Monday, December 11, 2023
Sunday, December 10, 2023
Americans Continue to Believe Falsehoods About the Economy
There are two big questions right now about the U.S. economy. One is why it’s doing so well. The other is why so many Americans insist that it’s terrible.
I have no illusions about persuading conservatives that the economy is in good shape; their minds are made up, and pointing out facts at odds with their views just makes them angry.
But there also seem to be a significant number of progressives unwilling, for different reasons, to accept the good news. And this group, at least, might be willing to listen to arguments that President Biden has accomplished more than they realize, as well as the proposition that half a loaf is better than none and much better than what Biden’s opponents will do if given the chance.
About the good economic news: This week two excellent economic reports were added to the pile. On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the third quarter, labor productivity rose at an annual rate of 5.2 percent, which is really, really fast. It’s too soon to call a trend, but there is increasing reason to hope that our economy is capable of growing considerably faster than we previously thought.
Oh, and unit labor costs are up only 1.6 percent over the past year, another indicator that inflation is coming under control.
Another report showed that unfilled job openings are down. Last year many economists were arguing that the high level of vacancies meant that we needed high unemployment to control inflation. That gap has now largely disappeared, one of many signs that the economy is healing from the disruptions brought on by the Covid pandemic. And this process of healing explains why we’ve been able to get inflation down without a recession or a surge in unemployment.
Nonetheless, many Americans continue to have very negative views of the economy. Some of this may reflect the fact that while inflation has come way down, prices are still high compared with the recent past. This effect may wear off over time; as I wrote not long ago, there has to be some statute of limitations on how far back people look for their sense of what things should cost. One interesting recent analysis suggests that it takes around two years for lower inflation to be reflected in consumer sentiment, in which case Americans might be feeling better about the economy in time for next year’s elections.
On the other hand, inflation has been a global phenomenon, but the huge gap between favorable economic indicators and grim public perceptions is unique to the United States, where people believe many bad things about the economy that simply aren’t true.
I can report from experience that talking about these issues with people on the right is basically impossible. Point out that most workers’ earnings have significantly outpaced inflation since the eve of the pandemic, and they’ll say you’re a member of the elite who has no idea what things really cost. Point out that Americans are more likely than not to express positive views about their family’s own financial situation and that strong consumer spending belies claims that families are suffering, and they’ll say you’re a snob telling people how to feel. It’s a no-win situation.
One group that might be amenable to persuasion, however, is progressives unwilling to acknowledge good economic news because they say that there’s still a lot wrong with America. I don’t know how large this group is, but I seem to know a lot of them, and their negativity may be affecting the general tone of conversation.
To be sure, Biden’s America isn’t a progressive paradise. Too much wealth and power is still concentrated in the hands of a few people, even as millions of this rich nation’s citizens still live in poverty and lack adequate health care.
But there has nonetheless been real progress. . . . And things would look even better if Democrats had won even a slightly bigger victory in the 2020 elections. Notably, just one or two more Democratic senators would have meant a permanent extension of the expanded child tax credit, which would have sharply reduced child poverty — and still could, if Democrats find a way to win big in 2024.
Furthermore, consider the alternatives. Over the past few months, Republican policy discourse has taken a hard right turn, with renewed pledges to repeal Obamacare — threatening health insurance coverage for more than 40 million Americans — and a push for cuts to Social Security.
So here’s how I see it: The results of Biden’s victory in 2020 have fallen well short of progressives’ dreams, but a Biden defeat next year would be the stuff of progressive nightmares. Are left-leaning Americans able to hold both facts in their minds and act appropriately?
Saturday, December 09, 2023
The Electoral College: Tyranny of the Minority
Arlando Monk is an increasingly rare find in presidential politics: a voter whose choices matter.
The Black entrepreneur lives in Wisconsin, one of seven expected battlegrounds in the 2024 presidential race. He is registered to vote but not sure he will bother. He has not decided between former president Donald Trump or President Biden, if those are the major-party options.
If U.S. presidents were selected through the principle of “one person, one vote” that governs legislative races, the ballots of undecided swing-state citizens such as Monk would be worth just as much as the other 150 million or so Americans who are expected to vote next year.
But that is not the system handed down from the nation’s founding fathers, who opted for multiple winner-take-all contests that give greater power to smaller states. The electoral college was supposed to moderate the passions of what Alexander Hamilton called the “general mass,” which he worried could fall prey to candidates with “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity.”
[T]he system increasingly distorts the democratic process as partisan divisions grow along geographic lines.
Advances in technology, meanwhile, allow campaigns to calibrate their outreach to only the most persuadable voters. The upshot is that a tiny segment of the population will get an outsize say in who leads the United States. And the will of the majority may not even prevail.
Once rare, the frequency with which the electoral college has skewed the overall result has increased: The “general mass” — now called the popular vote — has been won in two of the past six contests by someone who lost the White House. In both cases, the Republican candidate benefited.
At the same time, the count of swingable states has narrowed. The 2024 presidential campaign is likely to target a smaller share of Americans than at any point in the modern era, despite massive increases in spending due to online fundraising, a Washington Post analysis found.
During the last election, just 10 states and two congressional districts were targeted by Republican or Democratic nominees’ campaigns. It was a precipitous drop from the 26 states on average that were targeted each year between 1952 and 1980
The Washington Post’s analysis found that just 1 in 4 Americans lived in such areas in 2020, down from roughly 3 in 4 in the earlier period. If the major parties do not contest Florida in 2024, as is widely expected, only 18 percent of Americans would live in battlegrounds.
The targeted voters in the decisive states should expect a barrage of communications . . . . . The rest of the country’s citizens will find themselves on the sidelines, watching the news or the occasional live candidate event with a diminished voice in their own futures. Their vote will still count but is unlikely to decide anything.
“It’s now getting to the point where you are probably talking about 400,000 people in three or four states. That is what it is getting down to,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns since 1980. “It does mean that more and more people feel that they don’t have a say.”
The geographic sorting of Americans along partisan lines helps explain why. Most of the country resides in red or blue states where the outcome in a two-party race is not in doubt. If a candidate wins California by one vote or 1 million votes, the electoral college outcome is the same, giving candidates no incentive to campaign in places where the outcome can be predicted. Thirty-three states — including giants such as California, New York and Texas — have voted for the same party in each presidential election dating back to 2000.
“Instead of using increased spending to target a broader swath of voters, you have more and more money focused on specific voters that campaigns think will be decisive in the electoral college.”
“It is pretty clear that not all voters are equal,” said Shaw, the political scientist, whose book “Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era” is due out next year. “It’s not just the system. It is the system and the voters it is operating on.”
The vast majority of the ad and organizing dollars is focused on media markets and outlets where the voters who will decide the election reside, as campaigns seek to infiltrate the communities, households or iPhones where the few identified swing voters such as Monk spend their time.
At the Biden campaign, the early betting is that the outcome of next year’s election will again be very close, with a margin once again hinging on tens of thousands of votes in a few states. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who won the 2016 popular vote by 2.9 million votes, or 2 percent, could have won the electoral college if about 80,000 people in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had voted differently.
In 2020, about 45,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin could have changed the outcome of that race, even though Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million.
Before 2000, the outcome of the electoral vote had matched the popular vote in every election for more than a century. But in recent years the aberrations have become more common, with mismatches in 2000 and 2016 that enabled the popular vote loser to claim the White House.
In the past two elections, Republicans have had a distinct electoral college advantage. That’s because the tipping-point states that won the election were more Republican-leaning than the country as a whole. In 2020, Wisconsin, the tipping-point state, was 3.5 points more Republican than the country, the highest advantage since 1948.
The shifts have only magnified the need for campaigns to ignore the bigger blue states where Democrats tend to rack up large margins.
Persuading people to participate in the election at all may prove more important than winning them over from the other side. That means campaigns are likely to focus on voters who are among the least politically engaged.
“The people who will decide this election don’t want to participate in it,” said one Democrat who requested anonymity to describe planning for next year.
At the root of this dynamic is the antiquated assumption at the heart of U.S. presidential politics — that regular people cannot be trusted to directly select America’s leader. Enslaved people, Native Americans and women had no vote in the original U.S. Constitution. The White, landowning men who did were seen as susceptible to their own passions and selfish interest. Electors, by contrast, were expected to be enlightened and above the fray.
“The people choose the electors,” James Madison, a drafter of the U.S. Constitution, said during the debate. “This can be done with ease and convenience, and will render the choice more judicious.”
The electoral college system came with tricky ramifications, including a built-in bias toward smaller states. The population of California, the most populous state, is more than 67 times the population of Wyoming, the least inhabited. But California only gets 18 times the representation in the electoral college of Wyoming. Put another way, the vote of Wyoming residents is worth 3.7 times more than Californians in presidential contests.
The overall effect has been to give the GOP an edge. University of Texas political scientists found that in a 50-50 popular vote election, the Republican had a 65 percent chance of winning in recent elections.
Polling data has consistently shown that a majority of Americans oppose the electoral college, and in a 2019 Gallup survey one of the most common concerns among those opposed was that “the winner of the popular vote doesn’t always win the election.”
Abraham Lincoln won 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860 when he ran against Stephen Douglas and two other candidates. He got 59 percent of the electoral college votes. Bill Clinton won 69 percent of the electoral college votes in 1992 against two rivals, while winning only 43 percent of the vote.
Friday, December 08, 2023
Liz Cheney Reminds Us of the Stakes in 2024
No wonder MAGA Republicans hate Liz Cheney. No Republican is as articulate, persuasive and passionate as the former Wyoming congresswoman in describing the threat four-time-indicted former president Donald Trump and her own party as currently constituted pose to the future of American democracy and international security.
Her new book “Oath and Honor” has plenty of bombshells — the congressman who derided Trump as “orange Jesus”; Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s pathetic excuse that he had to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago because the former president was depressed and not eating. But the jaw-dropping tidbits should not distract from her overarching message, one that Republicans and the media alike need to embrace.
In her characteristically blunt, unvarnished way, she told CBS’s John Dickerson in an interview aired Sunday: “He’s told us what he will do. It’s very easy to see the steps that he will take. … People who say ‘Well, if he’s elected, it’s not that dangerous because we have all of these checks and balances’ don’t fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted.” She stressed, “One of the things that we see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.”
Without citing No Labels directly, she cautioned that in facing an existential crisis, we cannot have “a situation where the election that might be thrown into the House of Representatives is overseen by a Republican majority.” (No Labels has let on that throwing the election to the House rather than achieving an outright victory for its candidate might be its desired scheme.)
Moreover, she made no bones about the unfitness of her own party to hold power in Congress. “If you look at what Donald Trump is trying to do, he can’t do it by himself. He has to have collaborators,” she said. “And the story of [House Speaker] Mike Johnson is a story of a collaborator and of someone who knew then — and knows now — that what he’s doing and saying is wrong, but he’s willing to do it in an effort to please Donald Trump. And that’s what makes it dangerous.”
Asked directly whether we would be better off with a Democratic House majority, she did not mince words. “I believe very strongly in those principles and ideals that have defined the Republican Party, but the Republican Party of today has made a choice and they haven’t chosen the Constitution,” she said. “And so I do think it presents a threat if the Republicans are in the majority in January 2025.”
In a subsequent interview with Rachel Maddow, Cheney added another caution. Trump “would take those people who are the most radical, the most dangerous, who had the proposals that were the most dangerous, and he will put them in positions of supreme power,” she said. “That’s a risk that we simply can’t take.”
Her remarkable interviews and ongoing campaign to prevent the United States from “sleepwalking into dictatorship” should be a wake-up call to the remaining anti-MAGA Republican still deluding themselves that a second Trump term wouldn’t be all that bad. (As she told Maddow, “When you have a president who is willing to go to war with the rule of law, to ignore the rulings of the courts if he doesn’t agree with them, that has the potential to unravel everything.”)
[H]er message might resonate with “soft” Republicans, independents and even left-wing Democrats in a snit about President Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war and who vow not to support Biden.
How she will make her case in 2024 remains to be seen. Though she has not ruled out a third-party run, she might carry far more weight if she and pro-democracy Republicans such as Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah and former congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois endorse Biden and warn voters against enabling Trump by voting for one of the other candidates.
Cheney can also play another critical role: keeping the media focused on “not the odds, but the stakes” as media critic Jay Rosen put it. It has not been easy to get mainstream media to emphasize the stakes — the survival of our democracy — rather the horserace and premature, meaningless polls.
It is not enough to run a story once every month or so. Unless the campaign is covered as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, the real threat Trump poses will be concealed. Given Cheney’s extraordinary communications skills and ratings draw, her constant presence in print, online and TV coverage — and her willingness to dismiss efforts to normalize Trump and to assign Biden artificial demerits — might prove invaluable.
Cheney, long an ardent critic of Democrats, can provide one more service. After years of criticizing Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Democrats, she worked with them on the Jan. 6 committee, attesting to Pelosi’s willingness to put aside past barbs and Cheney’s fellow committee members’ fidelity to the Constitution. Cheney is a valuable character witness to debunk the demonization of Democrats that has driven Republicans to favor the grotesquely unfit Trump over a center-left, competent Democratic president.
No single voice can determine the outcome of the election. But few have as powerful or effective a voice as Cheney. If she wields her influence adroitly, she will earn her share of the credit for beating back the most serious threat to democracy in our history.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)