Eleven quick thoughts on the election
And some incredibly niche media criticism
He was Vice-president to a younger man who was a brilliant orator but perhaps a less skilled legislator than the elder man perceived himself to be. The young President forbade his elder from campaigning to succeed him, but the anointed successor lost to an aspiring tyrant.
The old man’s son and heir, while dying, had his father swear an oath that he would return to Washington and save the Republic. Grieving, the old man’s younger son had an affair with the widow of his late brother, before utterly loosing himself to addiction.
The old man returns and defeats the tyrant. He tells himself he has saved the Republic from tyranny. He is aging badly now, but he cannot stop. This is what he has been working towards since he was first elected to the senate almost fifty years ago. He cannot stop because he alone can keep the republic safe from the tyrant, and because he’s been campaigning and then governing non-stop since his son died. To relinquish the presidency would be to find himself alone with his grief.
So he ploughs on, certain that the weight of liberal democracy is safe solely on his shoulders, and in his hubris contrives to loose everything to the tyrant he thought he had saved his nation from.Trump is one of those people who seems to broadcast their psyche to the world. He can’t help but show you his deepest desires. I hadn’t reflected until now how Biden is like that too in a way. His story wouldn’t be unfamiliar to Sophocles or Euripides. Human folly is eternal.
In the end it wasn’t even close. We thought the election was on a knife edge, we debated which swing states would go to whom. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. He won them all.1 Harris’ campaign was better-run, her fund-raising far more fruitful, her turnout machine bigger and more advanced, her communications sharper and better-targeted, and none of it mattered. I do wonder how much of that stuff is quite a bit less important than we think.
The simplest way of looking at all this is that the party of an unpopular incumbent lost. Trump won the electoral college comfortably and the popular vote narrowly while being personally very unpopular. He just wasn’t *as* unpopular with crucial swing voters as Biden. A telegenic, moderate Republican like Nikki Haley or Glenn Youngkin would probably have won a landslide.
When inflation is high, incumbents loose. Voters understandably really, really, really hate it. Biden’s $1.9 trillion post-covid stimulus package is probably the last of its kind we’re going to see for a while. At the time, getting it through a 50-50 senate was lauded as a masterful piece of legislating on Biden’s part (and he really was good at it in a way Obama wasn’t), but perhaps with hindsight we should regard Democrat critics of the size of the stimulus like former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers as prescient.
Perhaps we should care more about spending power and less about GDP per capita when when using economic indicators to predict elections?
Too many of Trump’s 2016 voters have died for him to win with the same demographics again. This time, he attracted far more young people, particularly men (latino and black, as well as white) than he did previously.
Since the 60s, it’s been taken as given that when we talk about youth turnout in elections, we’re talking about young people voting for left parties. That may no longer obviously be the case. The discourse about Gen-Z men being right-wing is going to be a central topic of conversation for years to come.Pre-Trump, Republicans had a structural advantage in that as long as they were neoliberal on economic matters they could vary their level of social conservatism according to their local situation. So Chris Christie or Mitt Romney in New Jersey or Massachusetts could run as centrists on social issues as long as they wanted to cut taxes, while in Texas Rick Perry could be a full-spectrum conservative. Democrats meanwhile, had to be liberal on social issues no matter where they were, but had more room to manoeuvre on economics. This made it easier for Republicans to be competitive in Dem-leaning swing states than it did for Democrats to be competitive in Rep-leaning ones.
The quadrant of the ideological map that wasn’t being served by anyone was the closest to where actual swing voters in swing states are: Left-wing on economics, right-wing on social issues. I don’t think Trump really has an ideology in any meaningful sense, but this is certainly where Trumpism has staked its territory. It’s also true of Britain, where the average Labour-Tory swing voter is to the left of Labour on public spending and to the right of the Tories on criminal justice. There’s no party that wants to bring back hanging *and* fund the NHS, but that combination of policies could probably win you a general election with the right messenger.
It is *utterly insane* that the UK Labour Party was sending dozens of British staff members to swing states in America. For one, it probably put off swing voters. How would you like it if some American conservative knocked on your door in Yorkshire asking you to vote for Rishi Sunak? But more importantly, it was clearly a risk that Trump would win and be pissed about it. British millennials living out their West Wing fantasies created a completely needless diplomatic crisis.
Pakistan, El Salvador, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, India, Lithuania, South Africa, Mexico, the EU, Belgium, Iran, France, the UK, Japan, the USA. Ireland still to come. And the German coalition has just collapsed. What a year for elections! Or in some cases ‘elections’. Regular readers will of course know that the most interesting election this year was for the mayoralty of Florence.
Is this photo of Trump with first raised and flag behind a conscious echo of the image taken just after the assassination attempt? Both were taken by the same photographer: The NYT’s Doug Mills. Now for some incredibly niche media criticism: I’m pretty sure this is the first Presidential election in decades in which the issue of the New York Times after the result is announced doesn’t include a traditional lede-all explaining who won and lost. The lede-all is a story always on the right-most column of the cover, summarising many narrative threads and providing a big-picture summary of events, reserved for news of major consequence. Writing these pieces was traditionally considered a very prestigious role at the Times, requiring the author to weave together many developing fragments of news along with historical context. In 2008, Adam Nagourney wrote the lede-all on Obama’s victory. It began:
Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.
Mr. Obama’s election amounted to a national catharsis, a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country. But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.
Mr. Obama, 47, a first-term Democratic senator from Illinois, defeated Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, a former prisoner of war who was making his second bid for the presidency…
In 2016, Matt Flegenheimer and Michael Barbaro began:
Donald John Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States on Tuesday in a stunning culmination of an explosive, populist and polarizing campaign that took relentless aim at the institutions and long-held ideals of American democracy.
The surprise outcome, defying late polls that showed Hillary Clinton with a modest but persistent edge, threatened convulsions throughout the country and the world, where skeptics had watched with alarm as Mr. Trump’s unvarnished overtures to disillusioned voters took hold.
The triumph for Mr. Trump, 70, a real estate developer-turned-reality television star with no government experience, was a powerful rejection of the establishment forces that had assembled against him, from the world of business to government, and the consensus they had forged on everything from trade to immigration.
The results amounted to a repudiation, not only of Mrs. Clinton, but of President Obama, whose legacy is suddenly imperilled. And it was a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters who felt that the promise of the United States had slipped their grasp amid decades of globalization and multiculturalism.
This time, rather than something similar, the column on the far right of the cover is taken up by a narrative piece about Trump’s journey back to power by Jonathan Swan, Matt Flegenheimer and Maggie Haberman (Haberman is maybe the pre-eminent journalist of the Trump era) starting with an anecdote about his time in the wilderness. In fact, all four of the stories on the cover are analysis pieces, none are a straight news article. I mention all this because I think it’s an interesting sign of the changing role of daily newspapers in our information ecosystem, and also because it seems to be the sad end of a tradition I quite enjoyed.
Thanks for making it this far! More soon.
Dan x.
Yes, I know Nevada and Arizona are bizarrely incapable of telling anyone who won until five days after the election, but clearly he’s going to win them too.