In Alaska Peltola has drawn somewhat closer (and I think one batch of votes left maybe). But probably not going to get there unless the AKIP people really hate Begich.

So much "closer but not quite enough" will be the death of the republic.

But it does look like ranked choice voting is going to survive; repeal ois down about 200 votes.

I think "Trump lived and Ginsburg died" will be a grim summary of the post-2020 US political world. At least for the rest of my lifetime.

That's much worse than "Rosa sat so Martin could walk, etc"

WTF is it with Gen X? It's bad enough my kids call me a boomer, my cohort has to suck more than them? I may just become a Millennial.

I do have a post mortem I was going to share that was at least a little more thought-provoking than the usual. From a D consultant from rural Michigan. He has a part two coming out so will wait for that and probably do a guest post.

It was a compelling read at first blush, but then it slowly triggered my rage response as I though about it.
Two fronts triggered me:

1) Continued the coddling of those precious snowflakes, rural Trump voters. The most emotionally-pampered group in American history.
2) Accepted as fact so much of the RW media description of Harris--"word salad", "inauthentic" etc.

I do see he has some more tactical criticisms of the Harris campaign re: not funding or engaging with rural Dems on ground game etc. (Can't speak to those, had a hint of a flavor pf they did not buy from me.)

And of course every losing campaign is a world historic catastrophe, and every winning in is amaster class in persuasion.

4 Face it, we suck

I just heard a ufc fighter break down in tears talking about how a squirrel isn't just a squirrel so man I dunno

This sort of analysis can be a distraction. The relevant question is not exactly "How did Trump win," but "How did Trump get more than 35% of the vote?"

If this country is to be cured of Trumpism, it will be because Trumpism is discredited, not because the Dems will shave a few points off of the Republican vote among Latinos.*

*This comment comes dangerously close to belonging in the most reprehensible class of blog comments: The "Why are you talking about this? This isn't interesting" comment. Y'all can talk about whatever you want!

I think the bottom line is that America has a lot of shitty people in it.

1: Yes, Begich has declared victory but Peltola still has a slight chance. There are still a few overseas mail-ins to count. The final counts and RCV tabulations will be tomorrow. RCV will apply to several state legislative races as well as the US House one.

RCV repeal actually fell behind in the most recent count! It looks like it is probably going to fail but very narrowly.

10: As always, the problem with America is Americans.

The relevant question is not exactly "How did Trump win," but "How did Trump get more than 35% of the vote?"

This is only part of the answer; but I've come around to thinking that Trump is legitimately effective and charismatic as a politician. You can't explain Trump's success without reference to reactionary impulses in America, but I also don't think you can explain it without saying that he is personally doing something to build, and assemble a coalition, not just an empty vessel being carried on the shoulders of a mass movement.

My step mother in law just called me, ostensibly to wish me a happy birthday ( because she lost her calendars so only had a rough idea ) but in fact to say that she less hopeless about the election because she read RFK's bookn and actually he says a lot of things she agreed with ( she's obsessed with how bad cell phones and wfi and 5g is ) and *did I know* ivermectin was actually very helpful for COVID?

I literally had to burst into tears and list every overseas friend and relative to know who died from COVID ( which made the tears come harder for real) to get her to stop.

My step mother in law just called me, ostensibly to wish me a happy birthday ( because she lost her calendars so only had a rough idea ) but in fact to say that she less hopeless about the election because she read RFK's bookn and actually he says a lot of things she agreed with ( she's obsessed with how bad cell phones and wfi and 5g is ) and *did I know* ivermectin was actually very helpful for COVID?

I literally had to burst into tears and list every overseas friend and relative to know who died from COVID ( which made the tears come harder for real) to get her to stop.

My step mother in law just called me, ostensibly to wish me a happy birthday ( because she lost her calendars so only had a rough idea ) but in fact to say that she less hopeless about the election because she read RFK's bookn and actually he says a lot of things she agreed with ( she's obsessed with how bad cell phones and wfi and 5g is ) and *did I know* ivermectin was actually very helpful for COVID?

I literally had to burst into tears and list every overseas friend and relative to know who died from COVID ( which made the tears come harder for real) to get her to stop.

Oh no, that's an awful conversation.

Repeating my own comment from elsewhere on how the election changed my priors: I thought the average American had some baseline ability to recognize, and readiness to disdain, the characteristic self-serving patter of a used-car salesman.

13: I agree with the first part, but not the second. That is to say, I finally think that I understand Trump's charisma, but he's not consciously building a coalition.

He is who he is, and the coalition found him -- and it has grown with Trump's continued success.* I'd go so far as to say that it's not a "coalition" in the normal sense of that term, but more of a cult.** Trump appeared on the scene ready to give that cult what it had been pining for.***

* "Success" in this context doesn't mean "useful policies." It means victory over cultural forces that people resent.
** Let's reflect for a moment that in 2004, GW Bush was a demonstrable moron who lied the country into a costly war of aggression and was nonetheless re-elected.
*** And what does the cult want? GW was prepared to torture people, which earned him cult cred. But he also felt the need to be politically correct and call it "enhanced interrogation." Trump usually doesn't engage in that sort of euphemism -- and when he does, it's with a wink, so that we all know what he's really saying.

The most likely path to greater respect for medical knowledge (and used car sales resistance) is a bunch of people dying.

My cousin managed to put up Facebook updates on her husband's bypass surgery without anyone suggesting covid vaccines were involved. Or she's deleting them.

13: well, either that, or the opponents Trump defeated have been unusually bad (and Biden is an even better politician than Trump), or the third option which is that he won on 2016 and 2024 because of external circumstances.

20: But we've already seen that. Turns out that dead people no longer vote and therefore don't matter, and the non-dead ones constitute living proof that all those doctors and epidemiologists are just bullshitters.

My enough died.

Not enough.

I think the extent of dislike for the Democratic party and its candidates is really easy to underestimate. There is active dislike even among not-very-political people, and -- the thing I always find baffling -- they think their dislike is important. I almost never find politicians likable, but who cares? I don't like anyone!* Among the masses of Americans who actually do like other people... it's different.

* This is a self-serving lie. I've been upset for days about a minor celebrity scandal revealing things about people's character.

I thought the average American had some baseline ability to recognize, and readiness to disdain, the characteristic self-serving patter of a used-car salesman.

I mean, Americans do buy a lot of used cars.

My father-in-law, who is in the area and demographic categories where you would expect a vote for Trump, won't vote for Trump or let anyone he's close to buy a used car.

I mean, Americans do buy a lot of used cars.

Yes, but we see it as a distributive negotiation and don't (I thought) think they're on our side.

Okay wait wait wait. Do none of you buy used cars?

(Is the "they're" in 29 the salespeople, or the buyers? Or both?)

4: Gen X is afflicted by the "first love" problem. Anyone born between 1959 and 1971 first voted for President in the 1980 to 1988 Republican landslide era, when the aggregate electoral vote score over three elections was 1,440 - 173. Most people stick with the party they voted for the first time.

First I find out that the majority of white people have voted for the Republican in every presidential election for 50 years, and now it turns out that GenX are the worst white people? White, male, gen X, American. I am the quadfecta of bad demographic.

Thank you 17. I already had my therapy appointment yesterday and I have run out of other people to vent to.

30: I buy used cars! Currently driving a 2010 Toyota Yaris that I bought in....well, 2018-19. The salesman kind of charmed my wife and me by being grumpy and unenthusiastic.

I am on my fourth car in my life, the current one being the only one purchased new.

Okay cool. Just checking.

20 is unfortunately close to the chud endorsed hard times/strong men/good times/weak men meme.

4 and 35: My theory has to do with the costs of education and housing and the experience (or lack thereof) of government support. As someone born in the mid-70's who went to independent schools, I'm acutely aware of the Baumol effect. Tuition has gone from 9k (13k boarding) in 1989 to $63k ($75 k with boarding).

1. Boomers had much more affordable housing costs and subsidized tuition. The Greatest Generation, their parents, benefited from not needing a university degree and/or the GI bill. Life was pretty secure. You could go to college, graduate and get a job without a lot of debt. People feel good about government intervention.

2. Millennials are screwed by housing and education costs, and they know they need more help from the government.

3. Gen X was fed a free-market diet in economics. College tuitions were going up. This is partly because of the Baumol effect and partly because there was a lot less government support. Tuitions were about 75-100% of the salary at a first job, not 2x. Taking on debt to go to school was encouraged. Life was less secure, but if you took on the debt and pursued certain kinds of conservative-leaning careers, you could amass enough private wealth to pay back the loans and take care of your family. The individualization of risk worked ok for more people than it does now.

You convince yourself that you did it on your own. Gen X got less help and don't expect the Government to help them when they're older. That makes tax cuts appealing.

My parents paid for my college and I will cut you if you try to take my Social Security or Medicare.

I am on my fourth car in my life, the current one being the only one purchased new.

OMG TWINSIES. Same.

I like used cars! we just couldn't find a used hybrid minivan when ours died at peak-automobile-shortages post Covid.

Updated Alaska results have been posted. No on RCV repeal is still leading but the margin has narrowed to 45 votes(!). Begich v. Peltola still going to go to RCV tabulation tomorrow. Still a few more votes to count in addition to the RCV tabulations.

My wife has had four new cars, only one of which I crashed.

I'm kind of haunted by pre-election polling showing that people esp in swing states expected violence if Harris won. I wonder how many, if any, voters went for Trump to avoid this?

There were also people predicting violence from Democrats if Trump won. All such people are (a) Trumpers and (b) morons. I don't think fear of violent Democrats cost Harris any votes.

44 Me.

Remaining votes outstanding appear to be primarily from Anchorage and rural Alaska, so repeal probably will still end up failing narrowly.

people esp in swing states expected violence if Harris won. I wonder how many, if any, voters went for Trump to avoid this?

I have thought about this a lot. I don't know enough about the psychology of domestic abuse to draw a meaningful parallel, but I personally was extremely worried about violence if Harris won, and it would not surprise me *at all* if some people I know were worried about "making him [and his supporters] angry" and voted accordingly.

47 Everything about this whole thing is just so fucked up.

44, 47: Me too. Am sure it's not zero, but no idea if it would be a material percentage.. But thinking about the consequences of a Harris win 9especially a close one) was definitely near the top of many people's minds. (I heard it from a number of even less politically engaged acquaintances .)

49: if it was a significant concern you'd expect it to be strongest in swing states or red states and some of the largest swings were in highly blue states -- that's just circumstantial, but it suggests that wasn't a strong driver of vote change (it might have affected turnout however).

FWIW (almost nothing), I'm coming around to the idea that the two biggest reasons voters are unhappy with Democrats are inflation and a sense that Democrats are indifferent to public disorder

47: but you live in Philadelphia, right? You must fear violence all the time, and rightly so. The city is absolutely lousy with Eagles fans.

52: Ha, I was just downtown with an (Asian) friend the other night and we were remarking on the ridiculous overpresence of the police for a crowd of extremely well-dressed Black Philadelphians seeing the Ali Siddiq show at the Miller Theatre on Broad Street, compared to the general absence of such at gatherings of white Philadelphia sports fans....

Agree with 51. The main things that happened in this election was too many Clinton/Biden/didn't vote people, especially in Blue states (8% of Illinois!), and a large Republican swing among Latino men. Both of these had relatively small impacts in the key midwestern swing states, but the key swing states only moved a couple of percentiles, because the Democratic party is *slightly* less popular than it was 4 years ago mostly because of inflation and bad vibes.

I would add that I think the later stages of covid (especially during the Delta wave) was also a substantial driver of the "bad vibes," as was the media's obsession with punishing Biden for ending the war in Afghanistan. The latter was good and necessary, but for the former the message should have stayed with "get vaccinated and don't take other precautions," not because Delta wasn't serious but because everyone the whole point of precautions was to make it so that when you get it you're vaccinated.

I blame the Dems for the messaging around inflation, because the past three years have been, "The dumb people don't realize inflation is OVER! Wages have kept up!" instead of "Let's find an econ measure that reflects the extent to which the people are struggling to make ends meet."

I blame the Republicans for everything else, including a wildly successful ability to paint Kamala as running some woke detached campaign, plus all the bro shit and racism.

The end of the Afghan war wasn't just good and necessary, but was set up by Trump.

That said, just like my other principle professional relationship with the federal government, in executing that one they fucked my guy for no good reason. And called on it, they just have no coherent justification.

Anyway, inflation and normalization. We're going to have 100 days of people saying they didn't want THAT, but chill out, it's going to be OK. People don't believe how fucked up it's going to get.

principal!

(Yes, my client, despite being cleared to be released during the Trump administration, remains a guest of JTF GTMO.)

Belatedly expanding on 22, I think you could absolutely make an argument that Trump has just been lucky twice and this outweighs his weaknesses as a candidate:

in 2016 economy-based predictive models said that Trump should have won the popular vote by 3%. He lost it by 3%. It's very rare for a party to win three elections in a row and in a lacklustre economy (like that of early 2016) even less likely.
In 2024 inflation scuppered pretty much every incumbent in the world - the only year since records began in which no incumbent anywhere increased their vote share in an election. But the incumbent party in the US lost less vote share than any other incumbent.
https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1854485866548195735

Further down the thread there's an interesting chart of [inflation plus immigration] per year. Pretty much every rich country saw massive spikes in both in 2022 or thereabouts.

Trump certainly got somewhat lucky, but the fact that he ran ahead of the R senate candidate in open seat elections in MI and AZ, and against incumbents in PA, WI, and NV the gap was mostly Trump/no vote and not Trump/incumbent D splitters suggests to me that he really is 1%-2% better than a generic Republican because of his celebrity appeal to non-voters.

Basically generic Democrats are a little more popular than Trump who is a little more popular than a generic Republican, but all that is within about 5% and so things like inflation are enough to swing the election to Trump by a small margin, and maybe enough for a generic Republican (who Senate suggests would have pulled off PA and hence the election by a hair, but not swung MI/WI/NV, though AZ might have been in play depending on whether the Latino swing was Trump-specific).

Hmm, good point. I mean, the first thing could just as easily be Harris running behind local Democrats for reasons explored here https://www.semafor.com/article/05/23/2024/donald-trump-is-outrunning-other-republicans-what-does-it-mean-for-november

but the point about the Trump/no vote voters is a good one.

The polling suggested a much bigger Senate/President gap than the voting ended up being (especially if you exclude AZ where I do think Gallego is a great candidate and Lake a bad one). I think the pre-election takes on this gap, like the one you linked turned out to be largely wrong. In Midwestern swing states it was pretty striking how close Harris ran to the senators, and the gap was entirely Trump running ahead of the Republican candidate.

I'm a little surprised by how little anyone talks about the single most salient thing about the 2024 presidential campaign, which is the late-breaking candidate switch. I guess the conventional wisdom is that it was a wash, but realistically... that's not a remotely optimal campaign.

65: I've seen discussion of it -- I think the sense is that Harris did better than Biden but was at a disadvantage relative to a candidate who had a full campaign.

A long time ago (2012?) I saw a pretty granular breakdown showing that older boomers and millennials (youngest voters at the time) were fairly progressive while younger boomers and Gen Xers were more conservative, especially WRT economics and gender roles. I haven't been able to find it again but it seems like more recent data support this. Millennials came of age during the great recession and it has similar but milder knock on effects as coming of age during the great depression. It does appear that political/economic orientation is a cohort, not a generational, effect.

Dems for the messaging around inflation, because the past three years have been, "The dumb people don't realize inflation is OVER! Wages have kept up!" instead of "Let's find an econ measure that reflects the extent to which the people are struggling to make ends meet."

The Dem messaging on inflation should have been demonizing price gougers from Day 1. Scapegoating someone is way simpler than some other econ measure and even partially true.

The Dem messaging (and even more importantly, policy) on inflation was fine, we outperformed every other incumbent party in the world.

In Montana, 232k people voted for Harris and 276k voted for Tester. Trump got 352k and Sheehy got 319k. Even before Biden was out, the Tester campaign had a pretty good idea how many Trumpers it needed: their number was accurate, but they fell short. You'd be very hard pressed to find anyone associated with the Tester campaign who ever said the words "Biden" or "Harris" out loud in public. Except to point out instances where Tester had pushed Biden on, eg, immigration.* I'm sure Tester lost no votes at all over this stance wrt Harris.

The question is whether there is anything Tester could have said or done that would have closed the gap. I think the answer to that is a plain no. The strongest pitch against him was in a closely divided Senate, he's the deciding vote for the Biden agenda, the Biden appointments, the Biden judges. And against Mitch McConnell for majority leader. Sheehy is a big phony, and everybody knows it, but he'll be a reliable vote for everything Trump wants. He will not be reliable in raining money on Montana, so his presence in the body will whack the people who voted for him both by means of the hostile Trump agenda and the sudden lack of federal money for all sorts of things that disproportionately favor Trumpers.

Could Harris have done better here? I think so, and that with an active campaign she might have been able to shrink that 120k margin by 30-50%. Losing by 15 percentage points is still a loss, obviously, so her campaign wasn't wrong to go bare minimum here. The same can probably be said of New York and Oregon: a more active campaign might have run up the numbers, without changing the results. On the other hand, Trump's operation here was also pretty minimal, so I'm really not sure what getting rid of the Electoral College really does. The one this we know is that everything would be different. We wouldn't just switch looking from one existing scorecard to another.

* Tester has been an immigration hawk his entire time in office.

It wasn't fine, because it didn't address how angry people are about higher prices.

69: The policy might have been good, but the messaging kept blaming stupid yokels for not realizing inflation was over, we won, why aren't you happy.

Here I am genuinely being confused. But I don't understand why inflation made people so unhappy when real wages (corrected for inflation) were up. Like, what Heebie said in 55 -- was there actually an objective measure by which people were struggling to make ends meet more than usual?

I accept that it clearly did make people that unhappy, but how come?

73: The plausible arguments I picked up out of floating around include (a) people were pissed at price levels, not the rate of change in prices, (b) mortgage rates remaining high aggravated this sense for the more landed bourgeoisie who wanted the ability to trade up in homes, or cash out, etc., and (c) gas and food were the more salient parts of inflation to people on a daily basis out of keeping with their share of household expenses, and those price increases were even higher than the overall rate.

I think 55 is wrong in that people were not, in fact, struggling to make ends meet, by all available measures. And income and wealth disparities were actually narrowing, for the first time in ages! People can assess the economy wrong. That doesn't help one with messaging of course.

Also: "When I get a raise or a better job, that's my success, the government has nothing to do with it. When prices go up, that's the government's fault."

What I've been wondering is if the wage increases were not uniform, and who got left out. My salary certainly hasn't kept up with inflation.

68 and 75 are both 100% right.

Same reason that people are obsessed with finding the cheapest gas: because the prices are so know-able. There's a concrete before and after, for something they experience frequently in their daily lives.

I'm sure the wage increases were not uniform across industries. But across economic strata, they were bottom-up!

2019-2023 increase in income before taxes, bottom 20% of households: +39%
Second 20%: +25%
Middle 20%: +25%
Fourth 20%: +24%
Top 20%: +18%

Same trends in net worth, by the way. Big Fiscal worked as intended.

If it hadn't been "inflation" it would have been something else. Democrats want to find reasons rooted in mistakes or bad luck, and aren't prepared to look squarely at Trump's profound appeal to Americans.

Megan @68 proposes demagoguery as the right approach for Democrats, and I think that view has a lot of merit -- but it's also an approach that has never worked for Democrats in the past. The Dems have always relied on reality-based appeals -- both in success and failure. Where are the modern Huey Longs?

Why they weren't talking about Trump flu and trumpflation or whatever every goddamn day for the last five years I'll never understand.

76: I think middle managers and their equivalents in terms of pay are doing the same or slightly worse than they were in 2019.

The thing I like about price-gouging in particular is that it punches upward, is readily understood, and is even somewhat true. Reality-based!

Yes to Trumpflation as well.

Trump steals your money & your food
RFKJ steals your kid's medicine

I'm surprised people are surprised about inflation. With direct deposit an increase in paycheck is intangible while higher prices are concrete. Food prices have increased quite a lot and eating out has gone up astronomically. Much of this is probably needed market correction (food industry was unsustainable in 2019) but people don't think about it that way. Some of it is also a backlash against an increased expectation to tip more widely and in a higher amount than in 2019.

On top of this housing, education, and healthcare have been increasing at much higher rates than inflation for a long time. This is the fault of a bunch of things, mostly late capitalism and the financialization of all industries but most people aren't good critical thinkers.

The problem with democrats is that they're a center-left to centrist party and that all they are capable of doing is making things incrementally better but not instantly amazing. Obamacare was both an incredible feat but also kind of mediocre, objectively speaking. Democrats might be able to improve on things to the point they're reasonably good if they had a sustained run in power but the American people are morons. Anyways, Americans are mad and Trump is going to burn it all down.

83: I'm trying to find the graph.

If you got rid of the Electoral College, people in MA wouldn't feel that their votes were wasted.

People in MA and CA wouldn't know that their votes are actually wasted.

In addition to 75, which I think is a big part of it, there was a really interesting article about how much painful work it is for people to get those raises. You have to change jobs or go on strike, if you just don't do anything then you get a substantial real pay cut, your current employer isn't just going to give you a pay raise because there's inflation! I'm just going to make $10k of real money less every year for the rest of my life because of those two years of inflation. I don't blame Biden because I pay attention to the rest of the world so know this wasn't his fault, but it's definitely painful!

I'd have assumed LB would be in the same boat in terms of getting a real pay cut, you're not in a union are you?

No, but we get COLAs and merit raises. It's not a high-paying job by NY lawyer standards, but we're well treated.

You may be unusually vulnerable in that regard, because moving to a different academic job is harder than in lots of other professions, so once they've got you they can assume that it'll take a lot to make you unhappy enough to quit.

Merit raises is even an overstatement -- they're more like seniority raises. The only way you wouldn't get your merit raise when the office announced a round of them is if you were on seriously, but seriously, thin ice performance-wise.

I haven't had trouble getting salary increases within the same job, this decade or last. But I live something of a charmed life.

More reaction to 90: The thing is, that if on average real wages are broadly up, by definition most people aren't in your position. It makes sense that the people who are would be unhappy, but I can't see any way that there wouldn't be fewer people than usual in that position.

Is the COLA based on a formula? I think that'd be pretty unusual outside of union jobs.

Average real wages are up because people are changing jobs, moving, and going on strike, and all of those things are stressful and unpleasant.

No, it's ad hoc but happens most years.

Are there stats showing those stressful events are happening more than usual? More job changes, more moving, more strikes? It's possible, but I haven't seen that.

The WaPo (my cancellation hasn't taken effect yet) has a good discussion of the actual key factors behind Trump's win.

To steer voters away from Trump's "blow it all up" approach will require figuring out how to invite them into a country that feels alien to so many -- a society that is continually changing to embrace new peoples, cultures and technologies, products, environmental constraints, languages, religions, forms of expression, gender identities, sexual affinities, and so on. Voters' disgust might appear as though it is aimed at venal leaders out of touch with the salt of the earth. But it amounts to a rejection of what America is becoming.

Inflation was just as clearly a product of the pandemic as the preceding recession was -- and in any event, Reagan proclaimed "Morning in America" and won in a landslide when inflation was worse.

Middle-managers in government bureaucracies tend to get pay increases on a schedule that parallels the ones in union contracts even if they aren't unionized themselves (some are). It's just how the whole system is set up.

99: That's part of what I've enjoyed, but more besides.

The union/non-union difference in this context is generally more about job protections than pay or benefits.

Here's the article:

https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2024-09/draft_conflicts.pdf

102: I'm curious to read that, and it goes along with DSquared's comments: https://backofmind.substack.com/p/but-why-do-they-hate-inflation

And what's inflation, but a kind of dynamic pricing? When the price index rises, it's summarising a lot of different commodity price movements, some of which can be large in relative terms. This is particularly true of food and fuel, which are excluded from the "core" measure not because they're unimportant (they're not!) but because they're particularly volatile. In undergraduate economics you're taught that this is almost a good thing - the price level shift has an "income effect" (the same nominal income buys a smaller basket of goods), partly offset by a "substitution effect" (you can claw back some of that loss by rebalancing your own consumption bundle to consume more of the goods whose relative price has fallen). So an identical percentage move in CPI and nominal wages ought to leave you better off - as I say, it's an easy undergraduate exercise to prove it with curves and lines on a graph.

But of course, the "substitution effect" kind of sucks. It's a cognitive load, placed on people who, in my view, really aren't in any shape to be bearing more cognitive load. You have to find out what things have changed in relative price, potentially go through an extended trial-and-error period of changing your weekly shop, and so on[3]. If the only way to get your nominal wage increase is to either change jobs or have an awkward conversation with your boss about the cost of living, then that also really sucks.

87 is exactly right.

, there was a really interesting article about how much painful work it is for people to get those raises. You have to change jobs or go on strike, if you just don't do anything then you get a substantial real pay cut, your current employer isn't just going to give you a pay raise because there's inflation!

Is this true? That most of the wage gains came from employees taking active steps? This really goes hand-in-hand with this:

"When I get a raise or a better job, that's my success, the government has nothing to do with it. When prices go up, that's the government's fault."

and it also implies that all the more passive employees (or busier, or less bandwidth, or fewer opportunities) are the ones who got left behind and got mad.

The problem with democrats is that they're a center-left to centrist party and that all they are capable of doing is making things incrementally better but not instantly amazing. Obamacare was both an incredible feat but also kind of mediocre, objectively speaking. Democrats might be able to improve on things to the point they're reasonably good if they had a sustained run in power but the American people are morons. Anyways, Americans are mad and Trump is going to burn it all down.

This connects to something that I've been thinking about. I've seen comments from various different perspectives along the lines of, "it can't be a surprise that so many people are pissed off, given the number of significant problems that demand attention which are being ignored or for which the response is ineffectual."

That's all true. But what struck me is that the idea, "politicians should propose solutions that match the scale of the problems; people are hungry for real change" has the major flaw that even people who agree on problems will likely not agree on what large-scale response would be warranted.

Trump manages to appeal to people who want someone to kick over the apple cart, without actually proposing big transformative policies (and when he does -- like mass deportation -- nobody is quite sure what he means or whether it will actually happen).

I think that feeling committed to offering specific policy proposals will always push in the direction of, "making things incrementally better but not instantly amazing" -- and I think that's an argument in favor of incrementalism. I want to have specific policy proposals that can be debated.

Trump manages to appeal to people who want someone to kick over the apple cart, without actually proposing big transformative policies (and when he does -- like mass deportation -- nobody is quite sure what he means or whether it will actually happen).

This strikes me as a fundamental mischaracterization. Trump threatened violence if he lost the 2020 election and delivered -- ending a centuries-old tradition of a peaceful transfer of power. He referred to insurrectionists as "hostages" and promised pardons for them. This is a transformative policy change.

I do think it's fair to say that a frequent defense of Trump is that, well, actually he's lying. (He doesn't really mean to stand by if Putin invades Europe. He won't really try to deport millions of people. He won't really seek to overturn Roe. He won't really impose massive tariffs. He won't really use the Justice Department to go after his enemies. He didn't really grab 'em by the pussy.)

But if you want to understand Trump, follow the hate. People who aren't Trump still have some residual shame about hate, so they need to call it something else. It's "inflation" or "immigration" or whatever. Trump -- the guy who thought it might be a good idea to drink bleach -- is lauded by his supporters for his competence. But good governance is not the thing his supporters are looking for.

I think one overarching lesson from this election is just that policy and politics are totally different things, and doing well at one doesn't necessarily have any effect whatsoever on doing well at the other.

To actually get anything done you need to do well at both, but you have to think of them as separate challenges.

Inflation is unevenly distributed-- increasing one's family housing capacity (whether rental or a new mortgage) cost a lot more in 2023 than 2018, especially in blue cities where there is good work. Echoing 87, healthcare as well, though the way money flows through that system is so byzantine that who knows what the median proximal cause of rage is or how its changing. Maybe there's a lot of {election-significant} anger about restaurant or grocery prices also, or those cause positive feedback for the others also.

To actually get anything done you need to do well at both, but you have to think of them as separate challenges.

I agree with that.

Trump threatened violence if he lost the 2020 election and delivered -- ending a centuries-old tradition of a peaceful transfer of power. He referred to insurrectionists as "hostages" and promised pardons for them. This is a transformative policy change.

...

But good governance is not the thing his supporters are looking for.

I think you're misunderstanding my implied connection between politics and policy. My position would be:

1) There are some people who actively want Trump as an avatar of hate/rage. Personally I think that group is disturbingly large, but not large enough to win elections without help (and, probably not the cause of the shift from 2020 --> 2024).
2) There are some people who vote for trump because of his celebrity or persona who don't have a strong policy preference associate with it.
3) There are some people who voted for Trump because they have a general sense of unhappiness which is not mollified by Democrats saying, "we know there's a problem; here are our policies to respond to the problem; they aren't going to be an immediate solution."

Many people in the last group don't have a specific solution that they're looking for; and I think Trump's clear vagueness about policy allows them to project a sense of, "whatever he'll do it will be better than the Democrats" which is politically advantageous, but not something I want to see the Democrats emulate in general (I do also think there's a place for policy vaguenss and that there's a probem with Center-left commentators responding to every statement by Democrats with, "but can this be defined as a specific policy proposal).

Restaurant meals and takeout has gotten up in price in many places. But they had gotten to be ridiculously cheap, probably too cheap.

It costs $100 for our family to eat at the taco trucks in a cheap town. It really does jab you how much prices have gone up.

113: I got an excellent bagel sandwich today. With coffee it was more. $7.50 was reasonable. Adding bacon (very good quality) was $2.75 more. $3.75 for coffee. Independents with superior food seem to be cheaper, but I'm wrong. At a place like Tatte I get a Latte because the drip coffee is bad.

Your family is really big though. And that's not crazy if you go every month or two and see it as a treat. If you see it as a 2x week thing that you do because you're too tired to cook, it's way too much. I wish it were only $80, but if it used to be $30, the workers weren't getting paid enough.

Also, if you want a pay raise you have to change jobs, which probably means moving, but then the increase in mortgage interest more than wipes out your whole raise.

Have you tried selling coffee for $3.75?

Also, if you want a pay raise you have to change jobs, which probably means moving, but then the increase in mortgage interest more than wipes out your whole raise.

It's easy to spin out these scenarios, and they can be correct, but the fact that every income category's net worth went up significantly from 2019 to 2022 (and this will probably repeat when the next survey is done next year) suggests that on average, people have been making more money net of expenses.

I thought net worth went up mostly *during* the pandemic, when there were government checks and also lots of people were spending way less money. Has net wealth really gone up after 2022?

I have this link saved from a year ago, I haven't looked at more recent data: https://www.apricitas.io/p/americas-record-wealth-boom

"Pandemic-era Excess Savings"

Like I thought one of the big drivers of inflation was people having extra cash on hand from the pandemic that they proceeded to spend in the post-pandemic causing inflation.

I thought the driver was hinked up supply chains and price gouging opportunists.

Hinked up supply chains just as consumer demand went from services to goods.

We now have final results for Alaska and it's about as expected. RCV narrowly survives, Peltola narrowly doesn't. Dem-led coalitions have majorities in state House and Senate.

$100 for our family to eat at the taco trucks

Yeah, but you have like thirty goddamn kids.

Are there stats showing those stressful events are happening more than usual? More job changes, more moving, more strikes?

There are - BLS publishes monthly labour ("labor") turnover figures with a really quite user-friendly interface (or as we say "interfauce") https://www.bls.gov/jlt/

Neither total monthly job separations nor total monthly hires have changed much since 2009.

Another point from 119 - people like to be sniffy about the stock market going up but 58 per cent of Americans own stock (thinking about it I wouldn't be surprised if Pepsi Airport had an on-site brokerage.)

Anyway, the BLS has a wages series specifically for "production and nonsupervisory" employees and look at it take off after 2020: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AHETPI

125: At least you don't say "interfarce."

Interfacie. Like "aluminium".

Both aluminum and aluminium are wrong anyway. By analogy with antimony, it should be called alimony, but divorce was frowned on in 19th century Britain.

(While researching this comment I discovered that a credible explanation for the origin of the word "antimony" is from Greek, "antimonachos", or "Monk Killer".

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Can we expect to see the FDP below 5%, and if so should we read any encouraging things into it?
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divorce was frowned on in 19th century Britain

You're having me on. Rutherford didn't even discover the nucleus until after 1900, and it took a few more decades to manage a divorce. Even though no lawyers were involved.

The obvious description for a process that divides a nuclear family is nuclear fission.

129: Very possible that the FDP will fall out of parliament again. How encouraging that would be depends on where their voters go, I suppose, although another seat or two for the AfD is neither here nor there.

It would be best if neither Left nor BSW made it into the Bundestag, but it looks like at least one will, and maybe both if the Left comes up with a few direct constituency wins in the former East Berlin.

According to polls here

https://dawum.de/Bundestag/#Koalitionen

a grand coalition and a Christian Democrat-Green coalition are both possible, though the one with the Greens would have a very thin majority. My personal betting right now is on "Kenya," CDU/CSU-SPD-Green. They would have a stable majority and a good balance of interests, plus it would not be Yet Another Grand Coalition.

131 is Spaltung erasure!

It would be absolutely hilarious if the FDP ended up sitting in the cake, seeing as their bad faith has been so, so very deep since the very beginning and they've very clearly been playing for a dramatic coalition walkout and flip like in 1982.

Especially as Lindner is so horrifically personally smug.

Vindication for everyone who cancelled their Post subscription: the paper has apparently fired the senior political editor, effective end of the year, no reason given. Two Pulitzer wins and one Pulitzer finalist place, and out the door. I'm guessing that it's because that second Pulitzer is for extensive coverage of the January 6 attacks on the Capitol.

Democracy dies in vorauseilende Gehorsamkeit.

Oh no! Without his fearless, incisive political coverage, isn't there a real danger that an authoritarian candidate might win in the election this month?

137: When the Post decided not to endorse, you'd see that sort of reaction a lot -- usually in the form of "Newspaper endorsements are meaningless." The folks who hold that view need to ask themselves why Bezos disagrees with that, and what his view means for the future of democracy.

OK, maybe journalism in general doesn't matter. It's possible that the lesson of 2024 is "lol nothing matters." But the whole vorauseilende Gehorsamkeit thing* makes me nervous.

*Thanks to Google translate, I get to hang out online with the smart people.

138: first, there is a difference between incompetent and shallow political coverage and an editorial endorsement.
Second, it is possible to believe that endorsements are meaningless because they don't sway voters, and also to believe that endorsements are politically risky because they risk angering authoritarians.
Third, it is possible to believe that journalism in general does matter and still not to feel an urge to defend all journalists unquestioningly.

As David Karpf put it: https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/a-suggestion-for-the-washington-posts

The only remaining defense is "eh, our editorial statements don't really matter anyway." And there is some truth to that claim. This isn't the Comey Letter. The outcome of the Presidential Election does not hinge on courageous words, or lack thereof, from the Washington Post Editorial Board.

But you have to believe it matters in order to competently run a newsroom.

Let me draw an autobiographical parallel for a moment: I spent my student years as a political activist. I nearly dropped out of college to work full-time in activism. When I did graduate college, my advisor wanted to talk to me about grad school and I blew him off. Academia wasn't for me. I was going to go help bend the arc of history towards justice.

The TL;DR story of how I went from practicing political activism to studying political activism is that I lost that internal certainty that our work was making a difference. I became less effective as an activist because I became mired in self-doubt. And so I had to do something else. I ended up in academia, trying my best to produce research that would be matter to people who still had that passion/that fire/that internal confidence to try to force the power structure to be something better.

If the CEO and Publisher of the Washington Post does not believe that the Washington Post taking an editorial position fundamentally matters in some meaningful way, then what is he possibly doing other than collecting a paycheck? Journalism is not activism, but the work of journalism is hard and thankless in many of the same ways. You cannot lead a newsroom, particularly in these times, if you think the work doesn't make a difference.

Can you find 3 people who think that the WaPo non-endorsement wasn't a strategic decision to avoid Trump retaliation against the owner's other businesses? What does this say about the paper's willingness to publish a fully documented story about Trump selling pardons?

Thanks to Google translate ...

You are very kind, but I'm just a middle-aged ex-Germanist wishing his degree had turned out to be a useless indulgence.

I have this theory that the fundamental driver of enshittification is that it used to be that in many large companies most of the employees didn't see their daily job as directly related to money, but instead making a good product. Yes there's large marketing and sales divisions that are all about money, but a lot of people were focused directly on the product with less interference. But with better and better data, and more and more people buying into the idea that the company's bottom line is the goal, you get larger and larger fractions of organizations focused on the bottom line and this directly leads to enshittification. I think what's happening with the Post can to some extent be seen in that same light, the idea that the editorial staff is independent from the bottom line is dead.

143: I feel that so much right now. The department I worked in at the world's greatest hospital (TM) was driven by performance and money, but the doctors saw themselves as improving efficiencies to save society money, pay themselves more and improve patient care.

I got re-organized into the corporate parent, and a top leader is not a clinician but an MBA and there was one sentence about patients and everything else was business.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/23/philippine-president-ferdinand-marcos-jrs-deputy-vows-to-have-him-assassinated-if-she-is-killed

It's an option. I'm not saying Vance should take it, or that Mike Pence should have, but it's an option.

143: This is what's killing the academy. Two provosts ago, the provost was an economics professor who had been hired as a young man just out of grad school, who'd spent years working his way up through tenure and chairing and as provost he had a deep understanding of the institution and deep commitment to making it better as an educational insitution. Efficiency meant: how do we ensure we have the best possible product -- which are the students, by the way -- given the resources we have. How do we get the faculty on board? How do we sell hard things to the trustees? He thought as provost he was the head of the faculty. Our current dude is a b-school guy who doesn't understand why anyone would go to school for a non-engineering or business degree, or that anyone could find those things valuable. He doesn't know the institutional culture, the students, the community, and he can't navigate the trustees, and so whether education is good is now measured by completion rates, jobs-held-immediately-after-graduation, and projected-salary. If I train someone well enough to get them into a top14 law school, we've failed according to that metric.

If you take as an assumption that the only purpose of higher education is to match students in majors with jobs that have that major title in the tri-county area, then lots of things turn out to be useless majors, including most of the hard sciences. If the point of the liberals arts is "soft skills for the workplace", then there's no reason to value English rather than philosophy or public speaking. It's understandable that the university president thinks those things, but traditionally the provost is supposed to be able to tell him why he's wrong.