Reasons to be Cheerful
We are winning this election.
Turnout is already at record levels. Young people, whose turnout in 2016 was half of those eligible to vote, are coming out in huge numbers. Sixty-three percent of voters aged 18-29 say they will definitely be voting, up from 47% in 2016. And two-thirds of those young people say they prefer Biden over Trump (a higher ratio than favored Hillary Clinton over Trump four years ago). Overall, Americans are expressing a lot more enthusiasm about voting this year than in past cycles, but Democrats are 9% more enthusiastic than Republicans. The Trump campaign is being outspent and out-organized, and when typically Republican states like Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas, are in play, you know which way the wind is blowing. As my old friend Marc Cooper points out in the latest edition of his Coop’s Scoop newsletter, the odds of Trump winning the election are now in the single digits.
A lot of smart investments in progressive organizing infrastructure are delivering valuable results, as Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman of New Media Ventures describes, from Spread the Vote, which has worked intensively in a dozen states to help voters overcome barriers to the franchise, to Ballot Ready, which has made “your voting plan” a household phrase.
There is now a de facto “popular front” of anti-Trump activism that stretches from the climate change radical kids of the Sunrise Movement texting out the vote for Biden to many top generals and national security staff leaking to reporters like Ron Suskind to the unions discussing a potential general strike to the hundreds of corporate CEOs who have signed onto the Civic Alliance’s “We’re 100% for Democracy” statement. Re the latter, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of the Financial Times observes, “there is a growing consensus in corporate America that Mr. Trump is no longer good for business.”
I could go on, but my point today isn’t to shower you with more evidence of the Blue Wave, it’s to urge you to feel some confidence about what is happening. Not the kind of confidence that might cause anyone to relax in efforts to turn out the vote, but the kind of steely resolve that comes from knowing that we are the majority, and soon that will be apparent. With as many as 170 million Americans casting their ballots, Biden is on track to clobber Trump by more than 10 million votes. Next Tuesday, Election Night, that may not yet be fully clear, and because of how ballots our counted in various states, the early reported results may show Trump in the lead. But as the votes come in from the west coast, by midday Wednesday it should be obvious that he is losing.
Despite this, I see lots of my peers in a kind of defensive crouch about the week ahead. This is understandable. The past four years, starting with Trump’s unexpected-to-many victory, have been traumatizing. More so, Trump is a bully, and he attracts people who seek the comfort of displays of strength in an uncertain world. Bullies succeed only if we let them. Their intimidating chest-thumping is worrisome (especially coming from the police, as Jeff Sharlet dissects here), but it is also a sign of weakness. When the dust settles later next week, and it is clear that the popular will favors Biden, we should be very resolute. No amount of flag-waving or gun-displays will change that. Doom-scrolling to find examples of “proud” boys acting out, and hyping of far-right groups with minuscule memberships, simply feed fantasies of apocalypse. We’re not about to have a civil war—the vast majority of Americans will accept the results as they are verified by local election officials.
Hopefully, the parts of the left that have grown accustomed to being a prophetic minority “speaking truth to power” instead of organizing to take power will not be the primary face of the post-election transition. Trump is a buffoon, not a Hitler, and we should be joyfully laughing him off the stage, not propping him up by imagining that he is capable of organizing a coup against the election results. (His campaign couldn’t even remember to order enough busses to take rally attendees back to their cars after an air-hangar rally in Omaha a few days ago, stranding thousands, including many elderly people, in the freezing cold.) The weeks after Election Day may be bumpy, but ultimately we should remember that, ultimately, democratic legitimacy goes to the side that gets more votes. Civic resistance movements around the world have always succeeded when they’ve maintained their clarity about that simple fact. We got this.
Odds and Ends
As a longtime advocate for multi-party political systems, this survey by Echelon Insights on a hypothetical five-party political system for the US is pretty fascinating. Given the opportunity to choose between a Trumpist Nationalist Party, a more traditional Reaganite Conservative Party, an Mike Bloomberg-ish Acela Party dedicated to free trade and social liberalism, a Bidenish Labor party, and an AOC-ish Green Party, the Labor Party does best with present-day Democrats and Independents, while Generation Z voters (and a big chunk of African Americans) go strongly for the Green Party.
Don’t miss this excellent essay in Dissent by Bob Master, longtime labor organizer, on how the left can move Biden, the same way past presidents have been moved once in office.