The Big Lie meets the Big Truth

Could we possibly need another book about the nation's Trumpian travails and the election of 2020? It seemed unlikely. But Major Garrett, a senior journalist, and David Becker, an elections administrator and scholar, have written an extremely granular account from a slightly off-center perspective that I fully recommend. The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of “The Big Lie” recounts the practices, work, and trials of the people who work in administering free and fair elections.

This is the story of the enduring distrust in our election system sown by Trump and exacerbated by our different information systems. A telling anecdote:

Ricky Hatch lives in Weber County, Utah and has been a Republican election official there since 2012. ...

"It happens all the time, the emails and the phone calls, people telling me we have to go back to voting in person, having ID at the polls," Hatch told us. "They tell me we have to get rid of this voting by mail crap, that voting by mail is not secure, that it is fraught with fraud and Democrats use it to take over the world."

Hatch offers tours of the county's vote counting machinery, walks the curious through the process of checking and double-checking results. ...

Hatch has noticed a pattern among those he is able to persuade the Weber County's systems are verifiable and secure. Voters will say they now believe in the county's methods, but not in the election results and the officials who produced them in Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, or other states contested in 2020. 

"They say, 'I trust you." And I tell them there are 9000 other mes, people like me, around the country and they care as much as I do and they are just as competent as I am."

Hatch has commiserated with Republican election officials around the country ... "I hate saying this, but [Trump] has the same characteristics as a cult leader. He pulls people into a belief system. I thought it would die down. It's getting stronger. People are more skeptical now than were a year ago."

And Hatch lives and works in Utah where nobody is claiming the 2020 election or any election was "rigged" against Republicans!

The book does a good job of walking the reader through how US elections came to be run through the processes we currently use, how opportunities for fraud had in fact been wrung out out the system over the last couple a decades, and introducing the people who do what has long been largely thankless work.

These authors also communicate something about the information environment of 2020 which made the pervasive Republican belief in Trump's Big Lie more persuasive to its adherents.

I did not understand until reading this book the extent to which white people in the rightwing information bubble -- Fox News, their uncle on Facebook, etc. -- honestly came to assume that the protests over the murder of George Floyd were a personally threatening, murderous anarchy that might engulf their homes. I saw righteous protests against enduring white supremacy; they saw something else.

We are all too familiar with Republican whataboutism surrounding the violence and looting during the nationwide protests ... Initially some protests were violent and accompanied by looting and property damage. At least nineteen people died. Damages exceeded $1 billion. For a time, neighborhoods in Seattle and Portland were, due to unrest, impassable or closed off. Other cities saw blocks of boarded up streets. Even so, with protests in more than 2000 American cities, a report by the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location Event Data Project found that 93 percent were peaceful and non-destructive. ...

That's what I saw -- something wonderful if long overdue.

But that's not what Trump's base saw. And we're still living in the backwash of their terror at the rising of the Black and Brown, accompanied by some of their own children.

Garrett and Becker offer honest descriptions of the amazing accomplishments that are the United States' decentralized elections. They admit flaws; they plead against restrictions which might reduce the ability of election officials to smooth the process.

Elections are rife with technicalities and small errors or omissions. Humans are imperfect and elections multiply imperfections -- in using enough ink to fill in a space on a ballot, jotting your signature hurriedly so it many not match precisely with another for verification purposes, misspelling something on a ballot application, miscopying an address on an election form. Election officials and workers have long ironed out such mistakes by helping voters correct innocent mistakes or making sure they can properly submit a provisional ballot ... However, unforgiving application of rules, especially new and restrictive ones, could silence thousands of voters. ...

What's their prescription?

Don't blame elections. Win them. That is our message to all who read this book ...

That certainly accords with the prescription I've organized my work around. Contrary to my priors, this is a good and useful elections book.

January 6 committee hearings: the 2020 election as process

The January 6 committee hearings into Donald Trump's attempted coup continue to make me a fan of the chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson. His opening statement on Monday goes to the heart of what is at stake.

Chairman Thompson:  ... My colleagues and I don't want to spend time talking about ourselves during these hearings, but as someone who's run for office a few times, I can tell you: at the end of a campaign, it all comes down to the numbers. The numbers tell you the winner and the loser.

For the most part, the numbers don't lie.

But if something doesn't add up with the numbers, you go to court to get resolution. And that's the end of the line. We accept those results. That's what it means to respect the rule of law. That's what it means to seek elected office in our democracy.

Because those numbers aren't just numbers.

They are votes. They are your votes. They are the will and the voice of the people. And the very least we should expect from any person seeking a position of public trust is the acceptance of the will of the people—win or lose. ...

Watch here:

Thompson is doing what all of us who work in elections have to do, over and over again: helping both participants and citizens at large understand what all the fuss and drama is about. We grow up in this country absorbing that elections are somehow important, but without intentional education about our democratic government, it can all just seem a blur. To become empowered citizens, we need to know that votes matters and that often implies learning more about what these people in government do. What can a President do? How about a Senators? What powers do state governors wield -- and all those other officials, state and local? Democratic governance requires constant education to make people actors, something more than bemused spectators.

• • •

This hearing was also a short course in what elections feel like to the people who work in them (as I long have). I recognized Fox data journalist Chris Stirewalt's obvious pride in his team; their early, and accurate, call that Biden would eventually win Arizona certainly told me that night that, whatever bumps came along in the count, Dems had pulled through. As a pure instance of electoral professionalism, Stirewalt's delight in his work was a joy to see. (By the way, Fox later fired him for getting it right.)

I could even recognize how Trump's sad sack campaign manager Bill Stepien described watching the election slip away as votes came in and he could see the campaign was not hitting its goals. I remember doing that as New Mexico gave its electors to George W. Bush by a mere 4000 votes in 2004. Not feeling sorry for Stepien though: he's managing the campaign of the Trump-endorsed GOPer trying to supplant Liz Cheney as Wyoming's one congresscritter.

More to come.

Voter fraud alert

I wouldn't be paying any attention to this except that a good friend with whom I worked for months to elect Joe Biden found herself stuck in The Villages this year. She was attending to the affairs of a diseased relative.

She reports that you can't go anywhere in the famously conservative Florida retirement community without having to listen to "outside music" -- oldies interspersed with rightwing news. (The only place I've run across this was the hotel complex adjacent to Disneyland's Magic Kingdom in Anaheim. The apparent sprinkler heads spoke.)

Guess what? The Villages has proved to be a hotbed of (alleged) voter fraud -- Republican voter fraud.

SUMTER COUNTY, Fla. – Three residents of The Villages have recently been arrested as part of an ongoing investigation into voter fraud, court records show. 

Jay Ketcik, Joan Halstead and John Rider are each charged with casting more than one ballot in an election, a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison. . . . 

Ketcik, 63, is accused of voting by mail in Florida in October 2020 while also casting an absentee ballot in his original home state of Michigan, court records show. 

Halstead, 71, voted in-person in Florida but also cast an absentee ballot in New York, prosecutors allege. . . . 

Rider, 61, was arrested by Brevard County deputies at the Royal Caribbean cruise ship terminal at Port Canaveral on Dec. 3, according to court records. Details of the accusations against him were not immediately available, but prosecutors indicated he also cast ballots both out-of-state and in Florida. . . . 

All three are registered as Republicans in Florida, voter registration records show.

 

The place even looks a little like Anaheim, doesn't it?

• • •

H/t JVL at The Bulwark.

Winning Senate candidates

Matt Yglesias has written a long argument for why Democrats should want candidates in some states who are a little less in accord with our most progressive stances. He asserts we cannot win the Senate with people who are completely onboard with our best positions; most states lean at least a little to the right of the big states that are reliably Democratic and our candidates would do better if they reflected that reality. The essay is challenging and worth reading. 

But that's not what I want to write about here because Yglesias includes something that political commentators usually fail to do: along with Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia, he lists Nevada as a place where Democrats have been winning very narrow victories. That's true. In 2020, Joe Biden's margin in Nevada was less than in Michigan and Pennsylvania and was also challenged with crackpot GOP fraud theories. In 2016, Hillary Clinton's margin was similarly tiny, 27,202 votes.

Jacky Rosen

But Nevada is also a place where Democrats hold both Senate seats, one elected in 2016 (Catherine Cortez-Masto), and one replacing a Republican in 2018 (Jackie Rosen). As far as I can tell, neither of them vocally staked out stances that separated them from national Democratic policy planks. They may not have been screaming for gun control, but Cortez-Masto, as a former state attorney general, was onboard with regulating guns. The NRA spent heavily against her. Both Senators held a conventional Democratic women's position in favor of legal abortion.

Now perhaps Nevada is a unique place where Dems can get away with being more progressive. It's a lopsided state, consisting of two urbanish areas (Las Vegas and Reno) with 85 percent of the voters. This makes it the 5th most urban state according to the census, though for those of us in bigger cities, we might not recognize that. The rest is desert -- and everywhere access to water is the underlying issue. What Nevadans call "the rurals," the desert counties, vote strongly libertarian Republican. The entire state is heavily dependent on tourism; though Las Vegas hotels are mostly union shops, this is still a low wage, contingent worker economy.

Steve Sisolak

Yet mainstream progressive Democrats can win here, contra Yglesias' theory. I saw little of the 2016 race, but I saw Rosen's run in 2018 up close. She defeated her Republican opponent by hanging his vote to defund Obamacare around his neck and showing ads of him yucking it up with Trump. Rosen had the good fortune to be running in the same election alongside gubernatorial candidate Steve Sisolak, a seasoned white pol who looks like an old-time construction boss. He was a reassuring figure. Neither Democrat was successfully painted as dangerously liberal and both won, though not by a lot.

These Nevada Democrats did have the advantage of strong canvass operations mounted by the hotel workers' Culinary Union/UniteHERE. The urban areas are so discrete, and the overall population is also small, so that turnout work can have an impact. UniteHERE replicated that push in 2020 for Biden. 

Does the Nevada example hold against Yglesias' thesis that if Dems hope to win the Senate, they need candidates who trim their progressive sails (or never had progressive stances)? I am not sure it says much either way. Candidates do need to be good fits for their states -- convincingly attuned to their local issues. They need to be good communicators. And they may also need luck in the national environments in which they get to make their cases. With the nationalization of elections, I'm not convinced most voters ever take in the policy positions candidates are offering; they just figure out which kind feels right.

And both Nevada's experience and Georgia's Senate run-off elections this year show that on-the-ground voter mobilization can swing races that are close. Pundits poo-poo this, but we can see the results in the Senate today.

It was COVID -- and all those new voters

William Saletan at Slate reports on the factors that the former president's political consultant Tony Fabrizio believes lost the election for Donald Trump.

A different candidate might have been able to take advantage of the fact that the pre-pandemic economy was pretty good for many of us. But Trump put himself on the wrong side of people's life and death concerns:

... Fabrizio found that in the 10 battleground states, “majorities of voters … prioritized stopping the spread of [the virus] over re-opening the economy.” The virus “was the top issue” in these states, the pollster observed, “and Biden carried those voters nearly 3 to 1.” In the exit polls and in McLaughlin’s survey, voters said by significant margins that Biden would handle the virus better than Trump.

Fabrizio flagged two particularly foolish mistakes in Trump’s response to the virus. One was ridiculing masks. In the 10 battleground states, voters who favored mask mandates (Biden’s position) outnumbered those who opposed mask mandates (Trump’s position) by a ratio of 3 to 1. The enormous pro-mask constituency went to Biden by about 30 points, on average, in the five states that flipped to him. 

Trump’s other dumb move was his persistent slander against Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In the five states that flipped to Biden, 72 percent of voters approved of Fauci’s job performance, and 63 percent of those voters went to Biden.

But even those Trumpian missteps wouldn't necessarily have done the job of deposing the guy. For all Trump's unpopularity --

Trump outpolled Biden among people who had voted in 2016.

What killed Trump were the new voters. Biden won them by 14 points in the five decisive states. [my emphasis]

Election volunteers should take some credit. It's a truism that campaigns can't overcome fundamentals deriving from underlying conditions. A prosperous country isn't going change leadership lightly. 

But energetic campaigns can shift who votes by a few percentage points. By text, by postcard, by phone, and at the doors, millions of citizens determined to oust Trump turned out unexpected voters -- some newly registered, some just less politically engaged. And these citizens put Biden-Harris into office and sent the Donald scurrying off to his Florida resort.

Did that grassroots campaigning last fall accomplish anything?

The Pew Research Center just issued a bulletin describing survey research among citizens -- voters and non-voters --  about their contacts with various campaigns. Pew's interest is in the discrepancies between the quantity of campaign contact with people of color as compared to white people. I'm interested as well in the broader picture this information points to about what campaigning actually did.

To be honest, the racial gap which Pew is looking at isn't as large as I would have expected. And certainly, at least in Georgia, Philadelphia, and perhaps Florida, my experience of contacts through the UniteHERE phone bank was largely calling into Black populations. Pew notes that although 80 percent of people classified as Hispanic use English every day and likewise 71 percent of those labelled Asian, it seems likely that citizens who do not routinely speak English received fewer contacts. Smart campaigns try to work with that. The perfectly proper complaint that non-English speakers are ignored has been a feature of campaign postmortems for as long as I've worked in campaigns. Winning campaigns try harder.

What grabs me about the picture Pew draws is the sheer ubiquity of campaign contacts, including some that might have had some actual effect. Here are Pew's findings in graphic form as well as snippets of the accompanying text.

Click to enlarge.

• Overall, 84% of U.S. adults who are citizens, and therefore eligible to vote, said they were contacted by a candidate’s campaign or by a group supporting a candidate in at least one of six ways in the month before the November 2020 election.
• A higher share of U.S. citizen adults living in nine presidential battleground states reported receiving at least one campaign contact than did those living in non-battleground states, 93% vs. 80%.
• Among those who said they voted in the 2020 election, about nine-in-ten adults reported receiving one or more campaign contacts, a higher share than among all citizens (83%). This pattern extended across most racial and ethnic groups.
• Adults ages 50 and older are more likely than those 18 to 49 to say they were contacted by a campaign, 90% vs. 79%.

To be blunt, nothing in my experience of campaigning suggests that many of the methods of contact that Pew documented do a damn thing in a campaign. In that dismal category, I include postal mail and dropped flyers, "pre-recorded phone calls" otherwise known as robocalls, and email. 

I'm more agnostic on texting. Because of legal constraints on cell phone usage, some human has to click on a button for each text sent; texting therefore can engage a fair amount of volunteer energy. Whether texts move otherwise unlikely voters, I have no idea. I'm pretty sure that the efficacy rate is no higher than something like 500 or 1000 texts to one -- but that's not nothing. Software that enables activists conveniently to remind known friends to vote may be effectual in low participation elections -- which last November was not. 

Then we get down to the more effectual methods of voter contact: canvassing door to door and live person phone calls.  

Aside from a few places - Nevada and Philadelphia with UniteHERE, Arizona with a community coalition, and the Georgia run-offs -- canvassing just didn't happen on the Democratic side because of the pandemic. There were constant reports that the Trumpists were out on the doors, but this seemed to be a mixed bag. (Maybe too many of these folks got stuck on boat parades, another completely useless form of electioneering?) But the Pew survey suggests the amount of canvassing was actually quite restricted on both sides -- and quite targeted, amounting to 11 percent of voter contacts. Marginally more Blacks and Hispanics were door knocked than white voters.

The pandemic enormously heightened the importance of using phone calls as an election volunteer activity. Phoning also compensated somewhat for the geographical mismatch: though local volunteers are always the most effective messengers for a candidate, phoning can use volunteer energy among people who don't live in contested "battleground" states. Because so many of us never answer calls from unknown numbers, it strikes me as amazing 28 percent of voters report being contacted by a live caller.  They answered! The higher contact rate among older voters suggests that we may be more likely to answer our phones. And the pandemic itself may have increased the contact rate. Certainly early on, in August and September calling into Florida, I met many voters who seemed to have been cooped up for months with little human contact who were eager to chat while being helped to understand the rules for absentee voting. 

So did all that phoning actually do any good for our candidates? I think so, with two caveats. Callers need to be trained in whatever election information might be useful to the voter, such as what are the times and manners of casting a ballot. And also callers need to learn to establish a human connection with whoever answers the phone. This latter can be trained and practiced, but it is a high skill. 

From the small example amidst the vast coalitional effort I observed up close: the UniteHERE national phone bank developed a cadre of volunteers who could do it all; by the end of the Georgia run offs, I estimate this relatively small group of star talkers were turning up 2 to 4 voters each who otherwise might not have voted during each three hour shift. Less accomplished callers (I'm one) might be lucky to find one additional voter among 20 to 40 contacts with a human answering the phone during a shift.

Obviously, effective phone banking takes a lot of training, a lot of practice, a lot of shifts, and a lot of volunteers. And persistence. But something is accomplished if the election is closely fought.

And all-out citizen campaigning did prevail in Georgia, after all.

Black people save the country -- again

The Senate elections in Georgia -- the two new Democrats that the Peach State is sending to DC to break the Republican legislative strangehold -- mean, once again, we can hope for sane governance from the Feds. Congrats to "Rev. Warnock and Mr. Ossoff" as I've been naming them to voters on phones for a month.

It was a tremendous privilege to work with UniteHERE on this campaign, while knowing that every progressive force and person in the country was pulling hard for a Democratic and small "d" democratic result. And the people of Georgia have delivered, even if it isn't quite official at the moment of this writing.

The insightful reporter Perry Bacon Jr. pointed out a meaning of this result during a FiveThirtyEight live blog of the election. He wrote:

Democrats spent a lot of time the last four years obsessing about states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and wooing white voters without college degrees in particular. And while it’s not clear that Biden did that much better than Hillary Clinton with white voters without college degrees, he did win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But Georgia is a different ball game, in part because of its big Black population. And notably, the Democrats ran a campaign for these Senate seats that reflected the large Black electorate in the state:

1. They embraced the approach of Stacey Abrams, a Black woman, of really trying to boost turnout among voters of color, younger voters and those in the Atlanta area.
2. They embraced two candidates with lots of ties to Atlanta’s Black community. In Warnock, the pastor of the church MLK and his father ran, but also in Ossoff, who worked for two Atlanta Black congressmen, the late John Lewis and Hank Johnson.
3.  And lastly, they embraced a kind of social justice message. Ossoff and Warnock talked a lot about voting rights and other “Black” issues on the campaign trail.

If Democrats win one or both of these races, I would expect them to run similar campaigns to this in other states in the South with large Black populations.

Southerners have been telling the rest of us for years that there's a hopeful promise in their region arising from the Black history of pain, of enslavement, and of struggle. If we're to preserve and extend freedom, Black southerners will be among our leaders. Let us continue ...

Why are Jenkins and other UniteHERE members working so hard in Georgia?

Let him tell you himself. Jenkins Kolongbo is knocking on doors in Georgia for U.S. Senate candidates Rev. Rafael Warnock and Jon Offoff. UniteHERE members expect to hit 1,000,000 doors before the polls close tomorrow.

Hundreds of us are backing up Jenkins and the Georgia team on the phones from all over the country. You still have one more day to join us. Sign up for a shift and join us on Tuesday, January 5.

New Years reflections: not quite arrived and aging in place

Though the calendar has turned and we're finally out of 2020, I'm not quite into a new year -- yet. And I won't get there until after the voting ends in the Georgia Senate runoffs on January 5; I'm still phoning for Rev. Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. 

Perhaps I'll feel the arrival of a new year when Congress votes to accept the results of the election on January 6. Or perhaps the feeling will wait until Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20. I've lived four long years in a hyper-vigilant state, struggling for the survival of the better possibilities of this deeply flawed country -- that doesn't just disappear with the flip of the calendar.

I'll write plenty here during this new year about what I learned in that struggle -- and the struggles going forward -- but not yet.

Today I want write a little about what I learned in 2020 of my own experience of aging, of growing into getting older.

Going into the year, I knew what I thought was ahead. In the first half of the year, Erudite Partner would teach and I'd run, and continue Walking San Francisco, and writing this blog. In the second half of the year, we'd work in some way, somewhere, on a campaign to elect whatever Democrat emerged to contest Trump and the GOPers.

And then came the pandemic -- and we were locked down at home in a constrained world. This wasn't much of a hardship. Though I missed seeing people in person, I could still walk about, and read, and write. We could afford Costco deliveries and cooked more regularly. Pandemic isolation was comfortable for us.

But little nicks and aches interrupted my running. By July I was largely immobilized with a bad back which morphed into medicine-induced digestive problems. And we understood, incompletely but not inaccurately, that the coronavirus was a respiratory threat I had to take seriously. Over the last decade I've had several bouts of pneumonia and I just don't recover rapidly or cleanly. So I chose to reduce risk of infection drastically. I didn't even go out to participate in the racial reckoning protests triggered, this time around, by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

And I certainly couldn't join an on-the-ground political campaign during a pandemic. For me, working a political campaign is the equivalent of going to war; I have always required absolute and unstinting focus from myself when on campaign. I couldn't deliver that in my condition or in the situation the disease had created.

Erudite Partner is a little younger and healthier, so she could go, and in August she departed for 3 months in Nevada. I had to content myself with working on the hotel workers union (UniteHERE) phone bank. This got off to a slow start but built up into a significant effort in Florida, Nevada and Philadelphia -- and continues now in support of canvassers in Georgia.

But stuck at home, I became aware that the pandemic and my own aches were slamming me with a reality that I, like most of us, prefer to push aside. As we age, how we physically and psychically participate in the world around us changes. My mentor in aging Ronni Bennett taught me to experience these changes with curiosity and humor. In her honor, I hope to write here occasionally about what I learn from my aging.

Here are some snippets from this plague year:

• I can't use ladders to change light bulbs anymore unless I've got someone around to hand me needed tools, etc. Found that out the hard way; nothing broke in the tumble except the lamp cover.
• Best have a wall or bed nearby to lean on when pulling on pants. I no longer can do this comfortably standing on one foot.
• I don't know whether this change comes from aging, or the pandemic, or both: mundane tasks that just need to get done like an oil change for the car or calling in the roofer to clean gutters seem more challenging.
• Interests changed. Don't know whether this is a consequence of the pandemic or increasing maturity, but I find I am no longer interested in football, professional or college. Football is a less violent alternative to war. Maybe I don't need that jolt anymore?
• I no longer can intelligently write in the evening; I'm too tired. So it's a good thing I don't now have, and expect never to have, a day job. When would I blog? I can listen to books during evenings, and that's a delight. I hope the San Francisco Public Library reopens soon, as I like to borrow a hard copy of any book I write about here to check quotes. There's quite a blog backlog of booktalk coming once they open.
• You can't go home again (thanks Thomas Wolfe) but old passions recur -- and it's possible to take them up again. I spent much of my early adulthood working to ensure that people in need of food had some. In the pandemic, I find that just about the only useful service I can perform outside the home is contact-free deliveries of food to homebound households one day a week for the Mission Food Hub. 
  

We'll see what the New Year brings ... May yours be happy and peaceful.

All out for the Georgia Senate races

Stacey Abrams rallied over 700 UniteHERE canvassers and remote phonebankers this morning over zoom.

"You are going to knock on one million doors! If you have to, irritate the dickens out of the people you meet. Ask them what they want and let them know we can get it done. We turned Georgia blue and we can do it one more time."

Walking door to door this time of year is cold work.

Canvassers and phone callers alike are learning about Georgia.

Walkers on the ground are out from dawn to dusk. We know -- if we want more coronavirus help from the federal government, if we want health care for everyone, if we want a government that respects workers and democracy -- we have to get this done.

Why Democrats might win in Georgia Senate run-off elections

First and foremost, the answer is that Georgians have been organizing for a more democratic (small "d") state for at least a decade, and actually ever since ending the Jim Crow regime of the last century. The person most associated with the remarkable accomplishment of winning the state for Joe Biden this year is former state senate minority leader and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams; her organization FairFight is now organizing volunteer work in the Senate race. (There are others: if labor unions are more your style, join me on the UniteHERE national phone bank.)

But a little Georgia history can remind what an enormous change it is to see Georgia turn blue -- or at least purple. Democrats Reverend Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, Democratic candidates both, do still have a chance to win Senate seats in the January 5 vote.

Emily Badger in the Upshot captured a central truth about the November election:

“One way you could characterize what happened a month ago is this was the first time — maybe the first time ever — where urban Georgia outvoted rural Georgia,” said Charles S. Bullock III, a political scientist at the University of Georgia.

I'm old enough to vaguely remember that Jim Crow elections in Georgia were governed by what was called the County Unit Rule. After Southern elites defeated Reconstruction and restored their pre-Civil War power over the Black and white working class population, Georgia like all the South became a one-party state (Democrats in those days.) In a one-party state, the only election that matters is the primary. The County Unit Rule, legally established in 1917, ensured that small rural countries where only whites were allowed to vote retained preponderant power in Democratic primaries, ensuring that cities and the Black population could never choose candidates who would win in general elections. This system was only ended by Supreme Court decision in 1963.

Moreover, as in most of the South, the ruling party felt no pressure to ensure that state legislative seats represented equal numbers of voters. The white rural areas were grossly over represented. The Supreme Court's One Person One Vote decision in 1964 finally curbed that practice.

As the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gradually enabled Blacks to become members of the electorate, white Georgians migrated to the GOP. The last Democratic U.S. Senator from Georgia and the last Democratic Governor are both defeated by Republicans in 2002. Thereafter, until November, Georgia was once again a one-party state, now Republican.

Atlanta suburbs grow and turn blue. Click to enlarge.

The Upshot article makes a pretty convincing case that increasing integration of the Atlanta suburbs, created by migrants of all colors, as well as Georgian Black citizens, is key to finally empowering Georgia's diverse urban and suburban core.

“It’s been this evolution of Cobb from a white-flight suburb to, now, I went to a Ramadan meal in a gated community in Cobb County that was multiracial,” said Andrea Young, the executive director of the Georgia A.C.L.U., and the daughter of the former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young. “This is the story,” she said, “of Atlanta spilling out into the metro area.”

Around the region, suburban communities that once defined themselves in opposition to Atlanta have increasingly come to resemble it: in demographics, in urban conveniences and challenges, and, finally, in politics. Rather than symbolizing a bulwark against Black political power, these places have become part of a coalition led by Black voters that is large enough to tip statewide races — and that could hand control of the Senate to Democrats next month.

Georgia has been a state structurally consigned to one-party rule -- white, rural rule-- for generations.  What might happen there in January is earthshaking.

This is the coup

Republican office holders know what many of us in California have learned since the 1990s: if every citizen votes, they go down to defeat by the people. They can confuse and lie and inflame hatreds, but a majority of us neither want their policies nor trust them in office.

So now a flood of Republican controlled states led by the criminally indicted Attorney General of Texas and 106 Congresscritters have gone to the Supreme Court begging "Pretty please, overturn the election. We don't like the result." Trump has piled on -- "overturn" is his word. Joe Biden cannot be allowed to become President.

Marc Elias is the lead Democratic lawyer defending the election. His folks have won in 56 out of 57 of the bogus lawsuits in which GOPers have charged voting fraud in the states. He's gobsmacked by this new one:

I am shaken by this Texas case. Not because it will prevail (it won't) but because something is seriously wrong with our democracy that these elected leaders, who know better, are using the courts to spread lies and undermine our elections.

That seems too kind. GOPers want power and they don't care that they have to run over the majority to get it. It's been that way for citizens of color for most of our history; those of us who are white and currently disfavored are learning what it is like to be threatened by the boot on the neck. 

The peculiar personal pathologies of  Donald Trump have accelerated the descent of the national Republican Party into pure fascism.

We cannot let democracy die quietly. 

Job One is win the two Senate seats up for election in Georgia in January. You can get involved remotely through a coalition of non-profit organizations led by Fair Fight or through the unions by joining the UniteHERE phone effort. 

Who knows what Job Two will be -- RESISTANCE is still the word.

Georgia Republicans want less voting by the wrong citizens

The election, in all three counts, was more 99.965% accurate.

No quantity of recounts will shift the 2020 results in Georgia. Trump lost; Biden won.

So Republican legislators are already working to make sure such a thing never happens again. 

Georgia Republicans on Tuesday outlined a plan to restrict mail voting and roll back the election laws that contributed to the state's record-high turnout in the presidential election — unwinding rules the party itself put in place.

The framework for legislation — which would eliminate no-excuse absentee voting, add a voter ID requirement to mail ballots for voters with an eligible excuse and eliminate drop boxes — appears designed to respond to President Donald Trump's repeated and false claims that mail voting is rife with fraud.

... Voting rights experts have long argued that mail voting is already secure, and that these types of restrictions suppress voters, particularly Black and brown Americans who already face disproportionate hurdles.

... Georgia Republicans created the state's no-excuse absentee voting system in 2005, under Gov. Sonny Perdue, who now serves at Trump's secretary of agriculture.

And their efforts to make voting harder will begin with the January 5 Senate run off elections. The New York Times reports: 

Election officials in Cobb County, Georgia, the state’s third most populous county, are planning to open fewer than half the early voting locations for the Senate runoff elections in January. It is one of the only counties in the state to make such a drastic reduction in voting access while the pandemic surges.

In the 2020 election, the county had 11 early voting locations. For the January runoffs, the county is planning to have only five....

County officials claim holiday related staffing shortages -- but given the state's history of voter suppression, it's hard not to suspect partisan motives.

You can help Georgia voters make a plan to turn out despite whatever obstacles Republicans throw up by joining the UniteHERE phone bank.

Do we believe greed is good?

It's entirely too easy to underestimate what rapacious swindlers these two are. Here's Matt Ford:

The Georgia Runoff Elections Are a Referendum on Political Corruption

Some people collect stamps in their free time. Others play chess or go bird-watching. David Perdue, the senior senator from Georgia, trades stocks. An analysis by The New York Times earlier this month found that Perdue reportedly accounts for one-third of all stock trades made by senators in recent years, and that taken together, his trades exceed those made by the next five senators put together.

This wouldn’t be a problem if Perdue wasn’t a senator. Everyone needs a hobby, after all. But he is a senator, and his seat gives him access to nonpublic information that could affect stock prices, as well as influence over the fates and fortunes of businesses that could be affected by the Senate’s actions. To make matters worse, he appears to have bought and sold stocks in companies that deal with the committees and subcommittees on which he serves.

... Loeffler, who was appointed to the Senate in December 2019, has also been dogged by ethics concerns since taking office. Some of them stem from her own business dealings as well as her marriage to Jeffrey Sprecher, a wealthy financier and the founder of Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution presciently noted, when Loeffler took office, that she faced a potential “minefield” of ethical concerns if her financial holdings intersected with Senate business. Those predictions came true after news outlets discovered that she and her husband, along with a handful of other senators, sold off stocks in January as the Senate began to receive briefings about the emerging pandemic. ...

Do Georgians care about corruption? Or have years of dirty governance convinced them that all politicians steal, so who cares? 

We had a meeting today planning for the UniteHERE phonebank to Georgia voters for the January 5 run off. We were asked to think about what we hoped to learn from it. I want to learn more about what Georgians think about corruption and about what they might hope for. Join the phonebank from the link and you can too.

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.

Trump is history -- but it ain't over yet

There are more wins ahead if we make it happen. Once again, the hospitality workers union, UniteHERE, is fighting the good fight for a Democratic Senate by getting out the vote for Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the Georgia run-off elections to be held January 5.

Relief in the economic crunch caused by the pandemic is at stake, not to mention any hope of raising the national minimum wage and ensuring access to health care. 

Nearly 500 union folks are already on the ground, knocking on doors.

The doorknockers need our help; we can call Georgia voters from home. Right now, our calls focus on union members who need a push about this unusual election. Georgia turned Blue on November 3; let's finish the job, stick it to Trump and his Republican toadies, and elect two more Democratic Senators!

Sign up for shifts at this link.

I can understand why people think Trump should have won

How could it be that the election we have just survived was as close as it seemed? (It wasn't actually very close in truth; Biden won by about 6 million popular votes, but the crazy Electoral College system made the contest seem closer than it was.) This chart from Kevin Drum points me to one reality. 

For middle income people in this country, the four Trump years were pretty good. After the long trough that economic life was mired in during much of Obama times, by 2016 income was finally inching up. If you weren't alienated by Trump's misogyny, racism, corruption, cruelty, and generally embarrassing lunacy, what wasn't to like?

As better pundits sometime point out, presidents are only marginally responsible for good economic times. Events beyond their control can throw economic life into a tailspin -- note the chart doesn't include what has happened to median income since the pandemic. We won't fully know for awhile yet how bad a hit most people have taken. 

Meanwhile, whatever else pollsters missed, they always showed that people gave Trump good marks for "the economy." 

I've seen a suggestion somewhere (and am embarrassed to have lost the citation), that political journalists are scarred by their own position as precarious survivors in a dying industry. The thing we called "the economy" doesn't look good to them, as media outlets consolidate and jobs in their profession disappear. So it was hard for them to fathom that for many people, especially white mid-career and older ones, good times were back.

It's going to be very hard for Joe Biden and the Dems to promote economic health (equitable and greenish, we hope) if a Republican Senate can block every move. All the more reason to try to elect the two Democratic challengers in the run-off on January 5 in Georgia. I'll start back on the phones this week. Want to join me?

So what the hell happened in the election?

It will surprise no one that I have opinions, for what they are worth -- not much. I've read dozens of takes on why pre-election polls overestimated Joe Biden's margins in many states by 8-10 points -- plus why they failed to catch that in states Trump carried, Democratic Senate candidates couldn't bring the election home. 

As a smart friend said: "The narrative that pops up right after seems to take on a life of its own." So true. Heck, all of us on the west coast have been through a collective experience of this during both 2018 and 2020. Because of which races are called early in an election evening, it did not become apparent that 2018 was a wildly successful "blue wave" until after the east coast had gone to bed; it took several days for the punditry to catch up to the reality of Democratic success. In 2020, because Florida was called early and strongly for Trump, the evening of November 3 felt as if we were repeating the horror of 2016 -- until Fox News called Arizona for Biden. This call probably was a stretch at the time, but it has held up and it reassured me then. By morning, a more Democratic pattern had emerged. 

If you live on the west coast, you have to get used to this.

Then there are exit polls. It's always worth taking exit polls with a pound of salt. If you'd been waiting in line for hours to vote, would you talk with some kid with a clip board? Probably only if you were a highly engaged voter. This year, when we're avoiding close contact with each other and when more than half of us voted by mail anyway, exit polls seem obviously suspect.

I do think there is something to David Shor's conclusion that people who have "low social trust" aren't talking to pollsters -- and that means there were plenty of infrequent and non-voters, usually "white working class" ones, whose intentions would seldom be captured in a poll. Because I've actually worked on too many elections, I've talked with lots of these people. An experienced canvasser learns to discern the difference between "I'm not going to tell you who I'm for," "I'm for your guy, I guess ...," "I'm just shining you on because it's fun to talk to some poor schmuck," and "get out of here before I set my dog on you." Any of them may be open to voting in your direction -- or, more likely at that moment, none may be. You keep working to bring in the possibles, and give the impossible ones a wide berth.

I also think Shor is correct that "Voters are now determining their opinions about parties in a unified way and not reading about individual local candidates." The internet and the sheer tedium of the permanent campaign does that. I don't think most voters have a glimmer about what policies they are voting for when they choose candidates. This is hard for Democrats because on many "issues" like gun control and health care, polls show most of the electorate on our side. But mostly voters just gravitate toward the brand that feels congenial. I do think there is power in a good messenger offering hope as well as fear. But we have to recognize that the GOPers sure do well with the latter. It might be hard for lefties to see, but there were a lot of people for whom Biden was a messenger of hope.

Finally, my preferred take on what happened on November 3 comes from Marcos Moulitas, that's kos, the founder of the Democratic site, Daily Kos. He writes as an elections warrior more than as a data guy, and this rings true to me:

The reason the polls were off: the Hidden Deplorable  

The polls were off in 2016.
The polls were right in 2018.
The polls were off in 2020.

The difference? Donald Trump.

In 2016 and 2020, Republicans overperformed the polling, primarily by turnout of more people than any models expected. This is particularly striking in 2020 given that Democratic turnout was also bonkers. It didn’t matter. There’s legitimately a hidden deplorable vote for Trump, one that only has turned out when Trump himself is on the ballot.

If kos is right, perhaps the "deplorable vote" -- potential voters uniquely motivated to tear it all down behind their cult leader -- doesn't turn out in Georgia in the Senate run-offs set for January 5. Meanwhile, Jon Ossoff, Rev. Rafael Warnock, and Stacey Abrams are sure going to work to win these races to go along with the Biden-Harris victory.

Why the Black vote is different

The polling postmortems of 2020 are going to be long and tough. At this early moment, pollsters seem to be suggesting that Donald Trump has successfully trained or deepened the instinct among his most rabid (largely white and rural) base not to answer the telephone. Well, maybe. If so, and this habit endures, not only will journalistic polling be left in the dark, but also internal campaign polling on which candidates make decisions about resources.

Then there's the polling of non-white citizens. We are nowhere close to understanding the behavior of the various segments of the Latinx electorate; we should wait for more depth of analysis. I've been attending to Latinx polling since 1994 and all I know is that polling among Latinx communities ALWAYS stinks. And it doesn't seem to improve much.

What I want to do here is pass along a very clear, insightful, Twitter thread from Nicole Hannah-Jones (Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones) which explains to journalists how to think about Black voting patterns. Hannah-Jones is the prime mover behind the New York Times 1619 Project, that magisterial exploration of how Black USA came to be. She's got a lot to say:

Again we see how expertise in race, racism, racial history is an essential but underdeveloped journalistic skill. That Latinos, Asian & white votes are split is NOT surprising. It is the uniformity of the Black vote that is exceptional & it stems from a singular racial experience.

Black Americans, because of a history of chattel slavery and racial apartheid, have been forced into a monolithic vote even as they hold diverse political views. That's [because] every aspect of Black Americans' lives was legally and socially constrained by their designation as Black.

A Black doctor, a Black immigrant, a Black Northerner, a Black evangelical all were barred from schools, jobs, housing, libraries, parks, voting, by law, by custom, by policy. Their individual attributes were literally irrelevant. Their citizenship and rights always contested.

This was true until a half century ago! I am part of the first generation of Black Americans in the history of this country for whom it was not illegal to deny me marriage rights, housing, education and employment simply because my ancestors had once been enslaved.

Thus, Black Americans have a shared history and shared racial experience that is singular in its uniformity, and Black Americans have always had to vote their civil and human rights over any other concerns or political issues. That is a different experience from other groups.

We tend to cover elections, our country overall, as if every group who is not white experiences racism, racial inequality and race the same, but there is a distinct experience of being the people on which the established racial hierarchy was built. We need more sophistication here.

Yes, please.

Can an activist have druthers?

The Times queried a sample of individual voters:

... [what were] their hopes for the country — whatever the outcome of the election. What did they want for America?

This isn't the sort of thing I tend to think about. Experience and education have given me the opportunity to think more granularly about both policy directions that appear desirable to me and about the twisted trade-offs that advancing toward any of them might entail. So I write about that stuff.

But what would I hope for in a new presidency? I'll restrict myself to two:

• One: that the necessary popular mobilization that so many of us learned we must take part in during the Trump regime/GOPer remains alive in some form -- or in many forms. My greatest disappointment with the Obama presidency was that after the first Black man won the big job, he allowed all the energy which had been Organizing for America to be drained off into busy work, such as public service projects to mark the MLK holiday. It was pretty clear even before the inauguration that his crew didn't want the awakened tiger to stay around. And our hopes crashed along with the organized energy. I don't think we're as dependent on Biden for leadership in this as we were on Obama, though the money may dry up.

• Two: I hope to regain some feeling that this troubled land is once again in forward motion, is grappling with the inescapable requirements of our history and reality. You can't duck this stuff and live. The Trump regime felt as if a country limping toward a better, if imperfect, future had slammed into a wall. (There's that ur-Trumpian wall theme again.) The needs for forward motion are so many: for climate sustainability, for more racial justice, for a more equitable economy, for more gender equality, for more democracy, for less militarized empire. We aren't going to get to any of them (will, maybe, involuntarily, that last). But the country more or less works when we are trying.