A Failure Of Ego
The Perils Of Thinking There's An Easy Answer
One of the rules I try to live by in terms of public punditry is that if you have a thought that seems obvious but nobody else is advocating, you’re probably the one who is wrong. It is highly unlikely that you have managed to figure this out in a way that nobody else has, and it is a failure both of your analysis that you can’t find the hole in your logic, but also a failure of ego, that you decided that you alone have solved the puzzle.
I know what a lot of you think I’m referring to, and I am, but I’m also talking about me here. A lot of my 2020 analysis I stand by, in the sense that the polls were trash and a polls-based analyst can only do so much with shit polls, but there were clear and obvious failures of my approach, namely South Carolina. I thought Lindsay Graham was going to lose, and he won comfortably, and me letting a piece saying that go to print was a failure of ego. I had found the truth that everyone else couldn’t see, and I was going to let it ride, because in my arrogance, I thought I was smarter than everyone else who was coldly dismissing the chances of Jaime Harrison.
Turns out, I was the idiot.
I’m thinking of all of this as Matt Yglesias makes an ass out of himself on Twitter tonight, including a tweet where he actually used the word faggot to defend his vision of how to win elections - basically, run Joe Manchins everywhere, win a bigger majority, and then be less dependent on Manchin (and Sinema) to pass legislation. It makes a certain amount of sense, in theory, but it fails the very basic ego test - if it were that easy, you wouldn’t be the only one advocating for it. “Run cultural conservatives so that people with retrograde social views” is a strategy is Yglesias’ explicit strategy, but the problem with that strategy is it would have cost us the Senate majority, had Democrats been stupid enough to listen to it.
In 2020, Democrats won Senate seats in Colorado, Arizona, and two in Georgia to win the Senate majority we currently have, as bare bones as it is. The problem with the argument that running cultural conservatives would win us a bigger majority is you can’t appeal to both Southlake and Youngstown at the same time. We know from the Australian evidence that in 2016, the Australian right pivoted to a position of social liberalism by replacing Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull, and reaped the rewards in socially liberal, urban and inner suburban areas, but got shafted in the regional towns and Tasmania. In 2019, when they ditched Malcolm for Scott Morrison, they got all those regional towns back, and then proceeded to bleed votes amongst suburban and urban social liberals. In both cases they ran against the same Labor leader, and Labor were proposing huge tax increases on big business and on high income individuals, and still those areas - like Warringah and Kooyong - swung heavily left. Almost as if there’s a lesson there.
What was the county in Georgia with the biggest swing from 2018 to 2021? Longtime readers will know the answer, as I bust this stat out with frequency, but Forsyth is the answer. Why is this notable? Forsyth was a Romney +60 county that was Kemp +43 and Perdue +36, a rich enclave just north of Atlanta where the rich went to avoid Black people. It was whites only until the 90s, and that county had the biggest blue swing in just over two years (and for those who want to invoke Abrams’ race as to the cause of her underperformance, Warnock outran Ossoff). If you want to go for cultural conservative votes, you will go back to losing Forsyth by 50%+, just as you will Southlake. Maricopa, which voted for Romney by 11% before powering both Sinema and Kelly to victory in Arizona, would also go back to its old ways, and combined, that’s four Senate seats, gone.
Ah, but of course, I’m missing the great number of Senate seats we could go get, like the one in North Carolina we just lost by running a progressive, or Florida, where we made the huge mistake of running a pro-Castro candidate in 2018, right, or even Montana, where that DSA operative we ran in 2020 really shit the bed. Oh, but, wait, we didn’t do that - we actually ran milquetoast moderates in all of those seats, and still lost. The answer in North Carolina isn’t moderation, but increased Black turnout, but that doesn’t fit with Matt’s progressive bashing narrative, so fuck the facts, I guess. “Find a Manchin for every state” ignores the fact that Democrats have run white moderates for every Senate race in NC since Kay Hagan, and we’ve won exactly 0 times since Hagan’s 2008 victory, and that Bill Nelson was an amazing fit for his state when he won in 2012 by 13%, before being too left for his state in 2018 according to the wisdom of Yglesias. Oh, and throw in the fact that we know very little about what candidates will do well and which ones won’t, and “find a Manchin for every state” looks less like a coherent policy prescription and more like a buzzword - which is particularly galling from someone who professes his contempt for progressives who prioritize slogans over solutions.
More than my contempt for this individual plan - or, I should say, “plan”, given the intellectual caliber of it - is a contempt for the man who thinks it is okay to say faggot on the timeline and to treat everyone who disagrees with his plan as a moron. Yglesias has the arrogance of a man who thinks he has all the answers, and has never wondered why no other smart person has backed his idea. If “find a Manchin for every state” were really the answer, why have none of the tens of thousands of people paid to do politics for the Democratic Party, their various wings, SuperPACs, and members successfully made this pitch? If it were so obvious, if it was pushing against as open a door as he thinks, why is he on the island he is? The answer is that it is a slogan, not a solution, but Matt is unable or unwilling to engage with this fact. He thinks Democrats can stitch together Obama-era results with culturally conservative whites, get Obama-level support with Hispanics, and Biden-era support in the suburbs. It sounds amazing, but unfortunately, it suffers from the slight problem of being about as likely as my gay ass marrying a woman - and we know this from the Australian data, so it isn’t even just a hunch!
At some point, you can engage with the substance of his points all you want, but the inescapable conclusion is that Yglesias is suffering from a failure of ego - he thinks he has the answer, and he refuses to accept he could be wrong. The problem is, he’s as wrong as I was when I wrote that Lindsey Graham was losing last October - and it will end the same exact way.