Salem Political Snark

Why I'm going to look upon Trump's second term as a political experiment

Progressives like me have a choice to make now that Trump has been inaugurated for a second term as president. How do we preserve our sanity during the next four years?

I have Democratic friends who say that they're unable to pay attention to the news anymore, given all the crazy stuff the Trump administration will be doing. This doesn't appeal to me. I believe in staying informed, not ignoring what's going on.

Another option is to remain in a more or less constant state of outrage as Trump dismantles valuable programs and policies from the Biden administration and institutes his own right-wing priorities. This also isn't appealing to me. I've got better things to do than be incessantly irritated.

I've concluded that the healthiest thing for me to do is look upon Trump's presidency as a political experiment. Which, of course, it is.

Last November a majority of American voters embraced a hypothesis: Donald Trump will bring more benefits to the United States than Kamala Harris would. I favored the opposite hypothesis, but I respect the decision of voters to put Trump in charge of federal government policies.

Now we'll see what the outcome of the political experiment that will take place from now until election day in 2028 will be, with interim results being reported in the 2026 midterm election. Every decision that Trump makes during the next four years will have effects, large or small, on our country.

Fairly soon we'll have indications of how key questions will be answered. Here's a few of them.

Is inflation going up or down?
Is the budget deficit increasing or decreasing?
Will deporting undocumented immigrants help or hurt the economy?
Will tariffs on imported goods kick off an unproductive trade war?
Can an end to the Ukraine-Russia war be negotiated that isn't a giveaway to Putin?
Are entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security being protected?
Are other countries more or less willing to support the United States?
Does the stock market look positively upon how things are going?

Causes have effects which then become causes that produce more effects. And so it goes, in politics as in other areas of life.

Trump does his best to deny reality through lies, half-truths, exaggerations, and such. This works for him up to a point. However, reality has a way of coming out on top eventually, because facts are stronger than fictions.

Trump has made a lot of promises. His slew of executive orders that he signed today are a down payment on keeping some of those promises. Many of them will be challenged legally. Others will be implemented only partially, if at all.

Every newly-elected president has a honeymoon period. Trump's has just begun. It will end before too long. Then our country will begin to see the shortcomings in Trumpian programs and policies. His approval rating likely will fall. 

Republicans control the presidency and both chambers of Congress. Whatever the results of the political experiment Trump's election unleashed upon the United States are, they will be owned by Trump and the Republican Party.

I love science. It's humanity's best way of knowing reality. By looking upon Trump's presidency as a political experiment, rather than a horrible happening, I feel that I'll strike a good balance between ignoring the news and being outraged by the news.

Sure, a scientist wants their hypothesis to be confirmed. My hypothesis is that while Trump will have some clear successes, he will have more failures and limited successes -- leaving the American public dissatisfied with his presidency by the time of the 2026 midterms.

Of course, I may be wrong. A scientist is concerned mainly with getting valid results of the experiment being conducted, not with a particular outcome. By viewing the Trump administration as a political experiment, I'm hoping to be able to look upon his presidency with a certain detachment.

That said, I think Trump renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America is unbelievably ridiculous. I'll never stop saying "Gulf of Mexico." My bet is that most Americans will do the same.

Trump voters feel much better about economy now, though nothing has changed

If there ever was any doubt that the opinion of voters on important factual issues facing our country is heavily influenced by their political leaning, a pair of Politico/Morning Consult polls released today has put that doubt to rest.

The title of the Politico story tells the tale: "Trump voters feel very differently about things now that he's won, our new poll shows." Remember how the sorry state of the economy was cited as a major factor in Trump's victory and Harris's defeat?

Well, three weeks have passed since the election. The economy is in virtually the exact same state now as it was on November 5. Yet Trump voters are feeling much better about the economy, and Harris voters are feeling worse about it. The Politico story says:

The economy was the single biggest issue for most voters going into Election Day, with 81 percent of voters in the preelection POLITICO|Morning Consult polling identifying it as “very important” to determining their vote choice. Trump voters put slightly more emphasis on the economy than Harris voters, but it was important across party lines.

What wasn’t the same for Trump and Harris supporters: What they thought of the preelection economy — and what they think now.

A week before the election, just 8 percent of self-identified Trump voters described the economy as on the “right track,” the polling found. But after Trump’s victory, that number swung to 28 percent — still a minority, but a substantial swing in a span of just a few weeks when economic conditions did not change dramatically.

I find this disturbing, though not surprising. We humans have a lot of difficulty seeing reality as it is, since how we'd like it to be all too often sways our perception. 

Inflation, grocery prices, the cost of gasoline, interest rates -- these are quantitative. They are facts, not a matter of opinion. Yet elections aren't decided on the basis of facts, but on how voters feel about the facts. 

And this poll shows that Trump voters looked upon the economy much more negatively prior to the election than after it, while Harris voters had the opposite reaction, albeit not as pronounced. 

Trump voters also became a lot less concerned about voter fraud after Trump won, as did Harris voters to a lesser degree. 

Timothy Snyder describes Trump's fascism in chilling accuracy

American voters just chose a fascist to be president. This isn't political opinion. It is a political fact.

The only question that remains unanswered is how much of a fascist Trump will be. The best we can hope for is fascist-lite. The worst is both more likely and beyond comprehension, because the United States has never been led by a fascist.

Timothy Snyder is a distinguished Professor of History at Yale University who has studied fascism and authoritarianism in great depth. I've read his On Tyranny book and liked it a lot, though the message wasn't cheery. 

In the November 18 issue of The New Yorker, Snyder wrote an equally disturbing essay as part of the magazine's collection of essays on the theme, "Donald Trump Reprised: What His Return to the Presidency Reveals About America."

Each of the essays was interesting and thought-provoking. But I found Snyder's piece to be the hardest hitting. It is brilliantly written and appropriately scary. The title: "What Does It Mean That Donald Trump is a Fascist?."

It isn't enjoyable reading. However, it is vitally important reading. I've copied the essay in below.

It was wrong to treat Donald Trump as a series of absences. The standard critique has always been that he lacks something that we imagine to be a prerequisite for high office: breeding, or grammar, or diplomacy, or business acumen, or love of country. And he does lack all those things, as well as pretty much any conventional bourgeois virtue you can name.

Trump’s skills and talents go unrecognized when we see him as a conventional candidate—a person who seeks to explain policies that might improve lives, or who works to create the appearance of empathy. Yet this is our shortcoming more than his. Trump has always been a presence, not an absence: the presence of fascism. What does this mean?

When the Soviets called their enemies “fascists,” they turned the word into a meaningless insult. Putinist Russia has preserved the habit: a “fascist” is anyone who opposes the wishes of a Russian dictator. So Ukrainians defending their country from Russian invaders are “fascists.” This is a trick that Trump has copied. He, like Vladimir Putin, refers to his enemies as “fascists,” with no ideological significance at all. It is simply a term of opprobrium.

Putin and Trump are both, in fact, fascists. And their use of the word, though meant to confuse, reminds us of one of fascism’s essential characteristics. A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him. When a fascist calls a liberal a “fascist,” the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.

That is quite a fascist achievement. Faced with the complexity of history, liberals struggle with the overwhelming volume of questions to be asked, answers to be offered. Like communism, fascism is an answer to all questions, but a different kind of answer. Communism assures us that we can, thanks to science, find an underlying direction in all events, toward a better future. This is (or was) seductive. Fascism reduces the imbroglio of sensation to what the Leader says.

A liberal has to tell a hundred stories, or a thousand. A communist has one story, which might not turn out to be true. A fascist just has to be a storyteller. Because words do not attach to meanings, the stories don’t need to be consistent. They don’t need to accord with external reality. A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it. This can proceed through rehearsal, as with Hitler, or by way of trial and error, as with Trump.

That requires presence, which Trump has always had. His charisma need not resonate with you: probably, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s would not have reached you, either. But it is nevertheless a talent. To be a fascist and to call someone else a fascist requires a cunning that is natural to Trump. And in that naming of the enemy, absurd as it is, we see the second major element of fascism.

A Leader (“Duce” and “Führer” mean just that) initiates politics by choosing an enemy. As the Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt maintained, the choice is arbitrary. It has little or no basis in reality. It takes its force from the decisive will of the Leader. The people who watched Trump’s television ads during sporting events had not been harmed by a transgender person, or by an immigrant, or by a woman of color. The magic lies in the daring it takes to declare a weaker group to be part of an overwhelming conspiracy.

The one thing that is not arbitrary about the choice of an enemy is that it must exploit vulnerabilities. The Trump ads projected a fantasy of Kamala Harris allowing millions of sex-changed foreigners to take jobs from Americans. This touches, all at once, on gender, economic, and sexual vulnerability. We are unprotected and impoverished and will be replaced by something alien. And this is all orchestrated by a shadowy enemy in the background—in this case, a woman of color who knows how to laugh.

The “great replacement” theory is an example of an unoriginal fascist lie: conspirators will make you impotent and bring others to take your place in the world. The apparent complexity of the world resolves itself as a conspiracy, just as the attendant anxiety is resolved by hatred. This works with almost any combination of enemies. It can be a conspiracy of deep-state politicians to kidnap babies, or a conspiracy of Jews to corrupt women. Fascism wins when the enmity summoned begins to tell the story itself.

A fascist marries conspiracy and necessity. Not everyone can tell a spontaneous Big Lie, as Trump did, when he lost the 2020 election. And the Republicans around him did not challenge him. The Big Lie came to life when his followers stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Crucially, he paid no price for that. That made the Big Lie true, in a fascist sense. His de-facto impunity and then de-jure immunity also generated a sense of the untouchable, the heroic.

Trump’s presence has always been a co-creation: his and ours. From the moment when he first came down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he was treated as a source of spectacle. Because he was good for television, he was accepted as a legitimate candidate. In the print media, he grew through the doctrine of both-sides-ism: no matter how awful his deeds, his opponent had to be presented as equally bad. This empowered him to be both wicked and normal. During every campaign’s final months, polling had a similar effect. By displacing policy differences and reducing politics to two faces or two colors, polls reinforce the notion that Trump belonged where he was, and that politics was just a matter of us or them.

What amplifies Trump’s presence more than any other medium is the Internet. He is a natural with its quirky rhythms. And its algorithms make the rest of us open to exactly his sort of talky fascism. On social media, we are drawn away from people of complexity and toward blunt stereotypes. We ourselves are categorized, and are then fed content that brings out, in Václav Havel’s term, our “most probable states.” The Internet does not just spread specific conspiracy theories; it primes our minds for them. This was already true before Elon Musk reshaped Twitter in Trump’s image.

Our engagement with the machine illuminates a difference between the fascists of the twenty-twenties and the fascists of the nineteen-twenties. Back then, the machine was seen as bold and beautiful, a brutal instrument that would return us to our nature by wrenching us from the hold of soft civilization. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had an epiphany after an automobile accident in 1908, which led him to Futurism and then to fascism. For Hitler, the internal-combustion engine hastened a “Blitzsieg,” a lightning victory. The superior race with the superior technology exterminates other races, takes other peoples’ land, and thrives.

We are still driving around using internal-combustion engines, as we were a century ago; what has changed more than our means of locomotion is our means of staying put. When the Nazis dreamed of a radio in every home or a newsreel before every film, they did not imagine Germans motionlessly staring at screens for most of the day, as we all do now. Fascists a hundred years ago liked the male body, physical fitness, and marching around outside. Fascism today involves a masculinity softened by screen time. In both eras of fascism, women were explicitly deemed inferior. If the old fascism depended on a fantasy of accelerated male prowess, today’s rests on the anxiety of mechanical inability.

The fascist fantasy traditionally involved a return to nature. The Leader’s voice guided us into a competition with other races for habitat. Hitler was obsessed with coming ecological catastrophe, and he argued, in “Mein Kampf,” that Germans had to seize land or starve. That was incorrect. But, a hundred years later, those internal-combustion engines and other archaic technologies actually have changed the climate to the point of causing droughts and storms, as we saw during this electoral season.

When such disasters occur, today’s fascists react as Trump and J. D. Vance did: they blame the victims and the immigrants, and invent conspiracy theories. If the old fascism killed for the sake of a dream of uniting with nature, the new fascism will kill by a politics of catastrophe, a deliberate acceleration of global warming, and its exploitation in the service of the politics of us and them.

A century ago, socialists wanted to believe that fascism was just another sign of the decay of capitalism. And they were right, at least insofar as businessmen then didn’t understand that fascism would reshape all of politics and society, and not just suppress labor unions and undermine democracy. Today, though, the point would be much sharper.

Trump does not actually have a lot of money, but he pretends to—getting away with that lie is part of his presence. And his close fascist allies, Musk and Putin, are probably the two wealthiest people in the world. The fascism of today is nestled between the digital oligarchy (Musk) and the hydrocarbon oligarchy (Putin). Trump has pledged himself to America’s own hydrocarbon oligarchs, thereby insuring climate disaster, suffering, immigration, and even more occasions for division.

The oligarchs bring to our fascism its libertarian entry point: they preach that government is the source of all evil. As we yield to that logic, the hydrocarbon oligarchs drill away at the earth and the digital oligarchs at our minds. A weakened government can control neither, nor can it promise sound infrastructure or the welfare state. In these conditions, freedom is viewed not only as a struggle against the government but also as a struggle against one’s own neighbors.

The people who claim to want individual freedom are the same people who clamor for mass deportations. America’s hydrocarbon and digital oligarchs support this kind of libertarianism; it is social media that guides men (and it is usually men) away from the idea that they are solitary heroes to the conviction that other groups must be punished.

Fascism is now in the algorithms, the neural pathways, the social interactions. How did we fail to see all this? Part of it was our belief that history is over, that the great rivals to liberalism were dead or exhausted. Part of it was American exceptionalism: “it can’t happen here” and so on. But most of it was simple self-absorption: we wanted to see Trump in terms of his absences, so that our way of seeing the world would go unchallenged. So we failed to see his fascist presence. And, because we ignored the fascism, we were unable to make the easy predictions of what he would do next. Or, worse, we learned to thrill at our own mistakes, because he always did something more outrageous than we expected.

It was predictable that Trump would deny the results of the 2020 election. It was predictable that his Big Lie would change American politics. It is predictable, today, that he will give free rein to the oligarchs who, he knows, will continue to generate the social and digital bases of a politics of us and them. It is predictable that, in returning to power, he will seek to change the system so that he can remain in power until death. It is predictable that he will use deportations to divide us, to accustom us to violence, and to make accomplices of us. It is predictable that he will create a cult out of the martyrs of January 6th. It is predictable that he will coöperate with similarly minded rulers abroad.

When the historian Robert Paxton was asked about Trump and fascism a few weeks ago, he made an important point. Of course, Trump is a fascist, Paxton concluded. It was fine to compare him to Mussolini and Hitler, but there was a larger point. It took some luck for those two to come to power. “The Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base,” Paxton said, “which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.”

Fascism is a phenomenon, not a person. Just as Trump was always a presence, so is the movement he has created. It is not just a matter of the actual fascists in his movement, who are scarcely hiding, nor of his own friendly references to Hitler or his use of Hitlerian language (“vermin,” “enemy within”). He bears responsibility for what comes next, as do his allies and supporters.

Yet some, and probably more, of the blame rests with our actions and analysis. Again and again, our major institutions, from the media to the judiciary, have amplified Trump’s presence; again and again, we have failed to name the consequences. Fascism can be defeated, but not when we are on its side.

Political scientist explains why Trump won at City Club talk

After a national election, I look forward to Ed Dover explaining the results at a Salem City Club presentation. Dover is a retired political science professor at Western Oregon University. Dover's talk last Friday was his 13th City Club appearance.

Dover began by saying that asking the right questions is key to understanding election results. Adapting the opening song from Hamilton, he said, how could a liar, conman, narcissist, sex with a porn star candidate become president for the second time?

Three factors: (1) Entrenched partisanship, (2) Retrospective voting, (3) Democratic constituencies. 

Entrenched partisanship. Other countries have more variation in their political parties. Sometimes there are 10-12 in a parliamentary system. They come and go, while our Republican and Democratic parties are very old, dating from the late 1700s and mid 1800s. This makes them highly entrenched.

Dover likened this to trench warfare in World War I. At the battle of Verdun, where 800,000 soldiers were killed, the most ground gained by the Germans was 200 yards.

In like fashion, the Democratic and Republican parties are almost equal in strength. Over the last four presidential elections, the Democratic candidates got 49% of the vote and the Republican candidates 48%. With 435 seats in the House of Representatives, it looks like the Democrats will gain 1-2 seats via the recent election. 

Not long ago, parties adapted to their state. In Oregon, at one time we had a Republican Governor, Tom McCall, and two Republican Senators, Bob Packwood and Mark Hatfield. They were more liberal than almost every GOP elected official today. 

Now the parties are national. Every statewide office is held by a Democrat, and the 2024 election gave Democrats a supermajority in both the state House and Senate. But only two seats switched parties in the 60-member House and 30-member Senate, one in the House and one in the Senate.

In the Northwest states (Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Montana), of 24 House seats, 22 stayed with the same party. Republicans picked up a seat in Alaska; Democrats picked up a seat in Oregon.

Nationally, Trump outpaced Harris in the popular vote by just 1.6%, which could be 1.5% after all the votes are counted. In Polk County, out of 16 precincts Harris won six, the same number won by the Democratic candidate since 2000. 

Retrospective voting. This occurs when voters don't look ahead, but to the past, in this case 2019-24. About 1/3 of voters said the economy was their most important issue. They were bothered by higher prices and higher interest rates on mortgages and other debt. 

Dover said that a president doesn't have control of the economy. However, a president is the face of the economy, and that hurt Harris. In 1976 gasoline went from 50 cents a gallon to $1 a gallon after OPEC restricted oil production. Prices for other goods adjusted accordingly. If Reagan had become president in 1976 rather than Carter, likely he wouldn't have been reelected. 

Harris suffered from inflation taking off in the post-covid period. People switched jobs. The United States had a worker shortage, so wages were increased. The average working person was more affected by inflation than the rich. Wealth inequality bothered voters.

Structural problems will continue during the Trump administration, but now Trump will be blamed for economic issues. Inflation may increase again, after a recent decline, if Trump imposes widespread tariffs, which are paid by the purchaser of imported goods, who will pass on the cost to consumers. 

Democratic constituencies. Trump got 2 1/2 million more votes than he did in 2020. Harris got 4 1/2 million fewer votes than Biden did. Why? Many Democrats didn't vote in 2024 after voting in 2020. But likely this isn't a permanent feature of presidential politics. 

In 1992 Democrats controlled the presidency and both the House and Senate. Then in 1994 Democrats didn't vote. In 2000 many Democrats voted for Ralph Nader. If Gore had gotten 1% of the 100,000 votes cast for Nader in Florida, Gore would have become president rather than George W. Bush. In 2008 Obama won the presidency, and Democrats won the House and Senate. In 2010 Democrats lost control of Congress. In 2016 Clinton got money from Wall Street, and 20% of Sanders supporters didn't vote in the general election. 

These days a victorious political party only has 18 months to deal with problems of the past fifty years. Dover said that we may be in an era of one-term presidents. 

During the question and answer period, Dover said:

-- The effect of Biden not campaigning for Harris wasn't evident.
-- Third parties had a minimal effect in 2024.
-- Ranked choice voting failed in Oregon because the pro ads weren't effective.
-- We're #88! Since 87 other countries have elected a woman leader before the U.S.
-- The Wyoming GOP, which heavily controls the state, is the most bitterly divided.
-- Democratic lack of turnout made the difference in the swing states. 
-- In 2028 the Democrats will nominate a similar person, but the economy will work for them next time.

Harris didn't lose by a landslide. She lost by a trickle of electoral sand.

I never expect Trump to speak the truth. When he does, perhaps by accident, it's a shock.

But I haven't been at all shocked to hear Trump spout a lie: that he defeated Harris in a landslide victory that gives him a powerful mandate from the American people to do whatever he damn well wants, no matter how odious, unlawful, or unconstitutional.

Here's a screenshot by someone I follow on Blue Sky and X (I'm weaning myself from X after Elon Musk became a shameless promoter of MAGA falsehoods) which shows a graphic that was on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show today.

You can see that Trump's popular vote margin of victory was smaller than every presidential election since 2000, aside from Al Gore's very narrow margin of 0.5% in 2000. And California has many more votes to count, so Trump's 2024 margin likely will shrink to 1.6% or 1.5% (currently it is 1.65%, which rounds to 1.7%).

Notably, Trump's popular vote margin in his 2024 presidential win is lower than Hillary Clinton's popular vote margin in her 2016 presidential loss. And it likely will end up being about a third of the popular vote margin enjoyed by Joe Biden in 2020. 

Regarding how many votes enabled Trump to win the Blue Wall states in 2024, another person I follow on Blue Sky has the answer: 230,000. Which is 00.15% of the approximate 153 million votes cast in the election. So a shift from Trump to Harris in the Blue Wall states of about 1/7 of a percent would have meant that Kamala Harris would be announcing her cabinet picks, not Donald Trump.

Of course, in 2000 George Bush won the presidency on the basis of just 537 votes in Florida, aided by an extremely contentious and legally dubious ruling by the conservatives on the Supreme Court. But that was enough for him to become the undisputed president of the United States after Al Gore conceded to Bush.

Likewise, Trump was the legitimate victor in the 2024 election. All I'm saying is that Trump's margin of victory in both the popular vote and the electoral college wasn't hugely impressive by historical standards. Here's how CNN described Trump's mediocre electoral college margin.

In terms of the Electoral College, Trump won 312 electoral votes. It’s a solid win, but in the lower half of US presidential elections.

It was a better showing than either his or Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes in 2016 and 2020, respectively. It also outperformed both of George W. Bush’s electoral victories in 2000 and 2004. But it was far short of Barack Obama’s 365 electoral votes in 2008 and 332 in 2012.

Bill Clinton never reached 50% in the popular vote because both of his presidential elections featured a strong third-party candidate in Ross Perot. But Clinton did run away with the Electoral College vote, winning 370 electoral votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996.

Even those strong victories are dwarfed by Ronald Reagan’s 1984 win, a true landslide. Reagan lost only Washington, DC, and Minnesota, the home state of his Democratic rival, Walter Mondale, thereby securing 525 electoral votes and more than 58% of the popular vote.

I'm grateful Oregon is a bright side to 2024 election

I felt this way after the 2016 election, and I feeling it again now: I'm grateful that I live in Oregon, where the Trump red wave that soundly defeated Harris was more like a pink ripple.

According to the Cook Political Report, currently Harris' margin of victory in our state is 13.4% (54.9% for Harris, 41.5% for Trump). That's 2.7% less than the margin Biden beat Trump by in 2020. So Trump increased his vote share in Oregon, but only ten states had a lower increase in the Republican percentage of presidential votes.

Meaning, Oregon fared quite well (from the standpoint of a Democrat, which I am) in an election where nationally Trump gained about six points from his 2020 performance. 

In a November 5 story, "Oregon election results follow usual pattern," Randy Stapilus of the Oregon Capital Chronicle summed things up:

Oregon had few surprises in the  general election results that changed the political landscape very little.

Tracking closely with similar kinds of results in Washington state, the light blue Beaver state stuck with its usual voting patterns, careful to rarely edge over into landslides. In most cases, Portland remained deep blue and most of the eastern counties stayed deep red. 

Taken as a whole, Oregon remained generally blue, even as much of the country was awash in red-tinged results. 

The state Legislature will not be significantly changed by this election, even if a number of new faces will be taking their places in it.

Once again, all of the races for statewide elected officials ended up with Democratic victories. In the Secretary of State race, Tobias Read defeated Dennis Linthicum 54-42. In the State Treasurer race, Elizabeth Steiner defeated Brian Boquist 49-43. In the Attorney General race, Dan Rayfield defeated Will Lathrop 54-46. 

Pleasingly, since I live in the 6th Congressional District, Democrat Andrea Salinas beat Mike Erickson again, 53-47. It also warmed my liberal heart to see Democrat Janelle Bynum snatch the 5th District out of Republican hands by defeating Lori Chavez-Deremer 48-45. It's likely that the GOP will maintain narrow control of the House of Representatives, but Oregon did its part to reduce the Republican margin.

I think the ballot measures turned out fine.

Measure 115 passed 54-46, so now the Oregon legislature can impeach statewide elected officials by a 2/3 vote. Measure 116 failed 53-47, which is mildly surprising, since I expected voters would prefer that an independent commission set the salary for certain officials rather than the legislature. Measure 117 failed 58-42, showing that ranked choice voting isn't popular statewide. Measure 118, which would have increased corporate taxes to give an annual payment to each Oregonian was even less popular, failing 78-22. Unionizing cannabis businesses got a boost when Measure 119 passed 56-44.

I was disappointed that Democratic Salem city councilor Virginia Stapleton lost to incumbent Republican Kevin Mannix 53-47 in the race for the state House District 21 seat. Probably her City Council support for the ill-fated employee payroll tax that was soundly rejected by Salem voters hurt her. 

The national election results depressed me, while the Oregon results helped cheer me up. This wasn't exactly a wash, since I expected Harris to win and I also expected that Oregon would remain solidly Democratic. That made Harris' loss, which extended to her losing all seven of the swing states, more strongly disturbing than the amount of pleasure I got from Oregon doing what it usually does, vote blue.

Nonetheless, I've found some reasons to hope in the face of Trump's victory. Time will tell if I'm justified in that hope. 

Fellow Trump opponents, here's what gives me hope

Election day was really depressing for me. While I knew that the race between Harris and Trump was a toss-up, I expected that Harris would pull out a victory. Heck, maybe even a fairly easy one. At the least, I thought the election would come down to narrow margins in a few swing states.

So when it became evident that Trump was the victor before I went to bed around midnight out here in Oregon, my sleep was fitful. I couldn't stop thinking about the disasters that await our country and the world with another four years of Trump in the White House. 

But with the passage of a few days, my mood has markedly improved. Here's what gives me hope after Harris' disappointing loss.

(1) Let's start with the magnitude of the loss. Nationally, in the 43 non-swing states plus the District of Columbia, Trump gained about 6.7 points from his 2020 performance. However, in the seven swing states, Trump only gained about 3.1 points. So seemingly in the states focused on by the Harris campaign, Harris managed to cut Trump's 2024 over-performance by almost half of what he enjoyed elsewhere.

(2) So what happened on November 5 wasn't the overwhelming mandate from voters Trump is claiming. It was a fairly typical win for a candidate challenging a member of an unpopular president's party. This isn't the beginning of a never-ending upswing for Republicans. The United States frequently bounces back and forth between presidents with a D or R after their name.

(3) While Republicans will control the presidency and Senate, the House is still up for grabs. However the uncalled House races turn out, likely the balance of power will be just a few seats, as it is now. If Republicans control the House, probably they will continue to find passing major legislation to be difficult. This will be a check on Trump even if Johnson remains the Speaker of the House.

(4) If the Republican Party ends up with unified control -- President, Senate, House -- they will unequivocally own what happens to our country and our foreign policy. Given the wacko proposals put forward by Trump, such as deporting 20 million undocumented immigrants and putting a 20% or larger tariff (which amounts to a sales tax) on all imported goods, Americans are going to blame the Trump administration for all kinds of nasty problems that will arise in the next four years.

(5) This assumes that Trump will go down the crazier of two paths, the other being a more moderate presidency. If that restrained version of Trumpism comes to be, this will both be good for the United States and good for Trump (and the Republican Party). But I'm betting that the crazy path comes to be, because that's how Trump rolls.

(6) Sure, 2028 seems far away. That's when our country definitely will be done with Trump as president. So I focus on 2026, the midterms that are a bit under two years away. It seems very likely that Trump's extreme actions will turn off a large share of the American electorate by that time. He believes that his victory over Harris proved that a majority of voters have gone full-on MAGA. Actually, all it proved is that the vice-president to an unpopular president failed to beat an opponent who was saddled with all that people didn't like about the Biden years. In 2026 Trump will learn that now he's the unpopular president.

(7) The party out of power almost always does well in midterm elections. Democrats will be favored to win a majority of House seats, assuming this doesn't happen in the 2024 general election. In the Senate, Republicans will be defending 20 seats and Democrats 13 seats. So the Democratic Party has a good chance of taking control of either the House or Senate, and conceivably both. That would make Trump's last two years in office considerably more difficult.

(8) Public opinion counts. Opponents of Trump already make up about half of the country. Our number probably will grow, not shrink. We have the ability to engage in massive demonstrations if Trump pursues some of his most far-out anti-democracy autocratic schemes. Politicians of both parties are acutely conscious of what's bothering the electorate. Republican officials will stick with Trump so long as they think he is an asset to their re-election chances. When he becomes a detriment, they will begin to desert him.

I realize that things seem politically dark right now. But this won't last. Sunrise follows a sunset. Republicans are gleeful now after Trump's victory. Soon they will discover what many of them already know: embracing Trump means being tied to his erratic authoritarian behavior. When he goes off the rails, the whole Republican Party train will follow. 

Win or (probably) lose, I'm thankful for how Kamala Harris campaigned

It's turning out to be a sad night. I started watching the election returns on MSNBC around 5 pm with a lot of optimism. After all, a couple of days ago I wrote a blog post called "Why I expect Harris will beat Trump fairly easily."

For sure, that's not going to happen. I was wrong.

At the moment the New York Times Live Presidential Forecast gives Trump more than a 95% chance of victory. Harris' only option is to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Currently Trump is leading by 3 points in Pennsylvania, 6 points in Michigan, and 4 points in Wisconsin.

The Blue Wall is crumbling. When I wake up tomorrow, likely it will have fallen, and Trump will have been declared the victor.

Which is so depressing, I had trouble writing that last sentence. My daughter is depressed. Friends are depressed. My wife is watching something on TV that isn't the election results. I read an update from a New York Times reporter that said:

The Harris campaign just shut off the sound on the TVs at her watch party and replaced it with music after a guest on CNN said tonight felt "more like 2016 than 2020."

I feel the same way. Once again, a competent, highly qualified woman is poised to be defeated by one of the worst presidents our country has ever suffered under. And Trump has vowed to make his next term in office even nastier. 

Unless Harris pulls off a near-miracle in the Blue Wall states, get ready for Robert Kennedy Jr. to ban vaccines and fluoride in the water supply, for Elon Musk to make the federal government into a MAGA playground, for millions of hard-working undocumented immigrants to be rounded up in detention camps before being thrown out of the country, for the abortion pill to be banned nationwide along with possibly other forms of abortion due to the Trump administration putting a hitherto unenforced law from the 1800s into effect, for all U.S. aid to Ukraine being withdrawn thereby handing a victory to Putin, for giving unfettered free rein to Netanyahu to kill as many Palestinians as he wants with no consequences, for Trump tariffs devastating our economy via a huge sales tax on all imported goods.

That's what it appears American voters have said they want.

If a Harris defeat is disturbing, equally bothersome will be the realization among those of us who supported her that half of the people in this country are absolutely fine with having an authoritarian, who has been termed a fascist by his Chief of Staff, becoming president again. Well, almost certainly they're going to get what they asked for: a fascist authoritarian president. 

I'm afraid for the United States, and the world. From what I know of the prelude to Hitler taking full control of a Nazi'fied Germany, Trump's plans for his second term in office are disturbingly similar. German leaders thought Hitler wouldn't be as bad as those who warned about him thought he would be. Until, the worst happened. 

Understand: I'm not saying that we will become a 21st century version of Nazi Germany. But the fact that I can even think that we're heading in that direction is beyond disturbing. It's terrifying. 

Obviously voters bought into Trump's incessant lies. They are fine with his stated desire to be a "dictator on Day 1." They can accept all of the things happening that I included in the lengthy paragraph above. In short, they have given a thumbs up to the first truly authoritarian presidency in our nation's history.

I want to end this post on a positive note. And that is, my deep gratitude to Kamala Harris for stepping up after Biden withdrew from the race. She ran a virtually flawless campaign. I found little to criticize in how she presented herself to the American public. Harris gave those of us who supported her hope, joy, and laughter when we needed it in the dark times after Biden's disastrous debate performance.

I don't blame Harris for her impending loss to Trump. I blame the voters who failed to see Trump for who he is: a mortal danger to our country and the world. Say goodbye to federal efforts to combat climate change, young people. Say goodbye to any chance of a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestinians, American Muslims. Enough of you voted for Trump to help him return to power.

Soon you'll see how wrong you were to dismiss Harris. 

I'm not sure if I'll be able to watch an expected concession speech from Harris tomorrow. I'm sad enough now. I don't need more tears. But if I were able to speak to Kamala, I'd tell her that she ran a great campaign. As her running mate Walz likes to say, she left everything on the field. If she loses, as I expect she will, it won't be due to a lack of effort or competence.

It will be due to the inability of the American public to recognize that they could have chosen a gem to become president. Instead, it looks like they've chosen a piece of shit. 

Why I expect Harris will beat Trump fairly easily

As I told a friend today, when I consider how I feel about the almost-upon-us presidential election, it's difficult for me to separate out my strong desire to see Harris win from factual indicators of how her campaign is going.

Nonetheless, below are reasons for why I'm confident that the election is going to turn out surprisingly well for Harris.

I say "surprisingly," because the general attitude among political pundits is that this is a very tight 50-50 toss-up election. Indeed, that's how the three prediction models that I follow basically are rating the electoral college race: Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin favors Trump 53-47, FiveThirtyEight favors Trump 53-46, and the Economist favors Trump 51-49. 

Each of the models gives Trump a slightly higher probability of winning. But these models try to be a reflection of some aspects of reality and obviously aren't reality itself. They are largely, but not entirely, based on polls. 

So here's some other factors that lead me to believe that not only will Harris defeat Trump, she'll do so by winning more than the 270 electoral votes she'd get by holding on to the usually safe blue states, beating Trump in the Blue Wall of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and gaining the single electoral vote in Nebraska's 2nd District.

(I'm expecting that Harris will win all of the above, plus North Carolina and Nevada. If I'm horribly wrong, gleeful Trump supporters can tell me how stupid I was in post-election comments on this post.)

(1) Turnout is key in every election, but especially this one, given the very tight polling results. Trump has farmed out the Republican turnout effort in swing states to Elon Musk and a super PAC he controls. Harris is doing it the usual way, through the Democratic organizations in those states which rely heavily on an army of volunteers. Musk is a smart guy, but he is in over his head in this effort. So better Democratic turnout will be a big reason why Harris wins.

(2) Women strongly favor Harris. Men strongly favor Trump. This doesn't balance out because women are more likely to vote than men are, a plus for Harris.

(3) The Iowa Selzer poll that was released today sent shockwaves through political observers, since it showed Harris leading Trump 47-44 in the red state. As noted above, Iowa women broke strongly for Harris, seemingly motivated in part by the six-week abortion ban that went into effect in Iowa after a previous Selzer poll that showed Trump with a fairly comfortable lead. Ann Selzer is a highly respected pollster, so there's a good chance what the new poll found points to Harris leading in other mid-west states also.

(4) Trump's closing message to voters is incoherent, unfocused, negative, and hateful. Harris' closing message is much more appealing to independent and undecided voters. This is why a poll found that people who have recently decided between Harris and Trump are breaking for Harris by a significant margin.

(5) Latinos in general, and Puerto Ricans specifically, appear to be returning to the Democratic fold. This was spurred by a speaker at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally referring to Puerto Rico as a floating island of garbage. Black men also seem to be favoring Harris in greater numbers, helping to reduce Democratic anxiety about them defecting to Trump.

(6) Trump is making very little effort to appeal to voters outside of his MAGA base. He is putting more emphasis on challenging the results of the 2024 presidential election than on winning the election. This indicates that Trump isn't confident that he's going to get the most electoral votes, since he is hoping that a second try at overturning the results of an election he lost will be successful this time. It won't be, thankfully.

(7) Kamala Harris did great in her appearance on Saturday Night Live last night. She looked happy and relaxed. People are tired of Trump's habitual nastiness. I'm confident this will lead to Harris getting an unexpectedly large number of "I'm fed up with Trump's antics" voters. 

Climate is best reason to vote for Harris, and nobody's talking about it

There are many strange things about the current presidential campaign, including: how Harris suddenly became the Democratic nominee after Biden withdrew; how the Republican Party could happily get behind Trump, a convicted felon who lost the last election; how neither campaign is speaking much about the climate crisis, even though it is by far the most important long-term issue. 

I've watched all of Harris' debates and major speeches. Her silence on global warming is deafening. So is Trump's, but that's to be expected.

Based on his first term in office, and what he's saying now, if Trump is elected it's a certainty that he will try to undo all of the Biden/Harris accomplishments aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, once again withdraw the United States from international efforts to combat human-caused climate change, and give free rein to the oil and gas industry to, as he puts it, "Drill, drill, drill."

Yet long after the current furors over securing our southern border, protecting our democracy, and reducing inflation have been forgotten, the climate crisis will still be the most important long-term issue affecting the United States and the world.

So how is it that Kamala Harris has made this such an insignificant part of her campaign?

I expect this from Trump, not from Harris. I've been thinking that because fracking supposedly is a big deal to Pennsylvania voters, an important swing state, and Harris was attacked by Trump for saying in the 2020 presidential primary that she wanted to ban fracking, Harris is avoiding talking about climate change because it runs the risk of bringing back fracking as a campaign issue.

(Currently Harris says that she's OK with fracking, because she's learned that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced even if fracking continues -- a pretty weak explanation of why she's changed her mind.)

However, an essay by climate activist Bill McKibben in the October 28 issue of The New Yorker casts the climate change silence of the Harris campaign in a rosier light. Here's an excerpt:

This month, in the journal BioScience, a group of the world’s leading climate experts warned, “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt.”

Not that you’d know it from this year’s Presidential campaign. Vice-President Kamala Harris, since becoming the Democratic nominee, has spoken very little about climate change. To the degree that a transition from fossil fuel has been discussed at all, it’s been in the form of her assuring Pennsylvanians that she won’t interfere with fracking. She has spoken about creating green jobs, but not much else.

The reasons are fairly clear. First, the Democratic Party essentially had no primary season. Biden faced only token challenge, and when he stepped down Harris was nominated by acclamation, so activists had no chance to elevate climate change to a crucial electoral issue, as they had done in 2020.

Remember the backdrop: Greta Thunberg’s movement had crested in the fall of 2019, with some six million people marching in protests around the world. In this country, the Sunrise Movement was pushing a Green New Deal. The governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, who was also briefly a Presidential candidate, called that time a “magic moment” for climate politics.

NBC reported, “Climate change has recently shot to the top of polls of issues that Democratic voters care about in the presidential primary, rivaling for the first time longstanding bread-and-butter topics like health care.” Harris, in her primary bid, said that global warming “represents an existential threat to who we are as a species.” Biden, after winning the nomination, secured Senator Bernie Sanders’s support by committing to work with him on climate initiatives.

The second reason for the relative silence this year is that Biden, in fact, largely kept to his commitment. He somehow persuaded the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which finally devoted serious federal money to an energy transition. His need for Senator Joe Manchin’s vote meant that the bill included gifts to the fossil-fuel industry, but it has nonetheless unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars on everything from heat pumps and E.V. chargers to battery factories.

The basic stance of mainstream environmentalists now is that the country is more or less on the right track. They assume that, if Harris wins, many of the people driving policy in the White House will remain in place and that, in four more years, the momentum behind clean energy will be unstoppable. The fossil-fuel industry apparently assumes the same thing: it has been raising money at Spindletop rates for Trump, who has promised to “drill, drill, drill” and has noted, “I hate wind.” The choice is so obvious that Harris doesn’t really need to say much. But, if she’s elected, she’s going to have to do a lot.

That's for sure. I found an article by Elizabeth Colbert in the October 14 issue of The New Yorker to be super-scary. Here's passages about tipping points in "When the Arctic Melts: What the fate of Greenland means for the rest of the Earth."

Most scientists believe that ice ages—there have been at least ten of them over the past two and half million years—are initiated and terminated by periodic shifts in the Earth’s orbit, caused by, among other factors, the tug of Jupiter and Saturn. But orbital shifts produce only slight changes in the amount of sunlight that reaches different parts of the globe at different times of the year.

Such slight variations are insufficient to explain the growth and subsequent retreat of massive ice sheets. Rather, it seems, the orbital shifts act like a trigger, setting off other processes—feedbacks—that greatly amplify their effect.

One relatively straightforward feedback features albedo, from the Latin word for “whiteness.” Ice and especially snow have a high albedo. They reflect lots of sunlight back to space. Thus, as an ice sheet grows, the planet absorbs less energy. This has a cooling effect, which encourages the buildup of more snow and ice, which results in more reflectivity, and so on. Start to melt an ice sheet and the same cycle spins in reverse.

Today, feedbacks are, to put it mildly, a growing concern. A report published last year by more than two hundred researchers from around the world noted that many of the systems that determine the climate exhibit nonlinear behavior. Such systems may “shift to a very different state, often abruptly or irreversibly, as a result of self-sustaining feedbacks.” The researchers identified two dozen potential “tipping systems,” among them the Greenland ice sheet.

At a certain point, the report warned, feedbacks could become so powerful that, even if CO2 emissions were cut dramatically and temperatures stabilized, the ice sheet would continue to shrink, possibly until it collapsed. The “best estimate” of when this critical threshold will be reached is when average global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius—roughly three degrees Fahrenheit—above preindustrial levels. Even after that line is crossed, it will take many centuries for the changes set in motion to play out.

Still, as a practical matter, there will be no going back. When it comes to tipping systems, the future is in our hands until it isn’t.

...Climate change is not like other problems, and that is part of the problem. What it lacks in vividness and immediacy it makes up for in reach. Once the world’s remaining mountain glaciers disappear, they won’t be coming back. Nor will the coral reefs or the Amazon rain forest. If we cross the tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet, we may not even notice. And yet the world as we know it will be gone.