2020 Senate Elections Predictions

AL – Tuberville (flip to R)

AL- Sullivan

AZ- Kelly (flip D)

AR – Cotton

CO- Hickenlooper (flip D)

DE – Coons

GA- Ossoff vs Purdue Runoff; Ossoff Wins (flip D)

GA (Special) Warnock vs Loeffler Runoff; Loeffler Wins

ID- Risch

IL – Durbin

IA- Greenfield (flip D)

KS – Marshall

KY – McConnell

LA – Cassidy

ME – Gideon (flip D)

MA – Markey

MI- Peters

MN – Smith

MS – Hyde-Smith

MT – Bullock (flip D)

NE – Sasse

NH – Shaheen

NJ – Booker

NM – Lujan

NC – Cunningham (flip D)

OK – Inhofe

OR – Merkley

RI – Reed

SC – Graham

SD – Rounds

TN – Hagerty

TX – Cornyn

VA – Warner

WV – Capito

WY – Lummis

I predict after the runoffs, Democrats (and Independents) will control the Senate, 53-47.

2020 Presidential Prediction

2020 Rankings

Here are my current rankings of the declared major candidates, and why:

1. Elizabeth Warren (Making corporations accountable to their workers)

2. Cory Booker (Baby bonds! Sounds goofy, but it’s a fascinating antipoverty proposal)

3. Kirsten Gillibrand (She’s a supporter of the FAMILY Act, which mandates 12 weeks of   leave for new parents)

4. Kamala Harris (Massive expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit.)

5. Amy Klobuchar (Pragmatist focused on Big Tech and data protection. I’m worried about her high staff turnover, though.)

6. Bernie Sanders (He articulated ideas promoted by Occupy Wall Street, Fight for $15, etc. and built a large movement in 2016. He hired Faiz Shakir of the ACLU to run his campaign, which is good!)

7. Julian Castro (Served as mayor of San Antonio and as HUD Secretary.)

8. Pete Buttigieg (Mayor of South Bend. Big emphasis on infrastructure while in office.)

9. John Delaney (Provide universal health care by ending tax breaks for health care benefits is a pretty weird proposal. Then again, he founded a health care financing company in 1993.)

10. Tulsi Gabbard (She’s got the homophobic, Muslim-ban supporting, pro-Assad vote locked down. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to win in the Democratic Party.)

NeverSanders

NYMag recently published a long article about Senator Sanders’ nascent presidential run. It’s worth reading in full as the invisible primary heats up, if only to get a sense of how his campaign may differ (or not) from his previous effort.

Two passages, in particular, jumped out at me.

But Sanders can’t believe a 2020 race will be any more cynical or negative than the last one. In his experience, the attacks against him and his wife were so raw that he hasn’t asked his advisers for the customary “self-research” that might surface new vulnerabilities. “Look, you don’t even need [opposition research],” he tells me. “If I were a choirboy, it doesn’t matter, because they lie all the time.” But Clinton’s team never ran television ads against Sanders that attacked him personally, and even people close to him fear the amount of potential material is considerable.

Any candidate who doesn’t do self-opposition research is either very naive or very deluded. Harris, Booker, Biden, etc. are all researching Bernie’s past. If he thinks that Hillary Clinton’s mild criticisms of him were the absolute nadir of intra-party politics…then he is definitely not the candidate for a general election.

Sanders finds a lot of his newfound fame deeply unpleasant. He has talked with friends about the pressure of being, in his mind, the most popular politician in the country. He travels constantly but can’t go anywhere without being mobbed. He shoos away cameras that get too close, cuts off questioners.

Yeah, if there’s anything we know about being President, it’s that nobody follows you around and the press leaves you alone. Again, this is more evidence that Bernie doesn’t have the temperament for this job he apparently wants.

His decision to at least partially ingratiate himself with the Democratic Establishment is its own kind of heartache. He believes he has a responsibility to shape the party in his image, but at what point do these negotiations turn him into just another politician?

A guy who’s served in public office from 1980-1988 and continuously since 1991 sounds like a politician to me! I don’t consider this a bad thing; in fact, experience at both local and national government is helpful for public policy. This little passage says more about dumb media narratives than Sanders.

Radicalization

After the September 11th attacks, there was a large interest from citizens and policymakers over how to prevent radicalization of Muslims. Here is an example from Psychology Today:

In many ways, radicalization is similar to gang recruitment. If there is an opening due to discontent or unmet needs and adult guidance is lacking, a recruiter can try to win over a young person with radical propaganda.

The theory appears to be that people who feel alienated from their environment try to find deeper meanings or a sense of purpose in their lives. Unscrupulous leaders can use propaganda to create a sense of belonging for these disaffected people, and eventually recruit them into violent ideologies. The FBI explained the process in testimony from 2006:

The Internet is also a venue for the radicalization of young, computer-savvy Westerners—both male and female—who identify with an Islamic extremist ideology. An older generation of supporters and sympathizers of violent Islamic extremism, in the post-9/11 environment of increased law enforcement scrutiny, have migrated their radicalization, recruitment, and material support activities online.

Radicalization via the Internet is participatory, and individuals are actively engaged in exchanging extremist propaganda and rhetoric online which may facilitate the violent Islamic extremist cause. These online activities further their indoctrination, create links between extremists located around the world, and may serve as a springboard for future terrorist activities.

Now replace “Islamic” with “right-wing” or “fascist” or “white nationalist”.

I don’t understand how the process of de-radicalizing large swathes of the American public can begin. Hell, 40% of Americans probably think that Eric Holder and Maxine Waters are the real fascists.

 

Kavanaugh’s Best Friend

Mark Judge, a witness and participant to the actions Professor Ford described today, has chosen not to come to the Senate to defend his childhood friend. He is currently at a beach house in Delaware with vintage Superman comics (I swear to God I’m not making this up). The disinterest in his testimony speaks volumes about Senate Republicans, the President, Kavanaugh, and their sympathizers.

Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the UK

A few days ago, UK PM Theresa May made it clear that any border between the UK and the EU would not be the Irish Sea, but between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.  Since the Good Friday Accords, the entire Irish island has become a more fluid place, as people became more comfortable with multiple identities. Particularly, people in Northern Ireland could think of themselves as British, Irish, and EU citizens. Ireland is a source for many migrants, with Polish immigrants outnumbering UK immigrants in 2016 (see page 53 of this link to the Irish 2016 census).

A new border would complicate these efforts and lead to significant disruptions in both halves of the island. It’s also worrisome that northern Ireland is still without a domestic government: after a corruption scandal that unfolded in 2016, Sinn Féin broke the coalition agreement they had with the Democratic Unionist Party. Coalition talks have been unsuccessful. However, because DUP holds the balance in the UK Parliament, the incentive for them to cooperate with other parties must be pretty low. The Good Friday Accords specify that the UK must be a neutral partner between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland; it’s not clear how the UK can be neutral if the government majority depends on unionists to pass legislation. Nevertheless, the UK Parliament has passed a budget for NI for 2017-2018. Right now, the next domestic election for the devolved parliament will be on or before May 5th, 2022.

The relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland will change dramatically on March 29, 2019. I hope that the transition will go well for all Irish people.

Thoughts on American Democracy

In October 2015, Matt Yglesias at Vox published this article, arguing that the American political system is headed toward collapse. Because we’re going to be hearing about court-packing as a remedy to the failure of the Electoral College twice in 16 years, it’s worth pondering how we got to this point.

His thesis is that presidential systems suffer from a major flaw: there are two popularly elected groups, the Presidency and Congress. Both claim to speak for the people, and the system can’t really tell us how to resolve differences between them. The other problem is that we now have ideological parties, rather than patronage-based parties. Putting these two ingredients together yields gridlock (Congress and the President work against each other) and norm-breaking (filibuster, use of executive authority to fill gaps in legislation) in order to achieve policy goals, to satisfy their respective power centers.

Republicans are still to blame for many problems in politics. Their continued support of Pruitt, DeVos, Mulvaney, etc is truly despicable. But the issues with the actually existing constitutional order remain. How will debt ceiling crises be resolved in the future? How can the Electoral College be neutered to prevent a permanent minority from deciding the next Supreme Court Justice? Does Congress speak for the people, or does the President?

Other systems do away with the presidency altogether and have the executive be elected from the legislature. Some countries have a monarch that doesn’t actually have legislative power, they perform head of state functions. The UK has a bicameral legislature, but the House of Lords doesn’t pass bills. A quick glance around the rest of the Americas shows repeated cycles of democratization and authoritarianism.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that we have to develop one soon.

 

Immigration, an Ongoing Series

Senate Ds don't appear want laws against illegal immigration enforced, short and simple. We have offered them a simple solution that would keep families together and enforce laws on the books.

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) June 20, 2018

The above quote is bullshit because when various DACA bills were put up for a vote earlier this year, the major sticking point that prevented further action was disagreement over changes to legal immigration. Trumpists wanted major cuts to legal immigration programs. Moderate Republicans were apparently pretty worried about family members of DACA recipients getting legal status. DACA protections only failed to pass despite the fact that everyone agreed on them.

Republicans keep trotting out this old canard, “Well, we’re fine with legal immigration, it’s just the illegal ones we dislike”, that is clearly, undeniably, false. Republicanism is white supremacy, period.

Crazy Guy at the Hoover Dam

This news story about a deluded gun-toting white guy who demanded the release of a fictitious OIG report that will put Hillary, Pelosi, and Schumer in prison was rightfully lost among the traumatic separation of children from their parents. But it’s worth wondering if there will ever be consequences for anybody promoting this stuff. Sooner or later, somebody’s going to get hurt or killed from some heavily armed Fox News- watching whacko.