Putin is helping Trump again. This time, by invading Ukraine.

 I teased this post during the week, so here it is.  OK, so we are in one of those holy shit moments of world history.  A nuclear-armed madman has started a land war in Europe.  That is a holy shit moment.  Ben Bradlee, the long-time honcho of the Washington Post, used to say that he wanted people to open up the paper every day and say, holy shit!  My grad school advisor, Nelson W. Polsby, used to say that reporters would then call up professors, prodding us to say, "holy shit, right prof?  Holy shit?"  Nelson said that it was our job to say, "no, not holy shit, this is normal and boring and ordinary, and here's why," and most days, he was right, but every once in a while, the light of the divine, or perhaps the demonic, shines upon a whole, big mess of shit, and by the power vested in me by the high priesthood of political science, I do hereby declare this shit to be holy.  Yet let not the holiness of this shit be taken to mean that other questions are unimportant.

Yes, there are domestic electoral effects to the war in Ukraine.  Yes, it is crass to think of these things right now, but some crass questions need to be asked, because even though this is of secondary importance given the death and destruction being wrought, it still matters.  Donald Trump was, once upon a time, the greatest threat to the world order.  Currently, Vladimir Putin is.  If Trump is back... oy.  Badness.  So yeah, someone should ask the crass questions even though his is a holy shit moment in world history.  So let's just ask.  Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and predictably, Trump just talked about how strong and handsome Putin looked doing it.  Are there 2024 implications?

Yes.

Go elsewhere for a review of Trump's first impeachment, the Zelensky "perfect phone call," in which Trump tried to shake Zelensky down for weapons, and of course, Trump's long history of obsequiousness towards Putin.  Were the American people to look at Trump's subservience to Putin and his attempt to extort political favors from Zelensky for weapons, he'd be toast.  Yet it takes no stretch of the imagination to figure out exactly what Trump will say.  He'll say that Putin didn't invade when he was in office, and in the narcissistic, America-centered, Trump-centered world view, that means Putin invaded Ukraine because of Biden, and was secretly afraid of Trump's powerful power-ness and strength-itude, and Biden is weak, which is Trump's go-to insult, based on a moral view that the only virtue is strength, and the only vice is weakness.

Anyone wanna bet?

But here's the thing.  When voters here this, or really anything related to foreign policy, what they hear is...

Yup, that's pretty much what voters hear any time the political debate turns to foreign policy.  I apologize for conveying the false impression that Donald Trump counts as an adult, a teacher, or anything else within the Peanuts universe.  He is, and always will be Tony Clifton.

Can anything across the ocean affect the voters?  Yes.  If it leaves just a memory.  A snapshot in a family album.  Get it?

This is where we turn to election forecasting models.  One of the models that has, in various times, been useful is the "Bread & Peace" model, constructed by Doug Hibbs.  In the hypothetical case that anyone ever read this pretentious, little blog, that hypothetical person might remember that I most commonly reference the Abramowitz model-- "Time For A Change"-- and part of the reason is that it has held up the best over time, but the Hibbs model has/had a lot going for it.  The two primary variables Hibbs has used are change in "real disposable income" and troop deaths.  Troop deaths are bad.  Not just morally, as in, we care about kids, and yeah, 18-year-olds are kids, but American voters don't like it when a bunch of American kids are dying.  And they punish the incumbent when that happens.

The other big variable there-- change in RDI-- is different from the Abramowitz economic variable.  Abramowitz uses second quarter GDP growth in the election year.  There's a lot of predictive power there, to be sure, but conceptually/causally, I kinda like RDI.  What's going on there?  Disposable income is a thing that you know.  Tax day is-a-comin' up.  Are you one of those people whose political attitudes change based on proximity to April 15?  Just askin'.  Regardless, "real" means adjusted for inflation, and then change over time.  So there's a lot of cool stuff there, and the measure manages to capture the substance of inflation, unemployment (hence the misery index), economic growth, how tax rates affect everything... it's pretty cool, as measures go.  Conceptually, generally speaking, if what you want to know is something about voters'/consumers' economic state, and you asked me for a theoretically-grounded measure, I'd go RDI over GDP.

Now, Abramowitz has won out over Hibbs in the long run, at least to some degree because the troop death variable has diminished in importance as troop deaths have diminished over time.  Vietnam era?  Big deal.  The further we get from that, and the more data points we get where that big variable has less variance, and hence less predictive power, so as a model, Abramowitz wins.  GDP is still pretty good too!  And I'm gettin' off track, but the other thing is that inflation has not really been a big deal since the early 80s.

Um... it's bAaaack!  When inflation dropped to a consistently low level, that reduced variation in a key component in the Hibbs model, so it lost out, comparatively speaking.  Now that inflation is back, do we go Hibbs?  That's more variation in a key factor from the Hibbs model.

OK, so I just threw a bunch of abstractions at you.  What does any of this have to do with Vlady, Donnie, and my girl, Kamala, who will be Commander In Chief by 2024, once Biden kicks the bucket?

What?!  You know whose blog this is!

Anyway, we won't send troops.  Nor should we.  I have this thing about WWIII.  I don't want it to happen.  My answer to the time machine question is yes, kill baby Hitler.  Also, kill baby Putin, kill baby Marx, babies Lenin/Stalin/Mao, and do whatever is necessary to stop Russia from getting nukes in the past.  As a country, there's something deeply wrong with that place, and I'm really coming 'round to Samuel Huntington.  More on that later, though.

Regardless, we aren't sending troops.  There will be no American troop deaths.  RDI?  We're starting with high inflation, and the economic sanctions will increase inflation further.  That reduces RDI.  Mathematically, that helps Trump.  Sorry, Kamala.  And the kicker is that even with the Fed raising interest rates to bring down inflation, the result is a reduction in growth, possibly a recession, which reduces income, and RDI suffers anyway.

GDP?  Once the Fed starts raising interest rates, that suffers too.  Recessionary?  Difficult to say.  There's no two-term penalty for the Dems, Biden's approval rating right now is low, and we don't know what Harris's approval rating will be once she assumes office after Biden's heart attack, or whatever, but we can infer that it will be little different.  This is a matter of built-in partisan animosity, frustration has shifted from lingering COVID to inflation and now... this... and there will be the same basic pressures.  Candidates don't matter that much.  But the economy will face the same challenges, and any challenge created helps Trump.

Or perhaps I should say, helps "REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE IN GENERIC YEAR WITH INDEPENDENT VARIABLE SCORES AS FOLLOWS."  And the point is, anything bad helps the Republican nominee, even if that Republican nominee is the most unqualified, uninformed, corrupt, vile, subhuman piece of shit in the history of world politics.

In other words, even if it is Donald Trump.

But what, if anything, does this do to the Republican nomination contest?

Nothing.  Nothing whatsoever.  The contest begins as wholly owned by Trump.  The Republican electorate remains a Trump cult, unlike any electoral phenomenon the country has seen at least since a very different kind of president.  If you asked political scientists to list the greatest presidents, you'll get a very standard list, including names like Washington and Lincoln, but the name put forth by Neustadt in the standard text, Presidential Power, was FDR.  Roosevelt fundamentally altered the political landscape in a lot of ways, and understood a lot of the nature of politics.  We could debate, but the challenge of distinguishing between Roosevelt and Lincoln is one that really makes no sense.  Nevertheless, without quality survey data of the same kind that we have today, it is difficult to compare Democratic attachment to FDR to Republican attachment to Trump.  The four-wins thing is worth noting, but the point remains that Republicans are terrifyingly obsessed with Trump in a religious way.  It's just a cult.  Few things are certain.  It is certain that Trump will lie and brag and say and do vile things, and when cornered, fall back on "we'll see what happens," along with his other Polly-wanna-cracker-isms.  However, the evidentiary burden falls strongly on whoever claims that Trump can be beaten, keeping in mind that political scientists wrote him off completely in 2016, based on an absurdly stupid book called The Party Decides, which I am proud to say I always rejected, and in fact, I started blogging with The Unmutual Political Blog for the purpose of calling out my colleagues' rectal haberdashery on the dynamics of the 2016 Republican nomination contest.

If Trump's diet of junk food doesn't kill him first, or some other exogenous event doesn't intervene, he's the nominee.  The probability of him losing the nomination contest in 2024 is epsilon, which is the Greek character we use in math for a value arbitrarily close to, but not precisely zero.  He's the GOP nominee.

But... can't this do anything to the GOP nomination contest?

No.

What part of "no" didn't you understand?  Republican primary voters don't live in anything even remotely resembling a fact-based universe.  A bunch of them think that Putin is a co-divine figure, along with Trump.  Go watch a bit of Tucker Carlson some time.  Trump will alternate between telling Republicans that the invasion of Ukraine was totally awesome because Putin is totally awesome, and also it never would have happened if he had been in office, and stolen election, blah, blah, and while a functioning brain can detect a contradiction, a functioning brain would have detected that Trump is incompetent, a liar, and a sociopath years ago.  If they're still listening to him, they're lost anyway.

And they're still listening to him.

One of the most terrifying things about the modern Republican Party is how dramatically it shifted on Russia in response to Trump's Putin-slavering.  Prior to Trump, the Republican Party understood that Russia is not to be trusted.

And they're not.

Trump shows up, and the whole party turns on a dime.  Suddenly, Vladimir Putin is Jebus, and Russia is Shangri-La, a paradise on Earth to show us the way, built by right-thinking people.  (Shangri-La?  Jebus?  Fuck, I'm really mixing my cosmologies here.  Then again, Trump doesn't even know which way to hold a bible and these "differently-abled" voters still think he's their guy!)

What did this demonstrate?  It demonstrated that Republicans never had any stable attitudes on Russia, nor really anything on foreign policy.  This is an old observation, going back to Converse (1964).  What is consistent about the modern Republican electorate?

Trump.

So let's review.  Putin's invasion of Ukraine has no effect on the 2024 Republican primaries, leaving Trump essentially impossible to beat.  Sorry, DeSantis, you're dreamin'.  You can sign all the culture-wars bills you want, but you're nothing but a pretender.  Trump is the earthly avatar of partisan bile and malevolence, which makes him unbeatable in a party motivated by a quest for the most-evil.

Unless Putin can get around the citizenship question.  I wonder if Trump would ask to see his birth certificate?

But anyway, absent some external event, Trump walks away with the nomination in the easiest contest ever for any party lacking an incumbent.  Then, the economic consequences of the sanctions and the war work against Harris, helping Trump.

Yup.  Putin is helping Trump.  Again.  Then, once Trump is back in office, Donnie lifts all sanctions on Russia, and starts trade wars with democracies around the world.  Death of NATO, and... oy vey.

Also, if Trump loses, the GOP steals it for him.  Then, Trump lifts all sanctions on Russia, and starts trade wars with democracies, withdraws from NATO, and...

This ain't good, folks.

And I missed putting up jazz yesterday, so let's go with some jazz this morning.  Pat Metheny, with a live performance of "Question & Answer."  He is one of those guitarists who plays amazing music, and then as a guitarist, there is another level to appreciating him, because you don't get just how hard this is if you don't play.  Yet, you can just appreciate the beauty of the piece on its own terms.