Random Thoughts on the Election

 Here are my random thoughts on the election:

1) Here is a list of things I DONT care about

 a) Candidates Gender or Race. The people who say its about time we had a female president might not want to vote for a President Marjorie Taylor Green. (A while back I thought that the first african-american president and/or first female president would be a republican since such a candidates might take some usually-democratic voters into the republican camp. One of many predictions I was wrong about.)

b) Candidates personal lives. Attempts to tie a candidates affairs to their policies never made sense to me.

c) How well the candidate did in school. I care what they know and don't know now, and also if they know what they don't know. (Who was the last president to not have a college degree? I will tell you at the end of this post.)

d) Their religion. There were people who agreed with JFK on policy issues but did not want to vote for him because he was Catholic. I didn't understand it then nor do I understand it now. Biden is Catholic but this rarely comes up. Romney was Mormon and this only came up in the Republican primary, not in the general.  So I am glad it is no longer an issue. Having said that, we still haven't had a Jewish president, a Muslim President, or an Atheist president. 

e) Do I care if the candidate X will benefit me personally? It is very hard to tell that. Someone like Elon Musk is clearly going to support Kamala since she believes global warming is true and the e-cars will be a part of dealing with it. This is an example of someone supporting someone since it benefits them personally. Oh, bad example.

 Vance thinks people vote this way as he recently said that women past child-bearing age should not care about abortion rights.

f) There are ads that say things like I served in the military defending our country, and now I want to defined your rights to XXX. I don't see how serving in the military makes them a better senator or whatever. 

g) I don't care how they are doing at polls. Some of the articles saying that candidate X is ahead  also tend to say that that shows X  is better. I campaigned for George McGovern in 1972 and he went on to lose by a lot.  Some of my friends told me that I backed a loser and tried to make that an insult (I have better friends now). This puzzled me then since the fact that my candidate lost says NOTHING about how he would do as president.

2) DO I care about if they lie? Depends on how much and about what. That Vance changes his mind about Trump (he was anti-Trump in 2016) or that Kamala changed her mind on fracking are the standard lies that politicians always tell so I don't care about that. This may be a reflection on the low standards we have. More serious are lies that they KNOW are false and might ENDANGER people.

3) DO I care if they changed their mind on an issue. All I care about is how they feel NOW, though if they changed their mind I might not believe them.

4) I  DO care about policy and ability to get things done and to consider all sides of an issue. (I won't say what policies I like since I am trying to keep this post non-partisan).

5) Some of the attacks on Kamala have been a women should not be president. This puzzles me since there will come a time when the Republicans have a female candidate.

6) I am surprised there is anyone who is still undecided. We know both candidates  VERY WELL. What more information do you need?

7) Articles like Five Reasons Kamala Will Win or Five Reasons Trump Will Win are usually crap. For example, one of the reasons Kamala will win is People are tired of  Trump's corruption. But that just means that the author of the article is tired of it, and the author does not speak for the American people. An argument like Kamala is ahead in 5 of the 7 swing states (if it were true) is the kind of argument I want to see. More to the point- an argument that someone will win should not be partisan.

8) Since JD Vance might lose Trump some votes (actually I doubt that) I have heard the old argument that Sarah Palin cost McCain the Presidency, or at least cost him some votes. I began to think do we really know that? so I looked at some articles both new and old about this. I found things like:

The American public did not want Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency because of her views, or because of her perceived lack of intelligence or blah blah. Hence she cost McCain votes.

NONE of the articles I read pointed to polls or other EVIDENCE for this point of view.

There probably is some evidence on the issue (I do not know which way it would go)  somewhere but the LACK of any INTEREST in it bothers me.

9) I am surprised there are any undecided voters at this point. Both candidates are known to the public, so I don't see what more there is to think about. I accidentally already said this, however (a) I don't want to mess up my numbering and (ii) I do feel strongly about this point, so its worth having twice.

10) Because of Americas only-2-party-system you end up voting for people you agree with on some things but not others. I can imagine Mike Pence saying:

I prefer Trump to Kamala on the abortion issue.

I prefer Kamala to Trump on the  Hang Mike Pence issue.

Gee, who do I vote for?

 Actually he has said he is voting for neither one. 

11) IF Kamala wins then the decision to make Tim Walz her VP will be seen as genius.

      IF Kamala does not win Pennsylvania and loses the election then NOT picking Josh Shapiro (popular governor of PA) will be seen as stupid.

I call bullshit on both of those. There are SO MANY factors  at play here. This reminds me of when a basketball team wins 100-99 and the sportscasters are saying things like

The decision to concentrate on 3-point shots was genius!

12) More generally, after-the-fact pundits all have their own theories about why candidate X won, even those who were confident that candidate Y was going to win, and those theories are either partisan or just uninformed. It is hard to know what works, even after the fact.

13) I had a post, here, about breaking the record for number-of-living-ex-presidents.  I speculated that  if

a) Biden won in 2020 and lost in 2024 (I overlooked the option of his not running.)

b) Carter lives to see the winner of the 2024 election inaugurated

THEN we would have SIX living ex-presidents, which would break the record. They would be 

Carter, Clinton, Bush Jr, Obama, Trump, Biden.

If Trump wins then should Trump count? I think so- he would be a president AND an ex-president. If Kamala wins I won't have that issue. When I wrote that I didn't think Carter would last this long (he is 100), but he may very well. In fact, he has already voted!

14) Allan Lichtman is an American Historian (does that mean he studies American History or that he is American AND a historian?) who has a system to predict who will win the presidential election that has been correct 9 out of the last 10 elections. See here for his system. He predicts Kamala. I personally do not put to much stock in that since its going to be VERY CLOSE (hmmm- that's my prediction, and I could be wrong). While he is a democrat his system is OBJECTIVE-- he would have to be to be right so often. Even so, he is getting hate mail. This makes no sense. Predicting that X will happen does not mean you have an opinion about if X is good or bad. 

15) When people argue passionately about a rules change (e.g., get rid of the electoral college) I do not believe them- they would argue the other way if the current rules favored their candidate. 

16) JD Vance recently came out against the laws that say you can't wear political stuff at the polling place. He said that BOTH Kamala supporters and Trump supporters should be allowed to wear political T-shirts and hats and  what not at the polling place. NO HE DIDN"T. He applauded a Trump Supporter for calling a Poll Worker a XXX and told him to YYY in for asking her to follow the polling place's rules prohibiting political merchandise. See here. (I use XXX and YYY so that this post won't get censored as happened in the past, see here. Oddly enough, this morning the ban was lifted, so for the original post that was banned see here.)  No word yet on if he is going to praise a Texas man for punching a poll worker who told him to remove his Trump hat, see here.

The last president who did not have a college degree was Harry Truman.