First of all, we won.

But. But but but but.

Instead of a repudiation we got a base election. Rachel Bitecofer was right about the basic dynamics.

That we did not get a clear repudiation is a source of serious concern. There is no good reason why a President who was underwater in polling for the entirety of his four years, who mismanaged a pandemic that killed at least 231,000 people in the United States by election day, and who regularly insults the majority of the citizens it is his job to serve should have been within four and a half points of winning the popular vote. And yet he was. This is an indictment of how partisan the United States has become as well as a stunning confirmation of Trump’s normalization. For Trump’s transgressions and cruelties and dishonorable actions were given, over and over, a veneer of acceptability. His destruction of norms was given room – by journalists, by elected officials, by the Republican Party, over and over and over again.

There are many hasty takes on what the election meant, some data-driven, others opinion-fuelled. I think, eight weeks on, it continues to remain too early to properly gauge the election and what it means, but I still have some things to say.

1. It turned out that it was enough to be the anti-Trump. After every election involving right-wing populists for the last five years at least we have been told: if you don’t stand for a specific program – as opposed to simply against right-wing populism – you will lose to the right-wing populist. Not so. This was a referendum on Trump and Trump lost. Of course Biden had ideas – plenty of them, many of them good – but they simply didn’t make it out of the gate. Trump sucked all the oxygen out of every room, day in day out. This was a referendum on Trump, and American voters, by a margin of over seven million, decided that they did not want more of Trump’s toxic nonsense.

And, to turn to the UK for a minute, don’t forget we have at least one proper example of a left-wing counterprogram that failed. Corbyn had two opportunities to beat a Conservative government that made clear its intention to hobble the UK for at least a generation in the name of amorphous, emotionally-charged “sovereignty” – and he failed. How might those elections have gone had the leader of the Labour Party acknowledged the horrors of Brexit to come, pointed out the fact that the referendum was explicitly non-binding, stressed the slippery dishonesty of its proponents in the lead-up to the referendum, and fought the nightmarish slide on the part of the Tories and their cheering Telegraph columnist boosters toward enforced chaos and poverty? To do so would have meant to commit, in concert with the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, Plaid Cymru, the SNP, and Alliance, toward either an anti-Brexit coalition or a very soft Brexit, which ran contrary to his revolutionary plans for I don’t know water rights or railway renationalization or something. We’ll never know, though it might have been enough for Labour to have credibly said: we stand practically against this right-wing populism – join us.

2. This was a much bigger win, historically, than it appeared at first glance. Trump becomes one of four Presidents in the last century (the others are George HW Bush in 1992, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Herbert Hoover in 1932) to lose a re-election bid. Biden has ended up with 51.3 percent of the vote; according to the New York Times election tracker, this is a margin of 4.5 percentage points, which can be rounded up to a five point win. The last time a challenger to an elected President broke 50% was 1932, when Roosevelt beat Hoover. In 43 states there was movement toward Biden; only six states moved toward Trump between 2016 and 2020. (Nevada showed no change at all.) Yet the overwhelming coverage of the outliers to this trend ended up implying that much of the country turned toward Trump.

3. Trump did better than the polls suggested. Why? Why did a dozen-odd House seats go Republican? How did Democratic Senate candidates in Maine, Iowa, and North Carolina, apparently favored for most of the year, vastly underperform? I suspect that Trump activated two reservoirs of voters: his supporters, who don’t usually vote and who were somehow beyond the reach of polls, and Republicans who voted for Biden and then voted for Republican candidates down-ballot.

Whatever the explanation, and their various justifications to the contrary, US polling is not living up to expectations. Pollsters need to figure out how to model turnout better. Until they do, it will be difficult for laypeople to view polls as useful.

4. We still have a stunted grasp of Trump’s arc of the electorate. The Los Angeles Times turned its opinion page over to pro-Trump letters on 14 November. I read each one of those letters and learned nothing. It is tiring, how often and thoroughgoingly we have been compelled to listen to these voices. We have heard them for years. They consist of the following:

– Trump is a businessman and is good for the economy.

– Liberals are destroying America with their misguided approach to political correctness and Trump is the remedy.

– Abortion is bad and Trump opposes it.

– Negative partisanship is one hell of a drug. The more that people oppose Trump the greater the groundswell of support for him.

– Racism, coded racism, barely coded racism, bald racism, and more racism.

For the millionth time, we have been asked to understand the motivations of people voting for a dangerous demagogue, a racist huckster, a corrupt business failure with good marketing savvy, an illiberal risk. And yet in the above explanations there is not a lot to work with. Trump disparaged just about every good thing the US stands for. He was openly racist. He coddled authoritarians. He made money off his Presidency. He put children in cages. He is a sadistic crook. All of these things were acceptable for 74+ million Americans. I want to understand support for Trump in that I want people to vote differently, and the explanations above aren’t very helpful in getting us there.

Tim Alberta’s round-up of voters and their motivations in Politico was more helpful, and also more depressing – here we see the degree to which the conviction that the election was fraudulent, a conviction without evidence, refuted by everyone who has investigated them, has spread.

5. Emotions are running high.

On the other side of the ledger, Trumpists got a lot of attention for how they felt.

It's dispiriting to come across an analysis like this one by Batya Ungar-Sargon, which implies that none of this true panic that I know we felt terrorized by, authentically, matters. All that matters is taste.

Trump made four or five racist statements throughout his presidency, and about the same number of antisemitic ones. The rest of the opposition to him wasn’t about values at all. It was about taste. Trump is gross. That spray tan, that hair, the golden toilet, the vainglorious pettiness: He didn’t fit with the vision upper class people have of a leader. But we in the media clothed our taste-based objection to Trump, which is of course a stand in for class, in terms of values: He’s anti-truth; he’s racist; he’s a Nazi. (“What does Liberalism Even Mean Anymore?” in The Dandy)

Because I for one don’t give a toss about golden toilets. Sure, it’s interesting that Trump’s aesthetic sort of rhymes with the aesthetics of dictators and autocrats in the Ashgabat-Moscow-Dubai triangle. But who actually cares about it?

Ironic, too, that again it would be this accusation of aesthetic disdain from liberals when it was Trump who connected the final dot in the merging of politics and aesthetics, a process that has been underway for at least 20 years. In his remarkable piece on Trump and camp, Matthew Walther writes:

But Trump was still the culmination of a long process on the American right, the rejection of tedious dogma in favor of a general aestheticized disdain.

Where is the sustained attempt to understand us? The absolute emptiness, the consuming fear, the sleepless nights, the cold-sweat panic that many Americans have authentically felt for the past four years – and longer, for those of us who became concerned about Trump’s potential to win the White House from the summer of 2015 onwards. Our pain was real. Our fears are real. And while there was a lot of time devoted by the mainstream media to the dangers of Trump, there was relatively little devoted to the sheer panic and pain we were feeling – to our emotions.

6. We won decisively but on an authoritarian-time clock we barely made it out. One of the sages of this era is authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who points out somewhere (can’t find it just now) that only one in five autocratic takeovers is turned back. Normalization turns autocrats into palatable leaders.

On the topic of normalization, one of the stories about the 2020 election that needs to be told in depth is the story of Trump and the Mormons. I am partially of LDS stock, though I was not raised within the church and know little about its doctrines. But I have loads of Mormon relatives. They actively disliked Trump in 2016; they physically recoiled from him. And they simply got more comfortable over the past four years. There are certainly a few things going on here, but one thing that is going on is that autocracy-minded leaders over time become normalized. In 2016, Mormon women in particular felt disproportionately offended by Trump; by 2020, his transgressions and perceived immorality had become baked in, excused, simply part of the package in the war against socialism, violence in the streets, Hollywood, whatever. In 2016 they had Evan McMullin to vote for. Though I haven’t seen any solid data confirming this, it appears that over half of those votes went to Trump this year. McMullin got 21.54% of the Utah vote in 2016; adding to this figure the share of lost support for the Libertarian and Green candidates in 2020 and you get 22.95%, almost identical to the boost Biden received compared to Hillary Clinton (10.19%) combined with Trump’s (12.59%) rise in support against 2016.

It would be fascinating to see if this shift is present in other states where Mormons are particularly numerous. What happened in Mormon strongholds in Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, and Nevada? Does this shift explain the drift toward Trump in strongly Democratic Hawaii, where Mormons are a relatively significant 5+ percent of the population?

This drift has to be placed in the context of Biden’s relatively very good performance in Utah, by the way. But it also shows the effects of normalization and implies that vast numbers of Mormons became ok with Trump over the course of his Presidency.

7. Bernie Sanders would have gotten destroyed. The Trump campaign essentially ran the anti-Bernie playbook all year long, and it worked pretty well even in the absence of Bernie. It convinced just enough people in North Carolina and Texas that Biden was some sort of socialist, and it galvanized South Florida – Cuban-Americans and Venezuelan-Americans, among others – to oppose the Democrats as if they are some sort of pernicious Communist force.

Also, the smartest progressives on Twitter are usually – as in almost always – not good at understanding why people vote the way they do. Biden ended up being a very good candidate, despite the near-universal inability of this group of people to grasp that.

By the by, though I’m not sure this observation belongs under Bernie-would-have-lost heading: Liberals assume that we are right and that most people will agree with us if they have the right information. Sometimes this is correct; other times it is not. Liberals also often assume that everyone has the information that we do. But most people do not breathe politics. Most Americans continue to think that Trump is a successful businessman, not a blowhard idiot who has gone bankrupt multiples times and is good only at licensing his name and branding some abstract sense of success.

8. The end of the campaign was chaotic and very, very emotional. Trump caught COVID-19 and survived and then went full-tilt on the campaign trail. Prior to that, Republicans amassed a huge advantage in new voter registrations over the summer. Biden and the Democrats did what was responsible in both instances, but this turned out to be risky. By appearing at rallies, Trump activated some sort of twisted mass response: he almost died and he’s here for us. By registering voters all summer long, the Trump campaign built an advantage that was not picked up by polls.

9. Microtargeting remains the name of the game, and Democrats need to get much better at it. Why were some Asian-Americans lured by the Trump campaign? What was happening in Chinese-language social media? Vietnamese voters in Orange County reversed long-term voter realignment patterns and voted for Republicans. Why?

What is the shape of the Spanish-language disinfo media landscape? Why wasn’t it better understood by Democrats?

It can’t be beneath Democrats to investigate this stuff. We need to understand it much better and be able to contest it, because it is not going to go away anytime soon.

All this said, the narrative of Latinos suddenly being Republican is weird and incorrect. If white Americans voted the way Latinos did, the US would be in a much better place. In 1984, 37% of Latinos voted for Reagan. In 2004, 40% of Latinos voted for Bush. This year, by at least one estimation, 66% of Latinos voted for Biden versus the 65% who voted for Clinton in 2016. Even if this estimate is off by a bit, certainly Trump did nowhere near as well as Bush in 2004.

Outreach has to be better, and it has to be 24/7.

Interlude. The most difficult thing for me personally these past few years was the utter conviction with which friends, American and not, would tell me that Trump was destined for a second term. It didn’t matter that he was an historically unpopular President. It didn’t matter that 2018 was a dramatic Blue Wave mid-term election. It didn’t matter that by the close of 2019 every single leading Democratic candidate lead Trump in the polls. Perhaps as a reaction to trauma, the prevailing idea was that there was nothing we could do to stop Trump. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, precisely how authoritarianism roots itself – in the idea of inevitability. People convince themselves early on that a wannabe-autocratic ruler is unstoppable long before he actually is. The justifications might go like this: he won by a much bigger margin than we’d thought imaginable, thus he is likely unbeatable; he has friends in the media to help him finesse his message; he has violated norms and gotten away with it so nothing can stop him. All those reactions come before the actual clampdowns. They ease people into a servile position until all they can do is leave or retreat into private lives. And once that sense of agency has evaporated, it becomes vastly easier for an authoritarian to demolish democratic institutions and exercise power.

Make no mistake: American authoritarianism was very, very close. And it may return. We are on notice. But we had the power to beat Trump and I felt very sure, looking at the evidence, that we would.

To everyone who told me with utter conviction, against all available evidence, that Trump would definitely win: Think about what you signed off on with that conviction. The implications of inevitability and the irrelevance of engagement or voter agency, the sense that our own actions are destined to be meaningless, are both extremely corrosive and part of a larger narrative of authoritarian creep. Be mindful of revering authoritarianism over the evidence.

10. Resisting right-wing populism is important in every instance, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Trump backed down on a number of things when the response was fierce enough; courts turned him back; the mid-term blue surge that took back the House held him back; at other junctures he misjudged what he was up against and reacted poorly, endangering his own position. The fact is that we cannot afford right-wing populism in any instance. Fight its normalization wherever you are. It doesn’t matter that Chega here in Portugal – where I have been since September – is “only” polling at between 5 & 8 percent. That’s too high for a dangerous right-wing demagogue who attacks Joacine Katar Moreira – one of just three Black members of the Portuguese parliament – and scapegoats the Roma. Challenge people who tell you that he’s just voicing something that other politicians are afraid to voice. Give right-wing populism no quarter, for it is always destined to be first authoritarian and later genocidal.

11. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. Credit to Virginia Heffernan.

Those of us who oppose Trump probably do have something called Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump after all has been an unprecedented threat. But his supporters are also afflicted by this disorder, in ways that reconfigure their personalities entirely. I just came across a minor celebrity I hadn’t previously heard of whose entire social media universe is Trump triumphalism, QAnon memes, and nonsense hashtags. She appears to be utterly and completely taken over by a virus. Prior to 2016, she seemed pretty sane, all things considered, lucid and cogent. Once Trump was injected into her life, she became nearly unrecognizable.

I watch Trump’s rallies and I see madness, the eclipse of what Joseph Roth called the regulating consciousness. What happens when an advisor to the President suggests on air that Anthony Fauci should be beheaded or a lawyer allied with the President discusses shooting an elections integrity chief, or literally millions of Trump’s supporters argue with zero evidence that the election was rigged? Separately but not unrelatedly: What happens when information has become so siloed that we cannot speak of shared facts?

I think adoration of Trump is a virus but I also imagine it to be emotionally comforting, an identification with being disdained. The moment that scared me most in the 2016 campaign was when Trump said that he loved the poorly educated. Can you imagine a “responsible” mainstream Republican saying those words? That was a moment of entry for many people, a moment of feeling seen. Trump rallies look to be carnivalesque events, emotionally laden. People are there because they want to be, and Trump opens up a space – as Obama did – for people to choose how they belong. The crowd roars, laughs, erupts – the din is loud enough to chew on or to set your own melodies to.

Lies themselves are a bond. Lies connect. Lies provide an ideal way to reject, in the most dramatic manner possible. How better to demonstrate loyalty and belonging than to sign on to a shared lie, an open lie? How better to demonstrate that you are a true American than to sign on to a shared assassination of an ethnicity, a religion, “shithole countries,” or people who (you imagine or are told) think they are better than you?

I wonder also how “lies” register in the first place within certain life philosophies: what is a mere lie from Trump’s lips – whether viewed as a performance or not – if your values are such that there is a larger urgency that transcends and justifies lies of the present?

12. What did we ignore? In 2016 I volunteered for the Clinton campaign in Cincinnati. For the first several days of volunteering, before the voter registration deadline passed, I stood outside various Krogers asking people if they were registered to vote. It was slow going. One group of young people laughed: “Are you kidding? It’s a mess. I don’t want anything to do with that.” Men in their 20s, mostly Black, made it clear that they thought that the political system was too messed up for them to want to vote. It became clear that a civic grasp had broken, or had been rebroken, or was stillborn all along and only now somehow visible as such. Lack of participation was seen as agency, as separation from the zoo of politics. There were also the canvassing moments that should have rung alarm bells but didn’t: An older Asian woman with an accent telling me she just hadn’t made up her mind yet; a level of detachment throughout; the repeated refrain “I liked Bernie” cited not as a piece of the puzzle but as a block to enthusiasm. I hadn’t glimpsed any of this ambivalence in 2008 when I canvassed for Obama, also in Cincinnati. A sense of hope had been replaced by detachment, rejection, as if abstention would make a change.

In the retelling prior to Election Day I focussed on the encounters that lifted my spirits, the moments that told me that people shared with me the deep sense that Trumpism was a virus that had to be stopped: a young bouncy white couple in their 30s who had just purchased their house and were getting ready to go on a run; the dour upper-middle-class white woman who told me that she loved John Kasich but of course would be voting for Hillary; the white guy with a moustache wearing a tank top with a drawl born well south of Cincinnati who said “Trump is crazy. We have to stop him from becoming President” and registered to vote on the spot; the Black man who stopped to sit with me for a moment and said “I pay my taxes. I’m not voting for anyone who doesn’t pay his.”

I also think about my visit to south Florida in April 2019, striking up a conversation at Miami International Airport with two women, one in her 20s and the other in her 40s, both Latina. “Oh you’re going to Palm Beach. We love it,” said the younger. “Yes, it’s nice up there. Mar-a-Lago, Trump,” said the older, with a pump of her fist. “We really like him.” It’s easy to write things off, but this was a weird moment that stuck with me, that I had a hard time fully ignoring. (Someday someone will have to explain Florida to me.)

13. What should Biden do? Remain decent. Speak as if he wants to unify and never waver in this regard. Get as many Americans as possible vaccinated in the shortest amount of time. Be obvious about taking credit: Drawing attention to changes made by his administration should not be beneath him. Biden’s name should be on stimulus checks. Overturn every pernicious executive order he can. Reshape foreign policy away from lowest-common-denominator transactionalism; honor commitments and relationships. Do whatever he can with Congress. Remind the press often and loudly that the Trump administration has done untold damage and the clean-up is going to take time.

And take one page out of Trump’s book: Blitz. Overwhelm. Don’t pause for a second. Don’t wait for reactions. Just go. Every day.

Fuck them up, Uncle Joe.