Postmortem Note

Certainly looks like I was completely wrong about the presidential polls, in general, or at least the relation between the polls and what was going to happen. I'm still not convinced the race was ever as close and immobile as they kept portraying it, through all the turmoil from June to now. It's easier to talk about what did happen, which is clear from the NBC exit poll: it was the last-minute undecideds, so beloved of the media, probably the lowest propensity voters of all, who really did decide the election, "breaking" for Trump in the last week, after a period, mainly in September and October, when the main event was Democrats and Democrat leaners allowing themselves to get excited about the freshness and novelty of Harris and Walz, and the departure of Biden made the awfulness of Trump briefly more apparent.

But the majority of the voters decided Trump's awfulness didn't matter, in the finding of the AP VoteCast, a massive survey of 115,000 voters, and there's an element of incipient fascism in that:

Nearly 6 in 10 said Trump lacked the moral character to be president, a reflection of his criminal convictions, his often inflammatory rhetoric, his sexist remarks and actions and his denial of the 2020 presidential election results that fed into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Slightly fewer than half said Harris did not possess the morality to be president.

But voters gave Trump an edge on being a strong leader. Slightly more than half of voters described Trump as a strong leader, and slightly fewer than half said the same about Harris.

About 6 in 10 said Harris has the mental capability to serve effectively as president, compared to about half who said that about Trump.

Majorities liked Harris, and disliked Trump, recognizing him as bad and stupid, and presumably old, but a majority thought he had something we need. Being a "strong leader" is the important thing, and it isn't incompatible with those qualities. That's not just a view of those last-minute guys, but all the Republican voters.

I also have to acknowledge that there must be some validity to the conventional wisdom that inflation and immigration were the main issues, in spite of how silly it sounds to me, given that whatever I can recognize as a problem with inflation or immigration was fixed months ago. 

The public certainly cares about abortion rights, and generally votes that way on a referendum when it has a direct opportunity, but it doesn't seem to recognize it as a partisan question, as you can see from the votes in Missouri and Florida, where votes on abortion were completely disconnected from votes on Republican candidates, as if there were no connection between the two. Similarly, there seems to be plenty of concern about American democracy, but it hardly recognizes any difference between the parties:

Immigration and inflation, in contrast, seem to be entirely partisan issues, tagged as bad things that Democrats are to blame for, and both parts of the misinformation economy, much easier to lie about than to explain. 

Immigration misinformation has been a mainstay of the crude level, memes and spam email reports, some of them no doubt concocted in foreign intel operations, since the first denunciations of "caravans" of "illegals" in 2014. We were talking this morning about why so many people of immigrant backgrounds, Latino and Asian, vote for Trump on the immigration issue: it's because their phones are full of it, every day, passed on by friends through Tik Tok and WeChat. Inflation misinformation belongs to the upper level of stories originating in the prestige press, which treat it not as an economics problem (here's what's happening and can the government do something about it?) but a horserace problem (here's what's being perceived and will it hurt the candidate's chances?).

The prevalence of political misinformation, aggravated by rightwing attacks on education for critical thinking from figures like Ron DeSantis and Christopher Rufo, could be the most fundamental cause of yesterday's disastrous election. I can't imagine what to do about it, or if anything can be done. 

***

Another thing: We thought for the past two weeks or so from all the excited reporting on early voting that this was going to be a very high-turnout election, but it was the opposite: Trump won with quite a lot fewer votes than the number with which he lost to Biden in 2020; Harris got far fewer votes than that. 

2024: Trump 71,633,021 to Harris 66,802,204

2020: Trump 74,223,975 to Biden 81,283,501

Perhaps the Trump campaign's GOTV was as bad as we thought, but the Democratic campaign wasn't so flawless as we were led to believe, is one thing I'm thinking. I'm not really thinking that Gavin Newsom and the mini-primary would have done any better; if anything, that the whole situation was really terrible (there was some misinformation involved in the reporting on Biden's age and debate performance, by the way, of the prestige press variety; Emptywheel has a story, keyed to Bob Woodward's new book, of a reason why Biden performed so badly in that debate: stress and guilt in the roller coaster over Hunter Biden' criminal conviction at the same time, for which he blamed himself--if he hadn't been president...). 

But the numbers show it wasn't some huge last-minute wave of support for Trump. The election wasn't a massive ideological shift, as some have called it, but a massive withdrawal, of almost 18 million voters, into the woodwork.

One reason why Trump‘s win is bad news for the entire planet — not just for American citizens.

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— Kerim Friedman 傅可恩 (@kerim.oxus.net) November 6, 2024 at 5:26 AM