Born to do Math 96 – Statistical Probability of the Future of Rights
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is statistically likely to happen in the next two years with Kavanaugh passing into the Supreme Court only a couple of days ago?
Rick Rosner: If you want the most accurate predictions, you can go to 538.com. I like RealClearPolitics as well. But I like 538. Right now, they weight all the polls based on how accurate and reliable they are.
Right now, they are giving Democrats roughly a 74% chance of taking back the House and only 22% of taking back the Senate, and with the only 22% based on specific races may be too optimistic. Unless the Democrats make everybody surprised and show up in the mid-term.
It may happen with widespread rage.
Jacobsen: Who’s rage?
Rosner: Most women, though probably most Republican women are still behind him, Republicans only represent 1/3rd of the adult population and possibly less than that. So, everybody else.
Most women, about 2/3rds or 70%, and if you want to be even more accurate, then probably 28% of women support Kavanaugh. 20% don’t and 20% don’t have a clue. Republicans probably take back the House and then start a series of investigations into whatever they can investigate mostly Trump-related stuff.
Maybe, they can look into Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh has done a lot of stuff in a less partisan, Republican-dominated world would have been disqualifying and was actually perjury. If the Democrats take over the House, they start a lot of investigations.
These will have the effect of making Trump unreelectable in 2020. But he was thought to be unelectable in 2016 and got elected. Given that his popularity has remained at roughly 40% and that only bad stuff will come out about him if the Democrats take over the House, I don’t see him getting enough of a bump in approval to be elected to a second term.
Although, the Democrats have to come up with a person that they can get Independents to vote for. Kavanaugh on the court does not immediately lead to the rollback of a bunch of human rights stuff including the right to abortion.
Because all that stuff takes a while to get to the Supreme Court. You cannot simply go to the Supreme Court and then say, “We want a case on this.” It has to go to the lower courts first. Cases around abortion are designed to provide a pretext to throw out Roe v Wade are probably peppered throughout amenable courts, lower courts throughout the land.
It will probably take a year or a year and a half for those cases to make it to the Supreme Court. If Roe v Wade is overturned. It almost certainly will be given the composition of the court. Abortion could become illegal in a majority of the states.
Jacobsen: What will happen to the wellbeing of women?
Rosner: Well, all this stuff will take time to play out. If people are lucky, the fully playing out of the end of Roe v Wade will take until after the beginning of 2021 when there will be a Democrat, very likely, in the White House.
It is conceivable Trump could quit and then Pence would run for president while being president. It is possible Pence could be more electable than Trump. I’d give it at least a 60% chance of there being a Democrat winning the next presidential election.
In terms of the actual implications for women in roughly half of the country, you have half of the population – women – who will be in states where abortion will remain illegal because it will be up to the states.
Jacobsen: In the Handmaid’s Tale, New York was a holdout.
Rosner: Did they have to invade New York?
Jacobsen: I do not recall exactly.
Rosner: Since they changed the names of everything, we don’t know if that is taking place in Michigan or elsewhere. Everybody is trying to get to Canada. I assume they were trying to get out of New York and then to the border.
Anyway, half of the population will still be able to get abortions fairly easily. The other half may have to drive for hundreds of miles for the nearest state where abortion is illegal. Although, some states could make it illegal for you to drive out of state to get an abortion.
I do not know if that would be enforceable. I do not know how they would enforce it. Half of the population would face the end of reasonable abortion. Although, there is a historical trend. The rate at which people get abortions has been steadily dropping thanks to liberal policies of sex education and making contraception available.
The purpose of Planned Parenthood is not to give abortions. It is to give all sorts of health services that help people. Nobody wants the abortion rate to not decline. Liberal policies tend to help reduce it. The teaching of sexual education, non-abstinence sexual education, is helpful.
Liberal policies, which have been a force for decades, have been helping to steadily reduce the rate of people getting abortions. It isn’t to say that the situation won’t be dire for a lot of people but things will be much less fucked up than right before 1973 when Roe vs Wade made abortion legal for everyone.
What people have been missing, given that all the news has been Kavanaugh for the past four weeks or more, Trump has been rolling back all sorts of completely reasonable environmental regulations. For example, the insane rolling back of limits on radiation and other dangerous toxins.
As long as he remains president, he will probably make it through his term. It is just crazy, against all logic rollbacks of common sense policy, and widely agreed upon health and safety regulations. Who the fuck in the world was going to the government saying, “We need to make it so that there is more radiation in the atmosphere”?
No one, it was simply Trump and his ideologues. That will go on for 2 years. His people have realized that there is so much news that they can do whatever they want, and what they do will be lost in the avalanche of awfulness.
The huge story about the Trump family avoiding paying taxes through fraud for the most part on a billion dollars. Instead of paying the $550 million, they are paying $50 million. They, basically, defrauded the US government out of $500 million.
It makes them one of the biggest financial crime families in US history. But probably if you took a poll, and people should, most followers would say, “Yes! Fuck the government, it shows you’re smart.”
So, this stuff will keep going on. But the Democrats will slow down on stuff that can’t be done by presidential decree or whatever. The stuff that actually takes the House to okay it. The stuff it takes to slow down or stop.
Trump’s approval may be eroding a little bit from 41% to 35% approval over the next 18 months. As the investigations of the House of Representatives rollout, we are still looking for Mueller to drop all of his biggest shoes.
If that is given the most likely outcome of the mid-terms that Democrats take over the House; but if the 26% of the Republicans being in control, then you are looking at not an actual slide into a dystopia in terms of how day-to-day life is lived.
But a bunch of dominoes will get knocked over that set up a shitload of stuff that will need to clean up the next time Democrats have control of some branch of government, and it may be that the Republicans will use the next two years to figure out how to hold on to government even longer against the disapproval of the majority of American.
For one thing, the next census, which happens in 2020, may contain the question, “Are you a US citizen?” There is no better way to get undocumented aliens to not fill out census forms than to ask about citizenship.
The deal is, the census is based on everyone living in America, whether they are living in America or not. You have to understand the composition of the nation, regardless of the immigration status of some of its citizens.
It is one more way to fuck over the blue states because the blue states tend to have more undocumented immigrants. I am not positive about that, but I am pretty sure about that. There will be more voter suppression.
It is conceivable that if the Democrats don’t take back the House then the Republicans will continue to manipulate the system to continue to have majorities in the House and the Senate, and may even be able to get another Republican elected or Trump re-elected.
Even though, substantial and growing majorities of Americans do not want any of that. But likely, the most likely thing is the Democrats get the House and slow down some of the Republicans. One more thing, that 74% likelihood of the Democrats taking back the House.
Some caveats on that: a) polls can be inaccurate and improbable stuff can happen, b) the anger at Kavanaugh being confirmed hasn’t yet hit the polls so I would guess that the likelihood of the Democrats taking back the House will rise into as high as 80% in the next week or so with 3 weeks to go.
Everything always tightens up. It might to 80 or 82. It has been as high as 82 or 83 before the Republicans got all motivated because of Kavanaugh. It might get up there again for a week or two. But then races always tighten up in the last week or two. It may peak at 80 or 82 and then go back down to the 74 we’re seeing now.
It may be nervous-making until November 6. Election day is November 6. But the new Congress doesn’t come in until the first week in January, so it is conceivable that in the lame duck session – the two months between the election and the Republicans losing the majority – the Republicans could pull some crazy shit.
I do not know exactly what they could pull. But in the recent past, they pulled stuff that nobody ever believed they could pull. Given that they have nothing left to lose, and everyone already hates them, and if they lost their majority, there is no telling what they would do.
That’s it.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 