Like just about everyone I know, Wednesday started with a bad mood. In the interests of actually sleeping Tuesday night, we decided to block all incoming news, distract ourselves, and pull up the covers early. When I woke up, I imagined the delight I would feel when I saw the headlines proclaiming Kamala Harris President. I turned to my husband asked if he was ready to check the phone.
Did you know that the phrase “rude awakening” comes from a 19th century sci-fi novel by someone called Grant Allen?
My rude awakening triggered a walk down memory lane. I kept thinking about the morning after Reagan was elected in 1980, then about the disastrous 2016 election, waking up in shock both times. I include myself when I say that even after such rude awakenings, we somehow never learn the lesson of how misinformed and ignorant of political realities US voters are, both sides of the two-party system. The right because the ordinary people who voted a lying, vindictive, self-dealing, narcissistic criminal into office don’t have a clue of the real harm they are enabling. The left because no matter how smart we think we are, we still can’t read the room.
Ever minute since Wednesday, someone has tapped on my virtual shoulder to offer commiseration, advice, and analysis. You may have been inundated with missives of hindsight too. Many messages counsel taking time to grieve and regroup. Wise, no doubt, but somehow in conflict with the much larger volume of postmortem podcasts, columns, Zooms, chats, and urgent-sounding strategy memos flooding my inbox, all calling people to action.
Is this a moment that demands reflection? To be sure. Is it a good idea to publish the first thoughts that pop up when you start to reflect? I sincerely doubt it. For one thing, the rush to publish tends toward projection, reproducing the same failures of understanding that got us into this mess in the first place.
People have been sending forth Ezra Klein’s and David Brooks’ most recent dispatches from the New York Times. (I’m not going to link them here as I don’t want you to disrupt your true reflection with them.) What strikes me funny is that both focus in large part on the critique that over-educated elites missed the boat by failing to understand the challenges faced by working-class people, including the disrespect heaped on them as Democrats have failed to respond to their suffering and offered many insulting characterizations to explain their refusal to line up on the left side of the aisle.
It’s not that I disagree with the essence of that point. My last two blogs focused on a book that offers a much more nuanced and well-documented version of that critique. If either party could once have claimed class consciousness, it was the Democrats. But this time, the Republicans had their fingers on the pulse of hurt and resentment, and effectively impersonated caring. Taking part in the hindsight festival, Klein and Brooks, two over-educated elite intellectuals, display no hesitation in making their point in ways that caricature and insult their erstwhile allies. The underlying lesson they should have learned is about respecting others, even those to whom they feel superior. Ooops! Maybe next time.
Many entries in the hindsight festival have focused on the growing proportion of the vote for Trump from certain categories of men, particularly Latinos. These are based on exit polls of what are determined to be key states, which means they rely on self-reporting by a fairly small fraction of voters. To truly trust such information as portraying national realities, it’s best to wait months for the Pew Research report, which is provably national and far more trustworthy in methodology.
Based on the information being circulated now, hindsight festival wisdom seems to be trending toward a decline in the importance of identity politics, or, more simply stated, offering explanations for why some voters slipped out of predictable identity categories to cross party lines. There’s been shock that people were willing to vote for someone who insulted racial or ethnic groups to which they belong.
Just a few days and there are already lots of ideas in circulation for what the Democrats have to do to get through the next four years and—as most expect Trump’s cruelty and incompetence to become evident during that time—win in 2028. Again, I’d love to see a little more reflection and a little less kneejerk advice. But there is one wake-up call I find essential to prevent more rude awakenings, and I would be writing about it now even if Harris had won. Reform the electoral system.
Eliminate the Electoral College. I’ve written before about the importance of doing away with the Electoral College, a mechanism built into our electoral system that invites and insures a kind of gaming that treats some voters as mattering and the rest as negligible. With about eight percent of the vote left to be counted as I write this, Trump’s popular vote exceeded Harris’s by three percent. His Electoral College majority is nearly 70 points, wildly disproportionate. Trump won in 2016 even though Clinton got three million more votes than him, a difference of two percent. He won that time by getting 77 more Electoral College votes. This needs to end. Read all about it here.
Limit private contributions. Current estimates of spending in this presidential election are about $16 billion. This is obscene. Part of the hindsight festival has been pointing to the cash-rich Harris campaign’s decision to stress legacy media, buying lots of expensive TV advertising, especially late in the cycle when minds are likely to be made up. The smart money says Trump was wise to prioritize social media and podcasts, reaching prospective voters who may not watch old-style TV. Maybe so, but both campaigns ate money like hungry shredding machines.
Some industrialized countries have limits on individual contributions to political parties: France 7500 Euro; Poland 25 times the minimum wage; Portugal 60 times the minimum wage. For individuals donating to party committees in this country, it’s $41,300, and for party committees making contributions, unlimited. Many countries offer substantial public financing to parties and candidates. If you want to wonk out on the particulars, here’s a massive international database. There are viable ways to limit the scope and impact of private funds on elections. The Brennan Center for Justice features many.
Limit campaign duration. In the UK, the time between a prime minister calling a general election and the actual vote is six weeks. Think about it: instead of years of escalating bombardment by ads, name-calling, and harassment, just six weeks!
When I told a friend that I was going to write about this, he said, “Yeah, that has a great chance of passing now.” He’s right of course, it doesn’t. But almost every necessary change to our electoral system (not to mention a host of other institutions) has been rejected in my lifetime as something to not work on for that reason. We postpone the essential fixes to a broken system until some hypothetical time when the winds are favorable, and that time never comes. My friend pointed out that under Trump, the primary challenge will be to stop terrible things from happening, and I can’t disagree. But I also find it hard to breathe in the tightly closed room our political system has become. The main impediment to almost every change I long to see is the people we put in charge. Legislators depend on private contributions not only to pay for their campaigns but to heap up war chests they can distribute to other candidates, thereby enhancing their own clout and position in the legislative pecking order.
Never ask a barber if you need a haircut, someone once told me. It would take a lot of us outside the halls of power to accumulate the political force needed to stop the tidal wave of self-interest that floats Congress, despite the valiant efforts of some legislators. But if we can’t even discuss the need for necessary changes unless they are already on the short-term list of likely successes, how will we ever get unstuck? Can we take a breath and think harder about how to fix the system? Or is the only alternative to play by its rules?
Dan Auerbach, “Trouble Weighs a Ton.”