The Election Standoff: First Exit Poll Review

The blue wave never arrived, and as expected, Donald Trump declared victory--"frankly, we did win this election." He then demanded that ballot counting stop in the swing states where at 2:30 am ET he was ahead. Here's the full clip.

Both Fox and CNN denounced Trump's claim that continuing to count votes would be illegal. On Fox, Chris Wallace said, "This is an extremely flammable situation and the president just threw a match into it. He hasn't won these states ... the president doesn't get to say he won states ... there's no question that all these states can continue to count votes." On CNN, Jake Tapper declared, “what the president just said is undemocratic and false and premature."  

Now the battle begins, first just to complete voting counts, which will shift blue in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  And the Senate is still up in the air, with only the more predictable flips being called--a Dem loss in Alabama (I'm sad about Doug Jones, actually), and two Dem gains, in Arizona and Colorado. It's all especially terrible for those of us from states like California, where we are hostage, election after election, to the whims of a few perennial swing states, many of which are also bad at counting.

I have some early thoughts on the Edison Research exit poll posted at the New York Times. It confirms David Sirota's take, especially the first and last items, "Democrats' weak economic message hugely helped Trump," and "A large percentage of Americans have lost their minds."  

1. Let's start with the economy (Trump in red, Biden in blue)

Trump does not win the working class vote. I could complain about 40+ percent of the bottom income quartiles voting for an unvarnished plutocrat, but Trump doesn't get a majority until family income hits six figures, or the most affluent 25 percent.  Trump is the candidate of the white middle- and upper-middle class. (re the title of this, my ancient blog). 

This one is extremely annoying.

People whose main issue is the economy went with Trump by 4:1! These aren't necessarily the people who know the most about economics (obviously).   "The economy" seems to have become a proxy for pro-business ideology--tax cuts, deregulation, etc., rather than being a chance to evaluate policy performance. This is a massive failure for the Democrats, and confirms both of Sirota's points above.

No less absurd is the Republican vote for the guy who addresses public safety by endangering it. 

A bit more on the economy: incumbents always do very well with people who think the economy is good (for them). Covid-19 and economic inequality notwithstanding, over 40 percent of respondents say they're better off than 4 years ago.  The surprise to me is that only a fifth of respondents say they are worse off now.  A third of  even those people voted for Trump, again confirming the point that Biden didn't have a strong enough message to beat Trump with the 50 percent who think the economy is not so good or poor (below).

Finally, union households. They are only a fifth of respondents, and Trump gets a percentage of them that should embarrass Democrats, or unions, or both.  Forty percent of union families voted for guy whose appointees have done serious damage to the status of unions, quite deliberately.

2. Race and Gender

One story was that whites were still largely Trumpers but that white women had had enough. This was wrong. 55 percent of white women stuck with Trump.  For me, this is big surprise number 2.

At first glance, 1 + 2 = a confirmation of 2016 analyses that stressed Trumpers voted to keep their racial position rather than to overcome economic anxiety.  This is a depressing continuity.

3. College. 

Another story was the educational divide: non-college people were said to resent the rule of experts and B.A. know-it-alls. Trump was to lose the college crowd, especially women, but score big with the non-college crowd.

Trump hung on to white women and won a narrow victory with white women college grads.  College curbs but doesn't eliminate white enthusiasm for a president who so clearly elevates money and power over knowledge that he makes George W. Bush look like William Faulkner.  The most anti-intellectual president in modern history still gets half of white college grads -- and slightly more women than men. 

The main surprise here is among white men, where college cuts their Trump support two-thirds to under half.

4. Party Identity. 

The red state / blue state dichotomy is a tedious cliché. That doesn't make it wrong.  What seems to be happening is that D v. R isn't about parties anymore, but breeds of American.

Note two things. First, the major parties each only have a third of the electorate.  Second, they each had nearly 95 percent candidate loyalty.  There are not so much two parties as two Americas. I dislike writing that stupid sentence but it seems to be true.

The question for Trump gets the same numbers: the other party's candidate inspires concern or fear in 90 + percent of either party. And that's true even for an "Uncle Joe" moderate like Biden. 

A silver lining is tentative vindication of people like Sanders and Warren who tried to talk the Democrat establishment out of their faith in moderation and the centrist voter.  There's going to be hell to pay for the strategists who spent millions on white "persuadables" instead of on first-time Latinx voters, for example.

Party also beats region.  West and East are more Democratic as we already knew, but not by a landslide.  Biden got nearly half of the South, the same as his score in the Midwest.  We now have country  vs. city parties--confirmation of a trend people have analyzed for years.

5. Pandemic politics

This exit poll confirms that in America, there is no independent reality--only a party line.

We see the same 90+ percent correlations between perception of Covid-competence and party membership. This is a huge embarrassment for a country that prides itself on can-do realism.

Equally embarrassing is the failure of rocketing Covid infection rates to make many people rethink Trump's performance. The same goes for the split on reopening vs. containment.  Democrats did not break through the wall on the basic point that if Covid isn't contained the economy won't rebuild. There's lots of bad news here about the country's epistemic competence.

This polls has huge gaps on issues and better data will be flooding out.  And as of noon in London the count is far from over.

 

 

The Curse of the Countryside

It's Sunday morning, so I'm reading Father Frank, who flays the Republicans in no uncertain terms:

The G.O.P. ran out of steam and ideas well before George W. Bush took office and Tom DeLay ran amok, and it is now more representative of 20th-century South Africa during apartheid than 21st-century America.

It's kind of amazing to see that in print: the Republicans as the American Apartheid Party.

Rich then cites David Letterman's joke about how the 10 G.O.P. presidential candidates at an early debate looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club."

The very limited region of GOP gains were immediately apparent, and yet the GOP base in white males remained very solid this year. I criticized Father F last Sunday for understating how Republican white males continue to be overall, regardless of how culturally brain-dead or economically dysfunctional their party becomes.

There were reports this week of an upswelling of anti-Obama racist attacks on black folks, especially but not only in the South. Is it racism or some kind of country politics - or both - that made Southern whites go for McCain 68% - 30%? If you broke males out of the number it would be even higher?

The split between country and city is huge: cities over 500,000 went for Obama 70% - 28%, and cities 50,000-500,000 gave Obama a 59% - 39% advantage. Suburbs were almost evenly split, and everything below 50,000 went 53-45% for McCain.

On the other hand, the "West" is full of rural spaces, and yet "Whites in the West" gave McCain 48% and not the 68% McCain got from their Southern cousins. This may well be because the West has more gigantic coastal cities, huge urban-oriented suburbs, and multipolar racial politics.

This begs the question of why you need all those things to have even minimally centrist politics (Obama vs. the hard-right McCain and Palin). Why can't you have centrist politics with the normal class mixture of the white and still-rural South?

Journalistic anthropology isn't yet giving us answers. The best newspaper piece I've seen focused on the Republicans overdoing it on their Southern strategy and alienating voters elsewhere. But here's the underlying analysis:

Mr. Obama’s race appears to have been the critical deciding factor in pushing ever greater numbers of white Southerners away from the Democrats.

Here in Alabama, where Mr. McCain won 60.4 percent of the vote in his best Southern showing, he had the support of nearly 9 in 10 whites, according to exit polls, a figure comparable to other Southern states. Alabama analysts pointed to the persistence of traditional white Southern attitudes on race as the deciding factor in Mr. McCain’s strong margin. Mr. Obama won in Jefferson County, which includes the city of Birmingham, and in the Black Belt, but he made few inroads elsewhere.

And the idea is driven home by the accompanying visual stereotype of Southern White Man (one Bill Pennington of Vernon, Alabama).


Unfortunately, this assumes the cracker racism that needs to be explained.

The best non-Southern analysis I've read involves my favorite issue - the degradation of public systems and social spaces that force people to stick with personal hierarchies and private solutions. Racism supports the hierarchy that has done more in a perverse and destructive way for white Southern working class security in their own world than has the region's white economic and social leaders. The latter have pursued strategies of underdevelopment decade after decade since the beginning of the South itself - slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and "massive resistance" to integration led appropriately enough by Sen. Harry F. Byrd, a descendant of the Byrd family colonizers of Virginia, who united stone racism with stone opposition to public spending - all which have kept the South backward as an economy and a civil society and a democracy. It is a non-democracy, where that requires the full participation of all social partners. The poet Charles Simic wrote a great piece on this just before the 2004 presidential election, and it is worth reading now.