Commerce in the year of elections

Happy New Year! A quick housekeeping note to kick us off. This project is starting to gain some real momentum so I’ll be publishing weekly on Tuesdays throughout 2024. That means I’ll be tweaking the format to do more quick-hitter takes that I can bang out in an hour on the week’s news with the goal of one monthly longread to keep you all honest.

Noticing quite a few new email addresses come through each day so if we don’t know each other personally, please please reply to say hi. I do this primarily to have a virtual barroom conversation with good people so I’d love to learn who you all are.

OK, we’ve got good vibes going so let’s ruin it all with a nice politics post 🙂 

One of the greatest privileges to living in a functional state is that most citizens can give precisely zero fucks about politics with minimal adverse impact on their day to day quality of life. It’s also the ultimate double edged sword for a mature democracy. Hard times create civically minded men and women who give a damn. Men who give a damn create create good times. Good times create apatehtic men. And apathetic men create hard times.

American society has a weird dichotomy of people who choose to make being politically active their entire identity and those who trip over themselves to make sure you know that anything that they say or do isn’t political in nature. This is of course, mostly bullshit. Politics is simply the dirty elbow grease of democracy. If you do business in a democracy, to fundamentally opt out of politics is an unserious position, even when it is a privilege you are afforded. Giving a shit about the trajectory of your nation is a competitive advantage. 

In 2024, avoiding politics as a commerce operator will be a near impossible task. From the moment the Iowa caucus kicks off, every single major business news story will be framed with a political subtext. For better or worse, no country makes an absolute soap opera of its political process more than we do. Every election season feels longer than the entire anthology of the Walking Dead. Its a system almost designed to make citizens resentful of the political process.

But like it or not, politics matters and this is the most important political year of our lifetime both at home and abroad.

Around The World 

In eight days, Taiwan heads to the polls in a criminally under-covered and wildly vital parliamentary election which will go a long way towards determining whether the nation takes a conciliatory or pro-independence stance towards its large shadow. China is straight up framing the election as a struggle between war and peace and urging citizens to make the “correct” choice. 

All this comes against the backdrop of President Xi’s rare admission that the Chinese economy is in serious trouble. This paragraph from CNN sums it up nicely: 

Two days after Xi hit the airwaves, TikTok Shop suddenly announced that it has to actually make money, something we’ll dig into a lot more next week. Look, to a hammer who writes a newsletter called United States of Amazon, everything is a nail but it’s hard to see this as pure coincidence. If the Jan 13 elections swing against Xi, who knows what best laid plans of Chinese and American business operations will be caught in the crosshairs. 

Elsewhere, Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, has an unpredictable election upcoming. India has a parliamentary election that will serve as a de facto referendum on Modi. The EU parliamentary vote in June will be an interesting canary in the coal mine for measuring global anti-immigration sentiment and Mexico’s election a few days before promises to whip up the migrant narrative on the US campaign trail. Finally, in South Africa (where the ruling party selects the president), the African National Congress risks falling below 50% of the vote just 25 years after Thabo Mbeki succeeded Mandela in a landslide that made one-party rule seem near perpetually inevitable.  

This is an email delivered to busy professionals so these are almost comically reductionist summaries– I urge you to read more about each of these races. But suffice to say, with most of the world’s largest economies either directly or indirectly charting their macro political course, this is a historically significant geopolitical year for the world. 

Murica’s 2024 Election 

OK, I’ve bored you with the vegetables of foreign affairs. Let’s eat a little candy and call the U.S. presidential race. 

There’s no way around it–  as of today, things look absolutely awful for Biden. As the S & P rips near historic highs, inflation trickles back down and the Fed looks poised to pull off the mocked soft landing, Biden’s approval split sits at 38/55. Biden was elected to turn the page on COVID and make politics boring again. He’s done just that and look where it has him. 

In general, the macro vibe is perhaps historically bad for any incumbent president as 73% of Americans believe the nation is on the wrong track, a historic high riding a 20 year trend.

I like Reuben Rodriguez’s explanation for this best– we live in a time of unprecedented change which brings about deeply intense nostalgia. If this dynamic continues, we’ll be trapped in a weird doom loop of one-term presidents. But here’s why I think it won’t happen. 

In a reversal of 2016, Biden defeats Trump after trailing in all of the meaningful polls after Trump’s official confirmation as the GOP nominee. It will go down like this:  

Going into Election night, Trump will hold an aggregate 2-3 point lead in the polls, akin to Clinton’s 2016 edge. He’ll absolutely wipe the floor with Biden in Florida early, winning by 8+ points by dinnertime and sending the punditry into an absolute frenzy. In a stunner, Trump will lose New York by only 10 points, make major inroads in a number of blue states and permanently destroy any notion of Democrats turning Texas even the slightest shade of purple.   

But like daddy’s steady 1964 Oldsmobile, Grandpa Joe will chug on holding Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Nevada, New Hampshire & Minnesota. Georgia and Arizona swing back to Trump but it’s no matter. The president wins with 279 electoral votes. In the end, Biden wins the popular vote by about 2 million votes as well. 

Here’s my logic for why the zeitgeist will undervalue Biden leading up to Election Day. With Trump somewhat sidelined over the past few months, the right has refound its core playbook of drumming up a litany of manufactured controversies.  Like a lamb to the slaughter, several center-left pundits and mainstream media have gotten right in line. As a result, the president of Harvard bombing in front of Congress becomes some sprwaling rebuke of liberal politics writ large.

While all this kind of stuff plays really well with the comically small sample size of voters who actually respond to polls, it’s a funhouse mirror way of sampling public opinion. While it all hurts Biden’s approval rating now, it will largely be irrelevant by the fall when Trump owns the spotlight.

The president’s greatest political trait is that he isn’t on Twitter and with a gun to his head, probably couldn’t tell you who Claudine Gay is. In short, Biden lives in a magical world that is blissfully devoid of any online manufactured culture war bullshit. And thankfully, so too do tens of millions of Americans who will hit the polls.

In the months leading up to the election, all the GOP’s narrative manipulation nuance will wither as Trump goes to eleven, alienating just enough swing voters to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

2024’s silent majority will be people who simply want to vibe in peace. It’ll be just enough to carry the president to a second term.