Regardless of Who Becomes President

This is going to be a messy election.  Regardless of who becomes president, it is likely that the results of the election will further polarize out country to a degree our democracy may not ultimately survive.  Can we prepare for the political, social and cultural storm that is probably coming?  No matter which candidate is elected, large swaths of the country will feel at best cheated, at worst defrauded.

If Trump Wins   

If Trump repeats his 2016 success with

• narrow victories in the “swing states,”
• a small margin in the Electoral College, and
• a minority of the popular vote,

then many of us on the left are going to believe that the election does not represent the will of the American people.

We will have good reasons, which I’ve reviewed before: here, here, here, and here.  A brief review:

-- Voter suppression by disqualifying voters: A number of states have passed laws discouraging or even preventing particular groups from voting.

• Voter ID laws: Despite the lack of any evidence that voter fraud is an issue in American elections, many states have begun to require some form of official picture identification (drivers’ license, passport, etc) to vote.  The ostensible purpose is to prevent (nonexistent) individual voter fraud, but the actual impact is to discourage poor and minority populations (who tend to be Democratic) from voting.
• Felony disenfranchisement: A majority of states do not allow felons to vote until after their entire sentence (including parole) has been completed (and ten states even longer or permanently).  This disenfranchises approximate 2.5% of American voters, the majority of whom, again, would tend to vote Democratic.
• Purging of voter rolls: States can purge from the list of registered voters those who haven’t voted recently, often without notifying them or giving them a chance to object.  This punishes voters who move frequently (ie renters and the young) or those ignorant of the provision, again, groups that tend to vote Democratic.  Voter Picture ID laws favor Republicans exclusively.

-- Voter suppression through making voting more difficult: 

• Certain states have eliminated polling centers, especially in poor and minority areas, forcing voters to travel long distances and/or to wait in long lines to vote.
• Most states have no same-day registration, requiring voters to register prior to voting day, disenfranchising those who move frequently or who don’t know the regulation.
• A current issue is the effort to restrict mail-in voting.  Absentee ballots, mail-in ballots, and early voting increase voter participation.  Despite the President’s protestations, there is no evidence of significant voter fraud with write-in balloting.
• A number of states prohibit or curb civic groups from helping people vote, for instance, by delivering absentee ballots to polling places.

-- The Electoral College favors small states, which are overwhelmingly Republican, and allows candidates with a minority of popular vote to win.  Both George W Bush in the 2000 election and Donald Trump in the 2016 election became president despite receiving a minority of the popular vote.

If Trump wins, progressive and left-leaning independents will have many reasons for believing that democracy has been subverted.  Even if there is no voter fraud in the legal sense, we are also far from one-person-one-vote.

If Biden Wins

Progressives, on the other hand, must remember that if Biden wins, Trump voters will also have strongly-held, sincere reasons to believe that their voices have been suppressed.

• Primary among these is President Trump’s ongoing false claims that the 2016 presidential election was rigged and his repeated assertions (without evidence) that this year’s November election will be “the greatest Rigged Election in history.”
• As do Biden’s, Trump supporters have good reason to believe that their candidate should win.  Given the powerfully partisan nature of our country, we tend live in separate geographic areas, have different friends, read different news sources, and so on.  Knowing few people from the “other side ,” it’s easy to believe that our candidate has a majority.
• Mainstream media have been painted as purveyors of “fake news” and are, therefore, not trusted by Trump supporters.  The news and opinion sources they do watch, eg Fox News or Sinclair Broadcasting (that owns 40% of local broadcast stations), tend to interpret the news through their own political lenses, again leading to viewers’ expectations of a Trump victory.
• Even the multitude of voter polls can have widely varying results depending on how the questions are asked and tabulated.

The class differences between pro-Trump and anti-Trump supporters are not so strict as they are sometimes described, but there are certainly prejudices about the “elite,” on one side, and the “blue collar workers,” on the other.  Each side believes that the other side cannot really understand them, so the political game seems to be really zero-sum.  If I win, you lose; and vice-versa.  We find it hard to remember that we really do share common cause.

The expectations of Trump supporters can be exaggerated. But, given the fervor of the Trump campaign and his preparation to claim electoral fraud, there will be every reason for supporters to contest a Trump loss. 

Regardless of Who Wins

One issue that is only beginning to receive attention is that, given the pandemic, the number of write-in ballots is likely to swamp some election offices, creating a significant delay in reporting (as opposed to the same-night results we are used to).  In close elections, mail-in ballots, many arriving days after election day, may well change the early results, leading to easy charges of vote tampering with unpredictable results, even violence.

Two highly dangerous conditions might arise:

• In a close election, Trump has already indicated, he may contest the results, leading to a possible constitutional crisis.  Given our partisan divide, that could be disastrous for the democracy.

• Even without such a disastrous outcome, the great likelihood is that our partisanship will accelerate to disastrous levels, making democracy increasingly unstable.

I would suggest that such an increase in our antipathy and mistrust will threaten our democracy almost as much as the President’s re-election.

The question remains: How do we prepare?  What can we do about it? 

I have thought a lot about this in the past year, and I am not close to an answer.  Some people have written about interesting and hopeful long-term responses, but we are only a little over four months away from the election.  The question of how any of us (regardless of partisan view) should respond, requires a lot more time and energy than we have been giving it.