Guernica, a small but prestigious online literary magazine, was thrown into turmoil in recent days after publishing — and then retracting — a personal essay about coexistence and war in the Middle East by an Israeli writer, leading to multiple resignations by its volunteer staff members, who said that they objected to its publication.
In an essay titled “From the Edges of a Broken World,” Joanna Chen, a translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry and prose, had written about her experiences trying to bridge the divide with Palestinians, including by volunteering to drive Palestinian children from the West Bank to receive care at Israeli hospitals, and how her efforts to find common ground faltered after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent attacks on Gaza.
It was replaced on Guernica’s webpage with a note, attributed to “admin,” stating: “Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it,” and promising further explanation. Since the essay was published, at least 10 members of the magazine’s all-volunteer staff have resigned, including its former co-publisher, Madhuri Sastry, who on social media wrote that the essay “attempts to soften the violence of colonialism and genocide” and called for a cultural boycott of Israeli institutions.
Chen said in an email that she believed her critics had misunderstood “the meaning of my essay, which is about holding on to empathy when there is no human decency in sight.” . . .
April Zhu, who resigned as a senior editor, wrote that she believed the article “fails or refuses to trace the shape of power — in this case, a violent, imperialist, colonial power — that makes the systematic and historic dehumanization of Palestinians (the tacit precondition for why she may feel a need at all to affirm ‘shared humanity’) a non-issue.”
It’s an evocative and moving piece of writing, which conveys deep sympathy for all the victims of the Israel-Hamas war.
I suppose it’s inevitable that it would cause various trained parrots to squawk about “colonialism” and “genocide,” as if the mere invocation of those words justify censoring the work of an Israeli writer, because after all she is a colonialist oppressor by definition, even if she regularly risks her own personal safety to help get life-saving medical treatment to Palestinian children.
To combat such reflexive stupidities is among a writer’s many obligations.
Liam Kerr is co-founder of WelcomePAC, which supports candidates who win the middle to strengthen a coherent, welcoming faction of the Democratic Party that protects democracy and governs effectively. He writes the WelcomeStack newsletter.
When you hear “Blue Dog,” the progressive left wants you to think of a bloated old white guy stuffing his face with lobbyist appetizers. But while that archetype may fit into the DC happy hour scene, the new Blue Dogs stand out — both in how they vote, and in who votes for them.
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Mary Peltola, and Jared Golden are outliers. A quick Google Image search reveals they do not fit the caricature of a pot bellied old white guy either: Jared Golden is a sinewy, tattooed millennial, typically sans suit, who grew up in rural Maine and left college after 9/11 to enlist in the Marine infantry, deploying to combat zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. Peltola is a gun-collecting Alaska Native who began commercial fishing when she was six years old and was the captain of her own boat at 14. And MGP is a 35 year old Latina mom who co-owns and operates an auto repair and machine shop with her husband (they also built their own house).
They look like normal thirty and forty somethings. Fit, cool, thirty and forty1 somethings — but normal people nonetheless. There’s a line of thinking that this is how candidates can overperform: just send out some moderate vibes, maybe a few poll-tested messages and a good ad.
Electoral outliers
Whatever they’re doing, it is working. Democrats only represent five districts where Trump won a majority.
And three of them are these Blue Dog co-chairs, all of whom represent very Trumpy districts. There are two additional longtime Democrats in districts that Trump won by fewer than three points.2 Meanwhile, Trump won the Blue Dog chair districts by 4 (MGP), 6 (Golden), and 10 (Peltola). They ran 5%, 12%, and 20% ahead of Biden.
They are outliers.
OK so these three look pretty cool, and they’re winning a bunch of Trump voters. The good vibes help, for sure. But it isn’t just that they seem like Barack Obama circa 2009. They vote like the type of Democrats who once gave Obama sixty votes in the Senate.
This chart shows how often House members vote with Joe Biden, compared to the presidential margin in their district.
The Matthew Effect of legislative and electoral outliers
MGP and Peltola are both in their first term. Golden, meanwhile, has been increasing his margins each cycle — growing from a narrow 2018 win to a six-point win in 2022. And of the dozens of Democrats who entered the House after the 2018 blue wave, he’s the only one still standing in a Trump district.
It is probably not a coincidence that Golden breaks from Biden more. Consider the 2022 elections. Golden went in with a voting record that would allow him to credibly distance himself from Biden; he voted with Biden 88% of the time. Compare this to those who lost:
Tom O’Halleran (100%)
Cindy Axne (100%)
Tom Malinowski (99%)
Sean Patrick Maloney (100%)
Elaine Luria (99%)
Al Lawson (100%)
In the book Outliers, catchphrase enthusiast Malcolm Gladwell describes the “Matthew Effect.” Named for the biblical character for whom interest compounds, the most memorable example is of the NHL players who are disproportionately born in January. Because New Year’s is the cutoff date for youth hockey, the players born early in the year have a big advantage in the younger years where ten months of physical development makes a big difference. The associated confidence and experience of being a better four-year-old hockey player trickle all the way up into the NHL.
There appears to be a similar potential advantage for Trump-district Democrats. To be a Blue Dog in a Red District means starting off from an entirely different place - everyone knows you need to win over Republicans, and that your race is probably a long shot. So you have the runway of potential authenticity and confidence. If you are a relative long shot — Nate Silver gave MGP a 2% chance of winning in 2022 — then The Groups aren’t all over you. You can be true to yourself and true to your district’s voters.3
Why is Jared Golden the only one who flipped a House seat in 2018 and stayed in a Trump-won district? There’s been some redistricting and runs for higher office. There have also been losses. All the while, Golden continues to gain. Slow Boring readers know why: Democrats have moved far to the left over the past decade.
Having a normal, decent, attractive person on the ballot is a good thing. But they can’t just seem cool, or meet people where they are physically. They have to meet them where they are on issues. And that means voting off the party line. This is not rocket science, although the political science research demonstrates that moderates do better in elections. And the elections analysts at Split-Ticket.org show this extends to caucuses — GOP Problem Solvers and Blue Dogs are the two most overperforming, gaining 1.2 to 3.2 percent on average.4
Democrats should stop conceding democracy and try harder to win elections
These three raise a natural question: if winning requires being an outlier, and voting like an outlier, how can that scale? Once you have a bunch of outliers clustered together, that’s more like a pack.
Adam Frisch ran a similar campaign to MGP, showing up with authenticity. And like MGP, he put a “safe” seat in play. Same with Will Rollins in CA-41, who — you guessed it — the Blue Dogs have also endorsed this cycle. In WI-3, against January 6th incumbent Derrick van Orden, Blue Dog-endorsed Becca Cooke seems pretty cool, too.
Last cycle, when we at WelcomePAC tried supporting several of those candidates, we encountered a problem: It is difficult to get people to solve a problem they do not believe exists. Democrats conceding winnable races in districts like these throughout the country is hard to believe. How many seats are uncontested that are more potentially competitive than Jared Golden’s?
In 2022, there were 14 seats more-Democratic than Golden’s that were effectively conceded (the Democrat spent less than $1m). For this cycle, there are 14 where the challenger did not enter the year with even $200k on-hand. Three didn’t even have any declared challenger at all. In our quarterly Conceding Democracy reports, we analyze FEC reports. How is it possible, nine years after Trump came down the escalator, that Democrats cannot even get $200k into these districts in a $10B congressional spending cycle?
Running candidates in R+3 to R+6 seats isn’t just good to give Republicans a scare. It is the terrain on which future outliers can thrive.
So yes, Democrats need to field more candidates. But, as Slow Boring readers now, they also need to try harder to win elections that they are already competing in. And yes, those candidates should have moderate vibes. But to get electoral outliers, you need more than vibes: you need to legislate differently. To recall another Slow Boring classic, polarization is a choice. A choice that elites have made. In our hyper-polarized environment, those who overcome manufactured polarization – The Depolarizers – are worthy of significant attention.
Someone smart will point out that Mary Peltola is technically 50, but as a forty something who hangs out with other forty somethings, the point still stands.
Electoral reform advocates also point out that the three Blue Dog chairs were all elected in states that employ an election system different from the first-past-the-post plurality common in most states. In ME-2, an independent candidate received 11% of the vote the midterm before Golden was first elected on the second round of a Ranked Choice Voting election. While all three use different systems, each eliminates spoiler votes – and thus forces candidates to cast their nets more broadly.
While the GOP Problem Solvers and Blue Dogs overperform, the Squad and “MAGA Squad” underperform by even more: 5.5 and 7.3 points below expected, respectively.
Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week.
"Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data," Monica, a Midwest-based software professional, warned other Glassdoor users in a blog. (Ars will only refer to Monica by her first name so that she can speak freely about her experience using Glassdoor to review employers.)
Monica joined Glassdoor about 10 years ago, she said, leaving a few reviews for her employers, taking advantage of other employees' reviews when considering new opportunities, and hoping to help others survey their job options. This month, though, she abruptly deleted her account after she contacted Glassdoor support to request help removing information from her account. She never expected that instead of removing information, Glassdoor's support team would take the real name that she provided in her support email and add it to her Glassdoor profile—despite Monica repeatedly and explicitly not consenting to Glassdoor storing her real name.
There is literally no point to Glassdoor if the reviewing employees fear that their employers could retaliate. I'm sure that Glassdoor's advertisers THINK this is better for business, but they are killing the website's only distinguishing feature.
The national news has been focused on TikTok this week, but there are also big things happening in my neck of the woods. San Francisco just had an extremely important election, which featured “moderate” victories across the board. I put the word “moderate” in quotes, because actually everyone involved was pretty progressive; in fact, the victory was for a certain brand of results-oriented progressivism, over a more performative leftist sort of progressivism. (San Francisco is a bit like the bar in the movie The Blues Brothers, where the bartender says “We got both kinds [of music], country and western!”.)
Anyway, I was going to write about this election myself, but I thought it would be interesting to have someone who was actually involved in one of the campaigns write a guest post for me. So here’s a post by Armand Domalewski, a previous Noahpinion contributor, a data analyst and old friend of mine who volunteered for one of the campaigns this year. It’s the first of a two-part series, so expect a follow-up at some point!
San Francisco wants more than progressive ideas—it wants progressive results
As you might have heard, San Francisco had an election recently, and boy, did people have some feelings about it! I grew up in an East Bay suburb of San Francisco, so though I’ve now lived in the City proper for almost ten years, I think I have enough of an outsider’s perspective to understand why our relatively tiny town (at 870,000 people, we are not even the biggest city in the SF Bay Area–that would be San Jose) gets somuchattention.
San Francisco is a symbol of America’s progressive soul, a barometer for the state of American liberalism. So of course, when our very own San Francisco Chronicle dropped this banger of a headline into the mix, it caused quite the stir:
The Chronicle reported a variety of perspectives on what the election meant, and as a long time observer of and participant in the wild fever dream we call “San Francisco politics,” here’s how I think I can help you make sense of it all:
— I’ll tell you what actually happened
— I’ll tell you the different theories people have about why it happened, including mine!
— In my next piece, I’ll explain what I think happens next
So what actually happened?
San Franciscans voted for a lot of things this cycle, but here are the truly contested races (though I will touch on a few others to provide further context for some arguments):
The San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee: Every four years, every County in California has elections for seats on a party committee, and while San Francisco does in fact elect people to a Republican, Green, and even Libertarian County Committee, in a City that voted 85% for Joe Biden in 2020, the only game in town that really matters is the SFDCC. There were two competing slates of candidates, the “San Francisco Democrats for Change” slate (associated with the political coalition the San Francisco media dubs “moderate”) and the “Labor and Working Families” slate, (usually dubbed “progressive.) As of this writing, 18/24 seats were won by the Democrats for Change.
Two housing ballot propositions, A ($300M housing bond) and C (a temporary reduction in transfer taxes for office to housing conversions), which both won, 70% and 53%, respectively.
Three ballot propositions broadly associated with “public safety” concerns. Proposition B (a ballot measure that would mandate tax increases for police staffing increases) lost with 70% voting No, Proposition E, a ballot measuring reforming policing rules to do a variety of things, including more high speed chases and use of drones, won with 54% of the vote, and Proposition F, which would condition welfare benefits on agreeing to undergo treatment if you test positive for drugs, which won 58% Yes.
A ballot measure urging SFUSD to re-institute teaching Algebra in the 8th grade, won with 82% of the vote.
(For detailed breakdowns of the vote, I strongly recommend San Francisco’s Mission Local.)
Why do people think this happened?
Here the most popular theories about why we had this result, and my assessment of how correct they are:
Theory #1: The billionaires bought the election
“I think that the piles of money thrown into the more conservative positions and candidate’s campaigns this year serves to obscure what the true sentiment of the SF public is right now.”
I don’t mean to bag on Sarah, while I often disagree with her I think she’s a sincere person who really cares about the plight of the most vulnerable in our City, but her quote is a great distillation of a sentiment I heard A LOT after the election, and it’s just wrong.
Is it true that, broadly, “moderate” causes outspent “progressive” ones? Absolutely. But there are two major flaws in this narrative:
In 2016, the “moderates” vastly outspent the “progressives”---and lost badly, as reported by San Francisco Magazine. The former coalition outspends the latter coalition in almost every contest, and the latter coalition still wins a lot of races. (In my experience, the “SF progressive” coalition was basically on the upwards march for roughly 2016-2020, and has had a rough go of it in the elections since then. Mayor Breed’s election in 2018 was the closest the SF Progressives had come to winning the Mayor’s office since 1992.)
When you parse individual races, you’ll notice that money spent does not correlate very well at all with results. The supporters of Proposition E spent vastly more than the supporters of Proposition F, but the latter had better results. The rank order of DCCC candidates in terms of spending does not line up with the rank order of DCCC results.
Theory #2: San Francisco isn’t really progressive
There are two versions of this argument:
The stupid one, which argues that SF is actually full of closet Republicans and that the only reaction to losing a County Central Committee election is domestic terrorism:
The more sophisticated, but still wrong argument that San Franciscans are basically sort of libertarians, and that San Francisco’s moderates are essentially socially liberal Republicans
“And yet, they’re impossible to decouple: A Republican who sorts their recycling; does yoga; believes in women’s bodily autonomy; believes in LGBTQ, immigrant and minority rights; doesn’t think everyday citizens should be allowed to possess military arsenals and takes canvas bags to the grocery store would be hard to discern, ideologically, from a San Francisco moderate thought-leader. ”
Joe is another person who I disagree with often but who I nonetheless have a lot of affection for, but I just think he is dead wrong here. San Francisco just voted 70% for an affordable housing bond and 73% for California Proposition 1, a $8 billion $6.8 billion mental health bond. San Francisco voters routinely approve tax increases to fund transit, housing, education, and so on. Even our “law and order” ballot measures were significantly more nuanced than the media narrative would have you believe. Proposition E’s critics pointed to it allowing police officers to engage in more vehicular pursuits and expanded the use of drones, but failed to note that it specifically authorized the use of drones as an alternative to vehicular pursuits. Proposition F’s critics declared it to be mandatory drug testing for welfare scheme copied from Ron DeSantis, but failed to note the distinction between a program that allowed you to stay on benefits if you agreed to treatment versus a program that straight up cut you off. I personally supported E (with a lot of qualms) and opposed F, but I think it’s misleading to characterize San Francisco voters as closet reactionaries—even the policies that people brand the most “reactionary” have to work in a lot of San Francisco specific nuance to win over our voters.
Theory #3: San Franciscans are progressives who want results
“The electorate hasn’t changed, it’s just that elected officials have stopped doing their jobs well.”
— GrowSF co-founder Steven Buss
“San Franciscans want to make sure our streets are safe,” she said. “They want better public education. They want a government that works. When did those stop being Democratic values?”
— Nancy Tung, victorious DCCC candidate
The argument, articulated well by Lee Edwards in the SF Standard, is that while San Francisco’s ideology hasn’t changed, but that the voters are trading in grandstanding progressive declarations for tangible progressive results. While this is the sort of broad cliched proclamation you could honestly make in every election here, I think it rings the most true. San Francisco has been dysfunctional in its governance for a very long time, but two major shifts have brought that dysfunction to the forefront.
The 2010s tech boom made the city’s dysfunctional housing approval process to forefront of our politics: While the surge in rents birthed the San Francisco YIMBY movement, politically speaking I’d argue its most immediate short run impact was to boost the fortunes of San Francisco’s “progressives.” In a functioning city, a surge in economic growth would lead to a surge in housing, but because we are not a functioning city, the wave of money that flooded into San Francisco hit the hard constraints of our byzantine permitting process. This resulted in skyrocketing evictions and rents, and the SF Moderate coalition, under Mayor Ed Lee, took much of the blame.
The pandemic brought our dysfunctional public safety and education systems to the forefront of our politics: San Francisco’s school board elections have traditionally been a fairly inside baseball affair, because the percentage of San Franciscans with kids is famously small. However, the pandemic meant that a particularly ideological school board was left to handle a particularly fraught situation, and the results were…not pretty. General frustration with school closures and remote learning boiled over when board members generated national headlines over school renaming efforts denouncing Abraham Lincoln and bizarre tweets stoking racial resentment towards Asian-American students. The voters got the message that San Francisco’s educators had priortized ideology over their kids’ education and they didn’t like it, which is why the School Board recall succeeded with 70%+ of the vote and a ballot proposition urging SFUSD to reverse its removal of 8th Grade Algebra passed with 80%+ of the vote. This has been very damaging for the reputation of San Francisco’s “progressive” coalition.
The pandemic, of course, also skyrocketed voter concerns about public safety. There’s a lot more I want to say about this, but this piece is already long, so for now what I’d like to say is the dynamic here is very similar to what happened with education. San Francisco elected a uniquely ideological District Attorney—Chesa Boudin, who became a national symbol of criminal justice reform—just as the pandemic made public safety concerns incredibly salient for voters. The juxtaposition of a District Attorney pushing progressive criminal justice reforms and a surge in crime sent voters the strong message that SF Progressives were more interested in redeeming criminals than keeping old Chinese grandmothers safe from getting their heads bashed in. Do I think this perception is entirely fair? Of course not. But is it how voters feel? Absolutely.
The politics of housing, education, and public safety have morphed and transmuted a lot since those initial inflection points—housing is an issue where the growth of the YIMBY movement now gives SF “moderates” an edge, education is less about kicking the crazies out and more about trying to deliver tangible results, and public safety is about fentanyl and general feelings of public disorder more so than assaults and robberies—but taken together, they reflect an electorate deeply frustrated with grand ideological visions and hungry for better nuts and bolts of governance.
So if you want to know what happened in San Francisco, that’s my take–if you want to know what’s going to happen, tune in next time!