Did America go crazy in 2020? I suspect observers years hence will think so because of the responses, of both elite officials and ordinary Americans, to the COVID-19 pandemic starting last February and to the shocking video from Minneapolis police officers released over Memorial Day weekend.
Like Sherlock Holmes' dog that didn't bark in the night, so goes in politics: Uncharacteristic behavior can turn out to be crucially significant -- uncharacteristic behavior in politics being defined as one demographic group unexpectedly trending one way when most of the electorate trends the other.
Identity politics seems to be sticking around. Important election results seemed to refute the notion that Americans vote for their ethnic or racial identity. Hispanic voters trended significantly toward the supposedly anti-Hispanic Donald Trump, and Californians, while voting 63% for Joe Biden, rejected racial quotas and preferences in a referendum by an even larger margin than in the 1990s.
Eighty-five percent of counties with a Whole Foods store voted for Joe Biden. That factoid, relayed by The Cook Political Report's David Wasserman, tells you something important about the election -- and about today's Democratic Party.
"My sense is that if Trump wins, Hillary supporters will be sad," left-wing writer Sally Kohn tweeted the day of the 2016 election. "If Hillary wins, Trump supporters will be angry. Important difference." Kohn turned out to be wrong about her own side that year, which angrily set about delegitimizing Donald Trump's victory. She was wrong, too, in her apparent assumption -- shared by shop owners who boarded up their windows -- that Trump supporters would react as violently to his defeat as the Black Lives Matter movement reacted to a death in Minneapolis.
One of the many big surprises in this month's surprising election was the Democrats' failure to overturn Republican majorities in state legislatures. Various Democratic committees budgeted $88 million to flip majorities in big states such as Texas, Florida and North Carolina. Total gains: zero.
Among the most surprising of the multiple surprising results in this election was California's rejection of Proposition 16. The ballot measure was supported by the Democratic supermajorities in the state legislature; by long-established corporations and Silicon Valley tech firms; by leaders of mainline churches and nonprofit organizations. Some $20 million was spent on its behalf and only $1 million in opposition.
"I like a good contrarian argument as much as the next guy," tweets mild-mannered RealClearPolitics senior elections analyst Sean Trende, "but there's really no getting around the fact that the 2020 polling was a pile of steaming garbage."
1. This was not a good night for conventional polling. My review in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal of a book on the history of "polling failures" took perhaps too positive a view of contemporary polling. I find it remarkable that polling has been as accurate as it has been in a country where the completion rate for pollsters' contacts is below 10% -- but it got worse this week. The Real Clear Politics average of recent polls showed Joe Biden with more than 51% of the popular vote and Donald Trump with 44%. As this is written, Biden has 50% of the tabulated national popular vote, which will probably rise as California's data comes dribbling in, but Donald Trump has 48%. So, the current 1.9% Biden plurality is far lower than the polls' 7.2% Biden plurality.
If the final election returns, when they finally come in, match the current polls, Joe Biden's Democrats will win a trifecta: the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress.
Are both presidential candidates trying to lose? Or at least pursuing campaign strategies which put them at grave risk of defeat?
On Monday, Joe Biden finally broke his monthslong silence on court packing. Previously, he refused to take a stand -- "whatever position I take in that, that'll become the issue," he said in the Sept. 29 debate, said voters didn't "deserve to know" his position or would know it "when the election is over,"
Now that Donald Trump exited from Walter Reed Hospital and the vice presidential debate aired, let's turn to an apolitical analyst to understand what's happening. Vaclav Smil, 76, native of communist Czechoslovakia and former University of Manitoba professor for four decades, has written 39 books on energy, technology and demography. "Nobody," says Bill Gates, who has read every book, "sees the big picture with as wide an aperture as Vaclav Smil."
"Chaos." "Painful." "Dispiriting." "The worst presidential debate in American history." "The lowest point in American political culture in my lifetime."
Norms, we are told, matter. Violating norms, recklessly disregarding norms -- these are charges on which President Donald Trump is often arraigned in the court of public opinion.
What happens if, as seems much more likely now than it did a year or six months ago, Democrats overturn the Republican majority in the Senate?
Joe Biden just can't get his story straight on his green energy promises.
In Pittsburgh, in front of union workers last month, he declared: "I am not banning fracking. Let me say that again. I am not banning fracking. No matter how many times Donald Trump lies about me."
The presidential campaign is at knife's edge. Both parties' campaigns assume that patterns of support will closely resemble those in 2016. And both are making surprisingly little effort, considering how close that contest turned out to be, with the 46 crucial electoral votes decided by just 77,744 votes, to increase their levels of support.
To that nagging question, the answer increasingly seems to be yes.
You know the first two nights of the Republicans' virtual national convention have gone well when you see that Politico's morning Playbook leads with a lame joke about the U.S. Postal Service hiring a new lobbyist, aimed at reviving the post office non-scandal. Ho, ho, ho!
