Monthly Archives: November 2016

Why the Minority Rules

Politics, , ,

As Donald Trump forms a right-wing government with its sights trained on health care and workers’ rights, Americans are about to experience important policy changes they didn’t vote for and don’t want. On the morning after Election Day, Michael Moore pointed out:

You live in a country where a majority of citizens have said they believe there’s climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don’t want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the “liberal” position.

This year, 48% of voters belong to or lean toward the Democratic Party and 44% belong to or lean toward the Republicans. The Democratic candidate has won the popular vote for President in six of the last seven elections, but for the second time, has been denied the office. 42.5 millions Americans voted for a Democrat for the Senate in 2016, while 39.3 milllion voted for a Republican. In the House of Representatives, Republicans collected 49.7% of the votes to the Democrats’ 47.5%. Yet the Republicans will have a 52-48 advantage in the Senate and a 241-194 majority in the House. At all levels of government, Republicans typically wind up winning a percentage of elective offices that is greater than their percentage of the votes.

There are a variety of political and ideological reasons why the Republicans, the minority party for decades, do better than expected in elections, but this post will focus only on the structural reasons for minority rule. Our political system favors rural over urban areas, small states over larger ones, and conservatives over liberals, and this is by design. These structural biases have greater consequences now that rural and urban America have become more polarized.

The Senate

Of the branches of government, the Senate is the most structurally unequal. Every state gets two Senators regardless of its population. California has over 39 million residents, while Wyoming has just over 586,000, which means that a Wyoming resident’s Senate vote counts almost 67 times as much as a Californian’s. Today, states containing just 17% of the American population can theoretically elect a Senate majority. To make matters worse, even when the majority party controls the Senate, the filibuster rule requires a 60-vote majority to pass most legislation. Senators representing a very small percentage of the population can produce gridlock in the Senate.

The House of Representatives

In theory, House districts are approximately equal in population and are therefore “representative.” But there’s an exception, since every state gets at least one representative, and seven states have a smaller population than an average Congressional district—another small state advantage. There is also a built-in time lag, since redistricting occurs at the end of each decade’s census. Redistricting assumes the census is accurate, which of course it’s not. It is estimated that the census misses 2.1% of Black Americans and 1.5% of Hispanics. (Whites, not surprisingly, are overcounted.)

Two additional factors which account for most of the Republican advantage in the House.

Demography. Republican partisans are more evenly spread over the territories of most states, while Democratic partisans are concentrated in a smaller number of predominantly urban areas. This results in Democrats winning by large majorities in the districts they control, while Republicans win by smaller margins in a greater number of districts. This can be seen as unintentional gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering. Republicans control a greater number of state legislatures, especially after their victories in the 2010 (off-year, low turnout) election, and they have used this advantage to gerrymander Congressional districts. Gerrymandering refers to the manipulation of district boundaries for political advantage. With the aid of computer programs, it can produce legislative districts that resemble salamanders crawling across the state map. (I live in Pennsylvania’s notorious 12th district.)

Gerrymandering is most effective when the minority party engages in “packing”—that is, concentrating the majority party members in a small number of districts. This results in many “wasted votes.” Wasted votes are either votes for the losing candidate, or votes for the winning candidate that exceed the number need to win, as when a House candidate in an urban area receives 85% of the votes.

This chart shows how gerrymandering works. In the example, 60% of the voters favor blue. But if the red party controls redistricting, by packing two of the five districts, they can produce an outcome such as the one on the right where they control 60% of the seats. In Pennsylvania, Republicans controlled the 2010 redistricting. In 2012, Democrats received 51% of House votes, but won only 5 of 18 seats (28%).

Stephanopoulos and McGhee have proposed a mathematical formula for the efficiency gap, defined as the difference between the two parties’ wasted votes divided by the total votes cast. Ideally, it should be close to zero. When it’s not, it gives you a measure of a party’s undeserved vote share. This raises the possibility that the courts could rule that if the efficiency gap exceeds a certain percentage, the redistricting is unfair. A Wisconsin federal court recently struck down the Republicans’ 2010 redistricting, citing expert testimony about the state’s large efficiency gap.

The Electoral College

In the Electoral College, each state has a number of electors equal to its number of Senators plus Representatives—that is, a minimum of three. This produces a level of structural inequality that is intermediate between the more biased Senate and the (theoretically) less biased House. However, since the presidency is a winner-take-all event, it seems more unfair when Clinton, with 48.2% of the vote (as of this morning), loses to Trump, with 46.4%. Clinton’s large majorities in California and New York mean nothing in the Electoral College.

And it gets worse. In Wyoming there is an electoral vote for every 195,000 residents while in California there is one for every 711,000 residents. Merling and Baker point out that the states that are overrepresented are less diverse than the country as a whole. (Wyoming, for example, is 84% white; California, 38%.) Thus, the Electoral College amplifies the votes of White people. The chart below shows the underrepresentation of minorities in the Electoral College.

merling-baker-electoral-2016-11-fig-1

The States

These inequalities at the national level tend to be replicated in the states. As of January, Republicans will control both chambers of the state legislatures in 32 states, and the governor’s office as well as the legislature in either 24 or 25 states (depending on the outcome in North Carolina). Many states have geographically small urban areas that are traditionally outvoted by rural residents. (Lots of money for highways in rural areas, but little for mass transit.) When cities enact progressive changes, such as a minimum wage, they are sometimes preempted by more conservative state legislatures.

Why it is and won’t change

While some of our first political leaders, such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, favored proportional representation, the small-state, rural bias was an intentional policy choice deliberately built into the Constitution. The Senate and the Electoral College were a result of the Connecticut Compromise of 1787 designed to allay the fears of the smaller states that, if decisions were made by popular vote, their interests would be ignored by the larger states. Later, the small-state bias served to maintain slavery at a time when it probably would have been abolished by popular vote. (The analogy to our present situation is obvious.)

Equal state representation in the Senate is the only part of the Constitution that cannot be amended. The Electoral College, however, could be abolished by Constitutional amendment. Amending the Constitution, as specified in Article Five, is a two-step process. First, the proposed amendment must pass with a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate. Then it must be ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths, or 38, of the 50 states. It is hard to imagine the smaller states agreeing to surrender so much power.

Conclusion

This post only begins to cover the many reasons for minority rule in this country. Here are some additional political and ideological reasons. To their credit, the Republicans have a higher turnout, especially in seemingly less important off-year elections, probably because Republicans are older than the average voter, and are more likely to see voting as a normative obligation. They have used their control of state legislatures to enact voter suppression laws that reduce turnout among traditional Democratic constituencies such as poor people and college students. 2016 was the first election in over 50 years without the protection of the Voting Rights Act, and 14 states celebrated by enacting new voter restrictions such as requiring voter I.D., and reducing the time people could vote and the number of polling places.

Because they represent the interests of corporations and rich individuals, Republicans are able to raise more money to influence political campaigns and to lobby Congress. In recent decades, they have carefully developed a strategy of using religion and racial prejudice to persuade working class Americans to vote contrary to their economic self-interest. And so on.

But the structural advantages that favor the rural minority require Democrats to win by a landslide in order to have any real influence on social policy.

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Looking For an Exit

Counterfactual

Framing the Debates

Looking For an Exit

Politics, ,

The news that Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump in the popular vote by over two million votes (and counting) is no doubt one of many factors giving rise to demands for recounts in states where the vote totals are very close. Green Party candidate Jill Stein has raised over $3 million so far to finance recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, not to change her own outcomes but because “the unexpected results of the election and the anomolies that have been reported need to be investigated. We deserve elections we can trust.” The total cost of a recount in these three states is $6-7 million.

The unexpected results that require investigation are not the differences between pre-election polls and the outcome. There are many explanations for this discrepancy, including real changes in opinion in the last few days of the campaign and partisan differences in enthusiasm leading to differences in turnout. The real concern of experts in voter research is the discrepancy between the exit poll results and the official vote counts.

Exit polls are interviews with voters conducted, usually by news organizations, as they are leaving the polling place. Representative polling places are chosen, and researchers are given quotas to fill broken down by age, race, gender, etc. These data are then weighted by their best approximation of the demographic composition of the actual voters. In some countries, exit polls results are considered more reliable than official vote totals, and international observers use them to detect voter fraud.

chart_1

Above are the exit poll-vote count comparisons in four states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, in which the exit polls showed Clinton winning while the official totals gave the victory to Trump. Adding these two percentages together gives you the “red shift,” or the extent to which the official results unexpectedly favored the Republican candidate. In Michigan, the exit polls showed both Clinton and Trump at 46.8%, while the official totals stand at Trump 47.60% and Clinton 47.33%—a miniscule red shift, but worth recounting due to the vote’s closeness. Had Clinton won these three states, she would have won the Electoral College by 288 to 250.

If exit polls are subject only to random error, red and blue shifts should occur with equal frequency. Voting researcher Jonathan Simon, who compiled these data, has found a systematic tendency toward red shifts in all presidential elections since 2004. Blue shifts are almost nonexistent. However, a better name for these discrepancies might be a “conservative shift,” since in this year’s Democratic primaries, exit polls regularly showed higher percentages for Bernie Sanders than the official vote counts.

What, other than fraud, can account for these discrepancies? Here are the most likely suspects.

  • Early voting. Early voters are not exit polled. But if a recount is done, it should be easy to separate early voters from those who voted on Election Day.
  • Selection bias. The people interviewed may not be representative of the actual voters. This could occur if the interviewer chooses unrepresentative people, such as those who are smiling. A more likely possibility is that Republicans are more likely to refuse to answer. For example, if white male Republicans systematically decline to be interviewed, the white male quota will be filled by more Democrats. Neither the quotas given to the researchers nor the weighting formula totally correct for selection bias.
  • Response bias. Some of the respondents who voted for Trump may falsely claim to have voted for Clinton. This is a variation of the Bradley effect, named for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, in which polls systematically overestimate support for Black candidates and underestimate support for candidates who appeal to voters’ prejudice. In this case, it would mean that some voters are embarrassed to admit to a stranger that they voted for Trump.

Of course, the existence of these possible sources of error doesn’t mean that a recount is not worth doing, only that Democrats should have a low expectation of success.

The main argument for doing these recounts is the apparent ease with which computerized voting systems can be hacked. Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security, notes that, while he does not personally believe the outcome of the election was tainted by fraud, this year has seen an unprecedented number of cyberattacks apparently intended to influence the election. He explains that, prior to the election, hackers could probe election systems in various localities to see which ones can be hacked easily. Immediately before the election, they could select highly competitive districts and install malware designed to shift the vote totals by a couple of percentage points. The malware would erase itself after the election.

There’s no question that this is possible for technically sophisticated attackers. (If my Ph.D. students and I were criminals, I’m sure we could pull it off.) If anyone reasonably skilled is sufficiently motivated and willing to face the risk of getting caught, it’s happened already.

If the malware is self-erasing, tampering can only be detected when there are backup paper ballots. However, Halderman mentions the possibility that examining the voting equipment might produce evidence of some types of fraud.

Clearly paper ballots are the best technology for preventing and detecting computerized voter fraud. Optical scanning can be used to count the ballots quickly. But many districts, including some in Pennsylvania, continue to use computer systems known to be insecure with no paper ballots as backups. This is unacceptable in 2016.

The deadlines for filing for recounts are November 23 in Pennsylvania, November 25 in Wisconsin, and November 28 in Michigan. Contributions to the Green Party recount effort can be made at https://jillstein.nationbuilder.com/recount. It’s hard to believe the Democratic National Committee isn’t willing to finance this effort.

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Counterfactual

What Happened? What Will Happen Next?

Framing the Debates

Invisible Inequality

Economics, Health, War and peace, ,

The people who benefit least from American capitalism are mostly likely to be killed or maimed defending it, according to a new paper entitled “Invisible Inequality: The Two Americas of Military Sacrifice” by political scientist Douglas Kriner and law professor Francis Shen. And it wasn’t always that way.

The centerpiece of their investigation is a study of the socioeconomic status of American soldiers killed or wounded in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. Of course, the Pentagon does not provide such data, but they do list the home towns of the dead and wounded. The authors determined the median family incomes in the home counties of each casualty. Obviously, this introduces “rounding error” into the data, but it gives valuable information about whether the dead and wounded come from richer or poorer parts of the country. Here are the data for fatalities, with the median incomes adjusted to reflect dollars from the year 2000.

study

Clearly, as the U.S. has come to rely less on the draft and more on other forms of recruitment, what was once shared sacrifice has become more unequal. The results for non-fatal casualties are quite similar.

The authors attribute these results to two processes. The selection mechanism refers to differential selection into the armed forces of young people whose economic opportunities are limited, making them responsive to financial incentives the military offers. The sorting mechanism refers to the assignment of lower socioeconomic status soldiers to higher risk positions in the military, since they lack the education or job skills that would make them more useful away from the front lines.

It has been noted that soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan have a higher survival rate than in previous wars, but return home with more serious injuries. This means that inequality continues long after the war. The authors note several studies showing that social class is an important factor affecting the health outcomes of veterans. Veterans from poorer counties return to communities with fewer resources to help in their readjustment, and their injuries place an additional financial burden on those communities.

Kriner and Shen did a national survey showing that only about half of the public is aware of these inequalities. They asked the following question of a national sample: “Thinking about the American soldiers who have died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, what parts of the United States do you think they are coming from?” The alternatives were more from richer communities, more from poorer communities, or equally from richer and poorer communities. Forty-five percent believed that the sacrifice was shared equally, while 44% realized that poorer communities carried a larger part of the burden.

Finally, they did two web-based experiments measuring how Americans react to correct information about military inequality. In one of these, half the respondents were told that many more of the Iraq and Afghanistan fatalities came from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, while those in the control group were not given this information. Fifty-six percent of those in the control group said the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, compared to 62% given information about inequality of sacrifice. A similar result was obtained in a second study measuring willingness to engage in future wars. As the authors state, “The invisibility of casaulty inequality artificially inflates public support for war and the leaders who wage it.”

We know from attribution theory that if the public believes that people in the armed forces freely chose to serve out of personal motives such as patriotism, rather than being driven by environmental forces such as economic necessity, they are more likely to be held responsible for the outcomes of their decisions. Thus, the invisibility of military inequality may contribute to tendencies to blame these vicitims for their deaths or injuries, since they “freely chose” to enlist.

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On Obama’s Speech

Whose Opinion Matters?

Longevity, By the Book

Cognitive psychology, Health, Media,

Here’s good news for readers. Book reading, sometimes maligned as a sedentary behavior that may harm your health, actually increases your life expectancy. This  according to a study by Avni Bavishi and two colleagues from the Yale University School of Public Health. Since this is a correlational study, and correlation does not imply causation, it’s worth looking at their methods in some detail.

The data came from 3635 participants in the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative sample of adults over 50. They were interviewed every other year between 2001 and 2012, during which time 27.4% of them died. Participants were asked how many hours they spent during the past week reading books. They were asked the same question regarding periodicals (magazines and newspapers). The average time spent reading books was 3.92 hours a week; for periodicals, it was 6.10 hours. The correlation between book and periodical reading was modest (r = .23).

The authors predicted that the effect of book reading on life expectancy would be mediated by cognitive engagement; that is, reading books causes you to think about them, which in turn increases your longevity. Cognitive engagement was measured by performance on eight mental tasks, including immediate and delayed recall, backward counting and object naming.

In a correlational study such as this, it is important to control for alternative explanations that might cause both reading and longevity. Three variables predicted greater book reading in their sample. Women read more than men, people with more education read more, and so did higher income people. The statistical analysis held these three variables constant, plus an impressive list of others: age, race, visual acuity, marital status, job status, depression, self-rated health, and the presence of seven health problems (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc.). The analysis also controlled for cognitive engagement scores at the beginning of the study.

The results showed that book reading increased longevity, and that the more time you spend reading, the greater the effect. The effect of reading books was greater than that of reading magazines and newspapers. By the end of the study, 27% of the book readers had died, compared to 33% of non-readers. Comparing book readers and non-readers at the time at which 20% of the participants had died, the readers had a survival advantage of 23 months.

fig-1-survival-advantage-associated-with-book-reading-unadjusted-survival-curves-jpgAs predicted, the effect of book reading on longevity was mediated by cognitive engagement. (See this earlier post for an explanation of mediational analysis.) The researchers suggested two ways in which reading books increases cognitive engagement. First of all, book reading is deep reading, meaning that the greater length of books encourages readers to ask questions as they go along and to draw connections between various parts of the book. Secondly, book reading promotes empathy with the persons you are reading about, which might lead to greater social intelligence.

Of course, it’s impossible to rule out all possible alternative explanations for these results. I’m troubled by the lack of control for the participants’ social capital—the sum total of people’s involvement in community life-–which is known to be related to good health and life expectancy. However, the relationship between social capital and reading is unclear. You could argue that people who are involved in the community have less time to read. On the other hand, community involvement may encourage reading. People may read books in order to discuss them with other people, who in turn may suggest new books to read.

If these findings are valid, they raise several interesting questions. For example, would listening to audiobooks produce the same survival advantage? That is, is it the act of reading that is beneficial, or is it the content, regardless of how it is accessed? Of course, content must have some effect, since periodicals were less beneficial than books. Future researchers might want to look at the differences between fiction and non-fiction, or between genres or topics. Mysteries, for example, would seem to encourage deep reading.

As the authors note, the average American over 65 spends 4.4 hours per day watching television. In a 2012 study similar to this one, Peter Meunnig and his colleagues found that TV viewing reduced longevity. Specifically, each hour of daily viewing cost their participants about 1.2 years of life expectancy. The effect was mediated by greater unhappiness, reduced social capital and lower confidence in social institutions. If people could be persuaded to spend some of that 4.4 hours reading instead, they might be doing themselves a favor in more ways than one.

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Don’t Worry, Be Happy?

Bullshit

Name That Cognitive Bias

Cognitive psychology, Social psychology

Cognitive and social psychologists have identified an amazing number of cognitive biases to which we are all prone, especially when we are not thinking slowly. I realize the chart is too small to read. You can look at a larger version here.

cog-bias

This reminds me of an old joke.

Patient:  “Doctor, I’m suffering from a nameless dread.”

Therapist:  “Not to worry. We have a name for everything.”

Counterfactual

Media, Politics,

The dictionary defines a counterfactual as “a conditional statement in which the first clause is a past tense subjunctive statement expressing something contrary to fact, as in: if she had hurried, she would have caught the bus.” In the aftermath of the Tuesday’s election, some progressives are suggesting this counterfactual: If the Democrats had nominated Bernie Sanders, he would have beaten Donald Trump in the presidential election.

This counterfactual can never be proven. The main evidence in its favor comes from the results of polling during the primaries which showed Sanders doing consistently better than Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical race against Trump. The chart below shows Real Clear Politics’ average of all polls pitting Sanders against Trump from January 1 until June 6, when pollsters stopped asking the question. The overall average is Sanders, 49.6%, and Trump, 39.3%. Clinton also had a slight lead over Trump during some (but not all) of this period, but Sanders’ advantage was, on average, more than twice as large.

sandersvstrump

Not only were these poll results seldom reported by the corporate media, who were busily engaged in a “Bernie blackout,” but when they were, pundits urged readers to disregard them. (A classic example is an article by Slate‘s William Saletan entitled “Polls Say Bernie is More Electable Than Hillary. Don’t Believe Them.”) The pundits argued that Sanders had not been “vetted” as thoroughly as Clinton, and would therefore be more vulnerable to attack during the election campaign.

As Adam Johnson notes, this argument is wrong on two counts. First, Sanders’ qualifications had been thoroughly examined during the primary and throughout his long career. Secondly, whatever “vetting” Clinton had undergone had already resulted in a public evaluation that was more unfavorable than favorable, and she was still under FBI investigation. This effectively neutralized the corruption and character issues when voters compared Clinton with Trump.

But, you may say, Democratic Party could hardly have selected Sanders since Clinton received more votes in the primaries. She won it “fair and square.” (Cue the laughter.) Of course, this ignores the many obstacles the Democratic National Committee (DNC) placed in Bernie’s path. By far, the heaviest thumb they placed on the scales was the superdelegates—just under 15% of the convention delegates, nearly all of whom favored Clinton. More importantly, the corporate media, from day one, misreported the delegate totals by combining superdelegates (who were not committed) with those earned in the primaries (who were committed). This inflated Clinton’s lead by over 400 delegates. Her lead appeared insurmountable, and she was declared the winner before the primaries were over. It is reasonable to assume that this discouraged potential Sanders voters, but there is no way to tell how many votes this cost him.

It will be interesting to see whether the DNC reforms their primary selection process, or whether conservative Democrats continue to try to take the risk out of democracy.

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Trumping Bernie

Framing the Debates

What Happened? What Will Happen Next?

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, , ,

This post is not completely thought out and is inadequately sourced.  I decided to write it quickly in order to compare my initial impressions of a Trump presidency to what happens weeks, months, or years from now.

What happened? And what will happen next? The first question must be approached with caution. I hope social scientists have collected good data on the demographic and ideological characteristics that are associated with support for Donald Trump. My guess is that the two leading contenders will be economic deprivation and racial or ethnic prejudice.

The corporate media have attempted to “normalize” Trump’s candidacy by suggesting that his support comes mainly from less educated Whites who have seen their standard of living decline in recent years. A couple of early studies cast doubt on this explanation and suggested that “racial anxiety” was the stronger motivator of Trump supporters. (See also this previous post.) A study by Rothwell and Diego-Rosell of the Gallup organization—the best I’ve found so far—finds only limited support for the economic explanation. Trump supporters are less educated and more likely to be blue-collar workers, but they are wealthier than either Clinton supporters or the population generally, and are no more likely to be unemployed. In other words, Trump is supported by the traditional Republican base of relatively affluent people hoping to increase their wealth. These authors also found that Trump supporters tend to live in racially isolated communities. However, their study lacked a measure of prejudice. Let’s hope some political scientists have included measures of racial attitudes in their research.

Why were the polls so wrong? The most likely explanation is the so-called Bradley effect, named for LA Mayor Tom Bradley, in which pre-election polls overestimate support for Black candidates. The flip side of this is that polls underestimate support for candidates who appeal to voters’ prejudices. The best indication of a Bradley effect so far has been the finding that Trump did better in online polls than telephone polls, possibly because respondents were embarrassed to admit they support Trump to a live person. (Of course, there are other explanations for this finding.)

To determine what will happen next, we need to divide Trump’s campaign promises into those that he can easily fulfill on his own, those that will require the cooperation of Congress, and therefore can be disrupted either by lack of unanimity among Republicans or a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, and those that will be difficult or impossible to carry out under any circumstances.

The easiest thing for Trump to do is abandon efforts to control climate change. Both the Obama Clean Power Plan and the United States’ ratification of COP 21, the Paris climate change agreement, are essentially executive orders by President Obama. They can be undone with the stroke of a pen, and most likely they will be. The latest studies of climate change are extremely alarming, suggesting that previous climate models have dramatically underestimated the problem. Any international climate agreement will collapse without U. S. cooperation. This suggests that by electing Trump, Americans may have inadvertantly brought about the end of human life on Earth within a couple of decades.

All the rest is merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Since Republicans control the Senate, it is likely that Trump will be able to ensure conservative domination of the Supreme Court for at least the next three decades. If so, Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned, and the few remaining barriers to racial discrimination will be eliminated. But the best descriptor of the Roberts court is “pro-corporate.” This is important due to corporations’ tendency to sue any time a law is passed which they find inconvenient. Needless to say, they will find a sympathetic audience in a Trump-appointed court.

I also believe that Trump will have little difficulty getting approval for elimination of the minimal protections against Wall Street risk taking and outright fraud provided by the Dodd-Frank Act. This will likely include elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. However, this may not make much difference since Dodd-Frank is so weak. In other words, it’s likely that we will have another Great Recession fairly soon, regardless of what Trump does.

At an intermediate level of difficulty for Trump are actions that require Congressional approval, and which all Senate Democrats and some Republicans may be reluctant to go along with. I put the repeal of the Affordable Care Act in this category, since it is essentially a massive giveaway of public funds to the insurance, medical and pharmaceutical industries, all important Republican donors. More likely to happen are modifications to Obamacare that increase corporate profits and make it more difficult and expensive for less affluent Americans to obtain medical care.

Another change requiring Congressional approval that will elicit Congressional resistance is Trump’s promise to cancel and/or renegotiate so-called “free trade” agreements such as NAFTA, or to withdraw from the World Trade Organization. These treaties, the primary goal of which is to increase corporate dominance of the international economy, have always had greater support from Republicans than Democrats.

On the impossible side is Trump’s immigration policy. In the final months of the campaign, he began to back off from his promise to build a wall on the Mexican border. More importantly, it is difficult to imagine the kind of chaos that would result from any attempt to deport the approximately 11 million undocumented people living in this country. More likely, he will cooperate with Congress in passing laws that make it more difficult or impossible for people of certain religious or ethnic groups to enter to the country in the future.

Now for two wild cards.

Will Trump be more or less likely than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to involve us in any more than the five foreign military interventions in which we are currently involved? My guess is that he will escalate the war against ISIS, with totally unpredictable consequences, but be reluctant to deploy American troops in new wars. But given Trump’s childlike temperament, this prediction could be way off base.

Finally, it is important to remember that George W. Bush and Barack Obama have created a massive national security apparatus, including the capability of spying on virtually any electronic communication between American citizens, and the militarization of the police, who can bring overwhelming force to bear against protesters and demonstrators. This is important because if Trump is able to fulfill his campaign promises, there will be widespread dissent on the left, and if he blunders badly, there will be buyers’ remorse among his current followers. Some of us were dismayed by FBI Director Comey’s recent intervention in the presidential election, but we should be prepared for the possibility that Trump will not hesitate to use the national security state for political purposes, including attempts to influence future elections.

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Trump’s Trump Card

The World According to the Donald

Framing the Debates