Some thoughts from ten days out

A sucker punch is still painful a week and a half later. We need to recognize what happened, and our role(s) in this outcome.

a triumphant Donald Trump rides a horse into Carthage

I have agonized sitting down to draft this. While I am not surprised by the results of the US Presidential election, I am certainly shocked.

I had my doubts three weeks before the election when I posted this:

Three Weeks. Why am I so nervous?

In it I have this passage:

Then there’s the polling. You have JVL at The Bulwark painting his darkness about how fucking horrible Harris is doing, and that it really is a coin flip election.

Countering that is Jeff Tiedrich, Jay Kuo, and Rick Wilson countering that the low quality, biased polls is flooding the zone with shit. I would like to believe that, but …

I am a science dude, having studied physics, and with it a shit-ton of hard stats, and frankly, I can’t shake the fact that there is something there.

And anecdotally, I am having plenty of discussions with peers (I work in Tech, and whilst people think that Tech employees are liberals, the truth is there is a huge hard corpus of libertarian/deeply conservative people. And my conversations with them reveal that they don’t believe all the terrible things Trump says, and they think it is all talk. From the NY Times (gifted link), this matches many conversations I have had:

One of the more peculiar aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political appeal is this: A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will.

The former president has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department and jailing political opponents. He has said he would purge the government of non-loyalists and that he would have trouble hiring anyone who admits that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. He proposed “one really violent day” in which police officers could get “extraordinarily rough” with impunity. He has promised mass deportations and predicted it would be “a bloody story.” And while many of his supporters thrill at such talk, there are plenty of others who figure it’s all just part of some big act.

And no amount of jawboning I do with them will dislodge this disbelief. In fact, they all call me a bed-wetting lib (hiding their natural inclination to add the pejorative “tard” to the lib).

Alas, it seems my trepidation was justified.

Furthermore, the day before the election, Catherynne Valente drafted this nail-biter of an essay that largely maps to my thoughts after a lifetime in Democratic politics (as a supporter):

Election Eve: Zen and the Art of Doomscrolling

Cat opines why she was nervous, and that was largely because the “big tent” coalition of Democrats in the party has plenty of give/take stressors where the individual cohorts get snippy with the others. This passage is the one that got me:

Yeah, that Selzer poll was crazy surprising and injected hopium into everybody all at once like that scene in Pulp Fiction. Yeah, the early voting demographics and numbers look pretty good. Yeah, the vibe you and I feel, in our bubbles online and in real life, is that this is maybe probably gonna happen. Yeah, it should happen because voting against micro

I DO NOT TRUST THAT SHIT.

You know what I trust?

I trust Democrats’ deep, passionate, and powerful longing to not vote. I don’t understand it, but it’s as reliable as sunrise and the tide and white male comics complaining that their warmed-over take my wife, please jokes are being silenced to millions of views and dollars. Democrats FUCKING LOVE not voting. At the drop of the smallest and most irrelevant novelty hat, Dems seem to start celebrating, throw up our hands and joyfully not the fuck vote because…blue state so it doesn’t matter (yes it does, downballot dingus)/I got stuff to do and it’s a done deal (it isn’t, and we will all have a lot more shit to do if Elon Musk gets to Twitter our economy while RFK leaves the rotting carcass of public health in a park for fun and Trump sells the entire country to Putin for $599 and a kiss)/electoralism doesn’t work (oh my god hold my earrings)/my not voting sends a message to the establishment (they have no way of knowing why you didn’t vote, it could have been because Chipotle had a BOGO deal that day, your message is just a blank, subjectless email sent to no one)if Trump gets in it will accelerate us toward the revolution and people will rise up (he was already in power and there was no glorious leftist revolution, just the breakdown of society and suffering, also a revolution would not turn out with gentle loving progressives in charge)/the candidate isn’t perfect and will win anyway so I can stay pure (they won’t necessarily win anyway and not doing the bare minimum of saying please not fascism though is literally the opposite of political purity) or whatever reason seems fun that day.

It’s absolutely galling. And I’m so afraid we’re about to coast on vibes into another brick wall of assholes who get visibly excited talking about daddy punishing America for being such a bad girl. (And by the way, I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO, guys) running our entire lives directly into the core of the fucking earth.¹

(Yeah, the long pull-quote is worthy of reading and re-reading a few times)

And that appears to be what happened. Plenty of Dems didn’t turn out².

That was my fear. That was why I was nervous at T-3 weeks, because I know how lackadaisical Dem voters are.

The vibes were good. Packed houses, a solid convention, tons of on the ground field work, manna from heaven levels of donations (we donated extensively as a household).

Still, I had that niggling feeling in the back of my mind. Because I know that my fellow left of center and further left travelers would look at the positive news, the momentum and think “oh yeah, she’s got this, I can safely skip returning my ballot or avoid standing in line at the polling station.” I mean, if they didn’t have to possibly run into some MAGA asshole at the polls, that was better than turning out.

And you goddamn well know that was going through the minds of moderately politically informed Democrats. And hell, Biden got 84M votes in 2020, so surely, she has this in the bag.

Typing that made my eyes roll hard enough to need concussion protocols.

And sure enough, whilst I didn’t watch the returns (west coaster here, so starting at 4:30 we begin to see results) I did pop in for quick dips, and I wasn’t liking what I saw. I was reminded of the early returns from 2016, and this was looking like it was falling the same way.

Fuck.

But, what to do. Trump has slipped below 50% of the total vote tally (Saturday, November 16) but he will have beaten Harris by ~2% in the popular vote when all is said and done.

And that folks is done.

Some other notes:

I have seen a pretty large swath of the left of center folks I follow and subscribe to on Substack clamor about stolen election. That Trump rigged it. (Looking at you Jay Kuo and others). Look, we got beat. It is hard to understand, but not really surprising.

The strategy of the Trump campaign that looked insane from the outside (not trying to grow the base, alienating large swaths of the electorate) but was really savvy. Their goal was to turn out the lowest of low propensity voters, and they did so by going hard at the disaffected young men by going on Adin Ross³ and Joe Rogan.

Turns out that this cohort of predominately 18–29-year-old men just voted for the top of the ticket and left the rest of the ballot blank:

We saw another curious phenomenon relating to down-ballot voting. On millions of ballots, voters marked a vote for Trump but left all the other races unchecked. That’s why it was possible for Democratic senators in the battlegrounds to hang on to four out of five of their seats, even though Trump won every one of those states. Voters turned out to register their displeasure at the incumbent White House but not necessarily at the incumbent party. ⁴

Yep, a lot of those 3 million additional voters fall into this category.

So, while there was plenty of fuckery around states working to disenfranchise minority and Dem leaning cohorts — all endorsed by the SCOTUS — made a difference, outright fraud isn’t the cause of this.

And bellyaching about this makes us no better than the MAGA mobs after 2020.

Just stop.

I will leave it here for the day, but I will say that Trump beat Harris, beat her within the rules we have to live under. Whether they remain the rules we have in 2 or 4 years remains to be seen.

I have things to say about the Legacy media, conventional wisdom on campaigns, and how things are supposed to work, all suppositions that Trump has ripped from the ground and shit all over, successfully I might add.

But for now, this is it.

1. One wouldn’t expect such fire from an author of YA fiction, but Catherynne brings the FIRE. I do recommend subscribing.

2. As of this writing, it looks like 11 million fewer voters pulled the lever for Harris than Biden, and Trump increased his share by almost three million votes:

3. Adin Ross is the podcast bro who actually sniffed the seat of the chair that Andrew Tate was sitting in to inhale the musk of the ultimate “alpha” male.

4. Trump Claims a Mandate, But He’s Wrong And It Will Cost Him