New Voters Migrate to GOP

Ahead of the election, there is a voter registration trend that would ordinarily augur well for Donald Trump:

"The GOP leads by a point in party identification right now. The average when the Republican Party loses is the Democrats ahead by eight. When the Republican Party wins, the average party ID advantage for Democrats is at three. Republicans right now, are doing even better than the average when they win," [Harry Enten of CNN] explained.

Interesting, but two other variables coming into play probably explain why the race remains really tight, and why that should not and might not matter.

The first is where these new voters are coming from:

They're picking up ground in the areas you'd expect: non-college white-dominated areas, coal country in the northeast, southwest outside of Pittsburgh. The bottom line is, the registration trends we've been seeing over the last few cycles -- with Republicans dominating among non-college white voters -- are very much showing up in party registration.

The piece goes on to note that similar dynamics are playing out nationally.

I forget where I saw this, but I recall that this is a demographic that (a) typically shows up to vote less reliably than others, and (b) trended more Democrat in the past. Given Trump's populism and his Democrat-lite agenda, it is no surprise that this group of voters would migrate.

The second variable is how well Trump sits with traditional Republicans or the educated or suburban voters. The piece doesn't directly address this question, but I can't help but imagine not well would answer that question and help explain the following:

... Harris is doing slightly better among Democrats than Trump is among Republicans...

Trump is not doing as well as Harris within his own party, even with all these new voters?

There is a little something to cheer for Trump: He can win. There is nothing for "fiscal conservatives" and small-l libertarians who were Republican or leaned Republican in the past: What difference does it make?

The GOP is not a home to such voters, given that its economic program is arguably worse than Harris's. (And the anti-abortion/religious agenda doesn't sweeten the deal, to say the least.)

Given this shift, which may well mark the end of the GOP as we knew it or the beginning of a larger political realignment, RINO isn't just an insult Trumpists throw our way while assuming we'll "come [to their] home:" It's increasingly true, and it's time for those who still call themselves Republicans to ask: What am I doing here, and why should I stay?

-- CAV

Harris Losing? MAGA Isn't Why.

At The Hill is a piece speculating on why Kamala Harris appears to be on the way to an electoral loss. The list really boils down to three: Harris is a weak candidate, she isn't giving voters a good reason to vote for her (or at least against Trump), and that "It's virtually impossible to run against a 'cult of personality.'"

As one can glean from the piece, one could have guessed Harris was weak from her 2020 primary flame-out. But her generally low favorability ratings during her Vice Presidency were also a hint, and part of why I had hoped for not Harris when Biden was bowing out. I am an independent voter and definitely not a MAGA fan.

The second and fourth reasons given by the piece are just different aspects of my second reason: This administration has been terrible and it hasn't been hard for Trump to blame it for some of the problems he deserves some of the blame for. Inflation, to which he also contributed via money-printing and supply-depleting lockdowns, is Exhibit A. (And Trump's proposed tariffs will make us nostalgic for the boom times of Biden if he goes through with them.)

The third reason is complete bunk, because the supposedly unstoppable MAGA cult consists of fewer than the quarter of voters who view it favorably and it is strongly disliked by nearly half.

It's simple math that a candidate who worked to appeal to the solid majority of non-MAGA voters should easily be able to defeat Trump. This is even more true of a Democrat, who will have a similar-sized base of voters repulsed by MAGA, than for Trump's Republican challengers, who did not, and so either had to pander to that base or forfeit it.

The Democrats never tried to do this beyond "vibes:" Harris didn't even bother to add a moderate to her ticket!

That said, even Trump has to get votes from some non-MAGA voters -- which is part of why he isn't exactly running away with this election, either.

Biden is very unpopular: If Trump had the initiative or even self-control to stay on message, he could win in a cakewalk against Harris. Furthermore, by permitting Donald Trump to take over their party apparatus, the GOP didn't really attempt to find a stronger candidate than Trump, who is having trouble defeating Harris. The evidence for this is in early primary polls showing Nikki Haley polling better than Trump against Biden.

Blaming the alleged popularity and power of this bloc of voters is foolish, and not just because this election is winnable for the Democrats. It also practically guarantees that the Republicans will continue to be held captive to it, eliminating them as a serious alternative to the Democrats -- while also excusing the Democrats from the soul-searching they need to do to widen their appeal beyond the far left.

-- CAV

Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. The German word of the week is Deppenapostroph, as explained below:

Establishments that feature their owners' names, with signs like "Rosi's Bar" or "Kati's Kiosk" are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession. The correct spelling, therefore, would be "Rosis Bar", "Katis Kiosk", or, as in the title of a recent viral hit, Barbaras Rhabarberbar.

However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph ("idiot's apostrophe") has become so widespread that it is permissible -- as long as it separates the genitive 's' within a proper name.

And yes, dear reader, I shall save you the trouble of visiting Google Translate: Depp does indeed mean idiot.

Poor Johnny... I'll never complain about my own name again!

2. If you're old enough to remember Atari, you may have wondered how games like Pong were implemented without computers:

They were made by mostly avoiding 'computing' concepts altogether, and treating it more like a mechanical thing.

For example with Pong a major component is usually timers - every xth of a second the timer will emit a signal. You have timers calibrated to match the horizontal refresh of the screen, so they'll 'ring' at the same point on each scanline. Then you have timers calibrated to the vertical refresh, so they'll ring on the same scanline each frame.

The ball is then just two discrete timers for vertical and horizontal position, and their rings are sent through an AND gate that will raise the voltage going to the display when both are ringing causing a white dot to appear. The paddles build on this concept with a medium length timer that can be started and stopped to define the length...

The above is from the top-rated Stack Exchange answer, but another points to an online emulation of Pong that demonstrates how the schematics work.

3. If you were as impressed as I was with last month's pager attacks against Hezbollah, you might find this 2021 account of the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist interesting. "The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine" reads like a science fiction/spy novel hybrid:

[T]he machine gun, the robot, its components and accessories together weigh about a ton. So the equipment was broken down into its smallest possible parts and smuggled into the country piece by piece, in various ways, routes and times, then secretly reassembled in Iran.

The robot was built to fit in the bed of a Zamyad pickup, a common model in Iran. Cameras pointing in multiple directions were mounted on the truck to give the command room a full picture not just of the target and his security detail, but of the surrounding environment. Finally, the truck was packed with explosives so it could be blown to bits after the kill, destroying all evidence.

...

The time it took for the camera images to reach the sniper and for the sniper's response to reach the machine gun, not including his reaction time, was estimated to be 1.6 seconds, enough of a lag for the best-aimed shot to go astray.

The A.I. was programmed to compensate for the delay, the shake and the [target] car's speed.

The detailed account was unfortunately made possible by the fact that the device was not successfully destroyed as planned by the post-kill explosion.

4. Good news! The subtitle says just about all you need: "Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touch screens. Buttons are back!" The author has many of the usual misconceptions about capitalism, but he is a bearer of good news in what I would call the stupid smart car front.

-- CAV

Meet 'Brutal Honesty's' Equally Ugly Cousin

I have always disliked the phrase brutally honest despite its positive connotation to many people as something akin to forthright, even when the truth might be unpleasant. Too often, there seems to be an additional connotation/cultural baggage in the vein that truth is somehow more often unpleasant than not.

Said baggage is most often evident in the boastful use of the phrase as a self-descriptor. Most of the time, rude or (at best) blunt would be more accurate, and I take it as a red flag accordingly.

In fact, truth can be pleasant or not, and can be processed rationally or not -- the latter up to and including outright evasion.

That said, at the end of the day, the truth, even if it's unpleasant, is your friend. If a hurricane is coming, you can't run from it if you don't know about it or fail to take it seriously.

Today, I learned of a new phrase that strikes me as about as trendy at brutally honest was at one point when I was young: radical honesty.

Courtesy of a column by Suzanne Lucas, we have the following example making the rounds from the LinkedIn profile of a famous actor:

Was aggressively mediocre at job. Skipped work to be an extra on a Guillermo del Toro movie called Pacific Rim; subsequently let go. Suffered an existential crisis that led to enlightenment regarding the definition of success on one’s own terms. Became an actor instead.

Lucas herself sums this up as outlining [one's] flaws.

As with bluntness, there can be a place for "radical honesty," (or, as it is more commonly known, self-deprecation. A LinkedIn profile (which is a marketing tool) is not that place for the vast majority -- and Lucas shows us exactly what she means by indicating another viral and "radically honest" LinkedIn post whose many compliments failed to translate into a rapid end to a job hunt.

"Well, you're as pretty as any of them, you just need a nose job." -- Cosmo Kramer

It is true that it sometimes takes a real friend to break an unpleasant truth to someone else, and humor about past failures has its place. But communicating those things doesn't take place in a vacuum.

One's purpose and one's audience govern which facts are relevant to bring up and in what way. Whether you think an acquaintance could use a nose job or you know you weren't the best at a past position, telling others about those things isn't inherently necessary or even a good idea.

-- CAV

'13,099' Claims Thoroughly Debunked

Over at Capitalism Magazine is a thorough debunking of the latest hokum Donald Trump is throwing around to gin up anti-immigration hysteria.

The number comes from a letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) regarding how many noncitizen criminals are facing deportation.

Everything else apparently comes from misunderstanding of the data or downright fabrication. Cato's Alex Nowrasteh debunks the following untrue claims:

• The 13,099 non-detained migrants convicted of homicide are free to roam the United States.
• The small number of migrant murderers who are not in prison were released willy-nilly.
• These 13,099 migrants convicted of homicide committed their crimes recently.
• All these migrants were convicted for homicides committed in the United States.

Nowrasteh makes short work of the first claim:

Cropped from image by Nitish Meena, via Unsplash, license.

... Migrants incarcerated for homicide are considered "non-detained" by ICE when they are in state or federal prisons. When ICE uses the term "non-detained," they mean not currently detained by ICE. In other words, the migrant murderers included in the letter are overwhelmingly in prison serving their sentences. After they serve their sentences, the government transfers them onto ICE's docket for removal from the United States.

This alone should cause almost anyone to wonder how stupid or dishonest Donald Trump is, and question Harris's competence, given how easy it would be to answer his claims. But, alas, Harris has "struggl[ed] to respond."

-- CAV

Election Law Changes on the Ballot

This fall, quite a few states will have electoral reforms on the ballot, mostly one or more of ranked-choice voting (RCV), open primaries, and explicitly making it illegal for non-citizens to vote.

The third strikes me as so commonsensical that I'm wondering Isn't that already against the law?

The first two are more interesting, and attempt to address a blatant problem caused by the way the two-party system operates, namely that closed primaries make certain party factions disproportionately strong, leading to elections in which one or both parties fields a candidate with very narrow appeal to the general electorate.

While the overall current state of our politics is a direct result of our cultural deterioration, I am inclined to believe that the entrenched two-party system worsens the problem by putting each party under the thumb of its worst elements, by making it too easy to ignore centrist or pro-liberty voters.

But inclined is the key here: As I have said of ranked-choice voting in the past, I can see these measures being band-aids, too:

Image by Elliott Stallion, via Unsplash, license.

[M]ost voters are not just ignorant, but have been dulled by decades of welfare statism and pressure group warfare to the point that they basically sell their votes at election time.

The end result might be that, yes, the Matt Gaetzes and Rashida Tlaibs get eliminated from Congress, but eventually get replaced by smoother operators who can nonconfrontationally pass very bad legislation that "everybody" likes.

Consider this thought experiment: Imagine George Washington winning a modern election -- or Glenn Youngkin winning one during revolutionary times -- even with RCV. I can't, because the electorate has changed so much.

My apprehension about the "smooth operator" stems in part from how similar the two parties look to me today. Neither challenges the welfare state. Neither has a coherent (let alone pro-America) foreign policy. Neither speaks of individual rights. They look different only on exactly how they'll violate our rights. Sooner or later, someone will find a way to do so in a way that is popular across the board.

No election protocol can be well-designed enough to protect a diseased body politic from itself.

Another concern shows up courtesy of Alaska, which already has RCV and open primaries -- and will consider returning to the old system. That state elected a Democrat as representative due to pathological behavior in its particular RCV system when Nick Begich III, whom a majority preferred to his two opponents, lost anyway.

I don't know enough about RCV to know whether such results can be avoided in the future, but if they can, they need to be, given that the whole point would seem to be that the majority can elect its preferred candidate.

-- CAV

'Economist' Fig Leaf Hides Mere Lefty Lawyer

John Stossel includes the following gem near the start of his latest column:

Reich does almost exactly what I do, except Reich is repeatedly wrong.

It's understandable. Despite being frequently introduced as "economist Robert Reich," Reich has no economics degree. [bold added]

Having never particularly looked into Reich's background myself, I am among the many who have been and will be surprised to learn this.

The rest of the piece is as fun to read as it is informative. Here's a sample:

One of countless examples of Reich being referred to, incorrectly, as an "economist." (The author believes that this screen shot is protected as fair use under U.S. copyright law.)

Progressives and liberal lawyers like Reich believe rich people take most of America's wealth and leave little for the poor. Like the Hollywood writers for the movie Wall Street, they call our economy "a zero-sum game -- somebody wins, somebody loses."

But that's just dumb.

Capitalists create new wealth. They don't take a big slice of the pie and leave us a sliver. If they get rich, it's because they find ways to bake lots of new pies.

That's what's happened in America. Its why today, even poor Americans have access to things European kings only dreamed about.

Capitalists can get rich only by making all of us better off.

Actual economist Dan Mitchell explains, "Billionaires only kept 2.2 percent of the additional wealth they generated ... The rest of us captured almost 98 percent of the benefits."

This is not just a good refutation of a ridiculous trope, it calls to mind Ayn Rand's comprehensive demolition from Atlas Shrugged, where she says in part:

In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the "competition" between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of "exploitation" for which you have damned the strong. [bold added]

As Stossel indicates in his piece, Reich is hoodwinking millions with his zero-sum, envy-mongering nonsense. This piece and Atlas Shrugged are good things to keep in mind any time one might encounter a thoughtful person who might be receptive to a more truthful narrative.

-- CAV