Playing The Blame Game
Both Democrats and Republicans Are Looking To Avoid Blame For Their Election Failures - By Any Means Necessary
While we are *still* awaiting final results from Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina, it has been generally accepted among both Democrats and Republicans that Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States. The news isn’t completely good for Democrats however; as of now it seems that the Republicans will retain control of the Senate and the Democratic majority in the House will be shrinking. In even worse news for Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats, some of the seats they are projected to lose are seats they flipped in 2018.
The 2020 election, as it stands now, puts both parties in the unique position of neither being able to truly claim a victory. While Republicans are poised to lose the presidency, Democrats did not gain the Senate as they had planned and will have their House majority reduced. In the wake of this not quite victory on both sides Democrats and Republicans have been busy coming up with explanations as to what happened. The problem is, neither side’s explanations make much sense when examined.
On the Democratic side, one of the first narratives to come from Tuesday’s election was that the Cuban vote cost Biden a Florida win. While there may be merit to that claim - Biden lost Florida by 377,023 votes - it should not have come as a surprise to Democrats. According to a Pew Research study conducted earlier this year, 58% of Cuban voters identify as Republican and traditionally Cuban and Cuban Americans lean Republican. The bigger issue Democrats face with Cuban voters is the perception that the party now has a pro socialism message, a perception that Republicans leaned into heavily when campaigning to Cubans this election cycle. The surprise among Democrats that the Cuban vote broke for Trump indicates there is a troubling assumption among them that all Latinos and all immigrants will automatically vote Democrat. Not to mention, assuming that Cubans would vote Democratic despite the party’s current image shows an amazing lack of insight as to how Cubans feel about socialism.
Another statistic that Democrats are having trouble parsing is that compared to 2016, support among minorities, women, and the LGBTQ community rose for Trump. This, despite four years of Democrats labeling Trump a racist and a sexist, has led to quite a bit of confusion that culminated in a New York Times opinion piece by Charles Blow that asserts - I kid you not - that those voters were siding with their “oppressors” in order to maintain their position in a white patriarchy power structure. The last paragraph of the piece sums up Blow’s perception perfectly
“All of this to me points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. It reaches across gender and sexual orientation and even race. Trump’s brash, privileged chest trumping and alpha-male dismissiveness and in-your-face rudeness are aspirational to some men and appealing to some women. Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.”
This is a perception not held by Blow alone; there is a widely held belief among Democrats that certain groups should vote in certain ways based on their immutable characteristics and when that doesn’t happen it causes confusion and angry dismissal of those voters. There are several reasons why a voter chooses to vote in a certain way, denying those voters their agency and insinuating that they have been somehow manipulated is not a winning strategy.
Republicans have not been without their share of blame-shifting narrative crafting, opting to chase after bizarre and easily debunkable conspiracy theories to explain how Biden could possibly be winning. From making claims that Republican poll observers were being kept out of a Detroit vote tally room (they weren’t) to alleging voter fraud in Wisconsin due to there being more votes cast than eligible voters listed on voter rolls (Wisconsin allows same-day registration) to claims that Arizona poll workers tricked Trump voters into using felt tip markers to cast their vote to invalidate their votes (Maricopa and Pima Country election officials have said using felt tip markers is fine), they have latched on to an exhaustive list of theories. Republicans have also taken issue with the fact that as of Tuesday night Trump had a stable lead in battleground states like Wisconsin and Michigan only to have that led “magically” disappear by Wednesday evening, leading to allegations of vote tampering. There’s a simple explanation for this; in-person voters broke heavily Republican while mail-in voters broke heavily Democrat. It’s no wonder why either, as Trump launched a months long campaign against mail-in voting. The split between in-person voters and mail-in voters was widely discussed in the runup to Election Day, with FiveThirtyEight predicting the very scenario that is playing out.
All of this posturing by Republicans, including the multiple lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign to contest the results of the vote counts in key states, is being done to avoid the obvious conclusion to be made from the election. Republican voters decided that while they still support the GOP they no longer want Trump as president. This should be greeted as good news by Republicans, seeing as the prevailing thinking (from myself included) was that Trump would cause so much damage to the party that Republicans would not be able to overcome it. Instead, it’s being spun as some Democrat plat to steal the election from Trump.
Then there’s the perennial standby for every losing party - it’s the damn libertarians’ fault. This year we get to hear from disgruntled Republicans like Scott Walker who are mad that since Jo Jorgenson covered the vote spread in Wisconsin we’re to blame for a potential Trump loss in that state. On the merits of that argument from a voter turnout standpoint, Matt Welch has already crunched the numbers and found that the argument doesn’t hold water. Nor should it, the GOP is no more entitled to the libertarian vote than the Democrats are entitled to the minority vote. Trump has hardly been a friend to libertarians and the GOP is embracing a form of conservatism that is openly hostile to libertarians. Why should libertarians vote for GOP candidates when we have Libertarian candidates to support? Why should we vote for a party that at best forgets we exist until it’s election season or worse denigrates us? Although it is always expected, the entitlement the GOP feels toward libertarian voters is grating.
It has been a tradition that after a losing election season the losing party takes a hard look at its failures in order to correct them before the next election cycle. With both parties being in a losing position and looking for someone - anyone - to blame for that loss I don’t see that happening this year. The political party that refuses to identify the issues that cost them voters is doomed to shrink and stagnate. That’s bad news for Democrats and Republicans but potentially great news for libertarians looking to rehome the politically homeless.