Tag Archives: U.S. politics

September 1 U.S. election check-in

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Here’s my “official” take on the U.S. election for September 1. Sure, I admit I look at the polls almost every day. But I figure writing down the numbers and puzzling over them a bit once a month helps me to filter out some of the noise. So here goes. I still lean on the “Silver” numbers as probably reflecting the most well-thought-out adjustments of poll numbers to something close to reality. The 538 numbers are interesting to give a sense of how much small decisions about these adjustments matter, and the RCP numbers show what unadjusted (i.e., heavily biased) numbers would look like.

STATE2020 RESULTSilver Bulletin (August 1)Silver Bulletin (September 1)538 (September 1)RCP (September 1)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +2.7%Trump +0.6%Harris +0.3%Trump +0.5%
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Trump +2.2%Harris +0.9%Harris +0.5%Trump +0.2%
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Harris +0.4%Harris +3.2%Harris +3.2%Harris +1.4%
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +2.2%Trump +0.4%Trump +0.3%Trump +0.6%
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Trump +0.2%Harris +1.3%Harris +1.2%Harris +0.5%
MichiganBiden +2.8%Harris +2.6%Harris +1.9%Harris +2.4%Harris +1.1%
NevadaBiden +2.4%Trump +2.2%Harris +0.9%Harris +0.7%TIE

So going with the Silver numbers, the electoral college would be Harris 292, Trump 246.

270towin.com

Both Arizona and North Carolina have been in the Harris column during the month of August and flipped back over, while the numbers in Pennsylvania (>:-() seem like they might have tightened over the past two weeks. On the other hand, Georgia and Nevada are huge wins for the Harris campaign if they come through. Move Nevada and Georgia back into the Trump column and Harris still wins 270-268, with recount hilarity likely to ensue of course. This happens to match the RCP polling results above, if you give the Nevada tie to Trump. Surprisingly, she could lose Pennsylvania and still win the electoral college if everything else in the map above were to hold. But these things tend to be correlated and any event that moved Pennsylvania a whole point toward Trump would tend to move other states too. Unless we are talking some serious voter suppression or outright cheating by people in Harrisburg with pointy white hats in the back of their closets.

In the betting markets, PredictIt has Harris at a 56% chance of winning (the electoral college) vs. 47% for Trump (well actually $0.56 to $0.47 with about $0.08 given to other candidates, so apparently they don’t intend for these to add up close to 100%). Polymarket however has Trump at 51% to 48% for Harris. So whoever is betting on that site thinks they know something the rest of us do not.

So, my overall verdict is things look pretty good for Harris at the moment with two months to go. I think this election is hers to lose.

The time is now!!! (err…2016)

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Bernie Sanders 2016

We’re not going to get Bernie Sanders as President of the United States. If we are lucky, we are going to get the next-in-line representative of the pro-big-business, pro-war center-right consensus, rather than the nuclear war and climate change treaty breaking, science denying, bigoted serial rapist. We are not going to get health care, child care, and education for the vast majority of hard working citizens any time soon.

Who is the next Bernie Sanders? It is not Kamala Harris. I don’t think it’s a member of the “squad”, who seem mostly caught up in rhetoric and symbolic action around race and gender, not benefits for working people. Bernie is not the most articulate or charismatic politician out there, he is just extraordinarily authentic and straightforward. He showed us the formula, now some talented leaders should be able to emerge and follow his example.

July 2024 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Joe Biden’s depressing decline in the international spotlight, and our failed political system that could let such a thing happen. Not much more I can say about it that has not been said. The “election trifecta” – non-partisan, single ballot primaries; ranked-choice general elections; and non-partisan redistricting – is one promising proposal for improving this system.

Most hopeful story: A universal flu vaccine may be close, the same technology might work for other diseases like Covid, HIV, and tuberculosis.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Maybe we could replace congress with AI agents working tirelessly on behalf of us voters. Or maybe we could just have AI agents tirelessly paying attention to what the humans we have elected are doing, and communicating in both directions.

August 1 U.S. election check-in!

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Well, we’ve gone from an almost unspeakably boring election to a pretty exciting one in just over a month. We had the fateful Biden-Trump debate on June 27, the Trump assassination attempt on July 13, Biden’s announcement that he was dropping out of the race on July 21, and now the Democratic Party seemingly selecting Kamala Harris as its candidate.

Polls are a little crazy. 538 does not seem to be producing its typical weighted polling averages at this point, while Nate Silver’s substack is now posting some weighted polling averages for public consumption. Real Clear Politics unweighted polling averages are…there. One question is whether to include any polls from before July 21 in the averages. I am not going to do any math though, and just report the averages as these two sites are showing them on August 1 in my local time (11 hours ahead of EDT).

STATE2020 RESULT538 (TRUMP/BIDEN,
July 1)		Silver Bulletin (August 1)RCP (August 1)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +4.8%Trump +2.7%Trump +4.2%
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Trump +6.3%Trump +2.2%Trump +3.6%
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Trump +0.8%Harris +0.4%Trump +0.2%
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +7.3%Trump +2.2%Trump +5.5%
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Trump +2.0%Trump +0.2%Trump +2.7%
MichiganBiden +2.8%Trump +1.8%Harris +2.6%Harris +2.0%
NevadaBiden +2.4%Trump +3.8%Trump +2.2%Trump +4.0%

I tend to trust the Nate Silver numbers here, since they are weighted for recency and things have changed very recently. Based on his numbers, the electoral college as it stands today would be Trump 287, Harris 251. So despite Harris’s “momentum”, which the media is playing up because they want us to watch commercials, Trump still has it at this very moment. On the other hand, Pennsylvania is all but tied, and if it goes for Harris the electoral college would be Harris 270, Trump 268.

The momentum is clearly there – there has been a decisive shift toward Harris across the board compared to where Biden was a month ago. On the other hand, she is slightly underperforming Biden 2020 across the board. To me, Harris is a fairly bland center-right Democrat with less baggage than 2024 Biden or 2016 Hillary, so this all makes some sense to me. Being a mixed-race stepmother doesn’t really change my personal impression of her political leadership skills one way or the other, but perhaps it will affect turnout. For what it’s worth Polymarket gives a 55% chance of Trump winning and a 44% chance of Harris winning. Which seems consistent. Predictit seems to be blocked as an online gambling site in the jurisdiction I currently find myself in.

So, maybe more crazy things will happen, or maybe it will come down to economic trends and turnout, like it usually does.

the “election trifecta”

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This Freakonomics podcast describes an “election trifecta” three ideas to greatly improve US elections.

  1. Non-partisan, single ballot primaries, with the top four vote getters moving on to the general election
  2. ranked-choice voting in the general election
  3. non-partisan redistricting

This all sounds pretty good. The two major parties are not producing good candidates for leadership of our country, and they are preventing more talented potential leaders from competing.

I am a registered Democrat in a state with closed primaries, and I wrote in Bernie Sanders in the primary. I would have voted for Joe Biden in the general, but then again I would have voted and will vote for anyone who is not a serial rapist, convicted felon, and traitor who led a violent attack on the United States Congress.

New York to Boston in 100 minutes?

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I’ve taken Amtrak from New York to Boston. It takes about four hours, and is more or less the best the United States has to offer when it comes to passenger rail connecting major population centers. I live in Philadelphia, which along with New York and Boston, built some of the world’s first subway systems very early in the 20th century (trivia answer: even earlier subways were London, which people might guess, and Budapest, which they might not.) Before World War II, Philadelphia had an ambitious plan on paper to build out its subway system. It never happened – today, we have two dirty, old, and unreliable subway lines connecting a fraction of our city, and we are lucky to have what we have compared to most U.S. cities. I also lived in Singapore from 2010-2013. Singapore is not a utopia in every way, despite what their highly effective government propaganda might suggest, but in terms of public infrastructure and particularly transportation infrastructure, it was astonishing at the time. Well, no longer. After visiting Singapore this week for the first time since I left in 2013, it has gone from astonishing to science fiction. They have nearly doubled the size of their system in the time since I left. But what gave me this sense of science fiction is simply a decade of progress in another part of the world, while the United States has been more or less standing still. We are simply not an advanced country in comparison, and the gap is growing.

What do I think Singapore’s secret is? Not some secret high-tech technology. They nurture domestic industry to some extent, while purposely exposing them to competition from foreign competitors. When I was here as an engineering consultant a decade ago, the subway lines under construction were being managed by a German firm and a South Korean firm, which were in turn managed by the state transit agency, the Land Transportation Authority. The other secret is low-cost labor from developing countries. The Singapore-born population is shrinking, so they focus on educating their population for high value-added careers and allow in motivated and willing migrant workers to do the lower-tech stuff. This entails long hours of hard work in the tropical sun, but in Singapore at least labor and environmental standards are pretty reasonable (you can compare their construction site accident data to ours for example and it is very favorable to them, unless you believe there is some cover up. Middle Eastern countries may be a different story however.)

So the moral of the story here is that coddling inefficient domestic U.S. firms and high-cost U.S. labor to build our infrastructure is going to limit what we can accomplish. The winners will be some subset of domestic firms and workers, while the losers are everyone and the entire economy that would benefit from frictionless infrastructure. In a rational world, we might let in efficient foreign firms and low-cost foreign workers, boost our economy, institute a value-added tax, and use the proceeds to education our next generation and anyone in this generation left behind because we brought in the foreign workers. But our politics are clearly not headed in this direction.

Interestingly, the American Society of Civil Engineers has a new video called “Cities of the Future”, which largely showcases Singapore.

why the U.S. can’t have nice things, like health insurance

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According to this article in Vox, The United Nations has a goal of achieving universal health coverage in all countries by 2030. I doubt they were really thinking of the United States when they came up with that, but here we are.

I tend to blame the the situation on lobbying by the insurance industry, because they see public health insurance as an existential threat, and in this country of legalized corruption, big business gets to write our laws in its favor. I knew the American Medical Association, the special interest lobby for doctors, played a role, but I didn’t realize it was as soaked in disinformation and propaganda as this article makes it sound.

The AMA-WB campaign had two key components. First, they used mass advertising to associate NHI with socialism, while the private (or voluntary) insurance option was described as the “American Way”. These advertising efforts of the AMA were complemented by tie-in advertising from other industries fearing a return to war-time price controls. In addition, the strategy called on AMA doctors to discuss private health insurance with their patients and to distribute pamphlets echoing the individualistic advertising message (see Figure 1). Through local and state medical organizations, physicians looking to defray medical costs had organised their own insurance product, which came to be known as Blue Shield, and they were eager for enrolees. All told, approximately $250 million (in current terms) was spent to sway voters, an unprecedented amount for the time. Doctors were also instructed to use their prestige to urge local civic organisations to pass resolutions against national health insurance.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/why-us-doesnt-have-national-health-insurance-political-role-ama

“WB” is a public relations, aka propaganda firm.

I still like to think that individually, most doctors chose the field because they care about human beings. But somehow, as an organized group, they can add up to something evil. And before I cast the first stone, yes I am also thinking about my own profession of engineering (what could be more wholesome than public infrastructure and public health – yes, water treatment probably saves more lives than all the world’s medicine, but that’s a digression) and our unholy alliance with the highway/auto/sprawl industry.

This article also takes aim at unions. By its telling, they wanted to saddle the private sector with the cost of the health care system so they had something to negotiate on behalf of their members (and therefore get people to want to be members). This is also twisted and evil.

What puzzles me a bit is that if big business is really so powerful, why don’t they want to be freed from the burden of providing health insurance? It would seem only to benefit a fairly narrow slice of the finance industry. But it appears that this slice, along with the organized lobbies of doctors and unions, has been powerful enough to keep the American public from having a real health care system for over half a century now.

June 2024 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Some self-labeled “conservatives” in the United States want to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and possibly even the Federal Reserve. All these are needed to have a competent, stable government and society and to be prepared to respond and recover from the shocks that are coming, so I would call this nihilist and not “conservative” at all. How is it conservative to want to destroy the institutions that have underpinned the success of our nation thus far? On the other hand, they also want to double down on the unimaginative pro-big-business, pro-war consensus of the two major parties over the last 50 years or so, which has also gotten us to where we are today. And it looks like the amateurs and psychopaths have the upper hand at the moment in terms of our November election. This is certainly not “morning in America”.

Most hopeful story: Computer-controlled cars are slowly but surely attaining widespread commercial rollout. I don’t care what the cynics say – this will save land, money and lives. And combined with renewable and/or nuclear energy, it could play a big role in turning the corner on the climate crisis.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I had a misconception that if the world reduces greenhouse gases today, the benefits will not kick in for decades. Happily, scientists’ understanding of this has been updated and I will update my own understanding along with that. The key is the ocean’s ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere relatively quickly. (I am not sure this is good for the ocean itself, but it is somewhat hopeful for temperatures here on land.) And it is not all or nothing – any emissions reductions will help, so the failure to act in the past is not an excuse to continue to fail to act.

Biden

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This is one of those posts where I say I am not going to comment on fast-moving current events, and then I do anyway. I’m writing this the morning of Saturday, July 6, 2024, and anything can happen before this gets posted and certainly between now and when you are reading it, whoever you are.

Here are two interviews with Biden, one from September 2023 and one from last night. The difference is pretty clear to me. It’s clear that he is having a lot of trouble accessing words and names on demand. That in itself does not indicate that a person is not able to think clearly. Surely, if he had had a stroke his doctors, family and political team would not be trying to cover that up? (But see Woodrow Wilson where this exact thing happened – with his wife and doctors concealing the extent of it not just from the public but from Wilson himself. And some say losing his leadership was decisive in the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles, the failure of the League of Nations, both of which led to World War II being more likely.) Not being a particularly articulate person, I have had this problem myself in many stressful situations, such as job interviews and first dates, even in my 20s. But I am not a professional politician. Being articulate and appearing to be sharp thinking on their feet is their stock in trade, and as they say, “perception is reality” in politics.

In terms of the hard nosed probability of a Democrat winning this election in November 2024, a few days ago I thought the risk of someone other than Biden was greater than the risk of Biden losing. If Biden could return even to the form we see below from September 2023, I think the “bad night” at the debate would blow over and the election would be at least a tossup. I am coming around to the idea though that the situation is deteriorating and will continue to deteriorate over the next four months. Biden seems to be having more trouble over time and the spotlight is going to be on him every second. So I think the situation is irretrievable. Taking a sort of reverse inspiration from Woodrow Wilson, his doctors can “discover” some condition that requires his immediate retirement, and he can then announce that he is retiring with some relative saving of face. Maybe we’ll get that “contested convention” we are always hearing about. Personally I like Kamala Harris okay, and maybe she would inspire enough turnout in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee to eke out a victory. Or maybe a percentage point or two of suburban swing voters won’t bother to turn out for her because they just “don’t like her”, as happened to Hillary. Or maybe Trump will suffer an honest-to-god stroke in the next four months. The country has had a run of bad luck and we are due.

ProPublica, September 2023
ABC News, July 5, 2024

July U.S. Election Check-in

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Well, I was all set to tell you that the polls moved decisively toward Biden in June, and that would have been true with just a few days to go. But it seems the debate on June 27 really did cause a sharp swing toward Trump. I don’t like it, but these are the facts of the case. We will see if the effect is persistent or if things slowly revert to trend. Either way, the polls closing in the last few days of June may not fully indicate the state of the damage, so it may get worse before it gets better for Biden, if it does in fact ever get better.

STATE2020 RESULTMost Recent 538 Poll Average (as of 7/1/24)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +4.8% (June 1: Trump +4.7)
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Trump +6.3% (June 1: Trump +5.5)
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Trump +0.8% (June 1: Trump +1.4%)
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +7.3% (June 1: Trump +6.2%)
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Trump +2.0% (June 1: Trump +2.0%)
MichiganBiden +2.8%Trump +1.8% (June 1: Trump +0.6%)
NevadaBiden +2.4%Trump +3.8% (June 1: Trump +5.9%)

In June, 1/7 swing states had large (> 1%) movement toward Biden – Nevada.

In June, 1/7 swing states had small (< 1%) movement toward Biden – Wisconsin.

In June, 1/7 swing states had no change – Pennsylvania.

In June, 2/7 swing states had small (< 1%) movement toward Trump – Arizona, Georgia.

In June, 2/7 swing states had large (> 1%) movement toward Trump – North Carolina and Michigan.

So the trend is all over the place, with big swings toward Trump coming right at the end of the month. Trump obviously has all the swing states at the moment and is headed for an electoral college landslide if current trends hold.

Enough has been written about the debate. I’ll just link to this Politico article that points out that if you were just reading the transcript, a lot of what he said was very reasonable and even astute. That was my impression when listening to the actual debate. But I can’t excuse any politician for failing to be prepared and put on a decent rhetorical performance – that is what they do, and there 10,000 politicians who could have done it better than Biden did on Thursday night. So either he was inexplicably, inexcusably poorly prepared, or he really is faltering physically and mentally, with dire consequences for our nation’s future.