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The 2020 Election: A Post-Mortem
Two posts in one month? I’m smothering you! This is the longer, more explained version of something I already said on my Facebook wall. I don’t claim to be the smartest guy in the room, the most informed, or even the best predictor of the future — but, fools rush in where angels fear to tread, so let’s get into my key takeaways from the 2020 election. ((author’s note, I am writing this assuming that nothing earth-shattering happens to overturn the apparent Biden/Harris victory))
(1) The politics of fear work.
I think this is pretty obvious and fairly indisputable: fear is a helluva motivator and the 2020 election was silly with it. 2016 saw near-record turnouts for US voters with almost 129 million votes cast across the country, awarding 304 electoral votes to Donald Trump and 227 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton (7 faithless electors voted for “the wrong candidate”) in what was the most contentious presidential race in recent memory.
No matter what side you claim to be on, both sides were pushing fear of potential results. The left-leaning press were preaching about the disastrous consequences of four more years of CoVid incompetence, fascism and white supremacy, while the the right-leaning press whipped up fears of America dying in a fit of open borders, anarchy and global socialism. Pending final vote counts and lawsuits, these opposing forces managed to wring 150 million votes out of the American electorate. In districts that allow same-day registration, they managed to have more ballots cast than there were registered voters before the day of the election. Now, there is a larger conversation to be had about how secure same-day registration actually is, but that is generally up to the states that allow it, since it determines their Electoral Votes. I will say more transparency in that process would go a long way towards establishing public faith in those processes, but that is just me. The larger point is that regardless of what side you are on, the politics of fear are an extremely effective means of getting people to go vote.
(2) The Media has a major crisis of credibility, especially among minorities.
Donald Trump spent all day, every day, for four years getting accused of being a White Supremacist, Nazi, fascist Russian agent and, in his reelection bid, he increased his vote share among every demographic except white men. If anybody was taking the media as seriously as the media believe themselves to be being taken, those numbers should have gone from minimal to non-existent. At some point, the press is going to have to realize that we look at them less like Edward R Murrow and more like Alex Jones with a bigger platform. I mean, we all saw it on election night — were we watching the news cover an election or were we watching ESPN covering a boxing card? This presentation of politics as sport may be exciting — it may be great for drawing eyeballs to the product — but it absolutely kills the credibility of the coverage; doubly so if it is clear that the announcers are fans of a certain team.
(3) Democrats absolutely wanted chaos. They got it in spades. The US postal service has never been “great” — it’s generally “good enough”. If you need any evidence of this, think about how many other courier services there are in the United States, and realize that there is practically no chance that they are going to go out of business any time soon. If you think there are no problems with the Post office, take a signed blank check three towns away and mail it to yourself — if you can’t make yourself do it, then even you know the post office isn’t that great for things that you absolutely need to get from Point A to Point B. Then, we are going to insist on mail-in voting? We are going to mail unsolicited ballots to people who may or may not be registered voters? We are going to accept ballots that arrive late with no signature or date on them? I’m not going to go so far as to claim that there definitely has been voter fraud, but I struggle to think of a way to make it easier to get illegitimate ballots into the voter system… and I can’t think of a way to make it look more suspicious without consciously trying.
(4) Social Media was an insane mistake. Soaring over and above all of this, there is the never-ending spectre of Social Media and the ability for misinformation to get around the world. Social media and the internet in general have made it easier for the crazies to find each other, the conspiracy theorists to get their confirmation bias rolling, and the legacy media even more competition for viewers/ratings/advertising money. While it isn’t all bad (if not for Twitter, how many of us would have no clue about the 2600 ballots “found” uncounted in Georgia this week?), it also behooves us to wonder how much societal discharge and cultural decay has been amplified and/or accelerated because social media has made the world so much smaller.
(5) Public Polling is 100% as biased as the pollsters. Yes, I know, Biden won, the polls said Biden was going to win. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that the public polls suggested that Biden was going to win in a landslide, some even estimating almost 400 electoral votes for Joe Biden. Susan Collins was predicted by just about every pre-election poll to lose her seat to the Democrat challenger, and most of those had margins well outside the margin of error — Susan Collins won re-election by 9 points, surprising even herself by her margin of victory. The AP had projected 29 house races as “toss ups” — the GOP has won just about all of them, some by double digits. Considering that this is three elections in a row (2016, 2018, 2020) where the pollsters have predicted a massive blue wave that has failed to materialize, at some point, we have to start asking hard questions about the pollsters and how they keep getting it so, godawfully wrong. Until someone starts asking those questions with serious intent, however, the American electorate would be well served to simply ignore the polls.
(6) America didn’t have a problem with Trump’s policy as much as his persona. Donald Trump is and was a complete shmuck — a terrible human being with a record of personal character failings longer than Ron Jeremy’s famous “member”. This was accentuated by his maniacal tweet-fits and penchant for picking fights over the most mundane things, constant name-calling, and extreme narcissistic attitude. That said, outside of the trade war with China, there is very little that Trump has done while in office that your “in the wool” conservative really has to complain about. Admittedly, it’s time someone took a bite out of China for manipulating their currency, rampant humans rights abuses, and continuous IP thievery — but until someone can prove to me that we actually won that trade war, it’s the only real “blunder” I have seen from a policy standpoint. America seems to agree — yet another election, yet another prediction of a blue wave sweeping Republicans into the dustbin, yet another non-blue wave. The GOP still holds 50 seats in the Senate and has gained at least 8 seats in the House. In essence, the election where the democrats ran almost exclusively on “we’re not really democrats” and “We have to repudiate Donald Trump” after calling the opposition racist, fascist Nazis for four years, all they managed to accomplish was mostly maintain the status quo. What can we say about that result? Americans weren’t largely unhappy with the direction of the Government under Trump — only with Trump himself.
(7) Biden’s democrats may be in for a swift kick in the pants — particularly if Kamala is President in 2022. Not to sound too Tin Foil Fellowship, but I have a hard time seeing Biden lasting 4 years as President and may simply be a trojan horse for a Harris presidency. With all the threats boiling under the surface that Biden is going to get pushed further left than any other President before him, while Biden has been campaigning as a “return to normal” moderate, the Democrats find themselves in a rather unenviable position of having to defend a “non-left” president or having to defend Biden’s sudden lurch to the left with a mostly centrist population that is going to feel lied to. This is going to be even worse if Biden falls on his sword before the 2022 midterms to get an openly progressive Kamala Harris into the big office — because literally not one state actually voted for her. While it is far too early and far more optimistic than I feel like being to predict a Red Wave in 2022, it is worth noting that the hate and vitriol being thrown at the black men, white women and hispanics that defected in droves to vote for Trump have had no apologies or olive branches offered to bring them back into the democrat fold. If they have no reason to go back, haven’t been pushed away by the GOP since, and manage to hit the same notes with those voters, there is quite the possibility for a volatile swing to the right in the midterms.
As always, this is just my opinion on what I have witnessed/observed. Feel free to agree, disagree, like, share, comment, subscribe, whatever. It’s a free country… no matter how much Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsome, Tim Pritzker and Andy Cuomo would like to fix that.
–X