Election Day at Last--Civic Marathoners Ready to Collapse After the Finish

 

In a nation deeply and bitterly divided Election Day angst and exhaustion are the order of the day.  Will it be a dumpster fire for democracy? 

It's finally Election Day.  Here in Northern Illinois and adjacent states like vital Wisconsin it is raw. raining on and off, and blustery giving it a suitable Sturm und Drang cast that matches the anxiety so many of us feel.  In conventional wisdom these conditions suppress voter turn out.  People getting off of work did not like to stand in miserable lines outside jammed polling places or drive on rain slick pavement in the dark.  Casual or not deeply connected voters were discouraged.  Suburban Democrats in Red collar counties were notoriously easily daunted because they had faint hope that they had any chance for representation in important down ballot local races.  Increasingly right wing Republicans from the Tea Party to the MAGA crowd would, as I have observed many times over the years, "crawl through glass" to elect their candidates.  Advantage GOP.

But mail-in and early voting has changed that.  Democrats have pushed early voting here since Barack Obama's first election and the percentage of their supporters opting for it has grown steadily giving them an increasing edge.  In the last election Trump and his minions vilified early voting and falsely charged it as an opportunity for election fraud.  Instead, he urged his supporters to turn out on election day to insure that early returns before early and mail in ballots were counted to show election night leads.  

Trump thought otherwise this time out.  Now he encouraged his most loyal supporters to vote early to match or offset the Democratic advantage.  The question is, did the reprogramming actually work?  Older White men, the Orange Menace's prime demographic, still seem to prefer traditional balloting.

(Side note--as a member of that cohort I have to ask, just what the hell is wrong with men?)

Of course Illinois is one of the safest Blue States in the nation and has strengthening that tendency since the 1960 razor thin victory of John F. Kennedy.  Suburban Cook County and metropolitan collar counties which once nearly balanced the huge Democratic advantage in Chicago and conservative rural and Down State areas.  but many of those areas have turned purple or even flipped Blue like former bastions Lake and Dupage counties.  Even here in McHenry County where the Republicans still dominate local offices,  Obama won in 2008,  Joe Biden came withing a hair, and local voters have gone for Democrats for state constitutional offices, and U.S. Senate.

Neighbors and even family members are deeply split this election.  Personal relationships are ruptured adding yet more stress.

The difference has been women whose drift away from the GOP has accelerated and finally become a panicked stampede after the Trump puppets on the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade.

The national the Gender Gap is wider than ever and higher percentages of women actually cast ballots than men.

The pundits and talking heads still beat the band that the electorate is still split nearly in half and flickers either side of a dead heat in the critical six or seven battleground states that hold the key for an Electoral College victory and they have polls to prove it and keeping us all on jagged edge.

I think those polls under represent the rage and determination of women who have been the targets of intense voter turnout campaigns.  They will out-perform expectations.  So will blocks of voters with other key issues--youth voters and anti-gun violence advocates, climate change, LGBTQ+ rights and safety, election integrity and saving democracy, and minority rights.  Some "experts" wave their hand at the potential extra margins provided by these citizens claiming "liberals all stick together on a broad range of issues with the overlap of concerns limiting extra advantage.  True, as far as it goes, but at least some of those "single issue" voters are less motivated when they are not immanently threatened. Much depends on whose ox gets gored.  And all of these folks are likely under reported in the polls.

In addition, the drumbeat of traditional Republican conservatives like Liz Cheney, George Wills, and former Trump Cabinet members and national security heavies,  seems to be eroding Trump's base.  Dems recognized that when they began to assure Republican women that they could safely and secretly vote differently from their husbands.  Many will boycott the top of the ticket or vote for Harris without tipping their hands to voracious and possibly dangerous neighbors.  Another edge to Democrats.

I boldly predict the Harris-Waltz ticket will out-preform exceptions, win the popular vote, carry most swing states, and even bring others into play as the late Des Moines Register poll that show Harris up by 3% in that deep Red state suggests.  In Pennsylvania 400,000 Puerto Rican voters, easily enough to swing the state, are reported outraged by the "Floating Island of Garbage" comments at last week's Madison Square Garden hate fest.  On the other hand hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Michigan could boycott the top of the Democratic ticket over the War in Gaza.

Finally, many voters are sick to death after years of Trump psychodrama and just want it to end. 

The influx of Harris support will likely carry down ballot giving Democrats a good chance of retaining control of the Senate and even re-capturing the House.

Of course, my record of electoral prognostication is somewhat sketchy.

Here in McHenry County many Democrats will gather for this watch party at the historic Woodstock Opera House, but we won's know the final outcome of the Presidential election when the venue closes at 11 pm.

It could be days before the final results are known because of delays in counting mail in early ballots and likely Trump court challenges meant to once again undermine faith in election integrity and results evoking traumatic memories of four years ago.

There is nothing left for us to do but suck it up and be ready for a wild ride.

 

What the Fug Just Happened?

Donald Trump will be President of the United States.  In the immortal words of Margo Channing, “Fasten your seatbelts, we’re going to have a bumpy ride.”

So, what the fuck just happened?

The despicable Rudy Giuliani, of all people, offered one of the best historical insights last night in an interview on MSNBC.  He compared Trump’s victory to Andrew Jackson’s triumph over John Quincy Adams in 1828, a watershed election that road a populist wave and smashed the reigning political establishment. It was the paradigm shift election that I failed to consider in my blog essay yesterday.

Like Trump, Jackson was a popular personality—a folk hero—of a sort that despite being personally wealthy and having adopted the trappings and lifestyle of the aristocratic Southern Planter class, convinced the common man that he was their champion.  In doing so he smashed his own political party—the Republicans founded by Thomas Jefferson—and built on its ruins the Democratic Party.  He ousted a respected and successful incumbent president.  He did it so completely that it took years for a ragged Anti-Jacksonian coalition to form a fragile, unstable, and self-contradictory new opposition party—the largely hapless Whigs.  Jackson had more or less a free hand to pursue sweeping change including the final destruction of the Bank of the United States, the development of the political spoils system to reward supporters and punish enemies, and launch is Indian removal policy.  Each of these was highly popular with the people who elected him, and deplored by the old political establishment and traditional business interests.  It also sharply divided the nation geographically with the South and emerging West in one camp and New England and the Northern states heavily settled by the New England diaspora in another—divisions which persist in some ways to this day.

1828, 2016--Comparable elections?

Of course this comparison isn’t perfect.  Adams was an incumbent.  But Hillary Clinton was running largely as the anointed heir of two term Barak Obama.  Obama leaves office personally popular and with an approval rate north of a majority.  Clinton inherited much of his constituency, buy lost chunks on the left and among socially liberal millennial voters.  Jackson, though a national political outsider, was not only a celebrated and accomplished general, but had a long successful political career as a judge, member of the House of Representatives, military Governor of Florida, and twice a U.S. Senator.  He knew a thing or two about the levers of power.  Trump, on the other hand is completely devoid of any military—unless you credit his prep school ROTC time—elected office, or public service experience.  He doesn’t even have deep or wide political ties or support even in the Republican Party that he seized as a buccaneer’s prize.  More than one old line Republican last night observed that he had dismantled the house that Ronald Reagan built.  His Republican Party, even if it keeps the name, will be as new a creation as Jackson’s Democrats.

This was an electorate that was looking for change, almost any change, the more radical the better.  Bernie Sanders rode that same yearning among variant demographic groups to his surprisingly strong challenge for the Democratic nomination.  His failure to win the nomination bitterly disappointed his followers who saw Clinton as a corrupt trimmer and defender of entrenched elites despite her generally progressive record.  Many were slow to follow Sanders’ lead in rallying behind her.  While most eventually came around, it was largely without enthusiasm.  This morning some of the hard-core Bernie-or-Bust hold outs were busy on line barely concealing a gloating I-told-you-so and smugly asserting a don’t-blame-me posture on the defeat of Clinton and the failure of the Democrats as if their fingerprints were not on the corpse.

Could Bernie have beat Trump?  Maybe.  He was my candidate too, and I had high hopes for a surge that would bring deep progressive and social democratic values to the center stage of American politics.  But could he have broadened his coalition to include the disenchanted and disempowered working and middle class white voters who Trump zeroed in on with laser like efficiency?  That is more doubtful, largely because their resentments were also tied to race, immigration, so-called cultural values, and a distaste for the smart assed seemingly privileged young people who were Sanders’ most visible supporters.  How likely were they ever to jump into bed with those people? 

Could Bernie Sanders really have beaten Trump?  We'll never know.

Secondly, could Sanders, despite his spotless record on women’s issues, have mobilized the emotional and zealous support of so many women who saw a long held dream coming true?  Would at least some of those women be just as disappointed and alienated if he had edged Clinton out at the Convention as the Bernie-or-busters were?  You betcha.  And without that ardent female army, Clinton could not have done as well as she did.  She did, after all was said and done, win the popular vote.

The yearning for change was recognized by many, but dismissed by too many, including Clinton herself.  Although she made large accommodations to the Sanders platform and campaigned with him, progressive icon Senator Elizabeth Warren, and the formidable and beloved Obamas themselves, she always seemed to shy away from committing to sweeping change and reform.  She kept arguing for the effectiveness and practicality of incremental change.  It was in her political DNA.  But voters of all stripes were not interested in incremental change and in the end failed to be swayed by the real fear of losing long held gains.  Her best opportunity came with the selection of a Vice Presidential running mate.  In any other year Tim Kane would have been a perfectly reasonable choice—a popular senator from a battle ground state—with a folksy campaign style.  But Elizabeth Warren would have ignited the left and brought most of the enthusiastically home.  And we have seen how effective she can be on the campaign trail.

Still despite these stumbles, Clinton was clearly the favorite to win against a bizarre and erratic candidate with a scandal of the week, a vicious temperament, and a sexist potty mouth.  He repelled many traditional Republicans along with everybody else.  I believe that the polling showing a steady lead for Clinton was entirely accurate up to the last week or so.  She managed to survive innumerable slurs and faux scandals fostered by the false equivalency of the media which seemed to demand tit-for-tat to every revelation of another Trump abomination.  Virtually everyone thought that all of that had been taken into consideration and the sides at settled into a fixed gap.

Clinton--Confident and coasting.....

But that changed rapidly in the last week and a half or so.  This is what I think happened:

1. The unexpected discovery of totally irrelevant e-mails of Clinton aide Huma Abedin—a Muslim—on the laptop of her estranged husband, former Congressman Anthony Weiner of dick selfie fame, in an investigation of his further transgressions.  In a letter to Republican leaders in Congress FBI Director James Comey said investigators would determine whether the emails contained classified information.  This was falsely reported as reopening the closed investigation of Clinton’s use of private e-mail servers as Secretary of State.  Previously the FBI had announced that no charges would be brought against her for that, but that she had acted somewhat recklessly.  Within hours rumors were circulated and given credence that the Abedin/Weiner e-mails, which had not yet even been examined, contained evidence that would get Clinton indicted and sent to prison on some unspecified charge.  The Clinton campaign loudly called foul and charged Director Comey, a Republican Obama appointee, with meddling in the election.  The flurry of headlines and breathless media speculation reminded many traditional Republicans who were repulsed by Trump that they hated Clinton more.  Instead of leaving the Presidential line blank, voting for Libertarian Gary Johnson, or even holding their noses and voting for Clinton, many made a last minute decision to come home a vote Republican from the top of the ticket down.  On Sunday, two days before the election Comey quietly released a new letter to Congress saying that the e-mails had been examined and that they did not affect the Bureau’s previous conclusion.  In other words the whole fracas was a meaningless diversion.  But the damage was done.
2. A week out from the Election a lot of Republicans looked around and were convinced that Trump was going down in flames.  That meant Hillary Clinton would fill the currently vacant seat—assuming Congress didn’t cave and finally seat Obama’s moderate nominee Merrick Garland and one, possibly two more in her first term.  That sent shivers of revulsion down many social conservative spines, and abject terror in those who feared a reversal the Citizen United Version allowing for virtually unlimited spending by PACs under the guise of free speech and possible enforcement of sanctions for the voter suppression schemes the Republicans rely on to try and stave off the inevitable wave of minority voters becoming majority voters.  Senator John McCain, held up by some as a sane Republican and a target of Trump scorn, floated a pledge, “I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that ... that the next president [Clinton] should get to fill the Supreme Court’s open seat.”  By bringing the Court back into the discussion, more wavering Republicans were rallied.
3. But the number one cause that moved many wavering working class voters who were not necessarily bound hand and foot to the Republicans has been overlooked by most commentators.  Despite numerous attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act—Obama Care—the program allowed millions of Americans to get medical insurance coverage.  While far from perfect and somewhat buggy, the program was generally popular.  With medical coverage more Americans were seeking the routine health care that helps prevent far more expensive treatments later.  Untold numbers of American families were saved from bankruptcy when faced with a medical emergency, and lives were literally saved by access to health care.  The Republican drum beat for repeal was falling on increasingly deaf ears.  In fact the relative success of the program was a major reason that Obama’s personal popularity was surging in opinion polls.  Then two weeks before the election the Department of Health and Human Services announced that some insurers are dropping out of state pools and that premiums for 2017 would jump sharply.  In the 39 states using the HealthCare.gov platform, the median second-lowest cost silver plan, which sets the benchmark for premium tax credits, will increase 16%, while the average increase looking only at states on the federal exchange is 25%.  Projected average premiums will rise to $5,586, still below the cost of comparable private insurance but a huge ding to many tight family budgets.  Press reports presented eye popping numbers for month increases and largely failed to note that for most lower income customers, Federal subsidies would cover all or most of the increase.  The big hikes were a result of too many young health adults still refusing to enroll despite tax penalties for failing to do so.  Their premiums were meant to offset the high cost of older and sicker clients.  It was perhaps the inevitable result of the mixed system relying on insurance companies to provide coverage, over a bolder and simple single payer plan.  But Obama and Congressional Democrats settled for the mixed system for political expedience.  After all, half a loaf was better than none.  Those big increases were not just a theoretical burden.  They sent wavering consumers rushing into the waiting arms of the Republicans.  As a result Obama care is probably doomed and millions of Americans will lose their health care coverage.

Of course there was a lot of other stuff going on, not the least of which was the exposed depth of long smoldering racism, xenophobia, and misogyny lurking in wide swaths of White America, particularly mature and older men who feel their rightful heritage is being stripped away from them.

To save this nation from a grim fate we must find ways to reach out to and reassure these folks that the future—a multi-racial and ethnic future—is not their mortal enemy.  Tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.