The Democrats' new sunny vibes

Suddenly, the country has an opportunity to leave the madness of the 2010s behind.

"Sunrise in Minneapolis" by Groveland Media, CC0 1.0

Three weeks ago, as Donald Trump took a clear lead in the presidential race, Tyler Cowen wrote a post enumerating nineteen reasons why the “vibes” of the race had shifted. Some of the reasons included Trump’s personal sense of humor and confident attitude, his team’s mastery of social media, the intellectual vitality of the Trumpian Right, and popular backlashes against wokeness, immigration, higher education, the intellectual class, and various progressive cultural movements.

I would appreciate an update to this post, enumerating the reasons why the vibes appear to have shifted once more. In the last two weeks, Kamala Harris, the new Democratic nominee, has surged in the polls, making huge gains with independents. Nate Silver’s election forecasts have the race tied up. Betting markets also call it a toss-up, with PredictIt even calling Harris a slight favorite:

Source: PredictIt

Trump still has a good shot at returning to power in a few months, but he’s no longer anywhere close to the shoo-in he looked like three weeks ago.

I can’t tell you why the vibes have shifted toward the Democrats. My best guess is that Joe Biden was just very old, and that now that a younger nominee has taken his place, people feel more comfortable voting for the Dems. As for the assassination attempt on Trump, it appears to have been quickly forgotten as soon as the would-be assassin turned out to be a random crazy person instead of a Democratic partisan.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that along with the shift from Biden to Harris has come an abrupt and distinct shift in the Democrats’ tone. Whereas Biden’s messaging was often dark and dire, focusing on the MAGA movement’s threat to democracy, Harris’ has been lighter and more reminiscent of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. Instead of calling Trump a would-be dictator, she has labeled him “weird”. Her campaign is overtly patriotic, draped in American flags. Crowds at her speeches chant “U-S-A! U-S-A!”.

The speech in that particular clip was Harris’ announcement of her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Let’s talk about him for a bit.

Coach Walz and the politics of normality

Walz seems good to me, but I don’t know if he was the best person Kamala could have picked. I also have no idea whether a VP pick actually affects a presidential race or not. But I think the fact that Kamala selected a guy like Walz says a lot about the tone that the Democrats are going for, and what the tenor of American politics could look like after Donald Trump has finally shuffled off the stage.

Walz served in Congress for a long time, and his voting record was decidedly moderate. GovTrack’s analysis of bills Walz sponsored has him toward the center of the ideological spectrum, while Voteview’s analysis of bills he voted for shows the same:

Source: GovTrack

Source: Voteview

Walz is especially good at bringing Democrats together. He immediately received full-throated endorsements from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most progressive Dems, and from Joe Manchin, one of the most conservative.

As governor of Minnesota, Walz has combined a pragmatic, pro-market approach with government support for poor families. Gary Winslett has a good thread hitting some of the highlights:

I’m a self-identified pro-market moderate and I’m a big fan of this pick…He signed the country’s most comprehensive Right-to-Repair law. These laws give consumers over where and how to repair their purchases (i.e. *their property*), reduce barriers to market entry, and promote competition and innovation…He’s proud of the state attracting business. This is not a “billionaire tears”, anti-business, harangue-on-capital kind of guy, at least not as far as I can tell…He signed a $100 million tax cut that also simplified the tax-filing system in Minnesota. And he brags about tax cutting as part of his accomplishments…He has signed green energy permitting reform, supported refugee resettlement, banned noncompete agreements that curtail workers’ economic liberty, and has strongly supported workforce development which helps businesses and workers…Where he most leans toward expanding the state, it’s in areas like universal school lunches, more pre-K provision, and paid family leave[.]

Most importantly, in my view, Walz is in favor of making it easier to build things. This is America’s most important economic issue, and Walz is clearly on the right side here. Alec Stapp of the Institute for Progress calls him a “permitting reform champion”:

Semafor has more:

In 2023, Walz signed into law a target for Minnesota to get 100% of its power from zero-carbon sources, including nuclear, by 2040, and coal has fallen behind renewables and nuclear as the state’s top sources of power for the first time during his tenure. He set aside $2 billion in grants for clean energy projects in the state, a move likened to a local version of the federal Inflation Reduction Act. And in June, he signed legislation aimed at shaving a full year off the time it takes to get permits to build energy and grid transmission projects. Earlier, as a member of Congress, he voted in favor of carbon-pricing legislation and pitched it to skeptical constituents in Minnesota as a new way to squeeze profit out of farmland.

Yet Walz has also shown a willingness to engage with the fossil fuel industry, including by approving the controversial Line 3 oil pipeline and supporting a hydrogen production project backed by Marathon Petroleum and the pipeline company TC Energy.

Walz is very much in favor of nuclear energy, in a state where that has traditionally been a very unpopular stance. He has pushed hard to repeal Minnesota’s ban on nuclear.

Meanwhile, Walz is something of a YIMBY hero, for his efforts to make it easier for Minnesota to build housing:

As for Walz’s economic progressivism, it’s all about helping the poor instead of soaking the rich. Instead of punitive taxation, he actually cut taxes. He focuses on compassionate but pragmatic measures like free school lunches, which have been shown to have all kinds of positive effects — higher test scores, fewer behavioral problems, less child abuse, etc. — in addition to making kids less hungry.

Culturally, everything about Walz is Middle American and middle-class. He spent 24 years in the Army National Guard, and in fact is the highest-ranking enlisted soldier to ever serve in Congress. He was a successful high school football coach — in fact, Kamala Harris refers to him as “Coach Walz”. He’s a hunting enthusiast who poses with guns.

None of this means that Walz will appeal to conservatives, of course. He’s a very “woke” progressive — he talks about his “White privilege”, created a DEI council that labeled America “systemically racist”, supports gender reassignment surgery for children, and did a bunch of police reform stuff in the wake of the George Floyd protests. He’s emblematic of the way that wokeness has become a sort of post-Protestant middle-American orthodoxy.

But Walz’ messaging has none of the anger and accusatory bitterness that often characterizes woke discourse. He’s constantly cheerful, avuncular, and patriotic:

When he thanked Harris for choosing him for VP, he thanked her for “bringing back the joy”. It was Walz who first started calling the Trump campaign “weird”. And here’s what Joe Manchin said about Walz:

My friend Governor Tim Walz will bring normality back to the most chaotic political environment that most of us have ever seen. All of the candidates were strong and any one of them would have been a great pick, but I can think of no one better than Governor Walz to help bring our country closer together and bring balance back to the Democratic Party. Governor Walz is the real deal. I look forward to continuing to work with him to bring normalcy back to Washington.

“Normality” and “normalcy”. Those are words that many Americans are desperate to hear after a decade of social media screaming, street battles, riots, protests, coup attempts, domestic terrorism, mass shootings, and assassination attempts.

Kamala’s embrace of Walz thus signals Democrats’ yearning to return to a calmer, less apocalyptic, less bitter kind of American politics.

This doesn’t seem like empty rhetoric, either. Extremist Democrats are being defeated in primaries around the country, and Kamala has abandoned extreme ideas like a fracking ban and a federal job guarantee.

When do we get “Morning in America”?

Democrats might be ready to return to “normalcy”, but the Republican Party isn’t ready for that yet, for one simple reason: It’s still dominated by Donald Trump. As Walz was accepting his VP candidacy with cheerfulness and grace, here was what Trump was posting:

Is this the sense of humor that Tyler was talking about? Does anyone actually find this funny? Do Trump supporters really want four more years of this stuff dominating our social media feeds and our national discourse, day in and day out?

Meanwhile, even as progressives were celebrating Walz’ pragmatic policy record and avuncular vibe, right-wing online activists continued to turn the anger up to 11. Some of them ridiculed Walz’ (very normal-looking) family. Others posted dark apocalyptic stuff like this:

Does anyone actually think anything like this is going to happen? Or did the 2010s just make a lot of Americans so used to this sort of histrionic babble that it became commonplace and unremarkable? How does anyone not read this stuff and think “This is deeply weird”?

I realize there are progressives out there shouting apocalyptic warnings about Project 2025, Trump as a fascist dictator, and so on. I realize there is a leftist fringe who is still ready to burn down America over Gaza. But crucially, none of those people is in charge of the Democratic Party right now. The messaging coming from the Harris-Walz campaign has pivoted away from the rhetoric of civil conflict and toward the sort of calm, patriotic cheerfulness that typified the presidencies of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

The fact that the Trump-dominated GOP hasn’t followed suit just means that this election will be a referendum on whether Americans are more interested in normalization or four more years of rage.

Certainly, America’s actual situation seems ripe for a calmer age. The economy is still doing fine. Wages are growing, wealth is up, wage inequality is falling, inflation is back down and quickly fading into memory. The violent crime wave is over.

So when do we get back to “Morning in America”? Reagan’s famous ad — which has become the popular symbol of a country at rest — came out in 1984, when economic conditions and crime were far worse than they are in the America of 2024. But by then it had been over a decade since the unrest of the early 1970s petered out. In contrast, if the 2020s really are the new 1970s, we’re only up to 1976.

Thus, my pessimistic prediction is that we’ll probably have to wait at least another four years for the country to decide that the era of mass bitterness and insanity that was the 2010s is well and truly over. But thanks to the Democrats’ pivot to “normality” and positive vibes, I now think that electoral politics has an opportunity to help this process along. If Trump goes down to defeat this November, it will send a strong signal that Americans want to leave the 2010s in the past where they belong.

I don’t agree with everything Harris and Walz say and do. I certainly don’t agree with everything the progressive movement wants to do. In fact, I think progressivism has generally overreached, and America is headed for a more conservative decade no matter who wins in November. But I think that leaving Trump behind would do this country and its politics a whole world of good. Let’s move on to the next thing.

Update: Tyler has written an update to his post about vibes. Thanks, Tyler! Here’s what he writes:

I don’t think the vibes have shifted back at all, and here is my earlier post.  To cite one key point, MZ referred to Trump being “bad ass,” and it still has not created anything close to a scandal.  This new world is here to stay, and this kind of toleration is likely to be extended further.

Part of the ongoing shift in vibes is that now the Democrats are trying to win with a “brat” and “vibes only” strategy, and no real policy positions.  That is a sign that they too recognize the vibes have shifted.  So far Harris has been resisting most of the pressure from the Left.  And Walz’s Congressional voting record was to the right of 70% of the Democrats.  His recent big speech often felt like Frank Capra.  I also predict that his more extreme actions as Governor will not be emphasized, to say the least.

Noah has a very good post on the new vibes of the Democrats, and I agree with his major points.  Note that Cori Bush just became the second Squad member to be ousted in a Democratic primary.

It was never about who would win the election, as most economic theories predict this should be close to 50-50.  Rather, ideology has changed, voters are (mostly) fed up with Left positions, and of course they are fed up with a bunch of right-wing positions too (note that Vance is not popular and Trump is disavowing the 2025 agenda).

Once you realize that none of this is about “which party wins,” it is obvious that the vibe shift is continuing, not being reversed.

I think what Tyler is basically saying here is that America is headed for a more conservative era, Trump or no Trump. And I agree with that. Tyler thinks that the Democrats’ new sunny, cheerful, “normal” vibes are a response to this underlying conservative shift. And I think he’s partly right about that — the efflorescence of wokeness in 2014-2020 was just as much a creature of that decade as Trump was, and Americans want to leave much of that behind. As I wrote last week, Democrats calling Trump and MAGA “weird” is also an implicit promise to be less weird themselves. And I think this is what Tyler is getting at.

At the same time, though, I think Tyler’s initial post overstated Trump’s personal appeal. The idea that the people of America see him as this cocky funny “winner” type hero, rather than an elderly revenge-obsessed social media addict, feels inaccurate — sure, the former is how his followers see him, but the latter is how a whole lot of normies see him. And this, I think, is what allowed Democrats to shift the vibes back in their direction just by acting normal.

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