It depends on what people do. If Trump is effective governing people who voted for him may make it a habit. If he's not they won't.
The same could have been said of Biden in 2020.
The most encouraging sign in the election is that Hispanics and young people in TX/FL have swung hard to the right. I don't think Hispanics nationwide will ever get over 50% R or close to it (because in much of the country they are assimilating to a more leftist local culture), but in these particular strong conservative cultures they are assimilating more towards that culture. An effective Trump term might win them over longer term, which would mean the ultimate progressive goal of flipping Texas blue would be put off at least a generation.
This is especially important because these are the engines of growth in our economy and one of the few places where the GOP is culturally and electorally successful in the big cities (Trump won Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Dallas/Fort Worth metro area. He was competitive in San Antonio and Houston).
As to Yglesias, it's one thing to talk about defeating the woke wing, it's another to do it. A simple metric for me would be when CA/NY start building the same number of houses per capita as the sunbelt. Or internal migration stops fleeing these blue cities. So far I'm not seeing it. Substack posts and obscure Sacramento bills aren't results on the ground in and of themselves.
Maybe voting party line was the habit of a majority again for decades up until Reagan or a bit before him but I don't foresee such a clear majority for a long time if ever. Too many don't want to be tied to a party. Sometimes it's about charisma (Eisenhower?, Kennedy?, Reagan, Clinton, Obama), or maybe a total lack of it, but more often it's simply whether they think the economy is doing well under the party in power. Since I don't think the President has much if any sway over the economy, I'd argue how well they govern isn't much of a factor.
According to Nate Moore's analysis at The Liberal Patriot (https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/lone-star-letdown) it does look like voting Republican (at least for President) might becoming a habit for some Hispanic voters. It does take a while though. The way I look at it, if your grandparents were Reagan Democrats, then your parents probably voted about 50/50, and you might be willing to register as a Republican.
Come on. Why is there this conventional wisdom out there that it takes generations to change political parties? Is that your personal experience? It’s definitely not mine
Very much agreed. I've seen some very triumphant statements from some ordinarily sharp people essentially saying "this election was a repudiated of everything I don't like about the Democratic Party" and to me that seems like clear confirmation bias. Harris' candidacy was the natural consequence of DEI policies: selected for a prime position due to her ethnicity more than any merit, and then drastically underperformed to the surprise of no one. The irony here is that Trump you could also say won not on his own merit, but mainly because of the failures of his opponents. I would characterize the election as a practical failure of progressive identity politics, not necessarily a victory for Trumpist populism. It's going to take more than one lost election for Democrats to bail on identity politics, though.
Trump won on his own merit. 1) running and dominating in the Rep primary. 2) His policies of stopping illegal immigration, reducing crime thru more police & jail time, tariffs on China; these are his popular populist policies. So popular, even Harris started claiming she would get tough at the border. 3) welcoming RFK jr., who disagrees on some issues. And others.
However I think Gordon is correct in the sense that *actually* imposing high tarrifs and actually reducing *legal* immigration (after first correctly staunching illegal immigration’s on which point he definitely won AND the Dems definitely lost) are the “populist” policies that it might not necessarily be a victory for - or might get big pushback if he were to succeed with pushing them through free the results became apparent.
I suggest there are three primary factions on the left in the US. The woke, the technocrats, and the socialists (aka left-wing populism) eg. Bernie.
The socialist wing has been quiet in the past years as they watched the woke and technocrats fight it out. IMO the woke have lost a big battle and will recede while the socialist wing will be coming back with a vengeance to fight the technocrats for control.
I tried having this argument with another person of the same mind. His answers were muddy, but here goes.
”Technocrats” are basically the traditional/ old school liberals/progressives.
The socialist wing is indeed the Bernie very leftist economics (close to Marxist) wing.
The woke are the social justice warrior oppressor-oppressed ideology wing, that skews towards the young.
That said, the woke overlap highly with the leftist economics, so it is harder to disentangle them completely.
But the idea that the young hard left skews woke (oppressor-oppressed) ideology while the older hard left skews to economic neo-Marxism ideology is accurate enough.
This is a bit different than a normal win, in large part because of all the things done to Trump personally and to his network during the interregnum. Not just him, but his lawyers, his associates, his businesses, etc. Overcoming all of that is pretty substantial; and the fact that Harris is such a bad leader that she needed to be kept from appearing or saying anything - is not enough.
You personally want to limit the idea that anyone has any mandate. It appears to me associated with libertarianism. However, ironically, at this point limited government will require aggressive activist approaches in reducing the regulatory and deep state. If this isn't considered part of a mandate, then it won't be achieved.
I'm not sure exactly what the mandate is, but I my phrasing - interregnum - suggests something like the Stuart restoration. A return to normalcy after a period of Puritanical excess - the ancestry of Woke. What will come next, I'm not sure, but the Stuarts lasted a few decades before the Glorious Revolution and Hanovers. In that sense, I claim that the election did in fact repudiate the Woke arm of the Democratic Party.
I think the demographic swings that have been happening (there's a lot by Ruy Teixeira and others about them) are probably what will make this a more durable realignment than the movement from GHWB to Clinton or W to Obama. They've been happening even though Trump lost in 2020, and lost the popular vote in 2016.
There has never been a presidential candidate with such substantial forces arrayed against him - the Democrats, the media, the academy, Hollywood, even the bureaucracy - and yet he won comfortably. I don’t see how it goes back to business as usual among those groups.
They’re not going to end up doing the same thing they’ve been doing for eight years. Something’s going to give. And the “woke” branch seems the most likely to get sidelined. Everyone hates them, they’re probably a significant part of the reason the D’s lost everything last week, etc. I get the vibe that a lot of people in that cohort are already running for cover.
My question is, how do they get rid of the woke branch and where does the woke branch go? They’ll still exist and they’ll still be a mob influencing the Party through in-person, academic and online tribal pressures.
"There has never been a presidential candidate with such substantial forces arrayed against him - the Democrats, the media, the academy, Hollywood, even the bureaucracy"
How long is your memory? It seems to me that every Republican candidate since at least 1968 has faced the same forces. It's true that the energy expended against Trump was greater, but I think the extra energy was largely futile - once all these forces called Bush, McCain, and Romney racists and fascists, did it matter that they also called Trump the same?
I don’t know - I was around for all of them and my impression is that they didn’t receive anywhere near the same level pushback. I was pretty young for Reagan, so maybe my memory of his administration isn’t accurate, but George W definitely had a honeymoon phase with the press.
Maybe we should be more precise. I was referring to pre-election coverage; I think all these institutions were unified and consistent in opposing Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Dole, Bush, McCain, and Romney before doing the same for Trump. It's true that they turned the dial to 11 for Trump, but as I noted above, I don't think it mattered.
After election, Republicans before Trump tended to get reasonably clear-eyed coverage, at least from the press. As you noted, George W definitely got favorable treatment for at least a couple of years after 9/11. And Trump never got good-faith reporting from most of the media, so that was different. I'm still not sure how much difference it made.
I think the fear mongering “Beware the Trump Hitler Demon” was worse in 2020 than 2016, but about the same in 2024. Yes, it was effective, it mattered, in 2020. Tho the Dems openly talking about assassination was worse, and the Secret Service allowing an assassin to shoot multiple shots, killing an innocent, is the worst Deep State action so clear.
Plus the secret discrimination against hiring Rep professors, going on for decades, has resulted in more elite college grads both indoctrinated and arrogant taking more positions of power.
Mr. Kling's sports analogy is very good, capturing some of the feelings I've gotten from the DNC's backroom assignment of their last three presidential candidates. (I don't know why the D's even bother to hold primaries anymore.) Also, he's in excellent company. Matt Taibbi's "Hate Inc." describes the entire US presidential election as a sports event. Taibbi can be hilarious as he describes big-media and political dirty tricks that are seriously undermining our country. I recommend this book, you'll laugh your ass off while learning what a career Big-Media writer really thinks about his industry and the news it covers.
Candidates mattered in this race. If the Dems had put forward someone willing and able to credibly articulate the centrist position to which Harris flip-flopped, it would have been a nail-biter. If the Reps had put forward a sunny Reagan, instead of a candidate many swing voters would never vote for, the wave would have been truly tidal. That said, let's hope the Dems learn lessons about the ineffectiveness of their policies and the divisiveness of the Woke stuff (if they can't win, mammals won't play). Most importantly, the open borders policy, which shows the real agenda and bad faith of the Left. The technocrats worldwide would do well to recognize open borders as a big vote loser and stop enabling it. Hope springs eternal...
No, if the Reps had gone with DeSantis or Haley, most Dem-walk away folk would not have left, tho maybe most Jews who left ran away from Jew hating woke Dems. Many technocrats also are envious, and hate, the Jews, tho claim instead to oppose the Israeli settlements.
The idea you get Trump rally level of support without Trump is preposterous. The Dems know this, which is why they are even more deranged against him.
“The idea you get Trump rally level of support without Trump is preposterous. The Dems know this, which is why they are even more deranged against him.”
Hmmmm. I think you are correct about the first, but wrong about the second. The Dems decidedly did NOT “know this”, they specifically believed the opposite.
Both in 2016 and again in 2024, Dems did everything they could to ensure that Trump was the GOO nominee, believing he would be the easiest GOP candidate to defeat.
I agree with the 2016 case. I also believed it in 2024, right up until the election happened. But it was proven incorrect. See how much better Trump did than the Senate candidates in all the swing states, and OH, and TX.
except race is real and very much biological. or if you want to be semantically pedantic, population group avg differences on many traits (yes including above the neck) are real, in some cases substantially so.
and that's ok. the sooner we talk about it calmly and amicably instead of hysterically denying it, the better. Including you Arnold.
The more "outside view" theory going around was that this was a straightforwardly anti incumbent election. You may have seen that John Burn Murdoch graph that showed that -- unlike any other year on record -- every single election in the world in 2024 saw the ruling party lose vote share, including plenty of both left and right wing parties. Every major incumbent leader today is unpopular. The US Democrats actually lost proportionately fewer votes than most, and fewer still in the swing states where they actually campaigned hard.
You can tell many stories about why this might be: inflation, COVID hangovers, anti-immigration sentiment, or just a general Gurrian revolt of the public. But even if other factors affected the Dems' ability to swim against that tide -- and I do think Biden's hanging in till July was one of those -- there clearly was a tide anyone would have been swimming against.
"I think that the significance of this election is being over-rated." I think this is right. Like Arnold, I'm not a Democrat, and I'm not rooting for the Democrats.
Think about the scope of the election. Trump soundly defeated Harris, which has gotten all the attention. Beyond that, how did the Democrats do? Democrats lost 4 Senate seats, which is a significant number, but 2 of these were thoroughly expected - Democratic senators in deep-red states. In the House, the Democrats had a net loss of 1 seat (according to Real Clear Politics), with 18 seats still to be decided. It's possible they could end with a net gain, and even take control of the House. This is not a "red wave", or even a "red ripple".
My interpretation, surely based partly on my own hopes and tastes, is that voters did not clearly reject Democrats and all their works. I think this is in large part because Republicans haven't given them much of an agenda to embrace. Certainly, securing the border is a concrete objective. Beyond that, Republicans are as muddled as Democrats, thanks largely to Trump's own incoherence and inconsistency.
I hope the next 4 years don't cause too much damage, and that Republicans in 2028 can come up with a meaningful positive (and plausible) agenda, and that Democrats can come up with an agenda the country can support. I hope, but I don't expect.
The failure of Reps to win more House seats is the most important evidence that the Swing vote is not yet really red, nor that they are anti-incumbent.
How many votes did Dem House candidates get vs Rep reps?
Here's a slightly different take; Team Swing decided to side with Team Red for a while instead of Team Blue. It remains to be seen what will happen at the 7th inning stretch.
Your baseball analogy is apt, but what the substitution of woke for daft did was show Team Swing something important and deeply disturbing about the true nature of Team Blue. I agree with Lasagna; this election is no ripple; it is at least a small tsunami.
Then, show that every single person on the planet should be suing Pfizer and Moderna for deliberately hiding human DNA in their vaccines, and Pfizer, for injecting an undisclosed carcinogenic monkey virus (SV40) sequence into the cell nucleus of the clueless biohacked, as officially recognized by Health Canada !!!
Didn’t like that topic? Show 10 secs in the middle of this video (who doesn’t have 10 seconds for you):
(caveat about the beginning: pot destroys your brain + “Raises Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke”)
9/11: two "planes", yet 8 towers down. WTC7 imploded, free falling on its footprint, in a controlled demolition. It was out of reach as well as the unblemished Deutsche Bank. All 7 World Trade Center towers and that bank needed to be rebuilt, not the closer towers not belonging to World Trade Center...
The “owner” took an insurance policy for the WTC against terrorism, months before, when no one was taking them … he didn’t show up for work on 9/11 … just as his 2 grown up siblings.
The inside information about the FUTURE 9/11 event helped masons make trillions by shorting the stock exchange: the records were deleted by the SEC so they wouldn't be prosecuted !!!
- J6: The false flag operation of the fake riot was planned, incited and guided by 200 infiltrated FBI mason agents, who broke into the Capitol !!! All intel agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA) were founded by masons and are run by them for their own nefarious goals.
In 2022, the same mason-plot was copy-pasted to disband the demonstrations of millions of Brazilians against the stolen elections through the rigged voting machines owned by mason Soros:
- At least since the 90s, vaccines are weaponized to reduce the population, for example adding hCG to infertilize women: lab detected in 30 countries, and overpassing the FDA 10 ng limit to human DNA “contamination” (tampering) by 2000%, thus causing neuro-damage (autism, asperger, tics, dyslexia in 29% of kids, etc.) and childhood cancer epidemic (n.b. leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas). Check SoundChoice.org or videos.
- COVID was designed as a primer for even more lethal COVID haccines:
“Only” 0.33% of excess deaths in the first 2 years (ca. 1% of the haxxed, mainly elderly). 40 million people killed by the lethal injections... so far.
Yet, the most important impact of the COVID haccines, population-wise, is lifelong infertility.
Births keep dropping even more dramatically. The infertility bomb will fully explode in 10-20 years: a huge percentage of the babies of the haxxed pregnants and the haxxed children/adolescents could have become lifelong infertile.
If your unhaxxed children evade self-replicating haxxines (replicons) and marry haxxed ones, they will probably not have children ... just as planned: the only choice deliberately left for them will be infertile DNA-designed transhumanized babies, for an ever dependency on immoral IVF (for every IVF-born, 25 are lost or murdered), with a prohibitive cost (planned increasing prices of carbon-footprint monthly quotas tied to Central Bank Digital Currencies in their 15-min cities, where we become slaves to be hunted down in slo-mo):
2. There's proof of deliberate geoengineering to increase global temperatures and droughts, and decrease albedo by dissolving clouds with satellite and Weather Radars’ Electro-Magnetic Frequencies.
3. Life involves a carbon cycle. A war on carbon is a war on life, causing food scarcity, increase in food prices and famines. Decarbonization is part of the plan to exterminate 95% of us.
- Apart from sin-empowered demons, what is their main source of power? NOT a coincidence that the USA left dollar convertibility to gold in 1971, precisely triggering the exponential government deficit coupled with the trade deficit and inflation.
Taking down central banking doesn't solve the problem. Their source of free endless money is counterfeiting, fractional reserve banking and financial instruments (e.g. derivatives, debt over debt, compound interest above real growth, etc.). Also, insider information, sabotage, infiltration, manufactured news and events to create profitable market-movements, etc.
This is the Achilles’ heel of all nations: the SSS (Satanic Secret Societies such as masonry) create trillions out of thin air and launder them through their Banks, foundations, and International loans and “aid”, with which they buy puppeticians and seats in the boards of the Federal Reserve (the only private-run Central Bank in the world), judiciary, corporations, media, healthcare, universities, foundations, political parties, etc.
They can act as long as the majority keeps daydreaming. Their worst nightmare is that people wake up, find out all the crimes, and seek justice/revenge. They are only 8000. We are a million to one. They are scared and know they are walking a tight rope until they achieve the CBDC full digi-tatorship.
We've got a very small window of opportunity to fight or ... die (they want to murder 95% of us).
President John Quincy Adams: “Masonry ought forever to be abolished. It is wrong - essentially wrong - a seed of evil, which can never produce any good.”
Swing voters is a fragile theory, or its such a broad theory that it explains not very much. Vote totals from wikipedia come in at 136 million in 2016, 158 million in 2020 and 142 million in 2024. 'Swing' voters turning the election in 2020 means you have to define swing voter to include regular voters who could go either way and also a large surge in voters who normally don't. The surge in 2020 also included a halving of the vote total for other candidates outside of the top two, and then the decline this year in voting also saw another halving for 3rd party candidates. We went from over 7 million total votes in 2016 to 2 million in 2024 for other parties with higher total turnout. If your view is that the vote for Trump isn't 'for' Trump, but just not for Harris, then you should expect larger than average 3rd party voting instead of very, very low 3rd party voting.
Overall I think that framing this as Harris vs Trump and downplaying Trump's success when the Rs also took the House and Senate while 3rd parties collapsed in support is ignoring very obvious signs that the voters were not happy with the Ds overall, but were reasonably happy with the Rs overall. The other narratives don't fit.
The fact that the House is SO close argues against your claim that voters were reasonably happy with the Rs.
The fact that the Ds won 4 of 5 [MI, WI, NV and (probably) AZ, vs PA] Senate seats in the swing states that Trump won also argues against your claim that voters were reasonably happy with the Rs.
The third-party vote was unusually high in 2016 because the two main candidates were so terrible. As you say, you would think that would have been the case this year, too, but (at least to me) the third-party candidates were also pretty bad this year.
Yeah it's hard to find (at least when I looked) national third party numbers this election but in the few (my local) races where I pulled the raw data from the state election department, third party candidates were not only down as a percentage but even raw number of votes. The one thing that did honestly surprise me though was the Greens beat out Libertarians this year locally which suggests to me that those voters either really hated Harris or really liked Trump.
Btw I wish (maybe it exists and IDK) there was a website that sucked in ALL the voting data as I'd really like to see things down to even write ins, i.e. how many people wrote "Luke Skywalker" or Hitler for example.
Yeah, I was sad that the Greens beat the Libertarians here, too (New Mexico). Not that the Libertarian Party is any great shakes this year, but the Greens are really terrible...
Imo this is less likely a comment on the Libertarian party either way than on the fact that Kamala was so bad a candidate that some leftists decided to vote Green rather than back her.
Yglesias introduces his list as “principles for Common Sense Democrats to reform governance in the blue zones and be competitive in the red zones.”
The preamble to the 2024 Republican party platform is entitled “America First: A Return to Common Sense.”
Is the shared use of “Common Sense” a coincidence? Probably not. Market research no doubt found that “Common Sense” appeals to swing voters. Just like “normal” was the hot label in 2020.
Both the Republicans and the Democrats are missing the boat though if they think that swing vote populists can be led by the nose with a lot of blather while establishment business as usual continues.
Nope. This time around populists seem to share a belief that nothing is going to happen unless it happens from the ground up. Populists are going to monitor every single subcommittee hearing, every mark-up, every grant announcement, every federal register notice, and every conference that a federal official attends, and they are going to get real loud about shutting down the nonsense, calling out the phonies, and sticking a spine up the backside of the establishment quislings.
Twitter is of course out front on this. There you will find people like @fentasyl are posting bracing calls to action:
“Now is the time for citizen researchers to dig thru federal rules, regs, grants, contracts, orders, policy, & statute to discover the unconstitutional language contained therein.
Much is blatantly unconstitutional, much more still violates civil rights law.
Rapid abolition, defunding, clawback, & prosecution is necessary.
Common sense will prevail only to the extent that common sense populists amplify and direct their messages to their representatives in government. When the establishment lays a stinker, it is the populist’s duty to ensure the world smells it.
Mandates are irrelevant. Common sense mutual aid from the bottom up are all that will make any difference.
Common sense says people in the middle vote the party in power in or out depending on whether they think they economy is doing well. While sometimes not unimportant, everything else is small by comparison.
So we had 2+ years of covid related losses followed by a similarly long period of gains almost back to where we were. Makes me think it's more of a reaction to inflation than the actual wage losses.
Yes, I would like to see some entrenched, corrupt, wasteful government systems broken too.
Maybe at the top of the list is the Federal Non-Competitive Grants to Tax-Exempt Cronies and Clients System. (see the tip of the iceberg: https://x.com/fentasyl/status/1854571063566610805 ). My scorecard on this front will be the delta in Object Class 41 of the President’s Budget Object Class Analysis volume (see page 71 at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/objclass_fy2025.pdf ). If that isn’t cut by at least 20 percent in the next two years, there ought to be a whole lot of primary activity in the mid-term.
Maybe the second highest priority in corrupt wastes of money that need breaking bad is the federal pay system. See object class 11.1 on page 40 of the same volume. If the people Trump appoints to manage the agencies are incapable of reining in payroll growth, they really need to hear “You’re Fired!”
The focus really shouldn’t be on Trump. The establishment is going to try to flood the zone with negative coverage and misinformation and it all simply needs to be ignored.
For me at least, the prize that eyes need to be watching is real private sector wages and salaries. (https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-cost-index/wages-and-salaries-and-benefits-in-private-industry-12-month-percent-change.htm ) If the new administration can’t turn this disaster around, then they need to be replaced with people who can. They will need to both reduce inflation and the cost of living for ordinary people as well as promote opportunity and growth in a substantive manner. The economists will all tell you that you cannot have both wage growth and reductions in the cost of living, but this is nonsense. Housing costs can be brought down through tax reform addressing investor-owned housing (https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/unaffordable-housing-and-homeless ) and high-wage housing construction employment can be boosted by measures such as expanding laws like the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act (SNPLMA) to the entire country. The Bureau of Land Management is giving away land to be covered with solar panels that could be instead sold to developers and the money used to reduce the deficit. (https://www.blm.gov/press-release/bureau-land-management-proposes-online-fall-land-sale-las-vegas-valley ). BLM even has an 800 acre horse ranch in the Northern Virginia suburbs (https://www.blm.gov/visit/meadowood-special-recreation-management-area ) that could easily be sold off for tens of millions of dollars and developed with low income housing. Let’s see how YIMBY the Mason economics department really is!
Good list of things to watch. The housing built should be high density, high value, premium housing, auctioned off to the highest bidders/ prices set high. As rich folk move in, they leave less rich houses, selling them to less rich folk, who sell their place to middle folk, selling their place to lower middle, who sell their older less desirable Starter Place to the middle first time buyers.
Likewise but he won't. He didn't talk about the swamp this time at all, showing how scared he is of them after they successfully undermined his first term. And if you look at who he is hinting at putting into key positions, they are all swamp monsters whom will once again third rail against him, you'd think he would have learned. A prime example here is it's now being leaked RFK won't get HHS even though that was the bribe for him and his supporters to move to Trump because the swamp monsters adamantly oppose it.
It depends on what people do. If Trump is effective governing people who voted for him may make it a habit. If he's not they won't.
The same could have been said of Biden in 2020.
The most encouraging sign in the election is that Hispanics and young people in TX/FL have swung hard to the right. I don't think Hispanics nationwide will ever get over 50% R or close to it (because in much of the country they are assimilating to a more leftist local culture), but in these particular strong conservative cultures they are assimilating more towards that culture. An effective Trump term might win them over longer term, which would mean the ultimate progressive goal of flipping Texas blue would be put off at least a generation.
This is especially important because these are the engines of growth in our economy and one of the few places where the GOP is culturally and electorally successful in the big cities (Trump won Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Dallas/Fort Worth metro area. He was competitive in San Antonio and Houston).
As to Yglesias, it's one thing to talk about defeating the woke wing, it's another to do it. A simple metric for me would be when CA/NY start building the same number of houses per capita as the sunbelt. Or internal migration stops fleeing these blue cities. So far I'm not seeing it. Substack posts and obscure Sacramento bills aren't results on the ground in and of themselves.
Maybe voting party line was the habit of a majority again for decades up until Reagan or a bit before him but I don't foresee such a clear majority for a long time if ever. Too many don't want to be tied to a party. Sometimes it's about charisma (Eisenhower?, Kennedy?, Reagan, Clinton, Obama), or maybe a total lack of it, but more often it's simply whether they think the economy is doing well under the party in power. Since I don't think the President has much if any sway over the economy, I'd argue how well they govern isn't much of a factor.
According to Nate Moore's analysis at The Liberal Patriot (https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/lone-star-letdown) it does look like voting Republican (at least for President) might becoming a habit for some Hispanic voters. It does take a while though. The way I look at it, if your grandparents were Reagan Democrats, then your parents probably voted about 50/50, and you might be willing to register as a Republican.
Come on. Why is there this conventional wisdom out there that it takes generations to change political parties? Is that your personal experience? It’s definitely not mine
In most cases there aren’t such big swings. This worker + builder Trump coalition could be the biggest change since 80 Reagan.
Most voters vote the same party as last time, but whether it’s 90% or 60% makes a big difference.
Very much agreed. I've seen some very triumphant statements from some ordinarily sharp people essentially saying "this election was a repudiated of everything I don't like about the Democratic Party" and to me that seems like clear confirmation bias. Harris' candidacy was the natural consequence of DEI policies: selected for a prime position due to her ethnicity more than any merit, and then drastically underperformed to the surprise of no one. The irony here is that Trump you could also say won not on his own merit, but mainly because of the failures of his opponents. I would characterize the election as a practical failure of progressive identity politics, not necessarily a victory for Trumpist populism. It's going to take more than one lost election for Democrats to bail on identity politics, though.
Trump won on his own merit. 1) running and dominating in the Rep primary. 2) His policies of stopping illegal immigration, reducing crime thru more police & jail time, tariffs on China; these are his popular populist policies. So popular, even Harris started claiming she would get tough at the border. 3) welcoming RFK jr., who disagrees on some issues. And others.
How would you know if it was Tumpist populism?
I think you are partly or even mostly correct.
However I think Gordon is correct in the sense that *actually* imposing high tarrifs and actually reducing *legal* immigration (after first correctly staunching illegal immigration’s on which point he definitely won AND the Dems definitely lost) are the “populist” policies that it might not necessarily be a victory for - or might get big pushback if he were to succeed with pushing them through free the results became apparent.
I suggest there are three primary factions on the left in the US. The woke, the technocrats, and the socialists (aka left-wing populism) eg. Bernie.
The socialist wing has been quiet in the past years as they watched the woke and technocrats fight it out. IMO the woke have lost a big battle and will recede while the socialist wing will be coming back with a vengeance to fight the technocrats for control.
The idea that the woke will recede after this single election is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Trump’s policies will hugely impact the already reducing momentum of woke. But we might not have even seen peak woke … how would we know.
Almost certainly peak trans has passed, and more women athletes refuse to play against q’women, XY males who reject being men. So trans IS receding.
Is the measure how many Racist, Sexist/Misogynist, Homophobist insults are thrown? Or how effective they are?
Far fewer voters seemed afraid of the Trump Hitler Demon.
I'm not sure what those three wings are. Could you explain?
I tried having this argument with another person of the same mind. His answers were muddy, but here goes.
”Technocrats” are basically the traditional/ old school liberals/progressives.
The socialist wing is indeed the Bernie very leftist economics (close to Marxist) wing.
The woke are the social justice warrior oppressor-oppressed ideology wing, that skews towards the young.
That said, the woke overlap highly with the leftist economics, so it is harder to disentangle them completely.
But the idea that the young hard left skews woke (oppressor-oppressed) ideology while the older hard left skews to economic neo-Marxism ideology is accurate enough.
Thanks.
Beautiful! Thank you. Screencaptured this comment and posting as a note with your name attached.
I hope you’re wrong.
This is a bit different than a normal win, in large part because of all the things done to Trump personally and to his network during the interregnum. Not just him, but his lawyers, his associates, his businesses, etc. Overcoming all of that is pretty substantial; and the fact that Harris is such a bad leader that she needed to be kept from appearing or saying anything - is not enough.
You personally want to limit the idea that anyone has any mandate. It appears to me associated with libertarianism. However, ironically, at this point limited government will require aggressive activist approaches in reducing the regulatory and deep state. If this isn't considered part of a mandate, then it won't be achieved.
I'm not sure exactly what the mandate is, but I my phrasing - interregnum - suggests something like the Stuart restoration. A return to normalcy after a period of Puritanical excess - the ancestry of Woke. What will come next, I'm not sure, but the Stuarts lasted a few decades before the Glorious Revolution and Hanovers. In that sense, I claim that the election did in fact repudiate the Woke arm of the Democratic Party.
I think the demographic swings that have been happening (there's a lot by Ruy Teixeira and others about them) are probably what will make this a more durable realignment than the movement from GHWB to Clinton or W to Obama. They've been happening even though Trump lost in 2020, and lost the popular vote in 2016.
I don’t know. This seems much more momentous.
There has never been a presidential candidate with such substantial forces arrayed against him - the Democrats, the media, the academy, Hollywood, even the bureaucracy - and yet he won comfortably. I don’t see how it goes back to business as usual among those groups.
They’re not going to end up doing the same thing they’ve been doing for eight years. Something’s going to give. And the “woke” branch seems the most likely to get sidelined. Everyone hates them, they’re probably a significant part of the reason the D’s lost everything last week, etc. I get the vibe that a lot of people in that cohort are already running for cover.
My question is, how do they get rid of the woke branch and where does the woke branch go? They’ll still exist and they’ll still be a mob influencing the Party through in-person, academic and online tribal pressures.
"There has never been a presidential candidate with such substantial forces arrayed against him - the Democrats, the media, the academy, Hollywood, even the bureaucracy"
How long is your memory? It seems to me that every Republican candidate since at least 1968 has faced the same forces. It's true that the energy expended against Trump was greater, but I think the extra energy was largely futile - once all these forces called Bush, McCain, and Romney racists and fascists, did it matter that they also called Trump the same?
I don’t know - I was around for all of them and my impression is that they didn’t receive anywhere near the same level pushback. I was pretty young for Reagan, so maybe my memory of his administration isn’t accurate, but George W definitely had a honeymoon phase with the press.
Maybe we should be more precise. I was referring to pre-election coverage; I think all these institutions were unified and consistent in opposing Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Dole, Bush, McCain, and Romney before doing the same for Trump. It's true that they turned the dial to 11 for Trump, but as I noted above, I don't think it mattered.
After election, Republicans before Trump tended to get reasonably clear-eyed coverage, at least from the press. As you noted, George W definitely got favorable treatment for at least a couple of years after 9/11. And Trump never got good-faith reporting from most of the media, so that was different. I'm still not sure how much difference it made.
But Lasagna’s point was all about how high the dial was turned up. And I agree with him.
I think the fear mongering “Beware the Trump Hitler Demon” was worse in 2020 than 2016, but about the same in 2024. Yes, it was effective, it mattered, in 2020. Tho the Dems openly talking about assassination was worse, and the Secret Service allowing an assassin to shoot multiple shots, killing an innocent, is the worst Deep State action so clear.
Plus the secret discrimination against hiring Rep professors, going on for decades, has resulted in more elite college grads both indoctrinated and arrogant taking more positions of power.
So, 2024 was worst since WW II.
Mr. Kling's sports analogy is very good, capturing some of the feelings I've gotten from the DNC's backroom assignment of their last three presidential candidates. (I don't know why the D's even bother to hold primaries anymore.) Also, he's in excellent company. Matt Taibbi's "Hate Inc." describes the entire US presidential election as a sports event. Taibbi can be hilarious as he describes big-media and political dirty tricks that are seriously undermining our country. I recommend this book, you'll laugh your ass off while learning what a career Big-Media writer really thinks about his industry and the news it covers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_Inc.
It’s his best book. Now, unfortunately, he’s just kinda gone nuts.
Candidates mattered in this race. If the Dems had put forward someone willing and able to credibly articulate the centrist position to which Harris flip-flopped, it would have been a nail-biter. If the Reps had put forward a sunny Reagan, instead of a candidate many swing voters would never vote for, the wave would have been truly tidal. That said, let's hope the Dems learn lessons about the ineffectiveness of their policies and the divisiveness of the Woke stuff (if they can't win, mammals won't play). Most importantly, the open borders policy, which shows the real agenda and bad faith of the Left. The technocrats worldwide would do well to recognize open borders as a big vote loser and stop enabling it. Hope springs eternal...
No, if the Reps had gone with DeSantis or Haley, most Dem-walk away folk would not have left, tho maybe most Jews who left ran away from Jew hating woke Dems. Many technocrats also are envious, and hate, the Jews, tho claim instead to oppose the Israeli settlements.
The idea you get Trump rally level of support without Trump is preposterous. The Dems know this, which is why they are even more deranged against him.
“The idea you get Trump rally level of support without Trump is preposterous. The Dems know this, which is why they are even more deranged against him.”
Hmmmm. I think you are correct about the first, but wrong about the second. The Dems decidedly did NOT “know this”, they specifically believed the opposite.
Both in 2016 and again in 2024, Dems did everything they could to ensure that Trump was the GOO nominee, believing he would be the easiest GOP candidate to defeat.
I agree with the 2016 case. I also believed it in 2024, right up until the election happened. But it was proven incorrect. See how much better Trump did than the Senate candidates in all the swing states, and OH, and TX.
Well said, good points
except race is real and very much biological. or if you want to be semantically pedantic, population group avg differences on many traits (yes including above the neck) are real, in some cases substantially so.
and that's ok. the sooner we talk about it calmly and amicably instead of hysterically denying it, the better. Including you Arnold.
The more "outside view" theory going around was that this was a straightforwardly anti incumbent election. You may have seen that John Burn Murdoch graph that showed that -- unlike any other year on record -- every single election in the world in 2024 saw the ruling party lose vote share, including plenty of both left and right wing parties. Every major incumbent leader today is unpopular. The US Democrats actually lost proportionately fewer votes than most, and fewer still in the swing states where they actually campaigned hard.
You can tell many stories about why this might be: inflation, COVID hangovers, anti-immigration sentiment, or just a general Gurrian revolt of the public. But even if other factors affected the Dems' ability to swim against that tide -- and I do think Biden's hanging in till July was one of those -- there clearly was a tide anyone would have been swimming against.
"I think that the significance of this election is being over-rated." I think this is right. Like Arnold, I'm not a Democrat, and I'm not rooting for the Democrats.
Think about the scope of the election. Trump soundly defeated Harris, which has gotten all the attention. Beyond that, how did the Democrats do? Democrats lost 4 Senate seats, which is a significant number, but 2 of these were thoroughly expected - Democratic senators in deep-red states. In the House, the Democrats had a net loss of 1 seat (according to Real Clear Politics), with 18 seats still to be decided. It's possible they could end with a net gain, and even take control of the House. This is not a "red wave", or even a "red ripple".
My interpretation, surely based partly on my own hopes and tastes, is that voters did not clearly reject Democrats and all their works. I think this is in large part because Republicans haven't given them much of an agenda to embrace. Certainly, securing the border is a concrete objective. Beyond that, Republicans are as muddled as Democrats, thanks largely to Trump's own incoherence and inconsistency.
I hope the next 4 years don't cause too much damage, and that Republicans in 2028 can come up with a meaningful positive (and plausible) agenda, and that Democrats can come up with an agenda the country can support. I hope, but I don't expect.
The failure of Reps to win more House seats is the most important evidence that the Swing vote is not yet really red, nor that they are anti-incumbent.
How many votes did Dem House candidates get vs Rep reps?
Here's a slightly different take; Team Swing decided to side with Team Red for a while instead of Team Blue. It remains to be seen what will happen at the 7th inning stretch.
Your baseball analogy is apt, but what the substitution of woke for daft did was show Team Swing something important and deeply disturbing about the true nature of Team Blue. I agree with Lasagna; this election is no ripple; it is at least a small tsunami.
Yes, and what might that “something” be about the nature of Team Blue?
Team Swing does not agree at all with Team Woke.
But Team Swing is not per se opposed to Team Technocrat.
Team Blue was dominated - in rhetoric for sure, and in policy in some important ways - by its (sub) Team Woke faction.
And imo unlike Yglesias’ wishes, it is likely to continue to be for the foreseeable future.
That is the nature of current Team Blue.
If you’re as confident as I am about this in the foreseeable future, there’s a business opportunity here? Maybe more than one?
It was never between techno and woke but about masons and their corrupted puppets and the very few rest who miraculously made it to the ranks.
Both parties are infiltrated, coopted and bribed but more the left.
What’s your best way to wake-up those who don’t want to open their eyes?
Please share your most effective wake-up strategies.
The more the awakened, the sooner this nightmare will be over!
The most effective strategy is asking about the person’s opinion on some of these topics:
Would you be interested in the story of how a father got 20 million dollars from the Government?
Or, show the video of the baby seizures:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/autism-day-shall-we-celebrate-the
That usually works, especially with young couples having children.
If the person doesn’t want to discuss injections, then food is a good start:
Why is food poisoning legal?
How Rumsfeld forced the approval of Aspartame.
Artificial sweeteners, MSG, PFAS, Glyphosate ... go organic!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/why-is-food-poisoning-legal
Then I’d follow with "Are you opened to see if the actual data matches your opinion?"
Could you please explain why no country did this and why no country promoted the cures?:
http://c19early.com
http://bit.ly/research2000
Shortcomings of the Pharma industry?:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/system-failure-ai-exposes-zero-government
Then, show that every single person on the planet should be suing Pfizer and Moderna for deliberately hiding human DNA in their vaccines, and Pfizer, for injecting an undisclosed carcinogenic monkey virus (SV40) sequence into the cell nucleus of the clueless biohacked, as officially recognized by Health Canada !!!
Didn’t like that topic? Show 10 secs in the middle of this video (who doesn’t have 10 seconds for you):
https://odysee.com/@ImpossiblyWackedOutWorld:f/WTC-7-Free-Falling:8
(caveat about the beginning: pot destroys your brain + “Raises Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke”)
9/11: two "planes", yet 8 towers down. WTC7 imploded, free falling on its footprint, in a controlled demolition. It was out of reach as well as the unblemished Deutsche Bank. All 7 World Trade Center towers and that bank needed to be rebuilt, not the closer towers not belonging to World Trade Center...
The “owner” took an insurance policy for the WTC against terrorism, months before, when no one was taking them … he didn’t show up for work on 9/11 … just as his 2 grown up siblings.
The inside information about the FUTURE 9/11 event helped masons make trillions by shorting the stock exchange: the records were deleted by the SEC so they wouldn't be prosecuted !!!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/911-2-planes-3-towers
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/107-911
There's a plan to murder 95% of the global population by 2050… written on the masonic Georgia guide-stones: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 … ”:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/depopulation-or-extermination
- J6: The false flag operation of the fake riot was planned, incited and guided by 200 infiltrated FBI mason agents, who broke into the Capitol !!! All intel agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA) were founded by masons and are run by them for their own nefarious goals.
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/j6-what-you-need-to-know
In 2022, the same mason-plot was copy-pasted to disband the demonstrations of millions of Brazilians against the stolen elections through the rigged voting machines owned by mason Soros:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-2020-american-coup
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/dominion-over-us
Weaponization of migration to steal elections and destroy nations
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/weaponization-of-migration
2024 Elections: bought or stolen? Both!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/2024-elections-bought-or-stolen
It's important that people share, not the article, but the information! I'm expendable. Saving the free world, is not!
Kamala’s dirty Big Fat secrets:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/rogan-trump-interview-historical
Go vote! Let massive-voting drown massive-fraud!
Free 100 redpill movies and documentaries:
(don't miss the 1st one, 10 min at 2x, an amazing tool to start a discussion):
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/wake-up-videos
- At least since the 90s, vaccines are weaponized to reduce the population, for example adding hCG to infertilize women: lab detected in 30 countries, and overpassing the FDA 10 ng limit to human DNA “contamination” (tampering) by 2000%, thus causing neuro-damage (autism, asperger, tics, dyslexia in 29% of kids, etc.) and childhood cancer epidemic (n.b. leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas). Check SoundChoice.org or videos.
- COVID was designed as a primer for even more lethal COVID haccines:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-real-covid-timeline
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/not-vaccine-not-gene-therapy-just
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/what-do-bioweapons-have-to-do-with
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/you-are-anti-haccine
“Only” 0.33% of excess deaths in the first 2 years (ca. 1% of the haxxed, mainly elderly). 40 million people killed by the lethal injections... so far.
Yet, the most important impact of the COVID haccines, population-wise, is lifelong infertility.
Births keep dropping even more dramatically. The infertility bomb will fully explode in 10-20 years: a huge percentage of the babies of the haxxed pregnants and the haxxed children/adolescents could have become lifelong infertile.
If your unhaxxed children evade self-replicating haxxines (replicons) and marry haxxed ones, they will probably not have children ... just as planned: the only choice deliberately left for them will be infertile DNA-designed transhumanized babies, for an ever dependency on immoral IVF (for every IVF-born, 25 are lost or murdered), with a prohibitive cost (planned increasing prices of carbon-footprint monthly quotas tied to Central Bank Digital Currencies in their 15-min cities, where we become slaves to be hunted down in slo-mo):
- You’ll go nowhere and you’ll be happy:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/2050-youll-go-nowhere-and-youll-be
Elon's top secret: EVs cause cancer
Go green with gasoline!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/electric-vehicles-cause-cancer
- You are the carbon they want to exterminate!
1. No one denies that man affects the climate, but scientists disagree on the amount and causes.
Prehistoric data from ice cores proves that temperature rise precedes carbon release in the atmosphere, not the other way around.
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/best-scientific-sources-to-debunk
2. There's proof of deliberate geoengineering to increase global temperatures and droughts, and decrease albedo by dissolving clouds with satellite and Weather Radars’ Electro-Magnetic Frequencies.
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/satattack
3. Life involves a carbon cycle. A war on carbon is a war on life, causing food scarcity, increase in food prices and famines. Decarbonization is part of the plan to exterminate 95% of us.
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/carbon-reparations
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/climate-deaths
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/killing-me-softly-with-green-songs
- Apart from sin-empowered demons, what is their main source of power? NOT a coincidence that the USA left dollar convertibility to gold in 1971, precisely triggering the exponential government deficit coupled with the trade deficit and inflation.
Taking down central banking doesn't solve the problem. Their source of free endless money is counterfeiting, fractional reserve banking and financial instruments (e.g. derivatives, debt over debt, compound interest above real growth, etc.). Also, insider information, sabotage, infiltration, manufactured news and events to create profitable market-movements, etc.
This is the Achilles’ heel of all nations: the SSS (Satanic Secret Societies such as masonry) create trillions out of thin air and launder them through their Banks, foundations, and International loans and “aid”, with which they buy puppeticians and seats in the boards of the Federal Reserve (the only private-run Central Bank in the world), judiciary, corporations, media, healthcare, universities, foundations, political parties, etc.
They can act as long as the majority keeps daydreaming. Their worst nightmare is that people wake up, find out all the crimes, and seek justice/revenge. They are only 8000. We are a million to one. They are scared and know they are walking a tight rope until they achieve the CBDC full digi-tatorship.
We've got a very small window of opportunity to fight or ... die (they want to murder 95% of us).
Who are The Powers That SHOULDN'T Be ?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/criminal-intent
https://www.coreysdigs.com/global/who-is-they/
Weaponization of Justice
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/weaponization-of-justice
Illuminati David Rockefeller, finest quotes:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/david-rockefeller-illuminati
Confessions of ex illuminati Ronald Bernard:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/confessions-of-illuminati-ronald
Illuminati Attali, finest quotes:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/attali-illuminati-finest-quotes
Ex mason Serge Abad-Gallardo:
https://www.ncregister.com/interview/confessions-of-a-former-freemason-officer-converted-to-catholicism
President John Quincy Adams: “Masonry ought forever to be abolished. It is wrong - essentially wrong - a seed of evil, which can never produce any good.”
The way out of this mess:
16 laws we need to exit Prison Planet
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/laws-to-exit-planet-prison
Swing voters is a fragile theory, or its such a broad theory that it explains not very much. Vote totals from wikipedia come in at 136 million in 2016, 158 million in 2020 and 142 million in 2024. 'Swing' voters turning the election in 2020 means you have to define swing voter to include regular voters who could go either way and also a large surge in voters who normally don't. The surge in 2020 also included a halving of the vote total for other candidates outside of the top two, and then the decline this year in voting also saw another halving for 3rd party candidates. We went from over 7 million total votes in 2016 to 2 million in 2024 for other parties with higher total turnout. If your view is that the vote for Trump isn't 'for' Trump, but just not for Harris, then you should expect larger than average 3rd party voting instead of very, very low 3rd party voting.
Overall I think that framing this as Harris vs Trump and downplaying Trump's success when the Rs also took the House and Senate while 3rd parties collapsed in support is ignoring very obvious signs that the voters were not happy with the Ds overall, but were reasonably happy with the Rs overall. The other narratives don't fit.
The fact that the House is SO close argues against your claim that voters were reasonably happy with the Rs.
The fact that the Ds won 4 of 5 [MI, WI, NV and (probably) AZ, vs PA] Senate seats in the swing states that Trump won also argues against your claim that voters were reasonably happy with the Rs.
What if RFK jr had stayed in? How much is it just random?
The third-party vote was unusually high in 2016 because the two main candidates were so terrible. As you say, you would think that would have been the case this year, too, but (at least to me) the third-party candidates were also pretty bad this year.
Yeah it's hard to find (at least when I looked) national third party numbers this election but in the few (my local) races where I pulled the raw data from the state election department, third party candidates were not only down as a percentage but even raw number of votes. The one thing that did honestly surprise me though was the Greens beat out Libertarians this year locally which suggests to me that those voters either really hated Harris or really liked Trump.
Btw I wish (maybe it exists and IDK) there was a website that sucked in ALL the voting data as I'd really like to see things down to even write ins, i.e. how many people wrote "Luke Skywalker" or Hitler for example.
Yeah, I was sad that the Greens beat the Libertarians here, too (New Mexico). Not that the Libertarian Party is any great shakes this year, but the Greens are really terrible...
Imo this is less likely a comment on the Libertarian party either way than on the fact that Kamala was so bad a candidate that some leftists decided to vote Green rather than back her.
https://reason.com/2024/11/14/the-race-for-last-place/
Yglesias introduces his list as “principles for Common Sense Democrats to reform governance in the blue zones and be competitive in the red zones.”
The preamble to the 2024 Republican party platform is entitled “America First: A Return to Common Sense.”
Is the shared use of “Common Sense” a coincidence? Probably not. Market research no doubt found that “Common Sense” appeals to swing voters. Just like “normal” was the hot label in 2020.
Both the Republicans and the Democrats are missing the boat though if they think that swing vote populists can be led by the nose with a lot of blather while establishment business as usual continues.
Nope. This time around populists seem to share a belief that nothing is going to happen unless it happens from the ground up. Populists are going to monitor every single subcommittee hearing, every mark-up, every grant announcement, every federal register notice, and every conference that a federal official attends, and they are going to get real loud about shutting down the nonsense, calling out the phonies, and sticking a spine up the backside of the establishment quislings.
Twitter is of course out front on this. There you will find people like @fentasyl are posting bracing calls to action:
“Now is the time for citizen researchers to dig thru federal rules, regs, grants, contracts, orders, policy, & statute to discover the unconstitutional language contained therein.
Much is blatantly unconstitutional, much more still violates civil rights law.
Rapid abolition, defunding, clawback, & prosecution is necessary.
How are you helping to save America?”
(https://x.com/fentasyl/status/1854655569543475505 ) and
@johnkonrad shedding light on establishment plunder:
“The U.S. Navy has more Admirals than ships, yet it can’t keep the Red Sea open or deliver new ships on time.
So, how do Navy Admirals spend their time? World travel to 4-star hotels!
Here's their Nov conference list
P.S. The list for Army & Air Force Generals is even longer.”
( https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/1854873679831740829 ).
And substack has common sense heroes as well. People like James Roguski are delivering the receipts on grant waste:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jamesroguski/p/say-goodbye-to-your-money?r=4dddp0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
And the Energy Bad Boys are calling out the enormous give-away grifts under the guise of “green” energy. (https://open.substack.com/pub/energybadboys/p/7-quick-energy-takeaways-from-the?r=4dddp0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email ).
Common sense will prevail only to the extent that common sense populists amplify and direct their messages to their representatives in government. When the establishment lays a stinker, it is the populist’s duty to ensure the world smells it.
Mandates are irrelevant. Common sense mutual aid from the bottom up are all that will make any difference.
Common sense says people in the middle vote the party in power in or out depending on whether they think they economy is doing well. While sometimes not unimportant, everything else is small by comparison.
Concur. The measure of this I think can be found here: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-cost-index/wages-and-salaries-and-benefits-in-private-industry-12-month-percent-change.htm
Best I can tell that isn't adjusted for inflation. If so, that makes it hard to interpret without looking at inflation estimates too.
Have we had positive real wage growth?
You are right, that was the wrong link. I can't find a better one right now. Can't find the one I wanted but this one at least provides a baseline to compare against the next administrations performance: https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/worse-now-real-wages-have-declined-nov-2020
So we had 2+ years of covid related losses followed by a similarly long period of gains almost back to where we were. Makes me think it's more of a reaction to inflation than the actual wage losses.
I want Trump to be the proverbial bull in the China shop upsetting the apple cart and breaking things.
Yes, I would like to see some entrenched, corrupt, wasteful government systems broken too.
Maybe at the top of the list is the Federal Non-Competitive Grants to Tax-Exempt Cronies and Clients System. (see the tip of the iceberg: https://x.com/fentasyl/status/1854571063566610805 ). My scorecard on this front will be the delta in Object Class 41 of the President’s Budget Object Class Analysis volume (see page 71 at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/objclass_fy2025.pdf ). If that isn’t cut by at least 20 percent in the next two years, there ought to be a whole lot of primary activity in the mid-term.
Maybe the second highest priority in corrupt wastes of money that need breaking bad is the federal pay system. See object class 11.1 on page 40 of the same volume. If the people Trump appoints to manage the agencies are incapable of reining in payroll growth, they really need to hear “You’re Fired!”
The focus really shouldn’t be on Trump. The establishment is going to try to flood the zone with negative coverage and misinformation and it all simply needs to be ignored.
For me at least, the prize that eyes need to be watching is real private sector wages and salaries. (https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-cost-index/wages-and-salaries-and-benefits-in-private-industry-12-month-percent-change.htm ) If the new administration can’t turn this disaster around, then they need to be replaced with people who can. They will need to both reduce inflation and the cost of living for ordinary people as well as promote opportunity and growth in a substantive manner. The economists will all tell you that you cannot have both wage growth and reductions in the cost of living, but this is nonsense. Housing costs can be brought down through tax reform addressing investor-owned housing (https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/unaffordable-housing-and-homeless ) and high-wage housing construction employment can be boosted by measures such as expanding laws like the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act (SNPLMA) to the entire country. The Bureau of Land Management is giving away land to be covered with solar panels that could be instead sold to developers and the money used to reduce the deficit. (https://www.blm.gov/press-release/bureau-land-management-proposes-online-fall-land-sale-las-vegas-valley ). BLM even has an 800 acre horse ranch in the Northern Virginia suburbs (https://www.blm.gov/visit/meadowood-special-recreation-management-area ) that could easily be sold off for tens of millions of dollars and developed with low income housing. Let’s see how YIMBY the Mason economics department really is!
Good list of things to watch. The housing built should be high density, high value, premium housing, auctioned off to the highest bidders/ prices set high. As rich folk move in, they leave less rich houses, selling them to less rich folk, who sell their place to middle folk, selling their place to lower middle, who sell their older less desirable Starter Place to the middle first time buyers.
Likewise but he won't. He didn't talk about the swamp this time at all, showing how scared he is of them after they successfully undermined his first term. And if you look at who he is hinting at putting into key positions, they are all swamp monsters whom will once again third rail against him, you'd think he would have learned. A prime example here is it's now being leaked RFK won't get HHS even though that was the bribe for him and his supporters to move to Trump because the swamp monsters adamantly oppose it.