Joe Biden doesn't have the election in the bag, no matter what any polls say and no matter how crazy his opponent is. Neither is the preservation of democracy a sure thing. We have nine months to go, and things can happen during that time that would make the journey feel like trudging through an increasingly chaotic shitstorm.
Things can happen that would push Democrats out of what remaining power they have in D.C. and to a great extent in the states.
Even the herculean effort that all of you are going to put into GOTV this year will only offset the effects of the shitstorm by a fraction of what's needed. Instead it will be the policy decisions and campaign messaging decisions that have the greater role in staving off a Republican takeover. I hope they get it right. I'm terrified that they won't.
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So let's conjecture: what can go badly? Beyond that, what additional things can go badly that will compound upon the earlier things that went badly? What things can happen organically or by design that would shape the election decision-making process in a way that hands power to the fascists?
I'll offer a short list of possible events. If you read that far, I encourage you to consider two things alongside each item on the list.
- First, to what extent can public understanding of the event be shaped by the rightwing media infrastructure and particularly by the continuous informercial that's aired on Fox throughout every hour of every week? The messaging on Fox also ripples out to the more centrist media and displaces a lot of sensible reporting on policy.
- Second, to what extent will the event shave away votes for Democratic congressional candidates?
Because that's the game here -- winning Congress. A Democratically controlled Congress will certify the presidential election properly to the extent it is able, and Biden has a better-than-even chance of earning that electoral win. A Republican Congress will hijack the certification process, and a Republican court will back them up.
A short list of things that can go badly:
Israel can keep doing what it's doing. A fair number of progressives and Dem-leaning voters are either dissatisfied or angry about Israel's bombing of civilians and the Biden administration's inability to distance itself from what looks increasingly like a war of conquest. It's not that those people would turn around and vote for the Republican presidential candidate. Instead, a substantial percentage of them won't feel motivated to vote at all, and thus every Dem up and down the ticket loses out.
Front groups for Iran and/or Russia can provoke the U.S. into broader conflicts or perhaps even an actual war. Republicans in Congress will insist on escalation. In that situation, Democratic presidential administrations and the poorly organized Democratic congressional coalition typically get led by the nose. This will play badly for us because almost no part of the voting public wants a war.
The United States can be drawn into a conflict with Texas. The Texas governor is deliberately engineering a conflict by interfering with the federal mission to control the border and by ignoring a ruling by the Supreme Court. All but one of the Republican state governors backs him up. This is happening in a context where public perception of a "migrant crisis" is largely shaped by Fox and where a large segment of the public believes immigration policies need to be tougher. If the conflict between the U.S. and Texas ever involves bullets, it won't matter that that feds would win the shootout. The real damage will appear on election day.
Russia can turn its invasion of Ukraine into a dirty war in any number of ways. They can damage nuclear facilities. They can produce more environmental disasters like the one they caused by blowing up the dam last year. They can escalate hostilities in ways that write headlines and that make it appear the Biden administration is asking America to back a losing cause. They can continue to feed disinformation to segments of the progressive left and the Fox-watching crowd that frame U.S. support for Ukraine in terms of Biden drawing us into another war that the public does not want. Because Putin isn't only at war with Ukraine. He is at war with the West and specifically with the United States. And Putin wants a Republican in charge.
The stock markets can sort of crash. They look very toppy to me, an analyst. Although they would probably only fall back to the area of the October 2022 low, it would feel to many people like a real crash and Fox and Republicans would spin it that way. Public sentiment about the economy is already negative in a very distorted way (thanks to Fox, et al.) and a market decline would make it much worse. There is no useful policy response the Biden administration could offer that would mollify voters if this were to happen.
Republican state or county officials can prevent certification of the vote. This can cause challenges that would play out in Congress or in the courts. I believe there are scenarios where a legitimate Biden win could be countered by procedural moves and electoral monkeywrenching. In fact, I believe some Republicans are probably counting on that as being the plan.
Other weird stuff. We can expect disinformation from various players to show up in forms we haven't seen before, and through channels where we wouldn't have expected it. Disinformation can take the form of incriminating images, artificially stoked rumors and interpretations of events, and devastating reports about scandals which might or might not be real. The Republican advertising apparatus is good at promoting belief in stories that aren't true, and Democrats are bad at advertising the truth.
To that list of horribles, now add some kind of "black swan" event that you and I are unable to foresee. The computer systems for critical civil or financial infrastructure can be sabotaged. Domestic or foreign-sponsored terrorism can happen. Sometimes these things occur organically and sometimes (I imagine) they are engineered. If a foreign dictator were looking for the ideal time to create disruptions inside the U.S., this year would be the time.
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Your best GOTV won't do much to mitigate the voter-depressing and chaotic effects of the things on that list. We are not living in normal times, and this will not be a normal election year.
The things that could make a bigger difference would be deliberate and unified Democratic leadership, wise policy, and effective messaging. I'm not seeing those things with regard to the items on my list.
Particularly wrong-footed were Nancy Pelosi's recent statements describing protesters of the tragedy in Gaza as being Chinese or Russian stooges. She was halfway correct, of course. Russia and probably China are using their information resources to promote dissatisfaction about Biden's Israel policy, and she knows whatever is the highly classified truth about that. But she came across as being utterly unaware that most people protesting about Gaza are doing so because they believe it's the morally right thing to do. Those remarks will play very badly with the voters we want to keep.
Biden and his campaign seem to be aware that the electoral terrain isn't solid. There was the big shake-up in campaign leadership a couple weeks ago, which only ever happens because somebody notices that trends with key voting groups look bad. But the improvements need to go farther than the campaign organization. We need to see better policy and better advertising of that policy on all the fronts mentioned above. I'm skeptical that we will see it.