Discussing the pace at which 3D graphics have advanced (subjectively)

 So....I had this thought experiment after having another discussion with someone else. I wanted to actually quantify (somewhat) the rate of advancement in gaming over the years. So, I'm gonna take the list from my previous article, go back, and attempt to quantify how much better games look on a scale of 0-10. 0 means the same/worse (necessary some years), 10 means a mindblowing difference. 5 means a relatively moderate but substantial difference. I'll give two ratings. One for the best games and the other for the industry as a whole, because there really was uneven growth there overall. With that said, let's begin.  

1993

So 1992 is gonna serve as my baseline. 2D games are in fall swing, and wolfenstein is the best looking game of the year. 1993 gave us doom, which was a MASSIVE step up in retrospect. I won't say it's as massive as some jumps later on, but it was still substantial. 

Still, most of the industry remained unchanged, most games were 2D, and consoles generally lacked the hardware to run stuff like wolfenstein and doom. They'd later try, but yeah, the ports were rather compromised to make work at all. Still, you had SOME advancement. I'd say star fox looked better than super mario kart. But all in all? 16 bit era was in full swing. 

Best games: 8

Industry as a whole: 2

1994

1994 was a relatively unremarkable year. We got doom II, which graphically didnt look a ton better than doom 1. We did get the launch of the PS1 in Japan, which started bringing 3D games to home console, but we wouldnt officially get into gen 5 until 1995 in the US. All in all, 16 bit was still the staple, and yeah. We had some advancements, but it would take a few years for the public as a whole to make the shift.

Best games: 1

Industry as a whole: 3

1995

1995 would bring us Hexen at the high end, which was a mild jump over Doom/Doom 2, but nothing too special. Still, we started having the proliferation of the first gen 5 consoles with the PA1 and saturn, as well as ports of stuff like Doom on older consoles. So we started making the transition to 3D. 2D would still be dominant I think, but the tides were turning.

Best games: 3

Industry as a whole: 5

1996

 1996 brought us quake, another pretty strong title that had a decent uplift in graphics over what existed previously. I'd be inclined to say it was a decent jump, but given hexen bridging the gap, not a huge one. Still, we continued the transition to gen 5 with the N64. Super Mario 64 was pretty mindblowing at the time and it did look better than saturn/playstation games, even at 240p/20-30 FPS. 

Best games: 5

Industry as a whole: 6

1997

1997 brought quake at the high end. It wasnt a huge jump over quake 1, but still worth noting. The industry as a whole was really spitting out 3D games. This was the year I'd say 3D became truly normalized, with the industry being fully centered around putting out graphically impressive titles that seemed impossible just a few years ago.

Best games: 3

Industry as a whole: 8

Heck, let's start doing 5 year shifts too here so we can really see how much improvement we had over 5 years, because it seems like we lose sight of the big picture here due to how many incremental changes happen.

1992-1997 best games: 10

1992-1997 industry as a whole: 8

1998

1998 is actually the start of Gen 6. You get half life on PC, which was mind blowing. You get the sega dreamcast in Japan, with sonic adventure, also mindblowing. Perhaps one of the most substantial improvements ever, although it would take a few years for these graphics to become proliferated throughout the industry. For the most part we just enjoyed our PS1s and N64s. 

Best games: 10

Industry as a whole: 2

1999

 Sega dreamcast released in North America. So those fancy gen 6 graphics started becoming proliferated. We also got quake 3 and Unreal Tournament on PC, which kinda had that dreamcast aesthetic, so not mindblowing over say, half life. But yeah. More proliferation in the industry as a whole. 

Best games: 1

Industry as a whole: 5

2000

We got Deus Ex at the high end, which is still very...earlyish gen 6. It featured expansive levels and cityscapes so it deserves points for scale, but still. Not a HUGE jump. Still, this is where the PS2 was released and given that was THE console everyone flocked to in overwhelming numbers (dwarfing the dreamcast, gamecube, and xbox), yeah. This was the year those half life grapgics became normalized.

Best games: 3

Industry as a whole: 5

2001

2001

We got gamecube and Xbox which made the transition to gen 6 complete. Halo CE was crazy impressive, but given what existed between 1998 and 2000, still not a huge jump. Substantial though. Still, this is where the industry transitioned to gen 6.

At the high end, wolfenstein kinda looked a bit more like quake 3 in practice, but with rather crazy lighting. It was a decent jump.

Best games: 6 

Industry as a whole: 5

2002

At the high end, battlefield 1942 came out. Graphically it looked worse than return to castle wolfenstein, BUT, it deserves points for scale. And that's a tradeoff games often had to made in the 2000s and even 2010s. Do we go with a really insane looking corridor shooter, or a large scale open environment with more mediocre graphics? You could go either way, and I'll recognize progress either way. 

And by this point, yeah, everyone and their mother had gen 6 consoles, game developers were targetting them nearly exclusively, and if you didnt get one by this point, you were being left behind.  The games didnt look any better on the consoles, but the fact that more and more titles were released was big. This was like the "1997" type year for gen 6. 

Best games: 3

Industry as a whole: 4

And now we do another 5 year average. Here, we can compare 1997 to 2002. And the difference is pretty substantial. I don't think it's AS massive as 1992-1997, almost nothing matches that, but yeah, going from 240p to 480p and up from 32/64 bit games to 128 bit ones did grand us a rather massive jump. Basically those 1998 half life graphics were EVERYWHERE by this point. And some titles were even looking a little dated. Given Quake 2 was 1997's best...yeah. Pretty massive jump.

1997-2002 best games: 9

1997-2002 industry as a whole: 7

2003

 At the high end, we got UT2003, which was somewhat of a jump from say the 1999 one, but it's really just going from like dreamcast style graphics up to something thats a looks like a good gen 6 game. Not an insanely huge jump from RTCW or Battlefield 1942, but still deserves some credit. 

For the industry as a whole, we're in the middle of gen 6. Not a ton of improvements, although they did have some graphically decent games here and there. 

Best games: 4

Industry as a whole: 2

2004

2004 was the informal start of gen 7 IMO on PC. We had so many bangers with crazy graphics. Half Life 2, Doom 3 topped them showing that you can have scale and impressively modern graphics, and doom 3 was more corridor-y with insane graphics. Of course, this would take a whole to proliferate to the rest of the industry. We had stuff like Halo 2 which looked impressive on console, but really it still paled in comparison to say, UT2003. Looked better than CE though.

Best games: 8

Industry as a whole: 2

2005

Xbox 360 launched in 2005, but I dont think it really took off until 2006-2007. Still, it was there for early adopters. We had games like COD2 and Quake 4 on it which looked amazing. PC had FEAR, which would be ported to PS3 and 360 in a year. Still, at the top end, 2004 really stole it. Most 2005 titles just looked like 2004 ones but a bit better. FEAR showed a decent amount of improvement, but yeah. Things were moving, but like all these generational shifts, it actually happened over a period of a few years, not an all at once thing. Most gamers were too busy enjoying last gen titles like resident evil 4 and god of war on their PS2s. 

Best games: 5

Industry as a whole: 5

2006

 Gen 7 continued to trickle in. PS3 launched. Wii launched. Of course, both had missteps, PS3 was expensive and was a year behind Xbox. Wii had gamecube+ graphics, more akin to say, UT2003. At the top end, Gears looked amazing but nothing substantially better than 2004-2005. Still, we had more proliferation of good looking games in this time frame, so it deserves some industry points. 

Best games: 2

Industry as a whole: 5

2007

2007 is widely considered one of the best years for gaming. It was the year it really felt like gen 7 was in full swing, similar to 2002 for the gen 6 era, and 1997 for gen 5. We had SO MANY good games release in 2007, and yeah, this was peak gen 7. At the top end, we had Crysis, a game so advanced that as we'll see, it still kept pace with games 4-5 years later. If anything, this is the inflection point of where these massive increases kinda came to an end, and things became more incremental. Things stagnated in gen 7 for a while after this, and it would take a good 5 years for the industry to really move forward. 

Best games: 10

Industry as a whole: 6

2002-2007 best games: 10

2002-2007 industry as a whole: 8

2008

 2007 was so good 2008 felt kinda mid. I guess fallout 3 deserves scale points, and it did feel like a big improvement over say, oblivion just 2 years before, but still, looked pretty average for the time. Far Cry 2 and Haze looked good, but nothing touched Crysis. Really, this is where graphics started stagnating. Things were SO GOOD in 2007 that it would take a few years to top them.

Best games: 0

Industry as a whole: 1

2009

 More of the same. Btw, I never liked how fear 2 looked. yeah it had more detail but it just looked worse. Kinda like how modern games often look worse than previous counterparts. Killzone was somewhat impressive, but still, it was a console game. Nothing we hadnt seen before by this point. I think by this point, we can just celebrate reaching such a high standard of gaming and just ride the wave for a few years.

Best games: 0

Industry as a whole: 0

2010

 2010 really had some bangers on PC that kinda raised the bar, but nothing really exceeded Crysis. Yes, BF Bad Company 2 looked amazing, much better than 2/2142 but not crysis level. Metro 2033 was close to crysis level, but yeah, it didnt surpass it. A decent year for the industry, but Crysis remained the winner.

Best games: 0

Industry as a whole: 3

2011

 2011 is where I feel like the world finally started catching up with Crysis. Crysis 2 arguably had similar levels of graphics as Crysis 1, leading some to say Crysis 2 kept the crown. Battlefield 3 was amazing...but again did it really beat Crysis? Im inclined to say no. But it's very close though. This was the year the world started catching up with Crysis.

Best games: 0

Industry as a whole: 4

2012

2012, if anything, felt like a bit of a downgrade. We had Far Cry 3, which showed that we had not in fact kept up with Crysis. Dont get me wrong, it looked great, but Crysis...man. What a game. I mean, FC3 was more fun, Crysis was boring AF but it LOOKED good. Still between 2011 and 2012 we started seeing what Gen 8 would normalize. 

Oh, and planetside 2, mediocre game graphically, but OMFG THAT SCALE. It mightve been unoptimized and crushed CPUs, but yeah, you try sticking 2000 people on a single map and having them fight it out. So that deserves points for scale.

Best games: 0

Industry as a whole: 2 

So...where do we stand?

Well...Crysis still remains top dog by this point. The industry stagnated...BUT....we did see a proliferation of games that provided an outline of what gen 8 would become in the 2010-2012 era. Console gamers didnt see it because they had scaled down versions, but on PC...yeah, a lot of those titles were looking amazing toward the end, and 2007 standards were becoming dated. 

2007-2012 best games: 0

2007-2012 industry as a whole: 3

2013

 Like with every generation, we start creeping up to it with a few years of late last gen bangers. PC really got to enjoy the good version of the above games. The consoles had their versions, but they were getting sub-low graphics at 30 FPS. But here, we had the PS4 and the Xbox One really take the level of graphics we started seeing on PC and normalized it. By this point, every game looked like Crysis 1. Every game ran at 720P+ and up 30-60 FPS. However, unlike with previous gens, we had a "cross gen" period where a lot of games came to both the 360/PS3 and also the XB1/PS4. So you'd still get scaled down ports followed by the good versions for next gen. Rather than just drop the last gen and expect an upgrade, it became a phase in period. 

Still, we had substantial movement.

And here, we finally say Crysis dethroned with...Crysis 3. While I dont think Crysis 3 had the same staying power as crysis 1, it still represented the year where without a doubt, Crysis was finally dethroned. 

Best games: 5

Industry as a whole: 4

2014

 Actually I take it back, 2014 did have a lot of next gen exclusives. Metro last night, wolfenstein the new order, far cry 4, titanfall. I'd argue metro looked better than crysis 3, but in the way doom 3 looked better than half life 2 the decade before. Corridor shooter vs open world. Still, we did have beautiful game play from far cry 4. Wolfenstein looked solid, titanfall too. Really, this yeah really set the bar for Gen 8. Kind of the "1997/2002/2007 moment" looking back at it. 

Best games: 2

Industry as a whole: 5

2015

 Star Wars Battlefront mightve been a mid game but looked amazing. Witcher 3 looked beautiful, and Fallout 4 really was a step up from Fallout 3/New Vegas. Better than Crysis 3 though? Eh...yes and no. Crysis 3 had a lot more going on with it I think, although battlefront was a bit more cinematic. Like, it's looking a little better, but it's also a lot more "dead" if that makes sense. I mean, the 2015 games might look a little better, but it's not a clear win. Still, once again, decent movement within the industry.

Best games: 2

Industry as a whole: 2

2016

So this is the year the cross gen period ended and we got the PS4 pro and Xbox One X. These improved graphics even more, while staying compatible with the base consoles. Considering the transition period from gen 7 to gen 8, I feel like early adopters kinda got burned as the pro versions were a lot faster, equivalent to modern gaming PCs at the time, packing GTX 1060 level graphics. 

We got Doom 2016, which looked amazing for its time. Obviously best on PC and those new console refreshes. Battlefield 1 improved on battlefront's graphics and looked super gritty and detailed. And yeah, this is one of the last years I was TRULY impressed by graphical improvements. 

Best games: 5

Industry as a whole: 2

 2017

 Battlefront II brought BF1 level graphics to battlefront. Wolfenstein 2 brought doom 2016 level visuals to wolfenstein. It was somewhat of an improvement, but by this point we're clearly seeing diminishing returns. Like, the early gen period and then 2016 set the bar so much that once again it felt like the industry was stagnating again. 

Best games: 2

Industry as a whole: 3 

Looking at the 5 year, I think we really saw some decent advances as gen 8 showed how good games can really look. While the effects happen at the high end somewhat (where Crysis still arguably held the throne in 2012), the real gains were in the industry as a whole, where we fully transitioned to gen 8, and got to what we can consider "modern gaming" IMO (in a good way). 

Your typical 2017 game blew Crysis out of the water, and yeah, gen 8 really did wonders for the industry. At the high end, games began looking like fricking movies to me. It was crazy the level of detail they had by this point.

2012-2017 best games: 7

2012-2017 industry as a whole: 8

2018

2018 brought RTX to the world...which did F all for gaming for the most part early on. Represented the end of affordable GPUs, but yeah. 

Games like BF5 looked amazing, RTX or not, although we're clearly getting to a point of diminishing returns.  Other games looked decent too, but again, diminishing returns.

Best games: 3

Industry as a whole: 2

2019

 Metro exodus looked great, but once again, otherwise diminishing returns. 

Best games: 2

Industry as a whole: 0

2020

2020 was the start of gen 9 and with it we got cyberpunk. The game looked amazing and is the one case of ray tracing actually shown to be worth it, but it still looked next gen even without it. Still..it didnt look AMAZING AMAZING. Like, again, diminishing returns. I had become accustomed to fancy next gen graphics where these just became....more of the same. And honestly, it was COVID, no one could afford a next gen system despite series X and PS6 coming out, and early gen seemed to mostly be remasters of previous gen games to bring them up to the level PC gamers had been playing them for years.

Best games: 4

Industry as a whole: 1

 2021

 2021 seemed like a rather mid year. It had some decent titles, but let's face it, stuff like BF2042 arguably looked WORSE than BF5 and even BF1. Halo infinite looked decent but not cyberpunk level. Far Cry 6 looked decent but not worlds better than 5. Again, gen 9 seemed to mostly be like, late gen 8 but upscaled and with better lighting. Nothing in the industry was particularly amazing.

Best games: 0

Industry as a whole: 1

2022

 2022 did have some decent releases like callisto protocol but all in all I also found this year to be kind of mid graphically. Callisto protocol looked great but it never really blew cyberpunk out of the water. And the industry as a whole...again, it just felt like gen 8+. 

 Best games: 0

Industry as a whole: 1 

2017-2022 best games: 3

2017-2022 industry as a whole: 1 

Yeah this is where we start seeing a problem of diminishing returns. Games DO look better, but outside of a handful like cyberpunk RDR2 and BF5, they dont look amazing. And honestly, it just feels like a continuation of that late gen 8 vibe. To be fair, we were still in the cross gen era, but yeah. It kind of reminds me of that 2007-2012 era where we reached a level of graphics it would take years to surpass. And by this point, these graphics are so proliferated through the industry that I can no longer say we really got the massive gains we did in previous eras. I mean, this has been a bit of a struggle for a while by this point. We would hit a plateau, stick there for a while, and then get another jump, followed by a plateau. Some of it is caused by console generations and the loss of the true "crysis" style game, but even then, the shift from late gen 8 to gen 9 just wasn't that significant. Like, it was very gradual and not super noticeable. 

2023

 So this is where gen 9 REALLY kicked off. I mean, we were finally in the post COVID era, the cross gen era was functionally ending. And gen 9 is officially in full swing by this point. And we did get some pretty titles this year. Avatar frontiers of pandora, alan wake 2, but did it really beat cyberpunk? I mean cyberpunk is the new "crysis." I guess alan wake 2 looks cinematically better, but cyberpunk still has the scale. I'll give it to alan wake 2, but still. I think 2023 is better known for the proliferation of gen 9 graphics in the game industry, rather than it being a truly breakthrough moment. Definitely better than 2022 graphically. Again, crossgen is officially over by this point, you need the fancy new hardware, you need the new console. Your 1060 or PS4 pro aint doing it any more. But still. I dont think it really hits as hard as previous gens did. Impressive year, but not amazingly impressive, especially at the top end.

Best games: 3

Industry as a whole: 3

2024

 Another "full swing" year, with some graphically impressive titles, but nothing that really broke barriers on an insane amount. We get ray tracing mandatory titles for the first time (indiana jones and the great circle) but not gonna lie, is this a huge improvement over say, BF1/BF5/metro exodus? Eh, I'm inclined to disagree. Again, for all the hype ray tracing gets, I feel like outside of cyberpunk it's not really helping gaming all too much. I mean, that's the reality of it. Ray tracing is hyped as the new big thing, but it's not massively improving visuals of games. It's more making things easier for devs...who then dont optimize and expect people to just power through poorly optimized games. 

I think the big problem is when games already look like movies, and we've had movie level graphics since around 2016-2019 or so, being like "yeah but let's do that BETTER" tends to just lead to diminishing returns. Dont get me wrong, we're still getting progress, but it doesn't feel anywhere near as substantial as before. 

Best games: 0

Industry as a whole: 2

2025

Doom the dark ages and BF6 are the current new graphically insane titles in my book. BF6 finally looks better than BF5, but it does have some unwanted compromises like blur when you zoom in. Doom the dark ages looks marginally better than 2016 as previously discussed, but let's be honest, the 5 year averages aren't amazing at this point, and the 10 year ones aren't much better honestly. Again, 2016 is the tipping point where the best hit that "good enough" level and now everything looks that good or a bit better. If anything, I hate how poorly optimized games are, how ray tracing is forced while it doesnt seem to add much, and how now to compensate we need to upscale leading to blurry experiences. When accounting for price, it just feels like gaming is one step forward, 2 steps back. And now we're talking a new console is 2027-2028? Are you kidding me? Just...no....

Best games: 0

Industry as a whole: 2

With that said, let's do a 2 year average from 2022-2025. 

2022-2025 best games: 3

2022-2025 industry as a whole: 3

This era gets saved somewhat from the ending of the cross gen era, but still, gains over time are becoming marginal. I mean, you could go back to any year back in the 1990s, and outside of the most mediocre ones (like 1994-1995), you would probably get more progress than in any 5 year period from around 2016-2017 onward. 

Seriously, if I went back to 2017 and compared to 2025, we're talking like....

Best games: 5

Industry as a whole: 5

I mean, there is a difference, but that used to be like a very good single year back in the day like 2004 or 2014. not even like 1997, I mean, the shift to 3D was just an insane level of progress you cant possibly replicate. But yeah. From 2016-2017 onward, it's all been incremental, and it feels like that awkward 2007 -2013 era where everything felt mostly samey. heck, at least on PC we saw significant improvements year on year for much of that, even if crysis wasnt dethroned. It's like 2007-2013...as a console user. Yeah...

Again, this is why I feel jaded about the future of gaming. We're reaching a point where graphics are a matter of diminishing returns, most gains come from technologies that are one step forward and two steps back, and we're facing a very obvious affordability crisis as inflationary pressures are driving up the cost of new hardware while games only look maybe moderately better than they did 7-10 years ago. It feels like we're reaching "peak gaming", the end of history, where we have better tech than ever, but because the industry is so driven by creating new wants and needs for no reason it feels like we're being coerced into super expensive upgrades that barely offer anything to the average gamer. Rather than consumer electronics being reasonably affordable, the cost is going up, while we're not seeing clear gains, and the upgrade cycle feels driven more by planned/forced obsolescence through imposed software limitations than by an actual need for more raw power. 

THe last thing we need are fancier consoles with prettier graphics. This is just rampant consumerism driven by the wealthy and their insatiable profit drive than by an actual need for consumers. Meanwhile gaming suffers from these late stage capitalist impulses. Again, capitalism just gets to a point eventually where it's just creating artificial needs to keep the money flowing, than actually providing value to consumers. The system can't accept a world where consumers are happy with what they have because then they wont spend as much, so again, just gonna keep an artificial cycle of consumption going forever even though it clearly doesnt make sense.

This is why gaming sucks in the 2020s. Everything is monetized, everything is expensive, and the end user experience is no longer improving a lot. Back in the day, the rapid upgrade cycles were needed because graphics really would advance at a pace where every 5 years, the landscape would be unrecognizeable compared to the previous 5. This continued until around 2007. Then we started hitting stagnation, we saw the expansion of the console life cycle and a levelling of system requirements, but eventually we did move on again, we got some periods of rapid improvement in the mid 2010s as we finally got over the crysis hump, but again, now we're on the cyberpunk hump and tech is once again, at a relative standstill. This doesnt mean games dont look beautiful. But that's the thing. They've looked beautiful since around 2016. Everything has been diminishing returns since then, especially once we got past cyberpunk, which is the new de facto crysis. I honestly think things will continue like this until 2030 and we wont see massive improvements until some time past that. Maybe gen 10 will bring a new proliferation of better graphics. I doubt it though. It looks like it's gonna be prohibitively expensive, we're gonna be weighed down by yet another cross generational period, and we wont see major gains from what we have until probably 2030-2031. And who knows what it will cost? And will it even look THAT good? Again, it all remains to be seen. 

But yeah.  If we visualize these improvements over time, we get this. I admit I adjusted a lot of the scores for the cumulative to hit 100 after the best games just hit 100 naturally, but it really does serve as a metric of relative improvement over time. If 100 is the standard for 2025, we saw pretty strong growth among the best until 2007, where things just stagnated for a while. We hit 72% of 2025 graphics levels then by this quantification. The industry is at 64%, but it matches 2007 levels by 2011 which checks out roughly. We see more growth through the 2010s, but by 2017-2018,we're hitting 90% of 2025 levels. Which is why things are diminishing returns since. Growth in graphics has been relatively subjective since, despite hardware and software requirements still going up. To be fair, those requirements dont go up as linearly as before either, but still. 

 

 

But yeah the fact that by the mid 2000s we had games look arguably 60% as good as today is wild. We had as much progress in about 10-12 years as we did in the subsequent 20 or so.  

I mean let's really think about this. 

1992-1997:  20% best games gain, 24% cumulative gain

1997-2002: 23% best games gain, 20% cumulative gain

2002-2007:  30% best games gain, 20% cumulative gain

2007-2012: 0% best games gain, 10% cumulative gain

2012-2017: 16% best games gain, 16% cumulative gain

2017-2022: 9% best games gain, 5% cumulative gain

2022-present: 3% best games gain, 5% cumulative gain

Yeah, that puts it even more clearly than the chart does. We had pretty strong, linear gains until 2007ish....and then from there things drop off. We see a decent jump from 2012-2017 as we finally get over the crysis hump and into gen 8, but yeah. Once we hit that peak gen 8 graphics wise, things seem to drop off again. 

Put another way:

25% mark: 1998 (6 years)

50% mark: 2004-2005 (6-7 years)

75% mark: 2013 (8-9 years)

100% mark: 2025 (12 years) 

Again, we dont need better graphics, we need to make gaming cheaper, or at least keep it affordable. if that means stagnation, so be it, we're stagnating anyway.  At this rate, for us to hit 125%, we'll need to probably go another 15 years or so until 2040. With us hitting 150% by around 2060ish. Yikes. And that would represent a general jump from Crysis 1 graphics level until NOW. It will take 35 years to do what we've done in 18 qualitatively if things continue slowing down like this. We dont need better graphics. We need more affordable hardware and games.

 Put yet another way, let's look at console generations going by the peak years, given the breaks between them aren't common. By this, I mean we go by what I defined as the big defining years, which may be a couple years after they start. Basically by this point, the phase in period is mostly over and games are being designed primarily for those consoles.

Gen 4-5 (1992-1997): 24%

Gen 5-6 (1997-2002): 20%

Gen 6-7 (2002-2007): 20%

Gen 7-8 (2007-2014): 19%

Gen 8-9 (2014-2023): 14%

Remainder (2023-2025): 3%

Here things look a LITTLE more distributed over time, but keep in mind, gen 8 kinda had 2 waves of improvement. The early gen gains were substantial, yes, but the second half of the generation felt like a mini generation in itself. 

If I went by 2016 instead of 2014:

Gen 7-8 (2007-2016): 23%

Gen 8-9 (2016-2023): 10%

But yeah, it varies either way. Yeah yeah, we get it, incremental gains since 2016, I made my point, yada yada. I just wanted to define it by console generation, to really explain the magnitude in difference between previous ones and the current one. Again, this can be hard to define since what defines the console generation? is it launch? but the launch year, not everyone goes out to buy them right away and there is typically a bit of a slow transition over time. The best games could be another metric, but honestly, that has its own issues. Because I'd consider Crysis a de facto gen 8 game, and half life a de facto gen 6. So yeah. I went by 1997 because gen 5 was in full swing by then, 2002, because same to gen 6, 2007 because same to gen 7, gen 8 could go by either 2014 or 2016, as I said, there seem to be two jumps there. Gen 9 didnt seem real until 2023 I'd say, given the generation's weak start and how early gen 9 and late gen 8 kinda blend together. Honestly, that whole 2016-2022 period feels like a distinct gen in itself honestly. But I digress. Rambling. 

No leftists, Gaza was likely not a deciding factor in the dems' loss

 So....I see a lot of leftists grilling the dem autopsy for "not once mentioning gaza." I know it's common for leftists to try to make everything about their pet causes (and im arguably guilty of this myself, although i have a lot more sensibility and awareness on this topic),  but I honestly dont think gaza had a huge impact. i know that OTHER autopsy mentioned gaza, but i thought that WAS the dems' autopsy at the time. Anyway, my own take on gaza was this. It was a factor that may have depressed turnout, but to the best of my knowledge....I dont think it was a deciding factor. 

Most voters were pissed off about the economy/inflation above all else. And Harris just didnt seem like she offered anything differently from Biden. Not saying trump was the right option, we're seeing THAT play out right now, BUT...people tend to vote against the party in power, remember? We discussed that recently? And that was the democrats. So people blamed the democrats for rising inflation and harris didnt offer any convincing policies to fix the issue. And to be fair, navigating inflation is tricky. This is why i was willing to give biden/harris a lot of grace on the subject, despite not being enthused for them myself. I kinda realized that if the GOP gains power and then the inflation doesnt continue (which, under a competent administration, it wouldn't), we could very well have a carter/reagan type situation on our hands. But yeah.  Dems really were  in a tough spot and both biden and harris didnt navigate that with grace.  

Past inflation/the economy, the next set of issues were immigration and crime that really doomed harris. The republicans did a good job convincing the public that under the democrats we were experiencing an immigration/crime wave like we've never experienced before, and that this was a huge problem. With crime, crime did go up under biden, but only because it went down in 2020 during covid lockdowns and 2021 was a return to normal. Immigration had similar issues, but we also had a lot of refugees come over looking for asylum, and border patrol caught a lot of people, and despite us being legally required by international law to respond to asylum claims properly, a lot of ignorant people were just all SEND THEM BACK! and seem to want all that cruel  deterrence stuff trump is doing. Even now, trump's strongest issue is arguably his immigration policy. Dont get me wrong, he's negative on it, but a disturbing amount of people seem to approve of the psychopathy he's engaging in and he's still among his best issues. 

Honestly, I'm not sure what we could do here. People just were living in an alternative reality here, and idk how we are supposed to convince people something isnt an issue when they perceive it that way. This is a fundamental education problem driven by things like anecdotal experience and news telling them its an issue rather than it actually being an issue. It takes an educated mind to see past that stuff and sadly we have an education problem in this country. It's a huge reason the left is at such a disadvantage.

Democrats had some issues going for them. Democracy being a big one, SCOTUS being a big one too apparently, and of course abortion rights, but those didnt draw the necessary levels of support to the polls. 

Gaza was at best a mid level issue and if anything conservatives seemed more fired up on foreign policy, and their foreign policy is that Harris wasnt pro israel ENOUGH. So....the impact of a more strongly pro palestine position helping is questionable. Even if some leftists sat out the election because of it, between the dismal primary results of the write in campaign (which helped kill support for actual candidates like marianne williamson, not that it would've mattered since like 90% of dem voters voted for Biden anyway) progressives were shown to be a minor, if not nonexistent factor this election cycle. Really, Im not saying they  werent a factor at all, but they werent a statistically significant one IMO. They did not swing the election by themselves.

And oh, because centrists love to trot out this one, neither were trans issues. A lot of centrists are acting like those "kamala harris is for they/them" ads were a huge deal, they werent, the first link above showed that trans issues  were literally at the bottom and probably one of the least motivating factors of all factors. I aint saying we shouldnt avoid cringey unpopular stances that the overwhelming majority of voters are against, but....let's face it, anyone calling to throw trans people under the bus wholesale needs to shut up as well. 

I mean, I aint saying my takes are authoritative, I mean, this is primarily an opinion blog, but the fact that I can put together a better autopsy in like half an hour than the dems did really shows how bad the dems are at their job. And yes, while palestine deserves a mention, as it is A factor, and one often cited, it was a relatively minor one overshadowd by several far more significant ones. Dems had an enthusiasm problem. That much is obvious. But independents also voted against us, primarily because they were pissed off everything was so expensive and they cant afford to live properly. And if anything is the lesson to be learned from 2024, it's that 1) the dems need to do a better job appealing to people on the economy, and 2) a lot of the voter base lives in an alternative reality constructed by conservatives where brown people are an everpresent threat to normie americans' lives...even if they aren't. 

If we wanna go beyond that, I'd talk about the dems foisting an 80+ year old nominee on us that no one actually wanted, despite high dem primary support (alternatives werent well known and most just fell in line....dems manufactured consent around him arguably), and then when it was shown he was lacking the baseline competence to do the job properly due to his advanced age (still better than the other guy too old to do his job, as evidenced now), we got his vice president, who was more of the same and voters didnt want that.

Elections are won by enthusiasm, and the deciding factors of election cycles primarily work against the party in charge. While it's not uncommon for incumbents to pull it off and win a second term despite these factors, Biden barely won in 2020 and the dems lacked the sufficient enthusiasm and independent support to clear that hurdle the second time as republican enthusiasm remained high, while democratic enthusiasm dropped off a cliff. While 2024 couldve been much worse had Biden remained the nominee, harris still failed to secure enough votes to win it for democrats. Some of this was due to factors beyond her control, but some of it was just...being another moderate who didnt offer much in a time where voters wanted change. 

That's the true lesson of 2024. If we wanna be relatively objective about it, that's how I view it. 

And then there's climate change...

 *sigh*, sorry to continue being a bummer tonight, but I've seen several streamers I follow talking about the so called "Super El Nino" happening this year. I've heard all kinds of apocalyptic crap about this, how this could trigger a global famine, to how it could cause the southwest to run out of water, and while I asked a weather obsessed friend about it they didn't seem to have strong opinions on any of that happening, he did mention the 1877 one where a famine did happen. 

Either way, it did lead to a larger discussion on climate change on vaush's stream tonight. And uh...yeah...dystopian future. Look, I'm not gonna say the worst of the worst outcomes is gonna happen, it could, I'm not an expert and aint gonna be inclined to give into hysteria, but vaush has a point here. We humans are so fixated on our consumerism and just trying to work to survive, that we're not thinking about the big picture. We are messing with climate patterns that quite literally sustain the very economies we revere so deeply. And we have a choice, we can either do things sustainably and live the way that ends up being perpetually, or we can push our environment to the point of collapse, and then end up living far worse in the future. We are doing the latter. And idk where exactly all the big tipping points are....some suggest they could be in the next 15 years or so, which is really really bad. but we are playing with fire.

Really, we should have been on this. Some knew about this fifty years ago. Like people were sounding the alarms back in the 1970s. And what did we do? Ignore all warnings and just keep charging ahead. If anything, remember the scarcity thing? We REALLY dont wanna give up oil. Even though we should. Reagan went drill baby drill, republicans ignored the issue due to religious fundamentalism and big oil money, and yeah, we let it fester. Democrats refused to act on it. Bernie wanted a green new deal. Biden wanted build back better, which is IMO more sensible given the 30 year timeline we had at the time, but then we only got the inflation reduction act and Trump rolled that back. So now we're way behind again. Because republicans just won't fricking let progress happen. And then they'll attribute the extreme weather conditions to god punishing us for letting gay people get married or something. 

But yeah, this is bad. We are destroying our environment with our economic model, and because it isnt a destruction that causes backlash all at once, we just keep acting like it's normal. Well, as this century progresses, the conditions are gonna get progressively worse until we DO get pushback. And again, this process might start in the next 15 years or so. Hell if super el nino is that bad, it could start this year even. We could see mass famine or displacements in the worst case scenario. Idk if that will happen, but given the fertilizer situation with iran compounding things...eh....maybe? 

That's the thing about capitalism. Without it, the modern world isnt possible at all, BUT...unless you practice it with a sane level of moderation, and clearly control for the worst aspects of it, well...it sucks. it enslaves the populace, and yeah, it's literally destroying the planet for us. We might look back at our world 100 years from now like wtf were we thinking. We had it all and we blew it. If only we decided to embrace a more sustainable version of the model rather than going in with growth at all costs, we could've had a utopia. But scarcity might continue to exist and be WORSE in the future BECAUSE we didnt conserve now. Seriously, if we like...stopped working so much now, we could have a reasonable living standard with a short work week. 100 years from now, we might not be able to grow enough food to feed everyone because the climate changed so much. We might have water refugees fleeing the southwest as it dries up. New Orleans might be in the ocean, as will other coastal cities. And because people are stupid, they'll just continue to assume that that's just how the world is because of sin and we gotta get right with god or some crap. Like holy crap, no, you stupid people, you gotta get right with the environment. Sure, we can use resources from nature to enhance our lives. But that stuff is finite, and if we overuse it and abuse it, we're just risking a catastrophe. Think of a fish tank that has too many fish and gets too filled with poop or runs out of oxygen or something. Yeah. We're at risk of doing that to ourselves. This planet is our fish tank. 

And I know elon musk talks about colonizing mars, we aint fricking colonizing mars. We dont have the tech for it, and if we cant even stave off disaster on our own planet, how can be change a planet with a radically incompatible climate to be compatable with us? The idea is nonsensical. This isnt like starfield where humans are adaptable to a wide variety of environments, but earth is destroyed because of slipspace travel or something. The earth is our only home, we evolved to live on it, and we're messing with systems that are changing it. And if we change it too much, we die. Regardless, this altered earth is still going to be massively more compatible with us than the moon, or mars. Like, think of it this way. The earth is the only planet we know of that supports life. And it's the only planet that likely supports OUR life. We're MADE for this earth, and this earth is made for us. We evolved together. Despite this, we've had five mass extinctions are various forms of "climate change' caused a mass die off of life. The last one was the comet that killed the dinosaurs. And we're working on #6. Seriously, thinking beyond mere lifetimes, and thinking in terms of eons, this might be the next mass extinction event. Caused by us, and our stupidity. This warming of the planet we're causing? Yeah, we might be killing ourselves and the ecosystem off! Seriously. You ever see those memes about like the environment with the house of cards? We dont care about the cards, were at the top. But okay, what happens when enough cards get pulled out of the card house? The whole thing collapses. What do you think we're doing now? And even with all that destruction, a post sixth mass extinction earth will STILL likely be more habitable to current humans than any other planet in this solar system. The idea that we can compensate for our own stupidity here by colonizing the stars is insane. Other planets need to have proper levels of oxygen content, water, the ability to grow food, a good climate, an electromagnetic barrier to shield us from the sun, the right amount of gravity, etc. Any of these variables being off means...we cant live there. And what we're doing is shifting our variables by relatively small amounts that STILL might kill us, but we can somehow overcome much larger fundamental incompatibilities by expanding to the stars? Are we crazy? What crazy pills is elon taking here? Wait, hold on, I know, its ketamine. And being an out of touch billionaire. Those two things can make anyone that grossly out of touch.

But yeah. It's all so stupid. Im not saying we gotta give up all capitalism, or never engage in any consumerism at all. Just cut back somewhat, embrace a world with less work, rethink our energy systems, how we transport people around a bit, etc. We still have time to stop the absolute worst outcomes from occurring. I dont think we have a great window in that regard. As I said, it might only be 15-25 years or something by this point, based on some computer models saying that our economies might be screwed by 2040, and by 2050, I know that's the IPCC's timeline for carbon neutrality. But yeah. All I know is what we're doing isn't sustainable, and future generations are gonna HATE us for what we're doing to them now. Well, that's if they're smart enough to realize what we're doing. They might not. Not just because of climate change leading to a dark age, but also the fact that the wealthy and powerful rely on religious indoctrination to ensure most people are too stupid to realize it. 

Which...to future generations who may or may not read this...yeah. That's why we don't. Our economy is run by the ultra wealthy, and most of us are too stupid to do anything about it. Our economy keeps us in a state of constant scarcity where most of us are working too hard and struggling to survive to care. And those wealthy enough to not struggle dont wanna give up their living standards to accommodate changes. Capitalism keeps us from doing anything. And yeah, we literally got all of these crazy religious people who take the bible literally and think climate change cant happen based on that. Just so you know. Because Im sure a lot of you guys will be like "WHAT ARE WE THINKING?!" basically that. Climate change is an issue for "the future" if it happens at all. We just assume we'll fix it and it'll all just go away, or oh well, it wont be us who deals with it. That's future generations' problem. And again, religious fundamentalism ensures that many will just deny it's even a thing. "Why would god make a world we can destroy?" Yeah...

Anyway, enough ranting for tonight. I just wanted to cover that given everyone is freaking out about super el nino possible causing a mass famine next year. And maybe it can happen, maybe it wont. Im not an expert. But yeah. This just...isn't good. Anyone who denies climate change is a fool. Our weather has been erratic AF this year and it's all climate change. Heck, it's been erratic for years now. ANd yes, summers are hotter than they were when I was a kid. And winters are typically less cold and less snowy. This is all happening. But people have their heads in the sand on it. 

Why it's hard to get excited for "the future" these days

 So, I keep getting spammed with these annoying starlink commercials where it's like some old guy talking about "the future" and how "it's hard to predict the future, but I'm sure it's gonna be fantastic" or something like that.

My knee jerk reaction to the commercial is "F U Elon Musk"...but...honestly, it's kind of a frustrating realization to realize that I'm no longer the optimist I used to be about "the future." I was a more OG technofuturist. I've ALWAYS liked the future, and the idea of new technology, like pocketable computers (smartphones), and flying cars, and robots that do all of the work for us, but it seems like unless you're some ###hole tech CEO, the masses have lost their enthusiasm for the future, and so have I in a way.

I mean, this is kind of an expansion of what we were talking about the other day about how college grads are booing tech CEOs going on about how AI is changing everything. I should LOVE AI and LOVE the future. But I also can't blame people for being pissed at this tech for taking their jobs. And it pains me to actually sympathize with literal luddites, but here's the thing. All this "future" stuff is all well and good, but a lot of the time, it's fundamentally incompatible with our existing social institutions. Capitalism is a system based on scarcity. it's based on the perpetuation of scarcity. It's based on manipulating peoples' wants and needs to pressure them to work to produce more stuff, while simultaneously monetizing the crap out of things. And I think that's what kills "futurism" for a lot of us. Capitalism just ruins everything. 

Now, I'm gonna preface this again by saying, I'm NOT a full on leftist. Capitalism is the best system we have at this current stage of our development, and it will need to be necessary well into the future. Even with these futuristic sci fi aesthetics, we're probably gonna need to rely on some level of capitalism for that stuff to work. After all, it is capitalism that spurs technological development. yes, the state can help direct resources, but between a capitalist economy where these ###hole CEOs innovate to make a profit and a state run economy where state bureaucrats have to be the ones to make things happen and often don't, the decentralized structure of capitalism is gonna be better. Obviously we should have some mix of both, and I am for a mix of both, but yeah. Capitalism is necessary. You do socialism and society seems stuck in a perpetual time warp of the era that the socialism was implemented in, which is why most socialist countries (minus modern day china, itself a hybrid economy) end up looking like they're perpetually stuck in the 1950s. Because guess when many of them implemented socialism? Exactly.

But at the same time, capitalism, especially the more purist forms of capitalism we've trended toward since the mid 20th century, well...it seems like no matter how technologically advance things become, they still suck. We talk about robots taking the jobs, but we don't ask "well how will we take care of people when robots take the jobs?" We just talk about "creating new jobs", which itself is dystopian, and output the burden on individuals to sink or swim. Meanwhile systemically, we have a "war on normal people" while main streets are turning into ghost towns, major metropolises do look futuristic but then rent is insane amounts and it's difficult to get anywhere because high population density, car centric infrastructure, and jobism aren't really compatible with each other. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. 

Smartphones give us access to unlimited amounts of information, but then much of it is paywalled, and those phones become "leashes" for our employers to get ahold of us at any time. Despite all the labor saving devices, our lives are as fast and busy as ever and it's stressing us out. We can't afford things. When we can, they break on us because of planned obsolescence, yeah, we literally make stuff designed to break or go obsolete to keep people on a never ending cycle of consumption. Tech CEOs start going on about "the future" but it's never something where we're like "WOW WE WANT THAT" but rather its forced on us. AI has some uses, but it's not THAT amazing of a technology, and yet CEOs talk about "the future" where they sell "intelligence" to us on tap. We build datacenters that spike our electricity costs and suck up our water and create massive levels of pollution for this tech, which many of us dont want, and we're always told we're gonna be "left behind" if we dont embrace it. And while being "left behind" sounds like a blessing given the modern context, because they control the infrastructure and the institutions we depend on, we end up being forced to embrace it or being "left behind" literally means using old deprecated tech that doesnt work any more and not being able to do our jobs and getting fired.  

On the energy thing. We should embrace green energy. We should want "free energy", but the wealthy dont want that. They want us on oil and gas because it's energy they can control us with. If they cant charge us for it, then it's a bad idea, capitalism is designed to create constant dependence on the system, it's not freedom like it's sold as, it's a cycle of dependence sold to us AS freedom.

Btw...that's the core problem. Capitalism can't become too efficient at meeting peoples' needs, or it might obsolete itself. This cycle of dependence was created intentionally. It was created a hundred years ago, ironically by FDR, who I normally see as a hero. But in this case, he was a villain. The wealthy and powerful feared a society in which people didn't have to work, and had no desire to consume. They feared capitalism would automate itself out of existence. So instead they created consumerism to keep us on a cycle of work and consumption. ANd then as all that new deal stuff was rolled back half a century later, we went back to the gilded age more or less. We're in a new gilded age. And that's the problem, and this system was designed to enslave us.

And in this system, what are we getting from "the future?" We're getting mass surveillance as palantir decides to spy on us en masse and create massive blackmail databases on us. We're getting robot dogs that kill people. We're getting the president of the united states declaring people with "anti capitalist" beliefs as potential terrorists and putting us on watch lists. Technology is becoming dystopian, rather than utopian.

Rather than living in like star trek, or the jetsons, or futurama, we're getting something more like say, total recall, where the martian government kept people paying for air to keep them in a state of constant desperation to work for them. It didnt matter if there was tech that would auto terraform the planet into an earth like state, the control and desperation that scarcity created was the point. And they'd kill anyone who actually tried to end their control over people. And that's kinda where our society is. We invade foreign countries, force capitalism and dependence on them, bomb them if they disagree with us, and now we're trying to mass surveil people. Given trump's alliance with big tech, we're heading toward like a form of techno fascism or techno feudalism, than anything star trek like. We're heading toward a future like cyberpunk 2077 where people are in a constant state of poverty and desperation while corporations control everything. Basically, we're not going toward the good futures, we're going toward the bad futures.

Look, i love the aesthetics of futurism and the whole idea of the future being all sci fi technology that makes our lives better, but I'm kind of realizing this is full on incompatible with our social systems. It doesn't matter how great the future is on paper, as long as we dont deal with our underlying social institutions, it's gonna suck, and in some cases, this new tech might make our lives worse. Robots that do all the work dont matter if now we have to figure out how millions of people get paid, because our social institutions are designed around work. And btw, I do have answers on that, at least in the transition, but will we implement them? Lol nope. Because the rich people control everything and they dont wanna give up anything to the peasants. So they're destroying the fabric of society, won't allow the proper changes to make lives better for the masses, and stuff gets worse.

And did I forget to mention how dystopian everything is and how we're on a constant cycle of paying for things that are supposed to make our lives better, but in reality just make things harder and more complicated, and how we're ruining the environment, and how we're creating tools of mass surveillance and oppression? 

Yeah...

Like, again, I wanna believe in "the future", but until we start fixing our social institutions, we're going toward the more dystopian science fiction worlds, not the actual good ones. 

Defending the public option and dumping on McMorrow's weak answers

 So, Emma Vigeland got to interview Mallory McMcmorrow and MAN that didn't go very well. McMorrow just comes off so bad in practice. Like, she's terrible as a politician. On public option over M4A she went into like incoherent defenses about how republicans in office would F it up, when they F it up anyway and yeah. She just comes off as weak and fake. 

With that said, I wanna try to explain how I'd defend a public option. My answers don't translate to McMcmorrow because im not a weak moderate trying to masquerade as a progressive, I am a progressive in my own right, but yeah.

Defending McMorrow's point better than she did

 Okay, so this isn't my primary reason to be pro public option, but I'll put it this way. If you go M4A, you put all your eggs in one basket. And it's the government basket, meaning if the government screws up, healthcare struggles for many. Conservatives claim that government healthcare can lead to rationing and death panels. It doesn't have to, but imagine DOGE getting their hands on it and cutting it. They WOULD be the types to just start killing off the old and sick because it's too expensive, while simultaneously claiming that government healthcare cant work. it's bad enough when the GOP guts the ACA or a public option, but imagine if this is our ONLY healthcare option. The whole country is screwed. Currently there are prohibitions on taxpayer funds to be used on things like abortions. Abortions are healthcare. How can we maintain access to reproductive healthcare for women if the government runs the whole system and the right is willing to enforce their twisted ideology through the government? They could effectively just ban abortion on the federal level because the government is the only game in town.

I mean, maybe private options should at least exist. We both want universal healthcare. We just differ in what it looks like. It's fine if we have medicare for all who want it, to use a term some moderate public option supporters have used, but there is still room for private markets in healthcare, and I'm not sure a one size fits all approach works. 

Really, that's all that needs to be said. It's that simple. Basically, I argued McMorrow's point better than McMorrow.

Now, to go further:

My own defense of a public option over single payer

 Look, I like the idea of single payer, it's a very elegant solution to healthcare, but it's also insanely expensive. It cost $3 trillion in 2020, with $1-1.2 trillion already coming from government give or take. It would take $2 trillion to fund. And Bernie struggled to fund it himself. Last I checked his own plan had a gap of a few hundred billion in practice. Not fatal, but not great. We could work with it, and many who are dead set with it could probably tweak things to make it work...except....

Now it's $5 trillion a year. And we need $3 trillion. And I just can't make the numbers work. Now, again, I could, if this were my only priority, but it's not. I also wanna fund a $4.6 trillion UBI plan that most progressives dont actively advocate for in their campaigns. Seriously, I kind of have different ideas than a lot of progressives. Most model themselves off of Bernie Sanders. My own plans are closer to Yang. Sanders doesn't have UBI as a priority. That's why that lane of progressive can fund it and I cannot. And while you might say, "well, then screw your UBI this is more important." Well....agree to disagree.

The fact is, to make universal healthcare work, I'd have to cut my UBI in half, or move to a negative income tax. Both of which would compromise my UBI. I would rather compromise on healthcare. My own goals are to end poverty and free people from the coercion of employment. UBI is more of a swiss army knife of policies. It's central. Traditional progressives are still jobists. And while medicare for all would unlink healthcare from employment itself (again, it's more elegant), eh...if I'm forced to compromise, it's on healthcare. 

I'll defend this. My public option plan is based on medicare extra for all. It's a public option that automatically opts in all uninsured people. It bills them in line with their income. People with no income or, with a UBI, just a basic income, pay nothing. They get free healthcare. Those who work pay a bit of their salaries, like 2-8% based on their income, but here's the thing, if we had a single payer plan, these guys would be paying 4-5% or so anyway under Bernie's plan. And that might end up being higher, like 6% or something to make the numbers actually work. So you're paying either way, it's just a matter of how. You can pay for the public option, or pay for private insurance. THose who are employed probably still get private insurance. They can buy into medicare extra though. Those who are unemployed or underemployed have it worst under the current system. This would ensure everyone has automatic coverage. Currently you have to pay like $400 a month on the private market with a $9200 deductible. That's like $14400 in healthcare costs. Medicare extra would reduce these significantly, with a $5000 deductible max, say, 2% of your income at a low wage job monthly, that's like...$400 a year at $10 an hour. So you're saving $9k already versus the current system. Then my UBI gives you $16000 a year, or say, I did a half UBI at $8000 with medicare for all. Yeah, you can see how my plan very obviously benefits people. Just the UBI alone offsets whatever higher deductibles they'd have under UBI. 

 EDIT: Was in a hurry earlier, want to correct myself and point out that the deductibles and out of pocket costs likely also scale with income, so low income people pay very little at all, even if they are on the hook for some of it. It's generally people above 400-600% of the federal poverty line who pay full boat under such a plan, and for those people....there's always the private market if they want it cheaper.  

 Conclusion 

With that said....eh, I think a public option is quite defensible here, given my full economic package. Again, if you dont prioritize UBI and want a traditional bernie progressive, that's an ideological disagreement and a disagreement on priorities. We can agree to disagree. But as a UBI stan, I stand by my ideas. And if you dont like my ideas, vote for someone else, what can I say? 

And yeah, that's how I defend a public option. I dont expect everyone to agree with me, if anything, I straight up tell people "if you dont like my ideas vote for someone else", but yeah. I feel like this kind of defense is better than mcmorrow stuttering all over and not coherently defending anything. Seriously, why is she so bad at this? This is why I flipped on her so hard. She was originally my preferred candidate in the michigan race but then she crapped the bed so hard that now I'm in the el sayed camp. I really dont want weak liberals susceptible to corporate money here. McMorrow seems too compromised to support tbqh. She's supposed to be the middle ground soft progressive candidate but more and more she just reminds me of Kamala Harris. Bleh. Fauxgressive. 

Discussing college graduates booing speeches about AI

 So...this is, in a sense, yet another "battle of the cringe." in one corner, we got college grads indoctrinated into wanting to work after college, and who likely have tons of student loan debt, and in the other, we have out of touch tech CEOs giving speeches about how AI is amazing at commencement ceremonies.

 People might think I'm punching down on the college grads, and in a way I am, but as someone who was in that situation, and still technically is despite graduating over a decade ago, here's how I see it. We shouldnt want to work. We want to work, because we've been conditioned to work. We're told that's how life is and if you wanna survive, you need to work. We tell people to go to college so they dont end up in a dead end job, and when people leave school, they kinda hope not to end up in a dead end job. 

But then the tech bros are taking their jobs. And they're pissed off at the tech bros waxing quasi religious about how amazing AI is and blah blah blah when it's making their lives miserable. You can't blame the kids to some degree for wanting the existing social contract to...you know...work. 

But that's the thing. it doesn't. It quite frankly never did. It's always been a sham, and we should've wanted to change it for a while now. But we never do. We just end up talking about creating more jobs, while we're all indoctrinated to want more jobs, and rather than use technology to free us from labor, we cheer on our own enslavement by calling for the creation of more jobs, to fulfill a social contract that sucks and is increasingly unnecessary in the first place. 

Which is why I cringe at the whole jobist sentiments we see where people are anti AI because it "steals jobs." This is just luddism. I cant blame people for being pissed, but I feel like people are pissed at the wrong thing. The tech bros are right in a way, these technologies have the potential to revolutionize society. HOWEVER, for those changes to benefit the masses, that underlying social contract has to change. 

Will those tech bro CEOs advocate for the right changes? I dont think so. Like, a decade ago, I thought Elon Musk was one of the more sensible billionaires...because he talked about wanting UBI. But even then the cracks were obvious in his worldview. For example, he had a batcrap insane work ethic, wanted his employees to have a batcrap insane work ethic, and honestly, if UBI existed, he'd have no power over his employees to force his batcrap insane work ethic on them. Then the guy got involved with the Trump administration, outed himself as a nazi, made up nonsense about mass welfare fraud at doge to justify undermining social safety nets, and we saw the guy's true colors. This google CEO...I'd imagine he's cut from a similar cloth. Most of them are after all. They talk a big game about AI this and AI that, but i dont think they fully recognize what AI actually means for the labor force and our social contract. I mean....AI is all well and good, doing away with labor is all well and good. HOWEVER, if you aren't gonna advocate for proper solutions to the problems AI creates for our existing social systems, please STFU about it. Because yeah....we need to make those changes. And dont get me wrong, I'm PRO those changes. I DONT want a world where we all have to work for a living in an era where it's nowhere near as necessary as it was in the past. I've long since known we're literally just creating jobs to fulfill a social contract that shouldnt even exist any more, which is why im so blase on the subject. Like...we shouldnt want to work. We should want machines to do work. We should want to liberate people from work. But until we start establishing ways to take care of people outside of the work force, like a UBI, universal healthcare, etc., all we're doing by imposing these technologies on the masses is ruining their futures, just like my future was ruined. 

Idk, the reason I think the students are cringe is because I feel like the last thing we should want is to preserve this system of work and jobs, and yet people turn into massive luddites and rage against the machines in order to do so. it's nonsensical to me. Again, we shouldnt want to work. And if technology creates a jobless future, that's fine, as long as we take care of people outside of jobs. 

But again, the billionaires dont want that. They think "oh goody I save on labor costs", without realizing they're destroying their own work force. And then they oppose any changes to make the world better. Which is the real problem here. The real problem with AI and the tech is the billionaire class. It's the fact that they wield the tech, they use it to ruin peoples' lives, and then they oppose the changes necessary to make such a system work.

Again, if you're pro AI, you should also be pro UBI. If you arent pro UBI and you're pro AI, you're part of the problem. With that said, I guess the billionaires are the cringier faction. After all, the students are just victims of a social system that forced them to make certain life choices while then screwing them out of the upside that justified said choices in the first place. Their worst crime is...wanting the existing social contract to work after spending their whole lives doing everything right to get the best deal they can within it. The billionaires are ruining the economic system for the rest of us while opposing any positive change to fix things. So I'll always side with the workers over the billionaires on that one.

Still. I do feel like the whole "I want to work thing" is cringe luddism. Do we really wanna work? Or were we forced to work in a system that told us if we dont our lives are gonna be miserable?  Because im gonna be honest, as someone who graduated college and quickly found the system of work not...working...I deprogrammed myself from that where I honestly checked out of that system mentally. And I kinda just see that system for what it is: slavery without calling it such. Idk. I just encourage others to think the same way, rather than going in a direction of hating on labor saving technology in the name of preserving jobs we shouldnt want to do any more. 

Why the democratic enthusiasm gap exists

 So...as we saw in my previous article, elections are won by enthusiasm. However, I'd argue that republicans are somewhat less likely to bottom out on enthusiasm and tend to perform relatively strongly regardless, while democrats tend to either perform strongly or bomb. The reasons for this should be obvious if you pay attention to this blog for any length of time, but it's worth building an argument here given the DNC autopsy got me going in this direction.

Basically....it comes down to this. Republicans believe in their own branding, and are super enthusiastic about their party and its goals. The christian nationalists are truly religious psychos who want to see christianity imposed on everyone. The small government people actively want the end of social programs and tax cuts, believing that they'll make more money. On foreign policy, republicans vascillate between not wanting to be involved in war at all (the paleocon position) while simultaneously flipping to X country is the biggest existential threat and we need to blow them up to keep ourselves safe. We saw that recently with iran. Even as trump's policies raise gas prices and cause cascading inflation, the republican base will still insist it's all joe biden's fault, or that Trump is playing 5D chess or something. Admittedly, the GOP is straight up delusional, but the general gist of being a conservative is this. They have goals, the party tangibly works toward those goals, and the base is willing to vote for and fight for those goals. And because the GOP delivers on them, the party will fall on their sword for them. Some of it is delusion. As I said, I woke up, realized what they were selling was crazy, and abandoned them as a party, but those on the inside really believe in that vision of the country, and as we saw with thomas massie, they'll show up to throw out anyone who is seen as standing in the way.

Democrats? it's like we hate ourselves. We have no goals. We're constantly told we can't have goals or "purity test", that we're a "big tent", that we gotta compromise. We lecture voters about how the republicans show up no matter what, and we should too, but without the party being willing to put in the work to do it. They argue with voters and lecture them about what their priorities should be, and try to corral them into voting blue no matter who. And when voters clearly arent interested in what they're selling, they act like passive aggressive little craps going on about how we voted against our interests and dont know what's good for ourselves, and that if only we voted for them this wouldn't be happening.

Admittedly, then the dems lose, the cycle resets, and the republicans are on the clock before the public turns against them and elects democrats again, but they only elect democrats in opposition of republicans. No one really believes in the democrats, their branding, or what they're doing, because they barely have a branding, or goals. For as much as the right claims we want XYZ, and how fired up the republican base is on campaigning against XYZ, when you ask the dems if they want XYZ, they're like 'oh god no, I dont want any of that." I mean, they dont have clear goals and clear priorities. They're rudderless. As such, the second they take power and are forced to govern, not only do they lose independents who flip between the parties, but they tend to lose their own base, including young voters who are typically enthusiastic to vote for them the first time, only to be disappointed they dont govern properly in office. So dems stay home, republicans stay relatively fired up at all times, and republicans end up voting more consistently while dems have wild swings on enthusiasm.

I aint saying republicans dont have enthusiasm issues themselves. 2006/2008? Yeah. Lack of enthusiasm. 2012, lack of enthusiasm. Of course, in those cycles, they campaigned like democrats do, with the party held together by weak opposition to an opposing candidate who is seen as an existential threat, while completely unenthused by their own candidates, because those candidates dont represent their values. Of course, republicans recovered from this relatively quickly. In response to the republican failures of neoconservatism, the tea party was created and injected insane energy into the GOP. The dems just....never had their own tea party. And every time we try to, the establishment seems to fight it harder than they fight the other side. Which really makes you think whose side they're actually on.  This has been the problem with the dems for the past decade, and is the primary lesson any "autopsy" needs to walk away with. Harris lost because she lost millions of voters who voted for Biden. Biden won around 81 million people. harris had 75 million. Where did 6 million people go? Well, some voted for Trump, but a lot of them just stayed home and didnt bother showing up. 

The real question is, how do you get those people to show up for the dems time and time again? Dems think they can lecture us while projecting weird fantasies of conservatives showing up no matter how crappy their candidates are, ignoring that those voters actually are into that crap. Like, just because a candidate seems terrible to us, those guys have such a radically different value system that things that are repulsive to us...are things they like. They love that cruel, crass, orange jack###. LOVE him. Are so enthused by him that they make stores selling his merch, that his supporters by and put on everything. They turn their personal brand into a political statement. Meanwhile we libs think we're better for NOT having that level of enthusiasm when in reality half of us would rather not vote for our milquetoast, crappy candidates at all. 

The fact is, we do politics wrong on a fundamental level. politics is a battle of ideas. We want to win, because we have a vision we want to see implemented. The biggest problem with the dems is a lack of a coherent vision or set of policies that attempt to implement it. They stand for nothing, chastise you if you actually do have those principles, and then insist you vote for substanceless candidates you'd almost kinda wish would lose to the GOP just to teach these idiots the lesson you've been trying to teach them for a decade now. Because after a while of dealing with the centrists, you're literally that spiteful toward them that you stop caring, because neither of them make your life better, and you kinda stop caring who wins. Which is why I hate them so much.

Really, do I really need to put it this plainly? I only vote democrat to stop the encroachment of literal fascism at this point. The standard democrat is so bland and substanceless, and the aggressive bullying campaign to try to force me to vote for them so offputting, that I'd almost rather NOT vote for these guys, just to teach them a lesson. That's where I was in 2016 and 2020. I'm only a bit more sympathetic toward them because I do realize that we need to beat the fascists.

BUT...as I stated in the previous article, if we cant seal the deal, flip the script, and run a change candidate who does realign the parties in a positive way, the republicans are just gonna win again. 2030 is likely to be a red wave. 2032 is a tossup, although historically I'd favor the incumbent there. And we're likely to be back in the same situation by 2032 if we really drop the ball, or 2036 if we dont. If we wanna avoid that fate, the alternative is a transformational FDR style candidate with a strong vision that becomes so popular people will crawl over broken glass to vote for the guy. of course, that actually means the kinds of transformational change the party has been trying to avoid for a good decade now. That said, it's not looking good. But yeah, that's what we really need.  

Summing up every election cycle since 2004 in a nutshell

 So....the DNC autopsy had this section where it started with 2008, and it went through every election cycle and summed it up. I'm gonna do so from my own perspective, and I'll outline why I think things swung a certain way and why it turned out as it did. Im going back to 2004 because it's the first cycle I'd say I was politically aware for, and I still think it's relevant. 

2004- Red Wave

Bush rode a high after 9/11 where the GOP was able to win elections it otherwise would have lost. While the party took power in 2000 and by conventional knowledge I'd expect 2002 to be blue and 2004 to be up for debate, 2002 was deep red because the country unified around Bush. This started to fade by 2004 somewhat, as democrats turned against the Iraq War, but generally speaking, Bush was able to hold his coalition together enough to seal a win.

I dont think Kerry was a compelling candidate either. I mean, he kinda just seemed like another third way centrist and republican enthusiasm just seemed...higher. I was a republican at the time, and while I couldnt vote, I would've done so in Bush's favor, both based on Christian moral values (see: abortion, gay marriage), but also the war in Iraq, as I was inclined to believe democrats just hated America and were unpatriotic at the time. Still, it was a narrow win, showing the dem coalition had some support. But yeah, I would argue there was an enthusiasm gap there in favor of republicans.

2006- Blue Wave

 The democrats won big in 2006 as the country turned hard on Bush and the republicans. The war in iraq dragged on, there were no WMDs and with troop surges and fear of a draft, a lot of Americans wanted out of the war. On the domestic front, Bush dropping the ball on Katrina, and rising gas prices also contributed to poor conservative performance. This is the first election I could vote in and I did a split ticket. Some Rs, some Ds. I tended to view myself as a republican still, but I was moderating somewhat quickly, realizing that the Bush years werent all they were cracked up to be. 

2008- Blue wave

Bush's troubles got even worse. Iraq was massively unpopular. The national debt was a growing concern. The Great Depression devastated him. By this point, I feel like we were experiencing a full on national rejection of Bush's neoconservatism. Obama offered a left wing vision of "hope and change", but his campaign felt vapid AF. Still, didnt stop a lot of super enthusiastic college students from voting for him. Really, the enthusiasm for Obama made him seem very overrated for me. Still, conservative circles felt like a funeral at the time, so...yeah. Like the writing was on the wall, we were screwed, no one really liked McCain. He represented Bush's brand of conservatism that was unpopular. You start seeing faint outlines of what the tea party would become as people wanted a return to a more pure form of conservatism, and I was a bit of a ron paul stan in this era. Ultimately, we fell in line behind McCain on the right, as we were convinced Obama was a massive threat who had to be stopped and he was some raging communist, but ultimately, the enthusiasm for "hope and change" won. Again, I cite an enthusiasm gap here. I really do believe elections are won or lost on enthusiasm.

2010- Red Wave

 Obama's enthusiasm waned as he got into office though. Progressives were unhappy he governed like a moderate. That massive army of college students stayed home. Conservatives were fired up over the national debt, Obamacare, and Obama "ruining" the country in vague ways, and the right distanced itself from neoconservatism and embraced something closer to the libertarian conservatism that I was supportive of at the time. The Ron Paul movement might have failed in a way, but it also gave rise to the tea party, which took the aggressive approach of attacking the democrats on all fronts and stopping progress at all costs. This lack of progress frustrated democrats, and the republicans were still fired up. Again, enthusiasm gap.

2012- Blue Wave

Im speaking for myself, but I feel like people got what they voted for in 2010...and they didnt like it. The agenda was too extreme, and people seeing it in action were like NO, NOT LIKE THIS. For some, it might have been just a disagreement in strategy, for me, I kinda just realized that conservative ideas were actually bad and abandoned the GOP. A lot led to my own decision here. Deconversion from Christianity, the great recession, Bush's foreign policy, and of course, just seeing conservative ideals put into practice. 

Romney was also a weak candidate. He wasnt extreme enough for the tea party, so enthusiasm was low there, and he wasn't resonating during the great recession. As it turns out, trying to slash social programs to give rich people tax cuts in order to "create jobs" isn't popular, and Romney came off as an out of touch rich person who was fronting an extreme tea party agenda behind him. It didn't resonate, and people rallied around Obama and the democrats. 

This election cycle is what defined my own politics more than any other. I shifted left during this cycle, and the politics of it still shape my politics today. Between my secular humanism and anti fundamentalist christianity mindset, to the anti trickle down narratives that culminated in UBI centric human centered capitalism for me. Nowadays, we dont think much about 2012, but I feel like I was at that proper age range where its lessons just...resonated. 

2014 - Red Wave

However, Obama ended up being a lame duck. While he originally came off as the adult in the room and tried compromise with the GOP it very much didn't work. And while that reasonableness gap made me support Obama in 2012, by 2014 it was getting old. by this point, I was entirely polarized against the GOP, and I was really wanting the democrats to fight back. But they didn't. Here in PA, we went blue to get rid of our tea party governor tom corbett, but it seems like nationally, the dems did poorly. It seemed like it was a combination of gerrymandering from the 2011 redistricting combined with low enthusiasm TBQH. And for me, my solution was this: we need to create a blue wave so big it BTFOs the republicans. The democrats need to FIGHT, not just sit back and compromise and play nice. Really, dems arent enthused, and Obama was just this lightning rod that made the remains of what seemed like a dying GOP very polarized against him. But yeah. it did seem like eventually, the GOP coalition would die. The dems just gotta be more assertive, and given the lagging impacts of the recession, they needed to offer change.

2016 - Red Wave

As I stated, this didnt have to be a red wave. I think that the continuation of 2014 dynamics is what killed us. Clinton was very demotivational. No one really liked her. it seemed like she ran on this idea that it was her turn, and her entire campaign was designed to bully people into voting for her. Seriously, I have never seen such an out of touch campaign. Holy crap, as demonstrated in the previous article, she THREW it away! And then trump, he tapped into a lot of latent populist anger in the country over the economy, and that really swung it for him. Yes yes, racism, christian nationalism, and all that crap mattered too. but the dems would face that regardless, the GOP is just a party of voltorbs. A bunch of really pissed off people on the brink of a mass chain reaction of self destructs. But they are(were) a minority, and the dems should easily defeat these people if they embraced a more populist strategy. They didn't. And this is where the root of our current problems lies. This was a realigning cycle. And we got the crap realignment.

2018- Blue Wave

While trump's base remained very loyal to him, the rest of the country quickly turned against the buffoon. Dems went into full TDS mode (IMO), acting like he was 2nd term trump in his first term, and that just served to radicalize the trumpers more IMO as they realized no matter what they did WE'D act like a bunch of angry voltorbs too, and they just took the lesson I was hoping we'd learn and ran with it. Still, the dems were very fired up and independents swung against the trump coalition hard, leading to a comfortable win for the dems.

2020- Blue Wave

While the first mid term after a new president seems to swing hard against said president, the reelection tends to favor the president more weakly. Both bases are fired up, and typically, the status quo is maintained. Still, Trump BARELY won in 2016, and it seemed like a fluke, and Trump massively F-ed up COVID. So people swung against him for Biden. Still, the dems did seem to have some lagging enthusiasm as Biden was just more Hillary, and the win wasnt as strong or decisive as it should have been. While dems had high vote totals, they seemed to vote more against trump than for Biden IMO, and Trump STILL maintained a strong showing, showing that his 2016 base of support wasnt a fluke. And of course, when they lost, Trump screamed it was rigged and his supporters threw a temper tantrum at the capitol. It seems like Trump's biggest legacy up to this point was division. People were polarized either for or against him. But what happens after the dems retake the white house? Well, if it's true that the dems are only winning because of opposition to trump, and not enthusiasm for democrats, you can expect that enthusiasm to dissolve and the republicans to start winning again.

 2022- Red Trickle

And sadly, this is basically what happened. The 2021 local elections were really bad for democrats, and 2022 looked like it was gonna be an apocalpytic red wave. Enthusiasm for democrats was very low, and republicans were still fired up. However, the republicans made one mistake: overturning roe v wade. The second this happened, the polls shifted more toward democrats, and while the republicans still took the house, the democrats minimized the damage and it was a pretty good night for them. So this was a bit of a stay of execution for the democratic party, where they got to walk away with a soft "win." 

2024- Red Wave

However, that surge of adrenaline that spared the democrats in 2022 wore off by 2024. The democrats reached very low enthusiasm levels, while the GOP was fired up. Biden was NEVER gonna win. He was ALWAYS behind. And post debate, the bottom REALLY fell out where the dems were forced to pressure him to drop out and replaced him with Harris. Harris did bring some enthusiasm back in the into the party, but quickly lost it as she ran another centrist tone deaf campaign. While the election was close, Donald Trump prevailed, and the democrats once again suffered from an enthusiasm gap that proved fatal to them.

Future election predictions

2026- Blue wave

2026 is shaping up to be a blue wave as independent voters turn against Trump in a big way, and democratic enthusiasm has recovered as Trump is once again a target of ire by the party. I would expect democrats to win big and republicans to lose big. See: 2006, 2018.

2028- Blue wave

I expect 2028 to be a lot like 2020 or 2008 in that there's high energy for democrats, especially to remove a highly unpopular administration. However, the exact nature of the campaign remains to be seen. Will this simply be another oppositional campaign with little substance behind it, or will the democrats run someone transformational? Where we go from there depends on these answers.

2030- Red wave

With the democrats presumably having a trifecta, they have 2 years to get things done before they lose power. The republicans will likely be fired up against the democrats, and democratic enthusiasm will likely start to wane. If the dems simply run another oppositional campaign and govern from the center again, I expect the dem enthusiasm to drop a lot. If the dems run a more popular agenda, I expect the results to be better for them. Still, I'd give an edge to the republicans. See: 2010, 2022. 

2032- Blue wave

Second term reelections tend to be purpleish in my experience, but I generally favor the incumbent (see: 2004, 2012). 2020 and 2024 flipped because of extreme circumstances in 2020, and both 2016 and 2020 being close elections themselves, meaning Trump/Biden had nowhere to go but down, and couldn't clear the hurdle needed to comfortably win a reelection. Still, Id expect 2028 to be a much more decisive dem election than 2020. And I do think that lingering republican skepticism post trump, the loss of support as the GOP enters a post trump era, and the dems having enough of a buffer to guard against mild to moderate enthusiasm loss will lead to a situation where the democrat narrowly wins here. 

2034- Red wave

I expect a 2006/2014 style red wave here as the president's party experiences a widespread loss of support and enthusiasm while the GOP is fired up against them to happen here.

2036- Red wave

Unless the democrats REALLY knock it out of the park with a highly transformational candidate (see: 1940, 1988), I would expect them to lose to a republican in 2036. At which point, the 8 year cycle reverses itself. 

Past that: 2038- blue wave, 2040- red wave, 2042- blue wave, 2044- blue wave, 2046- red wave, 2048- blue wave, 2050- red wave, 2052- red wave. 

It's possible something anomalous can throw off the cycle, but yeah, politics is pretty cyclical and I would generally expect that overall cycle to continue to happen into the future for the most part.

Conclusions

So what can we conclude?

1) With exceptions, American politics is driven by 8 year cycles in which the public generally votes against the current incumbents. 

2) Underlying the cycle, elections are won or lost by enthusiasm. It's easier for opposition parties to run on high enthusiasm as they can just attack the existing governing party, while incumbent parties need to govern. Most americans seem to vote against current people hoping the other party will be better.

3) This cycle can be disrupted in times of significant division, and where the president's party's enthusiasm really bombs (or was never high to begin with due to a narrow initial win). 

4) Republicans seem to have more consistent enthusiasm. I would credit this due to them having a vision they believe in that they're willing to fight for, as well as an existential fear that the other side fundamentally opposes those values. Democrats, on the other hand, tend to struggle more with enthusiasm, due to the fact that they lack a cohesive brand that cultivates the same level of brand loyalty, and they seem to rely more on sheer opposition to the other side rather than support for their own side. This gives republicans an edge.

5) (Historical observation), during times of party realignments that clearly favor one party, the cycle can be lengthened. The Reagan revolution caused the cycle to last 12 years before Bill Clinton was elected. Franklin Roosevelt led to 20 year period of democratic dominance. Lincoln led to a 16 year period of dominance. Eventually, the ruling coalition will lose enthusiasm, but it can sometimes take much longer during realignment periods, causing the ruling party to control the narrative of politics. Part of the reason the republicans do so well is because we're still in the aftermath of the reagan revolution, with no clear realignment since.

6) While Trump is arguably a realigning figure, this time period represents deepening polarization without a clear ideological winner. The Trump coalition is high enthusiasm for what it is, but it's also small and he tends to lose independents quickly. However, democrats lack the same kind of brand loyalty on their side causing them to bottom out more quickly/easily. If this is a realignment and not a messy dealignment period leading to a more transformational realignment, this situation resembles most closely the Jacksonian democrats vs the whigs, where jackson's coalition had high enthusiasm around a rambunctious populist, while the whigs were a substanceless oppositional party who eventually imploded into irrelevance. 

7) The fate of the 7th party system depends on the democrats. If they are able to wrestle back control of the narrative from the republicans, they can enact generational change that can change the dynamics to make future politics more favorable to them. If they faiil to do so, Trump will be the transformational figure by default, dooming us to another generation of strong republicans and weak democrats. I do not know what direction the country will go in but right now we are on the more negative of these two timelines.

And yeah, that's generally how I view politics, and what my theory of elections is. While politics is cyclical, the republicans are the dominant party and the democrats the more submissive party. Some call this the sun and moon party hypothesis. If you wanna be kinky about it, you could call it the dom and sub hypothesis. Either way, unless the dems sieze the moment and take control of the system from the republicans through a generationally transformative candidate, the democrats are doomed to another generation as the moon and the republicans are all but guaranteed to be the sun party.

And yeah, that's the real lesson dems need to learn AND FAST, because I've been saying variations of this since 2016 and they still havent fricking got the message. 

Briefly discussing the democratic autopsy

 So apparently that autopsy I thought was an autopsy from a few months back wasnt the real autopsy, that was released today after pressure from the democratic party. It's a dumpster fire, but not in the way you'd expect. See the dems weren't hiding it because there were damning lessons in it they didn't want to learn, they were hiding it because it reads like an incomplete work that some intern put together. Seriously, who wrote this?! Fire this person, please. It kinda reminds me of my incomplete book drafts. Actually, that's an insult to my drafts, my drafts are better than this. There's no sources, many sections are missing, and it reads like a college paper a professor had to whip out the red pen and correct, and yeah there's literally red disclaimers everywhere saying there's no citations for data and that this doesn't represent the views of the DNC.

As for the content itself, eh...a lot of it was long and dry for my tastes, it is 200 pages, and it lacks summaries and conclusions because, well, again, it's very obviously incomplete. However, this also hurts readability since my eyes glaze over trying to read this mess, and i cant even go to the summary and be like "oh ok." To be fair as a writer, I kinda get the thought process. My drafts do the same thing, but again, I plan on FIXING that later. This is very obviously incomplete. 

From what I've gathered, they seem to take away SOME decent lessons, like less focus on social issues, more on economics, as well as the idea that they need to try to appeal to voters everywhere rather than doing whatever minmaxing crap they've been doing. So it's not entirely worthless IMO. 

Still...the fact that this became an issue really should highlight an issue the dems have. The reason the dems were pressured to release this is because wide swaths of their voters dont trust them. They thought that they were quashing it because the dems are arrogant and often dont WANT TO learn the right lessons. So rather than take away damning lessons to be learned, people thought they were just deflecting and ignoring the fact that they sucked and need to change. 

Which is...admittedly, the dems biggest issue. The fact is, they don't seem open minded or WILLING to learn from their mistakes. They seem like the kind of party who will ignore all lessons and just keep repeating the same strategy while blaming the voters for not turning up for them. If information came out that was unflattering, it seems very well within their character to ignore it and say "let's move on, shall we? no point dwelling on the past" while the base is like NO, YOU NEED TO LEARN THIS LESSON! 

I mean, if there's anything that should be gleaned from this whole mess, it's THAT. The dems are slow to learn, never actually learn the right lessons, and seem to ignore what people tell them. Hell, and this was a problem with the autopsy itself, dems are so washington brained that they cant stfu about their strategy for more than 5 seconds when talking to voters. When voters tell them what they want, they say "no you see you stupid person, you don't get it" and then go on about their grand plan of how we need to be a big tent, run to the center, and how we can't do the things the voters are asking for because they gotta appeal to completely different voters who might not even vote for them anyway. It's very arrogant and very out of touch. 

And yeah, they do have an issue with minmaxing demographics. They seem to not care at all about white male voters for instance while they'll hugbox themselves to death going on about black voters from safe red states that will NEVER, EVER go blue this election cycle.

With that said, the autopsy seems to emphasize a strategy that attempts to win all voters everywhere, but I still have reservations. yeah, they need to stop ignoring voters who ARE open to voting for them, but in our electoral college system, you need to split states into groups and focus accordingly. Look at my election predictions. I have safe blue and safe red. Likely blue and likely red.  Lean blue and lean red. And then the tossups. This translates to around 7 categories of states. Safes are...safe. You arent gonna lose them, you arent gonna flip them. On the other hand, tossups are your big states to focus on. In 2024, there were 7 of them. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, going from left to right vaguely. Lean blues like Virginia, Minnesota, and New Hampshire were in some danger of flipping, but they generally didn't. The dems had to keep an eye on them, but ultimately, they need less attention than the swings. You dont wanna neglect them, as that's what Clinton did in 2016, but you also dont wanna focus too heavily on them unless you already got a safeish electoral margin (kinda like clinton did in 2016, assuming the blue wall held). On the other hand, and this is a 2016 thing, I'd advise again spending too much time in say, lean R states. it's good to go after them, but you shouldnt abandon your core constituents to win them over. And of course, likely states are tougher to flip than leans, but more on the table than safe/solid states. 

So...when you look at an election prediction, you gotta look at the polling in the various states and focus your attention on your best and easiest path to 270 and expand from there. If you're like Clinton in 2016, you wanna focus on defense. You have the advantage, you wanna not lose states (like she did), and yeah, compete mostly in lean D and tossups. 

 Really, the thing that pissed everyone off about 2016 was that she had a map made in heaven, it took a lot of work to actually lose it, and she lost. She lost most swing states, outside of new hampshire and nevada, and then trump was able to poach states from her back yard because she was too busy F-ing up her political strategy by going down to like, Georgia and Arizona. 2016 was lost my hubris, and I honestly think that the core problems of the democratic party are apparent today.

But yeah, dems have a habit of trying to appeal to people in places they'll never win. Like, again, for all the talk of "OMG THE BLACK VOTE!" Which states will almost never flip to the dems here? South Carolina, where Clyburn is from. Mississippi, Alabama, etc. At this point I'll concede Georgia. 2016, i wouldnt. It was still very likely R back then, but yeah. It's like the dems are obsessed with winning the south when...as you can tell by this map, that's the bible belt, and we shouldnt compromise our message elsewhere trying to flip states we'll never flip. 

At the same time, take pennsylvania, which is very blue here but clinton lost anyway. She had this strategy of "for every working class voter we lose, we'll pick up two moderate republican", so she went all in with pittburgh and philly suburbs, neglecting all of those little islands of blue in between, and rural voters in general. The autopsy points that out. 

But enough with 2016, let's focus on how this applied to 2024.

 So this is the final map on election day. I could post other maps that are a lot redder of where things were under Biden, but this is where things generally were under Harris. 226 relatively safe dem electoral votes (although under Biden many of those "lean dem" states were on the verge of flipping red, with VA actually being red when Biden flipped out). Again, if you're losing and at risk of losing your next line of states after the swing states, you're kinda screwed and you do gotta play some defense to keep them blue. But you also need the actual swing states. Quickest path: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. The old 2016 rust belt strategy still applied. And those, along with nevada, were the most likely to flip. If the dems could maintain the rust belt and arguably nevada, which was very doable in theory, Harris would've won 276-262. 

From there, you wanna focus on the more lean R swing states in the sun belt. North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona. Not NECESSARY to win, but within reach enough to be "on the table". So yeah, similar map to 2016 more or less as far as the fundamentals go. I'd expect 2028 to be the same, although 2032 and onward are likely to have some reapportionments that favor republicans (lots of growth in texas and florida). But still, for now, they need to focus on defending their home turf and winning back the rust belt. We can focus on where to go post 2030, I feel like the dems were trying too hard to flip the map as if it were 2032 going as far back as 2016 and it seemed to just be an ill advised strategy. It's not working. And yeah. 

Like...really. That's a key problem the dems have had since 2016. They are trying too hard to prepare for a future 10-20 years down the line instead of winning elections now, and their core strategy has been, IMO, incongruent with what actual voters want. And rather than listen to those voters, they lecture them and talk about winning the south like...that's the big thing they need to do.

They ignore voters like me in the rust belt, who actually are giving them advice for winning the states that are part of their most obvious path to victory, to focus on states that they currently DONT need. 

Yes, post 2030, the rust belt alone is not gonna be sufficient to win elections:

 

 

However, if they kept trying to keep Ohio and Iowa, which were states that went for Obama twice, and used to be a lot more competitive pre Trump, it's very well possible we STILL wouldn't have needed to compete down south. Once again, the "neglect the rust belt in favor of the sun belt" strategy has always been a poor one in my own estimation. perhaps they were gonna lose those states anyway and they knew it, but still, at 261, you dont need a whole lot to continue winning here, the dems, if anything, had an advantage, going back to the Obama era, if they chose to maintain and strengthen that coalition, and didnt give trump such an obvious in to electoral relevance:

Really, this is a pretty reasonable Obama era style map. The whole strategy the dems decided to pursue, to abandon parts of the rust belt to focus on suburbanites and to win the south, has ALWAYS been ill advised. We dont NEED the south. We never did. We just needed to maintain a stronghold along the blue wall and nevada. And the blue wall used to include ohio and iowa too. Remember: Obama won BOTH OF THOSE, TWICE. This is just an Obama map except we lost florida.

Now, again, we've unfortunately been getting the "cursed realignment" in the 7th party system where Trump is gaining ground in a lot of previously blue obama era states like FLorida, and Ohio, and Iowa, which are now all likely to safe R, and we ARE being forced to compete in the sun belt more.

Still...I do think we have one trip up our sleeve, and yes, it is a sun belt state, and that's georgia:

 See, here's the thing. The sun belt is eventually going to flip more D anyway over time, mostly due to demographic changes. We could have easily maintained the Obama strategy well to 2028, and afterward, tried to make more of a pass down south, where demographic shifts brings the voters to us. I honestly dont think that we have to go down there and bring ourselves to them. I think they would eventually come to us, by 2032, 2036, 2040, etc. Georgia in particular has been shifting left at a fast pace where it's soon gonna vote to the left of Pennsylvania. In 2024, it was one of the few states that went further left despite the rest of the country moving hard right. I dont think the sun belt strategy has been working well otherwise. Texas is a tease, although in theory it's moving left as well. Like, in 2026, James Talarico might actually win here. But in 2024...it went R+13, the same as Ohio and Iowa, ya know, states we lost ground in. Arizona isn't as stubborn as texas, it has mark kelly there, and Biden won it in 2020, but it does require a centrist strategy that tends to flip more up north IMO. North Carolina might be more D friendly in the future too. It's been stubbornly red in recent elections, but Obama won it in 2008 and it looks like we will probably win the senate this year. 

So yeah, post 2030, we can appeal to the sun belt somewhat, but I still believe we need to keep the rust belt happy. They're still very relevant deciding states and I think they'll remain easier for democrats to flip than southern states. At this point, yeah, do both, but I still favor a rust belt strategy, and IMO, what wins the rust belt is economic populism and appealing to a broad base of people, not minmaxing. The dems try TOO HARD to win the south that they lose the north. They need to maintain their focus up north, while making passes at the south as the demographics force them to both expand down there, but also, as those same demographics...bring them to us.

The dems have this idea that we need to run to the center to win elections. Even when data supports that assertion, the difference between a leftie and centrist candidate is only like 3 points as we can see in Michigan this cycle. The fundamentals of the states dont change a ton between moderate and progressive candidates. What is gonna win elections is likely more based on enthusiasm and whether that cycle leans right or left, than the individual candidate. And I think a progressive candidate could bring out people more consistently, and fire people up more. So yeah. I do think we need to be a bit more economically progressive/populist, run a rust belt first strategy (while looking to expand into the sun belt as feasible without tainting our brand), and yeah. 

I mean, the fact that trump was able to outplay us by THIS much is as much a democratic failure than it is a republican success. You think that trump of all people was looking at data like this? I doubt it. I think in 2016 he just ran an impassioned campaign based on populism and it resonated. Bernie literally could've had that energy had the dems not quashed it. And yeah, Im gonna keep going back to 2016, but I dont think you can understand 2024, without understanding 2016.  People want something to vote for, they want someone to make their lives better. This shouldnt be rocket science, and the fact that the biggest scandal of this autopsy is that they attempted to cover up an incompetent report, and people thought the cover up was more malicious, points at the real problem with the democrats. They ignore what their own voters want and keep pushing this same crappy strategy on us that just doesn't work. They need to listen to people more and actually change based on voter feedback. They come off as arrogant, tell people what they want, dont listen to people, argue with them instead, and alienate voters. And that's why they lose elections.

Anyway, that's kinda my own third autopsy on this, but I wanted to get that out there as it's important to discuss.