Affordability and Abundance

 Derek Thompson argues that last Tuesday gave the Democrats a winning theme - if not quite a winning platform. By focusing on "Affordability" they can focus voters' ire about rising prices, the same ire that turned Democrats out of power last November. A year is eternity and Thompson does acknowledge that there are a few problems, but I'd expand on them.

First, the primary driver of rising costs in 2022 was the post-Covid supply chain issue. That was an exogenous event that had little policy roots. In 2025, the primary cause of inflation is a combination of tariffs and deportations. By raising the prices of imported goods and raw materials and also restricting the labor supply, Trump seems bound and determined to create a stagflationary spiral. The problem for Democrats should they win in 2026 is to actually reverse many of those problems, and that will be very hard to do with Trump in the White House. You probably will be able to reverse the tariffs, but the workforce issue will not improve as long as Stephen Miller has an office in the West Wing.

Secondly and relatedly, even where you can and could act today or in 2026, it takes a long time to turn an economy around. In 2021, inflation was at 4,7%. High but OK. In 2022, it was 8%. No bueno. In 2023, it was at 4.1%, which would suggest it was calming down and in 2024, sure enough, it was at 2.9%. That rate would have been fine, if it wasn't for the fact that prices had been rising for three years. That almost 3% increase was happening to an already elevated number. The policies pursued by the Federal Reserve and Biden Administration were good and working, and if the election had happened a year later, I bet the result might have been different. 

Still, if your Sherrill or Spanberger or even Mamdani, you are very unlikely to effect wholesale reductions in prices. Whereas Trump has pursued inflationary policies because he's a fucking idiot, you could try and reduce some regulations and that would be a really good policy outcome, but it might not rein in prices for two reasons. First, making it easier to build housing should be a priority in every Blue polity, but that will take 2-4 years to actually show up as places for people to live. Second, Trump's policies will supersede what you are doing. If you make it easier to generate electricity in your state, that won't help if unregulated data centers gobble it all up. If you reform housing codes, it won't matter if Trump deported all the Latin American tradesmen. 

Of course, who cares. If Democrats can win control of both house of Congress next November running against Trump's terrible economic policies, then democracy might be saved. Voters will still blame his party in 2028. Hopefully, the AI/Crypto bubble bursts and data centers wither on the vine, freeing up electrical generation for consumers. Maybe we finally get a comprehensive and humane guest worker program and more legal immigration in 2029. 

Paul Campos refers to our era as the Age of Unhappiness, which I think is accurate. That has political repercussions, but we need to recall how well Democrats did in 2022 relative to expectations. If Trump continues to immiserate the population, then any breath of fresh air in 2028 could reshape political coalitions.

Joe Biden's age was not a question of infirmity, so much as it rendered him incapable of making his case to the American voter. Making a case for abundance as a formula for affordability is something that doesn't require a politician to have the charisma of a Mamdani.

This Man Is A Sociopath

 

Trump stands aloof as someone faints behind him. 

One advantage Trump has had is that - as Troll in Chief - he's pretty good at "driving the narrative" via visuals. Between his Gatsby Ball, demolishing the East Wing and now this...Yeah, not so much, Donny.

Welcome To The Pantheon

 Nancy Pelosi was certainly the best and most effective Speaker of my adult lifetime. Especially in the 19th century, but even in the 20th, the Speaker was probably the second most powerful person in Washington. The nature of the House requires keeping the kittens herded together, and this became even more true as ideological partisanship increased during the last 40 years. Pelosi proved herself far superior to the Republican men who couldn't count votes, couldn't extend flexibility to their vulnerable members. Pelosi more than any other Speaker, at least since Tip O'Neill, knew how to count votes. She was Old School like that. "Czar" Reed never called a vote that he didn't know he could win. Same with Pelosi. Even as the House has slipped in power, Pelosi fought back to try and preserve it's historic role. (Also kudos for stepping down from the Speakership and for knowing the time was right to retire.)

Compare her to Mike Johnson:

Nancy Pelosi is 5'5", but she towers over the men who tried and failed to replace her.

Winning Matters

 Josh Marshall likes to say that the DC corpse is wired for Republicans. Here he notes how they are scrambling to understand the ass whupping the GOP got on Tuesday. What he points out is all the breathless articles about how Trump seems to be unpopular were true on Monday, but no one was writing that then (aside from filthy bloggers and Substackers).

Part of the "logic" of Project 2025 was to "move fast and break things" because that creates its own theory of power. It's not only about "flooding the zone" but creating a certain momentum that allows you to run roughshod over institutions. I would wager that even some Trump loyalists are surprised at how quickly some of those institutions caved.

The No King Rallies, the electoral rout and now the apparent limits of SCROTUS tolerance when it comes to tariffs have all begun to strip this imperial presidency of some of its momentum. This leaves aside Trump's seeming rapid aging that has him falling asleep at weird times. I'd wager that one reason Trump hasn't sat down with Schumer and Jeffries to negotiate an end to the shutdown is that his aides realize he's simply not up to the task.

These small victories add up. Acquitting "Sandwich Guy" matters. It's not just that "hope matters" but that Trump has asserted that he has dictatorial powers in a country with very elaborate structures to prevent that. The more toxic he becomes, the less ability he has to assert this, but the weaker he becomes, the more obvious that is.

ADDED: There's a strong argument that we should hope that the Court rules his tariffs illegal but that he tries a new rationale to keep them in place, forcing yet another round of court cases. The worse the economy gets, the better, but him losing is also good.

Candidate Quality

 G. Elliot Morris is a Data Guy. His takeaway from the election is that we are likely looking at a D+8 environment in 2026. I could argue that Trump is so bad, so chaotic, that we could see something along the lines of a D+12 environment. I could also see a bigger movement towards Dems in rural areas, since Trump seems to be doing everything he can to punish farmers.

Still, as Dems approach the midterms, I don't think that simply relying on Trump's toxicity is enough to win by margins large enough to counteract voter suppression. Good candidates matter. It sucks that Jared Golden isn't going to run, because he's a really good candidate for that district. (It wouldn't shock me if Maine elects to redraw that district in the face of Republican efforts to do the same elsewhere.)

You can even see this in the White Elephant case of Mamdani. He's a really impressive politician, especially when it comes to messaging. Ideally, you can find some really well-tailored candidates for their districts. I'd love to see Mary Peltola run for the Alaska Senate seat. 

An underrated flip side to this is that the Republican Party increasingly is made in Trump's image. Nancy Mace is mentally unwell, but she could win her primary for governor and lose because she's insane. As he remakes the party in his twisted image and his approval rating dips into the mid 30s, candidate quality could cut the other way. Running a dipshit like Markwayne Mullen will work in Oklahoma, but it might not work in Kansas or Iowa.

That Was Better

 After a long year of soul searching and self-flagellation, Democrats finally racked up some huge wins across multiple elections last night. Electing Mamdani in NYC is getting the headlines, because New York, but the more significant elections happened elsewhere. Democrats romped not only in the Virginia governor's race, but in the House of Delegates. Mikie Sherrill was supposed to be in trouble in New Jersey, but she romped. In Georgia, Democrats won seats on the public utilities commission for the first time in decades. In Pennsylvania, three Democratic Supreme Court justices were retained with 60% of the vote. In California, Newsom's gambit of submitting Prop 50, which will create a partisan gerrymander in California to match that in Texas, passed with 63% of the vote. Even the Democrat running for Virginia Attorney General who had been hit with a scandal won easily.

If there are common threads that run through these elections it looks like the following.

People are upset with corruption. Some of this is local - Georgia, the NYC mayoral race - some of this is Trump - California. The general Trump fatigue with his self-dealing bullshit is getting noticed. Hispanics apparently swung back to Democrats because of the Gestapo shit that ICE and Border Patrol are doing to anyone browner than an Irishman in February.

People are upset with rising prices. Obviously this applies to Mamdani, but it also applies to Sherrill across the Hudson. It applies to the Georgia election. Most of the Democrats ran on some variation of the "abundance" agenda. Mamdani is going to make things free. Sherrill is going to declare an emergency over utility bills. Colorado voted to give school kids more free food.

People should pump the brakes on reading too much into one particular candidate or result. Mamdani is not a model for Democrats to win the Senate seat in Iowa next year, except to the degree that he is a very skilled politician, very charismatic and very attuned to people's concerns about affordability. Is it more important that Sherrill and Spanberger are women or that they are fairly moderate? Or that they won in pretty blue states?

Sadly, here in our town, we saw what factionalism can still do. We elected four of the nine members of the Town Council, and voters can vote for three candidates, with each party putting up three candidates. Republican one party rule has been the norm here for as long as I can remember, and the local GOP completely screwed up a water issue that is going to cost taxpayers $31 million to escape. Last night, the Republican candidates each won about 40% of the vote. 

However, we have an Independent Party as well as a Democratic Party. They each got around 30% of the vote for their slate of candidates. That means 60% of voters wanted to turn the GOP out of office but instead they will continue to run the town into the ground.

I voted for the Independents, because I didn't think people in our town would vote for Democrats. Because they wouldn't cross list/cross endorse, they blew it.

I still think that creating a Farm-Labor party in the Great Plains states to replace the Democrats is a smart move, but it obviously requires Democrats to stand down completely.

Still, the good news is that we saw about a 4% shift towards Democrats in NJ and VA. That trend is great for Senate candidates in Maine and North Carolina. It opens the door for candidate quality in Ohio and Texas and even Iowa. If things get worse, things get better.

Here's an immediate question: What does this mean for the shutdown? Will Republicans look at these results and begin to worry about how their voters will treat them next November? Especially if they don't address exploding health care costs?

Right now, Trump's position is that he is going to starve kids and grandparents until Democrats agree to let him strip health care from millions. That ain't a great message. Last night confirmed that.

Not The Obituary I Wanted To Read Today

Dick Cheney had a stranglehold on "Worst Republican Elected Official In My Lifetime" until Donald Trump came along. The fact that he cared enough about the Constitution to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 is like a form of deathbed conversion.  The blood of thousands is on his hands in a war that was disastrously conceived and fought under his leadership. You could argue that without the Iraq war Donald Trump never really gains a foothold among a certain group of Republicans who saw the Grand Old Party betray them by sending their sons and daughter off to fight an elective war. Russia predicated its invasion of Ukraine on the Iraqi precedent. 

We are a worse country today, because Dick Cheney was Vice President under a weak and feckless president and maneuvered us into one of the three worst foreign policy misadventures in the long history of the Republic. Glad he saw through Trump, but it's not like that even helped.

So Close To Getting It

 Yglesias likes to take one or two ideas and beat them into a fine powder. One of his "ideas" is that Democrats should eschew unpopular ideas and promote popular ones. Really brilliant insight there. 

The problem with this post is that it once again fails to grapple with the fact that Democrats DON'T talk about unpopular issues. Republicans do and mischaracterize Democratic positions. Yes, as he notes, the other side gets to campaign, too, but he points to Andy Beshear who has done a good job sticking up for Democratic values without being labeled as too extreme or "woke".

It's because he's a white dude from Kentucky.

Harris and Hillary were naturally assumed to be further left on cultural issues than the were because they were women. Harris even more so as a Black woman from San Francisco. Voters are pretty freaking dumb when you get to the middle of the electorate. Sorry, but they are - at least about politics.  So they use easy short hands like how the candidate physically looks. Or aspects of their biography. 

If voters were voting their policy preferences, Democrats would be winning all 50 states. Trump's OBBB is toxic and getting worse, but it's basically the GOP wish list going back 60 years.

STFU

 I could make an argument that the most damaging thing to the Democratic Party in the last decade was the demagoguery of one man.

No, not that one.

This one.

The Cruelty Is The Point

 The decision to punish stores for making it easier on people to receive food assistance while Trump withholds SNAP benefits is genuinely monstrous. Yglesias lays out the many ways that SNAP is a genuinely impressive policy. OK, it's not 100% perfect, but the basic difference between the two parties can be distilled to Republicans being outraged that one person on five hundred is abusing SNAP benefits and Democrats working to make sure the other four hundred and ninety nine don't go hungry.

Meanwhile, Trump's approval among 18-29 year olds is 75% disapproval. Turns out dismantling the Great Society and New Deal isn't actually popular among people who have no memory (or historical context) for the world that existed before.

Tone Deaf

 Yesterday, SNAP benefits were shut off despite there being $6B in emergency funds that courts have ruled the administration has to spend to preserve food security. Around the same time, the rate increases to ACA insurance came out, highlighting the massive explosion in premiums. The House has not met in a month and a half. 

Meanwhile, Trump is posting pictures of the renovation desecration of the Lincoln bathroom. He's squeezing other plutocrats to build a ball room desecrate the East Wing of the White House. He's going golfing again. He's holding a Gatsby themed party at Mar a Lardo. 

The most baffling aspect of Trumpism is how working and middle class people convinced themselves that this scion of wealth, this tabloid plutocrat was their champion. As I've mentioned, we have a Republican Party in our town that has dominated the town for decades. They have recently screwed the pooch on a water dispute that is going to cost the town $36,000,000. They adhere to the politics of personal destruction. 

And they look like they might lose on Tuesday. If they do, it will be because some of the Trumpier households in town are displaying Independent Party signs. That screams to me that lots of support for Trump was because he wasn't a "normal politician" and he was going to "shake things up." I heard the same from my friend in Argentina about Milei. Normal politics wasn't helping them so let's vote for the chaos agent. 

I don't know if these stories of Trump's Gilded Age excesses will break through the conservative stranglehold on the media, but if they somehow do, what is the breaking point? At what point do these voters realize that they have been played? And even if they do have this epiphany, what's the best outcome? Do they switch parties? I doubt it. That's why the Independent Party is a great alternative for voters in our particular town. That's why I'd love to see a Great Plains Farm-Labor Party.

Or maybe they just stay home. In our close electoral landscape, not voting is as important as voting. 

Trump is doing everything that he possibly can to rip the scales from people's eyes. He's doing everything he can to govern poorly. 

Will it matter?

Oh No, Stop. Please. Don't.

 Trump has threatened to end the filibuster to get a continuing resolution, in case you were wondering what the White House polling is showing on the shutdown.

As Josh Marshall points out, please proceed. There's a common thread among Republicans Who Should Know Better, which is that  - despite being an absolute scandal machine and an actual convicted felon - Trump does seem to have some bizarro electoral juice. "He keeps winning when he should lose, so maybe we just need to roll over and pee on our bellies."

I do think Marshall is right that there are enough Senate Republicans who understand that the filibuster is a structural advantage for their party and it won't happen. But I hope it does. The filibuster is about 66% of the reason why Americans say that "government is broken." As Democrats are the only party that wants to govern (as opposed to reign) that hurts their ability to actually pass laws.

Let it die.

On To Something

 Yglesias is very much the "Manhattan Private School/Yale Philosophy Major" type of Smart Guy. However, I keep reading him because he does occasionally have some nice nuggets and I don't want to silo my reading too much.

He has a Six Point Plan for Democrats to run on in 2026:

• Ban congressional stock trading (+34)

• Expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing (+31)

• Raise the minimum wage to $12 (+22)

• Crack down on tax evasion (+18)

• Spend on reducing lead pollution (+14)

• Guarantee abortion rights nationally before 12 weeks (+13)

You’ve got some economic populism in there, some progressive social policy, some environmental policy, some good government reform, and a link to Trump’s corruption and abuses of power via tax evasion.

That's a good plan. He goes on to say that other planks are less popular and therefore you shouldn't include them. Climate actually polls poorly - don't touch it. Even background checks, which poll well, don't poll well enough, though a few mass shootings could nudge that into plank seven. 

He notes that a 12 week right to abortion isn't popular with abortion rights groups, but that it needs to be understood as a floor rather than a ceiling. Raising the minimum wage to $15 isn't quite as popular, but again: floor. 

I think you have to throw in some stuff about protecting democracy, just on principle and checking Trump's unbridled power and corruption, because I think that's going to poll well by next autumn.

Still, picking a few things to win a majority sounds like a really solid plan. Once you have the majority, then you can do more.

Speedbump On The Road To Fascism

 Central to the Ghouls surrounding Trump and intent on devouring the brains of American democracy is their plan to militarize police functions. Central to this is utilizing or threatening to utilize the Insurrection Act. That might actually have run into a legal problem that even the Scotus Six might notice. The Insurrection Act was always bullshit, but this might give the Republicans on the bench a chance to save democracy, a prospect I'm not willing to completely cede.

As Richardson notes, and others have noted, the GOP is increasingly in an untenable situation with the shutdown. People are going to lose SNAP tomorrow at exactly the time that they are getting letters about their ACA premium increases. People going hungry when the Agriculture Department is sitting in $6B and we are sending at least $20B to Argentina (a direct competitor in agriculture output) is not a great look! Especially with Trump behaving more and more like the Central Asian despot he so clearly aspires to be. The destruction of the White House to put up a gilded ballroom is just...I dunno man, seems pretty easy to understand, even for the dipshittiest of dipshit voters.

Democratic backsliding and emerging autocracy requires that that the would-be dictator be popular. Trump really isn't, and if anything his policies are less popular than he is. 

Krugman is right when he says that the Republicans were wise to push off many of the worst impacts of their terrible agenda until after the 2026 midterms. What Democrats have done with this shutdown is accelerate the timeline of when the inevitable pain will be felt. All the Very Online Experts who decried the feckless Dem strategy last spring and even this fall ("They will cave, because Schumer sucks.") were wrong. This is really sound strategy that puts the Democrats on their strongest ground.

At some point, too, the House will have to reconvene and Adelita Grijalva will be sworn in, which should prompt the release of House files related to Epstein. Trump's team's preference for "Move Fast, Break Things" is a shitty governance strategy and not much better politics. It works best as a media-dominance ploy, but that dominance isn't always good, when your positions are inherently bad. 

Harbingers

 Richardson's Catalog of Atrocities is longer than usual, but one thing stood out. It's the layoffs.

Amazon laid off 14,000. UPS has laid off 48,000 this year. Target laid off 1,800 corporate jobs. Molson Coors is also laying off corporate workers. General Motors and Rivian are laying of workers in their EV sections. 

The loss of white collar jobs might be a harbinger of the coming AI assault on corporate jobs. It may also be a combination of AI displacement AND a weakening overall economy. The Federal Reserve is cutting interest rates in the face of still high inflation, which can only mean their estimation of the job market is pretty bad. 

Now, we are about to get apocalyptic news for SNAP and ACA recipients in the face of these strong "headwinds" in the economy. 

Usually, we should see a market crash about now in the calendar year. For whatever reason, the fall is when the markets collapse. So far it hasn't happened, but the overall signs are pretty dire.

Given Republican efforts to gerrymander themselves out of electoral consequences, a massive economic collapse might be the Republic's only hope.