Kevin Drum

Ever since Pat Caddell became famous as the wunderkind pollster of the Jimmy Carter campaign, it seems as if there's always been a data geek of the moment who becomes both a guru and a lightning rod within the progressive movement. Today's DGOM is David Shor, an obsessive number cruncher who worked for the Obama campaign in 2012 and then achieved notoriety by getting himself fired last year from Civis Analytics, a progressive data science firm.

Today it's Ezra Klein's turn to interview Shor. Let's listen in:

At the heart of Shor’s frenzied work is the fear that Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe....Shor has built an increasingly influential theory of what the Democrats must do to avoid congressional calamity. The chain of logic is this: Democrats are on the edge of an electoral abyss. To avoid it, they need to win states that lean Republican. To do that, they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over. Swing voters in these states are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.

All this comes down to a simple prescription: Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.

Unfortunately, this doesn't go nearly far enough. It's simply not possible in the era of Fox News to talk only about what you want to. The opposition gets a vote too, and Fox News will relentlessly hammer progressives at our weakest points even if we could, miraculously, get everyone to agree to shut up about our less popular views.

The problem with progressives today isn't messaging. It's our actual views. Let's run down a few of the more obvious examples:

Immigration. As recently as 2013 liberals were mostly on board with the compromise immigration bill backed by Marco Rubio. Today it would be a laughable nonstarter. During the Democratic primary debates, there was barely any daylight at all between the center of gravity of Democratic opinion and a policy of full-on open borders. Within the progressive movement, you will almost never hear even the slightest support for any kind of immigration enforcement.

The Great Awokening. Can we all agree, at a minimum, that woke culture has gone a bit too far? No? Not even that?

OK then, can we agree that, to an average, ordinary, nonpolitical, middle-class man on the street, wokeism has gone too far? That it's become more than just a few college kids blowing off steam and it needs to be reined in?

It's instructive that Shor himself became famous for being fired due to a lack of sufficient wokeness. What was his sin? During the George Floyd protests last year, he cited research by a Black scholar showing that while nonviolent protests helped Democrats, violent protests hurt them. This was judged beyond the pale and Shor was let go.

The Welfare State. There's nothing new about this. Democrats and Republicans have been at war over the social safety net forever.

But there's something that progressives simply refuse to admit about it: we won. Over the past few decades safety net spending has skyrocketed to nearly a trillion dollars a year—and that's just federal spending. What's more, it's not being hollowed out or chipped away or anything close to it. Spending has gone steadily up, up, up, and it's stayed up even though Republicans may hate it.

Despite this, progressives relentlessly insist that welfare spending is on the verge of collapsing, and that poor people in the US are practically sleeping in the gutters. None of that is true. There are, obviously, people at the very bottom of the income ladder who are truly in terrible need. But not that many. Even near the bottom, the average poor household receives something like $35-40,000 in cash and government benefits.

Despite that, we remain so obsessed with the poor that we've almost entirely given up on the middle class. Is it any wonder they've given up on us?

I won't go on about this forever. I assume I've made my point, and I assume it's every bit as unpopular as I think it is.

But it's for real. A lot of progressives don't really get this because they're college educated and all their friends are college educated too. They simply don't have any friends who are working or lower middle class that they can talk to honestly. If they did, some of this stuff would be a whole lot more obvious.

To accept all this, you don't have to be the kind of person who thinks "Defund the Police" was responsible for Democratic losses in 2020. You merely have to be outside your bubble enough to acknowledge that it sure as hell didn't help. Are you?

The American economy gained 194,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate declined from 5.2% to 4.8%.

This makes two months in a row of disappointing job growth, once again led by a collapse of growth in government jobs.

Why is job growth so anemic in the face of huge demand for workers? Expanded UI benefits have been ended completely, so that's not the explanation. But here's one possibility:

During the pandemic recession, personal savings skyrocketed as people socked away some of the government benefits they received. Then, as those benefits started to fade, they began drawing down those savings. However, savings remain higher than normal, suggesting that a fair number of workers are still living off savings while they look for a job. When those savings run out, they'll start to get a little more realistic and will begin accepting job offers that are OK but not great.

Maybe! This is just a guess on my part. But it makes sense.

How much do poor households in the United States make? This is not an easy question to answer, but estimates are available that account in various ways for cash earnings, tax credits, government benefits, and so forth. Here are three estimates for the 10th percentile of income (i.e.,  poorer than 90% of all households):

The Survey of Consumer Expenditures (2020) places the cutoff for the bottom decile at $28,000. However, this accounts only for actual expenditures, not benefits like Medicaid that are paid directly by the government.

The Congressional Budget Office (2018) estimates that the average of the bottom 20%—which is probably close to the cutoff for the bottom decile—is $38,000. The median would be a little lower, or maybe around $35,000.

Clinton McCully (2010) placed mean consumption of the bottom quintile at $57,000. Median consumption would be a little lower than that, so figure that it's around $50,000 or so.

So we have three rough estimates:

• $28,000
• $35,000
• $50,000

The first one is clearly low since it leaves out some government benefits, and the third one is likely high due to its methodology, which uses NIPA accounts and probably casts too wide a net. The most likely number is around $35-40,000.

Another way of looking at this is the bottom decile as a fraction of the median for the entire country. Here it is:

• 58%
• 51%
• 74%

Roughly speaking, then, we can say that a household at the 10th percentile—in other words, quite poor—consumes about $35-40,000 per year in cash and benefits, which is about 60% of what a middle class household consumes.

Here's the chart that launched a thousand headlines about Instagram's impact on the body image of teenage girls:

This data is for teens who reported having a problem in one of the 12 areas the researchers asked about. The question presented to the teens was whether Instagram had helped them with their problem(s) or made things worse.

Among boys, the impact of Instagram was overwhelmingly net positive on every dimension.

Among girls, the impact of Instagram was net positive in 11 areas and net negative solely for body image.

I have no independent opinion on whether this research was properly done. However, to the extent that it's worth reporting on, its conclusions are clear: With only one exception, Instagram is very strongly a positive influence for teens who report social problems.

The leadership of the Senate has agreed to a small increase in the debt limit, enough to keep things going for another two months. But naturally there's a hitch: Ted Cruz, always desperate to position himself as the biggest asshole in the room, says he'll filibuster it. That means Mitch McConnell needs to find ten Republicans to break the filibuster and allow the deal to go forward.

That's a problem because Republicans are unanimously afraid to vote for even a short-term extension of the debt ceiling. That apparently includes even senators from ultra-safe states who would be taking no serious risk. It also includes senators who are not up for reelection until 2026, by which time this will all be ancient history.

In the end, I imagine McConnell will manage to cajole ten votes out of his caucus. But just barely. They're more afraid of Fox News than they are of wrecking the good credit of the United States.

Brit Hume cries foul:

This story never explains why the plan these officials threatened to resign over did not go forward. The answer is that Trump decided against it. It is not to his credit that he even considered it, but his rejection should be part of any story on it. https://t.co/omyOSJbkhu

— Brit Hume (@brithume) October 7, 2021

Let's go to the tape:

[On January 3] then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, his deputy Richard Donoghue, and a few other administration officials met in the Oval Office for a final confrontation on Trump’s plan to replace Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who had indicated he would publicly pursue Trump’s false claims of mass voter fraud.

....For three hours, the officials then debated Trump’s plan, and the insistence by Rosen and others that they would resign rather than go along with it.

During the meeting, Donoghue and another Justice Department official made clear that all of the Justice Department’s assistant attorneys general “would resign if Trump replaced Rosen with Clark,” the report says. “Donoghue added that the mass resignations likely would not end there, and that U.S. Attorneys and other DOJ officials might also resign en masse.”

....A key issue in the meeting was a letter that Clark and Trump wanted the Justice Department to send to Georgia officials warning of “irregularities” in voting....The Senate report says opposition to the idea came not only from the Justice Department but from the top White House lawyer, Pat Cipollone, who made clear that he and his deputy also would quit if Trump went through with his plan.

Yes, Trump "decided" against it after spending three hours trying to strong-arm the Justice Department into publicly lying about mass voter fraud. In the end, he "decided" against it only after the entire top level of the Justice Department threatened to publicly resign and were joined by Trump's own White House counsel.

That Trump. He's quite the hero of the rule of law, isn't he?

Here's a wood duck Cinnamon Teal preening itself in our local marsh.

Is there anybody left in the Republican Party who's seriously fighting Trumpism? It sure doesn't seem like it. The most I see from anyone is strategic silence while everyone else actively begs for Trump's support.

Am I missing somebody important? Is there anyone on the right who still takes the January 6 insurrection seriously? Or who publicly fights the Big Lie about 2020 election fraud? Or tells Fox News to its face to knock off the anti-vaccine nonsense?

There's Liz Cheney, I guess. Anyone else?

I feel sort of like Rip Van Winkle on Wednesdays. I wake up late, stay awake just long enough to eat a little bit and maybe see a headline or three, and then fall back asleep for the next six or seven hours. Finally, in the late afternoon, I wake up and shake the cobwebs from my brain. Then I check to see what happened while I was all asnooze.

Today, the answer turns out be not much. However, Democrats and Republicans alike appear to be ever more obsessed with Joe Biden's "plummeting" approval ratings and what it all means. Whenever that happens, I like to go straight to the Gallup Presidential Job Approval Center to check things out. Biden is the solid green line:

I go to Gallup because it ensures that I'm not cherry picking various polls to find the one that makes me happiest. I always look at the same one.

So, yeah, Biden's approval rating is a little low compared to Bush and Obama at similar points in their presidencies, but not in a way that looks historically unprecedented or anything. He's been a few points below Bush and Obama ever since he took office.

So we'll see. Maybe Afghanistan left a sour taste in people's mouths. Maybe COVID-19 is still taking a toll. Maybe it all depends on whether Democrats finally pass a decent safety net bill. Offhand, though, I'd say it's because new presidents almost always lose around ten points of approval by the end of summer.

Am I being a little too nonchalant about this? Could be. Biden has lost six points in just the last month. Still, it's the tail end of the dog days of summer and nothing much is going on except for squabbling over the spending bill. I'm just not sure it means much. It'll all change soon enough if memories of Afghanistan fade and Biden manages to pass a good chunk of his agenda.

This is one of the domes at Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica in Rome. It's not built along the usual cruciform nave and transept lines of most Christian churches, but if it were this would be one of the transept domes.

I love domes, and I always prefer to shoot them off center. This provides a better sense of what the dome actually looks like, and also gives you a better look at all the decoration surrounding the dome. Plus, it's just more interesting.