I don't think that Buttigieg would be a liability. The one thing I do think is that pretty much any candidate is going to be chancy and could well lose because the media is going to lean into the sports model of reporting and focus on the drama rather than on the substance. If Buttigieg did end up losing because something he did, or something about him blew up into a negative, then I'm certain that half of the pundits would have already half-written post-election analyses arguing that his gayness was just too big a feature for swing voters to get past, and they'd blame the loss on "activists" running the Dems. And then it would be a generation before the donors would have the courage to support any LGBTQ+ candidate for national office again.
Same way I don't think Harris will ever be given another chance at the presidency. Doesn't matter that she came damn close carrying a lot of baggage that had been forced upon her by the circumstances.
Meanwhile, given where we are right now in our politics, it's hard to even fathom how The Dean Scream was enough to sink a candidacy. Really? That? What a strange moment in time.
2025-12-19 19:02:06
wj - The challenge will be for such a person to get thru the primaries. Those tend to have a far higher concentration of, for lack of a better term, activists — people who do care, often passionately, about policy. At least some policies.
Convincing primary voters that “someone who can win a general election” should be a necessary criteria (not sufficient, but necessary) will be a non-trivial task. Not least because they, too, tend to live in an information bubble populated by others who care about policy.
We have a real structural problem with the primaries in that the voters who need to be brought on board often don't pay any attention to the election until after the primaries are done, leaving the primary voters and the donors to pick. None of the Dem coalitions in the primary seem to have any sense of what those people are looking for. I suspect that many of those low-engagement voters don't know themselves what they are going to go for, so it's a lot of guesswork. Most of the primary voters seem to have strong preferences and too much faith in the power of reason.
I think primaries are the place where ranked voting actually makes the most sense, in that ranked voting would not just take candidate support into account, but would also give a sense of crossover appeal. And if the primaries were done in two or three rounds it would also give the party a chance to see which candidates were gaining and which were losing support over time, and let the candidates adjust their approaches to some actual feedback.
2025-12-19 06:57:25
wj - I'd never call Newsom a progressive, but I agree that any reasonable CA pol would be read as a loony leftie by default because that's the trope everyone knows.
First and foremost, the Dems need someone who is young-ish, charismatic, and a good communicator, and then whoever that is needs to hammer on the idea that the middle class needs saving and expanding, and that tax cuts have not done the job for that. They need to run on restoring dignity and affordability to working people and reducing the influence of corporations and donors over elected officials - basically a pro-labor message without the high church union messaging.
wonkie - agree that policy messaging is a loser, but think that a good fight message needs some sort of big picture policy narrative that resonates and that gets to the core of the party's values. And they need to take aim at all of the tropes that have harmed us - trickle down, tax cut prosperity; tough on crime justice; making schools compete - and replace them with a focus on investing in the public good.
2025-12-18 22:45:14
Not a complaint about you or your posting that, wonkie, but I hate polls like the one that Emerson College put together because I don't think that they have any actual relevance to a real election. It's more about how people label political positions in their heads, and it shows us nothing about what voters actually want or what they respond to.
Who is the person being polled thinking of when they think of "MAGA Republican," of "moderate Republican," of "moderate Democrat," of "progressive Democrat?" What are the tipping point issues that make them choose one over the other? What do they like or dislike about each of them? No idea. Instead, we are left to guess what each of those labels might mean to a group of a thousand strangers.
These surveys pretend to inform, but they don't do any real work to unpack the assumptions on which they work to find any real information that might make a difference. And politicians are paying people six figure salaries to make this sort of tea and read the leaves.
I like Buttigieg. I like Booker a lot as well.
I don't think that Buttigieg would be a liability. The one thing I do think is that pretty much any candidate is going to be chancy and could well lose because the media is going to lean into the sports model of reporting and focus on the drama rather than on the substance. If Buttigieg did end up losing because something he did, or something about him blew up into a negative, then I'm certain that half of the pundits would have already half-written post-election analyses arguing that his gayness was just too big a feature for swing voters to get past, and they'd blame the loss on "activists" running the Dems. And then it would be a generation before the donors would have the courage to support any LGBTQ+ candidate for national office again.
Same way I don't think Harris will ever be given another chance at the presidency. Doesn't matter that she came damn close carrying a lot of baggage that had been forced upon her by the circumstances.
Meanwhile, given where we are right now in our politics, it's hard to even fathom how The Dean Scream was enough to sink a candidacy. Really? That? What a strange moment in time.
wj - The challenge will be for such a person to get thru the primaries. Those tend to have a far higher concentration of, for lack of a better term, activists — people who do care, often passionately, about policy. At least some policies.
Convincing primary voters that “someone who can win a general election” should be a necessary criteria (not sufficient, but necessary) will be a non-trivial task. Not least because they, too, tend to live in an information bubble populated by others who care about policy.
We have a real structural problem with the primaries in that the voters who need to be brought on board often don't pay any attention to the election until after the primaries are done, leaving the primary voters and the donors to pick. None of the Dem coalitions in the primary seem to have any sense of what those people are looking for. I suspect that many of those low-engagement voters don't know themselves what they are going to go for, so it's a lot of guesswork. Most of the primary voters seem to have strong preferences and too much faith in the power of reason.
I think primaries are the place where ranked voting actually makes the most sense, in that ranked voting would not just take candidate support into account, but would also give a sense of crossover appeal. And if the primaries were done in two or three rounds it would also give the party a chance to see which candidates were gaining and which were losing support over time, and let the candidates adjust their approaches to some actual feedback.
wj - I'd never call Newsom a progressive, but I agree that any reasonable CA pol would be read as a loony leftie by default because that's the trope everyone knows.
First and foremost, the Dems need someone who is young-ish, charismatic, and a good communicator, and then whoever that is needs to hammer on the idea that the middle class needs saving and expanding, and that tax cuts have not done the job for that. They need to run on restoring dignity and affordability to working people and reducing the influence of corporations and donors over elected officials - basically a pro-labor message without the high church union messaging.
wonkie - agree that policy messaging is a loser, but think that a good fight message needs some sort of big picture policy narrative that resonates and that gets to the core of the party's values. And they need to take aim at all of the tropes that have harmed us - trickle down, tax cut prosperity; tough on crime justice; making schools compete - and replace them with a focus on investing in the public good.
Not a complaint about you or your posting that, wonkie, but I hate polls like the one that Emerson College put together because I don't think that they have any actual relevance to a real election. It's more about how people label political positions in their heads, and it shows us nothing about what voters actually want or what they respond to.
Who is the person being polled thinking of when they think of "MAGA Republican," of "moderate Republican," of "moderate Democrat," of "progressive Democrat?" What are the tipping point issues that make them choose one over the other? What do they like or dislike about each of them? No idea. Instead, we are left to guess what each of those labels might mean to a group of a thousand strangers.
These surveys pretend to inform, but they don't do any real work to unpack the assumptions on which they work to find any real information that might make a difference. And politicians are paying people six figure salaries to make this sort of tea and read the leaves.