It’s Super Bowl Sunday in America, arguably the biggest secular holiday in America. You know all the storylines already. The Chiefs chasing an unprecedented third straight title. The Eagles going for revenge. Travis probably proposing to Taylor as the confetti falls after a questionable officiating call decides the game. Kendrick Lamar publicly executing Drake’s career during the halftime show. And of course the ads. All the ads.
When the Eagles are in the Super Bowl, the game becomes somewhat of a religious day of obligation across Philadelphia, South Jersey, The Delaware Valley, The Lehigh Valley, Delaware, and Northeast Maryland. Philadelphia is just a different place. Is it better? I won’t go there. Bills Mafia is amazing. Boston during a Yankees series is unique. Sundays in Pittsburgh are special. If you watch old videos from when Washington played in the East Side, you get them. Wrigley is a holy experience. Our friends down 95 in Baltimore put on a show. And yeah, while I hate the Queens fans, the Mets fan base is a blue collar crew. Even so, Philadelphia is different. The Eagles are definitely their own experience.
If you grew up around here, you heard the stories about the great wins, but you suffered through way more terrible losses. For as happy as February of 2018 or October of 2008 were, you earned it ten fold in heartbreak. Joe Carter. Spygate. Kobe and Shaq. Some kid from Millersville robbing Realmuto in the gap. A ticky-tack defensive holding ending Super Bowl 57. Scott Stevens. Fog Bowl. The 1987 Stanley Cup Final. All four of Andy’s NFC Title losses. We grow up together in Philly country learning to appreciate the highs, because we get plenty of lows. It’s the shared experience. We earn those wins.
America seems to be tired of Kansas City now, and I don’t blame them. It wasn’t long ago I was living in Omaha, and spent Super Bowl 54 in a Western Iowa casino. I took San Francisco mostly out of my spite for Reid, so when they went up a couple of scores, I started taunting the people around me who had been real loud. One of them, in an old worn down Chiefs coat replied to me, “of course we’re going to lose, we never win.” I immediately got that dude a drink. They suffered long and hard for this run. Nothing personal folks, you’re a great Midwest fanbase, but America is counting on us to save them from Travis and Taylor on a loop for the next month.
It’s time. The franchise that beat Lombardi and Brady for titles takes aim at Reid and Mahomes tonight. I’m ready for Philly-Philly.
I want to start by wishing the 47th President well. As of now, he’ll be President of the United States, including mine, for the next four years. I didn’t vote for him in any of his three campaigns, but clearly he inspired something in tens of millions of Americans. We must hope they are on to something now, as his failure would be the nation’s. I obviously disagree with him on many things. There’s still no point to hoping he makes a fool of himself though.
With that said, I do operate in an outcome driven world. I think results matter. I expect Donald J. Trump’s second term to be a failed Presidency. I see two pathways to failure- either he does pass harmful things like tariffs into law, bad the results of his success are painful, OR he’s ineffective and life doesn’t really get better this term. He may succeed at cutting some government spending on the margins, or at deporting a couple million people here illegally, but I doubt he gets everything he wants. Maybe the economy continues on autopilot and people decide that’s fine. If he actually pushed through most of his promised agenda from the 2024 Election, I predict tough times ahead.
What do I expect? More tax cuts for “inheritance baby” class levels of wealth. Deregulation of corporate America. Ukraine to have to surrender land to Russia. A roll back of environmental protections. Cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies. Two more conservative judges on the Supreme Court. Cuts to public education. More death in the Middle East. I don’t think any of this will be good. I think it will harm lives.
Look, there’s no reason to hope I’m right. There’s no point to keeping an enemy list of everyone performing at or attending his inaugural (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all are above that). You don’t need to pray for failure. If you believe in what you voted for last Fall, you believe it will come out in the wash. It’s time to move forward now. Joe Biden is gone and Donald Trump will be four years from now. Best of luck to the guy. I’m out living life today. If you’re raging at your television right now, please get out and touch grass.
Today will mark the end of a career of public service spanning more than 50 years. A New Castle County Councilman (elected in 1970). A U.S. Senator of 36 years (elected in 1972). Vice-President of the United States (elected in 2008) for two terms. The 46th President of the United States (elected in 2020). In a time of great division, Joe Biden served with class. He leaves certainly controversially, but history will be kinder than the present.
Joe Biden is leaving Washington with few to no allies. His own party sliced his candidacy to death, reportedly lead by the man who made him Vice-President 16 years ago and the powerful former Speaker he was friends with for decades. The media has laid his Vice-President’s defeat at his feet. The opposition blames him for everything from migrants at our border to inflation. Despite record low unemployment, record four year job creation, and rising wages, the public thinks his economy stunk. It’s hard to think of any positive coverage or feelings towards the 46th President right now. Even the activist groups he rewarded with student loan forgiveness, gun control legislation, and a record number of judges have moved on from the Biden White House. It’s fitting that he eulogized President Carter in one of his last major speeches. His Presidency will, in the near term, be equated with President Carter’s.
To be fair, Joe Biden brought some of this on himself. He built a White House around him filled with people who really didn’t owe their careers to him. That White House lacked powerful voices that were articulating his vision. His promises and achievements to liberal interest groups cast him as a “normal” Dem at a time when the Democratic brand is at it’s lowest popularity in a couple decades. His cabinet was full of experts and wonks, but short on inspiring messengers to put out to communicate with America. His public promise to pick a woman Vice-President opened the door to Republicans attacks on her as a “DEI hire.” He aged before our eyes, as an 80 years ago old man should, but never really addressed the elephant in the room. He picked a cautious Attorney General when he needed an aggressive pitbull. He allowed bad actors on the Supreme Court, in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, and running tech companies to drag out his Presidency. He seemed unaware of his sagging poll numbers as his re-election campaign sulked along for months, lacking any real, positive vision of why he deserved a second term. The Hunter saga drug on way too long. Trump remained too focal in his message. He clearly got nothing right with that June debate. Joe Biden got a lot wrong. Probably stuff I left out of here. For that reason, he’ll wake up on Tuesday as a former President.
I mentioned President Carter above, and he’s a great reference point for President Biden- Biden will leave office with 36% approval in his final poll, President Carter was at 34%. Carter went on to live nearly 44 years out of office, and his approval improved substantially. Harry Truman and Donald Trump left office in roughly the same range, and both saw markedly solid improvement out of office. LBJ left with 49% approval, but has also seen some image improvement. It is in fashion right now to regard Biden as nothing more than a pause in the two Trump terms. History suggests that won’t be a popular view soon.
The Biden Administration began in the midst of a major pandemic and on the heels of an attack on our Capitol on January 6th. Because those events subsided, we largely have politically forgotten about them. In time, that is likely to matter more. Sure, it is possible that the doomsayers are right, and Trump ends democracy and feeds us propaganda about Biden, but I’m not in that doomsayer camp. I think it is just as likely that the next four years are less eventful than people think, maybe even disappointingly so, and the passage of time leads to higher marks for President Biden. I don’t know that he’ll ever see it in his lifetime, but he may even become a fairly popular figure. Maybe even a 21st century version of Truman or LBJ.
Many of Biden’s critics in Washington will never rise to the level of giving a farewell address from the Oval Office. Few men really do, and sometimes their speeches are actually fairly memorable, because they say something actually profound. Joe Biden did that this week. In a speech that is being panned by critics across the spectrum, he gave us shades of President Eisenhower’s farewell, in which he warned us about the military industrial complex. President Biden warned us about the unchecked powers of big tech companies and the dangers of a few very rich men consolidating power within an oligarchy. This coming Monday we will watch an inauguration largely funded and attended by tech giants from Apple, Amazon, X (Twitter), OpenAI, and Meta, to name a few. These billionaires run companies that make them unbelievable wealth, in an industry almost totally unregulated by Washington. Many of them have extremely large government contracts that fund their excess. Several of them spent unheard of amounts of personal cash to influence the election. Others have censored the free flow of information to the public, on the behalf of the incoming President. Biden’s warnings about these dangers in his farewell are less predictions of the future and more an acknowledgment of where we are now. We may have little ability to stop them right now, but we probably need to make this front and center to our future.
For 50 years, Joe Biden had a front row seat to history. Now, as he put it, it’s someone else’s turn to stand guard. Democrats shouldn’t go overboard and call for an end to capitalism and free enterprise. Democrats should heed his warnings though. The next four years of Trump will be about deregulating corporate America, cutting spending on programs that benefit normal people, and cutting taxes for the super rich. This isn’t going to benefit successful six figure earners that worked hard and made it. It’s going to benefit people who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from their daddy. The next four years is designed to benefit them, not us. The Democratic Party Biden is leaving behind is not equipped right now to fight that battle. We need to heed the voice of experience and wisdom, and find authentic voices who can credibly articulate our case.
Later on today, Republicans will take control of both houses of Congress, setting up for a unified control of government when Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th President, later this month. Regardless of what you want the Democratic Party to be, they will essentially be irrelevant in governing America soon. Parties that win elections get to govern. Parties that lose get to complain.
I’ve largely stayed out of the debate over why exactly the Democratic Party lost in the 2024 Election. The reasons for that are fairly simple. First, I think there’s ample evidence that the election should have been much worse for Democrats, based on how they did down ballot from the Presidential race (they did better), so I think I’d be wrong to sit here and tell you how awful everyone did. Second, while I think there were serious problems with the Vice-President’s candidacy, I think it’s unfair to dunk on her after the loss when she didn’t cause most of the problems. Third, while I think Joe Biden does deserve some of the blame for the state he leaves the party in, I basically reject the media’s narrative that he lost the campaign for the party, or even that pushing him out was some stroke of strategic brilliance. My general read on what happened to the Democratic Party is that the root cause of their defeat was a death by a thousand cuts, that many different factors played into their defeat. My big picture opinion is that the problems with the Democratic Party were bigger than Biden, Harris, or even campaign tactics on the trail. Democrats have a mostly systemic problem that would be painful for a lot of people involved if they fixed it.
We make campaigns really complicated and scientific, and really at the end of the day they are more marketing than data science. Whether you’re trying to grow the electorate, shrink the electorate, or whatever, your goal is to convince more people that they want to make the effort to vote, and to vote for your candidate. Most voters don’t have some long checklist of issues they care about, they’ll look at the personal qualities they want and maybe one to three issues they care about. In other words, you want to be talking to the broadest audience possible about things they agree with you on, with the most likable/least offensive messenger possible. If you’re spending a lot of time as a party on stuff that excites 45% of the population, you’re probably going to lose, no matter how well you target voters. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were both generally likable people, who seemed to like things that normal guys liked, and ran competent governments on the day-to-day. There were a lot of people who didn’t consider themselves progressives or activists, many people who didn’t ever donate a dime, who felt fine casting their vote for them. The same could be said for Joe Biden in 2020.
The Democratic Party largely misread exactly why Barack Obama won two terms, and it has plagued them in almost every election after. It was less about changing social norms and demographic tidal waves changing the country, and more about President Obama providing cool, competent leadership coming out of a turbulent time. He wasn’t winning record numbers of Black, Latino, and young voters because those groups somehow are naturally more liberal than the rest of the population. He won them because they liked him, and he offered ideas that they liked when they heard him. I think that the misread of why Obama won has done serious damage to the party’s brand, and maybe gave a false sense of security that lead Democrats to take positions that were never going to sell. Democrats found themselves arguing the virtues of progressive social policy against conservatives, rather than going back to the faithful argument that all Americans deserve rights and security afforded to them simply as human beings. Democrats found themselves defending an open border, rather than a competent, orderly, and fair immigration process that has the resources to keep people safe. We got cornered into virtue signaling arguments about slogans like “Defund the Police” and “Green New Deal,” rather than fairness in the justice system and a clean, safe environment. Because a lot of donors, activists, and operatives in the Democratic Party wanted Obama’s mandate and legacy to be a demographic tsunami that was leading us to a rejection of white, traditionalist, Evangelical male values, we took his impressive electoral strength as confirmation that he won for the reasons we wanted him to. He didn’t. The belief that he did though lead a lot of the Democratic Party being very comfortable in a perpetual culture war that a combined majority of America either didn’t agree with us on, or just didn’t give a damn about. We spent a lot of time telling America what a bad guy Donald Trump and his supporters were. We probably would have done a lot better the last eight years talking about lowering Medicare’s eligibility age, funding public schools, and building more affordable housing. The Democratic Party lacked anything that could make a majority of America feel excited. We didn’t put forward a big idea that most people felt would improve their lives.
For sure there are other problems with the party. Our campaigns are overly bloated and inefficient, our messaging is too narrow, perhaps our candidates are too cautious. We waste our power on Capitol Hill when we win worrying about process arguments and norms. We view digital and online campaigning as largely a fundraising tool, rather than the battleground. I could go on. None of that on its own is what does us in though. If you don’t know what people like about you, it’s really hard to sell those attributes.
To the extent Joe Biden deserves blame, perhaps the timing was just bad. An 82 year old man just isn’t going to look and act like a 62 year old man. That’s not his fault, nor does it necessarily mean he was incapable of actually doing the job. Perhaps he should have run in 2016. Perhaps, given how close Kamala Harris lost, he should have never (been forced to) dropped out at all. Unfortunately, I think Joe Biden’s biggest political miscalculation in 2020 was trying to appease the numerous but small factions of people in the Democratic Party with his candidacy. Some people were never going to be happy and enthusiastic with Joe, because his brand really was different than the rest of the party. There’s a reason he looked like the most moderate guy on the debate stages in 2020- he knew better than to chase slogan politics. The unique brand that got him nominated and elected in 2020 should have been something he defiantly defended. Doing so would have given him much more space to address inflation, to address global issues, and to deal with a Congress that was increasingly dysfunctional for the latter half of his career in Washington. Governing as a fairly standard ideological Democrat boxed him in with a large chunk of America.
When Kamala Harris de facto took over the Biden campaign in the Summer, I privately told family at the time that she had no chance. Here she was, with terrible approval ratings, serving under a President with bad approval ratings, jumping into the race late, swimming uphill against the demographic history of our country (we elect white guys), and frankly her last Presidential run didn’t go great. She far exceeded my expectations of her. She was a disciplined and focused candidate, she raised money, she motivated people, and most of all, she didn’t make big mistakes. She picked a Vice-Presidential candidate who did the least harm even, a move that is almost always smart. She damn near won despite everything. About the only thing I can say bad about her was that previous Presidential campaign. Her instincts coming out of the 2018 midterms were to chase the lefty activists who seemed to have momentum in the party. Most of America was never there. Trump’s campaign effectively used her words against her. She just couldn’t quite get clear of being viewed as the average Democrat. She just couldn’t quite out run the past. Most of the reasons why (bigotry, the nature of her current job, poor media coverage, etc.) weren’t her fault. That doesn’t change the sense in hindsight that this was baked in from the jump.
The evidence suggests Democrats should have gotten blasted worse in this election. Basically every other governing party in the developed West has either lost or lost seats since the Covid-19 pandemic has faded from public view. Senators Rosen, Gallego, Baldwin, and Slotkin won swing states that Vice-President Harris lost, as did Governor Stein, while outgoing Senator Bob Casey out performed Harris in PA. House Democrats basically held the status quo. All this happened while Donald Trump won the election and the popular vote. If the Republican Party had matched his performance across the country, they would hold a sizable majority in both houses of Congress, comparable to now. This could have been way worse for Democrats. That they avoided it is worth some congratulations.
If you want people to buy your product, you have to sell them something they want. Republicans are always going to try and define the Democratic message as something terrible. The Democratic Party didn’t really push back against those perceptions. Most Americans view Democrats right now negatively. Allowing the GOP to define the Democrats as a “globalist” (such a gross term) status quo, Beltway insider, ideological, “DEI” (I know, horse shit), nerd party isn’t going to work. Marching out a collective of the same old faces and leaders, a surrogate list that still looks like 2009, and messaging points that are approved by every partner in the coalition isn’t breaking that mold.
In short, I think it’s time for some of our leading voices to take a break. Too many of our leaders listen too much to activists and donors in our party, and their views of the world just don’t jive right now with most of the people. Elections are won out where the people are, and the next generation of Democratic leaders should take the timeout we’re in to get out and meet them. Learn what the product is that they want from us, and run with it. Most people aren’t looking for a Bolshevik Revolution in America, but they do want something to be excited and hopeful for. Twenty years from now, the world will remember Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi fondly for the actually good governance they gave us over these past couple decades. We boxed them in though, and it’s time for Democrats to get outside of the box.
The last three weeks have been some of the longest of my life. On August 17th I was rushed to the hospital with diabetic keto acidosis. I did not know I was diabetic or had neuropathy, but I had an infected cut on my foot. The infection and diabetes fed off each other, and because of the neuropathy I didn’t feel the pain I should have. The result that day was losing half my foot. I chose to do an amputation of my lower leg just over a week later. I’ve done a week of rehab since and today I go home after three weeks. I’m beyond grateful.
In these past three weeks I’ve faced my mortality, my future, and the possibility of not doing a lot of things I love. The doctors at St. Luke’s Anderson saved my life. The nurses and staff kept me going. The staff at Sacred Heart rehab really put me back together. I’m fortunate. I had more visitors, calls, and texts than I could ever imagine. It kept me going. Other people wanting me to live was an even stronger motivation than my own desire to. Again, I’m grateful to everyone.
I will live and walk again. I have two pieces of advice for anyone who reads this. First, if you are uninsured, go on your state’s exchange and buy an insurance plan for 2025 under the Affordable Care Act. It cost me a couple dollars, but I’m not in financial ruin because I had good insurance. Second, get your blood work and watch every wound. This may very well have happened to me anyway, but it would have been better if I had known.
If you’re reading this, love ‘ya. Value life everyday.
I published this back in 2023, on 12/19. I got a lot of this right. This realignment wasn’t good for Democrats. Presidential approval remains poor. Non-college educated minority voters did keep moving towards Trump, while Harris actually improved with white voters almost entirely because of improved performance with college educated white men. The parts I got wrong were the importance of Dobbs and Biden winning. Dobbs did not disrupt the migration that was already going on with voters. Biden did not win, in no small part because of inflation/recession concerns and his own party knifing him up, because he wasn’t exactly what they really wanted. Kamala Harris could not unite the factions either, it turns out. Anyway, enjoy the update here.
It’s worth noting- our last two Presidents have spent most of the last seven years with poor approval ratings. When I say poor, I mean consistently under 50%, and usually handily. This is not something we’re necessarily used to- Bill Clinton spent most of his Presidency with high approval, George W. Bush spent his first term generally over 50%, and Barack Obama spent the majority of his Presidency with majority support. With that said, the new normal has become poor Presidential approval ratings, which seems to be an obsession of the press.
I think it’s worth us noting that this shouldn’t be shocking- the “right track, wrong track” question about this country has almost unanimously shown Americans saying we’re on the wrong track going back into the Bush 43 Presidency, or the better part of 20 years. Americans have not, for quite some time, thought the condition of our nation and society is improving. We live in one of the wealthiest, most technologically advanced, most militarily powerful countries in human history, we enjoy a high standard of living relative not only to the world, but to human history, and yet we’re not overly happy. The last couple of decades have shaken our confidence in so many institutions we held dear. We carry high debt, we work longer and longer hours for the same (or less) money, our marriages end in divorce (if they happen at all), addiction (to opioids, alcohol, whatever) is literally killing us, we’ve seen multiple wars in the last 75 years built on false pretenses, the Catholic Church covered up child molestations, school shootings are a constant part of our lives, universities covered for sexual monsters, our banks nearly melted down the economy, a hurricane destroyed an American city while our government looked incompetent, we spent 20 years in Afghanistan to just give it back within hours of leaving, Iran-Contra, the ridiculous Clinton impeachment, we lack confidence in our elections, Congress constantly gets us to the brink of government shutdowns, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I honestly can’t even remember all the stuff in my lifetime that people thought was horrible, and I didn’t even get into terrorist attacks here. It’s kind of surprising anyone thinks we’re on the right track. And I’m only bringing up the Supreme Court at the end of this list of grievances.
With that backdrop, it’s sort of surprising it took until 2017 for our Presidents to start seeing approval ratings that are under water. We began a period of political realignment with Barack Obama’s 2008 election, and we’ve been in it ever since. The net result is in-party division like we have never seen before. The Biden/Hillary wing of the Democratic Party represents somewhere between 55-70% of the party, while the Sanders wing approaches a third. The MAGA Republicans represent about two-thirds of their party, while the old Bush/Cheney/McCain/Romney/Ryan wing of the party is the other third. Nearly none of these people even entertain voting for the other party, but they basically hate the other wing of their own party. The net result of this is that virtually no national figure in American politics today has 50% of the population willing to “approve” of them. The other net result is that every Democratic Presidential nominee since 1996 has received at least 48% of the popular vote, and every Republican Presidential nominee since 2000 has received at least 46% of the popular vote. So basically the public will increasingly dislike our Presidential candidates, and yet they will basically vote for them or skip it. There’s very few actually open minded voters. There’s just a lot of unhappy voters.
All of this is a very long-winded way for me to say that Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s actual approval rating doesn’t really matter. About 90% of their voters from 2020 are going to vote for them again, no matter what, regardless of what pundits on X say. Even more to the point, even that last 10% might talk about doing something different, but 80% of them are voting the same way again, no matter what happens. National pollsters have not adjusted to an electorate that works more like the volume on your radio than a horse race. Intensity moves, opinions really don’t right now.
Again I’m making a point that is maybe lost in the explanation- Joe Biden is going to win in 2024. He’s going to win with an approval rating that probably never quite gets back to 50%. Most of the agitators to his left- be it on student loans, Gaza, or Dobbs- either live in super “blue” cities and states, or didn’t vote Democratic in 2020 (for varying reasons), and don’t represent anyone offline. Yes, this is true of the supposed “Gaza Backlash” voters in Michigan too, where Governor Whitmer last the Arab-American vote in 2022 and won an easy re-election. Trump has lead a very slow, drip of resurgence among non-white voters in general, particularly high school educated or less men, but he has more than limited his upward mobility with older white voters by putting Social Security and Medicare into question (and letting others in his party do so), and of course by Dobbs. Look, I’m going to be honest with you- Dobbs is going to decide the 2024 election. The GOP has generally underperformed a bit from 2017 on, but since Dobbs they have performed apocalyptically poorly for an opposition party in the United States, routinely losing or underwhelming in elections all over the United States. You simply cannot win an election telling slightly over half the population that they don’t have the right bodily autonomy in our society. There is no way to slice that. It cost the GOP what should have been a huge win in the 2022 midterms, it factored into abysmal performances in Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and around the country in 2023, and it simply will kill them in 2024. Worse yet for them, nominating Nikki Haley might seem like it would fix it, but both for her own extreme position on abortion, and the fact she could never get the Trump base voter to turn out for the election, she would underwhelm too. The GOP has a Dobbs problem, and virtually no silver bullet to fix it by 2024. The most angry women live in suburban swing Congressional districts, often times in the most swing states (which should be read as “suburban.”). Yes, things can happen yet. International crises. Recession. Inflation spikes (mostly from gas). A health crisis. So no, this is not set in stone. As is though, Dobbs is going to be what decides the 2024 election, and Joe Biden is in a good spot for that.
In the longer term though, this is more interesting than what I’m writing here. It may be a long while until a President has consistent majority approval. We basically live in a constant “four party” state where primaries are ideological war zones, and incumbents do not enjoy broad support within their parties. Voters are still realigning as I said before, but at a glacial pace for now. I would expect if the dam is going to break, and we’re going to see a mass migration of voters, it’s going to happen after Biden and Trump have run their final campaigns in 2024. In other words, a year from now you’ll just see the tip of the new political sun rising. College educated white voters moving left. Non-college educated voters of color moving right. This could make for significantly different politics in the near future, and serious problems for the Democratic Party. Much as Catholic voters moved substantially in the 20 years after JFK’s 1960 win, millennial and non-white voters are not going to continue to provide them the margins they gave Barack Obama. It was silly to ever think they would. Again though, these are five and ten year problems from now, not 2024. And no one should get worried about Presidential approval ratings for a while. They aren’t going to be pretty.
2004 under the 2024 electoral vote values.2008 under 2024 electoral vote values.2012 under 2024 electoral values.2016 under 2024 electoral vote values.2020 under 2024 electoral vote values.The 2024 outlook.
Back in the Obama years, we heard a lot about “demographics are destiny.” In fact they are, just not how those smart folks thought. There were thoughts of Democrats building huge electoral majorities as late as just after the 2012 election. The only part of that huge majority that has held as “permanent” so far is Colorado and Virginia, totaling 23 electoral votes. Democrats could probably count turning Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina all purple, totaling 49 electoral votes, as a somewhat positive outcome as well (Bush won them all somewhat easily). But for those 72 electoral votes, let’s be clear about what Democrats have seen slide against them. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin all blue from 1992 through 2012 and somewhat comfortable Obama wins, now are the 54 most competitive electoral votes in our nation’s politics. Florida, Ohio, and Iowa, 53 electoral votes that President Obama carried twice, are now almost certainly red moving forward. Indiana and Missouri, two of the three most competitive states in the 2008 election, are 21 electoral votes of red bastion. And of course, the promised movement of Texas to the left doesn’t look all that close to fruition. That’s 128 electoral votes Democrats thought as late as 2008 were no worse than battlegrounds that have slid away from them to varying degrees.
So the obvious question is why? An underrated part of this is Republican gains with Latinos and Black men in 2020 putting Democrats on defense. Even this though understates the bigger problem Democrats have had for a while- they put all their eggs in the demographic tsunami’s basket, and never understood what that meant under our federal system. This will become even more crystal clear in Senate elections over the coming decades. Population growth is in fact more non-white than ever before, but it’s all in a couple of states. By 2040, half the population will live in eight states, and 70% of the population will live in fifteen states. What that means in short is that half the country will elect 16 Senators and the other half (which will be much whiter and possibly have less education) will elect 84. The 70% of the country in 15 states will get just 30 Senators and the 30% in smaller, more rural, less diverse states will get 70 Senators. The United States Senate, before I am 60 years old, will be one of the least representative legislative bodies in the democratic world. While the House of Representatives, and by extension the electoral vote count for President, should at least partially move with population growth, even that won’t be perfect. Worse yet for Democrats, even if the GOP just keeps up marginal growth with non-white voters, they will keep Texas and Florida in their column for President, keeping them in the ball game to win elections if they continue doing well with white voters. Basically, if Democrats can’t change their 60 year trend line with white voters, Presidential elections remain on a knife’s edge, the Senate’s future is fairly conservative, and the House will only lean Democratic, not permanently tipped left. This is not even getting into state level governments, or what the Supreme Court will look like and do.
On Friday the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee formally adopted a new primary calendar for the 2024 Presidential race. The big highlights are replacing Iowa as first in the nation, instead having the South Carolina Primary go first, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada, then Georgia and Michigan. Already there are problems, including Iowa and New Hampshire saying they won’t go along, and Georgia officials saying their primary won’t move. The order will be finalized next year.
The rationalization behind the President and the DNC’s decision is actually pretty strong and realistic. No group has been more loyal to Democratic candidates than Black voters over the last 40 years. Since South Carolina began moving up the calendar, it has been growing in importance, catapulting Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden toward the nomination, and three of them towards the White House. Joe Biden said having more diverse voices pick the nominee is the principle he values. That is a very good principle to have.
I have two main problems with the new primary calendar. The first is that making changes presumes there is something broken that needs to be fixed. There isn’t. Democratic nominees have been extremely competitive in recent years, which every nominee since 1996 getting at least 48% of the popular vote. Since 1992, Democrats have won five of eight Presidential elections, and won the popular vote 7 of 8 times. None of the nominees were crackpots that took embarrassing positions either. Democrats nominated fairly solid candidates under the existing calendar.
My second problem is that there is a perceived second problem being answered with the new calendar, that the current calendar doesn’t give voice to non-white voters. It’s true that Iowa and New Hampshire are super white. It’s also true that going first and second hasn’t increased their influence. South Carolina is the undisputed kingmaker in Democratic politics. Voting fourth has allowed them to effectively end many candidates’ pathways who could not connect to the large Black voting population there. Since 1992, every Democratic nominee for President except for John Kerry, who lost to North Carolina’s Senator, won the South Carolina primary. Most of them won decisively and walked out with significant delegate leads. In Nevada, Hillary won in 2016 to get back on her feet after New Hampshire, and in 2020 Joe Biden’s 2nd place in Nevada saved his campaign. The more diverse states are already the decision makers in the Democratic Party. There’s no disputing that.
Sure, one can argue the new calendar is a bow to “new realities,” and that’s true. Iowa doesn’t look like a swing state anymore. The party is simply more diverse. The new calendar accelerates the reality we live in. Again though, why? This current early state structure nominated Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. It elevated voices from people of color. Sure, the new calendar does that more. Are we fixing a problem by doing that though, or creating one. Leftist Bernieland voices will perceive this as an attempt to insure they can’t win, and while they should look inward and realize why that is, is that a conversation we need. The media will point out that Democrats want their nominee picked almost entirely with no input from the central and mountain time zones, or by coastal states, basically. Swing state New Hampshire and quasi-swing state Iowa will almost certainly rebel and lose a chunk of their delegates. And frankly, if Michigan and Georgia are in for being swing states, why aren’t Pennsylvania and Arizona? We’re opening a lot of cans of worms here, for marginal improvement in the process.
I love the principles being displayed by these moves. I can’t find the problems they’re trying to fix. I can clearly see the problems they will create.
Apocalypse Vibes 