Best outcome for GOP/Trump?

Many Democrats want Let's Go Brandon to step aside for the sake of the party. Many Republicans do too, for the sake of the country. What's actually better for the country and for the Republicans?

What's best for the country is not in question - a guy who is supposedly alert between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. is not best for the country. For that reason he should definitely step aside.  

It's arguable either way whether it's better for Democrats to stick with him or to replace him.  But what's best for Republicans? To do what they can to foster/enable the Democratic Party discord for as long as possible? To call for Let's Go Brandon to leave the race? To stay out of it?  To secretly root for him to stay in the race? To secretly root for Kamala Harris to be the replacement? To have Trump face Gavin Newsome instead? Or Gretchen Whitmer?

That's a lot to unpack. What we know with almost certainty is that if Let's Go Brandon stays in the race, Trump will win. Yes, there is a slight chance Let's Go Brandon could recover with some good campaign speeches, some good interviews, and a really good second debate. I wouldn't put my own money on that happening. Additionally if Let's Go Brandon stays in the race, there is probably a down-ballot impact that affects congress, and hopefully the senate too. That is a good scenario for the GOP  

We know if Let's Go Brandon decides not to run again, there will be chaos within the Democratic party.

Here's a taste of that:

That's also a win for the GOP, at least in the short term. If the Democrats come up with a candidate that they can rally around, that could end up being bad news for the GOP. While that's not highly likely, it is a possibility. It's a bit of a wildcard scenario come November. I would classify that as less desirable than an almost certain Trump win with Let's Go Brandon in the race.

If he decides to step down from the presidency before the election, the chaos would be much greater. Kamala Harris would become the president in that case, and most likely (but not necessarily) the nominee as well.

As I write this, it may all be moot - more to follow:

Control the assumptions, control the outcome

Whether it relates to weather prediction models, polling questions or  even (perhaps especially) "non-partisan" assessments of government budgets, if you control the assumptions, you control the outcome.  Liberals get it, we don't.

I work extensively with statistical models in my day job.  Models can have very strong predictive power if they are created with proper diligence. That means that you must control the assumptions that go into them to avoid creating your own confirmation bias.  If you skew the input variables you skew the outcome accordingly.  For example if you treat a missing value in a row of data as a zero as opposed to ignoring the missing value, you are lowering your overall average and therefore skewing your outcome towards a lower value for that particular income.

Democrats have understood this for decades - controlling "non-partisan" groups in order to control the message that comes out of them to condemn every Republican bill (e.g. the recent tax cuts) and heap praise on every Democrat bill (e.g. Obamacare's fictitious budgetary cost reductions).  They have granted money extensively to scientists to predict weather calamity as a result of global warming, thus incenting them to find problems in order to secure more funding.  Intentionally done or not (it really is intentional), the results are skewed towards the desired outcome.

Democrats have stacked everything in their favor over decades of working their way into positions to do so - not just entertainment, journalism, government bureaucracy but also polling firms, lobbyists and even statistical modelling and supposedly non-partisan  organizations.  The trick in the latter is to find a gullible but well-intentioned Republican to co-found an organization or co-sponsor a bill in congress so the claim of non-partisan can be applied. Afterwards they ensure that they stack the top positions and teams involved with those who will find, or skew their findings to their own liberal liking.

This is an important lesson for conservatives.  It will take decades but we should be working towards undoing those decades of entrenching bias and deliberately skewed findings just as we should be working towards re-balancing journalism and entertainment and all the way down to the assumptions that go into models and forecasts.  It's not just a matter of voting for the right people and hoping for the best, or leaving it to them to do all the work. Progressives understand this and are fighting this way on all fronts, if conservatives do not fight with the same level of intensity, we are destined to lose despite being on the right side of the truth.

Is scandal fatigue going to help the president?

NOTE: I recently started a new job and have had a lot of my time eaten up with learning curve stuff, so I haven't been posting much and will probably be a bit slower than  for the next few days at least.

 

With the flurry of scandals that have haunted the president over the spring seemingly destined to fade over the summer what impact are they likely to have going forward?  I don't possess a crystal ball but I am familiar with game theory.

 

If we plot two axes with magnitude of the scandal impacts on the vertical axis and the immediacy on the horizontal axis (sorry for the lack of accompanying artwork), we can more readily think about potential outcomes.  On the magnitude axis we could have a small (e.g. no presidential wrongdoing/involvement, many of the scandals quietly being compartmentalized and/or just fading away or a compliant press covering up the magnitude of the wrongdoing) or large scandal impact.  On the immediacy axis we can have the scandal(s) blowing up right now or we can have them blowing up and creating fallout right before the 2014 midterms or before the 2016 presidential election.

 

On Mubarak's Departure

On Mubarak's departure I'm in a wait and see frame of mind.  In case you missed it, President Mubarak has resigned today as President of Egypt. One one side you've got the possibility of a Muslim Brotherhood, anti-American leaning nation as an outcome and on the other side you've got the possibility of a peaceful transition to a democracy in the Middle East with an unchanged peace treaty with Israel.  The former outcome would be a disaster and the latter fantastic.  Neither outcome is by any means assured.