Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I’ve always been a big fan of James Carville, the political strategist who turned 80 last month. I love his Louisiana accent, his curmudgeonly behavior and pull-no-punches discourse, and his inevitable appearance on television wearing a Louisana State University shirt, the place he went to college (he was also in the Marines).
You may remember Carville in the 1993 movie “The War Room” as a main strategist, along with George Stephanopoulos, of Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign. That film was great, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary (it didn’t win). Here’s Carville giving his minions a peptalk the day before Clinton’s election. He tears up a little as he gives his message:
But we forget that Carville was also the advisor to several losing Presidential campaigns of Democrats, including John Kerry in 2004, Hillary Clinton in 2008, and Colorado Senator Michael Bennet in 2020.
Carville wasn’t involved directly in Kamala Harris’s campaign, though he contributed to the effort, but right up to the end he thought that Harris would win, and said so loudly and confidently. Here he makes his prediction only five days before the election. (I still love his straightforward style of speaking.) Carville disappears in the middle of the video, but returns at about 5:50 to reaffirm his optimism, promising that the women of America will take Harris over the top.
Yes, Carville’s confident predictions were wrong.
Below you see his postmortem with Amanpour on CNN after the election, acting somewhat sheepish (“winning is everything,” he says) and branding the Democrats as “losers” and now an “opposition party”. His analysis: Harris didn’t sufficiently distinguish herself from Biden, a failure that proved “decisive.” He also blames the lack of an open primary process and the failure of Harris to layout new policies. Finally, he says at the end that the Democrats have been tarred for a long time by the party’s wokeness, and though Harris pivoted a bit towards the center, her party was still tarred with the “stench” of wokeness. As he says, “It’s gonna take more than one cycle to get this stench off of the Democratic Party, and it’s a STENCH of the highest order, let me tell you.” (He throws in that the Party could have given a much stronger economic message.)
But he knew this stuff already when he appeared in the video above! He was simply wrong, and this somewhat detracts from his ability to read politics. Yes, a lot of people were wrong, as the election was close, but somehow I’ve always put my faith in Carville.
But, at eighty, Carville still vows to fight on as a member of the disloyal opposition. He’s already thinking about the 2026 midterms, and about what the Democratic Party has to do to win some Senate and House seats. Ceiling Cat bless this Bayou Curmudgeon!
I have never singled out a single factor that I considcered crucial in Trump’s victory against Harris, because there were so many factors in play. These include immigration, the economy, wokeness among Dems (loudly decried by Trump’s ads), Harris’s failure to choose Josh Shapiro as a running mate, Biden’s failure to resign, the word-salady nature of Harris’s campaign and her refusal to answer questions like “How would your administration differ from Biden’s?”, and, of course, the blame people affix to Republicans, saying that they are simply misogynistic, stupid, and nationalistic yokels. A change in any of these factors might have changed the election’s results, but, in truth, we don’t know. All we can offer is post facto analyses. That’s why I simply post a diversity of takes so readers can hear all viewpoints.
In response to one public post I recently put on Facebook about Laura Helmuth leaving Scientific American after going on an expletive-laden post-election rant that demonized Trump voters as “fucking fascists”, as well as “mean, dumb, and bigoted,” I got one comment that basically agreed with Helmuth:
I think the outcome of the election was abysmal, dreadful, and maybe the trans activists were a small part of the problem, but a much bigger problem is the poor state of American education and the country’s persistent religiosity. Again, not the fault of the left.
In other words, this commenter agreed with Helmuth, throwing into the mix the high religiosity of Americans. I haven’t talked to enough people in my elite “bubble” to know how pervasive this feeling is.
In the 38-minute video below, a segment of Dan Senor’s “Call Me Back” show, New York freshman Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres, only 36, says that the Democratic left basically scuppered the election by infusing the party with progressive ideology, refusing to address the two issues that really mattered to the middle- and lower-class voters: immigration and inflation. Torres represents the South Bronx, and his district is characterized by Wikipedia as “by one measure the poorest congressional district in the United States.”
A couple of quotes from Torres:
“My diagnosis is that we have to Stop pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter and Tik Tok than it is to the real world and start listening to working-class people of color—working class people in general—who have historically been the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.”
“The movement of ‘defund the police’ has done almost irreparable damage to the brand of the Democratic Party. . . . if the objective is to win elections in the real world, then we have to marginalize the far left in favor of working class Americans.”
Torres is not hesitant to criticize Biden or Harris, calling Biden’s actions on immigration “political malpractice”, which aroused clear signs of popular discontent well before the election.
Senor, who comes from a Jewish background, then brings up an issue that most commenters have neglected: the Jewish vote. As he notes, Jewish voters went for the GOP in higher proportions than previously, so that in this election Jewish voters were largely “up for grabs”—unsure about how to vote. Slogans from the far left like “globalize the intifada,” or “from the river to the sea,” says Torres, alienated Jewish voters, most of whom support Israel.
Torres theorizes that the Jewish vote may have been decisive in states like Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona, all of whom went for Trump. He adds that the says far left “chose to wage an antisemitic smear campaign in an attempt to sabotage Josh Shapiro, simply because he was a Jew who spoke out against the antisemitism after October 7. . . . The far left’s hatred for Donald Trump was exceeded only by its hatred for Israel and for any Jew who identifies unequivocally as pro Israel. And that to me was the ultimate example of how destructive the far left can be to our ability to win elections.”
Torres argues that Harris herself wasn’t anti-Israel, but a mainstream, pro-Israel centrist who was falsely painted as anti-Israel by the far left. Nevertheless, as you may know, Harris talked out of both sides of her mouth, always mentioning the suffering of Palestinian people when she defended Israel. As Senor says, Harris was, on the Gaza War, talking out of both sides of her mouth to appeal to both sides. Senor argues that this kind of moral equivalency, or moral equivocation, cost Harris Jewish votes.
Torres chimes in eloquently, saying that in all politics, candidates must espouse “moral clarity”, and Jews didn’t feel Harris’s pious mouthings “in their kishkes“. (Torres gets extra points for the Yiddish.)
30 minutes in, Torres goes on an eloquent tear, including stuff like this:
“The fact that the far left would wage an antisemitic smear campaign against the most popular governor of the most pivotal swing state: that should have been a wake-up call that the far left is willing to sacrifice what is best for the Democratic party on the altar of ideological purity and anti-Zionism.”
Senor adds that pro-Hamas and anti-Israel protests weren’t just a Jewish issue—that others look at people celebrating Hamas and Hezbollah and get turned off by the far left. Torres thinks that the failure to deal with such protests undercut Americans’ sense of safety and convinced them that government cannot keep people safe. This, he sayus, was an indictment of the governments of both New York State and New York City.
In the end, since people of color, both middle-class and impecunious ones, are Torres’s constituents, he concludes that, at least in his district, the cost of living far, far outweighed their concern for a war 5,000 miles away.
I recommend this video not because it gives the reason why the Democrats were routed, but why they were routed in a poor, black district. And, to me at least, having sympathies for Israel, it makes Torres look like a guy with an exceedingly bright future in Democratic politics.
Like many Americans (and readers) this morning, I woke up, fumbled for my computer, and read the results in a state of shock. The Republicans had won everything: the Presidency, the Senate, and, most likely, the House (see NYT results below). As one of my friends wrote me, in the first email of the day, “I did not see this coming.” Neither did I. Click the headline below to see the NYT story (archived here for free)
A pessimistic take from the NYT:
Donald J. Trump rode a promise to smash the American status quo to win the presidency for a second time on Wednesday, surviving a criminal conviction, indictments, an assassin’s bullet, accusations of authoritarianism and an unprecedented switch of his opponent to complete a remarkable return to power.
Mr. Trump’s victory caps the astonishing political comeback of a man who was charged with plotting to overturn the last election but who tapped into frustrations and fears about the economy and illegal immigration to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris.
His defiant plans to upend the country’s political system held appeal to tens of millions of voters who feared that the American dream was drifting further from reach and who turned to Mr. Trump as a battering ram against the ruling establishment and the expert class of elites.
In a deeply divided nation, voters embraced Mr. Trump’s pledge to seal the southern border by almost any means, to revive the economy with 19th-century-style tariffs that would restore American manufacturing and to lead a retreat from international entanglements and global conflict.
Now, Mr. Trump will serve as the 47th president four years after reluctantly leaving office as the 45th, the first politician since Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s to lose re-election to the White House and later mount a successful run. At the age of 78, Mr. Trump has become the oldest man ever elected president, breaking a record held by President Biden, whose mental competence Mr. Trump has savaged.
His win ushers in an era of uncertainty for the nation.
To roughly half the country, Mr. Trump’s rise portends a dark turn for American democracy, whose future will now depend on a man who has openly talked about undermining the rule of law. Mr. Trump helped inspire an assault on the Capitol in 2021, has threatened to imprison political adversaries and was denounced as a fascist by former aides. But for his supporters, Mr. Trump’s provocations became selling points rather than pitfalls.
As of early Wednesday, the results showed Mr. Trump improving on his 2020 showing in counties all across America with only limited exceptions. Mr. Trump had secured the necessary swing states — including Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — to guarantee him the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.
Republicans also picked up at least two Senate seats, in Ohio and West Virginia, to give the party a majority in the Senate. Control of the House of Representatives was still too close to call.
Here are the results by state, with a few still undecided (the last update was at 5:45 a.m. Eastern time). As everyone expected, Illinois, as well as most of New England, went blue, while all the swing states with called elections (notably Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia) went for Trump. But he already has 277 Electoral-College votes, 7 more than he needs to win. Harris has not yet conceded nor made any announcement, though I heard on the news that she will speak this morning. Click on the map to see the state-by-state results:
Yes, America elected a man who, I think, is unstable and afflicted with narcissistic personality disorder. He is the first felon elected as President of the United States. Who knows what will happen? I was never a big fan of Kamala Harris, but I see Trump as unpredictable enough to plunge us into war. For the next four years we will face the Republicans enacting their agenda, making their laws and verifying them via a Republican-controlled Supreme Court.
I am not a political pundit, so all I can do is give my own personal reactions. Until recently, I thought that this election was Trump’s to lose, even though I knew it would be a squeaker. But Trump’s behavior over the last few weeks—the dark language, the execrable performance during the one debate, his laughter at the idea that reporters might be shot, the vows to overturn America starting on Day 1—all of this made me think that there is no way Americans could elect such a man.
They did.
On the other hand, I sometimes thought that this election was Harris’s to lose. What the American people wanted, I thought, was not only somebody likable (I don’t see Harris that way, but as someone who panders and dissimulates), and, most important, we—and by that I mean centrists, Democrats, and Republicans who don’t like Trump—wanted Harris to espouse a policy. But instead of hearing that, we heard a woman unable to answer questions, who pandered to the electorate using identity politics (which she’d seemingly foresworn), who seemed to be hiding the fact that she was really on the Progressive Left, and, in general, did not seem able to convince the public that she could handle the most important job in the world. She did not earn her nomination, but inherited it, and subsequently did nothing to show that she deserved it.
Still, all along I felt that she was a far better candidate than was Trump. She lost, I think, because she was not sufficiently centrist, and because she didn’t show, as Presidents must, that she had the ability to think on her feet. If there is a lesson for Democrats here, it is to recalibrate their message and move towards the center, and listen to the American people when they speak about things like immigration and the economy (no, tariffs—also Trump’s solution—are not the way to solve that)
Did wokeness cost Harris the election? Who knows, and I’m not prepared to assert it. (Note that the NYT above considers this a blow against “the elite.”) But I think the era of identity politics (an integral part of wokeism) has come to an end. Harris largely avoided them, but she still lost, for she did not lay out a program that would appeal to all Americans, which was what she promised to do. Perhaps, given the divisions in America, such a program is impossible.
Donald Trump ended his first term in disgrace, hit with a second impeachment after his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The 2022 midterm candidates he endorsed—Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz, Kari Lake—all went down in flames. In 2023, he was declared guilty of sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll in a civil case. This past May, he was convicted in a Manhattan court on 34 felony counts for improperly reporting hush money payments. Overall, he has faced 116 indictments. Even now, the New York State attorney general is trying to punish the Trump Organization with nearly $500 million in fines, claiming that he unlawfully inflated the value of his properties.
And yet here he is: America’s 47th president.
. . . . Trump’s mastery of political imagery [they describe four “iconic photographs,” including his punching-the-air photo after a bullet nicked his ear] stands in sharp contrast to Vice President Kamala Harris, who kept making gaffes when she needed to demonstrate basic competence. One such howler came at a rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan, eight days before Election Day. As the crowd chanted “Ka-ma-la! Ka-ma-la!” the vice president implored her fans: “Now I want each of you to shout your own name. Do that.” The cheers stopped. Then Harris offered an awkward laugh and, like a comic having to explain a joke that didn’t land, she said, “’cause it’s about all of us.”
In one stumble, you have a synopsis of what went wrong for the Harris-Walz ticket in 2024. Here was a friendly audience, raring to go, in a must-win state, brought to stunned silence because the candidate apparently hadn’t thought through a throwaway line at a rally. In the home stretch of the election, Harris couldn’t close the deal even as the media graded her on a curve.
In some ways, the Democratic Party should have seen all of this coming. In the perilous four weeks between Biden’s disastrous debate performance and the selection of Harris to replace him on the ticket, a number of Democratic insiders publicly proposed an abbreviated primary campaign to avoid anointing the vice president. Harris was seen by many Democrats as a liability. At the beginning of the summer she had a 37.9 approval rating, along with a reputation for being terrible to her staff and pathetic when it came to thinking on her feet.
A key part of her strategy was a disciplined avoidance of the media. Harris didn’t do her first solo television interview as her party’s nominee until five weeks after her selection on September 13. And until October, she largely avoided saying what she would do if she won the White House.
That turned out to be a good strategy. Because once Harris started to open her mouth, she reverted to form. Consider her October 8 appearance on The View, when she was asked the most obvious question of a vice president serving in an unpopular administration: What would you have done differently than President Biden? Her response: “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”
Is there any good news? Only that we won’t have a January 6 situation again! But joking aside, and despite all the anguish of my friends and most Democrats, I am strangely hopeful—hopeful that yes, the Republic can and will withstand four years of Trump and Republican rule. Somehow my faith in America has immunized me against the results of this election.
Beyond that, I can make no predictions save that Trump will not be elected again.
Here are the results of our poll from two days ago, and some readers have already sent anguished comments and emails. Harris was favored by more than six to one, and she was predicted to win by 62% of those who voted:
Finally, I listened to most of this two-hour podcast yesterday, created by The Free Press and moderated by Bari Weiss. It shows Sam Harris making the case for electing Kamala Harris, and Ben Shapiro making the case for Trump. This is about the best discussion I’ve heard, and I was convinced by Harris, especially his arguments against Trump. But Shapiro was no slouch, even though his case against Harris was better than his case for Trump.
Again, all I can think is this: “Our Republic will stand.” Ceiling Cat bless us all.
You are welcome to comment below. I’ll put up the Hili dialogue in an hour or so.
If you don’t want to be glued to the tube, I’ve learned from Luana of a good site to see the election returns in real time—that is, if you’re a fanatic about these things. It’s called 270towin, and shows a map giving votes in the states as they come in, and, at the same time, the latest Electoral College vote. For example, here’s what I see right now, a dead heat.
The color palette to the right tells you which states are considered safe, up for grabs, or (in tan) tossups when you click on them in real time.
When the count reaches 270, we have a winner. You can toggle back and forth between “live results” and “forecast”.
Feel free to blow off steam or elation below. It’s going to be a long night, and I have a feeling that the election won’t be settled when I wake up tomorrow.
As you know, there’s a Big Debate tonight between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It’ll be broadcast on television on ABC, a non-cable channel. ABC says this: (note that times are Eastern times):
The ABC News debate, moderated by David Muir and Linsey Davis, will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 10 at 9 p.m ET. A prime-time pre-debate special will air at 8 p.m. ET. It will air on ABC and stream on ABC News Live, Disney+ and Hulu. Viewers can also stream the debate on the ABC app on a smartphone or tablet, on ABC.com and connected devices.
The debate will last an hour and a half. I may do a live post with readers reacting in real time, but I will refrain from giving any of my own take until the next day.
If you’re a PBS fan, there’s a bunch of broadcasting on PBS starting at 6 pm EDT with the PBS News Hour, and continuing through the debate (with, undoubtedly, some post-debate analysis).
A few comments and some related articles.
Although Harris has been notably silent about specific policy issues until now, and has sat for only one (softball interview), I now see that there’s a menu of policy positions on her website, which you can see here. You’d better believe that the Trump campaign will be scanning them for what they see as weak spots. There are, of course, a gazillion ways Trump himselfcan be attacked, though, like Harris, he seems to have moderated some of his more extreme stands (e.g., on abortion) in a pragmatic bid for victory.
I’m not convinced that either candidate will tell the truth about what they really plan to do, as both now seem to be acting pragmatically: they both want to win, and both will say what they think will get them elected. Such is politics: you can’t govern unless you win. That said, I think Harris is absolutely serious in wanting to pass a law that reinstates the provisions of Roe v Wade nationwide, and I support her on that. But unless both houses of Congress turn Democratic, she stands no chance. As for Trump, I have no idea what he’s absolutely serious about, which scares me.
But I don’t think that Trump will have the self-control that will gain him a victory in the debate. Still, a victory in the debate may not, unlike the fatal Trump/Biden debate, have much to do with how people vote come November.
What will happen tonight? All I can predict with confidence is that it’s going to get nasty despite both candidates having moderated their tone and made noises about sticking to the issues. I don’t think Trump can control himself, and to the extent that Harris keeps her cool, she’ll come off looking better. But I hasten to add that Trump has always seemed impervious to how he “comes off,” and the support he’s enjoyed despite all the civil and criminal trials in his future support his statement that “”I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?. . . . It’s, like, incredible.”
As Tom Friedman notes in the NYT op-ed below (click headline to read, or find the article archived here). Harris has taken some positions in the past that could come back to haunt her should Trump bring them up in the debate. These include immigration and Title IX issues. As the Free Press reports in its daily news summary.
Even as Harris gets a little more specific in 2024, the promises she made in 2019 remain a headache. The latest unwelcome reminder of the progressive positions she took in the Democratic primary five years ago come courtesy of CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, who reports that during that race Harris told the ACLU she supports cutting ICE’s funding and providing gender transition surgery to detained migrants.
Further, she’s susceptible to her statement that her values haven’t changed but some of her positions have (e.g., fracking). If I were a moderator, I’d ask her to explain that. She’s also not good when thinking on her feet, and, with the pressure of a deranged opponent coming down on her, she has to try hard to keep her cool.
I am not a fan of Friedman so much, but I think he’s pretty much correct in his article below:
An excerpt:
“Joe and I got a lot of things right, but we got some things wrong, too — and here is what I have learned.”
For my money, uttering those 23 words, or something like them, is the key for Kamala Harris to win Tuesday’s debate against Donald Trump — and the election.
Utter them, and she will hugely improve her chances to win more of the undecided voters in this tight race. Fail to utter them or continue to disguise her policy shifts with the incoherent statement she used in the CNN interview — that while her positions might have changed on fracking and immigration, “my values have not changed” — and she will struggle.
Madam V.P., if you say your positions have changed but your values haven’t, what does that even mean? And what should we expect from your presidency — your values or your actions? Our latest poll shows too many voters still don’t know.
It’s OK to say: “I learned a lot as vice president. I’m proud of our record of putting America on a sustainable path to a clean energy future. It will make us more secure and more prosperous. But I also see that we can’t get there overnight. For reasons of both economic security and national security, we need an all-of-the-above energy strategy right now. So you can trust that in a Harris presidency, America will continue to lead the world in exploiting our oil and gas advantages but we will do it in the cleanest way possible while making the transition as fast as possible.”
I’m not so sure that admitting she was wrong will “hugely improve her chances” to win over undecided voters, but if she doesn’t she’ll be in a tight place.
Will admitting she was wrong hurt her? Not to me, but perhaps to the American public, which may interpret it as a weak candidate flip-flopping on the issues. Here’s one of the issues—from CNN—that she might want to back off on, especially given the fact that illegal immigration is now an important issue to many Americans (as is, to a lesser extent, “affirmative care”).
Click to read Kaczynski’s article mentioned above:
An excerpt from CNN:
As Kamala Harris pivots to the political center in her campaign for president, a 2019 questionnaire from a leading civil rights organization spotlights her past support for left-wing causes such as taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners.
In an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire then-Sen. Harris filled out as a candidate for president in 2020, she also expressed support for decriminalizing federal drug possession for personal use, and for sweeping reductions to Immigration and Custom Enforcement operations, including drastic cuts in ICE funding and an open-ended pledge to “end” immigration detention.
The questionnaire has received scant media attention and a spokesperson for the ACLU claimed it had remained live from 2019.
But the ACLU’s website upload and page source indicate the questionnaire was reposted last month after Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee. CNN was unable to find questionnaires filled out by other candidates from the 2020 campaign that the ACLU had reposted.
Harris has acknowledged that some of her stances have evolved over time but that she holds core beliefs that remain unshakable: “My values have not changed,” she said in an interview with CNN last month.
The ACLU questionnaire, which was sent to all Democratic and Republican candidates during the 2020 presidential campaign, provides a clear record of Harris’ progressive stances. Some candidates did not respond to the questionnaire, including Joe Biden. The ACLU later ran radio ads attacking Biden for not answering.
The ACLU also had volunteers question candidates at public town halls and later posted videos on their website of their responses.
During one town hall event in New Hampshire in April 2019, Harris was asked by a voter if she supports adding a “third gender” to federal identification cards.
“Sure,” Harris answered to a round of applause from the crowd. “I have my entire life and career been an ally and I see the issue of LGBTQ rights as a fundamental civil rights and human rights issue, period,” Harris said.
Here’s a graphic of that, again from CNN:
I have to say that her stand on this: giving federal funding for gender surgery for immigrants who entered the country illegally, is absurd. And slashing ICE funding is not something most Americans want. She’d better be ready to disavow these positions, because if Team Trump has any smarts, they’ll bring them up.
Perhaps most Americans will be watching the debate as a form of entertainment rather than a way to figure out how to vote. It’s not at all clear that there will be more debates, though, so this may be the only chance to see the candidates go mano a mano. All we know is the country is poised to go down two very divergent paths, and I find debate about that to be more anxiety-inducing than entertaining.
Anyway, these are just random thoughts, but I invite your random thoughts or predictions about the debate. I’m sure people will have more to say tomorrow.
Although if I were a Kiwi I’d probably be a member of the Labour Party, I have criticized them strongly for their education policy: a policy that has constantly tried to insinuate Māori “ways of knowing” (Mātauranga Māori ) into school science curricula (it’s fine if taught as history or sociology). Labour has also been engaged in a frenetic bout of “decolonization,” trying to get the country to adhere to the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), which has been dubiously interpreted as “Māori get half of everything: jobs, science grants, language in publications, etc.”
This “decolonization”, particularly in schools and colleges, has gone so far that no Kiwi citizen dares oppose it for fear of demonization. Academics, for example, won’t speak up because they’ll be fired. That’s why I get a ton of emails from disaffected New Zealand academics who are afraid to speak up against the insinuation of MM into science curricula, and it’s why I write so much about it. Who else can criticize “decolonization” in NZ without risking their job? (Only retired professor!)
As I’ve also documented, New Zealand’s schools aren’t doing their jobs: they’re slipping in student performance, in student attendance, and in quality when compared to schools in similar countries like Canada, Australia, Singapore, and the U.S. Kiwis are perfectly aware of this and worried about it, but again—they can’t object. (This decline in educational standards and accomplishment can’t be attributed solely to MM, as it’s been going on for several decades.)
But Labour, first under Jacinda Ardern (for whom I had great hopes) and then Chris Hipkins (former Minister of Education), must take the blame for what’s happened in the last six years, which includes a huge push for “decolonization.”
Apparently the public is fed up with Labour, as this report at the AP shows that Labour just lost the election, while the “conservatives” cleaned up big time (see also the report from the BBC and the live coverage at Stuff). The new PM, Christopher Luxon, isn’t really “conservative” in the way that American Republicans are; the NZ party is are closer to American “centrism”—or so I’m told:
From the AP:
Conservative former businessman Christopher Luxon will be New Zealand’s next prime minister after winning a decisive election victory Saturday.
People voted for change after six years of a liberal government led for most of that time by Jacinda Ardern.
The exact makeup of Luxon’s government is still to be determined as ballots continued to be counted.
Luxon arrived to rapturous applause at an event in Auckland. He was joined on stage by his wife, Amanda, and their children, William and Olivia. He said he was humbled by the victory and couldn’t wait to get stuck in to his new job. He thanked people from across the country.
“You have reached for hope and you have voted for change,” he said.
Supporters chanted his campaign slogan which promised to get the country “back on track.”
Outgoing Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, who spent just nine months in the top job after taking over from Ardern in January, told supporters late Saturday he had called Luxon to concede.
Hipkins said it wasn’t the result he wanted.
“But I want you to be proud of what we achieved over the last six years,” he told supporters at an event in Wellington.
Ardern unexpectedly stepped down as prime minister in January, saying she no longer had “enough in the tank” to do the job justice. She won the last election in a landslide, but her popularity waned as people got tired of COVID-19 restrictions and inflation threatened the economy.
Her departure left Hipkins, 45, to take over as leader. He had previously served as education minister and led the response to the coronavirus pandemic.
With most of the vote counted, Luxon’s National Party had about 40% of the vote. Under New Zealand’s proportional voting system, Luxon, 53, is expected to form an alliance with the libertarian ACT Party.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party that Hipkins leads was getting only a little over 25% of the vote — about half the proportion it got in the last election under Ardern.
And in a result that would be particularly stinging for Labour should it lose the seat,
A 40% vote for National versus a 25% vote for Labour is a huge difference, especially when compared to Ardern’s landslide. The NZ public clearly heaved out the old party with alacrity. I don’t know about National’s other policies, but it has promised to reform education, cracking down on schools to improve literacy and reforming curricula. Here are National’s six highlights for educational reform:
National will:
Progressively improve the adult-to-child ratio for under two year olds in early childhood education.
Invest an additional $4.8 billion in school infrastructure, including $2 billion over five years for the Fix New Zealand’s Schools Alliance, and another $2.8 billion over a decade for new classrooms and schools to accommodate growth and reduce the need to impose restrictive zoning requirements.
Establish a $160 million per year fund to support children with additional learning, behavioural and physical needs – allocated based on school roll and need – so schools can invest in the initiatives they believe are appropriate for their student community.
Invest $150 million over four years to fund an additional six million hours of teacher aide support in classrooms, equivalent to around 1500 new teacher aides (at 25 hours per week), or an average of 600 hours per school each year.
Invest $340 million over four years to deliver smaller class sizes by progressively reducing student-to-teacher ratios in primary schools. This will reduce teacher workloads and make sure children get more focused teacher attention in their foundation years.
Establish at least 25 new partnership schools by 2023, including some focussed on high-priority learners such as Māori and Pasifika; children with additional learning needs; and in specialist education areas such as Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM).
A quality education can make all the difference in the future of a child. National knows how important it is for children to leave school with firm foundations in core areas, but also for parents to feel empowered to make the choices that will best suit their child’s needs.
Now #6 does address indigenous people, but it is true that Māori and Pasifika children do poorly compared to others, like whites or Asians. So I have no objection to giving them special attention, so long as it’s not in the form of a Kiwi-an “affirmative action.” And the reform will concentrate on STEM, the area being most corrupted by decolonization.
But somehow I get the feeling that National is not going to truckle to indigenous demands that their “ways of knowing” be taught as equivalent of modern scientific ways of knowing. We may have a substantial time to find out, too, as there is no fixed term for NZ’s prime minister: they typically leave office when they lose an election or a confidence vote (in Ardern’s case, she simply resigned claiming she was worn out). In the 20th century, Kiwi PMs have stayed for up to 13 years.
