#steve phillips

While perhaps it's too early to call it a "masterstroke", Joe Biden stepping aside for Kamala Harris will probably turn out much better than any Democrat would have predicted a month ago.

Kamala Harris will likely be the next president of the United States – and that’s overall good news if you care about democracy, justice and equality. Joe Biden’s decision on Sunday to bow out of the presidential race clears the path for the country to elect its first woman and first woman of color as president.

For people who need a historical reminder...

[M]ost people in this country typically choose the Democratic nominee for president over the Republican nominee time and time again. With the sole exception of 2004, in every presidential election since 1992, the Democratic nominee has won the popular vote (Biden bested Donald Trump by 7m votes in 2020).

Now for more recent events.

If, in fact, support for Democrats among people of color is the principal problem, then putting Harris at the top of the ticket is a master stroke. The enthusiasm for electing the first woman of color as president will likely be a thunderclap across the country that consolidates the support of voters of color, and, equally important, motivates them to turn out in large numbers at the polls, much as they did for Barack Obama in 2008. The challenge the party will face in November is holding the support of Democratic-leaning and other “gettable” whites, especially given the electorate’s tortured history in embracing supremely qualified female candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams. (The primary difference between Abrams, who lost in Georgia, and Senator Raphael Warnock, who won, is gender.) Sexism, misogyny and sexist attitudes about who should be the leader of the free world are real and Democrats will have to work hard to address that challenge. One critical step to solidifying the Democratic base is for all political leaders to quickly and forcefully endorse and embrace Harris’s candidacy. Mathematically, it is likely – and certainly possible, if massive investments are made in getting out the vote of people of color and young people as soon as possible – that the gains for Democrats will offset any losses among whites worried about a woman (and one of color, no less) occupying the Oval Office and becoming our nation’s commander in chief.

We shouldn't forget that the VP's mom was born in India. A number of people in the growing South Asian community in the US who may not be especially interested in politics will be tempted to pause their disinterest and vote for Kamala. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have all had female prime ministers – so there's not exactly a taboo about women in power.

One way to measure enthusiasm for Kamala is to look at how much money is being raised by ActBlue. Not all the money ActBlue raises goes to the national ticket. I donated to a US Senate campaign in June via ActBlue. BUT the timing of recent donations leaves little doubt what the cause of the recent spike is.

For context, first some recent weekly totals (source)...

Week of June 30 through July 6 — $65,220,920

Week of July 7 through July 13 — $48,669,913

Week of July 14 through July 20 — $61,349,601

As of Noon today (CDT): Week of July 21 through July 27th — $150,042,360 and the third day of the week is just a little over half over. In the previous hour alone, roughly $2.44 million was raised.

These are small donations, not like the $45 million per month promised by multi-billionaire Elon Putz to Trump. So grassroots Dems are stoked and are out for a win.

ActBlue is fairly no-nonsense, it's not exactly Amazon in layout. So people are not drawn there by flashy graphics.

The gray jay - Perisoreus canadensis.

Also known as the whiskey jack or Canada jay.

To anyone who’s spent time in Democratic politics in the past decade, a certain type of young person will immediately be familiar: bright-eyed, old enough to drive a car but not old enough to rent one without insurance fees, maybe taking a gap year before starting college or else filling a period of post-graduation, pre-employment idleness.

They probably majored, or are majoring, in political science or public policy or whatever the equivalent area of study offered by their school is. Raised on a steady diet of West Wing optimism cut with a healthy dose of Veep pessimism, they’ve likely spent a summer or two sweating it out in Washington, D.C., cranking out esoteric policy memos for a junior member’s assistant deputy legislative director, or else doing research for a grizzled senior fellow at an upper-Massachusetts Avenue think tank. They might have a faded campaign button from some bygone presidential race dangling from their Fjällräven backpack — maybe for Bernie, or more likely for Pete.

These are, of course, the foot soldiers of the Democratic Party’s permanent reserve army, members of the class of aspiring politicos who work in the party’s national and local offices, flesh out campaign staffs and populate the broader network of consultants and strategists that churns to life during major election cycles. On the campaign trail, Democratic candidates hail these young people as a major political asset, pointing to them as proof of the party’s growing base of support among the next generation of leaders and voters. On college campuses around the country, a flourishing ecosystem of student-run organizations ensures that the quad-to-campaign pipelines continue to pump out a steady flow of enthusiastic young party staffers.

But what if, hidden below their laptop stickers and campaign totes, these young people represent a real political risk for Democrats? And what if, contrary to conventional Democratic wisdom, the power that these young people wield within the party is actually hurting its chance at the ballot box rather than helping it?

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At its most basic, Shor’s theory goes something like this: Although young people as a whole turn out to vote at a lower rate than the general population, the aforementioned type of young person is actually overrepresented within the core of the Democratic Party’s infrastructure. According to Shor, the problem with this permanent class of young staffers is that they tend to hold views that are both more liberal and more ideologically motivated than the views of the coveted median voter, and yet they yield a significant amount of influence over the party’s messaging and policy decisions. As a result, Democrats end up spending a lot of time talking about issues that matter to college-educated liberals but not to the multiracial bloc of moderate voters that the party needs to win over to secure governing majorities in Washington.

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People who paid close attention to the 2016 presidential campaign probably remember the most-watched Democratic campaign commercial from the cycle, Hillary Clinton’s “Mirrors” ad, which featured images of young women gazing at themselves in mirrors intercut with footage of Donald Trump making disparaging comments about women. It was powerful stuff — at least among the young liberals on Clinton’s staff.

The “Mirrors” ad featured prominently in a series of experiments that Shor did with Civis to evaluate the effect of various Democratic campaign commercials on voters’ decisions. The findings of the experiments were not encouraging. For one, they found that a full 20 percent of the ads — including “Mirrors” — made viewers more likely to vote for Republicans than people who hadn’t seen the same ads. And after his team started polling members of Civis’s staff, they made an even more troubling discovery. On average, the more that the Civis staff liked an ad, the worse it did with the general public.

“The reason is that my staff and me, we’re super f---ing different than than the median voter,” said Shor. “We’re a solid 30 years younger.”

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And while Shor is the most prominent proponent of the theory that young liberals wield too much power within the Democratic Party, he is hardly the first one to propose it. In 2015, the political scientists Ryan Enos and Eitan Hirsh published a paper in the American Political Science Review analyzing the results of a survey they conducted among staffers on Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. Based on the results of their survey, Enos and Hirsh concluded that “in the context of the campaign widely considered most adept at direct contact, individuals who were interacting with swing voters on the campaign’s behalf were demographically unrepresentative, ideologically extreme, cared about atypical issues, and misunderstood the voters’ priorities.”

In layman’s terms, the people the Obama campaign had hired to win over swing voters were seismically out of touch with the people they were meant to persuade — and as a result, their engagement with those voters may have hurt Obama’s chances more than it helped them.

To be clear, Shor does not put his theory forward as a monocausal explanation of Democrats’ missteps in 2020. But he does think that with just over a year until the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats have not fully reckoned with the political dangers of allowing their party to be powered predominantly by 20- to 30-year-old college graduates. In particular, he’s concerned that the post-election debate surrounding Democrats’ handling of the controversial “Defund the Police” slogan — a major flashpoint in the party’s postmortem analysis — has obscured other, more enduring areas of ideological divergence between young party staffers and key Democratic voters.

In reality, Shor says, young party staffers are far to the left of the median Democratic voters on relatively uncontroversial, bread-and-butter Democratic priorities like combatting income inequality or addressing climate change. In their 2015 paper, for instance, Enos and Hirsch found that 23 percent of Obama staffers cited income inequality as the single most important issue facing the country, whereas polls from that election cycle found that fewer than one percent of all voters listed “the gap between rich and poor” as the most important issue. Enos and Hirsch also found that campaign workers were more likely to cite health care and inequality as an important issue to voters — even though most voters did not list those as high-priority issues and said they were more concerned about things like war and inflation.

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Shor concedes that some version of this class of highly-educated neophytes has been a permanent feature of Democratic Party politics since at least the 1960s, but he argues that the downstream political effects of this demographic imbalance have gotten worse as the rise in education polarization — i.e. the tendency of highly educated voters to lean Democratic and less-educated voters to lean Republican—has exacerbated the ideological divide between Democratic staffers and the median voter.

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The way to compensate for these biases, Shor says, is twofold. The first is for Democratic candidates and their staff members to engage in more rigorous messaging discipline — in short, to “talk about popular things that people care about using simple language,” as Shor has defined his preferred brand of messaging restraint before. This approach would not preclude Democrats from talking about progressive-coded policy ideas that enjoy broad popular support, such as adopting a wealth tax on high earning individuals or mandating that workers receive representation on corporate boards.

In the longer term, however, the party will have to elevate the policy and messaging preferences of its moderate Black, Hispanic and working-class supporters over the preferences of young, highly-educated and liberal staffers.

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Of course, Shor’s theory might be entirely off the mark — and many on the left think it is.

“It’s both mixed up and wrong,” said Steve Phillips, founder of the political strategy group Democracy in Color and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Ironically enough, critics like Phillips agree with Shor’s premise that the demographic composition of the Democratic Party’s staff does not reflect the demographic make-up of its key voters, but they maintain that the primary problem is that these staffers are too white, not that the staff is too young or too liberal. From this modified premise, they draw the exact opposite conclusion about the party’s message: that Democrats need to double down on a bolder vision of progressive change rather than retreat toward the center.

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But the question of whether Democrats should embrace the bold, progressive vision championed by young party activists is decidedly not an empirical question — even though Shor’s and Phillip’s positions hinge on their interpretation of a handful of data points about the demographic composition and ideological leanings of the electorate.

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Ultimately, these internecine fights over demographic data obscure a more basic point of consensus on the left: that the highly-educated young liberals who serve as the standard-bearers of the party’s platform are leading Democrats down a path toward political obscurity. Unfortunately for Democrats, this cadre of young people isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon.

“The reality is that highly educated people run almost every institution in the world, and that is like a very difficult thing to swim against,” as Shor put it. “A lot of what I’m saying is that people like me have too much power and too much influence.”

‘Who the f–k is Brad34?’: How Mets were rocked by sports world’s first internet scandal

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After a 2-1 win on April 13, 2000, then-Mets manager Bobby Valentine answered the routine postgame questions at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia.

As the rest of the writers filed out of Valentine’s road office, a beat reporter for the Bergen Record named T.J. Quinn hung around to ask Valentine about alleged incendiary comments he made during a speech at Penn’s Wharton School of Business a…