President Biden announcing that there is no federal solution to COVID before heading off to his Delaware beach house. 

The Disappointment Is Complete

First Biden disappointed his voters with student loans, by reneging on his promise to cancel $10,000 or more of their debt. Now he has disappointed his voters who believed him when Biden said he had a plan to defeat COVID. On Monday, prior to leaving for his Delaware beach house, Biden announced that there was in fact no federal solution to the pandemic, and that he would be deferring to the states.

Not only has Biden not delivered on two of his biggest campaign promises, but his voters (as well as Americans who didn’t vote for him) are suffering through inflation and crime rates that are reminiscent of the decade when Biden got his start in national politics, the 1970s.

Joe Biden as a Senator in the 1970s. A reminder that he’s been in politics long enough to have gone bald twice. 

This sort of disappointment seems to be a common feature of democratic politics: on the other side of the spectrum, there are Trump voters upset that Trump didn’t fully build his wall, or end birthright citizenship.

Why (Most) Voters Keep Getting Disappointed

There was a thread on Twitter a few months back that made a thought provoking point about why most voters usually don’t get what they want. If I could find the thread, I’d repost it here and credit the author; instead, I’ll summarize the author’s argument from memory. In a nutshell, voting lets people and groups that already have power express their power; voting by itself doesn’t make anyone powerful. Think back to America’s founding. The right to vote was limited to those who already had power: generally, men who owned property and paid taxes. Giving the right to vote to a gig worker or barista struggling to pay off his student loans for his liberal arts degree doesn’t make that person powerful; hence, his demands to get his student loans canceled are ignored.

In contrast, consider the rioters who wreaked havoc on America last year. The threat of their continued violence was a form of power. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that they have succeeded in electing and reelecting soft-on-crime prosecutors, as was the case in Philadelphia.

Ending On A Brighter Note

To end this on a positive note, a quick update on our post last week (Time To Buy Tesla). In that one, I mentioned that Tesla was again one of our system’s top names, after having pulled back sharply over the previous month:

Screen capture via Portfolio Armor on 12/20/2021.

One thing you may have noticed from Monday’s top ten list is that it includes a few tech names that are down double digits over the last month: the chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Nvidia (NVDA), the streaming content company Netflix (NFLX), and the electric car maker Tesla (TSLA). We’ll focus on Tesla here, because, coincidentally, it was highlighted by our friends at the social data firm Likefolio on Monday as well.

Since then, Tesla is up 21.56% as of this writing, second only to the crypto bank Silvergate Capital (SI), another name which had pulled back sharply since November.

Overall, our top names from December 20th are up 10.98% on, average, versus 4.9% for SPY.