One Lonely Winter's Election Night

Or "A Digestive Post"

A long-running meme on Heir… is that “this is not an AI newsletter”, even though almost everything here covered ends up become tethered and tangled in concerns, little or large, of artificial intelligence in the end.

Along similar lines, I wrote in August that Heir… is not, and by its nature cannot be, a Morning-Joe-type politics blog. It cannot be, and I don’t want it to be.

With that in mind, I am nonetheless going to aggregate a few loose thoughts about the US election such that it has presently occurred, reflections such as may suit us to revisit in time to come should the points covered end up blossoming into true, full-fibred components of ‘the narrative’.

1. I called it. See below, from Shogun and the US Election, August 2024.

The idea of a swing towards Harris is possible but it leaves a lot of unanswered items on the table:

-Harris polled poorly throughout her tilt at the primaries (failing to reach double figures in her home state) and as VP. That she was broadly accredited as too unpopular to take a fight to Trump was, convention upholds, one of the primary drivers of Biden's aides' hesitance to hit the big red button. I don't see how this will have reversed given she has for the last x weeks been running a vibes campaign (by leveraging the same resources that H. Clinton used to alienate swathes of the swing-base, and even though the aforementioned polling suggests Harris does not have a strong enough base of affinity to run that kind of a campaign) with no particular signal policy directed towards the kinds of people unlikely to vote as the meme blows.

-Measured against the present conventions of American presidential debates, I do not expect Harris to come out on top in a 1-to-1, unless she has taken a radically different approach to public speaking appearances than she did previously. “Never been to Europe”, indeed.

-This is conjectural but I would assert that it was far more of a social risk to be MAGA in 2016 than in 2024. Then, it was considered the realm of philosophical deviants from Breitbart and the deplorables. In 2024, having seen how essentially moderate a lot of Trump's policy directions were set against Republican precedent (set apart from his presidential conduct, which is another thing), supporting him can be attributed/written off as being a vote in favour of some of the pretty conventional totems he's now associated with, as opposed to singularly and unequivocally being a vote of membership into a right fringe club, as it seemed then. (There has always been a thread of pseudo-MAGA sentiment, a relatively benign nationalism, that is not so conspiratorial as the one typically associated with the Trump hardcore, which I would suggest is less unfashionable now than it was in 2016).

-I’m sure the auguries I’ve seen that Trump's positions on women's issues put him out of favour with everyone from "blue-hair pronoun people...[to] wine upper-middle class wine mom types" is true, but these assertions never suggest the width of disapprobation they are probably supposed to. Those are the two demographics everyone would expect Trump to be (possibly intractably) least popular with, at least insofar as the latter are metropolitan upper-middle-class. If Trump had said something that put him out of favour with working class men, we might be on to a swing, but the fact is he just got shot and got up and shook his fist at the shooter and immediately went back to work; there will be many male voters even who despise Trump's policy stances and/or conduct who identified with that (many women too).

-I don't think the movement of some tech types to Trump support makes any real difference, except insofar as it demonstrates that supporting him is no longer unacceptable for people whose work and social lives put a premium on maintaining the right signalling. If non-fanatical publicly visible people are no longer wary of declaring their support, you can bet this will be reflective of similar movement in an unspecified swathe of people with no public profile to defend and no particular need to broadcast their leaning.

-Some commentators have been suggesting that the impact of immigration will be marginal in this exchange, a suggestion I'm not sure is anything other than fanciful, unless the individuals in question are suggesting there's already maximum polarisation on this issue and there are no more politi-transmittors for any further uptake to either position to be possible. If so, maybe immigration has already played the entirety of its present part, but either way that part is not no part.

-I wouldn't leap to fully crediting the recent polling that suddenly puts a previously non-beloved former VP ahead of the cultified former incumbent who just survived an assassination attempt. Big swing events in major(-feeling) campaigns often prompt a change in polling methodology, and where these happen they usually reflect the media's desire to fool itself about developments. Exactly this happened in 2016 in two major elections (i.e. Trump and Brexit).

2. My superstition — and it is only that — is that Trump won when he got shot and rose to shake his fist in the air, and then probably won again when he served fries at McDonalds. This is the not the Big Why — a notion to be distrusted at all times — but I suspect that these signal instances form the spear-tip behind which the tails of a lot of causal factors behind Trump’s victory have aggregated. Makes for a rather unwieldy spear, but that’s politics.

3. As it stands, the Republicans will win the Presidency, the popular vote, the House, and the Senate. The margin will be considerably greater than decided the 2020 election. Their mandate is undeniable.

4. It has been understood, for years and by anyone interested in watching, that standards of polling in Western countries are so low that they cannot, by any chalk, still be held to be legitimate forecasting instruments in major elections. An expert explains why. Nate Silver and the like were outdone by anime profile pics.

5. If you want to predict the result, follow the markets instead. See point Star-1 in the paddock below.

6. If you must follow pollsters, AtlasIntel might be one to keep your eye on (no affiliation). Contrarian, uncowed by consensus, powered by novel theory, and ultimately correct.

7. It was said, in probably unintentionally Stalinesque tones, that the Labour party had ‘dealt with’ staffer Sofia Patel, who had organised a coterie of UK government officials to go to swing states to campaign for Harris. I suspect this is because of the warm engagement between Keir Starmer and Trump after the latter’s escape from assassination in the summer, wherein Trump called Starmer his ‘friend’. If this dynamic remains unscuppered by the attempted election interference, and results in a US-UK trade deal, the UK could be in for a world of short-term benefit if Trump follows through on his rather questionable campaign of tariff levying elsewhere. Expect the Labour government to spoil this in some way if it does come to pass.

8. If we take it as given that all the things of which Trump is accused are true, we must also accept that the wider expanse of American people have taken this into account and still found the Harris campaign untenable as an alternative. Across the last decade and beyond, the Metropolitan left has set new watermarks for ineptitude of opposition; they have marshalled more resources of more varieties than any prior candidates for government have ever had (in this election alone Harris’ campaign budget was 3x Trump’s; she raised more and spent more), and they have still conspired to lose in almost every decisive theatre. The current convention of the Mets, throughout America and well-beyond, is arguably the most politically incompetent force ever seen in all the tournaments of democracy since the dawn of universal franchise.

9. Harris’ motion to campaign without a platform, without any notable policy positions, marks a fresh nadir in the capability of Mets to understand not just what messaging resonates with the vote shares they would capture, but to understand the most fundamental requirements of even base-functional politics. Their divorce from reality has been absolute throughout this administration, and it is unsurprising in this context that we’ve actually reached a stage where four months ago a wonk in a room somewhere went “You know what, I think it’d be best if we campaigned without policy. Policy’s just so divisive, y’know,” and instead of that person being dismissed with contempt everyone nodded their head and sealed their fates.

10. As would accord to points 7-9, the standard of Met political analysis is the most miserably useless standard as could be imagined. Nowhere is this better epitomised than by unrelated UK political commentary institution The Rest is Politics, run by New Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell and the esoteric Tory Rory Campbell. Adorably, the thing is run under the mantle of being a sort of civilised coming together of two men across a political divide even though, epistemologically and in general logical and moral reasoning, the two men are completely indistinguishable. Unlike their …History counterparts, who are popular because they do history better than most available alternatives, …Politics is popular because it caters to people who consider politics their preferred form of entertainment and to people who consider themselves ‘emblematic’ types (people who put a lot of premium on the right signalling and the moral superiority accorded to them thereby). This is all a way of saying that …Politics is popular because it does politics even worse than the already atrocious international standard on such things. It is an extremely useful digest of what Mets think about things — and make no mistake, …Politics represent the Mets, who are the richest and most politically obsessive denomination in Western politics, so well that their firesides are done in arenas to 10,000s of paying customers, which naturally has given both men the delusion that their views are representative of the wider masses. Not unrelatedly, Campbell and Stewart are wrong about almost everything they discuss, and their post-game analysis of the US election was risible, ‘Sunday Sport-level analysis’ as put by Sunday Sport itself. The below is a fine standard of their mental model.

11. People really hate inflation. They will not swallow much positive reporting on the economy if those reports do not truck with their lived experience of prices going up. See point Star-7.

12. So far, and very much unlike the past several election cycles in the US, immigration policy has taken a backseat to inflation and economics as the primary preferred ‘Big Why’ among commentators sifting through the aftermath. I noticed several pundits trying to pre-emptively insist that “Immigration won’t play a big part in settling this cycle” as long ago as July. I anticipate that this may be part of a shift in Met epistemology, where they go from loudly attempting to discredit the public on positions that the Mets hate to just pretending such unappealing positions don’t exist at all. Something similar is happening in the UK, where the most politically significant event in the last 3 years of the country’s political history — the Southport riots — has been completely memory-holed in most official polling and analysis despite driving a massive amount of the abiding ill-feeling towards Starmer’s government, with the result that according purely to these polls a certain % of their drop in popularity starts to look nominally inexplicable. If this continues we will probably see Met presence in elected government be washed out entirely in the cycles to come, pending the completion of their retreat into rational-idealism where they are fortified totally against any of the marauding intentions of data (that is, y’know, reality).

13. Grover Cleveland pub quiz specialists in crisis from which I suspect they will not emerge.