Category Archives: 2020 General Election

Runoffs and Control of the Senate

By tmess2 | Published October 14, 2020

With less than three weeks to go until election day. A lot of ink has been spilled over how state laws on the receipt and counting of absentee/mail-in ballots could delay knowing who won the presidential election.  But it could take even longer to know who will control the U.S. Senate.

One of the reasons is, of course, that the same delay in counting votes for the Presidential election could also delay counting the votes for the Senate elections.  However, given where the seats are and the current polling average, I expect that most Senate seats will be called on election night.  And it is possible that one party or the other will have a good enough night to get to 51 seats by midnight.

But there is a real chance that control of the Senate will come down to three races.  (At the very least, these three races will impact how comfortable the majority is.  Both parties have a handful of Senators who will occasionally split on a key vote.  Needless to say a 50-50 Senate with Vice-President Harris only voting in the case of a tie is going to be less likely to pass major legislation than a 53-47 Senate especially if the filibuster finally goes the way of the dodo.)  And in all three races, the election may not be over on election night. Continue Reading...

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The Electoral College and Election Law

By tmess2 | Published September 27, 2020

In recent weeks, there has been a proliferation of articles on how President Trump could effectively change the rules after the election if it appears that he is likely to lose.  For now, I am putting to the side the possibility of an actual coup in which he prevents the new Congress from meeting and certifying a Biden-Harris win or prevents Joe Biden from taking the oath of office after being certified as the winner.  I just don’t see the circumstances in which members of the military or the Secret Service or the D.C. police force would participate in such an extreme stance.  So I will limit myself to an attempt to change the legal winner of the election.

For federal offices, including the president, there are three main sources of law governing the election of such officials– the Constitution, federal statutes, and state laws (which can be the state constitution, state statutes, or state regulations).

Most of the arguments for legal manipulation are based on past history and a misreading of the Constitution.  There are two key provisions in Article II of the Constitution.  First, the electors are chosen “in the manner that the Legislature shall direct.”  The key thing about this provision is that it says that the Legislature directs the manner of choosing the electors.  It does not say that the state legislatures get to choose the electors.  While, in the early days of the country, some legislatures opted to have the legislature actually choose the electors.  that was because the legislature opted for that mechanism.  Today, every state has opted to choose the electors through a popular vote.  While the legislatures could theoretically change the manner of choosing electors, I will get back below to why this will not happen. Continue Reading...

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Labor Day 2020 — The Future of Social Security

By tmess2 | Published September 7, 2020

One of the big accomplishments of the labor movement in the 1900s — both in the U.S. and in other industrialized countries — was the concept of pensions (both public and private).  The basic concept behind pensions was to guarantee workers that, when they got too old to work anymore, they would have a guaranteed payment for the rest of their life.

Of course, with the decline of the labor movement, there has been a movement away from “defined benefit” plans to “defined contribution” plans.  From the workers perspective, a defined benefit plan offered two significant advantages:  1) if something went wrong, the company had to make up any shortfall caused by bad investments; and 2) the company would hire a competent money manager to properly invest the funds dedicated to the pension plan.  From the perspective of upper management, a defined contribution plan had two major advantages:  1) the company’s contribution was set in stone regardless of whether that investment ended up being sufficient; 2) the most economically savvy (i.e. the financial types that tend to ended up in the top tiers of companies) could get more from the pensions by making slick investment decisions while the average worker was left with measly investment gains (and maybe even losses if the default investment ended up going down the tubes).

At the public level, the big pension plan in the U.S. has been Social Security.  Social Security has always been a variation on a defined contribution plan.  But it has also always been a “pay as you go” type plan.  These two features has always combined to create a “crisis on the horizon” situation for Social Security. Continue Reading...

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Cut Time

By tmess2 | Published September 5, 2020

A political party serves two fundamental purposes.

First, people form and join political parties to advance policy.  (Of course, there are disagreements on the exact priorities or the specific details of policy proposals.)  In fact, one of the biggest mistakes that the Framers made was not anticipating that, once there were elections for federal offices, the groups in New Jersey that favored rural farmers over “urban” merchants would unite with similar groups in Georgia (and vice versa for the groups that favored merchants) rather than stay isolated in their own states.  Simply put, if you want a single-payer health care system, you are more likely to get it by forming a large group with other supporters of that type of proposal than working on your own.

Second, the way that political parties try to advance policy is by getting their candidates elected to office.  You can’t pass a single-payer system if the opponents of single-payer have the majority in Congress or control the White House.  And political parties win elections by finding good candidates and raising and spending money to support those candidates.   Especially in the year before the election, money tends to be spent on creating tools (like voter databases and helping state parties) that are available to all candidates that run on the party’s ticket.  And at this point in time, with the exception of the last handful of state primaries, the parties have their candidates. Continue Reading...

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Donald Trump’s Bad Day

By tmess2 | Published August 20, 2020

This day started out bad for Donald Trump.  He went to bed with President Obama having gotten under Donald Trump’s skin by calling out Trump’s wanna-be authoritarian tendencies.

And the day has only gotten worse.  On the one hand, Divine Providence/Nature has followed through on what everyone thought was possible when the Republicans named Jacksonville as their back-up site for the RNC.  This is the current five day forecast for Tropical Depression 13:

While a lot can change in five days (and five day forecasts have a good margin of error), there is a real possibility that the RNC will be dealing with a hurricane striking Florida on Monday when there convention is supposed to start.  Hurricanes have been a recurring problem for the Republican Convention multiple times in the past four cycles.  Of course, nobody would think to be concerned about a hurricane hitting Florida in late August. Continue Reading...

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How to Win in November: A Personal Plan

By DocJess | Published July 13, 2020

You want to be sure that the Orange Menace and his minions are ousted this November. But you don’t know what YOU can do. Sure, you can give money and hope that you can find a way to help the campaigns. And they will reach out to people like you, who are already committed to voting. And they will pick cohorts that they believe are persuadable. But they will miss people.

There is something that YOU can do, and you can start today. It’s based on the old concept of the telephone tree. As Nancy Pelosi said: “Own the ground. Don’t give one grain of sand. Get everybody out.”

Here’s the high level plan: Continue Reading...

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