Stidmatt

Allen Lichtman’s 13 Keys to the White House is a monumental study that correctly predicts the electoral college in every election since 1984 except 2000. He predicts Biden will win the election this year, with only 2-4 false keys. How can we use this research to dictate policy, both internal party politics and national policy, over the next 4 years in order to win in 2028?

Key 1: Party Mandate

Democrats need to pick up 6 seats in the House of Representatives this year and keep a majority through 2028. This both allows Biden to pass policy and is a key to the White House.

Key 2: No Primary Contest/Key 12: Charismatic Incumbent

Democrats need a clear candidate in 2028 who will carry the party with no serious challenger. It needs to be a challenger who can carry progressives and almost half of the New Democrats.

Key 3: Incumbent Seeking re-election

We will not have this key in 2028.

Key 4: No third party

Sticking to the platform will ensure third party candidates have a bad year. Our candidate must not be opposed to popular planks in our party platform.

Key 5/6: Strong economy

If Biden is like every other Democrat in the last century, we will have a strong economy.

Key 7: Major policy change

A trifecta can deliver a federal public option which will give Biden this key.

Key 8: No social unrest

Solving the crisis in Gaza and defeating Russia in Ukraine will ensure there is no social unrest on foreign issues. Passing a public option will reduce our uninsured rate, increasing the feelings of a strong economy for average Americans. These three policies will keep this key true.

Key 9: No scandal

It’s Biden. He is not scandal-prone.

Key 10/11: No major foreign/military failure and Major foreign/military success

Defeat Russia in Ukraine and solve the crisis in Palestine with a major treaty. These two accomplishments are worth two keys.

Key 13: Uncharismatic challenger

We have no control over this.

If Biden does those three policies:

1. Peace treaty with Palestine and Israel followed by legitimate elections in Palestine.
2. Arm Ukraine so they can defeat Russia and then have Ukraine join NATO.
3. Pass a health insurance public option.

These three policies will guarantee Democrats will win in 2028 more than anything else we can do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_to_the_White_House

I gathered some data on US states. This is not longitudinal yet, but I still think it has some interesting trends.

To start, states which vote more democratically have the following trends:

• more bachelor’s degrees
• higher incomes both before and after taxes
• live longer
• more people have health insurance.
• Fewer people smoke tobacco.

The one downside is that the cost of living is higher, and housing is more expensive on average.

If you are trying to minimize your taxes, random forest regressors fail to give a robust predictive model for the total tax rate, with an R squared of only 1%, which is no explanation. This includes presidential results for the last three elections and the partisan voting index! Still, tax rates are fairly uniform and not explained by partisan affiliation, no matter how I try to torture my data.

The biggest correlate of living longer is higher home prices, and vice versa. Increasing longevity reduces house turnover, reducing available housing stock and increasing prices. So, in the spirit of Jonathan Swift, if you want lower housing prices, kill grandma!

Or you can build more housing…

Long lives, higher incomes, high home prices, and bachelor’s degrees are strongly correlated.

The relationship between bachelor’s degrees and incomes is the strongest correlation in my dataset.

An interesting finding is that increasing school funding does not lead to better SAT Math scores. The strongest correlate is a slower population growth rate as education funding increases. Neither does school funding correlate to tax rates as strongly as it correlates to lower population growth. This is worth further exploration. It also does not correlate with partisan affiliation.

States with more smokers lean Republican and have lower incomes.

Nothing in my dataset strongly correlates with SAT math scores.

In conclusion…

• Simply increasing funding for a program will not necessarily lead to better results. Emphasize quality of government more than increasing funding, at least most of the time. Pumping more money into an inefficient system will not lead to better results.
• Throwing more money at a problem like police or increasing border restrictions haphazardly works as well as spending money on education or fighting climate change without considering the efficiency of how the money will be spent.
• Tax rates in the ranges we see in the US today have a minimal impact on quality of life.
• Higher education matters.
• Smoking kills.
• Keep people in school, which leads to lower poverty and higher incomes, which leads to less smoking, which leads to longer lives.

Sources:

Here are policies that are most likely to destroy your country:

• Nationalized agriculture will quickly cure overpopulation.
• Concentrate your economy in the hands of a handful of mega-corporations. The rich and powerful get significant benefits paid for by the working class.
• Increase the cost of housing. If a condo is less than 20 times the annual income, are you even trying to kill your country?
• Increase the cost of child care. If women can work and have children, you are just a feminist.
• Privatize education. Only the wealthy can afford to get the best jobs. This kills social mobility, which kills your population growth rate.
• Long-term economic depression. People have children based on relative terms, not absolute terms.

This is Korea. These are the policies of both North Korea and South Korea in one list that have destroyed the Korean nation.

If you instead want to build a society with stable growth and economic opportunity, do the opposite of these.

You can reduce the price of a good or service in two ways:

• Reduce demand
• Increase supply

Now, from the perspective of the United States, while we have one of the largest oil reserves, most of those reserves are shale. Shale oil is expensive to refine and particularly dirty compared to other sources of oil. If the price of oil drops far enough, America’s shale oil will no longer be profitable, and we will again force the owners of shale wells into bankruptcy. Setting up wells is expensive, and they must stay running for a while to recoup their cost. For this reason, it takes time to move wells successfully online and offline. It takes time to build, and it takes time to stop drilling. For this reason, America cannot drill baby drill our way to $1 per gallon of gasoline.

If you decide to give people cash to offset the increased cost of gasoline, demand will increase, pushing the price up. While government subsidies are helpful when there are long-term benefits from a good or service, such as education or health care, and a single player in an insurance market can reduce prices substantially, like with prescription drugs, the oil market is not one of those monopolistic markets. I am not opposed to all government regulation or even taking over entire sectors in the case of natural monopolies, but the oil market is not one of those sectors. It is not a natural monopoly, and it is not an insurance situation. The government should stay out of it. Sorry, Governor Newsom, gas cards are a bad policy.

It also is a strange situation where the government taxes and subsidizes a good. Pick a lane!

Suppose the US government decides to subsidize oil prices to a lower level while still having a gas tax (which is a bizarre combination of policies), that will either take tax revenue to subsidize a private good or print money to boost demand for a particular good, increasing the price overall. There is a point where printing money will cause inflation. It’s hard to know exactly where that will be; we don’t want to mess around with it. Printing money makes sense to pull ourselves out of recession, which is usually paired with deflation, but we don’t want to overheat the economy when GDP growth is up.

We need policies that raise people out of poverty, such as debt-free college, food stamps, and guaranteed health care. Subsidizing gasoline is not the way to do it.

The US cannot subsidize its way out of high oil prices.

Reducing demand can be done in several ways:

• Tax gasoline. Some of the tax will be paid by the producer, some by the consumer. You get a double dividend as well. You also don’t have to deal with the substitution effect.
• Upzone areas to increase tax revenue and lower the cost of housing. This makes transit more profitable to run.
• Implement mixed-use zoning so people don’t have to drive everywhere.
• Expanding transit, which is convenient and fast, will, through the substitution effect, pull people away from cars, reducing demand for gasoline. Transit needs to be built as a network, and larger cities should not operate out of a central hub. There are several ways to do this:
  • Reduce restrictive regulations (not regarding safety, however) to lower the cost of building transit so we can have more transit and less driving via the substitution effect.
  • Eliminate tariffs on foreign-built transit vehicles so transit agencies have lower costs and can expand.
  • Designate main arterials as transit only to make transit run faster. This one is free!

Simply making driving more expensive without upzoning, expanding transit, and mixed-use zoning will be a revenue source for the government. People need alternatives and have access to amenities near their houses. When you do both at the same time, you have a sustainable situation.

We can now implement many policies to reduce the cost of building transit and the need to drive, reducing financial strain on American families.

Zoning reforms are almost free to implement, reduce the need to drive, and increase city tax revenue per square kilometer, which can be used to expand transit.

This is a summary of everything I have written over the last 3 and a half years

Domestic Social: A

He supports the progress that was made under the Obama administration, abortion rights, gay marriage, trans rights, etc. Biden is a fantastic president on domestic social policy. He has not eroded American civil liberties; his court appointees are strong liberals.

He is among the best presidents we have ever had on domestic social policy. Only LBJ and Obama compare.

Solid A.

Economic: C

Biden is not to blame directly for the increase in oil prices since the invasion of Ukraine. That is the fault of Putin. He could have done a lot more to prevent the war, however, and that would have kept prices more under control.

Biden is a protectionist and his love of tariffs will cost America over the long term.

He supports the Affordable Care Cat.

I wish he would support a carbon tax.

But overall, while he is far worse than Obama on economics, he is not the worst president we have ever had on the economy by a long shot.

Solid C. Some good things, some bad things.

Foreign policy: F

He surrendered to terrorists in Afghanistan, supports Netanyahu, and has not done enough to ensure Ukraine wins the war. We would still have had a major inflation problem if he had done more, but the inflation would not have been as severe.

Social liberalism needs to be a bigger part of his foreign policy, and we must stop supplying Likud.

Trump receives an F on all three. He appointed justices who oppose gay marriage and abortion. His handling of COVID made it worse than it needed to be, which devastated our economy and many people died because of his choices. His foreign policy was to set in motion the crisis in Afghanistan with our surrender, did not support our allies, and did whatever Netanyahu told him to do. The only way Trump could have been worse is if he got more laws signed into law.

Neither President is perfect, both fail on foreign policy, but on domestic social policy, one of these men is clearly better than the other.

Stop sending arms to Israel.

Send arms to Ukraine with no restrictions beyond the Geneva conventions so they win the war this summer.

The truth is that Joe Biden is one of only two American presidents who lost a war; the other is Gerald Ford, who lost Vietnam. Biden’s approval rating plummeted after we abandoned Afghanistan to the terrorists, and his approval rating has not recovered since. So we now are faced with a presidential election with two deeply unpopular candidates.

I believe Biden can gain a lot more votes if he ends the war in Ukraine by giving them everything they need to push Russians out of their land and destroy Russian military bases in Russia, and makes a peace agreement in Israel and Palestine, combined with US recognition of an independent Palestinian state.

As usual, his foreign policy and defense teams have been massively miscalculating the situation in Ukraine. We live in a world where you can type in a prompt to ChatGPT and receive an answer within seconds. We live in a world where you can tap a button on the phone and have food delivered to your house within 30 minutes from across town.

This instant gratification does not extend to politics. We want everything unpleasant to be over now, and everything pleasant to be done fast, but this cannot be how we base our foreign policy. Sometimes, things will take some time. When we left a power vacuum in Afghanistan, the terrorists and their state sponsors were more than happy to fill the power vacuum. When we give Ukraine absurd requirements so we don’t cross Putin’s “red lines,” we prolong the conflict, and innocent young Ukrainians pay the ultimate price. This is their punishment for desiring to be free.

We need to be methodical and think through situations using game theory, and it is abundantly obvious the Biden Administration is not doing this. We need to look at the options we have:

• Afghanistan
  • Either we support a nominally government democratic government, training their security forces to the point of self-sufficiency and ensure they can educate their children, OR
  • The terrorists take over the country and girls will no longer go to school.
• Russia/Ukraine
  • Either we support Ukraine militarily until Russia leaves all of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory and Ukraine destroys the Russian military, OR
  • Ukraine will be fully annexed into Russia, and China will invade Taiwan.
• Israel/Palestine
  • Either we recognize a sovereign Palestinian state and require the Israeli government to protect Palestinian civilians and send aid into Gaza, OR
  • There will be genocide.

There are no other stable third options in these three crises.

Biden can still win the presidency by forcing Israel to agree to a stable lasting peace and not sending them more military aid if they continue to violate international.

Otherwise people will not vote for him, and I pray we will keep the Senate so Trump’s second term will be as ineffective as the first.

Oh, and Democrats really need to kick Rafael Cruz (If he believes trans people should go with their name assigned with birth, so should he) out of office down in Texas if we have any chance of taking the Senate this year. The only potential reason we might lose is Collin Allred is a New Democrat.

It’s 1938 Czechoslovakia. Here’s why.

1. UN status
   1. Russia and Ukraine are both UN member states.
   2. Israel is a UN member state, but Palestine is not.
2. Civilian deaths
   1. Over 30,000 civilians have been killed in the ongoing war in Gaza, almost all by Israel.
   2. Around 10,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine, basically only by Russia.
3. Hamas status
   1. Hamas is a terrorist organization.
   2. Russia and Israel are both UN member states.
4. Invasion vs Occupation
   1. Ukraine was invaded by Russia.
   2. Palestine is a Bantustan occupied by Israel. It’s the closest word I have for their status.

The only thing they have in common is both Ukraine and Israel are currently led by Jews.

Israel only counts as a democracy if you do not include Palestine, which is occupied and de facto governed by Israel. I do not count Israel as a democracy personally until Palestine has UN membership and Israel withdraws from Palestinian territory.

Ukraine has no equivalent to Palestine.

The two could not possibly be more different.

Slava Ukraine.

This is an interesting conversation I had with a friend over text. Published here with permission because we think it will be of interest to people who live in or travel to Southwest Oregon.

“Ashland, Oregon to Montague, California not being operated due to pricing actions. There is a general concern among some shippers that the line is at risk if business doesn’t resume.”

Friend: It’s not a good line. It was built cheaply for land grants, and it will be expensive to operate.

Me: Douglas County is expensive to build in, no matter what. Whether we connect the country with highways or rail just comes down to priorities. If we wanted to improve the railroad to Ashland, Oregon, we would.
The Klamath line’s advantage is that the land is much flatter on that side of the Pacific Crest. The disadvantage is that only 40,000 people live in all of Klamath County, so it is only about California.
The additional time it takes to get from Roseburg, Grants Pass, and Medford to Klamath County makes it not useful for most people in Southern Oregon. It would take too long for a private company to invest, and when UP can undercut the Class III railroad if it improves its infrastructure, there will never be an incentive for a Class II or III railroad to improve its tracks in most circumstances. So, they fall into disrepair, get bought out, and then are reliably abandoned.

In most countries, the usual option is to nationalize the railroads and use the profits to improve the tracks nationwide.

Friend: (The other option, the one we consistently do is the most expensive, and that is for) ODOT to constantly spend Connect Oregon money on reopening the line between Ashland and Montague.

Friend: It would never make sense to use that line for travel between Redding and Eugene without billions of dollars of investment.

Me: But I think the most beneficial thing would be to improve the line between Medford and Eugene to make it useful. The railroad through Medford is mostly only useful for people in Southern Oregon going to California, otherwise go through Klamabama (local lingo for Klamath Falls).

Me: Now… if the entire line from Montague to Eugene was brought up to take less time than the route going through Klamabama, then the route will become the more valuable of the two for multiple reasons: more people, shorter route, more industry, just a better route overall.

Friend: In the short run we can extend Cascades to Ashland, but I am comfortable forcing a transfer (to air or bus) for the foreseeable future in order to get south from there, and the Klamabama route can be kept around as a bypass for freight.

Me: If the Klamabama route is improved as well it will always be faster. We absolutely have enough demand to run both Cascades to Ashland and Coast Starlight through Klamabama.

Friend: Potentially get CORP more powerful locomotives, so they can compete better with road and have more motivation to keep their line better maintained as well.

Me: As long as they pay the investment back, sure. The inherent efficiency of rail vs road should be enough to be honest. They probably feel like its not worth the investment since they probably already are cheaper per km than freight via I-5, so no pressure to improve. Which for freight is fine… but people exist. So the state has to step in and get it improved to the point where the time is on par or faster than I-5, which already is a very slow section of freeway because of topography.

I wish openrailwaymap had speed information for CORP. I wonder how expensive it would be just to expand to Roseburg, which is north of the most hairy sections of track. It’s clearly the Roseburg-Glendale section in particular which causes the problem. Which is the most expensive to fix, the rest of the track isn’t that terrible at least looking at it on the map, which is also of course the most mountainous part of the route. f Cascades went as far as Roseburg, then having a bus at least temporarily to Grants Pass, Medford, and Ashland would be far more appealing.

Friend: It’s old, and I thought I saw Roseburg to Eugene capable of 40 mph, but I don’t remember any big rebuilding project more recently than this.

Me: yeah, that maximum authorized speed of 25 MPH is a killer. I’m sure it could be made capable of 60 MPH from Eugene to Roseburg and Ashland to Grants Pass, and that should be able to be done in a way that the benefits outweigh the costs. I’m not too concerned about the connection to Weed. If we could get that up to a higher speed, that’s great, but that will be the most expensive section of all.

So in order:

1. Start with Ashland – Grants Pass, which is mostly level, even the mountain pass from Medford to Grants Pass is wide and not too bad.
2. Then Eugene – Roseburg, as the second priority which is a little more hilly than Grants Pass – Medford, but not by much.

Getting those two sections done properly will be very beneficial for Southern Oregon.
Weed is a nice to have once the rest of the line is improved.
It’s easiest to think of it as river basins, which mostly lines up with counties except how both Josephine and Jackson are both mostly in the Rogue River Valley.
Contours.axismaps
This is the best contour map I have ever found online. What makes getting between the Umpqua and Rogue basins so difficult is the rivers go mostly east-west but we want the train to go north-south.
Honestly, Ashland – Weed is likely easier to improve compared to Canyonville – Grants Pass
While Ashland – Weed is taller, Canyonville – Weed has a much longer distance of mountainous terrain.

Friend: I mean even at the time of construction the line was advertised more as being scenic than being fast. The deviation through Cow Creek canyon was frequently used in advertising.

Me: I’m sure its a very pretty ride, and its ok if that section stays scenic, there’s no way to make it rapid, but the rest of the section has a lot of utility. Sure, maybe not NEC levels, but still useful enough to be worth investing in.

Friend: Yeah, I mean bypassing cow Creek canyon along I-5 wouldn’t be the hardest thing but there’s plenty of other speed up to do first.

Me: Odell Lake elevation: 1475 meters. Rail tunnel south of Ashland elevation: 1239 meters.

Friend: Probably why there’s a massive loop in the track near Odell Lake

Me: Exactly, but its interesting how the track we currently use reaches a higher elevation than the track which goes through Medford.

Friend: The stretch through the Cascades was built first, before it was bought out by Southern Pacific I believe, amd I believe a portion of that started as a logging railroad.

Me: So that would have been before there was more population in Douglas, Josephine, and Jackson counties than Klamath falls, or at least the differential was much larger. Pretty much all the railroads in the region were originally for logging and mining I believe.

Friend: Not really, the Siskiyou subdivision wasn’t. Hauling logs, hell yes but land grant railroads were usually built more passenger centric since the governmental incentive tried to prevent the land being used purely for industry.

Me: So mostly then about moving white people into the area.

Friend: “Civilizing” the native people.

Me: That also explains why Medford is bigger than Klamtucky (another euphemism for Klamath Falls).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_and_California_Railroad

So the government promised the railroads all these lands, and then claimed them in eminent domain. In response to fraud by the railroad. Imagine… massive megacorporation in lands the government has barely any control over commits fraud. Who could have expected that?!

Friend: Basically they sold the land to corporate interests rather than farming interests.

Me: Contrary to what the law said, which is fraud.

Friend: Yep.

Me: We should have bought out the railroad and let the O&C become a logging company. That would have been hill areas. Nyanyanya, hurhurhur.

Another interesting factoid… both the CORP and Klamtucky railroads were both owned by SPR. I’m guessing SP divested from the Medford route in favor of the Klamtucky route, which is definitely better than what happened to the railroad in Alger, Washington.

Friend: I mean they bypassed the Medford route by building the Klamabama route. There’s a reason why it’s faster to take US 97 and OR 58 than take I-5 between Weed and Eugene.

Me: I see. They built Klamabama in 1905. Medford was selected as right-of-way for OCR in 1883. Ashland received the railroad in 1887. I assume that when the Klamabama route was built, they expected it to prosper and grow, but it never did.

Friend: Nope, I think they believed it was more important to get between Redding and Eugene than to get to Ashland or Medford. I don’t think Union Pacific regrets the bypass one bit.

Me: Otherwise, they would have kept the original track.

Friend: I can’t remember if they sold it or leased it.

Me: They sold it to CORP in 1995, and it was still Southern Pacific at that point, which was divided and bought out in 1996.

Friend: I mean, I knew that SP sold to UP after first doing some weird shit with the Denver and Rio Grande Western.

Me: They had such a strong network in California, amazing how they had financial problems.

Friend: I know, right? Monopolies shouldn’t go bankrupt like that 😛

Me: Including both the Coast Starlight track, and the track running from Sacramento to LA. Yup, that’s my entire point on how the entire model is broken to the core.

Friend: Almost as if the transportation utility rather than the transportation technology creates the value.

Me: Exactly, we should just walk everywhere since mode doesn’t matter. 😛

Friend: Walking has a lot of transportation utility, many people can do it and it doesn’t cost much to furnish to the consumers of it.

Me: Absolutely. But since utility is the root of all demand…demand is a fancy way of saying utility, which is a fancy way of saying valuable.

Then we started to talk about other issues…

But…

The Medford route never reaches an elevation as high as Klamath Falls; the main issue is that the route is very windy. The highest point between Eugene and Ashland is Ashland.

References:

https://www.oregon.gov/odot/RPTD/RPTD%20Document%20Library/Oregon-Rail-Study-2010.pdf

https://wx4.org/to/foam/maps/2-Perry/020/2006-05-14CORP10-Perry.pdf

Stages to bring AMTRAK to Ashland, Oregon

Step 1:

Oregon purchases the tracks owned by the Central Oregon and Pacific Railroad.

Step 2:

Oregon upgrades the line for 60 MPH. This increases freight capacity and makes passenger rail viable.

Step 3:

Start running service.

Potential riders:

Josephine, Jackson, and Douglas counties have 400,000 people total, versus about 5 million on the Cascades route. In 2023, Cascades had 600k riders, which is around 15% of the total population. The 2010 projection for riders is 5200, or roughly 1% of the population, which sounds extremely low to me. It’s more likely to have 40,000-60,000 riders a year I believe, unless if the network effect of having three world cities in the Northwest is that strong.

But even at 40k riders, that section of Cascades would be a rounding error for the service, and if it was a separate route would be the third least used AMTRAK route in the country.

While an AMTRAK route to southern Oregon would be nice, there are not enough potential riders to justify the expense given the track’s state from a federal level, and so many other routes have no service.

That being said, if Oregon chose to buy out the track down to Ashland and start doing incremental upgrades at least between Eugene and Myrtle Creek and between Grants Pass and Ashland this can help increase trains using the track, reducing dependence on trucking. This helps reduce carbon emissions. Once the track is fast enough on the majority of the route, it can be used for passenger service.

Unfortunately, despite it being possible to extend service to Ashland, extending AMTRAK to Southern Oregon will unlikely happen in the next 30 years.

References:

https://wx4.org/to/foam/maps/2-Perry/020/2006-05-14CORP10-Perry.pdf

https://www.oregon.gov/odot/RPTD/RPTD%20Document%20Library/Oregon-Rail-Study-2010.pdf

https://media.amtrak.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Amtrak-Fiscal-Year-2023-Ridership.pdf