Another Measure of Political Polarization: The Winner’s Share of the Popular Vote in Presidential Elections

In “A Measure of Political Polarization: The Decline of Collegiality in the Confirmation of Justices“, I concocted an index of collegiality for the confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court justices:

C = Fraction of votes in favor of confirming a nominee/fraction of Senate seats held by the nominating president’s party

A C score greater than 1 implies some degree of (net) support from the opposing party. The higher the C score, the greater the degree of support from the opposing party.

Examples:

  1. Tom Clark, nominated by Democrat Harry Truman, was confirmed on August 18, 1949, by a vote of 73-8; that is, he received 90 percent of the votes cast. Democrats then held a 54-42 majority in the Senate, just over 56 percent of the Senate’s 96 seats. Dividing Clark’s share of the vote by the Democrats’ share of Senate seats yields C = 1.60. Clark, in other words, received 1.6 times the number of votes controlled by the party of the nominating president.
  2. Samuel Alito, nominated by Republican George W. Bush, was confirmed on January 31, 2006, by a vote of 58-42; that is, he received 58 percent of the votes cast. Republicans then held 55 percent of the Senate’s 100 seats. The C score for Alito’s nomination is 1.05 (0.58/0.55).

The index, which I computed for nominations since World War II, looks like this:

My commentary:

C peaked in 1975 with the confirmation of John Paul Stevens, a nominee of Republican Gerald Ford. (One of many disastrous nominations by GOP presidents.) It has gone downhill since then. The treatment of Brett Kavanaugh capped four decades of generally declining collegiality.

The decline began in Reagan’s presidency, and gained momentum in the presidency of Bush Sr. Clinton’s nominees fared about as well (or badly) as those of his two predecessors. But new lows (for successful nominations) were reached during the presidencies of Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, and Biden.

There’s another measure of political polarization, one that might be said to capture the general mood of the electorate. That measure is the share of the nationwide popular vote that has accrued to the winner of each presidential election. The nationwide popular vote is irrelevant to presidential elections because of the electoral college (see this post and this one). But the tally has some value as an indicator of the degree of divisiveness among the electorate.

Here are the numbers since the inception of the Republican Party in 1856:

The sharp dips were caused by the good showing of third parties (and sometimes fourth and fifth parties).

What I find interesting is the era of “big wins”, which began in 1920 and ended in 1984. It wasn’t an era of big wins by one party. Voters were (then) quite willing to flock to a Democrat or Republican when they were fed up with incumbent president of the other party for whatever reason (policies, economics, scandals, etc.).

A clearer picture emerges when the winner’s share is averaged over three elections:

By this measure, “national collegiality” peaked in the 1920s-1930s and remained high through the 1980s. It has since declined to a level similar to that of the rancorous and volatile post-Civil War era — the era that saw the rise of “progressivism”, which again poisons political discourse and stifles economic progress.

Related: The Hardening of Political Affiliations in America

How Good Are the Presidential Polls?

The results of the final polls in the last five presidential elections have pointed to four winners. Sounds good? You won’t think so after reading this post.

The values depicted in the graphs at the bottom of this post represent 10-poll averages of respondents’ presidential choices in two-way races (i.e., Republican or Democrat). The dates are mid-points of the periods during which the 10-poll samples were conducted.

The solid black lines trace the percentage-point lead (or deficit) for the eventual “winner” of the (meaningless) nationwide tally of the popular vote in each presidential election from 2004 through 2020. The gray lines trace the margins of error claimed by the organizations issuing the polls. (The dashed gray lines for 2004 are estimates derived by assuming a margin of error of 3 percentage points, which is typical of the later polls.) The range from the upper gray line to the lower gray line represents a 95-percent confidence interval; that is, the actual result would be within the range (or at its outer limit) with a probability of 95 percent.

The red diamond at the right in each graph is the “winner’s” actual margin of “victory” in the nationwide tally of popular votes. In every case, the actual margin of “victory” is within or at the outer limit of the final 95-percent confidence interval. (I use “sneer quotes” because there is no “winner” of the nationwide popular vote, which is a meaningless number. Presidential elections are decided State-by-State, and in 48 of 50 cases the candidate with the greatest number of popular votes in that State receives the State’s entire bloc of electoral votes.)

Putting that aside for the moment, the 95-percent confidence interval covers a range of about 6 percentage points. That is, the “winner’s” actual margin in the (meaningless) nationwide popular vote could be as many as 6 percentage points away the final 10-poll average. A margin of 6 percentage points means that the “winner’s” share of the popular vote could be 3 percent higher or lower than the share implied by the final 10-poll average. Given the statistical relationship between popular votes and electoral votes (discussed here), a shift of 3 percent can mean a gain or loss of 30 percent of the electoral vote.

What lies behind such a disproportionate response to such a small shift? It is the fact that a miniscule change in the distribution of a State’s popular vote can (in 48 cases out of 50) cause a 100-percent swing in the allocation of its electoral votes.

To take a concrete example, Trump won the electoral vote in 2016 despite Clinton’s 2.1 percent margin of “victory” in the tally of popular votes cast in the 50 States and District of Columbia. Clinton’s margin of “victory” was 2.9 million popular votes. She won California by 4.3 million popular votes. In other words, she “lost” the rest of the U.S. by 1.4 million popular votes. Crucially, she lost three States with a total of 46 electoral votes — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — by margins of 0.2 to 0.8 percent. Those three losses cost her the election.

To take another example, Biden’s 4.5 percent popular-vote “victory” in 2020 was much larger than Clinton’s. His huge win in California (5.1 million votes more than Trump) left him with a “victory” of about 2 million votes in the rest of the country. But Biden wouldn’t have won the election without narrow victories in Arizona (11 EV, margin of 0.3 percent), Georgia (16 EV, 0.2 percent), Pennsylvania (20 EV, 1.18 percent), and Wisconsin (10 EV, 0.63 percent).

Finally, there’s the case of the 2000 election (not represented in the graphs below), which Bush “lost” by more than 500,000 votes. He didn’t really lose the election, of course, because he won the crucial State of Florida by 537 votes when the U.S. Supreme Court put a stop to the illegal manufacture of votes for Gore in several Democrat-controlled jurisdictions.

Is there a fail-safe lead in the polls? Let’s return to 2020, when Biden eked out an electoral-vote win by “beating” Trump nationwide by 4.5 percentage points — a lead that was at the bottom edge of the 95-percent confidence interval for the final 10 polls. The center of that confidence interval — the 10-poll average — was 7.6 percentage points. You might suppose that a lead (in the polls) of that size would guarantee an election victory, but it didn’t. A lot of dirty pool was required.

Finally, the accuracy of the polls is compromised by two other facts: The mid-point of the polling period for the final 10 polls occurs three or four days before election day. Early voting has become more prevalent in this century, and it played a huge role in the election of 2020.

The lesson learned: Don’t bet on the outcome of a presidential election unless a candidate is leading in the final 10 polls by, say, 9 percentage points or more. (See above commentary about Biden’s final poll numbers in 2020.) Don’t bet against that candidate, and don’t expect to win more than a pittance if you bet on him to win. Anything else — like betting on a 3-point favorite — is pure guesswork or hope.

That’s reality. And don’t let a pollster tell you otherwise.

Here are the graphs:

Sources and notes — Values derived from the polls of polls at RealClearPolitics.com for the presidential elections of 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. The polls completed entirely in June of each election year were organized chronologically according to the middle date of each polling period. A moving, 10-poll average/lead deficit was then computed, as well as moving 10-poll average margin of error.

The Coming Showdown — As It Would Be if the U.S. Had Leaders Who Care about America

Iran is testing the resolve of the U.S. government by ordering the Houthis to attack shipping in the Red Sea. I doubt that the U.S. government under Biden & Co. will pass the test. But if it did pass the test, here’s what would happen:

  • In response to the attacks, the U.S. would strike Iran directly and with more than token force.
  • The strike wouldn’t decapitate the Irania regime. But the regime would be placed on notice to cease the attacks or face devastation.
  • Russia and China would be told — in no uncertain terms — to butt out of a dispute between the West and iran.
  • That should be the end of it. If it isn’t, all Iranian government and military targets, including “secret” nuclear weapons facility, would be obliterated.

Would Russia and China care to challenge the U.S. after that?  I think not.

Will it happen under Biden & Co.? I think not.

China’s Ascendancy: A Legacy of the Misconduct of the Korean War

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur differed privately and then publicly with President Harry S Truman about the conduct of the Korean War: Truman wanted to settle for stalemate, MacArthur wanted to press on to victory. MacArthur’s reward for presuming that victory was the aim of war came on April 11, 1951, when Truman dismissed him as commander of UN forces in Korea, CinC of the U.S. Far East Command, and Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan, that, is Japan’s overlord.

The firing of MacArthur — a war hero and acclaimed military leader since the U.S. expedition into Mexico in 1914 — instigated a firestorm of calumny directed at Truman and his administration and paeans of praise and honor for MacArthur.

The highest point of MacArthur’s homecoming was his appearance before a joint session of Congress on April 19, 1951. His speech is perhaps most famous for its concluding lines, described here by William Manchester in American Caesar:

He praised “your fighting sons,” reporting that “they are splendid in every way.… Those gallant men will remain often in my thoughts and in my prayers always.” Then, in words few would forget, he said: “I am closing my fifty-two years of military service. When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the Plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day, which proclaimed, most proudly, that ‘Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.’ And like the soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty.” The last word was a hush: “Good-bye.”

Before reaching that point, MacArthur addressed appeasement (again quoting Manchester):

All his life he had been a daring officer, an advocate of aggressive action, and now he told his listeners why: “History teaches with unmistakable emphasis that appeasement but begets new and bloodier war. It points to no single instance where the end has justified that means—where appeasement has led to more than a sham peace. Like blackmail, it lays the basis for new and successively greater demands, until, as in blackmail, violence becomes the only other alternative. Why, my soldiers asked of me, surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?” He paused histrionically, and his voice dropped to a husky whisper: “I could not answer.”

MacArthur followed his triumphal speech with a tour of cities across the U.S. Here is Manchester again on one stop along the way:

On Saturday, March 22, 1952, MacArthur capped his campaign against the administration. Standing on the steps of the capitol in Jackson, Mississippi, he charged that administration policies were “leading toward a Communist state with as dreadful certainly as though the leaders of the Kremlin were charting the course.” He deplored massive American aid to Europe; charity should begin at home, he said; although billions had been spent on the Continent, he doubted that the United States had “gained a single convert to the cause of freedom or inspired new or deeper friendships” there. Of the Korean truce talks, which had been under way for eight months, he said that “the only noticeable result is that the enemy has gained time,” and he prophesied that “our failure… in Korea will probably mean the ultimate loss of continental Asia.”

What he meant — and which everyone then understood — was the loss of continental Asia (i.e., the People’s Republic of China — the PRC — and the nations on its periphery) to the brand of Communism that then ruled and still rules the PRC.

And so the loss is coming to pass, and so will it extend well beyond continental Asia. Communists play the long game, as they are able to do — unencumbered as they are with fickleness of “democratic” politics.

In addition to the obvious (but as yet unanswered) buildup of naval and military forces and facilities in and around the strategically invaluable South China Sea, and the imminent demise of the Republic of China (a.k.a. Taiwan), there is just as importantly the PRC’s leading if not dominant position in international trade. The latter has been acquired in large part by the acquiescence of Western elites to the trading of the West’s industrial (and thus military) infrastructure for goods made in PRC factories under conditions that those same elites would deplore if found in the West.

A realistic reading of the PRC’s intentions and U.S. fecklessness is offered by James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer in “Credible Assurance Is Appeasement by Another Name” (American Greatness, December 11, 2023):

As the People’s Republic of China (PRC) mourns the loss of their “old friend” Dr. Henry Kissinger, who passed away on November 29, it is worth noting his influence as the originator of the “Engagement School” of thought towards the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which remains the dominant voice amongst the “China Hands” of America’s foreign policy establishment. Ironically, this was exemplified the day after his death in the pages of the Council of Foreign Relations Foreign Affairs international relations magazine. It published an article entitled “Taiwan and the True Sources of Deterrence: Why America Must Reassure, Not Just Threaten, China.”…

The authors condemn “ill-advised” statements by former and current U.S. officials who have called for the United States Government (USG) to formally recognize Taiwan. The authors go so far as to demand that USG officials avoid even giving the impression that America is moving toward restoring formal diplomatic relations or a defense alliance with the island, even in the face of the PRC’s military threats against Taiwan that have dramatically spiked in the past year….

[T]hroughout the article the authors provide no acknowledgement for the past 30 years of prior “credible assurances” the USG has made to the PRC through the implementation of the Kissinger School of Engagement by both Democrat and Republican Administrations.

The authors make no mention of the Clinton administration’s efforts to provide the PRC, and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), access to sensitive rocket and space technology or for ushering the PRC into the World Trade Organization (WTO) before the PRC’s economy was fully qualified. WTO entry greatly accelerated its military capabilities and thus threat to Taiwan and the U.S. and its allies. Neither still do the authors fully acknowledgement the Bush administration’s very public castigation of former Taiwan President Chen Shui-bien for his comments regarding independence.

What is most egregious is the failure of the authors to acknowledge the decades old policy of the U.S. Department of Defense’s invitations to their PLA counterparts to visit U.S. naval bases in Hawaii, San Diego, and Norfolk and to openly share with them solutions to improving the PLA as a fighting force. Neither do the author’s mention the Obama administration’s dismantlement of the U.S. Navy over an eight-year period that subsequently led to the PRC Navy becoming the largest in the world. In that vein, the authors also make no mention of the current administration’s pleadings to re-establish military-to-military relations to bring down the tensions they claim are so dangerous, and dominate, in U.S.-PRC relations.

The fact is these authors know full well that none of these efforts at “credible assurance” have altered the CCP from achieving its strategic goal of achieving the Great Rejuvenation of the PRC. Its end state demands the degradation of the United States and the post WWII system of peace and stability that most of the world has benefited from like no other time in history.

What is also clear is that the authors’ article has been used by pro-PRC parties in Taiwan to undermine the upcoming Presidential and parliamentary elections on January 13, 2024 and to interfere in Taiwan’s inherent right to pursue their own self-determination. This amounts to election interference, which the pro-PRC Engagement community appears to believe is their duty. Yet, regardless of what the authors claim, the assertion that Washington and Taipei must provide “credible assurances” is appeasement to the CCP and will only lead to more aggression and danger.

Rather than take the advice of these appeasers, American leaders should stand firm against the threat of war from the PRC and instead should get busy building up the hard-power elements of America’s national defense, which the authors dishonestly proclaim has received too much attention. The reality is the opposite—America’s military power vis-à-vis the PRC and our ability to deter a PRC invasion of Taiwan are at their lowest levels ever.

Taiwan is far from the PRC’s only target, of course. This is from Ellen Nakashima and Joseph Nenn’s “China’s Cyber Army Is Invading Critical U.S. Services” (The Washington Post, December 11, 2023):

The Chinese military is ramping up its ability to disrupt key American infrastructure, including power and water utilities as well as communications and transportation systems, according to U.S. officials and industry security officials.

Hackers affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army have burrowed into the computer systems of about two dozen critical entities over the past year, these experts said.

The intrusions are part of a broader effort to develop ways to sow panic and chaos or snarl logistics in the event of a U.S.-China conflict in the Pacific, they said.

Among the victims are a water utility in Hawaii, a major West Coast port and at least one oil and gas pipeline, people familiar with the incidents told The Washington Post. The hackers also attempted to break into the operator of Texas’s power grid, which operates independently from electrical systems in the rest of the country.

Several entities outside the United States, including electric utilities, also have been victimized by the hackers, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

None of the intrusions affected industrial control systems that operate pumps, pistons or any critical function, or caused a disruption, U.S. officials said. But they said the attention to Hawaii, which is home to the Pacific Fleet, and to at least one port as well as logistics centers suggests the Chinese military wants the ability to complicate U.S. efforts to ship troops and equipment to the region if a conflict breaks out over Taiwan….

“It is very clear that Chinese attempts to compromise critical infrastructure are in part to pre-position themselves to be able to disrupt or destroy that critical infrastructure in the event of a conflict, to either prevent the United States from being able to project power into Asia or to cause societal chaos inside the United States — to affect our decision-making around a crisis,” said Brandon Wales, executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “That is a significant change from Chinese cyber activity from seven to 10 years ago that was focused primarily on political and economic espionage.”…

The hackers are looking for a way to get in and stay in without being detected, said Joe McReynolds, a China security studies fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank focused on security issues. “You’re trying to build tunnels into your enemies’ infrastructure that you can later use to attack. Until then you lie in wait, carry out reconnaissance, figure out if you can move into industrial control systems or more critical companies or targets upstream. And one day, if you get the order from on high, you switch from reconnaissance to attack.”

The disclosures to The Post build on the annual threat assessment in February by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which warned that China “almost certainly is capable” of launching cyberattacks that would disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines and rail systems.

“If Beijing feared that a major conflict with the United States were imminent, it almost certainly would consider undertaking aggressive cyber operations against U.S. homeland critical infrastructure and military assets worldwide,” the assessment said….

This is far from China’s first foray into hacking critical infrastructure. In 2012, a Canadian company, Telvent, whose software remotely operated major natural gas pipelines in North America, notified customers that a sophisticated hacker had breached its firewalls and stolen data relating to industrial control systems. The cybersecurity firm Mandiant traced the breach to a prolific PLA hacking group, Unit 61398. Five members of the unit were indicted in 2014 on charges of hacking U.S. companies.

At the time, the U.S. government wasn’t sure whether China’s aim was to collect intelligence or pre-position itself to disrupt. Today, based on intelligence collection and the fact that the facilities targeted have little intelligence of political or economic value, U.S. officials say it’s clear that the only reason to penetrate them is to be able to conduct disruptive or destructive actions later….

China “is sitting on a stockpile of strategic” vulnerabilities, or undisclosed security flaws it can use in stealthy attacks, Adamski said last month at the CyberWarCon conference in Washington. “This is a fight for our critical infrastructure. We have to make it harder for them.”

The topic of Chinese cyber intrusions into critical infrastructure was on a proposed list of talking points to raise in Biden’s encounter with Xi, according to people familiar with the matter, but it did not come up in the four-hour meeting [emphasis added].

And so it goes. Appeasement sooner or later yields aggression against the appeasers — and the multitudes of innocent bystanders who are gulled in supporting the appeasers.

Political Conservatism Is Centrist

I have described the spectrum of political ideologies as a circle. But as I rethink my analysis, I conclude that the spectrum should be thought of a straight line. At the left is statism (which is really leftist even when it is said to be rightist), conservatism is in the middle, and pure libertarianism (anarchy) is at the right.

Statism is statism: The ruler or ruling class decides how you should live and ensures, through physical and psychological coercion that you live as you are told to live.

Anarchy is the opposite of statism: No one is in charge of everyone. Whether anarchy is good or bad depends on the morals of the potentially most powerful persons or coalitions.

Conservatism is therefore centrist because it recognizes the need for a state of defined and limited power — just enough power to enforce a benign morality.

Trump vs. Biden: 5a

REVISED METHODOLOGY AND UPDATED RESULTS

RealClearPolitics maintains a running tally of presidential election polls. I construct a moving average of the results, where the average represents Trump’s adjusted margin for the 10 most recent polls (taking the mid-point of each polling period as the date of each poll).

I then convert that 10-poll average to an estimate of Trump’s share of the two-party popular vote. For example, an average margin of +4 indicates a 52-48 split of the popular vote, that is, Trump gets 52 percent of the popular vote.

Finally, I apply my algorithm for the relationship between the GOP candidate’s share of the electoral vote and his share of two-party popular vote. Here is the trend since July 30, 2023:

These basic estimates of popular-vote and electoral-vote shares don’t account for the margin of error in pollsters’ findings or the margin of error in my estimate of electoral votes. When I apply those margins of error, Trump’s share of the electoral vote ranges from 40 percent to 77 percent for the 10 most-recent polls.

CAVEAT: These are not estimates of the outcome of next year’s election. They simply reflect the stated preferences of voters for Trump or Biden when the polls were conducted.

Toxic Femininity: Some Examples

Lucrezia Borgia:

The Wicked Witch of the West:

Cruella deVil:

The Squad:

'The Squad' wins: AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib

And the queen of toxic femininity:

Hillary Clinton says she'll support Sanders if he's nominated by ...

Sweet dreams. Hahahahahah!

Will Israel and Other Issues Split the Dems?

Some cracks are appearing in the Democrat Party. For one, there’s a very public fight between supporters of Israel and supporters of Palestine Hamas. For another, even among Democrats there are questions about Biden’s fitness for office. For a third, there’s Gavin Newsom’s “shadow” candidacy, which underscores Biden’s decrepitude and threatens to blow up into a big fight with Kamala Harris should Biden step aside. For a fourth, there’s illegal immigration, which is beginning to get on the nerves of some Dems. That’s a good enough list to start with.

The cracks in the Dems’ facade of unity are good for the GOP, and might make a difference next year. But the election is almost 12 months away, and the Dems seem to be better the GOP at pulling themselves together. I think it’s the power-lust, which has become stronger among Dems as they party has moved sharply leftward.

Today’s Democrat Party reminds me of the USSR — plenty of infighting, but unity in the face of the enemy.

Holiday Memories

I sometimes take a mental trip into the past — into the golden past of boyhood, where all the days are sunny and summery, or Christmas-y.

I stand on the sidewalk in front of the first house I lived in. There it is, a cream-colored, two-story, clapboard house with a small detached garage to the right. It sits on a corner lot of some size on a tree-lined street. An alley runs behind it. The streets at the front and left side of the house are unpaved, as were many streets in that small city where I was a boy in the 1940s.

The deep, covered porch runs the width of the house. I walk up the steps to the porch and enter the front door, which opens into the living room. With sunlight streaming through the windows, I wander through the living room to the dining room and kitchen. I go out the back door to the enclosed back porch, from which I can see the garage and the back yard.

I return to the house and venture to the basement, with its huge, coal-fired furnace, coal bin, and my father’s work shop. I go back up — and then up again, climbing the stairs to the second story — the stairs with a wrought-iron railing. I reach the upper hallway and visit, in turn, the three sunny bedrooms and the black-and-white tiled bathroom.

Yes, it was a modest house. But it was the first place I thought of as home, and it’s a place that I always think of as sunny.

At other times I remember my grandmother’s house in a small, lakeside village about 90 miles north of where I grew up. Her modest, two-story bungalow sat on a deep lot that backed up to open fields where doves cooed as I awoke on sunny, summer mornings to the smell of bacon frying. My favorite room was the kitchen, with its massive woodstove and huge, round, oak table, around which my grandmother, parents, and various aunts and uncles would sit after a meal, retelling and embellishing tales from the past.

We often visited my grandmother at Christmas, and I like to relive the Christmas eve when we made the 90-mile trip as feathery snow slowly piled deeper on the deserted, lakeside highway we traversed through quiet villages: Lexington, Port Sanilac, Forester, Richmondville, Forestville, White Rock, Harbor Beach, Port Hope, Huron City, and — at last — Port Austin.

Many of those villages were tiny: a scattering of houses, perhaps a church and a gas station — but not a traffic light. The more substantial villages — those that had 1,000 or even 2,000 residents and a traffic light — boasted rows of well-kept and sometimes stately homes on shady streets, along with prosperous brick and white-frame churches, a few blocks of tidy stores, and perhaps a lighthouse:

The lakeside highway (before it straightened and moved inland) rode atop high bluffs overlooking the vastness of Lake Huron:

Many of the stately homes along the way have become inns:


A short detour through the old part of Huron City would yield a view of Seven Gables, the summer home of William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943), a professor of English literature at Yale and a popular lecturer and writer in the early decades of the 20th century:

The village of Port Austin didn’t have a quaint main street (seen here probably in the 1970s), but it was a place where a young boy could wander safely:

The rest of the village had more to offer. An elegant old inn . . .

. . . these sights along the shoreline . . .



. . . and this view of the harbor at sunset:

Golden days, golden nights. Gone forever — but still alive in my reveries.

Trump vs. Biden: 5

Happy Thanksgiving! Trump’s lead over Biden has increased (explanation below):

RealClearPolitics maintains a running tally of presidential election polls (among many others). RCP has also assessed the pro-Democrat or pro-Republican bias of the final presidential-election polls issued by major pollsters in 2016 and 2020. On average, the polls were biased toward the Democrat nominee by 2.3 percentage points.

As the pollsters release their results, I adjust Trump’s lead/deficit for bias. I then construct a moving average of the adjusted results, where the average represents Trump’s adjusted margin for the 10 most recent polls (taking the mid-point of each polling period as the date of each poll).

I then convert that 10-poll average to an estimate of Trump’s share of the two-party popular vote. For example, an average margin of +4 indicates a 52-48 split of the popular vote, that is, Trump gets 52 percent of the popular vote.

Finally, I apply my algorithm for the relationship between the GOP candidate’s share of the electoral vote and his share of two-party popular vote.

The estimates of popular-vote and electoral-vote shares don’t account for the margin of error in pollsters’ findings or the margin of error in my estimate of electoral votes. But the movement of the estimates may be taken as indication of the movement in voters’ preferences between Trump and Biden (or whoever might become their parties’ nominees). It is that movement which I will report from time to time.

 

The Meaning of “Liberalism” is Beside the Point

Cass Sunstein attempts to define and justify liberalism in “Why I Am a Liberal” (The New York Times, November 20, 2023). Sunstein makes 34 claims about liberalism, most of them complicated and nuanced. The result can be described (charitably) as a dog’s breakfast. Take the first sentence of Sunstein’s first claim:

1. Liberals believe in six things: freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy.

What’s not to like? Well, those six things sound nice, but not when some hard questions are asked about them.

Is freedom unbounded? If not, how and by whom are the bounds to be determined? By bureaucrats whom democratically elected officials have empowered to dictate the minutiae of the citizenry’s existence, including but far from limited to the kinds of products and services they may buy and how those products and services may be made?

If freedom is unbounded, do human rights include the right to kill other persons randomly, including unborn persons? If freedom is bounded, do human rights include the right (for example) to take the income and wealth of some persons and give it to others? Who makes and enforces the rules that allow that to happen? Are they democratically elected officials and their bureaucratic surrogates who make laws for the benefit of their favored constituencies or in the service of an illiberal ideology that looks askance at wealth and property ownership?

Does pluralism contemplate the right of persons to invade another country, commit crimes against the inhabitants of that country, burden the taxpayers of that country by accepting, for example, “free” housing and education, and eventually to be proclaimed citizens of that country in order to perpetuate that kind of pluralism and its consequences (see the preceding and following paragraphs).

Does security include the right to retain the fruits of one’s labor and capital, or are such decisions made to democratically elected officials (and designated bureaucrats) who favor certain constituencies and ideologies? Does security include the right to be safe in one’s own home or while peacefully going about one’s own business when pluralism leads to an influx of criminal non-citizens and to the freeing of dangerous felons because they are considered “victims” of a system that (oddly enough) strives to punish wrongdoing.

My questions suggest that democracy and the rule of law aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The value of democracy and the rule of law depend very much on who is making and enforcing the laws, and for whose benefit they are making and enforcing those laws.

What matters isn’t whether a people seeks freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy. What matters is whether a people can cohere in voluntary, peaceful, and mutually beneficial coexistence.

Freedom and all of those other nice-sounding things are meaningless shibboleths absent a common culture grounded in traditional morality and shared by a people bound in genetic kinship.

Related posts:

Social Norms and Liberty

On Liberty

Facets of Liberty

Burkean Libertarianism

Genetic Kinship and Society

The Poison of Ideology

How the Constitution Was Lost

Trump vs. Biden: 4

UPDATED 11/21/23

RealClearPolitics maintains a running tally of presidential election polls (among many others). RCP has also assessed the pro-Democrat or pro-Republican bias of the final presidential-election polls issued by major pollsters in 2016 and 2020. On average, the polls were biased toward the Democrat nominee by 2.3 percentage points.

As the pollsters release their results, I adjust Trump’s lead/deficit for bias. I then construct a moving average of the adjusted results, where the average represents Trump’s adjusted margin for the 10 most recent polls (taking the mid-point of each polling period as the date of each poll).

I then convert that 10-poll average to an estimate of Trump’s share of the two-party popular vote. For example, an average margin of +4 indicates a 52-48 split of the popular vote, that is, Trump gets 52 percent of the popular vote.

Finally, I apply my algorithm for the relationship between the GOP candidate’s share of the electoral vote and his share of two-party popular vote.

The estimates of popular-vote and electoral-vote shares don’t account for the margin of error in pollsters’ findings or the margin of error in my estimate of electoral votes. But the movement of the estimates may be taken as indication of the movement in voters’ preferences between Trump and Biden (or whoever might become their parties’ nominees). It is that movement which I will report from time to time.

Here is the first report, which begins with a clutch of polls that were completed in mid-August, when polling season seems to have begun in earnest:

The Sky Is Not Falling

The Economist, via The Washington Post’s Dan Balz, has issued a warning that the sky will fall if Trump wins in 2024. Among the things feared by The Economist and many other pearl-clutchers are these:

  • Retribution against political enemies.
  • The roundup and deportation of illegal aliens.

A sober analyst of Trump’s threats regarding political enemies would understand those threats to be a promise to call his political enemies to account for their flagrant abuse of the justice system in an effort to discredit him and (if their luck holds) to put him in prison. There’s a prime facie case that all of the indictments of and other proceedings against Trump are the result of tacit collusion to take down the biggest threat to Democrat control of the executive branch. Trump, in other words, would seek to punish those who have politicized the justice system, which seems like justice to me.

A sober analyst would also understand Trump’s statements about illegal immigration as a promise to enforce the law. Failure to enforce the law has become a routine exercise for Democrat politicians.

But the usual suspects (which include The Economist, WaPo, and a long list of other such organs) eschew sobriety and paint every threat to the Democrat Party and its favored constituencies (e.g., blacks, illegal immigrants) as a moral outrage.

So, if it comes to pass that Trump is elected and he does what he says he’s going to do, the wailing and gnashing of teeth will resound through the left-o-sphere, but the sky definitely won’t be falling.

Conservatism and Happiness

The most-viewed post in the history of this blog is “Intelligence, Personality, Politics, and Happiness” (January 4, 2011). It ends with this:

If you are very intelligent — with an IQ that puts you in the top 2 percent of the population — you are most likely to be an INTJ, INTP, ENTJ, ENTP, or INFJ, in that order. Your politics will lean heavily toward libertarianism or small-government conservatism. You probably vote Republican most of the time because, even if you are not a card-carrying Republican, you are a staunch anti-Democrat. And you are a happy person because your expectations are not constantly defeated by reality.

If I were of a mind to rewrite the post, I would amend the final sentence to read:

And you are a happy person because your intelligence and personality make you self-confident and self-reliant. You are your own master (even though you pay taxes and obey laws out of prudence), not an emotional slave to the purveyors of political, economic, and scientific lies that are aimed at giving them power over your mind and your votes.

I remembered my old post and devised its new ending after reading Luke Conway’s “The Curious Case of Conservative Happiness” (The American Spectator, November 17, 2023). Sociologists (Conway is one) have found repeatedly that conservatives are happier than “liberals”. But why? Conway explains:

There are two extant theories. The first and more influential theory is that conservatives are comfortable with inequality and unconcerned with societal fairness. This tendency towards “system justifying” attitudes — attitudes that make conservatives insensitive to the needs of groups suffering in society — tends to serve as a buffer against bad stuff in their world. It makes them believe they live in a world where their group is on top of a system that is totally fair and justifies their own ethnic and political biases. As a result of this set of system justification blinders, conservatives believe they are at the top of a good system — and that is why they are happier than the lower-status, accurate, compassionate liberals….

The second theory is that conservatism tends to promote good psychological adjustment. As far back as 2012, social psychology researchers have suggested that conservatives were happier because conservative ideology is associated with personal agency, religiosity, optimism, emotional stability, and other variables that in turn are associated with positive psychological adjustment. In the words of Schlenker and colleagues: “Conservatives appear to have qualities that are traditionally associated with positive adjustment and mental health. When we examined established measures of personal agency, positive outlook, and transcendent moral beliefs (i.e., religiosity, moral commitment, tolerance of transgressions), we found ideological differences that accounted for the happiness gap.”…

… Part of the problem with past research is that it tends to conflate nasty-sounding “system justification” beliefs with perfectly healthy beliefs that would lead to good outcomes without any system-justifying component. For example, one of Napier and Jost’s primary measurements of system justifying beliefs was a single item anchored by “hard work doesn’t generally bring success, it’s more a matter of luck” on one end and “in the long run, hard work usually brings a better life” at the other.

Stop reading for one minute and think about that. In their view, believing that hard work usually is associated with success makes you a “system justifier” because that belief inherently blames people for the bad outcomes they get. But I’m not so sure about the immutability of that association. While it is possible that belief in hard work can be system-justifying, it need not be so. “If I work hard to prune this tree, it will be more likely to grow fruit” does not seem especially system justifying, as it doesn’t necessarily involve any social systems. Indeed, the two things are conceptually orthogonal. I might believe that hard work generally leads to good outcomes and yet believe that nonetheless this occurs in spite of admitted societal unfairness….

Thus, while it is certainly possible for someone to hold a belief in hard work to blame others’ failures on their lack of hard work, it need not be so. And there is no denying that believing in hard work also produces agency — the belief that one can make a difference — which is psychologically healthy….

So what happens when we try to separate the psychological adjustment and system justification models? Several years ago, our lab conducted a set of 5 studies to evaluate that question. We pitted the system justification theory against the psychological adjustment theory….

First, we found that direct measurements of a desire for social group inequality — the hallmark of the system justification explanation, a variable called “Social Dominance” — did not explain why conservatives were happy at all….

Second, three variable sets associated with psychological adjustment — religiosity, belief in hard work/achievement, and anti-entitlement attitudes — were good predictors of conservative happiness….

Third, Jost and Napier’s System Justification Scale, which is essentially a measurement of the degree that Americans believe American society is a good place, was in fact one of the better predictors of conservative happiness across our five studies. However, the system justification scale was also related to beliefs generally associated with psychological adjustment (hard work, religiosity). So even though the “system justification” scale explained part of conservative happiness, this is not overwhelmingly good evidence for the nastier implications of the system justification model. At worst for conservatives, it means that they are happier in part because living in a society they like makes them happy….

[R]esearchers often completely miss emphasizing the positive benefits of self-control, religion, hard work, and mental toughness in helping people deal with life’s challenges. In this omission, they do not largely fail conservatives — who are presumably doing those things anyway — they rather fail their liberal constituents by not equipping them with legitimate psychological tools for well-being….

Second, and more insidiously, this perspective simply mis-characterizes conservatives as uncaring people who, like rich autocrats stealing from the poor people they rule, gain their happiness at the expense of their lesser brethren….

For example, a recent four-study article illustrated that conservatives in both the United States and the United Kingdom actually show more empathy to their political enemies than liberals do. In the words of the authors: “conservatives consistently showed more empathy to liberals than liberals showed to conservatives.”

As I said: self-confidence and self-reliance (agency) make for happiness. Conservatives tend to have more of those things than “liberals”, which frees them (conservatives) of financial and regulatory dependence on the state and from psychological dependence on purveyors of lies — including lies about conservatism.

Related posts:

Obama’s Big Lie

That Which Dare Not Be Named

Why Trade Doesn’t Deter Aggression

Opponents of war (and corporate opportunists) like to believe (or claim) that it can be forestalled by trade. The reasoning goes like this:

If nation X and nation Y are trading partners, nation X will not attack nation Y (despite ideological differences) because nation X would lose its remunerative access to nation Y’s buyers of nation X’s products.

But why is X trading with Y? One reason is to fund the growth of X’s armed forces while also improving the health of its populace — including, not least of all, the health of its men of fighting age.

Unlike Y, which views trade only through the lens of economic advantage, X views trade as a means to its ultimate objective: dominance of other nations in order to dictate exploit their economic strengths and to obtain their acquiescence (if not outright submission) to X’s ideology.

There will come a time when the leaders of X believe that they have acquired the military might needed to attain the ultimate objective. When that time comes, X will leverage its might to dictate trade on its terms and cow its trading “partners” into ideological acquiescence, followed by submission. (Acquiescence having already been attained de facto, submission will follow given the venal and amoral character of Y’s leaders.)

Ideological zealots put dominance above all else. (Their true ideology is often the attainment of power for its own sake.) They should not be treated as if they were merely rational trading “partners”. But they are so treated by the avaricious “globalists” whose wealth and influence dazzle and dictate to Y’s leaders.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Americans, like most people in the world, are besieged by authority. How (many? most?) Americans can still believe that theirs is a land of liberty puzzles me greatly, and has done so for many years.

Take Joe Biden — please! — who yesterday said of China’s Xi: “He is a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is communist,” … adding that the Chinese government “is totally different than ours.” Different? In what way?

Atop of all of the millions of pages of federal, State, and local regulations that specify what Americans may and may not do and how their products and services must be produced (or not) — and atop of all of the chicanery that Democrats (mostly) deploy to acquire and sustain the power to tell Americans how to live — there has arisen in the past decade a vast industry of government lying, spying, censorship, and unequal justice that Xi might have designed. (See, for example, “Obamagate and Beyond“, and consider the latest revelation about the censorship industry.)

Americans, like most Westerners, seem to mistake relative prosperity for liberty. (There’s a good example of that in “Biden’s Popularity and Gasoline Prices“.) But like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, Americans will understand what’s happening to them only when it’s too late to do anything about it. (See “Economics: America’s Mega-Depression” and “Convergence Theory Revisited“.)

You have been warned.

Pages

If you are new to this blog, or haven’t visited in a while, check out Pages in the sidebar. There you’ll find links to long, substantial pieces that merit special attention (in my humble opinion).

In Case You Missed It …

This blog has reopened for business after a sojourn at Substack as Loquitur’s Letter. Stay tuned.

The New Dispensation

It’s simple, to a fault.

The new dispensation isn’t “liberty”, “democracy”, “equity”, or any of the other shibboleths mouthed by its Orwellian architects. The new dispensation is to force human events to follow a certain course by gaining control of the apparatus of the state and coercing its subjects to act according to its dictates through censorship and force.

That is the direction in which the United States is headed. Regardless of dire consequence of the policies favored by those in control of the state. Those consequences — in addition to the loss of liberty — include general inflation, soaring energy and food prices, the suppression of science that gets the “wrong” answers, and (above all) the destruction of civil society.

Those consequences are assured as the regime presses on with heavy handed regulation, the weaponization of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, the empowerment of private actors (e.g., Big Tech) to suppress the regime’s enemies, and the division of Americans into desirable and undesirable identity groups.

There is no learning from experience in this regime. Belief — uninformed and ends-driven — rules all. Every failure is met not with an honest reappraisal of policy failures but with the reassertion and expansion of failed policies.

It is the Sovietization of America: the exercise of power for its own sake, justified by the betterment of the people (or some of them), with the effect of impoverishing the people and setting them against one another.

I Told You So, Virginia

Never underestimate the appeal of the forbidden.

A year ago today, I posted “Don’t Celebrate Yet, Virginia”, wherein I had this to say about the election of Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s first Republican governor in eight years:

Gratifying as the resurgence of Virginia’s GOP may be, I’m not ready to declare Virginia’s return to Red-ness.  For one thing, there’s an underlying trend toward Blue-ness, which shows up in Virginia’s presidential election results:

Derived from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. The series for Virginia begins with the gubernatorial election of 1949,which is the earliest for which Leip as posted popular-vote tallies.

The GOP’s edge in the presidential election peaked in 1968, the year of George Wallace, who (in the South) siphoned votes from the Democrat candidate. If 1968 doesn’t suit as a peak year, because of the Wallace effect, then the peak certainly occurred in 1984, with the re-election of Ronald Reagan. In either case, the GOP candidate’s share of Virginia’s presidential vote has been in decline for decades, and seems unlikely to recover unless there is a nationwide shift away from the Democrat party. Such a shift might occur, given the Dems’ suicide pact with the far-left, but cooler heads may yet prevail among party leaders.

It’s true that the downswing in the GOP’s hold on Virginia’s governorship hasn’t been as pronounced — which supports Tip O’Neill’s observation that all politics are local. But the GOP’s edge in the past has been much greater than the razor-thin victory eked out by Glenn Youngkin in the recent election.

Nor is that victory especially impressive when the swing toward the GOP in 2021 is compared with earlier swings:

Source: Leip’s Atlas.

What probably happened in the 2021 election is what seems to have been happening since the early 1970s. The Virginia gubernatorial election reflects a typical “mid-term” reaction to the previous year’s presidential election. When the GOP presidential candidate racks up a gain relative to the showing of the GOP candidate four years earlier (a positive “swing”), the GOP gubernatorial candidate racks up a loss relative to the showing of the GOP candidate four years earlier (a negative “swing”). And conversely.

The results of the yesterday’s elections in Virginia bear out my pessimism. Governor Youngkin had hoped to flip the Virginia Senate, which Democrats held by 22-18, and hold (or build) the GOP lead in the House of Delegates, which Republicans held by 52-48.

At this moment, it looks like the Democrats will continue to hold the Senate, by 21-19, while reclaiming the House by a margin of 51-49.

The outcome in Virginia reflects America’s descent into depravity.

There was, for example, a close race in Virginia’s 57th House district. The Democrat who made it a close race is none other than Susanna Gibson. It is Gibson who raised funds for her election campaign by performing sex acts with her husband and uploading the videos to a porn site.

The big issue in Virginia was abortion — of course.

The failure of the GOP to retake the Senate had much to do with the campaign in the 16th district, where I live. The Republican incumbent lost to a Democrat in a contest that centered on abortion. Democrats pounded on the issue in mailings and TV ads. Had the Republican won, the Senate would be tied 20-20, with the Republican lieutenant governor determining the outcome of tied votes. But the “right” to abortion carried the day for the Democrat.

The outcome in House races was similarly linked to the issue of abortion. Again, I saw at first hand the emphasis that was placed on abortion by Democrats in the race for the seat in the 58th district, where I live, and in a neighboring district that the GOP incumbent seems to have held by a narrow margin.

Virginia’s — and America’s descent into depravity is confirmed by the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post, which hail the outcome of yesterday’s elections with headlines like these (in their online feeds):

Abortion Rights Fuel Big Democratic Wins, and Hopes for 2024

Abortion rights advocates win major victories in Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia

This of a piece with the open attacks on and mockery of religion (unless it’s Islam):

Let’s face it, the America that I knew — and which many Americans want to preserve — has been dying since the 1960s and is now dead.

I want my country back.