In 2017, John Fetterman, then the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania (population 1,721), was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. This is a serious but common cardiac condition that raises the risk of stroke and can be effectively treated with medication and lifestyle modifications. Fetterman did respond to this diagnosis by losing weight but he didn’t follow up with his cardiologist or take prescribed medication, and five years later he had a stroke that nearly killed him, just a few days before winning the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.

Graham Platner doesn’t work for a living. As The New York Times reports, the bulk of his income comes from a military disability pension of approximately $60,000 a year. The pension doesn’t mean he’s too disabled to work — he is, after all, currently seeking the job of U.S. Senator — but his recent non-campaign endeavors seem more like hobbies than a career. He runs an oyster farm that principally sells oysters to his mother’s restaurant. He earned a small stipend as his town’s harbor master: $3,000 last year. He lives in a $205,000 house that he bought with a $200,000 loan from his father.

Fetterman, like Platner, remained financially dependent on his parents into his 40s, until he reached a high elected office that paid a meaningful salary: lieutenant governor. People complain about ‘nepo babies,’ but do you know what’s worse than a nepo baby? Someone who grows up with the advantage of privileged birth but is too mediocre or lazy to parlay that advantage into professional success, instead flailing underemployed through middle age on the parental dime until he is somehow rescued from his failure to launch by getting elected to public office. That’s the Fetterman-Platner model.

Platner famously got a tattoo of a somewhat obscure Nazi symbol while he was in the Marines, drunk on shore leave in Croatia. I believe his claim that he didn’t know what the symbol meant when he got the tattoo. I don’t believe he didn’t know what it meant until just a few months ago when he decided to run for Senate and finally got it covered over. Republicans take the tattoo as a sign that Platner has Nazi sympathies, but I find that implausible too, given that his extensive and embarrassing Reddit posting history lays out a leftist political philosophy that is decidedly non-Nazi.

No, the failure to cover the tattoo indicates something different about Platner: Like John Fetterman, he is a fuckup.

These men lack conscientiousness, meaning they don’t take care of the things they should take care of, whether that’s staying on blood thinners, covering up a Nazi tattoo, or getting a job. They are messy and immature, and they make gobsmackingly stupid choices as a result. Platner isn’t just the kind of guy who uses Kik to sext with women who are not his wife — he’s the kind of guy who, after his Kik sexting is discovered during his campaign’s self-opposition research, fails to delete his Kik account before the press finds his profile picture in which he’s shirtless and strategically holding his phone to obscure his Nazi tattoo. (Apparently, he still hasn’t deleted it.) He’s also the kind of guy who forgets his talking points about the issue, denies claims his campaign has already admitted to, and extends the news cycle, forcing his campaign to clarify what he really meant to say.

This is just a man with poor executive function overall, and geniuses in the progressive consultant class and the Maine Democratic electorate have decided to saddle us with him as a Senate candidate.

Platner’s campaign is brought to us by many of the same people who were behind Fetterman’s political rise. Rebecca Katz, who’s now advising Platner and previously was a strategist for Fetterman (and began her career working for John Edwards), says “the era of the perfect candidate is over.” Fetterman, of course, has been decidedly imperfect for the left — breaking with his party over Gaza and Iran and many of Trump’s cabinet nominees. Democrats now fear he will quit the party entirely. Many on Fetterman’s team quit working for him as he moved rightward, but the lesson of his nomination is this: if you nominate people whose life history reflects a high degree of unreliability, they may prove unreliable once in office.

But leftists have fetishized the style of the low-conscientiousness man, in some cases literally: Ken Klippenstein says voters are picking candidates like Platner as a revolt against “asexual” “smoothgroin” politicians who are presumably insufficiently horny to get on Kik and sext with strangers. Klippenstein writes:

Platner’s story here is a pretty common one. This and his other “scandals” sound a lot like other former Marines I know. So when Washington acts like it’s disqualifying, what they’re really saying is that ordinary people aren’t fit for higher office.

First of all, this is unfair to ordinary people. Lots of ordinary Americans are conscientious: they honor their marital commitments, they work for a living, they don’t go on Kik if they’re over the age of 25. Even when they fail at some of these things (likelier the first two than the third), they understand that it is good and aspirational to succeed at them. And I hope at least some ordinary Americans still subscribe to the idea that our leaders should be extraordinary: a member of Congress should be better, on most measures, than the people he or she represents. I can’t be the only person who’s still interested in bourgeois virtues.

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But Klippenstein is at least narrowly correct in the sense that Democratic primary voters have clearly looked at Platner and decided they prefer him over Janet Mills, Maine’s very old governor; and four years ago, Democrats in Pennsylvania decided they were much more excited by John Fetterman — what with his hoodies and baggy shorts and his extensive use of the term “jagoff” — than they were by Conor Lamb, a former Marine JAG and assistant U.S. attorney who then got elected to Congress in the Republican-leaning outskirts of Pittsburgh, helping Democrats regain the House majority. I guess Lamb is a “smoothgroin” because he has been consistently employed since college? Back in 2022, leftists seemed to think he was a suspiciously establishment figure, unlike the committedly progressive, anti-establishment Fetterman. But I’ll tell you one thing: If Lamb were in the Senate right now, I don’t think he would have cast the deciding vote that made Markwayne Mullin Homeland Security Secretary.

Klippenstein says Americans are tired of “clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly,” but one virtue of the consistently-striving Tracy Flick archetype is that these people are consistent. They’ve had a plan since they climbed out of the womb and that helps us know what they will do if they get into office. Leftists have turned “McKinsey” into an epithet, but getting a job at McKinsey is damned hard. My college GPA wasn’t high enough to get hired there. Having worked there is a signal that you work hard, you complete your assignments, you adapt well to new tasks and requirements, and you’re ready to take on new challenges. Is that so bad? We don’t want politicians who are full of surprises. We want ones who set clear goals and then achieve them.

If nothing seriously more embarrassing and damaging comes out, Platner will be able to win a general election in Maine. He is running in a state with a strong Democratic lean and this is going to be a strong Democratic year. Jay Jones, another similarly “imperfect” candidate, managed to get elected attorney general of Virginia last year despite revelations that he was arrested for driving 46 miles an hour over the speed limit and wished death on the children of one of his Republican colleagues. But the “if” at the start of this paragraph is a big “if.” I lack confidence that Platner won’t be further damaged by much more embarrassing stories to come.

Even if he does win, I believe that, as with Fetterman, his unreliable nature — his manifest lack of conscientiousness — will come back to bite Democrats in the ass once he serves in the Senate. Most of all, it is likely to haunt the progressives who poured their hopes and dreams into his “imperfect” vessel, as they did with John Fetterman’s vessel before. As for moderates like me, I am less sure. His unreliability means he might break my way on policy. But then, he might not; Fetterman hasn’t exactly moderated in ways I find appealing.

In either case, this whole misadventure is destined to end more poorly than if Democrats had found a normal candidate under the age of 60 to run in Maine. And once that becomes clear to everyone, I hope the progressive left will learn the lesson they have obstinately failed to learn from the Fetterman episode.

Very seriously,

Josh

The president is conspiring with the treasury secretary and the acting attorney general to steal nearly $2 billion from taxpayers and distribute it as he sees fit among his supporters — including his criminal supporters who rioted at the U.S. Capitol — in the name of avenging the “weaponization” of the Justice Department. Frankly, all three of them ought to go to prison for this.

Even many Republicans in Congress are outraged — partly because they feel the theft is wrong, and partly because they are concerned Democrats will force them to take awkward votes about whether or not the president should be allowed to rob taxpayers of $2 billion and give it away to criminals.

Democrats, being in the congressional minority, have limited options for fighting back. But here’s one I think they should use: they should bring impeachment articles against Todd Blanche, the president’s former personal attorney who is currently serving as acting Attorney General (itself an outrageous fact) and who is administering this theft scheme for him.

Impeachment resolutions are privileged — any member of the House of Representatives can force one to the floor, even if the speaker does not want it considered. The House does not have to then vote on impeachment. It can instead vote to table impeachment articles or refer them to a House committee, effectively killing them, but these approaches would require the support of a majority of House members. While assembling that majority would be an easy lift for a disciplined majority party united in its desire to protect a same-party administration, it is a dicey proposition for Republicans given their razor-thin majority and the level of outrage many Republican members feel toward Blanche.

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican from the Philadelphia suburbs facing a serious re-election challenge, is on the warpath against the “anti-weaponization fund,” saying it cannot be allowed. Is he really going to vote to protect Blanche from impeachment and subject himself to attack ads about how he’s helping Trump steal from taxpayers to give payments to criminals? Will Rep. Thomas Massie? I think it’s likely Democrats could peel off enough Republicans to actually pass an impeachment resolution against Blanche.

Then we would turn to the Senate. Senate Republicans might vote to dismiss charges against Blanche without an impeachment trial, following what Democrats did in 2024 when Republicans impeached then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. But that approach, again, would require a majority vote of the body. And there is even less love lost for Blanche in the Senate than there is in the House — his lunch with Senate Republicans on Thursday was “incredibly hostile,” according to Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News, with about two dozen Republican senators standing up to lay into him about the fund. Are the Republican senators facing tough re-election challenges (Susan Collins, Jon Husted, Dan Sullivan) really going to vote to dismiss the charges and let the president’s personal lawyer get away with stealing $2 billion from taxpayers on his behalf?

As a Democrat, I’d like to see them forced to make the choice.

My guess is Republicans have lost the necessary cohesion to fall on Trump’s sword and block a trial. As such, Democrats should be able to force a trial of Blanche that elevates this issue — the president stealing billions of dollars of your money at a time when you can’t afford gasoline — in the 2026 campaign, and ultimately forces every Republican senator to render a verdict on whether the president can simply steal whatever he wants from the Treasury.

So let’s get those impeachment articles out there.

Very seriously,

Josh

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Kevin Warsh has been confirmed as the new chair of the Federal Reserve Board. As I wrote back in February, this was going to be the best available outcome, even though the Trump administration cannot credibly promise that it will stop its shenanigans on monetary policy. While Republican Sen. Thom Tillis did well by conditioning his support for Warsh’s confirmation on the Trump DOJ’s begrudging choice to close its pretextual investigation into the Fed, a prolonged effort to hold the chairmanship open in pursuit of broader demands would have been too costly for the long-run project of preserving political support for Fed independence. And, importantly, Warsh takes the seat of another recent Trump nominee to the board — former Council of Economic Advisers head Steve Miran, who served a very short term and remained as a holdover until Warsh was confirmed — which means the number of Trump loyalists on the Fed board is unchanged.

So I don’t blame Sen. Tillis at all for letting the confirmation go through. The important thing is that Trump must not be able to make further appointments to the Fed board, which could entail replacing good, independent members with Trump lackeys. Remember: the Federal Reserve Chair has little direct power; mainly, the chair builds consensus and exerts influence over decisions made by the Fed’s seven-member board and its 12-member Federal Open Market Committee, which consists of the board members plus five presidents of the Fed’s regional banks. The Fed’s ability to act independently relies on the willingness of the members of those bodies to pursue its mandates rather than acting as minions for the president.

Currently, the Fed board is full, and there’s only one term set to expire before Trump’s presidency does: Jerome Powell’s, which ends on January 31, 2028. But the administration has tried to fire Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee whose term is supposed to run until 2038. And historically, Federal Reserve Board members have often resigned their positions well before their 14-year terms expired, since that’s quite a long time to spend in one position in government. The board members now face a civic responsibility to stay in their seats because of the possibility that the president could seek to replace them with very irresponsible people. In some cases, this will entail significant personal sacrifice: Powell is 73 years old, at the end of a distinguished career, and I’m sure he would rather be enjoying retirement than sticking around to make sure his successor doesn’t light an important part of the world’s financial infrastructure on fire to make the president happy.

Powell’s unusual decision to stay on as a board member after leaving the chairmanship has obviously been driven in significant part by the Trump DOJ’s threats against the Fed and him personally, and a desire to ensure the Fed stands up to them. There are also risks to monetary policy itself: though he says he does not intend to be “a high-profile dissident,” I expect Powell to share the dominant position of FOMC members who are not eager for near-term interest rate cuts. And then there are low-probability disasters to prevent: Victoria Guida reports on one concern, which is that a Trump-friendly majority on the Fed board could seek to fire regional bank presidents who oppose Trump’s interest rate agenda on the FOMC, blowing up a key structural factor that keeps monetary policy insulated from political whims.

The good news is that there’s only two and a half years of clock to run out before Trump’s presidency ends. A war on the Fed has not served Trump’s political interests and generally does not serve any president’s interests. Trump has not gotten the low-interest rate environment that he wanted — with a handful of short-term rate cuts offset by forces, including his own irresponsible fiscal policy and the uncertainty caused by his very same attacks on the Fed, that have pushed up longer-term interest rates — and upward pressure on inflation caused by his campaign to make the Fed excessively dovish only stands to make him more unpopular over time. If he did get the really deep rate cuts he wants, inflation would go even higher, so even the next Republican president will have self-interested reasons to back off of Trump’s campaign to seize control of monetary policy.

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Plus, Trump has started an actual war that boxes in his new Fed chair. The conflict with Iran has spiked oil prices and caused overall inflation to rise. Inflation is now back up to 3.8% over the past 12 months, with the monthly rate running faster than that (prices up 0.6% in April alone). Warsh will preside over his first FOMC meeting next month, and I will be surprised if there are any votes for rate cuts, even from Warsh himself. The Fed may need to hike rates this year to tame inflation.

Trump, I’m sure, will be angry if Warsh does not appear to fight for the rate cuts he expects. Warsh might not care — his longstanding policy instincts are hawkish, and now that he has the job he’s spent his whole career striving for, he no longer needs Trump’s grace any more than Powell did. But if he wants Trump’s grace, it’s good that Powell will be there along with the rest of the incumbent board members — who are generally pretty good, even Trump’s appointees from his first term — and the regional bank presidents, who I expect will keep the Fed focused on stable prices and maximum employment, rather than on making the president happy.

Very seriously,

Josh

Nobody thinks they should have to pay for anything anymore. I will get to how this applies to the tax code, but let me first talk about shoplifting’s rebrand as “microlooting,” a term proposed by New York Times opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman. Spiegelman interviewed writer Jia Tolentino, who openly bragged about shoplifting from Whole Foods, justifying her theft on the grounds that corporations steal from their workers, so why shouldn’t we steal too, especially if we’re out shopping for our neighbors as part of “mutual aid” activity?

…Every week I would go get groceries for Miss Nancy, my now family friend who lived nearby, and she wanted to go to Whole Foods. She wanted food from Whole Foods. And I was like, OK, great. And so I’d be getting Miss Nancy all of her groceries, and then I would finish, and I’d be like, oh my God, four lemons, I forgot four lemons. And on several occasions I was like, I’m just going to go back, grab those four lemons and get the hell out.

For Tolentino, this is frivolous anarchy-chic (“I think that stealing from a big box store — I’ll just state my platform — it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action”). The streamer Hasan Piker emphatically agrees with her in the interview: “I’m pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers.” People have good reason to mock both of them over this defense of shoplifting,1 but the truth is that a lot of people are looking for more-formally-acceptable ways to get out of the social contract, and I’d like to show them some of the scorn that’s been shown to Tolentino for her lemon theft.

One of the key problems with Tolentino’s defense of shoplifting is that the system would fall apart if everyone did what she did. If we all stole our groceries from Whole Foods, there would be no Whole Foods; Tolentino depends on other people honoring the social contract so lemons can be available for her to steal. Yet lots of people who know it would be wrong to steal from the supermarket want to write special treatment for themselves into the tax code that could not sustainably be offered to everyone — and increasingly, politicians are pandering to these requests.

It started with Donald Trump and “no tax on tips,” a proposal that Kamala Harris then copied. The idea is that certain kinds of work — hospitality work, apparently — deserve better treatment than other work by traditional wage-earners or proprietors. This got written into the 2025 tax law, along with a special tax break for seniors. Now, politicians all around the political spectrum are proposing to cut their own holes in the tax base for preferred groups. No income tax for teachers. For veterans. For police. A special new tax break for renters. No property tax for seniors.

Just like someone has to pay at Whole Foods, someone has to pay income tax. But politicians are increasingly indulging voters who say: don’t tax me, I’m special; tax someone else. This causes a problem for financing necessary operations of government, but it’s also morally wrong to seek out special treatment that could not sustainably be offered to everyone. We need to bring back an ethic in this country that says we hold ourselves to the same civic expectations that we impose on others. If we expect others to pay taxes to finance the government services we rely on, we should understand that implies an obligation to pay taxes of our own — in similar amounts to other people with similar financial resources.2

To some extent, the breakdown of the ethic of shared responsibility arises from a perception of widespread cheating throughout society. It would behoove politicians to take cheating more seriously, because better enforcement would improve social trust — Republicans should not defund IRS enforcement or pardon scammers, and Democrats should not justify fare-beating or look the other way when social service programs get macrolooted. But I put most of the blame here on a public that’s looking for excuses to shirk their own civic responsibilities. There’s always cheating going on somewhere that you can use to justify why you personally shouldn’t have to pay to uphold the system, but other people’s bad behavior cannot justify our own — that’s the classroom rule we were all taught, but a lot of people seem to have forgotten.

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It’s worth noting that, while even as many left-wing Democrats with expansive ambitions for government spending have been jumping on the tax-cuts-for-special-people bandwagon, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an exception. She demonstrates she knows the progressive project depends on getting the broad public to pay taxes and feel that they’re getting something for it.

"This race to try to see who can be exempt from participating in society is not a conversation that I'm interested in," she told Sahil Kapur of NBC News last month. "I'm a Great Society Democrat, and I believe in building that together. And I think that the discourse around 'Everyone, let's all be like billionaires and opt out of our taxes,' I don't find it an inspiring message."

AOC is right, and what she says there applies regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum. Everyone who isn’t an anarchist is committed to some sort of joint governing project that relies on an understanding that taxes are the price of a civilized society, not a burden that can be placed only on those we deem morally unworthy. The necessary tax rates depend on how big a government you want, but all these systems rely on people paying taxes.

The environment of decreased social trust is making people miserable, and I understand politicians’ impulse to tell each individual voter he or she is special and deserving of special exemptions from societal expectations. But I also think there has to be a hunger in this country for a return to a more grown-up society, where we set high standards for others and for ourselves and we all share responsibility for making institutions work. That means not stealing lemons from Whole Foods. But it also means being willing to pay the income tax.

Have questions for me? Send them to josh@joshbarro.com and we’ll be coming at you with another edition of the Mayonnaise Clinic soon.

Very seriously,

Josh

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Democrats in the redistricting war. Instead of producing a near-draw, it’s now clear that Republicans have gained a significant advantage; they are now likely to win something like nine more House seats than if no maps had been redrawn this year. This is because of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Callais and the Virginia Supreme Court’s rejection of that state’s voter-approved congressional remap.

This is unfortunate. But Democrats already faced an obligation to shift rightward to win a majority in the Senate, the legislative body where the lines are durably drawn unfavorably to us, because the median state (Georgia or Arizona) has voting preferences several points to the right of the country as a whole.

To win a majority in the Senate, we have to consistently win states like Georgia and be competitive in even more conservative states like Ohio and Iowa. It is a high and unfair hurdle, but we’re already working on an effective strategy to clear it: picking locally strong candidates who demonstrate overperformance in Republican-leaning jurisdictions due to their more moderate issue positioning. We have candidates like former Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola, who has already shown she can win statewide, and state Rep. Josh Turek, who represents an Iowa legislative district that Donald Trump won by eight points in 2024. But to maximize our chances of winning back the Senate, it’s not enough to pick moderate candidates. We also need to give voters confidence that these candidates’ views will carry sway within a Democratic legislative majority — that Democratic Senate leadership will let a Sen. Peltola lead on issues related to Alaska’s natural resources, for example.

What we need to win on an unfavorable House map is similar: We must give voters in red-leaning districts confidence that when their candidates break with unpopular Democratic positions on issues like immigration, crime, fossil fuels, racial preferences, and trans participation in women’s sports, that will matter for lawmaking.

Democrats do not need to move to the center on every issue. There are important policy areas where the progressive position is the popular one: abortion rights, protecting Medicare and Social Security, enhancing ACA subsidies, taxing the wealthy, opposing the war in Iran and more. But the unfavorable map makes it more important than ever for Democrats to get out of a mindset driven by wealthy progressive donors and the NGOs they fund and into the head of a typical swing voter who is angry about inflation and war under Trump, regretful of the end of Roe v. Wade, upset the rich are not paying their fair share, and concerned about the cost of healthcare and the security of old-age benefits; but also skeptical of Democrats’ willingness to fight crime and enforce immigration law, and seeing us as too obsessed with “identity” issues, too hostile to cheap energy, and nearly as disreputable as Republicans on inflation.

These are the voters we need to win over to build a vote majority big enough to win on an unfavorable map.

Very seriously,

Josh

Virginia voters have narrowly approved a proposal to follow California’s lead and redraw their congressional district map to advantage Democrats, responding to a trend that kicked off with the Trump White House pushing for Texas and other Republican-controlled states to redraw their maps to add Republican seats. Nationally, the whole episode has drawn a lot of effort and expense but looks set to produce roughly a wash in terms of the overall partisan lean of the national congressional district map. Stupid games, stupid prizes, etc.

One strange aspect of the referendum fight over redistricting in Virginia has been that, while Virginia is a blue state overall, it’s disproportionately the home state of the national professional Republican class. Operatives and journalists and other influential members of Washington’s right-of-center elite tend to settle in Virginia, which, unlike Maryland and the District of Columbia, tends to have more conservative public policies1 and was recently politically competitive. But now, the state’s Democratic partisan lean is pronounced, and people who are Republican for a living are suffering the indignity of being rendered powerless in the state they call home.

And boy, have they been pissed about Democrats’ successful effort to redraw the map.

I get it — when you’re in the minority party in a state, it sucks to have the maps redrawn so your share of legislative seats falls far below your share of the vote. At the same time, it’s rational for voters in the majority party to want to maximize the odds that the policy outcomes they support actually get enacted in Washington. This is why gerrymanders pass, not just in blue states but also in red ones: the median voter in Texas votes Republican, and the new Texas gerrymander increases the odds that Congress will do what that voter wants. So, too, in Virginia, where the map increases the odds that Congress will have the Democratic majority the average Virginia voter prefers.

The only way to stop this race to the bottom is with a federal law that requires states to draw congressional districts to some uniform standard of fairness, however defined, even where it would serve the interest of each individual state’s political majority to draw its own map differently. But the Virginia-resident professional Republican operative class isn’t interested in a resolution like this, despite the fact that they keep losing these fights to Democrats. They just whine a lot, and if you point out to them that Democrats are acting rationally in response to gerrymandering in red states, the responses you get are variations on not-my-job, not-my-problem. It’s because they would like a policy that protects their interests at home in Virginia, thank you very much; why should they have to think about Texas, when we have a federal system, and they don’t live in Texas?

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The Constitution (Article I, Section 4) grants Congress the authority to tell states how to choose their representatives in Congress. The federal government has used these powers in ways that go well beyond the Voting Rights Act — for example, since 1967, federal law has required states to use single-member districts for the House of Representatives — so the idea that the federal government would tell states what to do here isn’t a breach of our federal system; it’s been contemplated in the Constitution since the founding. And there’s also no alternative — Democrats are not going to unilaterally disarm in blue states in response to Republican complaints. The only legislative body where a positive-sum compromise could possibly be reached is Congress, where there’s no obvious national advantage for either party to exploit by refusing to make a deal to end gerrymandering.

I actually think it’s a sign of progress that we’ve started to see Virginia-based Republicans make specific complaints about specific Democratic proposals to restrict gerrymandering. It’s true that defining a “fair” map is hard, and that it can also be hard to make sure a policy intended to produce a certain kind of map actually produces them in practice. I don’t expect Republicans to simply pick up a Democratic piece of voting legislation and pass it wholesale, but this would be a great thing to hash out in a legislative negotiation. There are a lot of state-level models to consider — including independent redistricting commissions in Arizona and Colorado that produced maps relatively congenial to Republicans this cycle — when designing a national compromise system.

Or, we can do nothing. Gerrymandering reform became a priority for Democrats because we went through a decade-plus period where the national congressional map was tilted toward Republicans, and both parties thought that situation was durable. But it hasn’t been durable — the national House map became more fair in part due to shifts in the political coalitions, party control of the state lawmaking process is now pretty evenly divided for redistricting purposes, and Democrats have recently shown that they can play hardball in redistricting fights better than Republicans can. The main groups that now stand to benefit from redistricting reform are members of minority parties in lopsided states2 — a group that now includes most of the national GOP operative class. I’d suggest they push their party to move now, while Democrats still have the reflexive impulse to want a national rule to rein in gerrymandering.

Very seriously,

Josh

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The average voter wants to live an abundant lifestyle that entails a lot of energy consumption. When Abundance came out last year, I had a warning for Democratic politicians: if you make energy expensive, voters will not believe you have delivered abundance. This is the “big-ass truck” Sen. Ruben Gallego has talked about: a lot of men would like to own one, and they’ll need to buy a lot of gasoline to fill it up. Democrats face an electoral penalty because of their commitment to climate policies that make the big-ass truck less available and the gas to drive it less affordable.

Unfortunately, the party has shown little interest in reckoning with this. In Abundance itself, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson tried to finesse the energy question in a way that was unconvincing, and in elected politics, Democrats have continued to vote for unpopular climate policies, including when every Senate Democrat except Elissa Slotkin stood with the party’s climate-obsessed donors and voted to uphold California’s highly unpopular electric vehicle mandate. It’s a huge drag for a Democratic Party that is supposedly trying to win back working-class voters who had shifted toward the Republicans in recent years.

And then Donald Trump decided to fritter away one of the Republican Party’s biggest political advantages.

Trump used to be a president whose pro-fossil-fuel rhetoric came paired with gasoline prices that were actually low. Prior to the Iran War, the highest monthly average price of a gallon of gasoline recorded during either Trump presidency was $3.34, in September of last year. Gas prices in 2025 were lower than they had been under Joe Biden, and gas prices in Trump’s first term were generally lower than they had been under Obama, never averaging over $3/gallon. As of this Monday, the average gallon price of gasoline in the United States was $4.125, entirely because of the president’s choice to attack Iran with no apparent plan for ending the conflict or preserving the flow of petroleum products. Trump appears to have actually believed that, because the US is a net exporter of crude oil, we would be insulated if an oil shock hit the global market. Now, he’s learned that he was wrong, but he can’t figure out what to do about it.

Democrats’ obsession with climate change and Republicans’ desire for regime change in the Middle East are two versions of the same political problem: Americans’ willingness to bear personal economic cost in the pursuit of policies whose putative benefits will primarily accrue abroad is extremely limited. Trump once appeared to understand this — it informed the way he talked about climate change, foreign aid, foreign wars, and trade policy. It was the basis of the slogan “America First.”

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Of course, administration officials would say the war with Iran is about protecting American interests, but they didn’t really argue this (or anything else) in the lead-up to the war. The administration’s choice not to really engage in public diplomacy selling the war either to American voters or foreign allies was norm-breaking, but it was also self-defeating. If Trump wanted foreign navies to help him with opening the Strait of Hormuz, he probably should have made an effort to get countries around the world to feel invested in and consulted about the military operation; and if he wanted American voters to offer him forbearance on spiking gasoline prices, he probably should have tried to convince them the war was worth suffering though.

For that matter, if he were planning to launch a war in the Middle East that was likely to disrupt the global oil trade, he probably should have refilled the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But he simply is not a guy who plans ahead.

The most remarkable thing for me is that it took so many years for our idiot president to make the specific sort of idiot mistake that stands to make the bottom fall out of his public support. Since the month that Trump launched his first presidential campaign, there has been endless commentary about how Trump has finally fallen into some trap he won’t be able to get out of. That now he’s done, the walls are closing in for real, his voters will abandon him. After years of these claims being wrong over and over, his supporters and his detractors alike came to believe that, no matter what Trump does, he’ll still retain a high floor of political support. But for all the chaos and controversy Trump has caused over the years, he largely kept his promise that he wouldn’t break the economy. Now we will finally see what happens politically when Donald Trump makes choices that wreck Americans’ personal financial situations en masse.1

I believe this is true even if Trump finds some sort of “off-ramp” for the war. Any kind of uneasy truce in the Persian Gulf region, even one with the Strait of Hormuz partially open, will have market participants worrying about future disruptions. It is likely to be persistently riskier to invest in oil infrastructure in the Gulf or to transport oil out. That will reduce volumes and raise prices. Trump’s fetish for fomenting uncertainty and his constantly shifting pronouncements about his intentions for the war also make it hard to offer any kind of certainty to investors and return oil prices to where they were. It’s been particularly strange to watch Trump celebrate the shifting flows of global oil, as tankers arrive to the US Gulf Coast to load up exports to markets that would usually rely on Middle East oil. This is just a manifestation of the global market shift that will make petroleum products less available and more costly for consumers around the world, including here in the US.

There is also the matter that inflation remained above target even before the war began. The fact that the president did something that directly raised fuel prices also makes it easier to blame him for all kinds of inflation. After all, fuel is a cost component for almost everything. Indeed, this is the president’s other big-ass truck problem: Diesel prices are up almost $2/gallon due to the war, harming the livelihoods of truckers and raising the cost of anything that needs to be shipped by road.

In recent days, Trump’s PR campaign for his own war have gotten sadder and more half-hearted. On Saturday, while his vice president was negotiating with the Iranians, he attended a UFC match in Miami. He has repeatedly attacked the pope. He shared on social media an image of himself as Jesus healing Uncle Sam, and in response to criticism from his own Christian conservative supporters, he claimed he understood the image to make him look like a Red Cross medical doctor. (Does your doctor wear flowing robes and emit light from his hands?)

The widespread criticism of Trump over the Jesus image tells me something interesting. It’s not that this is one of the more offensive things Trump has ever posted, or even that he’s new to blasphemy. It’s that even his fans know the bottom is falling out, that the president has become a lame duck, and that his numbers are only going to get worse from here. Ol’ Donny finally found the jam he can’t wriggle out of. All because he forgot to put America first.

Very seriously,

Josh

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I keep going back and forth about whether policy debates have been getting dumber over the years, or whether I’m just getting older and experiencing the completely standard set of feelings about how things were better when I was younger.

I’m pretty sure it’s the former, and that Donald Trump has set off a race to the bottom that has made other elected officials — Democrats and other Republicans alike — wonder why they should have to think about policy like grown-ups when he clearly has no intention of doing so.

An example of this degradation is the 2025 tax law compared to the 2017 tax law. I had some serious ideological objections to 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which set the overall level of federal tax collections too low and collected those taxes in a way that was not weighted enough toward higher earners. But the law at least reflected a coherent effort to pursue certain conservative policy objectives: that taxes should have lower rates applied to a broader base of income, with tax treatment of businesses designed to encourage more investment and growth. Many of the law’s structural changes to the tax code, like the curtailment of many deductions, were good even if the rates were set wrong.

The 2025 law, on the other hand, was pure slop. You could feel the absence of Paul Ryan acutely in this more stupid tax law. Instead of continuing the positive structural changes of the 2017 law, it unwound some of them — creating new tax exemptions based on whatever seemed to come to Donald Trump’s head, like “no tax on tips” and a new deduction for auto loan interest. It was also enacted in a different interest rate and inflation environment than the last time around: while deficit-financed tax cuts were already uncalled for in 2017, they were considerably more destructive in 2025 when both interest rates and inflation were undesirably elevated. (Tax cuts will tend to push both up rather than down.)

Most alarmingly, the all-candy mentality that fueled the 2025 tax law has spread from the Republican Party to infect the Democrats, too. When Trump announced “No Tax on Tips” as part of his 2024 campaign agenda, Kamala Harris responded with her own copycat policy for tax-free tips. Since then, Democrats around the country are announcing their own plans to exempt whole swathes of politically favored income from taxation. Keisha Lance Bottoms, a former Atlanta mayor and Biden White House official who is now running for governor of Georgia, says teachers shouldn’t have to pay income tax. Former Rep. Katie Porter says she’ll exempt everyone making less than $100,000 a year from paying income tax if she becomes governor of California. Senators Chris Van Hollen and Cory Booker have announced plans for trillions of dollars in income tax cuts, also designed to exempt huge swathes of the middle class from the taxes that finance our government.1

These are all examples of slopulism: Policies that are pitched as making life more affordable for everyday Americans but likely to produce negative consequences for ordinary people if enacted. Slopulism is bad when it comes from either party. But it’s especially a problem when Democrats engage in it because Democrats’ core pitch to voters is that they’re the party that will get government to do more and better things.

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In the case of the middle class tax cut proposals, they come within the context of an already-yawning federal budget gap that puts upward pressure on interest rates and inflation. Bringing inflation and interest rates down will require deficit reduction, not more tax cuts the government can’t afford. Tax cut proposals are especially puzzling from Democrats — at least Republicans want to shrink and degrade the functionality of the government, but Democrats purport to want not only to defend existing programs like Social Security and Medicare but to create new ones, like childcare benefits and subsidies for clean energy. Van Hollen, Booker and Porter all say they’ll finance their huge middle class tax cuts by raising taxes on corporations and/or the wealthy — thus using up fiscal capacity that won’t be available to finance new government programs or reduce unsustainable budget deficits. Exhaustion of the Social Security Trust Fund looms in the early 2030s, and the Van Hollen and Booker plans would both make it harder to find the funds needed to backfill the program and stave off benefit cuts. That all seems bad for the party that’s supposed to care about New Deal entitlement programs.

But these tax missteps are just part of a broader trend that is both worrying and annoying: the increasingly adolescent approach that both parties take to politics. Politicians swear and make up childish nicknames for each other. They propose simplistic nonsense like “abolish the IRS.” Some of them spent much of 2020 and 2021 saying it didn’t matter very much whether children attend school or not. And both parties’ tax proposals are a reflection of increasingly widespread sentiment that the financing of an effective government is somebody else’s problem. These phenomena are bad but they are also, more specifically, immature. They reflect a lack of responsibility and of the shared civic spirit that we’re supposed to try to achieve before adulthood.2

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There are counterexamples. In New York, I’ve been pleased to see Gov. Kathy Hochul not just talking about “affordability” but making politically hard choices to make New York more affordable. She annoyed environmentalists by approving a new gas pipeline to Long Island, because a new pipeline will help moderate electricity costs and actually make living there more affordable. She’s pushing to delay emissions regulations that would make energy more expensive, and she’s urging a relaxation of our state’s environmental review law that perversely can make it more difficult to build infrastructure that makes New York greener, like dense housing. Hochul is not immune to gimmicks — like Trump and Harris, she has become a booster of “no tax on tips” — but she’s shown an understanding that life involves tradeoffs and making New York less expensive sometimes involves saying “no” to interest groups within her coalition.

At the federal level, there are politicians working earnestly toward policy changes that could unlock more energy and more housing that this country needs to grow and remain affordable to ordinary people. They are doing worthy, grown-up work. I wrote last September about watching some of them at work, trying very hard to be smart at a time when Donald Trump continues to make everything stupid.

But at the same time, we’re in an environment where the ROAD to Housing Act — a bill full of small-but-worthy tweaks to promote housing production — faced a last-minute slop attack: a provision to discourage new home production by making it effectively illegal to build single-family home subdivisions for the rental market by imposing an unworkable provision that any rental house development has to be sold off to individual owners within seven years.3 When this provision came out of nowhere to be added to the bill — threatening to undermine all its benefits in terms of promoting new home production — Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz took to the Senate floor to ask why the body was making this inexplicable bipartisan mistake. For his trouble he faced dishonest attacks for being a handmaiden of private equity, never mind that (as Schatz pointed out) the provision isn’t even about private equity — it prohibits any kind of long-term institutional ownership of rental houses, whether by a publicly traded firm or a pension fund or one rich guy or any other possible owner.

You can tell that “houses are for people” is an idiotic slogan for the prohibition of rental houses if you bother to think about it for even five seconds. I lived my entire 30s in a home owned by AvalonBay Communities, and I certainly felt like a person with a home. Maybe my tenancy was oppressive and I should have been forced to buy an apartment if I wanted to live in one? Whatever this sentiment entails, it’s obviously not very progressive. But as Matt Yglesias notes, the proponents of the no-build-to-rent-houses rule don’t even bother trying to justify their position — it’s just all neener-neener, which is definitely an adolescent sentiment.

I like to think voters will tire of this approach to governance and want to be ruled by grown-ups again. But I am increasingly pessimistic — and especially pessimistic as a Democrat, since we’re the party that has more responsibility to make government work, as we want more of it than the other side does.

Very seriously,

Josh

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If you follow the stock market, you’ve probably seen the viral memo that Citrini Research published Sunday, laying out a scenario of a market crash by 2028 driven by AI — not due to some sci-fi future calamity which the AI engines become our tyrannical overlords, but in a more mundane financial-crash way, with AI productivity sharply reducing the demand for human labor, leading to elevated unemployment, defaults in private credit and then in the mortgage market, bankruptcies by firms that act primarily as intermediaries, etcetera. The memo has been surprisingly influential, with stocks named in it — a diverse group including DoorDash, ServiceNow, and Blackstone — falling especially sharply on Monday.

I think the memo makes little sense. And I don’t think you need AI-specific expertise to reach that conclusion — the problem with the memo is that its proposed mechanism of financial-crash-from-positive-productivity-shock is implausible, whether that positive productivity shock comes from AI or anything else.

To understand why, imagine that you and your spouse are two of the workers who do not lose your jobs in the Citrini scenario. (That would be most workers: The memo, dated June 30, 2028, starts by saying the unemployment rate has hit 10.2%, meaning the vast majority of people are still in work.) If you’re in healthcare, you might lose your job to a computer if you are a radiologist or a medical biller. But fortunately, you and your spouse are both nurses, and your services remain as in demand as ever.1 Not only do you still have your jobs — you’re enjoying a wide variety of benefits as a consumer, because of the productivity gains that underlie the economic scenario Citrini is describing.

What sort of benefits? Well, Citrini describes how you now pay less for all kinds of insurance:

Insurance renewals, where the entire renewal model depended on policyholder inertia, were reformed. Agents that re-shop your coverage annually dismantled the 15-20% of premiums that insurers earned from passive renewals.

You get better deals on your vacations:

Travel booking platforms were an early casualty, because they were the simplest. By Q4 2026, our agents could assemble a complete itinerary (flights, hotels, ground transport, loyalty optimization, budget constraints, refunds) faster and cheaper than any platform.

But really, it’s a lot broader than that. You become a more efficient shopper for basically everything, because the machines handle all the comparison shopping for you:

Consumer agents began to change how nearly all consumer transactions worked. Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars. Machines do.

And there are entire categories of professionals you can stop paying. Nobody needs a buyer’s agent when shopping for a house anymore, and that shaves 2-3% off your cost to buy a home:

Even places we thought insulated by the value of human relationships proved fragile. Real estate, where buyers had tolerated 5-6% commissions for decades because of information asymmetry between agent and consumer, crumbled once AI agents equipped with MLS access and decades of transaction data could replicate the knowledge base instantly. A sell-side piece from March 2027 titled it “agent on agent violence”. The median buy-side commission in major metros had compressed from 2.5-3% to under 1%, and a growing share of transactions were closing with no human agent on the buy side at all.

The Citrini memo focuses on the carnage this creates in certain industries: the realtors who lose their jobs and the travel agencies that lose their clients. But what does this mean for two married nurses who remain gainfully employed? It means your real income has gone way up. And presumably, that means you go out and buy more stuff.

And while the lost commercial activity has an obvious nexus to AI, the newly-created commercial activity will often have no obvious AI link at all, even though it is in fact downstream of AI-driven productivity gains. Vacations offer better value, and with more disposable income, you may go on more and nicer vacations. Maybe you renovate your home. Maybe you send your kids to six weeks of summer camp instead of three, and maybe you buy a new car every three years instead of every five.

Not only are those changes that make your life better. They’re also changes that create jobs — just not necessarily in the same parts of the economy where people are losing jobs due to AI.

Citrini also discusses sharp changes in business-to-business transactions with rough implications for specific industries. For example, firms start finding it practical to vibe code their own software, so they spend less on software-as-a-service, or they demand (and receive) sharp discounts from their SaaS providers. Obviously, this is bad news for the SaaS companies. But the companies that use SaaS now have improved profit margins — so they have better opportunities to hire and expand.

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Or consider the memo’s description of the implosion of DoorDash:

Coding agents had collapsed the barrier to entry for launching a delivery app. A competent developer could deploy a functional competitor in weeks, and dozens did, enticing drivers away from DoorDash and Uber Eats by passing 90-95% of the delivery fee through to the driver. Multi-app dashboards let gig workers track incoming jobs from twenty or thirty platforms at once, eliminating the lock-in that the incumbents depended on. The market fragmented overnight and margins compressed to nearly nothing.

OK, but if DoorDash’s margins get competed away to nothing, someone has to be enjoying the savings. In practice, the savings would be shared in some fraction across consumers (lower delivery prices), workers (higher wages), and restaurant owners (higher profits). Those savings all mean higher real income for people, who can turn around and consume more, though again, it won’t be obvious which specific consumption is the result of no longer having to pay DoorDash fees. And to the extent the change means higher restaurant profits, that also means it’s easier to open and operate a restaurant — i.e., more job creation.

The Citrini memo implicitly denies these observations of broadly shared benefit by saying that, in their scenario, the share of GDP that goes to labor income falls sharply, and that on-paper GDP growth is largely a function of outsized AI-firm profits, leading to a political crisis over exactly how to tax those specific firms to stabilize the macroeconomy. But that is hard to square with the fact that their memo describes all sorts of apparent benefits flowing outward to consumers and to non-AI firms: The reason AI is bankrupting the SaaS firms, for example, is that firms can replace their expensive SaaS contracts with cheaper AI-driven solutions that work just as well. That sounds like an economic gain that’s flowing widely through the economy to all kinds of firms, not one that’s being captured by AI firm shareholders. Indeed, the entire premise of the memo — AI solutions prove irresistible to firms and consumers because they save so much money — is impossible to square with the idea that the gains are concentrated in the hands of the few.

Now, it is true that even a positive change can entail transition costs. An economic transition that increases demand for electricians and personal trainers while reducing demand for lawyers and radiologists could produce a skills mismatch. But the transition costs have to be weighed against the direct benefits of higher productivity, which, again, the memo indicates are compelling in a way we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. There’s no logical explanation in here of why the sweeping productivity gains that raise real incomes for the vast majority of consumers somehow lead to plummeting consumption and a liquidity trap. It just doesn’t make sense that all this good news is, in fact, bad news.

None of this is to say that AI couldn’t cause a catastrophe for other reasons. Maybe the superintelligent machines will kill us all — it strikes me as far-fetched, but it’s not my area of expertise. The more modest thesis of the Citrini memo — that AI could cause an economic calamity merely by being very useful, even without achieving any sort of singularity — is easier to reject. Many things worry me about the economy, but “productivity growth will get too high” is not among them.

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Very seriously,

Josh

Before Donald Trump made everything weird, there was already a partisan divide over the Federal Reserve that had emerged in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

As the economy struggled to recover in the years after the 2008 crash, the Fed undertook extraordinary measures to support a sagging global economy. Most obviously, it held short-term interest rates at zero for years. It also took two categories of novel actions to push down long-term interest rates: forward guidance, which involves the Fed telling market participants it intends to keep rates low for an extended period; and quantitative easing, a policy of buying long-term bonds in vast quantities so their yields fall in the market. During the Obama presidency, Democrats tended to argue that these policies were effectively serving the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate of promoting maximum employment and stable prices — that extraordinary economic conditions required extraordinary action to prevent deflation and depression. Republicans claimed this was all unnecessary, and that the Fed was artificially inflating asset prices, “debasing” the dollar, and ultimately would cause great inflation.1

While these debates were heating up, Kevin Warsh was serving as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, having been nominated by George W. Bush in 2006. During his time on the Fed board, and also thereafter, Warsh has generally been a hawkish voice on monetary policy. He has been especially critical of the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet, publicly breaking with the Fed over its quantitative easing program in 2010 and then resigning from the Federal Reserve Board in 2011. Even as his views on short-term interest rates have changed in recent years, he has continued to urge the Fed to “significantly” reduce its balance sheet, which has now come to contain trillions of dollars in assets.

Warsh’s views were the orthodox stance for a Republican monetary policymaker to hold post-2009, and he was considered a likely candidate to chair the Federal Reserve if Mitt Romney won the 2012 election. He was also on Donald Trump’s short list of possible Fed chair candidates in 2017. But Trump has never wanted an orthodox monetary policymaker — he just wants low interest rates, which he was more likely to achieve through continuity with the Bernanke-Yellen approach than by appointing someone more hawkish. As I wrote in my 2020 profile of Jerome Powell for New York magazine, this is why Powell became Fed chair: He was the one available Republican who was tall, with the right kind of hair, appropriate experience, and an intention to continue Yellen’s policies instead of tightening them. Warsh, the president correctly assessed at the time, was too much of a hawk to do what he wanted.

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Now, Trump has nominated Warsh to be Fed chair, having apparently decided that he has aged into the role and no longer looks too youthful. (Warsh is 55.) There’s also a widespread sense — held by many more people than just the president — that Warsh has undergone a convenient shift in his policy views and has now become a dove who wants the loose monetary policy Trump demands. Nonetheless, Warsh is a well-established fixture in the monetary policy-making community (which is a thing), and he’s been earning endorsements from the likes of top Obama administration economic official Jason Furman and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, himself a former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.

There is an important asterisk associated with Warsh’s dovish turn. Yes, he now wants to cut short-term interest rates more than most sitting members of the Federal Open Market Committee2 would like to. But he also keeps calling for the Fed to greatly shrink its asset holdings. And indeed, after Warsh was nominated, the dollar strengthened, long-term bond yields rose, and precious metals declined; these are all signs that the market takes seriously the prospect that Warsh would move the Fed toward selling off assets and therefore doing less to hold down long-term rates. In other words, market participants don’t appear to believe Warsh has actually quit being a hawk.

As Fed Board member Stephen Miran correctly explained on Bloomberg TV last Friday, rate cuts and shrinking the balance sheet are policies with counteracting effects. If the Fed cools the economy by selling bonds, it can offset those effects by cutting short-term interest rates; if matched correctly, the offsetting policies need not produce any net stimulus or de-stimulus of the economy. You can also look at this the other way around: A Fed that cuts the Federal Funds rate in the way the president clearly wants could avoid overstimulating the economy by selling assets at the same time. But this combination of policies wouldn’t have the sugar-high effect the president clearly desires from rate cuts. In fact, you should tend to expect that longer-term interest rates — including mortgage rates — would go up.

I think — and the market also seems to think — there is a significant likelihood that Warsh is exploiting the president’s shallow understanding of monetary policy, in which Trump fixates solely on the Federal Funds rate and probably does not devote much time to thinking about the Fed’s balance sheet, thus causing him to misunderstand how dovish Warsh’s overall philosophy really is.3

On the other hand, there are major practical barriers to achieving a significant near-term shrinking of the Fed’s balance sheet. The Fed needs to hold a lot of assets because it has a lot of liabilities in the form of reserve deposits that banks make with the Fed — if a bank deposits money at the Fed, the Fed has to turn around and invest it in something. You could loosen bank regulations to reduce the amount of reserves banks hold, but that couldn’t be done overnight and would require a consensus on the Fed board. There’s also the issue that shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet is a contractionary policy, and a lot of people will lose their minds if Warsh is able to push through a program of asset sales and long-term interest rates — including mortgage rates — spike as a result.

More broadly, stubborn realities about how Fed policies actually affect inflation and interest rates would be a barrier for any Fed chair who hopes to sharply change policy — whether by cutting rates deeply like Trump wants or by selling off lots of assets in a way he’d likely end up hating — and are a reason to bet on more policy continuity at the Fed than Trump surely hopes for. And that’s before even discussing the fact that a new chair is just one vote among 12 on the FOMC.

Given all that, should someone wary of the president’s efforts to undermine Fed independence and push an inappropriately loose monetary policy want to see Warsh confirmed? From a policymaking perspective, I tend to share Furman’s view that Warsh is the best we’re likely to do under this presidency. But there’s an important issue beyond interest rate philosophies. The administration’s clearly telegraphed desire to assert more direct control over the Fed, including through misuse of the Department of Justice to criminally investigate Federal Reserve Board members the administration finds troublesome, is a reason not to want to let Trump put more people on the Federal Reserve Board.

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, whose vote is needed to move Warsh’s nomination out of the Senate Finance Committee, says he won’t advance any nominee for any position at the Fed until the Trump administration makes clear it’s giving up any effort to use pretextual DOJ action to pressure Powell to either change his policy stances or resign his board seat before his term ends in 2028. I share Tillis’s outrage — and the outrage of most congressional Democrats — at the president’s weaponization of the Justice Department. And I think the blockade is worth a shot.

But I think it’s worth considering what might ensue if the Tillis follows through, the White House does not back down, and no one is actually confirmed to the Fed before Powell’s term as chair expires in May.

If the Fed chairmanship became vacant, Trump would likely assert the authority to name an acting chair from among the sitting members of the Federal Reserve Board; there is legal ambiguity here, but Trump would be able to point to a precedent from the Carter administration. Meanwhile, the FOMC would be able to elect its own chair. By convention, the Federal Reserve Board chair also serves as FOMC chair, but the FOMC does not have to follow the convention if it doesn’t want to.

If Trump were smart, he would designate Christopher Waller, one of his first-term appointees to the Fed Board who has been somewhat more inclined toward rate cuts than most other policymakers at the Fed, as acting chair. Waller has made a non-crazy case for those rate cuts and has credibility with his colleagues that might help him lead the Fed in a modestly more dovish direction. I doubt there would be any controversy about installing Waller as the head of the FOMC.

But I suspect what Trump might do instead is designate Miran.4 Last September, Miran took a leave from his role as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to serve a short, Senate-confirmed stint on the Federal Reserve Board, replacing a Biden appointee who resigned shortly before the end of her term. Miran has advocated a more aggressive course of rate cuts than Waller has and is more severely out of step with the rest of the board and the Fed’s regional bank presidents; he’s also very closely associated with Trump and would have much less credibility as an independent actor than either Waller or Warsh.

Technically, Miran’s term at the Fed ended on Saturday, when his appointment to the board expired. Warsh has been nominated to take Miran’s seat on the board, in addition to the board’s chairmanship. But the Federal Reserve Act permits Miran to remain in his board seat until the Senate confirms his replacement, rendering Miran available as an acting chair designee. Miran has now officially resigned from his role running CEA in anticipation of a more extended tenure at the Fed. As such, the fact that the Senate already confirmed Miran — with Tillis’s vote — poses a significant tactical problem for any effort to blockade Trump’s Fed nominees. Unless Powell agrees to resign from the Fed board, Trump will have the same number of designees sitting on the board whether the Senate acts on the Warsh nomination or not; the Senate only gets to decide whether Miran or Warsh will be the Trump designee with power at the Fed.

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A protracted vacancy in the chairmanship would be chaotic and uncomfortable for both the president and those who would defend the Fed from him. Likely conflicts between an acting chair Miran and the rest of the FOMC, which he might not even chair — and the resulting uncertainty over the direction of monetary policy — would both unsettle markets and undermine the Fed’s ability to respond to market troubles. The president wouldn’t like that, and I think a blockade (or even just a threat of a blockade) might be an effective way to pressure him into calling off the DOJ.5

But the protracted period without a confirmed Fed chair would also increase the threat to Fed independence. A FOMC perceived as rudderless and divided won’t provide a great advertisement for the need to insulate the Fed from political control by the White House. And if Republicans in Congress — many of whom have spent years working hard to finesse this issue — are increasingly forced to choose between their support for the president and their support for Fed independence, a lot of them will choose wrong.

All of which is to say, it will behoove both Trump and Tillis to find a way to get to yes on Warsh. Democrats won’t have a say in the matter, but I think they too should root for an accord.

That doesn’t mean that Democratic senators should vote for Warsh. But I do think the main problem with Warsh is just as likely to be the normal one — he’s too hawkish, in the way we would have expected from a Fed nominee in a Romney administration — as it is to be the weird problem of him being inclined to inflate to make Trump happy.

Very seriously,

Josh

I got myself into a bit of a monkey’s paw situation when I wrote a few months ago that Texas Democrats shouldn’t nominate State Rep. James Talarico for U.S. Senate. Talarico, I wrote, is too far to the left — he holds all the usual orthodox liberal positions, and what makes him stand out in the crowd is his choir boy/seminarian persona. In theory, that’s supposed to help win over Texas swing voters, but as we saw with Tim Walz’s supposed advantage of being able to “code talk” to rural whites, these theories of crossover-appeal-through-persona don’t work. To win voters in the center, you need a candidate who is actually closer to the center himself or herself, not one who knows how to argue that gendered grammar in ancient Hebrew counsels in favor of trans participation in girls’ sports.

So naturally, after my warning, we’ve ended up with a primary between Talarico and a candidate who would be even more ill-suited than Talarico: Rep. Jasmine Crockett.

Crockett is a partisan bomb thrower who delights the kind of Democrats who watch a lot of MSNBC and share a lot of memes on Facebook. You may have seen her refer to Marjorie Taylor Greene at a House committee hearing as a “bleach-blond bad-built butch-body” — whatever that means — and if you want, you can buy a t-shirt declaring that phrase a “Crockett Clapback.” There are more clapbacks where that came from: she stood up at the Human Rights Campaign gala and called wheelchair-using Texas Gov. Greg Abbott “Hot Wheels”;1 she said Hispanics who voted for Trump have a “slave mentality”; she called detractors of DEI programs “mediocre white boys”.

Or, consider what Crockett said when Republicans sought to censure Stacey Plaskett, the non-voting delegate representing the U.S. Virgin Islands, for her ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein. Crockett went to the House floor with a list of Republicans who had taken donations from “Jeffrey Epstein,” including Lee Zeldin, the former congressman from Long Island who now serves as EPA Administrator. But there was a problem — the Jeffrey Epstein who donated to Zeldin is a Long Island neurosurgeon who made his donations in 2020, after the notorious Manhattan financier Epstein had died. Did Crockett apologize? Of course not. Here’s what she told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, with a straight face:

Listen, I never said that it was that Jeffrey Epstein. Just so that people understand, when you make a donation, your picture is not there…2 unlike Republicans, I at least don’t go out and just tell lies. Because, it was not the same one — that’s fine. But when Lee Zeldin had something to say, all he had to say was ‘it was a different Jeffrey Epstein.’ He admitted that he did receive donations from a Jeffrey Epstein, so at least I wasn’t trying to mislead people. Now, have I dug in to find out who this doctor is? I have not. So I will trust and take what he says, is that it wasn’t that Jeffrey Epstein.

You get the idea — she’s a loudmouth who talks a lot of shit in a way that’s neither smart nor strategic. She appeals to the sort of voter who is so partisan that he or she thinks “I never said that it was that Jeffrey Epstein” is a good argument. How this is supposed to appeal to Texas voters who aren’t already predisposed to hate Republicans is beyond me, and Texas isn’t Massachusetts — if she’s going to win, she’s going to need a lot of voters who aren’t already nodding along to MSNBC.

So, because they can read an electoral map, the liberal comedians Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers urged listeners on their podcast last week not to waste their money by donating to her. And boy, did some people on the internet get angry. Tim Miller flags one representative TikTok post, from black trans activist Hope Giselle, who called Yang and Rogers “twinks” with “gaping rosebuds”3 and said it was “structurally violent” for them to “tell black people, or people in general, not to financially support a black woman who is running for office.” Giselle’s post has gotten more than 220,000 likes.

On Saturday, Rogers and Yang issued groveling apologies on Instagram. Rogers declared his “great respect and admiration” for Crockett while Yang said he should not have weighed in “cursorily” and will use his platform “more responsibly” in the future. The apologies are preposterous, not only because their original comments were correct, but also because candidates are fair game: a core part of our political process is assessing which candidates can win and which ones can use donated funds effectively. This is something we’re all supposed to be arguing about. But the chorus of arguments like Giselle’s — that you can’t tell people not to give money to a black woman, simply because she is a black woman — was good enough to induce an apology anyway.

We have these arguments because a lot of Democratic voters have developed deeply dysfunctional relationships to black women as political candidates. They have extrapolated from the statistical observation that black women are an essential part of the Democratic Party coalition — they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, and their votes are needed to win elections — to a view that there is inherent moral authority that arises from being a black female Democrat. This is why we see hero-worship of Stacey Abrams, who literally got cast on the “Star Trek: Discovery” series as “president of Earth” in between her two losing campaigns for governor of Georgia.4 And it’s how you got die-hard Stans for Fulton County DA Fani Willis, even as she disastrously mismanaged the RICO prosecution of Donald Trump, including by appointing her lover as a special prosecutor.

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Of course, the grant of inherent moral authority does not extend to all black women, but only to black women who agree with the person issuing the grant — as Steve Morris noted on this week’s Central Air (see link below), a liberal who worships Crockett or Abrams is unlikely to extend the same reverence to a socialist like Nina Turner or a moderate like Lauren Underwood, let alone to a Republican like Winsome Earle-Sears. But the idea that moral authority arises from black female identity is what makes Crockett so popular as a meme: liberals, even if they are not themselves black or female, can share her “clapbacks” online and see them as final-boss slams that win arguments, even if what she is saying is false (Zeldin accepted money from Epstein) or politically damaging (Hispanic voters have a “slave mentality”) or contentless (Greene has a “bleach-blond bad-built butch-body”).5 Crockett is allowed to dish it out, as are her supporters — note that Bowen Yang is “white-adjacent” in addition to having that “gaping rosebud” — but if you dish back, then you’re racist.

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Among the problems with this identity-obsessed insanity is that it short-circuits the process by which you’re supposed to figure out if a candidate is any good. Candidates of all races and genders are good and bad at politics, and candidates of all races and genders are good or bad matches for different electorates. It is the electorate’s job to decide which candidates are the most adept and the best fit for a constituency. But Democrats pollute that process with all sorts of identity-based rules, such as the (conditional) irreproachability of black women. But there are others, including the projects of liberal folk-science that try to identify the exact right white guy with the right white guy folkways to win back white guys, which, you might notice, never work.

The biggest practical problem for the Crockett candidacy, though, is that the circa-2020 reign-of-terror racial politics that still pervade liberal milieus like the gay bubble in which Yang and Rogers are trying desperately not to lose podcast audience are alien to the rest of the electorate. Maybe Crockett will win the Democratic nomination on a wave of accusations that anyone who criticizes her is racist and sexist. But what is the strategy for the general election? To tell the broader Texas electorate that they, too, are racist if they are unimpressed with her name-calling? Nobody outside the Democratic base is going to go for that, and she is not going to be a U.S. senator.

Very seriously,

Josh

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You’ve probably seen news this week about Cea Weaver, the rent-control activist Zohran Mamdani appointed to lead his brand-new Office to Protect Tenants. Weaver’s now-deleted Twitter profile featured a lot of provocative far-left bangers circa 2019 and 2021, like “elect more communists” and “private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy” and “there is no such thing as a ‘good’ gentrifier, only people who are actively working on projects to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism and people who aren’t.” Fun stuff!

Weaver was also in the news last month, but if you don’t closely follow housing policy debates in New York, you probably didn’t notice. What she was doing last month might surprise you: the “elect more communists” lady who says “homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy” was getting herself to the right of our city council on various issues related to real estate development.

In the waning days of the Eric Adams administration, the council considered various bills that would impose costly mandates on affordable housing developments (sometimes new construction, sometimes conversion of existing buildings) which the city spends about $2 billion a year subsidizing. These bills had strong support from the council, especially its most left-wing members — one such bill would require buildings to contain more units that would be spacious enough for families; another would require more units to be priced for the lowest-income tenants. But some Mamdani allies tried to discourage the bills’ passage, understanding that these mandates would make projects more expensive for developers and therefore make it more difficult for the incoming mayor to deliver on his promise of more affordable housing. Weaver was one of the objectors. “I’m worried about things that are extraordinarily well-intentioned but could make it very difficult and more expensive for the agency to get money out of the door,” she told Crain’s New York Business.

Four years is a very long time on Twitter, and it can be a long time in politics. Mamdani has moderated a lot on housing issues and, in certain ways, Weaver seems to have too. Asked by The New York Times last June to name an issue he’s changed his mind about, Mamdani cited “the role of the private market in housing construction,” elaborating that he understands the government needs to enact policies and zoning reforms that foster more private housing development. Many far-left New Yorkers have evolved along with Mamdani toward a more market-oriented approach to development, much to the annoyance of left-NIMBYs like comedian Kate Willett, who tweeted after the election: “I can’t believe I petitioned and canvassed to have a real estate lobbyist doing all of Zohran’s housing hires.”1 So I actually don’t find it that surprising that someone who was tweeting about “dismantling capitalism” in 2021 would be issuing technocratic warnings in 2025 about how ordering developers to make housing more affordable could actually hurt the cause of affordable housing.

(By the way, I had a conversation about this Cea Weaver controversy at the end of this week’s episode of Central Air, and you should take a listen.)

All this said, Mamdani and his ideological allies are now aiming for a weird — and probably unworkable — synthesis of capitalism and communism. They see developers as productive allies in the fight against the housing shortage. They are sensitive to the need to attract private capital to invest in new housing developments, they want to loosen zoning regulations so private capital can be more easily deployed to build more homes, and they are cognizant of the ways that nice-sounding government regulation might drive up costs and make it too hard to deliver new homes. But they see owners of existing rental housing — the dreaded landlords — as rentiers whose assets can be expropriated without imposing economic cost on anyone else.

In 2019, progressive lawmakers fought for and passed a drastic tightening of New York’s rent control laws that has pushed swathes of our city’s stock of rent-regulated buildings into financial distress and sometimes foreclosure.2 Tens of thousands of dilapidated apartments are now held off the market because landlords cannot charge enough rent to justify the cost of bringing them up to code. According to data from the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, 10% of rent-regulated buildings had operating and maintenance expenses that exceeded their rental revenue in 2023, up from 5% in 2017.3 Effectively, these buildings are financially worthless even if they have no debt on them, and the finances of regulated buildings are only going to get worse if Mamdani delivers on his promise to freeze regulated rents through his mayoralty.

Mamdani says he will seek to help landlords cut their operating costs at the same time that he freezes rents, but the main way he proposes to do so is through property tax reform. This should be a red flag for anyone who follows New York City politics: New York mayors, both centrist and leftist, have said for decades they would reform property taxes and then failed to do so. Mamdani’s core observation is the same one we’ve heard from prior mayors: our city’s property tax system taxes rental apartments at a much higher rate than owner-occupied homes, which is an unfair burden on landlords and tenants. Fair enough. The problem is, to fix that unfairness, you either have to raise taxes on homeowners (hideously unpopular) or you have to cut property taxes overall (hard to do when you’ve also promised a raft of new spending programs). There’s a reason mayors tend to talk about property tax reform, ask a blue ribbon commission to look at what can be done, and then not do anything. The commission Bill de Blasio established to look into the issue literally issued its report with recommendations three days before he left office.

Mamdani also says he wants to help landlords with skyrocketing insurance costs, but to cut the cost of insurance you have to cut the cost of claims, and the reforms that would do this tend to draw a lot of opposition from trial lawyers and unions.

The area where I think Mamdani is most likely to succeed at providing operating cost relief to building owners is if he seeks to reform our city’s bizarre façade inspection regime — these are the rules that cause New York’s sidewalks to be uniquely festooned with scaffolding, at great expense to building owners — but even this could be challenging because our city council has shown a surprising attachment to these only-in-New-York rules, in significant part because the scaffolding companies have themselves become a serious political lobby.

So if Mamdani freezes rents, the likely outcome is that even more apartment buildings will have operating expenses that exceed rental income — that is, they will be worthless. But for some tenant activists, that crisis actually looks like opportunity: it creates a situation where the city can foreclose on apartment buildings for unpaid property tax and turn them into public housing, or where non-profits can acquire those buildings in foreclosure at fire-sale prices. Indeed, Weaver wrote in favor of the former option back in October. Mamdani’s administration is also this week seeking to block a proposed sale of a portfolio of buildings in the bankruptcy auction of the landlord Pinnacle, arguing that a bid of approximately $80,000 per unit is implausibly high because of the very low regulated rents on Pinnacle’s buildings, meaning the new for-profit landlord is likely to be unable to maintain the buildings and stay out of bankruptcy itself. ($80,000 per apartment, an implausibly high valuation in New York City! That just goes to show how punitive our rent-control regime is.) The endgame here appears to be to try to get the Pinnacle portfolio into city or non-profit hands instead.

Obviously, I see problems with the approach of “capitalism for developers, communism for landlords.” One is that today’s developer is often tomorrow’s landlord — the financial calculations that make a developer willing to build rest on an expectation that sufficient rents can be collected once a building is operating. Another is that, while a literal landlord (in the sense of someone who rents agricultural land, perhaps to a feudal serf) really does collect payment merely for owning capital, an apartment building is a business where landlords collect income in exchange for providing services that carry ongoing costs.

That said, I don’t think it’s crazy to think you can bifurcate this market and induce developers to invest while regulating away at least some of landlords’ profits. Cities have done it in the past: They impose rent controls only on old buildings, while promising not to regulate rents on newly built ones, and they often offer tax abatements as inducements for new construction. New York City has had some form of rent control for several decades, and that hasn’t stopped developers from building new rental apartments, mostly because rent controls apply only to buildings that were built before 1974 or where a developer voluntarily accepts rent control in exchange for a tax abatement or subsidy. A government also doesn’t need to be able to credibly promise developers that it will never regulate the new buildings — because of the discounted value of future cash flows, the earliest years’ revenues are the most important revenues for determining whether it’s worth building a new building, and so it’s good enough to convince developers that any rent regulations on new buildings are at least several decades away.4

But the aggressiveness of the 2019 rent regulation reforms, combined with Mamdani’s promise to hold rent increases below inflation (i.e., at zero), put us in uncharted territory. The city isn’t merely holding down rents and reducing landlord profits; it’s effectively engaging in a slow-motion expropriation of a huge swathe of the city’s housing stock, regulating its value all the way down to zero and putting itself in a position to socialize many existing private buildings. As Eric Kober writes for the Manhattan Institute, the city may regret doing this: when the city or various non-profits step into landlords’ shoes, they’ll still have to deal with the fact that these buildings’ rent rolls don’t cover expenses, and the buildings’ operating deficits could turn into a gaping maw that eats up tax dollars that are therefore unavailable for Mamdani’s other ambitions, like universal child care. (Confiscating the buildings will also take them off the city’s property tax rolls, reducing revenue.) And then there’s the question of how developers will react to a city government that appears to have moved beyond the ambitions of the 1970s-era rent regulations toward a policy where some private property effectively gets expropriated. Maybe they will no longer believe promises that new buildings will be excluded from the anti-landlord agenda for the foreseeable future. Weaver, for one, told Ben Max on his “Max Politics” podcast last October that she’d like to see rent control extended to newer buildings.

Meanwhile, our city council has been less than helpful: it ignored Weaver’s warnings and passed all those bills with the new unit-mix and rent-cap mandates that would make publicly subsidized affordable housing developments more expensive to build.5 More helpful to the new mayor was the outgoing mayor, Adams, who vetoed the bills. But in a testament to the power of the construction trade unions, Adams allowed another bill — this one setting a $40 hourly wage-and-benefit floor for the workers building the developments — to become law, imposing a mandate that will nearly double the amount of subsidy the city needs to provide to get an income-restricted affordable housing unit built. This is likely to seriously hamper Mamdani’s promise to massively scale up the city’s production of new affordable housing units, and is exactly the kind of trade-off that progressives in New York routinely fail to grapple with.

Like Matt Yglesias, I am much more impressed with Mamdani than I was six months ago. I’ve been heartened with the ways he has shifted toward the center on policing and education. But while I think he has his head on straight about real estate development, his (and Weaver’s) approach to landlords is a big problem. Rent increases have already been restricted below inflation for several years running and his plan to further reduce rents in real terms (which is what a “rent freeze” amounts to) is unsustainable without major reforms to reduce landlords’ operating costs, which he is unlikely to deliver. He would be wise to take some advice from Bill de Blasio, hardly a market fundamentalist, who told the New York Editorial Board last year that the 2019 rent law needs to be loosened — specifically, to allow landlords to raise rents more when they make capital upgrades to buildings — in order to make a freeze on base rents viable and discourage landlords from allowing their buildings to fall into disrepair.6 And he should worry more than he appears to about whether an expropriative attitude toward landlords will scare off the developers he acknowledges he needs to attract to build the new homes this city so badly needs.

After all, it’s pretty hard to credibly promise you’ll hold together a political coalition to ensure a system that’s capitalist and communist at the same time.

Very seriously,

Josh

P.S. Check out this week’s episode of Central Air, which ends with a discussion of life in Mamdani’s New York.

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Rose Horowitch wrote last week for The Atlantic about the explosion of disability designations at elite colleges and universities, mostly granted to students with mild and increasingly common psychiatric diagnoses like anxiety, depression and ADHD. Officially, 38% of Stanford undergraduates are registered as disabled, as are a third of those at Amherst and more than a fifth at Harvard and Brown. As the proportion of the student body that is designated disabled has climbed at these universities, so has the number of students who receive academic accommodations — most commonly, permission for extra time on exams. And while students who receive academic accommodations in middle and high school lag their un-designated peers in reading and math scores and are moreover less likely to attend college, this is not true for college students, many of whom had no history of such a designation before they enrolled in college.

Horowitch cites the research of Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, who studies these trends:

When Weis and his colleagues looked at how students receiving accommodations for learning disabilities at a selective liberal-arts school performed on reading, math, and IQ tests, most had above-average cognitive abilities and no evidence of impairment.

And that, of course, gets at a major reason why so many students are suddenly “disabled” — it gives them a leg up, academically, in a supposedly elite, achievement-measuring environment.1

A college education is supposed to both build human capital and send a signal about human capital to employers. The explosion of accommodations is one of several forces that are simultaneously undermining elite colleges’ value on both of those dimensions:

• Admissions standards at many schools have gotten less rigorous. This is because many universities have made standardized testing optional for applicants; in some cases, colleges will not even consider standardized test scores that students voluntarily report. The University of California Board of Regents voted in 2020 to phase out using test scores in admissions decisions, and the result is an exploding fraction of students at UC San Diego who can’t do basic math. This undermines the signal value of the degree: having gained admission to a UC is not the signal of academic aptitude that it once was. It also undermines actual human capital creation, because top schools are enrolling an unknown (but increasing) number of students who won’t be able to learn advanced material.

• Once students are in college, the grades they receive have greatly inflated — a majority of grades at Harvard College are now straight A’s. This reduces the signal value of a high GPA: if everyone gets the same A’s, you can’t tell from a transcript which students actually performed the best. It also reduces the fundamental value of a college education, because it gives students the option to work less hard and learn less while still getting good grades — an option many are surely taking.

• AI tools are undermining education. It is now easier for students to outsource their thinking to computers and harder for schools to accurately assess mastery. As a result, students learn less, and it’s harder to tell from a GPA how much a student has actually learned.

• Disability accommodations are reducing the signal value of both grades and standardized test scores, because students take exams under conditions of varying difficulty, and those conditions are not disclosed alongside either GPAs or test scores that were earned under them. How could a recruiter identify which of two seemingly identical applicants would have trouble delivering projects on time, or in high-pressure situations? Firms may be able to close this gap through rigorous evaluation during the interview process, but a shift toward those kinds of assessments makes degrees less valuable, because firms are likely to get better at identifying the best applicants without relying on their degrees as the signal.

All of these trends are making a college education less valuable. Additionally, the college-age population is declining, meaning schools have fewer potential customers. So it shouldn’t be surprising that college costs have finally started to lag overall inflation in recent years — the market will no longer bear an ever-rising price tag for a college degree. That’s a big problem for colleges and universities, whose labor costs continue to rise, and who face a tougher audience than ever when asking the government for money.

This is a full-blown, system-wide crisis for higher education. And as Matt Yglesias writes, neither academics nor college administrators appear to have a plan for dealing with it, in part because they don’t even have a clear mission to evaluate their performance against.

Obviously, elite universities have a research mission. But I don’t think it’s hard to encapsulate what had traditionally been their teaching mission: to help the brightest students reach their fullest potential. If that’s still their goal, then they should be focused on unwinding the four trends I describe above. They can increase the value of a degree by adding back rigor where it was stripped away; they can find stronger applicants by requiring standardized test scores again (as many, but not all, have chosen to do in recent years); they can reverse grade inflation and refine AI-proof ways to assess performance.

And they should rescind any academic accommodations regime that treats deficits in cognitive performance as disabilities to be adjusted for, rather than traits to be measured. Our disability regime has made a category error, expanding a system that was once intended to ensure that non-cognitive deficits didn’t interfere with measures of cognitive performance so that we now “adjust” for factors that are simply components of whether or not someone is good at learning, understanding and applying academic material. Congress can help with this last point by repealing overbroad disability accommodation laws that universities have interpreted as forcing them to accommodate fundamentally cognitive conditions like anxiety and ADHD: If you’re too anxious to complete a test on time, that’s something a test should measure, not something it should avoid measuring.

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At every level in the American education system over the last decade, left wing forces have pushed — often successfully — to evaluate less and rank less. They have fought for less standardized testing in K-12 schools, less tracking, less advanced math made available to the smartest students, and college admissions that are less tied to aptitude. The problems in colleges are in many ways downstream of the anti-measurement agenda in K-12 schools. And many of the people who have pushed this anti-assessment agenda are the same people who lament declining political support for educational institutions and declining funding for their activities.

But that outcome should have been foreseeable — if you make education less effective and make its effectiveness harder to measure, what about it is worth paying for, with public and private dollars? The political “assault” on schools can only be expected to get worse if schools make no effort to prove their worth. Liberals talk a lot about defending institutions, but the most important thing you can do to ensure that a valued institution survives a political assault is to make the institution worth defending. That effort has been sorely lacking in our educational system in the last decade.

By the way, I had a conversation about this topic with Ben Dreyfuss and Megan McArdle on this week’s Central Air podcast, which you can find below.

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6 months ago · 1 like · Josh Barro, Ben Dreyfuss, and Megan McArdle

Very seriously,

Josh

One issue that has helped Democrats in this year’s elections is public dissatisfaction with electricity prices. Electricity prices in September were 5.1% higher than one year earlier, and the upward march of electricity costs under Donald Trump extends an ongoing trend from the Biden administration. Consumer electricity prices rose by 37.5% from January 2020 to September of this year, outpacing general CPI inflation, which totaled 25.2% over the same period. The cost of piped natural gas has risen even more sharply over that time — 49.3%.

When you’re out of power, inflation is a good issue for you, and Democrats have capitalized on President Trump’s failure to actually make life more affordable. But over the long run, Republicans have an advantage on energy as a political issue, because they actually implement policies that make energy cheaper.

States run by Republicans tend to have much cheaper electricity than those run by Democrats: while consumers paid a national average of $0.18 per kilowatt hour for electricity in September, the average rate was $0.30 in New England, $0.24 in the Mid-Atlantic, and $0.32 in California. As a party, we should be nervous about the increasing salience of this issue, because we are worse than Republicans at delivering the cheap electricity that consumers want.

To gain a long-run advantage on the energy issue, Democrats need to commit to providing energy that is cheap and abundant. That’s going to require changing the way we govern, making it easier to produce energy and deliver it to consumers. And it’s going to mean scaling back policies that intentionally raise the cost of energy in pursuit of carbon emissions reduction.

Consider the situation in Connecticut, which at $0.30 per kilowatt hour in September had the second-highest electricity prices in the Lower 48, trailing only California. In theory, a densely populated state like Connecticut should have relatively cheap electricity, because you don’t need as much length of transmission line per customer. But in practice, the densely populated states of the northeast tend to have expensive electricity because they have not built enough energy generation and transmission infrastructure to meet demand.

Here are some drivers of Connecticut’s high electricity costs, as identified by Noah Kaufman in a recent report for the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia:

• Limited gas pipeline capacity into New England causes sharply spiking costs for gas-fired electrical plants in winter.

• A renewable portfolio standard pushes utilities toward relatively expensive sources of power generation, while a requirement to purchase cap-and-trade permits acts effectively like a tax on electricity, and expensive incentives encouraging the installation of rooftop solar are effectively borne by the rest of ratepayers who don’t have rooftop solar. Together, these three green policies account for somewhere between 2 and 3 cents of Connecticut’s $0.30-per-kWh residential electricity price — or about 20% of the extent to which Connecticut’s costs exceed the national average.

• Efforts to add capacity have foundered. Offshore wind was supposed to be the core of the state’s move toward renewable energy sources, but these projects were already behind schedule and over budget even before the Trump administration started trying to cancel them, and they are unlikely to be price-competitive even if permitted. Meanwhile, proposals to add gas pipeline and long-distance electrical-transmission capacity into Connecticut have faced political and judicial delays.

Kaufman has a variety of suggestions for how Connecticut can provide more abundant, cheaper electricity. These include encouraging more installations of grid-scale solar generation (more cost-effective than rooftop solar), entering into a contract to keep the Millstone Nuclear Power Station operating past 2029, reducing the price of cap-and-trade permits, and adding capacity for electrical transmission from Canada and piped natural gas from Pennsylvania. Note that this menu includes many kinds of energy sources: gas, nuclear, solar, and hydro (which is how Canadian electricity is made). If Democrats instead follow Bharat Ramamurti’s advice to focus their efforts on “solar, wind and other clean-energy”1 investments, it will limit how competitive and effective they can be on electricity costs. And if they accede to demands from groups like the League of Conservation Voters to refrain from easing permitting restrictions under the National Environmental Policy Act, then states like Connecticut are unlikely to get the pipelines and transmission lines they need to cut the retail price of electricity.

Some Democrats are demonstrating that they know an agenda aimed at containing energy costs must include an all-of-the-above approach. Last month, New York Governor Kathy Hochul approved the construction of a new gas pipeline to Long Island, which faces gas-capacity constraints similar to Connecticut, over the objections of progressives in her party. She’s also overseeing the construction of a major electrical transmission line to bring Quebec hydropower to the New York City area — a project that divides the smarter wing of the environmental movement from its dumber wing — and has an initiative to add new nuclear generation capacity in the state. Her administration constitutes a major improvement from Andrew Cuomo’s — Cuomo foolishly closed the Indian Point Energy Center, the nuclear power plant that had been New York City’s primary source of low-carbon electricity.2

A new law passed by Democrats in Illinois this fall also reflects an all-of-the-above approach to electricity abundance. Lawmakers in the state approved major subsidies for battery storage that are intended to bolster renewable energy development, while also repealing the state’s moratorium on new nuclear power plants, granting the state’s utility commission authority to waive deadlines the legislature previously set for retiring carbon-emitting plants, and reducing the ability of local jurisdictions to impede energy projects.

At the federal level, Democrats should buck the environmental groups and seek bipartisan permitting reforms that would make it easier for states to add needed pipelines, transmission lines, and power plants. I wrote a few months ago about the potential of such efforts in Congress, and while we’re not exactly at a high water mark for bipartisanship in Washington, there have been developments over the last year that should make both parties more eager for a deal. The Trump administration’s capricious cancellation of renewable projects should make Democrats eager for a deal that restricts the ability of the executive branch to cancel energy projects once they are approved. And Republicans, who used to view permitting reforms to ease interstate electrical transmission as primarily a concern for electrification-happy Democrats, are more attuned to the need for more electrical capacity because of consumer dissatisfaction with rising prices and the need for data centers to fuel the AI boom.

To the extent Democrats have a political opportunity here, it’s because of the ways the Trump administration is screwing up on energy policy. By canceling wind and solar projects for culture-war reasons, the president is essentially begging voters to blame him for rising electricity prices. He is damaging Republicans’ brand as the party of abundant energy. But to best capitalize, Democrats have to actually fight to increase the abundance of energy and reduce its cost, and to shed our image as the party that makes energy more expensive.

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To see the benefits that a pivot away from high-cost energy policies can produce for a left-of-center political party, look north to Canada. Liberal Canadian Prime Minster Mark Carney was all smiles last week with Danielle Smith, the conservative premier of Alberta, as the two leaders made a joint announcement about plans to better develop and export the province’s fossil fuel resources. The big headline was Carney’s support for a pipeline to carry Alberta crude oil to a Pacific Ocean port for export to Asia. This would reduce Canada’s reliance on the United States as an oil export market, allowing the country to get higher prices for its oil and be less exposed to our country’s tariff policy whims. But pipeline proposals have long faced opposition from environmental groups and from the coastal provinces they would need to pass through.

Just about a year ago, the Canadian Liberals — led by the very unpopular Justin Trudeau — appeared to be headed for a landslide defeat at the hands of the Conservatives. It helped Liberal fortunes that Trudeau stepped down so Carney could take over as prime minister, and it helped that Trump emerged as a unifying villain for Canadians across the political spectrum. But a major reason the leadership change helped was that Carney immediately canceled one of Trudeau’s most unpopular policies: a carbon tax. Carney stole the Conservatives’ best issue — a pledge to “axe the tax” — and led his party to a come-from-behind victory in an election last April. The Alberta deal represents his efforts to reposition his party away from its politically toxic positioning on energy, over the objections of certain elements in his coalition.

Progressives say the Democratic Party needs to be more economically populist, and everybody across the political spectrum wants to talk about how they are promoting affordability. But there can be no effective economic populism without a commitment to affordable energy — and energy needs to be more abundantly produced if it’s going to be more affordable. Over the next few years, we will see which Democratic leaders are willing to stand up to the de-growth elements in the environmental movement and support true energy abundance — and which ones will only pay lip service to “affordability” while prioritizing the interests of climate-obsessed party donors who actually want energy to be more expensive.

Very seriously,

Josh

Most Republicans, including the president, do not want to extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that Democrats first enacted during the pandemic. But they also don’t want to sound like they don’t care about skyrocketing health insurance premiums. So we’re back in yet another cycle of Republicans saying they’re going to reform the health care system to make it much cheaper and better, and as always, there’s really no plan — not even the “concepts of a plan” the president promised he had during last year’s campaign. Instead, there’s just a lot of complaining that health insurance is too expensive, and vague claims that Republicans can make it cheaper by unleashing the markets and consumer choice.

Back in 2017, former House Speaker John Boehner said this about Republicans and health care: “In the 25 years that I served in the United States Congress, Republicans never, ever, one time agreed on what a health care proposal should look like. Not once.” Eight years later, that remains true, and here’s why: (most) Republicans want a health insurance system that does three things — or rather, that doesn’t do three things:

1. It should not force people to buy health insurance if they don’t want to.

2. It should not spend a lot of taxpayer money subsidizing health insurance.

3. It should not allow insurers to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.

The problem for Republicans is it is only possible to have, at most, two out of those three things. In an unregulated market, you could have (1) and (2). It would suck for people with cancer, but it is a theoretically possible policy to enact. The trouble is with (3) — (3) is a rule that ensures that health insurance isn’t a normal kind of insurance, and to make the abnormal insurance market work, you have to abandon either (1) or (2) (or both).

The key thing to understand about health insurance is that if it worked the way auto or homeowner’s insurance works, we would not be very happy. This is because, while you can sell a house or a car, you cannot get a new body. Events may befall you this year that will cause you to have more and/or higher medical costs for the rest of your life, or at least far beyond the term of whatever health insurance policy covers you today. In the future, you will need to obtain insurance that covers expenses due to events that occurred in the past; left to an open market, your insurance is likely to be either unavailable or unaffordable.

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For the system to work, sicker people need to be able to buy insurance for less (often much less) than it actually costs to cover them. There are two ways to do that: the government can use tax revenues to subsidize insurance for the sick; or it can impose a cross-subsidy, by forcing healthy people to pay more for insurance (often much more) than their actual risks would require. And, for that second option, the key is “forcing”: if insurance for healthy people is based on sick people’s costs, it’s often going to look like a pretty bad value. The dreaded individual mandate is not the only way to bring the healthy along into the market, but all the options to make it work are pretty anti-free-market in one way or another.

Meanwhile, there is the compounding issue of high prices. Our high costs make every kind of possible health care policy harder to implement here than elsewhere: single payer would be way more expensive here than it is in Europe, while private-market solutions entail premiums that look shockingly high before subsidy — and that would be too high for some healthy people to afford, even if they weren’t cross-subsidizing the sick. In practice, we rely on a patchwork of direct and indirect government subsidies to get most non-elderly Americans on private health insurance, while we provide government insurance for free to the poorest Americans, and at a deeply discounted price to the elderly. There is a public sentiment that people have the right to receive health care, and these subsidies are necessary to ensure that they actually get it.

All of which is to say, a normal insurance pool transfers wealth to people who experience unforeseen losses and away from those who don’t experience them. Our health insurance system also makes these kinds of transfers, but for the reasons described above, it also needs to make two other kinds of transfers not normally seen in insurance markets: a cross-subsidy to people with foreseeable health costs, from people whose health costs are foreseeably low; and to people with low incomes, from people with high incomes.

Republicans look at this system, see the cross-subsidy, and decry it. They think that it is unfair for light users of the health care system to pay a lot into it, and they want to make it cheaper for them. Their instinct is shared by a lot of consumers, who look at the premiums for health insurance provided by the ACA exchanges, and wonder why they’re paying a thousand dollars a month for coverage with a deductible so high that they’re unlikely to make claims unless they get seriously ill. Democrats’ usual retort is that’s what insurance is — you pay a premium, and what you get in exchange is the right to make a big claim if something terrible befalls you. But this retort isn’t quite correct. Yes, part of a healthy person’s ACA plan premium pays for their own risk of developing serious illness, but a lot of it is financing other, sicker Americans’ already known serious illnesses. The premium would be a lot lower if it were built around the enrollee’s individual risk in the way a homeowner’s policy would typically1 be, instead of adding on this expensive cross-subsidy.

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The problem with getting rid of this cross-subsidy is: what are you going to do instead? You can tell people not to live in a flood zone if they can’t afford to insure against the risk of flood, but you can’t tell people not to get cancer if they can’t afford to insure against the risk of continuing to have cancer.

One option is that you can use taxpayer subsidies to replace the cross-subsidy — indeed, Democrats would generally like to do this, and the enhanced ACA subsidies that are about to expire are an example of a way to do it. Another way to replace the cross-subsidy, sometimes floated by Republican policy wonks, is the creation of “high-risk pools,” where the government provides a pool of money to subsidize health insurance for the sick. The problem is that an effective high-risk pool is very expensive and Republicans never want to put up the amount of money needed to turn their talking point into a workable policy. A third option — the one that prevailed in most of the country before the ACA — is that you can simply allow health insurers to refuse to cover pre-existing conditions, making insurance unaffordable or unavailable for a lot of sick people. This would be hideously unpopular and it would run afoul of prong (3), to which most Republicans remain committed. A fourth option, used in some blue states before the ACA, is that you can bar insurers from discriminating on the basis of pre-existing conditions, and also not provide subsidies to help people buy insurance. This improves “fairness” because, instead of health insurance being unaffordable for the sick, it becomes unaffordable for nearly everyone who doesn’t get it through work or Medicare or Medicaid.

Do you see why Republicans never actually come up with a health care plan? They could allow insurers to charge people based on how sick they actually are, but this would produce a broken insurance market that makes everyone mad — that is, this approach would violate prong (3). Replacing cross-subsidies with explicit subsidies, financed by taxes, violates prong (2) — it is something Republicans do not want to spend money on. A third option — the one Mitt Romney chose when he was governor of Massachusetts — is they could require healthy people to buy insurance whether they like it or not. The stick of a penalty for not carrying insurance can replace much of the carrot of subsidies for buying insurance, and reduce the fiscal cost of producing a reasonably universal health insurance system. But of course, this violates prong (1).

No option is available that meets all of the core Republican objectives, which is why they mumble and dissemble instead of actually producing a policy agenda around health insurance.

What I’ve described above is complicated, but it’s not that complicated. Republicans have had decades to learn that, like the Democrats, they want to regulate insurance in a way that won’t allow a free market to work, while unlike the Democrats, they are unwilling to commit to a corresponding set of mandates and subsidies to make that regulation work. This is why they couldn’t repeal Obamacare, and it’s why they don’t have an alternative to offer today — the suite of outcomes they think they are in favor of remains impossible to produce.

Very seriously,

Josh

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I’m opening the mayonnaise jar after a while. I’ve been getting some really interesting listener comments and questions since the launch of Central Air — a lot of them about issues I’ve written on extensively in Very Serious — so let’s reopen the Mayonnaise Clinic. By the way, you can always email your questions (on virtually any topic) to mayo@joshbarro.com.

First, though my distaste for Gavin Newsom is well known, I admitted on this week’s episode that I am increasingly resigned to the prospect that Newsom will be the 2028 Democratic nominee. Brian sent in this response:

This podcast should have a pillar that it will do everything it can to spoil a Newsom nomination. I say this as a Californian. He cannot be the nominee. We will lose by a million. It has to be a Shapiro or Whitmer type.

Look, Newsom continues to be far from my first choice. I don’t think he would put our party’s best foot forward to swing voters. I want Josh Shapiro to be the nominee, and I also think Gretchen Whitmer would be a strong choice. Pete Buttigieg might be fine, too, though I continue to worry about his lack of an electoral track record beyond South Bend.

But when I look back at my screed about Newsom from 2022, I mostly cringe about having scolded him for flirting with a 2024 presidential run at a time when Joe Biden was on a course to run again. Oops! Gavin Newsom was on to something, and I didn’t give him the credit he deserved! So maybe I should consider whether I also owe him credit in other areas.

As I said on the show this week, Democratic voters are hungry for the party to “fight back” against Trump, which is awkward, because Democrats are in the minority in Congress and have few good tools to fight back. Newsom, to his credit, found a good tool: He is leading a likely successful effort to redraw California’s congressional district maps and offset the effects of the redistricting the president demanded in Texas. Winning the nomination is going to require connecting with the party base somehow, and I appreciate that he is finding ways to fire up the Democratic base that don’t involve running hard to the left and taking positions that are likely to become new general election liabilities.

All that said, Newsom has a lot of pre-existing general election liabilities. His margins of victory have been underwhelming, and California’s substantive woes (Rampant unsheltered homelessness and unaffordable homes! Electricity prices up a third in five years!) and the left-wing policies he’s implemented in the state (Medicaid for illegal immigrants!) are both sure to be huge problems for him as a nominee. As with Kamala Harris, his lack of experience campaigning in anything other than a deep-blue electorate is a deficiency. He continues to look like an ‘80s movie villain, and he dined at the French Laundry while he had the state in COVID lockdown.

But: he demonstrates more self-awareness about his deficits than Harris did. He has taken some steps to moderate his image — for example, he admitted that Democrats are out to lunch on the trans sports issue, and he has pushed hard to give California municipalities more tools to force the homeless off the streets — and his podcasting foray, precisely because it is annoying to some Democrats, demonstrates an understanding that he’ll have to connect with and appeal to very different audiences than he has so far in his career.

So here is my qualified praise for Newsom: while I continue to think nominating him would be a mistake, I’d rather nominate him than Harris or JB Pritzker or Tim Walz or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or any number of other likely candidates who seem to believe that Democrats can win either by keeping their existing branding and positioning, or by shifting it to the left. And I worry that Newsom will enter the race in a dominant position — he’s already leading the prediction markets, and he’s about as high in the polls as Harris is — and that the main strategy for much of the field will be to differentiate from him by getting to his left, piling on added general election liabilities if we nominate one of the underdogs.

But, again, I am pulling for Shapiro. Shapiro has an argument that I think ought to be very appealing to Democratic primary voters: He has shown that he can win handily in exactly the sort of swing states we need to win to reclaim the presidency, and there’s no evidence that Newsom or most of the other prominent candidates in the field can do that. But I’m not sure that Democratic voters will find that persuasive — they would need to be in a more pragmatic mood than they appear to be in now.

I’ve written a few pieces recently about how Democrats need to find their way back to the popular side on several issues where they’ve gotten way out of touch with the median voter. Really, I think there are four big ones: immigration, energy and climate, crime (which I guess I should write on soon), and gender issues. On the last topic, I’ve written that Democrats should say that sports leagues should be organized by sex and I’ve urged Texas primary voters not to nominate a Senate candidate who has said “God is non-binary” on tape.

We also had a conversation about the trans sports issue this week on Central Air. And when I write or talk about this topic, I tend to get letters like the one below, which came from listener Eli:

I was listening to episode three with the discussion of trans kids playing sports. My thesis is that modern conservatives will pick on any vulnerable group and target them with cruel and bullying behavior. Not to strawman centrists, but it seems the prescribed reaction is to either join in or leave them to the wolves if they happen to poll below majority support. That was the case for gay people in the 90s and 2000s and I’m curious what the group feels the centrists of the day should have done? The “groups” at the time were raising gobs of money to advocate for HIV/AIDS, advocacy for gay teens, etc. It was a centerpiece of the 2004 election, and yet Democrats continued to keep gay advocacy in the platform and at the convention. Would the centrists of the day say they should’ve been thrown to the wolves instead?

I have a few things to say in response to this.

First, note that Eli makes no real argument for policies like organizing sports leagues around gender identity. All he offers is a conclusory allegation that failure to support this policy amounts to throwing trans people “to the wolves.” This rhetorical approach — emotionality and accusation, not argument — is the typical mode of trans advocacy, and it has not worked at all. In fact, as people have become more aware of trans issues over the years, the percentage of people supporting trans rights has declined. Queer Majority has an excellent essay this week from Jamie Paul on the failure of trans activism that I strongly recommend — in it, Paul faults (among other things) both the strategy and tone of trans activism: telling people they must support a particular agenda around trans issues unless they want to be “cruel and bullying,” as Eli contends in his email, is not just bound to fail. It has failed.

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The good people at Welcome1 have put out their “Deciding to Win” report, consolidating their opinion research-driven advice on how the party can effectively moderate in a way that will win over voters who have decided the Democratic Party has grown too extreme and out of touch.

If you’re a reader of this newsletter, you’re probably already bought in on the idea that the recommendations in the report are worth following. Their advice breaks down into five main recommendations, listed in the report’s executive summary, but I want to focus today on the third recommendation: “Convince voters that we share their priorities by focusing more on issues voters do not think our party prioritizes highly enough (the economy, the cost of living, health care, border security, public safety), and focusing less on issues voters think we place too much emphasis on (climate change, democracy, abortion, identity and cultural issues).”

Democratic candidates, of course, do not generally go into elections saying “we think climate change and cultural issues are more important than the cost of living and public safety.” Paid media (candidate- or PAC-funded ads) in Democratic campaigns tends to focus heavily on issues voters rate as highly important and urgent, like the economy and health care. In the New York area, successful Democratic congressional candidates in 2024 ran ads touting their get-tough positions on crime and immigration. But Democrats generally (and Kamala Harris specifically) have been dogged by the perception that, with the exception of health care, they’re not focused on the same issues Americans are, and instead are fixated on climate change and L.G.B.T. issues, which voters rate as low-priority.

It is already going to be a challenge for Democrats to change voters’ views about where the party stands on issues. But convincing voters to change their perception of which issues are important to Democrats seems even harder. If I’m a Democrat running for office, I can control how much I talk about certain issues, but I can’t necessarily control how much voters hear me talking about certain issues, and I can’t control how much my supporters talk about certain issues.

So to change perceptions of issue emphasis, candidates will need to wholly commit to the project, regardless of whether they are the type of candidate who has publicly expressed fringe stances on fringe issues. But politicians talk about a lot of things, prompted and un-prompted, so let’s start with the category of candidates who have said weird things in the past. If you expressed an unpopular idea a few times several years ago — perhaps during the 2020 Democratic primary about whether the government should provide sex changes to inmates and detained migrants2 — what can you do to stop your opponent from using the sound of your voice to cultivate the impression that it’s one of the main things you think about today, when you have not in fact made it a priority?

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One obvious answer is, never say you want the government to provide sex changes to prisoners. And I agree: the government shouldn’t do that,3 Kamala Harris shouldn’t have said they should do it, and more broadly, it was destructive to the party’s image for the Democratic candidates in the 2020 primary to be in a contest to see who could take the most ludicrously left-wing positions (also, no Democratic politician should fill out another ACLU questionnaire ever again). But nothing I’ve said in this paragraph is about issue emphasis; it’s just a number of different ways of saying don’t propose unpopular things.

The somewhat-unsatisfying answer, I think — and as we discussed this week on Central Air with Liam Kerr, one of the co-authors of the Welcome report — is about making message discipline a consistent practice across an entire political career. You cannot control what your opponent says about you, and if you’ve said something on tape, you cannot control who replays it. But you can control what you talk about day-to-day, and the image you cultivate through your own free and paid media. Before she became vice president, Harris intentionally cultivated an image of herself as one of the most left-wing members of the U.S. Senate, running away from her past record as a tough-on-crime prosecutor and attacking Joe Biden from the left during the primary debates. Answers like the confident one she gave on trans inmate health care were part of a concerted strategy to sculpt a progressive image, and while it didn’t win her the nomination, it did indelibly affect public perception of her. This made it easy to paint her in ads as left-wing and out of touch. But this perception of her political reinvention, fringe stances, and new priorities eviscerated her credibility as a tough-on-crime career prosecutor who also cared about economic issues and the cost of living.

For comparison, look at Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic former congresswoman who appears set to cruise to election as governor of Virginia. Spanberger’s Republican opponent is leaning heavily on messaging about trans issues in that race, and it’s not working, even though Spanberger has taken a mealy-mouthed4 position on trans participation in girls’ sports and school bathroom restrictions that doesn’t conform with the public’s view.

As we discuss with Liam on Central Air: because Spanberger, an ex-CIA officer, has spent years cultivating a moderate image, harping on the relatively low-salience trans sports issue has not been an effective way to paint her as extreme. Even if voters don’t necessarily agree with the exact stance Spanberger has taken on the specific issue, they don’t perceive her as overly focused on the issue. The idea of Spanberger as a gender radical doesn’t pass a gut-check against her record and her resume; if anything, it’s her opponent who either appears obsessed with the issue, or too obviously trying to re-run a playbook, or both.

So I think that’s the boring slog of the answer: candidates need to show voters they care about what they care about, and wake up every morning and talk about what they care about. And in an important race, it’s best to nominate the candidate who has committed to that daily practice. As the Welcome report says, Democrats should “focus the bulk of our opposition on issues where public support is on our side”:

Deciding to Win does not advocate for giving up our party’s core values or for refusing to stand up for disadvantaged groups. Nor does Deciding to Win advocate for being feckless or weak. Democrats should stand firm against Trump and the Republican Party’s extreme agenda. But we should also be disciplined and strategic in which fights we pick, and how we pick them, by focusing the bulk of our opposition on issues where public support is most on our side (like protecting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, opposing tax cuts for the wealthy, and opposing Trump’s tariffs).

There is a lot of material available here. I think the shutdown has been somewhat effective at drawing attention to the issue of health insurance premiums and subsidies — not just getting voters to notice insurance is getting more expensive, but to understand that the price of insurance is a public policy question where Democrats are on the side of making it cheaper. But there are other opportunities. The tariffs, in particular, have been under-exploited as a salient policy issue where Democrats are on the side of lower consumer prices.

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But maintaining this perception also requires discipline about what you don’t say. In fact, I think Democrats don’t realize how much discipline will be required to convince voters that no, actually, our party’s focus isn’t on a weird, niche, identity-politics thing that a slim segment of our base cares deeply about; we’re actually focused on the economy, just like you (and most other people) are. To that point, I want to complain about a particularly annoying identity-politics trap: the four-paragraph land acknowledgement at the top of the 2024 Democratic Party platform.

“The Democratic National Committee wishes to acknowledge that we gather together to state our values on lands that have been stewarded through many centuries by the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations who have been here since time immemorial,” declared our party’s official policy document for the 2024 election, before saying anything about inflation, jobs, immigration, crime or health care. The DNC routinely opens its meetings with land acknowledgments, too, before conducting business.5

The party platform used to lead with core pocketbook issues like job creation. But the entire point of the practice of land acknowledgements is that, whatever issue you’re gathering to discuss, a vague discussion of the importance of indigineity must come first. It literally must always be placed at the top of the agenda. Ask yourself: Does this serve to combat the image of the Democratic Party as overly focused on identity issues rather than substantive economic issues? Or does it compound that image?

Of course, most voters aren’t reading the party platform, and they’re definitely not watching credentials committee meetings. But this choice to “center” indigenous identity is indicative of the environments in which the party’s insiders and operatives marinate: one where endless identity navel-gazing is considered a valid important part of any policy analysis; one where a former White House press secretary can offer these kinds of answers with a straight face to a reporter, when asked why she thought Kamala Harris deserved an uncontested path to the nomination even though she also “never” believed Harris could win:

Isaac Chotiner: [W]hen I talked to people about whether Harris should be the nominee or there should be an open convention, I found people split. And one reason some people thought that Harris should not be the nominee is that they did not think she could win, which is why I was surprised to read in your book, a little later on, that “the truth was, I never really believed Harris could win.” That’s why I’m a little confused when you say it was an insult to try to get her off the ticket.

Karine Jean-Pierre: But two things should be true, right? The thing that I say the second time actually proves the thing that I said the first time, right? Because it’s a feeling that we have. The reason I felt that is because of how we’re treated as Black women. We’re not elevated, we’re not protected, we’re not taken seriously. She was the Vice-President for heaven’s sake. But the reality of it is that being a Black woman, being Black and being a woman, it’s just tough. It’s hard. It makes it harder. And she ran a fantastic campaign, but it wasn’t good enough for some people. That is heartbreaking.

Isaac Chotiner: Shouldn’t you extend the same generosity to other people, who didn’t think she could win or that she was the best candidate?

Karine Jean-Pierre: This is a book about my experience.

Isaac Chotiner: … I was confused by was you saying that you didn’t think Harris could win, but then you attack other people who didn’t seem to think Harris could win by saying they were insulting her.

Karine Jean-Pierre: Yes. Well, again, I wish you could walk in my body and live my life, and then I think you could understand what I’m saying. I really do, because I think any other Black woman would understand what I’m saying. What it truly is is that it wasn’t just an open primary or a brokered convention. There was disrespect to her as well. It was discounting her and her position and who she was. That’s what it felt like. This is a very unique thing that I don’t think anyone would understand unless you walked in our bodies and lived our lives. My feeling was not about her not being qualified. It was about people not being able to see past her being Black and a woman. It’s not that confusing for us because we live this life day in and day out.

Democrats are unified in laughing at Jean-Pierre now, but I think Jim Geraghty of National Review has a fair point: she’s playing by ground rules that Democrats spent years setting, where it’s not supposed to be a punchline to talk about being a black lesbian like it’s a job qualification, and where you get to be taken seriously when you use this kind of contradictory logic, in which you assert that Harris’s sex and race made it harder for her to win over voters and yet also insist that it was sexist and racist to be worried that she wasn’t the party’s strongest available candidate. Those were the ground rules that made it possible for her to be hired into a press secretary job that Democrats now openly say she was obviously, laughably bad at.

Not very long ago, talking like this was normal for a Democratic operative, and it is one of the reasons voters came to believe Democrats were obsessed with group-based identity issues.

Maybe the laughter at Jean-Pierre is a sign that things are changing, and that Democrats will not be permitted to obsess internally over identity and cultural issues, all toward a goal of convincing voters that the party really does care about the things voters actually care too. I’ll believe the change is taking hold if the DNC decides to ditch the land acknowledgements.

Very seriously,

Josh

P.S. Here’s that episode with Liam Kerr.

Central Air

Deciding to Win, with Liam Kerr

Dear listeners…

Listen now

7 months ago · 19 likes · 5 comments · Josh Barro, Ben Dreyfuss, Megan McArdle, and Liam Kerr

Dear readers,

Matt Yglesias wrote another piece earlier this week trying to understand exactly why the Biden administration went so wrong on immigration, and in it, he offers this helpfully reflective explanation for why Democrats struggle to offer coherent, effective immigration policy, while Republicans enjoy voters’ enduring trust to handle it. He writes:

The voters believe, accurately, that elite liberals — including fairly moderate ones like me — are uncomfortable with the idea of being mean to sympathetic immigration cases. And even if some of these voters are absolutely convinced that Trump is going too far on immigration, they’re also worried that putting soft-hearted Democrats in charge will lead to disaster. Which, after all, is what happened when Joe Biden was president.

It’s difficult to convincingly argue that your party will handle a problem when it’s made up of people who don’t think the problem is a problem. And most Democrats simply don’t recognize a large number of illegal immigrants as a problem, except to the extent that it is a political problem because other Americans consider it to be a problem. This includes Matt himself, who — despite his understanding that Democrats must urgently move in a pro-enforcement direction on immigration to win elections — says he feels “ick” about people who choose to work in immigration enforcement, because “making a career out of locking up and deporting people, most of whom aren’t hurting anyone, is weird.”

The default sympathy expressed here (and more broadly in the party) is a big problem for restoring trust in Democrats on the issue. In order to rectify this, Democrats need to re-think and re-direct this sympathy; they need to get back in touch with the reasons that both uncontrolled migration and excessive volumes of migration really are problems — not just political problems, but substantive ones. That is, they need to get back in touch with the feeling that illegal and irregular migration reflect a failure of our civic institutions, a misuse of the social safety net, and a breakdown of the rule of law, and that all of that is actually bad (after all, the importance of the rule of law is a core Democratic campaign message of late). In other words, some of that sympathy needs to be redirected toward American citizens who bear costs associated with illegal migration. If you get in touch with that feeling, you can get past the “ick” and properly understand the immigration enforcement apparatus as just another valid and appropriate part of our government that needs to function well, like the USPS or the FAA.

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Let’s start with the characterization that illegal immigrants “aren’t hurting anyone.” I agree that illegal immigrants generally lack malice and are, in a majority of cases, sympathetic individuals — they’re going about their lives, very often doing productive work, and certainly not trying to harm our country. But their intent isn’t the only thing that matters. Illegal immigration, and other forms of irregular migration that happen with the authorization of the executive branch, really do hurt Americans by putting strain on public resources, imposing costs on taxpayers, and undermining social cohesion. And this has been particularly noticeable because of the huge surge in three categories of migration over the last few years: old-fashioned illegal immigration; migrants abusing our asylum system to gain years of legal access to the U.S., even without claims that are likely to be judged valid in the end; and the Biden administration’s large-scale use of the Temporary Protected Status designation to admit about a million mostly low-skill, mostly non-English-speaking migrants into our communities, especially from Haiti and Venezuela.

Consider the situation in Springfield, Ohio, which has in just a few years absorbed about 20,000 Haitian immigrants into a city of 60,000, mostly authorized through TPS. Famously, in the 2024 presidential campaign, then-candidate Trump attacked Haitians in Springfield with the baseless claim that they were eating people’s cats and dogs. The main thing Democrats had to say about the Haitians in Springfield was that they weren’t eating cats and dogs, and that they weren’t illegal immigrants — they were here legally under TPS.1 But this response did nothing to actually address the concerns of American citizens in Springfield, who were seeing their school system transform to address a six-fold increase in the number of students who weren’t proficient in English, requiring a rapid hiring of numerous ESL and interpretation staff. When your tax dollars are diverted from educating your own children to addressing the needs of non-citizens, you are harmed — these voters had a valid grievance and Democrats had nothing to say about it. Republicans, meanwhile, offered a policy change that would address it: Trump has revoked the TPS grant for Haiti and is more broadly trying to get millions of migrants who arrived during the Biden administration to leave the country.

I have also seen the negative effects of irregular migration directly as a resident of New York City. Federal policies allowing migrants to claim asylum and hold a work permit while waiting (often, for years) for adjudication have combined with local policies entitling anyone who shows up here (regardless of immigration status) to city-funded shelter to lead to a huge fiscal burden on New York. The city has spent billions of dollars to house migrants who have arrived recently. More specifically, local taxpayers have paid to rent over 10,000 hotel rooms for multiple years, while other American taxpayers traveling to New York paid more to do so because so many hotel rooms got taken out of supply. In some neighborhoods, the new migrant shelters were significant sources of disorder. And far from being solely a concern to native-born New Yorkers, this process was observed with a mix of incredulity and outrage by naturalized citizens, who observed that nobody rented them a hotel room for months on end when they arrived in New York, even though their own tax dollars were now being used to do that for others. Some of Trump’s strongest gains in New York in the 2024 election were in working-class immigrant neighborhoods like Corona, Queens, which he narrowly won, relying on a surge of votes from Hispanic American citizens who, unlike the new migrants, can vote.

Democrats broadly understand that democratic legitimacy requires enacting policies that actually benefit the electorate. We advocate for effective K-12 education, health care that is affordable for all Americans, a tax code that balances fairness and growth, and so on. But immigration is a blind spot where Democrats focus first on the needs of the migrants rather than the needs of Americans. Prioritizing Americans would mean choosing immigrants on the basis of who can bring the most to the U.S., not on the basis of which potential immigrants most want to come here or stand to benefit most by immigrating. When we approach immigration that way, we not only fail to represent the interests of the electorate; we undermine the support for the rest of our governing agenda, as voters watch spending on the public programs we advocate for get diverted to the benefit of non-citizens. We have to be willing to firmly say ‘no’ and deny access to our country, even to people who stand to gain a lot by coming here — and part of saying “no” requires having an effective government apparatus that deports people who are here without authorization. That’s not icky at all; it’s the government serving the interests of its citizens, like it’s supposed to.

I realize this isn’t the way most liberals have come to feel in their hearts. But it would behoove them to start trying to feel it, because voters have repeatedly shown it’s what they expect from policymakers.

Very seriously,

Josh

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Many of you had positive feedback for the podcast episodes we made this past winter with Megan McArdle and Ben Dreyfuss, and I’m excited to announce that we’re turning that format into a weekly podcast, which we’re calling Central Air.

The first episode is out today! We talk about the new verve in centrist politics, the weirdly low-key government shutdown, naked cycling protesters in Portland, the new reign of Bari Weiss at CBS News, the bearer bonds in Die Hard, and much more. I encourage you to give it a listen:

Central Air

Welcome to Central Air!

Dear listeners…

Listen now

8 months ago · Josh Barro, Megan McArdle, and Ben Dreyfuss

Because it’s a team production, Central Air is going to be living on its own Substack — you won’t get all the episodes by email on Very Serious. The long versions of the shows will ordinarily go behind a paywall, but we’re putting the first few out entirely for free.

You’ll also be able to find the show on the various major podcast platforms. It’s here on Spotify and here on Apple1. If you were already following the Very Serious podcast on one of those platforms, you should start getting this new show as a replacement automatically — if that doesn’t work like it should for you, please reach out to mayo@joshbarro.com.

And of course you’ll keep getting your Very Serious newsletters right here, as before.

Go to Central Air

I’d love to hear from you about what you think of the show and what you’d like to hear going forward! Thanks for listening.

Best,

Josh

I wrote for The New York Times last week about how the Democratic Party needs a reset on immigration. The Biden administration’s loss of control over both the southern border and the asylum system caused the number of illegal immigrants in the country to soar by millions, ruining our party’s credibility on the issue. And so even as President Trump’s poll numbers on immigration have softened, poll respondents remain much more likely to say they trust Republicans to handle the issue than Democrats.

It wasn’t always like this. In June 2013, 48% of respondents told Gallup they thought Democrats were closer to their own views on immigration; 36% said Republicans shared their views.1 Not coincidentally, Barack Obama took a lot of attacks from his left for being the “Deporter-in-Chief.” The implication is clear: When Democrats are seen as willing to enforce immigration law and deport illegal immigrants, voters will trust us to set immigration policy.

To start to win back voters’ trust, the party must acknowledge that the Biden administration’s policy of laxity was a failure, and commit credibly to better enforcement — not only by preventing illegal border crossings and closing the loopholes in the asylum system, but also by enforcing immigration law in the interior of the country, by deporting people who weren’t supposed to come here during Biden’s term. Democrats have lots of criticisms of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement approach — and polls show some of those criticisms are shared by voters — but when Democrats criticize the administration, they should talk about what they would do instead to prevent illegal immigration and reduce the population of illegal immigrants. If Democrats are only seen talking about how the government is doing too much enforcement, we’ll be seen as the anti-enforcement party, and that’s politically deadly.

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We should also, by the way, bring back the term “illegal immigrant.” In general, I’m not big on fighting over language — I think Democrats’ main political problems stem from the unpopular content of the policies our candidates support, and that weird language choices are more a symptom than a cause of our estrangement from the median voter. But the refusal to use the word “illegal” has arisen out of a successful pressure campaign that has convinced many Democrats that there is nothing particularly wrong with being in the country without authorization. And that has made it hard for Democrats to say something they really need to say to regain trust on the issue: that being in the country illegally is reason enough to deport someone. Personally, I have tended to use the term “unauthorized immigrant,” because it’s just as accurate as “illegal,” it avoids disputes over whether “illegal” implies a criminal violation or can also apply to civil ones, and it’s not so euphemistic as “undocumented,” a term that makes it sound like someone just forgot to get a visa. But I think freeing Democrats to say “illegal immigrant” again will make it easier for us to get back into the habit of remembering that deportation is a necessary part of having an immigration policy, and not a dirty word.

Accountability for the prior administration’s policy failures is also very important, and Democrats should be clamoring for that now. One notable thing about my column bashing the Biden White House is that two top officials who worked on immigration policy in the Biden White House shared it approvingly: Neera Tanden, who served as Staff Secretary and then ran the Domestic Policy Council, which oversees immigration policy; and Stefanie Feldman, who worked at the DPC and then served as Staff Secretary. I wasn’t surprised by this: Both Tanden and Feldman have publicly criticized the administration they worked in over its handling of immigration. “Failure to confront the border crisis fully when illegal crossings spiked in 2021 and 2022 had dire political and humanitarian consequences,” Tanden wrote in the Wall Street Journal in July — and my piece approvingly cited Tanden’s policy proposal to restrict future asylum claims.2

It’s great that we agree on so much, but there’s a question I’d still like an answer to: Who’s to blame for the Biden administration handling this issue so badly? Tanden, Feldman, and Susan Rice (who ran the DPC while Feldman worked there) are all publicly known as relative immigration hawks from the Biden team. So who, specifically, stood in their way? Who decided Biden should issue those day-one executive orders that sent a message to migrants that they should run for our border while they had the chance? Whose idea was it to wait until 2024 to finally try to turn off the asylum taps? And how do we make sure that the next Democratic White House is staffed with people who won’t be inclined to make the same mistakes?

CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski asked on Twitter if Tanden or Feldman might tell us whose fault this all was, and Feldman — who in May wrote a useful postmortem about the staffing problems that pushed the Biden administration too far to the left on issues including immigration, but without naming names — responded that it (still) isn’t necessary to name names.

“That doesn’t need to be aired publicly — I’m sure people will all weigh in with the next transition team,” she wrote.

Ehhh… I am not so sure about that. I realize that, as a journalist, I have a bias toward the public airing of dirty laundry. But the next time a Democratic White House is staffing up, centrists like me aren’t going to be the only ones trying to win the personnel game. I certainly hope that the next team will feel scarred by Biden’s mistakes and not want to repeat them. But the Dreaded Groups will still be there, trying to build a White House that prioritizes their pet goals over building a sustainable political movement, and in some cases that basically means a reflexive hostility to enforcing immigration law. So I’d like my allies not to be flying blind — we should know more about who authored the biggest political blunders in the Biden White House so we can try to make sure those people never work in this town again.

The people whose identities I am most interested in learning are not the lower-level staff with bad left-wing ideas, but the senior staff that Feldman describes in her postmortem as consisting “with two exceptions”3 of “people who did not love tough conversations or having to say no to members of the Cabinet or other senior White House staff.” Now, maybe this list consists largely of career Bidenworld figures whose days in Washington are done regardless — I don’t need new journalism to tell me that Ron Klain and Mike Donilon were ineffectual. But if some of these people are likely to be lining up for a major job the next time a Democrat is president — and if they’re the ones who decided in 2021 a crackdown on asylum abuse wasn’t worth the internal drama — I think it would be good for the world to know about how they, personally, screwed up.

Very seriously,

Josh

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