2020 Election Predictions

I screwed up my 2016 election prediction but that doesn't prevent me from predicting again.  Because I feel optimistic today I think Biden/Harris will win a solid victory, north of 350 electoral votes, the Democrats will control the Senate 52-48, and they'll gain 5 seats in the House. These results will come after all the votes are counted, maybe by the end of the month, but most importantly the presidential outcome will be apparent the evening of Nov. 3.

 Trump will bluster for a bit, but will find he's a lame duck and has no support in the Party to fight the outcome.

A Letter from the President

 USDA and the administration are catching flak because of this:

The Agriculture Department last week began mandating that millions of boxes of surplus food for needy families include a letter from President Donald Trump claiming credit for the program.

 I'm trying but failing to remember somewhat of a parallel. Secretary Bergland signed a letter which we sent out to farmers, perhaps to all active producers associated with a farm.  This was, I think, in 1980, an election year.  The subject was something related to crop insurance.  I don't remember whether it was base on legislation or a policy decision, perhaps an expansion of the insurance program..  I do remember ASCS had been running a test of selling crop insurance, because Roy Cozart, who became DASCO when the Reagan administration came in, was working on putting FCIC directives into the ASCS system. That test was a failure.

IIRC we career bureaucrats, and possibly Roy, who was career but with political pull, raised an eyebrow on it. The differences between then and now: Jimmy Carter didn't sign the letter and I remember the content as being more informative and less propagandistic than the current letter.

The Right Question for President Trump

Lots of stuff going around on whether the losers will accept the results of the fall election.  I don't think the question to the president yesterday was well-phrased.  I think the right question for the president is whether he has designated his transition team. (He has, actually, designated Chris Liddell as you can see if you spend some time googling. But my real question is: does he know this, or has Meadows made the designation without telling Trump for fear he'll erupt. Based on everything which has come out about how the administration operates, I suspect that his staff keeps lots of stuff from him.)

[Updated: Politico just put out this piece on Liddell's work.]

Will I Accept a Trump Victory?

 There's some worrying that liberals would not accept another Trump victory.  I can only speak for myself, a diehard Democrat.

If a "Trump victory" means an outcome like 2016--a loss in the popular vote but a clear plurality in one or more states sufficient to mean an electoral college victory--yes, I'll "accept" it.  By which I mean I'll recognize him as the person elected to be president according to our constitution. It doesn't mean I won't be as active, or more active, in opposition as I have been.

If the election goes to Congress, I'm not giving a promise of acceptance, although to the extent I understand the 1876 resolution I'd likely acceptance such an outcome in 2020.

Sad Words on Records Management

 Federal Computer Week has a long discussion of the challenges records management faces in the current environment:“I love my records management staff,” one said. “They’re fantastic. But they are not database people. They are not technologists.”

I think the bottom line is that "records management" is not a sexy occupation, which means it can descend into a vicious circle: because it's not sexy it doesn't attract the best employees or employees who have experience in new processes and technology, management can ignore it for more crucial issues, employees can ignore records management problems and fail to understand the logic of the rules, and records management issues are ignored in developing new systems. Back in the day, my early days at ASCS, our business processes were pretty much standard across the country: electric typewriters and carbon paper, and information moved on mail carts and clearance folders.  No more.

That explains both Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as well as various figures in the White House under the current administration.

A Vet, But No Hero

 Our illustrious president is alleged to have called people who served in the military "losers", etc.  It seems consistent with his public persona, although the Atlantic article didn't have named sources.

In reaction, some are calling military personnel "heroes".

I take exception: I'm a vet, but no damned hero.  I was drafted, I went, I served, I got out very happily--end of story for me.

Prediction on Election Problems

There's a growing number of pieces discussing various problems which could arise in determining the outcome of the 2020 election. Slate has a piece on ten of them, collected from various sources.  As is often the case, I'm more optimistic.

I'll make this set of predictions:

• I don't think there will be a major problem, because I think the Biden-Harris ticket will win convincingly in enough states on election night to make the outcome clear.  There may be some states where the outcome is a bit doubtful, where recounts are going to happen, but history tells us recounts rarely change the result.
• If there are major problems, I expect the leaders of the Republican Party, excluding the Trump-Pence camp, to react much as one would have expected in the past.  Fight for advantage within the rules, as in Florida, but not violate norms.
• Even for Trump and Pence, I don't expect major violations of norms post-election.  Pence would want to run in 2024 and the Kushners may well have ambitions of their own.  At the least a long fight with norm violations is not going to do the Trump Organization any good.  

My Election Nightmare

We have record-breaking participation in the 2020 election.  Democrats, being more reluctant to expose themselves to the virus, choose overwhelmingly to use the mail to cast their ballots.  Democrats, being unfamiliar with the process and not particularly good at reading instructions, make errors in completing the ballots.

On election day, the interim count shows Trump and his fellow Republicans running ahead in most states, including the battleground states.  But most states will take days to process and count the mail ballots. As the count proceeds there is a very high rate of ballot rejections, and Democrats become more and more concerned.  

When the dust settles, Trump is reelected based on accepted ballots.  Post-election analysis shows that 7 million ballots from registered Democratic and independent voters have been rejected.  Trump's margin of victory is -2.8 million votes, better than his 2016 margin, but the improvement is entirely attributable to mistakes in the mail ballot process.

Oh, in my really bad nightmare, in several key states there's a Florida-2000 style recount, reviewing the rejected balllots. 

A Modest Suggestion--Trump Hotel as Dormitory

Louis Gohmert sleeps in his office, a fact mentioned in an article on his contracting coronavirus.  That's not unusual.  This article estimates up to 100 members of Congress do so.

Over the years there have been many articles bemoaning the decline of civility and bipartisanship in Congress, often attributed to the idea that members commute back to their districts on the weekend and don't develop close personal relationships with members of the other party.

Presumably the members who sleep in their offices are usually the ones who are commuting back home--they don't feel the need to rent quarters in DC when they're only sleeping here 2-3 days a week for 40  weeks.

A third fact: the Trump Hotel in DC  hasn't been doing well with the pandemic.  Once Trump is out of office, it's likely to do much worse than it did in 2017-19.

So my modest suggestion:

Let the US  government buy out Trump's lease on the building and set it up as a dormitory for members of Congress. By housing 250 or so members it should create a better atmosphere in Congress, and it helps get Trump back to NYC the evening of Jan 20.

Undoing Trump's Work II

The Times has an article today on how the Democrats are planning to use the Congressional Review Act to undo Trump regulatory actions.  According to the article the Republicans are now within the period to which the Act applies so a new Congress controlled by the Democrats would be able to reverse any final rules published from here on to Jan. 19.

The piece quotes Sally Katzen as raising the issue of whether it's possible to reinstate the Obama regs which the Trump administration nullified using the CRA, but it doesn't explore it. I haven't looked at the actual wording of the act recently, but I wonder if the courts would uphold the ability of one Congress to bind a future Congress.

Undoing Trump's Work

Trump has made many changes in federal policy, issuing a lot of executive orders. Most recently, he's proposing to change the way the government does environmental policy.  There's already a lawsuit saying he's not following the Administrative Procedure Act. IMHO it's likely the policy won't be final by Jan 20, so a new Biden administration could withdraw it easily. My point here is actions like this are basically political campaign fodder, not realistic.  It's okay; the Obama administration did  much the same.  You spend 3.5 years hoping to do something,and you wake up and find you're out of time, but you might as well do it anyway--it will look good to your supporters and there's always the chance the new administration will carry on the work.

Other changes Trump has made are permanent, meaning a new administration will have to go through the rulemaking process to consider whether they want just to reverse the changes, or whether they want to take the occasion to make some modifications of their own.  I'm not sure whether a straight revocation of a final rule has a lower legal hurdle for justification or not--it's possible a new cost-benefit analysis would still be required.  Since Trump's people have changed the parameters for such analyses  the situation gets a bit more complicated.

Assuming Biden wins in November, watching the new administration navigate these hurdles will be rewarding.

The National Garden of American Heroes

One of the items on the agenda of Biden's transition task force is, I hope, a listing of Trump executive orders to be reviewed, possibly modified, and perhaps revoked in the early days of a Biden administration.  One of the top items is this July 3rd order for creating the National Garden of American Heroes.

It's nonsense.  The listing looks like an abbreviated one from this "Conservapedia Gallery of American Heroes"

A Thought for Hillary

I was struck by this in an Atlantic piece on Biden:

"It’s better to be a mystery [like Biden is to many] than to be like Hillary Clinton, who faced what amounted to a 25-year negative-advertising campaign that left even sympathetic voters suspicious. Her 2016 word cloud was dominated by liar, criminal, and untrustworthy, with strong registering a bit too."

That seems to be the way she's remembered now. But it's wrong about the way she was regarded during her political career.  Wikipedia shows that she had 22 appearances topping the "most admired woman in America" list between 1948 and now, far more than anyone else.  (Ike and Obama each had 12 as the most admired man.)

Granted this just means that she had a plurality of strong supporters, but there were years in which her favorability was quite high.  What happened in 2015-16 was the Republican publicity machine tearing her down, aided by a "both sides" media world, eager to balance Trump's real faults with Hillary's supposed ones.

You can see I'm aggrieved here.  I won't say that Clinton was a good candidate nor that she didn't open the door to some of the attacks.  I will say she would have been an above-average president, not the total disaster of the man who beat her.

Furman and I: Great Minds

Politico reports that some Democrats, led by former Obama economist Furman, are worried that the fall will see lots and lots of positive economic news, as the economy starts to recover from the pandemic shutdown.  That's similar to my post here.

On the other hand, a FiveThirtyEight survey of economists has a prediction of a relatively slow recovery, a slight majority predicting a Swoosh (i.e., Nike logo) recovery.

Trump Is Dyslexic?

Bob Somerby at Daily Howler is often repetitive and long-winded, but he offers a perspective I don't often find elsewhere (although he and Kevin Drum respect each other and Kevin's my favorite blogger).

Here's Somerby discussing Andrew Sullivan's attack on the president.

Buried in there somewhere is the suggestion Donald Trump might be dyslexic.  I've not heard that before, but it's an intriguing suggestion.

As Somerby notes, liberals would normally shy from attacking someone with some disabilities or mental disorders, but not DJT.  The possibility won't change my attitude towards him either.

[Updated: If you assume that Trump is starting from a position of no knowledge, it would explain why he's easy prey for the last person to talk to him, and why he's suspicious of people.  For similar thoughts,here's Friedersdorf.

Speculation on What the FBI Was Doing

I approach the Michael Kelly case with some preconceptions:

1. the FBI has never been particularly fond of liberals.  The head of the agency has never been an agency.  For a long time it was headed by J.Edgar Hoover, a great bureaucrat and no friend to liberals.  It was a struggle to get some diversity into the agency, both minorities and women.
2. as an entrenched bureaucracy with its own esprit de corps it's liable not to follow direction from the outside.
3. Kelly I knew from his association with Gen. McChrystal and the Rolling Stone article, which got McChrystal fired.  I may have seen appraisals like that of Sarah Chayes in Business Insider, essentially a loose cannon, as I was once called, innovative but needing close management.
4. Not being a lawyer I've no good way of judging between claims that the interview with Flynn where he lied had no "predicate" (the Barr position) and therefore the case was tainted, and claims that the charges were appropriate and well-based.
5. Being a Democrat I'd enjoy any embarrassment to the Trump administration.

So, what do I make of Kelly, his indictment, and the subsequent dropping of the case by Attorney General Barr?

1. He was totally miscast as National Security Advisor, particularly for a president such as Trump. His selection, despite the warning from Obama, was an early instance of Trump's incompetence.
2. I doubt the narrative that the FBI looking at Flynn was part of an Obama administration's plot to undermine the Trump administration.  I don't believe the FBI would risk good relations with the incoming administration just because Obama or Yates told them to. That wouldn't fit my picture of the FBI as sophisticated bureaucratic players.
3. Not being a lawyer, I've not carefully followed the arguments about FBI having a predicate for its investigations, particularly because the rules seem to differ some between a criminal investigation and a national security (counter-intelligence) investigation.
4. My vague suspicion is as follows: in counter-intelligence people are paid to be suspicions, overly so.  Witness James Jesus Angleton, about whom I've written a time or two. It doesn't seem totally unreasonable to me that FBI agents would look at Flynn, fired by Obama from his DIA job, and say to themselves: if I were a Russian agent I might try to exploit his hard feelings, at least feel him out.  Certainly the KGB would see that as a potential gold mine and certain to reap big bureaucratic rewards.  
5. If I'm an FBI bureaucrat, I think I'd believe that the Russian/Flynn investigation could offer big rewards--it'd be good for my reputation and promotion prospects.  (I'm assuming that the FBI culture is rather insular, and  agents would believe that their director still, as J. Edgar was, could insulate them from flak from DOJ and the presidency.  )
6. I like a summary of the Mueller report from Dana Milbank: the Trump campaign wanted to collude with the Russians but was too incompetent to.  The whole episode is murky, and I don't believe it could have been much clearer to FBI agents.
7. One known unknown: we don't know what covert sources of information were and are available to the administration.   Presumably there are some, the existence of which has been hidden from the public record.

So my bottom line is disbelief in any sinister plot against Trump and his people. I think a combination of bureaucratic motives, culture, and incompetence came together with Trump incompetence to produce one good result: Flynn's resignation as national security adviser and likely a bad precedent for the way the FBI should operate in the future.

Firing Inspectors General

As a good government ("goo-goo") type, I'm perturbed by the president's removal of several IG's and acting IG"s.  But this piece  suggests there's not much Congress can do to stop such actions by a president.  IG's are executive branch employees and as such are subject to the president's authority.

I wonder: could we look to sports, the NFL, for a solution:  There the tension is between getting the call right and keeping the game flowing.  Could we give the president a couple get-out-of-jail cards per term--allow her to fire two IG's but no more?  Arguably this would permit the president flexibility but not too much.

I'm afraid what will happen when the administration changes: the new president will use the Trump precedent to fire the Trump-IG's and goo-goo norms will suffer further erosion.

Anti-Trump Derangement Syndrome

Conservatives use TDS to paint liberals as so biased against the president that they're incapable of treating his positions fairly.

I'd suggest the Anti-TDS as applying when conservatives or independents (like Ann Althouse) lean over backwards to whitewash his tweets and news conferences using excuses like he's joking or he's being sarcastic. 

I think it's sometimes true that DJT says things he doesn't expect to be taken seriously, but I refuse to believe it's a joke or sarcasm, at least not as a normal thing.

Suppose Trump Is Mostly Right?

Let's say the reopening of the US goes okay, some glitches, but on the whole the level of deaths keeps declining down to a low level, so Covid-19 is just the fourth or fifth most common cause of death.

And suppose that's low enough that businesses and schools reopen during the summer without major setbacks.

So now it's October 1 and things have been going pretty well.  And most important they have been going pretty well since May 15.

And the stories in the media are no longer the gloom of uncertainty but the resilience of the country.

And despite the impact on the economy, our "animal spirits" have revived and the majority of the country thinks things are improving, and we're on the right track.

What then will be the outlook for Trump's reelection?

Trump: Keep Your Cotton Pickin' Hands Off My Money

I remember when the Thrift Savings Plan was created as part of a plan to reform the compensation of federal employees, of which I was one. IIRC the administration tried to eliminate the defined benefit retirement plan under civil service.  Switching from defined benefit to defined contribution was all the rage in private enterprise back then.

IIRC correctly there was some opposition particularly on the right based on the idea the investment money would be under the control of political types who would try to use their leverage to further their socialistic goals.

From EBRI's summary:i

KEY FACTORS TO SUCCESS: Despite initial opposition from labor groups and veto threats from the Reagan administration, Congress ultimately enacted a plan that reduced federal spending and eventually won strong support from federal workers, particularly because of the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). Lawmakers deliberately and carefully insulated the TSP from political manipulation and minimized the impact of the federal workers’ investments in the financial markets.

Now the Trump administration is pushing the TSP board not to include Chinese stocks in the I (international) fund.  (Some in Congress are pushing a law forward to effect the same goal.)What it means is a lower return on my money because they view China as an adversary. 

I hope all those conservatives who worried about political considerations impacting TSP investment decisions back in 1986 will now oppose this move.