I just want to have a shout out on how good of a job Joe is doing. He offers excellent scoop and insights on all things politics. He is more of an old school newspaper reporter than a TV pundit. I was quite annoyed by all the negative comments on the live chat about his energy level.
Right? To be running the convention all day, interviewing people (& unmasking Matt Walsh!), doing the live chat and then writing something coherent? My commentary would have been something like "Walz good orange guy bad" just before I destroyed the laptop by doing a headplant onto the keyboard.
I turn off the comments any more in the live chats because the aggravation-to-insight ratio is just not worth it. Journalists maybe know how to nail ideas quickly in realtime; most of us don't.
PS (added later): in case it wasn't clear, I mean the comments in the live shows. I LOVE reading the comments here.
They are still fun sometimes but online comments bring the worst in people. Don’t think most have the guts to say it to his face (if I am to channel hopefully future Madam President’s line).
They do, don't they? I remember in my misspent middle age thinking how awful it was that people were so negative online, and then I had some bitingly clever thing I wanted to say, and then a bunch of people piled on pretty aggressively, and I was shocked! and then I realized oh wait no it sucks just as bad when I do it as when anyone else does. Imagine that. 🙄 I'm not the reincarnation of HL Mencken after all.
Joe is one of my favorite writers on the Bulwark. There are so many good writers at the Bulwark, I barely have time to read it all and watch YouTubes AND listen to podcasts, but the only newsletter I never miss is Joe's!
Florida is my home state - moved there in 1977. Unfortunately, the Dems political prospects started circling the drain when Lawton Chiles died in 12/1998 and Jeb Bush was elected. But now I see some hope - better D organization, better candidates. If we don't sink into the sea or get wiped out by a massive cat 5 hurricane, I think we will come back. Even the Ds in The Villages have come out of the closet and have held recent rallies for Kamala.
I lived in Florida when Ron Desantis first ran for governor in 2018. I was psyched to support voter registration in my little town and when I realized our library was having an event I decided to support that. So I created flyers and put them up around town, bought snacks, met with the librarian in charge of events a few times, got her some Facebook-adapted graphics (which she never used) … every time we met, she said “don’t get your hopes up, don’t spend money, nobody comes to these events,” but I went for it the best I could.
Come the day of the event … that librarian wasn’t even working, and none of the other staff knew about it. I set up the room, dragged the stacks looking for people who could be persuaded to attend (“there’s food!”), and found a few teenagers. The voter registrar guy droned on about pointless details that would have put Al Gore to sleep, and the ONLY message he had for those kids was “you’re not old enough to vote.” Not “bug your teachers, bug your parents” or “you can preregister” or “this is something to look forward to” — nothing. (By wild random statistical anomaly, no doubt, Mister Boring was white and the kids were black.)
RON DESANTIS WON THAT RACE BY LESS THAN ONE HALF OF ONE PERCENT.
He won the next race by a landslide.
So next time you tell yourselves “our little foibles don’t matter because the other guy does worse things” or “that little vote doesn’t count because xyz sophisticated political reason,” you just think about those Florida Dems, riding the back of the bus at the DNC and wondering how they’re ever going to dig themselves out of their hole. If you think you have a job to do, it pays to goddamn do it right.
Folks, about Florida: it took fifty years, two highways (301 & 41) and two interstates (75 & 95) to turn Florida red. It's going to take more than a couple of election cycles, although this year both abortion AND weed are on the ballot. The state's finances are a mess, and today Gov. DeSantis rolled out his plan to turn several beloved state parks into golf courses and pickle ball courts. There is pushback. There will be more. But it will take TIME. Be patient, don't lose faith, but as Michelle said, "DO SOMETHING."
Florida strikes me as a contradiction of sorts - it’s a beautiful state with incredible parks, but also rampant development along the coasts that will be burdened with increasing insurance costs. Clearly climate change will affect the state, and yet its political leaders aren’t interested in talking about it. Arizona is also like that, except with water resources.
Climate change is already affecting the state, and Ron DeSantis’ & the state legislature’s reactions are to pass laws forbidding mention of “climate change;” and to develop its state park wetlands further so that next time the state encounters a tropical storm or hurricane, the flooding is exponentially worse (see Sarasota and ‘Debby’).
I went to high school in Florida. So did Ron DeSantis. The single most salient fact we were supposed to learn in 9th grade environmental science is that the wetlands work as a huge sponge absorbing and filtering the storm water dumped on the state during hurricane season. The runoff is supposed to return to the underground aquifer. But as the state is developed and paved over, the wetlands can’t absorb the excess, which floods the surface and the aquifer isn’t replenished, so we get flooding outside the flood planes & inconvenient and large sink holes. Instead of figuring out a way to deal with the physical realities of the state, its leaders would rather stick their fingers in the ears and close their eyes and pretend it isn’t happening as insurers flee the state. What happens to growth in Florida when you can’t get housing insurance?
You totally nailed it. I watched Hillary’s speech on Tuesday with massive tears pouring down my face with a rush of PTSD of 2016 and all the work of so many women and the horror of seeing it all rejected.
I still think she should have been the first woman to sit in the Oval Office. That millions instead chose the most patently unfit person EVER instead of her exceptional resume...BEYOND disappointing as a woman.
Living in Texas, I'm exhausted with how many election cycles we've been led to believe that Texas is purple. It deepens the disappointment every time we come up short, even though we're talking of defeating the likes of Ted Cruz and Gov. Greg Abbott. We've never come close enough.
That's probably why I have the same jaded view of Florida.
I'm not saying we shouldn't keep working and trying to make it happen, I'm just saying that activists and pundits should stop blowing smoke up our you=know-whats. We're adults, treat us like that by leveling with us - let us know exactly what we're up against and what we can do to keep chipping away at it....
That's pretty much it. Our best shot was in 18 and we didn't quite get there. I love Beto but making gun restrictions part of your platform is suicide in Texas, and even before the El Paso mass shooting he wasn't too shy about his thoughts on the topic.
This year? Eh, I'd like to dream but I'm not gonna get my hopes up. I'll just do my part and then show up and vote.
Beto really drifted left after the 2018 race. Thought he was still fairly centrist at least in temperament during the senate race. Agree it is a suicide mission calling for people’s guns in TX.
TX has had so much population growth even since 2018. It's hard to say what the political mix of the newly-arrived eligible voters is (knowing that some growth is from births and from international non-citizen immigration). And most of that growth is in the large metro areas of the Triangle. Most of the large, high-growth suburban counties of the big metros (Montgomery County being the notable exception) have trended purple or even blue.
Beto was a flawed candidate, but he did come awfully close to Cruz in 2018 (Cruz is also a flawed candidate, obviously). The Texas Democratic party has done a really poor job of recruiting actually good candidates in recent years, and the national Democratic Party never seems to bring the right messaging to Texas in support of those that are running. The early pro-green messaging from that the Biden administration brought to Texas (that "green jobs" would somehow more than make up for the quantities and wage levels of oil industry jobs) was profoundly tin-eared. To sum up, a fair bit of poor Democratic performance in TX has been due to the Democrats themselves, unable to get their act together and be smart. Maybe the Allred campaign is doing a better job this time.
All that said, make no mistake, the elected Republican leaders in TX are only concerned about winning their primaries and answering to their primary voters. And those voters desire, and honestly demand, that those leaders do whatever is necessary to ensure that Trump and Cruz win TX in 2024. If it does get close (let alone look like the Democrats are winning either race), the leaders will do whatever is necessary to get the "correct" outcome.
I’ve spent the last 2 years away from Texas (after 48 years in the state). Upon reflection, I think it will be damn near impossible for progress in the state until there is some type of national voting rights bill. Make it easier to vote in Houston/Dallas/San Antonio and you get a chance to flip more statewide races. It was always so hard to vote in Houston. Always a minimum of an hour wait. Limited early voting locations. I hear it’s gotten even worse.
As a fairly recent refugee from DeSantistan, I agree with the delegate who asserted that the Dems are sorely in need of better candidates. Putting Charlie Crist, a tired old party-switching candidate up against DeSantis was simply a surrender. Having spent 12 years in Florida, my wife and I remain aghast at the rapid conversion of seemingly decent folks who simply wanted to enjoy warm sun and low prices into rabid Trump-ers. I have a theory that a lot of those Trumpophiles were once union Democrats before they took their pensions and moved from the north and the upper Midwest to FL. Then, as unions got crushed and jobs went overseas, they saw that their kids up north were having crappy lives, and Ma and Pa suggested moving to Florida as a cure. Warmer temperatures, cheaper housing, but the same life problems followed them to the Sunshine State, where they are confronted with low wages, dreary service jobs, poor health services and, now, skyrocketing insurance rates--both home and auto--as everyone sweats out the summer waiting for the Cat 5 storm. (And DeSantis, like Scott before him, doesn't allow any mention of climate change in official communications.) We saw a lot of broken lives become angry people ripe for the picking by Trump and DeSantis. A small glimmer of hope: I see that DeSantis' hand-picked school board candidates all lost in two sizable counties. Maybe the tide will turn before the tides rise up and inundate the state.
Last time i talked to any floridians, about 2 days ago they said "my wallet don't like the democrats that's for sure." And so i said, "well how will trump fix inflation -- what's his plan, i want to know." And they stared blankly at me for a long time before asking me if I wanted to go to chic-fil-a, or try the new culvers. and I said: "well we don't have culvers up in the north country..." So we settled on chipotle.
I think 2024 has a chance to be a blend of 2008 and 2020. We’ve got a candidate that radiates the best of America, and we’ve got an anti-Trump cohort that has morphed from disgust for the man himself to determined oppositional fury. Combine all that with the clear understanding that the finish line isn’t even 270+ electoral votes. It’s swearing in Harris and Walz, followed by the work of, as Warnock phrased it, “healing the land.”
Good to hear that the Florida delegation is realistic about the challenges that they face. Understanding that the only way, to put a big state like Florida back into play is via lots and lots of grass roots organizing tells me that they are better understanding their problem.
There’s a lot of doom and gloom about Florida, and it will be a slog. But look at what hard work and organizing did in Wisconsin. The only way out is through.
I personally know of some 2016 voters who didn’t/wouldn’t vote for Hillary because of Bill and they especially didn’t want to see him back in the White House. Kamala Harris doesn’t have that problem. 2024 feels way more optimistic.
I don't think this year is comparable to 2016. Kamala is not Hillary. She didn't try to upset the people's (lousy) healthcare. There's no ex-President spouse lurking in the background. She doesn't have anything close to the Whitewater pseudo-scandal for the great right wing noise machine to exploit. She's not white, which I believe fixes a ceiling for her potential, but one high enough for her to be able to win. That said, Trump may go so racist that many "ordinary" folks decide that he's just too toxic and look past their own racism. Resentment of consumer price increases is the major hurdle.
Let me offer some encouragement. You have a great party chair, young and full of energy. Get out there and meet with Democrats in your area, start a county party, volunteer, just get together. Start small, run in local races in your area. It's so invigorating right now, don't miss out!
Don't run in deep red areas, you get threats and nasty comments and all kinds of aggravation that makes it not worth the time and money (IMPO). You can do this. It won't be today, it won't be in 2026, it may not even be in 2028, but it will happen.
I just want to have a shout out on how good of a job Joe is doing. He offers excellent scoop and insights on all things politics. He is more of an old school newspaper reporter than a TV pundit. I was quite annoyed by all the negative comments on the live chat about his energy level.
Right? To be running the convention all day, interviewing people (& unmasking Matt Walsh!), doing the live chat and then writing something coherent? My commentary would have been something like "Walz good orange guy bad" just before I destroyed the laptop by doing a headplant onto the keyboard.
Joe's been gold since the day he started here. He was obviously wiped last night because it's crunch time on the job.
Hopefully he spends tomorrow sleeping, he's earned it.
💯
The people in the chat last night were so mean. Give Joe a break FFS! He has been working!
I totally agree that Joe has been doing yeoman's work in covering the convention.
Wow, glad I missed that.
I turn off the comments any more in the live chats because the aggravation-to-insight ratio is just not worth it. Journalists maybe know how to nail ideas quickly in realtime; most of us don't.
PS (added later): in case it wasn't clear, I mean the comments in the live shows. I LOVE reading the comments here.
They are still fun sometimes but online comments bring the worst in people. Don’t think most have the guts to say it to his face (if I am to channel hopefully future Madam President’s line).
They do, don't they? I remember in my misspent middle age thinking how awful it was that people were so negative online, and then I had some bitingly clever thing I wanted to say, and then a bunch of people piled on pretty aggressively, and I was shocked! and then I realized oh wait no it sucks just as bad when I do it as when anyone else does. Imagine that. 🙄 I'm not the reincarnation of HL Mencken after all.
I really like his writing style. Looks like I'm not alone!
This is incomprehensible to me. I love everything from the reporting to the fashion takes to Matt Walsh in disguise. What more could anyone want!
Plus Joe reminds me of Gregory Peck from Roman Holiday :)
Joe is one of my favorite writers on the Bulwark. There are so many good writers at the Bulwark, I barely have time to read it all and watch YouTubes AND listen to podcasts, but the only newsletter I never miss is Joe's!
Totally agree: thank you.
I agree. I've been pretty happy overall with Joe. And I have worked long hours. I too look tired in those circumstances. He did very well last night.
Send Gollum back to Mount Doom.. Come on, Florida!
"Climb Hobbits climb"
I'M TRYING
Florida is my home state - moved there in 1977. Unfortunately, the Dems political prospects started circling the drain when Lawton Chiles died in 12/1998 and Jeb Bush was elected. But now I see some hope - better D organization, better candidates. If we don't sink into the sea or get wiped out by a massive cat 5 hurricane, I think we will come back. Even the Ds in The Villages have come out of the closet and have held recent rallies for Kamala.
I lived in Florida when Ron Desantis first ran for governor in 2018. I was psyched to support voter registration in my little town and when I realized our library was having an event I decided to support that. So I created flyers and put them up around town, bought snacks, met with the librarian in charge of events a few times, got her some Facebook-adapted graphics (which she never used) … every time we met, she said “don’t get your hopes up, don’t spend money, nobody comes to these events,” but I went for it the best I could.
Come the day of the event … that librarian wasn’t even working, and none of the other staff knew about it. I set up the room, dragged the stacks looking for people who could be persuaded to attend (“there’s food!”), and found a few teenagers. The voter registrar guy droned on about pointless details that would have put Al Gore to sleep, and the ONLY message he had for those kids was “you’re not old enough to vote.” Not “bug your teachers, bug your parents” or “you can preregister” or “this is something to look forward to” — nothing. (By wild random statistical anomaly, no doubt, Mister Boring was white and the kids were black.)
RON DESANTIS WON THAT RACE BY LESS THAN ONE HALF OF ONE PERCENT.
He won the next race by a landslide.
So next time you tell yourselves “our little foibles don’t matter because the other guy does worse things” or “that little vote doesn’t count because xyz sophisticated political reason,” you just think about those Florida Dems, riding the back of the bus at the DNC and wondering how they’re ever going to dig themselves out of their hole. If you think you have a job to do, it pays to goddamn do it right.
Folks, about Florida: it took fifty years, two highways (301 & 41) and two interstates (75 & 95) to turn Florida red. It's going to take more than a couple of election cycles, although this year both abortion AND weed are on the ballot. The state's finances are a mess, and today Gov. DeSantis rolled out his plan to turn several beloved state parks into golf courses and pickle ball courts. There is pushback. There will be more. But it will take TIME. Be patient, don't lose faith, but as Michelle said, "DO SOMETHING."
Florida strikes me as a contradiction of sorts - it’s a beautiful state with incredible parks, but also rampant development along the coasts that will be burdened with increasing insurance costs. Clearly climate change will affect the state, and yet its political leaders aren’t interested in talking about it. Arizona is also like that, except with water resources.
Climate change is already affecting the state, and Ron DeSantis’ & the state legislature’s reactions are to pass laws forbidding mention of “climate change;” and to develop its state park wetlands further so that next time the state encounters a tropical storm or hurricane, the flooding is exponentially worse (see Sarasota and ‘Debby’).
I went to high school in Florida. So did Ron DeSantis. The single most salient fact we were supposed to learn in 9th grade environmental science is that the wetlands work as a huge sponge absorbing and filtering the storm water dumped on the state during hurricane season. The runoff is supposed to return to the underground aquifer. But as the state is developed and paved over, the wetlands can’t absorb the excess, which floods the surface and the aquifer isn’t replenished, so we get flooding outside the flood planes & inconvenient and large sink holes. Instead of figuring out a way to deal with the physical realities of the state, its leaders would rather stick their fingers in the ears and close their eyes and pretend it isn’t happening as insurers flee the state. What happens to growth in Florida when you can’t get housing insurance?
You totally nailed it. I watched Hillary’s speech on Tuesday with massive tears pouring down my face with a rush of PTSD of 2016 and all the work of so many women and the horror of seeing it all rejected.
I still think she should have been the first woman to sit in the Oval Office. That millions instead chose the most patently unfit person EVER instead of her exceptional resume...BEYOND disappointing as a woman.
Living in Texas, I'm exhausted with how many election cycles we've been led to believe that Texas is purple. It deepens the disappointment every time we come up short, even though we're talking of defeating the likes of Ted Cruz and Gov. Greg Abbott. We've never come close enough.
That's probably why I have the same jaded view of Florida.
I'm not saying we shouldn't keep working and trying to make it happen, I'm just saying that activists and pundits should stop blowing smoke up our you=know-whats. We're adults, treat us like that by leveling with us - let us know exactly what we're up against and what we can do to keep chipping away at it....
That's pretty much it. Our best shot was in 18 and we didn't quite get there. I love Beto but making gun restrictions part of your platform is suicide in Texas, and even before the El Paso mass shooting he wasn't too shy about his thoughts on the topic.
This year? Eh, I'd like to dream but I'm not gonna get my hopes up. I'll just do my part and then show up and vote.
Beto really drifted left after the 2018 race. Thought he was still fairly centrist at least in temperament during the senate race. Agree it is a suicide mission calling for people’s guns in TX.
TX has had so much population growth even since 2018. It's hard to say what the political mix of the newly-arrived eligible voters is (knowing that some growth is from births and from international non-citizen immigration). And most of that growth is in the large metro areas of the Triangle. Most of the large, high-growth suburban counties of the big metros (Montgomery County being the notable exception) have trended purple or even blue.
Beto was a flawed candidate, but he did come awfully close to Cruz in 2018 (Cruz is also a flawed candidate, obviously). The Texas Democratic party has done a really poor job of recruiting actually good candidates in recent years, and the national Democratic Party never seems to bring the right messaging to Texas in support of those that are running. The early pro-green messaging from that the Biden administration brought to Texas (that "green jobs" would somehow more than make up for the quantities and wage levels of oil industry jobs) was profoundly tin-eared. To sum up, a fair bit of poor Democratic performance in TX has been due to the Democrats themselves, unable to get their act together and be smart. Maybe the Allred campaign is doing a better job this time.
All that said, make no mistake, the elected Republican leaders in TX are only concerned about winning their primaries and answering to their primary voters. And those voters desire, and honestly demand, that those leaders do whatever is necessary to ensure that Trump and Cruz win TX in 2024. If it does get close (let alone look like the Democrats are winning either race), the leaders will do whatever is necessary to get the "correct" outcome.
I’ve spent the last 2 years away from Texas (after 48 years in the state). Upon reflection, I think it will be damn near impossible for progress in the state until there is some type of national voting rights bill. Make it easier to vote in Houston/Dallas/San Antonio and you get a chance to flip more statewide races. It was always so hard to vote in Houston. Always a minimum of an hour wait. Limited early voting locations. I hear it’s gotten even worse.
As a fairly recent refugee from DeSantistan, I agree with the delegate who asserted that the Dems are sorely in need of better candidates. Putting Charlie Crist, a tired old party-switching candidate up against DeSantis was simply a surrender. Having spent 12 years in Florida, my wife and I remain aghast at the rapid conversion of seemingly decent folks who simply wanted to enjoy warm sun and low prices into rabid Trump-ers. I have a theory that a lot of those Trumpophiles were once union Democrats before they took their pensions and moved from the north and the upper Midwest to FL. Then, as unions got crushed and jobs went overseas, they saw that their kids up north were having crappy lives, and Ma and Pa suggested moving to Florida as a cure. Warmer temperatures, cheaper housing, but the same life problems followed them to the Sunshine State, where they are confronted with low wages, dreary service jobs, poor health services and, now, skyrocketing insurance rates--both home and auto--as everyone sweats out the summer waiting for the Cat 5 storm. (And DeSantis, like Scott before him, doesn't allow any mention of climate change in official communications.) We saw a lot of broken lives become angry people ripe for the picking by Trump and DeSantis. A small glimmer of hope: I see that DeSantis' hand-picked school board candidates all lost in two sizable counties. Maybe the tide will turn before the tides rise up and inundate the state.
Last time i talked to any floridians, about 2 days ago they said "my wallet don't like the democrats that's for sure." And so i said, "well how will trump fix inflation -- what's his plan, i want to know." And they stared blankly at me for a long time before asking me if I wanted to go to chic-fil-a, or try the new culvers. and I said: "well we don't have culvers up in the north country..." So we settled on chipotle.
I think 2024 has a chance to be a blend of 2008 and 2020. We’ve got a candidate that radiates the best of America, and we’ve got an anti-Trump cohort that has morphed from disgust for the man himself to determined oppositional fury. Combine all that with the clear understanding that the finish line isn’t even 270+ electoral votes. It’s swearing in Harris and Walz, followed by the work of, as Warnock phrased it, “healing the land.”
Long road ahead. We’re just getting started.
Good to hear that the Florida delegation is realistic about the challenges that they face. Understanding that the only way, to put a big state like Florida back into play is via lots and lots of grass roots organizing tells me that they are better understanding their problem.
There’s a lot of doom and gloom about Florida, and it will be a slog. But look at what hard work and organizing did in Wisconsin. The only way out is through.
Seems DeSantis is not 100% winning with his policies. There are cracks to exploit. The Dems can do this.
FLORIDA! YOU CAN DO IT!
I personally know of some 2016 voters who didn’t/wouldn’t vote for Hillary because of Bill and they especially didn’t want to see him back in the White House. Kamala Harris doesn’t have that problem. 2024 feels way more optimistic.
I don't think this year is comparable to 2016. Kamala is not Hillary. She didn't try to upset the people's (lousy) healthcare. There's no ex-President spouse lurking in the background. She doesn't have anything close to the Whitewater pseudo-scandal for the great right wing noise machine to exploit. She's not white, which I believe fixes a ceiling for her potential, but one high enough for her to be able to win. That said, Trump may go so racist that many "ordinary" folks decide that he's just too toxic and look past their own racism. Resentment of consumer price increases is the major hurdle.
I’m with Jeff Merkley. Not worried at all.
This is 2008.
Dear Florida Democrats, welcome to Kansas.
Let me offer some encouragement. You have a great party chair, young and full of energy. Get out there and meet with Democrats in your area, start a county party, volunteer, just get together. Start small, run in local races in your area. It's so invigorating right now, don't miss out!
Don't run in deep red areas, you get threats and nasty comments and all kinds of aggravation that makes it not worth the time and money (IMPO). You can do this. It won't be today, it won't be in 2026, it may not even be in 2028, but it will happen.
#StrongerTogether