New Democratic leadership?

A potentially significant leadership battle is brewing in the House, where for example Jamie Raskin is weighing a challenge of Jerrold Nadler for the top Democratic spot on the Judiciary Committee (gift link):

House Democrats are considering pushing aside some of their most senior leaders from top posts in the next Congress, driven by a worry that aging members are not up to the task of countering President-elect Donald J. Trump and his loyal Republican allies in Congress.

The debate has grown most intense in recent days as dozens of Democrats have been privately pressing Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland to challenge Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York for his position as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. They are doing so out of concern that Mr. Nadler will be ineffective in pushing back against any efforts by Mr. Trump to abuse his power.

Mr. Nadler, 77, the dean of New York’s congressional delegation, has made it clear he has no plans to step aside. And while Mr. Raskin, 61, is mulling a challenge, he has not yet decided whether to pursue one, according to colleagues familiar with his thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.

It’s a symptom of how extreme the gerontocracy is getting that somebody who missed by a month from being old enough to vote for Jimmy Carter for president is the fresh young blood challenging the party elders. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Nadler and Raskin are friends, and also unofficial leaders of the unofficial caucus of Jewish members of the House.

It’s hard to find fault with how Nadler handled either one of Donald Trump’s first two impeachments, or the January 6th hearings, so what this probably represents more than anything is sheer frustration with the senior Democratic party leadership in the age of Trump — a frustration which, given that this grossly unfit seditious con man has been elected president twice now, is easy enough to understand.

Relatedly, after reading yesterday’s post on whether presidential campaigns are becoming less effective, Andrew Gelman pointed out to me that the political science literature has for the past 40-plus years tended to suggest strongly that presidential campaigns have made very little difference to the outcomes of elections over at least the past generation.

Gelman notes that the classic reference on this is Rosenstone (1983), where he found that election outcomes could be predicted pretty well from economic and political “fundamentals” that were not affected by campaigning.  The classic case study is 1988, when Dukakis was ahead of Bush Sr., who looked like a loser in every way, and then Bush won.  The point here is that, even when Dukakis was leading, people in the poli sci community were pretty sure that Bush was going to win, because they had read Rosenstone.

Gelman himself published an article in 1993 explaining why elections were predictable even though polls were variable:  http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/bjps1993.pdf

In addition, Gelman notes that polls have become quite a bit less variable since he published that article.

Of course in close presidential elections such as the last three — all of which could have been reversed by a swing of a couple of percentage points in a half dozen swing states — even very small campaign-driven effects can still end up being significant.

A difficult question in this context is how to classify the “fundamentals” in an election like 2024. Were the economic fundamentals good or bad for the incumbent party? It’s very clear that public economic sentiment was very bad — indeed probably fatal — for the Democrats, even though inflation and unemployment were both very low by the election year itself, the US economy had recovered more strongly from the pandemic than that of any other developed country, etc. This combination of strong objective measures and bad vibes is, I would think, difficult to fit into a classic fundamentals-based predictive model.

In sum it’s not hard to understand why even many establishment Democrats are looking to new leadership, on the assumption that there must be some way out of here.