I'm saying that major deployments might well happen in 2026, not that they already have.

Most obviously, he's already sent a small number of troops into Venezuela for a mission, plus he's literally said that he wants the US to be in charge of Venezuela (his Administration walked it back, but he himself still seems happy with the thought). There are plausible things that could happen that would lead him to send in a significant number of soldiers.

Secondly, he allegedly asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draw up an invasion plan for Greenland. Which would certainly cause a surrender rather than a fight, but a non-dangerous mass deployment would still be a mass deployment.

Crucially, he's not paying any domestic political price for talking as if he wants to deploy troops in either country, which contradicts your assertion already even without those events (yet) happening. The GOP in Congress once again chickened out of taking any action to constrain him, when they saw that his base wasn't bothered by it at all.

Add to that his saber-rattling against Cuba, and the possibility that something big happens in Gaza or Iran and he feels like it's an opportunity. 

I'm not claiming a major deployment is over 50% likely, but I'd say it's over 5%, which is enough that I think your footnote is wrong.

even though it was ultimately fruitless for them to [vote for Clinton]

As of Election Day 2016, there looked like a significant chance that Clinton would win, but by a margin substantially smaller than the size of the Sanders contingent. In the nearby Everett branch where this happened, would you have said that the Sanders voters made a wise or unwise choice?

You might want to pick another example; the assertion "ground troop deployments are politically infeasible" is looking more dubious this year than before.

You're wrong when it comes to the mathematical definition (cosine similarity is looking for normalized dot product ≈ +1, not -1), and wrong in the important practical sense that "similar parties" should result in similar policy outcomes if elected, whereas strongly polarized parties result in quite different policy outcomes if elected. Stop doubling down.

Strong correlation and strong anticorrelation are different things.

Third parties serve as kingmakers in parliamentary systems when no party has a majority, and in return get concessions for priorities that neither the left nor the right parties care about.

That's not a problem of similarity, it's a problem of one-dimensionality, caused by FPTP's destruction of third parties.

This post was certainly fun to write, and apparently fun to read as well, but I'm not very satisfied with it in retrospect:

• I dunked a bit on people who didn't deserve that tone; see the comments from Conflux and Nathan Young. 
• If I were writing it now, I'd also highlight that this form of cheap manipulation via self-fulfilling prophecy is a potentially fatal flaw with futarchy and even with fire-the-CEO markets. 
• It's also notable as a real-life example of a spurious counterfactual being used to manipulate a decision! I of all people really should have noticed and mentioned that one.

I don't think we used high-powered lobbyists in NY or CA (someone correct me if I'm wrong); their legislators already wanted to regulate the big AI companies, and they (and their staffers) are smart enough to distinguish it from the sloppy AI bills they usually see.

At the federal level, both Dems and the GOP want to go after the big AI companies, and I believe there's a bill with teeth that almost all of Congress would privately agree with. The problem is that the anti-regulation lobby already has Trump in their pocket, so they just need to buy one-third of the Senate to stop a veto override. MAGA senators are the most obvious targets, because Republicans don't remain in office for long if they feud with Trump.

The value of having 1 legislator who Gets It is vastly higher than the value of having 0 legislators who Get It, because that legislator can introduce bills. Alex Bores and Scott Wiener are the perfect examples of this; it didn't take a majority of their state legislatures to Get It in order to get some kind of AI regulation bill passed, but there would not have been a comparably good bill on the table without them.