THE ELECTION WHATNOT

Per my last update, I noted that there were three ways the US election could go: first, a large Biden win, second, a small Trump win, and third, a Biden win that would be attacked by Trump for its reliance on mail-in ballots being counted, which takes time and effort. What we ended up seeing was more or less the third one, for the most part, but with some variance on the down-ballot (mostly for the worse) and with the lovely surprise that the Trump team was as incompetent at trying to steal an election as they were at everything else. I mean, for crissake, they ended up holding press conferences at a landscaping center because the hotel they wanted to have the press conferences at was booked, and the landscaping center had the same name. We shouldn’t forget about that!

So, what can we learn from this election? According to literally everybody who has weighed in so far, it is - let me check my notes here - ah yes, “everything we have learned confirms my prior beliefs.” But, that said, let me try to be sort of objective about this.

Firstly: Donald Trump performed better than he did in 2016, and not just as a reflection of a slightly larger population but increasing his share of the vote among many minority groups - most notably Latinos, who are (as many immediately took pains to point out upon learning this) much less a monolithic group than, say, black voters. And Trump increased his vote share slightly among black voters as well. He certainly outperformed his polling in most battleground states, most notably in Florida. There is no way to pretend that Donald Trump is not very popular with slightly less than half of the American voting populace that bothered to turn out, and that is kind of terrible; it certainly goes against the long-standing adage that all Democrats have to do to win is make sure voters turn out in large numbers, because they definitely did this time and they nearly did not.

Secondly: Biden got more votes, absolutely, but where he got them from is fairly evident: he got them from turnout. The share of Republicans voting for Biden was lower than the share of Republicans voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Basically, at this point, any Republican who found Donald Trump distasteful enough to leave the party did it probably four years ago or, at most, three, and almost all of the remainder voted for him anyway. On the other hand, certain groups - noticeably Black people and Native Americans - voted for Biden in overwhelming numbers to the point of swinging states almost entirely by themselves.

Thirdly: Biden’s coattails down the ballot were, as mentioned above, weaker than hoped for. The Democrats will end up keeping control of the House of Representatives, but will end up losing seats overall. The Democrats also hoped to win control of the Senate back, and have in fact so far netted one additional seat (losing one and winning two) with four seats left to be determined, but all of those will likely be difficult at best and impossible at worst. Probably the best chances left are the two runoff elections in Georgia, where Democrats led in one initial election and were just slightly behind in the other. Regardless, Senate Democrats underperformed Biden, in some cases quite badly (the worst being in Maine, where the quite awful Susan Collins barely eked out a win).

Fourthly and finally: this election made is quite clear that scandals do not really matter any more. Whether candidates had credibly endorsed crazy conspiracy theories, engaged in obvious insider trading, were basically all but a neo-Nazi in name, or sexually harassed children - they all got elected, and the only question of whether individuals won or lost races was the electoral makeup of their district. This is super-great for democracy, by the way.

What does all of this mean going forward? Well, conservative Democrats and the Republicans who are always entirely happy to tell conservative Democrats to be more like Republicans are already, and predictably, asserting that the reason Democrats didn’t do as well as hoped was because of the mere existence of progressives within the party saying and doing things. Obviously, I don’t agree with this and think it is stupid, but this is about what I think will actually happen instead of what should, and I suspect that Democrats will once again pivot to the center, again. Because the party is run by very old people (seriously, the average Congressional Democrat is 58, and the average member of the Democratic leadership is a stunning 71 years young) who have been terrified of Ronald Reagan since 1984 and are apparently incapable of unlearning that.

The very real likelihood that the Democrats will not control the Senate means that, thanks to a political system designed by 18th-century slaveowners which now confers upon one party a near-permanent political advantage (seriously, all of the talk above about Biden underperforming? Does not really give him and his voters the fair credit for overcoming structural obstacles which are in fact quite difficult to overcome), very little will actually happen in terms of helpful governance, because Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has proven that the party suffers not a whit for endless obstruction and that the aforementioned terrified Democratic leadership will never stop extolling the virtues of co-operation even in the face of this. Without the Senate, there will be no reform of the court system, no new voting laws, no bringing DC or Puerto Rico in as states, and certainly no laws that have anything to do with anything that can directly help people’s day-to-day life or prevent climate change or anything like that. The only options President Biden will have will be to further expand the use of executive orders so as to get literally anything done, which will just break the American political system further.

So we get to sit back until early January to see if the United States can actually come back from the abyss or just sit there teetering on the edge for a while. Fun.

WAIT, BACK UP, PUERTO RICO?

Oh, yes. Puerto Rico had a statehood referendum during this election as well - not the first one it’s had, and arguably once again not a definitive answer to the question of whether or not Puerto Rico should be a state because the anti-statehood factions once again took issue with the form of the referendum - this time, because there was no option on the ballot for the status quo - which probably affected turnout. (There’s also some speculation that the government stopped counting ballots once they got a result they liked, although I haven’t seen a lot of hard evidence for that.)

That said: a definite majority of voters (52 percent) of a definite majority of the voting population (also 52 percent) voted in favour of statehood, as opposed to independence or a free association model where Puerto Rico would be kind of like Micronesia: a sovereign country that relies on the USA for defense and also uses American dollars for currency. (Or possibly not, because the entire point of free association is to pick and choose what elements of American governance a nation wants, typically in exchange for loose labour laws so American businesses can exploit your populace like they can’t do to regular Americans.)

This is probably as close to a definitive result as Puerto Rico is ever going to give on the statehood question, so one would think that they would just become a state, but the Republicans have been very clear that they don’t want Puerto Rico to become a state for the same reason they don’t want the District of Columbia to be a state: because the new state would almost certainly vote for Democrats, and the Republicans think that having states that like the other guys is cheating. So unless the Democrats control the Senate in three months, expect no movement on this.

MEANWHILE THERE IS STILL A PANDEMIC

Covid-19 numbers across Canada are exploding upwards, as they are in America and lots of other places (Germany in particular is having an awful spike), and at this point it just feels like we’re all sort of collectively beating our heads against the wall because the world, now, is divided into “countries that have basically beaten Covid” and “everybody else,” and there is no real magic to beating Covid-19: it simply entails locking down your country hard for three to four months with no piddling half-measures, letting the disease transmissions die down, and then putting in place an intensive testing and tracing regime with occasional briefer regional lockdowns as necessary when there are flares. Granted, this is not precisely “beating” the disease, but it does mean having a society where you can usually do things like eat at restaurants or attend live sporting events or go out to see a movie or, you know, everything you miss doing.

The problem is that everybody in the second failure category mostly went with half-measure lockdowns for a long period of time, which managed to have the worst possible outcome with no real beneficial effect: it made everybody emotionally exhausted by the pandemic, without providing the curative effect it was supposed to have. Now a whole lot of people don’t have the will to go through another lockdown, but another lockdown is the only way to properly implement the tracing and testing regime necessary to get society back to normal.

Tack on a lack of willingness by governments to regulate those industry sectors which cause the widest spread - like nursing homes in Canada, which have been a disgrace for literally decades with no government at any level ever doing a single goddamn thing about it - and there is no end in sight. Which is peachy.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

I haven’t been doing movie reviews here for a while - mostly because I am well behind on my Letterboxd reviews - but I am going to say that Spontaneous, available on demand on iTunes and Google Play and a lot of other on-demand streaming rental services, is so far the best movie I have seen this year and also a particularly 2020-ish movie in that it really captures the feeling of this hell year.

See you soon.