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Notes -
US Election Updates – Democratic Infighting + Project 2025
Some “top” House Democrats met yesterday to discuss the ongoing situation within the party. Besides an Asian Congressman being confused for another Asian Congressman, nothing really happened – House Democrats remain divided on how to proceed. Biden reaffirmed that he was running in a spicy letter to House Dems and told Dems to challenge him at the convention if they had a problem. Biden refused to acknowledge himself as “the elite,” using populist rhetoric to separate himself from the establishment that has defined his career. One Congressperson is pissed about leaks from the call, having wanted the opportunity to speak candidly amongst peers.
Some Senate Dems were supposed to meet today, but concerns over leaks led to Warner cancelling the tentative plans. Speculation grows they will instead discuss at the caucus meeting tomorrow. Schumer told Manchin to back off of publicly calling for Biden to drop out. Manchin, generally a maverick, obeyed, for reasons that are unclear.
Horseshoe theory is validated in real time. Biden’s misstating polls. Convicted felon Hunter Biden supposedly gatekeeps access to his father. Democrats are increasingly frustrated with the media and pundits are reluctantly acknowledging health issues that they previously called conspiracy theories. New conspiracy theories around Biden potentially having Parkinson’s have popped up. Democrats seek to redirect anger to Project 2025 to keep the heat off Their Guy, even as Trump disavows Project 2025 and instead seeks looser abortion restrictions in the Republican party platform - a direct contradiction of what Project 2025 seeks.
The hysteria over a think tank’s wish list astonishes me on a personal level; the involvement of previous members of Trump’s administration by no means indicates Trump signed onto the project or even knew about plans to direct his platform. Trump isn’t really one who likes to be controlled. But the rhetoric from the Twitteratti (X-eratti?) from “vote blue no matter who” to “vote against Project 2025 at all costs” – even though Project 2025 isn’t actually on the ballot.
I don’t see the Democratic party going as far as invoking the “in all good conscious” clause at the Convention to pick a different candidate, as that hits a level of party disunity I don't think we've seen from either side in recent memory. There’s funding issues that make Kamala the easiest option to continue campaign machinery, and Kamala isn’t very popular. Kicking both Kamala and Biden off the ticket makes it unlikely either one of them will direct their campaign funds back into the DNC. There’s also still enough DEI vibes floating around the Dems to maybe not want the optics of kicking a Black woman off the ticket. A brokered convention is messy, and it feels, in this moment, inevitable that Trump wins. Polls skew towards Democrats, after all, and Biden is still behind. Further intra-party chaos won’t help.
At the same time, Trump is only leading by an average of three points, and he beat Clinton when she was only ahead by four. There’s another debate on Sept. 10 (maybe), during which time Biden can possibly turn it around (so long as the debate is held between Biden's "good hours" of 10 am and 4 PM). Eight days after the second debate, Trump’s sentencing is set to proceed (pending evidentiary issues spawning from the SCOTUS immunity ruling); jail time will surely mess with the campaign, although polling around the impact of Trump's convictions is mixed.
Is there enough time before the election for Democrats to rally around Biden and wipe this mess from the minds of voters? Will Dems rally around Biden, or will the Lord Almighty Himself come down and remove Biden from the ballot? (as a side note - invoking God as the head of an increasingly a-religious party is an interesting choice). Is Project 2025 enough of a Bogeyman to overcome the very valid concern that Biden might not even be currently running the country? Is the average voter’s goldfish brain enough to move on from this mess in time for the election? While the conversation around replacing Biden has become a 24/7 media circus, extending over a week since the debate itself went down, how much is the average voter actually paying attention to any of this?
The most fascinating part of this, to me, are the Democratic attacks on a media that skews left. Turning against one’s historical allies is fascinating at a time when large Democratic donors are demanding Biden drop out. What a fun few months of culture war ahead.
Project 2025 is just a project to develop technocrats of the right.
Exactly. It's a pretty bog standard ThinkTank wishlist of policies and politicos that they want to put into some of the literally thousands of political appointee positions that follow any election. Every other major ThinkTank does this.
The "fear" of Project 2025 is a strange media / twitterati / very-online-people invention. I think it allows a lot of vague gestures to the idea of shadowy planning by unnamed (but somehow very influential) "party insiders." They kind of did this with the Federalist society people after Kavanaugh and Barrett got confirmed. It's quite literally the same as, all of a sudden, telling you friends, "Did you know that the GOVERNMENT is, like, storing all of these old BOOKS in these, like, secure buildings and you have to get an official identification card to ACCESS them?!"
All you've done is dramatized a dusty old library
Zooming out just a bit however, don't you think it's actually a good thing we are seeing greater emphasis on examining these non-official but still influential groups and what they actually do to policy within governments? Perhaps not, of course, panicking over it and we need to view it all in context, but isn't this still preferable to ignoring the whole thing as is historically the case? For example, if people had paid more attention to the Federalist Society's influence, they wouldn't have been as "surprised" about some of the actual Supreme Court picks that came out of the Trump years. While it's always tricky and potentially unfair to lump non-official positions in with official ones, the simple fact is that these non-official positions that are nonetheless strongly associated with one of the two major parties, and that's relevant info for a voter.
An analogy would be: you don't just marry a person, you marry their family too (in-laws). Factoring in what their family is like into a marriage decision might feel a little unfair, but it's eminently reasonable, because it's actually pretty hard to ignore the family in practice (and, even beyond that, this is the family that raised your potential spouse, so at least some of their ideas and values will have rubbed off).
I think this is what these kind of orgs would want you to think.
My opinion is that, in truth, all of them a far, far less influential than they want to be. I see big think tanks like Heritage, Brookings, CSIS etc. as something more like under performing charities that release ho-hum reports on various issues.
They do often function as halfway houses for former staffers who are (a) waiting for the next Congress / administration to come around and (b) Need to actually make some private sector levels of income before they go back to the goofy "salaries" of Congressional / admin staffers. But even that reveals something; if you have to find a bench to warm at a ThinkTank, and didn't get some actually big time job at a bank / law firm / lobby shop / tech company etc....are you that influential?
I once did some consulting work that dealt with illegal finance networks (terrorists, drug cartels etc.) I was doing a bunch of IT work for it, but wanted to get some degree of subject matter understanding. I asked which CSIS report I should read. The company laugh and introduced me to about four totally under-the-radar specialists in the space. They sell their research privately to firms who need it. It's higher quality, more quantitative, dispenses with policy "recommendations", and is generally delivered by folks who have worked outside of downtown D.C.
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