Dan Ancona

What the hell happened to the Wisconsin GOP?

People re-litigating this primary like it was some heartbreaking squeaker is so funny to me Fetterman won by 32 pts, carrying every single county He wasn’t some secret moderate who duped everyone into thinking he was progressive He was a fundamentally different guy pre-stroke

I need everyone with any modicum of influence in the Democratic Party or prominent progressive organization to drill this into their skull: “It's a DC myth that the swing voter is a hyper-engaged centrist that writes for the Washington Post. The average swing voter is very much a heterodox moderate — some far-right views, some far-left views. And they don't really care that much about politics. They don't trust people very much. They think that politicians are in it for themselves. And they generally vote for whoever makes the economy the best and whoever has the least chaos in their opinion. So that group overlaps a lot with young voters. It overlaps a lot with Hispanic voters. It overlaps a lot in general with the types of low-propensity voters that Donald Trump has gained a lot with. …[A lot of] these people don't care about politics when a presidential election is not on the ballot. They don't even know a special election is a thing. They barely know a midterm exists.”

note that you and i have spoken extensively about this. i do not actually believe that you are in for a good-faith discussion on this, so this will be the last time i engage with you on it. but here you go: yes, i disagree with your piece. yes, i think it is a good practice of politics to establish distance between yourself and an unpopular party when it comes to electoral terrain that is extremely unfavorable. for example, texas is a trump +14 state. you *need* to do that because people still need a reason to know you're not just a Generic Democrat. it's less about an attack on "the groups" and more about attacking *biden* — who is toxic in TX — that makes this specifically a good response from Talarico. yes, i think ordinary voters don't know what "the groups" really are, but they do know what policy is — and they believe the biden admin's policy failed them. yes, i do believe that the biden admin's policy probably was meaningfully shaped by these activists in ways that meaningfully altered the perception voters had of the biden admin. in texas, that was for the negative, given how red the state is. and yes, I think it is great politics for James Talarico to throw Joe Biden — and any liberal-associated group — under the bus. he will win ~99% of the liberal vote in the general against Ken Paxton. this is not in doubt. he needs conservatives and moderates in a Trump +14 state.

I will vote for any candidate who works 5 minutes in their stump about how dem funders are too focused on cost per net vote and thus limit themselves to only "measurable" things in an electoral context, which then leaves basically anything long term or difficult to measure the impact of (namely cultural change or social media communications) profoundly underfunded, which then hurts the campaigns they are seeking to help in the first place!

Voters in 2024 had both chronic and acute frustration about the economy. They wanted change and were skeptical of Dems’ capacity to deliver it. Right wing and corporate media effects are not insurmountable. But a lack of movement alignment makes this challenge more difficult.