GIN AND TACOS

Biden won, or will win shortly, but nobody seems very happy. That's understandable. The next four weeks and then the next four years are going to be miserable. Everyone can see it.

But what many of you really wanted was some big blowout, a massive repudiation of Trump. You didn't get it. It's disappointing and it has undermined your faith in your fellow voters.

Here is the thing, though: despite the criticism I leveled at the Biden campaign throughout – I felt it was far too safe and conservative an approach, it worked. It worked exactly like the people who came up with the idea to beat Trump with Biden set out to do. Biden was a careful, safe, unambitious play to win back (narrowly) some states Hillary Clinton lost very, very narrowly in 2016 – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. And it worked. That is what happened. Amazingly, a campaign that aimed low and didn't make big promises and that made an appeal amounting to "Hey, Trump's bad, that guy's bad, I'll be better!" managed to add Arizona to the Democratic column. In light of what an amorphous, no-promises campaign they ran, it's incredible they did as well as they did.

You cannot get a big nationwide forty-state blowout simply by showing up. They chose what they felt was the safest path to defeating Trump – pick an old, smiling white male, have him promise not to change much of anything, and win back states they lost in 2016 by less than the margin of error. To get a big nationwide blowout would require a similarly big, bold, ambitious campaign offering voters some big alternative vision, not "Let's get back to the way it used to be."

All I'm saying is, you can have Joe Biden as the nominee, running a conservative campaign that wins back the margins, or you can have a nationwide blowout a la Ronald Reagan in 1984. You can't have both. You got what you wanted; he won. Expecting him to win spectacularly was completely out of line with the campaign that he ran or with the choice of Biden as the nominee. Democrats have proven, notably in 2016, that voters in some places are more than a little lukewarm toward their ideological worldview. You can't simply expect everyone to get enthused about it and bury Trump by 20 points when the nominee's key attribute, even according to allies, is that he'll keep the seat warm.

At any moment I am persuaded by one of the following three outcomes tomorrow, depending on my mood and the last piece of information I thought about.

First and foremost, since about a billion people have asked, yes of course I voted for Biden I live in possibly the most competitive swing state. You all know my theory about voting; it's an instrumental act, not a venue through which we engage in the expression of our deepest selves. The problem with a lot of people is that voting for the guy isn't good enough, they also expect people to act excited about it and refrain from any criticism. Mostly I think that's pure projection. You have your own doubts and you lash out at people who verbalize them. Having doubts is understandable. Liberals and Democrats as a whole all still feel burned from 2016 when it seems very few people (myself included) saw it coming. There will always be doubts.

So, here's what I think could happen tomorrow, bearing in mind that 95 million people – a truly staggering number, about 2/3 of the 137 million who voted in 2016 – have already voted.

The most likely outcome is this conservative electoral projection of Biden coming in at 290. Essentially, I believe the election comes down to Michigan and Wisconsin. If Biden wins both, in accord with his current narrow polling leads in both states, there is virtually no way for Trump to win. In this projection I'm giving Trump a *lot* of benefit of doubt, giving him Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Iowa. And Biden can choke, lose one more important state (Arizona? Wisconsin?) and still win in this scenario. However, having one state be the difference between victory and defeat would be a bad outcome, since that would greatly increase the odds that some kind of Republican chicanery could swing the outcome.

In a scenario where Biden wins 290+ EV, I think Trump makes a colossal amount of noise – no matter what, he will scream until the day he dies that he was cheated in this election – but ultimately goes away. It will just be an extremely unpleasant 80-90 days. Most of the GOP seems to be expecting to lose the White House; McConnell has said as much out loud. I think they're perfectly content as a party to spend a couple years from the minority turning a Biden presidency into a complete disaster. They're good at it.

Remember that at his core, Trump does not put effort into anything, does not have the attention span to pull off a long, grueling post-election process, and doesn't even like having to do this job. Slinking away, crying foul, and cashing in on a central role in the right-wing media universe would suit him fine. As for the psychology of refusing to admit he lost, he will simply get around that by refusing to admit he lost.

A second possibility is that in multiple states the election is so close that nobody knows for days or weeks who really won. This is, from Trump's perspective, as good as a win. We saw in 2000 how good the right is at muddying the waters, sowing doubt, calling into question the validity of results, and general election-thieving. Trump will declare victory immediately while Biden will make some "appeal for calm" saying it's too soon to know who won, and that will be the first step to Biden losing in this scenario. A big part of W's success in 2000 was simply declaring that he won and acting like he was the winner for a month. That matters. The best case for Biden in this "bunch of super close states" scenario is winning the election in a series of court decisions and governing under a pall of illegitimacy. Of course Trump would too, but the right doesn't care about appearing legitimate while liberals tend to.

The third possibility is that all of the available data is badly flawed and Trump simply wins outright tomorrow. Everybody has been so focused on the potential for the GOP to steal the election that it appears not to have been considered that Trump might not have to. I do not subscribe to theories which posit that every poll is wrong and every polling error is in the same direction. Nor do I believe that the big Democratic edge in early voting is totally irrelevant. Republicans are currently pushing the narrative that people secretly support Trump but are too "shy" to say so. Have you met one Trump supporter, ever, who wasn't screaming the fact directly in your face? Anyway, there have been multiple analyses of the "shy Trumper" theory and there appears to be no empirical support for it whatsoever.

As for when we will know which scenario we face, I believe it will be apparent more quickly than many people are fearing. I've seen "end of the work day on Wednesday" proposed as a reasonable deadline to know who won unless the outcome is very, very close. There will be various courtroom challenges to follow immediately regardless of what happens. That is unavoidable. But remember, as I've been reminding you for a while, the "steal the election in court" gambit only works, maybe, if you have to flip one state. If Trump has to do it in like five places simultaneously it seems extremely unlikely.

Frankly, and I know many of you don't want to hear this, but if the Democrats couldn't come up with a candidate and campaign that could defeat this absolute moron by more than a tiny fraction of votes in multiple states at once, then why in god's name did they choose this candidate and this campaign strategy. But I don't think it will come to a debate like that. I think Trump won very narrowly in 2016 – more narrowly than anyone recalls accurately – and it's a real stretch to claim that one out of every 100 people who voted for him last time will not be voting for him again. He won by so little in a couple of states that he can afford no loss of support at all. I know Trumpers are loyal, but I see no reason to believe that no one – literally no one – gave him a "Well, why not!" vote in 2016 and didn't like what they saw. Whether those people abstain or hold their nose and vote for Biden, it helps Biden.

Overall, I think a lot of liberals are convinced that Trump is some kind of absolute evil genius and that no matter what happens, he will win, somehow. That reflects the trauma from the surprise defeat in 2016. In reality I see a guy who is an awful, awful politician who ran a ridiculous campaign and has a fanatically loyal but probably not big enough core of supporters. If Trump does win after the way he not only governed but campaigned in 2020, this country is farther gone than any of us imagine.

What I believe you're going to see is similar to 2018 – the Democrats will have an overall win but maybe it won't be the big blowout you were hoping for to restore your faith in your fellow Americans. Because let's be honest, what you're hoping to see is a massive repudiation of Trump and what he stands for. The more likely outcome is that he loses by a solid but unspectacular number of votes because he is terrible at politics and especially terrible at campaigning. It will be, despite all the noise and chaos of the next three months, pretty boring on paper.

I hope.

I think Americans, as individuals and as the institutions we create, are very bad at learning lessons from our mistakes. The media, for example, appears to have learned very little from its plethora of mistakes in covering Trump during the 2016 election. Here we are four years later, with all of the consequences clear, and they made an effort last week to circulate this patently ludicrous – really, it makes no sense whatsoever – "Biden laptop" scandal from the New York Post, an organ renowned for its careful investigative journalism and integrity.

The thing is, it hasn't gone anywhere. 90% of Americans have no idea what right-wingers are shrieking about when they say "Burisma," 8% think it's a soccer team, and the remaining 2% are addicts of (or grifters from) the Trump Cinematic Universe who nobody listens to outside of those confines. It's a non-story, despite the fact that Trump is flogging it with all his might and major media outlets gave it some air last week.

I doubt Americans have soberly internalized the details of the story and, after careful consideration, rejected it as implausible. I believe that on a more basic level, Trump has shot himself in the foot by unintentionally raising the bar for what counts as a "scandal" that rises to a level that our political discourse will actually pay attention to it. Once you've experienced all the things Trump has done over the past four years, he is finding (to his own detriment) that getting anybody to give a shit about some supposed email on supposedly Hunter Biden's laptop. The "Her Emails" thing that worked so well in 2016, or at least seemed to work well, now seems quaint to the point of comedy. For four years Trump stretched to the breaking point what would be tolerated as acceptable or even normal in American politics, and now he's discovering too late what every performer who relies on shock value learns: the dose must always be increased to have the same effect.

Here in North Carolina we see an even clearer example, with the revelation of embarrassing text messages by the Democratic Senate candidate Cal Cunningham, which the flailing, unpopular incumbent leapt upon like a life preserver. Certainly nobody would argue that what Cunningham did is awesome, but the story simply had no staying power. Beyond that, Cunningham's poll numbers actually went up – not because it somehow helped him to be publicly humiliated, but because the "scandal" simply didn't register at all. That classic political scandal, marital infidelity, seems silly and frivolous now to any voter who wasn't desperately looking for a reason to hate Cunningham in the first place.

I don't think we will ever go back. Things that would have been campaign- or career-ending in 1990 just aren't going to move the political dial anymore. There are too many other things on the table for voters right now (and remember that the average person will devote only limited attention to politics) for anyone to get excited about the mildly interesting titillation of a "politician cheats on wife" storyline. Maybe compared to the dullness of, say, the Jimmy Carter years such a thing might be leapt upon by voters and the media as a rare interesting tidbit in otherwise boring politics. Now, Trump got what he wanted. He vastly increased public tolerance for political malfeasance, which is what all autocrats want because it makes it easier for them to steal with impunity. But in getting what he wanted, he also let all the air out of the only thing in electoral politics he or the right-wing noise machine really know how to do.

The House hinted Thursday afternoon, then leaked Thursday evening, a plan to form a commission as part of the procedures outlined in the 25th Amendment. The stated purpose would be to determine if the President is fit to serve, which we all know he is not (by any number of criteria).

Look. You know me, Mister "Do Something!" But the timing on this is just…it's spectacularly bad.

The election is in three weeks. It really, really looks like Biden is going to win and maybe even win by a substantial amount. He has received a real boost – remember, the main message of his candidacy is "Are you sick of this asshole? I promise I'll be nice and boring and normal!" – from Trump's utterly unhinged and very likely drug-addled behavior of the first week of October.

Like impeachment, the 25th Amendment idea is dead on arrival because it simply isn't going to get the votes in the Senate. I do not understand at all the political value of reintroducing the idea of removing Trump by means other than the election right before the goddamn election. I strongly believe the House mishandled impeachment, approaching it "quick and narrowly" to win GOP votes (LOL) and to avoid letting a protracted House trial … uh I think their logic was it would create a backlash of support for the President. Whatever. They did what they did and it didn't work.

Now, when Trump really does seem to have effectively dug his own grave with his behavior and with his mystifyingly bad campaign (Ads in California! No ads in Iowa! Whatever man!) they're doing something Trump really, honestly could use to build some minor last-minute "Look what they're trying to do to me" sympathy.

Make absolutely no mistake: the country writ large may finally have turned on Donald Trump, but they don't especially like Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi either. Biden has successfully made a "Hey, I'm not so bad compared to that guy!" case, which frankly I wasn't sure he could do. When we are just arriving at the point where it seems highly unlikely that Trump could reverse his current downward trajectory, the Democrats should not even be thinking about doing anything to change the narrative. Focus on voter turnout and Trump should be DOA (the specter of fraud and post-election chicanery is another matter).

Proposing a commission to declare the president insane that will die in the Senate serves absolutely no purpose at this point – certainly none positive, and in the worst case it could serve a negative one. If there was a time for this, it was years ago when it could have mattered, but of course probably wouldn't because of the GOP hold on the Senate and party-wide commitment to ride Trump down to the bottom.

This is just stupid. It is grandstanding, and it's not even good or useful grandstanding. It comes at the moment at which the absolute last thing the Democrats appear to need is grandstanding. Congratulations, you're winning. I think you finally got this guy. Don't start thinking now. Just let him finish himself off without offering the lifeline of potential martyrdom at the hands of people only marginally less hated than himself.

At a recent CNN event Anderson Cooper accused Biden of "trying to have it both ways" on fracking (check out my minicast on nuclear fracking, btw) by refusing to condemn the practice but also promising to be the anti-climate change / pro-environment president. Biden's position, which he clarified, proved Cooper correct: he doesn't want to ban fracking, but he wants to stop issuing new fracking permits. That's supposed to make everyone happy, but of course in reality it just gives everyone something to point at and be dissatisfied.

I'm not criticizing Biden; I point this out because I think fracking is the ideal example of a trap issue for Democrats. Forget all the "culture wars" stuff. Fracking, and environmental issues in general, do a superior job of positioning them between a rock and a hard place. Pun intended.

On the one hand, you have environmental voters and younger people who are convinced that the climate crisis is real and imminent. They want bold, immediate action to address it. On the other hand, you have the working class and organized labor constituencies who see the reality that oil & gas industry work is some of the last well-paid blue collar work left in this country. If you don't believe me, take a trip through North Dakota and look at how $60+ per hour (dirty, dangerous) fracking jobs have transformed that state's economy and population.

What do you really expect a candidate to do in these economically depressed midwestern and plains states, not to mention out west: walk into town and say "Hey I see you finally got something going here, got some money coming in, got some steady work. Well, I promise to shut it all down!" At the same time, "Let's just ignore this climate change stuff" is…well, it may not be a politically suicidal message but it's actually suicidal. In the non-metaphorical sense. Older people mostly don't care, but it's increasingly being recognized as a life-and-death problem. A crisis, even.

The only way to play it, in theory, would be to promise to transition people from economically positive but environmentally destructive work like fracking to economically positive, environmentally positive industries. Promise them high-paying jobs in different lines of work, and deliver. The problem is the Democrats have played this card before – hell, Bill Clinton campaigned on "Your job will go away but we'll get you an even better job" in 1992. People have long memories and they simply don't believe it anymore. For this to work, there will have to be something tangible to show voters. Democrats, when in power, will actually have to do it. Then and only then they can plausibly go to voters and say, look at this. This is the deal. We will do this for you like we did it for X, Y, and Z.

That will mean an end to derisively referring to plans to make the economy work in favor of the environment as "the green dream or whatever." And most of all it will require that thing the modern Democratic Party seems to dread the most – long-term thinking. They'll have to admit that they can't please everyone in the short-term and work toward presenting voters with an everyone-pleasing option in the near future. Because right now this is a trap and there's no good way out of it. The solution is to work to avoid being in the same trap in the future.

Many years ago I taught a very large lecture course and to facilitate grading 400 exams I asked the students to write the number of the essay they chose to do on the front of their blue books. I wrote several times on the exam in bold type, Write the number of the essay you choose on the cover of your blue book. After a few experiences I also formed separate piles in the classroom when the students handed in their exams with a sign indicating the number of the essay. This pile is Essay 1. This pile is Essay 2. Etc.

If you've taught – from preschool to grad school – you know that no matter how many times or how clearly you give instructions, some students won't follow them. You can get to the point that most do if you're persistent, but for whatever reason some of them either won't read, won't listen, or won't process them. Of course in the example above it's not a big deal. It wasn't like they failed the exam if they put theirs in the wrong pile, or didn't mark the cover of their book. In that case the only consequence was me and the teaching assistants wondering why they can't follow simple directions to make our job a tiny bit easier.

One of the issues – not problems, but an issue to be aware of – with mail-in ballots is that the instructions create opportunities to reject ballots. To use the example of the recent Kentucky primary, ballots were rejected for failure to sign, failure to sign in the correct place, failure to enclose the ballot in an inner envelope before putting it in the outer envelope…on and on. Petty stuff, but stuff that is going to get your ballot tossed if you don't read and follow directions correctly.

My point is not to stick up for or lambaste Tyranny via Petty Bureaucracy. Rules and procedures, in some form, have to exist during an election. At the same time, I – we all – know that some people will end up doing the procedure incorrectly even if objectively we think the instructions are clear and simple. Burmila's Law: Each additional step in the instructions will remove more ballots from the final tally. Because whether the instruction says "Sign Here" or "Slither up a greased pole and battle the Rancor to submit your vote" someone will forget to do it, or do it wrong.

In an election in which a lot of ballots are going to be cast by mail and it is patently obvious that Trump will use every possible mechanism to try to question the legitimacy of the ballots cast, I worry about the potential for these minor, insignificant instructions will toss otherwise valid votes. No voting system is perfect and the rejection rate on mail-in ballots has been low everywhere it has been tried. "Low" and "zero" aren't identical though. True, votes can get rejected when cast in-person too (by filling in too many votes for a single office, etc). From mail to paper to voting machines, none of it will ever be 100% perfect.

This election is likely to be closer than some of the very optimistic poll results from June-July may have suggested ("Biden +15!!") and every vote is going to matter. It's too late to substantially alter any of the procedures in place for requesting and then casting votes by mail; at this point we can only anticipate how it could matter. Some states, for example, still require voters to submit a paper form by mail to request an absentee/mail-in ballot. How many voters do you lose with each additional step? I'm not sure it can be measured, but it's above zero. Some people will forget. Some will not have a printer. Some will do it but not correctly or in time. Some will misread or not read the fine print and give a reason for their ballot to be rejected.

And this is going to get incredibly ugly, with a large number of mailed-in ballots, if in the end one candidate wins by a very narrow margin and the rejected ballots could – potentially – have made a difference. People will start howling to count them anyway, and states will flat-out refuse. The perfect recipe for an election outcome that isn't broadly perceived as legitimate.

As the cost of living there continues to increase while the overall quality of life falls, New York City is suddenly worried about people leaving. As one of those places that has never really had to worry about either attracting new residents or holding onto its population, this is not a problem New Yorkers have had to spend a ton of time on. The linked article makes the very important point that residents do not owe the city anything. If you are being gouged on rent for the privilege of living there, you have a reasonable expectation that services will be provided and that your quality of life will be reflective of your costs. If you cease getting out of the city what you are paying to live in it, it's OK to move.

I have never lived in New York but this argument resonates with me because one encounters it often in the Rust Belt – particularly in Central Illinois during my time there. It is often suggested or said that each individual has an obligation to stay put and do the hard work of fixing their community. In practice this means struggling mightily to fix it until suffering a mental breakdown from stress and repeatedly banging your head against a wall. It turns out that the forces responsible for something like urban decay and the collapse of the economy of an entire region bigger than most countries is well beyond the power of one person or even a dedicated group of people to change. Huh.

You are not a traitor for wanting to stop giving part of yourself to a futile effort to fix what others have broken. You have a responsibility to your community and to the people around you, but not at the expense of yourself. Read The Giving Tree for god's sake. You have the right to live somewhere affordable, safe, and with a quality of life that supports your needs. If the place where you live stops meeting those criteria, it is worth your effort to try to fix it. But don't fool yourself into believing that the problem can always be fixed. Sometimes it can, sometimes it cannot. Sometimes it is beyond anyone's power to fix it; other times the people with the power to change things simply don't want to. In either case it is not your job to sit there and waste your life in a place that is falling down around you just because you happened to be born there or found yourself living there for whatever reason.

You do not owe it to New York City to spend 75% of your income on rent unless that is what you really want to do. You have agency, and the ability (if not responsibility) to decide if the problems in your community are simply too big for you or the like-minded people around you to fix. Sometimes they will be.

I have recently binge-read (I must admit some of the reading was skimming) all of Bob Woodward's books about the presidents between 1992 and 2016. And reading them all at once more or less in order makes one thing really jump out. In the Bill Clinton and Obama books, the congressional Republicans make regular appearances in the narrative. In the George W. Bush books, Democrats in Congress – or anywhere else for that matter – don't exist.

To make sure I wasn't imagining things, I checked the indexes. In State of Denial (late W years) Tom Daschale, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid are mentioned once each. Once. And not in any way that is significant. Reid is quoted as being "disappointed" about some committee appointed to look into money spent in Iraq. Daschale was called to schedule some kind of hearing. Pelosi I couldn't find at all, although the index lists her on a page she does not appear.

The Clinton books, which incidentally I think are the best reads in the sense of being enjoyable, focus predominantly on characters around the White House, obviously. But people like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich are in it a lot. They are physically present every chapter or so, and when they aren't the White House staff are talking about them. The names of minor Republicans in Congress come up too, as potential targets to be wooed.

It's not just a majority/minority thing; Obama and Clinton had a congressional majority for only two years compared to six* (The Senate was a coin flip for two years, so I guess four years depending on how you look at it) for Bush. That certainly matters. But I think there's more to it than that. Even after losing Congress in 2006, the Bush administration inner circle continued to act as though the Democrats did not exist. What they wanted was not a topic of conversation, even idly.

It could be tempting to write this off as an artifact of Woodward; that for some reason, Woodward was biased and portrayed the situations differently. I find it hard to come up with a convincing logic to support that. As far as Access Journalism goes, Woodward is a pretty reliable Scribe. And I'm unaware of allegations that he has some kind of big bias that leads him to want to write the Democrats out of the Bush story. It seems to reflect the reality around him, that in the Bush White House they didn't particularly give a shit about the opposition party. I think that matches reality to those of us who remember the W years and "unitary executive theory."

Clinton was somewhat successful at getting GOP buy-in, albeit at the cost of constantly giving them (and moderates in his own party) concessions. Obama, though, got nothing. Unfortunately it took him too long to discover that no amount of bringing them to the table or giving them sweeteners was going to get him anything in return.

Anyway, this is hardly an observation I quantified beyond checking the indexes to make sure I'm not crazy. Nonetheless I think it says something that comports with the current election – that Democrats are wired to try to woo moderate Republicans while Republicans make no effort whatsoever.