I mean it's entirely possible that we'll be reading a variation of much of this in November 2024 or November 2028, just swap out Trump's name for another Republican candidate
What's most chilling to me is how much of Trump's second term "agenda" outlined here could just become the first term (or non-consecutive Trump second term) agenda of the next GOP president. Without Congressional action, I'm not seeing much chance at permanently authoritarian-proofing the FBI, DOD, CIA, etc. either.
The question raised at the end is interesting too. I think the legitimacy of the federal government would have nosedived in some blue states if Trump won an electoral college victory with an even larger popular vote defeat. I do wonder what states like CA, MA, NY would do if their voters began insisting they openly defy the federal government on certain issues.
The thing is that while Senate bias is likely to stay with us for the indefinite future, the Electoral College bias is likely to decline or even reverse over the next 1-3 cycles.
The Democrats are in a position where there old strength in the Mid West is gone, but there new strength in the Sun Belt is yet to be established. In theory come 2028 they will have made Texas, Arizonia and Georgia so blue, that they can be relied upon to vote for the Democrats in closeish elections. Thereby giving them an advantage in the electoral college (because they will be earning huge EC votes from relatively narrow wins in formerly GOP states).
The RGV is pretty small. The three biggest MSAs account for 62% of Texas votes and they're getting bluer and bluer. Still, I agree that Texas will be purple for sometime to come. There are *lots* of small cities and towns and all that rural area.
I didn't mean that the RGV itself would have a huge impact on the state's overall votes. But I think what happened there is potentially a microcosm of the emerging trend where Hispanics vote along class/educational lines as opposed to having an allegiance to the Democratic Party. The RGV is just the best case to study, because it is predominantly Hispanic. There's no need to rely on flawed exit polling in those countries; the results speak for themselves.
How would that eliminate the electoral college bias? I define that as the disconnect between popular votes and electoral votes. Texas and Georgia are big states that Republicans used to win easily. Them being tighter races would increase the electoral bias as I've defined it.
If the coalition of states with a total of 270 EC votes that direct their EC delegates to vote for the national popular vote winner ever connects (they need 11 most states), the EC would become irrelevant without having to have a fight over a constitutional amendment.
I hope in my heart of hearts that this is true, and then maybe we can swing the GOPers over to the idea of EC reform/removal. I think it's better for everyone, really.
So long as the GOP sees advantage to the EC, which they do as the actual minority party, they will never do this. Expecting the modern Republican party to agree to anything that makes the system fair is a fool's errand, since they know they will never win in a "fair" contest.
I'll just share this ... when Trump started to pull away in Florida, I was pretty shaken there for a few hours. I still can't believe it was this close. Without the pandemic, I think Trump would have won. I don't know how I feel about that.
Impossible to play the counterfactuals game confidently, but I do think there are reasonable arguments that the pandemic cut both ways. With a 'rally around the flag' effect and Republicans being more willing to continue canvassing as factors that helped Trump to some degree.
Striking how similar this is to most of the existing post-election discourse, despite Biden's win. Would be very curious to read the Clinton wins pre-write if you're able to publish it in the future (sadly the democracy of the Twitter poll let me down here). All of the things that went wrong for the Clinton campaign have been so thoroughly examined that it would be very interesting to read what your interpretation of what went right would have been if those few votes had swung differently.
I think one cool thing about the piece is that a lot of this stuff really did happen. There WAS a big polling error. The electoral college DID get scarier. If only he had predicted racial depolarization too!
It's notable that even though Trump lost, most of the article is still true. Low trust voters did cause another polling miss, and the majority of America's voters will not get their wish given the outcome in the Senate and pre-existing situation at the Supreme Court
I'm a big proponent of the multi-world theory of quantum physics. A common, if minor, misconception many people have of that theory is that the multi-world splitting is primarily binary choices (this happened or that happened at a quantum event, and two worlds are created). I think this is mainly due to the popularity of the Schrodinger's cat example, which is either alive or dead.
But most of quantum theory revolves more around large sets of probabilities. The wave function states that an electron has an x% chance at being found at one of many positions/momentums. And when you take a measurement, the theory states that the world splits into one variation for each possible configuration you could have measured. However, some possibilities are FAR more likely than others. At the tail end of those wave functions are nearly infinite possible locations of nearly infinitely small probability. Perhaps your electron isn't in your lab at all, but is on the moon instead. Such ridiculousness theoretically CAN happen, and according to multi-world theory, you do in fact get a universe where that does happen.
The mental/mathematical construct used to deal with this is universe thickness. The higher the probability of a quantum measurement, the "thicker" the resulting split universe. This gives us an analogy to "conservation of mass" with the new concept "conservation of universe thickness", where the sum of all the thickness of all the resulting universes after a measurement equals the thickness of the universe before the measurement.
I'm sure some of you readers already know all this, so I apologize for the unrequested mansplaining. MattY's "Trump Wins" post brought this to my mind today, as there is now a set of universes where Trump won. I wonder how "thick" those universes are? According to 538's pre-election polling data, those universes should account for less than 10% of the pre-election universe. But, as I understand it, convention wisdom is that the polling data was wrong, and Trump had a much better than 10% chance going in.
I wonder what that number really is? What percentage of the pre-election version of us is now living in a two term Trump world?
That 10% probability was baking in a polling error; if they didn't, it would have been nearly 0% (not precisely 0% because something crazy could have happened at the last second). Now, we could argue they underestimated the probability distribution of polling errors, but I would speculate that gets you to, say, 20%.
I don't mind multiverse theory not being taken seriously. Your linked blog mentions Sean Carroll, of whom I am a big fan. And while I think that blog post fairly addresses several points, it leaves out what I believe is Sean's largest point, in that competing theories have significant flaws themselves. Copenhagen, objective collapse, hidden variables, etc, all stumble for their own reasons.
I'm not qualified to argue with an actual physicist on the topic, these debates often quickly veer into the philosophical anyway. But my understanding is that despite's its apparent face value ridiculousness, many worlds is mathematically the simplest, and scientifically the cleanest. At the same time, I'll concede the theory is non-falsifiable, non-provable and therefore not particularly useful! :)
On the NEJM note: It's not clear to me that low trust people know about or care about institutions like NEJM. I wouldn't be surprised if the first time many people heard of the journal was after they endorsed Biden. I'd be interested to know if people think an endorsement from NEJM simply signals to Trump voters that medicine is one more institution that they should not trust while not meaningfully changing the minds of any voters. However, I also take the point that Trump is such an authoritarian mess of a human being, that NEJM might have felt they needed to throw whatever weight they hold behind Anyone But Him. I would love perspectives from health care providers about whether or not they are seeing a lack of trust in medicine, beyond Covid or before Covid happened. I get that many people don't trust public health officials, but I was under the impression that trust in "medicine" was still fairly high, I worry this erodes it.
I want to offer two cheers for the bad polling this year. With Biden ahead in the polls by ~8 points, 538.com put his odds at winning at 90% because he could survive even another large polling error -- and that's what happened.
Had polls been accurate, showing Biden with a 4 percentage point lead and all the swing states effectively tied, I and millions of other Democrats would have been driven insane with worry and terror. We would have been living in mortal fear that even a small (and normal) polling error in Trump's direction would have delivered the election to him. To find out after the election that the polls, this time, were actually accurate, and Biden won, would have been joyful, but the scars of that dread I think would have lived on.
I much prefer that the bad polls spared us that period of existential angst and at least gave us the hope that Biden would win fairly easily, even though we didn't get the landslide we were hoping for. Sucks what happened in Congress, but Trump winning would have been an extinction event.
Take the polling aggregators to hell then too with their undergrad stats models. I find their work almost morally offensive. Feels like a grift sitting up on top of the real work the pollsters are doing out there.
Huh--I think I disagree here. I think the aggregators do a key job, and I think the 538 model of LIKELIHOOD wasn't that bad (though their point estimates were clearly poor).
Abandoning electoral politics because the electoral map is at the moment skewed against you more than usual doesn't seem like the long slow boring of hard boards.
I had no role in this piece, but I don't think Matt was saying we should abandon electoral politics. I think he was saying we should feel freer to public show our disdain for our particular institutional setup (Senate, EC, etc). Then if the disdain is shown, our leaders will make huge reforms once they are briefly in power--I think that's how the logic goes. But I do think Matt and you (and I) agree that there should be no giving up. I am confident that the Left/liberal side has the more popular policies, but boy should we work on packaging them better
Ezra frequently sites Nate Silver's median state +6 for dems as evidence for the Senate skew. But even Nate's article stats that "political coalitions change over time" and caveats it as "for the time being". His analysis is based on a 75% 2016 + 25% 2012 state level presidential vote margin. This is anything but permanent. And I'd say you only need to look back to the 57 seats we had to disprove it's permanence.
The 57 seats we had relied on Senators from Montana and West Virginia. I agree that Democrats can win again by having a coalition that incorporates more of the overrepresented voters, but that emphatically doesn't address the underlying issue here.
Interesting call for social disobedience at the end - I think that would’ve defined 2021 and by 2022 dem pols would’ve been apologizing for it all over again.
Also it reminded me that no matter how frustrated I get that Biden sucks, at least he’s not intensely corrupt like trump would’ve been in his second term (and was in his first)
Yep. I think this was my biggest reason to vote for Biden as well. The idea of having inspectors general and watchdogs allowed to actually do their job is appealing.
This is emotionally very difficult to read.
It's like being visited by the ghost of Christmas future.
I mean it's entirely possible that we'll be reading a variation of much of this in November 2024 or November 2028, just swap out Trump's name for another Republican candidate
If it really happened, I could force myself to deal with it, as I value being realistic. Feels like a punishment though .
What's most chilling to me is how much of Trump's second term "agenda" outlined here could just become the first term (or non-consecutive Trump second term) agenda of the next GOP president. Without Congressional action, I'm not seeing much chance at permanently authoritarian-proofing the FBI, DOD, CIA, etc. either.
The question raised at the end is interesting too. I think the legitimacy of the federal government would have nosedived in some blue states if Trump won an electoral college victory with an even larger popular vote defeat. I do wonder what states like CA, MA, NY would do if their voters began insisting they openly defy the federal government on certain issues.
The thing is that while Senate bias is likely to stay with us for the indefinite future, the Electoral College bias is likely to decline or even reverse over the next 1-3 cycles.
Why is the electoral bias likely to decline?
The Democrats are in a position where there old strength in the Mid West is gone, but there new strength in the Sun Belt is yet to be established. In theory come 2028 they will have made Texas, Arizonia and Georgia so blue, that they can be relied upon to vote for the Democrats in closeish elections. Thereby giving them an advantage in the electoral college (because they will be earning huge EC votes from relatively narrow wins in formerly GOP states).
I wouldn't count on Texas being "so blue" that soon. Look at the trends in the Rio Grande Valley. At best, Texas is purple.
The RGV is pretty small. The three biggest MSAs account for 62% of Texas votes and they're getting bluer and bluer. Still, I agree that Texas will be purple for sometime to come. There are *lots* of small cities and towns and all that rural area.
I didn't mean that the RGV itself would have a huge impact on the state's overall votes. But I think what happened there is potentially a microcosm of the emerging trend where Hispanics vote along class/educational lines as opposed to having an allegiance to the Democratic Party. The RGV is just the best case to study, because it is predominantly Hispanic. There's no need to rely on flawed exit polling in those countries; the results speak for themselves.
Sure. But that's the theory about why the Democrats may regain an edge in the electoral college
How would that eliminate the electoral college bias? I define that as the disconnect between popular votes and electoral votes. Texas and Georgia are big states that Republicans used to win easily. Them being tighter races would increase the electoral bias as I've defined it.
If the coalition of states with a total of 270 EC votes that direct their EC delegates to vote for the national popular vote winner ever connects (they need 11 most states), the EC would become irrelevant without having to have a fight over a constitutional amendment.
I hope in my heart of hearts that this is true, and then maybe we can swing the GOPers over to the idea of EC reform/removal. I think it's better for everyone, really.
So long as the GOP sees advantage to the EC, which they do as the actual minority party, they will never do this. Expecting the modern Republican party to agree to anything that makes the system fair is a fool's errand, since they know they will never win in a "fair" contest.
Could we also get the Hillary Wins one?
How about it Matt? As a treat for us when you get more subscribers than the bitcoin guy?
Haha, sure. If I beat the Bitcoin guy I will release the Hillary prestige
This is my singular assignment as intern. I've been doing opposition research on this fellow for the last 4 hours.
I would actually be more interested in reading that one.
I'll just share this ... when Trump started to pull away in Florida, I was pretty shaken there for a few hours. I still can't believe it was this close. Without the pandemic, I think Trump would have won. I don't know how I feel about that.
Impossible to play the counterfactuals game confidently, but I do think there are reasonable arguments that the pandemic cut both ways. With a 'rally around the flag' effect and Republicans being more willing to continue canvassing as factors that helped Trump to some degree.
the thing is that Floyd would very likely be alive without COVID.
Without BOTCHING the pandemic he would have won. Had he muttered some platitudes and let Fauci run the show, he's easily reelected.
Striking how similar this is to most of the existing post-election discourse, despite Biden's win. Would be very curious to read the Clinton wins pre-write if you're able to publish it in the future (sadly the democracy of the Twitter poll let me down here). All of the things that went wrong for the Clinton campaign have been so thoroughly examined that it would be very interesting to read what your interpretation of what went right would have been if those few votes had swung differently.
Shorter Yglesias: We just dodged the Mother of All Bullets.
(At least that's my takeaway from this seemingly 90% accurate piece).
I think one cool thing about the piece is that a lot of this stuff really did happen. There WAS a big polling error. The electoral college DID get scarier. If only he had predicted racial depolarization too!
It's notable that even though Trump lost, most of the article is still true. Low trust voters did cause another polling miss, and the majority of America's voters will not get their wish given the outcome in the Senate and pre-existing situation at the Supreme Court
I'm a big proponent of the multi-world theory of quantum physics. A common, if minor, misconception many people have of that theory is that the multi-world splitting is primarily binary choices (this happened or that happened at a quantum event, and two worlds are created). I think this is mainly due to the popularity of the Schrodinger's cat example, which is either alive or dead.
But most of quantum theory revolves more around large sets of probabilities. The wave function states that an electron has an x% chance at being found at one of many positions/momentums. And when you take a measurement, the theory states that the world splits into one variation for each possible configuration you could have measured. However, some possibilities are FAR more likely than others. At the tail end of those wave functions are nearly infinite possible locations of nearly infinitely small probability. Perhaps your electron isn't in your lab at all, but is on the moon instead. Such ridiculousness theoretically CAN happen, and according to multi-world theory, you do in fact get a universe where that does happen.
The mental/mathematical construct used to deal with this is universe thickness. The higher the probability of a quantum measurement, the "thicker" the resulting split universe. This gives us an analogy to "conservation of mass" with the new concept "conservation of universe thickness", where the sum of all the thickness of all the resulting universes after a measurement equals the thickness of the universe before the measurement.
I'm sure some of you readers already know all this, so I apologize for the unrequested mansplaining. MattY's "Trump Wins" post brought this to my mind today, as there is now a set of universes where Trump won. I wonder how "thick" those universes are? According to 538's pre-election polling data, those universes should account for less than 10% of the pre-election universe. But, as I understand it, convention wisdom is that the polling data was wrong, and Trump had a much better than 10% chance going in.
I wonder what that number really is? What percentage of the pre-election version of us is now living in a two term Trump world?
That 10% probability was baking in a polling error; if they didn't, it would have been nearly 0% (not precisely 0% because something crazy could have happened at the last second). Now, we could argue they underestimated the probability distribution of polling errors, but I would speculate that gets you to, say, 20%.
Not to be a wet blanket, but as a physicist, I find the multiverse theory silly (fun though it may be!). See, for example, the great blog by Sabine Hossenfelder: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-multiverse-madness.html
I don't mind multiverse theory not being taken seriously. Your linked blog mentions Sean Carroll, of whom I am a big fan. And while I think that blog post fairly addresses several points, it leaves out what I believe is Sean's largest point, in that competing theories have significant flaws themselves. Copenhagen, objective collapse, hidden variables, etc, all stumble for their own reasons.
I'm not qualified to argue with an actual physicist on the topic, these debates often quickly veer into the philosophical anyway. But my understanding is that despite's its apparent face value ridiculousness, many worlds is mathematically the simplest, and scientifically the cleanest. At the same time, I'll concede the theory is non-falsifiable, non-provable and therefore not particularly useful! :)
Well this was traumatic.
On the NEJM note: It's not clear to me that low trust people know about or care about institutions like NEJM. I wouldn't be surprised if the first time many people heard of the journal was after they endorsed Biden. I'd be interested to know if people think an endorsement from NEJM simply signals to Trump voters that medicine is one more institution that they should not trust while not meaningfully changing the minds of any voters. However, I also take the point that Trump is such an authoritarian mess of a human being, that NEJM might have felt they needed to throw whatever weight they hold behind Anyone But Him. I would love perspectives from health care providers about whether or not they are seeing a lack of trust in medicine, beyond Covid or before Covid happened. I get that many people don't trust public health officials, but I was under the impression that trust in "medicine" was still fairly high, I worry this erodes it.
I want to offer two cheers for the bad polling this year. With Biden ahead in the polls by ~8 points, 538.com put his odds at winning at 90% because he could survive even another large polling error -- and that's what happened.
Had polls been accurate, showing Biden with a 4 percentage point lead and all the swing states effectively tied, I and millions of other Democrats would have been driven insane with worry and terror. We would have been living in mortal fear that even a small (and normal) polling error in Trump's direction would have delivered the election to him. To find out after the election that the polls, this time, were actually accurate, and Biden won, would have been joyful, but the scars of that dread I think would have lived on.
I much prefer that the bad polls spared us that period of existential angst and at least gave us the hope that Biden would win fairly easily, even though we didn't get the landslide we were hoping for. Sucks what happened in Congress, but Trump winning would have been an extinction event.
And for those who think the fear of losing and narrow polls would have energized Democrats and motivated all of us to work harder, I direct you to Markos Moulitsas at dailyKos who would have absolutely none of that: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/10/15/1986564/-For-the-love-of-god-please-stop-with-the-run-like-we-re-10-points-down-nonsense
His view is that winning is contagious and energizing. I agree.
So again, thank you for your crappy performance, pollsters!
P.S. And go to hell, pollsters. I'll never believe you again.
Take the polling aggregators to hell then too with their undergrad stats models. I find their work almost morally offensive. Feels like a grift sitting up on top of the real work the pollsters are doing out there.
Huh--I think I disagree here. I think the aggregators do a key job, and I think the 538 model of LIKELIHOOD wasn't that bad (though their point estimates were clearly poor).
the aggregators are fine, but there's no way around GIGO.
careful - Trump is going to latch on to this as more evidence of his landslide victory
Abandoning electoral politics because the electoral map is at the moment skewed against you more than usual doesn't seem like the long slow boring of hard boards.
I had no role in this piece, but I don't think Matt was saying we should abandon electoral politics. I think he was saying we should feel freer to public show our disdain for our particular institutional setup (Senate, EC, etc). Then if the disdain is shown, our leaders will make huge reforms once they are briefly in power--I think that's how the logic goes. But I do think Matt and you (and I) agree that there should be no giving up. I am confident that the Left/liberal side has the more popular policies, but boy should we work on packaging them better
"At the moment"? The skew seems pretty permanent (against a liberal, urban coalition; the Democrats as a party can win, but urbanites never can).
Ezra frequently sites Nate Silver's median state +6 for dems as evidence for the Senate skew. But even Nate's article stats that "political coalitions change over time" and caveats it as "for the time being". His analysis is based on a 75% 2016 + 25% 2012 state level presidential vote margin. This is anything but permanent. And I'd say you only need to look back to the 57 seats we had to disprove it's permanence.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-senates-rural-skew-makes-it-very-hard-for-democrats-to-win-the-supreme-court/
The 57 seats we had relied on Senators from Montana and West Virginia. I agree that Democrats can win again by having a coalition that incorporates more of the overrepresented voters, but that emphatically doesn't address the underlying issue here.
I had a stress dream about just the idea of reading this.
Interesting call for social disobedience at the end - I think that would’ve defined 2021 and by 2022 dem pols would’ve been apologizing for it all over again.
Also it reminded me that no matter how frustrated I get that Biden sucks, at least he’s not intensely corrupt like trump would’ve been in his second term (and was in his first)
Yep. I think this was my biggest reason to vote for Biden as well. The idea of having inspectors general and watchdogs allowed to actually do their job is appealing.
Happy Thanksgiving! What does Tk stand for, in the paragraph where polling numbers were presumably to be inserted?
Yeah TK is the journalists’ placeholder (“to come”) for information to be filled in later
TK News by Matt Taibbi: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/note-to-readers-announcing-new-features
Thanks for putting that one up. Here's another worthy Substack blog to subscribe to, from Dr. Heather Cox Richardson - "Letters From An American":
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
It’s the name of Taibbi’s blog on Substack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_come_(publishing)