King For America

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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365 Responses

  1. Murali says:

    Even though they are saying the exact same words, Brenda King does come off better than trump did in the actual exchange. Somehow I found Gordon telling King that she lived in her own reality more offensive than Clinton telling Trump the same thing. Dammit I’ve really been absorbing SJW tropes.

    Maybe its sexist of me, but it seems like a woman can carry trumpism better than a man can. I’d attribitue this to a kind of stereotype. We stereotypically attribute a morality of impartiality to men and a morality of care and special concern to women. Trumpism is all about special concern (or more accurately, chauvinism) towards particular groups. So it sounds more appropriate coming from women?Report

    • Michael Drew in reply to Murali says:

      There is no way to divorce Trump’s performances in debates from the semi-trailer of extraneous but very particular-to-him baggage he brought into them with him. Brenda King simply isn’t Donald Trump – Donald Trump, who by the time of the debates had, what, dozens? scores? of women accusing him of sexual harassment if not assault, and by the time of the final debate had been revealed on the record as being a braggart about the behavior of sexually assaulting women (whether in reference to acts actually taken, or simply imagined by him for the purpose of such bragging).

      And no other woman peddling Trumpism could ever bring in that shipping container’s load of baggage with her into a debate, either. So it is almost a certainty that you would hear Donald Trump’s words (alone) in the mouth of a(ny) woman as less offensive (or, more appealing) than yu did when you heard them come out of his mouth.

      There may be a degree of this that owes to how you feel generically about a woman saying [anything] compared to when a man says the same things, but the much stronger explanation is that you are hearing someone who isn’t Donald Trump (and is a woman!) saying them, compared to hearing Donald Trump say them.Report

      • Kim in reply to Michael Drew says:

        Michael,
        Am I really the only one who found Donald Trump’s accusers being willing to speak about him to be a good thing? It means that whomever he was harassing, they have enough agency, enough strength of character and standing to speak to the media.

        Absence of smoke can sometimes mean absence of fire — but sometimes it means that the smoke is merely smothering someone to death.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Michael Drew says:

        I think it goes a bit beyond Trump though these are good points.

        Le Pen the Daughter is just as vile in her politics as Le Pen the Father but she seems able to get away with more and not provoking backlashes or public outcrys. Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin were mocked by liberals but they were never seen as being as dangerous as some of their male counterparts. I’d say that Michelle Bachmann produces a kind of camp love/affection that no male right-winger could.Report

  2. I’m not the only person who thought Hillary Clinton wasn’t aggressive enough in responding to Trump and that this made her an even more unappealing candidate. Liberals are big on just Knowing (presumably through their liberal spidey sense) that Sexism is the One True Reason Hillary lost the election, but how can you have a commander-in-chief who isn’t going to stand up to a bully? This is the same problem the Democrats have year after year after year: they’re pathetic and weak and whine when they lose instead of just shutting up and winning. And now Harry Reid and Joe Biden, the only prominent Democrats with spines, are both gone.Report

    • InMD in reply to Christopher Carr says:

      I demur on the larger issue of whether or not Democrats are sufficiently aggressive but I think part of the problem was that Clinton, due to her own baggage, was unable to get too mean without looking hypocritical herself. Take the sexism/womanizing issue. Of course she shouldn’t be blamed for the sins of her husband but could she plausibly hammer Trump on that with Bill’s own past, and her defense of him in particular? I’m not so sure, especially, when Trump has the whole cast and crew from the 90s reunited in the wings.

      And that’s without even getting into some of the more substantive policy issues.

      ‘Trump’s foreign policy is not only dangerous, it’s foolish and he’s putting the future of our country and global system at risk.’

      ‘Says the woman who voted to invade Iraq and gave the guns to the Islamist extremists. THAT’S RIGHT I SAID ISLAMIST!’Report

      • Kim in reply to InMD says:

        InMD,
        A very valid consideration in not voting for Clinton was that she’d be too aggressive. As in limited nuclear war in the first year of her presidency.Report

    • Francis in reply to Christopher Carr says:

      ” Liberals are big on just Knowing that Sexism is the One True Reason Hillary lost the election”

      No, we’re not. Some liberals believe in single causes, but they’re just wrong. Hillary lost for a multiplicity of reasons, from third-term fatigue to her disgraceful mishandling of the email issues to Director Comey conveniently violating long-standing FBI policy to not having a message that resonated with Rust Belt voters.

      Sentences that start with “Liberals / Democrats / Conservatives / Republicans are …” are most always such a gross over-generalization as to be useless, unless you’re talking about a core value of that faction. Beliefs, not so much.Report

      • I would say that being butthurt about losing is a core value of the Democratic Party.Report

        • Francis in reply to Christopher Carr says:

          fair enough, although I would expand the point to cover both parties.

          Politics is how we solve disputes without violence. No one likes to lose.Report

          • Will H. in reply to Francis says:

            Actually, politics very often involves violence.
            Violence is a tool of persuasion, the same as any other tool.
            Though we may claim to detest violence on moral grounds, etc., whenever the shooting stops at the end of a war, we are always prepared to accept those who shot best and longest as the winners, and recognize them diplomatically.
            I believe this says more about the value of our moral grounds than the value of violence as a tool of political persuasion.Report

    • Koz in reply to Christopher Carr says:

      No, there were complicating factors that may have changed things but certainly the focus of her campaign was negative. That was the real problem of course. Hillary’s message was a literal ad hominem,

      As it turned out, the idea of being Not Donald Trump was a lot less motivating for the voters than Hillary expected.Report

  3. Murali says:

    cory booker seems to do well enough, and should run for 2020 or 2024.Report

  4. Concerning Mr. Trump’s nomination speech: I actually saw it (didn’t read it), and I found it to be “good” in the sense that it was mostly a regular speech, competently given. It seemed (to me) mostly devoid of the type of on-purpose gaffery and faux “tell it like it is-ism” for which Mr. Trump is famous. But it had a minimal level of seriousness that to then I hadn’t seen him display (not that I had been looking too closely).

    Concerning the mock debate clip: I see what Will (and Murali) mean. With Will, I’ll say it doesn’t necessarily mean gender is irrelevant. With InMD, I’ll say that Clinton was probably not in a position to get aggressive in a way that the hypothetical candidate might have needed to. Not just because she was Clinton–although that had something to do with it–but also because she was more of an establishment candidate and it’s hard for an establishment candidate to get aggressive in the way that an anti-establishment candidate can.Report

  5. Damon says:

    Taking a different line of thought. So Trump is a gal and HRC a dude. OK, that means that the his “wife” was getting orally serviced in the WH by an intern. So America is going to elect a man for president who can’t even satisfy his wife or his wife’s a slutbag? He can’t control his wife or he’s a cuck.

    Yeah, that’ll win a majority of electoral votes.Report

  6. Jaybird says:

    There is a lot of things that still need to be processed about the 2016 election.

    The whole tension between “The Democrats did nothing wrong!” and “Huh. They lost the election to a (set of adjectives) (set of nouns).”

    You’ve seen some of it manifest in the whole issue of whether Trump winning was a surprise or not in these very comment threads.

    If you wanted to argue that The Democrats did nothing wrong, and it was very important to you that The Democrats did nothing wrong, you need to come up with a handful of narratives that help you maintain that narrative in the face of such things as “losing the election”.

    If we’re lucky, it’s merely the case that Clinton was surprisingly bad at what she did (polls notwithstanding, of course) and the Democrats, once they take a breather and find a fresh face who is able to strike the chords that Trump did without being Trump and doing so from a place of principle rather than a place of vulgar willingness to make deals like Trump had to do, they’ll win the White House back as well as start chipping back against the unrepresentative set of losses that they’ve suffered over the last 4 elections.

    I mean, after the 2018 elections. Everybody knows that off-year elections don’t favor Democrats.Report

    • Road Scholar in reply to Jaybird says:

      You’ve seen some of it manifest in the whole issue of whether Trump winning was a surprise or not in these very comment threads.

      I was surprised on election night, but only because the polls were all pretty darn consistent in showing HRC winning with the only real question being “squeaker or landslide?”

      If I had been hit by a bus just after the conventions and lain in a coma until November 9th, I wouldn’t have been surprised by the results at all. Trump won the nomination as an anti-establishment candidate and it seems to me that sentiment was mirrored by Sanders’ strong showing against Clinton as well. This was a decidedly asymmetric match-up with the establishment type having the uphill battle.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Road Scholar says:

        I mostly remember Sam Wang being the official Ordinary Times Numbers Guy and he said something to the effect of Trump not getting more than 240 EVs or else he would eat a bug.

        I remember the Saturday Night Live sketches showing people with their jaws on the floor as the returns rolled in.

        Of course, with hindsight, we now know that the polls were within DeMarge N. Overa and what she was doing with them, I’ll never know.

        But, on November 7th, we knew that Donald Trump was doing the “Meltdown/Total Meltdown” thing and had plans to be gaming out what states Bush/Cruz would have won that Donald lost and how the Republicans had lost their way.Report

        • Road Scholar in reply to Jaybird says:

          I mostly remember Sam Wang being the official Ordinary Times Numbers Guy and he said something to the effect of Trump not getting more than 240 EVs or else he would eat a bug.

          Yeah, and I remember Sam Wang being christened the official OT Numbers Guy by you in a conversation with Saul. I don’t recall anyone else being consulted or particularly giving a s***. Not that it matters, because…

          Of course, with hindsight, we now know that the polls were within DeMarge N. Overa and what she was doing with them, I’ll never know.

          You understand what Margin of Error means, right? If a poll shows Clinton up by 2 with a MOE of 3, then there’s a smallish, i.e. ~10% or so, chance that the polling sample was off by enough that Trump was actually winning. And with multiple polls taken by multiple outfits in multiple states pointing to the same outcome you have to multiply a bunch of 0.1’s and 0.2’s together to get to Trump Wins! This all assumes sound methodology and a genuine desire on the part of the polling firms to avoid systemic bias and actually be correct, which seems like a reasonable assumption to me.

          So I don’t see anything particularly weird or naive about going into election night expecting victory. And I don’t think your contrarian crowing is warranted given that it appeared to be solely based on your feelz.

          I would be a lot more impressed with your apparent belief that the Dems need to do something different if you would ever get around to saying what you think that something is.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Road Scholar says:

            I remember Sam Wang being christened the official OT Numbers Guy by you in a conversation with Saul. I don’t recall anyone else being consulted or particularly giving a s***.

            Indeed. I would have thought that *SOMEONE* might have shown up to say “no, Sam Wang is a partisan and his politics are informing his calculations. This is nowhere *NEAR* a 97% election. Not even close. We need to use (this guy here) because he’s actually better.”

            I mean, if they cared.

            I suppose I could understand why someone wouldn’t care, though.

            I would be a lot more impressed with your apparent belief that the Dems need to do something different if you would ever get around to saying what you think that something is.

            Well, if the whole “1000 lost elected positions in the last 4 elections” isn’t enough to impress you, I find it difficult to believe that me saying “run on a platform of legalizing marijuana” will impress you.Report

            • Troublesome Frog in reply to Jaybird says:

              Indeed. I would have thought that *SOMEONE* might have shown up to say “no, Sam Wang is a partisan and his politics are informing his calculations. This is nowhere *NEAR* a 97% election. Not even close. We need to use (this guy here) because he’s actually better.”

              Somebody could have said it, but I don’t think it’s necessarily true. I mean, if you have methodological concerns, I’d be interested in hearing them, but the critiques were mostly personal incredulity. Wang actually had pretty well articulated rationale for his methods. He wasn’t some “unskewing” crank who just put his thumb on the scale to make the numbers more friendly.

              I leaned toward Wang in the Wang/Silver wars because in past elections, the margin of error estimates seemed to fall closer to Wang’s than Silver’s (at least when I was checking them) and that Silver’s argument really did seem to be more of a fudge factor than anything else. The fact that he was less wrong is interesting, but I don’t think it had anything to do with partisanship or wishful thinking anywhere along the line.Report

              • Kim in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

                It’s a kangaroo court the whole way round.
                Silver’s even said that cellphones bollix the whole thing up.
                The issues are with everyone having their thumb on the scale.Report

              • I didn’t really cite Wang, but I wrote an entire post about a big methodological problem with his work. Specifically, he looked at each state’s polling in isolation and did not account for a uniform error.

                And the issue isn’t that most of us were wrong, but the level of certainty combined with how disagreement was approached.

                Those that faced the brunt of it have earned a little crowing rights here.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Will Truman says:

                You made a great point in that one.

                The criticism is *NOT* “the polls were wrong”.

                The criticism is “the polls were all wrong in the same direction”.Report

              • Troublesome Frog in reply to Will Truman says:

                I’m sorry I missed that post, but I also don’t think that’s quite an accurate characterization of Wang’s methodology. In any case, I’m just saying that there are reasons for being wrong other than being a partisan operative, wishful thinking, or, heaven forbid, living in The Bubble. As I see it, there were roughly four classifications for election prediction methodology:

                1) Mash together data and use historical norms to estimate the range for correlated error.
                2) Do (1), find that it was alarmingly one-sided, and apply a fudge factor to take into account that the year “feels” weird and may well depart from historical norms.
                3) Tell just-so stories to rationalize your gut feeling.
                4) Just say your guy is going to win and figure out a reason why later.

                Group 3 is always just chaos, so I usually ignore them. Wang and Silver were good representatives of 1 and 2, and the fact that Silver was (probably) less wrong this time around still doesn’t sell me on the process. Of the people who actually predicted a Trump win, a bunch of them were in group 3 and most of the rest were in group 4. If we repeat the experiment, groups 1 and 2 will dominate the prediction game. It would be interesting to see who comes out on top, and I don’t think the 2016 results necessarily confirm it.

                Most of the people philosophizing about “the bubble” or making a big deal out of how the pundits were wrong and probability is no longer a thing are mostly just engaged in methods 3 and 4. People make a lot about “lessons” from these types of outcomes, but they often forget that the country is pretty closely split and results in winner-take-all elections flip back and forth. They end up doing a lot of post-hoc story telling the same way the people on financial shows like to “explain” why the market went up/down that day.

                That’s not to say I don’t think there are lessons to be learned. I just don’t think that a massive re-weighting of trust in experts and polling methodology is one of them. If I did, I’d be a Bill Mitchell man all the way, when it’s pretty clear that his predictions are really just statements of what Bill Mitchell wants.Report

              • If Trump has a 20% chance of winning State A, a 30% chance of winning State B, and a 40% chance of winning State C, are his odds of winning all three closer to 2.5% or 20%? I believe the main way that Wang got to 97% certainty is that he was closer to 2.5%. That’s my methodological objection.

                My more intuitive version is this: Wang was wrong in 2004, and he embarrassed himself in 2014. He was right in 2008, 2010, and 2012. So going into this election he had a 3-2 record… but only 1-2 when Republicans had good years. It’s a limited data set and can be explained away (“2004 was a prototype, and his numbers did come back to earth in 2014”), but I did suspect that the next time Republicans won that he’d be wrong through September.

                I think Bill Mitchell got lucky. I don’t think he has any special insights. I think the media is about to make a huge over-correction mistake in that regard.

                My big thing is that the takeaway from this election ought not to be to go with anecdata, but to show some humility with the data. Don’t automatically believe people who say “I think the data is wrong” but not to laugh them out of the room.

                Coming into this election, Nate Silver had written quite a bit on the limitations and concerns with polls and showed some humility, and Wang didn’t.Report

              • Koz in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

                Somebody could have said it, but I don’t think it’s necessarily true. I mean, if you have methodological concerns, I’d be interested in hearing them, but the critiques were mostly personal incredulity. Wang actually had pretty well articulated rationale for his methods. He wasn’t some “unskewing” crank who just put his thumb on the scale to make the numbers more friendly.

                For me, Sam Wang is a partisan hack, actually representative of the corruptions of liberalism in some subtle ways. People have legitimate differences of opinion, but my impression of Sam Wang is that he was fairly consistently trying to put his thumb on the scale. Nate Silver is a lib, but for me at least it’s pretty clear that he’s not trying to put his thumb on the scale.

                In general, the best horse-race tea leaf reader is Sean Trende and the people he works with. After that, it’s Nate Silver, Michael Barone, Jay Cost and maybe a couple others I’m forgetting.

                Btw, I thought the “unskewed polls” theory in 2012 was pretty ridiculous. But given what happen in the 2016 Presidential Election, Brexit, and the most recent (I think) UK general election I think it’s fair to say that theory is in general more credible than Sam Wang.Report

              • Troublesome Frog in reply to Koz says:

                I’m not saying your opinion is invalid, but I do think that the post illustrates my point: You’re not talking data or methodology here. It seems like it’s a gut reaction at best or just affinity for people who agree with you at worst.Report

              • Koz in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

                To be fair, I didn’t try to argue the point in a comprehensive way. I probably could if I tried, but to be honest it’s too much work for a point I don’t care that much about.

                It’s a little stronger than just a gut reaction though. I’ve read enough from him across more than one cycle, to the point where I think my characterization is accurate, though I haven’t made any effort to substantiate it.Report

            • Will H. in reply to Jaybird says:

              This comment is indicative of single-loop vs. double-loop feedback conflicts.

              The single-loop side doesn’t work out mathematically because it assumes a 0 on the part of the double-looper, when in fact that 0 is really a variable.Report

          • Kim in reply to Road Scholar says:

            Good methodology has been lost since 2006.
            Cell phones and call screening. Nobody answers anymore, and when you do get answers, your sample is off.Report

          • gregiank in reply to Road Scholar says:

            Even the One and True Official OT numbers guy, Sliver, had it that Clinton was likely to win.Report

            • Jaybird in reply to gregiank says:

              He had it at something like 66% likely.

              1/3rd chance of a Clinton landslide, 1/3rd chance of a Clinton squeaker, and 1/3rd chance of Trump Trump Trump.

              And, if I recall correctly, people who talked about Nate Silver’s numbers as if they were accurate got yelled at for being partisan for doing so.Report

            • Will H. in reply to gregiank says:

              As I remember it, only one person had Trump picked to win, and that guy was largely dismissed as a crank.

              But really, turning the initial criticism into a matter of “How many polls were there that were actually wrong?” is a fantastic illustration of that criticism.Report

              • gregiank in reply to Will H. says:

                Not sure of your point. If Silver said Trump had a 30% chance of winning he wasn’t right or wrong if Trump or Clinton won. People just don’t’ understand what probabilities are.Report

              • Kim in reply to gregiank says:

                Silver is obsolete.Report

              • Will H. in reply to gregiank says:

                The whole tension between “The Democrats did nothing wrong!” and “Huh. They lost the election to a [ guy like Trump ].”

                You’ve seen some of it manifest in the whole issue of whether Trump winning was a surprise or not in these very comment threads.

                If you wanted to argue that The Democrats did nothing wrong, and it was very important to you that The Democrats did nothing wrong, you need to come up with a handful of narratives that help you maintain that narrative in the face of such things as “losing the election”.

                If we’re lucky, it’s merely the case that Clinton was surprisingly bad at what she did (polls notwithstanding, of course) and… start chipping back against the unrepresentative set of losses that they’ve suffered over the last 4 elections[,] after the 2018 elections.

                The argument is boldfaced.
                Examples are italicized.

                Compare the examples to the argument.
                Very humorous, considering the thread those examples spawned.

                The argument was never addressed.Report

              • greginak in reply to Will H. says:

                Umm yeah i wasn’t addressing that argument. I was pointing out how people don’t understand what probabilities are. That’s all. I wasn’t trying to discuss anything else about the election.

                If i say there is 50 50 chance a coin flip will be heads, i’m not wrong when it comes up tails.Report

              • Will H. in reply to greginak says:

                I get it.

                But then, the 50-50 chance is only that within a certain margin or error, as both coin faces would be exactly the same otherwise; and “right” is not the logical opposite of “not wrong;” etc.

                Typically, “the odds of being struck by lightning,” when used in a colloquial sense, refers to something very unlikely.

                Then, there’s playing golf in a thunderstorm.

                I believe we’re discussing one of those “golf in a thunderstorm” type of scenarios here, rather than something within a hair’s breadth.

                It’s not like Clinton lost to Teddy Roosevelt, or Abraham Lincoln.
                That woman lost to Donald Trump.

                That’s like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes up to the hamburger stand and asks, “What do you have to drink?” and the man says, “I have Mountain Dew, and I have crab juice.” Homer sighs, then says, “Okay, give me the crab juice.”

                But as far as peeling the blinders back goes, the really damning stuff hasn’t come out yet.Report

              • greginak in reply to Will H. says:

                And again, i wasn’t saying anything about the election. I was just making a point about how people don’t understand probabilities. So the blinders or Clinton or Trump was irrelevant to what i posted.Report

              • Will H. in reply to greginak says:

                And my point was, more or less, that your point was not made in isolation, but within a certain context.

                As for the latter part of this comment, forgive me if I came across as accusative in my previous comment. That was not intended. I was simply noting a phenomenon.

                It’s not like I take great pleasure in the bewilderment of the Left writ large.
                I am a former life-long Democrat who took great pride in voting against Reagan; a card-carrying trades journeyman; a volunteer on a number of campaigns for Democratic candidates at various levels.
                And I found there was no place for me in my party.
                And the truth is: I found the Right more welcoming, more robust in its diversity of thought, and generally more accepting.
                And I had to take a good, hard look at the Left.

                Here, Jaybird says many things that I have been saying for ten years now, using different words.

                I would like to see a robust and diverse Left, but I prefer one which actually practices those principles it claims to value.

                I can understand that the loss of the election can sting. I supported Kerry, and I remember that well.
                I prefer to see this as an opportunity rather than a loss.
                I ask you to do the same.
                Opportunity feels so much better.

                Granted, I have gone wide outside of the parameters of the inquiry here, but I prefer not to hash that out at this point.
                If that makes me chickensh!t, then I just happen to get a bit chickensh!t every once in a while, I beg your pardon in doing so, and I ask you to get used to it.Report

              • greginak in reply to Will H. says:

                You’re not CS. You were just going far past what i was saying. It’s not like that ever happens on the internet where we always stay laser focused on the precise topic.

                I do think this a chance for the D’ to get rid of some dead wood ( the old Clinton crew) and refocus their priorities and policies. I sort of thought this would happen in 2020 since i didn’t think Clinton could win two terms.

                Regarding the general welcoming nature and diversity of thought i’m glad you found a place. I know i’ve been a “traitor” or “commie” or “unamerican” to conservatives since i was a teen and still am to many. Both parties have their morons and those on the left are getting plenty of attnetion.Report

              • Will H. in reply to greginak says:

                You’re not CS. You were just going far past what i was saying.
                True. I feel pressured to remain on-topic these days, whether that pressure is real or assumed; and so, I try to link everything back to the OP.
                It really is a destructive tendency though. I always thought the best discussions here happen whenever people start wandering out into the perimeters.
                I do appreciate your actions in alleviating some of this perceived pressure.

                Both parties have their morons and those on the left are getting plenty of attnetion. (sic)
                This is true, but it seems like the ones on the Left used to be more out-of-sight & out-of-mind. Proliferation of the internet did a lot to distort reality over the past 20 years as television did post-WW II. There are things that have a sense of depth which really isn’t there. The problem there is that it affects operative assumptions; i.e., it manifests itself as subjective cognitive biases we translate into action without rational function.

                Example: Cop shows on TV, the FBI in specific.
                Police departments seem embedded in our culture, but they are a relatively new invention, and still developing conceptually. The four stages of policing in the U.S. are: the political model (1840 – 1930), the professional model (mid-1920’s* – 1968), the community model (1970 – 2000), and intelligence-led policing (2000 – present). That’s at the state level.
                The feds are now, and have always been, in the political model. They determine who they’re going to go after, and look for something to pin on them. While that may sound like a good idea while going after Capone & his ilk, there are far more instances of going after the guy leaking X to the press. We see more of one than another, and so the seen part takes precedence.
                The same with cop shows. Beating a confession out of a culprit was a widely accepted practice during the years of the professional model of policing, but you will never find footage of Joe Friday (the consummate of the professional model) whaling the tar out of a guy through a phone book set on a guy’s knees.
                The end result is that common knowledge disappears. The image holds more relevance than reality in our day-to-day affairs.

                Anyway, I began questioning some of those assumptions of depth. To hold that firmly in mind, though, is to cultivate a very negative view of humanity-at-large.

                From the study of communications, in various forms and contexts, one thing I can tell you for certain is that direct communication is, in practically all cases, the best option, and deviating from this is courting disaster. Nonetheless, direct communication is widely shunned (roughly 20% of human interaction), as people instead choose to engage in some fairly inventive forms of subterfuge, stealth, positioning, etc.
                It seems like it is fairly consistent (and, perhaps, across the board, or a good ways across it) that the simplest answers prove to be the most elusive.
                The prospects are not particularly encouraging.

                Nonetheless, thank you for a pleasant exchange, for hanging in there with me to get to this point.

                ____________________________________
                * Depending on whether you assess from the Wickersham Commission or August Vollmer in Berkeley, who had the professional model largely in place since 1905.Report

          • Stillwater in reply to Road Scholar says:

            Arguing with Jaybird:

            J: Here, let’s talk about this thing, the one under the left cup.
            I: OK, then I’d say X and Y about that.
            J: Really? That’s weird. Cuz what I’m talking about is actually here: under the middle cup. It’s this thingy right here.
            I: Alright, fair enough. Then I’d say W and Z. What say you?
            J: I’d say that what I’m talking about is actually – tada! – under the right cup.
            I: In that case, I’d say U and V. Are there any rules to this game?
            J: Yes, there are. I’ve tricked you again, since what I’m talking about is back under left cup….Report

            • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

              “We don’t even know if the Democrats need to change. (I think they do.)”
              “Here’s why they don’t: Reason 1.”
              “I don’t agree with Reason 1.”
              “Here’s another reason they don’t: Reason 2.”
              “I you know, I argued that Reason 2 was a problem back before the election and got pushback. But, sure.”
              “Here’s really why they don’t: Reason 3.”
              “I slightly agree with Reason 3 but it nowhere is near good enough to make the point that Democrats don’t need to change.”
              “Why do you keep jumping around on topics like it’s some sort of shell game?”Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                J: I’m playing this game to teach the ignorant a valuable lesson.
                I: What lesson is that?
                J: No, I’m not trying to teach them a lesson, I’m trying to get them to understand things better.
                I: Really? What things should they understand better?
                J: It’s not that they need to understand anything better, just that they’re not seeing reality for what it actually is.
                I: Can you describe that reality?
                J: The reality I’m talking about is that that there are important lessons to learn from time to time.

                …….Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                Please. Unless people reach the conclusion unbidden, it’s going to dissipate.

                They need to reach the conclusion and think that they did it by being smarter and better than you.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                J: What I’m trying to teach people is that I’m smarter and better than they are.

                ??Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                Yeah, that’s obviously what I’ve been going for.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Maybe not what you’re going for (tho you apparently think your conclusions come to you unbidden…) but that’s the effect.

                And by saying that I’m being charitable, cuz at the end of the day I think you just don’t like liberals and Dems even tho you apparently believe *that* conclusion came to you unbidden. 🙂Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                Love Liberals, less crazy about Dems.

                That said, I think that the Dems are making mistakes and that there is a way for me to say “okay, they’re doing some course correcting” and it’s measurable.

                Hey, maybe I’m measuring the wrong things and maybe I’m using the wrong numbers but I’ll tell you now that if your theory of what is going on cannot be disproven then I am not sure that your theory maps to reality in any interesting way.

                But if we want to take turns virtue signalling, I don’t mind being the guy who gets accused of supporting Trump.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                And right up there, in that above comment, you switched the cups on me. 🙂Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                “Let’s talk about X.”
                “Let’s talk about you.”
                “Fine. I think X.”
                “You’re switching the cups!”Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                No, Jaybird, I’m trying to get you to see that your unbidden beliefs, the ones you hold by thinking you’re better and smarter than everyone, simply won’t dissipate. No matter the challenge presented.

                If you don’t see that as a problem in your own reasoning I’ll continue my efforts to help you see the light.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                If your starting from the wrong place, you’re not going to get to the right place by following the directions you know by heart.

                I’m not better and smarter than everyone, Stillwater. What I am trying to do is be able to notice when I am wrong by giving myself measurable tests for whether I am wrong and if the measurements I measure give me outcomes that are nowhere near what I’m expecting, then I know that I’m thinking about things incorrectly.

                To bring us back, I think that the Dems are making mistakes and that there is a way for me to say “okay, they’re doing some course correcting” and it’s measurable.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Oh, I wish that’s all you were doing, Jaybird. It’d make conversations with you easier and a lot shorter. Instead of going meta to analyze what you view as defects in Dem-voters thinking you would just say that you disagree!!Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                “I disagree” is uninteresting. “I disagree because X, Y, and Z” might be interesting based on what X, Y, and Z are.

                If they’re sentiment? Eh. Argue about sentiments.
                If they’re measurables? Hey, measure them.
                If they’re only measurable in theory until Election Day? That’s where the fun is.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Depends on what you view as interesting: policy, politics, or partisan/ideological thinking. Seems to me you’re most interested in the latter, hence, my challenging you on exhibiting the very thing you’re challenging your interlocutors on without admitting that you actually exhibit one of them things.

                Look, my view on this stuff has been consistent and clear since I first got here and you and I began our discussions: evidence, as it relates to policy, is the only mechanism to determine a “correct” belief matrix, and b) that the higher you chase the meta dragon the more you’re creating the dynamic you think you’re opposing (ie, going meta).

                Ironically, the only way to counter going meta in the political domain is to go one level up and demonstrate that meta itself is self-defeating.

                I mean, sure it’s fun to analyze how certain people beliefs reduce to irrational sentiments and so on. I just think it runs entirely counter to your own stated views that we need to increase trust and collaboration in our society. You seem to think demonstrating low trust in people you think exhibit low trust is a good strategy to achieve your goals. But it seems self-contradictory to me since you’re exhibiting low trust in your opponents. Why would they ever agree with you?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                I just think it runs entirely counter to your own stated views that we need to increase trust and collaboration in our society.

                I suspect that that is no longer possible.

                I am beginning to agree with the New Republic on the best way forward.

                If we cannot create one society that is high trust/high collaboration because of the two societies that cannot communicate in it, it *MIGHT* be possible to create two societies that don’t trust each other but can, within themselves, create high trust/high collaboration societies.

                You seem to think demonstrating low trust in people you think exhibit low trust is a good strategy to achieve your goals.

                “Reciprocated Altruism” is, I think, the official name.

                Why would they ever agree with you?

                Agree with me about *WHAT*?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Agree with me about *WHAT*?

                Whatever you’re disagreeing with THEM about, Jaybird.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                If they’re disagreeing with me about something measurable, there’s a great way to make my face red and my expression sour.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Ah, so those folks, the ones you challenge via disagreement in the comment threads, are disagreeing with you, yeah? not you with them? I think that pretty clearly makes my general point, tho I don’t expect you understand why.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                “Disagreement” is not like “Defection”.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                What’s interesting about this conversation is that while you always move up the meta chain to critique the views of your opponents you refuse to allow a critiquer of your views to do the same. When that happens you always kick it back down a notch, to the measurable and empirical. Which is a characteristic of intensely ideological thinking, dude.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                I am refusing to allow you to do the same?

                How can I do a better job of allowing you to do the same?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                By merely saying, after offering an argument which is responded to on the merits, “I disagree”, rather than moving to a different reason why you think that person is wrong.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                I’ll try to just disagree more in the future.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Restrict your disagreement to the substance? Just the merits? Oh, I’d like to believe you. I really would. 🙂

                {{Do you still have that liberal decoder ring?}}Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Stillwater says:

                I mean, I get it. You think you’re on The Right Path now. Just like when you were a RedState conservative, or a right leaning libertarian, or a why-can’t-we-get-along trust and collaborationist, and now as a peaceful separationist.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                No. I know that I’m evolving.

                Or, at least, changing.

                What I’m interested in is whether certain things follow other certain things necessarily or whether it’s a random walk. (I suppose that there might be a non-death stopping point and that might be interesting too… but I kind of doubt that there is.)

                The system is also evolving. Or, at least, changing. And as above, so below.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                One solution is to buy some land up Kenosha Pass way, build yourself a little underground bunker with turrets and a solar-powered air supply, and start prepping for the apocalypse. If you feel a really extreme need to Figure It All Out Given Worst Case Scenarios impulse, that is. You can never be too careful, ya know?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                I got the operation when I was 25.

                That was pretty much the moment that I decided that I was pretty much okay with what happened to me afterwards.

                Preparations have been mooted.Report

              • Will H. in reply to Jaybird says:

                This exchange makes me really miss Hanley and Blaise.
                That’s a debate worth watching.Report

              • Koz in reply to Jaybird says:

                I am beginning to agree with the New Republic on the best way forward.

                I’m not. How’s this for a radical plan? How about libs collectively un-butthurt themselves over the results of the last Presidential election and let’s all do as best as we can for America?

                In the immediate aftermath of the election, I was very sympathetic to the shock libs felt from losing to Donald Trump. Now, I don’t feel as much. Not even from the passage of time (though that’s obviously important), but more from the substance of Trump himself.

                We all probably have to reevaluate Trump. I know that my opinion of Trump has changed but more importantly been clarified since he has been in office. The “resistance”-sympathetic Demos made a significant mistake in their campaign against “normalization” of Trump. I used to think that Trump had to be perceived as normal for the best interest of the United States. I still believe that, but now it’s becoming more clear to me that Trump substantially is a normal President.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Koz says:

                How about libs collectively un-butthurt themselves over the results of the last Presidential election and let’s all do as best as we can for America?

                There is a lot to unpack in there. Most of it involves “best”.

                Remember the Republican attitude towards Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama? Call it what you will, whether it be “obstruction” or “principled opposition”, it was certainly the opposite of un-butthurting themselves.

                The technically-not-quite-a-shenanigan with Merrick Garland not even getting a hearing prior to consent being denied was, for example, a good communication that the Republicans were defecting in their little iterated prisoner’s game.

                Why in the hell would you possibly expect Democrats to do anything but obstruct/principally oppose?Report

              • Koz in reply to Jaybird says:

                Remember the Republican attitude towards Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama? Call it what you will, whether it be “obstruction” or “principled opposition”, it was certainly the opposite of un-butthurting themselves.

                That’s because the GOP at that time never put themselves in world of butthurt that libs did after the Trump election. And an unfortunate number of libs have stayed there. Here’s a typical missive:

                http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/

                Libs read pieces like this seriously, and more importantly, have let the ideas in it remain as part of the furniture of their worldview beyond any legitimate critical analysis. I don’t blame the author for writing this on November 10, or the reader for believing it.

                But now, in the second week of March, it’s fair to say that the main analogy of Trump to the Nazis or the Soviets is bullshit. To be precise, what we have seen from the Trump Administration are not small signs of normality that deceive us, but actual normality that we should be adapting to.

                The Republican opposition to President Obama simply doesn’t fit in this context at all.Report

              • Francis in reply to Koz says:

                As to getting over the butt-hurt:

                Candidate Trump promised a health care plan that didn’t cut Medicaid, would have much lower deductibles, and stated “Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now”.

                The current Republican plan does precisely the opposite.

                So I invite President Trump to live up to his promises, oppose the RyanCare plan and put forth a plan which matches his campaign rhetoric.

                (He has two choices: a) use the power of government to drive down the cost of care and/or b) raise taxes.)Report

              • Koz in reply to Francis says:

                President Obama promised that you could keep your doctor, but that didn’t materialize. Frankly, my best guess is that there’s not going to be any significant health care reform pass the Senate in the next two months, and maybe not even pass the House either.

                In the bigger picture, I might disagree with your health care policy priorities but I certainly don’t have any problem with them being yours. It’s clearly outside of the mentality that libs have used to rationalize the “resistance” mentality, a la the link above.Report

              • Troublesome Frog in reply to Koz says:

                President Obama promised that you could keep your doctor, but that didn’t materialize.

                I’m pretty sure it mostly did, at least to the extent that you could keep your doctor before the ACA. If we’re going to hold Trump to his promises as strictly as we’re holding Obama to the “keep your doctor” promise, Trump is completely screwed.Report

              • Koz in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

                Whatevs. This is normal political jockeying about normal political issues under a normal American Administration led by a normal President.Report

              • Joe Sal in reply to Koz says:

                I don’t think the normal president thing here rings true. It is still early, but I have seen some of what Trump is doing used in the private sector. Sometimes it works pretty good, sometimes it stumbles about, but one thing is certain, he is going to be different.Report

              • Troublesome Frog in reply to Koz says:

                Who among us hasn’t accused our predecessor of illegally wiretapping us?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Depends on what you view as interesting: policy, politics, partisan/ideological thinking. Seems to me you’re most interested in the latter, hence, my challenging you on exhibiting the very thing you’re challenging your interlocutors on: demanding that they somehow concede to the thing you refuse to concede to.

                Look, my view on this stuff has been consistent and clear since I first got here, and you and I began our discussions: a) evidence as it relates to policy, in its totality, is the only mechanism to determine a “correct” belief matrix, and b) that the higher you chase the meta dragon the more you’re creating the dynamic you think you’re opposing (ie, going meta, be it partisan or ideological).

                Ironically, the only way to counter meta-analysis in the political domain is to go one level up and demonstrate that that meta-analysis itself ends up being self-defeating. And that’s what I’ve been trying to demonstrate to you.

                I mean, sure it’s fun to analyze how certain people’s beliefs reduce to irrational sentiments and so on. For the ideologue, anyway… And that’s especially true of folks who adore going meta. Personally, I think doing so runs counter to your own stated views that we need to increase trust and collaboration in our society. You seem to think demonstrating and exhibiting low trust in the people who you think exhibit low trust or bad thinking is a good strategy to achieve your goals. But it seems self-contradictory to me since you’re blatantly exhibiting low trust in your opponents. You clearly want them to think in a more “trustworthy” way. Recognizing that, why would they ever trust you or even agree you?Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Stillwater says:

                ” I think doing so runs counter to your own stated views that we need to increase trust and collaboration in our society. ”

                (hint: he’s using you as an example of what we’ll get if we don’t do this.)Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Stillwater says:

                “I’m trying to get you to see that your unbidden beliefs, the ones you hold by thinking you’re better and smarter than everyone, simply won’t dissipate. No matter the challenge presented.

                If you don’t see that as a problem in your own reasoning I’ll continue my efforts to help you see the light.”

                He could repeat this exact comment back to you.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to DensityDuck says:

                Thanks for the support, DD. What you said is exactly my point.

                {{If you’re not clear about that, read a bit further upthread and you’ll see who I’m quoting and already said that at me.}}Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Stillwater says:

                Oh right, I forgot who I was talking to. You’re still doing that thing where you’re doing the postrational “I know you are but what am I” instead of actually engaging.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to DensityDuck says:

                No, DD. I wrote that comment to demonstrate the absurdity of Jaybird’s view, and then you confirmed how absurd it was. What am I missing?Report

              • Pinky in reply to DensityDuck says:

                I imagine that everyone here could say the same thing to everyone else. I like this site in many respects, but the conversations are so inbred they’ve got webbed toes, and inevitably that leads to “meta”.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Pinky says:

                Also, it’s weird that we’re complaining that Jay doesn’t examine his hidden assumptions and has changed his philosophy.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Pinky says:

                And amongst all those iterations of certainty regarding the Right Path is one common denominator: liberals are fucking the whole thing up!Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                I disagree. Not Liberals. Progressives.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                +3.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Pinky says:

                The “meta” I’m interested in is an analysis of other people’s beliefs which rejects them based on the ideological priors of the person doing the analyzing. In … the person in question’s case, the reflexive view is +/- to oppose whatever liberals want, updated daily.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                I’m not sure I have a formula yet for how the liberals update what they want.

                I suppose if I figure that formula out, I’ll (finally) be getting somewhere.Report

        • North in reply to Jaybird says:

          Umm I’m pretty sure Mr. Silver was the generally acknowledged numbers guy around OT.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to North says:

            Oh, jeez. Now I have to find the post…Report

            • North in reply to Jaybird says:

              You don’t have to; Lord(lady?) knows I don’t relish the prospect of revisiting that painful time. That said I am pretty sure I’m one of the more forthrightly self described Democratic Partisans around here and I was all Nate. Then again it’s not all about me.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to North says:

                Too late.

                Here’s the thread in which I was asked: “Why is 538 god over Princeton and the Upshot?”

                (Oooh! Scroll up to here and read this one!)

                Anyway, the main thing I wanted was *ONE GUY* to go to and say “okay, here’s what he said last week, here’s what he said earlier this week, here’s what he said today, the trend is *THIS*.”

                I guess Sam Wang gave us that.

                But he’s never going to be our Official Ordinary Times Numbers Guy ever again.

                And if someone ever again asks “Why is 538 god over Princeton and the Upshot?”, I will have an answer ready for zher.

                (Edit: And I should point out that Pillsy offered pushback against Sam Wang being the Official Ordinary Times Numbers Guy. So I was wrong to say/imply that I didn’t get any pushback.)Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                I’m not sure who you’ve made look worse by linking that: Saul, for admitting he viewed the polling thru a partisan filter, or you for thinking anything important followed from that.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                Look… worse?

                It’s what happened. It’s the moment that Sam Wang became our Numbers Guy.

                It’s not about how anyone looks.

                This is me knitting my brows in incomprehension.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                It’s the moment that Sam Wang became our Numbers Guy.

                You have no self-awarenes, dude. You’re the one who anointed Sam Wang *our* Numbers Guy.

                You’re just talking to yourself now.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                And I will never make that mistake again.

                Nate Silver will be our guy from this point forward.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Again, you just make yourself look bad by thinking anything important is at stake in that issue. Except your own ego, I suppose.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                As I said then, I say now:

                I don’t care which yardstick we use. I only care that we agree which one we’re using before we start measuring.

                If we jump back and forth between yardsticks, we might find our own egos getting in the way.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Who heard you? Other than yourself?

                All those guys got it wrong, Jaybird, so it doesn’t mean a damn thing now anyway. It didn’t mean a damn thing back then either. (Unless you had money on the line…:)Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                How many comments have I devoted to complaining about your hobbies?Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Stillwater says:

                I understood what he meant.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Will Truman says:

                Is it different than what everyone already concedes?

                Requiring a partisan to pick a pollster only seems relevant if your objective is to keep a partisan from picking pollsters outa partisanship. Partisans are partisan. Saul admitted he was partisan. What’s interesting about that?Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Stillwater says:

                For my own part, I had no recollection of that conversation and had wondered where “Wang as the official poll guy” came from.

                I think asking us to hone in on a particular source, rather than jumping around as it suits our fancy, seems like a worthwhile pursuit. Or an admission that “I’m picking this one because they are telling me what I want to hear.” But I don’t think Saul conceded that. Credit to him if he did.

                And it’s also helpful to go back to some of those conversations to remind ourselves of how wrong we were. How we didn’t just think Clinton would win, we* were pretty sure of it. And we had a kind of eye-rolly attitude towards those who said otherwise. I remember repeating more than once “I believe Hillary is going to win” just to get people to listen to some tangential point that I was trying to make**.

                This seems important to remember as we seem to be trying to drift to a place where what happened on election day was unremarkable and only barely unexpected.

                * – As it happens, I remember/consider you among the least firmly in this camp. You always seemed to think that Trump had a better chance than most of us.

                ** – To be clear, I did believe that. Not trying to pass the buck like I was some sort of hostage.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Will Truman says:

                He kind of conceded that here.

                I check 538 for anxiety and Princeton and the Upshot to calm down

                Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Will Truman says:

                Well, that’s just it, Will. The entire list of people who said Trump would win is two: the Dilbert guy and Michael Moore. Jaybird certainly never said Trump would win. He was one of the people who emphatically said he’d never make it past the next disastrous news cycle during the primary.

                Look, Trump’s winning isn’t a function of a liberal media bubble, it’s the function of a fully general political/cultural bubble – conservative and liberal alike. This is like Mal taking on the Alliance: no one’ll see this coming.

                Now, it’s true that certain liberals didn’t think Trump had a chance when the evidence showed it was gonna be pretty close, but that’s no different than conservatives who also thought he didn’t have a chance in the general, not to mention conservatives who maintained he didn’t have a chance during the primary.

                Trump shook up the world.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                What edifices do we need to unmake to allow ourselves to be the kind of people who can see something like a Trump victory?

                That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with.

                Granted, Doha helped me shatter a few gross misconceptions as well.

                But we’ve been infected with a mind virus that is preventing us from seeing things.

                How in the hell do you fight against a mind virus?Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Stillwater says:

                At this point, I give credit to people who thought – and expressed the thought – that Trump could win*. “It could go either way” is (to my mind) actually a better prediction than “Trump is absolutely going to win.”

                On the rest, about bubbles, I quite agree.

                Also, I gotta give a shout out to my man Ed here:

                * – I always said that Trump could win. That doesn’t count, however, because I never acted like he could. I rarely defended the prospect that he might win. The most I ever did was say “If he wins, this is how…”Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Will Truman says:

                But now you’re just trolling through the thoughts of people you think got it sorta right back then looking for clues. Clues for what, exactly? Signals? About what?

                Is it an indicator that those people have more authority regarding what’s happening right now? That there were hidden trends which all of us for the most part missed? Why is that useful? Or in interesting. (History repeats itself, no? That’s a truism, if you take a wide enough scope of history.)

                Doesn’t matter now, seems to me. This is our new reality and we move on from here.Report

              • North in reply to Jaybird says:

                I dunno how I missed that article. I was busy late 2016 but damn.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

                “(Oooh! Scroll up to here and read this one!)”

                my contribution is pretty weirdly amusing, as well.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

                I love going back and reading the old threads. Remembering how I used to think about things (and how others presented how they were thinking about things).Report

              • I have a Twitter acquaintance who confessed he got his entire family to vote for Trump in the Virginia primary to help Hillary win.Report

              • North in reply to Will Truman says:

                I gotta confess… as a partisan I so far haven’t regretted that Trump won out of the stable of GOP usual suspects.Report

              • Kim in reply to North says:

                North,
                Me either, actually.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

                If I had a nickel for every weapon I have seen used that I have gone on to see the other side pick up and succeed with…Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

                And yet, somehow, they keep on building Death Lasers.Report

    • Kim in reply to Jaybird says:

      Jay,
      If the SJWs finish dying by 2018 (and let the competent take over again), I think the Democrats might have a shot. After all, 2006 was an off year, wasn’t it?Report

      • North in reply to Kim says:

        What on earth makes you think the “SJW’ movement is dying?Report

        • Kim in reply to North says:

          North,
          1) Clinton’s gone. Without an engine it’s hard to run a movement.
          2) Kos and everyone else on the left wants to put the drama queens down, and hard. Knives are out, and ready to get bloody.Report

          • North in reply to Kim says:

            Clinton was a “SJW” candidate? Wow.Report

            • Kim in reply to North says:

              No, you’re missing both the head and the tail, when you make that comment.
              Clinton’s campaign was a large outward manifestation of a deliberately introduced cancer that was eating the left. SJWs are more like the actual cancer, not the bulge that tells you there’s a problem. Without the Powers that Be actively fueling the fire, the left’s natural antibodies are likely to show up and clean house.

              There’s a reason the Gay Rights Movement succeeded, and the Trannie Rights Movement mostly failed. Drama is not an accident, anymore.

              People really said that there’d be a special place in hell for any woman who didn’t vote for the female candidate.

              Yeah. THAT insult earned votes, I’m certain. /sarcasmReport

            • LeeEsq in reply to North says:

              Clinton was not officially a Social Justice candidate but she was the preferred candidate of the Social Justice/Identity Politics crowd as compared to the “class not race” faction that preferred Bernie Sanders.Report

              • Kim in reply to LeeEsq says:

                Whose enemy is Solidarity?
                Can you count the ways they tear at it, like ravenous beasts?Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq says:

                Umm she was the preferred candidate of everyone except the Class Class Class crowd. She engineered it that way. God(ess?) damnit Hill, you had one job…Report

              • Kim in reply to North says:

                North,
                Oh, no she wasn’t.
                She knew where allllll the bodies were buried (and a few more were laid during her campaign), but that doesn’t mean anything about people’s preferences.

                Fear is not a preference. Neither is blatant voteriggingReport

      • Jaybird in reply to Kim says:

        We keep seeing riots at college campuses, Kim. The SJWs aren’t dying, they’re evolving.

        Now, granted, I’d be more than happy enough to discuss the whole “they’re eating themselves!” phenomenon… it does strike me as likely that they’re running into a bunch of (inevitable) contradictions…

        But dying? Nah.

        We might see them leaving by attrition once they get hired after graduation… but they’re constantly replaced by new Freshmen. (“This can’t be right. This here says you were born in 2000.”)Report

        • Kim in reply to Jaybird says:

          Jay,
          Knives are out, and even the Powers that Be have lost interest.
          Besides, all movements reach peak crazy eventually.
          What ever happened to the Tea Party, anyway? Something about Obama and Texas?

          Metabolism is off for the SJWs to be of any use to anybody. Acorn was a nascent movement, that got flattened by the rest of the left — after it had accomplished what it needed to.Report

    • North in reply to Jaybird says:

      Sure, but midterms don’t usually favor the party in control of the White House either.

      On the presidential level I still think that the Democratic Party doesn’t have many handicaps or fundamental problems that replacing HRC with a not-HRC won’t fix. Clinton is gone and isn’t coming back so

      On the non-presidential level I’m still unsure; is there a problem or not? Elections in this non-democratic President environment should lay that out pretty clearly; if the Dems have some fundamental problem they should struggle badly to regain seats and state houses. If they don’t we should see a 2006 redo.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to North says:

        I’ve mentioned before the 1000 elected positions that have been lost and, sure, 200 of those are due to gerrymandering and another 200 are probably some form of regression to the mean from last time which leaves… um… 600 seats that are probably legitimately up for grabs.

        What will be interesting aren’t the House and Senate, necessarily.
        A really good year wins… what? 50ish? Maybe 60ish House/Senate seats?

        What tells us if there is a fundamental problem is those State House/Senate seats.

        If, for example, 2018 has Republicans lose a couple of House seats and only hold the line in the Senate, we might be tempted to say that the Democrats are on the upswing…

        But if the State seats remains mostly static, then there is a fundamental problem and the House/Senate (at the national level) has papered it over.Report

        • North in reply to Jaybird says:

          Well thing is I struggle with state vs national. On the one hand I agree with your analysis but on the other hand isn’t each individual state version of the Dems and GOP somewhat regionally distinct? So if the Dems have big successes in the House and Senate but stay static on the State level what does that tell us? I mean if they just get held pat on all levels that’s pretty clear, likewise if there’s a national and state blowout but what about a muddled result?Report

          • Jaybird in reply to North says:

            I’ve been thinking about this and I think it has something to do with inclusiveness and orthodoxy.

            How many different ways are there to be a Republican? It’s easy to imagine how a New York Republican would be significantly different from a Mississippi Republican would be significantly different from a Wyoming Republican.

            Democrats used to have a similar phenomenon. Blue Dogs in the south, Democrats like Ben Nighthorse Campbell in the West, and, of course, the Coastal Elites.

            But I think that there are fewer ways to be a Democrat now.

            And, get this, the more that the Democrats become a National Party with a National Identity, the less easy (note: *NOT* impossible) it becomes for there to be a Warshington Democrat vs. a Wyoming Democrat vs. a Florida Democrat.Report

            • North in reply to Jaybird says:

              I suspect that with the new kinds of media we have there’re a lot fewer ways to be a Republican or a Democratic Party candidate. I can believe there may be more ways to be Republican. Hell, as we speak the different ways of being Republicans are knifing each other in the aisles.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to North says:

                as we speak the different ways of being Republicans are knifing each other in the aisles.

                An insight.

                Is this going to result in Republicans changing parties to Democrats?

                Gaming this out in my head… hrm. I don’t think so.

                But maybe they’ll do enough damage to each other that they will be easier to defeat come 2018.Report

              • North in reply to Jaybird says:

                Well it depends on the outcome. If the old school (1990’s to 2015) republican crowd wins it could end with something ranging from an avalanche victory for the Dems ranging up to hordes of Trump voters stringing their republican Senators and Congressmen by their toes from lamp posts. If the new republican crowd wins it means the republitarian faction will write a series of indignant screeds and Paul Ryan will cry into his pillow.Report

            • Marchmaine in reply to Jaybird says:

              @jaybird Interesting article at Hufpo along these lines about Joe Maxwell’s defeat of BigAg in OK while Trump ran the tabls.

              The article is confusing (in part because the author is confused by whether he’s happy a Democrat won a ballot initiative, or whether he should support the ballot initiative).

              The point is, Democrats in OK will look different than Democrats in CA, but is that OK?

              The funny thing is, that if I brought these things up at this site, I’d be lectured about how great Industrial Ag is… so here’s an example of a Democrat working with Trump voters on issues where the City Democrats are on the same side as the Republicans.

              Which begs the question, if the Country Democrat isn’t the same as the City Democrat… do the Democrats want them?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Marchmaine says:

                Tip O’Neil’s dictum of “All Politics Are Local” comes back to bite us on our noses.

                The Religious Right should have listened. Now they’re kinda moot.

                (Edit: They’re kinda moot, right? That’s what Trump taught us?)Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Jaybird says:

                They are kinda moot nationally; but the small incremental local changes to abortion laws don’t write themselves.Report

      • Koz in reply to North says:

        On the presidential level I still think that the Democratic Party doesn’t have many handicaps or fundamental problems that replacing HRC with a not-HRC won’t fix. Clinton is gone and isn’t coming back so

        On the non-presidential level I’m still unsure; is there a problem or not? Elections in this non-democratic President environment should lay that out pretty clearly; if the Dems have some fundamental problem they should struggle badly to regain seats and state houses. If they don’t we should see a 2006 redo.

        Ordinarily I’d agree with you but I don’t see as much difference between Presidential elections and midterms relative to the Obama years. The biggest thing the Demos have is that they oppose Trump and that might be better for them in the midterms.

        Their biggest obstacle is a message. They have to get rid of multiculturalism and political correctness and find a generically Left message on bread and butter economics. Otherwise they’re not going to get enough white voters, and even some minorities who aren’t playing the Balkanization game.Report

    • Road Scholar in reply to Jaybird says:

      I mean, after the 2018 elections. Everybody knows that off-year elections don’t favor Democrats.

      An important data point that I don’t feel has garnered the appropriate amount of attention is that, despite losing the White House the Dems actually gained seats in both the House and Senate. Not enough certainly, but with a better/stronger/different presidential candidate, and some coattails, we might actually be looking at a complete Democratic sweep.

      2018 is going to be rough for the Dems in the Senate, but the House could be interesting.Report

      • For a relatively brief window*, I thought a sweep was quite possible. For 2018, though, I think the bellweather will mostly be margins and especially governor’s mansions. If they don’t pick up a lot of House seats, I won’t necessarily consider that too ominous (districts can be lumpy). If they don’t pick up governorships, I think the party is in a lot of trouble.Report

        • Road Scholar in reply to Will Truman says:

          I don’t know how much governorships really mean, though. There are too many examples of relatively red states with Dem governors and the reverse as well. Kathleen Sibelius was the Dem governor of red, red Kansas prior to being tapped for HHS, for example.

          Perhaps this is because conservative/liberal doesn’t map as well to Republican/Democrat at that level. Or maybe issues of name recognition and perceived competence are more important.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Road Scholar says:

        despite losing the White House the Dems actually gained seats in both the House and Senate

        If this is not reflected in the state-level elections, it’s little more than churn.Report

        • Road Scholar in reply to Jaybird says:

          You do realize that state level districts are gerrymandered just as hard as the House seats are, right? You can easily find states that went for both Obama and Clinton in the EC and where Democrats in total garnered more votes than Republican candidates and yet the State Assembly remains in Republican control.

          Your assertion on this point relies heavily on eliding the effect of gerrymandering. I’m not saying it’s not a problem, but I’m not sure what if anything it says about what Dems need to do to fix it.Report

          • Saul Degraw in reply to Road Scholar says:

            No he doesn’t and he never well. The fact that Democratic candidates to Congress have won more votes than Republicans in the past few years but they are still a minority party due to gerrymandering is a non-issue in the land of Republicans, Libertarians, and Ex-Libertarians who still hate those Democrats.Report

            • George Turner in reply to Saul Degraw says:

              In 2010 the House Republicans got 44,827,441 votes to 38,980,192, or 51.7% to 44.9%

              In 2012 the House Republicans got 58,228,253 votes to 59,645,531, or 47.6% to 48.8%

              In 2014 the House Republicans got 40,081,282 votes to 35,624,357, or 51.2% to 45.5%

              In 2016 the House Republicans got 63,173,815 votes to 61,776,554, or 49.1% to 48.0%

              One of the advantages the Republicans have is that liberal cities tend to be very Democratic, so a slight Democrat advantage over a wide region can turn into a 55-45 Republican advantage in the rural areas (3 or 4 seats) and an 80-20 Democratic advantage in the major urban center (1 seat).Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Road Scholar says:

            You do realize that state level districts are gerrymandered just as hard as the House seats are, right?

            Sure. But Gerrymandering is a dangerous game.

            It allows for tight elections to be won, but, ironically, makes wave elections more likely.

            You can easily find states that went for both Obama and Clinton in the EC and where Democrats in total garnered more votes than Republican candidates and yet the State Assembly remains in Republican control.

            Absolutely.

            Now my question is this: is gerrymandering at its limit at this point 6ish years past the redistricting?

            Or can the gerrymandering *REALLY* turn the screws next election?

            One of the wacky things about immigration and migration in general is that it creates a need for redistricting. Like, a district that was heavily gerrymandered back in 2010 could very easily cease to be gerrymandered in 2018.

            So my question, when it comes to gerrymandering, is “how do we know if the Democrats are doing well or poorly in 2018?”

            It seems like there is more than enough cover for the democrats to not do well and then for Democrats to say “hey, the redistricting in 2010 was brutal for us” and then *NOT CHANGE*.

            At this point, it seems to me that the Democrats have a problem and they need to change… and “gerrymandering!” is an opiate that they can take to tell themselves “nah… I’m fine the way I am. Hell, those people who tell me that I need to change aren’t even giving me plans that I should follow.”Report

        • Troublesome Frog in reply to Jaybird says:

          If this is not reflected in the state-level elections, it’s little more than churn.

          This is not clear to me. Why is one authoritative and he other one churn?Report

          • Over the last 4 elections over the last 7 years, Democrats have lost 1000 elected positions when you add up nationally and locally.

            That strikes me as a breathtaking number. That’s 20 elected positions per state.

            Since that’s so very high, it seems to me that by nothing more than simple regression to the mean, the democrats will automatically win somewhere around 100 elections in 2018 (adding up both national and local numbers).

            Not based on anything but regression to the mean.

            Now, of course, it’s an off year election which tends to help the Republicans who tend to show up to vote just out of habit (plus all of the old people with nothing better to do) but off year elections tend to help the party not in the White House more than the party in it and blah blah blah.

            Anyway, based on little more than regression to the mean, it seems to me that the democrats should win 100 elections, national and local, next election just by putting someone on the ballot with a (D) next to their name and running about as hard as the person with an (R) next to it.

            If they win more than that, it seems to me, that we’ll have a good way to say “Huh, the Democrats are doing better than regression to the mean would indicate.”

            And if they do worse than that, we can say “Huh, the Democrats are doing worse than regression to the mean would indicate.”

            And if you don’t like the number 100 (hey, you might not!), find one that would work for you. I’m down.

            The main thing that I want to have is a way to say “Huh, the Democrats are doing something” rather than “well, those elections were always going to be tough, it’s an off year election, after all, plus the gerrymandering has changed the game. There’s really no reason for Democrats to change what they’re doing without you providing a plan for them.”Report

            • Joe Sal in reply to Jaybird says:

              Are you using an accurate mean?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Joe Sal says:

                I have no idea what an accurate mean would look like.

                Hey, let’s play pretend and assume than an accurate mean would split the country right down the middle, 50/50.

                So we’d have 50 states and 25 of them would be blue and 25 would be red and we’d have 50 legislatures with 25 houses and 25 senates and WHAT DO YOU MEAN NEBRASKA IS UNICAMERAL THIS RUINS EVERYTHING.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Jaybird says:

                DC council brings us back to a round number.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Will Truman says:

                Perhaps all is not lost.

                50/50.Report

              • Kolohe in reply to Will Truman says:

                The way the home rule act works, one of the council seats may be reserved for a non-Democrat (Republican, Independent, Green whatever) in the 2018 elections.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

                40-odd million people are currently governed by a 2/3 Democratic majority with a Democratic Governor, 2 Democratic Senators, etc.

                Why is that balanced the same as ya’ know, Wyoming being overwhelmingly Republican.

                While I think the DNC should work on rebuilding state parties and there are issues, I think a 25/25 split is virtually impossible in a time of political polarization.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Jesse says:

                A good point.

                So we can say that the states that have half the people have Democrats representing them and the states that have the other half have the Republicans representing them.

                No problem.

                This is fine.Report

            • Troublesome Frog in reply to Jaybird says:

              Over the last 4 elections over the last 7 years, Democrats have lost 1000 elected positions when you add up nationally and locally.

              That strikes me as a breathtaking number. That’s 20 elected positions per state.

              I guess there are two questions to be asked here:

              1) Is it actually a breathtaking number?
              2) What does it mean?

              To know whether it’s breathtaking, I’d want a reasonable denominator and some historical data. If we look at the Politifact discussion of it, it looks like the number goes down to state legislatives seats but no lower. It looks like substantial losses are expected for a 2-term president, but these losses are larger than usual. Not clear on whether it’s just the effect of changes in the economy, but politifact notes gerrymandering and a trend toward party-line voting as important factors, which makes me wonder if the trend is sustainable.

              As for what it means, that’s why I asked the question. As a practical matter, losing seats is not good for the Democrats or their ability to exercise power. So losing is losing. True as always. The party line note in the politifact article is interesting, because it implies that the presidential results should correlate more strongly raw vote counts for state-level offices. If I’m reading the claim correctly, the Democrats lost seats overall while winning seats in the senate and winning the presidential popular vote. Unless there’s a break in that party line trend, there’s some evidence that districting effects are strong at the state level.

              So what does it mean that the Democrats are getting a larger share of the vote and a smaller share of the wins? You can draw lots of conclusions about it, so I’m wondering what conclusion you’re drawing. If it’s just that the Dems need to find a way to win more elections, then I agree with that.Report

              • Well, if we’re unwilling to agree that we even have a problem at all, can we agree on a measurement that could tell us whether we even have a problem?

                I’m 100% down with the idea that this is nothing more than the pendulum swinging. Sure.

                Is there a point at which we can say “huh… why isn’t the pendulum swinging back? Is something going wrong?”Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Is there a point at which we can say “huh… why isn’t the pendulum swinging back? Is something going wrong?”

                Personally, I think something is wrong, but I don’t think it’s within the power of Dem partisans/Dem institutions to correct, let alone identify. Ie., the more strongly a person identifies with the Dems the less likely they will be to identify anything inherently wrong with the party’s core principles and policies. I think that’s true of the power structures controlling the official Dem political institutions as well (tho a bit of the Iron Law of Institutions factors into that as well). It all adds up to a situation where change cannot manifest from inside the ideological and power bases of the party. Which is why I’ve been saying (correctly or not…) that change in the party will only result from new candidates being elected on a different platform of priorities than the party currently defines itself by.

                All that is sorta internal institutional analysis and institutional decision-making stuff. But on the other side of the debate is that even if one concedes that the Democrats need to do something to become competitive again (ie, that they’re not merely waiting for the pendulum to swing back) it’s an open question (seems to me) whether the necessary change is a merely tactical one, or an ideological one. And in that regard I think lots of Democrats believe that better tactics will get the job done, for the reasons mentioned above.

                And then there’s also this: Democrats, as defined by their current composition and commitments, either will become nationally competitive again or they won’t. If they don’t, then the party either will change or it won’t. From the pov of democracy, nothing really hinges on the outcome one way or the other. If the party dies by not changing, then not enough people believed in the principles and policies to keep it alive.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                Personally, I think something is wrong, but I don’t think it’s within the power of Dem partisans/Dem institutions to correct, let alone identify.

                I think that the biggest mistake of the last cycle was having a very limited primary.

                There were only three names in the drawing.
                Clinton
                Bernie
                That Other Guy Whatshisname

                A primary with, oh, 7 people in it (I mean by Iowa… I don’t want to have the “What About Larry Lessig?” fight) might have allowed for someone capable of beating Trump.

                HOWEVER. The primary field was very limited and, if I had to guess, it was artificially limited… that is to say, it was done using the power of Dem partisans/Dem institutions to keep it limited.

                Allowing a rambunctious primary is well within the Democrats’ power.

                Or, God help me, it *SHOULD* be.Report

              • Troublesome Frog in reply to Jaybird says:

                Sure, that’s certainly valid, but to agree “we have a problem” we’d still have to agree what the problem is. Let’s imagine the trend continues rather than reverting (which I expect it probably will based on historical cycles), but let’s imagine two scenarios:

                1) Total Democrat vote percentage increases and total seat count decreases.
                2) Total Democrat vote percentage decreases and seat count decreases.

                I think we can agree that #2 requires a change in messaging/policy. But what does #1 mean?Report

              • PD Shaw in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

                The trend is something like this: In 2010, Republicans picked up around 750 seats nationwide, leaving Democrats with fewer offices than at any time since before the Great Depression. After the decennial redistricting, Democrats picked up around 150 seats in 2012. In the 2014 midterm, Republicans picked up almost 300 seats, and in 2016, Republicans picked up around 50 seats. So it looks to me like we are reaching an equilibrium, with Democrats accepting the secondary party position for now.

                Distribution-wise, Republicans had net gains of seats in every state from 2009 to 2014, except Illinois (lost 3 seats) and New Jersey (lost 1 seat). The greatest Republican gains were in New Hampshire (68), West Virginia (55), Arkansas (51), Alabama (40), North Carolina (36) and Minnesota (31). I don’t have numbers through 2016, but they got worse in the Midwest, with Minnesota Republicans picking up 9 seats and Illinois Republicans picking up 4.

                The trend is resolved; there was no real bounceback from 2010, and in retrospect it appears Democrats were waiting for one. I think what we’re waiting to see now in 2018 is (a) whether Trump creates an altogether new dynamic, with Republicans losing down ballot due to brand decline, (b) whether Republicans will gain or retain enough control over state redistricting to make it difficult for Democrats to come back within 10 years.Report

              • 1) Total Democrat vote percentage increases and total seat count decreases.
                2) Total Democrat vote percentage decreases and seat count decreases.

                I think we can agree that #2 requires a change in messaging/policy. But what does #1 mean?

                Well, if the next presidential election gets won the same way that this one did, I think it means that the states themselves are, effectively, gerrymandered districts on a national level with non-proportional voting.

                There will be a movement to “move into red states!” as well as a(nother) movement towards secession and a (stillborn) movement to abolish the Senate or something like that.Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to Jaybird says:

      @jaybird

      Not quite. Midterms are generally not good for the party occupying the White House. The few exceptions are Clinton in 1998 and Bush II in 2002. The Republicans did not do well in 1982, 1986, 1990. Bush II’s misadventures and the start of the financial crisis caused the Republicans to lose both houses of Congress in 2006.

      Now Democrat might have done worse than average in 2010 and 2014.

      2018 is going to be a tricky year for the Senate because the seats that are up for election are in redish and red states. But the Courts are going back against gerrymandering in the House and the GOP is freaking out about a special election in Georgia where the Ds looks like they can pick up a seat with a fresh-faced 30 year old.

      The Democratic Party did win Senate seats in the House and in the Senate in 2016. We arguably could have won more if we got better organized and put up candidates in some districts. We also nearly took out Darrell Issa.

      Will is probably right on the Governor thing.

      I think sometimes you have an anti-Democratic Party bias that you don’t quite want to admit.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

        Well, this is something that ought to be measurable, no?

        Personally, I’d like to know what the smallest number of House/Senate seats switching to Dem we ought to be looking at to be able to say “hey, the Democrats don’t have a problem”.

        I think sometimes you have an anti-Democratic Party bias that you don’t quite want to admit.

        “Guys, I’m thinking that the Broncos aren’t a playoff team anymore… they’re going to need to spend a few seasons rebuilding.”

        “Oh, you’re just still butthurt about the Tim Tebow thing.”Report

  7. Road Scholar says:

    FWIW, I think the charge of sexism as misogyny as a factor in the election results was mistaken. Conservatives are perfectly willing to support and vote for female politicians — Palin, Bachmann, Ernst, etc. Mind you, it seems to help if they have that certain, stereotypical, country music singer look about them, but I don’t know how much you can separate that from the general attractive-people-win-elections effect. In general, I think if you find a Trump voter with genuine misogynistic attitudes I think you’ll find that their vote was over-determined by other factors and misogyny wasn’t really a tipping point.

    That said, this experiment, as well as Damon’s comment above, demonstrates how men and women get different “deals” in society and in the political marketplace in particular.Report

    • InMD in reply to Road Scholar says:

      In Vikram’s post about voter turnout he linked to a Salon piece that I think is persuasive on that issue. Specifically it distinguishes ‘progressive fashion police’ from political liberalism. There are seriously sexist aspects of Republican preferred policies and Trump himself I think is a sexist, but I also think the ‘people didn’t vote for Hilary due to profound widespread personal sexism across the electorate’ theory is weak, or at least extremely incomplete, for exactly the reasons you mention.Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to Road Scholar says:

      Both of the United Kingdom’s women prime ministers came from the Conservative Party rather than the Labour Party. I think outside the Nordic countries, women politicians from conservative parties might do better than women politicians from liberal or leftist parties for many different reasons. Conservatives are willing to vote for a woman if they like her jab and even form a political cult around her if they like her well enough. They don’t come across as feminist and that is attractive to many voters even if they could similarly disprove of male pleasures from a conservative Christian view point.

      Women politicians from liberal and leftist parties are also going to be a disappointment to many liberal and leftist women because the nature of politics will prevent them from going all the way in their discourse and debates. Clinton got into enough trouble with talking about “baskets of deplorables.” She attempted to hit on Trump’s misogyny as much as possible. What she or any other women politician can’t do is use words like the patriarchy and full feminist academic discourse unless they are in a really safe seat.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to LeeEsq says:

        @leeesq

        How about Golda Meir? She was on the Israeli left. Indira Ghandi? Aung San Suu Kyi?Report

        • LeeEsq in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          Indira Ghandi and Aung San Suu Kyi are among the long list of women politicians who achieved office because their fathers were big in politics and their father’s supporters rallied around them. There is a dynastic element involved. When your dealing with Israel, left and right issues become popular. She would be considered Left in Israel but was also PM during Labour’s dominance period. The global left hated her because the Palestinian issue was becoming big than.Report

  8. Kim says:

    It REALLY doesn’t matter who the better actor was, given the patheticness of Clinton’s social skills.

    She had a signature move on the campaign trail — point to random person in audience, raise eyebrows, smile.

    You do NOT want to know how long it took her to learn it.Report

    • rmass in reply to Kim says:

      Christ above kimmi, she lost you got your pony.

      At some point are you going to stop spamming every politics post with you nutbag straight up hatred? Or are you going to keep stabbing that horse day after day until your arm falls off?

      Because seriously, you were funny before you were a one rant pony.Report

      • Kim in reply to rmass says:

        rmass,
        What part of “It took her X hours to learn this “trick” ” implies hatred?
        I’m quantifying exactly how … plastic?.? she is/was.

        This is a little different than what I’ve said about Huckabee (who, from the looks of it, went through extensive electroshock to learn how to talk that well — that or lights are the standard ways to teach voicework — no audio cues as they interfere with the learning)…

        And it’s way different than Romney, who at least has the excuse of brain damage (So does billy clinton, by the way — you can quantify the difference in what he lost after surgery).

        (And, it is topical for me to be discussing Clinton’s campaign on a thread about her debate performances. It would not be topical for me to discuss Obama deliberately throwing a debate SO POORLY that he was endangering his election…)Report

        • DensityDuck in reply to Kim says:

          uh

          I…haven’t seen anyone anywhere suggest that operant conditioning through pain stimulation was how you learn to speak confidently in publicReport

          • Kim in reply to DensityDuck says:

            DD,
            It depends on the person, I suppose (I’m certainly not suggesting that Bill Clinton needed that kind of help).
            A friend of mine recognized some of what he saw in Huckabee, I figure.

            There are voice coaches out there, and they do teach people how to talk. Ian Glen’s had extensive training in a particular, quite masculine and authoritative style. I don’t much match people’s faces, but his voice is so distinctive that I can recognize it at once.Report

  9. Marchmaine says:

    Fascinating; for me personally, and I think something that Will is suggesting, Trump was so obviously unbelievable… in the sense of not credible. Watching the snippet, King seems believable while Gordon seems not believable… “Oh but I do, I do have a plan.” I don’t think any doubted s/he had a plan, just whether s/he believed in the plan, whatever it might have been. My reaction to watching Gordon was that it really hammered home how much I didn’t believe either of them believed.

    Now, that’s not a reason to vote for Trump, but I get a little better why people who might have voted for Clinton didn’t.Report

    • Stillwater in reply to Marchmaine says:

      I agree with your point about Gordon/Hillary. Whether King/Trump engaged in over-the-top bully politics ought to separated from Gordon/Hillary’s response to the challenge presented. And I agree that when that response was presented by Gordon the lack of a plan was even more obvious. Which is interesting…Report

  10. Doctor Jay says:

    When I saw something about this experiment yesterday, my thought was, “That’s not science.” There are way too many variables that aren’t being controlled for. No actor, no matter how good, is going to recreate someone exactly. Nor is an actor going to recreate our associations with a particular face or voice.

    Neither Clinton nor Trump were new to the scene. They come with baggage. What the experiment did was erase the baggage. My personal baggage is that Trump is a bully. He bullies people constantly, as you sometimes see in certain men who are generally large. His face means “bully” to me. His voice means “bully”. If you were to erase those things, it would change the meaning of his words a lot.

    Clinton has baggage for me, but of a more positive sort. Of the, “she’s been banging away trying to make things better for a long time, and taken a lot of crap and kept going” sort. This, it seems, is not what people look for in a president, even though they can really admire it otherwise.

    Stereotypes, gender or otherwise, are what we know when we don’t know anything. These were not candidates we didn’t know anything about. I kind of doubt that stereotypes were the dominant force behind their success/failure, or behind this experiment.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Doctor Jay says:

      The point is that people weren’t saying “Trump has baggage, Trump has a bunch of past history, Clinton has a positive track record”, they were saying “Trump is obviously a bully even if it’s not Trump doing the talking, Clinton is objectively preferable, and when people ask why Clinton doesn’t go after Trump the way he goes after her it’s because our god damn sexist society would call her a mean-spirited bitch if she tried”.

      And what this showed was that, well, maybe Trump isn’t so obviously a bully, maybe Clinton isn’t objectively preferable, and maybe a woman who acted like Trump does wouldn’t be called a mean-spirited bitch any more than the default amount that happens to a woman who does anything public at all.Report

    • Koz in reply to Doctor Jay says:

      My personal baggage is that Trump is a bully. He bullies people constantly, as you sometimes see in certain men who are generally large. His face means “bully” to me. His voice means “bully”. If you were to erase those things, it would change the meaning of his words a lot.

      Yeah, I think that’s one of those things that looks a lot more credible before the inauguration than now.Report

    • Burt Likko in reply to Doctor Jay says:

      Well, I agree that this isn’t science in the sense that it doesn’t do a lot of controlling of the myriad of variables at play in a debate. But that’s a pretty tall order, I think. Economic propositions are similar: that actual economic “experiments” are not as adequately controlled as experiments that occur within, say, physics does not mean that we can’t take information of value from them.

      Certainly there are a lot of “what if the situation were reversed” arguments, and here on these pages we’re fond of saying that such arguments are more revealing about the prior assumptions of the arguers than the reality of the subjects. But here’s the thing: many of those prior assumptions are broadly held by a large number of people out there in meatworld. Exposing and dissecting those assumptions has some value and is of great intellectual interest.

      But this exercise teaches us another lesson: while you can learn a lot about how a frog works by dissecting it, you can also learn a lot about how a frog works by observing its behavior before you administer the chloroform and take the unfortunate creature apart with your scalpel. Here, we have a reasonably good “shoe on the other foot” model examining the role of sexism in political decision-making, and we find that Trump’s political message delivered in the vehicle of [an actor portraying] a female politician seemingly improves the quality of that message.

      That’s the lesson here, right? Especially for those of us, myself included, who were repelled by Candidate Trump.Report

  11. Kolohe says:

    having seen the one excerpt now, I’m thinking the reception to the reenactment has most to do with the qualities of the actors’ performances (e.g. tone, body language, timing & pacing) than the gender swap per se. Though there is probably a factor that the woman’s voice is a bit below the median for women’s voices, while the man’s voice is a bit above the median for men’s voices.

    (there’s probably also a factor that the accents of the actors are (afaict) standard US diction w/o a identifiable regional dialect. In contrast of course, with Trump’s Outerboroughese and Clinton’s (inconsistent) mashup of Chicagoland and Arkansas drawl)Report

    • Stillwater in reply to Kolohe says:

      I think there are lots of variables that can’t be controlled for in a demonstration like this: the accuracy of the actor’s recreations of real events, their own personalities and idiosyncracies effecting how we perceive their recreations, our own political biases, and so on. But even granting all those possible contributors to our judgment, don’t you agree that King appeared less threatening than Trump did on the stage that night, and Gordon appeared more condescending and defensive than Hillary did?Report

      • Kolohe in reply to Stillwater says:

        I do, but I think that’s intrinsic to each actor’s performance, and not their genders.

        To me, it’s sort of like that thing where a musical score composer can make the same exact visual scene provoke different emotional reactions depending on the style of music they use.

        (or better, how Airplane used for the most part the same exact script as Zero Hour, but to a very different end result. The difference was all in the performance and the staging)Report

  12. Stillwater says:

    Nice write up, Will. First, for me personally, that’s a really bad section of the debate to highlight the role gender plays in politics since in real time I not only agreed with Trump’s substantive point (that NAFTA and other trade deals have gutted parts of the labor force) but also thought he scored some deep and lasting political points (he had her on the defensive, effectively conceding his main line of attack).

    But even with that said, it is interesting to notice some slight perceptual differences when the roles are reversed. King appeared impassioned about the issue where Trump appeared a bit more like a bully; Gordon appeared defensive and confused where Hillary appeared a bit more calm and reasonable. That may merely be due to the actor’s personalities of course but I think it more likely points to more ingrained gender-based stereotypes in which impassioned, aggressive men are viewed as threatening in a way women aren’t.

    Also: the actor playing Trump did a terrific job imitating Trump’s hand gestures, even down to how he holds his fingers when he makes certain types of points.Report

    • Pinky in reply to Stillwater says:

      They were a little too mechanical in their gestures. They were doing the gestures rather than inhabiting characters who made those gestures. Still, the originals didn’t look particularly natural doing them either. Maybe that just compounded things.Report

  13. Jaybird says:

    Uh-oh, Nate Silver just opened a can of worms.

    Here’s the headline: There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble Report

    • Marchmaine in reply to Jaybird says:

      Let’s go back to Sam Wang.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to Marchmaine says:

        Silver was wrong, too, but he turned out to be less wrong than Wang. Doesn’t that pretty much sum it up?Report

        • Will Truman in reply to Burt Likko says:

          He was less wrong than Wang, but more importantly he was the only one saying the data was murky. Which people didn’t want to hear.Report

          • Incidentally, I am really glad I wrote this paragraph in my pre-election analysis:

            If I were looking at the polling data and only the polling data, and ignored the intangibles, my guess would be somewhere in between Upshot and 538. The fact that I am more confident than that is attributable to the intangibles and is not really empirical. Statistically, this is a close race, and polling isn’t that infallible.

            Report

            • Stillwater in reply to Will Truman says:

              Intangibles are a hard thing to measure, being intangible and all. In the car the other day I bumped into Michael Moore on NPR, specifically some audio from summer 2016 in which he predicted a Trump victory precisely because he was aware of the intangibles on the ground in Michigan. He observed that people were really really pissed off at the status quo.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Stillwater says:

                And actually, I always believed Trump ran his campaign almost entirely based on appeal to “the intangibles”. I mean, it’s possible to get a sense of how conservatives respond to a certain PC-based initiative proposed by liberals – (“another safe space? Are you kidding me?”) – but it’s more difficult to get a reading on the extent to which PCism drove conservatives batshit fucking crazy. Even when exhibited by conservative politicians! No one asked those types of questions, or if they did, the responses were plugged into the “standard model”. I think Trump recognized that an intangible campaign would work long before anyone of the other major players did.Report

              • gregiank in reply to Stillwater says:

                I think the voters enraged by PCism who voted R were always going to vote R. I doubt few voters were really on the edge but were turned off by whatever the hell PC is supposed to mean.

                I’ve yet to see anybody really demonstrate Trump’s plan was anything other then rile up the base and see what happens. Even on the day of the election they weren’t acting like they thought they were going to win. They had some good targeted ads and help from the Russians most likely. But i doubt there was active collusion with the R’s. Trump just did what was his nature to do. There wasn’t a brilliant plan or some secret understanding of how things are.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to gregiank says:

                “Everybody who voted against us was always going to vote against us (no matter what we did)” is as close to the Road to Nowhere as is imaginable. It can be true about some things, but I see it applied to pretty much everything.

                As far as PC goes, I think there may have been secondary influence. Not with the people flying the Rebel Flag, but with people who have been regularly been told, or at least inferred, that they might as well be. Or maybe that’s not the case at all. But things that weren’t supposed to work did work.Report

              • gregiank in reply to Will Truman says:

                Well all the people i’ve ever known who were really hot and bothered about PC were dyed in the wool Repubs. Maybe my sample is off but when i read peeps on the web i see the same thing. There are people who can be swayed and Clinton do that. So it’s not that the people who were always going to vote against her were always going to do that. But the people who freak about all sorts of PC are typically also very invested in conservative media so their info is pretty skewed.

                Why did some things work that shouldn’t have? Well an easy explanation is that harsh nationalism and fear of others works pretty well especially when combined with economic grievances and an ineffective opponent.

                Complaining about PC is sometimes a polite way of telling minorities to stop complaining. It’s the PC way of hushing people you are sick of hearing from. Complaining about PC is safer then letting the Id run free at the mouth.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to gregiank says:

                Whether PC is a political liability and whether it’s virtuous are two different questions.

                One thing that did seem to move some people was “deplorables.” It shouldn’t have, but it did.Report

              • gregiank in reply to Will Truman says:

                I guess i’m having a contrary day today. I better be careful when i order dinner tonight.

                Deplorable became a rallying cry. But did it change votes? I’m not all that sure. “Nasty woman” or pussy grabbing got some play to and those things pissed off people. I tend to think PC or deplorable are more the heat then the light about why the election went the way it did. They are the things people like to rant about and are easy talking points but are far less important then turn out or demographics or campaigns on the whole or other long term trends.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to gregiank says:

                That comment was supposed to include a link. I didn’t think the comment was good, but didn’t think it would have much impact. It… looks like it did. I think it was one of the two big campaign moments I misunderstood the importance of at the time.Report

              • Pinky in reply to gregiank says:

                My read is that the word “deplorable” had no effect on the election. A lot of people in the press talked about it, and a lot of people who were already going to be voting against Clinton wore it as a badge of honor. But by the time it was spoken, all the people who were going to be won over by PCism had already been.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Pinky says:

                As noted above, that was my read on it at the time. I’ve since come to the conclusion that I was wrong. Not just because of the Globe article, but a few people I know that did get off the fence at that point (one of whom I was sure was going to vote for Hillary) may have been more representative than I thought.Report

              • Koz in reply to Will Truman says:

                I was never going to vote for Hillary, but the deplorables thing was a contributing factor toward my decision to vote for Trump.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Koz says:

                I saw this repeated quite a bit. Not a mind changer but a heart changer.Report

              • Koz in reply to Marchmaine says:

                One thing Chris Caldwell pointed out recently is that the whole episode might not have been a gaffe as much a premeditated strategic error. In any event, the desire of libs to double down on it was certainly an aggravating factor for me.

                http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/sanctimony-cities/Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Koz says:

                ” the desire of libs to double down on it was certainly an aggravating factor for me.”

                See, to me, that’s the problem. Not that a candidate said something dumb, but the insistence that no it wasn’t dumb because they really are deplorable so it’s OK to say that.Report

              • Koz in reply to DensityDuck says:

                Yeah. The way it looks to me, the real fault line in the Trump Administration is the defense of the bourgeois versus the ad hoc cultural engineering.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Will Truman says:

                Eh, I don’t get all this Base talk… Trump went after a new base.

                And he got them in PA, MI, WI and OH and he was 1.5% behind in Minne-freakin’-sota. (vs. Obama’s 7.7% win).

                Romney got 93% of the Republican vote and Trump got 89%. You could call that the base, if you want.

                Trump is president because he shed Base votes in Red states and picked-up non-base votes (also called Democrats) in Blue States. We can call them “erstwhile” democrats if we prefer… or maybe they are even deplorable democrats. I don’t know.

                It is indeed a remarkable thing that Trump managed to get 89% of the Republican vote, but that’s not why he’s President.

                For what its worth, my prediction is that the Trump coalition will not endure Trump. So for those who don’t want to change Democratic party orientation, I think you have a solid case… not a foolproof case, but a solid one.

                As I’ve said before, there is no Trumpism, only Trump… and he can’t deliver the goods. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t someone else (maybe a democrat, maybe a republican, maybe a none) who won’t pick-up some of the themes of Trump and turn it into an actual movement. In which case, standing pat is just another way to lose.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Marchmaine says:

                As I’ve said before, there is no Trumpism, only Trump… and he can’t deliver the goods.

                I worry that “the goods” are also intangibles.

                If they are… well, Trump has been delivering for a while now. Since before the election, actually.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Jaybird says:

                Perhaps… I overheard an exchange among the smart set where the D asked the R how the whole Trump (debacle) was working out for him; rather than defend Trump he just said… “every day Hillary is not President is a day I don’t get a new ‘Dear Colleague’ letter that puts in jeopardy my project.”

                Intangible? Tangible? Maybe both.

                I followed-up with, yes, but will that be the same in year 5?

                When I say Trump can’t deliver the goods, I really do mean that even if he had a crystal clear vision for where the country should go (he doesn’t), you still need an entire movement of people and policies behind you to even begin a shift. Otherwise you will get Paul Ryan’s health care policy, and John McCain’s foreign policy, and Mitch McConell’s tax policy. And then people in MI/PA/WI will remember why they didn’t vote for Romney/Ryan or McCain in the first place.

                On the other hand, he’s president for 4-years (probably) and maybe he surprises me and learns some things on the job.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Marchmaine says:

                How tied is Trump to Ryan/McCain/McConnell?

                I could see him running against them *AND* whomever the Democrats throw against him.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Jaybird says:

                Sure, he could… maybe he will; but he hasn’t yet.

                I mean, I’ll watch agog if he ROFLSTOMPS the Ryan Healthcare bill that he is currently supporting. That’s the beauty of being Trump, he can be for something until he’s against it.

                But that doesn’t get him any closer to Avik Roy or Single Payer. Or whatever it is that gives everyone healthcare and costs less.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Marchmaine says:

                @jaybird maybe you are right. This is me preparing my “agog” face: :-0

                What if Trump was just setting-up Ryan to show his true colors before he swoops in to decapitate the Republican leadership and save his voters?

                White House Claims more uninsured that OMB

                Wait, what? Why would they…

                Oh, that’s why.

                As a purely political manoeuvre… if this is what’s happening. Its so simple its brilliant. What comes out of it? Who knows? Single Payer? Universal Catastrophic with 100% Govt. protection over 10%? Sugar Plums and Fairy Dust? Could be anything. But Ryan and the Republican leadership will be dust.

                Not saying its happening; but maybe its happening.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Marchmaine says:

                Very interesting observation, March. Personally, I could very much see Trump cutting Ryan’s legs off outa spite, or general contempt for politicians, or because his mood swings that way, without any larger strategic goal in mind other than that he hates Ryan or even that he thinks the politics of the plan suck for him personally…Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Stillwater says:

                He had an opportunity to dispatch Ryan (as Speaker anyway) and chose not to. Maybe to use him as a fall guy later or something, but I’m not sure how big that grudge is.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Will Truman says:

                but I’m not sure how big that grudge is.

                Precisely. None of us do. That’s why Marchmaine’s observation is so compelling. Trump’s motivations are so opaque to normal rational analysis it could literally go either way. Any which way.

                And what’s more: if Trump dumps Ryan simply outa spite (not saying he will!) the end result could turn out to be indistinguishable from a clever 11-D plan to implement a better healthcare bill. I mean, the beauty Trump-land is that he simply cannot go wrong by expressing a fully general contempt for politicians until it suits his purpose to agree with them.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Stillwater says:

                Well, to clarify, I think the Breitbart “grudge” piece is (if it is part of a plan) a FUD play. It’s not *the* reason, it’s *a* reason Trump won’t come to his defense once he signals that upon further review… this is a terrible healthcare plan and not at all what he had in mind.

                If (and this is the big *if* of pure speculation) he has a plan that is much more universal and throws republican healthcare orthodoxy under the bus… *this* is how he gets enough republican support to pass sweeping reform perhaps with Democratic support.

                We’re not eactly at 11D chess, just good old 2D chess that assumes facts not in evidence – like a [secret] Trump Health Care Plan, and Democrats willing to work with him.

                If he doesn’t have any of those things… well then, maybe just good old FU to Ryan. Twist in your own bed of feces, cause I’m not signing that crap.

                Heh, or he signs the bill and we just get to wonder what its like to be the king.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Marchmaine says:

                No disagreement. And in fact, and this I guess is my point, Trump’s managed to construct an epistemic reality in which every one of those options can be viewed not only as likely, but as a retroactive justification for his final decision-making process no matter how things turn out.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Marchmaine says:

                If we end up with Medicare for All because of Trump, it’s going to be weird.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Jaybird says:

                Would the Democrats trade Universal Single Payer for strict Citizenship requirements and/or a 4-year waiting period before non-citizens can participate?

                Because *that’s* how you f-up a coalition.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Marchmaine says:

                Agreed again, March. Not necessarily on the specifics of Single Payer, but more that insofar as Trump has an identifiable governing agenda, it seems to me typified by picking policy-sets which have red-meat components desired by each of the two major parties. He’s leveraging his “I hate both you guys” power as Pres. into (trying) to break apart partisanship, and derivatively (intentionally or not) the parties themselves.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Marchmaine says:

                We’re going to see people explain how Medicare for All will cost jobs. “Do you know how many people work in the medical insurance industry?”

                Keep an eye out for stories explaining how many people do.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

                I phrased that horribly.

                If that sort of thing is going to happen, it will be preceded by stories explaining the importance of the insurance workers for such things as employment.

                So look for those stories.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Jaybird says:

                Would be fascinating to see which Republicans would vote for it, and which Democrats against.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Will Truman says:

                Ok, maybe you all knew this already, but google tells me that Medicaid for All just started popping 3-hrs ago with this article by NewsMax’s CEO Chris Ruddy

                Which of course was a Bernie plank and has been mooted on and off over the years.

                Apparently Mr. Ruddy and Trump are buddies? So am I just catching up to the intertubes or is this unfolding?Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

                “Do you know how many people work in the medical insurance industry?”

                hey check this out http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/07/what-is-the-effect-of-obamacare-economy-000164Report

              • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

                A secret (and shockingly high!) UBI for people who have college degrees.

                I’ve heard dumber plans.

                There’s a debate about “adding value” that we could have, I suppose.Report

              • Koz in reply to Marchmaine says:

                I don’t see the logic for that trade. The possibility that non-citizens might get access to single payer coverage is only one objection to single payer, and not even one of the big ones as I understand it.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Koz says:

                Yes, but the offer isn’t being made to you… if this plays out, the Republican leadership is exposed and the offer is made to Democrats.

                The premise is that Trump’s voters (the bulk of them, anyway) just needed to be shown Ryan’s (and the Republican’s) true motives to give them the wherewithal to threaten enough Republicans to enact an entitlement that they want.

                Now, there’s a lot of “ifs” in the above… and while the theory is possibly sound, it still requires execution and all that… but yeah, go ahead and mount your fiscal objections. I have no problem with that.Report

              • Koz in reply to Marchmaine says:

                I guess I’m not following you. As a general framework (and borrowing from a couple comments above) there’s an enormous difference between Medicare for all and Medicaid for all that people seem to have ignored.

                As a general framework, Medicaid for all is probably a good starting point and I think the Trump base would probably be happy with that. But I don’t think any variant to lib would be willing to consider that as single payer, even though it sort of is.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Koz says:

                That’s google’s fault… when I googled Medicaid for All it returned Bernie’s Medicare for All down towards the bottom. And I didn’t catch the switch when I was connecting the dots between JB’s statement and Ruddy’s statement. {but I still blame google}

                So, yeah, assume Medicaid as that seems to be what Trump’s surrogate (if he’s a surrogate) is floating.Report

              • Koz in reply to Marchmaine says:

                Ok, that’s ok as far as I’m concerned. My guess is we won’t see it until ACA implodes.

                The GOP isn’t going to care enough about non-citizen access to sign on to single payers as the libs imagine it. The D’s are going to insist on something much more comprehensive than Medicaid.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Koz says:

                Sure… the McSuderman strategy?

                I’m not really seeing that as part of the Republican plan at the moment.Report

              • Koz in reply to Marchmaine says:

                Right, because the status quo seems tenable at the moment. When it no longer is, things will look different.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Koz says:

                Why bring a bill at all then? That’s where you lose me.Report

              • Koz in reply to Marchmaine says:

                Probably because Trump especially needed to read the lay of the land.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Koz says:

                Ok, first let’s stipulate that neither of us knows what’s going on.

                But if I’m following you correctly here, then we need to posit that Ryan is falling on his sword so that Trump can get a better read? And then Breitbart stabs him in the back just for good measure? I love a good story as much as the next guy… but dang, that’s cold. {I mean, its Ryan, not Christie, right?}

                I like my story better… that Ryan was assured that Trump would back the legislation (which he did), which is why Ryan put forward the bill in the first place. That was the trap. Now that the bill has laid an egg, Trump renounces not only the plan but Ryan too… floats his trial balloon (or a series of them) picks the winner and rides it roughshod over a discredited (and possibly unseated) speaker. It works because its so simple and Ryan was expecting good faith.

                Or possibly nothing is connected, Trump loves the AHCA, Breitbart undermines Ryan just for fun, and Ruddy is crackerdog for thinking Medicaid for all is anywhere in Trump’s policy grabbag.

                Who knows?Report

              • greginak in reply to Marchmaine says:

                I can buy a lot of that and i dont’ think Ryan is brilliant. But it stretches credulity to think Ryan expected good faith from Trump. Ryan would have to be a maroon for that. I think it’s more that Ryan felt he had to produce something and this was all that got through all the various and contradictory constraints. He was hoping for something to go right then just to wrangle all the details as best as could be.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to greginak says:

                Hmmn, well the nature of politics is that the good faith support that Trump actually did provide is usually enough to bind him to the process… at least to the first step. After that Ryan probably assumed that like all politics, once you have your stink all over something you have to see it through. So he could trust convention that they’d have to remain partners… its a reasonable assumption.

                Defecting on Phase 1 (and that hasn’t officially happened yet, I hasten to add) is a completely new twist. Or old twist that we haven’t seen for a long, long time, if we prefer.

                Again, maybe I’m just seeing a pattern emerging where there is none… only incompetence.
                1. WhiteHouse undermines Ryan’s bill with worse #’s than OMB
                2. Breitbart undermines Ryan’s loyalty to Trump
                3. Friend of Trump suggests ditching Ryan/Freedom caucus
                4. ???

                They could just be the random fumblings of the Trump machine.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to greginak says:

                it stretches credulity to think Ryan expected good faith from Trump

                March’s theory doesn’t require Ryan’s expectation of good faith, tho. All it requires is Ryan’s ambition.Report

              • greginak in reply to Stillwater says:

                Ambition and knowledge that, like it or not, they are in the same boat. At least Ryan would assume they are in the same boat even without assuming good faith. Trump is his own boat though and Ryan may not have completely learned that lesson.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to greginak says:

                I agree. Trump ain’t in anyone’s political boat*. My perception is he f***ing hates those f***ing f***ers.

                *Restricted to USAmerican political institutions, further conditions may apply.Report

              • Koz in reply to Marchmaine says:

                Yeah, I don’t think this is gamed out too far in advance. This isn’t like the Gorsuch nomination, where we know the intended outcome, we know what most of the votes are going to look like, and it’s just a matter of pulling it over the line.

                In this case they didn’t know the endgame. Now it looks like that AHCA won’t pass. Maybe somebody will end up falling on their sword over this but I don’t think anybody has to necessarily.

                Politically the downside is that is that the Tea Party-ers will be pissed but I think there’s a lot less there than people are supposing. First of all, there’s no one really to blame because you can’t say that if McConnell or Ryan or Trump had just twisted arms harder they could have gotten it done. The opposition is too well placed for that. Opposition, which by the way includes the Freedom Caucus in the House who aren’t on board with AHCA. Second, I think there’s a perception of having to govern with a narrow majority that is affecting things. You might be able to push certain things through if you had to, but if the opposition represents actual voters outside the Beltway, you could lose your majority for it. Or in the worst case, which is possible here, that you could lose the majority and lose the bill both.

                Finally, like I mentioned before, there’s at least a chance that time is working in our favor now. If that’s right, but the politics and policy will break in the GOP’s favor in a year or so. We could get what we want then (maybe even with a bunch of Demo votes even). We’d probably also know what we want a lot better then too.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Koz says:

                Possibly. But there are better ways to play the game.Report

              • Francis in reply to Koz says:

                It’s possible you’re right. But when a favorite idea goes nowhere, it’s the oldest trick in the book to say that you didn’t really care in the first place.

                If not health care reform, what does the Republican House stand for? And, for all that you accuse libs of polluting the discourse, what are the Republican House Members going to say when asked by a constituent: You had eight years to come up with a better bill and what you put on offer slashes care. Why did you do that?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Francis says:

                On top of that, the Republicans sent bills up to Obama repealing the PPACA dozens (hundreds?) of times and, yep, they all got vetoed.

                Trump takes office and, suddenly, they lose the copy of the bill they sent up dozens (hundreds?) of times?

                They’d been engaging in performative opposition for the last 8 years but when the time comes to actually do something, they put out this shit sandwich?

                That’s, effectively, an abdication on their part. This is why none of their own politicians won the primary.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Yeah, exactly.

                “Waitagoddamminute. You folks spent 8 years lambasting the Dem’s HCR policies and now that you have a chance to put yer money on the table not only do you throw down this piece of shite bill, but you can’t even get your own party to support it? That’s exactly why I voted for Trump, you ***** *********** *********s.”Report

              • Koz in reply to Francis says:

                The real answer is that the GOP, both Trump and the Establishment, stand for the primacy of the bourgeois over ad hoc cultural engineering. That’s kind of an odd thing to put on a bumper sticker but that’s the way it is nonetheless.Report

              • Francis in reply to Koz says:

                If that were true, you’d have the votes.Report

              • Koz in reply to Francis says:

                Not really. To the extent that ACA is holding up now, it’s doing so for bourgeois reasons.Report

              • Koz in reply to Koz says:

                For example, take the immigration issue. Leave aside some of the specifics for a moment, the’re a bourgeois angle and a multicultural angle to immigration.

                The bourgeois angle says that excess immigration lowers wages rates which is bad. The multicultural angle says that more immigration creates more diversity in the population which is good.

                The point being is that in the current environment, the bourgeois angles are important, the multicultural angles aren’t.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Koz says:

                Finally, like I mentioned before, there’s at least a chance that time is working in our favor now. If that’s right, but the politics and policy will break in the GOP’s favor in a year or so.

                Policy-wise time might be working in your favor: ie., it gives the GOP even more time to flood the news cycles with negative ACA propaganda. But to @francis point above, the politics of doing so work against it. All those House Critters ran on the premise that the first thing they’d do, if it was in their power, was Repeal/Replace. And worse, from a political perspective, is that Trump is also demanding a quick timeline on R/R, with the kicker that he’s not wedded to the Freedom Caucus’ desires here. So the politics of the situation are stacked pretty steeply against a Repeal/Wait scenario, or even moreso a Wait to Repeal scenario. All that signals to voters is that the GOP can’t get its poop in a bag and that Trumpism is a better way to go, even if it means getting Dems on board to pass something like Cassidy/Collins Senate bill, which only makes minor tweaks to the existing ACA architecture.

                As things are moving forward here, I’m increasingly inclined to believe March’s theory that Trump strung Ryan along for the express purpose of +/- shattering the ideologically-driven partisanship defining the House GOPers right now. He (meaning Trump) wants a bill passed, and he’ll pick up Dem support if he needs to (assuming he can of course), even if – and perhaps precisely if – doing so destabilizes the GOP.Report

              • Francis in reply to Stillwater says:

                Interesting theory. But Price is, from what I’ve read, not the guy you would want in the WH to take the lead in championing an ACA reform bill. Also, I’ve seen no sign that Trump has the political chops to split the House Republican coalition.

                Ryan may be seriously harmed by what’s going on right now, but it’s not like anyone could do better. The House has two coalitions each with blocking power: cut Medicaid and taxes, and preserve Medicaid and taxes. When Boehner finally realized his own party was hopelessly deadlocked, he quit. Can Ryan assemble a coalition of moderate Rs and Democrats? Possibly, but signs point to No.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Francis says:

                Well, my theory about Trump’s behavior and thought processes doesn’t include what I like, nor what I think is politically possible.

                Part of it, a big part too, is that Trump realizes the only way to enact legislation or policies that are currently viewed as politically impossible is to destroy the institutional/ideologically-partisan constraints which undergird that determination. I think he’s a deconstructionist, either by temperament or design.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Stillwater says:

                I’m going to quibble with “deconstructionist” … this is just a simple business move; Ryan is a key stakeholder who has juice, Trump has to work with Ryan one way or another. Letting a business partner over-extend himself to expose him and either neutralize that position and/or replace that person happens day-in and day-out. Heck, in Sales I’ve had to let a business partner prove their own failure because I couldn’t go over or around that person… and I couldn’t persuade them that our approach was less risky and better for them.

                Now, I didn’t have the luxury of media outlets to help set them up; but I did have score-cards (ROI calcs) and other stakeholders that were willing to take a more vocal stand once the key stakeholder had been taken down a peg… but that’s a long game that doesn’t always work… but its almost always in play.

                Sometimes the “headtrash” that accumulates in an organization is just too much to overcome… there’s a lot of headtrash in Congress. Trump’s headtrash is just totally different from Ryan’s and the rest of the Republican leadership.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Stillwater says:

                Re: The March Theory (TM) … Noah Millman pooh-pooh’s it as fanciful; opting, instead, for the usually solid… “Trump’s just not a detail guy” theory. But I found that theory (while maybe true for a whole lot of stuff a President should care about) doesn’t quite resonate with me regarding Health Care. Plus the CBO/OMB flare, and everything else.

                If we believe that Trump found one acorn, that acorn is identifying the primary issues for an important part of the population… It seems more fanciful that he’d forget about that with something like health care. Foreign Policy I get… there’s no specific demographic interest in Yemen… but not so with health care.

                So I’m tracking until further notice. People can PM me for paypal info to license the theory.Report

              • Koz in reply to Stillwater says:

                Could be, but I don’t think so. This isn’t 2013, where ACA was dominating the short-term political agenda. There’s a lot of plates in the air now, ACA is less important.

                If in the next 6 months we get Gorsuch and a wall or the equivalent to it, I think GOP will be happy.Report

              • Koz in reply to Marchmaine says:

                There could be some drama between Trump and Ryan governing this, but I don’t think so.

                The point being for me is that in the short term (like in three months or so) it doesn’t have to be resolved. The non-Trump GOP partisan base wants to see ACA repealed but that’s not as big a deal as some think.

                Trump/Ryan can run it up a flagpole now, let it get shot down. In another year or so, there’s a good likelihood that they’ll get another bite at the apple anyway because the Obamacare exchanges will fail/death spiral.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Koz says:

                Just so I’m clear, the idea on the flagpole is Ryan’s Bill AHCA?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Koz says:

                Trump/Ryan can run it up a flagpole now, let it get shot down.

                I see the dynamic quite a bit differently, Koz. Trump can run a plan up the flag pole without any cost. He’s a populist, afterall. But ideological Ryan can’t. If his plan gets shot down he ain’t coming back from that any time soon. That doesn’t mean your preference won’t ultimately make it thru the House. More that it’s gonna be hella harder to do so.

                The other reason the dynamic is different than you suppose is that Trump isn’t ideological nor partisan. He isn’t a Republican. He doesn’t care about your “limited government” fantasies. 🙂Report

              • Koz in reply to Stillwater says:

                I suspect the lay of the land may look much different in a year or two.

                If we see a death spiral or implosion there is going to be more grassroots support for moving off of ACA.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Stillwater says:

                Yeah, that’s why I asked… I’m closer to @stillwater on this point.

                I mean, I’d like to sit in on the conversation where Ryan was convinced to put his name on a bill like this as a “flagpole” idea. Not impossible, I suppose, but, ouch… that’s a lot of political capital he’s putting on a flagpole idea. Doesn’t quite add up for me. Especially since you note above that possibly the best plan for Ryan is to just wring his hands, rend his clothes and wait for the ACA to wobble off the tracks.

                As it is, he’s a huge gift to the ACA… either he repeals it and owns whatever happens, or he shows that he *could* have fixed it if he wanted too… but he didn’t so he owns that failure too.

                Politically Paul Ryan either elected Trump in 2020 or gave the Democrats the house in 2018.

                {or maybe not, but sounds good as a frothy coda}.Report

              • greginak in reply to Marchmaine says:

                It’s sort of irrelevant but the ACA is doing fine in most ways. There is no death spiral unless the R’s cripple it. If they let it go w/o any adjustments then it will cruise along fine. It’s irrelevant of course because the R’s are dead set on getting rid of it and are convinced it’s falling apart.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to greginak says:

                Sure, that’s the danger on the other side of the equation for Ryan… it bumps along well enough to survive. Although I think there would be a political fight over what constitutes “no adjustments.”

                But therein is the headscratcher for me… if the AHCA is a trial balloon (which I don’t think it is), its not a very good one.

                I mean, a trial balloon would be floating the Roy/McArdle/Suderman healthcare reform on a postcard idea and see if people love the simplicity of it. A very detailed bill designed to pass Senate rules of reconciliation is just what its been called, a framework for repeal and replace. There’s skin in that game. Or so it looks to me 40 or so miles outside the beltway.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Marchmaine says:

                Politically Paul Ryan either elected Trump in 2020 or gave the Democrats the house in 2018.

                {or maybe not, but sounds good as a frothy coda}.

                Well, not too frothy at all, seems to me. One of the weird dynamics of the last election cycle follows a line of reasoning like this: because Trump ran as an R and because his last conquest was a D, the Democrats are in deep trouble going forward. But I see it radically differently. I see the Trump Victory primarily as a repudiation of national-level GOP politics, and because of that I really do think that if they (meaning the Gran ‘Ol Pahty) can’t get their shit together and pass legislation along the lines Trump advocated then there in for a bigger world of hurt than the Dems are. That means legislation that (eg) doesn’t favor the wealthy over the middle and lower classes. And the current Ryan bill does just that. It basically punishes Trump voters under the guise of promoting “conservative” principles Trump voters to a great extent rejected. Plus, I think all the Republican infighting to determine even better ways to punish the poor inclines more people to defect from the GOP and turn towards Trumpism OR the Democrats.

                All the talk about a GOP majority and so on seems to me entirely tone-deaf to the actual lay of the land. They – meaning the GOP – certainly don’t have a “mandate” to do anything since the party is more fractured and vulnerable now than it’s been in recent history.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Stillwater says:

                Yes, that’s the read alright. Frothy because all of this is pure speculation on three unconnected (as yet) events. It’s one dark web link away from a conspiracy theory.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Marchmaine says:

                I’ll concede it may be a conspiracy of dunces, but that’s as far as I’ll go.Report

              • Paul Ryan: Reforming health care isn’t a sprint, it’s a 2-hour marathon.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Mike Schilling says:

                ISWYDTReport

              • Koz in reply to Marchmaine says:

                On the other hand, he’s president for 4-years (probably) and maybe he surprises me and learns some things on the job.

                Either he’s learning, or he’s showing some faculties that weren’t obvious during the campaign. Specifically, his knowledge and appreciation for factual information is very poor. But, he appreciates this and doesn’t get wedded to his misconceptions. He’s developed a strategy of policy by Braille that seems to work.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Koz says:

                I think that’s still to be seen; he hasn’t enacted any policy* yet and if/when he does we’ll have to wait to see if it worked or not.

                *EO’s are a sort of policy, but not actual policy… they are still bounded by the policies (laws) that created them. The are more like policy spices; something you add or not to the policy to make it more palatable to you. But if that’s all you can do, I’d hardly call you a chef.Report

              • Also, he’s a lazy, thin-skinned, greedy shitbag.Report

              • I don’t think he’s lazy.Report

              • Road Scholar in reply to Will Truman says:

                According to NBC news he’s spent 31% of his presidency thus far on vacation in Mar-a-Lago.Report

              • That’s not laziness so much as disinterest.Report

              • Road Scholar in reply to Will Truman says:

                So is that a good thing or a bad thing?Report

              • Bad, but maybe the lesser of available evils.Report

              • greginak in reply to Will Truman says:

                He makes more money hosting pay for access events while at Mar a Lago. And he has to justify raising the membership rates there, his customers gotta get their monies worth. Not lazy. Just doing business.Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to greginak says:

                So, POTUS is just a side gig?Report

              • I think we knew that when we hired him.Report

              • greginak in reply to Michael Cain says:

                It’s a branding opportunity.Report

              • From a strictly libertarian point of view, can we conclude that the president who makes the most profit has done the most good?Report

              • Kolohe in reply to Mike Schilling says:

                You’re thinking of the Grand Nagus.Report

              • notme in reply to Kolohe says:

                Only if you have the lobes for business.Report

              • “Lack of interest” — if there’s one thing Trump never is, it’s impartial. (I think this is a losing battle.)Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Road Scholar says:

                He that governs least governs best?

                Heh, so make up y’all’s minds… do you want Trump on vacation or Trump busy at work in the Oval office?Report

              • KenB in reply to Marchmaine says:

                The food at this restaurant is terrible! And such small portions!Report

              • So we’re 75% in agreement.

                But lazy or bored is moot — either way, there’s never the effort required to create and implement a policy.Report

              • Koz in reply to Marchmaine says:

                Oh I think he’s done a lot. He’s set the priorities, priorities that the other team doesn’t necessarily support, but don’t want to publicly oppose necessarily either.

                For example, supposedly President Trump has substantially reduced the number of illegal immigrants crossing through the southern border into the US. Ie, it’s not a matter of the long term decline in illegal immigration through Mexico but a sharp decline in the last month or so.

                The way this was accomplished wasn’t through anything particularly dramatic, except through statements and actions demonstrating the intent to enforce laws and policies that were set a long time ago.

                Imo at least, it’s this cognitive dissonance over priorities that’s fueling most of the energy behind the “resistance.” And it’s an odd quality of Trump, his steadfastness, that has taken a lot of the starch out of the “resistance” (and immediately reduced illegal immigration for that matter).Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Koz says:

                Supposedly? I will happily grant your supposed point.Report

              • Koz in reply to Marchmaine says:

                Forgive me, I can’t figure out if you’re quibbling, trolling, or agreeing with me. So for the record I was talking about effects such as this:

                https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/us/trump-immigration-border.htmlReport

              • Mike Schilling in reply to Koz says:

                By all means, extrapolate from one data point. It’s one more data point than your buddy Trump usually has.Report

              • Koz in reply to Mike Schilling says:

                Yeah, on the other hand it is kind of an important data point.Report

              • Mike Schilling in reply to Koz says:

                Maybe. As Mark Krikorian, who would love it to be true, said in the article you linked, in the short term you can make a big difference just with theater. And there’s been a lot of that.Report

              • Koz in reply to Mike Schilling says:

                We won’t know for sure till later of course, but Mark Krikorian’s point actually breaks the other way for me.

                That is, that the signal of intent is important in its own right. And the if the intent is sustained, not any kind of exaggerated or theatric way, we can actually stop illegal immigration.

                The idea among some supporters is to say, yeah border jumping is illegal but we need more immigrants here so let’s find some backhanded wink-and-nod way to encourage them. And it’s at least plausible to think that has been our defacto policy wrt illegal immigration for say 15 years.

                If it turns out that it’s enough simply to repudiate the wink-and-nod (which is basically what President Trump has done so far), then things look different and substantially better than what we may have thought before.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Koz says:

                eh, none of the above, really. My original point stands that it is premature to judge his effect or his legacy until such time that he has either. And that goes for good or for ill.Report

              • Koz in reply to Marchmaine says:

                I see your point but the Trump Administration has a bit of a different flavor than others.

                There’s a symbiotic wall of disinformation between the Trump partisans and the Trump “resistance” that complicates things. Being able to dial down the disinformation (or at least the consequences of it) and execute some kind of intent is useful in its own right.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to gregiank says:

                I’ve yet to see anybody really demonstrate Trump’s plan was anything other then rile up the base and see what happens.

                I think you give him too little credit. After Romney lost in 2012 the polling demonstrated that the number one priority within the conservative base was immigration reform (read: enforce the damn laws!) What was Trump’s first announcement after declaring? Build The Wall. That wasn’t Trump enflaming the base, but being incredibly targeted in his messaging. He effectively said to a whole bunch of people “Your first priority is my first priority as well. And I’ll get it done!”

                Same with so many other issues. “You’re pissed off about neoliberal trade? I’ll redo all the trade agreements so they take care of America first.” And so on down the line.

                What liberals of a certain stripe fail to realize is that he wasn’t promising that he’d make their lives better, he was promising to take their concerns seriously. They had grievances. Hell, I have grievances too, about a lot of those same issues. I thought NAFTA and etc. would be and are a disaster; I hatehatehate PCism; I think the US’ role in geopolitics is unsustainable, often evil, and ought to be revised; etc. I mean, he was speaking to a lot of grievances I also hold near and dear. But he was the guy who actually articulated them. Which is good politics. (Policy?…. ehhh, we’ll see….)Report

              • gregiank in reply to Stillwater says:

                I know i’ve mentioned that i had a solid dislike of Trump since the 90’s back when i lived in NJ. I’ve always seen him as a sleazy used car salesman who was lucky enough to be born rich. Nothing has really changed my view.

                He did do what you say and that worked. But what good salesman, and liars fwiw, do is they always agree with and bond with their target. That is just the way to get people to get peoples trust. That is just the basic skill has always had. And it worked on a big scale. But that also doesn’t’ mean he was able to run a business successfully that is a license to print money. He used his basic skill and it worked, i don’t’ see that as brilliance but a salesman selling.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to gregiank says:

                Oh, I hate the guy too. (Well, not hate. That’s too strong…) I think he’s all the things you mentioned: the lowest level of sleaze. A 99.44% pure bullshitter. I’ve felt that way ever since he single handedly destroyed the USFL in the mid 80s. 🙂Report

              • Koz in reply to Stillwater says:

                What liberals of a certain stripe fail to realize is that he wasn’t promising that he’d make their lives better, he was promising to take their concerns seriously. They had grievances. Hell, I have grievances too, about a lot of those same issues. I thought NAFTA and etc. would be and are a disaster; I hatehatehate PCism; I think the US’ role in geopolitics is unsustainable, often evil, and ought to be revised; etc. I mean, he was speaking to a lot of grievances I also hold near and dear. But he was the guy who actually articulated them.

                This is an excellent point, that deserves a lot more attention than it’s gotten so far.Report

              • Troublesome Frog in reply to Koz says:

                I agree. It’s a much nicer and more nuanced summary of my take that neither party has policies that will satisfy those voters, and neither party’s candidates particularly care about those voters, but the Republicans are very good at pretending to care about those voters, which makes a big difference. Just sending the right set of cultural signals and having an empathetic demeanor goes a long way. That’s one place where Clinton with all of her obvious politician phoniness picked up zero votes.Report

              • Koz in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

                Certainly Mrs Clinton was not an appealing candidate, but the problems here go substantially beyond candidates, or even electoral politics for that matter.

                President Trump may or may not solve his voters’ problems, but he will acknowledge what their grievances are. And most importantly, voting for Trump allows his voters to meaningfully participate in the process in a way that libs are explicitly or implicitly trying to take away from them.

                Consider some of the better-known recent instances of lib pollution. There were the Milo riots, the Charles Murray incident at Middlebury, the disruption of Mike Pence going to see the musical Hamilton, the deplorables thing. The thing these instances have in common (and more like them) is the attempt to deny cultural adversaries the ability to participate in political culture (or sometimes just plain old culture).

                Given what’s happened since the election, I think that Trump/GOP voters intend to keep voting GOP until the libs cry uncle regarding these sort of tactics.

                The other thing I don’t think people appreciate is the ideological coherence of Donald Trump and his Administration. As much as I’d like to blame this on the libs, it’s not really their fault. It’s not like anybody else saw it either. Nonetheless at this point it’s pretty clearly there and I think everybody would see it except for the left over cacophony from the campaign and the “resistance”.Report

              • Francis in reply to Koz says:

                Temperatures must be dropping in Hell; I agree with Koz.

                To explain further, I blinded myself to Clinton’s manifest awfulness as a candidate, because I’m a partisan. And I focused solely on Trump’s awfulness, because he seemed so appalling.

                So my preferred candidate got her ass kicked. And while I continue to believe that there are multiple causes to her loss, clearly one of them is that Trump had a nativist nationalist message that resonated with people who have been getting screwed by the economic system since approximately the mid-70s.

                Sure, it’s great (for some) that the GATT/WTO system has contributed to an enormous increase in welfare across the Third World and especially China. But the next Democratic candidate for President has to have a better message for those whose wages have been stagnant for 30 years (!!) than (a) suck it up, (b) you’re deplorable and (c) job retraining.

                (yes, her website was stuffed full of policies. but I don’t think that she ever converted those policies into a consistent resonant message. The feeling I got was mostly “trust me, I’m a professional wonk.” The result was that a few hundred thousand people stayed home and the election went the other way.)

                (Also, this outcome is probably for the best for the Democrats. I think that Trump will make an absolute mess of governance, and inspire a whole new generation of activists. The party needs to spend much more time and energy deep down-ballot and it may be the case that Trump is the spark for that commitment.)Report

              • Koz in reply to Francis says:

                (yes, her website was stuffed full of policies. but I don’t think that she ever converted those policies into a consistent resonant message. The feeling I got was mostly “trust me, I’m a professional wonk.” The result was that a few hundred thousand people stayed home and the election went the other way.)

                This is where the pollution angle is useful I think. It is true, that Hillary carried an aloof wonk vibe, and that did hurt her. But the damage from that was multiplied severalfold by her corruptions and pollutions of our discourse. That’s what really moved the needle for Trump voters.

                Over the last say, 10 years there has been an important reconsideration of the propensity for broad-based prosperity in America on terms that most Americans would recognize. As a result the GOP, in both its upscale and downscale manifestations. hasn’t changed its policies as much as it’s had to reorient itself to a different bunch of priorities.

                Specifically, the GOP voters care about wages, employment, good families, strong social fabric, crime and schools. In the context of America. That goes up and down the socioeconomic ladder. Therefore the GOP politicos care about that too, especially after the success of Trump.

                As a consequence, formulas like “The GOP pretends to care about X” or “the GOP can’t deliver Y” don’t get very much traction. That’s what we’re fighting for in the trenches right now. Not so much as our policies as our priorities.

                The cultural archipelago wants to care about immigration rights for Muslims, transgender bathrooms, global warming, multiculturalism, etc, etc. Those things are a distraction for us. Whatever else can be said abou tthem, they are not priorities.

                Whatever can be said about his policies, Donald Trump has done a good job upholding our priorities. I expect him to be reasonably stable as President as long as that holds.Report

              • Koz in reply to Koz says:

                And just in case this wasn’t clear from the prior comment, this is not something that resonates with a narrow slice of the population.

                Everybody gets that Trump flipped Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and won Ohio by 10 points. People have talked about cars, coal, manufacturing, unions, opiod addictions, etc.

                But the demographic behind the Trump priorities is much deeper than that. “Wages, employment, good families, strong social fabric, crime and schools”, these are the priorities of nearly all of America outside the cultural archipelago.

                The standards, net worth, nearness to poverty, socioeconomic statuses vary quite a bit across America but the priorities are the same. Those priorities are being represented by Donald Trump and the GOP, and they are not being represented by the D’s.Report

              • Mike Schilling in reply to Koz says:

                But the damage from that was multiplied severalfold by her corruptions and pollutions of our discourse. That’s what really moved the needle for Trump voters.

                If there is one thing I admire Donald Trump for, it’s his commitment to purity of discourse.Report

              • Koz in reply to Mike Schilling says:

                I appreciate it’s something libs are going to have a hard time bending their head around, nonetheless that’s the way it is.Report

              • Pinky in reply to gregiank says:

                “I think the voters enraged by PCism who voted R were always going to vote R.”

                Are you sure that the Pennsylvanians who hated PCism were going to vote R? My guess is that a lot of them had been voting D out of habit, or not voting at all.

                I think in retrospect Trump may have won the election when he said that Clinton’s slogan was “I’m With Her” but his was “I’m With America”. It cast her as the tribalist and him as the uniter.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Pinky says:

                That slogan? More evidence that Hillary is just terrible at politics.Report

              • gregiank in reply to Pinky says:

                I think for people whose votes were up in the air PCism would not have been high in the factors that would sway votes. Jobs, health care, trade, immigration would all be more salient. I don’t think Bob Pennsylvania went into the voting both saying Clinton will do a better job making me and America prosperous but there are now supposed to be 45 gender neutral pronouns so bring on Trump.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to gregiank says:

                Unless Bob believed PCism was part-and-parcel of a bunch of institutional crap he also rejected.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Stillwater says:

                There’s a lot to that. (I hate these super-nested comments! Who’s replying where?) PC is read as favoritism, which touches on a lot of the same nerves as trade deals. And this is where “I’m With Her” becomes more than a slogan; it becomes a representation that for the first time we’re being asked to vote for someone for president on the basis of identity. Not even “change”, just her-ness.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Pinky says:

                Well, not to get too deep in the weeds here, but where’s the leverage point around which an SJW cranks the cishet white males aren’t “woke” criticism? Where does that point exist in political-conceptual space? Is it a shared space? (I’d say that by definition it isn’t.)Report

              • Pinky in reply to Stillwater says:

                Way too deep in the woods for me. Could you rephrase the question?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Pinky says:

                That certain very vocal factions in the liberal/progressive community have walked out on a limb being sawed by theirownselves?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                Hey, Sully wrote an essay about something adjacent to that theory!Report

              • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

                Sully’s been trying to defend Murray’s “it’s not racism, it’s just science!” for nearly 25 years.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                First section pretty much IS the theory.

                Intersectionality cannot fail, it can only be failed. In particular, by gay men like Andrew Sullivan.Report

              • Pinky in reply to gregiank says:

                They may have said that they didn’t like either one, and weren’t sure which would be better, but this PC stuff was getting out of hand.Report

              • gregiank in reply to Pinky says:

                I’m not sure if this comment got eaten so i’ll repeat it.

                Disliking PC is a strong partisan indicator. If you think it’s terrible and out of hand you are much more likely to be conservative and in the RW media bubble. If you think most of PC is trying to be polite and respectful to others then you are far more likely to be on the liberal side. People who thought PC was going wild were always likely to break for the R’s regardless of the candidate.Report

              • Kim in reply to gregiank says:

                greg,
                Liberal here. Hearing from my friends in academia that college campuses are now worse than during McCarthy.

                (Of course, these are MY friends, so you can take it with a grain of salt).Report

              • gregiank in reply to Kim says:

                Got a giant shaker of salt. I’m sure their are problems on colleges. None of your friends would have been around during McCarthy. McCarthyism was much worse from what i’ve read since i wasn’t there either.Report

              • Kim in reply to gregiank says:

                greg,
                During McCarthyism, you didn’t have issues with people getting fired for using the wrong pronoun.Report

              • Pinky in reply to gregiank says:

                Greg – I’d say that ten years ago, disliking PC was more likely to be an effect of one’s politics. Increasingly, it’s a cause. It varies by age, I believe. Over-30’s may say that they were sympathetic at first but it’s gotten out of hand. They’d feel dragged away from a more automatic sympathy. But under-30’s are more likely to write off the whole thing as a joke, and that influences how they’re forming their political beliefs.Report

              • Koz in reply to Pinky says:

                Not just tribalist, but in the wrong tribe.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Stillwater says:

                It’s pretty clear the intangibles did indeed favor Trump. I knew the theory that they would, but I rejected it in part because it didn’t demonstrate in the primaries. Until he got momentum (ie minds were changing in between the polls and the vote), Trump performed up to his polling and no more. Combine that with the fact that 2012 polling got it wrong the other way, and that’s about where I was.Report

        • gregiank in reply to Burt Likko says:

          Silver wasn’t wrong. Saying Clinton had a 70% chance of winning ( or whatever number he used) does not mean he was wrong when Trump won. Even if Wang said Clinton had a 99% chance of winning he would not have been wrong when Trump won. Now the eat a bug thing, well that is a bit different. Much crunchier i assume.Report

          • Troublesome Frog in reply to gregiank says:

            That’s another key point about confidence intervals and probability predictions. Using Wang’s model with a more extreme value for the probability of systemic bias produced about a 90% Clinton probability, and I believe he acknowledged that it might be a better parameter slightly before the election but said he wasn’t going to change his number last minute. Stuff with 10:1 odds happens all the time. A probability of 0.3 is higher than two coin tosses coming up heads. A sample size of one can tell you which model is more likely to be right, but even then, it doesn’t do so with any great certainty.Report

    • Pinky in reply to Jaybird says:

      “You should be looking toward how much evidence there is for a particular position as opposed to how many people hold that position: Having 20 independent pieces of evidence that mostly point in the same direction might indeed reflect a powerful consensus, while having 20 like-minded people citing the same warmed-over evidence is much less powerful.”Report

    • Burt Likko in reply to Jaybird says:

      I don’t think this is a particularly controversial proposition. Is it? Silver does a decent job of breaking down its component parts, IMO, so in that sense it’s at least good-enough analysis.

      Maybe I suffer from a mutated form of confirmation bias here, because after someone… who was it… someone at Leaguefest… That someone looked me in the eye and said “We need to take the idea that we’re living in a bubble and not seeing reality clearly seriously,” and then we both took a sip of wine to think about it… Oh, right, that was you, @jaybird . You were the one who said that.

      So the last couple of days before the election, and very forcefully on election night itself, I came to accept that you were right about that and that I was wrong. Now that I see this idea restated elsewhere and I raise my voice in chorus with it with the fervor of the newly-converted.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to Burt Likko says:

        Not so much a controversial statement as the description of an unconscious tendency.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Burt Likko says:

        I don’t think this is a particularly controversial proposition. Is it?

        You’d think it wouldn’t be.

        I’m *NOT* saying that *I* find the proposition controversial. But I’m batshit insane.

        I’m saying that I suspect that Silver will be pilloried for saying something that you’d think wouldn’t be a particularly controversial proposition.

        (I’ve been offsite for the last few hours. Has he been pilloried yet?)Report