I know this may come as a shock to some, but people are arguing on the internet again. It began with data scientist G Elliott Morris’s article asking how much politicians and pundits should listen to polling. It a good article that is yet another rebuke of the popularists who know nothing about politics who think it’s all about pointing to polling and saying “do that” next to the highest numbers. It’s a lot more complex than that and how you ask poll questions has a massive effect on how people answer them, and Morris’ data-based analysis in that article can be summed up by this post.
A group of liberals separate from the popularists which included the most terminally online man on the left, Will Stancil, vehemently opposed part of Morris’s analysis that downplayed their vibes-based beliefs on inflation, with their critiques best summarized by David Roberts, who writes about clean energy and politics.
This spiraled out of this squabble into a larger debate across Bluesky about the political effectiveness of managing a good economy versus vibes, centering around the 2024 election where the facts of America’s economic improvement (especially compared to peer nations coming out of the pandemic shock) were drowned out by Trump’s vibes and the podcast bro-verse spreading them to the masses. I think with the benefit of hindsight, the overall theme of the last three elections is pretty clear, and this argument about economic policy or inflation or vibes misses the forest for the trees: we’ve essentially had the same election three times in a row, but with minor variations as we moved tens of thousands of people around in a handful of states and changed the course of history. You can’t compare these three elections to any others because it’s such a unique Trumpy environment with some clear and persistent aspects that create it.
Flip a little less than 39,000 Trump votes across Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and she’s president. Flip a little over 127,000 Biden votes to Trump in 2020 across all three states with a combined population of around 29 million and we may be in his third term right now. That is, unless Kamala Harris had flipped a little less than 115,000 votes in the so-called blue firewall in November, then she would have narrowly won 270-268 and this article wouldn’t exist, and Will Stancil would be arguing in circles about something else right now.
These narrow margins creating seemingly random results are a point in the favor of the Stancil army, as vibes more than hard data seem to direct the energies of the large number of low information voters who can be flipped every four years. Humans process information largely through a cultural lens, in part because that is how it was passed down going back to the days of man’s oral traditions. Epistemology gets pretty trippy when you start to drill down on the question of how you know you know something, and cultural vibes are undoubtedly a big part of how we process all kinds of information.
It’s a fact that Joe Biden enacted the most robust domestic investment in the United States in a generation. He accomplished a ton on the domestic economic front, including helping to fuel America’s genuine solar manufacturing revolution that Trump is now trying to kill in his bid to bring manufacturing jobs back to America (just not the woke kind), and by all accounts of the “do good economic policy that reduces inflation” wing of the argument, Biden succeeded. He even saw a huge decrease in inflation after the spike in 2021 that rippled across the entire globe.
But his protégé lost on the economy, with “Bidenomics” being an albatross that dragged her down. Because the braindead Democratic Party believes that their message should best be communicated through a cynical mainstream media who will print any “Dems in disarray” story they can get their hands on, the dramatic improvement on inflation and the economy never made it to enough voters. Some might call this another point in favor for vibes, but I don’t think so. There’s not enough data here to come to a conclusion, because the 2024 election is a classic example of the Bobby Knight quote that “stupid loses more games than smart wins.”
All politics is communication and persuasion. This has been the case since the dawn of governments. The Democratic Party failed this ephemeral part of politics during the Biden years because they are a fundraising apparatus masquerading as a political party who genuinely seem to believe that the mainstream media has their best interests at heart. We don’t have the data on what it looks like when you implement good economic policy in this new inflationary environment then tell people all about it, because the Democrats largely communicate through a mainstream press that no one except for Democrats over the age of 50 has any real trust in anymore. All the branding around “Bidenomics” never made it past Bill Maher’s audience, and it was drowned out by sticky prices that still were much higher than the baseline of the last thirty-ish years, as Biden’s signature accomplishment became associated with inflation in voters’ minds.
That isn’t vibes, it’s a failure to do basic politics.
There is admittedly a thin line between “vibes” and “the future is unpredictable but can be affected by politicians in subtle and not so subtle ways that we can and cannot measure,” but it exists, and we have an election to point to this century to support the “do good economic policy” theory that has won elections across the globe for centuries, while also scoring a point for the vibes caucus. Regardless of whether it’s severe inflation or deflation, voters do not like shocks to the economy, and they punish incumbent parties for it across the world. It happened in 2024, and it happened in 2008.
Barack Obama’s first election exposes how this either/or argument misses the mark, as there were three complementary traits that separated America’s first Black president to such an extreme degree that it turned Indiana and North Carolina blue. First, it was the economy stupid, as Obama assumed office as the United States lost 900,000 jobs in a month. A golden retriever probably could have defeated any Republican carrying George W. Bush’s baggage that year. Trump was also punished for the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression in 2020, but the difference between Biden’s thin victory and Obama’s overwhelming one is instructive. Obama had the vibes, while Biden was just faking them.
Second, Barack Obama voted against the wildly unpopular Iraq War, providing him with a genuine credibility very few other pro-Iraq War Democrats like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton had. He could not have weaponized the vibes to the degree he did without this trust he earned with voters that was rooted in a Senator voting for good policy when it mattered. Third, his generational oratory skills combined with a campaign centered around changing the status quo galvanized the electorate amidst our economic collapse, and the United States experienced a genuine political realignment with the aid of broad-based vibes around hope and change. The popularists could never win an election like 2008 because they don’t believe in driving public opinion like Barack Obama did. For a lot of reasons I have harped on before and that are represented in Obama’s jealousy of Biden’s accomplishments, this realignment did not hold, and it led to our current fractured electorate where neither faction has a serious leg up on the other, and we’re all dependent on a not insignificant portion of Joe Rogan’s audience to decide the future of America every four years.
You could argue that 2016, 2020 and 2024 were all referendums on the economy. The latter two certainly were, and I would assert that 2016 was voters punishing Democrats for failing to pass Obama’s ambitious 2008 agenda while inequality widened in the wake of the largest economic collapse in a generation. Inflation matters. Deflation matters. Voters punish incumbents for the economy, but economic policy is nuanced, and voters demonstrated an ability to understand nuance after the inflation shock of 2020. Democrats have dismayed over polls showing people believe we are in a recession when we’re not (yet!), but these vibes-based and wrongheaded beliefs were rooted in a very flawed economy in extremely tangible ways.
America just saw its weakest housing market in 30 years and the worst month for sales since 2009. The rent is too damn high, medical care is so expensive that people aren’t shy about cheering the cold blooded murder of a healthcare executive in public, prices for groceries were rising dramatically before Trump’s stupid trade war skyrocketed the price of things like beef, and despite rising wages relative to inflation, people are right to feel precarious given the rising gargantuan expenses of housing and healthcare. The Stancil-style folks making the wage-based argument asserting it proves that vibes rule all are simply ignoring how voters clearly responded to rising prices more than rising wages. Why should that be so surprising in an economy primarily driven by consumption? It’s not 1955 anymore, we’re a nation of consumers, not producers. This is a point in favor of Morris’ post asserting that meeting the voters in the moment is a crucial aspect of understanding how to read and influence polling and win elections.
Addressing people’s economic needs in a tangible way helps you win elections. Communicating how your actions make people’s lives better is an electoral force multiplier for good policy. There is a ceiling that both policy and communications can reach on their own, and it generally stops with us nerds, resulting in three stalemate elections in a row. To reach the general populace, you do need vibes, like in 2008. This isn’t a chicken and the egg or an either/or issue so much as it’s a peanut butter and jelly one. Both can be fine on their own, but they are limited in their scope, and combined together they are exponentially more powerful.
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