Reflections from the polling place

Stan Goff
Stan Goff
Nov 6 · 11 min read
There’s your swing.

I vote at the county fairgrounds. There’s a long driveway heading to the big parking lot by the main building, and the local authorities let candidates and supporters plug signs in the ground along the driveway so long as we stay at least 100 feet apart from the actual voting. Yesterday, I carried the flag for one of my local candidates — and outlier who took a pretty good lunge at the system for a city commission seat, though he lost to the old guard by around 700 votes. I stood out there for almost eight hours and had a chance to reflect on the process while I was actually watching and doing it.

The first thing I noticed today, after we’d lost, is that we can win well our little the city with a bloc of 1,400 voters (the winners received a bit fewer than that). Doesn’t sound like much, but in a town of around 20,000 souls that means reaching one out of every 14 people, and one out of every ten adults, and getting them to throw you a vote. Something we have to figure out for ourselves, this outreach thing — especially in an ever more enclosed world.

Thinking, too, as people drove by and waved, or didn’t (some folks have just lost their joie de vivre) about climate change, that great death drive that accelerates unchecked while we fiddle.

These were municipal elections. What can municipalities do to prepare for climate change. What does the city do? Water, sewer, streets, traffic . . . but what could we do, on what do we depend over which we currently have no control? When you think about it, nothing. We live in a farming county, and we buy our food from everywhere but here. Our county grows corn and soy, mostly for animal feed, but also for alcohol, or “ethanol,” if you prefer. We need “transition slates” for local elections, based on a careful study of our own situation combined with a re-read of Murray Bookchin, the Transition Towns initiatives, Mondragon cooperatives, and the social experiment in Jackson, Mississippi called Cooperation Jackson. How can we care for ourselves if the inputs from the outside are disrupted? In these “non-partisan” local elections, can we run “transition slates”?

I wish I’d thought about the polling driveway before I went. We’re trying to put together Sanders team here before the March Primary. If I’d thought about it (we’re so much smarter after the fact, eh?), I’d have had a big sign that said: Facebook — Adrian for Bernie. Our most reliable voting bloc is the one that shows up in an off-year municipal election. Here they were, driving right past me. I saw Bernie bumper stickers, and as each one drove away, I thought, “lost opportunity.”

It was chilly, and the wind kicked up as the sun rose. I was bundled up, but had to pace to stay warm. I wore a little trail in the grass behind our signs, and pacing is what I do when I’m puzzling my way through something, so pacing sort of sets the hamster on the wheel out of habitual association.

Thinking about the politics of the long emergency as a tangle of metaphors. Capital dissolves and leaves fissures. Nature abhors a vacuum. Phagocytes don’t confront, they surround and absorb. Can we be like moss and grow into those fissures? What does that look like?

Transition work has to begin now in case the politics fail . . . it has to begin as soon as possible whether the politics fails or not. We are like a double amputee I saw once in El Salvador. We can’t walk on two legs, as some say about politics and transition work. Too optimistic an account of where we are. We are like that double amputee, who walked with two hands on wooden blocks. One of our blocks is transition. Another is politics. We press on both at once.

When I get home, my friend Will has left me a link to new polling data. Reuters/Ipsos 2020 Primary Tracker. It guesses 2020 turnout to be 62 percent overall. But registered Democrats will turn out at 69 percent, and Republicans will turn out at 73 percent. Indies are not so committed. The Democrats outnumber the Republicans, so actual numbers in this poll reflect a two-point advantage for Dems.

Overall, Biden caught 29 percent of Democrats, with Sanders catching 18 percent and Warren getting 15 percent. Now it gets interesting.

Who is the best on each issue, according to respondents? On immigration, health care, environment, and economy, Sanders won every single one. Then for the kicker . . . who can beat Trump in the General Election? Biden 37%, Sanders 17%, Warren 15%.

Here is where Biden’s support is. The “electability” issue, traipsing across the Democratic landscape like Clinton’s zombie, refuses to lay in its own grave — one marked “2016.”

Polls are no longer as reliable an indicator as they were in less turbulent times. Polls are aimed at “likely voters,” that is voters who have voted in the previous elections. The Sanders campaign is banking on digging into the lost demographic of unlikely voters. My own thoughts on this turn to youth. Young voters, 18–30, haven’t turned out well in the past. When I was at the polls yesterday, the average age of those who went past was around 60. We’re a bit of an anomaly, because young residents can’t wait to leave and pursue their disappointments elsewhere, and the college students are mostly not from this town. I saw a fellow recently on TV who specializes in trend polling, who says the youth vote in 2020 — impelled by fears of a lost future due to climate change and capitalist collapse — will be historically high. I hope he’s right. This is the year when young voters can flip elections by simply showing up. If they do, they’ll feel their strength and be inclined to do it again.

We older folks — not generalizing, but speaking of tendencies — are more conservative by temperament. Not ideologically, but tactically. If you want to know why older voters, including older Black voters, e.g., still lean into Biden — a corporate shill, a racist, and a sexist to boot — it’s tactical conservatism. Another friend, Tom, stopped by on his way in to chat. He’s 70. A white guy, retired school teacher, and he loathes and fears Trump above all things. He’ll vote Biden. I’m not going to argue with his motives, but what I do argue about is the premise that Biden has the best chance of beating Trump. Tom is not comfortable with computers, so he gets his news from MSNBC. So long as Tom can be convinced that Biden will show strongest against Trump, even though he supports all of Sanders’ goals, including M4A, Green New Deal, union-power, and criminal justice reform.

Back to the Reuters poll, most like Sanders’ program, most believe Biden has a better shot at Trump. My thoughts? I’ll come back to “electability,” but another poll yesterday declared that in Michigan — where I live — 73 percent of 18–30 year-old voters are Sanderistas. We need to turn out youth, even as we do battle with the idiocy that Biden is the most “electable.”

Register those who haven’t voted, especially the young.

Keep providing analysis of why Biden’s “electability” issue is drivel (outlined below).

Strengthen our ground game — gather the like-minded and deliver plans to knock doors, table, and get out the vote.

Tactically focus fundraising based on building momentum.

By that last, I mean as Bernie approaches each state Primary or Caucus, if you have some extra $$$ to boost the Sanders campaign, this is how you can be effective. The name of the game is not raw numbers in the static universe of polls; it’s momentum. If the campaign surprises people in Iowa (February 3) and secures a victory for Sanders, New Hampshire (February 11) becomes easier. Likewise, momentum from New Hampshire carries over into South Carolina (February 29), and the cumulative effect is experienced on March 3rd, Super Tuesday. More funds in the two weeks prior to each gives the campaign more agility.

Remember the OODA loop. It’s a tactical decision cycle, based on the acceptance of a measure of unpredictability. Observe, orient, decide, act. Upon the completion of each action, one does not follow a strategic script, but returns to step one — observe . . . to see what the last action has produced as a reaction, then orient to the changed situation to decide and act again. It’s called tactical agility. Each of these elections is an action step, and the campaign — as well as us, the supporters who are also surrogates — identifies the strengths we need to build and the weaknesses we need to exploit.

This shit is not linear. It’s not a footrace, but a basketball game. It can’t be planned, but it still has to be played. It will be played exactly as well as how fast and effectively we can adapt.

Iowa is key, and its tricky because Caucus. Instead of asking voters to spend twenty minutes to merely vote, it depends on how many of the super-committed you can get to travel across the state and converge for a massive, day-long process that is a royal pain in the ass. The Sanders camp appears to have a very strong ground game everywhere, but Iowa will be its acid test.

Now back to that electability stuff.

The ghost of George McGovern hovers over the Democratic Party, a party that bases its whole strategic orientation on McGovern’s loss to Nixon back when the earth was still bubbling. But we aren’t trying to elect Jimmy Carter any more. And we don’t live in the 1970s any more either. We live in post-2007, in the maw of the long stagnation, when neoliberalism is unraveling before our eyes, provoking rebellions around the world alongside the resurgence of a proto-fascist right wing. We’ve gone long on the latter, and we are short on the former.

Our lives have grown substantially more precarious, and with greater precarity comes magma-like anger. That anger can go both directions — right and left — and there can be some crossover. What people want, even if they don’t fully grasp their situations, is some kind of dramatic change.

Obama ran on Change and Hope, which mobilized a pre-2007 movement, then he abandoned his movement and bailed out the banks, and “change” became just another campaign lie. Voters who voted twice for Obama voted for Trump 2016, 13 percent of total 2012 Obama voters! “Pivot counties,” counties where Obama-Trump voters shifted results from D to R — 206 counties in all, most heavily concentrated in Iowa, Wisconsin, New York (rural), Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Trump won Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Trump won all but New York. In Pennsylvania, another Clinton disaster, Clinton-Trump voters turned the election to Trump with three counties.

(There is a stratum of US voters, clueless as they might have been, that used their Trump vote as a cosmic fuck-you.)

Of all the Democratic contenders, Sanders places first among Obama-Trump voters, the swing that mattered most in 2016. It’s still an electoral college map, and not a pop-vote.

What matters is which candidate is perceived to be the shit-or-get-off-the-pot candidate. It’s still about change, even if people aren’t sure what kind of change. The polarization of the electorate is roughly generational, with old white folk like me leaning into Trump (as many old Democrats lean Biden out of tactical conservatism) and youth sliding left, fast. What “the center” means to most of us is the opposite of change. And for the record, this old white dude is a good way to the left of his own candidate — Sanders.

If we are voting based on electability, it is my contention — which I hope you’ll share and spread — that Sanders is the best candidate to field against Trump, polls now be damned (Polls predicted an landslide for Clinton!). The polls will shift with each Primary, but more importantly the Primaries are a different game than the General in two key ways.

First, the same red states that might swing the Democratic Primaries will be far less relevant in the General, which changes all the calculi. Democrats have to pick up every state they won in 2016 as well as win back Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. That can only mean two things: get people to the polls who didn’t show up the last time, and flip the Obama-Trump voters back into the D-column. These are the close races where intangibles like morale, momentum, and excitement can carry the day. Sanders is the strongest now of all the Democrats among Obama-Trump voters. In August, a tally of individual donors to Democratic contenders in Obama-Trump pivot counties showed Biden with 12,040 donors, Warren with 13,674, Buttigieg with 14,294, and Sanders with 33,185.

Tactical conservatism is seldom effective on battlefields, and it is even less effective in elections. Aging Democrats grasp at it like they’re clinging to a parent’s pantleg, and it has yielded Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton . . . “losing our asses since 1999” might be the Democratic centrist motto. Did we lose our asses to brilliance and superb tactical acumen? No, we lost to George W. Bush and Donald Trump, two intellectual mediocrities surrounded by scoundrels and idiots. We lost because we couldn’t articulate an actual vision and struggle in a principled way to achieve it. We lost by staying inside our bubbles. We lost by offering “change” that was anything but. We lost because we refused to fight, and instead relied on fear of Republicans as a “strategy.” We lost because Democratic elected official of the old guard is suffering from severe osteoporosis of the spinal column. We lost because we decided to continue to try manipulating the public with bullshit from above instead of enlisting people in social movements.

When X faces off against Trump after the Democratic Primaries have finished, Trump will bring the full force of his substantial cult-following along with fuck-you voters, unless the Democrats can offer something other than the same old pap. And they’ll turn out at 73 percent.

If X is Joe Biden (and for my money Elizabeth Warren will fare poorly against Trump, too), Trump will beat Biden about the head and shoulders with Biden’s own record — and easy thing to do. Trump will no exercise tactical conservatism, and his base will be pumped for a fight.

If there is one intangible that will matter most to swing voters, that intangible is “authenticity.” People may not understand how a consultant-driven, wooden candidate like Hillary Clinton got to be inauthentic, but inability to articulate that does not mean people have no intuition for it. Centrist Dems cannot be authentic and they cannot convince skeptics of their authenticity so long as they are trying to maintain an equivocating and manipulative line of neoliberal bullshit.

Beating back this tactical conservatism is a critical task for the left right now. Most Democratic voters are still undecided, but many are focused on their fear of Trump. The tactically conservative lie that Biden is the best for that job needs daily debunking.

Where are we on the OODA loop? We are in the initial action stage, yet incomplete. That happens on February 3rd in Iowa. What can we do? Everything you can, but ensure it aims at (1) debunking Biden’s electability myth, (2) getting youth registered, (3) planning in advance on how to defeat voter suppression efforts, (4) organizing local groups to actively participate and educate, (5) working our social media overtime to penetrate the MSNBC/NYT/WaPo fog, (6) contribute to your local and state candidates, and kick some over to Sanders, and (7) talk with elders about their tactical conservatism. Give us a sound argument (we aren’t hearing them on TV), and we’ll listen.

(What not to do — what Krystal Ball calls “performative woke signalling,” and forgetting that this is about persuasion.)

On that money thing, remember to boost (if you can) your contributions to the Sanders campaign, starting in the last half of January, to build that momentum.

And start having conversations locally about transition — local preparations to survive climactic-economic disruption. The calamity is already in motion, and waiting is the worst option.

Peace.

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