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.

 

 

New Elite at War with Everyone

This past month has seen the final shoving of Germany towards supporting a Greek bailout, the condition being an imposed austerity whose terms will lower Greek living standards for years to come.  Most of the Greek public is opposed, having never seen most of the money their financial and political sectors managed not to invest in rebuilding a modern Greek economy.  They are getting their wages and pensions cut anyway, and are regularly in the streets.

The media largely still tells the story as between past and future, meaning labor and finance, or unions, who seek self-protection that looks backward to a vanished era, and responsible, enlightened business opinion, which seeks austerity.  For example, a leading proponent of serious financial reregulation in the U.S., Simon Johnson, calls for austerity in Greece.  Economists who point out that this is a recipe for poverty and financial depression - which in turn endangers loan repayment - are in a minority.

The "capital vs. labor" paradigm suggests that there is a large, forward-looking majority -- wealthy business elites, of course, but also a large affluent middle-class with BAs, MBAs, JDs and MDs -- and that this combined majority sides with enlightened business interests who create new wealth and the future's new industries.  They oppose the dwindling, outmoded blue-collar folks represented by unions and the public sector in general, who fight a rear-guard action for privileges that the marketplace, reflecting the real economy, no longer supports.

There was a time during the post-war "golden age" when the very top of the financial pyramid cemented the loyalty of a large middle class with generous benefits, delivered largely through a well-funded public sector.  Great public universities were one major example, but so were cheap freeways and subsidized suburban developments, hospitals and schools, the whole panoply of the "American way of life" for what was actually a fairly ordinary bunch of people, judged by global standards.  This time has come and gone. I've written at length about the deliberate downsizing of the middle class through attacks on its central institution, the public university, and we now have abundant evidence of the result: a splitting of a tiny elite -- an upper 0.1% or so -- from the rest of the top, which it opposes.

We're actually seeing a return of the Three Estates of the profoundly pre-democratic French 18th century social system: well-educated brainworkers are falling into a huge Third Estate of unprotected, insecure workers of vastly different educational qualifications. One example of the tendency is the ongoing effort to eliminate public pensions in California, which provide compensation for the relatively lower wages of public service workers many of whom are as well educated as $800,000 / year attorneys (nurses, college professors, financial analysts, etc.)

A good example of our "post-democratic" class structure appears in a nice paper by Mike Konczal.
He finds a way to distinguish the views on financial reform of Certified Finanacial Analysts, whose median incomes of around $250,000 put them in the top 1.5%, in contrast to the people who hire them, in the top 0.1%.

Studies of the distribution of the financial gains of the past decade show much the same thing - the lion's share not to the top 10% or even the top 1% but to the top 0.1% and 0.01% of the population.  The result is an unsustainable economy - as the crisis has shown - and a fractured polity that even the apparently skillful Barack Obama is blatantly unable to glue together again in the absence of meaningful 'reform."

The only cure is moving ahead into a new egalitarian phase of whole-society development.  But this depends entirely on a push from the great majority that is currently losing ground.  And where is that push?  Konczal's paper went up on HuffPo on May 3rd.  Almost three weeks later, it has zero comments. Meanwhile, a clip of Rand Paul's dumb, obviously right-wing stuff about the Civil Rights Act has over 16 thousand. Great, we've figured out that Paul is Tea Partying right-winger, like he hadn't already said that everyday in his campaign.  Meanwhile, the middle-class seems completely unable to define the reforms on which depends for its survival.