I suppose gripes are inherently personal, so I’m off to a redundant start. That said, we all know the media love themselves a horse race—to the point where they manufacture narratives, build false equivalencies, and ignore stark realities in order to profit from races they help create.
For the record, I am excited that Joe Biden is on the verge of reaching 270 EC votes and will be our next president. Disappointed in the congressional outcomes, of course, but it looks like we live to fight another day.
Here’s the gripe. The way we all talk about these final states as they count and record the remaining ballots is not healthy. Not for our nerves or for our democracy. This has bothered me before, but even more so this election. (Thank you, pandemic!) When we talk about how Biden is “gaining on Trump in Pennsylvania” or “cutting into Trump’s lead in Georgia,” we are demonstrating a fundamental lack of understanding of how this all works. Look, I know we all know that they are just counting the remaining votes. But by framing this as its own sort of race horse, we are misrepresenting (to our own detriment, I think) the fundamental nature of what this is. Trump is not leading in Pennsylvania. Nor is Biden leading in Arizona. Those races, and the others, are already over.
I know this may seem like a purely semantic argument, and perhaps it is. But framing this final ballot counting as its own race leads to dangerous results. We can see these firsthand in tr*mp’s blatant lying about fraud or races being stolen. It’s obviously false, but it still has a corrosive effect on the integrity of our election and on our democracy. What’s more, when we create, or buy into, this horse race narrative in the ballot counting, we generate false and lasting impressions about the results of the election itself. If Biden wins Pennsylvania or Georgia, he was never trailing. He got more votes, and he won. This idea that he “came from behind” to win those state is bullshit. If he wins them, he was always going to win them. If tr*mp ends up with more votes in Arizona, he didn’t “grab a last second win.” He was always going to win.
These narratives are great for media companies, because it’s all-eyeballs-all-the-time. And, unlike 2016, when we watched Clinton’s lead “slip away” in PA, MI, and WI (note, the leads didn’t slip away...), we take great joy in watching the reverse happen in this election. But it’s still dangerous, because it creates a false and lasting narrative. It diminishes the value of the effort that generated the win. It cements a lasting impression that a candidate somehow “squeaked by” or “came from behind” or “made a late run”, or whatever phrases are employed to describe the final process. Whether we like it or not, those impressions affect our perception of the final result.
Look at Michigan. It appears Biden will win that state with 51% to tr*mp’s 48% of the vote. That is a huge turnaround from 2016’s tr&mp’s 47.50% to Clinton’s 47.27%. Okay, it’s four percentage points, but that was a significant jump and should not only be celebrated, but framed as a major victory for the Biden campaign. But because Biden was “trailing” until Detroit votes were counted, it doesn’t get the shine it deserves. It’s more of a sense of relief than a fervent yahoo. And that shouldn’t be. Moreover, it’s already lost in the haze of all the rest of the close state races.
Michigan, and other states that Biden wins “late” reinforce the notion that his win was somehow “shaky”, because he needed to “come from behind” at the very end to win them. He didn’t, and they should generate a narrative of how strong his candidacy was (full disclosure, I was/am a big Warren fan, though I knew rather early that she had no path to the nomination), and, perhaps more importantly, what kind of a mandate it is for him to govern. We still feel the pain of watching Clinton’s “lead slip away” four years ago. We felt pain on Tuesday night when things looked downright rosy for the orange one. And now, we—and more importantly the country—won’t get the full impact and benefit of how strong Biden’s win is (assuming...) because of how the narrative unfolded. That narrative will get baked into his presidency. And that’s wrong.
The result should not be colored by how the story of the ballot counting unfolds. That leads to tr•mp trying to poison the results and our democracy. (Okay, he was going to do that anyway.) It opens the door for the corporate media to continue to downplay and diminish not just Biden’s accomplishment, but what his victory means. (Okay, they would do that anyway.) To defeat an incumbent president is a terribly hard thing to do and is a historic accomplishment. When Biden wins, he won’t have won today, or tomorrow, or when Fox News calls it for him (which is must-see TV). He won the election when the votes were cast.
I don’t know that there is a solution, and hey, maybe people like it this way. Takes your mind off the 100,000+ new daily COVID cases. Certainly, the pandemic created a unique situation this election, as did the current occupant of the White House. But there has got to be a better way. The result is the result.
If anyone has gotten this far, thanks (and apologies) for reading what is little more than a ramble that has been bouncing around in my head and had to be put to pixels in order for it to go away.