James Comey might be the dumbest mother fucker in America. He literally influenced the 2016 Election to help Donald Trump win- any other excuse he gives about complying with Congress is silly, he gave them info they already had. His memo about Hillary Clinton was likely the 1,000th cut that bled her dry, and I’m sure he was quite smugly proud after that. Trump took office, realized that he couldn’t trust Comey, and fired his ass. Comey than ran his mouth off about him for a few years. Trump got back into office for a second, non-consecutive term, and fired Comey’s daughter and indicted his ass. Listen, I’m still not a Trump fan, but this is hilarious.
Trump’s read on Comey’s inability to be loyal to anyone but his own ego is a pretty good read. I might have called his efforts to stop illegal surveillance by the Bush Administration admirable, in a silo. Then he sent the famous “Comey memo” to Congress two weeks before the 2016 Election, costing his then-boss, President Obama’s chosen successor the Presidency. Comey likes attention. In both cases he failed to actually achieve anything- the illegal surveillance programs of the Bush Administration continued with Comey’s blessing after he got a White House meeting with President Bush and he never even indicted, much less convicted Clinton of even a minor crime. Since leaving office, Comey wastes no opportunity to write a book or get on TV. Comey’s loyalty is to Comey’s own ego. He did not serve his country well at all in office.
Obviously this is Lord of the Flies level shit, no responsible Republic lets their President order indictments against his enemies and then goes and finds a case to bring. This is basic lawlessness and Pam Bondi is just the latest useless goon to serve as hired help. With all of that said, I guess oh well? James Comey put himself ahead of the country when he plunged us into this mess by helping Donald Trump win in the closing weeks of the 2016 Presidential Election. Given the suffering some people are enduring from that, I’m totally fine that he has to suffer too. In fact, I don’t feel bad when Trump turns on any of these idiots who decided they’d be his personal ass kisser. You created this mess, James Comey. Sure, it’s ridiculous. It was ridiculous when he fired you, or for that matter your daughter, but you caused it. I don’t care, do you?
Look, I’ve found some of what Kamala Harris has had to say so far in her book to be hilariously funny. When I read the excerpt about why she didn’t pick Pete Buttigieg as her running mate, I definitely found her logic to be sad and maybe even cynical, but also probably correct from a purely strategical manner. Her “criticisms” of Biden for staying in as long as he did basically miss reality for me, but I think from her perspective are almost a necessary rationalization of why things went how they did.
Then there’s the screenshots above about her book, which are basically a good enough reason for me to not read it. Look, I voted for Kamala Harris, and I would again. She’s got tons of good qualities. The fact is though, if they weren’t prepared for her to lose by election night, she and her team are the most delusional people I’ve ever seen. Yes, I knew we were going to win for Biden/Harris in 2020, because Joe Biden was not only consistently ahead in state and national polls, but was usually over 50% in most polls, regardless of his margin. At no point was Kamala Harris ever really there. She was behind in the polling averages in almost all of the swing states, well within the margin of error, but behind. Her numbers in the polls looked eerily similar to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Election Results, and they basically finished exactly there. Many Democratic donors, activists, and even operatives have spent years getting excited at every “gotcha” moment for Donald Trump, every bad debate performance or speech, and every new scandal that arises around the guy, and every time they get excited and proclaim “this is the time” people finally turn on him. They never do. The only campaign that ever put forward a viable alternative that a broad enough cross section of the country might vote for instead of Trump, was Biden’s 2020 campaign. Hillary and Kamala both sort of relied on the country finally decided Trump was too stupid, evil, corrupt, or wrong to vote for. That was never, ever going to happen.
There’s a really ugly truth that maybe Vice-President Harris didn’t want to write about, or maybe it was cut from the book, or whatever- Kamala Harris was never going to win the 2024 Election. The country had soured on the Democratic Party as a whole. Inflation had put them in a bad mood. They had soured on Biden, in part because of inflation, in part because he was old, and very largely because they felt he had governed less moderately than they hoped he would when they elected him. Harris was his Vice-President, in a party where really no one had made a move to stand against Biden’s Presidency, making her the most vulnerable to his negatives of a party full of people who were vulnerable to his negatives. Then there is the simple fact that Harris herself was viewed even more negatively than Biden through virtually his entire Presidency until Democrats ran away from him (like cowards) after his debate performance. And yes, since I named every other reason, let’s just state the obvious demographic reasons. Hillary Clinton was possibly the most qualified, most universally known nominee the party ever put forward in 2016, and Barack Obama was still very popular, not to mention she was the first female nominee in the history of the country. Just read everything after that last comma and get the point, because none of the stuff before it mattered. Hillary Clinton lost, as about the best woman nominee anyone could have come up with at that time. The country is very, very resistant to electing a woman. That’s a bad thing, but it’s a thing that isn’t changing on it’s own. Kamala Harris was not only the next woman to run for President, she was also a Black woman. This country’s history of racism is well chronicled. It’s a large reason why one of our first forty-seven Presidents wasn’t white. Harris, with an avalanche of things already against her, was asking the country to elect a Black woman. I don’t know if it was impossible for her to win in a neutral environment, but the odds were pretty high against her. Stack all of the other negative things I mentioned here on top of that, and Kamala Harris was basically trying to swim up Niagra Falls in this race. She never had a chance.
The 2024 Election was decided when party elders like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama decided to be influenced by the politically blind, such as George Clooney and other wealthy donors, and basically pushed Joe Biden out of the race. No one but Biden had a prayer in hell of beating Donald Trump. Biden knew that, that was why he had continued running for President well after his 80th birthday. Biden also knew that if he didn’t run, the only way to avoid a complete Civil War level meltdown within the Democratic Party was to coronate Kamala Harris and hope for the best. He had much better instincts than any of the other “elders” in the Democratic Party. All of this is what bothers me about what Harris is saying here. She’s criticizing Biden for being the adult in the room. She also wants us to believe she really had no idea she was going to lose. The day Biden dropped out, I knew she was going to lose. I know she was smart enough to know that too. I am willing to bet a donut to anyone that if you could get a candid answer out of anyone senior on the analytics team, they would tell you their numbers showed they were losing. As cynical as I am about analytics, even I would be stunned if they were so bad that they actually believed anything else.
Last week I wrote about Charlie Kirk at length. My message was simple- this was a horrible tragedy, this is not a right-left political violence problem, and we’re being over force-fed “us vs. them” info. I went on to talk about how Kirk’s death and the hyper-partisan reactions were playing out locally, and how Jimmy Kimmel’s comments about Kirk fit into the larger war on liberal comedy. For those of you who read me regularly, you know this is a lot of typing for me about Charlie Kirk, who had never once been mentioned on my blog before his death. I don’t talk about really any of the MAGA podcast/influencer folks- not Laura Loomer, Nick Fuentes, not even Tucker Carlson. It’s not so much that they are insignificant to me, I acknowledge they have large audiences and a good deal of influence with MAGA leaders all the way up to Donald Trump. I think talking about them is complicated and takes a lot of nuance that you can’t really have in every post. They are not elected officials or government officials who have direct powers to help or hurt us as a society or individuals. I don’t listen to or read any of them, other than when I come across their tweets and other posts, most of which I don’t agree with (occasionally I do, but even a broken clock is right twice a day). On the other hand, and definitely in part because they are not empowered government officials, I absolutely support their first amendment right to speak whatever they wish, free from any government censorship. On the other hand, if they lie or defame people, they should have to deal with their employers, funders, and civil lawsuits from individuals for their actions. I just kind of think their world is largely none of my business, I’m not one of their consumers.
So all the writing about Kirk does kind of prove a right-wing talking point- Kirk is larger in death than he ever was in life. I didn’t give a shit about him a month ago. Now I’m writing about him. But are my writing about the actual person Charlie Kirk, or whitewashed character that has only marginal ties to the actual person? David A. Graham of the Atlantic writes about this, and concludes that this is literally an affront to the actual person Charlie Kirk was. He writes beautifully about the irony in this mythological version of Charlie Kirk:
Kirk’s commitment to debate was inextricable from his political views; he wasn’t a value-neutral advocate for free speech. Kirk arose as a countercultural figure and deployed the First Amendment as a crucial tool for spreading his ideas: In an environment where they were not welcome, he pointed out that they were protected. Now that Kirk’s political allies hold power, however, many appear eager to suppress ideas they dislike. The Trump administration is vowing to use Kirk’s death as an excuse to crack down on dissent even as it lionizes him for defending it.
Kirk began his career planting Turning Point USA chapters on college campuses. As many conservatives were writing off academia, Kirk was evangelizing, creating a beachhead for right-wing views in traditionally liberal environments. Free speech was an important shield for him, because some of his ideas were bigoted, or articulated abrasively.
Some people now praising Kirk are conflating a commitment to argument with a devotion to civility. Kirk succeeded, in part, by eschewing civility in favor of conflict. He said, for example, that “Joe Biden is a bumbling, dementia-filled—Alzheimer’s—corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.” (In the same radio show, he questioned whether Kamala Harris is Black.) He bused supporters to Washington on January 6, 2021; invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about the insurrection; and campaigned for pardons for the perpetrators.
Kirk railed against transgender and gay rights. He called George Floyd a “scumbag,” declared the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “mistake,” and claimed that many influential Black figures were in their roles only because of affirmative action. “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified,’” he said. He said that if Donald Trump lost in 2024, hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants would be brought to Alabama, where they would “become your masters.” Comparisons to King are especially ironic because King, Kirk said, was “awful. He’s not a good person.”
I hold some inconvenient beliefs sometimes, but central to them is authenticity. Charlie Kirk said exactly what he said, and simply replaying or reprinting his words is not an attack on him, it is an honest rendering. I don’t agree with virtually any of Kirk’s beliefs about civil rights, Joe Biden, women voting, LGBTQIA rights, “DEI,” George Floyd, January 6th, Donald Trump, the 2020 Election, or really anything I can think of, besides his belief that he had a right to say it. I don’t think that people I deem as bad should be shot, ever. I don’t believe the government should try to cancel a television show, ever. Hell, I’ll just be honest and say I don’t think employers should have any absolute right to view your social media, or censor it, even as I acknowledge that isn’t covered by the First Amendment. I think people should have the ability to be their authentic selves, and in fact I think morally it is an imperative. Yes, if you are out in public (I at least on some level don’t consider social media public, particularly if you are protecting your posts from the entire public), saying something really crazy can get you fired. I typically do not think it should.
The truth of the matter is that even dangerously stupid and ignorant speech should be policed through the court of public opinion, and if your response is that this is failing in our current society, my response to that is this is who we actually, truly are. Trying to censor who we are because this “Trump era” makes you uncomfortable, or because you thought these kinds of opinions were supposed to be gone by 2025, is UnAmerican and morally reprehensible. If it bothers you that Charlie Kirk was amassing followers saying the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, or that he hated Barack Obama and Joe Biden, or that he thinks Kamala Harris is a moron, or that Martin Luther King Jr. was a bad man, or that women didn’t vote, or whatever it is you think- just understand that the people listening and agreeing with Kirk also agreed with what he was saying before he had a job saying it. These opinions and thoughts, they always existed in the world, and it’s not society’s formal job to silence people for saying them. You silence these opinions by not listening and not buying from the advertisers. Charlie Kirk should be able to speak to the audience that believes these things, just as Jimmy Kimmel should be allowed to do the same. There is a market of millions of people who agree with them. As long as that exists, they should exist, and we should make authentic judgments about how we feel about them. It’s pretty simple.
Of course, there is only one logical conclusion to this though- I didn’t like Charlie Kirk. I did not listen to him when he was alive, and I wouldn’t now. He told us how he feels about the role of women in our society, how he feels about Civil Rights in our society, that he thinks most Black Americans in the work place are of lower quality and that they are there because of DEI, that he thinks Donald Trump is a good man and Joe Biden is not, that LGBTQIA people are predators, and lots of other things. Charlie Kirk lived authentically and told us who he is. I did not approve of it. While I would not describe myself as a “Jasmine Crockett Stan,” but I think she’s right to question why any Democrats were voting to honor Kirk in the Congress. Do these Democrats agree with him on his beliefs? Did they agree when he was live? Or are they being inauthentic and cowardly, in hopes that this conversation will go away?
Charlie Kirk’s death has been weaponized to do things that some conservatives wanted to do anyway, like cancel Jimmy Kimmel. The conservatives doing it are being as dishonest as the Democrats in Congress voting to honor Kirk. This is all mythology. It’s creating a martyr of a person who was just a person. It’s gross and antithetical to being a health nation with a vibrant First Amendment. It’s creating a false narrative about who we actually are and who we actually want to be as a society.
Out of town Republican running for the Democratic Congressional nomination Ryan Crosswell found Northampton County over the weekend to meet the Democrats there and ask for their support for him for Congress. Good for him honestly. Unfortunately, I hear it went very badly. One candidate called him an opportunist in her speech, for which she is spot on. Another noted his “in-artful use of a political metaphor.” I’m down the beach this week and didn’t get to see the bumbling, blunder filled speech, so I asked some people what he said. Apparently he claimed he’s been fighting the nomination of Emil Bove to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. Now of course that’s silly- Crosswell is no longer at the Justice Department, after “bravely” cutting and running from his former post, he’s also not a Senator or staffer dealing with the nomination, and there’s no public record anywhere of him leading some kind of protest. I’m glad he opposes Trump’s henchman for the nomination, but based on what? He’s opposed to unions too. Neither one left Trump after his flunkies attacked the Capitol on January 6th. Both of them were fine with Trump when the high court struck down Roe v. Wade. Based on their long held Republican views, when Crosswell registered as a Republican in Louisiana, North Carolina, and Washington D.C., I would presume Mr. Crosswell is for this nomination. I guess he’s not though, this time. Maybe there’s a primary coming up, or something.
“Why do all of these rich tech bros think Donald Trump is a moderate? They spend all this money. pushing a right-wing agenda and then people actually believe it’s moderate.”
This was the prompt of a recent conversation I had, and well, it’s a fascinating one. Donald Trump did have a lot of rich “moderates” behind him, didn’t he? Hillary Clinton was simultaneously beat on by alt-left dead-enders for basically being Dick Cheney, and also viewed as too left by a lot of voters. Kamala Harris is about as “normie Democrat” as you can be on policy at this point, but she was viewed as the extremist by a lot of voters, not Trump. Why did this happen?
I tend to not really want “big change” policy moves, and so I have a tendency to like and support actual moderate policy. I think it’s highly important that we don’t mistake actual fairly moderate policy for being a political moderate though. There is no real pocket of voters out there giving you credit for say, taking a moderate position on abortion rights, for example (codification of Roe in it’s original, two-trimester form that allows some regulations of procedures and when you can access care). Not many voters gave Senators any credit for moderate positions on immigration or gun control in the past 15 years. Taking actual moderate policy positions often times leaves you in the bullseye of your own party’s activists and gets you no credit from the opposition.
One of the key reasons both parties (and not at all the only reason) could not properly handle Donald Trump is that both are fairly ideologically homogeneous. Democrats fight over how to get people health insurance, they don’t fight over whether or not to do it. Voters don’t really view you as more moderate for preferring the Affordable Care Act over government Bernie-care for All (it’s not Medicare, really). Same on the Republican side, they have some disagreements over how far to go on deporting illegal aliens and whether or not they’ll allow bare minimum background checks for all gun sales. No one is literally arguing for a path to amnesty or for blocking some gun sales in the GOP. Both parties have their positions, and there are degrees of separation in them, but even a moderate is still basically a member of one or the other. Voters don’t really see moderates as different.
Most of the reason is that lower information voters and honestly voters in general are far less ideological than voters who are activists, staffers, or candidates. They personally hold views that are not always consistent. For instance I know friends that vote regularly and are pro-gay marriage (and lgbtq rights in general) and pro-life. Anti-war and love going to the shooting range. Anti-immigrant and pro-marijuana. Many non-politically active voters actually very commonly hold views that are ideologically contradictory. When they think of a moderate, they think of someone who breaks out from party orthodoxy, like they do. And there’s a lot of them- a third of Americans identify as moderate and 43% consider themselves an independent.
When faced with Trump’s sometimes bizarre campaign positions- being for mass deportation, but against any foreign military action, or being pro-life while also being for ending taxes on tips and social security- a lot of these voters feel more comfortable with that. Very disciplined candidates like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris actually pay a price for not saying anything all that shocking. Voters who want “moderate” are often times just telling you they want something different, and an ideologically consistent candidate isn’t it.
Obviously identity plays into how a candidate is perceived, and some portion of the public understands the “left-right continuum” in a traditional way. Part of this is just a basic disconnect though. Political people are thinking about moderates as actually being moderate. Normal voters are thinking of moderates as more free wheeling and less careful. That fits Trump perfectly. It’s also now his biggest vulnerability, as he governs. How long until the public realizes he’s the definition of a conservative?
In an earlier post, I told you how Ryan Crosswell is a Republican carpetbagger, running a fraudulent campaign for the Democratic nomination in PA-7. Ryan didn’t grow up in this district, or ever live in it until earlier this year. He registered to vote as a Republican in North Carolina, Louisiana, and Washington, DC (That we know of), and voted in the Republican Presidential primary in every one of Donald Trump’s races for President, so far. He claims he had some epiphany to become a Democrat when Trump’s DOJ decided to drop the charges against Eric Adams, but he purchased his campaign websites long, long before that. He just thinks Democratic voters are dumb enough to be bought off by a Republican from the Beltway.
Despite that, VoteVets and other DC groups are astroturfing together a well-funded campaign for the carpetbagger. He announced that he raised $320,000 in the first three weeks in the race. That’s an impressive amount of money, for regular candidates. This guy is going to need every penny of it though to distract voters from the fact he’s got no connection to this district, and that he’s not a Democrat. Turns out though, he’s got lots of help with that. He doesn’t just have VoteVets helping him, or the mega law firm that he works for in San Diego currently (yes, that’s in California). In fact, the guy is likely being funded by actual Republicans.
Back before Crosswell was working for the Trump Administration he worked for a firm called Littler Mendelson in Charlotte, NC. As they would tell you it, they’re the best of the best in employment law, from the perspective of the employer. Ask literally any labor union in the United States and they’ll tell you they are a notorious anti-labor firm. In regular people speak, Littler Mendelson is a union busting law firm. According to Crosswell’s LinkedIn (above), he specialized in the kind of “non-compete” agreements that the Biden Administration was trying to weaken or end in some cases.
Basically, in addition to not being from here and being a Republican, Crosswell is asking a district that literally was the birthplace of the working class (Bethlehem Steel and Mack Trucks) to elect a union buster. I would laugh at this, if he didn’t have so much money.
Of course Crosswell would raise a bunch of money to try and buy a district he has no relationship to. One has to just ask though- how much union buster money is in that $320,000? Given that nothing in his record suggests that he changed his mind from his previous Republican positions on any other issue, one has to wonder how working on the Eric Adams case changed Crosswell’s career long beliefs in anti-union practices?
It has become a near sacred belief for some folks on the internet that they don’t believe the 2024 Election results. I get it, they’re a nightmare. The idea that nearly 50% of the public would re-elect Trump after everything seems impossible. When you understand how close virtually every Presidential Election other than 2008 has been this century though, it starts to make at least some sense though.
Enter New York, specifically Rockland County where I worked on a County Executive race, more than a decade back. It is a politically peculiar place. It’s a very purple county in suburban New York City. It’s got the highest percentage of Jewish people of any county in America. It’s incredibly diverse in general. It’s got super, super wealthy and very working class people living together. It’s a part of the swing NY-17 Congressional District, one of the most competitive in America. It’s really, really expensive to run a campaign there. And they have a rather significant Hasidic Jewish population, now sitting over 50,000 in the district. They tend to vote together, as a block, getting them the name “the block” amongst politicos. Once the leaders decide who they are backing, and to what level, everyone does their job. It doesn’t fit neat partisan or ideological politics, and so it confuses many political class people who are new to the area. This often puts them at odds with other groups in the county, who don’t particularly love their voting power. The East Ramapo School District there has been controversial, but that’s nothing new.
I’m not shocked that a friend sent me an article about a challenge to their 2024 Election results, but I was immediately skeptical. Rockland is the king of weird election results. What’s more, Vice-President Harris underperformed President Biden and Secretary Clinton in general in New York. Senator Gillibrand was facing weak, token opposition at best, and some of the national hot button issues were less so problems for her. When I first looked at Smart Elections’ Blue Sky post comparing Harris and Gillibrand’s numbers in several voting districts, I immediately assumed they are simply “Block” voting districts, where the Hasidic population chose Donald Trump, but still wanted to vote for the incumbent Democratic Senator. There are absolutely districts in Rockland County where Trump probably won almost every vote, and so did Gillibrand. There are a few problems with my explanation though. First, just having the district number isn’t enough for me today to be sure those were “block” districts. Second, the lawsuit does point to other things, like statistical analysis, that suggests a problem. So it’s possible I’m wrong here.
My guess is that Harris generally underperformed fairly popular incumbents across the state, and Rockland was no different. My second thought is that the lopsided districts will be “block” areas. If anyone knowledgeable on the subject comes across this post, please feel free to keep me updated on this.
If you’re from the Lehigh Valley and don’t recognize the guy above, it’s ok, you’re not alone. His name is Ryan Crosswell and until we had a Congressional seat he felt he could win by switching parties, he probably had no idea where we were. Unless you’ve been at party events, you haven’t met him or heard the story he wants you to learn.
What is Ryan’s story? Well he grew up in Pottsville of the 9th District of Pennsylvania, not in the 7th where he’s running. He became a Marine, went off to school, graduated law school, and went to work in both the military and for the Department of Justice. He registered to vote as a Republican in North Carolina, Louisiana, and Washington, DC, from what I’ve been told. He has never actually lived in Northampton, Lehigh, Carbon, or Monroe Counties, the counties in the district. Ryan has voted as a Republican through the Tea Party, first Trump Administration, January 6th, Republican attacks on President Biden through his term, and up until this past December. The timeline that was provided to me:
December 2011: Ryan Crosswell registers as a Republican In North Carolina.
July 2014: Ryan Crosswell registers as a Republican in Louisiana.
July 19, 2016: Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination for president. Ryan Crosswell voted as a Republican.
November 8, 2016: Donald Trump is elected President of the United States. Ryan Crosswell voted as a Republican.
January 2017: Ryan Crosswell begins working for the Trump administration.
August 15, 2017: Trump defends white-nationalists: ‘Some very fine people on both sides’ . . . . Ryan Crosswell continues to vote as a Republican.
January 20, 2018:Ryan Crosswell begins his second year working for the Trump administration.
January 20, 2019:Ryan Crosswell begins his third year working for the Trump administration.
January 20, 2020:Ryan Crosswell begins his fourth year working for the Trump administration.
April 23, 2020:Donald Trump suggests injecting bleach will cure COVID. Ryan Crosswell continues to vote as a Republican.
January 6 . . . .Ryan Crosswell continues to vote as a Republican..
June 24th, 2022: Roe v. Wade is overturned. Trump and the Republican party celebrate the decision. Ryan Crosswell continues to vote as a Republican.
November 15, 2022: Donald Trump launches his third Republican campaign. Ryan Crosswell continues to vote as a Republican.
December 5, 2023: Donald Trump vows to be a dictator on day one. Ryan Crosswell is still voting as a Republican.
May 18, 2024:Donald Trump begins floating the idea of seeking a third term, which is unconstitutional. Ryan Crosswell was still a Republican.
July 19,2024: Donald Trump promises mass deportations if elected. Ryan Crosswell continues to vote as a Republican.
July 15, 2024:Donald Trump secures the Republican nomination for a third time. Ryan Crosswell voted as a Republican.
August 26, 2024:Donald Trump meets with Nayib Bukele to begin planning the illegal detention of American residents in El Salvador. Ryan Crosswell continues to vote as a Republican.
October 22, 2024: Donald Trump issues threat to prosecute political rivals. Ryan Crosswell voted as a Republican.
November 6, 2024: Donald Trump wins the 2024 general election. Ryan Crosswell voted as a Republican. December 27, 2024: Ryan Crosswell decides to run for Congress. Changes Washington, D.C., voter registration to Democratic.
To hear the story as it’s told to me, this guy voted as a Republican in the 2012 Election, then again in the 2016 Election, took a job in the Trump Administration in 2017, re-registered as a Republican and voted in the 2020 Election, and was a Republican through the 2024 Election. His story is of course that he registered as a Republican many years ago, in the Bush 43 Administration years, when that President was lying about a war that cost tens of thousands of Americans their lives, trying to open up secret prisons for torture operations not allowed to be carried out in America by law, was firing U.S. Attorney’s without cause, conducting massive unapproved warrantless wiretapping, passing the Patriot Act, and otherwise trampling on the rule of law. His defenders have suggested that Crosswell was not an ideological or active Republican. They say he was non-partisan because of his government work, and really just left his registration alone. He re-registered at least three times as a Republican that I see, and was registered as a Republican for all three of Trump’s runs. He went to work for Trump’s DOJ in 2017. It’s been also provided to me now that while he was mailed a ballot in the crucially important 2024 Presidential Election, he didn’t return it. I definitely have questions. He definitely does not seem to have held any meaningful Democratic views through the Iraq War, Obama years, first Trump Administration, the ending of Roe v. Wade, or at any other pivotal point.
Now, I’m not against converts, particularly given how terrible this Trump Administration seems to be doing. Let’s just say though that the more you tolerated, the more skeptical I am. When Trump mocked the disabled reporter, when he called Mexicans drug dealers and rapists, when the Access Hollywood tape dropped, when he did the first Muslim ban, when he appointed ideological extremists to the Supreme Court, when his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6th, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, when Trump said he wanted to be a dictator, when he accused immigrants of eating cats and dogs, all of that did not cause Crosswell to denounce his Republican registration. What we are asked to believe is that dropping the Eric Adams indictment was the last straw that made Croswell switch parties. Should we believe it? He entered this race on June 9th. He says he left DOJ on February 17th. He bought his websites for his run in December. We know all the things that didn’t make Ryan Crosswell leave the Republican Party. It certainly appears you can add dropping the Eric Adams prosecution to that list. He had made his decision to switch parties and move to a district he never lived in before the Adams’ prosecution was even able to be dropped.
I will say, it’s honorable that Crosswell defended his country, and he has an impressive academic history that suggests he’s a smart person, but our Republican Congressman Ryan Mackenzie can claim those things too, even after he recently voted to take health care from over ten million Americans. Crosswell could have moved home to the 9th Congressional District and ran in the open Republican Primary for 2026, but for whatever reasons he has decided to come run here in the most purple district in the country. The House Republicans will spend millions calling him a hypocrite, a liar, and citing his own contradictory history to make Republicans and Democrats alike hate him. There’s a long campaign to run, and maybe he’ll prove me to be wrong here, but he seems like a tremendous risk for Democrats to take.
I read today’s Politico piece about Biden Administration alums being mad about Karine Jean-Pierre’s upcoming book. I’ll be honest, I went into the piece expecting to agree with them. I didn’t think she was a very effective Press Secretary. I did think she was self-promoting. I had my biases. Then I read the article. Karine Jean-Pierre is right. From what it sounds like her book is going to say, she’s also writing something that absolutely, positively, without one shadow of a doubt had to be written.
Joe Biden’s White House never behaved as Joe Biden’s White House. It never did feel loyal and authentic to Joe’s brand. I would have guessed that Jean-Pierre was a part of that. It definitely appears not to be so. Her discontent with the decision of party elites to dump Joe Biden in last summer’s “switcheroo” was probably shared by a larger number of people than the margin of defeat for Vice-President Harris. Essentially a group of donors and a few has-been high level Democratic elected officials decided to nuke his re-election over their concerns and nominate someone who could not possibly win (This would have been true with virtually any Democrat, for the record.). What I think is more nauseating for some of us is the continual patting on the back that Beltway Democrats still give themselves for doing this. It failed miserably. There is nothing to be proud of. I was fine voting for Vice-President Harris myself, but I said on the day he dropped that she had no chance. Any non-brain dead Democrat knew the election was over when Biden dropped out.
I rarely read these books, so don’t hold your breath that I’ll read it. I will say this though- I’m glad someone is doing the pushback. While anonymous aides and donors further their narrative through corporate tools like Jake Tapper, the truth is very clear and obviously in front of us- the Democratic Party nuked their only chance to win because many of the people tasked with keeping the party in power never really wanted him anyway. Would Biden have won? His poll numbers were really not all that much changed after his June debate. We’ll never know. The disloyalty to him made it virtually impossible anyone was going to win though. Maybe it was mishandled from the decision to run again, maybe we blew it in June, but who cares? The incompetence at the high levels was laid bare before us, and I’m glad someone said it.
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.
Apocalypse Vibes 