issues are the most dramatic, but it's happened for lots of things.
Idk. Bit of a ramble. I've just run across a couple of your posts that say you think Dems need to move towards the center socially to ever win anything, and I'm torn on whether I agree or not.
I don’t agree.
Democrats didn’t lose in 2024 because of turnout among their base, they lost because of persuasion in swing states, especially in the Sunbelt, and even then, Kamala lost the electoral college by like 200k votes across the Blue Wall. Turnout was very high, and in swing states, Kamala got the necessary white support to win, but she crashed and burned with Hispanic voters who went ~20 points right in Pennsylvania and Michigan, and even if they’re only a small portion of the electorate, that basically swung the election.
Also, in blue cities, especially but not only in blue states, again, Democrats didn’t lose on turnout, they lost because a bunch of reliably Democratic groups, mainly non-college Hispanics and Asians but also some Black voters, all got really fed up with migrants in their communities and went hard right. Look at the precincts in Queens and the Bronx that went furthest right, they’re predominantly Hispanic and Asian. Look at the South Side of Chicago and how far right it swung; its residents were furious that migrants were being housed there while American citizens were struggling.
Plus like, Trump’s best issue is still immigration even after all the due process violations, and the reason he’s polling so low is because of his brainwormed tariffs and inability to actually fix the insane cost of living. People aren’t into ICE agents being in plain clothes and going into schools and raiding playgrounds for nannies, but Trump is still at -7.4 on immigration based on aggregated polls, and is at -8.9 overall so he’s doing BETTER on immigration than on all other issues even with all the atrocities that his administration are committing. Like, no matter how much Trump himself talks about bringing the smartest immigrants to make America great, Stephen Miller runs the show on this issue and he wants all brown people gone.
I also just don’t think you can change public opinion by changing policy on the national level. You have to meet people where they’re at and persuasion is on the scope of decades, not years.
So yes, I get what you’re saying but I disagree.
No offense, but you do realize a lot of the anger in your comments comes from people that are forced to care about politics, right? It’s irritating to have your right to marry or bodily autonomy be dictated by randos in Waukesha, Wisconsin. I’m not surprised most people don’t care more about democracy than that.
Actually, the people who get most mad at me are the people whose special interest is politics and hate voters for disagreeing with them. I get yelled at because these people scream at anybody who mildly disagrees with them instead of targeting actual ideological enemies, the narcissism of small differences.
I like this format a lot, and I kind of wish more Substackers had posts like these! Also, super random, but how's Jude these days?