There’s this principle in poker that you shouldn’t fall in love with your hole cards.
Start off with a pair of aces and a nice flop, and you’ll do your best to build the pot while simultaneously keeping the other players in. If that happens, great! Dollar signs appear in your eyes.
But then things go sideways. That third ace shows up, but you notice that there are three diamonds on the board. Also a possible straight. And some of the other players around the table seem surprisingly eager to bid up the pot. Aren’t they worried that someone has aces wired? Then another diamond shows up, or a fourth card for a straight, and you realize that your pocket aces aren’t so valuable.
These things happen, you can’t avoid them. You just have to avoid falling in love with those cards.
OK, now to politics. Back at the beginning of the year, looking forward to the primary and general elections, Andrew Cuomo seemed to be well positioned to run for mayor. Sure, he’d resigned from office under scandal, and he remained unpopular, so not a pair of aces by any means. But he had two paths to win: first, as the best-known candidate in a primary with nine obscure Democrats running, and as a backup he set himself up to run on a third-party line as the competent centrist, occupying a wide lane in the middle between a presumably left-wing Democratic candidate, a joke candidate on the Republican line, and the extremely unpopular Eric Adams running on his own third party. Maybe the poker analogy here is a high pair or two connected high cards, or something like that. The point was not that Cuomo was anything like a lock, but that, even with his unpopularity, he had the strongest hand on the board with room for improvement.
Then came the primary, which in poker terms is like the mediocre flop. All of a sudden Cuomo has to jump to plan B. But in the meantime his supporters had overcommitted to him. (Remember, in this analogy, Cuomo is not one of the poker players; he’s the hand. The players are the rich power brokers who invested millions of dollars and some bit of their personal and professional reputations on the Cuomo candidacy.) At this point, the pot was too big for them to get out and they just sat there, calling and raising while the hand played out. We’ve all been there: you know you’re beat, but you can’t afford to fold, so you grit your teeth, throwing in your chips until the inevitable showdown. Meanwhile you live on that sweet sweet hope, as in the highly inaccurate claim from last week that this was “the most unpredictable race for mayor that New York City has seen in decades.”
And now let’s go to national politics, setting poker aside entirely.
The appeal of Cuomo’s candidacy to his investors is clear: Cuomo is a pay-to-play guy (see for example here), and it stands to reason that if you drop a few million bucks on his campaign, he can repay you in the tens of millions with tax abatements or whatever.
But what’s his appeal to state and national Democratic leaders? From one direction, it’s clear: Mamdani as mayor becomes a target, and it will be the job of mainstream Democrats all across the country to distance themselves from him to demonstrate their moderate bona fides, a distancing that’s more difficulty if you already endorsed the guy in the election. Cuomo, then, for all his flaws, remains the anti-Mamdani.
But it’s not just that. Cuomo represents political moderation, which in the current hyper-polarized political environment is a virtue in itself. And, indeed, as governor he worked with both parties, using the Republicans in the state legislature as a counterweight to its Democratic leaders. This annoyed New York state Democrats to no end–and, indeed, given how New Yorkers mostly think about Donald Trump and the Republicans who control Congress and the Supreme Court, this sort of bipartisanship won’t be so popular in the general election, let alone the Democratic primary. But . . . if you want cross-party cooperation, this is what you have to do.
What I’m saying is that the theoretical Andrew Cuomo–the political moderate who can appeal to loyal Democrats (through some combination of party identification and the family name), while also being a competent administrator, a savvy wheeler-dealer–has a strong appeal, not just as an exemplar of the Democratic party’s common-sense moderation but also as a small step to a less polarized future. From that point of view, this theoretical Cuomo has a lot to offer even if you don’t like his policies and even if you despise the guy as a human being.
Unfortunately, the theoretical Andrew Cuomo is not the same as the real Andrew Cuomo. The theoretical version is a smart deal-maker who balances between the parties; the real one goes begging to Donald Trump. Theoretical Cuomo has valuable experience and knows how to run a government; Real Cuomo had the nursing home debacle. Theoretical Cuomo has devoted his life to public service; Real Cuomo is spinning through the revolving door, grabbing $5 million here, $5 million there, a governor who spent much of his time trying to outrun ethics investigations. Theoretical Cuomo unites the city; real Cuomo pits ethnic groups against each other.
Theoretical Cuomo had a lot to offer; Real Cuomo not so much.
It’s an unfortunate aspect of the current state of polarization in this country that political leaders, with their laudable goal of bridging the partisan divide, have been reduced to pouring their resources into the campaign of such a flawed politician as Andrew Cuomo. That’s the best they could do?? I guess he’d have been more functional in Congress because then all he’d have to do is vote on things. As mayor he could do more damage, especially given that he’d have owed his victory to those rich donors.
Of course there are also gaps between Theoretical and Real Mamdani, or between the promise and the reality of any politician. I didn’t write the above post to share the commonplace that politicians don’t live up to their hype; rather, my point was that the general election campaign for New York mayor was focused on the pros and cons of the frontrunner, but there was an actual positive reason to support Cuomo, not just as an anti-Mamdani, but as a step away from the partisan abyss. Cuomo just wasn’t the person to do this, not just in the sense of being a bad campaigner but also in the sense of not having the skills or desire to move in that way politically as mayor.
I think that all the discussion of the specifics of the campaign can obscure this point. For example, after listing Cuomo’s many flaws as a governor and as a candidate, Palko wrote, “By comparison, Mamdani is charming, personable, and has run a strong, sure-footed campaign. There’s nothing mysterious about him being ahead in the polls, nothing that requires convoluted explanations or close readings of the political and analytical tea leaves, no need for 10,000 words on what this says about Americans’ attitudes toward socialism or youth or even Trump.” I agree. But if you’re talking about Theoretical Cuomo, that’s another story. Theoretical Cuomo had a solid shot at winning a fragmented primary election, a wide moderate lane to cruise in the general election, and the capability to govern in a way that would be cross-partisan while still being politically savvy, not blandly technocratic.
At least, that’s how things appeared to the Democratic establishment when all they were looking at were their hole cards. As Josh “hot hand” Miller and I would say, they were slow to update.
P.S. Palko adds:
The question of why anyone thought Cuomo was a good idea is more interesting and worth pursuing than why did Mamdani win.
It doesn’t surprise me that lots of people thought Cuomo was a good idea. Looking at Cuomo’s career in retrospect, it all looks pretty bad: a nepo-baby who ran his father’s campaigns and was widely disliked at the time, followed by an unmemorable stint in a minor cabinet position, followed by unsuccessful runs for governor, a position he backed into after the sitting governor resigned following a scandal which was much less than the clusters of scandals that engulfed Cuomo when he himself became governor. And after he left office in disgrace he set up a consulting firm to enrich himself with questionable crypto schemes. Finally he ran for mayor and lost twice, once in the primary and once in the general. Cuomogeddon.
But look at this from the standpoint of the beginning of the primary election campaign: Cuomo was leading in the polls, the Democratic nomination was considered enough to ensure a general election victory, his opposition were a bunch of nobodies–and even if he didn’t win in the primary, there was this wide moderate lane in the general. That’s the argument for him winning. The argument for him being a good idea is that if you invest in him, he’ll return the favor many times over in the form of juicy tax breaks.
So I’d say this was a pretty good hand to hold–at least it was at first. The bit at the very end of the campaign where Bloomberg threw away his money (ok, a few million bucks isn’t a lot for him), Ackman threw away his reputation for common sense (ok, not much left of that), and Trump threw away some of his political capital (ok, I guess it’s there to be spent) . . . this all reminded me of that feeling I’ve had near the end of a poker hand where I pretty much know I’m beat, but there’s too much money in the pot for me to fold.
P.P.S. More here: If Cuomo had been able to run against Mamdani head-to-head, would he have won?
I really like this…. both the poker analogy and the disjunction between the Theoretical and Real Cuomos. I only vote for Theoretical candidates, though. Real candidates are horrible. I’d rather not vote than vote for a Real candidate. Fortunately, they never ask which one I’m voting for when I cast my vote.
Jonathan:
Uh oh. If you like this post, it probably doesn’t have mass appeal! I’ll have to moderate my message a bit to reach the mass electorate.
Jeez, what does the poker analogy say about the state of politics? Andrew puts it pretty well: “The players are the rich power brokers who invested millions of dollars and some bit of their personal and professional reputations on the Cuomo candidacy.” “We, the people” indeed!
From another angle, consider my step-son, who lives in the city. He and his wife are both ~12 years out of law school, with two kids, and they could buy a place in Brooklyn only because my wife and her former husband could give them money for the down. No wonder Mamdani’s platform struck a cord.
But, it wasn’t just NY (see G. Elliot Morris’s) run-down this morning at Strength in Numbers. There is a reason that Bernie Sanders has been drawing such big crowds in swing districts. For good graphics on the reason, see Realtimeinequality.org.
The real poker analogy is that you need the “cards” if you want to win. Is this post about understanding whether you really have the cards or just incorrectly think you do? Or is it the distinction between holding the cards in a theoretical poker game vs the real one? I’m with Jonathan (another one) here: I only vote for theoretical candidates as the real ones are too disappointing. I do make a few exceptions – Amy Klobuchar is one – but I think her case is the clearest example that a moderate candidate cannot be elected president under current conditions.
Dale:
The poker idea here is that you can have excellent cards in the hole, but then when new cards show up, the situation changes and you don’t necessarily have the leading hand anymore. In the election, Cuomo seemed to have two clear paths to victory. His cards weren’t perfect but they seemed strong. But then the landscape changed, and the power brokers who were paying for his campaign were stuck with him.
I have not voted in NYC in decades. I like your description of ‘theoretical Cuomo’ and ‘real Cuomo’. Many in the business community fantasized about a theoretical Cuomo but never had anything to do with him. I know someone with direct contact with him and said he always was difficult. I do give him credit for all the new bridges completed in his days. That said the only poker analogy is that he should not have sat at the table.
Georgette,
In my analogy, Cuomo was not sitting at the table. He was a hand of cards. It was the rich guys sitting at the table who were playing the Cuomo hand.
The other strange thing was how many of them were supporting Eric Adams, despite his massive unpopularity. From the outside, I’m just guessing that that these rich guys think it’s really important to have a pliable mayor who will go along with whatever they want to do.
Yes. I mean I can say that as Governor he was awful in many ways. He supported the IDC (a group of “Democrats” in the legislature) in their alliances with the Republicans and constant pushes against NYC’s interests. The IDC lost big when people got organized to take them down. Those districts all had IDC members because they are relatively conservative, but even they would not put up with it. That should have served as a bellweather to anyone paying close attention.
I tend to think a focus on moderate versus “populist” (I hate that term – everyone uses it but I don’t think there’s a shared definition) or progressive or whatever may not be very useful. Mamdani is likeable to a lot of people. He tends to come across as authentic. Cuomo feels like a creep. That’s my scientific analysis.
Joshua:
Your take is consistent with the idea, discussed in one of my other posts, that candidate issues become more important in less partisan races. In this case, the race became more partisan in the end, with the involvement of the national Republican party, and this did not serve Cuomo well, as the Republicans are very unpopular in NYC.
I think we can say that Trump and Musk endorsing Cuomo undermined Cuomo’s onetime argument that he was the only candidate tough enough to fend off Trump.
Yeah, I think this was their desperation throw, when their other tactics didn’t work. And the Republican endorsement did seem to be effective in shifting votes to Cuomo from the Republican mayoral candidate.
Well, that’s interesting. There must be some kind of a poltergeist going on here because I sure don’t remember writing that 3:35 PM comment.
But I do agree with it so who knows?
Joshua,
It was a different Joshua. That’s how things go sometimes.
This was really confusing.
“Joshua,
It was a different Joshua. That’s how things go sometimes.”
——————————————————————————
I thought it was understood that we were forced to have unique names when we signed on, otherwise total confusion and/or accusations.
If I am not mistaken, there have commonly been multiple “Anonymous” responders to a single thread, making accounting for arguments a bit daunting. It’s the ultimate shadow-hide.
Dsapsis:
The future of commenting is everyone adopting the “Joshua” handle.
“Joshuanonymous”
This is long, but I think there’s a lot of good insight into the NYC mayoral campaign – video and transcript.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/a-1010-night-for-democrats
Josh,
Yes, this all seems reasonable.
I want to add just one thing, based on the post I wrote today which will appear tomorrow. Nate writes that Cuomo “ran a terrible campaign,” which sounds about right, but I think the key terribleness was Cuomo squandering his early advantage in the primary election campaign. Once he decided to run in the general election, he was inherently in a tough place: on one hand he was trying to run as the sensible moderate, someone reasonable enough to appeal to conservative Republicans while leaning on his past credentials as a Democrat to appeal to the majority of the NYC electorate who prefer the Democrats to the Republicans. On the other hand, Cuomo was spending so much effort trying to get the other conservative candidates to drop out, but to the extent that he did this, he could no longer position himself as the centrist; he became Mamdani’s conservative, Republican-endorsed opponent, which was not a good place to be. I’m not saying that Cuomo couldn’t have won somehow, just that once he entered the general election, he was no longer holding the best hand. What really killed him was the bad campaigning back in the primary election period, back when he theoretically held the dominant position and thought he didn’t need to compromise, that he could just sit back, relax, and await four years of graft.
I dunno about all this. Cuomo was a really bad, really unlikeable candidate from the start. Between his covid handling and his sexual predation, it seems ridiculous to think he could run against someone actually speaking to actual needs of actual NYC residents.
Sure, I’m an old out-of-touch even-more-behind-the-times-than-thou don’t-blame-me-I’m-from-Massachusetts old-school Democrat, but it was (and will continue to be) a great pleasure to listen to Mamdani say things I actually agree with. He’s pushing policies that will actually work to make NYC a better place to live for most of its residents.
Yes, the point is that I actually think you guys actually need an actual reality check.
David:
See the P.S. above. I agree about all of Cuomo’s flaws–but it wasn’t clear at the beginning of the primary election campaign that he would look so bad. I agree that you can’t get rid of the sexual assault history and you can’t get rid of his atrocious covid actions, but he was leading in the polls and with more flexibility in his campaign he had a good chance against a splintered opposition.
Regarding your last sentence, we did have “an actual reality check”–the two elections, primary and general. When I speak of good “hole cards,” I’m talking about possibilities before that first “reality check” happened, which is the poker equivalent of having a hand that looks strong before the other cards hit the table.
Andrew –
Not sure if you read or listened to the interview. I was very impressed with Barkan’s knowledge about the campaign.
What you say is largely consistent with what he said. But he really stressed how bad a campaign Cuomo ran – said it was the worst he’s seen. There was no there, there. No positive or affirmative message, just Mamdani-bashing. Surely as you say, the structural issues he faced in the general after blowing his lead in the primary were a critical factor. But maybe they could have been overcome by a similar candidate who wasn’t so off-putting personally (especially relative to Mamdani), who was a better campaigner, who didn’t carry so much baggage, and who didn’t run such a bad campaign.
My personal view on the election was shaped by discussions with a few cab drivers I talked to back in July. They were all inclined towards someone more moderate than Mamdani, but they all considered Cuomo a crook embedded in a corrupt system.
Not to go all Tom Friedman, but I wonder if anyone has ever done election predictions based on discussions with cabbies. I’d bet that would work!
Joshua:
Yes, back in July! That’s my point: Cuomo ran a terrible campaign, and where it really mattered was in the primary. In the general election campaign, it’s not so clear how a better Cuomo campaign could’ve finessed the inherent contradiction of (a) positioning himself as a moderate, and (b) pushing for a head-to-head against Mamdani.
P.S. Earlier today I sent a link of today’s post to Nate, because I thought he’d enjoy a poker and politics analogy. But he didn’t respond or even acknowledge receipt! So if you’re in contact with Nate, please share it with him, as I’m curious to hear his thoughts. I’m pretty confident about my political analysis, but I could well believe I made some mistakes on the poker end of things. It’s been many decades since I regularly played poker, and it was for low stakes.
Andrew, I am disappointed given the poker/NY analogy, that you did not compare Cuomo to a pair of Queens.
Robin:
Good point! Cuomo was born in Queens, and Mamdani currently lives in that borough.
A quick lookup reveals that Sliwa was born and raised in Brooklyn. Too bad–otherwise we could’ve had three Queens. Eric Adams is from Brooklyn, though, so that gives us two pairs, Kings and Queens . . . not bad! Throw in the #5 candidate, Jim Walden, and that’s a pair of Kings, a pair of Queens, and a Levittown kicker.
Also this from Sliwa’s wikipedia page: “He admitted to having faked an injury while fighting rapists, the rescue of a mugging victim, and a false allegation that three off-duty transit police officers had kidnapped him.” Very Eric Adams-esque! Media reports didn’t mention this colorful bit of fabrication, perhaps because he was never considered to have a chance. But I did think that when they ran those news stories after the debate saying how charming Sliwa was, that they could’ve said that it’s not so hard to tell compelling stories if you’re willing to just make shit up whenever you want. Especially given Adams’s talents in that regard, you’d think the political press would be annoyed at this sort of behavior, even from the goofy guy running third in the polls.
Sounds like an argument that Cuomo’s backers were not Bayesians.
> you know you’re beat, but you can’t afford to fold, so you grit your teeth, throwing in your chips until the inevitable showdown
It’s not clear if you suggest that they should have done something different. Does “overcommit” mean that the right play them at the time was half-hearted support for Cuomo? Did they kept betting on the losing hand (ah, the benefit of hindsight) because they were in love with the hole cards or was it a rational thing to do?
As recently as six weeks ago you wrote “It could’ve been Trump, or it could’ve been just some rich guy (as here) who was willing to pay a couple million to boost Cuomo’s chances. I guess that, for these Wall Street guys, paying someone a million bucks to drop of an election wouldn’t be much more of an inconvenience than you or I paying two bucks to get some bacon added to our burger at the local restaurant.”
The repercussions of withdrawing their support or sticking until the inevitable showdown do not end with the election. In that sense it’s quite different from a poker hand.
Carlos:
That’s true that the election isn’t just about winning, it’s also about what comes after, and from that perspective I think Cuomo’s rich backers would’ve been better off folding after Cuomo lost in the primary, as it costs them even more to have antagonized the future mayor. I think the right play for them during the primary was to support Cuomo and that the right play for them after would’ve been to fold this particular hand. It’s true that 10 million bucks doesn’t count much for these people, but they also blew through quite a bit of their political reputations in this fiasco.
Where are the x-ray poker tables, hidden cameras, special contact lenses, and pre-marked cards in all of this?
Anon:
I guess I was talking about Theoretical Poker not Real Poker!
Mamdani was gonna win right from the start, and if he can’t rig the elections Trump will lose a bunch of support next year in congress. But this isn’t about the US alone. This is a global phenomenon. I agree with the analysis of this pseudonymous commenter
https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/115496186176374261
The entire world is flip flopping wildly from one group in power to the next, and when that didnt work Nepalese people showed up in the streets and burned their government buildings to the ground, got on a giant Discord chat and elected someone from the protests. Bangladesh and Madagascar also changed their governments by non electoral means and Sri Lanka drove their president out 3 years ago. France almost went far right a year ago ish, Germany has far left and far right groups on the rise, theres a civil war in Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and many countries have had declining vote turnout for decades.
The worlds people are tired of business as usual. Cuomo represents business as usual. Bidden represents business as usual, Harris represented a continuation of Biden. Electing trump was a vote for something else, but the people who did it (Latino men, immigrants, etc were the vote margin) didnt really expect him to do what he plainly said he was gonna do in Project 2025.
Right now we have business as usual vs fascism. People are gonna vote against fascism hard because it has wrecked their material conditions in months. If Dems run leftist candidates who run on derigging the economy, providing food, healthcare, and housing, and taxing the economic concentration away from the wealthy they will win. Those are the underlying issues leading to wild electoral thrashing or even burning govts to the ground globally.
The worst thing Dems could do next year is run establishment candidates.
I agree with all of this. I, too, am fed up with business as usual, politics as usual. I’m more inclined to look for a reasonable candidate with a solid background who doesn’t look at politics as a way to further their personal interests. Unfortunately, too many people seem inclined to vote for any outrageous candidate as long as they promise to not be establishment types. There are some young candidates that fit the bill, but the pressure will be to take extreme positions in order to not be lost in the maelstrom of noise. People like Slotkin appeal to me, but they are few and far between. In the meanwhile, the field is ripe for wacko candidates with extreme agendas provided that they don’t seem like “more of the same” (not intending that to be a description of any particular individual).
I do wonder, however, how your description of the public mood (which I agree with) fits with the strong incumbency advantage. Is it weaker now? My impression is that incumbency has been growing stronger which seems to run counter to what you are saying. Possibly the advantages of incumbency are really about money to run campaigns and primaries, and those factors cause an ever-wider gap between the candidates and the populace. “Wild electoral thrashing” indeed.
Slotkin is pro-genocide.
There’s a useful comment (not). And I doubt anybody is “pro-genocide” although I am sure it is possible to interpret someone’s views on particular subjects as being “pro-genocide” but that would be someone’s interpretation, not the politician’s stated views. In fact, I think there are few (possibly none) politicians who are actually “pro-genocide.” These reductionist interpretations of policy positions are part of the problem. It becomes impossible to have a reasoned debate of complex situations (like the Israeli/Palestinian situation, or US immigration policy, or climate change, etc.) when articulated positions are interpreted, magnified, and over-simplified to contribute to polarization. Even I don’t believe that Trump really wants to kill African HIV patients, though his policies could be interpreted in such a way – but that would be my interpretation, not his belief (I will admit, however, that I really don’t know about his beliefs on that).
Dale wrote:
“I think there are few (possibly none) politicians who are actually “pro-genocide.” These reductionist interpretations of policy positions are part of the problem.”
Or perhaps when people tell us who they are, we should believe them. After all, they sing songs glorifying past genocides in Israel. If you need the name of a politician, how about Itamar Ben-Gvir? Wikipedia has this:
“Prior to entering office Ben-Gvir was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre.”
I’m guessing Dale was referring to American politicians. Calling American politicians “pro-genocide” is the same class of bullshit rhetoric as calling American politicians “pro-hamas.”
Yes, I was referring mostly to American politicians but made too blanket a statement in any case. I’m sure there are and were people, even in politics, who do support genocide. I’m not sure there are any current ones in the US, but I guess I wouldn’t be shocked to discover one. I don’t think Slotkin can be characterized that way. Here is a relevant statement from her: https://www.slotkin.senate.gov/2025/07/31/slotkin-statement-on-senate-votes-to-block-arms-sales-to-israel/. I find myself in agreement with that, so if that characterizes “pro-genocide” then I guess I must be as well. Though I can’t see how that is an accurate interpretation. Nor do I think such a reductionist (however convoluted) interpretation is constructive in any way.
To be sure, there have been some American political actors who have approached immigration issues in ways that border on genocide, favoring some racial or ethnic groups while abhorring others. There are also social influencers (unfortunately one who has the ear of our President) who unabashedly declare themselves “Islamophobes,” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/laura-loomer-islamophobe-republican-primary-florida-a9677066.html). Even that isn’t quite the same thing as being “pro-genocide.” But Slotkin’s stated views are not even close.
Slotkin, like the rest of the mainstream, is desperately trying to triangulate under extreme public pressure. The average American thought that Israel already had gone too far in late October of 2023.
56% of Republicans and higher percentages of Ds and Is wanted a ceasfire on Oct 20, see this poll https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2023/10/19/voters-agree-the-us-should-call-for-a-ceasefire-and-de-escalation-of-violence-in-gaza.
If you think that’s an outlier poll, Gallup found that disapproval of Israel’s actions reached majority status between November 2023 and March 2024 (it was already 45% according to them in Nov 2023).
https://news.gallup.com/poll/692948/u.s.-back-israel-military-action-gaza-new-low.aspx
Slotkin and most Democrats voted to keep sending arms to Israel to continue its genocide, and denied that it was a genocide at all, until increases in public pressure caused about half the Democratic caucus to vote to block arms transfers in July 2025 (this is the vote she is talking about in Dale’s link, that she conveniently skipped).
“And since the war started, she has voted for measures to fund Israel’s military, impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court over arrest warrants for Israeli officials, forbid the State Department to cite statistics from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry and equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/us/politics/michigan-slotkin-senate-gaza-lebanon-israel.html
Slotkin was grilled over her views in an interview by the independent news channel Breaking Points, and had no (consistent) answers to simple questions because she does not actually believe the words she is saying about holding Israel accountable (she is directly asked about aid at 19:30 in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFrEJTFbSTc). She should not be trusted, and should be voted out at the next opportunity and replaced by someone such as Abdul El-Sayed (current candidate for the other senate seat in her state).
Slotkin signed this letter calling South Africa’s ICJ genocide case against Israel “unfounded”.
The ICJ ruled that Israel was “plausibly” committing genocide in January 2024.
https://chrissmith.house.gov/uploadedfiles/smith_manning_letter_to_sec._blinken_re._south_africa_claims_against_israel_at_ijc_1.23.24.pdf
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/26/1227078791/icj-israel-genocide-gaza-palestinians-south-africa
Anonymous
Then you are saying that all the members of Congress that signed that letter are “pro-genocide?” I’m not saying I’m happy she signed that letter nor am I completely informed of all her views. I’ve liked what I’ve heard, but that is far from a complete assessment. But equating that letter with being “pro-genocide” is a dangerous and unhelpful stretch. It’s no wonder the world has become so partisan. When you require complex issues to be reduced to binary actions (sign or not sign, for example) then you divide the world into two camps. I don’t see things that way. I guess I must be “pro-genocide” as well?
How about “genocide denier”, then. Mort of the American mainstream media is genocide-denying, or was until extremely recently. Most of the world’s experts on genocide have called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, and again, the ICJ ruled genocide to be plausible all the way back in Jan 2024.
Dale, anonymous –
. I guess I must be “pro-genocide” as well?
I’m no fan of Slotkin on Israel but I’m left wondering about this. “Pro-genocide” looks like one hell of a slippery slope. Again, it’s exactly like calling someone who thinks that Palestinians should be free (from the river to the sea) is “pro-Hamas.”
Saying things are “complex” is usually just a dodge. Not always, but I think it does apply in this case. When the officials of a country indiscriminately bomb while calling the women and children they are bombing “human animals”, and many other similar statements and actions in this case, I think it is very simple.
Israel has been occupying Palestinian land since 1967 with its takeover of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. All peaceful avenues for coexistence have been systematically crushed by Israel since then (the so-called “peace deals” were all lopsided enough to be called “fake”). Under these circumstances, the rise of a terrorist group such as Hamas is predictable. History did not start on October 7, 2023. Again, simple.
Joshua, how about flipping the situation? What if somebody denied the Rwandan genocide, and kept supporting and giving money to the Hutu as they murdered the Tutsi? Are they “pro-genocide”?
The situation of Israel-Palestine is indeed complicated. Israel is, in the context of such, presently committing genocide by the most unequivocal standards. This reality is unapologetically touted and embraced by the leaders of several parties in the ruling government coalition (in particular, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich) as well as identified by a large number of leading Israeli, Jewish diaspora, and other academic and NGO experts on genocide.
That plenty of Hamas’s leadership is or is likely inclined to genocide as well and would attempt such given a force imbalance as favorable to them as the present situation is to the Israeli military is irrelevant; only one of the two parties is presently in a position to execute such (October 7th, while awful, was nowhere near threatening the continued existence of the Israeli population as a whole), and in any case tit for tat when it comes to mass murder of civilians is unacceptable by international law, by even the flimsiest conception of any modern humanitarian principle, and by any pragmatic interest in preventing apocalyptic death spirals. Beyond any universalist moral concerns, the precedents of international law exist to protect us from and stigmatize the horrors of unrestrained atrocity; anyone complicit in allowing for exceptions for their favorite country is ultimately tying the knot for their own noose.
The Israeli military is massively dependent on foreign military aid for its munitions budget for sustained conflict, and the US is responsible for ~70% of Israeli military imports. Thus, in the present day a stance committed to Israeli military aid or even permission of sale for anything other than purely defensive tools like Iron Dome is synonymous with directly enabling Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign. This isn’t even slightly complicated.
Sometimes, people like to compare October 7th to 9/11. This is a funny comparison, because the US response to 9/11 was so utterly disastrous financially, economically, diplomatically, and in terms of domestic legal precedent that the country would be vastly stronger, safer, and happier now had it done nothing at all in terms of international military response. This also likely would have averted such monstrosities as the Russian invasions of Georgia and Ukraine by avoiding such disastrous military overextension. The pro-GWoT consensus was a psychotic fever dream that likely doomed America’s unquestioned post cold war geopolitical dominance, so to use that analogy to justify a fervid and overwhelming Israeli response is nothing short of insanity.
Daniel:
I agree that Mamdani was likely to win right from the start of the general election. The primary is another story. Yes, people are tired of business as usual, and both Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo were unpopular, but Mamdani was an unknown, and I don’t think it makes sense to say he “was gonna win right from the start” of the primary election campaign.
Your last paragraph is interesting, and I don’t know the answer.
At the level of the individual campaign, I think moderation is an expected vote winner. Not a lot, maybe something like 1% of the vote (see long discussion here), but not nothing in a close race, also an average of 1% can be more than 1% when comparing to a really extreme alternative.
The aggregate effect is another story: it’s not obvious what is the effect of a party’s candidates nationwide on its candidate’s vote in any particular district.
Another complication is that political moderation (in the sense of being near the median voter on important issues) is not the same thing as political moderation (in the sense of being near the median of the two parties’ issue positions) is not the same as political moderation (in the sense of doing things that rich power brokers think are reasonable and fair) is not the same as political moderation (in the sense of adopting a non-angry tone).
I think these issues are often conflated in discussions of particular candidates and also party strategies. For example, Donald Trump is an extremist in his political style and partisanship, and in his views on law and constitutionalism, but he’s a moderate in the sense of downplaying various unpopular Republican positions and in the sense of offering policies that seem reasonable to many rich power brokers.
Here is Peter Thiel writing to his uber rich buddies
https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/115498683760445538
I’ll paraphrase since its a screenshot and I can’t copy and paste. He says in essence GenZ and Millenials have been forced out of participation in “capitalism”. They have negative net worth from student loans and housing prices have risen faster than any income or wealth they have, the system leaves them on the outside and they aren’t gonna support it.
Of course, capitalist systems are ABOUT excluding others from participation. The defining character of capitalism is the enclosure of commons into privately held titled assets which others must pay rent to use (any other definition is ahistorical propaganda and theres plenty of that so this statement will be controversial). But seriously, enclosure of common assets and turning them into traceable titles to collect rent is the defining feature. If assets are held widely then transfer payments basically cancel out. But when ownership concentrates the system is unstable leading to a few hundred or thousand people controlling access to all resources needed to live. Their power allows them to be price setters, and prices in the market dont reflect any meaningful supply and demand (the supply is artificially controlled by the owners)
If we believe making more housing would decrease housing prices then we must believe that removing housing from the market would increase housing prices. Thats literally what we see. Companies hold apartments empty and collude via algorithm-wielding third party rent recommendation companies. Short term rentals (airbnb etc) keep residences off the market… Homelessness is at a ridiculously high rate.
So far I’m basically just repeating the economic facts shown in the data. High rent, wealth concentration, monopolistic behavior, withheld residences, homelessness, suppressed wages, financial insecurity… They’re all there in datasets to be seen clearly. And, guys whose job it is to literally look at everything and make economic and political plays (thats Thiel and his Palantir company) are literally saying what I’m saying to each other in private chats.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it a while and see if that will predict electoral outcomes.
I just cooked up this graph while cooking up breakfast for my kids:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NHbU
It shows (gdp/capita * wage fraction of gdp) / ( 2*CPIRent + CPIFoodAtHome + CPIHealthcare)
Normalized so that 1980 is 1.0
In other words, it’s how much purchasing power of basic living costs, housing, food, and healthcare an average wage earner can purchase relative to what they could purchase in 1980. It grew rapidly between 1955-1980, from 0.6 to 1.0 and has never been above 1.1 since 1980, the time average since 1980 looks to be about 1.04 or something.
In 1980 though you could graduate from UC Berkeley with no student debt. Add in the rising cost of education and the interest cost of student loans from that education, and undoubtedly purchasing power of basic necessities after educational debt service has fallen continuously since 1980. The data analysis is complicated, and the data less than easily available, but surely if education debt was often 0 in 1980, and is known to be large now, then the trend in income purchasing power was downward
Daniel –
Moderate, establishment Dems did really well in Virginia and NJ, arguably better even than Mamdani. I’d say beware trying to extract too much from Mamdani’s performance and trying to infer to much about American politics by looking at Nepal.
Your comment feels way over-confident to me, disregarding uncertainties and more local factors. For me, the intersting question is how to reconcile Mamdani’s success with that of the moderate Dems. As suggested in the Elliot Morris piece that Andrew linked to downstairs, one key factor is likely a distaste for Trump – which I think may not generalize all that well.
And I also am inclined to think that any analysis needs to clearly factor in the effects of social media and the “attention economy” as independent variables/interacting variables. They’re kind of a wild card (to continue the poker analogy) that can defy more traditional political calculus.
Ignoring the immediate next say 3 years in the US, the flailing about of the entire globe over the last 10 years or so needs a global explanation, and talking about traditional 1960’s 1970’s 1980’s 1990’s political strategies in a world where sufficient numbers of people are hopeless enough to come out in force and literally burn their governments to the ground, even if it is Nepal, is in my opinion missing the big picture.
The big picture is this in my humble opinion: as long as massive extraction of energy at low cost could drive development forward, we had exponential economic growth, for say 100 years from say 1890-1990. In an exponential growth regime, waiting a small fraction of a lifetime for conditions to get better is a strategy that can overcome various downsides.
We are not going to ever see that kind of growth again. The energy-cost of energy extraction has been rising for decades. The sources of energy we have are therefore less productive (efficiency wise). The pollution costs are already coming home to roost in more intense destructive weather events, shorter infrastructure lifetime, and other things. Even if we were to switch to some all-solar/wind future with batteries etc the growth rate of energy use must end in less than 100 years-ish as soon the historic growth rate will make just the waste-heat be a problem. Energy is the thing that has driven economic growth. “Capitalism” and “the market” and soforth has enabled fast energy extraction yes, but without the energy it’d be meaningless and we’d have hit a wall long ago with consolidation of a smaller pie.
So, exponential growth of energy use ends now-ish, and waiting 5 or 10 years until growth makes you prosperous is no longer a strategy. In fact, for the majority of people in developed nations their capacity to afford basic living costs has stagnated or declined for decades (see the graph I posted).
Literally no-one in the public political establishments is talking about that. They’re talking about “abundance” and some other stuff, but they aren’t in the same room as the actual problems people face. People will continue to flail around politically until establishment political structures go away, or they will get so back up against the wall that they will begin burning it to the ground. People like Trump and the project 2025 people are just lining citizens up against the wall faster, and so they are accelerating the path towards burn-it-to-the-ground. The enormous SIZE of the No Kings protests basically just say “look, there’s a lot of unhappy people here, get your act together or something bad is likely to happen not too far out”. “Establishment” Politicians are not hearing the message.
Political systems that address these fundamental problems will come forward to gain support, or, we will descend into a more chaotic system. Voting Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump is just an example of the kind of thing predicted by the thesis of the commenter I linked and which I agree with. No-one likes the choices, no one believes they’re going to be better off… but everyone knows SOMETHING NEEDS TO CHANGE so they’re choosing the “change” option over the “stay the same” option. That this options are both crap is evident. That Trump is literally doing fascism is also evident to many, especially for the ones who were duped into “Project 2025 isn’t really a thing don’t worry about it” now that there material conditions are deteriorating, they’re gonna reject that even stronger.
Daniel,
I don’t reject your thesis per se, there’s real weight in the structural pressures you identify. But I do think it’s argued with more certainty than the evidence warrants, both about where we’re headed and what’s driving the political volatility you describe.
The causal chain from energy constraints → stalled growth → mass despair → institutional collapse feels too linear, too monocausal, when the data and dynamics suggest far more contingency and interplay.
Take living standards. Yes, global growth has slowed, 2.3% projected for 2025, the weakest non-recession year in decades, and extreme poverty reduction has flatlined post-COVID. But the trend hasn’t reversed. The global poverty rate is still falling (10.3% in 2024 → 10.1% nowcast for 2025), and in non-fragile developing economies, per capita income has grown ~2.9% annually since 2020.
That’s not the boom of previous decades, but it’s not collapse. In high-income countries, real minimum wages are up in most OECD members since 2021, and inflation has stabilized at 4.2%. These aren’t golden numbers, but they don’t signal an inevitable march off a cliff either.
On energy: you’re right that fossil fuel extraction is getting costlier and dirtier. But you underweight the counter-trend in renewables. Solar and wind costs have fallen 85–90% since 2010. Grid-scale battery storage is dropping fast too. I’m not claiming a clean-energy utopia, intermittency, mineral constraints, and political inertia are real hurdles. But dismissing renewables and new tech as a potential growth engine or stabilizer of living standards ignores real trajectories in economics and engineering.
The IPCC’s own models show pathways to net-zero by mid-century without economic contraction. That could be wrong, but it can’t be lightly dismissed.
And then there’s the elephant: social media. I’m not replacing your economic story with a digital one; I’m saying they interact, and the internet is the accelerant. Populism didn’t surge in 2016 only because conditions were worse than in 1932 or 1976; they were better in key respects. Unemployment was 4.7%, growth was steady. What was new was algorithmic radicalization, QAnon pipelines, Pizzagate, and by 2024, a hydra of conspiracies on steroids: “censorship,” Trump as free-speech martyr, immigrant “invasion.” Studies (e.g., NBER 2017) show polarization rising fastest in high-internet-penetration demographics, not low-exposure ones. In Poland, PiS ruled for eight years on online-fueled judicial conspiracies despite steady GDP growth. The timing, the character of the rage, conspiratorial, performative, detached from policy, doesn’t fit a purely materialist model.
None of this means your concerns are wrong. Inequality is entrenched. Climate feedbacks are real. Trust is eroding. But the future isn’t a straight line from physics to flailing. It’s a system with feedbacks, wild cards, and policy levers. Renewables, internet reforms, wealth taxes, local governance experiments, these aren’t silver bullets, but they’re variables. And a thesis is far more likely to match reality, imo, if it integrates social media and technological development as an signal, not just noise.
Joshua, the biggest area of disagreement we have is on the facts of material conditions. I simply deny that the numbers you quote about GDP growth and such are correct. They’re the standard numbers yes, but I’ve spent about a decade looking at different measures of things off and on, including almost a full year of measurements of poverty back in 2017 starting from scratch using the entire microdata of the American Community Survey. That’s when I realized that standard poverty measures in the US are absolute lies through basically neglect (and it explains why they did a decade of “supplemental poverty measures” research).
Measures of Income that are important for typical people (not owners of corporations or high end lawyers or finance) has had negative growth for **decades** I literally showed the graph above of basically flat income (and that’s before accounting for the education/student loan situation). You can look at it various other ways and get a similar result. Especially if you look at median household income, I’ve looked at how gini coefficient predicts fraction of the population below a poverty threshold, and it grows extremely rapidly with GINI which grew extremely rapidly in the US between 1980 and 1995, and then continued to trend up less fast since.
The fact is, economists have either been complicit in jiggering this stuff, or simply fail to actually look at things in the correct light because it’s not within their world view or training. There’s one Economist who seems to agree with my take that I know of. Blair Fix, and he routinely takes into account the concepts that I complain about with respect to Economics measures… Here’s his takedown of an analysis of disasters… one of the key insights he uses shows that most of the effect seen by the previous analysis was due to analyzing two separate measures of “real” quantities, rather than working correctly with internally consistent dimensionless ratios of quantities https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2025/10/26/roger-pielke-jr-s-appallingly-bad-analysis-of-billion-dollar-disasters/
Another important thing is looking at the *distribution* rather than averages, another thing Blair tends to do:
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/12/15/inflation-everywhere-and-always-differential/
Another related thing is to focus on some kind of “real income” methodologies that are very flawed in that they don’t really reflect the concerns that people have. For example people care a lot more about not having a home or food or having to live with a damaged knee instead of getting a surgery or whatever than say … flights or concert tickets or restaurant food or whatever. Yet CPI seems to be based on weighted averages related to weights of *actual expenditures* thereby strongly overweighting the concerns of the most successful in the economy who have more things they can purchase compared to those who are on the edge of even maintaining rent etc. If you’re interested in comparing “economic security” you want to look at income relative to very BASE expenses. Then of course the ones with high dimensionless income will buy a lot more different stuff… but the ones near 1 will be on edge, and the share near 1 has grown, so the number of people feeling desparate has been growing for *decades* and Economists measures just don’t see it.
All this being said. I totally agree with you actually that the picture I painted doesn’t include lots of relevant questions, like social media controlled by billionaires and such. Those are all important questions. I just think that in some sense people are getting taken by surprise about how bad shit is because the measures they’re using fail to show them that it’s been bad a long time and it’s surprising we haven’t already burned stuff down.
This blindness is directly responsible for the Biden 2024 “vibeflation” bullshit where the Democrats literally gaslit their own voters. It’s no wonder they failed.
My other post is held in moderation but relevant graph for that post:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NIoG
It shows median household income / (2*cpi_rent + cpi_foodathome + cpi_healthcare) normalized to 1984 = 1.0 (the earliest year available)
by 2014 median income was about 20% lower than 1984, it recovered through 2024 so it’s down to only 0.91 which is still 9% lower than 1984
Basically for 40 years things trended worse for the median household with some variations. Given what’s happened in 2025 it must be considerably lower than 0.91 by now.
There hasn’t been a single year since 1989 when it’s been better than 1989.
This measure is a simple easy and meaningful measure, but it’s by no means the last word. Still it tells a **completely** different story than official “standard” numbers so it raises the question, which one explains the typical household’s experience for the last 40 years better?
Daniel –
Thanks for your thoughtful response. You do make a compelling argument on the economics. I’ll try to respond in more detail soon.