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
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.
You can read the entire bonkers tirade on Media Matters.
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."
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
While we plough through multiple elections, it will be the Supreme Court that lays out the topics for the next 8-12 years. Most of our government has run smoothly for the last 50 years. The departments that run are not listed in the constitution, but it does allow the president to employ assistants. These have turned into the bureaucratic cabinets. The defense side is rather safe, but many other cabinets are not legal (or at least not required) by the constitution. These two guys...
...will lead the effort. The Tenth Amendment (see top) will be heavily used. Based on this one amendment, the court will go on to strip the government of many powers. We can have federal income tax. But Social Security is rather iffy if you take the 10th amendment word for word.
Republicans in congress will simply allow the social security funds to run out. Then it is a simple matter to scrap the law as well.
There is a brief mention of "the people," but this people is pretty much going to be the people as part of a state. The people nationwide will not be considered having rights.
I was clicking around The Onion when a link from there caught my attention. it was a site called the Root. There was an article on the election with some numbers and a LOT of comments.
A few screen shots of the comments will give you an idea of the anger.
We are all quite anxious about the election. I think it will be a sort of non-event when we are over it. There may be recounts but we are still not in the full Trumpian era, where states reverse results. That will be more in the electoral count system in 2024.
But we will only enjoy our sigh of relief about two weeks. Once all the dust settles we will have the Trump 2024 campaign announcement. And if we get Trump on Twitter, you will get an endless stream of Trump news for two years. And whatever the result of the election...it will not stop Trump. He has one more chance to be relevant, 2024. After 2024...whew...Trump is quickly forgotten.
In 2024, he will lose, as the repeat of the 2016 election is unlikely. His unpopularity will be worse than Biden's as legal cases mount. All we have to do to win is...not run Biden. Democrats should see this and Biden himself needs to do a little something. He can promote someone when we have a likely candidate. And for those politicians, someone has to go first. A few more will then follow. [Added note 2023: this did not happen by 2023. Now it is a bit late for Biden to pull out. Also, name recognition needs more time, so a candidate not Biden has little chance to jump in during 2024]
Sorry folks , that is how it goes. Find a hobby for two years, travel, start exercising, anything! I am posting a President Niinistö picture. He is the symbol of all of us.
Trump is expected to announce running in 2024 a few days after the election. This is actually sensible, unlike the chaotic Trump camp, in that there is a window here. Waiting to 2023 looks "weak" in trump terminology. He no longer needs to support candidates for revenge, as he did this year. All the money goes to promote himself now. By campaign finance rules. Trump's popularity is 41%. In 2016 Gallup had him at 36% on election day. But he got some 30% of the voters who viewed both Trump and Clinton as unfavorable. So we don't really know anything about 2024 yet.
AND HERE WE GO
Update: The Big Lie has died. This was the end:
My prediction for 2024:
The end of the populist's career: I think that Trump as a whole will not interest a large part of the people in the 2024 election. Democrats and independents don't care how Trump did in 2020, and this is Trump's only theme. That he has suffered injustice. The whole of 2016 was a matter of white old people feeling that they had somehow been marginalized in the 2016 election. Trump ran a campaign against foreigners and people of color. Now the whole campaign is Trump himself. Sympathies ran out in this 2022 election.
The main feature is repetition. The main target is seniors. They go to church, they go to vote, out of duty.
When they are at the voting booth they vote mostly from tradition: the same party. But if there are options, then the thing that comes to mind is the TV ad. Name recognition is most important. After that gut feel. If they heard the candidate speak, they mostly made up their mind on how the person spoke. Not what they said, just the personality and the tone of voice. The way you sell mattresses and Prevagen is how you sell candidates.
A minor second point comes into play if there is still some hesitation, such as in a primary election. There you have to get that person watching TV to identify the candidate as part of "us." It does not matter if the candidate is Democrat of republican, they still have to make a bond of sorts with the voter. Trump was good at this, as his thinking is so simplified that he did not need to prove any point with any facts or numbers, just identify voters (white folks) as us and the enemy (foreigners) as the other people who are not us. "They are threatening our way of life!"
Democrats: simplify the message! This is good:
