Post-Election Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, November 5, 2025
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33 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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In our little neck of the woods, voting was for a bunch of constitutional amendments for our ridiculously long Texas constitution. About half were tax related, another half were performative. All were passed because most voters will not take the time to read them. I don’t think real harm was done.
On our ballot which covers said amendments was something more substantial: candidates for the local school board. Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District is the third largest in Texas with about 100,000 students and a $1.2B budget. We are in the NW corner of Harris County (Houston) and fairly Republican and conservative. A few years back a bunch of Christian Nationalists took over the school board with a 6-1 majority. It has been chaos and controversy ever since. Well, this year, I’m happy to say, three of those whack jobs were up for reelection and all were tossed out. I don’t know what it means in the long run but people with kids in school were fed up and voted accordingly. The pushback was satisfying.
It is also amusing to see the Republican establishment try to nationalize their elections and demonize Mamdani. The local Houston Police Union put out ads to recruit NYC police for the Houston police force. Don’t they know the deep corruption of the NYPD?
Time to take down the yard sign.
A year late, but apparently US voters have to literally be assaulted before they’ll vote against fascists.
I’ll take the slim sliver of hope for the next year though, especially since VA completely flipped.
@Scott: Trump doesn’t think he was on the ballot, but Trumpism was tossed everywhere. You love to see it – even though you have to wonder how the American public is blind to the act every 8-10 years. Complacency is ruinous.
God, it’s gonna be a long rest-of-my-life at this rate.
There’s hope for us yet.
Looking forward to a long day of GOPs stretching for rationalizations and the MSM leaping to conclusions.
Biggest shift in 30 plus years in VA house. Even with past GOP redistricting our fine state sent a message loud and clear. Sanity and the rule of law. Hate will not be tolerated and Kings are not welcome.
The Big Tent Democratic Party won big tonight. DEI strikes back!
A few lessons that Dems anywhere can take from Mamdani’s election last night are the relentless focus on affordability, message discipline and sophisticated use of social media. From the Spanberger-Sherrill results its to run candidates whose positions align with with the politics of the district/state that they are running in.
Alas, it will be easier for the party professionals and interest groups to absorb Mamdani’s lessons than Spanberger-Sherrill.
Yesterday there was a horrible plane crash in Louisville involving an MD-11 UPS cargo jet.
Details are sparse as yet. It seems a dual engine failure, one of them catastrophic, during the takeoff roll. One engine fell off the plane (yikes!) I expect the investigation will focus on maintenance issues.
The plane was bound for Hawaii, meaning it had a heavy fuel load, probably just short of the max fuel it can take. It carried three crew, all of whom are presumed dead but that hasn’t been confirmed yet.
@Scott:
I didn’t look to hard into the tax questions and what I gleen about taxes in TX is that they are pretty fucked. Fucked in the sense that they skew heavily towards real property and sales taxes. I’m guessing to screw over regular people so the robber baron types can horde their gold like perverts.
Anyway, taking a quick look at those tax amendmendments and was wondering if TX is just going to run a scam where they eliminate most taxes and then beg for blue state dollars.
In other TX news, I review and advise on a lot of contracts, including for a rather significant IL credit union. In the last year or two I’ve seen a ton of venue and choice of law provisions choosing TX as the venue and law. It’s especially odd since almost all of these companies are incorporated in DE and based anywhere but TX. I’ve started telling clients that it’s probably not a good thing for an IL entity (or person) to attempt to sue in TX.
Yesterday I told my client that “due to political instability in Texas and the governor’s threats against New Yorkers we absolutely cannot sign any contracts that contain Texas law or venue. The risks are simply to great.”
I’ve already forced one company to change their contract for us and I’m not going to budge on the next either. Chaos and Republicans are bad for business.
@Kathy:
At least 9 have died, according to CNN.
@Beth: This may not apply to what you are talking about but last year, Texas implemented specialized business courts to handle complex business matters.
About the Texas Business Court
@Sleeping Dog: Re affordability… Democrats won two seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission that had been held by Republicans. Statewide vote splits appear to be about 60/40 for the Democrats. Most of the press coverage focused on the six rate increases the PSC approved over the last two years.
@CSK:
I often wonder at the wisdom of having built up areas around airports.
@Scott:
That explains part of it. Thank you. I know another part of it is Texas is trying to be a right wing Delaware. Doesn’t change my mind at all that it would be impossible for my IL (Chicago Suburban) based clients to get a fair shake in that court. Or CA or NY clients for that matter.
@Kathy:
Have you ever flown into Midway in Chicago? On a windy, rainy/snowy day, the braking gets very exciting. Like every 10-15 years or so a plane breaches the fence. I’m kinda shocked that more don’t land on the houses nearby.
ETA: fixed a sentence and a typo
@Beth:
I’ve never flown into Chicago.
Sometimes I run Google maps and look at satellite images of different airports. A lot are surrounded by all sorts of things, from residential areas to commercial ones. At Mexico City’s airport, one runway ends just an access road short of a major avenue. I think landings and takeoffs take place into the other direction, which is quite open. But still, in an emergency you can’t always pick the right direction to land.
This is both farce and tragedy, but not repetitive: FIFA, that bastion of honesty and integrity, will create a Peace Prize, to be awarded at the draw for the 2026 snoozefest.
The piece doesn’t say whom they plan to award it to, but if it’s not El Taco, I’d be very surprised. the piece does say it’s meant to honor “..the outstanding contribution of those who work hard to end conflicts and bring people together in a spirit of peace,”
It also states it will be bestowed “on behalf of fans from all around the world”.
(Damn this is making me feel nauseated).
Sucker fans are a mixed bunch. I hope the majority howl with outrage at finding out a bogus prize is given to one of the most undeserving individuals to ever live in their name.
@Kathy: IT’s dumb as hell for multiple reasons. Safety related issues are blatantly obvious but it’s the new home owners complaining about the airport noise that makes me facepalm. This pattern has repeated across the nation for 100 years or so. Build an airport out side of town and within a decade or two the airport is near the center of the city and people are complaining about it.
I drive by that airport occasionally so I’m still in a wee bit of a shock at the damage done to that area. Friend of mine had to shelter in place because of all the toxic shit in the air (foam fluids etc). It’s going to be an ecological nightmare for years just because of all the foam they used let alone everything else.
@Beth: Midway was built in the 20s and was never designed for modern jet airliners. So while they expanded the runways the best they could there just isn’t the room available. O’hare had the advantage of being built on a huge plot of land that was used by the military for aircraft production. You probably already know all this as you lived there for a while too?
Fortunately I’ve never experienced the type of landing you described there. I can believe it though as the two long runways are only about 6500 feet long.
@Kathy: Landing in San Diego from the east is always interesting. The planes basically follow the terrain down to the sea-level runway, low enough that you can see people sunning themselves by their swimming pools.
@Matt:
The really big worry is an accident shortly after takeoff, as happened in Louisville yesterday and in Ahmedabad back in June (both widebodies with a large fuel load). Or on a go around, which is far less likely but depends on the cause for it. Crash on landing is also common, but not so much on approach (when it happens, it’s usually high terrain).
Overrunning the runway after landing is bad, but absent oddities like no gear, as happened in Korea recently, damage on the ground tends to be less.
Besides, there are means to deal with that, like engineered materials arrestor system. The problem with that is that not that many airports have it.
@Kathy: Yes, if some kids are playing soccer and after the game they get a little ribbon, that’s a participation trophy, and we despise that. When a egotistical world leader gets a totally made up shiny thing, then we all applaud.
Lots of news today. The fixer court heard arguments on the Taco tariffs. Elections continue to have consequences. And more.
More salient may be this: Michael Burry, featured in the book The Big Short, has taken short positions on Palantir and Nvidia.
This may signal 1) AI is a bubble, 2) it’s about to pop, 3) it may pop eventually.
To begin with, Burry can be as wrong as anyone else. He has been wrong, anticipating a market crash in 2023 that never materialized. Te continue, he had to stand several months paying credit default swap premiums before scoring his big hit in the 2008 housing market collapse. So even if AI is a bubble and it will collapse, it may take time.
And there’s one other thing, too. A bubble may not apply to a whole field equally. When the dot.com bubble popped, it took down a lot of startups and others who had taken in tons of investment capital, or even sold stock, but who had not provided any return on investment, and perhaps were never going to.
At the same time, companies like Amazon were setting the basis for e-commerce, Google did the same for search, and there were other survivors who made out ok.
More important, the newfangled, trendy internet went on to become essential, and home to lots of valuable businesses of several sizes. I recall casually mentioning to someone when the dot.com blood still flowed thick and free, that I had ordered some books online. they said something like “But the internet went broke!”
Yeah, no.
So the AI bubble may pop. This will be bad, a recession may follow (likely not as bad as the 2008 great recession, one hopes), but it won’t be the end of generative AI, and some of the companies involved might still thrive like Amazon and Google did.
In a way this is common. Back in he early days of home video there were competing formats beyond VHS and Beta. Like the RCA video disc (printed in vinyl), and later the laser disc, and there were others. Eventually VHS prevailed (until DVD and digital recording came long, and then streaming, and who knows what will follow).
So, products and formats may fail, and in fact do so quite often, but whole industries usually don’t fail all at once, and when they do is because something better, cheaper, and/or more convenient supplants them.
@Kathy: I finally saw a reference to something I’ve been trying to remember, the 1979 crash of a DC-10, the precursor of the MD-11, in Chicago. It also suffered an engine separation on takeoff. The linked WIKI article quotes a witness who saw the left engine pylon pivot forward so the engine and pylon swung forward, up, vaulted back over the wing, then crashed into the runway. The resultant loss of hydraulic power allowed the left leading-edge slat to retract, which stalled the left wing, adding to the effect of asymmetric thrust. I recall reading at the time that the DC-10 had three redundant hydraulic systems, but the lines for all three were on the front spar and ripped off by the pylon separating. Reading the WIKI article, if this was true it was localized, not total failure of all three, but the crew had little time to react with a crippled airplane. 271 on the plane killed and 2 on the ground. The cause was determined to have been damage during a flawed engine change procedure two months earlier.
@I Matt:
I grew up and lived near-ish Midway. As a Southsider it’s the preferred airport. O’Hare could and frequently did take hours to get to.
Those Southwest pilots have nerves of steel to land there. I’ve had a couple of flights that got close and one where I was sure we were going to go through the fence.
The noise issue was was always good for an eye roll. A while ago they changed the flight paths so that they came over my neighborhood. People were pissed for about a week and then it just became another city noise. The Dan Ryan was louder.
@gVOR10:
I thought that all three hydraulic systems converged under the number 2 engine at the back. I recall that was the explanation for the United 232 crash at Sioux City, Iowa.
Catastrophic failures that low make it all but impossible for the pilots to save the aircraft.
I’m hoping for more details at the aviation blogs this evening. I can’t reach many from work…
@Kathy:
Chicago O’Hare was where I took a plane trip for the first time. It was 1971* and me, my parents, and sister were making an emergency trip home because my brother Chris had an appendectomy back in New York where we lived.
In 1972 I flew two times with my father from Philadelphia to Chicago on horse racing related trips.
After finishing Navy recruit training in 1979, I flew to Chicago so I could attend Hospital Corpsman school at Great Lakes Naval Station.
In both 1979 and 1984, while attending school at Great Lakes at Christmas time, I flew home to Florida as school was paused for the holidays. Late 84-Early 85 I was at Great Lakes for training as a X-ray technician.
My mother died in April 1985. I was by then stationed in San Diego. For my trip home, I flew United via Chicago O’Hare.
I have never flown through Chicago Midway.
After 1985, I didn’t fly in or out of O’Hare till last November when I did a book signing there. I was supposed to be doing a book signing in Chicago next week but today I learned my signing tour has been cancelled because of the shutdown related air traffic chaos.
I will probably be flying to Chicago again next year but not before March.
DTW aka Detroit’s airport I know very well from my Northwest FF days and again today because of my Delta FFing.
*- I was 10 years old at the time.
@Kathy:
I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be way way worse for two reasons:
1. The oligarchs and Wall Street have lost their fucking minds. Between rampant fraud, shady financialization, a stock market totally unmoored from anything near reality and crypto, I wouldn’t be shocked to see a couple major banks just get immolated. The crypto stuff is probably the most dangerous. Anyone wanna start up a wild cat bank with me for funsies? There’s all kinds of shady stuff going on in Crypto, and not the socially useful kind like drug deals.
If there’s a decent sized regional bank out there that is hiding crypto losses like First Brands, we’re gonna party like it’s 1929.
2. The last few recessions have been brought about in part because the GOP was screwing around and not running the government like a government. Turns out deregulation is just another way to say scam. Does anyone think this flock of idiots and freaks will be able to step in and manage a severe crisis without making it significantly worse? They’ll all be too busy slitting each other’s throats to step in and do anything.
I’ve also been reading a lot about how the US is likely in a recession already, it’s just the data center/AI boom masking it. There’s absolutely no way that cools off in a measured, responsible way. Ohio is gonna be a wasteland of half used data centers and toxic waste. A whole lot of regular people are going to be wiped out again and I don’t think they are going to take kindly to another round of rich assholes getting bailed out and partying at Mar-A-Lardo.
@Michael Cain:
For commercial pilots, I think Lindbergh is considered one of the toughest US airports to fly in and out of.
Back in the mid 80’s I flew in and out of Lindbergh some because I was working at Balboa Naval Hospital in SD.
@Beth:
What can I say? I’m an optimist for some reason.
Crypto worries me more. It’s widespread, riddled with fraud, and the thing at its heart is completely useless. It’s kind of like gold, which is valuable because people think its valuable, but worse. Gold has some uses in electronics and jewelry, maybe still in medicine. Crypto seems to be popular with organized crime and tech bros, but as a store of value rather than as currency.
But it’s been around a long time, as these things go (I don’t think beanie babies or tulips lasted this long), and despite scandals and periodic crashes, apparently it’s still a thing for some reason.
AI, though, it using up real money, eating up real electricity, polluting real air with unregulated gas generators, and drinking real reservoirs of cooling water. And also employing real people in construction, installation, manufacturing, programming, etc.
So, yeah, when that pops it will be huge.
Maybe I should remind myself again optimism is close to hubris.
Everybody complains about Trump making a profit from crypto, but to me* the issue should be is that any alternative currency seems a de facto undermining of the US dollar. How can it be that any US politician, let alone a POTUS, can do that without a lot of people pointing that out?
*my education on high finance is, to say the least, limited.
@Beth:
Speaking of Chicago noise…
Jake (after walking into Elwood’s cramped apartment next to the L train line and sitting down): “How often does the train go by?”
Elwood: “So often you won’t even notice it.”
@dazedandconfused:
It’s bad that trump and numerous wealthy cabinet members and associates own huge stakes in cryptocurrency, presenting clear conflicts of interest with respect to the administration’s shameless promotion of crypto. It’s fairly insane that trump established the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile, with the goal to make the United States the “crypto capital of the world,” whatever tf that might look like.
@Kathy: A good friend just bought over 1200 laser discs at a local estate auction (numerous lots, as in hundreds of lots where he mostly put in the minimum bid as in under $1 each for lots of 5-15 discs), total about $1k. There is still a HUGE fan base. One biggie is the audio is still analogue. Some movies have never come out in DVD, or the DVD is based on a bad VHS so the laser disc is the best version available. It was several trips in his Chevy Suburban (yes, he has a huge basement garage).
What auctions did he not win (outbid)? – Japanese Anime (90s) and Star Wars. And Playboy soft-core porn.
He’s still inventorying, making a spread sheet (with his CPA wife’s oversight, woman knows spreadsheets). He’ll keep 5% for his personal collection and figures he’ll make 10x (or more) selling them off on eBay, etc. (His CPA wife agrees.)
I’ll add, I was waiting in a laywer’s waiting area (JAG that both I and Joyner know – Charlie) and looking at a Time Magazine ~1997, 1/3 of all VHS tapes sold were pron (swapping letters intentionally because filters).