Jonathan Chait Killed His Patient
And called me "simple-minded."
Because we’re in hell, people are still insisting Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election because she was too progressive. And by people, I mean John Fetterman’s former Chief of Staff, Adam Jentleson, and The Atlantic staff writer, Jonathan Chait. The pair spent their weekends in my Twitter mentions, arguing that it was progressives’ fault, not theirs, that Trump is in office and taking a wrecking ball to every aspect of American life.
We’ve covered this topic many times on JoeWrote. If you’re a returning reader, you’re familiar with how the Democratic establishment shrank the party’s electoral tent and drove its approval rating into the gutter by moving to the right to placate their corporate and Zionist donors. In the year or so since that strategy resulted in another embarrassing loss to the Sundowning pedophile, we’ve tracked and debunked the many ways establishment-aligned pundits, groups, and PACs have tried to shift blame onto the left to preserve their personal power. These figures have routinely faked polls to make progressive policies appear unpopular, sabotaged leftist candidates, and lied about their political records to save face. While we and others have proven these claims false and dishonest, truth be told, the centrist excuses don’t convince anyone except those who want to be convinced — mainly, the people writing them. There isn’t a voter in the country who doesn’t recognize that Kamala Harris is a product of the tired, corrupt Democratic establishment that Jonathan Chait and Adam Jentleson are fighting to protect. So, when they lie, such as Jentleson claiming Kamala Harris “supported open borders” (???), it only reveals their dishonesty and pushes the typical viewer even further away from them.
However, Jonathan Chait said one thing that warrants addressing. In his mind, it proves him correct. But to sober observers, it shows why Chait and ilk are too immature and unskilled to remain regarded as serious thought leaders in American politics.
Here’s Chait laying out his theory of the case: Kamala Harris’s 2019 “progressive positions” — by which I assume he means her plan to “establish a student loan debt forgiveness program for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities” — caused her loss. According to Chait, his advice to the Harris campaign to run to the center “worked.” But it didn’t “work enough,” so she lost. I’m unsure how “worked” is defined in The Atlantic’s style guide. But if your strategy resulted in a Republican trifecta, “worked” isn’t the term I would use.
This is, of course, a fallacy. “Kamala Harris moderated, but she lost because she didn’t moderate enough,” is pure cope. It’s also untrue. According to The Hill’s poll aggregator, Harris’s favorability increased gently from early July until the 21st, when she was announced as the nominee. Then it increased steeply, peaking on August 15th, 2024 (50.9%). When the Democratic convention began on August 18th, Harris had a +3.5 net favorable (50.5% favorable, 47.1% unfavorable). The convention was everything Jonathan Chait dreamed of. Matt Yglesias said he “liked it too much.” This isn’t a surprise, as the Harris campaign was designed to impress pundits who live in the D.C. echochamber. Unfortunately, they forgot they were trying to win over voters. The American people watched the Democratic National Convention and saw Harris was more of the tired, corporate-stamped politics they despised. When the convention ended on August 22nd, Harris’s net favorability had fallen to a +1.9 points (48.7% favorable, 46.6% unfavorable). That’s a 1.6 point drop in just a few days.
With an uninspiring message, it’s no wonder Kamala Harris’s popularity fell to a net-negative approval rating. She spent the rest of the campaign underwater, with a brief period of net-positive approval (between +1 and +2 points) between September 22nd, 2024, and October 3rd, 2024. When Jonathan Chait published his now-infamous essay, The Race Is Close Because Harris Is Running a Brilliant Campaign: Stop Complaining; The Centrism is Working on October 8th, 2024, Harris was -2 points underwater. Contrary to Chait’s claim, the centrism was not working at all. Her highest approval ratings came early in the campaign when she was a blank slate and understood as the change candidate. But when her convention clarified she’d be Biden 2.0, her ratings fell and never recovered.
If you haven’t read Chait’s essay, don’t. You’re not missing much. It’s about 800 words of him preemptively spiking the football on the left. He mentions Felipe De La Hoz, Katherine Krueger , and David Zirin by name, lecturing them that Harris’s successful centrism disproves their critiques of her right-wing stances on Israel, immigration, and China. But most interesting is his paragraph about the Republicans. You can tell Chait was certain Harris was going to win, as he points to the GOP as proof of moderation as a success.
“This form of paranoia has a surprisingly wide and durable appeal to activists on both ends of the political spectrum. In A Choice Not an Echo, the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly insisted Republicans could easily win national elections if they nominated right-wing candidates and had only been thwarted by the machinations of an eastern Establishment that preferred moderation and defeat (“a small group of secret kingmakers, using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques, manipulated the Republican National Convention to nominate candidates who would sidestep or suppress the key issues”).
Chait poses this as a mistake by Schlafly, but he’s too narcissistic to see that she was correct! After Republicans nominated the most right-wing guy ever, Donald Trump, he won the presidency twice! Trump was the first Republican to win the popular vote in decades, and led the Republicans to capture the Senate and House. Because Republicans ran a less moderate candidate, Trump delivered Phyllis Schlafly’s dream of overturning Roe v. Wade, which he proudly campaigned on in 2024. Trump ran so aggressively against reproductive rights that on election eve, 51% of the country expected him to sign a national abortion ban, should Congress put one on his desk. Only a third of the country wants an abortion ban, meaning Trump ran well to the right of the country’s wishes and still won. Like his theory of Democratic moderation, Jonathan Chait’s theory of Republican moderation could not be more wrong. But that’s not all he’s wrong about.
Of all the nonsense Chait tweeted at me this weekend, I found this to be the most damning.
First, being called simple-minded by Jonathan Chait is a badge of honor I’ll wear for the rest of my life. Second, let’s take his analogy to its conclusion. If centrism were the “medicine” to Kamala Harris’s ailment of alleged progressivism, then that would make Mr. Chait and his ilk her doctors. They encouraged her to move right, and she did, as evidenced by Chait’s admission that the medicine “worked” but “not enough to save her.” I won’t claim to be knowledgeable about medical malpractice suits, but I imagine if a doctor gives a patient the wrong dose of medicine and the patient dies, then that’s the doctor’s fault. Because no matter which way you look at it, whether you’re claiming “Kamala Harris was too moderate” or “Kamala Harris was too progressive,” the undeniable fact is that she was a product of the Democratic establishment that Jonathan Chait, Adam Jentleson, and every other overly online centrist represent. We can argue about whether it was the right medicine or “dose,” but there’s no denying Dr. Jonathan Chait killed his patient. Even if Chait’s theory is true (it’s not), that would mean he is at fault. He boastfully wrote, “The centrism is working.” Now he admits it didn’t, but only because he wasn’t listened to enough. The undeniable takeaway is that Chait and company lack both the political skill to find a path to Democratic victory and the maturity to admit when they are wrong. Good political leaders and analysts need both to make their project work. As he’s shown, Jonathan Chait has neither. And Adam Jentleson has even less than him.
I’ve been asked why I spend so much time arguing with people like this who are operating in bad faith to protect their egos and billionaire donors. I don’t expect them to change their minds or stop lying. Rather, I view this work as a preemptive defense against the inevitable sabotage these guys will try to attempt against any 2028 Democratic Presidential nominee to the left of Gavin Newsom. If AOC runs (which is looking increasingly likely), they will do everything in their power to sink her in the primary election and likely the general. If their current behavior continues, centrists’ narcissism and anti-leftist resentment will drive them to move heaven and earth to keep a standard progressive like Ro Khanna, never mind an actual leftist, out of the White House. Even if that means electing J.D. Vance.
If we’re going to have any chance of fixing the United States and turning it into a civilized, democratic nation, we’re going to need to rip the Democratic establishment from power. And that starts by recognizing 90% of them are self-serving frauds.
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In Solidarity — Joe
If the dose was too small, then the medicine by definition did not work. It doesn’t matter whether it didn’t work because the dose was too small, it was the wrong drug, or the pharmacist didn’t hold his mouth right when he typed up the label - the result is the same. The patient sickens and dies.
Great article. I think this is just another example of the futility of working within the Democratic Party as socialists. At the end of the day, establishment hacks would rather burn the party to the ground than allow it to be overtaken by socialists.