Nate Cohn and Nate Silver have been arguing with each other on Twitter lately, but one thing they agree about is that the midterm election outcomes are too uncertain to risk their reputations making a firm prediction. It’s the day before the election, though, and people want some kind of commitment.
Instead, Silver gives us the predictable “two scenarios” treatment. On the one hand, could be the polls suck but so do the fundamentals for the Democrats. Either way, big Republican win! Or, on the other hand, maybe “pollsters face more reputational risk from again missing high on Democrats than the other way around” and are skewing things in the GOP’s favor–the Democrats do better than expected!
Meanwhile, Cohn is even less committal.
Everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a fairly close race for the House to something like a Republican rout is well within the range of realistic possibilities on Tuesday.
In Cohn’s case, I believe he’s far more skeptical than Silver about the overall quality of the polls this cycle, which provides justification for throwing up his hands rather than going out on a limb.
However you look at it, the overall pundits’ narrative is definitely giving Republicans reason to rubs their hands in glee and expectation. And there’s a line of thought that there’s value to looking like a winner on the eve of Election Day because people don’t like to vote for losers. This is one reason why Democrats are fighting back against the narrative, arguing that the polling averages are inundated with low-quality Republican-aligned surveys, or that the early vote is great or youth turnout is up, etc.
But there’s a flip side to high expectations. Democrats know that they’re predicted to lose, but they also see that a lot of races are very tight. They aren’t complacent, although there surely are some who are resigned. They feel like they’re fighting for their lives and the future of democracy, and it might be better overall that they’re not convinced everything will be okay. It could help their turnout.
All this stuff is probably close to a wash, to be truthful.
To me, the problem is that the Republicans are competitive after four years of Trump, a failed coup attempt, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The electorate is fucked in the head, which means the country is probably fucked, too. Today, I have some (probably delusional) hope that the Democrats will hold the House and expand their majority in the Senate. But if Dems lose one or both chambers of Congress, I don’t think I’ll experience hope again in this lifetime.
I really do feel, if that’s the outcome, that everything I’ve done for the last 16 years was nothing more than sticking me finger in the dyke. The town couldn’t be saved.
Before you beat yourself up too much, remember that the boy who stuck his finger in the dyke didn’t save the town permanently – that wasn’t the solution to just leave him there. He bought the town time to patch the dyke properly.
The liberal blogosphere arouse over 20 years ago to be that boy – and the ‘town’ didn’t want to hear it. To whatever degree liberal bloggers gained some degree of mainstream visibility, the institutional forces pushed back just as hard or harder – the complete collapse of the GOP into reactionary politics is part of that pushback, but there’s few (any?) mainstream/centrist institutions that have truly grappled with the GOP’s descent into authoritarianism. The liberal bloggers and their descendants have been screaming about the dyke collapsing for nearly a generation now, and the town dismissed them as shrill. That’s not a failure of the bloggers, but of the town.
We probably should have understood the writing was on the wall when the Bush admin completely skated for their malevolence, incompetence and criminality, both legally and politically (the GOP paid no long term cost).
I know you know all this, but it’s important to remind yourself of it. There’s only so much one person can do, and you should give your self credit and permit yourself to be ok with what you did. It’s like children of divorce who beat themselves up for not ‘fixing’ their parents marriage. We understand how unrealistic, cruel, and damaging that sort of expectation is. It was never our job to single-handedly preserve American democracy. There are those who had that responsibility, and they could not or would not do it. The failure is theirs.
If all this goes south I have to wonder whether I should rethink where I apply my efforts in the future, and if there isn’t a way that I can do things in a way that stands a greater chance of generating a more productive outcome for people, and where I can actually feel and see that the things I do make a difference in people’s lives. I really thought that if we could just survive Trump, that better days would be ahead. When Biden won, and we took both houses of Congress, it felt like there was a real possibility that the worst was behind us. But the insurrection, the craven and deadly choice by the GOP to go all-in on fascism, and the fact that our broken system seems unable to hold anyone of power accountable for an attempted overthrow of our democracy just leaves one with the feeling that this whole thing is just not sustainable. I hope I’m wrong, but it feels like the last wisps of life giving oxygen are escaping from the lungs of Uncle Sam, and we are going to be forced to reckon with an entirely new landscape that has never existed in our history. Whatever that form of government is, it will not be based on the same principles that brought us together in 1787.
If Republicans can win in 2022 and 2024, then they’ll be on course for the Ecofascist land of their fever dreams.
I don’t care about any polls whatsoever as answering a poll isn’t the same as having your vote counted, so I’m not assuming that the D’s or R’s pick up or lose seats until it’s official. Maybe 5 days from now?
But, if Republicans can win in 2022 and 2024, it’ll be lights out for small-d democratic small-r republican government, for sure. By 2027, there’s almost no way that being anything other than a Party Member In Good Standing won’t be punishable economically and/or legally by the Party.
Well, I feel you. And it’s important to attend to those emotions because otherwise they’ll come back and hit you even harder. And maybe historians *will* look back on this election as the decisive turning point in the rise of fascism and the end of democracy in the US.
Or maybe not. Maybe, even if Republicans win control of the House and Senate and win a bunch of close state races, they’ll look back on this as the high water mark for early 21st century American fascism. Or maybe the turning point was Trump’s election. Or the Patriot Act/Iraq War/Guantanamo reaction to 9/11. Or the Brooks Brothers riot and Supreme Court hijacking of the 2000 election. Or the rise to power of Newt Gingrich in 1994.
And however it turns out, we’re all the kid with a finger in the dike. No matter how hard or well any one of us works, it’s a big, big world and we each have a tiny impact on it.
Final point for today: we’ve been here before. After Reconstruction, there was a complete and utter rollback of democracy in the South that lasted for three generations. “Great Replacement Theory” defined and controlled US immigration law and policy from 1924 to 1965. The KKK swept to power across much of the *North* in the 1920s. Anti-semitic fascists like Fr. Coughlin ruled the airwaves in the 1930s to a degree that Tucker Carlson could only dream of. In each of those examples, the reactionaries eventually lost because people like you, and others here at the Pond, kept the torch of hope flickering through the darkest times so that it could be passed onto the next torch-bearers.
Indeed, it’s interesting and terrifying to think that the Great Depression happened primarily because of some of the foolishness you name here – and it amplified fascism. We could be in for a rough couple of decades.
Yeah, for those interested in counterfactual history, consider that in 1932 voters everywhere punished the incumbent/governing parties. If Democrats had won the White House in 1928, then it’s easy to imagine a scenario where Republicans swept to power in 1932, leading to a full-blown fascist power realignment as the decade proceeded.
It’s still just a bit early to say with any certainty, but it looks plausible that the Dems will hold the Senate and quite possibly the House, admittedly by paper-thin margins. Maybe holding out hope for a bit longer is worthwhile. There are still votes being counted, and in some cases we’re talking days or weeks. What we’re experiencing flies in the face of what the pundits and pollsters were telling us. It’ll take all of us a while to process what happened and what it means. I’m stumped. I was expecting an awful night.
Polls are useless and have been.
It all depends on turnout.
It looks like we’ve avoided Armageddon in Wisconsin! The orcs have not managed to storm the keep!