Assuming Trump and Clinton will be the nominees, I am interested in who everyone would vote for during the U.S. presidential election in 2016. I'm only including 3 options, with two of the options being the two main candidates and the other being a third party or write-in candidate. If you're planning to vote third party/write-in please post who you're voting for in the thread. I'm not going to include an option for not voting at all because some people can't vote in the U.S. election (that doesn't count as people choosing consciously not to vote) and I only want to see who people would vote for if they did.

Update: I set the poll results to public, so users can see who's voting for who.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/top-us-baby-...istration/

With the departures of Ted Cruz and John Kasich from the Presidential race, we are down to this:

Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump



Bernie Sanders vs. Donald Trump



30% -- lead with 40-49% but a margin of 3% or less
40% -- lead with 40-49% but a margin of 4% or more
60% -- lead with 50-54%
70% -- lead with 55-59%
90% -- lead with 60% or more

White -- tie or  someone leading with less than 40%.

In order to make it easier for people who are primarily interested the theory to avoid general political discussion I’ve created forums for theory and non theory political discussion.  Topics such as “is Trump the Grey Champion” and “is Trump the start of a realignment” go in the Theory Related Political Discussions forum, while topics about the horse race and the merits or lack thereof of each candidate go in the General Political Discussion forum. If theory related political threads drift into general political debate they will be split and/or moved to the General Politics forum.

In order to make it easier for people who are primarily interested the theory to avoid general political discussion I’ve created forums for theory and non theory political discussion.  Topics such as “is Trump the Grey Champion” and “is Trump the start of a realignment” go in the Theory Related Political Discussions forum, while topics about the horse race and the merits or lack thereof of each candidate go in the General Political Discussion forum. If theory related political threads drift into general political debate they will be split and/or moved to the General Politics forum.

Quote:When the thread contains personal attacks.

Quote:When the thread has drifted from the original topic, this can happen without anyone doing anything wrong conversation naturally drifts, however thread drift makes it difficult for readers to follow the discussion, when there a posts in thread on a different topic the thread can be split.

Quote:When a thread is posted in the wrong forum, mistakes happen and they can be corrected in about 30 seconds.

Quote:I plan on moderating this forum a bit more than the old forum was moderated, as the lack of moderation was turning people off.

And in a very, very good way.

Donald Trump's victory means that Darwinian economics and moral judgmentalism are out in the Republican Party, and in American conservatism as a whole, and "America First" nationalism and isolationism are in.

The great era that began with Ronald Reagan in 1980 ended on Tuesday - just as George McGovern's clinching of the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1972 ended the great era of national liberalism in the Democratic Party that began with FDR's nomination four decades earlier.

When all is said and done, I think that the Obama and Eisenhower Presidencies are going to look like good analogues. Both Presidents are chilly rationalists. Both respect legal precedents more than they trust legislation and the transitory will of the people in states. Both are practically scandal-free administrations. Both started with a troublesome war that both found their way out of. Neither did much to 'grow' the strength of their Parties in either House of Congress. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama won only one state that Eisenhower lost in either 1952 or 1956 (North Carolina); in 2012 he did not win any state that Dwight Eisenhower ever lost. This is amazing in view of the partisan identities of the two Presidents.

It may be premature, but I expect historians to hold Eisenhower and Obama similar in quality.

Despite the great differences in curriculae vitae, Eisenhower and Obama seem to have something very much in common: both are members of Reactive generations. 60-ish Reactives (George Washington, John Adams, Grover Cleveland, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower) may be the best sorts of leaders that Reactive leaders can be: cautious, mellow, respectful of precedent, and more trusting in legality than in the contemporary passion. Even if Barack Obama is one of the youngest Presidents ever elected and won't reach or surpass 60 as President (barring an amendment to undo the 22nd Amendment) he seems to act like someone in his sixties.

(The worst Reactive leaders are amoral, angry, cynical, bigoted leaders with an agenda of seeking revenge against real and imagined personal enemies -- like Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong, puppets of tyrannical leaders such as Vidkun Quisling and Mátyás Rákosi, and such brutal functionaries of tyrants as Andrei Vishinsky and  Lavrenti Beria). When all is said and done, I think that the Obama and Eisenhower Presidencies are going to look like good analogues. Both Presidents are chilly rationalists. Both respect legal precedents more than they trust legislation and the transitory will of the people in states. Both are practically scandal-free administrations. Both started with a troublesome war that both found their way out of. Neither did much to 'grow' the strength of their Parties in either House of Congress.

The definitive moderate Republican may have been Dwight Eisenhower, and I have heard plenty of Democrats praise the Eisenhower Presidency. He went along with Supreme Court rulings that outlawed segregationist practices, stayed clear of the McCarthy bandwagon, and let McCarthy implode.


 
gray -- did not vote in 1952 or 1956
white -- Eisenhower twice, Obama twice
deep blue -- Republican all four elections
light blue -- Republican all but 2008 (I assume that greater Omaha went for Ike twice)
light green -- Eisenhower once, Stevenson once, Obama never
dark green -- Stevenson twice, Obama never
pink -- Stevenson twice, Obama once

No state voted Democratic all four times, so no state is in deep red.

(This site uses the very old red for Democrats and blue for Republicans... I do not make waves about that in that website).

To be sure, one would expect any winning President to win almost entirely states that FDR won in 1936 (all then voting except Vermont and Maine), that Nixon won in 1972 (all but Massachusetts), or Reagan won in 1980 (all but Minnesota).  But the overlay between Obama and Eisenhower fits far better includes all four such states that FDR, Nixon, and Reagan won in nearly-complete wins of the entire USA. As another coincidence, Eisenhower was the first Republican to win Virginia since 1928 (24 years) and Obama was the first Democrat to win the Old Dominion since 1964 (44 years) -- and both won the state twice.   


Now, Carter vs. Obama:

If anyone has any doubt that the Presidential Election of 1976 is ancient history for all practical purposes:

Carter 1976, Obama 2008/2012    



Carter 1976, Obama twice  red
Carter 1976, Obama once pink
Carter 1976, Obama never yellow
Ford 1976, Obama twice white
Ford 1976, Obama once light blue
Ford 1976, Obama never blue

....As you can see, Carter lost a raft of states (among them California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, and Maine) that Democratic nominees for President have not lost after 1988, and some states (Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and New Mexico) that Democrats have not LOST in Presidential wins. On the other side, Carter was the last Democrat to win Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, or Texas. Barring a major realignment of the states in partisan identity or an electoral blowout, Republicans are unlikely to win more than a state or two in white and Democrats are unlikely to win more than a state or two in yellow for the next couple of decades..

I plan on moderating this forum a bit more than the old forum was moderated, as the lack of moderation was turning people off.  I won’t be reading every thread and every post, so use the report feature to report a thread or post in need of moderation.

There are 3 basic reasons to report a thread or post.

1. When the thread contains personal attacks.
   
2. When the thread has drifted from the original topic, this can happen without anyone doing anything wrong conversation naturally drifts, however thread drift makes it difficult for readers to follow the discussion, when there a posts in thread on a different topic the thread can be split. 
   
3. When a thread is posted in the wrong forum, mistakes happen and they can be corrected in about 30 seconds.
   
   
   
   
   

One of the reasons S&H do not get serious attention from scientifically-inclined social scientists might be because they gave little for scholars to work with.  S&H never game an explicit cause for their cycle. They outlined some causal concepts and proposed a partial verbal model that goes something like this:

 Basically their generations are like those Mannheim discussed.  They are formed by the experience of like-aged persons to history-shaping times that they call social moments.  The define like-age as occupation of a specific phase of life.  In the appendix of Generations they provide an example of an event, a war, that causes people occupying different phases of life to be imprinted into different generations. 

An example is the GI generation, in which the experience of depression and war over 1929-1946 imprints a certain set of attributes (what they call the Civic peer personality or Hero archetype) on those who were in the rising adulthood phase of life forging them into what is known as the Greatest Generation.  So those in the 22-43 age bracket during the 1929-1946 period become members of the GI generation.  Persons born between 1903 and 1907 inclusive would fully occupy the 22-43 age bracket during the 1929-1946 period, and so would constitute “core” GIs.  People born between 1895 and 1915 would spend at least 10 of the years when they were in the 22-43 age bracket during the 1929-1946 period.  Yet the 1895 to 1900 cohorts are considered as Lost, even those they spend more than half of their rising adult years in a 4T.  Similarly the cohorts born 1916-1924 spent more than half of their rising adult years in a 1T, yet they are considered as GIs. 

This problem emerges with all the generations.  If we narrow the formative period we can get something closer to the S&H dates.  Suppose we only consider the period of mobilization 1941-1946.  Now the 1903-1919 years become the core years.  S&H also assert that the coming of age experience is particularly important so let’s assert that anyone who comes of age during the war (i.e. serves) is automatically a member of the GIs and so we add the 1920-24 cohort (who were 22 over 1942-1946) and get GSs as 1903-1924.  This is close enough.

If we do the same thing for the Boomers, we find that if we use formative years of 1982-84 we can construct a Boomer gen born 1941-1960, which is close enough.  The problem is whereas the idea that WW II “forged” the greatest generation makes sense, the idea that the early 1980’s was when the Boomers were forged does not.  In fact this period falls outside of the 1967-1980 2T social moment S&H proposed in Generations. This makes no sense. One has to conclude that their generation-creating process does not work to produce the generations they found.
 
As far as I know, S&H never explored these ideas any further than the cursory treatment they gave in Generations.

Another way to look at this is to flip it around. Instead of having “generational imprinting” occurring over a long period of time (a phase of life) having it occur over a shorter one, say a single year instead.  If we assume that generations are imprinted at their coming of age (which S&H put at age 22) then we simply subtract 22 from their social moments to get the “core years” for their dominant generations to obtain the table below. The portion of the S&H generations outside the core are considered as cusps.
 
Formative moment     Generation      “Core” generation      S&H generation

1967-1980                       Boomers             1945-1958                   1943-1960

1932-1945                       GIs                       1910-1923                    1901-1924

1913-1922                       Lost                      1891-1900                   1883-1900

This way of construction generations works pretty well, but why? To get answer this I turn the focus to politics, in which the formative events are political moments are the generations are political generations, that function very similarly to the core generation concept as we shall see.  I shift to politics for two reasons.  The first is a discussion I had with marc Lamb, whom some of you remember as a troll.  He was that, but he was more and he and I had productive discussions in his early years over 2001-2003.

I came to this site from the longwaves forum, a discussion group (long gone) about economic long cycles or Kondratieffs.  At that time I thought of the saeculum as primarily an economic cycle because there were strong parallels between the two cycles, which I wrote about in a book.  Marc liked my economic stuff, but argued that politics, not economics was the key to the saeculum because all facets of the social world, economics, politics, religion, morals, in short, culture, are represented in one’s politics.

The second reason is that political sciences/historians have done the most work with generations.  Here’s a paper on how the political environment (measured by presidential approval in a given year) shapes people’s party voting preferences as a function of age.  That is, how the experience of a low or high-rated presidential affects your opinion of their party as a function of age.  This opinion-forming caused by historical experience is generational imprinting or “history creates generations”.  Figure 4 shows a plot of how strongly history impacts your political opinions.  The figure shows that generational imprinting happens mostly between the ages of 14 and 30.  If you calculate the cumulative effect of past experience on people in their fifties (when they occupy positions of power) from that figure you find that 50% of their opinion is formed by the age of 22.

Looking at it another way one can consider that people will at some point choose their side and this will likely happen between the ages of 14 to 30, or on average at age 22 with a standard deviation of 4-5 years or so.  That is, people “come of age” politically sometime between 14 and 30, but mostly in the years around age 22.   If we wish to consider a birth cohort, we are talking about large numbers of people.  For the birth cohort the age at which they collective come of age is 22 with a standard error of the mean equal to the standard deviation of the individual divided by the square root of the number of individuals.  For groups of a 100 or more, the standard error will be less than a tenth of the standard deviation and so the age at which a cohort comes of age will be a constant equal to 22.

These arguments justify the generation-creating mechanism outlined above.
How do generations create history?  Well for politics, history would be created by the “history makers”: statesmen, government officials and legislators.  Neil how has collected age data for congressmen, senators, governors and Supreme Court Justices for each year since 1789.  His site provides average ages for the first three for each Congress.  He has a tool from which it is easy to obtain the average age of the fourth groups as a function of time.  I then average these four means for each year and get a parameter I call leader age AL.  This is the average age at which politicians exercise their mature adult role of leadership.  A generation then creates history over the years at which they are age AL. 
 
Simply take a generation and add AL to it and you get their time of history creation.  Or take a period and subtract AL from it and you get the generation that created that history.  Subtract 22 from it and your get that generation created by that history.  What this means is generations create new generations.  A generation born over the specific span then “begets” a generation born AL- 22 years after that span.  That is, generational “replication time” (length) is AL-22.  So back in medieval times when elite lifespans were shorter than today AL was lower, or about 49 (more later about where this value comes from, but for now just bear with me), generational length was 25 years and the saeculum ran about 100 years.  During early modern times lifespans were a bit longer and AL was able 52 or so, and generational length about 28 years.  With the coming of representative government, legislators became important and AL would have to take into consideration their (generation younger ages than the king’s high ministers) and so AL drops to about 45 or 46 and generation length to 23 or 24 years in the 18th century. The saeculum shortens to around 90 years in the 1700’s.
 
So far so good.  But now look at today.  In 2008  AL was 62 giving a replication time of 40 years.  Thus, the youth who went clean for Gene (McCarthy), thrilled to Robert Kennedy and were inspired by MLK and scarred by their deaths of the latter two, begot a generation 40 years later who went in droves for Barrack Obama.  The 2T over 1964-1984 created the Boomer generation (b 1942-1962) who begot the Millennium generation born over ca. 1980- 2002.  This makes sense, but what about this gap between 1962 and 1980.  S&H created a new category of generation.  A less active, recessive generation that we know as GenX.  Similar gaps are found going back, in which sit other recessive generations.
 
The same mechanism that has Boomers begetting Milles, has the Silent begetting GenXers.   Now Boomer and Milles are dominant political generations and COA/create political moments, which roughly correspond to Schlesinger liberal eras.  Recessive political generations, like the Silent and Gen X,  come of age in conservative eras, create the next conservative era and beget a new recessive generation. And so you have two parallel “family trees”.  As you got back AL declines with shorter lifespans, generational replication times shorten and so do the length of political eras and generations.  This shortening is best shown by spacing between critical elections in 1774, 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, 1968 and 2008.  This spacing rises from 24 to 40 years right in line with rising replication time. (Note 2008 will likely be confirmed by a Dem victory in the fall, which seems likely).
 
If you go back further you find AL dropped to 44 at points in which replication time is 22 years, and you start to have the same generation coming of age (being created) and creating history at the same time.  A generation cannot create itself!  So some time before AL gets this short we have to shift from having a recessive and dominant generations to just having dominant ones.   In other words the modern system (called by saeculum II by Sean Love) that I have been discussing turns into the system I discussed earlier, which Love calls saeculum I.  I place the split at the American Revolution 4T, which has an unusually long liberal era in Schlesinger’s scheme.  He has the 1765-1787 period as one liberal era.  I extend this period to 1765-1789 and split it into two at the 1774 break point: 1765-1774 and the 1775-1789.  The first of these creates the recessive generational line and the latter creates the founders of the dominant line.