The biggest difference between the successes of Clinton and Obama, who got re-elected, and the failure of the Biden-Harris team to win four more years was their midterm experiences. Both Clinton and Obama got clobbered, forcing them to rethink some of their policies and how to sell them.

Biden and the party as a whole took the Democrats’ “better than expected” performance in the 2022 midterms, when they still lost the House but gained a Senate seat, as a sign that they were on to something and that they didn’t need to course-correct as much as polling was actually telling them to course-correct.

The consumer price index for all urban consumers is the measure of inflation that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to calculate real incomes. To arrive at this figure, the bureau averages the prices for a basket of goods and services. It then assigns weights to individual items based on their relative importance in terms of what average American consumers spend on things like food, housing and medical care.

The problem is that, in 2023, nearly 15% of all U.S. households, including 24% of those who rent, spent more than half of their income on housing. These 20 million American households, who the housing department considers severely cost-burdened, surely don’t have enough disposable income left over after paying for shelter to cover other basic necessities.

Virtually everyone spends money on housing and health care. But the consumer price index also takes into account items that not everyone has to spend money on at a given point in time.

For example, the index assumes that American households spend, on average, only 0.7% of household income on child care or preschool each year. For families with infants or toddlers, the reality is much grimmer. One 2024 survey put the average cost of child care at 24% of household income.

For all Americans facing the steep cost of medical care, and for those also paying for college or child care, wage growth has not kept up with their expenses

Our Mission
To restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.
We work to develop the three pillars that support conservative economics:

Zoom out: Something bigger had been exploding across society, politics and business. Democrats, business and the media pushed diversity, equity and inclusion from an aspiration to a de facto mandate.

The new language of inclusivity included Latinx, a word that even many Latino groups rolled their eyes at. “Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke,” Dowd wrote.
These topics stirred white college men to vote in unusually high numbers. College women, stirred by concerns over abortion restrictions, were expected to offset the male surge. It didn’t happen.

A Letter To Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama explains how to actually make government more efficient.

So here’s the deal. You will never be able to run the government the way you run your companies. But you can do a lot to make it more efficient. The trick is to avoid simplistic moves like mass layoffs and the closing of entire agencies. Remember that Donald Trump’s appointee Rick Perry wanted to close the Department of Energy, not realizing that one of its most important functions was to run the system of national laboratories that were responsible for, among other things, research on nuclear weapons and energy. You will also run into the problem that Congress has a say in how the government operates. Even if that branch is controlled by Republicans, they will have equities in different parts of the American state, and may not allow you to violate statutes that they had earlier endorsed.

We need to cut back government regulation of many parts of the private sector. But we also need to deregulate the government itself, and allow those who work for it to actually do their jobs. If Donald Trump wants to help the American people, he needs to see the government not as an enemy to be dismantled, but as an effective and indeed necessary means of doing so.

New Hopium Series On What Happened And What Comes Next, Simon Rosenberg

Here’s what we know about 2024 right now (I will keep updating this everyday):

2024 was a close election. Trump will win by approx. 1.5 pts, and 0.9 in WI, 1.4 in MI, 2.1 in PA. A shift of 2.1 points in these three states and Harris wins. Not a landslide, not a blowout. The Senate today is at 52-48 (PA is still counting) and the House will be decided by a few seats, either way. While we lost some House seats, we’ve also flipped a few, including 4 in New York State this cycle. While Harris lost in the 7 battleground states, we had important down ballot wins, including AZ/MI/NV/WI Senate and NC Gov. We had other important wins across the US and did win the blue dot again in Nebraska.

There was a 6 point shift in the national popular vote towards Trump from 2020, and Trump is on track to be only the second Republican to win the national popular vote since 1988. While there were bright spots this year, this was a very bad election for our party, our freedoms, our democracy and our future and there is a lot of important work ahead of us.

A Peace Plan for Ukraine?
Futura Doctrina,  Mick Ryan

The West’s strategy for Ukraine is no longer failing. It has clearly failed.

It did not have to be that way. But a generation of western political leaders that were conditioned into slovenly strategic thinking by the long post-Cold War peace and the discretionary, slow-paced wars of the past two decades have been unable to sufficiently adjust their mindsets to deal with the ruthlessness of Putin and his supporters.

Meet Elon Musk, Our New Shadow President
Zeteo, Jacob Silverman

The Shadow President’s Agenda
We’re already starting to see what a Musk shadow presidency might look like. The day after the election, Musk participated in a phone call with Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It was an immediate promotion for Musk: from major donor to statesman. Musk is a Department of Defense contractor with a top-secret security clearance, and the Ukrainian military relies on his Starlink satellite internet service. But Musk has intervened to limit Ukraine’s ability to use Starlink in attacks on Russian forces; expressed his discomfort with being involved in the Ukraine war; and reportedly speaks regularly to Russian President Vladimir Putin (whose military forces, somehow, have acquired numerous Starlink terminals). It’s an extraordinary set of entanglements for a private citizen to bring to a diplomatic phone call about a sensitive foreign policy issue.

But that was just day one.

The Morning: It’s the loyalty, stupid
So What, Chris Cillizza

What does all of that tell us? Exactly what we suspected: The MOST important trait for being selected by Trump to serve in his administration is loyalty to him. It’s likely the second and third most important trait too.

Wiles managed Trump’s 2024 campaign from the start. Stefanik was one of the loudest and most ardent voices in Congress in favor of his run. Homan has been a regular presence at Trump’s rallies for years.

The debate over why Harris lost is in full swing. Here’s a guide.
Vox, Andrew Prokop

Was she a weak candidate? Was it Joe Biden’s fault? Did Trump have unexpected strength? Or was it a global trend?
 

I realize that the term “inclusive” may not be popular on the right these days, and perhaps seems especially out-of-fashion this week. But I will use it anyway: No political movement in modern America will succeed for any significant period of time without being intentionally and aggressively inclusive.

Some of the people who are in the coalition now are going to leave, which means you’d better have a plan to add even more of the people you just beat. Indeed, the moment of victory is the moment when outreach is most important. Is that as much fun as gloating and retaliating? No. But I promise it’s a lot more fun than what the Democrats are facing.

The focus group organized by Harris supporters in western Pennsylvania, not long after the presidential debate in September, was made up of a dozen people who voted for Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 but who were undecided this time, except for being sure that they’d vote.

Asked to pick between the two words, the woman said she’d “probably go with ‘crazy,’” anguish clearly in her voice.

“Because ‘crazy’ doesn’t look down on me,” she said. “‘Preachy’ does.”

After a crushing defeat, here are a few pathways out of the wilderness.

‘The Democratic Party should act more democratically, Andrew Yang

‘Speak to working class pain’, Faiz Shakir

‘Yield to a new generation’, Ross Barkan

‘Fox News and the podcast brosphere tell them we are weak’, Chuck Rocha

‘Wrest more control of the national information environment from Trump’, Wil Stancil

‘Democrats must return to being the party that a majority of voters believes to be saner’, Matt Bennett

Unlike broadcasting, viral communication initially reaches a much smaller audience. A TikTok only gets views if it generates enough algorithmic engagement to be recommended to more user feeds, and a tweet only goes viral if it gets enough retweets. Each post reaches a different audience, so politicians can’t expect their messaging to be consistent, or heard at all, unless they can make it go viral.

As such, candidates are reshaping their communication to perform better on algorithmic platforms. This means getting more likes, more shares, and more retention—which in turn means exaggerating and hyperbolizing, since less exciting content simply doesn’t go far on those platforms.

Yascha and Freya discuss why so many young people came to prefer the online world to real life.

I think the biggest kind of sentiment I want to get across in terms of what social media is doing is this sense of loss, that my generation has lost something. Love has completely changed. Friendship has completely changed. Social media creates the illusion that you’re in touch with people; you see people posting their Instagram stories, you see their relationship updates and it provides people with this sense that they’re connecting and they’re interacting even though, really, it’s somewhat of an illusion.

nd people didn’t anticipate the extent to which people would forfeit the real world for these online connections, especially young people who haven’t really grown up with a real sense of community. A lot of them haven’t grown up with real deep friendships. They haven’t known the alternative. And so when you provide them with these online communities, online friends, it might seem like a great thing. But, unfortunately, they compare that to the real world, which is full of friction, of rejection, and the social anxiety that comes from that. The online world seems much more compelling. I think we underestimated the extent to which people would choose that over reality.

… quite literally, the Berlin Wall did not fall.  It did not fall thirty-five years ago today.  It never fell.  The “fall of the Berlin Wall” is a literary device, not a historical event.

And that we have chosen a false image to stand for a moment of liberation reveals a problem.

We cannot change the world all at once.  But we can change the way we think.  We can clear away the clichés and make ourselves more lively.  We can work together and then, when other things are in motion, be ready to turn the change in the right direction.