You may have noticed that in recent weeks, the Biden administration has been rolling out a hell of a lot of new regulations. Earlier this month it was big student loan reforms and a massive improvement in how public lands are managed, then this week we had better pay and working conditions for working Americans, minimum staffing ratios for nursing homes, and even improved service on airlines.
That’s not only because it’s an election year, though Joe & Kamala certainly do like to point out that where the Other Guy rages (and wants to raise inflation!) they’ve been busy making Americans’ lives better. But the bigger reason is that the administration wants to get new rules finalized prior to May, to keep them from being tossed out in the next Congress via the Congressional Review Act, which Donald Trump and his cronies used to reverse a bunch of Barack Obama’s environmental regulations.
. . . The requirement that coal plants find a way to eliminate 90 percent of their emissions by 2032 effectively accelerates the end of coal for power generation, which was inevitable anyway. Roughly 70 percent of US coal plants have already closed, and last year, coal generated only 16 percent of electric power, a new record low. In addition to the emissions rule, three other final rules also impose strict new limits on mercury, coal ash, and pollution of wastewater, to put an end to the environmental degradation caused by coal.
. . . The other option, obviously, would be for utilities to meet coming demand with renewables, as administration officials pointed out when previewing the new rule. Thanks to the IRA’s hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives, carbon-free power generation, including battery storage, already beats the cost of building new gas plants. Going forward, the administration is confident renewables will be the far more cost-effective and reliable way to meet increasing demand by 2032, when the emissions limits fully kick in.
Speaking of direct contradiction, this statement directly contradicts your weird idea that there’s really no difference between right wing and left wing populist voters. Have you been hiding under a rock since 2008? Yes I agree, in the late 90s/early 2000s the gap between right and left was narrowing, but since the tea party Qanon phenomenon right wingers have gone off the deep end.
What are you smoking? That’s not true at all. Moderates win. A lot. Red and blue.
That’s going a lot further than I said. There are definitely left wing and right wing populists (i.e. Bernie and Trump) but most Americans aren’t policy wonks and don’t care a bit about left vs right political philosophy. These aren’t centrists because they aren’t on the line at all. However, a whole lot of those Americans have begun noticing that their money is somehow being taken by a tiny minority with obscene levels of wealth. These are the people that either sit out elections, or vote for a “reform” candidate. Trump, disingenuous as he is, effectively ran against the political establishment of both parties in 2016, while Hillary ran as a competent manager of the status quo.
What happens when the Democratic party runs after so called centrists with an establishment candidate is that they make right wing populism more attractive than left wing, and that’s where Trump’s base comes from. It’s not unique to America or post 2k politics, it’s how fascism always gets a foothold. It’s all just 1930s Germany all over again. It’s really not a dynamic that is well illustrated by a one dimensional line from left to right. A lot of voters that get categorized as the extreme right are the most conducive to populist left wing politicians. A Bernie Sanders gets a far better response from them than a Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton ever will.
Actually it is true, but I can’t find the study at the moment. It’s specifically about House races, which I do admit are a bit different from the Senate or Presidency. Two seemingly contradictory things are actually true. Progressives do tend to lose in redder districts more than establishment candidates, but they also tend to perform better when measured against typical outcomes for that district. The resolution to that contradiction is that the establishment fiercely fights to keep progressives out of districts that Democrats might win so, the average district progressives run in is more republican than the average district establishment candidates run in. What’s true in almost every race is that progressives do better at outperforming local historical outcomes in almost any district. Whether that gets translated into a better win/loss ratio is dependent on which districts progressives get to run in.
Here are a few of links I did come across when looking for that study. They don’t address it directly, but they do illustrate how the press struggles to map election dynamics to the left-right spectrum.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/12/how-to-turn-red-state-blue-purple-alaska-politics-2018-216304/
https://publicconsultation.org/redblue/new-study-finds-people-in-red-and-blue-districts-largely-agree-on-what-government-should-do/
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/05/09/purple-districts-elect-most-extreme-legislators-driving-polarization