Dear Friends -
86 days to go. This morning when I went out to walk the dog, it was downright chilly. It’s getting colder, at least up here in deep blue Massachusetts… but the election season hasn’t even begun to warm up, and once it gets going it is going to be on fire.
I have written extensively about the need to create a habit of news through email newsletters, so I was trying to keep my own advice and send this Thursday mornings… but life intervened. You’ll have to settle for a weekend read. But before I get to that delicious doomsday decadence, I want to revisit my prior pronouncements:
Ignore the polls. A recent twitter thread by a noted statistician points out that (1) “election polls contain a lot less evidence than indicated by their sample sizes”, (2) “the real-world margin of error is about twice its theoretical margin of error”, and (3) “there's hardly any historical data to extrapolate from”. I’d add that this particular election is completely unprecedented -- from the vagaries of pandemic turn-out to the machinations of “the Trump”, we’re unmoored. Maybe we should just ban election polling -- not only are they complicated and uncertain, but they influence people’s behavior in ways I think are bad. What if we just focused on the issues and the candidates, not who’s winning? That’s madness, I tell you, madness!
Expect more racism and anti-semitism. I printed some stickers to remind me to be vigilant in fighting hate - back story here - and if you want some, fill out this form and I’ll mail them to you.
Do something. Today’s email is mostly about all the scary stuff that might go wrong. But we -- yes, YOU! -- actually have the power to keep stuff from going too crazy. So get involved, especially in your own community. It will not only help this election have integrity but you’ll learn a lot about where you live and build greater resiliency in your own neighborhood.
For those of you who have known me for a while, you know that while I’m an enthusiast about all sorts of things, I have a pretty grim view of the future. For the last four years, I have regularly shared on social media my “Rule 1”: It Will Get Crazier. I just don’t see any incentives for anyone in charge to behave.
And then there is my 2013 book, The End of Big, where I make the big claim on page 3 that the U.S. Government is effectively a failed government, you just couldn’t see it yet.** Well, I think you can see it now -- from the screwed up elections we’ve already had this year (remember Iowa, Wisconsin, Georgia, New York, and that’s not all), to the failed response to the pandemic (Don’t worry; Americans are still welcome in Albania, Cambodia, Ethiopia, North Macedonia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Brexit UK -- and that’s about it. Everywhere else has banned us.) to the reality that almost nothing you think you recycle gets recycled. And now there is the Post Office.
In the time-honored tradition of releasing bad news Friday night so Americans will ignore it in their weekend recreational bliss, 23 senior post office executives were reassigned or displaced. The new structure seems purposefully designed to make it hard to deliver mail. There’s also this: “The Postal Service has informed states that they’ll need to pay first-class 55-cent postage to mail ballots to voters, rather than the normal 20-cent bulk rate. That nearly triples the per-ballot cost at a time when tens of millions more will be delivered.” [source] Meanwhile, post office workers are dying from COVID-19 because it turns out that delivering the mail in the midst of a pandemic is actually dangerous.
The failure of the postal service is not just run-of-the-mill incompetence -- it appears to be part of an attempt to screw with the election. Although even if you try to do the right thing, you can still end up with trouble. This June’s New York City primary is a case in point: election officials made it much, much easier to vote-by-mail. They wanted to make voting easier… but they didn’t anticipate that the response would be an order of magnitude greater than ever before. Turns out that people actually want to vote if you make it less of a pain the neck -- we’re just not used to people voting. That means -- and you heard it here first -- we’re not going to know the results on election night. NBC’s Chuck Todd is already referring to it as ‘election week’, but it might be more like ‘election month’. Stock up on klonopin wafers to fend off those panic attacks.
It’s not clear what can be done for the postal service; it has some long running structural problems that have made it very fragile. While I was on the board of Democracy.Works, we created a software package designed to integrate with the postal service for the explicit purpose of tracking and managing ballots - read more about it here - but it has proved remarkably hard to sell to states; right now only a tiny minority of states use it, although Michigan is a big focus this year.
So what can be done? If you want to be terrified and full of doom about this election, there is plenty of material -- start with this piece by Garrett Graff. You won’t be able to sleep after reading it. But here’s the thing: it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. To quote my old boss Joe Trippi’s most recent podcast, “Winning big is better than worrying it will be too close”. Take action -- especially at the local level, as I wrote about last week. Channel your anxiety and rage into winning big. Call and volunteer to be a poll worker in your community. Volunteer for a campaign. Go to a local Democratic party meeting (or heck, take the local party over). And please, please, please give me the great luxury of doom-scrolling on your behalf. Inhabit as fully as you can my little brother’s deep, deep desire to look me in the face and say “I told you so!” with great glee, watching my ego crumble.
One final thing: I watch -- savor might be a better word -- the Lincoln Project’s reliably brutal ads. They are designed to drive Trump nuts, and then tend to only buy the ads on shows they know he’ll watch. But I don’t think they’ll change a thing -- and if you don’t believe me, watch the discussion of them on The View this week (yes, The View… betcha didn’t know I’m a loyal viewer of The View).
Lots of love -- nicco
** Not to say “I told you so”, but I told you so. When I turned in the first draft of my book six years ago, my editor sent it back and said it was a bit “dark” and maybe I could be a little more hopeful. This is from the flap jacket of the hard cover edition of my book: “Mele examines...the collapse of traditional party politics, and the rise of a new kind of democracy, one which could produce dynamic and effective leaders… or demagogues...”