In his Wall Street Journal column Daniel Henninger argues that the biggest issue in the midterm election is chaos:

What, exactly, are these midterm elections about? The 500-pound bear in the room is inflation. Still, I don’t recall another recent midterm when so many discrete issues were filtering through voters’ minds. Crime, abortion, recession, energy prices, the border, schools, Ukraine and, not least, Joe Biden.

We live in chaotic times. The RealClearPolitics polling average has the country’s right-direction number bouncing along the bottom at 26.7%.

The plausible default theory of the election is that inflation running above 8%—raising consumer prices and eroding wage gains—pushes everything else into second-tier voting concerns.

Perhaps, but midterms under a new president are inevitably a Rorschach blot on the nation’s life during his first two years. While Mr. Biden’s approval rating has ticked up in recent polls, it has been awful, falling below 40%. My view is that some portion of his bad approval is discomfort over Mr. Biden’s mental state. But people aren’t going to vote for Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance or anyone else because of Mr. Biden’s teleprompter gaffes.

I keep wondering what voters make today of the 2020 presidential election. Not the contested result. Mr. Biden won. But one reason Mr. Biden narrowly won is that he pulled over independents and disaffected Republicans by running as a moderate alternative to his party’s progressives—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Mr. Biden’s moderate, “normal” presidency didn’t last past Inauguration Day. His switcheroo to progressive standard-bearer for the Sanders-Warren-Pelosi policy goals was startling. A lot of voters who decide close elections have to be wondering about the difference between what they wanted and what they got.

What’s left? Abortion was hot after the Supreme Court’s June 24 Dobbs decision but looks to have moved off the front burner. I’m hard put to see any toss-up election being decided by playing the Trump/MAGA card, though Mr. Trump could still produce a Halloween surprise for GOP candidates.

As for Mr. Biden, by attaching his presidency so wholeheartedly to his party’s political left, he has elevated the midterm importance of issues like crime and the border.

Progressive criminal-justice theories are running side by side with a crime surge in cities and suburbs. Virtually no new-generation prosecutor has been willing to make a midcourse correction. Democrats own it.

I’m not sure that Americans are worried about chaos so much as that many of us long for things to return to normal whatever that means. We’re looking for transformation less than not so much drama. I was reminded of this:

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.

That quote is from a speech given in 1920 by Warren G. Harding. That would make it a century old. Recovering from a pandemic? Check. Economic upheaval? Check. Concerns about war? Check. It seems we have come full circle.

Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report provides his take on the status of things with just a couple of weeks before the midterm elections:

The extreme partisan polarization in recent years has yielded fewer “true independents,” ones who do not identify with or even lean toward either party, and fewer people voting split tickets. Indeed, few Democrats will now even consider voting for a Republican for anything, nor Republicans cast a ballot for a Democrat. With the party lines so rigorously followed, we now have higher floors and lower ceilings, meaning that in most competitive states and districts, the margins are rarely more than low- to mid-single digits and the trailing candidate usually remains within striking distance of the leader, hoping that circumstances or a key event will enable them to close the gap and surge or just edge ahead.

But just because there are fewer true independents or undecided voters in key races doesn’t mean they are any less important. Indeed, with both parties’ bases so thoroughly motivated, any meaningful growth in support has to come from those non-aligned voters in the middle.

After reviewing a number of very close races, he concludes:

To hold onto the barest majority possible, 218 seats, Democrats have to win 25 (81 percent) out of the 31 Toss Ups, while Republicans need to win just seven (23 percent) of the 31. If Democrats win every Toss Up race, they would end up with a net gain of one seat, a total of 223. If Republicans win every Toss Up, they would have a net gain of 29 seats. So constructing a bell curve would put the tails around one seat up for Democrats to 29 seats for Republicans, up to 242 seats. Although it is fairly rare for a party to win all of the Toss Ups, keep in mind that in 2020, when the Blue Wave turned into the Dead Sea in the final week, the GOP did just that.

Voters are deeply conflicted this year. Watch for that last gust of wind: Whichever way it goes can make a huge difference in so many of these really close races.

I’m not sure whether “too close to tell” or “we have reached the end of the trail in using polls as predictors” is a better way of summarizing his comments. If the midterms are, indeed, very close it’s the former; if they’re not close at all, it’s the latter.

Update

at 538 Nate Silver characterizes his take on who will hold the Senate in 2023 as “it’s {expletive deleted} close”:

If you’d asked me a month ago — or really even a week ago — which party’s position I’d rather be in, I would have said the Democrats. Now, I honestly don’t know.

Hat tip: in comments

I’m trying to figure out how to put my thoughts into words. In a “winner take all” system (like ours) I don’t think that “a 57% chance” actually has a referent. As the late Mayor Daley once put it “no matter what it looks like now somebody will win”. There’s a 100% chance of that happening. There’s also a 100% of the other side losing. When you reach into an urn containing black pebbles and white pebbles there’s 100% chance you’ll pull out either a black pebble or a white pebble. There is no chance you’ll pull out a gray pebble.

I also think that if polling hasn’t collapsed it’s in the process of collapsing. That’s the result of so many people either refusing to speak to pollsters or even lying to pollsters as is the case right now. Calling 250 people to obtain one response inherently biases the results. Especially if Democrats are less likely to answer the phone than Republicans or vice versa which I believe to be the case.

As I have pointed out there are presently a number of Republican candidates running for office around the country who received their funding primarily from Democrats in the primaries. There were thirteen races in which that happened and four of those Republicans presumably less electable in the general election won their primaries. That includes the governors’ races in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Maryland and the 3rd District, U.S. House in Michigan.

What happens if they are elected? My own view is that if any are elected there will be one or more worse governors or a worse representative than might otherwise have been the case. I think that if none of them are elected we’ll see a lot more strategic opposition funding from both political parties.

I strongly doubt that Darren Bailey will be elected governor of Illinois. I think he’s a dolt and not a particularly good campaigner. Basically, I think that Pritzker could die tomorrow and still be elected. I don’t have enough knowledge of the other races to judge the likelihood of their being elected.

That’s the grade of political hurricane that pollster Dave Wasserman of Cook’s Political Report says will strike the Democrats in the midterm elections in this interview by Benjamin Hart in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer:

I think Nate Silver, my friend and fellow prognosticator, asked the right question over the summer when he wondered whether this would be an asterisk election. Today, we’re somewhere between an asterisk year, in which there’s a minimal wave, and a classic midterm election, where Republicans do quite well. I think this is probably a Category 2 or 3 hurricane headed Democrats’ way, just not a Category 4 or 5.

Biden’s approval ratings have sucked all year. That hasn’t changed much. Democrats have come home a bit to him since Dobbs, gas prices have come down a little bit, and he’s been able to pass an agenda during an election year, which is impressive — but that’s only gotten him to between 42 and 43 percent. Historically, that’s still a very rough place to be. The silver lining for congressional Democrats is that their approvals are still outpacing Biden’s. And the main reason is that the Democratic incumbents had the luxury of stockpiling cash all year while Republicans were locked in bitter primaries. That allowed Democrats a head start to communicate what benevolent bipartisan people they were, and to run as moderates, whereas the Republicans were stuck running to the right.

Basically, he’s predicting that Democrats will lose the House and have a good chance of capturing the Senate as well. That would only require the net gain of one additional senator.

Matt Yglesias has a similar prediction:

My big picture expectation is that polls and poll-based forecasts are overestimating Democrats’ odds, so a result that is actually pretty good by the normal standards of midterms is going to play as a crushing disappointment.

According to 538, Republicans have a 72 percent chance of taking the House, while Democrats have a 64 percent chance of holding the Senate. Those forecasts seem D-skewed to me. I will be genuinely shocked if Democrats hold the House. The only precedents for that happening in remotely recent history are the 9/11 election and the 1962 midterms held right after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’m not saying it’s impossible — we do have those two examples — but it’s difficult to understand why that would happen this fall. By contrast, Republicans picking up a net of one Senate seat would be a completely banal outcome. The fact that polling is giving it only a 1-in-3 chance of happening is, I believe, a consequence of the polling being skewed.

In response to that I will leap fearlessly into the fray to predict some things that won’t happen.

The Democrats won’t extend their majority in the House. Given gas prices, food prices, and President Biden’s lackluster popularity, doing that is not credible.

The Republicans won’t end up with veto-proof majorities in both houses. That would take a net gain of more than 70 seats in the House and 10 in the Senate. Biden isn’t that unpopular and the economic conditions aren’t that dire.

So what does that mean? I think that depends entirely on how angry the incoming Republicans are in the House.

There are websites and, apparently, maps for everything these days. You can find out what the favorite Halloween costume in your area is at a site called “FrightGeist“. I’m doing a mouseover of Chicago and, apparently, a lot of people like Stranger Things costumes here.

The Dinosaurs are apparently the favorite costumers in Washington, DC. There’s a joke in there somewhere.

Assume that the Democrats lose the House as most of the analyses suggest. Who will be blamed?

1. Putin
2. Biden
3. Trump
4. Pelosi
5. the Federal Reserve
6. COVID-19
7. the voters
8. All of the above

I’m guessing H, followed by D, followed by B.

I think that this piece by Hayley Smith at the Los Angeles Times via Yahoo News bears some consideration.

By now, it is clear that water independence is the best path forward for the 4 million residents of the city of Los Angeles, and for the county and region as a whole. Imported supplies from the State Water Project are heavily dependent on annual snowpack and rainfall in the Sierra, which are no longer a guarantee under the state’s shifting climate regime. What’s more, long-reliable federal supplies from the Colorado River are rapidly drying up, with the river’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead, nearing dangerously low levels.

In certain ways, the city is in better shape than some other major metropolitan areas because of the Los Angeles Aqueduct system, two pipelines that deliver water from the Mono Basin and Owens River hundreds of miles away. But even that supply — much of it secured by stealth and deception more than 100 years ago — is heavily reliant on Sierra snowmelt.

and

Pierce said San Fernando Valley groundwater has long been an untapped resource in Los Angeles.

“It used to be way too expensive and we had cheaper options [than remediation],” he said. “But now it’s finally here because there are no cheaper options, and because the technology has gotten there, so I think now is the time. DWP has already begun cleaning that up, and that’s going to be really useful for the city.”

He also underscored that current conservation efforts should become permanent in the face of water uncertainty. So far, Angelenos have more than risen to the challenge — achieving record-low demand in June, July and August this year, according to the DWP.

Cortez-Davis noted that the city has kept its water use at roughly 1970 levels despite growing by more than a million people since then.

I’ve been visiting Southern California fairly frequently over the last 60 years, sometimes for personal and sometimes for business reasons. I was just there again last week.

California’s population was around 10 million in 1950; by 1970 that had grown to 20 million; now it’s pushing 40 million people. The fundamental problem facing California is too many people and not enough water.

But California has multiple problems all of which need to be addressed and identifying their relative priorities is a major political problem. California’s economy is more dependent on housing than that of most state—nearly 17% of its state product according to the NAR. That’s higher than most Midwestern or Eastern states but lower than other Western states. It’s higher than Southern states other than South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia. In other words not only does California need water it needs people. See the problem?

California has an advantage that Colorado or Utah don’t: it could get more water by desalinating ocean water but that takes energy and California is already importing energy. That’s the price of its “green energy” initiatives.

While I’m completely in favor of conservation (not to mention lifestyle changes), I’m skeptical that California’s way forward is through conservation. At least not without reducing its population to something more in line with the state’s ability to produce water.

Note, too, that developing solar power is in conflict with California’s need for more land on which to build houses.

So there you have it. Water, population, housing as too-large a percentage of the state’s economy, competition with other Western states for the Colorado’s water, energy production, and land use. That’s quite a basket of problems.

Among the many food items that have shot up in price, at 32% year-on-year butter and margarine are among the biggest. You might find Greg Iacurci’s explainer at CNBC interesting:

The sharp rise is partly attributable to the same factors nudging up prices across the grocery aisle, such as elevated costs for labor and distribution, according to economists.

But it’s also due to global geopolitical events — like the war in Ukraine — as well as weather and other phenomena affecting the dairy industry and the market for vegetable oils, a key input for margarine.

“All the costs that go into producing a stick of butter, all those costs have risen,” said Matt Herrick, a spokesman for the International Dairy Foods Association, a group representing dairy producers.

It’s also a good primer on the economic concept of substitution. For making margarine canola oil, soy oil, palm oil, and…sunflower oil may be substituted for one another in producing margarine. The first margarine was made from beef tallow—practically any fat can be used. Between them Ukraine and Russia produce ten times as much sunflower oil as the next largest producer, basically more than all other countries combined.

There’s a war on which has resulted in price increases for sunflower oil. When the price of sunflower oil rises so do canola oil, soy oil, etc. And, of course, margarine is a substitute for butter. When the price of margarine increases, it raises the price of butter.

In one of his more interesting recent analyses George Friedman declaims that the world is still unipolar and the United States remains the sole global superpower:

It’s no surprise, then, that Putin sees the U.S. as a force trying to create a unipolar world, because in some notable ways, it is a unipolar world. The U.S. is the largest economy in the world, its current problems notwithstanding. It also has a sophisticated military, able to bring overwhelming force to bear, train an army at war in new weapons, and use subtle force to shape the world. American power isn’t absolute, and it can be outstripped. But it is sufficiently mobile to act sequentially when simultaneous action is impossible. Put simply, the United States is the most powerful economic and military force in the world – when it chooses to act. Inaction can be confused by men like Putin as weakness. The U.S. has learned that with its inherent power it has time to react.

The American public often sees the United States as weak and mismanaged. There’s a tendency to label Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as criminals or morons or both. The same charges were levied against Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Contempt for the commanders-in-chief is a prerequisite, to prevent tyranny, even if it has its drawbacks. The America First movement opposing U.S. participation in World War II interfered with Roosevelt’s ability to make decisions. It had a direct impact on Pearl Harbor and caused a painful initiation for the U.S. into war by the Japanese, which of course ended in catastrophe for them.

The perception of American weakness is a global one, shared even among Americans. Being underestimated has its uses, as does sporting a public that doesn’t trust its president. But only enormously powerful nations can afford the contempt. The past few months haven’t taught us that the United States is finagling a new world order. It’s taught us that Russia is weakening, that China is managing its relationship with the U.S. carefully, and that the international architecture created after World War II, though more complex, essentially remains in place. It is a unipolar world.

We’re not the only power capable of deploying force far from our shores. Countries capable of doing that include Russia, China, and France. Britain? Used to be but I’m not so sure at this point. I don’t think any other country is capable of deploying force from its shores at scale. Other than using intercontinental ballistic missiles that is. If you add that the club includes (at least) Russia, China, Britain, France, and, forsooth, North Korea.

Read the whole thing. His analysis of the differences between the Russian and Chinese postures is interesting (TL;DR is that Russia has flubbed but China hasn’t).