Bottoming Out or Approaching the Edge?

Apparently we're entering crunch time in the Dump Biden saga.  Biden, unfortunately, has caught COVID-19, taking him off the campaign trail for several days.  That has created another lever for those who are trying to get rid of Biden to use against him.  Apparently there are rumors "major donors" are now threatening to take their money away if he stays in, and as a result he is about to fold.  Of course, I am getting these rumors 3rd- or 4th- or 5th- or 27th-hand, so I have no way to verify them or what Biden's actual thinking is at the moment.  I'm just reacting to the flow of (potential) bullshit in my information streams.

Let me clear: I have thought Dump Biden has been a hit on Biden since day one.  There is not an organic groundswell among the Democratic primary voters based on the 6/28 debate to change who they selected in 50+ primaries.  This is a top-down, rich male-driven attack that does not have the country's best interest in mind,* blasted through a media that is owned by many of the same people but that also has its own parallel interests.  It's a one-way bet for both groups - either they cripple Biden and Trump wins, or they get a shitty replacement and Trump wins, or they get the exact replacement they (and not the Democratic base) want and that person wins, and is beholden to them.  Even Harris, if she survives this putsch and is the replacement candidate, may feel obligated to them (though I would like to think not), or at least very intimidated by what they just accomplished.  No matter the outcome, rich males will get tax cuts and the media will get a controversial, click-bait-ready president.  Everybody else will lose.

I very strongly prefer that Biden stays in.  I believe he can beat Trump - or at least could have beaten Trump before the hit on him was ordered.  Things have gotten murkier since the media blitz against Biden began, and the attempted assassination of Trump did not help.  Biden may be irreparably damaged among low-info swing voters who don't know much but do respond to the general tone of media coverage.  Of course, if the media decided to stop putting its thumb on one side of the scale and try the other one for a change, those swing voters would pick up different vibes.  That won't happen, especially now.  But it's also not clear to me that a replacement will suddenly surge in the polls, even with good vibes from the temporarily placated media.  For better or worse, even if the replacement is Johnny Unbeatable, some segment of the Democratic coalition will be bitter about what has transpired, rendering ole' Johnny eminently beatable.

No matter how it occurs, or why, any replacement for Biden other than Harris is absolutely unacceptable.  I will not accept "major donors" controlling the party in that way.  Yes, it may play into their hands if I don't vote for president.  And yes, I am a straight white male, albeit a poor one.  But I believe in democracy, and even if the Democratic Party's selection process is flawed, it is still little-d democratic, and should be respected.  If the Democratic Party won't stand for democracy within its own processes, what will it stand for at all?

So, we may be reaching an inflection point.  Or not.  I certainly don't know.  Whatever happens, it's going to be jarring for someone.

* I have ideas about the composition of this group which are circumstantially strong but otherwise unsubstantiated, so I won't publish them.

Blimey, Frenchies

French voters have just confounded both polling and the analysts by electing a somewhat more left-wing Assembly in the latest legislative election.  As in the 2024 UK general election, voters shifted away from the center and somewhat to the right, but due the geographic distribution of the vote, the left-leaning party (actually a coalition of parties) New Popular Front (NFP) made significant gains.  The main loser was the centrist President Emmanuel Macron, the head of Ensemble (ENS) who, in a classic case of being out of touch with the citizens, decided to call a snap election in response to the strong showing by the far-right (and possibly crypto-fascist) National Rally (RN) in European parliamentary elections.  The results from that election (in France) were not good, but EU elections are often venue where voters in various countries make a domestic protest vote, because the connection between EU governance and the average voter in EU countries is weak at best.  Nonetheless, Macron called an unnecessary election in order to basically berate French voters for making a protest vote in response to his unpopular government.  Initially, that looked like a bad idea, as RN led in the polls.  However, the outcome was a significantly different, as NFP won the most seats.

As in the UK, vote efficiency mattered significantly for the results.  French legislative elections are not strictly first-past-the-post (FPTP), but use a more complicated system (naturallement) where a candidate can win in a first round with over 50% of the vote, but a second round is held if there is no winner.  In that case, only candidates receiving 12.5% of the vote in the first round can advance.  The second round, however, is FPTP.  Voters in both France and the UK understand tactical voting, as do the parties, and in both elections the center and the left agreed to withdraw competing candidates in various seats (though it should be noted that Macron was hesitant about doing so, and his party subordinates revolted).  And in both France and the UK, the right-wing vote ended up being distributed inefficiently relative to other groupings in part because of tactical voting.

I've embedded a spreadsheet below that has the gory statistical details, but the summary is this: NFP earned a seat for approximately ever 89,000 votes, whereas RN earned a seat for every 144,000.*  Overall, right-wing parties picked up about 45% of the vote, but received just 36% of the seats.  The left got 30% and 33% respectively, while the center got 24% and 29%.  (<2% went to other assorted parties.)  Macron had previously appointed a minority government (France's governmental system is overly complicated, but that's the gist of what happened) based on the 43% of seats held by his party and his allies.  After this election, however, he will most likely (again, complicated) appoint someone from the left as Prime Minister.

As in the UK, the French should celebrate the outcome of their election, but nobody on the left or center in either state should be complacent for a moment about turning back the rising right-wing forces in their country.  The voters as a whole are moving in the wrong direction.  Macron may have slowed RN's momentum, but as of now there's no indication that will last.  The French center and French left will have to cooperate and prove the French government can work, or RN will make further gains.

* Note that this is the total of first and second round votes.  A more accurate analysis would take just the votes from the winning round, but I suspect the general point - RN had poor efficiency - would remain. 

Blimey, Limeys

My almost entirely uniformed take on the UK election results is that the while the party distribution in Whitehall shifted significantly to the left, British voters actually shifted away from the center and somewhat to the right.  The Labour Party of 2024 is not (for better or worse) Labour of 2019, and has shifted to the right while it rebuilt its appearance of competency and even-handedness.  On the whole, it picked up more voters on the right than it lost on the left, but the fact that it received roughly the same percentage of the vote as in 2019 can't be ignored.  And almost a sixth of the seats that it picked up came from the complete collapse (due to incompetency in the devolved government, and internal party issues) of the Scottish National Party, which has generally offered a very similar economic program to Labour.  The Green Party and assorted left-leaning independents picked up several seats, mostly from Labour, but also had a few oddball wins over Conservatives.  The Liberal Democrats rose from near death to capture the center by attracting center-right Conservative voters who couldn't stand the incompetency of the past few years, but who also would never vote for Labour or Reform.  However, its vote share was little changed as well, and like Labour, LibDem votes were distributed efficiently.  Reform UK - which should be "Reform", since it is more interested in revolution than reform - didn't capture many seats but did attract a huge protest/repudiation vote from people who thought that the Conservatives failed to deliver on the promises of Brexit and knew that the Conservatives failed to halt immigration.  And finally, the Conservatives collapsed, losing almost 44 percent of their 2019 vote share.  The punishment was entirely deserved given how poorly the party governed from 2010 to 2024.

If the Conservative and Reform votes were combined - as might be the case if the UK didn't use an archaic FPTP standard for parliamentary elections - the right-wing vote would exceed that of Labour.  That would leave LibDem voters as kingmakers, and given that the LibDems mostly captured seats from the Conservatives, the overall 2024 vote was more conservative than the outcome.  However, the UK system rewards "efficiency" - meaning that it rewards distributing enough votes to come in first across as many constituencies as possible, not the overall number of votes nationwide.  Given that the right-leaning vote was split 2 or 3 ways, Labour was the most efficient party in the election, and thus won the seat count handily.  (I'll have another post in a few days with the details of the vote distribution.)

Despite what some in America may hope, the Labour victory on 7/4/24 provides no lessons for Democrats beyond a generic "look competent", which Democrats should already know.  The dynamics are just too different this time for anything else to apply.

Predetermined

Unsurprisingly, a consensus emerged when given the opportunity.

 

 

I hope those people get what they are asking for, even if they don't understand what they've requested.