the thermodynamics of mid-term elections

As most of you know, last week was the US mid-term elections. Their electoral system is a bit intricate, and I'll (briefly) summarize the key feature before I move on:

Every 4 years, they elect the president, and a large fraction of their congress. Also every 4 years, but 1/2-way through the presidential term (the elections are staggered so there's one election every 2 years), they elect the other (large) fraction of congress, along with state governors, etc. While the president is the face of the government, and has a lot of power, he can't actually institute much change without the support of congress.

Okay, now that we know the lay of the land, let's imagine that you are a newly elected president, who promised sweeping changes. Indeed, it's hard to imagine someone getting elected unless they make such promises (irregardless of the nature of the promises: cutting spending, or building new social programs, or whatever): there's always lots of stuff wrong, and the voters want to elect someone to fix that stuff.

Well, if you promised to cut things, and remove existing social programs (or institutions, or whatever), you are in luck: it's pretty easy, and pretty fast to do that. 2 years into your term, when the mid-term elections come up, you can say to the voters "look at the stuff I promised to get rid of that I, indeed, got rid off. Give me more power in congress, and I will do more of this stuff." Consequently, you are likely to get that power, and to have increased power in the next 2 years of your term.

Now, let's imagine that, instead of promising to get rid of stuff, you promised to build new things (health care, or whatever).

Well, an important lesson from physics is that it's much harder to build things than to tear them down (this is the second law of thermodynamics, which says that chaos and disorder are always increasing over time). Imagine, for example, how long it takes to build a house, compared to how long it takes that house to fall down, once you set off an explosive, or start a fire, in that house.

Okay, so it takes a long time to build new things, and so it's pretty likely that, come the mid-term election, you won't yet have succeeded in getting your new programs running, or at least not running very effectively.

Now, at the mid-term election, the opposition can correctly say "see, the president promised all this stuff, but it's not working. give us more power!". The result is that the voters give more power to the opposition. Consequently, in the last 1/2 of your term as president, you have even less power in congress, making it very hard to ever get all of those programs working (the ones you promised to get working, in order to be elected as president in the first place).

So, we see an interesting effect: the relative slowness of building new programs (versus cutting them), coupled with the existence of mid-term elections that can change the balance of power in congress, means that administrations that cut existing programs meet with much more success than those that institute new ones. This is all a consequence of well-understood physics, but I haven't yet seen anyone spell out the consequences of the second law when it comes to elections.

Is this a good thing? I have my opinions, which I've tried to keep to myself. I'll let you decide.

Disclaimer: I am not a political analyst, nor do I have any training in political science. But, I know physics, and I'm willing to take a shot at applying that knowledge to any domain in which I think it is appropriate.