US Politics 2024

[dubsartur]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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.

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

[Jubal]

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?

[Jubal]

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.

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.

[Jubal]

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:
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, which is I guess now a libertarian/classical liberal party.


Meanwhile the actual race continues to look like a tight presidential race.

[dubsartur]

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).

[Jubal]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[Jubal]

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.