It seems timely to document the scrapheap fire that is the 2016 USA General Election -- and I say timely because 'early voting' began Monday in some US states, a reminder that the outcome is _not_ malleable all the way to the Tuesday, November 8th Election Day as often assumed. The die is already being cast. Electoral Collegeology I expect that in this mail I'll discuss the current situation and a bit about its historical context. I'll begin by citing a wager on which I staked US $10 on a mailing list, this past February 28th: Clinton 358 electors Trump 180 electors (I bet only that she'll _win_, I should stress.) My nervous friend Len (in Missouri, a traditionally Republican Party-leaning AKA 'red' state), feared a dramatic Trump victory and (unhappily) bet $10 that the Orange Menace would win. I'm in California, probably the deepest blue of all the blue (Democratic Party-leaning) states. This is very much a gentleman's wager; neither of us thinks the other a fool. I've already stated that if I win, especially as dramatically as I hope, I'll be so deliriously happy that Len can keep his $10. FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver's site, keeps analysing polling and other data, and publishes three metadata summary models, the 'poll-plus forecast', the 'polls-only forecast', and the 'now-cast'. The last of those is 'Who would win an election today', and predicts: Clinton 301 electors Trump 237 electors Each US state (plus District of Columbia, which is very like ACT) is allocated a number of 'electors', minimum three, and more if they have high population[1]. Per the US Constitution, each state is to pick electors pledged to opt for a specific slate of President & Vice-President. On a certain day late in December every four years, the states' electors meet in their respective state capitals and cast their votes. (For example, California's 55 electors would meet in Sacramento, California.) There are 538 electors total, which is the origin of Nate Silver's Web site name. Collectively the electors are colloquially called the 'Electoral College', a misleading term in many ways. The purpose of a General Election is for the voters of the various states plus DC to select their electors. States are NOT required to choose their elector through popular vote of their citizens, and the Founding Fathers expected state legislatures to pick them. However, all states have picked electors by popular election for over 100 years since the American Civil War of the 1860s. 48 of the states (plus DC) award their electors on a winner-take-all basis. Two (Maine and Nebraska) award them on a proportional basis between candidate slates by popular vote margins within their various Congressional districts -- though in a normal year Nebraska would be deep red (Republican Party) and Maine would be deep blue (Democratic Party). Trump has been so poisonous that the electors for two of the most urbanised parts of Nebraska, those around the cities of Omaha and Lincoln, may end up being pledged to Secretary Clinton, while the other three will doubtless be pledged to Trump as per the usual GOP allegiance. Accordingly, the _usual_ game of predicting Electoral College tallies involves tallying up the electoral votes of the reliably blue states, tallying those of the reliably red states, and guessing on which side the ~10 'battleground' states would fall. Mr. Trump promised to make more states competitive for the Republicans. So far, it appears he _has_, but not entirely the way he intended. Solid-red states like Texas(!) with 38 electors, Arizona with 11 electors, and Mississippi(!) may now 'flip' to blue on Election Day, if the polls can be believed. The California Cautionary Tale California wasn't always deep blue, and often in the past had Republican Senators and (to our horror, in 1966) elected has-been, slightly dim Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan as Governor, which major seat he then parleyed into the US Presidency in the 1980s. What turned California deep blue was subsequent Republican Governor Pete Wilson and his Proposition 187 campaign in 1994. Wilson decided his electoral prospects would be improved by backing a state-wide voter proposition ('initiative statute') to deny state services to illegal immigrants and create a state-funded citizen 'screening' programme -- the point being to scare and suck-up to anglophone voters of European descent worried about the gradually increasing influence of immigrants from Latin America and East Asia. Proposition 187 passed by a slim margin (and then was found unconstitutional by the courts) -- but backfired: Latino voters in particular, and many other ethnic subgroups, were driven straight into the waiting arms of the Democratic Party, where they have remained, and voters generally, including Euro-descended Californians of all stripes, turned massively away from xenophobic and especially Hispanophobic politics. Today, the California Republican Party is outvoted by state Democrats by a 2:1 margin statewide, and even extremely conservative polities such as Orange County (south of Los Angeles) have been -- at an increasing rate -- putting Democrats in office. The national Republican Party took careful note of the California calamity, and in particular of the nationwide demographic threat to its continued influence. The USA is becoming more Hispanic, in particular. This includes an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants from Central and South America -- who cannot vote, but all of their children born here are citizens, and do vote. The Republicans (AKA 'GOP' = Grand Old Party) have a recurring nightmare of shutout nationwide. Unlike with the Westminster system, shutout is possible: If your party consistently gets 40% of the vote everywhere, you will have zero elected offices. The Autopsy Report In 2012, Barack Obama and VP Joseph Biden shellacked the GOP a second time, defeating Republican challengers Mitt Romney and (VP-hopeful) Paul Ryan decisively. The Republicans were, quite reasonably, introspective, and commissioned a remarkably clear-headed and intelligent study of what it needed to do in the future, to assure greater success. The group's 97-page report appeared in March 2013, and was termed the Growth & Opportunity Project ('GOP') Report -- but everyone else calls it the Autopsy Report. http://goproject.gop.com/ To sum up the Project's recommendations: o GOP risks permanently losing younger voters o It's becoming a dead-end party of angry white men o The way forward involves getting fully behind real, honest immigration reform o and backing corporate whistleblowers, and curbing corporate welfare o and put a screeching halt to all the anti-gay rhetoric o and stop the bizarre extremism on abortion and rape that is alienating women voters o and get behind campaign finance reform The GOP mandarins earnestly urged all Republican leaders to take the report seriously, and they started doing so. But then things blew up. Project REDMAP and Unintended Consequences While the Autopsy Report committee was working on making the GOP saner to help it survive the decade, a very different group was using tactical application of money to take a different approach. The Republican State Leadership Committee realised that the 2010 census opened a rare opportunity to tip the scales in the GOP's favour for at least a decade. The US Constitution requires a nationwide census at the turn of each decade. States with increased population receive an allocation of more members of the House of Representatives (and thus also electors for the Presidential contests); states with population declines lose a few.[2] (Tax revenues were also to be apportioned among the states according to census numbers.) Following each census, every state redraws all Congressional seats with fresh district boundaries. The Republican State Leadership Committee allocated $30M to influence state legislature contests in states with thin, vulnerable Democratic Party majorities -- the Redistricting Majority Project, AKA Project REDMAP. This tactic proved successful past their wildest dreams, and 'flipped' many legislatures Republican even though those states remained majority Democratic -- helped by low voter turnout in 2010 because it wasn't a Presidential election year. Once in power in state capitals, the local Republicans now used greatly improved computer modeling to 'gerrymander'[3] the new Congressional districts to an unprecedented degree. (Note that the US Senate, lacking districts able to be manipulated, cannot be gerrymandered.) http://www.salon.com/2016/06/13/this_is_how_the_gop_rigged_congress_the_secr... http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/gops-house-seats-are-safe-heres... The aim of the gerrymandered districts was always to make as many districts as possible 'safe' for GOP candidates by carving boundaries so that likely Democratic voters were a slim but decisive minority in as many as possible, and 'packing' Democratic voters into the small remainder of districts. Project REDMAP was too successful. The unintended consequence of 'safe' districts is that it encouraged GOP extremism. Gerrymandering meant that any lunatic able to win a local primary in such a district would automatically prevail in the contest against the badly handicapped Democratic opponent, and go to Washington. Many dozens of far-extremist Republican Congressmen took office in 2012 and 2014. These replaced the vanishing 'Tea Party' contingent who'd been briefly funded by the wealthy Koch Brothers but had their allowance cut off and been vanishing since the mid-2000s -- and greatly outdid them in truculence and determination to sabotage the Federal government and prevent it from working. The newcomers called themselves the Liberty Caucus, but everyone else calls them the Suicide Caucus. These are the Congress members who tried and failed to prevent President Obama from doing his job during his second (2012-2016) term. With their conviction that Washington is evil and must be defeated, the newcomers opposed not just Democrats but also their own party leadership. Speaker of the House John Boehner (Republican of Ohio) resigned not just from his leadership post but from all of politics in 2015 because the Suicide Caucus prevented him from doing his job and was out to defeat him. His reluctant successor, Paul Ryan, has had no better luck. The dominance of extremist lunatics also created another change in the GOP. At least since President Nixon (1968-72 and 1972-74), the GOP had been 'dogwhistling': Making coded, deniably worded appeals to the xenophobe, racist, bigoted portion of their constituency, especially racist Southerners. The avoidance of outright 'support us and we'll keep the blacks down' (etc.) appeals made the GOP passable among moderates, pro-business liberals, and aspiring young people, but still let them appeal to bigots and get their votes. But the antics of the Suicide Caucus normalised saying bluntly what the GOP had spent half a century taking great pains to only hint at and never say. The Overton Window of GOP rhetoric had been slammed right. Note: I am _not_ saying that the traditional GOP is/was an organisation of bigots and xenophobes. That is not the case. It merely warmly appreciates the votes of those who are. The traditional GOP tactic was to accept their support and money during the primary election season but then 'pivot' away from them during the general election and silently betray their interests once in office. This is what Richard Nixon, who was the greatest exponent of this tactic and called it his 'Southern Strategy', did. Takeover Part of the Suicide Caucus's problem is that they were so much of a clown-car collision that they had no hope of fielding a credible GOP Presidential candidate during the early 2016 primary elections -- and nothing like such a candidate emerged. Instead, there were 17 variously bizarre and weak primary candidates -- as opposed to two on the Democratic side (three if you count one Mr. O'Malley). The seventeen mutually destructed over a period of some months, the last one to rule himself out other than the Orange Menace being a universally despised hard-Right, ultra-religious social conservative from Texas named Ted Cruz, being perhaps the closest to a Suicide Caucus pick. Mr. Cruz at least gave lip service to many of the GOP national party's goals -- though he'd headed a disaterious 2013 effort to make the Federal government shut down in order to strip funding from President Obama's Affordable Care Act ('Obamacare') initiative. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-cruzs-plan-to-defund-obamacare-f... And what about the Autopsy Report's programme? Members of Congress who'd attempted to advance that sane and reasonable agenda, including Florida's Marco Rubio (one of the 17) found themselves under attack by Suicide Caucus types, and _reversed_ their progressive positions, most notably on immigration. Other politicians who stuck with the Autopsy Report themes found themselves marginalised (such as the national GOP's intended candidate, Jeb Bush of Florida). All of these contending influences left the GOP weak, divided, and riddled with crazy racist factions -- which became the core of Trump's electorate when he showed up and started marching at the head of their parade and dragging them in his direction. The GOP violently opposed the Trump takeover, until it became obvious on the eve of the Republican Convention that the damage they'd take from attempting to unseat him as their nominee would be too high. Since then, Republicans have taken a variety of strategies. Most try to distance themselves from Trump, few support him except very tepidly, and some try to square the circle by condemning particular things he _says_ but refusing to disavow him. The View from the Blue Seats As a Democratic Party member (best option I have, USA electoral mechanics having the emergent effects they do per Duverger's Law), all I want from Father Christmas is President Hillary Clinton and a Democratic Party majority in the Senate taking office in January. Gerrymandering will probably protect the GOP House majority through the rest of this decade at least, but the other is enough, because the _most_ important goal in the next few years is getting several Democratic-appointed Justices on the US Supreme Court (USSC). These must be appointed by the President and confirmed by a majority in the Senate. (The Vice-President is permitted to cast a vote in the Senate any time it has a tie vote.) That _is_ projected to happen. And the USSC is important for many reasons, including getting some of the money out of politics (reverse the Citizens United decision), ending rampant gerrymandering -- e.g., a Federal court recently ordering the undoing of North Carolina gerrymandering that was openly racist and turned the legislature and Congressional delegation heavily Republican despite the electorate being majority Democratic Party members, ending voter suppression tactics, and _perhaps_ even eventually fixing some of the breakage in the economic system. Eventually. It has been, however, a crazy election season, and my $10 isn't safe any more than Len's is. [1] To be tediously precise, each state gets electors equal to its total of the number of Senators (always two per state) plus the state's number of representative in the House of Representatives, the house where the number of seats is set by population established by the nationwide decennial census. DC originally had no electors. As DC ceased in the 20th Century just being a Federal government company town and its citizens resented being disenfranchised, the Twenty-Third Amendment in 1961 vouchsafed them as many electors as the least populous state, currently three. [2] As part of the shady 1789 compromise that kept the 13 former British colonies from splitting apart, the Constitution required the census to count free persons, 3/5 the number of all slaves, and excluding non-taxed (i.e., living outside USA jurisdiction) American Indians. This arrangement guaranteed the slave-holding southern states a power advantage in the House of Representatives and a tax-revenue bonus. This 'three-fifth compromise' was eradicated at the time of the Civil War. Northern political interests agreed to the compromise because they knew slavery was increasingly uncompetitive and would die out by itself if the Republic could be held together long enough for that to happen. [2] 'Gerrymander' is an expression from early USA politics. In the 1812 redrawing of state districts within Massachusetts, Governor Elbridge Gerry was mocked for having caused formation of new electoral districts with grotesquely misshapen boundaries. One political cartoonist drew a caricature of such a district in Essex County that was in the shape of a salamander, which was thereupon dubbed the 'gerrymander', and the name stuck.