WTW103: You'll Never Guess What Bill Maher and the NYT Think Democrats Should Do
Sorry, wokies. Guess we have to close up shop. Bill Maher and The New York Times have said that the Left needs to moderate. Thomas guides us through the ridiculous source material that takes this position and we get plenty of debunks along the way! Also, chime in: Should we do a recurring Bill Maher segment? And: Is Maher Thomas's arch nemesis? Of course we barely scratched the surface, so we'll be back soon with additional parts on this one! If you enjoy our work, please consider leaving a 5-star review! You can always email questions, comments, and leads to lydia@seriouspod.com. Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
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Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
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Hello, and welcome to Where There's Woke.
I'm Thomas.
That over there is Lydia.
How you doing?
That was very like sultry intro we got from you just now.
I'm more interested in how you're doing.
Portion of the recording?
Is this the feedback portion?
The audience talk back portion.
Well, listen, no, it got me intrigued.
Now I want to know how you're doing because that vibe, it was, you know, it's giving me unlike Thomas.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
I'm excited, as I always am, when we're going to do an episode that we can pretty much call the same thing every time, Bill Maher is a fucking moron or something like that.
Yeah, it's our standing segment.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what I love about that is, for one, it's fun and I'll never get over his audience that I think is pranking him or on his side.
I can't.
It's a combination of like plants and people who are fucking with him.
This one is one of the best ever.
Like the cheers are so dumb that I think they're making fun of him.
Like I can.
Interesting.
Interesting.
That'll be a thing to keep an eye on.
Yeah.
Secondly, his ignorance is so profound that covering Bill Maher can take us through a lot of different things.
And he touched on the big debate that is happening.
I think has a lot to do with wokeness, with things we talk about on this show.
And that is this idea that Democrats need to moderate based on the election results, not only of Kamala losing to Trump, but also the recent election results.
And there's a big.
Oh, you mean where the left won like everything?
And they're like, oh, no, no, okay, that means we have to pull back, right?
Well, yeah, but I mean, to make the case for that side, well, I don't really have to because we have the entire editorial board of the New York Times saying, we got to moderate.
The partisans are wrong.
Moving to the center is the way to win.
And they wrote a whole thing on it.
They say that the moderate candidates did better and that they overperformed.
And that's what we need to do.
And that's a whole thing in itself.
So like we've got a number of different things going on.
We've got our source text is this Bill Maher's obnoxious new rules, which I just, I just can't wait to play.
It's just so fun to see how stupid this fucking guy is.
And that branches off in so many different directions.
We got a couple debunks of stuff and we've got a lot of debunking of that New York Times opinion piece as well.
And also just a kind of a lot to talk about in terms of socialism, democratic socialism, Zoran Mamdani.
Oh, if you want to take a guess, do you think Bill Maher gets Mamdani's name right?
I'm going to guess no.
Gonna guess no.
Okay.
Yeah.
Weird.
Isn't that weird?
It doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to get right.
Yeah.
We'll see what happens.
It might be arguable.
We'll have to listen to the judges on whether or not he gets it right or wrong.
It's weird that it's so hard to say Mamdani.
It's just the hardest pattern of syllables ever constructed in language.
It's amazing.
It's also weird how quickly I had a decision about whether or not Bill Maher bothered to get the name right of something he's going to talk about.
That's not weird.
That's totally normal.
Yeah.
They've been getting it so wrong that I found myself questioning myself.
I was like, wait, is it Mamdani?
I was like, yeah, I was like, because I've heard it wrong so many times now that I like started to forget.
I was like, is it Mondani?
Like, I thought maybe there's like a, I think I combined the two, you know, and I was like, no, it's fucking Mamdani.
If I just like clear my mind for a second, I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah.
Meditate.
Yeah.
I don't even need to do that.
Just like stop thinking about these idiots for a second.
And then I get it right.
And so there's so much to talk about here.
I can't wait.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
And I think we'll have to go to our first break here.
And then we'll get to all the his audience pranking him that is Bill Maher in his new rules segment from, I don't know, a few weeks back.
Who cares?
Doesn't matter.
It's timeless idiocy.
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Okay, new rules.
Here we go.
Okay.
I'm not sure I've heard Bill Maher bomb so quickly as he has in this one.
He's so up his own ass that like not even his own audience, which again, I think is 50-50 plants and people who are fucking with him.
That's my new theory based on new theory based on this.
I'll do a segment on that.
New rules.
He bombs immediately.
Listen to the start.
This is almost a nine-minute segment.
I don't know if we're going through all of it.
I want to, but I don't know if we are.
And we'll get obviously bogged down with how many things we have to talk about.
But let's just start and see where we get to.
And Friday No Roll Democrats must recognize that Zoron Mom Danny is the future of the party.
Oh, we got it right there.
Unfortunately, it's the Republican Party.
My God, that was so awkward.
And if you missed his victory speech in last month, no, I don't get it.
That's so awkward.
It's so funny.
So first off, he actually got it right there.
I think it may be because he was reading at that point.
He might have gotten it right.
Later, I think he gets it wrong.
So we're going to have kind of both answers being correct there.
We'll see.
All right.
One point for Bill Maher.
Yeah, he got it right.
He said Zoron Mamdani there.
So you were wrong.
I think you owe Bill Maher an apology.
I'm going to wait.
I'm going to give it more because it's wise to wait.
You should wait, actually, to see where this goes.
I just, I want to hear that bobbing again.
I also, I caught myself.
I had that on 1.25 speed for us.
I'm going to play it normal speed here.
And Friday No Roll.
You got to hear how fast it bombs.
Unfortunately, it's the Republican Party.
Oh, my God.
And then everyone's laughing.
That's the idea.
They're laughing because of how awkward it is that nobody laughs.
They're not laughing at his joke still because it's not a joke.
It doesn't make sense.
The problem with it is there's no way absent the context that he's later going to give, which at least makes the punchline intelligible, but no one would assume what he's talking about.
So like everyone's like, I don't, is he a Republican?
Are you saying he's going to run as a yeah, exactly?
That's part of the setup.
Why did Bill Maher pause there?
He should have just kept talking.
I don't know.
Whatever.
Well, that's fine if it were a punchline that he's pausing there.
It is a punchline.
You should put this line at the end of your segment or something.
Like once people have the context or at least at the end of your paragraph here, because once you, once he explains what he's talking about, then it's like, oh, okay, I guess it's not funny, but it's, I guess, at least they're lazily constructed and a joke there, but you haven't told anybody the context.
So it's just like, he's not a Republican.
I don't know what you're talking about.
But here's what he's talking about.
Get it?
No, they didn't.
And if you missed his victory speech in last week's mayoral election in New York, don't worry.
You'll see it in every attack ad for the next two years.
Now, Amendami seems like seems like a knife.
Mendami.
There he said Mendami.
So Mindami, anything.
Is that just a you and I joke?
Or is that there's anyone else?
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know if anyone on this show has heard us talk about it.
I don't know.
Just every time someone gets Mamdani, Mom Mandani says it like horribly.
It's just the one and only, the wickedly talented.
Wickedly talented.
Adele Tazim.
It's my favorite thing that's ever happened ever in the history of humanity.
That's so funny.
Adele Dazine.
Anyway, he puts up some a picture of Adele Dazim here, and then he says these are the like scare quote.
I don't know if he made this graphic or if it's from a Republican attack ad, but it says, do you like capitalism?
No.
Mom Danny on CNN 2025.
Seize the means of production.
Mamdani.
Zoran Momdani 2021.
Defund the police.
The NYPD is racist.
Zoran Momdani 2020.
And so you at least get his point now is like Mamdani is going to be, he's the future of the Republican Party, I guess, now that you've explained your shitty joke that didn't work, because they're going to use him to run against Democrats forever.
Anybody who's blue.
Yeah.
Fine.
Let's see where he goes with this.
Nice guy, and I congratulate him on an extraordinary political achievement.
But before the whole left side of the country catches socialism fever, let's listen to the other big winner in last Tuesday's election, Virginia governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, who before the 24 election said things like, if the party didn't shift to the center, we will get fucking torn apart.
And we need to never use the word socialist or socialism ever again.
Well, she was right, but they didn't listen.
Typical, am I right, ladies?
He's the fucking worst.
It's all so boring.
Typical, am I right, ladies?
He says to his audience of entirely men who he's paying to laugh.
That's why you heard three people respond to that.
And it also doesn't read as a joke because he's such a misogynist piece of shit that it's like, I don't know if he's being ironic the other way.
Like, is he doing two layers of irony?
If so, impressive.
Yeah, like, I don't even know.
It's once again, the first joke where you're like, I don't know what your joke is, man, because you're not like super progressive.
I'm not convinced he knows what the joke is either, ever.
I think he thinks he can just make a gesture toward women in a way that's like, yeah, am I right, ladies?
But it doesn't.
Anyway, it's like, should we do a whole episode on how unfunny he is?
There's too much.
There's too much to do because I would love to just cover how unfunny he is, but we should talk about the substance there.
First off, he says before the 24 election, which I guess is technically true, but those comments were right after the 2020 election.
Oh.
It was in a conference call.
At first, I was like, did that get leaked?
And I guess you wouldn't really call it a leak because I think it was broadly like pretty open, but it was a conference call from the, you know, like Democratic leadership because the House underperformed in the election.
Right.
She was yelling, we have to commit to not saying the words defund the police ever again.
We need to not ever use the word socialist or socialism ever again.
It does matter, and we have lost good members because of that.
She claimed an ad against her about defunding the police nearly cost her seat, while Dallas Fort Worth rep Mark V.C. blamed such ads for their miss in Texas pickup opportunities.
And House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn warned that any peep about defunding the police, Medicare for all or socialism will ruin their chances of winning the two expected Senate runoffs in Georgia in January.
Oh, well, we just we won those then.
So that was nice.
We will get fucking torn apart in the next election if this crazy leftism continues.
Well, that was a paraphrase.
The we will get fucking torn apart was a quote.
And I think what's funny about this is like noted socialist Nancy Pelosi was arguing against her.
Like, hey, I don't really think.
Oh, wow.
Well, it's like Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House was defending Democratic performance.
It was an underperformance, but I have so many thoughts about how to actually look at that election and look at those results.
I've shared some of them actually a while back.
I shared a lot of them after Kamala lost because everyone was inappropriately looking at the vote mark that Biden got as like, well, okay, that's the new normal for Democrats and those are Kamala's votes to lose.
And I think this reinforces the point I made at the time, which is the number one fucking issue in exit polling of the 2020 election, number one by far was COVID, COVID-19.
Yeah.
And you had an idiot in Trump, an anti-science moron who doesn't know what the fuck he's doing.
And that caused enough people to be like, we might die.
I mean, keep in mind when this election is.
You have to rewind back to like early COVID.
I mean, yes, it's November 2020, but that's still, what, like nine months of kind of going through all that?
You know, eight, eight months, nine months.
Still a lot unknowns.
People hadn't formed their diehard kind of polarized views as much back then about COVID.
And a lot of people in the middle were voting not based on left or right, not based on being a Democrat or caring about Democrats or anything, but based on this fucking asshole can't run the country while COVID's going.
Yeah, while we're going through a clear like national or worldwide emergency.
Yeah.
We don't have leadership.
Yeah.
So if you just took away everyone's bullshit, motivated reasoning and political ideology, everything, if you just presented to like a math person, hey, in 2020, Biden barely won at least electoral college lily.
And the number one issue was COVID-19.
In 2024, when that issue is not number one, not number two, not number three, it's not on the list.
It's not on the list of issues.
How do you think we'll do?
If you just asked a numbers person who has no investment in any of these political debates, they'd be like, well, that's going to be tough.
I mean, I would think with the number one issue that you won on in the previous election gone, like I would think that's going to be really, really tricky.
And so I think that's such a big factor when you look at this.
And I also think it explains why the House was more disappointing, because I think people who voted for Biden for these reasons, for the reasons I'm talking about, for the COVID reasons, probably weren't as motivated to come out for like house elections or care about the house elections that were on the ballot.
Maybe they didn't even fill them in.
Who knows?
Or maybe they're actually kind of more Republican, more moderate or Republican.
A lot of people, even though it seems insane to us, a lot of people will flip-flop between Republicans and Democrats in a weird way.
And so maybe that explains why the House races did not go as well as we thought they would in 2020.
So all that is to say, that was after the 2020 elections.
And it doesn't really necessarily mean that it's due to those comments that Spanberger won.
I mean, you could argue that there's a link between how she's going to have run her campaign based on her belief there.
But I think it's kind of sloppy as so much of Bill Maher's reasoning is to present it as, well, this person also won.
And here's what they said in a conference call in 2020.
Therefore, that means it's like a vindication of her point of view.
Or that she would even feel that same way today.
Yeah.
I mean, she does.
I don't know if it's to the same degree, but yeah, it's five years ago.
So already a bit of slappiness.
There's so much to talk about.
But as we go, this will be a gathering snowball as it rolls down the hill of kind of collecting stuff here and there.
And ultimately, hopefully it'll just plow over Bill Maher.
It'll be so big that it'll just run him over.
And then it'll do the thing where he's like in the snowball and then it rolls off a big cliff.
That's what I'm hoping for.
There you go.
At least the party has a clear choice here.
Very clear.
One wing is saying don't ever use the word socialist again.
And one is saying, I am a democratic socialist.
Clear, huh?
So how do we decide who's right?
All right.
That's at least a portion of the monologue that works.
It's not funny because he's not funny.
I've laughed at a couple of things in the past 10 years that he said maybe charitably.
But it's at least like, hey, that's kind of a humorous contradiction.
Which side of the party is right?
Is it this one that says never say socialism again?
Or is it this one that says they're socialists essentially?
And they both won.
So how do we decide who's right?
Hey, nothing wrong with that setup.
Let's see where he goes.
Well, it turns out we don't really have to flip a coin.
We have the evidence.
Oh, we have the evidence.
In 2024, 13 Democrats won in districts Trump also won.
All moderates.
Wow.
This isn't rocket science.
All the left-leaning think tanks have done autopsies on 2024, and they all came up with the same message.
Move to the center.
Even the New York Times, which did so much to promote woke politics, now says the partisans are wrong.
Moving to the center is the way to win.
And Democrats should recognize the party moved too far left on social issues after Obama left office.
Gosh, if only someone had been saying that all along.
But, you know, welcome home.
God, the idea that the New York Times has been some like bastion of wokeness.
Yeah.
The New York Times that had Barry fucking Weiss in it.
Well, yeah, I mean, like, if you're Bill Maher, you have to say that, I guess.
That's a big bad, right?
It gets the right all riled up.
That's a good thing for you.
So I'm not surprised he's doing that, but it's all.
I don't know what he's basing that on.
Like, I'll be honest, I don't even know what he would be basing that on.
I would love to just ask him, hey, what do you mean they stirred up wokeness?
Like, what things, what articles, what coverage did they do?
Yeah, what in particular?
I don't even know where he even has that opinion from.
Like, just because it's associated with like vague leftness, like it's more left than right or something.
Because it's not like he shows any clips of like headlines or anything during that part.
Right.
It's nothing.
What is he talking about?
It's the same thing how we'll see people do this in the anti-trans stuff where like even the New York Times that's like so woke and pro-trans is publishing this.
He's like, no, it's not.
The people who wrote this fucking op-ed are Bill Maher.
They're part of that.
It's like the same guy.
It's like Spider-Man meme.
It's just so weird to be like, look at the Spider-Man over there.
And even this Spider-Man guy who's, I am also in the Spider-Man outfit, even he's a Spider-Man now.
And you're like, yeah, you've both been Spider-Man the whole time.
The whole time.
We've all don't understand what the fuck you're talking about.
So weird.
But this brings us to, and it's unfortunate because later on is a lot more funny stuff to make fun of Bill Maher about.
We kind of got to the substance right away, which is this New York Times article.
And there's so much to digest here.
So first off, I also don't really get what the debate is here.
Like I get, broadly speaking, the debate is, should we move left or should we move moderate?
But I just think that's not really a question that works in a vacuum.
Like is he arguing that Zoron should have been more moderate?
Because if he sets it up as a contest between essentially Zorhan Mamdani or Zoran Mamdani, as he says, and the second time, and Spanberger, is he saying like, well, we have the evidence, though, Spanberger wins because this.
It's like, does he mean that Mamdani should have been more moderate?
Yeah, but clearly not because we had a more moderate person up there, Andrew Cuamo, who lost.
Yeah, you beat him twice.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
It's frustrating because my first response would be like, oh, okay, if you're looking at who did better in districts where Trump won, as in who did better in more right-leaning districts, well, magically, it's the candidates that are more right.
I'd be like, yeah, no.
Obviously.
I don't really know if anyone's arguing.
Like, I've consumed a lot about this in preparing for this.
I don't know that anyone is saying that, no, no, what those candidates in Trump district should have done is be Zorhan Mamdani.
I don't really know that anyone.
Because that's nonsensical.
Yeah.
The only pin I'll put in it is actually the real answer, which I'll save you sometime, although we're going to go through it.
The real answer is that this is all stupid and nobody actually thinks of things this way.
Like voters don't actually think this way anyway.
And it's more about affordability.
And that's pretty much all you have to worry about.
So in that sense, if someone ran in one of those districts as not Zoron is in, by the way, being of Zoron's ethnicity makes it so he's not allowed to run as a moderate.
Like he wouldn't even be able to do that because the country is so racist that just his identity makes him qualifying.
He mentioned Obama.
This is literally the quote that I've paused on.
Democrats should recognize that the party moved too far left on social issues after Barack Obama left office.
So there's like a Schrödinger's Obama now because at the time, Obama was as moderate.
And I think there's a weird way in which we've horseshoe theoried back to actually, yeah, Obama was very moderate, but that took a while for us to horseshoe back to that because it's one more illustration of the central point here, which is the stupidity and the futility of trying to identify just a flat left-right spectrum where it's like, well, there's right and there's moderate and then there's left.
There's someone who are you along this line going on.
Yeah.
And what white people like Bill Mart might not realize a lot of time is your identity often doesn't allow you to be any of those things.
Like as a black man, you can either be a hardcore conservative and then maybe you'll shed the idea that like you're radical.
But if you run as anything on the left as a black man, as a Muslim, as a woman, oftentimes, you're going to be assumed to be the most left version of that thing oftentimes.
And it kind of depends.
Again, even that's an overstatement because it really depends on the situation.
It depends on the individual race, who the opponent is.
Where you're running.
Yeah.
Cause like if you're running against another woman and you're a woman, well, then all of a sudden that issue doesn't really come up in the same way, or it could if there's like a particular issue, if there's a particular abortion debate, or if there's a particular something, like it's really context dependent.
Identity gets activated or it doesn't oftentimes.
It's way too simplistic to say race matters or race doesn't matter, gender matters or it doesn't matter.
Like it matters in different ways at different times, depending on what's being activated.
And in different electoral races, it's very complex to look at what's being activated.
It depends on the attack ads.
It depends on the lanes that people are running in.
And all this is to say, while Obama was elected by a lot of people who now I think are Trumpers, and I've talked about this before, that doesn't mean they weren't racist.
It means their racial identity wasn't activated in that election.
In that election of 2008, between Barack Obama and the worst candidate that was never going to win ever, after the Republican George W. Bush had the worst approval rating ever recorded going into that, everyone knew Obama was going to win.
So a whole bunch of people who were invested in the story of post-racialism, who are like, racism isn't even a problem now, were, I think, fine being like, yeah, let's vote Obama.
Awesome.
Black guy, president, we solved all the race thing.
People take this simplistic view that that means they weren't, oh, they couldn't have ever been racist.
They couldn't have ever been racist.
As though what every racist does at all times is be as maximally racist at all times, everywhere in all situations to anyone non-white.
It's just so simple.
It was just that at that point in time, their identity as a white person in most of the cases was not under threat.
Yeah.
There was nothing that was like pushing on the any loss of privilege or anything like that.
And so they didn't necessarily need to consider that subconsciously.
And they did try to, you know, they tried to run ads and paint him as a Muslim and paint him as not born here and pay, you know, like there's a lot of stuff they tried to do.
But I think it just, it didn't take for a lot of different reasons.
And also, I think there was the inevitability too.
Like Republicans, when you have an incumbent with the worst rating ever after the Iraq war and the disaster going on there.
And the economy.
Well, that's another thing.
Jesus.
Massive economic.
Yeah.
So like there was an inevitability to it.
Here's another thing.
Also the greatest politician of a generation.
So there's that too, where it's like, if we could somehow do a side-to-side comparison in a fucking universe simulator and show like, what if Obama was white, but the same level of talent?
Who knows if he would have won by even more?
Like it's one of those questions.
Well, they would have added him to Mount Rushmore.
Exactly.
It's like one of those questions that's hard to answer because it's so counterfactual.
But like, I think that he was such a good politician, we might not even know how good he was.
It might be that he would have been even more respected if he were white.
I don't know.
Point is as the administration went on and as the Obamacare fight went on and as more and more right-wing propaganda went on, it started to activate the racial identity.
It started to activate that fear.
Yeah.
And people started to sort even more to the point where the parties are now way more sorted on race to the point where those same people who might have voted for Obama in 08 are just nowhere near that now.
They're Trumpers.
They're hardcore Trumpers.
Or at the very least, their racial identities have been activated.
And maybe they might have voted for Biden in 2020 if they were the kind of people who were sensitive to the fact that COVID was going to kill a lot of people and you had an idiot in charge, but they also might not have been.
It's a different sorting of the electorate to where it's not just the same group of people that voted left or right all these elections.
They've sorted differently, even if the numbers vaguely stay similar, it's a different grouping.
But all that was to say, at the time, in the midst of that propaganda during the Obama years, Obama was just talked about as a radical all the time.
He was just matter of factly discussed by the right.
And of course, that works the refs and works its way into the kind of the centrist media.
He was just talked about as a radical, like a radical left Obama.
I feel like I probably sound crazy saying that now, but like that's what it was to be there at that time.
And people like Tanahasi Coates wrote about at the time, like, actually, he's really moderate.
Obama was an emblem of radical racial politics to white people who were scared of him.
But black people like Tanahasi Coates were like, he's not really, he's actually nowhere near as left as you might hope on a lot of these racial issues.
Right.
Because I think Obama very smartly knew he had to kind of triangulate and he had to kind of appear and be more moderate in those ways.
And maybe he genuinely has some more moderate views.
It's not as though black people are a monolith by any means.
There are plenty of conservative black people.
And also, even if they're black people who vote Democrat, they have some like conservative views.
And so it might be that Obama has some more centrist views on like affirmative action or, you know, that kind of thing.
And so it's really funny now in retrospect to see Bill Maher say, well, Obama, you know, we moved too far left after Obama left office when during that entire time, we were already having this SJW bullshit fight.
In 2014 is when I started doing a lot of this stuff.
Yeah.
We were already in the midst of that.
It's a revisionist history.
Yeah.
We were already painted as being too far left.
And it was because of radical Obama and the left is taking, you know, like it's just this weird revisionist thing that goes on.
Yeah, I think if someone asked him, hey, Bill, when was the first time you covered, you know, those crazy college kids?
I think he would be surprised at like what year it was.
Just, you know, based on how he talks about it now.
It's like it's a new phenomenon and it's not.
That would be interesting.
I know it's hard because I've collected so much fucking information for this and I'm just I have so many thoughts.
But to get back to this New York Times article, which I think is very important.
And I will say, I guess I won't put this on Bill because Bill reads a New York Times article that is very plausible and is very authoritative.
And it says, we looked at this.
So we looked at the data and it argues that moderates did way better and they overperformed.
I'm going to go ahead and not put this on Bill Maher to quote that.
I think it's fine for him to have that take.
I think that the framing is stupid because again, is he saying Mamdani should have been moderate?
Really, what should happen is you got to run the race you're in.
It depends on where you fucking are and what it is.
And it's kind of a meaningless debate to say like, well, we all, the party all needs to move to the center.
So let's look at this article.
And I can spare you a lot of the fucking details.
Good.
It's obnoxious.
Yeah, it's amazing how confident the centrist center left editorial board of the New York Times are that they're right.
And let me at least make the case and represent their case accurately.
And since this is a me episode, I want to make sure we get to hear Lydia's amazing voice more.
To get the sense, why don't we read like the first three paragraphs?
They're short.
Okay.
Just to get the kind of the thesis statement.
Let me scroll through some scatter plots real fast and some nice graphics.
Whoever did that.
They're great graphics.
This is really nice.
Good at those graphics.
All right.
This is titled, The Partisans Are Wrong.
Moving to the Center is the Way to Win.
American politics today can seem to be dominated by extremes.
President Trump is carrying out far-right policies while some of the country's highest profile Democrats identify as Democratic socialists.
Moderation sometimes feels outdated.
It is not.
Candidates closer to the political center from both parties continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left.
This pattern may be the strongest one in electoral politics today, but it is one that many partisans try to obscure and many voters do not fully grasp.
The evidence is vast.
Republicans have frittered away winnable races in Alabama, New Hampshire, and elsewhere over the past decade by nominating extremist candidates, while Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican, is the only sitting senator who represents a state that reliably votes the other way in presidential elections.
On the Democratic side, there are no progressives in the mold of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders who represent a swing district or state.
Instead, the Democrats who win tough races work hard to signal to voters that they are less progressive than their party.
Yeah, I mean, that's what you would expect.
Again, this really does just translate into the places that are more centrist elect more centrists.
Right, exactly.
I mean, that's the whole point of being a representative of the place that you are running for, right?
Is that you are representative of the people in that place and AOC is going to be representative of her constituents, whereas that's not going to be representative of, you know, middle of nowhere, Iowa or something.
Yeah, it's funny to cast that as like the tough races, you got to be moderate.
I was like, yeah, again, definitionally, those will be the ones that are closer because the population there, the voters there, are more in the middle or politically diverse.
Yeah, exactly.
Sorry.
It's more of a 50-50 is what I mean to say.
It might be a more 50-50 place.
So moderation might work better there.
In order to get the majority in a place where there isn't a clear majority.
I think what's really happening is we're all trying to debate the 2028 presidential election.
I think that's what's happening.
I think everyone is worried because that's the place where we get one candidate for the nation.
Right, exactly.
And I would argue that if you look at Kamala fucking Harris, she wasn't exactly Karl Marx.
Like, look at her campaign she ran and she was incredibly moderate, incredibly moderate.
I don't even know what we're doing here.
Like it's so weird to be one year out from us losing to Trump with the most moderate of moderates that it could ever moderate and be doing this.
Like that's what I think the key is.
I think they're talking about probably, or at least in their minds, are worried about the 2028 presidential election.
That single election, yeah.
Yeah, because for one, AOC, you do have to win a primary.
And the Democrats in those states have to win Democratic primaries.
That's the competitive place.
And that's a battle.
And the people who win are more progressive because that's what, you know, like it, it's, it's just becomes this like meaningless statement to be like, well, yeah, in the places that are left, you run more left.
In the places that are middle, you run more middle.
Like it just, I don't, I don't even know what we're talking about here.
But if we want to take this seriously, I actually do think that there's a disconnect between how lefty the engaged people like us and our audience and the people we talk to and hear from.
I think there's a big disconnect between us and the rest of the normies kind of thing.
I do think the country is way more centrist or even right wing than we tend to think.
And also way more apolitical than we realize.
Yeah, that's a big part of it too.
And I do think that people are way too hostile to centrists in certain ways.
Maybe I'm a Democratic socialist.
I don't even know.
I even really thought about it because it doesn't matter because I just think we need more socialism.
Like we just need way more socialism.
So I don't know what the exact line is there.
And I think these party identities doesn't really, it's so meaningless when in reality, we're not getting any of what we want.
So it's like, well, I don't care if we're at a zero and I'm a 50 and you're a 60 in terms of going towards socialism.
What does that even fucking matter?
We're at zero.
It doesn't matter.
We both need to pull together for at least 50 points of socialism, you know, like to put it simply.
Like a program.
Yeah.
There's no, I don't even care about fighting with someone who's to my left or like slightly to my right even if we're both if we're both pulling in the same direction.
Now if either of those people I'm talking about, either to my left or to my right, like within the left, are, in my opinion, not pulling in the same direction.
So they aren't advocating people vote for Democrats and they aren't working to turn out votes and to, in general, improve the reputation and the value of the Democratic Party or the people on the left and make the case that the people on the right are worse for the country.
If they're not pulling in that direction, then I do have an argument with them.
But if they're both pulling in that direction, well, you say that.
That's a lot of them.
No, no, I know, but just to chime in, because it's a, yeah, like then you're talking about like moral superiority.
And the fact of the matter is our country has hundreds of millions of people.
Yeah.
It's so often when people write in who are consider themselves to my left.
And I also think there's a, there's a big question mark in how you even define that.
And I think there's a lot of assumptions being made based on like just rhetoric and like how people situate themselves.
If I were to bash the Democratic Party all the time, that would come across as, oh, I must be like more of a socialist versus I could have the exact same policy positions, but recognize that the Democratic Party is the only way to really get that.
Pragmatic, yeah.
Yeah.
And then like then all of a sudden I'm like they're a trainer like a republic.
Yeah, exactly.
We have the same fucking policy positions or they'll try to go more extreme on their policy positions to differentiate when really all that's different between us is an anti-democratic party lean.
Like it's more negative partisanship about the Democratic Party.
And I've got plenty of that, but it's also just the only fucking thing we have right now.
Point is when I have arguments with those people, they want to cast it into a left-right thing.
Like I'm more to the right of them and they're more left.
They always want to put it that way because that's what's comfortable to them.
That makes them feel more correct, but it's not.
It's actually, we're just disagreeing in how we get to the more left place we want to go.
And there's going to be so much room to go before there's any meaningful difference between like a far left progressive and someone who actually is calling themselves a socialist.
There's so far to go before that.
And anyway, all this is to say, if you're in a more progressive area, you're going to fucking be more progressive.
And if you're in the centrist area, you're going to be more centrist.
And one thing I do think, and I forget if.
Bill Maher will mention this, but if not, the New York Times article talks about a lot.
They talk about Joe Manchin.
And I will say, this is a place where I argued with the left all the time.
I argued with Democrats all the time.
We should have been thankful for Joe Manchin.
I was thankful for Joe Manchin as much as I hated him.
It's good that we had Joe Manchin.
And now we're doing another revisionist history where people are like, wow, man, miss Joe Manchin.
It's like, yeah, it was better to have a person who caucused with Democrats in a seat than a Republican.
It just is better.
People get so mad because they think they're losing something.
It's just a classic fallacy.
It's like the, I forget if it's a gambler's fallacy or if it's the, whatever it is, where people are more lossivers.
Like they recognize, well, we have a Democrat, but here's what we don't have.
We don't have, talking about Joe Manchin, of course.
We don't have all these things where he should be voting with Democrats.
Like we don't, we don't have all these things where he, it wasn't even his voting record.
He was a party on.
Yeah, exactly.
It wasn't even his voting record.
It was often just what he would talk about.
And all people would focus on was that, when really you need to take a rational view and look at what should we expect from that fucking state, West Virginia.
Right.
And what were we getting?
He was the most valuable senator by far.
Oh, and he knew it.
Well, yeah.
And even not valuable, sorry, in a, in a sense of like important, just the comparison that you do mathematically of the expected amount a senator would vote.
What's that fucking website?
I used to look at it all the time.
What was that?
I actually don't remember now.
As we just had to pause as I had an existential crisis because I realized I used to always reference some website that compares the expected voting record based on like the, you know, constituents and stuff.
We think it was maybe the 538 Trump score.
I can't remember.
It's so weird.
I went went to that part of my brain that was like, you haven't looked for this in years, but it'll be exactly where you left it.
And then my brain was like, what?
Yeah.
Like I used to do this all the time.
Yeah, this Trump score or something tracker.
I don't know.
I could find it.
I go back and find it in any of my episodes from like four years ago, probably.
But the point is, if you track voting record versus expected kind of swing based on your state or your district, depending on if it's senator or house, Joe Manchin was the most valuable as in he produced more left kind of Democratic votes looking at their actual voting record than would be expected in his district by far.
Like he was just the most valuable without even question.
And that's one area where I guess I'll say this New York Times article and kind of that side of things, I do agree with the idea that we should have recognized that.
Now, what could we have done about that?
Even at the time, I said, hey, we ought to recognize that he's super valuable and we shouldn't really be bashing him.
But really, what did it matter?
This was more just rhetoric.
This was more just us arguing with each other.
Did we make Joe Manchin leave?
I don't really think so.
I mean, I guess you could argue that maybe had the left, I don't know, treated him better, would he still be there?
I don't really think that's true.
I think he mainly left because probably he got to the point where he wouldn't have won election again.
I mean, he was an old relic.
You know, the fact that he was a Democratic senator in West Virginia and it was going more and more MAGA, he might have just not won.
In the next election, yeah.
Yeah.
And he, you know, we would be where we would be.
So I'll say I have been right there with, I guess, the New York Times editorial board in saying we should have appreciated Joe Manchin.
But that being said, what does that really do?
Does that mean we lost Joe Manchin because we ran a progressive there?
Like, what does it actually mean?
I don't think we could have replaced Joe Manchin.
The incumbency is a huge advantage.
Yeah.
And Joe Manchin was probably going to lose anyway.
So it's not like we had the option to like, hey, should we pick a Zoron Mamdani AOC Bernie Sanders candidate to run in West fucking Virginia?
Or should we get a new Joe Manchin?
We didn't have that choice.
Yeah.
I think there definitely was an inevitability there.
I will say I actually stumbled on just this video recently where Bernie Sanders was doing some outreach in West Virginia.
I can't remember the exact date or anything like that, but he was like sitting down and just like chatting with some of the folks over lunch and stuff.
And this one woman, because this is like, like you said, it's becoming really, really MAGA in West Virginia.
And this one woman was like, I'm just really surprised after, you know, talking to you.
I was scared because of who I thought you were.
And now I'm realizing like all of that was wrong.
That's rare and not something that we could have expected from any particular candidate or anything like that.
So I think when Joe Manchin left, the inevitability of someone being right wing taking that seat is just obvious.
I don't think there's a candidate in the earth that we could have run that would win as a Democrat in West Virginia.
I don't think we have that option.
I went to the place in this article where it made this point.
And I'll just read the paragraph.
Joe Manchin, the moderate former senator from West Virginia, provides another example.
He won in a state where other Democrats often lose by 40 percentage points and then provided crucial votes for major Democratic legislation.
Even so, progressive activists spent years treating him as a heretic.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with that.
Now, treating him as linked, I was like, okay, what are they linking to?
And it says, how dare you protester confronts Joe Manchin at Harvard talk?
Okay, what do we got here?
I mean, I was just sued.
Well, there was a heated exchange between U.S. Senator Joe Manchin and climate activists.
Have a look here.
Joe Manchin has sold our futures and you've gotten rich doing it.
You sick fing.
How dare you?
You can see one protester getting thrown to the ground after confronting Manchin.
According to the Harvard Crimson, the near brawl happened when six demonstrators from the group Climate Defiance interrupted a talk Manchin was giving at a Harvard's Kennedy school on Friday.
They were criticizing Manchin's support of the Mountain Valley pipeline.
The 300-mile natural gas pipeline in West Virginia has drawn the ire of environmentalists.
I'm glad it didn't get worse than it did.
Obviously, a U.S. senator should be able to go to a campus and talk and whatever the disagreement is should be handled differently than that.
I will say that there is a growing level of alarm on the ecological left about what's happening.
Right now, the weather is just totally nuts.
You've got Texas burning.
California's freezing.
There's a lot that's going on.
There is a sense of frustration.
So I understand the young people's concern and their frustration, but that is not the right way to do it.
All they said were some curse words.
Yeah.
And then Joe Manchin got up like he was going to fight him.
Oh, wow.
I haven't seen the visual.
I was just going to make this point.
This is a bit of a rabbit trail, obviously.
This is branching out.
But I think this is so indicative of how meaningless a lot of this bullshit is from the New York Times.
Again, on a point I largely agree with that really we should have been happy we had Joe Manchin, which I agree with and I said at the time.
But their link is even so progressive activists spent years treating him as a heretic.
And then we link to one thing that happened in 2024.
Like I think we already knew he was leaving at this point.
And specifically related to the barrel.
Yeah, he was really bad on that issue.
Right.
He was incredibly bad on climate.
And maybe that was key to him winning.
Yeah.
But like, why would we not try to advocate and move him as left as we could?
Like there's no, especially at that point, he's not running again.
There's no reason in the world.
It would be one thing if it was before another election where Joe Manchin was going to run.
Let's go back in time to whenever, I don't know if it was 2018.
I could look at his schedule.
Yeah, so I'm just brushing up.
I figured it was 2018.
I was right.
So 2018 was the last election he had to win.
He only won two elections.
He had 2004, he was governor.
He was governor of West Virginia.
Okay.
So I'll count that, I guess.
And then he won in 2008.
Great.
Now in 2010, he won the special election to fill the seat after Robert Byrd died.
And he won with 53.5% of the vote.
Okay.
That's interesting for sure.
So we could look at like these things get flattened so much to make whatever fucking point that people want to make or the New York Times wants to make.
So let's look at what really applies here.
Okay.
Does the politics of 2010, when he's running to replace Robert Byrd in a special election, does that really apply to anything here at all?
No.
In 2012, he had to win the actual, you know, because that was a special election.
2012, he won the actual election and he got 60% of the vote.
Again, that's awesome.
That's great.
Different time.
And then in 2018, he barely won 49.6% of the vote.
He didn't get a majority, but he won.
That's awesome.
So you could argue that what he did in 2018, you might want to look at.
And if we went back in time to 2018 and if there were people saying, hey, Joe Manchin, you got to run on a Greta Thunberg platform for climate change, you know, whatever.
If that was a debate that happened then, I don't know about it, but I would have sided with the Joe Manchin of that.
Like if Joe Manchin was like- Yeah, and coal industry, West Virginia.
Yeah.
If Joe Manchin had said, no, no, and that's useful.
Maybe again, to make the New York Times point as best as we can.
And because it was a point I made, if in 2018, you had a switch to say, Joe Manchin, either run as the Greta Thunberg climate change policy position candidate or whatever the fuck he was, which was a way too coal-friendly piece of shit, whatever.
If you could go back in time and flip that switch, if you flip the switch so that he runs as Greta Thunberg, you fucked us.
Like that's a bad decision to make.
It just is, because he would have lost.
And then we wouldn't have had that key fucking vote, a very key vote that we needed many, many times.
We wouldn't have Katanji Brown Jackson.
There's so much we wouldn't have.
Like really, truly, it would be much worse.
Now, that's an interesting hypothetical.
It's an interesting like counterfactual.
And if you want to use that to first make up a group of people who would answer incorrectly to that hypothetical and then be mad at them, you can.
But there is no such real situation that existed.
There was no, you know, like there was never any decision maker other than Joe Manchin who could do that in 2018.
And it didn't happen and didn't matter.
You know what I mean?
Like there's no place where this was actionable.
There's no place or time where the way that progressives felt about Joe Manchin really mattered all that much.
And what's funny is this link, just to tie this point out, this happened in March 2024 after he announced he wasn't running.
After he left the Democratic Party, he became an independent, left the Democratic Party and announced he wasn't running for re-election.
And that's when a protester, yes, they used a bad word, but they said, you're, here, let's play it again.
Here's what they did.
I'll describe it.
Joe Manchin sold our futures and you've gotten rich doing it.
You sick f ⁇ ing.
How dare you?
So he uses words.
He says you sick fuck, sure.
But he says you sold out our futures, got rich doing it.
Joe Manchin gets up like he's going to hit him.
All of the quote unquote violence or any of that is from Joe fucking Manchin.
And so to say that this is some knock on progressives, like the anti-left, the anti-democratic partisanship.
So the negative partisanship of being anti-democratic is so strong with the New York Times and with other people that this is seen as some big knock on progressives.
The fact that a progressive, somebody who's a climate protester used a bad word and then Joe Manchin almost got up and hit him after Joe Manchin had already announced he wasn't running again.
Like that's some sort of knock on progressive tactics.
Like this didn't matter.
This did not matter in any way, shape or form and was correct.
That person is correct that he sold out our fucking futures and got rich doing it.
Like every part of everything he did was right, except, oh, he shouldn't have used a bad word.
Okay, fine.
And everything that Joe Manchin did was wrong.
And yet this is used as a knock on progressives.
Here's the point I'm making.
The anti-left, and I'm debating whether to say anti-left or I think it's more anti-democratic party, maybe.
The anti-democratic party partisanship, that sort of identity, that anti-left, anti-democratic identity is so strong that what happens when you have a bunch of people with the same misconception, in my opinion, is they make arguments that are actually really fucking bad, but no one ever calls them on it.
That's what happens.
That's what, like, if you watch Fox News, you'll see them, and we do from time to time, you'll see them make argument after argument that's fucking terrible.
You know why?
Because no one tells them no.
No one argues with them.
They all agree with each other.
I think that's a good sign that they all agree with each other.
Yeah.
And an argument like this sucks.
I just demolished it.
The link was from somebody saying a bad word, sure, after he already left the Democratic Party and was retiring.
It's just a bad argument.
Will they be called on it?
No, because fucking our whole media, our whole country, right and left alike, shares this anti-democratic party bias.
And any arguments that paint the left in a bad light, they're just not challenged.
Like it's, they just say it and no one challenges it.
And that's a big part of what's going on here.
That's such a shit argument to use that.
There was no point where progressives being mad at Joe Manchin fucking mattered.
It never mattered, even though I agree with their point.
And that's, that's important because so much of this is not, I haven't even gotten to the central failure of this article, which I'll just give a teaser.
They've either made a mistake or actively misled people with their statistics.
So we'll say they made a mistake, maybe.
And I haven't even gotten to that.
It's just substantively incorrect.
But also, it's not actionable.
Like it just depends on the race you're in.
And stuff like this, where you're like, oh, here's the lesson.
You should have appreciated Joe Manchin.
Yeah, you should have, but it didn't fucking matter.
There's no effect of that.
So if you're trying to say that if you'd listened to me, then there'd be these better outcomes.
No, there was nothing we could have done with this information.
Right.
So, sorry, I got really distracted.
Obviously, why don't you go ahead and read that paragraph one way to see, I guess.
One way to see the pattern is to examine the 17 Democrats, 13 in the House, four in the Senate, who last year won in places that Mr. Trump also won.
Moderation dominated their campaign messages.
Ruben Gallego of Arizona mocked the term Latinx and was hawkish on immigration.
Representative Vicente Gonzalez of Texas and Senator Jackie Rosen of Nevada criticized other Democrats' tolerance of illegal immigration.
Elisa Slotkin of Michigan and Representative Pat Ryan of New York emphasized public safety and their national security backgrounds.
Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin bragged about taking on federal bureaucrats who had imposed needless regulation.
Interesting.
Representative Jared Golden of Maine spoke of, quote, opening up oil and gas production to lower fuel costs.
No progressive won a race as difficult as any of these.
Interesting.
And I also want to maybe combine that with something real quick toward the bottom.
Can you get to Georgia and Wisconsin have offered recent case studies and read that?
Georgia and Wisconsin have offered recent case studies.
In Georgia, Raphael Warnock and Stacey Abrams, both Democrats, ran for statewide offices in 2022, making what NBC News called, quote, two markedly different pitches to voters.
One made the mistake of being a woman.
Yeah.
She ran a, quote, bold progressive campaign meant to, quote, turbocharge progressive turnout, while he put, quote, a greater emphasis on courting the center by emphasizing his independence and bipartisanship.
He won his Senate race.
She lost her race for governor as she did four years earlier.
Likewise, in Wisconsin, Mandela Barnes, a progressive Democrat with a history of supporting cuts to immigration enforcement and police funding, lost his 2022 Senate race, while Ms. Baldwin and Governor Tony Evers have won by running to the middle.
Now, here's what's interesting about that.
There's a lot going on here.
But when I go to, just coincidentally, when I go to that progressive punch, which I forget if I said is a website that's doing the thing that I think the 538 tracker was doing, if I'm remembering it right, basically the Trump score, so progressive score.
Here's what's weird.
The most valuable senators, just looking at the Senate, not the House, top of the list, Tammy Baldwin.
Second, John Ossoff.
Third, Raphael Warnock.
Yeah.
Isn't that weird?
That means what they're actually doing is voting very progressively, especially relative to their district.
They're in swing states.
Right, exactly.
Not district.
They're in swing states.
And so I just think that's interesting because wouldn't you expect that if they won by being centrist that you would expect they were voting in a centrist way?
No, they're actually voting.
They're voting more conservatively than, say, Elizabeth Warren, but based on the state they're in.
But more progressively than you would expect.
Oh, yeah.
Massive value.
And their score is still pretty high.
So I think that tells me that something else is going on.
It's more about rhetoric and maybe it's more about identity when it comes to the Warnock, Stacey Abrams example, because I firmly believe that we are just greatly penalizing women in certain races when that is activated.
And it's not always activated.
I think there's always going to be a certain percentage that it hurts female candidates for the most part.
But it's also a black woman is more threatening, I think, than a white woman to, you know, like, so there's the double double knock of that.
Now, here's what's interesting.
If we look at this 2022 comparison, so we're comparing, again, for the New York Times.
What was that claim?
It was, look at Raphael Warnock and Stacey Abrams, both Democrats who ran for, I'm just quoting, ran for statewide office 2022 in Georgia.
In their mind, they're isolating some variables.
Hey, look, same state.
They're both black.
Yep, both both Democrats.
One is running centrist campaign.
One is running a bold progressive campaign.
So let's look at the actual results there.
Here's one thing you might forget.
Do you remember, if you haven't already looked it up, who Raphael Warnock was running against?
Oh, shoot, I forget.
I feel like you're going to say, I'm like, oh, yeah, I can't remember.
I actually had forgotten about it.
I think I would have thought of it if someone had asked me, but I just saw it and was like, oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
It's the, what's his face?
The pedophile.
No.
No.
That's a different one.
That was a different horrible candidate.
That was the same election, though.
I think I know what you're thinking about.
A different state.
A different state.
Yeah.
In that election, 2022, they put up some fucking horrible candidates.
This is Herschel Walker.
Oh, okay.
One of the worst candidates to ever run in anything ever.
Yeah.
Okay.
They don't use numbers.
So they say she lost, he won.
Okay, fair enough.
If you look at the percentages, it might be deceptive because you're like, okay, well, he got 49.44% of the vote and she got 45.88.
Oh, that looks so different.
If you look at actual vote count.
Popular vote, yeah.
Yeah, which even this won't really work because of the nature of the opponents.
She got 1.8 million and he got 1.94 million.
Okay.
So he did better, but like, honestly, how much of a penalty would he expect for a woman versus a man?
Like, that's, for me, that's in the neighborhood of what I would expect.
And even if it's not that, even if you want to say, no, it's not that at all.
Okay.
What about the fact that Raphael Warnock ran against Herschel fucking Walker?
Yeah.
The worst candidate ever.
Herschel Walker got 1.9 million.
Brian Kemp got 2.1 million.
Yeah.
Same party, same state, same election.
And it's a 200,000 vote penalty senior Herschel Walker.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so that might be that there are a number of people who would have voted for, who knows?
They could have voted for, let's say instead of Herschel Walker, there was a more serious Republican challenger.
Maybe the difference between Warnock and Abrams is mostly those people that would have voted for Warnock's competitor, but they're already there and they're like, ah, God, I can't, Herschel Walker's a joke.
I'll vote for Raphael Warnock versus the people, and maybe sexism is part of it.
I would contend that it is, versus the people who looked at the gubernatorial election and were like, Brian Kemp, yeah, I'll vote for Brian Kemp.
And the race factor too, Brian Kemp's wife.
I was going to say in Brian Kemp's wife.
So you have gender and race potentially playing a huge role in that election.
And you're going to tell me that the difference between 1.94 million and 1.81 million is all because of one ran as a centrist and one ran as a progressive.
And none of it is to do with the fact that you had a national punchline of an opponent in Herschel Walker, who is also a black man versus a respectable looking white man, Brian Kemp, running against Stacey Abrams.
You're going to tell me that that meager difference, that 100,000, well, we'll say, what was it actually?
I don't want to exaggerate.
That 130,000 difference, roughly, in votes, 130,000.
That difference, you're going to say, is entirely explained by just the centrism versus not and nothing to do with whiteness and gender at all?
That's crazy.
In Georgia.
I mean, honestly, once again, this is a hard counterfactual.
It's not out of the question that Stacey Abrams could have done better if she had happened to be a man instead of a woman and happened to be running against the worst candidate in the world instead of Brian Kemp, who, I mean, it wasn't great, but like relative to Republicans.
You have to look at, you have to look at not our view of the candidate, but like relative to replacement level Republican kind of thing.
And he was the incumbent.
I didn't even think about that.
She's running against the fucking incumbent.
Yeah.
And Warnock is a really good.
What are you talking about?
Yeah.
Warnock is running.
He is the incumbent.
Oh my God.
I didn't even think about that, which I should have because spoiler, that's largely the problem with this entire article by the New York Times.
You got to be fucking kidding me.
That is such a stupid argument.
Yeah, it is.
It's really dumb.
Those numbers are nothing.
All right.
Well, like, I've been trying to make their case, but I can't even do it.
But why don't we go to the front of Steam?
Yeah, like, like, I've already been debunking as we go along.
Yeah.
Why don't you go down to the graph that says moderates outperform?
Because I think this is the key graph that like people are looking at to make this claim, essentially.
All right.
So the moderates outperformed average difference between House and presidential vote margin in 2024.
So we have two sections here.
We have a Democrat section, Republican section, and your midline, I guess, on each of these is the presidential candidate within that party.
So that's how Harris did versus how Trump did.
Harris versus Trump.
So moderates for Democrats outperformed Harris by 2.8 percentage points.
And then non-moderates underperformed by 1.2.
Wow.
A four-point swing.
Yeah.
Republicans, moderate Republicans outperformed Trump by 2.9 percentage points and non-moderates underperformed by 0.6.
Pretty negligible, but yeah, okay, so that's the key graph.
So there's a really good debunking done by, I came across it actually first through the on the media podcast who interviewed, I think it goes by G. Elliott Morris.
I'm not that familiar with him, but it looks like he does data stuff.
I guess he used to work for 538 at some point.
Okay.
I think he does.
Now he does his own thing on Substack.
I heard it from him, but I didn't realize he was actually referencing somebody else named Adam Bonica who wrote this on October 24th.
The New York Times moderation advantage is a statistical illusion.
This is so funny.
I didn't notice that he actually wrote two articles on this.
I was focused on this one that I just said, which was the statistical illusion.
I hadn't caught that he wrote two pieces.
And the first one was a different debunk, which is they had, this is so fucking, the fucking New York Times.
I don't know.
This guy wasn't familiar with Adam Bonica, but I think it looks like he was actually in conversation with David Leinhardt.
So I think he was actually like in conversation with the very people writing this fucking thing.
Who got it wrong, apparently?
So this first one, let me read a few paragraphs.
The data we didn't see.
The empirical core of the editorial is an analysis showing that moderate candidates as defined by their PAC endorsements outperformed their presidential ticket.
But is that the right way to measure the effect of moderation?
A better approach is to use measures of ideology that are more comprehensive or are directly tied to voter perceptions, which is the point I've been trying to make.
Because again, if you're a woman, if you're black, like you can't, you're just perceived as something you aren't.
That's what's important.
Anyway, back to it.
And then see how candidates with different ideologies perform.
For this analysis, we can use a straightforward metric.
How much better or worse does a congressional candidate do compared to their party's presidential nominee in the same district?
The result is telling.
When using either the composite measure or more importantly, the voter perception scores from the cooperative election study, the electoral benefit of a major ideological shift to the center is either small or statistically insignificant.
The advantage provided by simply being an incumbent, by contrast, is a reliable two to three percentage points.
And then it says, I was particularly disappointed not to see the CES data included in the editorial as it measures exactly the concept, how voters perceive candidates.
The piece sought to gauge.
Interesting.
Whatever the reason for its exclusion, the data is crucial because it shows that being perceived as moderate by voters does not increase vote shares.
It also challenges the claim that no progressives have won tough seats.
That's only true if you don't count candidates like Tammy Baldwin, whom the editorial celebrates as a successful moderate, but whom Wisconsin voters actually perceive as progressive.
She won despite, not because of, how voters see her ideology.
It fundamentally undermines the claim that only moderates win these districts.
And that kind of fits with what I said about the voting record and how she's actually the most valuable.
Again, she's not the most progressive by vote, but by expected vote, at least according to Progressive Punch.
So that's so funny because I actually hadn't seen that whole thing.
I had only seen this thing, which I'm now going to say.
So already that's like demolished it.
But then I guess maybe he had more time to digest.
And four days later, he writes.
It's like, hold my beer.
I was like, wait a minute.
The New York Times moderation advantage is a statistical illusion.
As I said, after accounting for money and incumbency, the supposed electoral bonus for moderate candidates vanishes entirely.
This is so frustrating.
This is so good.
I just want to read some of it.
The flaw in the simple story, the Times analysis rests on a straightforward correlation.
Candidates they define as moderate based on pack endorsements tend to do slightly better than those that don't.
But correlation, as the saying goes, is not causation.
People who carry EpiPens have higher rates of severe allergic reactions.
Oh, yeah.
But the EpiPen doesn't cause allergies.
People carry EpiPens because they have allergies.
The Times made the same mistake.
They saw candidates funded by centrist PACs winning more often and assumed moderation caused the wins without checking whether these moderates were more likely to be well-funded.
They were.
The candidates, the Times labeled as moderate, are significantly more likely to be well-funded incumbents.
The problem becomes clear once you see who they're actually comparing.
Unsurprisingly, these unfunded candidates underperform by 1.9 percentage points, but they're not underperforming because they're too progressive.
They're underperforming because they were never competitive to begin with.
By construction, the Times non-moderate group is weighed down by candidates who were never going to win.
So that chart you looked at that says, hey, moderates, non-moderates, look at how much better they do.
He says, okay, what if we split out PAC-funded versus not PAC-funded?
And so you have moderate PAC funded, non-moderate PAC funded, and then no PAC funding.
And what you get is moderates 1.3 percentage points higher, non-moderates pack funded, 0.4 percentage points higher, no pack funding minus 1.9 percentage points.
So that seems pretty clear.
And then this, I think, is even funnier.
This contamination problem isn't unique to the Times framing.
We can prove it by flipping their analysis.
What if we compared candidates back by progressive packs against everyone else?
And so he does the progressive advantage using the same method.
He uses their same method, but flipping it.
And all of a sudden that chart says progressive plus 1.4, non-progressive minus 0.4.
Because if you use the PAC funding as the way to identify it, that flips everything around.
Yeah, it's almost like money and politics is the real kicker here.
Yeah, it's money.
It's incumbency.
It's not any one thing.
This is just them doing shoddy math to support the thing that they want to say anyway.
Exactly.
The thing they already want to say.
Once you compare like with like, candidates with similar funding and similar incumbent status, the moderation advantage disappears.
Then he does this chart.
The New York Times claim plus two percentage points unadjusted plus basically one adjusted plus 0.24, which is statistically insignificant.
So there you have it.
Not only was the way they identified moderates wrong, because they should be going based on voter perception.
That's what matters.
That's why they vote.
If someone's secretly moderate, but is perceived as progressive and you're trying to look at performance, you want to know what people think.
It doesn't matter if they're secretly moderate.
That wouldn't be what was causing them.
Yeah.
How did they earn the vote?
Exactly.
Because that's people are voting based on what they think.
That already was bad.
But then also there's the statistical bullshit they pulled.
