I've never changed my mind so much over who I will vote for during an American presidential election year. First it was Williamson, but that flamed out fast. Democratic primary challengers can't run issue campaigns for very long if they are not successful in the first few primary states.
Like many others, I started focused on the differences between Trump and Biden when it became clear these would be the major party nominees. Both Biden and Trump have a recent track record, making their stated policies uninteresting. In practice, Trump seems to foster an extreme amount of cultural liberalism, whereas the latter doesn't, and despite stereotypes. So, if I were a stalwart liberal, I would probably vote Trump. Trump is also a huge deficit spender and moreso (in practice) than Biden. And unlike Biden, Trump has repeatedly signaled an agreement with Keynesian economic theory, to the point of approaching MMT reasoning. Biden has been much more of a deficit hawk in public. To vote for maximum deficit spending it'd make sense to vote Trump for president and capital "D" Democrats for Congress on the same ballot. This is partly because of the recent presence of MMT economists within the Democratic Party wing of the US Senate.
With Trump as the big spending liberal Keynesian and Biden as the somewhat more conservative candidate, why are the economic circles most associated with prominent Keynesians clinging so hard to Biden? Biden is making it clear he values democracy more than Trump, but Keynes was indifferent about democracy as a whole. Whatever the reason is for prominent Keynesians near universally backing Biden over Trump, it likely has little to do with deficit spending. Even more confusingly there are many monetarists on the Republican Party side voting for Trump because they think he will spend less money than Biden. Their wish is not based in evidence.
The January 6th insurrection selfie stick riots seemed so devoid of policy hopes that it was basically a mockery of a revolution. That made want to vote Biden for a short bit out of sheer spite. Ultimately, however, the choice between a queeny reality TV liberal who doesn't enact tranformational change and a comparatively temperamental/fiscal conservative with dementia who doesn't enact transformational change is not compelling enough for me.
So then I decided not to vote. Until today, when I read Jill Stein's policy page out of boredom. I've worked for Stein's presidential campaigns twice, starting in 2012. During 2012, Stein was super focused on the Green New Deal proposal, which I felt was a more reasonable set of policies than on offer from the major two parties. The Green New Deal proposal started 5 years earlier in the UK and eventually made its way into the margins of US Democratic Party policy circles 6 years after the US Green Party pushed it.
The Congressional Democrats ultimately voted against the Green New Deal multiple times however, not unlike prior votes on other New Deal mimicking or extension proposals. When Republicans put the Green New Deal to a vote to call bluffs, every Senate Democrat and Republican voted against it in 2019. Progressive Congressional Democrats didn't face much backlash as the proposal was doomed to fail at Trump's desk anyway. However, years later, when in control of the House, Senate, and presidency, all Senate Democrats voted to in support of Sen. John Barrasso's (R) budget amendment to keep Green New Deal policies out of budgets, including Bernie Sanders, a prior sponsor of the Green New Deal. All of this seems in direct contrast to public majority wishes. The small amount of polling done before 2019 shows a small majority of Republican US citizens supported the Green New Deal and a large majority of Democratic US citizens supported it. I tried to work less for Stein in 2016, when she became synonymous with professional-managerial capitulating concerns like college degree accessibility. But her Virginia campaign coordinator quit that year and started delegating the entire campaign to myself and another then co-chair of the NoVA Greens named Jim. I sort of expected her to continue that one-note policy obsession in 2024, but she has dropped it completely, which is refreshing.
Jill Stein's policy page is now not that much different from a set of policies I wished a party would adopt on an earlier blog I ran. She of course didn't read it, nor did it influence her. She got her inspiration from actually influential people like FDR. If she's on the ballot, I guess I'll vote for her, if not then I won't vote.
I feel like when Democrats cry that Trump's self-proposed authoritarianism will last more than a few days or years, that they are bluffing. If they truly believed that I think they would have passed laws to prevent consitutional crises when they had a majority in the US House and US Senate in 2021. They didn't, they just prefer to use the threat of a worst-case Trump scenario to appear reasonsable and get votes. Trump was the Democratic Party elites choice for Republican nominee in 2016, 2020, and 2024. If they truly thought Trump was an existential thread to their careers, I don't think they would have advertised him so much back when he was tying with Jeb Bush in 2016. And as Gabriel Debenedetti lays out in detail, Democratic party elites, including the DNC and the Clinton campaign conspired to make Trump or a select other few the Republican nominees in 2016