If nothing else, the selection of Tim Walz for VP should teach us that the political pundit class sucks. They know nothing — they want to claim that they’re objective, neutral observers, but they’ve all got an agenda that they lie about. For instance, Jonathan Chait has the worst take. He wants the Democrats to move to the right.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz Need to Pivot to the Center Right Now
Story by Jonathan Chait
When Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic presidential nominee, I expressed cautious optimism that she had learned from her disastrous 2020 campaign, which revolved around placating left-wing activists by adopting highly unpopular issue positions. The data point that seemed most compelling was her rumored slate of vice-presidential selections, which consisted of Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and Andy Beshear of Kentucky — the three most moderate governors in the party. “What this leak indicates,” I wrote, “is that Harris understands the assignment.”
But … does she? Her decision to pick Tim Walz, while not completely irrational, makes me much more cautious and less optimistic that Harris does understand the assignment.
The assignment, to be clear, is to win over voters who don’t like Donald Trump but worry Harris is too liberal.
Gosh. The Democrats need to be more Republican. Democrats embracing their principles is bad.
This is possibly the most idiotic take yet. Ask a Minnesotan: Walz is not the radical socialist some of us would like to see. He was elected to congress in a rural, southern Minnesota congressional district, where he had to be a conservative public servant, and he was selected to run for governor because he could appeal to both the urban Minneapolis/St Paul electorate and to the rural shitkicker vote. As governor, he’s been both pro-business and pro-civil liberties, a combination that might once have been natural for Republicans before Reagan, when they chose instead to follow the path of hating the poor.
He could be more liberal. The alternatives Chait favors are all consistently more conservatives. Screw that. It’s long past time Democrats moved to favor unions and schools and the social safety net, and that’s what Walz does, to the chagrin of the Chaits of the country.
And then there’s the awful Nate Silver, who favors the same candidates that Chait does, but for confusingly different reasons (that’s Silver all over the place, making counter-intuitive arguments for confusingly wrong-headed reasons). He thinks Walz is the risky product of triangulation.
Tim Walz is a Minnesota Nice choice
It’s fine. But Shapiro was the higher-upside option that was probably worth the risk.
If you surveyed Democratic members of Congress, he’d probably be who they’d choose. But I believe he’s probably the wrong choice, a step back toward the Democratic Party’s instincts to triangulate instead of the boldness the Harris campaign has displayed so far.
You’re just making it overly complex and twisting everything around. Walz is an advocate for politically popular choices, like childcare and free school lunches and abortion, and he’s an avuncular, friendly voice. That sounds like a good choice — true, making a smart decision is way off brand for the Democrats. Silver would rather see a radical, alienating weirdo in the position, a Democratic complement to JD Vance.
Nate Silver will always favor seeing the party don a handicap to keep the horserace close, because that’s where he makes his money and notoriety.
You know, these are the kinds of political pundits who get favored by the conservative media. Don’t trust them.
Just more casualties of the rightward shift of the Overton window. Anything even slightly left, or centrist, seems “radically left” to those who’ve succumbed to it.
Recalling some faint memories of Bush post-911. Lot of things I thought were uncontroversial are now radically left. Like being anti-torture.
Someone here will remind me who made the following quote: “people would rather vote for a Republican, than a Democrat pretending to be a Republican.”
None of the choices would have been terrible. I was kind of hoping for Mark Kelly, only because I have a low opinion of American voters, and think they are shallow and dumb enough to be swayed by the he-man veteran-astronaut-gun owner aura that he projects. I think he would have pulled in more Republicans. But I’ll take Walz– I just hope this works.
The “legitimate” news is as responsible as anyone for Trump being elected – and while PZ (rightly) takes down the NY Times, The New Yorker (!!) tried to host an event headlined by Steve Bannon – after years of reporting on how evil he was. They canceled it after several other luminaries (including Jim Carrey, Patton Oswald, John Delaney, Judd Apatow) dropped out.
Walter Solomon @ 1
Recursive Rabbit @ 2
USA is the outlier.
Example: In Bavaria the conservative CSU has been in power since the Bundesrepublik was founded. On social issues – free school lunches, free college education and health care, mostly all the things Bernie Sanders is for, they have implemented it. It is not controversial.
The Swedish conservatives would not have had problems with Barack Obama, except for his use of military might abroad.
Before the ‘nasty party’ took over Britain the only industrialised english-speaking country resembling USA in callousness towards the poor was Australia.
It’s not just commercial media where advertisers are the customers, and you and I are the product.
I’ve mentioned it before but don’t mind repeating: I remember a “Politics Monday” segment on PBS Newshour, back when Bernie Sanders was still a viable candidate for the Democratic nomination, in which Amy Walter could hardly construct a simple declarative sentence without some version of “electable” in it. It wasn’t even subtle. Indeed, I’d describe it as shameless.
The phrase, “self-fulfilling prophecy,” comes easily to mind.
…I expressed cautious optimism that she had learned from her disastrous 2020 campaign…
Yeah, that was a disaster all right — she didn’t win by enough!
…which revolved around placating left-wing activists by adopting highly unpopular issue positions.
Such as…? Does he give any examples of “unpopular issue positions?”
Matt G: The quote I heard, from my mom and several of her friends, was “If you run a Republican against a Republican, the Republican will win.”
here is some “minnesota nice” for republican pundits and candidates:
go fuck yourself.
Gee… no one in the MSM suggests the Republicans turn left.
@9, you meant to say:
go fuck yourself, please.
birgerjohansson @6
I’m willing to bet that has a lot to do with their indigenous population being largely poor.
A good argument can be made that the US would be a lot closer to Western Europe domestically if not for the racists worrying that non-whites would benefit from such a system.
Matt G @ # 3: … who made the following quote: “people would rather vote for a Republican, than a Democrat pretending to be a Republican”?
I’ve always seen this attributed to Harry Truman, and a web search agrees (but none of the quote sites cited provides a source*):
*(quoteinvestigator.com is the only such site I’ve found that digs up origins and contexts, but they don’t have this one.)
Nate Silver’s take is just bizarre. He claims the choice of Walz was “triangulation”, but doesn’t justify this in any way, except by saying Walz “will likely read as being pretty moderate to voters, having a fairly centrist track record as a member of Congress”. I somehow doubt many voters will be studying Walz’s voting record in Congress. He says Gretchen Whitmer should have been considered – but IIRC, she ruled herself out early on. But he really wanted Shapiro:
In fact, the reasons for not picking Shapiro are extremely good. His insults and lies aimed at pro-Palestinian demonstrators alone would have immediately ended the unusual period of Democratic “array”, but as the link details, there is plenty more, which will have come out in the vetting. Really, since Walz (and for that matter Kelly) meet the other criteria he lists, Silver’s key argument is that Shapiro would have helped to win Pennsylvania – but the consensus among psephologists seems to be that choice of running mate last made a real difference in the running mate’s home state in 1960, when Johnson delivered Texas for Kennedy.
As for Chait, he’s basically saying Harris should “Reach out to the centre” rather than “Fire up the base”. But that’s because he’s a right-winger who likes to believe he’s a sensible, realistic centrist. The extraordinary thing about Harris’s campaign is the huge surge of relief and enthusiasm that followed Biden’s withdrawal, which has given her real momentum, including large numbers of volunteers as well as a lot of money from small-scale donations. So in purely strategic terms it makes much more sense to ride that wave by choosing a running mate who will help in keeping the base fired up – keeping the coalition of youth/minorities/progressives/unions together – and focus on using that money and those volunteers to get that vote out – than to try to appeal to those who: “don’t like Donald Trump but worry Harris is too liberal.” Who the fuck are these people? If the alternative to Harris was George H.W. Bush or even Reagan, I could understand there being soggy centrists who might just be snagged by naming a right-wing running mate, but Trump is trumpeting his intention to establish a personal-dictatorship-cum-theocracy, and surely, by now, most people have decided whether they like that idea or not. I know it’s almost impossible to over-estimate the stupidity of considerable portions of the electorate, but how many people who are likely to vote at all are still wavering between Trump and Harris, rather than between one of the two and not voting at all out of sheer disgust with the choice offered – of whom there were many on the left when Biden was the alternative to Trump on offer? Getting as many of those people as possible off the couch and into the polling booth – and once there, getting them to keep voting Democratic all the way down the ballot sheet – is Harris’s obvious strategy, and wonder of wonders, she seems to have twigged it.
BTW, I consider voting third party – at least in the presidential contest in any state which could conceivably go either way – to be equivalent to not voting.
KG @ # 15: … I consider voting third party – at least in the presidential contest in any state which could conceivably go either way – to be equivalent to not voting.
That’s the catch – only about 6 or 8 states have much possibility that way. A few more, depending on individual candidates, may have meaningful Senate races, as will congressional districts in the low dozens. Local elections here and there may offer decent opportunities, but relatively few US citizens follow “downballot” politics to that depth, and the collapse/consolidation of area newspapers and broadcasters keeps the potentially curious from finding out much. Then we have to factor in gerrymandering, voter suppression, the influence of Big Money, the shrinkage of labor unions and community organizations in general, etc, etc…
American democracy was essentially hollowed out well before Trump’s whimsical publicity stunt of 2015-16.
So Chait wants Harris and Walz to move left, to join center-leftists like Bernie Sanders. That would be a great move for the Democrats, to end their far-to-the-right journey since 1992. I applaud. :)
Genocide-supporting Shapiro would have badly split Democratic voters. I will never vote for anyone who engages in or supports genocide, such as the evil Joe Biden. For the record, thanks to the disastrous electoral college, my vote for president won’t count as I’m in a very red state. But even if I were in a swing state, I would never vote for Biden under any circumstances, and likewise I would never vote for a ticket that included Shapiro or anyone else who was pro-genocide.
Kg at 14:
“So in purely strategic terms it makes much more sense to ride that wave by choosing a running mate who will help in keeping the base fired up – keeping the coalition of youth/minorities/progressives/unions together – and focus on using that money and those volunteers to get that vote out – than to try to appeal to those who: “don’t like Donald Trump but worry Harris is too liberal.” Who the fuck are these people?”
I said pretty much that to my wife this morning, after watching pundits who yesterday thought Walz was a bad choice. (To give several of them credit, they changed their tune once they both heard about and saw him). How the hell can anyone at this point think anyone should try to take voters away from Trump? Any that are still with him long ago left the state of reality and entered cultland.
I’ve never been happier to be wrong: Biden leaving the race has been a great thing. These idiots in the media who think they know what they’re talking about may help undermine the momentum. And lying, fascist ratfuckers will do their best to do whatever they can to knock them down*, but it’s going to be whole lot harder for these fools than I had thought.
Vance today saying Walz was guilty of ‘stolen valor’ has not gone down well, partially because it’s utter bullshit, but also because bone spurs.
The bit he’s leaving out is that by “unpopular” he doesn’t mean unpopular with the voting public; he means unpopular with the C-suite suits who pay his salary.
@17 Wouldn’t be as sure of your vote not counting. While every member of Trump’s base who either has their lips glued to one of his allies ass, or only watches right wing media (or rather reads it online, since even where I am the true Trumpers are now claiming Fox is anti-conservative due to many of its own staff saying things on air that is off script), but among literally anyone that either has, does, or can be convinced, to look closer at the crap Trump has said, or done, or his VP pick has, he is losing ground fast. Heck, when is the last f-ing time that that you saw a group pop up openly calling itself conservative, but explicitly supporting the liberal candidate? Likely never, right? Your “very red” area might turn a very bruised purple color this election.
That said… I kind of despair myself, not just over the number of absolute fools I am surrounded by, but by the utter and complete lack of interest on the part of local Dems to even so much as rent a booth at the events we have here and even try to make a case for their side. Think about it a moment – how the F is anything supposed to ever change in “red areas” if no one will even try to challenge the bullshit, at all?