Yesterday I was an election worker in a blueish precinct in a purple county in Pennsylvania, the king of all swing states. The previous evening, I had spent an hour or so perusing data from earlier presidential cycles and live mail-in ballot data, trying to determine how many in-person votes the Harris campaign would need in my precinct such that I could confidently extrapolate they would carry the day in PA. Without going into my assumptions and the math, I was fairly confident that number was about 70% of in person votes. More than 1% above that threshold (or at it, with increased turnout) Kamala was a sure thing, below it she was toast. So when, after 17 hours of work, I watched the tabulation machine print out its results tape with its breakdown of votes by race, my first words were “oh no”. Kamala got 61% of the vote.
It wasn’t even close.
I was working with more information than most – as an election worker I knew the precise number of mail-in ballots our precinct received, though not the breakdown of those votes – and I could see the wariness in some colleagues I chatted about this with. I knew how they felt. A symptom, perhaps, of the horserace treatment politics now gets. Odds, percentages, shifts in participation, assumptions that can swing numbers, it feels like handicapping something abstract and therefore reducible to math. When of course, it isn’t.
But it wasn’t even close.
I suspected Trump would win from the moment I saw those results. I was asleep only a few hours later, and I could see he was well ahead everywhere; it would take an almost miraculous turnaround to deliver the race to Harris. The miracle did not happen. It doesn’t make me regret serving as an election worker in any way, but it does make me deeply confused. It is not yet clear if Trump will win the electoral college while losing the popular vote, the pattern that has characterized Republican presidents for the last two decades. If he wins the popular vote, I will have to double down on my flabbergastation (is there a noun for flabbergast?) but my fundamental problem remains – what is going on?
My thoughts were racing this morning as I tried to process it. I thought back to the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. (RIP Alex Salmond.) Amid all the heightened rhetoric – clear even from overseas and presaging the joys of Brexit electioneering – I remember an article, I think in The Economist, that reviewed the polling data and determined the average Scottish voter needed about 1,000 GBP to be swayed either way. Approximately the value of the newest iPhone, at the time. A question as fundamental as independence, reducible to a value. Economics, indeed! It is all value, of course, whether tangible or intangible. If someone had asked American voters the same question over the past few months, I wonder what the required value would have been to push them either way. Is it money in the bank, a new phone in the hand? Or was it ideological? The former for voters that could be swayed, the latter for hardcore believers on both sides?
Now will come the tide of statistics to slice and dice what happened and start offering us stories. I don’t know what’s left, to be honest. In the 21st century we’ve seen urban/rural, educated/uneducated, white/non-white, male/female, religious/irreligious, young/old, rich/poor, and more. One of my favorites, of course, remains Gore Vidal’s point in the 1980s (?) about the two, roughly equally-sized parties in the United States being those who vote and those who do not. Educated/uneducated is striking a cord as well.
Faced with an unpleasant loss, the mind also turns to distractions, anything to avoid pouring over the results again and again, the almost hardwired refresh instinct driving the nails deeper in our skulls with every pageview. As I joked to C this morning, if I was 20 or 22, I might consider laying in 4 years worth of cannabis gummies and waking up in 2028 to see what’s next. Smaller escapisms loom more brightly. Things away from the news. Life will, itself, keep me busy. But turning away from the problem is immoral. More engagement with civic life will be necessary. I will start to forge a path forward, and I am at least lucky enough to live in a state with a Democratic governor (who today is doubtless thinking he is his party’s 2028 nominee) in a heavily Democratic township. I am not a young woman, minority, broke, or otherwise at risk to have my life imminently destroyed by capricious policy decisions, even if the climate change implications are terrifying.
Trying to deal with the other side will be tough. It’s a big party. There are lots of decent people who are wildly misinformed. Fox News did its generational damage in the same way as leaded gasoline. The demographics of yesterday’s results will be intriguing to me given the stereotype that younger voters are a budding blue wave that will eventually overcrest the Republicans. Every few years, the “Texas is a blue state” fantasy comes back into the press. Ted Cruz, about as loathsome an option as a Texan could have, won by more than 10% yesterday. The metaphor needs to be changed to a tsunami, perhaps. The blue tide has to pull out further and further before it rushes in and overtakes everything, but will those swimming in the sea have their morale break as they are swept out and lose sight of land…
Moving to the anger phase of mourning the election, it would be nice if Democrats could govern themselves, let alone the country. Obama is an nearly impossible act to follow, but Joe Biden was never a great candidate. Kamala brought the energy the party needed but her messaging wasn’t there. Why didn’t the party do more in the Obama years, when they managed to accomplish the American Care Act but little else? The obstructionism and idiocy of the Republicans is beyond the pale, of course, but the inability of the Democrats to do anything makes one despair as to what a victory would even deliver.
Falling asleep last night, a passage leapt out at me from Chronicles of the Black Company.
The Rebel tends to a streak of superstition. He loves prophets and prophecies and grand, dramatic foretellings of victories to come. It was pursuit of a prophecy which led him into the trap at Charm, nearly causing his extinction. He regained his balance afterward by convincing himself that he was the victim of false prophets and prophecies, laid upon him by villains trickier than he. In that conviction he could go on, and believe more impossible things.”
You can weaken the Rebel for a time, but it’s hard to defeat that mentality. Is it religion? Certainly. Populism? At times. Feels like spitting into the wind trying to overcome it, and going to a township budget meeting to ask about the projected rate of return on a police pension seems like a small and silly thing, but you have to start somewhere.
Onwards!
smq.world 