The Problem of Unreliable Predictions
March in Dearborn Michigan November 2, 2024, expresses peoples' anger with candidates that stand for war, genocide and impunity
One problem with predictions on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election as a two-party race is that the Democratic and Republican parties no longer function as political parties. The cartels of private interests that operate shift and change alliances, and so do the votes of their representatives in Congress. There are factions within these factions that show themselves not only during elections but for voting on legislation and other matters in between elections. The huge difficulty the House of Representatives had in electing a speaker last year is an example. The lack of a speaker halted all legislative activity for three weeks until finally a settlement was cobbled together with a lot of give and take nobody was happy with.
Cartel machinery in different states organized to defeat elected representatives presenting themselves for re-election in the primaries, often by targeting those who supported Palestine, or who did not bow to Trump, or who otherwise refused to be bribed.
Whereas in the past, candidates tended to rely on the party machinery to get elected, what stands out more today is that candidates must generate their own machinery. For instance, Obama built his own "army" of volunteers beholden to him directly, not the Democratic Party. The same kind of thing is evident with the two presidential candidates today.
While the individual candidates are still beholden to their private funders, they are not beholden to party machinery but to the machinery built around themselves. It is their private backers who generate the machinery. It has nothing to do with political parties which were at one time an integral part of a public system to involve the people in supporting the system of party government. Today, the narrow private interests of oligopolies have completely usurped the power of the state. These narrow private interests select the candidates, set their agenda and decide the outcome.
Thus, to more accurately predict the outcome of an election requires seeing what problems the U.S. ruling class faces at home and abroad, what agenda it is advocating and who it thinks can best impose that agenda on allies and foes alike. The anarchy and chaos the U.S. "rules-based order" has created both at home and internationally and the fact that the cartels and coalitions of the oligopolies work all sides at once in the style of very rich Las Vegas gamblers, makes prediction a game of chance.
Elections are also a matter for the gamblers to bet on as in any horse race, except in this horse race, it is nearly impossible to know at the starting point just what shape the horses are in.
In this election another wild card is the extent of anger amongst the people with candidates that stand for war, genocide and impunity and what effect their organized resistance will have on the election outcome.
This article was published in
Monday, November 4, 2024
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/ITN2024/Articles/TI54462.HTM
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