None of these questions matter. Did you see last week's jobs report? To be clear, the unemployment rate is actually a very poor predictor of presidential election results, but the unemployment rate is highly correlated with other economic statistics, and they're all... awesome. The unemployment rate is now 3.6%. I'll spare you a lecture on U1 through U6 measures for today, and simply point out that this is a five decade low. GDP has been growing steadily, with 3.2% growth in Q1 of 2019. That's pretty awesome, especially considering the consistency of growth since the "great recession!" Pick your measure, and things are pretty great, economically. Sorry, folks, but that's reality.
And I do mean, "sorry." Because without a change, this means as follows: Donald Trump will be reelected. Trump's net unfavorable over at RealClearPolitics is sitting at -11.5. That won't matter. He won't be hit with a two-term penalty for the GOP, and the economy, by every measure, is awesome.
If the economy doesn't tank in the next year, nothing the Democrats are debating or doing will matter. Donald Trump will be reelected. Period. Those net unfavorables? His unfavorables were worse than Clinton's in 2016. (Stop talking about how bad a candidate Clinton was! Trump's numbers were worse!) The two-term penalty for the Democrats took Clinton down. (Along with Comey!) It won't hit Trump, and he'll be buoyed by the economy. Trump. Will. Win. Unless the economy tanks.
Will it? With each passing month, the probability of it tanking in time for Trump to lose goes down. Recessions generally have causes. They don't just happen because the person in the White House is a moron or a cartoon villain. Capitalism works by divorcing the economy from politics as much as possible. That's the point. The opportunity for an event that causes a recession, though, goes down as the amount of time available for such an event decreases. Famous causes of recessions include the Fed raising interest rates to stop inflation (Trump's clear worry), a financial market collapse caused by sub-prime mortgages and derivatives built around them, the stock market crash of 1929, and so forth. Go read about economic history. Recessions, though, don't just happen because it's time for a recession.
Remember the gambler's fallacy? You haven't won a hand of cards or whatever recently, so you're due to win? It doesn't work that way. Casinos make money because every game has a slight bias in favor of the house, so any gambler who approaches the game that way is bound to lose in the long run. Except this time, it really does work in Trump's favor. (That numbskull can't even make money running a casino, but at least betting on capitalism, he'll come out on top.)
How much time is left? About a year. Roughly a year from now, it will be six months prior to the 2020 election, and political science forecasting models rely on economic data six months prior to the election. If the economic data six months prior to the 2020 election look even remotely similar to how they look now....
Trump will be unbeatable.
Nothing the Democrats are doing now will matter. Stop obsessing over where you put that damned deck chair!
During the 2016 election, I disregarded the forecasting models in favor of polls. The polls got it wrong. The models got it right. I said, right here on this blog, that I'd never do that again. This is me, not making the same mistake again. This is me, relying on political science models and not getting distracted by the bullshit. Yes, Trump's favorable/unfavorable numbers will be a parameter in the model. They will get swamped by the economic numbers, if these numbers don't turn around.
This raises several questions. First, in yesterday's post, I suggested that American-style democracy is either near or past a point of no return because of the way the Republican Party has reoriented itself around Donald Trump.
Hey, remember Pam Bondi? Remember how Donald Trump ran a fake "university" to scam idiots out of their money, and then used money from his fake "charity," (which has since been shut down for being a scam) to bribe the former AG of Florida-- Bondi-- to call off a fraud investigation of the fake "university" by making an illegal donation to Bondi's campaign from his fake "charity?"
Remember that? No? Why not? Because Donald Trump commits so many crimes that any one crime gets buried under the next thing to get revealed. And since this country doesn't punish white collar crime, Trump gets away with everything, and the idiots who got scammed are stupid enough to vote for him for the same reason that they were stupid enough to give him their money in the first place. Stupidity.
Oh, but that was before he became President. Remember when it was unthinkable for a president to ignore Article I/Article II distinctions and steal money from one program to fund another that Congress pointedly refused to fund under the auspices of a fake "emergency?"
Remember how Trump did that, effectively stealing Article I powers? Remember how everyone then moved on, like it's just now the new normal, and we have to accept it?
Five years from now, after five more years of this, what will be considered normal and acceptable? We have already hit a point at which the President lying so frequently that the media can't keep up is a just a thing that happens. One of our major political parties is, for all practical purposes, inviting a hostile foreign power to meddle in our elections on its behalf, and by helping to conceal the President's tax returns, actively covering up the extent of financial dealings between that country and our own President, which we know a) exist, by the admission of the President's own children and financial records, and b) have been the subject of extensive lying, year after year.
What will be left, in five years, of American democracy?
Would you rather have a recession, right now?
And this got me thinking. Recessions have causes. Totally hypothetically, what would it take for an economic sabotage? This is just a thought experiment, but consider:
1) What are the stakes of the 2020 election?
2) How dependent is the 2020 election on the state of the economy?
3) How much is the economy subject to strategic action?
I would argue that the stakes are extraordinarily high. Any potential future democracy in America would be hard-pressed to survive another four years of Donald Trump. Democracy runs on norms, not rules, and a person as dishonest and corrupt as Trump, whose very goal is to establish himself as above all norms and rules, almost by definition destroys all norms of democracy. Rebuilding norms is far different from rewriting rules. Add to that climate change, and the stakes are very high. How dependent is the election on the state of the economy? Very dependent, as forecasting models show. See, in particular, my favorite: the "Time for a Change" model, developed by Alan Abramowitz.
The trick? 3. Here's the thought experiment. How many people would have to stop showing up for work to cause a recession?
The motivating idea here was the government shutdown. Trump caved on that because a government shutdown has economic consequences, both direct an indirect. People don't get paychecks, contractors don't get paid, etc. The longer it goes on, the bigger the economic consequences. How big was the impact of the 2019 shutdown? I've actually looked for good estimates, and failed to be impressed. Somewhere in the neighborhood of fractions of a percent of GDP. That's hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of over a month of a shutdown.
A recession, according to the technical definition, is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. At last measure, we had 3.2%. Bringing that negative for two quarters... that'd take a fuckload of people not showing up for work, by my fancy math.
Reference time. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action. Suppose a bunch of people would receive a benefit by taking an action that is individually costly to them, and no one person takes decisive action. Every individual would behave rationally by declining to act. We call this "free-riding." Hypothetically, let's say a bunch of lefties decided that they wanted to try to bring down Trump by causing a recession, by not showing up for work. That'd suck for them. They'd have to not get paid. They'd probably lose their jobs! And it'd take a lot of them! There's a balancing act here, where the more of them who do it, the less time it would take, but the logic of the free-rider problem is there nevertheless. No individual would act rationally by participating in the attempt to bring on the recession. Instead, the rational thing to do is to keep showing up for work, and remain one of the employed people during the recession, even if you think the sabotage recession is a good idea. (Not that it has any chance of happening. I'm just messing around here, on a blog that nobody reads.)
Anyway, it's sort of an amusing thought experiment. Try to sabotage the economy to save American democracy, and possibly the planet, although depending on the climate change models you use, that may be a lost cause anyway.
Practical? Not even remotely. Ethical? That's not my department.
Hi. I'm Vernher Von Braun.
In case anyone needed a demonstration of why nobody takes professors seriously, point 'em to this blog post.