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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30657 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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Ballot Access - I said this back when Trump was potentially gonna get kicked off Colorado ballots. Neither of the two major parties will be off of a state ballot in any state. It does not matter what rules or procedures they fail to follow they will be on the ballot. I am 95% certain on this. In this 5% chance that it happens, I would like a followup bet that some portion of the US breaks off into its own country. Those are the consequences if you don't maintain the illusion of democracy.

The opposite is true of 3rd party candidates. A single failure to follow a single rule, or a single failure to get a triple the number of required signatures will result in them being off the ballot.

edit- went and did some research.

The most recent example of a major Democratic or Republican presidential candidate not appearing on a state ballot was in 1964. Lyndon B. Johnson, the incumbent president and Democratic candidate, was not on the ballot in Alabama. Instead, Alabama had former Governor John Malcolm Patterson as a stand-in candidate for the Democratic Party. This situation stemmed from complex political dynamics and disagreements within the party related to civil rights issues and other national policies at the time.

Before the 1964 instance involving Lyndon B. Johnson, another notable case occurred in the 1956 presidential election. That year, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican incumbent, was not on the ballot in Alabama either. In his place, a slate of unpledged electors was listed instead. This was due to internal disputes within the state's Democratic Party, which was deeply divided over issues such as civil rights. These unpledged electors were intended to be free to vote for a different candidate other than the official party nominees if they were elected.

So aside from Alabama being weird chatgpt could only give me two other examples:

  • 1860 Presidential Election: As mentioned earlier, Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was not on the ballot in several Southern states due to his anti-slavery platform. This exclusion was not limited to Alabama but included states like Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina.
  • 1912 Presidential Election: In this election, Theodore Roosevelt, who had previously been a Republican president, ran as a candidate for the Progressive Party (also known as the Bull Moose Party) after failing to secure the Republican nomination against incumbent President William Howard Taft. In some states, such as California, the situation led to a split in which both Taft and Roosevelt were competing for Republican votes, effectively making Roosevelt a major candidate running outside the traditional two-party system, impacting ballot dynamics.

So in one instance we had a literal civil war. And in the other three instances we had major party realignments happening.

Realistically, Ohio doesn't actually have anything to gain from keeping Biden off the ballot, and the Ohio republican party just wants to be dicks about it because they can. Biden has like, a single digit chance of winning Ohio. Whether Biden is technically on the ballot is therefore a minor paperwork issue that Ohio is making a big deal about because it's an opportunity for shitflinging.

That also means that Ohio keeping Biden off the ballot doesn't actually bring any greater likelihood of secession/major consequences. It might indicate that those consequences are more likely than previously thought, but it's not a rung on the escalation ladder.

Ohio doesn't actually have anything to gain from keeping Biden off the ballot, and the Ohio republican party just wants to be dicks about it because they can

There (probably) would be: If Republicans could keep Biden off the ballot, that would (probably) suppress blue voter turnout. That would make winning other elections easier. There is a Senate seat Republicans are trying to flip, among other prizes.

Most Ohio Republicans don't actually want to do this, however. Governor DeWine is on record saying they're working to get Biden access, and the rest of the party is in agreement. Democrats are a little bitter about it and don't want to have to concede anything, but the politicos will probably all figure it out.

It would throw a monkey wrench into all the arguments about "so-and-so won the popular vote".

That also means that Ohio keeping Biden off the ballot doesn't actually bring any greater likelihood of secession/major consequences.

The problem there is that everyone's running 1.2-tits-for-tat and as such once the door's been opened it becomes more likely that somebody winds up doing it in a plausibly-in-play state.

I am 95% certain on this. In this 5% chance that it happens, I would like a followup bet that some portion of the US breaks off into its own country.

I could see some portion of the US attempting to split off, but what makes you think they'd be any more successful than the last time it was tried?

I'm not sure the US public has the stomach to force a recalcitrant state back into the fold.

I don’t know about that. I’m not sure how representative they are of the general public, but I’ve met Democrats in real life whose Civil War II fantasies would make even the standard “boogaloo”-poster blush. Expanding our scope to the general public, don’t you remember the mass celebrations on social media whenever an anti-vaxxer died during the COVID lockdowns? This leads me to believe that if the “Cathedral” (for lack of a better term) wants the US public to harden their hearts, then they’ll be able to do so just fine.

It’s easy to celebrate your enemies dying. It’s hard to live go through nuclear bombardment drills while your currency hyper inflates, you live under rationing, and there’s a draft on.

And more to the point, the Twitter democrats are not representative of the average American.

The federal government lacks the state capacity it had in 1860.

…what? I admit I don’t have a great model of the federal government in 1860, but this seems like an insane claim to me.

I can kind of see it. The Federal government in 1860 more than 10x'd itself in just a few years, going from spending $80 million a year in 1860 to spending $1.3 billion in 1865. Over the course of doing that it organized and prosecuted a Continental war against a peer competitor, successfully. Starting from almost nothing in terms of the scale of its military.

Could you see the US government of today suddenly spending $30-40 trillion and getting anything comparatively useful done? That's 'jumpstart space colonization' money and I'm skeptical we'd get 'Moon Dust for All' once all was said and done.

This may be semantics, but I'd say that's not a function of state capacity, but of "spare" (or "surplus" or "discretionary") state capacity. The feds went from spending a couple percent of GDP to spending 15%? Okay, but the main reason we can't start federally spending 15% today is because that would be the biggest budget cut in history!

It would be interesting to imagine how anyone would budget for a Civil War II footing under current conditions. Surely any separatists aren't going to honor the US' Federal debt, and I don't see how the loyalists even continue rolling it over without hyperinflation to de-facto default. At that point it's hard to imagine either side being extended any significant credit, so budgets would have to be actual receipts-meet-outlays budgets, and the cost of "we have to pay for the biggest war since WWII" would be on top of "and we can't keep running the huge deficits we've gotten used to for generations".

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