Team Technocrat vs. Team Woke
The election did not repudiate either wing of the Democratic Party
The government should prioritize the interests of normal people over those of people who engage in antisocial conduct….
We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin.
He has several other principles that to the campus left would seem right-coded.1
Matt represents one wing of the Democratic Party. Call it Team Technocrat. The other wing is Team Woke, if you will.
One thing that happens after a party loses an election is that the party’s main wings start jockeying for power. That is what I see Matt doing here. He is assuming that Team Woke should feel particularly chastened by the Democrats’ defeat in the election. To him, it makes sense to move away from the more narrowly left-wing views of the party in order to broaden its coalition.
I do not have a comparable quote from Team Woke dissing Team Technocrat, but I imagine I could find one. I think that Team Woke is too numerous and too passionate to allow the Democrats to just throw them under the bus. The Republicans have been able to throw libertarians under the bus, but that is because the libertarian faction is insignificant. “You could throw them under a minivan,” as one of my friends joked.
A lot of people would like to regard the election as a significant defeat for Team Woke. I wish that were true. But I think that the significance of this election is being over-rated. And I am wary of the emotional appeal of social justice activism. Meanwhile, 2028 is a long way away, and there will undoubtedly be events that occur between now and then that take us off of what prognosticators regard as a deterministic path today.
Just to be clear, I am not a Democrat. I am not rooting for the Democrats. I just think that it is unrealistic to count them out on the basis of this one election.
Elections are decided by voters who are not heavily committed to one party or the other. Call these the Swing Voters. People who write about politics, and people who read a lot about politics, are usually not Swing Voters. They (we) are typically partisan in some way. So most commentators, including me, are on thin ice when we try to speculate on the thought process of Swing Voters. And that means we are on thin ice when we try to interpret elections. I try not to over-interpret an election.
In hindsight, my theory of the Swing Voters in2024 is that they never saw Kamala Harris as a rightful candidate. In the eyes of that cohort, she never reached the threshold of legitimacy. This was due to the way that she got inserted into the ballot and also to the approach adopted by her campaign.
Imagine that just before the World Series the Yankees had been stranded somewhere and could not play. Suppose that in order to have a World Series, the league commissioner substituted in the Toronto Blue Jays. The fans would not have accepted this. “The Blue Jays didn’t even make the playoffs!” they would complain, and they would tune out the Series.
I think that was the reaction to Kamala Harris. The Swing Voters never could see her as a real candidate for President. To them, she might as well have been RFK, Jr. So they gravitated toward the only candidate who seemed to belong on the ballot.
The campaign strategy that Harris followed was the opposite of what was needed in order to establish her credibility with Swing Voters. She needed to be very forward, “flooding the zone” with media appearances of all kinds. She had to campaign aggressively and take risks in order to get to a threshold level where Swing voters would be able to regard her plausibly as President. Instead, her strategy for the most part was to lie low. Under the circumstances, this effectively conceded the Swing Voters to Mr. Trump.
If Ms. Harris had won the election, I would be saying right now that she only has a mandate to be someone other than Donald Trump. Similarly, I would downplay the notion that Mr. Trump and the Republicans enjoy any substantive mandate.
I don’t think that either Team Technocrat or Team Woke needs to win the intraparty power struggle in order for the Democrats to be competitive in 2028. All that they need is to send a candidate to the World Series who has earned that position by going through the playoffs.
He put these in an image:
It depends on what people do. If Trump is effective governing people who voted for him may make it a habit. If he's not they won't.
The same could have been said of Biden in 2020.
The most encouraging sign in the election is that Hispanics and young people in TX/FL have swung hard to the right. I don't think Hispanics nationwide will ever get over 50% R or close to it (because in much of the country they are assimilating to a more leftist local culture), but in these particular strong conservative cultures they are assimilating more towards that culture. An effective Trump term might win them over longer term, which would mean the ultimate progressive goal of flipping Texas blue would be put off at least a generation.
This is especially important because these are the engines of growth in our economy and one of the few places where the GOP is culturally and electorally successful in the big cities (Trump won Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Dallas/Fort Worth metro area. He was competitive in San Antonio and Houston).
As to Yglesias, it's one thing to talk about defeating the woke wing, it's another to do it. A simple metric for me would be when CA/NY start building the same number of houses per capita as the sunbelt. Or internal migration stops fleeing these blue cities. So far I'm not seeing it. Substack posts and obscure Sacramento bills aren't results on the ground in and of themselves.
Very much agreed. I've seen some very triumphant statements from some ordinarily sharp people essentially saying "this election was a repudiated of everything I don't like about the Democratic Party" and to me that seems like clear confirmation bias. Harris' candidacy was the natural consequence of DEI policies: selected for a prime position due to her ethnicity more than any merit, and then drastically underperformed to the surprise of no one. The irony here is that Trump you could also say won not on his own merit, but mainly because of the failures of his opponents. I would characterize the election as a practical failure of progressive identity politics, not necessarily a victory for Trumpist populism. It's going to take more than one lost election for Democrats to bail on identity politics, though.