Another year, another US Pol thread beginneth.
The next few weeks will be critical to whether Trump gets a really clear run at the presidency from the GOP and legal sides (he probably will). If he runs table in Iowa and New Hampshire, which he looks like doing, that probably clears the GOP field for the most part. There's an outside chance that Nikki Haley could, if she comes second in Iowa and wins NH, still be a serious challenger, but that's unlikely.
At the moment Trump is largely outpolling Biden: I suspect that this is largely a result of Biden's polling being depressed among his own side (Israel, general incumbency penalties) while Trump's is buoyant, and that it'll be tighter once partisanship really starts cranking in and people face up to the potential reality of a second Trump presidency.
A lot of Americans who are not on the far right have opinions of the Biden administration which seem hard to defend (ie. the president who ended the drone war, left Afghanistan, did not enter any new wars, is very friendly to unions and passed some climate legislation in the Inflation Reduction Act gets attacked from the left and very little public gratitude for points 1 3 and 4). His disastrous public health policy has become bipartisan. This pessimism and unwillingness to thank the administration for wins goes back long before the current Hamas-Israel war and Biden's very strong support for the Netanyahu government. But I think that many, perhaps most, of the people who talk about US politics have no experience implementing policy through politics (some of them probably have experience in ingroup outgroup nonsense).
My suspicion is that negative partisanship and fear of Trump will reduce the volume of that criticism as the election gets closer, but I'd agree insofar that a lot of the more strident criticism of Biden does feel like it lacks a complete and effective theory of change behind it, even where I agree that I'd like a much more forceful and effective progressive movement in the US. Some of the criticism also lacks an effective appreciation of exactly how bad fascism is: there seems to be a degree of unrealistic "everything is so terrible due to American Imperialism and white supremacy now that what difference would outright fascism really make". To which the answer is still "a very, very large amount".
I can see an argument for the Democrats committing to eg. "if we get 60% of the house and senate we will pass a national law guaranteeing the right to abortion" as a way of motivating voters and volunteers, but because US parties are weakly whipped its hard to do that. Right now a lot of US persons understandably feel that the parties are calling wolf every two years.
Obviously as primate-politics go its not great that Biden is old and frail, but the leading Republican candidate is old and unwell too. Obama was on the centre right too (and perhaps more oriented towards wealthy credentialed people than Biden is), but he got credit in primate politics for using lefty language in all those beautiful speeches. Actually, Biden's tilt towards poorer less credentialed Americans over the professional managerial class might be one reason that the chattering class are lukewarm about him?
Fuel and food and housing are very expensive in the USA right now, but on the other hand there is low unemployment and its easier to buy those things when you have a job. And until October 7 the antiwar movement could have come out and given the administration cover on leaving Afghanistan and ending the drone war.
Things are not great in the USA with COVID and the high cost of living, but they don't seem that bad for the kind of leftish people who talk a lot about national politics.
Edit: can't comment on Biden's fitness for the job beyond "old and frail" (I don't listen to his speeches or interviews) but a lot of animosity seems to be against his imagined personality or policies
Quote from: dubsartur on January 09, 2024, 02:40:17 AM
Actually, Biden's tilt towards poorer less credentialed Americans over the professional managerial class might be one reason that the chattering class are lukewarm about him?
I think part of the problem all round may be that Biden's ideal target voter generally is part of a demographic that has aged out and moved into the Republican fold so heavily that he's not winning them back very effectively: even in the rust belt, today's swing voters are often younger and more suburban, whereas Biden would really like to be talking to a sort of white working class voting bloc that is fading and doesn't really trust him anyway. So it's probably true that chattering folks of today dislike his more old-school approach, but some of them do have a point in that managerial, office job, and service industry voters in the suburbs include a lot more swing voters than the remains of US heavy industry.
I think another problem that's wider than Biden but affects his relationship with some former blocs of swing voters is that broadly speaking the centre and left are less willing to pretend that the more polluting sorts of heavy industry have a real future, and people with those jobs or with emotional investment in that sort of industry would often rather be lied to by the right who will tell them that they can keep producing the stuff forever and that anything that happens to the contrary is the fault of the woke left. "We'll help you through the change" is still often unappealing to people who thought they had a secure economic footing, compared to "nothing needs to change".
It currently looks from polling like Trump will take about 50% of the vote in the Iowa caucuses and win by a country mile. And Iowa is actually a
weak state for Trump in the GOP primary calendar.
Quote from: Jubal on January 13, 2024, 11:52:34 AM
Quote from: dubsartur on January 09, 2024, 02:40:17 AM
Actually, Biden's tilt towards poorer less credentialed Americans over the professional managerial class might be one reason that the chattering class are lukewarm about him?
I think part of the problem all round may be that Biden's ideal target voter generally is part of a demographic that has aged out and moved into the Republican fold so heavily that he's not winning them back very effectively: even in the rust belt, today's swing voters are often younger and more suburban, whereas Biden would really like to be talking to a sort of white working class voting bloc that is fading and doesn't really trust him anyway. So it's probably true that chattering folks of today dislike his more old-school approach, but some of them do have a point in that managerial, office job, and service industry voters in the suburbs include a lot more swing voters than the remains of US heavy industry.
I can't speak to that (like I can't recall anyone speaking about Biden appealing to manufacturing and resource workers), but my understanding is that the US job market in 2023 was great for men under 30 without higher education or credentials (as witnessed by eg. the military recruitment crisis or the expansion of unions - its easier to crush unions when there is a 'reserve army of the unemployed'). And Biden did not push to raise interest rates and cause a recession to drive down employment and inflation like the wealthiest two fifths of the population would like. He is supposed to be the friendliest US president to unions in the past 50 or 100 years which is good for workers and bad for large employers in general. Obviously COVID, the housing crisis, and the global shortage of fossil fuels create other problems.
One reason why Twitter is depressogenic is that its dominated by writers, visual artists, academics, and other people who have been in hard times since 2008. (And people in a happy relationship with a satisfying job have less time to post).
Strippers in Oregon say things have been slow for a while.
Ramaswamy dropping out of the Republican race seems to have been another good piece of news for Trump, in that he's now an extra 5 or 6 points up - enough to move Haley from breathing down his neck in New Hampshire to languishing well behind.
And yeah, the economic indicators in the US generally seem pretty good, especially given global circumstances. It does feel like there's an unusual mismatch between how the economy's actually doing and how people feel about how it's doing.
And that's the primaries wrapped, basically: Haley out after Super Tuesday having won 2 contests.
Not seen anyone really trying to do polling averages yet, but a back of the envelope calculation on the head to head polls since Feb 20 comes out with Biden 43.9, Trump 45.7: given that the electoral college maths probably favour Trump again, then that's a race slightly leaning Trump: Biden probably wants to be three points up to win and he's a couple behind right now. All that said, these are very small margins this far out and polling probably doesn't mean very much this far out from the election itself.
The fact we're even contemplating all of this is so weird, honestly.
FiveThirtyEight now has its polling averages up and running. Federal level, their average has Trump up by a point, and I think I'm right looking at the swing states with my suggestion earlier that Biden needs to be up 2-3 points to eke out a win.
From the polls we've had so far, Trump leads across the swing states:
Michigan + 1.4
Pennsylvania + 1.8
Wisconsin + 2.8
Arizona + 3.2
Nevada +5.1
Georgia + 5.9
If Biden wins WI, MI, and PA, loses Maine's second district and Nebraska's second (the two swing bits of states that award some separate electoral votes on a by-district basis), then he probably gets precisely 269 electoral votes (which is to say, the presidential election gets tied and gets decided by the US house). Probably Biden's minimum victory is all that plus winning one of those two singular votes, and that means moving about three points up (to leading by 2-3 points). That's not an unrealistic goal, but it's also tricky to see exactly where Biden gets that benefit from right now.
The slightly better news for Biden is that these don't seem to be states where Democrats are destined to lose, so he may hope to be dragged upwards by more popular lower-tier candidates (though equally he might drag them down, it works both ways). But recent surveys have showed Democrats leading in the Senate races in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada, and running a handy few points ahead of Biden. Holding the Senate as a whole is a hell of an ask for the Democrats because they also need to retain Montana and Ohio, very red seats where they have fairly popular long-standing incumbents, and they need to hold the White House to get the VP's tie-breaking vote. That said, there is evidence they can get the fifty seats - getting the White House as well looks like it might be the hard ask right now.
Donald Trump has been found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records etc in the New York case. Will this affect much? Not sure but I guess we'll find out.
The 538 model is now running (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/)! It's more bullish for Biden than the polls are, showing him in basically a complete statistical tie with Trump for likelihood of winning. The complex bit is why - essentially, the presidential polls and perhaps approval ratings suggest Trump will (narrowly) win, but every other indicator, be that economic fundamentals or polls for other races etc, suggest Biden will (narrowly) win.
Basically Biden has a clear-ish but not a wide path: he wins Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska's 2nd district, and he's won. Those are all close races. If Biden significantly improves his position, then he's into trying to hold Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, all of which are much less likely. Trump conversely really just needs to knock out one of that midwestern trio and ensure he takes AZ/NV/GA, all of which are probably in his column by a few points right now.
Democrats also got a really big swing in their favour in a recent Ohio special election, and they are doing much better in Senate polls (not necessarily well enough to hold the Senate, though I think the only definite Senate loss for them right now is WV so if they can hold literally everything else and the White House then they remain the Senate majority party. Montana will be very difficult for the Democrats to hold, but it might yet happen.) I almost wonder if conditions in 2024 might create shy Biden voters: it's often hypothesised that a reason the far right sometimes overperform in elections is that people are reluctant to admit to a pollster that they're voting for a fascist, but I wonder if right now people on the left are nervous to admit that they're still actually going to vote for Biden on election day.
This seems like it would be an especially hard US election to predict because the two leading candidates are old and not in great health, and one is in the middle of a series of criminal trials. We are in a phase of world history where "events, dear boy, events" come thick and fast even if so many systems in the USA are frozen.
Quote from: dubsartur on June 18, 2024, 09:38:22 PM
This seems like it would be an especially hard US election to predict because the two leading candidates are old and not in great health, and one is in the middle of a series of criminal trials. We are in a phase of world history where "events, dear boy, events" come thick and fast even if so many systems in the USA are frozen.
Yeah, I think one has to take e.g. 538's prediction model for what it is, and in fairness to them I think they're fairly good at saying so - which is, to say, if one assumes an election where neither candidate is dead by election day and nobody ends up being permitted to cheat.
It's interesting how little any events short of candidate death are affecting anything much: Trump becoming a felon doesn't seem to have caused any significant shift in the polls and I think the conclusions of most of his other trials are going to be delayed until after the election. I think one of the candidates becoming medically unable to continue feels like the biggest actual wild-card at this point, the very heavy polarisation is reducing the impact of much else (though it may be affecting "Don't Know" respondents who hate both candidates, who are probably the actual election-deciding voting block in some ways, without that showing up much in polling).
A US citizen would have to be pretty clueless to be surprised that former guy commits felonies.
Well, exactly, or at least there's a block of people who won't believe that he did commit a felony regardless of what the law says: there's relatively little that isn't "priced in" to people's views given that these are two of the best known politicians ever to run in an election, in a very polarised political era.
Maine Representative Jared Golden's OpEd asserting that former guy will become president, US democracy will survive, and Congress can still pass useful laws https://www.bangordailynews.com/2024/07/02/opinion/opinion-contributor/jared-golden-donald-trump-going-to-win-election-democracy-be-just-fine/ He is a bit vague on where the votes would come from with a big part of the House of Representatives full of MAGA types who reject the idea that legislation can be a positive good https://www.bangordailynews.com/2024/07/02/opinion/opinion-contributor/jared-golden-donald-trump-going-to-win-election-democracy-be-just-fine/ And his only reference to the outside world is a sentence in favour of Trump's trade policy, which is probably what voters in Maine want to hear but not people in Ukraine or Canada.
I think this is a typical example of people writing pieces to produce an impact, not as an earnest debate contribution: Golden probably needs some Trump/Golden switch voters to hold his seat, and being seen as not like those sorts of Democrats who are warning of a Trumpocalypse may be helpful to him in that regard.
At least two and probably three previous presidents of the United States have been seriously disabled while in office (Woodrow Wilson who had a severe stroke in 1919 and never recovered, Ronald Reagan, and FDR who was very frail with heart and lung troubles by 1944). I am trying to think of parallels from other democracies?
Monarchies often end up with mad kings because of the stress of the office and because there is generally no way to make a monarch step down other than murder, but democracies influenced by the UK usually have ways to replace an elected official who can't do their job.
I think Churchill is the obvious UK comparison: he wasn't really at all well during his entire last term in office from 1951-1955.
Biden is gone!
I think it's hard to see anyone other than Harris becoming the Democrat nominee: she's willing to do the job, there's little time left, and she has the frankly crushingly strong case of "I was on the ticket that won the primaries by a mile" - one or two people will no doubt call for a more contested race, but I think Democrats who were pushing Biden to leave will look churlish if they don't respect his wish to pass on the torch to the person who people actually voted for as his backup torchbearer.
The problem for Democrats - Harris isn't actually polling any better than Biden in the swing states right now, though admittedly nor is anybody else, so they're going to have to hope that campaigning shifts things a fair bit. Harris obviously has both racism and sexism to contend with as electoral problems, but she certainly doesn't have age or a lack of sharpness, and I don't think she's someone with a lot of the sort of baggage Trump can have a crack at... so we'll see.
Idle running mate speculation (these probably aren't the most plausible ideas, more under-the-radar but I think actually good ideas):
- Tim Walz. Governor of a midwestern state that the Democrats can probably hold even if he leaves, solidly mid-tone white guy Democrat with a military background.
- Roy Cooper. Another swing-state governor from a much redder state, North Carolina maybe isn't as good as Minnesota on this front but Cooper is term limited this year so the Democrats again don't sacrifice much elsewhere if he's willing to be on the ticket.
- Michael Bennett. Not afraid of the national stage, replaceable given how blue Colorado is now, sits between the centrist and liberal wings of the Democrats.
- Jennifer Granholm. Want someone who can win in Michigan and want to bolster base turnout by showing you're taking climate change seriously? The current energy secretary and former Michigan governor would not be a bad choice.
- Pete Buttigeig. Having an LGBT man on the ticket would be a bold choice but Harris probably puts a lot of the bigots off anyway? Jared Polis probably comes in as #6 for similar reasons.
People I don't think it'll be: Newsom or Schiff (Californian like Harris), JB Pritzker (doesn't feel dynamic enough), any of the swing state senators and governors in places Dems can't afford to lose (Shapiro, Whitmer, Tester, Brown, Kelly, etc etc). It would be very funny if it was a Harris/Brown ticket because it would make for an Ohio senators' match against Vance and provide many uses for the "It's all Ohio?" meme, but the Democrats absolutely cannot afford to throw the Ohio senate seat away like that.
Quote from: Jubal on July 07, 2024, 10:10:33 AMI think Churchill is the obvious UK comparison: he wasn't really at all well during his entire last term in office from 1951-1955.
I did not know that! Most curious people know about his depression and cigars-and-armchairs lifestyle but not his strokes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Health_issues_to_eventual_resignation
State of play this morning: Harris has locked in Newsom, Shapiro, and Buttigeig's endorsements, and I think that means she's cleared the field to all intents and purposes. The BBC has literally rewritten its "other people in the Democrats" type article from "who else could challenge Harris" to "who could be Harris' running mate" overnight. I think Newsom was the closest thing to a credible anti-Harris option, sitting fairly in the middle of the Democrats and with really deep pockets, but also precisely because of that closeness to the middle of the party I think he was less inclined to do it.
Thinking and reading more, I've allowed myself to be nudged more towards thinking Shapiro (gov. of Pennsylvania) might be in the frame for the VP pick, though I think it'll depend how confident Democrats are that they can hold the gubernatorial mansion and therefore partly hinges on what the next level down of PA Democrat bench looks like. Wonder what Conor Lamb is doing these days?
Quote from: Jubal on July 21, 2024, 09:09:14 PMIdle running mate speculation (these probably aren't the most plausible ideas, more under-the-radar but I think actually good ideas):
- Tim Walz. Governor of a midwestern state that the Democrats can probably hold even if he leaves, solidly mid-tone white guy Democrat with a military background.
CALLED IT. Going to sit here being smug for a bit now :)
And I think this means it's time for a polling update too: the 538 system has started producing Harris/Trump averages now, and they're still very tight/margin of error but she's had a significant boost compared to where Biden was on dropping out. The averages since she became the nominee have her narrowly ahead but within MoE in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, which are essentially the golden trio still: if she wins all three and Nebraska's 2nd congressional district, she wins the election by one electoral vote. She obviously ideally wants to win all three plus at least one of Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. Conversely Trump really can't win without all three of those sun-belt states: if the Democrats win Georgia again they have a lot more breathing room in the midwest, though Pennsylvania is still effectively a must-win.
So I wouldn't say the Democrats are ahead as things stand, but I'd say they've pulled it back to a closely tied national picture.
Boundaries in US (or any sort of FPTP) politics are bizarre. The Redraw system at https://kevinhayeswilson.com/redraw/ is very good for showing this: below are some redrawn boundaries, I tried to give myself the general guideline of "states should still be approximately recognisable as themselves, ish" and came up with the following maps, one is 400+ electoral votes for Biden, the other for Trump:
| (https://i.imgur.com/UMb32co.png) | (https://i.imgur.com/rUg4BML.png) |
Notable on the maximum-democrat map: Utah is the state that's probably been most messed up, with only a tiny rump of Wyoming left in existence and "Utah" taking in chunks of blue northern Colorado as well as Salt Lake City and most of Wyoming. Western Utah is now joined to northern California and Nevada, Arizona takes in some blue stuff from Cali but loses some blue native-American majority bits to Colorado. Oklahoma takes in a big block of northern Texas, leaving the remaining city corridor and southern Texas blue. Mississippi needs very little work to turn blue: the black-majority belt down the river, big chunks of which are now in Louisiana and Arkansas, would be a solid core for a blue state if it weren't split between three red ones. Alabama stealing the Florida panhandle leaves the south of that state blue, and South Carolina has nabbed some of the reddest bits of North Carolina to switch the rest of North Carolina to the Democrats. The northeast is almost unchanged except that Ohio has been stretched right up to take in Pittsburgh and Buffalo along the lake-shore, turning it blue. In the midwest, Minnesota loses some of its red chunks to South Dakota but takes in a few off Iowa, which gets a 'tail' reaching down to Kansas City (again, a blue ball but split between states: the GOP really really luck out on a lot of the bluest bits of the South and Plains being split between multiple red states).
On the Republican map, it's all about cutting down the blue areas to city states. DC has been expanded to take in a lot of the wider metropolitan area (incidentally also disenfranchising everyone there in House of Representatives and Senate elections: I'm alsmost surprised no Republican has tried the "let's make DC a state but also expand it so much that Virginia is red again" call). Wisconsin has effectively been demolished, with Chicago taking its place as a state, and key urban areas like Minneapolis and Detroit are split between red states. A rump Denver state of Colorado has lots all its hinterland (there's nothing between there and the Texas suburbs with enough red votes to counterbalance Denver) and California has been reduced to the coastal strip. Oregon and Washington's urban areas form a state, with a big red hinterland state of Cascadia behind them in the mountains. The Northeast is a bit of a mess: NYC itself is now in Connecticut, and WV has donated territory to PA and Maryland and Virginia while taking some from Kentucky to shift red votes east. A coastal, red Delaware leaves a tiny inland New Jersey that's blue, and Maryland has taken a bunch of the other side of the Chesapeake where there are red Virginia countires. The Atlanta urban areas has been split with Alabama. Maine has had its bluest areas taken away but taken in the reddest bits of its neighbours to the south.
In other news, I've recently been reading about how much the Libertarian Party has imploded in recent years. In 2022 apparently an extreme-even-by-their-standards block called the Mises Caucus took over the national party. These are the ultra gold standard, more socially conservative, basically anarcho-capitalist wing, and they now run everything. They've even made the idea of national divorce (that is, having totally different law systems for red and blue states, or possibly even dissolving the USA) part of their platform.
Their 2024 candidate Chase Oliver is
not on the Mises wing of the party, is more on the socially liberal wing, and is probably spending more time fighting his party than fighting his election campaign. Four state parties, Colorado, Montana, New Hampshire, and Idaho, have denounced him as the nominee for not being right-wing enough and holding views that are too liberal on LGBT rights. Meanwhile the party organisation is collapsing in several places: multiple more moderate state parties (New Mexico, Massachussetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia) split off and then re-coalesced as the new Liberal Party USA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_USA), which is I guess now a libertarian/classical liberal party.
Meanwhile the actual race continues to look like a tight presidential race.
The thing which makes the US system so bad is the combination of the two-party system and the imperial presidency. Because so much federal policy is fiat by whoever holds the Oval Office, people get really fascinated by who that person will be, and because this is determined by 50 two-way races it can shift wildly (although university-educated Americans who like to talk party politics often avoid acknowledging that there has been a lot of policy continuity from 2004 to 2024).
I've been looking at the very bad Senate map a bit more, and I think there's one trick being missed on the Democrat side: it seems like a no-brainer for Democrat donors to throw a ton of money at independent Dan Osborn despite his (intentional and sensible) lack of the party's endorsement.
He *probably* won't win: Osborn has been narrowly trailing in his own polls, and campaigns' own polls tend to overestimate them... so it's likely he's more like ten points behind than two. But Jon Tester in Montana is trailing in mot polls, and if he loses then the Democrats need some other way to open up a Senate race. to have a shot at the majority They're not running miles behind in Florida's Senate race, but Florida is a big expensive media market and has a state government that's been working hard to suppress Democrat blocs. Nebraska might be a smart bet per dollar spent: even if you end up with Osborn refusing to Caucus with Democrats, he's still miles better than a replacement Republican from the Dems' perspective.
Colin Allred in Texas has already spent 27 million dollars on a race he's much more likely to lose than Osborn is, and Adam Schiff in California has spent fifty-one million on a race he's more or less guaranteed to win: rolling up another five to ten million in cash for Osborn's campaign to make him seriously competitive on a financial level would (yes even that is an absolutely insane amount of money for election spending, but we are talking the US here) be eminently sensible IMV.
We're under a month out from the election now - into what even normal countries would consider a valid campaign season - and things are not looking great honestly. They're not looking hopeless either, but maybe, as they say, it's the hope that gets you. 538 at the time of writing have Harris 53-47 Trump as their percentage chances of winning the election: after a bounce for Harris when she became nominee, Trump seems to have closed the gap and the 1-2 point lead Harris seems to have in a lot of national polls isn't going to be enough in the swing states which tend to be a point or two better for the Republicans than the national average.
On the other hand: we don't know what turnout will look like, and it may be that polls are using too much of the last electoral cycle or two as a default when actually black voters and women might turn up in larger numbers than expected. Or Republican turnout might be lower, or Harris' financial advantage might weigh in... or on the other hand rural turnout might be huge, or swing voters might break for Trump over the economy, or voter suppression might be enough for Trump to win states he might have lost otherwise. It's close enough that any small knock in any direction could be "enough".
There's really not a lot more one can say from the evidence, but a lot hangs in the balance. It's fashionable in some circles to try and downplay the influence of the presidency on US policy, but I'm not sure how well the world can survive another term of the US pushing hard away from a viable climate agenda, or a US that's tacitly pro-Kremlin in its foreign policy alignments.
Interesting little experiment here:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/ideological-turing-test
This suggests that Democrats and Republicans can convincingly pretend to be the other in the course of a mini statement about their beliefs. A lot of studies have shown that each party's partisans tend to overestimate the extremity of the other party's views - Republicans overstate the number of Democrat communists, Democrats overstate how may Republicans actually want to end democracy, etc. But this is a bit of a counter point - actually in terms of generic statements of belief, Republicans can convincingly write a Democrat statement and vice versa. This suggests that each side kind of is aware of the mainstream sorts of views of the other, in that they can rewrite them accurately.
In the horse-race you'd probably prefer to be the Republicans right now. The Senate is almost a lock for them unless the Democrats achieve a really big over-performance, they're toss ups for the House, and the presidency is a toss-up but one that's been slowly sliding in Trump's favour in recent weeks. Not long to go now, anyhow.
Notes one week out from the election, so I can check back afterwards and see how wrong I was. I've mostly been poll-watching this election rather than looking at any deep dives beyond that, so I don't think my thoughts have much meaning, and I think the election is basically a toss-up so "what I think will happen as my midpoint expectation" could easily be wrong in almost every respect. But I think it's sometimes useful to note down what one thought before a thing happened to be able to check oneself rather than post-hoc deciding you were sure what was going to occur beforehand.
- I think Harris will win the popular vote by 1.5 to 2 points, and lose the electoral college with Trump taking at least one of the three midwestern states and all but Nevada of the Sunbelt states.
- I think the order of swing states from most to least Democratic will be Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona.
- I think the Democrats will lose Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia in the Senate, with no pickups.
- Despite all this I think Democrats actually might retake the House: the GOP in the House have been pretty useless and the Democrats have more cash to throw at this election.
Well, the results were marginally worse than my expectations. Harris appears to have lost the national vote by about two points, though that might reduce to one once the last bits of California vote are acounted. She lost Nevada, and all of the midwestern and the other Sunbelt swing states. The GOP got one more Senate pickup than I suggested above, Pennsylvania (though some networks haven't formally called it, it's pretty clear now).
The actual order of Swing States was Wisconsin 0.9, Michigan 1.4, Pennsylvania 1.9, Georgia 2, North Carolina 3, Nevada 4, Arizona 5. Nevada was the one I got most wrong in my order in the above post: other than that, broadly the midwest was closer, and indeed WI and MI at the time of writing are slightly more blue than the national average, which is a big change from the last few cycles where they were a bit redder.
So the swing states were more closely in line with the national vote than in recent elections, suggesting the Democrat ground campaign was actually pretty good. But a heck of a lot of people voted for the fascist, so he won.
So what now? Trump is going full steam on not being able to handle the heat and appointing the weirdest yes-men Tim Walz was trying to warn folks about. The GOP have a full trifecta, though only narrowly in the House.
I think 53 Senate seats is just enough for them to get all their bizarre appointments through, though maybe someone will balk at making Matt Gaetz attorney general who I haven't expected to do so. I think a few of the appointments will have two Republican noes - Murkowski, Collins will probably not vote for Gaetz as AG and may get cold feet about a defence secretary who knows nothing about the job and wants to remove women from the military - but that's two Republicans and they'd need four. The most likely three and four are probably Bill Cassidy, the only other one of the seven Republicans who voted to impeach Trump who's still in the chamber, and John Curtis, a Utahn who is very conservative but was one of the 34 Republicans in Congress (where he served until this election) who voted for at least investigating the Jan 6 riots. I think probably a lot of Trump's appointments will get through, though, and stopping Gaetz because he's a liability may just mean getting someone who's a bit quieter about doing exactly the same stuff. Also in th Senate, filibustering will probably not be destroyed however, as the GOP senators picked a slightly more institutionalist leader to replace Mitch McConnell.
So, uh, it's all quite bad, really. Mostly for the environment, and possibly for the world economy if Trump's tariffs happen in the way he's said.