Dare Greatly

Lots of big stuff is happening in the news. I’m going to take a little time and just explain a bit about Iran. If you’re already familiar, my apologies, but I thought it would be good to just give a basic overview of the situation.

So, where to begin? The Iranian Government has been behind much (not all) of the turmoil of the Middle East over the past few decades. The Government which was in place a week or two ago hates two countries: Israel and the United States. Iran is the classic state sponsor of terrorism; if it can’t directly engage in war with its enemies, it funds terrorist groups that do. It funds Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Israel knows this, and every time it gets attacked by Hamas or Hezbollah, it knows Iran’s really behind it all.

For a long time, Iran has had a nuclear program, claiming it’s for peaceful purposes (power generation, nuclear medicine, etc.). The problem, though, is that it’s spent a lot of time and effort enriching Uranium to a very high level, and there’s no purpose to going through so much trouble other than for the construction of a nuclear device. A nuclear reactor used for generating electricity does not require such highly enriched fuel, and there’s no point in stockpiling so much Uranium for medicinal purposes. It’s bomb material, pure and simple. You can see how this, along with advancements to Iran’s ballistic missile program, makes Israel very nervous. Leaders in the U.S. and/or Israel may have received some intelligence about pending developments on this, prompting the recent action against Iran.

Strategically, Iran is physically located at a very important spot. It has the ability to shut down a maritime bottleneck (the Strait of Hormuz) through which a very large percentage of the world’s oil gets shipped. Tanker vessels carrying oil from Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and others transit this bottleneck every day. Iran can try to shut down all traffic transiting the Strait and hold the oil hostage until it gets what it wants, or until somebody forces the Strait back open. Iran’s navy has taken a beating since hostilities commenced, but even without large vessels it can still launch missiles from shore at ships that try to transit the Strait. Incidentally, China needs a lot of oil, and it previously got a large percentage of its oil imports from Venezuela and from Iran at discounted rates. Now that both of those gravy trains have stopped flowing and nobody wants to send oil through the Strait of Hormuz, China’s going to start making a lot of noise about opening the Strait back up again.

The United States has a history of involvement in Iran’s internal affairs. In the 1950s the CIA helped pull off a coup that installed a leader friendly to the United States and its interests (mostly regarding oil and oil infrastructure). This led to an uprising among the younger generation a couple of decades later, when the U.S.-installed Shah was sidelined and Iran’s recent government model took power during the Islamic Revolution of 1979. It established a Theocracy, with an Ayatollah in charge of the nation. A president is also present, but the appointed-for-life Ayatollah makes the decisions.

Over time the demographics in Iran have worked against the Government. Although the religious enthusiasm of the revolutionaries in 1979 swept them into power, today’s under-45 population is much less interested in the morality police and would rather not deal with the crippling sanctions their government’s policies have incurred from the international community. Uprisings have sputtered to life, only to be put down by a sophisticated and brutal security apparatus. Networks of secret police, informants, morality police, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) put down uprisings through fear, violence, and intimidation.

President Trump is keenly aware of Americans’ distaste for another multi-decade conflict in the Middle East. He appears content to remove the nation’s current rulers to give the general population an opportunity to rise up and establish its own version of government. I don’t have insight into the President’s actual plan, but a major sticking point here is that everyday citizens in Iran do not have access to firearms, and that makes it very tricky for them to overthrow the armed security apparatus. In all likelihood, the theocratic element of Iran’s Government will come to an end (the role of Ayatollah and clerics will be greatly diminished), but the apparatus put in place to maintain the theocracy’s survival will likely take charge in some capacity. If that’s true, Iran will trade a religious authoritarian government for a secular authoritarian government. We’ll see just how willing President Trump is to continue remotely disrupting the power of the establishment in Iran. Eventually, the theory goes, they’ll have enough of the struggle, and they will surrender. An opposition must emerge somehow, either organically within Iran or the descendents of the Shah who was ousted in 1979.

This is a pretty fluid situation and I’m sure things will change by the time this entry gets posted, but President Trump said he expects this operation to last four or five weeks. War Secretary Pete Hegseth stated the objectives of the operation to be threefold: 1. destroy Iranian missiles/missile production, 2. destroy Iran’s navy and other security infrastructure, and 3. they will never have nuclear weapons. Destroy the missile threat, destroy the navy, no nukes. All three of those goals have been brought much closer to reality, but now we have an Iranian military and IRGC who are armed with missiles and are scared and/or motivated to take action. A lot of missiles seem like they’re getting launched, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a strategy behind the launches other than lashing out at anyone who doesn’t help them.

Like I said, it’s a highly fluid situation. There are a lot of articles and a lot of TV coverage about this story, but there’s not always a lot of information to report, so you’ll see and hear a lot of words that aren’t really telling you many concrete facts. Be on the lookout for how Russia and China play this one, what governments in neighboring nations do, and what kind of opposition groups start emerging as serious contenders to take part in a new government. Obviously, there’s much more to come on this topic, so keep an eye on big developments.

When was the last time the majority of Americans agreed on anything?

I’ll get to that in a moment. I have to start wading through some controversial territory to get there; I’ll try to lay it out in a neutral way so you can be better informed.

Whether you call them illegal immigrants or undocumented workers, the topic has been in the news quite a bit lately. Our nation was built on the backs of immigrants, certainly, but there’s a very large difference between the legal and illegal versions of migration into the United States. I don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole; suffice it to say Democrats are widely in favor of encouraging vast numbers of undocumented workers into the country, and Republicans are widely opposed to it. What’s the rationale here?

Every 10 years, the U.S. performs a census. We want to see how many people live in our country, where they live, and as much demographic data about age, income, household size, ethnicity, etc. as we can easily collect. Ok cool, that sounds reasonable. One of the things the government does with that data is re-apportion congressional representation among the states according to population. Every state gets two senators regardless of how many people live in each state, but aside from that, the more people reside in a state, the more representatives they’ll have in Congress. For example, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming don’t have very many people living there, so they barely have any representation in the House of Representatives. Each of those states gets two electoral points for each senator, plus one point for a congressional representative, for a total of three Electoral College points each. California, Texas, and Florida, on the other hand, have very large populations. Accordingly, there are a lot of congressional districts, and a lot of Electoral College points, associated with those states. I’m sure you’ve watched as the Electoral College map gets filled in on presidential election nights. The states with the largest population are worth the most electoral votes.

California is the single most important state on the Electoral College map. It’s worth more points than any other state. A presidential candidate has to win 270 points in the Electoral College, and right now California accounts for 54 of them. That is, until the next census occurs.

Contrary to the best interest of the American electorate, it turns out congressional representation is not based on how many American citizens reside in a given state; it’s based instead on how many people, including non-citizens, live there. Due to its policies that result in a high cost of living, American citizens have been leaving California for years. They can leave California, but if additional people, citizen or otherwise, move in, it will mitigate the loss of electoral points. If your party normally wins California but people are leaving it in droves, what’s one possible solution to maintaining population levels? Facilitate the arrival of undocumented migrants in areas otherwise losing populations. Doing so tinkers with the census results, which subsequently affects the electoral math.

So what is it the majority of Americans are agreeing on?

It’s a slightly different, but still related topic. What’s your view on having to prove your identity and eligibility when you register to vote? Do you think you should be able to just show up and state your name and address, or should there be something a little more stringent where you have to prove you’re eligible to vote in an election?

According to a recent Pew poll, this is not a controversial topic at all. Overall, 83% of Americans (71% of Democrats and 95% of Republicans) are in favor of having a requirement for voter ID. The numbers are also high when broken down by race. Harry Enten of CNN has been quoted as saying “The bottom line is this: Voter ID is NOT controversial in this country. A photo ID to vote is NOT controversial in this country. It is not controversial by party and it is not controversial by race. The vast majority of Americans agree.”

Why, then, is there so much opposition to it by members of one of our two major political parties on Capitol Hill? Because it reduces opportunities to operate in the margins. When voter rolls are pretty slim, it’s fairly easy to ensure there isn’t any funny business going on regarding fraud in an election. When the voter rolls are swollen, it increases the opportunity for voting shenanigans. Election officials are just like any other job…there never seems to be enough hands to cover the basics. As long as everyone’s acting in good faith and playing by the rules, it’s wonderful to have high percentages of eligible voters participating in their civic rights. Not everyone plays by the rules, however, and fraud is more difficult to catch when it’s hidden among extensive numbers of registered voters in an understaffed voting location.

It may not be a 100% solution, but there’s a bill which has already passed the House, called the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act,” which aims to make it mandatory to be able to prove citizenship when registering to vote in elections. Again, only American citizens are eligible to vote in American elections. The various states are allowed to run their elections how they want, but they’re all supposed to have a process that ensures only American citizens can cast votes. Not all states have a stringent process. It might be a stretch to say there’s widespread fraud, but fraud does exist. The SAVE Act would establish minimum requirements for registering to vote (strict photo ID requirements and proof of citizenship). The downside is that even American citizens who are eligible to vote may not have easy access to the required proof (not everybody has a passport, for example, and there are plenty of people who wouldn’t be able to easily find their birth certificate). The requirements aren’t particularly onerous; you usually need to provide similar proof when starting a new job. While you don’t always need to have citizenship to get a photo ID, the SAVE Act would mean you must prove citizenship to register to vote. In theory, the combination of secure voter registration and legitimate photo ID should help minimize fraud at the polls.

This doesn’t quite cover everything related to election controversy these days (numerous states are looking at redrawing their congressional districts to manipulate which party wins the district), but hopefully it will help keep you informed as you hear about the SAVE Act in the coming days/weeks. Remember that it’s not the news media’s job to keep you informed on all sides of an issue; it’s the news media’s job to get high ratings and sell advertising space. Straightforward, honest reporting doesn’t draw an audience, but controversy and outrage do. Hopefully this will help you keep the facts straight as you keep an eye on the latest developments.

Well, the Charlie Kirk saga has been covered pretty extensively by now, but I figured I’d throw in my two cents, too. Prior to a week or two ago, I don’t think I’d even heard of him, but now he’s a household name.

Sorry, but I have to get political in this post. I ordinarily try to avoid that, but it seems necessary to help explain some of this. There’s an old political saying that goes something like: “If you aren’t a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, but if you aren’t a middle-aged conservative, you have no head.” The strategy of the Left (by which I mean Democrats/Liberals) is to appeal to peoples’ feelings; they tug at the heart strings rather than appeal to logic.

Donald Trump has effectively confounded the Democratic Party in the United States. Right now Democrats struggle to even articulate what their platform is. All they do is oppose whatever Trump advocates for. Party leaders stoke anger in their base because when you keep people seeing red, it reduces their capacity for rational thought. At this point fostering rage is the only thing they have. That’s how we’ve arrived in our current absurd situation; even if something is a good idea, if Donald Trump happens to support it, it is to be violently opposed. We now find ourselves in an environment where the Left opposes cracking down on violent crime and drug use, releases those with violent criminal histories, and opposes the enforcement of laws that have long been on the books, simply because Trump supports them and they believe there’s no possible way to find common ground with someone they label as so terrible.

The politicians themselves don’t believe the statements they’re making about how dire the situation is. It’s theater. It’s for the cameras. They don’t really believe Trump is going to throw them in jail for opposing him. If they did, they’d flee the country or go into hiding. It’s simply the rhetoric they use to keep their base engaged and fired up. A normal human being understands these people don’t believe the things coming out of their own mouths. For a while they tried the whole “he’s a threat to Democracy” thing, but that approach lost a lot of its effectiveness when the landslide electoral victory which installed Trump in the White House a second time was the direct result of Democracy in action. The Left, decimated and leaderless in the wake of the election, then had to crank up the rhetorical intensity, to the more recent claims of aspiring fascist dictator.

The problem is that when you keep things at a boil for so long, even if you don’t buy in to what you’re saying, there are people listening to you who do. They figure “a Representative/Senator gets to see it up close each and every day, they know even better than I do what a $@&#! that guy is.” The average Joes and Janes who get hyper political tend to spend time surrounded by people of the same opinion. Then, when they search things on YouTube, it follows each video with suggestions on similar videos. They don’t hear any other viewpoints, so they get further entrenched in their own. The boil builds further.

After living in an echo chamber of hate and vitriol for so long, eventually somebody from the more easily influenced among us says to themselves “here’s this threat, this guy who’s a danger to the country, and even to the world, who shouldn’t be president. Everybody I talk to knows it, but nobody’s doing anything about it! You know what? If nobody else is willing to do anything about it, I will!” This type of rhetoric and environment already radicalized two men enough to attempt to assassinate Donald Trump. One guy actually pulled the trigger and even struck then-candidate Trump, and the second attempt was foiled before the shooter had Trump in his sights.

For a while people on both sides started to realize the heat had been turned up too high. They backed off for a little, but a 24-hour news cycle demands something to report, even if nothing’s there. News cycles of this sort are incapable of toning things down; they can only ratchet things up. (Case in point – the word “unprecedented” has been used so often the word’s now lost a lot of its impact.) News channels simply cannot throttle back; they have to up the ante just to maintain ratings. Try going back and watching news coverage from the days of George W. Bush, who at the time was a highly controversial president. You’ll long for those “simpler” times. Is it any wonder people who watch a lot of news coverage for any length of time experience increased levels of anxiety?

Well, imagine you’re someone who’s been radicalized enough to become violent. You’ve seen Trump survive two assassination attempts, and figure he’s a pretty hard target to reach and his security has only increased. So who else can you take a look at?

Details are still emerging, so I don’t want to speculate on specifics, but evidently the shooter at the Utah Valley University campus determined it was acceptable to snuff out the life of someone who espouses a viewpoint contrary to his own. Charlie Kirk voiced such an opinion, was a known Trump supporter, and presented an opportunity. The gunman saw an opportunity and took it.

I’ll concede that while neither side is completely guiltless of exaggerating the rhetoric, it’s far easier to find inflammatory remarks from the Left than it is from the Right. (For every Marjorie Taylor Greene there’s a “Squad.”) I’m not sure why higher numbers of radicalized criminals come from the Left than from the Right. Maybe it’s the Left’s dependence on emotions, or would-be Right-leaning radicals having the viewpoint of “as long as Government stays out of my business, I don’t care.”

We need a reset. We need to be willing to listen to people with different opinions. Republicans: continue pointing out that this level of highly charged rhetoric contributed to the loss of life, and it can’t continue. Democrats: turn down the heat and for goodness’ sake, come up with a platform that appeals to people in the center rather than on the fringe. You’re on the wrong side of just about every 80/20 issue. Both sides: You need to work together to get something done. Start with some bipartisan stuff like stopping Daylight Savings Time or something easy for both sides to agree on. News media: diversify your coverage! With multiple 24-hour news channels there’d better be more than six to eight main stories…there’s more going on in this world than politics; mix in some good news, too, even if it means your ratings take a hit. Don’t worry, you’ll still get sponsors as long as people are watching you.

We’re losing our capacity to accept that not everyone thinks the way we do. Charlie Kirk didn’t spread hate; he challenged the basis for viewpoints. Healthy debate over ideas used to be an important thing in this nation, but we’ve moved from attacking ideas to attacking their supporters. Pray we’d all take a step back from the brink and see those with opposing viewpoints for who we are…fellow humans.

Well here we are, less than two weeks out from the election.

We’ve reached the point in election season where polls have begun tightening. This is normal, and is kind of a predictable thing. This explanation for why this happens is going to sound a little conspiracy-theory-ish, but you can go back and look at data from past elections and find it holds true in many cases.

To be honest, polling data isn’t super useful except for giving news commentators something to talk about. If that’s true, why start showing polling information months ahead of the election? The answer is a little counterintuitive. Poll results are released very early for the purpose of beginning to shape public opinion, not to measure it. Pollsters are very rarely politically agnostic. They want to steer the public toward a certain outcome, either by disheartening people supporting one candidate or by making them want to throw in with the winning team. This is why you’ll hear campaigns sometimes refer to their internal polling data. They wouldn’t need internal polling if the publicly available polling was reliable.

All right, so pollsters want to shape public opinion, but why do polls start tightening as the race nears an end? Well, it’s because pollsters aren’t stupid. After this election, there will be another election, and then another one after that. As political races near their conclusion, pollsters begin conducting polls more accurately, enabling their future selves to showcase accurate examples of their past work, including working with solid methodologies and appropriate sample sizes, to potential clients. As those methodologies change, they move away from tactics used for shaping opinion, and more toward those used to capture accurate snapshots of it. One way that’s done is by moving toward a more equal balance of both sides of an issue in the polling data (instead of an early poll of 1043 people comprising 573 Democrats and 470 Republicans, they’ll move closer to a 50/50 split, for example).

Just a note on why Donald Trump’s actual level of support is normally more than what shows up in polls. Political pundits, the news media, and a variety of others have done such a good job demonizing Trump, making people think he’s “unhinged” or a “threat to Democracy,” that people are sometimes reluctant to express support for him to anyone outside their trusted friends/family. They just don’t feel safe being honest with pollsters looking to get an idea of the level of support each candidate has. They’re more likely than Kamala Harris supporters to either skip answering a survey altogether or answer “I’m undecided” instead of verbalizing their “controversial” support for Trump. I think this is one of the biggest reasons Trump’s level of support gets underestimated. I think Trump is more likely to have this “hidden support” than Harris is. If that’s true, Harris’ level of support in the polls is about as good as it’s going to get, but Trump could still have some additional room to run.

As far as the national poll, the Democratic candidate usually wins that one. It’s not how you win the White House, though. Our elections are not decided by popular vote; they’re decided by the Electoral College method. National polling is essentially meaningless. You win the presidency by getting to 270 electoral votes, not by winning the popular vote. That’s why accurate polling from battleground states is so highly sought after.

If you live in a battleground state, you’re probably sick of seeing political ads on TV, hearing them on the radio, or getting them in your mailbox. I can’t help with the TV and radio versions, but I can tell you how to cut back on the amount of junk mail, phone calls, and door knocks from campaign volunteers you receive. Campaigns can be very smart with the money available to them. They don’t often spend money on canvassing or flyers when they don’t need to. Kamala Harris doesn’t need to campaign in Massachusetts or Maryland; she’s going to win those states. It would be a waste of money then, to send political flyers to supporters in those states. That money would be put to better use in a state or area where the outcome is less certain.

You may already know that your voting record is publicly available. Not your record of who you’ve voted for, mind you…your record of past elections you’ve shown up to vote in. Cost-minded campaign officials target the people with a demonstrated history of voting. As early- and mail-in voting begins, election officials remove the names of people who have voted from the pool of remaining eligible voters. This data is available to all campaigns. If they know you still haven’t voted, they see you as someone they still want to send advertisements to. If you want to help a campaign financially without actually donating to them, vote early so the campaign can spend its resources on someone who may still be considering voting. If you want to stop getting phone calls and junk mail, vote early. Doing so will remove you from the list of registered voters still eligible to vote, rather than you.

One final tip. Let’s say you’re not happy with either candidate but will still show up to vote for your choice of Senator and Congressional Representative. Many people doing this will skip over the presidential portion of the ballot. That’s something you don’t want to do. Doing it this way enables somebody without scruples, whoever that might be, to hijack your legitimate ballot and vote for their preferred candidate, having it count as much as every other ballot during a recount. Still don’t want to vote for either of the major party candidates? Choose somebody to write in. I hear Mickey Mouse consistently appears as one of the top write-in candidates. Writing in someone’s name, even if it’s not a real person, prevents the ballot from being misused in that capacity.

Keep the elections in your prayers. No matter where we are two weeks from now, almost half of the country is going to be unhappy with the outcome. Pray that the process would be secure, that people will trust the system, and that the winner would be a president for all Americans. We know nobody in power gets there without God’s allowing them to, but outcomes can still be tough to accept when your will doesn’t line up with God’s.

Well good golly. Things are happening so fast these days, this post will probably be outdated before it goes live!

President Biden has removed himself from consideration for the 2024 election. The poor guy got pressured from everybody to drop out, and he finally gave in before they made it really ugly for him. I can’t say I blame him, though I hope I will have retired at a much earlier age than him! What does this all mean for the 2024 Democratic ticket? At this point, it’s tough to say with certainty. Right now there’s a very large effort underway to portray Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean she’s the best candidate. President Biden endorsed her the day he dropped out of the race, and people rallied behind her very quickly. This is probably a mistake on the Democrats’ part. I acknowledge the short timeline between now and the election drives a desire to quickly coalesce behind someone, but I think Democrats would be better served by taking more time to figure out who that “someone” should be.

Democratic voters have been exceedingly anxious since the Biden/Trump debate, when their candidate’s “A Game” was discovered to be at best a C minus. In hindsight, folks are realizing a lot of people have been covering up President Biden’s decline for a long time now. By comparison, Harris looks young and vibrant, and Democratic voters were quick to rally to her side because they’re more or less excited to have anybody besides the President. Right now polls suggest things are very tight between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, but I expect there to be some changes to the polling as the Veep gets out in front of more cameras or people and starts giving unscripted interviews.

Kamala Harris isn’t known for her gravitas or political acumen. (If you want a few giggles, search YouTube for “Kamala Harris – What can be unburdened by what has been (compilation).”) If she’s named the Democratic nominee, it’s definitely not for her merit as a political heavyweight, and if it’s not for her merit, we’re likely to be consumed by a fresh round of identity politics between now and the election. If she ends up the nominee, she’s going to need someone on the ticket with her who can counterbalance some of her weaknesses. Whoever it is, look for them to be a strong public speaker with a sharp wit, probably from a swing state.

But I’m not yet convinced Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee this cycle. Although many high-level Democrats have endorsed her as their nominee, she still doesn’t have the endorsement of Barak Obama or Nancy Pelosi. If those two give her their blessing, it’s a done deal. Until then, nothing’s for certain. When Biden dropped out of the race it freed the delegates he won in primary elections to vote for whoever they’d like; even though enough of them have pledged their support to Harris to secure the nomination, that pledged support isn’t binding. We may not actually know who the nominee is until the last night of the Democratic National Convention next month. From a strategy perspective, the best thing to do would be to let the excitement over Harris die down a little, get some more accurate polling information from Independents as people get a better handle on who Kamala Harris is and whether they want her as President, and then based on that and whoever else is available, pick your best candidate to be the nominee in a theatrical and dramatic way at the convention. I expect there are two main factions in the Democratic Party right now: the portion very vocal about supporting Harris, and the very quiet portion who’s fully aware of her flaws and weaknesses and is looking for an alternative and a way to install him or her as the nominee without severely disrespecting Ms. Harris in front of the whole world. Something that could increase Harris’s chances would be if Joe leaves the Oval Office before the convention. It would destroy Democratic unity to have Harris be president for just a couple weeks before announcing someone else will run to succeed her.

The irony of all this, of course, is that for all the talk of Trump being a threat to democracy and the Constitution, the fact of the matter is that whoever the Democratic candidate for President ends up being will have become the nominee without winning any primary elections. No everyday citizens will have voted for him or her. Kinda shady to bypass the will of the people, don’t you think? I understand these are unusual circumstances, but the fact remains the next Democratic nominee could be chosen by a small group of powerful people in a dark, smoky room without the electorate’s approval. Realistically there’s not enough time to organize a new set of primary elections so this is largely unavoidable, but this will forever be an interesting little asterisk in the history of American Democracy.

Another question is “What now happens to the ballots which have Joe Biden’s name on them already?” With President Biden forcefully insisting for weeks he’d be staying in the race, and the Republican National Convention having concluded by nominating Donald Trump as its candidate, it’s easy to understand if election officials said “go ahead and print the 2024 ballots using the names Joe Biden and Donald Trump.” Well right now only one of those candidates remains in the race. A very simple question suddenly becomes very complicated: “What happens when people vote for Joe Biden on those ballots?”

It depends on the election laws of the state the citizen is voting in, and we’ve got more than 50 different electoral jurisdictions (states, territories, districts, etc.), each with their own laws. Common sense dictates they’d be counted for whoever the Democratic nominee ends up being, but it may not play out that way. The best thing to do would be to move heaven and earth to get new ballots printed with the right names, otherwise Trump may very well end up winning some traditionally blue states on a technicality. If that happens, you can expect another storming of the Capitol Building in DC, this time by Democratic protesters.

In the meantime, look for some countries to take advantage of the U.S. disarray. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea all have something to gain when the U.S. is weak or having a bad day, so be on the lookout for one or more of them to make some kind of move before Inauguration Day.

As always, keep our nation in prayer; we never seem to be short on unrest. No matter who wins in November, half the country’s not going to be happy about it. President Biden is still in charge, so keep him in your prayers as well. And finally, just because your neighbor doesn’t agree with you politically, help ‘em out if they need a hand. After all, Americans should come together when things are tough.

It’s time to take another look at the political landscape and how the 2024 election is shaping up.

Let’s not mince words. Despite Donald Trump’s recent conviction, Joe Biden is the one playing catch up. He recently tied the lowest approval rating of his presidency. His numbers went underwater with the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and they never looked back. The economy is this election’s number one issue, and far more voters trust Trump than Biden there. The only thing Biden really has going for him is the fact that he’s not Donald Trump. He doesn’t inspire much optimism and he doesn’t get people jazzed to head to the polls to vote for his vision of higher taxes, continued illegal immigration, boys competing in girls’ sports, letting violent criminals go unprosecuted, and switching gasoline engines to electric motors using a power grid ill-equipped to support them. If you’re a Democratic strategist taking a sober look at an administration who’s pushed too far left too quickly, your greatest hope, frankly, is for Trump’s recent conviction to sour enough people on him that it lifts Biden in the polls.

I think I’ve predicted in the past Biden would take just enough action to make it look like he was trying to get something done to secure the border. Well, now he has, with an Executive Order cutting back the level of illegal immigration from “inexcusable” to merely “overwhelming.” This is a bad political move for Biden. It’s far too late for his weak executive actions to have much effect at the border, but it’s strong enough to anger many “dissolve the border” enthusiasts planning to vote for him. There’s no real upside. He’s not actually interested in stemming the flow of illegal migration into the country; if he were, he would have taken much stronger executive action, and he would have done it years ago. He’s merely doing this to make it look like he’s tired of waiting for Congress to take action, and like he’s exhibiting strong leadership. (Strangely, the last president managed to take plenty of executive action to secure the southern border.)

I’m going to predict things will play out something like the following manner. Trump’s recent conviction won’t move the polling needle nearly as much as democratic strategists hoped. There will be an initial drop where Biden regains some advantage, but over time that advantage will fade in the polls and the “justice impacted” Trump will obtain an obvious advantage in the polls. As it becomes clear the conviction failed to derail Trump’s candidacy, Democrats will panic. The Democratic National Convention, where the Democratic nominee is officially crowned, isn’t held until August. Even though Americans tend to pay less attention to politics during the summer, it will become harder and harder to hide Biden’s physical and cognitive decline between now and then (in the past month, he’s departed both a college graduation and D-Day commemoration earlier than planned, looking very confused and frail in the process). The preference, obviously, would be for President Biden to withdraw from the race gracefully, of his own volition, citing health challenges and the frenetic pace of campaign season. Nobody can fault him for it; most Americans, if given a choice, would want to retire early, not have one of the most stressful jobs in the world until they’re 86. If his polling numbers don’t show any signs of improvement and he still doesn’t want to call it a career, the king-makers in the Democratic Party are going to have to get creative in coming up with a way to get enough public support to switch him out for some other candidate. If people get excited about change (in this case, Trump over Biden), it’s better to roll the dice and take a chance than it is to bet on a horse almost certain to lose. At this point I don’t know how they would do that, but two possibilities that come to mind are the President’s obvious health challenges and his son’s recent conviction. If the President’s health takes a turn for the worse or he pardons/commutes his son’s sentence even though he said he wouldn’t, the Democratic National Committee may suddenly use that event to say “we need a more energetic candidate to take on Trump” or “we can’t make a big deal of Trump’s legal woes if our candidate has questionable legal baggage of his own.” Success in swapping out candidates that late in the game would either depend on widespread name recognition (think someone like Michelle Obama) or a great resume (maybe a Democratic governor who capitalizes on some well-timed success with national visibility).

Regardless, it’s tough to imagine Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping restraining their military or other activities out of respect for Biden’s charisma, savvy, and strong leadership. Look for actions from both of those dictators to intensify before the elections take place, because they’d rather deal with Biden than Trump and they want to get away with stuff before the possibility of a new sheriff arriving in town. If you want an interesting perspective on President Biden’s physical and mental abilities, listen to what people in their 80s have to say about it. Spoiler alert: they’re usually alarmed that someone with his symptoms is the one everyone looks to in a crisis, because they often know someone with similar conditions, and those folks don’t perform well in high-pressure, rapidly changing situations.

It’s also interesting to see the misinformation from our own American news sources. For example, news networks have often spouted something about Trump being a threat to democracy, but they don’t call attention to the threats Democrats pose. Yes, Trump gave a speech that agitated people right before they rioted at the Capitol, but who has actually tried to bar a candidate from ballots in some locations, or entangle him in oddly timed court cases so he can’t be out on the campaign trail? These are legitimate threats to democracy; this is like, Soviet stuff. If this is what preserving democracy looks like, they’re sacrificing democracy to save democracy. This mischaracterization tactic isn’t just being used in the United States. In Europe, elections earlier this week shifted the power balance toward the political right, and people unhappy with the outcome are crying that this, too, is a threat to democracy. No, this is what’s known as the fulfillment of democracy, respecting the electorate’s choice. What’s being threatened is the power of the party losing seats. Those are two very different things.

Finally, what are we, as a nation, likely to face in the 2025-2028 presidential term? As I list these things, think about the kind of person you want sitting in the Oval Office, and the fortitude, clarity of thinking, and capacity for decision making each of the two major candidates possess.

Putin and Belarus may resume nuclear testing to increase alarm and try to fracture the NATO alliance or gain an advantage in Ukraine (maybe by inciting Ukraine to use up all its remaining air defense missiles because it doesn’t know whether or not incoming strikes include conventional explosives or nuclear explosives).

China has claimed this is the timeframe it will take Taiwan by force. Anticipate Chinese forces blockading, invading, and seizing Taiwan, which will likely lead to the most intense U.S. military action in the Pacific in decades, along with a potential direct military confrontation with a hostile superpower.

There’s a high potential for an economic downturn in the U.S. as a prolonged period of elevated interest rates finally catches up with and affects the nation’s economy.

Those are some of the biggies. There are other things which will affect everyday Americans on a less certain timeline, but are nonetheless noteworthy:

The convergence of advancements in block chain, Artificial Intelligence, medical technology, materials processing (3D printing), and robotics will develop quickly and could rapidly impose major changes on our daily lives. We need to balance responsibility with the ability to innovate, so we can be competitive without our less ethical or less regulated competitors leaving us in the dust.

NASA will physically return astronauts to the moon for the first time in over 50 years at a time when lunar missions from various nations and other “space race” activities intensify.

The Kansas City Chiefs will finally fail to make it to the Super Bowl again (hopefully).

There’s a lot to think about. Pray for our leaders (and potential leaders), even if you don’t vote for them. Our leaders make decisions and take actions that affect us all, so pray God gives them wisdom and clarity in knowing what to do.

Well, political primary season is here. Despite what it may seem, I don’t really like putting political posts on the blog, but sometimes I feel like it’s important to put information out there that doesn’t get much attention.

Here’s the bottom line up front: Primaries can be more important than general elections, so it’s very important that you study up on the candidates and participate in the process. It almost seems inevitable that we’re headed for a rematch on the Presidential ballot, but that’s only the most prominent part of a very large picture. It’s also important to consider the Representatives, Senators, and local officials you’re choosing to compete later in this cycle. If a district is solid red or solid blue, the November election is more or less a foregone conclusion. The actual decision point, where voter turnout matters, is going to be the primary election that selects which candidate subsequently appears in the general election. If you’re not voting in the primary, you’re really just letting someone else determine who gets into office. This is especially important for those of you that vote Democrat.

Here’s what I mean. The Democratic Party of today in almost no way resembles what it used to be. The values are different. Now it’s nonsensical and extreme. Don’t feel like you need to completely buy into what they’re putting into their national platform, which seems like it’s a contest to see who can be the craziest. Despite what you feel like you’ve been told, it’s perfectly acceptable to be a Democrat that wants secure borders. Even though the media doesn’t want you to think this way, it’s also totally fine to be a Pro-Life Democrat. Forget what the party platform says; I know there are plenty of Democratic voters out there that think “no, boys should not be able to compete in girls’ events by saying they’re girls.” They’ve become the party of sowing division, rather than unity. How is that good for Americans? What happened to this party? The state we’re in is a result of primaries selecting extremists whose views represent only a small percentage of the actual base. You didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left you during its leftward march. It’s up to you to take back your party.

While obviously there are problems on both sides of the aisle, the problems listed above are Democrat-owned. Republicans are trying to solve them but don’t have enough bipartisan support, either at the national level or at the local level (including school boards, in some cases). I’m not saying you have to vote Republican. Don’t worry, even if we find common ground on these few issues, there’s still plenty to distinguish the two parties!

If you’re not voting in the Democratic primary for candidates that are more centrist and less extremist, you’re probably going to find yourself stuck between voting for a Republican and voting for an extremist Democrat in November. Come November, there are a lot of people that vote only on the basis of whether the candidate has a “(D)” or an “(R)” next to their name and don’t know the actual positions of the candidate, and that’s dangerous.

There’s a lot of posturing politicians have to do with regard to taking hard-line stances against the opposing party when they’re in front of the cameras, and I understand that. Members of all parties are supposed to work together, though. They don’t have to be friends, they just have to work together. Right now the political atmosphere is one of tangible hatred, and that’s not going to get us to a better place than we are right now.

Do your homework. Find the primary candidates in your district’s election that align with your values and vote for them. Take back your party, and let’s hold our elected officials accountable.

Let’s pretend for a little bit that you and I are democratic strategists. Our chief goal is to retain control of the White House in November 2024.

Despite unprecedented legal problems for a presidential candidate, Donald Trump looks like he’s shaping up to once again be the Republican nominee. He’s so dominant in the polls, in fact, that he’s skipping debates and doesn’t appear to be suffering for it.

How confident are you that our horse can beat Trump in a rematch? This early in the election cycle, with polls tied in a statistical dead heat, we’re not confident at all. The incumbent normally has an advantage, and if the two are tied in the polls with more than a year to go before election day, it’s not looking good for Biden.

So what should we do? If you’re a democratic strategist working for Biden, your main focus is to try to fend off a primary challenge. Biden certainly has the advantage in being the nominee this coming cycle, but he has to demonstrate he’s still got enough spring in his step to handle the job. His gaffes have become more prominent in the news lately, and as ambitious potential candidates smell blood in the water, it’s going to get tougher to get the whole party to fall in line. The contenders most likely to pose a legitimate threat to his nomination need to be brought into the campaign or otherwise buy them off to prevent them from causing a problem.

What if, however, you’re not a democratic strategist working for Biden, but rather are focused on keeping the White House under democratic control with or without Biden? The media is starting to turn on Biden, his disapproval rating is at a record high, he’s dealing with a possible impeachment, and his son is nothing but a headache. It’s becoming impossible to conceal his cognitive decline. If we want to win, we’re going to have to get rid of Joe.

So what’s the play? Who do we have on the bench? Kamala’s a non-starter; she’s unelectable. Nancy Pelosi? No, if we want to attack Trump’s age, we can’t have someone older than him. Try Hillary again? I don’t think so. Governor Gavin Newsome of California? Maybe. There are a lot of unknowns there; that’s why we’re doing this Newsome/DeSantis debate soon, as a test run to see what kind of reaction he gets on the national stage. He’s from the far left wing and might be too radical to be a good presidential candidate, but we could be surprised. Biden’s so old and frail that anyone would look energetic by comparison. Let’s use this coming debate as a test to see what kind of traction he can get.

If all else fails, we could pull Michelle Obama off the bench. She had a very high popularity rating, played well on high-profile stages, and doesn’t have a whole lot of negatives. It’d be a dream come true for progressives. The big question is: can she be convinced to run? You have to be both very ambitious and a glutton for punishment if you’ve already spent eight years in the White House and want to go back for more. The White House has a way of making you claustrophobic. She’s never held an elected position before, so she’d have to be paired with a running mate that knows the system and probably one that’s viewed as a bit more centrist. Maybe we can find a democratic governor or senator that fits the bill. If that’s the play to be made, we can’t keep a lid on it for much longer; the deadline to file for the earliest primaries is early in 2024, and we can’t parachute her in until after Joe announces he’s decided not to run, and he still needs some convincing.

To win we’ve got to win over the independents. We won them last time by having a COVID death counter on the news all the time, but that only worked because we were able to make COVID the issue everyone cared about. This time it’s the economy, and that’s a tougher sell. Joe’s been out pushing Bidenomics, but he’s not getting real far with it. People just don’t believe that they’re better off in this economy than they were three or four years ago, and that’s a problem. The southern border is a similar issue; we overplayed the sympathy angle and now even democratic mayors of big cities are tapping out. We can use both of these topics to our advantage to oust Joe; we can hang the economy around his neck, “evolve our thinking” about the immigration issue, and admit that we need a different approach, and that opens the door to bring in someone new.

We also need some new lever issues. We’ve been pushing the insurrection angle pretty hard, but it’s running out of steam. People are starting to realize that even though the insurrection happened in January 2021, we waited two years to pursue any charges, and the timing looks suspicious. The Defund the Police and Black Lives Matter movements have largely stalled, and we need something fresh. Though there’s corruption in both parties, one potential angle is make a big show of rooting out corruption, giving us the moral high ground. We’ll start with Senator Bob Menendez. He’ll put up a fight, but we have enough dirt that we can lean on him hard enough to make him go. By the time he’s gone, more information about Biden’s involvement in his son’s influence-peddling scheme will be public, and we can express regret as we show Joe the door, gravely announcing that there’s no room for corruption in the Oval Office and hoping to turn some independents from Trump in the process using this show of “walking the walk.”

See? It can be kind of fun to take an alternative perspective. I don’t know how much of this is true, but it’s useful to look at things through someone else’s eyes every now and then. If Biden and Trump end up being the two nominees again, I’ve got to think Biden will lose, even with Trump’s legal problems. Joe’s fading in the polls already. That’s why there will likely be efforts in the coming weeks and months to prevent both Trump and Biden from becoming the nominee.

Whoever you vote for in your state’s primary, don’t let someone else tell you how to vote. If you’re all in for Biden or Trump, vote for him. If you desperately want someone…anyone…other than one of those two guys, cast your vote for that person. It’s your vote, not someone else’s. Let your voice be heard.

When you’re a blogger, you’re always at least a little curious about which posts really resonate with readers. Unless someone says something to you, you never really know for sure. You can get insights into things like the number of people viewing the different pages on your blog. That’s about as good a proxy as you’re going to get, because you can use that metric to see what kind of posts are more popular than others. I can’t see things like the names of people that have viewed different pages, but I can see which posts get the most traffic.

It turns out that the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the odd politics of our nation (it’s easier for a minor to get a sex change than it is for them to get a tattoo, for example) generated significantly more hits than normal. While I fully intend for this blog’s main purpose to remain focused on pushing Christ-followers to use their lives as a living sacrifice and step into the role God’s designed for them, sometimes I also need to take my own advice and do what I’m good at, even if it’s not directly God-honoring.

Today I’d like to have another look at American politics, starting out with some of the basics and hopefully help translate a little of that into where we are today.

I try to stay away from party names like “Democrat” or “Republican,” and instead use the terms “liberal” and “conservative.” The reason is partly because people don’t often fit cleanly into one camp or the other and people don’t react objectively to labels, but mainly it’s because each party’s views can be so wide-ranging that you could squeeze multiple ideologies into each party. You’ll hear me refer to the political left (liberals/Democrats generally, but Socialists and Communists if you go further and further left) and political right (conservatives/Republicans here, but dictators if you go further right). Both sides seek prosperity or financial security, but they take very different approaches to get there.

Please understand that these are broad generalizations. Of course you can find exceptions to the things I say here, but by and large, these principles hold true. Let’s start with an abridged look at the two groups.

Left: Their view is that the people work for the government, which provides stability, services, financial safety nets, etc. for its citizens (and non-citizens, in our case). Social issues are generally the most important things our country has to figure out. Quality of life is a good thing, but the government doesn’t like when there are large disparities between the “haves” and the “have nots,” so the “haves” should pay higher and higher tax percentages the more money they make. The government will take care of you from cradle to grave in return for your loyalty in paying high taxes. Life is hard, people have extenuating circumstances; they can’t always make the most of their opportunities and they should look to the government as the solution to their problems.

Right: In this group’s view, the government works for the people, providing basic national services (federal highways, FAA and FCC rules, a strong military), but not taking more taxes than necessary and allowing local-level politics to sort out the details. The law of supply and demand plays a big part in our economy. If people are willing to pay for something, someone will come up with a better or cheaper way to provide it. Individual innovators and service providers in the private sector drive the economy and wealth creation, and the government provides only basic guidelines to make sure those efforts don’t go off the rails (as an example, think about the reasonable rules/precautions the government should pass regarding artificial intelligence right now). Ideally there should be plentiful job opportunities for everyone, and those that work hard are encouraged to go as far as their potential and drive enable them to go.

If you’re a conservative, you kind of have the political deck stacked against you. People in the two camps have very different outlooks, as you might expect. The “best minds” of left-leaning thinkers end up in government. The “best minds” of right-leaning thinkers end up in the private sector. Who, then, on the right, ends up in government? There are some good ones, sure, but often the ones that are really good decide that they can make a more lucrative living doing something other than government service, and they end up leaving public office. I wouldn’t go so far as to say our government’s Democrats are the Varsity team and Republicans are the Junior Varsity team, but it’s tough to come up with a better analogy. As a result, the country has steadily marched left, even though we’re a mostly center-right nation. Even beyond Senators and Congressional Representatives, the bench is much deeper for liberals. When liberals can’t get their legislative agenda passed, faceless regulators and unelected officials use different avenues to advance the goals of hard-left politicians. Businesses that are just trying to make a profit are impacted when their bottom line is affected by regulations that get too complicated to understand. They have to pay for the services of lawyers and compliance officers to make sure they’re doing everything legally, rather than spending that money on enhancing the quality of their product or otherwise investing in their business. (Trump cleared a lot of regulations and the economy leapt forward. Biden reinstituted a lot of them and that’s part of the reason our economic recovery is so slow. Some regulations were good ideas, others were not, but the more regulations you have, the harder it is to run a business.)

Conservatives often have the viewpoint that they shouldn’t interfere in other peoples’ lives because that’s not what they’d want to happen to them. Legislatively, liberals tend to benefit from that outlook because they don’t have the same qualms and conservatives don’t normally fight back until it’s too late. Conservatives figure that as long as politicians in Washington don’t do anything too crazy, it’ll all be fine in the end. Well, then those politicians go and do things conservatives aren’t comfortable with. That gets the conservatives to vote in the next election or two, but eventually they go back to their complacency and the cycle starts again. The result is that the country’s politics have steadily shifted leftward over the last hundred years (examples: Social Security and the New Deal, Medicare and Medicaid, the mandatory health insurance of the Affordable Care Act, today’s practice of using well-qualified mortgage applicants to pay extra fees to help support riskier borrowers, and the functional removal of America’s southern border). The political left “takes new ground” while the best that conservatives hope for is “stopping the liberal agenda.” Conservatives don’t usually take new ground. (Or if they do, it causes face-melting rage fests and riots among the left.)

Our country’s government was set up to have multiple political parties, so I wouldn’t want to see just one be completely dominant, even if it’s the one I tend to side with. It’s a little unfair to refer to the current Democratic Party as the actual Democratic Party. Over the last 20 years or so, the party has shifted far left very quickly, often to the extreme left. The Democratic platform has changed and now embraces extremism in almost every case. (Everyday middle-class Democrats who agree on almost all the Party’s main issues but disagree on one thing, like the issue of abortion, are shouted down and all but kicked out of the Party if they push their views, it seems.) People that have voted Democrat for decades out of principle maybe went along with this leftward migration, but are finding that their party traveled further left than they really agree with. Their options are to not vote, to vote Republican (which some of them will never do just on principle), or to vote for a third party. I’d argue that they didn’t leave the Democratic Party, but that the Democratic Party instead left them. They should get involved earlier, in the primaries, to try to reclaim their party and move it back toward the center, where the two sides can actually get some things done by working together.

There’s so much more to cover, but this is already getting longer than normal. No matter what side you’re on politically, please pray for our nation, that it would turn from evil and toward the Lord. Pray for revival in this land and for God to be glorified.

There’s a whole lot more, but I don’t know if you’d be interested to hear it. Want additional political posts? Want me to stay away from future political posts? Let me know. Leave a comment or use the “contact us” option to share your thoughts.

This is a little bit of a continuation from last week’s post, where we took a look at some presidential candidates for the next election cycle. This time I’m not talking about presidential candidates, but instead will be taking a look at the things the president will need to spend his or her attention and political capital on.

We’re looking at the presidential term of January 2025 to January 2029. As the field of presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle takes shape, consider how these candidates will deal with the following issues. You never know what the most pressing issues will be, but here are some likely scenarios.

On the domestic front:

During that time period our economy will probably still be looking to really hit its stride and get inflation down to pre-pandemic levels. I can’t blame the Fed for raising interest rates, but as we’ve been seeing with a few high-profile bank stories recently, stuff is starting to break. More banks will likely follow. Prior to the bank failures, the Fed recognized that it needed to push rates higher than anticipated to get inflation under control. Now their job gets more complicated because they need to figure out a way to push rates higher without causing large amounts of collateral damage to the economy. That means they move slower, inflation sticks around longer, and it’s generally more painful for the average Jane and Joe.

Politically, we are still a highly polarized nation. There’s supposed to be a healthy amount of political debate, but when you have people getting harmed because of their political views, something has gone horribly wrong. We need someone that can create a degree of unity and foster the idea that it’s okay to agree to disagree and that political opposition is not something that needs to be silenced.

It will get harder and harder to ignore the growing Social Security shortfall. When you’re driving 70 mph on the highway and you see all lanes of traffic stopped up ahead, you can either start slowing down right away and have a gentle adjustment, or you can wait a little longer and then slam on the brakes to avoid catastrophe. The Social Security issue is similar. Something needs to be done. We can either start suggesting uncomfortable things now (shallow benefit cuts, small tax increases, or some combination thereof) or ignore them a bit longer for the sake of winning an election and then be compelled to take drastic action when the situation can no longer be ignored.

The education front has become a hot-button issue recently. Formerly, education meant that students gained proficiency in academic subjects. Many educational institutions seem to have decided that teaching kids is too hard, and instead they’ve taken it upon themselves to prioritize non-education topics above academics, seemingly to minimize the influence of parents. What is the appropriate level of influence parents should have in deciding the curriculum their children are taught? What level of involvement should the school have in steering children toward gender reassignment (and to what degree should the school intentionally keep a student’s parent(s) in the dark about the steps it’s taking to alter the student’s natural body? The education issue was a prominent one in Virginia’s election of Governor Youngkin in 2021.

While domestic politics are what usually help voters decide which candidate gets their vote, the next election will have very important ramifications as we look beyond our country. On the international front:

Hopefully by 2025 Russia will be out of Ukraine. That may be wishful thinking. By that point we may be further entangled. Russia’s downing of an American drone, followed by U.S. politicians calling for retaliation against Russian fighter aircraft illustrate how quickly this whole thing can spiral and suck us into something major. It’s very difficult to foresee how this will end. The Russian psyche is big on not surrendering, so there’s no easy way to convince Russian leaders to simply turn things around and head back home. As things get further bogged down for Russia and Putin runs low on weapons and troops, waving the white flag is not an option for him, and he’ll turn to whatever he has left in his arsenal to try to get his way. Putin will probably try to spin the capture of some small amount of Ukrainian territory into a major victory, but only if he can’t make any substantial headway in achieving his original goals. He’s avoided the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction thus far, but one has to wonder how many conventional weapons he’s got left. Naturally we tend to think things will get better if Putin were somehow thrown out of power. If that were to happen though, who would step into that power void, and would they be even more ruthless than him? They don’t have to be pure as the driven snow, but can/would the powerful people in Moscow agree to put someone more moderate in charge of the government? That’s difficult to believe.

While Russia is prominent today, China looms large during the ’25 to ‘29 timeframe, and will almost definitely be our largest international challenge. China’s backed itself into a corner. Decades of the disastrous one-child policy have led to where China is today: a population with an age demographic that’s about to see sharp increases in average age. China’s rise has been meteoric, but now it’s in a dangerous sprint. Beijing views it as important to assert (and grab) as much power and prestige as possible before it starts losing strength.

It’s very important for China’s ruling party to capture Taiwan and integrate it into the mainland’s system of government. Taiwan currently enjoys a very democratic system of government where it decides its own destiny. When China’s Communists rose up and overthrew the existing government, the deposed government’s leadership fled to an island off the coast of China, to what we know today as Taiwan. Up until the late 1960s/early 70s, China was a reclusive nation and didn’t engage much in the global arena. Richard Nixon helped coax them out of isolation, but one of the conditions was that we recognize only one Chinese Government (it’s called the “One China” policy). We’ve held to that ever since, but China’s moving closer and closer to simply devouring this island, which no Chinese nation, regardless of the style of government, has ever ruled in the past.

As China advances more and more militarily against the backdrop of an aging demographic, I expect it’s developing into a situation where as soon as its leaders feel that victory is possible, there will be no hesitating, but will move immediately and with full commitment to take over the island of Taiwan. The CIA director has stated openly that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has instructed the Chinese military to be ready by 2027 to conduct a successful invasion of Taiwan. Let’s not mince words: whoever is president during that time will be in charge of trying to deter this action, and when that fails, will likely give orders that cost American lives. This conflict could balloon into strikes on American soil, and could easily escalate very far very fast. When it comes to using nuclear weapons to deter enemies, the American President doesn’t necessarily have to be willing to employ them, he or she just needs to make the other guy believe they are. If they’re not convincing in this role, deterrence fails. We’re all probably going to hear a lot more about nuclear weapons in the coming years.

There are a whole bunch of other things that are going to happen. A new cold war and the alliances that come with it as the world chooses sides, a new space race and trips to the moon, the issue of climate change and how new policies related to it affect our lives. While we’re focused on China and Russia, opportunists in other parts of the world are taking advantage of the world’s diverted attention; what will they do?

That’s just the predictable stuff. We’ll also have earthquakes, solar storms, major power outages, hurricanes, airline accidents, mass casualty events, and on and on and on. There is no politician that will be prepared for it or get it all right. As the field of candidates expands and then begins narrowing, focus not on superficial things, but on how those still in the race will handle the issues laid out in this post. It will probably have a profound effect on different aspects of your life.

Well the midterms are four months behind us, and the players in the next presidential election are starting to emerge. It’s time for a little political update.

Let’s rip off the band aid. It’s possible (though I would say there’s a good chance it won’t happen) that we have a rematch of Biden vs. Trump.

On the Republican side, former President Trump looms large in the field of 2024 candidates. He’s held the office before, his vision for America contrasts sharply with the current administration, and he connects with an amazing number of people that don’t normally vote in elections. On the other hand, he brings along a lot of baggage. It probably would have been better for him to win two terms in a row than to serve one term, sit out one term, then return for a second one. One major thing he has going for him is that an awful lot of people think the country’s headed in the wrong direction, and he’s not afraid to say things and address issues that career politicians shy away from.

Right now the only other major Republican candidate that’s declared candidacy is Nikki Haley. She’s served as Governor of South Carolina and as the American ambassador to the UN under Donald Trump. She’s certainly qualified for the job, and is maybe more of a centrist than Mr. Trump, but so far she hasn’t been able to generate a significant amount of enthusiasm.

Former VP Mike Pence has yet to declare his candidacy. Due to differences in opinion since leaving office, it’s not likely that he and Trump would reunite to be on the same ticket. By most accounts Mike Pence is a good man, but something very large and unforeseen would need to happen in order for him to be elected president. A ticket consisting of Haley and Pence would likely be good at effectively governing once in office, but I could see how the pair would also be considered so boring as to be unelectable.

The biggest Republican challenge for Trump right now (and Trump knows it) is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He has not declared his candidacy, but momentum is building for him to do so, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he declared any day now. He’s using his position as governor to notch speaking points for a national run, but he shouldn’t wait much longer to declare. DeSantis has many of the same policy positions as Trump. He tends to be less abrasive, though is still more than willing to push back against those trying to shape the narrative for him. I think the ideal outcome would be to have DeSantis win the nomination, be advised by Trump, and have Haley or Pence run on the ticket with him. (I’ll let you be the judge of how realistic that might be.) This teaming would have a tremendous impact as far as putting the interests of American citizens first.

On the other side of the aisle, the Democrats have a problem. Not only has the widely held notion of Joe Biden being a centrist president been shattered, he’s also proven to not actually be in charge. Centrists that claim blue collar roots don’t try to ban gas stoves. President Biden goes “off script” quite often, much to the chagrin of those working close to him. On multiple occasions, he’s spoken his mind when he was supposed to just stick to the script. Many of those instances have either given insight into what he’s actually thinking or led to damage control sessions that include the phrase “What the President meant to say was…” This leads to the question “if the president’s speaking his mind and you’re walking back his comments, who’s actually making the decisions on his policy positions?”

I’m guessing it won’t be long before we see a minor civil war among the Democrats. While long-serving Dems value loyalty and will close ranks to protect their candidate, there are plenty of others that are looking at reality and seeing it for what it is. Many people know that President Biden will be a weak candidate, but there are two major problems. Number one, how do you prevent a sitting first-term president from running again? Number two, who do you run in his place?

For the first question, believe it or not, honesty just may be the best policy. “You know what? The Presidency is a demanding job. I was hoping that by this age (80+), I’d be able to enjoy retirement and the fruits of my labor. My health is becoming more and more of a concern for my family. I’m going to pass the torch.” This statement assumes the President chooses not to run. If he really and truly wants to be elected for another four years but the Democratic Party wants to clear the way for someone else, it could get ugly. My guess is that it would somehow involve investigations, legal action, or the threat of such things related either to son Hunter or President Biden’s past business dealings. They could all go away if he steps back from the limelight…

As to the second question, one of the obvious choices is VP Kamala Harris. There are major concerns about her track record, though. There has been little progress in anything she’s been placed in charge of (how’s that border crisis coming along?).

It seems like the Administration has also tried to promote the image of Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg as an up-and-comer, but it’s the job of every administration to insulate the president whenever a crisis pops up, and lately that insulation has come at Secretary Buttigieg’s expense. Recent train derailments in Ohio prompted calls for Biden to visit, but after what seemed an excessive amount of time, Buttigieg made the trip and had to face some of the wrath of affected residents in Trump country.

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s name has also been thrown around, though he’s a left-wing extremist and not likely to be competitive on the national stage. If you need someone to buck the tradition of loyalty to the president, this is one guy that would probably be willing to break norms.

Biden looks to perhaps be the best bad option at this point. Aside from them one could consider candidates with an outside shot: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, billionaire Mark Cuban, former presidential candidates Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton. Pair one of them with a gimmick act and you could make something out of nothing. What would happen if the election came down to Chuck Schumer and Tom Hanks on the blue side, with Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley on the red side? Tom Hanks would probably bring in a lot of votes that otherwise wouldn’t be there. Unconventional, yes, but it may be worth looking at if you’re a democratic strategist.

We’re still early enough in the election cycle that anything can happen, but I’m guessing that whoever gets sworn in sometime in January of 2025 will be one of the people mentioned in this post. Let’s check back in a couple of years to see how well this post ages.