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So, Kamala Harris has her book tour with the election retrospective. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it blames other people for a few things. But what drew some attention is that apparently some of the digs at fellow Democrats were notable, actually giving some the impression that she must be retiring from politics, though she's since tried to unburn some bridges.
What's drawing possibly the most attention is her description of the VP selection process. She said Josh Shapiro was too ambitious and had started for asking details about the VP's residence. She said that Tim Walz was actually her second choice, which is a bit hurtful if you're Tim. Eyebrows have been raised at this, but even more so at her reason for not choosing her first choice, who was Pete Buttigieg - literally described as the "ideal partner", if not for this one flaw, she says.
He's gay.
It did not really go over well. Buttigieg himself said he wished she had more faith in Americans. She was confronted about it by Maddow recently, here's a clip, asking her to elaborate, as it's "hard to hear."
I saw one twitter user summarize her answer as: "I didn’t not choose Pete because he was gay… I didn’t choose him because he is gay and I had 107 days."
This raises a number of questions. Was it right to be tactical like that? Was she correct about the tactics? Was it particularly absurd to say it out loud? Was this just an excuse, and there was some other reason? Is it hypocrisy by Harris? Is her point about having less time to run a campaign cope, or on some level a legitimate objection that such a short campaign must by nature adhere to different rules and strategies?
On the one hand I can see it. It was a short campaign, and the overarching philosophy was to play it safe. In retrospect, probably wrong. (And also an I told you so moment for me). In that light Harris is being perfectly consistent. On the other hand Kamala herself acknowledges that her own identity was potentially a barrier, is the concept of 'too much diversity to handle' a real thing, much less from those on the left? It is true that even Obama had his doubters about whether his campaign was doomed because of racism. Personally I don't buy that, I don't think it made much of a difference, but some people do think about it and still do think along the same lines. The flipside of that is also true, however: say she names Pete, would any alleged homophobia backfire onto Trump and his team, would it supercharge identity politics within the base, or is it a non-issue altogether?
My honest opinion? Again, like Obama: I don't think him being gay would matter. He's a great communicator, and would have been an asset. Although, he would need something of substance to explain, so it's not a full slam dunk, and I don't think it swings the election unless Pete gets to tack on his own new policies.
(There's other stuff to say about the memoir but I'll leave that for a different top-level post if people want to get into it.)
In 2023 the Dallas Cowboys faced the San Francisco 49ers in the divisional round of the NFL playoffs. It was probably the career-best year for QB Dakota Prescott, they had a strong team. Unfortunately the niners were having a better year, behind Mr. Irrelevant Brock Purdy's establishing campaign, and in the 4th quarter the cowgirl's season was on the brink: they were down a touchdown with just six seconds to go 76 yards. So the Cowboys draw up a hilarious trick play involving putting their running back at center and everyone else out wide, including the rest of the offensive line, and the plan appeared to be to try and lateral a series of hook-and-ladder runs up the field for the touchdown. It, of course, didn't work. Elliott got steamrolled, the pressure got to Dak and he threw it like seven yards for a short gain that accomplished nothing. They looked silly and everyone around the NFL mocked it for a while.
Now as much as I love mocking the cowgirls, realistically their win probability from that position was less than 2.5%. There was a 97% chance that the 49ers were going to win, and the play they called in that situation was unlikely to work. So I always thought mocking them in that situation was a little silly, they just didn't stand much of a chance to begin with so you gotta try something.
In the same way, mocking Kamala for her electoral results for not winning the election is kind of silly, like mocking Ezekiel Elliott and Dakota Prescott, a fun thing to do if you hate their team but ultimately not really the fault of the players on the field. She focuses on the 107 days, but the bigger problem was being tied to an unpopular incumbent president without the advantage of incumbency. If TPTB had the chutzpah to just kill Biden, Kamala would have had a chance: she would have been the first female president, she would have had the advantage of being in power. But running as an incumbent vice president of a clearly failed (because not-running) president, she had all the disadvantages of a failed admin attached to her while having none of the advantages of having concrete accomplishments to point to. She couldn't avoid blame for any of the failures of the administration eg Gaza and Inflation; she couldn't claim credit for any administration successes, eg the economy not cratering post Covid. The Democrats were doomed in 2024 when they nominated Biden and picked Kamala in 2020. Biden was always going to get old, Kamala couldn't be skipped over without pissing off too many people. The result in 2024 was pretty much set in stone, and confirmed when Trump turned left in Pennsylvania.
Pick Pete, don't pick Pete; you were losing either way. Accept what happened and move on, don't try to blame others.
Now if we want to play "How did Kamala manage to lose so badly?" then there's room to analyze performance. But losing was always her fate.
That election was winnable. First of all, 107 days is plenty of time for an election - fellow non-Americans, back me up on this. The last 7 days are more important than everything else put together. Secondly, Kamala Harris made a lot of unforced errors in that campaign. She basically hid from the public and she had no iconic or easy-to-understand policy goals. Compare some policy ideas from better politicians, like Build the Wall and Medicare for All. Iconic, bold, and yet emblematic of what the politician stands for. Inseparable from the personality of the originator. Give me a policy goal that fits in 3 words and you've got a shot at winning.
I don't think you can really say she had no chance considering how out-of-touch the campaign was. I think if Justin Trudeau (slightly slimy former PM of Canada) was zapped into Kamala Harris' body Freaky Friday style he could have won that election pretty easily. Trump is an unpopular, divisive figure and he's never won an election against an opponent who wasn't historically unpopular. He is not a strong candidate. The Democrats lost by being even weaker, not because the contest was impossible.
Eh? Do American voters really have no attention span, they forget about inflation that happened a couple years ago?
Biden and Kamala should've just done proper economic management and they could easily win. Don't talk about building/repairing infrastructure, build it or at least seem to be building it. Lower the price of energy and make people feel richer. Make them be richer.
Don't let in millions of people through the Southern Border either.
But they couldn't do that because the structure of US governance means the govt struggles to do anything correctly, plus the nature of Democratic policy and staffers means they can't focus on easy wins or implement them if it means compromising on climate, DEI, mass immigration and so on... DEI is how Kamala got into power at all.
Voters can have a long memory for things that actually happened, and a shorter memory for campaign messages. Conventional wisdom among both professional politicians and academic political scientists is that voters look back 1-2 years, but not a full term, when evaluating incumbents' record on the economy (and, presumably, other real issues like crime).
One interesting and afaik formerly unstudied possibility that emerged from the 2024 election is that voter anger about inflation can persist a lot longer than voter anger about other bad economic outcomes (in particular, temporary high unemployment) because "prices are higher than I think they should be" is something voters feel in the present even if the inflation has stopped.
Part of the point Cummings was making about the Brexit campaign is that the nature of paid online advertising allows you to back-load your campaign into the last week in a way which was impossible with a campaign involving a lot of activist effort, and difficult with paid MSM advertising because the media is already saturated with political ads the week before the election.
Indeed, more studies are necessary to explore scenarios like "people see with their own eyes that they can now afford less than they used to", which flabbergasted the academic political scientists. Why aren't they satisfied with the rate of decline of their purchasing power slowing down? It is difficult to tell, but probably has something to do with right-wing propaganda.
I mean that the claim "voters respond to price levels, not to inflation rates" is a claim that could be empirically tested using the standard methods of political science research, and has not been.
The voters who swung hardest against Biden in 2024 were working class non-white voters - roughly the group who were most likely to see their incomes keep up with Bidenflation. Historically, voters were pissed off with inflation even when wages were rising faster than prices economy-wide, which is why Nixon felt the need to promise to "Whip Inflation Now". The "voters punish incumbents for inflation" effect appears to be distinct from the "voters punish incumbents for falling living standards" effect. Conventional wisdom among both politicians and political scientists (backed by empirical research which you may or may not believe) is that the electorate as a whole evaluates "falling living standards" based on the first derivative over the 1-2 years before the election. (Voters who personally suffer a large drop in living standards will sometimes turn against the party that was in government at the time for the rest of their lives - one of the advantages Reform have over the Conservatives in the UK is that voters in the North of England don't blame them for Thatcher). It is therefore a surprise if voters evaluate "inflation" based on the price level.
I don't know if this is a wise way to investigate hypotheses in political science. Even in psychology, medicine, and biology, where metrics are much easier to measure, and conditions are much more controlled, study replication rates are dismal. If you want to measure something this aggregated with no controls, godspeed.
What do you think you're proving with that?
Let's take an analogy, like the ol' race vs crime that comes up here. When you look for things like "crime by income and race" you get things like this that, for some mysterious reason, talk about the correlations of wage gaps and crime, and it's not until you go to advanced internet racists that you see a straightforward presentation of the relevant data. Same thing is happening with your proposed relationship with Bidenflation and increasing wages. And this is before you start taking into account things like "there was more than one issue that swung the election.
Politicians communicate to voters is not the same way that economists communicate with each other. You can't bring up an old campaign slogan to prove that ackshully the voters were angry about about (the wrong) line go up. Again, you'd have to show that the people he was targeting did actually see the wage increase, and even if they did, that does absolutely nothing to address the issue we're discussing. Is it really so hard to believe that "I can't afford as much stuff as I used to" would be a compelling electoral issue?
I will again point out that you have absolutely no controls in this attempt to measure correlations.
If, and only if, you are having Managerialism injected directly into your veins. Like how in Jesus' name do you expect people to forget "I used to be able to afford a lot more with the same salary > 2 years ago"?
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