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Vibes Matter More Than Policy [1]

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Date: 2025-07-16

Last week there was a kerfuffle (still the greatest word in the English language. Fight me) on Bluesky over Mamdani’s plan to make all buses in NYC free. I won’t get into the details, but I do want to highlight something that I think explains why Mamdani is successful, and the Cuomo’s of the world are failures.

One of the interesting things about the bus fare vs spend the cash elsewhere debate was just how generally supportive of Mamdani the people arguing all seemed to be. Even the harshest critics were generally supportive of his goals even if they argued over his methods. I suspect that is because Mamdani is campaigning on a set of vibes, not a set of policy positions. Yes, he has well thought out policy positions, and yes, he talks about them. But he uses them as a supporting argument to his vibes, not as his campaign.

Mamdani clearly cares about or at least gives the impression that he cares about for those too cynical to understand that people actually do care about things, even politicians, the cost of living. As a result, people understand that his bus fare proposal as merely an indicator of his desire to make commuting in the city cheaper and more reliable. He has staked out not a position, but a vibe — vote for me, and I will never stop working to figure out how to make your life easier and less expensive. So even when people have nits to pick over his proposals, they are understood as nits rather than attacks on the candidacy. When you run, instead, on a specific proposal, then weakening that proposal weakens your candidacy.

I suspect this is why moderates do so much damage to the electoral prospects of the Democratic party. It is not the moderate policies. Everyone is a mix of radical and moderate policies. I would completely redo the Constitutional order to make it more democratically responsive and abolish ICE — any limited enforcement needed can be done by a better trained, less morally reprehensible agency. On the other hand, I am leery of sweeping rules around trans sports and domestic violence shelters, preferring to let the people on the groundwork out the best ways to deal with potentially difficult situations. No one is all one thing or the other, and no one is completely right about everything. But I am completely opposed to every anti-trans right politician and organization, because I believe that people should be free to be who they want and that everyone should have the same right to pursue happiness as everyone else. The anti-trans people clearly do not, so no policy of theirs is going to convince me to join them. That is what moderates miss.

Senator Manchin almost certainly cost the Democrats the White House. He personally killed the COVID social safety net that people had come to rely on and enjoy because he was afraid that somewhere, somehow, some mothers were using that money to get drugs. It was a stupid idea, but the real harm came because Manchin relied on policy not vibes. Manchin then had nothing to offer in exchange for those policies, nothing that could be used to achieve the same ends but in a way that he approved of or could sell to his voters. Manchin built his politics around policies — specifically, around opposing anything that came from the left of the party. He then had no vibes, no over-arching theory of the use of political power, to fall back on and negotiate. So, he screwed millions of Americans, and they remembered.

Most Democratic failures can be traced back to something like this. No one pushed for Court reform because the moderates sold themselves on the policy of not “packing” the court instead of the vibe of democracy matters. No one expanded the House or added states because the moderates sold themselves on the policy of opposing those changes rather than on the vibe of making the Congress more representative. The insurrection wasn’t prosecuted because moderates sold themselves on the policy of not prosecuting political rivals rather than on vibe of defending the country. Immigration was allowed to be a festering wound because the moderates sold themselves on the policy of the bipartisan immigration bill not on the vibe of defending America as a country of immigrants. In each case, moderates locked the party into bad decisions because they hung their hats on a specific set of policies rather than specific set of vibes.

The GOP has no such problem. They are all vibes — hierarchy, supremacy of some groups over others, supremacy of capital and the wealth, pushing their preferred religion onto all others. That allows them to be more successful as a party. Their policies change, but they do not get stuck or hung up on those details as long as the larger goals are being advanced. Democrats get stuck on the details and thus mistake those details for their proper goals. The fact the Dem priorities, Dem vibes, are generally much more popular than GOP priorities and yet the GOP has successfully remade the country in their image is, at least in part, because the GOP sees the big picture, not the details.

This is not a brief that moderates are wrong and bad and need to feel shame. As I said above, no one is right on every issue, and most of us are a mix of radical and moderate positions. What moderates get wrong, however, at least some of them, is the belief that they can triangulate their way to success, that by picking just the right policy mix, they can win the most voters. They cannot. Voters do not, as a rule, pay that much attention to policy nuance. They have lives, and people who do understand policy nuance outside of their jobs are political hobbyists, not general voters. General voters won’t believe your policy, especially once it gets attacked, because it’s not tied to belief system people can associate with.

People like Mamdani not because of his specific proposals but because he had made it clear he knows living in NYC is too hard and expensive for most people. People did not like Bill Clinton because he had a specific policy but because he felt their pain. People like to claim that these politicians had extraordinary charisma. Yeah, maybe. Or maybe they just had beliefs that the average person could understand and appreciate.

Imagine a world in which the democratic party stood up for American as a nation of immigrants, contesting the point rather than giving in to GOP framing and trying to triangulate a way out of that mess. Imagine a world in which Manchin believed that the government should help people navigate the ups and downs of life and came up with a good faith counterproposal to the child tax credits. I suspect we would be living in a much different, much better, world if we had more respect for vibes and less reverence for policy.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/16/2333515/-Vibes-Matter-More-Than-Policy?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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