Jonathan Chait is right. The heiress is wrong.

Plus news on the Shhhhhhicago DNC, and what Brookings says about coattails

Sometimes, a journalist reintroduces the hammer to the nail in such a way that it is worth reading multiple times. Jonathan Chait has a piece like that out this week.

More on that below, but first a few other things.

Starting with you RSVP’ing to our Welcome zoom this Wednesday at 12pm ET/9am PST with Joe Reagan, candidate in CO-05. Learn more about Joe and the race here.

Reverse Coattails

The Brookings Institute is out with a new piece on how North Carolina’s emergence as a swing state could help Biden win in November. The piece is coauthored by center-left OG Elaine Kamarck, author of the seminal 1989 paper that kickstarted the Clinton-era center-left faction, The Politics of Evasion (which she reprised last year). It includes a great nugget on how the state Democratic Party is investing in down-ballot races:

Students of politics are familiar with the concept of “coattails” where a popular candidate at the top of the ticket—usually the presidential candidate—pulls in candidates lower down on the ballot. But momentum works in the other direction as well. For instance, in 2020, the momentum in the Georgia U.S. Senate races helped secure Biden a win in the state. Largely driven by high turnout from Black voters, the down-ballot momentum bubbled up to the top and contributed to him eking out a win in the Peach State.

Research by BlueLabs has shown that there is an “estimated 0.4%-2.3% bump in top-of-ticket vote share when every local state legislative seat within a precinct is challenged.” As noted above, in the 2024 elections, North Carolina Democrats are contesting nearly all state legislative seats. According to Heather Williams, President of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, “The bottom of the ticket is absolutely driving engagement and will for all levels of the ballot.”

We saw this effect last year in Colorado, where Adam Frisch’s challenge to Lauren Boebert produced a sharp uptick in Democratic vote share in the US Senate race. Check out our piece last year on Adam Frisch’s Reverse Coattails:

In 7 of Colorado’s 8 U.S. Congressional districts, Bennet ran very close to Biden (overperforming by an average of 0.3 points). But in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional district, Bennet ran a full 3 points ahead of Biden — 10x his average in the rest of the state.

You can’t just be on the ballot of course. Check out Adam’s X or Instagram to see his literal coats as he travels his massive rural district meeting voters where they are, both physically and ideologically.

And if you think that Janelle Stelson’s campaign against Scott Perry in Pennsylvania or Rebecca’s Cooke’s challenge to Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin could similarly help Biden, support them on our Win The Middle slate here, which also includes over-performers like Adam, Jared Golden, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.

Shhhhhhicago

Politico’s Jonathan Martin shook things up on Friday with his reporting on attempts to move the Democratic National Convention more online to avoid protestors.

Our take on why the Forecast Calls for Blues in August in Chicago is here. And the day before Politico broke this news we outlined what we need to be preparing for, in our first piece for paid subscribers on the Progressive Unhappiness Hypothesis.

As we wrote in CNN recently, hiding from Far Left protests is not the answer. Speaking of which, back to the masterpiece from Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine this week.

In Defense of Punching Left

You really do need to read the whole thing, via New York Magazine or Apple News or call me and I’ll read it aloud to you. Just gotta read it. A brief excerpt is below, leading with a new book from the oil heiress funding a Far Left Fallacy.

“Don’t punch left” is the core tenet of Solidarity, a new book by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix. In a laudatory interview with the Washington Post, Hunt-Hendrix said the book was aimed not only at progressives in general but also specifically at liberals who criticize the left, naming me and newsletter author Matthew Yglesias as “falling into the right’s divide-and-conquer strategy.”

Solidarity provides the lengthiest and most serious case I’ve seen for why liberals should withhold criticism of the left. And since the basis of my refusal to take this advice is no longer self-evident to all my readers and colleagues, and appears increasingly deviant to some, their book provides a useful occasion for me to lay out my reasons why liberals should feel free to express criticisms of the left.

Solidarity synthesizes left-wing economic and social thought into a unified credo. The left can win by forming “passionate in-group bonds” among the component elements of its constituency based on the forms of oppression each element is experiencing: “Workers unite against bosses and owners who depress wages and degrade labor; feminists call out misogynists and patriarchal structures that disempower people on the basis of sex and gender; environmentalists name and shame special interests invested in destroying our planet; movements for racial justice protest the individuals and systems that perpetuate bigotry and xenophobia.” Solidarity is the magic ingredient that holds all these strands together in opposition to their shared enemy on the right.

This conceptualization of politics is not a radical new strategy, nor is it presented as such; it’s the progressive movement’s general operating theory. The progressive movement emerged over the past two decades out of a series of component groups representing causes like civil rights, environmentalism, abortion rights, and labor. Over the past two decades, these groups, sometimes called “The Groups,” have evolved from a patchwork of atomized single-issue organizations into a relatively unified movement. Each component part now habitually supports the projects of the others: Abortion-rights groups endorse defunding the police, civil-rights groups demand student-debt relief, and so on. Solidarity is creating a historical and theoretical basis for what is already the movement’s ethos.

One point to hammer home is that the Far Left paints the Moderate Democrat as the tool of the Right, when it is actually the Right and the Far Left that have a symbiotic relationship. This creates an opportunity, as we explained in What The Center Can Learn From AOC:

The far-left and far-right play off each other to generate fodder for their respective audiences. By invoking the specter of the other, each side is able to fire up its base and raise gobs of small-dollar donations. Anyone whose email address has been sold to far-left candidates sees plenty of “CAN YOU BELIEVE what FOX NEWS said about ILHAN OMAR???” in their inbox.

But the far-left takes it a step further: they also attack moderate Democrats — especially in earned media and digital fundraising — without a reciprocal positive effect for the center-left. Both the far-left and far-right win when they pick high-profile fights with each other (e.g. MTG and AOC battling it out on Twitter), but only the far-left wins in the tussle with mainstream Democrats. The far-left’s success in clearly defining their dual enemies (Trump Republicans and mainstream Democrats) allows the center-left to now do the same.

OK, now check out the Chait piece (via New York Magazine or Apple News) and enjoy the rest of your Sunday.