My Takes on the Election

I can't resist talking about the Current Thing

Overdetermined

You can say that the Democrats could have won if only ____. There are many possible ways to fill in the blank that are probably true. There are many plausible “if-only”s. If you like the Democrats on policy, your if-only will emphasize special factors, such as Biden’s late withdrawal, or Harris’ missteps, like choosing Walz rather than Shapiro. If you don’t like the Democrats on policy, you will say that they lost because of the issues on which you disagree with them. The game is to emphasize an if-only that raises your own status.

And Tyler was right.

J D Vance is formidable

Things could go wrong over the next four years. A lot of people voted for Mr. Trump did so holding their noses. He could become very unpopular fairly quickly. This is more likely to happen if the progressives keep quiet (which they won’t). Just as Israel was more likely to weaken if the Palestinians have kept quiet (remember the hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting Bibi’s court reform?), but instead they launched the October 7 attack.

Bad luck or mistakes could make many people unhappy, and being part of the Administration could be too much baggage. But otherwise, Vance will have a good chance of retaining Mr. Trump’s voters. He is very intelligent. I bet he had a two-standard-deviation IQ advantage over Harris or Walz. Note that this does not make me a fan of Vance.

It’s the economy, stupid

The day will come when the Federal government can no longer keep running up the debt. The challenge for the Trump Administration will be to come up with ways to reduce the deficit that don’t inflict pain on people whose votes it needs.

Just getting cuts through Congress and the bureaucracy will be a tremendous challenge. Good luck to you, Elon.

Also, they have to hope that their good policies (deregulation) overcome the damage that will be caused by their bad policies (tariffs). Alex is right.

It’s the Intelligence Agencies, stupid

My instinct about the current state of warfare is that there is a lot of potential for intelligence to be the deciding factor. If there is rot in the CIA or NSA or FBI or DOD, it will be important to carefully clean those agencies out. A wholesale dismantling would wipe out too much institutional knowledge. But if they are as hampered by DEI and partisanship as many on the right believe, you cannot just leave them alone. Mr. Trump’s appointments in these areas will have to be stellar managers.