EP 1: Morning in America?
ELECTION DAY — NOVEMBER 3, 2020.
“Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.”
-Thomas Hobbes.
And at the stroke of midnight November 3 finally arrived. There was a five to one ratio of masked camera crew members to unmasked geriatric voters in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. Indeed, there was a question as to whether the town would muster the requisite minimum of five voters, but by 12:03 a.m EST the voting was over: Trump 3, Biden 2. The evil omen was not dispelled by solid Biden majorities in Hart’s Location, N.H. (polls closed at 12:07) and Millsfield, N.H. (12:10) but the latter locations served food to the press and Millsfield even poured champagne.
There was no such speedy voting on offer, let alone champagne, at the polling place on Dr. Martin Luther King Drive in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Milwaukee. Khris Mayfield had started standing in line at 6:43 a.m., thinking he’d be able to walk right in when the polls opened at 7:00 but there had already been at least 60 people in front of him, socially distanced around the block and now it was 7:17, the line was hardly moving, and he’d just let two grandmother types butt in. They had to get to work. Didn’t everybody have to get to work? Vote by mail, what a joke! You had to fill out an application, then it seemed like it took forever for the ballot to arrive. It finally came, you filled it out and mailed it back that night, with six days to spare. That had to be enough time for it to arrive by the deadline of November 3, but you still worried about it. And then you found out: it wasn’t enough that you’d gone to the trouble of getting your sister to sign as your witness. You had to give her address too, and Khris didn’t remember filling that part in. So here you are, standing in line. Will voting undo the screw-up with the mail-in ballot or will the disqualified mail-in cancel out this vote? This line is not moving. The place will be open until 8:00 tonight. ”I gotta get to work.”
Patty Walker walked over to a polling station across the street from her job in downtown Atlanta during her morning break at around 10:00 a.m. EST but they said, no, you could have voted here when we were doing early voting but now you gotta vote at your precinct. Where was her precinct?
At 6:50 a.m. EST her aunt Jaylene had shown up at the All Saints Episcopal Church on Peachtree Street in Northwest for her gig as a poll worker only to find that she was only the second poll worker that would be working the morning shift. There were supposed to have been six of them. No big deal? A lot of IDs to check and the Trump people are going to insist on verifying every one of them. How many people will they have tonight when they have to start counting the votes?
At 6:50 a.m. CST Mary Hutchinson, a Trump campaign poll watcher, reports to a Brooklyn Center polling place in greater Minneapolis. She’ll pass the day sitting beside the poll workers as a second set of eyes to verify IDs. If the whole thing takes twice as long because they insist that she sit six feet from them, that’ll be on them. She’ll be joined by her sister in the early afternoon and they’re both going to stay there as late as it takes to prevent shenanigans in the vote counting.
At 6:30 a.m. EST Jack Woo, who supervises the mail sorting at the Squirrel Hill Post Office on Murray Avenue in Pittsburg gives his early morning shift a pep talk. “Until every last absentee ballot we have here in these piles is in those trucks, we’re not putting anything else in them and we’re not letting the trucks leave. Ballots are First Class Super Prime!” Everyone is gungho and, in spite of the second wave of the virus overtaking the city, the work attendance at Squirrel Hill this last week has been the best it’s been for months.
Miguel Fernandez was told he could leave his absentee ballot at a drop-box on Calle Azteca in Guadalupe, Arizona. It’s 5:35 a.m. PST, and there isn’t any drop box where his phone said it would be.
Alona Shapiro, sitting in front of her computer at her parents’ place in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan at 7:53 a.m. CST, about to log in to her class at U. of M. gets a robotext. Her mail-in ballot arrived last night!
Maarten Rutte and his partner Eefje Blok, two masked official election observers from The Hague in the Netherlands, sent by the Organization for Security and Cooperation, arrive at 6:45 EST at the Dorsey Memorial Library on 17th Street in the Overton neighborhood of Miami to spend the day “observing” the vote and the vote-counting.
At 8:31 a.m. EST, attorneys for the Trump campaign filed an ex parte application in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania seeking an injunction imposing a requirement that no mail-in ballot drop box be operative in Philadelphia County unless previously ordered surveillance video cameras are also operative. Also at 8:31, attorneys for the Biden campaign filed an ex parte in the Superior Court division in Charlotte, North Carolina, empowering election officials to eject Trump campaign poll observers who refuse to comply with previously issued orders to social distance and wear masks. Altogether 58 ex parte applications seeking some legal relief related to the election were filed in the first two hours of the morning of November 3 in 12 states. Most were with respect to already pending lawsuits. The number of new election-related lawsuits filed in 13 perceived battleground states by noon on Election Day was 73.
Although, in sharp contrast to all prior history, only about a third of the actual voting happens on what is still called “Election Day,” the television coverage in the morning is a riot of anecdotal reports of chaos in all aspects of voting. The only difference between MSNBC and Fox being who is supposedly to blame for it. Traditionally on E-Day there’s a sense in the press coverage that things are beginning to wind down. Maybe we can even sleep in tomorrow. But there was a distinct sense this time that the only thing that was going to be over was the boring part, the campaigning, and the “excitement” was just about to kick in. November 3 was Election Day, the first day of Election Week or Election Month, or of something so unfathomable that it made no real sense to speak of an endpoint.
Had the needle moved since Labor Day? There had been no real bounces for either candidate after the conventions and no pattern of minor brouhahas converting into even short term tectonic shifts in public opinion. There’d been some regression-to-the-mean tightening in the polls but nothing suggesting that any of Trump’s various lines of attack against Sleepy Joe/Beijing Biden were drawing blood. Polls showed that even a significant percentage of Trump voters weren’t buying claims that Biden was a stalking horse for the Squad, or that he planned to disarm the police or open the borders. By the same token, and not for lack of trying, Trump wasn’t managing to dig himself into a deeper hole. Late August and early September there’d been a book fair of Trump content. The revelations in the books came fast and furiously and had the effect of swatting away the revelations from other books in the previous news cycle, but they dominated the conversation and kept Trump off-message into late September. Ultimately, there was a lot of content to consume and, except for a few top line stories, the only people interested in consuming it were the legions of Trump porn addicts in blue states who were supposedly appalled by it. Bob Woodward’s revelations that Trump had known that the coronavirus could be transmitted by air and was “deadly,” but had chosen to say nothing about it “to avoid panic” (i.e., to avoid a stock market crash), had no discernible impact. Revelations that he had called American war dead “suckers” and “losers” didn’t even register in the polls. It seemed that no further item of information about the man was capable of changing anyone’s mind. Had the Access Hollywood tape first come to light in 2020 it probably wouldn’t have survived a single news cycle. The notion that the Russians could have leverage over Trump because they had a pee-tape of him with Russian prostitutes seemed laughable. The classic Trump self-description that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” and not lose any supporters no longer seemed sufficiently hyperbolic. How about if he were to hold a televised press briefing in the company of a Mafia hit man who would fire a round from an AK-47 at a bound and gagged Hillary Clinton, after which the President would turn to the reporters in mock astonishment (“Who would ever think he would do that?”), but then announce that he happened to have a spare blank Presidential pardon handy (“What did you say your name was?”) which he would sign with a great flourish and then proceed to take his first question from a CNN reporter as they carried the body away.
The debates hadn’t changed anyone’s mind. The first one had had the biggest ratings of any debate ever but by the time of the third one viewing was done 40%. Biden didn’t always finish his sentences and did better when he spoke off the cuff than when he was trying to jam all his talking points into a long answer. But he had benefited from low expectations and there were no “gaffes” as such. Trump for his part came to the debates with no prep other than a few genius attack lines recycled from his tweets. Otherwise, he, and seemingly everyone else involved, allowed him to be Trump. He certainly had more feral energy than Sleepy Joe but his attempts to cast Biden as a mid-stage dementia patient were cringe-inducing and only set the situation up for Gramps to take his revenge. Although accused by Trump of reading from non-available teleprompters, various well-rehearsed Biden zingers hit their mark. At one point when the moderator was trying to get Trump to finish an answer, Biden stopped him with the comment: “Let him decide when he’s finished. He’s digging his own grave.” Never one to want to change the topic when he’s been exposed as a loser, Trump spent the rest of that particular debate accusing Biden of not using his time because he’d run out of things to say. The moderator caught hell from Trump World after the debate for being unable to suppress a smile when Trump had grown particularly strident on one of these occasions. When another moderator had asked Trump whether, if he lost, he would issue himself a pardon, Trump had gotten carried away with his non-response and when it was Biden’s turn, he just said, “I’ll take that as a yes. It’s not constitutional but he’s going to try to pardon himself.”
A few new episodes of civil unrest in various cities had occurred but, unfortunately for Trump, the Kenosha unrest, which had died out by the beginning of September, was the last episode in a battleground state. Polls showed that people weren’t seeing Biden or other Democratic candidates as tools of Blacks Lives Matter, and the key non-college educated White demographic was actually repulsed by blatantly racist rhetoric. If the election was about turnout rather than persuasion, BLM was driving turnout by the youth vote.
The pandemic had boosted the popularity of virtually all other heads of state in the developed world and one could make the argument that any chance that Trump had ever had of expanding his support in time for the election had been lost because of his “China virus” response. The crisis hadn’t played to his strengths, such as they were, nor had the virus cooperated with his various attempts to talk it down. That said, although he lost the brief surge in his approval ratings he’d enjoyed in early April, you couldn’t really say that he’d taken a hit because of it. His approval rating stayed within one point of where it had been in January, although his disapproval rating was up a bit.
In April the FDA’s chief researcher Peter Marks, had presented to DHS Secretary Alex Azar a proposal for an accelerated development of a vaccine that he dubbed “Operation Warp Speed.” (Marks was a Star Trek fan.) This had resulted in a DHS presentation to the White House which led with a slide that read:: “DEADLINE: Enable broad access to the public by October 2020.” Thereafter, the government scientists were occasionally accused of being Deep Stater anti-Trump saboteurs and were exhorted to get on “Trump Time” and Trump was wont to say such things as: “We’ll have the vaccine soon. Maybe before a special date. You know what date I’m talking about.” But such clumsy talk had elicited so much ridicule that for most of the campaign vaccine hyping was looking like a net negative for him.
Although they weren’t as cutting edge as the three top American vaccines, by the fall the Chinese had stage three trials going for four potential vaccines and, although it didn’t draw a lot of attention, the military, most health care workers, and the senior levels of the Chinese Communist Party had already been vaccinated, supposedly as part of the trial. In mid-October intelligence leaks claimed that the Chinese had been secretly testing their vaccines through so-called “human challenge trials” (infecting vaccine recipients with the virus) to get a lead on what worked, which could explain why they were already distributing it where they thought it was needed most. The Chinese and the Russians were also accused of espionage on Western research efforts and China made hugely generous commitments to distribute its soon-to-be-released vaccines to large portions of the developing world. Trump expressed extreme fascination and exasperation with all these reports in interviews and tweets in the weeks prior to the election, speaking of a “vaccine race” where we weren’t going to let “Cheatin’ China beat us to the finish line.”
Finally, on Monday morning, October 18, four days before the last debate, a strange public statement had been issued by the FDA to the effect that, based on preliminary results, Emergency Use Authorization had been applied for and was “imminent” for the vaccine from Pfizer which nonetheless was still in Stage Three trials. There was no specificity beyond that, let alone publication of preliminary results from the trial. The statement was said to have been the product of a negotiation between the White House and Dr. Moncef Slauoui, the coordinator of the vaccine programs. Dr. Peter Davis, the Trekkie who had first proposed “Operation Warp Speed,” resigned in protest. Not resigning but denouncing the statement as “a breach of our pledge to avoid political messaging that would undermine confidence in the vaccines,” was Francis Collins, the Director of National Institutes of Health. Otherwise, no senior member of the government’s coronavirus team distanced him or herself from this carefully worded statement or stepped down as a consequence of it. A somber Dr. Fauci, who went out of his way to praise Dr. Davis’ seminal contribution, damned it with a faint endorsement, saying that the government’s scientists did not want to get involved in “messaging that could be interpreted as being political,” but that he felt encouraged that we were “in the home stretch” and it was “prudent to implement the preliminary stages of distribution of the Pfizer vaccine, whose safety and efficacy is now close to being confirmed.”
The Trump campaign, obviously poised to seize on the statement, had immediately commenced an ad blitz that ran right through Election Day. The ads not only trumpeted the news of a “cure” arriving in record time under the take-no-prisoners Trump leadership, but accused Biden and the Democrats of seeking to suppress the “cure” for political gain. By this point the public had, of course, been primed to expect an “October Surprise.” Polls showed that over 60% of the population were concerned about taking a virus that had been rushed out in time for the election and going into Election Day, even as the race was clearly tightening, it remained unclear what the effect would be. Still there was a sense that the development might have lightened the mood and sowed doubt among 2016 Trump voters who had seemed set on voting him out. By Election Day, fatigue with virus-related restrictions and the economic pain was broad and deep and people seemed to be in the horns of a dilemma about what needed to be done. Polls showed the country both highly skeptical of a vaccine and yet totally fed up with masks and isolation. One oft-cited poll showed that 65% of the population said that continuation of the current restrictive regime could not be sustained into 2021. There was a growing sense, fostered by Republicans in sly television and social media ads, that the election was a referendum on when this would all be over. Even Trump-haters were developing a conviction that this was somehow the case.The suggestion that one candidate offered a definitive break with the current restrictive regime was perhaps the ticket for a late break to Trump and the Republicans. Trump offered an easily mockable narrative about a “cure” but just because he continued to be full of shit didn’t mean he couldn’t get the job done. Biden, in spite of sober happy talk about the decency and fairness that would be ushered in by a Democratic victory, effectively only offered a no-end-in-sight vision of the future.
And remarkably, the lift for Trump might be coming from both directions in the vaccine controversy. Biden and the Democrats were caught somewhat flatfooted since, while they mocked the timing and ambiguity of the vaccine announcement, at least in their official messaging they were determined to take the high road. They weren’t opposed to expeditious introductions of vaccines and they didn’t want to exploit reflexive anti-vaxxer sentiment, in spite of it being as much as 30% of the electorate. Trump in fact had had a long history of being an anti-vaxxer himself, and it had been reported that as late as July he’d told donors: “You know people get these huge vaccines, and they’re never the same afterwards.” He had an innate affinity for single issue voters especially when they were driven by conspiracy theories. So he responded to the anti-vaxxer moment by pivoting to them, even as his ads touting the alleged arrival of the vaccines were flooding the airwaves. Exploiting the fact that the anti-vaxxers’ communication channels were specific to the internet, he furiously re-tweeted the anti-vaxxer tweets, perhaps not all of which originated from the United States, or even human beings. Reading some of the tweets you’d get the impression that it was Biden, not Trump, who was foisting the vaccines on the country. Biden and the Democrats, they alleged, were in bed with the pharmaceutical companies and pharma’s elite lackeys in the scientific community. Trump taking both sides of the argument at this late stage of the game wasn’t considered particularly shocking. In the last few days before the election the biggest concern among the Democratic strategists about all this late-stage vaccine talk wasn’t that people would believe Trump had delivered on his promise of a vaccine by November, but that there’d be movement among the anti-vaxxers. A lot of them, perhaps a majority, hated Trump’s guts but their turnout on behalf of Big Pharma Biden could become a problem. As crude and predictable as the “October surprise” and Trump’s contradictory bonding with the anti-vaxxers had been, both might give Trump a last minute lift that polls were only beginning to discern.
By Election Day, the number of the American confirmed dead from the virus was approaching 250,000. No matter. Polls showed that fully 30% of the American people believed these numbers were grossly exaggerated by all the usual suspects whose only purpose in life was to make Trump look bad.
It was taken for granted by Democrats that the brazenness and cunning of the messaging and cross-messaging that had been flooding the internet owed much to the G.R.U. unit of the Russian intelligence services, Yet in the last month before Election Day, intelligence briefings, already confined to meagerly informative and vague written materials, ceased to provide any meaningful information whatsoever. It was left to the technology companies to issue reports about their own independent awareness of what was described as extensive Russian activity on the internet. “Shifty” Adam Schiff sounded the alarm, but accusations that Trump was working hand-in-glove with the Russians lacked novelty. In speeches and ads Trump accused the Chinese of interfering on Biden’s behalf and said that if you wanted to let China off completely for causing the pandemic, elect Biden. The only actual disclosures by American intelligence on this subject had suggested that any pro-Biden Chinese interference was at best minimal, and the evidence from the technology companies suggested that such small efforts as the Chinese were engaged in were on behalf of Trump. However, Trump’s messaging on China was effective since most people assumed the Chinese were angry with and afraid of him. A majority of voters, including many Democrats, seemed to think that foreign interference was just a fact of life that on net wasn’t helping either candidate.
The economy was in terrible shape and the majority of the experts opined that the long term damage from the crisis would be severe. Whoever won, the next President would have to cope with a decimated in-store retail sector, a large percentage of small businesses on life support or already gone, an enormous population of displaced workers, states and local governments out of cash, and unprecedented deficit spending on the federal level. In short, it would be pretty much the opposite of what Trump had inherited from Obama. Assuming a Biden win, the timing couldn’t have been more exquisite for the Republican argument that had worked so well during the early years of Obama: that it was the Democrats whose policies were responsible for the recession and who were driving up the deficit.
However, as far as its impact on the election was concerned, Trump somehow maintained his lead over Biden on the question of “who was better for the economy.” There was, after all, a pandemic and it was hard for voters to get a fix on what could be expected to happen over the next year and whether Trump would be to blame for it. The initial stimulus package had been a whopping dose of painkiller, thanks almost entirely to Pelosi and the Democrats. Trump and the Republicans had balked at injecting a second dose but during the lead-up to the election the top line numbers supported the argument that the economy was coming back and evictions and foreclosures were on hold because of largely Democrataic action on the local level. The states were broke but again the implications of that for peoples’ lives were mostly in the future. Because of the continuing restrictions imposed by the virus it was difficult to get a clear picture of what a rebound after the dissemination of vaccines would look like or what it would mean for jobs and small businesses. Trump had obviously been deprived of his big selling point — a thriving economy — but neither was he particularly being held to account to what had happened.
Although the moderators at the debates dutifully raised other issues aside from the virus, the economic downturn, police shootings, and foreign election interference at the debates, these were the only issues the campaigns bothered to talk about. The Western United States experienced wildfires of an unprecedented severity that killed hundreds of people, but the relationship of these events to climate change was only of interest to people living in solidly blue states whose voters could run up the national vote for Biden, but not affect the electoral college outcome.
Lastly, as Election Day had approached, Republicans otherwise lacking in enthusiasm for Trump, had been motivated by the long term issue of the future of the federal courts and, in particular, the United States Supreme Court. The one unalloyed benefit from Trump’s term as far as conservatives were concerned had been the fact that — thanks to the real leader of the Republicans, Mitch McConnell — Trump had been able to appoint more federal judges in his first term than Obama had in two terms. Fully one-quarter of all the federal appellate judges were now Trump appointees. Looking ahead to the next presidential term, while the oldest conservative justice, Clarence Thomas, was only seventy-two, two of the liberal justices, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, were eighty-two and eighty-seven, respectively. The departure of Justice Ginsburg, in particular, was widely anticipated since the announcement in July that she had had a recurrence of a previously undisclosed liver cancer (related or not to her previously disclosed pancreatic cancer). Appointment of a staunch member of the Federalist Society to her seat would give conservatives a 6–3 advantage. The one potential swing vote, Chief Justice Roberts, could join the liberals any time he wanted, with no effect on the outcome.
Even as a winter wave of virus began to gather steam in the Northeast and Midwest, outdoor Trump rallies of mostly maskless supporters got larger and more frequent as Election Day approached. Wearing masks and generally being responsible about the virus was processed as common sense by a substantial majority of the population. But it was also boring and pressing for it gave you no particular credit with anybody. While he refrained from openly discouraging compliance with basic public health guidelines, Trump was obviously your guy if non-compliance was your thing. The GOP in general just hung back and almost acted as if the Democrats were running the coronavirus show, preserving the option of taking credit if something turned out well but mostly positioning themselves to reap the benefit of the inevitable frustration and exhaustion with the interventions. Trump showed the message discipline that had kicked in during the waning days of the 2016 campaign, but the various messages themselves — China will have conquered the world with its virus if Beijing Biden is elected, or the Democrats both are trying to prevent a cure and are tools of Big Pharma, or Biden wants to defund the police and open the borders — were obviously over the top. Biden made public appearances and gave speeches as well, and newspapers even occasionally gave him front page treatment for something he would say. However, as had been the case since he’d first been taken seriously as a candidate in 2015, Trump basically had free media all to himself and no one even pretended to care what his opponents had to say.
Hillary at her peaks — mid-August and mid-October of 2016– had held 7 point national polling leads. But she wasn’t able to sustain a 6 point lead for more than a month of polling. Since the beginning of June and until the last two weeks of October Biden had consistently held a lead of 6% or higher (sometimes exceeding 9%) in the Fivethirtyeight.com weighted average of polls. However, on Sunday, November 1, he was down to 5.2%. Biden’s odds of prevailing in the electoral college only reached 50% when his lead in the national vote was at least 3%. Assuming that national trends would carry through to the swing states, he should still be safe with a national lead above 5%. This calculus did not, however, take into account the baked-in suppression of Democratic votes caused by myriad laws already on the books in many states that disproportionately discouraged Democratic voting and invalidated Democratic votes, let alone the difficult-to-anticipate or quantify effect of targeted suppression of the Biden vote in specific swing states. State polls were all over the lot but Biden seemingly held meaningful leads in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, and narrower leads in North Carolina, New Hampshire, Florida, and Arizona. Trump had narrow leads in only Texas and Ohio, and Georgia was within the margin of error. The FiveThirtyEight.com prediction model gave Biden a 98.3% chance of prevailing in the national vote but only an 82.1% chance of prevailing in the electoral college. By November 2, the betting odds of Biden prevailing were down to 55%. Bettors liked the Trump bet. What was the fun of betting on Biden?
Although more given to incoherent discourse than ever, Donald Trump was the Energizer Bunny to Biden’s halting solemnity. The whole Western World had become one big dysfunctional family, a family that couldn’t keep its eyes off of Donald Trump. With his genius for calling attention to himself, it was all about him for his opponents (in spite of diligent efforts to make the conversation about so much else). Thus his supporters could forgive the fact that it was only all about him for Trump himself. In spite of everything else that was happening in the country and the world, in spite of the plight of billions of people, the election was ultimately just a referendum on Donald Trump. Are you sick of him? (Most were.) Or, with the cure for the China virus and roaring prosperity knocking at the door, if his opponents would only let them in, should we renew for a second season? The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Diehard movies. These are not accounts of the complex movements of armies or police units or medical researchers. They were the stories of singular anti-heros taking on all comers. How would this movie end?
And the really fascinating thing about it was the fact that Trump couldn’t possibly prevail by getting more votes, and no one seemed to care. A majority was out of reach and always had been. What mattered was the ferocity of his support, even if it was purchased at the cost of inciting a corresponding ferocity in a larger opposition. It was that ferocity that held the Republican establishment in line and gave Trump himself so much slack to just be Trump and do what he had to do to win. As the whole Republican party had understood for quite some time, what mattered weren’t your vote totals but your weapons in relation to the rules of the game. If you won the electoral college, held on to the Senate, controlled Congressional and legislative districts with gerrymandering and demographic sorting, and got to keep appointing federal judges, particularly to the Supreme Court, you were the winners, and the educated elites and majorities of voters who supported them the losers. And history is written by the winners.
From the perspective of Trump and the Republicans, through an impossibly long and difficult year they had held their ground. With the polls showing a tightening, they were in position for the battle that was only now going to begin.
At 11:13 a.m. EST, the trucks from the Squirrel Hill post office in Pittsburg laden with ballots had long since made their deliveries to the Allegheny County Board of Elections and were now making other rounds. As new mail came into the office and was being sorted, the pile of ballots was three times the size of what it had been the day before.
By 11:45 a.m. CST Maarten Rutte and Eefje Blok, the election observers from the Organization of Security and Cooperation watching the voting in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Milwaukee, wrote an urgent message to their team captain in Chicago. In spite of the fact that most of them had been able to vote earlier in the year in the primaries without a problem, more than 20% of the voters in this overwhelmingly Democratic precinct were having to fill out provisional ballots because of wrong addresses, wrong zip codes, mistakes with their sex, middle initial, or middle name, or because their names weren’t on the voter rolls at all.
