I don’t think people realize that exit polls are just polls. They’re good, as polls go, because they ask a lot of people what they think and what they voted for on the day of the election. But it takes several months for the numbers crunchers to adjust and analyse the data alongside the actual results and it is often substantially different than what we thought on the morning after the election.
Anyway, Ryan Cooper at the American Prospect suggests that we put our hair shirts in the closet for the time being and deal with the fact that half of the American public has no idea what they’re in for:
Now that Donald Trump has won, again, a furious debate on the left side of the political spectrum has erupted, as Democratic Party factions jostle for position by casting blame on everyone but themselves. For my part, while I can’t help but have some suspicions, it will be six months before we have detailed data on where demographics actually landed, and at time of writing California is not even done counting. Any serious conclusions are premature at this point.
A more interesting conundrum, however, is the maddening fact that Trump paid little or no electoral penalty for his numerous hideously unpopular positions. A developing body of evidence suggests that a critical mass of voters simply did not hear about these positions, or did not believe them if they did. (The most bleak thread in this story are interviews with unauthorized immigrants who say they would have voted for Trump if they could, assuming that surely he would not deport them, as they’re honest and hardworking folks.)
Broadly speaking, it seems this decisive stratum of the electorate (the don’t-knows or those who dismissed Trump’s positions) was dissatisfied with the status quo under President Biden for one reason or another, and cast a protest vote for Trump, assuming things will turn out about as they did during his first term. These people are about to learn the hard way how wrong they were.
He does an excellent run down of the whole agenda and it’s as terrifying as we thought. But he brings up something I haven’t heard mentioned much and it’s truly astonishing:
A more uncertain danger, but perhaps riskiest of all, would be a crypto meltdown leading to a general financial panic. During the campaign, Trump did an about-face and became a big crypto guy because the industry gave him tons of money. Now, the industry is certain to avoid any serious regulation under his watch. And like any Republican, Trump is certain to install Wall Street stooges in the SEC and other regulators.
From a 30,000 foot view, crypto is akin to the pre-New Deal securities market that produced phenomena like the deranged property speculation frenzy in Florida swamps from 1924-26, except without the swamps. It’s pure speculation and nothing else, where every type of financial scam is running rampant, perhaps because the post-2008 wariness about financial gambling has subsided, and young people today having no direct experience of the crash. Crypto fanatics are reacting jubilantly to the Trump victory, with Bitcoin surging well past $80,000 and retail investors flooding into crypto exchange traded funds (ETFs).
We already saw the risks of crypto with the bankruptcy of FTX and several other crypto firms in 2022, brought down by crimes on a Bernie Madoff-esque scale. But many keystone crypto institutions, above all the big stablecoins like Tether that are critical for moving money in and out of crypto, did not collapse during the panic. Tether’s balance sheet is comically suspicious, and even if it weren’t, if the history of finance teaches anything it’s that these kind of institutions always blow themselves up eventually unless government forces them to behave responsibly and protects them from self-fulfilling panics.
Over the last few years crypto haw insinuated itself into the financial system, with big firms like BlackRock offering crypto ETFs (which is also booming). So next year we are likely to have another rapidly inflating crypto bubble with essentially no regulation or oversight, only this time hooked into the normal financial system, with corrupt Trumper goons at the head of all the financial regulators. Even if they manage to bail out the big companies with tons of free taxpayer money, as Bush and Obama did in 2008, millions of regular people are going to lose their shirts.
I will confess that I find the whole crypto thing a bit mystifying and that’ backed up by professionals I know who call it a scam. But the Trump grifter family is all in on it so you can bet we’re not going to see any regulation of it. Good times ahead…
This is the kind of thing I’m going to be focusing on for the moment. I am not interested in self-flagellation and will be looking for better data on what happened in this election as time goes on. I doubt I’ll have any great insights into “what the Democrats have to do,” but I’ll pass on any that I think are worth sharing.
I do think I have some insight on what the Republicans are doing and I will be keeping an eye on all that as I have for the last 9 exhausting years. (Just when I thought I was out, he pulled me back in…)
As Cooper concludes:
This is far from a complete list of the horrors Trump might unleash during his second term. Whatever they turn out to be, it will be critical to pin the blame where it belongs.