Dear friends,
It’s a few days before an election, and I feel compelled to remind you of Rule 1: It Will Get Crazier. We still haven’t hit peak crazy. And to top it all off, Election Night promises to have a very spooky blood moon. Not that I’m superstitious or anything.
The country is evenly divided (sort of), and so the elections could turn out any which way. Please, ignore the media — all of it. Nobody has any idea what’s going on. Nobody has any idea who will actually vote and who they may or may not vote for. Trust me: I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time this week pouring over early vote data, voter registration data, polling data, and more. My conclusion? Nobody has any idea what is going to happen.
If you’re looking for good news, two “planet killer”-sized asteroids were found lurking behind the sun. Luckily, neither are expected to pose a threat to the Earth. This news has made me more optimistic, despite the fact I did not win the Powerball jackpot last night. At least nobody did; that means there might be more good news ahead.
The media (right-wing and otherwise) is positively giddy about Republicans supposedly closing the gap. But please, don’t believe the polls:
There are simply fewer polls than in the past, making the forecast aggregators less accurate. At this point Nate Silver is committing malpractice.
There are more partisan GOP polls designed to create the appearance of momentum – and everyone is taking the bait… although I think this could backfire in more ways than one.
Polls only work if people answer the phone and who does that anymore?
Most important: the polls are built on guesses at who will actually show up and vote, and the reality is we have no idea who is going to show up and vote. And to the extent we know anything about who is already showing up and voting, it looks pretty different from prior elections.
All of that to say: don’t believe the polls. There isn’t a red wave. But it’s still all very close.
As my grandfather used to say, if you hear hooves, it’s probably not a zebra— it’s probably a horse. Which is to say: Republicans will likely take back the House. But the Senate… well, the Senate is trickier. Democrats may keep the Senate for three reasons:
Early turnout data hints at more women and more younger people voting; this is usually good for Democrats. Frankly, Dem early vote numbers are at the upper end of what is even possible – more like the special elections and the Kansas referendum earlier this year, all good for Democrats.
Americans don’t want strict abortion bans. Sarah Longwell, a Republican pollster, talks about how even though abortion does not make it into polling as a major motivator for voting, she keeps hearing women bringing it up in focus groups. Call it that nagging feeling… “I don’t really want my freedom curtailed”.
The Trump effect. Trump isn’t on the ballot — which is likely to depress GOP turnout. And the candidates Trump recruited to run for Senate are (by and large) lousy candidates.
A major clue is where Mitch McConnell is spending money in this final stretch – and it suggests to me that Republicans are still on the defensive in Senate races like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
There are a lot of strange things happening out there right now. A Democrat is competitive in Oklahoma’s governor’s race. Republicans might lose the Utah Senate seat and a North Dakota House seat to independents. Legendary conservative Senator Chuck Grassley is facing his first competitive Senate race since I was born, and I’m no spring chicken. Grassley is likely to win – but it is much much closer than anyone ever imagined.
Which brings me to an important topic: what we have here is a failure of imagination, on multiple fronts. My most respectable friend, historian and journalist Garrett Graff, just launched his own newsletter (Sign up! It’s free!) and that was topic of his first email: “I’ve spent much of my reporting career focused on failures of imagination—foreseeable, even predictable, events that the government, intelligence, and society writ large downplayed, ignored, or overlooked. Whether it’s 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Russian attack on the 2016 election, or the Covid-19 pandemic, warnings signs were there and they weren’t taken seriously…”
And here we are again with a failure to imagine what might happen next. A few things I’m certain of:
There will be more violence. The GOP has already filed more than 100 lawsuits to contest the legitimacy and outcome of elections that haven’t even happened yet. Most incoming Republican Members of Congress reject the outcome of the 2020 election and don’t believe Biden is a legitimate president. If Democrats perform better than the current expectations the misguided media has set, it’s gonna get ugly. The leadership of the Republican Party has by and large refused to condemn political violence, and many have actively encouraged it.
This is the last election where you can believe what you see and hear. My own experiments with artificial intelligence to generate audio and video have left me gobsmacked at the power of the technology. I fully expect the next election – 2024 – to be a wild morass of insane misinformation that looks and sounds and feels real. Buckle up. My favorite discovery in this vein is this infinite AI-generated dialogue between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek.
Climate change will introduce more uncertainty, more suddenly.
Meanwhile, Americans are poorer than ever, with more debt and fewer prospects – especially younger Americans. So what are the ties that bind us as Americans, one to another? This, too, is a question that requires imagination. Looking to Ukraine, historian Timothy Snyder suggests there are lessons of democracy yet to be recognized, and the unorthodox viewpoint that true security, both individually and collectively, comes from freedom, from our indivisible rights– not giving up democratic practices for some ill-defined sense of security. There is nothing inevitable about the global slouch towards authoritarianism. Just a crisis of imagination.
I return frequently to a letter I wrote you about a year ago to remind myself that a grim future is not inevitable. We have the power to shape where we’re going – and more importantly, where our grandchildren are going. It is not going to be easy or fun, but we’ll be together. The future will be absolutely fantastic. We just gotta get there.
I’ve been thinking this week about change and innovation. Many of you know about my long-running obsession with local news – and how remarkably hard it is to get people to invest in local news. It’s not sexy. It’s not new. Reading this interview with Jony Ive, the legendary designer at Apple whose imagination brought us the iPhone among other things, I was struck about how he isn’t interested in disruption: “It’s associated with being successful and selling a company for money. But it’s too easy — in three weeks we could break everything.”
In the same vein, I’ve been reading Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell’s The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work that Matters Most. It reminds me of my former student Pete Davis’ book from a few years back, Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing. Community matters most – and community doesn’t tolerate disruption well, for good reason. The trouble is we’re in a time of disruption, whether we like it or not, from climate change to artificial intelligence. It is in this time of huge disruption and uncertainty that we need to return to and reinvest in our communities, in institutions that bring us closer to our neighbors – our physical neighbors. A return to the local, to the neighborhood is the one thing that can reliably navigate us out of the cul-de-sac of down-to-the-wire elections mired in misinformation and hype.
Easier said than done. But I’m up for the adventure, and I’ve been taking my own advice, building a local non-profit newspaper in my own neighborhood. What about you?
Lotsa love –
Nicco
PS. If you’re in need of some poetry – and who isn’t?? – we’ve got a great line up of local leaders for our annual Evening of Inspired Leaders poetry reading here in Boston - join us!