Yeah...we're heading toward an economic crapshow....

 So....ignore what I just posted earlier for a minute. I mean, that massive recession could happen, but that's mostly still theoretical. let's talk about what really matters this election cycle: inflation.

People are rightfully pissed everything is super expensive. I dont blame them. And I do understand that democrats failed to approach the situation correctly to win the election. As you guys know, this is one of the reasons I gave them so much leeway. Because I know inflation is bad for the left and its policies.

Still, we just elected the guy who promised to make inflation worse.

He's gonna put massive tariffs on foreign goods, raising their prices up to 60%. This is gonna completely wreck the electronics market. Gamers, you want new hardware in the near future? Upgrade this holiday season. Because if trump gets his way, things are gonna get rough. 

I was listening to people in comments who said that last time he was in office, he royally screwed the construction industry. You know...the people....who wanna build more housing? And now we got a housing crisis? Yeah. Trump is partly to blame for that apparently. 

The fact is, people were just so pissed off at the current administration for things largely beyond their control, they just voted for the idiot who would make things worse. So prepare for inflation 2.0. And then a possible massive recession by 2025-2026.This is gonna get ugly. Batten down the hatches. Prepare yourself for an economic crapshow not seen in possibly decades. The recession won't inherently be his fault, but people will blame him for it. Because the president controls the economy apparently. I mean they can influence it, and trump's policies are gonna make it worse. But yeah.

I hope people actually learn their lesson this time that this is why you dont elect republicans. I know democrats suck, but as crappy as things have been, they're about to look like a relative paradise compared to what's about to come.

Did Biden just hand Trump a massive economic time bomb?

 Okay, so, I was watching a video about the economy and someone dropped this gem on me.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y

Hit "max" for date range. Now, I don't understand the full implications of this, I'm not that much of an expert. I understand econ 101 and the phillips curve but when it comes to money markets and the like you might as well be speaking greek to me. But...the long story short is this: you see that line? You see that dip? That's something called a yield curve inversion. It has something to do with long term interest rates being lower than short term or something. Anyway, when this happens...you see what follows? That grey line? That's a recession. The bigger the inversion in the graph, the bigger the recession that follows.

We've been in an inversion since we recovered from COVID. This inversion is the worst and most pronounced since the 1980s. When that line starts to recover, BOOM, the economy is, most likely, going to go into a recession, possibly on par with 2008 and its financial crisis. 

Now, remember what I always say, inflation favors republicans. Because democratic policy involves spending money to improve peoples' lives, and the general solution to inflation is austerity (although this wave was weird and actually due to price gouging). And that's the chief reason the dems were screwed this time, the economic fundamentals just worked against them to such an extent they'd rather try 4 years with a fascist than a democrat. But if the bottom is about to fall out, well....let's face it, can trump handle a recession well? NOOOO. Could Harris? Well, I doubt she'd have the chops either. We'd likely get a Obama style performance out of her which is adequate, but we wouldn't have the agenda we really need. 

By 2028, assuming democracy lives that long, um....we might be in a deep recession, and hopefully dems will learn from previous cycles and run a fricking populist agenda like FDR did. 

Donald Trump is basically Herbert Hoover. And yeah, last time we tried tariffs in the US like trump did, it was during the hoover years. And it didnt fricking work, which is why we stopped doing it for 80 years. 

Hopefully voters will FINALLY wake up and regret voting for this idiot again. Let's hope. This is the one possible ray of sunshine in all of this.

Allen Lichtman finally gets it (kind of)

 So, Allen Lichtman went on CNN and finally had an interview discussing what went wrong with his prediction. And...he finally admits his model is wrong, and that if ahistorical factors occur, that the keys become useless. I don't think he realized the full extent of that statement, but no crap shirlock. Still, let's go into what he said.

He mentioned the incumbency key and how he never saw people openly trash their nominee like they did. Same with the no primary challenge key. And again, I have answers to that. We aren't in normal times. His model relies on assumptions about how people will act and while it might be right most of the time, 2024 was a very weird year. And people acted atypically. And here's the thing people miss.

We ARE undergoing a party realignment. I'm convinced of it. 2016 was a realigning election. We had both parties have a schism. Both parties had anti establishment elements arise from within, and take a portion of their voter bases with them. On the right, this was Donald Trump, who openly trashed the rest of the party, and won over the voter base, since making it his party and running out the opposition. The democrats? They had Bernie Sanders. But because the democrats are....significantly less fair, and operate more like a top down oligarchy, they basically were able to push clinton down everyone's throats, and suppressed criticism within their party. This has led to, ever since, low enthusiasm and morale among democratic voters, which has lost them elections.

And this is what lichtman misses. The democrats have a culture of suppressing dissent. This doesn't make dissent go away. It just makes it foment and rot the party from within while the party keeps carrying on like everything is good, everything is fine. The keys turned artificially. There was no primary challenge because the democrats suppress any challengers. They squashed dissent within their party, but outside of it, voters had been dissenting for years, only to be told to stfu and vote for them anyway, or else. And then once the debate happened and biden blew it, the facade of unity cracked and everything broke down. Then they pushed harris which, while putting a new coat of paint on the party, didn't actually solve their internal structural issues or coailitional issues. 

And from there, the story writes itself. Harris ran as 4 more years of biden, the democrats lost their enthusiasm by october, and harris lost. 

And before I go further, I wanna address my own (informal) prediction being wrong. While the stats are what they are, I misjudged the harris campaign's lack of enthusiasm, believing that she managed to get a second wind in the last minute with latino voters and possibly the white working class, but that didn't materialize. I mean, until elections are called, all possible outcomes are in superposition like schrodingers cat, and you dont know until the election happens which exact multiverse you happen to be in, so to speak. Are we in the one where the latino vote carries PA to victory or the one where harris deflates and trump underperforms? We found out tuesday, and my personal prediction went the wrong way. My official data driven one was pretty accurate, despite poll still underestimating trump (again). 

But yeah. Back to the keys. Again, the democrats "teach to the test" so to speak. They tend to artificially turn the keys like they're a checklist and ignore the massive dissent and dissatisfaction from within.

And I dont think lichtman even realizes how wrong his forecast was. Like, he doesnt seem to understand that what's driving a lot of trends since 2016 is the economy and how neoliberal centrism isnt materially making peoples' lives better. TO be frank, biden, despite whatever mildly progressive policy he failed to pass, still governed like a moderate republican in some ways. He was the "nothing will fundamentally change" guy. And that....went over like a wet fart. I knew this would happen. i was antagonizing libs when they were arrogant after winning 2020 about how in 2024, biden would be insanely unpopular and lose. And even replacing him with harris, they did. It's not rocket science. because they cant understand that people arent happy with the entire paradigm. This is the kind of disillusionment that existed in the soviet union in the 1980s. Where the system is operating as designed, but people kinda realize that its just not working. So what happened when gorbachev liberalized? The entire thing collapsed. 

Here in the US, things arent operating quite the same. We are experiencing a generational shift in a realignment toward populist politics. And the democrats have resisted this change. And they're reaping what they sowed. The left couldn't embraced this. They could've embraced big solutions. but they artificially suppressed the energy within their party and pushed the exact same thing no one wanted every 4 years, and with the exception of 2020, which biden barely won, the democrats are losing. Their coalition is only able to win in years where people are fired up to vote AGAINST the GOP. No one actually LIKES their stuff. THeir entire party at this point is merely an apparatus to oppose trump, and it's failing miserably at that.

Which, to go back to my point i was gonna make....the economy key. People are backlashing against the economy. it isnt working for people. The metrics are good yes, but much like the USSR in the 1980s, it isnt a matter of the system operating as intended, people are questioning the system itself. And we have two ways we can approach this. Well, 3 actually, but the third being communist revolution so thats off the table. We can either have a new deal on the left that changes what the economy is and makes it work for people, or we can descend into fascism. Because the democrats have refused to embrace populism and their own modern FDRs, we're getting the fascist outcome. We're facing a collapsing democratic party, and yeah, i'll say it, the democratic party is collapsing. It banked its money on being able to turn out the moderate republican and minority vote, and they're underperforming on all metrics. Their "for every working class voter we lose we'll pick up two moderate republicans" strategy is failing MISERABLY.

Part of me is glad to see it. Really. I HATE the democrats. The only reason I spent so much time defending them was because I believe trump is fundamentally dangerous and a threat to democracy itself. Also, because a democratic party collapse at this time may actually backfire against the left as biden has embraced mild elements of progressive policy into his party.

But it seems clear thats one of the reasons they had an axe to grind against biden. They wanted to push him back and get rid of the tiny modicum of power he gave progressives and go back to 1992. And the dems arrogantly started going on when harris took over that her path to victory was different from biden and went thorugh the sun belt. Polling never really supported this assertion. Polling was consistently better in the rust belt and come election day, harris's best path to 270 was still WI/MI/PA. The thing is, she underperformed so badly, she lost all those states. She was struggling in her 2024 "blue wall" states of VA, NH, MN, etc., and was even massively underperforming in fricking NEW YORK, ILLINOIS, and NEW JERSEY!

Seriously, if these trends continue, the democratic party is DONE. It's COLLAPSING. We're on the bad side of a realignment. And again, what's driving this is the economy. Lichtman's model didnt even account for fricking inflation. Like holy crap. It doesnt account for the fact that people dont have faith in the economy. We do have a great economy...on paper. But the metrics never actually meant anything for normal people. And they're losing faith in them. 

So yeah. We're realigning. During realignments, a model like lichtman's isn't gonna work, because it assumes people think "normally", and they're not. The democratic party is collapsing before our very eyes, people are losing faith in the economy. And the metrics the model predicts mean nothing. 

Allen Lichtman was a cope peddler for liberals who wanted to ignore realities and arrogantly assert that everything was fine and polls were wrong. And Lichtman, in his interview, STILL wouldnt acknowledge silver was more correct than him, citing that he was a competitor of his and had a vested interest against the keys. As a polls guy myself who does my own predictions, well, polls are accurate. And the polls were accurate enough this time. Anyone could look at the state of the race and know the dems were the underdog. Harris fought valiantly for what it's worth. She brought the race to a functional tossup by election day, but she wasn't able to get across the finish line.

The polls indicated this. My own model had Harris as a 46% chance she could win. She wasnt favored to win. i thought she would win because it was close enough to 50-50, and polling error could go either way, but my polling model had harris losing. And honestly? Even a single point overperformance for trump would've led to 226-312. She underperformed by around 2-3 on average I'd say. It varies, trends arent uniform across the country, but applying different national levels of over/under performance, i came to the conclusion 2.5 is about where we'd end up. Let's look at that again.

I always said, we could either end up with 2016, or 2022. 2016 and 2020 both had systematic underperformances by democrats. 2022 had the republicans underperforming. Which kind of year 2024 would be was a coin flip. I leaned into a 2022 year in my informal personal prediction, but i kind of understood all along that a scenario like the above was possible. I wish i articulated this before the eleciton, but i wanted to wait until i got the final data, and by then i was too busy doing other prediction stuff and too tired to post about it in time. But given statistics, yeah. I've always discussed over/underperformances to polling going back to 2016. So that was always assumed. 

The fact is, lichtman's keys were wrong, and he was selling copium to resist libs. Polling was largely correct, and the results were mostly within the margin of error. Some extreme outcomes happened in safe states, like NJ being D+5 instead of D+16 or so, but going back to biden's numbers, even the signs of that stuff was there all along, people just had hope that harris would actually outperform biden's map. 

And yeah. That's my opinion on lichtman, his keys, and polling. Polling, good, keys, bad, and if anything, for better or for worse, i as vindicated all along as i knew his model didn't necessarily apply in a weird year like 2024 where all of the metrics were going against it. And the polling was right. The one solace i have about trump getting reelected, is that the resist libs were fricking wrong all along. And tbqh, even if i also fear a trump outcome, part of me likes seeing their crap eating grin wiped off their smug faces. It's the one silver lining of this whole mess. Maybe they'll fricking listen when we tell them their candidates suck. I kinda get the impression democrats won't learn from this, just as they didn't learn in 2016, but one can hope.

So WTF just happened? 2024 edition, part 4

 So this is a short one. I wanna discuss why we DIDN'T lose.

"We lost because Kamala Harris was a woman or because she was black/Indian"

No. We lost because Harris was a centrist democrat and associated too much with the historically unpopular Biden administration. 

"Kamala Harris was a bad candidate"

This is mostly false IMO. Harris's only flaw from a personal standpoint is that she was associated with biden as his VP. 

Beyond that, Harris was the best democrat the centrists who control the party would allow. And any other candidate would be just as milquetoast, just as boring, and just as uninspiring. I honestly think ANYONE would've lost this year. 

"It was because of Palestine"

Okay, this is the one time I'm gonna actually gloat, but WE DID NOT LOSE DUE TO PALESTINE. The free palestine kiddies who voted jill stein were 0.5% of the population. That's actually pretty low. Most of those guys vote green every election, and honestly, given Trump won the swing states by a solid 3 point margin or so, they're irrelevant. Hear that? YOU'RE IRRELEVANT. I never wanna hear about palestine again. no one fricking cares.

"It was because we were too far left"

 I mean, "define left." You'll always get weirdo deranged comments about how she's a "San Francisco liberal" and stuff like that. Maybe "ooh she was for fracking" or "ooh she has the most left wing record in the senate", or random people calling her a communist.

Here's the thing. These people scream everyone's a communist. They're not gonna vote for her anyway. I'm less concerned with winning trumpers here as they seem ride or die on their guy, than I am with turning out people.

"She didn't appeal to men"

I dont understand this as a man myself. I mean, I KINDA do, but let me say this. The problem is democratic centrism. The dems actually downplayed idpol a lot and while they did lean into abortion and omg dont you care about the women in your life....uh....my problem here is more related to leaning into social issues thinking that will save us rather than actually having a vision that resonates with everyone.

If anything, I'm going to say this, idpol is cancer. And the solution to idpol is generally not MORE idpol. it's less. Men felt left out because the dems have no economic vision for men. Quite frankly, the only candidate who speaks about men at all is andrew yang.

But other than that, I'd be fine with the dems just dropping the identity politics. That strategy isnt working. As it turns out, latinos arent gonna go for us despite racist comments by the other team. Black people aren't, women aren't, and yeah, basically for as much as dems love to run up margins among women and latinos and black people...they themselves cared more about inflation than they did about anything else. it's the economy, stupid. 

I mean, there are probably other bad reasons, but these are the common ones I heard so far and I'm just like ugh, shut up. These people don't know what they're talking about. Heck maybe I dont either. Ive been reflective in this time too and i do think my own vision isnt popular with a certain segment of people, ie, the conservative leaners who were super anti covid restrictions and who basically were entitled middle class people who want cheap luxuries on the backs of wage slaves.

If anything i think the dems leaned too hard into appealing to those guys and it didnt work. No, our solution, i think, is to turn out our own base.

So wtf just happened? 2024 Part 3

 So, this is the spicy part. This is the part where I get frank and unfiltered about why we lost.

First, let's review the demographic data I ended with last night again. Joe Biden won 2020 with 82 million votes. While the results are not finalized, Harris stands at 68 million votes. I am sure she will break 70 million by the time all is said and done, but what happened to the other 10 million? And I'll be honest, they stayed home. They didn't turn out, and as such, while Trump was able to turn his base out, Harris was not able to turn out the democrats.

I've been saying it all along. ELECTIONS ARE WON BY ENTHUSIASM! And our enthusiasm was just...through the floor. We couldnt turn out our base. Because they didn't have someone to vote for who they were enthused to vote for. Democrats can lecture and moralize about the virtues of lesser evil voting, but as I always say, democrats are not entitled to votes, they have to earn them, and Harris (nor Biden), didn't earn them. 

This was a very red leaning year. In a sense, I predicted in 2020 this would happen. Because I know how electoral cycles work. Party takes power, wins presidency, house and senate. Loses house in the mid terms. Comes back, wins the presidency in the second term by a smaller margin than the first. Second mid term elections are a bloodbath and other party sweeps both houses of congress, and then finally the other side wins the house, senate, and presidency in one fell swoop. Barring potential party realignments, which can energize a coalition to make its cycle last a lot longer than the normal 8 years, that's normally how things go.

Except...we are in uncertain times and possibly undergoing a realignment. In 2016, Trump won narrowly. I thought it was a fluke at first, driven by low democratic turnout. In 2020, Biden got the most votes of any presidential candidate IN HISTORY but barely eeked out a victory vs Trump. Trump has insane energy and is very hard to defeat. In 2024....that coalition didn't hold up. Just as I kind of anticipated. Because if you won 2020 by the kinds of margins Biden did, that's not gonna bode well for reelection.

Because here's the thing. Biden was a milquetoast centrist. And while yes, he's more progressive than i gave him credit for, he barely passed anything that made peoples' lives better, and then his coalition stayed home in 2024. 

Now, to get into a few reasons why people on the internet are saying she lost, that I will address. A big one I'm seeing is that she's a woman, she's a black woman, blah blah blah. A lot of dem establishment people seem to be leaning into this one. STAHP. NO ONE GIVES A CRAP ABOUT HER GENDER AND THOSE WHO DO ARE JUST DIE HARD TRUMPERS. I've been following polling all election cycle. Harris polled far better than Biden did the entirety of this election cycle. I have the numbers to prove it:

Biden did terrible the whole time. That dip to rock bottom before dropping out was the debate, but his campaign was long struggling before that. The second harris dropped out, it energized the base where they were actually competitive and brought the race to a functional tossup. If Biden remained in the race, he would AT BEST do AS WELL as Harris, and probably worse. And he was a white male. An ancient one, yes, but look at his relative recovery from say, March until June. That due to him having a commanding presence at the state of the union, proving, for the time at least, he was still up for the job. And his performance there was....about where Harris ended up doing. So yeah. I stand by my beliefs. Harris did at least as good if not better than Biden would have, and Biden was the white male who brought out 82 million people last time.

This election was a referendum on Biden and the democrats. And because people weren't happy with their leadership, they lost, it was really that simple. 

In all fairness, I do think there are reasons Harris declined going into october that relate to this. Early in her campaign she was an unknown element. She was a progressive, she was a moderate, she was what anyone wanted her to be. She was obama 2.0, hope and change, baby. But then, like all candidates, she had to make decisions. She had to have a platform. And that platform sucked. She went in the milquetoast, technocratic, centrist direction and that was a MASSIVE enthusiasm killer. And I kind of feel like I followed the trend with everyone else. heck I soured on her before everyone else. I soured on her by the convention, where she started doing the work circlejerking and removing any decent healthcare from her platform. This is my own biases, but I didn't feel like Harris would actually make my life appreciably better. And neither did anyone else, apparently. Yes, she had policies. But her policies were milquetoast, moderate, aimed at only certain people under certain conditions, and they didn't connect.

Here's the thing about trump. Like in 2016, we acted like it was about the jobs. But I said back then, no, it isn't. Jobs arent the answer, they never were. Now, I can articulate these concerns because im a free thinker who doesn't give a F about what society thinks, and I'm educated enough to be able to come up with my own vision for how things should be, but with trump in 2016, it was about neoliberalism. The jobs thing was a symptom of the problem. We had the recession in 2008, we had this rather milquetoast recovery. by 2016, the numbers were good, but people werent feeling the numbers, and I'll tell you why, because they dont actually related to peoples' lives very well, and they aren't FEELING the numbers. 

The jobs we had were poor. They were of low quality. They paid badly. They had no benefits. They were run by abusive bosses who monopolized our time. We were told we were lucky just to have these jobs, because we could be out on the street. And that's the true nature of jobs. So why do we clamor for more of them? because we have this picture in our head of a better america in the past where we could afford things better, and work and make ends meet, and life was simple if you did what you were supposed to and kept your nose clean. People romanticize the past, gloss over its problems, and even if things are good, they don't feel good, because things simply weren't all they're cracked up to be. Not that things didn't decline. And that's why Clinton lost in 2016. it wasnt about the factory work. It was about the feels of being able to make one's way in the world comfortably, or at least idealize what our parents did that many of us never went through ourselves. 

So okay, trump inherited Obama's economy, and then things were good. To some extent, this is, once again, feels. This guy reassured them, marketed a vision to them, and they bought into it. Then COVID happened and that brought its own set of problems. Conservatives and moderates rebelled against the status quo of lock downs claiming we're infringing on their freedom to work and enjoy middle class luxuries. Biden still gets elected, since faith in trump wavered enough for him to lose, but he BARELY lost. he maintained a strong and passionate base of followers to the end. And those followers stormed the capitol when he cried the election was "rigged", because they bought into his vision with such cultish devotion  they believed him. This is, btw, where i realized trump was too dangerous to really win again.

Biden....he came in, and he had to handle the recovery. The vaccine launched early in 2020 and within 3 months of his presidency i was getting vaccinated and things were returning to normal. Originally he had high marks, but then inflation hit. First it was supply chain issues, but then it was corporate price gouging. Conservative misinformation began and people believed it. They blamed Biden for spending too much money, when the real problem was the supply and demand shocks associated with reopening the economy. Closing the economy in 2020 led to a mini great depression. Reopening it led to an inflationary wave. Previous realignments were decided by such crises. The great depression led to FDR's new deal. Stagflation in the 1970s led to Reagan's "morning in america". The great recession arguably gave us Trump. And now, inflation gave us trump again. 

Through 2021-2023, prices spiked, people couldnt' afford things, pay was relatively stagnant, and people felt like they were struggling to get by. Yet the democrats just ended up refusing to admit the problems, claiming that doing so would make them look bad. They dont wanna admit they have a bad economy, they have to pretend like its good, because their guy is in charge. So they kept going on about how many jobs they created, and how the chips act and other things are bringing back the manufacturing work, and how inflation is coming down (and it did), and none of it mattered, because PEOPLE DIDN'T FEEL LIKE THEY WERE DOING GOOD.

Democrats are like this meme. This is why they lost 2016, and this is why they lost 2024. They argue with people and lecture them about how they're stupid for not appreciating Biden's economy without acknowledging that people feel pain. Again, it's not about the jobs. We keep acting like the good life is everyone has a good job and it pays well but the economy just can't deliver that. Jobs suck, they've always sucked, yet we keep romanticizing them like a really crappy ex, and honestly? The Biden economy was, by all "conventional" metrics, the best we're ever gonna get. And Biden, being a milquetoast candidate, dug us into a hole. 

Further digging us into that hole was his lack of legislative accomplishments. He had a policy agenda that while i wouldnt call "bold", at least did some good things. But let me ask you this, do you feel like YOUR lives have improved due to most of his policies? Probably not. Democrats do technocratic policies that sound good on paper, but they dont connect with people. Republicans, they give tax cuts, no tax on tips, blah blah blah. They are basically promised MORE MONEY by voting republicans. More money means buying more things, means their lives are easier. But...you invest $80 billion in some act to create factory jobs, and is anyone gonna actually notice? It's not actually about the jobs, it's about how people feel. They vote for candidates that make them feel good, or otherwise are percieved as materially improving their lives. FDR's economy was garbage but he moved mountains with his new deal to improve peoples' lives and it made people FEEL good. People could connect FDR's policies in their head to improvements in their lives. That's also why the new deal coalition fell. But the end of its life cycle, people didn't feel like government did anything for them. It just took tons of money out of their paychecks for benefits they didn't actually notice, and if anything, they felt other people got but they didn't. 

But heres the thing, Biden wasnt bold enough in proposing things that mattered, and if the things that he did try to pass, he was railroaded by congress and the courts. Checks and balances effectively sabotaged the Biden administration.

So, what happens when you have a democratic government, it's not doing anything for you, you dont feel like they're helping, if anything you feel like their policies are hurting, and it comes election time? Why, you either vote against them, or you don't come out at all. What really killed Harris's campaign was the latter. Like 10 million people didn't show up. And Trump won. Again, lack of enthusiasm. 

People want solutions, and many of them dont care about the intricacies of passing things, and how its SO HARD, and to some extent it looks like weaponized incompetence. And to some extent it is, the centrist wing of the party doesnt want nice things either. They want diet republican. And harris ran like a diet republican. A last generation republican with some milquetoast policies here and there. SHe embraced democratic centrism, when people want a bold agenda. 

Not that it would have mattered, because Harris ended up being tied too closely to Biden. people wondered, in addition to how her policies would help people, why isnt she doing them already? By being associated with biden, she was associated with his failures. And she did little to really move away from Biden. She said in one interview she wouldnt do anything differently. If any moment probably killed her campaign, it was that. Because PEOPLE DON'T WANT 4 MORE YEARS OF JOE BIDEN! They dont want his VP either, who is running on the same policy agenda. I keep saying it, democrats are in the uncanny valley of suck. They're gonna be screamed at as being radical leftist by any right winger and they'll never vote for her anyway, but the democrats WANT SOMETHING DIFFERENT aren't gonna turn out for her either. So we get trump. The lack of enthusiasm killed her campaign. And I just explained WHY people weren't enthused, as someone who myself wasn't enthused.

We live in an age of populism. We live in an age where people want bold action. Trump wins because of populism. We lose because we lack it. This is 2016 again. it's just that this time, we're on the other end of the phillips curve. In 2016, the specter of the great recession was still fresh in peoples' minds and the concern was jobs. This time, the specter of the post covid inflationary wave is in their mind, and they want to be able to afford things. 

I admit, being on this side of the phillips curve is bad for dems. Democratic policies work better when the state of things errs on the side of unemployment, because they make peoples' lives better that way. Btw, wanna know what won obama in 2012 to me? Extended unemployment. People got money in an era where there were no jobs to be had. Romney wanted to take that away and give it all to rich people who were the "job creators" and clearly that wasn't working. In 2024 though, giving people money is a tough sell because inflation and people thinking government spending money contributes to it. That's why ive been panicking and being leery to embrace UBI fully in the 2024 election cycle. In retrospect though, I think that might've been a mistake on my part and probably harris's as well. I mean, no tax on tips, vance's baby bonus, and lower taxes are more money in peoples' pockets. ANd the real solution to inflation is ultimately raising living standards. We cant go back to deflating things, so we DO need more money in peoples' pockets. The right argues tax breaks, the left has to argue social programs like UBI. 

Heck I do think my original vision is the solution here. Policies like UBI and M4A are simple enough where if implemented, yes, people will see more money in their pockets. And if we can pull those off without causing MORE inflation, we can actually win people over. And people will be more enthused and vote for us. 

So yeah. Democrats, get to populism and grand visions to improve peoples' lives. Bernie was right, he talked about how democrats just didnt connect because they didn't offer a solid vision for people. And they didn't. They offered more milquetoast piecemeal solutions that didn't resonate. Because democrats dont understand how people think and don't care. 

If this election is a repudiation of anything, it's a repudiation of the centrism the democrats have been trying to force on us for a decade now. Running to the center to win over fricking Dick Cheney doesn't win elections. And the whole strategy of relying on minorities + suburbanites just FULL STOP collapsed on them. Because no one actually wants this crap.

The democrats need to clean house. They need to fire their entire leadership and abandon centrism. We're getting destroyed by the GOP. 2016 was a realignment. Trump tapped into something. And it;s resonating. Meanwhile what we're doing isn't. We lost in 2016. We lost in 2024, we ALMOST lost in 2020. Trump is popular, we are not. Democrats dont understand modern politics, and the boomer leadership needs to just retire and ride off into the sunset already. And by that, i dont mean we should replace Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer with like....Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg who embrace the same boring brand of politics. We need a new generation of political thinkers, and the democrats need to embrace people LIKE Bernie sanders (who they rejected in 2016, never forget, bernie would have won). Or people like AOC. Or someone like Andrew yang, who while lacking a populist instinct actually has it more right on policy than anyone else. 

The fact is, IF democracy survives trump, we need to completely revamp our strategy and realign ourselves. We need to abandon this loser fricking strategy of abandoning the rust belt to win the sun belt. because now we're losing both. This election was so bad, that it actually showed weaknesses in DEEP BLUE states like New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. That Biden polling showing those as swing states was ACTUALLY ACCURATE. THAT'S HOW BAD WE WERE DOING.

If we don't completely reimagine ourselves as a party, we are going to collapse. We're already starting to. This election shows me what we're doing isn't sustainable. This was a repudiation the democrats havent seen since 1988. And we might be SCREWED in the long term if we can't figure out how to come back from this. We just got DESTROYED. And the sad thing is, this happened at the worst possible moment. Because trump actually is that dangerous. I hope he doesnt actually destroy democracy, but I fear the worst here.

Either way, until THAT happens, we need to regroup and rework ourselves so we can come back next election and hopefully have a chance. Because this realignment is NOT going well for us.

So wtf just happened? 2024 edition, part 2

 So...this article is gonna be more about election night itself. I want to discuss when I knew something was amiss. 

So I wasn't exactly sure how I was gonna approach election night. I heard NC and GA closed early but I figured I'd use the early swing states as a barometer for how things were going. I actually spent much of the early closings following florida. Why florida? Because they counted the fastest. Georgia was still like DERP patrick with board nailed to head with 3% while florida quickly had like 60% of their votes counted. And here's the thing. I knew that Florida was supposed to go trump by 8. That's what my final prediction said, so I used that as a baseline. Much like how R+7 was the baseline for the iowa poll because that was the expected margin there. So I figured, R+10 is bad, R+6 is good. Anything in between that is kinda roughly on par. Keep in mind, one state may not determine the national trend completely within a single point, but i figured an over/under performance either way would. 

At first, Florida performed within expected parameters, and I didnt know how to read it. I kept flipping between different states, but with GA and NC at like <10% and knowing you cant really decide turnout based on that, I kept flipping back and forth. Virginia closed, they seemed D+5, on par with my expectations, back to florida....and...R+10. O_O. Well. Okay, it depends on the polling and where the rest of the votes are. That's why you cant call stuff early. If one county gets done and its super blue, the totals will be. Same thing with red. And GA and NC really do come down to the cities and suburbs, so I knew we were seeing a red mirage there. Back to florida, up to like 80-90% of the vote and....R+11. Uh...that really isn't good. Hopefully the remaining vote is all urban. I mean jacksonville and miami are red? Wtf? That's crazy. 

Okay so....VA...seems to be stagnating. VA seemed to get a lot of DC suburban vote in early and it was only D+5. A lot of the remaining vote was rural, although some was urban and suburban. Still, it's within expeced parameters....with expected D heavy vote pouring in.

Turn on NBC. They start going on about how harris is underperforming everywhere and her performance is 3 points below biden's. Again, still early, not sure what to think. Back to GA and NC...again, counting slow enough where we have no idea. Yeah they were like 60-38 trump but we really need atlanta to know for sure. 

Back to florida, R+11, R+12, R+13...hehehe, I'm in danger. Oh well, I think maybe florida is weird, it has a lot of demographic oddities other states dont have like the cuban vote being abnormally conservative for latinos.

OH and TX start to close. Originally...performing around where expected. R+8, R+9, ok. Rust belt closes. Early vote WAY up for harris, like 72-28. Ok, but that's all philly and allentown in PA. That's blue AF. Doesnt mean anything when you get urban vote in first. 

Back to GA and NC....harris gaining but seems to still be behind by like 5. Well, again, all comes down to atlanta and the tri city areas in their respective states. 

VA....wtf why is trump gaining there? D+2, D+1, trump ahead. DO we have any more of that DC suburb vote? And we seemed to be running low. Okay, now Im freaking out. TX and OH, both doing floridas, going R+13. CRAP CRAP NOT GOOD, NOT GOOD. 

And yeah, by this point, it's like 10 PM. And i start panicking. Friends tell me to chill, be optimistic and not doomer, but here's the thing. I know what I'm expecting. R+8 florida, R+9 OH and TX, D+5 virginia, R+1-2 GA and NC, and then the media keeps being like "yeah she's underperforming..." and im freaking out.

So I look up 2020 for a comparison when were states called? VA was called early, FL was called after midnight. I remember panicking in 2020 but thats because i thought Biden would have such a commanding lead that he would win easily. He didn't. And it was close. And it seemed clear we were underperforming there.

And I'm looking at it. Swing states still debatable, but trump is winning GA and NC and the margins are shifting toward trump in the rust belt. VA is too close to call, FL, OH, and TX are called quickly and are 4-5 points more R than expected.  A picture is starting to emerge. This is the R+4 scenario. That isn't good.

And yeah. I basically knew we were in trouble by like 10:30 or 11. Because I know how things were SUPPOSED to go based on polling and how we were several points underwater. 

GA and NC were called trump, and they went trump by much larger margins than expected, like R+3 instead of R+1. Oh well maybe swing states are performing a little better. What really matters is the rust belt. 

IA went trump quickly, and by the same blowout margins as the other red leaning "swing states". So much for the selzer poll. Wow. That selzer poll was off. Like WAY off. Like, 12 points off. Holy crap. I thought the other pollsters there were trying to do information warfare to even out the averages, but NOPE, they were accurate. Selzer wasn't. 

That kinda made me realize that the rust belt might not save us after all. WI, MI, and PA started showing the right wing lean the sun belt states had, and I started realizing, yeah, the rust belt wasnt gonna save us. It's performing no differently than the south. We're screwed. 

By this point, every election call was anxiety inducing as I was thinking "oh god they're gonna call PA arent there". I mean, it seemed obvious even before it was called we werent gonna win. We werent winning the suburbs by big enough margins to flip it. My own county was called already and it seemed like the latino vote that I thought would save us bugged out on us. And yeah, the margins started getting really concerning. 

And while VA was eventually called like 11:30, it shouldnt have gone that late. And then it was the same painful story where NH, MN, etc were too close to call. And uh...wtf. Again, those were the cake walk states. Like those were our TX/FL/IA/OH style states. 

What really broke me? NJ ahead by 5. WTF. I DIDNT HAVE THAT ON MY LIST EVEN. Like, it was on my list, but i took it off when a D+12 poll got averaged with a D+20 one and it was like, oh this is D16. WHY IS THIS TOO CLOSE TO CALL?!

Again, I'm not too worried about losing most of these. But some of these should've been quick victories for harris. The fact that those states were too close to call while the red equivalents were being called early pretty much proved things werent going our way. 

And yeah. PA was eventually called about 24 hours ago at 2 PM for trump, and it was over. 219 base, NC is 235, GA is 251, PA is 270. We're done. Toast. Cooked. I stayed up, watched trump's speech, and the whole time i was listening to the demented one ramble on and bringing sycophants like elon musk and RFK on the stage i was just like OH GOD WHY, WHY DID WE ELECT THIS GUY AGAIN? HOW AM I GONNA BE ABLE TO PUT UP WITH LISTENING TO THIS GUY FOR 4 MORE YEARS!? And yeah, the dude was like nails on the chalkboard. 

Going back and doing more post mortem stuff today, prediction subs pointed out some disturbing facts. NY was only D+11, not terrible terrible, but huge collapse from Biden. Illinois was only D+8 (!!!). NJ was D+5. I mean, this is the joe biden map. These were stated biden was struggling with and then when he dropped out they were removed. But no, that polling for joe biden that showed NJ, IL, and NY as swing states? That wasnt just outliers. Those trends were REAL. 

And the popular vote totals. Looking at it, it seems obvious that we had a MASSIVE coalition collapse. In 2020, we had 81 million votes for Biden. Trump, 74 million. Not all votes are counted yet, but Trump has 72 million so far...and Harris....67 million. We just lost like 15-20% of our coalition here. Wtf? No wonder we did so badly. And we did badly in so many demographics. Latinos, the moderate republican suburbanites, young men, heck we underperformed with the women who were supposed to come out for abortion. We underperformed with everyone.

And just looking at those numbers, WHERE DID THEY GO? I'll tell you, they didnt vote for trump mostly. Trump's vote totals look like they're gonna be relatively consistent. They stayed home. Over 10 million people probably who voted for biden, 1/8 of his coalition, stayed the frick home. 

And with that, Im gonna end this here. I'm gonna go into my actual autopsy for why i think this is tomorrow, but it's getting late, and this is a good place to stop. I started with the stats, i went into the demographics, and what actually happened, and now the stage is set for what I think happened. That part is probably gonna be the real fireworks for me. Because that's where I'm really gonna lay into the democrats and exactly what I think of them in this moment. Because they messed up and dropped the ball big time IMO.

So wtf just happened? (2024 edition, part 1)

 So, this was a clusterfudge. It's such a clusterfudge, I don't know how I can get to all of it in a single article. But trust me, I will be deep diving into this, both from a statistics perspective, and from my own personal perspective of what went wrong. This first part, I'm gonna do the autopsy from the statistical and forecasting perspective. Not all results are in, but I've seen enough to have an idea of what went on.

7 possible outcomes for the 2024 election

I didn't get to do this part of my election forecast because the polls kept changing on monday and on tuesday i was too tired to get around to posting it before the polls closed, but I did plan on doing an article discussing the 7 main scenarios for the election. This is a statistical exercise. As I always say, my model of elections is statistical, and carries some form of error with it. I was going to discuss various scenarios at very parts of the statistical bell curve that my prediction makes up. Posting this now might help shed light on how I see 2024 right now. 

The median projection (50th percentile outcome)

This is the default final projection. It is the median projection for how I expected the election to go. Of course, you see the probabilities, I aim for a 95% confidence interval, so anything within 8 points of this is feasibly possible. It actually is relatively accurate, like normal, I got 48 states right on it.

D+1 projection (60th percentile)

This is the outcome I expected. I was cautiously optimistic that Harris would overperform and pull off a win. I thought the MSG rally really clinched it. I wanted to be optimistic for Harris, I really did, and I wanted to be optimistic for her chances. Anyway I knew I'd get 48 states give or take right, it was just a matter of which way the winds blew. I guessed wrong.

D+4 projection (84th percentile)

This is the optimistic Harris outcome, akin to what happened. 7 state sweep, start threatening and applying pressure to Iowa and maybe Kansas (if accurate). I wasn't bold enough to predict this, but I considered this "the good" harris outcome.

D+8 projection (98th percentile)

This is the most optimistic outcome within the margin of error. Massive sweep, Iowa and Kansas taken, Florida is a tossup, and even Blue Texas and Ohio are on the table. This is basically the Ann Selzer special. It didn't happen. I never saw it as realistic, but it's technically within the realm of possibility...

Now, the republican outcomes:

R+1 projection (40th percentile)

Trump flips Michigan and Wisconsin, sweeps all 7 swing states. It's a little mild given the actual margins we saw, but it probably has the right electoral count.

R+4 projection (16th percentile)

Trump not just flips all 7 swing states, runs up the margins, and starts applying pressure on the blue states like Virginia, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. This is kind of accurate, given virginia, minnesota, and new hampshire were toss ups way longer than they had any business being. Also, the margins in red states like Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and Florida are reminiscient of this one. Still, it's just a little too aggressive. Still, if the 7, this is the closest one to what we got.

R+8 projection (2nd percentile)

The the Ann Selzer special for republicans. Apocalpytic red wave. At least we didn't get this one, not that it helps that much...

So yeah. As you can see, what we just witnessed wasn't really outside of the realm of possibility. The real outcome is between the R+1 and R+4 projection. Let's call it R+2.5.

That's...actually pretty accurate all things considered. On a bell curve this is approximately the 26th percentile outcome. So about 1/4 of possible scenarios are worse, but 3/4 are better. Keep in mind Harris would need 54th percentile or better to actually win. it was close in the polling, but on a scale of "is this 2016 or is this 2022?", it's 2016 again. This was literally 2016 again. 2016 could've been seen as roughly a R+3 style scenario, give or take. And yeah. Of all of the possible realities, this is what we got.

The current state of the race

As of right now, the race is here.

NV and AZ aren't called, but yeah. Probably the 226-312 Trump scenario.

Congratulations, simulation 61, you presumably won. My simulator did seem to predict the outcome. Both AZ and NV are 5 points ahead for Trump, and I'm not the AP, I've seen enough, they're likely going red. 

What about the senate?

Right now, this is the state of the race.

So again, overperformance. Let's look at my prediction again. 

YIKES. So basically they performed on par to overperforming. It's hard to put a line on how we're doing here. We're losing Nevada and Pennsylvania (although neither are called yet). But then we're overperforming in Arizona. We carried Michigan and Wisconsin. There's a lot of randomness in how things are performing. This is a weakness of both of my models. The main forecast focuses on national over/under performance, but then theres randomness where some states do better and others do worse. Still, if I were to use my election map and add an offset to the situation, we get a map most resembling what we have with an R+2 offset.

It doesn't fit perfectly. We kept michigan, where here it falls. We're losing nevada, but here it's still relatively safe. PA and AZ seem to be trending about right though. 

Honestly, it's a mess. Still, let's focus on the real question: was polling actually off?

The nature of polling in 2024

While the polls were off by normal polling error, on the whole, polls did a good job. Those right wing polls who are constantly accused of bias nailed it again. The herders came close enough to getting it right, and "right leaning RCP" still underestimated the actual electoral margins. 538 got it wrong again. Race to the white house forget it. All of these liberals were huffing copium the whole time, and even I ended up huffing it too in the end.

In all fairness to me, I did promise to report the numbers as they were and I did. It's why I did one prediction and then a second prediction that was more personal. And if the error went the other way, i would've nailed it. But yeah, the official prediction got it more right than my unofficial one. Official prediction for the presidency was off by 2 states, which is my par. Both were tossups within a point. my unofficial got at least 3 and up to 4 wrong. So by changing the data to fit my biases again, i screwed up just like in 2020.

Say it with me guys, LISTEN TO THE POLLS POLLS RIGHT, BIASED PREDICTIONS BASED ON FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS ARE WRONG. LISTEN TO THE POLLS, THEY'RE NOT FRICKING WRONG. 

And for all the people saying the polls were off...again. R+2-2.5 scenario wasnt exactly unrealistic. That's well within the margin of error. It's well within the 95% confidence interval. Heck it's technically just inside the 50% confidence interval (25th-75th percentile). Z score was around -0.625. To put things in stats terms, relatively accurate outcome. And my own personal outcome? Well, I made a bet based on my biases and i was wrong. It couldve went in my favor, it had a 50% chance of doing so. And my own projection wasn't outlandish. It was the 60th percentile outcome of all outcomes. So...yeah.

I know a lot of people huffing a lot more copium than I was on the democratic side. I kept it relatively grounded and realistic, understanding the odds and seeing so many election cycles by this point this wasn't my first rodeo, but yeah. Should've known better.

And yeah, to settle the "should I stop using RCP" debate...NO. They got it more right than anyone else. Again, dems were huffing copium and ignoring everything that didnt fit their narrative. Speaking of which...

From a nerd perspective, if there's any upside to trump winning, it's that hopefully we'll never have to hear from that arrogant windbag Allen Lichtman and his 13 keys ever again. Truly he did not have the power to wield the polls. 

 Conclusion on the election's statistics

So, this is a real basic one. This part I covered the statistics of the election and how I did. 

And for people wondering about the house, there are too many races uncalled and i don't even wanna touch that with a 10 foot pole. All i'll say is if I apply a 2-2.5 offset to that, we're gonna lose 207-228 and I now expect the GOP to maintain control. That's how my forecast shifts both with a 2 point and a 2.5 point offset. As such, I expect to be wrong on 11 of the 50 races I predicted. But again, so many of them are still up for grabs I ain't touching that until everything is called. 

But yeah. This was basically a butt whooping for us. Democrats underperformed nationally around 2-3 points give or take, although the margins vary by race. Again, despite the national trend thing being real, there also is an element of randomness there. Ya know? Some overperformed by 2, some overperformed by 5-6. It varies. Anyway. That's my statistical analysis of the situation based on the numbers, without me even going into my personal feelings of the election. I'll be getting to that by around part 3 or so. I have A LOT to say about that. And uh...a lot of it isn't gonna be nice, and we're gonna be seeing a return of 2016-2020 populist me here. Just a warning. Miss the old populist me who would rip the dems constantly and tell it like it is and be adversarial to them? Well I'm back, baby, and I'm not gonna hold back on this travesty of an election. Until next time.