Kevin Drum

From Elon Musk, after Tesla announced weak results yesterday:

Tesla is currently between two major growth waves.

You betcha. But not everyone bought it:

Dan Ives, a tech analyst with Wedbush Securities, said executives failed to address short-term concerns, even though he remains sold on the company’s long-term value.

“We were dead wrong expecting Musk and team to step up like adults in the room on the call and give a strategic and financial overview of the ongoing price cuts, margin structure and fluctuating demand. … instead we got a high-level Tesla long-term view with another train wreck conference call,” Ives wrote Thursday.

The company’s falling margins and “constant never-ending price cuts” are concerns, Ives wrote.

I'm a little surprised that analysts are surprised by this. Tesla was always bound to run into weakening growth when the rest of the world started competing in the electric car space, and they were lucky it took so long. But the future is finally here, and that means Tesla actually has to compete on both price and quality. Slowing revenue and weakening profits were inevitable.

This has nothing to do with whether or not Elon Musk is in his right mind these days. The smartest CEO in the world would have trouble navigating the changing climate of the EV market and responding to the tsunami of cheap Chinese EVs that are now flooding the world. Musk may or may not be one of history's great business geniuses, but even he can't turn back the tide on command.

As everyone predicted, economic growth in the final quarter of 2023 was excellent:

Over the last year and a half, GDP growth has averaged about 3%. This is a nice, healthy growth rate, but without being so high that it threatens to overheat the economy and reignite a surge of inflation. This trend continued in Q4, which produced basically the best number we could have hoped for.

Over at National Review, Michael New insists that abortions have declined since the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. In particular, he objects to contrary findings based on the WeCount project, which is fairly new and doesn't have very much pre-Dobbs data. He's right about that, but the Guttmacher Institute does have many years of data and their estimates suggest the same thing as WeCount:

As you can see, the abortion rate was already climbing from 2017-20, and Guttmacher's annual figures go only through 2020. So we don't know for sure precisely what happened in 2022 before and after red states began banning abortion. Still, the evidence strongly suggests that Dobbs had little effect because most of the affected women simply traveled to nearby states for abortions:

It's also the case that many red states have long made abortions difficult to get, so the pre and post-Dobbs environment in those states may not have been all that different.

What we do know is that Dobbs gave states the power to ban abortions, forcing upwards of 100,000 women in 2023 to travel long distances to end their pregnancies. We also know that the worst of these states are now desperately trying to ban women from even doing that. And we also know about a string of tragedies have already been caused by inhumane laws that have forced women to wait for lifesaving care.

So has Dobbs had an impact? Oh yes. It's just not the one conservatives were hoping for.

NOTE: Guttmacher data for 1973-2020 is here. Data for 2023 is here. Data for out-of-state travel is here.

Donald Trump says he wants to run on the border. Is this a sound strategy? Here's the share of Republicans who say the border is their #1 issue:

The border ranks second in importance among Republicans (the economy is first), generally getting about a 15% share over the past few years. But it's spiked recently, and if the economy continues to improve it could easily go up more. It still seems a little iffy to me given the moderate energy it seems to produce even among Republicans, but it could work.

And while we're at it, I happened to notice another trend while I was looking at the immigration numbers:

Look at that. Since the start of the Biden administration support for universal health care has gone up from 20% to 45% among Republicans. Interesting.

Here's the daily death toll of Palestinians in Gaza through January 24:

The blank space in the middle is the late-November ceasefire. Also, there have been several periods during which the death toll wasn't updated. I've interpolated those figures with a slight adjustment for randomness.

The good news, such as it is, is the trendline. It's gone down from 350 per day at the start of the war to about 150 per day now.

The total death toll is at 25,700 as of today.

It is, as Tom Edsall points out today, both remarkable and dispiriting that so many Americans continue to support Donald Trump. But then he asks:

Has Trump created a broad and enduring Republican coalition out of MAGA supporters, added backing from Republicans hostile to Democrats, a scattering of minority voters as well as white independents and Democrats who reject liberal social justice policies?

I don't mean to downplay the ugliness of what Trump's popularity says about the current state of American politics, but there's really nothing to this notion that Trump has somehow created a new coalition. Consider the trial heats from a recent YouGov poll:

Other polls show slightly different results both up and down, but basically they all exhibit little difference between Republican candidates. The people voting for Trump are the same ones who voted for Mitt Romney and John McCain and George W. Bush. And the main reason is that they hate Democrats:

Trump is, for some reason, more popular among Republicans than other candidates. There's not much question that this represents a destructive and malignant impulse within conservatism. At the same time, Trump hasn't put together a new coalition or created hostility where it didn't exist before. He's merely taking crude advantage of feelings that were already there—created and nurtured since the 1990s by Newt Gingrich and Fox News. As a result, for many years there's been a core of 40-45% of the electorate that hates Democrats no matter who's running.

It's not clear if there's a lot Democrats can do about this. A modest bit of moderation would help among the genuinely undecided, but probably not much among the true believers. They'll vote for any Republican—even if he's not their top choice.

Can we do anything about the surge of illegal immigrants at the southern border? Republicans would like to, of course, and they're hopeful they can persuade President Biden to go along with tough legislation.

Or are they? Jake Sherman reports that Mitch McConnell told a closed meeting of Senate Republicans, “The politics on this have changed”:

McConnell referred to Trump as “the nominee” and noted the former president wants to run his 2024 campaign centered on immigration. And the GOP leader said, “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him.”

“We’re in a quandary,” McConnell added.

Yep, that's quite the quandary. Do what they think is right for the country, or do nothing so that people stay mad and Trump has an issue to run on?

It's commonplace for partisans to claim that the other side doesn't really want to solve a particular problem (racism, abortion, etc.) because they don't want it to go away as a base-mobilizing issue. Very seldom, however, does the opposition actually confirm that. This time they have.

The Washington Post describes a new Pew report about people who answer "none" when asked about their religion:

As the nation’s fastest-growing segment of religion (or nonreligion) in recent decades, the nones may reflect the front line of future spirituality. Fifty-six percent say they believe in “some higher power” aside from the God of the Bible; 67 percent say they believe that humans have a soul or spirit, and majorities say they believe that nonhuman animals and parts of nature can have spiritual energies.

According to the Pew report, 28% of Americans are nones but 69% of them believe in God or a higher power. Only 29% don't. So true atheists come to only about 8% of the country.

But that's me! I believe the universe is just what you think it is: stars and galaxies, electrons and quarks, gauge fields and gravity, all described by quantum mechanics and general relativity. The universe and its components evolve via (surprisingly arcane) mathematical laws. There is nothing more.

We may be getting less religious as a society, but there are still damn few people who belong to my little clique.

POSTSCRIPT: What's kind of weird is that although 29% of nones don't believe in a higher power, neither do 24% of religious people. I'm a little unclear about which religions are compatible with no belief in God or a higher power. Isn't that sort of the whole point?

This is the Morongo Casino just off Interstate 10 on the way to Palm Springs. I pass it regularly when I go out to the desert for some stargazing. I took this photo around 3 am, and I was lucky to get it because a security guard shooed me off right after I snapped the shutter. I asked him (nicely!) why the casino cared if I took a picture, and he just shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea. Just following the rules.

Hum de hum:

Didn't the Supreme Court rule just two days ago that the Border Patrol could cut the razor wire that Texas has been installing along the border? Why yes.

So what's the theory here? I suppose Abbott figures the Supreme Court said only that the Border Patrol could cut the wire. It didn't prohibit Texas from putting up more. So now we have an inane race between Texas putting up razor wire and the Border Patrol immediately cutting it down?

Don't mess with Texas. But then again, don't mess with the Supreme Court either. At some point they're going to lose patience.