Much of the progressive agenda was rejected across America yesterday, but a few progressive causes prevailed here in blue-state Massachusetts, via referendum approval of dropping the MCAS graduation requirement (Question 2) and allowing Uber and Lyft drivers to unionize (Question 3). But it wasn’t a clean progressive sweep: voters rejected the partial legalization of psychedelics (Question 4) and changing the current restaurant tipping-pay structure (Question 5). … Btw: Approval of Question 1, which allows the auditing of the legislature, was definitely a bi-partisan affair, winning more than 70 percent of the vote.
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Oops. … Kamala Harris, loser
I sure got that one wrong. No huge last-minute female surge for Harris. Trump simply outperformed her on so many key levels. … I agree with Dan Kennedy: Win or lose, Harris performed magnificently as a candidate. Just not magnificently enough. … What really hurt Democrats was Democrats. I’ll have more on this later. But let me just say: Democrats have a lot of soul searching to do in coming weeks, months and years. They’re out of touch with huge swaths of the American electorate, particularly working-class, rural and non-college-educated people in general. Dems need to find a way to connect to them – economically and socially – and distance themselves from some of the radical positions of the academic left. What Dems don’t need is to act and sound like they haven’t learned anything.
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Prediction time: Kamala Harris, winner
Maybe it’s a case of wishful thinking, but my hunch is Kamala Harris is going to pull this one out today. Donald Trump outperformed the polls in 2016 and 2020 – and he may yet do it again this year. But I think women are going to put Harris over the top, as suggested by the recent Selzer/Iowa poll. Latino anger over third-rate comic Tony Hinchcliffe’s first-rate racist comments could also help Harris, or so I hope. .…
Update – 11-5-24 – I liked these lines in a NYT piece on what could happen today and this week: “If Kamala Harris wins big, we should have seen it coming all along. … If Mr. Trump wins big, we should have seen it coming all along.”
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Kristaps who?
Down two starters – Kristaps and Jaylen – and the defending champs still find a way to win. … In particular, it’s remarkable how little people are talking about Kristaps’s absence. … This team is just fun to watch. They have so much talent and depth.
Update – 11-5-24 – Ho-hum. Another day, another Celts win, this time by 30 points, and without Jaylen and Kristaps again.
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NYT: Identity politics, RIP
And good riddance. … The excesses of progressives’ identity politics and political correctness are the main reasons why Democrats aren’t a majority party today. …
BTW: Nate Cohn has a separate take on why Dems can’t shake Donald Trump.
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Et tu, Fall River?
Ben Berke at WBUR explains why Fall River has gone Trump. It’s that working-class thing again. … And that Portuguese thing, too.
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Harvard’s internal emails after Oct. 7 prove one thing: Administrators are more than capable of wasting time and energy
The NYT reports on internal emails that show Harvard leaders grappling with how to respond to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. … The obvious question: Why did they feel compelled to respond to events at all? They acted as if the entire world was waiting for their moral pronouncements, etc. … Mercifully, Harvard has since decided to no longer take stands on issues outside the university’s immediate interests.
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‘The courage to act’
The best political email of the week, via a friend: “The Yankees can still win the World Series if the scoreboard operator has the courage to act.”
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Bernie Sanders: Identifying the problem, not necessarily the cause or solution
I’m no admirer of Bernie’s socialist pedigree. But I do agree with him about the plight of today’s working-class in America and why so many of them are turning to Donald Trump …
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Here’s a tip: Tipping isn’t so bad; vote ‘no’ on Question 5
Here’s an example of how not to help the working-class: Question 5, which would raise the pay of tipped workers to $15 an hour. Similar to the views of the Globe’s Shirley Leung, I’m a ‘no’ vote on Question 5 because I question whether A.) referendum voters can and should be determining the pay of workers in specific industries and B.) whether restaurant workers really want this. …
Re voters deciding how much to pay workers: It’s similar to the nurse staffing referendum a few years back. How the heck is the average voter supposed to know how many nurses should be on a typical hospital shift? It’s a ridiculous question to ask voters. … Re whether restaurants workers really want a change: Working in restaurants is one of the last truly egalitarian jobs in America. Whether college-educated or not, it’s almost a rite of passage for young people to work in a restaurant. And one of the reasons why this strange and distinctly American payment system works is because there’s the incentive of potentially big paydays for tipped workers.
Update — From a reader: “RE your restaurant post – Eli Feldman is GM of Shy Bird (Kendall Square, South Boston) and Branch Line (Watertown) – writes a great Substack, go-to on restaurant economics but many other related ideas. He had a great summary of Question 5 earlier this month: One Bad Idea.
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