Trying to anticipate what things will look like on November 6th, what are some things that are going to happen between now and then? We have about 105 days.

1. Confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh (late August to September).
2. Ongoing Mueller Special Counsel investigation.
3. Further FBI Inspector General report.
4. Ongoing Congressional Oversight investigations.

Are there other potentially significant things that are going to happen or have a significant chance of happening between now and then?

Much has been made of how Donald Trump received fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, with some calling into question the legitimacy of his government because he didn’t receive the majority of support of voters. Specifically, he got 45.93%.

That’s an interesting argument, and especially so where I live, as the federal government in Canada has a majority of seats but received less, at 39.47% of the vote. So, according to this argument, Trudeau’s government has less legitimacy than Trump’s.

I think these sorts of post hoc arguments aren’t very persuasive. The Trudeau government campaigned in a system with specific rules which allow for parties with less than a majority vote (and sometimes not even the most votes) to form a majority government. Similarly, Trump’s strategy was based on the specific rules of the U.S.’s electoral college system. If there’s a problem, it’s at a higher level, in terms of electoral reform.

Having said that, one thing that’s interesting about the Trump-Clinton 2016 election is that Clinton didn’t get a majority, either. Rather, she received 48.02% of the vote. A majority of voters didn’t vote for her, either.

So, which candidate would the majority of voters have preferred, if they could transfer their vote with ranked choice? If you add up Trump, Johnson (Libertarians tend to be closer to Republicans than Democrats), and McMullin (closer to the Republican party than Democratic), you get 49.73%. If you add up Clinton and Stein (Greens tend to be closer to Democrats than Republicans), you get 49.08%. The remainder is various write-in ballots.

So, the right-wing bloc was larger than the left-wing bloc. If the U.S. had direct popular vote with ranked choice and instant run-off, which candidate would have won?

The answer is: we don’t know. Some of the people who voted for one of the smaller percentage candidates might not have ranked another candidate. For example, many people who voted Green might have done so because they excluded all the other options. Similarly, although McMullin was a protest candidate against Trump, it’s not clear how many people who voted for him would have supported Trump next. Similarly with Libertarians.

In 2016, Republicans won 1.1% more of the vote in House elections than Democrats (49.1% to 48%).

As you would expect, because they won a majority of the two party vote, Republicans won a majority of seats. The 2016 House elections results were 241 Republican to 194 seats.

Typically, in the House the incumbent party does worse in the mid-terms than in the Presidential cycle. So, if Democrats win a majority of the vote in the House elections, will they win a majority of seats?

If it’s by a small margin, almost certainly not.

Here, you can see what happens if you apply a universal percentage point shift in favor of Democrats, using the 2016 results as a starting point, such that the Democrats win the vote by about 10 percentage points – more precisely, if they increase their percentage by 6.5 percentage points compared to the 2016 results, such that they get about 56% of the two party vote instead of the 49.4% of the two party vote they got in 2016.

It is only at this point that the seats are almost even. Even here, though, Republicans hold a slight advantage in seats. So, applying a straightforward, universal shift in percentages, the Democrats need to do even better than this to win the House.

So, although polling gives a strong advantage to Democrats right now on the national level for the House, if that holds, it still might not mean a majority of seats for Democrats.

(I should note The Economist has a similar conclusion, although they give a more modest 53.5% of the two party vote the Democrats have to win before they are likely to win the majority of seats, and with recent polling, giving the Republicans a 30% chance of holding the House.)

I have noted how difficult the terrain is for Democrats in the Senate here. For the Senate, Democrats have to win approximately 100% of competitive seats with Republican incumbents, and lose 0% of their own, to take a working majority in the Senate.

So, although the best way to put a brake on Trump’s executive agenda for the Democrats would be to win either the Senate or House, the Democrats have structural challenges inherent in both of those this cycle.

My guess is that winning the House is more plausible, and Democrats should focus more of their efforts there. The problem, of course, is that means focusing on a lot more of individual elections.

“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” – Maxine Waters

This is very dangerous rhetoric – she’s calling for mobs to harass Cabinet members. What if Republican mobs start harassing Maxine Waters every time she shows up in public? How is this all going to work out?

The current polarized state of debate in the U.S. (I sample media from various sources, both left and right) is in large part due to the fractured media landscape. Because you can have a ‘Republican’ cable news network (Fox News) and a ‘Democratic’ cable news network (MSNBC), because you can listen to an echo chamber on Twitter, and so on, you have more and more people buying into hyper-partisan rhetoric, getting highly distorted views of events, and so on.

Please people, start listening to the ‘other side’. Politics is supposed to be a safer way to channel our tribal psychological mechanisms. But when politics starts to descend into rhetoric that leads to attempted assassinations (such as of House Whip Steve Scalise) or mobs harassing Cabinet members, it has become a monster.

If this keeps up, the trajectory is that you’re not going to have a country anymore, rather you’re going to have a Civil War.

To those who think Trump is a monster, and that he started this trajectory, the below quote is apropos.

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” – Friedrich Nietzsche