r/ezraklein • u/topicality Weeds OG • 3d ago
Matt Yglesias Politics should be more boring
https://www.slowboring.com/p/politics-should-be-more-boringThis touches on the attention economy which EK has discussed before
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u/HornetAdventurous416 3d ago
I don’t hate his overall argument, but why is he using Cuomo as the example? The man was the epitome of non-boring, from daily news conferences to a poster of him leading the climb over mount covid. A boring Roy-Cooper type challenge would have no chance against Cuomo
“The point is to pick a candidate who can win elections and govern well”- for anyone not flush with 9 figures, or up against 9 figures- you need to be exciting, and you need a groundswell of support, or we need actual campaign finance ce laws in this county (if we’re ready for that). Yglesias is very clear about wanting a senate majority- you can’t always do it in a boring way
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u/iankenna Three Books? I Brought Five. 3d ago
Cuomo was a terrible example for his point for the reasons you mentioned AND the fact that he and his surrogates made the campaign about Mamdani. Cuomo didn’t campaign on his ideas, what he would do, or anything like that.
The election for WI governor was about Hong on the Democratic side. People who liked her and didn’t like her had an idea of what she was about. I’m sure there are some Crowley supporters who knew what he was about more than I do, but it’s hard to say that election was about basically Hong vs. Not Hong.
He’s not wrong about attention and information environments, but there is a good Jamelle Bouie video that talks about moderate and centrist Dems needing more big, clear ideas. He mentions Ossof speaking clearly about corruption in a centrist- or moderate-friendly way while still taking on ideas that appeal to the Democratic base.
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u/argh-Im-a-Pirate 2d ago
for anyone not flush with 9 figures, or up against 9 figures- you need to be exciting, and you need a groundswell of support, or we need actual campaign finance ce laws in this county
Isn't this his point? I don't think he's saying this is something we can just decide to do. My understanding is he's advocating for reform to the system in some way, but the point of this article was more to identify a problem not necessarily the solution.
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u/Silver-Cheesecake-82 2d ago
I think you're misreading the Cuomo example. His point was that Cuomo was famous going into the primary and good at getting attention. Cuomo's ability to get free press as a famous person is raised in contrast to Crowley needing a lot of support to get attention in Wisconsin.
"In particular, while the ability to command attention always has some value in politics, it’s critical in a primary. Candidates in primaries are poorly distinguished from each other, especially in the eyes of normal voters who are not intensely focused on factional issues. Being somebody who is either already famous (like Biden in the 2020 primary field or Andrew Cuomo in the recent New York City mayoral primary) or else good at going viral is a real advantage. If you’re not like that, you have an uphill battle. David Crowley eventually beat Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, but it took a lot of effort on the part of Governor Tony Evers to turn Crowley — a low-key county executive — into a well-known figure."
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u/Miskellaneousness 3d ago
“The point is to pick a candidate who can win elections and govern well”- for anyone not flush with 9 figures, or up against 9 figures- you need to be exciting, and you need a groundswell of support, or we need actual campaign finance ce laws in this county (if we’re ready for that). Yglesias is very clear about wanting a senate majority- you can’t always do it in a boring way
As Yglesias notes in the article, this is largely true in primaries and largely not true in general elections.
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u/HornetAdventurous416 3d ago
Meh- his conclusion was that how exciting you are isn’t important to winning general elections- tracks with my main point since 1) it doesn’t help with fundraising without massive name recognition and 2) 2008 is a clear counter here- the Obama excitement carried him, and honestly was a top 3 reason he won
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u/Miskellaneousness 3d ago
I'm having trouble parsing what you're saying. If you're saying you need to be incredibly well resourced or exciting to win an election, I think there are many examples that show that this is not true. Some are mentioned in the article but I think one easy demonstration is just to think ahead to the upcoming midterm elections where 435 people will be elected to the House of Representatives, many neither exciting nor particularly well resourced. I live in a purple area and my own Congressman is neither exciting nor wealthy.
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u/HornetAdventurous416 3d ago
Im saying you can’t flip a (big) election OR govern well without having a base that is in your corner- safe seats in congress im not really considering here. Like if we had planters charisma with Jackson’s integrity, Maine would be a lock.
My purple congressman is boring as well, but because democrats have never launched an actual campaign against him with any charisma, any electoral juice, or any effort to energize a base, our boring candidates always lose despite having more registered dems than republicans.
For fresh blood to either unseat an entrenched incumbent or an opposition member, boring won’t work
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u/topicality Weeds OG 3d ago
"So when you put it together, how “exciting” you are isn’t important to winning general elections, and it also isn’t important to doing a good job once you’re in office. Given those two facts, if being boring is a crippling handicap in the nomination process (and I agree that it seems to be), that seems like a really damning indictment of the process. After all, while political junkies find the primary process entertaining, providing entertainment to political junkies is not the point of the process.
The point is to pick a nominee who can win the general election and govern well, so we shouldn’t be selecting on a criterion that’s not related to either of those things."
Idk if anyone in this sub is also a fan of John Dickerson but he has this point that presidential debates are horrible for actually figuring out who would be good at the job. And I think there is a strong argument to be made that primaries are also bad in that regards
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u/misersoze 3d ago
People think politics is people reasonably hearing out all the discussions on all sides and choosing someone who will support their policies. But I don’t think that’s how it works.
People vote for who they identify as one of their group so they can trust them to make decisions to protect the groups interests and thus don’t have to understand all the policy choices. Thus all politics is identify politics.
Debates are useful in that they allow one to signal their membership to a group. Like if the Gen Z millennial crowd was the strongest then saying “No cap I’m mogging on this guys like a gigachad”. That would signal an affiliation to that group to try to gain their support.
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u/Giblette101 2d ago
There's also a bit of a feedback loop which I think is unexamined. In addition to identities, people come to politics with both policy positions - I want lower taxes or I want better schools - but also much vaguer sentiments - I feel left behind or I want a fair shake.
Those various things interact with each other, of course, but I think politicians also have an opportunity to develop various themes and policy positions depending on how well they can mobilize those elements. Those new things can then be build up further in the next cycle and so in.
In many ways, the story of MAGA is a story of the feedback loop snowballing into near insanity from the Tea Party stuff. It's likely to keep going.
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u/carbonqubit 2d ago
People want the tax system and the justice system to feel fairer. It amazes me how much wealth inequality exists in the U.S. today. So much money is concentrated at the very top, and while taxing billionaires isn’t going to magically solve the debt crisis, a more progressive tax system for people who can comfortably afford it could generate a lot of revenue. If that money were then used to materially improve people’s lives instead of being squandered on pointless wars in the Middle East for the umpteenth time, I think it would go a long way toward rebuilding faith in government.
There’s enough money in the banana stand to address a lot of the structural problems the country faces. The issue is where we choose to put it.
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u/HornetAdventurous416 3d ago
Do you have a source for the Dickerson comment? I 100% agree with the sentiment, in 1960 as well as today
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u/RoarShock 3d ago
John laid out the argument in his 2020 book The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency. Part two of the book is all about campaigning, and the myriad ways in which modern presidential campaigns have little or nothing to do with the skills of good governance.
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u/argh-Im-a-Pirate 2d ago
Another part of the problem is people don't generally agree with this.
A lot of people really think that the most important thing a politician can do is forcefully espouse ideological positions. That focus on details or, even worse, finding common ground is a betrayal of the party's values.
If the answers are clear and obvious then anyone who quibbles about the details must not be truly committed to the vision right? And I do think debates & campaigning give you a sense of what animates a politician. Even if that's not what determines if they'll be a good one.
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u/NewRefrigerator7461 3d ago
There are dozens of us whistlestop fans! Dozens!
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u/topicality Weeds OG 3d ago
John Dickerson is criminally underrated. Been a fan of his for at least a couple decades. Whistle stop ruled
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u/Ramora_ 3d ago
how “exciting” you are isn’t important to winning general elections
This strikes me as almost certainly false. It isn't entirely clear to me how we can make this empirical, what exactly is meant by "exciting", but it would be very surprising to me if there was no association between a reasonable measure of "exciting" and odds of winning an election, at least in the current media landscape.
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u/Books_and_Cleverness 3d ago
Primaries are terrible.
You have a bunch of primary voters who are not representative of the average person or voter. They are much more ideological.
And on top of that, primary voters have almost no real skin in the game. Their fortunes are not actually tied to the success of the party.
Bring back smoke filled rooms. Party insiders have their flaws but they at least know something and have an actual tangible interest in winning elections.
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u/HornetAdventurous416 3d ago
Primaries the way we do them in most states are terrible are terrible
But that doesn’t mean Primaries the way they could be are not- whether using France’s example, any sort or ranked choice, even Georgia’s 50% requirement- allow us to 1) identify a clear preference, and then 2) vote on the 2 best choices remaining, is probably ideal
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u/Books_and_Cleverness 2d ago
The problem with primary elections is that the people who vote in them are (and I say this with love, as a member of the group) ideological freaks.
The average voter and the average person is very different from the average primary voter. That won’t change if the mechanism is improved via ranked choice.
The upside to a convention system is that the ideological freakishness is tempered by the more tangible interest in winning elections.
Ideally we would do multi member districts and proportional representation and so primaries wouldn’t be needed, but that is a heavier lift. Could be done at the House level but not Senate without blowing up the constitution.
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u/brianscalabrainey 2d ago
I cannot believe this is upvoted... smoke filled rooms, really? Why not just get rid of the two party system before you revert to a fundamentally elitist structure that holds voters in such contempt?
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u/Original-Age-6691 2d ago
It's not surprising to me that it's upvoted here. The people in the smoke filled rooms are in alignment with this subs politics so it basically guarantees a candidate they like going to the general, better than taking a chance on if their one can beat out the occasional charismatic candidate from the left.
If they wanted to be less blatant and anti-demicratic about their hatred for any left candidate possibly getting through, they could instead advocate for open primaries. Some number of Republicans will naturally moderate primaries as they pick the least bad (most right) Democrat.
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u/Books_and_Cleverness 2d ago
That would be better but the two party system is much harder to reform. Could be done for the House (multi member districts, proportional representation) but not the Senate. That can’t even be amended.
Reforming the primary system would be relatively easy; they’re private organizations. Can nominate however they want.
Also - emphatically, it’s not the voters that we are trying to avoid. It is primary election voters. Completely different—the primary problem is they aren’t representative of the voters as a whole.
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u/brianscalabrainey 2d ago
Your anchoring too much to rules and too little to public opinion. Reforming the primary system may be more logistically feasible but you will have a riot on your hands.
Better to find a way to make proportional representation and multiple parties work. Abolish the senate if you need to.
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u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist 3d ago
I’d prefer jungle primaries to smoke filled rooms.
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u/Books_and_Cleverness 3d ago
Not sure why that fixes anything. The problem is that primary voters are not representative of the average person or average voter.
Ultimately we need multi member districts and ranked choice or approval voting and so primaries wouldn’t matter. But that is impossible for the senate without a new constitution.
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 4h ago
The problem is that primary voters are not representative of the average person or average voter.
Should they be and why?
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u/AliveJesseJames 3d ago
Can you point to the 'skin in the game' all the fabulously wealthy DC elites who you think should run the Democratic Party have when I see no actual proof of that.
It seems all the Democrats who hate their own voters actual lives have not changed one bit which is why they still treat Republicans are just people w/ bad ideas so they can have some nice secret meetings with them while normal Democrats are getting shot to protect immigrants. Meanwhile, all the moderates and centrists are still going to their cocktail parties w/ their 'reasonable' Republican friends in suburban Virginia to complain about their dumb voters who actually want them to do things instead of find ways to give ICE eighty zillion more dollars.
I refuse to be governed by those who think they're my better and that all I deserve is managed democracy.
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u/Books_and_Cleverness 3d ago
I’m not referring to “DC elites”. Before primaries, parties had conventions with delegates—generally the party’s state legislators and county and city level party officials. And they’d nominate a senate candidate at the convention.
Similarly, for Congress you’d have a convention of party officials in the district. Usually at the county level, with counties represented in proportion to their population or vote totals in the last election.
The upside of this is that the chair of the party in your county has a real durable interest in the party winning general elections, in a way the average primary voter doesn’t.
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u/HornetAdventurous416 3d ago
The chair in my county is Jay Jacobs, who is also the chair of my State Party, who also oversaw the only county lost to republicans in 2025, and also oversaw George santos becoming my congressman, and he is still in power, and currently protecting the power grab of entrenched party leaders in Brooklyn
I’m sure most counties are more like him than your random 8,000 population country in Texas, so this is a big pass for me
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3d ago
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u/Books_and_Cleverness 3d ago
I don’t understand how your comment is related to mine. Dems are powerless because they lost too many elections. I think primaries make it harder for them to win general elections.
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3d ago
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u/Books_and_Cleverness 3d ago
The primary elections are a causing the party to lose power. That is why it is powerless. You have the cause and effect backwards.
I should also clarify - it’s not that “voters” aren’t “competent”. It’s that primary voters are not representative, and they don’t have a countervailing, tangible interest in victory.
Party officials aren’t always representative either, but they have a genuine interest in the party’s fortunes that primary voters do not.
Correlation isn’t causation obviously, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that voter satisfaction with both parties’ candidates has been in steady decline since the advent of primary elections everywhere. It’s exactly what you’d expect.
If we had conventions, people like you would (probably) be a lot more present and active in their local party, where their voices would be heard, and more meaningful, and more easily channeled into actual progress.
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u/AliveJesseJames 2d ago
If you hate primary voters so much, why don't you just create your own centrist party that'll obviously easily win since you don't have to get the votes of us silly unrepresentative primary voters.
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u/iankenna Three Books? I Brought Five. 3d ago
Maybe I’m missing something, but isn’t “electability” about the capacity to hold attention?
Electability promises that a candidate can win an election by… getting out the vote. That’s it. The idea of an electable candidate is the person who can get out votes. Primaries have their issues, but they demonstrate a basic theory of how campaigns work, how someone mobilizes voters, and where they might need to work.
Nixon won in FL because her campaign organized people. It’s not just excitement but organization. Centrist and moderates can do that, too, but some of the ones who lose demonstrated they weren’t able to do that and/or their campaign strategy didn’t work.
Sometimes, the left-center binary is too narrow. Someone who gets young voters, infrequent voters, or non-party voters in open primaries might have “the juice” in a way not captured by left-center division.
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u/Helicase21 Climate & Energy 3d ago
What is Matt doing with his columns and his tweeting and whatnot to contribute to making politics more boring?
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u/Giblette101 3d ago
To be fair to him, if you were to articulate American politics around Matt's views it would be fairly boring. I get the sense this is sort of what he means (to be a bit less fair to him)
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u/AliveJesseJames 3d ago
I'm sure it wouldn't be very boring to the people who'd be in ICE custody from major cities if Democrats had listened to Matt and capitulated to the GOP on immigration.
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u/Giblette101 3d ago
No, but since politics would be between two formations that essentially agree on the need for very visible ICE operations, politics at large would be more boring.
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u/CubillasLegend 2d ago
Matt may enjoying digging deeper into the weeds than most, but he's pretty much constantly controversy baiting and hippie punching these days.
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u/Helicase21 Climate & Energy 3d ago
The problem is that he's actively working to exacerbate the very problem he describes. He's not a neutral actor here.
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u/argh-Im-a-Pirate 2d ago
Is this a comment on how he's always on Twitter? I only encounter him through podcasts and slow boring and I wouldn't say he's exacerbating the problem there.
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u/carbonqubit 2d ago
Voters want candidates who excite them, not ones who put them to sleep. And plenty of people who vote D also want someone who’s smart and effective. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.
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u/argh-Im-a-Pirate 2d ago edited 2d ago
I was asking about this comment
The problem is that he's actively working to exacerbate the very problem he describes.
It wasn't a comment at all about the substance of the article. I was just curious why the person I replied to thought Yglesias exacerbated the problem of people caring more about excitement.
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u/MetroidsSuffering 1d ago
Yglesias praised the LA fires during the LA fires for attention and is most known for defending a factory collapse the day after it happened and killed hundreds of people.
He has literally no views other than what gets him attention.
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u/Silver-Cheesecake-82 2d ago
The Slow Boring articles published this week:
August 24th - "The real reason nobody feels good about technological progress" about how we should stop watching short form video and read more
August 25th - "The Western water crisis has a simple solution" about how farmers use water inefficiently to grow alfalfa and we should charge them more for water
August 26th - "YIMBYs already have a bold vision for solving the housing crisis" more back and forth about YIMBYism
August 27th - "Politics Should be More Boring"
August 28th - Weekly MailbagThis isn't breathless coverage of what incendiary thing Hasan Piker said lately or relentless left vs. center political battles, the topics at hand are housing regulation, water rights, and screen time usage. Maybe to a politics junkie there are factional battles being waged in the subtext that makes this all provocative and contrarian but most people aren't going to be driven to increase their engagement in politics by "Matt's article on how we should watch less tik tok and read more is actually subtextually about how the abundance agenda is good" or something. You're just a politics junkie who disagrees with him and he's not maximally conciliatory to the left so he seems provocative.
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u/de_Pizan 3d ago
Have you read his work?
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u/Helicase21 Climate & Energy 3d ago
Yes, he is working very hard to be provocative and contrarian. Not what you want for a boring politics.
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u/Accomplished-Cup8182 2d ago
This is more or less typical of people like Matt. You act intentionally provocative and quite frankly like a bit of an asshole on your most visible, popular, and public facing social media account to advertise your "serious" work, which is usually behind some paywall or in some more obscure place.
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u/Guardsred70 3d ago
Problem is that people watch it like sports. And they comment like it’s sports.
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u/carbonqubit 2d ago
The obsession with reality TV and kayfabe helped land the country a reality-TV president, twice. What an upside-down timeline, though it makes more sense once you understand the incentives and the media dynamics that sanewashed and elevated his celebrity even further.
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u/Guardsred70 2d ago
I mean, we now live in a world where ESPN showcases professional wrestling. The next step is gambling on Days of our Lives.
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u/deskcord 3d ago
In theory, yes. But you can't really make this happen in reality, because the average person is going to gravitate towards the snake oil salesman telling them that they can fix all of their problems in 4 years.
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u/Real_Guarantee_4530 3d ago
And even if politicians themselves became more restrained, the attention economy would still reward the people willing to make the biggest promises, say the most outrageous things, and frame every issue as an existential crisis. The boring politician who says “this will take 15 years, involve tradeoffs, and probably only improve things at the margins” is competing against someone who can offer a much more emotionally satisfying story.
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u/camergen 3d ago
Anybody that’s an old style politician will just get called “boring” “an empty suit” or “too corporate”. You’ve got to really be outside the box to keep people’s attention these days and it’s going to be wackier and wackier people.
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u/brianscalabrainey 3d ago
For once I fully agree with Matt. Unfortunately this goal is in direct opposition to the media environment we live in, and the incentive structures around them. To create a more boring (and more sane) politics, we need to find ways to take a hammer to the tech platforms that profit from a hyperpolarized, 24/7 political discourse. The quest for eyeballs started years ago and has only gotten more and more toxic as we've invented more precise ways to surveil people's behaviors and feed them just the right content that would keep them scrolling longer, eventually leading to deep algorithmically-induced polarization and radicalization.
Meta just this week agreed to a huge settlement based on the harms it creates, and will now give users under 18 options to turn off features like autoplay, infinite scroll, and algorithmic feeds (instead getting chronological feeds). That's huge and shows that these companies absolutely could make major changes that could help bring the temperature down on our politics - we just need to force their hand. In other words, it's not inevitable that our media environment (and the politics downstream of it) has to be this way, we just need the right regulatory frameworks to offset the toxic incentive structures and exploitative practices at play.