Well, See You On The Other Side Everybody
“I do not foretell, for all foretelling is now vain: on the one hand lies darkness, on the other only hope.”
—Galadriel
Icecano endorses Kamala Harris for President
Well, fuck it, if the LA Times and the Washington Post won’t do it I will: Icecano Formally Endorses Kamala Harris for President of the United States.
It’s hard to think of another presidential election in living memory that’s more of a slam dunk than the one we have here. One the one hand, we have a career public servant, senator, sitting vice-president, and lady who made a supreme court justice cry. On the other hand, we have the convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, wannabe warlord, racist game show host, and, oh, the last time he was president he got impeached twice and a million people died.
If you strip away all the context—and you shouldn’t, but if you did—there’s still no contest. On basic ability to do the job Harris far outstrips the other guy. But if you pour all the context back—well, here’s the thing, only one candidate has any context worth talking about, and it’s all utterly disqualifying.
Whatever, whoever, or wherever you care about, Harris is going to be better than anything the convicted felon would do. Will she be perfect? Almost certainly not, but that’s not how this works. We’re not choosing a best friend, or a Dungeon Master, or a national therapist, or figuring out who to invite out for drinks. We’re hiring the chief executive of a staggeringly well-armed and sprawling bureaucracy.
I was going to type a bunch more here, but it comes down to this: Harris would actually be good at that job. We know for a fact that other guy will not.
One of the gifts age gives you, as it’s taking away the ability to walk up and down stairs without using the handrail, is perspective.
Every election cycle, there’s a group of self-identified “liberal/leftist” types who mount a “principled” take on why they can’t possibly vote for the Democrat, and have to let the Republican win, despite the fact that the Republican would be objectively worse on the thing they claim to care about. And it’s always the same people.
Here’s the thing: these people are liars. Certainly to you, maybe to themselves.
Nothing has ever satisfied them, and nothing ever will. They’re conservatives, but they want their weed dealer to keep selling to them at the “friendly” price, so they pretend otherwise. You know that “punk rock to conservative voter” pipeline? At best, these are those people, about 2/3 of the way down the line. Stop paying attention to them, stop trying to convert them, and don’t let them distract you.
Whats the point of being a billionaire newspaper owner if you’re going to be a gutless coward about it? I genuinely don’t know which of these two Charles Foster Kane would have supported, but he’d have made a fucking endorsement.
A week to go everyone. Vote.
Two Weeks and Change
This election is starting to feel like that shot at the end of Return of the Jedi where the Falcon and a TIE Fighter are screaming up the Death Star tunnel away from the wall of flame. In just over two weeks we’ll know which ship we’re in.
The last month or so seems to have really borne out my initial impression that there are no undecided voters; the polls have been basically rock solid the whole time, despite an absurd number of plot twists and things that would have blown up any other election. I wouldn’t have thought a three-way race between “harm reduction, “fascism”, and “well, the leopards won’t eat my face” would be this close, but there you go. Everyone decided four years ago.
On the other hand, who knows? Part of being an American is saying things like “I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but….” and then a decade later finding out everything you suspected was right, and then some. Polling is clearly broken this cycle, but we won’t know how cooked it was until after the fact. Everyone who puts out poll numbers or talks about them has a strong financial incentive to make it sound like a close race no matter what; both so they have something to keep talking about and so that they don’t have to answer questions about why their methodologies were wrong. In retrospect, one of the most consequential political events of the last decade was the NYT website poll tracker meter slamming all the way towards Clinton on election night in 2016; everyone in the business looked at that the next morning and thought “never again.”
On a more positive note, how great is it that Jimmy Carter managed to hit his goal of living long enough to vote for Harris? There have been at least three complete narratives about “Jimmy Carter” since I’ve been an adult, and I’m glad he lived long enough to see it finally land on “Beloved and Respected Elder Statesman.” (And, that his long-term rep has increased in a directly inverse proportion to Reagan. Speaking of consequential political events, it’s also nice to see the 1980 election being more widely acknowledged as the course-of-civilization changing fuckup that it was. Here’s hoping we avoid another one.)
Harris/Walz ’24. Let’s clear the tunnel.
is it still called a subtweet if you use your blog to do it
There’s that line, that’s incorrectly attributed to Werner Herzog, that goes “Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3 while 1/3 watches.” (It was actually the former @WernerTwertzog.)
But sure, false attribution aside, I grew up hearing stories about that. The reason my family lives on this side of the planet is because of reasons strongly adjacent to that. Disappointing, but not surprising, when that energy rears back up.
What does keep surprising me over the last few years, is that I never expected that last third to be so smug about it.
That’s How You Do That
I’ve never been convinced that “debates” are a useful contribution to presidential campaigns; the idea that the candidates are going to do some kind of good faith high school debate club show is the same kind of pundit class galaxy brained take as “there are undecided voters." But then again, we’ve found ourselves with a system where the most powerful person in the world is selected by 6000 low-information people in rural Pennsylvania, so that results in some strange artifacts.
That said.
There’s your choice America. I can’t think of another occasion with that stark a contrast between candidates for anything. Both the best and the worst debate performance I’ve ever seen, on the same stage. Once again, Harris is proving that the way to deal with the convicted felon is to call him on his bullshit as clearly as possible and to his face. You love to see it.
With that said, I wish, I really wish, that some debate moderator would open with “so, we all know this isn’t about policy, this is about appearances and vibes, so I’m going to abandon the prepared questions and open with this: What’s your best joke?” Maybe move into the Voight-Kampff questions after that.
There we go: Harris/Walz 24
Candidate swap complete. Okay, I’m convinced. Let’s go win this thing.
The party conventions are always a sales event—they’re the political versions of those big keynotes Apple does—but this one was remarkably well put-together, probably the best of my lifetime, which is especially insane considering they had to swap candidates only four weeks ago. I’m acting like Belle’s father from Beauty and the Beast, just staring at it asking “how is this accomplished?” I’m really looking forward to next summer’s deluge of tell-all behind-the-scenes books, explaining how in the heck they pulled any of this off.
This bit from Josh Marshall’s piece on the final night stuck with me:
What I took from this is a sense of focus and discipline from the people running Harris’ convention and campaign — not getting lost in glitz or stagecraft but defining a specific list of critical deliverables and then methodically checking them off the list. This was going on in the midst of what was unquestionably a high-powered and high-energy event. There was a mix of discipline and ability there that could not fail to have an impact but was also, in the intensity of the final day of a convention, easy to miss.
The other nights had some of this too. But it came through to me most clearly tonight.
I continue to think there’s more going on in this campaign than much of the political and commenting class has yet understood or reckoned with.
There’s a thing going on here that’s not just a “honeymoon phase” after a surprise switch-up. Personally, I think a big part is the Dem’s long overdue embrace of being the “regular people” party, but critically, without a self-destructive “pivot to the center.” In the US “The Center”, like “libertarian” is just a code word for a republican who smokes weed and doesn’t openly hate the gays. For ages now the Dems have surrendered so much American iconography—camo, flags, guns, the entire midwest—and it’s incredibly refreshing to see the Dems openly embrace all that “Real America” stuff, leaving the Repubs with nothing but looking like the creepy weirdo loosers they are.
I tend to think of the Democrats as, effectively, a British-style coalition, just without the framework the parliamentary system provides of actually having each member party having a public number of seats. Instead the factions are fluid and more obscure. Which makes intra-party negotiations hard even in better times, and even more so when the “other side” isn’t a coalition and is full of wannabe petty dictators. From the outside, and probably from the inside, it’s hard to tell how the various factions are doing versus each other.
There are, bluntly, a lot of issues that just aren’t on the ballot this year, which for whatever reason have fallen outside of the contextual Overton window of the ’24 election. The lack of formal coalition dynamics makes those so frustrating; there’s no way to know how close they were to being on the ballot. And, of course, the reason I keep calling this a “harm reduction” election is that for those about six things I’m subtweeting, the other side would be an absolute catastrophe. And that’s before we remember that the baseline of the opponents here really is “…or fascism.”
That said, it’s such a relief to see that the party seems to have finally shook off the Clinton/Blair era “Third Way” hangover and landed in a much more progressive place than I’d have ever hoped a few years ago. This feels like a group that would have held the banks accountable, for starters?
The first Bill Clinton campaign is the one this keeps making me think of, that explicit sense of “the old ways failed, here comes the new generation.” (Speaking of, can you imagine how hard Harris would kill on the old Arsenio show? For that matter, how hard Walz would?)
But more than any of that, this is a campaign and a candiate that’s here to play None of this gingerly hoping “we can finally talk about policy,” this a group that’s solidly on the offensive and staying there. The Dem’s traditional move has been to blow what should have been easy wins (looking at you 2000 and 2016) mostly by wrecking out the campaign to chase votes they were never going to get, or because actually trying to win power was beneath them somehow. Not this time. Non-MAGA America is deeply, profoundly sick of those assholes, and Harris has really captured the desire to move on as a country.
Finally!
In any case, we’re really though the looking glass now. No one has any idea what’s going to happen. Yeah, I saw that poll, and yes that one, and that one. We’re so far outside the lines I don’t think any of those mean anything we can interpret with the data we have. At this point, anybody who says what they think is going to happen without ending the sentence with a question mark is lying.
To quote Doctor Who: “Oh, knowing's easy. Everyone does that ad nauseam. I just sort of hope."
“White Guy Tacos”
I just want to say that as a white guy with laughably-low spice tolerance, I never expected my demographic to be represented in a major national election, much less dominate a news cycle?
This is our time, fellow spice-phobes! You love to see it.
On Enthusiasm
Remember Howard Dean? Ran for president in 2004. Had huge grassroots support, got “the kids” really excited, and then got too excited in public, and went home to let Kerry lose the election.
I always thought the media kerfluffle around the “Dean Scream” was bizarre. Years later I saw a documentary where he was interviewed, about the election and other things, and he came across as sane, thoughtful, charismatic. Afterwards, he was a tremendously successful head of the nation party apparatus. Towards the end, the interviewer asked him if he’d do “the scream”, and he refused. Seemed embarrassed by the idea, kinda pissed the interviewer would bring it up. Oh, I thought, this is why you lost the election. You have a brief moment of actual personality in public, it’s still the thing you’re the most known for, and even now you can’t bring yourself to embrace it.
The Dems, at least for the last 20–30 years, have had a strange aversion to “enthusiasm”, treating it as somehow low-class or embarrassing. I guess this partly their self-identity as the “adults in the room,” and partly a reaction to looking over at Reagan and saying “screaming crowds are the thing the other guys do”.
So the guy in ’04 who has the kids all excited allows the media to shame him out of the race for being excited. And clearly he was actually embarrassed, based on that interview. He should have leaned into it, made that his thing. Opened every event with that yell, get a call and response going. Instead, nope, we’re gonna let the most boring man in the world lose the election to the war criminal running on ending social security.
And of course, the really maddeningly weird thing is that the Dem base is much more purpose-driven, more emotionally-connected to outcomes. They’re the ones who will stay home unless you fire them up! The main opponent has always been apathy!
So the Dems that win are (mostly) charismatic outsiders, whereas the party wants to run “grownups.” So you have Gore, who runs basically as a robot, and then as soon as he loses shows up on Futurama and is incredibly funny. Remember how scandalized the other Dems were by Clinton playing the sax on Arsenio? I think this was one of the dynamics that fueled the Bernie-Clinton feud too; somehow the Dems though people yelling “Bernie or bust” meant he wasn’t electable?
I suspect this is mostly a generational thing. The batch of boomer-age Dems that have been running the show the last 30 years have always treated “people being excited” as not grown up enough. And fair enough, if you grew up in the 50s & 60s, there was a very, very limited number of things you were allowed to “like” or express feeling about; maybe sports? Otherwise, stoicism was the goal. Maybe because an entire generation grew up with parents who had undiagnosed PTSD?
The younger generations aren’t like that? Or at the very least, have a different set of “things you’re allowed to be excited about” and aren’t fundamentally embarrassed by the concept of “excitement” or “emoting”. So those people start being in charge, and they’re like, no actually, stoicism isn’t the goal, let’s get the base fired up. Which turns out to be really valuable when the opponent isn’t “the other guy” but “staying home”?
Anyway, my Hot Take is that Harris/Walz is what you get when the Dems stop treating “enthusiasm” as something low class and embarrassing.
More than anything, Biden had a vibes problem; I see that Harris is now polling ahead of the convicted felon/ failed businessperson on “the economy”, as opposed to Biden who was well behind. It’s the same economy! Same administration! Same failed casinos! Vibes issue.
Being “the grown ups” meant being reactive, trying to stick to “serious topics”, with the result being that the other side gets to dictate the terms of the fight and then ground you down over a year(s)-long campaign.
But now we’ve got a team actually trying to fire up the base, setting the terms, taking the initiative. Part of why “mind you own damn business” has popped so hard as a campaign theme is that this is the kind of topic everyone actually cares about and has wanted a Dem to run on since forever, instead of the finer points of NATO funding or whatever.
This really does feel like a campaign run by people who at a critical age, instead of watching Mr Smith goes to Washington, watched Heathers. As they say, let’s not go back.
Meet the Veep
And there we go, it’s Walz. Personally, I was hoping for Mayor Pete, but as Elizabeth Sandifer says: “…when you create the campaign's new messaging strategy you get to be the VP nom.". I love that he’s a regular guy in the way that’s the exact opposite of what we use the word “weird” as a shorthand for.
The Dems claiming the title of the party of regular, normal, non-crazy people is long overdue; this is a note they should have been playing since at least the Tea Party, and probably since Gingrich. But, like planting a tree, the second best time is now, and Walz’s midwestern cool dad energy is the perfect counterpoint to the Couch Experience.
“Both sides are the same” is right-wing propganda designed to reduce voter turnout, but the Dems don’t always run a ticket that makes it easy to dispute. What I like about the Harris/Walz vs Trump/Vance race is that the differences are clear, even at a distance. What future do you want, America?
As I keep saying, this is a “turn out the base” election; everyone already knows which side they’d vote for, and the trick is to get them to think it’s worth it to bother to vote. Each candidate is running against apathy, not each other. Fairly or not, over the summer the Democrats found themselves with a substantial enthusiasm gap. The Repubs didn’t have a huge amount of enthusiasm either, but the reality is the members of the Republican coalition are more likely to show up and vote for someone they don’t like than the Dems, so structurally thats the sort of thing that hurts Team Blue more.
Literally no one wanted to do the 2020 election over again, and in one of those bizarre unfair moments America decided to blame Biden for it, instead of blaming the guy who lost for not staying down. But more than that, complaining about how “old” everyone was also a shorthand for something else—all the actors here are people who’ve been around since the 80s. We just keep re-litigating the ghosts of the 20th century. Obama felt like the moment we were finally done having elections rooted in how the Boomers felt about Nixon, but then, no, another three cycles made up entirely of people who’ve been household names since Cheers was on the air.
And then Harris crashes into the race at the last second with an “oh yeaaahhhh!” Suddenly, we’ve got something new. This finally feels like not just a properly post-Obama ticket, but actually post “The Third Way”; both in terms of policy and attitude this is the campaign the Dems should have been running every election in the 21st century. And for once, the Dems aren’t just trying to score points with some hypothetical ref and win on technicals, they’re here to actually win. Finally.
I’m as surprised as anyone at the amount of excitement that’s built up over the last two weeks; I was sure swapping candidates was an own-goal for the ages, but now I’m sure I was wrong.
Rooting for the winning team is fun, and the team with the initiative and hustle is usually the one that wins. It’s self-perpetuating, in both directions. (This is a big part of how Trump managed to stumble into a win in ’16, it was a weird feedback loop of him doing something insane and then everyone else going “hahaha what” and all that kept building on itself until he was suddenly the President.)
Accurately or not, the Dems had talked themselves into believing they were going to lose, and were acting like it. Now, not so much! The feedback loops are building the other way, and as Harris keeps picking up more support, you can see the air bleeding out of Trump’s tires as his support drifts away because he’s only fun when he’s winning.
I have a conceptual model that I use for US Presidential elections that has very rarely let me down. It goes like this: every cycle the Republicans run someone who reads as a Boss, and the Democrats run someone who reads as a college Professor. And so most elections turn into a contest between the worst boss you’ve ever had against your least favorite teacher; with the final decision boiling down to, basically, “would you rather work for this guy or take a class from that guy”. (Often leading to a frustrated “bleah, neither!”)
And elections pretty consistently go to the team that wins that comparison. As a historical example, I liked Gore a lot, but he really had the quality that he’d grade you down on a paper because he thought you used an em dash wrong when you didn’t, whereas W (war crimes notwithstanding) seemed like the kind of boss that wouldn’t hassle you too bad and would throw a great summer BBQ. And occasionally one side or the other pops a good one—Obama seemed like he’d be your favorite law professor of all time.
Viewing this ticket via that lens? This one I like. We have the worst boss you can imagine running with the worst coworker you’ve ever had, against literally the cool geography teacher/football coach and the lady that seems like she’d be your new favorite professor? Hell yeah. I’m sold. Let’s do this.
Pretty Weird
Absolutely loving this new Gen-X energy the Dems have suddenly discovered by just pointing out that the Repubs are super weird.
And they are! The republican party has been an absolute freakshow since at least the Gingrich era, and certainly since those tea party assholes. I distinctly remember wishing that Gore had run on a platform of “look how weird these guys are” and W looks positively sane next to the current freak farm. Normal people don’t actually care what goes on in other people’s bathrooms, houses, or pants?
This has completely thrown the repubs for a loop. I see they’re basically trying a Pee-Wee Herman “I know you are but what am I” move by trial-balooning various flavors of “we’re not weird, you the ones with ____” with various totally normal things in that blank spot, with a side-order of “weird is what all the bullies called me, who then is the real bully” crap.
The past couple of decades have tought the repubs that saying things like “ahh, who is the real villan” or “but you participate in society, interesting” or “then you are no better than they” is the equivalent of the roadrunner painting a fake tunnel on the side of a mountain, and that the dems will reliably run right into it, Wile E. Coyote–style.
So it is incredibly refreshing to see that the dems have finally discovered the correct response, which is “shut the fuck up, you freaky weirdo!”
Because everyone who has actually lived a life knows there is a difference between weird (kid plays too much D&D) and weird (do not, under any circumstances, leave your drink uncovered near him).
This election, more than usual, is everyone in that first group vs everyone in the second.
On the Other Hand…
…based on the amount of panicked flop sweat coming off of the republicans, this crazy gamble might pay off.
Is this where Gen X—the ignored generation—slides in, saves the country from a wannabe strongman, and then gets no credit? Because that would be pretty great.
C’mon, man
Well, there’s Undecided Voters NOW.
But not, I suspect, the kinds they have in mind. Good work, morons. This is what’s going to motivate the base, huh? Backstabbing the guy who won the last election for us?
That queasy feeling of knowing you’re watching a Historical Event that’s gonna be talked about in your grandkid’s history classes, but you don’t yet know what the end of that conversation is going to be.
My inclination is that this is one of those catastrophic miscalculations, a game-threatening bad play call. The premise is that that “america” has gotten “less sexist” since 2016? As they say, we’re about to run an experiment to see if Hillary Clinton lost because she was Hillary Clinton or if it was because she was a woman.
I think the case against Biden was badly overblown, a case of a panic spiral getting out of control. Letting that debate happen was clearly an act of breathtaking political malpractice, but the what polling there was still showed the difference between the candidates as being within the margin for error? And, wildly under-discussed is how bad polling has gotten the last decade or so. All the polls are just cooked now, we’re a long, long way away from Nate Silver calling all the races correctly ahead of time. And to paraphrase a tweet I saw and now can’t find, “Nate Silver works for Peter Thiel” is the sort of sentence that would have been shocking in 2016, but now the response is like the people in Clue finding another body, just a shrug and then walking back to the other room.
I think this is a huge unforced error, but one after a year of own-goals and stepping on rakes. This should have been one of the easiest cruise-to-reelection second terms of all time, but instead—here we are. There’s a just-so-story–style lesson here about not flaring off your goodwill a year out from the election.
I still don’t believe there are any actual undecided voters. And I simply don’t believe that there was anyone who was unwilling to vote for Biden who is willing to vote for Harris. Who are we even talking about here? What’s this mythical demographic the Dems can now access?
The plural of anecdote is not data, but in my orbit, the only people who actually brought up Biden’s age or ”mental state” were people who were always going to find a reason not to vote for him. Because, of course, none of those people ever bought up the other guy’s mental state. Get ready for that same crowd to start saying things like “well, of course I support a Black woman as president, but Harris…”
There’s three options in this election: “Harm Reduction”, “Fascism”, and “Fuck it, I don’t have enough empathy to tell the difference between the first two.” Anyone who is actually still describing themselves as an “Independent” “Undecided” voter here in the middle of the Disaster of the Twenties is, at best, an Asshole. And is probably actually a Trump voter, but needs the pageantry so they can blame “the libs” for “making them do it”. But this is the solution? Harris is going to unlock the middle-aged white guy asshole vote? Really?
Deep Breath
On the other hand, if you’ve bought in that Biden had to go, this is about as good as solution as exists. And dropping the news after the whole RNC news cycle has burned out makes it clear that they made the decision longer ago than it looks. “White women in the suburbs” is going to be one of the deciding demographics of this one, and Trump does the worst there when he’s being an unhinged racist bully and wanna-be gangster, and Harris is going to be drawing that foul constantly.
Credit where credit is due, there’s no more narrative about how everyone is too old. We’ve got a real sharp contrast between the parties now, let’s see if they can leverage it. Here’s hoping I’m wrong and this’ll move the needle with both of “the youths” and the “mad about Gaza” demographics. And, for once, the Dems have an actual move to respond to the GOP claiming to be “the law and order party”—“convicted felon” vs “former prosecutor” is a hell of a hand to be able to play.
This was winnable in January, it was winnable a month ago, and it’s winnable now. But god damn let’s stop giving up points.
All that said, the ticket is still the same as it has been: Warm Body/Warm Body vs Fascism. President Harris, let’s go.
Not the Time For Trick Plays
For as long as I can remember, the Democrats—both the party and the pundit-and-commentary class—have had an unfortunate fascination, a weakness really, for magical-thinking schemes. Magic Bullets, somewhere between a Captain Kirk plan and playing to a theoretical referee. There’s always some “thing” thats going to happen and solve The Problem, so we don’t have to do anything. The Mueller report, the state criminal charges, hell, the Supreme Court is gonna decide in favor of Gore. Anything to avoid doing the actual work. And this usually comes as a late-in-the-day last-ditch effort to make up for not having done the work.
But this thing about swapping out Biden as the candiate really takes the cake.
This seems insane to me. I understand that I like Biden more than most people as far to the left as I am, but that’s not the point. This is a single-issue election: beat Trump. Everything else is commentary. The incumbent in American Presidential elections has a huge structural advantage, and Biden is literally the only guy whose ever beat Trump in an election. Seems like a slam dunk to me, no matter how many bad debates we have.
(Also, buried in the background noise is that neither of them did well in the debate. And the other guy has a pretty hard ceiling of support.)
And look, I get it, there’s stuff he’s doing you hate, there’s issues you disagree on. Me too! But I guarantee whatever issue those are, the game show host will be worse.
I heard a lot the last week that the Dems have this deep bench full of people who could take over as candiate. Great! The 2028 primaries start now. Get them out on the trail today stumping for the sleepy grandpa. Let ‘em show us how great a campaigner they’d be. Whoever makes this happen gets the next nomination. While we’re at it, let’s make sure to tell folks about what this administration has actually pulled off the last couple of years? Take the credit. The fact that there is anyone over the age of 3 who can grump with a straight face that Biden “is the worst president of my lifetime” is a catastrophic PR miss. That’s the work they skipped, and all the hypothetical candidates in the world aren’t going to counteract forgetting to tell anyone what you did.
I love a good trick play as much as the next person who knows what an “onside kick” is, but there’s no crazy stunt where we pull Zaphod Beeblebrox out of a hat and he wins the election for us. The next president is gonna be one of those two guys. Let’s focus on making sure, at the very least, the wrong one doesn’t get there, not daydreaming about fucking unicorns.
Programming Note: Icecano will be off next week. Regular service resumes on July 15th.
Post-Debate Hot Takes & Hand-Wringing
I see after last week’s debate the Hot-Takes-and-Hand-Wringing-Industrial Complex has throttled up to maximum capacity. To be sure, it wasn’t exactly a high-point in American Presidential politics, and in a “normal” election year, this would have been a profound unforced error on the part of Biden and the Democrats. But it’s not a normal election, and so here’s my hot take: I actually don’t think it’s going to matter one bit.
Here’s my even hotter take: I don’t believe there’s actually a single undecided voter in the country.
American National Politics is built around the semi-mythical character of the “Undecided Voter”. Conventional wisdom says that in a given cycle, each party has an about even 40-something percent of the electorate that will vote for them no matter what, and then you have something between 10 and 20 percent who can be persuaded to one candiate or the other on “the merits”. I’ve never really believed that there were as many undecideds as we like to think. I think there are a lot of people who are performatively undecided, but they’re like the people who claim they tip servers “based on performance” but somehow only ever find reasons to make the tip smaller—they knew when they walked in that they were only going to tip the poor kid 10%, but they needed to make a production out of how it was the server’s fault, not them being an ass. And those people always seem to end up deciding the same way every cycle. (This applies to 3rd party “spoiler” candidates too—I don’t think they matter as much as we sometimes like to pretend. Literally no-one who voted for Jill Stein was ever going to vote for Clinton; Stein was the excuse, not the cause.) But the upshot is that many of the rituals of an American presidential election are built around the idea that there’s this pool of voters who are equally open to voting to either candidate, depending on who makes the better sales pitch.
This time, we’ve got something that hasn’t happened in living memory: both people running have already done the job. This is literally a redo of the election we had four years ago. Despite various outbreaks of magical thinking, everyone knew who was going to be running in this election as of thanksgiving 2020: It’s the sleepy-but-surprisingly-competent corporatist-centrist grandpa vs the racist tv game show host turned convicted felon and aspiring fascist, with the only third choice being a smörgåsbord of excuses providing air-cover for “fuck it, I’ve convinced myself that I have enough privilege that I can sit this one out.”
Nearly everyone already had to decide which of these two guys to vote for. The sales pitch this time isn’t the campaign, it’s their respective terms as president. I don’t believe that anyone is going to change their vote from last time, and I certainly don’t believe that anything this year is going to change anyone’s mind. Instead, the Dems need to realize that the opponent isn’t Trump or the Republicans, the opponent is apathy. Assume the number of “deplorable” votes is fixed. This isn’t a change hearts and minds election, this isn’t even really a competing policy election. This is a harm reduction election. This is a fight apathy and get-out-the-vote election. And you don’t fight apathy by putting a likable old guy with or without a cold and a stutter on stage next to the living manifestation of every mistake ever made by the American Experiment. Nobody changed their vote based on that tire fire that was on CNN, but nobody was ever going to.
And look, please don’t mistake any of the above for “optimism.” It’s not that we’re not in trouble. We’re in bad trouble, we’ve in terrible trouble. We’ve got problems the likes of which we can barely comprehend, but “a good debate performance” was the solution to none of them.