Coup Total Landscaping

Trump's coup attempt is bound for Coup Total Landscaping. He's so far behind electorally that he has to corrupt too many people in a coordinated way at once. Collective action problems prevent Evil from overthrowing democracy, so Good will win.

His big plan, I think, is to rope Republicans into his nonsense. Many will play along with the idea that he was robbed or say the outcome is uncertain until the Electoral College makes things official. At that point many GOP primary voters will be permanently convinced. That gives him a nice power base for the next few years.

Trump's one true business skill is winning a bankruptcy. He had six in his hotel and casino businesses. He walks away with most of what's left, leaving customers, creditors, and clients to curse their deals with the devil. We'll see how many Republicans end up in his hell.

The GOP versus the T Party? Dreams of a schism

Trump wants to overturn the election. I don't see how he could succeed. But he'll go at least as far as Republicans are willing to follow, and they could follow for a while. A president fighting such a clear election result is uncharted territory, so I can't say what happens here.

McConnell is approving Trump's move towards recounts and litigation, without criticizing his baseless allegations of fraud. Georgia's runoff-bound Republican Senators are parroting Trump's allegations of fraud in Georgia voting. But the Republican state Secretary of State says the election was clean and rejects their calls to resign. Fox News isn't trying to amplify Trump's fraud allegations -- their top headline now is about Pelosi being a socialist. We'll see how this plays out.

There's a lot I don't know. But I know what I want for Christmas: a schism in the Republican Party. On one side is Trump and his personality cult; on the other is the institutional party that preceded him. Right now he's trying to control the whole thing. But he'll be content to break off a nice big piece and hold the party hostage unless it respects his legal and financial interests.

2010-2012 saw seven Senate races where Tea Party Republicans beat moderates in primaries and lost general elections to Democrats. They included anti-masturbation crusader Christine O'Donnell of "I am not a witch" fame, Todd Akin of "legitimate rape / shut that whole thing down" fame, and Richard Mourdock who got tangled up in the Problem of Evil when answering a debate question about Akin's abortion views. I want to win that way again.

A Trump schism could undermine Republican coordination and help us win the Georgia runoffs. (I'm sorting out Georgia donation ideas. Trouble is that with maybe $100M going into this on both sides, we hit diminishing returns on any way of spending it, and I try to give you extra bang for your buck.) The incumbents could end having to take sides on intra-GOP disputes splitting their base, and the national party might not be able to unify behind them.

The big prize is 2022. Republicans are defending 20+ seats. Many are tough for Democrats to win. But if establishment GOP Senators get overthrown by T party candidates in league with their cult hero, we could clean up. That requires a deep Republican schism, so that's what I'm hoping for.

The Republican Party has been my enemy since I was 10 years old. That's when public-spirited black architect Harvey Gantt, recently mayor of Charlotte, was running for Senate as a Democrat. He lost to old segregationist Jesse Helms, who blocked federal AIDS funding because he thought gay people were disgusting. 

From Helms to Bush to Trump, that party has been the the same coalition of corrupt wealth and vicious prejudice. I don't really strategize against the politicians in it as individuals anymore. The party as an institution must be annihilated; the power of the Republican coalition must be destroyed.

Good luck, Georgia Democrats!

Joe Biden took the lead in Georgia, and I took a walk in the sunshine. Up in a tree were two hornbills, regarded as good omens by the Dayak people of the islands surrounding me here in Singapore. I thought of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, whose double runoff election will decide control of the Senate. 

Warnock and Ossoff's task is difficult. But they have fair chances against incumbents who traded stocks on insider COVID information, and a party that a defeated Trump may drag into chaos. Our NC and Alaska candidates rightly haven't conceded due to their states' back-loaded electoral processes, so we have long-shot hopes there. But Georgia will be the live heart of the struggle.

Stacey Abrams commands the forces behind these men, which now face a great test of strength. I gave her organization $1000 about a year ago when I saw this begin to take shape. Now I hope she can win a mighty victory.

Zach Barnett proves that it's rational to vote

Just in time for Election Day, Zach Barnett has a forthcoming proof that it's rational to vote in most elections.

Some people think it's not rational to vote because the chance of changing the outcome is so small. Of course, the stakes are very high (assuming you care about others). How do these factors trade off against each other?

Zach shows that your likelihood of deciding the outcome is usually more than one divided by the total number of voters. If there are a million voters aside from yourself, there are a million and one possible vote totals (1 million-to-zero.... 999,999-to-1... 999,998-to-2...). In a competitive election, the totals around the middle are much more likely than the ones at the edges. So an exact 500K to 500K tie, where your vote decides the election, is one of the more likely possibilities.

This means that in expectation, voting directs more than your share of tax dollars and government resources. If you could, you'd probably go to the trouble of voting to simply determine who directs your own share of all this (about $10,000 in annual revenue and $400,000 in assets, to divide the government's revenue and assets by the population). Your small chance to direct the $3.5 trillion federal budget and $124 trillion in assets is worth even more.

Humans being humans, I don't expect that Zach's argument is the key to converting many nonvoters into voters. But it's a nice formal explanation of why voting matters.

Boris won't feed the kids

Boris Johnson's Tory government has voted against giving poor children free school meals during the holidays. Before the pandemic, 10% of UK children were poor enough to go hungry, and estimates are up to 20% now. This is unconscionable penny-pinching from a government that subsidized restaurant meals as a stimulus measure during a pandemic.

Feeding poor hungry children is a good idea in so many ways. Most obviously, it improves their immediate well-being. It helps in the long-term, both through direct nutritional effects and by letting them do things now that are good for them. It stimulates an economy that's running below capacity. I'd bet on it as a market-beating human capital investment, giving the UK more healthy and productive future citizens.

India's Constitution explicitly honors a right to food. My utilitarian view of natural rights supports this. If legally guaranteeing something improves the general happiness, there's a right to it. By feeding people when famine strikes, India has avoided the mass starvation that repeatedly killed millions under British rule.

The former colonial rulers are still getting it wrong.

Amy Coney Barrett is unqualified: she doesn't respect the Constitution

Amy Coney Barrett is unqualified for her Appeals Court position. If she joins the Supreme Court, it must be radically reformed.

When asked whether the Constitution allows the President to delay the election, she replied that she'd have to consider matters “with an open mind." At greater length: "I would need to hear arguments from the litigants and read briefs and consult with my law clerks and talk to my colleagues and go through the opinion-writing process." 

This is like being open-minded about whether murder is legal. The Constitution allows only Congress to change election dates, which are set by Title 3, Section 1, Chapter 1 of the U.S. Code. 

When asked, "Under federal law, is it illegal to intimidate voters at the poll?" she replied, "I can’t apply the law to a hypothetical set of facts." But hypotheticals are irrelevant. Federal law bans even attempted intimidation, requiring some combination of fines or prison for "whoever intimidates, threatens, coerces, or attempts to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of such other person to vote."

If these are sincere statements of her beliefs, she doesn't know vital parts of American law. This renders her incompetent to be any sort of federal judge.

But I expect she knows election law perfectly well. She just doesn't care. Her policy preferences would be promoted by undermining elections so her allies could hold power. She will happily support voter intimidation to achieve that end.

Barrett describes herself as an originalist about Constitutional interpretation. Yet her answers violate the Constitution. This reveals the point of originalism -- to defend gruesome prejudices that society mostly surpassed by summoning them back from the 1700s in their full monstrous form.

Moral Twin Earth to Donald Trump

I've written only one paper that really bears the marks of the Trump Administration -- "One-person Moral Twin Earth Cases", which came out in Thought two years ago. It has two thought experiments. In one, you're a crash-landed astronaut hearing trolley problems from an alien nurse. The other one is heavier.

To explain what the paper is about, I'm criticizing theories of moral language popular among people who think that objective moral facts can be empirically discovered. This is in fact my team, as I think we can empirically discover that pleasure is moral value (long story there). But I think we're getting the linguistic stuff wrong by anchoring moral facts too tightly to things in our social environment, as the causal theory of reference does. The example tries to show that:

"You are an educated person on a planet like ours. While studying philosophy, you learned about consequentialist and deontological theories, each of which seemed to get at part of the moral truth. While studying history, you learned that properties at the level of gender, class, and race had significantly influenced moral judgment over millennia. Other societies within the broad linguistic community of your planet had accepted hierarchical class and gender norms, and valorized conquest, enslavement, and genocide of other races. Remnants of these anti-egalitarian norms still lingered in your society’s folk moral beliefs. You were optimistic that they would eventually be revised away. Future folk morality would then coincide with the philosophers’ values: happiness for all creatures and respect for rational agents. 

Your optimism was shaken by disturbing events. Politicians gained approval in your society and won election to its highest offices by proudly expressing sexist, classist, and racist values. Many of their influential supporters wanted to revise folk morality in favor of these values. They worked to entrench the old anti-egalitarian influences, even against values of happiness for all creatures and respect for rational agents. If their favored revisions succeeded, folk morality would favor the subjection of women, deference to the wealthy, and the glory of a master race.

You were forced to consider a grim future possibility. What if the long-run causal-regulatory influences on moral concepts were as your enemies hoped? What if the popularity of moral theories concerned with happiness for all creatures and respect for rational agency in recent centuries was merely a contingent historical aberration? What if gender, class, and racial properties were the strongest causal regulators of moral concepts across all of time? Would sexism, classism, and racism then be right?

I hope you’ll agree that the answer is no. The causal theory says yes. It entails that “water is XYZ*” is true if XYZ causally regulates the concept of water, and that “sexism, classism, and racism are right” is true if sexism, classism, and racism causally regulate the concept of rightness in our linguistic community. I do not believe that either concept is causally regulated in such a way. If proven wrong on both counts, I will start believing that water is XYZ. I will not start believing that sexism, classism, and racism are right...

[*XYZ is some non-H2O chemical structure.]

...Early causal theorists were optimistic about the causal influence of moral properties and the arc of the moral universe. They wrote in times of progress, when the fall of apartheid and communism made grim possibilities for the long-run causal regulation of moral concepts less salient. The time has come to consider these grim possibilities. Doing so reveals that the causal theory, the stabilizing function account, and the connectedness model allow a dystopian future to shape the moral truth in its own image. Moral concepts must let us convey the horror of such a future, rather than falling under its control."

Japan and England are weirdly similar

Both are island nations at ends of the Eurasian landmass. Both have vestigial monarchies from a feudal past (there are noble armored warrior stories). Freak storms saved both from invaders from the mainland. Both ran brutal empires from their industrial revolutions to the mid-20th century. Both have as standard condiments a light-colored sharp-tasting paste and a dark salty liquid, perhaps with vinegar.

Window mask

 I bought one of these window masks. The transparent plastic window blocks air. So it's safer to people in front, though I can't be sure about other angles. Also it fogs glasses more.

The first time I went out wearing it, a guy in the elevator asked me how breathable it was. I told him that it was about as good as fabric, and the air mostly flows from the back and sides.

Just after leaving the elevator, I noticed that my pants zipper was down. Fortunately, I don't think the guy noticed. I'd be embarrassed if he thought I was really into windows.

Elizabeth Warren for Vice President

The Vice President selection will come soon, and I hope Elizabeth Warren is chosen.

We need someone who builds good large-scale domestic policy to get out of this pandemic and recession, and nobody does it like her. She was calling to organize federal resources against the virus as early as January 29. On March 26 as the crisis hit, she was laying out which agencies to fund for more medical workers and which policies would create more RNA extraction tests.

Her wealth tax was my favorite big idea of the primary campaign. It's 2% on wealth over $50M, 3% on wealth over $1B, with big IRS funding to hunt the wealth of the super-rich. Concentrated wealth undermines democracy and the market, as it's happy to increase itself through undemocratic and non-market means. Warren's wealth tax, and the enforcement structure she wanted to build for it, is a good battle plan for the war against billionaire feudalism.

She's good in the Senate. But her policy superpowers make the optimal position for her Executive Branch super-technocrat. (Senate leadership positions are better for a bloc-builder like Jeff Merkley, and committees should be chaired by specialists rather than generalists.) She built the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Executive Branch coming out of an academic job, before running for Senate. It returned $12 billion to people ripped off by Wall Street.

We don't know what America's economic and medical situation will be in January 2021. But we need well-thought-out policy dealing with it, and that's what she offers. Base voters we need to turn out and swing voters we need to attract are both genuinely interested in well-thought-out policy on issues that weigh heavily on their lives. Warren earned a reputation for that kind of policy.Biden can cement his lead by offering it.

There are 9 polls on Wikipedia asking about VP preference, sampling various populations -- Democrats, battleground state independents, all voters. Warren leads outside the margin of error in 6, within the margin in 2, and is second in the final one (which was a panel of early primary state voters). What data we have says she's as solid a pick as anyone for getting people to vote for Biden.

Biden already consults her regularly. He's a party man, not a policy wonk. He knows this about himself. His abortion, Iraq, LGBT, and health care views have followed the party leftward over time. He already changed his position towards hers on the big conflict between them -- bankruptcy. I suspect she can change him further.

Biden's special ability is schmoozing DC old boys. That won't beat a pandemic and a recession. But having him schmooze the DC old boys to enact Warren's plans is the way we want it. It looks like they might eliminate the filibuster -- they'll do it for good old Joe!

We need to run Medicare for All and the Green New Deal through that opening. VPs have decided policy before, and Warren can be for the Jedi what Cheney was for the Sith. Biden currently opposes M4A, a party man taking the party line. It's fun when a party man gets asked "what would your view be if the party changed its view?" Philosophers of language will recognize questions about how to rigidify. Those who understand the Executive Branch will recognize the value of having someone who's good on the inside, with four years of locked-in job security, at the second-highest inside position.

Progressives can do a lot to change the party line with Warren on the inside. Biden's plan of public option 2021 is just the first step of her plan to M4A 2023. Biden's positions on this and other issues have changed with the party before, and of course they'll change some more.

Elizabeth Warren can change them, and so many other things, for the better.

Keynesian stimulus as a good investment

When a financial crisis or pandemic causes massive unemployment, the government should borrow lots of money and give people the money. (Or buy them things they need, or build infrastructure if it's safe.) This is just good public finance.

It's an automatic win on interest rates. As a crisis hits, lenders worry that whoever they lend to might fail. So who will they lend to? Well, they don't think the government will fail (and if it does, who knows what anything is worth anymore?) so they want to focus their loans on the government. The government gets easy money -- low interest rates -- when the people can't. The people need money. Solution: the government borrows the money and gives it to the people.

Alongside the value of preventing immediate human suffering, there's a long-term value in making sure people's lives don't get disrupted. If people are becoming homeless or courting disease in desperate attempts for money, it's bad for the long-term productivity of everything around them. IQ studies detect negative effects from maternal stress, which money problems will create. In general, poverty degrades human capital.

So: the government borrows cheap when nobody else can, helps people, and defends human capital. Bet on your well-defended and flourishing humans to pay back the low-interest loan. They can do it.

High-impact Elizabeth Warren meme

I made this a little while ago. Feel free to use!

Beyond Jim Crow foreign policy

If there's something big I like in American foreign policy over the last century, it's the basic approach to Europe. I want it extended to the whole world.

Being the big overseas defensive ally to European democracy was a hugely important project. America made enemies correctly, intervened effectively, and made the world a better place. When everything went totally bonkers, we beat the Nazis (with the villainous help of Communists and dying Empires). We Marshall Planned the remnant democracies into a defensive alliance that held off the Communists until their internal contradictions make them Aufhebung into... Putin? We did kind of mess that up, but until a recent counterstrike, we were back on our game. Anyway, the general idea of holding together a defensive alliance of democracies was right and should be continued.

Asia, Africa, Latin America -- that's where the terrible stuff is. We did nonsense we'd never do in Europe. Helping dictators fight democracy, covering countries in land mines, getting a million people killed through harebrained military strategies... wait that's all just Cambodia. There's so many dead across the border, and then the sun never sets on our proxy wars and regime change wars.

And now is the point where your narrator pauses to note that things seem to be color-coded. America (don't know if I can say 'we' here for reasons having to do the intentions of the policy's architects, indexicals are weird) defended the white democracies. I mean, maybe America is on the right side sometimes, but I think it's worse than chance. And really, what can we expect? Half the country was running apartheid. Those allies from the Empires were used to treating people of color as inferior races and getting millions of them killed for no reason.

A good first step in ending gruesome racial injustice is: treat everyone how you treat the white people. It's institutionally easy to enact, as these things go, because you just have to generalize an existing policy. So the foreign policy framework I like for a possible Biden era is: let's be the big overseas allies to democracies everywhere.

We don't invade anybody, there's lots of humanitarian aid when someone needs it, and the economic and military might of the whole alliance is there to stop anyone from invading another democracy. We do treaties with each other too! Maybe an immigration treaty. Want in on this deal? Become a democracy. (Terms and conditions apply, offer void if you violate basic human rights / freedoms. All rational beings welcome, concern for your utility is guaranteed.)

Raeesah, Jamus, and free speech win in Singapore

It's a historic win tonight for Singapore's opposition.

The Workers' Party rises from 6 to 10 seats in Parliament, its highest total ever. The ruling PAP has 83 seats and its overall victory was never in doubt. But the way this victory came means a lot.

Workers' Party candidate Raeesah Khan, who could be the Squad's adopted exchange student, was the story of the election. She criticized racial inequities in Singapore's criminal justice system, with police going after poor minorities for small-time crimes while wealthy Chinese church leaders embezzled $50 million. That got her investigated by police for "promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion or race."

Massive online support for her emerged, with #IStandWithRaeesah going around on Twitter. Poet Jee Leong Koh led Chinese Singaporeans posting #wewerenothurt to counter the dubious charge that Raeesah had in any sense been spreading racial enmity against them. I've seen some complicated free speech debates in recent days. Raeesah's case is not complicated.

Raeesah ran as one of 4 candidates on the Workers' Party slate in the newly formed Senkang district. Alongside her was Harvard economics postdoc and general heartthrob Jamus Lim. Tonight, Raeesah, Jamus, and their friends won 52-48.

The general message voters keep sending the PAP is: run things well, provide good services, and we'll vote for you. But don't do this heavy-handed stuff like what happened in the bad old days of Singaporean politics. Don't threaten the voters or they'll vote against you (that was a 2011 story). Don't send the police after opposition candidates for ordinary campaign speech.

It's a healthy message for the system.

Jeff Merkley's Leadership PAC

My top recommendation for political donations is Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley's Leadership PAC. Since 2010, I've given $5000 each year. I'll tell you the big story about what Leadership PACs are and why this one is so great.

Leadership PAC money is to pass on to other people's campaigns. Jeff can't be use it for his own re-election. He puts most of it into Senate races ($180,000 in the 2018 cycle), though he donates to House candidates ($45,796 in the 2018 cycle) and state-level races sometimes. The great thing about Leadership PACs is that I'm basically buying influence for Jeff. Senators have taken his money and owe him favors. 

If you have broadly progressive political views, you'll want to build Jeff's favor bank. He's great on every big issue from health care to climate change to immigration. (Medicare for All, Green New Deal, he broke the refugee kids in cages story by personally showing up at a detention center and demanding as a Senator to be let in). With my money, he basically becomes my lobbyist on a broad portfolio of issues. I can't get that if I donate directly to Jon Ossoff or whoever. By donating through Jeff, I give my causes influence with him. As an out-of-state donor, I can't really ask her to vote the right way on a key issue, and I might not know which procedural vote is the important one for making a big difference. Jeff has his eyes on the process and can easily talk to her face-to-face.

Focusing on the Senate is good. A competitive Senate race costs about 3x as much as a House race and has well over 13x the impact. Senate terms are 3x longer and the Senate is 4.35x as concentrated, which multiplies to ~13. The Senate also considers all those nominations to Cabinets and Courts and the Fed. Also treaties, which are important for global coordination and preventing war. Historically it's the tightest bottleneck in part because of the filibuster, so it's the place where we need help. Senate power is definitely the thing to buy. With this I can help Democratic Senators win and build Jeff's power within the Senate all at once.

Jeff is my dream Senate Majority Leader. He manages legislative blocs with a gentle soft-spoken style that gets people to see reason and avoids making enemies. The things he did on a 31-29 majority as Speaker in Oregon back in 07-08 are legend -- they passed the whole Democratic agenda they'd campaigned on (better educational funding, civil unions for gay people) plus cool things like a new form of collective landownership that made life easier for people in trailer parks. He got the 31 Democrats to vote as a bloc, voting even for a few things they didn't want, because otherwise a few defections would sink almost everything. So they passed everything.

Usually I'd also be able to tell you about the day-and-a-half long fundraisers in Portland and the Oregon wine country, but that's all canceled due to the pandemic this year. The picture above is me and Jeff some years ago in the vault of a winery. (He is quite tall.) I hope we can do it again soon -- it's a great place to learn what goes on inside politics. The picture below is Jeff's Chief of Staff, Mike Zamore, earlier in the Trump era. He's one of my favorite people to talk to at these things.

Here's a donation link. It's called the Blue Wave Project. The only thing I'm seeing of comparable value this year is in state legislative races and I have to do more work to figure that out. But if you think you might be giving money to Senate campaigns this year, this is my best idea about how to do it.

Deconstruct the police!

My friends are debating whether to reform, defund, or abolish the police. (A group called NWA had my favorite suggestion.) Biden kingmaker and #3 House Democrat Jim Clyburn goes left of us all: deconstruct the police!

I don't see how it would help to apply Jacques Derrida's theory of literary interpretation to the police. But I often don't see how it would help to apply Jacques Derrida's theory of literary interpretation.

Promising polls of the protests and the President

Americans think the protesters were fully or partially justified in burning the police station by a 54-38 margin. More say 'partially', but this level of support for arson against police property is striking. And by a 78-18 margin, they think the protesters' anger is fully or partially justified. Here a resounding majority say 'fully'.

Meanwhile, Trump's disapproval rating has climbed to 54%, which is a bad number even for him. People don't like it when he goes white supremacist -- his worst number was above 57% around the Charlottesville protests. Biden has a lead outside the margin of error in every poll I've seen, and the high outliers put it in double digits.

There's still a long time to go until November, and this year has taught us that earthshaking events can be plentiful. But presently, election polls are looking the way you want them to look.

Data in the image is from Monmouth, a pollster ranked A+ by Nate Silver's people at 538, n=759, MoE=3.6%.

Police must not assault or murder

"Don't assault or murder" is the most important rule for those patrolling society with deadly weapons. It's something we assume, before we get to their actual functions like deterring crime or capturing fugitive criminals.

Insofar as armed patrols permit assault and murder, they cease to be "police" in any sense that society needs. If they permit themselves to assault and murder, they become an institution that the rest of society must eradicate and replace with something better.

Politics from the Civil Rights Act to Trump

Even if Donald Trump is defeated in November, the Republican Party is likely to continue on his path for a while. The reason why goes into the history of the parties, and how the Civil Rights Act remade them.

Before the Civil Rights Act, Republicans were the educated wealthy party, and Democrats were the FDR coalition of Northern labor folks (often ethnic minorities) and poor white Southerners. Gruesome vote suppression made black Southerners a political nonentity.

Angered by a Democratic President ending segregation, white Southerners left and became the core of today's Republican Party. The northern labor folks plus newly enfranchised black voters became the core of today's Democratic Party. The old Republicans chose between the new parties depending on whether their values were more shaped by education or wealth. These changes took decades to play out, but they accumulated steadily over 55 years.

The Republican Party came to represent wealth and white Christianity, and then with the decline of religiosity, wealth and white nationalism. The wealth of white America means that these forces often come together in the same people.

The Democratic Party represents the interests threatened by the wealthy and by white nationalism. Of course, wealthy and white interests are strong in the Democratic Party too, as they're powerful interests. But this difference between the parties is significant, and it explains why the Democratic Party contains the groups it does.

It explains why labor and environmentalist groups are Democratic despite their very different interests. They're both threatened by concentrated corporate wealth. It also explains why black and Jewish voters are both heavily Democratic despite many demographic differences. They both feel the threat of white nationalism.

It also makes the current party system more stable than the old one. The North-South Democratic alliance was always unsteady, especially as it required depriving a whole race of the right to vote. The parties of today have much more coherence as interest-group coalitions. It's hard to see how they'll change.

This polarization of the parties began before me. It's been going on all my life. And I don't see how it'll stop, now that the parties are more stable coalitions than we had before. What the Republican Party has been becoming for decades, as a combination of wealthy and white nationalist interests, expresses itself clearly in Trump. You could say he was its destiny.

Senate outlook, May 2020

Democrats are on track for a 50-50 Senate, up from the current 53-47, and have a decent chance at doing better. Even under a Democratic President, Mitch McConnell can obstruct executive appointments, the budget, and other ordinary business with a majority. So let's hope we get at least 50-50. Here's a rundown of the seats that are likely to flip.

Colorado is the most likely Democratic pickup, with John Hickenlooper having double-digit leads over Cory Gardner. I'd look into voting for the possibly more progressive Andrew Romanoff in the primary. But former Governor Hickenlooper will probably win the nomination and the general election.

Second is Arizona. Both candidates used to get very high before entering politics: Republican fighter pilot Martha McSally and Democratic astronaut Mark Kelly. Kelly got higher, and is higher in all 8 polls this year.

Third is Maine, where the only 2 polls from this year have Sara Gideon leading Susan Collins by slim margins. Trump's impeachment trial was a trap laid for Collins, whose moderate brand took serious damage from voting to acquit him.

Fourth is my old home state of North Carolina, where the last 3 polls have Cal Cunningham slightly leading Thom Tillis. NC is known for Republican dirty tricks, and I consider this at present the tightest race. I've given Cunningham $250 (which makes me eligible for a virtual fundraiser; let me know if you want in).

Doug Jones has been valiant as the Democratic Senator from Alabama. But he won't get to run against Roy Moore again, so he probably loses to either former Senator Jeff Sessions or Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville.

There are a few more races that could go Democratic with luck. Republicans think they have chances in Michigan, but the public polling doesn't really bear it out. Here are a few additional seats that could go Democratic:

In Kansas, moderate Democratic lady Governors have a history of beating extreme Republican guys. We'll see if that works at the Senate level, where Barbara Bollier has 2% leads in two recent polls over immigrant-hating vote suppressor Kris Kobach.

In Montana, popular Democratic Governor Steve Bullock finally ended his silly run for President (did anyone notice?) and entered the Senate race on the last legal day. Dem-aligned pollsters have him maybe with a tiny lead, but I'd still consider him a slight underdog against incumbent Steve Daines.

Georgia has two Senate races, which still have to have their primaries. If Republican appointee Kelly Loeffler, famous for insider trading on the virus, wins her primary, I expect she loses the general election. Republican Senator David Perdue isn't the strongest either. But I don't know how good our Democratic candidates will be. It might've been better for Stacey Abrams to run in one of those races. Anyway, Georgia has been trending towards Democrats this decade and we'll see what happens.

It remains to be seen whether MJ Hegar can be like Beto or better in Texas against boring Republican John Cornyn. I would've liked Beto or Julian Castro in that race, but maybe MJ can do it. Polls don't show Cornyn to be strong, but MJ is behind with little name recognition at present.

Finally, there are two tough races with Democratic challengers against hated Republicans. Jaime Harrison is challenging Lindsay Graham in South Carolina and Amy McGrath is up against Mitch McConnell himself in Kentucky. Dem-aligned pollsters sometimes find the Democrats close behind in these races. But Trump won SC by 14% and KY by 30% in 2016, and this is a Presidential year, so his voters will come out. On the upside, the Democrats have fundraised well on their opponents' notoriety. They'll need something very unusual to win -- the kind of unusual that happens in like one Senate race in the average cycle.

If you're donating to individual races, my top two picks right now are probably Cal Cunningham in NC and Barbara Bollier in Kansas. It's best to donate to races that are as close to even as possible, because then your money stands a better chance of tipping the balance. Donating to candidates who will win big or lose big anyway is usually a waste. The Wikipedia page for 2020 Senate races is pretty good for keeping track of things, and links to the individual races with polling.

Bernie Sanders' campaign ends

Bernie is principled and honorable. He plays by the rules that should be, not the rules that are.

He's perfect for starting a movement. He'll clearly express his principles. People who share the principles will gather around him. He lives his principles, which makes him easy to follow.

He was a good Senator. Disdaining deals, he operated by amendments on the open floor. This kept him from determining the shape of major legislation, because that's a business of deals. He found a good place as a source of inspired small-bore improvements and a reliable Democratic team player who wore a funny jersey for his own reasons. The system accommodates Senators' quirks, and Bernie's quirk was his principles.

He's not good at running a large organization like a campaign. He often chooses personnel who are better at expressing his worldview than winning him an election. His surrogates drew the media spotlight, but sowed conflict with the DC media as well as the black establishment in the South, both of which operated on rules alien to them.

Recently his press secretary complained on Twitter about a podcast on Vox not paying attention to Bernie. The podcaster replied that he had emailed her inviting Bernie for a long interview on the podcast months ago, and he was still waiting for her reply.

This campaign's MVP staffer, Lis Smith, had the opposite approach. She made Mayor Pete a contender by putting him on all media at all times. Team Pete thought its job was to spread Pete's message. Team Bernie thought its job was to complain about others not spreading Bernie's message.

We'll learn more about what went wrong with the campaign in the next few days. But the picture of Bernie I'm left with is that of a simple and straightforward kind of very good person. He wasn't made to make deals, much less command armies.

He's made to express and live his principles, clearly and directly. They're good principles, and good people are drawn to his side. If that were all it took to achieve power, this would be a lovely world.

Bernie 2020: the right principles + dumb anti-establishment orientation

Last year Bernie Sanders convinced me that prisoners should be allowed to vote. The issue hadn't crossed my mind until he raised it, but I quickly realized he was right. Politicians neglect and mistreat groups who are denied the vote, and the horrific cruelties of the US prison system are a result.

Fresh new ideas like this were the best thing about the Sanders campaign. Polls showed that most Democrats agreed with him on issues like Medicare for All [M4A], even as they voted for Joe Biden. With Sanders underperforming his 2016 numbers, his inner circle is now deciding whether to end the campaign. It's a good time to consider why he performed so badly despite the popularity of his biggest ideas.

His campaign combined good policy directions with a dumb political idea: that progress on issues like M4A would require overthrowing the Democratic establishment. As far as I can tell, this idea came from staff and allies who didn't really understand the Democratic Party and didn't understand how to engage constructively with people in it.

Things started well in 2017. Bernie got 16 Senate co-sponsors for M4A. The stage was set for a campaign that could absorb reformist elements of the establishment and thus become a majority of the party. What you'd want is a hopeful and optimistic message, embracing establishment figures who came reasonably close to Bernie's position. The establishment itself hadn't coalesced around a single candidate like Hillary, making it possible for Bernie to win a majority by incorporating enough of its leftward fragments.

Having spent time on Twitter during this primary, I can tell you that this isn't the Sanders campaign we got. One avoided conflict with Sanders' supporters more by taking positions far from him, as Biden and Klobuchar did, than by coming closer like Warren. Buttigieg, ever the political calculator, saw what was happening and abandoned his support for M4A. Obama was presented more as a centrist enemy than as a Democratic friend. The message of the campaign was enmity between it and the party, to the point that top Sanders activists like Shaun King don't realize that lefty Senators like Brian Schatz agree with them.

Bernie's campaign could've instead advertised M4A as building on the coverage expansions of Obamacare. Knowing that Congress would drastically revise the details of any Presidential proposal, every co-sponsor could've been treated as an ally, with attacks reserved mainly for those opposed to the general idea of Medicare for All.

The anti-establishment message itself seems to have caused Sanders trouble with the black political establishment in the South. Biden defeated Sanders 81-15 in Mississippi, where the only Congressional Democrat and the Senate nominee are both black. Jim Clyburn explained his decisive endorsement of Biden partly as a response to Sanders' anti-establishment message, which he took as an attack on himself. And an unfriendly attitude towards Obama was not going to help.

There are all kinds of problems with the Democratic Party as a whole, as with any large institution. American politics is full of legalized corruption, and politics everywhere is full of self-serving people. But if you need corrupt people's votes to pass something like M4A, the first thing to do is to figure out what currency they accept. If they need time, give them time until you actually need their votes.

With the right strategy, Bernie could have won this primary. His ideas are largely popular within the party. But attacking Democratic establishment figures isn't the way to win over Democratic primary voters. I suppose that's what one should expect.

The deadly power of bats' immune systems

Why do bats carry so many viruses? They're vectors for Covid-19 and Ebola as well as old terrors like rabies.

Bat immune systems are unusually strong. Their cells emit very high levels of interferon, which slows down protein synthesis. So when a virus takes over a cell and starts making new copies of itself, it can't assemble all the proteins to make new viruses.

Bat immune systems may also be stronger because bats fly. Flying requires a lot of energy, keeping them in a hot and fever-like body state. This can cook viruses to death.

Creatures with strong immune systems tend to have the most dangerous pathogens. Anything that survives in them will be hard for others to beat. If you get a virus, your body will fight it by running a fever and emitting interferon. This stops many viruses. But making your insides more batlike isn't going to stop a bat virus.

There's a human version of this in European settlers having diseases that killed most of the native Americans and Australians, rather than the other way around. Having lived in dense cities and traded goods and diseases with the rest of Eurasia, Europeans' immune systems had evolved to be strong. So they were sources of strong diseases, especially smallpox, that killed most of the local folks.

The bat immune system might have given us our idea of vampirism, via rabies. The symptoms of both conditions overlap quite a bit. You get rabies from being bitten by a bat or an infected human. You become a vampire from being bitten by a nocturnal creature between bat and human.

It's really a shame about bats, because they're amazing. If bats didn't exist, the idea of a mammal that flies, uses sonar, sleeps upside-down all day, eats mosquitos, and poops super-fertilizer would seem batshit crazy. Unfortunately, their strong immune systems give them a viral dark side that lives up to vampirical legend.

How the Sanders campaign fell back into 2016

It wasn't hard to foresee that Bernie would do badly one-on-one against a moderate. You just had to remember 2016, when he got about 43% of the vote. He ran the same campaign this time, and we're looking down the barrel of a similar result.

To dispense with the stupid idea that's been consuming the internet, Elizabeth Warren's endorsement wouldn't have changed anything significant. Progressive Warren voters have moved to Sanders already -- there just aren't enough of them for him to win. Polls about counterfactuals aren't always reliable, but it's worth noting that the one poll to ask people how they'd vote if Warren endorsed Sanders had him gaining only 2%. The progressive movement is better served by Warren playing for influence within a future Biden Administration -- the same way she negotiated with Hillary four years before.

In fairness to the Sanders campaign, things could've turned out better. If Democrats had been completely ineffective in resisting Trump, disgusted mainstream partisans might have gone over to him, pushing him over 50%. But things generally went well enough to keep the Democratic faithful satisfied.

Obamacare survived by the skin of John McCain's thumb, Democrats won a House landslide in 2018, the new Congress began with Pelosi defeating Trump in a government shutdown, impeachment was handled skillfully, and it seems to have helped purple-state Democratic Senate challengers as intended. There were defeats too, but that's not a bad list of legislative and electoral successes.

So by October 2019, it should've been obvious that the Sanders campaign would need to do something new to get over 50% one-on-one. They didn't realize this. Some accounts have them being confident that centrists would divide the vote all the way through the primary. They didn't see Jim Clyburn coming, or even expect some shadowy insider force from Bernie Twitter ghost stories to unify the field against them. And that leaves us here.

Barring a miracle, the path to progressive reform in the next administration will involve maneuvering Biden into it. The inside game begins with whatever concessions Warren can squeeze from him. Then we need strong Congressional majorities, and victory in internal White House power struggles. Old Joe is a party man more than an ideologue, and his positions can move if you set things up right around him.

When there are no more moves in the outside game, you don't give up. You switch to the inside game. I'll have more on that in the weeks to come.

Electability in the time of coronavirus

My friends are discussing electability. I'm thinking about it in light of the coronavirus pandemic, and I expect either Biden or Sanders to win if nominated.

Both candidates have about a 5% lead over Trump in current head-to-head polling. Democratic consolidation around a nominee will push up on those numbers as Republican general-election attacks push down. Maybe the net effect pushes both down to 4% or so, where they need a ~3% lead to win because of Electoral College imbalances.

The likely levels of illness, economic damage, and loss of life from the coronavirus will make things harder for an already embattled Trump. He's been awful in many ways before, but it usually doesn't come back to bite his own voters. Most of them will find some way to blame Democrats. But not all will. Mismanaging a recession-causing pandemic might push him say 3% down, making the Democratic lead insurmountable.

Fox News and GOP media as a whole are in their early stages of attacking both Sanders and Biden. With Sanders, the attacks will probably concern socialism. With Biden, it's probably corruption attacks connected to Ukraine conspiracy theories. I expect both attacks to have less effect amidst a pandemic.

Biden will promise a return to Obama-era normalcy. Sanders will pitch policies like Medicare for All. Both messages are likely to play well under pandemic conditions.

If Trump's mismanagement leads to a major Democratic victory, it will likely help us in the Senate too. That's more likely to cause the passage of major Democratic legislation under Sanders than Biden, since Sanders is on board from the beginning. But there are still ways that Biden can be maneuvered into passing policies coded as progressive this primary, especially with an unexpectedly good Senate.

At this point, it's very unlikely that Sanders will win the nomination. But I think his policy ideas are much better, and if my vote were coming soon, I'd vote for him.

The campaign ends, the plans continue

Elizabeth Warren's campaign of plans has ended.

She proposed a wealth tax, and Bernie followed. She had the best-developed plans on universal child care, rebuilding the State Department, catching tax evaders, and a litany of other issues.

Plans outlive campaigns. They sometimes get passed into law by politicians who opposed them. Obviously, it's best for a plan when an ideologically aligned campaign wins.

That's why I hope Bernie Sanders can defeat Joe Biden. The Warren plans are a natural outcome of negotiations between Sanders and Democratic centrists in a good Senate situation (if Sanders sees that Warren was right about the filibuster). I'll tell you a story.

Obama's health care plan during the 2008 primary didn't include the individual mandate that Obamacare is famous for. When John Edwards had introduced a plan with a mandate in February 2007, unions celebrated it. Lefty policy types taught everyone how mandates prevent adverse selection from messing up insurance. Hillary Clinton took up Edwards' plan and argued its merits against Obama.

Though Obama won the election, the mandate supporters won the argument. After the November victory, Senate committee chairs suggested that they'd be open to passing something like the Edwards / Clinton plans. After an epic legislative struggle, the mandate Obama opposed became part of what we now call Obamacare.

(The mandate got converted into a tax by the Supreme Court, but it's still there. The public option was less lucky. It was part of everyone's plan at first and Pelosi got it through the House on first passage, but it was sacrificed to Joe Lieberman for his filibuster-breaking 60th vote. Warren was right to push for eliminating the filibuster.)

When plans win the debate, the planners gain power. James Kvaal, the staffer who built the party-driving policy shop of 2007-2008 for Edwards, became policy director for Obama. I expect the same for Warren's staffers, which creates useful inside pressure for the plans.

Things as big as Medicare for All could pass even under Biden if everything breaks right: Biden's public option 2021, 4-5 new Democrats from the very favorable 2022 Senate map, M4A in 2023. That was Warren's plan to pass the plan, and with good work on the inside it's not impossible to walk Biden into it. Everything is easier with Bernie, but it wouldn't be the first time old Joe has changed a position.

Warren contributed a lot more than ideas. The destruction of Michael Bloomberg's campaign was huge. Bloomberg must have been very interested in buying the Clyburn endorsement and taking the place Biden has now. I doubt Clyburn would sell, but I wouldn't want democracy to face that risk. Warren devastated Bloomberg in the Nevada debate, and democracy was saved.

But I'll return to the ideas, because that's what we academics do. And Warren is one of us. The big point I've been making here is something obvious to us: the success of an idea is distinct from the fortunes of its creator, let alone its creator's Presidential campaign. And for some of us, the ideas matter most. We're just here to help them along and find others who will.

The campaign ends here. But for the plans, it's just another day. Elizabeth Warren will still be fighting for them, and we will too.

Why Jim Clyburn endorsed Joe Biden

Jim Clyburn's endorsement seems to have been the decisive event of the primary. 27% of South Carolina voters called it the most important factor in driving their vote, and Biden won with 48% to Sanders' 20%. This was the signal moderates needed to consolidate around Biden, leading to his Super Tuesday victory.

South Carolina is usually won by an establishment Democrat, though a sufficiently impressive black candidate can win voters over. Hillary Clinton won 73% of the vote against Bernie in 2016, with Clyburn's endorsement. In the 2008 campaign, polling favored Hillary until Obama won other primaries and then won SC 55-27. Clyburn didn't officially endorse that year, but voted for Obama. This got him an angry phone call from Bill Clinton. Clyburn told him, "How could I ever look in the faces of our children and grandchildren had I not voted for Barack Obama?"

The last black candidate to win SC before Obama was Jesse Jackson in 1988. He supported Medicare for All, had Bernie's endorsement, and was the great left-wing predecessor to Bernie in my lifetime. Perhaps a candidate who shares Bernie's policies and can win SC will have to be black.

Clyburn is more typical of top Democrats who win elections for candidates like Biden than anyone at the DNC. He's highly placed in the House leadership, and has the unofficial responsibility of representing black community interests to powerful Democrats. When they use their power as he asks, they win favor with him, and that translates into presidential endorsements. This is how a lot of the DC economy of politics operates. It makes things hard for less powerful candidates who haven't built up a bank of favors with people like Clyburn.

Sanders' campaign messaging appears to have irritated Clyburn too: "I find it very interesting that someone is referring to African American voters in South Carolina as the establishment," Clyburn told The Daily Beast, referring to Sanders' claims that the Democratic establishment is coalescing around Biden in order to stop his campaign. "I don’t understand how that vote can be dismissed."

Broad anti-establishment messages resonate with many who recognize the party's past failures. But Clyburn heard these messages as an attack on him. He responded by throwing black support decisively behind Biden. It's a problem that I don't think the Sanders campaign recognized, and that progressives will have to solve in future primaries.

Sanders' ideals, Pelosi's deals, and how the system moves left

Yesterday, Alex Moe of NBC News asked Nancy Pelosi, "Will you be okay if Bernie Sanders is the nominee?" Pelosi said "Yes."

Then Moe asked, "Do you have any concerns that you could lose the majority?" Pelosi said "No."

Sanders' supporters often fear that the Democratic establishment will stop him from winning the nomination. Establishment Democrats often try to stop him by expressing grave predictions about what will happen downticket. But Pelosi is the center of the establishment, and she's refusing to do that.

As far as I can tell, Pelosi and Sanders have basically the same goals. It doesn't look like that because they act in fundamentally different ways. Sanders expresses ideals; Pelosi makes deals. But achieving their goals takes both kinds, as well as a number of Elizabeth Warren figures in between.

Sanders stands on the fringes of the system, where he can express his ideals with utter clarity. He's a powerful voice for humane views on all sorts of domestic and foreign issues. He wields less official power, because taking power constrains your ability to act so as to express ideals. But ideals attract followers, and a movement formed around him.

Between ideals and deals are plans -- how to set up universal child care; how to pass Medicare for All. That's the level where a President mostly has to operate in today's media environment and legislative landscape. Warren excels there, which is why I voted for her.

Pelosi is a central node in the system. Every deal belongs to her, and she to it. That includes good deals and evil ones; honest compromises and corrupt bargains. Playing her role in the system requires respecting all her deals, which deeply constrains what positions she can take. But it also means that when she moves left, that's the system moving left.

Pledged delegate majorities should win a brokered convention

The Nevada primary debate raised the issue of whether the candidate with the most pledged delegates should get the nomination. Here are some general ideas about the fairest way to do things.

The primary should be decided by pledged delegates, who are democratically chosen by voters. Decision by unelected superdelegates undermines the legitimacy of the process, disrupting the party coalition. Even if a completely unbreakable deadlock with pledged delegates somehow occurred, I might rather decide the nomination by a game of chance than have superdelegates swoop in. Better for Democrats to resent the Fates than to resent each other.

If you get more than half the pledged delegates, you should win. Someone could complain if they fell under the 15% threshold for delegates in many states, won other states big, and thus ended up down 51-49 in delegates despite receiving a majority of the votes. But it's hard to assess caucus and primary votes in a unified way, so we're probably stuck using delegate majorities as proxies for vote majorities.

Having the most pledged delegates shouldn't necessarily make someone the winner. In a 5-way race that ends up 22-21-20-19-18, the candidate with 22% shouldn't necessarily win. If all the other candidates are of a single ideological bloc and are ready to band together behind the candidate with 21%, that candidate should win, as they lead the bloc that won 78-22. (Note to Bloomberg: no buying delegates.)

In the future, it would be great for Democrats to set up some other voting system like IRV or approval voting. These systems are much better at representing voter preferences in multicandidate elections. They allow voters to rank candidates or choose more than one. (I voted for Warren; under IRV I would have ranked Sanders second; under approval voting I probably would have also approved Sanders.) The party could also do away with delegates and go straight to these nice IRV or approval-voting ballots.

Probably the best way to approximate those systems within the present mess is to let delegates reassemble into coalitions, guided by the candidate to whom they're pledged. That way, candidates from similar ideological blocs can combine their power. A majority wins, and if nobody has a majority, try to negotiate into a majority coalition. This system gets the right results in the majority and 22-21-20-19-18 cases by approximating the structures of these better voting systems.

I hope (and believe) one candidate will get a majority of pledged delegates. But in a mess, I think the right principles are: pledged delegates decide, you need 50%+ to win, you can get there by negotiating, Bloomberg can't buy delegates, and our dreams of better voting systems should guide our reasoning about fairness.

This may have been somewhat dense. So to symbolize the value of these principles to the Democratic Party, I'll just have a picture of a baby donkey romping through a field of flowers.

Not for sale

The story of the debate was Elizabeth Warren annihilating Michael Bloomberg. The winner was America.

The Bloomberg campaign is an experiment in whether money can buy the Presidency. His colossal ad spending got him to the mid-teens in national polls, and the 20s in some states. He bought his way into a debate. But when it became clear on the debate stage that he wasn't at all the kind of candidate that Democrats wanted, his billions couldn't buy him out of that.

That's how it should be. Billionaires can now see that if they try to buy the Democratic nomination and they're out of step with party values, they'll get wrecked by someone like Warren on the debate stage. If you want to stop Trump, you can donate lots of money and Democrats will appreciate that. But crude attempts to buy yourself the Presidency for a few billion dollars will just result in humiliation.

Everybody else did fine. Pete, Amy, and Joe don't have Bloomberg towering over them anymore. As long as they're tangled up with each other, Bernie has his path to victory.

Warren rightly benefits most of all. It was a great fundraising night, she's all over the news highlights, and her campaign has new life. The effect on Nevada will be muffled because early voting means that many ballots were cast before the debate, and she'll need a lot more than this to win. But whatever happens, her debate performance did a great deal to prevent obscene wealth from taking over her party and her country.

Thanks, Yang Gang! Let's do UBI someday.

Andrew Yang promoted the best vision of our long-term economic future. I'm glad he ran.

If all goes well, hyperefficient robots and AI will take most of our jobs a century from now. Instead of working, humans will get free money from the government to buy goods and services produced by robots. Kids today call this "Fully Automated Luxury Communism", though Yang used the more traditional "Universal Basic Income" (UBI). It's a future where advanced technology gives us economic freedom like old-fashioned aristocrats, and we can pursue whatever our hearts desire.

Yang wanted to implement UBI now, which isn't a good idea. Government can provide some things more efficiently than markets can -- public infrastructure and health insurance, for example. Better to buy people more of those things than to give them a $1000 monthly check to try to get them from the market. We aren't far enough into the automated robot future yet to run both UBI and all these services at once.

I might support UBI as a way to stabilize the economy in a recession. Instead of bailing out the banks to make sure paychecks still go out in a financial crisis, we can let them fail and give people free money to replace their paychecks. This might target people in dire situations better than traditional monetary policy does. If we started it off as an economic stabilization policy, we could ramp it up into a permanent thing as the robot future develops.

Yang wasn't the best choice for President. He doesn't have experience working within government. Obviously I'd take him over Trump, but that goes for probably 95% of the American population.

But it was good that Yang demonstrated the acceptability of UBI, at least within the Democratic party. Nobody tried to score points by attacking UBI, which they might have if it was anathema to Democrats for some reason. He carried the UBI flag all the way to New Hampshire, which is farther than many well-regarded Senators got.

I hope the Yang Gang will take note of this, and be part of Democratic policy conversations in the future. Perhaps I'll live long enough to see UBI become a reality.

Is Bloomberg manipulating the betting markets?

PredictIt gives Michael Bloomberg a 27% chance of winning the nomination. Nate Silver has him at 2.5%, which seems more right to me.

People pay some attention to betting markets. They're illiquid, so it isn't that expensive to move them. Buying his candidacy plausibility in the media by buying shares of himself -- isn't that just a perfect billionaire move?

Nancy Pelosi tore up the news cycle

Trump had a run of 20 tweets this morning, 19 of which were about Pelosi. (The other was a picture of flags.) He's attacking someone who keeps winning her San Francisco district with over 80% of the vote, instead of reinforcing the messages that his speechwriters crafted to promote his re-election.

It's sort of metaphysically picturesque to destroy a physical representation of a speech, and in doing so destroy the uptake of its content in other media.

The Trial Without Witnesses

Like the Red Wedding, the Trial Without Witnesses is an abomination deserving its own name. Not having witnesses or evidence violates the social purpose of a trial, just as mass murder violates the social purpose of a wedding.

Seven polls by six different pollsters demonstrate the high levels of popular support for having witnesses at Trump's impeachment trial. Some of these are from even before the John Bolton story broke:

Quinnipiac: 75
Monmouth: 80
Reuters: 72
CNN: 69
AP/NORC 68
Quinnipiac 66
WaPo 71

One reason I initially opposed impeachment is that I looked up the Senate rules and saw that McConnell could make whatever nonsense of the trial he liked. Pelosi knew that too. She also knew that she could withhold the articles of impeachment for weeks because of concerns about the fairness of the trial, putting media attention on the abomination McConnell would create. I changed my views because she changed hers; this was the strategy she saw. It neutralizes the political value of Trump's acquittal -- it came from the Trial Without Witnesses!

McConnell went for it anyway, in the face of this polling. Pelosi prevented Trump from getting any advantage from acquittal, but running a sham trial probably minimized McConnell's losses. The huge public support for witnesses won't bother him too much, because the Senate is a crime against democracy.

The Senate gives every state two votes, regardless of population. So if millions and millions of Californians know that trials should have witnesses, their support will matter no more than a few hundred thousand Alaskans who think otherwise. Because of this misalignment, McConnell can just ignore a democratic consensus. Support from the Trump-loving lords and barons of Alaska can preserve his power. It would be fair to create five to ten new Democratic-leaning states to rebalance the Senate, aligning it with national popular opinion. Best if we could disband the Senate and devolve its functions to the House, but our centuries-old Constitution is too badly designed to allow permanent fixes.

The Senate has always served to protect a corrupt status quo from democracy. It preserved segregation for decades, prevented Truman from setting up single-payer, and filibustered comprehensive climate change legislation in 2010. Today it produced the Trial Without Witnesses; tomorrow if we have a Democratic president, it'll be the main obstacle to good policy.

Bodies structured like the Senate shouldn't exist in modern democracies. As long as they exist, our politics remains halfway to a Game of Thrones.

Elizabeth Warren for President

Ezra Klein's quasi-endorsement of Warren is worth reading just to understand the powers and limitations of the Presidency. I'm happy for my movement to get its principles from Bernie Sanders; I want Elizabeth Warren to sit in the President's chair at meetings with top federal bureaucrats.

Campaigning in the age of television frames the presidency as a communications job, which, sometimes, it is. But those powers are overstated: Presidents are rarely able to dramatically change public opinion, and their interventions are as likely to hurt legislative efforts as help. By contrast, campaigns understate both the power and the difficulty of leading the world’s most powerful and consequential bureaucracy, and the next president will face a particularly hard version of that job, as Donald Trump has driven out a tremendous amount of civil service talent and demoralized many of those who remain. Warren has proven herself the candidate with the right skills and vision to rebuild. 

Warren’s work on the CFPB gave her something rare among political candidates. One is interest in, and experience with, the federal bureaucracy itself. She understands the regulatory process, how it works, who has access to it. She knows which meetings matter, where power sits, which explanations for why something isn’t possible or isn’t happening are merely stalling tactics. She has seen, firsthand, the entry points that lobbyists and special interests use to hijack the process, the difficulties of collaboration among agencies. 

What’s more, Warren’s political project is regulatory in nature: She wants to change how markets are governed so there’s more true competition, more information empowering and protecting consumers, and more broadly shared gains. When Warren says she’s “a capitalist to her bones,” this is what she means: She believes in the power of properly regulated markets, and she intends, as president, to properly regulate them.
The president has far more direct control of regulation than redistribution, and as such, much of what Warren wants to do — from using antitrust enforcement to break up monopolistic firms to simplifying consumer financial products to cancelling student loan debt to cracking down on the risks too-big-to-fail banks can run — can be done through powers the executive branch already holds. 

The next Democratic president is likely to face a Senate where Mitch McConnell remains majority leader, and even if Democrats manage to take back the gavel, the most optimistic outcome is a slim majority with the hinge vote being West Virginia’s Joe Manchin or Alabama’s Doug Jones — and that’s before taking the filibuster into account. It is possible, perhaps probable, that the president’s primary power will come through their control of the executive branch. Warren is the candidate who would be most interested in, knowledgeable about, and effective at wielding it.

Ezra then goes on to how Warren is better on Medicare for All. Biden and Buttigieg oppose it; Sanders thinks he can pass it without eliminating the filibuster. Warren supports it and has a plan for the hardest part, passing the Senate. First, pass a public option in 2021 with 50 votes, which we're moderately likely to have, while it takes really extreme scenarios to have the votes for Medicare for All. Then come the 2022 Senate elections where only 12 Dems are up for re-election and 22 Republicans are. If Democrats win half the races, they gain five seats. And with those votes, you can go for full M4A in 2023.

Warren’s careful navigation of the Medicare-for-all debate has widely been considered a misstep for her campaign, as her admission of the political realities alienated single-payer diehards who don’t want to admit the need for any initial compromises, while her endorsement of Sanders’s underlying bill and her specificity on financing opened her up to attack from the moderates. But what’s actually happening here speaks to Warren’s strengths: She’s developed a more politically realistic proposal and path than what Sanders offered, and a more ambitious and compelling vision than what the moderates have proposed. 

The truth of the Medicare-for-all debate is that it is extremely unlikely any president will pass a single-payer bill, but Warren is the only candidate to propose an even glancingly plausible strategy. As has been a hallmark of her campaign thus far, she’s taken the systemwide barriers to passing single-payer seriously, and has worked to come up with answers. Presidential campaigns reward uncut political optimism pumped right into the electorate’s veins, but carefully navigating a system designed to frustrate change is what a president actually has to do.

It's important to get a sense of which politicians are good at which positions. Nancy Pelosi and Jeff Merkley are great legislators. AOC has built a new kind of social media policy intellectual position around her distinctive package of skills. Bernie is the movement-father who gives voice to the voiceless and summon the AOCs from the bars of New York City to Congress.

Elizabeth Warren should be President. Bernie is second best; Biden is the worst major Democrat; any Democrat over Trump. But Warren is the best for making executive appointments, keeping bureaucrats in line with progressive priorities, and devising a legislative strategy with Pelosi and Schumer. And that's what this job is about.

In primaries you have to be flexible and switch over if your favorite candidate becomes nonviable by the time you vote. But I hope I can vote for her.

Seeing politicians the utilitarian way

I don't know how clearly my utilitarianism comes through in my political posts. Obviously, it affects my goals. But it also affects how I emotionally respond to political figures themselves.

Utilitarians want to increase everyone's happiness. In large-scale politics, this requires us to take a zoomed-out perspective where we can see all the happiness. From this perspective, each person's happiness is tiny.

Powerful politicians still stand out because their effects on others' happiness are so great. But their own happiness is no greater than anyone else's. The reason to focus on them is the consequences: averting calamities like war and climate change that could harm many. The greater my power to help, the less I can let personal resentments lead me to suboptimal strategies on such important issues. The right emotions to cultivate toward politicians will concern their powers to affect outcomes, and not their own character.

In Kantian language, I must regard politicians not as persons, but as things. I shouldn't get caught up in judging them personally. I have to focus on how useful they can be in avoiding disasters, and how to use them effectively.

This sits well with me, because I don't see myself as a person in the Kantian way. I'm just a thing with feelings. I hope I have pleasant feelings. And I really want to be a useful thing.

Solving the Sanders-Warren mystery

New reporting by Ryan Grim suggests an explanation of how the recent Sanders-Warren drama came to be. It's worth spelling out.

A conversation in 2018 ended with Warren thinking Sanders was saying that a woman couldn't win the election. (I imagine him emphatically warning about how awful Trump would be to her, as she was aware, and leaving his purpose unclear. You can vary the details.) It affected her deeply, and she told some people in DC what she thought he said shortly afterwards. And now those people, or some entity down the rumor mill, leaked it.

Neither campaign says they leaked it. Both must be right. Obviously, both need the other's voters to come over if they win, and this story disrupts that. It's two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, which register second choices, so alliances benefit both. This exactly the time to stick together.

When would they leak this, if they were going to? Maybe before Super Tuesday, when second choices won't register and alliances don't work, to break a panicked deadlock as Biden towers over them. But not now. It's the worst time. These people didn't get this far by missing the most obvious strategic dynamic concerning their campaigns. That all means it's the perfect time for an enemy to drop a bomb on them. It's right after the weird Bernie instructions-to-volunteers memo put both campaigns on edge, and right before the final pre-Iowa debate.

Warren is honest, and she's telling us what she honestly thinks Sanders said. It's easy to see why he couldn't convince her otherwise under these conditions. Recognizing that you completely misunderstood what an old friend said a year ago is hard enough when the two of you aren't running opposed Presidential primary campaigns two weeks before Iowa, with all the tensions, communication barriers, and reasons for mistrust that involves. They're competing for the most powerful position on Earth, surrounded by employees whose job is to help them defeat the other. And they have powerful enemies who want to split them apart.

In best-case scenarios, Bernie and Elizabeth overcome all this, discover their enemy, and vow never to be separated again. Obviously, that's unlikely. But supporters of either candidate, or both, would do well to push in that direction.

Istanbul kitty sunrise over the Strait of Bosporus