We’re a little more than a week past the election. Over 153M votes have been counted, and there's a decent chunk left. The electoral decision is final, though the minimum viable coup President Trump and his supporters are a/b testing has dragged out the anxiety of the last few days/weeks/months/years. We will never be free of that anxiety, but the election provided both a step forward and an opportunity for a reckoning. There are many details and nuances yet to be fleshed out about voting patterns and the people’s preferences, but I think we’re far enough along to pull together some thoughts, as I tried to do almost four years ago.
Before proceeding, here are my limited credentials and priors: I have a liberal arts background – History/Econ undergrad, Diplomacy/Conflict Resolution Master’s program – and have mostly lived in liberal communities, whether in Massachusetts growing up, in college in North Carolina's Research Triangle, or in expat communities in Europe and Israel. I’ve always voted Democrat, and am pretty far left socially. With respect to markets and finances, I was closer to the Obama/Clinton viewpoint, e.g. free trade is good, budgets should at least bend towards balancing. That stance has shifted left in part as a reaction to Trump’s 2016 victory and how I interpreted it. I voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primary and was very excited to do so. I donated more than I ever have to campaigns this year, and I phone banked for an unsuccessful House campaign once, my first time doing so. The last two relevant background points: I don’t use social media to talk about politics much, and my mindset as a person is to find compromise and something that works so we can move forward.
The Politicians
So, how to react to this election? I start with the President. Donald Trump deserves none of our empathy. He began his original presidential run with ugly rhetoric, building on a rise in politics that seized on racist rumors about his predecessor and that was littered with non-stop insults, a rise that itself was built on a lifetime of masquerading as a successful businessman. Even someone who had granted him the benefit of the doubt four years ago, buying that he might grow into the role of being President of the United States, was met with his first week in office – an inauguration speech decrying American Carnage, lies from his administration about how many people were there, and a travel ban of people from predominantly Muslim countries – a week proving that benefit of the doubt was wasted. He had previously discarded the respect owed to a president in his barrages against President Obama, and the idea that he would be entitled to a better reception after the way he behaved, well, I get that we all hold our views but that one is wrong.
Elected Republican officials deserve no more of our empathy. Their behavior during our slow-moving farce of a constitutional crisis fits in line with the behavioral pattern of the last 4-5 years. Condoning, looking past, not hearing, or outright supporting the President’s behavior, for whatever the reason; I expect partisanship in the US, I’m not surprised by the behavior, but it’s still irredeemable. The few timid exceptions prove the rule and are hardly worth mentioning. Principles and norms no longer belong in our political discourse, it seems.
The most obvious examples of two-faced behavior are budget deficits – which Republicans forgot about for the last four years after hammering on about them the six years prior, and which they have already begun to rediscover – and the Supreme Court and the Garland v. Barrett antics. The takeaway should be that Democrats will have to play just as tough in Congress and elsewhere, but without the Senate I’m not sure how much that matters. There are asymmetries that weaken the Democrat position, none bigger than the core incentives: Republicans are invested in less governance, Democrats in good governance. And as Leon Neyfakh put it, Republicans are not afraid of being hypocrites, just of losing.
The political tactics are among the less interesting implications of this election. They were going to be the same in any Biden victory, and the dictatorial tractor pull may have the positive effect of causing any remaining scales to fall from the Democrats’ eyes about whether a traditional bonhomie can be achieved. The Spanish term for polarization is crispación, and things are going to remain pretty crisp for the years to come.
The People
But what of the 72M+ Americans who voted for President Trump? The failed repudiation of Trumpism, of the past four years, the fact that even though President-Elect Biden won what in these days might amount to a landslide, it was still an election decided by five-digit numbers, by several tense days?
I start with the premise that we can’t write off the 47% the way Mitt Romney did. This was a high-turnout election, and while I understand that the on the ground work in Georgia, in Arizona, in Midwestern cities was exceptional, and should not have been exceptional, I still don’t know how many more votes there are out there from people who didn’t vote. It also seems wrong fundamentally to write off so many people; you start at a disadvantage if you never think about the other side. Again, I like to find compromises.
That’s not to ignore that tons of voters hold views that are antithetical to what I believe in, and that they are never going to be won nor worth the time. There are people who not only identified with President Trump, and not only disliked the Democrat platform, but identified with the full explicit and implied MAGA agenda. I don’t know what the playbook is there.
My dad is at least partly in this category. He voted for Trump both times. He likes that Trump talks shit to reporters. He has always voted Republican, and still views the Democrats as more aberrational than anything Trump is. I remember pleading with him to vote for Gary Johnson in 2016, and not getting anywhere. He probably enjoyed voting for Trump more than for Romney or McCain or either Bush. It’s one of the reasons I think the ‘there will be more competent authoritarians’ line is not quite right; Trump forged a connection with his voters, a real one that a Mike Pence or a Tom Cotton seems unlikely to do. It’s a connection that I believe is built on a bullshit marketing image, but it’s a real connection nevertheless.
There are people, I believe, who voted for President Trump or the Republican party who do not endorse his worst views and who do not explicitly identify with him. They may dislike the Democrats more, they may have focused on the economy at the expense of everything else – and mind you, the idea that Trump was the better pick for the economy to me because he ran a deficit-fueled 2-3% GDP growing economy with relatively low interest rates is, to me, nuts, but the perception is what it is. In any case, there is a part of the populace that enjoys spiting the left and 'political correctness' or, these days, wokeness to the point that they can overlook whatever it is they might dislike about the right.
How to reach them? I’m not sure. What I see from people who are in the middle and who did vote for Biden but with their nose held or picking Republicans down ballot, is 1) economic self-interest and 2) fatigue with the piety they see from the left. I don’t mean to use piety as an accusation. But there is a sense that you have to be for the entire platform or you’re no good, and a sense that if you make a false step, you’ll get hounded. A lot of this is the online conversation, and I don't know how much this feeling of fatigue and spite resonates at large, but I think it's one of the bigger opportunities. (After writing this, I listened to Kara Swisher's podcast with John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor, and he used the word 'nuance' to make what a similar argument).
The message of the Democrat’s platform resonates when the associations are removed, as seen in public opinion polls about individual issues, or in things like the Florida referendum on minimum wage. There are also arguments to address economic self-interest – I would make the case that higher taxes to help fund programs that will address inequality will pay huge dividends for the rich as well as the rest of the country over the next 50 years, e.g. Just as there are ways to open up to people who only agree with part of the game plan.
The challenge is that there are so many deal-breaking issues. You can't compromise on climate change given the Earth isn’t really part of the negotiations. We can't ask people to continue to neglect our ongoing scars of foundational racial injustice. Our dumb (in all senses) approach towards immigration destroys the one exceptional competitive advantage America has had over the decades, and I’m not really sure what compromise can be struck there.
And yet, there needs to be work done with some of those 72M+, to build a more durable constituency (at least until the electoral college is overturned, the Senate made more representative, the courts reformed, and all redistricting done by nonpartisan commissions; all of which, good luck, President Biden). The flipping of Georgia and Arizona is inspiring precisely because they support that ground can be won, both in persuading median voters and turning out more voters. Educating, taking policies out of identification and into common ground, making the case for how things can be better, those seem to me still feasible, even if they’re the stuff of old-school, door-to-door politicking.
All of this is not to say that Democrats should play to the middle. I think the last four years have shown identity and emotion overtake rational assessments of policy and competency when we are voting or aligning ourselves politically. Tapping into that emotion includes solving real problems, not developing incremental ideas to placate sensibilities. Certainly not in a climate where neither side is predisposed to compromise.
It’s hard for me to watch someone like Katie Porter or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez speak in Congressional hearings and not be impressed, and not think they’re the future of the left. They are unabashedly progressive, but they do the work and they translate their policies into real human concerns. As far as I recall, Stacey Abrams is more centrist than those two women but she is similarly inspiring. I was in Athens, GA for a wedding in May 2018, and other wedding guests spoke about her as a hero. (There is some irony in the bounty of well-deserved praise she is getting now after the weird and negative response some people had to her openly wanting to be VP this summer).
The Legacy
There have been some positive outcomes from the past four years, and I believe those outcomes prepare us for the next four. The first is increased political engagement. I’m more engaged than ever before, as I mentioned, and am setting a personal goal to contribute in some way to the ground-level politicking in the next 2-4 years. I’m hardly alone, and both the % of eligible voters and what you see on the web and in the real world is a testament to that. That’s a good thing – democracy should reflect an engaged society. I hope the intensity of our engagement goes down in the Biden era – and again, this snowball of a coup effort makes it hard to take one’s foot of the gas – but consistent engagement should be a hallmark of our society, the same way it was in De Tocqueville’s famed observation of (a significantly less democratic) America in the 19th century.
The flipside, of course, is that the other side is engaged. In a neutral sense, good, politics are better as a reflection of the country they take place in. But the politics that were reflected in this election were not good – and I’m sure Trump’s voters would agree, just from the opposite stance. The positive element out of all this? Any last illusions of American exceptionalism should have faded. This tension is an enduring fact of life in America, a core point of our history. I can argue that 2020 is actually a more just, more positive climate for the U.S. than almost any time in our history – the increasingly unlivable climate itself notwithstanding, of course – but it certainly doesn’t feel that way. My point is not to sell you a bill of goods about today, but to echo what Anna Lind-Guzik has been saying for the last 4+ years, what Monica Hesse wrote here, what Jelani Cobb wrote here, what Maria Hinojosa wrote here. America is not an exception, and it never really has been, it’s just been more powerful. A clear-eyed understanding will allow us to fight towards that ever greater union.
(My three points in favor of American exceptionalism would be that we have integrated immigrants better than any large country, that we have oceans to protect us from serious economic/military rivals, and that capitalism has provided a framework, however rapacious, to exploit our natural and human resources over time to economic growth. These do not add up to a ‘better’ model, and our current policies towards climate change and immigration have eroded two of those pillars).
2016's Echoes
I’m reminded of the feeling four years ago, when Trump won. Of hearing how my wife’s colleagues were sleepwalking in the school hallway, furious and groggy at the same time. Of going out with friends that Friday to commiserate, and finding out Leonard Cohen died too. Of having dinner with a good friend that Saturday, and hearing she was going to leave Bulgaria that year, which meant almost everyone we cared about was leaving, so we were going to be too. There were a lot of feelings that week. Elections, like Olympic Games and the World Cup, provide a global landmark, a snapshot that captures our state of mind more than normal weeks do.
I remember most of all meeting with my friend and Bulgarian teacher, Silva, at a café a day or two after the election. We had a lesson, but at this point our lessons were mostly just us talking. We started by rehashing how could this have happened – I believed the polls, I believed 538, and I put more weight on 70% than 30%. “How did this happen?” Silva asked me, and I didn’t know how to answer.
But then, she said, “now you know what the rest of the world is like.”
Well, here we are. What are we going to do about it?
Leftover Notes
1) One trend I do not like on Twitter is tweeting to express your disapproval for other people tweeting about things. Specifically, people who tweet to say ‘stop tweeting about politics’ or ‘why do people keep tweeting about politics?’ These people seem to tweet more about politics than the people who actually tweet about it, and to express their disapproval for other people’s interests.
Now, I don’t tweet about politics much. I find Twitter and social media bad places to talk about complicated or identity driven things. But I also don’t give a shit about college football, or even people talking about their stocks going up or down day after day without adding analysis. The thing is, the internet is wonderful for choosing what you consume. It’s not like being in the US and running into cable news everywhere you go (one of the true blessings of living abroad). Muting works. Just don’t engage!
This sticks in my craw because the implication is that politics isn’t important enough to be talked about on Twitter. Which, if politics aren’t important for you, I mean, congratulations. But it’s worth acknowledging that for a lot of people, national politics actually matter, whether they be refugees and immigrants or people still fighting for rights or just people who actually need federal government support to get by. You don’t have to even agree with them that it matters. You can just let them tweet or whatever they do in peace.
2) I don’t have a strong take on the polling miss. I think Zeynep Tufnecki got it more or less right, which is that the polling-based models provide such a wide range of possible outcomes that they don’t actually provide real answers, and so their utility for every-other year events is limited. I will be taking less stock of them in the future, having given them my full attention this year even after 2016 (after all, 2018 played out pretty well).
I respect how transparent Nate Silver/538 and a lot of the other polling aggregators/modelers are. They are public and they walk through their thought process regularly. Silver is overly defensive of his ‘mistakes’, and his last post read to me a little bit like ‘don’t listen to us so much’, which is right but also presumably against his self-interest. But whatever his Twitter persona, I find the criticism a little unfair; they do their work openly, it’s interesting, and the quantitative approach has value. For example, the quants’ analysis of the likely votes once the election ended and we were waiting for ballots to be counted was fairly accurate and informative. This went double once the various axes emerged for individual locations, Jon Ralston in Nevada being the top of mind example.
3) On the flipside, I should confess that I viewed the Trafalgars of the world, whether pollsters or people on twitter who picked the sort of red map where Minnesota would flip, a little unfairly. I viewed the incentives as slanted – people on the left, still scarred by 2016, would be in the mood to hedge every prediction, while those on the right, emboldened by a fluke event, would misunderstand why they were right in 2016. I don’t know why this matters, but it riled me up. I considered them bad faith actors.
The election was a good reminder that nobody knows everything, and that the range of outcomes should keep us all humble. They are just as likely to be trying to figure out what will happen in the election as anybody else. The stock market too is full of people trying to figure things out, and some of them are full of it and others or not. The market gives more regular feedback on whether you're right or wrong, but predictions about the future are hard no matter what.
That said, at least one or two of those self-styled pundits have blamed their getting it wrong on fraud, so maybe I was right after all about their bad faith.
4) Lastly, I think this election was a good reminder that Twitter isn’t real life. The people who talk about politics on Twitter are hyper engaged, and while they may be expanding the Overton window or foreshadowing where a given party is headed, they also might just be extremely online people. Twitter is an addicting and often informative service, and it’s a way for people to connect with others in their field. But expecting the conversation on Twitter to map to the offline world is a stretch, and perhaps an even bigger stretch when the President migrates to Parler (whether before Twitter bans him or after, tbd). My conclusions from my piece four years ago still hold up, even if a pandemic makes it ever harder to live offline.
