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there's this broader idea that swing voters are an impenetrable, mysterious bloc with arcane views that have nothing to do with what's actually happening
maybe! but "voted moderate, got left" is not a complicated message available only to the initiated
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Jesse Spafford
@jessespafford
What portion of these swing voters do you think could tell you a single policy that Biden passed? x.com/tracewoodgrain
I get this a lot as a high-info centrist. my views aren't representative of Real Swing Voters, etc
and again - maybe! but when Elon Musk is personally noticing and highlighting some of my points, and prominent Dems aren't touching them - I think Dems could do a bit more!
The reaction from this is going to be, voters didn't believe her running as a moderate so the party should move left. Take a look at the comments from Ezra’s latest podcast 
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yeah, anyone who says what the progressive base wants to hear is going to get an incredibly friendly hearing in the near future, but those in the party inclined to think strategically should recognize how badly that approach failed
The media won’t tell you, and woke liberals are clueless: Trump’s roaring comeback is driven by everyday Americans fed up with soaring bills, not obsessed about a dozen genders or the right to a transgender bathroom. #AbookThatChangesEverything #TrumpWon
There’s this weird tendency on the Dem side to dismiss economic leftism as not something that is offputting to voters as if voters can’t conclude that inflationary policies are inflationary
yeah. like, we were all there for Dems bragging about massive spending during the Biden admin and shouting down Manchin and Sinema for their skepticism towards massive spending
people aren't goldfish!
This was my explanation of the election.
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Yes, but Biden pursued the most progessive ECONOMIC policy in our lifetimes (not in US history). Not the most SOCIALLY progressive. He was vocally pro-Israel.
both economic and social progressivism, with exceptions around eg Israel
he was extremely pro-trans, for instance
I normally agree with you, but not this time. One of the reasons Harris didn't really get crushed was her doing well in rich, moderate, suburbs. I also don't think a left/right cleavage is the proper way of analyzing the election. Harris lost because she wasn't populist enough.
following that theory of politics, Biden pushed an extremely populist-left economic agenda. it did not lead to the mass popularity the populist left was counting on.
I think left/right absolutely matters here. median voter theorem remains undefeated
Kamala Harris is the most radical Presidential nominee in history.
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What “progressive” policies did he pursue that were unpopular? Cuz he certainly wasn’t spending political capital on trans rights, defunding the police, decriminalizing border crossings, or making electric vehicles mandatory.
he was very much spending political capital on the first and third of those things, in fact!
Fair analysis, but this doesn't explain the key fact of why voters found Biden palatable, while entirely rejecting Kamala Harris who ran on the same platform.
What caused the drastic shift among the American electorate over 4 years?
wait, how does it not explain that? what caused the drastic shift? the concrete evidence that electing any Dem without the spine to stand up to young progressives would mean a show run by young progressives
Do you honestly think swing voters believed these things because of how Biden governed, as opposed to being featured prominently in Republican attacks for ~5 years?
I do believe that, yes
propaganda with truth to point to goes much further than propaganda without truth. why do you think Dems focused so much on Project 2025 even after Trump disavowed it?
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The progressive stuff though is stuff that voters want. Union jobs etc. He didn't make trans issues a focal point of his administration
I don't think voters actually want the country to be held captive to the longshoreman's union!
This nails it! Biden changed lanes to progressive and Harris said she wouldn't have done anything different. How can anyone believe she was actually running as a moderate?
“didn’t campaign on” doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in all the election postmortems
It's so insulting to voters like me, who would be open to a moderate Democratic party, to say "but Kamala didn't run a leftist campaign!!!"
What, you think I'm a fucking goldfish? GTFOH.
The problem for the left is that if they don't have a strong personality and cognitive ability it doesn't even matter how the DNC candidate campaigns because the 30 & 40 year old staffers with far-left policy positions will be running the country.
This was explicitly me. I voted for Biden as a centrist, and his administration was the most screamingly far left, illiberal, corrupt administration we’ve had in my lifetime. The Biden administration made Trump look like a paragon of honest good governance- and that’s a tall
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Wait, someone thought that was a viable theory?
That is the weirdest take to learn about for me.
Maybe it is just because I live in this grey area but that is like declaring the grass red.
If I spend a bunch of time publicly establishing myself as a carnivore
I can’t quietly distance myself in order to ingratiate myself to the veggie crowd
Honestly it’s kind of like talking to Google engineers and they don’t know why people don’t want their software
It’s not because it doesn’t necessarily work as advertised, it’s that no one trusts them anymore and they can’t quantify that.
Like the Machine can’t poll for it so
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I think it's nearly impossible to overstate how little most people know about politics, including swing voters. I think the biggest thing is that things kinda sucked under Biden when they didn't kinda suck under Trump. Many swing voters woulda just been happy with the leftism if
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I haven’t seen this expressed so well before, but this was definitely part of my swing voter calculus.
It doesn’t help that historically, Harris has been wildly progressive and only “moderated” when it came time to run for the presidency.
A lot of the more high-profile and vocal Trump supporters are really swing voters. The tell is how many are pleading, even after a decisive election, "here is how you could win the next one". The loyal Trump team people are busy gloating.
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can never actually come out and repudiate any of their extreme woke positions, or they would precipitate an intraparty civil war.
The best they can do is "keep quiet and hope nobody remembers we're in favor of that stuff."
Voters see through it!
Could even 10% of swing voters point to what progressive policies Biden implemented that they didn't like? Or will they parrot Fox news vibes bullshit (or just say inflation)?
They’re still lying or in denial about this. Obama 2nd term was the same story. Their “normalcy” minstrel show isn’t fooling anymore
You could also phrase it "Perception Gap: Over 80% of swing voters who chose Trump remembered Harris held positions before 2024 she didn't campaign on in 2024,"
This reports the beliefs of swing voters “who broke for Trump, not swing voters as a whole.
I don’t think you can conclude something like “no swing voter believed” based on this data.
Maybe so but it’s still worth distinguishing what progressive means in that context, in other words, not cultural. At least when it comes to what Biden had control over. He loudly said FUND the police at a SOTU address.
Exactly. Plus they chose her knowing she would be a weak candidate, revealing Biden never meant it when he said he wouldn't run again. Just a thoroughly-deserved loss.
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Fabricio Nakata
@FabricioNakata
It's Biden's fault, btw. For limiting his VP choice and going with Harris, governing with the progressives after beating them in the primary, and not dealing with the border.
The progressive establishment is very aggressive, and a president who was half checked out was never going to stand up to it. Neither would one who saw nothing wrong with it except that it polled poorly.
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I think the primary contributor to Kamala’s very real lack of belief in her supposed moderation was her 2019 run - so many sound bites
1/- My preferred reaction would be to open up a new simultaneous chat window, ask them why they don't believe Trump when he says that he doesn't want a nationwide abortion ban, and then parrot their answers back to them.
"believe Harris held positions she didn't campaign on in 2024"
She never repudiated the positions she campaigned on in 2019!
This is absolutely correct, but also not a bad strategy, e.g. Bush’s ‘compassionate conservative’
Of course a real mystery is the swing voter who believes Kamala is lying about being a moderate and Trump is lying about his policies proposals.
Well, she didn’t run as a moderate.
They opened her convention with a land acknowledgement.
Even Native American voters said “enough already!”
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You know just maybe the average swing voter isn't as dumb as everyone thinks? Hard to believe, right?
in retrospect as basically a trans rights single issue voter, I was screaming about this for 2 years until I thought Dobbs would bail us out. It didn't.
If you campaign to the center during the general election and then fail to govern from the center, eventually folks in the middle will twig to your strategy...
I was paying attention to be familiar with what the campaign wanted their image to be and I can tell you the #1 concern I had voting Harris was "I'm not cosigning any ridiculous lefty shit, this is not a mandate."
I don’t think progressives think he ran a particularly progressive administration.
Piece says "Swing voters broke for Trump 52% versus just 38% for Harris" so this is talking about 80% of that 52% =~40% of swing voters as defined. A significant chunk, but not even a majority.
Democrats never campaign on their most unpopular policy positions, they simply hope to gain control over the institutions (courts, media, academia, etc.) so they can ram them through.
The other problem is that she did a literal 180 from her policy positions both in the administration and prior to the administration in the 2020 primary. Lots of reasons to believe she wasn't telling the truth.
Reality: voters voted for racism and sexism and justify their choices by total bullshit.
the same ppl who shriek about the 2017 muslim ban despite trump never mentioning it once in 8 years simply don't understand how swing voters know things that she didn't expressly campaign on. it's the tell that they think voters are stupid and couldn't possibly know things
Their reward is going to be the 4 most corrupt years in history and a heaping serving of broken, incompetent government. I'm sure billionaires are lining up to install policies that benefit me. It's not if swing voters exist, it's what are they swinging to?
