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1. Some people have asked me to explain why these 14 Ds voted this way.
The #1 goal of all elected officials is win office/stay in office bc if they don't achieve that goal, none of their policy goals can be realized (Mayhew)
This is the MOST IMP thing driving their behavior https://twitter.com/Jaaavis/status/1285564623928918016
The #1 goal of all elected officials is win office/stay in office bc if they don't achieve that goal, none of their policy goals can be realized (Mayhew)
This is the MOST IMP thing driving their behavior https://twitter.com/Jaaavis/status/1285564623928918016
2. Most people think of politicians as principled vs unprincipled. This is wrong. You should also think of them as they think of themselves- in safe seats or swing ones.
People in safe seats can run as partisans & be principled.
People in swing seats cannot.
It's really simple
People in safe seats can run as partisans & be principled.
People in swing seats cannot.
It's really simple
3. If @AOC had the bad luck of living in a competitive house district, she would have had to run as a less progressive candidate. Probably as @RepKatiePorter- who frankly, I argue is the IDEAL Dem for this moment. Not too hot, not too cold.
4. Even more fun, if @berniesanders lived in Michigan, he probably wouldn't have ever made it to senate. He really need to the perfect mix of an liberal-leaning & robustly Indie electorate. Even so, to win, Bernie had to be centrist on guns until VERY recently, bc until very
5. very recently, the modal Vermonter was. Then the mass shooting scourge moved into its 2nd decade and opinion shifted among white Vermonters. This gave sanders the leeway to shift to. This does not make him unprincipled- it makes him elected. Almost everything members do or
6. say is structured around what Mayhew called The Electoral Connection: will this help me, or hurt me, in my next election. So, these Ds, being what is known as "overflow votes" bc the bill had the votes it needed to pass, voted no bc they feared a yes vote would be used against
7. them in the election. Now, they will angrily deny this, probably even to themselves, but that is why and you know what that's OK. I mean, I argue that its actually not necessary & perhaps counter productive bc it angers donors & volunteers, but the idea that MOC's make votes
8. based around maximizing their probability of holding onto their seats, to me, is not all that controversial. I'd point you to the sole Republican that voted yes. Its much rarer, in the age of polarization though, to see anything but firm and universal party discipline on votes
9. votes from the GOP side- so any time you get a defector, and its sometimes 1 or 2 and usually its one of the wackadoodle Freedom Caucus people or Rand Paul & they ARE actually doing it for principled reasons. BUT, sometimes they do it for electoral ones https://thehill.com/people/jaime-herrera-beutler