Yeah, it's been awhile since I last blogged, but I was fighting with a 3 year old over. . .everything. Ugh. Anyway, as of this morning, here are my general thoughts:
It Looks Like Biden Will Win. . .
As of right now, Joe Biden appears poised to win the Presidency. He's up in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, and looking promising in Pennsylvania and Georgia. He will most likely get over 300 electoral votes. While we can get into the some of the disappointment below, the thing to keep in mind is that Biden actually managed to pull off the victory. That's not a small feat given that Trump raised over $1 billion, blew threw it, and then utilized every portion of the federal government he controls to help his reelection. Our tax dollars funded much of his campaign, including the Republican National Convention being held on the grounds of the White House. That's. . .pretty fucking amazing.
And if you look at the electoral history of presidential elections, what Biden did last night (assuming he pulls off the win), is even more amazing. Incumbent presidents get the benefit of the doubt - meaning that when someone who's undecided steps into the voting booth and votes, they tend to vote for the guy in office. That makes the job of the challenger incredibly hard, and that goes double for Presidential elections. In the past 90 years of Presidential elections, only three (if the numbers hold) Presidents have lost a reelection campaign: Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Donald Trump.
What's also amazing about the potential win is that Joe Biden is not the transformative figure that Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton were. He doesn't represent a watershed change in the Democratic Party - he is a Party insider. It is pretty clear to me is that Biden fits with the mood of the non-Trump voters. He was somber, and more than any other candidate I've ever seen, could understand the grief that a lot of people are feeling right now. And his campaign in that regard was pitch-perfect.
But It Wasn't A Landslide
If you look at the fundamentals of Donald Trump's Administration, it's pretty clear that, at least as domestic policies go, Donald Trump was the worst President of my lifetime. I would have said George W. Bush, but Bush got a fair bit of (EXTREMELY BAD) legislation passed. The only major piece of legislation passed in the past four years was a tax cut for the rich - and a major tax increase for middle class families, by the way. That's it. Everything else Trump has done has been by executive fiat. Now, unlike Bush, he hasn't gotten us into 2-3 foreign wars, but he fucked up the COVID-19 response, and 230,000 people have died.
In that context, it's little wonder that QANON developed with the underlying premise that this is all a facade of nonwork, and that behind the scenes, any day now, Trump is going to arrest all the sexual predators. For those of you who are wondering, Trump is not going to do any of that. He used to walk into the dressing rooms of Miss Teen USA to ogle teenage girls dressing. He doesn't give a shit about sex trafficking, and never has.
And, in fact, Trump doesn't have any positions whatsoever - except for taking away the protections for people with preexisting conditions from the ACA. Nor does the Republican Party. Their platform was literally, "whatever Mr. Trump says it is." I'm paraphrasing, but I'm not joking. Look it up.
Despite all of his craziness, his rampant corruption, the fact that women are being forcibly sterilized at the Border, the fact that he orphaned hundreds of refugee kids, the fact that he bungled a pandemic so badly my daughter will probably never see her kindergarten classroom, Donald Trump almost won reelection. In fact, he got more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. Now, again, some of that is the incumbent effect, but the deeper issue is that we have a divide in this country that is based largely on the types and sources of information we receive. As a result, it's like we as a country live in two different worlds. That's really, really, bad.
In fact, it's untenable. How can policies be discussed or considered when there's no agreement on what the underlying problem is? Or what's actually going on? How can you ever come to some agreement? As an attorney, I negotiate settlements all the time and I've learned something - the Parties have to be on the same page. Right now, we're nowhere near the same book.
To give you an example, take COVID-19. While we're still learning about this disease, we know that it is transmitted through the air, that it causes hospitalization in 15% of all reported cases, and it causes death in 2.75% of all cases. We know this because of the numbers put out by Johns Hopkins and the CDC, among others. Now, there might be some variation in the death toll, but we generally know that it kills anywhere from 1-5% of those who get the disease. Over 230,000 Americans have died from it. But you look on Facebook, and there are a variety of conspiracy theories regarding Fauci, or that doctors get paid more money for COVID*, and suddenly dealing with the pandemic becomes political. We can't agree on what needs to be done because 50% of the population doesn't believe that COVID-19 is at all dangerous, despite the fact that 1,000 people a day are dying.
A big part of that is the fact that we have two types of media in this country - corporate media (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS) and conservative media (Fox, etc.). Corporate media just wants to sell advertising, and advertisers want to sell people stuff. Conservative media wants to sell itself, and push conservative ideals. In that context, people never really got a full understanding of how corrupt and ugly the Trump Administration really was. And in the meantime, Facebook gives special privileges to the Daily Wire, a conservative outlet, and wave after wave of conspiracy theories hit the public. In the meantime, there are dozens of examples of corporate media normalizing Trump's behavior.
Democrats, meanwhile, are hardly free from blame. Pelosi and the House Democrats stopped investigating and stopped putting in the work necessary to push Democratic messages to the forefront. When Obama wore a tan suit, that's all the GOP and conservative media could talk about for WEEKS. When Trump was found to be taking bribes, or paying $750 in taxes for 2016 and 2017, or when it was discovered he has a secret Chinese bank account, or when it was found that the DHS has an unlicensed doctor ripping out the uteruses of women in immigrant camps against their will, no one put in the work to get that story onto the front page of the New York Times for as long as possible. For that reason, I hope Pelosi steps down as the Speaker of the House. She isn't up to the task.
The long and short of it is, we're going to be dealing with this for a long time. Trump isn't the cause of this breakdown, he's a symptom of a larger rot. My guess is that we'll see Trump, or a Trumpist run for President in 2024, and win the GOP nomination. My worry is that the next one will be a little bit smarter, a little bit more disciplined, and a little bit less obvious in their authoritarian impulses.
One Note Regarding Bernie Sanders
I've seen a fair number of people online (okay, on Twitter), who say that Sanders would've beaten Trump by a larger vote share. I disagree with this sentiment for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign apparatus was. . .bad. Going into 2020, Bernie Sanders had a solid core of support, a fundraising base that was unrivaled, and voter data for every voter in the 2016 Democratic primaries. He had every advantage, and never increased his base. I just don't see how Sanders could have pulled off a win.
That said, could a more progressive candidate have done a better job, or won by a larger margin? Possibly. Biden ran a very good campaign, but he was intentionally vague on certain things in order to maintain as large of a tent as possible. But since polling is absolutely fucked, who knows.
Polling is Fucked
As with 2016, the 2020 polling showed a Democratic wave election, and then flipped to a much closer one. While some people assert ulterior motives to pollsters, the issue here is voter screens, and how they're done. Think of it this way, if you call 1000 numbers at random, you are going to get a fair number of people who probably can't vote. You will also get a fair number of people who don't vote, and then you'll get likely voters. Of those, the likely voters are going to be the most valuable because their opinions will translate into actual votes.
But figuring out who the likely voters are in 2020 was a nightmare. Both Parties have shown a tremendous ability to get out their voters to the polls, with Donald Trump's campaign seemingly able to do this at a better rate than the Democrats in places like Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. While voter suppression is a real thing, more people actually voted for Trump this time around than in 2016, and no one expected their votes. That's either the result of good GOTV, or good fraud.
Either way, the end result is that polling is now broken. I don't know how you fix this. The best bet is probably to stick with polling aggregators like fivethirtyeight.com, but even then, things are tricky.
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