I had two new pieces this week for subscribers to the Athletic, my annual ranking of the top 50 free agents (which I’ve updated to reflect option decisions and the probable return of Cody Ponce from the KBO) and a column on why the Contemporary Era Committee should put Dale Murphy in the Hall of Fame. I also held a Q&A on Monday after the rankings went live.
At Endless Mode, I looked at the massive board game Luthier, which has its own soundtrack to reflect the composers depicted within the game.
I’ll do another newsletter any day now, I swear.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: ProPublica investigates what was really happening in Portland before Trump illegally sent the National Guard to the Oregon city. The short answer: not much, just peaceful protests and a whopping three people charged with crimes.
- The Atlantic has the unbelievable story of a Wisconsin man who appeared to have drowned while fishing, but when police couldn’t find his body, the story started to get very weird.
- The Guardian examines Tucson residents’ fight against a data center that is going to put a huge strain on the region’s water and energy supplies. It doesn’t help that the center’s developers have been sketchy about who’s going to use the facility – but it’s probably Amazon.
- One major lesson from Tuesday night’s decisive victories by Democrats is that supporting trans rights is a winning issue – or, I suppose, at least not a losing one. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been rushing to throw trans rights out the window as he lines up to run for President in 2028, and it’s both cruel and unnecessary.
- In The Nation, Gillian Branstetter goes further, pointing out that so-called centrist Democrats need to stop blaming trans people for the party’s failures in 2024.
- Democrats can be sketchy too! Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-IL) is withdrawing his reelection papers to try to gift the seat to his chief of staff, which critics are calling a “coronation.”
- The stochastic terrorists of the online right, especially on Twitter, directed death threats to Arizona teachers who wore the same Halloween costumes they wear every year, because the right-wing loons assumed without evidence that the costumes were mocking the death of Charlie Kirk.
- Speaking of Kirk, his death left a void in the white-nationalist wing of the Republican Party that Nick Fuentes is happily trying to fill.
- An 18-year-old man in Oklahoma was convicted of raping two girls, including strangling one until she fell unconscious, but the judge approved a plea deal that charged him as a minor and turned a minimum of 10 years in prison to counseling with no prison time. Jesse Mack Butler was 16 at the time of at least one of the assaults. The linked story implies that he received favorable treatment because his father was the football director at Oklahoma State, where the ADA went to school; I think he got favorable treatment because he’s a white man.
- Australia is generating so much electricity from renewables that they’re offering consumers three free hours of solar energy in the middle of the day, when demand is lower and generation is highest. This could be us, but you playin’ (taking fossil fuel money to prop up a dying, suicidal industry).
- The north African country Mali may be about to fall to a rebel group affiliated with al-Qaeda. America’s influence in the Sahel was already waning before January, and it appears to be diminishing even further.
- A couple of Philadelphia restaurants found their Google pages spammed with fake 1-star reviews … plus a “review” offering to remove those for a fee.
- Astronomers detected the longest-lasting gamma-ray burst on record, so now they’re trying to figure out what caused it.
- Bluesky’s official blog noted the huge traffic surge during the World Series, with a 30% bump for Saturday’s game 7, and in doing so they used a post from yours truly.
- Board game news: The Gamefound campaign for The Mix, a midweight game about making cocktails, funded in just an hour and is approaching C$60,000 as I write this.
- And the campaign for Movers & Shakers, a railway game of building routes and completing contracts, also funded inside of a day. It’s looks a bit lighter than the typical title from Quined, who specialize in heavier Euros and have a great reputation.
- Damion Schubert looked at 365 board game rankings, condensed the games by game families (e.g., putting all Ticket to Ride games into one bucket), and then compiled the top 100 families based on those individual rankings. The list skews towards medium-heavy games, but not the heaviest, which I appreciate, and there are three families in this top ten that appeared in my own top ten last November. (Damion confirmed my list was one of the 365.)
I think the lesson that’s much more instructive for Democrats is to focus much more political energy on economic issues over cultural ones. Their brand had become so toxic by getting that equation exactly backwards.
And I think the key is to customize the economic message to the community that you’re in. I realize that Spanberger was always gonna be favored to win Virginia. However she really focused her ads and messaging on jobs and affordability while Sears had way too many ads attacking trans people. It turns out that voters don’t care about anti-trans messaging when NoVA has been devastated by the DOGE cuts and government shutdown. By 7:30 on election night, I could tell that Spanberger was winning big just by looking at the difference between Loudoun County (major DC suburb) between 2021 and 2025.
So Democrats are supposed to stop protecting populations that are in trouble? Supposed to leave the cultural conversations to the Republicans? This is such a privileged, concern troll comment.
I don’t think it’s that. I think you can still show support for trans rights like Spanberger did. She just prioritized economic issues and affordability as the center pieces of her campaign. I think the overemphasis on anti-trans ads by Sears actually helped Spanberger because it felt like a miss given the current economic environment in Virginia.
Surely there is enough time and money to campaign on both issues mentioned above?
For me, Gavin and Mayor Pete have disqualified themselves for 2028 for not standing up for trans rights without qualification. I mean, I don’t like either of them for a few other reasons, but it is a litmus test, whether or not you have real principles and really care about vulnerable people.
As an independent who desperately wants to get the Republicans out of power, and as someone who also is generally supportive of trans rights and sympathetic to trans people, including trans people I know, I’m dreading watching Democrats cut their noses off to spite their faces by deciding that Gavin Newsom, the guy who made same-sex marriage a reality in the U.S. and who has a long track record of support for LGBT people, is not progressive enough on trans rights because he expressed an opinion about women’s sports that is shared by two-thirds to three-quarters of Americans according to various surveys. Even the “LGB” part of the LGBT community is not uniformly in agreement regarding trans participation in women’s sports.
The hard left wing of the Democratic Party can’t resist the highly unnecessary purity test. Better to lose an election, and maintain that self-righteous veneer, than to find common ground with the majority.
If you think Gavin Newsom or Pete Buttigieg “don’t care about vulnerable people”, then you’ve really lost the plot.
@Brian Ignoring the moral arguments for trans rights, arguing that trans rights are “unpopular” is both blinkered and wildly anti-political. This was a non-issue until the right-wing media machine made it one. Sports leagues had perfectly reasonable and uncontroversial policies in place until bad faith charlatans upended them for cynical reasons. The idea that Dem pols have to simply accept this “reality” rather than working to change it is self-defeating.
@John Gavin Newsom has literally done photo ops destroying homeless encampments. There are few politicians that I am more sure do not care about vulnerable people than him.
Just seconding Mike’s point on Newsom. His war on the homeless is way to the right of even what I’d consider the moderate Democrat median. It’s not going to go over well in the primaries – and it shouldn’t.
To piggyback on to Mike’s point, Spanberger was pro-trans rights and she won by 14 points in a purple state and despite the fact that her opponent spent more than half of their ad budget playing up the issue. We don’t have to concede that at all. I do think the Dems need to prioritize the economy and affordability but they don’t have to throw trans people off the boat because it’s politically expedient at this time.
Yep, thanks Mike and Brian in NoVA for summing it up nicely.
None of this really undermines my point. If Gavin Newsom ends up as the Democratic presidential nominee, and Democrats or anti-Republican independents refuse to vote for him because he doesn’t think trans women should compete against cis women in sports (or because they disapprove of his approach to homelessness), they will be shooting themselves in the foot because whoever ends up as the Republican nominee is guaranteed to be worse on not only these issues, but most other issues as well. You’ll save yourself from having a president who doesn’t think that trans women should compete against cis women in sports, and you’ll get yourself a president who doesn’t even acknowledge that trans people exist. It reminds me of voters who didn’t vote for Harris because she was too pro-Israel and not sympathetic enough to Palestinians. Congratulations, you voted your conscience in November– but you also helped to elect a president who is 100 percent pro-Israel and doesn’t give a shit about Palestinians.
By all means, support your ideal candidates in the primaries. But if they don’t get the nomination, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Kamala Harris, who was my state’s district attorney and U.S. Senator, never did much of anything in either job (or as V.P.) to convince me that she might make a good president, but I sure as hell voted for her because the alternative was the worst possible candidate.
@Brian Two related thoughts:
1. It is November 2025. Voting for presidential primaries doesn’t start for over two years. Hell, voting for midterm primaries hasn’t even started. What is the value of trying to enforce discipline on a general election vote at this point? More to the point, who does this sort of rhetoric serve? The interest of mediocre (at best) candidates like Gavin Newsom or the people?
2. The political vision you lay out presents us with fundamentally the same two options we’ve had for my whole life. This setup has very clearly insufficient for creating a durable political coalition a la the New Deal (perhaps because it’s always willing to sell out parts of the coalition for short-term gain). If you can’t even propose hope for something better now, three years out from an election, how do you expect anyone here to take you seriously?
@Mike:
1) When people lay down a marker, even this early in the process, that they can’t or won’t support a candidate, it can be a barrier to later supporting that candidate, even if they are clearly better than the alternative. I think it’s important to push back against that kind of thinking now before it becomes entrenched and creates a cognitive hurdle later.
2) I’m not laying out a political vision. I’m observing that recent history suggests that voters will end up with a practical choice between a Republican candidate who is against every progressive priority and a Democrat who isn’t. If Democrats nominate someone who is more progressive, it will be an even starker choice. But it’s a clear choice either way. I’m not telling anyone for whom they should vote in the primary. Vote for the candidate that you think best represents your beliefs or that you believe will do the best job in the office. And be prepared, if your preferred candidate doesn’t win the Democratic nomination, to vote in the general for the candidate who does win it, because to refuse to do so is to guarantee that progressive priorities will not be advanced in the next administration. JD Vance or Marco Rubio or anyone else that could get the Republican nomination will be exponentially worse than Gavin Newsom or Pete Buttigieg or whichever Democrat you feel you can’t stomach right now.
With respect to the comment about “taking me seriously,” do you think I’m joking? Too many people didn’t take Trump seriously in 2015 and 2016– some of them voted for Jill Stein or for the Libertarian– and look where that got us. Take virtually everything you hear from voters and candidates seriously.
The number one priority is for Democrats to win elections, period. It’s hard to protect the rights of vulnerable groups if they keep losing elections like they did in 2024. And that involves not prioritizing issues that aren’t top concerns to voters and definitely don’t keep promoting publicly stances that are supported by a small minority.
Win elections to what end? if you’re willing to sacrifice people to win, then what is really won? What’s more is that we just saw the futility of this approach in the 2024 election…why would we try to do the same thing again?
Most Dems are already “not prioritizing (culture war/social) issues that aren’t top concerns to voters.” They’re mostly running on the material/economic concerns that people say they should. The people prioritizing Dems’ nominal support for progressive social issues are the hugely entrenched right-wing media apparatus that’s been built into a behemoth after decades of devoted conservative financial support.
No amount of centrist yelling about which marginalized groups should be sacrificed for the greater good can affect what opposition media chooses to focus on.
Dave Karpf exposed this stupid argument in a recent TNR guest editorial https://newrepublic.com/article/202394/centrist-democrats-welcomepac-win-elections
Dems 100% were prioritizing cultural issues prior to these recent elections. The 2020 primary was a race to see who can go furthest to the left on many of those issues.
And the Dems in 2020 ended up nominating checks notes Joe Biden. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul.
Primary voters went with the nominee who didn’t run as far to the left. How does that negate my point? And the Biden administration was staffed with many from those further left, failed primary campaigns. While Kamala Harris didn’t run on or lean into cultural issues during her campaign, she had a fairly recent history of making statements many voters didn’t agree with and she gave no plausible explanation why her views might’ve changed. Mamdani is give a textbook lesson on how to quickly pivot away from statements that might unnecessary turn away voters.
The point is there’s a massive perception gap between how the voters think Dems run and how they actually run. You’re exhibit “A” of that on this site. Hell, Kamala Harris was a prosecutor at one point who bragged about owning a gun and knowing how to use it. She ran about as close to the center (if not center right) as she possibly could and lost. Saying Dems run to the extreme left on social issues is fundamentally wrong. It’s built on a faulty perception that you seem to fall for.
“…and may God have mercy on your soul.”
Fucking please.
What? Are Happy Gilmore references no longer welcome?
The price is wrong, bitch, that quote was from Billy Madison.
As a left-of-center Democrat, I welcome the energy and passion of the ultra-progressives. But as several people in this thread have said/intimated, we can’t pass legislation or govern inclusively if we don’t get elected. While I support trans rights, same-sex marriage, gun control, acknowledgement and response to climate change, pro-choice, anti-discrimination laws and aggressive steps to protect the rights and liberties of vulnerable audiences, I now acknowledge (sadly) that we can’t run primarily on those issues. We can and should govern to those issues, but for reasons I can’t fully grasp, a lot of swing voters and even some center-left voters don’t want to hear it. Let’s win elections based on improving the lives of the vast majority of people (i.e., the non-1%), and then we’ll have the opportunity to do what we all know to be the correct things. That doesn’t mean throwing the vulnerable classes under the bus–far from it. But we can’t help them if we don’t get elected.
It’s a huge mistake to think “that voters’ sense of the Democratic Party comes from the party’s policy platform and candidate speeches, rather than random tidbits absorbed from a propaganda-filled media environment… It’s not that (Trump and the GOP) have a better grasp of the values of some mythical heartland America…Their advantage is that they spent decades building their own constellation of conservative propaganda outlets, and then they went out and purchased most of the mainstream outlets as well.”
“The Democratic Party does not have the capacity to control what people hear or think about it. If Democrats want to influence public opinion about the Democratic Party, then they are going to have to make a sustained investment in media organizations.”
(The gist of the Dave Karpf piece I linked to above, re: to all these claims that Dems need to sacrifice the marginalized, or at least refuse to voice their any support for them until they win office and then suddenly find courage to act on issues they apparently believe to be politically unpopular.)
To address what was said above.
Wouldn’t the optimal course of action for the democrats be to make whatever statements necessary to get elected, and then once in office, vote their actual conscience and belief, even if that means not voting exactly as they said they would while campaigning?
Hmm…I’m not sure the choices are quite that binary. I think it’s a matter of emphasis and how/when/where you address these issues. For instance, Democratic candidates can and should talk to leaders of disenfranchised groups and make a strong commitment to them to enact good policies, with specifics on what programs we support and how we intend to pay for them and enforce them. I just wouldn’t run national advertising campaigns based on them. The reality is that the vast majority of Americans (i.e., voters) care about their pocketbooks, public safety and strong educational programs for their kids. We can and should support Ukraine in its fight against Russia (economically, militarily and politically), but we’re not going to be elected based on being pro-Ukraine. The one thing Republicans continue to do better than Democrats is consistent messaging. You may not like what the Republicans stand for (I don’t), but as someone who has been engaged in communications and marketing for 50 years, it’s clear they have much better messaging discipline than our side.
It’s a lot easier to message hate, ignorance, and mistrust.
Perhaps we get the government we deserve, but constantly running toward the center has given us Democrats afraid to use their mandates because they want to raise the level of discourse or be statesmen or are actually Republicans at heart.
It’s hard to hold to left principles when so many white people are so deeply invested in their own racism, ‘exceptionalism,’ and ignorance. Going for the big fat lazy middle is why people don’t believe in Democrats.
Care to explain how Trump pulled in so many minority votes last time if the problems are mostly
The result of white people’s racism? Pretty sure the only voting bloc Harris did better than Biden was educated white women.
Oh, honey, are you trying to tell me that some men of color aren’t sexist?
What has Newsom done to “throw trans rights out the window”? Because he said the issue of trans people playing in sports is complex? Is that really where we are now? We’re going to need an excellent messenger to rebut every lie that comes out of JD’s mouth in 2028 and, like them or not, Mayor Pete and Newsom are the best at that.
He also vetoed a bill that would have required insurers to cover 12 months of hormone therapy, giving a rather nonsense explanation that blamed health care costs. It’s pandering.
Still ignores my question. Trump did better with just about all minorities; way better than Republican candidates have historically done. Blaming white racists for Trump, aside from being factually wrong, ignores the Democrats own issues and political strategies.
Incumbents tend to lose support when the economy is bad, or at least when voters perceive that it’s bad; that was the case in 2024, although voters’ perception of the economy was worse than reality.
Trump still won the election primarily due to his base – white men, people without college degrees, the hyper-religious. These groups are more likely to hold racist views, and are also more likely to fall into the “economic uncertainty” category that drives anti-incumbent voting.
Lots of (electronic ink spilled) already, but want to add my 2 cents:
1) Trump did better with men of all demographics, so it’s very possible that sexism played a role in opinions of Harris as a candidate.
2) Biden dropped out post-primary, which tied the Democrats hands. The party coalesced around her as VP, which was likely the least bad option, but that very likely was off-putting to ‘swing’ voters who did not have a vote in the process.
3) Keith is right about the economy driving anti-incumbent voting for the ever-shrinking ‘swing’ voters. Sure, Democrats should hammer that point home (it’s a losing issue right now for Republicans), but I don’t think anti-wokism is something that true swing voters care about. Those are already right leaners.
My last post was supposed to be a reply to Stu’s 11:15 note.
Mark, you complained that Democrats were too woke, or something, last time around.
When it was pointed out to you that they ran Kamala Harris–look, we found a black woman who’s tough on crime!–you didn’t seem to grasp how cynical and center-humping that decision was.
Turns out a lot of black men didn’t want to vote for someone who was so proud of incarcerating so many of them.
There is absolutely zero proof in the voting that anyone was concerned about Kamala being too tough on crime. You couldn’t be more wrong in your interpretation of the 2024 election. If anything, Kamala being a tough on crime AG in CA and then trying to proclaim her woke bonafides during the 2020 primaries just showed no one takes her as authentic on anything.
You keep moving the goalposts in an attempt to make establishment politicians “woke.” I’m done here.
You tried to blame everything on white racists. I said that doesn’t explain why Trump did so well with almost every minority group compared to past Republican candidates. You mentioned maybe Kamala being tough on crime did her in. I pointed out how that’s not borne out by any date whatsoever. Now I’m moving goalposts. Whatever. Be able to defend your points.
Let’s not confuse well with better. Trump did well with hispanic men (who clearly have a major case of buyer’s remorse given the 2025 results) which he won by 2. He lost hispanic women by 6, black men by 54, black women by 79, asian men by 16, and asian women by 17. The counter is that he won white men by 20 and white women by 4.
Harris did worse than Biden in almost every minority group. Of course she did better overall than Trump, but it sure wasn’t a good reflection of Harris or the party that Trump did much better with those groups then he did in 2016. I think Dems were slow to understand why, but those that well electorally a few weeks ago have shown the key is to focus on economic issues over cultural.
The only these comments have convinced me of is that it is a good thing none of the commenters are campaign consultants.
Jakob, with all due respect, you have no idea what anyone’s experience is who is commenting here and you might be surprised to learn that some of us actually have relevant experience on the subject.