So, it looks like Joseph Robinette Biden has won the 2020 presidential election, by which I mean Biden will win once the Electoral College meets. Beyond what I wrote in August (here), a few more things crossed my mind as I followed election coverage from various sources.

A Mini-Celebration

I allowed myself moments of relief and relaxation — not quite what most people would call a “celebration”, but I smiled, and I felt some tension fade. I tried some analogies but none were perfect. “Like waking up from a bad dream and being relieved it was just a dream, but still having to face the work of the day” — that was my first one. But it isn’t accurate because the “bad dream” turned to be stuff that actually happened.

I’m relieved that TAINTUS was limited to one term. I’m proud that we put our first-ever woman into the VP slot (and first person of color, first Black person, first person of Asian descent, etc.) I’m glad that it only took a few days to count the votes.

But I did not feel overly celebratory, and the reasons for that are listed below — all the things that went through my mind during the days of the vote-counting.

It Shouldn’t Be This Close

When I say the election “shouldn’t be this close”, I don’t refer to the complaints that polling was mistaken again, nor the mistaken anticipation among Democrats that Biden was going to win in a landslide. I use the word “shouldn’t” in the sense of “you shouldn’t drive drunk” or “you shouldn’t self-medicate with Clorox”. I mean that it’s dangerous and harmful for such a large number of people in the country to be willing to vote for El Loco. I mean that, in a better country, Biden would have won the popular vote with something like 70 or 80 percent, if not more.

I also mean there should have been a fundamental difference between 2016 and 2020, a difference that simply didn’t materialize. We can’t explain away the 2020 results like we can the 2016 results. Four years ago, we could make excuses like “Clinton had a lot of baggage” (it’s true there was longstanding discontent). We could acknowledge that many people simply didn’t pay much attention to the GOP primary in 2016. We know that the guy who emerged from that crowd already had national name recognition, had been on TV regularly for a generation, and his name was virtually synonymous with “flashy billionaire”. In hindsight, we understand that many uninformed folks showed up at the polls, saw two well-known names, and shrugged as they selected the “R” candidate.

But none of those excuses hold any water in 2020.

By 2020, four disturbing years had passed. Four years of “build the wall” scams, children in cages, targeted voter suppression, hate crimes spiking, repeated instances of white supremacists endorsing the president (and him telling them to “stand by”). Even the most dedicated news-avoiders had to have heard something in that time. Maybe they noticed the laughably incompetent handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, or the daily lies and whining. The unhinged rants both on social media and at press events. Or how many members of his administration and previous campaign ended up convicted of felonies and/or in prison. Or that he was credibly impeached and only spared due to a sycophantic Senate (which announced ahead of time that they would ignore the evidence). Or that he doesn’t even qualify for a national security clearance due to incredible amounts of foreign debt (estimated to be over a billion dollars). Or the sickening lurches in the stock market (for those who rely on the Dow Jones as their election decider). The skyrocketing national debt. The bullying, the demeaning comments, and general pre-school like atmosphere of the administration. The not-very-thinly-veiled racism (Muslim travel ban, “shithole countries”, etc.) A complete abdication of so many things conservatives always claimed to care about, like law and order, honesty, decency, firm leadership, the economy, and the debt. (Not to mention other things we should care about, like climate change, the environment, civil rights, etc.)

All against a relatively well-known and well-liked DNC candidate with decades of public service under his belt — without the “baggage” of Clinton.

(A day after I wrote the above, famed sci-fi author John Scalzi said basically the same thing, though I humbly agree his wording is better than mine. In part:)

“America should have forcefully repudiated Donald Trump; this wannabe despot, this childish authoritarian who fawned over dictators, this incipient fascist whose first impulse towards American Nazis was to collect them into his embrace, and could only querulously condemn them under duress. This liar, this racist, this cheat, this sociopathic bundle of insecurities and anhedonia, this sad example of a human for whom the White House was merely an ATM with an oval office, this pathetic creature for whom everything was about who would flatter him and who he could punish, this impeached debauch, this bad man, should have been shown the door on the end of a broom.”

John Scalzi

Why?

What is the reason for such strong support of an utter failure, a verifiable loon, a pathetic bully?

I can only conclude that there are actually 70 million or so U.S. voters who like that sort of thing. No, I don’t believe people — even conservatives — actually like being lied to constantly, or our country being a global embarrassment, but there must be something in there that they like. And what is that thing?

It’s getting easier and easier to believe that the part they like is the bigotry.

Another possibility that holds some water is that they were somehow misled or tricked by misinformation. I don’t like that as a reason any more than I like bigotry, but it’s certainly possible. I know (at least prior to my permanent Facebook exit) that some of my family members believe nonsense accusations about Democrat/liberal policies including “open borders”, “they hate white people”, Democrats will take all their guns (some never deleted their older posts claiming that Obama was going to take all their guns), legalizing “post-birth abortion” (whatever that is), outlawing religion, and much more. Some of these, I was taught when I was young, living mostly among conservatives.

Are these the only two possibilities? Perhaps my readers will suggest others in the comments and attempt to convince me.

If either bigotry or willful ignorance (or both) is true for a sizable portion of GOP voters — and I’m increasingly convinced both are — then this isn’t a country I can love anymore, nor can I respect it. Nor do I see any realistic path forward from here.

Election Reform Matters

Throughout the election season, from the first days of early voting through the tepid conclusion, it was increasingly obvious that we need a series of election reforms and shoring up of voting rights. Many were in the 2019 For The People Act passed by the U.S. House in 2019, but the bill was ignored by the GOP-held U.S. Senate. I discussed several of them in my October 2020 entry Proposals For Election Reform In The U.S.

For example, there were dozens (if not hundreds) of stories explaining the differences in each state’s voting laws. We don’t need these stories; we need to consolidate voting laws as a nation. If I can vote three weeks early in Texas, then people in New York ought to be able to vote three weeks early (instead of less than two). If people in Oregon can mail their ballots, then the rest of us should also be able to mail in our ballots. And so on.

And all these struggles to improve voting have highlighted a major difference between the two parties: Democrats constantly and regularly tried to make voting more secure, more accessible, more efficient, and more reflective of the will of the people; while Republicans constantly and regularly fought against the right to vote. Perhaps the worst example was in Florida where the GOP overrode a popular mandate to restore voting rights to felons, instituting a new poll tax.

Repeatedly, we saw that what matters more isn’t how blue or red a state is, but who is allowed to vote in each state. Sure, in some states like Oklahoma (2/3 voted for TAINTUS) or California (2/3 voted for Biden), it doesn’t matter as much. But in states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania (and many others), the vote was close enough that even small suppression efforts mattered. How soon polls closed, when counting was allowed to start or stop, how late to accept mailed-in ballots, and even whether or not to look for missing mailed ballots — all of these make a difference. And though it likely didn’t make much of a difference, the battle in Texas over ballot drop-off locations raged for over a month, through multiple levels of state and federal courts, affecting the ease of voting for millions of residents in the Houston area. Until these shenanigans cease — until voting is easy and accessible for all adult U.S. citizens — none of us can have complete confidence in our elections.

I’m So Glad I Don’t Watch TV

Even before my family canceled cable TV a few years ago, my spouse and I already got most of our news elsewhere — usually online. I tend to focus more on reputable news organizations like NPR and large newspapers. During this election, I occasionally saw clips of TV talking heads online and I was so incredibly glad that TV wasn’t an option for us.

In print — especially online — a journalist can write a story when there’s a story, but on TV someone has to say something the whole time, even if there’s nothing new to report:

• “We still don’t know anything, Jan?”
• “That’s right, Marsha, nothing new has happened for a few hours.”

And they go back and forth like this, interspersed with advertisements, only getting occasional new bits of information from scattered states.

• “Looks like Nevada’s counted another ten percent of their ballots, Marsha.”
• “That’s right, Jan, another ten percent. This is breaking news! But our correspondent, Cindy, says the leader hasn’t changed and it could still be days before we know the winner.”
• “We have to keep talking like this for days, Marsha?
• “My sources say ‘yes’, Jan. We’ll take our lunch breaks during commercials, but otherwise we’re going to sit at this desk and chat about nothing for days. At least we’re better off than Cindy, who has to stand on a sidewalk in Nevada that whole time.”

Voter Analysis

As usual, I like to look at various breakdowns of voter demographics. And, as usual, I found myself playing against type. One thing was different this year for me, because I got older: I’m now in the 45+ age group, which consistently votes at a higher frequency than the younger half of U.S. voters. (I used Fox News as a source for this — here — because it was a fairly comprehensive breakdown.)

Except for the fact that most voters (53%) were women, I fell into most of the “typical voter” categories: white, suburban, household income in a certain range, over 45, no college degree. But my vote did not align with most people in my demographic categories. For example, 57 percent of white people voted for the incumbent. My age category was evenly split between the two major candidates (most people under 45 went for Biden and most people over 65 went for TAINTUS). While college-educated voters favored Biden by 13%, people without a degree (like me) were split evenly. Most married people voted for the incumbent.

One question asked in exit polling is “is your family’s financial situation better today” than it was four years ago. More than seventy percent of people who answered “yes” to that question voted GOP. (My family’s financial situation is quite a bit better than it was four years ago, but it’s mainly because we paid of our mortgage early and because we used the Covid-19 stimulus check to pay off my wife’s student loan.)

And, perhaps obviously, I went against the grain for people who live in this region. People who identify their part of the country as “the South” went mostly for TAINTUS.

The Weird Argument From Centrist Democrats

During the ongoing count of ballots in a few states, before Biden was announced the winner, congressional Democrats erupted into a blame game about whose policies cost them seats. Note that this argument took place while Biden held the lead, both in potential Electoral College votes and in the popular vote nationwide. It also took place after it was certain that Democrats would retain control of the U.S. House, and before the outcome of Senate elections was clear.

Basically, the complaint was that the DNC’s “liberal wing” pushed too far left, making it harder for the centrists to win their seats.

I find this absurd for a multitude of reasons.

First, the most notorious members of the “liberal wing” all won their reelection bids easily, by wider margins than Biden got in those same districts. It was the centrist Democrats who had a hard time against Republican challengers, for the most part in districts that voted for TAINTUS in 2016.

Second, I can’t find where any of the candidates pushed further left during the general election. All of the shifts I saw were toward center (as is usual post-primaries). For example, Joe Biden himself, during the primaries, indicated he might ban fracking or at least limit its expansion, but by the time he was the candidate, he spoke very kindly and supportively of fracking. When activists called for defunding the police this summer, Biden responded by saying police funding should be increased. The same was true downballot: nearly every time the GOP accused any Democrat candidate of favoring some far-left position, the Democrat denied and claimed to favor the centrist (or sometimes the right’s) position.

Thirdly, many of the positions and policies derided as “far left” are either very popular across the aisle (like background checks for all firearms purchases) or incredibly necessary no matter who supports them (like drastic cuts to our fossil fuel industry). The party as a whole never adopted truly far left positions — and probably never will.

Fourthly, these complaints often took the form of “Republicans were easily able to paint them all as socialists and radical leftists who endorse far-left positions such as defunding the police”. It’s silly to blame Democrats for something the GOP said. My entire life, the GOP has been lying about Democrats being soft on communism, or being radical leftists. For actual, sitting congresspersons in the DNC to take those accusations and somehow blame other Democrats is absurd.

One thing that went unsaid in these arguments, perhaps because politicians are loath to openly blame voters for anything, is that a lot of the problem rests in voter perception. If voters actually believed Republicans’ false claims that moderate Democrats are “far left”, then that can’t be blamed on other Democrats who actually are far left. It can only be blamed on those voters dumb enough to believe GOP propoganda. Of course, the centrist Democrats won’t say that in so many words, but it’s dishonest of them to shift that blame. But I can say it, because I’m not running for office: any voter dumb enough to think that the existence of some far-left positions within the DNC means that every Democrat leans far left is probably not smart enough to vote at all.

Conclusion

In the end, it seemed inevitable to me that Biden would win the election, but it’s disturbing that so many of us are either bigoted enough or gullible enough to vote for the pathetic tumor of an incumbent. I can only celebrate bits and pieces of this outcome, such as getting our first non-white, non-male Vice President. Or that we rejected our first overtly criminal president.

But there is still far too much work to do before I can consider any of this as “winning the war”. Biden doesn’t have a magical wand to wave away Covid-19, climate change, the national debt, the surge of evictions, or worsening wealth inequality. He can’t solve or even make a dent in the fearsome misinformation distribution machine that rightists have assembled. He can’t, even with the help of Congress, weed out the white supremacists from law enforcement or elsewhere.

Our nation is limping along, gasping, weaker than ever before in almost every way. The only consolation from today is that it could have been much worse, and we prevented that. Good for us.