Is there a way forward past Trump?

Republicans are stuck with some Trump policies. They cannot lose their voters because they disagree with Trump. Ukraine is a good example.

If we end up with Trump, some America First issues will change quickly. Most of them domestic issues. The change in foreign policy will be much slower. The US military is still somewhat independent of the president.

If we end up with Nikki Haley, we will see a quicker exit out of the Trump era. Pew has run the poll. There is still a lot of anger which Trump whipped in 2016 and which had kept Trump himself going. But the country will only see revenge under Trump. Haley is our way out of this. Not really commenting on any of her political views, she just appears more normal next to Trump. This may turn against her in the middle of the primaries. DeSantis dropped out and more of the extreme voters will go from him to Trump than to Haley.

The story ran December 14th. The headline had to do with a dislike for compromise. Trump certainly will be exactly that. He will decide on money going to foreign countries and even NATO. The NATO issue is more to do with our bases abroad. Trump wanted to completely pull out of South Korea. "We are not their piggy bank." In other foreign policy matters Trump will simply tell leaders what he will do. He does not discuss with leaders.

Trump voters are not entirely in support of ideas that the GOP brought up, so they are pretty much focued on the candidate and not the issues. Trump is trusted to do something about the border. Foreign policy is not something they think much about. More than half the voters overall think foreign policy is important. It came up in the 2022 election, long before the current Israel mess.

Among Republicans, those with college degrees and those over 65 have ideas that match Nikki Haley. There is no difference between men and women supporting Trump, but more men support Haley than women. Those with high school only do not support Haley.  Those supporting Haley are the group likely to leave the president slot blank when electing, if Trump is the candidate. 

Republicans that have college degrees have no major problem with Biden as leader. The economy is doing well, and again...these are the people who have 401K plans. Personal issues are very important to the wealthy and upper middle class.

Abortion was not a major factor for Republicans in 2022. The independents and Democrats will have to show up in polls with that issue throug 2024. Partly it will end up on state level refendums votes. Those will help turnout. The issue is not off the books yet, and may get Biden the win.

Mornin'! 10 more months of this?

Probably.

Biden's message failing the working classes

Joe Biden can deliver a speech, though of course he does stumble a bit. There is no need to do it all live. You can film and edit. 

What I talk about below is one item on the mind of Trump voters. However, it may be very tiny overall. The Trump base is angry. When people are angry about their situation it is difficult to change their mind. And....when it is all over, they seem to forget how they decided and claim that the result was "not their fault." Voters never take blame for what they got after the election.

Back to the topic. Joe's image.

That is neither here or there, the main problem is the message. It is not good to boast about the markets, the economy or even jobs figures. The person just getting by will feel even more of a loser reading about all this success. The success of corporations. On the personal level, wages did not go up as much as costs of consumer goods. The speech writers are failing. He needs to hire a writer with a bachelor's degree in poltical science or journalism. One that paid their own way through college. Address the needs of a person just getting by. Inflation increased prices and wages went up a little. But not enough. These people are not putting money into 401K accounts. The ones with the college degrees are. There are some small things improved for the consumer, but the details seem to be "not news." One item I have looked at poorly...I don't really do economics any more than catching a "meme" here and there...is debt. There seems to be some consumer debt in the picture. See link at the end.

Home prices have been another factor. Starter homes need to be built and Biden has made a small effort in this. The plan is for "500K" homes in the lower price end.

A person on a message board I follow put it best:

"We can look at home prices, wealth inequity and taxation, student loans, social safety nets, energy and the environment, childcare and healthcare costs, etc. and not seeing a future where major reform is required for it to work for anyone not eyeballing retirement."

I guess even I don't see the situation quite as it is, since I am in fact retired. I am not going to criticize things at the federal level, they did remarkably well past the pandemic. And I also know that Trump did nothing for me in the long run. We retirees, working class folks and students are not in the tax bracket where Trump helped out. But he will tell them he did, and the Trump base will believe him.

Meanwhile, I now shop for everrything: services, coffee at under 6 dollars a bag or new tires. We all do that now.

LINK to economics, personal debt:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/09/15/americans-gloomy-about-economy/70833096007/

The Perfect GOP candidate and The Compromise Candidate

Joe Biden is the perfect politician, but not the perfect candidate. People are trying to find fault with him. Too old, etc. But the main difference between the two candidates is the supporting group of voters.

Trump is a perfect candidate. But only for keeping the GOP going. He is also a faulty candidate, and is stained by all his autocratic maneuvering and speeches. He cannot really be Trump 2016 anymore. He is muddied. (And yes, there is some erosion of support for Trump getting to the end of 2023. The primaries will do something to his number, I predict.)

Trump does not have to be everything for everyone. Only to his base. This populist movement has picked up enthusiasm. Before Trump, from the grass roots level you could not get excited about Republicans. Only a weak bond as "our kind of people" for most of those voters. They basically had been Republicans for generations.

Trump, unable to make real friendships, needs his fans and they adore him. He simply needs to be himself, working with fear, hate and crude jokes. And he is ideal for them. They would not show up for DeSantis.

Biden is none of that. He was the 2020 compromise. He may be popular among those involved in the actual politics.  Few Democrats dislike him, merely wishing he made way for a follower. But he lacks charisma even for us Democrats. He is not as bad as Nixon was appearing in public (he really had to work at it), but he is simply a politician. He can work solutions with others. None of that really matters, since he is not given any credit for what he has done, and Trump (with little to claim other than a tax cut) runs the conversation. He is the media man. He has some skill as a performer. It does not not make any difference to his supporters what he achieved or what he promises. It just has to sound different from anyone before. And the supporters do not even need anything from a president. They only want to prevent "some people" getting anything from the government.

The GOP does not need the Trump base or Trump for politics, they need them for turnout. This group of voters is not affected by much of politics. Banning abortion did not lose the Trump base. The Trump base sees things as black and white. Things are good or bad. I do not know if these conclusions come from the peer group or a leader. In any case "the issue is decided" and any individual Trump voter is no more responsible for what banning abortion does. As for the turnout part, the logic goes something like this. The people that were not interested in politics before Trump, they will vote for the Republican as long as he or she never criticizes Trump. Other more traditionl Republicans will also vote for that Republican candidate. But it is the combined total of them that gets the win. As goofy and inconsistent as Kevin McCarthy was, he seemed to be doing these kind of calculations. He cold guess the support for various races by the campaign contributions. Whene he was even a little critical of Trump the money stopped coming in.

Trump voters are a rather homogeneous group of white working class Christians. Democrats are always a group of educated whites and minorities.

What will happen the next year is that we will use the same fear tactics that Trump does. We need to get him ridiculed and punished in court. We also need to lecture on the end democracy with Trump.

Then comes the big job: get turnout at the election.

The polling at this point is rather poor at reflecting anything more than a general feeling of not being quite as comfortable as before the pandemic. Prices went up, wages did not. On top of that there are things Biden has to do as president (Israel) that the public just has a gut feeling about. Meanwhile Trump...between rants about an unjust legal battle...has nothing else to do so he is promoting simple ideas that seem to ring true with sonservative voters. "Close the border" and so on. The exaggerated arguments do not amount to much more than strawmen arguments. Trump never closed the border for four years. Millions of cars drive in and out of Mexico each month.

SIDENOTE ON POLLING

Biden seems to be "too old" and incompetent to run the US in polls. But the voters that are polled do not actually follow news. It is still a year to election and this is not a part of the life of 90% of voters. So what is the basis of their decision? The polls, of course! The more negative polls they hear, the more they believe the polls. The current polls are just the result of a string of polls in the news.

Early Polling...and Independents

I respect independents enough that I don't think they are all politically naive. A lot of it is hatred of politics and politicians. These are people that decide things for you. You can send your congressman an email and a staff member will read it. But nothing happens. You form an opinion of that party (your congressman) based on being ignored. The independents then get to the election and with little information vote for one or the other, mainly by what items are in the  news for both that week.

Independents are a big part of polling looking strange. I believe they are not actually answering the question asked but just reflecting a general dislike of politics. Politics does run in the background and makes sure we have no catastrophes generated by bad planning. But those kinds of politics are not known to them. They do not want to hear politics in the news. Yet Trump is there in your face everyday. Trump knows he can make the news and the media just use that to make income. The independents ignore most of it. But the stuff they do hear, if they have any memory of it, is all negative.

One other problem with the polls is that they may not ask the right things. "Is there something else that makes you decide on Trump or Biden that we did not ask you about?" That sort of thing never gets asked. 

When so called independents are asked about Trump and Biden and the economy, I was a little confused. How is Trump running an economy? How did he run anything? Poorly. Perhaps these independents are simply libertarians and Biden running the economy would be ruining capitalism? It does not need to be run.

Or maybe I am reading too much into it? Independents do not care too much for the government, so Biden "running" it is just Biden wasting my tax dollars.

I have never been polled in a nonpartisan poll. I have voted for some 40 years.

Normally the voters are asked polling questions during the spring primaries. With Trump we are always pushing ahead of that. The independents (over 40%) are confused. Independents are still shopping for someone other than Trump of Biden. Too late. For the rest of us the question already came up in 2020. Who do you think can beat Trump? When you voted for Biden, you could reliably expect him to run again if Trump was running again. The not running issue would only have come up if the Republicans were past Trump. They are not. That, too, was predictable.

2016

 

We had had politicians that preached hatred of the government continuously from Reagan on. But we were done with most of the 2000s versions. We got to 2016. You could not imagine two candidates more different. One was focused on the little guy in ways that the government could support you. The other was focused on the little guy too. But his little guys did not want anything from the government. Or whatever it was, they distrusted it. The hatred candidate cleverly wanted to stop the government from giving stuff " to all those other people." And foreigners. The little guy was to survive purely by capitalism. I guess by being an Amazon seasonal worker. Or "entrepreneur." Which for the little guy was lawn care etc.

Four dollar gas

The price of oil has varied quite a lot in the long run. The spikes are some sort of world wide events.

Business news are always trying to scare you. They want you to support the "more drilling" candidate.

That was this week. As far as politics goes, the Trump vs Biden issues are burying all long term plans. Biden is right to promote electric cars. But even the politicians supporting less emissions have not quite looked at this well enough. Consumers have, and many want a plug in hybrid. This is mainly because they want to be independent. There may be the luxury end, but most of are going to charge at home, not at Tesla charging stations. They do travel, though, and most are used to finding gas stations, even if they charge the car at home. Those will remain, and interstate roads will have plenty of gas stations. The electric charging stations will be at work places and shopping centers.

Where the politics is going wrong is in supporting electric truck transport. Not even California is going to get that anytime soon. We had decades to support electric trains, but those are not going to go far. Mostly commuter trains. But we could certainly go for an electric train going East and West.  It would have to be a set of parallel tracks with normal trains going North and South from it. None of these things are going to happen with the current Democrats and Republicans fighting for abortion and shutdowns. So I'll just leave that for now.

But the cars are coming. The barrel price of oil will not get to 150 dollars soon and will not stay there for long. But in the coming decades, it will. The price of oil can only go up. It will never come down to the 1900s prices again. We won't give up on oil, but it will be expensive. Large vehicles will continue use it and consumer prices for retail goods will reflect it.

The consumer is going to go for the plug in hybrid for the next car. Drivers will become more frugal and will try to limit driving to less than 50 miles a day.

Googling for plug in hybrid with 50 mile range gets me...

Ford, Lexus and Volvo, Mitsubishi and BMW. But all with 35-40 mile range. Karma GS-6 will go 61 miles. But that is more of a sports car. Not a people's car. We are getting there. I predict that some small vehicles will develop. Safety issues will arise. Prices will be worked on, a compromise of price and safety. Since the hybrids and electric cars will both have some weight issues, let us just say that the challenge is similar. But the weight issue can be addressed by much smaller vehicles. Imagine a car that looks and acts more like an electric bicycle. Or even the type of three wheeled motorcycle we see now. Basically a light vehicle with all the weight other than the battery stripped down. 

Just to give some idea of a light weight vehicle, here is one with some calculations made by the physics people. (This is not a hybrid, this a light weight electric). See*

All those will go 50 miles as the technology develops. No technology developed in less than 20 years to this level. 

There is also a case to be made for "full hybrid" but the issues are a bit complicated. You may not get politicians to support full hybrids as it will always use gas. LINK:

https://www.progressive.com/answers/plug-in-hybrid-vs-hybrid/

*PAPER • OPEN ACCESS Lightweight Design and Test of Electric Experimental Car To cite this article: Fei Song et al 2022 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 2185 012046

LINK https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2185/1/012046/meta

The Criminal Trump

As a Democrat I am concerned about Trump, but also the presidency. The president can, as it is, do anything he or she feels like with all the departments, the cabinets and secretaries. With the right wing hatred of the federal government, we could end up firing a million government employees. Nothing in the constitution says we need to have the cabinet posts. We could end up with secretary of state, war and treasury. Keep about 500 people to run those.

Another point I wish to make is that ex-Trump voters, still republicans, dismiss the Trump charges as politics. Not actual crimes. No, we don't want any president to act like the autocrat that he was.

Our election laws need fixing. Our human rights...including voting...need fixing.

Some comments, just watch 10-20 minutes, on this topic.

Now, the case for january 6th will indeed go to court. Trump lawyers have their own problems. The rest of us will have the problem of protecting witnesses and jurors. I have said this before. I would not be on that jury. I would refuse.

The Georgia indictment also came through. I will be curious about the GOP response to RICO charges involving actual voting processes and voting machines. "It's just politics" is not going to work anymore.

The Debt Ceiling

 In 2017 the national debt was about 20 trillion. It is appoaching 25 trillion now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States

President Obama added about $8.6 trillion, about a 74% increase, to the national debt at the end of President Bush’s last budget in 2009.

At the end of fiscal year 2020, the debt was $26.9 trillion. Trump added $6.7 trillion to the debt between fiscal year 2017 and fiscal year 2020, a 33.1% increase, largely due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and 2020 recession.

Trump's years before the pandemic:

In 2017, 2018, and 2019, the debt limit (total debt) was reset at $20.5 trillion, $22 trillion and $28.4 trillion, respectively. (Snopes)

You could easily manage the debt by raising taxes. Taxing individuals would be needed, as corporations do not pay a lot of tax, even if you raise it a few percent.

Peer pressure, groups and the odd group identity

People form groups naturally. These groups appear in public, discuss things, and may hold opinions as a group that the members do not agree with. Things like stability and a safe environment are important for people. In public they may conform to the rules that they do not follow in private.

Important members of the group express their opinions in public. They may be the employers in the community. When election comes around they have a big influence on the candidates and votes. The members of the group may follow the leader on some issues or all of them. Personal opinions are not so important to many people. The authoritarian group respects a strong leader.

In addition some of the people voting are not smart enough to follow what happens after election. They actually never find out they were screwed. Or they refuse to admit it out of embarrassment.

Social psychology is the field that attempts to unwind all this and see what the factors are that determine election outcomes. In the internet era you could get a lot of data from anonymous surveys. But they too have error, there is now a reluctance to answer. The internet is seen as too invasive. We just use it to get info, not to provide it.

The topic of the book was quite eye opening for me, as I have never identified with any groups in this manner, other than the camraderie I had as a scientists with my type of science.

Books on Populism

For a year or two I've looked at books on populism that did not go to one or the other side, supporting populists or at least populism as beneficial or then going full anti Trump. This Moffitt book so far has been the only one, even from academia. It only goes to 2016. The tea party movement is well described, birthers and anti Obama feel bubbling under. Trump is not covered, as the book focuses mostly on Europe and Latin America and does not go past 2016. Sarah Palin makes a brief appearance.

Populism is not always active in day to day politics, but occasionally will color the entire year with shades of discontent. This happened with the banking crisis 2008. Somebody was doing terrible things. They have to be held accountable!

A paragraph will explain more on the scope of this book.

It's quite readable, and the first page of text captures quite well the views of the populist right: the elites and unelected bureaucrats are running "our" country, so they are angry. It gives good historical background. The chapter on populism and democracy catalogs the academic views on populism, positive and negative. From the negative side, it is pointed out that in elections the populist parties may be large parties, even larger than the other two or three if we are in Europe. The populist leaders and their followers always seem to subjugate the other parties and any minority groups to their rules.

One thing that got pointed out is that like everything in the world of the Internet and media, even popular movements might not be genuine, but manipulated from the very start.

Other authors seemed to be too happy with populism as a force. This book does describe what happened in recent times, but with not much criticism. The chapter titled Protest in the Age of Populism is worth reading. Covers grass roots activism, which on the right got funded by the Koch brothers.

Anne Applebaum covers Brexit and Europe well but not so much the US. Her examples are from the 1970s.

Protest in the 2020s

The tens of millions of people that voted for Trump and the equally large group that attended his rallies are used to togetherness at events, and even anger. But protest is alien to most of the group. And even expressing what they felt was difficult. When they heard "the election was stolen," that was easy enough to repeat to reporters. Conspiracy phrases were also popular. They would remember phrases from Tucker Carlson as well. In fact Tucker was probably the needed fuel to get Trump going in 2016. He convinced them the "liberal elites" and unelected bureaucrats should not be running the country.

I'm reading some books on the 1968 Chicago convention, Vietnam war and the 70s popular trends.
It struck me how different the protest is from the left and the right. We had the truckers protesting the Covid lock downs, but other than that, the protest from the MAGA folks was at Trump rallies. There were some major events with armed Proud Boys and so on, but the majority of the events were in the safe confines of some building or outdoor event center. There was parking! Vietnam protesters did not need cars or parking.

The same restrained attitude to protest came up with the BLM protests. The black people protesting were all "looters and criminals" according to MAGA.

It's all sanitized to give a safe family type of protest for them. No thought involved, even the signs they held ups were printed by Trump. Jordan Klepper was able to get something more out of the Trump supporters on the grounds of the events, but the issues still tended to fall in the conspiracy theories and the stolen election.

The people in the Trump rallies would discuss the conspiracies, election denial and other Trump claims, but not anything serious as far as politics, mainly things they were taught to be outraged about. If you would ask them about what sort of things government is necessary for, how do we spend tax money, and that sort of thing, they would not have much to say. Or they would come right out and say "government is spending on minorities." Obama tried to explain how most government programs benefit us all. But this benefit of government is quite vague in the minds of MAGA republicans. You could only demonstrate the benefit by cutting it off for a few years. Much of spending is also long term planning and support, so the systems supported might run ten years or more before much deterioration. The Cincinnati bridge is an example.

The political scientists would say that the questions need to be more anonymous. I would say that the majority of Trump voters still believe in "deep state" and the elites running everything. But they only need to hint at this and not say it directly. They are racists, and this includes Jews as a target. Just a few words leak out, like "Jewish space lasers" and the crowd will know who to blame. The establishment.

A Jewish journalist comments: Apparently, according to Greene, “Rothschild Inc” started the fires using a space laser, and its goal was to clear the way for a high-speed rail project.

You can read the entire bonkers tirade on Media Matters. 

The violence did appear but those were basically young men with nothing to do, libertarians, not the white working class that Trump captured.

Separate from the MAGA protests, the anti-abortion movement has always been public.

Puzzling Trends and Minority Rule

Support for Democrats and Republicans fluctuates wildly from president to president. I am always surprised at the number of people going back and forth between elections and midterm results. Both Clinton and Obama lost a lot of votes and the house at the midterm of their first four years. I am led to think that voting is mostly a gut feel thing. Short slogans and TV ads are a big influence. "But her emails." Voters have to like a candidate in some manner, policy never wins an election.

The Republicans have been the minority party for a while, though they occasionally get more votes than Democrats in a mid term election. That may be more to do with who shows up to vote. That is part of their strategy, to control access to voting. And also in general, they have a good number of states under control. The governors may decide future elections, if vote counts are close, and we continue using the Electoral College.

Ballot initiatives even in Republican states like Kansas and Kentucky have provided protection for abortion rights. Of course the state legislatures in red states have moved to block ballot initiatives. You can do this by demanding so many signatures in every county, for example. And other legal tricks.

The general trend over decades, with voters in urban areas, is toward the liberal end. The tolerance view, as opposed to white Christian nationalists. People are influenced by family and may tend to drift toward the views of the parents when they get past forty.

But there is now evidence that the millennials do not change to conservatives as they age. They may even have fewer children and continue to be the same liberals they were when they were 20.

So the trend may be toward the Democrats here. However, since Trump packed the court with conservatives, that may be a major factor holding back the millennials for another 20 years. A disturbing trend came up with Title 42 which is essentially a presidential tool to control health hazards and the movement of people in a pandemic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Health_Service_Act

Gorsuch dissented, explaining how it is not even their job.

In a dissenting opinion, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the "current border crisis is not a COVID crisis. And courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort."