Conservatives are rejoicing over the incoming new Republican triumvirate in Washington. Include the Supreme Court, and all 3 branches of government are in Republican hands for only the third time in my lifetime. Whoopie!

But wait. Donald Trump is a center-right populist. He is not a conservative in a traditional sense. Is this a problem? Should conservatives put the cork back in the half-drunk bottle of champagne?

Let’s take a look.

Many of you were surprised that I did not “spike the football” in my immediate post-election missive. That’s just not me. I won 17 straight elections when I was in office. I did not enjoy campaigns. I endured them in order to be able to affect policy. After each of those 17 victories, I took a deep breath, enjoyed an adult beverage in celebration, was grateful that it was over and that I won, and then started thinking about the job ahead. That is what I did last week. It’s just who I am.

Winning elections is hard. Governing is harder. We will have lots of opportunities to analyze what happened in this week’s election over the next 2 1/2 months until Donald J. Trump is inaugurated as only the second American President to serve 2 non-consecutive terms. (The first being Democrat Grover Cleveland in the 19th century.) With most of this missive, I would like to focus on the difficult challenges ahead for the new American government.

You may have heard that there is an election next week. Well, technically these days, there has been an ongoing election for about a month and it ends next week. Actually the voting ends next week but in dysfunctional places like the state of California “counting” said votes will persist for 30-40 more days.

In this missive, I will tell you where I see the election as standing as of this writing. And then, we will discuss what each candidate for president might do with their newly acquired power. This power shift is not being discussed much on the campaign trail.

Three separate topics today. So, let’s get right into them.

Energy: Energy is essential for almost all human activity. From basic needs like cooking food or moving from place to place or keeping warm at night to all the things in a modern lifestyle like computers, you need energy to do any of it.

The Machine: Nobody is going to vote for Kamala Harris. Well, OK, a few people are. But most who will pull the lever for her are either voting against Donald Trump or they are voting for the Democratic Machine.

The Eve of Destruction: The 1965 song that opens this missive was a huge hit in the US and UK, hitting #1 in the US. The Vietnam war was heating up. We were all being taught drills in the event of a nuclear attack.

I try hard to understand what the future holds. I expect we all do. We have more information now than ever at our fingertips. We can research almost anything with a few clicks on a keyboard and find out things that 50 years ago would take researchers days to find in a library. Maybe it’s the easy access to reams of information that makes it more difficult to see what lies ahead, when we used to just rely on gut feel. Or, maybe we are in a particular era of uncertainty that obscures our vision of the path ahead. Let’s take a look at our 5 dimensions of chaos and try to assess what might come next. As you will see, there are mixed messages on all of them.

I confess I did not watch the debate on Tuesday evening. I am an Elder here at our church in Scottsdale, and we had a previously scheduled session meeting that night. I’m sorry Donald and Kamala. But God comes first.

So, I will not comment on the debate itself, but instead on the reactions to it and perhaps where things might go from here:

Trump Campaign: It was a bad night for the Trump team. All but the most ardent always-Trumpers agree that Trump took the bait on too many issues that Harris wanted to talk about while failing to make her defend her record at all. The “moderators” were totally on board with Team Kamala, which even all lefties except the most fervent ones agree. Even taking that into account, Donald did not make his points effectively.

In 2006, Arnold Schwarzenegger was reelected governor of California by 17 points. A decisive victory. I actually played his Democratic opponent, Phil Angelides in debate prep with the governor for two days that year. 17 points is a substantial margin of victory. No Republican has won statewide office in California since.

How did this happen?

Answer: After Democrats win, they change the rules so they can never lose again.

As Labor Day weekend approaches, I’ll give much of the election a rest for a week. The 60 day dash to the finish will begin after that, and it will likely be a very newsy dash. So, let’s look at a couple of other things.

A.I.: In the Terminator 2 Movie, Judgment Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character states that the “Skynet” computer system became “self-aware” at “2:14 AM Eastern time on August 29th, 1997.” Everything changed at that moment, at least in the movie. You would think that something similar happened in the last year as computers became “intelligent” and they now “think,” which they didn’t do a few months earlier.

No, I am not going to write about the DNC convention this week. If Kamala says something of interest you will hear from me about it next week. Instead, let’s review where the campaigns look like they are right now, and what might change.

On July 17th, I wrote you all about the surge Trump was having in polling and how it looked like reliably blue states like Virginia, Minnesota and New Hampshire were in play. Today, less than a month later, I have to tell you that if the election were held today, I think Harris/Walz would win. How did this happen and what’s ahead? Let’s take a look.

I will use a bunch of sports analogies today. Elections, after all, are like sports in that they are a competition where somebody wins and somebody loses.

I’m a baseball fan. During this election, I feel like I am watching two teams that are now tied in the 7th inning. Each team has committed four errors, like they are trying to lose. I’m just watching the last three innings hoping my team doesn’t throw a wild pitch or drop a pop fly to lose a game they could clearly win. And by the way, there are dark clouds on the horizon that might bring rain and change everything. It’s hard to score when it’s raining.

I intentionally did not capitalize the word “democracy” in the title of this missive in order to distinguish the true meaning of the word from the many capitalized uses it has including it’s use on the name of one of the two major political parties in the United States.

According to a 1975 printing of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (contemporary dictionaries are almost all woke and worthless), democracy is derived from the greek word demokratia which literally means “rule by the people”. It goes on to say “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation involving periodic free elections.”

I’m sure you already knew that.

I have been wanting to write about AI and some policy issues and interest rates and such. But the gods of politics will not let me do so. The Trump/Biden debate was less than a month ago as I write this. Since that time, President Trump was nearly assassinated, a GOP convention and VP pick was made, a sitting president withdrew from a presidential race for the first time since 1968, and the sitting Vice President sewed up the Democratic Party nomination in less than 48 hours.

Wow. May you live in interesting times.

So, now it is Kamala Harris. I have never met her. But, I was in elected office in California during the time of her rise to power in that state. So, I have followed her closely. Let’s look at the pros and cons of the new Democratic nominee and her prospects to become the 47th president.

The debate between Trump and Biden was less than three weeks ago as I write this missive. In that short time, everything in politics has changed. Since that debate, Biden’s cognitive deficiencies have gone from being “deep fakes” according to the regime media, to being undeniable. What was a unified Democratic Party has splintered over whether Biden should run again or even resign as president and, if he did one or the other, over who would replace him. On the other hand, a deeply divided Republican Party has totally unified behind the Trump/Vance ticket. Speaker Mike Johnson no longer faces any credible threats to throw him out, and he is able to pass almost any legislation he wants with only a two seat majority.

That said, if Trump wins (increasingly a likely probability) , the Republican Party will cement its transformation from the NeoCon, business conservative party of Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan into a new America First Populist party. On the other side, the Democrats will do some soul searching to see if they need reinvention as well.

Let’s look a bit deeper into all of this.