Election Night Thoughts
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about politics, which has actually been a nice little hiatus from the madness, but I can’t not have thoughts about Donald Trump’s reelection, so here are some organized disorganized thoughts about the last 24 hours.
The Dems Blew It
The GOP won the Congressional races, as pretty much every coin flip went their way, and in a seemingly unfathomable development, some Spanish speaking Obama +30 counties have moved to Trump +5. The Democrats had an historically unpopular president bungling a pandemic, an economy undergoing a seismic stress test, and it seems as if long-term demographic shifts in the southwest and southeast combined with Trump’s toxicity in the suburbs are going to bail them out of an election they bungled up an down the ballot.
In short, Phoenix, Arizona has their shit together more than the DNC does.
Also, weren’t I and everyone else in the Bernieverse told that Bernie would be too toxic to down-ballot candidates?
Weird how a strategy centered around courting Republican voters lead to Republican Congressional victories!
Progressive Policy Is Still Popular
Florida decisively voted against Joe Biden and decisively voted for a $15 minimum wage. That seems like a message from the political gods as to where the Democratic Party should travel. Now, Bernie’s loss in the primary and socialism’s, shall we say, limited reach in the suburbs (which definitely contributed in some manner to Biden’s stunning loss in Miami Dade, no collapse like that happens without a team effort) proves that the current leftist coalition still has a lower ceiling right now, but in the world of ballot measures, plenty of progressive policy had a big night, especially the war against the War on Drugs.
If you are going to assemble a coalition in the limited pool of likely voters that can take on the GOP’s fervently popular ethnonationalism in the 21st century, you must begin with a aggressive policy containing a simple message as to how you will improve people’s lives. $15 per hour. Medicare for All. $2,000 a month.
The Dems Blew It, But They Still Did What they Needed to Do
The Bernieverse rightfully gets exasperated with the Orange Man Bad low-hanging fruit that we see across the digital landscape, but orange man really is bad and getting him out is job #1 this year. The Democrats wrestled back a Midwest that’s getting redder with each election, and they continued to transform the southwest, as a solid blue wall from California to Colorado has formed on the frontier. As of this writing, it even looks pretty favorable that Biden will win Georgia.
Georgia!
The confederate client state where the Secretary of State runs his own election.
Georgia!
I can only assume that it took so long for Atlanta and the surrounding suburbs’ vote to come in because some great American heroes were fishing those voting machines out of the Atlantic Ocean. Shout out to my former home, no matter what happens from here on out, this has to be an exciting night for the areas within and around John Lewis’s district.
Cable News Was Behind the Curve, Again
I flipped between CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and NBC, with the occasional Fox News check-in while primarily following the election online. The vast majority of my TV time was spent on the first 2 cable news giants, so these critiques are derived predominantly from their coverage.
Following the data nerds online told a very different story of election night than the TV did. Both were all over Biden’s looming disaster in Florida early, but from there the focus diverged. While cable news was checking in on various suburbs throughout east coast returns, the betting markets pointed everyone towards what the new data was saying: Ohio was tightening. For a solid half hour there was real uncertainty about how close Ohio may be, but cable news never caught up with that development in time, focusing on a (vitally important) narrative that was a long ways away from yielding a meaningful answer. Almost as soon as the blue wave began to crest and the Dem dream of flipping this seemingly red state dissipated, the hair plugs put their Steve Kornackis on the case of a question that had been rebuked in about 45 minutes. There were examples of this kind of stuff all night, as the TV coverage was meandering and lacked a focus as to how the race was unfolding under the avalanche of returns.
Speed is not the primary cause of this disorganization, as I just watched another half hour of MSNBC this afternoon the day after the election and experienced this focus on narrative over news again. Following the data nerds online made it clear that a ton of D votes are left in the very close Georgia race (Georgia!).
But!
Today has been all about Arizona’s 9 pm EST vote dump, and The Official Narrative was in place on the networks to focus on the Arizona drama that combined with potential Nevada finality, may actually give us Finality thanks to Michigan and Wisconsin calls. Not once during this stretch where Georgia got really interesting did they let Kornacki zoom in on Georgia. He was tasked to focus on The Narrative in Arizona.
We had all been primed to have an official winner at 9 EST and during the day, Georgia flipped the script (along with the tsunami of Philly votes being unleashed on Pennsylvania), and MSNBC focused only on Arizona’s drama, while ignoring the news of two larger states updating vote totals that look increasingly rosy for the Democratic nominee. The networks wanted a made-for-TV moment in prime time at 9 EST, when the real world is a lot messier than that. Today is a perfect demonstration of how so many of our major media structures are unable to think outside of the box of narratives crafted around their coverage, putting journalism in the backseat and handing entertainment the wheel.
America Owes the Southwest One (and maybe probably Georgia too)
Trump told everyone his plan coming into the election: he had Republicans in WI, MI, and PA pass laws that counted the early vote on election day, so the overwhelmingly Democratic vote came in last, and then he would declare victory on election night while discrediting all votes counted afterward. Pennsylvania seemed to be the linchpin of the plan, and with a friendly Supreme Court and Republicans in state power, Trump had hoped to replay the 2000 election with PA in Florida’s place (given that plenty of PA Republicans have signaled a willingness to overrule democracy in ways that would make Saddam Hussein blush, they may have pulled it off too).
Phoenix, Tuscon and Omaha flipping Trump’s script opened lots of additional doors for Biden, and instead of needing one state to be decided in his favor by the judiciary per the initial scheme, Trump needs 2 at minimum.
The 32 electoral votes brought to Biden by Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Omaha, Nebraska are more than Pennsylvania and Wisconsin combined. They’re more than New York or Florida. Arizona commanding the focus of this election proved that this region continues to be a power player in American politics and will be one of the keystones of the 21st century Democratic coalition. Without these newly blue states, the anti-Trump vote across the country would be sweating a lot more right now.
