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https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/11/16/bill-...

PJMedia link chosen for extra deliciousness.

He began by mocking the left’s inability to learn from their mistakes, saying, “when you’re in a hole, stop digging, not keep digging.” As Maher sees it, their refusal to adjust has resulted in a disconnect from the very voters they need to win over.

“You wear Queers for Palestine T-shirts and masks two years after the pandemic ended, and you can't define woman—I mean, person who menstruates. You're the Teachers Union Education Party, and you've turned schools and colleges into a joke.”

He added, “You love to speak truth to power, and we always should, but you have completely lost the ability to speak truth to bulls**t.”

At some point in the past the left departed the realm known as reality. They started saying, in no particular order

-Trump was a Russian agent
-We don't have a crime problem in the US
-The southern border is secure
-The world is totally peaceful you guys
-The world when Trump was in office was absolutely bonkers
-Inflation is transitory
-The economy is doing just awesome
-We never defunded the police, the Republicans did, and even if we did, what crime crisis?

...and a million other things. They sat around in their blue bubbles and told each other these things over and over again, then went out and tried to gaslight the rest of the country.

Didn't work.

Ezra Klein did a podcast the other day and when his co-host was befuddled as to why more urban voters went for Trump, he went off.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/11/14...

EZRA KLEIN: I come from outside Los Angeles. I lived in San Francisco until, you know, 18 months ago. And I live in New York City. The thing that surprised me most, at least, I'm sorry, the thing that surprised me least about the election was the sharp red shift in these big cities. Because if you just talk to anybody who lives in them, they are furious. And this idea that like, oh, no, the economy is actually good or crime is actually down. This is all just FOX News. Like, shut the f*ck up with that. Like, talk to some people who live near you.

I tried to tell libs here exactly this, but they all live in red or reddish purple states run by competent people. The best cure for liberalism is to bend a lib over and give to them - good and hard - by making them live under their bubble policies.

Oakland.
San Francisco.
Los Angeles.
Seattle.

All poster child blue cities, and all awash in property crime, homelessness, drugs and human feces. The residents all got tired of it - imagine that- and are starting to do something about it.

The board's lefties can take heart, though. Of all 50 states, only 1 moved to the left in this election, and that's stone-stupid Washington State, where I get to live. Voters here just keep begging for more.

More Ezra Klein, because he's saying what I've been telling you people for years:

The rage I just hear from people in New York, this is partially Greg Abbott busing huge amounts of migrants here. But that does mean, by the way, there are enough migrants that Greg Abbott could bus actual human bodies to New York City. And it was a big enough problem that New York City was not able to effectively deal with it, right?

It does show that what was going on the border was much worse, I think, than Democrats were letting themselves accept. That was not, for all the cruelty of what Abbott did there, that was not like an ad campaign. Those were like actual people who had come into the country who were overwhelming border states.

The sense of disorder rising, right? Not just crime, but homeless encampments, trash on the streets, people jumping turnstiles in subways, right? You just like crazy people on the streets.

You just talk to people and they're mad about it. They feel it's different than it used to be. I mean, in San Francisco, like the fury is overwhelming.

Klein is from the "deliverist" wing of the party - the portion of the party that thinks the key to electoral success is identifying popular things that people want to see from government and then doing those things. There's considerable overlap with these guys and the centrist wing of the party. One of their constant critiques has been that the Democrats aren't great at prioritizing popular stuff at the expense of unpopular stuff.

While often discussed at the federal level, this sometimes comes out as criticism of municipal administration - that while Democratic policies poll well in the abstract, people get frustrated with the actual outcomes.

I generally agree with the deliverists, as well as Klein's critique of the "everything bagel" of the blue model.

However, I do think that this particular criticism is a bit unfair for folks like Klein to make. Crime and immigration happen to be two areas where the Democrats were doing things that were popular, but then public opinion changed on them.

Around 2020, public sentiment was very much in favor of police reform. In that year, 56% of people felt that the police were either just right or too tough, while only 41% felt the police weren't tough enough - and that 15 point margin against tougher police was the biggest in the history of that question. That's why, you may remember, criminal justice reform was briefly a bi-partisan issue in early- and mid-2020, and Trump was proud to have signed the First Step Act.

Yet by 2023, that had completely reversed - then 58% of the people wanted tougher police, while only 40% were happy or wanted them to be less tough, so now 18 points in the other direction. That's a 33 point net move in public opinion.

The same thing happened on immigration. In 2020, 34% of Americans wanted immigration increased, while only 28% wanted it decreased. Literally the most pro-immigrant polling since the 1960's. And by 2024, that had swung to 55% of Americans wanting a decrease to only 16% wanting an increase. The worst polling for immigration in two decades, and nearly a 60 point net swing.

It's just brutal when public opinion moves against you that much on two high-salience issues. Because Democrats were really out front in 2020 on these things, believing (correctly) that they were doing what the voters wanted them to do. And when the voters turned against their prior positions, Democrats were saddled with so much recent support for what voters now did not want, there was little they could do to recover.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/544439/americans-crit...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/647123/sharply-americ...

Soon there will be Google links shrugging and saying how there wasn't much wrong with the Dem campaign.


PS: I saw the Maher comments and yep - if they had listened to him - Trump would've been thrashed this time around. But like I said - wait for indifference , and some shit online data point that shows that whatever Dems were saying was fine - totally missing the big picture but focusing on the link.

The Google Jockey Association lol.

A root cause on why "Because Democrats were really out front in 2020 on these things,...Democrats were saddled with so much recent support for what voters now did not want, there was little they could do to recover."

Democratic policy and media messaging / "talking points" have a leftward bent, like a leftward pull in a steering system. The violent police racism of the late 'teens was way outside the behavior guardrails most people expect from their police. It NECESSITATED a strong corrective response, which happened to be right in line with Democratic anti-racism platforms and the game changed.

But because of the leftward pull, it over-corrected, swerved too far to the left for most people. Became defund the police and trying to force low policing policies - which became part of the political feast from heaven for the Pubs. And they can't get back to the center line without a quick steer back to the right.

The answer to Trump is not going further left. Whatever.

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