I'm writing this on the morning after election day 2020. At the moment the electoral totals are close for both Biden and Trump, but no one knows how it will end up. The pundits are leaning toward Biden as the mail-in ballots are still being counted in several swing states.
However it eventually turns out, I have been proven wrong in my prediction for a landslide victory for Biden. My calculus was that Biden would pick-up millions of "Bernie Bros." who reportedly sat out the 2016 election because they felt Hillary and the DNC had conspired to keep him from winning the nomination. Moreover, I was counting on a major shift in Trump voters who I assumed would have been alienated by his unpresidential antics and lies. I counted on former military supporters to become disillusioned by his lack of respect for military leaders, and that his denigration of captured and dead heroes would have made them vote against him. I thought that decency and integrity were more important than "standing up" to foreign powers.
I was wrong.
The mere fact that the counts are so close is a shock to me. It tells me that I am out of touch with reality. To quiet my mind, I had come to view the past 4 years as an anomaly, something we would someday look back and laugh the way we do about mistakes we made in our youth. Certainly the electorate would come to its senses in the light of Trump's edging toward autocracy, embarrassing ignorance of science and diplomacy, his narcissistic obsession to make everything about him, the bombastic and unsupported accusations of fraud and embracing of conspiracy groups. But I was wrong.
Trying to assess why more people couldn't support Biden, I am flummoxed.
AFTERWORD: 11/5/2020 In a Globe article titled "A Liberal Dream meets the crushing reality of America" the authors attempt to provide an answer to the shared surprise of many liberal/progressive Americans who thought that the electorate would be more decisively anti-Trump. The biases of both camps created starkly different perceptions. "It is as if the two sides were watching different movies."
1 comment:
There's a rumor I've heard that as the election results were announced there were people dancing on rooftops in New Jersey. No one seemed to know what religion these people were.
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