Closing in on Chaos

There's a useful article in this Sunday's Washington Post, "Loyalty, unease in Trump’s Midwest," subtitled "Voters gave Trump a chance. Some remain all in. Others have grown weary of the chaos." By longtime Post political reporter Dan Balz, it's an extended look at how opinion about President Trump has shifted — and how it hasn't — in parts of four upper-Midwestern states, two of which states helped put the current chief executive in office in the November 2016 presidential election.

Balz's interviewees were people in key counties and congressional districts in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Most of the interviewees voted for Trump Those localities had a history, prior to 2016, of voting Democratic. This national map shows how so many of those localities are clustered around the upper Mississippi River:

The white areas on the national map above represent localities which went for Hillary Clinton in 2016. All the other areas, shown in pink or red, are localities that went for Trump. That they comprise an area far, far greater than that of those that supported Clinton in an election which saw Trump narrowly lose the overall popular vote is testimony to the fact that most of Clinton's voters came from cities and localities with much denser population concentrations than the areas which Trump won.

Here's the way the electoral vote broke in 2016:

Minnesota and Illinois stayed in the Democratic column they had occupied in 2012, but Iowa and Wisconsin, which had tipped toward Barack Obama in 2012, in 2016 supported the GOP candidate. If the results in Minnesota and Illinois had depended just on localities shown in dark red in the first map, those two upper-Midwestern blue states might likewise have flipped into the Trump column.

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In the Post article, Balz's interviewees mention a plethora of issues and concerns that (a) influenced their pro-Trump voting behavior in 2016 and (b) still influence the attitudes of many of the interviewees toward President Trump today.

My main reaction is one of wonder at the sheer number of issues and concerns that get mentioned in the interviews. I can't recall a presidency that, 16 months in, evoked such a wide diversity of concerns.

A thought experiment: pretend that, as you begin to read the Balz article, you've sharpened a brand new pencil so as to make a note of each distinct issue or concern mentioned by the interviewees. My guess is that you would have to sharpen that pencil over and over again, and by the end of the article it would have been sharpened down to a nub.

Now try to imagine doing the same for a similar article 16 months into the Obama presidency — or that of George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton's, or any of the other presidents before them. My hunch is that, as passionately as many people felt about particular concerns at those respective times, the number of those concerns would not have required nearly as many sharpenings of your hypothetical pencil.

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To me this suggests we're closer to political chaos than we've been in recent memory.

By chaos I mean the way scientists and mathematicians studying "chaos theory" define the term. In chaos theory, certain kinds of systems operate in a way that makes their future states fundamentally impossible to predict. These systems are among what the mathematicians call "dynamical systems" — systems that change in mathematically describable ways over time. Such systems can be orderly or chaotic, and they can move from order to chaos in response to various perturbations. Once they are in the chaotic regime, they are prone to the "butterfly effect": a small change in the current state of such a system can result in large-yet-unpredictable differences at a later date.

I think our political system is close to chaos, in that mathematical sense of the word. As one of Balz's interviewees so aptly puts it the next-to-last paragraph of the article, " ... no one can predict the future."

So many of the interviewees seem truly torn, now mentioning a lot more things that they don't like about Trump than those same people mentioned in earlier interviews. I feel some of the interviewees are presently on the edge of turning against Trump. Clearly, though, the slightest Trump-friendly event might reinstate their full support. This is why I think of the political situation as being very close to chaos.

I hear predictions from some of my fellow liberal Democrats that this year's midterms will constitute a "wave election." By this they mean that Democrats will do so well in November as to return control of the House of Representatives, and possibly even of the U.S. Senate, to Democratic hands. As a result, Democrats will be in good position to take back the White House in 2020.

I join my fellow progressives in hoping that's true. However, I really think the butterfly effect is what will decide the 2018 outcome. Some tiny perturbation may make Democrats' dreams come true. On the other hand, an equally minute perturbation might boost Trump's Republicans into even greater power than they possess now, at state and local levels as well as nationally.

Stay tuned. It's going to be interesting ... and unpredictable.