It’s an eerie sort of experience attending (at least via Zoom) the memorial service for someone for whom you used to babysit, listening to his children and grandchildren express their love and grief over the loss of their father or grandfather.
I guess it’s something I’ll need to get used to. I suspect I’ll have more of these than weddings to attend.
As of this writing the 120th Congress will have six black senators. If Scott Colom is pronounced the winner in Mississippi, it will be seven.
| Benchmark | Black share | “Expected” senators | Actual (6–7) as share of expected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total population (the Joint Center figure) | ~14% | 14 | ~45–50% |
| Adults 25+ | ~12.5% | 12–13 | ~50–55% |
| College graduates 25+ | ~9.5% | 9–10 | ~65–75% |
Or, in other words, the Senate’s racial composition is considerably closer to that of college-educated American adults than to that of the population as a whole. One additional black senator would narrow the difference further. Personally, I see no particular reason the Senate’s racial composition should mirror either population. Senators represent states, not racial groups, and I think their election should depend principally on their qualifications rather than their race.
But it’s interesting.
The editors of the Washington Post seem convinced that Tuesday’s election was a rejection of the president but not necessarily an embrace of “progressive” propositions on ballots around the country:
Democrats had an extraordinary night at the ballot box on Tuesday, but what does it mean for policy? Looking further down the ballot in swing states shows that while voters wanted Democratic elected officials to check President Donald Trump, they also wanted to check the power of government. And they aren’t sold on left-wing economic policy prescriptions.
They follow that with a selection of “left-wing economic policy prescriptions” that failed in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, all states in which Democrats replaced Republicans in the Congress but ballot propositions were defeated. They conclude:
If voters in the most competitive battlegrounds believed in progressive policies, they would have rejected these ballot measures with as much enthusiasm as they voted for Democrats. But they approved a lot of conservative policies while voting for anti-Trump candidates. If Democrats lurch far left on policy, the voters who gave them an enormous victory on Tuesday will probably be strongly tempted to switch back to the GOP or stay home in future elections.
The editors of the Wall Street Journal take a similar tack:
Democrats won an historic midterm election victory Tuesday, and congratulations on again having real legislative power. The question now is what lessons Democrats will take from their triumph, and whether they’ll return to the same mistakes of the Biden era that cost them so dearly in 2024.
The first essential lesson is that voters are handing Democrats power because they wanted to rebuke President Trump. They think he failed to deliver on his promise to lower prices, and they don’t like his excesses on the rule of law, tariffs, mass deportation, and crony cashing in.
Voters weren’t endorsing the Democratic Party, which stands at 29% approval in the latest NBC poll, below even the 38% for the Republican Party. Voters also weren’t embracing a Democratic policy agenda, since the party didn’t offer one. Candidates chanted “Trump” like an incantation and then talked about costs and corruption. They offered little specificity about how to reduce costs.
I’d like to offer a brief “unified theory” of voter behavior in the last elections that include not just those listed by the WaPo editors but those in California, Washington, and elsewhere. Voters tend to favor policies whose benefits they can identify and whose costs they believe they can avoid. They resist policies that impose visible costs or threaten arrangements they regard as personally important.
One final observation. American voters are a lot less tribal and more pragmatic than many seem to think.
I was very much struck by a single thing when I read Joakim Book’s lament at The Daily Economy for his loss of confidence in human progress. Here are some sample excerpts:
The most obvious and direct answer to that puzzling question is that most people haven’t seen much progress in a while. We’re not irrational, blind, or technophobic; we legitimately have not enjoyed the promised progress.
The Survey of Consumers put out by the University of Michigan has recorded near-record-low consumer sentiment for months, in an ostensibly thriving economy with lots of technological progress and trillion-dollar AI investments.
If the map and the territory disagree, one option is to follow the map, blame reality, and call the consumers fearful or irrational. The more serious avenue would be to consider that maybe, just maybe, the irrational subjects know something you don’t.
and
In fact, admitting that there has been no progress for years would clear up these supposed puzzles at once: both the surveys that show Americans so surprisingly sour on the economy when headline figures (growth, unemployment, investments) seem positive, and Omary’s conundrum of why we “fear” progress.
[…]
Most of the measures on which the progress movement has made its intellectual and popular reputation have stayed high, but stopped moving.
On child mortality, the incredible fall from double digits about a century ago to hugging zero percent in the Nordic welfare states is an astonishing development worthy of all praise. (Even a generation ago, the US posted an inexcusable one percent child mortality.) The downside is that once you’re at 0.2 percent there’s hardly any more progress available — diminishing returns and all that. Also, zoom in on that celebrated downward-sloping graph: the richest European countries have seen no change in the last twenty years.
What struck me was that the words “China” and “India” appear nowhere in his post. That suggests his definition of “human” is highly eccentric and, frankly, Euro-centric. Let’s frame the question as a series of questions:
When you include China and India, the answer is obviously “yes”. In terms of total GDP, per capita GDP, personal income, life expectancy, and other measures China and India have progressed enormously over the last 30 years. Since roughly a third of the human species lives in either China or India, that means there has been enormous human progress. It just hasn’t been in the United States, Canada, or Europe.
According to the the World Bank’s revised estimates approximately 1.5 billion people escaped extreme poverty between 1990 and 2022
The verdict isn’t in on this question but the answer may well be “no”. The progress in China and India has resulted in the prices of many of the things that people consume falling while wages have stayed stubbornly the same and underemployment has soared.
The verdict isn’t in on this question, either, but the answer to this one may well be “no” as well. The extremely abbreviated version of the explanation for that is that China’s enormous over-investment in productive capacity has foreclosed the mechanism that Japan, South Korea, and China used to progress from the countries of Africa.
This subject rightfully would require a whole volume rather than a brief answer. The TL;DR answer is it would require a lot of things that people in the United States, Canada, and Europe would find highly objectionable including
The question isn’t whether humanity has made progress over the last thirty years. It plainly has. The question is whether the countries that enjoyed the greatest prosperity in the twentieth century can continue to prosper in the twenty-first and whether the countries that have not yet achieved comparable prosperity can follow the same path. Neither answer is obvious. Both questions deserve considerably more attention than whether Americans are pleased with their washing machines.
I wanted to take note of financier Richard Pozen’s Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he outlines a plan for remedying the problems with the Social Security Trust Fund with four components:
I have one reservation about his plan. Not all jobs are created equal and the reality is that physical work is significantly harder to continue past age 65 than, say, a desk job. Remedying that will probably be considerably more complex and difficult to enforce than it sounds at first glance, requiring an additional classification analogous but not identical to Social Security Disability. Or maintain early Social Security retirement age while gradually increasing full retirement age.
Other than that, it seems to me a reasonable, workable plan but I call your attention to it more for where it is appearing than for its contents. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has traditionally opposed higher taxes and been skeptical of entitlement spending. That it should publish a proposal combining higher payroll taxes with reductions in the growth of benefits is noteworthy. Whether that signals a growing willingness to compromise or merely recognition of an approaching crisis remains to be seen. The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund is projected to exhaust its reserves in 2032. Congress has rather little time left to act.
The precedent here is the Reagan-era change to Social Security. In 1983 the two parties could agree that Social Security’s financing problem required a negotiated solution in which both sides accepted politically uncomfortable provisions. The critical difference today is that there is less overlap in views between the two parties and hence greater difficulty in compromising.
ACA Marketplace Premiums 2018 to 2027
These increases reflect two interacting problems: the persistently rising cost of healthcare itself and the peculiar dynamics of health insurance, in which higher premiums can drive healthier customers out of the market, raising costs for those who remain.
This reinforces a point I have made before. Healthcare experiences structural pressures that produce persistent cost escalation, although economists disagree about whether these constitute a wage-price spiral in the conventional sense. Whatever we call it, healthcare has been a major source of upward pressure on Americans’ cost of living for decades.
I don’t do this very often. I’m going to quote in full the Wall Street Journal after-election editorial:
Democrats won an historic midterm election victory Tuesday, and congratulations on again having real legislative power. The question now is what lessons Democrats will take from their triumph, and whether they’ll return to the same mistakes of the Biden era that cost them so dearly in 2024.
The first essential lesson is that voters are handing Democrats power because they wanted to rebuke President Trump. They think he failed to deliver on his promise to lower prices, and they don’t like his excesses on the rule of law, tariffs, mass deportation, and crony cashing in.
Voters weren’t endorsing the Democratic Party, which stands at 29% approval in the latest NBC poll, below even the 38% for the Republican Party. Voters also weren’t embracing a Democratic policy agenda, since the party didn’t offer one. Candidates chanted “Trump” like an incantation and then talked about costs and corruption. They offered little specificity about how to reduce costs.
One Democratic priority is sure to be investigating the executive branch and the Trump family businesses, and some oversight is warranted. Mr. Trump’s misuse of the pardon power, his cryptocurrency plays, and Don Jr.’s investments in firms that do business with the government are all worthy subjects. Ditto for the government loans to or investment in private firms, especially those in which Trump family companies have stakes.
More scrutiny on policy matters could also be usefully informative. Who really throttled Ukraine’s Starshield satellite access? And let’s learn more about the U.S. agreement with Alejandro Betancourt, the Administration’s politically connected partner in its preferential deal to exploit Venezuelan oil resources.
The political danger is that Democrats won’t be able to control themselves. They didn’t in Mr. Trump’s first term, and it cost them politically. One key test will be whether they can resist the calls to impeach him again. Nancy Pelosi didn’t, and her efforts merely solidified the President’s Republican support. Unless Democrats uncover something serious enough to get Republican Senators to convict after a House impeachment, they would be wise to settle for oversight and informing the voters.
Legislatively the next two years will feature the frustrations of divided government. Unfortunately for the country, given the $40 trillion debt and last year’s $2 trillion deficit, Congress typically papers over disagreements by spending even more.
Did Democrats learn a lesson from Mr. Biden’s spending binge, which fueled the inflation that cost him re-election? As workers worry about energy prices, will the party go straight back to climate mandates and subsidies for expensive electric cars?
Ditto for other ideological excesses from Mr. Biden’s time. Democrats pushed hard for H.R.1, their bill to nationalize election rules on California’s model, including overriding state laws against ballot harvesting. Will that reappear? Likely new House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries has called for “dramatic Supreme Court reform,” which won’t get Mr. Trump’s signature. But if Mr. Jeffries keeps talking that way, it will be a serious reason for voters not to trust his party with total power in 2029.
If he and likely Senate leader Chuck Schumer want a better path, they could seek compromise with Republicans to benefit the country. Permitting reform is one example. Another might be immigration.
Mr. Trump has sometimes spoken of wanting to help “Dreamers” brought to the U.S. as children. Democrats, meantime, have castigated the President for killing the border bill negotiated in 2024 by Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, which would have codified a stricter legal standard for asylum. Such a change to the statute is worth Mr. Trump’s support, since it would outlast him and make it harder for the next President to reopen the southern border.
One difficulty for Democrats will be the radicals in their ranks. The House “squad” will double in size, and the socialist left will feel empowered. New York Rep.-elect Darializa Avila Chevalier has argued that it’s immoral to deport even violent criminals. Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed wants to purge Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, for the offense of believing Israel has a right to defend itself. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has floated a Supreme Court with 13 Justices.
None of that will improve the party’s approval rating. It could also lead voters to conclude in 2028 that the post-Trump Republican Party doesn’t look so bad after all.
I sincerely wish that both parties will learn the lessons this election taught. I think it’s far more likely they’ll continue to promote what their more extreme supporters want on the shaky assumption that will get them re-elected.
The results of the 2026 midterm elections aren’t fully in yet but my predictions about them appear to have been directionally right with Democrats winning majorities in both houses of Congress. As of this writing I may have underestimated the anger across the country at Trump since the Democratic majorities in each house appears to be somewhat larger than I predicted. It does, indeed, appear to have been a “wave election”.
Here in Chicago I am gratified That Jessica Biggs won her election as president of the Chicago School Board over the candidate preferred by Mayor Brandon Johnson.
So far the best comment I have found about the elections was from WSJ columnist Joseph Sternberg at about 11:30pm last night:
As the dominoes keep falling for Democrats, there’s a lot of talk tonight about the end of President Trump’s policy-political project, to the extent there was a coherent one, and fair enough. Republicans are getting punished because Mr. Trump keeps tripping over himself on the economy (tariffs, anyone?) and struggles to explain himself even when he’s right (Iran).
But the Ohio governor’s race marks a rebuke for the Trump political method, too. Vivek Ramaswamy’s loss can be attributed in part to that late campaign ad — yes, that one. Many voters appear to have ruled it out of bounds. While politics have gotten coarser in the Trump era, maybe there are still some limits after all.
With the elections over the question before us will be what will the Democrats do with their majorities? As I said in the post linked above I think that investigations and possibly impeachments of President Trump and his cabinet officers will prove irresistible to the new Congress. We will see.
In the morning newsletter I received from Axios this morning there was a sentence I wanted to react to: “There’s a difference between a blowout and a mandate.” Yes. Nowadays a “mandate” means you won the election. Anyone who wins an election regardless of why or by how many votes will claim a mandate.
I’m preparing to go to the polls to cast my vote. I’m old enough that there’s an “election day” rather than an election season.
I look forward to it with some foreboding. Given my track record my casting a vote for a candidate is practically proof positive that they’ll lose.
The elections I look forward to casting my votes for are for the president of the school board and the board member for our subdistrict. For Chicago that’s a first. There are three candidates running for board president, one endorsed by the mayor and the other two opposed to property tax increases and short term high interest rate loans. I think it’s actually an open question which candidate will win and I’ll be casting my vote for the non-Johnson candidate I think is most likely to win. My concern is that the two non-Johnson candidates will split the anti-Johnson vote and give the election to the candidate the mayor endorsed.
I neglected to mention that I will be voting in the mayoral primary, too. The difficulty in that election is deciding among the several notables running who is the best and is not Brandon Johnson.
