Category: Commentary

I was going to do a postmortem of the 2024 election, when I thought better of it. There are a few results that jump out, but what’s really important is clearer when the last three elections are looked at as a trilogy.

Join me in the Wayback machine to April, 2011. President Obama is finishing off a first term and at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. As the event requires, he takes jabs at himself, the media, his political opponents, and also at one unusual target: a rich New York land developer and reality TV star named Donald J. Trump. Seems Trump had been the most vocal spokesman for “birtherism,” claiming Obama wasn’t born in the United States. The President, indignant at the charge, refused to respond to it until it grew into an issue, at which point he released his birth certificate to end the charade. And so he took some swipes at “the Donald.”

Some progressives believe this was the genesis of the Trump candidacy: revenge for a public insult. However, people close to Trump, including those who sat at his table that night, say he took Obama’s ribbing well (he was less happy with Seth Myers’ jokes, probably because he saw the comedian as a nobody who had no right to make jokes about Trump). Trump and his closest advisors all say he felt he could do a better job than any politician as President, and he was only looking for the right opportunity.

It came in 2016, when the GOP nomination was up for grabs, and the leading candidate was Jeb Bush (who seemed more obliged than enthusiastic) with a host of newcomers. Trump’s brash style separated him from the pack, and he proceeded to win pluralities of primary votes without ever getting a majority, knocking off the other contenders one at a time, until only Marco Rubio was left standing. Rubio tried to adopt Trump’s personae (remember the whole story about “small hands”?) but it didn’t work, and the GOP resigned itself to going down in glorious defeat.

Then the Democratic Party leadership said, “hold my beer.” When Obama pushed aside Hillary Clinton’s first campaign for the nomination, she agreed to be his Secretary of State. Her plan was simple: get a Cabinet position and some foreign policy bona fides, spend all your time outside of DC, and wait for the opportunity to run again. She planned to become “the most traveled” Secretary of State in US history (this she accomplished), which ironically led to her need to have classified information sent to her through her personal e-mail account, and thus the whole Comey investigation. But the implicit party deal was: behave as a loyal party member, and when the time comes, Obama will endorse you and the party will clear your path. Forgotten in all this was that her first campaign had been a disaster: it’s why a one-term Senator from Illinois with a funny name and no federal experience quickly eclipsed her. That and, as Obama said in a debate to Hillary, “you’re likable enough” (addressing the simple fact that everyone who met her found her at best irritating).

True to his word, Obama told his Vice President, Joe Biden, to stand down in his desire to be Obama’s successor. Which was a relief to most Democrats, as no one (except Dr. Jill Biden) had ever woken up in the morning and said, “what we need is a Biden presidency.” His past efforts had always ended in failure without receiving a single percent of any votes. When the Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders ignited hope with his candidacy, the Democratic party (note, these are the ones for democracy and free-n-fair elections) put their collective thumbs on the scale to prohibit any outcome but Hillary Clinton as the nominee.

All of which set up the hubristic 2016 campaign between Clinton and Trump. Democrats were certain there was no way their seasoned, veteran leader could lose to this guy. A common commentary among talking heads was “how would this even be close?” (foreshadowing here) They actually debated using the campaign slogan, “it’s her turn” as if the outcome was fore-ordained. Trump for his part lurched from calling all Mexican immigrants “rapists and criminals” to admitting he could “grab women by the p***y” on a tape released the week before the election. Clinton suffered through the sturm und drang of James Comey’s “her investigation is on/off/on.”

Trump won by 80,000 votes in three states. Nobody saw the outcome coming, least of all Trump, who hadn’t seriously planned a transition effort. What the Democrats missed was (1) the country was sick and tired of the ancien regime, which included all Clintons and Bushes, who had been monopolizing the political arena for twenty-plus years, and (2) just how unlikable Hillary Clinton was. Even a grasping, greedy reality TV star seemed a more approachable choice. Hillary completed the story by becoming a bitter political crone blaming everyone but herself from the confines of her home in the Westchester, New York, woods.

Years of Donald Trump’s tweets, threats (real or imagined), and bluster left the entire country exhausted precisely when a once-in-a-lifetime (we hope) pandemic hit. The Democrats, desperate to limit Trump to one term, held an open primary for the 2020 election, resulting in twenty-nine major candidates. This quickly whittled down to eighteen. After the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, Bernie Sanders and former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg were the leaders. Sensing they had candidates who might not be ready to confront President Trump, party leaders pinned their hopes on the South Carolina primary, which Joe Biden won going away. His moderate opponents were convinced to withdraw (remember, this is the party for choice!), consolidating enough support for the chosen leader, Biden, to hold off the non-party member Bernie Sanders.

During the early debates, Senator Kamala Harris ran an uber-progressive campaign and lit into Joe Biden, suggesting he was responsible for the oppressive bussing she experienced growing up in Oakland. This was odd in that Biden had a strong record and ties to african-american voters in the party. She quickly flamed out after the debates, and would have been forgotten, but Biden made the rash pledge to put a woman on the ticket if he were selected as the nominee. When he won, the likely ticket-mates were few and far between, and he ended up with Kamala.

Biden ran a low-key campaign, mostly from his home in Delaware, ostensibly due to the ongoing pandemic. It also conveniently limited his opportunity for gaffes, something he admitted he was prone to. He promised a moderate presidency emphasizing stability and decency, to “unify the country.” President Trump refused to stop tweeting nonsense and vitriol, right through the post-election Capitol riot on January 6th. Biden had the victory in hand when the voters realized he didn’t even know how to tweet. While receiving the most votes for President by any candidate in history, he ended up winning (the electoral vote, the only one that matters) by only 43,000 votes in three states!

Sadly for the Biden-Harris administration, they were no more effective against the COVID virus than the Trump administration had been. Biden had won both Houses of Congress, and sometime after the election he decided this was a mandate for a progressive rework of the federal government. Out went the emphasis on compromise and in came a series of big, then bigger, finally biggest government programs. Progressives sensed an opportunity unlike anything since FDR. Some of this was in response to the Democrats’ belief that Obama had been too hesitant to respond to crises in his two terms, and now was the time for greater action. Some of it was a completely justified stimulus for an ailing economy, to avoid a depression. Most of it was progressivism run amok.

Biden’s extravagant domestic spending fueled inflation, while his extraordinary caution led foreign leaders to see opportunities to strike. Biden spent much time decrying Trump, who seethed on the sidelines claiming the election was stolen (it wasn’t). Biden’s position as morally above the tawdry self-dealing of the Trump family was belied by his family’s business dealings with wealthy and duplicitous Chinese and Romanian businessmen. Biden made a great show of rescinding hundreds of Trump policies, especially about the border, but was then unwilling to address the massive influx it created. The inevitable end was foreshadowed very early, when he didn’t rescind Trump’s mistaken commitment to withdraw from Afghanistan, and instead meddled in the planning, resulting in the most horrifying foreign policy photo op since Saigon, 1973.

Biden’s approval rating never recovered. Meanwhile, Trump consolidated control of the Republican party, forcing out anyone who wasn’t willing to concede to his contention the 2020 result was stolen. While a whopping eighty percent of the voters wanted anybody but Biden and Trump as the 2024 candidates, the two leaders remained locked in a manichean struggle (who was good and who was evil was in the eye of each party).

Trump continued his raging and sometimes incoherent attacks, while evidence mounted that Biden was working only a few hours a day, and mostly for canned photo-ops. He showed up for some big-ticket events, like the State of the Union speech, and gave an impressive performance. But as the campaign began in earnest, his more frequent public appearances became grist for the idea he wasn’t up for a real campaign (remember his basement campaign in 2020) let alone another four years of the presidency. The White House and the Democrats erected an elaborate house-of-cards defense of Biden, calling him ‘vigorous’ and saying he ‘ran circles around the staff.’ All of which came crashing down when the Biden who appeared opposite Trump for a debate was a pitiable, befuddled old guy.

While Biden simply insisted he “had a bad night,” Democrats panicked. He continued to avoid public events or pressers, but when asked, insisted he was still the nominee and in it to win it. Each time Joe said the matter was closed, Nancy Pelosi said “we’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.” No wait, she said “when the President makes up his mind, we will support him.” Same difference. The party of democracy told its sitting President, the guy who won all the primaries and had all the delegates, to shuffle off the ticket not because he wasn’t up to the job, or the campaign, but because he as going to lose.

Faced with legal issues over campaign financing, loyal black Democratic voters who wanted to see the Vice President elevated, and facing the specter of an open convention in Chicago (how did that work out the last time?), the party leaders quickly coalesced around Kamala Harris. Immediately forgotten were the three bad years of Vice Presidential publicity, her failed 2020 campaign, or the rumblings the month before that Biden couldn’t leave the ticket to Kamala because she wasn’t up to the challenge.

Having snatched potential victory from the jaws of defeat, the Harris campaign took stock of its situation. She needed money, and proceeded to accumulate more than a billion dollars in weeks, a record which will probably not be broken for a long time. She settled upon a positive campaign featuring “joy” as an antidote to the ever-darker musing at Trump’s rallies. She selected as Vice President Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz, who had impeccable progressive credentials, but was also the liberal caricature of a common Midwesterner. The media went into overdrive, ignoring the lack of access and acting as amplifiers for the party. I watched ABC World News Tonight with David Muir almost every night, and the first fifteen minutes were positive clips from Harris events or spokespersons interspersed which whatever outrage Trump said that day. The polls were already turning around, as voters remembered they wanted “anybody but Biden and Trump.”

A funny thing happened on the way to the coronation. Harris could only avoid interviews for so long, and when she started doing them, it became apparent to everyone not in the Democratic Party leadership that she couldn’t answer basic questions, or when she tried, made it worse. She served up heaping helpings of word salad or acted irritably, a trait evident way back when Lester Holt asked her about visiting the border. Meanwhile her running mate went from charming local guy to weird uncle in record time. Whether it was his lying about a DUI, leaving his unit on the verge of deployment, or mis-stating a combat record, his folksiness degraded into his self-description as “a knucklehead.” And his prancing around on stage didn’t help. And while it was a sideshow, the media’s attempt to paint a philanderer who slapped his girlfriend silly in public as the new face of positive masculinity was an affront to both common sense and decency.

Harris was focused enough to destroy Trump in a debate, after which the GOP decided to let Harris do to herself what Trump could not. Trump’s Vice President pick, Senator JD Vance, had been written off by the media (who once adored him) as some kind of character from the Handmaid’s Tale. When Tim met JD for a debate, the result was lopsided. The Democrats and media started to waterboard everything Trump said into actionable threats, while the problems of new and untested-on-the-national-stage candidates hampered any positive vibes.

While pollsters tried to squeeze something definitive out of their data, everything kept coming up a near tie. Which is how we went into election night. Trump won again, although when all the votes are cast it will probably be by a few votes in a couple of states.

Why did I relive all this trauma? Because the story is consistent, and can only be understood as a tale in three parts.

Part one is the Democrats. Remember the Wayback machine? We started with the Wayback machine. If we went back to that night, and we sat down with Democratic party leaders and described Trump in all his glory over the next three elections (the vulgarity, the name-calling, January 6th, Roe v. Wade, and on and on), then we told them democracy itself was at stake, and they would violate every norm of it to get the right candidates, would they have said the following: OK, we lead with Hillary Clinton, then Joe Biden, then this Kamala lady from California (she was then its Attorney General)?

Of course not. They told us Trump was an unqualified misogynist, then he was dangerous and unstable, and finally he was a greedy fascist. And then they ran, first, the most hated woman in America, second, a non-entity who had never won anything at the national level, and finally a little-known progressive politician with no seasoning or national campaign experience. That is either world-class political malpractice, elitism (“we know better”) beyond belief, or they didn’t really mean what they said about him. Or all three. This was so bad, we must embrace the power of “AND.”

I lean towards elitism as the main culprit. It showed up with the frequent refrain about”how can we lose to this guy?”, the willingness to engage in ever-more-shrill exaggerations (a Liz Cheney firing squad? Really?), the disdain for the common man’s pain (“you don’t understand how well the economy is doing”), and the epithets (deplorables, racists, fascists, garbage, etc.).

The second part was the Republican, no, wait, the MAGA party. Maybe there are still some classic Republicans out there in hiding. Some went completely into Trump Derangement Syndrome (e.g., the Cheneys) and endorsed Harris. How anyone who had conventional Republican credentials could do this is beyond me. Others went into defiance and just got “primaried” out of office. The rest became compliant. Those powerful enough (McConnell, DeSantis) laid low and avoided eye-contact with the MAGA king. Lesser types were forced to genuflect at the MAGA altar of election denial. The old GOP had neo-conservatives, culture warriors, free-marketeers, and some libertarians. Now it has MAGA hats. Perhaps it will continue to evolve PT (post-Trump); that remains to be seen. Clearly Trump has decided enough is enough, and specifically picked JD Vance as heir apparent.

The voters were the third part for the story. You will find some pretty sophisticated analyses out there showing how much of what I described is explained by a general, worldwide discontent with the governing authorities and systems. This explains Trump’s first win and second loss (he was the establishment at the time), Macron’s emasculation in France, the routing of Merkel’s side in Germany, the rise of right-wing parties in Europe, Milei in Argentina, Meloni in Italy, and so forth. Doesn’t matter if they’re right or left or wrong, out they go.

But this analysis has its own bias: it comes from elites, and it lets them conveniently avoid the deeper question. See, the voters are being emotional, not rational, it’s not our (the elite’s) fault. But why are voters rejecting leaders across the political spectrum? Because voters will only tolerate being ignored, being lectured, being condescended to for so long. For example, in most advanced western nations, neoliberalism (the free movement of capital, people, and trade) was supported by both sides. It worked well for the world as a whole, not so well for individuals in certain countries. And those individuals vote. It started small, built over time, and eventually overthrew leadership. In Mexico, it drove a left-wing populist (AMLO) into power, and his chosen successor, too.

You can see this outcome in many forms over the last twenty years: Brexit was one, as was the MAGA movement. Neoliberlism posited that borders were a thing of the past, as was national identity, a crude hangover from the twentieth century. Funny thing is, elites who love neoliberalism generally aren’t futbol fans; if they were, they would have known that nationalism didn’t die, it simply changed into something less warlike (soccer). People want to belong to something, not be an atomized consumer recipient of big government largesse. Europeans loved travelling across the Schengen area without ever showing a passport, right up to when millions of illegal immigrants started doing the same.

In America, the voters revolted over very being told they shouldn’t mind losing jobs to China, shouldn’t mind introducing large numbers of foreign immigrants to small local communities, shouldn’t mind the disorder which accompanies lax policing and drug decriminalization, shouldn’t mind having odd or novel social theories taught to their children. When they objected, they were denounced. Sometimes they stopped arguing publicly (this is why the polls are so often off), but never changed their minds, they just changed their votes.

If the trends persist as the final votes are counted, Trump-the-misogynist won married women. Trump-the-bigot won Hispanic men. Trump-the-billionaire won the paycheck-to-paycheck vote. And of course he won men, white men, and increasing shares of blacks, Asians, and Jews. He won heavily Puerto Rican districts despite his comedian’s attempt to label the island “garbage,” and nearly swept the totally Hispanic, formerly Democratic Texas border communities, who know something about immigration (legal and illegal).

One question before election night was “will this be a re-form or realignment election?” The former would be Harris rallying the Obama coalition to victory; the latter Trump taking the working class (all races) away from the Democrats. It’s clear now it was the latter. Whether that is temporary or not is still in question. If Trump can’t make life better for the voters as he promised, they’ll look elsewhere in 2028. That is mostly JD Vance’s challenge, as Trump will be an eminence grise in the next presidential election.

The winner was simply Trump. Who were the losers? Not Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. While he deserves blame for a lack of humility in running again, and she proved ineffective in a national campaign, Biden’s pride and Harris’ competence were well-understood long ago. The Democratic party worked long and hard to get the results it received on November 4th, and they are the biggest losers. The soul-searching has begun, and maybe they’ll recover. Here are some thoughts :

• trading non-college educated working class voters for college-educated women is a losing proposition.
• thinking women have only one view about abortion is a mistake.
• defending every progressive cultural movement dissipates your energies.
• telling voters how they should feel is disastrous.
• calling voters names feels good until you lose.

The other great losers are the legacy media. I know the history of media in America: I don’t expect unbiased coverage. Major newspapers began as political party sheets, publishing whatever their preferred party wanted. Even the concept of “professional journalism” was mostly a patina of non-partisanship, as the professional journalists were almost uniformly liberal/progressive types. But in the Trump era the media went all in.

Smaller, more partisan types (New Republic, Daily Beast, MSNBC) were rabid in their coverage, and the larger media (ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times and the Washington Post) felt they had to compete. Things got so out of hand that journalists regularly “rioted” over anything that wasn’t critical of Trump, and the Post lost two-hundred thousand subscribers for not endorsing Harris/Walz (While the decision was handled terribly, Post readers/writers should remember that but for Jeff Bezos’ millions, the Post would be have been a $1 sale item on eBay). Fox News was about as bad, and there are even more right-wing crazy small web pubs than left-wing ones, but all of these are nakedly partisan, not pretending to be the neutral arbiters that the networks and newspapers claim.

Don’t believe me, believe the voters. With all these media types relentlessly covering Trump’s every off-color comment, highlighting Democratic talking points about fascism and misogyny, critiquing every Trump comment as a lie (Glenn Kessler, Post fact-checker, characterized Trump’s pre-election comment that “we’re leading in the polls” as his 20, 218 lie. That’s real quality work, there), it had little to no effect on voters, other than to drive regard for the media into the toilet.

What should we take from all this? The economy, immigration, and abortion were the top three issues.

The country must address the economic needs of the working class, pronto. That may mean higher prices as we protect (or recreate) domestic industry. That may mean loosening restrictions on housing starts to create greater supply where it’s wanted, in the cities. That may mean shifting the tax burden to higher income types while exempting tips and social security. That will mean reducing regulation, which was probably the most successful part of Trump’s first term.

Immigration must be normalized, legalized, and controlled, which will be painful and ugly at first. We can’t just build a wall, we have to change people’s minds about why they try to come. That means deporting those who have gone through the whole immigration process, been denied, but stayed. That will make for tragic stories, and that’s the cost of decades of neglect. Of course we’ll need legislative reform to create a system that encourages the immigrants we want, and discourages those we don’t. And foreign relations which force countries to assist us in this endeavor, or face serious political and economic consequences if they don’t.

We’ll need a truce in the federal abortion wars. The voters clearly want one. They are willing to decide the issue at the state level, and Trump apparently is too. Pro-lifers must switch from legislating a ban to changing the culture back to where it was for millennia: abortion is something heinous that must be avoided but will never go completely away. Pro-choicers must accept that abortion wasn’t even the most important issue for all women, and will never again be a “fundamental” national right.

Many other serious issues face America. Trump is now the greatest second act in American history, easily eclipsing Richard Nixon (oldies will remember his “you won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more!” speech). Whether you wear a red hat or not, we’re all living in the Trump era, as history will now note. There will be no brown shirts goose-stepping past the White House at the Inaugural parade. Trump will be Trump on X and in the news: astonishing some, appalling others, but unchanged.

As Trump gets his second chance, so do those who so opposed him. As I wrote on social media recently (and I’ll write again in a future blog post), Trump is ultimately about Trump and making deals. If his political opponents stop and think, they can cut deals with him that would have been impossible with the former Republican party. Or they can march in pink hats and scream and cry.

A long while back, in the series entitled “Everything You Know is Wrong,” I covered that unique American institution, the Electoral College. We are about to experience a very close popular election, so close that some models have it coming out with the electoral college results being 270-268 or even 269-269 (and I’ll cover what that means, too, heaven forbid!). So it’s time for a refresher: why did the founders create it, how has it worked historically, what does it do today, how will it play out in this year’s election, and finally why we should keep it (anyway).

First off, there is no such thing as the “electoral college” in the US Constitution. What?!?! The document solely refers to electors, and the tradition of referring to the system as the “electoral college” is just that: a tradition. The system is simple: states names slates of electors, who gather and submit their state’s electoral votes (based on the total number of federal senators and representatives) for a candidate. The candidate which gets a simple majority (currently 270 electoral votes), wins. So if Virginia has eleven representatives and two senators, they have thirteen electoral votes. The state names thirteen people as electors, and they gather and vote as directed in the Constitution.

During the drafting of the Constitution, there was a serious and prolonged debate about how to choose the President. One group wanted the Congress (in total) to select the President. Another group wanted a direct election of all voters. There were significantly more people among the drafters who feared direct democracy, and much of the document is written to diffuse power and prevent simple majority rule. But all those working on the document saw the power of a presidency elected by the voters (even if only wealthy landowners were voting at that time).

The compromise was to create the electors, which numerically represented the Congress but were chosen from the people. In fact, current office holders were proscribed from being electors. The concept was a group of intelligent, responsible men (they were always men, back then), who would represent “cool heads” should a demagogue arise to whip up a democratic majority, or a foreign power use money to bribe votes. The decision on how to select the electors was left totally to the states, in line with the feeling at the time that the country was the United STATES (note the emphasis).

There is a recent popular myth that the electoral college was designed to support slavery, which is based on the idea that slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of proportional representation. This confuses several things. The electors are based on proportional representation, but not because of slavery. The big worry among the states was that Virginia and New York, the most powerful and populous states at the time, would gang up to share the presidency to the exclusion of all others. Basing electors on congressional representation gave small states a slightly greater influence, especially as more small states joined the nation. But the issue was always big versus small, not slave versus free.

The founders’ vision for the electors never came to pass. They never sat in judgment after the election, keeping things from getting out of control. And since states controlled how they select the electors, for a long time the state government simply appointed them. There was not then (and is not now, believe it or not) any requirement for the state to actually hold a vote of the people. States could (and New York did until late in the 18th century) simply choose who the electors were, knowing full well who those electors would then choose for President!

The original electoral college system’s flaws because quickly apparent. The candidate getting the most votes became President, the candidates getting the second most votes became Vice President. Really. It was even worse, as the electors had two votes and were supposed to vote with these for both offices (President and Vice President). The nascent parties schemed to have their leader get the most votes, their other preferred candidate the second most. And there were incidents of horse-trading votes, missed communication (via horseback, remember), and other political shenanigans. Remember, this was before parties were really significant, and the founders’ thinking was such candidates would still work together.

The especially heated 1796 Adams-Jefferson race left the rivals as President and Vice President, demonstrating what could go wrong. In the 1804 race, the results were reversed, and all concerned knew something had to change. Congress passed and the President signed the Twelfth Amendment, giving the electors a single vote toward a party “ticket” comprising a Presidential and a Vice Presidential candidate, which is roughly what the system still is today.

Electors have at times refused to vote per the winner of the popular vote in their state, and some states have passed laws to mandate the vote, although the constitutionality of these laws is undetermined. The Supreme Court had held that while states hold the right to determine the slates of electors, they can’t bait-n-switch the results. If they start out an election directing the electors to enforce the popular vote result in that state, the state government cannot later choose just to appoint its own electors. Most states have a winner take all approach, giving the popular vote victor in that state all its electoral spoils. Two states, Nebraska and Maine, divvy up one elector to a single voting district, the rest to the winner of the state popular vote.

The net effect of the electoral college system is to give smaller states a little more power in Presidential politics. But it is wrong to overstate this effect. In the end, a state like California determines more electoral votes (54) than the fifteen smallest states combined (AK, HI, ID, MT, WY, ND, SD, NE, WV, DC, DE, RI, VT, NH, ME = 51). Looking at that list, it would be damn near impossible to get those entities to agree on anything.

Some people criticize the electoral college because they feel their vote doesn’t count. For example, a Republican voter in California or a Democratic voter in Texas has little chance of seeing their preferred candidate win the state’s electors. Every election has numerous states that vote reliably one way or the other, and a group of swing states where the election turns. Which states are swing states change over time; when I lived in Virginia, it went from reliably red to purple (swing) to light blue, then blue, now almost back to purple. The swing states this year are Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia. And in those states, there are reliably blue cities and red rural counties, so the vote actually comes down to a small number of voters in a small number of states (as it did in 2016 and 2020).

One effect of the electoral college winner-take-all system is that it often makes the winner’s advantage look bigger than it was. In the 1960 election, Kennedy beat Nixon electorally 303-219, but the popular vote was only 49.7 to 49.5%! And of course since the popular vote only matters within a state, a candidate can run up huge totals in the national popular vote and still lose the electoral college (Gore in 2000, Clinton in 2016). As they say in software, this is a feature, not a bug in the system. While the vote is close in all the swing states, it’s quite possible this year they all fall the same way, making a close popular vote look like a large electoral victory.

If Vice President Harris wins Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (often called the “blue-wall,” as they usually vote for the Democratic party candidate) and former President Trump takes Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, the entire electoral decision comes down to the outlier districts in Maine and Nebraska which allocate votes directly. This is where the 270-268 or 269 tie becomes possible. What happens in the event of a tie? The vote for the President goes to the new House of Representatives which will be sworn in on January 3rd (before the Presidential inauguration). In the House, the states vote as units (fifty votes, nothing for the District of Columbia). Although there is no set rule currently, the obvious method is for each state’s representative to caucus and vote, with the majority deciding the state’s singular vote. The states can only vote for one of the candidates who received the three most electoral votes (in reality, it means just the Democratic or Republican nominees, as there are no third parties who will capture a state’s electors this time).

While Republicans “control” more state delegations in the House currently, remember that all Representatives are up for re-election, and how individual member would vote within their state caucus is entirely up to them. When such a contingent election happened in US history, there was a lot of deal-making and behind-the-scenes subterfuge.

As to the Vice Presidency, the same process goes on in the Senate. Except there each state has two Senators, so they vote as individuals, not as a state caucus. A simple majority selects the Vice President. But right now the Senate is split: there are forty-nine Republicans, forty-seven Democrats, and four independents. Three of the independents caucus with the Democrats, and the Vice President breaks ties, so Democrats currently control the Senate. But one-third of Senators are up for re-election, and like the House, the new Senate with a to-be-determined majority will conduct the vote. Interestingly, if the House has not settled on a President by March 4th, and the Senate has selected a Vice President, that Vice President becomes acting President until the House finishes its determination.

Among the strange possibilities?

• Vice President Harris runs up huge vote totals in deep-blue New York and California, but narrowly loses all the swing states and the Presidency to a Donald Trump electoral wave (the reverse is unlikely).
• The candidates virtually tie in the national popular vote (as many polls now indicate) but Harris narrowly wins all the swing states and large electoral majority.
• An electoral tie would result in Democrats trying to coax individual Republican Representatives (especially traditional Republicans and non-MAGA types) to toss the vote by the states in the House to Harris (they would only need a few states). Imagine the intrigue when career politicians know their votes have an immensely high value, they can vote as they like, and the result would end Trump’s stranglehold on the party. Making it even stranger and more fraught, the House Members would be up against the clock if the new Senate was deadlocked fifty-fifty, since sitting Vice President Harris might be the deciding vote (this part is unclear and untested, so a chance to get the Supreme Court involved, too!) for Vice President Walz, and if the House didn’t decide first, he would become President for a time! And if no one is selected by the House and Senate in time, the Speaker of the House becomes acting President, although who might that be next year is anybody’s guess! Imagine for a moment a grand electoral bargain, where House Republican members agree to vote for President Harris if she agrees to select JD Vance as the Vice President winner!

If you think that last one was implausible, let me introduce you to the election of 1876 and the “corrupt bargain.” That year, Democrat Samuel Tilden got 184 electoral votes, but needed 185 for a simple majority. His Republican opponent, Rutherford Hayes, got 165 electoral votes, and twenty electoral votes (from Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina) were disputed and therefore not counted (yes, it happened before, and no, it can’t happen this time, as after our last Presidential election, Congress changed the counting process to exclude contested electors from the total, meaning the number of electors needed for a majority is decreased by the number of electors disputed. It could still make a mess, but it helps address the problem.)

Since there is only about a page of rules in the Constitution about what happens when there is not an electoral majority, the Congress is free to determine its own methods. It established a commission to work out a compromise. That group comprised eight Republicans and seven Democrats, who predictably voted on party lines to give all disputed electoral votes to Hayes, meaning he won the Presidency 185-184. The rules Congress chose for the commission were that its results were final, unless both houses of Congress rejected them. The Senate, controlled by Republicans, did not reject the results (predictably), but Democrats controlled the House and tried desperately to filibuster or delay a vote in hope the result could be forestalled. Eventually they gave in, and threats that opponents would march on Washington were deterred by President US Grant’s promise to call out the army. Rutherford B. Hayes joined the list as twenty-ninth President of the United States and most people have never heard of Samuel Tilden, but that’s not the end of the story.

As you were reading that story, you probably asked yourself, “why did the Democrats agree to a Republican-majority commission? Why agree that both houses needed to disapprove, making the commission’s results almost certain?” While there is no written documentary evidence, many of those involved at the time talk about a “compromise” (later dubbed the “Corrupt Bargain”) between southern Democrats and the Hayes campaign, under which the rules would lead to Hayes becoming President while the southerners would receive several things: a cabinet-level official, the removal of federal troops in the South, no more interference with southern cultural (i.e., racist) policies, and a new southern rail line to the Pacific, among other things.

Hayes became President and all those things happened, including the state governments of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana switching to the Democratic party once federal protections were removed. As I said, there is no document proving this theory, and some of the compromises mentioned were already things of which Hayes was supportive. But the theory of a “corrupt Bargain” best explains what happened.

So the electoral college doesn’t function as the founders intended (never has), works against a straight democratic process for the Presidency, and has been the subject of political intrigue throughout our history. There is a movement afoot (the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact) to have enough state governments agree to change their electoral slates to match the winner of the national popular vote in case the electoral outcome does not represent that democratic majority. As such, it attempts to end-run the electoral college system, but it will fail, simply because the Supreme Court has already held the states cannot change how they select their electors mid-election. It doesn’t stop the folks from trying, but don’t get your hopes up.

Why keep the electoral college system? Because despite all that history and anti-democracy, it works. Consider a hypothetical under a direct, popular vote system for President. It takes somewhere in the neighborhood 0f seventy-five million votes to win the Presidency. Americans are increasingly associative migrating, that is, moving to areas where like-minded voters live. It is why you can find cities where no one knows a Trump supporter, and large farmlands where there is nary a Harris-Walz sign. Most of the Californians fleeing (literally) the Golden State are its GOP twenty percent, and they are moving to the reddest of red states, even when they choose blue-bubble cities in those states.

Under a popular vote system, a Democratic candidate could focus all his campaign and policies on the twenty largest cities and the states of New York/New England and California/Washington/Oregon in order to easily reach that total. No need to visit anywhere else, campaign anywhere else, consider anything else. Simply promise things to those cities/states/voters, focus your attention on mobilizing that base and getting it to polls (virtually or really), win the election and reward your supporters. Rinse & repeat. Likely? Maybe not. Willing to risk it? No. I don’t think even a partisan Democrat thinks that’s a better system of Presidential selection.

There may be alternatives or small changes to improve the electoral college system, and the country should always review and consider them. But if the problem is you’re not winning, the solution needn’t be to change the rules of the game. All systems can be gamed (as I demonstrated), so any proposal must demonstrate it is hands-down superior. And that’s a tall order against an electoral system which has itself evolved to meet the nation’s needs.

I could almost hear the grinding of my liberal/progressive friends’ teeth as they read the first three installments of this series. “Pat,” they’d say, “you’re missing the point. Trump is inherently, obviously, and unchangeably EVIL. Why don’t you just accept that fact? Why belabor us with a political science lesson when the real problem is obvious?”

I did so because–as I pointed out at the start–if the real problem is so obvious, it should be apparent in a comparison of the morality of the policies of the two candidates. It wasn’t. So what is it, that is, what makes some people so certain Donald Trump is a cross between Hitler, Darth Vader, and Pennywise (the evil clown in Steven King’s IT).

Many people have hated the very idea of a Trump candidacy long before he provided the comments or the actions which now form the basis of that loathing. I started writing a piece about that five years ago, and it’s still marinating, waiting for when we can all claim to be post-Trump for me to introduce my theory. Setting that aside for the moment, most people who hold this view cite two things: his boorish behavior, of which there is ample evidence, and his actions leading up to and culminating in January 6th. As to the former, there is no defense for his many sins against charity. The man seems incapable of behaving well, and of moderating his bad impulses. As a disqualification, however, it is weak. No one who has listened to the Nixon tapes, read the many quotes (and eye-witness reports) of LBJ’s crudity, or perused the several accounts of the Kennedy family can be shocked by Trump’s tweets, rallies, or misogyny. Trump would never admit it, but he is a piker when it comes to such things.

Which leaves January 6th. I went back and read (link) what I wrote about that event, to see how it aged (I thought well). What I later learned through the courts and January 6th commission was how much planning was involved by some of the participants, although none of it effective (gladly). Also, that the gist of Trump’s intent was to intimidate Vice President Pence into not certifying the election. This was Trump-in-a-nutshell: loud, braggadocious, absent any knowledge of how things work, yet somehow hopeful he’ll get what he wants.

Join me in a thought experiment about that day. Imagine it really was a coup attempt. Would the planners and plotters not have downloaded the map of the Capitol showing where the members’ offices were? Was marching through the hallways chanting, “where is Nancy?” (Pelosi, then Speaker of the House) really part of the plan? What if they had caught up with her, and the Vice President, and even strung them up (another chant of the day)? Would it have stopped the election results from being certified, or changed the outcome? No. Believe me, the day was bad enough, but could have been much worse. But even if it had been so, nothing would be different. It was all without purpose, other than to assuage Trump’s ego. (One side note: we should all take a second look at Mike Pence. Whatever you thought about him, when the moment came, he stood in the breach).

What I wrote at the time was I thought Trump should have been impeached for simply interfering with the constitutional process and prevented from ever running for federal office. That’s not what happened. Democrats in the House and Senate inflated the event (which was quite serious as a riot and interference) into an insurrection, comparing it to the civil war and wanting Trump found guilty of fomenting the violence. This proved too much even for GOP Senators who would have been happy to be done once-and-for-all with Trump, and he was acquitted by the Senate. This left Trump’s supporters aggrieved, Progressives enraged, and everybody else weary. But of course it was only a step along the way, and here we are again, with another Trumpified election.

To those who believe Trump is the epitome of evil, ask yourself whether you always felt that, and if it colored your views as time went on. To those who say, “No, it was his policies, his language, his actions,” I would say only this: understand that everything you believe about this man was known on November 3rd, 2020, and yet seventy-four million Americans voted for him, which was a total only surpassed once in American history. Believing that that many Americans are not only complicit, but actively support evil must be exhausting, and perhaps requires a little self-reflection.

Finally, to those who view January 6th as a dis-qualifier: I certainly understand. It is surprising to me that people who would call out any irregularity in the justice system as cause for overturning a guilty verdict seem blind to the fact that Trump was tried (impeachment being the trial process specified in the Constitution) and found not guilty. Yes, he is awaiting another trial, but one that has only spotlighted the challenges of such charges outside the constitutional measure (i.e., impeachment). Yes, politics played a major role in the impeachment result, as was intended by those who wrote the language. But the result stands. You can’t simply deny a fact produced by the system, or so Trump’s supporters are often told when he denies the election results.

I hope no one takes this series of blog posts as suggesting you should vote for Donald Trump. Rather, it was meant to show that there are reasons and policies which could lead you to support either the former President or the current Vice President, and it is on that basis you should choose. Not on some media-driven standard of morality which leaves people debating Hitler analogies.

Paraphrasing Lt. Colonel Kilgore, “someday this (Trumpian) war’s gonna end.” We can start preparing for this today by treating the election as a contest, not an Apocalypse Now.

Finally, I know that some of my friends are thinking I’m trying too hard to just look like I’m independent, that I don’t really mean what I say. I guess my ambivalent views are best described by what the Holy Father, Pope Francis, said recently about the election: “One must choose the lesser of two evils. Who is the lesser of two evils? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know. Everyone with a conscience should think on this and do it.” I would add pray on it. I’m sure that’s what he meant.

Go vote!

One doesn’t immediately think about morality when discussing economic policy. Perhaps it comes up in rules against price-gouging, laws against fraud, or policies to support the neediest or prevent unfair trade practices. Let me start by explaining one thing I am not going to consider: inflation. Many people put inflation at the top of the economic worries list. They are absolutely correct in their gut feeling that inflation was a major challenge to the average family, and the higher prices that resulted need to be addressed. But inflation is about tomorrow’s prices, not today’s, and the inflation monster has been largely tamed.

Now put your pitchforks and torches down, MAGA friends! It is worth remembering that the terrible inflation we all experienced happened under the Biden administration (although they are only party to blame). It is more important to remember that that same administration told us there was little inflation, or it was temporary, or that we were making too much of it. It is most important to remember that Joe’s policies were going to make it even worse: but for Senator Joe Manchin, the Biden administration wanted to spend more than twice as much on its Green New Deal/Build Back Better/”Inflation Reduction” act. If the administration had its way, we might never have gotten inflation under control.

That in mind, the Federal Reserve has done a spectacular job, it remains on the job, and while prices are not going to decrease, they are back to increasing at a rate that few even notice. So the problem is not inflation now, but affordability. How do we get our economy growing while making life more affordable? And where do the candidates’ policies stack morally in answering this issue?

Vice President Harris intends to build what she calls “an opportunity economy.” While her public discussions and interviews have yielded only a word salad of buzzwords and the endlessly-repeated claim she grew up in a middle class family (with two university professors as parents), she has some details on her campaign website and an associated “policy book.” Among her proposals are these:

• Increasing the child care and earned income tax credits
• Extending the Trump tax cuts for all those making less than $400,000 annually
• new or larger tax credits for low-income home developers/redevelopers
• $25,000+ for renters buying their first-time home
• $40 Billion as a fund for local governments to innovate in home building
• more tax credits for small businesses, debt forgiveness for student loans, and an specified commitment to fund long-term health care for seniors.

The Vice President also has proposed raising the capital gains tax rate to 28%, rescinding the Trump tax cuts for the rich, and various other new taxes or policies that are either unconstitutional (wealth tax) or unworkable (“stopping Wall Street from buying and marking up homes”). There are many more proposals than I cover here, and in general, they are pretty much more of the same: the government has something for you. Let me choose one final one which encapsulates the main thrust of her economic policies: prices.

Noting the continuing problem that the voters really hate inflation and blame the administration for it, she announced her intention to go after price-gouging with a new federal law in order to address the practice. Pundits naturally interpreted this as some form of price control, which is as failed a policy as there is economically. She quickly disavowed this publicly, indicating rather her initiative was to create another law (there are thirty-seven states with such laws already) to combat price-gouging. So this has nothing to do with high prices, per se, but rather those who take advantage of situations (like natural disasters) to unfairly gouge consumers. The problems? She said it would address the already high prices, but it doesn’t. Price-gouging laws all take effect when there is a causative event (think charging an exorbitant fee for bottled water after a hurricane), which is not where we are now. And we have these laws, and few have been used by the States because there isn’t a problem here. The gist? A policy announced to sound good, but it is ultimately unrelated to the problem and unworkable. Ditto for some of her tax proposals, resulting in continuing additions to the deficit and national debt.

Turning to former President Trump, his plans (to the extent they can be called that) seem even more vague. He refers to building the greatest economy ever and helping various groups without further elaboration. There is way more spending and reducing government revenue, resulting in ever-higher deficits and national debt. He does have an economic record to run on, and the economy was a bright spot during his administration, right up until covid. On the stump, the former President has called for extending his previous tax cuts, eliminating unnecessary regulations, reducing the capital gains tax to 15%, eliminating income taxes on social security, overtime pay and tips, and instituting more and more draconian tariffs. Tariffs seem to be Trump’s magic solution to all problems economic. As price-gouging is to Harris, I want to look deeper into Trump and tariffs.

Tariffs were once upon a time the primary way governments acquired funding. Taxes on income were hard to collect before modern convenience made it easy, and they were strongly resisted. Tariffs, taxes paid by the government or company exporting something into your country, seemed like a no-brainer: “they” pay the tax for “us.”Another version of the concept is a “duty” (ever seen duty-free shops at the airport?), which is a tax paid by the company importing an item. Since companies run on profit, they have a tendency to pass along any tariffs, duties, or business taxes to the consumer. But not always (more on that later).

Tariffs fell out of favor because (1) they tinker with free trade, which has been shown to be the best way to run the global economy, and (2) heavy tariffs under the Smoot-Hawley Act helped turn the terrible recession of 1929 into the Great Depression. After that, no sane economist wanted to defend the practice. Tariffs were still around, but seldom used. When then-candidate Trump proposed smacking China with punitive tariffs back in 2016, he was widely ridiculed and economists predicted a disastrous trade war. President Trump went ahead, anyway.

Trump’s China tariffs (which the Biden administration decried but then kept in place, and now are proposing more!) produced US$233 billion dollars of tax revenue as of March 2024. There was no trade war; China responded with weaker, more-symbolic tariffs. But didn’t US consumers actually pay those taxes? There is no evidence to support that. Prices for Chinese goods under tariff rose slightly, but not as much as the tariffs, nor in-line with inflation. China’s producers simply let the tariffs eat into their profit margin, in order to keep market-share in the United States. Selling (even with reduced profit) was more important to China and its producers than buying Chinese products was to American consumers. This is the case where tariffs can really work.

Despite this apparent success, economists continue to howl. There are any number of statistical analysis showing the tariffs were a hidden tax on US consumers and cost the US economy a reduction in Gross Domestic Product. On the latter claim, US economic growth has been robust, and there is no way to prove at this point it would have been even stronger without tariffs. On the former point, the “hidden tax on US consumers” hypothesis always includes the caveat, “before accounting for behavioral effects.” What does that mean? When the price of Chinese products increases, fewer Americans buy from them: they change their behavior and buy from a different national producer. So the American consumers does not pay the tariff, rather, they avoid it.

As you can see, tariffs can be an effective policy in certain circumstances: there is a robust, competitive market, substitution is possible, and the tariffs are not so comprehensive. If you want to buy parmesan cheese and only the one from Parma, Italy, will suffice, you will end up paying the tariff, as the producer will pass it along to you. But if local “parmesan” will do, it will force the producer to eat it (the tariff, not the cheese). If you tariff everything, other countries will do the same, and the benefits may disappear.

There is another potential benefit/drawback with tariffs. They can encourage the growth of domestic industry (and thus jobs), since those products have a price advantage absent the tariff. This is a little tricky, though, since if there is no such industry, and you need the product now, you can’t wait. Or the industry might be one with enormously high start-up costs (think semiconductor production), or one where the country under tariff has a huge quality advantage (would you want to buy a “good-enough” domestic defibrillator?).

Sorry for the long macro-economics lesson! I wanted to explain that when you hear the experts talking about Trump’s tariffs, there is more than a whiff of “how dare you be right!” about it. But tariffs are a blunt tool, and can cause the problems I cited (pass-through taxes, trade wars, shoddy domestic production). For her part, Vice President Harris calls it “Trump’s sales tax” which may be smart politics, if inaccurate economics. Sales taxes are paid by the consumer, and are unavoidable. Try asking the check-out person at the store. Tariffs can be avoided. It’s also a bit funny she uses “sales tax” as a bogeyman. Many States employ sales taxes, and nearly every other large industrialized economy has some form of national sale tax. Many use an even more draconian Value-Added Tax, or VAT. You are no doubt familiar with it if you travel, as there are sometimes ways to get VAT rebated when making significant purchases as a tourist.

VAT is a sales tax on steroids, as it applies at every level of the value chain. Whenever a substance or product has value-added, the transaction is taxed. Mine dirt to find silicon (value-added over plain dirt) and sell it: taxed. Take that silicon and refine/purify it (value-added) and market it: taxed again. Cut that silicon and place in on transistors: yup, more tax. Put the transistors in a computer: taxed. And put that computer in a car: more tax. States and countries like sales taxes (they produce a lot of revenue), but they really love VAT.

What are Trump’s tariffs like? No one knows! He talks about massive tariffs, sometimes universal, but has no hard plans for them. Suffice it to say the tariffs will produce revenue, mostly not from Americans, but could also cause other issues.

Before I depart from former President Trump, a word about Project 2025. This is the 922 page document put out by the Heritage Foundation (a noted conservative think-tank) with policy proposals on just about everything, including the economy. Social media is filled with spurious posts about things that aren’t even in the document, but then again, there are many claims that are. Why haven’t I mentioned it thus far? Here’s a simple observation and a piece of inside-the-beltway insight. The observation is that if you think former President Trump has read the 922 page document, let alone endorses it, you need a reality check. But wait, aren’t many Trump supporters at Heritage? Didn’t JD Vance write the forward on a book by the same lead author? Won’t Heritage people be “in” a Trump administration. Yes to all, and just as irrelevant.

If you look up the advocacy group Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), you’ll see many Obama/Biden administration members, who will come back for a Harris administration. The DSA has a policy agenda on their website, and I could pick out some dandy ideas there to scare you. They haven’t (to my knowledge) yet endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket, but neither has Harris nor Walz declaimed their support. The DSA do claim to have influenced the Democratic Party to select Walz over Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro, a claim not denied by the ticket. DC types will tell you there are think tanks and agendas galore, and people who really believe in them, but as Mike Tyson legendarily said, “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Neither candidate has introduced the kind of benefit cuts, savings, revenue increases or spending decreases to do anything about the federal deficit and ever-growing debt. Both seem content to leave the looming Social Security and Medicare collapses for the next administration to handle, meanwhile claiming the other side is out to “push granny off the proverbial cliff”

Neither candidate has plans or policies directly addressing the core economic challenges. Both pander to favored groups (student debt, big corporations, seniors, etc.) and tinker at the margins. As with the policies about Immigration and Abortion, there is little moral difference between them. Not to say a voter might like one set or the other, but it would be on expected results, not some inherenty more moral standard.

I’ll complete this series with a final look at January 6th, and a wrap-up to explain why I took all this time to compare the morality of the two campaigns.

Take a deep breath. This is not an attempt to change your mind on this fraught, deeply divisive issue. This is the second post in a series looking into whether the policies of the two leading candidates can be described as significantly different in terms of their morality. Not the candidates, the policies.

Abortion, or women’s reproductive choice, is another major issue in the presidential election. Where do the candidates stand, and what does it mean?

When Vice President Harris speaks on this issue, she does so with clarity and sincerity. Even her extemporaneous remarks on this issue are (usually) coherent and forceful. Prior to becoming the presidential candidate, the Biden campaign had assigned her the lead role in public discussions on it, and she was effective with the liberal/progressive audiences with which she engaged.

At its most elemental, Harris says she will sign a new federal law reinstating the status quo before the Dobbs decision overturned Roe’s constitutional right to an abortion. However, there are several areas where she goes further. She has promised to rescind the Hyde Amendment, a bipartisan agreement (that has lasted decades) that says no federal funding can be used to procure an abortion. She has suggested (according to the American Civil Liberties Union) that this is “to ensure that everyone can get an abortion if they need one, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much money they have.” Harris also co-sponsored (and has not backed away from) the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2017, which would invalidate all state-level laws or regulations which restrict abortion or abortion access.

Just today, the Vice President announced she supports making an exception to the filibuster rules to pass her pro-choice law in the Senate. This is an important development. To remind, the Senate has a rule that for any vote to take place, debate must be allowed first, and if that debate becomes a filibuster, it takes a super-majority of sixty Senators to break the filibuster and continue to the actual vote. Her support, coupled with any Democratic majority in the Senate, makes passage of her proposed abortion rights bill far more likely. It also means that Republicans will accept the new rule change, and our nation’s abortion rules will go from one extreme (unlimited abortion) to another (abortion banned) with every change in the Presidency and Congress. And some thought things were bad before now!

In practical terms, when asked at the presidential debate if she supports any restrictions on abortion, Harris did not answer the question. When former President Trump said “You could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month” Harris responded “that’s not true.” This happened at the end of a back-n-forth exchange between the candidates, so perhaps the moderator Linsey Davis can be forgiven for not fact-checking the Vice President. Roe placed no limitation on abortion after viability; it only afforded the states the ability to do so. Some states under Roe placed no such restrictions, and many more have done the same under Dobbs. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2019 there were almost 5,000 abortions in the US after the twenty-first week; the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute estimates it was closer to 9,000. That’s between one or two every hour. And that same group denies these were abortions for late-discovered fetal anomalies, but rather (according to the women who had the abortions) they were for the same reasons as abortions in general.

Summing up, Vice President Harris sees abortion solely as women’s health care, there is no reason to place any limits on it, and she would use the powers of the federal government to prevent states from restricting the practice.

As clear and unapologetic as Vice President Harris is on this issue, former President Trump is vague and evasive. He was vigorously pro-choice for decades, but changed to pro-life when he announced his candidacy in 2015. When asked by Maureen Dowd whether “he was ever involved with someone who had an abortion?” he said, “Such an interesting question. So what’s your next question?” Responding to prompts from pro-life activists, he has taken positions all over the map on abortion, then walked those same positions back when they attracted negative attention. His one constant has been his promise to nominate Supreme Court Justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, which he did.

In the post Dobbs environment, he has continued to waffle, saying he was against a six-week Florida state limit for abortions as “too early” but then denying that he said it. He often states these flips are due to hypothetical discussions, hyperbole, or sarcasm, although there is no evidence for this. His most recent touchstone has been that he doesn’t need to take a stand on abortion as a national issue, as his work to overturn Roe had made the issue one for each state and its voters. He even went so far at the debate as to (falsely) claim “that was what everybody wanted” (i.e. that abortion be decided at the state level).

While the former President at times speaks passionately about the issue and some of its more repulsive aspects, I don’t think it is too judgmental to say he doesn’t have set personal views on it. For him, it seems to be something transactional, in that he understands it is important to others.

One final comment on another part for the debate. When former President Trump tried to bring up the issue of children born despite an abortion, then left to die, moderator Linsey Davis replied with this fact check, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.” This response was both telling and frightening. Telling in that it denies the fact there are people alive today who survived botched abortions; they even have their own affinity group. And chilling in that by the logic of the pro-choice movement, the product of an abortion is not a person but “tissue” or “a fetus.” So if that product just happens to be breathing when it is removed, it is not a child, so it can be left to die. If you don’t believe me, check out what the proud abortion doctor William Hern says on his own website!

How do we assess all this when it comes to the morality of the two candidates’ policies? It is important to separate the morality of the issue from that of the policy. Each side absolutely believes it is not only right but totally moral, while the opposing side is irrational, uncaring, and evil. It is important to note this is not where most Americans are. Polls on the issue of abortion reliably show that most people accept neither the full pro-life nor pro-choice side. Poll results can be easily manipulated by how the questions are asked, demonstrating how conflicted people are. Ask whether a teenager should be forced to give birth to her rapist’s child and you get a strong result. Ask whether a woman should be able to choose to abort in the third trimester for sex selection and you get the same strong result. Both cases are extreme, and they point out the relative weaknesses in each side’s argument. That doesn’t make either side’s case wrong; it just shows how fraught the issue is.

Vice President Harris has staked out consistent positions on this issue, although she denies some of the inconvenient facts along the way. Her positions would go well beyond the status quo under Roe. Former President Trump has been consistently inconsistent. He seems to want to be done with the issue, and I believe he thought he was with the Dobbs decision. There is no way to know what he might choose to support, but I think it is telling this is no longer an issue on which he seems comfortable leading.

Trump’s position is almost amoral, although his instincts are that there is something wrong about abortion. He seems to want to limit it, but would prefer to stop talking about it altogether. Harris has the certainty of a true believer, and her policies represent the furthest extent of those beliefs. On an issue which is so divisive and difficult, I don’t see either of them having a decided moral advantage here.

Americans may feel inundated with political news these days, what with an election pending in little more than a month. And according to all the right people, the vote is between sweetness and joy or thuggery and fascism: what a choice! But elections happen everywhere, and they’re just as monumental to expats as to citizens. Let me explain.

Mexico had an election back in June, and the ruling Morena party won an overwhelming victory. The party leader and current Presidente, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (hereafter by his nickname, AMLO), is limited to a single term, so he was not on the ballot. But he is immensely popular, especially among the poor, and they rewarded his party (Morena) with absolute control over the Congress and elected AMLO’s hand-picked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, as Presidente. The new Congress is in session (under AMLO), but Sheinbaum takes office in October.

AMLO describes his term in office as part of Mexico’s fourth transformation, directly calling to mind the enormous changes involved in events such as the War of Independence and the Revolution. He has made sweeping changes in the country, reinforcing his popularity with the masses. Still, some of his proposals were stopped by the independent Mexican judiciary branch, especially the Mexican Supreme Court. For his final month in office, with a Congressional super-majority, AMLO has initiated changes to the Mexican Constitution that were earlier thwarted by the courts. And this includes making all judges (even the Supreme Court) stand for partisan election (before they were appointed after passing a series of qualification checks).

There are critics–foreign and domestic–of the current Mexican judicial system. Conviction rates are low and many complain of favoritism to the wealthy. AMLO contends voting will make the justices responsive to the people: real democracy brought to the halls of justice. Critics claim judges will become beholden to political parties and no longer represent a check-and-balance on the system. Such was the case when Mexico was a one party state under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI, from 1929-2000.

There are foreign examples to draw upon. In 2017, Bolivia adopted a similar democratic approach to judicial offices, with disastrous results. Qualified candidates have withdrawn, party-hack justices have interpreted the constitution as the sitting leadership requests, and voters routinely leave the judicial ballots blank, expressing no confidence in the candidates. On the other hand, as AMLO notes, America often votes for its state and local judges. The American example is particularly interesting. While almost half of the states elect justices, no one suggests the system is better than appointments, and it incurs all the problems of campaigning, fund-raising, and partisanship. Imagine someone campaigning on the promise to indict a former President! Nevermind.

The Biden administration has been especially tough on AMLO’s judicial reforms. They have pointedly criticized them, suggested they are authoritarian, and threatened to challenge them under the tripartite USMCA trade agreement, which is due for review shortly. The Presidente has not taken this criticism lightly, calling it “interventionist” and “disrespectful” and freezing his relationship with the US Ambassador. However you look at this situation, the irony abounds: the party of democracy in the United States, which is considering stacking the US Supreme Court unless it changes its way, is criticizing a more-democratic approach to appointing Mexican Supreme Court justices, devised by a party with unheard of domestic popularity, in order to get that body to change its ways. Ain’t democracy grand?

Now for expats, the consequences are many. In the near term, no one knows how judicial reform will play out, which has international finance and business on alert: business needs predictability, and elected judges don’t provide that, in general. All the business moving to Mexico under the concept of friend- or near-shoring is dependent upon Mexico being a stable place to do business. Is that still the case? Will it continue to be? That uncertainty took the Mexican Peso from almost sixteen to the dollar about six months ago to almost 20 to the dollar, now hovering around 19 to one dollar. There will be downward pressure on the Peso until it is clear how judicial reform will play out in reality under Presidente Sheinbaum.

In the longer term, Mexico is indeed amidst a significant transformation. While those NOB may still think of Mexico as a poor, crime-ridden place, it has the twelfth largest Gross Domestic Product in the world, larger than Spain and tied with Australia and South Korea. It’s number seven in world tourism, seventh in auto production (close behind Germany), and fourth in beer production. Mexico is twenty-fifth in the World Happiness Index, but Mexican society remains unequal (twelfth worst in economic inequality). AMLO came to office promising change, especially for the poorest, and delivered on much of that agenda. Whether the Morena party can continue to fund those initiatives and consolidate its gains while avoiding sliding into the stagnant authoritarianism which beset the PRI is the unanswered question.

On both sides of the border, people make dire projections of the catastrophe about to engulf us. Some do so to get your attention: nobody ever clicked through a link with the title “the world isn’t ending today.” Some people want to believe it’s true, because we live in the most interesting times EVER. Some are just trolls. The word mundane, which has come to be synonymous with boring, originally meant “of the earthly (real) world, as opposed to the heavenly one.” In both meanings, most of what happens in today’s politics is, in fact, mundane.

Some of my friends describe the upcoming presidential election in the United States as a moral choice, in which an obvious evil must be rejected, once and for all. If you accept this premise, there really is no choice at all. But how does one come to this conclusion in the first place? By looking at each candidate’s records and policies. Otherwise you’re simply choosing sides and cheering without any basis. So let’s start fresh by reviewing the important issues and the policies, shall we? Or should we just jump to conclusions (as Amy Winehouse sang)?

Democrats and Republicans agree that immigration is one of the critical issues. The simple fact is immigration (legal and illegal) has been greatly increasing for almost forty years. In terms of the relative share of the total American population, it is roughly equal to the all-time record highs that happened in waves during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whenever such numbers occur, anti-immigrant sentiment rises as a result of the sudden changes to the fabric of communities. That is what the US is experiencing now.

This is not a unique phenomenon, nor is the reaction uniquely American or nativist. Few countries accept as many immigrants as the United States does (some small ones do in relative proportion) and few countries have borders as permeable as those between the US and Canada/Mexico. Whenever countries accept a large number of immigrants, local governments struggle to deal with them, and poverty, crime, and social dislocation ensue. In America historically, the immigrants acculturate, and by the second or third generation, the children don’t even speak the grandparents’ native language. It is a problem that solves itself, so to speak, but that’s twenty-to-thirty years from now, and only if the immigration is controlled.

Fans of former President Trump will claim he has a much better handle on this issue than his opponent, but is that true? Certainly polls suggest a majority of Americans think this is the case. But there wasn’t a big drop in immigration during the Trump years, just more of the same. COVID did permit a temporary lull, but that only increased the pool of people waiting to enter. Trump did work with Mexico to keep migrants from entering while awaiting their asylum hearing, the so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy. Liberals derided this policy as leaving the migrants to be victimized by the cartels (more on that later), but it did reduce the numbers. He also caused changes in the types of immigrants by separating children from their parents, leading to charges of inhumanity. That message did get through to potential illegal immigrants, who changed conduct accordingly.

Opponents of the former President cite his inflammatory rhetoric, building a wall, his use of “child cages,” the “Muslim ban,” and the aforementioned child separation policy. But only a little of the wall got built, the cages proved to be from the Obama era, the “Muslim ban” wasn’t (and passed review by the Supreme Court). Trump continued his inflammatory and false rhetoric, but his administration abandoned its separation policy in response to public disgust. Yet the overall immigration numbers still kept increasing.

Now he claims to be prepared to finish the wall and to begin mass deportations. Setting the aside the wall, which is not a solution, the threat of mass deportations riles up both his followers and critics. This is not a simple process, regardless of what the former President says: lawyers, judges, cops, federal agents, soldiers, and everyday government employees would have to be involved in such an operation, and its legality would be scrutinized every step of the way. While the senior leadership in DC may wave its hand and say “away with them,” there are thousands of people who will simply stop if they think what they’re doing is wrong or illegal. So it’s not an easy or fast fix.

That said, there are approximately ten million immigrants in the country who have either illegally overstayed their visa, or not shown up after their asylum request was rejected (important note here: people claiming asylum show up for all their hearings, hoping to “win” and gain entry into the country. After their final rejection–and over ninety percent are rejected–they are given a date to report to ICE for processing and deportation. This is the appointment where they never show up.) We know who these people are, we know generally where they are, and we know they have exhausted the legal means to remain in the country. A reasonable policy question is: why can’t some of them be deported? What is the point of all these processes if nobody is ever deported? President Obama ran a robust and effective deportation policy with little fuss.

The Biden administration is correct in pointing out that the near riotous situation at the border two years ago has greatly calmed down. President Biden made a grand show of rescinding all of Trump’s border policies on day one, and predictably a huge migrant tsunami ensued. After first denying it, then ignoring it, impending elections forced the administration to act. They re-adopted some Trump policies (like Title 42, which operated to close off some immigration during the pandemic), and assigned Vice President Harris to work on the root causes of migration (not the border Czar, a term only used by those who don’t know how government works). All of which had little effect.

The administration then tightened rules on families entering, created a streamlined (app-based) application for asylum from certain countries, and started rejecting those who crossed the border at other than border crossings. This helped to normalize the border, but did not reduce the overall numbers. Finally, late in the game, President Biden sent Secretary of State Blinken to meet with Mexican President AMLO and his team. Quietly, Mexico began to implement the El Carrusel (the merry-go-round) policy. As detailed in a recent Washington Post piece, the Mexican government rounds up 10,000 migrants a month and buses them from near the US border, where they are preparing to cross illegally, all the way to the southernmost, poorest Mexican states adjacent to Guatemala. The Post interviewed one Venezuelan family which has ridden the carousel four times! This policy, which takes desperate people and sends them (chutes-n-ladders style) to remote parts of Mexico furthest from the United States, is the main reason the border is quieter. How this is morally different than Remain in Mexico is unclear, at best.

Biden may be President, and this is his policy, but he’s no longer a candidate for re-election. What of Vice President Harris’ views on immigration? When she ran for the Democratic party nomination in 2019-20, she called for border crossing to be changed from a criminal to a civil offense. Now she says the law on border crossing “should be enforced” but without any further guidance, which leads to this question: is it not being enforced now? The Vice President has noted that border crossings are at a four-year low, but has made no comment on el carrusel: how does she view this policy, coordinated between the Biden administration and the Mexican government?

She vocally supports the bipartisan immigration bill which former President Trump maneuvered to kill, attempting to keep immigration as a major issue in the election. The bill would have tightened and streamlined the asylum process, created new pathways to status for immigrants, and added resources for Customs and Border Protection (CBP). It was an important step in the right direction, but in no way would it solve the immigration problem. It was simply the art of the possible at a point of extreme partisanship. Former President Trump opposed the timing of the bill, but it is unclear where he stands on it ultimately, if he were to return to office. Some of the key provisions of the bill were subsequently enacted by President Biden under executive orders, leading to the obvious question (which David Muir asked Vice President Harris at the recent debate, without an answer): why didn’t the administration enact these measures earlier?

Finally she still supports “comprehensive immigration reform” without any further explanation as to what that means. That could mean tightening, loosening, or nothing at all.

As is obvious by now, much of the debate over immigration is shallow and for show. And like any show, it needs a climax, which recently happened in the village of Springfield, Ohio. This town, about an hour west of Columbus, is a sagging reminder of the Midwest-that-was. It was a local manufacturing hub until all the jobs went away. The population fell from over 80,000 to under 60,000. Recently, federal, state, and local officials worked together to welcome Haitian refugees to Springfield. These immigrants are here legally, the vast majority entering under a short-term provision due to the endemic violence and recurrent natural disasters in their home country.

The Trump-Vance ticket seized upon baseless claims that Haitian migrants are catching and eating the pets of Springfield residents. The claims seem to rest on a photo of a man carrying a duck or goose, which turned out to be in a different city, and unsubstantiated social media posts. All of this is of course ridiculous, and the Harris-Walz ticket rightly lampooned the claims. Even if it were true, so what? Desperate people do desperate things. What is missing here is the obvious but overlooked part of the story, and that says a lot about our immigration challenges.

Who thought it was a good idea to place, or assist in the placement of, 12,000-20,000 Haitian refugees in a small, wilting, Ohio town? Why are we making long-term plans for refugees brought in under a temporary program? If the town asked for this, where was the expert judgment of state and federal officials telling them, “this won’t end well?” If the Haitians are just settling there of their own accord, why doesn’t the government have any ability to limit the size of the community? Meanwhile, the two political parties post memes.

All of which is to remind my friends that immigration is a classic “wicked problem,” that is, one that defies simple solutions. Our policies must work to mitigate the urge to leave, normalize the border, and allow in the mix of people (including refugees) that we want: not just anybody who wants to come. Oh, and do all that in a safe, legal, and humane way. I see very little from either candidate–their records or their proposals–that indicates a serious attempt to solve the problem. Trump is characteristically offensive about immigrants; that cannot be denied. Harris has been inconsistent, although she claims “my values have not changed.” When I first heard this, I thought, “if your policies can totally change, but your values haven’t, maybe your main value is ‘what do I say to get elected?'”

We can and should argue about the effectiveness of the policies in play. But to wrap up an exceedingly long post: are you sure the morality of this issue is clear? I’m not.