u/Sunshine7178

No angle, just an open thread. Interested in thoughtful takes. What should we take away from this?

And if you think it's a good idea, then which version would do the most to adress those problems?

Over time, I've come to strongly suspect that progressive movement democrats/political figures are shooting themselves in the foot by overinvesting in show horse talent rather than work horse talent.

• The Show horse vs work horse distinction is about whether a politician specializes in the public facing aspects of politics (show horses) or the policy making aspect (work horses). The poli sci finding here is that politicians only have so much time and resources, and so they face a tradeoff where if they spend a lot of time/resources in one area they will have less to invest in the other. For example, if you/your team are spending hours and hours writing a very complex financial policy bill, you can't use that same time for public events or messaging workshopping. Thus, politicians face a choice of how much of they want to invest in each bucket overall.
• This distinction is generally well evidence: A lot of the most effective policy makers are people you've never heard of. And a lot of the most effective public engagement politicians are not that effective at crafting or passing their policies. Though, as with all trends, there are exceptions.
• Neither show horses or work horses are necessarily superior to the other, and a political party generally needs both to be healthy and effective.
• I think progressives have so far not had the power to directly affect the policy platform and overall positioning of the democratic party (including its voters) as much as they want or need to enact their more ambitious goals. (This one seems obvious as I'm writing it, but it's still a part of the puzzle here.)
• I think being a smaller and/or less powerful faction has incentivized progressives to find alternative ways of wielding power, with one primary way being developing/recruiting show horse talent. These show horse political skills let progressives get around gate keepers, energize certain segments of the public, have disproportionate influence on political discourse, gather attention for issues they want spotlighted, etc. Overall, I think that this is an effective way for a faction in their position to project power.
• But I think that the relative rewards of show horse politics for their faction have led progressives to invest heavily in that profile. Think about how many attention grabbers, stars, and charismatic types they have per capita relative to the democratic party average. But now remember that you'd expect these strong show horse politicians to generally be weaker than average when it comes to governing/policy making skills.
• This would indicate that progressive politicians as a group would be fairly low-quality policy makers by comparison to other groups. I will certainly say, as someone with experience in politics, my anecdotal experience definitely matches this. Progressives have a lot of big ideas, but far fewer real, deeply thought-out policy proposals. I'm not an expert, but the poli sci and data I was able to find seems to back this up generally.
• Furthermore, progressives in the wider public seem to have come to expect their leaders to be show horses, and in fact see this as a sign of virtue to some degree (think about how much of what they like about candidates is just the ability to effectively project the progressive vibe). By extension, progressive leaders may have strong electoral incentives to be show horses even if they otherwise wanted to be work horses.

As a result, I have increasingly found plausible that the progressives have a serious imbalance in their bench's skills. Even if progressives swept into power tomorrow, this imbalance plausibly means they would be ineffective and fail in a lot of ways. And furthermore, they seem to face an incentive trap where they have a lot of reasons (current rewards, power projection, the bases expectations) to continue this imbalance even if it's bad for them in the long run.

I know that was a lot, but what do people think? Am I right that progressives are making choices that are setting themselves and their movement up for some degree of failure, even if those choices are being made for understandable reasons?