Trump Time

Would abolishing daylight saving time be a winning issue for the President-Elect?

Daylight saving time is back in the news because Trump came out against it on Friday.

Clock policy has been an interesting political science case study because it has been a rare contentious yet non-partisan, non-identity, and non-regional issue in the 21st Century in a time when everything else tends to turn into a red vs. blue, black vs. white, and/or urban vs. rural debate.

A lot of people have strong opinions on what time it should be, but, like Trump’s, they appear to arrive at their arguments idiosyncratically (or, often, just out of ignorance). Are you an early bird? Do you like getting up in daylight or darkness? Are you offended by messing with clocks? People seem to have all sorts of unpredictable reasons for their views.

Interestingly, time traits like being a morning person or a night person don’t seem to correlate much with other identity categories like sex and race. They seem more like left-handedness, which appears to be distributed pretty randomly, and left-handers thus aren’t a coherent identity politics bloc.

For example, when the Senate voted to go to year-round DST in 2022 (the House refused to consider it), the main sponsors were Patty Murray (D-WA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) from opposite corners of the country.

Huh?

This issue is a natural for Trump. Despite being denounced as a far-right fascist new Hitler for nine years, he’s actually not very ideological, and time policy seems orthogonal to most ideologies. Instead, he’s egomaniacal. He’s got an opinion on clocks, so he may run with it. (Or he may just drop it. After all, there are more important things to do and, as I’ll explain below, it’s hard to put together a majority behind any single time policy. We’ll see.)

And there’s ignorance: a lot of people with strong opinions on time don’t realize that we’ve had most of the alternative policies during my lifetime and got rid of them.

Much of the country had year round standard time until clock-changing was mandated by the federal government in 1967 so we would have 6 months of daylight saving time.

The law lets states opt out of daylight saving time completely, but at present the only states that do are tropical Hawaii and sun-blasted Arizona (where the state motto should be “Hurry, sundown”).

What your state is not allowed to do is opt-in to year-round DST, or invent your own variation, like starting DST on a different date or having 45 minutes of DST or whatever: too confusing for everybody else.

Then, due to the Energy Crisis, Congress switched to year-round daylight saving time in early January 1974. This proved so unpopular that Congress got rid of it later that year and everyone in public life vowed never to speak of what they had done again — or at least it seems that way.

It’s possible that if year round DST had begun in the fall of 1973, people might have have gotten more used to the sun coming up later and later in the morning. But switching to it on the first week of school back from Christmas vacation was horrible: I can recall getting up that Monday morning in the pitch black with the rain pelting down and feeling like a kid in London in 1940 getting dressed to go to a bomb shelter during the Blitz.

After the 1974 mistake, the current system of partial daylight saving time proved popular enough that four more weeks was added in the spring in 1987. And then in 2007, another four weeks of DST was added to the spring, and one more in the fall because Big Candy thought Halloween would be even more popular if it didn’t get dark so early. So, now we have 35 weeks of DST per year (about two-thirds of the year).

So nobody on the pro-clock-changing side has anymore complaints or wishes. Hence, they aren’t very active on social media, where it’s more natural to complain than to praise the current system.

At this point, pro-partial DST lobbies like the golf industry have won so many victories that they’ve folded their tents and gone home from the fight. (I’m not sure why Trump, a golf course owner, is against DST when his peers are for it.) Nobody who is okay with clock-switching is out there anymore arguing that what we really need a few more weeks of DST, like they used to be up through 2007.

This is a funny example of how achieving your maximum demands can weaken your side in the long run. That might be more common on issues like this one that don’t have an identity politics angle. For most issues, you want to keep winning because it shows your group is powerful and should be feared. But clock policy views don’t map well to enduring groups: the trick-or-treat and golf industries really never had much in common, so it’s not surprising their coalition dissolved as soon as they won their maximal demands of 35 weeks of DST.

Similarly, individual views on daylight saving time appear to be motivated by traits like: Are you an early bird or a night owl? But these seem to be fairly randomly distributed among identity groups, so they aren’t good for forming coalitions across multiple issues.

But Trump might decide to make time change reform a big deal in his second term. Will the country respond by sorting itself into pro-Trump and anti-Trump sides, as on so much else?

Here’s the paywall: lot’s more beneath it.