There are still miles to go in this election, and with his premature victory announcement minutes ago President Trump continues to show his true (and despicable) colors, marring what until that point had been an election process less tarnished by violence, threats of violence, and assaults on process than expected. But even if Biden/Harris somehow manage to navigate the votes and the courts and eke out a win there are a few takeaways that leap out of these preliminary results:
1) Should Trump go on to win, the election will look a great deal like 2004, which it resembled strongly on paper before Covid-19. Most Americans— including many who voted for Biden— utterly fail to understand, and his followers do not care, the extent to which the United States turned what ought to have been one of the world’s best responses into a tragic failure.
While we may yet mitigate the second wave of the virus with vaccines, the United States is in fact on the third surge of the first wave rather than into the second wave, as in Europe. But Trump managed to turn the current reversals and lockdowns in Europe, with just enough voters, into a de facto hall pass for his incompetence.
This also calls into question the extent to which Biden/Harris dwelled on the virus, though in their defense they went by the book and did exactly what polling suggested was the right strategy. It is quite possible, even likely, looking at various blue states that Biden will carry with fairly narrow margins, that without the arrival of the coronavirus Trump would otherwise have won in a landslide.
2) Gender once again is playing a huge role in the election: the glue that holds the Trump coalition together is largely misogyny and patriarchy, much more than race, and the loud drumbeats in right wing social media that Biden was simply a “trojan horse” for a Harris presidency— whom Trump viciously maligned as a “monster” and in similar vein— had a much greater impact than most realized. My personal discussions with Trump voters, both religious and secular, confirms this. While the final numbers will bear looking at closely, I suspect that Trump’s better-than-predicted showing among Hispanic and Black men stem from the same level of sexism. When we are talking about a systematic polling mismeasurement of 2-3 points and the “shy” Trump voter it is gender that is probably the main factor.
3) Even without a particularly good GOTV strategy— and I saw little evidence of a great formal GOP effort— it is simply easier to turn out a base that is operating out of shared identity and ideology than to piece together a coalition in which every addition is tenuous and in which everyone has to give up something to gain something— the definition both of coalitions in general and of the modern Democratic Party.
4) As I believed at the time, Biden’s seeming remark in the third debate about eliminating the oil industry turned out to be a significant gaffe (though a kind of “Kinsley” gaffe since everyone concerned with climate change, including the fossil fuel industry leaders themselves, know it to be true). The loss of several tossup House races in OK and NM are direct evidence of this, and it appears that (unlike Markey in Massachusetts) Biden didn’t galvanize plus younger voters on climate change while losing some swing voters who feared for their jobs.
Moreover—and this was even more important— the gaffe played right into the narrative that Trump would be better on the economy than Biden...the Democratic candidate’s Achilles heel, though an unwarranted one, throughout the campaign. By trying to ignore and ride out this gaffe rather than to come out swinging in response was, I believe, a strategic error.
5) Style matters. That Trump palpably cost lives with his late rallies is undeniable, but the visuals and the macho behavior galvanized the GOP in a way that the responsible and careful campaigning of the Biden campaign did not. Once again rational people always underestimate the power of raw charisma, in the authoritarian-minded, to sway a crowd and those watching on television. Just as in 2016 with Clinton, there wasn’t enough frenzied urgency in the Biden campaign, and while our ticket’s strategy might yet work in an election played scrupulously by the rules, it is more concerning in a narrow race of the kind that we actually have.
This said, a grudging respect must be paid both to Trump and to the GOP for retaining an unfailing optimism against what looked from polling like tall if not impossible odds. Norman Vincent Peale is not entirely a crock. The undercurrent of pessimism that surrounded the final days of the Biden campaign, and virtually all the other scores of campaigns that contacted me, was highly counterproductive. Under the guise of avoiding complacency it actually encouraged lots of negativity.
6) Polling errors aside, and clearly there were some this time around, the result looks like a familiar version in American presidential elections of a weak incumbent against a decent challenger, and the results can go either way. Carter barely defeated Ford in 1976, and Bush-Kerry was close. No incumbent (I think) has lost an election since World War II without a major third party vote (pundits forget John Anderson’s role in 1980) and the powers of incumbency in US politics continue to be underestimated. The wildcard here, of course, is Donald Trump and the depredations he has wrought on American democracy., and which in a second term can be made more permanent. Under circumstances in which both parties were “ordinary” parties of the center-right and center-left, as even in fairly recent episodes of US history, this situation would be unthreatening and even banal.
7) Again, the votes will continue to trickle in and the turnout will continue to rise, but it appeared to me that this was a classic turnout election in which under 140 million Trump was almost sure to win, given the EV skew, between 140-150 million (where we will end up?) it would be a close-run thing, and over 150 million Trump would have only a vanishing chance. For whatever reasons it looks as though we won’t hit that 538 estimated total of 154 million, and if that is the case why this happened should be a big topic of discussion.
8) What I told people in advance is that if Democrats broke even in the House, let alone won 10 seats or more as many confidently predicted, it would be virtually impossible for Trump to win. The down-ballot races would be turnout agents and the district polling unlike in 2016 appeared to back this up, while giving me confidence that the result would not be this close. Still far to go but it looks like Dems while holding the House will lose some seats, which again, for the party out of power, would be typical in a year of an incumbent seeking reelection, but this goes against virtually all predictions including that of many if not most GOP analysts, let alone neutral parties.
9) Leaving the dreadful portents of a Trump reelection aside, once again in an election that wasn’t “must-win” there would be positive takeaways for Democrats from the result thus far, irrespective of the top of the ticket, and the closer margins in a number of GOP-held states such as Texas and Georgia would be at the head of the list. I expected Biden to win North Carolina and if he does not, as appears very likely though not certain, it will be a disappointment as well as a very damaging loss in its own right. I also expected Biden to pick up a few more votes in Ohio and in general from rural districts throughout the Midwest and South more generally, especially with the spread of the disease into every state and rising death tolls, not only caseloads...why Biden appears not to have outperformed in many of these districts goes back again to why Covid-19 appeared to have greater salience as a defining voting issue in pre-election polling compared to its apparent lesser significance in the election itself.
10) It is worth remembering that history often plays tricks, even when something as pivotal as the most important election in history hangs in the balance, and when a President with autocratic impulses is on the brink of success. There are still a number of twists of turns in the actual results that can make a real difference, and even victories can unexpectedly contain the seeds of future defeats. It was the lopsided triumph of the anti-immigrant Prop. 187, as some forget, not its defeat, that ultimately turned California against the GOP, and I suspect that Trumpian overreach, should he manage to prevail, may yet produce a greater backlash, though with a degree of avoidable suffering that it is tragic to contemplate.