2020 Election Crisis Diary
Excerpts from my writings in the year leading up to the 2020 election.
What follows, in reverse chronological order, are selected excerpts from my off-the-record “Weekend Reading” newsletter from October 2019 through December 2020, unchanged from the original emails except to format. In these emails, I raised the alarm about the likelihood that Trump and the MAGA movement would try to subvert the election results.
Lost Cause Thinking (December 14, 2020)
In its original meaning, the word united in “United States” was an adjective modifying “states.” It was an aspiration. That was reflected in its usage, which was plural – the “United States were .…” Eventually, “united” stopped being an adjective to become part of the new noun, “United States.” And thus, “the United States was….” The Electoral College is our quadrennial reminder that we are a nation of states, not equal citizens.
We are not a nation divided into blue states and red states – we have always been a country divided into blue states and gray states. Our political geography is divided as it has been since the founding. In both 2016 and 2020, the gap between Union and Confederate states1 has been more than 20 points, with Clinton and then Biden winning the Union states by 11 and 13 points while Trump won the Confederate states 9 and 6 points. The other 19 states essentially broke even in both elections (D -3, +1).
The reason to remind ourselves of that today is that there is nothing new about the Republican campaign to deny the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, nor Trump’s voters’ mythic delusions, nor the wave of death threats against Biden electors and others. This is how authoritarian parties always respond to setbacks. They must because the basis for their authority is their moral certainty, not consent democratically gained. The Confederate states have constituted an authoritarian nation inside a broader nation with credible democratic traditions and aspirations. The Confederate nation began and continues to be authoritarian because its commitment to white supremacy requires it.
Our political commentary routinely fails us because of its overwhelming need to find fresh causes for phenomena that need no new explanations. The story being told by Republicans now is essentially the same story told to justify secession in 1860, to justify terrorist resistance after the Civil War all the way to birtherism and now fraud. Trump’s authoritarianism was not an innovation or new direction, but a reflection of the historical commitment of his base. The rush to enact voting restrictions that began with Obama’s election is just an echo of the Southern constitutions drafted when Reconstruction ended.
Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics shows how closely contemporary white racial attitudes and partisan choice track the extent of slavery at the time of the Civil War at the county level. It argues that “these historical attitudes have passed down over generations to create the contemporary political cultures we detect today. Americans’ political attitudes are in part a direct consequence of generations of ideas that have been collectively passed down over times, via institutions such as schools and churches and also directly from parents and grandparents.”
Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction is a masterful history of how the South sustained its authoritarian structures as it participated in and came to dominate a somewhat democratic natural structure, a “system of racial totalitarianism embedded in a wider democracy.”
The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism provides the basis for the author’s recent oped, which argues that, “Trump or no Trump, religious authoritarianism is here to stay.” And in White Too Long, Robby Jones narrates how southern churches provided the moral rationales for supremacy and the authoritarian system need to guarantee it.
Contemporary factors reinforce those authoritarian tendencies. The Economist’s Elliot Morris just posted what he titled “These data are an ominous warning about the future of American democracy.” The post contains several ways of seeing how House members signing onto the Texas amicus brief were much more likely to have won by bigger margins.
Insecure Majorities lays out how essentially even partisan division motivates losing congressional parties to undermine the momentarily governing party to deprive it of successes on which to campaign in the next election.
So, while there is nothing shocking or surprising about what the Republicans are doing, it is important to notice how the Lost Cause mentality has metastasized. In Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan and Wisconsin movement Republicans victories have led to comprehensive assaults on democratic norms including hyper-aggressive gerrymandering, voter ID laws and Right to Work. And, as we see most Southern cities turn blue, authoritarian bases in those states have exploited extreme gerrymandering to overturn progressive urban initiatives.
Gore Vidal called America the “United States of Amnesia.” There is no historical basis for believing that the Confederate states can ever be good faith partners in democratic governance. We continue to pretend otherwise at our own peril, and so assure ourselves perpetual disappointment.
Trump’s Campaign to Defeat the Election (December 9, 2020)
Joe Biden and every presidential candidate before him campaigned to win the election to be able to claim the consent of the governed. Donald Trump was the first presidential candidate to campaign to defeat the election itself to enable himself to govern without consent.
Even before Trump was sworn in four years ago, experts alerted us to the ways in which “democratic backsliding” was succeeding in other countries. As the months of the Trump Administration clicked by we saw Trump taking increasingly aggressive and brazen actions to subvert the election. Itemizing them provides the clarity missing when he is characterized generally as having broken norms or tried to subvert the election. Itemizing insists that we acknowledge how total the effort was And it makes clear that what Dershowitz argued on the floor of the Senate, has been the guiding principle of the Trump’s tenure: “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” . (In no particular order, and nowhere near comprehensive in each category.)
Ukraine and Foreign Interference. Immediately after the Mueller report, Trump attempted to extort dirt on Hunter Biden from the Ukrainian president. Later, John Bolton reported that Trump solicited dirt on Hunter Biden from the Chinese.
Vote by Mail. In the wake of COVID, expanding vote by mail was immediately recognized as the sensible solution to the obvious health hazards. Rather than facilitate that, Trump did everything he could to discredit voting by mail, but more importantly to make sure it was as difficult as possible. Although rarely understood publically, the major strategic value of limiting voting by mail was the stress it put on urban election administration, disproportionately deprived of its Election Day workforce by COVID. Picture the lines we saw to vote in places like Philadelphia and Detroit. Now, imagine what might have happened if the millions of voters in those cities who switched to voting by mail this year had not been able to do so.
The Post Office. Trump replaced the Postmaster General with a campaign crony who initiated practices intended to hobble delivery, especially in major urban areas and blocked adequate funding. And just as he told Lester Holt that he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation, he was direct about this, saying, “They want three and a half billion dollars for something that'll turn out to be fraudulent … they need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots."
Funding the Elections. Twice the House passed CARES bills with substantial funding for election administration. Despite a $4 billion need, Trump and McConnell managed to limit federal assistance to an initial $400 million.
Voter Suppression. As with everything else, Trump said the quiet part out loud “If we let more people vote, Republicans will never win another election. He built his campaign around voter suppression, with an unprecedented budget, eventually replacing Pascrale with his Bill Stepien, formerly his voter suppression director, and supporting outside groups like True the Vote. The Trump campaign took full advantage of it being the first presidential election after the consent decree limiting GOP suppression activities expired. It followed a strategy famously stated in Weyrich’s “I don’t want everybody to vote” speech.
Subverting Confidence in the Elections. Trump was never willing to commit to accepting the results of either the 2016 or the 2020 elections, something no president has ever even hinted at. From before he took office, Trump claimed that the election system was rigged and the results were a fraud. He claimed that he won the popular vote in 2016 because millions voted illegally. He established the Kobach Commission to publicize fraud. He told wild and unsubstantiated anecdotes about election fraud that were often “confirmed” by his Attorney General.
Federal Law Enforcement. Trump concocted an executive order to give himself authority to use his determination that federal buildings were at risk as a pretext for deploying federal law enforcement agents to cities to suppress demonstrations for racial justice. The images of urban violence those agents created became the “proof points” for his contention that electing Democrats was dangerous and that he was the “law and order candidate.” In doing this, he was repeating in the physical world what he continuously did rhetorically: follow racially incendiary remarks meant to consolidate his supporters with ridicule for the inevitable “overreaction.”
Abuse of Executive Power. Trump treated the executive branch as an extension of his campaign and used it to advance his political interests from resisting the intelligence community’s efforts to crack down on threats of foreign interference, to firing or displacing career officials who insisted on following the law to encouraging the Justice Department to investigate Hunter Biden.
Packing the Courts. The Trump/McConnell campaign to pack the courts culminated in the last minute approval of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Again, Trump was transparent about his motives, saying that her vote was needed to make sure that the Supreme Court decided questions about his own election properly. Before and after the election Trump and his allies have argued that the Supreme Court should overturn the results of the election.
Trump’s extra-legal efforts didn’t stop when the polls closed and the ballots were counted. Among the many things he’s done since then (that we know of) – personally coercing Wayne County canvass board members, summoning Michigan state legislative leaders to the White House to overturn the results, calling the Governor of Georgia and the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House to overturn the results, publicly attacking the Georgia Secretary of State for certifying Biden’s win and so much more.
Already Plowed Ground
In doing all that, Trump continued what other Republicans had been doing for decades with impunity. The ground was already plowed by Supreme Court cases like Shelby and the wave of disenfranchising laws passed by gerrymandered legislatures in response to Obama’s victory. The import of the 2010 elections are still not properly appreciated. It wasn’t that Republicans swept those elections in the states, it was that almost all of the Republicans were movement Republicans. Ironically, at least in outline, it set off the mirror image of the decade leading up to the New Deal. In the 1920’s, state governments were considered the “laboratories of democracy” generating reforms that would shape the New Deal. History will likely see the 2010’s as the period when state governments were laboratories of autocracy. For example, Scott Walker’s polarizing and authoritarian approach presaged Trump’s. And after Democrats won governor races in the 2016 and 2018 elections, gerrymandered Republican majorities in Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin curtailed their powers in lame duck sessions.
And, in that spirit, Republican legislatures have already announced plans to fix the “problem” of too many people voting (Georgia).
Authoritarian Government
And those were just some of his authoritarian actions taken to subvert the election. Along the way, Trump’s authoritarian governing shredded norms in every area. The Weekly List: This Is How Democracy Ends is a brutal, impossible read, with entries of Trump norm breaking for each of the last 208 weeks. Moreover, his relentless campaign against the media (fake news) and success at establishing his own assertions as truth made America more susceptible to authoritarianism.
An Illegitimate Process Produced a Plausibly Legitimate Outcome
Now, imagine that Biden had gotten 3/10ths of one percent - 44,000 fewer votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, deadlocking the Electoral College at 269-269. That would throw the election to the House of Representatives where each state gets a single vote giving Trump the win, even though Democrats hold the majority of the seats in the House.
And, if all of that happened, if Trump were now preparing for his second term, would his subversion of the election, the voter suppression, the Electoral College and the House vote that produced that outcome despite his having lost by 7 million votes, can we doubt that we would be expected to accept the results as legitimate? And that many of “our” institutions would demand we act “responsibly?” What would we have said, done?
The “System” Didn’t Hold
So, regardless of whether Biden is sworn in, in no way can we understand the system to have “held.” Neither Trump nor Republicans will be held accountable for their authoritarian/antidemocratic actions in any way. Given Trump and his Senate enablers’ continuous brazen antidemocratic actions the election results demonstrate that none of their supporters valued democracy more than their reelection.
Nor will any elected Republican pay a price for their post-election denial. Yesterday, McConnell, McCarthy and Blunt vetoed a pro forma resolution from the bipartisan Inaugural Committee because it acknowledged that Biden was the president elect. And the Washington Post reported that only 25 Republican representatives were will to acknowledge Biden as the next President. (Not to put too fine a point on it, those demurring Representatives are by implication saying that the process that made them members of Congress cannot be trusted.) And allies like just pardoned Michael Flynn demand the Constitution be suspended for a do-over election, and Joseph diGenova offered that Krebs “should be taken out and shot.”
It is time that we recognize that we do not live in an eroding democracy whose institutions held; we live in a competitive authoritarian state in which something like a democratic outcome barely occurred. In 2010, Steven Levitsy and Lucan Way wrote Competitive Authoritarianism which examined dozens of post-Cold War “fledgling” democracies to make a very important point that contradicts our intuition that democracies naturally become more democratic. On the contrary, they argued, especially when partisans are well sorted, political systems become “competitive authoritarian” – that is, “civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à- vis their opponents.”
In the United States, the sorting that competitive authoritarianism requires comes in response to the combination of the breakdown of the white racial political consensus in the 1960’s, an incumbent racial group feeling existential threat and a constitutional system that affords that group extraordinary advantages in elections, extraordinary power when it governs and a near absolute veto when it does not hold executive power.
Trump will be evicted from the White House because his villainy was so grotesque, his buffoonery so embarrassing and his incompetence so manifest pretty much all of the corporate America seized the election returns as an opportunity to rid themselves of him. Explain Fox’s coverage in any other way. Or that no one, none of the courts he has packed, none of the state legislatures dominated by gerrymandered Republican majorities and almost none of the state and local Republican election officials have thrown him any kind of lifeline other than denialism rhetoric. Russia has been nowhere to be seen. And the election might not have come off without a late infusion of $300 million from philanthropy. As Eric Clapton learned, no one loves you when you’re down and out.
Elections Are a Means Not the End
If we believe that a democratic election is one in which, at a minimum, every citizen has the same opportunity to vote, that every ballot cast is counted and that the candidate with the most votes is elected, no presidential election has ever met that standard. That is the case de jure and de facto. The Electoral College alone is a de jure violation, and voter ID laws, unequal funding of elections, etc are de facto violations of those conditions. On top of that, this election wasn’t even legal, per the partial inventory of Trump’s violations above. Even the outcome has to be qualified as only “plausibly” democratic given that more people declined to vote than voted for Biden and the manner in which we arrive at the two candidates to choose from – and even that as a practical matter we have just two candidates to choose from.
That this is true might be of little moment if it somehow produced a thriving, flourishing nation. After all, elections are supposed to be a means to that objective, not the objective itself. But, of course, the opposite is true. Just in the 21st Century our political system has given us forever wars and never responses to accelerating climate catastrophes and inequalities of power, wealth, income and health outcomes. If ever America was seen around the world as a shining city on the hill, it is now seen as a mortal hazard and cautionary tale. A mortal hazard in its indifference to the consequences of its foreign policies, nuclear stockpile and energy consumption. A cautionary tale in its inability to provide a decent life to so many despite its unprecedented wealth, ensure working conditions that provide dignity, stability enough time off for loved ones and to be active citizens, or to address enduring racial and social injustices that put the lie to its founding creed.
The Great Forgetting
For many progressives, first with Trump’s election and then with COVID, the lights came on, shining a spotlight on the contradictions between the world we live in and the stories we tell ourselves about that world. Many things that we accepted as natural were exposed for what they actually are. The reckoning with increasingly corrupt commercial and political arrangements as well as disintegrating social bonds felt as if it was coming due. But now, as inauguration day approaches, as legislative agendas and cabinet appointments become Topic A, a Great Forgetting seems to be spreading. Today we risk confusing a momentary reprieve won at great cost against long odds with something like a new beginning. The tides didn’t breach the levees this time, but without repair, it won’t be long before they do.
Stepping Back from the Brink (November 30, 2020)
It may seem strange to pick this moment as a significant marker – as opposed to November 7th when the race was “called” or to wait for January 20th, when Biden is sworn in. I pick this moment because the significance of what happened between last Wednesday and Monday night has not yet been fully appreciated.
All along, we knew that Trump’s strategy was to prevent the results of the election from being certified by the December 8th, safe harbor day, in order to create a narrative of a failed election justifying at least three of the already anti-democratic legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to reverse the results of the election in their states, giving him an Electoral College victory.
From the day after the election until last Wednesday, Trump pursued that strategy in the courts, hoping that a favorable court would give him a ruling that could at least be used as a pretext for delaying certification. But he came up empty, which was almost certainly a surprise to him, given his sense that he and McConnell had successfully transformed the judiciary into ready accomplices.
With no help coming from the courts, Trump turned to enlisting the members of canvassing boards to delay certification, shredding one more element of the election system. The basic way we seek to make the results of our elections legitimate is to require an equal number of partisans to agree on the count. It has almost never been the case that the partisans on canvass boards refuse to accept the results of the count for nakedly partisan reasons. If that assumption of good faith is violated, our electoral system collapses. Nonetheless, Trump partisans on the Wayne County Board (which includes Detroit), initially voted against certification, advancing Trump’s strategy. That set off a firestorm. We the People, a coalition which had been organized for just this purpose, launched an immediate and ferocious response which led to a reversal just a few hours later.
Trump clearly understood what that reversal meant: he could not depend on such rogue agents, and that the reversal itself would be a signal to others in the system not to act in bad faith. So Trump went to his go-to play: bullying. His last possible procedural card was those state legislatures asserting their authority to name Trump Electors despite the results of the elections. And so, despite the fact that most of the Republican leaders of those legislatures had already gone on the record opposing such an option, he summoned the Michigan state senate and House of Representatives leaders with the clear intention of having them open the door to that option.
In a very real sense, the future of elections in the United States hinged on what came next. To state the obvious: In our system, voters vote, partisan pairs of officials count the votes and certify the results and if the losing candidate wants to contest the results, s/he does so in the courts, which are intended to be non-partisan. To step outside that process and allow state legislatures to overturn results that could not be reversed in the courts would be to make elections meaningless. And it doesn’t get much more nakedly authoritarian than for the President of the United States to summon his co- partisans to insist that they overturn the results on his behalf. Remember, state legislatures sending a different slate of electors has never happened. Ever.
Given the states backed up behind Michigan – Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, how those two legislators responded would be crucial. If they did anything short of shutting the door on the option, Trump would have succeeded in putting the state legislative option on the table, where we could have expected the media to debate it and a signal to the rest of his allies not to give up. And it would have reconfirmed Trump's ability to blow through norms. He was so confident of success that he scheduled a press conference immediately after their meeting.
Now, here’s the remarkable thing – there was no press conference because the state legislators would not go along. They did not open the door even a crack. That meant that Trump was effectively out of procedural options that could lead to a second term. (Unfortunately, he is not out of options to senselessly delay the process and reinforce the illegitimacy of the election to his supporters, and, even more damagingly, create a pretext for further reducing voting rights.)
In every one of the contested states, broad based coalitions came together, planned and were ready. We the People Michigan’s campaign was ready and already well in motion before Wednesday, laying the foundation for the speedy reversal on Wednesday, the legislators’ rebuff on Friday and the certification on Monday.
Today, Nevada and Pennsylvania quickly followed Michigan’s lead, certifying their vote, giving Biden 269 certified Electoral Votes. The next state to certify will put Biden over 270 uncontested votes. That said, it is still possible that Trump will file lawsuits against the certifications. But that will not change the results.
In the Zooms I’ve been on in the last 24 hours I’ve often heard, “we’re almost out of the woods now.” That is true because nearly every element of society rose up together to reject four more years of Donald Trump. But what lies outside those woods is not a sun speckled meadow, but the legacies of the hate and dysfunction given free rein to compound and entrench the conditions that brought Trump to power. Those realities can be overcome only if we address them with same vision, unity and intensity we’ve been mustering for the last four years.
Polarized and Helpless (November 9, 2020)
I want to end this first after the election Weekend Reading with one of the things that frustrates me the most about the current discourse about American politics. There’s an enormous and growing literature converging on the idea that the story of the last fifty or so years is a story of the polarization and division triggered by the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. polarized and divided country. That’s true. We have been divided over fundamental questions separating us into teams that have become identities for most of us.
But no one is writing the story of how we became a helpless people that takes its helplessness for granted. We endlessly investigate, write books, start podcasts etc to declaim what is wrong with America and getting worse, without a companion effort offering a vision of what we can aspire to that is neither trimmed to the limits of the Overton window of the day or that goes beyond that without acknowledging the impossibility of achieving it without reordering the balance of power in the United States (at a minimum) or breaking out of our constitutional strait jacket (more certainly).
Neoliberalism has vanquished the institutions and habits of daily democracy. We are the frogs in the pot, very much aware that the water around is getting hotter, even narrating it vividly and arguing with each other about when it will boil, while never imagining that different pots are possible, let alone acting to make them so.
No More Gaslighting Ourselves (October 26, 2020)
That is, if winning means getting more votes than your opponent. Trump’s only hope for a second term with a patina of legality is through the Electoral College. Biden’s 538 lead this morning is 9.2 points. Let’s say that’s way off and Biden is winning by only 5 points. Based on a reasonable projection of turnout, that means that he will win by more than 7 million votes. Or put another way a very, very small margin among the three million people who vote in Wisconsin or the six million people who will vote in Pennsylvania will reverse the overwhelming will of the other 145 million voters. (Being off by more than two points nationally would be very unusual.)
And yet … nearly all of us, and everyone in the media, continuously talk about Trump’s prospects as if it were perfectly normal and legitimate for the most powerful nation in the world, one that prides itself on calling itself a democracy, to set its course based on a tight contest in one or two of its arbitrary geographic jurisdictions. When we talk about this election for the next eight days, we must always say that we will elect Biden, but there is still the possibility that the Electoral College or SCOTUS could select Trump.
This is very important, because if we don’t, should this come down to one or two very close, and certainly litigated, state counts, the momentum will be lost in legal jockeying and hanging chads. America will have decided; but we’ll be waiting to see if Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or some other state overrules that judgment. Finally, remember that in 2000, Gore won the popular vote by only a half point, less than 550,000 votes out of more than 100 million cast. It really was a tie. On 11/3, Biden will win by at least 10 times that margin. And voters are certain to elect more Democratic senators and state representatives, and much more likely than not return Nancy Pelosi an even larger majority. We know what America wants now.
No More Gaslighting Ourselves
Relinquishing the moral authority of the nation The way we talk about whether Biden will win is only one way in which we continue to make ourselves accomplices in a very anti-democratic story of this moment. You remember August 2020? We were so worked up about Trump opposing USPS funding because he “doesn’t want to see it used for mail-in voting,” and DeJoy for making those cutbacks in and removing equipment in Democratic areas. On the eve of the election, the media scrutinizes USPS for delays and reports glitches in VBM, but almost never mentions Trumps role undercutting the system. The New York Times’ latest update on delivery times makes no mention of Trump, let alone that when something goes wrong, that was Trump’s intention.
Similarly, there are an uncountable number of stories about long lines to vote and administrative irregularities. There will be many more to come. The Trump campaign and Fox etc are amplifying them (below). Every time they tell us about long lines and glitches, they should remind us that in March, the CARES act passed without needed funding for election administration or adoption of rules to rationalize mail voting in the pandemic. Again, neither Trump nor McConnell even bothered to disguise why that was a deal breaker for them. Yet the problems we are having conducting this election are being reported as inevitable consequences of COVID, bureaucratic incompetence or vote rigging when they are the intended consequences of Trump’s and McConnell’s actions.
We are outraged by Trump’s every anti-democratic transgression, but accept their intended consequences as normal, without remark.
This Is Not Normal (October 24, 2020)
It’s been three weeks since my last Weekend Reading – Crises because, well, the crises. But, with ten days until the election, there are things to say that cannot wait.
Two weeks ago, the Washington Post published, “This is not normal.” It’s based on The Weekly List: This Is How Democracy Ends. The List is a brutal, impossible read, with entries of Trump norm breaking for each of the last 204 weeks. Any random entry makes the point. Remember week 154? That’s when Trump pulled troops out of the Turkish-Syrian border, leaving the Kurds to be slaughtered. The whole thing is numbing in exactly the same way these last four years have been.
But The List is only one of the most comprehensive entries in two booming journalistic and publishing projects: one trashes Trump and his record, the other consists of “democracy watchers” set to tell us when we are no longer a democratic nation.
They miss the point. We are not a democratic nation now because we fail to act collectively as democratic citizens. If “we the people” means anything, it is that we the people are sovereign. What happens in America is our responsibility. With any perspective we could readily see that what we have done for twelve of the last twenty years – protests that, “we didn’t vote for him,” outrage expressed to our friends on Facebook and blistering condemnations of Bush then Trump are pathetic against the record of what continues to be done in our name, from nearly invisible (to us) permanent wars to neglect of the existential peril to the planet to the continuing tolerance of racial injustice.
I write this now, on the eve of the election, because I fear that when we succeed in our immediate task, electing Joe Biden, we seem all too ready to make the same mistake we made in January 2009 – believing that the worst is now behind us. We will again believe that Democratic politicians can solve our problems if only we “hold them accountable.” The lessons of the early Obama years are seen to be tactical and correctable – this time, we’ll end the filibuster and do big things fast.
This is delusional.
Our collective de facto tolerance for racism, capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy excused by the pretense that we have no choice but to abide a Constitution that favors supremacists, capitalists, imperialists and patriarchs makes hope for a future better than a meager extension of our recent past or confidence that “this” will not happen again insupportable.
There can be no real progress unless we change the balance of power. The intellectual industry devoted to documenting and proposing schemes to ameliorate the outrageous and accelerating disparities of wealth, income and life outcomes in America relentlessly ignores the actual source of those disparities – disparities in power. In all times and places political and social arrangements reflect the continuous efforts of those with the most to protect what they have from those with the least.
When Biden is sworn in, we cannot forget that had COVID not intervened, and had Trump not so spectacularly failed the moment, we might easily be preparing for a second Trump term. Even after you acknowledge that we’d have no Trump terms if we had a national popular vote, our efforts to realize a more just society have no chance until we give more people more power over their own destinies and greater ability to act together to contest power.
When Biden is sworn in, attention will turn to his appointments and his congressional agenda when many of the most pressing challenges will not yield to legislation. The last four years have empowered those who want the worst for America; they will not readily retreat. In the short term, even if they abide by an election they are sure to believe has been stolen by a ring of pedophiles, their resolve will be stiffened. Republican senators will be more committed than they were in 2009 to making the Biden Administration fail, and then there’s the Supreme Court.
In the struggle to be a more just people, elections will always be milestones, not the destination.
It’s the end of the world as we know it … (September 27, 2020)
The combination of Trump’s escalating authoritarian posturing and rhetoric combined with sensational viral headlines like “The Election That Could Break America” has pushed post-election catastrophizing past a tipping point. But, we must be clear:
The 2020 election is like every presidential re-election in American history in that the challenger will need to win more electoral votes. Catastrophizing publicly makes it less likely Biden will win because when we do it we are (1) signaling that we believe that Trump is that powerful; (2) not talking to voters about COVID, health care or their economic well-being; (3) allowing the legitimacy of the election to seem debatable and (4) amplifying his messages that that it’s going to be a disaster. All discourage our voters. (See these articles (here, here) and Anat Shenker and Anna Greenberg’s messaging memos (here, here.)
The 2020 election is unlike every presidential re-election in American history in that the incumbent has made it clear that he will not concede, an intention made especially credible by his party’s escalating disregard for democratic norms in its pursuit and exercise of power over the last twenty years along with its unwillingness to censure even his most egregious extralegal actions.
As I’ve written before, Trump cannot steal an election he’s won. But it’s worth pausing to better understand what Trump’s threats mean and what the reaction to them is saying about America today.
For Trump to succeed, some set of powerful people will have to assist him – it might be the courts invalidating tranches of mail ballots, or Republican state legislatures manufacturing a pretext to appoint Trump electors, or Republicans in the next Congress finding a way to leverage their Senate majority (if they still have it), or in the most nightmarish scenarios, militia violence becomes the pretext for invoking emergency powers on up to the Insurrection Act, to overturn the results. None of these things have ever happened before at that scale.
In nearly every article or conversation, the questions are inevitably along the lines of will he do that, and can he get away with it? When we do that, we make ourselves spectators to a process in which we should be participants. In the death struggle drama that unfolds, only elites have a place on the stage, and so we ask questions like, what would this or that institution do, but never ask, what will the American people do?
It is so much taken as a given that voters’ roles in the outcome are over after they cast their ballots on November 3rd, that they only appear as cardboard cutout protesters on both sides.
The actual question is not whether Trump will prevail, but whether we allow him to.
We cannot allow ourselves to be conditioned by the flaccid response to the contested 2000 election in which America (and importantly both candidates) stood by as vote counters sifted through hanging chads and judges decided who would be president. The way in which nightmare scenarios are specified make us feel powerless because they are described in abstract terms. We casually talk about courts throwing out tranches of mail ballots without even mentioning or imagining the reaction of all those citizens’ whose votes would be disenfranchised. Or, we speculate that Barr might seize the ballots, without understanding that he has no legal authority to do so, and that lacking cooperation from the governor, would have to mount a military-style operation to forcibly remove them from hundreds of sites scattered across each state.
How hollow is our democracy?
It is doubly astounding that Trump’s stating his intentions to ignore the results of the election if he loses does not seem to have cost him any votes, and that no one seems to believe that that’s remarkable enough to point out. Apparently, his supporters would prefer to live in Trump’s America, even if that America is not a democratic America.
It’s time to remind ourselves that not all power is statutory power. Societies inevitably function through the daily exercise of informal power and relationships not legally dictated. But all of that happens in such a natural way that it’s rarely seen as worthy of reporting or naming. As a result, we have fallen out of the habit of exercising our enormous informal power. Again, to pick just one of the nightmare scenarios – the national guard is called out to put down protesters. Each reservist is not an automaton who Trump can count on to do whatever he tells them to. They live in communities where s/he will have to live with the choices s/he makes. And we know from other authoritarian countries that bureaucrats often defect when they feel the other side will prevail.
Bottom line.
In the next 37 days we must do all we can to win the vote. After that we need to understand that to ensure a democratic outcome, we must all assume our responsibilities as citizens working toward a democracy – and not assume this falls only to the people we see on the news.
Heading into an Election Like No Other (August 24, 2020)
Since his election, Trump has been taking aggressive steps to disrupt the election and undermine the public’s confidence in the results. In just the last few months, (among other things) he’s relentlessly attacked vote by mail as fraud, sought to hobble USPS, deployed federal law enforcement, blocked funding for the election and refused to say that he would accept the results of the election. All of that has taken a toll. A number of recent surveys show that:
No more than half of voters express confidence that we will have accurate results, as sharp decline from four years ago (down 14 points per latest NBC/WSJ Survey);
About 40 percent accept the Trump narrative that he deployed federal law enforcement in order to maintain law and order; and
Voters are split on whether expanding vote by mail is a threat to the election;
Yet, at the same time, 55 percent say it’s likely Trump is constructing a false narrative in order to contest election results.
While there are predictable differences by party, there are some warning signs among those who merely lean Biden or are conflicted. (More below.)
Reactions to changes at USPS were swift and negative (DFP survey), leading to nearly
immediate rhetorical backtracking. It’s important to remember how serious our concerns for the politicization of USPS were before the latest rounds of attacks on USPS. At best we are celebrating
rolling things back to where we didn’t want them to be in the first place. This report from the Brennan Center explains what the postal service crisis means for the election.
It’s time to stop caring what Trump voters think
By habit we strive to make every survey representative of the electorate. And certainly we should continue to do that when we survey for the trial heat. But if our goal is to inform our strategy or messaging, including the opinions of those who we have no hope of reaching in our results is
counterproductive. Right now, our minds are cluttered with top lines that don’t reflect the attitudes of the voters we care about – those who support Biden, lean toward him or are genuinely conflicted. Over the next 72 days they are the voters that matter. Biden wins easily if those who lean toward him and a small fraction of those who are conflicted vote for him. We can win by consolidating and mobilizing this group of voters.
For example, in the battleground states, 55 percent of voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that “Trump is creating a false narrative about election fraud, and normalizing the use of federal law enforcement in cities because he intends to contest the election results so he can stay in power.” But 76 percent of our potential voters agree with that and only 10 percent doubt it. (The rest are unsure.) And then, if we zero in on those who are leaning to Biden or conflicted, we find that only 16 percent find it unlikely, but 31 percent are unsure.
USPS and the Danger of Self-Fulfilled Prophecy (August 17, 2020)
Nixon’s most remembered effort to steal an election wasn’t close to his most egregious action. That would be his back channeling to the South Vietnamese government ahead of the 1968 elections to urge them to reject the Johnson Administration’s peace overtures on the promise of a better deal when he was elected. What distinguishes Trump’s efforts is that by carrying them out in the open, they are about the thing (crippling the post office) and the reaction to the thing (reducing confidence in voting by mail).
And, like the cat in the GIF, almost everyone rushes after the non-existent light. Over the weekend, there have been innumerable email threads, Zooms, panicked calls etc about revising our strategy of encouraging voters to vote by mail.
Everyone Who Can Should Apply to Vote by Mail Now
Nothing about what’s been reported about USPS changes that. There is no downside to applying to vote by mail. Voters would still be able to vote in person if USPS disappeared altogether. And, in most states, voters will be able to drop their mail ballots off somewhere if postal delivery looks uncertain in October. On the other hand, if voters wait, their only choice might be to vote in person, and there may not be enough polling locations to accommodate them.
Don't Be Trump's Unwitting Accomplice
Trump is trying to steal the election because he is losing, and because, well, he’s Donald Trump and he cheats at everything. But even as we all call out his violations, we mustn’t convey fatalism. While none
of us believe that Trump will concede if Biden gets more votes than he does, we cannot take for granted that Biden will get more votes. When we use rhetoric that conveys that those ballots might not be decisive, we undermine our voters’ commitment to making what could be considerable effort to cast those ballots. As the just released Pew survey makes clear, claims about the risks to the election are disproportionately influencing our voters. They are 25 points more likely to say that it will be difficult to vote and about 8 points less likely to say their choice will win.
The Authoritarian Moment (August 2, 2020)
We live in terrifying times that are about to become more so. The worst global pandemic in a century has already claimed 150,000 lives, shows no signs of abating in the United States and will soon be combining with flu season and the opening of schools to take more lives and wreck more havoc. That has led to the worst unemployment in nearly a century, and the greatest recorded economic contraction in our history. Every month the indicators of misery and social decay predictably rise – poverty, hungry children, domestic violence, child abuse and so on, as it sinks in for more people that that hope is not around the corner. No V shaped recovery is on the way, and that even when things substantially improve, the economic prospects for the majority of Americans will have ratcheted down, as they have after each economic crisis since the 1960’s – the stagflation of the 1970s’ and the Great Recession. More than ten million Americans have not worked since early April, and tens of millions more are living lives of despair, with bleak expectations for the future at best.
In March, many predicted that COVID would bring America together and that “government” would no longer be the “problem” but the solution, setting the foundation for some kind of 2020’s inclusive New Deal. After all, the argument went, the virus did not respect class or position and extinguishing it required collective action.
Of course, that did not happen. More like the opposite. The multiple ramifying crises reveal the depths of divisions in America, that, for quite some time, have constituted a cold war between (shorthanded) Red and Blue America. Blue America competes for power through the ballot, while Red America wins and holds onto power through increasingly counter-democratic tactics. In power, Red America’s agenda prevails through authoritarian measures against which there are rarely decisive democratic checks. Out of power, Red America cancels Blue America through the leverage provided by a Constitution designed for an age that no longer exists, yet impervious to substantial change.
And so, the times are more terrifying still because we are all but powerless to stem the virus, provide relief or comfort to those who desperately need it or begin to respond to the popular demands for police reform or any of the other responses to systemic racism, as overdue as they are. And, for the first time since 1876, it cannot be said with confidence what will decide who will be sworn in on January 20, 2021.
The remainder of this edition will examine three topics: the authoritarian moment, law enforcement riots and Damon Silver’s examination of the economy awaiting us on Election Day.
This Authoritarian Moment
Nearly every bit of reporting that describes a Trump action as authoritarian, understands his actions in one or more of these ways:
Traditional campaigning. Variously, Trump is rallying his base or scaring suburban women to present a law and order contrast with Biden and the Democratic mayors, etc. Also in this category, articles about his appeal to voters with authoritarian tendencies who want strong leaders to make them feel safe.
Stealing the election. Increasingly, and fortunately, reporting has begun to interpret his outrageous and unfounded statements about voter fraud, vote by mail and moving the elections as meant to further his chances of staying in power rather than engaging them at face value.
Weakening democratic norms and truth. Variously, explanations of how Trump’s attacks on the media and his creation and dissemination of disinformation undermine a democratic outcome, now drawing parallels to Russia and other authoritarian regimes.
Yet it is almost never said with the same clarity that Trump has been successfully governing as an authoritarian. Or that it is authoritarianism in the service of a particular agenda that is both substantive and kleptocratic. Each element in that agenda – promoting white supremacy, dismantling the regulatory state, redistributing wealth upward, disadvantaging working people and attenuating democratic recourse seek to reverse progress made through periodic popular struggles that, until the 1970’s, have generally made progress, if too little. Nor has the extent to which enforcing white supremacy has been a continuously authoritarian project in the United States been fully acknowledged. Yet none of what the authoritarian alarms the media are sounding point to anything nearly as egregious as what the majority of white Americans have accepted as “normal” for most of the nation’s history when directed at others.
The last three and a half years have not been an unfortunate hijacking of the government by a deranged individual with authoritarian tendencies. Rather, odd as it sounds, Trump is the leader of an authoritarian movement that has been gaining steam for quite some time.
What’s happening now cannot be properly understood unless it’s seen in the chain of revanchist successes most recently beginning with the House takeover in 1994 and succeeded by the sweep of state governments in 2010. The import of the latter is still not properly appreciated. It wasn’t
that Republicans swept the elections, it was that almost all of them were movement Republicans. In another, albeit schematic, way, we may be living through a mirror image of the decade leading up to the Depression. In the 1920’s, state governments were the “laboratories of democracy” generating reforms that would shape the New Deal. In the 2010’s, state governments may come to be seen as laboratories of autocracy, as we see for example, ways in which Scott Walker’s polarizing and authoritarian approach presaged Trump’s.
Trump’s deployment of federal law enforcement to Portland is, among other things, an extension of something that’s been happening in Red States since 2010. Long before Trump, Red State governors were using their powers along with their gerrymandered legislative majorities to overturn progressive initiatives in their cities. We see it in Brian Kemp’s overruling Atlanta’s attempt to require masks. Trump is doing the same thing, seeing himself as president of Red America, bringing Blue America to
heel. Again, this is hardly the opening salvo – consider the ways in which he handled the early stages of the COVID crisis and continues to block needed aid to state and local governments.
In the first days of his Administration, some vestigial legal guard rails held against initiatives like the early Muslim ban. Since then, they have blown by one democratic norm after another without consequence. The latest will test whether there are any institutions left after his acquittal, court packing etc that can restrain the most naked form of authoritarian power – unconstitutional state violence.
To wrap-up, let’s return to the deployment of federal law enforcement to Portland, and now other cities. Trump’s proximate motive for deploying federal law enforcement is clearly to advantage his chances of staying in power after the elections. The goal is to normalize federal law enforcement presence in urban areas in order to suppress turnout on November 3rd and be ready to put down post- election protests.
Generally, public reaction has been very negative, along the lines of the reaction to Lafayette Square. But I think we need to entertain the idea that something much more dangerous is happening - the normalization of violent federal repression of protest. We’ve seen this play out many times over the last three and a half years and it never ends well:
Trump shatters a norm - or even a law. (For example, Ukraine, “kids in cages”)
That provokes a furious response
Trump creates a new narrative of what happened (Impeachment = Democratic coup attempt) for his base and sometimes takes temporary baby step back (immigration)
The public, media, et al go back to their business and Trump motors on
What we’re seeing now is thus familiar - a new narrative for his base (cities in flames set by left Biden-socialists), flailing by traditional institutions that can’t formulate or execute an effective response (the media, Congress, etc.) and a ratcheting down of what’s “normal” in America.
Therefore, we must resist the temptation to refer to what is happening as being about “protests” or “restoring order.” As this New York Times video makes clear, validated by much else, these are law enforcement riots. When this is discussed it has to be in reference to what the police/federal law enforcement are doing, not to what the protesters are doing. (More next week.)
No Place to Vote (July 19, 2020)
If Donald Trump receives more votes than Biden, the most likely reason will be that not everyone who says they're going to vote for Biden now will be able to do so in November. The most likely reason for that is the immense reduction in polling places in urban areas due to COVID. While making fewer places available for people of color to vote has always been a page in Republican administrators’ playbooks, this year Democratic administrators have been forced to consolidate polling places as well because they cannot recruit enough poll workers due to the understandable reluctance of a largely older “volunteers” put their health at risk. First, some background on the heretofore invisible role of poll workers, then some evidence of the impact polling place consolidation is having on turnout and then some thoughts about what can be done.
Background
It has long been the case that fewer polling places have been available to communities of color than to white communities. This has been due to intentional voter suppression, especially after
the Shelby decision, as well as to the general discrepancy in resources provided to those communities, even when county governments are Democratic. The consequences of this convenience gap can be seen every Election Day when lines are much longer in those communities and less visibly in lower turnout rates. On average, polling places are further away from people of color (and young people) and when they get there, they wait longer in line. The solution to the discrepancy has always been obvious but rarely acted upon: more polling places with more poll workers.
The nation’s election system is hyper local and grossly under resourced. There are more than 8,000 election jurisdictions. The 2016 elections were staffed by about 900,000 “volunteers.” (They’re paid a stipend.) As a result, Election Day administration relies on a largely retired workforce, nearly sixty percent of whom are over the age of sixty. In its biennial survey the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) found that in the fifty largest jurisdictions, 88 percent of election administrators reported difficulties recruiting sufficient poll workers. Clinton carried all but six of those jurisdictions, winning nearly two to one, netting 10 million votes.
In short, the United States has long depended on a fragile, archaic and grossly under resourced for conducting its elections.
In Person Voting in COVID
According to its thoroughly researched Location Consolidation study, the Voting Rights Lab inventories the damage. For example:
Wisconsin. Polling places in the most populous cities with the largest number of Black and Latinx voters faced the most severe reductions: Madison reduced its number of polling places by 28% while Milwaukee and Green Bay experienced 97% and 94% reductions, respectively.
Pennsylvania. Densely populated counties in Pennsylvania eliminated 75% of polling places, documented here by Fair Fight Action:
Nevada. There were only three polling places in Las Vegas.
Kentucky. The number of polling places was reduced from 3,700 to 170.
Georgia. More than 10% of polling places were relocated throughout Georgia due to the pandemic, with more than 80 polling places closed or consolidated in Atlanta alone.
Two rigorous efforts have been made to calculate the impact that those closures had on turnout. The findings from both are appalling.
Wisconsin. The Brennan Center estimated that COVID and polling place consolidation in Milwaukee reduced turnout by 8.5 points, with the impact even greater for the Black population (10.2 points). An 8.5 point drop in turnout in Milwaukee in November would likely cut Biden’s margin by between three fourths of a point and 1.1 points statewide. To be clear – that’s just the statewide effect from the drop in Milwaukee. Biden would also take a substantial hit in Madison as well. (This is very back of the envelope, just to get a sense of magnitude.) Looked at another way, Democratic primary turnout was down by 4 percent statewide compared to 2016, while in Milwaukee turnout dropped by 37 percent.
Philadelphia. The website, Sixty Six Wards, which covers Philadelphia politics, reported that, “we closed 645 polling places due to COVID 19. That cost us 19,000 votes.” Their statistical model is based on changes in distance to polling places from previous elections. They too find the impact even greater for African American voters.
These results are not surprising or explained by the other current circumstances. The Brennan report summarizes the findings of several earlier studies on the impact of consolidation which found reductions of 5 points or so common. However, in none of the studies was the scale of consolidations comparable to what happened in the primaries or is all but certain to happen in November. In short, based on historical evidence, as well as the two studies so far during COVID, the impact of polling place closures could easily be 5 points, more than enough to tip a close election given the disproportionate incidence of polling place consolidation in Democratic areas.
The Authoritarian Moment (July 13, 2020)
Donald Trump is not running for re-election. Instead, he continues to wage the campaign he began the day he took office, which is to stay in power. (More below – What Lies Ahead.)
Naming our political system. If this isn’t a democracy, what is it? Some opening thoughts as we struggle to understand America today.
Another way to think about the future. All of our efforts to anticipate the future begin by extrapolating from what we see around us. Yet, in 1969, the Soviet dissident, Andrei Amalrik took a much different approach in his extraordinarily prescient, Will the Soviet Union Survive to 1984? As we are now, he was living in an empire managing immense contradictions and stresses with enormous self-delusion and denial. He began by imagining the Soviet Union’s demise and set about explaining how it happened, which, as it turned out, was much easier than it was to prove that the Soviet Union would collapse. Consider that to historians the reasons for every great empire’s demise seem obvious and inevitable.
What Lies Ahead
Max Boot’s Op-Ed, What if Trump loses, but insists he won? relates his experience participating in one of the many war gaming exercises going on now. Even if you haven’t participated in one of those
exercises, you’ve read essays speculating on what’s ahead and thought about it yourself. Having participated in a number of them myself, I want to offer that we have come to a faulty consensus of how the future will unfold in any scenario other than the one in which Trump wins a decisive victory. The commons sense of the future held by those not in the Trump camp looks something like this:
Between now and Election Day, there will be a campaign.
Election Day will be chaotic and inconclusive, with Trump claiming victory or fraud.
Between Election Day and the day that states constituting 270 Electoral Votes certify their elections or December 14th (end of the safe harbor period), the Trump and Biden campaigns will contend with each other in much the same way that the Bush and Gore campaigns contended with each other in 2000, albeit multiplied by a 1000 and with much greater civil disorder.
On December 14th, if secretaries of state have given one or the other at least 270 the process will be effectively over as no one seems to think that either SCOTUS or the Army would back Trump in that context. If that hasn’t happened, the door opens to another round of uncertainty around how to settle the matter when the Congress convenes.
On January 6th, Congress will convene to certify the Electoral College result. It is all but certain that will be insisting the election was stolen, and he will likely be backed up by his allies in Congress.
January 20th, Biden will be sworn in.
What all of the planning exercises and speculation have in common is the assumption that the outcome can be decided by the actors we can name (Trump, Biden, congressional leaders, etc) without reference to powerful forces already in motion. Here’s what I think is actually happening and what’s ahead of us.
The Republican Party is an increasingly authoritarian ethno-nationalist kleptocratic enterprise, accelerating in its rejection of democratic boundaries since 2000. It is authoritarian both in its approach to gaining and holding onto power (Bush v. Gore, Garland, gerrymandering, Shelby, Citizens United, legislatures rolling back incoming Democratic governors’ powers in lame duck sessions, Ukraine, etc) and to governing (Abu Ghraib, drone wars, Bush and Trump signing statements and Executive Orders, no resources to states with governors who don’t say nice things about me etc).
This is not a bulletin – books have been written, etc. But, weirdly, while we accept that as the explanation for how we got here, we treat contending with those forces as nearly irrelevant to plans for a better future, as if defeated at the polls those forces will concede and fade away. The Black – white wage gap is a large today as it was in 1950, and schools are barely more integrated than they were before Brown.
Here are two reasons why:
1. Incredulity. We repeatedly assume that today’s norms will hold, believing each roll back to have been the final roll back.
2. We under- or don’t appreciate that we are up against a popular enterprise as well as an elite one. We believe authoritarian drift as completely the choice of Republican politicians. But in fact, it is a reflection of a very significant minority of Americans who believe their way of life and fundamental values to be under constant existential threat, and so value outcomes that protect that way of life absolutely with no regard for democratic process.
The second point is essential because those tens of millions of Americans collectively constitute an independent actor in this drama never given a role in our scenario planning or expectations for the future. We plan for what we think Trump would do in different scenarios, but not for what they will do when they are told that Joe Biden is going to be president and as it now looks more likely, Democrats control the Senate.
Remember that it was this bloc of voters who nominated Trump because they felt that W Bush Republicans weren’t getting the job done fast enough. Those Republican voters are an authoritarian accelerant and a check on Republican moderation. The ways in which Trump has given license to their hopes have metastasized their hate and ambitions beyond the point that they will likely retreat peacefully from any outcome other than his reelection.
In that frame what seems to be obscure to nearly all should be obvious – that Donald Trump is not running for re-election. Instead, he continues to wage the campaign he began the day he took office, which is to stay in power; to him winning the election is just one option for how to do it. He clearly believes that his base is large and militant enough to prevent his removal from office. His remarks at Rushmore – defending cultural symbols of white supremacy, but more importantly warning that his loss will hand the country to a “left wing fascist mob,” cannot plausibly be seen as intended to win him more votes. Couple that with his relentless efforts to crash the conduct of the election by blocking congressional funding, starving the USPS (which he installed his crony to lead) and the credibility of the election’s results with his supporters with his continuous claims of Democratic voter fraud. And we don’t know what else he has in store for us in the next four months. Scarier than all the revelations in the Bolton book is that no one else blew the whistle on any of them, meaning those kinds of abuses continue, remain unknown to us and have no internal check. As bizarre as it may sound, Trump may be our first movement president.
Naming Our Political System (July 13, 2020)
In 2010, Steven Levitsy and Lucan Way wrote Competitive Authoritarianism which examined dozens of post-Cold War “fledgling” democracies to make a very important point that contradicts our intuition that democracies naturally become more democratic. On the contrary, they argue, especially when partisans are well sorted, they become “competitive authoritarian” – that is, “civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents.” The relevance of that frame to this moment is obvious.
In the United States, competitive authoritarianism is a response to the combination of the breakdown of white racial consensus, an incumbent racial group feeling existential threat and a constitutional system that affords that group extraordinary advantages in elections, extraordinary power when it governs and a near absolute veto when it does not hold executive power.
The “Golden Ages” of American democracy (for white people) have been those periods when neither party advocated for civil rights. Conversely, the more insistent partisan claims for civil rights, the more catastrophic for democracy – the Civil War being the ultimate breakdown of the constitutional system.
Whenever ethno-parties emerge and gain power in the United States they almost always take advantage of that power to diminish the electoral prospects of their opponents, whether it’s Jim Crow laws, Mitch McConnell or urban bosses. That’s the norm in our system, not the exception.
Those who are optimistic that the rapid demographic changes underway spell doom for white ethno- nationalism, even with its procedural advantages (Senate, gerrymandering, Supreme Court) underestimate the shape shifting vitality of whiteness. Over the course of the last century, we have seen the practical definition of whiteness expand to encompass European immigrants, and the practical definition of Christian expand to include Catholics and other denominations.
It’s worth pausing to note that Trump’s regime is actually an authoritarian kakistocracy, a government by the least suitable or competent to govern. Many viewed the Soviet Union as a kakistocracy owing to the relentless purging of its most competent, leaving only the most sycophantic to survive and enrich themselves. While Trump has no gulag to send his Vindmans to, you get the idea. We need to be careful because for many Never Trumpers, rolling back the kakistocracy will be sufficient.
And here, it becomes crucial to reboot what we even mean by “political system” when we talk about the United States in the first place. In his essential The Racial Contract, Charles Mills writes, “White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory or even advanced texts in political theory…. [Those theories] will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought … there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world … Ironically, the most important political system of recent global history … is not seen as a political system at all. It is just taken for granted; it is the background against which other systems, which are seen as political, are highlighted.”
The Right Wing Reality Machine Levels Up (May 10, 2020)
Over the last ten or so years it’s become conventional wisdom that nearly all Americans see the world through their partisan lenses. Academics have demonstrated many times that, for example, voters’ evaluations of the economy heavily depend on the party in the White House. So, it’s easy to forget that in 2008, even before the crash, between a quarter and one-third of Republicans gave George W Bush a negative job rating, something unimaginable for Trump today. We’ve arrived here because Fox et al have graduated from providing a counterpoint to the mainstream media to establishing an alternate reality altogether.
It used to be that, for the most part, voters got their information from liberal and conservative media outlets who were in dialogue with each other. Although that dialogue was becoming increasingly acrimonious, it was mostly about the same things. Today, that is still true within the main stream media – conservatives, moderates and liberals are in dialogue with each other over the most important issues of the day. A more or less free press that doesn’t look much different than it has for decades, now lives side by side with a right wing propaganda system that doesn’t look much different from state run systems in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in which no significant deviation from the established narrative can be tolerated. And the proliferation of disinformation further erodes public confidence in the still free press. In 2003, the last time Gallup asked, about the same share of Republicans as Democrats had confidence in the accuracy of the media. Fourteen years later, the share of Democrats expressing confidence jumped 20 points and the share of Republicans expressing confidence dropped twenty points down to only 14 percent.
Compare the Clinton and Trump impeachments. Although they both ended the same way, in 1998, pretty much every Democrat agreed that what Clinton did was wrong (including Clinton himself), but that it didn’t warrant removal from office as did ten Republicans (perjury). In 2020, neither Trump, nearly every Republican senator nor Fox et al acknowledged that anything improper had been done.
Election Meltdown (April 26, 2020)
Election Meltdown.
Last weekend’s Liberate demonstrations offer an inescapable preview of November 4th, should the electoral tallies not yet re-elect Trump.
When Democratic governors are counting the votes that could make Joe Biden president, it doesn’t take much imagination to expect the worst from folks who are willing to show up at the capital armed with automatic weapons in the middle of a global pandemic when even a majority of Republicans supported the stay at home orders. The 2000 GOP organized “Brooks Brothers riot” meant to intimidate the Florida recount seems quaint now. There’s been increasing recognition that escalating polarization could easily manifest as civil violence, whether it’s the excellent academic work of Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe or podcasts such as It Could Happen Here. More updates on Republican voter suppression efforts later in this Weekend Reading.
Liberate style demonstrations could be the template for right wing electoral activity. You’ll recall in 2016, when candidate Trump would say things like:
Make sure everything is on the up and up. You’ve been reading the same stories as I’ve been reading, so to your place and vote, and then go pick some other place and go sit there with your friends and make sure it’s on the up and up. Because, you know what, that’s a big problem in this country, and nobody wants to talk about it, nobody has the guts to talk about it. So go and watch these polling places.
In 2020, we will see heightened suppression efforts from the Trump Campaign/RNC as well as outside groups.
Trump Campaign/RNC Suppression
Justin Clark, who leads the Trump campaigns voter suppression efforts, promises that in 2020, “it’s going to be a much bigger program. Much more aggressive program, a better funded program.” This Fair Fight memo provides an over of the “GOP 2020 Voter Suppression War Machine.” The memo describes a four part program:
A Nationwide Poll Watching Program, Fully Integrated Into Field and Political Operations, and Supported By Third Party Groups. The RNC/Trump campaign will recruit and train 50,000 poll watchers by fall 2020 early vote. In addition, the campaign will have 18 “Election Day Operation Directors” on the ground in 15 targeted states by April 2020: AZ, CO, FL, GA, ME, MI, MN, NC, NH, NM, NV, OH, PA, VA and WI. The campaign’s goal to “cover every polling place in the country,” will require substantial support from third-party anti-voting groups.
A Federal, State, and Local Effort to Reshape Election Rules, Regulations and Policy. The Trump re-elect team is directly engaged with local election boards, secretaries of state and state party leaders to reshape election policy. Politico reported that Trump campaign officials are working behind the scenes to limit absentee voting policy changes across Pennsylvania, Georgia and other states. States like Georgia and West Virginia are launching ballot “fraud” task forces in conjunction with the Trump administration. In Florida, the GOP-led legislature is advancing a bill to loosen poll watcher requirements. There is also evidence of a concerted local effort to restrict ballot count/recount rules, change ballot review board policy and shift election operations powers to individuals and boards more aligned with the Trump re-elect team. These political efforts are undergirded by a nearly $18 million investment in state parties this cycle.
A $15.5 Million Nationwide Election Litigation Strategy. The Trump re-elect team is engaged in numerous state and federal court battles across the country to limit the expansion of voting rights. The campaign is also providing litigation financing directly to state parties. We estimate the minimum spend on litigation by the campaign alone this cycle will be $11.5 million.
A $29 Million Message Amplification Strategy for Trump, Honest Elections Project, and Others. Donald Trump is a core component of the voter suppression strategy and is literally written into the campaign’s plan to amplify ‘voter fraud’ issues that may have previously gone unreported. By amplifying these issues, Trump can “short-circuit media attention,” recruit poll watchers, and amplify the GOP’s preferred election policy.
True the Vote and Other Suppression Allies
The Trump/RNC efforts are being supported by and coordinated with outside organizations, most prominently, True the Vote. True the Vote is actively recruiting law enforcement and veterans to become poll watchers with alarming rhetoric recently documented by the Intercept. These groups are also creating contingency plans for the coronavirus such as recruiting members to join absentee ballot review boards. True the Vote, the Honest Elections Project, PILF and Judicial Watch, have either launched litigation threats or filed lawsuits or intervened in at least 13 states and will likely spend a minimum of $4 million on election legal activity this cycle. There is substantial overlap of the counsel for True the Vote, Honest Elections Project, and the RNC. In particular, Jason Torchinsky, Will Consovoy, and James Bopp continue to represent these anti-voting groups while on the RNC payroll. These attorneys have a long history of dismantling civil rights.
The paid media budget to amplify voter fraud and other anti-voting messaging is expected to be carried by Honest Elections Project and Judicial Watch. It has been reported that these groups plan to spend $25 million and $4million respectively. The Honest Elections Project previewed this media strategy when they launched a $250,000 anti-voting TV + digital campaign within days of the U.S. Supreme Court Decision to hold in person elections.
Liberate Is Only the Beginning
According to GQRR’s Kelsey Suter, “Far-right accounts and conservative influencers are trying to deflect blame for the economic situation onto the Democratic officials who are implementing stay-at-home orders and negotiating for more funding and protections for American workers. Governors, including Gov. Newsom (CA) and Gov. Whitmer (MI) are particular targets, but Democratic leaders across the country are subject to disinformation and attacks. These narratives paint stay-at-home orders as attempts at “martial law” or a “police state”; suggest Democrats are favoring immigrants over American workers in stimulus negotiations; mislead about the inclusion of progressive proposals included in COVID-19 legislation, and claim Democrats are endangering Americans by “releasing criminals” into the streets.
The media has been quick to report the connections between the Liberate protests and networks of conservative groups and funders. Some examples: this piece by the Guardian documenting significant funding from the DeVoses, this piece showing connections to the Koch network, and this piece that shows, “the quiet hand of conservative groups in the anti-lockdown protests. Groups in a loose coalition have tapped their networks to drive up turnout at recent rallies in state capitals and financed lawsuits, polling and research to combat the stay-at-home orders.”
Unfortunately, nearly all of the reporting is being used to discredit the authenticity of the protests rather than to recognize them as the assembling and activating of forces that will be ready when more popular grievances emerge, especially anti-immigrant sentiment in the midst of high unemployment.
Democracy Checkmated - Legal but not Legitimate (April 9, 2020)
In its Monday Wisconsin decision, the Supreme Court left no doubt about its role in the 2020 elections: checkmating our democratic aspirations. It was one more confirmation that twenty years after Bush v. Gore, Democrats still find themselves in the same trap: how to be the party of the rule of law when the other party decides what the law is? It’s a sucker’s game.
This is not, as the media and conventional thinking would have it, the Democrats’ loss in the manner of a football team’s loss when the referee is in the tank for their opponent. It is all of our loss because unlike the Dallas Cowboys, after the game, the Republicans get to determine how we all live – whether we go to war in Iraq, whether we acknowledge climate change, whether we have reproductive rights, whether we are ready for pandemics, and of course how we conduct the next election. It would be bad enough if the Republican Party was an overreaching majority party. But it’s not. It’s the minority party, and has been for nearly thirty years.
How did we get here? Somewhere along the line, we accepted that “elections” and “democracy” were synonyms. Our democratic aspirations have become so attenuated that holding regular elections suffices to support our conviction that we live in a democracy. This forgets that the fundamental role of elections is to establish that the state has the consent of the governed. Democracy requires more than periodic elections, and elections themselves are only one of a number of tools that could provide the state legitimacy. Yet we think the mere fact of elections is enough to call ourselves a democracy when, as practiced, all they do is determine which of two seemingly permanent parties can wield power for the next four years, often in quite authoritarian and irreversible ways.
Here’s why the sports metaphor keeps us from seeing this. In sports, the point is for one team to win. In a democracy, the point is for the fans to win. But in its Wisconsin ruling, the Supreme Court advantaged one team without reference to fans whose well-being is the reason for elections in the first place.
Even if we could be satisfied with the fact of elections certifying America as democracy, we do not have democratic elections. At a minimum, any notion of a democratic election has to begin with these two principles: that the candidate with the most votes wins and that everyone has at least a roughly equal chance to vote. Our presidential elections fail both tests.
Back to the present moment. When the results are announced in Wisconsin on Monday, whichever candidates win, their victories will be legal (only because SCOTUS said so) but not legitimate in any democratic sense.
The Vote by Mail “Debate” (April 9, 2020)
Trump is punking America again with his claims that VBM is corrupt. To the uninitiated, Trump’s rhetoric makes it seem like there’s a debate over whether Americans should be able to vote by mail. In fact, that question has already been decided in 33 states, including all of the presidential battleground states, where voters can already cast absentee ballots without an excuse. So what is Trump doing?
Discrediting the election unless he wins. VBM will now be another proof point in the fantastical case his supporters believe that the elections are being rigged against him.
Denying states the resources they need to conduct proper elections. The debate in Congress is about whether to provide the states the funds they need to shore up their electoral infrastructure to contend with COVID, not whether Americans can vote by mail.
Running out the clock. Delay takes options off the table. As this this morning’s Cybersecurity 202 explains, “time’s running out to prep for a mail voting surge.”
But here’s how the media covers the debate:
Surveys – voters want to be able to vote by mail.
Fact checking – there is no VBM voter fraud.
Insider sports punditry - who does VBM really help?
The media asks whether VBM and a better resourced election infrastructure is required for the Democrats to win. They should be asking whether it’s required for democracy to win.
Here are some of the key references:
Policy. In this Atlantic piece, Marc Elias lays out, “how to fix our voting rules before November.” Those principles are elaborated on by Fair Fight, the Brennan Center and the National Task Force on Election Crisis. The National Vote at Home Institute lays out its recommendations here and here.
Opinion research. In the last week or so, nearly every public survey (Pew, etc) has asked whether voters support VBM; they all show overwhelming support.
Messaging. The Center for Secure and Modern Elections has just released survey results and messaging advice.
Authoritarian Creep and the 2020 Election (April 5, 2020)
After the 2016 elections, students of authoritarian takeovers warned us that crises would be especially dangerous (Levitsky, Mounk, Snyder,etc). We’re seeing that around the world now, including
in Hungary, Israel the Philippines, Turkmenistan, and Thailand. We can already see the Trump Administration hatching plans, including the DOJ’s secret request to Congress for authority to arrest people “indefinitely.” Most obviously, we’re seeing it in the Trump/McConnell stonewall against the resources necessary to effectively conduct the election in a public health emergency. This fits with the strategy he’s been successfully deployed since the beginning, but most memorably with Charlottesville:
Stoke the base with what they need to know and want to hear. Trump flat out says that VBM is a non-starter because too many people voting means Republican lose (Fox and Friends); it’s a Democratic power grab. From McConnell on down GOP politicians on down (Georgia Speaker, Breitbart, North Carolina).
Confuse the media/elites by sounding reasonable. Per Bill Kristol: Trump and the GOP will say:
Today: No reason to prepare to move to vote by mail now.
October: The public health experts say an election on Nov. 3 won’t be safe. The election experts say it’s too late to arrange safe and reliable vote by mail. Congress needs to delay Election Day.
A week later, after negative reaction to postponing Election Day: OK, if you don’t want to delay, we’ll have to go ahead Nov. 3 with the voting mechanisms we have. Too bad it will be kind of hard to vote in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia etc., but what can you do?”
More on vote by mail and other election threat news below to come in the next Weekend Reading. This just out from Marc Elias explains how to fix our voting rules before November.
We’re not in Kansas Anymore (October 6, 2019)
It’s official: We’re Not in Kansas Anymore. Take yourself back to October 6, 2016. Someone tells you that in three years the President will almost certainly be impeached for using the power of the United States to get a foreign power to dig up dirt on his political opponent, that the Senate will almost certainly not vote to remove him, and that we will be debating whether all that will improve or diminish his chance of being re-elected in 2020. Meanwhile, that week, three years in the future, there’s nothing particularly remarkable about a headline like this in the New York Times, “Will Trump Ever Leave the White House?”
And yet … How we think about political strategy or what we need to do to win the next presidential election hasn’t changed much at all. In particular, we rely on the following despite all evidence that should make us reconsider:
The rule of law. Although we’re still trying to process this week’s revelations, the most important takeaway should be this: If Donald Trump is so nonchalant about enlisting foreign governments’ support for his re-election campaign, how else is he abusing his powers to win in 2020? What else is the Justice Department doing to support Trump’s re-election?
Truth. While we’ve made important strides developing strategies to knock down the kind of online disinformation that flourished in the 2016 election, in just the last week, Facebook decided that it will no longer fact check political ads. Immediately, Trump was up with this Facebook ad which states that, "Joe Biden promised Ukraine $1 billion dollars if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son's company."
Data and analytics. From the early 2000’s until 2016 models have been very accurate and are foundational for strategic thinking. However, we have to remember that those models have worked so well in a period of political stability. We need to revisit those models to make sure that their assumptions still make sense. For example, turnout models have been consistently the most accurate models we have, yet they were way off in 2018.
Polling. While we’re on alert to the specific 2016 Midwest-education fail, the higher the turnout is in 2020, the more consequential the much lower rates at which lower propensity voters take surveys will be. Moreover, we continue to have too much confidence in surveys to assess reactions to campaign interventions.
Moreover, most of our planning takes us through Election Day, 2020. But, we are not prepared for the two most likely outcomes:
Trump loses the vote but refuses to concede. If Trump loses, this seems all but inevitable. He will challenge the results and incite supporters. The potential for chaos, violence and legal challenges before the votes can be certified is enormous. Although there is already thoughtful mainstream speculation about the potential for political violence, it’s still too abstract – not accounting for the particulars that will roil the country the week after the election. Furthermore, while most of what I’ve read on this subject wonders whether institutions are ready to enforce the election’s result in January 2021, the real danger is how Trump would change facts on the ground in the month after the election. How, for example, would our institutions handle crackdowns on “rule of law” demonstrations?
Trump loses the popular vote by millions but narrowly wins the Electoral College again after running a lawless campaign and/or voting irregularities. Nineteen years after Bush v. Gore, Democrats still don’t have a plan for this.
While I don’t have answers for many of these questions, they need to be asked. We desperately need to systematically “red-team” this election so that we can anticipate and plan for the worst we know will be coming our way.
Confederate nation is not meant literally, but rather as a descriptor for the authoritarian mindset that still dominates the region and that are no longer strictly confined to those original states. But I chose to stick with “Confederate” because “authoritarian” still leaves the continuing motivation unstated. I also chose those “Confederate” because a regional word would overlook or seem to minimize the importance of the enormous progress that continues to be made by racial justice organizers to make the region otherwise. As a reminder, the eleven Confederate states were Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.