The New Hampshire Primary

The Republicans

New Hampshire voters in the Republican Primary identified themselves as moderate by a 3-to-1 margin. Moderates did favor Haley over Trump, but only about 55% of them favored Haley in a one on one contest with Trump.

Then again, who are we kidding?

Getting 43% of the vote is amazing for a woman, who isn't white, and has recent immigrant origins, in the political party known for is misogyny, racism, and xenophobia. Haley can also expect a decent showing in the upcoming South Carolina primary, her home state where she is the Governor.

Haley had a 3rd place finish in Iowa with just under 20% of the caucus support (a nose behind Florida Governor DeSantis who won just over 20% and then endorsed Trump).

Trump got a little over 50% of the caucus support in Iowa and didn't break 55% in New Hampshire. This isn't much of a bump from DeSantis dropping out of the race and endorsing Trump, even though New Hampshire is a more moderate electorate than Iowa, not least because the New Hampshire primary is open to unaffiliated voters. Almost half of Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary voters in the Republican contest were willing to break with clear front runner Donald Trump, which isn't nothing, and it wouldn't be stunning if Haley could secure a thin majority in her home state (she is probably staying in the race, unlike DeSantis, in part, for just that reason).

Keep in mind that there are lots of ways that Trump could implode before the Republican National Committee selected it's party's Presidential nominee this summer.

While it is more likely than not that the U.S. Supreme Court will hold that he can't be kept off the ballot as an insurrectionist under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as the Colorado Supreme Court held, the legal argument that SCOTUS should affirm the Colorado Supreme Court's ruling is strong on the merits, and there are institutional reasons that it would make sense for it to do so.

Trump is currently facing four criminal felony prosecutions on 92 very solid felony charges, each of which is currently scheduled to go to trial before the 2024 general election. Polling has indicated that his support from unaffiliated voters and GOP moderates will fall enough to cost him the election, in a race that is currently polling as close to a statistical tie, if he is convicted of a felony in any of them. And, there won't be time for him to get any felony conviction reversed on appeal before the election, even if a reversal on appeal is a possibility.

Finally, Trump is 77 years old, is morbidly obese (despite obvious lies about his weight which his physicians have colluded in), which makes the possibility of his death or a disability which prevents him from running or serving as President statistically pretty likely.

Furthermore, within the last month or so, Trump hit new lows of incoherence in some of his campaign speeches, confusing Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley for former Democratic Party Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, calling for former President Obama to resign from the Presidency, and so on. While Trump is known for his confused word salad speeches that are only dimly connected to reality, there is a real possibility that his cognitive health has taken another big slide sometime in the past few weeks, and that it could slide into the intolerable zone before the Republican National Convention this summer.

As the only serious challenger to Trump for the Republican Presidential nomination, if Trump does implode prior to the RNC, Nikki Haley is well positioned to reap the benefit of that and become her party's nominee. There is also a long tradition in both political parties of naming one of the strongest challengers to the nominee at the RNC as the winner's Vice Presidential candidate. And, this year's Republican VP candidate will be especially relevant. If Trump implodes after the RNC but before the election, the RNC chosen VP will be his natural replacement. And, as a 77 year old man with serious physical and cognitive health problems, the probability that Trump won't be able to finish his second term as President if he is elected is significant.

Unless and until Trump names another running mate in his 2024 Presidential campaign (and he certainly won't be naming Cheney again), Haley is the third most likely person in the world to be President at some point from early January of 2025 to early January of 2029. She's less likely to be President than either Biden or Trump, but more likely than Kamala Harris and more likely than anyone else Biden might name as his running mate this summer (although I'd be surprised if he chose a different VP candidate this time). And, of course, at 81 years of age, the probability that Biden will die before he starts his second term of office, or if he is re-elected, during his second term of office, is also not negligible, even though it seems to me that Biden is less likely to suffer a sudden collapse in his physical or cognitive health in that time frame than Trump, despite being four years older and showing signs of deterioration in his old age himself.

The Democrats

Biden's two-thirds of the primary vote (with almost all of the 19% of the vote not yet counted being write-in ballots for Biden, it will probably be Biden 72%, Phillips 15%, and Williamson 3%, by the time all of the votes are counted) wasn't so bad given that he wasn't on the ballot and was merely a write in candidate, unlike 21 other candidates with absolute no chance of winning the Democratic Party nomination.

You have to feel a little bad for the 17ish people in the Democratic Party primary who thought maybe they were serious candidates, and got less than the 0.6% of "Vermin Supreme" (who secured about 666 votes).

No delegates were awarded in New Hampshire's Democratic primary because they refused to accept the second in the nation timing that the DNC gave them behind South Carolina. Democrats in Iowa complied with the DNC mandate.

Dean Phillips, a Democratic Congressman from Minnesota, as the second place finisher in New Hampshire's no delegate Democratic primary (the first Democratic race held in the 2024 primary season, even if it is really only a straw poll), probably deserves a little mention. I actually have a cousin who lives in his western Twin Cities area district.

His background is as a businessman in his family's liquor business (of which he was made CEO upon earning his MBA in 2000 at the age of 31) and running a two location coffee shop chain he founded in 2016, and a gelato product line. He is one of the wealthiest members of Congress with a net worth of about $77 million. He is a 54 year old white man and a Brown University graduate with a University of Minnesota MBA, whose father died in Vietnam when he was six months old after which he was adopted by his wealthy stepfather. He has generally supported President Biden's party line, backs Medicare for All, and is a bit more liberal than the average Democrat in Congress.

First elected in 2018, Phillips defeated six-term Republican incumbent Erik Paulsen. By flipping the previously Republican district, he became the first Democrat to win the seat since 1958. He has since been reelected twice.

In Congress, he is on the Committee on Foreign Affairs (where he is the ranking member on the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia Subcommittee) and the Committee on Small Business. He is a member of the LGBT Equality Caucus, the New Democrat Coalition, and the Problem Solver's Caucus.

Honestly, but for the fact that the Democrats have an incumbent President running for re-election, he'd be fine Presidential nominee. Indeed, he'd probably be a significantly better President than a re-elected President Biden.

The same cannot be said of third-place Democratic New Hampshire primary finisher Marianne Williamson, a nice person and New Age-ish former Unity Church pastor raised Jewish, and non-profit director from Texas, who simply put, doesn't have the experience or competence to be President and didn't even run on the Democratic Party ticket in a failed 2014 Congressional candidacy in California.

South Asians In U.S. Presidential Politics

Two of the candidates for the GOP Presidential nomination, of the seven who are likely to make it to the first Republican Presidential debate, and the current U.S. Vice President, a Democrat, have South Asian ancestry.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a Hindu businessman, and Nikki Haley (Nimarata Nikki Haley, née Randhawa) former Governor of South Carolina and former US Ambassador to the UN who was born and raised as a Sikh, and is now a Methodist, are both running for the Republican Presidential nomination. Haley is one of the better polling candidates whose name is not "Trump". 

Vice President Kamala Harris is also of Indian decent. Her mother was from Chennai. Her father was from Jamaica. Harris was exposed to both African American Christian life and Hindu religious life as a child and is now a member of the American Baptist Church (the most politically moderate, predominantly white Baptist denomination). At this point there are no really viable announced Democratic challengers to the Biden-Harris ticket, even though a couple of candidates have thrown their hats into the ring.

Present Company Excluded And The Confederate Flag

One of the most powerful reasons that the South Carolina legislature has done an about face and voted to take down the Confederate flag, is that one of the nine people murdered by a flag touting white supremacist was one of their own, a state senator.  Many of those legislators attended his funeral at the church where the shooting took place and some discussed that experience in the debate of the matter on the floor of  the legislature.

Legislators are by nature social animals and the identification with a murder victim who was one of their own crossed party lines.  What I call the "present company excluded rule" is the principle of etiquette and social interacts that considers it rude, to the point of being socially prohibited, to insult or be openly hateful towards someone who is part of your social circle with whom you regularly interact.

This murder brought home to state legislators in South Carolina that their persistence is keeping up the Confederate flag violated this rule as to people within their ranks, and not mere outsider citizens, and acted accordingly.

Similar observations can be applied to gay rights.  For example, it is no coincidence that the laws in Colorado favorable to gay rights were almost all enacted while the Colorado General Assembly has openly gay legislators and in many cases those legislators were the sponsors of the bills.

A Modest Proposal

Consider this proposal for a law, and I am only half tongue in cheek here, enacted using the grant of Congressional enforcement powers under the final sections of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, respectively:

1.  An "Unreconstructed Government" shall mean any state, county, city, or other governmental entity that as a matter of official policy, or as a matter of practice without ratification in an official policy (or contrary to a statement in an official policy), makes use of any of the distinctive symbols of the Confederate State of America, or a substantially similar symbol, or uses the name of any politician of the Confederate State of America to name any building, department, part of a building, or program. 

2. In any civil action, or in any motion filed or legal action taken in any civil or criminal or administrative case in any state, or local or federal court or administrative proceeding, in which it is alleged that an Unreconstructed Government, or an officer, employee or agent of that Unreconstructed Government acted with an intent to discriminate against a person on account of race or ethnicity, because a person is not a native born non-Hispanic white individual, this intent shall be presumed.  This presumption may be overcome only with proof beyond a reasonable doubt to the contrary.

Thus, for example, in an employment discrimination lawsuit, or Batson challenge, or suit alleging that a state patrol officer acted in a racially discriminatory manner with South Carolina, which is an "Unreconstructed Government" as defined in the statute, the person claiming discrimination would automatically establish that intent unless the State of South Carolina overcame that presumption with proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Governments make symbolic statements and this law would not bar them from doing so.  But, it is well within the scope of federal power under the Reconstruction Amendments to make reasonable efforts to define the statement that a governmental entity makes when it uses those symbols, in a manner that reflects their widely understood meaning.

Flying a Confederate flag, just like burning a cross, has a well defined meaning in the American historical context which everyone on both sides of the issue of whether those symbols are used understands perfectly well.

If a government wants to make those statements, coded in symbols, however, it needs to live with the consequences of its acts, like losing cases where it claims, insincerely to be saying something else, in the Courts.

States like South Carolina, which has flown the Confederate battle flag since 1962, and which recently experienced a white supremacist murder of nine people at a prayer meeting in a historically black church which was intended to "start a race war," would have to decide if they wanted to pay that price.

The hope, of course, is that so shamed and so made to pay the consequences of their acts, that the Unreconstructed Governments in the United States would "voluntarily" change their ways in a way that created a new cultural reality, just as anti-discrimination laws have done in the private sector despite the fact that they are extremely hard to enforce in many contexts such as initial hiring of employees for open positions.

Many "moderates" are willing to make racist statements with symbols if there are no consequences for their actions, but would change their tune if they were forced to own their symbolic statements.

South Carolina Celebrates Treason and Slavery

The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.

- William Faulkner

Despite being a white guy born in Atlanta, Georgia whose earliest memories include a trip to Stone Mountain (the Confederate answer to Mount Rushmore), I really don't have much sympathy for celebrations of the Confederacy.

South Carolina Politicians Tacky

Republican Senator Joe Wilson's outburst "You lie!" during a Presidential address to a joint session of Congress (and, in fact, President Obama wasn't lying, Wilson was), earned his Democratic opponent about $500,000 of campaign contributions.

The Washington Post notes that Wilson is one of a long line of current and former tacky, rude and incivil South Carolina politicians.

Louisiana Doomed?

Bad Astronomy's Illustration

Bad Astronomy comments on Louisiana's recent election of a creationist Governor. Their loss is our gain. He used to be in Congress. Texas and South Carolina also have creationist governors.