The Puzzling 2020 Election

New York election workers coping with a deluge of absentee ballots, November 3, 2020.

No, I can’t leave the 2021 election alone, nor should anyone else. As of now, though, it is, as per Churchill’s quip about the Soviet Union, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Analysis varies so much and is often infected with wishful thinking and partisan bias. Maybe it’s just that it’s too soon to tell. Maybe we’ll just have to wait for analytical competence. I don’t know.

Part of the problem lies in our affection for generalizations. Generalizations stray into oversimplifications. Many Republicans ask themselves the question, can we have Trump without Trump? Meaning, can we have Trump’s good parts and not his bad parts? The answer frequently swirls around stats that compare his numbers with R’s down ballot in an attempt to measure his toxicity. And that picture is murky. He did better in some places and worse in others. In the battleground ‘burbs, the scene is equally cloudy. The plain fact is that the numbers are all over the map making general conclusions difficult.

In addition, the raw vote totals for Trump don’t paint a clear picture. He added to his vote totals in some states, counties, and precincts, but in many of those places so do did Biden. In Texas for instance, Trump added 1.2 million more votes, but Biden added 1.3 million. In other locations, he didn’t. Thus, the percentage differential between him and Biden fluctuated wildly. Post-election boasts from either side is probably pablum.

Processing ballots in Michigan, November 3, 2020.

Two factors missing from the analysis are secularization and the weird election system that was concocted this time around. Secularization is a trend that predates Trump. Broadly speaking, it has been on the march long before Trump, even in places that have been Republican strongholds. How much has it weakened the strength of the elephant party? As of yet, I haven’t seen any numbers for this election. I suspect – and suspicion is all that I have at this point – that it has continued its onward march. Religiosity has been known to have a clear relationship to political affiliation and voting patterns. The trend has been going ill for Republicans.

2012 Secular Society march.

And then there’s COVID. The virus was destructive, and so was our reaction to it. The economy, the schools, our social life was laid waste. Elections weren’t spared. Distance voting joined social distancing and distance learning and distance working in our lives, with equally deleterious effects. It was imposed by purely authoritarian means, and out the window went voter authentication at the point of voting, which was the precinct polling place in normal times. Not this time. The point of voting happened to be a home with any number of people to fill them out, cajole, harangue. The person alone with their conscience became a social affair.

Increasingly conducting an election by mail is fraught with serious credibility problems. In many states, the simple authenticating act of presenting an ID to a precinct worker in normal in-person suffrage was replaced by county registrar worker bees functioning as graphologists. I didn’t know that handwriting expertise could be so easily performed by temporary, underpaid, and overwhelmed election workers. Software can help, but I wonder about its efficacy. This and other mutilations of our vote system resulted in mail-in votes accounting for over 60% of the total cast. This election system was weird, very weird, making comparisons highly suspect.

What would never have been tolerated in prior elections was done with zeal in this one. In some states, ballots were shot-gunned through the mail from voter registration lists littered with inaccuracies. Absentee ballots laid in clumps beneath mail boxes in apartment complexes in some documented cases. Forget about voter verification; forget about knowing what happens behind a home’s four walls to the four ballots that arrived. Out the window went the secret ballot. The normal election system was completely upended in many states.

The process so skewed the vote numbers that this election stands as a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, hardly analogous to any other. The process dictated the outcome to a great degree. The Democrats have long maintained the advantage in the suspicious kind of voting that doesn’t require your presence. Combine this with their longstanding vetoes of voter authentication measures and efforts to clean up the voter lists and you have an election system that feeds into their wheelhouse. They now have a legalized means to round up the large cohorts of the uninterested and ill-informed in their potential fan base. Their numbers were inflated in ways that hopefully will be never replicated again. All numbers were artificially inflated, with COVID-panic as the underlying excuse. As a result, once again, any comparisons with earlier elections to draw out trends will be fraught with misperceptions.

Since vote-by-mail asks so little of the voter – after all, the ballot comes to them so they don’t even have to go get it – it places premium on the uncaring and moron voter. In normal times, they won’t get off their couch. I intuit – and intuition is all that many of us have at this time – that a large increase in the moron vote in this election had some effect. To whose benefit? Can’t say. I have my suspicions.

Then we have the person of Trump, a third underappreciated element in this campaign season. How did his outsized personality affect the results? The spectrum of reactions to him ranged from repulsed to merely tolerated to loved, with not much between the markers. The personality-driven election may have made it possible for Biden to run his “not Trump” campaign from his basement and thereby hide his mental incontinence by simply laying back to garner the repulsed, something easy to do with ballots scattered by mail and postage-free voting. Trump here, there, and everywhere may have altered the normal election landscape.

In so many ways, this was an election like no other. It stands alone, and may not be comparable at all. So, when I see talking heads make bold claims, I shake my head in wonder at the silliness. They take the black swan election of 2020 and place it in a line with previous ones. But that’s like bringing onto the stage the 7’2” Kareem Abdul Jabbar and then claiming that he’s proof that we’re getting taller.

To the editors of publications of the literary set: 2020 was a huge black swan event which mangled everything within its calendar. Please exercise caution before you spout.

RogerG

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