I read the whole piece and it is very interesting. Thanks for posting. Some of the things I found very particularly interesting. From the piece. "I don’t think I can answer that comprehensively. But if you look at the concrete questions, white liberals are to the left of Hispanic Democrats, but also of Black Democrats, on defunding the police and those ideological questions about the source of racial inequity. Regardless, even if a majority of nonwhite people agreed with liberals on all of these issues, the fundamental problem is that Democrats have been relying on the support of roughly 90 percent of Black voters and 70 percent of Hispanic voters. So if Democrats elevate issues or theories that a large minority of nonwhite voters reject, it’s going to be hard to keep those margins. Because these issues are strongly correlated with ideology. And Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do. And I don’t think we can buy our way out of this trade-off. Most voters are not liberals. If we polarize the electorate on ideology — or if nationally prominent Democrats raise the salience of issues that polarize the electorate on ideology — we’re going to lose a lot of votes." This goes to issues like "Defund Police" and how the riots following the death of George Floyd were talked. I've seen many people talk about the destruction and the looting as the breaking of a social contract and even having Kimberly Jones saying "as far as I'm concerned they can burn it all down!" While Kimberly Jones is black what we've found out since then was that that attitude wasn't as widely shared among black Americans. This also goes that the brunt of the destruction and looting was in primarily black and other minority neighborhoods but also poorer neighborhoods with a lower level of education than many neighborhoods that were more white, wealthy and better educated. The next part: "The good news is that there’s a strong case for thinking this time might be different. I’m not a macroeconomist, but it seems like Joe Biden might preside over a post-corona economic boom. Already, Biden’s approval rating is very strong. The best predictor of how a midterm is going to shake out is how popular the president is. So, for now, everything looks about as good as you could hope for. But we have no margin for error. If we conduct ourselves the way we did after 2008, we’re definitely going to lose. And due to the way that our electoral system works, we really could be locked out of power for a very long time, just like we were after 2010. So that means the need for messaging discipline is stronger than ever. But keeping the national conversation focused around popular economic issues probably won’t be enough. Since the maps in the House of Representatives are so biased against us, if we don’t pass a redistricting reform, our chance of keeping the House is very low. And then the Senate is even more biased against us than the House. So, it’s also very important that we add as many states as we can." It's no longer the economy stupid.. This is a very troubling sign for Democrats that even if the economy is booming they still might lose. I think he might be onto something as Democrats lost seats in 2014 when the economy was in full rebound and in 2016 when it was already in boom. I'm not sure I think it's so dire that only redistricting and adding seats can save Democratic majority but I think it needs to go to finding candidates that match their districts. While yes the gerrymandered maps aren't good and they aren't going to get better the growth of suburban districts does give moderate Democrats a good chance especially if they are running against extremely conservative Republicans. As I said in another thread I also think Democrats could still compete and win in even rural districts if they are willing to accept a socially conservative candidate but who otherwise supports progressive economic policies. This part I found very interesting: "So, in 2016, Hillary Clinton got 51.1 percent of the two-party vote. Obama got 52 percent in 2012. In just about any other country, retaining 51.1 percent support would have been enough to keep power. But in this country, between 2012 and 2016, the Electoral College bias changed from being one percent biased toward Democrats to 3 percent biased toward Republicans, mainly because of education polarization. So Donald Trump is unpopular. And he does pay a penalty for that relative to a generic Republican. But the voters he’s popular with happen to be extremely efficiently distributed in political-geography terms." It sounds to me that Trump is the Morey / D'Antoni strategy candidate. He's a very poor candidate by traditional measures but very good by analytics. In other words he's taking a lot of threes and even though his shooting percentage is lower than if he took midrange jumpers over the course of a game there is a bigger return per possession for taking threes. There definitely appears to be something to that and as someone who did think that the GOP was demographically doomed this shows how they can hang on and even do well for much longer.
I just wrote about adding states. I think his analysis makes sense and in terms of getting things done yes that makes sense too. Yes it is a power grab but seeing how Republicans do things that is pretty much how things get done. My own opposition towards doing away with the filibuster is less about winning elections or getting legislation passed. My own argument has been that while you will get a lot of your agenda passed without things like the filibuster that just means that once COngress changes those can be reversed and other things that perhaps you don't want get passed. Congress starts looking more like what we see with EO's now. A lot are written by a President only with the first act of the next President reversing them. My own view is that PR and DC should get statehood. Not so much that Democrats can get four new senators but that from Maria and what we saw on Jan. 6th the US citizens are underserved by the Federal government largely due to lack of representation.
Another interesting factoid. https://www.kuow.org/stories/majority-of-muslims-voted-for-biden-but-trump-got-more-not-less-support In fact, Trump appears to have gotten more, not less support from American Muslims. Associated Press exit polls show 35% of Muslims voted for Trump and 64% for Joe Biden. A separate poll from a Muslim civil rights group found that 17% of Muslims voted for Trump, but that was still up by 4 percentage points from its poll in 2016. Muslims make up a small percentage of the population, but their vote is key in states such as Michigan. It's a state where Biden won by about 155,000 votes. Trump won Michigan in 2016 by under 11,000. The slight increase in support didn't surprise Dalia Mogahed, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, an American Muslim research organization. It conducted a poll in the spring. "We did see a weakening of Democratic support among Muslims," she said. "Just from 2019 to 2020, the percentage of Muslims who increased their approval rating of the president had gone up significantly." It jumped from 16% to 30%.
Do you know how hard it is for a first term President to lose an election? Oh course it was going to be close. Trump was literally President for 4 years and used his office to illegally campaign every chance he got. There's a reason Trump got more votes from minorities this time around, he attracted populists that are attracted to big loud men.
