How I think about politics
Not like most people do
Quick note: there was obviously big news on Sunday. Biden announced he won’t be running for reelection. He made the right choice and instantly Democrats have gone from being demoralized to insanely energized. It may be a sugar high or may be longer lasting, we just don’t know yet. Kamala Harris will be the nominee as she has racked up all the endorsements and delegates. All other potential challengers have endorsed her. I will have plenty to say about all that and more over the weekend. For now, you all can enjoy what I was planning on putting out on Sunday before the news broke.
____________________________________________________________________________
At the end of my last two pieces, I said that I thought Biden would drop out because he cares about his party and country. That idea gets at the core of how I think about politics and I’m going to try to explain it here. The way I look at politics is very different from how most others do.
Most people don’t follow politics at all. To the extent they do, it’s presidential elections that they’re most familiar with. Most people don’t vote in midterms and other non-presidential elections.
For those who take part in protests or join political groups, most tend to do it because they want to feel like they’re a part of something, whatever that something is. For many who follow politics obsessively online, it’s all about vibes. Most people like that follow politics as a hobby and are interested in scoring points, “owning” the other side, getting mad over little things and arguing for its own sake. It’s purely performative.
I’m very different. I see politics as a way to accomplish substantive things that I think are good policy and will make the country a better place and improve peoples’ lives. I care about elections and write about it plenty, but the end goal of politics is not to get elected. Getting elected is necessary and I love winning as much as the next person, but it’s only the beginning.
An example of how I see politics is what I wrote about recently regarding legislation Congress passed and Biden has since signed that boosts smaller nuclear reactors. It had overwhelming bipartisan support and will be helpful for revitalizing nuclear power, a critical part of the energy transition. It got almost no media coverage, will influence zero votes in November and won’t even be known about by more than .1% of the population. That’s okay in my view because it passed and will do good things, which is what counts.
I care about legislation passing and being implemented effectively. I give credit to the members of Congress (or state or local legislatures) who worked to get it done and the president (or governor or local official) who signed it. I give credit, too, to the staffers and others who worked on it and helped smooth out differences. But I don’t worship any of them.
That’s something that makes me very different from most others who are into politics. I am not wedded to any specific individuals. There are plenty of people who I like and think well of, but I am not a member of any cult. If I have to choose between the fortunes of an individual and the prospect of legislation passing or winning an election, I will opt for the latter 100% of the time.
It’s not uncommon for people who don’t normally follow politics to become infatuated with a particular candidate. Trump is an obvious example of that, but so was Obama. Some people will only vote for particular candidates they’re really into. They like candidates who standout in some way and “capture their imagination.” I have no imagination to be captured so you don’t have to worry about that here.
I view individual political actors as akin to widgets. There is nothing special about any of them and they can be switched out at any time. They are all part of a bigger effort to accomplish things. None of them are irreplaceable.
Plenty of elected officials, especially those who won as underdogs, get high on their own supply and think there’s something magical about them. You won’t ever find me saying that about anyone. There is no such thing as magic. Most of what determines whether someone gets elected is beyond their control.
In the US political system, unfortunately, my view of politics is heavily disfavored. Presidential systems are candidate centered and political parties tend to be weak. Presidential elections in particular are very candidate centered. Often, what looks like a party gaining a durable national majority is just a function of a particular candidate being unusually strong with key groups. We saw that with Obama and odds are we’ll see that again with Trump if he wins.
The main reason why I’m a Democrat is because the Democratic Party is the vehicle by which the things I want to see accomplished are most likely to happen. That may not be true forever, but I don’t see it changing any time soon. The positions of Democratic candidates and elected officials are heavily in line with my views on almost all substantive issues from abortion to taxes to healthcare. Even on issues where I think most Democrats are wrong or behind the times, I still think they have much greater potential to improve compared to Republicans.
The state of the Republican Party right now is the polar opposite of how I view politics. It is a personality cult centered entirely around one man. Whatever he says goes even if that completely contradicts what most Republican candidates and elected officials claimed to believe in five seconds earlier. No joke, if Trump came out now and said he was in favor of federally codifying Roe v Wade, almost everyone in the GOP would either cheer it on or stay quiet. That would be great from a policy standpoint, but it’s a terrible way to do things.
Of all the reasons that were given for Biden to stay in the race, there are none that I found persuasive. There is one, though, that I particularly didn’t like. It was the idea that Democrats owed it to him to support him because he was loyal to them. As I’ve written about many times before, I think Biden has been a good president and deserves way more credit than he’s gotten, but he’s not owed anything.
Serving as an elected official in any capacity (or working for one) is a privilege, not a right. What matters is having a candidate who can beat Trump, not owing someone something. If anything, Biden owed it to his party to drop out. It was political actors of all sorts in his party who coalesced around him in 2020 and made him the nominee. They didn’t have to do that. They did it because they put their party and country’s interest over their own egos and agendas.
To make it simple, what I care about the most it goes in this order: (1) the country, (2) the Democratic Party, (3) everything else, which is a very distant third. Literally the last thing I care about are the egos of political actors. If someone’s ego gets bruised, I couldn’t care any less. Politics is a full-contact sport and is not for those with glass jaws. If upsetting someone is required to win an election or get a policy victory, that’s a small price to pay.
Good for the country v good for the party
As a committed Democrat, you might think that I think what’s good for the Democratic Party is good for the country. That’s often true, but not always. An easy example is the upcoming election. It would be awful for the country to have Trump in charge again. I don’t want to have our political and legal systems pushed to the brink. I don’t want the federal government to become a tool for him to exact revenge. I don’t want one sentence of Project 2025 to become reality.
While having Trump in charge again would be bad for the country, for the Democratic Party it would likely be great. That’s what happened the last time he was in charge. Democrats were demoralized after 2016, but his win revived their fortunes like nothing else. In 2018, Democrats won the House with flying colors and did well on the state level.
On Earth 2, where Clinton won, Trump is never president and goes away. That’s good for the country, but a catastrophe for the Democratic Party. Clinton begins her term badly wounded and unpopular with no room for error. From her first day in office, she makes error after error. Each day, congressional Republicans launch investigations against her and she happily provides them with ammo.
Because she won despite her best efforts to lose, Clinton thinks her way is the way to go and surrounds herself with sycophants. She struggles throughout her entire term, is very unpopular and accomplishes almost nothing. The 2018 midterms are a red wave and Democrats get wiped out in all but the bluest places. In 2020, she loses reelection handily. In 2021, Republicans have the White House, a filibuster proof majority in the Senate and a large majority in the House.
On the planet where we live, Democrats have been seen their fortunes improve dramatically since 2016. Democrats went from being in a terrible position on the state level after 2014 to being in the best shape they’ve been in since the early 1990s. Because of Trump, Democrats won the runoffs in Georgia in 2021 when they weren’t supposed to. In part because Trump endorsed toxic candidates in key races, the midterms weren’t a red wave. Had he not been president, he couldn’t have done any of that.
The most consequential thing to happen from Trump’s first term was the reversal of Roe v Wade. I think abortion bans are horrible and I would never accept that in return for some good election cycles, but that’s how things have unfolded. Ever since Dobbs, Democrats have been thriving. Having abortion as a live issue has given a big jolt of energy to the pro-choice cause, which has almost always worked to benefit Democrats at the voting booth. That will continue to be true unless/until abortion is settled.
I don’t want Trump to win just in case anyone still had doubts. No victory of any kind is worth the hell he will unleash here and abroad. I don’t believe in American decline, but if someone was going to make a case for it, Trump being back in power after trying to overturn an election would be the best piece of evidence there is.
As bad as it will be for the country if Trump wins, it will probably be even worse for our allies, especially Ukraine. Putin and Xi will be very happy as they will be given license to do as they please. God help Taiwan and our allies in Asia as they will be on their own. Europe will have to fill a huge void and fill it fast because the US will abandon Ukraine and stop aid efforts. Putin will have been vindicated in believing that the US won’t try to stop his ambitions. A great election cycle(s) isn’t worth that, not even close.
Let’s assume Trump does win. Let’s assume we don’t descend into a civil war and those of us opposed to Trump aren’t jailed and we still have elections. That might sound crazy and it probably won’t happen, but the chances of those things happening are higher than they should be, which is zero.
Assuming all that, how does the Democratic Party fare? This involves trying to predict the future, which I’m not good at doing and hate even pretending to try, but I think the Democratic Party will do extremely well. To start with, Trump is very unpopular. No matter what happens in November, he won’t be a popular figure and his behavior guarantees his ceiling of support will be very low no matter what else is going on.
From 2017-2019, the economy was very good, but Trump’s approval rating was not. That’s because he’s a repulsive jackass. Had he just acted like a normal, decent person, his approval rating would have been much higher and he would be finishing his second term.
Right off the bat, we’d be starting with Trump being very unpopular and that’s before he acts on anything. Very soon after getting sworn in, he will pardon all those in jail for their role in January 6. There will almost certainly be protests across the country and he has said he wants to use the military for domestic purposes, including against protesters. If that happens, we will immediately be in a major crisis. That will be very unpopular.
If he uses the federal government to go after enemies of his, that will be unpopular. If he fires a good chunk of the federal workforce, the chaos from that will get wall-to-wall media coverage. It, too, will be unpopular, especially when it impacts the lives of normal people. All this is before any policies come into effect.
A central plank of Trump’s platform is across the board 10% tariffs on all goods. If he goes through with that it will make the price of everything more expensive. I can’t imagine people will be happy with that.
On abortion, Trump has tried to talk like a moderate and the party’s platform no longer advocates for an explicit national ban. Trump doesn’t care about abortion, but the people he will be hiring do and personnel is policy. There are people who will be working in his administration who want to use the Comstock Act to take abortion pills off the market and who have said that’s what they plan to do if Trump wins. Unless Trump himself intervenes against it, they will do that.
If abortion pills are taken off the market or access to them is curtailed that will affect abortion access all over the country. If you think there’s been a backlash to Dobbs, you haven’t even seen the previews. If there is an effort to impose a de facto ban not just on abortion pills, but on the shipping of items used in surgical abortions across state lines, don’t be surprised if Democrats start getting dictator levels of support in suburban areas.
We haven’t even gotten to Congress yet. If Trump wins, Congress is highly likely to stay in Republican hands. Already, there are plans to extend all of Trump’s tax cuts from 2017. When the tax cuts were first passed, they weren’t offset by spending cuts or tax increases elsewhere. With interest rates being low and inflation not being a concern that didn’t matter. The world of 2025 will be very different.
If the tax cuts are extended without any offsets, one of two things will happen. Either inflation will go up or the Fed will raise interest rates to prevent that from happening. No matter what happens, people will not be happy about it.
Alternatively, let’s say there is an attempt to offset the cost of the tax cuts. Trump has ruled out cuts to Medicare and Social Security, but not Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act exchanges or anything else. If those programs bear all of the spending cut burden, millions of people will lose their insurance.
Remember, Republicans tried to repeal the ACA in 2017. That effort failed and was toxically unpopular. Since that time, the ACA has become more popular and has benefitted millions more people. Kicking them off their insurance will be much more unpopular than the ACA repeal effort in 2017 was.
If Trump goes through with even some of those things, let alone all of them, he will be very unpopular for it. Even with heavily polarization, he could see his approval rating go into the low 30s or worse. If that happens, Democrats are going to do very well in the midterms.
That’s not all. In addition to Trump being unpopular, a problem Republicans now have is that they’re the party of unreliable voters. Since Trump showed up, he drove out educated Republicans who always vote. The voters he brought in are less educated and much less reliable in voting outside of presidential elections. Many of Trump’s avid supporters are voting for him and not the Republican Party. When he’s not on the ballot, they don’t show up and Republicans have suffered for it.
Come November 2026, between Trump being toxic and Republicans being reliant on voters who don’t show up in midterms, it should be a massive blue wave. It could be so big that we might have to create a new term for it. I would expect Democrats to take the House with ease and make gains in the Senate, including in states that are on nobody’s radar now. On the state level, I would expect Democrats to kill it and keep every governorship they have now with ease while gaining many others, also including in states nobody is thinking about now.
That’s just looking at the midterms. In the odd numbered year elections, I would expect Democrats to wipe the floor with Republicans. As for 2028, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What I will say is JD Vance would certainly run and given his status as VP my guess is he would be the favorite to be nominated, but who knows? What I do know is Trump wouldn’t be running again and would be very unpopular and whoever the Republican nominee is couldn’t rely on the Trump fans to show up for them.