First things first… this election is not over even before the Trump skullduggery is fully unleashed...despite the estimable Jon Ralston I am a bit worried about Nevada and I think we’ll need Pennsylvania regardless to avoid the “faithless elector” problem and the Supreme Court. But the trends remain positive even if being on tenterhooks is natural right now.
I posted in the middle of the night on a few takeaways that I think are worth pondering, but I feel compelled to add a few more. Perhaps in the spirit of Leonard Cohen’s “Some Like It Darker,” but for me there is a glimmer of hope in them. Maybe you’ll agree.
www.dailykos.com/…
As someone who makes a living by consulting in and around politics, I have to say that if you had given me this presidential election scenario right now in fall 2019 I would have taken it in a heartbeat. Despite hypothetical polling leads some of that Biden support was softer than Charmin and I fully expected Trump to be re-elected in as much of a landslide as modern polarized politics allows, based on a good economy, and with states like NH, VA in play and NH, ME, and MN flipping red. While Covid-19 and health care didn’t have the impact many of us anticipated it completely changed the narrative and that benefited Biden immensely.
No one really understands just how hard it is for an incumbent American president to lose, no matter how terrible he is. In fact, since World War II, no President serving a full term and standing for reelection has ever lost previously unless there was a strong third party candidate. Whatever the post-facto dynamics of where votes supposedly would have gone to which candidates, the viable third party candidates change the whole dimension of the race by making it more than a binary decision for voters, dragging the incumbent’s numbers below 50 percent, and changing the media frame. All of the focus on Trump’s historic awfulness doesn’t change these hard facts.
Actually to consolidate voters in a majority coalition (Biden will win more than 50 percent of the vote, an historically tall order for Dems despite recent popular vote history) against a sitting incumbent is a difficult task. And winning with a Democratic coalition under Citizens United rules requires threading the needle to an insane degree, given the Electoral College skew in favor of rural and more conservative voters along with the need to raise gobs of money.
You can wish for a once-in-a-generation politician all you want (for the Democrats we’ve had two, in Clinton and Obama) but generally you have to win with an average candidate. Biden was picked, and may well still be President, precisely because he had the best chance of threading that needle— namely to retake WI, PA, and MI. And if Pennsylvania comes through that will be exactly what he did. The groundswell in his favor came just before Covid-19 struck in earnest but it didn’t change those fundamental dynamics— one of the weak spots in the Biden camp was that it overvalued polling that showed disapproval of Trump on the coronavirus as the biggest voting issue. That may have been true in April but it was less true in November, fairly or not.
The trouble with a coalition like that of Democrats, in which many of the groups frankly don’t like each other very much, and have different economic incentives, is that changing one element (VP candidate, fundraising strategies, issue appeals) tends predictably to saw off another part of the leg of the table. Which is normal. Coalitions are like that. The main problem with modern US politics, as Lee Grossman points out in his brilliant Two Party Doom Loop, is that we used to have a de facto parliamentary system with Southern conservative D’s and liberal northeastern and western R’s that could cooperate and accomplish things. Now every incentive leads to polarization and stalemate even if legislators have good intentions, and not all of them do.
The Democratic Party has done yeoman work in advocating for those who have been left behind in American life and for those who are not part of the dominant caste structure. While most on this site are aghast at what they see in the 70 million or so voters who mainly chose tribe and religion and identity in voting for Donald Trump, I see a kind of cultural miracle in making such a heavy lift given the dominance of tribalism, the lure of authoritarian and conservative ideology, and the reality of white privilege.
As a result of my work and family (my brother is a born-again Christian minister) I actually know a number of Trump voters and am acquainted with many more. The good news is that most of them do not resemble the people at Trump’s rallies. But they are not likely to budge quickly, or easily, from their views, let alone their religion, and particularly about what they think of as racism.
I want to stress this point even if it is maddening to readers here. Trying to push a narrative of systemic racism on these voters (as opposed to one-on-one conversations in which you speak your truth to someone with whom you already have a relationship, or where they are curious and willing to read something) is a boomerang strategy and as much of anything accounts for a backlash both at the voting booths and in real life. There are a zillion commentaries here, which I respect greatly on their merits, on how to defuse racism. But as a matter of politics demanding that one self-classify as a racist based on your definition (again, I agree with it!) just energizes a group which is trying to deal with the reality of becoming a very large white minority, but an eventual minority nevertheless.
For most of those who voted for Biden, they would complete the phrase “white_____ with “privilege”. For those who voted for Trump, they would complete it with “pride.” That’s the difference in a nutshell.
More controversial, no doubt: we can reach a reconciliation road with this group when we find a way for them to embrace their white identity without recapping the segregationist themes of the South and the Civil War and all the overwhelming baggage that they entail— white identity without the trappings of white supremacy. In this respect I see a lot of symbolic progress in taking down Confederate flags and other symbols. And an identity that doesn’t just absorb Hispanic and Asian Americans into a new “white” power structure, which is probably the most likely scenario assuming the country doesn’t go into full cardiac arrest.
That is a tall order, maybe impossible, but there a large number of younger people who are searching for ethnic identity and we can’t just count on racism “dying out.” For me it starts with accepting their vote for Donald Trump and asking why he appeals to them...for most of these voters their support is instrumental (usually because of Christian nationalism) and the conversations, however ungrounded in facts and reality one believes they may be, have a positive value in and of themselves. They allow one to state what you believe while treating the other person equally. If you want to disengage and to write these folks off, I get it totally. But it sets you up for a round of unpleasant surprises like the one that this election— fingers crossed it is not worse!— seems to have delivered.