The most interesting thing I think happening in the midterms is Seattle’s ballot initiative to use approval voting.
But besides that, I’m having a hard time getting interested in the elections, and I don’t think it’s my normal libertarian neutrality either.
If you’ve got a partisan loyalty, most interesting political commentary is about how to strategically win elections. I don’t really consider myself a partisan, so my model is to ask which party or candidate is most willing to expend political capital to pass legislation that improves the world. The issues I find most important and impactful are:
- Preparing for the next pandemic
- Increasing immigration
- Liberalizing housing construction
- Protecting the rule of law
The problem I see with the midterms are that:
- These issues aren’t prioritized by the parties, so even if there are differences in position, the actual differences on these issues would be small
- The actual differences at stake in the election seem not that important
A few weeks ago, Dustin Moskovitz, the largest donor in the EA space answered a bunch of questions on Twitter, including one about US politics:
Sam Bankman-Fried is the other major EA billionaire in the space. Let’s see if Moskovitz is right.
Republicans and Democrats on the Most Important Issues
Pandemics: There were several Biden plans for a significant chunk of future pandemic funding, but then Democrats jettisoned it in favor of other priorities. Republicans seem, if anything, worse, with some even opposing the vaccines we already have despite them clearly reducing mortality.
Immigration: The story is the same on immigration. Republicans do not seem interested in reforming the immigration process, only in border enforcement. I would have hoped Democrats would counter with better border funding in exchange for clearer legal immigration paths, but they’ve not done anything of the sort. Biden decided to spend political capital elsewhere.
Housing: The Biden admin has been alright on housing, as I noted here:
But still housing is mostly a local issue. The highest impacts I’ve seen were at the state level in California where YIMBY democrats have gotten several impressive victories. I just don’t see much at stake in the national midterms on this.
Rule of Law: Democrats have a clear edge. Although they’ve taken their time, it appears that the Electoral Count Reform Act could pass in the lame duck session this year, with bipartisan support, although many more Democratic votes than Republican. That would be a solid victory, and Democrats have been talking about threats to democracy, so I can’t fault them for not trying to draw the distinction here. The challenge is that they relegated democratic reforms to the lame duck session and haven’t proposed specific forward-looking legislative reforms they’d like to pass in order to protect the rule of law, or talked about bipartisan efforts with Republicans they are undertaking. While I give this one to Democrats, I wouldn’t expect any actual legislation if they retain the Senate.
What’s Actually at Stake
Matthew Yglesias has a post arguing what is actually at stake in the midterms isn’t what most voters seem to think; for example, Democrats aren’t going to restrict immigration and neither party will have enough votes to do anything on abortion.
He did seem to skip over the inflation question, where it seems plausible to me that a Republican House or Senate could force a reduction in spending from the Biden administration, which could be positive for inflation. However, Republicans have not put forward an inflation reduction plan they’d like to pass like e.g. repealing the Jones Act or ending the Trump tariffs. Republicans also killed Manchin’s permitting reform which would unambiguously help with inflation, but Yglesias thinks they’ll reconsider after the midterms regardless of outcome.
Yglesias maintains that the real difference will be debt ceiling games, possibly centered around entitlement changes, as well as government appointments.
Debt ceiling games seem legitimately bad; if we should not spend money, Congress should vote to stop spending money, rather than voting to spend money and then not let the Treasury pay for the thing they said we were going to pay for. Shutting down the government doesn’t actually reduce any spending whatsoever. However, it’s not clear to what extent Republicans actually want to have a fight over the debt ceiling. Kevin McCarthy explicitly said they didn’t want to use it in conjunction with the entitlement cuts.
Yglesias emphasizes that Republicans want to cut popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. Now, his position is that this is bad political strategy and thus voters should reject Republicans because this is unpopular. However, I’m less concerned about good strategy and more concerned about who I would actually want to succeed. And right now, by default, Medicare will be undergoing automatic cuts in about 6 years because the trust fund will run out. Given that reality, getting ahead of the game sound like a good idea!
Finally, there’s government appointments. I also tend to think it’s bad that we can’t get government appointments completed when Congress disagrees with the president. We need people to run our government offices. If Republicans think an appointed position shouldn’t exist, they should pass legislation saying so! Not appointing people will come back to harm Republican presidents if they lose their midterms in the future, and we’d be at a much better spot if everyone agreed to pass each other’s appointments.
However, the judicial appointments game seems very zero-sum. If you’re a staunch conservative, stopping Biden appointments has some costs but a lot of upside. I tend to think conservative judges are better since they often act to restrain government power. Of course, I’d prefer if Republicans or Democrats actually passed legislation limiting government power directly since that seems like a much better and accountable system. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to live in a universe like that.
Conclusions
First, I’ve done past calculations that you should probably vote in close elections.
I think Democrats seem to be a bit better on the issue of the Rule of Law. I haven’t made a strong case on why the rule of law is good in this post, but if you’re interested, I’ve written about its importance in the past, critiquing both the Right and Left. Nonetheless, there aren’t many concrete policy promises apart from some Republicans denying Trump lost the 2020 election, which bodes ill for 2024.
Debt ceiling brinkmanship would be bad, and Republicans do seem to be talking about it, although perhaps not in relation to cutting entitlements. Of course, fixing/cutting entitlements is probably a good thing in my opinion.
Government appointment fights also seem to be a net negative for everyone. If you’re particularly conservative already, perhaps leaving lots of judicial appointments open is worth this particular cost.
Overall though, my takeaway is that I’d slightly favor the generic Democrat in most midterm races, although you should update based on the specific candidate, but I remain deeply disappointed that our political system has focused on less important issues, or indeed many issues where Congress simply doesn’t have jurisdiction.
I wrote this quickly to get it out before election day, so if you think I’m missing something, tweet at me, or leave a comment.