Trumpery

 

Michael Cohen on television is so great at punching through the punditical assumptions of people scratching their heads to understand what Trump's lawyers are doing in the New York civil case against him and his organization, behaving like idiots and antagonizing the judge, trying to figure out what is Trump's legal strategy or Trump's political strategy: no, Cohen explains, they're doing what Trump wants them to do, and it's more political than legal, but it's not very strategic at all! Or, it's just bad! He's "fighting", is what he's doing, and convinced this will get him reelected and enable him to take care of his legal troubles, and he's wrong about that, as he has been ever since he started insulting judges with Gonzalo Curiel on the Trump University case in spring 2016 and eventually had to pony up $25 million, where this case is going to cost him up toward ten times that and put an end to the Queens-boy-makes-good-in-Manhattan part of his career, but that's probably OK because he's been in trouble before and he always gets out of it, more or less. There's always been money somewhere!

That's Trump the individual, a narcissistic and intellectually challenged fool whose success in life began with the half a billion dollars his father was able to invest in him and continued through daddy after daddy down to the Republican party and the grassroots movement of his own donors. Or maybe the kindhearted taxpayers of Florida

We need a fund to support this in our state. We can use our record budget surpluses to do it. That way ANY Floridians who run for President can have a way to defend themselves from politically motivated lawsuits that just magically appear during an election cycle. (2/3)

— Jimmy Patronis (@JimmyPatronis) November 4, 2023

as suggested a couple of days ago by the Chief Financial Officer of Florida (Florida has a CFO, is that socialism?).

For the Record: Election Handicapping

 

Photo via.

Following up on the previous, some thoughts I had with regard to a longstanding with Thornton/Henry, who's right on this problem with election forecasting (not polling, forecasting, claiming to know with a certain probability who's going to win):

It's interesting to me how we sneak up on this as we go from coin tosses to poker to baseball to elections. It's really the jump from poker to baseball where the fundamental error happens.

— Henry Porter (@HenryPorters) November 22, 2022

A Game of Thrones

 

Via ESPN, October 2011. 

People saying The Former Guy incriminated himself last week with his remarkable statement wishing Pence had "overturned the Election" 

"If the Vice President (Mike Pence) had 'absolutely no right' to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election? Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!"

are misreading the way he and his ghostwriter are thinking: the "overturning" he's talking about would not be a crime at all, but simple justice, to his mind, because he's better attuned to sports than democracy. 

Whoa, If True

Speaking of Republican plots to ensure the party a permanent majority through gerrymandering of state legislatures and House districts, they've seemed pretty scary to most of us—they haven't pretended not to be doing it, and we've seen plenty of evidence of success in the disproportions, at all levels, between how many Republicans vote in a given contest and how many seat they win—sometimes grossly unfair, as in 2012, when Republicans won a comfortable 33-seat majority in the House with just 46% of the vote, or these crucial and grotesque results for local legislatures in the 2018 election

As Eric Levitz put it in New York's Intelligencer rubric on Christmas Day,

The Democratic House majority was supposed to die in redistricting. For months now, pundits and political forecasters have predicted that Republicans could win back the House next year without flipping a single voter. After all, the GOP controls far more state governments than the Democrats, and this is a post-Census year, when states redraw their congressional maps. Republicans boast sole authority over the boundaries of 193 congressional districts, while Democrats command just 94. Given the slimness of Nancy Pelosi’s majority, several analyses projected that GOP cartographers would generate enough new, safe “red” seats to retake the House through gerrymandering alone.

But now, Levitz continued, Democrats seemed to be doing "weirdly well" in the redistricting process:

How to Steal a Horse Race: Get to the Finish First

Ruidoso Downs, New Mexico.

 

How to rob a bank: go to your bank, make a withdrawal not exceeding the available funds in your personal account, walk out counting your cash. pic.twitter.com/ruDFpgge7q

— Tyler Hansen (@tjhansen) December 27, 2021

Speaking of ignorant tweets by contenders for the Most Obnoxious Republican Senator title. Paul doesn't seem to notice that the process he describes as "done in a legally valid way" is done in a legally valid way, or, in short, is legal. Like, he's waxing indignant at the way Democrats win elections by getting more votes.

In reality, the article he links to, by somebody called William Doyle at Rod Dreher's American Conservative, does have a suggestion of some nefarious and possibly illegal activities, but doesn't make it very explicit, possibly because he knows he's lying, and poor Rand evidently can't follow the argument,  so he just posts this quote from it, hoping the sound of it will be scary enough.

The story Doyle is trying to convey is not what the extracted paragraph seems to be saying, that Democrats somehow cheated by successfully getting out the vote in 2020, but rather that Mark Zuckerberg, that well known radical leftist firebrand, did it:

Do you believe in magic?

Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window.

 

You folks know that Fox calling Arizona didn't change the results of the election, right?https://t.co/1F7gYX8blJ pic.twitter.com/CKd5cG6KfG

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) November 15, 2020

You know what this is? It's the horse race metaphor, and the lack of practice in sober thinking. Of course people know perfectly well that all of the ballots have already been cast, and nothing that happens after the polls close is going to change them, but that's not what they see, as they're watching the returns on TV: they're experiencing a moment in which the situation is constantly changing, and one candidate is "pulling ahead" while the other one is "falling behind".

It's like the GIF above, where you read the turn of James Stewart's head as a response to a noise and the cut to the window scene as showing the source of the noise toward which he turned, the cause of his head turn—it's easy to understand that the two segments weren't really filmed at the same time, and what he's really turning toward is Hitchcock's instructions; but you have to think about it, and that isn't what a life of film watching accustoms you to doing—the normal thing is to ignore the editing and absorb the intended narrative.

A very stable genius like Donald Trump, who's always lived on the cusp between reality and media, who never quite thought he had even had an experience until he read about it on Page Six and literally became something like a billionaire by appearing on television pretending to be a billionaire, whose sense of self-worth is. by now completely tied to the concept of ratings, can't even be made to understand it's impossible for Fox calling Arizona to change the overall election results. But perfectly ordinary people, used to TV, may not try to understand it, absorbed as they are in the narrative of Trump getting stabbed in the back by the news network for which he has done so much, and won't listen if you try to explain it, not because they're too dumb but because they're too emotionally invested in the story.

Who says Trump has accomplished nothing in his presidency? Here's something he can honestly take pride in: He's a "golden goose" who made a lot of money for Fox News. https://t.co/9aIT88kMJW pic.twitter.com/0AiJ2gXzbF

— Rank Democracy (@Yastreblyansky) November 13, 2020

Goat Rodeo notes

Goat Rodeo Roundup, via the Isaac Brock Society.

This guy collapsed two of our scariest preoccupations on Trump—his cognitive disability and über-authoritarian inclinations—into one:

"lack of object permanence turned into fascism" is the most precise description you'll see
👇👇👇👇👇 https://t.co/MMEdil3kJn

— Yas We Can #BidenHarris2020 (@Yastreblyansky) November 4, 2020

It's really true. In Trump's mind, the thing he sees on TV, the "state of the race" expressed as a percentage, is more real than the things he can't see, the ballots, and he can't bring himself to understand that the election itself stopped last night—if that's true how come the numbers keep changing? He can't bear the fluidity, and he feels as president he ought to be able to put a stop to it.

By putting his lawyers on it, of course, as he told the world on Monday:

Horse Race Junk: Wave Multipliers

Image from Hotel News Resource. Fight me.

Trying to count the different kinds of waves. There's this geographical one signaled by southerner Ed Kilgore as "Jimmy Carter's revenge", where a multiracial progressive Democratic coalition is making really shocking inroads from Virginia and North Carolina through Florida to Georgia, and now extraordinarily looking powerful in Texas and South Carolina of all places:

Like Georgia, Texas is a state where Democrats made startling urban and suburban gains in 2018 and seem to be approaching a demographic tipping point. They flipped two House seats despite a heavily gerrymandered district map and improved their vote share almost everywhere, while Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke broke fundraising records and threw a serious scare into Ted Cruz. And that midterm election built on the gains of 2016, when Hillary Clinton reduced Barack Obama’s 15-point margin of defeat in 2012 to less than nine points.

Even in South Carolina, where the South’s conservative Republican revolution really began when the segregationist senator Strom Thurmond joined the GOP in 1964, the same coalition of Black and upscale white suburban voters is beginning to make serious inroads into Republican rule. This year, Democrat Jaime Harrison, one of the most prodigious fundraisers in U.S. political history, is running even in the polls with veteran Republican senator Lindsey Graham. No Democrat has won a Senate or gubernatorial race in the Palmetto State since 1998.

And the astonishing turn of older voters toward Biden in the wake of Trump's crazy mishandling of a murderous plague bringing Florida and Arizona within reach:

Hi It's Stupid: Horse Race

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, figurine by Donald F. Saari, 1973, via WorthPoint.

Hi, it's Stupid to say Elizabeth Warren shouldn't compete for the vice presidency with all the means at her disposal, including deploying all the power of those hot influencers Lawrence Tribe and Jane Fonda. After all, doesn't she have the right to think she's the best for the job?

With all respect and fervent admiration, she has the right to think she's the best for a lot of jobs, and she's probably right about it, too, but that doesn't mean she has to take all of them. I've said it before and I'll say it again: why shouldn't she chair the Senate Banking Committee after the coming blue wave democratizes the Senate and exercise some real power? Why should she opt instead to be "buried before I am dead", as Daniel Webster saw it when he turned down the vice presidency in 1839?

Horse race stuff

Hi Cowpokes from Mike's Roundup, thanks Monsieur Bouffant!

Via All Hat No Cattle.

Jordan writes in comments:

Yas, what do you think of Steve's new post about how the likelihood that testing won't get straightened out by November won't affect Trump's reëlection chances?

Not to impugn Steve, obviously (and we all know he's been on that side of every "Trump support will not flag" argument), but I wonder whether this is a "hot hand fallacy" (to the extent that I understand the idea: I admit I got it from The Big Short) -- whether this is finally Trump's Waterloo or whether that's as false as it's been every previous time.

As usual, I think Steve is right-but: he's always right when he says Trump support won't flag, that's not a "hot hands" fallacy but a consistent reality of the last four years and he's been on it from the start.

But they're still a minority and always will be. He's now back to a more normal 8.6 points underwater in the 538 average. Which doesn't in itself stop him from winning (on election day 2016 he was down 13 points in the Gallup poll!), but it takes more cooperation from Fate and from the Democrats than he's likely to get a second time. Saying there's any likelihood he'd be able to steal it through the Electoral College the way he did last time would be in the hot-hands universe, I think, because it took such a lot of factors to line up, and most of them won't be available to him this year. Not Wisconsin and Michigan.

Horse race stuff

First horse race in North America, New York 1655, painted sometime in the 1960s by Frederick Elmiger, via George Glazer Galleries.

As the Big Tuesday results started flowing in last night, a thing that happened earlier was starting to take on some iconic experience for me: the pearl clutching when candidate Joe Biden visiting a Detroit auto plant has a run-in with a misinformed young gun nut and tells him he's "full of shit":

It’s almost like liberals hate the working class.

— Heshmat Alavi is a Cop (@Punkrawkpersian) March 10, 2020

It's almost like Berners have never met anybody from the working class in real life, or possibly never met anybody at all. The idea of Joe Biden being some kind of lordly figure unable to repress his contempt for the simple (white) working stiff will not work.

You know to what kind of person you can always say, "You're full of shit"? Your brother.

Handicap

Via League of Legends.

The family dined in Chinatown last night, standing by our conviction that we're no more likely to catch Covid-19 (or Trump Flu, as Misfit, via Ten Bears, via Bethesda71 is calling it) there than anywhere else in town (for the moment—we are not adopting President Chucklehead's position that there's nothing wrong, or that the virus is just a CNN trick to make him look bad), and I had the opportunity to miss the entire debate—didn't even look at my phone until we were on the way home, and I'm pretty happy about that. Judging from the clips it was awful, though I'm glad in principle that Elizabeth Warren said the things she said about Michael Bloomberg, whom I continue to consider to be a danger to the country, and about Bernard Sanders, in terms I'd like to have used myself:

“Bernie and I agree on a lot of things, but I think that I would make a better president than Bernie. And the reason for that is that getting a progressive agenda enacted is going to be really hard, and it's gonna take someone who digs into the details to make it happen,” Warren said. “Bernie and I both wanted to help rein in Wall Street. In 2008 we both got our chance, but I dug in, I fought the big banks, I built the coalitions and I won. Bernie and I both want to see universal health care. But Bernie's plan doesn't show how we're gonna get there, doesn't show how we're going to get enough allies into it, and doesn't show enough about how we're going to pay for it. I dug in, I did the work, and then Bernie's team trashed me for it.”

As I mentioned in my angry note of 17 February.

I have the funniest feeling at the moment of really seriously not knowing what's going on in this election at all, and of nobody really knowing. Some of the less obnoxious class of Berners on my Twitter feed were going on about what Bernie would do if Bloomberg were to win the nomination (of which fivethirtyeight estimates the chances at about 4%), betray his following by keeping his promise to support the nominee, or split off and lead the Revolution on some kind of outside, you couldn't tell whether in an independent candidacy or a mass people power movement or what, and everything about this scenario seemed so implausible to me that I stopped reading, but I didn't have a more probable one myself.

Horse race stuff

Caucus race, by John Tenniel. No allegorical interpretations of who Alice and the Dodo respectively represent, if you don't mind. Via Wikipedia.

Molly Jong-Fast at Washington Post has what looks initially like a hot take on the miseries of the current Democratic presidential nomination contest: that it's all Biden's fault for screwing up his assigned role.

After a fourth-place finish in Iowa and a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire, it’s time to take a good, hard look at former vice president Joe Biden, the once-dominant, now-floundering Democratic “front-runner.” Not to get too technical about it, but I would like to postulate that the Democratic front-runner should be, you know, in front....

With all respect—she's a very sharp writer—I think she's misplacing the blame, if blame is due, in not asking who appointed Joe; who failed to give him that good hard look ten months or so ago, when he obtained that front-runner label though he'd been running unsuccessfully for president for OVER THIRTY YEARS and had a history of alienating the very voters he was going to have to depend on the most, from backing agitators against school busing to patronizing Barack Obama as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" (although this seemed to have greatly improved starting in late 2008).

2020 Prognostications

Photo by Matthew J. Lee/Boston Globe.

OK, so as is well known I'm no good at political handicapping, but one thing I'm sure of is that Bill Weld gets into it somehow. Either Biden gets the nomination and picks Weld as his Republican vice-presidential candidate—adding a little youth to the ticket along with the moderate views, Weld is only 74—or Warren gets the nomination and wins, and Massachusetts's famously moderate Republican governor, Charlie Baker, names Weld to replace her in the Senate.

Or Bernie gets the nomination and bloodthirsty Twitter centrist Sally Albright carries out her threat (not warning) to get a centrist third party on the presidential ballot, which she says is the way Democrats can capture the Senate if Sanders is the nominee, logic I don't entirely follow, and of course Weld is the one.

The only thing Weld will never get is the thing he's reputedly running for.

Horse race stuff

Théodore Géricicault, The Wild Horse Race at Rome, ca. 1817, via Wikiart.

I've been looking at extremely interesting ideas (warning: when I say "extremely interesting" I may really mean "in agreement with my naive expectations that nobody else agrees with or has corroborated", just the way most people do) about the US electorate being developed by a political scientist called Rachel Bitecofer at the Judy Ford Wason Center, Christopher Newport University, in Newport News, Virginia, making election predictions on the hypothesis that the behavior of "independents" isn't especially important, and the effects of what she calls "negative partisanship" are (it's not that simple: it considers a lot of factors, in two separate tiers, and regression analysis).

Which led her to predict last November's Democratic gain of 42 House seats (she said 43) in July 2018, when mainstream forecasters were unsure whether Democrats would win the 23 seats they needed to take the majority, which was a pretty remarkable feat, and is leading her now to predict a very solid Electoral College victory for the Democrats in 2020, without knowing who the candidates are. You'll have to check out the paper to get the details, because that's what I'm running this post to get you to do.

I was especially taken by Bitecofer's analysis of what happened in the 2016 election, because it not only puts to rest the zombie story of the "white working class" as decisive factor but also gives the first precise estimate I've seen (schematic, not numerical) of the influence of the Russian active measures:

Electability

I wanted to say something on the subject of "electability", but wasn't quite sure what; then there's this by Alex Pareene in The New Republic:

“Electability” is a crock of shit. It is defined, like political “moderation,” only in terms of opposition to things people want, but are told they can’t have, ranging from antiwar politics to left-wing economic populism to even the “cultural liberalism” that is seemingly the cornerstone of the modern Democratic Party. (Back in 2004, supporting civil unions, not even marriage, for same-sex couples was a threat to a Democrat’s perceived “electability.”) While the impulse to vote according to how you think a candidate would appeal to people who don’t share your priorities might make sense in theory, practice has revealed time and time again that no one involved in electoral politics—from the pundits down to the caucus-goers—has a clue who or what Americans will actually vote for. That was supposed to be, as the political scientist [Seth] Masket says, the main lesson of Trump’s election.

Which only goes partway to where I want to go, and gets a little locked into the self-denominated "progressive" cliché—I mean what made Trump seem unelectable wasn't his antiwar politics or his economic populism, it was his being a cartoon character, like Daffy Duck or Yosemite Sam, a buffoon completely ignorant of all the subject matter a president is expected to be conversant with, a person whose only genuine interest seemed to be in his own magnificence. And the way he didn't seem to really be in the money primary, too, which is an immensely important part of the electability calculus to the people who calculate it, and his personal unpopularity, which was always even worse than Hillary's, bad as that was.

And yet Trump won. And from there we know that he really was electable, contrary to what practically every political scientist would have told you. Or that the concept is meaningless, which is certainly a possibility.

Inevitability

This is a pretty weird opening pitch from Biden, if you look at it:

The core values of this nation… our standing in the world… our very democracy...everything that has made America -- America --is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States. #Joe2020 https://t.co/jzaQbyTEz3

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 25, 2019

Wait we're supposed to vote for him why? Because the stakes are high? There's a missing premise there, which would answer why Joe in particular, what is his skill set that is more appropriate to a high-stakes election than a low-stakes one, and I think I know what it is and why he's not saying it aloud but hoping we'll imagine it:

Joe

Valedictory: 2017 Cornell University Convocation; photo by Michael Suguitan for the Cornell Sun.

I think Steve is 100% right when he accuses old Joe Biden of Trumpiness in this game he's playing at the moment, hugging male persons up on stage and grinning his sweet open-hearted grin and telling the audience, "I want you to know I had permission to do that," as much as to say "unlike some of these new-fangled ladies who for some unaccountable reason think they feel threatened by my goofy and harmless old self," which as any fool can see is insane and perhaps insanely self-regarding. He's almost the Trump who says he couldn't possibly have assaulted some given woman because she's not hot enough, but makes it about what a silly old good he is.

Then he turns around and says some proper words about understanding that he needs to listen etc. etc. But he's winking, not in the obvious clown Trump way—he's a million times smarter than Trump anyway—but winking nevertheless.

Then blogfriend Lance Mannion comes out to do some handicapping, which, like me, he rarely does, and suggests that Biden's going to win the nomination, because he's kind of "our" Trump:

All the Dems in this hipster Applebees are nuts about Mayor Pete

Via Thundra, vintage 2011. Requires some mouse hovering.

It's the world's greatest concern troll David F. Brooks, jumping on the Buttigieg train ("Why You Love Mayor Pete"):

Pete Buttigieg has some kind of magic right now. His campaign bio, “Shortest Way Home,” was the 25th-best-selling book on Amazon when I checked on Monday. That put him just a few dozen places behind Michelle Obama, and thousands or tens of thousands of places ahead of Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and the other candidates who have campaign books out now.

If anybody has the stats on correlation between campaign biography sales 14 months before the conventions and nomination success, @ me.

"Stormy news won't move the needle on Trump". And you're surprised?

Oxford-Cambridge goat race, 24 March 2018, via londontown.com.

This sequence goes from dismal to somewhere productive:

Democratic pollster on why Stormy news won’t move the needle on Trump: “people have concluded he’s a liar. he lies every day. people know it. the world hasn’t come to an end” https://t.co/ClKEujrm3t

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) May 4, 2018

This is true and has wide political implications. Because knowledge of Trump's dishonesty is baked in, there's no more marginal votes to be gained from emphasizing it. His lies should be corrected but Democrats need to focus on issues. https://t.co/ESQGr01jt4

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) May 4, 2018

The composition of the electorate is not baked in. Attacks on Trump are less about getting people to go from Trump in 2016 to Dem in 2018 than:
Trump->Don't vote
Third Party->Dem
Clinton+R Sen/Cong->Dem
Clinton+Dem->turnout higher than normal in midterm elections https://t.co/yWlWz8c7wv

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) May 4, 2018

I've never understood arguments in the form "People shouldn't talk about how X is a bad person, they should focus on the issues" or the other way around. Obviously candidates and editorialists and partisans of all varieties should talk about the issues as much as they think their audience can stand, and they can probably stand more than your average campaign manager thinks they can, but if your opponent is a genuinely bad person and you can make some use of that, you might as well.

But in the present situation, I really can't understand why anybody should think it's a problem, as if laying off Trump might get Democrats some of those votes from people who've decided they don't care if Trump is a liar or a fornicator or criminal or traitor as long as that wall gets built or Trump is on the air demanding that the wall get built. There is nothing that is going to change their minds. You can talk about the issues until you faint. You will not get that vote by insulting Trump and you will not get it by not insulting him. It really doesn't matter either way.