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Everyone wants lower prices. Voters say they want lower prices in exit polls. Political candidates run entire campaigns on lowering prices. Any internet discussion can be derailed in an instant by complaining about how much things cost. In 2024, Donald Trump and Republicans surged to power on a wave of anger and resentment at high prices.
Then he immediately jacked the effective tariff rate from 2% to 10% and caused a global energy crisis by starting another war in the Middle East. Now Texas is run by Democrats.
Why? I think the answer is public choice theory. Despite inflation being the number 1 political issue of the last two US general elections, nobody gets into politics to lower consumer prices. Strong consumer sentiment is not a terminal value of ~any of our politicians. It is good with solely instrumental value in that it allows politicians to spend political capital on the things they actually care about, like open borders, ethnic squabbles, corporate profits, or wars.
There is a Matt Yglesias take that even though Republican economic policy is on paper better than Democrat economic policy, Republican presidents end up with worse economic performance because they always start pointless foreign wars, causing both global supply shocks and a rundown of the treasury to pay for military expenditures. It’s hard to argue with this. I’m sort of left going, “real Republican governance has never been tried.”
The big lesson here IMO should be properly understanding the mandate. It won't be learned, but it should. The American people primarily care about bread and butter topics as always, and your win on those as the "best of two evil" does not mean free reign to throw away economic concerns and start doing whatever you want. Like it or not most Americans still think of the parties as giant douche vs turd sandwich, and if you're turd sandwich, you do not pile on extra shit after a win.
But that's exactly what happened. Consider the infamous "Harris is for they/them, Trump is for you" ad. The underlying message painted Harris as an idealogue concerned about irrelevant topics like trans people, and Trump as caring about the real topics. But what did Republicans take away from this? The exact opposite of what they should have learned, they hyper focused on culture war shit. They spent their ad focus and money saying tranny 50 times in a mirror hoping to summon the voters again, and it failed.
And likewise with overreach. Voters are very clear that they don't like trans people participating in their preferred sports, but in general they actually trust Democrats more on the overall topic!. Most voters don't want big daddy government coming in and repressing people's access to hormone treatments or discriminating in employment or anything like that.
Focusing the political discussion on trans people both makes the GOP look out of touch and cruel.
This has happened with Trump on basically every topic. The average voter does not consider the US in an existential crisis that needs 100 million deportations. They want a secure border where criminals can't get in, but they don't want a border so shut down and so hard to get visas with that their favorite voice actors are barred from entering. Yes a single concert by itself isn't a big deal, but it's not just a single concert. It is just one example of the many ways that overreach and a misunderstanding of the border mandate happened. Yet putting extremists in charge who want to limit foreigners of all kinds and of all types into the country inevitably leads to these fuckups.
And then if it wasn't for all this shit, there's also Trump specific problems too. Even if you're a hardcore conservative who thinks two years of idealogical overreach is worth the political sacrifice, Trump is barely even doing that well! He's focusing on his ballroom, the reflecting pool, threatening to invade Canada and Greenland over and over! He's probably spent more time on the white house's furnishings than he did trying to pass real legislation with the trifecta. Certainly even a hardcore idealogue is well aware of how no voter gives a shit about that and watching the president ignore the Real Issues in favor of such nonsense is a bad look right?
Finally a reference to the Uma Musume: Pretty Derby franchise on The Motte. Thumbs up (and not just for this).
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