Our Long National Nightmare Isn’t Over Yet
Everything you need to know for Monday, Nov. 9: North Carolina's expanding rural/urban divide + Dems’ troubles with Latinos
Monday, Nov. 9, 2020
17 days until Thanksgiving
31 days until Hanukkah
46 days until Christmas
53 days until this cursed year ends
72 days until this cursed presidency is over
Housekeeping: A few people have told me they have trouble seeing emoji when I use them, particularly for numbers. I’m curious how many of you are having similar issues, and if so, what you are using to read this newsletter—i.e., phone, browser, etc.
Today’s number: 102,694
New coronavirus cases reported in the United States yesterday. We haven’t fallen below 100,000 since Election Day.
ABOVE THE FOLD
—> Our Long National Nightmare
(From my column this week.)
“How American conservatism dies is the most important story, by far, of this moment,” Matthew Sheffield, a co-founder of the right-wing media-criticism site NewsBusters, wrote in a mea culpa Twitter thread on Friday night. “Conventional media will never tell this story because their business is built on the lie that [Donald] Trump is an aberration rather than apotheosis.”
Sheffield’s thread bemoaned the right’s susceptibility to bullshit—specifically, Trump’s lies about voter fraud—following decades of conservative propaganda. But here he touched on two ideas central to understanding modern American politics that warrant further exploration: 1) Conservatism is dead. 2) Trump is a symptom of conservatism’s collapse, not its cause. Trumpism lives on.
By rights, Joe Biden won a decisive victory. Historically, defeating an incumbent first-term president is hard. It’s only happened three times in a century. Defeating right-wing populism is also hard. Biden won more than 300 electoral votes. When all is said and done, he’ll receive the support of the largest share of the voting-age population since Richard Nixon in 1972. Democrats kept the House, and, in January’s runoff elections in Georgia, they’ll have a chance to retake the Senate.
Yet Tuesday night felt like a disappointment. In part, it was the order in which votes were counted and the uncertainty it produced. In part, it owed to polls foretelling a blue wave that never materialized. But mostly, it was because the goal wasn’t just to defeat Trump. It was to repudiate him and the spineless quislings who spent the last four years goose-stepping to his every utterance.
The 230,000 dead from COVID demanded a landslide. The children locked in cages demanded a landslide. The wanton corruption demanded a landslide.
It didn’t happen. Instead, Democrats lost seats in Congress and state legislatures. And had the vote swung just a point in the other direction, the GOP would likely have had a governing trifecta in Washington.
Such a close shave with illiberalism should prompt introspection. Dems juiced urban turnout, but Trump matched it in the exurbs and rural towns. He even made gains among Hispanics and African Americans. In some cases, there’s a ready explanation: In South Florida, the Trump campaign fear-mongered relentlessly—and effectively—about socialism on Spanish-language media. In other cases, Democrats simply got outhustled.
To be sure, Biden overwhelmingly won BIPOC votes. He also offset Trump’s gains by winning white suburbs. But the returns made clear that Democrats have a messaging problem with some working-class voters—mostly lower-education whites, yes, but also some people of color who bought Trump’s promises of economic prosperity.
Arguments about the soul of the nation and the dangers of authoritarianism resonated among college-educated Americans. Among everyone else, not so much.
Within 48 hours of the election, introspection morphed into full recrimination. Moderates blamed progressives for Democrats’ lackluster showing, claiming that words like “socialism” and “defund” cost them seats. Progressives countered that Black voters had secured Biden’s wins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona; forsaking their needs to chase white suburbanites is counterproductive.
In a way, this exemplifies Democrats’ dilemma. They comprise a coalition party, drawing from disparate factions with little resemblance to each other. Only in the US would Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Joe Manchin call the same party home.
Republicans, meanwhile, are ideologically sorted and much more orthodox. They don’t need coalitions, and they have little use for those outside of their base. In 2016, when Trump careened into office despite earning 2.9 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, Republicans governed not as a minority that drew its power from constitutional anachronisms but as if they had a mandate from God to put partisan hacks on the federal bench and cut taxes for the rich.
Implicitly, Trump’s votes were more legitimate than Clinton’s—more reflective of the “Real America”—an idea buttressed by countless New York Times features on MAGA types in Midwestern diners. This year, the implicit became explicit: Biden’s (ahem, urban) votes must be fraudulent, even if they can’t prove it. (As one Pennsylvania state representative tweeted, “It remains to be proven but it appears Dems in Philly did not let a good crisis in COVID go to waste and ruined the integrity of our election process.”) The party’s radicalization is both a product and cause of its epistemic closure: Facts that deviate from its worldview must be discarded.
For those of us outside the bubble, the results border on hilarity. On Saturday, for instance, Trump consigliere Rudy Giuliani held an amazing press conference outside of a Philadelphia landscaping shop (which was—chef’s kiss—next to a porn store) to insist there was a massive conspiracy to steal the election (evidence to come, pinky-swear!).
But there are real-life consequences. The thin-gruel legal challenges will fail, but Trump is nonetheless refusing to turn over the keys to the Biden transition team, hampering an incoming administration that will inherit myriad crises. Trump, meanwhile, wants to host a series of MAGA rallies to complain that the election was fraudulent and Biden’s presidency is illegitimate—actions that could have dangerous consequences. Few prominent Republicans will get in his way; their devolution into mush-brained quislings who quake at the thought of a Trump tweet is complete.
Trump’s shadow will linger for years, maybe decades after he’s gone. For the immediate future, he’ll be a kingmaker. It’s possible he’ll run again in 2024, or that Ivanka or Don Jr. will. It would be foolish to count them out. Consider this: More than 70 million people, after witnessing four years of The Trump Show, wanted to do it again. Whoever the next GOP nominee is, they’ll sing from Trump’s hymnal.
Conservatism is dead. Trumpism remains. We’ll get a reprieve, a chance to inhale—and if Democrats prevail in the Senate runoffs in Georgia in January, an opportunity to inch forward on climate change and health care policy. But our long national nightmare isn’t over yet.
LOCAL & STATE
—> North Carolina’s Urban/Rural Divide
The News & Observer highlights an important—if somewhat obvious—takeaway from last week’s results: The longstanding political gap between the state’s blue cities and red exurbs is getting wider.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton won Wake, Durham, and Mecklenburg counties combined by more than 338,000 votes. Four years later, Biden won them by more than 473,000 combined votes.
That trend continued throughout North Carolina’s next-largest cities and counties, where the places that most embraced Clinton in ‘16 only became more Democratic this year.
But another trend continued, too: the considerable advantage for Democrats in more urban areas disappeared completely in rural North Carolina, so much that Biden, like Clinton before him, failed to carry the state. … Overall, Biden won 25 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, with his margin of victory ranging from 197,437 votes (in Mecklenburg) to 27 (in Pasquotank). In those 25 counties, he built a margin of more than 717,000 votes. Trump won the other 75 counties by 794,000 votes.
WHY IT MATTERS: While the story of this gap is most easily told through the presidential election, it’s implications are most pronounced in races for Congress and the General Assembly. With Democrats packed in urban areas, Republicans will likely continue to have outsize power in the legislature and the state’s congressional delegation even after if state courts rein in gerrymandering.
NATION & WORLD
—> The Lede: Pfizer’s Vaccine Breakthrough
The news, which sent stocks soaring this morning, is based on a press release, so take it with a grain of salt. But Pfizer reported that a study shows its COVID vaccine is more than 90% effective at protecting people from acquiring the disease.
The early look at the ongoing trial provides a decisive initial glimpse of the real-world performance of one of the four coronavirus vaccines in the last stages of testing in the United States. It is the strongest signal yet that the unprecedented quest to develop a vaccine that could help bring the pandemic to an end might succeed, breaking every scientific speed record. …
“The results are really quite good, I mean extraordinary,” said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, adding that the results might bode well for a vaccine being developed by biotech firm Moderna and his institute that uses a similar technology, “which gives you hope we might even have two vaccines.” …
Pfizer and BioNTech said they plan to submit an application for emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration after the third week of November, when they will have two months of safety follow-up data on half of the participants in their trial, along with data on their manufacturing process.
—> The Brief: 4 Stories to Read Today
Why Trump won Miami’s Cuban Americans. “In Hialeah, one of Miami-Dade's most Cuban municipalities, 46 out of 48 precincts had a majority of voters go for Trump, and most of them weren’t even close …. ‘Cubans have a proclivity for a leader that's dynamic and authoritarian. Some of the recent arrivals supporting Trump have a proclivity for political fanaticism,’ says Lisandro Pérez, a professor in the Department of Latin American and Latinx Studies at the City University of New York and the founder of FIU’s Cuban Research Institute. ‘In Latin America, since the colonial period, there's been a tendency to support strong, authoritarian leaders.’ Pérez tells New Times that Trump's campaign succeeded in demonizing Biden and aligning him with socialism, adding that Biden didn’t do enough to dispel the notion that he was a socialist.”
Also: “This summer many Latinos started to loudly express contempt for—and falsehoods about—the Black Lives Matter (BLM) racial justice movement. For months, Latinos for Trump rallies—like one in Miami Lakes where an organizer shouted BLM ‘wants to tear down the Biblical definition of family!’—have been trumpeting bogus claims about the movement being anti-American.”
Progressives should rethink their approach to Hispanic voters. “The professional class of progressives who often shape cultural narratives should consider the racial dynamics of the Trump years and their own approach to intersectional politics. … Andrea Pino-Silva, a Cuban American left-wing activist … posited that by aligning with Trump, Cuban Americans are specifically reaching for a kind of aspirational white status. In this view, Cuban Americans don’t vote for Trump despite his racism. Rather, ‘Trump’s appeal is the appeal of white supremacy.’ … But this is not the whole story. … What if many US Hispanics simply don’t see the racial politics of the Trump era the way intellectuals—whose thinking and writing on structural racism and white supremacy have gained broad influence in recent years—think they should?”
Election Day took its toll on journalists of color. “Once again, journalists of color—in particular Black journalists—are exhausted. It’s not only the work; it’s the emotional labor. The summer of racial reckoning meant newsrooms enlisted diversity trainers (including me), hired for race-focused beats, and committed to an annual census of staff demographics. Yet what has changed? Here’s what has changed: The seemingly bottomless well of patience that journalists of color—Black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian, and multiracial—have exhibited has run dry. We want meaningful changes, and we need them to happen now. We are tired of constantly trying to put bandages on the gaping wounds of newsroom hierarchies that perpetuate inequity.”
Obsessing over polls could be destroying our democracy. “But beyond accuracy, this race raises another, potentially more important, concern about America’s prediction obsession: that endless consumption of poll data—updated, analyzed, dissected, and promoted on TV, the web, and even in partisan fundraising efforts—distorts the entire political process, affecting the behavior of both voters and politicians in troublingly unforeseeable ways. … After Donald Trump’s surprising Electoral College victory in 2016, [Acronym chief scientist Solomon] Messing studied the way polling influences voter behavior. He found that hyper-confidence in an election outcome makes people less likely to vote—why bother, the thinking goes, if your candidate already has it sewn up—and that the effect seems larger among Democratic voters than Republicans. Forecasts, he found, seem to bolster that confidence.”
Why bother with polls when political scientists got it right?
That number is based on the average of 10 popular vote forecasts in the October edition of PS: Political Science and Politics. As ballots are still being counted, we don’t yet know precisely what the final popular vote margin will be. Currently, Biden is winning 50.6% to 47.7%—with Biden at 75.6 million votes to Trump’s 71.2 million—but many of California and New York’s absentee ballots haven’t been counted.