Slouching Towards Electoral Babylon

If President Trump declares himself the winner of the 2020 election before the votes are all counted, we are heading for deep trouble. According to a recent poll done by Data for Progress and the Justice Collaborative Institute, 77% of likely Republican voters say they would trust Trump’s word if he did so (46% “a lot”; 31% “a little”). Similarly, 70% said they would trust Fox News (36% “a lot”; 34% “a little) if it made that call. No other major media outlets exhibit the same level of trust from likely Republican voters.

While an optimist could read this survey the opposite way—only 46% of likely Republican voters said they trusted Trump’s word “a lot”—it should be clear that history hinges a lot on what Trump says Election Night. Maybe he’ll be coy. Maybe the saner side of his family will somehow convince to hold back. But if not, he’ll be pushing the country down a slippery slope that is already being well-greased. A little over a week ago, former top Trump adviser Steve Bannon (and longtime nihilist who hungers for a World War III) told a Republican group that, “At 10 o’clock or 11 o’clock… on November 3, Donald J. Trump is going to walk into the Oval Office, and he may hit a tweet before he goes in there… and he’s going to sit there, having won Ohio, and being up in Pennsylvania and Florida, and he’s going to say, ‘Hey, game’s over.’” Bannon has also been promoting the idea that the “blue shift,” where late-counted ballots tilt Democratic, is actually just a “blue steal.”

A second poll, also done by Data for Progress and the Justice Collaborative Institute, is also worrisome. In a hypothetical scenario where the election in Pennsylvania is close, with Trump ahead on Election Night but millions of mail-in ballots eventually tilting the result to Biden, 70% of likely Republican voters say they would put their trust in the Republican-controlled state legislature if it certified the results for Trump and voted to send the state’s electors his way. Even if all the major networks, including Fox, were declaring Biden the victor in this scenario, a majority of Republican voters (61%) said they’d still be more likely to trust the state legislature over a decision by the Democratic secretary of state to certify the results for Biden. This matters a lot, because if Trump and his allies pressure Republican-controlled legislatures to deliver him their electoral votes because they don’t trust the actual count, we will be in the full-blown version of the post-election crisis we’re hoping to avoid.

While for the next two weeks what matters most is how well Biden and Trump supporters get out their voters, how the media covers the election results—and the public’s response to those results—will matter enormously. Republicans trust the media far less than Democrats to make the right call. A new survey from the Pew Research Center of registered voters finds that 49% of Biden supporters express a lot of confidence in their news sources to make the right call, just 34% of Trump supporters do. Add into this mix the toxic brew that is QAnon, plus the spread of new conspiracy theories that fit perfectly into the Q mindset – “The deep state is plotting a ‘color revolution’ against Trump” being the latest – plus the right’s paranoia about Antifa, and you have the recipe for a post-electoral explosion. If Trump falsely declares victory, and Americans go out into the streets to peacefully protest, as is our right and duty, the days after November 3rd will be a challenging time for all of us.

As we slouch towards this new Babylon, I’m struck by how far we’ve let the goalposts drift. Most of the commentary about this situation I’m describing usually includes a comment along the lines of “this is why the election needs to be a landslide.” Weirdly, we seem to have forgotten that no, to become president you don’t have to win by a landslide. George W. Bush lost the 2000 election to Al Gore by 543,000 votes, and only won the electoral college 271-266. Trump lost the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million votes. The national polling average shows Biden leading Trump 52.2% to 42.0%. Let’s say Biden wins 50.2% and Trump gets 44% (with the rest going to third-party candidates). If, as some are projecting, a record 150 million Americans vote this year (a turnout rate of 62%, which would be slightly better than 2008), that would mean Biden earning nearly 9 million more votes than Trump. In such a context, any legislator thinking about voting to give their state’s electoral votes to the popular vote loser should pressed to answer why the people’s overwhelming will should be so nakedly thwarted.

Where Do Backlashes Come From?

Pondering the post-election dynamics, I find myself worrying less about how the media will cover the voting results and more about how it will cover the public’s reaction to those results. At all of the major news organizations, including Fox, there’s a political unit that specializes in analyzing election returns and projecting winners. You may recall how in 2012, Republican uber-operative Karl Rove tried to deny that Obama had won Ohio that night, but was rebuked on-air by the team at Fox’s Decision Desk. The major media, however, doesn’t cover mass demonstrations with the same degree of cool objectivity. Unfortunately, you don’t get good ratings showing pictures of orderly and peaceful protests; “if it bleeds, it leads,” has long been a rule of thumb for television. At times, this means more attention to injustices like police brutality (if there’s video to show); but it also means more attention to spectacles like burning buildings and extremist provocateurs.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, when America was riven by massive protests against the Vietnam War and for civil rights for Blacks, women, gays, Latinos and Native Americans, media coverage of those mass movements contributed greatly toward driving the conservative backlash against them (along with help from various nefarious government actors, like J. Edgard Hoover’s FBI). Historian Ted Morgan’s book What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy, is a must-read on this topic. About 8 years ago, I heard Morgan speak in Boston at a seminar of the Movement and Media Research & Action Project about this, and remember jotting in my notes something along the lines of, “little did we know that at the same time the left was organizing against the war, it was also, in effect, organizing the police and hard hats too.”

I’ve been thinking about this ever since this summer’s massive wave of protests in support of the Movement for Black Lives. One could see in those weeks a precursor of what may be around the corner next month. Outraged by the murder of George Floyd, millions of Americans took to the streets demanding fundamental reforms in policing and criminal justice. To the astonishment of longtime observers of grassroots organizing, these protests spread far beyond the usual hubs of liberal-left political activism in America. The Crowd Counting Consortium tallied more than 4,700 discrete locations for #BlackLivesMatter protests from late May into early July. That’s about six times as many places than the Women’s Marches of 2017. Many were in suburban and rural areas that are typically politically quiescent or supposedly dominated by more conservative folks.

What followed was also important: a secondary wave of #BlueLivesMatter protests that occurred in the penumbra of many of those events, often in suburban counties that have been trending more liberal. CountLove.org, which culls thousands of news sites constantly for reports of protests on a variety of topics, has tallied nearly 400 pro-police rallies across America since late May. While their data may be incomplete, they only show 26 such rallies from Trump’s inauguration until mid-May. Here in Westchester County, where I live, there were many pro-#BLM rallies, which didn’t surprise me, as the county has trended more Democratic especially since 2016. Seeing vocal support for #BlueLivesMatter especially after these rallies did turn my head. One was in mid-July in Harrison; another, at the end of August, was in the northwest Bronx; and a third, just a month ago in Tarrytown. While it’s understandable that people may want to express support for the police, who have difficult jobs, and their families also live daily with the stress that comes with the job, the rhetoric at these rallies goes way beyond mere expressions of civic love for public defenders. For example, at the August rally in the Bronx, which was organized by a retired policeman and attended by many off-duty cops, one speaker told the crowd of 200 that New York was “under attack” by an “insurgence of an extreme left population, subsequently creating violence and chaos that’s causing public safety to go out of control.”

We should welcome all forms of peaceful dissent, and the right to assemble peacefully to express grievances in public in enshrined in the Bill of Rights as the First Amendment. But dehumanizing rhetoric, along with conspiracy theories that threaten to delegitimize popular votes, can set the stage for violent action and political repression. As this report from Erie County, Pennsylvania, where leaflets from the Ku Klux Klan are showing up on people’s doorsteps, suggests, we are on a razor’s edge.

When I reached Morgan yesterday by email, he explained how the media had distorted the mass movements of the 1960s and in doing so failed democracy:

In much of my writing (and talks) I have described ways in which the mass media culture tended to exclude (not take seriously) any system-critical arguments from the antiwar, new Left, or black movements of the 60s while at the same time the media's cameras were widely drawn to the most inflammatory, militant, or extreme behaviors exhibited by individuals in the various movements (thus inviting more of the same). Quite clearly a significant focus of the establishment's backlash against the movements zeroed in on these behavioral manifestations, equating them ("violent," "anti-American" etc.) with the movements themselves. COINTELPRO under Hoover was responsible for galvanizing police repression of virtually all the 60s movements (civil rights, black power, BPP, New Left, student movement, antiwar movement, Socialist Workers Party, American Indian Movement, women's movement, etc.). So, the "unwitting" part would seem to apply to those in the antiwar movement who believed their inflammatory or militant actions were "getting the message through the media" when in fact, they were providing the forces of backlash with fodder for their ultimately successful propaganda campaigns.

I don't know if this fits your sense of what's happening now with the move towards "support our police" etc. or not, but to me it would seem to fit. Incidentally, with respect to "looting" by those who "joined in" alongside BLM protests, the inner city riots of the 60s very clearly triggered the "law and order" campaign that Nixon rode into the white House in 1968. I quote in the book a young black male in the aftermath of the Watts riot of 1965 saying "We won, because we made the whole world pay attention to us." As I put it, following that quote, "In reality, while the riot may have produced a temporary rush that felt like winning, and while it may have provoked action in some governmental quarters, these same dramatic media images were useful to those who sought to close off the longer-term prospects for building a more democratic society."

Longtime readers know I’m a congenital optimist, and I do think that today’s media has been doing a better job of covering today’s movements than in the past. But we’re in a period where history is moving fast. And when events move fast, the media often make mistakes. And first impressions count far more than they should.

Odds and Ends

Say hello to the 2020 Election Tech Handbook, a new section of the Civic Tech Field Guide that Matt Stempeck is curating with help from Allison Fine and yours truly. We’re paying extra attention to tools and projects that address not only how and where to vote, but efforts to help voters on long line, observe the election and assist in a peaceful transition of power. One of my favorites: SeeSay2020, a project of Democracy Labs, that is aggregating and visualizing citizen reports of voter suppression and election irregularities into real-time maps and alerts.

The August Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which drew nearly half a million people for a week of partying in rural South Dakota, was a Covid-19 super-spreader event, according to a data-intensive study by the Center for New Data’s Covid Alliance working group. I’m convinced by the research, which correlated the cellphone mobility data of thousands of actual attendees to later spikes in coronavirus cases in the counties associated with those attendees. But I also have to wonder whether we really want any organization to be able to purchase and analyze the records of 25 million cellphone owners, given how much detail is readily available.

On the other hand, Sturgis attendees had sneezing contests inside bars!?