On Occam's Razor

There are a lot of theories floating around about the recent success of progressive candidates this cycle and last night (despite the narrowest victory possible in Wisconsin of a normie Dem). Maybe Americans are economically exhausted and we really are living through brooding resentment in a new Gilded Age, and voters are finally beginning to revolt against the concentration of wealth and power. Maybe Donald Trump has pushed the electorate left by demonstrating what an unconstrained right looks like, and turnabout is fair play. Maybe the Overton window has shifted, making ideas that sounded radical ten years ago like single-payer health care suddenly seem ordinary. There is probably some truth in all of these explanations.

But there is another explanation that requires considerably less intellectual machinery: they have better candidates.

I have been around Democratic political circles long enough now to recognize a peculiar feature of the party. Dems reward seniority, caution, credentials, and being the safe choice. Maybe Republicans are the same way; I honestly don’t know their ecosystem nearly as well. But Democrats have built an enormous professional infrastructure around identifying candidates who look like people who have previously been successful candidates. You served in the state legislature and have the right endorsements, and nobody important dislikes you? Congratulations.

Most importantly, when somebody asks whether you can win an election, one of the first questions is inevitably: How much money can you raise?

I know this because, five or so years ago, I was recruited to run for office by some consultants, and this was indeed the first question I was asked. Leaving aside why I chose not to (family, Vermont would be a difficult path for a moderate, I swear a lot, being a Senator sounds fucking horrible), it felt, even then, like the wrong question. Sure, there was a time when that question was almost synonymous with electability. In the 1980s and 1990s, money bought attention because television was attention. If you wanted to introduce yourself to 500,000 voters, you couldn’t pull out your phone, record yourself talking for three minutes, and potentially reach them before dinner. You had to buy thirty seconds during the local news. Political communication had an enormous tollbooth sitting in the middle of it, and the toll was expensive. A candidate who could raise $10 million could purchase something a candidate with $500,000 simply could not: the ability to be seen.

But that world is gone.

Money still matters, obviously. Campaigns need staff, polling, field operations, lawyers, travel, data, advertising, and all the other machinery required to run a modern election. But money no longer has the monopoly on attention that it once did. Attention can now generate money rather than merely the other way around. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, podcasts, X, Substack, livestreams, and the millions of derivatives of these platforms have radically lowered the cost of political communication. A candidate can upload something from a phone and, if people actually want to watch it, reach an audience that would once have required millions of dollars to purchase.

That is a totally different skill set. If I wanted to get the most money into my campaign, I would reach out to Boomers on Cape Cod. If I wanted to get the most eyeballs on my campaign, I would reach out to Gen Z at the skate park.

For decades, Democrats have behaved as though fundraising ability were a proxy for political talent. But it’s not. The person who can spend four hours in a conference room dialing wealthy donors is demonstrating a real and useful skill, but it is not really what gets you elected now. Nor is assembling the right résumé, accumulating institutional endorsements, or surviving long enough inside the party apparatus to become next in line. Those are skills for succeeding within a political organization, but political organizations do not vote.

Every night, when the demands of the day have been met, and my wife and I want to unwind, we scroll through 10 minutes of reels on Instagram, which is free and hilarious. It’s not like we couldn’t watch paid programming during that time; Instagram is just more fun. Therein lies the dynamic of the Progs versus the normie D’s.

The strange thing is that we have a perfectly good word for the quality that suddenly matters more in the new media environment: charisma. The ability to make people pay attention to you. The ability to explain complicated things simply and to appear comfortable without appearing rehearsed. To be funny. To fight without seeming miserable. To make someone who was not previously interested in politics send a clip to his wife or his brother or the group chat.

Platner, as shitty as he turned out to be, understood this. Hong understood this. El-Sayed understands this. Mamdani understands it.

Normie Dems, for the most part, do not.

This sounds almost embarrassingly obvious, but modern campaigns have spent decades building systems that can obscure it. The Democratic Party is an ecosystem of consultants, fundraisers, pollsters, strategists, communications professionals, opposition researchers, media buyers, and advocacy organizations. I know, because through Civly I am one of them. All of these people can make a candidate better. But none of us can manufacture the quality that causes a stranger to stop scrolling.

The old model could compensate for mediocrity with money. If your candidate was wooden, you could shoot twenty takes, hire an excellent production company, test the message, buy enough television, and put the finished product in front of voters until they knew his name. Now you can’t fake it. Everyone has an iPhone and every second of your day is an unscripted recording studio. If you’re good in that environment, congratulations, you can be the mayor of Gotham.

This is why some progressive candidates outperform expectations without requiring us to conclude that the country has suddenly undergone a massive ideological transformation. Perhaps some of it has. Housing is brutally expensive, and younger Americans have good reasons to question an economic system in which asset ownership has produced extraordinary wealth for one generation while the price of admission keeps rising for the next. Trump has undoubtedly changed the ideological landscape. The Overton window really has moved.

But Occam’s razor should at least make us consider the simpler possibility: voters like candidates with rizz.

Democrats, being Democrats, will learn the wrong lesson from these electoral victories. If a charismatic progressive wins, the institutional instinct will be to study the platform and reproduce it. Which policy positions did she take? Which interest groups endorsed him? What percentage did he support increasing the marginal tax rate? An entire industry will emerge to explain the ideological formula, and it will be incorrect.

Politics is full of this mistake. Barack Obama’s success produced endless attempts to reproduce the Obama coalition, the Obama digital strategy, the Obama messaging architecture, and the Obama policy mix. Sure. But Democrats sometimes seemed reluctant to acknowledge the most obvious variable: Barack Obama was an unusually gifted politician. Bill Clinton was too. Ronald Reagan was. Donald Trump, whatever else one thinks of him, possesses an extraordinary instinct for commanding attention. You cannot reproduce that by copying the bullet points from somebody’s platform.

The institutional candidate is optimized to avoid mistakes, yet the internet rewards novelty. The institutional candidate learns to speak in carefully tested language, but the internet rewards authenticity, or at least the appearance of it. The institutional candidate is taught never to say anything that might become a negative advertisement. The compelling candidate says something interesting enough that people voluntarily distribute it. One system rewards risk minimization. The other rewards being worth watching.

This doesn’t mean Democrats should simply nominate the loudest person with a TikTok account. But enough voters, forever, have walked into that voting booth and, before any other thought crosses their mind about the affairs of the polis, fill in the circle next to the name of the man or woman that, at the end of the day, they kind of like.

That should be incredibly good news for political parties willing to adapt to it. It means the next great candidate does not necessarily need to have spent fifteen years accumulating favors or cultivating a Rolodex of wealthy donors. You don’t need to be a risk-averse wimp. A few months back, I had a candidate for a statewide office up here in Vermont tell me she hadn’t attended a large protest against ICE because it might make her appeal too radical and donors wouldn’t like it. This was an ICE protest in Vermont. In Burlington, Vermont.

If that’s not a safe space for a political candidate to earn some free media, I dunno what is. But that’s the kind of boring, stiff-as-a-board candidate that the Democratic machine enables.

So in parsing the results of last night, before Democrats construct another elaborate theory of the electorate, they might consider the simplest one: find some candidates who don’t suck.