"Fork in the Road": Does The Democratic Party Move Center or Left?

Last week's off-year elections simultaneously represented a unified backlash to Trump's first year in office and an impossible crossroads for the Democratic Party.  Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Shirrell won their respective gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey several points above and beyond expectations or what the polls prepared us for, and did so by running on a centrist platform that didn't scare off any faction of their coalition.  On the same night, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor New York City with a majority of the vote running unapologetically as a Democratic Socialist.

This incoherent set of results is a preview of the 2028 Democratic nomination fight, and it won't be pretty.

It's also not at all clear which path is better for the Democratic Party or more importantly for the future of the country.  The establishment will assure us that the upside potential is greater if we elect mushy moderates, but keep in mind that the Republican Party's establishment 10 years ago likewise assured us with similar cocksure certitude that softening its edges and courting more nonwhite voters would be its path to long-term survival.  Instead, Donald Trump ran on explicit ethnonationalism, driving up his numbers among whites by enough to win without minority voters......and eventually winning over a huge chunk of the minorities who he managed to co-opt into his coalition by doubling down on the same ethnonationalist message.  Expect any hypothetical Democratic comeback to likewise function with significant defiance to what the party establishment tells them is the formula for revival.

To be sure, there are both features and bugs to whichever path the Democratic Party ends up taking.  Let's break them down a bit.

The moderates are likely right that they'd be better positioned for victory by running to the center....but only as it applies to the NEXT election.  The long-awaited generational tug-of-war has arrived and politicians are gonna have no choice but to pick sides.  Do they serve the older voters who have secure 401Ks, homes with inflated values, and a steadfast refusal to pay another nickel (can't say penny anymore!) in taxes?  Or do they serve the increasingly destitute younger voters coming of age into an economy that has no use for their human capital and little interest in elevating them from their parents' basements?  

It's hard to envision a path forward for one group that doesn't operate to the exclusion of the other, but certainly any politician running as a centrist would feel duty-bound to serve the interests of the older faction of its coalition, which will only alienate and radicalize the younger faction.  A centrist might unify both groups in opposition to the unpopular governing party in the short term, but that coalition will come apart when the "moderate" puts their thumb on the scale for policies that lock young people out of the job market, lock them out of the housing market, keep them from ever considering procreation, and still invest in the insurance market risk pools consumed mostly by their grandparents.  There's not gonna be much in it for younger people, and they'll respond by gravitating in one of two directions:  to Donald Trump and Nick Fuentes, or to Zohran Mamdani and AOC.

It only took one week after the election of "centrists" Spanberger and Shirrell before voters were reminded of what "centrists" do when put in the position of governing:  a complete capitulation to hard-liners in the form a "deal" that represented complete surrender.  Whatever spin defenders of the "Gang of Eight" grace us with in the aftermath of surrender, the message will get through loud and clear to the faction of the Democratic coalition demanding policies that fix what's broken.  This same template will play out over and over again on issue after issue.  The "centrists" will obstruct meaningful policy initiatives in service of the "haves" while the "have-nots" keep getting told to wait another day for their piece of the pie.  The have-nots will quickly recognize this pattern and when said moderates ask for their vote again the next time, there will be little motivation to return the favor.

So socialism is the way to go then right?  Uh....about that.

As has been proven everywhere outside of New York City and Vermont, socialists have a vastly more challenging entry point with the electorate than do the moderates, meaning its much harder to put together a winning coalition at the outset.  And if you can't win elections, you're assured of getting your teeth knocked in on absolutely everything.  Until socialists prove they're able to be victorious outside of a few city council wards in left-wing enclaves like Seattle or Minneapolis, it's gonna be hard to take them seriously for carrying Pennsylvania in higher-profile elections.

Enter Zohran Mamdani.  As mayor of New York City, he'll represent our highest-profile socialist experiment thus far.  And from what I've seen so far, he has the eloquence and charisma to be the movement's most successful salesman to date.  It's nonetheless delusional to imagine that socialism could ever work at a municipal level, commandeered by a mayor who lacks the ability to print money to finance his ambitious agenda.  He's already on record saying he'll need to go to New York's Governor and Legislature for authorization for revenue generation, and there's little indication any of them would have an interest in extending that authority to him.  The likeliest consequence is a web of broken promises so deep that the odious Elise Stefanik gets elevated to the New York statehouse next November.  

But even if Mamdani falls on his face as I think is more likely than not, don't expect socialism to go away.  With each passing month, another wave of Gen Z voters comes of an age into a society locking them out of every aspect of a middle-class life.  They're not gonna permanently accept their parents' generation and the tech oligarchs hoarding absolutely everything for themselves.  Mamdani wasn't born in the United States so he could never be a national emissary, but as the status quo continues to break down for an increasing share of the electorate, somebody else is assured of filling his shoes.

The widely held argument is that socialism can't work because "eventually you run out of other people's money".  That's probably 90% true, but there are nations throughout the globe who have made a version of socialism work.  The places that have made it work generally have two things in common though:  they have small populations coupled with large oil reserves, and they have ethnic homogeneity.   I suppose the United States could nationalize its oil companies and free up billions of dollars in resources, although that alone would trigger a civil war. but the toothpaste is never going back into the tube with ethnic diversity.

And history has also proven that the quickest way to derail even a successful experiment in socialism is an increasingly diverse population.  It invariably becomes an exercise in "us versus them".  The closest America ever came to socialism was during the New Deal and after World War II when the country was 90% white, but it all began to unravel with the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  This was no coincidence, just as it's no coincidence that the Scandinavian countries' longer experiment in socialism is currently breaking down as large-scale immigration is altering its homogeneous population.  For whatever reason, humanity likes to sort itself by race and ethnicity, and if the majority no longer sees a socialist experiment as serving "our people", it's doomed for failure.  We'll accept nihilistic plutocrats sodomizing us before we let "those people" have a win.  It's sadly the way it's always been and most likely always be.  The fact that America's older population is majority white and its younger population is majority nonwhite will instill both racial and generational fault lines that will be all the more difficult to penetrate.

With all that said, who is best-positioned to win the Democratic Party's 2028 nomination tug of war?  The Abigail Spanberger wing or the Zohran Mamdani wing?  My money is on a fleeting Spanberger wing prevailing, but quite possibly for the last time, and it will be complicated by two other predictions that I stand by.

First, I don't see Trump going away willingly.  He'll do whatever he feels he needs to rig the election either for himself or for his hand-picked successor, confident that the Supreme Court's ruling of unconditional Presidential impunity will protect him.  The signs will be there in advance that Trump will be putting his thumb on the scale, and Democrats will consolidate toward the "safe" choice believing that a consensus moderate can run up the score high enough to overcome the dirty tricks Trump has up his sleeve to steal the election.

Suppose for the sake of argument that this consensus moderate prevails and goes on to govern the nation in 2029.  It's impossible to imagine that the same wing of the party that just folded like a cheap accordion in ending the government shutdown will have the moxie to bulldoze the rule book as will be expected in a post-Trump world.

As I said last year, the future is autocracy.  The public has gotten a taste of a President who elbows his way past constitutional guardrails to get things that he wants done, and voters aren't gonna accept returning to the recalcitrant paralysis of our constitutional system as their lives swirl the drain.  If the moderates won't discard constitutional guardrails and hold their political foes at the end of a gun barrel just as Trump has done and Republicans will continue to do post-Trump, then Democratic voters will move on to the next socialist candidate who will.

It's a bleak prognosis on the future of our politics, but when you couple the choice voters made to give autocracy a try last November and the public's comprehensive subjugation at the hands of a tech oligarchy keeping all of the globe's resources for themselves, I struggle to see an alternative. 

The 2026 Congressional Midterms....Hypothetically

A year ago this weekend, when it was clear that Donald Trump was favored to be re-elected President, I predicted that "the future is autocracy".   The majority of people undoubtedly scoffed, beset by a failure of imagination and a childish naivete about what a sociopath like Trump was capable of given full, unequivocal impunity from the Supreme Court.  As I said at the time, most people would be comforted by the manifest destiny delusion that autocracy could never happen here because....because....well because we're the United States of America!

Twelve months later and here we are.   A near-majority of the country came to the conclusion in 2024 that one man--a career criminal--should be bequeathed more power than any other human in the history of our species.  And now this career criminal is telling the country that he intends to steal $230 million of their money to pay himself reparations for past Justice Department prosecutions. 

And even with all the stunning headlines of unprecedented plunder and extralegal corruption playing out, it's a good bet that at least 40% of the country is cheering on Trump every step of the way.  The same 40% would undoubtedly be just fine if we never had another election again, bestowing the power upon Trump and his hand maidens to choose the line of governing succession for the rest of civilization.  In a movement where "owning the libs" is the only thing that matters, multigenerational subjugation of political opponents to an omnipotent monarchy and forcing them to stare down the barrel of the sovereign's gun would be the ultimate sugar high!

It's kind of adorable that I'm joining the chorus of online election analysts speculating about the "midterms" as if any semblance of a normal election will play out 365 days from now.  That's why I'm putting a long line of asterisks on these predictions and pretending they will play out with some semblance of normal procedure and transfer of power.  

In the real world, Trump is strong-arming every red state to redraw district lines in a way that, with collaboration from the Supreme Court, would mean that even a D+10 generic ballot would not likely be enough to get Democrats a House majority.

In the real world, Trump is undoubtedly planning a scenario similar to what he successfully pulled with Argentina, promising to use tariff money to bail them out conditional upon how they vote in the midterms, denying the money to any state that dares to elect Democrats.

In the real world, Trump will escalate his efforts ahead of election day to deploy red state national guard members to literally hold people in blue states at gunpoint, with the intent to intimidate turnout.  He'll probably state these intentions out loud and it will be treated like business as usual.

In the real world, Mike Johnson and John Thune will take whatever steps they need to keep from seating the 218th Democratic House member or the 51st Democratic Senator.....or any Democratic numbers above and beyond that for that matter.  And there will be no consequences when they don't.

With all this in mind, it's comically quaint for me to proceed with my predictions, but it's a tradition and is fun in the abstract, so I'll take an early look at the state-by-state Senate race landscape for 2026.

Alabama--Republican Tommy Tuberville is quitting the Senate after one term to run for Governor.  He'll go from being the dumbest Senator in the country to the dumbest Governor in the country. There's a long list of Republicans waiting to succeed him and no Democrats above the fourth tier of recruitment options stepping up.  Will be a predictable 20+ point Republican win.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Alaska--Two-term Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan seems like exactly the kind of charisma-free backbencher who could be felled in a perfect storm.  The Last Frontier has been trending incrementally toward Democrats and former Congresswoman Mary Peltola would make for a strong recruit and give the party a modest chance of victory.  So far, however, Peltola has been dragging her feet Hamlet-style and remains undecided which race to run for as she could go for Governor or try to retake her old House seat.  That doesn't give me hope that her heart is in it for a long shot Senate race against an incumbent, and I'm not seeing much indication the Dems have a Plan B if Peltola decides against it.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Arkansas--Two-term GOP incumbent Tom Cotton is running for reelection in a state that has quietly become one of the reddest states in the country a generation after being a Democratic stronghold.  He'll win it again.  The only question is if Arkansas can find any Democrat willing to run against him.  They didn't last time!  Prediction: GOP hold.

Colorado--I had honestly forgotten that Democrat John Hickenlooper was elected to the Senate in 2020.  If a guy that nobody knows announces his intention to run for a second term, does that mean he's really in the U.S. Senate?  Seriously though, the Rocky Mountain State has become such a Democratic cinch that Hickenlooper is more likely to be defeated in a primary than the general election and I'm betting against that too.  Prediction: Dem hold.

Delaware--As far as I know, Democrat Chris Coons is planning to run for a fourth term next year.  Pretty safe bet he wins if he runs.  Prediction: Dem hold.

Florida--Put this race on the outer periphery of the battleground just in case there's a perfect storm.  Republican Ashley Moody was appointed to fill Marco Rubio's seat when Rubio was selected to be Secretary of State, and Moody appears to be the favorite to run in next year's special election for the final two years of the term.  The best Democrats have been able to do so far is former Brevard County school board member Jennifer Jenkins.  The Democratic collapse in this former quintessential swing state has been astonishing, and even in an ostensibly Democratic climate with a quasi-incumbent with little name recognition, I'm still betting on a double-digit Republican win.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Georgia--Accidental Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff runs for a second term in what I expect could be the marquee Senate race of the cycle. Ossoff defeated a Republican incumbent in a January 2021 runoff election that was the textbook definition of a "perfect storm".  With two special elections on the ballot that included a race with a popular African American candidate (Rafael Warnock) boosting black turnout and positioning Ossoff to offer $1,400 checks in the mail as a reward for voting for him, Ossoff pulled off a one-point win.  Georgia's demographics keep shifting in the Democrats' direction and next year would seem like a cycle where Ossoff's party will be on offense, but I still think Ossoff will be the underdog.  I just have a hard time believing he'll be able to inspire black turnout sufficient enough to win without Warnock or another proven African American vote-getter sharing the ballot with him.  And, of course, Ossoff won't be able to offer the carrot of $1,400 checks in the mail if he wins as he did in 2021.  GOP Governor Brian Kemp declined to run but ultimately I think a generic Republican would have a small advantage over Ossoff.  The large GOP field won't settle until next year's primary, but I like the chances of whoever prevails better than I like Ossoff's chances.  Prediction:  GOP gain.  Running Total:  GOP +1.

Idaho--I guess three-term GOP incumbent Jim Risch is running for a fourth term.  He'll get it.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Illinois--Long-time Democratic incumbent Dick Durbin is calling it a career, leaving an open seat in a state where Trump significantly outperformed expectations in 2024.  There's a multi-candidate field of Democrats vying for the seat with Chicagoland Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi looking like an early frontrunner.  Nobody in the Republican field looks the least bit intimidating and it seems extraordinarily unlikely we should expect a GOP upset.  However, I would expect the trend of downstate Illinois "voting against Chicago" to accelerate, canceling out any hypothetical rejection of Trump in the heartland.  The possibility of a Senator with the surname "Krishnamoorthi" will likely reinforce the obsolescence of the old Obama and Durbin coalitions, conceivably by enough to hold the Democratic victory to single digits.  Prediction:  Dem hold.

Iowa--Democrats' impressive overperformance in a number of Hawkeye State special elections this year notwithstanding, I still think Republican Joni Ernst was on track for a mid-to-high single-digit victory in 2026 if she hadn't chosen to retire.  On paper, Ashley Hinson seems like a stronger GOP candidate than post-gaffe Ernst, having represented (and outperformed the GOP baseline) in a northeastern Iowa district that will likely be a statewide bellwether.  As for the Democrats poised to challenge her, Jonathan Turek seems to be generating the most favorable buzz but I expect its mostly Democratic wishcasting.  Zach Wahls would likely be a tough sell....a candidate of, by, and for Iowa City.  This remains a race to watch but my early bet is a decisive win for Hinson.  Prediction:  GOP hold.

Kansas--With the possible exception of Dan Sullivan in Alaska, first-term Republican Roger Marshall comes closest to representing the personification of the bland arrogance and entitlement of the incumbent party without having any kind of personal brand to shield him from a wave.  That's why I hope Democratic Congresswoman Sharice Davids decides to swing for the fences and take Marshall on.  She'd be a long shot even in a perfect storm, but a candidate of her skill level should rise to the challenge of the dire times we live in.  Particularly with Trump's self-imposed woes on the ag economy, Democratic Governor Laura Kelly's winning coalition is out there for the taking if Davids runs and figures out how to tap into it.  It's not likely available to any of the current third-rate and fourth-rate Democratic contenders for the seat.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Kentucky--I have to admire Democrat Amy McGrath for her pluck.  Even after getting bulldozed by long-time Republican incumbent Mitch McConnell six years ago, she's still running again for his open seat.  She seems like the early frontrunner for the Democratic nomination and will continue to be a substantial underdog against a crowded Republican field that includes Congressman Andy Barr and former Attorney General Daniel Cameron.  Something bonkers would have to happen for this race to become competitive.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Louisiana--When two-term Republican incumbent Bill Cassidy voted to impeach Trump in 2021, I knew he'd struggle to win re-election whether Trump did or didn't mount a political comeback.  I stand by that position.  Cassidy, normally as close to a sane voice as you'll find in the contemporary GOP, is out there nominating Trump for a Nobel Peace prize to atone for his past sins, but Trump won't forgive and forget and he'll remind his voters not to either.  The seat will stay in Republican hands no matter which MAGA troglodyte Pelican State voters choose over Cassidy.  Any sliver of hope for a Democratic upset was likely extinguished when former Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards declined to run.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Maine--A perfectly on-brand comedy of errors is playing out presently in the state where Democrats are generically best-positioned to pick up a seat.  Five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins has a well-earned reputation as a survivor, but Maine should nonetheless be a cinch to flip if the GOP brand is as poisonous as Democrats like to think it is. With that said, here's the state of the Democratic opposition a year before the election:  a charismatic and progressive oyster farmer (!) and former Marine named Graham Platner got into the race and got the base worked up, only for oppo researchers to discover he had once dismissed rape in the military, used homophobic slurs, criticized both police and the intelligence of rural Americans....and that he has a Nazi tattoo on his chest!  Meanwhile, after months of dithering, Maine's Democratic Governor Janet Mills decided she was gonna get into the race and embark on a Senate career....at age 78!  A nightmare scenario is now unfolding with Maine voters continuing to express their early preference for Platner while the Democratic establishment is putting their thumb on the scale for Mills.  It's a huge mess, but at least for now, I still suspect Collins is more likely to lose than win.  This would be Mainers' first opportunity to judge Collins entirely within the context of a protest vote against an incumbent President who lost the state by 7 points last year.  I'll put it this way....if Susan Collins is re-elected to a sixth term in the U.S. Senate, it means that November 3, 2026, was an absolutely disastrous failure of a night for the Democratic Party.  Prediction:  Dem gain.  (Running total Dems +0)

Massachusetts--Democratic incumbent Ed Markey continues to not get the memo that the Democratic base is done indulging octogenarian egos.  After nearly a half century in the House and two terms in the Senate, Markey is running again.  He's facing primary challengers from his right (Seth Moulton) and potentially from his left (Ayanna Pressley), but honestly my money is on Markey pulling it out in a multi-candidate field.  From there, it's an almost certain Democratic victory in the Bay State, which is true even if one of Markey's primary challengers prevails.  I'm hoping it's not Pressley as she would be a bad look for Democrats nationally.  Prediction: Dem hold.

Michigan--The Wolverine State has had two close Senate races in a row and I suspect 2026 will be another.  Two-term Democratic incumbent Gary Peters is retiring and there's a multi-candidate Democratic field attempting a promotion with no early frontrunner.  State Senator Mallory McMorrow is the darling of the left.  Former Wayne County Health Director Abdul El-Sayed would rally Dearborn's Palestinian community and terrify much of the rest of the state.  And suburban Detroit Congresswoman Haley Stevens, a long-time Israel ally, would likely be the most competitive in most necessary places but would be obliterated among Dearborn-area Palestinians.  None seems well-positioned to put together the increasingly fragile winning coalition Democrats need in Michigan.  The Republicans seem inexplicably poised to renominate former Congressman Mike Rogers who was a weary choice two years ago and seems even less inspiring now having been unable to ride Trump's winning coattails.  I'm betting that the environment and candidate selection is just bad enough to deny Republicans a victory, but it'll be close and it's very much a race worth watching.  Prediction: Dem hold.

Minnesota--Two months ago, Minnesota Republicans promised that their slow launch for candidate selection would blow wide open as soon as Democratic Governor Tim Walz announced his intentions.  That hasn't happened....and it's downright bizarre.  With Democratic incumbent Senator Tina Smith having announced her retirement, Republicans absolutely have an opening, particularly if the Democrats nominate Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan over Congresswoman Angie Craig.  But it ain't gonna happen if the Republicans nominate Royce White again.  Nobody from the Republican field even rises to the third tier of candidates and would struggle even to beat Flanagan let alone Craig in a blue state in a defensive cycle.  Unless there's a surprise announcement from a better GOP recruit in the very near future, you can probably stick a fork in Republicans prospects for victory in the Gopher State.  Prediction: Dem hold.

Mississippi--Democrats have drawn some blood on Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith in their two previous races against her, but still fell several points short of victory.  I'd be surprised if it's as competitive this time and expect that Hyde-Smith not only wins, but wins more comfortably that she did in 2018 or 2020.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Montana--Not so long ago, the Treasure State would have been on the table for a competitive Senate race in a defensive cycle for the governing party, but there's no indication that two-term Republican incumbent Steve Daines has anything to worry about.  His lone Democratic challenger seems less than intimidating and Jon Tester has no interest in trying to mount a comeback.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Nebraska--I'll admit to being surprised at how well left-coded independent candidate Dan Osborn did last year.  The de facto Democratic challenger to a two-term Republican incumbent outperformed Kamala Harris by 13 points.  It was a stark reminder of how big of a deal both candidate packaging and separation from the national brand is, with Osborn getting 66,000 more votes than the Democratic Presidential nominee by running as a blue-collar populist...in Nebraska!  Osborn is running again this year and I'm bummed that he's being wasted in Nebraska, where I still think he's a serious long shot.  In neighboring Iowa or even Kansas, I think he could pull it off.  Nebraska is a really heavy lift though, and incumbent Senator (and former Governor) Pete Ricketts is probably at least a little stronger of a challenger than Deb Fischer was last year.  It's certainly a race to watch though and I don't want to underestimate Osborn after his performance last year.  Prediction: GOP hold.

New Hampshire--It's quite telling that the strongest GOP recruit for a Democratic-held Senate seat this year is John Sununu, a former Senator who was defeated 17 years ago.  Maybe the Republicans can dust off Norm Coleman in Minnesota and Gordon Smith in Oregon for another bid too!  Seriously though, the Sununu name probably won't hurt in the Granite State and since retiring Democrat Jeanne Shaheen is leaving behind an open seat, it represents one of the Republicans' best prospects for a pickup.  I think Democratic Congressman Chris Pappas is favored against either Sununu or Massachusetts carpetbagger Scott Brown if he gets the nomination instead, but I also don't want to underestimate Republicans' durability in New Hampshire.  I don't know the culture that well in New Hampshire and always assume the MAGA message is not their brand of Republicanism, but then I remember that Pat Buchanan won the 1996 Republican primary in New Hampshire.  So I don't think it's gonna be a GOP year in New Hampshire, but I've thought that every cycle going back to the Obama years and am never fully proven right.  Prediction: Dem hold.

New Jersey--In a perfect storm, I think grandstanding blowhard Cory Booker might be vulnerable, especially with a good chunk of the Garden State's Democratic coalition having realigned to MAGA in the last few years.  Even in a cycle where the Democrats are on offense, I can imagine Booker being held to a single-digit win next year, but it's very hard to see him losing.  Prediction: Dem hold.

New Mexico--Freshman Democrat Ben Lujan prevailed by an underwhelming 6 points back in 2020, underperforming Joe Biden significantly.  If Harris had won last year and Republicans were on offense, I think Lujan could be vulnerable this go-round, but it seems doubtful they'll go with Trump's party in the midterm, and at least thus far no credible Republican has stepped up to challenge Lujan.  Prediction: Dem hold.

North Carolina--I've been rightly skeptical about the oft-cited assurances that the Tar Heel State is about to flip blue as Republicans have outperformed the polls and continued their winning streak ever since Obama's unlikely 2008 win.  Part of me still has my doubts that the retiring Thom Tillis's seat is gonna actually flip blue this cycle or that Democrat Roy Cooper is the guy to do it, but as of now, I'm narrowly tipping this one in the Democrats' favor.  Former RNC chair Michael Whatley just doesn't seem like what the electorate will be looking for in 2026.  Democrats are very bullish on Cooper but they were just as bullish on Kay Hagan and Cal Cunningham until they failed to get past the finish line.  If Cooper does pull this out, I think it'll be by 1 point or less.  Prediction:  Dem gain (Running Total: Dem +1)

Ohio--I'm a bit surprised that after Sherrod Brown's embarrassing defeat to a Mercedes dealership owner last year, they were able to persuade him to run again, especially for a special election where he'll only hold the seat for two years if he manages to win.  It makes me admire Brown even more that he's going for it.  With the Mahoning Valley and most of Ohio's small industrial cities having realigned to MAGA, I just don't see a path to victory for Brown or any other Buckeye State Democrat even in a bullish national environment.  I hope I'm proven wrong but I think appointed incumbent Jon Husted will be elected to finish out his term.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Oklahoma--First-term Republican incumbent Markwayne Mullin will be re-elected by more than 20 points and probably more than 30 points.  He might even get a free pass with no Democratic challenger.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Oregon--Democrat Jeff Merkley will be seeking a fourth term next year.  He'll get it.  Prediction: Dem hold.

Rhode Island--While I've always thought the Ocean State's demographics suggest increased MAGA competitiveness, it hasn't happened to any serious degree yet and 2026 is not likely to be the year that it starts.  In other words, I expect five-term Democratic incumbent Jack Reed to get a sixth term.  Prediction: Dem hold.

South Carolina--Democrats got themselves excited about the possibility of unseating grotesque Republican incumbent Lindsey Graham six years ago when polls suggested vulnerability.  It turns out the polls were wrong and Graham went on to win by 10 points.  As loathsome as he is, I'm taking the over this year on Graham's reelection performance margin.  Prediction: GOP hold.

South Dakota--Considering how bipartisan the Mount Rushmore State was 20 years ago, it's striking how Democrats are no longer even remotely competitive there in any capacity in the 2020s.  Two-term Republican incumbent Mike Rounds seems like the kind of guy who would have been vulnerable in a perfect storm, especially in the middle of a self-induced GOP farm crisis, but it's unlikely he'll have more than a "some dude" challenger next year.  I wonder if former Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin still lives in South Dakota.  Kind of surprised she disappeared without a trace 15 years ago.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Tennessee--Freshman Republican Bill Hagerty is as soulless of a MAGA water carrier as exists anywhere in the country but that won't hurt him in the least in today's incarnation of the Volunteer State, as uncompetitive of a place as there is anywhere in the country.  He'll be safely reelected and will probably have no more than a fourth-rate Democratic challenger if any at all.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Texas--It's a very unsettled field for both Democrats and Republicans in the Lone Star State.  In an ordinary year, four-term Republican incumbent Jon Cornyn would be poised to cruise to another term, but he faces primary challenges to the right in his own party that seem legitimately threatening.  Impeached right-wing Attorney General Ken Paxton seems likely to be Cornyn's most serious foe, but it's entirely possible that divided opposition could keep the nomination in Cornyn's hands.  As for the Democrats, both 2024 nominee Colin Allred and rising star lawmaker James Talarico are running with relatively high fanfare, both hoping that the controversial Paxton wrestles the GOP nomination.  But after the Hispanic vote shifted hard to the right last year, I suspect Democrats' efforts to corral Texas were set back at least another a decade.  Even if Paxton is the Republican nominee, I suspect he'll win by mid-single digits.  Prediction: GOP hold.

Virginia--Last year's surprisingly modest Harris victory in the Old Dominion was a reality check that Virginia is not yet out of reach for the GOP.  With that said, three-term Democratic incumbent Mark Warner has a strong brand and wouldn't be felled easily even in a perfect storm.  It's a pretty safe bet he'll have the wind at his back this year with the regional economy in tatters after Trump's federal employee job cuts.  Prediction: Dem hold.

West Virginia--Two-term Republican incumbent Shelley Moore Capito should be as safe as they come in a general election.  The only way I could see her not getting a third term is if she lost a Republican primary to an even more shameless MAGA apologist.  Prediction: GOP hold. 

Wyoming--After a few moments struggling to remember who Wyoming's junior Senator was, I recalled it was freshman Republican Cynthia Lummis.  Bet on her safely winning a second term and bet against a hypothetical Liz Cheney comeback.  Prediction: GOP hold.

 

I'm often more bearish about predictions than most on the Democratic side, but interestingly, I don't really think there's that much distance between me and the average Democratic-leaning prognosticator this time around.  It's possible they'll be more bullish that I am on Sherrod Brown's chances in Ohio or Jon Ossoff's chances in Georgia but I don't think too many people would consider me crazy for thinking they're slight underdogs.  And I'm probably more optimistic about taking out Susan Collins than most Democrats, especially with the current Graham Platner-Janet Mills disaster unfolding.  Meanwhile, even typically sunny Democrats would likely concede that there's plenty of opportunity for things to go wrong in Michigan, New Hampshire, or North Carolina.  

My prediction of Democrats netting a single Senate seat isn't quite a best-case scenario, but plenty of things will have to go right even for this outcome.  The Democrats would still be in the minority 52-48, and my money is on John Fetterman switching parties either before or after the midterms, digging the Democratic hole deeper.

Is it still possible that Democrats could win the Senate next year?  They'd have to win the long shot race in Iowa and some combination of even longer shots in Alaska, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, and Florida.  I'd put their chances at less than 2%.

But 2% quickly drops to 0% when acknowledging that Trump will deploy unprecedented levels of dirty tricks in every competitive jurisdiction to ensure his preferred outcome.  If Sherrod Brown is polling favorably, Trump will fill streets of Cleveland and Columbus with his red-state national guard crime syndicate to fire tear gas and rubber bullets at those entering polling stations.  If Derrick Van Orden narrowly leads Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin's Third District but the remaining vote is from a Democratic-leaning city, Trump will order the vote to be stopped and dare Democrats to challenge it in the courts filled with his appointees.  And if that doesn't work and Rebecca Cooke still manages to get a victory certified, Mike Johnson will refuse to seat her.

The era of fair elections is over. The era of peaceful transfers of power is over.  Americans voted for autocracy last November and I hope they like it because they're gonna be stuck with it for the rest of all of our lives.

It's About The Guns....Obviously

I've gone back and forth on the gun issue for decades, but I'll confess it's been a low-salience issue for me just as it is for the vast majority of voters not heavily immersed in gun culture.  My perspective on the gun control debate has mostly been guided by my partisan political preference, where the risk-reward calculus on the gun issue overwhelmingly favors Democratic lawmakers looking the other way as the gun supply proliferates and the body count rises.  I've always personally preferred the idea of more legal limits on firearm ownership, but since the country quietly moved the other direction since the 1990s, I didn't think it was worth the risk of fracturing whatever is left of the Democratic coalition still in love with their guns.  Even now, after the Trump realignment, I don't think we should underestimate that number as having the potential to swing elections.

With that said, it feels like we've hit a tipping point in the 2020s.  The poisonous radicalization of the Internet and its ability to both create and glorify mass shooters simply cannot coexist with a gun supply that keeps outpacing population growth.  Mass shootings have been a thing since I was in college, but the ones that seemed most shocking in scope in the past are business as usual today, with each previous high-profile shooting serving as inspiration for the next.

And while mass shootings via assault rifles in the suburbs dominate the headlines, they pale in comparison to the body count of handgun shootings primarily in our cities.  Just as it's impossible to keep our expansion pack supply of assault rifles out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them, it's also impossible to keep our expansion pack supply of handguns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them.

The obvious answer to the gun issue has been staring me in the face for decades but I finally put my finger on it in the last year or so:  America has a gun volume issue, a vicious cycle of supply and demand reinforcement that has made our problems worse and will continue to.

The United States had approximately 100 million guns in 1990.  Thirty-five years later, that number has quadrupled to nearly 400 million.  The country that ranks second in gun volume is India, which has 72 million guns.  India, of course, has 1.5 billion people.  Per capita, America has 10 times more guns than any other country in the world.  It also has 10 times more mass shootings than any other country in the world.   Correlation doesn't always mean causation, but it's pretty hard to ignore that arithmetic.  

And therein lies the problem.  When there are more guns than human beings within the United States borders, how do you stop anybody from getting one?   Whether it be teen mass shooters in schools or the Bloods settling scores with the Crips, it's always going to be ridiculously easy for just about any of them to get their hands on a firearm when there are 400 million to choose from.  Much as we like to think hypothetical new laws would be a silver bullet, no pun intended, we have little hope of success until we bend the demand curve for guns down and wait for the supply to follow the same trajectory.

We have two different supply and demand models.  The rifle market is dominated by hunters and by gun fetishists, people whose identity is defined by their arsenals.  As a percentage of the population this group is relatively small, but they nonetheless number in the tens of millions and wield tremendous political strength.  Rifles are generally not used to commit a high percentage of the violence, but they are used in the vast majority of high-profile mass shootings.  Nobody even seems to be able to agree on what does and doesn't constitute an "assault weapon" and I certainly don't know enough on firearm assembly to break the stalemate.  That definitional ambiguity will probably make any attempt to ban them ineffective, even in the unlikely event that such a ban was to pass.

The other supply and demand model is for handguns, which are responsible for most shootings.  Here, our perverse culture of firearm saturation constantly feeds upon itself.  Because so many handguns are in circulation in the first place, more gun crimes happen and fill the hearts of everyday Americans with fear.  Everyday Americans then respond by buying a gun of their own for personal protection.  This additional demand drives supply up higher, and a disproportionate number of the new guns manufactured continue to find their way into the hands of those who shouldn't have them.  This drives up fears in yet another cohort of everyday people who then decide they need a gun of their own.  Rinse and repeat.....

If introducing yet-again more guns into circulation "made us safer", as gun rights advocate argue, we'd have seen it play out in the last 35 years when the U.S. population has increased by 33% while the guns in circulation have increased by more than 200%.  Nearly quadrupling the number of guns in the next 35 years seems incredibly unlikely to change that.  At that same time, it's hard to tell people they shouldn't be able to protect themselves, meaning it won't be easy to convince law-abiding citizens concerned for their own safety or their families' safety to pass on buying a gun as is needed to bend the supply curve down.

I am no fan of the bullying tactics employed by antismoking groups to humiliate and overcharge smokers over the last few decades, but it was unquestionably effective in driving down tobacco use.  Some variation of the same template would be needed to drive down demand, followed by supply, of guns.  What worked in reducing the number of smokers is not really transferable to firearms in that the customer base of guns is vastly more engaged about their gun purchases than smokers ever were about their cigarette habits.  Still, there are options such as a carnage tax on weapons and ammunition or insurance and license requirements, consistent with the approach used to snuff out smoking, that could be imposed on guns without violating the Second Amendment.

At least for me, the tipping point on gun access and supply has been crossed, but it remains unclear whether it was has with the country.  Throughout recent history, gun violence has always been a "you problem" to the majority of Americans.  They offer "thoughts and prayers" and move on with their lives.  "You" get to pick up the mop and clean up the bloody mess where your child perished.  "You" get to sponge their brain matter off the walls.  Until it happens to "me", it's not salient.  It will only become salient with an uptick in mass shootings substantial enough that more people feel at risk.  Until then, the minority who values their guns more than anything else in life will keep on winning.

Obviously, any kind of gun reform is a nonstarter with Republicans controlling the legislative process.  We're familiar with the pattern: after offering thoughts and prayers, Republicans will filibuster several news cycles complaining that the real problem is mental health and not guns right up until the story gets upstaged by something else.  Once it does, the same Republicans will resume with their 75-year project of defunding mental health programs.  But it's a little less unthinkable that, by 2027, a hypothetical Democratic Congress could get Trump to get the ball rolling.  I don't think Trump has any real vested interest in gun culture and if he believed there was a critical mass in favor of gun control in the country, I could see him making a deal.

Of course, even with any legislative and judicial momentum for enacting and enforcing gun control measures, there will be more failures than successes.  It's not as if a switch will be flipped and mass shootings will drop to zero or even by half overnight.  With 400 million guns in the country, we'll only start to see the violence begin to atrophy when supply goes down.  Even in the best of times, this would be a long-term project and would require a trial and error legislative approach. Some things would work and some things wouldn't. Lawmakers would have to be vigilant and honest about things that weren't working and alter their solution proposals from there.  And if we've learned anything in the last 20 years, it's that "vigilance" and "honesty" aren't in abundant supply among our polarized elected officials, so I'll forgive readers for being cynical about their aptitude to take this difficult issue on with any success even with a national consensus.

Still, I think the framing I've outlined above is the most persuasive approach.  We have a gun volume problem.  There are far too many guns in circulation and no realistic way to stop people who shouldn't have them from getting them because of that volume.  If we could figure out a way to dramatically reduce the supply without making the law-abiding people most vested in gun ownership from feeling that their arsenals are under siege, we would likely see a corresponding decline in gun violence.  That's a big ask in our ferociously polarized country, but as more people have to worry about mopping up their own children's blood off the school building floor other than just wishing thoughts and prayers to others when they have to do it, it seems a little more doable. At the very least, I'd bet on a national consensus on gun reform happening before a national consensus on health care reform.

 

The Growing Gender Gap in Politics and Dating

The gender gap in American politics is nothing new.  The last election when men and women voted in partisan parity was 1976 when Jimmy Carter won 50-48 among both genders.  Since then, Barack Obama's 1-point margin among men in 2008 was the only time a Democrat has won among male voters and George H.W. Bush, who prevailed by 1 point among female voters in 1988, was the last Republican to win among women.  The divide has grown to a chasm in the new millennium and even more so in the Trump era.  The biggest distinction in the Trump era is that the chasm is now transcending both gender and generational lines.  Among younger voters, both males and females had both voted Democrat for the last quarter century.  It was just a matter of young women voting considerably more Democratic than young men.  As of election 2024, that's no longer the case.

In 2024, men 18-29 officially tipped into Republican territory according to the exit polls, favoring Donald Trump 49-48 while women in the same age range went for Kamala Harris by a 61-38 margin.  The divide was just as lopsided among 30-44 year-old voters, where men went 52-45 Trump and women went 56-41 Harris.  The abortion issue obviously really shined a spotlight on this gender gap, and the Democrats were widely discredited for overplaying their hand on the Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling that repealed Roe vs. Wade, concentrating their messaging so lopsidedly on women of fertility age who constitute only 10% of voters.  It wasn't until the last month of the election cycle that they realized how disconnected young male voters were from this message, and even when they did figure it out, their solution was to send Michelle Obama onstage to scold young men for insufficiently prioritizing women's issues.

Just as fascinating as the ongoing gender gap in American elections is that the same gender gap is taking root throughout the world, and in some cases, even more lopsidedly.  South Korea is ground zero on the globe for poisonous gender relations that have manifested themselves into the body politic.  Korean men are both more shy in personal relations with women and more traditional in their views of women's role in society.....while Korean women are looking to be independent of them both personally and financially.  The result:  in last spring's presidential election, 60% of men in their 30s voted for one of the two conservative candidates compared to 40% of women in their 30s.  The gender gap was decidedly worse for Korean voters in their 20s where a whopping 74% of men voted conservative compared to only 36% women in their 20s.

Needless to say, this polarization has hardly been limited to the voting booth.  It's not a coincidence that South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world and is poised to see their population decline by half in another 50 years as a result.  It's all happened quite quickly too.  In 2000, just 19% of South Koreans between the ages of 30 and 34 were unmarried, but today that number is 56%.  The mismatch is breeding an expansion pack cohort of Korean male "incels" who bond together with a shared rage about the "kimchi women", their term for gold diggers who are unwilling to pull their weight while demanding too much from men.

The U.S. hasn't quite sunken to South Korea depths, but it's well on its way.  The gender wars have been raging hot in the toxic contemporary dating scene for several years now, but this summer, men have been indulging in a schadenfreude of female misery that definitely seems like another baby step in South Korea's direction.  A number of videos have gone viral of attractive young women out on the town, publicly disgusted that no men are approaching them.  The response from males has been pretty much universal gloating that women brought this on themselves by trying to have it both ways for too long.

This all strikes me as a perverse overcorrection of the excesses of the #MeToo era, with men wearing it as a badge of honor to snub a demographic of women that, just by nature of being out there and shouting through a megaphone that they're available, probably wasn't responsible for hurt male feelings during #MeToo.  It's not entirely clear if the subculture being portrayed in this gender tug-of-war is representative of the population at large, but there's certainly reason to believe it is.  Alcohol sales and dance club receipts are in precipitous decline, and the birth rate plummets to new lows with each passing year.  Something unsavory and unsettling is definitely going on here.

Unfortunately, it's not exactly a mystery what that something is.  It's known as the Internet.  It took just a little over a generation for the Internet to poison relations between the genders just as deeply as it's poisoned our politics.  And it's not just a matter of online dating making singles simultaneously too selective in choosing a mate and too socially awkward to approach somebody of the opposite sex in the wild.  It's about social media delivering sounding boards for everybody with a grievance from the dating world to find others in their situation and then collectively radicalize one another.

As someone who was too shy to ask girls out during my youth, and as someone who was very active in the early years of online dating, I can relate to the enraged men who are congregating to talk shit about women.  Luckily for me, there were no 4Chan or Reddit groups in my online dating days to seize upon my frustrations and take me down the rabbit hole that I'm seeing from these guys in the You Tube comments sections, where the hatred for females of our species is so visceral that it's clearly come from extended sessions of social media groupthink.

I bowed out of the online dating marketplace right about the time that #MeToo was raging the hottest, and it was indeed a scary time to be a single guy on a date.  I'm not sure how pervasive attitudes of female empowerment in the dating scene remain eight years later, but the #MeToo excesses were clearly born of the same social media poison that are driving the incel backlash today.  Far as I can tell, the frustrations singles are having with the opposite sex in 2025 are structurally the same as they were 20 years and 40 years ago, driven mostly by irrational expectations and self-pity.  The difference is that they're now filtered through an online echo chamber.

Guys who used to get mad when pretty girls shot them down in bars are now getting mad that pretty girls are swiping left on their Tinder profiles.  Girls that used to lament that guys in the bars using them for one-night stands were pigs are now getting played by the attractive guys on dating sites who dominate female attention.  Unattractive guys felt entitled to attractive women while women of all levels of attractiveness expected attractive men to settle down with them instead of playing the field.....irrational expectations then and now.

And then comes the self-pity.  I certainly remember that.  The feelings of brokenness.  The simmering anger that hung heavy and kept you awake at night when one "Miss Right" after another wasn't interested in you.  This feeling is bad enough when left to one's own devices amidst the self-pity.  When you have an online community not only reinforcing it but ascribing sinister motives to the other gender, it's easy to see how self-pity can manifest itself into something far uglier.

Just like everything else broken in this country, it'll be fascinating to see when or if the fever breaks.  It's folly to believe this won't come without catastrophic consequences.  The downstream effects of endemic sexual repression will lead to an endless feedback loop of rage and violence, not to mention a constant rising tide of gender dysphoria confusion.  The downstream effects of population loss will lead to a collapsing economy.  

It's also fascinating to compare the current cultural dilemma with that of a generation ago.  Go back to the early 2000s and those worried about the nation's future were wringing their hands about the catastrophe of cigarette smoking in bars and other public places, all part of a larger platform of puritanical lifestyle enforcement.  Fast forward 20 years and it's astonishing how innocent our fears were back then.  I guess those on the front lines of civilizing away our naughty habits can claim "success".  Studies have shown that among today's generation of 20-somethings, the number of people who have drunk alcohol or smoked a cigarette in the last month has declined by more than 20 points.  Of course, they're behaving themselves today because they're no longer patronizing the venues where sinful behavior used to transpire.....and where males and females used to make the kinds of connections that ultimately perpetuated the species.

In those innocent times of a generation ago, our wellness scolds assured us that the nation faced no challenge as serious as young people smoking cigarettes in bars who might get sick from it by the time they reached Social Security.  Today, the same young people are staying home in their parents' basements hating on the opposite sex in online forums full of equally miserable strangers, baking their brains with every motivation-sapping hit from their now-legalized bong, so beset by anger, confusion, and grief that they're convinced that they are trapped in the wrong body.  Between the collapsing birth rate, the lost economic activity from drug use, and the tenfold increase in the number of people seeking to transition to another gender on the nickel of those sharing a health insurance risk pool with them, I think it's a pretty good bet our physical and mental health care costs aren't going down since the days of smoky bars when young men and young women still got together and procreated.

The Minnesota State Flag: Another Front Of The Cold Civil War

Like most sixth-graders who grew up in the Gopher State, I had a Minnesota history class back in 1989 where my classmates and I were given a detailed analysis of the Minnesota state flag originally devised in 1957.  On one hand, the class where we broke down the meaning and symbolism of the Minnesota state flag stuck with me over the years.  But on the other hand, I never really thought much about the Minnesota flag in the 35 years since I was in sixth grade.  And I'd venture to say that that's true of the overwhelming majority of Minnesotans, whose kinship with their state's flag began and ended in sixth-grade history class.  At least that was the case until 2023 when somebody decided to change it.

Specifically, a few members of the Minnesota Legislature decided it was time for a change and eventually got consensus to form a redesign commission that would accept multiple design proposals submitted by the public and vote on the configuration of a new flag and state seal.  And so was born another inevitable culture war battlefield...

It shouldn't have been surprising.  The vast majority of people instinctively hate cultural change.  Our necks tend to get even redder when said change is being made to a symbol of heritage, even if it's a symbol they haven't thought about since they were 12 years old on the elementary school field trip to the State Capitol.  I'm not sure there was ever a scenario where the adoption of a new state flag would engender anything but contempt from a majority of Minnesotans, but change advocates really poisoned the well when articulating their short list of reasons why the 1957 flag had to be replaced.

They said it was interchangeable with too many other state flags with activity centered within a circle amidst a blue back drop.  And it's true that many other states adopted cookie-cutter designs for their state flag and it's very hard to tell which one is which from a distance.  Change advocates also suggested the imagery is cluttered and clunky, with far too much going on inside that compressed circular image.  And they have a point.  Sometimes less is more, and that's probably true of the 1957 flag design.  But it's the third reason occasionally cited as an impetus for changing the state flag that generated the most chatter and the most righteous opposition.  Some critics alleged that the flag was, wait for it, racist!!!

To be fair, I don't believe any of the members of the State Emblems Redesign Commission leveled this accusation, but plenty of others did, including someone as high up the food chain as Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan.  She refused to display the flag and claimed it was a visual representation of Manifest Destiny.  Even though very few people had any idea what that reference meant, the accusation of racism formally calcified that this process was gonna be divisive and culturally poisonous.

The commission moved forward with the process, narrowing down more than 2,000 design submissions to the entry that would ultimately be selected in the spring of 2024, a flag that combines a dark blue and light blue background with a north star symbol.  And how is it going over?

A local news poll gave the new flag a 23% approval rating shortly after its rollout.  Another 21% of respondents said they were fine with a new state flag in principle but didn't like the chosen design, while a full 49% wanted to keep the existing state flag. Seven Minnesota counties passed resolutions either opposing the new flag or the process by which it was chosen.

Well that didn't go so well!

But no worries.  The new flag's defenders assure us the public will come around in time.

A year has passed and I informally put that to the test during a road trip to western Minnesota this summer.  There was nothing scientific about my "windshield poll" but considering I was venturing through a vast expanse of old-school DFL territory--the kinds of places where stubborn Lutheran farmers reflexively voted Democrat every two years until the 2016 realignment--I thought it would make for an interesting visual experiment.

The result:  I saw more 1957 Minnesota state flags flown loud and proud in 2025, a year after it was repealed, than I had since my sixth-grade Minnesota class in 1989.  How many new state flags did I see flapping in the wind of the western Minnesota prairies?  One....in a courthouse lawn.  And that's despite the new flag design coming from one of their own as the selected submission was created by an artist from Luverne.

Indeed, sales of the old flag have outpaced sales of the new flag ever since May 2024.  I'm sure the imbalance isn't nearly as imbalanced in the metro area, but that's exactly the point.  The decision to adopt a new flag was inevitably poised to elicit a visually prescient ideological schism.  Even outside of election seasons, the split sides of Minnesota's ideological Mason-Dixon line would be exposed in front yards throughout the state. That would have been true no matter which design was selected and no matter what process was used for the selection, at least outside of a ballot measure where, again, virtually any design would have led to tribal fault line development and certain failure.

But to be honest, it's rather impressive that the commission did as amazing of a job as they did in unifying the state....in opposition.  I'm not sure if that 23% approval rating of the new flag measured shortly after its inception holds, but I have my doubts that it's engendered a great deal more support a year later.  I don't really care much about what the state flag looks like, but even I have to admit it comes across as pretty slight.  It certainly isn't compelling enough to justify the tangible displays of disunity and the inevitable ascent of the old Minnesota state flag as detractors' version of the Confederate battle flag.

My guess is that if I take to the highways of outstate Minnesota 10 years from now, I'll continue to see 1957 state flags flapping in the yards of people who couldn't have even identified the Minnesota state flag from a lineup in 2022.  Our cultural divisions don't seem poised to in any way diminish in the years ahead, so representations of rebellion and nonconformity will only gain in currency. 

Conservative Star Tribune columnist Andy Brehm wrote an op-ed last month suggesting that the problem is the new flag's "ugly" design and the exclusive process is what ginned up such enduring opposition, and that if we started over from scratch, we could find an agreeable middle ground. But I think he's naive.  There's no symbol of contemporary Minnesota--or America for that matter--than can unify us, and there's no governing body that most people would accept as fair arbiters.  People opposed to cultural change are gonna find some comparison to the "Somali flag" no matter what design any "commission" agrees upon, no matter how bipartisan.  They're also unlikely to accept any alternative to an existing design they believe is being discarded based on dubious accusations of white supremacy.

Defiance against the new Minnesota state flag is merely the latest pit stop of our cold civil war, consistent with my assessment before the November election that "owning the libs" is no longer just a hobby but a lifestyle, bordering on a religion.  The inverse is that finding racism under every rock became a religion of its own for those on the other side of the battle lines.  Even if one side blinks, the road to unification is nowhere in sight.  It's hard to imagine an uglier manifestation of that than living in a state where different sides of the ideological spectrum are flying different state flags in protest of the other.  But that's where we are, and Minnesota is far from being the only state where it's 1861 all over again.

 

The AI Revolution At Our Doorstep

In an episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher" last month, a panel discussion on rapidly advancing artificial intelligence technology provoked Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman to say "we're like in February 2020 just before the pandemic hit."  This was a sobering analogy, and fitting given the degree to which basically everybody, aside from tech company executives, is whistling past graveyards about the comprehensive societal disruption that's likely to be right around the corner.

The equivalent of an atomic bomb is about to be detonated upon our species and the only political or media figure talking about it is Bill Maher.  I guess the good news is that those who are currently saddled down with jobs are about to have a lot more time on their hands to obsess about the Epstein File!

To be fair, it's too early to know if the AI revolution lives up to the hype, and both the media and elected officials could be proven wise to hold their fire and not incite a panic.  After all, a decade ago we were told that half the vehicles on the highway would be self-driving by the mid-2020s.  As of 2025, it's still well below 1% of all traffic.  More recently, we were assured that the long-promised electric car takeover that I've been hearing about since I was in elementary school was absolutely, unequivocally, we-really-mean-it-this-time gonna happen, and happen very quickly, in the 2020s.  Several years later, electric car sales' trajectory remains at a crawl, constituting only 7% of vehicle sales in 2024, vastly below expectations from the beginning of the decade.

Is it possible the big talk about AI will fail to materialize as well?  Or at least move at a much slower pace than currently projected?

It's absolutely possible, but I wouldn't count on it.  Not with the global arms race ensuing to perfect the technology and worry about the risks later.  The only thing I can safely project is that the inevitable disruption will differ in a variety of ways than what's currently forecast.  

The early conventional wisdom that the college boys are all gonna be thrown out on their asses from their cushy desk jobs while the plumbers and HVAC technicians will be laughing all the way to the bank is too rudimentary.  The economy doesn't exist in a bubble, so if the college boys that constitute the core of the American middle class experience a deluge of unemployment, blue-collar people will be affected downstream.  After all, if office cube farms are replaced with robots, there won't be much demand for plumbers or HVAC technicians in the human-free commercial property complexes, will there?  Furthermore, it's not as if the ongoing trend of conventional automation impacting blue-collar fields will stop or slow with the advent of AI.  If anything, it will likely accelerate.

Pontificating on further hypotheticals about the magnitude of AI disruption in the job market is ultimately too speculative, at least for an amateur like myself.  All one can do when they hear that more than half of work currently done by doctors and teachers will be handled by AI in 10 years is....to hope they're as wrong as they were about electric cars dominating the highways by 2025.  

The problem is that our elected officials are likely taking the same approach as they not only give the tech barons carte blanche to move forward with this dangerous technology as they see fit, but they borrowed $3 trillion to give them a fresh round of tax cuts as they orchestrate this disruption upon us.  And if the disruption of AI is even a fraction as substantial as these very tech barons are warning, the consequences for public policy will be even more pressing than those for the employment market.

Casual commentators on AI disruption, when faced with the follow-up question of what human workers are gonna do as this revolution plays out, will often tell us the government will have to offer some form of universal basic income to offset loss of employment and income.  There are a lot of problems with that supposition, and the biggest is simple arithmetic.  Even Andrew Yang's 2020 UBI proposal--offering a mere $1,000 per month in benefits--came with a price tag of $3 trillion per year.  The government collects about $5.2 trillion per year in revenues.  

In other words, even a UBI program that backfills a mere $12,000 per year in income, which is well below the poverty line, would consume nearly 60% of the federal budget.  This is the same federal budget currently running deficits in the trillions of dollars per year just trying to keep up with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the military, and interest on the existing national debt, all programs whose tab will only exponentially increase during the same period of time that AI is expected to displace tens of millions of middle-class jobs.

There's always the possibility that AI will trigger a surge of economic growth so blistering that it will double federal revenues and UBI and everything else our hearts desire will suddenly become affordable.  That seems unlikely, and even if some iteration of that scenario played out, the tech oligarchs will run the country and the same guys sitting in the front row of Trump's inauguration greasing the skids for their budget-busting tax cuts in 2025 will be sure that any surge of federal revenues gets drained into their bank accounts in the form of future tax cuts.

Furthermore, whether AI generates an era of budgetary abundance or scarcity, you can be sure American politics will still operate under its long-standing zero-sum rules, spearheaded by a Republican Party that will effectively divide the working class against itself as the Republicans have done successfully since the Nixon era.  Those predicting the disruption of AI will necessitate an embrace of socialism and/or an expanded safety net are likely to be sorely disappointed.  AI will almost assuredly be rocket fuel to already scandalous levels of inequality, but the story probably won't be "winners vs. losers" so much as "major losers vs. minor losers".  And that's where the political story will get complicated.

I can already hear the Republican campaign ads targeting the "minor losers" of the AI disruption, warning them that the "lowlife, parasitic rabble and festering subhuman filth are sponging off of hardworking folk like themselves and eating Cheetos all day.  Let them get a damn job!!!"  And it will work!  Guaranteed!  Maybe an expanded safety net message will work in one election for the center-left.  Possibly even twice.  But the life cycle of safety net expansion, no matter how desperately needed, will almost assuredly run out of gas long before the economic disruption connected to AI will.  Anybody who's studied the recent history of American politics even a little should be able to see that coming a mile away.  

The bottom line is that neither our gluttonous private sector, willing to torch the country to ashes in pursuit of a strong quarterly earnings report to greet their shareholders with, nor our public sector, beholden to an easily distracted electorate licking their chops to villainize their struggling neighbor rather than the oligarchs bleeding them dry, will be the least bit prepared or capable of managing the decline in what could really live up to the typically overhyped term "existential crisis".

But maybe our new machine overlords will make it easy on us....and simply exterminate our entire species before we get a chance to wring our hands about it merely taking our jobs away.  The fact that virtually nobody in the AI development realm is prepared to debunk that possibility should alarm us that digital genocide of the human race is a very real possibility and possibly even the most likely outcome. And yet, everybody at every level overseeing the introduction and expansion of this technology is ready, willing, and able to take that risk.  

The highest-stakes gamble in human history awaits us in the immediate aftermath of a narcissistic sociopath becoming the most powerful man in the world.  Oh well.  At least we'll have high-pressure shower heads to enjoy before we go!

 

 

 

Will Manufacturing Jobs Be Coming Back To America?

It's hard to give Donald Trump credit for much of anything, but one thing he deserves some degree of credit for is rhetorical and philosophical consistency on the topics of tariffs and economic protectionism.  He has believed in these things long before he got into politics and is defying the overwhelming consensus of both economists and public opinion with his supersized tariff scheme.  So even if we assume that wielding his sovereign-sized Excalibur on the global stage is Trump's strongest motivation for the tidal wave of tariffs he's deployed--and then summarily rolled back--in the last two months, he's sincere in his belief they will lead to a more independently functioning America, and that that would be a good thing.

This puts him on the same side of this issue as a lot of labor unions, so it's not a big surprise that he's cleaved off such a large share of the union vote by peddling this protectionist message.  So that begs the question.  Is there any chance that he's gonna be proven right?

The easy answer is that it's a major long shot, but this is a guy who has defied unimaginable odds to prevail in two Presidential elections, so underestimate his ability to reveal yet another royal flush with his poker hand at your own risk. The experts are assured Trump is hopelessly misguided with his economic policy, and I tend to agree with them, but a little humility is in order on these things until we actually start seeing the results. 

While I may not be 100% convinced that hefty and broadly applied tariffs won't accomplish the intended goal of boosting domestic manufacturing capacity, I can predict with far more confidence that it won't play out as cleanly or as beneficially as MAGA voters expect it to.

Let's break down the biggest challenges to weaponizing tariff policy for long-term economic realignment goals.  The core conundrum here is that most people are impatient.  Asking voters to play the long game and endure hardship has been an electoral loser at least since Jimmy Carter suggested Americans should turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater if they wanted to reduce energy bills.  Trump is asking Americans, who voted for him largely because of a boomlet of inflation that occurred during his predecessor's term, to withstand thousands of dollars per household of additional inflation every year based on a hypothetical promise of a pot of gold at the end of a very, very long rainbow.  But Trump knows most people don't have that kind of patience, which is why he's been spooked into rolling back the overwhelming majority of tariffs that he's imposed since April 2, attempting to dodge the groundswell of rage he knows will be coming in the event of significant inflation or empty shelves.

Let's suppose a majority of Americans were willing to endure this bargain and stand by their man at the polls until the desired outcome materialized.  If that was the case, Trump's original behemoth tariffs may have worked--in a qualified way and with incredible short-term pain that would take years to bounce back from--in incentivizing companies to bring manufacturing back to America.  But scaling back those tariffs to the 10% baseline as he's done since is far less likely to bring about the intended goal.  Factories operating in countries with lower labor, regulatory, and administrative costs will need more of an incentive to build a new plant in Flint, Michigan, than a mere 10% tariff if they remain abroad.

With that in mind, it's hard to see any outcome of such modest tariffs than just....inflation.  Trump wants to have it both ways with tariffs that are small enough to keep Wall Street and consumers from getting "yippy" but not large enough to have much chance of shifting manufacturer behavior. 

Trump actually has a small degree of leverage with public opinion because, in the abstract, a good-sized chunk of the electorate agrees with his core philosophy and are willing to give him a long leash to corral manufacturing back to America.  That's one of the reasons his approval rating has only ticked down a bit in the last two months.  Little to no hardship has been felt yet in working-class America because of the tariffs, but even if and when it is amidst a probable near-term recession, most of Trump's voters will stand by him because they believe in the cause.  It'll be far less than a majority of the American public, but not enough to create a political earthquake and turn many red states blue in the 2026 midterms or the next Presidential election.

Then the question begs itself: what should Trump's base expect as their reward for standing by him, especially if the tariffs somehow work and we're three years away from a manufacturing renaissance?  Will the farm and factory towns left for dead return to their mid-20th century glory days?  Will a virtuous cycle of private sector investment transpire to mend all that has been broken in the last half century in rural and industrial America?  Will the valedictorians of small-town high schools be inclined to stick around after graduation to lay down roots in a way they haven't in most people's lifetimes?

Not a chance.

Voters with romanticized expectations of towering plants on the edge of town employing 1,000 or more union workers are gonna be disappointed with what they end up getting even in the best-case scenario of tariff-induced domestic reinvestment.  Most of the jobs we'd be getting would be low-value light manufacturing.  Think tennis shoes or lunch boxes or crayons.  They'd be small operations with low pay, and that's if they employed any actual humans at all.  And even if we got manufacturing plants that made generators or something with more value and higher pay, job availability wouldn't resemble anything like the plants their grandparents were used to.  In the mid-2020s, it's a matter of whether the plants will be mostly automated or fully automated.

Now let's say automation advancements fall behind expectations and the new plants need more human capital than may be expected.  Light manufacturing jobs would still offer low pay, just as the existing domestic light manufacturing jobs do that always have "Help Wanted" signs on their doors.  In other words, the depopulating rural and industrial communities hosting these new plants wouldn't be any better positioned to fully staff them than their current employers are.  In fact, as the workforce continues to shrink with the retiring Baby Boomers and the plummeting birth rate, finding workers for low-wage jobs will get harder rather than easier.

What does that mean?  Immigrants.  Any scenario where millions of new light manufacturing jobs resurface in a nation with a fast-shrinking labor force means a greatly expanded need for immigrant labor to assemble the tennis shoes and lunch boxes, or even generators, domestically.  I'm sure the number of MAGA voters who've even considered this is very close to zero, and I also bet most wouldn't be very happy about it if it came to pass.  They sure weren't in Springfield, Ohio, where this scenario has already unfolded at a localized level.

And while there's a "chicken versus egg" debate that could be had here, most major employers are gonna be reluctant to locate anyplace with a shrinking labor force and schools and hospitals that are either already closed or on the knife's edge.  Recent reports showed that fully 20% of America's hospitals are teetering on that knife's edge, a strong breeze away from inevitable closure.  But that strong breeze is about to become a tornado in the form of $723 billion in Medicaid cuts serving as the centerpiece for Trump's "big beautiful bill" currently on the cusp of passing Congress.  The inevitable closure of hundreds more hospitals brought about by these Medicaid cuts is certainly not gonna make dying farm and factory towns more attractive for would-be employers, even the ones newly incentivized to find a domestic home for their lunch box factory.

A good case can be made for manufacturing more at home.  COVID exposed that we're too dependent on the goodwill of trading partners, and it made us more vulnerable than we should have been to supply chain disruption. Of course, there's at least as much risk of being too independent of trading partners, the ensuing global isolation leading to the 1930s-style conflicts that have historically always come amidst isolated cultures.  There's no silver bullet when it comes to geopolitical equilibrium. 

And there's no denying that it was a catastrophic political mistake and failure of imagination to let our manufacturing sector drift away with the expectation that something--anything--would fill the void in the hollowed-out communities that remained after the factories went to China.  Still, the muscular effort by the Trump administration to restore Pax Americana manufacturing employment is probably coming two generations too late for the desired effect.  If these tariffs were imposed in 1985 or 1995, when the workforce was abundant and the communities' infrastructure had not yet dissolved, Trump's gambit may have had a puncher's chance of working.  But even then, it might have been a net negative if it stalled out dynamism in other economic sectors insurgent at the time.

By 2025, the patient has already bled too much and for too long to be saved.  Biden's infrastructure bill and unrealized Build Back Better concepts were probably the best hope rural and industrial communities had for smoothing out the edges and managing their decline.  The private sector drove the decimation of blue-collar America because it no longer had a use for them.  Unless and until the private sector decides they need blue-collar America again, it's hard to believe the same people who tore it apart will choose to put it back together, even amidst the most heavy-handed possible government intrusion like large tariffs.  If Trump proves me and his other detractors wrong once again, then hats off.  But making Midwestern steel towns and Deep South mill towns look like they did when our grandparents were alive is gonna be a much more daunting task even than getting elected President twice.