Stidmatt

First and foremost, every Presidential election is unique.

You cannot accurately predict an election’s outcome by the candidates’ offices in the race.

No matter who Harris picks as her running mate, this election will be unique because it is the only election in which an incumbent Vice President has run against a former President. This is funny because 2020 was the first election in history where a former Vice President ran against an incumbent President.

However, there are some trends that are interesting to observe.

When analyzing the offices held by the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates from the two major parties in every election since 1828, every combination is unique.

The most common combination for a winning ticket is the sitting President and sitting Vice President.

The most common losing ticket is two Senators, the second most common winning ticket.

Most combinations are rare enough the results are not statistically significant. But it is clear that incumbent President/Vice President tickets win 71% of the time.

Tickets with a Senator as the Presidential candidate and a Representative as the Vice Presidential candidate have been run 5 times and lost every time. It’s the most common losing ticket, and a ticket like this has not been sold since 1964. The last ticket of this shape was in 1848.

All of this is to say that while there is clearly an incumbency advantage, any other office held by candidates has little to no impact on the election.

Candidate quality and the record of the incumbent administration are the best predictors of whether a candidate will win or lose the election.

Arm Ukraine and force a peaceful resolution to Palestine to win the Presidency.

Over the last 60 years, the two parties have diverged.

On the one hand, Johnson passed major civil rights reform.

On the other hand, Nixon negotiated with hostile regimes to not sign peace agreements with the United States for political gain.

But on the other hand, Jimmy Carter has pushed for and eradicated Guinea Worm.

However, Ronald Reagan sold weapons to terrorists.

But on the other hand, Clinton passed gun reform and enforced UN missions to end genocide.

But on the other hand, Bush curtailed constitutional rights and started an illegal war in Iraq at Netanyahu’s urging.

But on the other hand, Obama expanded access to health insurance to millions of Americans.

But on the other hand, Trump actively backtalked doctors during a pandemic and his court appointments led to the repeal of Roe v. Wade.

However, Biden passed gun reform.

How is one to choose between the two parties?

Here’s a more balanced way to look at it:

Democrats are not perfect, but Republicans are horrendous, and they have been for the last 60 years.

With Biden ending his campaign and Harris as the presumptive nominee to be the next president of the United States, there is clearly only one path to protecting democracy at home and worldwide.

That is to elect Kamala Harris as the next President of the United States.

She was one of the most consistent Democrats in the Senate, so we won’t have to worry about her moving toward Republicans. However, she is likely to be harsher towards New Democrats when they inevitably oppose her proposals, which will help her push policy through.

Trump will be more supportive of Israel and will certainly not work towards a peace agreement between Palestine and Israel.

Trump will stop supporting Ukraine.

Trump wants to ban abortion.

Trump wants to abolish the Affordable Care Act.

Harris is none of these things.

We need to vote for Kamala Harris.

• People who think Democrats need to approach the center were never going to vote Democratic in the first place. No one will ever vote for a black man who supports extending health care to disabled people… oh wait… the best performance for a Democrat since 1964… twice.
• George McGovern is the ideal candidate. He is from South Dakota and blames our inflation crisis on the Great Society. He’s definitely going to win as the moderate candidate we can all support!
• The New Democratic lie is a fraud. The closer New Democrats get to power, the worse Democrats do across the board. We should have had a landslide in 2022, and they failed.
• I fully believe Biden won in 2020 because of COVID-19. If COVID was not around and Biden ran against Trump, it is now obvious Trump would have won the electoral college again. It’s funny how not campaigning in swing states gets Republicans elected.

I’m a reliable Democratic voter, and I have benefited massively from the Affordable Care Act since I was born with cerebral palsy. If the ACA is repealed as Republicans promise, I will have to leave the country or not have health insurance. Those are the stakes of this election.

I read the article in Politico that the Biden campaign was not even polling in swing states over the last month, and that is absolutely unacceptable. Biden handpicked his campaigns top operatives himself, according to the article. Tim Kaine made this mistake on only focusing on safe wins in the 2010 election. We know how that turned out, voter turnout dropped relative to 2006 levels, and we lost the election. Hillary Clinton’s campaign and DNC operations under Debbie Wasserman Schultz did not invest in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin despite them having republican governors, and we know how the 2016 election turned out.

Twice in my life my fundamental rights have been threatened by Republicans and high-ranking Democrats have failed to protect the rights of disabled people by absurd campaigning strategies. To see President Biden following in Kaine and Clinton’s footsteps this year is infuriating to me. The DNC and the Harris campaign need to instead follow the strategy Howard Dean used in 2006 and President Obama successfully used to sail to victory with wide margins, even as Democrats were destroyed in the House elections under the strategy of only funding races we know we can win.

There is only so much I can do as a single voter. My phone banking in swing states helps a small amount, but is only a drop in the bucket compared to the resources the DNC has. I implore the DNC to continue the tried and true 50-state strategy which gave us victories in 2018 and 2020 under the leadership of Jaime Harrison, and that the DNC needs to force the Harris campaign to campaign in all 50 states, otherwise history shows Trump will probably win.

Tacoma’s unfortunate geography makes transit difficult to serve. The city is fairly low-density, but zoning can fix this. It’s dense enough to support Link.

Problem 1: Bad bus routes

If you want to go from the St. Joseph Medical Center to the Tacoma Dome, the new transit center for the South Sound, the bus takes over half an hour without a forced transfer, driving takes 9 minutes, and the distance is only a mile. This is insane. Pierce Transit needs to design its routes to be more user-friendly, increase average speed, and optimize routes. If the Tacoma Dome Station will be the transit center for Tacoma, it needs to be easy to access from across the city. It is not.

Problem 2: Tacoma Dome had bad land use

There is an even bigger problem which is there is very poor land use around the Tacoma Dome. It is a very low density area, not much else to do, and sandwiched next to two freeways. This means it will not be a very useful station by itself.

Solution:

Turn WA-509 into the new track for Link and connect it with Tacoma Rail via Jefferson Ave. Build a new train station for Tacoma with Link, Cascades, and Sounder stopping at Union Station in downtown Tacoma. Use Union Station for its original purpose. Abandon I-705 and create a new Union Station on top of where I-705 used to be. This will be far more useful than Tacoma Dome. Close Pacific Ave to cars and will be the heart of Pierce Transit’s bus service, running to the county.

Eliminate surface parking lots and zone all abandoned lots within a mile of downtown Tacoma as mixed-use. This will do more to alleviate increasing housing costs than anything else you can do.

This will provide better, faster transit to everyone in the South Sound. The train station will be far more useful, and being right next to the University of Washington campus will be very useful. The easy transfer between the University, frequent local trains, and frequent regional trains will make downtown Tacoma one of the best places to live in the United States.

Assuming good land use around a station (I live in Jersey City, which is a good assumption around here), I expect that as frequency changes, the demand for using a station at any given minute creates a parabola.

Case 1: There is very frequent service, more than once every 5 minutes. People move in and out of the station quickly, and crowds are very brief. I recommend using the Spanish solution.

Case 2: Medium service, every 5-15 minutes. Transit is still useful, so people crowd the stations. Building enough space on the platform to prevent overcrowding requires more money. The Spanish Solution might still be ideal.

Case 3: Low service, anything less than every 15 minutes. At this point, the longer your frequency, the lower your demand as people switch to other modes, so you need smaller stations. You don’t need a center platform at this point.

This is why the frequency of service vs. demand for space at train stations forms a parabola.

I downloaded data from https://visamap.co/, which is open-source, and combined it with my existing borders data set to see which countries have open visa policies versus closed visa policies.

When we compare the total number of countries that offer visa-free access, a pattern appears that linear models fail to capture. The overall score is the democracy score from the Economist Intelligence Unit. We notice three distinct groups:

1. Most authoritarian states (score under 2) allow very few, if any, nationalities to travel to their country visa-free.
2. Moderately authoritarian and hybrid regimes (scores between 2 and 6) are random.
3. Democratic states (scores above 6) allow over 50 countries to visit visa free, are former British colonies, or are Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and Cabo Verde.

This pattern continues when we look at press freedom. Lower is better.

Every country with a high press score over 20 allows at least 92 nationalities to visit visa-free or was a British colony. Countries with a mediocre press freedom score between 20 and 60 run the gamut. Every country with poor press freedom or a score over 60 allows fewer than 50 countries to visit visa-free.

I find the same trend with corruption.

When we color countries by color, almost every democracy outside the Anglosphere has a pretty open visa policy.

If we look only at high-income economies with a GDP per capita over $20,000, we find the following:

Saudi Arabia is the only high-income country based on GDP per capita that is not a former British colony that allows fewer than 70 nationalities to visit visa-free, defined as no ESTA, no pre-registration, no fee, just show up with your passport.

AP stands for Asia-Pacific, WE/EU for Western Europe, AME for America, and MENA for the Middle East.

Changing our GDP per capita threshold to USD 10,000 does not change much.

Now, using GDP per capita as a metric, we find the following:

Here is a correlation matrix of these variables:

As we can see, while no one metric by itself explains why a country would choose to have a more open or closed visa policy, two questions can quickly narrow the likely number of policies:

• Is your country democratic?
• Were you not a British colony at any point in your history?

If you answered yes to all three of these questions, you probably have a liberal visa policy. We can now sort the world into eight buckets: The first number is the number of countries, the second is the average number of countries that can travel to a given country visa-free.

• GDP per capita high (over $20k)
  • Former British colony
    • Democratic: (9, 92.0)
    • Not democratic: (4, 48.0)
  • Not a former British colony
    • Democratic: (18, 103.0)
    • Not democratic: (1,6.0)
• GDP per capita low
  • Former British colony
    • Democratic: (19, 65.0)
    • Not democratic: (14, 10.0)
  • Not a former British colony:
    • Democratic: (46,103.0)
    • Not democratic: (45,20.0)

So, based on my graphing, this doesn’t show what I expected. Let’s reverse our methodology and instead test whether a country is a former British colony.

• GDP per capita over $20k
  • No visa for over 50 nationalities
    • Democratic (score over 5)
      • Not a British colony: 18
      • Former British colony: 5
    • Not democratic
      • Former British colony: 2 (UAE & Qatar)
  • Closed visa
    • Democratic
      • Former British colony: 4 (Australia, Canada, NZ, US)
    • Not democratic
      • Former British colony: 2 (Bahrain and Kuwait)
      • Not a British colony: 1 (Saudi Arabia)
• GDP per capita under $20,000
  • No visa for over 50 nationalities
    • Democratic
      • Not a British colony: 40
      • Former British colony: 12
    • Not democratic
      • Not a British colony: 15
      • Former British colony: 2 (Oman and Zambia)
  • Closed visa
    • Democratic
      • Former British colony: 7
      • Not a British colony: 6
    • Not democratic
      • • Not a British colony: 30
        • Former British colony: 12

We see here that if you are not a former British colony and democratic, you are likely open to tourists from most countries visiting visa-free. Rich democratic former British colonies, on the other hand, maintain strict visa policies.

One more way to visualize this data. To be considered English-speaking, over 50% of your population needs to speak English as a first language by this definition.

• Democracy Score over 5
  • Open visa
    • GDP per capita over $20k
      • English speaking
        • Former British colony: 1
        • Not a British colony: 1
      • Not English speaking
        • Not a British colony: 17
        • Former British colony: 4
    • GDP per capita under $20k
      • Not English speaking
        • Not a British colony: 40
        • Former British colony: 12
  • Closed visa
    • GDP per capita over $20k
      • English speaking
        • Former British colony: 4
    • GDP per capita under $20k
      • Not English speaking
        • Former British colony: 7
        • Not a British colony: 6
• Democracy Score under 5
  • Open visa
    • GDP per capita over $20k
      • Not English speaking
        • Former British colony: 2
    • GDP per capita under $20k
      • Not English speaking
        • Not a British colony: 15
          • Former British colony: 2
  • Closed visa
    • GDP per capita over $20k
      • Not English speaking
        • Former British colony: 2
        • Not a British colony: 1
    • GDP per capita under $20k
      • Not English speaking
        • Not a British colony: 30
        • Former British colony: 12

So from this, we can clearly see the factors that matter in whether a country will have a more open visa policy:

1. Be Democratic.
2. Don’t be a former British colony.

Income has little impact on visa policy.

Few other raw data metrics correlate well with a highly democratic society. Most of the proxies we use are not raw data. The press freedom index and corruption perceptions index are useful, but they are interpretations of non-profits’ data.

I love the metric of counting how many countries can travel visa-free to a given country because no interpretation or aggregation is necessary. You either can show up at the airport with your passport from an international flight and go through customs for free, or you can’t. There is no middle ground.

The best raw data metric for determining whether a country is democratic is whether people from democracies can travel visa-free to that country.

I will write a second article on this topic, counting eVisas as visa-free.

If you are on the same list as Afghanistan, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan, you are doing something wrong.

We are going in the wrong direction.

Biometrics are fine

Most countries in the world now have biometric passports. Biometrics are limited to a digital copy of your face, and they have been used for years to move people across borders securely. Many countries, such as the EU, the UK, and Brazil, exclusively use this method for all of their citizens. The UK even uses this for EU, US, Canadian, and other citizens. You don’t have to pre-enroll. It just works. It means faster borders for everyone so customs agents can focus on actual threats.

I watch British media frequently, and I have NEVER seen an article about how using facial recognition at the UK border has been insufficient to move people across the border quickly and securely. I believe this is the maximum level of necessary security between low-corruption democracies.

However, most countries are going in the wrong direction. The new entry/exit system the European Union is implementing will fingerprint every passenger entering and exiting the European Union in the foreseeable future. It’s not simply a retaliatory action against the United States that does this, but they will do this for all passengers who are not citizens of the EU or Schengen.

I was unaware that the current system was insecure because despite frequently reading news articles from across Europe, I have never once seen a single article discussing how the existing system has let terrorists through. The reason is, it is a solution in search of a problem.

Visa-free Travel is Ending

The future of borders is a world without visa-free travel if the current trajectory continues. Not only do we continue to share criminal records with partners, which is reasonable, but you won’t be able to travel anywhere without getting a visa first. It might be inexpensive, but any document that you need to purchase before traveling and costs money is a visa.

Is the sharing of criminal records insufficient? What is the real benefit of this new system?

All of these are so necessary that they have been delaying the implementation of ETIAS for years now.

Why though? I think it is because the European Union had an election last month. They were likely hoping the new visa system would be put into place after the right-wing lost, but they were unfortunately reelected, so they will rightfully receive the blame once it is in place.

Face recognition at an eGate is enough security to prevent felons from crossing borders. There is no reason to make travel a hassle for the rest of us. Fingerprints are unnecessary since we share criminal records through INTERPOL and face recognition works. We have already prevented criminals from crossing the border, assuming people like Colin Powell are not in charge of the State Department.

If there is no security benefit to such a system, why?

Assault on Freedom

I believe the real reason is to slowly reduce liberties worldwide. We have been eradicating privacy through warrantless surveillance since the 1970s. Increase police budgets. Increase border security with new border guards. But the goal was never simply to crack down on criminals, and mass surveillance is no more helpful to catching terrorists than limited constitutional searches targeting who, what, and where will be searched.

Once privacy is gone, they will move forward with making travel more complex, so fewer people bother with the hassle of more paperwork and more fees when the cost of a flight is already expensive enough—death by bureaucracy.

I do not believe it is simply about corruption, with private companies making loads of money from such a system. There are far more effective ways to defraud your government, namely through the military-industrial complex. But mobsters will do whatever they can to become rich from no work. Legal corruption is their modern strategy.

Once travel is significantly restricted and fewer people travel, they can limit civil liberties further. That is the only political motive I can see for such systems.

How to Reverse Course

The first thing to reverse course is to return to an era of visa-free travel. The only way to do this is to vote. Vote for the most progressive politicians you can and tell politicians we want to, at minimum, go back to the era of visa-free travel. This would still have border guards despite the existence of biometric passports, but at least it wouldn’t continue the decline.

So, first and foremost, support true visa-free travel for citizens of NATO to start.

Once we return to an era of actual visa-free travel, we can also push for using eGates at our airports to increase security and speed up customs for travelers. Our passports have all the information to allow low-risk travelers to speed through customs securely while higher-risk travelers get adequately vetted. The UK already does this process correctly, and terrorist attacks in the UK are no more common than in any other democracy. They are extraordinarily rare. Such a system is what we should aim for as a minimum.

Once we are at the point where customs between NATO members and other low-risk countries is done through eGates, speeding up customs for everyone, we can then talk about extending open border regimes like Schengen to include the UK, Ireland, Canada, and the United States.

But we first need to stop this downward slide towards more travel restrictions.