Weekend Update, May 8Warm up for Mother's Day with some hot takes

Weekend Update, May 8

Warm up for Mother's Day with some hot takes

Matthew Yglesias

 May 8 

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I’m getting ready for the cicadas.

The moderate candidate often wins

Dana Rubenstein and Emma Fitzsimmons report for The New York Times on possible conflicts of interest given that Andrew Yang’s campaign manager is also a wealthy businessman and occasional lobbyist. But the article also goes in for some fairly odd editorializing in a news piece:

Voters who like Mr. Yang and his upbeat vision for the city’s recovery might not know Mr. Tusk’s name. His closeness to big business and connections to Mr. Bloomberg have led some Democrats to worry that Mr. Yang will embrace a Wall Street-centric vision for New York City.

I mean Bloomberg, for better or worse, won three times. And in 2009, when Tusk was Bloomberg’s campaign manager, the Times endorsed him. So it’s definitely not obvious that this connection is a liability. If anything, it might reassure some people who think Yang is under-experienced. Of course, other people won’t like it — there’s a reason the city’s progressive groups aren’t endorsing Yang. But Michael Bloomberg is not like some obscure foreign dictator; he’s living, breathing proof that the more moderate candidate in the field just wins pretty often.

All apologies

I tweeted this week that one reason fundamentally unimportant questions like “what if some folks continue to be personally hyper-cautious about Covid even after getting vaccinated” have become so touchy is we all have a lot of raw feelings from a fairly traumatic 2020. And one thing that’s exacerbated that, I think, is that nobody in authority has apologized for anything. That immediately set off a furious debate in comments where it was clear everyone had two entirely separate groups of people who they thought owed the public an apology.

This is one issue, though, where I really do think we need to both sides it.

Let me start from the right. I think the smarter conservatives out there have managed to memory-hole key elements of the actual Republican Party response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which was not to criticize the cost-benefit ratio of the most extreme anti-pandemic measures but to repeatedly lie to the public about the risks.

Trump promised Covid would be “miraculously gone” by April.

The Council of Economic Advisors published this absurd cubic model asserting the pandemic would end by late May.

After Trump personally recovered from Covid, he said the experimental treatment he received was a “cure” that would be available to everyone.

Again, these were not sober-minded cost-benefit assessments that happened to differ from the public health bureaucracy’s preferences. They were straight-up misinformation. I did not travel to see my family this Thanksgiving or Christmas due to Covid. Had it been the case that a cure for Covid had been developed in October and was now widely available, I absolutely would have traveled to see my family. Unfortunately, lots of people believe Trump when he says things.

The flip side is that:

Playgrounds were closed for months here in D.C. and for most of 2020 in California, even as progressive epidemiologists hesitated to criticize extended anti-racism protests that featured prolonged crowding and extensive unmasked shouting and chanting.

Public health officials bungled the guidelines on masks in February and March.

They also spent the first four months of the crisis pushing a line on travel bans that had no evidentiary basis.

I don’t want to litigate whether these errors are “the same” or not, but they are real errors. And different ones hurt different people in different ways. And everyone is so up on their high horse about the other guy’s problems that nobody will own up to having done anything wrong.

Midterms preview — doom

The president’s party normally loses House seats in the midterms. You can point to an exception like 1998 where the economy was strong and House Republicans alienated voters with their impeachment of Bill Clinton.

But when thinking about this, it’s critical to keep in mind this point from David Shor — if Democrats replicate their historically impressive 1998 share of the national House vote in 2022, they’ll probably lose the House.

This is why it’s so crucial to buckle down and focus on gerrymandering reform. There are lots of nice-sounding political reforms out there, but redistricting makes a real difference, and “election outcomes should not deviate wildly from voter preferences” is a nice, easy way to defend the position.

President don’t persuade

Thinking more about the debate over race-forward messaging strategies, it occurred to me after Jamelle Bouie scolded me for an ungenerous tweet that there’s some background disagreement here that I’ve never articulated properly.

Most people, I think, believe that when prominent politicians speak out about an issue, this is a good way to shift public opinion in their direction. They are, in other words, believers in the bully pulpit. My view is that this is mistaken. I believe in George Edwards’ research and related work summarized in this great 2012 Ezra Klein article, and I believe that politicians being outspoken about issues is likely to be counterproductive. Obviously if you disagree with me about that, then one reason to hope for people to highlight racial angles in their rhetoric is that you are hoping they will shift public opinion on race.

To see how I think these things tend to work, though, check out Gallup’s poll on marriage equality, which is basically an uninterrupted line of upward support except when Barack Obama came out swinging in favor of it.

I think that what has moved public opinion on race has been social media exposing more white people to Black people’s views and experiences, and more Black journalists getting hired into what had long been a very white industry. Something like Tim Scott speaking about racial profiling might help because Scott is a Republican. But in my view, Democrats talking about any kind of progressive issue at all is likely to cause backlash on that issue, so the only reason to talk about anything at all is to try to win elections and pass policies. But I recognize that general point as a minority view, and I should try harder to persuade everyone of the general uselessness of getting politicians to talk about your priorities, because the race framings are, in some ways, a special case of that.

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