Tag Archives: U.S. politics

How weak was Kamala Harris?

Maybe it’s time to stop rehashing the 2024 and 2016 elections, you say, but I keep hearing people say that “America will never elect a woman”. I suspect being female, or black, or Muslim, or any minority, puts a candidate at a small disadvantage that they have to overcome through political talent. In other words, a female and/or minority candidate may need to be a little bit more talented than a white male just to draw even. Barrack Obama comes to mind – he was such a strong and charismatic candidate that his minority status didn’t seem to matter. Reagan and Bill Clinton were other particularly strong, charismatic candidates from my lifetime (seriously, where are the TV-cowboy-turned-governors today?) So the important question going forward is, were Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris just particularly weak candidates to being with?

One way to objectively measure this is to look at whether a candidate underperforms or overperforms other candidates from their party in particular jurisdictions. And on this measure, Kamala Harris was weak according to Nate Silver’s analysis.

One piece of evidence for this is her inferior performance compared to most Democratic Senate candidates. On net, Harris underperformed the Democratic Senate candidate by an average of 2.6 points and a median of 2.4. Yes, this includes three “Democrats” who were actually independents — nontrivially so in the case of Dan Osborn of Nebraska, who hadn’t said which party he’d caucasus with. (The independents are highlighted in green in the table.) Still, in the five swing states to also feature Senate races (highlighted in gold), Harris underperformed the Senate candidate by an average of 3.5 points, and Democrats won 4 out of the 5 contests in states that Harris lost.

So while “messaging” and policy communication certainly matter, the Democrats (and post-Trump Republicans for that matter) need to try to find strong, charismatic candidates. One obvious problem is that this measure is backward looking, requiring past election results to analyze. But that could be an argument for looking at candidates with past election results, like mayors, governors, and senators.

I’m an amateur here, and smart professional political people must be doing this, surely? Well then why have we had such poor leadership choices put before us in this country since approximately 2012 (sorry McCain, Romney, H. Clinton, Trump, Biden, Harris – none of you inspired me). In a country of 350 million people or so, there just has to be more talent out there. Either the incentives or the political gatekeepers or both are preventing them from running.

ranked choice voting

Ranked choice voting seems like a good idea, especially for those of us who liked Al Gore, and don’t like the consequences we are living decades later of that election being stolen (yes, I said it out loud). Then again, for those of us who also liked Bill Clinton, there is the question of whether ranked choice voting would have changed the outcome of that one.

Anyway, here is a long, wonky article in the context of New York City politics, saying ranked choice voting does indeed work well most of the time. In a small number of cases it can result in a “Condorcet violation”, where the ultimate winner is not one a majority of voters would have chosen in a head to head matchup.

It still seems to me much better than the system we have, with nearly insurmountable barriers to entry for all but the two large parties, and party insiders and wealthy donors largely determining the two often mediocre choices that are put before the rest of us. The biggest downside I see is that with people so suspicious of even a very simple system of counting votes, a more complicated system will lead to even more mistrust among the public, and even more ability of bad actors to exploit that mistrust. Of course, one alternative would be open, ranked choice primaries followed by an old fashioned, non-instant runoff. But even there, many variations are possible, like having primaries with a large number of candidates whittle the choices to three or four, which are then on the general election ranked choice ballot. Having just two candidates in the general might risk a choice between extremist candidates, where three or four might allow that true compromise candidate to emerge.

Abundance

I suppose I need to take on the new book “Abundance” at some point. Perhaps I should read the book first? Well, I doubt most people talking about it have read the book. I’ve read at least half a dozen review of it, and not one of them was able to summarize it in a simple sentence or two that I am able to remember. And this would seem to be a problem politically. I personally had an impression of it as being about technological progress, because I remembered reading a 2012 book by Peter Diamandis called Abundance: The Future is Better than you Think. It is not about that. Then I thought it must be about inequality, because the U.S. is a rich country with a big and growing inequality problem, and that is why the cast masses of people do not have abundance. But it is definitely not about that, in fact it argues that the Democratic Party should mostly not be talking about inequality.

Okay, so without reading the book (yet), it seems to go back to this 2022 article in the Atlantic by Derek Thompson called A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems. If it were truly simple, again, I should be able to summarize it in a sentence or two, but I can’t. But here goes in a few sentences:

  • Unnecessary complicated Federal bureaucracy slows down or stops implementation of many things we like, such as Covid tests (dated example), issuance of visas for skilled foreigners like nurses and teachers (hoo boy, dated example).
  • The public and private sectors together have failed to invest enough to keep up with critical technologies like semiconductor manufacturing and automated port operations (not mentioned here, but in the news a lot lately, is ship building).
  • We’re not solving our massive market failures in housing (local zoning laws are cited) and health care. In the case of the latter, the author cites the government and medical industry artificially limiting the supply of licensed doctors and nurses.
  • The clean energy rollout has been somewhat of a bust, or at least very slow.
  • He talks about colleges, but only cites the fact that “elite colleges” only enroll a small fraction of the nation’s students.
  • Infrastructure…er, he only talks about transportation, as the majority of discussions on infrastructure do. But yes, it is hard, slow, and expensive to implement.

And…I’m out of time, but I’d like to come back to each of these at some point. Each one has a complicated, messy set of origins and potential solutions. I am having trouble seeing a sound bite version of these solutions. But the idea of “Abundance” seems to be that if we solve these problems, we get abundance, so they are worth solving.

May 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The India-Pakistan conflict seems to have died down a bit (or did the media outlets I pay attention to just lose interest?). But both the potential nuclear conflict and the long-term loss of glacial ice billions of people depend on are terrifying.

Most hopeful story: I came up with four keys to my personal happiness in the moment: sleep, coffee, exercise, and down time. What, no family, community, career accomplishment, or making a lasting difference in the world you ask? No, those are about reflecting on life satisfaction, not being in the moment. No “fun”? Well, my idea of fun may be different than your idea of fun. I wish you joy and happiness as you pursue your idea of fun, only try to have some empathy and don’t force your own idea of fun on others. So there.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The U.S. approach to R&D is a partnership between government (through both grants and procurement power), universities, and the private sector (historically, including regulated monopolies like Bell Labs). Other countries including China have copied this model somewhat successfully, and our own government taking a monkey wrench to our own system that has worked so well seems like a really stupid idea. First we need to stop the damage and then let’s hope it can be repaired.

What did DOGE actually do?

This article is by David Walker, a former US Comptroller General.

Contrary to assertions by some, DOGE has not conducted audits. Rather, it has performed targeted and tactical transaction reviews of selected government information systems using artificial intelligence capabilities.

Its objective has been to identify possible fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement in an effort to cut federal spending. Musk announced a goal to save $2 trillion, but this was later reduced to $1 trillion and then to $500 billion, which has still proven to be overly optimistic. DOGE now claims to have achieved about $160 billion in savings, but this number may be significantly overstated based on the evidence provided…

While DOGE has so far fallen far short of any of its financial goal, it has brought some important things to light. For example, it has uncovered a number of concrete examples of significant waste in the federal government, and it has re-exposed many of its operational problems, such as outdated information systems and inadequate internal controls. A vast majority of these operational problems were previously identified by the Government Accountability Office and various inspectors general.

So, they just tried to feed all the government’s data into an AI and identify some waste, fraud, and abuse. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like such a terrible job to do that routinely, or just add it to the audit toolbox as this guy is suggesting. So why all the drama and general crazy?

It occurs to me though that the approach was shockingly ignorant in many ways. They seem to have assumed that nothing the government does has any benefits, only costs, and therefore any reduction in spending would be a savings. Government accounting in general does not distinguish between spending and investment, which has always been a problem. I could “save” money by not going to the dentist any more, for example, but I would pay for it many times over both in money and pain sometime in the not too distant future.

The Clinton-Gore administration executed a rational, effective, and somewhat brutal government efficiency campaign in the 1990s. You can hear about it on Planet Money: The Last Time We Shrank the Federal Workforce.

Rationally speaking, the government should step in to improve citizens’ lives where private markets are obviously not able to deliver, like on health care, child care, education, fundamental research, unemployment and disability insurance, and retirement. It should create a level playing field for businesses large and small, regulate anticompetitive practices, set minimum labor and environmental standards, maintain public safety, and provide for the common defense. It should use a portion of the value added by a healthy economy to do these things, which reinforce the healthy economy in a positive loop. I’m not a genius tech bro but these things are obvious to me.

more Peter Turchin on Trump

Peter Turchin doesn’t really believe in grass-roots popular movements. Behind any apparent popular movement, he sees a “counter elite” competing for dominance over the current elite. In the present moment, this means the Trump movement vs. what I would call the center-right consensus of the last three decades or so.

The initial state of shock is now transforming into a more active phase, judging by a surge of recent mainstream media editorials and statements by various establishment figures who call for “mobilization,” “mass protest,” “national civic uprising,” and “revolution” (in my terms, counter-revolution). In a recent post on Racket News, Are We in a “Soft” Civil War?, Matt Taibbi provides an impressive sample of such calls to action. (In my view, we’ve been in a soft, that is, relatively non-violent, civil war since 2016. Now it is a revolution.) …

He then goes through the different ways the revolution could proceed: (1) assassination, (2) impeachment, (3) “sectional secession” – the example given is California refusing to follow federal orders, Trump sending in troops, and the governor mobilizing national guard, (4) a “color revolution” – the example given is CIA operatives Trump has fired organizing an apparent grass-roots movement, (5) military coup, (6) “the inertial scenario” which basically means Democrats trying to resist through traditional legislative and election politics, (7) “suppression by external Great Powers”, and (8) restoration by an internal faction (King Obama! okay, that is my example). He says #6 looks most likely but is not likely to be successful.

One can imagine combinations of these. If shadowy forces are plotting under #4, an apparent grass-roots movement can be combined with a not entirely free and fair election (hello, Ukraine and many other countries where the CIA has mucked about). You can imagine a not entirely free and fair election where the military steps in supposedly on the side of the constitution and announces resumption of the normal constitutional process in a year or two, which may or may not happen (hello, Thailand and many other countries).

Turchin says #7 is unlikely, but I wonder. No country is going to mount a full frontal military assault on the United States, I don’t think. But our federal government is deeply dysfunctional and incompetent, and while we may be able to bump along during relatively normal times we will not be able to respond competently to an unexpected emergency. If I were a competent enemy of the United States, I would mount a cyberattack or terrorist attack of some sort, cover my tracks, and frame some obvious public enemy (like Iran or China) for the crime. With an incompetent response, it might not take much to trigger a meltdown of systems like the financial system, power grid, food distribution system, etc. Even without a malign actor out there, it is doubtful our country could handle something like a major earthquake.

To be clear, I am hoping against hope that my country can muddle through the next 3-4 years without a major crisis it can’t handle.

the US “R&D ecosystem”

This article from “chinatalk.media” (which I know nothing about) explains how the US R&D pipeline has always been a partnership between universities, the private sector (including, in some cases, closely regulated monopolies like Bell Labs), and the government. It has been the envy of the world and emulated by others, including by China. Basically, the federal government funds basic research through universities that there is not a clear market for yet. In some cases, it creates a market through its procurement ability which incentivizes the private sector to take the risk of taking nascent scientific breakthroughs from the universities and bring them to market.

To better understand today’s landscape, we need to trace our steps back about 70 years and examine how the American research ecosystem was conceptualized. The original model positioned universities to conduct curiosity-driven research funded by the federal government, while American industry focused on transforming that research into applications.

There were certain industrial monopolies created by the government that also conducted basic research, which Alex can address more comprehensively. However, the overwhelming majority of basic research happened in academia — universities created as land-grant institutions or those existing before the war. This system served us remarkably well, as basic research developments from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s bore fruit 10, 20, 30, or 40 years later. The nature of basic research doesn’t necessarily have an immediate application, but applications may emerge years down the line.

Agencies like the National Institutes of Health fund more applied research on medicines and can point to tangible outcomes — specific drugs developed with NIH funding. The NSF, conversely, funds basic research that may not demonstrate tangible benefits for decades, as happened with neural networks.

What madman claiming to love our country would try to break this? He would have to be either extremely ignorant or a traitor to our country.

news coverage of protests in the U.S.

I’m still thinking about Charlie Stross’s concern about U.S. protestors being targeted. I don’t doubt that there was surveillance present at the recent protests, and we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the technology exists to track people. But the news coverage of the event was very muted here in the U.S. compared to what people might have seen abroad. The BBC headline was Anti-Trump protests held in cities across the US. But here in the U.S., many people I spoke to were not even aware they were happening. I happened to be aware because I am on a text list for Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign supporters, which still seems to exist and get used by mainstream Democrats from time to time. (So if there is in fact a cross hairs, I am most likely already in it.) But anyway, I turned on the local news that day in my city, which is a big city and definitely one of the protests sites, and the local protest was not only not the lead story, it was never mentioned in the first 20 minutes of the news broadcast (which was much more local TV news than I normally subject myself to.) Sure enough, leading news outlets in the U.S. including the New York Times, Washington Post, and ABC News seem to have intentionally minimized the event.

So either it was a small event not worthy of much coverage, or there was some censorship here. It was not a tiny event. In my city (Philadelphia), I know they closed off four blocks of a major downtown street, and I heard eyewitness accounts of people who were there. (I would have liked to be there but I can plead child care issues. Lack of child care is a pretty effective way to suppress political energy among working parents.) Anyway, this article from Fair.org, which is a left-leaning organization, offers some facts and figures:

  • 1400 cities
  • “At a conservative minimum, hundreds of thousands of people turned out to resist the Trump administration’s many assaults on democracy; organizers estimate the total reached into the millions.”

500,000 people spread over 1400 locations works out to an average of 400 per location. So say you had a few thousand at the larger protests. A few thousand people sounds like a lot, but spread over a few city blocks it is not exactly going to go un-noticed but it may not attract a huge amount of attention. The 2020 George Floyd protests in Philadelphia were estimated at 50,000 – 80,000 people, and those were impressive. I tend to think we may have spent a generation’s political energy on those, and it is questionable what we got. Besides more awareness of police violence, an important but narrow issue in my view in terms of the number of people affected, we possibly got some tangible reductions in the prison population, which is something.

The Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl parade crowd this year was estimated at 1 million people. That is a big, borderline dangerous crowd and gives a sense of how packed with people it is possible for the city streets to get.

Project 2025 Tracker

Anonymous parties have put together a Project 2025 Tracker. They pulled out and listed all the individual policy recommendations in the document, and are trying to track which are complete, in progress, or not started. As I write, they put the agenda at 42% complete.

I would break the recommendations down into three categories: (1) Christian/White Nationalism, (2) Homophobia, and (3) Rich and Powerful/Big Business Giveaways.

March 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The U.S. might be headed for recession. Recessions happen, but this would be the first one where the U.S. government obviously and counter to all competent advice throws a monkey wrench in a perfectly healthy economy, that I know of anyway. Lest we think GDP growth is only a statistic that does not affect real people, the U.S. poverty rate among children was 5% in 2021 and rose to over 13% in 2023, when the economy was doing relatively well as measured by GDP growth and employment, but Congress forced the end of Biden’s tax credits for parents. So pop quiz: force a completely unnecessary recession by choice and will more or less children suffer? Shame shame shame on the Trump administration and Congress you stupid assholes.

Most hopeful story: Trump seems to have some anti-nuclear (weapons) instincts. We will see if his actions bear any relation to his words.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Prospera is a weird quasi-autonomous city-state nominally inside Honduras run by crypto-currency weirdos.