Coping

I appreciate that there are reasons to be optimistic, but at the same time I cannot help but feel like we’re living in some horrific mashup of 2016 (shocking defeat) and 2000 (long-drawn out agony). The downside of the latter is the paralysis; it becomes impossible to do any kind of planning or even serious thinking about the future while uncertainty about the future remains.

I know we’re not in the mood for takeaways right now, but here are my very initial thoughts; feel free to dismantle in the comments, I won’t feel bad at all.

• Can’t dismiss this with “we were pretty close to right, just standard polling error” as in 2016. Voting continues, but the errors were substantial, mostly in one direction, and extended down to the Senate, House, and state houses. The only upside is that the error doesn’t seem to be random (5 points in one direction can be accounted for, obviously), but that’s actually gonna have to happen before next time.
• We’ve barely even started to think about specific tactical lessons, but it does seem clear that the Biden campaign undertook an ineffective defensive operation regarding Black and Latino voters. Trump telegraphed that he would try to cut into traditional Democratic margins with these groups, and too often our response was “look at the obvious racism” rather than undertaking more significant outreach and mobilization.
• That said, it is very difficult for me to look at the Democratic field and say “this candidate would have won more votes than Biden.” Indeed, Trump generated high turnout by arguing that Biden was more like his defeated primary opponents than he actually was.
• As far as I can tell, the pandemic turned out to be irrelevant; folks had priced Trump’s bravado and incompetence into their calculations, and so it ended up not mattering. The summer of unrest may have been somewhat more consequential, although it didn’t turn up in the places you’d most expect it.

With respect to our happy little LGM community, October 2020 was a record month for traffic, exceeding the previous record set in July. Also, Tuesday and Wednesday are the two highest traffic days in the august history of the blog, exceeding the previous daily record by about 20%. So, thank you all for enduring this with us.