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What you're describing is how nearly all the countries of Latin America became the way they are. If we fall into that trap, the best we can hope for is that a Pinochet (a strong-man dictator who supports markets) comes along to lead us back out.

Several of the commentators I follow on podcast are comparing the present to the 1830-50 period and talking about forming some kind of new-right party which they think can become a new major party, as the Republicans did in about 1856. In most versions the new party would be called the Patriot party or America First party. But beware fakes!

As I read your post a thought came to me: Perhaps the Iranian regime will last as long as it has an army of bullies willing to kill any citizens that disagree with the regime regardless of the economy. My guess is with 1400 years of Islamic fanaticism backing them up the ayatollahs and mullahs have a deep pool of willing bullies even if they have to reach outside Iran to get them. Is the Iranian populace up to the task of taking down such a brutal regime? Are they even adequately armed? I wonder how many of those willing to throw off the regime were already killed off as part of the estimated 30 to 40 thousand already executed. Just thinking out loud here, Lucky, because I'm not seeing or hearing of much resistance inside Iran anymore.

Hell, I heard that even some RINOs were introducing their own version of a Amnesty Bill! Spit

Since you stated nothing will convince you I won't argue that, but I will point out you misread what I was saying regarding that red wave. The argument being posited wasn't that voters responded based on oil prices, it is that they didn't. Specifically that the effects were not due to the oil prices but that in combination with the other "inflation" aspects and the length and lack of visible policy response - the no end in sight. And your conclusion basically agrees with mine: absent much higher, lasting prices that extend outward to other costs it won't be a deciding factor, and nothing is indicating that is happening.

On the "Dobbs decided the midterms" claim:

The standard framing you are pointing to became consensus in the press within about 72 hours of the 2022 election, and it has been repeated so many times since that the underlying data gets lost. Looking at what the data actually shows matters because the analytical error in the Dobbs-decided-everything narrative is the same kind of single-variable snapshot thinking the article above is critiquing about gas prices.

Some of the evidence that Dobbs mattered is real. KFF/AP VoteCast found that voters who cited the Supreme Court decision as their single most important factor broke more than 2-to-1 for Democratic candidates, and roughly 9 percent of Republicans who prioritized Dobbs crossed over to vote Democratic. Abortion ballot measures went 5-for-5 in favor of abortion rights across five states, including Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana where voters otherwise broke Republican on candidate races. Any serious analysis has to start by acknowledging those signals are real.

The question is whether they add up to the causal claim being made. A 2025 study in Economics Letters by Blumenkrantz et al. used nationwide county-level vote data and controlled for demographic and economic factors. Their finding: after those controls, the Republican vote margin in 2022 does not significantly differ from prior midterm elections. The one exception was meaningful but narrow: in states with abortion ballot measures on the ticket, Republican vote margin decreased by 4.8 percentage points more than the national average. Note that I use "market" often here. That is because I view politics through an economics sense - every race is a market for government power/use of force. I find it much more predictive and instructive to analyze them in that sense.

That 4.8 points has been treated as proof that Dobbs moved the midterms, but that reading overlooks a structural change Dobbs itself introduced: by returning abortion policy to the states, the ruling shifted the relevant market from Congress to state governments. The finding becomes less convincing still once you look at those ballot-measure states as the distinct markets they actually are rather than as six instances of a single phenomenon.

The six ballot-measure states came to their measures through very different political conditions, and those conditions pre-sorted the outcomes. California and Vermont had Democratic supermajority legislatures that placed protective measures, an option available only in states where Democrats already dominated. Michigan got its measure through a citizen petition requiring 750,000-plus signatures, the largest in state history and a demonstration of pre-existing organizing infrastructure that predated Dobbs. Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana had restrictive measures placed by Republican legislatures expecting to ratify conservative voter preferences. Every one of these conditions encoded political realities that existed before June 2022, meaning the states that entered the ballot-measure market were pre-sorted in ways the statistical controls cannot capture.

California passed Prop 1 with 66.9 percent in a state where Newsom won reelection by eighteen points. Vermont passed Proposal 5 with 76.8 percent in a state where the Republican Senate candidate lost by thirty-nine points. These states contribute to the 4.8-point finding, but their candidate-race outcomes were foregone conclusions regardless of whether abortion was on the ballot.

Michigan is the only competitive market in the set, and its congressional results are instructive. The delegation went from 7-7 to 7-6 Democratic, but Michigan also lost a seat in reapportionment and ran on entirely new maps drawn by an independent redistricting commission, making any Dobbs-specific attribution difficult to isolate from redistricting effects. The one district Democrats flipped, MI-3, followed the same candidate-quality pattern visible nationally: moderate Republican Peter Meijer, who voted to impeach Trump, was primaried by Trump-endorsed John Gibbs, who then lost to Democrat Hillary Scholten by 13 points. That is the Oz/Walker/Masters dynamic, not a Dobbs dynamic. Because Dobbs shifted the issue to state governments, the governor's race is where its effect should be strongest, yet Whitmer's margin improved only 1.1 points over her 2018 open-seat race despite $38 million in Prop 3 campaign spending and massive volunteer mobilization on the same ballot. That result is less than the typical incumbent advantage provides.

The Kansas cases are the cleanest test. In August 2022, Kansas rejected the restrictive amendment 59-41 with turnout roughly doubling typical primary levels. Then in November, the same electorate reelected Republican Senator Jerry Moran by a wide margin, sent an all-Republican House delegation to Washington, and split the governor's race narrowly for the Democratic incumbent. Kentucky and Montana show the same pattern: voters rejected restrictive measures while simultaneously reelecting Republican federal delegations. The ballot-measure market and the candidate-race market cleared at different prices in the same week, with the same consumers making different decisions in each. A referendum vote on a single policy question is a different product than a candidate vote bundling dozens of positions, personal qualities, and local dynamics, and voters evaluate them accordingly.

In the competitive-race market where the 2022 outcome was actually determined, the dominant variable was candidate quality rather than any issue dynamic. The Republicans who underperformed were Trump-endorsed candidates with their own liabilities: Oz in Pennsylvania, Walker in Georgia, Masters in Arizona, Bolduc in New Hampshire, Lake in Arizona. All ran meaningfully behind other Republicans on the same ballot. Meanwhile, pro-life Republicans with disciplined campaigns (and in the appropriate state market) won their races.

DeSantis signed a 15-week abortion limit and won 53 percent of women in Florida. Kemp in Georgia, Abbott in Texas, DeWine in Ohio, same pattern. The abortion attack worked as a delivery mechanism for candidate-quality attacks against weak candidates, not as an independent issue driving outcomes against strong ones. Tom Bonier of TargetSmart, a Democratic strategist with every incentive to claim Dobbs as decisive, described it precisely: Dobbs "focused and crystallized" the Republican extremism argument that "wasn't really making a dent in the numbers" before it had a concrete example to attach to.

A second factor often left out of the narrative is the failure of the traditional economic-backlash mechanism. Mutz and Mansfield, writing in PNAS, found that 55 percent of voters held "neither party" or "both parties" responsible for inflation. You cannot have a red wave driven by economic grievance when voters cannot decide who to blame, and that attribution failure was independent of Dobbs.

The structural problems in the Dobbs-decided-everything narrative are the specific ones my other recent posts have identified, with the added twist of comparing a previously national market to a new collection of state markets. "What War Polls Actually Measure" covers how national aggregate data cannot resolve local market dynamics. "The Number That Predicts Nothing" covers how a single metric gets assigned causal weight it cannot carry when other variables are doing the work. "The Bilateral Disgust Contest" covers how forecasting models fail when they omit load-bearing variables. The Dobbs narrative does all three simultaneously.

Unfortunately, the Hermand Goering quote is unsubstantiated.

Thanks for the post, the points and argument are solid.
No mention of nukes and missiles, the cause of the action, tho' note, without the oil income the regime is not just weak, it will loose internal authority.

Yes ,and many in coordination with the Deep states agenda, I would add that many RINO’s were in sink with the enemies of We The People.

A contest to see who is the tallest midget?
All jokes aside

The DemonRats have their "Super Delegates" to thwart the will of their constitutes.

The RINOs simply become turncoats, once elected. And there is a proven mechanism to make this happen in real-time:

I just heard an interview with a freshman CongressCritter.
He said the first cocktail party he was invited to, a gorgeous young thing hung all over him all night. Of coarse the expected happened.

What he didn't see coming was that she was a honeypot.
All caught on camera.
He's an owned man now.
He votes the way he is told, or he can walk away.

He said this happens to anyone not savvy enough to sense a trap is being set.

And the Demoncrat media is hoping that you are as bad at statistics as they are. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Dobrian,
In your DemonRat highlight list, you missed a couple:
> Creation of the Federal Income tax (1913)
> Creation of the FED (1913)
> The New Deal (1933)
> Welfare (1965)
> That shitshow known as Vietnam.
> "Super Delegates": the very antithesis of "Democracy"
> Dodd-Frank
> The Climate Scam (in all it's incarnations)
> The 1873 incorporation of the Republic (the circumvention the Constitution)
> The Illegal Alien Invasion.
> Trillions in Fraud: From Minnesota, to Maine, California, New York.. enough fraud to eliminate our entire national debt!

At the State of the Union" Trump called upon all of Congress to literally make a stand: is their priority legal American citizens? Only Republicans stood, not one Rat, not one.
In a recent interview, I witnessed a Rat Congress Critter say outlaid, their parties TOP PRIORITY is illegal alien voters.

Even this amended list of shame is far from complete.

The "red wave" failed due to the overturning of Roe v Wade by the Supreme Court. It motivated the left and moderate independents to keep the dems in power.

I laugh when I hear the left complaining about the gas prices. They were higher under Obama and Biden. Also, I remember that the left wanted high gas prices so the people wouldn't drive as much and take public transport and find alternatives (EVs).

Lot of good points, however this “Biden's party then lost only 9 House seats in the 2022 midterms, dramatically underperforming the predicted "red wave."
Fake election results as an example of voters response to oil prices or anything else is not convincing to me. In a few mo.s gas at the pump will be significantly lower than today and won’t be a factor in the mid-terms, imo.

ThanQ FFA, Of course the fake allies are opposed to Trump taking full control of the oil markets. The city of London lost the insurance control. They used terrorism to cause high insurance premiums resulting in 50 years of artificial high energy prices.
3 top 8 energy producers oil has been kept off the mrkt. Venezuela,Iran and Russian oil adding to the supply demand equation will result in lower prices.
Another win for US is NATO and the UN are on life support. Get ready to welcome to Greenland to our constitutional republic. Tired of winning yet?

Well, sure lots of heat, but no one wants the laundry connected to the engine room via steam. They get the heat with electricity.

Soap I can see, but with a nuclear reactor on board, I can't see where they'd have a problem with heat.

Thanks for the post FFA! Excellent points up and down the list.

Nicely done. Interestingly, you point out the "inflation tax" on gas price at the pump, which is NEVER mentioned in the MSM as a factor.

Excellent article. Thanks, FFA.

It is a possibility, for sure. But I think the more recent extremeness of Democrats has actually worked against it. I guess you could think of that as a silver lining to the shrieking autocrats on the Left; they've made being a Democrat or voting that way less acceptable - that disgust kicking in for them.

Now, I am not saying he should/shouldn't, but if Trump's speech was more refined and less hyperbolic and raw, we'd be in a very different world I think. Because despite the R next to his name, Trump (and Vance!) are 1980s-1990s Democrats by almost every policy position. So if you removed the disgust part of the anti-Trump side I'd suspect an easy 15, maybe up to a 20 point swing to the current Republican party.

I think decent issue polling shows it: 70+% on illegal immigration, voter ID, no-men in women's sports, don't be "sexual-first" in schools with children, 65+% agreeing with "no nukes for Iran," how the Republicans "fight" inflation, or countering China. And almost every one was a position the Dems agreed with back then (and for most positions Republicans, too).

Right there is the bulk of the public pissing contests. When you strip away the party affiliation, names, and the partisan framing the real support for the Left falls away significantly. Unfortunately there is no true Right Wing in politics these days. But if not for those disgust level disagreements with Democrats, by Democrats, I think a lot more would vote Democrat. Unless we had that true Right Wing, of course.

Thanks. On the evenly split that has nagged at me for a long time as well. I suspect there are two main factors:

1. It is still primarily seen as a binary choice, and there aren't any biological factors that might skew a binary distribution. Poll questions asking if your Red or Blue artificially shape the poll outcome.

2. I haven't investigated specifically for it yet, but I suspect a factor is the distribution of high-density vs low-density population distribution. It is clear that low-density strongly runs Republican while high-density does it for Democrats (which I find hilariously ironic).

3. Not everyone votes. The last "big" cycle was 2024 and it had only about 60% voting, so really we're not looking at everyone. My hunch is that those who don't are a mix of "I don't like either and am not going to play" and those (like myself and probably most of us here) who do not fit into either box at all. That removes them from the population which might otherwise change the split to something like a three way split. At an oversimplified math level, if 60% roughly distribute evenly, that is 30, 30, leaving 40 as "other." Personally, I think seeing it that way can really shift how one thinks about it.

4. Something that is a mix of earlier ones: the more "leave me alone" types are IME, not only less likely to play poll games, but less likely to register and vote. But with the Left going apoplectic and inevitably more authoritarian, it pushes them into taking a stand out of self defense if nothing else. I suspect this is behind a quiet and rarely reported shift in registered voter affiliation (for the states that still have it). Notably in solid blue states, red has been closing the gap there and in some exceeding blue.

5. The Democrats are really only unified on "we want more power." To your point of public opinion vs. politician position, consider Voter ID. It is an 80/20 issue. Even 70+% of Democrats favor/want it. But the Democratic "leadership" hates it. This overall phenomenon (I've often heard it expressed as "on every 80/20 issue the Democrats take the 20%") is probably reducing the voting of otherwise Democrat voters, thus skewing the numbers.

LOL...I'm close. I, literally, can't afford to work due to taxes.

It's a joke and an insult to anybody who understands basic math. They're playing to the prole shlub...like arguing about which chair to move first on the deck of the Titanic. It's a joke. We'll eventually default...But, not before trying to use the only method of payoff that's not political suicide for incumbents...inflation.

You nailed it. I had a pension check coming in. 10% was just removed by health premium. Who's to say that won't happen every year? Nobody. It will happen. It's easy money. Theft. Per longstanding Federal law they cannot alter/reduce a "defined benefit" pension.....except for this, apparently. They found the loophole and now they'll take it...