Monday, November 4, 2024

Part I

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Are You an Undecided Voter? How Is That Even Possible? The Stakes are Just Too High to Not be Prepared When You Enter the Voting Booth

Well, we are less than 24 hours from election day 2024, and it is a day that will live in history, no doubt about it. We’ve been aiming for this day for a long time. Every presidential election in American history is a very big deal. It’s a very big democratic, a very big electoral event. But as we’re looking at this, we recognize that there are issues on the table. There’s an historical context in place for this election that makes it particularly important. But at this point there are some interesting things from the Christian worldview to think about. One of them is the existence at this point in the election of so-called undecided voters.

So let’s just think about that for a moment. We have been at the presidential election in a formal sense for almost two years. That is to say you go back to late 2022 and you are already looking at the presidential race shaping up. Of course, there’s never a time when Americans aren’t thinking about talking about, the political class isn’t organizing about, a presidential campaign. But in a big public way, we’ve been talking about it for so long with such intensity that most Americans are no doubt tired of hearing about the issues and hearing the candidates. And no doubt, on both sides, the candidates are tired of this electoral race. It’s just something that human beings can’t endure for too long, and it’s too long already. But even as election day comes around, let’s go back to that question of who in the world could be undecided at this point?

Now keep in mind that newspapers and political analysts have been raising the question as to whether or not the so-called undecided vote can throw the election either to Vice President Kamala Harris or to former President Donald Trump as we look at election day tomorrow and the results coming in. But here’s where a bit of honesty would help us. One point of honesty is this. If someone is undecided at this point, they are not very invested on the issues. They’re not very convictional. They’re not operating out of any kind of worldview, any kind of consistent worldview, and they’re not taking responsibility to be informed and to make informed decisions. If you are undecided at this point in an election, it’s probably best that you just don’t vote.

Now Jeff Greenfield made that point in the pages of The Wall Street Journal just this week. He simply said if at this point you don’t know for whom you’re going to vote, his word is stay home, “It might be better for everyone that way.” Now I agree with Jeff Greenfield in that. I think he’s saying it a bit tongue in cheek, but, let’s face it, it is actually a very valid point we need to consider. The issues are so stark. The differences between the two candidates, the distinctives between the two party, they are so deep, they’re so radical, they’re so clear. They have been so in contrast for so long, it seems virtually impossible that any person really thoughtful or really invested about these issues could have any question about how he or she would vote in the presidential election cycle. That’s the question that was presented in terms of this article.

If you’re undecided between the two major presidential candidates at this point, well, let’s just ask the obvious question. What would change your mind or what would help you to make up your mind? This just gets back to the fact that we as human beings, we’re made up of different parts. We’re in a whole. We’re pulled together. We are, as is described in Christian theology, a psychosomatic unity, which is to say we are a unity, a conscious mind, and a physical body.

Now there’s more to it than that body, mind and soul. All kinds of biblical words are invoked, but the fact is that the most important part of psychosomatic unity is the unity. We are actually the unity of a mind and a body. And so, when you understand that, the mind comes into crucial action here because when the mind is in action, a mind, at least in terms of God’s design, moves towards some consistency.

That’s one of the reasons why you have the two political parties. They are moving consistently in opposite directions. Now they’re opposite directions, but there are consistent positions that are eventually made clear with the development of these two parties. Just take the issue of abortion. You go back 50 years. The two parties do not have defined positions on abortion. Both of them are working towards defined positions through the late 1970s into the 1980s, even into the 1990s. But by the time you go beyond the 1990s, the two parties hold starkly different and absolutely opposing views on the sanctity of human life.

You look at Republican candidates and Republican platforms during that era, overwhelmingly pro-life. You look at the Democratic candidates, the Democratic convention, the Democratic platforms, overwhelmingly pro-abortion, and the pro-abortion becomes more pro-abortion. At least until 2024, the pro-life had become a more highly articulated and developed pro-life position. We have to hope for that again. 

 

So going back to that psychosomatic unity, which means the unity in the human being, of the body and the spirit, the body and the intelligence, the reality is that the intelligence operates in different levels, too. We can speak about rationality, but we also speak about, say, the emotions. Now here’s where we really don’t want Americans voting on the basis of emotion. We really do want to encourage Christians to vote on the basis of conviction and worldview, thinking these issues through. Now there are two reasons for that. The first reason for that just pragmatically is that you’re more likely to be consistent. The other reason for this pragmatically is that your convictions are more likely to line up with other believers of the same conviction. So that turns out to be two very powerful, pragmatic issues.

But there’s also a principled issue above that, which is we want our vote to be glorifying to God. We better know what would glorify God before we would dare to understand that this vote rather than that vote we believe would bring God greater glory, would be a greater demonstration of faithfulness. So, again, the USA Today article says undecided voters carry weight. But, again, I agree with The Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Greenfield in saying if you’re not decided at this point, probably better for everyone that you just don’t vote because you clearly don’t really care.

That gets to another question, why don’t we make people vote? You look at many governments around the world and they actually require voting. Overwhelmingly, the population that is required to vote is concentrated in Central and South America. In several of those countries, which, by the way, aren’t necessarily the most typical forms of democracy, in some of those nations, it is a crime not to vote. You are required to vote. You will receive some kind of penalty or sanction if you do not vote. It’s against the law not to vote. In the United States, it is not against the law not to vote. Which is the better system?

Well, as it turns out, The Economist of London looks at the two alternatives, and it simply says in those constitutional systems that require citizens to vote, there is no really clear good democratic outcome to making people vote. The Economist simply says that one of the reasons is that people who don’t want to vote don’t vote carefully. They don’t vote strategically. In some cases, they specifically just go in to vote in order to, say, make a political statement that I’m being forced to do this. They mingle the ballot, they do something, they mismark the ballot. They do something to make very clear, okay, you can make me vote, but you can’t make me vote.

Another big complaint in systems where citizens are forced or coerced to vote or sanctioned if they do not, another adverse outcome is that oftentimes they simply go in and vote to destabilize the system. That means, say, to look at some kind of minor candidate, start throwing votes that way simply to make a statement. We don’t want voters to go into the voting booth simply to make a statement. And so, yes, it’s a problem that many citizens in the United States don’t vote, but it might be a bigger problem if some of those citizens did vote because they might not be voting on the basis of any kind of rational or intelligent or consistent evaluation. They may be doing it because they’re forced to do it, and being forced to do it, they decide, “Okay, I’m going to make a statement.” That’s not good for democracy either.

Part II

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Swing States, Polling, and Confidence in Election Results: How We Should Evaluate the Polling and News Reports So Close to Election Day?

Okay, another point that needs to be made on this Monday before election Tuesday, 2024, and that is this. If someone tells you that something is happening right now in the election, you should doubt it. That would start if I told you something’s happening in this election that’s unexpected and supposedly newsworthy. At this point, we are so deep into the system, we are so thick into the schedule, at this point election day is looming so closely that polling, for example, can’t be done with any accuracy at this point, and that’s been true for a number of days.

People who say there’s a surge of this or there’s a decline of that going into election day, they are talking basically something that is a political fiction. Now they may turn out to be right, but if they are right, it’s probably accidental. That’s simply because any responsible survey or poll takes time both to conduct the research and then to analyze the research and to publish it. Now this can be done pretty quickly in the course of, say, a presidential campaign. It can be done pretty quickly in a primary season. But pretty quickly means something like 48 to 72 hours. It doesn’t mean two hours. Someone who’s turning around a poll in just a number of hours is lying to you about its accuracy.

So let’s ask the question, why do so many in the media talk about some of these late polls? By the way, sometimes they’ll contextualize it and say, “We know this is a late poll. We don’t know how accurate it is.” Why do they talk about it? They talk about it for two reasons. Number one, in the news media, they feed on this kind of data. They feed on this kind of news lead because it gives them a handle in which they can say, “All right, we’re talking about the election. Let’s talk about this. Here is a poll, here’s a survey. Here is a political analyst perception. Let’s get a debate about it with a round table.” That’s the way so much of it is conducted these days, but much of it is simply based upon nothing.

But there’s another reason these kinds of stories get a lot of traction, and that is because it is in the interest of both candidates to appear to surge at the last. That’s a longstanding reality in modern politics. Now I said longstanding in modern, that may sound a bit contradictory, but modern politics covers a lot of the waterfront since the middle of the 20th century, and, over time, since the middle of the 20th century, there has been a reliance upon polls and there has been an attempt to try to use polling data to say, “My candidate is surging ahead.”

Now let’s ask the interesting question from the Christian worldview. Why would it serve your purposes to claim at the end that your candidate is winning? Well, just ask President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. President Jimmy Carter was the Democratic incumbent president and he was being confronted with the challenge of former California Governor Ronald Reagan running as the Republican nominee. Now you know already that Reagan won in a landslide, but guess what? The perception was in the last four to five days of the campaign that Jimmy Carter was simply collapsing, and yet at the same time there were people who said, no, instead he is surging in the polls. By the way, just in terms of honesty, there were some polls at the end of the campaign that indicated that Jimmy Carter was experiencing something of a surge. The problem is that was a surge that was inundated by a tsunami.

Okay. So who’s right in that? Well, the fact is if you’re just citing data, both of them could have been right. Yes, Jimmy Carter’s surging, but, no, Jimmy Carter is about to lose in a landslide. By the time Jimmy Carter had finished the end of his campaign and was flying back to Washington on Air Force One, his advisors were able or, perhaps you might say, forced to tell him that he was going to lose the election, which he did, as I said, in a landslide.

But at the same time, the campaign didn’t acknowledge that. But on election day they did acknowledge it, but they acknowledged it too early. And so, Jimmy Carter goes down in history as the man who conceded the office before many people in the United States were finished voting, and that was considered very bad politics.

Okay. In a situation like that, it can become clear, especially looking at early results coming in from eastern states, that someone is almost assuredly going to win election as president of the United States. But there may, at that point, still be people who are voting on the west coast and, thus, at that point, it is something that both candidates need to keep up throughout the entire course of the campaign.

It’s just another part of the way democracy works, in this case, a democratic constitutional form of government through elected leaders. At some point, there has to be an acknowledgement that this thing isn’t over until it’s over. Of course, the bigger problem in recent election cycles has been that it’s not over when it should have been over, and that leads to other questions. One of those questions has to do with what in the world is going on in states like Pennsylvania?

Now you already have the news media talking about, say, the Republicans making accusations of voter fraud or problems with voting and all the rest, voting irregularities. But I just want to look at the State of Pennsylvania for a moment and understand, at this point, Pennsylvania is the most crucial state in terms of the electoral vote. 19 electoral college votes. It’s going to come down in large part to what happens in Pennsylvania.

But Pennsylvania is almost assuredly not going to know the results of the election in that state on Tuesday night. Tomorrow night, it is extremely unlikely. One official there in Pennsylvania said the chances of Pennsylvania having a result on election night are virtually zero. Zero is a very understandable number. That is a very bad number When it comes to confidence in an election. There are at least two or three big problems in Pennsylvania. One of them is that it allows early voting, but it doesn’t allow the tabulation or the calculation of that early vote until election day. And so, you have a situation in which Pennsylvania is likely to have an incredibly large number of persons who have voted, but the votes can’t be tabulated, and in some situations there’s the admission it won’t be tabulated until late in the day the process will get started.

Furthermore, it allows mailed-in ballots to come in for days after election day. And so, they have to be tabulated as well. It is just an absolute mess. Furthermore, there were court decisions that appeared to violate Pennsylvania law in 2020, and a lot of those issues simply weren’t very clarified even in the course of the last several days. Now here’s a bottom line fact. The people of Pennsylvania, the state legislature and the governor in Pennsylvania, had a chance to fix these problems after the debacle of 2020, and they’ve chosen not to. You simply have to ask the question, why not? I’m not saying that they’re inviting voter fraud. I am saying this. They have allowed a vulnerability in the system because confidence doesn’t go up with delay, confidence goes down.

Another related aspect of this is the fact that you’ve got states such as Virginia that have been challenged on disallowing non-citizen votes, and especially you have the Democratic Party that says repeatedly and intervenes even in court cases in order to say you shouldn’t take this action or that action to prevent non-citizens from voting. Then they come back and say there’s no problem. Non-citizens don’t vote. Well, if that’s not a problem, then why are you against a measure that would prevent it?

That’s another one of those issues in which you would think, just thinking about the American people and confidence in the electoral system, that any kind of measure that legitimately prevented non-citizens from voting would be a good thing. Now we don’t want to deprive a citizen qualified to vote from doing so, but the states, they’ve had a lot of time to prepare, but the states, they have the responsibility and they’ve had a lot of time to prepare in order to meet that standard.

By the way, the Democrats are overwhelmingly also against the use of multiple forms of ID, or even in some cases authoritative state-issued forms of ID, in order to qualify a person for voting. They say that doesn’t allow many minority populations or many voters facing hardship to vote as well as others. Well, there needs to be a mechanism in which that problem can be solved. But the problem is not solved by simply saying there’s not a problem or we’re against any effort to address it. Again, confidence is not built by evasion.

Part III

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The Dog Fight for Majority Control in the House: Out of 435 Seats, Less Than 30 Are Really in Question

But, tomorrow, we’ll be talking about how to follow the electoral results, what to look for, and how the electoral college works, just to remind ourselves of that particular dimension of the race. But I want to turn at this point to the House of Representatives, because as you’re looking at the Congress, as you’re looking at the House and as you’re looking at the Senate, the big question is which party is going to be in the majority and that’s which party will have control in both of those chambers?

Now just remember, snapshot right now, Democrats have an extremely thin majority in the United States Senate and Republicans have an extremely historically thin majority in the House. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, pointed out just yesterday that he has the smallest Republican majority in political history. And so, he wants a larger majority. At the same time, the Democrats want the majority to take over control and elect their own as speaker. That’s in the House of Representatives. We’ll get to the Senate in a minute.

In the House of Representatives, whoever is speaker, whichever party is in the majority, absolutely controls just about everything. The same thing is not true in the Senate, but hold that thought. In the House of Representatives–and, remember, funding bills must start in the House of Representatives–in the House of Representatives, if you’re in the majority, you are basically out of power. You are out of control. You don’t chair committees. You can’t insist on legislation getting through. You are basically just there to block the majority party in terms of some votes, and in many cases you’re not able to do that.

In that case, the House of Representatives in the United States is somewhat analogous to the House of Commons in the British Parliament. The majority, if it sticks in the majority, can never lose. The party in the minority may have some influence, but they basically have no power and they have no initiative. And so, they’re spending their time trying to figure out how to get into the majority once again. So in the House, what’s it down to? Let’s just remind ourselves of a little math. How many seats in the House? 435. That’s the magic number. 435. 

How many of those seats are so D or so R that there’s little question that they’re even in play in this election cycle? Out of 435, about 410 to 412 are absolutely predictable. The Republican seat, the Republican candidate is going to be elected, or it’s a Democratic seat. The Democratic candidate is going to be elected. So notice what that means. That means there are only about 20 seats in the United States House of Representatives that are actually up for play. Some of those seats are in the State of New York. You say, well, New York’s overwhelmingly Democratic. Well, it is. It is indeed overwhelmingly Democratic, but in that clearly Democratic state, there are some lean Republican congressional districts. It’s been that way for a long time, especially in places like upstate New York.

But some of those hotly contested seats that are at stake in 2024 are on Long Island. It’s going to be very, very interesting to see how all of that turns around. A lot of it is based upon personality. A lot of it is based upon political context. In the case of the House of Representatives, it is simply true. Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill had it right when he said all politics is local. In the House, it’s very local.

Okay, some of the other seats that are likely in play, out of the 435, only about 20 seats, some of them are in the State of California. Again, you say it’s overwhelmingly Democratic. Yes, but it is also geographically stratified. And so, even as most of the state is deep, deep blue, there in the Central Valley, in the middle of the state, you find a band of red. Some of those districts that include some blue and some red they’re the ones that are in play. And you have the blue, that is to say the Democratic, the more liberal, the more progressive, trying to do its best to win over those seats, believing that if they win them, they’ll be able to keep them.

Writing about these two dozen seats in play on the front page of The New York Times, Catie Edmondson says, “The battlefield includes centrist Democratic incumbents in Maine, Washington, Alaska, and Pennsylvania who are trying to hang on in their rural districts that favor former President Donald J. Trump and Midwestern Republicans facing unexpectedly steep challenges in Nebraska, Iowa, and Wisconsin.”

Okay, let’s talk Nebraska for a moment. Nebraska is a very interesting state because there it is in the very heart of the union, and it has been overwhelmingly Republican for a long time. But Nebraska has some interesting facets to its constitution and its mode of operation in elections. For one thing, it has a unicameral legislature. That’s right, it is distinctive among the states in having no House and Senate, but rather having a legislature of one chamber. Now, by the way, that means that not having a second chamber, there’s not a second chamber that can mitigate or veto legislation from the unichamber.

But the Nebraska legislature is not the only distinction of that state. The other distinction is that in that area of the country, it is the only state that has entered into the agreement whereby the electoral college votes will be distributed by congressional district. That means that there could be an island of blue in the middle of red, red Nebraska. In a tight presidential race, going into electoral college, that one vote in Nebraska along with another in the American northeast, it could be in play, and if the electoral college vote comes down to just one or two votes, it could be determinative.

That’s not likely, but it is possible. As a matter of fact, it is so possible that the Democratic ticket’s been spending a lot of time there near Omaha, Nebraska in order to try to win that single congressional seat and also to win in the vote within that district what would be the electoral college vote. Both of those would be big wins for the Democratic Party, and they understand that.

Part IV

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Christian Stewardship, Disinformation, and Chaos: Christians Have a Particular Responsibility for How We Handle Election Chatter

But as we draw today’s edition of The Briefing to a close, I want to speak personally, a little more personally than is normal, to listeners of The Briefing. I want to thank you for listening. I want to tell you that because you are listeners to The Briefing, and as you are qualified to vote in the United States, I know you are engaged in the issues, and I certainly hope you either have voted or will vote today or tomorrow. That is an exercise of our stewardship, and Christians take that stewardship with great seriousness.

The second thing I want to say very personally is I think we have to be really careful, and I think our Christian reputation can be very much on the line about this. I think we have to be very, very careful understanding that there will be a flood of disinformation and manipulation coming in the course of the campaign in the last few hours. I’m not blaming one side or the other I’m simply saying there’s going to be a lot of disinformation, some of that disinformation we now know is being planted by Russian agents and others, international motivations, to destabilize American democracy.

But the other thing is that just remember that people can post anything on social media or, for that matter, they not only can, they do. And so, I would just encourage you in a way that is a bit more urgent than at other times, be careful to source anything before you take it for certain, for granted, or for true. One key, I think, to this is understanding that you shouldn’t take anything as true if the source of that has no skin in the game, no reputation at stake, and, frankly, can’t be traced to anything that is authoritative or responsible.

So let me put it this way. I’m not saying just trust the mainstream media. I think you know me better than that. I am saying let’s be very careful. I wouldn’t trust any kind of unusual report coming from any source written by anyone who can’t be fired if it’s wrong. I certainly wouldn’t run with anything that’s reported by an anonymous post because, as you know already, anonymous comes with no responsibility. In this kind of context, there’s so much at stake, we all need to take responsibility for what we receive and what we pass on. That’s true for all citizens, but it would seem to be particularly true for Christians. Just based on the truth, you know we’re going to have plenty to talk about.