Campaign take aways

You do know the election of 2020 is not over, don't you? We could still win a Democratic Party run Senate and therefore a good sized coronavirus relief and stimulus package.  Sign up to help elect Rev. Warnock and Jon Offoff in the Georgia run elections on January 5.

That said, we're beginning to get some believable and intriguing analysis of what happened in the long season that led up to November 3. A few items:

Turnout: this election drew out a higher percentage of the electorate than any since the early 1900s. Democrats fought for easy access by mail and early voting opportunities in response to the pandemic, but also because easier voting is simply the right way to run a democracy. We, collectively, seem to have responded -- regardless of which side of the party divide we came from. 

Republicans may again try to hamper easy voting in future elections, but suppressing the vote will probably be more unpopular than it might have been before so many experienced its advantages. And it isn't clear that increased access benefits either party more; an awful lot of new Trump voters came out of somewhere.

From a campaign perspective, all this creates new demands. Nick Corasaniti and Jim Rutenberg observe:

The expansion of voting options also created a fall “election season” rather than a sole Election Day, a change that is likely to endure and force political campaigns to restructure fall operations with a greater emphasis on getting out the vote over a period of weeks. ... “Voters really thought about how they were going to vote, and many had a plan and executed on that plan,” said Kim Wyman, the secretary of state in Washington.

That's the job of a campaign, to help their voters make their own plans.

Door knocking: Mostly, Democrats respected the danger created by COVID and didn't canvass door to door. (UniteHERE and some other community campaigns did canvass in Nevada, Arizona, Philadelphia and probably other places I don't know about.) 

Dan Pfeiffer points out that eschewing face to face contacts most likely hurt Democrats in cities.

The expectation, headed into this election was that turnout would be up everywhere [over 2016] including in those cities [-- such as Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee.] That assumption turned out to be incorrect. While turnout was up across the board in 2020, it was flat in the big cities in battleground states.

... It’s possible the flat turnout in urban areas was pandemic-related. The cities were some of the hardest hit areas. Due to the pandemic, Democrats mostly abandoned the door knocking efforts that have always been central to our get out the vote efforts. It’s also likely that we left some votes on the table because our usual efforts to register new voters were constrained by the pandemic.

Digital: Kevin Roose has written a very interesting assessment of the Biden campaign's efforts online. He gives them high marks for using celebrity influencers rather than trying to turn Joe into an internet phenom, tailoring content rooted in empathy directed to suburban women Facebook users, and empowering more abrasive fans with content like Occupy Democrats.

What strikes me about all this is that they were able, through deft use of various platforms, to make Biden-Harris come off as slightly different people to different audiences. I'm not saying they lied; rather they put the candidates' best feet forward in appropriate venues. This has long been the unrealizable grail of campaigns -- and something that, before we all started living in separate new media silos, was well nigh impossible. You couldn't be the scrappy fighter in one speech and the compassionate statesman in another and get away with the contrast. Now you can. But you better be smart about it.

The Biden campaign certainly thereby identified terrain on which Donald J. Trump literally could not compete; the guy is kryptonite to nuance.