Tracking the Presidential Election, 2016, Part II

I started this thread at the commencement of the 2016 Election Season:

Tracking the Presidential Election, 2016

The focus of this blog, at least theoretically, is on events of a century ago.  Indeed, the event that really motivated the concept of a novel and hence this support blog occurred 100 years ago, and is coming right up.  So we should be looking at the 1916 Presidential election.

That election, as the readers here well know, featured Woodrow Wilson in a contest against Charles E. Hughes. Wilson, of course, campaigning on "He kept us out of war" won.

President Woodrow Wilson.

Charles E. Hughes.  Maybe the beard, in the post bearded era, did in his chances.

I can't compare that election to the current one, as it was nothing like it.  I can compare, and often have, President Obama with President Wilson (without Wilson's racism, however) as in my view they're both guilty of confusing talk with action.

When I did that it was my intent to run that thread all the way through to the end of the campaign.

It's proven to be impossible, however, as the thread has grown impossibly large, and now when I update it the effect is to wipe out all of the other posts on the first page of the blog.  It's basically threatening to suck the life out of the blog, the same way this election is sucking the life out of the country, or so it seems.

So, I've decided to stop trying to update one single entry and start a part two.  There may be more parts later on, depending upon how things go.  There probably will be.

And this is a good point at which to do this, as the race really seems to have turned a corner recently.  It isn't the same race that the pundits were declaring inevitable results for just a couple of weeks ago, although it should be noted that we never did that here.

So, here's part two.

First, the tell of the tape as of today, following the Wisconsin victory for Cruz and Sanders, and the Colorado victory for Sanders.

Democrats (needed to win 2,383)

Clinton:  1,740, or 1,739 (469 Superdelegates)

Sanders:  1055 or 1070 (31 Superdelegates).

Martin O'Malley:  1 (now out)

Republicans (needed to win, 1,237)

Donald Trump:  737 or 753 (1 of which is an unpledged delegate)

Ted Cruz: 505 or 478 (12 of which are unpledged).

Marco Rubio: 171 or 173  (now out)
John Kasich: 143 or 144

Ben Carson: 8  (now out)

Jeb Bush: 4  (now out).

Carly Fiorina:  1 (now out)

Ron Paul:  1 (now out).

Commentary. 

First let us note that the Trump tallies have gone down, that's right, down, since the last tally.

And Marco Rubio's have gone up.  Yes, up, even though he's out.

This race is far from over.

Now, I've been saying that all along, in spite of the press treatment of this race as being over and Trump and Clinton as being the nominees.  They aren't the nominees yet.

And there's more than a fair chance they won't be.

Indeed the pundits have now stated that the race is up in the air.  Last weekend one of them actually blew up at the assertion that Sanders couldn't win the Democratic nomination and that Trump had won the Republican nomination.  And there's suddenly a lot of discussion of the convention rules and what they mean, or the fact that there really aren't any rules.

A lot of things have gone into this, including a sharper focus in the GOP race on the various positions and statements of the candidates. And in spite of the assertions to the contrary, Kasich remaining in the race appears to be hurting Trump but not helping Cruz.  On the Democratic side discontent with Clinton and a surprisingly broad appeal for Sanders is making it far from certain that Clinton will gain enough delegates to prevent a contested convention.

And, as one of the pundits this past weekend finally admitted, there really is no prior convention or even election that provides a useful guild, as up until recently the conventions weren't dominated by primary elections, but by state conventions. So, we may be back, oddly enough, to the old free form convention of old.  Indeed, I suspect we are.

So, given that, my prediction right now is that neither the GOP or the Democrats enter conventions with the result of the race determined.

And if that occurs, on the GOP side Trump will not be the nominee.  He lacks a majority of the delegates now, and that may still be the case by the convention.  And, if he has a plurality, it will not matter.  I'd give Cruz less than a 50% chance of being the nominee as well.  Kasich, maybe, but more likely than that a candidate not currently running.

And while I think it more likely that Clinton take the nomination in a contested convention, I don't think its a guaranteed result by any means.  Sanders still stands a chance, as does a candidate not running at the present time, including Biden.  Sanders is actually within striking distance of Clinton on pledged delegates, and if his tally exceeds that of Clinton's the Superdelegates may truly being to fall apart for Clinton. At least some will defect, or being to look for a compromise candidate.

For the first time in a very long time, it's actually possible that the candidates in the fall might not be those who ran prior to the conventions.

First Commentary Followup

The real nature of the national contests this year is showing up in a surprising way locally. Wyoming is actually getting a lot of attention from the various campaigns, save for the Kasich campaign, which might tell us something about it.  

The Democrats hold their county conventions this Saturday.  The vote at the county level will determine the elected delegates.  The Superdelegates have already pledged for Clinton in spite of the strong state wide general dislike of Clinton.  

Demonstrating how tight this race really is, at the local and national level, both campaigns have sent representatives of surprising nature here recently.  Earlier this week Jane Sanders spoke in Casper.  On the same day, Bernie Sanders spoke in Laramie.  The choice of Laramie, Wyoming's most liberal town (omitted Jackson, whose demographics don't reflect the state very well) was a wise one showing some knowledge of demographics in the state on the part of somebody.

And Sanders has been running television ads. These may be the first Democratic pre convention ads to be ever run in the state.

The Clinton's sent Bill Clinton to Cheyenne.  In Cheyenne he gave a speech where he mentioned the plight of coal.  That shows that they're paying attention to what is going on in the state, but it's also the sort of thing that is fueling the sort of cynicism that is drawing in a lot of people to Trump and Sanders this year.  I doubt very much that anyone here thinks the Clinton's really feel that coal has a long term future in the national energy picture.  Sanders is opposed to fracking, which is part of his national plank, which will mean than in a general election he'll be a flop here, amongst other reasons, but at least he's honest about it.

The Republican state convention is on April 12.  The GOP system is odd as the county conventions have already been held and chose delegates, with nine out of twelve going for Cruz.  The remainder of the twenty-nine total will be chosen at the state convention.

Cruz will come and address the convention, again showing how tight the national election is.  The Trump campaign is sending Sarah Palin to address the GOP convention.  Idaho Governor Butch Otter will cross the state lines to address the delegates for Kasich.

On the Kasich campaign, their choice is the oddest and saddest, and they basically haven't mounted a campaign here. Perhaps that's because they felt that they didn't have a chance here, or perhaps they don't have the cash or the base. There were Rubio supporters in Wyoming although Rubio did not show well at the county conventions.  This is all odd as Cruz is vulnerable for his stated views, in Idaho, about public lands.  Public lands in public hands is a huge issue here and the vast majority of Wyomingites are hugely in favor of keeping it that way.  Trump is known to favor keeping the lands in public hands, Cruz actually favors privatizing them.  Kasich's views are unknown, but if his views on this issue mirrored Trump's, Clinton's and Sander's, he'd have an opening I suspect.  A lot of the votes going to Cruz here now are simply going to him as he's not Sanders.  Otherwise I suspect the support isn't deep.  Cruz is definitely running the best, and most politically astute, campaign here on the GOP side.

___________________________________________________________________________________

April 8, 2016

Updated totals following Colorado.

Democrats (needed to win 2,383)

Clinton:  1,767 (469 Superdelegates)

Sanders:  1 110 (31 Superdelegates)

Martin O'Malley:  1 (now out)

Republicans (needed to win, 1,237)

Donald Trump:  743 (1 of which is an unpledged delegate)

Ted Cruz: 520 (12 of which are unpledged).

Marco Rubio: 171 or 173  (now out)
John Kasich: 143 or 144

Ben Carson: 8  (now out)

Jeb Bush: 4  (now out).

Carly Fiorina:  1 (now out)

Ron Paul:  1 (now out).

Commentary

Why is a Clinton victory regarded as inevitable, when she has over 600 delegates left to capture, while a brokered convention in the GOP is regarded as likely when Trump is about 500 delegates away from securing the GOP nomination?

I'm not saying that a Trump victory is inevitable. Rather, I"m saying that a Clinton victory isn't.

April 10, 2016

Yesterday the Wyoming Democratic Caucus was held.  Here's the new table:

Democrats:  Needed to win, 2,383.

Clinton: 1,774 (469 of which are Superdelegates)

Sanders:  1,117 (31 of which are Superdelegates)

Republicans:  Needed to win, 1,237.

Trump:  743 (of which 1 is an unpledged delegates).

Cruz:  532 (of which 12 are unpledged delegates)

Rubio:  171.  Rubio has suspended his campaign.

Kasich:  143.

Carson:  8  Carson has suspended his campaign.

Bush:  4  Carson has suspended his campaign.

Fiorina:  1  Fiorina has dropped out of the race.

Paul:  1  Paul has dropped out of the race.

Commentary

Okay, a couple of comments.

First of all, these tallies are based on those kept by the New York Times.  You can find alternate ones that vary, sometimes quite significantly.  None of the alternate tallies impact who is the front runner, but they truly are different.  The Times is generally a lower tally.

Part of this might be based on the fact that there's actually more doubt in who takes what in terms of delegates than might initially appear to be the case.  So at any one time time, there could be a 20 delegate swing in the top contenders.  Indeed, these tallies tend to change a bit days after an election is supposedly concluded as the actual picking of the delegates commences.

Next, the Wyoming Democratic vote was yesterday.  This vote is very illustrative of a couple of things.  One of them is that Hillary Clinton has a huge likeability problem.  The second one is that Sanders has a very difficult time getting to where he needs to be even "winning" a state.

You'd have expected that a well established candidate link Clinton would have blown the doors off the Sanders campaign bus against Sanders.  Wyoming's basic outlook on things tends towards the Libertarian, and Sanders Socialist world outlook is about as far from the average Wyomingites as can be imagined.  None the less, Sanders took over 50% of the Democratic vote.  A lot of that is simply because people don't like Hillary Clinton.  Even with the endorsement of one of the state's former governors Clinton couldn't take the state in terms of the popular vote.

None the less, in delegate breakdown, she took the same number of elected delegates that Sanders did.  They each took seven. So if its a "victory", it's a Pyrrhic victory.  The real result is a wash.  Neither candidate really pulled ahead.  If Sanders can really pull ahead somehow, the seven delegates he took in Wyoming might matter.  But right now they surely do not.  Moreover, all of the state's superdelegates are presently pledged to Clinton, giving us an example of exactly what Sanders has been saying shouldn't happen. The majority of Wyoming Democrats, barely, might want Sanders, but the majority of the state's delegates, after the superdelegates are considered, are going to Clinton.

How the Democrats got themselves into this mess is interesting, but then both parties are in a mess right now.  The Democrats are set to nominate the most unlikable candidate they've run in a century.  She is so unlikable that she should be easy pickings for the GOP, but for the fact that the GOP seems to be heading towards nominating the least electable candidate of their own since 1964.  The parties, if their front runners win the nomination, will pit two candidates against each other that are hugely unpopular with large segments of the American public.  Perhaps, in an odd way, that wouldn't be a bad result as none of the front runners is likely to have much truck with Congress.  And that would include those in second position.  Cruz is barely more liked by average Americans than Trump.  Sanders is generally liked but his positions on almost everything are not going to be taken seriously by Congress.

For these reasons, oddly, the best hope for both parties are contested conventions resulting in the picking of somebody other than somebody now running.  There's a relatively good chance of that happening with the GOP and a slight chance of that happening with the Democrats.  With the Republicans, basically, if the current trend in the primaries continues that will happen.  With the Democrats, it's unlikely unless the Superdelegates bolt in mass, which perhaps would be the best service they could offer their party at this time.

On one final item, there's now a building movement to draft Gen. James Mattis as a GOP candidate or even as a Third Party candidate.  This hasn't gone far enough yet to regard there being a high likelihood of it happening, but there's definitely talk of it occurring.  The retired Marine Corps general was popular with servicemen who served with him, and he's not a professional politician.  He reportedly has some big money behind a campaign to draft him, although there's no evidence that he's supporting the movement himself.  It's an interesting development that should be watched.

____________________________________________________________________________________
April 17, 2016 

Yesterday Wyoming's Republican convention was held.  Before we consider that here's a new table, even though yesterday's event shouldn't really impact the tallies actually.

Democrats:  Needed to win, 2,383.

Clinton: 1,776 (469 of which are Superdelegates)
Sanders:  1,118 (31 of which are Superdelegates)

Republicans:  Needed to win, 1,237.

Trump:  743 (of which 1 is an unpledged delegates).
Cruz:  545 (of which 16 are unpledged delegates)
Rubio:  171.  Rubio has suspended his campaign.
Kasich:  143.
Carson:  8  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Bush:  4  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Fiorina:  1  Fiorina has dropped out of the race.
Paul:  1  Paul has dropped out of the race.

Now, these numbers are  bit different on both sides.  For one treason or another, both Clinton and Sanders, who have had no races since the last reported on, have had an increase in delegates.  Trump has remained stationary, but Cruz has gone up for some reason, part of that, but only part, due to an increase in unpledged delegates.  So now Sanders trails Clinton's combined total by over 600 delegates while Cruz trails Trump by slightly under 200. With the New York primary coming up, these numbers stand to change a lot, with early predictions being that Trump will add quite a few delegates.  The Democratic side is much more difficult to predict.

The Wyoming GOP convention is a bit of a non event, as odd as that may seem, in some ways as the results were known a long time ago, after the county caucuses.   It is possible for the convention to arrive at another result but it was known it wouldn't.  Perhaps the most surprising thing is that one state official who is a super delegate did indicate that he might go for Kasich at the national convention.  Which points both ti his wisdom on preserving a future run at office and the big GOP problem that's developing locally and nationally.

That Trump wouldn't win here was already known, but frankly Cruz isn't a popular candidate amongst regular people either.  At least one long term GOP voter I know will be voting Democratic this fall, and he's in the class of folks whom, due to the Second Amendment, normally votes GOP.  And he's not the only one, and he's declaring it openly.  That's because public lands are his litmus test.

Cruz, again in the convention yesterday, said the same thing here that he did in Idaho about wanting to transfer the Public Lands "back" to the states. That is a popular idea with the hard right wing of the GOP here, which reflects a split in the party between the old GOP and the Tea Party elements, but it's massively unpopular with sportsmen, whom make up a large percentage of the voting public here.  Indeed, Cruz again state that the Federal government owns only 2% of Texas and Texans feel that's 2% too much, which is exactly what most native Wyomingites feel is wrong about Texas.  We know that Texans have no ability to use their wild areas without paying massive fees and for many Wyomingites, therefore, Texas isn't what we hold dear about the West.  It's going to be very difficult for Wyoming sportsmen this fall, therefore, and not just Wyoming sportsmen but sportsmen from any area of the West, as they'll have to choose between a land grab that would end the West as we know it or a President who will be hostile the Second Amendment.  I strongly suspect in a lot of areas sportsmen will go for Second Amendment restrictions over the loss of the Public Lands.

Which bring us to this.  The strong discontent in the GOP that's causing this race to be one in which either Trump or Cruz stand the best chances of being the nominee is effectively handing this race to the Democrats in the fall.  Neither Cruz nor Trump will beat Hillary Clinton, assuming that she is the nominee, and while a Sanders nomination is unlikely, I strongly doubt that either Trump or Cruz can beat Sanders either.   Indeed, given the common appeal that both Sanders and Trump have to the disaffected, Trump probably has a better chance of winning against Sanders than Cruz does.

All of which is known to the Democrats and to the GOP, which is why the GOP regulars are considering their options for a brokered convention or a third party candidate, if need be.

This isn't as obvious to the local Democrats, who have never really recovered from the Clinton era and therefore are blind to their chances in the fall.  If Wyoming's Democratic Party were able to muster a strong established candidate for our Congressional seat, which so far seems really unlikely, and if they were able to run on economic and public lands issues, without having to accept the Democratic social agenda that's way too far to the left for most Wyoming voters, they'd have a real chance at taking the house seat away from the GOP.  At least one of the GOP candidates seems to know that, as he's quietly backed off of his vote to remove, which became to study, taking the public domain from the Federal Government.

And so we're off to New York on this thread next.

____________________________________________________________________________________

 New York City construction, 1912

April 19, 2016

Yesterday the New York primaries were held.

The lineup this morning:


Democrats:  Needed to win, 2,383.

Clinton: 1,915 (469 of which are Superdelegates)
Sanders:  1,231 (31 of which are Superdelegates)

Republicans:  Needed to win, 1,237.

Trump:  845 (of which 1 is an unpledged delegates).
Cruz:  559 (of which 16 are unpledged delegates)
Rubio:  171.  Rubio has suspended his campaign.
Kasich:  147.
Carson:  8  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Bush:  4  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Fiorina:  1  Fiorina has dropped out of the race.
Paul:  1  Paul has dropped out of the race.

Commentary

Yawn.  And Oh Wow. And, pundits, really?

Now, in fairness, this is exactly what was predicted on the Republican side, and that's why its anticlimactic.   And nobody can fault anyone for that.  But, for a state that seems to pride itself on being a national leader even if it frequently isn't, this is a surprisingly dull result in some ways, but in ways that were expected and nobody can really be faulted for. . . much. . . save for Cruz having made any traction in New York, which he was unlikely to get anyhow, impossible early in the race.

With Trump the highly predictable occurred, not too surprising given Cruz's earlier mass insult of all New Yorkers with his poorly thought out "New York Values" statement.  Having slapped New Yorkers they slapped him back.  Cruz clearly wasn't going to win in New York.  

Still, it would have been thought that maybe Kasich could have done well and a surprise wouldn't have been impossible. .  As it was, he took 25% of the vote, beating Cruz out for second, and securing three delegates.  That wasn't a bad performance for Kasich, but it certainly wasn't great.  Given that the state is an East Coast state with a strong Democratic liberal base, it would have been presumed that perhaps the less radically conservative element in the GOP would have gone for Kasich in higher numbers there, but they did not.  His presence perhaps helped to keep this from being a complete Trump blow out, maybe, assuming that it was not.

In the Democratic race we saw a real New Yorker, Sanders (by birth) against a late import.  But, New Yorkers went with the Democratic candidate that other more daring states rejected, choosing established and disliked over liked but radial, but not by that great of a margin.  Again, a person can't fault them for that, but the results may not quite be the landslide that pundits are claiming it is by any means.  Even in defeat Sanders did nearly as well as Clinton.

So what do these results mean?

Well, on the GOP side maybe not much.  Trump doesn't really gain that much, although it must be noted that a little under 400 delegates away from winning the nomination at this point.  Still, Cruz is less than 300 delegates away from Trump and the chances for a contested convention remain high.  So we won't really know what this means until the next few primaries are over.  Maybe its the beginning of a final  Trump rally.  Or maybe its just Trump taking his native state. . . a state still retains a fairly significant hard had vote.  

It's hard not to regard this as very disappointing for Kasich, who even after picking up a few delegates and coming in second is still over twenty delegates behind Rubio, who of course dropped out some time ago.  Even combined Rubio and Kasich delegates don't come up to equaling second place Cruz.

On the Democratic side the results are perhaps more telling.  Sanders didn't do bad at all, and he did pick up 106 delegates.  So, even on Clinton's adopted home turf, he did pretty well but still not well enough. Still, if he can make that sort of inroad in a state that Clinton was supposed to have all sewn up, Clinton may be in for a rough time the next few primaries.  Sanders continues to trail Clinton even in the states she wins, including the states she should win in big, and he overcomes her outside of the East and South.  He's  not building enough of a margin right now to make it certain that the Democrats will have a brokered convention (and the GOP race isn't certain to have one either) but it's becoming an increasingly possiblity.

On the press, the coverage again continues to miss the mark.  Last night, and probably today, you could read of both Trump and Clinton scoring "major" victories by large margins. But Clinton didn't.  She took 60% of her adopted state's vote, which is a significant margin over Sanders, and it is comparable to Trump's share of the vote in his native state, but she faces only one opponent and she can't put him away.  40% of New York Democrats said no to her and indicated that they'd prefer Sanders, who is much more "progressive" than Clinton and is well liked personally by most.  If Sanders can take 40% of the vote in a state where she is a Senator she's in real trouble where she isn't.  Indeed, the irony of this race is that both parties are currently heading towards probably nominating very unlikable candidate which makes Clinton a strong candidate by default, where she otherwise would be a weak one.

The race might not mean what it seems to mean for Trump either.  Trump is a New Yorker, and his brash loud style is the type of presentation that many people, no doubt unfairly, associate with New York City.  That style really is disliked in many places and this is the first race in which Trump has pulled a majority of the votes.  But he didn't pull such a majority that he took all the delegates.  Kasich, who nationally is barely being heard now, took three, a small number, but reflecting 25% of the GOP no doubt reflecting a large percentage of the party that doesn't like Trump or Cruz and which reflects a more traditional conservatism.  Trump was expected to do well in New York, and did, but it should also be the state where he performs the best.  60% is good, but it might not be good enough. We will soon see.

Kasich interestingly took Manhattan, the only county he took at all.  Trump took all the rest.  Clinton took only the large urban areas. Sanders took all the rest.  That's very interesting as it tends to show that Clinton is really weak, even in her adopted state, outside of town.  New York is a Democratic state, but the results there tend to show that Trump polled well amongst hard hat and rural voters in the New York GOP.

A big series of East Coast races next occurs on April 26.  Given the performance yesterday the Cruz and Kasich campaigns have to be sweating over that race.  Having gone back to the Atlantic, the "Stop Trump" effort has taken a bit of a blow.   Whether or not that just means something about New York or New England is the big question.  Trump is now within striking distance of taking the GOP race and his opponents have to do well in the never several primaries.

On the Democratic side Clinton is in the same boat, within striking distance, although the number of delegates awarded in any one primary differs. She therefore is actually closer in some ways, but her tally still includes the large number of Superdelegates which, if subtracted, mean that she and Sanders are actually fairly close.  Her victory in New York might not really mean the same thing about New England that it does for the GOP, as Sanders has done well there.  Sanders is nearly 700 delegates behind, but over 400 of those are Superdelegates, so he might be able to close the gap a little on the 26th.

On a couple of semi amusing observations, counties in New York are incredibly tiny.  I happened to look one up last night as it was the only one whose returns hadn't come in.  Unbelievably small.

Also, I can't help be amused in some ways how the New York press, in particular the New York Times, which is a very liberal journal, is in the same state that gives us a Trump sweep.  The New York Times is a great newspaper, but it's amusing to read in some ways as it lives in an atmosphere steeped with East Coast liberalism. Apparently it doesn't know about he large number of New York hard hat voters being in its own state.  The same is true of its readers, based on the comments you see on its news articles, who tend towards the snotty and just can't seem to understand that its a big country out there and a lot of Americans disagree strongly with the Times.  I'd wager, however, the candidates all know that.

Commentary Followup.

The Pundits, oh bother.

Just a few days ago the Pundits were all in a lather about the decline of the Trump campaign.

Now, going into New York, anyone paying attention knew that Trump was going to win.  The task, always regarded as doubtful, was to limit that win. Well, exactly what was expected to occur, occurred. Exactly.

This morning, the Pundits are again in a lather, declaring a Trump pre convention sewing up of the nomination inevitable.

No, it isn't.

Let's say that again.

No, it isn't.

Trump's task remains just as daunting as it was before.  It's no more inevitable after New York, than it was before New York.

Now, let's say the next series of instabilities and get them out of the way. Trump, for old hard hat voter reasons, is likely to do well in all of New England.  But he won't take enough delegates to get the nomination through New England.

After the New England races, the pundits will be flipping over backwards to declare his nomination inevitable.  Right up until some non New England race goes the other way, and they'll start to doubt.

Can I predict the race with certainty here?  No, I can't, but nobody else can either.  If were to make a predication, my predication will be for a convention in which nobody has the nomination.  Going from there is even more risky so I'll abstain for the time being, and turn to the Democrats.

The Press declared Hillary Clinton the Democratic nominee prior to her even running.  People who are skeptical of the Press are legitimately fueled by this, as even if it is accidental, and it likely is, the Press has always treated her as the Democratic nominee and continues to do so.  This in spite of the fact that Sanders is doing well and continues to do well, even in New York.  Not deterred by his persistently increasing share of the vote, the Press has now again ramped up its view that she's the certain nominee.

No, she isn't.

It's likely that she will be, and if I were to hazard a guess, I will guess that she'll get enough delegates, when the Superdelegates are taken into account, to take the nomination prior to the convention, but even at that there will be a bit of a contest.  But it isn't impossible even now, nor even remote, that Sanders could upset thing so much that there will be a brokered convention.  A convention of that type would likely still result in her nomination, but it might not.

Anyway you look at it the race is still on, and the pundits, well, aren't doing that well.

___________________________________________________________________________________

April 26, 2016 

Today was a five northeastern state primary day.

First the days' result, as they stand right now.

Democrats:  Needed to win, 2,383.

Clinton: 2,155 (519 of which are Superdelegates)
Sanders:  1,355 (39 of which are Superdelegates)

Republicans:  Needed to win, 1,237.

Trump:  944 (of which 1 is an unpledged delegates).
Cruz:  558 (of which 16 are unpledged delegates)
Rubio:  171.  Rubio has suspended his campaign.
Kasich:  153.
Carson:  8  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Bush:  4  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Fiorina:  1  Fiorina has dropped out of the race.
Paul:  1  Paul has dropped out of the race.

Commentary 

The big news of course is the Republican event which saw Trump sweep all of these states.  It's proving to be interesting that Trump's real appeal is in the East, which is generally not thought of as having his particular brand of Conservatism.  It also, at this point, puts the forces aligned against Trump in nearly a last ditch scenario, which they are well aware of.  What Trump supporters seem unaware of is that in nominating Trump, which they are now close to doing, they're guaranteed to put the GOP into a serious defeat in the fall. They are very mad about how the GOP has reneged on its promises to them, but at the same time the defeat the GOP is set to receive may be nearly irreparable in some ways, particularly given the stakes involved at the Supreme Court.

Kasich picked up a few delegates, which perhaps isn't surprising, but it's very few.  Yesterday, anticipating the results that in fact occurred, Cruz and Kasich formed an uneasy alliance ceding Indiana to Cruz in exchange for some other states for Kasich.  They'll preserve their dispute, and chances for the convention, if they can make it that far.  The next few races, no matter what occurs, will not determine that as Trump needs over 280 delegates which means the race will go on until at least California.  California really looms as a decisive battleground for everyone and on June 7 there will only be one race remaining in any event.

On the Democratic side Sanders took Rhode Island and Clinton took every other state.  That's interesting too, as given as well as Trump did, we'd expect to perhaps see the same for Sanders given his hard hat Democrat appeal, but outside of Rhode Island, this appears not to have been the case.  Clinton is now very close to taking the nomination, with the Superdelegates included, but not at all close if you omit them.  So their race will continue on but for the first time it is beginning to take on the true air of inevitability.  Having said that, as the Democratic races were not winner take all, Sanders took delegates in every single race, but was only otherwise close in Delaware.  Sanders promises to go on to the end, but unless he can keep Clinton away from 1,237 delegates of all type, his race may rapidly decline in relevance.

Clinton needs over 200 delegates to lock things in, maybe, depending upon the reliability of the Superdelegates.  This probably means that this race remains up in the air until California as well.  But Sanders has to do extraordinary well from here on out to make it all the way to the convention.

Commentary followup:

The New York Times, looking at the math, has this to say about the GOP race in terms of where it will end up:

Though Mr. Trump is in a strong position, his path to winning enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination is not assured. Breaching the 1,237-delegate threshold requires him to maintain the same level of voter support in the contests ahead. If the dynamics of the race shift against him even slightly, he will fall short. Mr. Cruz and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio will try to earn enough delegates between them to deny Mr. Trump a majority and force the convention to undertake a second ballot. At that point, anything could happen.

In addition, there are several caveats that add uncertainty to these numbers. In a few states, there are delegates still to be allocated. Even delegates that have already been allocated can be reassigned.

Interesting analysis.  And something yesterday's results feed into.  The majority of Pennsylvania delegates are unassigned, in spite of yesterday's primary, and will go into the convention that way. That makes them, basically, something sort of like superdelegates.

About the Democrats the Times stated:

Democratic delegates are awarded proportionally, and in states that have voted so far, Mrs. Clinton has won more than half of the vote, on average. The lack of winner-take-all states on the Democratic side makes it very unlikely for Mr. Sanders to close the delegate gap.

Mrs. Clinton can win less than half of the remaining vote and still earn a majority of the pledged delegates by June.

That's pretty interesting too.  Clinton, even at a rate close to failure in a lot of the upcoming races, can still close the deal prior to the convention.

____________________________________________________________________________________

April 27, 2016

Ted Cruz announced today that Carly Fiorina would be his vp candidate.

I have to admit that its not immediately apparent to me what the strategy here is, unless its to link his campaign with a female business executive.  That may be all the more there is to it.  Chances are that Trump will go after the choice and won't look good for doing so.  For those who may be inclined to think more favorably of Cruz if he is running with a woman, including one who is a business person, perhaps this will achieve something, although frankly I'd guess the impact to be fairly marginal.  

____________________________________________________________________________________

April 28, 2016

The GOP race took another surprising turn today when the former Speaker of the House John Boehner really went after Ted Cruz.  In a speech today, which wasn't supposed to really be the subject of news quips, Boehner made his dislike of Cruz very well known using some extremely blunt terms about him.  Boehner indicated that he's support Trump if he was nominated, although he has been supporting Kasich, but would not support Cruz.  Given the serious effort to stop Trump, his comments were surprising, but Boehner has been fairly sincere all along and has been particularly open ever since meeting with Pope Francis, just prior to Boehner's resignation.

___________________________________________________________________________________

April 30, 2016 

 Updated totals

Democrats:  Needed to win, 2,383.

Clinton: 2,183 (520 of which are Superdelegates)
Sanders:  1,406 (39 of which are Superdelegates)

Republicans:  Needed to win, 1,237.

Trump:  997 (of which 41 are unpledged delegates).
Cruz:  566 (of which 16 are unpledged delegates)
Rubio:  173.  Rubio has suspended his campaign.
Kasich:  153.
Carson:  8  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Bush:  4  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Fiorina:  1  Fiorina has dropped out of the race.
Paul:  1  Paul has dropped out of the race.

Commentary

With these new tallies Trump is only 240 delegates away from securing the nomination.  Very close, but not quite close enough right now to guarantee an early end to the contest.  There will not be enough delegates at stake to wrap things up before California on June 3, so the race will continue until at least then.  Indiana is being depicted as the potential end of the race, but it really cannot be.  If the race isn't sewn up by California there are only four races left after that.

On the Democratic side Clinton is 200 delegates away.  The earliest the Democratic race could wrap up would be May 17, although that would require Clinton to take every delegate at stack from now until then.

Commentary followup

Recently I've been avoiding actually bumping this up (even though I've been occasionally commenting on events) as I don't want this thread to resume the same position as its predecessor where it wipes out everything else on the page.  But then there's was the President's Washington Press speech.

For anyone who didn't see it, it was an amazing comic moment, showing the President's excellent comedic timing, and it was stunning in content.  It was nearly impossible to watch and not draw the conclusion that President Obama really doesn't care much for Hillary Clinton, frankly like the majority of Democrats.  But beyond that, his speech was both funny and kind to Bernie Sanders, who was present.  It was rally hard not to conclude that the President favors Sanders in the election.

It also poked fun at the remainder of the candidates, and Trump in particular, but it started off with a comedic statement about the next President "whoever she is".

Whether a person is a Democrat, Republican or Independent, that statement reflects what almost everyone who has looked at the election is concluding.  In spite of her lack of popularity the chances of the GOP basically committing suicide in the election by nominating Trump are becoming so overwhelming that the conclusion is beginning to seem fairly inevitable.

On that probable inevitability, the New York Times ran an editorial yesterday entitled "Go Ahead and Play the Woman Card", maintaining that Clinton's status as a woman really truly matters arguing "
We can't change assumptions about what a leader looks like unless we change what leaders look like.".  This shows how really truly clueless the New York Times tends to be.

Something that pundits have seemingly missed, and in fact the older set of Democratic voters has also missed, is that in 2016 a candidates gender is completely irrelevant.  Nobody cares if Clinton is a woman or not, and that is hardly being noticed by the voters. This is a good thing.  

Frankly, President Obama's election eight years ago crashed that window on everything and effectively he is the last of the firsts.  Prior to him, the "first black" President, or "first Catholic President (Kennedy), or what have you, mattered.  Now, it doesn't. The country that weighted race, gender or religion into these calculations is no more. Oh, sure, some people do, but the country as a whole does not.

This is why in this election we've heard hardly anything at all, really, about Clinton's gender.  And we've heard hardly anything at all about Sanders Jewish faith, which just a decade ago would have been a big deal.  We heard nothing about Rubio's Catholic faith, which was a huge issue for Kennedy.  We aren't even hearing about Trump's serial marriages, when the fact that Reagan had been married and divorced and remarried once was a big deal in the 1976 and 1980 elections for some. A person's religion, background, etc., still undoubtedly matter, but not in the "won't vote for him because. . . "sort of way it once did for many voters.  So, New York Times, it really don't care about what a candidate looks like anymore.  It's not 1975 anymore.

Back to Clinton's nearly inevitable run, some Republican figures, such as George F. Will, are now urging a Dunkirk strategy.

Dunkirk, of course, is famous for being that location in France where British and French soldiers stages a heroic defense of the town against the Germans in 1940 so that the British forces could be withdrawn.  Basically, troops maintaining the line fought to save their army, so that it could be rebuilt in Britain.  Will, and others, are now urging Republicans to fight to save House and Senate seats so that the GOP can be rebuilt over the next four years.  Basically, the Presidency will be abandoned as a hope, conceding that it is already lost.

Will was blunt in his article that the forces that supported Trump will simply be dumped.  He doesn't want them.  The proposal, basically, is to create a new conservative party out of the wrecked shell of the current one, a pretty dramatic concession for a lifelong conservative Republican.

If that occurs, chances are that John Boehner will be one of the Republicans joining him in that effort. The former Speaker of the House was caught this past week taking real hard shots at Ted Cruz, going so far as to indicate that he'd support Trump if Trump is nominated, but not Cruz.  He didn't apologize when audio of that was released, which we probably would generally have expected.  And he showed up with Obama on an amusing video that showed up at the end of the President's speech.  Cruz has been ineffective in trying to paint Boehner since then as just the sort of Washington insider that he's been campaigning against, so in a way Beohner's recent actions may turn out to be the "establishment" getting the last laugh on Cruz, whom they truly dislike.

I should note, no matter what the pundits are currently saying, that even if neither Cruz or Kasich can mathematically get the nomination, it's far from certain that Trump will prior to the convention.  He will have take 47% of the remaining delegates and he's had trouble mustering over 35% of the vote in any election outside of the northeast.  If this goes to the convention, I'd expect the mainline GOP to try to rally and take out Trump and Cruz both.  By this point they are starting to steel themselves against a Trumpite revolt as they're starting to plan, long term, to really dump the Tea Party wing of their party and they might prefer an open breach right now to simply doing it quietly later, if there's a chance to take the White House, which there would still be.  Likewise, while Clinton's nomination seems assured, she doesn't have it yet, and in an election year when even President Obama, for whom she worked as Secretary of State, didn't really have anything nice to say about her, it's still not impossible for the unlikely to happen and Sanders obtain the nomination. 

____________________________________________________________________________________

May 1, 2016

With Indiana done, Trump is all but nominated, Cruz had dropped out, and Sanders remains in the race.

First, the results as they stand right now.  This probably stands to be revised, as Indiana is still coming in.


Democrats:  Needed to win, 2,383.

Clinton: 2,219 (520 of which are Superdelegates)
Sanders:  1,448 (39 of which are Superdelegates)

Republicans:  Needed to win, 1,237.

Trump:  1,048 (of which 41 are unpledged delegates).
Cruz:  566   Cruz has suspended his campaign. (of which 16 are unpledged delegates)
Rubio:  173.  Rubio has suspended his campaign.
Kasich:  153.
Carson:  8  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Bush:  4  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Fiorina:  1  Fiorina has dropped out of the race.
Paul:  1  Paul has dropped out of the race.

Commentary

The real surprise of the evening is that Cruz dropped out.  He wasn't expected to win Indiana in the first place so his loss impacted very little in terms of his overall chances.  It probably operates to put the bullet in his political future, however.

That leaves only Kasich contesting Trump in the convention, but he has no realistic chance.  Many of Cruz's voters will go to Trump rather than Kasich in any area where Cruz had support.  So keeping this running long enough to go for a contested convention is highly unlikely.  If he did manage to pull that off, there's a decent chance that Trump would not be the nominee, but that's very unlikely.

So that takes us to the Democrats where Hillary Clinton now needs less than 200 delegates to win.  Amazingly, even at this late date, Sanders managed what Cruz could not; he remains competitive against a nominee who is closing in on the final number.   He'd need a little under 900 delegates to make it, however, and that's unlikely to occur.  But he continues to try.  And as it isn't impossible, he can't be blamed and to has to be admired.

Assuming that these primaries continue to play out in their current direction, this now means that the contest in the fall will between two disliked candidates, Trump and Clinton, but the dynamics mean Clinton will win. The Presidential race, therefore, is now all but over.

The amazing thing is that the GOP has managed to throw a race such as this, but then it's done very poorly in its Presidential picks in recent years.  At the same time, it's made promises it didn't keep.  It set itself up for failure in these regards, but now it may have set the table for internal reform.  It's current task is to hold on to the seats in the House it has for the next two years, and to keep the Senate seats it has right now.  Clinton's unpopularity may aid it in that.  The struggle it will face, if it does that, is dealing with likely vacancies in the Supreme Court, including the current one, over the next four years while it rebuilds.

That process has started already.  It's pretty clear that at the same time some in the GOP are now embracing Trump, others, recognizing the upcoming defeat, have their knives out for those responsible for it.  The GOP that we see in 2020 will not be the same one that will complete the 2016 election.  And it may be questionable as to what the Democratic party is as well.

___________________________________________________________________________________

May 4, 2016

 And now Kasich is out.  Trump is the Republican nominee.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Related  Threads:

Tracking the Presidential Election, 2016

Blog Mirror: James Bilder, Artillery Scout: The Story of a Forward Observer with the U.S. Field Artillery in World War I

James Bilder, Artillery Scout: The Story of a Forward Observer with the U.S. Field Artillery in World War I

Interesting podcast on a book on the same topic:I have to say, I was looking forward to listening to the podcast but there are so many material detail errors in some of the discussion (the Krag being a single shot, for example) that it causes me to wonder about the accuracy of anything in the discussion.  If anyone happens to listen to it (and the audio variant is free), I'd be curious as to your impressions.

Blog Mirror: Jeffrey Sammons & John Morrow, Jr., Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War: The Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African American Quest for Equality

Interesting podcast on two all black National  Guard infantry regiments during the Great War (and posted down here as it's clearly off topic, no horses discussed anywhere).Of interest, the speakers present a highly negative view of Pershing in regards towards his attitudes towards his black troops, which is the first time I've heard his views expressed in this fashion.  

Knowing little about this, if anyone listens to the podcast and is knowledgeable on this topic, I'd be curious as to their views.

Blog Mirror: New mystery arises from iconic Iwo Jima image

Interesting article.  Apparently Bradley, the author of Flag Of Our Fathers, now agrees.

New mystery arises from
iconic Iwo Jima image

History buffs’ analysis of the famous World War II photo challenges a long-assumed truth

The analysis of the photos is pretty convincing.

British Pathe newsreel of U.S. Troops in Mexico.

Another bad idea at the ABA

Eee gads, our buddies at the ABA:

Is nonlawyer ownership of law firms long overdue? Or a bad idea?

Posted Apr 27, 2016 04:34 pm CDT

By Sarah Mui

This week, we noted that until Monday, May 2, the ABA is seeking comments on an issues paper that considers the risks and benefits of alternative business structures allowing nonlawyer ownership of law firms—which is currently permitted in the United Kingdom, Australia, and to a limited extent in Washington, D.C.

Nonlawyer ownership could increase capital for law firms and help them strengthen their management teams with nonlawyers. But there are concerns that nonlawyer ownership will threaten lawyers’ independent professional judgment.

The debate has been raging for years. This week, we’d like to ask you: Is nonlawyer ownership of law firms long overdue? Or a bad idea?

Bad idea?  Injecting more money into the system, and this in the form of non lawyer ownership?  Yeah, that's a bad idea.

Most of the lawyers replying to the query agree that it's a bad idea.

Let's hope this idea fails.

Sinclair Oil Corporation founded on this day in 1916

 

 Sinclair advertisement in Hudson Wyoming.

Sinclair Oil Corporation, which recently announced a major turnaround at its refinery in Casper Wyoming, was founded on this day in 1916.

The founder of the company, Harry F. Sinclair, created the company by merging the assets of eleven small petroleum companies. 

The company has long had a presence in Wyoming with even a town being named after it.

 

Former Parco Hotel in Sinclair, which was once called Parco.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: First Presbyterian Church, Cheyenne Wyoming

Churches of the West: First Presbyterian Church, Cheyenne Wyoming:

Lex Anteinternet: The ghost of the Crow Treaty of 1868 appears in a ...

Lex Anteinternet: The ghost of the Crow Treaty of 1868 appears in a ...:    Crow Indians, 1908. These men may have been living at the time the Ft. Laramie Treaty came into being. The Casper Star Tribune rep...

At least based on the reporting on this trial the 1868 treaty didn't actually come up much.  Instead the defendant mostly relied upon his declaration that he had believed he was in Montana rather than Wyoming. That wouldn't really be a defense to the charge, but it was a smart strategy.

He was convicted but just received a year of unsupervised parole.  All in all, probably a good result for everyone.

Lex Anteinternet: Mixed messages.

Lex Anteinternet: Mixed mesages.: Just when all the local economic news is bad, we get this from the Tribune: The Sinclair Refinery in Casper is undergoing one of its m...

On a negative note, we learned today that yet another oil and gas producer, Ultra Petroleum, Wyoming's largest gas producer, filed for bankruptcy yesterday.

Best Posts for the week of April 24, 2016.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

The Wyoming Economy. Looking at it in a different way.

 

 Big Horn foothills. There's a reason why I've posted this here, but you'll have to slog through the post to discover why.

Scott and Obregon meet in El Paso.

 Hugh Scott

Gen Hugh Scott, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, and General Alvaro Obregon, Minister of War of the Mexican Government, met in El Paso to discuss problems that had arisen due to the American intervention in Mexico.  The meetings continued to May 2 and resulted in an understanding between the two governments providing that the United States would slowly withdraw from Mexico and the Mexican government would undertake measures to prevent future raids into the United States.  The understanding was then submitted to the governments of the respective parties to see if they would agree to it.

Alvaro Obregon

Casper Daily Press for April 29, 1916

No Casper Daily Press was put up yesterday as the Friday edition, the Casper Weekly Press, was simply a copy of the prior day's edition.

Mixed messages.

Just when all the local economic news is bad, we get this from the Tribune:

The Sinclair Refinery in Casper is undergoing one of its most significant overhauls since it opened in 1923, and hiring people by the hundreds in the process.

Wow.

“We believe in operating the refinery in Casper long-term,” Ruble said. “With the crude units, and boilers, electrical, all that stuff - theoretically we should be good for 100 years.”

Wow again. 

On the other hand, Alpha has laid off 37 miners and natural gas driller QEP reported a $863 million loss on Wednesday.

The British Surrender at Kut, April 29, 1916.

 Indian POW after the surrender at Kut.

Besieged British forces at Kut, Mesopotamia, surrendered to the Ottomans in a major British defeat in the Middle East.

Kut was a British strategic disaster, although in the history of the Great War its somewhat forgotten except by those who study the war in the Middle East.  An operation controlled by the Indian Army, rather than the British Army (a confusing distinction for those not too familiar, and even those who are, with the distinction made in the case of British administered India) the concept was to have moved up the Euphrates into Mesopotamia (Iraq) and basically cut the Ottoman's off from the balance of their Middle Eastern empire.  The operation was successful at first but outstretched its supply lines and had to fall back to Kut.  At Kut a force that was then about 11,000 men were put under siege by the Ottomans.  The commanding British officer recommended a withdrawal from Kut but was denied permission as there was conceived to be a value in tying down Ottoman forces.  When the same commander misreported ration reserves a rescue attempt was mounted, but it failed.  No attempt by the garrison itself to withdraw overland was made.

The British later attempted to parole the force in Kut, an age old military practice which is misinterpreted in regards to the effort as the offer of a bribe, and even T. E. Lawrence was involved in the effort, showing to what extent he'd rising in importance already.  The Ottomans rejected the offer and the surrender of the remaining 8,000 troops was made on this day.

Blog Mirror: Prologue: How the West was Settled.

Prologue:  How the West was Settled.

The Wyoming Economy. Looking at it in a different way.

 

 Big Horn foothills. There's a reason why I've posted this here, but you'll have to slog through the post to discover why.

I thought about starting this thread just the other day.  On what must surely be a "Great Wyoming Minds Think Alike" type of day, Neil Waring, on one of his blogs (like me, he keeps more than one blog) posted this item on the same topic:

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Bring on the Tourists: Must Be In Wyoming With Wyoming coal now suffering at the hands of environmentalists, the downturn in crude oil prices, and natural g...

So he got there first.

I'm going to post anyway, however, and in doing that I'm actually combining three draft post that I had sitting in the hopper, one that dates as far back as last summer (there are ones older than that, I don't always write stuff in one sitting or block by any means).

I've been posting a lot on Wyoming's economy here recently. And almost everything I've posted on that has been bad economics news.  Petroleum oil is been sick in the respiratory ward for months.  Natural Gas is convalescing with a low price head cold that threatens to turn into pneumonia.  Coal is in the ICU and might not make it back out.  And just yesterday we learned that Uranium, a fuel that has nothing to do with anything we've just mentioned whatsoever, is in trouble here, due to an earthquake several years ago in far off Japan.

Now, in some other states people would just shrug and not worry much about this.  But Wyoming's economy is heavily invested in the extractive industries.  Indeed, as things started to tank I heard nervous comments about how this wasn't so anymore, but it is.

The extractive industries

Almost all of our real industry and almost all of our government revenue derives from the extractive industries.  Everyone depends on them.  The way it works is this way.  The resources is taken out of the ground and taxed.  That's where the state gets most of its revenue.  If the lease if public, the Federal government or the State gets more revenue, depending upon who holds the lease, and if that lease is Federal the Federal government pays back to the state an additional amount.  Obviously, the people working in the extractive industry make their money there. But so do all the vast number of support industries.  And that ripples out from there. As oil companies lay people off, for example, the support industries start too. And soon, not all that long thereafter, the hotels are empty, etc.

 

Early Wyoming oilfield.

Indeed, the Alaskan fishing industry was down in town the other day recruiting laborers used to hard physical labor to work on fish processing boats.  Seems odd, but makes sense.  When we couldn't find laborers in this state we recruited in depressed Michigan for the same reason.

Anyhow, with coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium all in a slump. the state's really hurting.  And it should be noted that this always tends to happen in this freakish way. There's no reason that the price of petroleum oil should fall along with coal, let alone uranium, but that's happened to us before.  An entire town in northern Carbon County disappeared just as the coal mining towns were starting to nearly disappear, and this in the 1980s.  Here we go again.

Well, whenever a slump happens we tend to wring our hands and declare, like The Who, that "We Won't Get Fooled Again" by the cyclical nature of the extractive industries.  Here we must note that some are so invested in the concept that the extractive industries are Wyoming that to even say that is taken as some sort of slam against them, which isn't true at all. Rather, we have to acknowledge the nature of those industries, which is that they boom and bust.  When they are booming, the income and revenue stream they provide to the state is great.  When they crash, however, it's a problem if we haven't prepared for it, and we seem not to.

As part of that, and here we need to be thinking of coal and its future, some of our former extractive industries do indeed disappear over time.  Wyoming at one time mined iron and gold.  It doesn't anymore.  Indeed, I posted some photos of a former gold mine at South Pass on a thread at Holscher's Hub, that thread being this one:

The Carissa Mine, South Pass Wyoming
 

Even within the last fifteen or so years there's been speculation about the possibilities of opening the mining at South Pass back up.  Well, I suppose its a remote possibility, but the key word  there is remote.  Sometimes the bust is for keeps.

Indeed, one of  my grandmothers on my father's side was from Leadville Colorado.  She was born there.  Her father had come there as a gold miner originally.  He switched to being a merchant, and they later moved to Denver, but Leadville provides a good example.  Leadville's mines closed and the town limped along for decades before remaking itself into something else, finally accepting that gold and heavy metal mining was not going to come back.

Now, I'm not saying that petroleum oil and natural gas will not come back. They may not come roaring back, but they'll come back.  But we should be cautious about assuming that they'll come back in the same way that Rick from Casablanca assured Elsa about regret, that it would come "maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and always."  The reason we should be cautious here is that there is reason to believe, at least with petroleum oil, that we may in fact be living in a new production regime.  For years people worried about "peak oil", with people who enjoy being alarmed particularly enjoying worrying about it. But it turns out that the problem here may not be peak oil, but we don't need the oil as much anymore, and that this trend will grow.  It seems to be.  In fact Saudi Arabia is literally banking on it, ramping up production to dominate the market while it scoops up what it thinks is the last of the oil bucks.  This doesn't mean oil will go away entirely, but it might mean that in an environment in which it is used increasingly less as a fuel it won't have the value it once had.

It seems unlikely that we fact the same story with natural gas, which is likely to be used more in the future.  The problem here is, right now, that there's a lot of it, so the price is depressed.  We shouldn't assume that this will be the situation for eternity, however, and therefore we ought to really pause when we see gas being flared, as someday we may wish that we had it to sell.  Right now, however, the price is in the basement.  This past week the industry pinned some hopes on being able to export gas to China, which a recent Federal statute encourages.  We'll see how that goes.

With both petroleum oil and natural gas we'll also have to watch the advance of technology, which has been a huge factor in the recent boom. Hardly noticed it was also a factor in the slow revival of uranium with technology advancing so much in regards the mineral that scares the dickens out of the very people who should embrace it ardently that we don't really mine it in the conventional sense anymore. We drill for it and "mine" it in solution.  So here, the mineral that once created enormous mines with high paying jobs does not even with the price is good.  It still provides jobs, bu they're drilling jobs and infrastructure jobs.  Indeed infrastructure in some ways turns out to be the long term stable set of jobs for petroleum, gas and uranium.

I'll omit addressing the sad state of coal as I've written about it so much recently.

Anyhow, all that is really background for the observation that Wyoming has had a strong attachment to the petroleum industry since day one, but we've had a hard time ever accepting the boom and bust nature of it.  This isn't a criticism of the industry so much as its an observation on the reality of our blindness to problems in this area.  So this has always been a part of our economic picture, and that's what I propose to examine here, our long term economic picture.

The state's economic constants

As far back as you can go in Wyoming's history there are certain economic constants.  Some of them are that we have a collection of industries all related to one thing that just keep on keeping on.  Another is that we have hoped for the extractive industries to work economic miracles from our very onset of existence.  A third is the background role of government in providing jobs, even when we've been hostile to that.  Let's look at that.

And let's look again at oil.

Oil, and the other extractive industries, but oil very much in particular has been the expectant economic hope of Wyoming almost from day one.

July 15, 1891, Natrona County Tribune, reporting on both oil and gas production.

This may be surprising, really, for those who think of the early history of Wyoming all in the context of cattlemen, or perhaps earlier in the context of Mountain Men and Indians.  And it is certainly the case that cattlemen and Indians are part of the story (and still are, and we'll be looking at that shortly), but oil was expected to bring big returns early on.  Indeed the first time I realized that was in trying to research the Johnson County War back when I was in high school, as I plowed through a pile of microfiche issues of the Natrona County Tribune.  Issue after issue discussed oil finds, not, I expect, what we expect to see from a Natrona County newspaper in the 1890s. But it's there.

Okay, well so what?

Well, the point is that oil, gas, and coal are there and always have been.  But the boom and bust nature of those industries has always been part of them.  When the price rises, as it always has, we leap into them great guns.  After awhile we expect the boom to be eternal, even though there's always good indicators that the boom will not be.  And we are always surprised by the crash.

Wyoming Oil World, June 15, 1918.  A crash was soon to occur with the end of World War One.

A real change, it should be noted, has occurred in the oil industry since the 1980s, and that's been the demise of the local refinery.  This has to be noted here as its significant, and ties into what I'll later note.  Wyoming had refineries almost from the onset of oil exploration here.  Casper had three refineries here in town up until the 1980s. Every town in Wyoming had one, it seemed.  Glenrock had a refinery.  Laramie had a refinery.  Now we have four operating refineries of which I'm aware.  Maybe there are more, but I'm not aware of them.  Refineries provided good blue collar jobs for decades, now they provide very few.  In fairness, gas plants have come in whereas up until fairly recently we didn't have many of them.  But that points out what I intended to note above.  Gas builds and is still building infrastructure in Wyoming.  Petroleum oil does as well, but not in the way it once did. Refining has tended to shift to super huge refineries on the Gulf Coast, which can take in U.S. production, and also take in imported production.

 

Standard Oil Refinery in Casper.

So what we can accept here is that oil and gas will remain, but in looking at this aspect of our economy, can't we do more to build local stable jobs from that?  We'll round back around to that towards the end.

So, we've looked at coal, gas, uranium and oil a bit, and will come back to them, what else is out there?  We tend not to notice much until the crash.  One thing is what Neil Waring already noted, tourism, but we will come back to that bit later also.  That's because, in order to look at tourism, we have to look at why anyone comes here at all.  And that comes from. . . agriculture.

Agriculture

 Oats

Agriculture is the great ignored industry in Wyoming.

This will being the hackles up on some, because agriculture in Wyoming is generally conceived of as ranching, and ranching has some real opponents in the modern U.S., even though in the West, contrary to the anti's views, its darned near environmentally neutral.  In fact, truth be known, it's environmentally positive if objectively views. That's right, that's what I'm saying as that's the truth. An environmentalist, if they're realistic, ought to thank a rancher every time he sees one (and ought to be for nuclear power also, but that's another topic).

 

Laramie Range hayfield.

Agriculture is an economic constant in Wyoming. While there was some economic activity, even national economic activity, if we consider that courier du bois  and trappers were in fact part of an international industry, it's agriculture that really created the state and made it what it was, and is.

Agriculture made its appearance in a recognizable form in Wyoming as early as the 1840s when New Mexican laborers brought up to work on Adobe buildings at Ft. Laramie stayed on and started small vegetable farms on the "Mexican Hills" near there.  This gave them in an income in that the produce was available to sell both to soldiers at Ft. Laramie as well as to travelers on the Oregon Trail, who by that time no doubt were pretty darned ready for something green and fresh.  Unfortunately, while the area remains a farming area, as far as I know there aren't any farms in the area that are descendant from the original ones.

Cattle, of course, is what we think of in terms of Wyoming agriculture, although it was really farming that made its the first appearance and it certainly continues on in a big way.  Crop farming continues on in southeastern Wyoming which has a climate and soil much like Nebraska's, and hence is part of the giant corn and wheat belt that stretches all the way into the Mid West and which is a massive part of the economy in many such states.  It also exists in Fremont County as well, and in Big Horn and Washakie Counties.  Hay crop production exists in many places, as long as there's water to support it.

 

Porta-vet box of a large animal vetrinarian.  A common ranch site in some times of the year.

Where there isn't sufficient water, which is most of the state we have cattle and sheep, although now days mostly cattle.  And Wyoming cattle live out on the range.  They're fed in the winter, but on the range.  Really, they're making use of the ground that in earlier eras buffalo made use of and in the same way, save for the fact that buffalo tended to crowd into Cottonwood groves in the winter and destroy them.

It's cattle and sheep that keep Wyoming wild.  This use of the land keeps the land open and natural. When that stops, you get houses and "ranchettes", something that environmentalist should keep in mind.  A strong cattle industry makes for a strong wild Wyoming.

Given this, and that it's so much a part of the background of the state, you'd think that this is an industry the state would seek to support in some ways.  But it doesn't.  Stockmen and other agriculturalist are largely on their own in all sorts of ways.  There is the leased ground, a very misunderstood public asset, but even this is under attack, unfortunately by agriculturalist as well as others.  At any rate, agriculture is an industry which, in spite of the slams against it, just keeps on keeping on by itself under its own steam, ignored by the state and by Wyoming communities.

It should and must be noted that employment in this industry has really changed over the years.  In the early days Wyoming ranches large and small employed a fair number of people directly.  That was due tot he nature of the operations, and even though a very significant amount of the labor on ranches remains the same now as it was in 1890, not nearly as many people are directly employed in the industry as once were.  There are a lot of reasons for this.

 

One reason is that barbed wire changed the nature of ranching and accelerated the change to smaller, in relative terms, family operations.  When that occurred large numbers of year around employees were not needed and to some extent those employees were members of the immediate family.  As this evolution took place family run operations relied on neighbors and friends for additional labor support during those times of the years which, at one time, caused large numbers of seasonal cowhands to be employed.

Another big factor was the 4x4 truck.  Up until World War Two ranches had to rely on cowhands stationed at the edges of their lands for winter feeding in many instances. The truck stopped that, and it reduced the need for labor as well.  Ranchers that once would employ several hands on remote areas of their ranches could now simply drive their with a 4x4 truck.  Such trucks were first available immediately after the war, and it was the war that really brougth them on in strength and proved their utility.  So now many ranches, even large ones, employ no individual cowhands at all, although there are still quite a few that do.

 

World War Two era Dodge 4x4 truck.  With very little in the way of change, this model would go into civilian production immediately after World War Two.

The demise of the sheep industry also really played a large role in the number of direct employees.  There are still Sheepmen in Wyoming, but not like they once were. And this is because, in part, due to the fact that that sheep production was in fact one of the rare areas where there was government involvement, as up until the late 1980s the Federal Government supported the price of wool due to the Defense Wool program.  That program came in during the Korean War when the military had to purchase heavy woolen clothing in large quantities and found that there wasn't a sufficient supply of it. The wool program was therefore brought in but it carried on well after it probably should not have.  Even defending the program it has to be admitted that ending it in the late 1980s made sense, keeping in mind that we hadn't fought a cold weather war since 1954 (we would again in the 2000s) and the technology of winter clothing had changed a lot in that 30 year period.

 Sheep in Natrona County, Wyoming, 1940s.  This photo could have been taken at any point in the 20th Century up into the 1990s.

Also related to it, however, is that the United Kingdom joined the European Community which in turn caused the UK to dump the market policies that favored its former Dominions.  During the late Empire stage of the UK the UK had a policy of developing agricultural production in its Dominions but finishing the products in the UK. So Australian, New Zealand and Canadian wool all went to fine British wool mills for a finished product.  When the UK became part of the EC, however, that violated the EC's policies and the British stopped doing that, focusing on local markets instead.  Indeed, the EC has sort of a bizarre semi autarkic economic policy that heavily impacts agriculture in a negative way in some instances and which explains some odd things, such as a constant EU effort at serious beef production, which it really doesn't have an agricultural landmass to support properly.

When that occurred the Australians dumped their wool in the United States and an already ailing American wool industry was really hurt. So we see few sheep now, although they've come back a bit.

The sheep industry supported an infrastructure that was immediate and obvious, which brings us to the next part of this story.  While Wyoming has lost direct employment in agriculture, it's really lost the infrastructure over the years in a major way.

Early on, there was no infrastructure and everything produced here was shipped out for processing in some fashion.  We've almost completely returned to that.  Turning first to wool, when the sheep industry massively contracted all the supporting wool buyers and shearers, an immediate support industry, were hurt.  But its in other areas where the change has been more dramatic in some ways.  Wyoming once had a very large number of stockyards. Every city had them, and they were mostly associated with railroads.  Those are almost all gone, and that's due to the fact that commercial trucking has completely taken over that role from the railroads, although as late as the 1990s the railroads were still attempting to get back into this for sheep.  Perhaps nothing can be done about that and it was inevitable.

Less inevitable, however has been the end of the local meat processing operations on a large scale. There are still some, but they're really small custom houses.  It was this industry that brought my father's family to Wyoming, as we owned a packing plant here in Casper. Today there is no packing plant in Casper, or anywhere in Wyoming for that matter, of that type.  The plant produced not only meat for sale to stores, but other products as well.  Now, you will not find that in Wyoming.  The cattle are all here, but they are shipped out of state for finishing and processing.

 Closed packing plant, Omaha Nebraska.

You'll also not find much in the way of dairy production, although the Starr Valley in western Wyoming hands on in this area, producing cheese on a commercial basis. At one time most larger towns had a creamery that processed milk, and indeed my family had one for a time here in Casper. That meant that there were dairy cows nearby, which there were, and where you have dairy cows, you have to have a large quantity of high quality hay for them, which was also produced locally.

 

Former Jersey Creamery, Casper Wyoming.

Now all of this is gone.  National consolidation of these things is the reason why.  The situation in the meat packing industry is legendary and is the source of steady complaints from both ranchers and consumers.  Indeed, ti's slowly spawned a direct buy movement, which is now pretty common, where families will purchase a cow, i.e., a "beef", for a half beef, for slaughter.

Having said all of this, the direct economic impact of agriculture remains quite large in Wyoming, it's just not very well noted by anyone. Independent truckers, local feeds stores, professional services, and even local manufacturing all rely on it pretty heavily.  Seemingly nobody notices.  Indeed, in some instances, local governments can be a bit hostile to agriculture when some sorts of support facilities are proposed.

Before I depart from this topic, I'm going to note one thing that seems self evident but for some reason is never treated that way.  Silvaculture, the raising of trees for harvest, is agriculture. That makes logging part of agriculture.  Indeed in Wyoming, all logging, to the extent any remains, and it isn't much, takes place on land that cattle are normally on.  Logging is an industry that's really been hurt in the US over the last thirty years and this may actually be one area where environmental concerns have hurt agriculture, although ironically here too its something that environmentalist should reconsider.  Growing trees are carbon sinks.  Full grown trees much less so.

 

 Cattle sharing ground with camping fisherman.

Tourism of all types

In a real sense the tourism industry, and if we consider out of state sportsmen part of that, which we should, is ancillary to agriculture.  It's the open lands, largely caused by agriculture, that cause people to come in and tour Wyoming for a whole host of reasons.  Neil Waring, as noted, has done a fine entry on that the other day and I'll not go into it, therefore, in too much depth.  I will note that most towns and cities have gotten pretty good at promoting this.  Indeed, maybe a little too good.

I will turn however to the sportsmen aspect of this, which is often missed and which may be the part of this that aggravates locals the most.  Indeed, some months ago, before the downturn in the economy here really got rolling in a big way, I ran across this:

Found on Facebook and posted via fair use.

This was going to be on one of those threads I started as a draft quite awhile back, and I'm just getting around to posting now, as I think the topic has changed a bit in context.

When I was a boy, you used to frequently see a bumper sticker around here that said "Live in Colorado, fish in Colorado. . . live in Wyoming, fish in Wyoming. The gist was that people were tired of being overrun with Colorado fishermen.

It was also during a period of time when we were in one of those oil booms.  We felt rather overrun, including by Colorado fishermen.  The view wasn't limited to fishermen, however, as it extended to out of state hunters in general.  This was particularly the case when landowners, who can be their own worst enemies, took a legislative run at trying to own the state's wildlife, a move that came about with a view much like that of the effort to get the Federal Government to give us a gift of the Federal domain against our own interest.

I ran across this on Facebook (actually I ran across it sometime back, and started working on it as a draft, and then forgot about it and rediscovered it). When I did, the old complaint was back, but when I first noted this, we were in what turned out to be the last stages of an oil boom, now turned to bust, and that's what happened the last time too.  When I started this, it was really reminding me of the 1970s.   Our current times, however, remind me of the 1980s.  I wonder if these sentiments, that caused the revival of this view, will now persevere.  One thing that we really started thinking shortly after this is how glad we were that out of state outdoorsmen came in and spent their cash when they did.

That's where I suspect we are again.

And then there's the government.

The Government and Employment in Wyoming

Oh, I know, what people expect on this, particularly from a Wyomingite, is "that darned government is ruining everything. . . we need to get the government out of . . . "

And, indeed, if you read the newspaper comments on Governor Mead's recent decision to scale back the state government by 8% in spending, you'll see some comments of that type.

But, as I posted here awhile back, government spending has been propping up the state's economy recently and keeping the downturn from being a wholesale disaster. . . so far.

We hate to think of this that way, but a good argument can be made that, in the economy we've had since the 1890s, the government is one leg of a three legged stool.  One of those legs, the mineral industry, is now wobbly, another, agriculture and what it supports, keeps on keeping on, and the third, government, is saving our bacon right now.

It's doing that through, in part, construction projects, but that's not all.  In quite a few towns around Wyoming government itself is the major employer.  In Natrona County the school district is the largest single employer.  Indeed, even the bus fleet the school district supports is really impressive.  If we add the towns, cities and the county itself, and then the Federal Government, you get quite the number of employees.   A state agency, the Oil & Gas Commission, has a major building here.

And lets' not forget the Federal Government, one of our favorite whipping boys around here.  The Bureau of Land Management, which gets no love it seems, has quite a facility here supporting both agriculture as well as the mineral industry.  The Soil Conservation Service also has a facility. The constant suggestions that we "take back" the Federal Domain in part amount to a suggestion that we just axe these agencies and have no real state expression of them which would mean. . . more jobs right out the window.  We already know that we don't have the money to spend in this are that the Federal Government does, so really, we just aren't going to. And in turn we would stumble and stammer under the strain. "Trail permit?   Um. . . . what's a trail permit. . . what's a trail?"

And stuff like this is true all around Wyoming.  Douglas has the Police Academy. Every county has a Game and Fish facility.  Laramie has the university.  Every substantial town has a community college or an extension of the University of Wyoming.  Guernsey has a major state park and the huge National Guard training range (really an Army training range).  Northwest Wyoming has the parks, and not just Yellowstone.  It goes on and on.

And part of the way that it goes on and on has to do with the massive amount of government sponsored construction that goes on here.  Schools (three huge projects in Natrona County alone), highways, it's nearly endless.

So where do we go?

So then, what to make of this?

Well, usually when we go through a crash, we start to talk about diversification.  We also usually start to take about cutting back government spending.  And we're going to have to talk about a new government revenue sources, or having a state government that matches the money we take in.  It's probably time for all of that.

Maybe its' time to talk about building upon what we have, and actually realizing what that is.  And, as we can see from the above, in terms of private industry, that's agriculture, tourism and mineral extraction.  And, like it philosophically or not, we have a lot of government employment in this state and government entities that are pretty darned involved in some sectors of the economy, particularly oil and gas, already.

So, what do we have to build with?  Let's start with mineral extraction.

Mineral extraction?  Perhaps you're thinking "why I thought you were arguing against relying on that?"  No, I'm really not. I'm arguing that we have to be smart and realistic about that.

The boom and bust nature of much of the mineral industry is a feature of it that is pretty fixed, long established by history, and that's all largely beyond our control.  We have to accept that.  But these industries aren't going completely away.  Even coal, which is in real trouble, isn't going completely away and indeed even right now there's an effort by one coal company to start a mine near Sheridan.

The thing we can do, therefore, is to be smart in our planning on these industries.  And that would have to accept that they're going to have rocky periods.

We may also want to be very careful, and we very rarely are, about thinking that when times are good that they're going to go on forever.  There are those who will act that way and they nearly take any suggestion to the contrary as a hostile comment.  Planning for the crash ought to go on during the boom, rather than waiting until it occurs, and that's just smart.

It's also smart to recognize long term trends, none of which are hugely favorable towards the fossil fuel industry.  Recognizing that isn't being hostile, once again, it's just recognizing it.

And perhaps we also ought to at least ponder that, like the oil exporting nations of the Middle East, we really don't do much with the raw product anymore.  We did at one time with petroleum oil, in that we did refine it here, but we no longer do that.  Natural gas, because of its nature, is "refined", or rather processed here, and that will go on.  We ought to consider all of that, however.  We never processed the iron we mined, for example, even though we had all the things necessary to do it (except, perhaps, the large scale shipping necessary for that).

Now, at this point in time, I may have to admit that the ship has sailed on all of these things.  Down to a handful of refineries, I don't see that industry coming back.  There's a reason that super sized refineries are all located on the Gulf Coast.  But if we're not going to process our raw products here, maybe taxing slightly what we export would be a good idea.  Nothing radical, but to add a little bit of a tax in addition to the existing ones for what is departing would not impact the price and might help us out quite a bit in lean times, particularly based upon how the funds were earmarked.  And who knows, maybe that would encourage a little processing here as well.

All of which might do nothing at all, I'll concede.

Okay then, what about agriculture the one we ignore?

Well, here's something I think we can do a fair amount about.

Agriculture in the state has weathered all the storms. Everything we've ever raised or grown here we still do, we just don't do it in the same proportions as some prior eras, but that's not surprising. What we don't do is to process hardly anything here.  We don't pack any of the meat on a large scale.  We don't process any wool into woolens.  We don't mill any flour.  We don't do any of that.

Indeed, the only processing we do, and its a return to something we hadn't done in a long time, is to brew beer and bottle it and (and this is new) to distill grain and bottle that.

Maybe it's time to sit back and have one of those beers and ponder that.

There's a lot we can do here, but in some ways we have to be a bit bold and buck some trends.  There's a large multi-state industry devoted to processing remotely here, and to suggest we ought to do it locally means having to deal with that.

But it can be dealt with.

Let's start with the toughest aspect of that, the beef cattle industry.

At one time, Wyoming had at least one packing plant, indeed right here in Casper.  There was another just outside of the state in Scotsbluff, right over the border, and yet another in Denver.  There were probably others, including perhaps some in the state, but now there are none and all of those which I have mentioned are gone, although one remains in Greeley Colorado.

 February 1922 Casper Packing Company advertisement.

Now, they are gone because the meat packing industry has become amazingly consolidated and the profit margins in packing are, or at least were, low. But if the packing industry could be revived, it would be a natural for Wyoming.  We have everything it requires, at least in certain localities, that being cattle, agriculture for hay and feed corn, sufficient water, good roads and land.

The situation is similar when we consider sheep.  While the sheep industry has really taken a hit, it's slowly somewhat revived over the years and we do have sheep.  Sheep, as an agricultural animal, are interesting in that their primary crop is really wool, with meat being a secondary one.  The meat aspect of this is already addressed by the comments on beef above, but the wool part isn't.

Wool itself used to contribute quite a bit to the Wyoming economy in that there were wool buyers, sorters, and shearers, all in addition to the sheep ranchers, who employed themselves and their herders.  What we never had, however, was a woolen mill, to process raw wool into anything.  We could, but we don't.

This is also true of the milling industry; i.e., flour milling.

 

 Old elevator in Sheridan Wyoming. This elevator belonged to the Best Out West flour mill, and apparently this was the mill. The hotel next to it is named after the mill.  From Painted Bricks.

Wyoming grows a fair amount of grain, and grows it all over, even though we often do not seem to realize it.  Major agricultural areas can be found in southeastern Wyoming, west central Wyoming, northeastern Wyoming and northern Wyoming.  We grow a fair amount of wheat and corn and if milling facilities were here, we could go the next step.  We don't, however.

We've done better with sugar. We do have some sugar facilities serving, in particular, the Big Horn Basin. Those, it should be noted, are owned by co-ops that formed to operate them with the sugar companies pulled out of that area.  Elsewhere we haven't done as well with that.

Probably the one area that we've done well at recently that might point the way forward a bit is in the category of alcohol.  

A bottle of Wyoming Whiskey, depicted in a thread here on Lex Anteinternet.

I addressed the introduction of a local bourbon some time ago, indeed quite some time ago, on a thread that was once one of the most popular here on this page, that being The Rebirth Of Rye Whiskey And Nostalgia For 'The Good Stuff' & Beer and Prohibition.  That thread also addressed, a bit, the history of local beers.  On the whiskey, I noted; 

Wyoming Whiskey is a new brand of whiskey that's distilled in the tiny Hot Springs County town of Kirby.  It came about, according to what I've read, as the Meads purchased farm ground in the area in order to have a steady supply of corn for their cattle operation, and then hit upon the idea of distilling whiskey in the county.  Hot Springs County is otherwise famous for, well, hots springs, and is of course the location of Thermopolis, which features the same.

This trend has really continued since then, and there's apparently some sort of distillery in Teton County now as well, and there is one that is distilling a couple of different types of hard alcohol here in Natrona County.  I can't opine on the Teton County one at all, and I'm only aware of it as the state government recently turned down the request of an Idaho distiller for a grant to help relocate its headquarters over into the county, as another distiller opposed it.  For that matter, my experience with the local Natrona County distiller is limited to having had a single shot of its vodka, given to me by a friend as proof that not all vodka is bad.  While my position on vodka remains that the difference between the best vodka and the worst is the price, I have to say that I was impressed because . . . well, it didn't taste like vodka.

It's not only hard alcohol that's making inroads into Wyoming and processing the state's agricultural produce. Beer has made an amazing return in these regards.

Snake River Brewery in Jackson Wyoming.

I've commented on this before, but here too the trend has really developed.  And to an amazing extent.  There are now breweries in quite a few Wyoming towns putting out a really high quality product.  This industry has gone from one which, a few years ago, would have required a person to hunt for a Wyoming beer (and a few years before that there were none) to one in which a person could easily buy beer on any occasional and always find a high quality Wyoming beer of any type.  It's really amazing.  

Indeed, Wyoming beer is even canned now.  That may not seem so amazing, but a brewery has to put out quite a bit of beer before they begin canning it.  But that's now going on.  Indeed, beer is the Distributist Economic champion of Wyoming.

This revival, it should be noted, represents a return of an industry that once was all over and very local.  Casper, which recently saw local beer return at The Wonder Bar, an bar that dates back forever in Casper's history, once had a regional brewer in the form of Hillcrest Brewery.  

Bottles from Hillcrest Lager Beer, a beer that was once brewed locally but is no more. Casper doesn't bottle any beer anymore, but it does brew it once again.

There are even a couple of winerys in Wyoming. I don't know anything about them, other than that they exist, but this is additional evidence that at least in terms of processing a local agricultural product into a finished one, alcohol leads the way.

Okay, its one thing to point all of these things out, but what of it.  We don't have packing plants, mills, etc.  What, a person might ask, do you propose?

Well, I'd propose something that Wyomingites hate, state assistance for private enterprise, or even direct involvement in it.

Now, before people have their hackles up too much, let me point out that we only oppose this to a limited degree.  We're actually okay, based on our track records, of supporting start ups with grants.  We're also okay with investing in doubtful technologies, if they relate to the mineral industry.  Witness there all the money the state is sinking into Clean Coal Technology.  I'm not opposed to that by any means, but we must admit that the chances of it ever paying off are remote.

So, before we get too much further, let us consider North Dakota Mill and Elevator.

Eh?

Postcard of the North Dakota State Mill, 1915.

While nearly a neighboring state (it doesn't border us, but you can sprint across the corner of South Dakota and be there in no time at all), North Dakota, which we will return to when we discuss education, has a really different cultural history compared to Wyoming.  With a heavily Scandinavian immigrant population from early in the 20th Century, North Dakota had and still has a political culture that, quite frankly, was occasionally sympathetic to socialism.

Now, let me be frank, I'm not terribly sympathetic with socialism, but we can take a page out of an example of something that works, if it works.  And here's something that has worked for North Dakota.

It's a state owned operation, formed to address problems that farmers were experiencing, but it doesn't receive a subsidy from the state and its self supporting.  

This is the same model used by the other Dakota, South Dakota, for South Dakota Cement, an operation so successful that it has expanded even recently and markets its product in every state bordering South Dakota.  It even had a plant, at one time, here in Casper.

Now, I'm not suggesting that we need state run or owned industries everywhere.  But perhaps we can take an example where there isn't a private industry.  Critics would say, and they should be listened to, that if a private industry isn't operating it's for a good reason. But, we also have to admit that there are a fair number of industries that get their start from some sort of government support.  Indeed, the entire transcontinental railroad was such an example, getting state support in the form of massive land grants, which is essentially the same as a massive infusion of capital.  There's no reason to pretend otherwise.

So, where we don't have a local industry, perhaps we should consider if the state should help. The state's already helping the coal and petroleum industries via various studies at the University of Wyoming, including clean coal.  The very day I wrote this part of this entry, Governor Mead was appearing on the front page of the Tribune at a state funded facility studying clean coal.  And let's not forget the pile of administrative entities that help business one way or another, from the Farmers Home Administration to the Small Business Administration.

So, suing the North and South Dakota models, could the state infest in the infrastructure for milling, packing and wool processing?  Perhaps it could. And, after an initial start up, perhaps it could require those industries to run on a self-sufficient basis.

Now, granted, this is a species of socialism, albeit of an odd type that differs from the classic economy destroying the government owns everything variety.  The concept would only be, on sort of  Distributist basis, to form those entities aiding major Wyoming industries where we aren't able to finish the product ourselves on an reasonably economic level.  We can't, for example, create refineries and have them compete.  Nor power plants. But packing plants are another matter, and mills are a demonstrated different matter.  This wouldn't bring in an economic miracle by any means, but it would allow us to further make use of the resources that we do have, right here. And there would be a market for the product, including a small market right here, in that the state is already in the lunch business for kids up to age 19.  Moreover, tags like "Wyoming beef" do have a local price and maybe even a regional one that could be useful for a product grown and finished here, and that is already the case.

One of the things that state and local government do spend money on is tourism.  That's fine, and that's already been addressed by the fine post on Neil Waring's blog that I mentioned earlier.  So I'll forgo going into that in depth, other than to mention that I really think that tourism is an offshoot of agriculture.  Let's face it, without agriculture, tourism in Wyoming would be Yellowstone National Park, and that's about it.  Sure, we have other things, but agriculture keeps them going.

That circles us back around, I suppose, to government. Right now all the local governments are contracting.  Everyone is out of money, and given the means by which the state raises money, that makes sense. But what's the long term impact of that?

Probably bad.  Construction contracts are actually keeping the state's economy from sinking into a real disaster right now.  Major construction projects, funded some time ago, are big deals in the cities where they are occurring.  That isn't an argument for deficit funding, but it is an argument for both planning ahead and figuring out what a more stable source of funding for state government may be.  It doesn't seem to me that the state spending every got truly out of control, although the last couple of years some really big projects were funded.  We're not going to be able to keep that going at the level it was at, unless we figure out another funding source. We probably ought to be able to do that at least in part, however.  We should consider it, not because we should build just to build, but because we have to acknowledge the construction has been necessary and in some instances (like the lack of a swimming pool at one of the local high schools)  actually underdone because it was too local.  I'm not proposing an income tax for the state, but we ought to reconsider how we tax.

As part of that, we can also consider what we don't tax, and that may prove to be an incentive in addition.  Not taxing start up industries on their land is a possibility, for example.  On the flip side of that, Wyoming could take a page out of some Mid Western states books and restrict the corporate form in some instances which would favor local entities.  For example, there's no really good reason to encourage land to be idled as a type of playground if it could be used by local agriculturalists.  Distributist, of whom there are few of course, would go further and attempt to restrict the corporate form for large retain in order to encourage small retail.  But that latter approach is not done anywhere in the US at the present time.

Another thing we should be considering is education.  This has been a long embattled topic in the state but we really ought to ponder it. Most Wyoming school districts do really well but we have seen the unfortunate rise of battles at the state administrative level in the last few years, much of which had to do with a person's political concepts.  Let's hope that's over.  Beyond that, we've also seen the gerrymandering of school placement in order that high schools cold keep their athletic classifications, which is absurd.  Notable examples of that have occurred in Campbell and Natrona counties.  That ought to cease in part because it might cause high schools to be built as real high schools, rather than as campuses or special facilities, a trend which ought to be stopped.

More importantly however this would be a good time to expand post high school education.  Indeed the University of Wyoming and the community colleges already are anticipating a crush of new students from the recently laid off mineral sector economy.  That's fine, but perhaps this is a time to expand what we've already been doing, which is to convert more of the community colleges into four year institutions.  This was a big battle back in the 1970s which saw UW pitted against the community colleges and which resolved in an armistice which saw UW steadily expand onto community college grounds.  Now Casper College, for example, offers a fair number of four year degrees through the UW extension there. This ought to be encouraged and expanded, as its been done very well.

Now, I admit all of my ideas placed here are not silver bullets  Maybe none of them would do much.  But I expect they would.  We have a selection of industries based on the land that we're under utilizing.  None of them will result in high dollar wages in the same way as the oilfield did, but they might offer steady employment while needed, and form a base for local economic expansion.  Tourism is going to have to keep on keeping on.   Government spending is something we hate here, but we actually employ a lot, and we may wish to find ways to keep funding the necessary construction that we require, as right now, that's keeping our economy afloat.

So what do you think?

Casper Daily Press for April 27, 1916