Some Unsolicited Advice to Democrats from an Outside Observer

At this point, there is a very good chance that in 9 months, we will be "celebrating" Trump 2.0.  That's a sobering thought for people who believe in climate science.  Or any science.  Or intelligent discourse. Or honesty.  Or justice of any sort. Or democracy.

Do you think that's an exaggeration? According to Sarah Kendzior, expert on the authoritarian states that emerged after the dissolution of he USSR, Trump has been following a well-documented pattern of undermining democracy since he was elected.  In fact, the situation with the Trump family is eerily similar to that of Uzbekistan.

Still, Trump is historically unpopular.  Shouldn't we take comfort in the fact that polls say that almost any Democratic candidate would be 8-10 points ahead of him in an election? Maybe.  The problem is the increasingly vitriolic infighting that is going on between supporters of various Democratic candidates - particular between Bernie supporters and people I will refer to as Bernie-phobics (including those who say they will bring a barf bag to the ballot box if they have to vote for him).

If I were a Trump strategist, an obvious strategy presents itself.  When you need to re-elect a divisive, unpopular leader, you need to aggressively deploy voter suppression techniques.  Release damaging information (true or not) and make it appear that the candidates are cheating or employing unethical tactics to win.  For Republicans, the path to victory is to get Democrats engaged in a bitter battle to the point where the loser's supporters stay home on election day.

If I could address Democratic supporters, I'd say this.  First of all, stay clear of conspiracy theories.  If you are spreading rumours about other candidates that even your own candidate doesn't repeat,  you're not helping.  If you're announcing that you will never vote for candidate x, you're not helping.

For the Obama/Clinton/Biden crowd who seem to be desperate for any centrist alternative to Bernie Sanders, I have to ask: what's so bad about universal healthcare and free post-secondary education?  It seems to work pretty well for the Finns. If you're convinced that Bernie can't win, I invite you to read this insightful analysis that claims the opposite.  If you think Sanders is a radical, here's what French economist Thomas Piketty had to say on the matter:

 I think, first, that [Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth] Warren and Sanders are not radicals," said Piketty in response to one interviewer's question. "They are moderate social democrats by European standards....

Like many other economists, Piketty insists that, as happened in Sweden, sharing wealth more broadly will make the U.S. economy stronger, not weaker, and richer overall.

And for those of you who consider Michael Bloomberg some sort of saviour who can stand up to Trump, I invite you to look at his own, very troubling past, particularly when it comes to racial issues.  No, he's not Trump but he's not great either.

For Bernie supporters, I would say this.  Yes, this is a historic chance to finally get a progressive in the White House and it will be a bitter blow if it doesn't happen.  Still, there is no basis for the claim that Biden, Klobuchar, or even Bloomberg is "worse than Trump".  Publicly declaring "Bernie or bust" is divisive and will encourage centrists to stay home or worse, defect to Trump.  Your best play is to support Bernie but stay positive.

To everyone, I would say support your candidate.  Keep it clean and remember that the ultimate goal in November is to have  president whose name doesn't rhyme with "dump". 

Good luck to the US and to the world.

Why the Democratic Party Demonizes Third Party Candidates

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard of the shitstorm started by Hillary Clinton when she spoke on David Plouffe's podcast Campaign HQ.

I'm not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She is a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she is also a Russian asset.

If you're just visiting this planet, you may not be aware that the "somebody" that Hillary references is none other than Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who is currently running in the Democratic primaries to be the presidential nominee.

There are so many levels of weirdness attached to this, I need to prune some of them to narrow the focus. Forget, for the moment, that Hillary, whose supporters have been rightly claiming for years has been the subject of unfair accusations, is now leveling unsupported accusations at a fellow Democrat.  Forget that she is a senior member of the Democratic Party wading into a primary to shoot at one of the candidates. Forget that Gabbard's campaign was dying and Hillary's foray into this mess has shone a new spotlight on it.  Forget even that by stirring up controversy, Hillary is doing the Russians a huge favor because they ostensibly are trying to sow division in the US.

The weirdness I want to focus on is this: why do Democrats get so passionate when it comes to third party candidates?  After all, Jill Stein, who Hillary directly accused of being a "Russian asset", garnered a grand total of just under 470,000 votes in 2016.  Rough math tells me that's just around 1/3 of 1% of the votes cast. It seems hardly enough to make a huge deal over.  Democrats claim that she took enough votes away from Clinton in swing states to cost the election but this is nonsense.

Though Democrats have often pointed to Stein getting 1 percent of the vote in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as a reason Clinton lost those longtime Democratic strongholds, exit polls have shown that most of Stein's voters would not have supported either Clinton or Trump if Stein had not run.

 The Democratic Party is an institution with lots of money and elections run on data; so I'm sure they know that Stein didn't cost them the election.  So, why are Clinton and others making with the histrionics?  More to the point is this.  If third party candidate really are a threat to the US electoral system, isn't there a way to change the voting system to address the threat?

The answer to the second question is yes and provides insight into the first question.  If third party candidates were a threat to the US electoral system, there is a fairly simple way to address it.  Simply switch from a from a "first-past-the-post" single choice ballot to a ranked ballot where voters can rank their choices.  The inherent assumption in the Democrats complaint is that if the third party candidates (like Jill Stein) weren't there, the voters would still show up and they would vote Democrat.  This isn't actually true but for now, let's assume it is.

You might think that the Democratic Party would jump at the prospect of an "alternative vote" system with ranked ballots where people who really wanted to vote for, say, the Green Party but would choose the Democrat second.  This would allow the Democratic Party to capture the votes of those "spoiler" candidates.  If you think this, you would be wrong.

The last thing that either the Democrats or the Republicans want is a system that encourages more parties.  They have a monopoly on voter choice and they don't want to give it up.  Every election, they use fear mongering to get people who don't really like them to vote for them anyway, just to stop the other party.  It's a dumb, anti-democratic game but it works for them.  So, they don't want it to change.