Mines in the Harbor

By the end of the day today, every state except possibly only Wisconsin will have certified its election results. By doing so by today, those results will be insulated, under “safe harbor” provisions of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, from being challenged in Congress. So, while a few “faithless electors” may vote next Monday for someone other than the candidate who won the popular vote in their state, Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump is effectively done. Woo-hoo, right?!

And yet. A team of 25 Washington Post reporters contacted aides for every Republican in Congress over the last week, and found of those 249 House and Senate members, just 26 acknowledged that Biden won the election, a number that only rose to 31 when the question was phrased thus: “If Joe Biden wins a majority in the Electoral College, will you accept him as the legitimately elected president of the United States?” More than 70% of the elected officials contacted by the Post didn’t even acknowledge its questions. Not only does Trump himself continue to press for the results to be overturned—now we learn that he’s been calling the speaker of the Pennsylvania state house asking him to throw the race to him—other leading Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz keep adding fuel to the fire, pushing for the Supreme Court to somehow step in and “ensure we are following the Constitution and following the law.” As if we are not.

As Paul Waldman cogently writes yesterday in The Washington Post, the more the myth of a “stolen election” solidifies among Republicans, the greater the damage to the future. Not only will belief in the myth become a litmus test for who is a “true” Republican, it will become “the easy justification for complete Republican obstruction of the Biden presidency.”

So while Trump will eventually be gone from the White House, his actions and those of most Republican party leaders are poisoning the well that the Biden Administration will soon inherit. Which is why Zeynep Tufekci’s new article in the Atlantic, “This Must Be Your First,” is resonating. She argues that while the word “coup” doesn’t quite describe what’s been happening, we should be doing more to respond to it. “The incoherence and the incompetence of the attempt do not change its nature, however, nor do those traits allow us to dismiss it or ignore it until it finally fails on account of its incompetence.” She also connects Trump’s efforts to overturn the election to its larger context: the many ways that minority rule is enshrined in our government and entrenched by practices like gerrymandering and voter suppression. She concludes with a challenge: “Ignoring a near catastrophe that was averted by the buffoonish, half-hearted efforts of its would-be perpetrator invites a real catastrophe brought on by someone more competent and ambitious.”

Couped Up

I think this is a bit unfair. Trump’s challenge and the larger one hasn’t been simply “ignored.” First, Democrats made a massive effort to get out the vote in the midst of a pandemic and succeeded. Second, there’s been a quiet but very well-organized army of Democrat-allied lawyers clobbering Trump’s formal challenges in state courts. And third, as I have been chronicling in earlier editions of The Connector, the organized liberal-left (such as it is), made a decision to get ready for a real power grab, but then when the scope of Biden’s victory started to clarify, its leaders decided to hold off on protesting the Orange Cheeto’s false claims of victory and instead let the facts speak for themselves.

This decision was driven in part by internal data showing that the blue wave was real and would be in evidence by Thursday or Friday after Election Day. Lo and behold by Saturday morning Biden was declared the winner and instead of hitting the streets to protest Trump, we hit the streets to celebrate. It was also driven by a fear of unintended consequences, since street protests against all of Trump’s bullshit could have led to clashes with Proud Boys looking for a fight “with Antifa,” possibly giving Trump a pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act, leading to who knows what outcome. The organized left instead took a more fine-tuned approach to mobilization. When Trump’s post-election maneuvering got most serious, with his call to the Michigan legislators to come to DC to supposedly embrace his theory that he actually won there, organizers in Michigan were prepared, already in motion and successfully mobilized a lot of opposition in precisely targeted ways.

But there’s been a pretty rigorous effort to keep people from panicking, and not calling Trump’s actions a “coup” has been part of that. That’s because, I think, the progressive base in America has been trained to respond to the word “coup” with “we must take the streets” (while it isn’t at all clear how that actually stops a coup), and also because of polling that suggests that telling people “it’s a coup” scares them away from political action rather than draws them toward it. But that leaves a vacuum, and power abhors a vacuum.

And for all the amazing work done by dozens of groups leading up to the election to protect democracy by re-enfranchising voters, strengthening local election systems, recruiting hundreds of thousands of volunteers to shore up the ranks of poll workers, guarding polling sites from voter intimidation, and batting down disinformation, there seems to be nothing being done now to effectively counter the acidic effects of Trump’s “stolen election” myth. At ProtectDemocracy.org, founders Ian Bassin and Justin Florence have an oped talking about actions Biden should take to address the “representational deficiencies” of the Senate and Electoral College. Common Cause says it’s busy “closely monitoring all election litigation” that is coming from Trump’s campaign. MoveOn’s current campaign, per its website, is focused on winning the election that we won a month ago. Indivisible National is focused on the Georgia senate runoffs.

So, here we are, at the safe harbor. Soon, we will be celebrating Biden’s inauguration. On the other hand, the vast majority of Republicans from Congress on down are denying that reality, laying down mines in that safe harbor. As far as I can tell there’s no one organizing anything now to address that.

Odds and Ends

Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for the New York Times, offers a nice rundown of the various tactics the Biden campaign’s digital team used to mobilize its supporters, reach voters and counter disinformation. What’s interesting to me about the piece is how humble it is compared to the rock-star profiles tech journalists have given to the “wizards” of past presidential campaigns. Roose frames that story the way Rob Flaherty, Biden’s digital director, wants it framed, as an effort in reaching “a kinder, gentler version of the Internet that [the Biden team] still believed existed.” OK, but what if the story is even simpler—Biden’s team started late, and by necessity partnered with the much larger online Democratic ecosystem, and mostly just did the obvious work of feeding it relevant content? (Also interesting what Roose doesn’t report: the size of Biden’s email list or other measures of digital reach, because at one-tenth the size of numbers hit by Barack Obama’s campaigns they weren’t that impressive.)

Mark Headd, an old friend from the early days of civic tech, writes on Medium about how going to work at 18F has taught him about “unbecoming a hotshot.” He writes, “the greatest benefit of joining the federal government and working at 18F is that it’s given me the freedom to let go of the need to be the one standing in front of the crowd. The one who always has to have the deepest insight, or most quotable remark.” Amen to that. (h/t Rebecca Williams)

Upcoming Talks

Tomorrow, Weds December 9th from 11:30am-12:30pm, I’ll be doing a talk with my co-authors Berhan Taye, Diana Nucera, Sasha Costanza-Chock and Matt Stempeck on our recent report “Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest.” It’s a free event, but you should RSVP here to get the link.

I’ll also be moderating a panel at RootsCamp 2020, the annual post-campaign debrief that brings together lots of Democratic and progressive campaign staff, strategists and vendors which is taking place virtually this Friday and Saturday. The panel is called “Lessons Learned From the Indivisible Movement,” and it will feature Aram Fischer, Co-founder and facilitator of the Indivisible Middle Tier; Paula Martinos-Mantay, Co-founder, Statewide Indivisible Michigan; Liz Shaw, President, Indivisible Appalachian Ohio and Lara Putnam, Associate Professor of History, University of Pittsburgh. The event is still coming together and so I don’t yet have the exact date and time of the session, but highly recommend that you sign up to attend RootsCamp if you’re interested in a deeper dive into Election 2020 and what is coming next.