Ukraine Escalation?

Over the weekend, there was a flurry of posts suggesting pro-war diehards were going to try to force an escalation in Ukraine that would give Trump no choice but to continue the war, which he's asserted he can quickly end once he's in office. For instance,

With around 50 days remaining to stir up as much trouble as possible, and with around 50 days of strategic activity left in order to Trump-proof the UE coalition of the NATO alliance, the U.K and France are in “classified” discussions about sending their troops into Ukraine before President Trump takes office.

Or this:

According to the New York Times, US and European officials have discussed a range of options they believe will deter Russia from taking more Ukrainian territory, including providing Kiev with nuclear weapons. The outlet reports that Western officials believe the Kremlin will not significantly escalate the war before Donald Trump is sworn in as President in January.

Following the election of Trump earlier this month, the US and its NATO allies began taking steps to rush weapons to Ukraine and give Kiev the ability to strike targets inside Russian territory with long-range weapons.

The problem is that Putin is already escalating in response to the West's own escalation:

Russia has a stock of powerful new missiles "ready to be used", President Vladimir Putin has said, a day after his country fired a new ballistic missile at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

In an unscheduled TV address, the Russian leader said the Oreshnik missile could not be intercepted and promised to carry out more tests, including in "combat conditions".

Russia's use of the Oreshnik capped a week of escalation in the war that also saw Ukraine fire US and British missiles into Russia for the first time.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for world leaders to give a "serious response" so that Putin "feels the real consequences of his actions".

Elsewhere,

Russia’s use of the weapon comes amid intense fighting between the two sides and after the U.S. authorized Ukraine to use sophisticated weapons to strike targets located further inside Russian territory.

President Joe Biden reversed his ban on Kyiv using high-precision Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, to strike deeper inside Russia after revelations that Moscow escalated the conflict by deploying North Korean troops. Some 10,000 troops from North Korea are now believed to be fighting on behalf of Russia.

. . . Former Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward detailed in his recent book “War” that the U.S. had intelligence pointing to “highly sensitive, credible conversations inside the Kremlin” that Putin was seriously considering nuclear weapons and scrambled at the last minute to deter it.

NATO will now hold an emergency meeting with Ukraine at its headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday to discuss the situation. The alliance confirmed that at Kyiv’s request, the NATO Ukraine Council will convene.

Any negotiation with Trump will have to consider Putin's current objectives, which are generally those with which he began the invasion of Ukraine in 2022:

In the first detailed reporting of what President Putin would accept in any deal brokered by Trump, the five current and former Russian officials said the Kremlin could broadly agree to freeze the conflict along the front lines.

There may be room for negotiation over the precise carve-up of the four eastern regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, according to three of the people who all requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

While Moscow claims the four regions as wholly part of Russia, defended by the country's nuclear umbrella, its forces on the ground control 70-80% of the territory with about 26,000 square km still held by Ukrainian troops, open-source data on the front line shows. Russia may also be open to withdrawing from the relatively small patches of territory it holds in the Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions, in the north and south of Ukraine, two of the officials said.

. . . Two of the sources said outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden's decision to allow Ukraine to fire American ATACMS missiles deep into Russia could complicate and delay any settlement - and stiffen Moscow's demands as hardliners push for a bigger chunk of Ukraine. On Tuesday, Kyiv used the missiles to strike Russian territory for the first time, according to Moscow which decried the move as a major escalation. If no ceasefire is agreed, the two sources said, then Russia will fight on.

"Putin has already said that freezing the conflict will not work in any way," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters hours before the Russians reported the ATACMS strikes. "And the missile authorisation is a very dangerous escalation on the part of the United States."

This strongly implies that Putin won't accept any sort of NATO-leaning government in Kyiv. I don't think this is an unreasonable position, considering the Maidan Revolution of 2014, which prompted the first Russian invasion of that year, appears to have been organized by US neoconservatives in the Obama State Department. An eventual settlement will need to accommodate the concern that the US will continue to stir up this sort of trouble.

For now, though, the escalation stories are takiong a holiday break. The best anyone can surmise is that as Trump's inauguration gets closer, Biden has diminishing credibility, while Trump is beginning to make his intentions clear. He's already beginning to outline what is post-January 20 policies will be:

🚨 🚨 🚨 pic.twitter.com/qwPmIpDqrQ

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) November 25, 2024

This gives Biden less anmd less room for last-minute maneuver.

War Among The Finpols?

In yesterday's post, I brought up Ferdinand Lundberg's incisively Swiftian term finpol, which refers to a person wealthy enough to control the levers of public life. In 1968, he was referring mainly to people like the Rockefeller brothers, Averell Harriman, Henry Ford II, J Paul Getty, and Sid Ricbardson. Times have changed, these people have passed away, and a new generation of finpols has come onto the scene. By coincidence yesterday, I found this piece at The Atlantic via Real Clear Politics, What the Broligarchs Want From Trump.

Let's not be misled here: The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs's widow and the heir of his fortune. Laurene Powell Jobs is a finpol, or at least she thinks she is. We must assume this piece is speaking for her, and it at least recognizes that it's speaking from within the world of finpolity:

After Donald Trump won this month’s election, one of the first things he did was to name two unelected male plutocrats, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to run a new Department of Government Efficiency. . . . [I]ts appointed task of reorganizing the federal bureaucracy and slashing its spending heralds a new political arrangement in Washington: a broligarchy, in which tremendous power is flowing to tech and finance magnates, some of whom appear indifferent or even overtly hostile to democratic tradition.

Ferdinand Lundberg would insist there's absolutely nothing new here. In The Rich and the Super-Rich, he observed,

In their overlapping aspects, government and finpolities are almost identical, a fact most apparent in time of war and in matters of defense. The so-called defense industries are such an indispensable part of government today as to have given rise to the concept of the Warfare State. Company boardrooms are departments of the Department of Defense or, looked at another way, the Department of Defense is a special branch of the big-company boardrooms.

. . . On the whole, most of the time, the relations between the president of the United States and the leading finpols have been cordial. Actually most of the presidents of the United States appear to have admired and stood in awe of the finpols-- men who have mastered or have been put in mastery of the mysterious life-giving market.

So let's begin with the understanding that there should be absolutely no surprise that at Mar-a-Lago, which since its building in Palm Beach, founded by the finpol Henry M Flagler, has always been something of a palace in the Versailles of finpolity, there should be something of a party under way. Ms Powell Jobs's avatar at The Atlantic is nevertheless shocked, shocked:

The broligarchs’ ranks also include the PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel—Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance’s mentor, former employer, and primary financial backer—as well as venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, both of whom added millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign. Musk, to be sure, is the archetype. The world’s richest man has reportedly been sitting in on the president-elect’s calls with at least three heads of foreign states: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Musk joined Trump in welcoming Argentine President Javier Milei at Mar-a-Lago and, according to The New York Times, met privately in New York with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in a bid to “defuse tensions” between that country and the United States. Recently, after Musk publicly endorsed the financier Howard Lutnick for secretary of the Treasury, some in Trump’s camp were concerned that Musk was acting as a “co-president,” The Washington Post reported.

But Henry Kissinger rose to prominence as a retainer of the finpol Nelson Rockefeller, and we may assume that his China policy innovations during the Nixon administration, his settlement of the Viet Nam War, his continuation at the State Department after Nixon's resignation, when Rockefeller himself was named to the vice presidency under Gerald Ford, were all with the full approval of the finpolity. There is absolutely nothing new here.

So is there war among the finpols? Ferdinand Lundberg would suggest this is a logical impossibility:

National policy with respect to the finpolities has been paralyzed by ambivalence relating to two ideas. There has been, first, the strong national belief in competition. Without competition the national history itself would be seen as without meaning, simply a record of random activity. On the other hand, there has been admiration for advancing technology, linked purely by association with the corporations, and with bigness. Americans generally admire competition, advanced technology and pure bigness. The fact that one must choose between competition and corporate bigness has been evaded. It is logically impossible to have finpolity and competition, yet few are willing to make a choice between the two.

So what's really going on among the finpols in the wake of Trump's victory? This story at Page Six gives hints:

President Biden jokingly urged a roomful of Democratic donors and insiders not to jump in the White House pool at a weekend dinner to thank them before he leaves office.

. . . We hear that guests included big donors and Biden’s cabinet, as well as friends and others who have been super-supportive of the Bidens through the years. Former and current ambassadors came in for the elite event.

Spotted among the crowd was former Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz and his wife, Gwen, who were chatting with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo.

One source said some donors who’d given $250,000 skipped the bash.

“Insiders who were invited and didn’t go are calling it ‘the losers party,’ ” groused one source. “Many said they didn’t want to be associated with the Dems right now because of the embarrassing loss” to Donald Trump in the election “and anger over the $1.5 billion spent on the campaign that failed.”

It looks to me as though the finpols are getting in line behind Trump. Trump, however, is probably not a finpol himself, or if he is at all, he's a minor leaguer. Wikipedia lists his net worth in the $5-6 billion range, while lists of the world's richest men, true finpols, put them orders of magnitude higher, Elon Musk at over $300 billion, Jeff Bezos at over $200 million, and Larry Ellison, also just over $200 billon. All three are thought to be aligned with Trump, visibly or less so.

Trump had a career in real estate, then in media and entertainment, and he finally turned to politics as a retirement activity, where he turned out to be surprisingly successful. But he's a politician, not a caudillo.

In fact, it appears that finpolity was hghly skeptical of Trump in his first and second campaigns and was even somewhat dubious up to the time Biden withdrew from the race this past summer. As of now, though, it looks like a firm political consensus is building as Trump morphs into a mainstream politician -- but what this bodes for the MAGA agenda is up in the air.

A&E And Reelz Settle Their Lawsuit Over Live PD and OP Live

One of the big conundrums of the woke interlude just past is A&E's cancellation of its top show, Live PD, in the wake of the George Floyd riots. According to Wikipedia,

At the time of cancellation, Live PD was the most watched show on A&E and the most watched show on cable during prime time on Friday. After the cancellation of Live PD, A&E's viewership went down 49% in the following months.

On June 10, 2020, A&E canceled the show. Over succeeding months, the host, Dan Abrams, wko is also a News Nation anchor and the host of other programs still on A&E, put out vaguely worded statements about efforts to restart the program.

Variety reported that A&E executives felt they had no choice after Paramount Network canceled Cops, even though they thought Live PD was a very different show

Abrams appeared in several media outlets after the show was canceled, defending the show and its portrayal of police. He said he was "shocked & beyond disappointed" about its cancellation and added, "To the loyal #LivePDNation please know I, we, did everything we could to fight for you, and for our continuing effort at transparency in policing. I was convinced the show would go on.

.. . On June 8, 2022, it was announced that a new program, On Patrol: Live, with a similar lineup of producers and hosts and a nearly identical format, would debut on the channel Reelz. The new program was universally described in media outlets as a revival or return of Live PD. On August 30, A&E Networks filed suit against Reelz and Big Fish, alleging that the new program violates A&E's intellectual property rights in the Live PD name and format

It's hard to attribute this saga to anything but the groupthink, short-sighedness, and stubbornness of legacy media. One odd factor is that Abrams himself appears to be a card-carrying member of the generally leftist media elite, but even he saw that A&E was simply leaving big money on the table.

A&E contended that although it had canceled the show, it hadn't relinquished its intellectual prolperty rights, and Reelz and Big Fish Entertainment were using them without authorization. A&E demanded punitive damages and a share of the profits from the new show. But as of Friday,

A+E Networks has settled its “Live PD” dispute with Amazon-owned Big Fish Entertainment and Reelz. As part of the settlement, A+E and Amazon have struck a new multi-year licensing deal on A+E programming.

“A+E Networks and Amazon have agreed to significantly expand their commercial relationship in a multi-year agreement that will amplify the reach of A+E Networks’ brands and content on Amazon’s Prime Video service,” A+E, Big Fish and Amazon said in a join statement. “In connection with that agreement, the legal dispute between A+E and Big Fish Entertainment and Reelz concerning ‘Live PD’ has been resolved.”

This is the first I've seen that Amazon owns Big Fish Entertainment and appears to have been the power behind the deal -- Reelz was likely a bit player, as was probably Abrams as well. While the terms of the settlement are typically confidential, it looks like A&E dropped any demand for punitive damages and a cut of the profits, and Amazon offered A&E some sort of business deal that allowed A&E to save face, while Amazon would still turn a profit on it.

I don't think it's a coincidence that this comes so soon in the wake of Trump's November 5 election victory. That victory might on one hand be seen as a win for the common man, but Ferdinand Lundberg of The Rich and the Super-Rich would, I believe, also see this as a realignment among the finpols,

a politico-economic elite of elites, which is a "closed" elite. It is closed because something other than personal ability is required to belong to it. The main although not exclusive qualification for membership, it is here contended, is money. This elite has been referred to as the moneybund-- the complex of finpolities. Its leading members, I suggest, are finpols. This moneybund is different from C. Wright Mills's "power elite," which is a somewhat fanciful and highly personal embroidery upon the old-established basic idea of a moneyed elite. Take the money crowd away and Mills' "power elite" crumbles into verbal dust.

The message being sent from Mar-a-Lago isn't so much that MAGA has taken over, but that the world's richest men are beginning to align themselves with MAGA because it presents a serious oporuntity to make money. This is why Elon Musk is cavorting with his kids in the halls there, other finpols like Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett are sending subtle signals that they're on board with this, and indeed finpolitan institutions like Comcast are moving to dump MSNBC, which is losing momey, while finpol Jeff Bezos reinstated Live PD because it made money.

I don't think Lundberg foresaw a realignment within finpolity. but I don't think it conflicts with his basic view, that there is a limited clique of people who can control public life. What I think is occurring is that an older generation of finpols, made up primarily of those descended from the post-Civil War robber baron families that had been primarily aligned with the New Deal, the Great Society, the Bush-Clinton uniparty, and neoconservative foreign policy, is being supplanted by newer money, exemplified in particular by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, which is now aligning itself with Trump.

TRhe finpolitan old guard at this point would include Alex Soros, Bill Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, and the Hololywood-legacy media establishment. I don't think it's a coincidence, though, that one small skirmish in this ongoing war was over Live PD.

David Brooks On The Failure Of The Elites

David Brooks, a somewhat dimwitted apologist for the status quo, has suddenly decided the status quo doesn't work. I signed up for a free trial subscription to the Atlantic so I could reach his latest piece, How the Ivy League Broke America, behind a paywall. If you don't want to do this, he summarizes it in this YouTube interview:

Let's recall that in his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise, he was all for the elites. The bobos were bourgeois bohemians, whom he defines as postwar Jews beginning with the baby boom generation, who benefited from the advent of the SATs, attributed to Harvard's President James B Conant, which caused elite schools to drop their Jewish quotas and admit high-achieving Jews in greater numbers. Brooks, who got into Chicago, cited his own example as part of this positive outcome. He found the students at Princeton, which he visited as part of the book project, admirable in that they scheduled their days in 15-minute increments to maximize their opportunities. This was meritocracy. In fact, it was paradise.

But something has gone sour:

In short, under the leadership of our current meritocratic class, trust in institutions has plummeted to the point where, three times since 2016, a large mass of voters has shoved a big middle finger in the elites’ faces by voting for Donald Trump.

What happened?

Conant’s reforms should have led to an American golden age. The old WASP aristocracy had been dethroned. A more just society was being built. . . . Researchers at the University of Chicago and Stanford measured America’s economic growth per person from 1960 to 2010 and concluded that up to two-fifths of America’s increased prosperity during that time can be explained by better identification and allocation of talent.

But the voters don't seem to agree, and we have Donald Trump. Brooks's prescription for how we fix this is long and muddled, but it seems to boil down to somehow reforming the SATs:

If we sort people only by superior intelligence, we’re sorting people by a quality few possess; we’re inevitably creating a stratified, elitist society. We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people’s motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society.

The idea seems to be we just aren't identifying the right people to send to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

In 1910, the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands wrote a book in which he said: “The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities—energy.” What you assess is what you end up selecting for and producing. We should want to create a meritocracy that selects for energy and initiative as much as for brainpower. After all, what’s really at the core of a person? Is your IQ the most important thing about you? No. I would submit that it’s your desires—what you are interested in, what you love. We want a meritocracy that will help each person identify, nurture, and pursue the ruling passion of their soul.

But this is nothing but gaseous verbiage. Brooks's main proposal seems to be to tweak the elite-school model in some vague way so that their prestige can continue -- although it's worth noting that even among Trump's recent nominees, J D Vance went to Yale Law, Pete Hegseth has degrees from Harvard and Princeton, and Scott Bessent went to Yale. One thing Brooks doesn't seem to consider is Mike Rowe's point, that unprestigious, often blue-collar work can be rewarding on one hand and profitable on the other, no elite-school degree needed.

As I've gotten older, I've come to recognize that, although I went through the elite-school admissions rat race -- and Brooks isn't really advocating eliminating this at all, just sorta kinda rethinking just what type of extracurriculars the admssions office should be weighting -- and I graduated from one of them, I wound up working in fields that didn't even exist when I was in college, IT technical writing, computer security, disaster recovery, contingency planning, and system engineering. Most of my colleagues in those fields didn't even have four-year degrees from any institution.

At the same time, lookng back on my experience as an Ivy undergraduate, I keep being surprised at how many of my schoolmates came from the traditional Ivy demographic -- many were legacies, and of those who weren't, many others nevertheless came from generational WASPy wealth, attended prestigious private secondary schools, and went on to predictable WASPy careers, one roommate to the State Department, another to a white-shoe law firm.

The fact is that the proportions of each entering Ivy class reserved for major donors, legacies, and other favored groups continue to be a closely guarded secret. I'm convinced it's much larger than most people assume. Frankly, the image Brooks keeps trying to project of an Ivy meritocracy based on the SATs has never been much more than a fantasy -- and it's worth wondering how much of that fantasy stems from Brooks's need to feed his own self-regard.

Let's Revisit Just War Doctrine.

Almost exactly a year ago, on November 26, 1963, I posted:

It was never a secret that Zelensky had only up to the end of this year to win the war, and he clearly hasn't done it, with the new added factor that the Israeli-Palestinian situation is bleeding attention and resources from Ukraine. The new circumstances simply compound the general miscalculation over Ukraine's prospects. This brings me to Roman Catholic just war doctrine as outlined in CCC 2309: >

• damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

"These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the 'just war' doctrine."

What we're beginning to see is that for whatever reason, US and Western policymakers seriously underestimated Russia's capability to continue the war in spite of serious early setbacks. These only served to confirm policymakers and other influencers in their initial view, which discounted any factors warning that there simply were not serious prospects for long-term success. But this circumstance reflects back on the question of whether all other prospects for putting an end to the crisis of early 2022 had been shown to be impractical or ineffective, especially if the end state imposed by the US and NATO looks like it will be little different from a negotiated solution imposed before Russia invaded.

One reason this question is being so little discussed is that, as Signor Graziani points out, a retreat from his signature Ukraine policy would be yet another factor lessening Biden's chances in next year's election.

Remarkably little is being said about the latest development in the Ukraine war, which simply doubles down on the original bait-and-switch: that Ukraine could quickly regain the terrirories Russia had annexed in 2014 by the end of 2023. But as of April of that year, the Council on Foreign Relations had begun to have its doubts:

For any government interested in the outcome of Ukraine’s coming counteroffensive, few issues loom as large as Crimea. Kyiv’s leaders say they are determined to regain all territory lost in last year’s Russian invasion. . . . Washington policymakers routinely insist that Ukraine’s war aims are for Ukraine alone to decide, yet they suspect that such grand aims exceed the country’s military capacity. They worry too that Russian President Vladimir Putin might even be ready to use nuclear weapons to hold on to the Black Sea peninsula—his single biggest foreign policy trophy.

In recent days, with the war in a two-year stalemate and Ukraine's prospects looking increasingly grim, Biden has inexplicably initiated a last-ditch escalation:

In the last few days, Biden has removed restrictions on Ukraine’s use of the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, for long-range attacks inside Russia. Ukraine promptly fired U.S.-made missiles deep into Russian territory. At the same time, Biden has sent U.S. antipersonnel mines to Ukraine, reversing an earlier policy. Both moves were “part of a sweep of urgent actions that the lame-duck Biden administration is taking to help Kyiv’s faltering war effort,” in the words of the Washington Post. In a further escalation — and of course, there would be a response — Russia announced that it had fired a new hypersonic ballistic missile at Ukraine that could also strike U.S. facilities there.

The recent developments in Ukraine would be alarming in any context. But these events come as the 82-year-old President Biden’s apparent cognitive decline continues. Biden, of course, did not run for reelection because a secretive group of Democratic Party powerbrokers forced him out of the race, convinced that he was not up to a second term that would last until he was 86 years old.

Biden's forced withdrawal from the campaign was a no-confidence vote in his ability to serve as president at all, but the outcome of the election, based in part on Trump's campaign promise to end the war, was also a clear rejection of his Ukraine policy. The problem is Putin's response:

Russian President Vladimir Putin decided his response to the U.S-led NATO group firing missiles into the Russian Federation would be to send a message with a multi-warhead intermediate range hypersonic missile.

President Vladimir Putin said, “one of the newest Russian medium-range missile systems was tested in combat conditions, in this case with a ballistic missile in non-nuclear hypersonic edition.” The missile has a range of approximately 3,500 kilometers, below the threshold for the “Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), that’s a reach throughout western Europe and the hypersonic message is likely, ‘you have no iron dome system that can prevent this.”

Sundance at Cobnservative Treehouse concludes,

So far President Trump has remained quiet, as the provocation against our peaceful interests are ongoing. For his part, Vladimir Putin has remained reserved and careful in his response; however, as U.S/NATO missiles continue to land inside the Russian Federation, there is concern that Putin’s restrained responses may indeed escalate.

We hope there are backchannels between Moscow and Mar-a-Lago; however, without any doubt the [Intelligence Community] is looking to intercept any communication that might possibly be taking place. Everyone in/around the orbit of President Trump likely has Nat/Sec surveillance on them.

It doesn't appear that Biden ever had a realistic outlook on the Ukraine situation, especially after Zelensky's counteroffensive faltered in early 2023. But at this stage, a likely negotiated settlement that would stop the carnage while accepting the status as of late 2022 would indicate that the damage inflicted by Russia on the nation or community of nations would not be lasting, grave, and certain; all other means of putting an end to it would not have been impractical or ineffective; there were never serious prospects of success; and continued conflict is likely to produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

It's hard to imagine what Biden has in mind, but it certainly isn't good.

The Polls Did Pretty Well!

Predictably, I fouynd this at Real Clear Politics this morning: Were the polls right? It’s complicated.

One of the most frequent questions I get about this election is some version of, “why were the polls so wrong?”

. . . RCP’s final poll average gave Harris a lead of .1 (that is, one-tenth of a point) nationally. Trump is now winning by 1.7 points, yielding a miss of 1.8 for the national average — pretty close, by any reckoning. And it could get even closer when the final tranche of ballots is tallied.

The biggest miss in the swing states was Arizona, where the poll average missed by 2.7. In four of the seven swing states, the difference between the average poll margin and the vote count was 1.7 points — even better than the national results. 

Turn now to the seven battleground Senate contests: In three of them, the miss was less than 1 point. It averages 1.6 points. The biggest miss was in Nevada, where the polls had Jacky Rosen ahead of Sam Brown by 4.9 points in a race she won by 1.6.

So the polls were pretty darn close, huh? Less than two points off! The problem was that most of them, including the RCP average, had Harris winning. On top of that, the consensus across all media throkughout the election season, even before Biden withdrew, was it was going to be "razor thin", "extremely close", and so forth.

This site gives the electoral college totals for all presidential elections since 2000:

• 2000: George W. Bush wins the Electoral College 271-266 (with one faithless elector not voting for Al Gore)
• 2004: George W. Bush wins the Electoral College 286-251 (with one faithless elector not voting for John Kerry)
• 2008: Barack Obama wins the Electoral College 365-173
• 2012: Obama wins the Electoral College 332-206
• 2016: Donald Trump wins the Electoral College 304-227 (Trump lost 2 electoral votes to faithless electors while Hillary Clinton lost 5)
• 2020: Joe Biden wins the Electoral College 306-232

It concludes,

So the last 6 elections give us some parameters in assessing whether and how 2024 ends up being a “close” election.

As noted above, it would be very hard for the election to be closer than 2000, given the hair’s width of separation between Bush and Gore that decided the pivotal state of Florida.

Something along the lines of 2016 and 2020, where the decisive margin was 5 figures’ worth of raw vote margin and less than a percentage point’s worth of difference in the key states, would also qualify.

Even something like 2004, where the difference between victory and defeat was a bit over 100,000 votes or 2 points in margin in a single key state, probably would qualify as “close,” although it actually would not rank as one of the top 3 closest elections of the 2000s.

The 2024 Electoral College total was 312-226, with only Obama's two victories surpassing Trump's margin. This was nothing like a close election, especially with the recent example of 2020 for comparison. This piece neverthneless insists the polls did pretty well:

The final Yahoo News/YouGov survey had Trump and Harris at 47% of the vote apiece among likely voters. That left 6% of likely voters who were either backing third-party candidates or who were still undecided — giving ample room for either candidate to take a small lead.

But the popular vote total had Trump at 50% to Harris at 48.3%, which means that that poll had Trump's total at 3% too low. All it did was reassure everyone that the election would be close, when it wasn't. The only definite thing this does is convince me that reading Real Clear Politics is a waste of time.

The Gaetz And Hegseth Controversies Look Like They're Fading Away

What I'm beginning to notice about the dual Gaetz-Hegseth not-quite scandals so far is that, unlike the sort of allegations that go metastatic, these both seem to have stalled. It's beern roughly a week since news leaked of a memo written by an unnamed woman who claims to be a friend of another unnamed accuser that was sent to Trump's transition team.

That memo claimed Hegseth raped a 30-year-old conservative group staffer in a hotel room in Monterey in 2017, the [Washington] Post reported. Police investigated the incident but Hegseth never faced charges, the memo said.

And so far, we've basically had clarifying information regarding a non-disclosure agreement and Hegseth's version of events, which seems to have been confirmed by a subsequent police investigation. Let's contrast this with, say, the timeline of the Monica Lewinsky scandal:

Jan. 7: Lewinsky signed an affidavit stating that she never had a sexual relationship with Clinton, at the request of attorneys representing Paula Jones, who had accused Clinton of sexual harassment in 1994. . . . A conservative legal group that had volunteered to fund her lawsuit had gotten an anonymous tip about Lewinsky, so Jones’ lawyers subpoenaed Lewinsky in hopes of arguing that Clinton displayed a pattern of workplace harassment.

Jan. 12: Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr — who had been investigating Whitewater, a scandal-plagued Arkansas real-estate venture with which the Clintons had been involved — receives more than 20 hours of tapes of phone conversations that seem to contradict the affidavit. The tapes come from Linda Tripp. . . to whom Lewinsky had confided about President Clinton.

. . . Jan. 13: At the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, Va., Lewinsky dishes more about the relationship to Tripp, who’s been secretly wired by FBI agents, per Starr’s orders.

Jan. 17: Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report reports that Newsweek had been tipped off about President Clinton’s affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky, but had yet to run a story about it. On the same day, Clinton denies the affair in a deposition in the Jones suit[.]

. . . Jan. 21: Drudge publishes allegations that Lewinsky had kept a “garment with Clinton’s dried semen.” Mainstream news outlets pick up his report over the course of the week.

What clearly made the scandal juicy at the time was the idea that something was actively being covered up by both the Clinton administration and the media, and independent journalists and the FBI were concurrently leaking details that contradicted the official version of events. The whole basic story emerged over a 14-day period, with a steady drumbeat of emerging figures like Linda Tripp and Matt Drudge that gave credibility to the initial allegations.

So far with the Hegseth controversy, we're halfway through the 14-day period of the Lewinsky blowup, but the big key ingredient is missing, that is, credible evidence that something has been covered up, at least, not by the Trump transition or the media. No Linda Tripp has emerged with dynamite confirmation, either. All we have is an anonymous memo by a friend of an anonymous woman who so far doesn't seem willing to become the latest metonymy for a cheating wife a la a Lewinsky.

The big problem we also have is that through the Stormy Daniels "hush money" trial, we've already learned what a non-disclosure agreement is, that media figures routinely obtain them to make troublesome litigants go away, that Trump himself did this, and attempts to put him on trial for it simply boosted has standing in the polls. And at this point, unlike with Stormy Daniels, whose reputation can't be damaged more than it's already been, the anonymous accuser here has a great deal to lose if she violates the NDA.

A similar thing seems to be happening with Matt Gaetz. The allegatioins against him

began during the first Trump Administration in late 2020 under Attorney General Bill Barr, and concerned allegations that Gaetz had engaged in a sex-trafficking scheme involving a 17-year-old girl.

The probe intensified following revelations about Gaetz’s ties to Joel Greenberg, a former Seminole County tax collector, who pleaded guilty to sex trafficking and other charges in 2021 and admitted to paying women for sex, including the minor in question, and introducing her to other men.

. . . Gaetz vehemently denies the allegations, calling them part of a politically motivated extortion attempt. His attorney insisted that no evidence connected him to the crimes, and in February 2023, the DOJ closed its investigation into him without filing charges. Prosecutors reportedly struggled with witness credibility, including Greenberg’s testimony.

The problem continues to be that there's nothing new. As of yesterday,

An unauthorized person gained access to a file containing confidential testimony from women who have made allegations about former Rep. Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s pick to become the next attorney general, a lawyer said Tuesday.

Attorneys involved in a civil case brought by a Gaetz associate were notified this week that an unauthorized person accessed a file shared between lawyers that included unredacted depositions from a woman who has said Gaetz had sex with her when she was 17, and a second woman who says she saw the encounter, according to attorney Joel Leppard.

Gaetz has denied all the allegations, and the Justice Department ended its sex trafficking investigation without any criminal charges against him.

. . . The files the person was able to access were part of a defamation case filed by a Gaetz associate against Gaetz’s onetime political ally Joel Greenberg, who pleaded guilty in 2021 to sex trafficking of a minor, and admitted that he had paid at least one underage girl to have sex with him and other men.

As with Hegseth, these allegations are old, they've been made by people with serious credibility issues, and they've already been thoroughly investigated by law enforcement with no charges issued. There are no new assertions by a new Linda Tripp-type figure of stains on blue dresses that would contradict the existing narrative. And it sounds like Gaetz's attorneys, possibly augmented by the Trump transition legal team, are frightening media away from the story:

Sunny Hostin looks like she’s about to rip the heart out of her producer as she’s forced to issue a correction on Matt Gaetz.

pic.twitter.com/DdGCKaCHG0

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) November 20, 2024

Mark Halperin probably has this right.

“Really smart people who understand Capitol Hill and politics and confirmation history say Gaetz is going to be confirmed,” says @MarkHalperin. “Kennedy is going to be confirmed. Because for one thing, every Republican senator has constituents, donors, staff, family members in… pic.twitter.com/gMxXuTdyjm

— 2WAY (@2waytvapp) November 15, 2024

It's all kabuki so far.