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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
I was kinda shocked when Trump felt the need to distance himself from it publicly. Really bizarre behavior. From what I saw, he distanced himself from Project 2025 harder than he distanced himself from a lot of much worse things.
Trump needs to distance himself from a number of unpopular items on the movement conservative wishlist to be electable. In particular, he can't afford to be associated with "Cut Social Security and Medicare in order to cut taxes for the super-rich" - something that was a huge part of why he polled better than the Goldman-Aramco Republicans in 2016 - and he doesn't want (for good reasons) to be associated with the likely consequences of actually making an abortion ban stick.
Project 2025 includes entitlement reform and a big federal push against abortion (e.g. enforcing the Comstock Act) so Trump benefits from publicly rejecting it.
It strikes me as a Bad Move on his part, though I will confess that Donald is a significantly better political mind than me, possessed as Asimov put it of a tremendous instinctual understanding of psychohistory.
Attempting to distance himself from it will reduce or blunt Democratic attacks on him precisely zero, any more than Conservatives are less apt to attack Biden about the 2020 riots because of his public denouncements of defunding the police. He won't succeed in persuading anyone who has heard of Project 2025 and can process what it is that he isn't tied to it, he's more likely to succeed in convincing people who like the Heritage Foundation that he isn't a reliable executive for that purpose.
Trump has been an incredible maverick about that kind of thing up to this point. He's notable/notorious for his refusal to full-throatedly denounce some really out-of-the-mainstream support he gets. This is a guy who had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner, he's not afraid to charm people who are way outside the norm, he doesn't tack to the middle the way most politicians have, to the chagrin of media blobs and to great electoral success. Appealing to the extremes has gone well for him!
It strikes me as odd, because I've had the conversation with my wife, far more liberal than I am, and we both found the liberal obsession with Project 2025 groan-inducing. It's a very inside-baseball, extremely-online liberal attack, similar to the ever-idiotic analysis of party-platform positions. We're seeing the Trump campaign neuter the party platform too.
Maybe he's smarter than me, but I always think of this kind of stuff as more editorial page nonsense than having a real impact.
Maybe, but it could conceivably make him far more palatable centrists anyways. Think of Clinton and his Sister Souljah moment. Breaking publicly with your party's activists can win over that swing voter, if you can do it without making too many of your own people stay home.
I have to be honest, I don't know what sister Souljah means.
Here ya go.
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