Or at least that's what the headlines could have been saying. Now if you're thinking I'm right because of all of the massive amounts of vote fraud that occurred in November of 2020, this is not the post for you. Until your crack squad of professional dipshits can do anything besides hold press conferences where they say all the things they won't say in court, yet still never present any evidence, consider yourself out of school here. You’ve gotten used to trying everything in the court of public opinion and muddying the waters enough to either win or soil the prize to where it isn’t worth anything anymore. You’re as annoying as the lefties who say Putin is the only reason Trump won the 2016 election. Now that your man has to go to actual court court, he doesn’t have a fucking fart in a skillet. Take that shit back to the corner of the internet where your bubble is impenetrable. Here in the halls of the Big Empty, like the courts, facts still matter. In God We Trust, all others; bring data. So unless you are the Almighty Himself, your "plausible theories about what could explain the outcome that you can't fathom is possible" hold not one fucking drop of water here. There are plenty of other sites that will eat that garbage up, but this isn't one of them.
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So, How'd we end up here in a movie review series? I've been working on the Best Documentary category, which I hope to finish soon. My plan was to finish that up in September so that I could get to work on the Horror Category in October. I think doing the Horror post was my plan for October of last year too now that I think of it. Holy crap this is taking longer than I ever thought it would. I'll finish this....I will. I think I will. No, I will.
Movies aren't on my mind much right now. We are almost into month 9 of the Covid. We just ended a very divisive election. Every time we have one of those, we always say it was more divisive than any other previous election so saying that is somewhat stock. But it was partly because, love him or hate him, there is no way that we can have anything unifying where Donald Trump is involved. He's not the cause, but rather the most glaring symptom of the rhetorical cancer that is now how government is chosen in the United States.
As I sit here with two paragraphs written, I'm thinking to myself that I know this is going to be a long post, so I'll say what I think is the crux of the matter right at the top, and then go from there. There are some, heck probably many many people, especially supporters of Trump that will disagree with me on this, but I truly believe there are two factors that had the greatest influence on the outcome of the election:
- Donald Trump botched the pandemic response and doubled down on failure.
- Had Trump told people to take the pandemic seriously and followed guidelines from the experts, we'd be on the waning end of the pandemic, the economy would be showing strong signs of recovery, and it would have been worth 4-8% points nationally and at most state levels, especially the tipping point states.
- The appeal of Donald Trump's performative jerkitude has a ceiling.
- Had Trump conducted himself, especially on Twitter and at rallies with better decorum and spoke substantively instead of stylistically, it would have been worth about 5-10% of the group of people who make up the center right-center left Independents and Democrats who voted against him. This would likely be offset by a modest and probably insignificant drop in the enthusiasm of the contingent of his base that normally doesn't participate in the process but is enthralled by his penchant for brawling. There'd be less trucks and boats all decked out in efforts to outdo all of the other Stans out there. But I don't think it would be a wash. He'd be trading some homegrown flag displays and Rocky/Rambo art for a lot more votes. I see a net gain for the man who is now the outgoing President in this scenario.
You can disagree with me, fine. Some may say the pandemic is overblown or that making this argument is TDS. You'd be wrong though. This election was in fact a referendum on Donald Trump in the White House and whether his concerns aligned with the concerns of the electorate. You can say the electorate was wrong to have those concerns, but that's not how this works. Whether you think they're right or wrong, the people get the final say. So there you have it. Had Trump done just No. 1, he likely gets Wisconsin back, and makes it much tighter in Pennsylvania. Even Michigan wouldn't be out of reach, as that is a state that was hit hard early by Covid. Under this scenario you get:
- Biden: 306-10-20-16 = 260
- Trump: 232+10+20+16 = 278
Doing just number 2 is incredible to ponder. Just follow along on this journey for a moment.
- Donald Trump stops insulting a beloved public figure in Arizona named John McCain, and instead acknowledges McCain's dedicated service and contributions to our country. He commends McCain's very distinguished career in the Senate representing his state.
- Biden: 306-11= 295
- Trump: 232+11= 243
- Along these lines, this scenario asks us to really start stretching our imaginations beyond the boundaries of fiction, but since Georgia was so close, it matters. In this scenario Trump would have attended the funeral of John Lewis and made remarks about the contributions that Lewis made toward the cause of freedom and justice for all people in America.
- Biden: 295-16=279
- Trump: 243+16=259
- With Wisconsin and the Nebraska 2nd district being so close and the number of moderate Republicans and Independents put off by Trump's confrontational style throughout the battleground states we get this math:
- Biden: 279-10-1= 268
- Trump: 259+10+1=270
- And that's just the beginning. We haven't even talked about his antagonism toward the city of Philadelphia in the first debate. He had a chance to hold Pennsylvania. Under this scenario, this also means that he would not have been confrontational with the Governor of Michigan. If this goes so far as to alter history such that nobody is inspired to kidnap and murder her, or if that still plays out but Trump instead says that kind of thing has no place in the United States of America, Michigan is back in play. Let's just suppose our friends in the mitten state say this is just the kind of elixir we need in these crazy times and it's enough to keep Michigan in the Trump column.
- Biden: 268-20-16=232
- Trump: 270+20+16=306
Now if you found yourself laughing at the notion of Trump ever taking the 2nd tack, I guarantee you you weren't laughing as hard as I was while typing it. The whole idea goes against everything that he is and stands for. And yet, I'll submit to you that Trump, had he just known how to behave like an adult would have easily duplicated the electoral results of 2016 +2.
Now had he done both 1 and 2, we're talking about a bona fide landslide the likes of which we haven't seen since Ronald Reagan blasted Walter Mondale into political exile.
I'll spot you a Nevada (+6), one state of Maine with a bonus district (+3), Minnesota (+10), New Hampshire (+4), and a narrow loss in Virginia, but within the margin of error so consider that potential for (+13).
The headline on Wednesday morning would be: Trump Cruises to Re-election with Broad Mandate for Second Term. We'd be reading editorials and columns later in the week with titles like "California Back in play for Republicans" and "RNC Chair Sees Opportunity in Coastal States Once Thought Unreachable."
So now that we're done playing make-believe, let's get to what really happened.
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We now live in an era deadlocked in a state of perpetual political grievance. Donald Trump was the antithesis of both 1 and 2, perhaps because his political calculus quickly concluded that this motivated his base more than ever. We have two parties that have been keeping score against each other in a Mortal Kombat death match for most of my adult life. I can't say when this started. An argument could be made that grievance politics have been around as long as the U.S. has and built to a fever pitch in the election of 1860 when we elected a president who wasn't even on the ballot in a third of the states participating (10/33). We've been engaged in culture wars since the beginning.
But the modern iteration that has led to deep polarization, score keeping, and grievance settling I'd wager to say began for Republicans in 1987. Vietnam was behind us at that point along with all of the offenses and personal slights they felt about the protests and chaos the DFH's (Dirty Fucking Hippies, ™ patented) brought on. That was an era that had passed. They believed it was morning in America, we were winning the Cold War™ (patent at the time still pending), and America was well on her way toward prosperity at home and hegemony abroad. Then came the Borking, an event so awful just typing it makes me tremble and the sight of it on my flickering screen makes me prostrate myself before all that is mighty on heaven and Earth and beg forgiveness. And you thought the Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest we came to total annihilation. I'll have to move on, but suffice it to say, for adult voting age Republicans in the twilight of the 80's and their young offspring, it was on from this point.
How to characterize the Democrats in this era is tricky. Some of the DFH's grew up and got jobs, got married, had kids, and some became Reagan voting Republicans. Those that didn't swing right pined for the days of the Kennedy's and lived in high hopes that they would one day ride back into the limelight to usher in a liberal paradise. Jimmy Carter's presidency failed. Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis tried to carry that torch, to no avail. After Bill Clinton benefited from a popular third party candidate while facing a lackluster opponent, he governed mostly from the center left and was checked by a Republican Congress from pursuing any liberal dreams. Al Gore tried to do whatever it was he tried to do, then John Kerry once again tried to resurrect left leaning classical liberalism. It failed. With all of this rejection, it's tough for me to understand why there is a faction of the modern left that truly believes that Democrats lose elections because they don't talk boldly enough about how they're going to give you free stuff. When I talk to people who aren't innately political, I don't ever hear anyone say they need more free stuff. They want a fair chance to make ends meet without having to ask the government for help. Ask any liberal who is not a pundit or politician what the three most important things that need to be addressed are, the first item on their list will be:
- Human rights
- Civil rights
- Animal rights
- Global warming
- Environmental justice
- Peace
- Economic justice
- Racial justice
- Social justice
- Women's rights
- LGBTQ+ rights
- Abolishing the electoral college
- Raising the minimum wage
- Free College
- Free student loans
- Free child care
- Free stuff not already mentioned
Centrists and Independents listen to this and hear "my taxes will go up to pay for things that people shouldn't need to have provided for them by the government, and we aren't going to make any progress on the problems I'm seeing."
Just using student loan debt forgiveness as an example, free stuff is an electoral loser. Last I checked, student loan debt is not thrust upon students at gunpoint, and there are still affordable college options available. If all student debt is on the table for forgiveness regardless of how it came about, then the struggling single parent enrolled in classes to improve their earning potential is completely but not equally entitled to the same benefits as:
- an average student who didn't apply for any scholarships they could have reasonably been awarded
- a student who could have earned a degree with high earning potential from a reasonably priced public institution but chose to go to a much more expensive private school and borrowed a lot more money to do so
- a student who changes majors or transfers to the tune of requiring more credit hours or results in accumulating much more debt while obtaining a degree
Where do the kids who work hard in high school to earn scholarships, work a part time job in the summer to offset costs, and choose an institution that is within their budget without having to borrow the equivalent of a 4 bedroom home mortgage fit in? Well they don't. The new name for these would-be model students is: suckers. Why do it that way when you can just borrow all the money and send the bill to the taxpayers? Hell, take a couple of extra years discovering yourself while you're at it? It's on the house so why not? Ooh, also, in the meantime, the academic institutions and lenders are still getting filthy rich on a way overpriced commodity, but at least that's not the students' problem. Just the taxpayers problem. I mean how does a school compete for students without 5 star hotel residence halls and a state of the art Rec Center with a bitchin rock wall? Not to worry though. It will all get paid for by billing it back to the students, who will pass that bill right on to the taxpayers. We don't need to worry about reigning in the costs of this disproportionately high boondoggle at all because we're in a free paradise! And now that college debt is free, why isn't credit card debt free? I mean it is unfair to poor people right? We can't have a discussion on the left about which credit card debt is worthy of forgiveness because only Republicans would talk that way and we all know they just hate poor people amirite?
Here's the secret that they've never learned, one that Republicans have embraced since the 1960s. The party that wins the election is the one that succeeds in dividing the other party. No exceptions. So progressives, Bernie-bros, AOC fans, I love your passion and I even like how cutting edge you all are. But as long as you keep narrowing the definition of who belongs, it just won't matter how many Instagram followers you have compared to your opponents. They are the left-wing equivalent of a Trump-truck. The truck owner still only gets one vote even if he adds five more flags than it had last week. There are plenty of people who don't care about Instagram....and aren't tattooing their trucks or boats with devotion to a candidate....but they do always vote. I'm one of them.
So what happened in 2020? Instead of Trump embracing strategy 1 or 2, Trump embraced Trump, and embraced those that embrace Trump . Joe Biden went into his basement and kept a low profile. We've seen this from a Democrat before. John Kerry calculated in 2004 that he would also lay low when Bush was being assaulted with bad news from Iraq on a daily basis. "You don't need to commit homicide on someone who is committing suicide" he quipped to those who told him to take the gloves off. He failed. Hillary Clinton tried this on Trump, banking that no sane person would seriously consider Donald Trump as presidential. She was wrong. Bush still had a coherent message of outreach for moderates, independents and Democrats. And he had a war that he'd convinced enough Americans needed to be finished. Trump had a constituency fed up for years and years with a political system that never solved the very real problems they were facing. Trump's was the first candidacy that even acknowledged that people were right to be angry about it.
How did Biden manage to translate this failing strategy into enough votes where those who came before him failed? He didn't scare moderates, and Trump did. That shifted the math, but nobody really knew if it would until they counted real votes. And one of the other things that happened that was not predicted until the final days of the campaign, was that both parties suffered small, but significant defections to the other side that neither anticipated. Sure we had the Obama --->Trump voters, and we had the Never Trump Republicans already baked into this election. But what the Biden campaign didn't see as well as they should have was diminishing support from minorities. This is an issue that demands soul searching from Democrats, a party that is famously bad at ever looking inward for answers. There is always, it seems some external force of evil in the country, misogyny, racism, xenophobia....etc that is the real reason. This oversimplified explanation doesn't answer why women and minorities vote for Trump and will continue to vote for Trumpy candidates in the future. This is the part where the left nearly always springs the trap from their own rhetoric on themselves. They don't quite say the quiet part out loud, but the explanation all too often given for this is that [insert demographic here] is not smart enough to know what is good for them. This isn't political seppuku, this is just wandering into heavy traffic with a blindfold on and getting killed before you even realize there's any danger. The Darwin Award that just keeps on giving to Republicans.
While Trump's team was delighting in their ability to peel away voters from the Democratic base though, they neglected to watch their own flank enough to see what was happening in their own backyard. Perhaps their view was clouded by all of the flags bearing his name. People that vote reliably Republican were doing so except when making their selection for President. Biden succeeded where Kerry and Hillary Clinton didn't not because he divided the opposing party, but because Trump did. If Trumpism is the new Republican standard, these defectors need a political home, and they are looking for solutions rooted in the language of the constitution and in classical liberal conservatism. They think we should only spend within our means, that local governing is the place to solve local problems, and resent being told what to do by people who don't know their communities or local culture.
Progressives can tell themselves they don't need moderates and they may be right. I don't think they are, but we are but 4 short years away from an election for an open White House, and if the Democrats lose or eek out a small win, will we once again hear them saying "how could so many people not see we're the better choice?!" after spending three years prior defining all of the people who didn't fit in? After spending 3 years not engaging in the states that they don't usually win? In the meantime, Republicans are all over the down ballot running unopposed for local, county, and state level offices every single year. They are getting votes anyway because they are the only ones listening to the people with those ballots. Oh and Barack Obama listened to them too. But that didn't have anything to do with him winning anything at all. And who needs him anyway? He's Republican.
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