Election 2026

Strikes me that blygging is a great way to log your evolving impressions during an election.

from Venkatesh Rao's Blyg ↗ · excerpt of v1

The States

Electoral

• Team Apathy seems to really be winning over the combined forces of Red and Blue.
• Polling seems to have gotten more inaccurate. Part of this seems to have been the result of 1) more focus on the polls along with 2) the shift away from landlines.
• This may be the end of Trumpism. The dude seems very old and unhinged even to committed supporters I know.
• The Iran Not War and the economy has been a bigger deal for Trumps coalition than many outside MAGA world realize methinks. There’s words that offend you and then actions that affect you as they say.
• Germandering likely will backfire in unexpected ways. There was a big story 1-2 years back on how teams Red and Blue were carving up more seats. The math of Redistricting though is that trying to spread out voters to gain seats leads increases the brittleness and susceptibility of wave elections.

Governing (Issues to track the next two years)

• Will Congress reassert itself as a functioning constitutional branch? (I’m not holding my breadth.)
• Will the growing consensus about the need to modernize government operations result in meaningful reform?

California

• The governor’s race has really disappointed me. It feels like the blob machine candidate versus the sloptivism promise the world alternative. So much for a serious and sober dialogue on the many problems we face. The race was well summed up by one undergrad at the debate hosted at the Claremont Colleges (my Alma mater): “well that was an absolute mess.”
• I bet that the wealth tax fails either outright or in terms of the alternative poison pills that Sergei put on. (The initiatives will be a good indicator of where the CA electorate is trending on a political compass over the medium, better than the gubernatorial non-race which is intertwined with the national partisanship.)
• I bet that Raman has it. There’s enough anti-incumbency spirit in the air to take down Bass. Also a piece of anecdota: I’ve seen around a half dozen Raman signs but none from Bass.

Global elections

• Israel — It seems that Netanyahu may find a way to squirrel his way into holding onto power (sadly)?
• Brazil — Lula won. Meta’s glitch favoring Bolsanero’s son strikes me as the sort of thing that really emphasizes the need for user control of the algorithms. That was on Muse though also applies to the feed and really is a data point in favor of open protocols like blygger.
• This may just be motivated reasoning on my part but ousting Orban earlier this year feels like a big deal.
• One governing trend to watch: the Spanish series of rail crashes feel like a bad omen in a normally high capacity and competent train country.

More broadly, as country after country has a battle between the nationalist right and blob-like left, I am struck by the common political patterns. I’ve been enjoying the book After Nations on audible the past month or so:

Cui Bono

Stateside, I have definitely been on team Not Trump, sometimes team Very Much Not Trump (which I suppose lapses / gets caricatured into TDS. I am a candidate for local office in an anytown suburb of So Cal. See my water board campaign website at AtwaterForFMWD.com.

I have found focusing my political energies on something that I can control and potentially impact much healthier than the digitally supercharged bizarre spin cycle we’ve lived through. My general joke about the last decade is I’d be hard pressed to get my high school self circa 2005 to take seriously what has happened.

Lastly once upon a time I wrote a book, A New California Dream, that argues for a constitutional convention to modernize our democratic and administrative procedures in our state. I’ve had a bit of a reformist streak.