Media Matters looked at the media coverage of the Hillary Clinton “basket of deplorables” comment back in 2016 and Trump’s “vermin” comment this year. It shows that they only learned that they shouldn’t treat Trump as badly as they treated Clinton. Great.
Trump benefits from the fact that he says so many disgusting, reprehensible things that the media no longer sees it as newsworthy. That is perverse.
Nate Cohn of the NY Times wrote a little piece for a NY Times newsletter today explaining that all isn’t actually lost for Joe Biden since the race is close in the northern swing states.
Here’s the headline:
Lol. That’s nice. He also mentions this down in the piece:
Why is Mr. Biden competitive in the Northern battlegrounds? White voters and older voters.
In Times/Siena polling this year, Mr. Biden is running only about a point behind how he fared among white voters in 2020. For good measure, he’s also faring a bit better than he did among voters over 65. Other polls tell a similar story.
Mr. Biden’s resilience among white voters and older voters hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, but it’s very important. White voters will make up around 70 percent of the electorate in November, and their share will be even higher in the Northern battleground states that Mr. Biden will be counting on. And voters over 65 will outnumber those under 30.
The piece is full of caveats and warnings so don’t expect the mainstream media to change their Biden Is Doomed narrative any time soon. (Cohn is their god.) But it’s interesting in any case, especially since this much longer and comprehensive piece by Ron Brownstein takes a much closer look at what this means:
For decades, Democrats have built their electoral strategies on a common assumption: the higher the turnout, the better their chances of winning. But that familiar equation may no longer apply for President Joe Biden in 2024
A wide array of polls this year shows Biden running best among Americans with the most consistent history of voting, while former President Donald Trump often displays the most strength among people who have been the least likely to vote.
These new patterns are creating challenges for each party. Trump’s potential appeal to more irregular voters, particularly younger Black and Latino men, is compelling Democrats to rethink longstanding strategies that focused on mobilizing as many younger and non-White voters as possible without worrying about their partisan allegiance. For Republicans, the challenge will be to build an organization capable of connecting with irregular voters they have not traditionally focused on reaching, particularly in minority communities.
“What all this means is this election has volatility,” says Daniel Hopkins, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist who has studied the widening partisan divergence between voters with and without a consistent history of turning out. “We used to expect that the marginal non-voter, the next voter who turned out if an election was very engaging, didn’t look different from people who did vote. In this case, the crowd that hasn’t gotten engaged looks very, very different.”
Brownstein looks at a number of polls that back this up focusing on one in particular that looked specifically at this phenomenon:
The results were striking. Among adults who had voted in each of the past three federal elections, Biden led Trump by 11 points, and Biden eked out a narrow advantage among voters who participated in two of the past three races. But, the poll found, Trump led Biden by 12 percentage points among those who voted in just one of the past three elections and by a crushing margin of 18 percentage points among those who came out for none of them.
As important, the pattern held across racial lines. In the poll, Trump ran even with Biden among Latinos who voted in two, one or none of the past three elections, while Biden held a nearly 20-point advantage among those who voted in all three. With Black voters, Biden’s lead was just 10 points among those who did not show up for any of the past three elections, but over 80 points among those who participated in all three.
It’s about people who don’t watch the news and are apathetic about politics:
Hopkins said the gap between habitual and irregular voters in his latest survey was far greater than the difference he found when he conducted a similar poll early in the 2016 race between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Key to this widening chasm, he believes, may be another dynamic: Adults who are less likely to vote are also less likely to follow political news.
“For more infrequent voters, these are often people who pay less attention to politics and whose political barometer is more the question of how is my family doing economically, how does the country seem to be doing,” Hopkins said. “For those voters, Donald Trump…is not especially unusual.” By contrast, Hopkins said, a “sizable sliver” of habitual voters “have a sense that Trump may be qualitatively different than other political candidates with respect to norm violations and January 6.” For less frequent voters, he added, the equation may be as simple as “they don’t love what they see with Joe Biden, and if Donald Trump is the person running against Joe Biden, they want change.”
The NBC polling results buttress that conclusion: It found that among the roughly one-sixth of voters who say they do not follow political news, Trump led Biden by fully 2-to-1.
Ok. That’s not good news for our country. People should pay attention and should be involved in our civic life. However, this election seems to have produced a particularly apathetic electorate — it’s a re-run and a whole lot of people just aren’t interested — and the potential benefit of that is that these un-engaged citizens tend to favor Donald Trump. That could change in the next few months as people do start to tune in. But I really wonder if that’s going to happen. There is, to borrow a phrase, a malaise in the land, whether it’s due to the post pandemic hangover, Trump’s unrelenting negativity or just the uninspiring nature our polarized politics, and this looks like it may be an election of only the most engaged voters. That may very well benefit Biden who is doing unusually well with seniors and college educated voters who are the most likely to vote.
I don’t think anyone should pin their hopes on apathy. The Dems need to get every possible vote in their column just to stay even. But as Simon Rosenberg says every day, I’d rather be us than them.
This has no relevance to the trial, which has now gone to the jury, but it’s relevant to anyone who has questions about whether it happened:
The celebrity athlete, who spoke to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity, citing fear of harassment or retaliation, said he was close to Trump and Daniels while they socialized at the 2006 American Century Championship celebrity golf tournament on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.
Though Trump sometimes referred to Daniels indirectly as a “porn star,” the athlete said, he emphasized that it was understood among the golfers who heard the boasts that Trump, at the time best known as the host of reality TV show The Apprentice, was saying he had slept with Daniels.
“It was clear to me and everyone who heard him that he was talking about Stormy,” the athlete said, adding that Trump encouraged other celebs to try to have sex with Daniels, behavior the athlete described as “crass,” “gross,” and “stupid.”
“He’d say all these things like, ‘You’ve gotta bang a porn star, it’s incredible,’ and, ‘It added 20 yards to my drive today,’” the athlete told The Daily Beast.
That sure sounds like him…
And this also sounds right:
According to the athlete, shortly before the 2016 election, around the time Daniels’ hush-money payment was being negotiated, he received multiple calls from people who declined to identify themselves, asking what he remembered from the golf event 10 years before.
It was later revealed that in those final critical weeks before the election—amid political fallout from the Access Hollywood video, in which Trump boasted of grabbing women without permission—Trump associates were scrambling to “catch and kill” Daniels’ story, to stop it appearing in the press.
But that was not public information in 2016, and the athlete told The Daily Beast that at the time that he did not fully understand the reason for the calls, and did not answer the questions. In hindsight, he acknowledged, the calls seem “ominous.”
I would have thought this was Michael Cohen, but I think he would have mentioned it. So maybe Keith Schiller? Some GOP operative? Who knows? But Trump bragging about “banging a porn star” and sending some thug to find out what the guys to whom he bragged about it remembered is patented Trump.
The article, which is worth reading for even more details, includes this:
The athlete who spoke to The Daily Beast called Trump a “cheat,” claiming to have witnessed Trump kicking his own ball and clearing obstacles—“like these giant Tahoe pine cones the size of a baby’s head”—from his lie, in violation of the rules. He also said Trump left trails in sandtraps that clearly showed he had moved his ball, and falsely lowered his score.
Tournament officials learned of the cheating allegations, the athlete said, but it was unclear whether anything came of them.
Yep. Totally believe it.
With all the violence and vandalism on January 6th it’s easy to forget that Trump and his henchmen’s real game plan was to send the election to the House and let them decide the winner as the constitution anticipated would happen in case of a tie. This was to be accomplished by submitting competing sets of electors to the VP who would throw up his hands and say that he didn’t know how to count the votes so the congress would have to decide the election. According to Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, they had hoped that in the event Pence didn’t cooperate, having the mob storm the Capitol could have caused a delay which would have allowed Justice Samuel Alito time to stop the certification but they were thwarted when Speaker Nancy Pelosi reconvened Congress that night. (There is no word on whether Justice Alito had been apprised of his role but it’s not a stretch to think he would have been happy to oblige considering his history of flying insurrectionist flags during that period.)
Had they persuaded Pence to twist the constitutional process for a tie vote into a process for resolving (fake) competing slates of electoral votes and had the House taken it up, Trump would have won because votes are counted by state delegation and there are more Republican delegations than Democratic. There was a whole group of Republicans ready and willing to declare Trump the winner under this unprecedented, unconstitutional plot and let the courts and anyone else try and stop them. This was the coup.
Essentially, they were willing to stretch their undemocratic electoral college advantage in controlling rural, lower populated states to an even more undemocratic electoral advantage in the House of Representatives to steal the election. If Pence had cooperated, they might have pulled it off.
It’s obvious that the framers made a huge error with this silly process of having the House delegations decide the election in case of a tie. It should be the popular vote winner. (It should be the popular vote winner in all cases but for some reason we seem to be stuck with this antediluvian artifact of a compromise that should have been fixed over a century ago.)
There has long been a belief among a certain set of American white elites that democracy is good in theory and a very nice idea, but really we can’t let the riff raff have the last word. Our history of denying the voting franchise to vast numbers of citizens goes all the way back to the beginning and we’re still fighting over it. That’s also why we’re stuck with the US Senate which gives two senators to states which have more cows than people and two senators to states which have many more people than cows. They did finally manage to allow direct election of those senators which was a step in the right direction but really, the senate is an undemocratic institution.
And after the debacles of 2000 and 2016 in which Republicans won the presidency with victories in the electoral college while losing the popular vote, it’s not necessary to make any argument that our presidential elections have a very serious, potentially fatal flaw for a modern democracy. It’s really no wonder that the Republican Party, faced with the fact that it is a minority party, has decided to push the envelope even farther.
Vote suppression and disenfranchisement are no longer enough. They have discovered that they can change the system itself in their favor now. The latest example comes from Texas which held its GOP convention last week. Aside from the odious culture war issues they installed in their platform such as labeling gender-affirming care as child abuse, requiring the Bible to be taught in public schools and calling for “equal protection for the preborn” which means abortion can be punishable as a homicide, they are proposing to create an electoral college system in their state:
“The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add the additional criteria for election to a statewide office to include the majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county.”
In other words, they want to create a system in which every county has exactly the same vote, whether the county has 20 people in it or 5 million. As Paul Waldman wrote in his newsletter The Cross Section, this would be the equivalent of California and Wyoming each having one electoral vote for president. Waldman ran some numbers and the outcome is astonishing:
In the 2020 election, 11,315,056 votes were cast for president in Texas. Fifty percent plus one of the votes cast in the smallest 178 counties (almost all of which Trump won) produces a total of 481,548 votes. Which means that under the GOP proposal, a candidate could win a statewide race with just 4 percent of the vote.
That’s right: You could get blown out 96%-4% and become governor, attorney general, or any of the other statewide offices. The candidates who did this would inevitably be Republicans, because they’d be the ones winning all those small rural counties. Which of course is the point.
Texas isn’t the only red state to attempt such an end run around democracy and majority rule. In Missouri where their ballot system was allowing some progressive policies to be passed by a majority of citizens, they tried to change the law to require that not only do they need a majority of voters to pass, but they must have a majority in five of their eight congressional districts which gives rural GOP districts the upper hand. Arizona has proposed a similar initiative. So far they haven’t had any luck enacting any of these changes, and the Texas proposals are just part of the GOP platform for now, but does anyone think that MAGAfied parties in red states won’t do it if they get the chance?
The old saw that “states are the laboratories of democracy” has long been one of the rationales for states’ rights adherents to excuse their anti-democratic behavior. Donald Trump’s Big Lie and coup attempt has given permission to these same political actors to experiment with ways to permanently advantage their shrinking constituency by corrupting the election systems in the states. And because of the electoral college, that will likely permanently advantage them in presidential elections as well.
Donald Trump will not win the popular vote next November but he might be able to eke out another win in the electoral college. The opposition which is fighting so energetically to save democracy is already fighting with one hand tied behind its back and it’s only going to get worse.
Update: Paul Waldman corrected some numbers in his post. The above quote should read:
In the 2020 election, 11,315,056 votes were cast for president in Texas. Fifty percent plus one of the votes cast in the smallest 128 counties (almost all of which Trump won) produces a total of 191,978 votes. Which means that under the GOP proposal, a candidate could win a statewide race with less than 2 percent of the vote.
That’s right: You could get blown out 98%-2% and become governor, attorney general, or any of the other statewide offices. The candidates who did this would inevitably be Republicans, because they’d be the ones winning all those small rural counties. Which of course is the point.
The Bulwark reports:
“Whatever happens happens,” Trump told one person recently. “I have no control.”
But there is one clear hope MAGAville clings to: a hung jury that results in a mistrial.
If that happens, Trump allies suspect that it will be chiefly due to the one juror who has made friendly eye contact with Trump from time to time as the jury enters the room and walks right past the defense table.
“There are eight people on that jury who definitely hate Trump. If there’s one person who doesn’t, it’s [this] juror,” said one court attendee who, like others for this story, relayed their observations on condition of anonymity to The Bulwark, which is also protecting the privacy and safety of the juror in question by not disclosing identifying details.
[…]
“There’s one juror that people are worried about and I share the worry,” Harry Litmam, a Democrat and former deputy attorney general, wrote Tuesday on X, adding he “can’t identify her or him per judge’s orders but seems less engaged and slightly irritable.”
But in the meantime, body-language augury has only grown in MAGAville.
“Whenever our allies or elected officials are in the courtroom, [the juror] sort of gets animated,” said one, noting how the person makes eye contact or gives “a smile or a nod” in the defense’s direction at times.
“When [Sen. J.D. Vance] came to court, that [juror’s] face lit up. It wasn’t the only time.”
That source said the juror also reacted favorably to Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, Lauren Boebert, Byron Donalds, and Matt Gaetz.
It would not surprise me if there is one holdout, especially if this is a white guy. It might even be a good career move if he wants to be a MAGA hero. That was always a risk with this jury.
On the other hand, I can’t help but remember that Georgia Grand Jury foreperson who gave media interviews. She was clearly entranced by all the celebrities involved but didn’t vote in Trump’s favor. Some people just get starstruck. So we’ll see.
Actor Robert De Niro appeared Tuesday with retired Capitol Police officers Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone, Jan. 6 combat veterans, outside the Manhattan courthouse where closing arguments were underway in Donald Trump’s falsified business records trial.
The Ink explains why the stunt was significant:
When we spoke with writer and policy wonk Heather McGhee earlier this month, she pointed out that Democrats have a serious “meaning making” problem. Which is to say, Trump understands what Democratic leaders tend not to: that in today’s media environment and attention economy, an effective candidate needs not only to seek votes but also, crucially, to be an active, vigorous participant in the cultural process through which voters construct meaning.
Voting is downstream; meaning making is upstream. Authoritarian leaders tend to be deft at working at both points of the river. And pro-democracy leaders are often at risk of earnestly seeking votes downstream and ignoring the sense-making part.
A trial, for example, doesn’t explain itself, as obvious a situation as it may appear to be. A trial is a thousand fragments of reality. It needs to be arrayed into a story in people’s minds to gain meaning. That meaning could be “Donald Trump is relentlessly persecuted by the powerful elite because he fights for people like me,” or it could be “Donald Trump is a lifelong charlatan who does crimes the way you do breakfast.”
Friends in the Writers Guild lament regularly that Democrats don’t avail themselves of the professional storytelling skills they are more than willing to share. Democrats rely instead on the Beltway Boys Club, the campaign industrial complex of former Hill staffers who, once they leave government employ, hang out shingles as chummy campaign consultants.
I’ll remind you again:
“I don’t get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys — keep hiring them.”
— Nationally prominent Republican officialFrom “Crashing the Gate,” by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (2006)
What was different yesterday is that De Niro is an excellent storyteller. He “made meaning out of the narrative fragments of the Trump trial, telling a story that people might tell themselves, the kind of story about Trump the penny-ante grifter that New Yorkers certainly know in their bones.”
As McGhee explained it to us recently:
Biden is nowhere in our daily and cultural lives, which is, actually, I think, even worse than him being this caricature of a doddering old man. He is not an avatar for anything we either are or want to be. He is not a brand. He is not a style. He is not a storyteller. He’s not a cultural icon or a logic, and he doesn’t knit together different things that we experience on a daily basis into a story.
Perhaps a shift is in the works. Can Biden engage in more of this meaning-making himself? That remains to be seen, but yesterday offered evidence that the Democrats are trying to speak to people where they live.
Another storyteller, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, made the same point in his commencement address at Brandeis University. He quoted novelist Richard Powers: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
Biden is not a natural. He needs help he may not know he needs. Perhaps someone got to him. Good. It’s not enough to be the most qualified for the office. (Ask Hillary Clinton.) You first have to be the best candidate. Different skill sets. Plus, what’s worked for Biden his whole decades-long career needs to adapt to current realities. His “MAGA Republicans” speech at Independence Hall in 2022 showed he can bring it. But he needs to bring it, and bring it, and bring it if he expects to be part of “our daily and cultural lives.”
De Niro recently narrated a Biden-Harris ad, suggesting maybe our Democrats is learning (intentional Bushism).
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Finding boldfaced italics in a column in a major newspaper is highly unusual. But these are unusual times. A former U.S. president faces a jury verdict in a criminal trial for the first time in our history. His flag-draped followers believe themselves the apex of patriotism even as the self-styled Real Americans™ dedicate their lives to a man starstruck by dictators, who incites mobs to violence, who derides the sacrifices of soldiers, who flaunts flouts the law and is prepared to void the country’s constitution if it serves personal ambition.
His acolytes around the country are not as lazy as he, no. They are putting plans in motion to destroy the country. Patriotically, of course. Inspired by Dear Leader, they mean to shoot America in the middle of Fifth Avenue and expect no blowback.
The bolded text that grabs my attention is in a Washington Post column by Jennifer Rubin commenting on the Ken Burns commencement address mentioned here on Sunday. Burns dropped his accustomed political neutrality to raise an alarm about the 2024 presidential election.
Rubin writes:
The choice this election, he explained, boils down to this: “There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment, or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route.” If we choose former president Donald Trump, then we will see what happens when “the checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.” There is no third choice.
She continues, bolded in italics, with her own admonition to the press:
The media should collectively recognize that the pretense that “an unequal equation is equal” amounts to an in-kind gift to authoritarians who crave the appearance of normalcy and respectability. Sharp contrasts and moral judgment are kryptonite to MAGA forces, who would love nothing better than months more of fantasy politics (“What if Biden backed out?”) and poll obsession (that only now begin to reflect the views of likely voters).
The media would do well to focus on the authoritarian threat. A candidate such as Trump, who lies about his crowd size, the results of past elections and the sentiments of certain voters, intends to convey inevitability, strength and the futility of resistance. Trump assiduously follows the totalitarian playbook to demoralize opponents and condition the public to believe only he can possibly win. (He also sets the stage for election denial: How could I lose with such big crowds?). The false premise that President Biden is destined to lose (because Trump says so? because of premature, irrelevant polling?) is not news; it’s Trumpian propaganda. The press can avoid Trump’s manipulation by explaining the playbook and refusing to present his braggadocio as fact.
But Trump is not the author of the totalitarianism he teases. The resentments he stokes and the zombie Lost Cause he’s reanimated long predate his emotionally stunted childhood. Trump recognizes seething insecurity when he sees it. Like a tent revivalist, he skillfully manipulates people into giving themselves over a higher power— Himself — with the promise of Christian-nationalist salvation.
In Texas, Republicans plan on taking “one of the worst provisions in our Constitution, and bring it to the state level, then supercharge it” to guarantee permanent, Christianity-infused, one-party rule, writes Paul Waldman:
The state Republican Party has put together its new platform, which is an amalgam of right-wing ideas including declaring abortion to be “homicide” and demanding that public schools “require instruction on the Bible, servant leadership and Christian self-governance.” And it proposes a truly incredible kind of Electoral College, in which statewide elections would be won by whoever got a majority in a majority of those 254 counties. Here’s how it’s worded:
“The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add the additional criteria for election to a statewide office to include the majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county.”
With so many near-vacant, very red, rural Texas counties, what it would mean at its worst, Waldman explains, is “that under the GOP proposal, a candidate could win a statewide race with less than 2 percent of the vote. ” Goodbye popular sovereignty. Hello minority rule. Hell, superminority rule.
Florida, another laboratory of autocracy, has already moved toward public instruction in Christian “self-governance,” reports Judd Legum:
Training materials produced by the Florida Department of Education direct middle and high school teachers to indoctrinate students in the tenets of Christian nationalism, a right-wing effort to merge Christian and American identities. Thousands of Florida teachers, lured by cash stipends, have attended trainings featuring these materials.
A three-day training course on civic education, conducted throughout Florida in the summer of 2023, included a presentation on the “Influences of the Judeo-Christian Tradition” on the founding of the United States. According to speaker notes accompanying one slide, teachers were told that “Christianity challenged the notion that religion should be subservient to the goals of the state,” and the same hierarchy is reflected in America’s founding documents. That slide quotes the Bible to assert that “[c]ivil government must be respected, but the state is not God.” Teachers were told the same principle is embedded in the Declaration of Independence.
[…]
Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and an expert in Christian nationalism, reviewed the entire presentation at Popular Information’s request. Tyler said that the “focus on the mythological founding of the country as a Christian nation, this use of cherry-picked history… is very much a marker of Christian nationalism.” According to Tyler, the aim of the presentation is “to solidify this ideology that equates being American to being Christian.” Tyler noted that the presentation does not address why, if religion was so essential to the structure of the government, the Constitution does not mention God at all.
My Catholic grade school nuns never taught this nonsense. But Florida is promoting it in its public schools?
Tyler adds that Christian nationalism underlies “the false idea that the country was founded by Christians to privilege Christianity in law and policy.”
Equating being American with being Christian means to second-class-citizenize anyone not part of the fringiest of Christianity. For this faction, that means even most other Christians.
Jenny Cohn posted this clip yesterday from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. Perkins believes liberals mean to convince “Bible-believing Christians” that they are “out of step with the rest of America.” He then concedes that only 9% of Christians share his worldview:
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I wrote the other day about Trump’s weird “freeze” during his speech to the NRA, when he just stood there for 30 seconds making faces while the music rose. He claimed that he always did this and I contradicted it saying I’ve never seen it happen. Well, a reader pointed out that I have seen it happen, it’s just that usually there is cheering and applauding for that 30 seconds.
He builds up to the line “greatest nation in the history of the world.”
The music starts.
He stands for about 30 seconds, looking around, as the crowds cheer wildly and chant his name.
Then he proceeds with the “We are a nation in decline” line.
ANGRY MARMOT [Dkos commenter]:
See for instance the laboriously dramatic musical pause-for-effect from 1:26:57 to 1:27:23 here (Waco, March 25, 2023) and from 1:09:42 to 1:10:31 here (Greensboro, March 2, 2024), always before the “we are a nation in decline” line.
The only difference in the “freezing”/“teleprompter fail” video is that, while Trump is doing what he always does, with the exact same timing he always uses …
No one cheers and yells his name during those 30 seconds. There is dead silence.
That’s what makes it look weird. He’s acting as if there are cheers going on for about 30 seconds, when there aren’t, and then proceeding, as usual. But if someone overdubbed the usual crowd sounds over those 30 “frozen” seconds, that video would look just like any of his other speeches.
In fact, if there is anything weird about Trump’s behavior in that clip, it is that he’s NOT doing anything differently. He’s doing everything rigidly and by rote, and not showing enough flexibility to adjust to the change in circumstances.
Or maybe, most likely, the teleprompter was not glitching at all, but working perfectly — the way it is programmed to — doing the usual timing and allowing for 30 seconds of cheering and showing a blank screen for about 30 seconds, forcing Trump to wait for the next line to come up.
I stand corrected. He didn’t freeze like Mitch McConnell. He just didn’t know how to cover a 30 second pause for applause that didn’t come. So he just stood there. That makes sense.
Brian Beutler has some advice in his excellent newsletter OffMessage today for the Biden campaign that doesn’t include throwing up their hands and saying “Oh my God we’re so bad that we’re giving up and will open up the convention to anyone who wants to try for it!” This might actually be useful:
At the outset we should stipulate that if Donald Trump were in office today—presiding over full employment at a time when Americans enjoyed more purchasing power than ever before, and inflation was hovering steadily around three percent—he and Republican officeholders across the country would claim credit for building the greatest economy in history. In fact, if Trump defeats Joe Biden in November, they’ll all sing from that hymnal by early 2025. The news media will scratch its head and finally notice, Gosh, this is a strong economy! Economic sentiment will spike as Republican voters come around to the Trump line in unison, while most Democratic voters—who are much less driven by partisanship in their responses to survey takers—will continue to acknowledge the economy is strong.
Nothing will change in the macroeconomic or policy realm, but public opinion will kip upright.
I know a bunch of liberals who disagree with each other over what Biden should do to change economic sentiment. I don’t know any who doubt my premise: Republicans would love to inherit this economy. They’d brag about how it became good the moment they took charge, and they’d quickly reap the political spoils.
Nevertheless, the emerging Democratic consensus seems to be that Biden should continue to “meet people where they are”: sympathize with the plight of the struggling, implicitly concede that the economy—which would poll through the roof with Republicans stealing credit for it—is actually bad.
“Within the White House, some aides are pushing for a message that makes empathy toward the economic plight of certain Americans more central,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday in a piece titled, Biden Needs More Empathy on the Economy, Democrats Say. “Some noticed a preview of that direction when the president described the April inflation report in a statement, writing, ‘I know many families are struggling, and that even though we’ve made progress we have a lot more to do.’”
How can this be right, though, if poor economic sentiment is a matter of pure partisan affect? If we can swap Republicans for Democrats without changing anything else, and the mass “struggling” magically goes away, it seems almost mathematically true that Democratic sheepishness over their economic successes is one of the key reasons Biden’s economy is widely viewed to be a failure. Letting people who hate Democrats or who are perennial critics of the U.S. economic system make all the strong claims about the economy, while the people in charge hide behind empathy for those left behind, is a big reason why public opinion and economic reality have detached from one another.
That’s not to say empathy has no place in Democratic campaign rhetoric. America is a big place. Even in prosperous times, millions of Americans will fall behind, and Democrats are the only major party concerned with the wellbeing of the poor. But speaking as though the Biden economy is one where more people need that kind of help, rather than less, simply affirms the false notion perpetuated by people who want to see Biden lose: That American suffering is out of control and there is much work to be done to alleviate it—as though that doesn’t reflect poorly on the man who’s been president for three and a half years.
What if instead of exaggerating the level of deprivation in America right now, Democrats characterized the situation accurately—as the most prosperous period in our lifetimes—and expressed their empathy by promising to help everyone share in the bounty? What if Biden and Democrats took pride in their accomplishments, and appealed to voters not to be taken in by prophets of false doom?
I know, I know. I get blow back whenever I write that the economy is good from people who insist that the statistics are wrong and it’s all Biden’s fault and it’s his fault (and mine) if Trump wins next November. Inevitably people say that the Biden campaign needs to grovel and apologize and promise to do better in a second term. Meanwhile, Trump has convinced half the country that his economy was the best in the country’s history and he will being it back to that the moment he is re-elected. And it will be very good on that day indeed. Because it already is. And all the Republicans who are currently wailing about the terrible economy (which makes up the vast majority of economic naysayers) will change their opinion.
This is a sucker’s game. I really hope the Democrats don’t succumb to this impulse. It will get them nowhere and only helps Trump.
Beutler has a much longer discussion of all this and it’s well worth reading.
Paul Krugman calls out commentators who blame everything on inflation as suffering from “inflation brain.”
Let me give you two recent examples of inflation brain in action.
This month, a preliminary release by the widely followed University of Michigan survey of consumers reported a significant fall in consumer sentiment. Consumers gave a number of reasons for reduced optimism, but every news article I saw about it attributed their pessimism to a jump in expected inflation, both over the next year and over the next five years.
Then the final version of the May report was released, and the initially reported jump in inflation expectations more or less disappeared. Consumer sentiment was still significantly down, but the survey’s news release attributed this decline largely to concerns about labor markets and interest rates, not inflation fears.
Another example: Target, Walmart and other big retail chains have recently announced a number of price cuts, both temporary and permanent. They are presumably doing this because they are seeing worrisome softness in demand. But many of the reports I saw managed to frame falling prices as somehow a symptom of inflation — simply assuming that inflation must be sapping consumers’ purchasing power, when the reality is that wages have consistently outpaced inflation since the summer of 2022. Maybe demand is weakening for other reasons?
In both cases, then, commentators seemed determined to frame everything — even falling prices! — as an inflation problem, while ignoring other possible concerns and risks.
And he worries that it’s infecting the Federal Reserve, noting that the European Central bank is planning to cut rates while it seems the Fed is still holding fast. He notes that inflation is coming down at a similar rate in both America and Europe (and goes into some arcane technical explanations as to why inflation is at this rate) and then speculates that the Fed is suffering from a touch of inflation brain:
Am I sure that the bump in inflation early this year was a statistical illusion? No, of course not. But the Fed has to steer between two risks, that of cutting rates too soon and feeding a reacceleration of inflation and that of waiting too long while the economy starts to crack under the stress of high rates — a possibility hinted at in consumer surveys and in those big-store price cuts, as well as indications of a softening job market. And I worry that the Fed is too focused on the first risk and not enough on the second — that it’s suffering from at least a mild case of inflation brain.
And at this point we have to talk about politics. If and when the Fed finally does cut, you know that it will be fiercely attacked by Donald Trump and his allies for conspiring to re-elect President Biden; after all, that’s what they wanted the Fed to do on their behalf before the last election. I don’t think that’s weighing on the Fed yet, but as the election approaches I fear that it will.
So let’s be clear: This would be a really bad time for the Fed to give in to political pressure from the right. It shouldn’t do so in any case, but especially not now, when it’s clear that any attempt to appease MAGA types would be futile. If Trump’s forces are victorious, the Fed (along with many other U.S. institutions) will quickly lose its independence; a former Trump aide, Peter Navarro, interviewed in prison, recently declared that if Trump wins, Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, will be gone within 100 days.
I understand that Fed officials can’t talk about these political considerations. But I hope they’re aware of them.
Vibes are a bad way for people to decide elections or for the Fed to decide interest rates. Succumbing to threats is even worse. But both of those things make up a huge part of our politics today. It’s not good.
