The Books of Bokonon

For those interested, it is streaming live. I don't know if the full live stream will be archived, but just in case: Some action - any action is better than nothing. I am glad to see this. If he can last long enough to disrupt some of Tuesday's Senate business, that's even better. There's something to be said about good trouble.

Learned helplessness is not helpful, and the rationale for learned helplessness is not even based on reality . I would honestly be breathing a lot easier if Harris had won the White House and ideally the Democratic Party held the Senate and regained the House. That did not happen. Trump squeaked out a win in terms of popular vote and really had a so-so showing in terms of the electoral vote. To put things in perspective, Biden's performance in 2020 was also relatively speaking so-so, and aside from Obama in 2008, so-so victories are about all that we've seen this century when it comes to Presidential races. The US Senate ended up about how I was expecting it to go, and about the way that actual professional analysts had expected. A GOP mandate would have meant sweeping Senate seats in the same swing states Trump won. Aside from Pennsylvania, where Casey lost just barely, Trump proved to have no coattails. And if you paid attention to the polls, one thing that was consistent was...

The title comes from an opening line from Gil Scott-Heron's song B-Movie . Over the course of his spoken word performance, accompanied by a wonderful late-1970s/early 1980s funk groove, Gil Scott-Heron broke it down that there was no way that a guy who got maybe around a quarter of all potential eligible voters, and that it boiled down to half of the eligible American voters didn't vote in the first place, whether due to apathy, dislike for any candidate on the ballot for President that year, or any of a number of structural barriers to voting (persons with disabilities, or who work and have no early voting options, etc). Reagan managed to win over 25% of the eligible voters and the rest who bothered to cast a vote did so for Carter or Anderson in 1980. So the case that Ronald Reagan did not have a mandate for his first term is very defensible.  So why go back into some funk and R&B history? Because we have a bigger problem now, and that bigger problem also does not have a ...

As anyone who has known me for a while - even if simply as an online presence - will understand, I've been residing in the state of Arkansas for about fourteen and a half years. When I moved there in the summer of 2010, the state's Democratic Party was usually more successful than not in electing statewide officials to office, held two US Senate seats, and supermajorities in both chambers of the State Assembly. In other words, compared to other neighboring southern states in the US that had long ago become solidly GOP, the Arkansas Democratic Party defied political gravity. The 2010 election was a sign that something was starting to change. Statewide office holders did fine, and Governor Mike Beebe won re-election by comfortable margins. But we lost a US Senate seat that year and we still had governing majorities but no longer supermajorities. Some formerly Democratic state politicians had changed their party affiliation from Democratic to GOP. And the population in the state s...

There is a channel I follow on Telegram called Military & Strategic, and is typically signed by a blogger who refers to himself or herself as The Analyst. The primary topic is the on-going Russo-Ukraine war, but US politics gets mentioned from time to time, which is very pertinent to the Ukrainian cause. Here is one of The Analyst's most recent posts , which deals with the prospects for the Harris/Walz campaign's success in November: GROWING CONFIDENCE IN A DEMOCRATIC VICTORY We all know how important the coming election is in the US. We are quite literally faced with a fork in the road - one side takes us down a dark and dangerous path towards a semi-fascist autocracy and the other is the real America that despite its many flaws is a decent and honest democrat at its core. It’s a truly shocking difference in possible futures. However I am ever more certain that Kamala Harris will win the presidency. I am growing more certain that the Democrats will regain the House, and ju...

I'll admit I had never heard of Dr. Allan Lichtman prior to 2016, when he correctly predicted that Donald Trump would become the next US President. My reaction was along the lines of "who is this guy" and "you've got to be kidding me". But I learned who he was and realized that he knows his stuff. Lichtman uses a set of thirteen keys (answered as true or false) developed by him and a colleague in 1981. This model ignores polling data, which is the stuff that most take for gospel. Instead, the model is guided by historical precedent. As someone who relied on polling aggregators at the time (e.g., 538), I can see how his approach to prediction seems unsophisticated to the data wonks.  Here's the thing: he's used those keys to make the right prediction for nearly all US Presidential elections since 1984. That kind of track record establishes his credibility. We ignore his predictions at our peril. A lot of hay has been made out of the Democratic Party l...

This article is a friendly reminder that to win a Presidential campaign in Georgia or similar swing states your campaign needs to reach out to rural voters as well, and more importantly that those efforts do make a difference. In Georgia in 2020, for example, Joe Biden was netting a noticeably higher level of support in rural counties than Hillary Clinton had against Trump in 2016. Senator Raphael Warnock's successful Senatorial bid for a full term can likewise be attributed in part to rural county outreach. The Harris/Walz team is building on that approach.  Voter outreach in rural areas is something analysts like Martin Longman (of Progress Pond) has advocated for years. I am sure he is far from alone. Yes, it is true that many of these rural counties will not flip Democratic, but by reaching out to those silent Democrats, the odds that they turn out to vote improve, thus improving the odds that a Democratic Presidential candidate will win a highly competitive state. And let...

I am glad to have Jon Stewart back. He's consistently funny, and he is not one to pull punches. Here is his recap of Day 4 of the DNC convention:   Jon Stewart's take on Fox News' coverage was brilliantly brutal. Jesse Watters comes across as the GOP's "Baghdad Bob". If you are too young to know who that is, Wikipedia is your friend. The absurdity of reporting on how miserable the convention-goers are while literally next to a screen showing the convention-goers having the time of their life is truly a sight to behold. He loves highlighting the internal contradictions of the Democratic coalition. Speaking as a Democratic Party member, I can tell you that we are truly a big tent party, and perhaps even more so this election season. We can be a bit like herding cats - always have been. Diversity is our strength, but the DNC programmers' choice to not focus on Palestinian Americans strikes both Stewart and me as something that may come back to haunt them lat...

As I have taken a few hours out of each evening this week to watch the DNC convention, it is not lost on me that several speakers have been Republicans who have chosen to endorse the Democratic nominee for President, Kamala Harris, over their own party's candidate, the failed former President Donald Trump. I am grateful that the audience of Democratic delegates, officials, and fellow travelers have given these folks a warm welcome. I hope we all give them a warm welcome. This evening I listened to the remarks of a Republican mayor from Arizona at the convention endorse Harris. What I saw was a man probably close to my age who has dedicated himself to a party for an entire adult life and found that it was no longer recognizable; that it had become a cult of personalty centered around Trump. To realize that party no longer exists, that the cause one had served had become corrupted by what amounted to a crime syndicate is difficult, to say the least. To have the moral clarity to say ...

About a month ago, President Joe Biden announced that he would not be seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for a second term, even though he had more than enough delegates to accept the nomination. He was the candidate I had voted for during my state's primary this year just as I had done in 2020. Biden had been the man for the moment. His Presidential term was solid, and I would argue exceeded expectations. I might circle back to that another time. He had no serious opponents during this year's primary season and he had made it clear that he still believed he was the man for this moment. Unfortunately, the polls kept consistently telling a different story. And his performance at that first (and as it turned out, last) debate against Trump was nothing short of disastrous for both candidates. This was an election that very few were enthusiastic about. I was saddened at the news that Joe Biden had decided to step aside in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris, but also r...

It's late now, but earlier today I awoke to the news that Kamala Harris had picked Tim Walz as her running mate. Harris had plenty of good choices. Walz signals to me that she is building something akin to the Obama/Biden coalition of 2008 and 2012. Tim Walz, as Governor of Minnesota since 2019 presides over what is arguably a purple state. It's not really a swing state when it comes to Presidential elections. Minnesota also borders Wisconsin (which is a true swing state). Like the other "blue wall" states in the Midwest, it is both an industrial and agricultural state. Walz himself hails from rural Nebraska. He's made a career in the military and as a high school educator, and has worked in a relatively GOP-leaning area in Minnesota for most of his career. As a Congress member from 2007 until 2019, Walz earned a reputation as a moderate who worked with his GOP colleagues to pass legislation. As Governor of Minnesota, he's presided over an impressive number of...

Since the protracted process of electing a Speaker of the House of Representatives began on Tuesday, Hakeem Jeffrees, the Democratic Minority Leader, has been a paragon of patience and grace. Following the final vote that just barely elected Kevin McCarthy as Speaker (history-making, but for the wrong reasons), Jeffries delivered the first speech prior to McCarthy taking the gavel. It was a masterful speech which often reminded me of the first time I saw Obama give a speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. This was one for the ages. Here is the clip from CNN's YouTube channel: