Swing State Voter Report: Some warmed-over hot takes
In recent days, there have been a spate of broadcasts and articles on “here is what historical precedent/constitutional law/the Magic-8 ball on my desk tells us about what to expect from a Trump presidency.” I understand this, and for a minute I was consuming this media as desperately as I refreshed 538 through the campaign. But the problem is we are in truly uncharted territory, where the historical past can only tell us so much about what to expect from the future.
I spend a lot of my time thinking about how we can learn from the Earth, and in particular, what Americans can learn from our relationship with the American landscape. And I had a pretty epic realization the other day, the kind that immediately made me look for the beer with the highest ABV in the fridge: Donald Trump is a lot like climate change itself. Historical data only gives us a baseline to measure how radical things are getting, but it can no longer provide us accurate predictions of the future because what has taken place is so unprecedented. This is why flood insurance maps/flood predictions get so politicized – they are based on historical flooding data, but historical data is no longer predictive of a world with a 2C temperature increase. But regardless of how unthinkable and terrible Trump and climate change is, this is really happening, and as things get underway, it seems to have a scary effect of accelerating things faster than we thought. We can predict things will be bad, but the timing of when shit will hit the fan and how bad it will be, or if we’ll only actually realize it hit the fan in retrospect, is part of what makes all of this so gut-wrenching.
I have a lot of thoughts about the many directions of fallout from this election. I don’t think I’m going to do a good job of unpacking all of them in one go, but here are my hot takes on everyone else’s hot takes, and I won’t even make you pay a subscription for my blog (but I always welcome a beer next time you see me if you like what I write).
First, a quick word on hot takes in general: A diagnosis is not a cure. A diagnosis is not a cure. A DIAGNOSIS IS NOT A CURE. Right now, I’m seeing too many postmortems and not enough “…and here’s how we win elections again and fight like hell in the mean time.” I don’t know about y’all, but nihilism is not a solution (and it sure as hell ain’t a cure). In fact, I strongly believe nihilism is one of the most weaponized forms of oppression that people internalize far too much. Fuck nihilism, do whatever you need to do to be rested and ready for the road ahead. I’ll be back with more writing in the coming weeks.
Back to the title of this post:
How I’m Handling Existence At The Moment:
I don’t think it’s an accident that the vast majority of people who were checking in on me within the first couple of days after the election were women. Women know how to do emotional labor, and lord did the women in my life deliver it over and over as soon as it became clear what was going on. It really sucked to go from feeling like I was serving democracy by working the polls on Election Day (I definitely now feel entitled to my strong opinions about how elections are administered), to taking the express rocket into the post-election hell mouth. For the first 36 hours or so after the results I was dealing with physical symptoms of something (panic? shock? not totally sure but my blood literally felt cold and I felt like the skin on the back of my arms was going to peel off). I also had to drive up to Pittsburgh the morning after the election for a conference, and mostly made it there safely thanks to distracting podcasts and a long phone call with my best friend.
For friends and colleagues who reached out to me: thank you, thank you, thank you.
Why are we obsessed about the white working class and not the white McMansion suburbanites?
Ask yourself why coastal media outlets are so obsessed with profiling the poor white people who voted for Trump and not the similar numbers of middle- and upper-class white people who did the same. I have some theories, they involve two things: 1. White people acting like a six-figure salary and a college-degree makes them immune from racism and related dubious-political choices, 2. These same media outlets don’t want to piss off their subscriber base.
A word for those who want this election to be permission to write off the Midwest and South forever: you’re telling me that women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks who live in the middle of the country don’t matter.
You want some progress from flyover country? Send the folks in the South and the Midwest who are DOING. THE. DAMN. WORK. some help, money, or prayers, or STFU. I really, really, really need the national Democratic party leadership to not abandon the Midwest right now, because my reproductive rights will literally depend on it the second Roe is overturned at the federal level and bullshit trigger laws start taking effect. I don’t want to have to get on an airplane if I ever need an abortion (something that is already a reality for a lot of women in this country).
Do you know how hard people in places like Texas and Ohio work on things like reproductive access? Harder than you can possibly imagine. We work our tails off because it’s not abstract, it’s not theoretical, it’s very, very real. I’ve been a part of a supporters’ group affiliated with Planned Parenthood for a couple of years now, and people who do not spend time in this area have not a damn clue how bad things already have been for years now.
I don’t need condescension right now from Midwest ex-pats who live in coastal areas that say things like “Ugh, I’m so glad I don’t live there anymore.” I don’t need people to engage in narratives that erase the diversity of the Midwest by trying to say we’re all homogeneous and parochial white people. I REALLY don’t need bullshit secession fantasies
For those of us fighting the good fight right here at home, we need your money, we need your organizing strategies, and if you’ve ever thought about moving, or boomeranging back, to the Midwest, I can’t think of a better time to come here and help us. We need all the help we can get. And assuming we don’t all perish first in nuclear war, you know you’re going to want to be in a state that has access to some of the best freshwater sources on Earth when climate change really fucks things up.
Where are the geographers?
I really need some good, county-by-county breakdown on WTF happened in Midwestern counties that went Obama-Obama-Trump by the political geographers out there. I’ve read probably a dozen theories by now, but much of it is highly speculative (as well as lazy, uncritical, and self-serving), and there has been precious little comparison of in-migration/out-migration demographics (i.e., did the eligible voter population change in the last 4 years in a way that favored Trump), how voter restrictions might have affected the populations in those particular areas, how gerrymandered legislative districts might have affected turnout for the national ticket, etc etc.
Because I haven’t seen any articles from anyone who seems to know what the hell they’re talking about when it comes to Ohio political geographic analysis, I went and looked at the counties that Democrats have carried in the last several elections (2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, disclaimer: I have not verified wikipedia’s sourcing of county return data against official state elections sources). While this is very quick and dirty, non-scientific, non-rigorous analysis, here is what I found. Basically from 2000-2012, Dems consistently carried an average of 17 counties per general election – in other words, most of these were reliable Democratic counties that we won despite whether it was Bush or Obama who won the White House. This year? We only got 7 counties (out of 88). I wish a political geographer would dig into this, but this is why I am losing my goddamn mind lately about the state of the state party.
We have been asking too many “why” questions during this election. In my opinion, going forward, we need to be asking more questions that start with “where.” The where matters, because as we all learned the hard way, a national election is not won by “how many votes did someone get?”, it’s won by “where are the states that deliver us 270 electoral votes.” I think the electoral college is horse shit as much as the next lefty, but until that changes, we need a geographic analysis for every single aspect of our organizing. We need to start asking questions like, “where are the counties that we can flip back from Trump? where are the precincts that suffered the most disenfranchisement, and how do we prioritize those precincts for voter registration the next election? where are the most brazenly gerrymandered districts? where are the union halls that we need to make sure the candidate actually shows up to visit if they give a damn about winning labor’s vote?”
The GOP has been building their party up for 40 years and we were asleep at the wheel
We have so much ground to make up because of breathtakingly incompetent leadership who walked away from the 50 State Strategy to concentrate on easy wins or galas or whatever else makes the Democratic leadership confuse schmoozing donors for actual organizing. Meanwhile, not only was the GOP doubling down on the Gospel of the 1%, they rarely left a contest uncontested, turned gerrymandering up to 11 following the 2008 election, all while marinating in decades worth of propaganda from Lee Atwater to Jerry Falwell to Karl Rove.
Maybe the Democrats haven’t completely lost their moral compass, but I sure as hell wish we’d figured out how to win more races in the meantime. Because right now the GOP has an unbelievable lock on both state and federal governance.
Right here in Ohio, we have a habit of throwing promising leaders, who are often young, under the bus. We did it a few years ago. Then the Party came back for more humble pie this year, outdoing itself by cutting down P.G. Sittenfeld in order to back a candidate who had a compelling millennial outreach strategy that involved telling his younger opponent that politics isn’t like playing Little League. Meanwhile, the “it’s their turn” establishment Democrats get their asses kicked at election-time, and people freak out about who the next generation of leaders will be. Sound familiar?
No matter where they are in life, people feel like their vote doesn’t matter and that’s a problem
Look, I tried to warn y’all about this idea that voting is an individual act of conscience, and how dangerous this ideology is, especially when it comes to turning out the vote. And what’s happened is because we keep acting like voting is this individual declaration of intent or some personal branding signal, then of course when you’re on the losing side, it’s going to feel like your vote didn’t matter.
Some of you may know that I did some voter registration and canvassing for Clinton in the area near where I live. I also served as a poll worker on election day. The areas I canvassed for the Clinton campaign were mostly low-income neighborhoods, and the residents are predominantly people of color. One day when I was doing voter registration, a young black man told me he doesn’t vote because he doesn’t believe it matters. The area where I served as a poll worker was in an area that was middle to upper-class, with predominantly white residents. During my very long day checking people in to the voter registration book and issuing ballots, some older white people also grumbled and said “None of this matters anyway, our votes won’t count.”So folks, this is where we’re at: no matter where they’re at in life, tons of people in my own corner of Ohio feel like their vote doesn’t matter. This is true across the country. How do we get people to recognize that their vote does matter, at least in the herd immunity position I’ve argued from? Do we highlight stories where razor-thin margins show just how much one’s vote counts? We have these stories in abundance from local and state elections. Again, I feel like the focus on the top of the ticket has really hurt politics overall – of course in a national election, your vote has less “weight” simply because of volume. On the other hand, local elections mean your vote has much greater weight.
When my husband and I were encountering friends during this election season who simply couldn’t be convinced to turn out for Clinton, we at least implored them to still show up to vote, and vote for the down-ballot tickets. But this is never a message that official get out the vote machinery will say – it starts with “Vote for (Presidential Candidate) and oh, also, by the way, for these down ballot issues and candidates”. I suspect people’s brains click off after they decide “well I’m not voting for the President, so why bother showing up at all?” This would have to be confirmed by comparing overall turnout numbers with how many people voted a blank race at the top of the ticket. I hope someone does it.
Either way: even though this election has global implications that I fear will reverberate for decades, nothing has brought home for me how much local politics matters than this one. And that’s where I plan to put an enormous amount of my work in over the coming years.
Categorised as: life