Monday, October 14, 2024

Part I

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How Close is the Presidential Election Race Today? Both Parties Agree That Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are in One of the Closest Election Races in U.S. History

Well, here we are barely three weeks before the presidential election, and as you know by now, that’s just about all the country can talk about and for good reason. We’re not talking about an insignificant issue here. We’re not talking about something that’s merely a media obsession. Yes, it is a media obsession, but quite honestly, this is one of those events that is absolutely worthwhile. We are talking about who will be President of the United States for the next four years. We’re talking about who will be commander in chief. We are talking about who will control Congress on both the House side and the Senate side. We’re talking about crucial votes in many states for governor, in some states for control of the legislature, and some states for Supreme Court elections. And in 10 states, no less than 10 states, major issues will be faced by voters on the question of abortion.

So you just look at that and you recognize, it’s virtually impossible to talk too much about this. At this point, it’s virtually impossible to think too much about this, but we do want to think rightly. So I want to throw some things out today just in terms of what should be markers on the landscape as we think about the election coming because this has turned out to be an election season with a lot of surprises. The most important surprise, of course, was the fact that the incumbent Democratic President of the United States dropped out of the race. And even as that happened very quickly after the first debate when you had President Biden facing off against former President Trump, President Biden’s performance was simply so bad, so absolutely appalling, that his party, including at least some very close to him, went into absolute panic.

Now, in the time since President Biden has withdrawn from the race, everything in terms of evidence has tended to support the fact that he needed to drop out of the race. But we also need to recognize there was really no provision in terms of the policies and procedures of a major political party for such a thing to happen, especially shortly before that party’s national convention. And just to remind ourselves of how radical this was, let’s just go back to the Republican National Convention when Joe Biden was still the anticipated nominee. And so we really are talking about something that just turned on a dime. And there will no doubt be historians who will go back and question the procedure whereby the Democratic Party went on to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris. But it really was something like an appointment that ended up a coronation, at least when it comes to the party’s power.

What is really remarkable is how the Democratic Party coalesced around Kamala Harris as the presidential nominee and eventually also Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as the vice presidential nominee. And here’s where I want us as Christians to recognize there’s a predictable cycle to this. And the cycle is this. The news media and the political pundits have every incentive to tell you that this is the closest election in all of American history. They have every reason to keep you hooked looking at all of the news programs, the 24/7 streaming news, cable, all the rest. They want you paying a lot of attention. And one way to make sure you pay attention is by arguing that this particular race is just uniquely close. It just so happens at this time on this occasion, they might be right.

And one of the ways you check this is by understanding that a lot of the polling and a lot of the political game going on is being conducted not just by the media, and I’m not ascribing to them any neutrality, far from it, but actively by the two parties and by the universes of organizations, think tanks and all the rest associated with the two parties. But when you have an avalanche of information, especially controversial information like this, and basically the same information is coming from both parties and the oppositional party system we have, that tells you that it just might be that this is actually what is taking place. And on the ground it appears that this is an incredibly tight race.

Now, here’s where I want us to think about location for a moment because no doubt you might be in a place right now that doesn’t appear to be divided that closely in any sense. If you are in, for example, the city of San Francisco, well good luck even finding a Republican. And so Kamala Harris is not just going to win San Francisco, she’s going to win California, and at least by double-digit amounts. It’s not even going to be close. And that’s because of the liberalism and the Democratic Party tilt of the state of California. The same thing would be true on the opposite coast, say in a place like Massachusetts or for that matter, in a state like Illinois, particularly as is centered in the population concentration in the North in places like Chicago. You’re talking about Democratic of Democratic locales.

On the other hand, you might be in a place like Mississippi where even though there are Democrats, it’s really beyond question that Donald Trump and the Republican ticket are going to carry the state of Mississippi. You could add some other states to that. Indeed, a lot of the states in the middle of America, and that just reminds us again, that if you’re looking at a map of the United States, state by state, red states and blue states, the blue states are heavily concentrated on the two coasts, and the heartland in between is basically solidly red. When you look at the electoral results for the last several presidential election cycles, you would be hard-pressed to go across the country only in blue states, but you could pretty much go across most of the continental United States while traveling only in red states. The problem for Red America is that the population doesn’t line up that way. The problem for the Democratic Party is that the electoral college is actually what has to be won in order to win the White House.

Now, if you were to go to say just the last three or four election cycles, you’d be paying particular attention to states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, because those were considered bellwether states. As those states go, so will the presidential election go. But things have changed a bit, and for one thing, Ohio is now pretty much red. It’s not purple, it’s not say in one cycle going this way, in another cycle going the other way. At this point for now, Ohio is pretty red, but that does leave Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. And at least the polling is indicating that the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris is ahead in those three states. But it’s also clear that the Democratic Party is not sure that that’s true.

Now, a couple of interesting things for us to observe here. Let’s just take the state of Pennsylvania. There can be no doubt that the state of Pennsylvania might be singularly the most important state in this presidential election cycle. And that’s because when you think about a path to victory in the electoral college, it is difficult, not impossible, but it is difficult for both candidates, that is to say the nominees of both parties, to figure out how to get to the winning number without Pennsylvania. Now it’s not exactly equal because the fact is that if Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee loses Pennsylvania, it’s a lot more difficult to figure out how she might be able to catch up elsewhere. At least in terms of how the electoral college has operated in recent cycles, Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, could find a way to an electoral college majority, those magic 270 votes without Pennsylvania. But you know what? It would be a nail biter if indeed it is possible.

So there is a sense that whoever wins Pennsylvania is at least likely, more likely than not to win the White House. It’s not a sure thing, but you did say, well, Pennsylvania is in the Eastern Time Zone, so it might be that we will know at least a likely signal about the outcome of the election early on Tuesday evening on election day. And yet then again, maybe not. And that is because Pennsylvania, and this is one of the controversial issues about the 2020 presidential election. Pennsylvania has adopted some really weird electoral rules. I’m not even suggesting they all went through the state government in terms of the legislature. Some of them were just enacted by bureaucracies there, but they basically allow for mail-in balloting in such a way that you can’t even start counting until you have election day.

And even then there are ballots that could still come in and later be counted. And so it may well be a nail biter, but on the other hand, it might be inconclusive, which is going to be very frustrating to all concerned. But it is basically the Democrats in power who have wanted these very loose rules concerning voting. It’s been Republicans who’ve wanted tighter rules concerning voting, but it is likely, at least it’s very possible or plausible that on election night we might not have final results from Pennsylvania or even results that either side can bank on. But when you mention Pennsylvania, that raises another issue. When we think about states, and we understand how they function in the electoral college, we understand the variable number of electors based upon the relative population, which is translated into the number of seats in the House and in the Senate, and you understand how that comes together. And so we think of states, but you know what?

States are not solid blocks themselves. You have a map of the United States and you say, well, that’s just too simplistic. The United States is not either red or blue. There are red states and blue states. Yeah, that’s true. But even within some of those counties, there are red counties and blue counties. You have a state like Pennsylvania, and you understand that even folks in Pennsylvania for years have said it is basically, well, a fairly eastern seaboard state with more liberal voters on the western side and the eastern side of Pennsylvania. And then as former Pennsylvania governor, Ed Rendell famously put it, “It’s like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and then Alabama in the middle.” Alabama is deep red, very conservative. 

But that then raises an issue as we’re thinking about the electorate, but also as we’re thinking about the culture. Because I often mention that the closer you get to a city, the closer you get to a campus, the closer you get to a coast, there’s more to it than that. But the closer you get to those three realities, the more liberal the society becomes, the more secularized, the more progressive the society becomes. So you have a state like Pennsylvania, and on the eastern seaboard, well, it tends to vote something like New York on the eastern seaboard. But then again, New York has some rather conservative and Republican leaning areas, particularly to the north. The further inland you go, the more variability you’re going to find. 

In a state like Pennsylvania, that means that you have Western Pennsylvania, very strong historic labor union vote there in Western Pennsylvania. And even as they have sometimes gone for Republicans, it’s not been the same kind of Republican that they would go for in Alabama. But the state of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, Alabama in the middle. So if the votes that are lacking in terms of the accounting in Pennsylvania are from say, Philadelphia, well, you can probably count on those votes when they come in being pretty much Democratic votes. On the other hand, if they’re coming from the middle of the state, well the numbers will be down in terms of population density, but the redness of the area goes up. In many cases, way up.

Part II

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Why Do the Young Vote Left? How Work, Income, and Family Tend to Make Voters More Conservative

So all right, what’s been going on as states have changed? I mentioned that Ohio had been considered a swing state, but at least in recent cycles it’s been reliably red. Well, USA Today interestingly, has done several front page articles on how some of the states have shifted and why. So for instance, take the state of Georgia. Georgia would’ve been considered once, well as USA Today said, “Ruby red.” That is to say deeply Republican. It has a very powerful governor there, Republican governor who was not only elected, but re-elected, but at the same time, Joe Biden won Georgia in the 2020 presidential race. And of course there’s controversy about that, but the fact is there’s no controversy that Georgia is changing. The headline in USA Today, “Once ruby red, Georgia growing into a swing state.” So that’s the term that USA Today uses: a swing state.

In another front page article, the very same newspaper, USA Today on a different day ran their analysis of Florida. And what they said about Florida is that it basically stopped swinging. It had been a swing state, but like Ohio and maybe even more so in one sense, Florida is now very deeply red. If Georgia used to be ruby red, well Florida is increasingly red. And you ask the question why? And the answer has to do with a couple of other factors that we need to think about. One of them is age. Now when you think about the age of the electorate, just understand younger voters, they’re not all liberals, but you know what? They tend to be more liberal than people even in the same area who are older.

Andy Kessler at the Wall Street Journal recently wrote a column in which he reported that 57% of 18 to 34 year olds surveyed according to the Pell Center, well, they’re going to vote for Kamala Harris. That’s 18 to 34 year olds, 57%. 57% is big. Only 26% said that in that age group they were going to vote for Donald Trump. Now, so you’re looking at 57 versus 26, and so you could quickly do the math. Well, that could turn out if you have a younger electorate, that say Kamala Harris will get 57% of the vote, Donald Trump will get 26% of the vote. Here’s the problem with that, and I’ll get to this in greater detail in just a moment. But young people are in a very different position as to political preference with older voters in the United States. But there’s another huge difference. Older voters actually vote. Younger voters certainly have a preference, but the fact is a lot of them just evidently don’t make it to the voting booth. And so even answering pollster’s questions doesn’t mean that this is how the vote is going to turn out.

And so you definitely have some very politically motivated young people. And by the way, you have them in both parties on both sides of the culture war. You have some very committed young people on the Left. You also have, I’m glad to say, some very committed young people on the Right. You have some very active progressivists, leftists, secularists, young people. You also have some very active conservative Christian young people. And so you have some young people who are definitely going to vote and they’re activists and they volunteer. But the majority of the cohort that age talks more about voting than they actually vote.

Andy Kessler, by the way, at the Wall Street Journal is asking the question, why do the young vote left? And the reason he asked this is because it’s not just this election cycle. If it were just this election cycle, there’d be a lot more news about it. This is basically the way it has worked for the last several decades in the United States and in the last several presidential election cycles. There have been some changes in terms of say how the graphs would map out, but in general, the younger the electorate, the more liberal the electorate votes. And that’s fairly easy to understand. Now, Andy Kessler says the reason that so many young people vote left is because they are undereducated and over-indoctrinated with someone else’s agenda. He means the agenda of the liberal faculty members, and he’s especially talking about colleges and universities. But increasingly in some school systems you’d have the same problem, although you don’t have that many voters in that age group.

But as you’re looking at the young people beginning to vote at age 18 going up to 34, yes, there is no doubt that liberal higher education has a big impact. And I simply agree with Andy Kessler on that assessment, but I want to come back and say there’s something else going on here. And it might be just as basic as education, and that is income. So one of the reasons that younger Americans vote more liberal or progressive in direction than older Americans is because in general, older Americans are paying taxes and younger Americans are not. It may well be that the most important factor, determining who moves in a more conservative direction, and that means in worldview, but also in political instinct, it may well be the most important factor there is having a child. But second is likely to be having a job and especially receiving a paycheck and noticing how much of your paycheck is taken out by that giant shark bite known as withholding and taxes.

Younger people tend to vote in a more conservative pattern once they settle in to say marriage and family, but also owning a home or trying to own a home or trying to do financial planning and recognizing that when you talk about raising taxes, eventually that means raising your taxes. And so an awful lot of young people who are on the receiving side of the financial ledger, they are, well, they can afford to be liberal because they’re not having to pay the bills, but as soon as they do start having to pay the bills, it’s amazing, at least there is a different kind of priority that sets in. Now, those on the Left have been frustrated for decades, and I mean very frustrated. And I mean the real Left, I mean we’re talking about Marxists here. Marxists have been very frustrated that in the United States when you have very, very liberal leftist young people when they reach, say the end of their 20s and the beginning of their 30s, well all of a sudden things begin to change and you have people move into more conservative voting patterns.

And I was just reading a leftist, I mean a genuine leftist over the last couple of days who has been pointing fingers at the liberals in the United States for being sellouts because at the end of the day they have IRAs and 401(k)s and they get involved in investing and the next thing you know, they’re concerned about how the stock market’s doing. And you know what? If you’re concerned about how the stock market’s doing, you’re not a Marxist.

Part III

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When Californians Move, They Take Their Voting Patterns With Them: The Electoral Map is Being Reshaped One Precinct at a Time

So thus far today we’ve just been looking at some of the setup for the conflict, which is the great electoral battle before us. And we’ve been talking about how close the race appears to be, and we’ve been looking at the fact that at the granular level, it’s just not a simple thing. It’s not just one electorate going to vote. It is human beings, by the millions, who live in all kinds of different zip codes and frankly, in all kinds of different family arrangements and who hold to all different kinds of worldviews. And even though there are some predictable patterns, the bottom line is we don’t know until the vote actually takes place.

Now in days to come, we’re going to be doing a deeper dive on some of these issues. Just when does it make a difference in terms of say, the worldview translated into politics when someone starts a family and has a family. And one of the things we’re going to look at is how the arrival of a first child tends to change a lot. Guess what? Wake up call there. And then you understand once you’re responsible for a family, it tends to move you in a more conservative direction.

On the other hand, when you have an increased number of young people who are delaying marriage and in many cases not getting married and not having children and the birth rate’s going down, one of the things we’re going to be looking at is how all of a sudden that reshapes the political equation. If you have a society in which people are increasingly for a period of their lives, a large period of their lives, they’re basically in an extended adolescence, guess what? They can extend that liberal period in their lives in terms of the typical political lifespan. We’re also going to be looking at how people moving from one state to another can make a big difference. And I can give you a preview. We’re going to be looking at, for example, what happens in Arizona when increasingly people in Arizona are moving there from California. Guess what? They bring their California ideologies with them. So guess what Arizona? Your voting patterns are going to change.

The same thing is true in a different sense, and at least at this point, a less acute sense in a state like Texas, which is still very red. But you look at the population growth and the demographic trends, and it looks increasingly at least purple-ish on the horizon. So Republicans have better be factoring that in. Then you ask the state of Florida, why is it that Florida’s got so many people moving to it? Millions of people over the last several decades have moved to Florida. How did it end up so predictably red? Well, it is because of the people who moved to Florida.

Now having grown up there myself, I can tell you there are some genuine liberals in Florida. But the fact is that an awful lot of the people who decided move to Florida decided to move to Florida because they wanted to be with like-minded people. And so you have people moving from the north, they wanted to move to a warmer place. If they wanted to move to a more liberal place, which might be say their retirement community, well, they could head all the way to California if they wanted, but many of them go to Florida and they’re sorting. That’s another big issue here. And one demographer simply calls this The Big Sort. The argument is that over time people sort themselves out and people like to live in the company of people who at least share to a considerable extent their own worldview. And that comes right down to their own political preferences, and that comes right down to red and blue America.

So I wanted to throw some of these things out today simply because as we close in on the final weeks of the election, these things are going to become more crucial. They’re going to show themselves, and they may give us an indication of what we will be looking at on election day in terms of the result. But right now, I simply want to affirm again, it does appear to be as close as the media say. It really is very close. And as I said, the indication of that is the fact that both parties are rationally acting as if it is this close.

So in this case, it’s not just that we listen to what they say, it’s that we watch how they act. And right now on the Democratic side, it is clear that Vice President Kamala Harris is worried about losing some of the key constituencies or at least losing a margin among key constituencies that a Democrat must win in order to prevail in the so-called Blue Wall. That Blue Wall means the line that separates the absolutely must have Democratic states, from other states that might be those swing states. And so the fact that you have Democrats talking about that openly, that’s something that we should notice.

The other thing we need to note is that the main concern on the Republican side is the volatility of the nominee. And so you’ll have Republicans saying out loud, “Yeah, we know what all the statistics look like, and we understand there has been a shift in momentum,” they believe from the vice president to the former president, but their concern is just the volatility of the former President and just watching Donald Trump on the stump, so to speak. You just never know what he’s going to say. And there is increasing concern about some of the darkness in terms of the sense of foreboding in Trump’s speeches.

But you look at this and you recognize there is no doubt at this point that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are presenting two very different visions of what actually could be even a way of saying they’re really describing two different countries. I’m not saying it’s two different countries, I’m just simply saying the way they describe the United States as it is and the way they want it to be, you’re not looking at close approximations as you look at the two parties now. You’re looking at two very different visions. So we’ll be looking at this and tracking this in days to come, looking in a deeper dive at some of the issues we’ve been talking about and some of the data there is just really fascinating.

Part IV

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Conservatives Have a New Laugh Track? The Transformation of Comedy Now Meets the Right

But I’m going to end today by saying that it’s also interesting that this kind of world view conflict, this kind of cultural conflict, this political electoral conflict, it is also showing up in comedy. That’s right, comedy. Now, politicized comedy is not new. You could say it goes all the way back to the satirists of Ancient Greece. But on the other hand, political commentary in the United States, at least in terms of say that which is broadcast and streamed, well, during the period of say the last 10 years, there was the rise of a lot of very hard liberal comedy programs that got a lot of attention. And so you could know about John Oliver or John Stewart, you could name many others. And even as early on, they were kind of sort of political. As time went on, they became extremely political and very clearly on the Left, and they had very large audiences, nothing like that on the Right until now.

Again, as USA Today reports, here’s the headline, “Conservative leading comedy getting laughs and more viewers.” Karissa Waddick is the reporter in the story. And what we are told is that what we’ve seen lately in ratings and what we have seen lately in public attention is a shift not so much away from the liberals as a shift among conservatives to watching the kind of programming, including programs for example, on Fox News that are explicitly comedy. Now, there’s a very interesting section in this report where we are told that more liberals watch political comedy than conservatives, especially when it gets to late night viewership. And I’m just going to say, I’m going to take that right back to the demographics. I’m going to believe that one of those reasons is that single people in cities are more likely to watch any late night programming than parents who are taking care of their children in the heartland. I’m just going to say you’re looking at a likelihood that there’s going to be a difference and it’s not just politics.

But it also says something that when you look at the sorting that takes place in our country, it also takes place in comedy. It’s not to say that conservatives never watch the programs, the comedy programs that are coming from the cultural Left. It is to say that sometimes it’s easier to get the humor if it’s an inside joke. And that’s one of the reasons that these conservative comedy programs have taken off is because conservatives get the joke the way that liberals, on the other hand, watching the other side’s programming, they get the joke as well. But it’s also interesting that an awful lot of the so-called humor on both sides of the political equation is fairly vicious. It is very personal, and that also tells you something about the coarsening of the political age in which we live, because it’s one thing to laugh with as Christians understand, it’s a very different thing to laugh at. Easy for us to tell that to children. Maybe we better think about it for ourselves.