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Free time is at a premium for me these days, so this is going to be pretty much a stream of consciousness. As the old saw goes, I’m sorry to have written such a long post, but I didn’t have time to write a shorter one. 🙧 1 Every year I ask my sophomores to pick a theme for the second semester, and this year they went with alternate history. The covids have cut our number of instructional days per class in half, so our exploration of this theme will probably not amount to much more than reading a single novel about America falling into the grip of unmitigated fascism. Fortunately, as of this writing that appears to still fall into the category of alternate history rather than current events. Elections always get me thinking about alternate history. They’re rare examples of events whose outcomes can seem good at the time but bad in retrospect, or vice versa—not because of any misjudgment of the candidates, but because of their knock-on effects. Since the Democrats ripped off five straight wins from 1932 to 1948, no party has been able to hold the White House for more than three consecutive terms, and even the three‑peat has only happened once. Within each base, there are reliable voters who turn out every time and unreliable voters who only turn out when they’re dissatisfied—i.e., when their side is out of power. This asymmetry favoring turnover is amplified by the small swing vote, which is not particularly political: it swings this way or that not because some set group of tuned-in centrists has come to view the country’s course as too liberal or too conservative, but because people who don’t fall anywhere on the conventional spectrum have a vague feeling that things are bad and it’s time to shake things up. And apparently the 21st century has been pretty bad! The last time the nation’s “right track / wrong track” polling numbers were in positive territory was 2004. Let’s take a look at the elections since then:
In recent years, it has become a given that 45% of the population will be unhappy because the other side is in power; some portion of the 45% whose side is in power will be disappointed that things aren’t getting better faster; and those sufficiently tuned out not to have any investment in which side is in power tend to be tuned out precisely because things have remained bad for them through several cycles of red and blue. So the “right track” numbers remain deeply underwater and in response the pendulum swings back and forth. Hence my earlier assertion about alternate election results: flip one outcome from a loss to a win, and you pretty much have no choice but to flip a later win to a loss. The question is what sequence makes for the best timing and dodges the worst candidates. When I first started playing this game, the objective was to keep George W. Bush out of the White House. I wrote a whole article back in the day about how it would probably backfire to go the most likely route:
A similar calculus played out in 2016. Yes, in the aftermath of the election, I couldn’t help but wonder whether it might have been better for one of the “good” elections to have gone wrong. How about 2008? Does Donald Trump get any political traction in the early ’10s without a President Barack Obama to serve as a target? We were scared that McCain might bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran, or that he might drop dead and leave Sarah Palin in charge, but the Democratic Congress would probably have limited the amount of damage he could do at least on a legislative level. And with right-wing austerity leading to an even weaker recovery, plus the unlikelihood of the same party winning four successive terms… that means the Democrats win in 2012, right? Except with Hillary Clinton as the likely nominee, maybe not—or if she does win, and thereby gives Donald Trump a foil to use in building a political following for four years… ulp. So how about 2012, then? A lot of people thought that election was going to be a coin flip. If Mitt Romney wins, he’s the nominee in 2016 as well, and then, win or lose, Paul Ryan’s the favorite for the Republican nomination in 2020, and “President Trump” remains a wacky Simpsons joke. But is that scenario actually better than where we are now? I’m pretty glad that we’re not about to embark upon 4+ years of living in an Ayn Rand novel. And in any case, the calculus I was talking about wasn’t about alternate pasts, but possible futures. In 2016, it seemed like we had the following two options:
Obviously I was never going to vote for Trump, but I was torn about which of these was the better scenario. I decided that the chance to fill the empty Supreme Court seat—and lock down the Ginsburg and Breyer seats for another generation, assuming they chose to retire—was worth ceding the 2020s to the Republicans. When we wound up in the other scenario, it was traumatic, but once the shock had worn off, that silver lining gave even a hardened pessimist like me something to look forward to. If we could just make it through four years with a narcissistic mobster in the Oval Office, we could look forward to a decade of real progress! …or apparently we could find ourselves right back in scenario one, with Joe Biden in Hillary Clinton’s place. 🙧 2 In the months leading up to the election, the polling aggregators published article after article explaining why 2020 wasn’t going to be like 2016. Polls now weighted for education! They had proven to be dead on in 2018! Joe Biden’s lead was several points greater than Hillary Clinton’s! It was extraordinarily steady, without the swings of 2016! Most crucially, these weren’t 42-to-39 polls with huge swaths of the electorate unaccounted for—Joe Biden was over 50%! Even if every single voter not projected as committed to Biden broke against him, Biden would still win! Good thing, too, because apparently every single voter not projected as committed to Biden broke against him. In the weeks since the election, many partisans for Team Blue have tried to put forward the story that the election was not actually all that close: Joe Biden won by over seven million votes! He won the electoral vote 306 to 232, and per Kellyanne Conway, that’s a historic landslide! And the polls weren’t that far off—here, look at the spread of simulated outcomes on fivethirtyeight.com! The correct dot turned out to be the one highlighted in yellow—that’s not too far from the center of the range of possibilities! Click it to see the map: |
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But as Joe Biden said in the 2007 Democratic debates, let’s stop all this happy talk. This election was terrifyingly close. It will be a long time before I get over that sick feeling watching the early returns from Florida, as a state that the Economist put at 80% likely to end up in Biden’s column instead had its New York Times needle slam over to 95% Trump within moments. This was no “red mirage”: the returns from Miami were indeed dire, came the reports on the ground. North Carolina soon tagged along, and liberal pundits were left to mumble on Twitter about how some of the counties in Ohio didn’t look so bad. Ultimately, of course, the “blue wall” did hold this time: South Carolina’s Democratic primary voters rescued Joe Biden from an ignominious final campaign based on the notion that he was the one candidate who could reclaim the Great Lakes states that Trump had captured in 2016, and their bet paid off. But blue voters spent four years grumbling that Trump’s wins had been a matter of a few thousand votes, and this time around, the same held true for his losses. Have a look:
So, yes, Biden won the popular vote by over seven million votes. But flip 21,600 of those votes—10,400 in Wisconsin, 5900 in Georgia, and 5300 in Arizona—and the 27 Republican state delegations in the House give Trump a second term. 21,600 votes out of over 158 million cast! We just made it home with a bullet hole in our hat, people. There are lots of lessons here, some new, some that have been obvious for decades. Let’s look at some of them. 🙧 3 The first lesson is that the structure of the United States government as laid out in the Constitution is terrible. We are taught to treat the Constitution as a sort of secular scripture, or at least as a work of unparalleled political brilliance. It’s not. It was an impressive development for the eighteenth century, but so were steam engines. They are equally obsolete. Take the Electoral College (please). The Electoral College was founded on the notion that a commoner like you would have no idea who might make a good president, but you could hold a vote on who was the smartest guy in your village, and the winner would know. This is not how society works anymore. It is not really how society worked in the eighteenth century either, which is why the Electoral College rapidly evolved into the current system in which electors belong to committed slates and the selection of a slate depends on a winner-take-all vote on the state level (Maine and Nebraska excepted). The thing is, it is not particularly controversial to say that the Electoral College is terrible. People make all sorts of arguments against it:
So, as bad as the Electoral College is, ultimately it is a symptom of a bigger problem: the states themselves. The framers of the Constitution envisioned a country less like what the United States has actually become and more like what the European Union is: a collection of distinct societies whose borders have at least a semblance of logic to them. West Germany and East Germany united because the Germans recognized themselves as a single nation whose partition had been imposed from without. Czechoslovakia split because its leaders determined that to continue as a federation of two clearly separate peoples was no longer viable. And borders may continue to shift over the years to come: Scotland may declare independence from the U.K., Ireland may unify, Belgium may divide into Flanders and Wallonia. Because, again, these are distinct populations. American states are just administrative subdivisions. Does anyone actually believe that North Dakota and South Dakota are such radically different societies that they need separate governors and sets of senators, while downtown Detroit and a sleepy Finnish-American neighborhood in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula form a politically coherent unit? It’s not that the country shouldn’t have subdivisions; on the contrary, I’d like to see states become more meaningful political units with significantly more autonomy than they have today. But that means periodically redrawing borders so that they’re actually meaningful, not ossified accidents of history. A number of people have tried their hands at figuring out where these borders might be. A group at MIT measured what communities emerge when looking at texting patterns, for instance, while a study out of Dartmouth and Sheffield produced a map of megaregions based on commute patterns. It seems the leading figure in this particular pastime is a guy named Neil Freeman, who’s divided up the country all sorts of different ways—perhaps the best known of which is his map of fifty states with equal population. This doesn’t solve the problems with the Electoral College, nor does it even solve the problems with the Senate, whose composition may not reflect the will of the public as a whole. True, at least you don’t end up with preposterous anomalies like twelve senators for New England and two for Texas, or four senators for the Dakotas and one-sixth of a senator for the more populous island of Manhattan. But the problems with the Senate go even deeper. We are taught to revere of the entire Constitution, but hallowed above all else is its system of checks and balances, that exquisite clockwork that pits ambition against ambition and thereby keeps potential tyrants at bay. Yet somehow countries with other systems manage to avoid falling into vicious tyranny—and lately they’ve been doing a better job of it. These countries also subscribe to the startling principle that when people vote a new government into power they actually want that government to be able to do something. In these countries, the idea that the head of government might not command a majority or at least enjoy the support of a majority coalition would be a head-scratcher, since the head of government is defined as the leader of the party that has secured that position. The elected government then implements the program it had successfully campaigned on. But in the U.S., even if the person who takes office as the head of government has actually won a majority of the vote—which, as noted, is by no means a sure thing!—that incoming president may well face a hostile House, Senate, Supreme Court, or all three, and therefore won’t be able to do anything particularly ambitious. That is, for anything significant to get done, four governmental divisions selected by different methods—one subject to gerrymanders by state officials, one gerrymandered by the vagaries of history, and one reflecting the administrations of the previous thirty years or so—all have to be in broad agreement on an agenda, for any one of them can hit the brakes. Some put forward as a feature the existence of these institutional guarantees that nothing can change too quickly. And, yes, we’ve all recently been reminded that a democracy that allows an administration to change things enough that it dismantles the apparatus of representative government will not remain a democracy for long. But the philosophy that keeping things basically the same is inherently good has a name: it’s called conservatism. A system in which a progressive mandate can be thwarted by an opposition that holds a paper-thin margin in half of one branch of government is not particularly representative either. And in a crisis, that can be catastrophic. The metaphor I’ve used in the past is that you’re trapped in a car whose driver is headed straight for a cliff, and you manage to grab the wheel, but discover that it can only move about five degrees. Over time, even this might be enough to stave off disaster. But we have elections every two years. No immediate improvement in people’s lives means a midterm backlash, and in a two-party system, that’s the equivalent of another passenger grabbing the wheel, yanking it in the opposite direction, and assuring that you’re once again headed directly over the cliff. 🙧 4 Of course, that last point is currently academic. There was no blue wave in 2020, and this year’s elections did not produce a progressive mandate. Which brings us to the second and perhaps more interesting lesson of the past few weeks: what the election tells us about where we might be headed. One big question is whether the swinging pendulum I discussed in part one is ever going to stop. So far, prophecies from both the left and right of permanent majorities haven’t panned out on the national level. But that’s an artifact of our flawed political system. Going by the popular vote, we do have a durable consensus: the Democrats have won seven of the past eight presidential elections. But in that span we’ve seen two Republican presidents installed despite coming in second. Will the 2020s make that three in a row? It sure looks that way! Though Joe Biden was able to flip three Rust Belt states back into the blue column this time, Democratic prospects in the Midwest look pretty dismal. Ohio was supposed to be a coin flip, and it wound up at R+8.0. The Economist had Iowa as even closer than Ohio, and it wound up at R+8.2. These states look lost. One poll had Wisconsin at D+17, and while nearly everyone agreed that that poll was an outlier, the aggregators had it at D+8.3. That’s a miss of 7.7 points; if the miss had been 8.4, we’d be headed into a hellscape. Over the course of the previous three presidential elections, Wisconsin went from being 6.7 points bluer than the nation as a whole, to 3.0 points bluer, to 2.9 points redder; this time around, even as its electoral votes went to Joe Biden, it was 3.8 points redder than the country was. So that state will be hard to keep. Pennsylvania, 3.2 points redder than the nation as a whole, won’t be easy. Even Michigan is 1.6 points redder than the U.S. average. The Rust Belt strategy implicit in the Biden nomination may not be viable for elections past this one. The optimists have been expecting these losses to be balanced out by gains in the Sun Belt. But the Sun Belt states aren’t heading left as fast as the Rust Belt states are running right. Biden did flip Arizona and Georgia; time will tell whether those states become Democratic mainstays like Colorado and Virginia, or flukes like Barack Obama’s 2008 wins in North Carolina and Indiana. Arizona actually looks pretty good, with two Democratic senators, and four of its five neighbors (if you count Colorado) having preceded it as red-to-blue states just in my own time as a voter. Georgia may be a fluke, or it may become a southern version of Illinois, the one Midwestern state that Democrats don’t worry about, thanks to the megalopolis keeping it anchored on the blue side of the line. If Atlanta becomes the next Chicago, that could offset some of the damage up north. But North Carolina disappointed: over the past four elections it’s gone from 6.9 points redder than the U.S. average, to 5.9, to 5.8, to 5.7 this time around. That’s glacial. Texas has been moving faster, from 19.7 points redder in 2012 to 11.1 in ’16 and 10.0 in ’20, but that’s still a pace that makes it look like it’s eight years away from being eight years away. And Florida did more than disappoint: it’s trending the wrong way at an accelerating rate, going from 3.0 points redder than the U.S. average in 2012 to 3.3 in ’16 to 7.8 this year. Ouch. So where do the Democratic votes come from in 2024? With the currently projected reallocation of electoral votes, Hillary Clinton’s states plus Arizona and Georgia only get the Democratic candidate to 258 electoral votes. Looks like a lot of advertising money will be flowing into Michigan! But why look forward to potentially worrisome elections in future cycles when the 2020 results were plenty worrisome themselves? Yes, Biden won, but he was projected to have as many as 55 Democratic senators joining him, and that number instead looks like it will be 48. Democrats were supposed to add to their already robust House majority, but instead they came a whisker away from losing it entirely. The Princeton Election Consortium projected that the Democrats would still win the Senate even with a 3.9% polling error, the House with a 4.6% polling error, and the presidency with a 5.3% polling error. Based purely on that, it seems safe to say that the polling error was a gruesome 4.5%. Oh, and Republicans won big on the state level, so redistricting will be a bust and we can expect Republicans to retake the House in 2022 even if most of the electorate votes for Democrats. So much for the value in trading a 2016 win for a 2020 one. I suppose that all hope is not yet lost: as of this writing, there’s a chance that the Senate number won’t be 48, as two seats in Georgia are going to a runoff. So we could have a 50–50 Senate with VP Kamala Harris breaking ties. That would be phenomenal, in that it would put Mitch McConnell in the minority and the Senate might then actually take up legislation passed by the House. Then the Democrats could actually put forward an agenda… that is acceptable to Joe Manchin. Sigh. If the blue team had only won one extra seat, though, it could have enacted bold legislation! …so long as Kyrsten Sinema didn’t think it went too far. So, yeah. Taking control of the Senate would be better than having to cross our fingers and hope that Biden’s cabinet picks win the approval of Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitt Romney, but it won’t mean that we’re getting Supreme Court expansion, D.C. statehood, or even a “Bidencare” package to rescue the Affordable Care Act. And that’s a problem, because it seems pretty clear that Democrats need to pass all those measures and more in order to level the playing field. And it seemed like this was our shot. George W. Bush had been such a disaster that voters handed the White House to a guy whose middle name was “Hussein”, turned the House over to Nancy Pelosi, and gave the Democrats a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate. Trump seemed likely to be an even bigger disaster, and he was. True, he didn’t get the nation embroiled in a war, though there were some fraught moments with North Korea and Iran. But he ricocheted from scandal to scandal, one so egregious that even the hyper-cautious House leadership launched impeachment proceedings, and his inner circle of associates regularly went to jail or accepted pardons to escape their sentences. The Bush administration tortured cab drivers to death, leaving an indelible stain on the soul of the nation; the Trump administration took a different tack and tortured babies, separating them from their parents (forever, in hundreds of cases) and locking them in cages. Bush was criticized for launching wars of choice without the backing of a coalition of allies like those his father had assembled; Trump actively drove away our closest allies and curried favor with dictators. And then of course Trump’s handling of the coronavirus made Bush’s handling of Katrina look masterful. (For that matter, so did Trump’s handling of a hurricane.) Like Bush, Trump will be handing his successor an economy battered enough that the new administration’s first order of business will need to be a stimulus package, though the Dow is doing well enough to assure that the gap between the top 1% and everyone else will continue to widen. On top of this substance was style. Bush was widely derided as a fratboy president. But Trump has been both a sociopath and a toddler, his personality so horrifically defective that the most apt comparisons are not with a George W. Bush or a Richard Nixon but with the likes of Idi Amin and King Joffrey. All the ingredients were there for a bigger, and better-timed, backlash than than in 2008. And it’s not like it didn’t materialize: the Democrats got nearly sixteen million more votes this year than in 2016. The problem is that there was a simultaneous backlash to the backlash, as more than eleven million people who hadn’t voted for Trump the first time around decided that, now that they knew what a Trump presidency looked like, they wanted more of the same. Down-ballot, they voted Republican. So did plenty of embarrassed conservatives who voted for the Biden / Harris ticket and then picked Republicans for every other office. Thus do we get a band-aid when what we really need are stitches and rabies shots. As pessimistic as I am, I have to confess that I had bought into the comforting notion that a wholescale realignment was waiting in the distance. Demographics is destiny, right? Forget blue waves—we had a blue tide coming in. The old power structure would try to hang on as long as it could, using voter suppression and gerrymandering and a hundred other tricks, but eventually none of these would be enough, and then we’d be set. I’d even seen one of these realignments from up close. When I was a kid, California was a red state. Between 1948 and 1992, it voted Democratic exactly once, in Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide. But in 1992, it flipped blue and has never looked back. The Democratic share of California’s presidential vote has risen from 46% in ’92 (enough to win in a three-way race) to 51, 53, 54, 61, 60, 62, and 64% over the course of the next seven elections. The 2020s were supposed to be the decade that Florida and Texas made the same leap—after which all four of the big electoral prizes would be blue locks. We’d have a starting map that looked something like this— |
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—and that would spell the end of the Republican Party in its current form as a force in national politics. In fact, some argued, we might be there already if we could just get turnout up. I saw this kind of rhetoric all the time on the liberal blogs. “Texas isn’t a red state, it’s a non-voting state! When we get our people to the polls, we win!” From this perspective, the scary thing about 2020 was not that Florida and Texas didn’t flip. It’s that, not only did we get our people to the polls and lose, but some of “our people”—that is, those in the areas of those states that were considered solid parts of the Democratic base—flipped red. 🙧 5 The “demographics is destiny” argument is based on the notion that the Republican Party is the party of white conservatives and the Democratic Party is the party of everyone who isn’t conservative and everyone who isn’t white. As the country becomes less white, the argument proceeded, it will therefore necessarily become less Republican. Except there’s nothing necessary about our current coalitions. They’ve been different in the past. The usual shorthand is to say that over time the parties switched ideologies, but that’s not quite accurate: the Republicans have been the party of the rich since at least the Grant administration. But they were also the party that freed the slaves, and therefore enjoyed almost the entirety of African-American support for decades. That didn’t mean that having African ancestry automatically made you an economic conservative with a preference for protectionist tariffs and a disdain for free coinage of silver. It was just that, for decades after the Civil War, the Republicans remained the less racist of the two major parties, and for that demographic, that trumped other concerns. These days the Democrats are the less racist of the two major parties. This has been the case for my entire lifetime and then some, but Trump really brought it to the fore with what the media euphemistically called “racially charged” rhetoric. After dabbling in the public arena as far back as the 1980s, taking out full-page ads in every major New York newspaper calling for the execution of five teenagers of African and Latin American ancestry wrongfully accused in a rape case, Trump made his first big splash in politics as the leading exponent of the lie that Barack Obama was born in Africa rather than Hawaii and was therefore illegitimately occupying the White House. The signature proposal of Trump’s 2016 campaign was to build a giant wall on the southern border, saying of Mexican immigrants that “they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists”. The wall didn’t happen, but border detentions skyrocketed, and the aforementioned family separation policy drew a lot of attention. Trump also called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”, and partially implemented such a ban upon his election (exempting countries where he owned property). It would be an oversimplification to say that this drove members of the relevant demographics into the Democratic camp, but the fact that such rhetoric meshed so well with the Republican program—it was viewed not as a sharp break, but as a case of “saying the quiet part out loud”—may help to explain why in 2016, 91% of voters of African ancestry voted blue; of Muslims, 82%; of voters of Latin American ancestry, 66%. And that is actually kind of weird! And a contingent of Republican strategists has been lamenting for years that it’s weird. Because just as the freed slaves who joined the Republican Party in the 19th century weren’t necessarily economic conservatives, members of minority groups who vote Democratic in the 21st century aren’t necessarily progressives or liberals. The Republican post-mortem of the 2012 election spent pages arguing for more outreach to “Hispanic communities” and the elevation of “Hispanic leaders” within the party—why drive away a constituency immersed in a conservative culture? Republicans once viewed Muslims, those of Arab ancestry in particular, as one of their natural voting blocs—again, the argument went, here was a growing segment of the electorate steeped in a conservative culture, so why alienate them? George W. Bush won 70% of Muslims in 2000; take away the Muslim vote in Florida, and Al Gore is president. By 2004, for obvious reasons, Muslim support for the Republican Party had fallen to 12%. That same year, one of my favorite writers, Christopher J. Priest, the pastor of an African-American Baptist church, warned liberals not to take “black conservative Christians” for granted, because every time they filled out their ballots, they were “stuck between a political decision and a moral one”, and it would only take a tiny bit of Republican outreach to flip these voters to the red team en masse. My own anecdotes are just that—anecdotes—and they come from an atypical corner of the country, but I have to say: I teach extraordinarily diverse classes, and often have my students write about issues of culture and ethics. And the students who write that their ethics are just to follow Jesus and the Virgin Mary? Who say that we shouldn’t do anything about the problems facing the world because this is how God wants things to be and He will be the one to make changes if He wants? Who in our class debates roll their eyes at issues of ethics and argue, as if any other viewpoint were preposterous, that anything goes in pursuit of self-enrichment? These are not the students from stereotypically Republican demographics. It is easy for me to believe that if the Republican Party were just to drop even a scintilla of the racism, we might be in for a realignment that would lock in generations of reactionary rather than progressive governance. And the 2020 election suggests that even dropping the racism may not be necessary! As noted, even with Trump still at the top of the ticket, the Republicans made gains in places that had pundits scrambling for an explanation. Let’s return to those first few minutes that returns started coming in from the east coast. Analysts monitored benchmark counties and reported good news for Democrats: the suburbs responsible for 2018’s blue wave were once again reporting significantly more favorable results than in 2016! And then Florida’s needle slammed into the red zone. Forget the suburban counties—the bottom had dropped out in Miami‑Dade. This urban county, checking in at 65.0% “Hispanic or Latino of any race” in the 2010 census, had shifted twenty‑two points more Republican than in 2016. The “Hispanic or Latino of any race” vote in Florida as a whole shifted red by eleven points. What happened? And what can we learn from what happened? One lesson is that people don’t necessarily subscribe to the system of categories other people want to sort them into. There is no such thing as “the Latino vote”, analysts argued. Sure, Florida has lots of “Latino” voters, but they don’t vote like Latinos in other states! Most of them are Cubans! They fled to Miami after Castro took over and they’re fierce right-wingers! That was sixty years ago, and every election cycle we hear that those exiles’ kids and grandkids might have different predilections, but maybe not so much! And then a lot of those who aren’t Cuban have fled from places like Venezuela or Nicaragua. When they hear about polls showing that socialism is moving into the mainstream, with 70% of Millennials and Zoomers open to socialist proposals, they don’t think about Austria’s subsidized housing, Finland’s universal basic income initiative, or Denmark’s low GINI coefficient. They think of Hugo Chavez, Nicolás Maduro, Daniel Ortega. So long before they think of themselves as “Latinos”, the analysts reported, they think of themselves as anti-socialists. Meaning that the Republicans could sway a lot of voters by finding their preferred media outlets and precisely targeting them with the message that Joe Biden, of all people, was some kind of fire-breathing socialist. And apparently they spent a year doing exactly that. And it all went on under the radar—or under my radar, at least. I consumed a lot of campaign news and I never heard about it. I did hear about broader efforts by the Trump campaign to paint Joe Biden as a socialist, leading some to speculate that the operatives had been so certain that they’d be facing Bernie Sanders that they had no Plan B and just swapped the names. And for a couple of weeks there it did look like Bernie Sanders was the heavy favorite for the Democratic nomination. Some contended that, as in 2008, in a year when Republicans were sure to lose, there was no need to go with the safe choice—take advantage of a rare window of opportunity to swing for the fences! Picking a self-proclaimed socialist might seem risky, but the Republicans are going to call any Democratic nominee a socialist, so what’s the difference? In hindsight, seeing how even the safest candidate squeaked out a whisker-thin win, it’s hard to imagine a Sanders victory, and easy to imagine the recriminations that would have ensued after a Sanders loss: “This was the one election we had to win, and could have won, and we threw it away nominating a socialist! When the Proud Boys are throwing people into ovens it’ll be the progressives’ fault!” But the Bernie crowd was right about one thing: the Republicans did call archetypal centrist Joe Biden a socialist, and in Florida, it worked. And while pundits were quick to reassure despairing Democrats that Florida’s results didn’t represent a nationwide red swing—no other state has all those Cubans, after all—it occurred to me that what held true for the Cubans and Venezuelans might also have held true for other immigrant groups, were it not for the Republicans’ demonization of immigrants. Even setting aside the conservative nature of the cultures those immigrants tend to come from, what sorts of people decide to move to the United States rather than somewhere else? The xenophobic answer is that immigrants want to come to the U.S. and live off our sweet, sweet welfare programs… but why would they then choose a country whose welfare programs are depressingly meager? Duncan Black once had a running bit about the popular notion on the right that there is some sort of secret “good welfare” that only “those people” have access to, but again, that’s a xenophobic fantasy—our social safety net is hardly what the U.S. is known for outside the U.S. Our reputation is that we’re the developed country without the safety net, the low-tax haven where “haves” from countries in turmoil can flee with their wealth, where entrepreneurs can start businesses without a lot of regulations getting in the way, and where pay is low enough that those hardy enough to try to live on it will find plenty of scutwork jobs available. If you’re looking for a robust welfare state, go somewhere else. But if you’re looking for a shot at getting rich—if not immediately, then at least over the course of a couple of generations—this is supposedly the place. Doesn’t it stand to reason that a country with that kind of right-leaning ethos would attract right-leaning immigrants? I’ve never been to Florida, and the closest I came to interacting with the Cuban-American community back in my old stomping grounds was grabbing lunch at the Felix Continental Cafe on the Orange Circle. But growing up I had plenty of classmates whose families had fled communist regimes in Vietnam and China. Those families did not make 1980s Orange County markedly more liberal. My father was also an immigrant, of course. And he’s a case in point of why it’s a mistake to think that people identify along the lines others draw for them. Earlier I wrote about “the Muslim vote”. My father would be classed within that category. Like a lot of people, he had his share of ethnic prejudices. His number one target: other Muslims! “Egyptians are the stupidest people,” I’d hear him grumble. “No, wait. Egyptians are the second-stupidest people. Turkmens are the stupidest.” I was a geography nerd, but I’d never even heard of the Turkmens—modern-day Turkmenistan was still part of the USSR. There probably weren’t too many Turkmen-American voters in the ’80s. But my father would have vociferously objected to being placed in the same category as them. Similarly, election analysts contended, Democrats shouldn’t have expected that Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric would have alienated Floridians from Cuba or Venezuela or Puerto Rico. Many wouldn’t care. Some might even agree! 🙧 6
And then once again, many reported a desire to send a protest vote against being taken for granted and forced into someone else’s boxes. There is no Latino vote, they insisted, nor even a “Mexican-American” vote. “What do we in the Rio Grande Valley have in common with people in East L.A.? We’re Tejanos! And we’re supposed to be mad that Trump wants to stop immigration from Mexico? We agree with him! We never crossed the border—the border crossed us!” I read remarks from a number of South Texans who took the argument even further. Tejanos didn’t just have a lot in common with Trump’s base, they said—they were Trump’s base. “Why is anyone surprised that white working-class voters would vote for Trump? We’re white!”
The U.S. has gone through many waves of reviling and then assimilating
immigrant groups.
In the 19th century, it was the Irish.
Under the Second Party System of the early 19th century, the Whigs were
the party of strait-laced mainline Protestantism, putting them at odds
with the Baptists and Methodists of the South and the Irish Catholics
flooding into Northeastern cities.
These groups correspondingly voted Democratic.
As the Republicans became the party of abolition, African-Americans
became one of the party’s reliable constituencies.
Thus, you wound up with Republican cartoonists who would dispense with
racist caricature and
🙧 7 Which brings us to the white vote. As Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez and others have pointed out, maybe disappointed Democrats should stop looking at why minority groups voted less overwhelmingly for Democrats than usual, and start looking at why nominating Joe Biden, which was supposed to be the key to bringing back the white non-college vote that a “wine-track” candidate like Elizabeth Warren would never have reached, meant that the Democrats lost that demographic by merely 35 points rather than Hillary Clinton’s 38. If waiting for the demographic tide to come in is a sucker’s game, then what can move the needle back in the right direction? One traditional lament is how many people vote against their own expressed policy preferences. Progressive proposals are extremely popular, leftie pundits fume—how about actually running on them? Look at ballot initiatives in the red states! In 2018, Florida voted overwhelmingly to restore voting rights to felons who’d served their time; this year, it voted almost as overwhelmingly for a $15 minimum wage. Mississippi voted to remove the electoral vote from its gubernatorial elections. Mississippi also approved medical marijuana, while Montana and South Dakota (!) approved recreational use. Nebraska capped payday loan rates. Utah voted to ban slavery, which is something, I guess. Other policies weren’t put to the test this year but poll very well: background checks for private sales of firearms, a Medicare buy‑in, regulation of prescription drug prices, wealth taxes, a ban on assault weapons, public broadband, worker representation on corporate boards, employment guarantees, free public college tuition. But poor messaging means that people don’t associate the blue team with these popular initiatives: centrists run on negatives (“We’re not Trump!”), and the left gets tied to slogans like “defund the police”, which backfired tremendously, and policies such as student loan forgiveness, which seems likely to backfire nearly as badly. It’s a perennial problem… …but it’s actually one that cuts both ways! Remember that staunchly blue state, California? Where we haven’t given our electoral votes to a Republican since 1988 and where Democrats have won 46 out of 48 of the past midterm elections for statewide executive office? The disparity between policy preference and voting record is evident here, too. This month we voted against property taxes to fund schools, against reversing the 1996 ban on affirmative action (by a wide margin), against rent control (by an even wider margin), and for stripping labor protections from people who work for online services. It was kind of a bloodbath for progressive policy. And it showed that voting blue can also be more a matter of tribal identification than political philosophy. Which casts doubt on the notion that the non-voting public consists of unmotivated liberals and that if Democrats can just get turnout up, they win. Of course, casting even more doubt on that notion is the fact that Donald Trump somehow managed to find eleven million people in that pool willing to come out this time and give him their vote. Where did they come from? How did polls miss them? If you read a lot of political analysis, the phrase of the month has been “social trust”. In a 2020 survey, more than one in six people reported having absolutely no close social contacts—that is, people with whom they talked about anything important. Studies dating back to the ’90s suggest that such people are particularly unlikely to answer polls. (So perhaps the social isolation survey actually underestimated the total loners—after all, they had to answer that survey!) This is a group that also voted more than two-to-one for Trump. Some have pointed to this as the key to understanding Trump’s newfound eleven million. For years now, I’ve heard political scientists assert that the number one tell in determining whether someone will vote Republican is an authoritarian temperament. This is said to explain how Trump, an outsider who deviated from Republican orthodoxy on a number of points, was so easily able to swoop in and win the nomination: he views the world entirely through the lens of dominance and submission. When the 2020 Republican Party platform consisted solely of “strong support for President Trump and his Administration”, that was fine with most Republicans—they weren’t looking for a political philosophy or policy agenda, but just wanted someone to follow. When Trump turned the Department of Justice into his personal law firm, sabotaged the post office, and made any number of other increasingly naked authoritarian moves, a few Republicans jumped ship, but most became all the more committed. “Making America great again” meant moving away from democracy. But it looks like Trump didn’t find eleven million new authoritarians. The group he added to his coalition were the nihilists. Some men just want to watch the world burn. I’ve read many warnings that that our next aspiring dictator won’t be so dull-witted and undisciplined that he repeatedly blows his opportunities—he’ll smoothly take over and reorient the working of government rather than loudly smashing things up. “How could anyone live through the last four years of destruction and chaos and vote for more of it?” For some who feel like society has nothing to offer them, a promise of a return to a mythical period of greatness may hold some allure. For others, not so much. These others wouldn’t have voted for Trump, or for anyone, in 2016. But destruction and chaos? Smashing things up? Now that was an agenda they could get behind. Again, the conventional wisdom used to be that the Republican base always turned out, so Democrats’ fortunes rose and fell with turnout. Low turnout, like 36.4% in the 2014 midterms—the lowest midterm turnout since 1942? A Republican blowout. High turnout, like 50.3% in the 2018 midterms—the highest midterm turnout since 1914? Democratic domination. Republicans seemed to believe it too, judging by their voter suppression efforts. (Not to mention the number of Republican strategists and office holders who have just come right out and said that they need to keep turnout low in order to win.) Whenever I’d read about the latest scheme to suppress the vote, I’d think about how Australia doesn’t have these problems: turnout isn’t an issue, because voting is compulsory! Imagine the margins Democrats would rack up! But this year the U.S. turnout rate—the highest since the year 1900!— was almost exactly two-thirds. That means there were still 79 million people out there who were eligible to vote but didn’t cast a ballot. Look at the views of the eleven million Trump was able to coax to the polls in 2020. What sort of input on our future might we get from the other seventy-nine million? And what are elections going to be like going forward now that 70% of Republicans claim that the 2020 election was rigged? It’s so hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that they’re not just pretending. I mean, I’m sure some of them are—i.e., telling pollsters that the election was rigged just to register their dissatisfaction with the result. But there are a lot of true believers out there. RNC chair Ronna McDaniel was recently down in Georgia pleading her case with a bunch of Republicans who griped that there was no point in voting in the Senate runoffs because all the elections are rigged. When the presidential results finally became clear, it seemed like we’d cleared some breathing space—“Whew! We’re still a democracy for another four years!”—but what happens when half the country either doesn’t believe in democracy or thinks our time as a democracy is already over? Mainstream magazines and newspapers are now suggesting that the breakup of the U.S. could be at hand. And what’s startling is that some are even starting to agree with me that, out of the range of possible outcomes of the trajectory we’re on, that might be one of the better ones.
🙧 Coda I concluded my 2016 election article with a song by Local H called “Sad History”. I’ll conclude this one with a song that really captures the experience of 2020. For a few hours on November 3rd, the middle section seemed like it would turn out to be a cruel joke. But for the moment—if only for the moment—it appears to have been a promise kept.
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But what about the Rio Grande Valley?
The 
