That Was Disappointing

It's an understatement to say I'm disappointed by the election results. We have elected a 78-year-old man who's barely coherent at the best of times, after pushing aside an 81-year-old man because he was too old. We've also given Trump control of the Senate, so he can appoint just about any random yahoo to any post. As H. L. Mencken said, "“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” Looks like we're about to prove that.

Making coherent sense of this election will be difficult. Missouri passed an abortion-rights amendment while re-electing the people who made the amendment necessary. Florida's amendment didn't clear the 60% threshold required, but 57% voted for both abortion rights and the people who made the amendment necessary. I'm not exactly sure what Harris could have done differently or better.

Having said that, some thoughts:

1) There's a floor of 30% to 40% of the vote for any major party candidate, as evidenced by that jerk Mark Robinson's vote total in North Carolina. One needs to overcome this to win.

2) There are a large number of people in the US who are just mad at "the system." One group of them reminds me of a 3-year-old having a meltdown in that they are mad at stupid shit, such as transexual people. Another group is mad at arguably more reasonable things, such as immigration (it's a problem, even if Trump didn't want it fixed) and the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

3) We do have a participation problem. I can't find the number at the moment, but I hear that only about half of registered voters actually voted this year. Getting these people involved needs to happen.

The mission for the next four years is to make Trump (and when he's finally too senile to be handed a microphone, J. D. Vance) as miserable and ineffective as possible. Then we'll have to fix their messes.

Apparently we live in interesting times.

Donald Trump and Grover Cleveland

Unless something unforeseen happens, Donald Trump will be the second man to be sworn in as President for two non-consecutive terms. A while back, I read and reviewed a biography of Grover Cleveland, the first such occurrence. I thought it was a good book about a not-very interesting man. In any event, this election got me thinking about the parallels.

Cleveland, a Democrat, was elected to his first term in 1884 to an open seat. His Republican opponent, James G. Blaine, was considered by his own party to be corrupt, ambitious and amoral. Cleveland was, unusually for politicians in that era, honest and notably not that ambitious. He won.

Trump first came to office in 2016, defeating Hilary Clinton. Rightly or wrongly, she was perceived by many to be corrupt, ambitious and amoral. Trump of course was not notably moral himself, but he was perceived as rich and therefore honest. (Perceived is doing a lot of work in that last sentence.) And much like Cleveland in 1884, Trump won by a very narrow margin.

Cleveland lost the election of 1888. His first term was marked by a lot of unpopular actions (he issued 414 vetoes, more than twice as many as all of his predecessors combined) and his 1888 campaign was ran on a platform of lower tariffs, unpopular in his base. Trump, of course, presided over and mismanaged COVID, clearly not a popular thing to do. Both men were defeated by what appeared to be fairly standard-issue politicians of their era. (I would argue that Biden's better-than-average, but that's not relevant for this post.)

Cleveland won the election of 1892. Harrison, his opponent, had greatly increased tariffs, increasing prices and creating general economic problems. Biden, of course, had a bunch of supply chain issues and inflation. To be fair, these were not his fault (it hit every major economy) and the US experience was much better than everybody else's, largely due to Biden's policies. In fact, the US economy is dragging the rest of the world up, although the higher interest rates resulting from those policies have their own negative impacts.

But clearly (to me at any rate) Harris was unable to effectively separate herself from "Bidenomics" as evidenced by the fact that she underperformed Biden in essentially all voter demographics. Trump, by being the only major-party alternative, was the beneficiary.

To close the loop, Cleveland presided over the Panic of 1893, "the most serious economic depression in history until the Great Depression of the 1930s." It was made worse by Cleveland's economic policies, specifically his tight money policies. Cleveland was eligible to run for re-election in 1896, but lost his party's nomination.

So, lessons and observations:

1) It's the economy, stupid. Low-propensity voters make a binary choice - economy good = re-elect incumbents, economy bad = vote for the other guy.

2) Not nearly enough Americans actually care about rule of law, equal rights, or related issues. I hope that if and when Trump tries to do some of his "dictator on day one" BS more people will, but hope is in short supply at the moment. I also think (and this may be more hope) that there's a "it won't happen here" mentality at work, especially among low-propensity voters.

3) Yes, there does appear to be a problem with young men but the graph in the linked article shows men and women shifting right. I think that higher interest rates are more painful to people just starting out in the economy then old fogies like me who already have a house and a car.

4) Yes, Joe Rogan, talk radio, Fox News are factors. But nobody is making people consume this stuff. They are filling a need. Address the need instead of focusing on the medium. In Cleveland's time, we had all sorts of populist third parties, formed because of economic problems.

None of the above is going to get fixed in one election, much though I wish it would. The Gilded Age didn't really start to end until Teddy Roosevelt's election in 1900 - almost a decade after the start of Cleveland's second term.