Now that all states have been called, I wanted to record a few thoughts about the election while they're still fresh -- what seems to have been important, and what was evidently not. Follow along if interested.

I suppose it's only fair to disclose my priors, many of which were summed up in something I wrote just after the 2016 election. This characterized support for Trump by Republicans -- particularly the better-off among them -- largely as a moral failing. https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/798315103867109376?s=20

The single most important dimension of this moral failing is rejection of responsibility -- which Trump certainly personifies, and which has been a recurring motif throughout his Presidency. His supporters, in this sense, got what they asked for in 2016.

Did it matter in the election this year? Well, Biden won, in the face of structural disadvantages, unprecedented deployment of public resources on behalf of Trump, and a years-long Republican campaign to suppress the vote of mostly Democratic constituencies. That's not nothing.

Democratic candidates down the ballot, however, made little progress. The party actually lost seats in the House, and did not regain control of any state legislature. A Senate majority, so taken for granted by Democrats that the party's Presidential candidates devoted much time

...discussing the future of the filibuster, is just barely a possibility. These unsatisfying results occurred after perhaps the most spectacular failure of basic governance in American history. A quarter million Americans are dead and the nation's daily life turned upside down.

This happened after the Republican President ignored the #COVID19 pandemic, then undermined efforts to fight it, then ignored it again for months, then -- in his campaign -- worked actively to make it worse. Republicans in Congress went along with a legislative package in March

....to address the economic disruption caused by the pandemic, then essentially did nothing for the rest of the year. Republicans in state legislatures mostly followed suit (here in Wisconsin the legislature stayed out of session entirely after April).

The #COVID19 pandemic, already a massive national disaster, worsened throughout the fall. It should have had devastating electoral consequences for the party holding the White House, as much less significant misfortunes had had for Democrats in 1980, Republicans in 1992,...

....and Republicans again in 2008. It did not. Why it did not is, I submit, the salient question that needs answering about the 2020 election. Was the pandemic's limited electoral impact a product of an accident of timing, a failure of Democratic messaging, or something else?

I take the accident of timing theory seriously, because history teaches us that timing can be very important. Herbert Hoover presided over the first three years of the Great Depression, and the Republicans became a minority party for generations. The Great Recession....

....began mere months before George W. Bush's Presidency ended, and Republicans recovered most of their election losses in the 2010 midterms. Trump's sole ownership of the world's worst #COVID19 response is somewhere in the middle in terms of duration. Did this matter?

I take the failure of messaging theory seriously because Trump's greatest strength was the credit he got for the pre- #COVID19 economy. This never made much sense; Trump spent his days before the pandemic struck as he did afterwards: watching TV, being praised in meetings,...

....golfing on the weekends. He inherited post-Great Recession growth from @BarackObama, and insistently claimed sole credit for it -- a claim Democrats did little to refute until Obama's own entry into the campaign two weeks before the election. Did this matter?

What else? Some things happen during campaigns that can't be helped. In retrospect, the CARES #COVID19 relief bill in March probably helped Republican candidates across the country, by taking the edge off the economic collapse caused by the pandemic until voting had started.

Not passing any relief legislation then was unthinkable to Congressional Democrats, and rightly so. It may be true their passivity in the face of Republican refusal to do anything further after May blurred the apparent difference between the parties, but how much is uncertain.

Trump's impeachment and trial in the Senate didn't matter. His extensively-documented personal corruption and that of an astonishing list of senior officials didn't matter; nor did his history of sex predation. His contempt for & erosion of US alliances overseas didn't matter.

The negligible record of Republican legislative achievement throughout the Trump years didn't matter. Democrats spent little time talking about any of these, before or after #COVID19 struck. Republicans in Congress stood united in declaring that Trump should be above the law...

....and actually participated in his use of the Presidency to generate income for his businesses -- this presented an opportunity for Democrats to tie Republicans tightly to the least popular pre-pandemic aspects of Trump's Presidency, but it was an opportunity not seized.

In retrospect in appears @SpeakerPelosi and other Democrats made some assumptions about how readily the public would recoil from Trump without their help that were not well founded. This went well beyond impeachment and corruption.

To be fair, some of the Democrats' assumptions did not seem unreasonable. Trump has governed as an overt, White Power racist, and this was no mere matter of rhetoric. Entire government agencies were devoted to brutalizing Hispanic migrants for years, for example,....

....in ways that shock the conscience -- just not the conscience of many voters of Hispanic descent, some of whom were more impressed by Trump's empty posturing against the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes. It's hard to fault Democrats for getting this one wrong, but they did.

Of course, an overt racist could not have won the Presidency in the first place if overt racism did not have a committed constituency. Democrats underestimated this. They assumed articulate, well-known & well-funded black candidates could overcome the hereditary revulsion....

....among many white voters toward African Americans holding high public office in South Carolina and Mississippi, and were proven wrong. This assumption gets another test next month in Georgia, a very different state.

I fear Republican elected officials will come away from the 2020 election with confidence that the identity politics,
shameless demagoguery, and rejection of responsibility essential to Trump's rise will work for them in the future.

Large election losses would have shaken this confidence; the defeat of the personally unpopular Trump by the personally popular Biden is unlikely to. Only 12 years ago, the United States had a traditional election, in which perceived poor performance in government....

....by the party holding the White House was punished at the polls. In 2020 we had a very different kind of election, in which truly catastrophic failure in government had a very modest electoral impact. This change bodes ill for the future of free government in America.

This has been a very long thread, even for me. Sorry. I thank all who have made it this far for their attention. [end]