You're not dreaming!

Biden wins a squeaker but Dems lose seats in the House and likely failed to take Senate

That was not fun.  I did not enjoy that.  Can we not do that again?

So, as I write this on Friday afternoon, Biden has pulled slightly ahead in PA and GA while maintaining leads in AZ and NV.  The betting markets have a Biden Presidency at a 95% probability though Trump and the GOP will continue to lie, steal, and litigate to the last second.  The Democrats will keep the house but lose a handful of seats.  Who knows, maybe Nancy Pelosi won’t die in office.  The Democrats have a shot at Senate control if they win both Georgia Senate runoffs -- but the betting markets put the odds of success at just 25%.

Some non-definitive, preliminary, likely to be completely revised at a later date, thoughts:

1. I’ll take it. 

I’m not happy but I’m not sad.  My disappointment about Congressional underperformance will slowly fade but my satisfaction at seeing “Trump” and “Lost” in the same newspaper headline will be vast, long-lasting, and life-affirming.  Yes, he and his merry band of morons will still be making mischief but NOT WITH HIS GRUBBY PAWS ON THE CONTROLS OF THE AMERICAN SHIP OF STATE. 

2. Hate conquers all

Biden pitched coming together/Kumbaya to an electorate that wanted to hate someone, anyone.  Would a more strident Bernie-esque pitch about economic unfairness have done better?  If Republicans are convinced Dems are communists, maybe it was pointless to make a show about moderation.  In the years ahead, I think it is critical that Democrats make the case very clearly and convincingly that the stock market may be hitting all time highs but the US economy is not working for three-quarters of Americans.

3. Split ticket

Related to #2, I know many Republicans who hated Trump, thought Trump was disgusting and voted for Biden… but who also hate Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer almost as much.  I wonder if there was rampant ticket-splitting (i.e., Reps voting for Biden for Pres but voting for Reps for congress).

4. Ground game

Republicans didn’t care about Covid and so ran a an exceptional get out the vote effort, whereas Dems stayed in the basement to avoid killing people.  Given that Trump’s entire strategy was to get the apparently vast number of illiterate yokels who’ve never voted to the polls, this may have been a key advantage.

5. What changed from 2018 and An Everest of Dupes

This is something I never really focused on but should have.  Never overlook simple facts.  In the 2016 election, there were 230 million eligible voters but only 135 million voted (~ 60%).  Among the 98 million with a high school education or less, the percentage who vote historically has been ~ 40-50%.  So there was ~ 50 million-plus votes for Trump to go after.  Trump had a bottomless well of easily duped hayseeds to brainwash into thinking he’s god.  His strategy was correct!  This would seem to be why the Dems did great in 2018 but underperformed in 2020.  This cohort of voters worships Trump but otherwise don’t vote.  The Dems must have SOMETHING to offer these unfortunate people in terms of a better economic future.

6. Trump Es Loco pero Muy Muy Macho

Dems, stop treating Latinos as a homogenous block.  Stop treating them as though they are somehow “naturally” liberal.  They are lovers of all things macho, many are very religious and socially conservative.  A successful future strategy for liberals cannot be one where you rely on getting 90% of Latinos and forget about ignorant Whites.  That is a party based on race, not principles.  The same is true for Blacks.  No party should assume they are the “natural home” of any race and that those who resist “ain’t black”.  Great piece from Fareed Zakaria on this.

7. Riots

I can’t help but think that the morphing of BLM protests into occasional riots and vandalism (often spurring by vicious police attacks), plus a sense of disorder and rising crime in big cities was a big factor in why the “blue suburban wave” turned out to be kind of feeble.  Portland hurts, San Francisco hurts, NYC hurts, Chicago hurts.  The charge that the Democrats can’t seem to successfully manage large cities -- as unfair as that may be to say -- is a very potent attack line and another reason why more Republicans didn’t vote the Dem ticket even if they voted for Biden.  I see this as an enduring Achilles heel for Dems.  Why should we let you run the country if you can’t run a city?

8. The Matrix?

Two weeks ago, Keith Raniere, the leader of the NXIVM cult was sentenced to 120 years in prison.  Several new documentaries explain how thousands of really bright, really high performing men and women, people with successful careers in business and professions were duped by a creep selling “professional development”.  The highest performing women were initiated into a secret society within NXIVM where they had sex with Raniere and allowed themselves to be branded with his initials near their public region.  While there is a certain prurient interest in how it happened, the takeaway actually shouldn’t be a surprise at all: under the right circumstances anyone can be made to believe anything.  The surprise is that we’re surprised.

2500 years ago, Siddhartha Gautama taught that each of us create our own versions of reality – which have little or nothing to do with actual reality.  About the same time, Plato taught that what we think is reality is actually an internal construct bearing little relation to the truth.  Over the last 25-30 years, social scientists have started to catch up.  Behavioral economics has proven (i.e., through repeatable experiments) that human beings, contrary to what had been assumed by economists, are not at all rational in making decisions and that generally speaking, most people are easily influenced, in a whole series of predictable ways, by how information is presented to them.  Of course none of this was a surprise to the folks on Madison Avenue.

Take all of that and add into the equation social media sites/apps that target users with sophisticated "engagement" algorithms which use artificial intelligence to continually enhance and optimize their power over their users -- and why are we surprised that Trump can not only win once but come close to winning again?  Why are we surprised that the reality of 230 thousand deaths has no effect at all on Trump supporters' understanding of reality.  Trump isn’t the issue.  There've been con men, frauds, and faux holy men throughout human history.  The issue is that our poor inadequate brains, optimized for brontosaurus hunts and procreation, when plopped into an atomized digital world of ever changing, infinite “information”, bereft of trusted sources, targeted by sophisticated machine learning algorithms -- have an incredibly hard time perceiving truth.  It's never been particularly difficult to get people to believe a lie but in 2020, it is vastly easier than it's ever been.  This does not bode well for representative democracy.