Seven Observations on the 2016 Election →

The best summary analysis I've seen on how Clinton lost/Trump won the election, as well as likely potential paths the Trump admin may take.

My takeaways:
  1. This did not need to happen and is primarily the result of mind-boggling incompetence by the professionals of the Democratic Party.
  2. Fundamentally—consistent with pretty much everything everyone is saying—the election was lost by taking Rust Belt whites for granted [5]: without question, flip Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania and Clinton would have been president. Everything else—Wikileaks, Comey, emails—was just gravy.
  3. The existing opinion and likely-voter models have been shown to be woefully inadequate, however much individuals making money off these will protest otherwise.
And a couple things we should keep in mind did not happen
  1. The country did not shift radically to the right: Trump did not even get a majority of the votes cast, much less of eligible voters.
  2. Trump is not a Republican in any conventional sense, though clearly the Republicans benefited from the Trump victory more than the Democrats did. Well, probablybenefited more.
  3. There is a whole lot to still play out here.
Seven observations:...

Decision Boundary 2016: Margin of Terror →

If you're interested in understanding how/where the polls went wrong, very good (podcast) discussion between various polling and data science pros, including from the media and from both the RNC's and DNC's data teams.

The Lawfare Podcast: "The First Day of the Rest of Our Lives" Edition →

Good podcast discussing the issues with serving (or not) under Trump. Because of his constant lies, obvious sociopathy, and calls for flagrantly illegal and immoral policies on the future part of US military and intelligence officials, Trump and his campaign staff received "No"s from seemingly everyone they contacted about serving in senior and middle administration. They're now scrambling to fill any and all positions, which could mean the Trump administration is being led by some of the most extremist people with little if any experience.

Veterans Day, 2016

Thank You to all of those willing to give up your Constitutional rights in the hope your sacrifice serves the people of this country and creates a better tomorrow. May we all do better to honor that sacrifice and ensure a peaceful future.

Politics Is the Solution →

Heavily quoting this article (please read the rest), as it's the best *very* *very* PRELIMINARY analysis I've seen so far (and I'm curious how well the data will hold up over the next few weeks).

To believe that Trump’s appeal was entirely based on ethnic nationalism is to believe that a near majority of Americans are driven only by hate and a shared desire for a white supremacist political program.
We don’t believe that. And the facts don’t bear it out.
This election, in the words of New York Times analyst Nate Cohn, was decided by people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Not all of them can be bigots.
Clinton won only 65 percent of Latino voters, compared to Obama’s 71 percent four years ago. She performed this poorly against a candidate who ran on a program of building a wall along America’s southern border, a candidate who kicked off his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists.
Clinton won 34 percent of white women without college degrees. And she won just 54 percent of women overall, compared to Obama’s 55 percent in 2012. Clinton, of course, was running against a candidate who has gloated on film about grabbing women “by the pussy.”
...
The problem with Clinton wasn’t her peculiarity but her typicality. It was characteristic of this Democratic Party that the power players in Washington decided on the nominee — with overwhelming endorsements — many months before a single ballot was cast.
They made a fateful choice for all of us by stacking the deck, decisively, against the kind of politics that could win: a working-class politics.
Seventy-two percent of Americans who voted last night believed that “the economy is rigged to the advantage of the rich and powerful.” Sixty-eight percent agreed that “traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like me.”
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This is a new era that requires a new type of politics — one that speaks to people’s pressing needs and hopes, rather than to their fears. Elite liberalism, it turns out, cannot defeat right-wing populism. We can’t move to Canada or hide under the bed. This is a moment to embrace democratic politics, not repudiate them.

What's Really at Stake in the Syria Debate →

Good essay from someone who actually studies these kinds of things:

The collapse of U.S.-Russian diplomacy and the escalating atrocities in Aleppo have once again opened the floodgates for ideas on how to intervene in Syria. These ideas are all familiar: typically some combination of no-fly zones, air strikes, and arming the opposition. The goals range from civilian protection, to evening the balance of power to facilitate diplomacy, to toppling the Assad regime by force. It may seem odd that these proposals have changed so little over the years despite having failed to persuade previously and despite the dramatic evolution of the Syrian conflict.
This is confusing only if evaluated from the starting point that the purpose of these ideas is primarily to end the Syrian war or to reduce human suffering.  For the most part, it is not.
The air of surreality and endless repetition around much of the Syria debate emanates from the mismatch between stated and actual goals. In fact, both advocates and critics of these interventionist ideas generally understand that the limited measures being proposed have virtually no chance of changing the strategic trajectory of the war.  The real argument is not over saving lives or even about removing the Assad regime, as laudable as such goals might be.  It is over the extent to which the United States should be involved in the war, regardless of whether or how the war ends.
While some surely believe that intervention would reduce the immediate killing or force the Assad regime to engage in more serious negotiations, this is a far cry from ending the war. Limited intervention will run aground of the war’s basic strategic structure...
The cost of this stalemate is an estimated half million dead and over 10 million refugees and displaced. But little has been achieved at this horrifying cost...

This grim logic was obvious quite early on in the war.  Once it became clear that early optimism over Assad’s imminent fall had been misplaced and this strategic stalemate set in, diplomacy had to begin from the premise that neither side could win and neither side could lose.  Political science studies of civil wars tell us that wars of this type tend to last approximately a decade, and that the number and contradictory preferences of both internal and external actors in Syria make it an extreme version of this type of war.  Syria’s war has not been ripe for resolution, either military or diplomatic, and will not be for years to come.

The limited American intervention options on offer over the last few years could never have changed this logic. These proposals, such as no-fly zones or air strikes, would have done little more than move the war more quickly up the escalatory ladder...

The Perpetual Panic of American Parenthood →

What we do get is a pervasive national angst. A forthcoming study in The American Journal of Sociology finds that Americans with children are 12 percent less happy than non-parents, the largest “happiness gap” of 22 rich countries surveyed. The main sources of parents’ unhappiness are the lack of paid vacation and sick leave, and the high cost of child care, the authors said.
I might have thought America’s parenting misery was inevitable if I hadn’t moved from the United States to France (where parents are slightly happier than non-parents). Raising kids is consuming here, but not overwhelming: The government offers high-quality day care, billed on a sliding scale, and free preschool for children 3 and up. Older kids have subsidized after-school activities and summer camps. On average, college costs less than $500 a year.
...
Leaving America for Paris had the opposite effect. Suddenly it wasn’t all on me. I gradually understood why European mothers aren’t in perpetual panic about their work-life balance, and don’t write books about how executive moms should just try harder: Their governments are helping them, and doing it competently.

We Must Address Gerrymandering →

The United States is an outlier in the democratic world in the extent to which politicians shape the rules that affect their own electoral fortunes. Federal campaign finance policy is administered by a feckless Federal Election Commission, whose three Democratic and three Republican commissionersroutinely produce gridlock instead of effective implementation of the law. The conditions under which election ballots are cast and counted—from registration to voting equipment, ballot design, polling locations, voter ID requirements, absentee ballots and early voting—are set in a very decentralized fashion and prey to political manipulation to advantage one party over the other. And while most countries with single-member districts (such as Canada, Britain and Australia) use nonpartisan boundary commissions to redraw lines so they reflect population shifts, in America, most state legislatures create the maps for both congressional and state legislative districts through the regular legislative process. They make their own luck.
Gerrymandering—the manipulation of district boundaries to protect or harm the political interests of incumbents, parties and minorities—began in the early years of the republic and has been a source of controversy and criticism throughout American history. Setting and following appropriate standards—such as contiguity, compactness, equal population, adherence to local political boundaries, respect for communities of interest and neutrality with regard to any political party or candidate—has proven much more difficult than it might appear...
Eliminating gerrymandering would not by itself dramatically increase the competitiveness of House and state legislative districts and reduce the historic level of polarization between the two major political parties. The roots of safe seats and partisan polarization go much deeper than the political manipulation of redistricting. These include the racial realignment of the South, the ideological sorting of the two parties, the geographical clustering of like-minded voters and an increase in party-line voting. That said, there are two compelling reasons for citizens to demand a reform of our gerrymander-prone redistricting system.
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The second reason is that partisan gerrymandering reinforces the hyper-partisanship that paralyzes our politics and governance...