2024 WASN'T PERMANENT AND 2025 WON'T BE PERMANENT EITHER

This morning, The New York Times posted a conversation between Ezra Klein and his editor, Aaron Retica. I wondered whether Klein would be chastened by the fact that Tuesday's election results didn't match up with his recent doomsaying about Democrats. While Klein acknowledges the magnitude of the Democratic wins, he's sticking with his theory that Democrats need to do more to regain the voters they've lost. He cites a fellow pundit's math:

I don’t think the question of what you would need to do to win an election in Ohio, Florida and Iowa is answered yet. Matt Yglesias made this point where he says: If you look at how Sherrill and Spanberger ran and how Harris ran, they both ran about five points ahead of her.

And if you just say: OK, what that tells us is that the off-cycle electorate right now — and this would be a big extrapolation, but just for the sake of argument — is plus-five Democratic compared to 2024. That is almost certainly enough to win you the House, but it is only maybe enough to win you Ohio. And it is not enough to win you Iowa, Alaska and places like that.

When I read that, I thought Klein was cooking the books -- Kamala Harris won both New Jersey and Virginia by just under six points, while Abigail's Spanberger's lead in the Virginia governor's race is 14.4%. And Mikie Sherrill's lead in New Jersey is 13.4%. But Yglesias was talking about percentage of the vote, not margin of victory. On Wednesday, he wrote:

Harris got 52 percent in Virginia versus a projected 57 percent for Spanberger. Harris got 44 percent in Ohio and 43 percent in Iowa. If you add five to those numbers, Democrats maybe win Ohio and still almost certainly lose Iowa. And this is the Senate problem in a nutshell: a really strong national climate isn’t good enough.

That math, regrettably, makes sense. If you add five points to a sub-45% Democratic vote percentage, you don't get enough to win the state. In 2024, an additional five points would have given Harris a victory in the popular vote and in the Electoral College -- she would have won all seven swing states -- but Senate races are tougher. John Cornyn's last opponent, M.J. Hegar, got 43.87% of the vote in 2020. The #2 finisher in Alaska the last time Dan Sullivan ran got 41.19% of the vote. Add five points and it's still not enough to win.

But just as 2024's apparent realignment in favor of the GOP proved to be a mirage, 2025 won't last forever either.

Some of the changes over the next year could favor the GOP -- for instance, the government won't be shut down a year from now (probably!). On the other hand, you have to ask youself: Does it really seem possible that America will be better off in 2026 than it is now? An America in which job numbers suggest we're heading for a recession while the markets seem to be headed for a AI-bubble crash?

I know that the Supreme Court's hostility toward President Trump's tariffs is a hopeful sign, but you really need to read this New York Times story (gift link), which makes clear that the Court is ruling on one method of imposing tariffs while Trump has many more ways of imposing them.

Multiple trade authorities exist that would allow the president to impose tariffs that are not subject to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, the law at issue in the Supreme Court case....

Some of those provisions are in use today, while others are more obscure. Together, they could be employed to impose tariffs on foreign countries or products, or even the entire globe. They could also be used to reinforce the trade deals that Mr. Trump has negotiated globally, which are based on tariffs issued under the IEEPA authority.

After reading the article, ou might not be ready to take a pop quiz on all the laws Trump can use, but you'll be persuaded that he will use them, and they'll keep prices high.

Will Trump stop militarizing cities and brutalizing their residents? No. Will he stop using the presidency to indulge his own sense of grandiosity? No. Will he stop threatening wars? No -- we might be in a war (or more than one) a year from now.

Among the lessons we learned on Tuesday were these two: Trump's horrible presidency can drive anti-Trump voters to the polls in large numbers and, at least so far, Trump isn't trying to interfere with the vote. The election monitors we were told the Department of Justice was sending to California and New Jersey didn't prevent fair elections in those states. I think Trump genuinely believes he's massively popular and the public is on his side, and that's prevented him from the kind of authoritarian election tampering we all fear. Will that still be the case next year? I don't know -- but it's possible that Trump's ego will be what saves us from a serious shutdown of democracy.

Democrats already have Senate candidates who are beating Republicans in red states in some early polling. Former governor Roy Cooper leads in every poll of the 2026 North Carolina Senate race. In the most recent Senate poll in Ohio, Sherrod Brown beats incumbent Jon Husted. A recent poll shows Mary Peltola beating Dan Sullivan in Alaska. And while it's a long shot, a couple of polls show Democratic contenders beating Republican candidates in Texas.

Democrats need good candidates and good messaging in 2026. But Trump might continue to make their job easier -- and might not use his authoritarian muscle to deprive them of the chance to win.

WHOOPS! NEVER MIND.

I'm pleased that the mainstream media is acknowledging the significance of the Democratic Party's victories on Tuesday. I'm pleased, for instance, that Nate Cohn of The New York Times is noting that the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia appear to have flipped 7% of Trump voters, based on exit poll data. I'm pleased that Hispanic voters' return to the Democratic Party is being widely acknowledged. I'm pleased that some media outlets are acknowledging that the wins weren't limited to blue states and cities.

But I'd like an acknowledgment that the same mainstream media was wrong when it was telling us just before the elections that the Democratic Party couldn't possibly dig itself out of the deep hole it was in without massive policy and messaging changes. Just eight days before the election, we were all reading that Semafor story headlined "Left-Wing Ideas Have Wrecked Democrats’ Brand, New Report Warns." Wrecked! The brand was wrecked! And yet a "wrecked" party romped a little more than a week after that story appeared. It was only a few weeks after a series of Ezra Klein interviews in which he monomaniacally focused on the Democrats' apparent electability crisis, which included a discussion with Ta-Nehisi Coates that should have been about Charlie Kirk's bigotry but was instead hijacked by Klein so he could obsess over the notion that Democrats must jettison some liberal policy positions in order to win elections. Will Klein admit that he was wrong about the hopelessness of Democrats' position? Will the rest of the media acknowledge that maybe young men and Hispanic men weren't lost to the GOP forever when Trump won in 2024? Will they admit that maybe Republicans also have policy positions that make them vulnerable, and that this is particularly a problem when they're in charge, as they are nationwide and in Virginia?

I made some mistakes. I thought the left-centrism of Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia would be uninspiring and would lead to close gubernatorial races in those states. I was wrong about that. But I've always assumed that discontent within the Democratic Party could be coming from a lot of people who'll turn out for the party regardless. I wasn't surprised when I read about an NBC poll conducted just before Election Day in which only 28% of voters said they had a positive view of Democrats, but Democrats had a 7-point lead in enthusiasm about voting in the 2026 midterms, comparable to the 9-point lead they had a year before the very successful 2018 midterms.

The press should have acknowledged that the results of the 2024 election might not be signs of a permanent voter realignment, that grumbling about Democrats might be accompanied by votes for Democrats, and that Republicans are capable of alienating voters, too. Every "Democrats are doomed" story should have come with the caveat that maybe Democrats weren't doomed.

Now we know they weren't, but the people who said they weren't won't own up to their mistakes.

TRUMP GAVE CARROTS TO ARGENTINA. MILEI WON. HE GAVE STICKS TO DEMOCRATIC STATES AND CITIES. DEMOCRATS WON.

Last month, just before an Argentinian election that MAGA-esque president Javier Milei's party was expected to lose, President Trump offered the country $20 billion in aid and an additional $20 billion currency swap, with a threat to withhold the money if Milei's party lost. Milei's party won.

So what carrots did Trump extend to the Democratic-leaning cities and states that held elections yesterday? There weren't any -- only sticks. Trump's message to New York City, New Jersey, Virginia, and California was what the young Michael Corleone said to Senator Geary:



New York got threats of a federal funding freeze and a military occupation. California has already seen a military occupation of its largest city. Virginia has seen massive layoffs of federal workers and paychecks withheld from those who are still employed. New Jersey saw the termination of a much-needed rail project that would connect the states' commuters to New York City.

And everyone got higher prices, as well as, in Jamelle Bouie's words,

soldiers on the streets, masked agents leading violent immigration raids, arbitrary tariffs, new conflicts abroad, dictatorial aspirations, endless chaos and a president more interested in taking a wrecking ball to the White House to build his garish ballroom than delivering anything of value to the public.

Some of this is incompetence -- Trump seems to have genuinely believed that he was capable of ushering in an economic Golden Age based on his cockamamie theories about tariffs. Some of it is his narcissistic grandiosity, which is encouraged by the right-wing media he eagerly consumes: He thought that, like his base, the rest of us would delight in his self-indulgent Gatsby party and destruction of the East Wing to build a ballroom reportedly funded by bribes disguised as construction contributions.

But to a large extent, Trump and his party behaved the way they did in the run-up to the election because they hate Democrats. They hate the left, they hate liberalism, they hate any group they identify with Democrats -- Blacks, Hispanics, people of non-European descent, immigrants, LGBTQ people, feminists, librarians, teachers, professors, anyone from Hollywood or the mainstream media -- and they've simply stopped trying to govern as if this is one country that includes groups they despise as full citizens. Not all of them make pronouncements in obscure journals about how evil we are and how necessary our destruction is, like this one from Charles Haywood, a wealthy right-wing donor and movement figure:

What is our end? That is easy — winning. What is the winning condition? It is the total, permanent defeat of the Left, of the ideology at the heart of the Enlightenment, with its two core principles of total emancipation from all bonds not continuously chosen, and of total forced equality of all people. When this defeat is accomplished, Right principles, those based in reality and recognizing the nature of man, his limitations, and his capabilities, can again become ascendant.

Winning does not mean electoral victory such that Right principles may be voted into law, and then nullified or voted out again. It means the total, permanent elimination of all Left power, and, even more importantly, the total discrediting, both on a moral and practical basis, of all Left ideology. What is Left should be seen for what it is, evil, and it should be seen as not only destructive in practice, but laughable, the ideology of losers and idiots, or at most something from the discredited past, viewed with vague curiosity, as the cult of Mithras is today.

On Fox News this past summer, Stephen Miller put it more simply:

“The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization."

This has been the message of the right-wing media for decades: that there are heroes and villains in our culture, and all the heroes are Republicans in good standing (or their allies overseas), while the villains are ... everyone else.

Now we have a Republican Party openly governing according to this worldview. Trump unabashedly attacks places and institutions identified as Democratic -- and then he's surprised when voters who aren't Republican go to the polls to reject more of the same.

Democrats had a message of affordability that came in both center-left and progressive-left varieties; they won elections both ways. Democrats won back groups who, according to hand-wringing pundits and consultants, were said to be permanently lost to the party after the 2024 elections -- including young voters and Hispanics. Punchbowl News notes:

Two heavily Latino counties in New Jersey that Trump won in 2024 swung back to the left. [New Jersey governor-elect Mikie] Sherrill flipped Passaic and Cumberland counties and improved [Kamala] Harris’ margin in Hudson County by a double-digit advantage. That’s an early sign for Democrats that Trump’s inroads with Latino voters may not last in the face of ICE’s national immigration raids. That has huge implications for the battle for the House.

And the issue that was supposed to mean instant death for Democrats -- the alleged trans menance -- utterly failed Republicans. We're told that "Republicans in the Virginia race have dedicated 57 percent of all their paid media campaigning toward transgender-related issues," but Winsome Earle-Sears lost the governor's race by double digits because that wasn't a key issue for voters.

Hard to overstate lack of salience of trans issue in new Washington Post/Schar poll of Virginia It actually went down in importance since their last poll It is top concern of 3% of voters This is after months of ads and posts about it Economy top concern at 18%

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— Sam Shirazi (@samshirazi.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 11:55 AM

The Democrats who won yesterday might struggle to deliver real change, but at least they want to make voters' lives better. It's clear now that Republicans hate a large portion of the electorate and don't want to make their lives better -- and are so focused on consolidating power that they're not even trying to make the lives of anyone else (except themselves and their friends) better.

THE NEW YORK POST THINKS THE NAZI FIGHT IN THE GOP IS ALARMING. RESPONSE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯?

There's a Nazi crisis in the GOP, and the New York Post is taking it seriously:

One of the largest conservative think tanks in Washington, DC, has been roiled by its president’s embrace of Tucker Carlson after the conservative podcaster hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his show, prompting an outcry from senior staff.

Internal chats reviewed by The Post show high-ranking members of the Heritage Foundation told each other privately how “embarrassed” and “disgusted” they were by Kevin Roberts’ “ridiculous” decision to come to Carlson’s defense over the sitdown with Fuentes....

In Carlson’s two-hour interview, which has racked up more than 17 million views on X, Fuentes called himself “a fan” of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and denounced the influence of “organized Jewry” in US politics, while Carlson accused American Christians who support the state of Israel of being heretics with a “brain virus.”

Roberts, 51, released a video statement Oct. 30, three days after the Carlson-Fuentes interview was posted, condemning efforts by movement conservatives aimed at “canceling our own people.” ...

The ripple effect from Roberts’ statement has gone beyond staff issues, with sources close to the think tank saying that it has been “hemorrhaging” evangelical Christian and Jewish contributors....

We're told that Princeton's Robert P. George, an influential Heritage board member, has tried to oust Kevin Roberts as president.

But the take on this story at The New York Times is: Republican officeholders reassure us that there's nothing to see here.

Republican lawmakers and influencers continued on Monday to distance themselves from Tucker Carlson after his sympathetic interview with the prominent white supremacist Nick Fuentes....

On Capitol Hill, Republicans were quick to disavow antisemitism and declare unbending support for Israel....

“There’s already the Democratic Party that is anti-Israel, and is OK with antisemitism,” Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, said in an interview. “We’ve got to be very clear we don’t support antisemitism and we do support Israel.” ...

“I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said over the weekend....

For years, the Republican Party has embraced greater and greater degrees of extremism, but the press has continued to turn to soft-spoken Republican Senate and House leaders who reassure the journalistic establishment that the party is full of fine, moderate fellows who'd never do anything out of bounds. That's worked for so long that we now have a White House full of extremist freaks tearing away at the foundations of our democracy and the Republican Party still isn't seen as significantly more extreme than the Democratic Party.

The Times story briefly mentions the fact that the rot extends to the vice president's office, then drops that subject quickly.

When a cache of leaked antisemitic, misogynistic and other bigoted texts that circulated among a group of Republican operatives recently surfaced, Vice President JD Vance ridiculed the outraged reaction as “pearl clutching.”

But others, including Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, have argued that Republicans must rid their movement of such viewpoints. Mr. Cruz has positioned himself as one of the party’s loudest voices denouncing antisemitism and appeared especially eager for a hand-to-hand fight with Mr. Carlson.

Vance is one blocked presidential artery away from the Oval Office. Cruz isn't. But the story never mentions Vance again.

And there appears to be nothing in the Times about the racist reaction to this innocuous tweet:

Happy Halloween! 🎃 pic.twitter.com/e8PeD0SXQx

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) October 31, 2025

Get out of our country, you scamming piece of shit.

— painmute (@painmute) November 3, 2025

holy shit, you dressed them up as the scariest thing I can imagine, H1B visa workers!

— TardFax (@Tard_Fax) October 31, 2025

Politely

Go back

Your making my white country unrecognizable

There are also MILLIONS of Indians suffering back at your home
That need you BADLY to fix their land and save them

— tony4America (@Tony4_America) November 1, 2025

This is not an isolated incident:

During the recent Diwali period, FBI Director Kash Patel ... posted on X: “Happy Diwali — celebrating the Festival of Lights around the world, as good triumphs over evil.”

Among the many hateful comments he received were:

* “Reject this false religion’s Diwali nonsense. Hinduism is idolatry, not truth.”

* "Dude we are a Christian nation. Assimilate or leave.”

* And a popular comment, whose visibility has been limited by X: “I’ve seen that one. Is that the festival where they all s**t in the street?”

There was at least one fecal response to Ramaswamy's tweet as well:

Is this before or after you bathe in shit? 😂😂😂

Kiddingggg

— John Quigg II (@CatofFable) November 3, 2025

But to the mainstream media, this racism doesn't exist. Republican rank-and-file voters are Carhartt-wearing Real Americans who drive pickup trucks and have dirt under their fingernails from long days of honest labor. They're noble -- and Democratic voters aren't.

Nick Fuentes could be the future of the GOP. Even if he isn't, opposition to religious pluralism probably is the future, even if many non-Christians are potential Republican voters (or actual Republican candidates or top aides). But the mainstream press might continue to tell us that everything is fine.

ALL THE PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT AS GOOD-LOOKING AS DONALD TRUMP, ACCORDING TO DONALD TRUMP

That was a weird moment in Donald Trump's 60 Minutes interview:

In a wide-ranging interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" that aired Nov. 2 ... Norah O'Donnell asked Trump what he thought of comparisons to [Zohran] Mamdani, 34, as a left-wing version of the 79-year-old Republican president. They are both seen as charismatic leaders breaking old rules.

"Well, I think I'm a much better looking person than him," Trump responded.

Some have called Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic socialist front-runner for New York City mayor, a left-wing version of President Trump.

"I think I'm a much better looking person than him," says Trump, after calling Mamdani a "communist." pic.twitter.com/p9FDWNcoGs

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 2, 2025

Trump does this a lot. In August of last year, Trump said at a campaign appearance that he was better-looking than Kamala Harris.

Trump then goes after a “Ronald Reagan speechwriter,” presumptively Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. Noonan has written about Harris’s appearance in recent weeks, saying that, “Her beauty, plus the social warmth that all who have known her over the years speak of, combines to produce: radiance.”

“She said one thing that got me,” Trump began, seemingly talking about Noonan’s columns. “She said Kamala has one big advantage, she’s a very beautiful woman. She’s a beautiful woman.” The crowd boos.

“But I say that I’m much better looking than her. Much better. Much better. I’m a better looking person than Kamala,” Trump continued, to cheers.

He also said it to Elon Musk:

... Trump claimed he was "better looking" than the vice president, after previously calling her "beautiful," during a conversation with Elon Musk last week.

"Don't ever call a woman beautiful, because that'll be the end of your political career, please." Trump began, later going on to say, "But I say that I am much better looking. I'm a better-looking person than Kamala."

"They said, 'No, her biggest advantage is that she's a beautiful woman.' I'm going, huh? I never thought of that. I'm better looking than she is."

In 2018, during Democrat Conor Lamb's successful campaign in a special House election in Pennsylvania, Trump said this about Lamb at a campaign appearance for his opponent, Rick Saccone:

"And Conor Lamb, Lamb the Sham, right? Lamb the Sham. He's trying to act like a Republican, so he gets—He won't give me one vote," Trump said. "Look, I don't know him. He looks like a nice guy. I hear he's nice looking. I think I'm better looking than him. I do. I do. I do, and he's slightly younger than me...."

In November 2015, Trump said he was better looking than one of his opponents in the Republican presidential primaries, Marco Rubio.

Trump made the comments on Bloomberg Television's "With All Due Respect," referencing the media fawning over Rubio, who had a successful performance at last week's Republican debate.

"I watched someone on [MSNBC's 'Morning Joe'] this morning...He's fawning over him. He says how handsome he is," Trump said.

"I don’t know, I think I’m better looking than he is."

And Trump said this, in the third person, about billionaire Mark Cuban, a frequent Trump critic:

Sorry folks, but Donald Trump is far richer and much better looking than dopey @mcuban!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 19, 2013

This message was even worked into a staged shouting match between Trump and World Wrestling's Vince McMahon in 2007:

"I'm taller than you, I'm better looking than you—and I will kick your ass!"

Trump does a lot of self-soothing on the subject of his looks. He likes telling himself he's handsome:

"@Matt_Cad: @realDonaldTrump Why do so many people despise you?" Because I am so handsome!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2013

And he likes it when other people (or bots) call him handsome.

"@HMunjal: You're one of the most educated, handsome and sophisticated men that I know of. Men should aspire to be like you." Thank you!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2013

"@m_i_c_h_a_e_l_m: @realDonaldTrump you are a very handsome man" I know, but the haters and losers never give me credit for that! Too bad.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 6, 2013

"@WeLoveTheDonald @DonaldJTrumpJr @realDonaldTrump @EricTrump Such handsome men! Great pic!" Thank you.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 4, 2015

In 2018, Annie Karni reported:

Tall and broad-shouldered, Trump sees himself as a leading man and has told friends in recent years: “Can you believe I’m better looking in my 70s than when I was 35.”

Occasionally he dials it down, saying only that he once was handsome:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Independent (@the.independent)

A thought I had while reading the transcript of Trump's 60 Minutes interview is that self-soothing is how Trump gets through the day, and it's also how the Republican Party maintains its grip on its voter base. Trump continually tells himself that he's the best:

I rebuilt the military during my first term. My first term was a tremendous success. We had the greatest economy in the history of our country.

But my second term is blowing it away. It's blowing it away when you look at the numbers, the stock market, the jobs. Look at the job numbers, how good they've been. And, again, I have costs down.

And his enemies are evil:

Joe Biden was the worst president in the history of our country. We had the worst inflation, we had the worst of everything....

If [Democrats] get into power and someday I guess they will. Who knows? It's hard to believe when they have men in women's sports, open borders, open everything, a transgender for everyone....

... from the standpoint of winning is, they have the worst policy of-- it's hard to believe. Think of it. Open borders, men playing in women's sports, transgender for everybody.

Trump's self-soothing habit and the right-wing propaganda machine work well together because they work the same way: At every point where a reasonable person might say, Maybe this is a mistake and we should take a different course, the response is a series of hyperbolic claims of brilliance, accompanied by equally hyperbolic claims of the calamity that would result from abandoning the current course.

America sucks right now, and most Americans understand that. Trump's poll numbers are beginning to plummet. A majority of Americans think we're on the wrong track. But Trump soothes himself, and the GOP base is soothed with him, as the Republican propaganda operation repeats Trump's claims as fact or allows them to stand unchallenged, as 60 Minutes largely did last night,

JUST STOP, DEMOCRATS -- YOU'VE DONE ENOUGH 2024 ELECTION POST-MORTEMS

Here's a headline that appeared at Politico this morning:

Gosh, where could they have possibly gotten that impression?

I'll say it again: Democrats, if you don't want voters to think your party is "weak and woke," stop saying that it's "weak and woke" every time there's a microphone in your face. If voters have a bad impression of your party, maybe you're the problem.

This is a new 2024 post-mortem:

The nine-month, 21-state research project is ... aimed at solving the Democratic Party’s electoral challenges after their sweeping losses in 2024. It was funded by Democracy Matters, a nonprofit aligned with flagship Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, and backed by months of polling, dozens of focus groups and message testing.

It's not to be confused with the 2024 post-mortem we were all talking about last week:

Democrats have badly weakened their party with left-leaning ideas and rhetoric, growing only with self-described “white liberals” while losing ground with other voters, according to a new center-left group’s report....

The group, called Welcome, consulted hundreds of thousands of voters over six months for its broad findings....

Democrats need to stop doing so many damn post-mortems, and they need to stop publicly proclaiming that the party is in trouble. It would help if every Democrat ran on a set of serious, bold ideas that would improve people's lives, which is the approach Zohran Mamdani is winning on. The ideas don't need to be the same all over the country, but they shouldn't be the beveled, focus-group-tested mush that's likely to result from all these post-mortems.

On other issues, they could try being proud of themselves, rather than ashamed. Both of the post-mortems I've cited say that the issue of trans scholastic athletes is seriously hurting Democrats, even though the Democrat listed in the Welcome report as having the most impressive "performance relative to expectations in [his] most recent election," Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, has won two statewide elections while remaining supportive of trans athletes. What would happen if more Democrats refused to flinch -- or made the GOP's obsession with trans people the issue? I love what Don Scott, Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, says here about Winsome Earle-Sears, the trans-obsessed GOP candidate for governor in his state:

Scott: Her whole race is about policing bathrooms. They’re the pee-and-poop caucus. That’s all they do—they police where kids are going to the bathroom. They’re not worried about where kids are learning or what they’re getting out of school.

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 6:26 PM

Maybe you think that's not a message for general consumption. (Scott says this on a liberal podcast). But in the case of another issue on which Republicans are presumed to have an advantage -- crime -- why aren't Democrats talking the way Maryland governor Wes Moore does at the end of the following clip? I don't like the fact that in the middle of this clip Moore does what Democratic consultants tell all Democrats to do -- he uses the word "distraction" and pivots to kitchen-table issues -- but the end of this is straight fire:

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A post shared by Wes Moore (@iamwesmoore)

Moore says:

If [President Trump] really wants to address the issue of violent crime, he just needs to look at what we've done in the state of Maryland over the past two and a half years, where when I first became governor in 2022, Baltimore was averaging almost a murder a day. Now, the homicide rate in Baltimore is nearly a fifty-year low and we have watched how the state of Maryland has essentially helped to lead the country in drops in violent crime, in drops in non-fatal shootings, in drops in carjackings. So, if he truly wants to understand how to lower crime, he should pay attention to what we're doing in the state of Maryland. And I did it without ever having to once operationalize our National Guard to do municipal policing.

There have been crime declines in Democratic cities and states all over the country since 2020. If I were the Democrats, I'd be producing clips of mayors and governors across America making that point, showing safe neighborhoods, citing crime-drop statistics, and adding -- to the accompaniment of chaos scenes from Trump's occupations -- "and we did it without tanks in the streets or turning neighborhoods into war zones."

Republicans are vulnerable. Donald Trump's job approval is 41% in a new ABC/Washington Post poll, and his disapproval rating is 59%. His numbers are the same in a new CBS poll, and are 43%-55% in a new NBC poll. The Welcome report laments the fact that Democrats are increasingly seen as too liberal, while the percentage of voters who think Republicans are too conservative declined in recent years:

But look at the dot in the upper right corner of the Republican chart. That's where Republicans are now. So Democrats should treat Republicans as extremely out of touch.

These post-mortems lament the fact that Trump made inroads with Black, Hispanic, and young voters in 2024, while retaining his strength among non-college-educated voters, But look at the Post/ABC poll. Trump's approval-disapproval numbers among Blacks are 16%/84%. They're 34%/66% among Hispanics, 33%/66% among 18-to-29-year-olds, and 42%/59% among those who never attended college.

It's not November 2024 anymore. Democrats should stop acting as if it is.

ONLY DEMOCRATS HAVE AGENCY -- EXCEPT WHEN THEY WIN

You've probably heard of Murc's Law -- “the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.” Murc's Law implicitly says that Republicans aren't responsible for the policy choices they make -- they're simply responding to Democrats, who have all the power. Amanda Marcotte wrote this in 2022:

“Murc’s Law” [was] named after a commenter at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money who noticed years ago the habitual assumption among the punditry that Republican misbehavior can only be caused by Democrats. Do Republicans reject climate science? Must be because Democrats failed to persuade them! Did Republicans pass unpopular tax cuts for the rich? Must be that Democrats didn’t do enough to guide them to better choices! Do Republicans keep voting for lunatics and fascists? It must be the fault of Democrats for being mean to them! Even Donald Trump’s election was widely blamed on Democrats — who voted against him, to be clear — on the bizarre grounds that Barack Obama should have rolled over and just let Mitt Romney win in 2012.

But now Politico's Jonathan Martin tells us that Democrats aren't responsible for one thing in American politics: Democratic electoral success, including likely victories on Tuesday by Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, and Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey.

The mere fact of [Donald Trump's] election last year handed Democrats a powerful turnout lever in blue-leaning New Jersey and Virginia, but Trump has further undermined GOP hopes in the two states with his conduct....

There are his explicit actions: The DOGE layoffs and government shutdown reductions-in-force hit federal worker-heavy Virginia hard, and then he “terminated” funding for the Gateway Tunnel construction between New Jersey and New York. Both handed ad scripts that write themselves to the Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls.

Yet the more fundamental challenge Trump presents is ... his expectation of unwavering fealty.... Particularly in governor’s races, and particularly when your party is in the White House, Republicans running in blue states and Democrats competing in red states must take steps to appeal to independents and voters in the other party by separating themselves from the national brand, at least symbolically.

Nonetheless, Virginia’s Winsome Earle-Sears and New Jersey’s Jack Ciattarelli have embraced Trump in states he’s never won in three consecutive presidential elections.

There's some truth in Martin's argument that Trump makes it difficult for Republican candidates to challenge him -- but it's fascinating that at a time when Democrats are being castigated yet again by the political culture, particularly their own consultants, for (barely) losing the 2024 presidential election because of what are being called bad policy choices, likely victories by Democrats aren't being credited to the party's candidates and their policy choices. The political culture thinks Democrats were too associated with left-wing ideas in 2024 -- yet now when left-centrists Spanberger and Sherrill seem likely to win, they might get no credit for earning their own victories.

I'm reminded of the response to 2020 and 2024 presidential elections. In 2020, Joe Biden won an unprecedented 81 million votes, still the highest vote total in U.S. presidential history, and won the popular vote by four and a half points. He won the Electoral College 306-232. Yet a Google search for appearances of the phrase "biden has a mandate" from Election Day to Inauguration Day yields only 552 results. In 2024, Trump won the popular vote by one and a half points, and won fewer votes than Biden in 2020. He won the Electoral College 312-226. Yet if you search "trump has a mandate" from Election Day to Inauguration Day, you get 11,300 hits -- far more than for Biden four years earlier.

Maybe this wasn't true in the days of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, but there's a sense that Biden somehow stumbled into the presidency, with a glide path given to him by Trump. Subsequently, everything that went wrong in his presidency was his fault, and Democrats were collectively responsible for Kamala Harris's loss.

It looks as if Sherrill and Spanberger might not get get credit for winning this election, and won't be seen as having a mandate, even though Spanberger, at least, might win by double digits. I think it's because our political culture can never really believe that Democrats could be the normal ones, the ones with popular ideas, the ones whose values align with voters' values.

Democrats can alienate, but they can't persuade. Maybe we should call that Steve M.'s law.