The future of the supermarket

The future of the supermarket

And the perils of regulating against bigness

Matthew Yglesias

Jul 29

Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, and the changes to the store since then have been fairly modest. By contrast, a new Amazon Fresh store just opened in D.C., and it really looks to me like the future of grocery shopping.

But of course, the Fresh product is a lot easier to launch since it can piggyback on the Whole Foods supply chain. And the existing Whole Foods retail footprint means that if Fresh is really working out, then Amazon can retrofit Whole Foods markets as Amazon Fresh stores.

The whole thing could turn out to be a huge bust, but I don’t think it will — especially if policymakers keep us on track for full employment and rising wages. And the benefits of the model could be pretty exciting: higher productivity throughout the retail sector, plus more convenient shopping for millions of people. This, in turn, is an object lesson in the perils of dogmatic anti-bigness — as opposed to pro-competition — as a worldview and a philosophy.

How it works

Before walking into the store you fire up the Amazon app on your phone and click on a button there that gives you a QR code. Then you scan the code at the entrance to the store as you head in.

Once you’re in the store, you can get a cart and grab paper bags or reusable bags (or bring your own reusable bag) and then browse the aisles like any normal supermarket. You grab stuff off the shelves and put it into your bags. Then when you have everything you want to buy, you just walk out of the store.

It works because there’s a huge array of cameras in the store (most people don’t look at the ceiling while grocery shopping, but you can see them up there) monitoring you and seeing what you take off the shelves. The All-Seeing Eye of Bezos then simply bills you for whatever you took when you head out the door and emails you a receipt.

The experience is a delight, and a friend reports that he even got a free watermelon for his trouble due to some kind of bug.

Advancing productivity in grocery sales

To know whether or not this is really working as a business, you would need to know a ton of stuff that Amazon doesn’t disclose. How many free watermelons are they accidentally giving away? How much do the cameras and other electronics they’re installing cost? What kind of rent are they paying for the stores?

But the basic business case for the Amazon Fresh store looks pretty obvious:

You reduce labor costs by not employing people to check out and bag the groceries.

It’s more convenient for customers than traditional check-out and dramatically more convenient than the self-checkout methods stores have been pushing people to.

Perhaps a little more subtly, you’re not taking up all this space with check-out facilities, so you can have a reasonably full-featured grocery store in a smaller space.

This last part is intriguing to me because the Amazon Fresh store is more compact than would be suggested by strictly eliminating the square footage of the checkout apparatus. The Amazon hypothesis seems to be that the actual optimal size of the store has changed with their technology.

And you can see why; the check-out mechanism is kind of a fixed cost that can serve a store of arbitrary size. So the check-out mechanism rewards the creation of very large supermarkets or even hypermarkets like Target and Walmart that combine grocery store functions with other merchandising. That model works very well in places where land is cheap and traffic is uncongested (I am writing to you from Kerrville, Texas, for example) but in more expensive urban and suburban destinations, it faces some limits.

With Amazon Fresh, there’s no fixed checkout infrastructure. But the more square feet you add to the store, the more ceiling cameras you need. So it makes sense to operate a larger number of smaller stores in a given area — especially if your company features a world-beating delivery and logistics operation. The smaller footprint lets you become the most convenient option for a larger number of customers.

Productivity is good

One of the many, many, many harmful aspects of the long, sluggish recovery from the Great Recession is that having the country underemployed for a decade created a kind of Luddite mentality where productivity improvements are bad. “Oh no, they are getting rid of the checkout workers!”

Today we’re seeing the emergence of a high-pressure economy that doesn’t have those properties. Instead, employers are reporting difficulty recruiting workers.

“Just pay them more!” goes the shout on Twitter, and in some circumstances, we are talking about high-margin companies that can certainly afford to pay more. But lots of companies deal with very slim profit margins, and if they’re forced to raise pay they will have to raise prices commensurately. There’s also just stuff nobody is going to pay for. It is nice to have someone come in and clean your hotel room. But if the Hampton Inn can’t hire people to clean rooms cheaply, they’re just not going to hire anyone to do it. It’s not a high-end luxury brand, and the customers don’t care that much about it.

To go from high pressure to sustainable high wages, you need productivity improvements that let certain tasks be done by smaller numbers of workers. That productivity doesn’t generate automatic wage gains by magic, but it does create the circumstances in which a high-productivity employer can take advantage of the tight labor market to offer higher pay and drive competitors out of business.

And that’s really what Amazon is threatening here. A model that will let them squeeze grocery stores into locations that other companies don’t see as viable for supermarkets and then hop in with a customer-friendly high-productivity model. And it’s hard to see how many other companies could have pulled this off.

Amazon’s flywheel of everything

It’s very hard for me to imagine a startup doing what Amazon is trying to accomplish with Fresh.

For starters, it’s the prior acquisition of Whole Foods that ensures Amazon has access to a full-scale supply chain for meat and produce even while operating their new stores at a relatively modest scale. But Amazon also has all these built-in customer relationships. “Just walk out of the store and trust us to charge you an appropriate amount of money” is an amazing feature, but it’s also a big ask to make of customers. Why should you trust them?

Well the reason you trust them is that a huge share of the population already shops with Amazon routinely, and we have mostly positive experiences with it. I can’t recall being charged for something in error by Amazon, and they are excellent at dealing with lost or stolen merchandise. Then on top of that, the whole thing relies on a lot of fancy computer stuff (AI? Machine learning? I will just call it “fancy computer stuff”) of the sort Amazon already built in order to power their Alexa devices.

But then the stores, once they exist, become a vehicle for boosting more Amazon businesses. They are locations for Amazon Locker, for example. But also yet another reason to get an Amazon credit card.

Oftentimes sprawling conglomerates lose focus, let things slide, and get disrupted hungrier, more nimble companies with narrower concerns. But at the moment, Amazon is really making bigness work for it. By having established beachheads in so many markets, they are able to execute double envelopment of competitors in new areas. It can feel almost unfair.

The antitrust “paradox”

Noah Smith wrote a post recently arguing that a group of economists from outside the traditional industrial organization subfield has been leading the charge for a rethink of American competition policy.

I agree that the stuff Smith says is happening is, in fact, happening. But there is also a different thing happening, namely a political movement in favor of a neo-Brandeisian approach to anti-trust policy that would focus more on bigness per se and corporate power. David Dayen, who’s now executive editor of the American Prospect, was an early mover in this space, and Barry Lynn, Sarah Miller, and Matt Stoller at the American Economic Liberties Project are its biggest institutional voices. Pierre Omidyar has put money into this movement. And Lina Khan, an early intellectual leader, has been elevated to chair of the Federal Trade Commission and is now a really powerful person.

And these people are saying something different from the economists. The revisionist economists, I think, are basically making two arguments:

For either technical or political reasons, merger enforcement has gotten too lax.

Consumer welfare analysis has tended to overlook non-price harms of lack of competition, such as labor market monopsony.

The neo-Brandeisians are saying something totally different. Khan’s seminal article is titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” and the paradox is basically that Amazon is this giant super-powerful company that neo-Brandeisians would like to take action against, but there isn’t anything remotely resembling a case against Amazon that you could win in court. Amazon is a really big company, and Amazon does shady stuff sometimes (there have been a lot of labor rights exposés, they sometimes rip off products that other people sell on their platform, they drove Diapers.com out of business with a price war), but they operate in highly competitive markets. And what’s more, they are constantly entering new markets and increasing competition.

Because the competitiveness of the marketplace is just a different thing than the bigness or power of the corporations operating in it.

The perils of anti-bigness

To the neo-Brandeisians, I’m sure the threat of Amazon stepping into groceries and gobbling up a large share of the supermarket industry is terrifying.

And beyond the world of abstract ideas, a concrete issue here is that a lot of America’s older grocery chains are unionized. If Amazon drives them out of business, that’s bad news for the UFCW and bad news for the labor movement as a whole. This is one of the worst aspects of America’s broken labor relations paradigm — it is so hard to organize new unions at new companies that essentially any shift in the business landscape is bad for labor, which is not a healthy way to run an economy.

To me, though, Amazon Fresh is an object lesson in the perils of anti-bigness as an approach to economic policy. It’s important to have technological progress, rising productivity, and higher living standards. And not everything in life can be done by small groups of hackers working out of a garage somewhere. We need changes that involve interplay with the physical world.

Another area where, in part because of the pandemic, we are seeing technology advance is hotel check-in. The future is clearly a situation where you use your phone to provide the hotel with a credit card and to verify your arrival, and then an app on your phone serves as the key to your room and pass for the elevator. That’s more convenient for customers and also labor-saving for the hotel. But making a system like this work seamlessly is something that is much easier for management groups that operate at a big scale than for a fragmented ecosystem of independent operators. And as this advance rolls across the country, America is going to benefit from having a relatively consolidated hotel sector where Hilton, Marriott, etc. control the bulk of the rooms.

By the same token, it’s because Amazon is big — because it has an e-commerce platform and a cloud computing platform and a grocery chain and more — that it can take on a project like semi-automated supermarkets. A world without bigness is going to be a world where it’s much harder to make certain kinds of progress.

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The Power Center in the GOP Isn't Just Trump, It's the Conservative Media

The Power Center in the GOP Isn't Just Trump, It's the Conservative Media

THURSDAY, JULY 29, 2021

ABOUT ME

David A. Hopkins

I am a political scientist at Boston College who specializes in the study of American political parties, elections, Congress, and voting behavior. Email: david.hopkins {at} bc.edu. The name of this blog honors the notable political philosopher and practitioner George Washington Plunkitt.

View my complete profile

Donald Trump is still the Republican Party's spiritual leader in exile. Most other Republican politicians don't dare express criticism of Trump in public, ambitious candidates troop to Mar-a-Lago to seek his endorsement, and his style of resentment politics continues to gain adoption even among former detractors in his party. But Trump's repeated denunciations of the infrastructure legislation being developed in the Senate by a bipartisan "gang of 20" do not yet seem to be having much of an effect on its amount of Republican support; the bill survived its first test vote on Wednesday evening when the motion to begin consideration passed with the votes of 17 Republican senators, including minority leader Mitch McConnell.

This reflects something important about the nature of Trump's internal power within the GOP. The main conduits through which Trump exerts control over other Republicans are the conservative media outlets with which he has maintained a close alliance ever since his 2016 nomination. Trump is much more effective at imposing his preferences on the party when the Republican electorate is made aware of those preferences by the informational sources they trust the most.

When Trump was president, and before he was banned from social media, we often heard about how he had uniquely harnessed the power of Twitter. But it wasn't his tweets themselves that were especially powerful (only a small slice of the American public would have seen any of them directly), it was his tweets as amplified by other media platforms with much larger popular audiences. Republican members of Congress enjoyed much more political leeway to reject or ignore President Trump's policy proposals than they did to explicitly disapprove of his personal behavior, because substantive differences with Trump did not usually receive much attention from the media—including the conservative media—while personal differences could turn into headline news.

Trump is no longer allowed to tweet, but he still issues statements that resemble his old social media posts. Now, however, his goal of attracting widespread attention for these messages is even more dependent on the decision of others with louder bullhorns to give them publicity.

Some of the Senate Republicans participating in the bipartisan infrastructure negotiations, like Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, have already survived confrontation with Trump or his conservative media allies. Others, like Rob Portman and Richard Burr, are not planning to seek another term and may not care much what the Fox News audience thinks about them. But a few Republican members of the "gang of 20," like Todd Young of Indiana or Mike Rounds of South Dakota, might well be made uncomfortable if their names and faces repeatedly led off the top of Tucker Carlson Tonight broadcasts as accused enemies of Trump and the conservative cause.

Fortunately for them, the infrastructure bill simply hasn't been promoted to Republican supporters in the electorate as a critical test of ideological purity. The attention of Carlson and his fellow conservative media personalities is mostly trained elsewhere these days, on the various cultural concerns that have come to dominate the agenda of the popular right. This may cause Trump some frustration. But if the energy of conservative activists and voters has indeed shifted in recent years from opposing increases in government spending to fighting the contemporary culture war, Trump—as well as his friends in the right-of-center media world—surely bears considerable responsibility for encouraging this change in priorities.

Some of Donald Trump’s legacy will last. Other parts are already disappearing.

Some of Donald Trump’s legacy will last. Other parts are already disappearing.

Opinion by 

Paul Waldman

Columnist

Today at 3:06 p.m. EDT

President Donald Trump outside the White House on May 1, 2020.(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

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While the lawmaking process grinds slowly along — six months into his term, President Biden has signed exactly one major piece of legislation, the American Rescue Plan — most of the work of the administration in advancing liberal goals has happened relatively quietly at the agency level, as executive-branch appointees and career officials go about their business. And much of that effort involves undoing what the last administration did.

So how is it going? It turns out that in many ways, Donald Trump’s policy legacy is proving easier to roll back than that of most presidents. As Olga Khazan of the Atlantic reports, the Trump administration did such a poor job of writing and implementing its own policies that many either have already been struck down by courts or will be straightforward to dismantle:

The Trump administration seems to have fundamentally underestimated the difficulty of changing U.S. government policy: As of April, out of the 259 regulations, guidance documents, and agency memoranda it issued that were challenged in court, 200, or 77 percent, were unsuccessful, according to a tracker from the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank at New York University that researches regulatory policy. A typical administration loses more like 30 percent of the time, the group says.

There’s always a good deal of back-and-forth during any transition; for instance, every Republican administration reimposes the Mexico City policy, a.k.a. the “global gag rule” on abortion, as soon as it takes office, and every Democratic administration rescinds it. But one of our conclusions about Trump’s presidency may wind up being that his long-term effect on policy was minimal, while his political impact in one term was deeper and more profound than that of most two-term presidents.

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Let’s consider the policy first. When Trump emerged as the front-runner for their party’s presidential nomination, many Republicans worried that he was neither conversant with nor committed to conservative ideology. But their nervousness faded as it became clear that it wasn’t that he disagreed in any meaningful way with what conservatives wanted; he just didn’t care. If he said something like “We’re going to have insurance for everybody” or claimed he’d take on the NRA, they knew there would be no follow-through and they could easily bring him back in line.

Apart from trade and immigration, Trump had almost no firm beliefs about any policy issue — but that made his administration more conservative, not less. Because he’d rather watch Fox News for hours and tweet at his enemies than sit through boring policy briefings, and because many mainstream Republicans decided not to forever soil their reputations by working for him, his administration was staffed largely by grifters and far-right ideologues.

But that led to the problem Khazan’s piece highlights: Without experienced Republicans staffing executive-branch agencies, the people whom Trump put in charge simply didn’t know what they were doing. In some cases, their incompetence combined with their malevolence to produce disaster, while in others, the incompetence actually prevented things from getting even worse. Both routes led to the kind of slapdashery that is now allowing Biden appointees — who are indeed very experienced and knowledgeable, with many of them having worked in the Obama administration — to reverse the damage.

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Politics, on the other hand, was what Trump really cared about, and where his impact was so deep and lasting.

Whether Trump had a well-thought-out plan to remake the Republican Party is unclear; much of what he did seemed impulsive and ad hoc, done mostly for the purpose of feeding his deep insecurities and need for validation. But he did have an instinctive ability to locate and stimulate the worst in people.

And at a moment when many in the party were convinced it had to appeal to a changing America in which their base of White Christian voters would continue to decline as a proportion of the electorate, Trump saw the power of those people’s anger: that with enough stoking, it could bring him to an electoral college victory.

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Through an extraordinary and unrepeatable confluence of circumstances — shout-out to Jim Comey! — it worked. And once it did, the party couldn’t go back. The fact that Trump lost badly in the 2020 election, and was the direct cause of Republicans losing both the House and Senate, didn’t change anything. Devotion not just to Trump himself but to Trumpism in all its forms now defines what it is to be a Republican.

Which is why a hard-right conservative such as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is now considered not a “real” Republican. Being a Republican means you support (or at least give a wink to) the lie that Trump won the 2020 election, and that you want to make voting more difficult, and that your primary project is not advancing a policy agenda but Owning the Libs. It’s the party of Jan. 6, the party of scam election “audits,” and the party of endless fake culture-war controversies.

The policy story tells us that the particular personality of the president really does matter a great deal in what their administration does (how that applies to Biden is not yet completely clear). The political story tells us that Republican voters were just waiting for someone like Trump to come along and give them the kind of unadorned, rage-based politics they wanted. And once they got the taste for it, they couldn’t go back.

I was part of the problem. Please ignore everything I’ve said and get vaccinated.

I was part of the problem. Please ignore everything I’ve said and get vaccinated.

Opinion by 

Alexandra Petri

Columnist

Today at 5:04 p.m. EDT

Nurses prepare syringes with doses of the Moderna vaccine covid-19 at a vaccination center in Meloneras on the island of Gran Canaria, Spain on July 28. (Borja Suarez/Reuters)

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Hi, everyone! I know some people (not naming any names, because one of those names would be my name) have been doing a very bad thing and not encouraging you to get vaccinated — or even discouraging you from getting vaccinated — under the misapprehension that they could score consequence-free political points by so doing. Those people (among whom I no longer am!) are pretty bad. Look how many Americans have decided not to do this lifesaving thing, because of some misunderstood risk, because some irresponsible people (again, no names) fueled their doubts in the hopes of reaping short-term political gain! I sure would hate to be one of them, although, technically, I was, until just about three seconds ago. But that was then. Now to my theme, which I will be executing according to a tried and true formula.

First, we can all agree that Donald Trump is the best person in the world. It is a well-known fact that his body is so perfect that modern science is baffled, and it should come as no surprise that the vaccine for covid-19 came from his perfect mind and “very good brain.” He is a golden, godlike being from whom a healing effulgence emanates at all times. His smile is the origin of what is called sunshine, and he personally cured my scrofula. The vaccine was his gift to us, as when Prometheus gave fire to mankind. We shouldn’t call it the coronavirus vaccine; we should call it The Blessing From Donald Trump. That’s what I personally call it, and how I think about it, and I urge anyone who has hesitated to get it to think of it that way too.

Which reminds me, until literally right now, I did hesitate, because I was laboring under the misapprehension that this vaccine was of Biden, and therefore bad, rather than of Trump, and therefore perfect. But I was wrong. I got the vaccine, and it worked, like the country used to do under Trump. So I am begging you to think about Donald Trump and get this Blessing From Donald Trump!

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And now, I’d like to spend a little time blaming Democrats and the Media and the Partisan Climate in Washington for the unwillingness of people to get vaccinated. That is what it is; because doctors sounded too sure, and nothing dissuades people from medical treatments like a full-throated recommendation by experts. That is why dentists are so careful never to let more than four out of a possible five recommend anything at one time. Otherwise, the whole country would be awash in Oral-B heads and fluoride and chaos would reign.

Yes, it was definitely all that certainty that grated on people, I think. And also the polarization. When I say polarization, I don’t mean when I decided to score political points by casting aspersions on the vaccine. I mean … other things. I’m so disappointed, because this didn’t need to be a partisan issue. It was just that people I disliked were for it, so I assumed it was bad, and it became one.

People — not bad people, just confused — may have said to you that they weren’t sure about the vaccine, or had doubts about it, or even raised groundless questions about its safety. Technically, in the most literal sense, I may have been one of those people. But that was me a second ago — a totally different person, and I don’t need to reckon with that in any way. What I do need is for you to get the Blessing From Donald Trump!

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Maybe a paragraph blaming President Biden and Vice President Harris for vaccine hesitancy will help? Here is just such a paragraph. Gosh, they are just terrible! I bet nothing would make them madder than for you to get the Blessing From Donald Trump! They ought to apologize to the American people — for the virus, and in general. They need to reckon with all the bad things they said in the past. Just the two of them, and no one else.

Is Trump’s Influence Starting to Fade? / Jonathan Bernstein

 Is Trump’s Influence Starting to Fade?

His preferred candidate just lost a special election. But don’t count the former president out yet.

Not gone yet.

July 28, 2021

Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty

Republicans who have been hoping that former President Donald Trump will somehow just fade away got a glimmer of hope Tuesday. In a House special election in Texas with two Republicans competing in a runoff, the Trump-endorsed candidate was defeated.

Now, measuring the effects of endorsements across a full election cycle is difficult, and assessing the effect on a single contest is basically impossible. (That’s true of almost everything, whether it’s endorsements or campaign ads or speeches or debates.) There are too many possible factors, and only one outcome. However, the result in Texas does suggest that some of the more exaggerated expectations about Trump’s endorsement were overstated. If he can’t deliver in a low-interest contest without an incumbent on the ballot — and we can at least say that he failed to generate any kind of turnout surge for Susan Wright, his preferred candidate — then it seems less likely that he can bump off otherwise safe incumbent Republicans in primary elections with little effort.

But what matters isn’t how important Trump’s endorsement actually was. It’s how his endorsements are perceived by Republican party actors, especially politicians. And thus as soon as state Representative Jake Ellzey was declared the winner, everyone immediately started speculating that, as CNN’s Manu Raju said about Trump, “This loss will undoubtedly be interpreted as a sign of the waning influence of his endorsement.”

How much of a sign is still to be seen. But these kinds of perceptions can change rapidly, based on relatively flimsy evidence.

Political scientist David Karol notes that Trump himself can affect his reputation, and suspects he’ll take action to “endorse more selectively” going forward. Perhaps. Endorsements have been one of the few areas in which Trump has, at times, appeared to behave as a normal, incentive-driven politician, although he’s made some seemingly random picks as well. It’s quite possible that Trump will instead place the blame elsewhere and decide he got it right after all. It’s also unclear if Trump has the capacity to choose well at this point. He doesn’t seem to have much of a political shop surrounding him, and his endorsements may well be based on which candidates are good at flattering him.

Still, Trump’s influence isn’t entirely dependent on the perception that he can swing primary elections. It’s also based on the (almost certainly accurate) belief that Trump has no fundamental long-term loyalty to the Republican Party, and that at any point he could turn against its candidates and take enough voters with him that the party would be in terrible shape. After all, he wouldn’t have to convince very many voters to stay home to have a devastating impact on the midterms in 2022 or the 2024 presidential-year elections. That’s not going to change, no matter how many of his endorsed candidates lose.

So while congressional Republicans may now be a little less worried about Trump’s ability to unseat them, we’ll just have to watch how they act to see if they think the former president’s influence is really fading.

1. Lindsey Cormack and Jack Santucci at the Monkey Cage on ranked-choice voting.

2. Eric McGhee on invisible voters in California.

3. Benjamin F. Miller and Norm Ornstein on holding politicians responsible for their reactions to the pandemic.

4. Annie Lowrey on the “time tax.”

5. David Leonhardt on liberal Supreme Court justices putting their careers over their principles.

6. And a wonderful Jamelle Bouie item about the founders. I’ll add that using the Roman republic as a model — as the founding generation did — immediately sets up the expectation that the republic will give way to tyranny.

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Kamala Harris should try to be really popular

Kamala Harris should try to be really popular

Slow Boring / by Matthew Yglesias / July 27, 2021. 

SlowBoring.com

(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Perhaps the worst-kept secret in Washington is that tons of Democrats are terrified of the prospect of Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic Party presidential nominee at some point in the future.

Indeed, it’s such a poorly kept secret that it’s barely even a secret. For example, even though officially Biden has not announced a reelection bid — and given his age, this is formally an open question — absolutely everyone wants him to run again. But the terror is that he might not, or even if he does, he might not make it all the way through eight years. But beyond the possibility that Biden would die or step down, if he serves through 2028, it seems overwhelmingly likely that she’d win a primary.

Why are people scared? Well, mostly because her approval rating lags stubbornly behind Biden’s.

Personally, I am not that scared of her current approval numbers. What scares me instead is the reaction that you hear from the Harrisverse to these worries, which is mostly to accuse critics of sexism or to attribute her political problems to sexism. Indeed, just typing this paragraph I can feel the people getting ready to yell at me on Twitter. But my point isn’t to deny that sexism is real (it clearly is) or that it’s felt by women in politics (it clearly is) but that this kind of fatalism is paralyzing and politically deadly. There are women in politics who are popular and successful at winning tough races, and they didn’t do it by making sexism vanish from the planet earth any more than Barack Obama and Raphael Warnock ended racism.

These are political problems, and they need to be addressed politically. And on some level, I don’t think there’s any problem with Harris that can’t be solved by her wanting to solve problems. If she wants to be president, she needs to win the nomination and then she needs to win a general election. And she is in such a favorable position to win the nomination that her biggest vulnerability by far is concern that she’d lose a general election.

So to win a general election, she needs to be popular with swing voters. And to win the nomination, she also needs to be popular with swing voters. And to be popular with swing voters, she needs to try to do something she’s never really done in her career and try to be popular with swing voters. It seems to me that if you look at Harris’ career, you see someone who is smart and hard-working and has a lot of impressive political achievements, but she’s never before been in a place where winning the allegiance of swing voters has been important to her mission, and so she’s never really focused on that.

But she needs to. And she needs to start ASAP.

People pick vice presidents for bad reasons

As everyone from John Adams forward has noted, the Vice Presidency is a very odd role.

But if you look at the postwar years, we have had 14 VPs (Barkley, Nixon, Johnson, Humphrey, Agnew, Ford, Rockefeller, Mondale, Bush, Quayle, Gore, Cheney, Biden, Pence), and eight of them have become their party’s presidential nominee down the road. Eight out of 14 is great odds, and I wouldn’t entirely count Pence out yet. So in effect, when you are picking a VP you are putting a huge thumb on the scale for a future party nominee. Even when you do what Obama did and deliberately go out of your way to pick someone who you think is going to be too old, you might end up picking a future party nominee.

This means that when you pick someone, you really ought to be picking someone you think will be a good future party nominee.

And yet historically, this is almost never what actually happens. Indeed oftentimes you see something close to the reverse of that happening, and the nominee selects a vice president from the opposite faction of the party that he came from. That’s understandable, of course — nominees are trying to win the election so they address short-term party unity concerns. More recently, there’s less ideological factionalism in American politics, so you get something like Obama picking Biden to compensate for a lack of experience.

In Biden’s case, he found himself in a sort of weird situation where despite being an ex-VP and on some level a very “establishment” choice, his primary campaign actually didn’t raise much money or attract top-tier political operatives.

A lot of women who work professionally in Democratic Party politics like Harris a lot, so she brought that to the ticket, and major progressive donors love her. So she helped Biden consolidate the party not so much in an ideological sense as on the level of sensibilities. Biden had a lot of endorsements from frontline elected officials in swing districts, but Harris helped deliver the base. Not in the sense of the most left-wing people in America, but the kind of shock troops of Democratic Party politics who give time and money or even their whole careers over to the cause. Harris flatters their sensibilities of what the party is or should be all about in a way that Biden doesn’t.

But of course as a general election candidate, that’s the whole problem.

Harris impressive career is bad training

California is a huge-ass state and it’s overwhelmingly Democratic, but it only has two senators, and one of them has been in office since I was 11.

It is a very challenging feat to go from being the District Attorney of California’s 12th largest county to holding one of those precious Senate seats. But it’s a very particular kind of challenging feat. In 2010, Harris faced what was probably her toughest statewide race to become attorney general. The big problem there was that, unusually for California, the GOP had a viable candidate in LA County District Attorney Steve Cooley. And if you look at the final results, for a Democrat to win a statewide race in California 46-45 is really not very impressive.

But winning crowded primaries is hard, and Harris pulled it off. Then as Attorney General, she became a natural choice to succeed Barbara Boxer when her Senate seat opened up, but hardly the only choice. It’s a big state and it has four or five other statewide elected officials plus a couple of big-city mayors, former cabinet officials, and any number of billionaires, along with dozens of House members. But Harris once again rose to the top.

These are real political achievements, but they’re a particular kind of political achievement — mostly one that involves making elite actors in the Democratic Party like you a lot.

And that same skillset is exactly what made her an appealing choice to Biden — hard-core Democrats love her.

We shouldn’t slight these achievements, nor should we say (as I’ve heard people do) that she is “bad at politics.” But it’s precisely when you appreciate that this in fact a highly difficult career path that you see the problem.

On the one hand, Harris has never before been in a position where she needs the support of anyone other than a hardcore Democrat.

On the other hand, Harris is now the overwhelming favorite to be the nominee in either 2028 or 2024, so this inside appeal is now absolutely useless.

I think when you’re good at something in life, it’s hard to stop just continuing to do the thing that you’re good at. So it’s natural for Harris to find herself gravitationally pulled toward trying to lock down Democratic Party inside support more and more and more and more. But she’s already got that. And to the extent she doesn’t have that, it’s because people are worried about her national favorability numbers. To win the nomination, she needs to start taking the nomination for granted and focus on swing voters.

Many women are successful politicians

The sexism factor is, obviously, real.

Just mechanically, the way politics works is that if you’re a high-profile politician then people attack you. And if you’re a woman and people want to attack you, then some of them will attack you in misogynistic ways. Of course, the fact that people attack you for something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a net disadvantage. Barack Obama lost votes due to racism, but he also gained the highest level of Black support of any candidate on record. Most voters, by contrast, are women. Life is much more complicated than “women can’t be sexist,” but just as a mathematical baseline, gender identity does give you some upside to work with. Studies of women in congressional races show no net penalty relative to male nominees.

Looking specifically at Democrats’ core challenge of winning in the midwestern swing states, we know from experience that Tammy Baldwin and Gretchen Whitmer have done this well. We also know that Tina Smith and especially Amy Klobuchar do extremely well relative to the fundamentals in the sociologically similar state of Minnesota.

Kyrsten Sinema, whether you love or hate her, has a solid electoral track record in Arizona. Stacy Abrams did not win her race in Georgia, but she performed well relative to the fundamentals there. Susan Collins is a Republican rather than a Democrat, but she consistently delivers some of the most impressive election results in the country relative to the partisan fundamentals.

It is certainly possible that this does not translate cleanly or perfectly into presidential politics. But I think we should at least take Jennifer Lawless’ “Women on The Run” data and the observed success of midwestern Democratic women as creating a presumption that it is possible for a woman to put up Whitmer/Baldwin-type numbers and win. To be totally frank, my sense is Democrats would be in better shape today had Biden just picked Whitmer to begin with.

But what’s done is done, and Harris is the odds-on favorite. She and her whole team need to get up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say “we know women can win tough races and gain the support of swing voters in the key states, and now we need to win a tough race and gain the support of swing voters in the key states.” It’s not that sexism isn’t a factor in life, but it’s not insurmountable, and if your numbers are bad that means you are doing something worse than other politicians who manage to pull this off. And you need to fix it.

Swing voters for dummies

Whenever I say that Democrats need to try harder to appeal to the sensibilities of voters with moderately conservative views on cultural issues, people come out of the woodwork to ask what exactly I mean.

But I really do have two key opinions about this. One is that on one level, it’s not rocket science. The other is that on another level, it’s probably not possible to identify the exact single tweak that magically unlocks electoral success. The key is to do something like have everyone in the office put a sticky note on their computer screen that says “the median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in the suburbs of an unfashionable city.” If you try your best to run decisions through that filter, you are going to do a lot better than if you don’t run decisions through that filter.

The day-to-day work of Democratic Party politics is mostly done by under-50 college graduates who live in central cities and who socialize on a day-to-day basis with other under-50 college graduates who live in central cities. But even people in that kind of bubble aren’t truly in some kind of informational void. Think about how you’d talk to your mom or your uncle or your barber. Nobody is really so sheltered that they have no idea how to communicate outside their personal niche.

I don’t think the person who decided this was a smart pre-election thing for Harris to tweet believed that this message is a good way to appeal to 50-something working-class white suburbanites in the Midwest. I think that person decided that he or she didn’t care.

Kamala Harris @KamalaHarris

There’s a big difference between equality and equity.

November 1st 2020

8,340 Retweets42,874 Likes

The mission for Harris is to care. To say “I am not going to say that unless I think it will increase my appeal to swing voters.” Then if someone else (a donor, a staffer, a foundation executive, an interest group leader) asks why she said something that they don’t like, the answer should be “I did it to increase my appeal to swing voters.” And then if someone says “look, Kamala, there are more important things in life than increasing your appeal to swing voters,” she should say “that is wrong, literally the most important thing in my life is increasing my appeal to swing voters. If I want to win the nomination, I need to increase my appeal to swing voters. If I want to win the general election, I need to increase my appeal to swing voters. If I do not increase my appeal to swing voters, there is literally nothing of substance that I can accomplish in politics. So my singular focus in life is on increasing my appeal to swing voters.”

A lot of people will find this extremely alienating, which is good because it means she will end up surrounded by people who believe wholeheartedly in trying to increase her appeal to swing voters.

Okay, but what does this mean specifically?

In concrete terms, it seems to me that the biggest thing Harris could do to close her polling gap with Biden is to embrace hokey patriotism.

Biden loves hokey patriotism. Harris, when asked about Tim Scott’s contention that America is not a racist country, gave an answer that sounds to me like she wanted to give a smart answer to the question. But she shouldn’t be trying to give smart answers to questions, she should be trying to appeal to swing voters, and the correct answer is “this is the greatest country on earth — period.”

Isn’t it more complicated than that? Well, yes, obviously the question of racism in American life is more complicated than that. But the question of what do old white people in the suburbs of Grand Rapids want to hear from Kamala Harris? is really simple. Nobody who sometimes votes for Democrats and sometimes votes for Republicans is worried that Harris is too patriotic. As the child of immigrants, she’s ideally situated to really lean into patriotism and say that her parents came here because they knew it was the greatest country on earth. Where else can you move and then watch your daughter grow up to be vice president? What an amazing land of opportunity!

Troops are good. Criminals are bad. College students sometimes get out of control with political correctness.

Politicians with a less commanding position than Harris need to do things like “sound smart and impressive to journalists,” but she’s lucky and she doesn’t need to do that. It’s important to respect the flag. People are too sensitive sometimes these days.

In a lot of ways, I think Tammy Baldwin is the most instructive example. She was the first woman elected to Congress from Wisconsin, the first openly LGBTQ woman elected to the House, and the first openly LGBTQ person elected to the United States Senate. And while none of that is a secret, she doesn’t really talk about it much at all. If you were trying to make your way up the ladder of Democratic Party politics in California and had that list of identity markers you would talk about it constantly, because the main thing that matters in California politics is what hard-core Democrats think, and hard-core Democrats love that stuff. But Baldwin works in Wisconsin, so she talks relentlessly about her work on behalf of the Wisconsin dairy industry.

Obviously, California’s members of Congress do work on behalf of California industries too, but it would be considered crass to go on and on about how you got the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to prioritize Hollywood’s requests on copyright policy when negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That’s the difference between California politics and Wisconsin politics. And what Harris has to do is try to flip the switch from California to Wisconsin.

The hero Democrats need

There’s a valuable lesson in how quickly the White House and Democrats more broadly embraced Eric Adams after he narrowly won the NYC mayoral primary.

Simply put, there are a lot of white Democrats who are leery of super-woke politics but feel uncertain about how to express that without triggering a backlash. And one of the most effective means at their disposal is to elevate moderate Black and Hispanic Democrats who are willing to go out with a little swagger and punch left. James Clyburn has often played this role, but he’s 81 years old and not going to be the future of the party.

But Harris very likely is going to be the future of the party. She could play that kind of role much more effectively than either Clyburn or Adams.

This is a particularly valuable opportunity not just because of her personal identity but due to the weird nature of her job. VPs often become their party’s nominee, but they also often struggle politically because it’s an inherently awkward position. You’d like to be defined in the public eye as your own unique person, but you’d also like to have a good working relationship with your boss, which requires you to be deferential and not make trouble. A thing that Harris could do that would distinguish her from Biden without being disloyal to Biden would be to operate with a little more boldness than an old white man would be permitted.

She can remind people that she challenged the incumbent DA in San Francisco from the right to win her first election — that she is well aware of the excesses of big-city liberalism and has in fact fought against them. I always thought it would’ve been an easy layup for her to denounce the San Francisco school renaming drive and say she had plenty of experience tangling with these kinds of lunatics.

Somebody like that would be playing a valuable role for lots of people in the party. They’d be saying “thank God Harris is around.” You might even start to see someone suggesting somewhere that it might be better for the party if Biden were to step aside. Obviously, she shouldn’t try to encourage that kind of talk, but I do think she should be worried that nobody at all is even bothering to make that kind of counterintuitive pitch. Journalists are easily bored and we need material. The fact that nobody at all finds that to be a credible thing to say is not great. But the biggest possible trap is to act defeatist about it rather than take action.

Well, what if she doesn’t want to say and do the kinds of things I’m suggesting? To me, that’s politics. When I wrote “Obama won downscale white people’s votes by pandering to their views,” I remember Intern Marc pushing back a little bit and saying I was making Obama out to be too cynical and he was probably saying what he believed. I think successful politicians manage to work themselves to a point where they are beyond these kinds of petty questions of sincerity. Lying is bad, morally speaking. But nobody says every single thing that they believe, and certainly nobody does so in public. Politicians, especially, edit themselves. And Obama edited himself differently during his 2008 and 2012 runs than he did post-2014 and in his post-presidency.

Harris needs to work her way into something more like an Early Obama Edit — showily patriotic, unifying, and optimistic. After all, either highly woke ideas are wrong, in which case it’s good to eschew them, or else they are correct and it’s necessary for someone in Harris’ position to pander to white fragility in order to win. I don’t really care which of those lines of analysis her team sells themselves on (they can disagree among themselves); the point is to reach an overlapping consensus around the benefits of a culturally moderate style of politics.

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I’m tired of being nice to vaccine refusers

I’m tired of being nice to vaccine refusers

Opinion by 

Paul Waldman

Columnist

Today at 11:55 a.m. EDT

Imagine how the United States must look to someone in South Africa, where 3.9 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, or India, where the number is 6.9 percent. People in those nations and a hundred others are desperate to be vaccinated, while here in the world’s richest country we have more vaccine doses than we know what to do with, and we’re terribly worried about not hurting the delicate feelings of those who insist on putting everyone else at risk.

This is not the most efficacious public health message to deliver, but I’ll say it anyway: Being nice to those who refuse to be vaccinated is getting awfully tiresome.

To be clear, I’m not saying anyone should start yelling at their family members or neighbors who refuse to be vaccinated; it won’t work, and it will probably just harden their resolve. This isn’t about personal interactions. It’s about how we as a society are treating those who in the name of their “freedom” are putting everyone else at risk.

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At the very least, we should start taking every step possible to prevent those actively refusing to participate in our mutual effort to prevent each other from getting sick and dying from doing more harm.

That’s why it’s encouraging to see that some state government agencies and large private organizations are finally putting their foot down and imposing vaccine requirements. The Department of Veterans Affairs will now require vaccinations for front-line workers, and the state of California and the city of New York are telling workers that they have to either be vaccinated or get weekly coronavirus tests. And a long list of health-care organizations is calling for mandatory vaccinations for all workers in their industry.

But consider these alarming statistics:

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An analysis by WebMD and Medscape Medical News estimated that 25 percent of hospital workers who had contact with patients had not been vaccinated by the end of May.

One factor behind the slow uptake: Health-care organizations had largely avoided imposing vaccination mandates, fearing the risk of lawsuits or staff defections. Fewer than 9 percent of hospitals had required their workers to get vaccinated as of last Thursday, according to tracking by the American Hospital Association.

I’m sorry, but if you work in a hospital you simply don’t get the “freedom” to put other people at risk. That’s a principle we regularly apply: If your job involves the safety of other people, you may have to do some things you otherwise wouldn’t, to protect the rest of us. Truck drivers are required to pull over and rest so they don’t get into accidents. A chef doesn’t get to say that it’s an infringement on his “freedom” to force him to wash his hands. If you don’t like it, you can do something else for a living.

No, we aren’t going to forcibly vaccinate anyone. But because unvaccinated people pose a danger to the rest of us, we ought to be able to say that if you make that choice, the rest of us can require you to minimize the harm you’re able to do.

There’s no perfect answer to how far such restrictions should go, but at a minimum we ought to say that if you want the freedom not to be vaccinated, a business or organization should have the freedom to tell you to stay away until either you’re vaccinated or the pandemic is over.

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Unfortunately, we’ve been moving in exactly the opposite direction. Cynical Republican politicians who see political advantage in pandering to their supporters’ most toxic instincts have moved to prohibit state agencies and even private businesses from requiring proof of vaccination; among the places where this has happened are Texas and Florida, two of the worst current covid hotspots (along with Missouri, where not being vaccinated is now a badge of pride).

We know that there are multiple kinds of people who have yet to be vaccinated. A relatively small number have medical conditions that make it dangerous, and of course accommodations can be made for them. There are people who are hesitant because they distrust the medical system, and they might be convinced with the right kind of outreach. There are those who for whatever reason don’t feel the urgency but wouldn’t necessarily be against it — and might get vaccinated if that’s what it took to go to their favorite restaurant or movie theater.

But then there are the active refusers, the ones imbibing Fox News propaganda and Facebook conspiracy theories, the ones who think not getting vaccinated for a disease that has already killed well over 600,000 Americans makes them independent and strong.

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It won’t work to lecture or insult them. There may be nothing that can change their minds. But don’t tell us that there’s something wrong with being angry at them. We should do everything we can to stop them from putting others at risk.

And if saying so makes them upset, and makes them bray even louder about their freedom? Too bad. After a year and a half of this pandemic, and so much suffering and death, it’s hard to care about their feelings.