Does a 90% chance of the cost of failed campaign out way the 10% chance of the benefit of a successful campaign. My guess is that the vast majority of successful people do not want to be governor to begin with.
I think that depends on the person. A "failed campaign" did a lot to raise Bernie Sanders' brand. Plausibly it will be good for Kevin Paffrath too (although he claims he's lost subscribers since all this happened because his politics are too controversial).
The thing is, California in particular is full of rich people who could either benefit from, or at least not be harmed by running for Governor. Think about all of the rich tech bros, VCs, etc. that are largely anonymous and normal people don't know or care who they are. Likewise, various actors who make outlandish political statements all the time, and for who dropping a million or two on a campaign is a rounding error. Or Internet celebrities who are already mired in controversy. Plenty of people with lots of money and nothing to lose.
Beg to differ. If you're a rich person, and especially if you're involved in complex business in hi-tech, you have a great deal to lose by having your every utterance recorded and broadcast widely for several months, especially in the context of being asked deliberately rude and/or provocative questions by people who are experts at political campaignery and who would love to see you put your foot in your mouth. One misstep, one "ah..oops...of course what I meant by that is..." and multiple future career option doors could slam shut.
Subscribers are practically worthless. A channel like VSauce has over 10 million subscribers, and most videos have millions if not tens of millions of views. Meanwhile, a channel like WatchMojo has similar subscriber numbers, but most videos have under 100k views. VSauce makes engaging, well-edited videos, while WatchMojo makes stupid clickbait list videos.
Point is, everything good comes from views, whether you're in it for money, spreading information/ideology, or the fun/art of making videos. Subs very weakly correlate with views.
Sure, but there are millions of successful people, and divide that by a thousand for whatever factors you need and there’s still a lot of people with the desire or use for or ability to use the opportunity. Most people don’t want to be politicians, or even want large scale power, and yet there’s stiff competition.
This. Unless you are really into politics, governor is much less fun than most of the other jobs that "successful" people have. Sure, by some measure a governor holds lots of power, but it is much more of a hassle for a governor to get his ideas enacted than for, say, a ceo of a tech company.
Well, in these Imperial Executive days it may sound laughably quaint, but in principle within our system the responsibility for having ideas and enacting them lies with the legislature, and the governor is supposed to restrict himself to putting those ideas into effective execution.
Whether it was technically "indoor" may have been a matter of opinion and the angle of the picture taken. What was not a matter of opinion was that he was in gross violation of his own COVID restaurant restrictions. That's the kind of thing that could unite anti-mask Republicans angry about his hypocrisy and pro-mask Democrats angry about him spreading COVID.
Exactly. The controversy wasn't over the fact that he was being risky with COVID. The controversy was over the fact that he was breaking his own executive order. I believe he would have been in violation even if it were outdoors (there were too many people). It gave the impression that the rules only applied to the little people and it pissed off both the left and the right.
OTOH California "indoor"/"outdoor" standards defy any attempt at logic. You can't be in a space where industrial ventilation system is installed (and can be easily amended to add whatever improvements exist to kill as many viruses as possible), but you totally can be in an enclosed tent having no air flow, no ventilation, poorly cleaned and trying to cram the same amount of people into half the space. Because yeah, technically it's "outdoors".
I get why it is like that - between not banning indoors dining and paying the political cost of all covid death being attributed to this single decision, and banning all dining and killing all the restaurant industry and causing enormous economic calamity (and being recalled for sure because people want their sushi back!), they chose a compromise - something that maybe does something, maybe not, but clearly they did their part and it's not their fault if something goes wrong.
And since they know exactly what they did - they behave accordingly.
Reading the story, it was alleged that due to weather/noise/can't remember what, the restaurant closed sliding glass doors and that turned it from 'outdoors' (which, by that photo, it isn't really outdoors either) to 'indoors'.
But it's not so much about the doors, as the public anger. Same things have tripped up politicians in my country as well, there were two such fundraising/lobbying parties and arguments over "well was it really indoors or outdoors" but people didn't care; what they cared about was the same members of the same government telling them "No, you can't go to Sunday Mass because of the risk of spreading infection, you can't visit family members, you can't go outside" had no problems at all breaking all the regulations when it came to themselves (and getting money for their campaigns).
Sally and John can't have their wedding because ban on gatherings of more than X people and hotels and restaurants have to institute rules on distance between tables. Minister for Cardboard Boxes has a function where the tables are jammed together, but that's different, don't you know!
Exactly. If you pass a sweeping law that hurts a lot of people ostensibly for their own good, they are going to be righteously pissed if you rules-lawyer yourself into vaguely plausible “compliance” that requires no apparent sacrifice on your part.
The fact that he did it at a stupid expensive restaurant with a bunch of fat cats is just icing on the let-them-eat-cake.
It really didn't help that the dinner included meeting with American Medical Association lobbyists. You'd think that of all people, the doctor's group would not take part in violating health orders.
One missing wall does not make that dinner, that eye-poppingly expensive dinner paid for by lobbyists, one iota less crass, naive and stupid.
I mailed my ballot today and I voted against recall. Even so, I think he's an idiot out of his depth but the best of the rotten bunch from which I had to choose.
Unless you have staggering amount of intelligence at your disposal, what you need is a decent amount, like, more than the average, for sure but no need to exceed the top 10%. After that, a lot of other factors matter. Imagination, for sure. Grit/dedication/ambition, absolutely. Social/political skills, very much so.
Do you actually want to be governor of California? For myself, this is a job that I am completely unqualified for (including residency requirements), would have no aptitude for, and which is a lot of work for not much reward. If I had the option of definitely becoming California governor, I would turn it down, so I certainly wouldn't campaign for the office.
Even if you go full Calvin Coolidge and don't do ANYTHING with the influence that you suddenly have, you're going to be absolutely inundated with perks. You won't be able to buy your own meals, your own drinks, your own tickets, for the friendly lobbyists swarming around (a friend-of-a-friend is a lowly State House Rep, and it's bad even at that level).
But say you have an iron will and you mightily refuse every gladhand; you STILL retain the option, for most of the rest of your life, to go give a $25,000 speech any day of the week. Any day, forever, even if you're not good!
They don’t pay you for a good speech. They pay you so they can say “the governor spoke at our event”. And also because they imagine it will lead to some sort of positive influence their way, someday.
I assume that I'd get recalled almost immediately if I became governor, once people found out what my actual policy positions were, so my influence wouldn't be worth a lot.
The perks doen't seem to be much reward given that you 1. become a public persona 2. are suddenly responsible for everything that's wrong with CA. I'd rather pay for my meals and have a better life.
One figures the novelty of having 'the non-politician who was briefly an unsuccessful Governor of CA' giving speeches would wear out pretty quickly, how many $25k speeches would you expect to give? If >50 then I guess this starts being appealing.
I might not know what to do, but I think I am smart enough to identify people who do. I'd just contact them (eg the list would include Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen) and basically just do whatever they tell me to do
Seriously, Cowen is a teetotaler but that is a personal choice. Considering his libertarian leaning I doubt very much that he would want to /impose/ a prohibition on alcohol. Maybe he would want more "nudging" against it, though.
I would be more worried about his open border tendencies. And even that I would expect him to be somewhat pragmatic about it, as he is about everything else.
I'm not so sure that the California Democratic party's logic was unsound here. If a legitimate democratic candidate did run, the chance that the recall succeeds is inevitably higher (there may be people who don't want a Republican replacement, but who'll vote yes on the recall because they don't like Newsom and are hoping for the sane Democratic replacement). But, the chance that the recall succeeds also raises the chance that we end up with Larry Elder as governor.
This is essentially what happened during the 2003 recall. Democratic politician Bustamente campaigned on "No on recall, yes on Bustamente", ended up getting 30% of the vote, and that's how we ended up with The Terminator as our governor.
This supposes that lots of people voted for recall specifically because they wanted Bustamente as governor instead of Davis. Is there much proof of this? It seems unlikely, especially since Recall won by 10 points.
I phrased that badly. To clarify, I find it unlikely that many people voted for recall because they wanted Bustamente as governor, and even if a few such people existed, they are unlikely to have swung a 10 point result.
There were a lot of people who really disliked Gray Davis. Up until the last month, I was considering voting Yes on the recall because I disliked him so much, and would have preferred Bustamante or Arianna Huffington.
It's been 7 years since I lived in California, so I haven't looked into this. I've disliked Newsom for my entire adult life, ever since he pulled in the national Democratic leadership to campaign for him against the Green Party alternative in the San Francisco runoff election, on a platform of removing funds for homeless people. But I've also never particularly liked San Diego Republicans. So I would need to study to know for sure.
I probably wouldn't prefer Faulconer to Newsom, but it's not out of the question that, if Faulconer were leading the polls in the race to replace Newsom, I might not worry so much about how the first question went.
One of the few challengers to the California Democratic Party's level of incompetence is... the California Republican Party. One-party rule is corrosive, nationalizing state politics is bad strategy, and the brain drain by federal offices is real.
This really annoys me as Californian (really, expat still registered to vote in California). New England has moderate state level Republican parties who can be voted into power when the Democrats screw up. The California Republican Party is as conservative as the national party and filled with weirdos. And it's self-fulfilling, since they never win statewide races they can't attract good candidates. I'd love to vote the California Democrats out of office, but not when the alternative is Larry Elder.
I'm a big fan of the Canadian system where provincial and federal parties are completely different things and you can be a provincial Liberal and a federal Conservative or vice versa and no-one thinks twice about it.
A bit different from state vs federal, where I know it used to be common for people to retain old party loyalties at the state level even while voting differently for national politics. I wonder why we've gone a different route from Canada.
I don't really know. Some Canadian provinces don't even have some parties, for instance British Columbia has the NDP and Liberals, but no Conservatives (federal Conservatives are mostly in the BC Liberals).
My suspicion is that Canada is largely to do with the Reform story. The main right wing party in Canada until the 1980s was the Progressive Conservatives. In the east (Ontario and the four Maritimes), it still is. But in the west (BC and the three plains provinces), the Reform Party arose as a party to the right of the PCs. At the federal level, they merged into the CPC in 2000-3. All four of the western states had their own separate versions of this, BC had Social Credit, which collapsed as a result of corruption scandals in 1991 and that resulted in everyone on the right joining the BC provincial Liberals to try to defeat the NDP provincial government (classic Duverger's Law creating a two party system). In other states a broad party of the right got formed - similar but different from the CPC - like the Saskatchewan Party or Alberta's "United Conservative" Party. Only in Manitoba has the PC brand survived in the west (in part because the Manitoba Liberals became very right wing in the 1970s, pulled in all the people who would form Reform elsewhere and then collapsed in infighting with the more leftwing federal-type liberals).
In the Maritimes, the provincial parties still match up with the three federal parties (provincial PC with the federal CPC, plus Liberals and NDP).
Quebec is obviously different, but it has been ever since the rise of the first nationalist parties in the 1970s.
Its not due to Reform per se, but does reflect an aspect of Canadian politics that American politics has evolved away from, that its a system where parties can and do die and get replaced by new parties. So even if you start with the same two major parties at the Federal level and in each of the 10 provinces, the situation evolves in each jurisdiction and changes accumulate with time.
I highly doubt someone will win question 2 with just 30% of the vote. In the most recent poll (YouGov), Elder was polling at 23%. But 45% of respondents said they either wouldn't vote on that question or were unsure. If you only count the respondents who chose a candidate, Elder is polling at 42%. For comparison, Schwarzenegger got 49%. And I imagine as the election approaches more people are going to coalesce around the front runners.
By this logic, should the Democratic Party *still* be telling people to leave the replacement slot blank, so they're screwing up now? Or was the optimal strategy "tell people to vote for the backup candidate, but make sure the backup candidate sucks so they'll vote not to recall"? That seems... not totally implausible, but I doubt it was anyone's plan at the start of this process.
It's better to have a simple message so people don't mess it up. Telling people to vote for Pathraff would likely lead to people getting confused and a net lose in votes. Plus, he's an idiot who shouldn't get near the governor's office anyway.
I took the Democratic strategy as a sign of the local power of Newsom in California politics as much as anything else. The best strategy for the Democratic party might be to run an amazing candidate who could easily trounce any Republican running. That strategy almost certainly destroys Newsom (as you add the people who want the new D candidate to the people who dislike Newsom and they easily vote Yes to removing Newsom).
If Newsom were not very powerful in California Democrat politics, someone would have identified this possibility and tried to run as a powerful D or at least recruit a popular D to run. That he could remove all valid D competitors indicates that almost no one was willing to step out of line against him.
Then it sounds like the pragmatic best strategy is for the party to find an acceptable replacement, throw Newsom under the bus, and campaign on "Yes on recall, Yes on Nice Guy".
Why are they so wedded to Newsom? Presumably he does have very strong connections and allies, but why are they so gung-ho for him and nobody but him, and hang the public?
This seems to be a feature of the current political climate. Or maybe it's been around forever and I'm just noticing it?
A state Democratic Party with some common sense would think "hey, Newsom is kind of damaged property at this point, let's find someone better and run them". As you said: yes on recall, yes on nice guy.
A state Republican Party with some common sense would realize "hey, Trump-supporting candidates will never win statewide office in California, let's grit our teeth and run a moderate".
But nope, we get Newsom vs Elder.
I can't explain it. Maybe personalities are bigger than parties? Maybe something to do with modern primaries? I really don't know.
Larry Elder has said nice things about Trump in the past, but at this point seem to be trying to reject identification as a Trump supporter. Probably prudent.
I have to admit that I haven't looked into the recall candidates as much as maybe I should. (Or maybe I shouldn't... this election isn't really making me love anyone on either side, and I'm not convinced that spending time researching the candidates will do me any good.)
But anyway, as a pragmatist (I'll probably never love CA politics, but I have to live with them), I guess I'll count this as progress. If CA Republicans are willing to acknowledge, even implicitly, that association with Trump will hurt them, I suppose that's a good step.
I expect they believe, correctly, that it will help them in a Republican primary, hurt them in a general election. But California has a weird primary system, which may make the first irrelevant.
Larry Elder supports school vouchers and reduced regulation of construction, which strike me as important pluses, although given the legislature I wouldn't count on his succeeding in doing much.
As I see it generally the smaller a political party gets, the more ideologically rigid it gets. Evaporation of a solution concentrates it -- all the less rigid people who were just barely attracted into the tent leave, and what's left consists of the more hard-core people. Furthermore, when the party is generally shrinking, its focus tends to be on retention of who they still have, not recruiting people further from their remaining core. So they have "inreach" instead of "outreach," circular-firing squads, harsher tests of group loyalty, et cetera.
It all sounds dysfunctional, like it would accelerate complete evaporation, and I would say often it is and does -- but not always. The motivating belief is usually that by stripping down to a core group that is more ideologically pure, they acquire a degree of clarity and forcefulness in their messaging (no need for a ton of asterisks to mollify coalition partners on the fringe) that improves it for a future audience. Then, they count on some stroke of luck, change in circumstance, or massive screw-up by their enemies bringing that clear message to a big audience that is abruptly more receptive, and Bob's your uncle.
There is some historical precedent, e.g. I would say Reagan did *not* modify his message between his years as California governor and the election of 1980. Indeed, he rather purified it and moved if anything further to the right, which is probably why he didn't come close in 1968 and 1976. But the mountain came to Mohammed, so to speak, and when Carter immolated himself and took down 1970s liberalism with him in 1979, Reagan was ready, with a purer message that resonated strongly with the passions of the moment.
Newsom was up like 17 points before Delta hit and will probably still win. So much monday morning quarterbacking here, except the team hasn't even lost yet.
The problem is that Newsom didn't actually do anything that any other generic Democrat wouldn't have done (including the French Laundry thing, similar such "scandals" have happened repeatedly, all over the nation).
For them to openly endorse Yes on Recall implies that Newsom did do something wrong. But what? It'd be a huge sign of weakness and set a really bad precedent for the future.
You need something like an Andrew Cuomo style "20 women accuse you of sexual assault" level scandal, that is uniquely individualized to the person in question, to convince a party to turn on one of its own who has maintained the party line without fault.
This is a good point. I don't particularly like Newsom, but it's useful to be reminded that he's probably not much worse than any of the other Democrats.
That is entirely the problem for politics everywhere. "Yeah, he did this dodgy thing, but they're all doing it and he's no worse than anyone else".
It gives people very little recourse when they're angry, and their elected public representative can't in fact be shifted because, well, this is how the sausage is made.
The pragmatic strategy (endorsed by the LA Times) if were able to get enough people to agree on it is (No, Faulconer). It looks like we might fail the prisoners dilemma by not promoting it enough to be a Schelling point, even around here.
I think the way this works is that every politician has his personal groupies, or retainers, people who are faithful to him personally for whatever reason. Then there are party groupies, who are faithful to whomever is the most powerful party politician at the moment. When you win an election for governor, personal and party retainers merge, and that's your governing coalition.* While you govern, some party retainers may become personal retainers -- indeed, every politician hopes for this, and usually sends some favors their way to encourage the transition -- or, if you're a screw-up, personal retainers may become more distant from you and become mere party retainers, ready to abandon you if a better guy comes along.
If Newsom loses, by definition the Democratic party loses all his personal retainers, who will stick with their guy (and usually dislike the party for not having sufficiently supported him, the way Trump fanbois depise the "RINOs" who they think did not sufficiently support Trump). That weakens the party. If there has been the normal conversion of party to personal retainers while Newsom held power -- if he was a competent governing politician -- then the party is weakened by that extra amount.
The only way this doesn't happen is if (1) a fair amount of Newsom's personal retainers converted to merely party retainers lately, meaning he was a crappy feudal lord, and (2) whoever Newsom's replacement is comes in with at least as many personal retainers, so party strength is preserved. That's certainly possible, but usually it requires an unusually inept candidate -- "unusually" because he did, after all, win the previous election, so he has to have made serious missteps in the recent past (or got elected in the first place by wild luck).
----------------
* By "retainers" I don't just mean individual employees or voters, but also interest groups that are generally beholden to you on a somewhat personal basis, e.g. the late unlamented Gray Davis had a special relationship with the prison guards union, they were in some sense a member of his personal entourage.
I'm not sure about that narrative. The 2003 recall voted out Davis by a margin of 55.4% Yes to 44.6% No, and according to CNN's exit polls, only about 3% of votes voted Yes/Bustamante, which doesn't come close to making up the difference.
The 2003 recall was also very unusual in California in that the two major Republican candidates (Schwarzenegger and McClintock) combined for 62% of the vote, 6.6 percentage points over the Yes vote on the recall and almost 20 percentage points over the Republican performance in the state in the 2000 (41.7%) and 2004 (44.4%) Presidential elections. And per the exit poll, 18% of Democrats voted for Schwarzenegger and 6% voted for McClintock.
My read is that while Bustamante was a decent replacement candidate on paper, he and Davis were both unusually unpopular Democratic Party candidate in the actual election, while Schwarzenegger and McClintock were both unusually popular for Republicans in California. This is borne out by the favorable/unfavorable numbers in the same exit poll: Davis's job approval was deep underwater (26% approve, 73% disapprove), as was Bustamante's favorability (37% favorable, 58% unfavorable), while both Schwarzenegger and McClintock had net-positive favorabilities (51%-47% and 55%-37% respectively).
Also, partisanship is extremely strong nowadays. Not running a Democratic candidate greatly strengthens the "Republican recall" message in a state where there are a lot more Democrats than Republicans.
Which raises the question of whether his having married her should be taken as evidence of his incompetence. A large part of the job of a top level executive is evaluating other people in order to decide who to hire, who to have do what.
I'm much more confused about what Donald Trump Jr is doing with her. She's not quite old enough to be his mother, but she's too old to be his stepmother.
Not having a good alternative to Newsom seems bad. However,
1) Having a legitimate backup to Newsom might get some people who would normally vote "no" on the recall to vote "yes." Voters aren't super rational so if a high profile, reasonable Dem is running, you might get more "yes" votes even if they make it way more likely Larry Elder is elected.
Yeah, but if you give people a choice and they go "We want the new guy", isn't that more indicative of a problem with Newsom/the Californian Democrats than "the public are irrational"? Maybe they're not being fair to Newsom, but if I ask you for tea and you give me coffee on the grounds "No, what you really want is coffee", I'm still going to be dissatisfied no matter how good the coffee is.
Sure, but that means that there is a problem with the voting system. If people whose preference is new Democrat > Newsom > Larry Elder have no effective way of casting a vote that expresses that preference without a high risk of helping Elder, then that's a problem.
One option would be that the new candidate has to get more votes than the No vote in the first question (ie count the No votes as votes for Newsom as the replacement)
Well, politics. Choice of the lesser weevil usw. One needs to practice gratitude that you weren't served dog piss, and that coffee is a lot closer to what you really want than most other random brown liquids.
> if you don't have diminishing marginal utility to power, a 10% chance at the California governorship looks fantastic.
Does it?
If you, a random guy got elected as governor, what are the chances you'd be able to accomplish anything that you really wanted to?
I get the impression politicians are all actors in this insanely complex system which depends heavily on human relationships, that literally nobody is in charge of. The power any one politician has (i.e. their ability to influence outcomes) stems far more from the relationships they, and their ability to build and manage those relationships, than anything else.
Being governor of california sounds like being CEO of a giant money losing non-profit, stuffed to the gills with ambitious people who'll all be trying to trick you into doing what they want. It's not like the state government is some chess board and the governor gets to move pieces around. I'm beginning to think that measuring power with a number is kind of silly, and instead it's like, we're playing chess in 10 millions, and being made governor only amplifies a certain kind of power you must already possess in order to do any thing.
If you end up somewhere 'above your pay grade' then i'd be the most likely outcome is you have no idea how to appoint, who to trust, who's trying to screw you, or how to do things like build a consensus around your objectives, so that the end result is likely that you just become hated for doing nothing, as rivals for your power successfully trip you up and get the media to blame you for failing.
That's kinda how I felt about Schwarzenegger. He had reasonable policy goals, but had zero idea how to build the political capital necessary to move the state even the slightest bit toward those goals.
Didn't he manage to do a couple things? I know that he at least had one training-wheels accomplishment, with getting some after-school-care ballot measure passed the year before the recall.
Then there's the much more fun National Enquirer style hypothesis, that he was caught boning the maid much earlier, and the Kennedys neutered him as the price of their silence.
There are still presumably people who aren’t career politicians but have the experience and friends necessary to do something with such a position. But I am curious why they didn’t
I think both were way above their Peter Principle level as CEOs, so it's just as well they flamed out in politics, for the sake of their ultimate reputation. Now we can all say "oh what might have been!" without some ugly reality of what actually was making us sad.
As a libertarian, I'd be happy to just veto stuff all day long. I'm unelectable in the first place, so I have no reason to not do the right thing in the first place.
As nice as that sounds to people against the standard California Democrat stances, the reality of that approach would be the legislature overriding vetoes all day long. The better approach would be to use the bully pulpit and standard politics to promote better options and convince/shame the legislature into making better rules. That takes connections and support, which puts us back to square one of making it useful to be governor.
I mean, yeah, you can obstruct to a certain extent. You might also tick off the legislature to the point that they streamline the override process and just start passing crazy things even faster.
Donald Trump is the perfect example of this. He had no idea how to manage the massive bureaucracy, his subordinates resigned when asked to do harmful or illegal things, and he wasn't that successful in implementing his agenda. When he did get things done they were things that mainstream Republicans wanted like conservative judges and tax cuts.
He couldn't even get things done which were clearly legal and within his power. Cancelling DACA seems like an obvious no-brainer, but the Supreme Court wouldn't even let him do that.
For a guy who was supposedly a wannabe dictator, Trump couldn't get a Team R Congress to repeal Obamacare, much less fund The Great Wall of Ignorance.
For nearly eight years, Team R railed against the evils of Obamacare. Then, when they had solid majorities in both houses of Congress and a Team R president, no more talk, no more excuses, they couldn't get it done. Pathetic! (and I say that as one who sees Obamacare as perhaps the best that a late-stage oligarchy would able to accomplish under the circumstances and considering entrenched interests involved).
"couldn't" get it done? Republicans used to put up symbolic votes against the ACA all the time. The instant they got power, they lost interest in repealing it. What could this mean other than... they never really opposed it, they just wanted their base to see them opposing it.
Glad to see I'm not that alone in having this opinion of him. Trump's greatest weakness as a politician, which I think also runs all through his career, is his complete inability to hire and keep the loyalty of a cadre of competent subordinates. Even people who were ideologically very close to him, and had strong personal reasons for wanting to stick with him, ended up hating him. He must be a complete asshole as a boss. As long as he can make things work as a one-man operation, or a Messiah directly preaching simple sermons to a million groupies who don't really know him and aren't expected to be active lieutenants managing his army, he does OK. But as soon as he tries being captain of a ship, something about the way he interacts with them makes his entire bridge crew revolt and start shooting at each other, and then the ship runs into the iceberg while the 2nd Officer is trying to strangle the navigator.
After decades of work, he still runs what is essentially a small family business. He can't keep any talent required to run a business with thousands of employees. (Nearly every business that jumps to mind when people see "Trump" on it is actually the name being licensed out.)
It works out as a pretty solid move if you're a cynical asshole who doesn't care what other people think, but I don't think there are very many people who genuinely think that way.
This; as part of my job I work a lot with relatively senior people at a fairly wide range of companies, and one of their most consistent complaints is an inability to accomplish their goals. At first I thought this was false modesty, but the more I see the more I'm convinced that most large organisations actually run on a model closer to an ant hive or school of fish than what the org charts tell you.
There's a story, maybe apocryphal, maybe not, about a particular head of the US federal exective branch who had zero executive experience. When confronted with the bankruptcy of a certain very large automaker, one who made a bunch of cars no one wants to buy, this newbie exec looked at how well Honda Civics were selling and asked 'Why can't they just start making something like a Civic?'
I don't know if it actually happened, but it certantly sounds right to me, both on the part of the newbie exec not understanding that you can't just pick up your pen and phone and make an org change because your name plate says so, and because I've seen enough large orgs to know that some types of change are just outside of the realm of the possible.
There is a story which is straight from the horse's mouth about a certain very large automaker who hired a famous and highly qualified executive for the specific purpose of driving much needed reforms. A couple of years of ignominy and failure later, that executive said that the only people in the whole company who wanted any reforms were the people who interviewed him for the job.
<i>4. Californians are lucky Peter Thiel isn't a Democrat, because his mind is minmaxed for spotting opportunities like this, and you can bet he would have gotten involved here if he could have.</i>
I keenly remember when Thiel was going to influence Trump to pick all these awesome contrarian technocrats and instead he picked a bunch of mediocre hangers-on and FOX commentators.
And I note his current pet project, JD Vance, has approximately 100% name recognition from blue checks and 10% name recognition from Ohio primary voters, who are flocking to the established local actual-crazy-guy over a Yalie who left the state after college and wrote a book about how shitty it was but is now pretending to be crazy.
Mandel isn't actually crazy, just pretending. But, yeah; Vance's campaign is ineffectual to the extreme, and is extremely unlikely to fail because he is, in fact, substantially to the left of Mitt Romney.
Honestly speaking, I have seen nothing but hot air from Vance. What I personally would want to see is what specific proposals does he have, how will these proposals result in concrete and material benefits to the average frustrated Ohioan, and how does he plan to implement these proposals.
Instead, all I hear is vague talk of values and families, which is all well and good but tells me nothing. That in turn to me is a signal that, if elected, Vance is going to act just like any other replacement-level Team R politician, with perhaps a slightly different rhetorical cast.
Okay, you fascinate me strangely. Why is Mandel crazy? His Wikipedia article doesn't tell me much, apart from him having a few failed runs at campaigns and being involved in the usual political storms in a teacup over election campaigning re: calling your opponents names, pretending you did X, Y and Z, and repurposing money/resources to personal use.
What did he do that is particularly nuts? Or is it just his positions on abortion, gay rights, and climate change you are referring to?
"Abortion
Mandel is anti-abortion.
Health care
Mandel has called for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. In a campaign advertisement during his 2012 Senatorial run, Mandel claimed opponent Sherrod Brown "cast the deciding vote on the government takeover of health care". Politifact has labeled as false the claim that Brown cast the deciding vote for the act. The description of the act as a government takeover of health care, by Mandel, has been labeled by Politifact as "nonsensical" and a "myth".
Environment
Mandel rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. He has referred to climate change research as "riddled with fraud" and has vowed to fight attempts to advance clean-air standards.
Mandel has called for what he terms as "aggressive and responsible" energy exploration that protects "the air we breathe and water we drink" while reducing environmental regulation. He supports the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Mandel is a supporter of expanded coal plants and has criticized what he has termed as "radical" environmental groups.
LGBT rights
Mandel opposes same-sex marriage, saying in 2012 that he will "protect the sanctity of marriage" and "this is a fight that I will never, ever back down." He is against openly gay people serving in the military, and voted against workplace and housing discrimination protections for gay and transgender people in 2009.
Foreign policy
In 2012, Mandel said that he disagreed with plans to set a "date certain" for withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, also stating that "at some point in time, we have to take the training wheels off and we have to allow those countries to stand on their own two feet."
I call him "crazy" because of how lockstep he is. I don't call someone crazy just for supporting Trump, I call them crazy if they backed 100% of the stolen election bullshit. I don't call someone crazy for opposing Democrats, I call them crazy if they can't stop calling Muslim Democrats "Hamas spokesmen." I don't call someone crazy for being skeptical of some COVID measures, I call them crazy if they oppose 100% of them, even those proposed by their Republican governor.
8 hours ago he tweeted "masks are a form of child abuse." This, to me, is crazy.
People who grew up in southern Ohio don't have any illusions that it's not dirt poor and dysfunctional; I don't know that him writing a book about his ugly background is going to alienate him with the locals. It's like when an old Jewish guy cracks a joke about Jewish mothers: he gets away with it because he very well knows whereof he speaks.
> Maybe you should actually be scared of the California Democratic Party and its demand that no Democrat stand as a replacement for Governor Newsom? I think this makes sense if you want a future career in California state politics; probably they can blacklist you forever if you cross them. But I wasn’t expecting to have a future career in California state politics, neither were you, and probably neither was Kevin Paffrath. That’s why we would have been able to take this weird opportunity that all the real politicians turned down. Also, given the level of competence they’ve shown here, having the California state Democratic Party out for your head is probably the surest path to a long and healthy life.
This is the key part, IMO. The opportunity is only desirable to people who want power within the Californian political system, but the costs are higher on those who... have a career engaged with the Californian political system. Without disputing that there surely are people whose expected value exceeded Paffrath's, I'd bet the candidate space is fairly small. Maybe a few thousand people or so?
Even smaller when you realize that Angelynne and Gary Coleman and various other B-or-lower-list celebrities already made their run 18 years ago (but Caitlyn Jenner had to wait until this time).
"But I wasn’t expecting to have a future career in California state politics, neither were you, and probably neither was Kevin Paffrath."
But the thing is, suppose you get a candidate like Joe Average, stand-in for Newsom, with party backing (just about, as they really want Newsom to survive). What are my positions? What are the issues I care about? If elected, what will I do? (1) Niceness in general (2) Nothing much past keeping any crazies from polling better than Newsom (3) Warming the seat until the Democratic Party picks a real candidate it wants to run.
Out of a bunch of similar "who the heck is that, I never heard of him?" runners, why should the long-suffering people of California pick you over, say, "Oh, that's that guy off Youtube? The one who dressed up as an elf?"
I would think most sane Democrats who don't want to see the state burn would go NO / Faulconer.
He's not some rando vanity candidate - or a far right loon. He was the mayor of demographically diverse, largely safe and orderly, San Diego - probably the best run city in California.
Which makes it even more hilarious that he's polling so low.
My theory is the normie California managerial class sees a "R" next to the name and is immediately revolted, and the more sophisticated politicos think that he would have a much better shot at re-election than any of the other meme candidates.
I know some Democrats who say that Faulconer is the best candidate, but that in the unlikely event that Dianne Feinstein ever dies, the governor will choose her replacement, and a GOP governor would choose a GOP replacement, and flipping the Senate to the GOP would be really bad.
Is the California GOP really that crazy? I seem to remember GOP-led California being pretty well managed in ye olden days, but I suppose being the minority party can make you weird, and ever since the Trump nomination I guess I have no idea what to think about the Republican party anymore (and I'm a Republican.)
I think there's a theory of base-level competence, which the leading party in whatever state has to meet. The lights need to stay on, the garbage needs to get picked up, etc. Is the California GOP up to that level of competence?
(My personal opinion of Newsom is mostly formed by being downwind from California and having our air quality suck all summer. And all last summer. And the summer before. Yes, climate change, etc., but fix SOMETHING.)
There's some sane CA GOP politicians in Orange County and San Diego (Faulconer), but on the state level much more insane than places like MD, VT or MA. Their only platform is really lower gas taxes and hardcore NIMBY. Better policies than Dems on crime and law and order IMO, but that takes a backseat to the other bad policies.
It's actually interesting how deep blue places like MD/VT/MA have decent Republican parties while places like NY and CA have insane GOP. I don't know what the commonality here is.
My theory is that Republicans in MA, VT, and MD are more moderate is because those are all small states with relatively evenly distributed populations. Just like conservatives on college campuses, they're forced to be more moderate, polite, and accommodating in order to avoid being cast out of their social and professional networks as a pariah. Republicans are both statewide and local minorities.
Contrast this with California and New York, large states with extraordinarily pronounced urban/rural divides. Republicans in California may be heavily outnumbered statewide, but dominate in the communities they actually live in. The interior of the state is, in many ways, as hardcore Red Tribe as anywhere in the country. There's no real incentive to moderate because Democrats don't really travel more than 20 miles inland unless they're driving to Vegas or the mountains, and they're always going to lose the statewide elections anyway. My understanding is that New York (and other states, like Virginia and Oregon) has a similar dynamic, but I'm not familiar enough with up-state politics to state with any confidence.
This also makes me wonder if the same happens in reverse. It makes intuitive sense to me that a Democratic Party in a rural state based mostly around a handful of isolated college towns would be more extreme than a Democratic Party that's forced to interact with a GOP majority in more mixed, suburban environments. But, having lived in big blue cities in big blue states all my life, I don't have a strong sense of red state dynamics
First of all - not sure if that's referring to the politicians or the general populace - but either way, I'd think it's much more likely that they're actually more moderate, not just putting on a fake "front". I don't think Charlie Baker is secretly a MAGA populist.
Fair enough. Forced may be too strong a word. I'm mostly speaking from my own experience as a right-libertarian on college campuses. I often felt the need to present myself as more moderate and agreeable than I really was. I wasn't nefariously lying about my true intentions or anything, but the incentives acting on me certainly had a significant effect on how I expressed my politics publicly. And now that I'm living and working in an environment much more in line with my personal beliefs, I've noticed I'm not quite as good at "reaching across the aisle" as it were. It feels like those skills have atrophied from less strenuous effort.
Native Upstate New Yorker here. A couple of decades ago, New York Republicans were largely sane and decent at governing, and popular upstate. Now, the usual pattern is Democratic local politicians in the cities, and the Trump base in the rural areas around them. There’s broad awareness that nobody at the state level gives Upstate much thought, which is probably why Trump’s support was as strong as it was.
The new Gov is from Buffalo - first upstate governor since FDR - but my friends who still live there don’t expect much from her.
Ok but don’t come crying if that attempt at 4D chess gives you Gov. Larry Elder.
Or just have a party with the balls to tell / beg / convince / bribe their grand old dames to step down when they have a chance to choose their own replacement (*cough* RBG *cough*)
She might get caught out in sunlight, or she might loose track of the earth from her native town when her coffin is being shipped to DC, might get tricked into going to a beach and end up counting all the grains of sand. Lots of possibilities, really.
Yes this is correct. NO on general principles, and Faulconer as the clearly most qualified candidate. This will be my vote as a reasonably left-libertarian California.
FWIW my wife is a staunch Democrat and voted NO/blank as she did not care for any of the replacement candidates.
Glad to see there's some convergence in this [stag hunt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt) mess of a ballot. I'm kind of floored no one has fixed the process since the 2003 fiasco.
As a Californian progressive, this is exactly what I did, since Paffrath seems like a piece of shit NIMBY, and if we're in the alternative where Yes wins, then there are more Republicans than Democrats voting, so the only real choices are Republicans. On a side note, this recall needs reform so badly.
If people think Paffrath has that good a chance of becoming governor, I'll offer them 12:1 odds. I'll accept up to $200. (As an assurance that I'm trustworthy, I work at the Future of Humanity Institute, and my colleagues would expect me to honor bets like this, and if I didn't pay, you could ruin my reputation by informing them.)
I think he wants to demonstrate that he's pretty confident that Paffrath doesn't have much of a chance which makes Scott's argument not as strong if true.
But he's not saying 'I believe the odds are 12:1'; he's saying 'I will offer you 12:1'. It makes sense that he'd try to get the best odds he can. 12:1 might just be a number chosen to sound tempting to somebody who believes it's truly 9:1.
I don't think he has a chance of becoming governor, but I do think he has a good chance of picking up a lot of disaffected people who want to send a protest vote message to the local party: we're not recalling Newsom but we want you to take us seriously.
This reminded me to check who won the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York and yep, it was Eric Adams, which did not surprise me at all.
Back when everybody was running and Yang was topping the polls, I figured that the voters would go for people they knew, people from local government or otherwise, and when it came down to Adams and Garcia, this was in line with my expectations.
Same way with Paffrath; I think Newsom *may* squeak past the recall, but I do expect Paffrath or some other 'random' candidate to chalk up a lot of votes as people want to express dissatisfaction with both Newsom's governorship and how the Democratic Party are treating them re: not permitting any other candidate to run with party backing.
I would think that most people voting for Paffrath are actually your standard-issue MSNBC-watchers who think that voting No on recall, and then voting for the guy with the D after the name is how you show loyalty to the party.
Is Peter Thiel really so ideologically attached to the Republican Party that he wouldn't have switched party registration to run? It seems like he totally could have run, so either he didn't see it or it wasn't worth it to him given the controversy it would stir up.
Probably meant that he wouldn’t win as a Democrat, given supporting Trump. He does have two friends as senate candidates up an running now, (Vance and masters) suggesting he is interested in political power
The question is whether Peter Thiel can find anyone that he trusts to implement sufficiently Thiely policies. The overlap between "smart enough to agree with Peter Thiel on everything" and "dumb enough to want to go into politics" has to be pretty small.
I think if you're as well-known as Bloomberg or Thiel, switching parties to run in the easier lane doesn't really help - everyone always knew Bloomberg was basically a technocratic Democrat, and everyone already knows Thiel is a weird Christian libertarian Trumpian Republican. In Bloomberg's case, changing lanes helped because there was a formal Democratic primary and a formal Republican primary, and the Republican primary was easy to win. But in Thiel's case, there is no formal primary, and putting a D after his name was just going to make the wolves bay even louder for his blood rather than pick up many votes.
Switching parties might work if you stick with it and are a loner. Trump was a centrist D like D-Richard Gephardt until the 1990's, made the usual 'the party left me' switch, ran and governed on D-Gephardt's platform. And you could read Matt Braynard's pretty solid claim that the level of 2020 election fraud was higher than the margin of D victory.
I don't believe that Trump governed on a Gephardt-style platform. At least, the bill that is usually pointed to as the largest legislative accomplishment of the Trump era is the tax bill of 2017, which seems like it was very un-Gephardt-ian. (Perhaps the explanation though is that this bill was driven by Congress, and the distinctively Trump endeavors were things like tariffs and immigration policy, which probably were much more consonant with Gephardt.)
"At first, the hearing went smoothly for Braynard, who has the professional presentation of a data specialist. But then came state Rep. Bee Nguyen, a Democrat from Atlanta. It turns out she had been doing her own research. Citing an exhibit filed by Braynard that listed people who had voted but who supposedly had registered in Georgia and another state, she pointed out that several names were duplicated on the list. Then she said that she had looked up the first 10 names on the list and had found eight of these people listed in Georgia property records as residents. She reached one of them on the phone, she said, and he confirmed that he lived and voted only in Georgia. Nguyen said she verified this person’s voting record.
Taking another name from this list—a woman allegedly registered in Georgia and Arizona—she confirmed this person’s residence and voting record in Georgia, and she found another voter with the exact same name listed in the Arizona voter rolls, born in the same year but with a different birth date. She also identified another person on the list in a similar situation: same name, different birth dates.
In rapid-fire fashion, Nguyen continued on. She turned to the Braynard list of voters who he said had registered with postal boxes “disguised” as residences. She recognized one of the addresses as being around the corner from her home—a condo complex with a FedEx center on the first floor. (Some apartment buildings use a postal box-like system for their addresses.) A friend in the building sent her a list of residents of the complex. They were all on Braynard’s list, she said. And the same was true, she had discovered, for another condo complex with a FedEx center. On her own, she said, she had discovered that 128 names on this list—more than 10 percent of Braynard’s total number—were errors."
Where is this from? If you work somewhere you'd be fired for reading anything but D media, you could still read Charlie Peters' anecdote about how D-Daley's machine stole Illinois in 1960- 1) let the other guy vote first so you know how much to fake, 2) then raise the dead and print more ballots. The 2020 amateurs needed a suspicious pause between these two, but Daley was a pro.
There are laws about that in California - you can't run as a party member unless you've been in that party for something like 12 months. (Too lazy to look up details, but that's the idea.) 12 months before the filing deadline, the recall wasn't really on anyone's horizon.
My wish is that a close election shakes up the smug complacency of California Democrats.
The state is like a one-party mandated country, but unlike somewhere like China, government officials don't face any consequences for poor outcomes. China fired hundreds of local officials for poor COVID response for example. In California you can be a corrupt grifter and really nothing happens.
Take crime in California. The numbers are relatively middle of the pack vs. other states, but I recently did an analysis where I looked at county by country crime rates adjusted for demographics and income, and virtually every county in CA dropped to the very bottom / worst.
A country like China has the benefit of a standard or common conception of what constitutes good governance. It's hard to call it "incompetence" when your government makes a conscious decision to prioritize decarceration.
We really need to break the stranglehold of national parties on state and local politics. California needs a pro-development/pro-housing party and a slow growth party, that both align with Democrats at the federal level, but that contest state and local elections, and maybe even both run candidates for federal office with separate subscripts after the D (the top-two jungle primary system in California makes it easy to do this kind of thing).
The problem is that without two actual local party lines, you can't hold primaries, and run one candidate on each line, and actually figure out which direction the voters prefer (or let the factions figure out where exactly to split the difference to get half of the voters on each side). I remember in the Los Angeles race to succeed Villaraigosa, I eventually did support Garcetti, but it was a bit hard to decide between him and the two other Democrats that qualified for the four-candidate debates. And I suspect the situation for London Breed in San Francisco would be a bit clearer if the Board of Supervisors had a clear party split in her favor or against her.
It might. Newsom's first election (at least, the first one I heard of him in) was a runoff for San Francisco mayor, where he faced off against the Green Party candidate. I don't recall what triggered the runoff there, since it was not a federal office (and the federal jungle primary law didn't exist yet anyway, I think).
I still think it would be more helpful to make the factions more explicitly clear, so that we know whether there are specifically two factions, or specifically three, and so that we can be more sure whether electing this candidate or that one to city council or county supervisor will help or hurt the mayor in their goals, rather than having to read the tea leaves of what people are saying in their campaign ads, and what is hovering just below the surface.
I see your point, but such antics take creativity and independence, which are probably better qualifiers than blind obedience and adeptness at ass-licking and character assassination.
Expert level: Imagine a possible future where antics like this AREN'T necessary for political influence.
I'm already working on a novel where the dominant party is 4chan's "troll party", and the Church of GME is the biggest lender...
In a world where they're necessary, it doesn't take creativity and independence, it just requires you to hire some PR firm that makes up crazy stunts for you to do.
I was just about to post the same thing ! We need more elves in government. Perhaps then we'd finally get something done, even if it's cookie-cutter environmental policy :-)
I find it interesting that the strategy of the party that calls themselves Democrats was to intentionally limit the choices available to voters. Doesn't seem very (little d) democratic to me.
It turns out that two patriotic-sounding names picked from the same descriptor "Democratic Republic" over a hundred years prior convey very little info about the actual policies of their respective parties
I mean, party primaries have a long and established history within political parties with all sorts of democratic ambitions, despite their role in intentionally limiting the choices available to voters in the general election.
I don't think your comparison really fits the situation. There's a world of difference between whittling down a field of many contenders and attempting to dissuade the rise of contenders in the first place. The former is meant to give voters a choice, whereas the latter is meant to not. Certainly there's plenty of gaming the system that occurs, as well as times when there aren't any real primary challengers, but the point still stands.
Presumably the downside risk for political actors is that:
1. You run.
2. You lose and Newsom wins.
3. The enduring Newsom administration bears a grudge and ices you out.
And this risk doesn't necessarily have a symmetrical upside if e.g. Elder wins.
The interesting thing about this downside is it's proportional to how engaged you are with state government. So it's a very strong downside incentive for the sorts of people who are most natural candidates for governor—state-wide electeds, mayors and state legislators, etc. etc. etc. On the other hand, this risk basically doesn't exist for Kevin P.
This is a fascinating counterproductive incentive structure. Probably someone should fix it.
If you lie to somebody in an attempt to induce them to provide you with an economic benefit (for example by not imposing on you the cost of trimming your palm trees, as in his example), then that is fraud. Saying you're not the owner, or not the sole owner, or whatever, in the hope of discouraging a tenant from going after you, is absolutely fraud.
It's half-assed clumsy incompetent fraud, since land titles are public records, but it's still fraud...
Not being the owner doesn't remove any of the tenant's rights - he still has a legal right to trimmed trees, or he doesn't. I think the definition you're suggesting is overly broad. Like, if I tell my manager I won't be reachable on vacation because I won't have cell phone service when that's not true -- it might be inadvisable to that relationship, it's definitely dishonest, and I might get an economic benefit from it (because otherwise he'd expect me to work a bit over vacation), but I wouldn't call it fraud because it doesn't change anyone's legal obligations to anyone else, it's not criminal, and no one is taking a risk/investment they wouldn't take otherwise. But at any rate, the article didn't call this fraud, no one else on the internet seemed to call it fraud, so if this is the example of fraud (and I don't know if it is), it would at the very least be a non-central example that I think a lot of people would find misleading. But maybe there is another one.
Fraud has an unambiguous legal definition, and the word isn't really used outside of that definition, so it doesn't make sense to talk about what you'd "call" fraud.
If you use deception to induce somebody *not to exercise* one of their legal rights, to their detriment and your benefit, then you've committed fraud. It doesn't matter that you can't *remove* the right. And it doesn't matter *what* lie you told, either. "I'm not the owner" is fraud, and so is "my mother is sick" or "my dog ate the hedge clippers". None of those actually have any effect on the other person's rights, but that's not the question. The question is whether the false information you gave altered the other person's decision.
...and if your manager actually *has* a legal right to access to you while you're on vacation, and you falsely tell your manager that you won't be reachable, then that is also at least civil fraud, maybe criminal in some places. On the other hand, if your manager does not have such a right to begin with, and just tends to be pushy, then it's not fraud (in most places anyway)... because you haven't induced your manager not to exercise any enforceable right.
In the example given, the contract says it's the tenant's obligation to trim the trees. So the owner isn't trying to get out of a legal obligation. There's no enforceable right the the landlord is trying to get out of. The tenant is being pushy. Not fraud, then.
He says "Never, ever tell the tenant that you're the owner. You're just the manager." If taken 100% literally this would be a command to lie. But in the next bit he says (paraphrasing) that if confronted that they know you are owner, tell them you are one of the owners (he is married). So we know "never, ever" isn't 100% literal. Given that context, I think the advice he is ultimately trying to convey is "don't introduce yourself as the owner, but as the manager." with a dash of hyperbole. That would not be a lie. The Curbed author goes on to write "the overwhelming majority of Paffrath’s content consists of mundane tips that have a neutral or even positive effect on tenants". I haven't really watched anything where I felt he was encouraging someone to defraud tenants, and even this clip doesn't give me that impression when it is viewed in full context.
This particular subthread, by the way, can be taken as evidence for why you really _don't_ want to run for governor.
If you actually emerge as a possible threat to the powers that be, then suddenly an army of journalists will appear out of the woodwork to scrutinise everything you've ever said, written or done, and paint it in the worst possible light.
Amusingly, Scott's already got a small taste of that, but still implied in this post that it might've been a good idea for him to run. Of course, maybe it's mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I'm still somewhat surprised.
I think that 'induce them to provide you with an economic benefit (for example by not imposing on you the cost of trimming your palm trees)' is rather grossly misleading, because in that case it was in the context of a contract there the tenants were responsible for something and trying to weasel out of it. I don't think it is an example of the most integrity at all, but it's more a white lie than fraud.
Agreed. The Curbed article linked by Emily suggests the defrauding would be a reference to him telling tenants he's not the owner, just a manager. Strikes me as illegal (IANAL), but defrauding makes it sound like he's creating videos like "How to steal your tenants' security deposit even though they did nothing to the apartment."
Another consideration: if you ran as a "D" against the party's wishes, you would almost certainly be retributed against. The California state govt has a long history of political retribution (most of it gets no press coverage for obvious reasons). It would be as dumb as publicly standing up against the CCP as a business leader in China. Just suicide.
Just to check: you're implying that political enemies of the CA state government are jailed, killed, black-sited, framed for crimes, etc? Do you have a source on this?
There's something wrong with describing a factually correct statement as "maximally uncharitable." There's no haze of uncertainty or interpretation here.
“Fact-checking” an almost certainly intentionally hyperbolic statement with the passive aggressive “do you have a source for this” is indeed uncharitable.
Making a statement of the form "X would be as dumb as Y", where X is an important real-life action, and Y is intended to be hyperbolic, would be worse than uncharitable; it would be deliberate motte-and-bailey propaganda.
David, I was responding under the impression that Eöl meant that McKenzie was being maximally uncharitable to the CCP, rather than that McKenzie was being maximally uncharitable to scf0101.
(I wrote the above under the mistaken assumption that Eöl meant that McKenzie was being maximally uncharitable to the CCP, rather than that McKenzie was being maximally uncharitable to scf0101.)
Perhaps I should let scf speak, but I believe the post referred to "political retribution". I would understand "suicide" metaphorically, as in "career suicide".
Which sort of political retribution? I assume there's lots of retribution in the form of withholding party support for future political ambitions, which is why party member politicians didn't do it. But do they exact retribution in other forms, against non-politicians?
most non-politician challengers would be actors (Reagan, Schwarzenegger), so i suppose they have some kind of control over Hollywood and actors' guilds.
And I think "withholding" party support is an understatement, they would try to actively deny staff and funding even from other sources.
You'll have your reputation trashed, for starters.
Unless you have an absolutely flawless character, as attested to by every one of your exes, and have never ever expressed anything that could possibly be construed as a heterodox opinion, then you will be universally known to be a Nazi-sympathising rapist before the end of the week.
Well, see the trick is to *run as* a Nazi-sympathizing rapist. I'm not entirely sure how funny that actually is, since I'm not too sure how close we are to that actually happening.
Californian politics sounds crazy even by the standards of local politics, and also grudge-bearing and mean. Being a Democrat safe state means that the party feels like it can get away with milking the tears of orphans for their morning smoothie and the important work of knifing their rivals in the back and being petty about ever-decreasing circles of self-righteousness and the ordinary corruption of 'getting my girlfriend/boyfriend onto some plum quango at the expense of the public purse', because what are the people gonna do, vote Republican and kick 'em all out? Ha ha ha!
(I don't even know how to begin to describe whatever the San Francisco Board of Supervisors thinks it's doing, maybe there really is a Hellmouth there or something).
If you think the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is bad, wait till you hear about the San Francisco Board of Education. We think we have a good chance of getting two of the worst ones recalled soon, that's how bad they are.
Ah yes, the ones that wanted to get rid of racist highschool names? Including for a school named after Diane Feinstein? The original list of names had an Irish one on it, a guy I never heard of before, and he seems to have done something like write about the history of Irish music back in the 19th century. I have no idea what he did to have a school in California named after him, and I have no idea what he did that was so racist he had to be de-named.
Yeah, there must be something in the air or the water there.
The big question here is, Do the people of California want to keep Newsom as governor? Reading up about it, it seems that there have been a few attempts at recalls that never got anywhere, until this year. This year, for whatever reason or reasons, enough people were pissed-off enough to do something like sign up to the recall campaign.
Probably yes, everyone is tired of Covid, and the fires, and all the rest of it, and whoever is sitting in the hot seat is bearing the brunt of it. That happens to be Newsom.
However, then the Democratic Party in California does have a problem. Because if people *are* fed-up and blaming Newsom, they are also going to be angry at *you*. And doing the strong-arm tactics of "anybody serious who tries running, we're gonna break your legs (politically speaking)" is *not* a good look when the public want to know "so are you taking our concerns seriously, or are you treating us like mushrooms?"
Scott talks about running a spoiler candidate, but that won't get anywhere unless the Californian Democrats (and the wider party, it sounded like Biden etc. were rowing in behind Newsom to fight the recall) sit up and take notice. Because if they won't give people a choice, this is the perfect opportunity for a protest vote: no, we are not your tame spaniels who'll roll over and follow what you say.
The way this is set up sounds *great* for angry voters to go "No. 1 - don't recall Newsom (because we don't want the Republican candidates and we don't want the joke candidates)" BUT also "No. 2 - we're voting for the guy who brings you out in hives as the recall candidate, because fluff you Democratic Party in California, is why".
Paffrath is not a good candidate? He sounds like a joke? Well, (a) if the worst anyone can dig up in his past is "dressed up as one of Santa's elves and delivered flowers to a Youtube rival", then we're doing pretty good in today's cancel culture and (b) if nice reasonable Democrat supporters are going "Don't vote for Paffrath, for the love of God!", then it's Trump all over again - 'I can't stand the guy, but more importantly, these people who have annoyed the cranberry sauce out of me and are taking me and my concerns for granted and ignoring them *really* can't stand him'.
If the Democratic Party didn't choose a proper candidate to run if Newsom is recalled, then that sounds like they're afraid Newsom *will* be recalled and if given a choice, the electorate will boot him out and pick the replacement. But by trying to strong-arm the voters into "Newsom or no-one", they very much risk "well since you put it like that - stick it up your jumper, I'm voting for the one guy you all hate".
In which case a guy (or gal) running on "I don't really care about being governor, I'll serve the one year if elected then stand down for the Democratic Party really true candidate" is not what the people want and if they went on the list of candidates with the Party backing them, maybe they would pick up the concerned moderates - or maybe they'd throw fuel on the fire and make a protest vote even more likely.
I do think what needs to be addressed here is "the people of California are mad, why are they mad, and what can the Democratic Party do to make them not mad, and that does not mean 'you vote for who we tell you to vote for, peasants!' tactics" and not "oh, if only someone Nice had run, then we wouldn't get Youtube landlords and Republicans with a chance".
I don't think "the people of California" are mad. It only takes 12% signing a petition to get the recall to happen, and the petition missed this goal by the deadline. *However*, a judge happened to extend the deadline due to covid, at just the same moment as the dinner at the French Laundry went viral. I think it would be interesting for some pollster to poll a few thousand California registered voters so they can find a couple hundred that signed the petition, and ask what fraction of those people now regret having signed it last November in a fit of pique at the darkest moment of the pandemic, inspired by a clickbait news story.
I was surprised no actually big YouTube personality, like a Logan Paul, went for it. My sense of it is that Paffrath was a big enough deal to get name ID and traction, but not so big that the negative attention of a campaign could harm their career. Remember, Americans hate politicians---every celebrity who gets publicly involved in politics sees their career prospects damaged. Is a grueling, miserable campaign where you will get blasted by folks you're normally aligned with, attacked by the media, and have your career tainted with politics worth it? I doubt it
I sort of wonder what the story is with Caitlyn Jenner. (I mean, ever since I heard the name Kardashian, I've been wondering what's the story with Caitlyn Jenner, but the governor run is an even newer and weirder story to wonder about.)
It seems like someone really ought to circulate a ballot measure to reform the recall process. Probably the best way to do it is to automatically put the current Governor and the current Lieutenant Governor on the ballot of alternatives, whether they want to be or not, and only require other people to file to run. Having the current Governor on there solves the problem of the Governor losing the first half, but still getting more votes than anyone on the replacement ballot. Having the current Lt. Gov. on there solves the problem of the Governor being a transparently corrupt crook with a 30% fanbase but hanging on because there is no coherent alternative. The possibility of other candidates filing means that there is still a chance for new blood if there is really a popular revolt against the current political establishment.
They could get blowback for putting any actual effort into campaigning, though, or for not actively trying to sink their candidacy. If the Gov is bitter and vindictive enough.
>The point of VC funds is to help people who do have declining marginal utility to money act as if they don't
I have strong reasons to believe LPs think VC funds exist to provide returns and potentially coinvest opportunities. Was your comment more of a dig at VCs (which is totally warranted)?
I know you wrote this post in a sorta joking tone but I think it's worth mentioned that Kevin Faulconer is pretty much doing what you've suggested and he's a legit candidate with legit experience and not the least bit of an assclown. He was the mayor of San Diego and dealt with most of the issues that are now endemic across the state.
Faulconer just has the misfortune of being a career member of the party that has a dozen or more people running, so he couldn't get the party to coalesce around him. (Especially since the rank and file of that party at the statewide level doesn't have any interest in the sorts of things that matter in the one urban corner of the state where Republicans still matter.)
What I was trying to say about VCs was that although buying 25% of a company with a 5% chance of making a billion dollars and a 95% chance of nothing (expected value, $12.5 million) for $5 million is a really good deal, in practice nobody with $5 million wants to do that, because in most worlds they lose all their money and get nothing back, and the lure of a few worlds where they're super-rich doesn't compensate for that. But if you package a hundred of those deals together, then you can bet a few of them will succeed and it becomes more about simple expected money calculations.
Yeah, Faulconer seems fine, this was entirely about the Democratic side of the aisle.
Yea, portfolio theory is very much a real thing. I've never heard it talked about as a product of the declining marginal utility of money but I'm more of a finance type than an econ type. Maybe that's the underlying interaction driving diversification.
I think the chance of a failed campaign is a massive hit to personal reputation apart from just money lost which takes a special kind of person to be willing to do it. Billionaires maybe willing to lose money but they’re not willing to be the most hated person in the universe. I can only imagine the number of sexual harassment cases that will come out of the woodwork once someone starts to run for office, followed by claims of racism and on and on. A politician is built different
I honestly don't think that the characterization of Kevin Paffrath as a "landlord influencer" is entirely fair. His heavily politicized Wikipedia makes a big deal about it to try to leave a bad impression in the reader's mind, and I'm wondering if that figured prominently in your research. The term comes from a writer that did a piece on him in a trade publication a couple years ago, referring to him that way. What one author pigeonholed him as doesn't define the man.
I also don't think he has posted any videos showing how to "defraud tenants" (I've watch many but not all - he is prolific). He is quoted as saying that "most landlords sucks" and he has videos encouraging people to develop win/win relationships with their tenants.
A comparatively small percentage of his content in the past 2 years has to do with landlording. Most of it is more in the arena of financial education and real estate.
Lastly, his campaign had no telltale signs of being a vanity campaign. He has been aggressively and transparently campaigning the entire time, sharing aspects of it on YouTube and other social media as he crisscrossed the state. He did a 24 live stream that was the source of much of his campaign donations.
I believe that the available evidence on his channel shows that Kevin Paffrath is both sharp and shrewd and saw this opportunity that the Democrats left wide open.
There is some similarity, but if it was more directly analogous then this post would be asking "there's such a great opportunity here to be governor of California, so how come only 4 of the 50 candidates are rationalists?"
The California recall election is the absolute weirdest electoral game. It's a scenario where a potentially *tiny* minority can win an incredibly important election due to the sheer inconvenience of having to vote in a one-off.
It would be a stretch to say that Paffrath is running because his Wikipedia article got deleted last year ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Kevin_Paffrath ), but I think the basic idea holds: Paffrath wanted to boost his public profile, and "lucked" into a decent chance of getting elected governor.
This works if you're the one, and only one, "reasonable" Dem. But once the first person like that files, a dozen others figure "well, why not me then?" and it's all shot to hell.
If the candidate is some rando Internet personality who gives landlords tips on defrauding tenants and who is only running opportunistically, is the fact that he claims to support your preferred political party still a good reason to vote for him over a different-party candidate? If so, why? Is this based on a belief that the political game is zero-sum, or what?
Eight hundred miles long, with a projected cost (in 2011) of $23 billion. There are certainly dumber and more expensive ideas I could think of, like, say, a really fast train from Bakersfield to Fresno...
I don't know much about this, but I am sufficiently trusting in 538 to have adjusted for that that I'll bet you $100 at 3:2 odds Newsom stays (eg you give me $150 if he wins, I give you $100 if he loses). Offer open to anyone else interested if c1ue isn't.
538 was historically wrong in 2016 and they were directionally correct but factually wrong in 2020 - and the directional win was entirely a function of mail-in ballots.
As such, your reliance on that expertise is likely misplaced.
I'd be happy to take your money except it would then require exchanging identities.
Since I live in cancel happy country, I'll just have to sit back and take the victory lap when it happens.
I may be interested in getting on a bet with Scott and at these amounts I maybe would not care much if I lose (I certainly would be very unhappy to lose if the amount was in the hundreds of dollars, but I bet -- not literally, I don't want this bet to get recursive! -- so would Scott.)
Scott, I assume you would be respectful of people's privacy to a fault (you moved to substack to begin with due to your privacy being violated when the NYT doxxed you), so I am curious what you have in mind in terms of the logistics regarding this bet. Mind sharing it in general terms, and if I am willing to take the bet, we could discuss the details offline? (I don't know how Bryan Caplan does it with his, but he seems to mostly take bets with other economists he knows well, not with random commenters on econlog. That being said, I might not be so "random", I met you in person 3 times.)
538 gave Trump an almost 30% chance to win in 2016, and was correct on the popular vote, I wouldn't call that "historically wrong". And since when do mail-in ballots count differently?
Perhaps you weren't watching television on election night in 2016: nowhere was there a mention of Trump having any chance.
Nor was the shocked look on the faces of every single professional political predictor fake.
Nor is the "almost 30%" number correct - you got this from 538's own butt covering story in 2017. All the talk was about the path to victory - and 538 was consistent with ALL the other polls showing Trump had no chance. Equally, the downplaying of a 2% to 3% consistent undercounting of Republican votes is not a minor delta given the plethora of interviews, exit polls, online polls, etc etc. Nor was this a one time phenomenon: the same happened for in-person voting in 2020.
As for mail-in ballots: I am not a believer in mass outright fraud via mail-in ballots, but I am a believer that mass mail-in ballots encourages fraud and is a bad idea.
The manner by which mail-in ballots were introduced was also extremely not conducive to acceptance by the losing side.
But ultimately these issues will be resolved in the states and those shenanigans aren't going to slip through again, unchallenged, which is what matters.
538's model for this is way simpler than their presidential forecasting model -- it's pretty much just a weighted average of the polls by quality, minus a "house effect" that adjusts for the bias of polling groups *relative to other pollsters*. It doesn't take into account the possibility that Republicans might be undercounted by polls; there's not even enough data to try doing that, since there's been exactly 3 polls in the past month.
That being said, that's not at all where your prior should hedge towards in the absence of any data. California is a heavily Democratic state, so if there are few polls and they're all low-quality, then regardless of who's favored in them, you should put your money on the Democrat. This is doubly true since polls show Newsom has decent approval ratings.
If there is one thing that has been consistent about elections for the past many years - it is that non-Democrats are undercounted.
In this case, it is actually well understood by everyone that the issue is turnout.
The people who are angry are motivated to turn out - nobody else cares.
It is certainly possible that this won't be true, but let's face it: Newsom is simply not inspiring in any positive way.
Nor did you address the precedent: remember Gray Davis?
Davis also was a Democrat governor in California. Davis also faced a recall election and he lost. He didn't lose to Schwarzenegger - he lost the recall and Schwarzenegger was simply the most visible of the alternate candidates.
Was the bursting of the Y2K bubble plus the (Enron assisted) electricity crisis worse than the economic and societal maelstrom due to COVID?
You can bet on Newsom being recalled at only 20c at polymarket.com -- it's a crypto exchange so you don't need to give personally identifying information, and it's available to people anywhere in the world.
Even assuming you don't use a credit card to fund - you need to provide at least an email. The web site captures all kinds of other data as well; go to amiunique.org to see what just browser level info reveals about you. Actual surveillance would sample cookies etc - so if you use Google, Facebook, Twitter etc then there is no hope for anonymity.
On the wallet side: if you're using "pure" bitcoin, using the wallet for spurious transactions like a small bet means more opportunity to link the wallet to your real identity.
Can you be anonymous doing what you said?
Yes in theory, no for the vast majority of people.
You can interact directly with the contracts without using the Poly UI if you're worried (which I'm not, because, like the vast majority of readers here, I live in a country where betting is legal)
I wish more of the internet people I respect got involved in politics. But being a public figure sounds like my idea of hell and I imagine that's pretty typical in the community.
Scott's one of THE most public figures in the community, and he's still desperate to preserve the anonymity he can.
I remember very clearly that when Grey Davis was recalled, the Dem establishment tried the same thing, no candidate. Lt. Governor Buestamante tried running on a platform of "No on the recall, Yes on Buestemante"
It's interesting that Bustamante's political career went no where after that. He tried running for the Insurance Commissioner and lost.
So maybe based on precedent there was an idea of it's bad to be the guy who tries to be the insurance policy.
On the other hand, in the last 20 years, two Democratic governors will either have been recalled or be at risk of being recalled and replaced by a Republican. So it seems like the Democrats don't have a strategy other than grumble-grumbling about the will of the people.
The position of governor of California is nothing more than a scapegoat. It clearly doesn't afford enough power to fix anything or someone would have do so.
Scott is writing here as if he personally would like to be CA governor if he recognized a low cost opportunity to take the job. And I think that probably isn't true, but just as some jokes work best when told in first person, he's using it as a literary device of sorts. Really, having to be governor of California sounds terrible.
I really thing the best explanation is Paffrath is a much more serious and intelligent candidate than you're giving him credit for, and most people didn't seize this opportunity because most people aren't as ambitious and hard-working. Its ridiculous to dismiss him as a youtuber -- he's had success in other fields, his videos directly help people build wealth (not just for entertainment), and he has a strong policy platform
Stepping back from the object-level political discussion, I want to talk about the philosophy of “smart people should win” that underlies this post and several of your older ones. You’ve written about:
- How smart people could/should have seen the early Bitcoin boom coming and invested/mined some Bitcoin early,
- How smart people could have seen COVID-19 coming before the mainstream did (this is arguably the one people in this community did best at), and
- Now this post about how smart people could have had a decent chance of being governor of California.
In all these cases it feels like the issue isn’t intelligence per se, it’s more an issue of *knowing what to pay attention to*.
Generally speaking, it seems like it’s less about “forecasting the future value” of each of these scenarios (future price of Bitcoin, chance of COVID-19 being a serious worldwide pandemic, chance of being able to seriously get listed on the California ballot) and more about estimating whether it’s worth putting in the effort to forecast that in the first place, instead of just focusing on your day-to-day life as you usually do.
COVID is arguably the most obvious of all of these, given that the terrifying lockdowns in Wuhan and its spread across the rest of China was being decently well-reported in the media. Most people seemed to be using their incorrect heuristics from previous pandemic scares, where pandemics were either mild (e.g. swine flu) or heavily localized (e.g. SARS, Ebola); those that didn’t (many of them in this community) took it seriously enough to be better prepared.
But the other two? I don’t think people here had heuristics that were well-tuned for bringing those opportunities to conscious attention. Bitcoin was weird and niche and annoying to set yourself up with back then. And I’ll bet that most people in California don’t have a clear enough sense of how state politics works to know how to get yourself listed on the ballot. (Though maybe richer people would?)
It might be worth focusing on how you can train yourself to actually see these opportunities clearly enough to justify spending time validating them, without constantly wasting time on fake “opportunities” that go nowhere.
I didn't just ignore bitcoin, I actively spent time writing comments on the internet about how it was a stupid pyramid scheme exploiting gullible people, back when it first crossed the $1 mark.
What's the lesson here? Even excluding bitcoin, if I'd put a bit of money into every stupid bubble I heard of, at the moment I first thought it was a stupid bubble, and then held forever, then I'd be a very rich man now. I'd probably have a few worthless beanie babies, but I'd also have a lot of AAPL, GOOG, FB et cetera. My "stupid bubble" judgments are probably right more often than they're wrong, but honestly I'm probably barely doing better than 50-50, and when I'm wrong I'm leaving 10x, 100x, 1000x returns on the table.
Amen to this. Opportunities on the sheer scale of bitcoin are very rare and, not knowing in advance that bitcoin was that rare opportunity, I only researched enough to see that "damn, the bitcoin wallet is stored in plaintext? That's stupid."
Bitcoin is all about survivorship bias. The historical charts don't count the number of people who lost everything in hacks, scams, exchange failures, etc.
Yes, that's a question I'd like Scott to address directly - if he had a do-over, would he in fact take a stab at becoming Governor of California?
I'm with you, and no. "Governor" is a job that requires particular skills and experience that I do not have. I'd like to think I'd do better than Donald Trump, but probably not as well as Herbert Hoover. I think I, and you, and Scott, have better *ideas* about how California should be run than do Newson, Elder, Paffrath, or Faulconer. But the bit where I stand on the bridge of the Sacramento Enterprise and say "make it so", ends with it not being made so. The bit where I try to hire a bridge crew as talented and cooperative as that of the USS Enterprise (any of them), I can do that for an engineering team and probably for a spaceship but not for a state government.
And, what's the value proposition for being a *bad* governor? It pays a little more than my current job, but not enough to justify the aggravation. It makes me ten million enemies the day I take the job, some of whom are e.g. skilled journalists who will make a career of doing to me what Cade Metz made only a brief hobby of doing to Scott. It probably damages my reputation, and my ability to succeed in my chosen career. And, yes, it sets me up for a "career" as an ex-Governor, which can be lucrative if you do it right but it's not what I want to do and it's also something I'd be particularly good at.
I think this is true of an awful lot of people who could plausibly exploit this opportunity, and most of them know it.
I was in this exact situation. I ran. I deliberately ran no campaign. And I won. I'm still regretting it.
The stakes were lower: councilor on the student government at university. A very large student government handling something like multiple millions of dollars a year, but just a student government nonetheless. I didn't want to run, since my friends had horror stories about their time in student government. But my closest friend still wanted to reform it, and was running to be president. So when they asked me to join them, I accepted because what are friends for? (It also helped that he handheld me through the process of gathering enough signatures to become eligible to run - beware trivial inconveniences and all that, plus I'm about as sociable as you'd expect from a SSC/ACX reader.)
I deliberately ran no campaign. No appearances at the scheduled debate, no advertising online, no canvassing people in the dorms, no posting flyers, and definitely no walking up to people and asking for a moment of their time to hear the good word. (I hate that stuff, especially when I'm running to class, and I didn't want to force any other introverts to go through it either). All I did was write up the candidacy statement you have to put on the ballot, the one that goes next to your name and in a couple hundred words explains why people should vote for you. Even then I kind of half-assed it, since I only started late and almost missed the deadline. But I wrote something I would like, talking about what I was going to do and how we weren't getting much done with our multi-million dollar budget. I deliberately avoided writing like the other candidates: too many words, too much focus on which groups you're from and how you've had previous student government experience in high school, too much focus on what groups have endorsed you and which people you'll stand up for... the position was to be a general representative, so I wrote for the ordinary student instead.
And I won, first place, against a well-established political machine. I'm still kind of shocked about it. I joked with my friend that I was running an experiment to see if any of the conventional wisdom was right: you need a campaign, you need to appeal to these sorts of people since they're the only ones that vote, you need endorsements from these groups to win over those people, you need to attend the debate to make it clear which groups you favor and disfavor to win their endorsements... all of that was wrong. Turnout in our elections was as low as ever, something like 15 to 20%, but in our uni that still meant >5000 voters. The last debate I had attended the year before had something like 6 people in the audience, and every single one of them was there as a friend of one of the candidates running (I should know, I was one of them). The debate for this election, the one I had skipped as pointless, had something like ~100 people watching. The set of activists who cared about identity politicization enough to vote by club endorsement lines? A few hundred at most. This was the fearsome political machine, the one that had won every previous election for years, that I had defeated with a zero effort attempt to speak like an ordinary person.
And there were a dozen candidates! There were like 8 independents! And somehow none of them had worked out that they could do things differently from the political machine and *not* buy votes by the group, and instead speak to people like they were individual people. I had found the proverbial $100 bill on the ground, and all it took was one candidate statement that talked about issues instead of identities. It was even worth more than $100 because of the stipend (something like $10 000 for a year of attending weekly meetings), and I think I wrote and edited my candidacy statement in like a few hours tops.
And yet none of it was worth it. This post is already going on too long, but in short everything people are speculating about, about why someone might not want to be in politics - all of that is true. Tomorrow I might have enough energy to rant about all the time I wasted, but in short everything you're saying about long meetings, inability to actually change things [remember I was once councilor in a council of 12], pointlessness of everything we *were* doing, making enemies by being a competitor to the political machine, having to be surrounded by people who hate you, being shouted at whenever you do speak up - all of it is true. We might have been able to change things if the set of candidates my friend had organized had all won, and we swept the council, but instead I was basically the only person who won and I was completely alone in the most toxic work environment I have ever known. It was almost as bad as the things my friend saw in his time in student government, like the time the council shouted at a gay police officer that it was not his job to protect people if that meant protecting Republicans. (Note that this was in 2019, not 2020. Apparently the police officer is used to things like this, which is why he quit attending our council meetings as police department representative. I eventually realized he had made the right decision and quit as well.)
All of this is to say that (a) there are $100 bills on the ground, and (b) they're left lying there for a reason. Taking a position in government has brought nothing but disillusionment to me, an inability to fit into activist circles and a wish I had spent more time working on my own things. Epicurus was right, politics was a mistake - we should neither seek power over others nor support those who do in our name. To do so is to lose yourself in a game without any sense of satisfaction, only the bitterness of humiliation. Fundamentally, that is what the game is about: dominance and submission, hierarchy and humiliation, the powerful and the powerless. Every round of it is a net destroyer of happiness: the powerful get less schadenfreude than the powerless feel pain. And every round creates the desire for another round from the slighted, an endless cycle of vendetta. I am glad to be rid of it.
(About the only good thing that came of this was that I got to donate $10 000, my entire office stipend, to the Coronavirus Relief Fund when the pandemic started. From an Effective Altruism standpoint, that might have made the entire thing worth it, all the time and fear and humiliation. Might have. I will not do this again.)
Oh man, I had blocked from my memory my time involved in student government.
Slightly different story, because we were all incompetent and Peter Principle'd into it, but some of the people refused to recognize their incompetence. I personally paid hundreds of dollars (that I didn't have) out to other people to paper over ruinations that we would've done to them.
Well, I can only say: thanks for trying! Even if it failed in this case then you at least really tried to improve things, what is still much better than a typical person.
Hopefully your other attempts were less soul-crushing.
I keep thinking that U.S. politics is awful and toxic and that it should be easy to do better than the average candidate just by saying you want various things that most Americans also say they want.
Well, no, not actually easy, because you have to somehow communicate with voters, otherwise attack ads with blatant lies/misrepresentations will be voters' only impression of you. You got to speak directly with voters on the ballot, a hugely valuable advantage you won't get running for public office.
Still, your post makes me think that because modern American politicians are so extreme, it's not hard to win if you can communicate with voters. But this brings us to the reason reasonable people don't run for office: you have to deal with toxic nasty people during the election and for as long as you hold office.
I wonder, though: what if your friends were running and also won? What if we not only had governor Alexander, but also Rep. Upon Water, Rep. Deiseach, Rep. Pham, Rep. Friedman, Rep. Scizorhands and so on? Okay, maybe we're not all friends here exactly, but it's not hard to get along better than the current crop of politicians :)
P.S. I've long advocated electoral reform - range voting, approval, proportional representation, and last but not least, Simple Direct Representation. But now I'm thinking maybe I missed something important: a reform that allows every candidate to say 280 characters on the ballot (it can't be too long: can't have voters parking in the voting booth reading for an hour).
Vice President Kamela Harris is the smartest person in the world. Look at an actuarial life table for men aged 78 to 86. About half of 78 year old men in the US don't make it to 86.
Then consider that former vice presidents have a very good chance to be nominated as a presidential candidate by their party. Major party nominees always have a good chance to win.
She has multiple paths to the Oval Office, and in the meantime she was elected to fill a job with few responsibilities, so she can avoid association with the outcome of bad decisions. All she has to do is show up.
She has placed herself perfectly to become the next president. Hats off.
Biden doesn’t have the diseases or disabilities that a lot of 78yo men have. And his parents lived very long. So he’s likely to live longer than most. That sad such a disability or disease would disqualify him even without dying
A deep sub-point, but look at the ref to Thiel's Zero to One book on the old SSC.
My short on-topic point is - these actors/celebs/ceos/VC and PE etc. people don't want to be governor. It is simply not something they want to do with their time. The model is that they purchase legislation through think tanks and campaign donations if they're interested and rich enough and they do so for the narrowest band of policy which specifically relates to themselves. The idea of generalised power is unimportant to them, so they don't think to go for it. The king has servants to take care of that sort of thing! Maybe?
But primarily!
Thiel makes the argument that monopolies can treat their workers better and at the time the plight of Amazon warehouse workers who have timed bathroom breaks, get fired by the app on their phone, have to pack an unreasonable number of boxes per hour, and are subject to anti-union thuggery - not to mention the drivers who piss in bottles and have to now assemble all kinds of furniture in 12 minutes on site somehow....
I think everyone/Thiel is thinking of the $200k salary ping pong playing Google employee with a meditation lego room....but the reality is that monopolies are terrible for workers in the same way kings are terrible for serfs and peasants.
This is a huge bias of that type of person who basically see the entire lens through the world of the wealthy and the ownership class while regular humans are just cattle. How could workers ever get nicer conditions without a monopoly daddy figure to give it to them? Why it is that dirty U' word of Unions or the G word of Government who can mandate better conditions.
Thiel would knee-jerk style throw up in his mouth if he had to think about unions by himself, except as the evil boogeyman here to slay the financial aristocracy. A primal fear in the wealthy business circles exists where there is a mind-killer style effect of unions=evil and all they can see are villagers with pitchforks from their ancestral memories of owning 100% of everything while doing less than 0.001% of the work.
Did Rockefeller get so rich that he decided on an 8 hour work day, a 5 hour work week minimum wages, or paid sick leave? I don't think so. Every single good thing that has ever happened for lower class workers was something they fought for and forced the government or employers to give them. I recall them being so rich that they hired thugs to murder union leaders from the 1890s-1930s major factory and farmer labour movements.
This poor person blindness is a deep affliction in 'business' thinking and the wants, dreams, and perspectives of the poor simply don't exist in their world.
In the end it is no surprise that 'rich VC guy' has entire system and way of thinking where he is the virtuous hero leading humanity into the future. No surprise there. I recall the old kings saying they had a divine right to rule and special bloodlines and such. How is this any different? It is just another ideology of the wealthy that 'somehow' just so happens to strongly support their own existence. While ignoring any and all common thought of ideas like minimum wage or unions as 'mind-killer evil throw a tantrum and kick you legs around wildly' type ideas which must be expunged from your mind to maintain PURITY!
It is uncharitable, but I think there's a degree of truth there, the main reason that libertarians are ever extremely unpopular. Even those of them who aren't outright evil still likely think deep inside that they're better than most people and as such deserve better outcomes. They state that their preferred policies would make everybody else better off too, perhaps at a somewhat slower rate, which isn't too convincing, because they're expected to make such a claim whether it was true or not.
Thiel could be so ignorant of the world around him that he doesn't know it sucks to be an Amazon warehouse worker. He could have an ideological perspective that refuses to connect that unpleasantness with the kinds of strategies he advocates and practices, due to all the ways we already know politics can bias our thinking. Or he could be fully aware that model breeds those results, and actively lying about the fact.
I don't think Thiel is stupid, I don't think he's a liar, and I suspect he would find being
affected by common cognitive biases far lesser accusation than either of those. I know most ACX readers would.
Either the premise of this argument is untrue and monopolists really are a significant driver of improved working conditions, there's something else at play that's not bias, ignorance, or dishonesty, or this is in fact a maximally charitable way of presenting a disagreement with Thiel's position.
Deleted post is mine, sorry, screwed up formatting. post is here:
From what I've experienced, amazon warehouse jobs aren't significantly worse than any other warehouse job, while paying significantly better. The added pay is sufficient that there's usually a waiting list for the amazon warehouse jobs, and whenever they hire extra workers, several people in my social group immediately take them, even though it means losing hours at their normal (unionized) job and potentially irritating their normal employer. They usually describe the jobs with great excitement, about how good the presents they'll be able to afford will be this christmas, stuff like that.
And frankly it's therefore always seemed very strange to me that 'amazon warehouse job' is the go-to example of horrible exploitation by a monopolist. If my friends could get permanent jobs at the local amazon warehouse, they would, gladly, but apparently the jobs are too in-demand.
I have a couple theories as to what's going on. First, that *anything* involving Bezos automatically gets politicized hatred, and so when an amazon warehouse worker gets injured it's a political, polarizing event that can be laid at the feet of capitalism and evidence that amazon is horrible, but when a warehouse worker who works for some random shipping company gets injured, nobody thinks of it as *evidence in the ideological conflict between the evil silicon valley libertarians versus the good-natured marxists*. They certainly don't blame the employer. They blame the fact that sometimes when you do manual labor, you get hurt, and it doesn't really matter what kind of manual labor it is. The idea, to them, of treating labor injuries, or poor working conditions, or whatever, as gristle for politics would never occur to them. They just collect their 2 weeks of disability pay and go back to work.
The people in my social group are pretty red-tribe, pretty lower class. Maybe it's that they're not sophisticated enough to understand the way in which they're being exploited. But every time they talk about the amazon jobs, I always express a little bit of surprise at their enthusiasm. I remember in particular one occasion where I read through some article about a journalist who got a job at an amazon warehouse to document the poor working conditions, and my friends laughed and laughed at the journalist's complaints, explaining that most of the job's so-called hardships were true of any job involving manual labor whatsoever, from construction to roadwork to dockworking to warehouse operating, and the only reason the 'liberal' journalists think amazon jobs are uniquely bad is because they've never done a day's labor in their entire life. Or if they did, if they helped their mom move a couch for instance, they didn't have an evil political enemy to instinctively blame the resulting back pain on.
I'm not exactly sure what to believe. But it makes me very suspicious of people who use amazon warehouse jobs as an example of a horrible working experience. I suspect that there are literally millions of jobs that are worse. I don't really know what to do with this info re: Thiel. But I do know that telling two people who want to voluntarily enter into a contract together that they're not *allowed* to do, because the contract is actually deeply exploitative...
it's dangerous, because oftentimes you're wrong, oftentimes you don't actually know their circumstance as well as they do. I'm reminded of the whole payday loans thing, where upstanding kind liberal advocates recognized that payday lenders were horribly exploitative, 'tricking' poor people into high interest loans, and so they decided to heavily regulate the practice in cali, and the result was... a lot of poor people missing their rent payments, or other bills, because of a lack of liquidity. They became worse off. And that makes me extremely suspicious about that whole category of stuff. The idea that people would voluntarily sign up to be exploited is just weird. You can't do a cost benefit analysis on a decision until you know the opportunity cost. And from what I can tell, those horribly exploitative amazon warehouse jobs that somehow have waiting lists, are significantly better than other jobs with the same requirements, and so the people who take the jobs *genuinely are* eager to get them. Because maybe they'll end up with back pain, sure, but that was gonna happen at any job they could get, while at least amazon pays them a high amount for sacrificing their long-term health. Forcing Bezos to drastically change the nature of those jobs, to be less 'exploitative', would mean people like my friends have to choose their second job preference, which is pretty much strictly worse.
Sorry for the rambling rant. I don't really have a coherent argument here, just lots of disparate observations. But all of it makes me extremely skeptical of the whole... idk... the whole narrative? I guess? That is being pushed above. All these disparate ideas... People used to literally kill themselves by the thousand voluntarily working on ship voyages with approximately a 35% chance of dying and approximately a 30% chance of being captured by Algerian pirates and sold as slaves in dar al islam, and they would willingly join those voyages, and nobody would have dreamed of claiming that the investors were evil exploiters. The first factory jobs, the ones which today are mostly regarded as horrible pre-OSHA scenes of exploitation... they were a huge step up from all the other labor that existed, both in terms of conditions and in terms of pay, which is why people flocked to them like crazy.
I don't know what to do with all these different notions. But in general they all make me far more sympathetic to libertarians. There's something *real* there. It's not just hating poor people, or purposefully avoiding evidence of the sheer horror of amazon warehouse jobs, or any of the other explanations offered above. And people like
Peter Thiel, Bezos, Musk etc, they are not cartoon villians.
Again, sorry for rambling. Maybe if we continue this thread, the back and forth will eventually solidify my thoughts on this matter and I can actually give a coherent argument
This reminds me of the exchange between Superman and Lex Luthor in the (excellent) JLA cartoon (paraphrased):
"Superman: What do you want, Luthor ? Where do you go from here ? You want to be President ?
Luthor: Ha ! Do you know how much power I'd have to *give up* just to be President ?"
What's the point of being Governor of California ? Everything you do is subject to extreme scrutiny; the Republicans are out to get you just because you exist, and the Democrats are out to get you because they want to be you. You get to deal with intractable problems like the homeless crisis, endless wildfires, and COVID, and no decision you make will be judged the correct one.
Meanwhile, if you spent all that time quietly making money at your mansion instead of campaigning, you could spend $200M -- a relative pittance -- to push through whatever policy you wanted. It doesn't take a genius to figure out which option to pick.
Re: Kilpatrick: his "platform", such as it is, is clearly focused on the film industry, and has limited appeal outside of SoCal. Paffrath, in contrast, is clearly thinking about the whole state and beyond. Granted, a lot of his platform is a wishlist of big projects that are completely untenable for a number of reasons ("turned up to 11 and given all-you-can-snort cocaine" is one description of it I can't disagree with), for example: building a 14 feet-diameter water pipeline to CA from the Mississippi River, building giant homeless shelters in cities (where?), ending homelessness by executive order in 60 days, etc. It's unquestionably ambitious and unworkable, but I can admire the effort to move the Overton window on the government ambition axis. What he actually can get done happens to align with my views more than most, and that's why I'll be voting for him if the polls indicate he has a better chance of beating Larry Elder than Kevin Faulconer at the time I send in my ballot.
Re: No, and leave Q2 blank: It's not about not dignifying it, nor is it strictly about "voters being confused" by "No on recall, Yes on Bustamante" as they claim. Part of it is, yes, not giving Democrats an excuse to vote Yes on the recall because there's a candidate they really like, but there's more to it than that, I think. Your average partisan Democrat may not care for Newsom (and I don't think they do. His unforced errors, especially during the pandemic, are absolutely morale-busting), but if they know that the party is deliberately ceding the choice of the next governor to the Republicans, not only does it swing the median Democrat's vote toward No, it should increase Democratic turnout as well: "I don't really care if Newsom loses, as long as his replacement will probably be a Democrat" turns into "With all these Democrats not voting on Q2, there is no chance he'll be replaced by a Democrat. I better vote". It's manipulative, and I kinda resent it, but it should work.
It wouldn't surprise me either if it turned out that the Democratic Party (or someone in it) quietly pushed Larry Elder to run, and certainly they must have been happy about his announcement. If Elder hadn't joined the race, that probably would have meant a Faulconer win. By many measures he's done well for San Diego, and if he wins now, he's got a decent shot at winning in 2022, which is when he was already planning to run. A good year for Faulconer could give Republicans the governorship until 2026 at least, maybe even 2030, and that probably seemed in early July like a larger risk to the CA Democratic Party than a right wing nut getting a plurality in a recall election Newsom would sail to victory in *if* Democratic turnout was high enough. And Larry Elder is great motivation to turn out; I know several people who were apathetic about the recall election until Elder joined; and then they were guaranteed to turn out for Newsom. But then Newsom had to go along and commit yet another unforced error that makes him look arrogant and hypocritical, and suddenly the victory on Q1 is no longer assured. If there was such a push by the party or by someone in the party, they're probably changing their pants about now.
Here is a more boring explanation: the Democrats successfully solved coordination problems, and the problem wasn't that steep in the first place. Gavin Newsom has a greater than 80% popularity among Democrats[1], and so running against him now is worse of a sin than running a primary challenge against a popular incumbent.
Look at Chamath Palihapitiya. The Technology investor threw his hat in the ring as early as January[2], then pulled out a few weeks later[3]. Most likely, any Democrats in his investor network convinced him that this move was too much of a troll.
To run against Newsom as a Democrat is effectively saying, "I hate Democrats so much that I might as well be considered a Republican." But if you truly felt that way, then your incentive would be to probably not piss off actual Republicans by running as a Democrat.
The opportunity only exists to fringe candidates with some success story and no Democratic friends. I even think you, Scott, would get a lot of blowback from the Rationalist community because running as a strategically labeled Democratic in a California recall election against a popular Democrat is too affirmatively anti-Democratic.
McAfee would've probably seen this opportunity, but he hated Democrats so much that he wouldn't have gone for the Democratic label.
The Democrats raised the penalty for defection when the penalty was already high.
Re [1]: in the middle of a recall election campaign, how much can we believe that approval or disapproval in a public poll is something other than a statement about belief whether Newsom should be recalled? Like, I think he's not doing a great job and has definitely done some really boneheaded things, but I'd still say I approve of the job he's doing in such a poll right now. Without the recall campaign in progress, I probably wouldn't. Not Another Politics Podcast has done 2 or 3 episodes on this topic (not about the recall specifically, but about what polls are actually useful for/what responses actually say in general). I agree that they solved a coordination problem, but I don't know that it's really that small.
>I even think you, Scott, would get a lot of blowback from the Rationalist community because running as a strategically labeled Democratic in a California recall election against a popular Democrat is too affirmatively anti-Democratic.
I'm not so sure. You need to be pretty ruthless and devote a lot of your care to "up with the Blue Tribe, kill the Red Tribe" to see "D but not Gavin Newsom" as treason to Blue rather than a legitimate stance, and I think Scott has pissed off most of those people already (they might still be in the rationalist orbit, but not as Scott-fans).
(His explicit "please vote for Hillary Clinton" back in 2016, plus his unwavering support for UBI, is enough that the *other* objection, the super-principled people's "you're no Democrat; putting D next to your name is scummy" is at least somewhat defanged. I'd expect more of that backlash than the one you provide, though.)
Reading that article, it's not that Newsom has 80% support amongst Democrats, it's that his environmental policy has support:
"Californians are especially supportive of his “30 by 30” executive order: 76% of adults and likely voters favor the goal to conserve 30% of California’s land, inland water, and ocean areas by the year 2030."
Presumably "likely voters" includes Republicans as well? On other metrics, his support is lower:
"In our latest reading of the political tea leaves, the July PPIC survey finds 56% of California likely voters approving of his handling of jobs and the economy, and 59% approve of his handling of environmental issues."
Now, this is divided over all voters (Democrats, Republicans, Independents) so yes, for the Democrats only he gets high ratings: 85% on the environment, 84% on jobs and the economy. But a lot of voters also think the recall election is a waste of time and money (again, higher amongst Democrats), so voter turnout is likely to be low and it really does depend on who shows up and what way they vote on both No. 1 (recall) and No. 2 (pick your backup candidate).
This is especially relevant because the only reason Newsom is in trouble is because his support among LA area Latinos -- strong Democrats, heretofore -- has cratered. If *only* Hispanics could vote, Newsom would lose in a landslide, according to the most recent polls I've seen. Basically his chance of survival rests on enough Bay Area whites coming out for him, and enough LA area browns staying home.
Unfortunately, that points both ways. On the one hand, it means an attractive Democrat would have a pretty good chance of topping the "replacement" vote, because of the Democratic voter advantage, and the people second-most motivated to kick Newsom to the curb and vote are Democrats. But on the other hand, it means it's quite reasonable to think that having a plausible Democratic replacement on the ballot would make it easier to vote to recall the governor in the first place, for the Democratic voters who are going to swing the election.
Newsom can end this farce now, and do the right thing for the California, by resigning immediately.
Eleni Kounalakis will become California's first female governor, and the Democrats will not face the very real possibility of losing the Senate due to Feinstein becoming unable to serve.
Newsom won't resign though, because it's not about California, it's about Newsom.
It's never been tested, so it's hard to say how the courts would rule. My best guess is that it is A-OK before early voting starts, invalid on or after election day, and that during the early voting period the court would weigh various factors such as how much of the vote was in and whether the governor was just trying to use this loophole or resigning for other more voter-respecting reasons.
Instruct me on this about Feinstein - wasn't she elected due to a special election the first time she got the seat? So why would the new governor (if there is one) be able to replace her with someone from his own party? Wouldn't they have to have an election anyway?
I think there's a ton of overlap in the traits that make a popular politician and the traits that make a popular YouTube personality. The only major difference between the two might be that the politician needs to modulate the content to appeal to a broader audience more shallowly and suck up to more gatekeepers.
Scott, I admire how you were able to put a practical and (somewhat) optimistic spin on the story that basically reads "California Democrats are so far up their own asses that they ended up with a tenant-defrauding christmas elf as their top candidate".
Newsom's chances keep getting worse, but there is a claim that if he flat out resigns from office before the recall election, the recall election goes up in smoke and the Lieutenant Governor (another middle of the road Democrat) becomes governor. As the election gets close, if the polls are going against him he'd be crazy not to pull the plug like that. Here is an article about the specifics:
While it would be the statesmanlike thing to resign and let the party get behind the lieutenant-governor, I don't think Newsom will do so. I think the linked article is right about two things: he honestly doesn't get what is so bad about him hob-nobbing with a lobbyist in the middle of the lockdown, and he wants a run at the presidency.
I also think the article is wrong about resignation being a magic wand against any future Republican attempts at recall: you can simply circumvent the "plot" by resigning. The writer doesn't seem to contemplate that this too can be weaponised by the Republicans; if they can't beat Governor Somebody in the polls, and they don't think their own candidate can beat him, then they still push a recall in order to get Somebody to resign. Whoever replaces him might be someone they like better, or don't dislike as much, but at the very least they got rid of Somebody.
Pushing a recall doesn't get somebody to resign, it gets the people pushing the recall branded as losers. Recall elections can succeed, or even plausibly threaten to succeed, only in very unusual circumstances, so I don't think there is much danger of their being generally weaponized.
If they somehow do become generally weaponized, then I think the winning strategy for the incumbent party is to oppose the recall and have the lieutenant governor put his or her name in as the replacement candidate for that party with the understanding that this is not an act of party treason.
That's what happened in the LAST recall (Lt Gov Cruz Bustamante ran as a potential replacement for Gray Davis). The voters picked Arnold Schwarzenegger instead. Dems this time decided not to repeat that mistake, and chose a different mistake.
Note it is possible in California for the Gov. and the Lt Gov. to be from separate parties. I don't know if that has ever happened.
Given that Newsom had no problem seeing off past recall attempts, I agree that this is not a good strategy for opponents to pursue. But the writer of that post seems to try to push it as a superweapon in future: those evil moustache-twirling Repubicans are a-plottin' and a-schemin' against our virtuous Democratic governor? They're trying to get them recalled, the cads! Then all our Virtuous Etc. has to do is laugh lightly and resign - plot foiled!
I don't think it's as simple as that, or as effective. It might work if Newsom could be persuaded to do it (about as likely as the winning lottery numbers being revealed to us all tonight in a dream) because at this point a lot of people are pissed-off and it's damage control for the party, but for future use? No.
If the evil moustache-twirling Republicans are plotting and scheming against a normal Democratic governor, all the governor and the party have to do is point and laugh. It's only when the evil Republicans are plotting and scheming against a ridiculously bad and/or unlucky Democratic governor that the Democrats would need to go with Plan B. It's still useful for them to have Plan B on the shelf.
> if they can't beat Governor Somebody in the polls, and they don't think their own candidate can beat him, then they still push a recall in order to get Somebody to resign.
The governor would only consider resigning if she or he expects to lose the recall election, i.e. the voters want her or him out of office. That seems to me like a good reason to resign.
And the election gets even more interesting! Now, this news story comes from a place that seems to be one of a set of various websites/blogs/online media run by a guy who is definitely very right-wing (this is the opinion about one of his ventures which is not at all enthused about it: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-red-elephants/).
"According to a report from KTLA5, over 300 California recall ballots, drugs, and multiple driver’s licenses were found in the vehicle of a passed-out felon in Torrance, California.
According to Torrance police, approximately 300 ballots were recovered from the vehicle, which was found in a 7-Eleven convenience store parking lot on August 16th.
Officers also found a loaded firearm, methamphetamine, a scale, and dozens of California driver’s licenses that were in other people’s names. Xanax pills were also discovered on the unidentified male subject, who police described as a felon.
In Valley Village, another Los Angeles neighborhood, hundreds of more ballots were stolen out of the mailboxes of a multi-unit housing complex.
Two women with a USPS post office master key were caught on camera stealing the California recall election ballots within several mailboxes at an apartment complex."
I have no dog at all in this race, so it's free entertainment as far as I'm concerned, but long-suffering citizens of the Golden Utopian Dream of California, my thoughts and prayers are with you 😁
It's probably opportunistic theft, though the fact that all the stolen mail was ballots may lean towards "paid to commit fraud", if you include the fake (stolen?) driver's licences as well. Had it been a mix of post, along with the same for the two lassies caught opening postal boxes in the apartment complex, you could write it off to stealing mail in the hopes that cheques and money were in the envelopes.
It's not huge fraud (if that is indeed what it was) but at the same time you would like an accounting as to how this guy got his hands on the ballots. It sits poorly with the pre-presidential election claims that there could not possibly be any hint of fraud anywhere at all, no way no how.
Like you, I accept that there probably is some amount of fraud in elections everywhere at all times, but I'd expect it to be more along the lines of "oh looky here, we suddenly found an unopened ballot box full of votes for Candidate McGillycuddy which by total coincidence is precisely the number of votes needed to elect him" and not "guy with drugs passed out in parking lot has a sack full of blank ballots" 😁
You may recognize San Diego businessman John Cox as the Republican nominee in the 2018 gubernatorial election, which Newsom won in a landslide. Cox also made headlines earlier this summer for his use of a live bear as a campaign prop."
Dress up as an elf? Pah! Only a live bear will do for Candidate Cox! Plainly what Governor Newsom needs to do to restore the confidence of the citizenry in his abilities is to find an appropriate costume and animal friend to frolic with. Smokey The Bear *might* be a bit on the nose, given all the fires, but surely there are some birds or beasts he could be photographed interacting with?
I was ready to vote for the elf, but now I'm deeply conflicted. There's only one possible way out of this dilemma. The Thunderdome. Two mascots enter, one mascot leaves !
“He’s getting attention because the media is looking for some Democrat to tell people to vote for, and he’s the best they can find.”
If this was mere honesty, it’s kind of amusing that the Democrats have the media do their political organizing for them and nobody seems to think that’s objectionable. If it was meant to be a jab at the media for being partisans, then well done with the jab.
Paffrath is a quarter of Bergisch Gladbach, where the clergy of Cologne had the forest cut down to build the settlement. So it comes from Pfaffe and Rodung, thus: cleric clearing. Considering this kabbalistically, Kevin Paffrath won't be a good governor against forest fires. For real estate, maybe?
On the other hand, would that not make him excessively effective? After all, if you cut down all the forests, then there' s nothing to burn, so no more forest fires!
The real reason no one did is because politicians are petty vindictive little shits. Newsome really didn't want a challenger and anyone who through their hat in the ring could expect revenge in the very likely case he isn't recalled.
A: the sitting governor by law can not win the post-recall election to be his own replacement, and B: write-in votes aren't counted unless the candidate has filed paperwork saying "I am running for this office and expect to gain enough write-in votes that it is worth the bother of you counting them - also I'm the Gavin Newsom who lives at 1562 H Street, Sacramento, not the Gavin Newsom who lives at 742 Evergreen Terrace, Pacoima". AFIK, no California resident named Gavin Newsom has filed such paperwork.
But it would be an interesting opportunity if such a Californian existed and was interested in taking the shot.
> There have been a lot of fights around here about whether you can really get power just by being intelligent, able to predict things accurately, etc. I think this is a point in favor - sometimes there are big opportunities just waiting for someone to notice them. But also a point against - intelligence did not, in fact, help anyone notice this opportunity. Overall kind of a wash.
Does anyone have any good examples for both sides of the argument?
Being a governor without experience is actively terrible. Your name gets dragged through the mud constantly and without prior political experience you don’t have the knowledge or close allies to fend off the attacks. And you don’t actually have that much power. The legislature ties your hand, and somehow you’re still blamed when things go wrong. If I had a magic button to become governor of any state, I would dare not press it.
And that’s just from a selfish perspective. From a utilitarian perspective, running a big governor campaign in this instance gives you a small shot at the governorship but it increases the odds of Larry Elder becoming governor (probably to a greater extent than it helps you).
My takeaway is different. The recall process is stupid beyond belief and it should be replaced with a single question “who do you want to be governor?” Or alternatively, it should be a run off, with the replacement election held at a later date.
Also, there's the usual problem of markets overweighting longshot candidates.
Nope. At this point I'm just hoping that an unbeatable benevolent superintelligence becomes dictator.
Does a 90% chance of the cost of failed campaign out way the 10% chance of the benefit of a successful campaign. My guess is that the vast majority of successful people do not want to be governor to begin with.
I think that depends on the person. A "failed campaign" did a lot to raise Bernie Sanders' brand. Plausibly it will be good for Kevin Paffrath too (although he claims he's lost subscribers since all this happened because his politics are too controversial).
Yes. But it narrows the poll considerably. You need a candidate that
A. Has the name recognition of Kevin Paffrath. (otherwise the argument that you have a similar probability falls apart)
B. Has a career that can benefit from branding like Kevin Pafferath.
Most people have only what to lose be putting their politics out in the open.
The thing is, California in particular is full of rich people who could either benefit from, or at least not be harmed by running for Governor. Think about all of the rich tech bros, VCs, etc. that are largely anonymous and normal people don't know or care who they are. Likewise, various actors who make outlandish political statements all the time, and for who dropping a million or two on a campaign is a rounding error. Or Internet celebrities who are already mired in controversy. Plenty of people with lots of money and nothing to lose.
Beg to differ. If you're a rich person, and especially if you're involved in complex business in hi-tech, you have a great deal to lose by having your every utterance recorded and broadcast widely for several months, especially in the context of being asked deliberately rude and/or provocative questions by people who are experts at political campaignery and who would love to see you put your foot in your mouth. One misstep, one "ah..oops...of course what I meant by that is..." and multiple future career option doors could slam shut.
If you know who Arianna Huffington is, thank a failed campaign.
Subscribers are practically worthless. A channel like VSauce has over 10 million subscribers, and most videos have millions if not tens of millions of views. Meanwhile, a channel like WatchMojo has similar subscriber numbers, but most videos have under 100k views. VSauce makes engaging, well-edited videos, while WatchMojo makes stupid clickbait list videos.
Point is, everything good comes from views, whether you're in it for money, spreading information/ideology, or the fun/art of making videos. Subs very weakly correlate with views.
Sure, but there are millions of successful people, and divide that by a thousand for whatever factors you need and there’s still a lot of people with the desire or use for or ability to use the opportunity. Most people don’t want to be politicians, or even want large scale power, and yet there’s stiff competition.
This. Unless you are really into politics, governor is much less fun than most of the other jobs that "successful" people have. Sure, by some measure a governor holds lots of power, but it is much more of a hassle for a governor to get his ideas enacted than for, say, a ceo of a tech company.
Well, in these Imperial Executive days it may sound laughably quaint, but in principle within our system the responsibility for having ideas and enacting them lies with the legislature, and the governor is supposed to restrict himself to putting those ideas into effective execution.
“ unvaccinated unmasked indoor dinner”
In his defense:
https://assets.vogue.com/photos/5a820d454bab8b3e87d794dd/master/pass/00-promo-french-laundry-garden-renovation.jpg
I wouldn’t call that indoor.
There was a lot of debate on how some doors might or might not have gotten closed, but I'll remove the word "indoor" to avoid controversy.
Whether it was technically "indoor" may have been a matter of opinion and the angle of the picture taken. What was not a matter of opinion was that he was in gross violation of his own COVID restaurant restrictions. That's the kind of thing that could unite anti-mask Republicans angry about his hypocrisy and pro-mask Democrats angry about him spreading COVID.
Exactly. The controversy wasn't over the fact that he was being risky with COVID. The controversy was over the fact that he was breaking his own executive order. I believe he would have been in violation even if it were outdoors (there were too many people). It gave the impression that the rules only applied to the little people and it pissed off both the left and the right.
OTOH California "indoor"/"outdoor" standards defy any attempt at logic. You can't be in a space where industrial ventilation system is installed (and can be easily amended to add whatever improvements exist to kill as many viruses as possible), but you totally can be in an enclosed tent having no air flow, no ventilation, poorly cleaned and trying to cram the same amount of people into half the space. Because yeah, technically it's "outdoors".
I get why it is like that - between not banning indoors dining and paying the political cost of all covid death being attributed to this single decision, and banning all dining and killing all the restaurant industry and causing enormous economic calamity (and being recalled for sure because people want their sushi back!), they chose a compromise - something that maybe does something, maybe not, but clearly they did their part and it's not their fault if something goes wrong.
And since they know exactly what they did - they behave accordingly.
Reading the story, it was alleged that due to weather/noise/can't remember what, the restaurant closed sliding glass doors and that turned it from 'outdoors' (which, by that photo, it isn't really outdoors either) to 'indoors'.
But it's not so much about the doors, as the public anger. Same things have tripped up politicians in my country as well, there were two such fundraising/lobbying parties and arguments over "well was it really indoors or outdoors" but people didn't care; what they cared about was the same members of the same government telling them "No, you can't go to Sunday Mass because of the risk of spreading infection, you can't visit family members, you can't go outside" had no problems at all breaking all the regulations when it came to themselves (and getting money for their campaigns).
Sally and John can't have their wedding because ban on gatherings of more than X people and hotels and restaurants have to institute rules on distance between tables. Minister for Cardboard Boxes has a function where the tables are jammed together, but that's different, don't you know!
Exactly. If you pass a sweeping law that hurts a lot of people ostensibly for their own good, they are going to be righteously pissed if you rules-lawyer yourself into vaguely plausible “compliance” that requires no apparent sacrifice on your part.
The fact that he did it at a stupid expensive restaurant with a bunch of fat cats is just icing on the let-them-eat-cake.
It really didn't help that the dinner included meeting with American Medical Association lobbyists. You'd think that of all people, the doctor's group would not take part in violating health orders.
One missing wall does not make that dinner, that eye-poppingly expensive dinner paid for by lobbyists, one iota less crass, naive and stupid.
I mailed my ballot today and I voted against recall. Even so, I think he's an idiot out of his depth but the best of the rotten bunch from which I had to choose.
Why wouldn't they be rotten if misbehavior brings no punishment?
point in favor of intelligence, but evidence that intelligence isn't worth much without imagination?
That.
Unless you have staggering amount of intelligence at your disposal, what you need is a decent amount, like, more than the average, for sure but no need to exceed the top 10%. After that, a lot of other factors matter. Imagination, for sure. Grit/dedication/ambition, absolutely. Social/political skills, very much so.
... if you want to be conventionally successful.
Do you actually want to be governor of California? For myself, this is a job that I am completely unqualified for (including residency requirements), would have no aptitude for, and which is a lot of work for not much reward. If I had the option of definitely becoming California governor, I would turn it down, so I certainly wouldn't campaign for the office.
Not much reward!
Even if you go full Calvin Coolidge and don't do ANYTHING with the influence that you suddenly have, you're going to be absolutely inundated with perks. You won't be able to buy your own meals, your own drinks, your own tickets, for the friendly lobbyists swarming around (a friend-of-a-friend is a lowly State House Rep, and it's bad even at that level).
But say you have an iron will and you mightily refuse every gladhand; you STILL retain the option, for most of the rest of your life, to go give a $25,000 speech any day of the week. Any day, forever, even if you're not good!
That option is MUCH REWARD, if you ask me.
That'd only last for a few speeches before they realize I'm a super boring speaker and I only want to talk about civic planning.
$50k for marginal amounts of effort on your part is still pretty baller tho
They don’t pay you for a good speech. They pay you so they can say “the governor spoke at our event”. And also because they imagine it will lead to some sort of positive influence their way, someday.
I assume that I'd get recalled almost immediately if I became governor, once people found out what my actual policy positions were, so my influence wouldn't be worth a lot.
Holmes, there is nothing that you or I or any politician can say in a speech that is worth any $25,000, much less the sums what the real players get.
The "speech" is a figleaf. The speakers are paid surely not to talk, but to listen.
And even more, to be favorably disposed toward those who paid him.
The perks doen't seem to be much reward given that you 1. become a public persona 2. are suddenly responsible for everything that's wrong with CA. I'd rather pay for my meals and have a better life.
One figures the novelty of having 'the non-politician who was briefly an unsuccessful Governor of CA' giving speeches would wear out pretty quickly, how many $25k speeches would you expect to give? If >50 then I guess this starts being appealing.
I might not know what to do, but I think I am smart enough to identify people who do. I'd just contact them (eg the list would include Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen) and basically just do whatever they tell me to do
While your Covid policy would win worldwide plaudits with Tabarrok and Cowen your reinstatement of prohibition might cause some controversy.
Reinstatement of prohibition?
Seriously, Cowen is a teetotaler but that is a personal choice. Considering his libertarian leaning I doubt very much that he would want to /impose/ a prohibition on alcohol. Maybe he would want more "nudging" against it, though.
I would be more worried about his open border tendencies. And even that I would expect him to be somewhat pragmatic about it, as he is about everything else.
Not a bad choice, in my humble opinion.
Alcohol taxes. The late Mark Kleiman always insisted they were way too low given the amount of damage caused by drunk people.
I'm not so sure that the California Democratic party's logic was unsound here. If a legitimate democratic candidate did run, the chance that the recall succeeds is inevitably higher (there may be people who don't want a Republican replacement, but who'll vote yes on the recall because they don't like Newsom and are hoping for the sane Democratic replacement). But, the chance that the recall succeeds also raises the chance that we end up with Larry Elder as governor.
This is essentially what happened during the 2003 recall. Democratic politician Bustamente campaigned on "No on recall, yes on Bustamente", ended up getting 30% of the vote, and that's how we ended up with The Terminator as our governor.
This supposes that lots of people voted for recall specifically because they wanted Bustamente as governor instead of Davis. Is there much proof of this? It seems unlikely, especially since Recall won by 10 points.
I phrased that badly. To clarify, I find it unlikely that many people voted for recall because they wanted Bustamente as governor, and even if a few such people existed, they are unlikely to have swung a 10 point result.
There were a lot of people who really disliked Gray Davis. Up until the last month, I was considering voting Yes on the recall because I disliked him so much, and would have preferred Bustamante or Arianna Huffington.
Would you prefer Kevin Faulconer to Newsum?
It's been 7 years since I lived in California, so I haven't looked into this. I've disliked Newsom for my entire adult life, ever since he pulled in the national Democratic leadership to campaign for him against the Green Party alternative in the San Francisco runoff election, on a platform of removing funds for homeless people. But I've also never particularly liked San Diego Republicans. So I would need to study to know for sure.
I probably wouldn't prefer Faulconer to Newsom, but it's not out of the question that, if Faulconer were leading the polls in the race to replace Newsom, I might not worry so much about how the first question went.
Unlike 2003 there is no Arnold in this field unifying the Republican vote. 30% would be very likely to win in this field.
One of the few challengers to the California Democratic Party's level of incompetence is... the California Republican Party. One-party rule is corrosive, nationalizing state politics is bad strategy, and the brain drain by federal offices is real.
This really annoys me as Californian (really, expat still registered to vote in California). New England has moderate state level Republican parties who can be voted into power when the Democrats screw up. The California Republican Party is as conservative as the national party and filled with weirdos. And it's self-fulfilling, since they never win statewide races they can't attract good candidates. I'd love to vote the California Democrats out of office, but not when the alternative is Larry Elder.
What do you have against Larry Elder? He's a libertarian, not a conservative, and I plan to vote for him.
I'm a big fan of the Canadian system where provincial and federal parties are completely different things and you can be a provincial Liberal and a federal Conservative or vice versa and no-one thinks twice about it.
But I have no idea how it gets there.
David Schleicher has blamed the lack of partisan competition in urban politics on people choosing their party loyalties at the national level.
https://volokh.com/posts/chain_1228735775.shtml
A bit different from state vs federal, where I know it used to be common for people to retain old party loyalties at the state level even while voting differently for national politics. I wonder why we've gone a different route from Canada.
I don't really know. Some Canadian provinces don't even have some parties, for instance British Columbia has the NDP and Liberals, but no Conservatives (federal Conservatives are mostly in the BC Liberals).
My suspicion is that Canada is largely to do with the Reform story. The main right wing party in Canada until the 1980s was the Progressive Conservatives. In the east (Ontario and the four Maritimes), it still is. But in the west (BC and the three plains provinces), the Reform Party arose as a party to the right of the PCs. At the federal level, they merged into the CPC in 2000-3. All four of the western states had their own separate versions of this, BC had Social Credit, which collapsed as a result of corruption scandals in 1991 and that resulted in everyone on the right joining the BC provincial Liberals to try to defeat the NDP provincial government (classic Duverger's Law creating a two party system). In other states a broad party of the right got formed - similar but different from the CPC - like the Saskatchewan Party or Alberta's "United Conservative" Party. Only in Manitoba has the PC brand survived in the west (in part because the Manitoba Liberals became very right wing in the 1970s, pulled in all the people who would form Reform elsewhere and then collapsed in infighting with the more leftwing federal-type liberals).
In the Maritimes, the provincial parties still match up with the three federal parties (provincial PC with the federal CPC, plus Liberals and NDP).
Quebec is obviously different, but it has been ever since the rise of the first nationalist parties in the 1970s.
Its not due to Reform per se, but does reflect an aspect of Canadian politics that American politics has evolved away from, that its a system where parties can and do die and get replaced by new parties. So even if you start with the same two major parties at the Federal level and in each of the 10 provinces, the situation evolves in each jurisdiction and changes accumulate with time.
I highly doubt someone will win question 2 with just 30% of the vote. In the most recent poll (YouGov), Elder was polling at 23%. But 45% of respondents said they either wouldn't vote on that question or were unsure. If you only count the respondents who chose a candidate, Elder is polling at 42%. For comparison, Schwarzenegger got 49%. And I imagine as the election approaches more people are going to coalesce around the front runners.
By this logic, should the Democratic Party *still* be telling people to leave the replacement slot blank, so they're screwing up now? Or was the optimal strategy "tell people to vote for the backup candidate, but make sure the backup candidate sucks so they'll vote not to recall"? That seems... not totally implausible, but I doubt it was anyone's plan at the start of this process.
It's better to have a simple message so people don't mess it up. Telling people to vote for Pathraff would likely lead to people getting confused and a net lose in votes. Plus, he's an idiot who shouldn't get near the governor's office anyway.
I took the Democratic strategy as a sign of the local power of Newsom in California politics as much as anything else. The best strategy for the Democratic party might be to run an amazing candidate who could easily trounce any Republican running. That strategy almost certainly destroys Newsom (as you add the people who want the new D candidate to the people who dislike Newsom and they easily vote Yes to removing Newsom).
If Newsom were not very powerful in California Democrat politics, someone would have identified this possibility and tried to run as a powerful D or at least recruit a popular D to run. That he could remove all valid D competitors indicates that almost no one was willing to step out of line against him.
Then it sounds like the pragmatic best strategy is for the party to find an acceptable replacement, throw Newsom under the bus, and campaign on "Yes on recall, Yes on Nice Guy".
Why are they so wedded to Newsom? Presumably he does have very strong connections and allies, but why are they so gung-ho for him and nobody but him, and hang the public?
This seems to be a feature of the current political climate. Or maybe it's been around forever and I'm just noticing it?
A state Democratic Party with some common sense would think "hey, Newsom is kind of damaged property at this point, let's find someone better and run them". As you said: yes on recall, yes on nice guy.
A state Republican Party with some common sense would realize "hey, Trump-supporting candidates will never win statewide office in California, let's grit our teeth and run a moderate".
But nope, we get Newsom vs Elder.
I can't explain it. Maybe personalities are bigger than parties? Maybe something to do with modern primaries? I really don't know.
Larry Elder has said nice things about Trump in the past, but at this point seem to be trying to reject identification as a Trump supporter. Probably prudent.
I have to admit that I haven't looked into the recall candidates as much as maybe I should. (Or maybe I shouldn't... this election isn't really making me love anyone on either side, and I'm not convinced that spending time researching the candidates will do me any good.)
But anyway, as a pragmatist (I'll probably never love CA politics, but I have to live with them), I guess I'll count this as progress. If CA Republicans are willing to acknowledge, even implicitly, that association with Trump will hurt them, I suppose that's a good step.
I expect they believe, correctly, that it will help them in a Republican primary, hurt them in a general election. But California has a weird primary system, which may make the first irrelevant.
Larry Elder supports school vouchers and reduced regulation of construction, which strike me as important pluses, although given the legislature I wouldn't count on his succeeding in doing much.
As I see it generally the smaller a political party gets, the more ideologically rigid it gets. Evaporation of a solution concentrates it -- all the less rigid people who were just barely attracted into the tent leave, and what's left consists of the more hard-core people. Furthermore, when the party is generally shrinking, its focus tends to be on retention of who they still have, not recruiting people further from their remaining core. So they have "inreach" instead of "outreach," circular-firing squads, harsher tests of group loyalty, et cetera.
It all sounds dysfunctional, like it would accelerate complete evaporation, and I would say often it is and does -- but not always. The motivating belief is usually that by stripping down to a core group that is more ideologically pure, they acquire a degree of clarity and forcefulness in their messaging (no need for a ton of asterisks to mollify coalition partners on the fringe) that improves it for a future audience. Then, they count on some stroke of luck, change in circumstance, or massive screw-up by their enemies bringing that clear message to a big audience that is abruptly more receptive, and Bob's your uncle.
There is some historical precedent, e.g. I would say Reagan did *not* modify his message between his years as California governor and the election of 1980. Indeed, he rather purified it and moved if anything further to the right, which is probably why he didn't come close in 1968 and 1976. But the mountain came to Mohammed, so to speak, and when Carter immolated himself and took down 1970s liberalism with him in 1979, Reagan was ready, with a purer message that resonated strongly with the passions of the moment.
Newsom was up like 17 points before Delta hit and will probably still win. So much monday morning quarterbacking here, except the team hasn't even lost yet.
The problem is that Newsom didn't actually do anything that any other generic Democrat wouldn't have done (including the French Laundry thing, similar such "scandals" have happened repeatedly, all over the nation).
For them to openly endorse Yes on Recall implies that Newsom did do something wrong. But what? It'd be a huge sign of weakness and set a really bad precedent for the future.
You need something like an Andrew Cuomo style "20 women accuse you of sexual assault" level scandal, that is uniquely individualized to the person in question, to convince a party to turn on one of its own who has maintained the party line without fault.
This is a good point. I don't particularly like Newsom, but it's useful to be reminded that he's probably not much worse than any of the other Democrats.
That is entirely the problem for politics everywhere. "Yeah, he did this dodgy thing, but they're all doing it and he's no worse than anyone else".
It gives people very little recourse when they're angry, and their elected public representative can't in fact be shifted because, well, this is how the sausage is made.
The pragmatic strategy (endorsed by the LA Times) if were able to get enough people to agree on it is (No, Faulconer). It looks like we might fail the prisoners dilemma by not promoting it enough to be a Schelling point, even around here.
I think the way this works is that every politician has his personal groupies, or retainers, people who are faithful to him personally for whatever reason. Then there are party groupies, who are faithful to whomever is the most powerful party politician at the moment. When you win an election for governor, personal and party retainers merge, and that's your governing coalition.* While you govern, some party retainers may become personal retainers -- indeed, every politician hopes for this, and usually sends some favors their way to encourage the transition -- or, if you're a screw-up, personal retainers may become more distant from you and become mere party retainers, ready to abandon you if a better guy comes along.
If Newsom loses, by definition the Democratic party loses all his personal retainers, who will stick with their guy (and usually dislike the party for not having sufficiently supported him, the way Trump fanbois depise the "RINOs" who they think did not sufficiently support Trump). That weakens the party. If there has been the normal conversion of party to personal retainers while Newsom held power -- if he was a competent governing politician -- then the party is weakened by that extra amount.
The only way this doesn't happen is if (1) a fair amount of Newsom's personal retainers converted to merely party retainers lately, meaning he was a crappy feudal lord, and (2) whoever Newsom's replacement is comes in with at least as many personal retainers, so party strength is preserved. That's certainly possible, but usually it requires an unusually inept candidate -- "unusually" because he did, after all, win the previous election, so he has to have made serious missteps in the recent past (or got elected in the first place by wild luck).
----------------
* By "retainers" I don't just mean individual employees or voters, but also interest groups that are generally beholden to you on a somewhat personal basis, e.g. the late unlamented Gray Davis had a special relationship with the prison guards union, they were in some sense a member of his personal entourage.
I disagree strongly. The best strategy is to cast the recall in partisan terms. Trying to be clever and thread the needle is a recipe for failure.
I'm not sure about that narrative. The 2003 recall voted out Davis by a margin of 55.4% Yes to 44.6% No, and according to CNN's exit polls, only about 3% of votes voted Yes/Bustamante, which doesn't come close to making up the difference.
The 2003 recall was also very unusual in California in that the two major Republican candidates (Schwarzenegger and McClintock) combined for 62% of the vote, 6.6 percentage points over the Yes vote on the recall and almost 20 percentage points over the Republican performance in the state in the 2000 (41.7%) and 2004 (44.4%) Presidential elections. And per the exit poll, 18% of Democrats voted for Schwarzenegger and 6% voted for McClintock.
My read is that while Bustamante was a decent replacement candidate on paper, he and Davis were both unusually unpopular Democratic Party candidate in the actual election, while Schwarzenegger and McClintock were both unusually popular for Republicans in California. This is borne out by the favorable/unfavorable numbers in the same exit poll: Davis's job approval was deep underwater (26% approve, 73% disapprove), as was Bustamante's favorability (37% favorable, 58% unfavorable), while both Schwarzenegger and McClintock had net-positive favorabilities (51%-47% and 55%-37% respectively).
Data: https://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2003/recall/pages/epolls/governor.html
Also, partisanship is extremely strong nowadays. Not running a Democratic candidate greatly strengthens the "Republican recall" message in a state where there are a lot more Democrats than Republicans.
His ex-wife... has done a lot worse than date Donald Trump Jr.
(I don't recommend reading this)
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-secret-history-of-kimberly-guilfoyles-departure-from-fox
Which raises the question of whether his having married her should be taken as evidence of his incompetence. A large part of the job of a top level executive is evaluating other people in order to decide who to hire, who to have do what.
I'm much more confused about what Donald Trump Jr is doing with her. She's not quite old enough to be his mother, but she's too old to be his stepmother.
On the other hand, the fact that she's his EX-wife could be a point in FAVOR of his ability to evaluate other people!
Not having a good alternative to Newsom seems bad. However,
1) Having a legitimate backup to Newsom might get some people who would normally vote "no" on the recall to vote "yes." Voters aren't super rational so if a high profile, reasonable Dem is running, you might get more "yes" votes even if they make it way more likely Larry Elder is elected.
2) At least some people think this is what happened in the 2003 election: https://www.kqed.org/news/11870960/should-a-democrat-run-in-the-newsom-recall-we-asked-cruz-bustamante
Thanks, I've added this to the post.
Yeah, but if you give people a choice and they go "We want the new guy", isn't that more indicative of a problem with Newsom/the Californian Democrats than "the public are irrational"? Maybe they're not being fair to Newsom, but if I ask you for tea and you give me coffee on the grounds "No, what you really want is coffee", I'm still going to be dissatisfied no matter how good the coffee is.
Sure, but that means that there is a problem with the voting system. If people whose preference is new Democrat > Newsom > Larry Elder have no effective way of casting a vote that expresses that preference without a high risk of helping Elder, then that's a problem.
One option would be that the new candidate has to get more votes than the No vote in the first question (ie count the No votes as votes for Newsom as the replacement)
Well, politics. Choice of the lesser weevil usw. One needs to practice gratitude that you weren't served dog piss, and that coffee is a lot closer to what you really want than most other random brown liquids.
I think voters may be sensing that someone named "Patrick Kilpatrick" would be at risk of suicide.
yessss
I resisted the urge to make that joke!
Great minds think alike. And so do we.
I can imagine the chanting at rallies...
"KILL, PATRICK, KILL"
I posted something similar but saw this post and it is better -- removed my original :)
> if you don't have diminishing marginal utility to power, a 10% chance at the California governorship looks fantastic.
Does it?
If you, a random guy got elected as governor, what are the chances you'd be able to accomplish anything that you really wanted to?
I get the impression politicians are all actors in this insanely complex system which depends heavily on human relationships, that literally nobody is in charge of. The power any one politician has (i.e. their ability to influence outcomes) stems far more from the relationships they, and their ability to build and manage those relationships, than anything else.
Being governor of california sounds like being CEO of a giant money losing non-profit, stuffed to the gills with ambitious people who'll all be trying to trick you into doing what they want. It's not like the state government is some chess board and the governor gets to move pieces around. I'm beginning to think that measuring power with a number is kind of silly, and instead it's like, we're playing chess in 10 millions, and being made governor only amplifies a certain kind of power you must already possess in order to do any thing.
If you end up somewhere 'above your pay grade' then i'd be the most likely outcome is you have no idea how to appoint, who to trust, who's trying to screw you, or how to do things like build a consensus around your objectives, so that the end result is likely that you just become hated for doing nothing, as rivals for your power successfully trip you up and get the media to blame you for failing.
That's kinda how I felt about Schwarzenegger. He had reasonable policy goals, but had zero idea how to build the political capital necessary to move the state even the slightest bit toward those goals.
Didn't he manage to do a couple things? I know that he at least had one training-wheels accomplishment, with getting some after-school-care ballot measure passed the year before the recall.
Then there's the much more fun National Enquirer style hypothesis, that he was caught boning the maid much earlier, and the Kennedys neutered him as the price of their silence.
The bull being wild and rabid doesn’t mean you can’t ride and whip it with the right gear and skill
There are still presumably people who aren’t career politicians but have the experience and friends necessary to do something with such a position. But I am curious why they didn’t
Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina should have held out an extra decade before trying to make their jump into politics.
I think both were way above their Peter Principle level as CEOs, so it's just as well they flamed out in politics, for the sake of their ultimate reputation. Now we can all say "oh what might have been!" without some ugly reality of what actually was making us sad.
As a libertarian, I'd be happy to just veto stuff all day long. I'm unelectable in the first place, so I have no reason to not do the right thing in the first place.
As nice as that sounds to people against the standard California Democrat stances, the reality of that approach would be the legislature overriding vetoes all day long. The better approach would be to use the bully pulpit and standard politics to promote better options and convince/shame the legislature into making better rules. That takes connections and support, which puts us back to square one of making it useful to be governor.
Vetoes take extra time. And every minute they have to spend running through the veto process is one minute they can't spend wrecking new things.
I mean, yeah, you can obstruct to a certain extent. You might also tick off the legislature to the point that they streamline the override process and just start passing crazy things even faster.
This sounds accurate.
Donald Trump is the perfect example of this. He had no idea how to manage the massive bureaucracy, his subordinates resigned when asked to do harmful or illegal things, and he wasn't that successful in implementing his agenda. When he did get things done they were things that mainstream Republicans wanted like conservative judges and tax cuts.
He couldn't even get things done which were clearly legal and within his power. Cancelling DACA seems like an obvious no-brainer, but the Supreme Court wouldn't even let him do that.
Not to mention a Team R with solid majorities in both houses of Congress.
For a guy who was supposedly a wannabe dictator, Trump couldn't get a Team R Congress to repeal Obamacare, much less fund The Great Wall of Ignorance.
For nearly eight years, Team R railed against the evils of Obamacare. Then, when they had solid majorities in both houses of Congress and a Team R president, no more talk, no more excuses, they couldn't get it done. Pathetic! (and I say that as one who sees Obamacare as perhaps the best that a late-stage oligarchy would able to accomplish under the circumstances and considering entrenched interests involved).
I don't think Obamacare was ever that important to Trump. Just something to bash the last guy over. Any minor tweak and he could declare victory.
Well, the USMCA was basically NAFTA with a few tweaks. But Trump couldn't even do that with Obamacare, after Team R railing against it for years.
The individual mandate got zeroed out, but I can't remember if that happened under Obama or Trump.
"couldn't" get it done? Republicans used to put up symbolic votes against the ACA all the time. The instant they got power, they lost interest in repealing it. What could this mean other than... they never really opposed it, they just wanted their base to see them opposing it.
Performative rage.
Pretty much this.
Finster's Second Law: no matter how cynical you think you are, the people in charge are way more cynical than that.
Glad to see I'm not that alone in having this opinion of him. Trump's greatest weakness as a politician, which I think also runs all through his career, is his complete inability to hire and keep the loyalty of a cadre of competent subordinates. Even people who were ideologically very close to him, and had strong personal reasons for wanting to stick with him, ended up hating him. He must be a complete asshole as a boss. As long as he can make things work as a one-man operation, or a Messiah directly preaching simple sermons to a million groupies who don't really know him and aren't expected to be active lieutenants managing his army, he does OK. But as soon as he tries being captain of a ship, something about the way he interacts with them makes his entire bridge crew revolt and start shooting at each other, and then the ship runs into the iceberg while the 2nd Officer is trying to strangle the navigator.
> He must be a complete asshole as a boss.
After decades of work, he still runs what is essentially a small family business. He can't keep any talent required to run a business with thousands of employees. (Nearly every business that jumps to mind when people see "Trump" on it is actually the name being licensed out.)
It works out as a pretty solid move if you're a cynical asshole who doesn't care what other people think, but I don't think there are very many people who genuinely think that way.
This; as part of my job I work a lot with relatively senior people at a fairly wide range of companies, and one of their most consistent complaints is an inability to accomplish their goals. At first I thought this was false modesty, but the more I see the more I'm convinced that most large organisations actually run on a model closer to an ant hive or school of fish than what the org charts tell you.
“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”
There's a story, maybe apocryphal, maybe not, about a particular head of the US federal exective branch who had zero executive experience. When confronted with the bankruptcy of a certain very large automaker, one who made a bunch of cars no one wants to buy, this newbie exec looked at how well Honda Civics were selling and asked 'Why can't they just start making something like a Civic?'
I don't know if it actually happened, but it certantly sounds right to me, both on the part of the newbie exec not understanding that you can't just pick up your pen and phone and make an org change because your name plate says so, and because I've seen enough large orgs to know that some types of change are just outside of the realm of the possible.
There is a story which is straight from the horse's mouth about a certain very large automaker who hired a famous and highly qualified executive for the specific purpose of driving much needed reforms. A couple of years of ignominy and failure later, that executive said that the only people in the whole company who wanted any reforms were the people who interviewed him for the job.
<i>4. Californians are lucky Peter Thiel isn't a Democrat, because his mind is minmaxed for spotting opportunities like this, and you can bet he would have gotten involved here if he could have.</i>
I keenly remember when Thiel was going to influence Trump to pick all these awesome contrarian technocrats and instead he picked a bunch of mediocre hangers-on and FOX commentators.
And I note his current pet project, JD Vance, has approximately 100% name recognition from blue checks and 10% name recognition from Ohio primary voters, who are flocking to the established local actual-crazy-guy over a Yalie who left the state after college and wrote a book about how shitty it was but is now pretending to be crazy.
Mandel isn't actually crazy, just pretending. But, yeah; Vance's campaign is ineffectual to the extreme, and is extremely unlikely to fail because he is, in fact, substantially to the left of Mitt Romney.
Did you mean "extremely likely to fail"?
Yeah.
I don’t think Vance is to the left of Romney? What do you mean?
An article that paints him as ... not that: https://t.co/0TFIANPQVN?amp=1
Honestly speaking, I have seen nothing but hot air from Vance. What I personally would want to see is what specific proposals does he have, how will these proposals result in concrete and material benefits to the average frustrated Ohioan, and how does he plan to implement these proposals.
Instead, all I hear is vague talk of values and families, which is all well and good but tells me nothing. That in turn to me is a signal that, if elected, Vance is going to act just like any other replacement-level Team R politician, with perhaps a slightly different rhetorical cast.
Okay, you fascinate me strangely. Why is Mandel crazy? His Wikipedia article doesn't tell me much, apart from him having a few failed runs at campaigns and being involved in the usual political storms in a teacup over election campaigning re: calling your opponents names, pretending you did X, Y and Z, and repurposing money/resources to personal use.
What did he do that is particularly nuts? Or is it just his positions on abortion, gay rights, and climate change you are referring to?
"Abortion
Mandel is anti-abortion.
Health care
Mandel has called for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. In a campaign advertisement during his 2012 Senatorial run, Mandel claimed opponent Sherrod Brown "cast the deciding vote on the government takeover of health care". Politifact has labeled as false the claim that Brown cast the deciding vote for the act. The description of the act as a government takeover of health care, by Mandel, has been labeled by Politifact as "nonsensical" and a "myth".
Environment
Mandel rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. He has referred to climate change research as "riddled with fraud" and has vowed to fight attempts to advance clean-air standards.
Mandel has called for what he terms as "aggressive and responsible" energy exploration that protects "the air we breathe and water we drink" while reducing environmental regulation. He supports the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Mandel is a supporter of expanded coal plants and has criticized what he has termed as "radical" environmental groups.
LGBT rights
Mandel opposes same-sex marriage, saying in 2012 that he will "protect the sanctity of marriage" and "this is a fight that I will never, ever back down." He is against openly gay people serving in the military, and voted against workplace and housing discrimination protections for gay and transgender people in 2009.
Foreign policy
In 2012, Mandel said that he disagreed with plans to set a "date certain" for withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, also stating that "at some point in time, we have to take the training wheels off and we have to allow those countries to stand on their own two feet."
I call him "crazy" because of how lockstep he is. I don't call someone crazy just for supporting Trump, I call them crazy if they backed 100% of the stolen election bullshit. I don't call someone crazy for opposing Democrats, I call them crazy if they can't stop calling Muslim Democrats "Hamas spokesmen." I don't call someone crazy for being skeptical of some COVID measures, I call them crazy if they oppose 100% of them, even those proposed by their Republican governor.
8 hours ago he tweeted "masks are a form of child abuse." This, to me, is crazy.
Okay, that's an explanation, thanks.
People who grew up in southern Ohio don't have any illusions that it's not dirt poor and dysfunctional; I don't know that him writing a book about his ugly background is going to alienate him with the locals. It's like when an old Jewish guy cracks a joke about Jewish mothers: he gets away with it because he very well knows whereof he speaks.
> Maybe you should actually be scared of the California Democratic Party and its demand that no Democrat stand as a replacement for Governor Newsom? I think this makes sense if you want a future career in California state politics; probably they can blacklist you forever if you cross them. But I wasn’t expecting to have a future career in California state politics, neither were you, and probably neither was Kevin Paffrath. That’s why we would have been able to take this weird opportunity that all the real politicians turned down. Also, given the level of competence they’ve shown here, having the California state Democratic Party out for your head is probably the surest path to a long and healthy life.
This is the key part, IMO. The opportunity is only desirable to people who want power within the Californian political system, but the costs are higher on those who... have a career engaged with the Californian political system. Without disputing that there surely are people whose expected value exceeded Paffrath's, I'd bet the candidate space is fairly small. Maybe a few thousand people or so?
Even smaller when you realize that Angelynne and Gary Coleman and various other B-or-lower-list celebrities already made their run 18 years ago (but Caitlyn Jenner had to wait until this time).
Not that Coleman could run again this time anyway of course.
"But I wasn’t expecting to have a future career in California state politics, neither were you, and probably neither was Kevin Paffrath."
But the thing is, suppose you get a candidate like Joe Average, stand-in for Newsom, with party backing (just about, as they really want Newsom to survive). What are my positions? What are the issues I care about? If elected, what will I do? (1) Niceness in general (2) Nothing much past keeping any crazies from polling better than Newsom (3) Warming the seat until the Democratic Party picks a real candidate it wants to run.
Out of a bunch of similar "who the heck is that, I never heard of him?" runners, why should the long-suffering people of California pick you over, say, "Oh, that's that guy off Youtube? The one who dressed up as an elf?"
I would think most sane Democrats who don't want to see the state burn would go NO / Faulconer.
He's not some rando vanity candidate - or a far right loon. He was the mayor of demographically diverse, largely safe and orderly, San Diego - probably the best run city in California.
Which makes it even more hilarious that he's polling so low.
My theory is the normie California managerial class sees a "R" next to the name and is immediately revolted, and the more sophisticated politicos think that he would have a much better shot at re-election than any of the other meme candidates.
I know some Democrats who say that Faulconer is the best candidate, but that in the unlikely event that Dianne Feinstein ever dies, the governor will choose her replacement, and a GOP governor would choose a GOP replacement, and flipping the Senate to the GOP would be really bad.
In my state, the appointee must be of the same political party as the person they're replacing. But I guess that's not a thing in California.
Given how California normally operates, I'm sure you can get a ballot initiative to fix that if the governor ends up GOP :)
Is the California GOP really that crazy? I seem to remember GOP-led California being pretty well managed in ye olden days, but I suppose being the minority party can make you weird, and ever since the Trump nomination I guess I have no idea what to think about the Republican party anymore (and I'm a Republican.)
I think there's a theory of base-level competence, which the leading party in whatever state has to meet. The lights need to stay on, the garbage needs to get picked up, etc. Is the California GOP up to that level of competence?
(My personal opinion of Newsom is mostly formed by being downwind from California and having our air quality suck all summer. And all last summer. And the summer before. Yes, climate change, etc., but fix SOMETHING.)
There's some sane CA GOP politicians in Orange County and San Diego (Faulconer), but on the state level much more insane than places like MD, VT or MA. Their only platform is really lower gas taxes and hardcore NIMBY. Better policies than Dems on crime and law and order IMO, but that takes a backseat to the other bad policies.
It's actually interesting how deep blue places like MD/VT/MA have decent Republican parties while places like NY and CA have insane GOP. I don't know what the commonality here is.
My theory is that Republicans in MA, VT, and MD are more moderate is because those are all small states with relatively evenly distributed populations. Just like conservatives on college campuses, they're forced to be more moderate, polite, and accommodating in order to avoid being cast out of their social and professional networks as a pariah. Republicans are both statewide and local minorities.
Contrast this with California and New York, large states with extraordinarily pronounced urban/rural divides. Republicans in California may be heavily outnumbered statewide, but dominate in the communities they actually live in. The interior of the state is, in many ways, as hardcore Red Tribe as anywhere in the country. There's no real incentive to moderate because Democrats don't really travel more than 20 miles inland unless they're driving to Vegas or the mountains, and they're always going to lose the statewide elections anyway. My understanding is that New York (and other states, like Virginia and Oregon) has a similar dynamic, but I'm not familiar enough with up-state politics to state with any confidence.
This also makes me wonder if the same happens in reverse. It makes intuitive sense to me that a Democratic Party in a rural state based mostly around a handful of isolated college towns would be more extreme than a Democratic Party that's forced to interact with a GOP majority in more mixed, suburban environments. But, having lived in big blue cities in big blue states all my life, I don't have a strong sense of red state dynamics
I think I agree with all of that except:
"they're forced to be"
First of all - not sure if that's referring to the politicians or the general populace - but either way, I'd think it's much more likely that they're actually more moderate, not just putting on a fake "front". I don't think Charlie Baker is secretly a MAGA populist.
Fair enough. Forced may be too strong a word. I'm mostly speaking from my own experience as a right-libertarian on college campuses. I often felt the need to present myself as more moderate and agreeable than I really was. I wasn't nefariously lying about my true intentions or anything, but the incentives acting on me certainly had a significant effect on how I expressed my politics publicly. And now that I'm living and working in an environment much more in line with my personal beliefs, I've noticed I'm not quite as good at "reaching across the aisle" as it were. It feels like those skills have atrophied from less strenuous effort.
Native Upstate New Yorker here. A couple of decades ago, New York Republicans were largely sane and decent at governing, and popular upstate. Now, the usual pattern is Democratic local politicians in the cities, and the Trump base in the rural areas around them. There’s broad awareness that nobody at the state level gives Upstate much thought, which is probably why Trump’s support was as strong as it was.
The new Gov is from Buffalo - first upstate governor since FDR - but my friends who still live there don’t expect much from her.
Zach, some people are claiming that Newsom actually had some role in causing the fires by cutting fire prevention budgets. https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-they-blame-heat-deaths
How much did he cut the fire prevention budgets in Siberia?
Ok but don’t come crying if that attempt at 4D chess gives you Gov. Larry Elder.
Or just have a party with the balls to tell / beg / convince / bribe their grand old dames to step down when they have a chance to choose their own replacement (*cough* RBG *cough*)
>the unlikely event that Dianne Feinstein ever dies
Why, because of all the adrenochrome she drinks?
She might get caught out in sunlight, or she might loose track of the earth from her native town when her coffin is being shipped to DC, might get tricked into going to a beach and end up counting all the grains of sand. Lots of possibilities, really.
An H S Thomson reference? The reader base of ACX continues to surprise me.
Unfortunately the term has spread much wider than Thomson's readership recently... https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-dark-virality-of-a-hollywood-blood-harvesting-conspiracy/
Oh boy. Didn’t know it was part of the baby eating Democrat business.
Also a running ACX joke from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-august #5
Couldn't agree m ore.
Americans have the government they deserve.
Yes this is correct. NO on general principles, and Faulconer as the clearly most qualified candidate. This will be my vote as a reasonably left-libertarian California.
FWIW my wife is a staunch Democrat and voted NO/blank as she did not care for any of the replacement candidates.
Glad to see there's some convergence in this [stag hunt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt) mess of a ballot. I'm kind of floored no one has fixed the process since the 2003 fiasco.
As a Californian progressive, this is exactly what I did, since Paffrath seems like a piece of shit NIMBY, and if we're in the alternative where Yes wins, then there are more Republicans than Democrats voting, so the only real choices are Republicans. On a side note, this recall needs reform so badly.
If people think Paffrath has that good a chance of becoming governor, I'll offer them 12:1 odds. I'll accept up to $200. (As an assurance that I'm trustworthy, I work at the Future of Humanity Institute, and my colleagues would expect me to honor bets like this, and if I didn't pay, you could ruin my reputation by informing them.)
Why don't you just use Polymarket or Omni or any of the crypto betting sites out there.
I think he wants to demonstrate that he's pretty confident that Paffrath doesn't have much of a chance which makes Scott's argument not as strong if true.
His is not significantly different from Scott's, though. 12:1 and 10% chance are quite similar.
Yes, good point. Not an astounding difference.
But he's not saying 'I believe the odds are 12:1'; he's saying 'I will offer you 12:1'. It makes sense that he'd try to get the best odds he can. 12:1 might just be a number chosen to sound tempting to somebody who believes it's truly 9:1.
I don't think he has a chance of becoming governor, but I do think he has a good chance of picking up a lot of disaffected people who want to send a protest vote message to the local party: we're not recalling Newsom but we want you to take us seriously.
This reminded me to check who won the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York and yep, it was Eric Adams, which did not surprise me at all.
Back when everybody was running and Yang was topping the polls, I figured that the voters would go for people they knew, people from local government or otherwise, and when it came down to Adams and Garcia, this was in line with my expectations.
Same way with Paffrath; I think Newsom *may* squeak past the recall, but I do expect Paffrath or some other 'random' candidate to chalk up a lot of votes as people want to express dissatisfaction with both Newsom's governorship and how the Democratic Party are treating them re: not permitting any other candidate to run with party backing.
I would think that most people voting for Paffrath are actually your standard-issue MSNBC-watchers who think that voting No on recall, and then voting for the guy with the D after the name is how you show loyalty to the party.
This doesn't really say anything because scott's argument is roughly as strong whether paffrath has a 5% chance or a 10% chance
Yeah, conditional on the recall going through, it's virtually guaranteed to be Elder. Paffrath will only get a subset of Democratic votes.
Is Peter Thiel really so ideologically attached to the Republican Party that he wouldn't have switched party registration to run? It seems like he totally could have run, so either he didn't see it or it wasn't worth it to him given the controversy it would stir up.
Probably meant that he wouldn’t win as a Democrat, given supporting Trump. He does have two friends as senate candidates up an running now, (Vance and masters) suggesting he is interested in political power
Thiel likely has no appetite for running himself but there certainly wasn't anything stopping him from bankrolling some ambitious state legislator.
The question is whether Peter Thiel can find anyone that he trusts to implement sufficiently Thiely policies. The overlap between "smart enough to agree with Peter Thiel on everything" and "dumb enough to want to go into politics" has to be pretty small.
No "ambitious state legislator" will run because doing so as a Democrat will automatically kill your career.
I think if you're as well-known as Bloomberg or Thiel, switching parties to run in the easier lane doesn't really help - everyone always knew Bloomberg was basically a technocratic Democrat, and everyone already knows Thiel is a weird Christian libertarian Trumpian Republican. In Bloomberg's case, changing lanes helped because there was a formal Democratic primary and a formal Republican primary, and the Republican primary was easy to win. But in Thiel's case, there is no formal primary, and putting a D after his name was just going to make the wolves bay even louder for his blood rather than pick up many votes.
Thiel would be an awesome choice if only to see what to does to stop Girardian mimetic violence, sacrifice Trump maybe?
I think he doesn't really crave the limelight, and has far too weird a demeanour to be electable. Far too smart too.
Switching parties might work if you stick with it and are a loner. Trump was a centrist D like D-Richard Gephardt until the 1990's, made the usual 'the party left me' switch, ran and governed on D-Gephardt's platform. And you could read Matt Braynard's pretty solid claim that the level of 2020 election fraud was higher than the margin of D victory.
I don't believe that Trump governed on a Gephardt-style platform. At least, the bill that is usually pointed to as the largest legislative accomplishment of the Trump era is the tax bill of 2017, which seems like it was very un-Gephardt-ian. (Perhaps the explanation though is that this bill was driven by Congress, and the distinctively Trump endeavors were things like tariffs and immigration policy, which probably were much more consonant with Gephardt.)
"At first, the hearing went smoothly for Braynard, who has the professional presentation of a data specialist. But then came state Rep. Bee Nguyen, a Democrat from Atlanta. It turns out she had been doing her own research. Citing an exhibit filed by Braynard that listed people who had voted but who supposedly had registered in Georgia and another state, she pointed out that several names were duplicated on the list. Then she said that she had looked up the first 10 names on the list and had found eight of these people listed in Georgia property records as residents. She reached one of them on the phone, she said, and he confirmed that he lived and voted only in Georgia. Nguyen said she verified this person’s voting record.
Taking another name from this list—a woman allegedly registered in Georgia and Arizona—she confirmed this person’s residence and voting record in Georgia, and she found another voter with the exact same name listed in the Arizona voter rolls, born in the same year but with a different birth date. She also identified another person on the list in a similar situation: same name, different birth dates.
In rapid-fire fashion, Nguyen continued on. She turned to the Braynard list of voters who he said had registered with postal boxes “disguised” as residences. She recognized one of the addresses as being around the corner from her home—a condo complex with a FedEx center on the first floor. (Some apartment buildings use a postal box-like system for their addresses.) A friend in the building sent her a list of residents of the complex. They were all on Braynard’s list, she said. And the same was true, she had discovered, for another condo complex with a FedEx center. On her own, she said, she had discovered that 128 names on this list—more than 10 percent of Braynard’s total number—were errors."
Yeah, looks solid alright.
Where is this from? If you work somewhere you'd be fired for reading anything but D media, you could still read Charlie Peters' anecdote about how D-Daley's machine stole Illinois in 1960- 1) let the other guy vote first so you know how much to fake, 2) then raise the dead and print more ballots. The 2020 amateurs needed a suspicious pause between these two, but Daley was a pro.
So you literally have no evidence of fraud in 2020 then?
For now your censors haven't deleted Matt Braynard https://lookaheadamerica.org/wisconsinreport/.
There are laws about that in California - you can't run as a party member unless you've been in that party for something like 12 months. (Too lazy to look up details, but that's the idea.) 12 months before the filing deadline, the recall wasn't really on anyone's horizon.
The election is rigged
Wow, already? My, the deep state does work fast, doesn't it?
/s
Fast, effective and efficient.
Oh wait...
Can we elect *them* governor? They're starting to sound pretty good compared to Newsom.
You not only can, but you will!
Just wanted to say, LOL
My wish is that a close election shakes up the smug complacency of California Democrats.
The state is like a one-party mandated country, but unlike somewhere like China, government officials don't face any consequences for poor outcomes. China fired hundreds of local officials for poor COVID response for example. In California you can be a corrupt grifter and really nothing happens.
Take crime in California. The numbers are relatively middle of the pack vs. other states, but I recently did an analysis where I looked at county by country crime rates adjusted for demographics and income, and virtually every county in CA dropped to the very bottom / worst.
Was it the income or the demographics? It's a high COL state, so I'm not sure if that gives you apples-to-apples. Is it on GitHub?
A country like China has the benefit of a standard or common conception of what constitutes good governance. It's hard to call it "incompetence" when your government makes a conscious decision to prioritize decarceration.
We really need to break the stranglehold of national parties on state and local politics. California needs a pro-development/pro-housing party and a slow growth party, that both align with Democrats at the federal level, but that contest state and local elections, and maybe even both run candidates for federal office with separate subscripts after the D (the top-two jungle primary system in California makes it easy to do this kind of thing).
The problem is that without two actual local party lines, you can't hold primaries, and run one candidate on each line, and actually figure out which direction the voters prefer (or let the factions figure out where exactly to split the difference to get half of the voters on each side). I remember in the Los Angeles race to succeed Villaraigosa, I eventually did support Garcetti, but it was a bit hard to decide between him and the two other Democrats that qualified for the four-candidate debates. And I suspect the situation for London Breed in San Francisco would be a bit clearer if the Board of Supervisors had a clear party split in her favor or against her.
Could expanding the “jungle primary” to non-federal positions in California help with that?
It might. Newsom's first election (at least, the first one I heard of him in) was a runoff for San Francisco mayor, where he faced off against the Green Party candidate. I don't recall what triggered the runoff there, since it was not a federal office (and the federal jungle primary law didn't exist yet anyway, I think).
I still think it would be more helpful to make the factions more explicitly clear, so that we know whether there are specifically two factions, or specifically three, and so that we can be more sure whether electing this candidate or that one to city council or county supervisor will help or hurt the mayor in their goals, rather than having to read the tea leaves of what people are saying in their campaign ads, and what is hovering just below the surface.
If you want to demonstrate the anti-crime backlash, recall Chesa Boudin, not Newsom.
I consider "went through a competitor's office dressed as an elf and giving out flowers" a pro, not a con.
Imagine a future were antics like this are necessary for political influence. People criticize the other candidates as "boring"
I see your point, but such antics take creativity and independence, which are probably better qualifiers than blind obedience and adeptness at ass-licking and character assassination.
Expert level: Imagine a possible future where antics like this AREN'T necessary for political influence.
I'm already working on a novel where the dominant party is 4chan's "troll party", and the Church of GME is the biggest lender...
In a world where they're necessary, it doesn't take creativity and independence, it just requires you to hire some PR firm that makes up crazy stunts for you to do.
For me, it depends. Keebler elf or Tolkien elf? I like both well enough, but for very different reasons.
I was just about to post the same thing ! We need more elves in government. Perhaps then we'd finally get something done, even if it's cookie-cutter environmental policy :-)
I find it interesting that the strategy of the party that calls themselves Democrats was to intentionally limit the choices available to voters. Doesn't seem very (little d) democratic to me.
It turns out that two patriotic-sounding names picked from the same descriptor "Democratic Republic" over a hundred years prior convey very little info about the actual policies of their respective parties
Indeed. I wonder how many of the members of those parties could even adequately define the terms that underlie their names....
I mean, party primaries have a long and established history within political parties with all sorts of democratic ambitions, despite their role in intentionally limiting the choices available to voters in the general election.
I don't think your comparison really fits the situation. There's a world of difference between whittling down a field of many contenders and attempting to dissuade the rise of contenders in the first place. The former is meant to give voters a choice, whereas the latter is meant to not. Certainly there's plenty of gaming the system that occurs, as well as times when there aren't any real primary challengers, but the point still stands.
Presumably the downside risk for political actors is that:
1. You run.
2. You lose and Newsom wins.
3. The enduring Newsom administration bears a grudge and ices you out.
And this risk doesn't necessarily have a symmetrical upside if e.g. Elder wins.
The interesting thing about this downside is it's proportional to how engaged you are with state government. So it's a very strong downside incentive for the sorts of people who are most natural candidates for governor—state-wide electeds, mayors and state legislators, etc. etc. etc. On the other hand, this risk basically doesn't exist for Kevin P.
This is a fascinating counterproductive incentive structure. Probably someone should fix it.
It seems to me that the incentive structure worked great.
>>>Apparently his videos include things like tips on how to defraud your tenants.
An accusation like this needs support, I think.
Maybe it's this? https://archive.curbed.com/2019/11/15/20963196/youtube-video-advice-real-estate-landlord I wouldn't call this defrauding, though, just lying to them.
If you lie to somebody in an attempt to induce them to provide you with an economic benefit (for example by not imposing on you the cost of trimming your palm trees, as in his example), then that is fraud. Saying you're not the owner, or not the sole owner, or whatever, in the hope of discouraging a tenant from going after you, is absolutely fraud.
It's half-assed clumsy incompetent fraud, since land titles are public records, but it's still fraud...
Not being the owner doesn't remove any of the tenant's rights - he still has a legal right to trimmed trees, or he doesn't. I think the definition you're suggesting is overly broad. Like, if I tell my manager I won't be reachable on vacation because I won't have cell phone service when that's not true -- it might be inadvisable to that relationship, it's definitely dishonest, and I might get an economic benefit from it (because otherwise he'd expect me to work a bit over vacation), but I wouldn't call it fraud because it doesn't change anyone's legal obligations to anyone else, it's not criminal, and no one is taking a risk/investment they wouldn't take otherwise. But at any rate, the article didn't call this fraud, no one else on the internet seemed to call it fraud, so if this is the example of fraud (and I don't know if it is), it would at the very least be a non-central example that I think a lot of people would find misleading. But maybe there is another one.
Fraud has an unambiguous legal definition, and the word isn't really used outside of that definition, so it doesn't make sense to talk about what you'd "call" fraud.
If you use deception to induce somebody *not to exercise* one of their legal rights, to their detriment and your benefit, then you've committed fraud. It doesn't matter that you can't *remove* the right. And it doesn't matter *what* lie you told, either. "I'm not the owner" is fraud, and so is "my mother is sick" or "my dog ate the hedge clippers". None of those actually have any effect on the other person's rights, but that's not the question. The question is whether the false information you gave altered the other person's decision.
...and if your manager actually *has* a legal right to access to you while you're on vacation, and you falsely tell your manager that you won't be reachable, then that is also at least civil fraud, maybe criminal in some places. On the other hand, if your manager does not have such a right to begin with, and just tends to be pushy, then it's not fraud (in most places anyway)... because you haven't induced your manager not to exercise any enforceable right.
In the example given, the contract says it's the tenant's obligation to trim the trees. So the owner isn't trying to get out of a legal obligation. There's no enforceable right the the landlord is trying to get out of. The tenant is being pushy. Not fraud, then.
He says "Never, ever tell the tenant that you're the owner. You're just the manager." If taken 100% literally this would be a command to lie. But in the next bit he says (paraphrasing) that if confronted that they know you are owner, tell them you are one of the owners (he is married). So we know "never, ever" isn't 100% literal. Given that context, I think the advice he is ultimately trying to convey is "don't introduce yourself as the owner, but as the manager." with a dash of hyperbole. That would not be a lie. The Curbed author goes on to write "the overwhelming majority of Paffrath’s content consists of mundane tips that have a neutral or even positive effect on tenants". I haven't really watched anything where I felt he was encouraging someone to defraud tenants, and even this clip doesn't give me that impression when it is viewed in full context.
This particular subthread, by the way, can be taken as evidence for why you really _don't_ want to run for governor.
If you actually emerge as a possible threat to the powers that be, then suddenly an army of journalists will appear out of the woodwork to scrutinise everything you've ever said, written or done, and paint it in the worst possible light.
Amusingly, Scott's already got a small taste of that, but still implied in this post that it might've been a good idea for him to run. Of course, maybe it's mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I'm still somewhat surprised.
I think that 'induce them to provide you with an economic benefit (for example by not imposing on you the cost of trimming your palm trees)' is rather grossly misleading, because in that case it was in the context of a contract there the tenants were responsible for something and trying to weasel out of it. I don't think it is an example of the most integrity at all, but it's more a white lie than fraud.
Agreed. The Curbed article linked by Emily suggests the defrauding would be a reference to him telling tenants he's not the owner, just a manager. Strikes me as illegal (IANAL), but defrauding makes it sound like he's creating videos like "How to steal your tenants' security deposit even though they did nothing to the apartment."
Another consideration: if you ran as a "D" against the party's wishes, you would almost certainly be retributed against. The California state govt has a long history of political retribution (most of it gets no press coverage for obvious reasons). It would be as dumb as publicly standing up against the CCP as a business leader in China. Just suicide.
Just to check: you're implying that political enemies of the CA state government are jailed, killed, black-sited, framed for crimes, etc? Do you have a source on this?
Maximally uncharitable. Nice.
> It would be as dumb as publicly standing up against the CCP as a business leader in China
The CCP does execute billionaires for corruption. And they were, I believe, corrupt, but also stood against the party in doing so.
There's something wrong with describing a factually correct statement as "maximally uncharitable." There's no haze of uncertainty or interpretation here.
“Fact-checking” an almost certainly intentionally hyperbolic statement with the passive aggressive “do you have a source for this” is indeed uncharitable.
Making a statement of the form "X would be as dumb as Y", where X is an important real-life action, and Y is intended to be hyperbolic, would be worse than uncharitable; it would be deliberate motte-and-bailey propaganda.
That’s not what motte-and-bailey means.
Rhetorical hyperbole is not automatically strategic equivocation.
It isn't factually correct. "As dumb as X" doesn't imply that the consequences are the same, only that they are as obviously bad.
David, I was responding under the impression that Eöl meant that McKenzie was being maximally uncharitable to the CCP, rather than that McKenzie was being maximally uncharitable to scf0101.
(I wrote the above under the mistaken assumption that Eöl meant that McKenzie was being maximally uncharitable to the CCP, rather than that McKenzie was being maximally uncharitable to scf0101.)
Perhaps I should let scf speak, but I believe the post referred to "political retribution". I would understand "suicide" metaphorically, as in "career suicide".
The issue is with the comparison. Defying the CPC as a rich Chinese businessman isn't just career suicide; they actually execute you for it.
Which sort of political retribution? I assume there's lots of retribution in the form of withholding party support for future political ambitions, which is why party member politicians didn't do it. But do they exact retribution in other forms, against non-politicians?
most non-politician challengers would be actors (Reagan, Schwarzenegger), so i suppose they have some kind of control over Hollywood and actors' guilds.
And I think "withholding" party support is an understatement, they would try to actively deny staff and funding even from other sources.
You'll have your reputation trashed, for starters.
Unless you have an absolutely flawless character, as attested to by every one of your exes, and have never ever expressed anything that could possibly be construed as a heterodox opinion, then you will be universally known to be a Nazi-sympathising rapist before the end of the week.
That optimistically assumes that people are not capable of blatantly lying.
Well, see the trick is to *run as* a Nazi-sympathizing rapist. I'm not entirely sure how funny that actually is, since I'm not too sure how close we are to that actually happening.
Californian politics sounds crazy even by the standards of local politics, and also grudge-bearing and mean. Being a Democrat safe state means that the party feels like it can get away with milking the tears of orphans for their morning smoothie and the important work of knifing their rivals in the back and being petty about ever-decreasing circles of self-righteousness and the ordinary corruption of 'getting my girlfriend/boyfriend onto some plum quango at the expense of the public purse', because what are the people gonna do, vote Republican and kick 'em all out? Ha ha ha!
(I don't even know how to begin to describe whatever the San Francisco Board of Supervisors thinks it's doing, maybe there really is a Hellmouth there or something).
If you think the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is bad, wait till you hear about the San Francisco Board of Education. We think we have a good chance of getting two of the worst ones recalled soon, that's how bad they are.
Ah yes, the ones that wanted to get rid of racist highschool names? Including for a school named after Diane Feinstein? The original list of names had an Irish one on it, a guy I never heard of before, and he seems to have done something like write about the history of Irish music back in the 19th century. I have no idea what he did to have a school in California named after him, and I have no idea what he did that was so racist he had to be de-named.
Yeah, there must be something in the air or the water there.
The big question here is, Do the people of California want to keep Newsom as governor? Reading up about it, it seems that there have been a few attempts at recalls that never got anywhere, until this year. This year, for whatever reason or reasons, enough people were pissed-off enough to do something like sign up to the recall campaign.
Probably yes, everyone is tired of Covid, and the fires, and all the rest of it, and whoever is sitting in the hot seat is bearing the brunt of it. That happens to be Newsom.
However, then the Democratic Party in California does have a problem. Because if people *are* fed-up and blaming Newsom, they are also going to be angry at *you*. And doing the strong-arm tactics of "anybody serious who tries running, we're gonna break your legs (politically speaking)" is *not* a good look when the public want to know "so are you taking our concerns seriously, or are you treating us like mushrooms?"
Scott talks about running a spoiler candidate, but that won't get anywhere unless the Californian Democrats (and the wider party, it sounded like Biden etc. were rowing in behind Newsom to fight the recall) sit up and take notice. Because if they won't give people a choice, this is the perfect opportunity for a protest vote: no, we are not your tame spaniels who'll roll over and follow what you say.
The way this is set up sounds *great* for angry voters to go "No. 1 - don't recall Newsom (because we don't want the Republican candidates and we don't want the joke candidates)" BUT also "No. 2 - we're voting for the guy who brings you out in hives as the recall candidate, because fluff you Democratic Party in California, is why".
Paffrath is not a good candidate? He sounds like a joke? Well, (a) if the worst anyone can dig up in his past is "dressed up as one of Santa's elves and delivered flowers to a Youtube rival", then we're doing pretty good in today's cancel culture and (b) if nice reasonable Democrat supporters are going "Don't vote for Paffrath, for the love of God!", then it's Trump all over again - 'I can't stand the guy, but more importantly, these people who have annoyed the cranberry sauce out of me and are taking me and my concerns for granted and ignoring them *really* can't stand him'.
If the Democratic Party didn't choose a proper candidate to run if Newsom is recalled, then that sounds like they're afraid Newsom *will* be recalled and if given a choice, the electorate will boot him out and pick the replacement. But by trying to strong-arm the voters into "Newsom or no-one", they very much risk "well since you put it like that - stick it up your jumper, I'm voting for the one guy you all hate".
In which case a guy (or gal) running on "I don't really care about being governor, I'll serve the one year if elected then stand down for the Democratic Party really true candidate" is not what the people want and if they went on the list of candidates with the Party backing them, maybe they would pick up the concerned moderates - or maybe they'd throw fuel on the fire and make a protest vote even more likely.
I do think what needs to be addressed here is "the people of California are mad, why are they mad, and what can the Democratic Party do to make them not mad, and that does not mean 'you vote for who we tell you to vote for, peasants!' tactics" and not "oh, if only someone Nice had run, then we wouldn't get Youtube landlords and Republicans with a chance".
But
I don't think "the people of California" are mad. It only takes 12% signing a petition to get the recall to happen, and the petition missed this goal by the deadline. *However*, a judge happened to extend the deadline due to covid, at just the same moment as the dinner at the French Laundry went viral. I think it would be interesting for some pollster to poll a few thousand California registered voters so they can find a couple hundred that signed the petition, and ask what fraction of those people now regret having signed it last November in a fit of pique at the darkest moment of the pandemic, inspired by a clickbait news story.
I was surprised no actually big YouTube personality, like a Logan Paul, went for it. My sense of it is that Paffrath was a big enough deal to get name ID and traction, but not so big that the negative attention of a campaign could harm their career. Remember, Americans hate politicians---every celebrity who gets publicly involved in politics sees their career prospects damaged. Is a grueling, miserable campaign where you will get blasted by folks you're normally aligned with, attacked by the media, and have your career tainted with politics worth it? I doubt it
I sort of wonder what the story is with Caitlyn Jenner. (I mean, ever since I heard the name Kardashian, I've been wondering what's the story with Caitlyn Jenner, but the governor run is an even newer and weirder story to wonder about.)
Her consultants saw a big, attention grabbing celebrity as a way to get rich. Happens all the time. Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina were similar tales.
This is the argument from Newsom's former campaign manager regarding voting on the second candidate. I think he's right.
https://twitter.com/ASDem/status/1429877738999992321?s=20
Wow, that lowers my opinion of Nate Silver a lot.
It seems like someone really ought to circulate a ballot measure to reform the recall process. Probably the best way to do it is to automatically put the current Governor and the current Lieutenant Governor on the ballot of alternatives, whether they want to be or not, and only require other people to file to run. Having the current Governor on there solves the problem of the Governor losing the first half, but still getting more votes than anyone on the replacement ballot. Having the current Lt. Gov. on there solves the problem of the Governor being a transparently corrupt crook with a 30% fanbase but hanging on because there is no coherent alternative. The possibility of other candidates filing means that there is still a chance for new blood if there is really a popular revolt against the current political establishment.
Forcing these two names on there means that the Lt. Gov. faces no blowback for choosing to put their name on the ballot.
They could get blowback for putting any actual effort into campaigning, though, or for not actively trying to sink their candidacy. If the Gov is bitter and vindictive enough.
>The point of VC funds is to help people who do have declining marginal utility to money act as if they don't
I have strong reasons to believe LPs think VC funds exist to provide returns and potentially coinvest opportunities. Was your comment more of a dig at VCs (which is totally warranted)?
I know you wrote this post in a sorta joking tone but I think it's worth mentioned that Kevin Faulconer is pretty much doing what you've suggested and he's a legit candidate with legit experience and not the least bit of an assclown. He was the mayor of San Diego and dealt with most of the issues that are now endemic across the state.
Faulconer just has the misfortune of being a career member of the party that has a dozen or more people running, so he couldn't get the party to coalesce around him. (Especially since the rank and file of that party at the statewide level doesn't have any interest in the sorts of things that matter in the one urban corner of the state where Republicans still matter.)
What I was trying to say about VCs was that although buying 25% of a company with a 5% chance of making a billion dollars and a 95% chance of nothing (expected value, $12.5 million) for $5 million is a really good deal, in practice nobody with $5 million wants to do that, because in most worlds they lose all their money and get nothing back, and the lure of a few worlds where they're super-rich doesn't compensate for that. But if you package a hundred of those deals together, then you can bet a few of them will succeed and it becomes more about simple expected money calculations.
Yeah, Faulconer seems fine, this was entirely about the Democratic side of the aisle.
Yea, portfolio theory is very much a real thing. I've never heard it talked about as a product of the declining marginal utility of money but I'm more of a finance type than an econ type. Maybe that's the underlying interaction driving diversification.
I mistakenly thought Faulconer was a Democrat.
I think the chance of a failed campaign is a massive hit to personal reputation apart from just money lost which takes a special kind of person to be willing to do it. Billionaires maybe willing to lose money but they’re not willing to be the most hated person in the universe. I can only imagine the number of sexual harassment cases that will come out of the woodwork once someone starts to run for office, followed by claims of racism and on and on. A politician is built different
I honestly don't think that the characterization of Kevin Paffrath as a "landlord influencer" is entirely fair. His heavily politicized Wikipedia makes a big deal about it to try to leave a bad impression in the reader's mind, and I'm wondering if that figured prominently in your research. The term comes from a writer that did a piece on him in a trade publication a couple years ago, referring to him that way. What one author pigeonholed him as doesn't define the man.
I also don't think he has posted any videos showing how to "defraud tenants" (I've watch many but not all - he is prolific). He is quoted as saying that "most landlords sucks" and he has videos encouraging people to develop win/win relationships with their tenants.
A comparatively small percentage of his content in the past 2 years has to do with landlording. Most of it is more in the arena of financial education and real estate.
Lastly, his campaign had no telltale signs of being a vanity campaign. He has been aggressively and transparently campaigning the entire time, sharing aspects of it on YouTube and other social media as he crisscrossed the state. He did a 24 live stream that was the source of much of his campaign donations.
I believe that the available evidence on his channel shows that Kevin Paffrath is both sharp and shrewd and saw this opportunity that the Democrats left wide open.
Thanks for this perspective - I haven't watched any Paffrath and just know what Wikipedia/the media/his governor website say about him.
Reminds me of a the rationalist failure in early bitcoin. Thought without action..
There is some similarity, but if it was more directly analogous then this post would be asking "there's such a great opportunity here to be governor of California, so how come only 4 of the 50 candidates are rationalists?"
You're probably referencing this (in case anyone else is interested): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MajyZJrsf8fAywWgY/a-lesswrong-crypto-autopsy
The California recall election is the absolute weirdest electoral game. It's a scenario where a potentially *tiny* minority can win an incredibly important election due to the sheer inconvenience of having to vote in a one-off.
It would be a stretch to say that Paffrath is running because his Wikipedia article got deleted last year ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Kevin_Paffrath ), but I think the basic idea holds: Paffrath wanted to boost his public profile, and "lucked" into a decent chance of getting elected governor.
Because nobody else seems to want the job.
This works if you're the one, and only one, "reasonable" Dem. But once the first person like that files, a dozen others figure "well, why not me then?" and it's all shot to hell.
Probably a naive question, but:
If the candidate is some rando Internet personality who gives landlords tips on defrauding tenants and who is only running opportunistically, is the fact that he claims to support your preferred political party still a good reason to vote for him over a different-party candidate? If so, why? Is this based on a belief that the political game is zero-sum, or what?
Surprised nobody’s mentioned Paffrath’s Reddit AMA where he proposed piping water from the Mississippi River to California
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMADisasters/comments/p1y0vg/youtuber_kevin_paffrath_runs_for_governor_of/
Now I'm curious about that idea and doing some research. It's not quite as crazy as you make it sound, it has a bit of history https://coyotegulch.blog/2011/05/19/pipeline-from-the-mississippi-river-to-colorado
Looks like it's been seriously studied by the US Bureau of Reclamation too, https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/programs/crbstudy/finalreport/Technical%20Report%20F%20-%20Development%20of%20Options%20and%20Stategies/TR-F_Appendix4_FINAL.pdf -- see section 2.2
Eight hundred miles long, with a projected cost (in 2011) of $23 billion. There are certainly dumber and more expensive ideas I could think of, like, say, a really fast train from Bakersfield to Fresno...
50/50 means Newsom is a goner.
If there is one thing that is very clear - it is that Republicans don't respond to traditional polling anywhere like the liberals.
I don't know much about this, but I am sufficiently trusting in 538 to have adjusted for that that I'll bet you $100 at 3:2 odds Newsom stays (eg you give me $150 if he wins, I give you $100 if he loses). Offer open to anyone else interested if c1ue isn't.
538 was historically wrong in 2016 and they were directionally correct but factually wrong in 2020 - and the directional win was entirely a function of mail-in ballots.
As such, your reliance on that expertise is likely misplaced.
I'd be happy to take your money except it would then require exchanging identities.
Since I live in cancel happy country, I'll just have to sit back and take the victory lap when it happens.
I may be interested in getting on a bet with Scott and at these amounts I maybe would not care much if I lose (I certainly would be very unhappy to lose if the amount was in the hundreds of dollars, but I bet -- not literally, I don't want this bet to get recursive! -- so would Scott.)
Scott, I assume you would be respectful of people's privacy to a fault (you moved to substack to begin with due to your privacy being violated when the NYT doxxed you), so I am curious what you have in mind in terms of the logistics regarding this bet. Mind sharing it in general terms, and if I am willing to take the bet, we could discuss the details offline? (I don't know how Bryan Caplan does it with his, but he seems to mostly take bets with other economists he knows well, not with random commenters on econlog. That being said, I might not be so "random", I met you in person 3 times.)
538 gave Trump an almost 30% chance to win in 2016, and was correct on the popular vote, I wouldn't call that "historically wrong". And since when do mail-in ballots count differently?
Perhaps you weren't watching television on election night in 2016: nowhere was there a mention of Trump having any chance.
Nor was the shocked look on the faces of every single professional political predictor fake.
Nor is the "almost 30%" number correct - you got this from 538's own butt covering story in 2017. All the talk was about the path to victory - and 538 was consistent with ALL the other polls showing Trump had no chance. Equally, the downplaying of a 2% to 3% consistent undercounting of Republican votes is not a minor delta given the plethora of interviews, exit polls, online polls, etc etc. Nor was this a one time phenomenon: the same happened for in-person voting in 2020.
As for mail-in ballots: I am not a believer in mass outright fraud via mail-in ballots, but I am a believer that mass mail-in ballots encourages fraud and is a bad idea.
The manner by which mail-in ballots were introduced was also extremely not conducive to acceptance by the losing side.
But ultimately these issues will be resolved in the states and those shenanigans aren't going to slip through again, unchallenged, which is what matters.
I actually read the 538 website on the morning of the election and can assure you that they did in fact give Trump a 30% chance.
538's model for this is way simpler than their presidential forecasting model -- it's pretty much just a weighted average of the polls by quality, minus a "house effect" that adjusts for the bias of polling groups *relative to other pollsters*. It doesn't take into account the possibility that Republicans might be undercounted by polls; there's not even enough data to try doing that, since there's been exactly 3 polls in the past month.
That being said, that's not at all where your prior should hedge towards in the absence of any data. California is a heavily Democratic state, so if there are few polls and they're all low-quality, then regardless of who's favored in them, you should put your money on the Democrat. This is doubly true since polls show Newsom has decent approval ratings.
If there is one thing that has been consistent about elections for the past many years - it is that non-Democrats are undercounted.
In this case, it is actually well understood by everyone that the issue is turnout.
The people who are angry are motivated to turn out - nobody else cares.
It is certainly possible that this won't be true, but let's face it: Newsom is simply not inspiring in any positive way.
Nor did you address the precedent: remember Gray Davis?
Davis also was a Democrat governor in California. Davis also faced a recall election and he lost. He didn't lose to Schwarzenegger - he lost the recall and Schwarzenegger was simply the most visible of the alternate candidates.
Was the bursting of the Y2K bubble plus the (Enron assisted) electricity crisis worse than the economic and societal maelstrom due to COVID?
I think not.
Want to bet, then?
The polls are already adjusting for motivation. That's the only reason they're even close in the first place.
You can bet on Newsom being recalled at only 20c at polymarket.com -- it's a crypto exchange so you don't need to give personally identifying information, and it's available to people anywhere in the world.
Wow, if there is something more insecure than the combination of crypto plus a betting service, I don't know what it is.
You get both a permanent record of having made the bet and a link to your real identity.
Pass.
What's the link to your real identity?
Even assuming you don't use a credit card to fund - you need to provide at least an email. The web site captures all kinds of other data as well; go to amiunique.org to see what just browser level info reveals about you. Actual surveillance would sample cookies etc - so if you use Google, Facebook, Twitter etc then there is no hope for anonymity.
On the wallet side: if you're using "pure" bitcoin, using the wallet for spurious transactions like a small bet means more opportunity to link the wallet to your real identity.
Can you be anonymous doing what you said?
Yes in theory, no for the vast majority of people.
You can interact directly with the contracts without using the Poly UI if you're worried (which I'm not, because, like the vast majority of readers here, I live in a country where betting is legal)
This isn't about the legality - it is about being canceled.
I wish more of the internet people I respect got involved in politics. But being a public figure sounds like my idea of hell and I imagine that's pretty typical in the community.
Scott's one of THE most public figures in the community, and he's still desperate to preserve the anonymity he can.
I remember very clearly that when Grey Davis was recalled, the Dem establishment tried the same thing, no candidate. Lt. Governor Buestamante tried running on a platform of "No on the recall, Yes on Buestemante"
It's interesting that Bustamante's political career went no where after that. He tried running for the Insurance Commissioner and lost.
So maybe based on precedent there was an idea of it's bad to be the guy who tries to be the insurance policy.
On the other hand, in the last 20 years, two Democratic governors will either have been recalled or be at risk of being recalled and replaced by a Republican. So it seems like the Democrats don't have a strategy other than grumble-grumbling about the will of the people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruz_Bustamante#:~:text=Bustamante%20had%20an%20apparently%20icy,before%20the%20recall%20election%20approached.&text=During%20the%20recall%20election%2C%20Bustamante,indicating%20he%20opposed%20the%20recall.
The position of governor of California is nothing more than a scapegoat. It clearly doesn't afford enough power to fix anything or someone would have do so.
Scott is writing here as if he personally would like to be CA governor if he recognized a low cost opportunity to take the job. And I think that probably isn't true, but just as some jokes work best when told in first person, he's using it as a literary device of sorts. Really, having to be governor of California sounds terrible.
I really thing the best explanation is Paffrath is a much more serious and intelligent candidate than you're giving him credit for, and most people didn't seize this opportunity because most people aren't as ambitious and hard-working. Its ridiculous to dismiss him as a youtuber -- he's had success in other fields, his videos directly help people build wealth (not just for entertainment), and he has a strong policy platform
Stepping back from the object-level political discussion, I want to talk about the philosophy of “smart people should win” that underlies this post and several of your older ones. You’ve written about:
- How smart people could/should have seen the early Bitcoin boom coming and invested/mined some Bitcoin early,
- How smart people could have seen COVID-19 coming before the mainstream did (this is arguably the one people in this community did best at), and
- Now this post about how smart people could have had a decent chance of being governor of California.
In all these cases it feels like the issue isn’t intelligence per se, it’s more an issue of *knowing what to pay attention to*.
Generally speaking, it seems like it’s less about “forecasting the future value” of each of these scenarios (future price of Bitcoin, chance of COVID-19 being a serious worldwide pandemic, chance of being able to seriously get listed on the California ballot) and more about estimating whether it’s worth putting in the effort to forecast that in the first place, instead of just focusing on your day-to-day life as you usually do.
COVID is arguably the most obvious of all of these, given that the terrifying lockdowns in Wuhan and its spread across the rest of China was being decently well-reported in the media. Most people seemed to be using their incorrect heuristics from previous pandemic scares, where pandemics were either mild (e.g. swine flu) or heavily localized (e.g. SARS, Ebola); those that didn’t (many of them in this community) took it seriously enough to be better prepared.
But the other two? I don’t think people here had heuristics that were well-tuned for bringing those opportunities to conscious attention. Bitcoin was weird and niche and annoying to set yourself up with back then. And I’ll bet that most people in California don’t have a clear enough sense of how state politics works to know how to get yourself listed on the ballot. (Though maybe richer people would?)
It might be worth focusing on how you can train yourself to actually see these opportunities clearly enough to justify spending time validating them, without constantly wasting time on fake “opportunities” that go nowhere.
I didn't just ignore bitcoin, I actively spent time writing comments on the internet about how it was a stupid pyramid scheme exploiting gullible people, back when it first crossed the $1 mark.
What's the lesson here? Even excluding bitcoin, if I'd put a bit of money into every stupid bubble I heard of, at the moment I first thought it was a stupid bubble, and then held forever, then I'd be a very rich man now. I'd probably have a few worthless beanie babies, but I'd also have a lot of AAPL, GOOG, FB et cetera. My "stupid bubble" judgments are probably right more often than they're wrong, but honestly I'm probably barely doing better than 50-50, and when I'm wrong I'm leaving 10x, 100x, 1000x returns on the table.
You're ignoring the likelihood of losing it all due to Mt. Gox, crashed harddrives, hacks, forgotten passwords, etc.
Amen to this. Opportunities on the sheer scale of bitcoin are very rare and, not knowing in advance that bitcoin was that rare opportunity, I only researched enough to see that "damn, the bitcoin wallet is stored in plaintext? That's stupid."
Bitcoin is all about survivorship bias. The historical charts don't count the number of people who lost everything in hacks, scams, exchange failures, etc.
I'm sufficiently smart not to want to be governor of California. I expect you are too.
Yes, that's a question I'd like Scott to address directly - if he had a do-over, would he in fact take a stab at becoming Governor of California?
I'm with you, and no. "Governor" is a job that requires particular skills and experience that I do not have. I'd like to think I'd do better than Donald Trump, but probably not as well as Herbert Hoover. I think I, and you, and Scott, have better *ideas* about how California should be run than do Newson, Elder, Paffrath, or Faulconer. But the bit where I stand on the bridge of the Sacramento Enterprise and say "make it so", ends with it not being made so. The bit where I try to hire a bridge crew as talented and cooperative as that of the USS Enterprise (any of them), I can do that for an engineering team and probably for a spaceship but not for a state government.
And, what's the value proposition for being a *bad* governor? It pays a little more than my current job, but not enough to justify the aggravation. It makes me ten million enemies the day I take the job, some of whom are e.g. skilled journalists who will make a career of doing to me what Cade Metz made only a brief hobby of doing to Scott. It probably damages my reputation, and my ability to succeed in my chosen career. And, yes, it sets me up for a "career" as an ex-Governor, which can be lucrative if you do it right but it's not what I want to do and it's also something I'd be particularly good at.
I think this is true of an awful lot of people who could plausibly exploit this opportunity, and most of them know it.
Political power does not select for intelligence.
Political power selects strongly for sociopathy.
Okay, I'll bite.
I was in this exact situation. I ran. I deliberately ran no campaign. And I won. I'm still regretting it.
The stakes were lower: councilor on the student government at university. A very large student government handling something like multiple millions of dollars a year, but just a student government nonetheless. I didn't want to run, since my friends had horror stories about their time in student government. But my closest friend still wanted to reform it, and was running to be president. So when they asked me to join them, I accepted because what are friends for? (It also helped that he handheld me through the process of gathering enough signatures to become eligible to run - beware trivial inconveniences and all that, plus I'm about as sociable as you'd expect from a SSC/ACX reader.)
I deliberately ran no campaign. No appearances at the scheduled debate, no advertising online, no canvassing people in the dorms, no posting flyers, and definitely no walking up to people and asking for a moment of their time to hear the good word. (I hate that stuff, especially when I'm running to class, and I didn't want to force any other introverts to go through it either). All I did was write up the candidacy statement you have to put on the ballot, the one that goes next to your name and in a couple hundred words explains why people should vote for you. Even then I kind of half-assed it, since I only started late and almost missed the deadline. But I wrote something I would like, talking about what I was going to do and how we weren't getting much done with our multi-million dollar budget. I deliberately avoided writing like the other candidates: too many words, too much focus on which groups you're from and how you've had previous student government experience in high school, too much focus on what groups have endorsed you and which people you'll stand up for... the position was to be a general representative, so I wrote for the ordinary student instead.
And I won, first place, against a well-established political machine. I'm still kind of shocked about it. I joked with my friend that I was running an experiment to see if any of the conventional wisdom was right: you need a campaign, you need to appeal to these sorts of people since they're the only ones that vote, you need endorsements from these groups to win over those people, you need to attend the debate to make it clear which groups you favor and disfavor to win their endorsements... all of that was wrong. Turnout in our elections was as low as ever, something like 15 to 20%, but in our uni that still meant >5000 voters. The last debate I had attended the year before had something like 6 people in the audience, and every single one of them was there as a friend of one of the candidates running (I should know, I was one of them). The debate for this election, the one I had skipped as pointless, had something like ~100 people watching. The set of activists who cared about identity politicization enough to vote by club endorsement lines? A few hundred at most. This was the fearsome political machine, the one that had won every previous election for years, that I had defeated with a zero effort attempt to speak like an ordinary person.
And there were a dozen candidates! There were like 8 independents! And somehow none of them had worked out that they could do things differently from the political machine and *not* buy votes by the group, and instead speak to people like they were individual people. I had found the proverbial $100 bill on the ground, and all it took was one candidate statement that talked about issues instead of identities. It was even worth more than $100 because of the stipend (something like $10 000 for a year of attending weekly meetings), and I think I wrote and edited my candidacy statement in like a few hours tops.
And yet none of it was worth it. This post is already going on too long, but in short everything people are speculating about, about why someone might not want to be in politics - all of that is true. Tomorrow I might have enough energy to rant about all the time I wasted, but in short everything you're saying about long meetings, inability to actually change things [remember I was once councilor in a council of 12], pointlessness of everything we *were* doing, making enemies by being a competitor to the political machine, having to be surrounded by people who hate you, being shouted at whenever you do speak up - all of it is true. We might have been able to change things if the set of candidates my friend had organized had all won, and we swept the council, but instead I was basically the only person who won and I was completely alone in the most toxic work environment I have ever known. It was almost as bad as the things my friend saw in his time in student government, like the time the council shouted at a gay police officer that it was not his job to protect people if that meant protecting Republicans. (Note that this was in 2019, not 2020. Apparently the police officer is used to things like this, which is why he quit attending our council meetings as police department representative. I eventually realized he had made the right decision and quit as well.)
All of this is to say that (a) there are $100 bills on the ground, and (b) they're left lying there for a reason. Taking a position in government has brought nothing but disillusionment to me, an inability to fit into activist circles and a wish I had spent more time working on my own things. Epicurus was right, politics was a mistake - we should neither seek power over others nor support those who do in our name. To do so is to lose yourself in a game without any sense of satisfaction, only the bitterness of humiliation. Fundamentally, that is what the game is about: dominance and submission, hierarchy and humiliation, the powerful and the powerless. Every round of it is a net destroyer of happiness: the powerful get less schadenfreude than the powerless feel pain. And every round creates the desire for another round from the slighted, an endless cycle of vendetta. I am glad to be rid of it.
(About the only good thing that came of this was that I got to donate $10 000, my entire office stipend, to the Coronavirus Relief Fund when the pandemic started. From an Effective Altruism standpoint, that might have made the entire thing worth it, all the time and fear and humiliation. Might have. I will not do this again.)
Gist I just came up with: The only reason to be involved with politics is to abolish it.
Oh man, I had blocked from my memory my time involved in student government.
Slightly different story, because we were all incompetent and Peter Principle'd into it, but some of the people refused to recognize their incompetence. I personally paid hundreds of dollars (that I didn't have) out to other people to paper over ruinations that we would've done to them.
Well, I can only say: thanks for trying! Even if it failed in this case then you at least really tried to improve things, what is still much better than a typical person.
Hopefully your other attempts were less soul-crushing.
That was a great, informative comment! Thank you!
I keep thinking that U.S. politics is awful and toxic and that it should be easy to do better than the average candidate just by saying you want various things that most Americans also say they want.
Well, no, not actually easy, because you have to somehow communicate with voters, otherwise attack ads with blatant lies/misrepresentations will be voters' only impression of you. You got to speak directly with voters on the ballot, a hugely valuable advantage you won't get running for public office.
Still, your post makes me think that because modern American politicians are so extreme, it's not hard to win if you can communicate with voters. But this brings us to the reason reasonable people don't run for office: you have to deal with toxic nasty people during the election and for as long as you hold office.
I wonder, though: what if your friends were running and also won? What if we not only had governor Alexander, but also Rep. Upon Water, Rep. Deiseach, Rep. Pham, Rep. Friedman, Rep. Scizorhands and so on? Okay, maybe we're not all friends here exactly, but it's not hard to get along better than the current crop of politicians :)
P.S. I've long advocated electoral reform - range voting, approval, proportional representation, and last but not least, Simple Direct Representation. But now I'm thinking maybe I missed something important: a reform that allows every candidate to say 280 characters on the ballot (it can't be too long: can't have voters parking in the voting booth reading for an hour).
Vice President Kamela Harris is the smartest person in the world. Look at an actuarial life table for men aged 78 to 86. About half of 78 year old men in the US don't make it to 86.
Then consider that former vice presidents have a very good chance to be nominated as a presidential candidate by their party. Major party nominees always have a good chance to win.
She has multiple paths to the Oval Office, and in the meantime she was elected to fill a job with few responsibilities, so she can avoid association with the outcome of bad decisions. All she has to do is show up.
She has placed herself perfectly to become the next president. Hats off.
Biden doesn’t have the diseases or disabilities that a lot of 78yo men have. And his parents lived very long. So he’s likely to live longer than most. That sad such a disability or disease would disqualify him even without dying
She was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad. Too bad about her track record.
A deep sub-point, but look at the ref to Thiel's Zero to One book on the old SSC.
My short on-topic point is - these actors/celebs/ceos/VC and PE etc. people don't want to be governor. It is simply not something they want to do with their time. The model is that they purchase legislation through think tanks and campaign donations if they're interested and rich enough and they do so for the narrowest band of policy which specifically relates to themselves. The idea of generalised power is unimportant to them, so they don't think to go for it. The king has servants to take care of that sort of thing! Maybe?
But primarily!
Thiel makes the argument that monopolies can treat their workers better and at the time the plight of Amazon warehouse workers who have timed bathroom breaks, get fired by the app on their phone, have to pack an unreasonable number of boxes per hour, and are subject to anti-union thuggery - not to mention the drivers who piss in bottles and have to now assemble all kinds of furniture in 12 minutes on site somehow....
I think everyone/Thiel is thinking of the $200k salary ping pong playing Google employee with a meditation lego room....but the reality is that monopolies are terrible for workers in the same way kings are terrible for serfs and peasants.
This is a huge bias of that type of person who basically see the entire lens through the world of the wealthy and the ownership class while regular humans are just cattle. How could workers ever get nicer conditions without a monopoly daddy figure to give it to them? Why it is that dirty U' word of Unions or the G word of Government who can mandate better conditions.
Thiel would knee-jerk style throw up in his mouth if he had to think about unions by himself, except as the evil boogeyman here to slay the financial aristocracy. A primal fear in the wealthy business circles exists where there is a mind-killer style effect of unions=evil and all they can see are villagers with pitchforks from their ancestral memories of owning 100% of everything while doing less than 0.001% of the work.
Did Rockefeller get so rich that he decided on an 8 hour work day, a 5 hour work week minimum wages, or paid sick leave? I don't think so. Every single good thing that has ever happened for lower class workers was something they fought for and forced the government or employers to give them. I recall them being so rich that they hired thugs to murder union leaders from the 1890s-1930s major factory and farmer labour movements.
This poor person blindness is a deep affliction in 'business' thinking and the wants, dreams, and perspectives of the poor simply don't exist in their world.
In the end it is no surprise that 'rich VC guy' has entire system and way of thinking where he is the virtuous hero leading humanity into the future. No surprise there. I recall the old kings saying they had a divine right to rule and special bloodlines and such. How is this any different? It is just another ideology of the wealthy that 'somehow' just so happens to strongly support their own existence. While ignoring any and all common thought of ideas like minimum wage or unions as 'mind-killer evil throw a tantrum and kick you legs around wildly' type ideas which must be expunged from your mind to maintain PURITY!
This is pretty damn uncharitable. Do you actually think this is what's going on inside the minds of libertarians?
It is uncharitable, but I think there's a degree of truth there, the main reason that libertarians are ever extremely unpopular. Even those of them who aren't outright evil still likely think deep inside that they're better than most people and as such deserve better outcomes. They state that their preferred policies would make everybody else better off too, perhaps at a somewhat slower rate, which isn't too convincing, because they're expected to make such a claim whether it was true or not.
I'm not sure it is.
Thiel could be so ignorant of the world around him that he doesn't know it sucks to be an Amazon warehouse worker. He could have an ideological perspective that refuses to connect that unpleasantness with the kinds of strategies he advocates and practices, due to all the ways we already know politics can bias our thinking. Or he could be fully aware that model breeds those results, and actively lying about the fact.
I don't think Thiel is stupid, I don't think he's a liar, and I suspect he would find being
affected by common cognitive biases far lesser accusation than either of those. I know most ACX readers would.
Either the premise of this argument is untrue and monopolists really are a significant driver of improved working conditions, there's something else at play that's not bias, ignorance, or dishonesty, or this is in fact a maximally charitable way of presenting a disagreement with Thiel's position.
Deleted post is mine, sorry, screwed up formatting. post is here:
From what I've experienced, amazon warehouse jobs aren't significantly worse than any other warehouse job, while paying significantly better. The added pay is sufficient that there's usually a waiting list for the amazon warehouse jobs, and whenever they hire extra workers, several people in my social group immediately take them, even though it means losing hours at their normal (unionized) job and potentially irritating their normal employer. They usually describe the jobs with great excitement, about how good the presents they'll be able to afford will be this christmas, stuff like that.
And frankly it's therefore always seemed very strange to me that 'amazon warehouse job' is the go-to example of horrible exploitation by a monopolist. If my friends could get permanent jobs at the local amazon warehouse, they would, gladly, but apparently the jobs are too in-demand.
I have a couple theories as to what's going on. First, that *anything* involving Bezos automatically gets politicized hatred, and so when an amazon warehouse worker gets injured it's a political, polarizing event that can be laid at the feet of capitalism and evidence that amazon is horrible, but when a warehouse worker who works for some random shipping company gets injured, nobody thinks of it as *evidence in the ideological conflict between the evil silicon valley libertarians versus the good-natured marxists*. They certainly don't blame the employer. They blame the fact that sometimes when you do manual labor, you get hurt, and it doesn't really matter what kind of manual labor it is. The idea, to them, of treating labor injuries, or poor working conditions, or whatever, as gristle for politics would never occur to them. They just collect their 2 weeks of disability pay and go back to work.
The people in my social group are pretty red-tribe, pretty lower class. Maybe it's that they're not sophisticated enough to understand the way in which they're being exploited. But every time they talk about the amazon jobs, I always express a little bit of surprise at their enthusiasm. I remember in particular one occasion where I read through some article about a journalist who got a job at an amazon warehouse to document the poor working conditions, and my friends laughed and laughed at the journalist's complaints, explaining that most of the job's so-called hardships were true of any job involving manual labor whatsoever, from construction to roadwork to dockworking to warehouse operating, and the only reason the 'liberal' journalists think amazon jobs are uniquely bad is because they've never done a day's labor in their entire life. Or if they did, if they helped their mom move a couch for instance, they didn't have an evil political enemy to instinctively blame the resulting back pain on.
I'm not exactly sure what to believe. But it makes me very suspicious of people who use amazon warehouse jobs as an example of a horrible working experience. I suspect that there are literally millions of jobs that are worse. I don't really know what to do with this info re: Thiel. But I do know that telling two people who want to voluntarily enter into a contract together that they're not *allowed* to do, because the contract is actually deeply exploitative...
it's dangerous, because oftentimes you're wrong, oftentimes you don't actually know their circumstance as well as they do. I'm reminded of the whole payday loans thing, where upstanding kind liberal advocates recognized that payday lenders were horribly exploitative, 'tricking' poor people into high interest loans, and so they decided to heavily regulate the practice in cali, and the result was... a lot of poor people missing their rent payments, or other bills, because of a lack of liquidity. They became worse off. And that makes me extremely suspicious about that whole category of stuff. The idea that people would voluntarily sign up to be exploited is just weird. You can't do a cost benefit analysis on a decision until you know the opportunity cost. And from what I can tell, those horribly exploitative amazon warehouse jobs that somehow have waiting lists, are significantly better than other jobs with the same requirements, and so the people who take the jobs *genuinely are* eager to get them. Because maybe they'll end up with back pain, sure, but that was gonna happen at any job they could get, while at least amazon pays them a high amount for sacrificing their long-term health. Forcing Bezos to drastically change the nature of those jobs, to be less 'exploitative', would mean people like my friends have to choose their second job preference, which is pretty much strictly worse.
Sorry for the rambling rant. I don't really have a coherent argument here, just lots of disparate observations. But all of it makes me extremely skeptical of the whole... idk... the whole narrative? I guess? That is being pushed above. All these disparate ideas... People used to literally kill themselves by the thousand voluntarily working on ship voyages with approximately a 35% chance of dying and approximately a 30% chance of being captured by Algerian pirates and sold as slaves in dar al islam, and they would willingly join those voyages, and nobody would have dreamed of claiming that the investors were evil exploiters. The first factory jobs, the ones which today are mostly regarded as horrible pre-OSHA scenes of exploitation... they were a huge step up from all the other labor that existed, both in terms of conditions and in terms of pay, which is why people flocked to them like crazy.
I don't know what to do with all these different notions. But in general they all make me far more sympathetic to libertarians. There's something *real* there. It's not just hating poor people, or purposefully avoiding evidence of the sheer horror of amazon warehouse jobs, or any of the other explanations offered above. And people like
Peter Thiel, Bezos, Musk etc, they are not cartoon villians.
Again, sorry for rambling. Maybe if we continue this thread, the back and forth will eventually solidify my thoughts on this matter and I can actually give a coherent argument
This reminds me of the exchange between Superman and Lex Luthor in the (excellent) JLA cartoon (paraphrased):
"Superman: What do you want, Luthor ? Where do you go from here ? You want to be President ?
Luthor: Ha ! Do you know how much power I'd have to *give up* just to be President ?"
What's the point of being Governor of California ? Everything you do is subject to extreme scrutiny; the Republicans are out to get you just because you exist, and the Democrats are out to get you because they want to be you. You get to deal with intractable problems like the homeless crisis, endless wildfires, and COVID, and no decision you make will be judged the correct one.
Meanwhile, if you spent all that time quietly making money at your mansion instead of campaigning, you could spend $200M -- a relative pittance -- to push through whatever policy you wanted. It doesn't take a genius to figure out which option to pick.
Re: Kilpatrick: his "platform", such as it is, is clearly focused on the film industry, and has limited appeal outside of SoCal. Paffrath, in contrast, is clearly thinking about the whole state and beyond. Granted, a lot of his platform is a wishlist of big projects that are completely untenable for a number of reasons ("turned up to 11 and given all-you-can-snort cocaine" is one description of it I can't disagree with), for example: building a 14 feet-diameter water pipeline to CA from the Mississippi River, building giant homeless shelters in cities (where?), ending homelessness by executive order in 60 days, etc. It's unquestionably ambitious and unworkable, but I can admire the effort to move the Overton window on the government ambition axis. What he actually can get done happens to align with my views more than most, and that's why I'll be voting for him if the polls indicate he has a better chance of beating Larry Elder than Kevin Faulconer at the time I send in my ballot.
Re: No, and leave Q2 blank: It's not about not dignifying it, nor is it strictly about "voters being confused" by "No on recall, Yes on Bustamante" as they claim. Part of it is, yes, not giving Democrats an excuse to vote Yes on the recall because there's a candidate they really like, but there's more to it than that, I think. Your average partisan Democrat may not care for Newsom (and I don't think they do. His unforced errors, especially during the pandemic, are absolutely morale-busting), but if they know that the party is deliberately ceding the choice of the next governor to the Republicans, not only does it swing the median Democrat's vote toward No, it should increase Democratic turnout as well: "I don't really care if Newsom loses, as long as his replacement will probably be a Democrat" turns into "With all these Democrats not voting on Q2, there is no chance he'll be replaced by a Democrat. I better vote". It's manipulative, and I kinda resent it, but it should work.
It wouldn't surprise me either if it turned out that the Democratic Party (or someone in it) quietly pushed Larry Elder to run, and certainly they must have been happy about his announcement. If Elder hadn't joined the race, that probably would have meant a Faulconer win. By many measures he's done well for San Diego, and if he wins now, he's got a decent shot at winning in 2022, which is when he was already planning to run. A good year for Faulconer could give Republicans the governorship until 2026 at least, maybe even 2030, and that probably seemed in early July like a larger risk to the CA Democratic Party than a right wing nut getting a plurality in a recall election Newsom would sail to victory in *if* Democratic turnout was high enough. And Larry Elder is great motivation to turn out; I know several people who were apathetic about the recall election until Elder joined; and then they were guaranteed to turn out for Newsom. But then Newsom had to go along and commit yet another unforced error that makes him look arrogant and hypocritical, and suddenly the victory on Q1 is no longer assured. If there was such a push by the party or by someone in the party, they're probably changing their pants about now.
I remembered that a common Democratic move is to make people terrified of the alternative.
"We're putting total control of health care into the government! Don't worry, Republicans will never control it."
"The only alternate to Trump is Hillary! Better vote for her!"
Here is a more boring explanation: the Democrats successfully solved coordination problems, and the problem wasn't that steep in the first place. Gavin Newsom has a greater than 80% popularity among Democrats[1], and so running against him now is worse of a sin than running a primary challenge against a popular incumbent.
Look at Chamath Palihapitiya. The Technology investor threw his hat in the ring as early as January[2], then pulled out a few weeks later[3]. Most likely, any Democrats in his investor network convinced him that this move was too much of a troll.
To run against Newsom as a Democrat is effectively saying, "I hate Democrats so much that I might as well be considered a Republican." But if you truly felt that way, then your incentive would be to probably not piss off actual Republicans by running as a Democrat.
The opportunity only exists to fringe candidates with some success story and no Democratic friends. I even think you, Scott, would get a lot of blowback from the Rationalist community because running as a strategically labeled Democratic in a California recall election against a popular Democrat is too affirmatively anti-Democratic.
McAfee would've probably seen this opportunity, but he hated Democrats so much that he wouldn't have gone for the Democratic label.
The Democrats raised the penalty for defection when the penalty was already high.
[1] https://www.ppic.org/blog/tag/approval-ratings/
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-governor-palihapitiya-idUSKBN29V2PE
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/03/chamath-palihapitiya-says-hes-not-running-for-california-governor.html
Re [1]: in the middle of a recall election campaign, how much can we believe that approval or disapproval in a public poll is something other than a statement about belief whether Newsom should be recalled? Like, I think he's not doing a great job and has definitely done some really boneheaded things, but I'd still say I approve of the job he's doing in such a poll right now. Without the recall campaign in progress, I probably wouldn't. Not Another Politics Podcast has done 2 or 3 episodes on this topic (not about the recall specifically, but about what polls are actually useful for/what responses actually say in general). I agree that they solved a coordination problem, but I don't know that it's really that small.
>I even think you, Scott, would get a lot of blowback from the Rationalist community because running as a strategically labeled Democratic in a California recall election against a popular Democrat is too affirmatively anti-Democratic.
I'm not so sure. You need to be pretty ruthless and devote a lot of your care to "up with the Blue Tribe, kill the Red Tribe" to see "D but not Gavin Newsom" as treason to Blue rather than a legitimate stance, and I think Scott has pissed off most of those people already (they might still be in the rationalist orbit, but not as Scott-fans).
(His explicit "please vote for Hillary Clinton" back in 2016, plus his unwavering support for UBI, is enough that the *other* objection, the super-principled people's "you're no Democrat; putting D next to your name is scummy" is at least somewhat defanged. I'd expect more of that backlash than the one you provide, though.)
I think the best analogy is the way Ralph Nader was seen post 2000. You don't want to be perceived as a spoiler.
How much of that is support for Newsom because they like him personally as against because he's the Democrat guy?
Reading that article, it's not that Newsom has 80% support amongst Democrats, it's that his environmental policy has support:
"Californians are especially supportive of his “30 by 30” executive order: 76% of adults and likely voters favor the goal to conserve 30% of California’s land, inland water, and ocean areas by the year 2030."
Presumably "likely voters" includes Republicans as well? On other metrics, his support is lower:
"In our latest reading of the political tea leaves, the July PPIC survey finds 56% of California likely voters approving of his handling of jobs and the economy, and 59% approve of his handling of environmental issues."
Now, this is divided over all voters (Democrats, Republicans, Independents) so yes, for the Democrats only he gets high ratings: 85% on the environment, 84% on jobs and the economy. But a lot of voters also think the recall election is a waste of time and money (again, higher amongst Democrats), so voter turnout is likely to be low and it really does depend on who shows up and what way they vote on both No. 1 (recall) and No. 2 (pick your backup candidate).
This is especially relevant because the only reason Newsom is in trouble is because his support among LA area Latinos -- strong Democrats, heretofore -- has cratered. If *only* Hispanics could vote, Newsom would lose in a landslide, according to the most recent polls I've seen. Basically his chance of survival rests on enough Bay Area whites coming out for him, and enough LA area browns staying home.
Unfortunately, that points both ways. On the one hand, it means an attractive Democrat would have a pretty good chance of topping the "replacement" vote, because of the Democratic voter advantage, and the people second-most motivated to kick Newsom to the curb and vote are Democrats. But on the other hand, it means it's quite reasonable to think that having a plausible Democratic replacement on the ballot would make it easier to vote to recall the governor in the first place, for the Democratic voters who are going to swing the election.
Newsom can end this farce now, and do the right thing for the California, by resigning immediately.
Eleni Kounalakis will become California's first female governor, and the Democrats will not face the very real possibility of losing the Senate due to Feinstein becoming unable to serve.
Newsom won't resign though, because it's not about California, it's about Newsom.
^ This is the optimal strategic action for Californians who cares about issues and lean Democratic. Resigning moots the recall.
Can he do that today and stop the recall? Can he do it the night of the election? What is the drop-dead threshold for doing so?
It's never been tested, so it's hard to say how the courts would rule. My best guess is that it is A-OK before early voting starts, invalid on or after election day, and that during the early voting period the court would weigh various factors such as how much of the vote was in and whether the governor was just trying to use this loophole or resigning for other more voter-respecting reasons.
Instruct me on this about Feinstein - wasn't she elected due to a special election the first time she got the seat? So why would the new governor (if there is one) be able to replace her with someone from his own party? Wouldn't they have to have an election anyway?
Look at Alex Padilla. Special elections are optional.
I think there's a ton of overlap in the traits that make a popular politician and the traits that make a popular YouTube personality. The only major difference between the two might be that the politician needs to modulate the content to appeal to a broader audience more shallowly and suck up to more gatekeepers.
Scott, I admire how you were able to put a practical and (somewhat) optimistic spin on the story that basically reads "California Democrats are so far up their own asses that they ended up with a tenant-defrauding christmas elf as their top candidate".
Newsom's chances keep getting worse, but there is a claim that if he flat out resigns from office before the recall election, the recall election goes up in smoke and the Lieutenant Governor (another middle of the road Democrat) becomes governor. As the election gets close, if the polls are going against him he'd be crazy not to pull the plug like that. Here is an article about the specifics:
http://www.orangejuiceblog.com/2021/07/newsom-recall-part-4-gavin-should-resign-now/
While it would be the statesmanlike thing to resign and let the party get behind the lieutenant-governor, I don't think Newsom will do so. I think the linked article is right about two things: he honestly doesn't get what is so bad about him hob-nobbing with a lobbyist in the middle of the lockdown, and he wants a run at the presidency.
I also think the article is wrong about resignation being a magic wand against any future Republican attempts at recall: you can simply circumvent the "plot" by resigning. The writer doesn't seem to contemplate that this too can be weaponised by the Republicans; if they can't beat Governor Somebody in the polls, and they don't think their own candidate can beat him, then they still push a recall in order to get Somebody to resign. Whoever replaces him might be someone they like better, or don't dislike as much, but at the very least they got rid of Somebody.
Pushing a recall doesn't get somebody to resign, it gets the people pushing the recall branded as losers. Recall elections can succeed, or even plausibly threaten to succeed, only in very unusual circumstances, so I don't think there is much danger of their being generally weaponized.
If they somehow do become generally weaponized, then I think the winning strategy for the incumbent party is to oppose the recall and have the lieutenant governor put his or her name in as the replacement candidate for that party with the understanding that this is not an act of party treason.
That's what happened in the LAST recall (Lt Gov Cruz Bustamante ran as a potential replacement for Gray Davis). The voters picked Arnold Schwarzenegger instead. Dems this time decided not to repeat that mistake, and chose a different mistake.
Note it is possible in California for the Gov. and the Lt Gov. to be from separate parties. I don't know if that has ever happened.
Given that Newsom had no problem seeing off past recall attempts, I agree that this is not a good strategy for opponents to pursue. But the writer of that post seems to try to push it as a superweapon in future: those evil moustache-twirling Repubicans are a-plottin' and a-schemin' against our virtuous Democratic governor? They're trying to get them recalled, the cads! Then all our Virtuous Etc. has to do is laugh lightly and resign - plot foiled!
I don't think it's as simple as that, or as effective. It might work if Newsom could be persuaded to do it (about as likely as the winning lottery numbers being revealed to us all tonight in a dream) because at this point a lot of people are pissed-off and it's damage control for the party, but for future use? No.
If the evil moustache-twirling Republicans are plotting and scheming against a normal Democratic governor, all the governor and the party have to do is point and laugh. It's only when the evil Republicans are plotting and scheming against a ridiculously bad and/or unlucky Democratic governor that the Democrats would need to go with Plan B. It's still useful for them to have Plan B on the shelf.
> if they can't beat Governor Somebody in the polls, and they don't think their own candidate can beat him, then they still push a recall in order to get Somebody to resign.
The governor would only consider resigning if she or he expects to lose the recall election, i.e. the voters want her or him out of office. That seems to me like a good reason to resign.
And the election gets even more interesting! Now, this news story comes from a place that seems to be one of a set of various websites/blogs/online media run by a guy who is definitely very right-wing (this is the opinion about one of his ventures which is not at all enthused about it: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-red-elephants/).
So yeah, probably a fair amount of bias in it. That being said, if the facts are anywhere near correct, then there could be all the fun of the fair with protests over the ballot results being rigged or fake or dodgy in some manner: https://www.dailyveracity.com/2021/08/25/women-caught-stealing-hundreds-of-recall-ballots-as-police-find-hundreds-more-in-car-of-passed-out-felon/
"According to a report from KTLA5, over 300 California recall ballots, drugs, and multiple driver’s licenses were found in the vehicle of a passed-out felon in Torrance, California.
According to Torrance police, approximately 300 ballots were recovered from the vehicle, which was found in a 7-Eleven convenience store parking lot on August 16th.
Officers also found a loaded firearm, methamphetamine, a scale, and dozens of California driver’s licenses that were in other people’s names. Xanax pills were also discovered on the unidentified male subject, who police described as a felon.
In Valley Village, another Los Angeles neighborhood, hundreds of more ballots were stolen out of the mailboxes of a multi-unit housing complex.
Two women with a USPS post office master key were caught on camera stealing the California recall election ballots within several mailboxes at an apartment complex."
I have no dog at all in this race, so it's free entertainment as far as I'm concerned, but long-suffering citizens of the Golden Utopian Dream of California, my thoughts and prayers are with you 😁
My feeling is that some level of election fraud goes on all the time; we only hear about it when someone mounts a media campaign to exploit it.
To put it another way, "0.0015% of ballots found in car with meth" is not news. "Over 20% of ballots were found to be forged" is news.
It's probably opportunistic theft, though the fact that all the stolen mail was ballots may lean towards "paid to commit fraud", if you include the fake (stolen?) driver's licences as well. Had it been a mix of post, along with the same for the two lassies caught opening postal boxes in the apartment complex, you could write it off to stealing mail in the hopes that cheques and money were in the envelopes.
It's not huge fraud (if that is indeed what it was) but at the same time you would like an accounting as to how this guy got his hands on the ballots. It sits poorly with the pre-presidential election claims that there could not possibly be any hint of fraud anywhere at all, no way no how.
Like you, I accept that there probably is some amount of fraud in elections everywhere at all times, but I'd expect it to be more along the lines of "oh looky here, we suddenly found an unopened ballot box full of votes for Candidate McGillycuddy which by total coincidence is precisely the number of votes needed to elect him" and not "guy with drugs passed out in parking lot has a sack full of blank ballots" 😁
And we have the Republican candidate answer to Kevin Paffrath!
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/aug/23/closer-look-four-top-candidates-recall-election/
"John Cox
You may recognize San Diego businessman John Cox as the Republican nominee in the 2018 gubernatorial election, which Newsom won in a landslide. Cox also made headlines earlier this summer for his use of a live bear as a campaign prop."
Dress up as an elf? Pah! Only a live bear will do for Candidate Cox! Plainly what Governor Newsom needs to do to restore the confidence of the citizenry in his abilities is to find an appropriate costume and animal friend to frolic with. Smokey The Bear *might* be a bit on the nose, given all the fires, but surely there are some birds or beasts he could be photographed interacting with?
I was ready to vote for the elf, but now I'm deeply conflicted. There's only one possible way out of this dilemma. The Thunderdome. Two mascots enter, one mascot leaves !
These are the issues that truly concern the people!
“He’s getting attention because the media is looking for some Democrat to tell people to vote for, and he’s the best they can find.”
If this was mere honesty, it’s kind of amusing that the Democrats have the media do their political organizing for them and nobody seems to think that’s objectionable. If it was meant to be a jab at the media for being partisans, then well done with the jab.
I mean, Scott called attention to this in 2017: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
So whether or not it's a deliberate jab, it's certainly something he's aware of.
Paffrath is a quarter of Bergisch Gladbach, where the clergy of Cologne had the forest cut down to build the settlement. So it comes from Pfaffe and Rodung, thus: cleric clearing. Considering this kabbalistically, Kevin Paffrath won't be a good governor against forest fires. For real estate, maybe?
On the other hand, would that not make him excessively effective? After all, if you cut down all the forests, then there' s nothing to burn, so no more forest fires!
The real reason no one did is because politicians are petty vindictive little shits. Newsome really didn't want a challenger and anyone who through their hat in the ring could expect revenge in the very likely case he isn't recalled.
could you not write in "gavin newsom" as I did?
A: the sitting governor by law can not win the post-recall election to be his own replacement, and B: write-in votes aren't counted unless the candidate has filed paperwork saying "I am running for this office and expect to gain enough write-in votes that it is worth the bother of you counting them - also I'm the Gavin Newsom who lives at 1562 H Street, Sacramento, not the Gavin Newsom who lives at 742 Evergreen Terrace, Pacoima". AFIK, no California resident named Gavin Newsom has filed such paperwork.
But it would be an interesting opportunity if such a Californian existed and was interested in taking the shot.
> There have been a lot of fights around here about whether you can really get power just by being intelligent, able to predict things accurately, etc. I think this is a point in favor - sometimes there are big opportunities just waiting for someone to notice them. But also a point against - intelligence did not, in fact, help anyone notice this opportunity. Overall kind of a wash.
Does anyone have any good examples for both sides of the argument?
" Californians are lucky Peter Thiel isn't a Democrat,"
Uhh why? Because Newsom is so much better than Thiel?
Not only that but that Thiel is sooooo awful that we can't risk punishing Newsom like behavior because Thiel might get elected?
This whole essay is written from the perspective that Democrat means "better for California".
Which is wrong on many levels.
Being a governor without experience is actively terrible. Your name gets dragged through the mud constantly and without prior political experience you don’t have the knowledge or close allies to fend off the attacks. And you don’t actually have that much power. The legislature ties your hand, and somehow you’re still blamed when things go wrong. If I had a magic button to become governor of any state, I would dare not press it.
And that’s just from a selfish perspective. From a utilitarian perspective, running a big governor campaign in this instance gives you a small shot at the governorship but it increases the odds of Larry Elder becoming governor (probably to a greater extent than it helps you).
My takeaway is different. The recall process is stupid beyond belief and it should be replaced with a single question “who do you want to be governor?” Or alternatively, it should be a run off, with the replacement election held at a later date.
Well this post didn't age welll... though IMO, it was a dumb take even at the time it was written.
The state of California is shocking. I have not visited a dirtier place. If Californians are so clever, why does their state resemble a dystopia?