You’re not dreaming!
Biden wins a squeaker but Dems lose seats in
the House and likely failed to take Senate
That was not fun. I did not enjoy that. Can we not do that again?
So, as I write this on Friday afternoon, Biden has pulled slightly ahead in PA
and GA while maintaining leads in AZ and NV.
The betting markets have a
Biden Presidency at a 95% probability though Trump and the GOP will continue to
lie, steal, and litigate to the last second.
The Democrats will keep the house but lose a handful of seats. Who knows, maybe Nancy Pelosi won’t die in
office. The Democrats have a shot at
Senate control if they win both Georgia Senate runoffs — but the betting
markets put the odds of success at just 25%.
Some non-definitive, preliminary, likely to be completely revised at a later date, thoughts:
- I’ll take
it.
I’m not happy but I’m not sad. My disappointment about Congressional
underperformance will slowly fade but my satisfaction at seeing “Trump” and “Lost”
in the same newspaper headline will be vast, long-lasting, and life-affirming. Yes, he and his merry band of morons will still
be making mischief but NOT WITH HIS GRUBBY PAWS ON THE CONTROLS OF THE AMERICAN
SHIP OF STATE.
- Hate
conquers all
Biden pitched coming together/Kumbaya to
an electorate that wanted to hate someone, anyone. Would a more strident Bernie-esque pitch
about economic unfairness have done better?
If Republicans are convinced Dems are communists, maybe it was pointless
to make a show about moderation. In the
years ahead, I think it is critical that Democrats make the case very clearly
and convincingly that the stock market may be hitting all time highs but the US
economy is not working for three-quarters of Americans.
- Split
ticket
Related to #2, I know many Republicans who
hated Trump, thought Trump was disgusting and voted for
Biden… but who also hate Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer almost as much. I wonder if there was rampant
ticket-splitting (i.e., Reps voting for Biden for Pres but voting for Reps for
congress).
- Ground
game
Republicans didn’t care about Covid and so
ran a an exceptional get out the vote effort, whereas Dems stayed in the
basement to avoid killing people. Given
that Trump’s entire strategy was to get the apparently vast number of illiterate
yokels who’ve never voted to the polls, this may have been a key advantage.
- What
changed from 2018 and An Everest of Dupes
This is something I never really focused on
but should have. Never overlook simple
facts. In the 2016 election, there were
230 million eligible voters but only 135 million voted (~ 60%). Among the 98 million with a high school
education or less, the percentage who vote historically has been ~ 40-50%. So there was ~ 50 million-plus votes for Trump to
go after. Trump had a bottomless well of
easily duped hayseeds to brainwash into thinking he’s god. His strategy was correct! This would seem to be why the Dems did great
in 2018 but underperformed in 2020. This
cohort of voters worships Trump but otherwise don’t vote. The Dems must have SOMETHING to offer these
unfortunate people in terms of a better economic future.
- Trump Es Loco pero Muy
Muy Macho
Dems, stop treating Latinos as a
homogenous block. Stop treating them as
though they are somehow “naturally” liberal. They are lovers of all things macho, many are very
religious and socially conservative. A
successful future strategy for liberals cannot be one where you rely on getting
90% of Latinos and forget about ignorant Whites. That is a party based on race, not
principles. The same is true for
Blacks. No party should assume they are
the “natural home” of any race and that those who resist “ain’t black”. Great
piece from Fareed Zakaria on this.
- Riots
I can’t help but think that the morphing
of BLM protests into occasional riots and vandalism (often spurring by vicious
police attacks), plus a sense of disorder and rising crime in big cities was a
big factor in why the “blue suburban wave” turned out to be kind of
feeble. Portland hurts, San Francisco
hurts, NYC hurts, Chicago hurts. The charge
that the Democrats can’t seem to successfully manage large cities — as unfair
as that may be to say — is a very potent attack line and another reason why
more Republicans didn’t vote the Dem ticket even if they voted for Biden. I see this as an enduring Achilles heel for
Dems. Why should we let you run the
country if you can’t run a city?
- The Matrix?
Two weeks ago, Keith Raniere, the leader
of the NXIVM
cult was sentenced to 120 years in prison.
Several new documentaries explain how thousands of really bright, really
high performing men and women, people with successful careers in business and professions were duped by a creep selling “professional development”. The highest performing women were initiated
into a secret society within NXIVM where they had sex with Raniere and allowed
themselves to be branded with his initials near their public
region. While there is a certain prurient
interest in how it happened, the takeaway actually shouldn’t be a surprise at
all: under the right circumstances anyone can be made to believe anything. The surprise is that we’re surprised.
2500 years ago, Siddhartha Gautama taught
that each of us create our own versions of reality – which have little or
nothing to do with actual reality. About
the same time, Plato taught that what we think is reality is actually an
internal construct bearing little relation to the truth. Over the last 25-30 years, social scientists
have started to catch up. Behavioral
economics has proven (i.e., through repeatable experiments) that human
beings, contrary to what had been assumed by economists, are not at all
rational in making decisions and that generally speaking, most people are
easily influenced, in a whole series of predictable ways, by how information is
presented to them. Of course none of this was a surprise to the folks on Madison Avenue.
Take all of that and add into the equation social media sites/apps that target users with sophisticated “engagement” algorithms which use artificial intelligence to continually enhance and optimize their power over their users — and why are we surprised
that Trump can not only win once but come close to winning again? Why are we surprised that the reality of 230
thousand deaths has no effect at all on Trump supporters’ understanding of reality. Trump isn’t the
issue. There’ve been con men, frauds, and faux holy men throughout human history. The issue is that our poor inadequate
brains, optimized for brontosaurus hunts and procreation, when plopped into an
atomized digital world of ever changing, infinite “information”, bereft of trusted sources, targeted by sophisticated machine learning algorithms — have an incredibly hard
time perceiving truth. It’s never been particularly difficult to get people to believe a lie but in 2020, it
is vastly easier than it’s ever been. This does not bode well for representative democracy.